Shelley: The Pursuit

by Richard Holmes

  The Christmas Day letter, where one first becomes aware of Shelley grappling with contemporary political issues on any extended scale, in fact commences as a discussion of Southey, whom he had just met after ‘contemplating the outisde of his house’ for several days.

  I have also been much engaged in talking to Southey. You may conjecture that a man must possess high and estimable qualities, if with the prejudice of such total difference from my sentiments I can regard him great and worthy. — In fact Southey is an advocate of liberty and equality; he looks forward to a state when all shall be perfected, and matter become subjected to the omnipotence of mind; but he is now an advocate for existing establishments. . . . Southey hates the Irish, he speaks against Catholic Emancipation, & Parliamentary reform. In all these things we differ, & our differences were the subject of a long conversation. . . . But Southey tho’ far from being a man of great reasoning powers is a great Man. He has all that characterizes the poet — great eloquence though obstinacy in opinion which arguments are the last things that can shake. He is a man of virtue, he never will belie what he thinks. His professions are in strict compatibility with his practice.45

  Shelley was later to reverse the end part of this appraisal, but not at once, and not before Southey had had a considerable effect upon him.[6]

  Southey was at this time, as he says, a man of 37, living at Greta Hall, originally Coleridge’s house, with his wife, Mrs Coleridge and her three children, and the wife of the poet Robert Lovell. All three ladies were sisters: Edith, Sara and Mary Fricker. Southey supported all these by journalism in the Tory periodicals,46 and by writing voluminous biographies and histories, the most lasting of which has been his Life of Nelson. Southey was acutely aware of the serious condition of the social question in England, and wrote at length on issues such as Poor Law relief, unemployment, national education and Luddism. Though his opinions were, as Shelley already knew, quite different from his own, Southey was better informed on these issues than anyone Shelley had met before. The long conversations Shelley had with him gave his own vague ideological loyalties to ‘liberty’ and egalitarianism a new clarity and immediacy. They also led, inevitably, to a break with Southey himself. Poetically though, Southey was to remain an influence on Shelley, and The Curse of Kehama (1810), especially, was to be one of the primary sources for the long poem Shelley was beginning to contemplate.

  Seven days after the Christmas letter, Shelley was still reporting long, though somewhat one-sided conversations with Southey; one-sided on Shelley’s side. Southey ‘says I ought not to call myself an Atheist, since in reality I believe that the Universe is God. — I tell him I believe that God is another signification for the Universe. — I then explain — ’ Southey was then treated to a description of Shelley’s view of the universe. ‘Southey agrees in my idea of the Deity, the mass of infinite intelligence. I, you, & he are constituent parts of this immeasurable whole.’47 Shelley was to make this idea — a development of the eighteenth-century ‘Great Chain of Being’ — central to his long poem. It was at this point that Southey tried to put Shelley on to ‘a course of Berkeley’, the great Idealist philosopher.48 This may have caught Shelley’s attention; at any rate he was given the run of Southey’s library.

  Southey helped to strengthen the link between Shelley’s religious and social criticism. ‘Southey is no believer in original sin: he thinks that which appears to be a taint of our nature is in effect the result of unnatural political institutions — there we agree — he thinks the prejudices of education and sinister influence of political institutions adequate to account for all Specimens of vice which have fallen within his observation.’49 Thus Shelley was firmly across the bridge travelled by most of the confirmed radicals of the period: they saw atheism or at least ‘Deism’ as the precondition for social reform. Only if human nature was freed from the religious definition of its potential, freed from all concepts of its ‘fallen’ or ‘subjected’ state, did it become genuinely open to political and social improvement. God’s Will could no longer be used to justify the ways of Man to men. Finally, it was Southey who recommended that he write to James Montgomery, the radical poet and editor of the Sheffield Iris, about political pamphleteering; and Southey who reminded him — he may not have known before — that William Godwin was still alive, and working in London.

