Ariel: The Life of Shelley quotes

In the year 1809 George III appointed as Headmaster of Eton, Dr. Keate, a terrible little man who considered the flogging-block a necessary station on the road to perfection, and who ended a sermon on the Sixth Beatitude by saying, “

Now, boys, be pure in heart! For if not, I’ll flog you until you are!

”

The real, but hidden, aim of the system was to form “hard-faced men,” all run in the same mould.

In action you might be independent, but any originality of thought, of dress, or of language, was the most heinous of crimes.

To betray the smallest interest in ideas or books was a bit of disgusting affectation to be forcibly pulled up by the roots.

Shelley picked up his mud-stained books and lost in thought wandered away through the meadows that border the Thames and, flinging himself down on the sun-flecked grass, watched the river glide past him.

Running water, like music, has the power to change misery into melancholy.

Both, through their smooth, unceasing flow, pour over the soul the anodyne of forgetfulness and peace.

The boy’s tears ran down, and pressing his hands together, he made this vow: “I swear, to be just and wise and free, if such power in me lies.

I swear never to become an accomplice, even by my silence, of the selfish and the powerful.

I swear to dedicate my whole life to the worship of beauty.”

“I swear, to be just and wise and free, if such power in me lies. I swear never to become an accomplice, even by my silence, of the selfish and the powerful.

I swear to dedicate my whole life to the worship of beauty.

”

His dearest and most faithful disciples were Elizabeth his eldest sister, and his lovely cousin, Harriet Grove. These three children were drawn together by their dawning senses and their impassioned love of Truth.

The first awakening of instinct always sheds over ideas an extraordinary charm.

Shelley led his fair pupils to the churchyard to which the mysterious presence of the dead lent, in his eyes, a poetic fascination, and safe from the pursuit of his father, seated between them on some rustic tomb in the shadow of the old church, …

“Men’s laws pretend to regulate our natural sentiments. How absurd! When the eye perceives a lovely being the heart takes fire. How is it under man’s control to love or not to love?

But the essence of love is liberty and it withers in an atmosphere of constraint.

It is incompatible with obedience, jealousy, or fear. It requires perfect confidence and absolute freedom. Marriage is a prison. . . .”

How is it under man’s control to love or not to love? But the essence of love is liberty and it withers in an atmosphere of constraint. It is incompatible with obedience, jealousy, or fear. It requires perfect confidence and absolute freedom.

Marriage is a prison. . . .

”

But the essence of love is liberty and it withers in an atmosphere of constraint. It is incompatible with obedience, jealousy, or fear. It requires perfect confidence and absolute freedom. Marriage is a prison. . . .”

Scepticism extended to marriage is a form of wit which unmarried ladies do not much appreciate. Metaphysical heresy may sometimes amuse them, matrimonial heresy smells of the faggot.

“Bonds?” repeated Harriet. “No doubt. . . . But what matter if the bonds are light ones?”

“

What can custom matter to us in this short moment of eternity which we call the nineteenth century?

”

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.

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.

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.

“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.

“I remain your affectionate, dutiful son,

The chief obstacle in the diplomatic relations between father and son is that the former desires above all things to avoid a rupture, which renders disciplinary measures difficult.

His “conditions” having been succinctly refused, Timothy Shelley found himself at a loss what to do.

“Marriage is odious and hateful,” he told her. “I am sickened when I think of this despotic chain, the heaviest forged by man to shackle fiery souls. Scepticism and free love are as necessarily associated together as religion and marriage.

Honourable men have no need of laws.

For heaven’s sake, Elizabeth, read over the Marriage Service and ask yourself if any decent man could wish the girl he loved to submit to such degradation.”

“An act of will, not an act of passion,” the young Knight told himself, as he sat facing his exquisite little sweetheart, while the stage jolted and rumbled on its way.

A pair of young lovers, persecuted and charming, exercises a fascination which is almost irresistible.

The citizens of Edinburgh, difficult to get at where their purse is concerned, could not prevent themselves from giving an amused and indulgent welcome to the very young couple who arrived at their gates in such brilliant penury.

She practised saying over the magic words “Intolerance,” “Equality,” “Justice,” and her child-lips uttered maxims which would have staggered the Lord Chancellor. As to the Anglican religion she ignored it as completely as did Calypso and Nausicaa.

Children are delightful, but their society is fatiguing.

Fully alive to the charm, sweet temper, and unselfishness of Harriet, nevertheless Shelley now and again sighed for Hogg’s caustic talk, or Miss Hitchener’s ardent enthusiasm. He asked himself uneasily what the latter would think of his marriage.

