Shelley: The Pursuit (57 page)

Shelley was himself beginning to be aware of the self-reflecting nature of his feelings, adding to Hogg with a sudden flash of recognition: ‘I speak thus of Mary now — & so intimately are our natures now united, that I feel whilst I describe her excellencies as if I were an egoist expatiating on his own perfections.’ The extraordinary delusive, subjective, nature of sexual feelings, and the complications of self-projection which can so easily dominate passionate relationships between a man and a woman, became the subject of several of Shelley’s prose speculations, and the long poem
Alastor
the following year.

Writing to Hogg he omitted much that was still painful and difficult, and mentioned nothing about his expected children by both Harriet and Mary, or his ostracism by Godwin and the Boinville set. Yet he was anxious for Hogg’s tacit approval, and asked if ‘any degree of our ancient affection is yet cherished by you for a being apparently so inconsistent and indisciplinable as me’. He ended his letter with a partially veiled appeal. ‘My dear friend I entreat you to write to me soon. Even in this pure & celestial felicity I am not contented until I hear from you.’
¹²
Hogg replied to this letter on 17 October, and first met Shelley again in London some three weeks later on 7 November.

Shelley’s felicity was now indeed very far from that pure and celestial state he wished to suggest. Apart from the pressures and anxieties caused by his wife and his creditors, there was increasing tension within the
ménage à trois
at Church Terrace. The state of affairs between himself and Jane was reaching a critical stage. On the night of October 7, there took place an extremely bizarre incident, with ingredients of mystery, sexuality and terror which made it almost a paradigm of Shelley’s relationships with young women. It is particularly interesting, because it is relatively well documented, with a full account both by Shelley himself in the journal, and by Jane in her diary.

On the 5th the threesome had gone to Hampstead Ponds to sail fireboats, and in the evening Shelley had excited the two girls with a melodramatic reading of Coleridge’s ‘Ancient Mariner’, and Wordsworth’s macabre tale ‘The Mad Mother’. Mary went to bed early, as she tended to do at this time, and Shelley and Jane sat up ‘till one over the fire’ talking, while Shelley wrote to Harriet. This entry Jane later tried to delete from her diary.
¹³

The next day, the 6th, Peacock came to breakfast and Shelley went off to negotiate with Ballechy, and came back feeling ‘very unwell’.
¹⁴
Peacock had stayed at Church Terrace ‘wearying us all morning’, according to Jane. They dined at 6, Shelley read a canto of
Queen Mab
and some of Mary Wollstonecraft’s love letters out loud to them, and they all retired to bed early.

On the morning of the 7th, Shelley, Mary and Peacock walked over the fields towards Hampstead, while Jane, for some reason, ‘refuses to walk’, as Shelley wrote in the journal. Actually, we know from Jane’s diary that she slipped out after they had gone and walked by herself ‘in the Squares’. The friction between Mary and Jane was now tacitly recognized. Shelley’s entry continues, with faintly disquieting touches. ‘We traverse the fields towards Hampstead. Under an expansive oak lies a dead calf. (Contemplate subject for a poem.) The sunset is beautiful. Return at 9. Peacock departs. Mary goes to bed at half-past 8; Shelley sits up with Jane. Talk of oppression and reform, of cutting squares of skin from the soldiers’ backs. Jane states her conception of a subterranean community of women.
[4]
Talk of Hogg, Harriet, Miss Hitchener &c.’ The last part of this indicates the degree of confidentiality now reached between Shelley and Jane.

