The Real Shelley. New Views of the Poet's Life. Vol. 1 (of 2)

It is certain, that instead of having any natural aptitude for the practice, Shelley was unusually deficient in the qualities, requisite in a scientific experimentalist. A dreamer, a visionary, and an enthusiast, he wanted the nice touch, the fine perception of minute phenomena, the intellectual patience, the mental disposition for accuracy in the smallest details. It is certain that the man, who, even in his proper art, was curiously careless of verbal details, never had any sincere disposition for pursuits, in which nothing can be done without incessant attention to minutiæ,—for pursuits which repel the student, who does not delight in the painful vigilance and methodical exactness of scientific inquiry. Had he played with the microscope to the last hour of a long life, as he played with it fitfully for several years after leaving Eton, he would never for a single hour have been ‘a worker’ with it. He was singularly wanting in what Mr. Rossetti calls ‘scientific tendencies.’

On the other hand, it is no less manifest that in his earlier time a certain mental and moral perversity—a perversity by no means uncommon in young people, and only a few degrees less common in persons of mature age—gave him a keen appetite for fruit he was forbidden to pluck, and a distaste for whatever fruit he was required to enjoy. The majority of boys take to smoking (a very disagreeable pastime to beginners), even as Thomas Carlyle confessed he took to it,—‘for the pure sin of it.’ Just as the Chelsea sage began smoking because he was ordered not to smoke, the Etonian Shelley pursued chemistry because he was ordered not to pursue it. Had it not been for the needful prohibition of the pastime, that threw the school into disorder and threatened boarding-houses with destruction, the enthusiasm for science, for which Old Walker’s lectures were in the first instance accountable, would soon have died out. Forbidden to play with his chemical apparatus and munitions, Shelley cared for no other pastime, and maintained that the pastime was a serious pursuit. Had the authorities of the school ordered every boy to study chemistry and astronomy, and put their ban on the pursuit of classical lore, Shelley would soon have declared natural science a profitless kind of busy idleness, and would have ‘wrought linked-armour for his soul’ out of Latin and Greek books. This perversity must be borne in mind by those who would take a true view of the Shelley of later times,—the Shelley who at Oxford soon ceased to care for the ‘experimental studies’ in which he was at liberty to waste his whole time, and cared especially for the sceptical writers whom he was admonished to avoid; the Shelley who, on coming from the university into the wider world, threw himself into the arms of the revolutionary doctrinaires (before he had given three weeks to the study of political science), because his natural advisers,—the persons with the strongest title to direct him authoritatively,—bade and entreated him to give no heed to such dangerous teachers.

Having come into conflict with the Eton masters on the blue-flame question, and the natural right of every Eton boy to possess an electrical machine and use it at his pleasure for the humiliation of his tutor, Shelley was nearing the time when the unanimous voice of the forms (minus the masters) proclaimed him ‘The Atheist’ of the school. Under the persecutions of the playground, which had goaded him out of his girlishness into thought and action, that revealed the masculine forces of his nature, Shelley was ceasing to be the Sion House ‘faint heart’ and ‘milksop,’ when Old Walker visited Eton. In the subsequent battle for freedom of scientific inquiry, the boy’s combativeness became daily more and more apparent; his carelessness for his own skin and his contempt for Dr. Keate’s rods more and more sublime, till Mad Shelley, ceasing to be everybody’s butt, became a boy of pluck and merit to the whole school,—a possible martyr in the sacred cause of scholastic disorder,—a lad who cared not a fig for Keate or any of Keate’s underlings. From the mad-dog of the Eton playing-grounds, he had risen to the proud position of The Eton Atheist. The girlish Shelley had for the moment become ‘a boy,’—a very naughty boy!

Let there be no misunderstanding about this rather sensational title. A boy might be The Eton Atheist, and at the same time be a sound and unwavering believer in every doctrine of the Thirty-nine Articles. The gods of Eton were only the masters of the school; the sceptics of Eton were nothing more terrible than those naughty boys who held these masters full cheap, and questioned their natural fitness for the authority given into their hands. The Atheist of Eton was the boy who surpassed all the other naughty boys in contempt for the masters, and not content with questioning their natural fitness for their official eminence, boldly and utterly denied it. No Etonian sceptic could question, no Etonian Atheist could deny the existence of gods who daily entered boys’ names on flogging-bills. Dr. Keate’s rods were no things to be ignored; the wielder of those rods was a person, whose existence could not be questioned. His character, however, was open to criticism, and the Lord High Atheist spoke his mind about it with freedom.

