Art. X.—The Loves of the Poets. By the Author of the "Diary of an Ennuyée."
author: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
source date: October 1829

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Art. X.—The Loves of the Poets. By the Author of the "Diary of an Ennuyée ." 2 Vols. 12mo. Colburn. 1829. [The Westminister Review , vol. 11, October 1829, pp. 472-477. This review article is tentatively attributed to Mary Shelley in The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals 1824-1900 , ed. Walter E. Houghton, University of Toronto Press, 1966. This edition of the article was prepared for The Criticism Archive by Jonathan Pinkerton and Mary A. Waters.]

THE Loves of the Poets! that we may understand why the conjunction of ideas represented by these words, presents the most resplendent image of beauty, grace, and happiness, that the human mind can well conceive, let us analyze them, and learn what Love, and what a Poet is.

There is much in the world afforded by nature and contrived by man, to yield satisfaction and enjoyment to our senses and our physical wants. In this northern clime the rich engross much of these. Carriages, horses, palaces with all their appendages, costly dress, and luxurious tables. The poor, (i.e. the unopulent, not the absolutely poor, those shut out from nature's table, the starving and miserable), have a counterbalance in a keener sense of the delights of leisure—they bring appetite instead of fastidious taste to season their plain viands, repose after labour, instead of downy beds, and silken hangings. With the omission of the necessitous and sick, our physical nature is replete with agreeable sensations; and yet how many ministered to, even to superfluity, are unhappy.

The mind requires more contribution than even our corporeal frame; ennui is the offspring of plenty and comfort; and while we contrive to shut out the evil elements, listlessness and weariness pervade the soul and pall every enjoyment. If the poor suffer less from this annoyance, it is not because they receive more pleasure; but because care, anxiety, or labour, occupy them; the rich also invent employments; books, operas, concerts, hunting, shooting, balls, picture-dealing, building, planting, travelling, fanciful changes of dress, and gambling. Yet these suffice not, nor professions, trades, nor ambition, to afford pleasure, though they waste the time; even the pursuits of wisdom, and the discoveries of science, engrossing as they are, and often delightful, are inefficient to take the sting from life, changing its burthen to gladness: this miracle is left for the affections; and the best form of affection, from the excess of its sympathy, is Love.

Who can feel satiety or sorrow when he loves?—"Love," Plato says, "showers benignity upon the world; before his presence, all harsh passions flee and perish. He is the author of all soft affections, the destroyer of all ungentle thoughts, possessed by the fortunate, and desired by the unhappy, therefore unhappy, because they possess him not; he is the father of grace and delicacy, and gentleness and delight and persuasion, and desire; the cherisher of all that is good, the abolisher of all that is evil, our most excellent pilot, defence, saviour and guardian, in labour and in fear, in desire and in reason; the ornament and governor of all things human and divine; the best, the loveliest." [Plato's Symposium. [Shelley's note]]

"Love," Shelley writes, "is that powerful attraction towards all we conceive, or fear, or hope beyond ourselves, when we find within our own thoughts the chasm of an inefficient void, and seek to awaken in all things that are, a community with what we experience within ourselves. The meeting with an understanding capable of clearly estimating our own, an imagination which should enter into, and seize upon the subtle and delicate peculiarities we have delighted to cherish and unfold in secret, with a frame whose nerves, like the chords of two exquisite lyres strung to the accompaniment of one delightful voice, vibrate with the vibrations of our own; this is the unattainable point to which Love tends; and to attain which, it urges forth the powers of man to arrest the faintest shadow of that, without the possession of which there is no rest or respite to the heart over which it rules." [Essay on Love by Shelley, published in the Keepsake for 1829.[Shelley's note]]

If so imperious, intense and pervading, be the spirit of Love, most powerful in the best and most delicate natures, how earnestly must women, whose being is formed for tenderness and sympathy, desire to know among whom in the harder, harsher sex this feeling exists in its greatest purity and force. And is not a poet an incarnation of the very essence of Love?

What is a Poet? Is he not that which wakens melody in the silent chords of the human heart? A light which arrays in splendor things and thoughts which else were dim in the shadow of their own insignificance. His soul is like one of the pools in the Ilex woods of the Maremma, [Maremma is a coastal area of Tuscany in Italy. The ilex genus of evergreen grow plentifully in the Mediterranean climate of that region.] it reflects the surrounding universe, but it beautifies, groupes, and mellows their tints, making a little world within itself, the copy of the outer one; but more entire, more faultless. But above all, a poet's soul is Love; the desire of sympathy is the breath that inspires his lay, while he lavishes on the sentiment and its object, his whole treasure-house of resplendent imagery, burning emotion, and ardent enthusiasm. He is the mirror of nature, reflecting her back ten thousand times more lovely; what then must not his power be, when he adds beauty to the most perfect thing in nature—even Love.

