Shelley: The Pursuit (25 page)

Beside this pamphlet and the poems, Shelley was also preparing a broadside ballad for sticking on walls and pinning up in meeting-halls, after the propaganda methods of Paine. This was called ‘The Devil’s Walk’, admiringly plagiarized from Coleridge’s ‘The Devil’s Thoughts’.
[8]
It described a natty
beau-monde
Devil who takes a stroll to review the activities of his faithful servants in the earthly metropolis: the politicians, lawyers and courtiers in London. This was the first notable time that Shelley used the Devil as his satirical protagonist, a poetic role that eventually bordered on a strange kind of self-identification. For the time being the verse was very rough and ready stuff, unevenly handled and lacking sufficient striking power, but some of the images have a lively presence:

Once, early in the morning,

Beelzebub arose,

With care his sweet person adorning,

He put on his Sunday clothes.

He drew on his boot to hide his hoof,

He drew on a glove to hide his claw,

His horns were concealed by a
Bras Chapeau
,

And the Devil went forth as natty a
Beau

As Bond-street ever saw.

Then at the Inns of Court . . .

He peeped in each hole, to each chamber stole,

His promising live-stock to view;

Grinning applause, he just showed them his claws,

And they shrunk with affright from his ugly sight,

Whose work they delighted to do.

Then observing the Prince Regent . . .

For he is fat, — his waistcoat gay,

When strained upon a levee day,

Scarce meets across his princely paunch;

And pantaloons are like half-moons

Upon each brawny haunch.
⁶³

It has been suggested that this sort of work was merely characteristic of Shelley’s juvenilia. But Shelley was to return to the raw material and style of ‘The Devil’s Walk’ nine years later, and to use it with vastly more sophisticated effect, though with an essentially similar target, in
Peter Bell the Third
and in
The Mask of Anarchy
. In 1812 it served to make the simple propaganda point that the established officials of the English rule were corrupt, cowardly and obscene, as they busied themselves with the satanic task of cheating and oppressing the under-privileged masses of society.

The ‘Esdaile Notebook’ shows evidence of other, more private poems also written on political themes during these weeks. In all of them one can sense Shelley trying to work towards an expression of his new-found awareness of the radical cause. In ‘The Crisis’ he attempted to produce a kind of litany of his new beliefs, a sapphic chant with an oddly psalmic, stumbling rhythm. But as yet it is hollow and rhetorical:

When we see Despots prosper in their weakness,

When we see Falsehood triumph in its folly,

When we see Evil, Tyranny, Corruption,

Grin, grow and fatten;

When Virtue toileth through a world of sorrow,

When Freedom dwelleth in the deepest dungeon,

When Truth, in chains and infamy, bewaileth

O’er a world’s ruin;

When Monarchs laugh upon their throne securely

Mocking the woes which are to them a treasure,

Hear the deep curse, and quench the Mother’s hunger

In her child’s murder;

Then we may hope the consummating hour

Dreadfully, sweetly, swiftly is arriving,

When light from Darkness, peace from desolation,

Bursts unresisted. . . .
⁶⁴

What Shelley meant by all these capitalized abstracts, and in particular the line about the child’s murder, is partly clarified by his observations on Keswick and its surroundings. Though the Lake District was beautiful in itself, he found that man’s presence made it morally and socially
ugly
. ‘The manufacturers with their contamination have crept into the peaceful vale and deformed the loveliness of Nature with human taint,’ he observed, as many a tourist has done since. But then he continued with that characteristic puritanism, ‘The debauched servants of the great families who resort contribute to the total extinction of morality. Keswick seems more like a suburb of London than a village of Cumberland. Children are frequently found in the River which the unfortunate women employed at the manufactory destroy.’
⁶⁵
From this situation, Shelley in his poem was trying to extrapolate a broad picture of England in that bad winter of 1811–12, and vaguely invoking that ‘dreadfully, sweetly, swiftly’ arriving moment of revolution. Of his Irish campaign he had written to Miss Hitchener: ‘You see my friend what I am about. I consider the State of Ireland as constituting a part of a great crisis in opinions.’
⁶⁶

In another poem, Shelley tried to relate the Irish social conditions more closely to his own political ambitions. Imitating Southey’s oriental frames of mythology, he created an Indian tale involving two lovers, Zeinab and Kathema, who are separated by tyrannic authority. The girl, Zeinab, is eventually hanged at a crossroad gibbet, and Kathema later hangs himself by the same chain in a moment of despairing desire to rejoin her. At the end of the poem, Shelley turns Zeinab’s career into an apocalyptic symbol of revolt, burning like a fiery comet through the darkness of society. It is clear that he was partially identifying himself with this early heroine of rebellion against the great ‘Them’ of established society:

Therefore against them she waged ruthless war

With their own arms of bold and bloody crime, —

Even like a mild and sweetly beaming star

Whose rays were wont to grace the matin-prime

Changed to a comet, horrible and bright,

Which wild careers awhile then sinks in dark-red night.

Thus, like its God, unjust and pityless,

Crimes first are made and then avenged by man,

For where’s the tender heart, whose hopes can bless

Or man or God’s unprofitable plan, —

A universe of horror and decay,

Gibbets, disease, and wars, and hearts as hard as they.
⁶⁷

In Edinburgh, during the autumn, Shelley, Hogg and Harriet had watched a comet that appeared for some days in the evening sky.

