Even more likely to produce the same agonizing apprehension, were some of the more painful incidents of his life at Eton, if their terrorizing power was intensified by the knowledge that one of his not very remote collateral ancestors had been confined justly or unjustly as a lunatic. The nervous boy who was hunted and baited in the Eton playing-grounds, by a multitude of lads, shouting at the top of their voices, ‘Mad Shelley, Mad Shelley, Mad Shelley!’ had good reason to suspect that something in his behaviour and idiosyncrasy must have suggested the imputation of insanity.
‘I have seen him,’ says one of the spectators of these frequent scenes of cruelty and suffering, ‘surrounded, hooted, baited like a maddened bull; and, at this distance of time (forty years after), I seem to hear ringing in my ears the cry which Shelley was wont to utter in his paroxysms of revengeful anger.’
The torture, which made so deep and enduring an impression on the boy who only witnessed it, affected far more strongly the boy who was the object of the persecution. To the end of his life, the poet (given like Byron to brood over the sorrows of his childhood) used to speak with passionate resentment of the barbarous malice of the boys, who either exasperated him with an accusation they knew to be groundless, or, worse still (if they really thought him insane), mocked him for the affliction that entitled him to their compassion.
In his later time at Eton, when he was distinguishing himself by contumacy and insolence to the masters of his school, his father was of course informed of his insubordination and other scholastic offences. Could his word be taken (which it may not be) on the matter, Shelley was twice expelled from Eton, and twice (at his father’s entreaty) re-admitted to the school, before he was dismissed from it for the third and last time. It cannot be doubted the Atheist of College gave the masters good reasons for wishing him away from the school, and for requesting Mr. Shelley to remove him from an establishment that, fruitless of benefit to him, suffered not a little from his disorderliness. It is probable that the Squire of Field Place was aware of the maledictions poured upon him by the Etonian scapegrace. It is unlikely that the boy, so unruly and contumacious at school, was submissive and respectful to his father in the holidays. There is no evidence before the world that the lad received personal chastisement at his father’s hands. But it is conceivable he was so corrected by the Member for New Shoreham, in days when fathers of unimpeachable humanity and affectionateness applied the bamboo and the birch to their sons in a way, that would now-a-days be justly stigmatized as barbarous and revolting. It is, however, certain that the essentially amiable, though rather choleric, squire, had much trouble to manage his heir, and that their inharmonious intercourse was attended with friction and collisions, that could not fail to make such a son regard his sire with suspicion and aversion. If he was familiar with the story of the Uckfield lunatic, either from the gossip of old servants, or from the free speech of that lunatic’s nephew (old Sir Bysshe), what more likely and natural than for the Etonian scapegrace to think that his fate might resemble his great-great-uncle’s fate,—that he might be set aside as a lunatic to his little brother’s advantage in the arrangements of his family,—that his father was already looking about for a pretext and an occasion for sending him to a mad-house?
But, it may be asked, was Peacock justified in going so far as to say of the poet, that ‘the idea, that his father was continually on the watch for a pretext to lock him up, haunted him through life?’ Was the delusion so absolutely unintermitting? Were there no times when the hideous fancy passed from his brain? No lucid intervals when he saw he had in this matter been the dupe of his own imagination? No times, moreover, when he forced himself back into the delusion by an effort of will and fancy, similar to those imaginative exercises in which Byron was so expert and curious an operator? In answer to these questions, it can only be said that there is no evidence of intermissions in the delusion, and that Peacock probably intended to say no more when he remarked that the morbid fancy, which certainly held the poet’s mind in his later time, ‘haunted him through life.’
To the present writer, indeed, it is conceivable that there were times when the poet’s mind got the better of the most hideous of the several delusions that troubled it from time to time. The present writer can also conceive there were times when the poet, by the exercise of his will, sustained his belief in the delusion, even as the dreamer can for a few seconds by pure volition persist in believing a dream, which may be described as overlying his consciousness of its unreality. One of the prime dogmas of the school of metaphysicians, whose tenets Shelley embraced with cordial conviction of their truth, is that belief is independent of volition. The dogma is true in respect to perfectly logical and altogether sound minds. But there are unsound minds that are capable of shaping their opinions and determining their belief by processes of volition. Minds subject to manifest and distressing illusions are not to be rated as perfectly logical and altogether sound. Shelley’s mind certainly was liable to such delusions. It is conceivable he would not have insisted on the separateness of belief and volition with so much needless emphasis and passion, had he not been uneasily conscious,—troubled and irritated by a criminatory sub-consciousness—that in some matters (such for instance as his delusion respecting his father) he believed what he ought not to believe, and could by strenuous volition save himself from believing. Some such thought as this was perhaps in Peacock’s mind, when he spoke of the ‘semi-delusions’ of the man whom he loved so heartily.
Returning to Eton after recovering from the fever, of which so much has been said in foregoing pages of this chapter, Shelley, to the end of his time at the public school, continued to be in most respects the same boy he was on rising to the office of Lord High Atheist. Persisting in contumacy and unruliness he left the school in disgrace, though not under any ignominy to preclude him from the advantages of further education at one of the universities. In one particular, however, he seems to have changed his course towards the close of his Etonian career. The passion for scientific amusements (let them not be called ‘studies’) having in some degree spent itself, he devoted the greater part of his leisure to literary exercise, in the hope of winning premature distinction as a man of letters,—an ambition he certainly would not have entertained, had he been so seriously set on scientific inquiry, and occupied with scientific interests, as successive biographers have represented.
On 7th May of 1809, whilst still a boarder in Mr. Bethell’s house, Shelley wrote Messrs. Longman & Co., the eminent publishers of Paternoster Row, London, a boyish letter, informing them that he was writing a romance, and expressing his wish for them to publish it. The publishers were informed that, as he was ‘the heir of a gentleman of large fortune in the county of Sussex,’ their correspondent was not writing for money, though he would gladly take a share of any pecuniary profits, resulting from the production of his work. As the publishers endorsed this puerile letter with a memorandum of their readiness to look at the story on its completion, it may be assumed that the manuscript of perhaps the most ludicrous tale of all English literature was submitted to the publishers’ reader. As the absurd performance was not published till the end of May, or an early day of June, 1810, and was then published by Messrs. G. Wilkie and J. Robinson, of 57 Paternoster Row, it may be assumed that after considering their reader’s opinion of the story, Messrs. Longman & Co. declined to publish it,—or at least to publish it on terms the author could consent to accept.
Though it is certain Shelley left Eton prematurely and on account of misbehaviour, the particular misconduct which resulted in his dismissal from the school is unknown. To Peacock (who at the time smiled secretly at the ‘semi-delusion,’ even as in later time he smiled at it openly in the pages of Fraser’s Magazine), Shelley averred that he was sent away from Eton for striking a penknife through the hand of one of his school-fellows, and pinning it to a desk. Of course, Shelley said the ferocious act was the result of extravagant provocation.
To satisfy impartial readers that Shelley did not pin his schoolfellow’s hand to a desk with the blade of a pen-knife, it is enough to say that his comrades at Eton had no recollection of any such incident in his career at the school. How Shelley came to account in so remarkable a manner for his premature withdrawal from the public school, is not left altogether to conjecture. Though he makes no reference to the affair in his Fraser article, Peacock, on hearing Shelley’s astounding story, was doubtless mindful of the case of the military gamester, whose hand (in an early year of the present century) was pinned with a steel fork to the table of a famous gambling-club, as a convenient preliminary to the exposure of what was concealed between his wrist and cuff.