ARIEL

A SHELLEY ROMANCE

BY

ANDRÉ MAUROIS

TRANSLATED BY

ELLA D’ARCY

First published in 1924

CONTENTS

ARIEL

PART I

So I turned to the Garden of Love

That so many sweet flowers bore;

And I saw it was filled with graves.

William Blake

CHAPTER I
KEATE’S WAY

In the year 1809 George III appointed as Headmaster of Eton, Dr. Keate, a terrible little man who considered the flogging-block a necessary station on the road to perfection, and who ended a sermon on the Sixth Beatitude by saying, “Now, boys, be pure in heart! For if not, I’ll flog you until you are!”

The county gentlemen and merchant princes who put their sons under his care were not displeased by such a specimen of pious ferocity, nor could they think lightly of the man who had birched half the ministers, bishops, generals, and dukes in the kingdom.

In those days the severest discipline found favour with the best people. The recent French Revolution had proved the dangers of liberalism when it affects the governing classes. Official England, which was the soul of the Holy Alliance, believed that in combating Napoleon she was combating liberalism in the purple. She required from her public schools a generation of smooth-tongued hypocrites.

In order to crush out any possible republican ardour in the young aristocrats of Eton, their studies were organized on conventional and frivolous lines. At the end of five years the pupil had read Homer twice through, almost all Virgil, and an expurgated Horace; he could turn out passable Latin epigrams on Wellington and Nelson. The taste for Latin quotations was then so pronounced, that Pitt in the House of Commons being interrupted in a quotation from the Æneid, the whole House, Whigs and Tories alike, rose as one man to supply the end. Certainly a fine example of homogeneous culture.

The study of science, being optional, was naturally neglected, but dancing was obligatory. On the subject of religion Keate held doubt to be a crime, but that otherwise it wasn’t worth talking about. He feared mysticism more than indifference, permitted laughing in chapel and wasn’t strict about keeping the Sabbath.

Here, in order to make the reader understand the—perhaps unconscious—Machiavellism of this celebrated trainer of youth, we may note that he did not mind being told a few lies: “A sign of respect,” he would say.

Barbarous customs reigned amongst the boys themselves. The little boys were the slaves or “fags” of the big boys. The fag made his master’s bed, fetched from the pump outside and carried up his water in the morning, brushed his clothes, and cleaned his shoes. Disobedience was punished by torments to fit the crime. A boy writing home, not to complain, but to describe his life, says: “Rolls, whose fag I am, put on spurs to force me to jump a ditch which was too wide for me. Each time I funked it he dug them into me, and of course my legs are bleeding, my ‘Greek Poets’ reduced to pulp, and my new clothes torn to tatters.”

The glorious “art of self-defence” was in high honour. At the conclusion of one strenuous bout, a boy was left dead upon the floor. Keate, coming to look at the corpse, said simply: “This is regrettable, of course, but I desire above all things that an Eton boy should be ready to return a blow for a blow.”

The real, but hidden, aim of the system was to form “hard-faced men,” all run in the same mould. In action you might be independent, but any originality of thought, of dress, or of language, was the most heinous of crimes. To betray the smallest interest in ideas or books was a bit of disgusting affectation to be forcibly pulled up by the roots.

Such a life as this seemed to the majority of English boys quite right. The pride they felt in carrying on the traditions of a school like Eton founded by a king, and under the protection of and near neighbour to all the succeeding kings, was balm of Gilead to their woes.

Only a few sensitive souls suffered terribly and suffered long.

One of these, for example, the young Percy Bysshe Shelley, son of a rich Sussex landowner, and grandson to Sir Bysshe Shelley, Bart., did not seem able to acclimatize himself at all.

This boy, who was exceptionally beautiful, with brilliant blue eyes, dark curling hair, and a delicate complexion, displayed a sensitiveness of conscience most unusual in one of his class, as well as an incredible tendency to question the Rules of the Game.

When first he appeared in the school, the Sixth Form captains, seeing his slender build and girlish air, imagined they would have little need to enforce their authority over him. But they soon discovered that the smallest threat threw him into a passion of resistance. An unbreakable will, with a lack of the necessary physical strength to carry out its decrees, forefated him to rebellion. His eyes, dreamy when at peace, acquired, under the influence of enthusiasm or indignation, a light that was almost wild; his voice, usually soft and low, became agonized and shrill.

His love of books, his contempt for games, his long hair floating in the wind, his collar opened on a girlish throat, everything about him scandalized those self-charged to maintain in the little world of Eton the brutal spirit of which it was so proud.

But Shelley, from his first day there, having decided that fagging was an outrage to human dignity, had refused obedience to the orders of his fag-master, and in consequence was proclaimed an outlaw.

He was called “Mad Shelley.” The strongest of his tormentors undertook to save his soul as by fire, although they gave up attacking him in single combat, when they found he would stop at nothing. Scratching and slapping, he fought with open hands like a girl.

An organized “Shelley-bait” became one of the favourite amusements. Some scout would discover the strange lad reading poetry by the riverside, and at once give the “view hallo!” Shelley, with his hair streaming on the wind, would take flight across the meadows, through the college cloisters, the Eton streets. Finally, surrounded like a stag at bay, he would utter a prolonged and piercing shriek, while his tormentors would “nail” him to the wall with balls slimy with mud.

A voice would cry “Shelley!” And “Shelley!” another voice would take it up. The old walls would re-echo to yells of “Shelley!” in every key. A lickspittle fag would pluck at the victim’s jacket; another would pinch him; a third would kick away the books he squeezed convulsively under his arm. Then, every finger would be pointed towards him, while fresh cries of “Shelley!” “Shelley!” “Shelley!” finally shattered his nerves.

The crisis was reached for which his tormentors waited—an outburst of mad rage, in which the boy’s eyes flashed fire, his cheeks grew white, his whole body trembled and shook.

Tired at length of a spectacle that was always the same, the school went back to its games.

Shelley picked up his mud-stained books and lost in thought wandered away through the meadows that border the Thames and, flinging himself down on the sun-flecked grass, watched the river glide past him. Running water, like music, has the power to change misery into melancholy. Both, through their smooth, unceasing flow, pour over the soul the anodyne of forgetfulness and peace. The massive towers of Windsor and Eton, typified to the young rebel a hostile and unchanging world, but the reflection of the willow-trees trembling in the water soothed him by its tenuous fragility.

He returned to his books, to Diderot, to Voltaire, to the system of M. d’Holbach. To love these Frenchmen, so hated by his masters, seemed an act of defiance worthy of his courage. An English work condensed them all. Godwin’s Political Justice. It was his favourite reading.

Godwin made all things seem simple. Had men studied him the world would have attained to a state of idyllic happiness. Had they listened to the voice of reason, that is of Godwin, two hours’ work a day would have been sufficient for all their needs. Free love would have replaced the stupid conventions of marriage, and philosophy have banished the terrors of superstition.

Unfortunately, “prejudices” still shut men’s minds to truth.

Shelley closed his book, stretched himself out upon the sunny, flower-starred grass, and meditated on the misery of man. From the school buildings behind him a confused murmur of stupid voices floated out over the exquisite landscape of wood and stream, but here at least no mocking eye could spy upon him. The boy’s tears ran down, and pressing his hands together, he made this vow: “I swear, to be just and wise and free, if such power in me lies. I swear never to become an accomplice, even by my silence, of the selfish and the powerful. I swear to dedicate my whole life to the worship of beauty.”

Had Dr. Keate been witness to the above outburst of religious ardour, so deplorable in any well-regulated school, he would certainly have treated the case in his favourite way.

