Shelley: The Pursuit Read online

  Hogg’s narration of one of Shelley’s solitary devil-raising sessions reflects certain descriptions and scenes in Shelley’s later poetry:

  He consulted his books, how to raise a ghost; and once, at midnight, — he was then at Eton — he stole from his Dame’s house, and quitting the town, crossed the fields towards a running stream. As he walked along the pathway amidst the long grass, he heard it rustle behind him; he dared not look back; he felt convinced that the devil followed him; he walked fast, and held tight the skull, the prescribed assistant of his incantations. When he had crossed the field he felt less fearful, for the grass no longer rustled, so the devil no longer followed him.61

  In this little piece of comic macabre is the first appearance of one of those ghostly ‘following figures’ which were to haunt Shelley both in his life and his writing throughout his remaining years. The first occasion on which Shelley consciously admitted this obsession to himself was in the poem, ‘Oh! There are spirits of the air’, written when he was 23.62

  The one adult figure of importance in Shelley’s life at Eton was Dr James Lind. Lind had been at one time physician to the Royal Household, and was now retired, living at Windsor, and teaching part-time at the college. He was a mild, silver-haired, professorial and somewhat eccentric figure. He had been a scholar and a traveller. His journeys had taken him to Iceland, India and China, and his collection of stones and curios was extensive. He was fascinated by typography and set up and printed his own little pamphlets. He had a wide knowledge of mythological and philosophical writings, both Greek and Oriental, and had published three papers for the Royal Society.63 He was interested in hermetic writings, and it was rumoured that he was an amateur demonologist.64 Shelley found in him both an intellectual guide and an emotional father-figure, and in this respect he was to be the precursor of William Godwin.

  During Shelley’s last two years at Eton he was taken under the Doctor’s wing, and was frequently invited to Lind’s house in Windsor for tea, which was served in a variegated selection of teacups by the Doctor’s niece. Lind encouraged Shelley to be systematic in his reading and speculation, discussing with him the philosophical limitations of Pliny’s natural history, and recommending his first liberal and radical texts, the works of Benjamin Franklin, Condorcet the materialist and Voltaire the sceptic. Shelley’s interest in Lucretius as a sound, classical authority for an anti-religious and scientific-materialist philosophy was also probably fostered by Lind; and there is some evidence that Shelley’s first contact with Godwin’s writing was a glimpse of Lind’s copy of Political Justice.65 Lind’s interest in pamphleteering encouraged Shelley in his own printing schemes, and Lind also taught him the value of the postal debate.

  Shelley’s strategy, adopted from the Doctor, was to write to well-known authorities on religious or philosophical questions, posing as a distressed spinster, puzzled curate or other intellectual innocent. Having once hooked a reply the innocent correspondence would step up the level of the debate, until suddenly the unwary Doctor of Divinity found himself having to argue for his life. Shelley delighted in this form of intellectual ambush, and Hogg recorded that in 1810 Shelley had several postal debates in progress simultaneously. Shelley’s favourite pseudonym was the harmless-sounding ‘Reverend Merton’, and his most distinguished catch was no less than the Dean of St Paul’s.66 Hogg also said, less reliably, that Dr Lind was amused to hear of old Bysshe’s capacity for cursing, and that he taught Shelley a formal Rite of Damnation to be pronounced against political enemies.

  It was Dr Lind who first read Plato — still regarded both in schools and universities as a subversive and corrupting author — with Shelley and drew his attention to the Phaedrus and the Symposium. This was an introduction which was to bear fruit in a masterly translation when Shelley was 26. Shelley commemorated Dr Lind in two of his poems of 1817, The Revolt of Islam and ‘Prince Athanase’, in which he was transformed, like Godwin, into a mythical personage: the sage, the rescuer, the healer. Shelley celebrated this in his description of the education of Prince Athanase by the magus Zonoras, the ‘one beloved friend’ with eyes ‘whose arrowy light shone like the reflex of a thousand minds’. The platonic teaching was presented by Shelley in retrospect as something intellectually and emotionally sacred:

