Shelley: The Pursuit (17 page)

There was much in this to attract Shelley: the simple moral earnestness set off by physical beauty, and the selflessness which resonated perfectly with Shelley’s current plans for disinheriting himself from his family and his class. But even more attractive was the sisterly horror, the spinal shiver, with which she reacted to his atheism. ‘You may conceive with what horror I first heard that Percy was an Atheist; at least so it was given out at Clapham; at first I did not comprehend the meaning of the word; therefore when it was explained I was truly petrified. I wondered how he could live a moment professing such principles. . . . I would listen to none of his arguments, so afraid was I that he should shake my belief: at the same time I believed in eternal punishment, and was dreadfully afraid of his supreme Majesty the Devil. I thought I should see him if I listened to his arguments. I often dreamed of him & felt such terror when I heard his name
mentioned.’
²³
It is not coincidental that in the final comment about her dreams, it is difficult to tell if she is referring to His Supreme Majesty or Shelley. Almost the last thing she ever wrote about him was that he was a vampire.

All in all there was a wonderfully attractive
simplicity
about Harriet, that irradiated both her personality and her person. Peacock, one of her great defenders, has recalled this well:

She had a good figure, light, active and graceful. Her features were regular and well proportioned. Her hair was light brown, and dressed with taste and simplicity. In her dress she was truly
simplex munditiis
. Her complexion was beautifully transparent; the tint of the blush rose shining through the lily. The tone of her voice was pleasant; her speech the essence of frankness and cordiality; her spirits always cheerful; her laugh spontaneous, hearty, and joyous. She was well educated. . . . Her manners were good . . . to be once in her company was to know her thoroughly.
²⁴

There was, however, in Harriet’s make-up a certain kind of passive fatalism, a slightly doll-like quality, which made her over-dependent on her family, and especially upon her elder sister Eliza. This led her to resign herself too easily to the difficulties of circumstance. In extreme form this weakness brought her to thoughts of suicide, which she contemplated with a calm gravity. Hogg, among others, remarked on her willingness to discuss suicide, and the regularity with which the subject came up in her conversations with Shelley. This flaw in her transparency was probably the result of being brought up as the showpiece of the family. She had always been prevented from asserting herself, expressing herself, or thinking for herself. She was, as she herself realized, surrounded by fears, inhibitions and devils. Shelley realized this too. Harriet would do for ‘one of the crushers’ of ‘the fiend’ — which one can take as an amalgam of Christianity, Superstition and Parental Authority.

From all these things Shelley longed to liberate Harriet. As he put it to Hogg at the beginning of May, in terms of a problem that they both faced (Shelley with Harriet, Hogg with Elizabeth):

I almost despair — you have not only to conquer all the hateful prejudices of religion, not only to conquer duty to father,
duty
indeed of all kind — but I see in the background a monster more terrific. Have you forgotten the tremendous Gregory: the opinion of the world, its myriads of hateful champions, its ten thousand of votaries who deserved a better fate, yet compulsatorily were plunged into this — I tremble when I think of it. Yet
marriage
is hateful detestable — a kind of ineffable sickening disgust seizes my mind when I think of this most despotic most unrequired fetter which prejudice has forged to confine its energies. Yet this is Xtianity — & Xt
must
perish before this can fall.
²⁵

This in a sense is one of Shelley’s earliest statements of a radical politics. What was at first only a theological or moral position now took on a social extension as he fell in love with Harriet. In attacking marriage as it was formulated at the beginning of the nineteenth century, without legal protection for women and without provision for divorce, Shelley was attacking a nexus of fundamental social values: inheritance, property, possession and legal representation.

Yet Shelley was largely mistaken in reading his own personal problems into Harriet’s life. It is difficult to see that before his advent, either the Clapham school or Mr Westbrook were genuine sources of ‘tyranny’. The upbringing was strict and conventional, but it fitted with Shelley’s own puritanism in many respects. What was a real source of tyranny for Harriet, and one which Shelley signally failed to appreciate or act against, was the damagingly over-dependent relationship with Eliza. It was this, and possibly this alone, which gave Harriet her immaturity, her doll-like fatalism and her world of superstitious devils, the kind that governesses traditionally create to obtain mental control over their charges. Shelley acknowledged the dominating side of Eliza, as his remark about ‘taming’ her makes clear. But it transpired that Shelley himself came to depend on such a secondary female figure, and was not prepared to dispense with her until too late.