  This last piece of news filled Shelley with ‘inconceivable emotions’, and he decided at once to write to the philosopher. Very soon the false prophet would be abandoned for the true, and Shelley would refer with disgust to Southey, as previously he had written with delight. By 16 January he had read a piece of Southey’s heavy Tory time-serving in the Edinburgh Annual Register and was already describing him to Miss Hitchener as a ‘hateful prostitution of talents’.50 To Godwin he was to write dismissively: ‘Southey the Poet whose principles were pure & elevated once, is now the servile champion of every abuse and absurdity. — I have had much conversation with him. He says “You will think as I do when you are as old.” I do not feel the least disposition to be Mr S’s proselyte.’51 The swiftness and violence of this reaction might have warned Godwin of what was eventually in store for him too.

  Southey never met Shelley again, but he does not drop out of Shelley’s life. What Southey had written about meeting himself was true: the young idealist who wrote Wat Tyler and planned a Utopian community on the banks of the Susquehannah with Coleridge, had indeed been a kind of previous Shelley.[7]

  Equally, Shelley was haunted by Southey as an image of what he might himself come to in his middle age, surrounded by domestic commitments and forced to make some kind of compromise with society. Southey in turn felt some degree of reproach from this vision of his younger self, and turned away in comfortable clichés, unable to face it. Shelley for his part could not accept that Southey’s ‘apostacy’, his revulsion from the revolutionary principles in 1797, was part of the revulsion and shattering disappointment of a whole generation, a bitter historical fact, which had very little to do with ‘corruption’ or middle-aged hypocrisy. That he was at least aware of the historical problem is shown by his planning at this time a novel designed to ‘exhibit the cause of the failure of the French Revolution’.52 But it was typical of him that he would not let this moderate in any way his sudden sweeping condemnation of Southey. The novel, entitled ‘Hubert Cauvin’, never materialized; but the problem recurs in Shelley’s writing. Thus the two faced each other, and bitter unretractable words passed between them. When Shelley left Keswick he passed by Greta Hall ‘without a sting’ of regret, but years later, in Italy, Southey rose up again in Shelley’s life, and stood in his turn like an accusing ghost. In its own way, though by no means the most influential, it was one of the most significant confrontations in Shelley’s whole life.

  Shelley’s lights were now beamed on Godwin. On 3 January he wrote his famous letter of philosophic introduction.

  You will be surprised at hearing from a stranger. . . . The name of Godwin has been used to excite in me feelings of reverence and admiration, I have been accustomed to consider him a luminary too dazzling for the darkness which surrounds him; and from the earliest period of my knowledge of his principles I have ardently desired to share on the footing of intimacy that intellect which I have delighted to contemplate in its emanations. . . . I am young — I am ardent in the cause of philanthropy and truth, do not suppose that this is vanity. I am not conscious that it influences this portraiture. I imagine myself dispassionately describing the state of my mind. I am young — you have gone before me, I doubt not are a veteran to me in the years of persecution — is it strange that defying prejudice as I have done, I should outstep the limits of custom’s prescription, and endeavour to make my desire useful by a friendship with William Godwin. . . . I am convinced I could represent myself to you in such terms as not to be thought wholly unworthy of your friendship. At least if desire for universal happiness has any claim upon your preference that desire I can exhibit. — Adieu. I shall earnestly awai
t your answer.53

  In writing thus out of the blue to William Godwin, Shelley decided to adopt the ‘Godwinian style’ of discourse, in which all sentiments are considered and expressed as impersonal and objective facts according to the universal principles of Reason. The final effect of this style is a curious kind of vertigo, as if Shelley was looking down at himself from a very great height, and yet was all the time fearful of falling. Godwin, who doubtless recognized this tribute to his own manner in Political Justice, wrote back at once, but complained with some justification, that Shelley’s letter was too ‘generalizing’ in character. Shelley then sent a second, more autobiographical letter on 10 January.

  The ‘Godwinian style’ nevertheless remained to infect much of Shelley’s correspondence for the next three or four years, making him at times almost unreadably periphrastic. Most dangerously, the style gave Shelley a temporary substitute for precisely that quality which Coleridge noted that he lacked: that ‘plane whereon to stand, and look down upon his own mind’.