Jane’s own entry makes this even clearer, and also sounds the first note of sinister implications. ‘Mary goes to bed — Shelley & myself sit over the fire — we talk of making an Association of Philosophical people — of Eliza and Helen — of Hogg and Harriet — at one the conversation turned upon those unaccountable & mysterious feelings about supernatural things that we are sometimes subject to — Shelley looks beyond all passing strange — ’

To understand what happened next it is necessary to recall Shelley’s skilled manipulation of feminine sensitivities ever since the legends of the Great Snake among his sisters at Field Place. It is also necessary to observe very carefully the small, probably unconscious clues in his gestures and questions, which show that Shelley subtly diverted the potentially sexual elements of the fireside intimacy into the path of horror. Jane, as he had previously discovered in France, was peculiarly susceptible to this diversion. Shelley’s journal continues, referring to himself in the third person. ‘At 1 o’clock Shelley observes that it is the witching time of night; he inquires soon after if it is not horrible to feel the silence of night tingling in our ears; in half an hour the question is repeated in a different form; at 2 they retire awe-struck and hardly daring to breathe. Shelley says to Jane “Good night”; his hand is leaning on the table; he is conscious of an expression in his countenance which he cannot repress. Jane hesitates. “Good night” again. She still hesitates. “Did you ever read the tragedy of Orra?” said Shelley. “Yes — How horrible you look — take your eyes off.” “Good night” again, and Jane ran to her room.’
¹⁵

What Shelley’s entry explicitly fails to mention at this point is the extreme
pitch of nervousness to which he had now succeeded in bringing Jane. Her own entry makes this painfully clear, and also makes the deeply disturbing effect of the facial expression which Shelley ‘could not repress’ quite definite. Jane wrote: ‘Shelley looks beyond all passing strange — a look of impressive deep & melancholy awe — I cannot describe it I well know how I felt it — I ran upstairs to bed — I placed the candle on the drawers & stood looking at a pillow that lay in the very middle of the Bed — I turned my head round to the window & then back again to the Bed — the pillow was no longer there — it had been removed to the chair
[5]
— I stood thinking for two moments — how did this come? Was it possible that I had deluded myself so far as to place it there myself & then forget the action? This was not likely — Every passed at it were in a moment
[6]
— I ran downstairs — Shelley heard me & came out of his room — He gives the most horrible description of my countenance — I did not feel the way he thinks I did — We sat up all night — I was ill.’
¹⁶

Towards the end of this entry, it is Jane who is omitting details, and we have to turn back to Shelley’s journal to gain a fuller picture. It is helpful to see the passage at length, to understand quite clearly how Shelley managed to aggravate rather than calm Jane. It is notable that almost every action which he performed, ostensibly in order to soothe her, has the actual result of further increasing her terror. Just how far Shelley consciously realized what he was doing is difficult to decide; there is an element of game-playing in his account. One presumes that the ghastly description of Jane’s face, a portrait far more macabre than anything to be found in
Zastrozzi
, is the same description which he gave to Jane
at the time
. This surely was a calculated piece of witch-raising, and Jane herself says that she ‘did not feel in the way he thinks I did’. This is what Shelley wrote in the journal which he shared with Mary.

Shelley, unable to sleep, kissed Mary and prepared to sit beside her & read until morning, when rapid footsteps descended the stairs. Jane was there; her countenance was distorted most unnaturally by horrible dismay — it beamed with a whiteness that seemed almost like light; her lips and cheeks were of one deadly hue; the skin of her face and forehead was drawn into unnumerable
wrinkles — the lineaments of terror that could not be contained;
[7]
her hair came prominent and erect; her eyes were wide and staring, drawn almost from the sockets by the convulsion of the muscles; the eyelids were forced in, and the eyeballs, without any relief, seemed as if they had been newly inserted, in ghastly sport, in the sockets of a lifeless head. This frightful spectacle endured but for a few moments — it was displaced by terror and confusion, violent, indeed, and full of dismay, but human. She asked me (Shelley) if I had touched her pillow (her tone was that of dreadful alarm). I said, ‘No, no! if you come into the room I will tell you’
[8]
I informed her of Mary’s pregnancy; this seemed to check her violence.
[9]
She told me that a pillow placed upon her bed had been removed, in the moment that she turned her eyes away to a chair at some distance, and evidently by no human power. She was positive as to the fact of her self-possession and calmness. Her manner convinced me that she was not deceived. We continued to sit by the fire, at intervals engaging in awful conversation relative to the nature of these mysteries. . . . I repeated one of my own poems. Our conversation, though intentionally directed to other topics, irresistibly recurred to these. Our candles burned low, we feared they would not last until daylight. Just as dawn was struggling with moonlight, Jane remarked in me that unutterable expression which had affected her with so much horror before; she described it as expressing a mixture of deep sadness and conscious power over her. I covered my face with my hands, and spoke to her in the most studied gentleness. It was ineffectual; her horror and agony increased even to the most dreadful convulsions. She shrieked and writhed on the floor. I ran to Mary; I communicated in a few words the state of Jane. I brought her to Mary. The convulsions gradually ceased, and she slept. At daybreak we examined her apartment and found her pillow on the chair.
¹⁷

