SOURCE: “Macropolitics of Utopia: Shelley's Hellas in Context,” in Macropolitics of Nineteenth-Century Literature: Nationalism, Exoticism, Imperialism, edited by Jonathan Arac and Harriet Ritvo, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991, pp. 86-101.

[In the following essay, Kipperman studies the utopian, romantic, and radical view of history offered in Percy Shelley's Hellas.]

“We are all Greeks,” said Shelley in his Preface to Hellas, “Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts have their root in Greece. … The modern Greek is the descendant of those glorious beings whom the imagination almost refuses to figure to itself as belonging to our Kind, and he inherits much of their sensibility, their rapidity of conception, their enthusiasm, and their courage.” Shelley's idealism here echoes the excited report of the Greek revolution by Leigh Hunt in the Examiner. But, as historian William St. Clair records in his withering and often sad critique of philhellenism, That Greece Might Still Be Free, nearly identical sentiments were voiced in pamphlets and lectures all over Europe by suddenly politicized classics professors at the outbreak of the 1821 revolt.¹ What is remarkable to St. Clair is how utterly wrong, even preposterous, such statements were; how little knowledge they reflected of the loosely knit bands of marauding tribes, unconcerned with the modern nation-state and as savage in their warfare as the Turks themselves, who then inhabited the ancient territories of the city-states and their heroes.² From slender knowledge, though, came the great utopian propaganda of Shelley's Hellas, a work that in one sense is historically myopic, even deluded by its liberal philhellenism; and yet in another sense it is precise, even radically visionary in its opposition to Ottoman imperialism and its support for a people struggling toward identity in a modern constitutional state—in 1821 a progressive idea. How would we today evaluate the political alignment of this romantic utopia?

At stake are our theoretical assumptions as well as our practical judgments in reading a text across its own historical moment, and, too, our ways of aligning that moment itself within our own historiography. From one perspective, Shelley's conception of Greek “nationhood” is anti-historical rather than progressive—will seem even imperializing to some—since it assumes a “Greek” continuity in a realm of classical ideas rather than in the realities of ethnohistory. Yet from another perspective, despite the philhellenic ideology, Shelley's Hellas aligns itself with the historical moment of insurgency in 1821, in Spain, in Naples, and among the westernized Greeks, against the Holy Alliance and for constitutional nationhood. (It is easy to forget that despite internal contradictions the bourgeoisie in the decade after the Congress of Vienna could still be called a revolutionary class.) And, as with all good revolutionary propaganda, Hellas associates this progressive movement with the utopian evolution of mankind in general.³

These tensions and contradictions make Hellas particularly challenging to situate politically, and although this may seem to be an extra-literary matter, in fact the success of the work's intended or non-intended political ideology has inspired interesting theoretical debate among Marxist and historicist critics. I will suggest, however, that the precise relation of a single text (especially, as in this case, a propagandistic one) to the macropolitics of its age is a practical judgment of the degree to which ideological elements disguise or distort its overt historical commitment. Often, the question turns on whether utopian language is judged as futurist flight from history or as exhortation to mobilize in a period of transformation. Either way, however, it must be acknowledged that utopian language, in its explicit ahistoricality, risks an unself-conscious escapism, denying its grounding in the history it demands to transform.

I would like to begin with Jerome McGann's mordant response to a long line of liberal critics on the politics of Hellas:

Although [Kenneth Neill] Cameron represents the Greek Revolution as a significant crack in the Holy Alliance, it was far from being that. Rather, it represented the beginning of the end of the Turkish Empire and the definitive emergence of European imperialism—at the head of which was England—into world history.⁴

I do not see how such an outcome could have been clear (or historically inevitable) from the perspective of 1821, but McGann's real point is that Shelley's idealist philhellenism is “open to a political exploitation by Europe's imperialist powers” out of blindness to the objective forces of politics and history. McGann is at the same time attacking idealist critics for assenting unreflectively to this escapism. And no doubt there is something vulnerable in the near contempt for “mere” history shown by a purely idealist reader of Shelley such as Earl Wasserman: “Only in a nearly trivial way is Hellas a propagandistic call to rally to the Greek cause; in its true scope, it centers upon the Greek revolution to validate Shelley's confidence in an imminent and ineluctable universal transformation.” He concludes that Shelley's (Hegelian) aim is to locate the drama in “recurrent historical cycles and therefore to transform merely temporal events into an eternal truth.”⁵

