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.