One can tell from various cryptic entries later in the journal and Jane’s diary that these ritual horror sessions were regular features of the menage at Church Terrace throughout October. Mary never took part in them, but neither did she
interfere; she seems to have taken the attitude that this was something to be worked out strictly between Shelley and Jane, and retained a certain ironic detachment. Ten days later, on the 18th, for example, she noted ‘I go to bed soon, but Shelley and Jane sit up, and, for a wonder do not frighten themselves.’
¹⁸
Jane’s diary for this day has a deleted entry, ‘Mary goes to bed — Talk with Shelley over the fire until two — Hogg — his letter — friendship — Dante — Tasso & various other subjects.’
¹⁹
Peacock was told on a walk to the ‘Withered Tree’ at Hampstead, and apparently laughed at them. Nevertheless they had another session that same night, when Jane’s diary reads: ‘Mary [
deleted for
We] goes to bed at eight — sit up with Shelley over the fire — get rather in a horrid mood — go to bed at eleven thinking of ghosts cannot sleep all night.’
²⁰
Shelley directed her reading to
Zastrozzi
, the Abbé Barruel and
Queen Mab
.

Apart from the light which these occurrences throw on the darker side of Shelley’s personality, they are also of great interest in connection with the development of his poetry. Up to 1814 his writing had mainly a political source of inspiration, but now gradually it was turning inwards as well, and drawing upon psychological or even psychic materials and imagery. Shelley began to extend his lifelong fascination with ghosts, monsters and gothic machinery into a more exact appreciation of abnormal mental states, when the faculties of perception appeared to be in some sense heightened and acutely sensitized. The ‘aesthetic of terror’, the idea that terror and beauty are closely linked, had become almost a commonplace of Romantic painters, epitomized by the work of Blake and Fuseli. Several passages in the childhood sections of Wordsworth’s
Prelude
and many of the
Lyrical Ballads
link the state of terror and the state of visionary enlightenment.
[10]

Shelley pursued the theme much further and much more grotesquely than any poet had done previously. For him, the state of terror was one of literally ‘aweful’ hypersensitivity to the phenomenon of the natural universe. The mind’s receptive powers were enormously increased, like the tautened strings of a musical instrument, and certain clues and hints about invisible and possibly supernatural forces might just enter the abnormally increased range of mental perception. The analogy of the musical instrument is one he himself used, and the sensation of night silence ‘tingling’ in the ears, as if even the very hearing faculty had become enhanced, appears both in his journal entries of this month
and the poetry of the following year. To a lesser degree, one can also infer that an ‘abnormal’ state of sexual excitement or tension seemed to Shelley to have similar sensitizing and visionary properties. The word ‘properties’ is particularly appropriate here, for Shelley continued for some time to use the old student concept of the alchemical experiment to describe this kind of exploration. He was also interested in the dream, and the sudden ‘flash’ of imagination during ordinary daylight affairs, as similar abnormal conditions of vision.

Such incidents as these horror sessions with Jane, fortuitously well documented at Church Terrace, suggest the direction in which Shelley’s writing began to develop. In particular the journal and diary entries for the night of 7 October provide an excellent critical gloss for such passages as the opening invocation of
Alastor
, which would otherwise remain a largely inert and over-stylized piece of gothic machinery. Although this poem was not first drafted for at least another nine months, the verbal echoes are explicit, and it is most appropriately given in this place as an example of the way Shelley was learning to transform his daily experiences into a new kind of poetry.