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At first glance nothing seems more un-Shelleyean
than patriotism. Nothing seems more opposed to
Shelley’s professed cosmopolitanism, to his
philosophical skepticism, to his Godwinian
disinterestedness, to his moral universalism, and to
his political radicalism than the idea of patriotism,
especially if we associate, as we are prone to do,
patriotic sentiment with chauvinistic nationalism. But
if we recall that there was a politically radical
version of British patriotism,[1]
and if we realize that Shelley’s politics were
just as practical as they were radical, we can start to
think through just what Shelley means when he invokes
patriotism, which he does in a surprising number of
writings. Not only is his appeal to patriotic sentiment
rhetorical, as in the "popular songs wholly
political" (Letters 2: 191), it is also
philosophical and poetic, as in writings as diverse as
the pamphlet An Address to the People on the Death
of the Princess Charlotte, the essay On
Love, the unpublished Philosophical View of
Reform, and the manifesto A Defence of
Poetry. What emerges from these various
deployments is an idea of patriotism that at once
motivates the political reformer, whom Shelley calls
the "true patriot" in A Philosophical View of
Reform, and also occasions community, offering
proof, in the language of the Princess
Charlotte pamphlet, "that we love something
besides ourselves" (Prose Works 232).
Combining the motive to reform with the necessity of
community, the references to patriotism in A
Defence of Poetry suggest that patriotism in
Shelley is what Edward Blyden called "the poetry of
politics" (qtd. in Appiah 26).
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Shelley’s Irish pamphlets, written mostly in
England, show an acute awareness of the problems facing
a reformer who would like to address those outside his
national borders. An Address to the Irish
People (1812) begins,
FELLOW MEN, I am not an Irishman, yet I can feel for
you. I hope there are none among you who will read
this address with prejudice or levity, because it is
made by an Englishman; indeed, I believe there are
not. (Prose Works 9)
From a position of tenuous authority,
Shelley’s gesture of transcultural sympathy is
careful to register cultural difference and then move
on to assert that the accident of where we are born
ought not to disqualify the desire of the English
reformer to enlighten the Irish: "I should like to know
what there is in a man being an Englishman, a Spaniard,
or a Frenchman, that makes him worse or better than he
really is. He was born in one town, you in another, but
that is no reason why he should not feel for you,
desire your benefit, or be willing to give you some
advice, which may make you more capable of knowing your
own interest, or acting so as to secure it" (9).
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But is there tension between the apparently
deracinated interests of the cosmopolitan reformer
speaking political truth to the Irish people, and the
"interests," however unspecified, of the Irish people
themselves, interests that the cosmopolitan claims to
be able to help the Irishman know? On a Shelleyean
account the answer would be no: by virtue of feeling
for and speaking to the Irish people, the cosmopolitan
reformer performs the benevolence with which he or she
hopes to animate his or her readership. As Shelley puts
it in another of the Irish pamphlets, the "benevolent
passions . . . generalize and expand private into
public feelings, and make the hearts of individuals
vibrate not merely for themselves, their families, and
their friends, but for posterity, for a
people; till their country becomes the world, and
their family the sensitive creation" (Prose
Works 41). The idea of feeling "for a
people," italicized by Shelley in
Proposals for an Association of
Philanthropists, is probably deliberately
unspecific as to who "the people" is, because "a
people" in this sense can be either a nation or the
world. So long as we move beyond the circles of
families and friends and into the larger, often
inconceivable circles of nation and world—and
here is where patriotism becomes a vital concept even
for the young Shelley — we negate the tendency
toward self-centeredness: "In proportion as he feels
with, or for, a nation or a world, so will man consider
himself less as that centre, to which we are but too
prone to believe that every line of human concern does,
or ought to converge" (41).
