Shelley: The Pursuit

by Richard Holmes

  She added a few lines later with rather more force, ‘indeed, my love, I cannot bear to remain so long without you — so if you will not give me leave — expect me without it some day’.2

  The real basis of her fears was revealed in a brief paragraph that came unexpectedly in the middle of her letter. ‘Pray is Clary with you? for I have enquired several times & no letters — but seriously it would not in the least surprise me if you have written to her from London & let her know that you are there without me that she should have taken some such freak — ’. Whether Mary’s fears were unfounded or not, there is no way of knowing, as Claire’s exact whereabouts are a mystery all this summer. Not until October, when Shelley sent her a draft for ten pounds at Enniscorthy, County Wexford, is it known that she was definitely in Ireland with her brother Charles. Peacock has no remarks upon the point.

  For the most part, it would seem that Shelley spent July alone with Peacock, visiting his doctor, Lawrence, and arranging for a house. He was assailed by a curious sense of detachment and vacancy, as if suddenly he had seen through life and all it had to offer. One anecdote of Peacock’s seems to belong to the month which he spent coming to the decision to take the house at Bishopsgate, and join his life irreparably with Mary.

  He had many schemes of life [recalled Peacock] amongst them all, the most singular that ever crossed his mind was that of entering the church. . . . We were walking in the early summer through a village where there was a good vicarage house, with a nice garden, and the front wall of the vicarage was covered with corchorus in full flower, a plant less common then than it has since become. He stood some time admiring the vicarage wall. The extreme quietness of the scene, the pleasant pathway through the village churchyard, and the brightness of the summer morning, apparently concurred to produce the impression under which he suddenly said to me, — ‘I feel strongly inclined to enter the church.’ ‘What,’ I said, ‘to become a clergyman with your ideas of the faith?’ ‘Assent to the supernatural part of it’, he said, ‘is merely technical. Of the moral doctrines of Christianity I am a more decided disciple than many of its more ostentatious professors. And consider for a moment how much good a clergyman may do. In his teaching as a scholar and a moralist; in his example as a gentleman and a man of regular life; in the consolation of his personal intercourse and of his charity among the poor, to whom he may often prove a most beneficial friend when they have no other to comfort them.’

  Peacock answered in his usual mode of gentle irony that he thought Shelley would find ‘more restraint in the office than would suit his aspirations’, and he walked on in thoughtful silence, and then turned to another subject.3

  The decision to be taken about his mode of life was really a decision to be taken about his own character and temperament. In the effort to face certain aspects of himself, his attempts and failures to set up constant and happy relations with those around him, he made a breakthrough into a new kind of reflective poetry. Probably the first short lyric which dates from the transition period of this summer is a six-stanza poem beginning ‘Oh, there are spirits of the air’. When it was published the following year, it was simply entitled ‘To — ’, and in her notes of 1839, Mary was to claim that it was ‘addressed in idea to Mr Coleridge, whom he never knew’. But she always found it difficult to accept that Shelley suffered from deep personal doubts which inevitably reflected on her own relationship with him. Shelley’s subsequent editors, including William Rossetti and Hutchinson, have generally accepted that the poem must have been addressed to himself. The stanzas have a Greek epigraph, from Euripides’s Hippolytus.[1] Like all the poems from the period of summer and autumn 1815, it has the hallmark of psychological introspection, and attempts to reach a position of philosophic balance. This is matched by the balance and simplicity of its rhythms and phrasing. It also has the elegiac note, a nostalgia for a way of life lost, which was the result of looking back and trying to understand certain elements in his own developing personality. Throughout, the imagery draws on the world of ghosts and spirits, which it begins by affirming

  Oh! there are spirits of the air,

  And genii of the evening breeze,

  And gentle ghosts, with eyes as fair

  As star-beams among twilight trees: —

  Such lovely ministers to meet

  Oft hast thou turned from men thy lonely feet.

  With mountain winds, and babbling springs,

  And moonlight seas, that are the voice

  Of these inexplicable things,

  Thou didst hold commune, and rejoice

  When they did answer thee; but they

  Cast, like a worthless boon, thy love away.

  And thou hast sought in starry eyes

  Beams that were never meant for thine,

  Another’s wealth! — tame sacrifice

  To a fond faith! still dost thou pine?

