I remonstrated with him in vain on the tone of mind from which such a view of things alone arises. It is a kind of obstinate & selfwilled folly in which he hardens himself. ![]() ![]() The spirit in which it is written is, if insane, the most wicked & mischievous insanity that ever was given forth. I entirely agree with what you say about Childe Harold. I cannot consent to be auditor tantum of this systematical ‘poisoning’ of the ‘mind’ of the ‘Reading Public’ ( Letters 1: 123), Shelley had replied, on December 17th or 18th of the same year: The fourth canto of Childe Harold is really too bad. I think it necessary to ‘make a stand’ against the encroachments of black bile. But when on May 30th 1818 Peacock had written to him, “I have almost finished Nightmare Abbey. That which sprung / From his lips like music flung / O’er a mighty thunder-fit, / Chastening terror is Childe Harold IV (it hardly describes Beppo). Though thy sins and slaveries foul / Overcloud a sunlike soul means Byron’s life in Venice is a non-stop sex orgy. Driven from his ancestral streams / By the might of evil dreams is a poetic way of saying that Byron had been beastly to his wife, and had felt the scandal to be bad enough to force him out of England. Shelley creates here an idealising vocabulary, through which his prose Byron may be viewed from a safe distance. That would be a Byron about whom he would not be able to write poetry. If ever Byron became an Italian, Shelley would confine him to the realm of prose for ever. Shelley, a bit out of character, assumes here the role of morally fastidious patriot, chiding his fellow-countryman for letting the side down. ![]() He is not yet an Italian & is heartily & deeply discontented with himself, & contemplating in the distorted mirror of his own thoughts, the nature & the destiny of man, what can he behold but objects of contempt & despair? LPBS 2: 57 He associates with wretches who seem almost to have lost the gait & phisiognomy of man, & do not scruple to avow practices which are not only not named but I believe seldom even conceived in England. He allows fathers & mothers to bargain with him for their daughters, & though this is common enough in Italy, yet for an Englishman to encourage such sickening vice is a melancholy thing. Well, L B is familiar with the lowest sort of these women, the people his gondolieri pick up in the streets. Countesses smell so of garlick that an ordinary Englishman cannot approach them. the Italian women are perhaps the most contemptible of all who exist under the moon the most ignorant the most disgusting, the most bigotted, the most filthy. Here he is writing to Peacock in mid-December 1818, from Venice, about the prose Byron:
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