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Phrases such as "a nation or a world" suggest that
Shelley thought the moral imagination capable of
feeling for more than one "people" at once;
additionally, they suggest that he thought patriotism
and cosmopolitanism not incompatible. The compatibility
of cosmopolitanism and patriotism was not an uncommon
trope in the rhetoric of English radicalism after the
French Revolution, a tradition which came to Shelley
most of all through William Godwin, his intellectual
hero and eventual father-in-law, but also through
Paine, Tooke, Coleridge, and the Wordsworth of the
1790s. In a sermon called A Discourse on the Love
of our Country on 4 November 1789, the Dissenting
minister Richard Price asserted that there was no
problem in celebrating the English constitution along
with the events in France. The love of our country,
Price says, "does not imply any conviction of the
superior value of it to other countries, or any
particular preference of its laws and constitution of
government" (25). Moreover, Price says of our country
that "[w]e ought to seek its good, by all the means
that our different circumstances and abilities will
allow; but at the same time we ought to consider
ourselves as citizens of the world, and take care to
maintain a just regard to the rights of other
countries" (26).
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As David Bromwich notes, the "pretension" of
Price’s cosmopolitan sympathies was a central
target of Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the
Revolution in France, which argues passionately
that such sympathy, in Bromwich’s paraphrase, is
"morally impossible" because "before you can be a
citizen of the world, you must be a member of a family,
then a neighbor of others in a small community, then
and only then a citizen of a nation. . . . After the
abstraction of a nation, long after, comes mankind"
(73). Burke’s expression of the communitarian
thesis contains the memorable idea of our "little
platoon":
To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little
platoon we belong to in society, is the first
principle (the germ as it were) of public affections.
It is the first link in the series by which we
proceed towards a love to our country and to mankind.
(46-7)
Shelley’s idea of patriotism encompasses both
Burke’s organic localism and Price’s
radical world-citizenship: it would extol them both
equally for the basic virtue of countervailing our
tendency to self-love, and for the expansion of private
into public feelings for either a nation or a
world.
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Unlike the patriotism of Burke or Price, however,
Shelley’s idea of patriotism was not based on an
ancient English constitution or even what Price calls
"that event in this country to which the name of THE
REVOLUTION has been given" (28). Shelley did not, as
Paine charged of Burke, look to antiquity for
authority. This much is made clear in Shelley’s
obscure prose fragment The Elysian Fields
(1815 or 1816), which E. B. Murray identifies as a
lesson in political philosophy addressed to the
Princess Charlotte (Prose Works 400):
The English nation does not, as has been imagined,
inherit freedom from its ancestors. Public opinion
rather than positive institution maintains it in
whatever portion it may now possess; which is in
truth the acquirement of its own incessant struggles.
(Prose Works 163)
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Yet in "The Mask of Anarchy" (a poem included among
his "popular songs"), Shelley addresses the "Men of
England, heirs of glory, / Heroes of unwritten story"
(147-148), bringing together the acknowledgement of a
common past with the idea of a shared future, while
"unwritten" asserts the agency of the "men of England,"
the "heroes," in that future. "Unwritten" also
indicates their heroic though yet-to-be written role in
the past "glory" of England to which the present
generation is "heir." The as-yet-imagined, "unwritten"
quality of the future of England aligns Shelley with
the radical constitutionalism of Paine’s
Rights of Man, and against the interpretation
of the English constitution in Burke’s
Reflections. But how does Shelley get from the
assertion in The Elysian Fields that "the
English nation does not, as has been imagined, inherit
freedom from its ancestors" to the idea in the popular
songs of 1819 that the "men of England" are not only
the "heroes" of their nation’s "incessant
struggles," but also that they are the "heirs of
glory"?
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The transition can be explained by a look at a
series of texts in which Shelley invokes patriotism,
proceeding from the political pamphlets of 1817 to
A Defence of Poetry in 1821. Patriotism
appears at the intersection of Shelley’s
practical politics of reform, as in the appeals to it
in the pamphlets, and his developing aesthetics of
sociality, as in On Love and A
Defence. The ideas that Shelley associates with
patriotism, as well as the uses to which he puts it,
originate as the going-out-of-ourselves, however
contingent and varied the occasion, be it for the sake
of aesthetic experience, material necessity, or public
mourning. While the political pamphlets of 1817
encourage patriotism—and in fact are composed out
of patriotic feeling—Shelley’s
philosophical and poetic writings locate this
patriotism in the affections. It is located in "our
best affections," in fact, according to the
Princess Charlotte pamphlet, and it is "at war
with every base desire," in the language of A
Defence. Variously deployed, patriotism in Shelley
is a form of what he would come to call Love: a
sympathetic identification with something besides our
selves, something larger. It is both cause and effect;
which is to say, it is both that out of which we act,
writing pamphlets or poetry, and what it is we hope to
achieve, the history that is yet unwritten.
