Shelley: The Pursuit

by Richard Holmes

  Finally, in the character of Zastrozzi, the towering irrepressible villain, we have an early draft of the Satanic outcast, the damned atheist, who confronts his judges and remains unmoved in the final scenario, gaining, at the last, a heroic stature by default.78 This figure became enormously important to Shelley, and sophisticated variations on him appear in nearly all the longer poems: Queen Mab (1813), The Revolt of Islam, Prometheus Unbound and The Cenci (1819) — as well as in many of the shorter ones.

  The question of violence, first encountered in Shelley’s reaction to school, now occurred for the first time as a literary peculiarity. The violence in Zastrozzi is striking; it is physical violence and often presented with blatant satisfaction. Here, for example, the scarlet woman ends the career of the virginal blonde:

  ‘Die, detested wretch,’ exclaimed Mathilda, in a paroxysm of rage, as she violently attempted to bathe the stiletto in the life-blood of her rival; but Julia starting aside, the weapon slightly wounded her neck, and the ensanguined stream stained her alabaster bosom. She fell on the floor, but suddenly starting up, attempted to escape her bloodthirsty persecutor. Nerved anew by this futile attempt to escape her vengeance, the ferocious Mathilda seized Julia’s floating hair, and holding her back with fiend-like strength, stabbed her in a thousand places; and, with exulting pleasure, again and again buried the dagger to the hilt in her body, even after all remains of life were annihilated. At last the passions of Mathilda, exhausted by their own violence, sank into a deadly calm; she threw the dagger violently from her, and contemplated the terrific scene before her with a sullen gaze.79

  There is a sense in which all this, too, can be dismissed — and perhaps should be — as cheerful plagiarism. Nevertheless the skill and relish with which the action is drawn out is remarkable; and more so is the fact that the basic rhythm of the action, its frantic climax and torpid decline, reflects not so much an act of ordinary assault, as the specific act of rape.[5]

  The intoxicating sense of freedom which Shelley felt in his departure from Eton allowed many of his darker and solitary preoccupations (witnessed in Zastrozzi) to bubble up again more lightly in the camaraderie between himself, Elizabeth and Edward Graham. A letter informing Graham that the Shelley family were coming to Town, and would meet him in Clapham, contained the following macabre instructions:

  Stalk along the road towards them — & mind & keep concealed as my mother brings a blood stained stiletto which she purposes to make you bathe in the lifeblood of her enemy. Never mind the Death-demons, & skeletons dripping with the putrefaction of the grave, that occasionally may blast your straining eyeball — Persevere even though Hell & destruction should yawn beneath your feet — ‘Think of all this at the frightful hour of midnight, when the Hell Demon leans over your sleeping form, & inspires those thoughts which eventually will lead you to the gates of destruction’. . . .80

  A note by Elizabeth added, with suitable Rosicrucian cyphers, that the Hell Demon was to be honoured with the title of ‘HD’. This demon proved to be a useful all-purpose persona, for it featured prominently in more serious, melodramatic form in the collection of poetry by Shelley and Elizabeth, published anonymously and entitled Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire. The book appeared in September 1810, the month before Shelley went to Oxford.

  This was Shelley’s first poetical production: an entirely third-rate collection of bad gothic verses, sixteen pieces and a fragment in all. Among these were two verse epistles by Elizabeth; some half a dozen sentimental ‘Songs’ addressed by Shelley to Harriet Grove; translations from German and Italian material; a revolutionary declamation about Ireland; and Shelley’s imitation of Chatterton, ‘Ghasta; or the Avenging Demon!!!’ There was also a straight plagiarism from a horror-poem by Monk Lewis which led to the whole edition being pulped before the end of the year. No less than 1,500 copies of the book were printed in Worthing, and published in Pall Mall by John James Stockdale. It was again financed, according to Hogg, by Shelley’s grandfather, old Bysshe. The contents and style give a fair indication of Shelley’s imaginative development at the age of 18: he could not be called precocious. But the collection gave him a new sense of achieved identity, and he filled his letters to Graham with hard-headed professional remarks about ‘pouching’ the reviewers. Amazingly, two periodicals did actually notice it.[6]

