Shelley: The Pursuit

by Richard Holmes

  My very chains and I grew friends,

  So much a long communion tends

  To make us what we are: — even I

  Regained my freedom with a sigh.

  In contrast Shelley found he could draw no direct inspiration from their surroundings, but continued to read La Nouvelle Héloise, and began to sketch out the autobiographical opening of his ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, with its romantic memories of ghosts and terrors and self-dedications in early childhood.

  Byron’s presence continued to inhibit Shelley. He noted with curious regret how he had been unable to let himself cry openly when they walked in the beautiful vineyards above the bosquet de Julie at Clarens. It also affected his writing, and it is characteristic that while Byron scribbled verse, Shelley walked and read and wrote letters.[5] There was however one passage in the long diary-letter to Peacock, which achieved a strong autobiographical resonance, and rose nearly to the intensity of a prose poem. Besides this, the dates and statistics concerning the Chateau Chillon look stiff and unfeeling. Shelley had noticed the cruel deformation of the children on the Savoy side of the lake. This was a thyroid condition caused by an iodine deficiency in the water, not discovered until nearly a hundred years later. To Shelley, the sight of one child who was a striking exception to this grim malformation seemed to have a strong symbolic overtone. He described the scene with a new combination of perception and delicacy, in a dreamy, pre-occupied mood that suggests his own boyhood was much in his mind.

  On returning to the village, we sat on a wall beside the lake, looking at some children who were playing at a game like ninepins. The children here appeared in an extraordinary way deformed and diseased. Most of them were crooked, and with enlarged throats; but one little boy had such exquisite grace in his mien and motions, as I never before saw equalled in a child. His countenance was beautiful for the expression with which it overflowed. There was a mixture of pride and gentleness in his eyes and lips, the indications of sensibility, which his education will probably subvert to misery or seduce to crime; but there was more of gentleness than of pride, and it seemed that the pride was tamed from its original wildness by the habitual exericse of milder feelings. My companion gave him a piece of money, which he took without speaking, with a sweet smile of easy thankfulness, and then with an unembarrassed air turned to his play. All this might scarcely be; but the imagination surely could not forbear to breath into the most inanimate forms, some likeness of its own visions, on such a serene and glowing evening, in this remote and romantic village, beside the calm lake that bore us hither.

  At Lausanne they walked on the terrace of Gibbon’s house where he had finished the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Byron was deeply moved, but Shelley again drew himself back from the experience. ‘My companion gathered some acacia leaves to preserve in remembrance of him. I refrained from doing so, fearing to outrage the greater and more sacred name of Rousseau; the contemplation of whose imperishable creations had left no vacancy in my heart for mortal things. Gibbon had a cold and unimpassioned spirit.’ Byron entered his tribute to Gibbon in his Childe Harold notebook, calling him the ‘Lord of irony’, ‘sapping a solemn creed with solemn sneer’, and dispatched the acacia leaves to Murray. Shelley walked back down to the pier, where the waves still lashed the anchored boat and stood gazing out across the lake. Suddenly the sun came out, for the only time that day. ‘A rainbow spanned the lake, or rather rested one extremity of its arch upon the water, and the other at the foot of the mountains of Savoy. Some white houses, I know not if they were those of Meillerie, shone through the yellow fire.’ Two days later, on the evening of Sunday, 30 June, Mary and Claire spotted the little sail curving across the lake towards the harbour at Montalègre.

  This boat trip created an understanding between Shelley and Byron, which from now on continued to work at a level above the ordinary domestic relationships established through Mary and Claire. Yet there was still no complete intimacy between them, and both continued to observe the other as a somewhat curious specimen. They said one thing to each other’s faces and another behind each other’s backs. Byron wrote that Shelley had dosed him with Wordsworth, ‘even to nausea’, while Shelley wrote to Peacock after their return that ‘Lord Byron is an exceedingly interesting person, and as such it is to be regretted that he is a slave to the vilest and most vulgar prejudices, and as mad as the winds’. Whether, when referring to Byron’s prejudices, he had Gibbon or Claire in mind, is not completely clear. But the way for intimacy was opened, and this was to occur immediately on the next occasion that they were alone together: at Venice in 1818.

