The Real Shelley. New Views of the Poet's Life. Vol. 1 (of 2)

by John Cordy Jeaffreson

From Shelley’s letter of 26th November, 1811, to Mr. Medwin, of Horsham, it appears that the trio came to Keswick with the purpose of journeying southward, and settling in some picturesque nook of Sussex, when they should have succeeded or failed in the main object of their expedition to the Lake country. The Horsham attorney was instructed to look out for a cottage, adapted to their means and requirements, near St. Leonard’s forest or in any other part of the county, where they would be at a distance from soldiers and workshops, and have rural quietude with good scenery.

It would have been well, perhaps, for Shelley and his chances of domestic contentment, had they held to this plan, and settling down in a peaceful Sussex village, avoided the life of comfortless vagrancy, in which he spent the rest of his life. It would have been better still, perhaps, both for him and Harriett, had they been content to lead tranquil and studious days at Greta Bank for two or three years in the society of the Southeys at Keswick, of De Quincey and Wordsworth at Grasmere, of Coleridge and John Wilson. But it was not in his nature, nor, perhaps, was it possible to a young woman of her peculiar temper, to be happy for many months together, in any place that wanted the charm of novelty. Anyhow, instead of biding his time at Greta Bank till De Quincey and Wordsworth, Coleridge and Wilson, had come about them, Shelley surrendered the advantages of the home, that had been provided for him by ducal favour, and left Cumberland at the beginning of February without making any acquaintances at Keswick with the exception of the Calverts from whom he parted regretfully, and the Southeys from whom he parted in no kindly temper.

Either through the carelessness of the original writer (who may have made the common mistake of pre-dating the epistle by an entire month), or through the carelessness of the copyist of the document, a wrong date (10th October, 1811) is given in Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy’s Shelley’s Early Life, to the extract from an unpublished letter, in which the poetical aspirant says of the author of Thalaba, ‘Southey hates the Irish; he speaks against Catholic Emancipation. In all these things we differ. Our differences were the subject of a long conversation.’ As Shelley had not seen Southey on 10th October, 1811, as he made Southey’s acquaintance at Keswick, which he entered for the first time on some day of the following month (November, 1811), he cannot have talked in the earlier days of October, 1811, with the celebrated man of letters on questions touching Catholic Emancipation and the discontents of the Irish Catholics. The long conversation and differences about those topics may have been affairs of November, but it is more probable that the famous poet and the unknown literary aspirant had no angry altercations about Ireland’s wrongs and Robert Emmett’s story before the last month of 1811.

It is, however, certain that they differed on these subjects, and that their differences of opinion were fruitful of overbearing speech on Southey’s part,—and of much vehement and bitter speech from Shelley.

Shelley came to Keswick with a disposition to have the friendliest relations with the man of letters who two years since had been his favourite English poet, and whom he regarded as a great man till personal intercourse extinguished the favourable opinion. And whilst Shelley went to ‘the lakes’ in a mood to render homage to Southey’s greatness, Southey was by no means disinclined to receive the homage in those portions of his laborious time, in which he condescended to have speech with inferior mortals. But, notwithstanding Shelley’s readiness to admire and Southey’s readiness to be admired, no one familiar with their peculiar infirmities of intellect and temper would have predicted that the two men would prove congenial companions. In return for his worship and deference, the vehement and romantic Shelley looked for encouragement and sympathy from the famous scholar and poet. Hoping for a cordial welcome to the great man’s heart and library, Shelley was reprimanded with a look of mingled surprise and displeasure for his presumption in taking books from the great man’s shelves. The welcome accorded to him by the man of fame was attended with limitations and conditions. The house was open to him, but only at times when the master could see him. The library was open to him for the perusal of such books as their owner put into his hands, or rather for such passages of them as were submitted to his consideration. Eager for approval and acutely sensitive of disrespect, the youngster was quick to perceive that Southey listened to his words with supercilious curiosity and amusement, and in replying to them felt himself talking to an intellectual inferior,—to a mere whimsical scatterbrain singularly devoid of mental discretion; to a youth whose exuberant speech ran on matters of which he knew very little. Taking this view of his young friend, Southey (whose dictatorial air and eloquence had, in his thirty-eighth year, assumed all the overbearing insolence that distinguished him in later time) gave his young friend much equally wholesome and unacceptable admonition, that would have been less ineffectual for good and far less effectual for harm, had it been given in a less offensive manner.

Whilst he never failed to take something more than his proper share of the conversation, in whatever company he found himself at this period of his life, the argumentative Shelley liked to imagine he controlled the minds of the listeners, who were more often silenced than swayed by his excessive loquacity. With comical and characteristic self-complacence he wrote of Mr. Calvert and the Duke of Norfolk’s other guests, soon after the visit to Greystoke Castle, ‘We met several people at the Duke’s. One in particular struck me. He was an elderly man, who seemed to know all my concerns, and the expression of his face, whenever I held the argument, which I do everywhere, was such as I shall not readily forget.’ The young gentleman who, ‘holding the argument everywhere,’ pursued his customary course even in the presence of ducal quality, met in Southey’s house with an entertainer, no less fond of holding the argument; with a host not at all disposed to be overtalked by a boy, barely half his own age. In Southey, the poet usually went hand-in-hand with the pedagogue; but in his dealings with Shelley, the poet disappeared in the pedagogue, the scholar merged in the schoolmaster,—sometimes in the angry schoolmaster. Instead of withdrawing into silence, Southey met the youngster’s vehement assertions with scornful counterstatements, traversed his arguments with caustic speech that turned them to ridicule, or raising his voice poured upon him torrents of invective, that only stung and lashed the beardless disputant to wilder extravagances of speech.