Lady Morgan who writes many things, not because they are true, but because they come into her head, has devoted some pages of the "Book of the Boudoir" [An 1829 collection of essays published by Henry Colburn.] to the villifying a poet's love. Another scrap in the same volume may serve as a comment. The few lines she has written on "Sentiment" sufficiently show why she depreciates the breathing sentiment of love, which is a poet's treasure and his gift.

Let us instead of refuting an opinion which this lady may already have discarded as false, turn to the pages of the book before us, which propose to give us the history of the Loves of the Poets, of modern poets that is, for with many declarations of ignorance, yet with no little presumption, the fair authoress sweeps out of her list the loves of the classic authors; she shall have her way, however, and with her we will confine ourselves to the poets of modern Europe.

This work is the production of the authoress of the "Diary of an Ennuyée," a book we have heard described as the offspring of a singular union of a light head and a heavy heart—whose defect is to have made reality and fiction, who are brother and sister, and who may not therefore too closely unite, marry, and produce an offspring which is neither true nor false. Yet notwithstanding this defect, which disturbs and confuses the reader throughout, it is an interesting, clever, and graceful work.

The book dwells somewhat on the Troubadours, and then commences with the early Italian poets. So much has been said concerning Petrarch and Laura, that we find the account here given concise. She seems to have neglected his letters, which are abundant in testimonies of the truth, ardour, and reality of his attachment, and to have confined herself to his poems only, and to repeat what is already known, without research, to every one. Dante and Beatrice are a pair more veiled in obscurity. Dante, like our own gentle affectionate Milton, has been stigmatized with the accusation of moroseness. Few know, that while bad institutions and bad men awoke stern resistance and severe animosity in the fervent souls of both, their hearts were the abode of Love, the realm over which sweet womanhood reigned and ruled. Dante's "Vita Nuova" is a beautiful and fanciful history of his love; and who that reads the vivid description of his trembling before the beauteous girl he almost worshipped, would figure the harsh proud Dante, so often pourtrayed to us? The loves of Ariosto, but little known, are on that account interesting; while the melancholy, impassioned, mysterious sentiment of Tasso, borrowing its grace from suffering, fascinates the imagination. In these pages this sad romance is unravelled much to our satisfaction. An extract on this subject will serve as a specimen of the work, and excite the curiosity of the reader to peruse the whole of these little volumes, replete as they are with the beautiful and unknown.

Leonora then was not unworthy of her illustrious conquest, either in person, heart, or mind. To be summoned daily into the presence of a princess thus beautiful and amiable, to read aloud his verses to her, to hear his own praises from her lips, to bask in her approving smiles, to associate with her in retirement, to behold her in all the graceful simplicity of her familiar life, was a dangerous situation for Tasso, and surely not less so for Leonora herself. That she was aware of his admiration, and perfectly understood his sentiments, and that a mysterious intelligence existed between them, consistent with the utmost reverence on his part, and the most perfect delicacy and dignity on hers, is apparent from the meaning and tendency of innumerable passages scattered through his minor poems, too significant in their application to be mistaken. Though that application be not avowed, and even disguised, the very disguise, when once detected, points to the object. Leonora knew, as well as her lover, that a princess "was no love-mate for a bard." [Byron, "The Lament of Tasso" stanza V, line 13, slightly altered.]She knew far better than her lover—until he too had been taught by wretched experience—the haughty and implacable temper of her brother Alphonso, who was never known to brook an injury or forgive an offender. She must have remembered too well the twelve years imprisonment and the narrow escape from death, of her unfortunate mother, for a less cause. She was of a timid reserved nature, increased by the extreme delicacy of her constitution. Her hand had been frequently sought by princes and nobles, whom she had uniformly rejected, at the risk of displeasing her brother; and the eyes of a jealous court were upon her. Tasso, on the other hand, was imprudent, hot-headed, fearless, and ardently attached. For both their sakes it was necessary for Leonora to be guarded and reserved, unless she would have made herself the fable of all Italy. —Vol. i. p. 296.

The reader must be referred to the volume itself for the proofs brought of these premises.

Perhaps the most interesting portion of these volumes, is that dedicated to the commemoration of conjugal poetry—the poets being for the most part women. The soft sweetness of Clotilde de Surville,[^1] the impassioned grace of Vittoria Colonna, bear the palm. Complaint here is superseded by tender regret; solicitation by acknowledged sympathy; jealousy and suspense by gratitude and joy. The authoress is not pleased that while women mourn till death the loss of their companion, men usually change the elegiac strain composed for their first love, for epithalamiums on a marriage with a second. It is probably one among the many superstitions which rather injure than exalt the characters of women, which makes us, in spite of ourselves, set so high a price on their constancy even to the dead. Human beings in every stage of life need companions; women protectors; and except that, for the highminded and delicate, there are few worthy companions and protectors, and that if once a woman find one man on whom she may bestow without sorrow her tenderness, it is very unlikely that, losing him, she find a second, we know no cause in reason and morality, and hardly in good taste, which should condemn the lovely, bereaved, and ardent heart to perpetual widowhood.

