miching mallecho
Feb. 16th, 2009 08:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lotesseHave some snide Shelley to strt off the morning - the introductory note to his "Peter Bell the Third," a poem written in satire of Wordsworth.
"Dear Tom -- Allow me to request you to introduce Mr. Peter Bell to the respectable family of the Fudges; although he may fall short of those very considerable personages in the more active properties which characterize the Rat and the Apostate, I suspect that even you their historian will be forced to confess that he surpasses them in the more peculiarly legitimate qualification of intolerable dulnss.
You know Mr. Examiner Hunt. That murderous and smiling villain at the mere sound of whose voice our susceptible friend the Quarterly fell into a paroxysm of eleutherophobia and foamed so much acrid gall that it burned the carpet in Mr. Murray's upper room, and eating a hole in the floor fell like rain upon our poor friend's head, who was scampering from room to room like a bear with a swarm of bees on his nose: -- it caused an incurable ulcer and our poor friend has worn a wig ever since. Well, this monkey suckled with tyger's milk, this odious thief, liar, scoundrel, coxcomb and monster presented me to two of the Mr. Bells. Seeing me in his presence they of course uttered very few words and those with much caution. I scarcely need observe that they only kept company with him -- at least I can certainly answer for one of them -- in order to observe whether they could not borrow colours from any particulars of his private life for the denunciation they mean to make of him, as the member of an "infamous and black conspiracy, diminishing the authority of that venerable canon, which forbids any man to mar his grandmother"; the effect of which in this our moral and religious nation is likely to answer the purpose of the controversy. My intimacy with the younger Mr. Bell naturally sprung from this introduction to his brothers. And in presenting him to you, I have the satisfaction of being able to assure you that he is considerably the dullest of the three.
There is this particular advantage in an acquaintance with any one of the Peter Bells; that if you know one Peter Bell, you know three Peter Bells; they are not one but three, not three but one. An awful mystery after having caused torrents of blood, and having been hymned by groans enough to deafen the music of the spheres is at length illustrated to the satisfaction of all parties in the theological world, by the nature of Mr. Peter Bell.
Peter is a polyhedric Peter, or a Peter with many sides. He changes colours like a chameleon, and his coat like a snake. He is a Proteus of a Peter. He was at first sublime, pathetic, impressive, profound; then dull; then prosy and dull; and now dull -- o so dull! it is an ultra-legitimate dulness.
You will perceive that it is not necessary to consider Hell and the Devil as supernatural machinery. The whole scene of my epic is in "this world which is" -- so Peter informed us before his conversion to White Obi --
the world of all of us, and where
We find our happiness, or not at all.
Let me observe that I have spent six or seven days in composing this sublime piece; -- the orb of my moonlike genius has made the fourth part of its revolution round the dull earth which you inhabit, driving you mad whilst it has retained its calmness and its splendour, and I have been fitting this its last phase "to occupy a permanent station in the literature of my country."
Your works, indeed, dear Tom, sell better; but mine are far superior. The public is no judge; posterity sets all to rights.
Allow me to observe that so much has been written of Peter Bell, that the present history can be considered only, like the Iliad, as a continuation of that series of cyclic poems which have already been candidates for bestowing immortality upon, at the same time that they receive it from, his character and adventures. In this point of view, I have violated no rule of syntax in beginning my composition with a conjunction; the full stop which closes the poem continued by me being, like the full stops at the end of the Iliad and Odyssey, a full stop of a very qualified import.
Hoping that the immortality which you have given to the Fudges, you will receive from them; and in the firm expectation that when London shall be an habitation of bitterns, when St. Paul's and Westminster Abbey shall stand, shapeless and nameless ruins, in the midst of an unpeopled marsh; when the piers of Waterloo bridge shall become the nuclei of islets of reeds and osiers and cast the jagged shadows of their broken arches on the solitary stream, -- some transatlantic commentator will be weighing in the scales of some new and now unimagined system of criticism, the respective merits of the Bells and the Fudges, and of their historians; I remain, Dear Tom, Yours sincerely,
Miching Mallecho.
December 1, 1819.
P.S. Pray, excuse the date of place; so soon as the profits of this publication come in, I mean to hire lodgings in a more respectable street."