  Thus through his age, dark, cold, and tempest-tossed,

  Shone truth upon Zonoras; and he filled

  From fountains pure, nigh overgrown and lost,

  The spirit of Prince Athanase, a child,

  With soul sustaining songs of ancient lore

  And philosophic wisdom, clear and mild,

  And sweet and subtle talk they evermore,

  The pupil and the master, shared. . . .67

  The adolescent idea of learning as a kind of alchemy which provided the secret key to wisdom was gradually to become transformed into a more mature and political conception. Learning became the private and secret weapon against public tyranny, passed on by the aged philosopher to the youthful activist. It was almost the idea of the ‘conspiracy of the intellect’. Shelley expounded this view of his education in the mouth of another Lind-like sage and father-figure in the other poem of 1817, The Revolt of Islam.

  ‘Yes, from the records of my youthful state,

  And from the lore of bards and sages old,

  From whatsoe’er my wakened thoughts create

  Out of the hopes of thine aspirings bold,

  Have I collected language to unfold

  Truth to my countrymen; from shore to shore

  Doctrines of human power my words have told,

  They have been heard, and men aspire to more

  Than they have ever gained or ever lost of yore.

  ‘In secret chambers parents read, and weep,

  My writings to their babes, no longer blind;

  And young men gather when their tyrants sleep

  And vows of faith each to the other bind. . . .

  ‘The tyrants of the Golden City tremble

  At the voices which are heard about the streets,

  The ministers of fraud can scarce dissemble

  The lies of their own heart; but when one meets

  Another at the shrine, he inly weets,

  Though he says nothing, that the truth is known;

  Murderers are pale upon the judgement-seats,

  And gold grows vile even to the wealthy crone,

  And laughter fills the Fane, and curses shake the Throne . . . .’68

  If Dr Lind had gradually inherited over the years the position of spiritual father and guide, Timothy, by contrast, was to be transformed into the type of false father, betrayer and tyrant.

  According to Shelley it was Dr Lind who came to Field Place to prevent his beloved pupil from being committed to the asylum by the tyrant father Timothy during his fever. Lind’s contrast with Timothy was overt in Shelley’s mind. ‘This man . . . is exactly what an old man ought to be. Free, calm-spirited, full of benevolence, and even of youthful ardour; his eye seemed to burn with supernatural spirit beneath his brow, shaded by his venerable white locks; he was tall, vigorous, and healthy in his body; tempered, as it had ever been, by his amiable mind. I owe that man far, ah! far more than I owe to my father; he loved me, and I shall never forget our long talks where he breathed the spirit of the kindest tolerance and the purest wisdom.’69 So he told Mary Shelley, on the night in 1814 when he declared his love for her.

  By 1809, when Shelley was 17, the friendship with Lind had brought out the first clear marks of dawning intellectual maturity, and Eton had begun to smooth some of its expensive social polish over the disturbed and volatile personality beneath. His sisters remembered their ‘silent, though excessive’ admiration as their elder brother stood in beautifully fitting silk pantaloons warming his coat-tails in front of the massive fire at Field Place. To an Eton friend he wrote nonchalantly of shooting at thousands of wild ducks and geese ‘in our River and Lake’ all day, and reading novels and romances all night. Tom Medwin s
aw him down three snipe in three successive shots at the end of the pond. In another letter he issued an invitation in the Eton style of the day: ‘I hope we shall have the Pleasure of your Company at Field Place at Easter, & that you will conjointly with Il Padre & myself esclipse the Beau’s & Belles of the Horsham Ball. . . . O how I wish you were here to enliven our Provincial Stupidity & how I regret the Frost — I am your affectionate friend.’70 It is notable that his father is still referred to in a markedly amiable light.

