Shelley: The Pursuit (6 page)

Apart from Tom Medwin, Shelley found little companionship at Syon House, except for one romantic friendship, a ‘devoted attachment’ which he recalled gratefully many years after when analysing his own emotional development. ‘The object of these sentiments was a boy about my own age, of a character eminently grave, generous and gentle. . . . There was a delicacy and simplicity in his manner, inexpressibly attractive. . . . The tones of his voice were so soft and winning that every word pierced into my heart, and their pathos was so deep that in listening to him the tears often have involuntarily gushed from my eyes.’ Shelley was so moved by this friendship that he wrote a long and enthusiastic letter to his mother at Field Place explaining the warmth of his feelings.

I suppose she thought me out of my wits, for she returned no answer to my letter. I remember we used to walk the whole play-hours up and down by some moss-covered palings, pouring out our hearts in youthful talk. We used to speak of the ladies with whom we were in love, and I remember that our usual practice was to confirm each other in the everlasting fidelity, in which we had bound ourselves towards them and towards each other. I recollect thinking my friendship exquisitely beautiful. Every night, when we parted to go to bed, I remember we kissed each other.
³¹

The failure of his mother to respond on this occasion was one of the small indications to Shelley that her sympathy and affection was steadily being withdrawn. She merely thought he was a bit mad. Yet at Oxford, Hogg was to notice how he still loved to talk of his feelings for his mother and his sisters; especially his sister Elizabeth.

The patterns of male love and friendship were to be very important in
Shelley’s life, and he again reverted to this first close attachment outside the circle of Field Place, in his description of the statue of Bacchus and Ampelus in the Uffizi Gallery, which he saw at Florence when he was 27: ‘One arm of Bacchus rests on the shoulder of Ampelus . . . just as you may have seen (yet how seldom from their dissevering and tyrannical institutions do you see) a younger and an elder boy walking in some remote grassy spot of their playground with that tender friendship towards each other which has so much of love. The countenance of Bacchus is sublimely sweet and lovely, taking a shade of gentle and playful tenderness from the arch looks of Ampelus, whose cheerful face turned towards him, expresses the suggestions of some droll and merry device.’
³²
By this time, it was self-evident to him that school was just one of many tyrannical and perverse institutions.

In his early twenties, Shelley deliberately attempted to establish a specific moment of revolt at Syon House, which he wrote about as having the quality and intensity of something like a religious conversion. Passages in ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ (1816) and in the Dedication to
The Revolt of Islam
(1817) have become famous memorials of this, although the thin, high-pitched egotism of their tone largely vitiates them as poetry.

Thoughts of great deeds were mine, dear Friend, when first

The clouds which wrap this world from youth did pass.

I do remember well the hour which burst

My spirit’s sleep: a fresh May-dawn it was,

When I walked forth upon the glittering grass,

And wept, I knew not why; until there rose

From the near schoolroom, voices, that, alas!

Were but one echo from a world of woes —

The harsh and grating strife of tyrants and of foes.

And then I clasped my hands and looked around —

— But none was near to mock my streaming eyes,

Which poured their warm drops on the sunny ground —

So, without shame, I spake: — ‘I will be wise,

And just, and free, and mild, if in me lies

Such power, for I grow weary to behold

The selfish and the strong still tyrannise

Without reproach or check.’ I then controlled

My tears, my heart grew calm, and I was meek and bold.
³³

That this moment ever had a definite historical existence during Shelley’s time at Syon House is doubtful. Yet it records faithfully enough the shock that
the school experience had on him, and in Shelley’s elaborate private myth of his own childhood it forms one of the most significant parts.

One teacher alone had any lasting positive effect on Shelley at Syon House, or made any real contact with his inner imaginative world. This was an itinerant, eccentric lecturer, Dr Adam Walker — a ‘mad doctor’ in the best eighteenth-century tradition of Priestley and Erasmus Darwin — who frequently made teaching tours of schools such as Winchester, Eton and their preparatory offspring. Walker was primarily an inventor and astronomer, who had made his name with a popular scientific textbook published in 1779,
Familar Philosophy
.
[2]
He lectured on the stars and the zodiac, on the planets of the solar system, on magnetism and electricity, on the possibilities of extra-terrestial life or the ‘plurality of worlds’, and above all on the practical use of the telescope and the solar microscope. These subjects grafted perfectly on to Shelley’s already thriving occult interests, and vastly enlarged his field for practical experiments, devices and fantastic speculation. Tom Medwin recalled his breathless curiosity as he gazed through one of Walker’s telescopes at Saturn, ‘its atmosphere seeming to him an irrefragable proof of its being inhabited like our globe’; and after another lecture, peering spellbound through a microscope at mites seething in cheese, the wing of a fly, ‘the vermicular
animalculae
in vinegar’ and other invisible forms of biological life. Later these revelations would form the subject for endless conversations, back and forth by the southern wall of the detested playground.
³⁴

Shelley’s attitude to science was never to be ‘scientific’ in the empirical sense, but speculative and imaginative. Chemistry, electricity, astronomy fused easily with alchemy, fire-worship, explosives and psychical investigations. At Oxford, Hogg was to describe Shelley in his rooms as ‘the chemist in his laboratory, the alchemist in his study, the wizard in his cave’.
³⁵
His later adherence to Necessity shows the continuing desire for such a magical key to invisible laws, such as an alchemical formula of life. Yet Shelley was to be much more naturally inclined to the field of social sciences — sociology, psychology, even para-psychology — than the physical ones.

