Shelley: The Pursuit

by Richard Holmes

  During this whirling river-trip they fluctuated wildly, as lonely travellers often do, between moods of elation and desperation. Jane, over-excited by Shelley’s talk of terrorism and political revenge as he continued to work on The Assassins,21 had a fit of ‘horrors’ while reading the passage in King Lear where Gloucester’s eyes are torn out. ‘Such refinement in wickedness and cruelty’, she wrote in her diary, ‘[it] produces almost stupendous despair on the reader.’ Mary noted briefly in the journal, ‘interrupted by Jane’s horrors; pack up’. It was Shelley who had to calm Jane down and put her to sleep, though it seems as if he was partly responsible for her unsettled state. In her diary she wrote, “‘What shall poor Cordelia do — love & be silent” — Oh this is true — Real Love will never shew itself to the eye of broad day — it courts the secret glades — Go to bed after . . . .’22 The rest of the entry, where she describes Shelley’s talk with her, is thoroughly crossed out. He could not help being intrigued by Jane’s susceptibilities to the macabre, which made her particularly vulnerable to his old cultivation of feminine fears. This episode was not to be the last.

  On board the local boats, their democratic spirit was often strained by the coarseness and proximity of their fellow-travellers, and a peculiarly English kind of fastidiousness emerged. The horrid and slimy faces of the people on one boat made them ‘only wish to absolutely annihilate such uncleanly animals’, while on another Shelley flew at a German who took their seats and when the man continued to remonstrate in a loud voice, Shelley turned on him and knocked him down.23 All Shelley’s puritan instincts were outraged by what Jane described, with suitable sternness, as ‘the licentiousness of the Manners that prevailed in the Cabin below — Drinking, smoking, singing and cracking jokes of a risqu�� nature’.24 They stuck firmly on the top deck, except when the wind was too cold to bear. Beyond Mayence, with the banks lined with rocks and mountains, crowned with lonely castles, they were happier, and when someone suggested fearfully that they should pray as the boat entered a particularly dangerous, foaming defile of the river, they laughed him down, until a good-natured schoolmaster broke in, ‘Eh! bien donc il faut chanter,’ and did so much to Jane’s delight.25 Mary and Shelley were cornered by a disagreeable man who spoke a little English, but their response was pointed: ‘We frightened [him] from us…by talking of cutting off kings’ heads.’ At their lowest moments, when they were unable to buy enough to eat, or the delay and discomforts seemed overwhelming, Shelley read Shakespeare and Mary Wollstonecraft to the two girls. Mary’s seventeenth birthday passed, almost unnoticed, on 30 August.

  But behind everything there was the river, with its ceaseless, dream-like unfolding of the landscape, its broad calm sweeps dotted with little islands, green and beautiful, and its sudden, swollen rapids dashing among the rocks. It was the images from this unbroken, ever-changing scenario of the Rhine, moving like a superior reality around the discomfort and bustle of their boats, which entered most deeply into Shelley’s mind. In his long poem of the following year, Alastor, these returned to dominate the vision of the poet’s journey, and the changing river which controlled the poem’s symbolism. It was the vision of the river which also filled Mary’s reworking of their journal which she published in England in 1817 under the title of History of a Six Weeks Tour, her first book.

  At Rotterdam they bargained with an English captain to take them to Graves-end for three guineas apiece; most of this fare had to be taken on trust. The boat left Rotterdam on Friday, 9 September, but they were held back in the harbour at Marsluys until Sunday, by a violent storm. They had almost nothing to eat, but Shelley returned to writing The Assassins, and Mary and Jane were both encouraged to start stories. Mary’s was called ‘Hate’, and Jane’s ‘Idiot’; they were not to be outdone by Shelley’s gothic fiction. The packet finally crossed the Channel in forty-eight hours of heavy swell, while Mary huddled below and Shelley and Jane sat doggedly on deck, with alarming waves battering the boat and occasionally breaking over them. There was an easterly gale during the night, which they recorded in the journal, ‘nearly kills us, whilst it carries us nearer our journey’s end’. But in the morning Shelley argued loudly with a fellow-passenger against the slave trade. They docked at Gravesend at 10 o’clock, on Tuesday the 13th, and with great trouble convinced the captain and the watermen that payment would be immediately forthcoming in the city. ‘Every one of the passengers was sick except myself,’ recorded Jane brightly. It suddenly seemed nice to be back. But what of Harriet, what of the Godwins?

