CHAPTER XIII

SOAP BUBBLES

The Knight of the Rueful Countenance got stoned by the galley-slaves whom he wished to free. Shelley was greeted with cat-calls when, at a meeting of the friends of Catholic Emancipation, he affirmed that it was harmful to refuse public employment to the Irish because of their religion, since one religion is as good as another. His audience much preferred the fanaticism of its persecutors to the scepticism of its defender.

The famous Address was on the same subject. It showed that Catholic Emancipation is a step on the road to total emancipation, and that morality and not expediency should be the principle of politics. Instead of expecting their freedom from the British, the Irish should free themselves by becoming sober, just, and charitable. Shelley imagined that his teaching would go straight to the heart of the poor Dubliners, and he held himself ready for martyrdom in the cause.

Harriet was not less enthusiastic, and her reforming ardour was a joy to behold. With pockets stuffed with pamphlets, the young couple walked up and down Sackville Street, and when they met anyone with a “likely air” they slipped a soul-saving paper into his hand; or from the balcony of their lodgings they spread sound doctrine by dropping Addresses on the heads of the passers-by. When Shelley put one adroitly into the hood of an old woman’s cloak, Harriet, ready to die of laughter, was obliged to rush away. The conversion of the Irish was assuredly the most amusing of games. Godwin and Miss Kitchener expected every day to hear of Shelley’s arrest. The school-teacher even considered the possibility of a political assassination. But Dublin Castle learned with composure that a young Englishman, nineteen years of age, had just made a speech on Virtue.

The police sent a copy of the Address to the Secretary of State, and Shelley’s advice to the Irish on sobriety and toleration struck the official mind as a screaming joke.

Such impunity was very discouraging, nor were the ways of the Irish themselves any less so. “The reason they drink so much whisky,” said kind-hearted Harriet, “is because meat is so dear.” When Shelley tried to save some wretched creature run in for theft or brawling, the policeman, with a smile of pity, would prove to him the man was drunk.

On St. Patrick’s Night everybody was drunk, and there was a ball at the Castle. Percy and Harriet watched the starving people crowd round the State carriages to admire the finery. Such a want of dignity reduced Percy to despair.

That they themselves might set an example of plain living, all three became vegetarians, and Shelley thus freed himself from the remorse he felt when thinking of the “horrors of the slaughterhouse” and the “massacre of the bird-innocents.” They only broke the rule when Mrs. Nugent came to dinner. She was their sole acquaintance in Dublin, a dressmaker by trade. It was just one of the difficulties of their position that they knew nobody amongst these Irish whom they loved so much. “I suppose,” said Harriet, “that the moment Percy becomes famous we shall know everybody all at once.”

But Shelley himself hadn’t much hope. In the land of baseless and visionary fabrics where he usually wandered down-trodden Ireland figured as a proud and beautiful female, Shelley as a knight-errant and apostle, ready to fight for her and die if need be: crowds of tatterdemalions followed them in the streets: barbarous British soldiers stopped him and cudgelled him: but the heroic sweetness of his gospel tamed the brutes themselves, and philosophy worked the miracle of reconciling hostile races.

Little by little this brilliant fantasy melted away, the last shred of rainbow-tinted mist floated over dirt-blackened houses, and the real Ireland loomed up, a huge solid mass of towns, farms, forests, an incalculable number of obscure and dissimilar men, a heap of immemorial traditions and laws; the land of gambling, hunting, and blood-feuds; seat of the magistrature, garrison for the soldiery, centre for the police; Ireland wretched but jeering, suffering but garrulous, discontented, and rejoicing in her discontent. The Enigmatical Island . . . the Absurd Island. . . . Gazing at the terrifying Reality, what could he do? What could he hope for? He was crushed and tired out.

With growing insistence Godwin urged his disciple to give up the game. Ever since Shelley had hailed him as a spiritual father he had adopted the paternal tone, a grumbling and hostile one.

“Believe me, Shelley,” he prophesied, “you are preparing a bath of blood!”

Could he have seen his spiritual son drawing up an inoffensive “Proposal for an Association for the Good of Mankind,” with Eliza on one side sewing at a crimson cloak, and Harriet, preparing a meal of bread and honey on the other, he might have felt more tranquil.

However, his exhortations were so far useful that they gave Shelley a decent excuse to give up rescuing the oppressed who didn’t want to be rescued.

Minus a few poor creatures who knew how to sponge on him successfully, no one in Dublin took him seriously. For if in the eyes of an Irishman there is any one being more ridiculous than an Englishman, it is an Englishman who loves Ireland, and if in the whole world there is any one spectacle which an old Eton boy and Oxford man cannot endure, it is Irish disorder and dirt.

Having seen close at hand the folly and the misery of the people, his thoughts turned with longing to the beauty and peace of the English country-side.

“I give in,” he wrote to his “venerated” friend. “Never again will I address myself to the ignorant. . . . I will content myself with being the cause of an effect which will manifest itself years after I myself am dust.”

