Shelley: The Pursuit (63 page)

[16]
It is notable that the £4,500 cash ‘gift’ is the same figure as that offered to Nash: Sir Timothy no doubt intended Shelley to deal with the debt from this fund. That Nash ruthlessly stuck to his original bond was perhaps more exasperating for father than for son, since Shelley rapidly converted the money for other uses. A final judgement in favour of Nash was made in May 1818, but since this was the time that Shelley left England there is no definite evidence that the debt was honoured by him. Eventually though, the Shelley estate would have been legally constrained to pay: the family disagreements of the aristocracy were the best class of business.

12. Up the River: Bishopsgate 1815

During the summer months of June and July 1815, Shelley’s whereabouts in England is largely unknown. But what has survived suggests that he was in a state of great uncertainty about his immediate future. This was complicated by the first serious bout of his chronic abdominal illness, together with consumptive symptoms, which led him in July or August to put himself under the care of Sir William Lawrence, the eminent London consultant surgeon and medical author who wrote one of the early essays on modern evolutionary theory. It is not until the very end of August that he sent a calm, but strangely soulful letter to Hogg, announcing that he had finally taken a house near Peacock in Bishops-gate, and was living there quietly reading and writing with Mary. During the intervening months he had undergone a decisive change, one of the effects of which was the recommencement of his creative output. Another expression of this change was his decision to set up house properly with Mary, and to start a second family.

This decision was not easily made. From Torquay, on 22 June, he had written to John Williams in North Wales inquiring if there was ‘any remote or solitary situation of a house
to let
for a time, with the prospect of purchase when my affairs will permit’. On the 24th he received the first quarterly payment of his £1,000 annuity. With funds actually in hand, he changed his mind about going to Wales and sealing himself off alone with Mary. On the 30th he sent a brief note to Williams saying he had altered his plans and was leaving Torquay early the following day ‘for Windsor in whose neighbourhood a friend has seen & highly recommended a furnished house’.
¹
This was a result of correspondence with Peacock, who was already living in a house at Marlow on the Thames. But Mary was only told that he was going house hunting, and he left her behind in rooms at Clifton. More than three weeks later she was still writing miserably and now rather desperately to him, asking when he would find a house, and
when she would see him again. She was particularly upset by the fact that they were to be apart on 28 July, the anniversary of their elopement. She could see only small hope of seeing him on his birthday on 4 August — and then only if she forced matters, and jumped into a London coach herself, which he obviously did not want. Her letter is eloquent of her distress, and shows in places that she had real fears of losing him:

We ought not to be absent any longer — indeed we ought not — I am not happy at it — when I retire to my room no sweet Love — after dinner no Shelley — though I have heaps of things
very particular
to say — in fine either you must come back or I must come to you directly — You will say shall we neglect taking a house — a dear home? No my love I would not for worlds give up that. . . . Dearest, I know how it will be — we shall both of us be put off day after day with the hopes of the success of the next days search for I am frightened to think how long — do you not see it in this light my own love.

She added a few lines later with rather more force, ‘indeed, my love, I cannot bear to remain so long without you — so if you will not give me leave — expect me without it some day’.
²

The real basis of her fears was revealed in a brief paragraph that came unexpectedly in the middle of her letter. ‘Pray is Clary with you? for I have enquired several times & no letters — but seriously it would not in the least surprise me if you have written to her from London & let her know that you are there without me that she should have taken some such freak — ’. Whether Mary’s fears were unfounded or not, there is no way of knowing, as Claire’s exact whereabouts are a mystery all this summer. Not until October, when Shelley sent her a draft for ten pounds at Enniscorthy, County Wexford, is it known that she was definitely in Ireland with her brother Charles. Peacock has no remarks upon the point.

For the most part, it would seem that Shelley spent July alone with Peacock, visiting his doctor, Lawrence, and arranging for a house. He was assailed by a curious sense of detachment and vacancy, as if suddenly he had seen through life and all it had to offer. One anecdote of Peacock’s seems to belong to the month which he spent coming to the decision to take the house at Bishopsgate, and join his life irreparably with Mary.

