In this stage of his existence, little Bysshe resembled Geordie Byron at a somewhat earlier age, in having the nervous diathesis that often disposes children to walk in their sleep, when suffering from derangement of the stomach. At least, on one occasion, Geordie Byron was a somnambulist at Aberdeen. At least, on one occasion, Bysshe Shelley was a somnambulist during the time he passed under Dr. Greenlaw’s government. More than forty years later, Medwin remembered how the boy looked, when after leaving his proper bedroom he advanced with slow steps, one summer night, to the open window of the dormitory he had no right to enter. Seeing that he was asleep, and unaware that sleep-walkers should be awakened gradually, Medwin jumped from bed and, seizing him quickly, roused the somnambulist with a suddenness that gave him a painful shock, attended with severe nervous erethism. In the morning Shelley paid another penalty for the misbehaviour of his nerves. Boys taken at night in a wrong bed-room were offenders against a wholesome domestic rule, to be punished even though the offence was unintentional. ‘I remember,’ says Medwin, ‘that he was severely punished for this involuntary transgression.’ It does not appear how he was punished, or whether it was known to the punisher that the breach of law had been committed during sleep.
Though he was not guilty of another walk in his sleep, the nervous and delicate boy was still visited by ‘waking dreams, a sort of lethargy and abstraction that became habitual to him.’ Whilst he was under the influence of these day-dreams, his prominent blue eyes were glazed with a peculiar dullness, and were equally inexpressive and insensible of external objects. As soon as the visitations were over, his eyes flashed, his lips quivered, and he spoke with a tremulous voice that was strangely and painfully indicative of nervous agitation and distress. ‘A sort of ecstasy,’ says Medwin, ‘came over him, and he talked more like a spirit or an angel than a human being.’ As the words convey the intended impression, there is no need to inquire in what respect the speech of a human creature differs from the speech of a spirit, or to imagine the circumstances under which Mr. Medwin may have been permitted to overhear the talk of angels.
Under the manifold vexations and sorrows that preyed upon his feelings at Sion House, Shelley found solace and intermissions of grief in the perusal of blue books,—no folios of parliamentary manufacture and information; but the little blue-covered volumes of extremely exciting and unwholesome prose-fiction, that were to be bought at sixpence a-piece of ordinary booksellers in the earlier decades of the present century. He was also a greedy devourer of tales (touching haunted castles, magicians, picturesque brigands, and mysterious murderers) that proceeded from writers, who did not condescend to offer their productions to the public eye, in the vulgar little ‘blue books,’ or in any form less acceptable to connoisseurs of elegant literature than board-bound volumes. It is something to the honour of prose-fiction that the two greatest poets of the nineteenth century may be said to have been mentally suckled and reared on novels from infancy to adult age,—taught by novels how to think and feel, and how to make others think and feel. It is alike true of Byron and Shelley, that the germs of much that is most delightful and admirable in their finest poems must be sought in old novels. John Moore’s Zeluco was not more influential in the production of Childe Harold, than Zofloya or the Moor was influential in the production of Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne, those crude and unutterably ridiculous achievements of Shelley’s youthful pen, which, offering to their amused perusers the feeble fancies and puerile conceits that, appearing and reappearing in successive volumes, developed eventually into vigorous creations and exquisite examples of poetic imagery,—exhibit also the rude notions and embryonic reasonings, that in the course of a few years grew and shaped themselves in the fundamental principles and main features of his philosophy on matters pertaining to politics, social economy, and religion.
It is a question whether the recollections of misery endured at school, which occupy three of the familiar stanzas to ‘Mary,’ should be regarded as reminiscences of trials the poet underwent at Sion House, or of sorrows that moved him to tears at Eton. Mrs. Shelley had no doubt the stanzas referred to the public school; and Lady Shelley is no less confident that her father-in-law was thinking of the Eton playing-grounds, when he wrote in the dedicatory prelude to Laon and Cythna:
‘Thoughts of great deeds were mine, dear Friend, when first
The clouds which wrap this world from youth did pass;
I do remember well the hour which burst
My spirit’s sleep: a fresh May-dawn it was,
When I walked forth upon the glittering grass,
And wept, I knew not why; until there rose
From the near schoolroom, voices, that, alas!
Were but one echo from a world of woes—
The harsh and grating strife of tyrants and of foes.
