Shelley: The Pursuit (78 page)

Compiling his autobiography in 1846, Haydon considerably dilated on his first impressions of Shelley at that dinner in January, when he was gored for his Christianity. Allowing for retrospective colouring, the picture of Shelley at his most domineering and insensitive is very vivid.

I went a little after the time, and seated myself in the place kept for me at [Hunt’s] table right opposite Shelley himself, as I was told after, for I did not know what hectic, spare, weakly, yet intellectual-looking creature it was carving a bit of brocoli or cabbage on his plate, as if it had been the substantial
wing of a chicken. Hunt and his wife [Marianne] and her sister [Elizabeth Kent], Keats, Horace Smith and myself made up the party. In a few minutes Shelley opened the conversation by saying in a most feminine and gentle voice, ‘As to that detestable religion, the Christian . . .’ I looked astounded, but casting a glance round the table, easily saw by Hunt’s expression of ecstasy and the women’s simper, I was to be set at that evening
vi et armis
. No reply, however, was made to this sally during dinner, but when the desert came and the servants were gone, to it we went like fiends. — and — were deists. I felt exactly like a stag at bay and resolved to gore without mercy. Shelley said the Mosaic and Christian dispensations were inconsistent. I swore they were . . . neither of us using an atom of logic. Neither — Keats nor all codes of law in the earth. Shelley denied it. [Hunt] backed him. I affirmed they were . . . neither of us using an atom of logic [
sic
]. Neither — Keats nor — said a word to this; but still Shelley, and [Hunt] and — kept at it till, finding I was a match for them in argument, they became personal, and so did I. We said unpleasant things to each other, and when I retired to the other room for a moment I overheard them say, ‘Haydon is fierce.’ ‘Yes’ said Hunt, ‘the question always irritates him.’
²³

It was this sort of scene, far more than the sense of class distinction which Hunt hinted at, that made Keats wary of Shelley. At first his attitude was merely playful, taking after Hunt, but with a touch of Keatsian sarcasm: ‘Does Shelley go on telling strange Stories of the Death of Kings?’ he asked in May 1817; ‘Tell him there are strange Stories of the death of Poets — some have died before they were conceived . . . . Does Mrs S[helley] cut Bread and Butter as neatly as ever? Tell her to procure some fatal Scissars and cut the thread of Life of all to be disappointed Poets.’
²⁴
Later, in the summer, he definitely refused to be drawn into the Shelley
ménage
at Marlow: ‘I refused to visit Shelley, that I might have my own unfettered scope.’
²⁵
[4]
Discussing ‘Endymion’ which he had been working on at the same time as Shelley wrote
Laon and Cythna
, he made his antagonism clearer, though without any of Haydon’s defensive malice: ‘the fact is [Hunt] & Shelley are hurt & perhaps justly, at my not having showed them the affair officiously & from several hints I have had they appear much disposed to dissect & anatomize, any trip or slip I may have made. — but whose afraid Ay! Tom! demme if I am.’
²⁶

William Hazlitt felt no such reticence as Keats, and his description of Shelley
in an essay of 1821 aroused the anger of Hunt, and shadowed the friendship for some time to come. In a celebrated rodomontade Hazlitt displayed with ironic gusto much that had been merely implied by Keats and Smith.

Mr Shelley . . . has a fire in his eye, a fever in his blood, a maggot in his brain, a hectic flutter in his speech, which mark out the philosophic fanatic. He is sanguine-complexioned, and shrill-voiced. As is often observable in the case of religious enthusiasts, there is a slenderness of constitutional
stamina
, which renders the flesh no match for the spirit . . . . The shock of accident, the weight of authority make no impression on his opinions, which retire like a feather, or rise from the encounter unhurt, through their own buoyancy . . . . There is no
caput mortuum
of worn-out, thread-bare experience to serve as ballast to his mind; it is all volatile intellectual salt of tartar, that refuses to combine its evanescent, inflammable essence with any thing solid or any thing lasting . . . . Curiosity is the only proper category of his mind, and though a man in knowledge, he is a child in feeling . . . . He strives to overturn all established creeds and systems: but this is in him an effect of constitution. He runs before the most extravagant opinions, but this is because he is held back by none of the merely mechanical checks of sympathy and habit. He tampers with all sorts of obnoxious subjects, but it is less because he is gratified with the rankness of the taint, than captivated with the intellectual phosphoric light they emit.
²⁷