Before an Etonian could rise to the position of Lord High Atheist, or even become a candidate for the office, it was needful for him to distinguish himself from ordinary deriders of the pedagogic species by some super-puerile extravagance of audacity. The youngster, who preceded Shelley in the Atheist’s chair, had one dark winter’s night taken possession of the huge, richly-gilded bunch of grapes, which hung in front of ‘The Christopher Tavern,’ and having so taken into his keeping the inn-sign, suspended it over the door of the head-master’s house. In the morning, on rushing over his threshold to get to chapel in time for sacred service, this head-master ran full butt into the bunch of grapes, with consequences altogether satisfactory to the contriver and doer of the practical joke, who witnessed the successful issue of his arrangements from a convenient corner. It is needless to say that, after executing this feat in contempt of the greatest of the Etonian gods, the borrower of the grapes was declared Lord High Atheist before he had lived another day. It is uncertain what egregious act of profanity raised Shelley to the same eminence. Possibly the affair with the electric battery, that hurled Mr. Bethell against the bedroom wall, may have contributed to the future poet’s elevation to an office, which he does not seem to have disgraced. Anyhow, it is certain that Shelley became the Lord High Atheist of the school, and that he would not have attained to this distinction, had he not been regarded by his comrades as the most unruly and impudent boy of the establishment.

Whilst holding this office, not content with deriding the masters and disobeying their orders at every turn, the boy also distinguished himself by the fervour and blasphemous ingenuity with which he used to curse the King (George the Third), and used also to curse his own father. It speaks ill for the tone of Etonian manners during the poet’s time at the public school, that the boys used to gather round the Lord High Atheist on a hint that he meant forthwith to curse his own father. The willing listeners never seem to have expressed disgust at the comminatory performance. On the contrary, the frequently repeated entertainment was thought so droll and piquant that, during his short stay at Oxford, Shelley was entreated, at least on one occasion, to curse his father yet again for the gratification of two or three of his former schoolfellows. Hogg, who was present on this occasion, records that Shelley yielded reluctantly to the entreaty; but he did consent to the importunity of the old Etonians, and ‘delivered with vehemence and animation a string of execrations, greatly resembling in its absurdity a papal anathema.’ Though he joined in the ‘hearty laugh,’ that rewarded the performer, Hogg, on the departure of the two or three Etonians, exclaimed, ‘Why, you young reprobate, who in the world taught you to curse your father,—your own father?’—an inquiry to which Shelley replied:—

Ever ready, though he was, to give evidence to his father’s discredit, the undergraduate did not venture to charge his father with retorting Sir Bysshe’s maledictions. Whilst Mr. Timothy Shelley appears only to have sworn after a bad fashion of the period, the first baronet of Castle Goring exceeded the licence of blasphemy accorded to gentlemen by a custom, more honoured in the breach than the observance.

It remains to be seen how the Shelleyan enthusiasts will deal with the record of Shelley’s habit of cursing his father, when the public shall have been educated to approve every act of the poet’s life; but at present they glide lightly over the ugly business in memoirs for the general reader, glossing it with suggestions of wilful misstatement or unconscious exaggeration on the part of the poet’s earliest biographer. Even Mr. Forman forbears to hint that Shelley’s resemblance to the Saviour of the World is heightened by the poet’s behaviour to his father. In the coteries, however, where the Shelleyan apologists speak with less caution, these cursing bouts are sometimes referred to for evidence that, even in his boyhood, the author of Laon and Cythna was a person of infinite jest and subtle humour. These apologists must bear with a writer who sees much to condemn, and nothing to admire, in such exhibitions of unfilial rancour and profanity. There are jokes and jokes;—those that can be enjoyed, those that can be tolerated, and those that are absolutely intolerable. The joke of a boy cursing his own father for the amusement of his schoolfellows is one of the intolerable kind. The reader may be safely left to select a fitter word than ‘humourist’ for the designation of the young gentleman, who amused himself and his friends in so revolting a manner.

Mr. Walter S. Halliday, by the way, must have forgotten all about these cursing-bouts, when he wrote to Lady Shelley, ‘He’ (i.e., the poet at Eton) ‘had great moral courage and feared nothing, but what was base, false, and low.’ Surely it is base and low for a boy to curse his own father for the pure fun of the thing.

