Shelley: The Pursuit Read online

  The perjured love was of course Harriet Grove’s, and the ‘novel’ was an unknown production, now of atheistical tendencies, which Shelley in the event never had time to publish. The letter ended with a fighting motto: ‘Adieu — Ecrasez l’infame ecrasez l’impie.’ This, as appeared later during the following term at Oxford, was not merely the motto of Voltaire’s elegant critique of revealed Christianity; it was also something far more sinister, the watchword of the international revolutionary Jacobins of the 1790s, known as the Illuminists.

  Shelley’s ragings against Christianity seemed to take place in a strange kind of twilight world, a world essentially adolescent, in which the actions and emotions of his private fantasies — the world of HD and Zastrozzi — had partially crossed over into the public world of real relationships, of Field Place, of the Groves, of Oxford, of theological debate. This invasion of fact by fiction would be regarded in a mature adult as a kind of insanity, a paranoia. But Shelley was not mature, he acted out the fiction with the intensity of childhood.

  With the coming of the New Year 1811, Shelley indulged himself at Field Place in a series of tortuous scenarios which he recounted in detail for Hogg’s benefit. One night he had gone to bed with ‘a loaded pistol and some poison’ by his side — but ‘did not die’.25 On another occasion he wrote that he had spent most of the night ‘pacing a churchyard’.26 His passion against Christianity increased in violence, and became more purely melodramatic: ‘Yet here I swear, and as I break my oath may Infinity Eternity blast me, here I swear that never will I forgive Christianity!. . . Oh how I wish I were the Antichrist, that it were mine to crush the Demon, to hurl him to his native Hell never to rise again — I expect to gratify some of this insatiable feeling in Poetry.’27 The last consideration was obviously the most important one, and in his next letter five stanzas about ‘long visions of soul racking pain’ were enclosed. Shelley was aware of the disturbing violence in his letters, and in the adult and public side of his personality he tried to ‘place’ and distance it for Hogg. Thus all his more frantic missives contain little notes of marginal comment, either wry or whimsical. In one letter he observed suddenly: ‘How can you fancy that I can think you mad; am I not the wildest, most delirious of enthusiasm’s offspring?’28 In another: ‘I have wandered in the snow for I am cold wet & mad — Pardon me, pardon my delirious egotism, this really shall be the last . . . .’29 By mid-January his explanations were more matter-of-fact: ‘My head is rather dizzy today on account of not taking rest, & a slight attack of Typhus.’30 ‘Excuse my mad arguments, they are none at all, for I am rather confused, & fear in consequence of a fever they will not allow me to come on the 26 [January], but I will. Adieu.’31

  With the approach of the Easter term, Timothy Shelley, who had been observing his elder son’s strange behaviour with many misgivings, decided that he should attempt to exert a calming paternal influence. He spent some time in his study trying to debate with Shelley on religious issues, an unusual experience for both of them which Shelley duly reported back to Hogg. ‘I attempted to Deistify my father; mirabile dictu! he for a time listened to my arguments . . . .’ But when it came down to Shelley’s flushed and triumphant conclusion that Christianity could be logically disproved, Timothy brushed aside the undergraduate dialectics, and silenced Shelley with an ‘equine argument — in effect these words “I believe because I do believe.” ’32 Both Timothy and Mrs Shelley were only too aware of the social and political stigma attached to anything that smacked of — dread word — ‘atheism’, especially in an intensely conservative and wholly theological institution like Oxford. Atheism implied immorality, social inferiority and unpatriotic behaviour all in one sweep; during a time of war against the revolutionary forces in Europe, it also implied treachery, revolutionism and foreign degeneracy. At Field Place in that January of 1811, it caused the deepest anxiety: ‘My mother fancies me in the High road to Pandemonium, she fancies I want to make a deistical coterie of all my little sisters.’33 Mrs Elizabeth Shelley, who knew of old her son’s wild leadership of the other children, and his instinct for proselytizing, was perfectly correct.

