Shelley: The Pursuit (88 page)

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:

And on the pedestal these words appear:

‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.
⁹⁸

Apart from business connected with the house at Marlow, and the immediate arrangements for the coach and the journey, Shelley had only one other
important affair to arrange: Godwin’s finances. By the technical device of having his own life insured against the possibility of dying before Sir Timothy, Shelley was able to secure a very substantial
post obit
, and Godwin expected to benefit handsomely. It is not quite clear how much the sum amounted to, but it may have been a sum as large as £4,500; at any rate the liability to Willats was £9,000.
⁹⁹
Godwin’s delight at hearing of this agreement was quickly dashed when he discovered that Shelley, as in 1815, had decided to make use of a good part of this money for his own expenses. He wrote acknowledging the receipt of ‘the sum mentioned in your letter. I acknowledge with equal explicitness my complete disappointment. I observe the expression you use, that you are “resolved to keep in your hands the power conferred by the difference of the two sums”.’
¹⁰⁰

Godwin pressed Shelley to leave all the
post obit
money in England, under a joint account, requiring joint signatures; but Shelley would not accept this, for he had learnt his lesson and was not leaving financial hostages behind. Godwin’s bitter reaction brought out much of that mixture of shame and hostility towards Shelley that he had tried to suppress since the marriage of 1816. His letter, the last one we have from him to Shelley in England, sadly recalls the declining course which the relationship between master and protégé had run, ever since 1812. Godwin wrote that he had ‘reflected much on the subject. I am ashamed of the tone I have taken with you in all our late conversations. I have played the part of a supplicant, and deserted that of a philosopher. It was not thus I talked with you when I first knew you. I will talk so no more. I will talk principles; I will talk
Political Justice
; whether it makes for me or against me, no matter. I am fully capable of this . . . . I have nothing to say to you of a passionate nature; least of all do I wish to move your feelings; less than the least to wound you. All that I have to say in the calmness of philosophy, and moves far above the atmosphere of vulgar sensations. If you have the courage to hear me, come; if you have not, be it so.’
¹⁰¹

This final appeal, intended by Godwin to be dignified and even majestic, had to Shelley’s ear a mixture of hypocrisy and pathos, and his answer was eloquent. Having assured himself that Godwin had received the allotted money, he broke off contact. Throughout the month of February, his last in England, while he was lodging at Great Russell Street and visiting friends virtually every evening, he did not once call on Godwin. Meanwhile, abandoning every restraint, Godwin wrote to him again and again, on the 2, 3, 5 and 10 February; and renewed the onslaught on the 17th, 22nd, 24th and 25th. There is no record of Shelley replying, and Godwin’s own letters have not survived, probably because Shelley tore them up.
¹⁰²
As a last resort, five days before they left London, Godwin slipped in to see his daughter while Shelley was out. By chance, or
perhaps by Godwin’s calculation, Shelley returned while he was still there, and a stiff but polite reconciliation followed.

Over their last weekend, the 7 and 8 March, Shelley called briefly on Godwin, and stayed to tea. But he visited in company with Hogg, Peacock and Horace Smith, so it was impossible to talk business. Claire also visited her mother, Mrs Godwin, to say farewell. On Monday the 9th, Godwin was permitted to come to the christening of William and little Clara at St Giles-in-the-Fields. Claire also had Alba baptized according to Byron’s instructions, ‘Clara Allegra’, adding: ‘reputed daughter of Rt Hon. George Gordon, Lord Byron, Peer of no fixed residence, travelling on the continent’. They all returned to Russell Street, but once again Shelley had Peacock and Horace Smith on hand, and the visitors left early. Later in the evening Hunt and Bessy Kent walked down from Paddington, and arranged a farewell dinner for the following day. On Tuesday the 11th they were busy packing, and various friends looked in to say goodbye. The children were put to bed early in precaution for the next day’s journey, and Hunt and Marianne came down to celebrate Shelley’s last night. After supper, exhausted, Shelley fell asleep on the couch, and the Hunts crept away without finally saying goodbye at all.

The next morning they were up before first light, and left the capital still in darkness. They breakfasted at Dartford, and by nightfall came down the long Dover hill from Canterbury, with Claire pointing out to the children all the lights below then, the castle and the sea, ‘almost like a fair city’. It was the largest household Shelley had ever taken abroad, consisting of eight people: Mary and Claire, little William, the babies Clara and Allegra, their faithful Swiss nurse Elise and Milly Shields, a servant girl from Marlow. This time they were not pursued, and put up comfortably at York House, intending to sail the next day. In the morning, Claire and the maids walked with the children on the beach, and Allegra had her first experience of sea bathing.
¹⁰³

While waiting for the captain of their packet to decide if they could manage the stiff north-easterly, Shelley suddenly remembered that he had not left his bankers, Brookes, full instructions concerning unpaid bills. He hurried off a note, specifying four applicants only, and ‘no other bills to be honoured’. Peacock was put down first, for thirty pounds. Towards the printing of
The Revolt of Islam
, Shelley also stipulated thirty pounds for Charles Ollier. Godwin got a handshake of £150. Finally, ‘Mr Madocks (for accounts at Marlow). £117’.
¹⁰⁴
The last thing Shelley wrote in England concerned bills, not poetry.