  Still dost thou hope that greeting hands,

  Voice, looks, or lips, may answer thy demands?

  At this point, the poem turns sharply upon itself, and considers the damaging consequence of trying to live in isolation and spiritual solitude, purely in ‘thine own mind’. This was to be the theme he explored fully in Alastor during the autumn. But here, it merely leads to a terrible image of deadlock, drawn from a reservoir far back in his earliest poetry and experience. It is the image of the relentlessly pursuing fiend.

  Yes, all the faithless smiles are fled

  Whose falsehood left thee broken-hearted;

  The glory of the moon is dead;

  Night’s ghosts and dreams have now departed;

  Thine own soul still is true to thee,

  But changed to a foul fiend through misery.

  This fiend, whose ghastly presence ever

  Beside thee like thy shadow hangs,

  Dream not to chase; — the mad endeavour

  Would scourge thee to severer pangs.

  Be as thou art. Thy settled fate,

  Dark as it is, all change would aggravate.4

  Ghosts, dreams, pursuit, the difficulty of stable human relationships, and the terror and destruction implicit in the solitary ‘settled fate’ were to be the broad terms within which Shelley worked for the rest of the year.

  After some four weeks with Peacock at Marlow, he decided to take a house in the neighbourhood, at Bishopsgate, and settle down. The lease was signed on 3 August for a neat, two-storey cottage, with a little verandah and trellised porch, which stood at the eastern entrance to Windsor Park. Mary joined him from Clifton, within a week, and they established themselves in a quiet, regular routine, surrounded by books, and varied with long walks by the river and day-long expeditions into the leafy caverns of the Great Park. Here Shelley established one of his outdoor studies and read for hours surrounded by a litter of books with their pages blowing open in the wind. To begin with he read little but classics, mostly Lucan and Cicero, and began to teach Mary Latin by going through a section of the Aeneid each day. By the end of the month he was writing to Hogg, ‘My life has been very regular and undisturbed by new occurrences since your departure. My health has been considerably improved under Lawrence’s care, and I am so much more free from the continual irritation which I lived, as to devote myself with more effect and consistency to study.’5

  But the sense of detachment, almost of disillusion, remained. Commenting on a fanatical missionary whom Hogg had met on the law circuit, Shelley remarked generally on the illusions of ambition in a way that seemed to reflect upon himself. ‘Yet who is there that will not pursue phantoms, spend his choicest hours in hunting after dreams, and wake only to perceive his error and regret that death is so near. . . . Even the men who hold dominion over nations fatigue themselves by the interminable pursuit of emptiest visions; the honour and power which they seek is enjoyed neither in acquirement, possession, or retrospect; for what is the fame which attends the most skilful deceiver or destroyer?’ His observations on politics, and particularly on the final denouement of the Nap
oleonic struggle in Europe, are distanced to the point of indifference. ‘In considering the political events of the day I endeavour to divest my mind of temporary sensations, to consider them as already historical. This is difficult. Spite of ourselves the human beings which surround us infect us with their opinions; so much as to forbid us to be dispassionate observers of the questions arising out of the events of the age.’ Although he later wrote a sonnet celebrating Bonaparte’s defeat, it is difficult to believe these were the words of a political radical aged 23, who had elected to live with the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft. It is also extraordinary that in writing to Hogg, who had in the spring been living as an intimate part of his household, he should make absolutely no mention of Mary.

  His farewell to Hogg is itself an elegy. ‘It is already the end of August. Those leaves have lost their summer glossiness which, when I see you again, will be fluttering in the wind of autumn. Such is mortal life. Your affectionate friend — ’.6