  In the third week of January, Hogg came sweeping to his beleaguered friend’s rescue. He had been putting his legalistic talents to work, and had extracted from Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding the basis for a waterproof brief against not merely Christianity but also the idea of God itself. He sent it to Shelley, who was delighted, and wrote back enthusiastically: ‘Your systematic cudgel for Xtianity is excellent, I tried it again with my Father who told me that 30 years ago he had read Locke but this made no impression.’34 This ‘systematic cudgel’ was the basis of the little pamphlet which, with certain Humean additions by Shelley, became the notorious Oxford pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism.

  By the end of the vacation, Timothy had changed his tack. After making enquiries of the Hogg family at Durham, and discovering that Hogg’s grandfather had made the family fortune as agent for the Dean and Chapter of Durham Cathedral, he felt the situation was not as dangerous as it had first looked. He told Shelley that he approved of the friendship, and asked him to invite Hogg to Field Place for the Easter vacation.

  Shelley’s letters to Timothy at the beginning of the next term also suggest that his father had come to an arrangement concerning Shelley’s theology. Shelley could believe what he liked in private or among friends, but he must not circulate his views publicly in the university. Shelley seemed to react rationally enough to this compromise. In February he continued to debate questions with his father in private correspondence in a confidential, if slightly mocking, manner. At the end of a long discussion of the Deistical tradition, Shelley wrote: ‘At some leisure moment may I request to hear your objections, (if any yet remain) to my private sentiments — “Religion fetters a reasoning mind with the very bonds which restrain the unthinking one from mischief” — this is my great objection to it.’35 He was on strong ground here, and he knew it.

  In addition Shelley agreed to turn his publishing freaks to the more orthodox business of composing a prize-winning poem on the subject of the Parthenon. Timothy went to considerable trouble to get Shelley background material on this from a learned cleric, the Reverend Edward Dalloway.36 Shelley specifically reassured his father that he would keep his views private as far as the university authorities were concerned.

  But Timothy had not fully appreciated the powerful forces which the friendship with Hogg, and the mutual love letters concerning Elizabeth and Harriet Grove, had released in Shelley. The two undergraduate friends had been brought together at the most intense level of emotional revelation. Love — frustrated, ideal or profaned — became their common topic, the conspiratorial philosophy which drew them together in the ‘duties of friendship’. In their artificial paradise of misery and passion, their own relationship could reach a molten intimacy without hesitations or embarrassments. Atheism, love, philosophical discussions of idealism, were all fuel for the communicating flame:

  The question is, What do I love? it is almost unnecessary to answer. Do I love the person, the embodied identity, (if I may be allowed the expression)? No! I love what is superior, what is excellent, or what I conceive to be so, and wish, ardently wish to be convinced of the existence of a God that so superior a spirit should derive happiness from my exertions — for Love is Heaven, and Heaven is Love. Oh! that it were. You think so too, — yet you disbelieve the existence of an eternal omnipresent spirit. Am I not mad? alas I am, but I pour my ravings into the ear of a friend who will pardon them.37

  One thinks of poor Timothy Shelley trying to cool his son with the idea of a prize-winning poem on the Parthenon. The invitation to Hogg for the Easter vacation was a wiser thought, but it came into effect far too late. When Shelley went back to Oxford for his second term in the last week of January 1811, he was going back to wage a secret war in a conspiracy of sacred friendship in which his main target was the theological authorities of the university. Fiction had become fact. />
  Shelley and Hogg were not now in the mood to be content with theoretical and private speculations, in politics, or poetry, or in theology. They embarked instead on a cleverly conceived and planned campaign to publicize their ideas within Oxford through the medium of Slatter and Munday’s bookshop. The first fruits of this had been a decoratively printed and assiduously circulated edition of the supposed Posthumous Poems of Margaret Nicholson, a collection of pastiches in the Victor and Cazire style, but with altered subject matter. Romantic and demoniac themes gave way to poems attacking warfare, monarchy, poverty and political oppression. One piece also gained a certain local notoriety for its apparent eroticism.[3] The whole, with its expensive binding and grotesque gothic type set, became something of a succès de scandale, and the subject of much university gossip in February.

