Shelley: The Pursuit (15 page)

Timothy then laid down two proposals; that Shelley should go at once to Field Place and should be placed under the care of such tutors as Timothy felt were suitable. This was to be the basis of a reconciliation between them. Otherwise, Timothy wrote sternly: ‘I am resolved to withdraw myself from you, and leave you to the punishment and misery that belongs to the wicked pursuit of an opinion so diabolical and wicked as that which you have dared to declare, if you shall not accept the proposals I shall go home on Thursday — I am, your affectionate and most afflicted father, T. Shelley.’
⁶⁶

Shelley’s reaction to this letter was bitterly contemptuous. He instantly wrote a note in which he dismissed Timothy’s peace formula: ‘I feel it my Duty altho’ it gives me pain to wound the Sense of Duty to your own character to that of your family & your feelings as a Christian decidedly to refuse my assent to both the Proposals in your letter . . . .’
⁶⁷
The flippancy of this reply, and the deliberately insulting sarcasm tell us a good deal about Shelley’s state of mind. Undoubtedly he was deeply wounded by Timothy’s threat to ‘withdraw’ himself — a threat far more disturbing for him than any persecution — and reacted with blind desire to hurt in return. Though he wrote in the language of one gentleman coolly insulting another, his feelings were those of a child betrayed. He was quite deaf to the note of entreaty in his father’s painful defence of his own motives.

But most damaging of all, Shelley was too young and too self-absorbed to realize that Timothy’s letter was the product of a man desperately unsure of himself. It was partly personal uncertainty, torn between anger and disappointment for his son; but much more it was social uncertainty. Timothy was fearful of the social effects of such a disgrace. At the centre of Timothy’s feelings lay the terror of the social
arriviste
who dreads compromising his standing in the society of his peers and his overlords. The emphasis on Duty, especially the duty to his family, the duty as a
respectable
Christian, all indicate the presence of this pressure. But Shelley could see no more than theological hypocrisy and paternal treachery; while Timothy could see no more than a spoilt and over-confident son dragging the whole family into social disgrace. So they were content to wound each other in the dark.

Four days later, Shelley, marginally calmed by the reasonableness of Hogg’s father’s reaction, allowed himself to be talked into submitting his own set of ‘peace proposals’ to Timothy. These included an immediate return to Field Place, and a promise to make certain apologies and refrain from further publications. But he boldly insisted on ‘unrestrained correspondence’, and announced that ‘Mr P.B. Shelley may be permitted to select the situation in life, which may be consonant with his intentions, to which he may judge his abilities adequate.’
⁶⁸

The deliberate condescension in the tone only infuriated Timothy further, and hid from him Shelley’s attempt at a gesture of goodwill. He had by this time learnt from his solicitor Whitton that a public prosecution of
The Necessity of Atheism
was possible and even likely, for blasphemous libel, and his fear of the social stigma now carried the day. He made the fatal mistake of putting all further communications with Shelley through the intermediary of the solicitor, ‘to guard my character and honour in case of any prosecutions in the courts’.
⁶⁹
Whitton was a sententious high Tory, narrowly legalistic in outlook, easily offended and totally unable to comprehend how Shelley’s mind worked.
Timothy’s appointment of him as intermediary thus put a hopeless barrier between father and son, preparing for an endless fund of misunderstanding and mutual recrimination to be built up. It was a fatal mistake, and one made primarily from fear.

Shelley reacted to this news, on 17 April, with renewed violence. He now felt utterly betrayed by his father, and struck back with an overwhelming desire to cause pain in return. Hogg had agreed to return to his own paternal roof, and left London the same day, thus leaving Shelley unsupported and unrestrained. He dashed off a note to Whitton from his Poland Street sitting-room, announcing that he intended to resign his claim to the family inheritance of Sir Bysshe Shelley’s property, and accept a £2,000 annuity if the remainder should be broken up ‘equally with my sisters and my mother’.
⁷⁰
When the news reached his father on 22 April — Whitton had attempted to forestall it — Timothy wrote back to his solicitor with profound dismay. ‘I never felt such a shock in my life, infinitely more than when I heard of his expulsion.’
⁷¹
Shelley had instinctively struck at his father’s most sensitive point: the ambition, inherited from grandfather to father, to secure the family name in the undivided and orderly inheritance from generation to generation of a solid body of English landed estates.

