Shelley: The Pursuit (34 page)

Twinkling amid the dark blue depths of Heaven;

Unlike the Fire thou bearest, soon shalt thou

Fade like a meteor in surrounding gloom,

Whilst that, unquenchable, is doomed to glow

A watch light by the patriots lonely tomb,

A ray of courage to the opprest and poor,

A spark, tho’ gleaming on the hovel’s hearth,

Which thro’ the tyrant’s guilded domes shall roar,

A beacon in the darkness of the earth,

A sun which o’er the renovated scene

Shall dart like Truth where Falsehood yet has been.
⁴⁶

One remembers how he berated one of his friends at Eton as
apyros
, a man who has no love for fire. In this poem, every image is shot through by the presence of flame, and the fire-balloon itself becomes a metaphor of the life of the revolutionary or philanthropist, whose body is burnt away and destroyed, but whose message survives and kindles those around. The poem weakens and falls off towards the end, until the distinctive image of fire in darkness succumbs to the almost meaninglessly general ‘renovation of the scene’ by Truth replacing Falsehood. This was a very apt reflection of Shelley’s own limitations in understanding the philosophy of political change, at this point in his life.

The 1st of August was Harriet’s seventeenth birthday, and the 4th was Shelley’s twentieth. They let off balloons to celebrate. Afterwards this became one of Shelley’s customs, and he was continuing it four years later in Switzerland.

Living all together at Lynmouth, Shelley again began to think about the communal life, and how it was best organized for his own little circle. All the time while he campaigned for egalitarian principles, he kept a regular servant in Dan. It is not known if Dan ate at table with the rest of the household, but it is certain that Shelley liked to employ local servants to cook and housekeep wherever he went. The wages for such services were tiny. The plan to run the farm at Nantgwillt had been part of a general idea that manual labour and a certain degree of self-sufficiency should be a necessary feature of communal living. Carried through into action, this would have been a truly revolutionary scheme, reminiscent of the Southey — Coleridge Pantisocratic plan formed at Cambridge and Bristol during the 1790s, and a premonition of the breakaway groups from the Owenite factory townships in the 1820.
[6]

But at Lynmouth, writing to Godwin, Shelley stated his views differently, and showed a surprising willingness to reflect the current morality and class stratification of his own day. It is, however, important to remember that he was trying to get Godwin’s daughter down to stay with them, and that Shelley consistently put on a more conservative and respectful front for the master’s benefit than he did in real life. ‘I do not mean’, Shelley wrote to Godwin, ‘that a splendid mansion, or an equipage is in any degree essential to life, — but that, if I was
employed at the loom or the plough, & my wife in culinary business and housewifery we should in the present state of society quickly become very different beings, & I may add, less useful to our species. Nor consistently with invincible ideas of delicacy, can two persons of opposite sexes unconnected by certain ties sleep in the same apartment. Probably, in a regenerated state of society agriculture & manufacture would be compatible with the most powerful intellect and polished manners; — probably delicacy as it relates to sexual distinction would disappear. Yet now, a ploughboy can with difficulty acquire refinement of intellect, & promiscuous sexual intercourse under the present system of thinking would inevitably lead to consequences the most injurious to the happiness of mankind.’
⁴⁷

These arguments reflect the assumptions of Shelley’s social background. It was certainly true that a ploughboy in 1812 would be extraordinarily lucky to achieve any degree of education, even literacy. Although even here, there were distinguished exceptions in the working-men’s movement, which threw up writers of the calibre of Samuel Bamford, William Lovett and Richard Carlile.
[7]
But Shelley’s argument that if
he
, the educated man, the man of intellectual refinement, were put to the plough, he ‘would quickly become a very different being’, suggests a very deep sense of class differentiation, so deep as to be almost a
biological
differentiation. He seemed to believe that the mere act of manual labour destroyed a man’s mental capacity for thought and the intellectual life. Again, on the sexual issue, the slightly embarrassed consideration of the physical details of undressing and sleeping in the same room, which lies behind Shelley’s idea of invincible delicacy, is another deeply ingrained idea of his own class stratum, dependent on the simple fact of spacious living.