At Syon House Adam Walker’s lectures fascinated Shelley above all with the ideas of new sources of power: steam power, electrical power, free flight and air power, chemical power controlling agriculture and the climate. Hogg records many of Shelley’s diatribes on these subjects at Oxford. It was Adam Walker’s assistant who sold Shelley — or helped him to build — his more advanced forms of electrical generators. Walker also procured Shelley his most precious
piece of ‘philosophic’ equipment, the solar microscope in its rugged mahogany travelling box, which was to go with him on many of his subsequent voyagings.
³⁶

The disruptive and in many ways traumatic effect of Shelley’s two years at Syon House gradually made itself felt during his holidays at Field Place. The house and garden still retained its paradisiac aura. He could still return temporarily to the old warmth and security and freedom, and his sisters were if anything more adoring and compliant companions and followers than before. But Shelley’s natural mischievousness had become more uncontrollable, his games and experiments more violent, and his authority over his sisters more domineering. Gunpowder devices and fire balloons were constructed in distant parts of the orchard, and his own and his sisters’ clothes were constantly stained and burnt by acids and caustics. Elizabeth alone was an entirely willing co-partner in these escapades; the other children were frequently terrified by their wild elder brother. Hellen wrote: ‘When my brother commenced his studies in chemistry, and practised electricity upon us, I confess my pleasure in it was entirely negatived by terror at its effects. Whenever he came to me with his piece of folded brown packing-paper under his arm and a bit of wire and a bottle (if I remember right), my heart would sink with fear at his approach; but shame kept me silent, and, with as many others as he could collect, we were placed hand-in-hand round the nursery table to be electrified.’
³⁷
Finally Shelley suggested that he would be able to cure their chilblains by this method of electrification, but his sister’s ‘terror overwhelmed all other feelings’ and she complained to their parents. Shelley was required to desist. A similar episode was recorded some six years later at Oxford by Hogg. Shelley kept his scout’s small simpleton son James under half-comic threats of sudden electrocution, so that James ‘roared aloud with ludicrous and stupid terror, whenever Shelley affected to bring by stealth any part of his philosophical apparatus near to him’.
³⁸

Another victim of Shelley’s experiments at Field Place was a local tom-cat, which appears to have been wired up to what Tom Medwin called an ‘electrical kite’ flying in a thunderstorm overhead. The result of this test was not recorded.
³⁹
It was perhaps this cat that Shelley celebrated in his earliest recorded piece of juvenile verse, five stanzas about ‘a cat in distress’ written on a sheet of paper with a small cat painted on the top, probably by Elizabeth. The cat in question is suffering simply from hunger, but even at the age of eleven, Shelley gives its sufferings a characteristic supernatural twist:

You would not easily guess

All the modes of distress

Which torture the tenants of earth;

And the various evils,

Which like so many devils,

Attend the poor souls from their birth.

The doggerel also contains a sly cross-reference to the relationship between Shelley’s father Timothy and old Bysshe, which shows the quickness with which he had seized on the nature of the feelings between father and son:

Some a living require,

And others desire

An old fellow out of the way;

And which is the best

I leave to be guessed,

For I cannot pretend to say.
⁴⁰

A similar kind of humorous self-assurance, which verges on the cynicism of a spoilt child, was shown in his first known letter dating from the summer before he went to Eton. He invites a girl-friend, a certain Miss Kate of Horsham, to a picnic expedition boating on Warnham Pond. The letter is franked ‘free’, as if it had been posted by his father under parliamentary privilege, though it was actually carried by Tom Medwin. The letter ends: ‘Mama depends on you bringing Tom over tomorrow, and if you don’t we shall be very much disappointed. Tell the bearer not to forget to bring me a fairing, which is some gingerbread, sweetmeat, hunting-nuts, and a pocket book. Now I end. I am not, Your obedient servant, PBShelley.’
⁴¹
Yet underneath the confident façade, the nightmares and the anxiety continued, and the sense of betrayal. It was first noticed at this time that Shelley began taking his pony out for long periods, or going on mysterious night-time expeditions. The old servant of the family was sent to follow him at a discreet distance, but he returned to report with a puzzled shake of his grey head: ‘Master Bysshe only took a walk and came back again.’

In 1804, Shelley left Syon House Academy and the protective friendship of Tom Medwin; and in September of that year, one month after his twelfth birthday, he was sent to Eton College. On the morning of his departure, a fire was discovered in the washroom at Field Place, started by one of Shelley’s ‘chemical preparations’ ignited in the fire grate with the chimney valve closed. It seems to have been timed to coincide with his leave-taking. His sisters remembered that ‘much was made of this incident’.
⁴²

Shelley was at Eton for six years, one of 400 Oppidans and some seventy scholars. The latter lived in College, had their fees paid, and were distinguished by their black academic gowns. The former, of which Shelley was one, were fee-paying, and lived in various school houses and lodgings. The years were
divided into ‘elections’, with a strict and brutally enforced system of social hierarchies, and it was traditional that the junior election always ‘fagged’ — acting as menial servants for senior boys. At the time of Shelley’s election, the Lower School were ruled by the notorious, squat, roaring figure of Dr Keate, soon to become the headmaster of the whole College when he earned his sobriquet ‘Flogger’. He was both a feared and a ridiculed figure, with a grimacing bulldog face glaring out beneath a large tricorn hat, whose harsh military régime set the tone for barbaric behaviour among the boys until they reached the relative civilization of the Remove and the Sixth Form in their last two years.