  After Shelley and Byron’s return, the routine of boating and visiting settled down again between Montalègre and the Villa Diodati. Shelley completed his ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’, Byron his Third Canto, and Claire was gratified to be given the task of fair copying the ‘Prisoner of Chillon’. To Peacock, Shelley wrote to say that they planned to remain probably until next spring. In the meantime would Peacock sell the furniture and goods at Bishopsgate, relinquish the possession and inquire after ‘an unfurnished house, with as good a garden as may be, near Windsor Forest’, to be taken on a long lease of fourteen or preferably twenty-one years. ‘My present intention is to return to England and make that most excellent of nations my perpetual resting place.’ Peacock was probably receiving a small stipend from Shelley by this time, which is indicated by his unhesitating use of Peacock as an amanuensis. Shelley had now clearly rejected any ideas of permanent exile, and indeed his letter is full of nostalgic references which fall strangely from his pen: ‘good wood fires, or window frames intertwined with creeping plants; . . . purring of kittens, the hissing of kettles; the long talks over the past and dead, laugh of children, . . . and the pelting storm of winter struggling in vain for entrance’.39 Shelley also asked for news of the political state in England.

  Meanwhile he was vaguely planning another of his epic river voyages which never materialized, this time descending the Danube as far as Constantinople, and then back through Athens and Rome, ‘. . . Always following great rivers. The Danube, the Po, the Rhone, and the Garonne; rivers are not like roads, the work of the hands of man; they imitate mind, which wanders at will over pathless deserts, and flows through nature’s loveliest recesses, which are inaccessible to anything besides.’ When he had read through this letter, Peacock shrewdly decided to postpone purchase of ‘a fixed, settled, eternal home’ until Shelley had definitely set foot in England again.

  On 17 and 18 July, Shelley also wrote to Godwin and Hogg. To the former, he hinted that he would not remain at Geneva for much longer, so that complicated postal negotiations were impossible. Hogg was now told definitely that the plan for him to join their community again would have to be postponed. Shelley suggested rather wildly that he should address his letters in future to poste restante at Avignon. Shelley was perhaps thinking of the river Rhône; but in fact he never visited Avignon in his life. He wrote briefly, somewhat airily, of Byron, and of Madame de Staël and the literary people whom he had ‘no great curiosity to see’.

  On Sunday, 21 July, three weeks after he had returned from his lake tour, Shelley suddenly set off again with Mary and Claire to visit the valley at Chamonix, a popular and picturesque resort among the Alps, dramatically situated at the head of the river Arve. Little William was left behind at Montalègre to be cared for by a Swiss maidservant Shelley had hired, Elise. Mary took with her instead the manuscript of Frankenstein.

  Mary’s journal, after an interval of over a year, now recommences, and is full of descriptive passages. Many of these served as drafts for settings of the confrontation scene between Dr Frankenstein and the monster in the Mer de Glace. She wrote now with a new power and irony. On the long road up the valley of the Arve between Bonneville and Chamonix, she observed. ‘This cataract fell in to the Arve, which dashed against its banks like a wild animal who is furious in constraint. As we continued our route to Cerveaux, the mountains increased in h
eight and beauty; the summits of the highest were hid in clouds, but they sometimes peeped out into the blue sky, higher one would think than the safety of God would permit, since it is well known that the Tower of Babel did not nearly equal them in immensity.’ Another rock, over which a waterfall divided, seemed to her like the visionary image of ‘a colossal Egyptian statue of a female deity’.40 Shelley bought a squirrel for the girls, which bit him while trying to escape.