Who was Dr. James Lind, chiefly famous (and infamous) as Shelley’s chief instructor in the science and art of cursing? Drawing her facts from ‘authentic sources,’ Lady Shelley speaks of him as ‘an erudite scholar and amiable old man, much devoted to chemistry, at whose house Shelley passed the happiest of his Eton hours.’ ‘He was a physician,’ the lady adds, ‘and also one of the tutors.’ Recording that Dr. James Lind bore ‘a name well known among the professors of medical science,’ Mrs. Shelley has also put it on record that ‘the Doctor often stood by to befriend and support the persecuted, and that her husband never, in after-life, mentioned his name without love and reverence.’ Shelley himself used to say of this amiable and erudite old man, ‘He loved me, and I shall never forget our long talks, where he breathed the spirit of the kindest tolerance and the purest wisdom.’ Without alleging that he speaks from other and better authorities than the poet, his widow and his daughter-in-law, Mr. Rossetti says of Shelley and his peculiar patron, ‘The only official person whom he really liked there’ (i.e. Eton) ‘was Dr. James Lind of Windsor, a physician, chemist, and tutor, and a man of erudition, who superintended the youth’s scientific studies.’ Had he only deserved half the praise lavished upon him, Dr. Lind would have been a man of extraordinary goodness. But, unfortunately, it is only too clear that he was a mischievous, malignant, hard-swearing old man, who gained great influence over the Etonian Shelley, and used it hurtfully.

Possibly Lady Shelley and later biographers were justified in writing of this bad old man, as though he held a tutorial office on the Eton establishment; but without being in a position to speak positively to their discredit, the present writer ventures to entertain a doubt of their accuracy on this matter, and to give Dr. James Lind the full benefit of the doubt. If the Doctor was one of the Eton tutors, he was even a worse man than he is declared in these pages; for in that case the man, who encouraged Shelley to study chemistry in defiance of the recent prohibition, and to persist in his contumacy to the masters of the school, was guilty of encouraging the boy to rebel against authority, which he was bound by honour and official obligations to maintain. The grey-headed tutor, who secretly stimulated the boy’s rebellious spirit, and applauded him for it, was wanting in loyalty, and not guiltless of treachery, to his comrades in tutorial service. But in the absence of clear evidence to the contrary, it may be assumed that the amiable and extremely benevolent old gentleman, who taught a fifteen-or sixteen-years-old boy to curse his father, was under no especial obligation to have a care for the lad’s moral health, apart from the general duty of every man to encourage what is virtuous, and discountenance what is vicious in all persons, over whom he has any influence.

If Mrs. Shelley was right in saying Dr. James Lind made himself famous among the professors of medical science, it is strange that the fame at this date rests chiefly on the lady’s certificate. Though he has inquired of the persons most likely to have heard of Dr. Lind’s services to science, the present writer has learnt nothing of the deeds from which so bright a fame should have proceeded.

All that is known with certainty at this present date about this amiable and benevolent old man, apart from his pernicious intimacy with the young Etonian, is that during Shelley’s time he was a medical practitioner (certainly no physician of the London College) following his vocation at Windsor, that he had for his housekeeper a Miss Lind (his daughter or sister), that he was a hard swearer, and that, conceiving himself to have been badly treated by George the Third, he used to make much of his grievance, and waste many words and much time in cursing the King who had done him evil. What the man’s grievance was, that made him think so ill of poor old George the Third, is wholly a matter for conjecture. The Doctor may have been employed for awhile at ‘the Castle,’ and been superseded by a younger doctor. He may have failed in some candidature for a medical office within the royal borough, and discovered grounds for attributing his misadventure to the influence of the Castle. The grievance may have been a real one, or an affair of the imagination. All that can be told of the matter, in this year of grace, is that the Doctor believed himself to have been ‘infamously treated’ by the King, and that, in a manner scarcely accordant with all that has been written of his amiability and benevolence, seldom allowed a day to pass without doing his best to consign his royal enemy to the lowest and darkest pit of perdition.

The Lord High Atheist of the Etonians used to join Dr. and Miss Lind over their tea-table twice or thrice a-week, and after the meal spend in their society those happy hours (mentioned by Lady Shelley) during which he learnt how to curse his father more strenuously by hearing the Doctor curse his King. The Shelleyan enthusiasts are sometimes heard to suggest that Hogg may have made too much of what Shelley told him about the physician’s comminatory taste and achievements. But there is no evidence that Hogg was guilty of the exaggeration. Nor is there any reason to suppose Shelley was more than just to his teacher’s consummate mastery of malediction. Yet it was of this Doctor, who swore so heavily over his willow-pattern tea-cups, whose swearing was so inexpressibly piquant to its youthful auditor, that Shelley wrote some eight years later in Laon and Cythna, as though the man of oaths and imprecations were chiefly remarkable for philosophic dignity, sweetness of speech, mildness of manners. It was of his intercourse with this embittered and scurrilous apothecary, that the poet wrote in Prince Athanase with equal melody and falseness:—

‘Prince Athanase had one belovèd friend,
An old, old man, with hair of silver white,
And lips where heavenly smiles would hang and blend

With his wise words;
********
Such was Zonoras; and as daylight finds
One amaranth glittering on the path of frost,
When autumn nights have nipt all weaker kinds,

Thus through his age, dark, cold, and tempest-tost,
Shone truth upon Zonoras; and he filled
From fountains pure, nigh overgrown and lost,

The spirit of Prince Athanase, a child,
With soul-sustaining songs of ancient lore
And philosophic wisdom, clear and mild.