  But Shelley was out for bigger game, and he now turned his attention to the ‘cudgel against Christianity’, which Hogg had produced during the vacation. He edited and polished it, fitted it with introductory and concluding material, and sent it secretly to be printed in Sussex, under the mildly provocative title The Necessity of Atheism. Under Shelley’s hand the pamphlet became a neat and effective piece of theological polemic, about 1,000 words long, beginning with a tag from Bacon on the value of clarity of thought and logical demonstration. Its introduction set a tone of conscious innocence and integrity which was perfectly calculated to enrage a prejudiced reader. ‘As love of truth is the only motive which actuates the Author of this little tract, he earnestly entreats that those of his readers who may discover any deficiency in his reasonings, or may be in possession of proofs which his mind could never obtain, would offer them, together with their objections to the Public, as briefly, as methodically, as plainly as he has taken the liberty of doing. Thro’ deficiency of proof, An Atheist.’

  The pamphlet then examines the proofs of a Deity available in three ways: through personal evidence of the senses, through reasoning as to the Prime Cause, and through the testimony of others. Each of these is in turn proved, syllogistically, to be inadequate. The pamphlet then demurely observes that ‘it is also evident that as belief is a passion of the mind, no degree of criminality can be attached to disbelief’. It concludes reassuringly: ‘It is almost unnecessary to observe, that the general knowledge of the deficiency of such a proof, cannot be prejudicial to society: Truth has always been found to promote the best interests of mankind. — Every reflecting mind must allow that there is no proof of the existence of a Deity. Q.E.D.’

  Hogg remarks that Shelley was particularly pleased with the mathematical effect of the ‘potent characters’ Q.E.D. at the end, like a kind of charm, especially designed for ‘their efficacy in rousing antagonists’.38 It has been noted that this is almost the first known open avowal of atheism in print in England.39

  Copies of The Necessity of Atheism arrived from the Worthing printers on or just before St Valentine’s Day. Shelley and Hogg immediately began the process of distributing and mailing, taking great care to remain anonymous. A few days later the Oxford booksellers agreed to display copies in their bow window overlooking the High, apparently not having glanced beyond the title page. Seizing the opportunity, Shelley scattered copies throughout the shop, pricing them at sixpence. This was a dramatic chance for Shelley, but in the event also a fatal one. After only twenty minutes the Reverend Jocelyn Walker, a fellow of New College, walked in and read the little tract, immediately ordering all copies to be burnt at the back of the shop. Horrified, the booksellers complied. One copy was retained as evidence for the university authorities.

  Munday, sensing trouble, wrote to Phillips the Worthing printer, and advised him to destroy all copies and type-sets immediately as it looked as if a prosecution for Blasphemous Libel was afoot.40

  On 17 February, Shelley wrote to his father from Oxford with cheery reassurance:

  It is needless to observe that in the Schools Colleges &c which are all on the principle of Inquisisatorial [sic] Orthodoxy with respect to matters of belief I shall perfectly coincide with the opinions of the learned doctors, although by the very rules of reasoning which their own systems of logic teach me I could refute their errors. — I shall not therefore publically come under the act ‘de heretico comburendo’.41

  Yet here arises one of Shelley’s extremely characteristic pieces of calculating duplicity. For the very same day, 17 February, he wrote to his friend Edward Graham, who was acting as a kind of literary agent for him in London with Stockdale, that he had completed sending copies of The Necessity of Atheism to all the bishops, and heads of colleges, and that they must now consider plans for advertising and publishing the tract in London.42 By this date also, the pamphlet had been advertised in the Oxford University and City Herald, and exposed for sale in Slatter and Munday’s window.43 Shelley was coolly playing his own double game. ‘I intended to have come to London on Saturday, but if I left Oxford so abruptly I shd. be suspected as the Author of the tract,’ he apprised Graham.

  It is doubtful if the mere twenty minutes of sale at Munday’s would itself have led to Shelley’s arraignment and expulsion. There were, after all, alternative penalties: for example, he could have been rusticated for a term. It was Shelley’s deliberately inflammatory tactic of mailing the pamphlet to all the bishops and all the heads of colleges which put the matter into a wider and more dangerous arena. This he perhaps intended; but he could not have foreseen the party-political antagonisms which he inflamed.