An oblique light can be thrown on how Shelley intended to liberate Harriet, by a reminiscence of Merle’s which dates from about the summer of this year. Shelley wrote to Merle to ask his aid in mounting an educational experiment of a somewhat unusual kind. He wished to create an educational situation which would ‘shut out enquiry on subjects of religious or social government’. For this purpose, Shelley wrote, ‘I wish to find two young persons of not more than four or five years of age; and should prefer females, as they are usually more precocious than males. . . . I will withdraw from the world with my charge, and in some sequestered spot direct their education. They shall know nothing of men or manners until their minds shall have been sufficiently matured to enable me to ascertain, when brought into play, what the impressions of the world are upon the mind when it has been veiled from human prejudice.’ Merle’s response was, he says, one of scandalized disbelief. ‘The idea of a youth of twenty shutting himself from the world with two females until an age when, without religious instruction, they would have no other guarantee for their chastity than the reason of a man who would then be in the summer of his life, with all his passions in full vigour, was more than absurd — it was horrible.’
²⁶
He remonstrated, ‘firmly, but kindly’, and Shelley apparently dropped the plan. Yet it shows a theoretical half-way house between the desire to proselytize his sisters — which his mother so feared — and his adult scheme for an ideological community of radicals, which were in practice to be composed largely of female disciples.
This adult scheme was of course open to the same misinterpretations that Merle made of the youthful one.

All these ideas were in the air when Shelley finally left London and the Westbrooks on Friday, 10 May, and re-entered Field Place where ‘the enemy’ lay, after a preparatory weekend with Captain Pilfold at Nelson Hall, Lindfield, near Cuckfield. Captain Pilfold was persuasive, and by negotiating separately with both parties he got Timothy to offer Shelley an income of £200 per annum and freedom to choose where he would live. Shelley in turn allowed his threats over the inheritance to drop, and tacitly refrained from hot-gospelling atheism at least within the confines of Field Place.
²⁷
We learn from letters to Hogg that Shelley was allowed to settle himself independently in two rooms of the house: a bedroom and a little study. But none of the rest of the family were permitted to enter. Shelley read and wrote, walked out at night, and according to Merle used to frequent the taproom of one of the Horsham taverns where he talked atheism into any available ear. It was lonely in a different way from Poland Street. ‘I am a perfect hermite, not a being to speak with, I sometimes exchange a word with my mother on the subject of the weather, upon which she is irresistibly eloquent — otherwise all is deep silence. I wander about this place, walking over the grounds with no particular object in view. I cannot write except now & then to you — sometimes to Miss Westbrook — my hand begins to hurry, & I am tired & ennued.’
²⁸
Shelley sent Hogg poetical effusions selected from his notebook of the previous
St Irvyne
summer, and meditated on the divine character of Luxima, a beautiful Indian girl in Lady Morgan’s
The Missionary
. ‘What pity,’ he lamented, ‘that we cannot incorporate these creations of Fancy; the very thought of them thrills the soul.’ The passages he chose from his own poems were appropriately melancholic:

Hopes that bud in youthful breasts

Live not thro the lapse of time —

Love’s rose a host of thorns invests

And ungenial is the clime. . . .
²⁹

His restless sense of having no immediate purpose unsettled him as he took his midnight walks, and for Hogg’s benefit he dramatized his longings, half mocking himself, half serious: ‘I have been thinking of Death and Heaven for four days. What is the latter? shall we set off — Is there a future life; whom should we injure by departing? should we not benefit some — I was thinking last night when from the summer house I saw the moon, just behind one of the chimneys if she were alone to witness our departure.’
³⁰
Years later, in a small boat on the bay of Lerici, he was to terrify his lady passenger with exactly the same brand of mournful humour, meditating on suicide.

