Shelley: The Pursuit

by Richard Holmes

  Apart from the light which these occurrences throw on the darker side of Shelley’s personality, they are also of great interest in connection with the development of his poetry. Up to 1814 his writing had mainly a political source of inspiration, but now gradually it was turning inwards as well, and drawing upon psychological or even psychic materials and imagery. Shelley began to extend his lifelong fascination with ghosts, monsters and gothic machinery into a more exact appreciation of abnormal mental states, when the faculties of perception appeared to be in some sense heightened and acutely sensitized. The ‘aesthetic of terror’, the idea that terror and beauty are closely linked, had become almost a commonplace of Romantic painters, epitomized by the work of Blake and Fuseli. Several passages in the childhood sections of Wordsworth’s Prelude and many of the Lyrical Ballads link the state of terror and the state of visionary enlightenment.[10]

  Shelley pursued the theme much further and much more grotesquely than any poet had done previously. For him, the state of terror was one of literally ‘aweful’ hypersensitivity to the phenomenon of the natural universe. The mind’s receptive powers were enormously increased, like the tautened strings of a musical instrument, and certain clues and hints about invisible and possibly supernatural forces might just enter the abnormally increased range of mental perception. The analogy of the musical instrument is one he himself used, and the sensation of night silence ‘tingling’ in the ears, as if even the very hearing faculty had become enhanced, appears both in his journal entries of this month and the poetry of the following year. To a lesser degree, one can also infer that an ‘abnormal’ state of sexual excitement or tension seemed to Shelley to have similar sensitizing and visionary properties. The word ‘properties’ is particularly appropriate here, for Shelley continued for some time to use the old student concept of the alchemical experiment to describe this kind of exploration. He was also interested in the dream, and the sudden ‘flash’ of imagination during ordinary daylight affairs, as similar abnormal conditions of vision.

  Such incidents as these horror sessions with Jane, fortuitously well documented at Church Terrace, suggest the direction in which Shelley’s writing began to develop. In particular the journal and diary entries for the night of 7 October provide an excellent critical gloss for such passages as the opening invocation of Alastor, which would otherwise remain a largely inert and over-stylized piece of gothic machinery. Although this poem was not first drafted for at least another nine months, the verbal echoes are explicit, and it is most appropriately given in this place as an example of the way Shelley was learning to transform his daily experiences into a new kind of poetry.

  Mother of this unfathomable world!

  Favour my solemn song, for I have loved

  Thee ever, and thee only; I have watched

  Thy shadow, and the darkness of thy steps,

  And my heart ever gazes on the depth

  Of thy deep mysteries. I have made my bed

  In charnels and on coffins, where black death

  Keeps records of the trophies won from thee,

  Hoping to still these obstinate questionings

  Of thee and thine, by forcing some lone ghost

  Thy messenger, to render up the tale

  Of what we are. In lone and silent hours,

  When night makes a weird sound of its own stillness,

  Like an inspired and desperate alchymist

  Staking his very life on some dark hope,

  Have I mixed awful talk and asking looks

  With my most innocent love, until strange tears

  Uniting with those breathless kisses, made

  Such magic as compels the charmèd night

  To render up thy charge:…and, though ne’er yet

  Thou hast unveiled thy inmost sanctuary,

  Enough from incommunicable dream,

  And twilight phantasms, and deep noon-day thought,

  Has shone within me, that serenely now

  And moveless, as a long-forgotten lyre

  Suspended in the solitary dome

  Of some mysterious and deserted fane,

  I wait thy breath, Great Parent. . . .21

  At a personal level, however, the stress between Shelley and Jane could not really be sustained at this pitch for long, and on 14 October there was a violent quarrel. The previous evening they had been to see Kean playing Hamlet at Covent Garden (an interesting sidelight on Shelley’s budgeting), and had walked out at the end of the second act because, as Shelley put it, of ‘the extreme depravity and disgusting nature of the scene’. But when they returned to Church Terrace, something about the feeling in the house so upset them that they finally left it late in the evening and spent the night at the Stratford Hotel.

