Using the Byronic measure (for the Spenserian measure had become for the moment Byron’s property), Shelley made a Byronic use of matter taken from romances devoured in his childhood. ‘Treading in the footsteps’ of his master, notwithstanding his assertions to the contrary, Shelley followed the Byronic example in attaching his own personality to the hero of his poem. Not content with hinting poetically in the Dedicatory Stanzas to Mary that he and Laon are one, the author of Laon and Cythna is at pains to declare more fully and precisely in the prose of his Preface that Laon’s views on matters of religion and politics, on questions of government and misgovernment, on the vices of ecclesiasticism and the merits of vegetarianism, on the relations of the sexes and the æsthetics of love, are the views of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Esq., who has studied human nature in Switzerland as well as England, and who, in consideration of his ‘having trodden the glaciers of the Alps, and lived under the eye of Mont Blanc,’ should be regarded as a gentleman especially educated and peculiarly qualified to dogmatize on such matters to English persons who have never crossed the Channel. Both in the poem and dedicatory prelude he seizes every opportunity to impress on the reader that Percy Bysshe Shelley is Laon, the apostle of ‘Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality,’ and that this Preacher of the ‘New Evangel,’ who at the close of the poem sails into Paradise with his sister and the offspring of their incestuous intercourse in a boat made of
‘one curved shell of hollow pearl,
Almost translucent with the light divine
Of her within,’
is no other than Percy Bysshe Shelley, Esq., eldest son of the Member of Parliament for New Shoreham, and heir-apparent to a Sussex baronetcy. In these Shelleyan egotisms the critical reader of the marvellous poem recognizes the very touch and trick of Byron’s way of dressing up details of his domestic woes and personal story for the delight and mystification of his readers. One of the most pathetic and effective of the egotisms is the poet’s account of the misery he endured from hard-hearted masters and malicious boys whilst he was at school.
Just as Byron seasoned the introductory stanzas of Childe Harold’s first canto with more or less imaginary particulars of his misspent youth, when
‘Few earthly things found favour in his sight,
Save concubines and carnal companie,
And flaunting wassailers of high and low degree,’
Shelley seasoned the dedicatory verses of Laon and Cythna with references to the wretchedness that preyed upon him when, walking forth upon the glittering grass, he wept and
‘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.’
Both descriptions were equally truthful and untruthful. The basis of truth in Byron’s poetical narrative of his misspent youth is that he kept the girl at Brompton who used to ride and walk about London in boy’s clothes, and that when he entertained three or four old college friends at Newstead, they talked a good deal of nonsense and drank rather more champagne than was good for them. The basis of truth in Shelley’s narrative of his wretched boyhood is that he was often unhappy at school (very unhappy at Brentford), and that being of a soft and girlish temperament when he was at Sion House, he sometimes fell a-weeping because the ‘boys were so unkind to him.’ The Shelleyan narrative is not historically exact to his doings and experiences in either of his two schools. At Brentford he was not remarkably insubordinate (as he was at Eton), and did nothing to give the faintest justificatory colour to his vaunt of having devoted himself to studies prohibited or discountenanced by the masters of the establishment. At Eton (where, though often unhappy, he was less given to crying than in his Brentford days), instead of neglecting the studies of the college, he attained to considerable excellence in them. Upon the whole, the weeping boy ‘upon the glittering grass’ bears more resemblance to the chicken-heart and milksop of Dr. Greenlaw’s playground than to the unruly, fitfully riotous, and inordinately blasphemous young rascal, who was eliminated from Eton with the least possible disgrace, even as in later time he was expelled in an irregular way, and with no needless humiliation, from Oxford. And in consideration of this greater resemblance, the present writer has thought right to deal, in this chapter about the Brentford schoolboy, with the verses that, in Mrs. Shelley’s opinion and Lady Shelley’s opinion, are a faithful picture of the lad at Eton.
It is certain that the little Bysshe was an unhappy child at Sion House, even to the time of his withdrawal from the school, when he had grown almost too tall, though certainly not too robust, to be called ‘little.’ But miserable children are curiously, pathetically clever in escaping from their misery. The smart of them over, Bysshe soon dismissed from his mind those disagreeable visits to the Doctor’s study. In the pages of his ghost-stories and banditti-stories, his tales of satanic malice and knightly heroism, he forgot all about those very unkind boys. Most of those delightful books he borrowed from the circulating library, but doubtless he had in his schoolroom ‘locker’ his own copies of his favourite novels. It cannot be questioned he had a peculiar and inalienable copy of Zofloya, or The Moor, which, yielding flowers of romance to be found in the ineffably absurd novels which he published in the opening term of his literary career, gave him also fine pieces of descriptive writing that, after doing service in Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne, were worked with skilful art into the lofty song of Laon and Cythna.
The urchin enjoyed his frequent walks under the playground’s southern wall with his cousin Tom Medwin, till the latter left Dr. Greenlaw’s sadly plebeian school, and went off to the public school which prepared him for Oxford. Though he cannot rely so confidently as he could wish on Tom Medwin’s assurance, the present writer likes to imagine Mr. Medwin had better ground than his treacherous memory for saying that, when they were schoolfellows at Sion House, he and his young cousin more than once played the truant; and rowing on the river more than once to Kew, went on one occasion by water to Richmond, where they visited the theatre and saw Mrs. Jordan in the ‘Country Girl.’ One would fain believe this of the little boy who, on growing to be a man, disliked the theatre almost as cordially as he had in former time hated Professor Sala’s dancing academy.