Shelley in 1892
Centenary Address delivered at Horsham, August 11, 1892
We meet to-day to celebrate the fact that, exactly one hundred years ago, there was born, in an old house in this parish, one of the greatest of the English poets, one of the most individual and remarkable of the poets of the world. This beautiful county of Sussex, with its blowing woodlands and its shining downs, was even then not unaccustomed to poetic honours. One hundred and thirty years before, it had given birth to Otway; seventy years before, to Collins. But charming as these pathetic figures were and are, not Collins and not Otway can compare for a moment with that writer who is the main intellectual glory of Sussex, the ever-beloved and ethereally illustrious Percy Bysshe Shelley. It has appeared to me that you might, as a Sussex audience, gathered in a Sussex town, like to be reminded, before we go any further, of the exact connection of our poet with the county—of the stake, as it is called, which his family held in Sussex, and of the period of his own residence in it. You will see that, although his native province lost him early, she had a strong claim upon his interests and associations.
When Shelley was born, on the 4th of August, 1792, his grandfather, afterwards a baronet, Sir Bysshe Shelley, was ensconced at Goring Castle, while his father, the heir to the title, Mr. Timothy Shelley, inhabited that famous house, Field Place, which lies here at your doors. Mr. Timothy Shelley had married a lady from your nearest eastern neighbour, the town of Cuckfield; he was M.P. for another Sussex borough, Shoreham; in the next Parliament he was to represent, if I am not mistaken, Horsham itself. The names which meet us in the earliest pages of the poet's biographies are all Sussex names. It was at Warnham that he was taught his earliest lessons, and it was in Warnham Pond that the great tortoise lurked which was the earliest of his visions. St. Irvine's, in whose woods he loved to wander by moonlight, has disappeared, but Strode is close to you still, and if St. Leonard's Forest has shrunken somewhat to the eastward since Shelley walked and raved in its allies, you still possess it in your neighbourhood.
Until Shelley was expelled from Oxford, Field Place was his constant residence out of school and college hours. Nor, although his father at first forbade him to return, was his connection with Sussex broken even then. The house of his uncle, Captain Pilfold, was always open to him at Cuckfield, and when the Duke of Norfolk made his kind suggestion that the young man should enter Parliament, as a species of moral sedative, it was to a Sussex borough that he proposed to nominate him. Shelley's first abortive volume of poems was set up by a Horsham printer, and it was from Hurstpierpoint that Miss Hitchener, afterwards known as the "Brown Demon," started on her disastrous expedition into the lives of the Shelleys. It was not until 1814, on the eve of his departure for the Continent, that Shelley came to Sussex for the last time, paying that furtive visit to his mother and sisters, on which, in order to conceal himself from his father, he buttoned the scarlet jacket of a guardsman round his attenuated form.
If I have endeavoured, by thus grouping together all the Sussex names which are connected with Shelley, to attract your personal and local sympathy around the career of the poet, it is with no intention to claim for him a provincial significance. Shelley does not belong to any one county, however rich and illustrious that county may be; he belongs to Europe—to the world. The tendency of his poetry and its peculiar accent were not so much English as European. He might have been a Frenchman, or an Italian, a Pole, or a Greek, in a way in which Wordsworth, for instance, or even Byron, could never have been anything but an Englishman. He passes, as we watch the brief and sparkling record of his life, from Sussex to the world. One day he is a child, sailing paper boats among the reeds in Warnham Pond; next day we look, and see, scarcely the son of worthy Mr. Timothy Shelley of Field Place, but a spirit without a country, "a planet-crested shape sweeping by on lightning-braided pinions" to scatter the liquid joy of life over humanity.
Into the particulars of this strange life I need not pass. You know them well. No life so brief as Shelley's has occupied so much curiosity, and for my part I think that even too minute inquiry has been made concerning some of its details. The "Harriet problem" leaves its trail across one petal of this rose; minuter insects, not quite so slimy, lurk where there should be nothing but colour and odour. We may well, I think, be content to-day to take the large romance of Shelley's life, and leave any sordid details to oblivion. He died before he was quite thirty years of age, and the busy piety of biographers has peeped into the record of almost every day of the last ten of those years. What seems to me most wonderful is that a creature so nervous, so passionate, so ill-disciplined as Shelley was, should be able to come out of such an unprecedented ordeal with his shining garments so little specked with mire. Let us, at all events, to-day, think of the man only as "the peregrine falcon" that his best and oldest friends describe him.