  The longish ballad poem ‘Ghasta; or the Avenging Demon!!!’ contains many suggestive elements. In it Shelley first introduced the figure of the Wandering Jew, the cursed exile who is damned to eternal wandering over the earth. The exile figure already fascinated Shelley: the Jewishness seemed insignificant in itself, though the Jewish conception of God — the Jehovah figure — was already abhorrent to him. He was to write to his friend Hogg during a frantic exchange of letters over the winter vacation of 1810/11: ‘For the immoral “never to be able to die, never to escape from some shrine as chilling as the clay-formed dungeon which now it inhabits” is the future punishment I believe in.’ This was Shelley’s first conception of ‘the damned’. He also immediately clarified in the same letter what was the opposite, his conception of ‘the saved’: it was love. ‘Love, love infinite in extent, eternal in duration, yet (allowing your theory in that point) perfectible should be the reward.’81 The exile, the damned, is withdrawn from the central warmth of love into eternal and icy orbit; the saved, the justified, is for ever enclosed in its perfect stable glowing heart. It was the lesson of Field Place.

  ‘Ghasta’ also contained Shelley’s first poetical presentation of one of the ‘following figures’ who had appeared in the little anecdote retold by Hogg. The scene is a misty castle in a drear wilderness, a nightmare vision of Field Place. Along the ‘terrace’ a Hell Demon begins to accumulate:

  Light the cloud as summer fog,

  Which transient shuns the morning beam;

  Fleeting as the cloud on bog,

  That hangs or on the mountain stream. —

  Horror seized my shuddering brain,

  Horror dimmed my starting eye,

  In vain I tried to speak, — In vain

  My limbs essayed the spot to fly —

  At last the thin and shadowy form,

  With noiseless, trackless footsteps came, —

  Its light robe floated on the storm,

  Its head was bound with lambent flame.

  In chilling voice drear as the breeze

  Which sweeps along th’ autumnal ground,

  Which wanders thro’ the leafless trees,

  Or the mandrake’s groan which floats around.

  ‘Thou art mine and I am thine

  ’Till the sinking of the world,

  I am thine and thou are mine,

  ’Till in ruin death is hurled —

  Shelley’s passion for the rhythmic chanting alchemical formula shows well in the last verse. The Demon dissolves at dawn, but daylight gives the poet little peace, ‘melancholy seized my brain’, and when night returns, so does the horror:

  At last came night, ah! horrid hour,

  Ah! chilling time that wakes the dead,

  When demons ride the clouds that lower,

  — The phantom sat upon my bed.82

  This final picture may well account for the fact that Shelley wrote to Graham concerning the painter Henry Fuseli. Fuseli’s bedside vision of the ‘Nightmare’ is one of the signatures of the horror art of the period.

  Victor and Cazire demonstrated how the horror genre could be developed in different directions. Shelley’s Demons were never to prove intractable or rigid: on the contrary they adapted themselves to his interests and assimilated his intellectual developments with an almost sinister ease. In ‘The Irishman’s Song’, they showed signs of a dawning political dimension born of crude revolutionary sentiment:

  Our foes ride in triumph throughout our domains,

  And our mightiest heroes lie stretched on the plains.

  . . . the yelling ghosts ride on the blast that sweeps by,

  And ‘my countrymen! v
engeance!’ incessantly cry.83

  These are nothing less than the primitive ancestors of the fiends of Prometheus Unbound.

