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Sydney Waterlow >> Shelley
Shelley
By Sydney Waterlow
Contents
I. SHELLEY AND HIS AGE
II. PRINCIPAL WRITINGS
III. THE POET OF REBELLION, OF NATURE, AND OF LOVE
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Chapter I Shelley and His Age
In the case of most great writers our interest in them as
persons is derived from out interest in them as writers; we are
not very curious about them except for reasons that have
something to do with their art. With Shelley it is different.
During his life he aroused fears and hatreds, loves and
adorations, that were quite irrelevant to literature; and even
now, when he has become a classic, he still causes excitement
as a man. His lovers are as vehement as ever. For them he is
the "banner of freedom," which,
"Torn but flying,
Streams like a thunder-cloud against the wind."
He has suffered that worst indignity of canonisation as a being
saintly and superhuman, not subject to the morality of ordinary
mortals. He has been bedaubed with pathos. Nevertheless it is
possible still to recognise in him one of the most engaging
personalities that ever lived. What is the secret of this
charm? He had many characteristics that belong to the most
tiresome natures; he even had the qualities of the man as to
whom one wonders whether partial insanity may not be his best
excuse--inconstancy expressing itself in hysterical revulsions
of feeling, complete lack of balance, proneness to act
recklessly to the hurt of others. Yet he was loved and
respected by contemporaries of tastes very different from his
own, who were good judges and intolerant of bores--by Byron,
who was apt to care little for any one, least of all for poets,
except himself; by Peacock, who poured laughter on all
enthusiasms; and by Hogg, who, though slightly eccentric, was a
Tory eccentric. The fact is that, with all his defects, he had
two qualities which, combined, are so attractive that there is
scarcely anything they will not redeem-- perfect sincerity
without a thought of self, and vivid emotional force. All his
faults as well as his virtues were, moreover, derived from a
certain strong feeling, coloured in a peculiar way which will
be explained in what follows--a sort of ardour of universal
benevolence. One of his letters ends with these words:
"Affectionate love to and from all. This ought to be not only
the vale of a letter, but a superscription over the gate of
life"--words which, expressing not merely Shelley's opinion of
what ought to be, but what he actually felt, reveal the
ultimate reason why he is still loved, and the reason, too, why
he has so often been idealised. For this universal benevolence
is a thing which appeals to men almost with the force of
divinity, still carrying, even when mutilated and obscured by
frailties, some suggestion of St. Francis or of Christ.
The object of these pages is not to idealise either his life,
his characte, or his works. The three are inseparably
connected, and to understand one we must understand all. The
reason is that Shelley is one of the most subjective of
writers. It would be hard to name a poet who has kept his art
more free from all taint of representation of the real, making
it nor an instrument for creating something life-like, but a
more and more intimate echo or emanation of his own spirit. In
studying his writings we shall see how they flow from his
dominating emotion of love for his fellow-men; and the drama of
his life, displayed against the background of the time, will in
turn throw light on that emotion. His benevolence took many
forms--none perfect, some admirable, some ridiculous. It was
too universal. He never had a clear enough perception of the
real qualities of real men and women; hence his loves for
individuals, as capricious as they were violent, always seem to
lack something which is perhaps the most valuable element in
human affection. If in this way we can analyse his temperament
successfully, the process should help us to a more critical
understanding, and so to a fuller enjoyment, of the poems.
This greatest of our lyric poets, the culmination of the
Romantic Movement in English literature, appeared in an age
which, following on the series of successful wars that had
established British power all over the world, was one of the
gloomiest in our history. If in some ways the England of
1800-20 was ahead of the rest of Europe, in others it lagged
far behind. The Industrial Revolution, which was to turn us
from a nation of peasants and traders into a nation of
manufacturers, had begun; but its chief fruits as yet were
increased materialism and greed, and politically the period was
one of blackest reaction. Alone of European peoples we had
been untouched by the tide of Napoleon's conquests, which, when
it receded from the Continent, at least left behind a framework
of enlightened institutions, while our success in the
Napoleonic wars only confirmed the ruling aristocratic families
in their grip of the nation which they had governed since the
reign of Anne. This despotism crushed the humble and
stimulated the high-spirited to violence, and is the reason why
three such poets as Byron, Landor, and Shelley, though by birth
and fortune members of the ruling class, were pioneers as much
of political as of spiritual rebellion. Unable to breathe the
atmosphere of England, they were driven to live in exile.
It requires some effort to reconstruct that atmosphere to-day.