With Hunt’s family however, Shelley was indulged as a great favourite. Hunt’s wife, Marianne, looked on Mary and Shelley simply as a misunderstood and persecuted couple, and she was delighted with the way Shelley played with the children. Hunt’s eldest son, Thornton, then 11, afterwards remembered how he frequently went boating and walking on the Heath with Shelley. His father’s new strange friend filled him with a mixture of fascination and fear. He remembered one of his alarming physical spasms ‘when he suddenly threw up his book and hands, and fell back, the chair sliding steeply from under him, and he poured forth shrieks, loud and continuous, stamping his feet madly on the ground’.

Contrasting him with his own father, Thornton recalled: ‘Shelley entered more unreservedly into the sports and even the thoughts of the children. I had probably awakened interest in him, not only because I was my father’s eldest child, but still more, because I had already begun to read with great avidity, and with an especial sense of imaginative wonders and horrors . . . . I can remember well one day when we were both for some long time engaged in gambols, broken off by my terror at his screwing up his long and curling hair into a horn,
and approaching me with rampant paws and frightful gestures as some imaginative monster . . . . Shelley often called me for a long ramble on the heath, or into regions which I then thought far distant; and I went with him rather than with my father, because he walked faster, and talked with me while he walked . . . and when I was “done up”, he carried me home in his arms, on his shoulder, or pickback. Our communion was not always concord; as I have intimated, he took a pleasure in frightening me, though I never really lost my confidence in his protection, if he would only drop the fantastic aspects that he delighted to assume. Sometimes, but much more rarely, he teased me with exasperating banter . . . . I am well aware that he
had
suffered severely, and that he continued to be haunted by certain recollections, partly real and partly imaginative, which pursued him like an Orestes. He frequently talked on such subjects . . . .’
²⁸
Young Hunt’s memories are remarkable, and have the candid, unflinching penetration of a child’s glance. Thornton was, incidentally, one of those who was always convinced of the reality of the attack at Tan-yr-allt. Perhaps more than any of the adult Hampstead friends, Shelley allowed him into the dark side of his mind.

But for Shelley, the games, the sociable dinners, the late-night arguments, the comfortable breakfasts with Hunt joking and punning genially in his flowered dressing-gown, all served as stimulating distractions. A sense of purpose was hardening secretly inside him. Both the Chancery case, and the reform meetings which had been sweeping the country had crystallized within him a new determination to express himself politically. The creative and the political impulse worked, as before, together.

In February, Lord Liverpool’s administration had again announced a national state of alarm, as it had done in 1812. Government secret committees, commissioned to examine agitational and insurrectional movements and the levelling propaganda of the Spenceans, reported to both Houses of Parliament in the middle of the month. On 3 March Habeas Corpus was suspended, and on the 29th the Seditious Meetings Act was passed.
²⁹
On 30 January the deputies of the Hampden Clubs had held a special conference in London, and a contest for command of the reform movement was fought out between Francis Place, William Hone the editor of
Reformist’s Register
, and Cobbett. The fundamental principle at issue was whether it was best to press at once for full manhood suffrage, by working-class agitation throughout the nation, or whether to try and increase merely the middle-class representation. Francis Place advocated the second course, arguing that they might then carry the final stage of reform through from the floor of the Commons itself. Shelley was deeply involved with these issues. When Shelley and Mary moved from Hampstead to stay with Peacock at Marlow, she wrote to Hunt that the house was ‘very political as
well as poetical’, and somewhat nervously asked his advice on a scheme which Shelley and Peacock were planning to start a local protest movement based on a refusal, as householders, to pay their rates and taxes.
³⁰