And sweet and subtle talk now evermore,
The pupil and the master shared; until,
Sharing that undiminishable store,

The youth, as shadows on a grassy hill
Outrun the winds that chase them, soon outran
His teacher, and did teach with native skill

Strange truths and new to that experienced man;
Still they were friends, as few have ever been
Who mark the extremes of life’s discordant span.’

It was to this amiable and wise physician that Shelley was indebted for another practice, scarcely less hurtful to his moral character, and far more fruitful to him of disaster at the outset of life, than his revolting habit of cursing his own father. Not content with teaching him to curse his parent, Dr. Lind taught the boy it was good fun to inveigle unwary people into scientific controversies, to trip them up with catch-questions, and then to laugh at them for being fools. By this mild-natured and benevolent physician (who is usually described as satisfying the boy’s hunger for wholesome knowledge, and ministering to his spiritual needs) Shelley, whilst at Eton, was taught to write letters under assumed names to persons interested in, but only slightly acquainted with, chemistry,—in order to discover their ignorance, and then have the pleasure of laughing insolently at it. The letters written for this amiable purpose (under Dr. Lind’s instruction) were for the most part written deceitfully,—i.e. with a false show of being written by a young and ingenuous inquirer after truth, and with a false name and address. Can any diversion be imagined more likely to infuse a boy with self-conceit and arrogance, to inspire him with the temper most foreign to genuine love of knowledge, and giving him a taste for underhand trickery, to train him how to indulge it habitually? Yet the good and wise Dr. Lind taught the boy to amuse himself in this ungenerous and deceitful way. By-and-bye, the disastrous consequences of this practice on the boy’s career at Oxford will be seen. That Shelley on coming to Oxford was so disputatious, so overflowing with scorn for minds he deemed weaker than his own, so ungenerously eager to prove himself wiser than his teachers, so ungenerously quick to show people they were fools, and mock them for being fools, must be attributed in a great degree to his premature introduction (by the humane and judicious Dr. Lind) to the violent delights of controversy. One of the correspondents, whom the boy thus lured into profitless disputation, is said to have threatened him with a flogging from Dr. Keate; a threat that is said to have determined the Etonian henceforth to approach strangers under cover of a false name and address. Had the threat been carried out and the flogging given, the boy would have taken no more than he deserved for his bad manners.

To Dr. Lind the poet was also indebted for his earliest lessons in Free Thought on matters pertaining to religion. Hogg is a good authority for this statement. Having thus sown the seeds of religious scepticism in the mind of his young friend, this exemplary physician left them to grow in a congenial soil. It does not appear that the doctor ever troubled himself to observe the consequences of his action in this matter, after his pupil left Eton. Nor does it appear that, after leaving Eton, Shelley ever troubled himself to visit, or correspond with, the virtuous sage to whom he declared himself so deeply indebted. For good or evil it cannot be questioned the boy of tender age was influenced in no slight degree by the tutor who educated him to write false epistles, to curse his father, and to repudiate Christianity.

On finding themselves disposed to regard the ‘egotisms’ of the Shelleyan poems as passages of veracious autobiography, readers should correct the tendency to error by remembering, how the hard-swearing Windsor doctor was idealized into the virtuous hermit of Laon and Cythna and the no less virtuous philosopher of Prince Athanase; how the boy (the poet’s former self), who delighted in the doctor’s profane and scurrilous utterances, was idealized into the young Prince whose heart harboured ‘nought of ill,’ whose ‘gentle, yet aspiring mind,’ was alike remarkable for justice, innocence, and various learning; and how, in course of time, the poet believed so completely all his fanciful pen had written to the Doctor’s honour, that he used to speak of him as an example of wise, stately, and virtuous old age. According to words, spoken by the poet to his second wife, Dr. Lind’s benevolence and dignified demeanour were qualified by youthful ardour. His locks were white, his eyes glowed with supernatural expressiveness, his countenance and mien were eloquent of amiability. ‘I owe to that man,’ Shelley used to ejaculate, ‘far, ah! far more than I owe to my father; he loved me, and I never shall forget our long talks, when he breathed the kindest toleration and the purest wisdom.’

In this strain Shelley used to talk of the man who taught him to curse his own father,—of the man whom he would have remembered only as a profane old reprobate, had he been less completely the victim of his own delusive fancy.

It has already been told how Shelley spent his Eton holidays at Field Place; how he took his sisters for walks, entertained them with his scientific toys, amused them with romantic stories, and dazzled them with his Eton air and stylish clothing; and how he strolled forth by starlight and moonlight to gaze at the heavenly bodies. But precise mention has still to be made of an incident of the Etonian’s life under his father’s roof, to which readers may well give their best attention.