  Shelley’s second letter to Godwin has often been understood as the classic inside description of his own childhood, and in particular of Shelley’s development from Gothic adolescence to Godwinian maturity.

  I was haunted with a passion for the wildest and most extravagant romances: ancient books of Chemistry and Magic were perused with an enthusiasm of wonder almost amounting to belief. . . . From a reader I became a writer of Romances; before the age of seventeen I had published two ‘St Irvyne’ and ‘Zastrozzi’ each of which tho quite uncharacteristic of me as I now am, yet serve to mark the state of my mind at the period of their composition. . . . It is now a period of more than two years since first I saw your inestimable book on ‘Political Justice’; it opened to my mind fresh & more extensive views, it materially influenced my character, and I rose from its perusal a wiser and a better man. — I was no longer a votary of Romance; till then I had existed in an ideal world; now I found that in this universe of ours was enough to excite the interest of the heart, enough to employ the discussions of Reason. I beheld in short that I had duties to perform.54

  But this is really a description of what had happened to Shelley’s mind only very recently, since his elopement, and especially since coming to Keswick. That is, it was a description of what Shelley wanted Godwin to think had happened to his mind. Yet in truth, the shedding of Gothic shadows and the putting on of luminous Reason was not to be accomplished so easily in one of Shelley’s temperament.

  The autobiographical letter has quite another interest. For what is perhaps most remarkable about it, as a piece of serious self-description by a 19-year-old, is the number of facts that are distorted or embellished. Shelley says he published his romances ‘before the age of seventeen’; actually he published Zastrozzi three months after his seventeenth birthday (November 1810), and St Irvyne at Oxford when he was 18. He says he first saw Political Justice ‘more than two years since’ and implies that it ‘materially’ influenced him from that date. Actually the first time there is any solid evidence that he read the book is when he ordered it from Stockdale at Oxford on 19 November 1810, and references to Godwin remain very slight,55 before the development of the Hitchener correspondence in the summer of 1811. Even then, the main point of remark is the ‘Godwinian’ anti-matrimonial system.

  Later in the letter Shelley says he was ‘twice expelled’ from Eton. There is no evidence for this dramatic occurrence, though it is possible his ‘feverish illness’ related to a threat of expulsion on one occasion. Over his Oxford expulsion, he says, ‘It was never my intention to deny’ the ‘Atheism’ pamphlet; yet as we have seen, he took great care that it should remain anonymous, and probably ruined his own case by refusing to come out with an open avowal of his authorship. To Godwin he implies strongly that he was expelled for the reverse, for ‘refusing’ to deny authorship.

  At the end of the letter Shelley again resurrects the story that his father had wanted to kill him off in the Peninsular War, but with a different twist: ‘He wished to induce me by poverty to accept of some commission in a distant regiment, and in the interim of my absence to prosecute the pamphlet that a process of outlawry might make the estate on his death devolve on my younger brother.’ Again there is no evidence at all for this, and the most that can be said is that immediately on hearing news of Shelley’s elopement, Timothy consulted with his solicitor Whitton and may, among other things, have looked into the possibility of disinheriting his son, though he could not do this by law, since the estate was entailed.56

  Finally Shelley gives a strong general impression of an utterly subjugated childhood: ‘Passive obedience was inculcated and enforced in my childhood: I was required to love because it was my duty to love.’ Again, this does not fit the facts of his Field Place upbringing, as we now know them, though it is consistent with Shelley’s mythical interpretation of them. These are all small points, but together they show that at the very time when Shelley was attempting to be most rational and Godwinian in his self-description, he was shifting and remoulding the image of himself to fit a preconceived picture of how he felt he ought to be. A good deal of this remoulding can be accounted for by Shelley’s enthusiastic wish to prove himself as a true pupil of Godwin’s: the shifting of the dates, the background of persecution. But one concludes on this and other occasions that Shelley could be very unscrupulous in adjusting the truth when the need arose. What is most disturbing is that it is difficult to tell how far Shelley really realized — or admitted to himself — what he was doing.