  A new attraction who entered briefly but intensely into his life in 1809 was his beautiful cousin, Harriet Grove, who came to stay with the rest of her family at Field Place during the spring. His new-found appetite for postal debates had led him to write to his cousin as well, and in her diary between January and April 1809 she recorded the receipt of weekly letters. The friendship began on paper before it began in fact, and it was to retain a novelettish quality throughout the next eighteen months. Shelley first properly met Harriet in April, at a time when he described himself immersed in solitude at Field Place, having ‘no Employment, except writing Novels & Letters’. His youngest sisters were now themselves away at school. The descent of the Grove family for several days cheered him up and excited him: an inseparable romantic foursome was formed of Shelley, Harriet, her closest brother Charles and Elizabeth Shelley. There were moonlit walks to Strood — Shelley’s old favourite — and twilit rambles round St Irving’s, a beautiful Elizabethan manor house near Horsham with gardens and fountains laid out by Capability Brown. Shelley, Harriet and Elizabeth planned poems and novels together, and when the Groves moved up to Town to stay at John Grove’s house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, Shelley, Elizabeth and Mrs Shelley rapidly joined them. Shelley wrote pointedly to an Eton friend: ‘I shall be in London on the 16th at the Opera on Tuesday — observe who I am with, & I will ask your opinion at some future period.’71

  In London, they all went to see Hellen and Margaret Shelley at their school in Clapham, and Hellen was much impressed by Harriet’s prettiness as Tom Medwin had been at Field Place — ‘like some Madonna of Raphael’. She remembered that Shelley was very full of himself and showing off, and much to everyone’s embarrassment spilt a glass of port wine on the headmistress’s tablecloth. Then they all went into the garden and ‘there was much ado to calm the spirits of the wild boy’.72 The curious thing was that the two cousins looked very much alike, and Shelley seemed to revel in this sense of twinship. In May, the Groves returned to Wiltshire and Shelley went back to Eton for his last year. Charles Grove remembered that ‘Bysshe was full of life and spirits, and very well pleased with his successful devotion to my sister.’73 Harriet tacitly agreed to act as his Muse, and the friendship brought him both kudos and self-confidence. He continued to write to her regularly in Wiltshire, but his letters instead of being full of romantic declarations, were packed out with Shelley’s strange mixture of grim, gothic fantasies and poems, and lumps of ill-digested Condorcet and Lucretius. By September, Harriet had grown both alarmed and slightly bored with the correspondence, and she showed some of it to her parents who advised her to break it off. Shelley was piqued rather than upset by this development, but he continued to address her as a convenient Muse in the poems which he was writing with Elizabeth, and in the following spring he met her again at Field Place. Neither Shelley’s nor Harriet’s parents regarded this in any way as ill-advised. Harriet had some arguments with her brother Charles about a gothic novel Shelley had written, which she was prepared to patronize: ‘I think it makes him [Charles] appear very illnatured to criticise so very much.’74 Shelley himself was sulking, and she found his behaviour strange and odd, but they walked again at St Irving’s and Strood, and had ‘a long conversation’, in which nothing very constructive seemed to emerge. They had little in common, and it was only in her absence that Shelley could feel very strongly about her.

  For her part Harriet certainly did not take the matter very seriously, and by the end of the year she had announced her formal engagement to a local gentleman farmer, William Helyer. Shelley by this time was at Oxford, and it was only during the winter vacation of 1810, when he first heard the news, that he reacted with melodramatic despair, and Elizabeth spoke of watching him very carefully when he went out for walks with his gun. But by this time, quite other forces were at work, and Harriet’s ‘betrayal’ provided a natural mise en scène. It was an affair, like the other myths of his childhood, that flourished in retrospect and in his angry memories of persecution and love withdrawn.

  Shelley was 18 in 1810, and in his last term at Eton he finally established himself as a notable classical scholar, a tolerated eccentric with strange philosophical views and, something rather smarter, a popular author. In April, the gothic novel upon which he had been working both at Eton and Field Place for some eighteen months, appeared under the announcement in The British Critic: ‘Zastrozzi; a Romance. By P.B.S. 5s.’ Shelley earned the remarkable sum of £40 for this work, printed by J. Robinson, and circulated in time to bring him considerable admiration and notoriety in his leaving term at Eton. The £40 was spent on a farewell dinner, which suggests that he had established not merely a niche but an active following by the time he left. Hogg records that he was dignified by the title ‘the Eton Atheist’, a title reserved for those who had successfully opposed the school authorities. The implication was sociological rather than theological; but it implied recognition.

