Shelley: The Pursuit (64 page)

They returned to their wherry that evening, and pushed on towards Lechlade, in Gloucestershire; the last town before the river curls away to its hidden sources and headstreams in the Cotswolds. A characteristic fancy took hold of Shelley’s mind as they rowed in turn, and he began to talk, half humorously, half seriously, of prolonging the expedition throughout England. ‘We had in the course of our voyage conceived the scheme of not stopping there, but, by going along a canal which here joins the Thames, to get into the Severn, and so also follow up that river to its source. Shelley even proposed, in his wildness, that there should be no halting place even there; he even proposed, by the help of divers canals and rivers, to leave North Wales, and traversing the inland counties, to reach Durham and the Lakes, so on to the Tweed, and hence to come out on the Forth, nor rest till we reached the Falls of the Clyde, when by the time we returned we should have voyaged two thousand miles.’
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As it turned out, they could not manage the Severn Canal sailing fee of twenty pounds, and above Lechlade, ‘the weeds became so enormously thick and high, that all three of us tugging could not move the boat an inch’. Mary stayed demurely aboard the boat during these struggles. ‘We did not get much beyond Inglesham Weir,’ Peacock recalled, ‘a solitary sluice was hanging by a chain, swinging in the wind and creaking dismally. Our voyage terminated at a spot where the cattle stood entirely across the stream, with the water scarcely covering their hooves.’
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They turned back, and drifted quietly downstream again under the hot September sun, towards Lechlade. Shelley continued to talk about his endless river expedition, and years later, in 1831, Peacock gently conjured up a nostalgic, afternoon portrait of him in the middle of the mad river voyage of
Crotchet Castle
, ‘Mr Philpot would lie alone for hours, listening to the gurgling of the water around the prow, and would occasionally edify the company with speculations on the great changes that would be effected in the world by the steam navigation of rivers: sketching the course of a steam-boat up and down some mighty stream which civilisation had either never visited, or long since deserted; the Missouri and the Columbia, the Oronoko and the Amazon, the Nile and the Niger, the Euphrates and the Tigris…under the overcanopying forests of the new, or by the long-silent ruins of the ancient world; through the shapeless mounds of Babylon, or the gigantic temples of Thebes.’
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While Shelley was publicly amusing the party and playing the eccentric dreamer, he was privately brooding on the river imagery as an analogue, a poetic metaphor, for an entirely different kind of journey. It was a journey into the past, and into his own personality. This combination of public joking and private poetic meditation can be seen to recur as a pre-creative condition both in England and later in Italy. In a notebook of September, he made a number of haphazard jottings, attempting to define something which he tentatively called ‘the science of mind’. In one of these fragments, taking up an idea he had first mentioned several years ago in a letter to Godwin, of 1812, he wrote:

If it were possible that a person should give a faithful history of his being from the earliest epochs of his recollection, a picture would be presented such as the world has never contemplated before. A mirror would be held up to all men in which they might behold their own recollections and, in dim perspective, their shadowy hopes and fears — all that they dare not, or that daring and desiring, they could not expose to the open eyes of day. But thought can with difficulty visit the intricate and winding chambers which it inhabits. It is like a river whose rapid and perpetual stream flows outwards — like one in dread who speeds through the recesses of some haunted pile and dares
not look behind. . . . If it were possible to be where we have been, vitally and indeed — if, at the moment of our presence there, we could define the results of our experience — if the passage from sensation to reflection — from a state of passive perception to voluntary contemplation were not so dizzying and so tumultuous, this attempt would be less difficult.
¹¹
[2]

In this thoughtful mood he returned with the rest of the party to the village of Lechlade, where they put up for two nights at the secluded little inn. Mary began to write up a diary of the trip, and Shelley, wandering alone through the little churchyard during the evening began to draft his second poem of the year. The calm, reflective tone and pace of the opening stanzas are full of echoes of Gray, and other eighteenth-century churchyard verses. Only the supple freedom with which the iambic pentameter line is shaped and run over, and the faintly disturbing literalness with which the personifications of Evening, Silence and Twilight are used — as if they really were gigantic, floating figures like something out of a medieval pageant — suggest that ‘A Summer Evening Churchyard, Lechlade, Gloucestershire’, was not written fifty years before.

The wind has swept from the wide atmosphere

Each vapour that obscured the sunset’s ray;

And pallid Evening twines its beaming hair

In duskier braids about the languid eyes of Day:

Silence and Twilight, unbeloved of men,

Creep hand in hand from yon obscurest glen.

They breathe their spells towards the departing day,

Encompassing the earth, air, stars, and sea;

Light, sound, and motion own the potent sway,

Responding to the charm with its own mystery.

The winds are still, or the dry church-tower grass

Knows not their gentle motions as they pass.

In the last two stanzas the pulse of the verse quickens, and Shelley’s familiar concern with the abnormal state of acute perception, the potential force of terror hovering at the margins of thought, makes itself felt. The overt ‘softening’
of these forces, and the faintly ironic dismissal of the experience as an ‘inquiring child’s’ game, though beautiful and tantalizing, reflects the unusual warmth and security which the company of Mary, Peacock and Charles brought to him during this expedition. It is perhaps the most relaxed and harmonious poem he ever wrote.

The dead are sleeping in their sepulchres:

And, mouldering as they sleep, a thrilling sound,

Half sense, half thought, among the darkness stirs,

Breathed from their wormy beds all living things around,

And mingling with the still night and mute sky

Its awful hush is felt inaudibly.

