Shelley: The Pursuit

by Richard Holmes

  With the coming of September, the golden chain of summer days began to dissolve, and the atmosphere seemed to grow chilly in Albion House. Mary noted that the lowered declination of the sun prevented it from reaching over the roof into the garden, and the rooms seemed to become perpetually dark and damp. Later she discovered that all Shelley’s books in the library had gathered a sinister blue mould.23 Her child was born on the 2nd, and though both mother and baby remained well, Mary was constantly troubled by inability to provide sufficient milk. She knew that Shelley would not consider a wet-nurse, and the child had constant upsets from attempts to feed it cow’s milk. Shelley struggled on to finish his poem, but he could no longer spend the day comfortably outside, and he began to feel ill again, and now his chest especially troubled him. His new daughter did not move him as the birth of little William had done. He wrote archly to Byron: ‘Since I wrote to you last, Mary has presented me with a little girl. We call it Clara. Little Alba and William, who are fast friends, and amuse themselves with talking a most unintelligible language together, are dreadfully puzzled by the stranger, whom they consider very stupid for not coming to play with them on the floor.’24 With a great effort, Shelley pushed Laon and Cythna to a conclusion on 20 September. He wrote a dedication ‘To Mary’ —

  So now my summer task is ended, Mary,

  And I return to thee, mine own heart’s home;

  As to his Queen some victor Knight of Faëry,

  Earning bright spoils for her enchanted dome . . . .25

  But far from returning to his ‘heart’s home’, Shelley immediately left for London, arriving with Claire at Hunt’s on the evening of the 23rd. Suddenly he was immersed in business: correcting the proofs of Frankenstein, negotiating the publication of his poem with Ollier, and dealing with debts which had been growing ominously at Longdill’s office. Once again he put himself under the treatment of Sir William Lawrence. His health was in a ‘miserable state’ and he gloomily told Mary that he was consumptive and sometimes feared that he would die during the coming winter. His separation from Mary was to last, apart from fleeting weekend visits, for almost the whole of the rest of September and October, and was to worry her into a state of irritation and nervous anxiety reminiscent of the separation of 1815.

  Shelley’s sudden plunge into the gloom and despondency of September was caused by the sense of circumstances closing around him once more. There were his debts; the responsibility of Alba and Mary’s complaints about Claire which had increased since the birth of her own little Clara; and the collapse of his health in the autumnal damps of Albion House. A mood of martyrdom and self-sacrifice assailed him, and writing to Byron from Hunt’s new address in Paddington, he described the future of Laon and Cythna with lurid relish. ‘I have been engaged this summer, heart and soul, in one pursuit. I have completed a poem . . . in the style and for the same object as “Queen Mab”, but interwoven with a story of human passion . . . . It is to be published — for I am not of your opinion as to religion, etc, and for this simple reason, that I am careless of the consequences as they regard myself. I only feel persecution bitterly, because I bitterly lament the depravity and mistake of those who persecute. As to me, I can but die; I can but be torn to pieces, or devoted to infamy most undeserved . . . .’26

  Shelley now decided that the house at Marlow could never be their permanent home. This was to be a momentous decision. By the end of September, he was already advertising the lease for sale, and asking Mary to decide between wintering in Italy or somewhere on the Kent coast. Mary was aware that details of their financial difficulties were being kept from her, and when Claire returned from London without Shelley, Mary cross-questioned her. Afterwards she wrote anxiously to Shelley, ‘whether it might be that [Claire] was in a croaking humour (in ill spirits she certainly was) or whether she represented things as they really were I know not but certainly affairs did not seem to wear a very good face — She talks of Harriet’s debts to a large amount & something about Longdill’s having undertaken for them so that they must be payed — She mentioned also that you were entering into a post-obit transaction . . . .’27