CHAPTER II
THE HOME

In the holidays the refractory slave became the hereditary prince. Mr. Timothy Shelley, his father, owned the manor of Field Place in Sussex, a well-built, low, white house surrounded by a park, and extensive woods. There Shelley found his four pretty sisters, a little brother three years old, whom he had taught to say “The devil!” so as to shock the pious, and his beautiful cousin Harriet Grove, who people said resembled him.

The head of the family, Sir Bysshe Shelley, lived in the market-town of Horsham. He was a gentleman of the old school who boasted of being as rich as a duke and of living like a poacher. Six feet high, of commanding presence and a handsome face, Sir Bysshe was of cynical mind and energetic temperament. Unlike the rest of the Shelleys, who all had bright blue eyes, Sir Bysshe’s eyes were brown, inherited presumably from his New Jersey mother, the wealthy widow Plum.

He had sunk eighty thousand pounds in building Castle Goring, but could not finish it because of the expense. So he lived in a cottage close to the Horsham Town Hall, with one man-servant as eccentric as himself. He dressed like a peasant and spent his days in the tap-room of the Swan Inn, talking politics with all and sundry. He had a rough sort of humour that frightened the slow-witted country-folk. He had made his two daughters so unhappy at home that they had run away, which afforded him an excellent pretext for not giving them any dowry.

His one desire was to round off an immense estate and to transmit it intact to innumerable generations of Shelleys. With this in view he had entailed the greater part of it on Percy, to the total exclusion of his other children. Considering his grandson as the necessary upholder of his posthumous ambition, he had a certain affection for him. But for his son, Timothy, who dealt in stilted phrases, he had nothing but contempt.

Timothy Shelley was member of Parliament for the pocket borough of New Shoreham. Like his father, he was tall and well made, fair, handsome and imposing. He had a better heart than Sir Bysshe but less will-power. Sir Bysshe was rather attractive, as avowed egoists and cynics often are. Timothy had good intentions and was insupportable. He admired intellect with the irritating want of tact of the illiterate. He affected a fashionable respect for religion, an aggressive tolerance for new ideas, a pompous philosophy. He liked to call himself liberal in his political and religious opinions, but was careful not to scandalize the people of his set. A friend of the Duke of Norfolk, he spoke with complacency of the emancipation of the Irish Catholics. He was proud of his own boldness and not a little scared by it. He had tears at command, but became ferocious if his vanity was touched. In private life he plumed himself on his urbanity, but tried to combine the mailed fist with the velvet glove. Diplomatic in small things he was boorish in big ones; inoffensive yet exasperating, he was well fitted to try the temper of any young critic; and it was the vexation caused by the silly bibble-babble of his father which had done much to throw Shelley into intellectual isolation. As to Mrs. Shelley, she had been the prettiest girl in the county, she liked a man to be a fighter and a gentleman, and she would watch with disgust her eldest son go off into the woods carrying a book under his arm instead of a gun.

In the eyes of his sisters, however, Shelley was a Superman. The moment he arrived from Eton the house was filled with fantastic guests, the park was alive with confused murmurs as in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” The little girls lived in a continual but agreeable terror. Percy delighted in clothing with mystery the everyday objects of life. There was no hole in the old walls into which he did not thrust a stick in the search for secret passages. In the attics he had discovered a locked room. Here, said he, lived an old alchemist with a long beard, the terrible Cornelius Agrippa. When a noise was heard in the attics, it was Cornelius upsetting his lamp. During a whole week the Shelley family worked in the garden, digging out a summer shelter for Cornelius.

Other monsters woke again with the boy’s arrival. There was the great tortoise which lived in the pond, and the great old snake, a formidable reptile, that once had really frequented the underwood, and which one of the Squire’s gardeners had killed with a scythe. “This gardener, little girls, this gardener who had the look of a human being like you and me, was in reality Father Time himself who causes all legendary monsters to perish.”

What rendered these inventions so fascinating was that the teller himself was not too sure he was inventing them. Stories of witches and ghosts had troubled his sensitive childhood. But the more he feared ghostly apparitions the more he forced himself to brave them. At Eton, having drawn a circle on the ground, and set fire to some alcohol in a saucer, which enveloped him in its bluish flame, he began his incantation: “Demons of the air, and of fire. . . .” “What on earth are you doing, Shelley?” said his Master, the solemn and magnificent Bethel, interrupting him one day: “Please, sir, I’m raising the devil. . . .” In the country likewise the Lord of Darkness was often called up by a shrill young voice, and sometimes to their great joy the children received an order from the sovereign brother to dress up as ghosts or demons.

The discipline of science was quite alien to Shelley’s nature, but he liked its romantic side. Armed with a machine which had just been invented, he gave electric shocks to the admiring bevy of little girls. But whenever little Hellen, the youngest, saw him coming with a bottle and a bit of wire she began to cry.

His dearest and most faithful disciples were Elizabeth his eldest sister, and his lovely cousin, Harriet Grove. These three children were drawn together by their dawning senses and their impassioned love of Truth. The first awakening of instinct always sheds over ideas an extraordinary charm. Shelley led his fair pupils to the churchyard to which the mysterious presence of the dead lent, in his eyes, a poetic fascination, and safe from the pursuit of his father, seated between them on some rustic tomb in the shadow of the old church, arms round swaying waists, he discoursed eloquently on all things in heaven and earth while lovely eyes drank up his every word.

The picture he drew of the world was a simple one. On the one side Vice: kings, priests, and the rich. On the other Virtue: philosophers, the wretched, and the poor. Here, religion in the service of tyranny: there, Godwin and his Political Justice. But more often he spoke to the girls of Love.

“Men’s laws pretend to regulate our natural sentiments. How absurd! When the eye perceives a lovely being the heart takes fire. How is it under man’s control to love or not to love? But the essence of love is liberty and it withers in an atmosphere of constraint. It is incompatible with obedience, jealousy, or fear. It requires perfect confidence and absolute freedom. Marriage is a prison. . . .”

Scepticism extended to marriage is a form of wit which unmarried ladies do not much appreciate. Metaphysical heresy may sometimes amuse them, matrimonial heresy smells of the faggot.

“Bonds?” repeated Harriet. “No doubt. . . . But what matter if the bonds are light ones?”

“If they are light they are useless. Does one shackle a voluntary prisoner?”

“But religion . . .”

Shelley called Holbach to the aid of Godwin. “If God is just, how can we believe that he will punish creatures whom he himself has created weak? If he is All-Powerful, how is it possible either to offend him or resist him? If he is reasonable, why is he angry with the hapless beings to whom he has left the liberty to be unreasonable?”

“Custom . . .”

“What can custom matter to us in this short moment of eternity which we call the nineteenth century?”

Elizabeth took her brother’s side, and it was impossible for Harriet to oppose a demi-god with flashing eyes, a shirt-collar open on a delicate throat, and hair as fine as spun-silk.

She sighed; then to change the conversation, “Let us go on with Zastrozzi?” she proposed.

This was a novel which the three were writing together. It dealt with a robber chief, a haughty tyrant, and an “elegantly proportioned heroine all tenderness and purity.”

The hours passed pleasantly in Zastrozzi’s company; the evening closed in. Elizabeth left the guileless lovers alone in the darkness.

Shelley and Harriet, their arms interlocked, wandered back to the house through the white mist rising from the meadows. The breeze waved the topmost leaves of the trees across the face of the moon. The anemones shut their pale cups and drooped their heads. The sadness of twilight reminded Shelley of his approaching return to the sombre cloisters of Eton. But conscious of the warm loveliness of his cousin, who trembled and vibrated beneath his touch, he felt himself filled with new courage for a life of apostleship and combat.

CHAPTER III
THE CONFIDANT

In October, 1810, Timothy Shelley took his son up to Oxford. The member for New Shoreham was in the best of tempers.