By way of sympathy, Hogg resurrected his passion for Elizabeth Shelley, whom he had still not set eyes on, and implored Shelley to let him visit Field Place. Shelley enthused heatedly over Hogg’s desire for illicit union with his sister, while simultaneously doing everything in his power to prevent Hogg coming down to Sussex to fulfil his tryst in reality. Elizabeth, he told Hogg sadly, would hear nothing of the scheme, she was ‘a Christian’, her mind was ‘diseased’. But all the same the prospect had been glorious: ‘I own it — I desired, eagerly desired to see you & my sister irrecoverably united where you have no priest but love: I pictured to myself Elysium in beholding my only perfect friend daring the vain world, smiling at its silly forms, setting an example of perfection to an universe.’
³¹
Elizabeth, one notes, plays a minor role in this picture of perfection. But for the two friends it would have been an achieved community of passion.

There is evidence from a letter of Hogg’s to Mrs Shelley, that Hogg did eventually convince Shelley that it was safe to spend a few secret days at Field Place, and he came at the end of June. ‘Do not trouble about baggage; I have plenty of clean things for you,’ wrote Shelley with a sudden access of practicality. Hogg was rewarded with a single peep at Elizabeth through the window of Warnham Church.
³²
But afterwards, when Shelley was about to leave for Wales, Timothy found out, and there was a further row. ‘God send he does not write to yr father,’ observed Shelley sententiously, ‘ — I threw cool water on the rage of the old buck.’
³³

One further friend began to play an important part in Shelley’s life in these days of interregnum at Field Place. It was another lady, a certain Miss Elizabeth Hitchener. She ran the local school at Hurstpierpoint which Captain Pilfold’s daughter attended.

Miss Hitchener was an unusual figure in the neighbourhood, a girl of working-class background who had educated herself in liberal ideas, and now at 29, had established an independent intellectual standing and gained considerable respect as the local schoolmistress. She was a striking figure, tall, black-haired and dark-eyed, self-possessed and remarkably articulate. Her father was rumoured to be a retired smuggler from the Sussex coast. Miss Hitchener had risen so far beyond her background that she had already made contact with the radical Godwinian set in London. Hogg, in one of his most rumbustious passages, says she had a bony, masculine figure, with a shadow of facial hair above her lip.

Some time during June, Shelley met Miss Hitchener, and struck up an extraordinary intellectual friendship, with hours of long and candid arguments on the subjects of religion and philosophy.
³⁴
Shelley eagerly embarked on the process of organizing Miss Hitchener’s secondary education. He procured her copies of Locke, Southey’s
The Curse of Kehama
and Ensor’s book
On National Education
which argued that literature, and poetry in particular, had an instructive and social function, and should be considered primarily as a didactic medium: ‘Poetry seems to me the most powerful means of instructing youth.’
³⁵

The friendship and progressive discussion soon grew into a correspondence. For Shelley this seems at first to have served a purely proselytizing function, with Miss Hitchener in the role of eager pupil. But later it became an extraordinary arena for his philosophical and political speculations, and for his attempts at emotional self-analysis and self-justification. Miss Hitchener found herself inexorably up-graded, to confidante, and finally to soul-mate. She had the great merit of being a regular and enormously prolix correspondent, as she admitted herself with pleasure, and responded with enthusiasm to her promotions, little understanding what was going on, though a good deal flattered, and half convinced that Shelley might be in love with her. Miss Hitchener seems to have been an earnest, awkward, lonely creature, without any obvious guile or malice, and the estimates of her intelligence have suffered unfairly from the fact that the copies of her letters which exist were merely first drafts, very rough and unfinished.
³⁶
The fact that she made drafts at all is indicative of her earnestness. She was aware, more realistically than Shelley, of the social divide that existed between them, and was only talked into ignoring it by Shelley’s sweeping disregard for all social forms. In the end this ruined Miss Hitchener’s career, so carefully built up at Hurstpierpoint, shattered her relationship with Shelley, and turned her into the lasting butt of Shelley biographers.