Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy seizes every occasion for inaccuracy, and now and then makes an occasion, in the absence of a decent opportunity, for blundering. What does Mr. MacCarthy mean ‘by University College at Cambridge?’ Oxford has a college styled University College; there is a college so called in London; but Cambridge has no University College. By the charitable writer of the present page, it is assumed that by ‘University College at Cambridge,’ Mr. MacCarthy (who is so merciless and malignant to Hogg for his occasional inaccuracies) means The Cambridge University Library. Let it be so assumed by the reader.
It follows, that some years since Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy sought by printed circular for a copy of this Shelleyan poem (which possibly was never published) in the shop of nearly every second-hand bookseller in Great Britain and Ireland; that he caused the Librarians of the Bodleian Library, and the Cambridge University Library, to search for a copy of the poem in their libraries; that he induced Mr. Quaritch of Piccadilly, Mr. Stibbs of Museum Street, and the Messrs. Longmans of Paternoster Row, ‘and others,’ to make search by advertisements and special inquiries, for a copy of the poem,—without coming upon a copy after all the trouble.
Yet more:—Hogg never heard of this poem; Peacock never heard of it, so far as the evidences go; no one of the poet’s friends or relations appears ever to have heard of it; no review of the poem has come to light; and (more remarkable yet!) no one of the many published lists of subscriptions to the Finerty Fund, to be found in the Morning Chronicle, and other papers of the period (examined by Mr. MacCarthy), makes mention of any single contribution amounting to 100l.,—of any contributions whatever as the result of the sale of the poem.
What a labour of searching for a copy of the poem, and for evidence about the poem, that may never have been written! Surely the searching would have resulted in the discovery of a copy, had 2000 copies passed into circulation, or in the discovery of some stronger evidence of the poem’s publication, had the sale of the work yielded any considerable sum of money to the Fund, which amounted in the course of twelve months to something more than 1000l.
The evidence is not even conclusive that Shelley had a serious intention to produce a poem for Mr. Finerty’s advantage. He may have put forth the advertisements to whip up the public interest in the movement for the unfortunate journalist’s benefit. Evidence so weak can only be used conjecturally. I am disposed to regard the advertisements as bonâ-fide advertisements, and to think they referred to some poem published by Shelley for the alleged object. The author may also have published the poem with an eye to his own advantage; may have hoped to use the excitement of a political stir as a means of floating into circulation a poem, which, in case it succeeded, the ‘Gentleman of the University of Oxford’ could claim in his own name. He had been for some time thinking of publishing a satirical poem. ‘I am,’ he wrote to Hogg from Field Place, on 20th December, 1810, ‘composing a satirical poem. I shall print it at Oxford, unless I find, on visiting him, that R. is ripe for printing whatever will sell. In case of that, he is my man.’ There is evidence (though of a doubtful quality) that he wrote the first sketches for a poem, which eventually took shape in Queen Mab, in the summer of 1810. Much of that poem would answer to the title of A Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things.
Shelley put so many fictions into his earlier letters to Godwin, that the reader, who is not a ‘Shelleyan enthusiast,’ hesitates to trust any statement of those highly imaginative epistles, that is not supported by another witness. But he may have been writing truth at Keswick on 16th January, 1812, when he wrote of himself as the author of the Essay on Love, a little poem. This ‘little poem,’ if it was ever written, may have been the same poem as the Political Essay on the Existing State of Things, if the latter was ever written. Were it announced to-morrow on good authority that a copy had been recovered of the poem by Shelley, for a copy of which Mr. MacCarthy made so vain a search, I should expect to learn that the poem, published for Mr. Finerty’s benefit, proved to be poetry that was subsequently worked into Queen Mab. If the Poetical Essay (of March and April, 1811) contained some of the more violent and outrageous passages of Queen Mab, the same considerations that caused the poet’s Oxford bookseller to destroy all the copies of The Necessity of Atheism, that were in his hands, would determine him to destroy at the same time all the copies of the Poetical Essay lying in his premises.
II. What evidence does MacCarthy produce that Shelley was a contributor of poetry and of prose articles of literary subjects to the Oxford Herald, whilst he was an Oxford undergraduate?
(1) Mr. MacCarthy’s sole reason for attributing the Ode to the Death of Summer to Shelley’s pen, is that it possesses the ‘peculiar Shelleyan flavour by which we can so easily recognise his later poems,’ the qualities of feeling and expression, which justify the author of Shelley’s Early Life for saying,—
‘As Pope said of Chapman’s translation of the Iliad, that it was “something like what one would imagine Homer himself would have writ before he arrived at years of discretion;” so this little poem may be offered as something like what Shelley would have sung before he attained the full faculty of lyrical expression.’
But whilst there is no positive testimony that the Oxonian Shelley could give his verses the peculiar flavour for which Mr. MacCarthy commends the ‘Ode,’ which appears in the Oxford Herald of 22nd September, 1810, the poems of St. Irvyne, published three months later, may well dispose critical readers to question, whether the author of the novel was capable of producing verses, having any resemblance to the poetry of his later time. It may, of course, be urged that the verses, put into the ridiculous romance, were the nerveless efforts of a considerably earlier period; but it is difficult to believe that, could he have produced the Ode to the Death of Summer in September, 1810, the Oxonian Shelley could a few weeks later have offered the public such feeble effusions as the St. Irvyne verses.