Though Shelley's first eager desire to excite his countrymen to resist
openly the oppressions existent during 'the good old times' had faded
with early youth, still his warmest sympathies were for the people. He
was a republican, and loved a democracy. He looked on all human beings
as inheriting an equal right to possess the dearest privileges of our
nature; the necessaries of life when fairly earned by labour, and
intellectual instruction. His hatred of any despotism that looked upon
the people as not to be consulted, or protected from want and
ignorance, was intense. He was residing near Leghorn, at Villa
Valsovano, writing "The Cenci", when the news of the Manchester
Massacre reached us; it roused in him violent emotions of indignation
and compassion. The great truth that the many, if accordant and
resolute, could control the few, as was shown some years after, made
him long to teach his injured countrymen how to resist. Inspired by
these feelings, he wrote the "Mask of Anarchy", which he sent to his
friend Leigh Hunt, to be inserted in the Examiner, of which he was
then the Editor.
'I did not insert it,' Leigh Hunt writes in his valuable and
interesting preface to this poem, when he printed it in 1832, 'because
I thought that the public at large had not become sufficiently
discerning to do justice to the sincerity and kind-heartedness of the
spirit that walked in this flaming robe of verse.' Days of outrage
have passed away, and with them the exasperation that would cause such
an appeal to the many to be injurious. Without being aware of them,
they at one time acted on his suggestions, and gained the day. But
they rose when human life was respected by the Minister in power; such
was not the case during the Administration which excited Shelley's
abhorrence.
The poem was written for the people, and is therefore in a more
popular tone than usual: portions strike as abrupt and unpolished, but
many stanzas are all his own. I heard him repeat, and admired, those
beginning
'My Father Time is old and gray,'
before I knew to what poem they were to belong. But the most touching
passage is that which describes the blessed effects of liberty; it
might make a patriot of any man whose heart was not wholly closed
against his humbler fellow-creatures.
