Page:Essays and Studies

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194

NOTES ON THE TEXT OF SHELLEY.

the tyrants and slaves who play their parts here with such frank ferocity; Persian and Indian, Christian and Mahometan mythologies are massed together for attack. And certainly Islam is not, as the rules of language would imply, the creed of the insurgents.^[1] Could the phrase "revolt of the Christians" be taken to signify a revolt against the Christians? There is at least meaning in the first title—"Laon and Cythna, or the Revolution of the Golden City." Readers may prefer a text which makes hero and heroine strangers in blood, but the fact remains that Shelley saw fit to make them brother and sister, and to defend their union as essentially innocent even if socially condemnable. The letters printed in the "Shelley Memorials" show with what staunch resolution he clung to this point, when beaten upon by remonstrance from all sides. This most singular of his social and ethical heresies was indeed never quite thrown over. "Incest," he wrote in 1819 to Mrs. Gisborne, with reference to Calderon's tragic treatment of the story of Amnon and Tamar, "is, like many other incorrect things, a very poetical circumstance. It may be the excess of love or hate. It may be the defiance of everything for the sake of another, which clothes itself in the glory of the highest heroism; or it may be that cynical rage which,

↑ It may be objected that the creed from which the insurgent population has been delivered by the preaching of Laon and Cythna was that of Islam, and that the word is here used to express not the doctrine itself, but the mass of men or nations reared in the belief or tradition of that doctrine. This use may doubtless be permissible, and does afford a reasonable sense to the later title of the poem; but the original title as well as the original text still seems to me preferable.

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[1] It may be objected that the creed from which the insurgent population has been delivered by the preaching of Laon and Cythna was that of Islam, and that the word is here used to express not the doctrine itself, but the mass of men or nations reared in the belief or tradition of that doctrine. This use may doubtless be permissible, and does afford a reasonable sense to the later title of the poem; but the original title as well as the original text still seems to me preferable.

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