I would like at once to distinguish between critics' idealism and Shelley's. I do not believe Shelley would completely recognize his political aims in Wasserman's breathless transcendentalism. But McGann's historicist attack accepts critics' exaggeration of this strain in the poem as representing Shelley's own sense of politics. For McGann, idealist escapism does indeed reveal Shelley's commitment to politics, but only negatively as a “reflex” against the despair of facing up to history: a notion that denies to Shelley any meaningful radicalism in his own local circumstances. I do agree with the aim of embedding the idealism within its historical horizons, but I am less anxious to condemn Shelley's utopian language as escapist or even “open to exploitation by Europe's imperialist powers.” I doubt such ideological appropriation would have occurred to conservative readers—much less to the nervous publisher who in 1820 deleted the radical attack on the Holy Alliance from the Preface.⁶ And, of course, the play is dedicated to Prince Mavrocordato, whom Shelley had known well in Pisa and who left to join the uprising initiated by his cousin Ypsilanti in March. Shelley and many of his readers believed a massive rebellion was beginning on Europe's southern flank, and Shelley urged Ollier to publish Hellas immediately: “What little interest this poem may ever excite, depends upon its immediate publication.”⁷ If Hellas is filled with atemporal ideals, they had timely urgency for Shelley.

That urgency can be appreciated only by a keener sense of the history of the revolt than McGann's, who seems to believe that Hellenism was clearly the ideology of choice for British imperial aims. In fact, the relationship between ideology and historical fact was, from the perspective of 1821, interdetermining, causal relationships confused and not open to clear scientific specification. Philhellenism was an idealism rooted in nationalism, and the applicability of nationalism to a “Greek” people emerging from Ottoman domination was radical, even shocking. For Turkey was still a great power in 1821 and Greece only an ideal, her people (beyond the Peloponnese) little more than disorganized tribes, her leaders living abroad out of touch with local chieftains. And yet the ideal of a nation was crucial to the success of the guerilla struggle. Was nationalism, then, a romantic mystification manipulated by the elites of the great powers for macropolitical ends? Or was it the rallying cry for a new historical order that threatened the Holy Alliance? The question cannot be posed outside an historical perspective: however “romantic” or conservative nationalism may seem to appear over its nineteenth-century development, and no matter how much classicist nostalgia was invoked by British elites, in 1821 the cause of the Greeks did also emblematize a broader, radical call for a new world order. The significance of philhellenism, according to historian C. W. Crawley,

was quite independent of the character of the Greeks and the real conditions of Levantine politics; it lay in the European appeal of classical tradition and of Christendom oppressed, and above all in the discovery of an outlet for energies compressed by the Conservative Alliance—an outlet the more welcome because relatively unconnected with the dangers of revolutionary movements at home. Every statesman in England, and many abroad, had been brought up in Classical studies, and some of them felt a warm personal concern in the fate of Greece, whatever their view of public duty. … In the age of Sir Walter Scott, with the passing of the eighteenth century and the end of the stern struggle against Napoleon, there was renewed among Englishmen, official and unofficial, of every political creed, a strain of fine Quixotism, a temper ready to admire adventure. … It manifested itself in different forms; not merely in the avowed romantics and philhellenes—men like Lord Guilford and Sir Richard Church—but in the zeal of the anti-slavery group, in the warm-hearted impulsiveness of Stratford Canning, in the fervor of Urquhart, a convert to the “Spirit of the East,” in Palmerston himself, the apostle of “British common sense,” and strangest of all, in those who professed themselves least moved by sentiment, such missionary disciples of Bentham as Sir John Bowring and the “typographical” Colonel Stanhope.⁸

The British elites found themselves divided. Shelley's poem appeared at a crucial historical moment, when the classicist sympathies of statesmen like Canning were in conflict with British imperial interests. Not that those interests were exactly clear at the time: both Castlereagh and Canning played a delicate diplomatic game, attempting to preserve neutrality, the navigability of Ionian waters, and the trust of both Russia and the Turks. Castlereagh refused to intervene, in order to avoid being sucked into a military alliance with Russia to guarantee Greek independence, and indeed there was some sense among the ministers—probably well founded—that if the Greeks could make some advances themselves they were better served than if England and Russia had negotiated a settlement for them at the Congress of Verona in 1822.⁹