He had many schemes of life [recalled Peacock] amongst them all, the most singular that ever crossed his mind was that of entering the church. . . . We were walking in the early summer through a village where there was a good vicarage house, with a nice garden, and the front wall of the vicarage was covered with corchorus in full flower, a plant less common then than it has
since become. He stood some time admiring the vicarage wall. The extreme quietness of the scene, the pleasant pathway through the village churchyard, and the brightness of the summer morning, apparently concurred to produce the impression under which he suddenly said to me, — ‘I feel strongly inclined to enter the church.’ ‘What,’ I said, ‘to become a clergyman with your ideas of the faith?’ ‘Assent to the supernatural part of it’, he said, ‘is merely technical. Of the moral doctrines of Christianity I am a more decided disciple than many of its more ostentatious professors. And consider for a moment how much good a clergyman may do. In his teaching as a scholar and a moralist; in his example as a gentleman and a man of regular life; in the consolation of his personal intercourse and of his charity among the poor, to whom he may often prove a most beneficial friend when they have no other to comfort them.’

Peacock answered in his usual mode of gentle irony that he thought Shelley would find ‘more restraint in the office than would suit his aspirations’, and he walked on in thoughtful silence, and then turned to another subject.
³

The decision to be taken about his mode of life was really a decision to be taken about his own character and temperament. In the effort to face certain aspects of himself, his attempts and failures to set up constant and happy relations with those around him, he made a breakthrough into a new kind of reflective poetry. Probably the first short lyric which dates from the transition period of this summer is a six-stanza poem beginning ‘Oh, there are spirits of the air’. When it was published the following year, it was simply entitled ‘To — ’, and in her notes of 1839, Mary was to claim that it was ‘addressed in idea to Mr Coleridge, whom he never knew’. But she always found it difficult to accept that Shelley suffered from deep personal doubts which inevitably reflected on her own relationship with him. Shelley’s subsequent editors, including William Rossetti and Hutchinson, have generally accepted that the poem must have been addressed to himself. The stanzas have a Greek epigraph, from Euripides’s
Hippolytus
.
[1]
Like all the poems from the period of summer and autumn 1815, it has the hallmark of psychological introspection, and attempts to reach a position of philosophic balance. This is matched by the balance and simplicity of its rhythms and phrasing. It also has the elegiac note, a nostalgia for a way of life lost, which was the result of looking back and trying to understand certain elements in his own
developing personality. Throughout, the imagery draws on the world of ghosts and spirits, which it begins by affirming

Oh! there are spirits of the air,

And genii of the evening breeze,

And gentle ghosts, with eyes as fair

As star-beams among twilight trees: —

Such lovely ministers to meet

Oft hast thou turned from men thy lonely feet.

With mountain winds, and babbling springs,

And moonlight seas, that are the voice

Of these inexplicable things,

Thou didst hold commune, and rejoice

When they did answer thee; but they

Cast, like a worthless boon, thy love away.

And thou hast sought in starry eyes

Beams that were never meant for thine,

Another’s wealth! — tame sacrifice

To a fond faith! still dost thou pine?

Still dost thou hope that greeting hands,

Voice, looks, or lips, may answer thy demands?

At this point, the poem turns sharply upon itself, and considers the damaging consequence of trying to live in isolation and spiritual solitude, purely in ‘thine own mind’. This was to be the theme he explored fully in
Alastor
during the autumn. But here, it merely leads to a terrible image of deadlock, drawn from a reservoir far back in his earliest poetry and experience. It is the image of the relentlessly pursuing fiend.

Yes, all the faithless smiles are fled

Whose falsehood left thee broken-hearted;

The glory of the moon is dead;

Night’s ghosts and dreams have now departed;

Thine own soul still is true to thee,

But changed to a foul fiend through misery.

This fiend, whose ghastly presence ever

Beside thee like thy shadow hangs,

Dream not to chase; — the mad endeavour

Would scourge thee to severer pangs.

