Shelley: The Pursuit (18 page)

Atheism was their great topic in these early days. It is interesting to compare Miss Hitchener’s cool reaction to Harriet’s horror. ‘
Self-love
, you see,’ she wrote to Shelley, consciously adopting his own terminology, ‘prompts me eagerly to accept the opportunity you offer me of improving my mind by a correspondence with you, though you cannot surely suppose me so
conceited
as to attempt making you a proselyte to my faith, have I not reason rather to tremble for my own; but tho’ I presume not to argue I love to
discuss
. . . .’
³⁷
This was her answer to Shelley’s studiously polite and dignified offer: ‘. . . I know that you, like myself are a devotee at the Shrine of truth. Truth is
my
God, &
say
he is Air, Water, Earth or Electricity but I think
yours
is reducible to the same simple Divinityship. Seriously however, if you
very
widely differ, or differ indeed in the least from me on the subject of our late argument, the only reason which would induce me to object to a polemical correspondence, is that it might deprive
your
time of that application which it’s value deserves:
mine
is totally vacant.’
³⁸

The correspondence then moved out into discussions of Christianity, the nature of God, of belief, of reason; the possibility and type of an after-life — the ‘future state’. Politics only entered marginally at first, with references to Shelley’s disapproval of aristocratic notions, and his belief that religious establishments
were the ‘formidable tho’ destructible barriers’ to a society politically organized in ‘accordance with Nature and Reason’.
³⁹

On a topical issue Shelley attacked the Prince Regent’s lavishly extravagant fête at Carlton House on 19 June, which included a 200-foot banqueting table along the length of which ran an artificial stream encased in banks of silver and pumped from intricately ornamented silver fountains at one end. ‘What think you of the bubbling brooks, & mossy banks at Carlton House?’ he exclaimed to Miss Hitchener, grimly enumerating the ludicrous magnificence and ‘disgusting splendours’. ‘Here are a people advanced in intellectual improvement, willfully rushing to a Revolution, the natural death of all great commercial Empires, which must plunge them in the barbarism from which they are slowly rising.’
⁴⁰
Misuse of wealth in this way always outraged Shelley, for not only did it inflame his natural puritanism, but it shocked his sense of the justice of fair distribution and the self-evident claims for a reasonable economic equity.

But he did not risk telling Miss Hitchener later that he had carried out a rapid propaganda expedition against the Regent’s festivities. He had dashed off a satire of some fifty lines, had it printed locally as a pamphlet, and on his way through London to Wales, stopped off at the Groves, to spend several hours tossing copies into the windows of carriages driving up to Carlton House. This was to be his first exercise in active political campaigning, half prank and half serious propaganda. His pupil Miss Hitchener was not apprised of it, nor did Shelley’s promise to visit her in London on the first stage of his journey actually materialize. He afterwards explained that he had been prevented by several nights of sleeplessness and days of pressing business, which ended by giving him ‘a short but violent nervous illness’ on his arrival in Wales.
⁴¹
All this, though perhaps conveniently exaggerated, suggests that he had been living at Field Place under considerable nervous stress.

The plan to go to Wales had been worked out with his cousins the Groves at the end of June. It came as both an escape and a relief, for he wished to take stock of his position on neutral ground. Shelley left Field Place for London, and then travelled to Thomas Grove’s remote house at the top of the valley of Cwm Elan, near Rhayader, in the county of Radnorshire. He arrived about 9 July, immediately sending off a note to Hogg.

Thomas Grove, Harriet Grove’s eldest brother, was aged 27, and a gentleman farmer with an estate of 10,000 acres. His house lay some four miles south-west of Rhayader, and not far from the tiny country village of Elan. The Elan valley which surrounds it is a formation of bleak and rocky hills, covered in mauve heather and flowering gorse with the pink sandy Radnorshire stone peering through. In fine weather it is very beautiful and dramatic, especially the curving view from the road leading back into Rhayader; but the geography of the area
is essentially closed and gloomy. The population in 1811 was extremely sparse, consisting largely of the semi-wild breed of mountain sheep, with their long thin muzzles, narrow close-set eyes and vivid splashes of marker dye maintained by the seasonal visits of the reddleman. The kind of
enclosure
offered by this landscape, with its steeply sheltered sides, the wall of rock or hillside at its back, and the single dramatically channelled vista through the open end of the valley seems to have exercised a quite extraordinary and hitherto unremarked attraction for Shelley. As his travels took him further afield and eventually on to the Continent, this curiously symbolic geographical setting became the recurrent and dominant motif of the many different houses in which he chose to stay. The airy remoteness, the cradling protection, and the single dramatic view recur like some kind of subliminal theme. His houses were, for choice, like the encastellated strongholds of chivalric romance, each one an ultimate retreat in which he seemed to be waiting, back to the wall, for the inevitable pursuer who will appear at first a great way off, but inexorably advancing through the only route that is not barred. Once again, this is a central image in the mature poetry.