Objecting to hotels, he put up at his old lodgings in the High—“the leaden horse”—appropriate house-sign of John Slatter, Plumber and Glazier. This Slatter was a son of Mr. Shelley’s former landlord, whom he had succeeded in the lodging-house and plumbing businesses. Another son, with whom to his chagrin he was to have much to do, had gone into partnership with Munday, bookseller at Carfax.

Mr. Shelley had come to enter a future baronet in the books of University College; through which he himself had passed many years earlier, without distinction. Such ceremonies are always agreeable to an Englishman, and would be particularly so to a man of the consequential turn of mind of Timothy Shelley. So soon as the rite was satisfactorily accomplished, he went down with Bysshe to the bookseller, and there opened for him an unlimited credit in books and paper.

“My son here,” he said, pointing good-humouredly to the wild-haired youth with luminous eyes who stood by, “has a literary turn, Mr. Slatter. He is already the author of a romance”—it was the famous Zastrozzi—“and if he wishes to publish again, do pray indulge him in his printing freaks.”

Shelley was delighted with college. To have rooms of his own, where he could sport his oak; to be free to attend lectures or shirk them; to follow the studies of his choice; to read, write, or go walking as he pleased; this was to combine the charm of the monastic life with the freedom of thought of the philosopher. It was thus he had dreamed of passing his life “for ever.”

That evening in hall he found himself seated by the side of a young man, a freshman like himself, who after introducing himself as “Jefferson Hogg,” relapsed into the high-bred reserve which Oxford manners require. However, towards the middle of the meal the two young men, incapable of maintaining silence any longer, began to talk of their reading.

“The best poetical literature of these days,” said Shelley, “is German literature.”

Hogg, with a smile, asserted the German’s want of nature. So much romanticism made him tired. . . .

“What modern literature can you compare with theirs?”

Hogg named the Italian.

This roused all Shelley’s impetuosity, and started such an endless discussion that the servants were able to clear the tables before the two perceived they were alone.

“Will you come up to my rooms?” said Hogg. “We can go on talking there.”

Shelley eagerly accepted, but he lost the thread of his discourse on the way and the whole of his enthusiasm in the cause of Germany. While Hogg was lighting the candles, his guest said calmly that he was not qualified to maintain such a discussion, being as ignorant of Italian as he was of German, and that he had only talked for talking’s sake.

Hogg replied smiling that his own indifference and ignorance were profound, and proceeded to set out on the table a bottle, glasses, and biscuits.

“Besides,” declared Shelley, “all literature is vain trifling. What is the study of ancient or modern tongues but merely a study of words and phrases, of the names of things? How much wiser it were to investigate the things themselves!”

How was this to be done, Hogg wanted to know.

“Through the physical sciences, and especially through chemistry,” said Shelley, and raising his voice he discoursed with a degree of animation that far outshone his zeal in defence of the Germans, on chemical analysis, on the recent discoveries in physics, and on electricity.

Feeling no interest in these subjects Hogg had leisure to examine the appearance of his new friend. His clothes were expensive, and made according to the most approved mode of the day, but they were tumbled, rumpled, unbrushed. His figure was slight and fragile, he was tall, but appeared less tall than he really was, being round-shouldered, through an habitual eagerness of mood which always made him thrust his face forward. His gestures were both graceful and abrupt, his complexion red and white like a girl’s; his hair dark-brown, long and bushy. His features breathed an animation, a fire, a vivid and preternatural intelligence. Nor was the moral expression less beautiful than the intellectual, for there was a softness, a delicacy, a gentleness about it, and that air of profound religious veneration which characterizes the frescoed saints of the great masters of Florence.

Shelley was still talking when some clock chimed—he uttered a cry. “My mineralogy class!” and fled downstairs.

⁂

Hogg had promised to call on him next morning. He found him in a violent dispute with the scout who wanted to tidy up his rooms.

Books, boots, papers, pistols, linen, ammunition, phials, and crucibles were scattered on the floor and on every chair and table. An electrical machine, an air pump, and a solar microscope were conspicuous amidst the mass of matter. Shelley turned the handle of the machine so that the fierce crackling sparks flew out, and presently getting upon the stool with glass feet, his long wild locks bristled and stood on end. Hogg, with a look of amusement, followed his movements with anxiety, watching in particular over the glasses and tea-cups. Just as his host was going to pour out tea, the guest removed in haste from the bottom of his cup a small gold seven-shilling piece partly dissolved by the nitromuriatic acid in which it was immersed.

The young men became inseparable. Every morning they went for a long walk, during which Shelley behaved like a child, climbing all the banks, jumping all the ditches.

When he came to any water he launched paper boats, and sent little argosies trembling down the Isis. He followed them until they sank, while Hogg, compliant but exasperated, waited for him at the starting point by the water’s edge.

After the walk they went up to Shelley’s rooms where, worn out by his continual expenditure of energy, he would be overcome by extreme drowsiness. He would lie stretched out upon the rug before a large fire and, curled round upon himself like a cat, would sleep thus from six to ten. At ten he would suddenly start up, and rubbing his eyes with great violence and passing his fingers swiftly through his long hair, he would enter at once into a vehement argument, or begin to recite verses with an energy which was almost painful.

At eleven he supped, but his meals were very simple. Eating no meat on principle, he liked bread, and his pockets were always full of it. He would walk reading and nibbling as he went, and his path was marked by a long line of crumbs. Next to bread he liked pudding raisins and dried prunes bought at the grocer’s. A regular sit-down meal was intolerably boring to him, and he hardly ever remained to the end.

After supper his mind was clear and his conversation brilliant. He spoke to Hogg about his cousin Harriet, to whom he wrote long letters in which outbursts of love alternated with Godwin’s philosophy; about his sister Elizabeth, a valiant enemy of convention. Or he read the last solemn letter from his father with shrieks of laughter. Or he took up one of his favourite books, Locke, Hume or Voltaire, and commented on it with enthusiasm.

Hogg often asked himself why these writers exercised so great a fascination over the religious and mystical nature of his friend. It seemed as though in suddenly discovering in the by-ways of his extensive reading the immense variety of systems, resembling an entanglement of deep valleys and rocky precipices, that a sort of vertigo must have seized Shelley and only a clear and simple doctrine such as Godwin’s could relieve his metaphysical giddiness. He amused himself by substituting for the titanic and confused accumulations of History, an aëry edifice of crystalline theories, and he preferred to the real world, the incoherence of which terrified him, the more agreeable vision which the soul gains by looking at facts through the vaporous meshes of clouds.

Then the college clock struck two. Hogg got up, and in spite of the protestations of his friend went off to bed.

“What an extraordinary creature!” thought he as he went up to his room . . . “the grace of a young girl, the purity of a maiden who has never left her mother’s side . . . and nevertheless an indomitable force . . . the soul of a Benedictine monk, with the ideas of a Jacobin.”

It was certainly a strange mixture, well worth thinking over. But Master Jefferson Hogg didn’t care about tiring his brain, and his dear friend Shelley always gave him an overwhelming desire to sleep.

CHAPTER IV
THE NEIGHBOURING PINE

A few days before Christmas Mr. Shelley found in his letter-bag a communication from a London publisher, a certain Mr. Stockdale, who called his attention to the extraordinary productions which young Mr. Percy Shelley desired to have published. Stockdale had received the MS. of a novel, St. Irvyne, or the Rosicrucian, filled with the most subversive ideas, and the worthy tradesman could not see without misgiving the son of so estimable a gentleman as Mr. Shelley treading this dangerous path. He considered it to be his duty to warn the young man’s father; and above all to call his attention to the young man’s evil genius, his comrade Mr. Jefferson Hogg, son of a good old Tory family in the north of England, but thoroughly false and dangerous in character.