  This second letter was a success with Godwin, and Shelley was soon engaged in a rapid philosophic correspondence, occasionally interjected by frissons of pure delight: ‘that William Godwin should have a “deep and earnest interest in my welfare” cannot but produce the most intoxicating sensations’,57 as he wrote back. Godwin’s first move, it seems, was to try to discourage Shelley from any premature publication, or worse, from any political activity. He urged him to proceed with due philosophical calm and modesty. It was one of the fundamental principles of Political Justice that change was not to be brought about by active political association or campaigning, but by the process of reading, reasoning and discussion carried on by a broad front of the intelligentsia, and carried on peacefully and privately. Godwin also reasoned with Shelley over his hardened attitude towards his father, quickly realizing that Shelley would in every way be less useful to himself and to others if he forfeited his inheritance.

  Shelley’s reply, in which he conceded a good deal, is interesting. ‘You mistake me if you think that I am angry with my father, I have ever been desirous of a reconciliation with him, but the price which he demands for it is a renunciation of my opinions. . . . It is probable that my father has acted for my welfare, but the manner in which he has done so will not allow me to suppose that he has felt for it, unconnectedly with certain considerations of birth; and feeling for these things was not feeling for me.’58 This emphasis on Timothy’s failure of feeling for him, on his failure of love, is extremely revealing. Beside this omission, Shelley seems to be admitting, all Timothy’s ‘tyrannical’ actions pale into insignificance. It was the crucial, unforgivable failure of fatherly love that really counted. Shelley’s next remark to Godwin immediately reflects this: ‘I never loved my father; it is not from hardness of heart for I have loved, and I do love warmly.’59

  In this opening phase of the correspondence, in which Shelley wrote four letters from Keswick, he respectfully took issue with Godwin over his own desire to proselytize, though he assured him that he hoped ‘in the course of our communication to acquire that sobriety of spirit which is the characteristic of true heroism’; adding with a sententiousness that might have warned Godwin, ‘I have not heard without benefit that Newton was a modest man.’60

  Sobriety of spirit was not exactly what Shelley had immediately in mind. He and Harriet had been busy planning the trip to Dublin. It was not to be a pleasure trip, but was intended to be a serious and indeed possi
bly dangerous propaganda campaign. ‘We go principally to forward as much as we can the Catholic Emancipation.’61 The idea had grown since December, when Ireland had seemed to be a good place to publish Shelley’s collection of poems in the cause of liberty. On 16 January Shelley was busy writing a pamphlet on Catholic Emancipation which he planned to distribute in the capital. This now absorbed his interest rather than the novel ‘Hubert Cauvin’, which was thrown aside, and the collection of metaphysical essays he had been tinkering with in December. The as yet unnamed long poem was again postponed. The pamphlet eventually became An Address to the Irish People, a rather disorganized popular tract of some 12,000 words, with sceptical ideas drawn from Hume, and spruced with punchy political formulations taken from Tom Paine’s propaganda masterpiece The Rights of Man. Shelley’s recent reading also showed up in echoes of Political Justice and Holbach’s Système de la Nature. General information on the Irish background Shelley culled from the published speeches of John Philpot Curran, a fiery Irish lawyer who had defended Wolfe Tone, Hamilton Rowan and Peter Finnerty in the courts.62 Some of his more striking passages Shelley cleverly incorporated, though without acknowledgement.

  Beside this pamphlet and the poems, Shelley was also preparing a broadside ballad for sticking on walls and pinning up in meeting-halls, after the propaganda methods of Paine. This was called ‘The Devil’s Walk’, admiringly plagiarized from Coleridge’s ‘The Devil’s Thoughts’.[8] It described a natty beau-monde Devil who takes a stroll to review the activities of his faithful servants in the earthly metropolis: the politicians, lawyers and courtiers in London. This was the first notable time that Shelley used the Devil as his satirical protagonist, a poetic role that eventually bordered on a strange kind of self-identification. For the time being the verse was very rough and ready stuff, unevenly handled and lacking sufficient striking power, but some of the images have a lively presence: