Читать книгу Ariel (A Shelley Romance) - Andre Maurois - Страница 7

Table of Contents

A few days before Christmas Mr. Shelley found in his letter-bag a communication from a London publisher, a certain Mr. Stockdale, who called his attention to the extraordinary productions which young Mr. Percy Shelley desired to have published. Stockdale had received the MS. of a novel, St. Irvyne, or the Rosicrucian, filled with the most subversive ideas, and the worthy tradesman could not see without misgiving the son of so estimable a gentleman as Mr. Shelley treading this dangerous path. He considered it to be his duty to warn the young man’s father; and above all to call his attention to the young man’s evil genius, his comrade Mr. Jefferson Hogg, son of a good old Tory family in the north of England, but thoroughly false and dangerous in character.

Mr. Shelley replied by informing Stockdale that he refused to pay one penny of the printing bill, which greatly increased the metaphysical and doctrinal anxieties of the publisher. Then, while awaiting the arrival of his son, who was to spend the first week of the Christmas holidays at Field Place, he prepared one of his incoherent, affectionate, and blustering sermons, in the bombastic style of which he was past master.

Arguments have never convinced anybody yet. But to imagine that the arguments of a father can change the ideas of a son is the height of argumentative madness. At the close of the conversation Shelley went away sickened by the stupidity of his family, filled with a righteous fury at the behaviour of Stockdale so unworthy of a gentleman, and more than ever attached to Jefferson Hogg, his only friend. That very evening he sat down and confided every thing to him in a long letter:

“Everybody attacks me for my detestable principles; I am reckoned an outcast; there lowers a terrific tempest, but I stand as it were on a pharos, and smile exultingly at the vain beating of the billows below. I attempted to enlighten my father. Mirabile dictu! He, for a time, listened to my arguments; he allowed the impossibility of any direct intervention of Providence. He allowed the utter incredibility of witches, ghosts, legendary miracles. But when I came to apply the truths on which we had agreed so harmoniously, he started ... and silenced me with an equine argument ‘I believe because I believe.’

“My mother believes me to be in the high-road to Pandemonium. She fancies I want to make a deistical coterie of all my little sisters. How laughable!”

Field Place, usually so gay during the holidays, was overshadowed by these happenings. Mrs. Shelley advised her daughters not to speak too much with Percy, and the little girls became shy and silent. They continued their Christmas preparations through force of habit, but no one took any further interest in them; the little amusements and surprises were arranged as usual, but without the laughter and fun which makes Christmas Day so delightful in happy families.

Only Elizabeth remained faithful to Shelley in secret. But she saw that her admiration was no longer shared by her cousin Harriet, who grew colder and more evasive every day.

The letters which Harriet had received from Oxford, filled with enthusiastic dissertations extremely difficult to follow, had troubled and annoyed her. The quotations from Godwin bored her to tears, and her terror was even greater than her boredom. It is rare that pretty women show a taste for dangerous ideas. Beauty, the natural expression of law and order, is conservative by essence; it upholds all established religions of which it adorns the ceremonies; Venus was always the right hand of Jupiter.

Harriet showed Shelley’s letters to her mother, who advised her to pass them on to her father. This gentleman pronounced Shelley’s doctrines to be abominable. Both parents took gloomy views as to the young man’s future. Ought Harriet to unite herself with an eccentric creature whose follies alienated everybody? She loved elegance, county balls, and admiration. What sort of a life would she lead with this mad boy who respected nothing, not even marriage? Yet, after all, religion has claims....

Before Shelley’s arrival the two young girls had some violent discussions. Elizabeth pleaded his cause. How could Harriet weigh a few poor worldly successes against the happiness of passing her life with the most marvellous of men?

“You make your brother out to be an extraordinary person, but how can I be sure he really is as you represent him? We have always lived in the country, we know nothing of life. Our parents, your own father even, who is in Parliament, disapprove of Bysshe’s ideas. However, let us admit that he is a genius. What right have I to enter into an intimacy with him which must end in disappointment when he discovers how really inferior I am to the being his imagination has pictured? I am just an ordinary young girl like all the rest. He has idealized me and he would be very much surprised if he knew me as I am.”