Diplomatically, the British did not want to be forced into military action to guarantee a settlement. Politically, Castlereagh as much as his liberal opponents tended to see the Greek revolt as part of a general rebellion against the Holy Alliance. At the same time, he feared that an alliance with Russia against the Turks would in the long run be a danger to British interests in Southwest Asia. For one thing, there was not just important trade with Smyrna in Asia Minor but trade also with Ottoman lands throughout the Levant. The Ionian islands (controlled by Britain) were trade centers, and the British were sensitive to the fact that they were used as refuges by Greek rebels, the waters endangered by warfare and piracy. But most important to British fears of antagonizing the Turks was the common tendency in the period both to overestimate Russian power and to predict the eventual demise of the moribund Ottoman Empire. Turkey was Britain's only defense against Russian advances to the Mediterranean; the collapse of Turkish armed power might mean conflict with Russia. Only when the Russo-Turkish war broke out in 1829 did it become evident that Russia had only limited power to seize and hold territory south of the Danube. It is not surprising, then, that the British ambassador to Constantinople, Lord Strangford, urged Castlereagh to call for immediate Greek surrender and even ordered the local British admiral to assist the Turkish fleet! Even as late as 1827, the British crown apologized for the destruction of the Turkish and Egyptian fleets at Navarino by Admiral Codington, acting independently and impulsively to preserve a declared armistice. Liberals like Lord Holland proclaimed Navarino a “glorious victory”; George IV “lamented” the “untoward event.”¹⁰

In this context, philhellenism could have been seen as nothing less than a challenge to the global order of empires negotiated in 1815. Moreover, as Marilyn Butler has pointed out, Shelley's particular brand of hellenism would have been immediately obvious to his contemporaries as an alignment with republican radicalism. Butler sees Shelley's circle, particularly Peacock, Keats, and Hunt, forming a “left-wing cult of the classical” in conscious response to the conservative “Romanticism” of Coleridge and Wordsworth. And that classicism expressed itself in a fascination with naturalism, paganism, and myth: “In the tradition of learned polemic absorbed by Shelley and Peacock, the classic tale was not poetic fancy but religious myth, a means of conveying a universal truth through allegory.”¹¹ No doubt the urbane classicism of a Peacock or a Shelley carries with it an air of aristocratic idealization. But such class analysis here would be too blunt an instrument; the myth-making here is no mere flight from historicity but a more complex engagement with an Enlightenment and Radical-Dissenter tradition of liberalism, naturalism, and anti-authoritarianism. Ancient Greece is indeed an enduring, atemporal ideal for Shelley and his circle, but one that can speak to the present era which, as we shall see, Shelley portrays as emerging from authoritarian Christianity to a new pagan-inspired liberality, egalitarianism, and harmony. It is not true that Shelley's romantic utopianism is somehow politically disengaged or confused. In 1821 Shelley's idealism was both atemporal and rooted in historical progressivism in a way that only art and not politics can be.

McGann's attack on the utopian strains in romanticism resembles Lukács's on literary expressionism in the 1930s, generally that expressions of idealism in art are ideological in the same sense as they would be in critical or philosophical propositions about the world. But art is not itself history or politics, retaining enough autonomy to imagine (ideal) potentialities within these that science might not. It is not surprising that critics can situate a work within some historical or political context not consciously (or possibly) perceived by the artist; but this does not imply that any particular poetic treatment of history or myth, idealist or not, has necessarily predictable political implications. Historicists must avoid such claims. This point was made in a famous attack on Lukács by Adorno:

Lukács would doubtless deprecate as idealistic the use of terms like “image” and “essence” in aesthetics. But their application in the realm of art is fundamentally different from what it is in philosophies of essence or of primitive images, especially refurbished versions of the Platonic Ideas. The most fundamental weakness of Lukács's position is probably his inability to maintain this distinction, a failure which leads him to transfer to the realm of art categories which refer to the relationship of consciousness to the actual, as if there were no difference between them. … It is no idealistic crime for art to provide essences, “images”; the fact that many artists have inclined toward an idealist philosophy says nothing about the content of their works. The truth of the matter is that except where art goes against its own nature and simply duplicates existence, its task vis-à-vis that which merely exists, is to be its essence and image.¹²

In Shelley's Hellas there is indeed a good deal of Wasserman's kind of transcendent idealism, in the imagery of an enduring principle of liberation existing potentially within each moment (“Greece and her foundations are / Built below the tide of war, / Based on the chrystalline sea / Of thought and its eternity” [696-99]). But the political function of the imagery is not to deny the meaningfulness of human history but rather to revise both Mahmud's and the reader's conception of history and of the power of empire to control those conceptions. Shelley's idealism here is neither platonic nor escapist but argues that the very shape and realization of human ideals like peace and equality depend on the progress of history; that struggles for liberation are founded in permanent ideals but expressed and defined only within historical contingency; and that these ideals exist as permanent possibilities of social and spiritual progress, so that even as negatives (utopia is not yet) they persist to negate the negations of imperialism with its delusions of permanent power.

