Shelley | Page 6

lofty aspirations left no mark on
history. And so it was, not with his republican ardours alone, but with
all he undertook. Nothing he did influenced his contemporaries outside
his immediate circle; the public only noticed him to execrate the atheist,
the fiend, and the monster. He felt that "his name was writ on water,"
and languished for want of recognition. His life, a lightning-flash
across the storm-cloud of the age, was a brief but crowded record of
mistakes and disasters, the classical example of the rule that genius is
an infinite capacity for getting into trouble.
Though poets must "learn in suffering what they teach in song," there is
often a vein of comedy in their lives. If we could transport ourselves to
Miller's Hotel, Westminster Bridge, on a certain afternoon in the early
spring of 1811, we should behold a scene apparently swayed entirely
by the Comic Muse. The member for Shoreham, Mr. Timothy Shelley,
a handsome, consequential gentleman of middle age, who piques
himself on his enlightened opinions, is expecting two guests to
dinner--his eldest son, and his son's friend, T. J. Hogg, who have just
been sent down from Oxford for a scandalous affair of an aesthetical
squib. When the young men arrive at five o'clock, Mr. Shelley receives
Hogg, an observant and cool-headed person, with graciousness, and an
hour is spent in conversation. Mr. Shelley runs on strangely, "in an odd,
unconnected manner, scolding, crying, swearing, and then weeping
again." After dinner, his son being out of the room, he expresses his
surprise to Hogg at finding him such a sensible fellow, and asks him
what is to be done with the scapegoat. "Let him be married to a girl
who will sober him." The wine moves briskly round, and Mr. Shelley
becomes maudlin and tearful again. He is a model magistrate, the terror
and the idol of poachers; he is highly respected in the House of
Commons, and the Speaker could not get through the session without
him. Then he drifts to religion. God exists, no one can deny it; in fact,
he has the proof in his pocket. Out comes a piece of paper, and
arguments are read aloud, which his son recognises as Palley's. "Yes,
they are Palley's arguments, but he had them from me; almost
everything in Palley's book he had taken from me." The boy of nineteen,

who listens fuming to this folly, takes it all with fatal seriousness. In
appearance he is no ordinary being. A shock of dark brown hair makes
his small round head look larger than it really is; from beneath a pale,
freckled forehead, deep blue eyes, large and mild as a stag's, beam an
earnestness which easily flashes into enthusiasm; the nose is small and
turn-up, the beardless lips girlish and sensitive. He is tall, but stoops,
and has an air of feminine fragility, though his bones and joints are
large. Hands and feet, exquisitely shaped, are expressive of high
breeding. His expensive, handsome clothes are disordered and dusty,
and bulging with books. When he speaks, it is in a strident peacock
voice, and there is an abrupt clumsiness in his gestures, especially in
drawing-rooms, where he is ill at ease, liable to trip in the carpet and
upset furniture. Complete absence of self-consciousness, perfect
disinterestedness, are evident in every tone; it is clear that he is an
aristocrat, but it is also clear that he is a saint.
The catastrophe of expulsion from Oxford would have been impossible
in a well-regulated university, but Percy Bysshe Shelley could not have
fitted easily into any system. Born at Field Place, Horsham, Sussex, on
August 4, 1792, simultaneously with the French Revolution, he had
more than a drop of wildness in his blood. The long pedigree of the
Shelley family is full of turbulent ancestors, and the poet's grandfather,
Sir Bysshe, an eccentric old miser who lived until 1815, had been
married twice, on both occasions eloping with an heiress. Already at
Eton Shelley was a rebel and a pariah. Contemptuous of authority, he
had gone his own way, spending pocket-money on revolutionary
literature, trying to raise ghosts, and dabbling in chemical experiments.
As often happens to queer boys, his school-fellows herded against him,
pursuing him with blows and cries of "Mad Shelley." But the holidays
were happy. There must have been plenty of fun at Field Place when he
told his sisters stories about the alchemist in the attic or "the Great
Tortoise that lived in Warnham Pond," frightened them with electric
shocks, and taught his baby brother to say devil. There is something of
high-spirited fun even in the raptures and despairs of his first love for
his cousin, Harriet Grove. He tried to convert her to republican atheism,
until the family, becoming alarmed, interfered,