Living continually in the company of this charming girl, he began to desire her with passion. At first he told himself that this was a terrible desire and that the wife of his best friend could never be an object of his pursuit.

But when one is intelligent, one knows how to put intelligence at the service of one’s desires.

“Am I to blame,” said he, “if Bysshe throws her in my arms? What a mad notion of his to sit and write long letters on Virtue when he possesses an adorable creature like Harriet! For she is ravishingly pretty.

She spoke with vivacity.

Love scenes are a pretty woman’s battlefields and soldiers enjoy fighting.

Harriet’s courage was victorious, and Hogg promised to be good.

“

No passion is invincible. Our will can always be victorious.

Had you thought of me . . . This revelation has aged and broken me more than twenty years of misery could have done. . . . my heart seems seared . . .

“I’m not angry with you, I hate your crime, but not yourself. I hope that one day you will regard this horrible error with as much disgust as I do. When that day comes, you will no longer be responsible for it.

The man who feels remorse is no longer the man who was guilty.

It is certainly not I who would ever reproach you, for I value a human being not for what it has been, but for what it is.”

But the Middle Age looked at Youth with a kindly irony, and promised himself to dominate it by the strength of a more cultivated mind.

Middle Age forgot that the minds of different generations are as impenetrable one by the other as are the monads of Leibniz.

Southey and his wife did all in their power to be of service to the young couple. He persuaded Shelley’s landlord to reduce the weekly rent of Chestnut Cottage. Mrs.

And at this precise moment he troubled himself very little about Southey, for he had just discovered Godwin, the great Godwin, the author of Political Justice, the destroyer of marriage, the enemy of the divinity, the atheist, republican and revolutionary.

Godwin was still alive, he lived in London, he had a postal address like everybody else, one could send letters on Virtue to Virtue’s own high prophet!

Had anyone but the “venerated” Godwin written this he would have been relegated at once to the class of stipended upholders of Intolerance.

But Authority and Hierarchies are so essential to Youth, even to rebellious Youth, that it humbles itself with delight before the chosen director of its conscience.

The mystic side of Shelley’s nature had more need than another’s of some shrine at which to worship. “I am willing to become a scholar; nay a pupil,” he replied.

Just as a strongly armed nation desires to ensure her place in the sun, before demobilizing, Woman wishes to exact good terms from her enemy Man, before resigning herself to the pacifism of old age.

Besides which Eliza was continually pitying Harriet, and self-pity comes so naturally to all of us that the most solid happiness can be shaken by the compassion of a fool.

Moved thereunto by Harriet at the instigation of Eliza, and also by renewed counsel from the Duke of Norfolk, Shelley decided to write again to his father. He would not have taken this step had he not judged it to be both honourable and necessary.

For her and her sister, as for Shelley himself, the play of thought was the finest of pastimes.

Learning is nothing without cultivated manners, but when the two are combined in a woman you have one of the most exquisite products of civilization.

With a secret joy and a delicious feeling of attained perfection, Shelley realized that he had at last found surroundings propitious to his happiness, and that everything he had previously known was grotesquely unworthy of him.

The attractive Cornelia gave the two young men lessons in Italian, and Madame de Boinville expounded in her delicious voice the indulgent teaching of the French philosophers. “

To enjoy life, and help others to enjoy it, without harming anyone, herein lies the whole of morality.

” This dictum of Chamfort’s, which was a great favourite of Madame de Boinville, ought by rights to have roused Shelley’s wrath. Poor Harriet had never said anything so flatly opposed to virtue. . . .

He was accustomed to think of it as his echo. On suddenly discovering that this other self had detached itself from him, and could sometimes even make fun of what he said, he was surprised and profoundly hurt.

There is nothing which makes a woman appear stupider than secret jealousy.

Instead of attacking the foe openly, which would be natural and pathetic, she criticizes with spite innocent words and inoffensive actions, and showing a terrible want of tact gives an air of meanness to a sentiment which is perfectly justifiable.

“

What more am I now but an insect warming itself in a ray of sunshine? The next cloud that passes will plunge me into the frozen darkness of death.

” And, in melancholy mood, he recited the lines from Burns:

But his marriage was legally indissoluble. He had nothing to offer Mary but that reprobate existence which he had not dared to impose on his first love, Harriet Grove.

Nevertheless, a love shared, even though hopeless, is better than uncertainty and moral isolation.

He determined to tell Mary the whole truth about his wife.

Nevertheless, a love shared, even though hopeless, is better than uncertainty and moral isolation. He determined to tell Mary the whole truth about his wife.

Married love, even as it dies, long holds out behind a mask of silence against the world’s assaults, but there comes a moment when a man finds a bitter joy in laying bare his wounds.