At a time when Dr. Lind’s pernicious influence over him was at its height, Shelley suffered at Field Place from a febrile attack attended with delirium,—the illness of which he spoke to William Godwin’s daughter, before her elopement with him, in these words—

These words were spoken by Shelley to Mary Godwin on the ‘night that’ (to use her own words) ‘decided her destiny; when he opened at first with the confidence of friendship, and then with the ardour of love, his whole heart to me.’ Mrs. Shelley is at great pains to impress her readers with a sense of the precise accuracy of her report of the words, which, it is suggested, determined her, or at least were largely influential, in determining her, to fly with the object of such atrocious paternal malignity. The substantial accuracy of the lady’s report is put out of question by Hogg, who declares that he heard ‘Shelley speak of his fever and this scene at Field Place more than once, in nearly the same terms as Mrs. Shelley adopts.’ It appears, therefore, that, whilst the accuracy of Mrs. Shelley’s report is unquestionable, the statement made to her by her husband is one of the few statements respecting himself, which he repeated at different times with no important variation; the substantial consistency of his several accounts being evidential at least of the earnestness with which he pondered the narrative, and in some degree of the sincerity of his avowals of its truthfulness.

Like so many of the poet’s stories about himself, it was a curious mixture of fact and fiction. As the story, so thoroughly believed and steadily repeated by its teller, points to the period when Shelley began to regard his father with morbid fear and aversion, and also to the circumstances that gave birth to so unnatural a state of feeling, it is well to inquire how much of this marvellous story was true, and how much of it was illusion. No discreet and judicial hearer of the story ever gave the slightest credit to the chief and most painful statements of the narrative,—viz., that Mr. Timothy Shelley intended to send his fever-stricken boy to a madhouse, and had been heard to express this intention. The evidence being conclusive that he was an affectionate father and kindly gentleman, the notion that he was capable of any such atrocity can have been nothing more than one of the sick boy’s delirious fancies. Had Mr. Timothy Shelley been a less amiable person, his abundant sensitiveness for the honour of Field Place (the honour of the newly-created Castle Goring family), and his nervous care for the world’s opinion, would have saved him from the blunder of sending the sick boy to a lunatic asylum; the blunder, moreover, of consigning to a madhouse the son who, as a lunatic, could not have concurred in the resettlement of family estates, for which his concurrence was requisite, and the Squire was greatly desirous. Old Sir Bysshe was not more desirous than his son Timothy for the resettlement of the estates A and B. A man of affairs, Mr. Timothy Shelley, would have known that, whilst imprisoned as a lunatic, his son could not resettle the estates; knew also that, by barbarously throwing him into a madhouse, he would create in his son’s mind a state of feeling that would be fatal to the scheme for getting him to join in the resettlement, on his liberation or escape from the madhouse. Had he been morally capable of so atrocious an offence, self-interest would have preserved the Squire of Field Place from the iniquitous purpose, about which Shelley’s wild story made him gossip lightly and loudly. Hogg gave not a moment’s credence to the ghastly and revolting particulars of the story. The other hearers of the story, to whom Hogg makes reference, concurred with him in ascribing these particulars to hallucination, which continued to prey on the patient’s light and flighty brain, long years after his recovery from the fever that gave birth to the morbid fancy. Even Lady Shelley seems to take the only sensible view of this part of the affair, though she does not go the length of saying her father-in-law was the victim of hallucination—

language certainly implying that the sick boy’s fancy was erroneous. Hogg says:—

Other particulars of the story may have been no less baseless. That a servant told him of his father’s purpose, that he gave this servant orders and means to despatch a messenger to Dr. Lind, may have been mere fancies of the delirious brain. On the other hand, Lady Shelley may have had better authority than the poet’s words for attributing the painful conviction to a servant’s gossip. It can also be readily imagined that the sufferer from the distressing fancy gave his pocket-money to a servant, and bade him be off to Windsor for the doctor. These are points on which the reader may be left to form his own opinion, but he must altogether acquit Mr. Timothy Shelley of intending to send his boy to a madhouse.

