Shelley: The Pursuit (8 page)

By 1808, Shelley’s fourth year at Eton, he finally began to rise out of the miseries of the lower elections, and establish something of his own freedom and identity. He had now moved to Dr Bethel’s house, in a room directly above the Doctor’s study, and he began to make himself felt with his experiments, on one occasion electrifying his housemaster who inadvertently put his hand on a wired-up doorknob, and on another being discovered in a circle of blue spirit flame apparently trying to raise the devil. He blew up an old tree stump near his lodgings with an advanced gunpowder device, and later had his whole library of chemical books banned by Bethel and sent back to Field Place.
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His co-fag and one friend of the early days, Andrew Amos, was alienated by these brushes with authority, and he was rather bitterly taunted by Shelley as ‘Amos Apyrist’ — the man who hates or fears fire.

His interest in the occult remained part of the developing world of scientific magic. Another friend, Walter Halliday, recalled: ‘We used to wander for hours about Clewer, Frogmore, the Park at Windsor, the Terrace; and I was a delighted and willing listener to his marvellous stories of fairyland, and apparitions, and spirits, and haunted ground; and his speculations were then, (for his mind was far more developed than mine), of the world beyond the grave.’
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Hogg gave a detailed summary of Shelley’s pursuits in this direction when he first described them at Oxford, two years later:

He was passionately attached to the study of what used to be called the occult sciences, conjointly with that of the new wonders, which chemistry and natural philosophy have displayed to us. His pocket money was spent in the purchase of books relative to these darling pursuits — of chemical apparatus and materials. The books consisted of treatises on magic and witchcraft, as well as those more modern ones detailing the miracles of electricity and
galvanism. Sometimes he watched the livelong nights for ghosts. At his father’s house, where his influence was, of course, great among the dependents, he even planned how he might get admission to the vault, or charnel-house, at Warnham Church, and might sit there all night, harrowed by fear, yet trembling with expectation, to see one of the spiritualized owners of the bones piled around him.
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Peacock, who always understood this side of Shelley better than Hogg and was prepared to write about it more carefully, says that in after-life Shelley himself laughed over many of these incidents, yet ‘he often spoke of them to me’. Peacock felt it was worth putting on record the fact that ‘if he had ever any faith in the possible success of his incantations, he had lost it before I knew him’.
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Peacock was cautious, for he knew that Shelley’s cast of mind was deeply affected by these adolescent interests, which were not so much abandoned as developed, intellectualized, refined and further sophisticated. Many curious incidents in later life can be traced to this root.

Hogg’s narration of one of Shelley’s solitary devil-raising sessions reflects certain descriptions and scenes in Shelley’s later poetry:

He consulted his books, how to raise a ghost; and once, at midnight, — he was then at Eton — he stole from his Dame’s house, and quitting the town, crossed the fields towards a running stream. As he walked along the pathway amidst the long grass, he heard it rustle behind him; he dared not look back; he felt convinced that the devil followed him; he walked fast, and held tight the skull, the prescribed assistant of his incantations. When he had crossed the field he felt less fearful, for the grass no longer rustled, so the devil no longer followed him.
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In this little piece of comic macabre is the first appearance of one of those ghostly ‘following figures’ which were to haunt Shelley both in his life and his writing throughout his remaining years. The first occasion on which Shelley consciously admitted this obsession to himself was in the poem, ‘Oh! There are spirits of the air’, written when he was 23.
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The one adult figure of importance in Shelley’s life at Eton was Dr James Lind. Lind had been at one time physician to the Royal Household, and was now retired, living at Windsor, and teaching part-time at the college. He was a mild, silver-haired, professorial and somewhat eccentric figure. He had been a scholar and a traveller. His journeys had taken him to Iceland, India and China, and his collection of stones and curios was extensive. He was fascinated by typography and set up and printed his own little pamphlets. He had a wide knowledge of
mythological and philosophical writings, both Greek and Oriental, and had published three papers for the Royal Society.
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He was interested in hermetic writings, and it was rumoured that he was an amateur demonologist.
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Shelley found in him both an intellectual guide and an emotional father-figure, and in this respect he was to be the precursor of William Godwin.

During Shelley’s last two years at Eton he was taken under the Doctor’s wing, and was frequently invited to Lind’s house in Windsor for tea, which was served in a variegated selection of teacups by the Doctor’s niece. Lind encouraged Shelley to be systematic in his reading and speculation, discussing with him the philosophical limitations of Pliny’s natural history, and recommending his first liberal and radical texts, the works of Benjamin Franklin, Condorcet the materialist and Voltaire the sceptic. Shelley’s interest in Lucretius as a sound, classical authority for an anti-religious and scientific-materialist philosophy was also probably fostered by Lind; and there is some evidence that Shelley’s first contact with Godwin’s writing was a glimpse of Lind’s copy of
Political Justice
.
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Lind’s interest in pamphleteering encouraged Shelley in his own printing schemes, and Lind also taught him the value of the postal debate.

Shelley’s strategy, adopted from the Doctor, was to write to well-known authorities on religious or philosophical questions, posing as a distressed spinster, puzzled curate or other intellectual innocent. Having once hooked a reply the innocent correspondence would step up the level of the debate, until suddenly the unwary Doctor of Divinity found himself having to argue for his life. Shelley delighted in this form of intellectual ambush, and Hogg recorded that in 1810 Shelley had several postal debates in progress simultaneously. Shelley’s favourite pseudonym was the harmless-sounding ‘Reverend Merton’, and his most distinguished catch was no less than the Dean of St Paul’s.
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Hogg also said, less reliably, that Dr Lind was amused to hear of old Bysshe’s capacity for cursing, and that he taught Shelley a formal Rite of Damnation to be pronounced against political enemies.