Be as thou art. Thy settled fate,

Dark as it is, all change would aggravate.
⁴

Ghosts, dreams, pursuit, the difficulty of stable human relationships, and the terror and destruction implicit in the solitary ‘settled fate’ were to be the broad terms within which Shelley worked for the rest of the year.

After some four weeks with Peacock at Marlow, he decided to take a house in the neighbourhood, at Bishopsgate, and settle down. The lease was signed on 3 August for a neat, two-storey cottage, with a little verandah and trellised porch, which stood at the eastern entrance to Windsor Park. Mary joined him from Clifton, within a week, and they established themselves in a quiet, regular routine, surrounded by books, and varied with long walks by the river and day-long expeditions into the leafy caverns of the Great Park. Here Shelley established one of his outdoor studies and read for hours surrounded by a litter of books with their pages blowing open in the wind. To begin with he read little but classics, mostly Lucan and Cicero, and began to teach Mary Latin by going through a section of the
Aeneid
each day. By the end of the month he was writing to Hogg, ‘My life has been very regular and undisturbed by new occurrences since your departure. My health has been considerably improved under Lawrence’s care, and I am so much more free from the continual irritation which I lived, as to devote myself with more effect and consistency to study.’
⁵

But the sense of detachment, almost of disillusion, remained. Commenting on a fanatical missionary whom Hogg had met on the law circuit, Shelley remarked generally on the illusions of ambition in a way that seemed to reflect upon himself. ‘Yet who is there that will not pursue phantoms, spend his choicest hours in hunting after dreams, and wake only to perceive his error and regret that death is so near. . . . Even the men who hold dominion over nations fatigue themselves by the interminable pursuit of emptiest visions; the honour and power which they seek is enjoyed neither in acquirement, possession, or retrospect; for what is the fame which attends the most skilful deceiver or destroyer?’ His observations on politics, and particularly on the final denouement of the Napoleonic struggle in Europe, are distanced to the point of indifference. ‘In considering the political events of the day I endeavour to divest my mind of temporary sensations, to consider them as already historical. This is difficult. Spite of ourselves the human beings which surround us infect us with their opinions; so much as to forbid us to be dispassionate observers of the questions arising out of the events of the age.’ Although he later wrote a sonnet celebrating Bonaparte’s defeat, it is difficult to believe these were the words of a political radical aged 23, who had elected to
live with the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft. It is also extraordinary that in writing to Hogg, who had in the spring been living as an intimate part of his household, he should make absolutely no mention of Mary.

His farewell to Hogg is itself an elegy. ‘It is already the end of August. Those leaves have lost their summer glossiness which, when I see you again, will be fluttering in the wind of autumn. Such is mortal life. Your affectionate friend — ’.
⁶

Shelley was finally aroused from his state of almost permanent brown study by an unexpectedly successful boating expedition, in the first fortnight of September. It was organized by Peacock, and included Mary and Charles Clairmont in the party. They decided they would try to reach the source of the Thames, and Shelley was forced to abandon his strict vegetarian régime by Peacock, who said it was inconvenient and fed him ‘mutton chops, well-peppered’. The four of them started in a wherry from Old Windsor, and the whole expedition lasted ten days. Charles wrote a long letter to Claire, describing their progress. The weather was hot, and the river wound smoothly through chalk hills, woodland and Oxfordshire Downs. Arriving at Oxford one evening, they put up for the night and Shelley spent the next day showing them round the scene of his former campaigns. In company he was cheerful and good-humoured during this
recherche du temps perdu
. ‘We saw the Bodleian Library, the Clarendon Press, and walked through the quadrangles of the different colleges,’ Charles told Claire, adding, with the echo of Shelley’s own voice, ‘We visited the very rooms where the two noted infidels, Shelley and Hogg, (now, happily, excluded from the society of the present residents), pored, with the incessant and unwearied application of the alchymist, over the certified and natural boundaries of human knowledge.’
⁷
Perhaps something Shelley said on this day first laid the germ of an idea in Mary’s mind for a story involving an ‘infidel’ student, working secretly in the heart of a respectable university, to bring forth a diabolic creation.