Shelley: The Pursuit

by Richard Holmes

  Shelley had the idea for a romance forming in his mind, about a small community of idealists living cut off from the world in a secret valley somewhere in the Near East. The Alps were transformed into an even more exotic vision, as he wrote a few days later:

  After many days of wandering the Assassins pitched their tents in the valley of Bethzatanai. . . . The mountains of Lebanon had been divided to their base to form this happy valley; on every side their icy summits darted their white pinnacles into the clear blue sky, imaging, in their grotesque outline, minarets, and ruined domes, and columns worn with time. . . . Meteoric shapes, more effulgent than the moonlight, hung on the wandering clouds and mixed in discordant dance around the spiral fountains. Blue vapours assumed strange lineaments under the rocks and among the ruins, lingering like ghosts with slow and solemn step.13

  At Neufchatel on Saturday morning, they found nothing at the Poste Restante; nothing from Harriet, and much more serious, no remittances from Hookham or Peacock or Shelley’s solicitor. Once again, they were virtually without money. Shelley hastily sold off their carriage to the voiturier, and went into town to negotiate a loan at a bank. He was not very hopeful, but to the astonishment and consolation of Jane and Mary at the inn, he returned within two hours ‘staggering under the weight of a large canvas bag full of silver’. Shelley later wrote in the journal, referring to himself in the third person, as was the communal idiom: ‘Shelley alone looks grave on the occasion, for he alone clearly apprehends that francs and louis d’or are like the white and flying clouds of noon, that is gone before one can say “Jack Robinson”.’ The Swiss banker’s advance was worth about thirty-eight pounds, though Jane had the vague idea that it was a round fifty pounds. Shelley booked cheap seats on the local diligence, and they left at dawn on Sunday, travelling towards Lucerne, with misty views of the St Gothard. Their inn room, after Zoffingen, was graced with a glass case of stuffed birds, which they glared at disapprovingly, and Shelley was in a ‘jocosely horrible’ humour. On this day, there was the first sign of Jane’s moody temperament; there was a brief quarrel, and Mary and Shelley went to look at the cathedral at Soleure alone, and, in an irritable state themselves, they found it very modern and stupid. The disagreement was patched up by Shelley: Mary recorded, ‘Shelley and Jane talk concerning Jane’s character’, without further comment. Jane’s diary has the page torn between Sunday the 21st and Tuesday the 23rd.14

  This was to be the beginning of a recurrent pattern, which had an enormous influence on Shelley’s domestic life for the next six years. Jane and Mary, though very close to each other in childhood and adolescence, and with only six months’ age between them, were nevertheless almost absolute temperamental opposites. Jane had undergone neither the intellectual awakening, nor the emotional strain of having Godwin as her childhood father. With thick, black unruly ringlets of hair parted round an oval face, a compact and generously moulded figure verging on chubbiness, and large dark bright eyes, she was volatile, childish and outgoing. On her father’s side, she was half Swiss, and she always felt at home in Europe, eventually remaining for many years as a governess in Moscow. Although without Mary’s intelligence, she wrote letters and diaries always more lively and more immediately observant than her half-sister’s, bursting with life and feeling, and as she grew older, sharpened with wit. By nature she was passionate and generous, but she could also hate — as subsequent events proved — with a sustained and fiery anger where Mary could only freeze and turn away. She was always very much at the mercy of her feelings, while Mary frequently felt divorced from sentiment. She was sexually attractive to men (the disappointed innkeeper at Troyes was the first of many), more obviously so than Mary, and it was characteristic that one of her accomplishments, besides languages, was singing, which she did with verve and confidence.[2] Throughout their tour through France and Switzerland, Jane’s mood fluctuated wildly between the sullen and the ecstatic. At 16 she was full of unharnessed energies and interests, and unfocused passion. She was fond of Shelley from the start, and competed mildly — and occasionally more than mildly — for his attentions, against Mary. For his part, the relationship with Jane, which was built up gradually and through many vicissitudes and crises over the next eight years of his life, was if not the most intimate, yet perhaps the kindest and most successful of all his relationships with the opposite sex — a field in which his successes were sometimes startling, but rarely lasting. Jane and Mary grew steadily apart from this time onwards, and not the least reason for this was Shelley; though, as now at Soleure, it was always he who, perhaps surprisingly, supplied the necessary patience and understanding and contrived the many reconciliations.