Within its own form and the real historical context it evokes, Shelley's idealism in Hellas does reflect the constitutionalist, nationalist, and essentially anti-imperialist progressivism of his time. Eurocentric and classicist, yes—and bourgeois nationalism itself would not seem so progressive, perhaps, by the 1840s—but it is worth noting that for all his classicism Shelley was progressive enough to fault the historical Athens for its treatment of slaves and women.¹³ The “brighter Hellas” that shall arise in the far future might seem to imply a flight from contemporary history; yet this utopia remains poised upon and defined by historical contingencies rendered urgent for the play's contemporary readers. The Shelley-Peacock circle needed to idealize Hellas in the post-Napoleonic era precisely because they sensed the crisis of culture—for them either a medium of social vision or a means of social control—in a secular age of failed revolutions and imperial reaction. Again, bourgeois nationalism at this time must have seemed the most radical position capable, at a revolutionary moment, of articulating social ideals based on the most enduring yet progressive principles of European civilization.¹⁴ Indeed, our ability to idealize within any historical situation is itself probed in Hellas and is essential to the often ironic structure of the drama.

Contributing to that irony, of course, is the sense of potential historical and spiritual progress that contrasts with Mahmud's growing ability to perceive his own necessary defeat; the counterpoint to this parabolic tale is Mahmud's actual victory, now emptied of meaning. The most remarkable dramatic recognition in the play, of course, is Mahmud's dream-vision, induced by the seer, Ahasuerus. His evocation of “the One” that transcends the fleeting moments of life seems to support the view of idealist critics that Shelley's metaphysics etherealizes the historical present:

                                                            —this Whole
Of suns, and worlds, and men, and beasts, and flowers
With all the silent or tempestuous workings
By which they have been, are, or cease to be,
Is but a vision—all that it inherits
Are motes of a sick eye, bubbles and dreams;
Thought is its cradle and its grave, nor less
The future and the past are idle shadows
Of thought's eternal flight—they have no being.
Nought is but that which feels itself to be.

(776-85)

But despite Shelley's sympathy with such metaphysical idealism, it should not be seen in isolation from its dramatic context. I would agree with Cameron that the speech is directed at Mahmud's imperial arrogance, producing “visions that will undermine Mahmud's morale by convincing him of the inevitable end of his empire.”¹⁵ In this, he functions like Demogorgon in Prometheus Unbound, announcing the ineluctable progress of history (conceived of as the progress of human ideals into the real). He is a type of the romantic border-figure, signaling a transition from one stage of consciousness to another. But in the dramatic context, that transition is from one understanding of history to another:

Mistake me not! All is contained in each.
Dodona's forest to an acorn's cup
Is that which has been, or will be, to that
Which is—the absent to the present …
Knock and it shall be opened—look and lo!
The coming age is shadowed on the past
As on a glass.

(792-95; 804-06)

Such a view of historical necessity should bring to mind an earlier dream-vision, where Ahasuerus makes his first appearance in Shelley, Queen Mab. Here the use of dream-vision as aesthetic form does not imply any implicit commitment to idealist metaphysics. Quite the contrary: in Queen Mab the metaphysics is explicit and materialist. In Hellas the relation of ideals to history is more dialectical. But in either case the use of dream-vision is consistent and incidental to idealism or materialism; it serves rather as a utopian form aimed at revising—or “awakening”—the dreamer's sense of history. This rhetorical mode should not be thought of (or abused as) a peculiarly “romantic” ideology: in fact, it is as deeply rooted in D’Holbach, Volney, and the philosophes as it is a precursor of later nineteenth-century scientific utopianism. In Hellas, the new vision itself concerns the relation of history to civilization's ideals.