This marked, more really than the expulsion from Oxford, Shelley’s first significant step in the process of self-exile which came to dominate much of his life. Perhaps characteristically, the gesture had at its core a gratuitous violence; for such a renunciation was of course legally quite empty until Shelley had attained the age of 21. Still, it accorded with his egalitarian principles, and besides those he had little else left.

[1]
Hogg first contributed a long article to the
New Monthly Magazine
in 1832 entitled ‘Reminiscences of Shelley at Oxford’; later he was allowed access to Shelley papers kept at Field Place and wrote the first two volumes of
The Life of Shelley
covering the poet’s career until 1814. It was published in 1858, after which permission to use the Shelley papers was withdrawn. Hogg’s presentation of Shelley is brilliantly anecdotal, but consistently humorous and facetious, with a great deal of his own autobiography intermixed. He altered the text of Shelley’s letters, to soften their radicalism, and characteristically ‘Atheist’ is always printed as ‘Deist’, and ‘atheistical’ as ‘philosophical’. Pronouns were also changed to disguise his emotional involvement in Shelley’s life. Hogg has been harshly viewed by later scholars, but his own life was crippled partially by his connection with Shelley: disaster at Oxford, disinheritance and failure to achieve high distinction at the Bar. He wrote sadly: ‘It is difficult to view [Shelley] with the mind which I then bore — with a young mind; to lay aside the seriousness of old age; for twenty years of assiduous study have induced, if not in the body, at least within, something of premature old age.’

[2]
It is one of the instructive ironies of literary history that it was precisely this image which William Hazlitt used to attack the irresponsibility of Shelley’s wild radicalism in a celebrated essay ten years later, ‘On Paradox and Commonplace’: ‘It would seem that [Mr Shelley] wanted not so much to convince or inform, as to shock the public by the tenor of his productions, but I suspect he is more intent upon startling himself with his electrical experiments in morals and philosophy; and though they may scorch other people, they are to him harmless amusements, the coruscations of an Aurora Borealis, that play around the head, but do not reach the heart! Still I could wish he would put a stop to the incessant, alarming whirl of his Voltaic battery.’

[3]
Shelley wrote to Graham at the end of November 1810: ‘The part of the Epithalamium which you mention [i.e. from the end of Satan’s triumph] is the production of a friend’s
mistress
. . . [it] will make it sell like wildfire.’ Mrs Nicholson had regrettably attempted to assassinate King George III in 1786; she was subsequently committed to a Bedlam. King George escaped both fates. Shelley posed as her nephew, anxious to publish a ‘more copious collection of my unfortunate Aunt’s Poems’, if the first had any success.

[4]
Of the poem itself we know nothing, but what appears to be a later version occurs in the Esdaile MS Notebook, a collection of works written between 1810 and 1814; it is his first short piece of recognizable poetic qualities, though obviously influenced by Wordsworth.

[5]
The
Examiner
had carried an article against military flogging entitled ‘One Thousand Lashes’; Henry Brougham brilliantly defended the case under the jaundiced eye of Lord Ellenborough who never usually missed a chance to put a publisher in the stocks.

[6]
For the most lively contemporary account of the Illuminist movement, see John Robison,
Proofs of a Conspiracy Against all the Religions and Governments of Europe
. London, 1798. Shelley’s treasured edition of the Abbé Barruel’s polemic study was the exhaustive
Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism
, trans. the Hon. Robert Clifford, 4 vols, London, 1798.