Mr. Shelley replied by informing Stockdale that he refused to pay one penny of the printing bill, which greatly increased the metaphysical and doctrinal anxieties of the publisher. Then, while awaiting the arrival of his son, who was to spend the first week of the Christmas holidays at Field Place, he prepared one of his incoherent, affectionate, and blustering sermons, in the bombastic style of which he was past master.

Arguments have never convinced anybody yet. But to imagine that the arguments of a father can change the ideas of a son is the height of argumentative madness. At the close of the conversation Shelley went away sickened by the stupidity of his family, filled with a righteous fury at the behaviour of Stockdale so unworthy of a gentleman, and more than ever attached to Jefferson Hogg, his only friend. That very evening he sat down and confided every thing to him in a long letter:

“Everybody attacks me for my detestable principles; I am reckoned an outcast; there lowers a terrific tempest, but I stand as it were on a pharos, and smile exultingly at the vain beating of the billows below. I attempted to enlighten my father. Mirabile dictu! He, for a time, listened to my arguments; he allowed the impossibility of any direct intervention of Providence. He allowed the utter incredibility of witches, ghosts, legendary miracles. But when I came to apply the truths on which we had agreed so harmoniously, he started . . . and silenced me with an equine argument ‘I believe because I believe.’

“My mother believes me to be in the high-road to Pandemonium. She fancies I want to make a deistical coterie of all my little sisters. How laughable!”

Field Place, usually so gay during the holidays, was overshadowed by these happenings. Mrs. Shelley advised her daughters not to speak too much with Percy, and the little girls became shy and silent. They continued their Christmas preparations through force of habit, but no one took any further interest in them; the little amusements and surprises were arranged as usual, but without the laughter and fun which makes Christmas Day so delightful in happy families.

Only Elizabeth remained faithful to Shelley in secret. But she saw that her admiration was no longer shared by her cousin Harriet, who grew colder and more evasive every day.

The letters which Harriet had received from Oxford, filled with enthusiastic dissertations extremely difficult to follow, had troubled and annoyed her. The quotations from Godwin bored her to tears, and her terror was even greater than her boredom. It is rare that pretty women show a taste for dangerous ideas. Beauty, the natural expression of law and order, is conservative by essence; it upholds all established religions of which it adorns the ceremonies; Venus was always the right hand of Jupiter.

Harriet showed Shelley’s letters to her mother, who advised her to pass them on to her father. This gentleman pronounced Shelley’s doctrines to be abominable. Both parents took gloomy views as to the young man’s future. Ought Harriet to unite herself with an eccentric creature whose follies alienated everybody? She loved elegance, county balls, and admiration. What sort of a life would she lead with this mad boy who respected nothing, not even marriage? Yet, after all, religion has claims. . . .

Before Shelley’s arrival the two young girls had some violent discussions. Elizabeth pleaded his cause. How could Harriet weigh a few poor worldly successes against the happiness of passing her life with the most marvellous of men?

“You make your brother out to be an extraordinary person, but how can I be sure he really is as you represent him? We have always lived in the country, we know nothing of life. Our parents, your own father even, who is in Parliament, disapprove of Bysshe’s ideas. However, let us admit that he is a genius. What right have I to enter into an intimacy with him which must end in disappointment when he discovers how really inferior I am to the being his imagination has pictured? I am just an ordinary young girl like all the rest. He has idealized me and he would be very much surprised if he knew me as I am.”

So much modesty gives one to think: Love does not reason like this.

When Shelley arrived Elizabeth explained the situation to him. Instantly he sought Harriet out. He found her cold and distant, exactly as Elizabeth had described her. She did not ask Shelley to justify himself: all she asked was that he should leave her alone. She reproached him with his universal scepticism.

“But really, Harriet,” Shelley protested, “it is monstrous that I should not be allowed to express opinions which I have reached by the most logical of arguments. And how can my theological opinions disqualify me as brother, friend, or lover?”

“You may think what you please,” replied Harriet, “I do not care in the least what you think, but don’t ask me to unite my lot with yours.”

It was the first time Shelley had come in contact with a woman’s indifference, which she can spring upon a man with the suddenness of night falling in the centre of Africa.

He went away mad with grief. Through the naked, frozen woods, he wandered back towards Field Place; unconscious of the drifting snow, he paced for hours the village graveyard, which had been the background for love’s young dream.

He got home at two o’clock in the morning, and went to bed after placing a loaded pistol, and various poisons taken from his chemical arsenal, by his side. But the thought of Elizabeth’s grief on finding his corpse prevented him from killing himself.

Next day he wrote to Hogg. Against Harriet herself he expressed no resentment, none against his father nor Mr. Grove. The Spirit of Intolerance alone was responsible for the tragedy:

“Here I swear—and as I break my oaths, may Infinity, Eternity blast me—I swear that I will never forgive Intolerance! It is the only point on which I allow myself to encourage revenge; every moment I can spare shall be devoted to my object. Intolerance is of the greatest disservice to Society; it encourages prejudices which strike at the root of the dearest, the tenderest of its ties. Oh how I wish I were the avenger!—that it were mine to crush the demon; to hurl him to his native hell, never to rise again and thus to establish for ever perfect and universal toleration.

“I expect to gratify some of this insatiable feeling in poetry. You shall see, you shall hear, how it has injured me. She is no longer mine! She abhors me as a sceptic, as what she was before! O bigotry! When I pardon this last, this severest of thy persecutions, may Heaven—if there be wrath in Heaven—blast me!

“Forgive me, I have done. I am afraid there is selfishness in the passion of love, for I cannot avoid feeling every instant as if my soul were bursting. But I will feel no more. It is selfish. I would feel for others, but for myself—oh how much rather would I expire in the struggle! Yes, that were a relief! Is suicide wrong? I slept with a loaded pistol and some poison last night, but did not die. Had it not been for my sister, for you, I should have bidden you a final farewell.”

There still remained a fortnight of the holidays to be passed at Field Place, an unhappy fortnight owing to the displeasure of his father and mother, and the embarrassment of his sisters.

In spite of Elizabeth’s invitations Harriet refused to come over and see them while he was there.

People began to whisper, under the seal of secrecy, that she was engaged to someone else.

Seeking to appease his spirit in the endeavour to make others happy, Shelley had resolved that Hogg should fall in love with Elizabeth, whom he had never seen. He sent Hogg some verses written by her, which were filled with good intentions, hatred of tyranny, and faults of prosody.

“All are brethren,” sang Elizabeth like the good pupil she was, “even the African bending to the stroke of the hard-hearted Englishman’s rod” . . . and more in the same strain.

In return, Shelley gave his sister Hogg’s poems which he declared to be “extremely beautiful” and in which he himself was compared to a young oak, and Harriet Grove to the ivy which stifles the tree by its embraces.

“You have not said,” wrote Shelley, “that the ivy after it had destroyed the oak, as if to mock the miseries which it had caused, twined around a pine which stood near.”

The neighbouring pine was Mr. Heylar, a wealthy landowner, and a man of sound doctrines, who had been expressly created by Providence to escort his wife to county balls.

“She is lost to me for ever! She is married! Married to a clod of earth! She will become as insensible herself. All those fine capabilities will moulder. Let us speak no more on the subject.”

He would have liked to invite Hogg to Field Place, so that Elizabeth might judge for herself of his admirable qualities. But the squire, remembering Stockdale’s warnings concerning a certain Evil Genius, forbade the invitation.

CHAPTER V
QUOD ERAT DEMONSTRANDUM

About a month after these unfortunate holidays, Messrs. Munday & Slatter, the Oxford booksellers to whom Timothy Shelley had recommended the literary freaks of his son, saw that young man burst into their shop, his hair flying, his shirt-collar wide open, and a fat parcel of pamphlets under his arm. He wished these to be sold at sixpence each, and to be displayed conspicuously in the shop-window. To be sure of this being well done, he set about doing it himself.