  This extraordinary move was even more remarkable because of their thin financial resources. But Shelley simply wrote in the journal ‘alarm’; and Jane wrote cryptically ‘we don’t like the house — get a Coach & sleep at the Stratford Hotel’. Probably Jane had got herself into another horror fit, and refused to go to bed in the house. She got up very late the next morning, and came down ‘in a very ill humour’ and immediately quarrelled with Shelley. They set out to walk home across Regent’s Park, and Jane stalked off by herself. When Shelley and Mary got to the house Peacock arrived, and Jane soon after. Peacock tried to cheer them up in his usual laughing manner, but Jane retired to her room. Finally Shelley went up to her room and made up with her, at the same time trying to explain what was wrong between them.

  Jane wrote, ‘Shelley comes into my room & thinks he was to blame — but I don’t — how I like good explaining people.’ Later Shelley told her that he had thought she despised him, and that he had been angry with her. He also told her some home truths, but they were gratefully received. ‘To know ones faults is to mend them,’ Jane confided to her diary, ‘perhaps this morning though productive of very painful feelings has in reality been of more essential benefit to me than any I ever yet passed — how hateful it is to quarrell — to say a thousand unkind things — meaning none — things produced by the bitterness of disappointment.’22

  But later that night she was again disturbed and frightened, walking in her sleep and ‘groaning horribly’. Shelley finally went up and took her down to sleep with Mary on the floor below. ‘Can’t think what the deuce is the matter with me,’ she wrote pathetically, “‘I weep yet never know why — I sigh yet feel no pain.” Go to sleep at ½ past two.’ Shelley wrote with a certain irony that ‘the next morning the chimney-board in Jane’s room is found to have walked leisurely into the middle of the room, accompanied by the pillow, who, being very sleepy, tried to get into bed again, but fell down on his back.’23

  News of some of these disturbances had apparently filtered back to Skinner Street, for the following day a letter arrived from Godwin while Shelley was out, suggesting that Jane leave Shelley and Mary and return to her mother and stepfather. Mary seems to have thought this was an excellent idea, but when Shelley returned with Peacock from financial negotiations, he advised Jane strongly not to go, and she wrote a letter of refusal the same evening. Mary wrote slightly irritably in the journal, ‘Talk about going away, and, as usual, settle nothing.’24 This fluctuating situation was to remain virtually unchanged, with the occasional crisis and reconciliation, until the following spring.

  The pressures of the triangular relationship produced a long self-analytic note which Shelley wrote in the shared journal for 14 October. Though ostensibly about Jane’s shortcomings, it also showed the philosophic gravity with which Shelley approached his relationship with the two teenage girls. Its sternness and moral earnestness was revealing, though doubtless Shelley was writing partly for Mary’s benefit. He did not hint at warm feelings for Jane, though the lack of philosophic ‘severity’ was perhaps meant to confess them. Shelley began his note briskly: ‘Jane’s insensibility and incapacity for the slightest degree of friendship. The feelings occasioned by this discovery prevent me (Shelley) from maintaining a
ny measure in severity. This highly incorrect, subversion of the first principles of true philosophy; characters, particularly those which are unformed, may change. Beware of weakly giving way to trivial sympathies.’

  After this admonitory introduction, Shelley turned to his love for Mary, though he did not actually use the word ‘love’. ‘Content yourself with one great affection — with a single mighty hope; let the rest of mankind be the subjects of your benevolence, your justice, and, as human beings, of your sensibility; but, as you value many hours of peace, never suffer more than one even to approach the hallowed circle. Nothing should shake the truly great spirit which is not sufficiently mighty to destroy it.’

  From these considerations, which betray a heroic and almost military view of his own life and task in society, he turned back to Jane, and also with surprising coldness, to Peacock. Here again the puritan fibre in Shelley’s pattern of moral judgements asserted itself. ‘Peacock calls. I take some interest in this man, but no possible conduct of his would disturb my tranquillity. Hear that Eliza and Helen go to Norfolk in three weeks. Converse with Jane; her mind unsettled; her character unformed; occasion of hope from some instances of softness and feeling; she is not entirely insensible to concessions; new proofs that the most exalted philosophy, the truest virtue, consists in an habitual contempt of self; a subduing of all angry feelings; a sacrifice of pride and selfishness. When you attempt benefit to either an individual or a community, abstain from imputing it an error that they despise or overlook your virtue.’

  This had perhaps been the text of his bedroom talks with Jane.