Of all Shelley’s Keswick poems, easily the most striking is the long Wordsworthian ‘A Tale of Society as It Is’, which he posted to Miss Hitchener on 7 January. It deserves to be counted as the first of Shelley’s important poems, though it is undramatic, indeed markedly flat and factual in its narrative style. It keeps as close as possible to the story of a poor woman whose only son is pressed into the Army, while she is left in solitude and poverty; Shelley had learnt of the incident at Keswick. This style, with its plain-faced, austere quality of statement and reflection was to mature gradually, like the other satiric style, until Shelley used it in his Italian poems to carry and present some of his finest human material. It is quite different from the gaseous, hyperbolic manner traditionally associated with Shelley’s lyricism.

For seven years did this poor woman live

In unparticipated solitude.

Thou might have seen her in the desert rude

Picking the scattered remnants of its wood.

If human, thou might’st there have learned to grieve.
⁶⁸
[9]

While Shelley was arming himself for the Irish expedition with propaganda pamphlets and poems, he had received more practical aid in the form of an unexpected stabilization of his finances. Both Timothy Shelley and old Westbrook, after hearing of Shelley’s successful visit to the Duke of Norfolk’s at Greystoke, had agreed to contribute an allowance of £200 a year each. As Timothy put it, it was to prevent his son ‘cheating strangers’.
⁶⁹
The money was important, for it at last gave Shelley a degree of freedom of choice and movement, however ironically Timothy chose to concede it.

Timothy’s irony had some point, for the final gaining of this allowance has its own special twist. Immediately after returning from Greystoke, Shelley wrote to his father to broach the question of the £200. He stated his own point of view with an air of calm resolution which perhaps owed something to the duke’s influence. ‘Now let me say’, he wrote, ‘that a reconciliation with you is a thing which I very much desire, accept my apologies for the uneasiness which I have
occasioned, believe that my wishes to repair any uneasiness is firm, & sincere — I regard family differences as a very great evil. . . . I hope you will not consider what I am about to say an insulting want of respect or contempt, but I think it my duty to say that however great advantages might result from such concessions, I can make no promise of concealing my opinions in political and religious matters.’
⁷⁰
On the face of it this looked admirably fair and sincere.

Yet on the very same day Shelley posted a secret letter to his little sister Hellen, who was then 12 years old. He sent it clandestinely via Sir Bysshe Shelley’s huntsman, Mr Allen Etheridge, with instructions to leave it in the summer-house at Field Place where Hellen might find it. Etheridge was to pick up the return correspondence. As a reward, there was a promise of favours to come: ‘Remember Allen, that I shall
not
forget you.’
⁷¹
The contents of this remarkable cloak and dagger missive were not exactly consistent with a ‘sincere & firm’ wish to repair the ‘uneasiness’ among the senior members of the family. It was imaginatively written from ‘Summer House. Evening.’, in order to convince little Hellen of her brother’s magical powers, liable to appear at a window or in the shadow of the redwoods at any moment. ‘Show this letter to no one,’ Shelley began dramatically. ‘Because everybody else hates me, that is no reason that you should. Think for yourself my dear girl, and write to me to tell me what you think. Where you are now you cannot do as you please. — You are obliged to submit to other people. — They will not let you walk and read and think (if they knew your thoughts) just as you like tho’ you have as good a right to do it as they. — But if you were with me you would be with some one who loved you, you might run & skip read write think just as you liked.’
⁷²
The simplicity of this appeal, its offer of unimpeded love and freedom, is in one way exquisitely Shelleyan. But it is also, in the context of what he had been promising to his father at the same day and at the same desk, exquisitely treacherous — a machiavellian attempt to take the stronghold from within.

Later in the letter Shelley touched, very lightly and subtly, on the note of fear, as in the old days: ‘. . . nobody can suspect you, you may easily write and put your letter into the Summer House where I shall be sure to get it. I watch over you, tho’ you do not think I am near, I need not tell you how I love you. — I know all that is said of me — but do not believe it. You will perhaps think
I’m
the Devil, but no, I am only your brother who is obliged to be put to these shifts to get a letter from you.’
⁷³
He aroused the fear by denying it.

Needless to say, Etheridge the huntsman saw how the land lay, and turned over both this letter and the covering one to Sir Bysshe, who passed it on to Timothy. Timothy was, naturally, infuriated. Once again, he turned all correspondence over to his solicitor Whitton, and refused to have any more direct contact with his son. Later in the spring, when Shelley was trying to raise
capital to set himself up in a farmhouse for his little community, he found all his overtures peremptorily rejected. His father was disillusioned with him. Ever after he seems to have felt that Shelley might have designs on his other children. One recalls the plan that Shelley outlined to Merle. Certainly in 1814 Shelley was to consider a plan to kidnap Hellen and Mary.

The violent disagreement with Southey, combined with the nervous tension of planning a semi-subversive campaign, began to put considerable stress on Shelley. This made itself apparent in the middle of January. The references to the possibility of prison and government persecution lose their lightheartedness in his letters to Miss Hitchener. On 16 January he refers in passing to a ‘terrible headache’. ‘I have been obliged by an accession of nervous attack to take a quantity of laudanum which I did very unwillingly and reluctantly, and which I should not have done had I been alone. — I am now quite recovered.’
⁷⁴
But he was not really; the symptom passed, but the cause remained. He compared what he was planning to the radical work of Godwin, Tom Paine and Sir Francis Burdett, and, as he said, ‘Tom Paine died a natural death — his writings were far more violently in opposition to government than mine perhaps will ever be.’ Thus he tried to reassure both Miss Hitchener and himself.