  Shelley enrolled for the Michaelmas term at University College, Oxford, in October 1810. Before he set out, his father Timothy gave him some worldly advice in the study with its pictures of Christ crucified and Vesuvius erupting. Tom Medwin happened to be present, and recorded: ‘He would provide for as many natural children as [Bysshe] chose to get, but that he would never forgive him for making a mésalliance.’84 Shelley, the romantic author of Zastrozzi, the demon-raiser and the Eton atheist, stared at his father with silent scorn. Father and son took the Oxford coach together, and when they arrived, Timothy made a special point of taking Shelley round to the leading bookseller, Slatter’s in the High. ‘My son here,’ said Timothy Shelley, ‘has a literary turn; he is already an author, and do pray indulge him in his printing freaks.’85

  [1] Timothy, as noted in the Introduction, forbade all biography, and the only substantial eye-witness accounts of Shelley’s early years at Field Place depend on two sources: a series of ten letters written by his younger sister Hellen between 1856 and 1857 when she was an ageing lady of 57; and the reminiscences of his cousin Tom Medwin first published in 1847, when also in his fifties. The one person who really understood Shelley’s childhood from the inside was his closest sister, Elizabeth. She died early, having remained under the paternal influence, and never broke her silence.

  [2]Dr Adam Walker, 1731–1821, was also the inventor of the patent empyreal air-stove, the patent celistina harpsichord, and the eidouranion or transparent orrery, a device for projecting an illuminated model of the solar system and the stars.

  [3] Among Shelley’s senior election was John Taylor Coleridge, who later savaged his character and poetry in an anonymous review in the Quarterly for April 1819. Taylor did not forget the upstart fag: ‘[Mr Shelley] speaks of his school as “a world of woes”, of his masters as “tyrants”, of his schoolfellows as “enemies”, — alas! what is this, but to bear evidence against himself? every one who knows what a public school ordinarily must be, will only trace in these lines the language of an insubordinate, a vain, a mortified spirit.’

  [4] This may be taken as a premonition of the mid-Victorian attitude to Shelley’s life which was glowingly propagated by Lady Jane Shelley in her Shelley Memorials: From Authentic Sources (1859), and much subsequent sentimentalizing scholarship down to Maurois’s Ariel (1924) which was originally intended as an ‘exorcism’. Its finest visual flower may be seen in Shelley’s marble monument at University College, Oxford: the recumbent statue, with bronze sea nymphs weeping below the plinth, is by E. Onslow Ford, 1894.

  [5]Dr Eustace Chesser’s analytic summary of the novel, though dogmatic and infected by some of Shelley’s own melodrama, is none the less worth bearing in mind. ‘Some introverts are cold and withdrawn, but Shelley is not of this type. His emotions are exceptionally violent. His hatred is passionate, almost murderous; his love is of unbearable intensity. . . . Shelley’s aggression is personified by his persecutor. Since both Zastrozzi and Verezzi are different aspects of Shelley, he is his own tormentor.’

  [6]The British Critic assumed the author was a lady, and left it at that. The Literary Panorama, October 1810, noted sympathetically: ‘Surely modern poets are the most unhappy of men! Their imaginations are perpetually haunted with terrors. . . . Can anything possibly be finer — that is, more terrific — that is — ahem! — than the following?’

  2. Oxford: 1810–11

  The bookshop of Slatter and Munday, with its wide bow display window, stood on one side of the Oxford High; nearly opposite on the other side of the street stood the gatehouse of University College. The college was one of Oxford’s most venerable foundations, dating from 1249, though its buildings — the first quadrangle, the hall and the chapel — all dated from the mid-seventeenth century. Walking under the vaulted gatehouse beneath the solicitous eyes of the lodge porter, and turning to his rooms in the south-west corner of the quad, Shelley was overwhelmed by the impression of entering the inner temple of an ecclesiastical institution, some grim Jacobean seminary for ancient clerics. His rooms, on the first floor, overlooked the trim green walks of Fellows’ Garden to the west, and on the other side the chapel across the quad to the east. The Master had recently spent several thousand pounds renovating the latter building, and it now boasted an extravagant gothic façade of buttresses, looming battlements and sportif pinnacles.1

  Into this stronghold of royalist tradition and prejudice, Shelley unloaded trunkloads of French philosophy, German horror novels, his solar microscope and several crates of chemical and electrical equipment, including a system of Voltaic batteries and a hand-cranked generator. A long battle instantly began with his scout, whose job it was to clean the apartment and to bring Shelley whatever light meals and domestic requirements he might need. But by the end of November it was clear that Shelley had permanently established his chaos of tangled ‘philosophic’ apparatus, broken crockery, expensive clothes flung in heaps, acid-burnt carpets, and across all available surfaces, including the floor, a permanent cascade of calf-bound quarto and folio volumes interspersed with the occasional blue-paper cover of the Minerva Press.