Against a backdrop of timeless ideals struggling into history and modified by their incarnation unfolds this drama of new conceptions demanding new historical choices. Historicity and ideality are not so much opposed as interwoven, but not in a way open to theoretical knowledge or a “science” of politics. Their relation is revealed, rather, through the antagonisms of dramatic action; as one critic observes, “lyric drama is used to accentuate the dynamics of antithesis in the context of an unfinished struggle.”¹⁶ Thus the complex, tempered, often obscure idealism of the chorus:

Worlds on worlds are rolling ever
          From creation to decay,
Like the bubbles on a river
          Sparkling, bursting, borne away.
          But they are still
immortal
          Who through Birth's orient portal
And Death's dark charm hurrying to and fro,
          Clothe their unceasing flight
          In the brief dust and light …
          New shapes they still may weave,
          New Gods, new Laws receive.

(196-205, 207-08)

Despite their eternal presence, these immortals both affect and are subject to history. Historical evolution in Hellas appears as a progression of awakenings into temporality.

Swift as the radiant shapes of sleep
          From one whose dreams are Paradise
Fly, when the fond wretch wakes to weep …
          The Powers of earth and air
Fled from the folding star of Bethlehem.

(225-31)

At this historical advent, the Greek gods “Apollo, Pan, and Love”—who designate a benign humanized nature—desert a world awakening to the new “Truth” of Christianity.

Our hills and seas and streams,
          Dispeopled of their dreams,
Their waters turned to blood, their dew to tears,
          Wailed for the golden years.

(235-38)

The imagery is a complex inversion of Milton's “On the morning of Christ's Nativity,” and reflects Shelley's ambivalence toward a Christianity whose victory implied centuries of sectarian strife. In Milton, the mountains hear weeping from departing gods (xx), but nature herself rather rejoices in the new spiritual music and is “almost won” now that “her reign had here its last fulfilling” (x). In Shelley's chorus Christian truths waken us “to weep,” and although they are “true in their relation to the worship they superseded” do not usher in utopia.¹⁷ In contrast to this cold awakening to “blood” and “tears,” Hellas hopes for an awakening into history not sorrowful but joyous and humane.

The play itself recalls this wakening “to weep” as Mahmud progressively comprehends his own historical irrelevance; it further encourages its audience to a countermovement, a vision of victory even in the face of a temporary setback to the cause of liberation, a Greek failure. The utopian ideal, of course, would be the unification of the realm of Love with real historical advance. In the final chorus the “tears” become votive offerings, and the blood is rejected as Saturn and Love return to fulfill the hope of the first chorus for a history without triumphs, empire, or the blood sacrifice of war demanded by the “thorns of life.” And these thorns are not the vague stings of any earthly embodiment to the too-sensitive soul so often associated with Shelley; the rejected “Prologue to Hellas” identifies them specifically as “scepters and crowns, mitres and swords and snares” (Julian 3:15, lines 153-54).

Saturn and Love their long repose
          Shall burst, more bright and good
Than all who fell, than One who rose [Jesus]
          Than many unsubdued;
Not gold, not blood their altar dowers
          But votive tears and symbol flowers.

(1040-95)

History and ideality converge for Shelley in a moment of political choice, and it is too often forgotten that Hellas's macropolitical vision dawns not only on the immobilized and obsolescent Mahmud but also on the play's audience. Hellas, like The Persians upon which it is modeled, is a drama of reports. As in Aeschylus's play, or as in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, the sense of the reporting is the impinging of historical moment upon idyll, dream, or, in Mahmud's case, the mystification of power and imperial permanence. For Shelley's audience in 1821, the idealization of hellenism would not have been escapist; rather it intensified the sense of the present, where British action could uphold the ideological fantasies of Holy Alliance or intervene on behalf of emergent nationalism. It is precisely at this moment that the drama reaches its ironic climax, as the report reaches Mahmud of his victory over the Greeks, with British aid:

Victory! Victory! The bought Briton sends
The keys of Ocean to the Islamite— …
                                                                                O keep holy
This jubilee of unrevenged blood—
Kill, crush, despoil! Let not a Greek escape!