  [1] It seems that Shelley may have pressed money on Peacock during their stay in Edinburgh, the previous winter. Leigh Hunt says that Shelley gave Peacock ‘a pension of a hundred a year’, but Shelley would not have been able to do this — a quarter of his income — until summer 1815 at earliest when there was a family settlement. Possibly Peacock, like Godwin, benefited from the money realized by the ruinous post orbit with Nash; or again Harriet, who had access to Shelley’s account for paying off some of his numerous bills, rewarded Peacock for his good offices on her behalf.

  [2] In 1817 Shelley was to write a poem in praise of her singing, where the musical and sexual gift are successfully united in evocation. See ‘To Constantia, Singing’ in Chapter 15.

  [3] Historically, the Assassins were a sect of Ismaeli extremists of the eleventh century commanded by the Persian Hassan-ben-Sabbah (Sheikh el Djebel — the Lord of the Mountains) and based on the mountain stronghold of Alamut. According to Mary in her notes of 1840, Shelley first read about them in Sales de Lisle’s The Old Man of the Mountain — Le Vieux de la Montaigne, printed in 1799. It was a book that Shelley probably picked up during their week in Paris. Shelley was attracted by three elements in the Assassins’ history: the tradition that Hassan had been educated by a mystic sub-cult of primitive, communist Christians known as the Druses who lived in a secret valley of the Lebanon; the idea that Hassan was dedicated to political terrorism intended to destroy religious and state authorities; and finally the curious legend of the Garden of Earthly Paradise, administered by beautiful girls and youths, in which each Assassin was allowed to spend one perfect day of complete licence on the eve of his mission, as a foretaste of eternal ecstasy. The garden was said originally to have been created by Hassan at Alamut. Such heretical and antinomian splinter groups as the Assassins, the Druses, the Gnostics and the Manicheans became important in the development of Shelley’s mature political thought and poetic imagery. They illustrated for him the endless historical struggle between Revolution and Tyranny, Satan and God, Light and Darkness.

  [4] The incident of the stranger dropping from the sky is taken directly from Sales de Lisle’s romance, and initiates the beginning of the hero’s picaresque adventures with his Arab guide. The full significance of Shelley’s use of the Assassins material and de Lisle was first discovered and examined by Jean Overton Fuller, op. cit., pp. 156–61, a fine discursive chapter concluding with the suggestive revelation that the 15-year-old hero of de Lisle’s book was named Ariel.

  [5] This is the first time that snakes appear in Shelley’s writings; thereafter they play a large symbolic role in many of the political poems. The snake symbol does not seem to be primarily sexual in Shelley, and although frequently ambiguous, it is usually associated with positive forces of Reason, Freedom or Revolt, as in the Gnostics. In Egyptian mythology, as Shelley later discovered, the serpent swallowing its own tail is the symbol of eternity. Shelley always ridiculed the Hebrew serpent of the Book of Genesis; most memorably in his ‘Essay on the Devil’ written in Italy, 1821.

  11. Bad Dreams: Kentish Town 1814

  When Shelley, Mary and Jane got back into London on the afternoon of Tuesday, 13 September 1814, one consideration dominated all others: the pressing need to obtain money. At the bank Shelley found he had no credit left. This was scarcely surprising since the payment of the gift to Godwin, and the personal withdrawals that Harriet had made with Peacock’s aid in an attempt to meet twelve months’ accumulate
d bills in London. There were also his own withdrawals made at Paris and Neufchatel. In Old Bond Street they found Hookham was out, while his brother was sarcastic and unhelpful, keeping them ‘a long time at the door’.1 A friend of Mary’s, Henry Voisey, was unable to lend anything substantial. Shelley felt quite unable to apply to the Boinvilles, to Godwin or the Newtons; and Hogg was away on the northern legal circuit. The situation was now desperate, and decisive action was required. Shelley hired a closed hackney carriage, drove to Chapel Street, and spent two hours in the house with Harriet, while Mary and Jane waited outside in awful suspense sitting well back from the carriage windows. It was an extremely delicate situation, since Harriet’s first startled reaction was that Shelley had returned to her. Somehow he convinced her that everything could be arranged if only she would trust him, but it is not known exactly what he promised. Finally, Shelley emerged alone after dark triumphant, and they collected their baggage, paid off the channel fare and the carriage, and put up for the night at the Stratford Hotel in Oxford Street. The next day Shelley took cheap lodgings at 56 Margaret Street, off Cavendish Square and about five minutes’ walk from the Westbrooks. It was to prove the first of many such temporary addresses in the coming eight months.