To Hogg, Shelley wrote with unusually bluff brevity that the scenery was ‘divine, but all very stale flat and unprofitable — indeed this place is a very great bore’.
⁴²
But to Miss Hitchener, who had already channelled off a good deal of the enthusiastic froth previously reserved for his college friend, Shelley was rather more thoughtfully forthcoming: ‘Rocks piled on to each other to tremendous heights, rivers formed into cataracts by their projections, & valleys clothed with woods, present an appearance of enchantment — but
why
do they enchant,
why
is it more affecting than a plain, it cannot be innate, is it acquired?’ Already he seems to have felt some response in himself to this kind of landscape, some particular reflection of his own mind. He went on, meditatively: ‘Thus does knowledge lose all pleasure which involuntarily arises, by attempting to arrest the fleeting Phantom as it passes — vain almost like the chemist’s aether it evaporates under our observation; it flies from all but the slaves of passion and sickly sensibility who will not analyse a feeling.’
⁴³

This contempt for ‘sickly sensibility’ was new and growing in Shelley. He attempted to replace it by a more objective concern with facts around him, especially the social facts of oppression and hardship. He had told Miss Hitchener that he was going to travel around ‘on foot’ to view the manner and conditions of the peasantry. He produced an immediate report on an incident concerning a Welsh beggar whom he had heard asking for bread at Grove’s kitchen door while he was dressing by his window in the morning. He hurried downstairs, caught the old man, and ‘gave him something’ which was received with due grace. Then, thinking no doubt of Wordsworth’s philosophic vagrants, he tried to get the beggar to talk. ‘I followed him a mile asking a thousand questions; at
length I quitted him finding by this remarkable observation that perseverance was useless. “I see by your dress that you are a rich man — they have injured me and mine a million times. You appear to be well intentioned but I have no security of it while you live in such a house as that, or wear such clothes as those. It would be charity to quit me.” ’
⁴⁴
Shelley learnt one of his first genuine political lessons from the unexpectedly abrupt and prosaic denouement of this romantic encounter.

Cwm Elan was not all social study. It was mostly boredom and indecision and self-doubt. ‘I am what the sailors call banyaning. I do not see a soul. All is gloomy and desolate. I amuse myself however with reading Darwin,
[4]
climbing rocks and exploring this scenery.’
⁴⁵
Various plans were fermenting in Shelley’s mind. The Westbrooks were on holiday at Aberystwyth, only thirty miles away to the west, and part of Shelley’s undeclared reason for coming to Wales was to arrange a visit to Harriet and Eliza.
⁴⁶
To Edward Graham he wrote that he was still planning surgical studies, in emulation of John Grove, but was hindered by being ‘as poor as a rat’.
⁴⁷
To Hogg, he wrote drily that if he knew anything about love then he knew he was not in love with Harriet; he planned, on the other hand, to come to see Hogg at York as soon as his strengthened finances might allow, and added that it would be necessary to come under a false name to avoid irritating his father ‘needlessly’. He found the deception easily justified in his newly adopted tone of brisk objectivity: ‘we must
live
if we intend to live, that is we must eat drink & sleep, & money is the necessary procurer of these things’.
⁴⁸
He was scathing about Timothy’s unfortunate discovery of Hogg’s visit to Field Place in June. ‘I regard the whole as a finesse to which I
had
supposed the Honourable Member’s headpiece unequal.’
⁴⁹

As he steeled himself to fling back into the centre of action and events, Shelley’s thoughts turned increasingly to politics, and it was of these that he wrote to Miss Hitchener rather than disclosing his ambitions for Harriet. His discussions were now rapidly moving from the notion of atheism to the idea of equality in society:

You are willing to dismiss for the present the subject of Religion. As to its influence in individuals we will — but it is so intimately connected with politics, & augments in so vivid a degree the evils resulting from the system before us, that I will make a few remarks on it.
⁵⁰

Shelley was now determined to view religion in the wider context of the English society of 1811, and indeed within the context of the whole history of social oppression. His mind ran over the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and the Gordon Riots. His conclusion was a crude building-block version of Rousseau, that a naturally egalitarian society had been continually corrupted by the hereditary power-pyramids of Religion, Monarchy and Aristocracy.

It is this empire of terror which is established by Religion, Monarchy is its prototype, Aristocracy may be regarded as symbolising its very essence. They are mixed — one can now be scarce distinguished from the other, & equality in politics like perfection in morality appears now far removed from even the visionary anticipations of what is called the wildest theorist.
I
then am wilder than the wildest.
⁵¹

In other letters he looked at the idea of equality more closely, and tried to answer the objection that his views on a just society were ‘visionary’: ‘Why is it visionary, have you tried?’ If Locke’s argument that there are no ‘innate ideas’ is correct, it proved to him that all mankind started out equal before nature, ‘intellect varies but in the impressions with which casualty or intention has marked it’.
⁵²
At any rate, he felt, whatever the objections to complete equality as an attainable political situation, any advance in this direction would be an improvement. ‘What can be worse than the present aristocratical system? there are in England ten millions only 500,000 of whom live in a state of ease; the rest earn their livelihood with toil and care.’

As yet Shelley’s grasp of the problem was primitive, not to say naïve. He had no real experience of how the majority lived; he had suffered no real economic deprivation; he had no realization of the problems of educating ignorance and bigotry at the lowest level; and, like most of his contemporaries, he had no idea that industrialization and urbanization were far more at the roots of an unjust society than a lazy, pleasure-loving aristocracy, or a fat quiescent clergy. The Welsh beggar had been right to take his alms and distrust his intentions.

It was not politics, but the romantic interest of Harriet’s situation which finally brought Shelley out of Radnorshire. A rapid correspondence moved between Cwm Elan and Aberystwyth, though the post was maddeningly irregular, ‘like the waves in Hell were to Tantalus’.
⁵³
Scenting the wind, Eliza, through Harriet, had sent him a novel extolling the virtues of matrimony, by Amelia Opie.
⁵⁴
It was entitled suggestively
Adeline Mowbray, or The Mother and Daughter
.

Walking alone through the rocks and waterfalls of Wales, Shelley felt ready to embark on some new form of life, to grapple with it: ‘. . . a thousand shadowy trees form the principal features of the scenery, I am not wholly uninfluenced by
its magic in my lonely walks, but I long for a thunder storm.’
⁵⁵
Thus he wrote at the end of July.