(1016-17, 1020-22)

But Mahmud has already accepted the irrelevance of this victory (“Come what may, / The Future must become the Past” [923-24]), his final words adding an undermining question-mark to his echo of the shouts: “Victory? Poor slaves!”¹⁸

The victory will belong to the progressive emergence of enlarged human potential, symbolized by ancient Greece but not limited even to that historical example. This larger cause may lose as little by this defeat as the Turks gain:

          If Greece must be
A wreck, yet shall its fragments reassemble
And build themselves again impregnably
          In a diviner clime …

(1002-05)

This may seem to be a retreat to otherworldliness—in which case no historical outcome would matter much—but again Shelley here is only invoking the permanence of human ideals as guiding principles of further political struggle:

Let the tyrants rule the desert they have made
          Let the free possess the paradise they claim
Be the fortune of our fierce oppressors weighed
          With our ruin, our resistance and our name!

(1008-11)

That struggle, he does suggest, may take place in other lands than contemporary Greece: “Let Freedom and Peace flee far / To a sunnier strand / And follow Love's folding star / To the Evening-land” (1027-30). But despite the obvious nervousness here at the drama's end, the shifting away from the contemporary political exigency, the suggestion of a new utopian advent (“the folding star”) in America does connect Shelley to recent revolutionary history and also, perhaps, to American Philhellenes, whose vigorous fund-raising Shelley would have heard of from Byron.¹⁹ Thus, even if Shelley in typical romantic fashion sees ideals as transcending history in their unity and permanence, their function remains radical, demanding political commitments and presenting historical possibilities here and now.

For Shelley, idealization is not ideological mystification if it presents a clarified political choice, an intensification of the present seen against a progressive future. In Ernst Bloch's terms, the future leaves a “trace” on the present, which is interlaced with political possibilities. Shelley's utopianism cannot in these terms be seen only as escapist illusion. But Hellas, particularly in its famous final chorus, does pose utopianism's most archly impossible question, Can any event within history conclusively revise our ways both of writing and of making it?

If Shelley demands that utopia emerge within historical struggles, he also insists on annihilating that history whose implicit goal, especially in the West's chiliastic theology, is the triumph and revenge of the good. This demand to remythologize history implies an idealization of the secular both classical in its humanism and Christian in its vision of an end to the past through an advent in the present. But it is more than these in aiming at a human appropriation of the forces of history in an actual moment of radical reconceptualization. Such appropriation interfuses history with mental drama, and it would clarify matters to admit that Marxist critics are correct to say that Shelley's radicalism on this point is unlike Marx's. But radicalism it is—Marx himself, incidentally, found Shelley so—and not a pure escape from politics into ideality.²⁰

Here we have identified the romantic paradox of Hellas's politics: that the poem commits itself to a specific progressive political struggle to be resolved by a mental revision, and yet is aware that historical progress has been written in a vocabulary of opposition, of victory, retribution, power divorced from love. How, indeed, given the “degradation” of most contemporary Greeks that even Shelley acknowledges in his Preface, how could even a Greek victory in 1821 avoid the turn to blood revenge and ensuing reactionary oppression? This question, I would argue, would have been obvious, even urgent, for a generation that had venerated and then despised a French revolution turned to empire, and had looked on in greater horror at the brutal irony of the Emperor's defeat by the reactionary Alliance. It would be natural to appeal to enduring ideals of liberation while supporting revolutionary violence. It is, perhaps, a permanent paradox of revolutionary utopianism to demand in advance of attaining political victory a reinvention of history (and culture) in the midst of crisis.

Re-envisioning dominant mythologies, we have come to believe, requires a power more political than cultural, rarely given to poets, rarely taken bloodlessly, rarely held without compromise. We feel this way—if we are to be truly historicist, and fair, in judging Shelley's radical legislator-poet—because we live in an era of state power that has made obsolete Shelley's tyrant kings, whose divinity and power so easily vanish when exposed to romantic mental theater. The bourgeois revolution that dethroned kings replaced them with less demonized powers, the Captains of Industry. The growth of the liberal industrial state in the nineteenth century has permanently changed what we count as radicalism and support for the oppressed: these new victims, as Engels was the first to note, become invisible even to themselves as such, their struggles not obviously dramatic but ideologically effaced in the name of political consensus. Romantic rebellion soon seemed less threatening for most people than just irrelevant. It is a measure of Shelley's real historicity, then, this rather sad tone of irrelevance and apology we hear in Mary Shelley's own note on Hellas, written for her 1839 edition: “We have seen the rise and progress of reform. But the Holy Alliance was alive and active in those days, and few could dream of the peaceful triumph of liberty. … Freedom and knowledge have now a chance of proceeding hand in hand” (Julian 3:63).