A foreign critic [Dr. George Brandes, in vol. iv. of his 'Main
Currents of Nineteenth Century Literature'] has summed it up by
saying that England was then pre-eminently the home of cant;
while in politics her native energy was diverted to oppression,
in morals and religion it took the form of hypocrisy and
persecution. Abroad she was supporting the Holy Alliance,
throwing her weight into the scale against all movements for
freedom. At home there was exhaustion after war; workmen were
thrown out of employment, and taxation pressed heavily on high
rents and the high price of corn, was made cruel by fear; for
the French Revolution had sent a wave of panic through the
country, not to ebb until about 1830. Suspicion of republican
principles--which, it seemed, led straight to the
Terror--frightened many good men, who would otherwise have been
reformers, into supporting the triumph of coercion and Toryism.
The elder generation of poets had been republicans in their
youth. Wordsworth had said of the Revolution that it was
"bliss to be alive" in that dawn; Southey and Coleridge had
even planned to found a communistic society in the New World.
Now all three were rallied to the defence of order and
property, to Church and Throne and Constitution. From their
seclusion in the Lakes, Southey and Wordsworth praised the
royal family and celebrated England as the home of freedom;
while Thomson wrote "Rule, Britannia," as if Britons, though
they never, never would be slaves to a foreigner, were to a
home-grown tyranny more blighting, because more stupid, than
that of Napoleon. England had stamped out the Irish rebellion
of 1798 in blood, had forced Ireland by fraud into the Union of
1800, and was strangling her industry and commerce. Catholics
could neither vote nor hold office. At a time when the
population of the United Kingdom was some thirty millions, the
Parliamentary franchise was possessed by no more than a million
persons, and most of the seats in the House of Commons were the
private property of rich men. Representative government did
not exist; whoever agitated for some measure of it was deported
to Australia or forced to fly to America. Glasgow and
Manchester weavers starved and rioted. The press was gagged
and the Habeas Corpus Act constantly suspended. A second
rebellion in Ireland, when Castlereagh "dabbled his sleek young
hands in Erin's gore," was suppressed with unusual ferocity.
In England in 1812 famine drove bands of poor people to wander
and pillage. Under the criminal law, still of medieval
cruelty, death was the punishment for the theft of a loaf or a
sheep. The social organism had come to a deadlock--on the one
hand a starved and angry populace, on the other a vast
Church-and-King party, impregnably powerful, made up of all who
had "a stake in the country." The strain was not to be
relieved until the Reform Act of 1832 set the wheels in motion
again; they then moved painfully indeed, but still they moved.
Meanwhile Parliament was the stronghold of selfish interests;
the Church was the jackal of the gentry; George III, who lost
the American colonies and maintained negro slavery, was on the
throne, until he went mad and was succeeded by his profligate
son.
Shelley said of himself that he was
"A nerve o'er which do creep
The else unfelt oppressions of this earth,"
and all the shades of this dark picture are reflected in his
life and in his verse. He was the eldest son of a Sussex
family that was loyally Whig and moved in the orbit of the
Catholic Dukes of Norfolk, and the talk about emancipation
which he would hear at home may partly explain his amazing
invasion of Ireland in 1811-12, when he was nineteen years old,
with the object of procuring Catholic emancipation and the
repeal of the Union Act--subjects on which he was quite
ignorant. He addressed meetings, wasted money, and distributed
two pamphlets "consisting of the benevolent and tolerant
deductions of philosophy reduced into the simplest language."
Later on, when he had left England for ever, he still followed
eagerly the details of the struggle for freedom at home, and in
1819 composed a group of poems designed to stir the masses from
their lethargy. Lord Liverpool's administration was in office,
with Sidmouth as Home Secretary and Castlereagh as Foreign
Secretary, a pair whom he thus pillories:
"As a shark and dog-fish wait
Under an Atlantic Isle,
For the negro ship, whose freight
Is the theme of their debate,
Wrinkling their red gills the while--
Are ye, two vultures sick for battle,
Two scorpions under one wet stone,
Two bloodless wolves whose dry throats rattle,
Two crows perched on the murrained cattle,
Two vipers tangled into one."
The most effective of these bitter poems is 'The Masque of
Anarchy', called forth by the "Peterloo Massacre" at Manchester
on August 16, 1819, when hussars had charged a peaceable
meeting held in support of Parliamentary reform, killing six
people and wounding some seventy others. Shelley's frenzy of
indignation poured itself out in the terrific stanzas, written
in simplest language so as to be understood by the people,
which tell how
"I met a murder on the way--
He had a mask like Castlereagh--
Very smooth he looked, yet grim;
Seven blood-hounds followed him."