The booksellers watched him at work with the amused and fatherly benevolence which Oxford tradesmen show to Oxford freshmen who have plenty of money. Had they looked closer they would have been horrified at the explosive matter with which their young customer strewed their counters and windows.

The title of the pamphlet, The Necessity of Atheism, was the most scandalous imaginable in a mealy-mouthed, theological city like Oxford. It was signed by the unknown name of “Jeremiah Stukeley,” and had Messrs. Munday & Slatter turned over its pages they would have been more horrified still by the insolent logic of the imaginary Stukeley.

“A close examination of the validity of the proofs adduced to support any proposition, has ever been allowed to be the only sure way of attaining truth, upon the advantages of which it is unnecessary to descant.”

It was with this bold axiom that the pamphlet began, and written in the form of a geometrical theorem it proceeded to prove the impossibility of the existence of God. It ended triumphantly with the three letters Q.E.D., quod erat demonstrandum.

To Shelley who knew nothing of mathematics, this formula had always seemed like a magician’s spell for the evocation of Truth. Although he had an ardent belief in a Spirit of universal Goodness, the creator and director of all things; although he professed the personal theology of an anglican “Vicaire Savoyard”; the word “Atheist” pleased him because of its vigour. He loved to fling it in the face of Bigotry. He picked up the epithet with which he had already been pelted at Eton, as a Knight Errant picks up a glove. To the physical and moral courage of his race, he added intellectual courage, thus affronting great dangers and an inevitable scandal.

The Necessity of Atheism had been published just twenty minutes, when the Rev. John Walker, a Fellow of New College, a man of a sinister and inquisitorial turn of mind, passed the shop-window and looked in.

The Necessity of Atheism! . . . Astounded and outraged, the Rev. John strode into the shop, calling out in stentorian tones, “Mr. Munday! Mr. Slatter! What is the meaning of this?”

“Really, sir, we know nothing about it. We have not personally examined the pamphlet. . . .”

“The Necessity of Atheism! . . . But the title in itself is sufficient to inform you.”

“Quite so, sir. Quite so. And now that our attention has been called to it . . .”

“Now that your attention, gentlemen, has been called to it, you will have the goodness to withdraw immediately every copy from your window, and to carry them, as well as any other copies you may possess, into your kitchen and throw them all into the fire.”

Mr. Walker had not, of course, the smallest right to give any such order, but the booksellers knew that he had only to complain to the University authorities, and they would see their shop put out of bounds. So they obeyed with obsequious smiles, and sent one of their clerks to beg young Mr. Shelley to step round for a few minutes’ conversation with them.

“We are very sorry, Mr. Shelley, very sorry indeed, but really we couldn’t help ourselves. Mr. Walker insisted on it, and in your own interest . . .”

But his “own interest” was the last thing Shelley ever thought of. In his piercing, urgent voice, he asserted to the much-worried booksellers his right to think as he pleased, and to communicate his thoughts to the world.

“And,” he told them triumphantly, “I have done worse than spread my net in the sight of callow Oxford birds. I have sent a copy of The Necessity of Atheism to every bishop on the Bench, to the Chancellor of the University, and to every college Master, Warden, and Dean, with the compliments of ‘Jeremiah Stukeley’ in my own handwriting!”

⁂

A few days later a porter appeared in Hogg’s rooms with the Dean’s compliments to Mr. Shelley, and would he go down to him immediately. He went down to the Common Room where he found the Master and several of the Fellows; a little group of learned puritans, all classical and muscular Christians who had always abhorred Shelley because of his long hair, his eccentricities of dress, and his really low taste for experimental science.

The Dean showed him a copy of The Necessity of Atheism, and asked him if he were the author. As he spoke in a rude, abrupt, and insolent voice, Shelley did not reply.

“Are you, yes or no, the author of this pamphlet?”

“If you can prove that it is by me, produce your evidence. It is neither just nor lawful to interrogate me in this fashion. Such proceedings would become a court of inquisitors, but not free men in a free country.”

“Do you choose to deny that this is your composition?”

“I refuse to reply.”

“Then you are expelled, and I desire that you will quit the college to-morrow morning at the very latest.”

An envelope sealed with the college seal was immediately handed to him by one of the Fellows. It contained the sentence of expulsion.

Shelley dashed back to Hogg’s rooms, flung himself down on the sofa, and trembling with rage repeated “Expelled! . . . Expelled!”

The punishment was terrible. It put a stop to his studies; made it impossible for him to enter any other university; deprived him of the peaceful life he so much enjoyed; and drew down on his head his father’s grotesque and inextinguishable anger.

Hogg was as indignant as his friend, and carried away by a youthful generosity, instantly addressed a note to the Master and Fellows, expressing his grief and astonishment that such treatment could have been meted out to such a man as Shelley. He trusted that the sentence was not final.

The note was dispatched. The Conclave was still sitting. In a moment the porter returned with “the Dean’s compliments to Mr. Hogg and would he go down at once.”

The audience was brief.

“Did you write this?”

It was the letter he had just written and he acknowledged it.

“And this?” putting into Hogg’s hand the pamphlet on Atheism.

With a wealth of arguments and the subtleties of a K.C., Hogg pointed out the absurdity of the question, and the injustice of punishing Shelley for having refused to answer it, the obligation lying on every man conscious of his rights. . . .

“That’s enough!” shouted the Master in a furious voice. “You’re expelled too!” . . . He seemed in a mood to have expelled every man in the college. Hogg was handed the sealed envelope in his turn.

In the course of the day a large official paper was affixed to the door of hall. It was signed by the Master and Dean, bore the college seal, and declared that Thomas Jefferson Hogg and Percy Bysshe Shelley were publicly expelled for refusing to answer certain questions put to them.

CHAPTER VI
TIMOTHY SHELLEY’S VIGOROUS DIALECTICS

The exiles set off bag and baggage in the Oxford coach. Shelley had borrowed £20 from his booksellers, in order to pay his way in London while waiting news from his father.

Every lodging which he visited with Hogg appeared to him impossible, either the street was too noisy, the district too dirty, the maid-servant too plain. Finally, the name of Poland Street reminded him of Warsaw . . . of Freedom . . . he was certain that in Poland Street any one of the rooms must be worthy of a free man’s choice, and the very first which he visited, where there was a trellised paper, vine leaves, and huge bunches of green and purple grapes, seemed to him the most beautiful room in the world.

“Here we will settle down,” said he, “and begin our Oxford days over again, our readings by the fireside, our rambles, our delightful experiences. Here we will live for ever.”

Nothing was wanting to his programme but the consent of the two fathers, Mr. Shelley and Mr. Hogg.

⁂

When Timothy Shelley heard of the events at Oxford, he was enraged beyond measure. Evidently, for a wealthy landowner, a Member of Parliament, and a J.P. for his county, it was a most disagreeable occurrence. The accusation of atheism annoyed him most, because he himself was known as a Liberal, and such advanced thought in politics required to balance it orthodoxy in religion.

He sat down and wrote a solemn letter to Mr. Hogg senior, deploring “the unfortunate affair that has happened to my son and yours at Oxford,” and urging him to get his “young man home” as soon as possible. “As for me,” he added, “I shall recommend mine to read Paley’s Natural Theology: it is extremely applicable. I shall read it with him.”

Then he wrote a second letter to his own “young man,” very strongly worded: “Though I have felt as a father and sympathized in the misfortune which your criminal opinions and improper acts have begot: yet you must know that I have a duty to perform to my own character, as well as to your young brother and sisters. Above all my feelings as a Christian require from me a firm and decided conduct toward you.

