Shelley: The Pursuit (16 page)

The ‘tenderly loved’ are Elizabeth Shelley, and perhaps Harriet Grove.

In prose, however, Shelley’s feelings were rather less meek and he developed a practical strategy. He was certain that he had complete hereditary power over the estate which would fall to him legally at 21, and he felt confident of forcing Timothy to terms: ‘The estate is
entirely
entailed on me, totally out of the power of the enemy, he is yet angry beyond measure; pacification is remote; but I
will
be at peace vi et armis; I will enter his domains preserving a quaker-like carelessness of opposition, I shall manage a l’Amerique & seat myself quietly in his mansion turning a deaf ear to any declamatory objections.’
⁸
Meekness, in personal relations, now seemed to him a decidedly
religious
kind of fault, so that he could write of a certain Revd Faber, whom he had offended with his atheism: ‘Poor fool! His Christian mildness, his consistent forgiveness of injuries amuses me; he is
le vrai esprit de Christianisme
, which Helvetius talks of . . .’
⁹
Of all Shelley’s London supporters, Captain Pilfold alone, ‘a very hearty fellow’, seemed sufficiently fierce. Shelley delightedly told Hogg that he had ‘illuminated’ Pilfold on religious matters in return for his noble aid, and the Captain had responded well. ‘A physician named Dr J — dined with us last night, who is a redhot saint; the captain attacked him, warm from “The Necessity”, and the doctor went away very much shocked.’
¹⁰
It looked like his first proselytizing success; but it was not a permanent one.

Another ideological landmark during this unsettled interim period was Shelley’s first visit to the editor of the
Examiner
, Leigh Hunt, to whom he had written from Oxford in March. Hunt invited him to a Sunday breakfast at Hampstead.

Shelley’s impression of the Hunts, given for Hogg’s benefit, characteristically lacked all human or physical elements. He judged them as a pair of potentially interesting theories, but rather less enlightened than himself. ‘Hunt is a man of cultivated mind, & certainly exalted notions; — I do not entirely despair of rescuing him out of this damnable heresy from Reason — Mrs Hunt is a most sensible woman, she is by no means a Xtian, & rather atheistically given; — It is a curious fact that they were married when they were both Wesleyan Methodists & subsequently converted each other.’
¹¹
There was, probably, a certain ironic bravado intended in all this, though one is reminded of Merle’s comments concerning religious monomania. Hunt in his turn remembered Shelley as an intense, self-conscious, elegant but rather immature figure: ‘a youth, not come to his full growth, very gentlemanly, earnestly gazing at every object that interested him, and quoting the Greek dramatists’.
¹²
Greek quotation appeared as part of the running debate he was having about the role of individual virtue within the process of political reform. Was Antigone immoral, he wondered. ‘Did she wrong when she acted in direct in noble violation of the laws of a prejudiced society?’ Hardly, he concluded, since ‘political affairs are quite distinct from morality’.
¹³

At this date his idea of the enlightened and the virtuous still contained the strong Methodistical element of the ‘elect’, the spiritually chosen. He remained far from William Godwin’s idea of a public and
political
standard of virtue, upon which general reform might be based. ‘What constitutes real virtue, motive or consequence?
surely the former. . . . I have left the proof to Aristotle — shall we take Godwin’s criterion, expediency — oh surely not. Any very satisfactory general reform is I fear impracticable, human nature taken in the mass . . . .’
¹⁴
The most immediate consequence of this highly selective and meritocratic form of moral dogma, was, it appeared, that for ‘men of honour’ marriage was detestable, and ‘antimatrimonialism’ was to be recommended. A friendship with Hunt did not develop at this time.

In Poland Street, in that rather dark back sitting-room, Shelley was becoming aware of his own solitary identity, divorced for the first time from the society of Field Place or Oxford, and cut off from the impassioned discussions with Elizabeth or Harriet Grove or Hogg. This kind of solitude, not merely a physical one but also a social and spiritual one, was his first taste of an experience that was to become terribly familiar. Now there were only the four walls with the vine trellis wallpaper, and the maid coming up with the meals, or going down with the post. After two weeks it began to press upon him with real horror and he wrote about it to Hogg.