The indisputable facts of the story are these:—The boy had a febrile illness attended with delirium; whilst ill he suffered from a fancy that his father meant to send him to a lunatic asylum; after this notion had fastened on the disordered brain, Dr. Lind was sent for; in compliance with the summons Dr. Lind came from Windsor to Field Place, and attended the boy till he was better. A reasonable view of these facts is that during his delirious sickness the patient expressed a strong desire to see Dr. Lind, and that, in their natural desire to do the best for their child’s comfort and recovery, Mr. and Mrs. Shelley invited the doctor to come to Field Place. Even Dr. Lind with all his eccentricity would not have presumed to visit Field Place without an invitation from the master of the house. Still less would he have ventured to force his way into the sick chamber against Mr. Timothy Shelley’s wish. The statement that he dared Mr. Shelley ‘to execute his purpose,’ and brought him to a sense of decency by ‘menaces,’ is simply ridiculous. Ever reluctant though she is to discredit any of the poet’s statements, Lady Shelley shows her opinion of the wildest extravagances of his marvellous story by being silent about them.

Something should be said about the probable time of this illness. Circumstances point to the latter part of 1808 as the period in which Dr. Lind attended Shelley in Field Place. Shelley may have been right in regarding the illness as an incident of one of his ‘holidays;’ but there are grounds for thinking it more probable that the illness ran its course during one of the Eton terms. Four-and-thirty years after the poet’s death, Miss Margaret Shelley could remember that, whilst her sister Hellen was at school at Clapham, Bysshe was sent home from Eton to be nursed through an illness.

Hellen’s age (she was born in 1799) seems to indicate that this illness cannot have taken place earlier than the autumn of 1808. Even then she would have been young to go to boarding-school. If this was the illness mentioned in the poet’s strange story, Dr. Lind’s visit to Field Place is a simple affair. Sent home when he was already sickening for an illness, the patient had been under Dr. Lind’s medical treatment before he was sent home to be nursed through an illness that would probably prove a severe one. What more natural and in the ordinary course of things, when the boy grew worse, and the village apothecary wished for ‘a second opinion,’ than for Mr. Timothy Shelley to summon the Windsor doctor who had seen the patient in the earliest stage of the malady. The conversation between Mr. Timothy Shelley and the village apothecary, which is said to have been so indiscreetly reported to the sick boy, may have turned wholly on the question, whether Dr. Lind should be sent for. Dr. Lind unquestionably was summoned; and as Mr. Shelley was at Field Place at the time, no one else is likely to have dispatched the summons. Had he imagined Dr. Lind had already been, or would soon be, the boy’s instructor in hard swearing, Mr. Shelley would, doubtless, have sent for another doctor. As the future poet left Eton towards the end of 1809; as the illness of the marvellous story occurred during the height of Dr. Lind’s influence over the boy; as that influence was certainly an affair of the later half of Bysshe’s stay at Eton (1808-9); and as Shelley was certainly sent home from Eton to be nursed through an illness when his sister Hellen (born in September, 1799) was already at school and in ‘the middle of her half-year,’ most readers will concur with the present writer in thinking the illness mentioned in the story and the illness mentioned in the letter were one and the same illness,—and that the illness at the earliest took place in the autumn of 1808, at the latest in the spring of 1809, i.e. when Shelley was sixteen years old. If this manner of dealing with sure facts is acceptable to readers, they may congratulate themselves on having discovered the six months, at the beginning or end of which, the poet was first possessed by the fancy that his father was looking out for a pretext for locking him up in a madhouse:—the hideous fancy that (to use Love Peacock’s words) ‘haunted him throughout life.’

How came this ghastly and absolutely groundless fancy to take this early and enduring hold of his mind? The answer must be sought in the poet’s ancestral story, the characteristics of the romantic literature of which he had been a greedy devourer from his early childhood, and the conditions of his life at Eton. The answer to be extorted from these three sources of information is doubtless an answer, resting on inference and conjecture from facts, almost as much as upon facts themselves. Still it is an answer worth having, though veined with uncertainties. The Shelleys, who eventually blossomed into the Castle Goring house, resembled the eighteenth and nineteenth century Byrons in having a distinct strain of madness. Mention has already been made of the Newark apothecary’s elder brother, whose story is told in the following words of the Castle Goring pedigree:—

This long-lived lunatic, who did not escape from his dismal doom in this world, till he had entered his seventy-seventh year, is a significant feature of the poet’s ancestral story. Brother of the Newark apothecary, this madman, whose affliction caused him to be set aside in the arrangements of the family (to his younger brother’s advantage), was the first baronet’s uncle, the poet’s great-great-uncle. The obscurity of the families, with whom this lunatic’s ancestors intermarried before his period, precludes the discovery of the number of the various channels through which insanity may have come to his brain. But it is not to the physiological credit of the Castle Goring Shelleys, that their ancestors married so many heiresses. Families, whose men have married for money in successive generations, are usually seen to suffer in bodily stamina and mental health from what has come together with money to the family story. There is, of course, no reason why an heiress should not be as healthy as a poor parson’s daughter. But there is nothing in money to exempt its possessor from struma in its various forms; and so long as he can win in his bride the first object of his desire, money, the male fortune-hunter is apt to shut his eyes to the indications that the advantages of the money must be taken with serious attendant drawbacks. Families, famous for marrying heiresses, whether they intermarry with noble stocks, or, like our poet’s ancestors, with mere gentle yeomanry (i.e. squireens entitled to bear arms), are seldom famous for the qualities that render individuals gracious and existence delightful. If they endure for centuries, such families often do so by suffering for centuries.

