Shelley: The Pursuit (12 page)

Offering to lend Hogg money, Shelley was to write at about this time: ‘Tell me then if you want cash, as I have nearly drained you, & all delicacy, like sisters stripping before each other is out of the question.’
¹⁹

By the end of their first term together, Shelley had convinced Hogg that he ought to fall in love with his sister Elizabeth, and for that purpose it was arranged that Hogg would write regularly to Field Place during the vacation, both to declare his feelings to the girl, and also to keep Shelley intimately informed of the progress of his emotions. This somewhat curious agreement was to provide Shelley — if not his sister — with fine material for a passionate exchange of letters between the two friends, during December and January.

For Hogg, the sudden friendship swept him off his feet, and for all his studious ironies and hard-headed argumentation, a new and fantastic world of possibilities and adventures burst over him. The favourite memory that Hogg seemed to take away with him for the vacation was that of Shelley enthroned in the primal chaos of his room, wildly enraptured with one of his alarming experiments, ceaselessly discoursing on future achievements, and in the meantime transforming himself into a kind of electrical daemon, an ‘unearthly’ spirit of pure creative force, a fiery visionary:

He then proceeded, with much eagerness and enthusiasm, to show me the various instruments, especially the electrical apparatus; turning round the handle very rapidly, so that the fierce, crackling sparks flew forth; and presently standing upon the stool with glass feet, he begged me to work the machine until he was filled with the fluid, so that his long, wild locks bristled and stood on end. Afterwards he charged a powerful battery of several large jars; labouring with vast energy, and discoursing with increasing vehemence of the marvellous powers of electricity, of thunder and lightning; describing an electrical kite that he had made at home, and projecting another and an
enormous one, or rather a combination of many kites, that would draw down from the sky an immense volume of electricity, the whole ammunition of a mighty thunderstorm; and this being directed to some point would there produce the most stupendous results.
²⁰
[2]

At Field Place the winter vacation of 1810-11 began with a crisis. Shelley’s publisher, Stockdale, had grown suspicious of the influence that Hogg was having over Timothy Shelley’s son, and on reading the manuscript of Hogg’s ideological novel
Leonora
, his worst fears were confirmed. He talked with Timothy privately when he was in London, shortly before Christmas, and warned him that a fellow-undergraduate was corrupting his son’s religious principles and leading him into lawless speculations.
²¹
Timothy took up the matter with Shelley at Field Place, cautioning him against bad influences. Shelley immediately wrote to Hogg on 20 December:

There is now need for all my art, I must resort to deception — My Father called on Stockdale in London who has converted him to an Xtian, he mentioned your name as a supporter of Deistical Principles. My father wrote to me & I am now surrounded, environed by dangers to which compared the Devils who besieged St Anthony all were inefficient. — They attack me for my detestable principles, I am reckoned an outcast, yet defy them & laugh at their inefficient efforts.
²²

Shelley posed to Hogg as a hero in one of their own romances, and it is difficult to tell how serious the matter was. It seems however, that Timothy was genuinely alarmed; ‘My father wished to withdraw me from College, I
would
not consent to it. — There lowers a terrific tempest, but I stand as it were on a Pharos, & smile exultingly at the vain beating of the billows below.’

This at any rate was a promising beginning to their correspondence, and during the next five weeks Shelley and Hogg wrote steadily to each other by return of post, Shelley’s thick wads of missive leaving Field Place two or three times a week with the ‘post-free’ stamp of his father’s franking. Elizabeth was soon informed of her admirer’s talents, but disappointingly she seemed reluctant to involve herself. Shelley wrote on Boxing Day: ‘I read most of your letters to my sister; she frequently enquires after you, and we talk of you often. I do not
wish to awaken her intellect too powerfully; this must be my apology for not communicating all my speculations to her. Thanks,
truly
thanks for opening your heart to me, for telling me your feelings towards [her]. Dare I do the same to you? I dare not to myself, how can I to another, perfect as he may be . . .?’
²³

However, while the passion between his friend and his favourite sister seemed reluctant to ignite, Shelley soon found in the not unexpected news of Harriet Grove’s engagement in Wiltshire sufficient material for more heated self-revelations. He told Hogg that his cousin had abandoned him on account of his anti-religious opinions, and Hogg apparently wrote back concerning the heroism necessary in the pursuit of the atheistical principles in a prejudiced society. Shelley picked up his cue, and transformed himself into one of the cursing outcasts of Romance, furious for revenge:

Oh! I burn with impatience for the moment of Xtianity’s dissolution, it has injured me; I swear on the altar of perjured love to revenge myself on the hated cause of the effect which
even now
I can scarcely help deploring. — Indeed I think it is to the benefit of society to destroy the opinions which
can
annihilate the dearest of its ties. Inconveniences would now result from my
owning
the novel which I have in preparation for the press. I give out therefore that I will publish no more; every one here, but the select few who enter into its schemes believed my assertion — I will stab the wretch in secret. — Let us hope that the wound which we inflict tho’ the dagger be concealed, will rankle in the heart of our adversary.
²⁴

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: