Shelley: The Pursuit

by Richard Holmes

  Shelley’s first attempt to exploit the realization that ‘we are ourselves the depositories of the evidence of the subject which we consider’, was to embark on an analysis of his own dreams. He called this a ‘Catalogue of the Phenomena of Dreams, As Connecting Sleeping and Waking’. For the moment he was content to work away at these ‘obscure and shadowy’ caverns of the mind in prose rather than in verse. ‘Let us reflect on our infancy, and give as faithfully as possible a relation of the events of sleep. And I am first bound to present a faithful picture of my own peculiar nature relative to sleep. . . . I shall employ caution, indeed, as to the facts which I state, that they contain nothing false or exaggerated.’ The main interest of this ‘Catalogue’ lies in the dramatic way in which it proved how difficult Shelley found it to analyse himself, to follow the stream to its source.

  His first recurrent dream is presented with little comment, ‘the single image, unconnected with all other images, of a youth who was educated at the same school as myself’. He merely remarks that he had dreamed of this youth ‘between intervals of two or more years’, and that he could never hear his name without instantly remembering the dreams and the places where he dreamt them. This dream obviously refers to the early romantic attachment at Syon House, which the sight of a statue in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, was also to recall.[4]

  The next dream that he discussed produced on the contrary an extraordinary commentary, one of the most peculiar records of composition that he ever made.

  I have beheld scenes, with the intimate and unaccountable connection of which to the obscure parts of my own nature, I have been irresistibly impressed. I have beheld a scene which has produced no unusual effect on my thoughts. After the lapse of many years I have dreamed of this scene. It has hung on my memory; it has haunted my thoughts at intervals with the pertinacity of an object connected with human affections. I have visited this scene again. Neither the dream could be dissociated from the landscape, nor the landscape from the dream, nor feelings, such as neither singly could have awakened, from both. But the most remarkable event of this nature which ever occurred to me happened five years ago at Oxford. I was walking with a friend in the neighbourhood of that city engaged in earnest and interesting conversation. We suddenly turned the corner of a lane, and the view which its banks and hedges had concealed presented itself. The view consisted of a windmill, standing in one among many plashy meadows, inclosed with stone walls; the irregular and broken ground between the wall and the road on which we stood; a long low hill behind the windmill, and a grey covering of uniform cloud spread over the evening sky. It was that season when the last leaf had just fallen from the scant and stunted ash. The scene surely was a common scene; the season and the hour little calculated to kindle lawless thought; it was a tame uninteresting assemblage of objects, such as would drive the imagination for refuge in serious and sober talk, to the evening fireside and the dessert of winter fruits and wine. The effect which it produced on me was not such as could have been expected. I suddenly remembered to have seen that exact scene in some dream of long . . .

  At this point the manuscript breaks off, and the whole ‘Catalogue’ ends, with the single startling note by Shelley: ‘Here I was obliged to leave off, overcome by thrilling horror.’ Mrs Shelley, in her later editorial footnote, remarks: ‘I remember well his coming to me from writing it, pale and agitated, to seek refuge in conversation from the fearful emotions it excited. No man, as these fragments prove, had such keen sensations as Shelley.’16

  This curious incident, recalled as it obviously is, from a walk with Hogg in the autumn of 1810, is difficult to interpret. Hogg’s Life offers no clues, and the image of the windmill, with its outstretched vanes, against the long low hill and grey sky, does not recur anywhere in the rest of Shelley’s writing. The only clue to the nature of the ‘lawless thought’ is Shelley’s earlier remark about the pertinacity of objects ‘connected with human affection’. It is perhaps possible that something revisited at Oxford during the river trip recalled his passionate feelings for Hogg, and set off this powerful reaction.

  Despite this surprising setback, Shelley was able to write to Hogg at the end of the month that the boat trip had done him good, and he was now busily at work. ‘The exercise & dissipation of mind attached to such an expedition have produced so favourable an effect on my health, that my habitual dejection & irritability have almost deserted me, & I can devote 6 hours in the day to study without difficulty. I have been engaged lately in the commencement of several literary plans, which if my present temper of mind endures I shall probably complete in the winter. . . . The East Wind, the wind of Autumn is abroad, & even now the leaves of the forest are shattered at every gust. When may we expect you?’17 From October onwards, Hogg made several visits, walking down from London, while Peacock walked across from Marlow frequently. Otherwise Shelley was alone with Mary.

  This was the first time since his marriage to Harriet that he had lived alone in one other woman’s company for more than a few days at a stretch. This was a decisive change in itself, and indicates the increased emotional maturity of the relationship. Mary was pregnant again, which she probably knew for certain at the end of July, and the baby was due early in the following year. She fitted in easily with Shelley’s studious routine, not troubling him when he spent hours alone in Windsor Park, and coped well with both Hogg and Peacock. Both remained slightly in awe of her, the demure intellectual who remained in Shelley’s boat. She went on with her study of Latin authors under Shelley’s direction. In the evenings they read out loud to each other. For his part Shelley was embarking on his first concentrated study of Greek writers, especially the dramatists Aeschylus and Euripides, with the encouragement of Peacock who already read and translated fluently and was able to lend and recommend him texts. Hogg called this winter ‘a mere Atticism’.

  Peacock recalled that ‘one or two persons called upon him’, but they were not to his mind, and were not encouraged to reappear. The only exception was a physician whom he had called in; the Quaker, Dr Pope of Staines. This worthy old gentleman came more than once, not as a doctor, but as a friend. He liked to discuss theology with Shelley. Shelley at first avoided the discussion, saying his opinions would not be to the doctor’s taste, but the doctor answered, ‘I like to hear thee talk, friend Shelley; I see thee art very deep.’18 The friendship is not so surprising, considering Shelley’s natural reverence for eccentric doctors and sages, and the zealous, puritan cast to his own temperament.

  With these few interruptions, Shelley continued the course of his exploration into the caverns of the mind. It was now apparent to him that the way was blocked through a straightforward autobiographical account of his own sensations and dreams, and he turned to more formal types of philosophical essay to describe the problems. These, equally, had little success. In a 2,000-word essay ‘On Life’, he moved awkwardly between academic notes on the distinction between Berkeleian idealism and Humean scepticism as philosophical systems, and much broader semi-poetic formulations. ‘What is life? Thoughts and feelings arise, with or without our will, and we employ words to express them. We are born, and our birth is unremembered, and our infancy remembered but in fragments; we live on, and in living we lose the apprehension of life. How vain it is to think that words can penetrate the mystery of our being!’19 But this was merely to surrender the problem as an insoluble one, and apart from rejecting a simple materialist philosophy — which he had never really held anyway — and remarking on the book of philosophical commentaries which he always subsequently stood by, Academical Questions by Sir William Drummond, the essay took him little further.[5] Towards the end of the essay, Shelley once again found himself turning back upon his own past, and suddenly, almost unexpectedly, for it links with little that had gone before, Shelley managed to define the condition of one of those ‘abnormal states’ which seemed to him to offer the key, both to self-knowledge and to artistic creation.

  Let us recollect our sensations as
children. What a distinct and intense apprehension had we of the world and of ourselves. Many of the circumstances of social life were then important to us which are now no longer so. But that is not the point of comparison on which I mean to insist. We less habitually distinguished all that we saw and felt, from ourselves! They seemed, as it were, to constitute one mass. There are some persons who in this respect are always children. Those who are subject to the state called reverie feel as if their nature were dissolved into the surrounding universe, or as if the surrounding universe were absorbed into their being. They are conscious of no distinction. And these are states which precede, or accompany, or follow an unusually intense and vivid apprehension of life. As men grow up this power commonly decays, and they become mechanical and habitual agents.20

  The identification of this creative condition of ‘reverie’, linked with the continuation of childhood states and the cultivation of the ‘intense’ experience in adult life was a striking personal discovery, though one already made for themselves by poets of the previous generation, such as Wordsworth and Coleridge. But it gave Shelley no satisfaction for it led immediately to two further problems. How far was the state of self-absorbing reverie a genuinely creative or valuable one? And how far was it a state peculiar to himself, one that cut off his experiences from those of people and society around him? How far indeed, was it precisely that state in which ‘Thine own soul still is true to thee, But changed to a foul fiend through misery’?

  Shelley was now on the frontier which led immediately into that country and river of the mind to be described in the poem Alastor. He made one last effort to push his prose investigations further, in a second essay, ‘On Love’. This differs from the previous work in that he was now addressing in imagination at least a specific reader who was beyond doubt Mary.[6] It also differs in that the terms he uses are in places virtually identical with those used in the prose preface to Alastor, and one can assume that he was already drafting sections of the poem. This final prose trial is very brief, less than a thousand words, and opens with the directness which is characteristic of Shelley when he has tracked down what he wished to say. ‘I know not the internal constitution of other men, nor even yours whom I now address. I see that in some external attributes they resemble me, but when misled by that appearance I have thought to appeal to something in common and unburden my inmost soul to them, I have found my language misunderstood like one in a distant and savage land. . . . Thou demandest, What is Love? It is that powerful attraction towards all that we conceive, or fear, or hope beyond ourselves, when we find within our own thoughts the chasm of an insufficient void and seek to awaken in all things that are a community with what we experience within ourselves.’ Within this broad idea of a ‘community’ of attraction and sympathy, Shelley specified the particular human direction in which his own idea of love had developed. Its peculiar egoism is immediately apparent.

  We dimly see within our intellectual nature a miniature as it were of our entire self, yet deprived of all we condemn or despise, the ideal prototype of everything excellent or lovely that we are capable of conceiving. . . . To this we eagerly refer all sensations, thirsting that they should resemble or correspond with it. The discovery of its anti-type; the meeting with an understanding capable of clearly estimating our own; an imagination which should enter into and seize upon the subtle and delicate peculiarities which we have delighted to cherish and unfold in secret. . . . this is the invisible and unattainable point to which Love tends.21

  In this short essay, directed at Mary, which already admitted from a personal point of view the existence of the gap between them, Shelley had pressed the search into the caverns of his own mind as far as he could go in prose. He now sought the even greater formality and distancing of poetry, and composed the 700-line blank verse poem Alastor, the second long poem of his career. This was the final point which these months of introspection and self-assessment reached, and his own comment, as a poet, on the inner significance of the events of 1814. The subject of the poem is, specifically, the picture of a developing psychological state. ‘The poem entitled Alastor may be considered as allegorical of one of the most interesting situations of the human mind,’ Shelley wrote. To which Mary shrewdly added in a later editorial note, ‘the poem ought rather to be considered didactic than narrative’. It is not known how long Shelley took to draft or revise it, but a good deal of it was written in his open-air study, sitting under the autumnal oaks of Windsor Great Park, during September and October.

  The myth that shapes the broad outline of the story is that of Narcissus and Echo. The youth, ‘the Poet’, goes in search of an ideal vision of beauty, which leads him eventually to his death. It is a rite de passage. On the way he is helped by an Arab girl who falls in love with him, but is ignored; at night he dreams intensely erotic visions of a girl who can satisfy him; but unable to bring the dream and the fleshly reality together, he embarks on a wild and hopeless boat trip up the river, through fantastic landscapes and caverns, seeking the visionary beauty. Both pursuer and pursued, he is tortured by unattainable desires, grows ill and old, passes into more and more grotesque and macabre landscapes, and finally finds himself gazing at his own image in a pool.

  His eyes beheld

  Their own wan light through the reflected lines

  Of his thin hair, distinct in the dark depth

  Of that still fountain; as the human heart,

  Gazing in dreams over the gloomy grave,

  Sees its own treacherous likeness there.22

  All these settings, Shelley stresses from the outset, are mental landscapes, which reflect directly the spiritual state of the protagonist. There is now nothing left for him but to pursue the course of the river, which is itself a journey further inwards. ‘O stream!’ says the Poet,

  Whose source is inaccessibly profound,

  Whither do thy mysterious waters tend?

  Thou imagest my life.23

  The river takes him into an utterly barren land of rocks and precipices, and, on the edge of one of these, overlooking a night landscape of jagged hills and stars, he lies down in exhaustion and dies, incapable of further emotion or feeling.

  Sad mother, you bore him in vain!

  I am angry at the gods.

  Sister Graces, why did you let him go

  Guiltless, out of his native land,

  Out of his father’s house?

  Hope and despair,

  The torturers, slept; no mortal pain or fear

  Marred his repose, the influxes of sense,

  And his own being unalloyed by pain,

  Yet feebler and more feeble, calmly fed

  The stream of thought, till he lay breathing there

  At peace, and faintly smiling: — his last sight

  Was the great moon, which o’er the western line

  Of the wide world her mighty horn suspended . . . .24

  The final verse paragraph of the poem stands as a coda, an elegy regretting the death of the Poet and the passing of his special vision of the world, with further Shelleyan references to dreams, alchemy and God — ‘profuse of poisons’.

  Shelley is careful, both in the preface and the verse prologue, to distinguish himself from the Poet. Yet it is clear that the value of the poem to him was the degree to which it allowed him to extend the investigations into his own psychology further than he had managed in prose. In his preface, he draws a clear judgement against the experience of the Poet, condemning it as limited and destructive. In this, he was attempting to come to terms with and reject tendencies which he had found in his past life. ‘The picture is not barren of instruction to actual men. The Poet’s self-centred seclusion was avenged by the furies of an irresistible passion pursuing him to speedy ruin.’ But the text of the poem does not underwrite this judgement, especially in its coda, and there is evidence of some sense of contradiction in Shelley’s own mind. The references to the furies of solitude, the pursuing fiends of his earlier poems, remain consistent. In
one passage he writes,

  At night the passion came,

  Like the fierce fiend of a distempered dream,

  And shook him from his rest, and led him forth

  Into the darkness.25

  And in another, just as the Poet prepares to embark on the river from which he can never return,

  Startled by his own thoughts he looked around.

  There was no fair fiend near him, not a sight

  Or sound of awe but in his own deep mind.26

  The preface also draws the wider conclusion, already set out in the essay ‘On Love’, that satisfactory love can only be found within the context of a human community of responsible relationships. ‘Among those who attempt to exist without human sympathy, the pure and tender-hearted perish through the intensity and passion of their search after its communities, when the vacancy of their spirit suddenly makes itself felt.’ Yet again, this conclusion is not explicitly drawn within the text of the poem.