  On Tuesday morning, the 23rd, they arrived at last at Lucerne and, now in reach of their projected residence, they bought needful supplies with their dwindling sum of money, and embarked on a boat for Bessen on the further side. The weather was hot and clear, and they gazed with rapture at the rocks and pine forests covering the feet of the immense mountains. As their thoughts turned to the community they hoped vaguely to form, Shelley bought out his precious copy of Barruel’s History of Jacobinism and they read together of the Illuminists’ secret societies on the boat. The book and its ideas were probably new both to Jane and to Mary; Jane records that they studied it over the next three days. The boat put in at Bessen, and after a comical scene in the wrong inn, they moved up the road to Brunnen, situated on the far end of the lake opposite Uri. From their room they gazed down at lake waters, breaking in a stiff evening wind below the house. Around them towered the pine-covered mountains and rocky peaks. Now they had to find a home.

  It was not easy. The next morning, as they took stock of their money and their expensive but none too salubrious surroundings, they were depressed: ‘We cannot procure a house; we are in despair; the filth of the apartment is terrible to Mary; she cannot bear it all winter.’ They thought of moving on round the lake, but the wind was contrary. Finally they found an apartment of two rooms to rent in ‘an ugly house they call the Chateau’, set back from Brunnen on a small hill; it cost one louis a month, and they took it for six months, starting from the next day. Shelley and Mary walked by the lake and read Tacitus’s account of the Siege of Jerusalem, yet another beleaguered community. Shelley turned the idea over in his mind. Jane went to bed early and had ‘very curious dreams or perhaps they were realities’.15

  On the 25th they moved to their new apartment, and were visited by their landlord, the local abbé, whom Shelley treated with ostentatious ill grace. Jane heard without enjoyment of a local legend at Brunnen, that a renegade priest had taken his mistress across to the mountains opposite the village, only to meet divine retribution in the form of an avalanche that overwhelmed both of them. On some nights, it was said, their moans could be heard drifting across the waters on the wind.16 Shelley noticed Jane’s fright; but he encouraged her to work at Barruel in the evening as the rain fell, and the clouds came down far below the mountain tops. Meanwhile, with Mary’s help, he was beginning his own peculiar fable, a romance which they had immediately entitled The Assassins. He worked on it that evening, and most of the rest of the next day.

  The Assassins as we now have it is a story of four chapters, of which the last is unfinished. The main part of the narrative, which alternates between exotic description and discussions of abstract ethical principles, tells how a small breakaway sect of primitive Christians, ‘an obscure community of speculators’,[3] escaped the sack of Jerusalem by the Romans and fled to safety. ‘Attached from principle to peace, despising and hating the pleasures and customs of degenerate mankind, this unostentatious community of good and happy men fled to the solitudes of Lebanon.’ In Lebanon they find the happy valley, with its tropical alpine setting, ‘the flowering orange tree, the balsam, and innumerable odiferous shrubs’, where the fantastic broken sculptural remains of a previous civilization are hidden by the vegetation. Here they settle, unaffected by previous history, and quietly survive the Fall of Rome:


  Four centuries had passed thus terribly characterized by the most calamitous revolutions. The Assassins, meanwhile, undisturbed by surrounding tumult, possessed and cultivated their fertile valley. The gradual operation of their peculiar condition had matured and perfected the singularity of their character . . . . Their republic was the scene of perpetual contentions of benevolence; not the heartless and assumed kindness of commercial man, but the genuine virtue. . . . Little embarrassed by the complexities of civilized society, they knew not to conceive any happiness that can be satiated without participation, or that thirsts not to reproduce and perpetually generate itself. . . . They clearly acknowledged in every case that conduct to be entitled to preference which would obviously produce the greatest pleasure. They could not conceive an instance in which it would be their duty to hesitate in causing, at whatever expense, the greatest and most unmixed delight.17

