‘Why! good God, Southey!’ the younger poet is reported to have exclaimed, with a look of disgust at the unromantic fare, ‘I am ashamed of you! It is awful, horrible, to see such a man as you are, greedily devouring this nasty stuff.’
‘Nasty stuff, indeed!’ cried Mrs. Southey. ‘How dare you call my tea-cakes nasty stuff?’
To assuage the lady’s wrath, Shelley scanned the cakes, sniffed their savour, took up a piece of one of them, and ate it. Scent and palate convincing Shelley that it was an occasion for prompt recantation of a sentiment formed from the mere appearance of things, he went to work at the remaining tea-cakes, devouring them even more greedily than Southey. Another plate of the hot and buttered cakes being brought to the board, Shelley took something more than his full share of them, and was hoping for the appearance of yet a third plate, when he learnt that more could not be had, the whole batch having been eaten to the last fragment and crumb. Hogg had the story of Mrs. Southey’s tea-cakes from Harriett (Westbrook) Shelley, who added, naïvely, ‘We were to have hot tea-cakes every evening “for ever.” I was to make them myself, and Mrs. Southey was to teach me.’
The story has considerable biographical value, as an example of Shelley’s alternate abstemiousness and self-indulgence in food. Resembling Byron in habitual abstinence and indifference to the quality of the fare that sustained him, Shelley also resembled Byron in occasional acts of feasting that might almost be called excesses of greediness. Hogg gives a piquant account of a meal Shelley made off eggs and bacon, in the parlour of a humble inn on Hounslow Heath, at a time subsequent to his union with William Godwin’s daughter, when, as a vegetarian, he had for a considerable period regarded pork with abhorrence. Entering the modest tavern, at a moment when Hogg was about to assail a goodly dish of the gross and abominable meat, the hungry poet eyed the bacon with disgust, looked at it with curiosity, sniffed its alluring savour, regarded it longingly, just as he had in former time regarded Mrs. Southey’s tea-cakes. ‘So this is bacon,’ he observed daintily, taking a morsel of the meat on the end of a fork, and putting it into his mouth. Having tasted fat, he fell from the purity of abstinence to the uncleanness of carnal enjoyment. Having consumed a liberal portion of his friend’s dish, he ordered another dish on his own account, and devoured it voraciously. Sharpened with what it fed upon, his appetite caused him to cry aloud, ‘Bring more bacon;’ an order that was speedily followed by the appearance of a third dish. After despatching this third dish, the poet demanded a fourth, when to his lively annoyance he learnt there was no more bacon in the house. It was debated whether the landlady should not be sent to Staines for more bacon; but Hogg prevailed on his friend to put a bridle on fleshly appetite, and set forth for his cottage at Bishopgate and Mary’s well-furnished tea-table. On coming to that tea-table, Shelley astonished his wife by exclaiming eagerly, ‘We have been eating bacon together on Hounslow Heath, and do you know it was very nice? Cannot we have bacon here, Mary?’ On hearing he could not have bacon till the morrow, but must for the present be content with tea and bread and butter, the poet replied plaintively, ‘I would rather have some more bacon.’ When a worthy book shall be written on the Feasts of the Poets, it will not fail to tell how Byron, after long spells of fasting, used to devour huge messes of broken potato and stale fish, drenched with vinegar. Nor will it omit to record how Shelley ate poor Mrs. Southey out of buttered tea-cakes, and gorged himself with fried bacon at a pot-house on Hounslow Heath.
Whilst they dispose me to think the famous feast on tea-cakes cannot have preceded the hour when Shelley fell asleep under Southey’s poem, circumstances also incline me to think the acrimonious disputations on Irish affairs must have followed the first day of Shelley’s entertainment at Greta Bank. Anyhow, it is certain that the Shelleys and Southeys were on friendly terms, when the former took up their abode in Mr. Calvert’s house. The garden at Greta Bank was the ‘pretty garden’ of the piquant story known to every reader of De Quincey’s curiously inaccurate paper about Shelley. It was to a question, put to her by one of the Southey party, then calling upon her in her new quarters, that Mrs. Shelley replied, with winning childishness, ‘Oh, no, the garden is not ours; but then, you know, the people let us run about in it, whenever Percy and I are tired of sitting in the house;’ an utterance that, coming from the girlish wife, may well have amused the married ladies to whom it was made.
Nor is it conceivable that Southey and Shelley had exchanged hot and disdainful words on questions of Irish politics, when the younger poet, overflowing with pitiful speech on subjects about which he should not have uttered a syllable to so slight an acquaintance, told Southey the story of Harriett’s conversion to Atheism, and the still more revolting tale of Hogg’s attempt to seduce her. By the first of these excesses of communicativeness, Southey was informed how Shelley had busied himself in making proselytes in Mrs. Fenning’s boarding-school; how Harriett Westbrook was expelled the school for accepting his doctrine and aiding him in his purpose; and how he had married her, in order to render her the amende honorable for the disgrace and trouble he had brought upon her. The second of the amazing stories was, that on their journey from Edinburgh to York Hogg had attempted to debauch his friend’s bride, so soon after her marriage. Telling these things to his wife’s discredit and Hogg’s infamy, Shelley spoke frankly of his disapproval of marriage. About the same time, either from Shelley’s own lips, or from the lips of some other informant, it came to Southey’s knowledge that, since coming to Keswick, Shelley had told his wife expressly, that he regarded the marriage-rite as a ceremony of no binding force, and that he should leave her on ceasing to love her. Having no doubt the statements thus made to Harriett at Keswick were a mere repetition of statements made to her by Shelley before their marriage, Southey had reasons in 1820 for declining to believe that, after deciding to wed one another by lawful form, either she or Shelley had entered the compact on the Free Love understanding that they should be at liberty to separate on ceasing to like one another. One could wish Southey had stated more precisely how much of his knowledge of Shelley’s nuptial and pre-nuptial relations to Harriett came to him from Shelley’s own lips, and how much from other informants. It is, however, certain that Southey received from Shelley’s own tongue, his information, or misinformation, touching the circumstances of Harriett’s alleged expulsion from school, touching Shelley’s alleged motive for marrying her, and touching the attempt said to have been made by Hogg on her honour. Whether the allegation to Hogg’s infamy should be deemed good evidence against the law-student is a question to be considered in a subsequent chapter. For the present, it is enough to observe that Shelley spoke to Southey at Keswick on divers delicate personal matters, about which even he would scarcely have opened mind and heart to so recent an acquaintance had they already squabbled fiercely on Irish affairs.
Because Shelley introduced a virtuous Irishman into the later part of St. Irvyne, and published in the Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson some metrical trash about a banshee’s moan, and a white courser, bestridden by a shadow sprite, Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy would have us believe, that Shelley did not leave Oxford without seriously interesting himself in the history and legends of Ireland, and entertaining a purpose to redress the wrongs of her miserable people. Here are Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy’s own words:—
‘One of them’ (i.e. the poems of the Posthumous Fragments) ‘The Spectral Horseman, is interesting as showing that at this early period, Shelley had begun to take that interest in the history and legends of Ireland, which led to such extraordinary results two years later. We have here “The Banshee’s moan on the storm;” “A white courser,” like that of O’Donoghue, “bears the shadowy sprite;” “The whirlwinds howl in the caves of Innisfallen,”—
“Then does the dragon, who, chained in the caverns
To eternity, curses the champion of Erin,
Moan and yell loud at the lone hour of midnight.”
Fragments, page 25.
‘Extravagant as all these passages are,—they show Shelley’s sympathies for Ireland had already been awakened, and that his practical efforts for her benefit at a later period were not the result of any sudden or passing caprice.’