Shelley: The Pursuit (22 page)

Once Shelley had arrived in Keswick a passionate exchange of letters took place between him and the deserted Hogg. It was a series of recriminations, explanations and avowals which continued for most of November. In one of the last and longest, Shelley insisted: ‘I am not jealous. — Heaven knows that if the possession of Harriet’s person, or the attainment of her love was all that intervened between our meeting again tomorrow, willingly would I return to York, aye willingly, to be happy thus to prove my friendship. Jealousy has no place in my bosom; I am indeed at times very much inclined to think the Godwinian plan is best, particularly since the late events. But Harriet does not think so. She is prejudiced; tho’ I hope she will not always be so, — and on her opinions of right and wrong alone does the morality of the present case depend.’
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This was how Shelley interpreted events when he rationalized them at a distance.

Yet the real emotional shock for him was not the seduction of Harriet, but the loss of Hogg as a friend, and almost — one must insist — as a lover. Shelley’s letters from Keswick give a vivid impression of the battle fought out in his mind between Hogg and Harriet for his ultimate allegiance. It was more than the usual rivalry between the young wife and the best friend of the young husband, and it was a close thing. Eliza certainly realized that it could only be won by separating the two friends first. In writing to Miss Hitchener, the painful
affection with which Shelley looks back at Hogg was heartfelt, if partially veiled: never could you conceive never having experienced it that resistless & pathetic eloquence of his, never the illumination of that countenance on which I have sometimes gazed till I fancied the world could be reformed by gazing too’.
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In addressing Hogg himself, Shelley completely broke down, and he became passionate and agonized:

I am dismayed. I tremble — is it so? Are we parted, you — I — Forgive this wildness. I am half mad. I am wretchedly miserable. I look on Harriet. I start — she is before me — Has
she
convinced you?. . . Will you come — dearest, best beloved of friends, will
you
come? Will you share my fortune, enter into my schemes — love me as I love you; be inseparable as once I fondly hoped you were. . . . Ah! how I have loved you. I was even ashamed to tell you how! & now to leave you
forever
, — no, not forever. Night comes, — Death comes — Cold, calm death, almost I would it were tomorrow. There is another life. — Are you not to be the first there — Assuredly. Dearest, dearest friend, reason with me — I am like a child in weakness. . . .
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This was, in many respects, the letter of one lover to another, written at the most bewildering moment of a major upheaval and breach.

Hogg, in his turn, was writing distractedly, threatening to pursue them to Keswick, sending letters directly to Harriet herself, which Shelley had to intercept — the parallel with Elizabeth Shelley is obvious — swearing that he would blow his brains out at Harriet’s feet. This side of the correspondence has not survived, but its nature is clear from Shelley’s return comments in his own letters. He wrote back: ‘
Can
I not feel? are not those throbbing temples that bursting heart chained to mine . . . do they not sympathize. Cannot I read your soul as I have done your letter which I believe especially considered to be a copy of the former — little must you know me if now I appear to you otherwise than the most wretched of men . . . .’

Referring to his friend’s passion for Harriet, which Hogg was still urging and declaring, Shelley wrote to Hogg in the same letter: ‘But how tyrannic is that feeling do I not know; how restless its influence, how sophisticated its inductions. And shall I eager to avoid prejudice, by the vanity of disinterestedness expose you to the possibility of a renewal of this. . . . Shall I to gratify your present feelings expose you to the lasting scorpion sting . . . .’
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For the duration of the letter, at least, Shelley considered Hogg’s physical passion for a woman as a poison, a scorpion’s sting.