William Cobbett, the editor and journalist who proudly proclaimed his ploughboy origins, featured in the discussions which were going on at the cottage about his paper the
Weekly Register
and his attitudes as a political popularist. Both Shelley and Harriet were furious that Cobbett had attacked Sir Francis Burdett in his recent stand over the building of barracks in disturbed areas. Harriet thought that ‘Cobbett merely changes his sentiments as occasion requires’, and that his political manners were abusive and contradictory.
⁴⁸
Both were anti-Cobbett because of his popularist appeal and style, precisely that bridgehead to the ‘poor and opprest’ that Shelley had failed to establish in his Dublin pamphlet. Shelley enlisted Cobbett’s name rather sneeringly in a general
attack on the irrelevancy of classical education, suggesting that men like Cobbett were really beyond all hope of refinement. ‘I have as great a contempt for Cobbett as you have’, he wrote to Godwin, ‘but it is because he is a dastard & a time server; he has no humanity, no refinement, but were he a classical scholar would he have more?’
⁴⁹
As Shelley began to understand the political process more broadly and with more insight, so his admiration for Cobbett steadily increased. He eventually came to regard him as a ‘mischievous’ and delightful bull-baiter of authority, and almost exactly seven years after Lynmouth, he was writing ‘Cobbett still more & more delights me, with all my horror of the sanguinary commonplaces of his creed. His design to overthrow Bank notes by forgery is very comic.’
⁵⁰

At Lynmouth in July, Shelley embarked on a concentrated period of reading and study. He began a debate with Godwin over the materialist philosophy and the principles behind
Political Justice
. They discussed Helvetius and Berkeley, and Shelley once more found himself at issue with Godwin. They had agreed on the ‘omnipotence of education’ and were united in antagonism towards the ‘system of self-love’, which they understood to be the operating principle behind contemporary society. But in more purely philosophical regions, Shelley disagreed with Godwin that ‘the loftiest disinterestedness is incompatible with the strictest materialism’. Shelley at this stage regarded himself as a strict ‘necessitarian’, with a rigidly mechanical view of the moral universe, whereas Godwin tended towards a more flexible philosophy. Shelley held his ground without compunction. ‘If I err in what I say, or if I differ from you (though in this point I think I do not) Reason stands arbiter between us. Reason (if I may be permitted to personify it) is as much your superior, as you are mine.’
⁵¹

Shelley took issue with Godwin over the content of education, and argued that Godwin’s ideas were too literary and fettered by undue respect for a classical education and sophisticated linguistic training. ‘You say that words will neither debauch our understandings, nor distort our moral feelings. — You say that the time of youth could not be better employed than in the acquisition of classical learning. But
words
are the very things that so eminently contribute to the growth and establishment of prejudice: the learning of
words
before the mind is capable of attaching correspondent ideas to them, is like possessing machinery with the use of which we are so unacquainted as to be in danger of misusing it.’ Shelley here hit upon a powerful critique not only of literary education in general, but of eighteenth-century literature in particular; his argument is not unrelated to the advocacy by both Wordsworth and Coleridge of the ‘plain style’ in their essays and prefaces.

Shelley was at this moment most concerned with education, and he therefore concluded his argument with a suggestion for an adolescent syllabus: ‘I should
think that natural philosophy,
[8]
medicine, astronomy, & above all History would be sufficient employments for immaturity, employments which would completely fill up the era of tutelage, & render unnecessary all expedients for losing time well, by gaining it safely.’
⁵²
The subjects which Shelley chose as the basis for a true education show he was once again turning over in his mind the background for his long poem which he had projected at Keswick. The ‘Notes to Queen Mab’, which he finally put down in definite form in London the following year, are based on exactly these categories. Shelley was ‘re-educating’ himself with all these disciplines at Lynmouth. A book order to Hookham dated 29 July included a collection of
Medical Extracts
, Sir Humphry Davy’s
Elements of Chemical Philosophy
, Mary Wollstonecraft’s
Rights of Women
and David Hartley’s study of ‘mental association’, an early psychological thesis,
Observations on Man
.
⁵³