But Shelley has left us with an enduring problem, even if we are less sanguine about the political power of literary culture. This is the question of the political power of utopian idealization and radical, humane vision. I have argued that the precise relation of the idealizations of art to politics will depend not on any intrinsic ideological formula but rather on the clarity with which ideals and political “realism” are interwoven to display in art the dialectical relation between utopia and history.

I do not mean this as historical relativism or determinism, however. If there is no escaping history, there is also no escaping Shelley's utopian insistence that our political struggles emerge from reconstructions of history. Such reconstruction is the difficult work of culture itself, a truly discontented struggle between ideologies of power and the hope for a progressive future. Both are culture's dream-work, but Shelley's utopianism strives to awaken us into a world transformed by a dream of love, not a fantasy of power. He thought poets best able to do this—through the mental theater that both awakens us to the limiting paradoxes of our received beliefs and reforms them through new visions, visions of how our present moment might recreate history as the secular unfolding of love.

Notes

1. That Greece Might Still Be Free (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 51-65. Hunt remarks that “We are Greek when we speak of nautical matters with the sailor, of arithmetic with the merchant, of strategems with the soldier, of theatres and dramas with the play-goer, of poetry and philosophy with the man of letters, of theology with the churchman, of cosmetics with the fine lady [Hunt continues in this fashion]. … How can any of us pretend to admire the Greek love of liberty, if we will do nothing for it when it revives?” The Examiner, no. 718 (October 7, 1821): 626. This was published as Shelley was composing Hellas. For the circumstances of its composition, and Shelley's access to contemporary events in Greece through Byron, Hunt, and Mavrocordato (the Greek prince who tutored Mary Shelley in Greek), see Kenneth Neill Cameron, Shelley: The Golden Years (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), 375-80, 634 nn.

   The text of Hellas I have used, unless otherwise noted, is in Shelley's Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald Reiman and Sharon Powers (New York: Norton, 1977), 407-40. I have also consulted the Williams transcript, with Shelley's corrections, and the first edition (1822), both in the Huntington Library, HM 329 and 22407.

2. It is true, as Carl Woodring says, that “naturally Hellas does not describe the barbaric slaughter then practiced at every opportunity by the Greeks. In this work Shelley tries to persuade” (Politics in English Romantic Poetry [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970], 315). But it is doubtful that, even through Hunt or Mavrocordato, Shelley would have known of these massacres. Few Europeans did (St. Clair 23-27), and the Westernized educated class of Greeks were interested, of course, in raising money for a glorious cause. Shelley himself apologizes for having to rely on “newspaper erudition” (Preface). Hunt's information does not seem to have been much better: a year after Hellas was written he could write to his brother Henry, “I have already inquired about the Greeks, and have little doubt that I shall get information for the paper. I have written to Mr. Brown at Pisa, where there are numbers staying, and am going to apply to a merchant at Leghorn who has a Greek connexion.” Even by the standards of the day these were poor sources, and he wrote little more about Greece: Letter to Henry Hunt, November 1822, MS in the Huntington Library, HM6601.

3. For Marx it is inevitable that a rising class will represent its interests as a universal advance for “mankind.” Hence utopias are always fantasies of a particular class disguised in idealism. This does not, however, make them the less radical. “For each new class which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it, is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interest as the common interest of all the members of society, that is, expressed in ideal form.” But Marx goes on to say that at the moment of revolution, “its interest really is more connected with the common interest of all other non-ruling classes”; that is, is from its own historical vantage universally liberating. See Marx, The German Ideology, ed. C. J. Arthur (New York: International Publishers, 1970), 65-66. I am arguing that this was the case, in fact, with the spectrum of liberal and radical opposition to Holy Alliance; it was not until ten or fifteen years later that liberalism might be seen as out for its own nationalist-industrialist interests. (Marx's point, of course, is that it was those class interests and not the ideals, that moved history along. “‘Liberation’ is an historical and not a mental act” [61]. Shelley, though wanting to move history in much the same direction, would not agree.)

4. The Romantic Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 125. Historians might question this history: in 1821 the “end” of the Ottoman Empire would be generations in the future; and the “definitive emergence of European imperialism” would be difficult to specify, particularly given the scrapping among Holy Allies over this issue in the 1820s. Indeed, in 1821 the Greek revolt was seen by Metternich and the British ministers as potentially revealing “significant cracks” in the alliance—as it did, to some degree. See C. W. Crawley, The Question of Greek Independence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1930), 17-29.