“If you shall require aid or assistance from me—or any protection—you must please yourself to me:

“1st. To go immediately to Field Place, and to abstain from all communication with Mr. Hogg for some considerable time.

“2nd. That you shall place yourself under the care and society of such gentleman as I shall appoint and attend to his instructions and directions he shall give.”

If these conditions were not accepted Timothy Shelley would abandon his son to all the misery which such wicked and diabolical opinions justly entail.

Shelley’s reply was brief:

“My dear Father,

“As you do me the honour of requesting to hear the determination of my mind as the basis of your future actions I feel it my duty, although it gives me pain to wound ‘the sense of duty to your own character, to that of your family and your feelings as a Christian,’ decidedly to refuse my assent to both the proposals in your letter and to affirm that similar refusals will always be the fate of similar requests. With many thanks for your great kindness,

“I remain your affectionate, dutiful son,

“Percy B. Shelley.”

⁂

The chief obstacle in the diplomatic relations between father and son is that the former desires above all things to avoid a rupture, which renders disciplinary measures difficult. His “conditions” having been succinctly refused, Timothy Shelley found himself at a loss what to do.

Not a bad man at bottom, he believed in the powerful persuasion of a bottle of old port. He resolved to go up to town and invite the delinquents to dinner at Miller’s Hotel, where the wine was good.

“After all,” he said to himself, while waiting for the two young men, “one must treat young people with good humour, and even go so far, ridiculous as it may seem, as to discuss things with them. . . . A ripened and thoughtful mind should get the better, without any difficulty, of a philosopher of eighteen, and serious misfortune may be avoided, by a word of wisdom in the nick of time. . . . I mustn’t forget that Percy is my heir and that he will succeed to the title: he must be led back into the fold.”

And the excellent man, while marshalling into order Paley’s chief arguments, rubbed his hands with satisfaction.

Meanwhile, the friends, going on foot from Poland Street to Southwark, read aloud to each other passages from Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary which Shelley had picked up on a stall. They found it extremely amusing and laughed immoderately at the old Frenchman’s ridicule of the Jewish people, the intolerance with which the Bible is packed, and Jehovah’s sickening and useless cruelties.

When they reached the hotel, a certain Mr. Graham, the factotum of Timothy Shelley, was already there with his friend and patron. Mr. Shelley received Hogg with a wheedling benevolence, then turning to his son, began to talk in an odd, unconnected manner, punctuating his discourse with dramatic gestures, which appeared highly ridiculous to the two young men.

“What do you think of my father?” Shelley whispered to Hogg.

“Oh, it is not your father. It is the God of the Jews, the Jehovah you have been reading about.”

Percy gave a wild demoniacal burst of laughter, slipped from his seat and fell on his back at full length on the floor.

“What’s the matter, Bysshe? Are you ill? Are you mad? Why do you laugh?” asked his father, scandalized.

Fortunately, at the same moment, dinner was announced, and proving excellent, the conversation became almost cordial. When the dessert was put on the table, the squire sent his son off to order the post-horses for the next morning, while he undertook the conquest of Hogg.

“You are a very different person, sir, from what I expected to find; you are a nice, moderate, reasonable, pleasant gentleman. Tell me what you think I ought to do with my poor boy? He is rather wild, is he not?”

“Yes, rather.”

“Then what am I to do?”

“If he had married his cousin he would perhaps have been less so. . . . He wants somebody to take care of him; a good wife. What if he were married?”

“But how can I do that? It is impossible. If I were to tell Bysshe to marry a girl he would refuse immediately. I know him so well.”

“I have no doubt he would refuse if you were to order him to marry, and I should not blame him. But if you were to bring him in contact with some young lady who you believed would make him a suitable wife, without saying anything about marriage, perhaps he would take a fancy to her, and if he did not like her you could try another.”

Mr. Graham, interposing, said it was an excellent plan, and the two men talking in low voices were going over a list of the young women of their acquaintance, when Shelley returned. His father ordered a bottle of a still older port than any they had yet had, and began to speak in praise of himself. He was so highly respected in the House of Commons: he was respected by the whole House and by the Speaker in particular, who said to him, “Mr. Shelley, I do not know what we should do without you.” He was greatly beloved in the county; he was an admirable Justice of the Peace; he told a very long story of how he had lately committed two poachers: “You know the fellows, Graham. You know what they are?” Graham assented. “Well, when they got out of prison one of them came and thanked me.”

Why the poacher was so grateful for a pitiless sentence Hogg never knew, for the worthy magistrate, believing the wine to have by now produced its effect, attacked the principal subject of his thoughts.

“There is certainly a God,” said he. “There can be no doubt of the existence of a Deity; none whatever.”

Nobody present expressed any doubt.

“You, sir,” said he, addressing himself to Hogg, “you have no doubt on the subject, have you?”

“None whatever.”

“If you have, I can prove it to you in a moment.”

“But I have no doubt.”

“Ah . . . still you might perhaps like to hear my argument?”

“Very much.”

“I will read it to you then.”

He searched in all his pockets, pulling out various bills and letters, producing finally a half-sheet of note-paper, which he began to read. Bysshe, leaning forward, listened with profound attention.

“I have heard this argument before,” said he, at the end of a few minutes, and turning to Hogg, “Where have I heard that?”

“They are Paley’s arguments.”

“Yes,” the reader observed with much complacency. “They are Paley’s arguments. I copied them out of Paley’s book this morning, but Paley had them originally from me; everything in Paley’s book he had from me.”

On this he folded up the paper, and returned it to his pocket. His son watched him with more disdain than ever, and the dinner terminated without having brought about a reconciliation. Shelley refused to go with his father. His father refused to give him a penny. The only two who seemed satisfied with one another were Hogg and his host. Timothy Shelley had found his son’s friend to be far more human than his son. He was not like Percy, always with bristling quills, always on the strain, always dug in behind principles which one could not attack without wounding his infernal pride. Young as he was, Hogg understood life. His notions on marriage were sensible. Hogg, on his side, declared that though the oratorical eloquence of the member for New Shoreham was certainly a bit foggy, nevertheless he was very hospitable and a good sort.

A few days later he gave another proof that he understood life by making up his quarrel with his own father, who, head of a True Blue Tory family, well known for its orthodoxy, had no need to display the same horror at the actions of his “young man” as had the Whig owner of Field Place.

Hogg senior advised his son to read for the Bar and got him into a conveyancer’s chambers at York. Hogg was, therefore, obliged to abandon Shelley in the Poland Street lodgings, a wistful, bright-eyed fox in the midst of the green and purple bunches of grapes.

CHAPTER VII
AN ACADEMY FOR YOUNG LADIES

Alone in London, without friends, work, or money, Shelley fell into despair. He passed his time in writing melancholy poems, or letters to Hogg. Not knowing what to do with his evenings he went to bed at eight o’clock. Sleep alone stopped him from going over and over the story of his woes. The moment he let himself think, the image of his beautiful and shallow-hearted cousin rose to torture him. He tried to steel his heart against the painful vision by syllogisms.

“I loved a being,” he told himself. “The being whom I loved is not what she was: consequently, as love appertains to mind and not to body, she exists no longer. . . . I might as well court the worms, which the soulless body of a beloved being generates in the damp unintelligent vaults of a charnel-house.”

This appeared to him such excellent logic that he was astounded it brought him no consolation.

The money question grew serious. His father gave no sign of life. Shelley meeting him one day by chance, politely hoped he was well? All he got was a look black as a thunder cloud and a majestic “Your most humble servant, sir!”