They embarked. The sea was very rough and they left Dover on the wings of a March storm. Claire watched waves ‘mountains high’, but the sail over to Calais took just two hours and forty minutes, and was the quickest crossing Shelley had ever had. The babies were ill, but behaved beautifully, and slept
below deck with the servants. Shelley, Mary and Claire leaned on the deck rail. Next to them, a military gentleman’s wife became so frightened she began to repeat the Lord’s Prayer out loud. Each time she was sick, she ordered her servant to continue repeating it for her.
¹⁰⁵
Shelley looked away towards France: it seemed to him that spring was hastening to meet them from the south.
¹⁰⁶

[1]
In
The Cenci
, Shelley adapted the fragment to the speech of Orsino in which he explicitly describes the overwhelming force of his physical lust for Beatrice, in the last soliloquy of Act II, Scene II, 1. 132:

Her bright form kneels beside me at the altar

And follows me to the resort of men,

And fills my slumber with tumultuous dreams,

So when I wake my blood seems liquid fire;

. . . and thus unprofitably

I clasp the phantom of unfelt delights

Till weak imagination half possesses

The self-created shadow.

[2]
On 22 November 1817, Shelley sent a copy of
Queen Mab
to a certain Mr Waller, writing in the flyleaf: ‘It is the Author’s boast . . . that after 6 years of added experience and reflection, the doctrines of equality and liberty and disinterestedness, and entire unbelief in religion of any sort to which this Poem is devoted have gained rather than lost that beauty and that grandeur which first determined him to devote his life to the investigation and inculcation of them. — PBS.’ Bod. MS Shelley Adds. c. 4, F303.

[3]
E. P. Thompson’s summary is definitive. ‘We may see the Pentridge rising as one of the first attempts in history to mount a wholly proletarian insurrection, without any middle-class support. The objectives of this revolutionary movement cannot perhaps be better characterized than in the words of the Belper Street song — “The Levelution is begun”. . . . And yet the longer-term influence of the Oliver affair was to strengthen the constitutionalist, as opposed to the revolutionary, wing of the reform movement . . . . For three years the crucial political contests centered upon the defence of civil liberties, and the rights of the Press, where the middle class was itself most sensitive . . . . the failure of Pentridge emphasized the extreme danger of conspiracy. Only the shock of Peterloo (August 1819)

threw a part of the movement back into revolutionary courses; and the Cato Street Conspiracy (February 1820) served to reinforce the lesson of Oliver and Pentridge. From 1817 until Chartist times, the central working-class tradition was that which exploited every means of agitation and protest short of active insurrectionary preparation.’
The Making of the English Working Class
, 1968 pp. 733–5.

[4]
The ‘fac-simile reprint’ was published by Thomas Rodd, who stated that ‘The author printed only twenty copies of this Address’. There is no way of checking this, but certainly the strong political views Shelley expressed in this pamphlet, as with the
Philosophical View of Reform
, were generally unavailable to his contemporaries, and for many years after his death. See T. J. Wise,
A Shelley Library
, 1924.

[5]
A typical alteration came at the climax of the death-speech of one of Laon’s supporters in Canto XII, stanza 30. Shelley had originally written:

‘For me the world is grown too void and cold,

Since hope pursues immortal destiny

With steps thus slow — therefore shall ye behold

How Atheists and Republicans can die;

Tell to your children this!’ Then suddenly

He sheathed a dagger in his heart and fell . . . .

But, bending to Ollier’s wishes, the fourth line was finally reduced to the inoffensive and unremarkable

How those who love, yet fear not, dare to die.

[6]
These became a favourite symbol of Shelley’s and in his later Italian notebooks he made frequent sketches of them, often resembling sycamore seeds with a round central pod and a single or double fibrous wing extension. See, for example, Bod. MS Shelley Adds. e. 6, p. 97 rev.

[7]
In Shelley’s manuscript notebook (Bod. MS Shelley Adds. e. 10), this whole passage of Canto IX from stanzas 19 to 26 is written very carefully in ink and much corrected; while the surrounding body of the canto is written in his usual racing pencil scrawl, as Trelawny later said, for all the world like a marsh overgrown with bulrushes and blotted with wild ducks.

[8]
One curious and unexpected influence was on the German Expressionist writers of a century later, who wrote in the climate of social upheaval and desperation of the years 1917-22.
The Revolt of Islam
is particularly reflected in the Expressionist revolutionary
Ich-dramas
written by Ernst Toller and Georg Kaiser, where epic scenarios are combined with political and utopian imagery and intense mythological projections of the individual self. Like Shelley they relied on violent and luridly distorted images, combined with highly abstract rhetoric; but like Shelley too they found it impossible to integrate fully heroic myth and political reality. The Expressionist novelist B. Traven, author of
The Death Ship
(1926), proclaimed his main influences as Max Steiner and Shelley.
⁷⁵

[9]
John Gibson Lockhart (1794-1854), critic, editor and biographer. An almost exact contemporary of Shelley’s, he revived
Blackwood’s Magazine
with John Wilson, with whom much of his review work has been confused, and later edited the
Quarterly Review
from 1825 to 1853. Though he was to prove Shelley’s most intelligent reviewer, his sympathies were unreliable and he was partly responsible for the notorious attack on Keats’s
Endymion
in 1818. His great
Life of Scott
(1837-8) is remembered for its brilliant inaccuracies.