‘And then I clasped my hands and looked around,
But none was near to mock my streaming eyes,
Which poured their warm drops on the sunny ground—
So without shame, I spake:—“I will be wise,
And just, and free, and mild, if in me lies
Such power, for I grow weary to behold
The selfish and the strong still tyrannise,
Without reproach or check.” I then controuled
My tears; my heart grew calm, and I was meek and bold.
‘And from that hour did I with earnest thought
Heap knowledge from forbidden mines of lore;
Yet nothing that my tyrants knew or taught
I cared to learn, but from that secret store
Wrought linked-armour for my soul, before
It might walk forth to war upon mankind;
Thus power and hope were strengthened more and more
Within me, till there came upon my mind
A sense of loneliness, a thirst with which I pined.’
It has been usual with Shelley’s biographers to deal with these verses as though, besides referring to Eton, they afford a substantially accurate account of trouble undergone, resolutions formed, and action taken by the poet whilst he was at Eton. To the Shelleyan enthusiasts, it is heresy to question the strict and severe historic veracity of any particular statement of this piece of melodious egotism. To them it is an affair of certainty that the grass glittered, the boy wept, the voices came from the school-house, the weeping youth made virtuous resolves, precisely as, and when, the poetry represents. The verses are given in evidence that Shelley neglected Latin and Greek in order that he might devote all his best energies to chemistry, astronomy, electricity, pneumatics,—in brief, to those ‘scientific pursuits,’ about which so much fantastic nonsense has been printed by the more fervid and less discreet of his eulogists. To this way of reading and handling these verses, is mainly referable the equally general and false notion that Shelley’s principal employment at Eton was to make ‘linked armour for his soul’ out of materials prohibited to ingenuous youth by the teachers of his despotic school,—and that his one purpose in forging this linked armour for his soul, was that he might equip himself for ‘walking forth to war among mankind,’ i.e. for playing the part of a political revolutionist and social reformer, as soon as he should be his own master.
There is the less need to trouble oneself seriously with the question whether the verses refer to Sion House or Eton, because it is certain they do not correspond, in all their chief particulars, to his life at either school. Whilst it is certain that his studies at the private school were the studies prescribed by Dr. Greenlaw (unless the not-actually-prohibited perusal of novels is to be rated as ‘study’), it is no less certain that he never grossly neglected the studies of either school. Far from neglecting the ordinary scholastic exercises of an Eton boy in the degree implied by the words,
‘Yet nothing that my tyrants knew or taught
I cared to learn,’
it is certain that, without holding steadily a high place in any of the higher forms, he acquired something more than a fair amount of the only learning imparted to boys at Eton eighty years since, and displayed remarkable aptitude and skill in making Latin verses,—an important part of what his tyrants knew and taught. The evidence is conclusive that, at Eton he was a facile and clever maker of Latin verses. Medwin speaks to ‘his capacity for writing Latin verses,’ and gives some examples of the capacity, that may, at least, be styled creditable performances for a public school-boy. Long after his abrupt withdrawal from the school, the excellence of Shelley’s Latin verses was remembered by old Etonians. Whilst his readiness in the verse-maker’s art was described as ‘wonderful’ by Mr. Packe, another of his former schoolmates at Eton (Mr. Walter S. Halliday) wrote of the same faculty to Lady Shelley, ‘his power of Latin versification’ was ‘marvellous.’ Hogg certifies that, though more than a year elapsed between his retirement from Eton and his going into residence at University College—a period during which he certainly omitted to enlarge his classical attainments—Shelley came up to Oxford an expert and singularly quick Latin verse-maker, and a ready writer of Latin prose. So much for the poet’s vaunt that he did not care to learn what the Eton masters could teach him.
On the other hand, it is certain that, whilst carrying away from Eton something more than a creditable amount of the learning to be acquired in the classes, Shelley learnt nothing at the school by irregular and unrecognized study to justify the assertion that, whilst a schoolboy, he gathered ‘knowledge from forbidden mines of lore,’ and armed himself for the battle of life with weapons his official teachers would fain have kept from his hands. His scientific studies were the mere sports of a schoolboy, playing idly with an air-pump, an electrical battery, and a few acids and alkalies. Instead of spending his leisure at Eton in the serious pursuits of natural science, he employed it chiefly in literary essays, that show him to have been possessed by an ambition scarcely compatible with an enthusiasm for scientific investigation and a yearning for scientific celebrity.