  In other letters to Shelley she urged him in turn to come to a decision about Italy, and in the meantime badgered him with domestic requests, telling him to get his hair cut, and demanding his immediate return to Marlow. Mary in her domestic mood is well illustrated by her instructions concerning a hat for William. ‘I wish Willy to be my companion in my future walks — to further which plan will you send down if possible by Monday’s coach (and if you go to Longdill’s it will be very possible — for you can buy it at the corner of Southampton buildings and send it to the coach at the Old Bailey) a seal skin fur hat for him it must be a fashionable round shape for a boy mention particularly and have a narrow gold riband round it, that it may be taken in if too large; it must measure [blank] round & let it rather be too large than too small — but exactly the thing would be best — He cannot walk with me until it comes . . . .’ Several paragraphs later, she cancels the whole request, ‘as it may not fit him or please me’.28 This nagging, carping side of Mary’s personality gradually emerged through her craving for complete emotional security, which Shelley’s temperament could never satisfy.

  From trivial complaints about Peacock ‘drinking his bottle’, and Claire’s moods, and her own depressions with the children she turned increasingly to his own lack of efficiency and decision. On 2 October her letter began, ‘My dear Love, Your letter received per parcel tonight was very unsatisfactory. You decide nothing and tell me nothing. — You say — “the Chancery expenses must be paid” but you do not say whether our going to Italy would obviate this necessity.’29

  Shelley wrote back four days later, with a variety of explanations. ‘We must go to Italy, on every ground. This weather does me great mischief. I nurse myself, & these kind people [the Hunts] nurse me with great care. I think of you my own beloved & study the minutest things relative to my health. I suffer today under a violent bowel complaint attended with pain in the side which I daresay will relieve me but which prevents me today from going out at all. I have thus put off engagements with Longdill & Godwin which must be done tomorrow. I have borrowed £250 from Horace Smith which is now at my bankers.’30 Mary answered this briskly by return of post, remarking that she could not understand his complaints about the weather since she had ‘seldom known any more pleasant’. She was not impressed by Horace Smith’s timely loan. ‘Your account of our expenses is by very much too favourable. You say that you have only borrowed £250 — our debts at Marlow are greater than you are aware of besides living in the mean time and articles of dress that I must buy — Now we cannot hope to sell the house for £1200 — And to think of going abroad with only about £200 would be madness . . . .’ She ended her note affectionately, but to the point. ‘Adieu my own love — Get rid of that nasty side ache — You will tell me the Italian sun will be the best physician — be it so — but money money . . . .’31

  To these frictions, as the month dragged on, were added Godwin’s request for cash in London, and a swelling number of local creditors who started calling at Albion House demanding bills rendered. The news of the house sale had quickly got about. Some time about 15 October Shelley was actually arrested for debt and detained for two days on the instance of his father and his old ally of the Irish days, Captain Pilfold. Sir Timothy’s solicitor Whitton estimated Shelley’s debts in this affair alone at some £1,500.32

  But despite everything, Shelley pushed firmly ahead with his own literary projects. His main effort was still concentrated on finding Laon and Cythna a publisher. But he also found time to draft the beginning of an eclogue, to be called Rosalind and Helen, based on Mary’s relationship with her old Scottish schoolfriend Isabel Baxter. The poem is weak, and Shelley only forced himself to finish it at Mary’s request the following year, at the Bagni di Lucca. It is based on two stories told respectively by two sisters, Rosalind and Helen, which combine many of the private and public is
sues facing Shelley during 1817, and cover sketchily much of the material handled with infinitely greater skill and perception in Laon and Cythna. Rosalind’s story concerns an incestuous love-match, and a tyrannical father; Helen’s story narrates the tribulations of a family life destroyed by her husband Lionel’s political persecution. The emphasis on exile is also notable, and the two sisters meet each other at the beginning of the poem on the banks-of Lake Como, where Shelley was to search for a house in spring 1818.

  Lionel, like Laon, reflects Shelley’s own ambitions for radical political leadership, and his own state of spiritual exile. Crude as the workmanship is, frequently descending to a kind of fumbling sub-Skeltonic doggerel, it shows something of the way in which Shelley now saw his role as a writer. Lionel attacked the conventions and superstitions of ‘the priests’ in verses ‘wild and queer’:

  So this grew a proverb: ‘Don’t get old

  Till Lionel’s “Banquet in Hell” you hear,

  And then you will laugh yourself young again.’