Fortunately, his sisters did not forget him and sent him their pocket-money. It was all he had to live on. Elizabeth at Field Place was too well watched to do anything, but the younger girls were now at Mrs. Fenning’s Academy for Young Ladies on Clapham Common, and very soon Mrs. Fenning’s pupils made acquaintance with the fine eyes, the open shirt-collar and tossed curls of Hellen Shelley’s wonderful brother.

He would arrive, his pockets bulging with biscuits and raisins, and begin to discourse on ultimate themes to an adoring circle of little girls. He had undertaken to “illuminate” the prettiest amongst them. He could not endure the idea that so much loveliness should be abandoned to “prejudices.”

He admired most of all his sisters’ greatest friend, Harriet Westbrook, a lovely child of sixteen, with light brown hair and a complexion of milk and roses. She was small, slightly and delicately formed, and had an air of youthful gaiety, of delicious freshness. She came to the rescue when Mrs. Fenning, acting on the orders of Timothy Shelley, requested Percy to visit his sisters less often. Harriet, whose family lived in Chapel Street, Mayfair, often went home: the little sisters, therefore, entrusted her with the cakes and the money intended for Percy, and she taking these to the hermit of Poland Street, the two young people became naturally the greatest friends.

Harriet Westbrook’s father was a retired publican; he had made money, and desired to give his youngest daughter a genteel education. Her mother was dead, and she had been brought up by Eliza, a much older sister. One can easily imagine the interest which the Westbrook family took in the grandson of a baronet, the heir to an immense fortune, who was beautiful as a young god, lived in lodgings on bread and pudding raisins, and to whom the youngest of the Westbrook girls carried his sisters’ pocket-money to prevent him from starving to death.

Eliza being keen to see the hero, Harriet took her with her on the next visit. Shelley was somewhat intimidated by the elder Miss Westbrook, a mature virgin, dried-up and bony, with a dead-white skin seamed with scars, and fish-like eyes that stared without intelligence, the whole crowned with an immense crop of black hair. Eliza was particularly proud of her hair. Her affected manners were in striking contrast with Harriet’s spontaneous gaiety. But Bysshe soon forgot she was plain when he saw that her intentions were friendly. Not only she made no objection, as might have been feared, to Harriet’s visits to Poland Street, but she offered to bring her there, and on several occasions invited Shelley to come and dine with them when Mr. Westbrook was away.

She completely won the heart of the young philosopher by asking to share with Harriet in his teaching, and undertook to read the Philosophical Dictionary under his guidance.

Harriet’s walks with Shelley soon became the talk of the Young Ladies’ Academy. One of the mistresses thought fit to warn her: “Young Mr. Shelley is notorious for his advanced opinions, and it is probable that his morals are no better than his ideas.” Harriet had to give up a letter from him, filled with the most pernicious arguments, and for corresponding with an “atheist,” she was threatened with expulsion. The county gentlemen’s daughters gave the cold shoulder to the publican’s daughter, and life in the school was made exceeding bitter to her.

One night as Shelley sat alone, reading by his fireside, a message was brought him from Eliza to say that Harriet was sick, and would he come and keep her company. He found her in bed, very pale, but lovelier than ever, with all her chestnut hair spread about her.

Old Westbrook came upstairs to say “How-d’ye-do,” and Shelley was rather embarrassed on seeing him, for however free he was from convention, he could not help feeling that his presence at that late hour in a young girl’s bedroom was hardly discreet.

Westbrook, however, showed himself all geniality. “Sorry I can’t stop with you but I’ve got friends downstairs. Perhaps you’ll join us presently?”

Shelley thanked him and declined. The friends of Westbrook had no attraction for him. He sat beside Harriet’s bed, with Eliza near by. She was in eloquent vein, speaking at great length on the enthralling subject of Love. Harriet complained of a headache; she could not stand the noise of conversation.

“Very well then,” said Eliza, “I’ll go away.”

The two young things were left alone until long after midnight, while Westbrook’s friends drank and roared below.

Next day Harriet was quite well.

⁂

Shelley’s exile was less hard to bear from the moment he could receive the visits of a young girl and “illuminate” her soul. Nevertheless, he suffered from being separated from his sister Elizabeth. She no longer even answered his letters. Could she be shut up in her room? He determined at all costs to make a secret visit to Field Place so as to see her. At times he thought of a pacific invasion. What could happen to him, after all, if one evening he turned up there without notice, and opposed a Quaker-like silence to the cursings of his father? But the adventure was simplified when Captain Pilfold, a brother of Mrs. Shelley, offered his nephew most opportunely a jumping-off place for his attack on Field Place.

Pilfold was a hearty and jovial old sea-dog who, under Nelson, had commanded a frigate at Trafalgar. He infinitely preferred his fantastic nephew to his solemn brother-in-law. That Percy were an atheist or not, the Captain did not care a hang. The boy had energy, and that was the important thing. He invited him to run down to Cuckfield, ten miles from Field Place, and received him with open arms.

Shelley, out of gratitude, offered to “illuminate” his host, and the Captain proved such an apt scholar that at the end of ten days he staggered the Rector and the Doctor by his fiery syllogisms.

At Cuckfield, Shelley made acquaintance with Miss Kitchener, a school-teacher, from the neighbouring town of Hurstpierpoint. She was rather good-looking, had a Roman nose, and was in her twenty-ninth year. She was a republican in politics, and enjoyed the reputation of being sentimental and conceited. She, on her side, lamented that there was not one who understood her. Shelley having admired as was natural to him the nobility of her attitude, perceived with regret that she was still a deist. He proposed “a polemical correspondence,” in the course of which he undertook to cure her of this infirmity. She agreed.

Captain Pilfold, meanwhile, set off courageously to grapple and board Timothy Shelley. He had the bright idea of enrolling in the cause the Duke of Norfolk, chief of the Whig party. Snobbism triumphed over paternal tyranny. Shelley walked back into Field Place with all the honours of war. He was given £200 a year unconditionally.

⁂

He could now again see Elizabeth, but he was overwhelmed by the change he found in her. She was livelier, and gayer, than formerly, but had become incredibly frivolous. He remembered her serious, enthusiastic; he found her apathetic to everything but dancing, trivial amusements, and silly chatter. She lived now for nothing but society.

He wished to read to her Hogg’s letters as he had been used to do.

“Oh, you and your ridiculous friend! Every one I know thinks you are both mad.”

On this she spoke of matrimony: she thought of little else, and nothing disgusted Shelley more. She seemed to have forgotten all they had read together on the subject, and all Godwin’s elevated ideas.

“Marriage is odious and hateful,” he told her. “I am sickened when I think of this despotic chain, the heaviest forged by man to shackle fiery souls. Scepticism and free love are as necessarily associated together as religion and marriage. Honourable men have no need of laws. For heaven’s sake, Elizabeth, read over the Marriage Service and ask yourself if any decent man could wish the girl he loved to submit to such degradation.”

“Yet you want me to marry your friend Hogg?”

“Yes, but not by a clergyman nor according to man’s laws, but freely and with Love only as high priest.”

“This then is the honourable advice of a brother?” said Elizabeth with disdain.

It was useless to hope to make any impression on a character become futile beyond any possible cure. “Why should I deceive myself? She is lost, lost to everything. She talks nothing but cant and twaddle. What she wants of me is that, like a fashionable brother, I should act as a jackal for husbands, well, I refuse! I refuse emphatically.”

He had returned to Field Place merely to see Elizabeth. There was no good in remaining. Invitations elsewhere were not wanting. Captain Pilfold would have been glad to have him again at Cuckfield. Westbrook was going to pass the summer in Wales, and his daughters pressed Shelley to join them. Hogg wanted him to come for a month to York; it was this last idea which tempted him most. But his father, who doubtless saw a symbolic value in the separation of the two Oxford criminals, would not have tolerated it, and as the first quarter’s allowance was due on the first of September it was better to be patient. Hogg wrote jestingly that it was easy to see the lovely Harriet took precedence over old friends.

