THE EVERLASTING UNIVERSE OF THINGS AS SHELLEY FOUND IT IN 1816: "MONT BLANC" AND "HYMN TO INTELLECTUAL BEAUTY"

The matter is to express the intuition that fantasy shadows anything we can understand reality to be. As Wittgenstein more or less puts a related matter: the issue is not to explain how grammar and criteria allow us to relate language to the world but to determine what language relates the world to be. This is not well expressed as the priority of mind over reality or of self over world ... It is better put as the priority of grammar — the thing Kant calls conditions of possibility (of experience and of objects), the thing Wittgenstein calls possibilities of phenomena — over both what we call mind and what we call the world. If we call grammar the Logos, we will more readily sense the shadow of fantasy in this picture.

Although Shelley's "Mont Blanc" is a difficult poem that has elicited widely differing interpretations, its readers have arrived at several generally accepted points of agreement about its significance and place in the Shelley canon. It is, for example, routinely assumed that this poem and "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" are to be taken together, the one "sister" to the other. In her edition of Shelley's lyrics, Judith Chernaik defines at least five other major and interrelated elements of a partial critical consensus still securely in place: 1) the revelation of "Mont Blanc" is the negative one that the "Power" is "not wise and providential but indifferent"; 2) the epiphany of this indifferent power paradoxically redirects human attention from brute physical force to the "importance of freedom and the power of mind"; 3) taken together, the two poems constitute the self-recognition of a writer "who presents himself publicly as a poet and announces his claim to recognition ... [and] formulates for the first time in his own voice the themes that are to dominate his major work"; 4) because "Mont Blanc" gives expression to its author's resolution "to accept no authority for belief other than that of his own mind, his own senses, his own powers of intuition," that author both asserts and enacts how the "mind's imaginings" are what alone we have to go on for disclosing who we are and for arriving at any claims about the "everlasting universe of things"; 5) in both poems Shelley deliberately "questions the traditional formulations of religion and philosophy" as when he converts the triad of faith, hope, and love into love, hope, and self-esteem.

In summary, we have substantial agreement that these two poems, the one as elusive as the other is abstruse, jointly labor toward an authorial self-recognition, its negative the denial of any providential God Our Father in Heaven, its positive the announcement of the "human mind's imaginings" as that into whose keeping we now find left "life, and the world, or whatever we call that which we are and feel" (NS 505). (The only major demurral from this "substantial agreement" are recent readings of "Mont Blanc" by, among others, Aaron Dunckel, Louise Economides, and Christopher Hitt. They argue for a materialist corrective to the long dominant idealist account of "Mont Blanc," exemplified most influentially by Earl Wasserman. Hitt, in particular, mounts a persuasive argument for how, contrary to the idealist account of the poem, thought "is ultimately subject to the power of 'things,' to the 'secret strength' they wield," and he provides a copious bibliography and succinct summary of recent work along these lines. I welcome this as indeed a corrective, bringing us closer to the subtleties of Shelley's position. But the epigraph to this chapter is meant to suggest that Cavell's Wittgensteinian thought, while perhaps laying a greater stress on the Kantian "conditions of possibility (of experience and of objects)" still leaves room for a complementary "materialist" stress on a "secret strength of things" to be received or acknowledged. More pertinently, perhaps, the epigraph is meant to suggest that, without the other, both the "idealist" and the "materialist" perspectives distort things and our mindful reception of them. The epigraph gives expression to Cavell's skepticism about applying to our human way of being in the world the idealist formulation of the, "priority of mind over reality or of self over world," but (to refer to a later formulation of our philosopher) Cavell does, it is clear, accept the linguistically turned "idealist" intuition that, "language comes to be hooked on or emitted into the world." But he also calls for that intuition to be complemented with one going, he insists, in a "reverse direction" in which, "the world calls for words, an intuition that words are, I will say, world-bound, that the world to be experienced, is to be answered, that this is what words are for." (It may help to think of this aspect of Cavell's thought as pithily expressed in Wittgenstein's cry, "Don't think, look."))

A more orthodoxly enthusiastic response to the Alpine scenery of "Mont Blanc" can be found in Coleridge's "Hymn before Sun-Rise in the Vale of Chamouni," the locale, theme, and phrasing of which evince numerous parallels with "Mont Blanc." In a letter, Coleridge associated his hymn with the Hebrew psalms that praise God as forever declaring himself in the work of his hand and the fiat of his voice. In the hymn itself, he makes the entire landscape "utter forth God" and be as it is only on the strength of a continuously effective divine command, establishing the foundations of being and sinking Mont Blanc's "sunless pillars deep in Earth." Coleridge's architectural language frames the world according to the wisdom psalms of the Hebrew Bible. God is a skillful and loving architect, and although the signs of His constructive and custodial care may range from the humble sheepfold to the splendid temple, they always entail an intelligent and providential design. In the culture Coleridge and Shelley shared, this was the privileged worldview which "Mont Blanc" calls into aggressive question. Against any imagining of a personal God always with us and always even unto death benignly superintendent over physical process, Shelley would have his "great mountain" rise up as a stark sign of contradiction "to repeal large codes of fraud and woe." Gavin de Beer has determined that during his 1816 sojourn in the Alps, Shelley repeatedly signed himself into his lodgings as [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]. Building on this, Timothy Webb has cogently argued that this theatrical...