The same year and mood produced the great sonnet, 'England in
1819'--
"An old, mad, blind, despised and dying king,
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn,--mud from a muddy spring."
and to the same group belongs that not quite successful essay
in sinister humour, 'Swellfoot the Tyrant' (1820), suggested by
the grunting of pigs at an Italian fair, and burlesquing the
quarrel between the Prince Regent and his wife. When the
Princess of Wales (Caroline of Brunswick-Wolfenbuttel), after
having left her husband and perambulated Europe with a
paramour, returned, soon after the Prince's accession as George
IV, to claim her position as Queen, the royal differences
became an affair of high national importance. The divorce case
which followed was like a gangrenous eruption symptomatic of
the distempers of the age. Shelley felt that sort of disgust
which makes a man rave and curse under the attacks of some
loathsome disease; if he laughs, it is the laugh of frenzy. In
the slight Aristophanic drama of 'Swellfoot', which was sent
home, published, and at once suppressed, he represents the men
of England as starving pigs content to lap up such diluted
hog's-wash as their tyrant, the priests, and the soldiers will
allow them. At the end, when the pigs, rollicking after the
triumphant Princess, hunt down their oppressors, we cannot help
feeling a little sorry that he does not glide from the
insistent note of piggishness into some gentler mood: their is
a rasping quality in his humour, even though it is always on
the side of right. He wrote one good satire though. This is
'Peter Bell the Third' (1819), an attack on Wordsworth, partly
literary for the dulness of his writing since he had been sunk
in clerical respectability, partly political for his renegade
flunkyism.
In 1820 the pall which still hung over northern Europe began to
lift in the south. After Napoleon's downfall the Congress of
Vienna (1814-16) had parcelled Europe out on the principle of
disregarding national aspirations and restoring the legitimate
rulers. This system, which could not last, was first shaken by
revolutions that set up constitutional governments in Spain and
Naples. Shelley hailed these streaks of dawn with joy, and
uttered his enthusiasm in two odes--the 'Ode to Liberty' and
the 'Ode to Naples'--the most splendid of those cries of hope
and prophecy with which a long line of English poets has
encouraged the insurrection of the nations. Such cries,
however, have no visible effect on the course of events.
Byron's jingles could change the face of the world, while all
Shelley's pure and lofty aspirations left no mark on history.
And so it was, not with his republican ardours alone, but with
all he undertook. Nothing he did influenced his contemporaries
outside his immediate circle; the public only noticed him to
execrate the atheist, the fiend, and the monster. He felt that
"his name was writ on water," and languished for want of
recognition. His life, a lightning-flash across the
storm-cloud of the age, was a brief but crowded record of
mistakes and disasters, the classical example of the rule that
genius is an infinite capacity for getting into trouble.
Though poets must "learn in suffering what they teach in song,"
there is often a vein of comedy in their lives. If we could
transport ourselves to Miller's Hotel, Westminster Bridge, on a
certain afternoon in the early spring of 1811, we should behold
a scene apparently swayed entirely by the Comic Muse. The
member for Shoreham, Mr. Timothy Shelley, a handsome,
consequential gentleman of middle age, who piques himself on
his enlightened opinions, is expecting two guests to
dinner--his eldest son, and his son's friend, T. J. Hogg, who
have just been sent down from Oxford for a scandalous affair of
an aesthetical squib. When the young men arrive at five
o'clock, Mr. Shelley receives Hogg, an observant and
cool-headed person, with graciousness, and an hour is spent in
conversation. Mr. Shelley runs on strangely, "in an odd,
unconnected manner, scolding, crying, swearing, and then
weeping again." After dinner, his son being out of the room,
he expresses his surprise to Hogg at finding him such a
sensible fellow, and asks him what is to be done with the
scapegoat. "Let him be married to a girl who will sober him."
The wine moves briskly round, and Mr. Shelley becomes maudlin
and tearful again. He is a model magistrate, the terror and
the idol of poachers; he is highly respected in the House of
Commons, and the Speaker could not get through the session
without him. Then he drifts to religion. God exists, no one
can deny it; in fact, he has the proof in his pocket. Out
comes a piece of paper, and arguments are read aloud, which his
son recognises as Palley's. "Yes, they are Palley's arguments,
but he had them from me; almost everything in Palley's book he
had taken from me." The boy of nineteen, who listens fuming to
this folly, takes it all with fatal seriousness. In appearance
he is no ordinary being. A shock of dark brown hair makes his
small round head look larger than it really is; from beneath a
pale, freckled forehead, deep blue eyes, large and mild as a
stag's, beam an earnestness which easily flashes into
enthusiasm; the nose is small and turn-up, the beardless lips
girlish and sensitive. He is tall, but stoops, and has an air
of feminine fragility, though his bones and joints are large.
