Abstract
Man, argues Hume, is a creature capable of limited generosity but extended sympathy. He feels called upon to relieve the distress only of those close to himself, but he can sympathise inactively with the plight of others at a much greater remove. Morality is a direct product of the sympathetic capacity in man, because it enables him to adjust or even to overrule those reactions which arise from his ‘particular and momentary situation’. For example, it enables him to estimate justly the good qualities of an enemy, even though, in the present situation, those qualities may make him the more dangerous. ‘The imagination adheres to the general view of things’, and hence morality, the child of the imagination, is separable from self-interest, which is peculiar to each individual.1
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Notes
For a different, but not incompatible, account of the poem’s structure, see R. H. Haswell, ‘Shelley’s The Revolt of Islam [Laon and Cythna]: “The Connexion of its Parts”’, Keats — Shelley Journal, XXV (1976), pp. 81–102.
Most criticism of Julian and Maddalo has begun from Byron’s remark that the poem records conversation he had with Shelley when Shelley visited him in Venice to discuss arrangements for the upbringing of Allegra, Byron’s illegitimate daughter by Clair Clairmont. This has led most critics to assume that Julian represents Shelley, Maddalo Byron, and Maddalo’s daughter Allegra. The problem of the poem becomes the identity of the madman. Most argue that he is Shelley in a bad mood, some that he is a depressed Byron, and a few that he is Tasso strayed in from a play on Tasso’s madness that Shelley began but never finished. These readings are summarised by C. E. Robinson in Shelley and Byron: The Snake and Eagle Wreathed in Fight (Baltimore and London, 1976), pp. 81–104. Robinson himself offers a reading that ingeniously reconciles them all. His ingenuity, however, is surely misplaced, for the poem is explicable in its own terms without recourse to Shelley’s biography. Earl Wasserman in Shelley: A Critical Reading, pp. 57–83, and G. M. Matthews in ‘Julian and Maddalo: The Draft and the Meaning’, Studia Neophilologica, 35 (1963), pp. 57–84
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© 1981 Richard Cronin
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Cronin, R. (1981). The Language of Self-love. In: Shelley’s Poetic Thoughts. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16471-4_3
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