  So the priests hated him, and he

  Repaid their hate with cheerful glee.

  Frustrated by the collapse of political hopes, Lionel became

  A spirit of unresting flame,

  Which goaded him in his distress

  Over the world’s vast wilderness.33

  The single important thing about this minor work, was the creative pattern it established in Shelley’s mind of repeating a theme from one of the public ‘visionary’ poems, in a second, more intimate, ‘domestic’ poem. Thus Laon and Cythna and Rosalind and Helen are not unlike parallel texts. Many of his Italian poems were later to be paired in this way.

  Of Laon and Cythna itself Shelley wrote a clear descriptive letter to Longmans, enclosing the first four sheets — 64 pages — which he had had set up in print, in the hope of catching the attention of Longmans’ chief reader, Thomas Moore. ‘The scene is supposed to be laid in Constantinople & modern Greece, but . . . it is in fact a tale illustrative of such a Revolution as might be supposed to take place in an European nation . . . . It is a Revolution of this kind, that is, the beau ideal as it were of the French Revolution, but produced by the influence of individual genius, and out of general knowledge. The authors of it are supposed to be my hero & heroine whose names appear in the title.’34

  Shelley was careful to make no reference to the incestuous relationship between Laon and Cythna; but in a prose preface he wrote that the introduction of the theme of incest ‘was intended to startle the reader from the trance of ordinary life. It was my object to break through the crust of those outworn opinions on which established institutions depend.’35 It was a straight case of épater les bourgeois, and illustrated well what was implied by Lionel who ‘repaid their hate with cheerful glee’.

  In the last week of October, Shelley came down to spend several days at Albion House, bringing with him Walter Coulson, as a weekend guest. Coulson was a protégé of Jeremy Bentham’s, and a journalist of the liberal-intellectual wing. His presence, with his enthusiastic and encyclopaedic talk, eased the atmosphere, and after his return to London Shelley spent a quiet final week with Mary and Claire and the children, ‘writing, reading and walking’ and dictating to Mary a rough translation of a piece of Spinoza.36

  The preface to Laon and Cythna, was now completed; although it is only 3,000 words long, it touches many essential matters, and it shows that behind the sustained and perhaps overdrawn creative effort of the summer, an intense critical process had been at work. It represents the first emergence of his mature thought as a writer, and contains the seed of nearly all the literary arguments he was later to develop in his separate essays.

  His description of his own education as a poet, while being a remarkable statement of the Romantic position, is also interesting for its emphasis on physical experience and travel.

  There is an education peculiarly fitted for a Poet, without which genius and sensibility can hardly fill the circle of their capacities . . . . The circumstances of my accidental education have been favourable to this ambition. I have been familiar from boyhood with mountains and lakes and the sea, and the solitude of forests: Danger, which sports upon the brink of precipices, has been my playmate. I have trodden the glaciers of the Alps, and lived under the eye of Mont Blanc. I have been a wanderer among distant fields. I have sailed down mighty rivers, and seen the sun rise and set, and the stars come forth, whilst I have sailed night and day down a rapid stream among mountains. I have seen populous cities, and have watched the passions which rise and spread, and sink and change, amongst assembled multitudes of men. I have seen the theatre of the more visible ravages of tyranny and war; cities and villages reduced to scattered groups of black and roofless houses, and the naked inhabitants sitting famished upon their desolate thresholds. I have conversed with living men of genius. The poetry of ancient Greece and Rome, and modern Italy, and our own country, has been to me, like external nature, a passion and an enjoyment. Such are the sources from which the materials for the imagery of my Poem have been drawn. I have considered Poetry in its most comprehensive sense; and have read the Poets and the Historians and the Metaphysicians whose writings have been accessible to me, and have looked upon the beautiful and majestic scenery of the earth, as common sources of those elements which it is the province of the Poet to embody and combine . . . . How far I shall be found to possess that more essential attribute of Poetry, the power of awakening in others sensations like those which animate my own bosom, is that which, to speak sincerely, I know not . . . .37

  Most striking about this affirmation is its sweeping, measured, prose reminiscent of the authorised version of the Bible; and its quality of dauntless dignity containing neither self-aggrandisement or self-pity. It has an almost heroic note. The quality of confidence, and the old missionary note of Queen Mab,[5] is repeated and amplified, in Shelley’s declaration of intent, about writing ‘in the cause of liberal and comprehensive morality’.