  Shelley was finally aroused from his state of almost permanent brown study by an unexpectedly successful boating expedition, in the first fortnight of September. It was organized by Peacock, and included Mary and Charles Clairmont in the party. They decided they would try to reach the source of the Thames, and Shelley was forced to abandon his strict vegetarian régime by Peacock, who said it was inconvenient and fed him ‘mutton chops, well-peppered’. The four of them started in a wherry from Old Windsor, and the whole expedition lasted ten days. Charles wrote a long letter to Claire, describing their progress. The weather was hot, and the river wound smoothly through chalk hills, woodland and Oxfordshire Downs. Arriving at Oxford one evening, they put up for the night and Shelley spent the next day showing them round the scene of his former campaigns. In company he was cheerful and good-humoured during this recherche du temps perdu. ‘We saw the Bodleian Library, the Clarendon Press, and walked through the quadrangles of the different colleges,’ Charles told Claire, adding, with the echo of Shelley’s own voice, ‘We visited the very rooms where the two noted infidels, Shelley and Hogg, (now, happily, excluded from the society of the present residents), pored, with the incessant and unwearied application of the alchymist, over the certified and natural boundaries of human knowledge.’7 Perhaps something Shelley said on this day first laid the germ of an idea in Mary’s mind for a story involving an ‘infidel’ student, working secretly in the heart of a respectable university, to bring forth a diabolic creation.

  They returned to their wherry that evening, and pushed on towards Lechlade, in Gloucestershire; the last town before the river curls away to its hidden sources and headstreams in the Cotswolds. A characteristic fancy took hold of Shelley’s mind as they rowed in turn, and he began to talk, half humorously, half seriously, of prolonging the expedition throughout England. ‘We had in the course of our voyage conceived the scheme of not stopping there, but, by going along a canal which here joins the Thames, to get into the Severn, and so also follow up that river to its source. Shelley even proposed, in his wildness, that there should be no halting place even there; he even proposed, by the help of divers canals and rivers, to leave North Wales, and traversing the inland counties, to reach Durham and the Lakes, so on to the Tweed, and hence to come out on the Forth, nor rest till we reached the Falls of the Clyde, when by the time we returned we should have voyaged two thousand miles.’8

  As it turned out, they could not manage the Severn Canal sailing fee of twenty pounds, and above Lechlade, ‘the weeds became so enormously thick and high, that all three of us tugging could not move the boat an inch’. Mary stayed demurely aboard the boat during these struggles. ‘We did not get much beyond Inglesham Weir,’ Peacock recalled, ‘a solitary sluice was hanging by a chain, swinging in the wind and creaking dismally. Our voyage terminated at a spot where the cattle stood entirely across the stream, with the water scarcely covering their hooves.’9 They turned back, and drifted quietly downstream again under the hot September sun, towards Lechlade. Shelley continued to talk about his endless river expedition, and years later, in 1831, Peacock gently conjured up a nostalgic, afternoon portrait of him in the middle of the mad river voyage of Crotchet Castle, ‘Mr Philpot would lie alone for hours, listening to the gurgling of the water around the prow, and would occasionally edify the company with speculations on the great changes that would be effected in the world by the steam navigation of rivers: sketching the course of a steam-boat up and down some mighty stream which civilisation had either never visited, or long since deserted; the Missouri and the Columbia, the Oronoko and the Amazon, the Nile and the Niger, the Euphrates and the Tigris…under the overcanopying forests of the new, or by the long-silent ruins of the ancient world; through the shapeless mounds of Babylon, or the gigantic temples of Thebes.’10

  While Shelley was publicly amusing the party and playing the eccentric dreamer, he was privately brooding on the river imagery as an analogue, a poetic metaphor, for an entirely different kind of journey. It was a journey into the past, and into his own personality. This combination of public joking and private poetic meditation can be seen to recur as a pre-creative condition both in England and later in Italy. In a notebook of September, he made a number of haphazard jottings, attempting to define something which he tentatively called ‘the science of mind’. In one of these fragments, taking up an idea he had first mentioned several years ago in a letter to Godwin, of 1812, he wrote:

  If it were possible that a person should give a faithful history of his being from the earliest epochs of his recollection, a picture would be presented such as the world has never contemplated before. A mirror would be held up to all men in which they might behold their own recollections and, in dim perspective, their shadowy hopes and fears — all that they dare not, or that daring and desiring, they could not expose to the open eyes of day. But thought can with difficulty visit the intricate and winding chambers which it inhabits. It is like a river whose rapid and perpetual stream flows outwards — like one in dread who speeds through the recesses of some haunted pile and dares not look behind. . . . If it were possible to be where we have been, vitally and indeed — if, at the moment of our presence there, we could define the results of our experience — if the passage from sensation to reflection — from a state of passive perception to voluntary contemplation were not so dizzying and so tumultuous, this attempt would be less difficult.11[2]