Hands and feet, exquisitely shaped, are expressive of high
breeding. His expensive, handsome clothes are disordered and
dusty, and bulging with books. When he speaks, it is in a
strident peacock voice, and there is an abrupt clumsiness in
his gestures, especially in drawing-rooms, where he is ill at
ease, liable to trip in the carpet and upset furniture.
Complete absence of self-consciousness, perfect
disinterestedness, are evident in every tone; it is clear that
he is an aristocrat, but it is also clear that he is a saint.
The catastrophe of expulsion from Oxford would have been
impossible in a well-regulated university, but Percy Bysshe
Shelley could not have fitted easily into any system. Born at
Field Place, Horsham, Sussex, on August 4, 1792, simultaneously
with the French Revolution, he had more than a drop of wildness
in his blood. The long pedigree of the Shelley family is full
of turbulent ancestors, and the poet's grandfather, Sir Bysshe,
an eccentric old miser who lived until 1815, had been married
twice, on both occasions eloping with an heiress. Already at
Eton Shelley was a rebel and a pariah. Contemptuous of
authority, he had gone his own way, spending pocket-money on
revolutionary literature, trying to raise ghosts, and dabbling
in chemical experiments. As often happens to queer boys, his
school-fellows herded against him, pursuing him with blows and
cries of "Mad Shelley." But the holidays were happy. There
must have been plenty of fun at Field Place when he told his
sisters stories about the alchemist in the attic or "the Great
Tortoise that lived in Warnham Pond," frightened them with
electric shocks, and taught his baby brother to say devil.
There is something of high-spirited fun even in the raptures
and despairs of his first love for his cousin, Harriet Grove.
He tried to convert her to republican atheism, until the
family, becoming alarmed, interfered, and Harriet was disposed
of otherwise. "Married to a clod of earth!" exclaims Shelley.
He spent nights "pacing the churchyard," and slept with a
loaded pistol and poison beside him.
He went in to residence at University College, Oxford, in the
Michaelmas term of 1810. The world must always bless the
chance which sent Thomas Jefferson Hogg a freshman to the same
college at the same time, and made him Shelley's friend. The
chapters in which Hogg describes their live at Oxford are the
best part of his biography. In these lively pages we see, with
all the force of reality, Shelley working by fits in a litter
of books and retorts and "galvanic troughs," and discoursing on
the vast possibilities of science for making mankind happy; how
chemistry will turn deserts into cornfields, and even the air
and water will year fire and food; how Africa will be explored
by balloons, of which the shadows, passing over the jungles,
will emancipate the slaves. In the midst he would rush out to
a lecture on mineralogy, and come back sighing that it was all
about "stones, stones, stones"! The friends read Plato
together, and held endless talk of metaphysics, pre-existence,
and the sceptical philosophy, on winter walks across country,
and all night beside the fire, until Shelley would curl up on
the hearthrug and go to sleep. He was happy because he was left
to himself. With all his thoughts and impulses, ill-controlled
indeed, but directed to the acquisition of knowledge for the
benefit of the world, such a student would nowadays be a marked
man, applauded and restrained. But the Oxford of that day was
a home of "chartered laziness." An academic circle absorbed in
intrigues for preferment, and enlivened only by drunkenness and
immorality, could offer nothing but what was repugnant to
Shelley. He remained a solitary until the hand of authority
fell and expelled him.
He had always had a habit of writing to strangers on the
subjects next his heart. Once he approached Miss Felicia
Dorothea Browne (afterwards Mrs. Hemans), who had not been
encouraging. Now half in earnest, and half with an impish
desire for dialectical scores, he printed a pamphlet on 'The
Necessity of Atheism', a single foolscap sheet concisely
proving that no reason for the existence of God can be valid,
and sent it to various personages, including bishops, asking
for a refutation. It fell into the hands of the college
authorities. Summoned before the council to say whether he was
the author, Shelley very properly refused to answer, and was
peremptorily expelled, together with Hogg, who had intervened
in his behalf.