[^1: The collection Poésies de Marguerite-Eleonore Clotilde de Vallon-Chalys, depuis Madame de Surville, poëte françois de XVe siècle , published in 1803 by Henrichs in Paris with an introduction by Charles Vandenbourg, turned out to be a literary hoax.]

A woman's love is tenderness, and may wed itself to the lost and dead. A man's is passion, and must expend itself on the living. A woman's domesticity is of her own making, and her home may be replete with elegance though she be alone. An unmarried man has no home. A solitary woman is the world's victim, and there is heroism in her consecration. A man whose fate is not allied to a female, from whatever cause, is divested of every poetical attribute—there is something rugged, harsh, and unnatural in the very idea. After all, the worthiness of the beloved object must always stand as an excuse for inconstancy; or, with a poet, the fervency and truth of his passion: since, through the force of his imagination, he may dress in jewels richer than those that adorned the doll at Loretto, a black-visaged Madonna; [The statue of Our Lady of Loreto in Italy features a gold- and jewel-draped "Black Madonna" whose face has been darkened by centuries of smoke.] nor be aware that the beauty of the object resides in his eyes instead of in her mind or form.

The latter part of these volumes forms a very amusing and sentimental scandalous chronicle. We pity Pope, who, in default of better, lavished his verses and his poetical attentions on so uninteresting a personage as Martha Blount. Our authoress says, "me thinks, had I been a poet, or Pope, I would rather have been led about in triumph by the spirited, accomplished lady Mary, than chained to the footstool of two paltry girls." [The quotation refers to Pope's intense dislike of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu along with his closeness to the sisters Martha and Teresa Blount.] [vol. ii. p. 284.] Yet as no satisfactory account is given for the cause of the quarrel between Pope and that lady, we may believe, judging from the hardness and peremptoriness of her character, her love of ridicule, and her talent for sarcasm, that she first awoke the sting of the "Wasp of Twickenham;" [A common epithet for Pope.] and he, with all the bitterness of one whose person was but too open to vulgar derision, could not bear to have his genuine tenderness scoffed at; while the spiteful, jealous, bitter disposition, usually characteristic of deformed persons, gave poison to the wound she had provoked.

If we smile somewhat at the loves of the "Wasp" and the Sappho of the satires, whom Horace Walpole so amusingly describes [vol. ii. p. 307], what shall we say to the French philosophers by nature—poets by courtesy—Messrs. Du Chatelêt and Voltaire.[^2] Had either of them had one spark of real poetry in their composition, it had led to different results than those ridiculous, disgusting, violent and laughable scenes commemorated in these volumes [vol. ii. p. 222]. The same observations may apply to Swift. Lovers in verse are not, therefore, poets. Swift's victims were beautiful accomplished women. He was clever, and could forge even rhythm and rhyme in his head, but the spirit of poetry disdained to take up its abode in his coarse-grained, ill-fashioned, hard-natured soul. Of these modern moderns the greatest portion of interest has been thrown over the rustic loves of Burns,—thus redeeming a poet's name,—shewing that the high born and bred, and clever lady Mary Montague, Voltaire and his femme terrible , and Swift, were lovers, but not poets, and therefore neither gentle, imaginative, nor interesting; while the lowly-born Burns, being instinct with Apollo's fire, sheds a glory over the humble objects of his attachment, which a princess might envy [vol. ii. p. 195]. Monti and his wife are also an interesting pair [vol. ii. p. 209], and we are charmed by the sweetness displayed in the loves of Klopstock and Meta [vol. ii. p. 154], though there is a Germanism about it, which, giving effeminacy to the man, dims the picture by a mist of what appears to us almost like affectation.

[^2: The prominent French intellectual and woman of letters Emilie Du Châtelet and Voltaire carried on a devoted affair of several years duration, apparently at least partially countenanced by Mme. Du Châtelet's husband, the Marquis Florent-Claude du Chêtelet, with whom Mme. Du Châtelet had little in common.]

The authoress sums up her work by a glance at the poets of the day, and their loves—a chapter as well left out, for she, fearing to tread on forbidden ground, tells us, in fact, nothing. Unable to throw the ideality of distance over the near and distinct—and afraid, justly so—for the practice of shewing up our friends is the vice and shame of our literature,—of dragging into undesired publicity the modest and retiring,—she does not even bestow the interest of reality upon her undefined sketches. Besides, there are certain names she dreads to mention. May we not say, in the somewhat hacknied phrase of Tacitus: Sed perfulgebant, eo ipso quod nomines eorum non visebantur?[^3]

[^3: Mary Shelley replaces "effigies" (likenesses) with "nomines" (names) to render applicable a version of Tacitus's line from Annals Book 3, chapter 76: But Cassius and Brutus outshone them all, from the very fact that their likenesses were not to be seen. This translation provided by the Perseus Digital Library in an edition by Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb.]