It was Dr Lind who first read Plato — still regarded both in schools and universities as a subversive and corrupting author — with Shelley and drew his attention to the
Phaedrus
and the
Symposium
. This was an introduction which was to bear fruit in a masterly translation when Shelley was 26. Shelley commemorated Dr Lind in two of his poems of 1817,
The Revolt of Islam
and ‘Prince Athanase’, in which he was transformed, like Godwin, into a mythical personage: the sage, the rescuer, the healer. Shelley celebrated this in his description of the education of Prince Athanase by the magus Zonoras, the ‘one beloved friend’ with eyes ‘whose arrowy light shone like the reflex of a thousand minds’. The platonic teaching was presented by Shelley in retrospect as something intellectually and emotionally sacred:

Thus through his age, dark, cold, and tempest-tossed,

Shone truth upon Zonoras; and he filled

From fountains pure, nigh overgrown and lost,

The spirit of Prince Athanase, a child,

With soul sustaining songs of ancient lore

And philosophic wisdom, clear and mild,

And sweet and subtle talk they evermore,

The pupil and the master, shared. . . .
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The adolescent idea of learning as a kind of alchemy which provided the secret key to wisdom was gradually to become transformed into a more mature and political conception. Learning became the private and secret weapon against public tyranny, passed on by the aged philosopher to the youthful activist. It was almost the idea of the ‘conspiracy of the intellect’. Shelley expounded this view of his education in the mouth of another Lind-like sage and father-figure in the other poem of 1817,
The Revolt of Islam
.

‘Yes, from the records of my youthful state,

And from the lore of bards and sages old,

From whatsoe’er my wakened thoughts create

Out of the hopes of thine aspirings bold,

Have I collected language to unfold

Truth to my countrymen; from shore to shore

Doctrines of human power my words have told,

They have been heard, and men aspire to more

Than they have ever gained or ever lost of yore.

‘In secret chambers parents read, and weep,

My writings to their babes, no longer blind;

And young men gather when their tyrants sleep

And vows of faith each to the other bind. . . .

‘The tyrants of the Golden City tremble

At the voices which are heard about the streets,

The ministers of fraud can scarce dissemble

The lies of their own heart; but when one meets

Another at the shrine, he inly weets,

Though he says nothing, that the truth is known;

Murderers are pale upon the judgement-seats,

And gold grows vile even to the wealthy crone,

And laughter fills the Fane, and curses shake the Throne . . . .’
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If Dr Lind had gradually inherited over the years the position of spiritual father and guide, Timothy, by contrast, was to be transformed into the type of false father, betrayer and tyrant.

According to Shelley it was Dr Lind who came to Field Place to prevent his beloved pupil from being committed to the asylum by the tyrant father Timothy during his fever. Lind’s contrast with Timothy was overt in Shelley’s mind. ‘This man . . . is exactly what an old man ought to be. Free, calm-spirited, full of benevolence, and even of youthful ardour; his eye seemed to burn with supernatural spirit beneath his brow, shaded by his venerable white locks; he was tall, vigorous, and healthy in his body; tempered, as it had ever been, by his amiable mind. I owe that man far, ah! far more than I owe to my father; he loved me, and I shall never forget our long talks where he breathed the spirit of the kindest tolerance and the purest wisdom.’
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So he told Mary Shelley, on the night in 1814 when he declared his love for her.

By 1809, when Shelley was 17, the friendship with Lind had brought out the first clear marks of dawning intellectual maturity, and Eton had begun to smooth some of its expensive social polish over the disturbed and volatile personality beneath. His sisters remembered their ‘silent, though excessive’ admiration as their elder brother stood in beautifully fitting silk pantaloons warming his coat-tails in front of the massive fire at Field Place. To an Eton friend he wrote nonchalantly of shooting at thousands of wild ducks and geese ‘in our River and Lake’ all day, and reading novels and romances all night. Tom Medwin saw him down three snipe in three successive shots at the end of the pond. In another letter he issued an invitation in the Eton style of the day: ‘I hope we shall have the Pleasure of your Company at Field Place at Easter, & that you will conjointly with Il Padre & myself esclipse the Beau’s & Belles of the Horsham Ball. . . . O how I wish you were here to enliven our Provincial Stupidity & how I regret the Frost — I am your affectionate friend.’
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It is notable that his father is still referred to in a markedly amiable light.

A new attraction who entered briefly but intensely into his life in 1809 was his beautiful cousin, Harriet Grove, who came to stay with the rest of her family at Field Place during the spring. His new-found appetite for postal debates had led him to write to his cousin as well, and in her diary between January and April 1809 she recorded the receipt of weekly letters. The friendship began on paper before it began in fact, and it was to retain a novelettish quality throughout the next eighteen months. Shelley first properly met Harriet in April, at a time when he described himself immersed in solitude at Field Place, having ‘no Employment, except writing Novels & Letters’. His youngest sisters were now themselves away at school. The descent of the Grove family for several days cheered him up and excited him: an inseparable romantic foursome was formed
of Shelley, Harriet, her closest brother Charles and Elizabeth Shelley. There were moonlit walks to Strood — Shelley’s old favourite — and twilit rambles round St Irving’s, a beautiful Elizabethan manor house near Horsham with gardens and fountains laid out by Capability Brown. Shelley, Harriet and Elizabeth planned poems and novels together, and when the Groves moved up to Town to stay at John Grove’s house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, Shelley, Elizabeth and Mrs Shelley rapidly joined them. Shelley wrote pointedly to an Eton friend: ‘I shall be in London on the 16th at the Opera on Tuesday — observe
who
I am with, & I will ask your opinion at some future period.’
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