Nothing can better capture the popular political feeling of this early spring of 1817 than the reports which Cobbett’s
Weekly Political Pamphlet
and the
Black Dwarf
carried of the execution of a sailor called Cashman who had been convicted as a result of the Spa Fields Riot of December 1816. The execution itself acted as the trigger for a large and spontaneous demonstration, in which Cashman gallantly played the jocular democratic hero to the very last. ‘As the Sherriffs advanced, the mob expressed the strongest feelings of indignation; groans and hisses burst from all quarters, and attempts were made to rush forward . . . . Cashman . . . seemed to enter into the spirit of the spectators, and joined in their exclamations with a terrific shout . . .“Hurra, my hearties in the cause! success! cheer up!” ’ He brushed away two Anglican clergymen, and the execution hood, with derision, stepped on to the trap with the noose around his neck and bellowed amiably at the crowd. ‘ “Now you buggers, give me three cheers when I trip”; and, after telling the executioner to “let go the jib-boom”, Cashman “was cheering at the instant the fatal board fell from beneath his feet”.’ The crowd fell silent, and the constables shifted uneasily at the barricades. Then with growing force they cried ‘Murder’ and ‘Shame’, and would not disperse for several hours.
³¹

It was in this month also that Samuel Bamford was arrested near Manchester and brought south for a trial and imprisonment that led to his personal examination by Sidmouth and other members of the Cabinet, of which he has left a brilliant and celebrated description.
³²

In mid-February, Shelley suddenly began to work on a political pamphlet, his first since 1812. He showed the draft to Hunt’s friend Ollier, who agreed to print and publish it at Shelley’s expense. Shelley took the manuscript with him to Marlow, where he revised it, in discussion with Peacock. Its final title was
A Proposal for Putting Reform to the Vote throughout the Kingdom
, and it was signed with the vatic pseudonym, ‘The Hermit of Marlow’. The pamphlet itself is short and to the point, and deliberately reasonable and moderate. Shelley suggested that a Crown and Anchor Meeting should be assembled of all the Friends of Liberty, whatever their particular bias, in order to set up what was in effect a national plebiscite. Funds and representatives should be organized to ask every ‘adult individual of Great Britain’ one simple question: whether or not they were in favour of the proposal that the House of Commons ‘should originate such measure of reform as would render its members the actual representatives of the nation’. This single question should be canvassed, without any further details or particulars. ‘It is trivial to discuss what species of reform shall have place when it remains a question whether there will be any reform or
no.’ But if the answer was a majority ‘yes’, then all pressures could be brought to bear on Parliament to put through some immediate measure of reform, as this would then indisputably be the ‘will of the nation’.

Beyond this simple target, towards which Shelley himself made a characteristic offer of £100 to set up an action fund, the meeting should disclaim ‘revolutionary and disorganizing schemes’, and declare its object to be ‘purely constitutional’. Indeed he stated that for his part, he did not believe that it was the right time to press matters further than instituting annual Parliaments, and a limited middle-class extension of the electoral base. He had, it seemed, no wish to be counted, in this contest at least, a democrat or demagogue. ‘With respect to universal suffrage, I confess I consider its adoption in the present unprepared state of public knowledge and feeling a measure fraught with peril. I think that none but those who register their names as paying a certain small sum in
direct taxes
ought, at present, to send members to Parliament. The consequences of the immediate extension of the elective franchise to every male adult would be to place power in the hands of men who have been rendered brutal and torpid and ferocious by ages of slavery. It is to suppose that the qualities belonging to a demagogue are such as are sufficient to endow a legislator.’
³³

It would appear from this that Shelley was quite deliberately setting out to align himself with the liberals of Hunt’s
Examiner
, rather than with the real radicals of the
Political Register
and the
Black Dwarf
. But in private, Shelley’s views were much further left than he admitted in this pamphlet. His scheme with Peacock to withhold payment of taxes — a highly unusual piece of direct action at that time — demonstrates this well; as also his tendency to side in political argument with the republican Hazlitt; and much of his private writings. This split between public and private attitudes gives some indication of the intense difficulty with which men like Shelley entertained the idea of a real English democracy.