Shelley having caused so much trouble with his experimental excesses, it was decided that, to prevent them from turning their bedrooms into laboratories and setting fire to rotten timber, the boys should at least for awhile be forbidden to play at being chemical students. A book on chemistry, which Shelley had borrowed of Mr. Medwin, the Horsham attorney (Tom Medwin’s father), being found in the lad’s room, it was sent by his tutor to Mr. Timothy Shelley, of Field Place, who passed the volume on to its owner, saying in a note (referred to in the younger Medwin’s Life of Shelley), ‘I have returned the book on chemistry, as it is a forbidden thing at Eton.’ As chemistry, thus forbidden in 1808, cannot be supposed to have been forbidden in the school when Old Walker was permitted to make the boys take an interest in the science, it is a fair inference that the prohibition resulted in some degree from annoyances, coming to the school through the lecturer’s most interested auditor. Mad Shelley’s electrical machine, and other scientific apparatus, would probably have been sent to Field Place, together with the volume on chemistry, had he not already deposited them for safe keeping in the hands of a certain white-headed gentleman, who will soon receive the attention he merits at the hands of the present writer.
Those who knew Shelley best in his boyhood did not imagine at the time, that the ‘prohibition of chemistry’ would dispose him to desist from the forbidden pastime. Those who knew him best in later time concurred in thinking that the order to refrain from chemical inquiry and experiments would only quicken his enthusiasm for the proscribed amusement.
‘Might not this extraordinary prohibition,’ asks Mr. Medwin, speaking from his personal knowledge of his cousin in boyhood and manhood, ‘have the more stimulated Shelley to engage in the pursuit?’ In the same spirit, Mr. Rossetti remarks, with equal sagacity and justice. ‘No doubt the great turn for chemical experiment which he developed at Eton, and which became his chief passion there, had as much to do with an impressible fancy, and with the fact that chemical practice was prohibited to the schoolboys in their chambers, as with scientific tendencies.’
It is certain, that instead of having any natural aptitude for the practice, Shelley was unusually deficient in the qualities, requisite in a scientific experimentalist. A dreamer, a visionary, and an enthusiast, he wanted the nice touch, the fine perception of minute phenomena, the intellectual patience, the mental disposition for accuracy in the smallest details. It is certain that the man, who, even in his proper art, was curiously careless of verbal details, never had any sincere disposition for pursuits, in which nothing can be done without incessant attention to minutiæ,—for pursuits which repel the student, who does not delight in the painful vigilance and methodical exactness of scientific inquiry. Had he played with the microscope to the last hour of a long life, as he played with it fitfully for several years after leaving Eton, he would never for a single hour have been ‘a worker’ with it. He was singularly wanting in what Mr. Rossetti calls ‘scientific tendencies.’
On the other hand, it is no less manifest that in his earlier time a certain mental and moral perversity—a perversity by no means uncommon in young people, and only a few degrees less common in persons of mature age—gave him a keen appetite for fruit he was forbidden to pluck, and a distaste for whatever fruit he was required to enjoy. The majority of boys take to smoking (a very disagreeable pastime to beginners), even as Thomas Carlyle confessed he took to it,—‘for the pure sin of it.’ Just as the Chelsea sage began smoking because he was ordered not to smoke, the Etonian Shelley pursued chemistry because he was ordered not to pursue it. Had it not been for the needful prohibition of the pastime, that threw the school into disorder and threatened boarding-houses with destruction, the enthusiasm for science, for which Old Walker’s lectures were in the first instance accountable, would soon have died out. Forbidden to play with his chemical apparatus and munitions, Shelley cared for no other pastime, and maintained that the pastime was a serious pursuit. Had the authorities of the school ordered every boy to study chemistry and astronomy, and put their ban on the pursuit of classical lore, Shelley would soon have declared natural science a profitless kind of busy idleness, and would have ‘wrought linked-armour for his soul’ out of Latin and Greek books. This perversity must be borne in mind by those who would take a true view of the Shelley of later times,—the Shelley who at Oxford soon ceased to care for the ‘experimental studies’ in which he was at liberty to waste his whole time, and cared especially for the sceptical writers whom he was admonished to avoid; the Shelley who, on coming from the university into the wider world, threw himself into the arms of the revolutionary doctrinaires (before he had given three weeks to the study of political science), because his natural advisers,—the persons with the strongest title to direct him authoritatively,—bade and entreated him to give no heed to such dangerous teachers.