To account for the same revolting fancy, allowance must also be made for the morbid literature on which the boy had been mentally suckled from his tender infancy,—the tales of domestic horror and cruelties, in which he had revelled from early childhood. To the producers and readers of that literature, no character was more attractive than a wretched being unjustly dealt with as a lunatic by barbarous relations. It is at least probable that the stories of such cruelty, flowing as they did from the press in the period when Monk Lewis threw the audience of a crowded theatre into hysterical anguish by his monodrama of The Captive, may have inspired the boy with a morbid apprehension of life-long imprisonment in a mad-house.

Even more likely to produce the same agonizing apprehension, were some of the more painful incidents of his life at Eton, if their terrorizing power was intensified by the knowledge that one of his not very remote collateral ancestors had been confined justly or unjustly as a lunatic. The nervous boy who was hunted and baited in the Eton playing-grounds, by a multitude of lads, shouting at the top of their voices, ‘Mad Shelley, Mad Shelley, Mad Shelley!’ had good reason to suspect that something in his behaviour and idiosyncrasy must have suggested the imputation of insanity.

The torture, which made so deep and enduring an impression on the boy who only witnessed it, affected far more strongly the boy who was the object of the persecution. To the end of his life, the poet (given like Byron to brood over the sorrows of his childhood) used to speak with passionate resentment of the barbarous malice of the boys, who either exasperated him with an accusation they knew to be groundless, or, worse still (if they really thought him insane), mocked him for the affliction that entitled him to their compassion.

In his later time at Eton, when he was distinguishing himself by contumacy and insolence to the masters of his school, his father was of course informed of his insubordination and other scholastic offences. Could his word be taken (which it may not be) on the matter, Shelley was twice expelled from Eton, and twice (at his father’s entreaty) re-admitted to the school, before he was dismissed from it for the third and last time. It cannot be doubted the Atheist of College gave the masters good reasons for wishing him away from the school, and for requesting Mr. Shelley to remove him from an establishment that, fruitless of benefit to him, suffered not a little from his disorderliness. It is probable that the Squire of Field Place was aware of the maledictions poured upon him by the Etonian scapegrace. It is unlikely that the boy, so unruly and contumacious at school, was submissive and respectful to his father in the holidays. There is no evidence before the world that the lad received personal chastisement at his father’s hands. But it is conceivable he was so corrected by the Member for New Shoreham, in days when fathers of unimpeachable humanity and affectionateness applied the bamboo and the birch to their sons in a way, that would now-a-days be justly stigmatized as barbarous and revolting. It is, however, certain that the essentially amiable, though rather choleric, squire, had much trouble to manage his heir, and that their inharmonious intercourse was attended with friction and collisions, that could not fail to make such a son regard his sire with suspicion and aversion. If he was familiar with the story of the Uckfield lunatic, either from the gossip of old servants, or from the free speech of that lunatic’s nephew (old Sir Bysshe), what more likely and natural than for the Etonian scapegrace to think that his fate might resemble his great-great-uncle’s fate,—that he might be set aside as a lunatic to his little brother’s advantage in the arrangements of his family,—that his father was already looking about for a pretext and an occasion for sending him to a mad-house?

But, it may be asked, was Peacock justified in going so far as to say of the poet, that ‘the idea, that his father was continually on the watch for a pretext to lock him up, haunted him through life?’ Was the delusion so absolutely unintermitting? Were there no times when the hideous fancy passed from his brain? No lucid intervals when he saw he had in this matter been the dupe of his own imagination? No times, moreover, when he forced himself back into the delusion by an effort of will and fancy, similar to those imaginative exercises in which Byron was so expert and curious an operator? In answer to these questions, it can only be said that there is no evidence of intermissions in the delusion, and that Peacock probably intended to say no more when he remarked that the morbid fancy, which certainly held the poet’s mind in his later time, ‘haunted him through life.’