  I have made no attempt to recommend the motives which I would substitute for those at present governing mankind, by methodical and systematic argument. I would only awaken the feelings, so that the reader should see the beauty of true virtue, and be incited to those inquiries which have led to my moral and political creed, and that of some of the sublimest intellects in the world. The Poem therefore (with the exception of the first canto, which is purely introductory) is narrative, not didactic. It is a succession of pictures illustrating the growth and progress of individual mind aspiring after excellence, and devoted to the love of mankind . . . .38

  From 1817 onwards Shelley relied more frequently than before on prose to advance the ‘methodical and systematic argument’ for altering the present government of mankind.

  Finally, in his preface, Shelley tried to make some overall assessment of the social, political and spiritual climate in which he now wrote. His assessment is essentially post-Godwinian. His analysis shows strongly the influence of discussions with Byron in 1816, and Hunt and Peacock and to some extent Hazlitt in 1817. It is not only historically mature, but we can now see that it was also extremely perceptive.

  . . . those who now live have survived an age of despair.

  The French Revolution may be considered as one of those manifestations of a general state of feeling among civilised mankind produced by a defect of correspondence between the knowledge existing in society and the improvement or gradual abolition of political institutions. The year 1788 may be assumed as the epoch of one of the most important crises produced by this feeling . . . . The revulsion occasioned by the atrocities of the demagogues, and the re-establishment of successive tyrannies in France, was terrible, and felt in the remotest corner of the civilised world. Could they listen to the plea of reason who had groaned under the calamities of a social state according to the provisions of which one man riots in luxury whilst another famishes for want of bread? Can he who the day before was a trampled slave suddenly become liberal-minded, forbearing, and independe
nt? This is the consequence of the habits of a state of society to be produced by resolute perseverance and indefatigable hope, and long-suffering and long-believing courage, and the systematic efforts of generations of men of intellect and virtue.

  Such is the lesson which experience teaches us now. But, on the first reverses of hope in the progress of French liberty, the sanguine eagerness for good overleaped the solution of these questions, and for a time extinguished itself in the unexpectedness of their result. Thus, many of the most ardent and tenderhearted of the worshippers of public good have been morally ruined by what a partial glimpse of the events they deplored appeared to show as the melancholy desolation of all their cherished hopes. Hence gloom and misanthropy have become the characteristics of an age in which we live, the solace of a disappointment that unconsciously finds relief only in the wilful exaggeration of its own despair. This influence has tainted the literature of the age with the hopelessness of the minds from which it flows. Metaphysics, and enquiries into moral and political science, have become little else than vain attempts to revive exploded superstitions, or sophisms like those of Mr Malthus, calculated to lull the oppressors of mankind into a security of everlasting triumph. Our works of fiction and poetry have been overshadowed by the same infectious gloom. But mankind appear to me to be emerging from their trance. I am aware, methinks, of a slow, gradual, silent change. In that belief I have composed the following Poem.39

  On 2 November Shelley returned alone to London, and on the 8th he took temporary lodgings for a month at 19 Mabledon Place, off the Euston Road, where Mary joined him, leaving the children with Claire at Marlow. Mary and Shelley were now both busy in the task of supervising their respective works for publication. For the fortnight that Mary remained much time was spent dining and taking tea with the publishers Ollier and Hookham; and also with the Godwins, the Hunts and the Baxters. There was one visit to Mabledon Place on the 18th from Keats and Walter Coulson. After the 19th, the guard changed, and Mary returned to Marlow while Claire came up to London; she and Shelley dined together at the Godwins on the 24th.