  The final one-and-a-half chapters embark on an unfinished and semi-allegoric account of how a member of the Assassins’ community one day finds the body of a mangled man hanging in the trees, having apparently just dropped into their valley from the sky. The stranger, who is still alive, is being assaulted by a monstrous snake, which he regards with ‘a bitter smile of mingled abhorrence and scorn’, and complete self-possession. The snake is driven off, and he is succoured by the young Assassin who found him.[4] Though mild and kind, the stranger occasionally breaks out into demoniac monologues: ‘Delight and exultation sit before the closed gates of death! I fear not to dwell beneath their black and mighty shadow. Here thy power may not avail! Thou createst — tis mine to ruin and destroy. I was thy slave — I am thy equal and thy foe. Thousands tremble before thy throne, who, at my voice, shall dare to pluck the golden crown from thy unholy head!’ He is clearly some semi-divine personage, half Satan, half Illuminist revolutionary. Later, as he convalesces, he watches with delight the Assassin’s children at play, while they make a toy boat for another snake — this time a friendly one — to sail in. The snake curls itself in the little girl’s bosom. Here, without the least hint of a conclusion, the narrative breaks off.[5]

  It is clear that, apart from its literary sources, the themes of The Assassins reflect many of the issues on Shelley’s own mind during his time in Switzerland, in connection with his flight from London and his plan for a community. The most interesting part of the story concerns his speculation on how the behaviour of the Assassins, once withdrawn from the religious and moral conventions of a large society, would develop under the influence of natural surroundings. The Assassins became rationalists, but also hedonists, whose conduct is only measured by what causes the ‘most unmixed delight’. Their natural behaviour is marked by physical gentleness and imaginative energy, they achieve a state of almost complete intellectual and sexual freedom, and at times reach a condition of ecstatic and virtually hallucinogenic perception of the beauties of the physical universe.

  Thus securely excluded from an abhorred world, all thought of its judgement was cancelled by the rapidity of their fervid imaginations. . . . A new and sacred fire was kindled in their hearts and sparkled in their eyes. Every gesture, every feature, the minutest action was modelled to beneficence and beauty by the holy inspiration that had descended on their searching spirits. The epidemic transport communicated itself through every heart with the rapidity of a blast from heaven. They were already disembodied spirits; they were already the inhabitants of paradise. To live, to breathe, to move was itself a sensation of immeasurable transport. . . . To love, to be loved, suddenly became an insatiable famine of his nature, which the wide circle of the universe, comprehending beings of such inexhaustible variety and stupendous magnitude of excellence, appeared too narrow and confined to satiate.18

  This is the language of mystical transport, private and ecstatic, and one notes how Shelley has slipped from describing how ‘they’ felt, to how ‘he’ felt. It has risen beyond political or social description, to a purely poetical one. From the journal, it is clear that Mary and Shelley worked on it together, with Shelley probably dictating and Mary transcribing.

  In Chapter II, at the heart of the story, Shelley begins to speculate on what would happen if this community of Assassins, once secured in their principles, were to return to the corrupt society outside. Would they remain the same peace-loving, free, ecstatic human beings? ‘It would be difficult for men of such a sincere and simple faith to estimate the final results of their intentions among the corrupt and slavish multitude.’ Here the narrative takes on a specifically political slant again. Shelley argued that there would in fact be a state of war between the two communities: ‘against their predilections and distastes an Assassin, accidentally the inhabitant of a civilized community, would wage unremitting hostility from principle’. The Assassin would not accept the right of established government and authority to control and mislead the lower orders. ‘Can the power derived from the weakness of the oppressed, or the ignorance of the deceived, confer the right in security to tyrannize and defraud?’ No, on the contrary, ‘the religion of the Assassin imposes other virtues than endurance when his fellow-men groan under tyranny, or have become so bestial and abject that they cannot feel their chains’. Shelley concludes this argument, and the chapter, with an extraordinary passage in which he invokes a condition of wholesale political terrorism and violence as the justifiable and indeed glorious means towards liberating and freeing a ‘civilized’ society. This is, undoubtedly, the unspoken coda to his Irish experience which William Godwin, for one, was never allowed to glimpse. With its grim and fantastic gothic imagery, and its fiery, energetic, hate-filled language, it brings Shelley one step further towards his best political poetry.