  On Election Day, 30 July 1810, Shelley delivered one of Cicero’s speeches against Catiline as his contribution to the leaving ceremony, and it was generally understood that the tall, thin, strangely animated figure who would be going up to Oxford in the autumn had recently completed a translation of the first fifteen books of Pliny’s Historia Naturalis. Tom Medwin added that at this time Shelley’s favourite among contemporary poets was Robert Southey, and that he knew Southey’s massive oriental verse narrative Thalaba almost by heart. Shelley liked to chant the demonic formula from Southey’s Curse of Kehama while fixing his eye on his companion —

  And water shall see thee

  And fear thee, and fly thee

  The waves shall not touch thee

  As they pass by thee!

  He had also developed the eccentricity of muttering bits of Macbeth and Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner under his breath, which he added to the natural peculiarity of his high, sharp laughter at unexpected moments. The ‘eccentric’ style, perhaps partly imitated from Dr Lind, was a deliberate piece of character creation, and revealed that the slightly spoilt arrogance of the eldest child had survived the long infernal trial of his schooldays. At this time he wrote to Edward Graham, the young music master who taught Shelley’s sisters at Clapham and lived at the fashionable address of 29 Vine Street, Piccadilly: ‘It is never my custom to make new friends whom I cannot own to my old ones. . . . I act unlike every mortal enough in all conscience, without seeking for more Quixotish adventures.’75 Graham actually became a close friend during this summer of 1810, and helped Shelley with his literary schemes, while sharing with him and Elizabeth in the wilder weavings of their horror fantasies.

  The months before Oxford saw a burst of literary publications, which suggests that Timothy had granted Shelley an allowance to indulge in this more adult form of ‘pranking’. There were four completed works, apart from a lost horror tale called The Nightmare, which it appears Shelley wanted Henry Fuseli to illustrate.76 Besides Zastrozzi, which came out in the spring, Shelley completed a book of poems with Elizabeth; a verse melodrama The Wandering Jew, which was partly written by Tom Medwin; and St Irvyne, or The Rosicrucian, a second romance in the style of Zastrozzi, concerning alchemy and free love and unspeakable crimes of passion. St Irvyne was duly published during Shelley’s first term at Oxford, but the verses of The Wandering Jew stuck at Ballantyne’s office and did not appear in book form until the Shelley Society solemnly brought it forth in 1887. The book of poems appeared in September. All the works were lurid in the extreme, a grand vindication of the education
al powers of the Minerva Press.

  The most interesting, Zastrozzi, is a work of pure pastiche, and draws continually — even down to names — on the novels and stories of Lewis, Mrs Radcliffe and the Zofloya of Charlotte Dacre. The protagonists are the standard cardboard figures of the genre: Verezzi the suffering hero and Zastrozzi the persecuting villain: Julia the blonde virginal heroine (Verezzi’s true love) and Mathilda the hot-blooded scarlet woman (raven-haired and Zastrozzi’s accomplice in crime). It has however provided perfect raw material for a modern psychoanalytic study which yields the succinct interpretation that Shelley was ‘an introspective schizoid type with arrested sexual development at an undifferentiated stage, showing itself in elements of narcissism, homosexuality, and immature heterosexuality’.77 Certain unusual qualities in Shelley’s juvenile work do show up through the psychoanalytic screen; and certain significant repetitions of structure and theme do relate to later developments — not so much directly in Shelley’s life, but rather more in his work.

  Throughout the tale, Verezzi, like the best heroes of the type, is pursued or tortured or seduced, or all three simultaneously. But the way this occurs is on at least one occasion less typical. At the beginning of the tale he is immured in a cave, chained to a rock, starved and driven mad. This is clearly an early rendition of the ‘asylum’ incident at Field Place: it recurs in The Revolt of Islam (1817) and Prometheus Unbound (1820).

  Mathilda and Julia are standard types again, but Verezzi’s agonized inability to choose between them, for he falls in love with both, one sexually and the other platonically, is more original. At the height of the imaginative and sexual excitement he is confronted by both at once in the same room: his reaction is traumatic — first he swoons and loses consciousness, then he awakes and stabs himself to death in a kind of ecstasy. The two contrasting women, and the suicidal or self-immolating third alternative are recurrent in Shelley’s work; they are to be found in Alastor (1815), Prometheus Unbound (1819) and in Epipsychidion (1821). They are also in Peacock’s brilliant comic variation on the Shelleyan theme, Nightmare Abbey (1818).