  This was further exacerbated on 9 March when he advertised A Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things[4] to be sold price two shillings, ‘by a Gentleman of the University of Oxford’. This was the openly political side of Shelley’s campaign with Hogg against the authorities, and the declared intention of the sale of the poem was that of ‘assisting to maintain in Prison Mr Peter Finnerty, imprisoned for libel’.44 On 7 February Peter Finnerty the Irish journalist had finally been sentenced to eighteen months’ imprisonment for his protests against the government’s disastrous military policies. Finnerty had written for the Whig Morning Chronicle and the Walcheren fiasco was the result of Tory policy. Finnerty’s case was taken up at once in London by the left ginger group of the new Whigs, notably Sir Francis Burdett, and by the Examiner group of liberals who always fought with considerable daring on free speech issues. Meetings were held at the traditional centre of reform politics, The Crown and Anchor, and Shelley read the accounts avidly. In Oxford, the Herald opened a public subscription for Finnerty, and on 2 March four courageous names had appeared with one-guinea donations. One of these was ‘Mr P.B. Shelley’.45 On the same day, Shelley wrote a private letter to Leigh Hunt, the 27-year-old editor of the Examiner. His ostensible motive was to congratulate Hunt on his recent acquittal in a libel action.[5] Shelley introduced himself as follows: ‘My father is in Parliament, and on attaining 21 I shall, in all probability, fill his vacant seat.’ This apparently indicated that he was considering a political career within the auspices of the left wing of the Whigs.

  But Shelley’s real reason for writing was that he had concocted in discussions with Hogg a plan for uniting the many dislocated reform groups which had remained splintered and ineffective virtually since the nineties, when Pitt took the nation into war with the French, calling for national unity and suppression of agitators and radical groups. Shelley’s plan was that a meeting should be called of all reform elements, and from this there should be constructed a ‘form of methodical society which should be organized so as to resist the coalition of the enemies of liberty which at present renders any expression of opinions on matters of policy dangerous to individuals’.46 It has been pointed out that this suggestion preceded the formation of just such a ‘methodical organization’ in the Hampden Clubs of Major Cartwright which brought together both solid parliamentary Whigs and popular reformers, in the final months of the Napoleonic War.47 But Shelley’s suggestion for an extra-parliamentary political reform organization went further than this. As his letter to Hunt
shows, he had a particular historical model in mind:

  It has been for want of societies of this nature that corruption has attained the height at which we now behold it, nor can any of us bear in mind the very great influence, which some years since was gained by Illuminism, without considering that a society of equal extent might establish rational liberty on as firm a basis as that which would have supported the visionary schemes of a completely-equalized community.48

  The comparison with Illuminism must have shaken Hunt when he read it. The Illuminists were the secret international Jacobin society, dedicated to worldwide revolutionary conspiracy, founded by Dr Adam Weishaupt, in Ingolstadt in May 1776. Their doctrine was one of militant egalitarianism, the destruction of private property, religion and ‘superstitious’ social forms such as marriage. Their methods were essentially conspiratorial, based on the Masonic type of secret lodges, and with a tradition of antinomian underground movement dating back to a medieval Spanish sect of the same name. In England their work was known exclusively through the rabid witch-hunting four-volume treatise on their infamies by the French emigré the Abbé Augustin Barruel: Histoire du Jacobinisme (1797). This book had come into Shelley’s hands, possibly through Hogg, in his first term at Oxford; and it was the Illuminists’ watchword that he had quoted in his letters of the Christmas vacation. There was no reply to Shelley’s letter from Hunt, but the idea of that visionary ‘completely-equalized community’ as the basis for movements of political liberty remained an active ideal for Shelley for the next two years; and in modified form throughout his life.[6]

  By this time in mid-March of 1811, Shelley’s views and publications had become widely known among the small circle of Fellows and undergraduates, and the notoriety that he had deliberately set out to court had been at least partially achieved. If he had not yet exactly stormed the stronghold, he had succeeded in arousing its distasteful interest.