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Intended for an imagined readership of enlightened
reformers, A Proposal for Putting Reform to the
Vote throughout the Kingdom (1817) appeals to
love-of-country as the solution to partisan
gridlock:
That the most eloquent, and the most virtuous, and
the most venerable among the Friends of Liberty
should employ their authority and their intellect to
persuade men to lay aside all animosity and even
discussion respecting the topics on which they are
disunited and by the love which they bear to their
suffering country conjure them to contribute all
their energies to set this great question at
rest—whether the nation desires a reform in
Parliament or no. (Prose Works 173)
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With the concept of patriotism unstable in the
second decade of the nineteenth century, Shelley
attaches it to eloquence, virtue, authority, intellect,
and even to rhetorical persuasion—all
characteristics of the enlightened. There is a
distinction between the "most venerable among the
Friends of Liberty" and the "men" whom they must
persuade, suggesting that those who are enlightened
already love their country and ought, for practical
political reasons, convince others to love it too. As
such, patriotism has a dual function in this passage:
it is both what motivates the eloquent and virtuous
Friends of Liberty to persuade others to set aside
their differences and what the result of such
persuasion is; which is to say, patriotism is both
cause and effect.
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In his other major pamphlet of 1817, Shelley locates
patriotism not in the perfection of a mythical
pre-Norman constitution or in "public opinion," but
instead in the "bosoms of men," "revived" along with
other "glorious emotions" such as "a noble spirit" and
"the love of liberty" (Prose Works 236). The
revival of patriotism in the "bosoms of men" occupies a
crucial juncture in the brief historical narrative that
Shelley presents in the pamphlet On the Death of
the Princess. The narrative is an economic and
social history of England from the war in America to
the juxtaposed death of the Princess Charlotte and the
execution of laborers Jeremiah Brandreth, William
Turner, and Isaac Ludlum. A précis of the
socioeconomic analysis in the 1819 Philosophical
View of Reform, the version of "things as they
are" in the 1817 pamphlet not only shows
Shelley’s proto-Marxian vision of alienated
labor, but also, in its indictment of the "double
aristocracy" effected by the public debt, betrays
Shelley’s often overlooked aristocratic
disposition.[2]
Shelley posits a necessary connection between the
prosperity of the new aristocracy of "villainous trade"
and the "miseries" of the "day labourer":
The labourer, he that tills the ground and
manufactures cloth, is the man who has to provide,
out of what he would bring home to his wife and
children, for the luxuries and comforts of those,
whose claims are represented by an annuity of
forty-four millions a year levied upon the English
nation. . . . Many and various are the mischiefs
flowing from oppression, but this is the
representative of them all; namely, that one man is
forced to labour for another in a degree not only
necessary to the support of the subsisting
distinctions among mankind, but so as by the excess
of the injustice to endanger the very foundations of
all that is valuable in social order, and to provoke
that anarchy which is at once the enemy of freedom,
and the child and the chastiser of misrule. (236)
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According to Shelley the agent of redress is "the
nation," which "began to be weary of the continuance of
such dangers and degradations," and its means is "the
public voice," which "loudly demanded a free
representation of the people" (236). And while "the
nation itself" was reacting to the "hard necessity"
following from the public debt, at some point, perhaps
without "the nation" even knowing, "[a] nobler spirit
also went abroad, and the love of liberty, and
patriotism, and the self-respect attendant on those
glorious emotions, revived in the bosoms of men" (236).
