On St. Patrick’s Night everybody was drunk, and there was a ball at the Castle. Percy and Harriet watched the starving people crowd round the State carriages to admire the finery. Such a want of dignity reduced Percy to despair.
That they themselves might set an example of plain living, all three became vegetarians, and Shelley thus freed himself from the remorse he felt when thinking of the “horrors of the slaughterhouse” and the “massacre of the bird-innocents.” They only broke the rule when Mrs. Nugent came to dinner. She was their sole acquaintance in Dublin, a dressmaker by trade. It was just one of the difficulties of their position that they knew nobody amongst these Irish whom they loved so much. “I suppose,” said Harriet, “that the moment Percy becomes famous we shall know everybody all at once.”
But Shelley himself hadn’t much hope. In the land of baseless and visionary fabrics where he usually wandered down-trodden Ireland figured as a proud and beautiful female, Shelley as a knight-errant and apostle, ready to fight for her and die if need be: crowds of tatterdemalions followed them in the streets: barbarous British soldiers stopped him and cudgelled him: but the heroic sweetness of his gospel tamed the brutes themselves, and philosophy worked the miracle of reconciling hostile races.
Little by little this brilliant fantasy melted away, the last shred of rainbow-tinted mist floated over dirt-blackened houses, and the real Ireland loomed up, a huge solid mass of towns, farms, forests, an incalculable number of obscure and dissimilar men, a heap of immemorial traditions and laws; the land of gambling, hunting, and blood-feuds; seat of the magistrature, garrison for the soldiery, centre for the police; Ireland wretched but jeering, suffering but garrulous, discontented, and rejoicing in her discontent. The Enigmatical Island . . . the Absurd Island. . . . Gazing at the terrifying Reality, what could he do? What could he hope for? He was crushed and tired out.
With growing insistence Godwin urged his disciple to give up the game. Ever since Shelley had hailed him as a spiritual father he had adopted the paternal tone, a grumbling and hostile one.
“Believe me, Shelley,” he prophesied, “you are preparing a bath of blood!”
Could he have seen his spiritual son drawing up an inoffensive “Proposal for an Association for the Good of Mankind,” with Eliza on one side sewing at a crimson cloak, and Harriet, preparing a meal of bread and honey on the other, he might have felt more tranquil.
However, his exhortations were so far useful that they gave Shelley a decent excuse to give up rescuing the oppressed who didn’t want to be rescued.
Minus a few poor creatures who knew how to sponge on him successfully, no one in Dublin took him seriously. For if in the eyes of an Irishman there is any one being more ridiculous than an Englishman, it is an Englishman who loves Ireland, and if in the whole world there is any one spectacle which an old Eton boy and Oxford man cannot endure, it is Irish disorder and dirt.
Having seen close at hand the folly and the misery of the people, his thoughts turned with longing to the beauty and peace of the English country-side.