His chemical operations seemed to an unskilful observer to premise nothing but disasters. He had blown himself up at Eton. He had inadvertently swallowed some mineral poison, which he declared had seriously injured his health, and from the effects of which he should never recover. His hands, his clothes, his books, and his furniture, were stained and covered by medical acids—more than one hole in the carpet could elucidate the ultimate phenomena of combustion, especially in the middle of the room, where the floor had also been burnt by his mixing ether or some other fluid in a crucible, and the honourable wound was speedily enlarged by rents, for the philosopher, as he hastily crossed the room in pursuit of truth, was frequently caught in it by the foot.
The same eagerness of discovery is shown in his passion for kite-flying as a boy:
He was fond of flying kites, and at Field Place made an electrical one, an idea borrowed from Franklin, in order to draw lightning from The clouds—fire from Heaven, like a new Prometheus.
And his generous dream of bringing science to the service of humanity is revealed in his reflection:
What a comfort it would be to the poor at all times, and especially in winter, if we could be masters of caloric, and could at will furnish them with a constant supply!
Shelley’s many-sided zeal in the pursuit of truth naturally led him early to invade theology. From his Eton days, he used to enter into controversies by letter with learned divines. Medwin declares that he saw one such correspondence in which Shelley engaged in argument with a bishop “under the assumed name of a woman.” It must have been in a somewhat similar mood that “one Sunday after we had been to Rowland Hill’s chapel, and were dining together in the city, he wrote to him under an assumed name, proposing to preach to his congregation.”
Certainly, Shelley loved mystification scarcely less than he loved truth itself. He was a romanticist as well as a philosopher, and the reading in his childhood of novels like Zofloya the Moor—a work as wild, apparently, as anything Cyril Tourneur ever wrote—excited his imagination to impossible flights of adventure. Few of us have the endurance to study the effects of this ghostly reading in Shelley’s own work—his forgotten novels, Zastrossi, and St. Irvyne or the Rosicrucian—but we can see how his life itself borrowed some of the extravagances of fiction. Many of his recorded adventures are supposed to have been hallucinations, like the story of the “stranger in a military cloak,” who, seeing him in a post-office at Pisa, said, “What! Are you that d—d atheist, Shelley?” and felled him to the ground. On the other hand, Shelley’s story of his being attacked by a midnight assassin in Wales, after being disbelieved for three-quarters of a century, has in recent years been corroborated in the most unexpected way. Wild a fiction as his life was in many respects, it was a fiction he himself sincerely and innocently believed. His imaginative appetite, having devoured science by day and sixpenny romances by night, still remained unsatisfied, and, quite probably, went on to mix up reality and make-believe past all recognition for its next dish. Francis Thompson, with all respect to many critics, was right when he noted what a complete playfellow Shelley was in his life. When he was in London after his expulsion from the University, he could throw himself with all his being into childish games like skimming stones on the Serpentine, “counting with the utmost glee the number of bounds, as the flat stones flew skimming over the surface of the water.” He found a perfect pleasure in paper boats, and we hear of his making a sail on one occasion out of a ten-pound note—one of those myths, perhaps, which gather round poets. It must have been the innocence of pleasure shown in games like these that made him an irresistible companion to so many comparatively prosaic people. For the idea that Shelley in private life was aloof and unpopular from his childhood up is an entirely false one. As Medwin points out, in referring to his school-days, he “must have had a rather large circle of friends, since his parting breakfast at Eton cost £50.”
Even at the distance of a century, we are still seized by the fascination of that boyish figure with the “stag eyes,” so enthusiastically in pursuit of truth and of dreams, of trifles light as air and of the redemption of the human race. “His figure,” Hogg tells us, “was slight and fragile, and yet his bones were large and strong. He was tall, but he stooped so much that he seemed of low stature.” And, in Medwin’s book, we even become reconciled to that shrill voice of his, which Lamb and most other people found so unpleasant. Medwin gives us nothing in the nature of a portrait of Shelley in these heavy and incoherent pages; but he gives us invaluable materials for such a portrait—in descriptions, for instance, of how he used to go on with his reading, even when he was out walking, and would get so absorbed in his studies that he sometimes asked, “Mary, have I dined?” More important, as revealing his too exquisite sensitiveness, is the account of how Medwin saw him, “after threading the carnival crowd in the Lung’ Arno Corsos, throw himself, half-fainting, into a chair, overpowered by the atmosphere of evil passions, as he used to say, in that sensual and unintellectual crowd.” Some people, on reading a passage like this, will rush to the conclusion that Shelley was a prig. But the prig is a man easily wounded by blows to his self-esteem, not by the miseries and imperfections of humanity. Shelley, no doubt, was more convinced of his own rightness than any other man of the same fine genius in English history. He did not indulge in repentance, like Burns and Byron. On the other hand, he was not in the smallest degree an egolator. He had not even such an innocent egoism as Thoreau’s. He was always longing to give himself to the world. In the Italian days we find him planning an expedition with Byron to rescue, by main force, a man who was in danger of being burnt alive for sacrilege. He has often been denounced for his heartless treatment of Harriet Westbrook, and, though we may not judge him, it is possible that a better man would have behaved differently. But it was a mark of his unselfishness, at least, that he went through the marriage service with both his wives, in spite of his principles, that he so long endured Harriet’s sister as the tyrant of his house, and that he neglected none of his responsibilities to her, in so far as they were consistent with his deserting her for another woman. This may seem a bizarre defence, but I merely wish to emphasize the fact that Shelley behaved far better than ninety-nine men out of a hundred would have done, given the same principles and the same circumstances. He was a man who never followed the line of least resistance or of self-indulgence, as most men do in their love affairs. He fought a difficult fight all his life in a world that ignored him, except when it was denouncing him as a polluter of Society. Whatever mistakes we may consider him to have made, we can hardly fail to admit that he was one of the greatest of English Puritans.