Solitude is most horrible; in despite of the αφιλαυτια
[1]
which perhaps vanity has a great share in, but certainly not with my own good will I cannot endure the horror the evil which comes to
self
in solitude . . . what strange being I am, how inconsistent, in spite of all my boasted hatred of self — this moment thinking I could so far overcome Nature’s law as to exist in complete seclusion; the next shrinking from a moment of solitude, starting from my own company
as it were that of a fiend
, seeking anything rather than a continued communion with
self
— Unravel this mystery — but no. I tell you to find the clue which even the bewildered explorer of the cavern cannot reach. . . .
¹⁵

At this unguarded moment, Shelley here touched on one of the great themes and images of his later poetry, and one of the great difficulties of his personal life. He was both fascinated and terrified by the workings of his own mind viewed in solitude. Though his work almost never became realistically autobiographical in the sense of Wordsworth’s
Prelude
, or studiously self-analytic in the mode of Coleridge’s poems, nevertheless the secret workings of his own personality and the half-hidden movements of his mind at a subconscious level, were for him an ever-deepening source of imagery, and poetic myth-making. The accent was always on fear, on mystery and on hidden terror.

Passages from his letters written at Poland Street strikingly predict much later
work: his second long poem was to be called ‘Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude’; the image of the pursuing fiend which had already appeared during Shelley’s school period, was to become a central motif in many individual works; while the notion of the mind as an unexplored cave, a bewildering labyrinth through which the explorer must risk his search for a personal identity, was to fill his poems, his notebook and his prose speculations. For him, ‘inquiry’ came to mean in essence travelling, movement outwards or inwards, rather than analysis, the accumulation of different categories at a single stable point. The image of the journey, especially the subterranean journey, constantly recurs in this respect.

In his battle with solitude, Shelley tried to divert himself with his cousin Medwin’s company on brisk walks, especially around the Serpentine and through Regent’s Park. It was always a relief to revert to childhood games, and Medwin found Shelley mixing intense discussion of dreams with energetic bouts of ducks-and-drakes, the number of bounds called out loud ‘with the utmost glee’. Then there were silent moments of paper-boat-building followed by anxious launching rituals.
[2]
In the discussion of dreams, it transpired that Shelley had been keeping a dream journal. Perhaps this accounted for his early evenings.

At this time Shelley was ever in a dreamy state, and he told me he was in the habit of noting down his dreams. The first day he said, they amounted to a page, the next to two, the third to several, till at last they constituted the greater part of his existence. . . . One morning he told me he was satisfied of the existence of two sorts of dreams, the Phrenic and the Psychic; and that he had witnessed a singular phenomenon, proving that the mind and soul were separate and different entities — that it had more than once happened to him to have a dream, which the mind was pleasantly and actively developing; in the midst of which, it was broken off by
a dream within a dream
— a dream of the soul, to which the mind was not privy; but that from the effect it produced — the start of horror with which he waked — must have been terrific.
¹⁶

These were already familiar concerns. The sense of a doubleness in the mind, the psychic dreams ever ready to invade the phrenic one, just as the self is waited on by its own ‘fiend’; and more explicit even, the realization that the psychic dream — the dream
within
the dream — is something uncontrollable, alien, fearful and horrifying. They remained permanent interests with Shelley in his lifelong exploration of psychic and parapsychic phenomena, conducted with the ever-present mixture of fascination and revulsion.