5. Shelley: A Critical Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), 376. See also the parallels Wasserman finds with Hegel, 402, 411.

6. We should not discount censorship as an index of what was truly threatening or as a force that in itself delimited what could be written, debated, and thought, in the first third of the century. Cameron is correct to remark that Shelley's Preface “contains what is perhaps the most concentrated revolutionary statement of the age” (379). The paragraph, “Should the English people ever become free …” threatens to bring the war home to the oppressors; it was deleted by Charles Ollier in the 1822 edition, but proofs containing it were available to Buxton Forman in 1892 (Poetical Works 4:40-41), and at least one early printed copy contained this paragraph and the deleted ll. 1091-93 (Huntington 54530).

7. The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 2:365.

8. The Question of Greek Independence: A Study of British Policy in the Near East, 1821-1833 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1930), 14-15. See also C. M. Woodhouse, The Greek War of Independence (London: Hutchinson's, 1952), 57: “few indeed in this country were prepared at the time to see the magnificence of the Greeks' challenge. … The preface to Hellas, written in the early months of the struggle, is a notable vindication of poetic vision in the practical affairs of the world.”

9. Crawley 25-29.

10. Crawley 20; 100-12.

11. Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 121.

12. “Reconciliation under Duress” (1960), in Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, 1980), 159. McGann has more recently taken the position that sociohistorical criticism “argues that ‘what may be and should be’ is always a direct function of ‘what is, hath been, or shall be,’ and its theory of representation holds that art imitates not merely the ‘fact’ and the ‘ideal’ but also the dynamic relation which operates between the two.” He goes on to insist on the “determinate” character of the relation to the “what is,” such that there is a “natural or scientific relation” available to critical knowledge: McGann, ed., Historical Studies and Literary Criticism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 14. My own position is more pragmatic and closer to Marilyn Butler's in her essay in the above volume, “Against Tradition: The Case for a Particularized Historical Method,” 25-47.

13. A lucid summary of Shelley's attitudes toward ancient Greece and the relation of these to Hellas is Timothy Webb's chapter “The Greek Example,” in his Shelley: A Voice Not Understood (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1977), esp. 194-203.

14. To clarify: for Shelley these principles would include urbanity, skeptical scientific inquiry, contractual and republican government, liberality and progressivism in the arts and sciences. It would be instructive to compare this kind of “political middle ground” in the Regency with the considerably more conservative Hellenism (a static ideal of “perfection,” “sweetness and light” guiding liberal inquiry) to which Arnold retreats, during the tumultuous days of the reformist parliament of 1869, in Culture and Anarchy. For Shelley, culture could still lead a revolution; for Arnold it could only temper one.

15. Cameron 390.

16. Constance Walker, “The Urn of Bitter Prophecy: Antithetical Patterns in Hellas,” Keats-Shelley Memorial Bulletin 33 (1982): 36.

17. Shelley, note to lines 197-238, in Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Roger Ingpen and Walter Peck, Julian Edition (London: Ernst Benn, 1930), 3:56. Hereafter cited as Julian in the text. On the imagery of blood, gold, and awakening, see the valuable article by Walker, 40-44.

18. This line, 930, was later added to the Williams Transcript (HM 329) by Shelley.

19. Or even from Prince Mavrocordato himself. Byron would have known of Philhellenic committees from his friends Sir John Bowring and J. C. Hobhouse, but the London Greek Committee itself was not founded until 1823, eight months after Shelley's death. For a useful history, see Douglas Dakin, British and American Philhellenes (Thessaloniki: Institute for Balkan Studies, 1955), esp. 42-62.

20. McGann's is only the most recent of Marxist criticisms of Shelley. See, for instance, the attack on the “bourgeois illusion” in Shelley by Christopher Caudwell, who nonetheless sees Shelley as “the most revolutionary of the bourgeois poets of this era,” in “The Bourgeois Illusion and English Romantic Poetry,” in his Illusion and Reality (1936); rpt. Romanticism: Points of View, ed. Robert Gleckner and Gerald Enscoe, 2d ed. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1975), 117. (Caudwell's analysis is often crude, accusing Shelley of “indistinct emotions” and ethereal idealism; but also identifying Prometheus with the “machine-wielding capitalist,” an unlikely hero for such a poet.) That Marx and Engels admired Shelley is reported (perhaps unreliability) by Eleanor Marx and E. Aveling, Shelley's Socialism (London, 1888).