Having come into conflict with the Eton masters on the blue-flame question, and the natural right of every Eton boy to possess an electrical machine and use it at his pleasure for the humiliation of his tutor, Shelley was nearing the time when the unanimous voice of the forms (minus the masters) proclaimed him ‘The Atheist’ of the school. Under the persecutions of the playground, which had goaded him out of his girlishness into thought and action, that revealed the masculine forces of his nature, Shelley was ceasing to be the Sion House ‘faint heart’ and ‘milksop,’ when Old Walker visited Eton. In the subsequent battle for freedom of scientific inquiry, the boy’s combativeness became daily more and more apparent; his carelessness for his own skin and his contempt for Dr. Keate’s rods more and more sublime, till Mad Shelley, ceasing to be everybody’s butt, became a boy of pluck and merit to the whole school,—a possible martyr in the sacred cause of scholastic disorder,—a lad who cared not a fig for Keate or any of Keate’s underlings. From the mad-dog of the Eton playing-grounds, he had risen to the proud position of The Eton Atheist. The girlish Shelley had for the moment become ‘a boy,’—a very naughty boy!
Let there be no misunderstanding about this rather sensational title. A boy might be The Eton Atheist, and at the same time be a sound and unwavering believer in every doctrine of the Thirty-nine Articles. The gods of Eton were only the masters of the school; the sceptics of Eton were nothing more terrible than those naughty boys who held these masters full cheap, and questioned their natural fitness for the authority given into their hands. The Atheist of Eton was the boy who surpassed all the other naughty boys in contempt for the masters, and not content with questioning their natural fitness for their official eminence, boldly and utterly denied it. No Etonian sceptic could question, no Etonian Atheist could deny the existence of gods who daily entered boys’ names on flogging-bills. Dr. Keate’s rods were no things to be ignored; the wielder of those rods was a person, whose existence could not be questioned. His character, however, was open to criticism, and the Lord High Atheist spoke his mind about it with freedom.
Before an Etonian could rise to the position of Lord High Atheist, or even become a candidate for the office, it was needful for him to distinguish himself from ordinary deriders of the pedagogic species by some super-puerile extravagance of audacity. The youngster, who preceded Shelley in the Atheist’s chair, had one dark winter’s night taken possession of the huge, richly-gilded bunch of grapes, which hung in front of ‘The Christopher Tavern,’ and having so taken into his keeping the inn-sign, suspended it over the door of the head-master’s house. In the morning, on rushing over his threshold to get to chapel in time for sacred service, this head-master ran full butt into the bunch of grapes, with consequences altogether satisfactory to the contriver and doer of the practical joke, who witnessed the successful issue of his arrangements from a convenient corner. It is needless to say that, after executing this feat in contempt of the greatest of the Etonian gods, the borrower of the grapes was declared Lord High Atheist before he had lived another day. It is uncertain what egregious act of profanity raised Shelley to the same eminence. Possibly the affair with the electric battery, that hurled Mr. Bethell against the bedroom wall, may have contributed to the future poet’s elevation to an office, which he does not seem to have disgraced. Anyhow, it is certain that Shelley became the Lord High Atheist of the school, and that he would not have attained to this distinction, had he not been regarded by his comrades as the most unruly and impudent boy of the establishment.
Whilst holding this office, not content with deriding the masters and disobeying their orders at every turn, the boy also distinguished himself by the fervour and blasphemous ingenuity with which he used to curse the King (George the Third), and used also to curse his own father. It speaks ill for the tone of Etonian manners during the poet’s time at the public school, that the boys used to gather round the Lord High Atheist on a hint that he meant forthwith to curse his own father. The willing listeners never seem to have expressed disgust at the comminatory performance. On the contrary, the frequently repeated entertainment was thought so droll and piquant that, during his short stay at Oxford, Shelley was entreated, at least on one occasion, to curse his father yet again for the gratification of two or three of his former schoolfellows. Hogg, who was present on this occasion, records that Shelley yielded reluctantly to the entreaty; but he did consent to the importunity of the old Etonians, and ‘delivered with vehemence and animation a string of execrations, greatly resembling in its absurdity a papal anathema.’ Though he joined in the ‘hearty laugh,’ that rewarded the performer, Hogg, on the departure of the two or three Etonians, exclaimed, ‘Why, you young reprobate, who in the world taught you to curse your father,—your own father?’—an inquiry to which Shelley replied:—
‘My grandfather, Sir Bysshe, partly; but principally my friend, Dr. Lind, at Eton. When anything goes wrong at Field Place, my father does nothing but swear all day long afterwards. Whenever I have gone with my father to visit Sir Bysshe, he always received him with a tremendous oath, and continued to heap curses upon his head so long as he remained in the room.’