  The final part of Shelley’s note returned to the texture of everyday life at Church Terrace, with its peculiar mixture of elevated ethical discussion and extreme emotional upheaval. (Marianne St Croix had become Peacock’s mistress.) ‘These are incidental reflections which arise only indirectly from the circumstances recorded. Walk with Peacock to the pond; talk of Marian and Greek metre. Peacock dines. In the evening read Cicero and the “Paradoxa”. Night comes; Jane walks in her sleep, and groans horribly, listen for two hours; at length bring her to Mary.’25

  Their self-engrossed life at Church Terrace did not continue for more than a few days longer. Shelley’s creditors, notably Charters the Coach-maker, the money-lender Starling, and Mrs Stewart, one of their previous landladies, had decided to employ bailiffs to track down Shelley’s address and arrest him. To his fury and dismay, Hookham, in an ill-judged moment of irritation and impatience, revealed the address in St Pancras, which had hitherto been kept secret. It is not clear if either of the households at Chapel Street or Skinner Street had any responsibility for the betrayal; but a veiled warning first arrived through the faithful Fanny Godwin, on Saturday 22 October, when she sent an anonymous note into Church Terrace.

  Fanny got little thanks except for a bad fright. Shelley and Jane rushed wildly out to the field opposite where she was waiting to give more information: ‘I catch hold of her,’ Jane related afterwards. ‘She foolishly screams & runs away — She escapes — Shelley and I hasten to Skinner St. We watch through the window.’ The following day, Sunday, they got up at dawn and waited like spies until the shutters were open at the Godwins’ shop, then rang the bell and seized Fanny, who had come unsuspecting to the door. Cornered, and yet anxious not to give them away, Fanny admitted the ‘surprising treachery of the Hookhams’, and they realized for certain that the bailiffs were now alerted.26 The only respite was the fact that through a technicality of Lord’s day observance, bailiffs were not empowered to arrest between midnight on Saturdays and midnight on Sundays. This gave them some twelve hours to work out a plan.

  They hurried over to Old Bond Street to confront Hookham, but he was out: ‘the little sly rascal got out of the way’, as Jane expressed it, echoing Shelley’s anger. Back at Church Terrace, they tried to consult together to make a plan, but ended up only by quarrelling until ‘Shelley makes all right again in his usual Way’. Peacock came in, and it was at last agreed that Shelley would have to separate from the two girls and go to ground while he and Peacock tried to speed the negotiation of a loan. Mary and Jane, with much foreboding, were left alone at Church Terrace, and Shelley departed with Peacock as soon as it got dark, to stay the night at Southampton Street, where Peacock lived with his mother. For the next fortnight or so, until 9 November, a game of cat and mouse was played out with the bailiffs. Shelley stayed secretly with Peacock in Holborn, or at City coffee-houses, met with Mary or Jane at prearranged rendezvous, and slipped home on Sundays to sleep with Mary. The pain of separation frequently tempted him to throw caution to the winds and return to Church Terrace during the week; Mary, on the other hand, mixed prudence with passion.

  After about four days of their separation Shelley wrote, ‘Oh my dearest love why are our pleasures so short and so uninterrupted [sic]? How long is this to last? — Know you my best Mary that I feel myself almost degraded to the level of the vulgar & impure. I feel their vacant stiff eyeballs fixed upon me — until I seem to have been infected with the loathsome meaning — to inhale a sickness that subdues me to languor. Oh! those redeeming eyes of Mary that they might beam upon me before I sleep! Praise my forbearance oh beloved one that I do not rashly fly to you — & at least secure a moments bliss. . . . Meet tomorrow at 3 o’clock in St Paul’s if you do not hear before. Adieu remember love at vespers — before sleep. I do not omit my prayers.’27 In their intense mutual frustration, they had fixed on a private ceremony of making love to each other in imagination before they went to sleep. ‘I did not forget to kiss your eidwlov kevov[11] before I slept,’ he wrote forlornly on another occasion.28

  Shelley and Peacock were now involved in a hectic, ceaseless round of negotiations. Their main hope was still Ballechy, but other names who featured were a ‘somewhat benevolent baldheaded man’ called Mr Watts; a farmer from Sussex, possibly William Bryant of Worth Rectory, East Grinstead; Starling, the veteran from the negotiations of 1813; Lambert, a rich merchant who was also one of Godwin’s creditors; and a property speculator called Pike, who was interested in obtaining the reversion on old Sir Bysshe Shelley’s seat at Goring Castle. Most of these schemes were to prove quite fruitless, and the people involved were little better than sharks. But Shelley’s anger was still reserved for the Hookhams, whose hearts he intended to tear out ‘by the roots with irony and sarcasm’.