Harriet packed up all the remaining pamphlets and forwarded them to Miss Kitchener, who could have very well done without this “inflammable matter.”

Eliza folded up the crimson cloak, and the three apostles took the boat back to England.

* * *

The second part of their programme was now to be carried out, the house in Wales, where the “spiritual flock” could be brought together, and _all_ problems solved. They thought they had found just the very thing, in the district where Shelley had stayed before his marriage. The wildness and beauty of the country attracted him. Near the house a mountain torrent brawled over the stones, and formed pools on which he had floated a little boat a foot long. His sail had been a £5 note: a terrified cat his passenger. He hoped that Miss Hitchener would persuade her father to come and farm the property of one hundred and thirty acres.

But the affair hung fire. The house was too dear. Mr. Hitchener, indignant at the Cuckfield slanders concerning Shelley and his daughter, refused to let her go to Nantgwillt. The school-teacher, proud of the invitation she had received, had very imprudently boasted of it to every one, and every one, led by Aunt Pilford, construed it in the worst possible way.

Once again was Shelley astounded by the world’s malignancy. He, who had run away with his wife, and made a Scotch love-marriage, how could anyone suppose he would be unfaithful to Harriet! The idea caused him such an overwhelming surprise that a less virtuous woman than Miss Hitchener might have been offended by it.

As for Mr. Hitchener, he got the treatment he merited. He, too, was a retired public-house keeper, for the gods seemed to delight in putting the crystalline Shelley in connection with “the trade.” “Sir,” he wrote to the lady’s father, “I have some difficulty in repressing my indignant astonishment on hearing that _you_ refuse my invitation to _your daughter_. By what right? Who made you her master? . . . Neither the laws of Nature nor yet those of England have put children on the footing of personal property. . . . Adieu. When next I hear from you I hope that time will have liberalized your sentiments.”

* * *

As the Shelleys were going to leave Wales, Godwin mentioned to them a most desirable cottage which one of his friends wanted to let. His advice was always respected. Shelley and Harriet went to see the cottage and found it hopeless. The house was commonplace, scarcely finished and far too small for them. But, on their way back from this useless journey, they discovered a very picturesque village. Thirty cottages with thatched roofs covered with climbing roses and myrtles, formed the delightful hamlet of Lynmouth. By a miracle, one of the cottages was to let. It was the best situated, above a wooded gorge. From the windows you looked down upon the sea, three hundred feet below. They instantly decided to settle there “for ever.”

The “venerated friend,” on news of this, wrote a stiff letter. He said, harshly, that the tastes of the Shelleys were too luxurious, and that a small house, modest as it might be, ought to suffice for one who called himself Godwin’s disciple. Had Timothy Shelley written such a letter the most violent epithets would have been hurled at his head, but one naturally accepts from a stranger what one would never put up with from one’s own father.

Shelley did not think of complaining, but of justifying himself. If he had said that the house recommended by his guide, philosopher, and friend was too small, this was not from a wish for luxury, or even for comfort. But the number of rooms was too few, and it seemed to him hardly the thing for two persons of opposite sex and unmarried to share the same bedroom. He knew that in a regenerated society this prejudice would disappear, but in the present state of things, promiscuity appeared to him imprudent. However, he advanced this opinion—which he feared was rather reactionary—with precaution. The Master was good enough to forget it.

The adorable cottage at Lynmouth was soon the scene of a great event, the arrival of Miss Hitchener. Shelley promised himself that she would add to his life the element of intellectual collaboration, so far rather wanting to it. Nor would Harriet lose anything by the arrangement, for her “spiritual sister” would help him to form her, both young women being, he thought, sufficiently high-minded to accept these parts.

With surprise the Lynmouth villagers now saw him set off of a morning on long expeditions with this gaunt, bony stranger. And henceforth it was with her that he discussed all plans for the propagation of his ideas. The diffusion of Virtue was growing difficult. A London printer had just been sentenced to the pillory. The fate of Galileo did not frighten Shelley for himself, but he would not thrust an innocent printer into danger.

Luckily, the Magician had at his disposal ways and means which defied the police of Lord Castlereagh. When he had written some fine incendiary pamphlet, he would put it in a little box, well resined and waxed, with a lead below and a tiny mast and sail above, and launch it on the ocean, or he would make small fire-balloons, and having loaded them with Wisdom set them sailing up into the summer sky. Or he would watch entranced a flotilla of dark-green bottles tightly corked, and each containing a divine remedy, rise and sink as the emerald waves swayed them seaward.

After he had “worked” hard in this manner, his favourite relaxation was blowing soap-bubbles. Seated before the door, churchwarden in hand, he blew glassy spheres that reflected all the forms and colours of heaven and earth upon their tenuous surfaces. He watched them float away until they broke and vanished.

Then quitting for a short time the aërial, translucent palaces of Logic, he experienced the need of fixing in verse, the intangible beauty of these shimmering violets, greens, and golds.