At Lynmouth Shelley also read for the first time J.H. Lawrence’s four-volume romance,
The Empire of the Nairs; or The Rights of Women
. It was based on a study of the matriarchal caste of the Nairs in Malabar, and was one of the most influential of feminist tracts.
[14]
Shelley at once wrote enthusiastically to Lawrence that his book had ‘succeeded in making me a perfect convert to its doctrines. I then retained no doubts as to the evils of marriage, — Mrs Wollstonecraft reasons too well for that; but I had been dull enough not to perceive the greatest argument against it, until developed in the “Nairs”, viz. prostitution both legal and illegal.’
⁵⁴
The fundamental exemplum of Lawrence’s book was that a healthy and happy community could only be formed by the abolition of a sexually monogamous morality. This chimed with the kind of theories Shelley had been developing ever since Oxford; yet he was acutely aware of the dangers of practising such a theory in the present society. For this reason he defended his own marriage as he had done previously to Miss Hitchener, remarking cheerfully that ‘Love seems inclined to stay in the prison’.

Yet his further comments on seduction, with their curiously over-sensitive shudder of recoil, reflect much less on Harriet than on his relationship with Miss Hitchener, and the accusations which had been levelled from Sussex: ‘. . . Seduction, which term could have no meaning in a rational society, has now a most tremendous one; the fictitious merit attached to chastity has made that a forerunner of the most terrible of ruins, which, in Malabar, would be a pledge of honour and homage. If there is any enormous and desolating crime, of which I should shudder to be accused, it is seduction.’
⁵⁵
For all his shuddering however, one notes that, quite firmly, chastity was a ‘fictitious merit’.

This period of summer study gradually bore fruit. In a package to Hookham, dated 29 July, Shelley delivered twenty-five copies of his completed pamphlet, the
Letter to Lord Ellenborough
; and on 18 August, he sent fifty more. The work, printed locally in Barnstaple, was an essay of some 4,000 words, in which Shelley argued the case for complete freedom of the press and toleration of all published opinion on the classic ground that ‘That which is false will ultimately be controverted by its own falsehood. That which is true needs but publicity to be acknowledged.’
⁵⁶

Eaton had been tried and found guilty of ‘blasphemous libel’ by a jury directed by Lord Ellenborough. His defence had been that he was a deist, and not an atheist; that the Scriptures were open to the kind of criticism that Tom Paine was making, since the God of the Old Testament was a revengeful and primitive deity, and Christ was ‘an exceedingly virtuous, good man, but nothing supernatural or divine’.
⁵⁷
With great relish Shelley chose to defend a highly polemic version of this position. ‘Mr Eaton asserted that the Scriptures were, from beginning to end, a fable and imposture, that the Apostles were liars and deceivers. He denied the miracles, the resurrection, and ascension of Christ. He did so, and the Attorney General denied the propositions which he asserted, and asserted those which he denied. What singular conclusion is deducible from this fact? None, but that the Attorney General and Mr Eaton sustained two opposite opinions.’
⁵⁸

There are several other passages in which Shelley writes with this kind of clarity and verve. But as in the Irish pamphlets, he still had no clear idea what kind of audience he was speaking to, and his argument shows little coherent development, but swirls away to itself without ever reaching any definite set of conclusions, except the need to raise his ‘solitary voice’ in ‘disapprobation’.
[9]
Shelley missed one crucial point about the larger significance of Eaton’s trial. His letter was based on the idea that Eaton’s persecution was, strictly speaking, theological. ‘Wherefore, I repeat, is Mr Eaton punished? Because he is a Deist? And what are you, my Lord? A Christian. Ha then! the mask is fallen off; you persecute him because his faith differs from yours.’ But in fact the legal instrument of ‘blasphemous libel’ had become far more a political weapon used by the government to suppress socially subversive ideas. The very name of Tom Paine signified social subversion. Eaton’s trial for publishing Paine was really the opening of the second phase of political repression — the first had been conducted by Pitt in the nineties — which took place between 1812 and 1824, and involved all the most distinguished members of the early free press movement:
Wooler, Hone, Carlile, Cobbett, Burdett and Hunt. In every case prosecutions were mounted on one of two counts: blasphemous libel or seditious libel. Shelley did not see, at the time of writing his
Letter to Lord Ellenborough
, the full political implications of what was taking place. Later he came to see only too well: the open letter he wrote for Hunt’s
Examiner
on the occasion of Carlile’s trial in 1819 is a far more penetrating and forceful plea for liberty of the press and published opinion than this early pamphlet.