3. Wales and Limbo: 1811

Shelley now found himself existing in a kind of limbo. He kept on his sitting-room at Poland Street, but it was lonely without Hogg, and he was running out of money. He complained of solitude and made a virtue of having nothing but an ill-kept overcoat to wear. He read, wrote letters and retired to bed at 8 to make the days pass. Until he decided to stay with relatives in Wales at the beginning of July, his life was to be unsettled and shapeless. The correspondence with Hogg continued, and Shelley kept up his contacts with the Medwins, John Grove and Edward Graham in London. But in Sussex both Timothy and Sir Bysshe sealed themselves away from him.

At the end of April, Shelley crossed paths with his father, who had come up to Town to consult with Whitton, and they bumped into each other in Grove’s corridor: ‘I met my father in the passage, and politely enquired after his health, he looked as black as a thunder cloud & said “Your most humble Servant!” I made a low bow & wishing him a very good morning passed on. He is very irate about my proposals. I cannot resign anything till I am 21, I cannot do anything, therefore I have 3 more years to consider the matter you mentioned.’
¹

A possible ally appeared in the form of Captain Pilfold, one of Shelley’s uncles on his mother’s side. Pilfold was a retired naval officer, a veteran of Trafalgar, crusty and good-humoured by all accounts, and he felt Timothy had acted precipitately towards his eldest son. He was prepared to sympathize with Shelley and help him. Pilfold had a house at Cuckfield near Horsham, and it was from this welcome base that Shelley eventually renewed his siege of Timothy on Friday, 10 May. Timothy had announced that he would not have Shelley back at Field Place, except on his own terms. Shelley nevertheless threatened to come, at which Timothy retaliated with — ‘Oh then I shall take his sister away, before he comes.’
²
The position was now curiously reversed, with Timothy at bay, and Shelley barking at his heels. We learn from a letter to Hogg that the Shelley
family had rallied round Timothy during the crisis rather than his son: Elizabeth, for example, refused to have ‘an Atheist correspond with her. She talks of Duty to her Father.’
³

Shelley was still writing fiercely to Hogg of the ‘cold Prejudice and selfish fear’ of which religion was the child, and appealed to Hogg for his constant support: ‘. . . I appeal to your own heart to your own feelings. At that tribunal I feel that I am secure, I once could
tolerate
Christ — he then merely injured me — he merely deprived me of all that I cared for, touching myself, on Earth — but now he has done more and I cannot forgive.’ The strange, mythical transformation of his feelings into theological terms continued, half suggesting a kind of mental breakdown. For the rest, he was confused, demoralized, vainly attempting to get a grip of his situation. ‘I don’t know where I am, where I will be. — Future present past is all a mist, it seems as if I had begun existence anew under auspices so unfavourable. — Yet no, that is stupid.’
⁴

Harriet Grove’s elder brother John, then aged 26 and training in London as a surgeon, attempted to intervene on his young cousin’s behalf, ‘flattering like a courtier’, and at one visit Timothy agreed to supply Shelley with £200 per annum ‘and leave [him] to misery’. But on return to Field Place he cancelled the offer.
⁵
Shelley was not without family allies, as this shows, and by 29 April his immediate financial worries were being dealt with, probably by Pilfold or Grove, and he felt sure enough to offer aid to Hogg who was at York.
⁶
His passion against Timothy was not abated though it matured on reflection as the days went by. He sent off to Hogg a ‘mad effusion’, in which his father plays the role of a hunting lion or tiger or blood-sucking monster, and Shelley himself becomes the pursued llama, the fleeting hind, sinking in ‘a trance of despair’. The poem was later adapted for the Esdaile Notebook and entitled ‘Dares the Lama’. Its final lines generalize Shelley’s picture of himself heroically matched against the pursuing horror of religion, unrepentent to the bitter end:

For in vain from the grasp of Religion I flee

The most tenderly loved of my soul

Are slaves to its hated control

It pursues me, it blasts me! oh where shall I fly

What remains but to curse it, to curse it & die.
⁷