INTRODUCTION

THE LIFE OF SHELLEY

EVERY life is a symbol as well as a history, a symbol, perhaps it were truer to say, because it is a history. The life of Shelley as a man, exceptional as it appears, is at one with the genius of Shelley as a poet, it was impulsive; generously ardent; filled with the scorn of scorn, the love of love; eager and anxious to establish universal justice, freedom, and happiness; but pursuing too characteristically the dehumanized method of importing goodness into men rather than that of winning men into goodness. The course of his life moved from the tense yet dark mood of Paracelsus, exultant in denial and challenge, to the high affirmations of Aprile,

the over-radiant star too mad

To drink the life-springs."

Had he lived, it is hardly possible that he would have failed to become at last

And better-tempered spirit, warned by both."

On the fourth day of August, 1792, their first child was born to Timothy and Elizabeth Shelley, at Field Place, near Horsham, Sussex. He was called Percy, because that was a favourite name in the Shelley family, ancient in Sussex; and Bysshe, because that was the name of his paternal grandfather, a handsome, wealthy, and positive old gentleman, eventually made a baronet, who had been twice. married, first to Miss Mary Catherine Michell, a Sussex heiress, who died after eight years of union, at the age of twenty-six; and again to Miss Elizabeth Jane Sidney,

another heiress, this time of Kent, and a descendant of Sir Philip. It is interesting to note that, according to Medwin, the impetuous Sir Bysshe eloped in each instance, and also that he was usually on bad terms with his son Timothy, one of three children - the others being girls — born in the first

family.

Timothy Shelley was a good-hearted rural Englishman of social importance and limited intelligence. He believed in the things that it was proper and dignified to believe in, and he expected equal conformity from his fellows, perhaps rather more of it from his inferiors. He had attended University College, Oxford, and had got himself duly elected Member of Parliament. He did his duty by the Church, the State, and the family, and was hardly less willing than his father to play Sir Oracle. In October, 1791, he married Miss Elizabeth Pilfold, of Effingham, Surrey, a somewhat unfeminine yet attractive and gracious woman. She became the mother of seven children, two boys, Percy Bysshe and John, separated in age by fourteen years; and five girls, Elizabeth, Mary, two Hellens one of whom died very early and Margaret. Their adventurous and wellfavoured brother was adored by the little maidens, who, during his stay at home, "followed my leader" in all sorts of thrilling excursions about house and garden. Quiet old Field Place spelled to these half-quaking explorers a land of mystery and portent, of golden enchantment, a background for the most moving legends, told fearsomely by Bysshe to his awed companions. He was fond, too, like other imaginative children, of inventing remarkable but shadowy situations in which he had played a leading part, or again, he would detach himself from all, and go brooding about alone in the moonlight, save for a watchful servant following discreetly at a distance.

After six secluded years of infancy and boyhood had passed, Bysshe became a pupil of the Rev. Mr. Edwards, of the village of Warnham, hard by. The four succeeding years

he spent chiefly in studying Latin and developing his strength by somewhat irregular exercise. At ten he was entered at Sion House Academy, Isleworth, near Brentford. Here he found himself one of some sixty pupils, ruled by a Dr. Greenlaw, "a vigorous old Scotch divine," writes Professor Dowden, " choleric and hard-headed, but not unkindly.

With spectacles pushed high above his dark and bushy eyebrows, the dominie would stimulate the laggard construers. Frequent dips into his mull of Scotch snuff helped him to sustain the wear and tear of the class-room." Shelley's slight, lithe, graceful figure was at once felt by the hoi polloi to present an irritatingly marked deviation from the norm, and they soon found that this was true also of his manner. His advent, accordingly, provoked roughness, persecution even, the more readily that the fagging system covered a multitude of petty tyrannies. Thomas Medwin, a cousin and biographer of Shelley, who was also a pupil at Sion House, describes him as 66 a strange and unsocial being." Preoccupied as he was with his visions and imaginings, he gave only a constrained attention to either his schoolmates or his tasks, yet he advanced steadily in learning, and was transferred at the age of twelve to Eton. Meantime his taste for the eerie as steadily asserted itself: he read avidly the sixpenny dreadfuls, and was particularly charmed with the gothic romances of Mrs. Anne Radcliffe. He was also significantly interested in physical and chemical experiments.

Shelley must have passed from Sion House with scant regret, for he seems there to have been an all too willing Ishmael, save for a single friend; yet at Eton his situation was hardly improved. Though he found more friends of a sort, he found also more persecutors among both masters and pupils, and he was so often thrashed that he became dully apathetic to the mere bodily pain. Dr. Goodall, the head-master, a man of solid worth, was seconded in the Lower School by Dr. Keate, powerful with book and birch alike. Shelley entered the Fourth Form under Keate's juris