In one matter Shelley remained firm. Here again the parallel with the earlier love-triangle with Elizabeth Shelley is obvious. He always refused to have Hogg join them in Cumberland. However distracted his letters became in those first
two weeks, he always ended them with an absolute injunction not to come, on one occasion waiting until the flap of the outer cover to write: ‘Do not come
now
.’
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Continually he upbraided Hogg for his weakness in letting a woman, the implication is a
mere
woman, come between them. ‘Oh! how the sophistry of the passions has changed you, the sport of a woman’s whim; the plaything of her inconsistencies, the bauble with which she is angry, the footstool of her exaltation. Assert yourself be what you were Love! Adore! It will exalt your nature, bid you a Man be a God.’
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Shelley became extraordinarily dependent on Elizabeth Hitchener’s support during these early days at Keswick, writing, ‘I am immersed in a labyrinth of doubt. My friend, I need your advice your reason, my own seems almost withered. Will you come here in your Christmas holydays.’
²³
He was almost surprised to find himself immersed in the green, tranquil depths of the Lake District, in sole command of a grateful and adoring Harriet, and a strangely good-humoured Eliza. He walked out alone over the cold and beautiful upland pastures, gazing down on the ruffled waters and brooding on mutability. He felt his friendship with Hogg was one more example of an intimate emotional relationship that had failed him. Paradoxically he came to believe that it was Hogg who had deserted him, and not he who had allowed himself to be spirited away from Hogg at York. He wrote plaintively: ‘I know how much I owe to you . . . but it is not my fault, indeed it is not.’
²⁴

Transformed into mythical pattern, the desertion of his first friend was to appear in the opening cantos of the long poem
The Revolt of Islam
of 1817. At the time it left him little that was illuminating about his own nature. There was the clear statement on free love: ‘I attach little value to the monopoly of exclusive cohabitation. You know that I have frequently spoken slightingly of it.’
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But even this was overshadowed by the ambiguity of his feelings towards his new wife. As he wrote to Hogg about his sexual relations with Harriet: ‘suppose not that I would have envyed you what I too might share, what I should not much care utterly to resign (you see I am explicit as you were)’.
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There was still too little that seemed settled or explicit in his own mind. Without Hogg his marriage began to take on a different complexion; while with Eliza the old problem of Harriet’s dependence threatened to return. Yet it was no good looking back: the letters to his old friend tailed off in mid-November, and the correspondence gradually ceased as the passion burnt itself out with nothing left to feed on. The silence that came between them was to last for almost a year.

At Keswick they had taken a small house, Chesnut Cottage, about two miles outside Keswick on the Penrith road. They were now in the region of the Lake poets, and Shelley expected as his immediate neighbours Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey and de Quincey. It was, perhaps, one of the greatest strokes of
ill-luck that in all his time at Chesnut Cottage he was only to meet Southey. Coleridge was away lecturing in London that winter, and Wordsworth remained deep in hibernation at Grasmere.
[3]
Wordsworth does not seem to have been aware that Shelley was ever in his vicinity, and in all probability would not have relished the idea very much. But Coleridge was to recall the missed opportunity long afterwards with a mixture of wistful regret and gentle patronizing complacency. ‘Poor Shelley,’ he confided to John Frere in 1830, ‘it is a pity I think that I never met him. I could have done him good. He went to Keswick on purpose to see me. . . . Southey had no understanding for a toleration of such principles as Shelley’s. I should have laughed at his Atheism. I could have sympathized with him, and shown him that I did so, and he would have felt that I did so. I could have shown him that I had been in the same state myself, and I could have guided him through it. I have often bitterly regretted in my heart that I never did meet with Shelley.’
²⁷
In this interview, not published until 1917, Coleridge added an acute general comment on Shelley’s predicament as he had seen it unfolding. ‘Shelley was a man of great power as a poet,’ he told Frere, ‘and could he only have had some notion of order, could you only have given him some plane whereon to stand, and look down upon his mind, he would have succeeded.’ The strange thing was that Shelley himself soon wrote about his difficulties in a very similar way. De Quincey, who was burrowed into Grasmere at Dove Cottage, missed Shelley and commented impishly on his own library, which, ‘being rich in the wickedest of German speculations, would naturally have been more to Shelley’s taste than the Spanish library of Southey’.
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It was, then, Southey alone that Shelley chanced to meet during his four months’ stay in the Lake District.

In the meantime, the Shelleyan routine reestablished itself at Chesnut Cottage. The house was divided with another family, but the Shelleys were allowed to use the little garden, or as Harriet naïvely explained to some visitors, ‘the people let us run about in it, whenever Percy and I are tired of sitting in the house’.
²⁹
The post came in daily at Keswick at 7 o’clock in the morning, and went out again at 9, and on urgent occasions Shelley would be waiting for letters — especially from Hogg — and dash off his replies in time to go by return. This in itself may account sometimes for their breathless wildness. Shelley walked about the lakes and peaks, often alone, and his reflections on the deserted and magnificent scenery were soon flooding out to Miss Hitchener. A small sum of money came from old Westbrook, perhaps in response to a request from Eliza, but Shelley
was soon on the verge of penury again despite the fact that his rent only came to thirty shillings a week. By 30 November he was writing to Medwin, who had been severely taxed by Timothy for helping with Harriet’s marriage settlement, to inquire about the possibilities of raising some money by loan with his inheritance as security. It is interesting that Shelley did not yet stoop to entertaining the idea of getting work himself.