  The address at Margaret Street was a deliberately strategic choice on Shelley’s part. Until a fortnight later, at the beginning of October, when he moved away north-eastwards across the city to St Pancras, he was determined to come to a working arrangement with Harriet. The acute shortage of day-to-day money remained, and even by the 16th he was having to cancel a meeting at Chapel Street because of dangers of arrest by bailiffs.2 Gone too was Skinner Street as his old centre of gravity in London, and complete social ostracism now threatened. Both Mary and Jane stood by him under increasingly trying circumstances, and through the medium of Jane’s brother, Charles Clairmont, and through Fanny, they managed to keep themselves informed of the feelings and events in the Godwin household. But Godwin himself refused absolutely to have anything to do with Shelley, rejected his letters and let it be known that he bitterly reproached his daughter Mary. Three days after their arrival, Mrs Godwin, accompanied by an anxious Fanny, called at the window of 56 Margaret Street to talk with Mary, but when Shelley appeared they walked away down the street, refusing to speak.3 Later, in the evening, Charles threw stones at the window, and stayed talking until 3 a.m.4 But he could be of no practical aid and everything depended on what could be arranged with Harriet.

  Between 13 September and 12 October Shelley wrote at least nine letters to his wife. He saw her in private at least three times, on 13,14 and 15 September, and thereafter he had news of her through personal intermediaries, notably his publisher Hookham and Peacock. This four-week period did not mark the end of his communications with Harriet, but it did mark what was in retrospect the decisive quarrel. Till the end of October Harriet was still hoping to recover Shelley from the arms of Mary. She could not believe that Shelley was really in love with the Godwin girl; sometimes she felt that Shelley had been dazzled intellectually by the Wollstonecraft connection; sometimes that Mary had mischievously set out to seduce him; and sometimes in her wildest moments, that Godwin had simply sold Mary to Shelley in return for the financial gift of July. It is significant that Harriet did not choose to tell her old friend and correspondent, Mrs Nugent, what had occurred in any detail, until a letter of 20 November. Shelley took great pains to dispel these ideas, one by one, from Harriet’s head, though each contained an element of truth. But what Harriet could never believe, and what Shelley never attempted to explain to her in forthright terms, was that for him the marriage had been falling apart ever since the birth of the first child, and that Harriet’s longing for security and her dependence on Eliza had become hateful to him. Instead he told his wife that she had always failed to satisfy him intellectually or emotionally, and that her commitment to his principles had been hollow. He embarked on long disquisitions about the difference between love and friendship, and claimed that from the beginning he had never felt passionately about her. He offered Harriet the benefit of his perpetual care, protection and solicitude, but failed to specify any practical means to bring this about. The only definite conclusion that Harriet could draw from his first few letters was that Shelley was anxious for her to keep all their negotiations secret from her family and her friends, and that whatever she did she must on no account apply to solicitors. It was very cold comfort.

  In his first letter, written on the afternoon they took lodgings at Margaret Street, he wrote: ‘Indeed my dear friend I cannot write to you in confidence unless my letters are sacredly confined to yourself. . . . I know not what is the nature and extent of the intercourse which is hereafter to take place between us. Whatever it be let it not be contaminated by the comments and interference of others. Suffice to your own self, and despise the miserable compassion of those who cannot esteem or love — Forgive this frankness Harriet. Let us understand each other and ourselves. I deem myself far worthier and better than any of your nominal friends. . . . We must agree on certain points, or our intimacy will be the mere gibe and mockery of affection. — Are you above the world & to what extent? — My attachment to Mary neither could nor ought to have been overcome: our spirits and our bodies[1] are united. We met with passion, she has resigned all for me. But I shall probably see you tomorrow. I wish you to answer this letter.’5

