At Eton Shelley became acquainted with Dr. Lind, whom he immortalized as a hermit in The Revolt of Islam and as Zonoras in Prince Athanase. It was Dr. Lind, according to Hogg, who gave Shelley his first lessons in French philosophism. Jeafferson says that he taught Shelley to curse his superiors and to write letters to unsuspecting persons to trip them up with catch questions and then laugh at them.[9]
An event occurred in the summer of 1810 which had considerable influence in developing the radicalism of Shelley. He had known and loved his cousin. Harriet Grove, from childhood, and during the vacation of this year asked her to be his wife. Harriet’s family, however, became alarmed at his atheistical tendencies and made her give up all communications with him. This angered him very much, and made him declaim against what he considered to be bigotry and intolerance. In a letter to Hogg, December 20, 1810, he writes: “O! I burn with impatience for the moment of the dissolution of intolerance; it has injured me. I swear on the altar of perjured love to revenge myself, on the hated cause of the effect; which even now I can scarcely help deploring.... Adieu! Down with bigotry! Down with intolerance! In this endeavour your most sincere friend will join his every power, his every feeble resource. Adieu!” And in a letter of January 3, 1811: “She is no longer mine! She abhors me as a skeptic as what she was before! Oh, bigotry! When I pardon this last, this severest of thy persecutions, may Heaven (if there be wrath in Heaven) blast me!” These ravings show Shelley to have been nervous, hysterical, and supersensitive.
The breaking of this engagement with Harriet made such an impression on him as to convince him that he should combat all those influences which caused the rupture. The story of Shelley’s life might have been an entirely different one had he been allowed to marry Harriet Grove. Man is a stubborn animal. Once he takes up a certain side, opposition merely serves to strengthen his convictions and make him fight all the harder. If Shelley’s willfulness had been ignored instead of opposed, I have no doubt that he would have seen things in their proper light and would never have been the rabid radical that he became. An Etonian called once on Shelley in Oxford and asked him if he meant to be an atheist there too. “No!” he answered, “certainly not. There is no motive for it; they are very civil to us here; it is not like Eton.”[10] It is Medwin’s conviction that Shelley never completely overcame his love for Harriet. Hogg notes that as late as 1813 Shelley loved to play a simple air that Harriet taught him. In the Epipsychidion he refers to her thus: “And one was true—Oh! why not true to me?” Love was to Shelley what religion is to the ascetic. He could not understand why one should put obstacles in the way of anyone in love, and so he thinks himself in duty bound to fight everything that supports this hated intolerance. This led him to wage war against religion itself.
Shelley entered University College, Oxford, in the Michaelmas term of 1810. It was unfortunate for him that conditions at the university were as deplorable as they were. He did not find there the intellectual food that his mind needed, and no doubt his sensitive soul was scandalized by what it felt. Intellectual life there was dull. Mark Pattison[11] says Oxford was nothing more than a grammar school, the college tutors were a little inferior to public school directors, and they obtained their positions through favoritism and not through merit. Copleston, a defender of the university against the attacks of the Edinburgh Review, admitted that only extreme incapacity or flagrant idleness would prevent a student from obtaining his degree at the end of his course. Fynes Clinton, in his Autobiography, tells us that Greek studies at Christ Church were very much neglected. During his seven years of residence grammar, syntax, prosody were never mentioned. Students rarely attended lectures. Much of their time was passed in hunting, drinking, and every kind of debauchery. “At boarding schools of every description,” writes Mrs. Wollstonecraft, “the relaxation of the junior boys is mischief; and of the senior, vice. Besides, in great schools, what can be more prejudicial to the moral character than the system of tyranny and abject slavery which is established among the boys, to say nothing of the slavery to forms, which makes religion worse than a farce? For what good can be expected from the youth who receives the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, to avoid forfeiting half-a-guinea, which he probably afterwards spends in some sensual manner?”[12] Such was the atmosphere in which Shelley was placed, and it is little wonder that it hastened the growth of the seeds of discontent and revolt which had been already implanted in his soul.
Misfortune still pursued Shelley. Had he formed friendships at Oxford with men of sober intellect, the whole course of his life might have been changed. Unfortunately he soon found a kindred spirit in the cynic Hogg.
This friend of Shelley gives us minute details of the poet’s life there. He thinks that Shelley took up skeptical philosophy because of the advantage it gave him in argument. Hume’s Essays was a favorite book with Shelley, and he was always ready to put forward in argument its doctrines. It may seem strange that this cold skeptical philosophy appealed to such an imaginative poet as Shelley; but destruction, as Hogg remarks, so that it be on a grand scale, may sometimes prove hardly less inspiring than creation. “The feat of the magician who, by the touch of his wand, could cause the great pyramid to dissolve into the air would be as surprising as the achievement of him who by the same rod could instantly raise a similar mass in any chosen spot.”
On September 18, 1810, Stockdale offered for sale a volume of poetry by Shelley entitled “Original Poetry: by Victor and Cazire.” The book was not out long when it was discovered that many of the poems were stolen property—a fraud on the public and an infringement of at least one writer’s copyright. The book was at once withdrawn and suppressed. Some doubt exists as to the name of the person who cooperated with Shelley in producing this book. Shelley enthusiasts say that Shelley was the unsuspicious victim of an unworthy coadjutor. Jeafferson is of the opinion that Shelley was fully conscious of the fraud that was being done. This biographer maintains that Shelley was an inveterate liar.
“About this time,” says Stockdale, “not merely slight hints but constant allusions, personally and by letters, ... rendered me extremely uneasy respecting Mr. Shelley’s religious, or indeed irreligious, sentiments.” Shelley’s father too was worrying at this time about his son’s loss of faith. He may have received the first intimation of his son’s speculations from a criticism in The Critical Review of another work of Shelley’s, Zastrozzi, in which the unknown author was condemned as an offender against morality and a corrupter of youth. The irate father wrote to his son and severely reprimanded him for his conduct.
In a letter to Hogg, Shelley says: “My father wrote to me, and I am now surrounded, environed by dangers, to which compared the devils who besieged St. Anthony were all inefficient. They attack me for my detestable principles. I am reckoned an outcast, yet I defy them, and laugh at their ineffectual efforts, etc.” And in another letter: “My mother imagines me to be on the highroad to Pandemonium; she fancies I want to make a deistical coterie of my little sisters. How laughable!” Shelley imagines the whole world is against him. He feels very keenly his isolation. He says his “soul was bursting.” There is a relief though. “I slept with a loaded pistol and some poison last night, but did not die.”
Shelley thought he was called upon to come to the aid of all those in distress. We find him at this time aiding aspiring authors, and defending traitorous politicians. An Irish journalist, Peter Finnerty, was condemned for libel and sentenced to eighteen months’ imprisonment in Lincoln jail. Shelley contributed to a subscription list in aid of Finnerty and also wrote a poem entitled A Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things to help on the cause. Leigh and John Hunt, who defended Finnerty in The Examiner, were tried for seditious libel and acquitted. Shelley rejoiced over their triumph, and wrote the following letter to Leigh Hunt congratulating him and proposing a scheme for the mutual defense of all friends of “rational liberty.”