  They arrived at Chamonix, exhausted, at 7 on Monday evening, and were startled by the unearthly thunder of an avalanche from the further mountain. Shelley was not too tired to note a proclamation of the King of Sardinia’s ‘prohibiting his subjects from holding private assemblies, on pain of a fine of 12 Francs, and, in default of payment, imprisonment’.41 Shelley wrote briefly to Byron from their Hotel de Ville de Londres, suggesting he hire mules and join them. Then he began the second of his long descriptive diary-letters to Peacock, filled with the immensity and grandeur of the icy peaks. During the following days they visited the glaciers at Boisson and at Montavert. The impact which the sheer mass and cruel simplicity of the Alps at close quarters had on Shelley was profound. It entered immediately into the store of his fundamental imagery, like the rivers, and the sea, and the sky. On the first day in Chamonix he wrote to Peacock. ‘Pinnacles of snow, intolerably bright, part of the chain connected with Mont Blanc shone through the clouds at intervals on high. I never knew I never imagined what mountains were before. The immensity of these ariel summits excited, when they suddenly burst upon the sight, a sentiment of extatic wonder, not unallied to madness.’42 Already, crossing the bridge over the river Arve, he had begun to work over the outline of a philosophic meditation on the Alpine experience. His overall impression was one of overwhelming power, gigantic but infinitely remote force. It frightened and fascinated him. He was filled with awe and the sense of his own limited, human intelligence brought face to face with enormous natural energies and processes beyond anything he had previously imagined. The meditation became a poem called simply, ‘Mont Blanc’.

  The experience which Shelley underwent at Chamonix, something close to a religious experience, was in fact a recognized feature of such visits to the Alps. Unearthly revelations were soon to become a regular part of the Englishman’s tour. Writing in 1825 William Hazlitt noted wrily: ‘The Crossing of the Alps has, I believe, given some of our fashionables a shivering-fit of morality; as the sight of Mont Blanc convinced our author [in this case Tom Moore] of the Being of God — they are seized with an amiable horror and remorse for the vices of others (of course so much worse than their own) so that several of our bluestockings have got the blue-devils . . . .’ The only difference was that Shelley was in contrast convinced by this experience of the non-existence of God.[6]

  Indeed, the emotions he experienced depended entirely on his intellectual position as an atheist. What he saw seemed to him both a symbol, and an actual example, of the sublime but utterly impersonal Power which functioned through nature. Describing the slow but irresistible advance of the glacier towards Chamonix, and the ‘inexpressibly dreadful’ aspect presented by the shattered pines which were overwhelmed one by one by its relentless progress, a few feet each year, he wrote to Peacock that he tended to believe Buffon’s theory of Nature’s inevitable self-destruction, of its inherent entropy. He saw this as yet another example of a tyranny, of power functioning inhumanely to crush and destroy, and likened it to the esoteric Indian dualism which Peacock had used in his earlier poetry. This was the eternal struggle between Oromazes, the spirit of life and warmth, and Ahrimanes, the spirit of darkness, cold and death.

  After a superb description of the terror of the glacier’s advance, he concluded: ‘I will not pursue Buffon’s sublime but gloomy theory, that this earth which we inhabit will at some future period be changed into a mass of frost. Do you who assert the supremacy of Ahriman imagine him throned among these desolating snows, among these palaces of death and frost, sculptured in this their terrible magnificence by the unsparing hand of necessity, & that he casts around him as the first essays of his final usurpation avalanches, torrents, rocks & thunders — and above all, these deadly glaciers at once the proofs and symbols of his reign. — Add to this the degradation of the human species, who in these regions are half deformed or idiotic & all of whom are deprived of anything that can excite interest & admiration. This is a part of the subject more mournful & less sublime; — but such as neither the poet not the philosopher should disdain.’43

  These reflections formed the basis of Shelley’s descriptive and meditative poem ‘Mont Blanc’. The river Arve, the glaciers and the mountain are loosely organized into a system of images to represent three levels of the human consciousness as it speculates on, respectively, human imagination, material phenomena and on a hypothetical divinity. The poem is Wordsworthian in its verse phrasing, and its apparent subject matter; yet the tone has a grimness, and a sense of disruptive uncontrollable forces, which is peculiar to Shelley alone. Characteristically, the philosophic conclusions which he tries to draw from his imagery are continuously left suspended in dread or doubt. Both at the beginning and the end of the poem, it is this sense of baffled, fearful and yet heroic confrontation between sensitive mind and brutal matter which is dominant.

  For the very spirit fails,

  Driven like a homeless cloud from steep to steep

  That vanishes among the viewless gales!