Thus solemnized and softened, death is mild

And terrorless as this serenest night:

Here could I hope, like some inquiring child

Sporting on graves, that death did hide from human sight

Sweet secrets, or beside its breathless sleep

That loveliest dreams perpetual watch did keep.
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They set off down-river next morning at 6, and had reached Old Windsor again in four days, on 10 September. ‘We all felt the good effects of this jaunt,’ Charles wrote to Claire, ‘but in Shelley the change is quite remarkable; he now has the ruddy, healthy complexion of the autumn upon his countenance, and is twice as fat as he used to be.’
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‘He…rowed vigorously, was cheerful, merry, overflowing with animal spirits, and had certainly one week of thorough enjoyment of life,’ said Peacock, who was inclined to attribute it to his diagnostic prescription of mutton chops.

Returned to the house at Bishopsgate, Shelley sent off lists of classical and philosophical authors to booksellers in London and Edinburgh, and got down to developing his speculations ‘On the Science of Mind’ with fresh determination. ‘Let us contemplate facts,’ he wrote. ‘Let us in the great study of ourselves resolutely compel the mind to a rigid consideration of itself. We are not content with conjecture, and inductions, and syllogisms in sciences regarding external objects. As in these, let us also, in considering the phenomena of the mind, severely collect those facts which cannot be disputed. Metaphysics will thus possess this conspicuous advantage over every other science that each student by attentively referring to his own mind may ascertain the authorities upon which any assertions regarding it are supported. . . . Metaphysics may be defined as an inquiry concerning those things belonging to, or connected with, the internal nature of man.’
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With the emphasis on severely factual inquiry into mental
phenomena, Shelley was clearly advancing towards the notion of an objective psychology, which despite the work of the philosopher David Hartley, was still not generally current.
[3]
He was himself aware that some new descriptive term was needed, though he hesitated to supply it. ‘Metaphysics is a word which has been so long applied to denote an enquiry into the phenomena of mind that it would justly be considered presumptious to employ another. But etymologically considered it is very ill adapted to express the science of mind.’
¹⁵

Shelley’s first attempt to exploit the realization that ‘we are ourselves the depositories of the evidence of the subject which we consider’, was to embark on an analysis of his own dreams. He called this a ‘Catalogue of the Phenomena of Dreams, As Connecting Sleeping and Waking’. For the moment he was content to work away at these ‘obscure and shadowy’ caverns of the mind in prose rather than in verse. ‘Let us reflect on our infancy, and give as faithfully as possible a relation of the events of sleep. And I am first bound to present a faithful picture of my own peculiar nature relative to sleep. . . . I shall employ caution, indeed, as to the facts which I state, that they contain nothing false or exaggerated.’ The main interest of this ‘Catalogue’ lies in the dramatic way in which it proved how difficult Shelley found it to analyse himself, to follow the stream to its source.

His first recurrent dream is presented with little comment, ‘the single image, unconnected with all other images, of a youth who was educated at the same school as myself’. He merely remarks that he had dreamed of this youth ‘between intervals of two or more years’, and that he could never hear his name without instantly remembering the dreams and the places where he dreamt them. This dream obviously refers to the early romantic attachment at Syon House, which the sight of a statue in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, was also to recall.
[4]

The next dream that he discussed produced on the contrary an extraordinary commentary, one of the most peculiar records of composition that he ever made.

I have beheld scenes, with the intimate and unaccountable connection of which to the obscure parts of my own nature, I have been irresistibly impressed. I have beheld a scene which has produced no unusual effect on my thoughts. After the lapse of many years I have dreamed of this scene. It has
hung on my memory; it has haunted my thoughts at intervals with the pertinacity of an object connected with human affections. I have visited this scene again. Neither the dream could be dissociated from the landscape, nor the landscape from the dream, nor feelings, such as neither singly could have awakened, from both. But the most remarkable event of this nature which ever occurred to me happened five years ago at Oxford. I was walking with a friend in the neighbourhood of that city engaged in earnest and interesting conversation. We suddenly turned the corner of a lane, and the view which its banks and hedges had concealed presented itself. The view consisted of a windmill, standing in one among many plashy meadows, inclosed with stone walls; the irregular and broken ground between the wall and the road on which we stood; a long low hill behind the windmill, and a grey covering of uniform cloud spread over the evening sky. It was that season when the last leaf had just fallen from the scant and stunted ash. The scene surely was a common scene; the season and the hour little calculated to kindle lawless thought; it was a tame uninteresting assemblage of objects, such as would drive the imagination for refuge in serious and sober talk, to the evening fireside and the dessert of winter fruits and wine. The effect which it produced on me was not such as could have been expected. I suddenly remembered to have seen that exact scene in some dream of long . . .

At this point the manuscript breaks off, and the whole ‘Catalogue’ ends, with the single startling note by Shelley: ‘Here I was obliged to leave off, overcome by thrilling horror.’ Mrs Shelley, in her later editorial footnote, remarks: ‘I remember well his coming to me from writing it, pale and agitated, to seek refuge in conversation from the fearful emotions it excited. No man, as these fragments prove, had such keen sensations as Shelley.’
¹⁶

This curious incident, recalled as it obviously is, from a walk with Hogg in the autumn of 1810, is difficult to interpret. Hogg’s
Life
offers no clues, and the image of the windmill, with its outstretched vanes, against the long low hill and grey sky, does not recur anywhere in the rest of Shelley’s writing. The only clue to the nature of the ‘lawless thought’ is Shelley’s earlier remark about the pertinacity of objects ‘connected with human affection’. It is perhaps possible that something revisited at Oxford during the river trip recalled his passionate feelings for Hogg, and set off this powerful reaction.