  What answer could Harriet make to this? Shelley did meet her the next day, and it gradually became clear to both parties what was at issue, and how far ‘above the world’ Harriet was required to be. Shelley, on his side, still wanted Harriet to join him and live under his protection with Mary and Jane as ‘a sister’. He also wished for a private and informal settlement over the terms of Harriet’s support. How Mary would have taken to this we can only guess; her sole comment in her journal had so far been that Harriet was ‘certainly a very odd creature’. Yet without her positive enthusiasm the plan was a hopeless one, necessarily fated to founder on every sort of jealousy and insecurity, between her and Harriet. Harriet, on her side, was at first prepared to appear interested in anything Shelley might suggest. But what she hoped was to draw Shelley’s interest away from the younger girl, supposing that he would still come to his senses. She hoped above all to press Shelley into making some formal arrangement over money, which would provide the necessary independence for herself and her children, and have the effect of still acknowledging her as the true Mrs Shelley. But in this she completely misunderstood the precariousness of Shelley’s financial state, and her actions to secure a legal settlement had the opposite effect from that which she had intended. She inadvertently disorganized all Shelley’s arrangements for securing an immediate loan, which only infuriated him and drove him even more firmly into the arms of Mary, where solidarity was confirmed by adversity. Harriet also lost the moral advantage of her pregnancy, for in October Mary announced that she was expecting a child as well.

  Until about 20 September the situation was still evenly balanced. Shelley was attempting to secure money through his lawyer Amory, who seems to have agreed to try and sell the reversion of part of the inheritance which was ultimately due, without being fully informed of Shelley’s and Harriet’s situation. Shelley was still writing in a conciliatory tone to Harriet, begging her secrecy, promising his aid and urging her to reconsider her position: ‘I am anxious for an answer to my letter — Collect your maturest judgement & acquit yourself with justice towards me and Mary. United as we are we cannot be considered separately. Consider how far you would desire your future life to be placed within the influence of my superintending mind, whether you still confide sufficiently in my tried and unalterable integrity to submit to the laws which any friendship would create between us: whether we are to meet in entire and unreserved faith or allow our intimacy to subside.’6 But Harriet, who had been finding the high-minded and condescending tone increasingly insufferable, finally doubted the genuineness of Shelley’s intentions, and despite his requests, sh
e went direct to the lawyer, overwhelmed by misery and bitterness and uncertainty. She proceeded to explain the full nature of Shelley’s position, and demanded that he be forced to come to a formal legal settlement. She then closed all communication with Margaret Street, and appears to have left London for several days. When Shelley called at Chapel Street on the 22nd, he found Harriet was ‘out of town’. No doubt her father and Eliza were strongly influential in this determined action on her part, and there was talk that Eliza had told Hookham that a legal action against Shelley was about to be put in motion by Mr Westbrook. The results were fatal for any reconciliation. In Shelley’s mind she had reverted to her original status, a puppet of the Westbrooks.

  Four days later, Shelley wrote her a stinging, furious letter, which showed that at last she too, the beautiful Harriet, had joined the ranks of those who had finally and irrevocably fallen from grace. He began with pointed coolness. ‘In the first place I find that you have detailed the circumstances of our separation to Amory in opposition to your own agreement with me, in contradiction to your own sense of right, & with the most perfect contempt for my safety or comfort. He, as you foresaw, has determined to resign the affairs of mine that were on the point of completion.’

  This, as Shelley implied, cut Harriet’s throat as effectively as it cut his own. Certainly it was true that from this time onwards Shelley had to abandon ordinary legal channels, and engage in a desperate game of dodging bailiffs and warrants of arrest for debt. His negotiations were forced to descend into the seedy world of money-lenders and property speculators. Realizing this, he now turned on Harriet the full force of his anger. ‘I was an idiot to expect greatness or generosity from you, that when an occasion of the sublimest virtue occurred, you would fail to play a part of mean and despicable selfishness. The pure & liberal principles of which you used to boast that you were a disciple, served only for display. In your heart it seems you were always enslaved to the vilest superstitions, or ready to accept their support for your own narrow & worldly views. You are plainly lost to me forever. I foresee no probability of change.’7 This was, among many unwise and unfortunate outbursts, perhaps the unkindest and most arrogant in his life. Perhaps some of his bitterness was called forth by what he called the ‘wanton cruelty & injustice’ of Harriet circulating to various persons false reports about Godwin favouring Shelley’s passion for Mary. But one can understand how it must have looked to Harriet. Shelley concluded his letter with the observation that ‘the subject of money alone remains’, and signed himself with pointed brevity ‘PB Shelley’.