  Nevertheless, it was Thomas Hookham who had helped Shelley most with ready money up till October,29 and it was finally to be Hookham who helped him clinch and distribute the deal with Ballechy between 5 and 8 November. Shelley’s outrage was in consequence tempered by a certain self-interested and rather cynical caution: ‘If you see Hookham, do not insult him openly,’ he wrote to Mary on 25 October. ‘I still have hopes. We must not resign an inch of hope. I will make this remorseless villain loathe his own flesh — in good time. He shall be cut down in his season. His pride shall be trampled into atoms. I will wither up his selfish soul by piecemeal. Your own only love — ’ This note closed with an epigraph from Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound: ‘he hisses murder with ghastly jaws’.30

  Their circumstances during these days were indeed frequently very strained. At the Cross Keys Inn on 1 November, where Mary and Shelley were meeting in secret, Mary noted, ‘People want their money; won’t send up dinner; and we are all very hungry.’31 On one occasion Shelley fed them with cakes taken from Mrs Peacock. The bailiffs, ‘Shelley’s old friends’, pounced frequently at Church Terrace, but always missed their prey, and went away ‘much disappointed and very angry’. Shelley wrote to Harriet towards the very end of the month, demanding thirty pounds urgently, and with some excusable exaggeration: ‘These vexations have induced my ancient illness. I am perfectly free from danger but so exhausted as scarcely to be able to walk. This however does not matter. I have not a friend in the world who can assist me. My endeavours have been in vain. If once in a prison, confined in a damp cell, without a sixpence, without a friend. . . . I must inevitably be st
arved to death. We have even now sold all that we have to buy bread. I am with a friend who supplies me with food and lodging, but I think you will shudder to hear that before I could sell the last valuable Mary and her sister very nearly perished with hunger — My dear Harriet send quick supplies — ’32 But it seems unlikely that this, Shelley’s last recorded appeal to Harriet, had much result. Mary at any rate was writing to Shelley that ‘it is impossible to knock into some people’s heads that Harriet is selfish and unfeeling’.33

  With much regret, Shelley decided to sell his solar microscope, and took Jane for support. ‘We go to Harris the optician — he won’t have our microscope — I go to Peacock to fetch him and the microscope — He talks to Shelley a little while in Holborn — Shelley & I go to Davison’s in Skinner Street. We are sent away for half an hour — Walk up and down Chatham Place though we are both so tired we can hardly stand — I am so hungry for I had nothing since breakfast & it is now six o’clock — Return to Davison’s get 5 Pounds — for our microscope — In my absence Peacock has gone all the way to Pancras we were not at home — he sees the waiter at St James’ Hotel there — much frightened and returns home.’34 A few days later, Shelley, after much hesitation, sold his pistols to Davison as well. There really was no one to turn to.

  The two girls stuck together, despite several misunderstandings and reproachful scenes. Shelley failed to arrive at meeting places on time or at all; Jane got left behind when Shelley and Mary were trying to find a hotel room for the day. It was perhaps hardest on Jane, who had the least support, and inevitably tended to feel on the outside of the intimacy between Shelley and Mary. ‘He says he is unhappy,’ she exploded once in her diary, ‘God in heaven what has he to be unhappy about! Go to Bed at ten.’ One of his brief Sunday visits she summed up: ‘Shelley writes many letters. Dine at four. Mary & Shelley & I sleep all evening — Shelley goes at ten — Very philosophical way of spending the day — To sleep & talk — why this is merely vegetating.’35 On 9 November Mary noted with a certain satisfaction in the journal, ‘Jane gloomy; she is very sullen with Shelley. Well, never mind, my love — we are happy.’ Perhaps Jane’s mood was partly explained by a meeting Shelley had just had with Hogg who was returned to London. ‘Hogg had been with him the evening before & asked him after his two Wives. He joked all the time and talked of the pleasures of Hunting.’36 In the circumstances it must have seemed a cruel jest.