Some of Southey’s donnish ways to the irrepressible lad were superlatively exasperating. One of the schoolmaster’s tricks was to stop the course of controversy by taking down a book, opening it, and reading a passage in a tone, which implied that the quotation closed the discussion for all minds, accessible to reason. At other times, when Shelley had talked himself purple, this exasperating Southey was content to remark in a tone of galling pity and tenderness, ‘No doubt, no doubt; I thought and spoke in just the same way when I was your age.’ Few forms of dissent are more irritating to a callow disputant than a suggestion that he thinks what he thinks and says what he says, merely because he is very young and inexperienced. Whilst Southey was writing with sublime compassionateness of the young ‘man at Keswick, who acted upon him as his own ghost would,’ Shelley wrote from Greta Bank to a correspondent, whose personal acquaintance he had still to make:—‘Southey, the poet, whose principles were pure and elevated once, is now the paid champion of every abuse and absurdity. I have had much conversation with him. He says, “You will think as I do when you are as old.” I do not feel the least disposition to be Mr. S.’s proselyte.’ Recalling how he had dealt and differed with Shelley in Keswick, Southey (vide The Correspondence of Robert Southey with Caroline Bowles, 1881) wrote to the author of Laon and Cythna in June, 1820:—‘Eight years ago you were somewhat displeased when I declined disputing with you on points which are beyond the reach of the human intellect,—telling you that the great difference between us was, that you were then nineteen and I was eight-and-thirty.’ Southey’s letter about his own ghost was dated 14th January, 1812; Shelley’s letter to Godwin, about ‘the poet, whose principles were pure and elevated once,’ was dated just two days later, 16th January, 1812. Whilst Shelley was nothing more respectable to Southey than a young simpleton of parts, who might survive his folly and become a sensible man, Southey was nothing less contemptible in Shelley’s eyes than a literary hireling, who defended every abuse and absurdity he was ordered to defend.

Few were the words spoken in later time to Southey’s advantage, many the words spoken to his ridicule, by the younger poet, with whom he had wrangled so hotly on the marge of Derwentwater. One of Shelley’s stories, to his enemy’s discredit, was the droll account of the way he was led by Southey into his little upstairs study, locked into the narrow chamber, and then ‘read’ into unconsciousness by his merciless captor; the thing thus read to the captive’s stupefaction being one of the captor’s poems in manuscript. Charmed with the beauties of his own creation, the author read on slowly and distinctly, till the listener would fain have escaped from the scene of his punishment; read on till the listener nodded from drowsiness, instead of approval; read on till the whilom unwilling listener had ceased to listen; read on till the same whilom listener slipt from his seat to the floor; and still read on till, on looking up from his manuscript for something more flattering than silent admiration, he looked in vain for him who should have given it. The Southey of this comical anecdote may well have been surprised at the listener’s unaccountable disappearance. How had he escaped?—Not by the door, for it was locked; nor by the window, for it was barred; nor by the chimney, for it was too narrow. The poet’s wonder at the listener’s disappearance was exchanged for wonder at his insensibility and indifference to what was loveliest in poetic art, when, on looking under the table, he discovered the whilom listener, lying at full length on the carpet, and wrapt in profoundest slumber. It is suggested by the humorous Hogg that, if Shelley had kept his chair and consciousness, during the reading of the long poem, he would never have been placed by the naturally indignant bard on the roll of the Satanic School.

Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy, by the way, discovers cause for virtuous indignation at Hogg’s monstrous untruthfulness, in representing that the poem, which acted thus soporifically on Shelley, was The Curse of Kehama. The poem of The Curse had been published long before Shelley set foot in Southey’s house. Even whilst he was at Oxford, Shelley had taken from a printed copy of The Curse four lines to serve as a motto for the title-page of his own sublime and undiscoverable poem (that possibly was never written), On the Existing State of Things. It is infinitely absurd to suppose Southey read in manuscript one of his old poems to Shelley at Keswick. In saying Southey was guilty of this offence, Hogg said what was untrue. It follows that Hogg was a reckless writer, false biographer, and bad man. The fun of the matter is that Hogg does not say the poem was The Curse of Kehama. On the contrary, he is at pains to say he is uncertain whether it was The Curse, or some other of the poet’s metrical performances. ‘The poem, if I mistake not, was The Curse of Kehama,’ are the words of the biographer, who is so rashly assailed for inaccuracy, though in his mere repetition of Shelley’s piquant anecdote, he is so careful to say the poem of the story may not have been the Curse. It is thus that, in his passion for defaming Hogg, Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy pelts him with any stone, or stick, or bit of dirt that comes to hand.

The incident of the story, if it was a real one, cannot be supposed to have taken place when Mrs. Southey regaled the stranger from southern England with the tea-cakes, which he devoured so ravenously, after abusing them with the vehemence of unqualified prejudice. Had he at that time offered her husband the affront of going to sleep at the poetical-reading, the lady would scarcely have pressed Shelley so cordially to partake of the tea and hot buttered tea-cakes, blushing with currants, or sprinkled with caraway seed, with which she and her poet were regaling themselves, at the close of washing-day.