Medwin says that the habit of ‘systematizing of dreams’ revived Shelley’s somnambulism and he used to wander about at night in a trance. On one occasion he even got so far as to leave Poland Street altogether. Medwin says he was crossing Leicester Square at 5 in the morning when his attention was caught by a group of urchins gathered round a hunched shape under one of the railings; the shape turned out to be Shelley, fully dressed and curled up fast asleep. Medwin woke him up, and found that Shelley was as surprised as he at the discovery.
¹⁷
The story might sound unlikely, except that it is matched by several recorded incidents of a similar type at various stages of Shelley’s life.
[3]

One of the side-effects of Shelley’s loneliness was that from mid-April he began to rely on the company of the Westbrook sisters. Shelley had first met the youngest, Harriet, through his own sisters Elizabeth and Hellen, at their school at Clapham. The Westbrooks were the daughters of a retired merchant and coffeehouse proprietor, John Westbrook, colloquially known by some contemporaries as ‘Jew’ Westbrook. Mr Westbrook’s establishment had been the Mount Street Coffee House in Grosvenor Square, respectable and very prosperous. On his death, he left an estate of £60,000.
¹⁸
Westbrook was, in effect, achieving that most difficult piece of English social navigation: moving from the lower middle class to the upper middle class. In the process his wife seems to have been reduced to an almost invisible nonentity, and his daughters split by a kind of cultural lag: the elder, Eliza (who was 29) being sharply self-educated and consciously refined; while the younger, Harriet, (then 16) was an almost perfectly natural middle-class creation, very neat in her dress and manners and writing, and exceedingly pretty. She was also immature for her age, and had come to rely upon her elder sister, both emotionally and morally, as a second and much more influential mother. Hogg always tended to ridicule the social pretensions of the Westbrooks, but he had his own reasons for this. Medwin refers to Harriet admiringly as ‘a handsome blonde’, but remarks that it was, socially, an ill-judged friendship. Eliza was taller, sallow, with long jet-black hair which she spent much time in combing.
¹⁹

Shelley, whose letters to Hogg are full of the Westbrook sisters from 18 April on, compared them thoughtfully: Harriet was ‘the more noble, yet not so cultivated as the elder — a larger diamond, yet not so highly polished’.
²⁰
As the visits between Westbrook’s house at 23 Chapel Street and Shelley’s lodgings developed, he found Eliza consciously appealing to his speculative interests, and discussing what she referred to elegantly as ‘Voltaire’s Philosophique Dictionnaire’. Harriet, less consciously perhaps, appealed to other feelings. Shelley’s
gently ironic description of one of his visits showed that he was well aware of the female strategy: ‘My poor little friend [Harriet] has been ill, her sister sent for me the other night. I found her on a couch pale; — Her father is civil to me, very strangely, the sister is too civil by half. — She began talking about
l’amour
; I philosophised, & the youngest said she had such a headache that she could not bear conversation. — Her sister then went away & I staid till half past twelve. Her father had a large party below — he invited me — I refused.’ Shelley for his own part was already considering the Westbrooks as candidates for his own future plans. His comment on this evening’s
tête à tête
was: ‘Yes! the fiend the wretch shall fall. Harriet will do for one of the crushers, & the eldest (Eliza) with some taming will do too. They are both very clever, & the youngest (my friend) is amiable.’
²¹
Shelley used the word in its root meaning: worthy of passionate love.

Shelley established a characteristic hold over Harriet’s mind, inspiring her with atheistic ideas, encouraging her to think for herself and challenge her surroundings, forcing her especially to question the polite drawing-room assumptions of the schooling she was receiving, like Shelley’s sisters, at Clapham. They agreed to call this prison, and, more slowly, to identify her father as yet another paternal tyrant.

Harriet recorded her own reactions to Shelley’s explosive entry into her adolescent life, in a letter to an Irish friend, written one year later. She describes the shelteredness of her upbringing, the way her father kept her out of ‘places of fashionable resort and amusement’, and how she was taught to respect standards of self-sufficiency, economy and hard work so that she thought to herself ’twas better even to be a beggar or to be obliged to gain my bread with my needle than to be the inhabitant of those great houses when misery and famine howl around’. She records how thoroughly the Christian religion was inculcated, so that apart from the occasional dream of a handsome Redcoat, she assumed that if she married anyone it would be a clergyman.
²²