  No Assassin would submissively temporize with vice, and in cold charity become a pandar to falsehood and desolation. His path through the wilderness of civilized society would be marked with the blood of the oppressor and the ruiner. The wretch whom nations tremblingly adore would expiate in his throttling grasp a thousand licensed and venerable crimes.

  How many holy liars and parasites, in solemn guise, would his saviour arm drag from their luxurious couches, and plunge in the cold charnel, that the green and many-legged monsters of the slimy grave might eat off at their leisure the lineaments of rooted malignity and detested cunning. The respectable man — smooth, smiling, polished villain whom all the city honours; whose very trade is lies and murder; who buys his daily bread with the blood and tears of men — would feed the ravens with his limbs. The Assassin would cater nobly for the eyeless worms of earth and carrion fowls of heaven.19

  It is important to remember that The Assassins is a work of fiction, and that it is unfinished for the simple reason that Shelley had reached an impasse. It has been one of the most neglected of Shelley’s works, although it is clear that it occupies a significant place in the mainstream of his political thought, and centres on questions of freedom, love and violence. The appearance of the outcast, heroic leader in the final chapters, although not pursued, points to the direction in which Shelley was to attempt to resolve his dilemma in the visionary work of the years 1815–19. His ultimate projection is Prometheus himself. The desperate longing for a transcending and paradisal form of love, for ever unsatisfied, which appears in the description of the Assassins’ life, also points towards the more inward and psychologically orientated work which Shelley began in the spring of the following year and displayed at length in his notebook essays ‘On Love’ and ‘On Life’, and his rite de passage of adolescent sexuality, Alastor. That Shelley managed to take up and pursue these themes again, after a lapse of almost two years, can be largely attributed to the confidence and affection which his relationships with Mary, and also Jane Clairmont, had brought back into his world.

  Shelley was to add to and rework his romance desultorily over the coming days and weeks, but Mary’s dislike of their house and surroundings and Brunnen, and their increasingly frail finances, quickly interrupted his first burst after only two days. On Friday, 26 August
, a mere three days after their arrival on the lake, they suddenly decided that they had had enough. Arguing through the afternoon, as the rain fell miserably on the waters below them, they decided first to go over the St Gothard, and finally, quite abruptly, to return to England and London. They could manage it, Shelley calculated, if they took the risk of travelling by the ‘water-diligence’ used mostly by local peasants, merchants and students, down the length of the Rhine to a Channel port. The next morning, the 27th, they flitted from Brunnen at dawn on the first boat available, having packed their bags and omitted to inform or pay their landlord, and gazed back on the receding shore ironically imagining ‘the astonishment of the good people of Brunnen’. ‘Most laughable to think’, as Jane put it, ‘of our going to England the second day after we entered a new house for six months — All because the stove don’t suit.’20 From Lucerne they launched on a headlong river journey in a series of local boats and water-buses of varying degrees of discomfort and precariousness, which took them breathlessly, travelling day and night without respite, on often swollen and dangerous waterways, down the river Reuss through Dettingen to Mumpf, and switching to the Rhine at Rheinfelden, on down through Basle, Strasbourg, Mannheim and Mayence as far as Bonn, which they reached nine days later on Monday, 5 September. From there they crawled at a maddening snail’s pace over the border into Holland by carriage, arriving at Rotterdam on the evening of the 8th, exhausted, and with barely enough money to buy a meal.