"Dear Tom -- Allow me to request you to introduce Mr. Peter Bell to the respectable family of the Fudges; although he may fall short of those very considerable personages in the more active properties which characterize the Rat and the Apostate, I suspect that even you their historian will be forced to confess that he surpasses them in the more peculiarly legitimate qualification of intolerable dulnss.
You know Mr. Examiner Hunt. That murderous and smiling villain at the mere sound of whose voice our susceptible friend the Quarterly fell into a paroxysm of eleutherophobia and foamed so much acrid gall that it burned the carpet in Mr. Murray's upper room, and eating a hole in the floor fell like rain upon our poor friend's head, who was scampering from room to room like a bear with a swarm of bees on his nose: -- it caused an incurable ulcer and our poor friend has worn a wig ever since. Well, this monkey suckled with tyger's milk, this odious thief, liar, scoundrel, coxcomb and monster presented me to two of the Mr. Bells. Seeing me in his presence they of course uttered very few words and those with much caution. I scarcely need observe that they only kept company with him -- at least I can certainly answer for one of them -- in order to observe whether they could not borrow colours from any particulars of his private life for the denunciation they mean to make of him, as the member of an "infamous and black conspiracy, diminishing the authority of that venerable canon, which forbids any man to mar his grandmother"; the effect of which in this our moral and religious nation is likely to answer the purpose of the controversy. My intimacy with the younger Mr. Bell naturally sprung from this introduction to his brothers. And in presenting him to you, I have the satisfaction of being able to assure you that he is considerably the dullest of the three.
There is this particular advantage in an acquaintance with any one of the Peter Bells; that if you know one Peter Bell, you know three Peter Bells; they are not one but three, not three but one. An awful mystery after having caused torrents of blood, and having been hymned by groans enough to deafen the music of the spheres is at length illustrated to the satisfaction of all parties in the theological world, by the nature of Mr. Peter Bell.
Peter is a polyhedric Peter, or a Peter with many sides. He changes colours like a chameleon, and his coat like a snake. He is a Proteus of a Peter. He was at first sublime, pathetic, impressive, profound; then dull; then prosy and dull; and now dull -- o so dull! it is an ultra-legitimate dulness.
You will perceive that it is not necessary to consider Hell and the Devil as supernatural machinery. The whole scene of my epic is in "this world which is" -- so Peter informed us before his conversion to White Obi --
the world of all of us, and where
We find our happiness, or not at all.
Let me observe that I have spent six or seven days in composing this sublime piece; -- the orb of my moonlike genius has made the fourth part of its revolution round the dull earth which you inhabit, driving you mad whilst it has retained its calmness and its splendour, and I have been fitting this its last phase "to occupy a permanent station in the literature of my country."
Your works, indeed, dear Tom, sell better; but mine are far superior. The public is no judge; posterity sets all to rights.
Allow me to observe that so much has been written of Peter Bell, that the present history can be considered only, like the Iliad, as a continuation of that series of cyclic poems which have already been candidates for bestowing immortality upon, at the same time that they receive it from, his character and adventures. In this point of view, I have violated no rule of syntax in beginning my composition with a conjunction; the full stop which closes the poem continued by me being, like the full stops at the end of the Iliad and Odyssey, a full stop of a very qualified import.
Hoping that the immortality which you have given to the Fudges, you will receive from them; and in the firm expectation that when London shall be an habitation of bitterns, when St. Paul's and Westminster Abbey shall stand, shapeless and nameless ruins, in the midst of an unpeopled marsh; when the piers of Waterloo bridge shall become the nuclei of islets of reeds and osiers and cast the jagged shadows of their broken arches on the solitary stream, -- some transatlantic commentator will be weighing in the scales of some new and now unimagined system of criticism, the respective merits of the Bells and the Fudges, and of their historians; I remain, Dear Tom, Yours sincerely,
Miching Mallecho.
December 1, 1819.
P.S. Pray, excuse the date of place; so soon as the profits of this publication come in, I mean to hire lodgings in a more respectable street."
no subject
Date: 2009-02-16 04:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-16 08:51 pm (UTC)If you haven't read him before, I'd suggest William Blake - he's this wild revolutionary who sees angels and makes snotty remarks against Aristotle. :)
no subject
Date: 2009-02-16 08:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-16 09:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-16 09:48 pm (UTC)