United in the sense of "self-respect" that they
generate, the "glorious emotions" of patriotism,
liberty, and nobility of spirit are in fact not
presented as the cause of the nation’s "daring to
touch the question" of parliamentary reform; rather,
they are presented by Shelley as being there all along,
having "[gone] abroad" uncaused or been "revived"
unknowingly by and in each who contributed to the
"public voice." But in Shelley’s historical
narrative the "public voice" gets "overpowered by the
timid and the selfish" (237), showing the contingency
of progressive reform on the confluence of daring and
selflessness. Only a "regularly constituted assembly of
the nation" can conjure again the "public voice" that
brings with it a nobler spirit, the love of liberty and
patriotism—in short, the
self-respect—necessary for wresting power away
from the despots of England in 1817 and their "infernal
agents." For the time being, however, Shelley advises
the English people to mourn, not just for the Princess
Charlotte or even just for the executed laborers, but
for "British Liberty":
Mourn then People of England. Clothe yourselves in
solemn black. Let the bells be tolled. Think of
mortality and change. Shroud yourselves in solitude
and the gloom of sacred sorrow. Spare no symbol of
universal grief. Weep—mourn—lament. Fill
the great City—fill the boundless fields, with
lamentation and the echoes of groans. (238-39)
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The idea of public mourning is addressed at the
start of the pamphlet On the Death of the
Princess. Shelley comes out in favor of it for
reasons that have everything to do with what he means
when he invokes patriotism: "Men do well to mourn the
dead," Shelley writes, "because it proves that we love
something besides ourselves" (232). Patriotism proves
the same thing, and it becomes clear that patriotic
sentiment is involved in Shelley’s vision of
public mourning, as he writes that "[t]o lament for
those who have benefitted the state, is a habit yet
more favorable to the cultivation of our best
affections" (Prose Works 232). While
patriotism is not mentioned in Shelley’s
dissertation on public mourning, it is undoubtedly
present as the name for what happens when we mourn,
like the Athenians, for "those who have benefitted the
state." Feeling for a loss beyond our little platoon is
a characteristic of a "liberal mind":
We cannot truly grieve for every one who dies beyond
the circle of those especially dear to us; yet in the
extinction of the objects of public love and
admiration, and gratitude, there is something, if we
enjoy a liberal mind, which has departed from within
that circle. It were well done also, that men should
mourn for any public calamity which has befallen
their country or the world, though it be not death.
This helps maintain that connexion between one man
and another, and all men considered as a whole, which
is the bond of social life. (232)
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Public mourning and patriotic sentiment are affairs
of the heart, grounded in the "feelings of men" rather
than in their intellects (232). They "occasion" a
"pouring forth" of "those fertilizing streams of
sympathy," which Shelley calls "solemnity": "This
solemnity should be used only to express a wide and
intelligible calamity, and one which is felt to be such
by those who feel for their country and for mankind;
its character ought to be universal, not particular"
(233). Seeing no problem with feeling for both the
country and for mankind at the same time, Shelley looks
to public mourning as an occasion for patriotic
sentiment—an occasion, however contingent, for
the sociality that comprises our "best affections."
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Our "best affections" are the subject of the 1818
essay On Love, which defines them as our
search for community when we discover that merely our
own thoughts are not enough: "[Love] is that powerful
attraction towards all that we conceive or fear or hope
beyond ourselves when we find within our own thoughts
the chasm of an insufficient void and seek to awaken in
all things that are a community with what we experience
within ourselves" (Shelley’s Poetry and
Prose 503). Directed "beyond ourselves," this
"powerful attraction" is what is at work in the kind of
patriotism Shelley imagines and invokes. Indeed,
patriotism, or more specifically "patriotic success,"
is referenced in On Love, occurring remarkably
in a group with both natural beauty and the singing of
a loved one:
There is eloquence in the tongueless wind and a
melody in the flowing of brooks and the rustling of
the reeds beside them which by their inconceivable
relation to something within the soul awaken the
spirits to a dance of breathless rapture, and bring
tears of mysterious tenderness to the eyes like the
enthusiasm of patriotic success or the voice of one
beloved singing to you alone. (504)
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The specific comparison in this passage between the
effect of natural "eloquence" and "melody" on "the
soul" and that of "patriotic success" and a
beloved’s voice, both eliciting "tears of
mysterious tenderness," suggests that while the true
nature of patriotic sentiment is utterly inconceivable
and thus profoundly mysterious, it can still be judged
by its emotional impact. Like eloquence, melody, and a
lover’s voice, it belies our self-centeredness
and shows us that we have a stake in what is public,
that our "souls" bear a relationship to a nation or a
world.