To the present writer, indeed, it is conceivable that there were times when the poet’s mind got the better of the most hideous of the several delusions that troubled it from time to time. The present writer can also conceive there were times when the poet, by the exercise of his will, sustained his belief in the delusion, even as the dreamer can for a few seconds by pure volition persist in believing a dream, which may be described as overlying his consciousness of its unreality. One of the prime dogmas of the school of metaphysicians, whose tenets Shelley embraced with cordial conviction of their truth, is that belief is independent of volition. The dogma is true in respect to perfectly logical and altogether sound minds. But there are unsound minds that are capable of shaping their opinions and determining their belief by processes of volition. Minds subject to manifest and distressing illusions are not to be rated as perfectly logical and altogether sound. Shelley’s mind certainly was liable to such delusions. It is conceivable he would not have insisted on the separateness of belief and volition with so much needless emphasis and passion, had he not been uneasily conscious,—troubled and irritated by a criminatory sub-consciousness—that in some matters (such for instance as his delusion respecting his father) he believed what he ought not to believe, and could by strenuous volition save himself from believing. Some such thought as this was perhaps in Peacock’s mind, when he spoke of the ‘semi-delusions’ of the man whom he loved so heartily.

Returning to Eton after recovering from the fever, of which so much has been said in foregoing pages of this chapter, Shelley, to the end of his time at the public school, continued to be in most respects the same boy he was on rising to the office of Lord High Atheist. Persisting in contumacy and unruliness he left the school in disgrace, though not under any ignominy to preclude him from the advantages of further education at one of the universities. In one particular, however, he seems to have changed his course towards the close of his Etonian career. The passion for scientific amusements (let them not be called ‘studies’) having in some degree spent itself, he devoted the greater part of his leisure to literary exercise, in the hope of winning premature distinction as a man of letters,—an ambition he certainly would not have entertained, had he been so seriously set on scientific inquiry, and occupied with scientific interests, as successive biographers have represented.

On 7th May of 1809, whilst still a boarder in Mr. Bethell’s house, Shelley wrote Messrs. Longman & Co., the eminent publishers of Paternoster Row, London, a boyish letter, informing them that he was writing a romance, and expressing his wish for them to publish it. The publishers were informed that, as he was ‘the heir of a gentleman of large fortune in the county of Sussex,’ their correspondent was not writing for money, though he would gladly take a share of any pecuniary profits, resulting from the production of his work. As the publishers endorsed this puerile letter with a memorandum of their readiness to look at the story on its completion, it may be assumed that the manuscript of perhaps the most ludicrous tale of all English literature was submitted to the publishers’ reader. As the absurd performance was not published till the end of May, or an early day of June, 1810, and was then published by Messrs. G. Wilkie and J. Robinson, of 57 Paternoster Row, it may be assumed that after considering their reader’s opinion of the story, Messrs. Longman & Co. declined to publish it,—or at least to publish it on terms the author could consent to accept.

Though it is certain Shelley left Eton prematurely and on account of misbehaviour, the particular misconduct which resulted in his dismissal from the school is unknown. To Peacock (who at the time smiled secretly at the ‘semi-delusion,’ even as in later time he smiled at it openly in the pages of Fraser’s Magazine), Shelley averred that he was sent away from Eton for striking a penknife through the hand of one of his school-fellows, and pinning it to a desk. Of course, Shelley said the ferocious act was the result of extravagant provocation.

To satisfy impartial readers that Shelley did not pin his schoolfellow’s hand to a desk with the blade of a pen-knife, it is enough to say that his comrades at Eton had no recollection of any such incident in his career at the school. How Shelley came to account in so remarkable a manner for his premature withdrawal from the public school, is not left altogether to conjecture. Though he makes no reference to the affair in his Fraser article, Peacock, on hearing Shelley’s astounding story, was doubtless mindful of the case of the military gamester, whose hand (in an early year of the present century) was pinned with a steel fork to the table of a famous gambling-club, as a convenient preliminary to the exposure of what was concealed between his wrist and cuff.

Whilst it is certain that Shelley was not dismissed from Eton for the cause he stated, it is by no means improbable that he was sent home on account of his amiable habit of cursing his own father,—a practice that cannot have favoured the moral tone of school, and on coming to the knowledge of the masters would necessarily move them to a strong expression of disapproval.

It accords with this conjecture, that the Etonians, who called on Shelley at Oxford in Hogg’s presence, obviously regarded his singular way of proclaiming his hatred of his father as the grandest and most memorable of his offences at school. The young man, whose reluctance to repeat the form of cursing for the amusement of his old schoolfellows may be fairly attributed to regretful shame, would naturally in later time shrink from confessing he had been sent away from Eton for so heinous a misdemeanour.

But though he left Eton in disgrace with the masters, the Atheist of the school does not seem to have fallen out of favour with the boys, whose regard he had won by extravagances of unruliness. Hogg speaks of the books (Greek or Latin classics, each inscribed with the donor’s name) given to Shelley by his comrades on his withdrawal from the college, and reasonably urges that the ‘unusual number’ of these parting gifts is sufficient evidence of his eventual popularity with his schoolfellows.

CHAPTER VI.