“Your jokes amuse me,” Shelley answered.

“If I know anything about love I am not in love. But I have heard from the Westbrooks, both of whom I highly esteem.”

While he still hesitated where to go, Thomas Grove, a cousin of his mother’s, invited him to Cwm Elan, a wild corner of Radnorshire. Here he could economize while awaiting his allowance. He accepted the Groves’ invitation.

On his way through London he would have liked to have seen Miss Kitchener and have taken her to lunch. But the school-teacher with the Roman nose feared this would not be quite a proper thing to do, there was such an immense social difference between her and Mr. Shelley. Indignant at the mere idea, Shelley wrote her a long letter on equality, in which he addressed her as “his soul’s sister.” Miss Kitchener began to think that Lady Shelley was a fine name and to study her reflection in the looking-glass.

CHAPTER VIII
THIS DESPOTIC CHAIN . . .

Now for the first time Shelley was among mountain solitudes, and heard the voices of mountain torrents, but the power of hills was not upon him. “This is most divine scenery,” he wrote to Hogg, “but all very dull, stale, flat, and unprofitable; indeed, the place is a very great bore.” Sitting near some tree-shaded waterfall he passed his time in reading and re-reading the letters he received from his friends. He was the director of innumerable “souls”: Miss Kitchener, the faithful Hogg, Captain Pilfold, the terror of the pious, Eliza and Harriet Westbrook, without counting many whose names are unknown.

The Westbrooks had just gone back to London when he received from Harriet a most disturbing letter. Her father insisted on her returning to Mrs. Fenning’s school where she had been so miserable, where her schoolfellows had sent her to Coventry, and called her “an abandoned wretch.” Rather than exist in such a prison she would kill herself. “Why live? No one loves me, and I have no one to love. Is suicide a crime in one who is useless to others and insupportable to herself? Since there is no law of God, has the law of man any right to forbid so natural an action?”

A sort of terror seized Shelley. This schoolgirl logic appeared irrefutable, and it was he who had formed her mind. How then could he answer her with calculated coldness and abandon her to death? He wrote advising firmness; before despairing she should resist, she should refuse to return to school, and he himself wrote Mr. Westbrook a letter of expostulation.

The old publican was outraged. What right had this young sprig of nobility to interfere? He had been dangling after the Westbrook girls for six months or more, and Eliza imagined he would marry Harriet, but when had a future baronet ever married the daughter of a tavern-keeper? The young fellow wanted, evidently, something very different.

Westbrook had sized him up the evening he had first met him in Harriet’s bedroom. He had invited him to come down and take a glass in the parlour, and Mr. Shelley had refused with disdain.

How could the grandson of Sir Bysshe Shelley, the wealthy baronet, be a Friend of the People, or a believer in Equality? Bah! the Upper Ten were all exactly the same.

Harriet was ordered to get ready for Clapham. She wrote to Shelley again a letter in which a somewhat less lugubrious plan replaced that of suicide. She was too miserable at home, too cruelly persecuted, but she was ready to elope with him if he would consent.

He instantly took the coach for London in indescribable agitation of mind.

That he was partly responsible for Harriet he could not doubt. He had formed her, he had inspired her with exalted courage, and the horror of injustice. It was a letter from him which had brought about her first disgrace.

But if he eloped with her how should they live? He had no profession, no prospects—and did he really love her? Could he love anyone again after the blighting of his young hopes by his cousin?

Still, Harriet was charming, and there was something intoxicating in the idea of a journey in the company of the lovely creature he had seen one night in bed, with unbound auburn hair.

It was difficult to repel even warmer ideas.

When he saw her again her face was pale, wasted, tragic.

“They have made you suffer?”

“No, no. . . .” She hesitated to say, “I suffer because I am in love with you,” but her eyes, lifted to his, confessed the truth. She was madly in love with him. He had completely transformed her. Before meeting him she had had all the normal tastes of the British schoolgirl. She had adored the red coats of the military, and when she wove day-dreams the hero was always an officer. But when she dreamed of marriage the hero became a black-coated clergyman.

Shelley had overthrown all such reasonable ideals. The first time she had heard him declaim on religion or politics, she had been frightened, and made up her mind to convert him. But at the outset his logic had crushed her, and conquered by an antagonist so greatly her superior, she found nothing but pleasure in her defeat.

When he had decided not to join them in Wales, she was afraid she had lost him, and in writing to him had exaggerated her hardships in order to bring her hero back.

Shelley had little admiration for Knight Errantry, which struck him as senseless. A man has no right to devote to Woman a life which should be consecrated to the service of Humanity. But looking on Harriet’s exquisite face, which a single word from him could suffuse with happiness, he gave his principles the go-by. He took her hand in his, and declared himself hers heart and soul.

A last rag of prudence made him decide against an immediate elopement. It was dangerous and needless to force events. If they tried to coerce her, she had but to make a sign to him, he would fly to her from the ends of the earth and carry her off.

Once more her face glowed with the rosy happiness of the young girl who knows she is beloved.

⁂

But the moment he had left her, he sighed deeply and fell into embarrassment and melancholy. He wrote to describe the situation to Hogg, and Hogg replied strongly urging his friend not to elope with Harriet without marrying her first. He knew all Shelley’s hostility to marriage, but he used powerful arguments. “If you don’t marry her, which will suffer? You or she? Evidently she alone. It is she whom the world will scorn. It is she who must make the sacrifice of her reputation and her security. Have you the right to ask this of her?” The appeal was cleverly turned, as selfishness was of all vices the one which Shelley most despised. But he felt too that marriage was a shameful and immoral action. The chapters in Political Justice against matrimonial chains stuck in his mind. It was now that some one reassured him by telling him that the great Godwin himself had been married twice.

“It is evidently useless,” he wrote to Hogg, “to seek by an individual example to rejuvenate the forms of society until such time as reason shall have brought about so great a change, that the reformer be no longer exposed to stoning.”

At the same time he was in no hurry to apply his new tenets. Captain Pilfold invited him to Cuckfield; he knew he would see there his “soul’s sister,” the handsome school-teacher with the Roman nose. He desired to complete her initiation in the Truth. So, again promising Harriet to return at the first sign she should make him, he left London.

One would need to be nineteen years old to have the smallest doubt as to what must happen. A young girl very much in love and armed with such a promise, does not long resist her heart’s desire. Before a week was out an ardent message recalled Shelley to town. The tyrants insisted on delivering up Andromeda to the Scholastic Dragon!

Shelley realized that there was no help for it but to elope with Harriet, and marry her afterwards—as soon as possible.

Next day the Edinburgh Mail Coach carried northwards these two young things whose united ages did not exceed thirty-five.

“An act of will, not an act of passion,” the young Knight told himself, as he sat facing his exquisite little sweetheart, while the stage jolted and rumbled on its way.

CHAPTER IX
A VERY YOUNG COUPLE

A pair of young lovers, persecuted and charming, exercises a fascination which is almost irresistible. The citizens of Edinburgh, difficult to get at where their purse is concerned, could not prevent themselves from giving an amused and indulgent welcome to the very young couple who arrived at their gates in such brilliant penury.

Before leaving London Shelley had borrowed a few pounds from a friend. When he got to Edinburgh he hadn’t a penny left. It was useless to hope for help from his father, whom the news of his elopement must have thrown into paroxysms of rage.

However, he found a good-humoured landlord to whom he told his story; this, with Harriet’s beauty and a promise of speedy payment, induced him to give the travellers an excellent ground-floor flat in his house.