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In A Philosophical View of Reform (1819),
the idea of patriotism as both cause and effect, as
both the motivation of the reformer and what reform
would look like, informs Shelley’s definition of
the "true patriot": "The true patriot will endeavor to
enlighten and to unite the nation and animate it with
enthusiasm and confidence" (Trumpet of a
Prophecy 257). The true, reformist patriot by
definition goes out of herself and identifies with
something larger; and the task of reform is to elicit
this going out of self and identification—in
short, this kind of Love—in others. Patriotism is
both what impels the reformer and what she hopes to
achieve. Refraining from any talk of enlightening,
uniting, or animating all of mankind (a task left to
the poets, those "legislators of the world"), Shelley
assigns a central role to the "true patriot" in his
vision of English social reform. In fact, the projects
that Shelley sets forth for the "true patriot"
encompass many of Shelley’s own activities as a
socially-committed poet: the tireless promulgation of
political truth, the appeal to the Friends of Liberty
to put aside their differences and come together on
issues of common concern, the proposal of "open
confederations" or philanthropic associations, and the
incitement of the people to exercise their right of
assembly in reasonable numbers. The "true patriot" is
also the prophet of nonviolence:
Lastly, if circumstances had collected a more
considerable number as at Manchester on the memorable
16th of August, if the tyrants command their troops
to fire upon them or cut them down unless they
disperse, [the true patriot] will exhort them
peaceably to risk the danger, and to expect without
resistance the onset of the cavalry, and wait with
folded arms the event of the fire of the artillery
and receive with unshrinking bosoms the bayonets of
the charging battalions. (257)
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The logic of Shelleyean nonviolence is manifold, but
it includes at its heart the confrontation of the
soldiers with their fellow men and fellow
countrymen—or perhaps more accurately with their
fellow men whom they only know, by virtue of the
accident of being born in one country instead of
another, as their fellow countrymen. Shelley notes
twice this dual citizenship, both times pointing out
that the soldiers are men and Englishmen: "In the first
place, the soldiers are men and Englishmen, and it is
not to be believed that they would massacre an
unresisting multitude of their countrymen drawn up in
unarmed array before them and bearing in their looks
the calm, deliberate resolution to perish rather than
abandon the assertion of their rights" (257). In the
next use of the phrase—"[b]ut the soldier is a
man and an Englishman" (257)—such dual
citizenship is what "would probably throw [the soldier]
back upon a recollection of the true nature of the
measures of which he was made the instrument, and the
enemy might be converted into the ally" (257). The
sympathetic identification of soldier and laborer is
not only a going-out-of-self by each party, but an
expansion of passion, benevolence, and affection that
is concomitant with the soldier’s realization of
his merely instrumental, and thus repressive,
agency.
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Although Shelley’s "popular songs" prescribe
just this kind of nonviolent resistance, there is no
mention of poets and poetry in Shelley’s
description of the "true patriot" in A
Philosophical View of Reform. Yet in A Defence
of Poetry patriotism clearly depends for its
vitality on poetry, and on the delicate sensibility and
enlarged imagination of the true poet, which elevate
patriotism to the realm of virtue, friendship, and
love. Shelley mentions patriotism three times in A
Defence, once in a discussion of Homer’s
heroes, and then twice in a list with virtue,
friendship, and love, implying that each is equivalent
to the others not only for their common grounding in
poetry, but also for the fact that each is a version of
the great secret of morals, which is "the going out of
our own nature" (Shelley’s Poetry and
Prose 517):
What were Virtue, Love, Patriotism, Friendship
&c.—what were the scenery of this beautiful
Universe which we inhabit—what were our
consolations on this side of the grave—and what
were our aspirations beyond it—if Poetry did
not ascend to bring light and fire from those eternal
regions where the owl-winged faculty of calculation
dare not ever soar? (531)
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Poetry, "unlike reasoning" but more like "something
divine," "that from which all spring, and that which
adorns all," or "the perfect and consummate surface and
bloom of things," not only accompanies, expresses, and
embodies patriotism, but also participates wholly in
it. Poetry is the origin of patriotism as well as its
performance. The expression of patriotism, or its
influence on thought or action, is poetry, because a
patriot by definition proves that she loves something
besides herself. This is "the poetry of politics," the
Shellyean patriotism that is what happens when "self
appears as what it is, an atom to a Universe," the part
of a necessary whole (532). But this applies, as
Shelley’s repeated invocations of patriotic
sentiment contend, whether the "whole" be a nation or a
world, for love of either mankind or England is equally
a going out of our own nature, equally enough to
motivate reform and to occasion sympathy.
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