So much modesty gives one to think: Love does not reason like this.

When Shelley arrived Elizabeth explained the situation to him. Instantly he sought Harriet out. He found her cold and distant, exactly as Elizabeth had described her. She did not ask Shelley to justify himself: all she asked was that he should leave her alone. She reproached him with his universal scepticism.

“But really, Harriet,” Shelley protested, “it is monstrous that I should not be allowed to express opinions which I have reached by the most logical of arguments. And how can my theological opinions disqualify me as brother, friend, or lover?”

“You may think what you please,” replied Harriet, “I do not care in the least what you think, but don’t ask me to unite my lot with yours.”

It was the first time Shelley had come in contact with a woman’s indifference, which she can spring upon a man with the suddenness of night falling in the centre of Africa.

He went away mad with grief. Through the naked, frozen woods, he wandered back towards Field Place; unconscious of the drifting snow, he paced for hours the village graveyard, which had been the background for love’s young dream.

He got home at two o’clock in the morning, and went to bed after placing a loaded pistol, and various poisons taken from his chemical arsenal, by his side. But the thought of Elizabeth’s grief on finding his corpse prevented him from killing himself.

Next day he wrote to Hogg. Against Harriet herself he expressed no resentment, none against his father nor Mr. Grove. The Spirit of Intolerance alone was responsible for the tragedy:

“Here I swear—and as I break my oaths, may Infinity, Eternity blast me—I swear that I will never forgive Intolerance! It is the only point on which I allow myself to encourage revenge; every moment I can spare shall be devoted to my object. Intolerance is of the greatest disservice to Society; it encourages prejudices which strike at the root of the dearest, the tenderest of its ties. Oh how I wish I were the avenger!—that it were mine to crush the demon; to hurl him to his native hell, never to rise again and thus to establish for ever perfect and universal toleration.

“I expect to gratify some of this insatiable feeling in poetry. You shall see, you shall hear, how it has injured me. She is no longer mine! She abhors me as a sceptic, as what she was before! O bigotry! When I pardon this last, this severest of thy persecutions, may Heaven—if there be wrath in Heaven—blast me!

“Forgive me, I have done. I am afraid there is selfishness in the passion of love, for I cannot avoid feeling every instant as if my soul were bursting. But I will feel no more. It is selfish. I would feel for others, but for myself—oh how much rather would I expire in the struggle! Yes, that were a relief! Is suicide wrong? I slept with a loaded pistol and some poison last night, but did not die. Had it not been for my sister, for you, I should have bidden you a final farewell.”

There still remained a fortnight of the holidays to be passed at Field Place, an unhappy fortnight owing to the displeasure of his father and mother, and the embarrassment of his sisters.

In spite of Elizabeth’s invitations Harriet refused to come over and see them while he was there.

People began to whisper, under the seal of secrecy, that she was engaged to someone else.

Seeking to appease his spirit in the endeavour to make others happy, Shelley had resolved that Hogg should fall in love with Elizabeth, whom he had never seen. He sent Hogg some verses written by her, which were filled with good intentions, hatred of tyranny, and faults of prosody.

“All are brethren,” sang Elizabeth like the good pupil she was, “even the African bending to the stroke of the hard-hearted Englishman’s rod” ... and more in the same strain.

In return, Shelley gave his sister Hogg’s poems which he declared to be “extremely beautiful” and in which he himself was compared to a young oak, and Harriet Grove to the ivy which stifles the tree by its embraces.

“You have not said,” wrote Shelley, “that the ivy after it had destroyed the oak, as if to mock the miseries which it had caused, twined around a pine which stood near.”

The neighbouring pine was Mr. Heylar, a wealthy landowner, and a man of sound doctrines, who had been expressly created by Providence to escort his wife to county balls.

“She is lost to me for ever! She is married! Married to a clod of earth! She will become as insensible herself. All those fine capabilities will moulder. Let us speak no more on the subject.”

He would have liked to invite Hogg to Field Place, so that Elizabeth might judge for herself of his admirable qualities. But the squire, remembering Stockdale’s warnings concerning a certain Evil Genius, forbade the invitation.