The pair went to London, and took lodgings in a house where a
wall-paper with a vine-trellis pattern caught Shelley's fancy.
Mr. Timothy Shelley appeared on the scene, and, his feelings as
a Christian and a father deeply outraged, did the worst thing
he could possibly have done--he made forgiveness conditional on
his son's giving up his friend. The next step was to cut off
supplies and to forbid Field Place to him, lest he should
corrupt his sisters' minds. Soon Hogg had to go to York to
work in a conveyancer's office, and Shelley was left alone in
London, depressed, a martyr, and determined to save others from
similar persecution. In this mood he formed a connection
destined to end in tragedy. His sisters were at a school at
Clapham, where among the girls was one Harriet Westbrook, the
sixteen-year-old daughter of a coffee-house keeper. Shelley
became intimate with the Westbrooks, and set about saving the
soul of Harriet, who had a pretty rosy face, a neat figure, and
a glib school-girl mind quick to catch up and reproduce his
doctrines. The child seems to have been innocent enough, but
her elder sister, Eliza, a vulgar woman of thirty, used her as
a bait to entangle the future baronet; she played on Shelley's
feelings by encouraging Harriet to believe herself the victim
of tyranny at school. Still, it was six months before he took
the final step. How he could save Harriet from scholastic and
domestic bigotry was a grave question. In the first place,
hatred of "matrimonialism" was one of his principles, yet it
seemed unfair to drag a helpless woman into the risks of
illicit union; in the second place, he was at this time
passionately interested in another woman, a certain Miss
Hitchener, a Sussex school mistress of republican and deistic
principles, whom he idealised as an angel, only to discover
soon, with equal falsity, that she was a demon. At last
Harriet was worked up to throw herself on his protection. They
fled by the northern mail, dropping at York a summons to Hogg
to join them, and contracted a Scottish marriage at Edinburgh
on August 28, 1811.
The story of the two years and nine months during which Shelley
lived with Harriet must seem insane to a rational mind. Life
was one comfortless picnic. When Shelley wanted food, he would
dart into a shop and buy a loaf or a handful of raisins.
Always accompanied by Eliza, they changed their dwelling-place
more than twelve times. Edinburgh, York, Keswick, Dublin,
Nantgwillt, Lynmouth, Tremadoc, Tanyrallt, Killarney, London
(Half Moon Street and Pimlico), Bracknell, Edinburgh again, and
Windsor, successively received this fantastic household. Each
fresh house was the one where they were to abide for ever, and
each formed the base of operations for some new scheme of
comprehensive beneficence. Thus at Tremadoc, on the Welsh
coast, Shelley embarked on the construction of an embankment to
reclaim a drowned tract of land; 'Queen Mab' was written partly
in Devonshire and partly in Wales; and from Ireland, where he
had gone to regenerate the country, he opened correspondence
with William Godwin, the philosopher and author of 'Political
Justice'. His energy in entering upon ecstatic personal
relations was as great as that which he threw into
philanthropic schemes; but the relations, like the schemes,
were formed with no notion of adapting means to ends, and were
often dropped as hurriedly. Eliza Westbrook, at first a woman
of estimable qualities, quickly became "a blind and loathsome
worm that cannot see to sting", Miss Hitchener, who had been
induced to give up her school and come to live with them "for
ever," was discovered to be a "brown demon," and had to be
pensioned off. He loved his wife for a time, but they drifted
apart, and he found consolation in a sentimental attachment to
a Mrs. Boinville and her daughter, Cornelia Turner, ladies who
read Italian poetry with him and sang to guitars. Harriet had
borne him a daughter, Ianthe, but she herself was a child, who
soon wearied of philosophy and of being taught Latin; naturally
she wanted fine clothes, fashion, a settlement. Egged on by
her sister, she spent on plate and a carriage the money that
Shelley would have squandered on humanity at large. Money
difficulties and negotiations with his father were the
background of all this period. On March 24, 1814, he married
Harriet in church, to settle any possible question as to the
legitimacy of his children; but they parted soon after.
Attempts were made at reconciliation, which might have.
succeeded had not Shelley during this summer drifted into a
serious and relatively permanent passion. He made financial
provision for his wife, who gave birth to a second child, a
boy, on November 30, 1814; but, as the months passed, and
Shelley was irrevocably bound to another, she lost heart for
life in the dreariness of her father's house. An Irish officer
took her for his mistress, and on December 10, 1816, she was
found drowned in the Serpentine. Twenty days later Shelley
married his second wife.