  Far, far above, piercing the infinite sky,

  Mont Blanc appears, — still, snowy, and serene —

  Its subject mountains their unearthly forms

  Pile around it, ice and rock . . . . 44

  Despite its essentially philosophic and sceptic pitch, the poem is not without its monsters and ghosts. Shelley refers to the ‘old Earthquake-daemon’; the glaciers are at one point described as serpents creeping on their prey; and the snowy peaks as ‘A city of death, distinct with many a tower’. In his letter to Peacock, which he subsequently adapted for Mary’s book A History of a Six Weeks Tour, Shelley expressed this feeling of the monstrous — closely connected with Mary’s Frankenstein — in a memorable image. ‘One would think that Mont Blanc, like the god of the Stoics, was a vast animal, and the frozen blood forever circulated through his stony veins.’ Yet the poem ends finally, with its focus neither on the mountain, nor the monster, nor God, but on the poised, unflinching attention of the human mind itself which embraces all, and is in this sense the ultimate power:

  And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea,

  If to the human mind’s imaginings

  Silence and solitude were vacancy?45

  As far as he could press the question in this poem, Mont Blanc proved for Shelley that the natural world held no other intelligent divinity except the mind of man. The effect of this prolonged and intense meditation was to induce in Shelley a feeling of irritable and mocking superiority towards his fellow tourists, and the locals of Chamonix. The Swiss guide, Ducrée, who took him over the glacier of Boisson, he called ‘the only tolerable person I have seen in this country’. To Peacock he wrote acidly: ‘There is a Cabinet d’Histoire Naturelle at Chamouni, just as at Matlock & Keswick & Clifton; the proprietor of which is the very vilest specimen, of that vile species of quack that together with the whole army of aubergistes & guides & indeed the entire mass of the population subsist on the weakness & credulity of travellers as leeches subsist on the blood of the sick.’ When in September, Byron came to Chamonix, he was more infuriated by the general philistinism of his compatriots, and raged about an English woman who exclaimed how rural the mountains looked — ‘as if it was Highgate, or Hampstead, or Brompton, or Hayes’.46

  But Shelley was not content with registering merely private indignation. In the hotel register at Chamonix, and in another at Montavert, and possibly in a third on the return journey down the Arve valley, he made a celebrated entry in Greek. Under the ‘Occupation’ column, he inscribed the deliberately provocative tag: ‘Δη
μoκρατικoς, Φιλáνθρωπoτατoς, κáι’αθες’ — Democrat, Philanthropist and Atheist. Under the destination column, for him and the two girls, he wrote succinctly ‘L’Enfer’.47 Only by considering the reputation Chamonix had among the travelling English at this time, as a natural temple of the Lord and a proof of the Deity by design, is it possible to realize the spirit in which Shelley wrote these entries, and the astounding fury with which they were greeted. Fifty years later, Swinburne noted that the entry in the register previous to Shelley’s was ‘fervid with ghostly grease and rancid religion’.48 Yet when Byron himself came across one of Shelley’s three entries with Hobhouse in September, he immediately felt obliged to cross it out as indelibly as possible for Shelley’s own protection. Byron missed the other registers, and the scandalous annotation was soon a regular notoriety. Thomas Raffles noted it in his Letters During a Tour of 1818, together with a retort: ‘If an atheist, a fool — if not, a liar.’ Southey, among others, seized upon it and spread the story, and it played a prominent part in the major newspaper attacks on Shelley in the Quarterly of January 1818, and the London Chronicle of June 1819. It was the word ’αθεoς which caused the original offence; but in such a context, the word Δημoκρατικoς was mentally read as ‘revolutionary’, and the word φιλκáνθρωπoς as ‘pervert’.

  On Thursday the 25th, they returned from Montavert, picnicking in an Alpine meadow, among wild rhododendron and mountain roses. Friday was wet, and Shelley spent much time cross-questioning the guide about his work, his pay, Swiss politics and conscription laws. He noted with interest that Ducrée married a girl of 16 when he himself was only 18. Mary and Shelley collected Alpine seeds to plant in the garden of their proposed home at Windsor. The following day they returned down the valley for Lake Leman. ‘Did I tell you that there are troops of wolves among these mountains?’ Shelley closed his letter to Peacock. ‘In the winter they descend into the valleys which the snow occupies during six months of the year, & devour everything they find outside of the doors. A wolf is more powerful than the fiercest & strongest dog.’49