THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

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The lots were made, and mark’d, and mix’d, and handed,
In silent horror, and their distribution
Lull’d even the savage hunger which demanded,
Like the Promethean vulture, this pollution;
None in particular had sought or plann’d it,
’Twas Nature gnaw’d them to this resolution,
By which none were permitted to be neuter —
And the lot fell on Juan’s luckless tutor.
He but requested to be bled to death:
The surgeon had his instruments, and bled
Pedrillo, and so gently ebb’d his breath
You hardly could perceive when he was dead.
He died as born, a Catholic in faith,
Like most in the belief in which they’re bred,
And first a little crucifix he kiss’d
And then held out his jugular and wrist.
The poem veers easily, and often comically, between extremes of suffering and luxury, hunger and excess, longing
and satiety, ignorance and knowingness, shifting appearance and an equally shifting reality. Both the art and the
artfulness of the narrator are frequently concealed under a pretence of purposelessness and self deprecation — ‘’tis my
way, | Sometimes with and sometimes without occasion | I write what’s uppermost, without delay; | This narrative is
not meant for narration, | But a mere airy and fantastic basis, | To build up common things with common places’
(Canto XIV, 7). Byron’s earnestness evident enough in his earlier poetry and in the urgently fluent lyric ‘The Isles of
Greece’ which he introduces into Canto III, is now steadily qualified, or, in the case of the lyric, framed by comments
on the supposed ‘trimming’ nature of its imagined singer. The ‘earnest’ poet is reduced to the level of the despised,
time-serving, pliable Southey, the chief object of ridicule in The Vision of Judgement (1821). Byron’s poetry, like his
letters and the surviving fragments of his journals, emerges from an energetic restlessness tempered by an amused
detachment, not from a carefully formulated theory of literature, a determining philosophy, or a desire to enhance and
improve public taste. ‘I have written’, he told his publisher in 1819, ‘from the fullness of my mind, from passion —
from impulse — from many motives — but not for their [his public’s] „sweet voices”. — I know the precise worth of
public applause.’
Byron’s friend and sometime companion in self imposed exile, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), had an equally
low view of ‘public applause’ and an equally distinct distaste for the British Establishments, literary and political.
Unlike Byron’s, his work derives from a consistent, if malleable, ideology, one determined by a philosophical
scepticism which questions its Platonic roots as much as it steadily rejects Christian mythology and morality.
Shelley’s first public diatribe against Christianity, the undergraduate pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism, so
antagonized the authorities of University College at Oxford in 1811 that its author was expelled from the University.
Although Shelley’s rejection of ‘revealed’ religion and its dogmas remained a cardinal element in his thought, and
though he systematically maintained his faith in the principle that ‘every reflecting mind must allow that there is no
proof of the existence of a Deity’, his later work suggests both a steady qualification of arguments based purely on
‘reason’ and a search for the source of the mysterious ‘Power’ that he acknowledged to be implicit in wild nature and
in the inspiration of poetry. This complex and intellectually demanding aspiration is paralleled by, and to
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some extent married to, Shelley’s abiding interest in the politics of revolution and evolution and to the idea of a
gradual and inevitable social awakening.
Shelley’s political thought, informed as it is with experimental scientific theory and with the social ideas of his
father-in-law Godwin, elucidates more than simply an opposition of liberty and tyranny; it explores future possibilities
and not past defeats and, in attempting to adduce the nature of egalitarianism, it moves beyond the general disillusion
resultant from the defeat of the ideals of the French Revolution. As Shelley wrote to Godwin in 1817, he felt himself
‘formed ... to apprehend minute & remote distinctions of feeling whether relative to external nature, or the living
beings which surround us, & to communicate the conceptions which result from considering either the moral or the
material universe as a whole’. He recognized the significance of details, but as a poet and a theorist of poetry and