  The first impression of his undergraduate friend Hogg was never forgotten:

  Books, boots, papers, shoes, philosophical instruments, clothes, pistols, linen, crockery, ammunition, and phials innumerable, with money, stockings, prints, crucibles, bags, and boxes, were scattered on the floor in every place. . . . The tables, and especially the carpet, were already stained with large spots of various hues, which frequently proclaimed the agency of fire. An electrical machine, an air-pump, the galvanic trough, a solar microscope, and large glass jars and receivers, were conspicuous amidst the mass of matter. Upon the table by his side were some books lying open, several letters, a bundle of new pens, and a bottle of japan ink, that served as an ink stand; a piece of deal, lately part of the lid of a box, with many chips, and a handsome razor that had been used as a knife.2

  The only factor that kept this swelling pandemonium in bounds was not Shelley’s scout but the college system of double doors or ‘oaks’ which sealed off each set of rooms, both visibly and audibly, from the staircase and the outside world. Shelley recounted that on his second morning, after the scout had left and, according to custom, ‘sported the oak’ of the outer door, he had later run hurriedly out to the bookshop and precipitantly flinging open his first door in the dark, had bounded headlong into the second. Shelley observed acidly that the oak was the tree of knowledge.3

  The Michaelmas term of winter 1810 soon convinced Shelley that his first impressions of Oxford were representative. The Master and Fellows of his college were, of course, all clergymen, and the only intellectual distinction it could claim from past history was that Dr Johnson regularly used to spend the evening there with Sir Robert Chambers, Vinerian Professor of English Law, and Sir William Jones the orientalist, on which occasions he would personally consume three bottles of port. The undergraduates at University College still only numbered some 200 in Shelley’s time, and the total number in all three years at Oxford was well under 5,000, so it was a close-knit and somewhat claustrophobic society. Oxford had no Faculties of Science, and Shelley’s main requirements seem to have been to attend Chapel daily each morning, deliver a translation into Latin of an article from the Spectator once a week, and visit his tutor once a term. Personal academic supervision was minimal, and undergraduates, especially those from county backgrounds, were expected to do a good deal of private entertaining, take an active part in the drinking, sporting and whoring life of the city, and to do a little light general reading among the Greek and Latin classics. Particularly during the years of the Napoleonic Wars, and more than a decade before the growth of such remarkable institutions as ‘The Apostles’ at Cambridge, where young writers such as Tennyson and Richard Monckton Milnes could gather, the intellectual life of the universities
was virtually dormant. Hogg remembered Shelley returning mournfully from one of his early tutorials:

  They are very dull people here. . . . A little man sent for me this morning, and told me in an almost inaudible whisper that I must read; ‘you must read’ he said many times in his small voice. I answered that I had no objection. He persisted. . . . ‘Must I read Euclid?’ I asked sorrowfully. ‘Yes, certainly; and when you have read the Greek works I have mentioned, you must begin Aristotle’s Ethics; and then you may go on to his other treatises. It is of the utmost importance to be well acquainted with Aristotle.’ This he repeated so often that I was quite tired, and at last I said ‘Must I care about Aristotle? What if I do not mind Aristotle?’ I then left him, for he seemed to be in great perplexity.4

  For Shelley, intoxicated by the freedom which the university gave in comparison to Eton, and yet suffocated by the atmosphere of entrenched, comfortable, and venal clerical auctoritas, Oxford rapidly took shape in his mind as a personal challenge, a fortress of superstition and mediocrity, which required above all rousing from its antiquated slumbers; it had to be outraged by sheer excess of behaviour, and taken by a dazzling intellectual storm. It was a Bastille of the spirit, and he had arrived in person to open its gates.