  In this thoughtful mood he returned with the rest of the party to the village of Lechlade, where they put up for two nights at the secluded little inn. Mary began to write up a diary of the trip, and Shelley, wandering alone through the little churchyard during the evening began to draft his second poem of the year. The calm, reflective tone and pace of the opening stanzas are full of echoes of Gray, and other eighteenth-century churchyard verses. Only the supple freedom with which the iambic pentameter line is shaped and run over, and the faintly disturbing literalness with which the personifications of Evening, Silence and Twilight are used — as if they really were gigantic, floating figures like something out of a medieval pageant — suggest that ‘A Summer Evening Churchyard, Lechlade, Gloucestershire’, was not written fifty years before.

  The wind has swept from the wide atmosphere

  Each vapour that obscured the sunset’s ray;

  And pallid Evening twines its beaming hair

  In duskier braids about the languid eyes of Day:

  Silence and Twilight, unbeloved of men,

  Creep hand in hand from yon obscurest glen.

  They breathe their spells towards the departing day,

  Encompassing the earth, air, stars, and sea;

  Light, sound, and motion own the potent sway,

  Responding to the charm with its own mystery.

  The winds are still, or the dry church-tower grass

  Knows not their gentle motions as they pass.

  In the last two stanzas the pulse of the verse quickens, and Shelley’s familiar concern with the abnormal state of acute perception, the potential force o
f terror hovering at the margins of thought, makes itself felt. The overt ‘softening’ of these forces, and the faintly ironic dismissal of the experience as an ‘inquiring child’s’ game, though beautiful and tantalizing, reflects the unusual warmth and security which the company of Mary, Peacock and Charles brought to him during this expedition. It is perhaps the most relaxed and harmonious poem he ever wrote.

  The dead are sleeping in their sepulchres:

  And, mouldering as they sleep, a thrilling sound,

  Half sense, half thought, among the darkness stirs,

  Breathed from their wormy beds all living things around,

  And mingling with the still night and mute sky

  Its awful hush is felt inaudibly.

  Thus solemnized and softened, death is mild

  And terrorless as this serenest night:

  Here could I hope, like some inquiring child

  Sporting on graves, that death did hide from human sight

  Sweet secrets, or beside its breathless sleep

  That loveliest dreams perpetual watch did keep.12

  They set off down-river next morning at 6, and had reached Old Windsor again in four days, on 10 September. ‘We all felt the good effects of this jaunt,’ Charles wrote to Claire, ‘but in Shelley the change is quite remarkable; he now has the ruddy, healthy complexion of the autumn upon his countenance, and is twice as fat as he used to be.’13 ‘He…rowed vigorously, was cheerful, merry, overflowing with animal spirits, and had certainly one week of thorough enjoyment of life,’ said Peacock, who was inclined to attribute it to his diagnostic prescription of mutton chops.

  Returned to the house at Bishopsgate, Shelley sent off lists of classical and philosophical authors to booksellers in London and Edinburgh, and got down to developing his speculations ‘On the Science of Mind’ with fresh determination. ‘Let us contemplate facts,’ he wrote. ‘Let us in the great study of ourselves resolutely compel the mind to a rigid consideration of itself. We are not content with conjecture, and inductions, and syllogisms in sciences regarding external objects. As in these, let us also, in considering the phenomena of the mind, severely collect those facts which cannot be disputed. Metaphysics will thus possess this conspicuous advantage over every other science that each student by attentively referring to his own mind may ascertain the authorities upon which any assertions regarding it are supported. . . . Metaphysics may be defined as an inquiry concerning those things belonging to, or connected with, the internal nature of man.’14 With the emphasis on severely factual inquiry into mental phenomena, Shelley was clearly advancing towards the notion of an objective psychology, which despite the work of the philosopher David Hartley, was still not generally current.[3] He was himself aware that some new descriptive term was needed, though he hesitated to supply it. ‘Metaphysics is a word which has been so long applied to denote an enquiry into the phenomena of mind that it would justly be considered presumptious to employ another. But etymologically considered it is very ill adapted to express the science of mind.’15