Despite being ‘so poor as to be actually in danger of every day being deprived of the necessaries of life’,
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Shelley was able to gird himself and his ladies up to visit the Duke of Norfolk at Greystoke at his lordship’s invitation in the first week of December. The weekend was extended to one of more than seven days. The meeting did not help solve family difficulties as the duke had hoped, but it gave Shelley an introduction to the Lake District notables. Unexpectedly Shelley enjoyed himself, showing off the pretty and very presentable Harriet, and arguing everyone into corners. The duke, who remembered his own radical days when he had proposed the notorious toast to ‘our Sovereign, the People’ was by all accounts friendly and tolerant of his fiery young guest, and Shelley recovered much of the resilience and self-confidence which the break with Hogg had weakened. ‘I held the arguments which I do everywhere.’
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On his return to Chesnut Cottage, about 9 December, he wrote to Miss Hitchener that he was ‘fatigued by aristocratical insipidity’, but that was only to reassure her that he was still of the egalitarian faith. More indicative was the short, low-toned and refreshingly simple note he sent to Hogg, the epilogue to the agonized series, and its dismissal. Here at last he put all the vaporous emotions, tortuous moral distinctions and defensive Godwinian theories firmly aside, and admitted it had been a straight fight. A fight which by the nature of things Hogg had lost. ‘If I were free,’ he told Hogg gently but firmly, ‘I were yours — tho’ I don’t think you sinless, I think you capable of great things, and in truth as well as in the stores of such a mind as yours can I conceive no pleasure equal to the participation. But I
am
Harriet’s. I am devoted to her happiness;
this
is entrusted to me, nor will I resign it. Would you desire me to desert her and live with you?’
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There could be only one answer to this. For the time being, T. J. Hogg, his first great friend, dropped out of his life.

As Shelley recovered, the radical mission which he had first clearly perceived at York reasserted itself, and now more comprehensively than before. In the letters to Miss Hitchener, the image of ‘sister of his soul’ was subtly replaced by a more politicized one in which he saw the mirror of his own aspirations: ‘I consider you one of those beings who carry happiness, reform, liberty wherever they go — to me you are as my better genius, the judge of my reasonings, the guide of my actions, the influencer of my usefulness. Great responsibility is the consequence of high powers.’
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His genius for disturbance began to make itself felt at Keswick. There was talk of strange lights and noises in the cottage, and rumours of the devilish consequences of Shelley’s atheism soon went abroad. ‘Strange prejudices have these country people!’ remarked Shelley innocently, as he set out to project the sinister reputation for alchemy that he had marketed at Oxford. The occult influences of childhood were growing up with him. Shelley’s landlord finally came knocking at the door to protest. ‘Mr Dare entered our cottage and said he had something to say to me. “Why Sir,” said he, “I am not satisfied with you. I wish you to leave my house.” — “Why Sir?” “Because the country talks very strangely of your proceedings. — Odd things have been seen at night near your dwelling. I am very ill satisfied with this — Sir I don’t like to talk of it. I wish you to provide for yourself elsewhere.’” Shelley succeeded in quieting Mr Dare’s fears with ‘much difficulty’, but realized that he was not welcome as a permanent tenant, and would eventually have to move. His explanation for the strange night-time proceedings was disarmingly simple. He had been discussing physics with Harriet and Eliza and demonstrating the nature of the atmosphere: ‘to illustrate my theory I made some experiments on hydrogen gas, one of its constituent parts. — This was in the garden, and the vivid flame was seen at some distance.’
³⁴
He concluded his account to Miss Hitchener with a rather more mocking gleam, ‘I wish to stay at Keswick . . . to see Southey. You may imagine then that I was very humble to Mr Dare, I should think he was tolerable afraid of the Devil.’
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