Shelley drew a picture of Harriet as he now saw her, and by an unconscious change of values lent, to his very human deception, motives of a spiritual order. He had needed a companion who could appreciate poetry and understand philosophy.

Shelley employed his time arguing the question of slavery with one of the passengers. Mary and Jane backed him up with warmth.

They did not know in the least if they would have anything to eat the next day, but they did know that Percy was a genius, and that Man is perfectible.

On arriving in London, Shelley could not pay the cab fare, so with Mary, Jane, and the trunks, he drove round to his bankers, merely to learn that Harriet had withdrawn the entire balance to his credit.

Under his direction, she set herself to learn Latin and even Greek. More cultured than Harriet, she did not see in these studies, as did the first Mrs. Shelley, a rather boring game, but an extension of her enjoyment.

The greatest charm of literary culture is that it humanizes love.

Catullus, Theocritus, and Petrarch united to render more exquisite our lovers’ kisses. Shelley, watching his new companion at work, was filled with admiration for her strength of character, and was delighted to consider her as much superior to himself.

It made them forget their hunger a whole day through. Next morning at breakfast-time Peacock, penniless himself, sent them some cakes.

If life was difficult there was joy in suffering together. Love and misfortune made a happy pair.

When they were apart, waiting for night-time, they sent each other by a confidential messenger, tender little notes, scribbled in haste.

Claire, exiled to the country, enjoyed after such storm and stress her first days of profound peace. But she was not the girl to put up for long with rural solitude. She must have a reason for living—and she did not fail to find one.

When people are in love they always imagine, quite wrongly, that it is because they have come across an exceptional being who has inspired them with the passion. The truth is that love, existing already in the soul, seeks out a suitable object, and if it does not find one, then creates it.

But if, in an ordinary girl, this love-seeking is unconscious, it was otherwise with the brilliant and hot-blooded Claire.

His departure was accompanied by the most frenzied curiosity.

Society, which punishes cruelly any revolt of the elemental instincts, nevertheless, in her heart of hearts, admires the rebel and envies him.

At Dover, where the Pilgrim embarked, a double line of spectators stood on either side of the gangway. Great ladies borrowed the clothes of their chamber-maids, so as to mix unobserved with the crowd.

Byron was glad to find him a man of his own class, who in spite of hardships had retained the charming ease of manner peculiar to the young aristocrat. His cultivation was astounding. Byron, too, had read enormously, but without Shelley’s serious application.

Shelley had read to know, Byron had read to dazzle, and Byron was perfectly well aware of the difference.

He felt, too, the instant conviction that Shelley’s will was a force, a bent bow, while his own floated loose on the current at the mercy of his passions and of his mistresses.

But if the poet filled him with admiration, the man filled him with astonishment. He had expected a Titan in revolt, and he found a wounded aristocrat fully alive to the pleasures and pains of vanity, which seemed to Shelley so puerile.

Byron had outraged convention, but, all the same, he believed in it.

It had stood in the path of his desires, and he had flung it aside, but with regret. That which Shelley had done ingenuously, he had done consciously. Banished from society, he valued nothing so much as social success.

Between marriage and depravity he recognized no middle path. He had sought to terrify his compatriots by acting an audacious part, but only because he had despaired of conquering them by acting a traditional one.

Shelley looked to women as a source of exaltation, Byron as a pretext for idling.

Shelley angelic, too angelic, venerated them. Byron human, too human, desired them and talked of them in the most contemptuous fashion. “It is the plague of these women,” said he, “that you cannot live with them or without them. . . .

Your work should spring from a purer, simpler source. You should desire nothing more than to express your own thoughts, and to address yourself to the sympathy of those who are capable of thinking as you do.

Fame follows those whom she is unworthy to guide.

”

She alone, who was neither Godwin’s child, nor yet Mrs. Godwin’s, lived at home with them and called them “papa” and “mamma.” She alone, so gentle and so loving, had found neither lover nor husband.

Modest and unselfish, these are virtues which men praise—and pass by.

For a moment she had wondered whether Percy would not think of her, and with a beating heart had begun a correspondence with him. But Mary’s hazel eyes had quenched the hopes to which the timid Fanny had never given definite form.

May I see them in manuscript? Say you have a friend who has few pleasures, and is very impatient to read them. . . . It is impossible to tell the good that Poets do their fellow creatures, at least those that can feel.

Whilst I read I am a poet.

I am inspired with good feelings—feelings that create perhaps a more permanent good in me than all the everyday preachments in the world;

“How difficult it is to understand the soul of another; How much suffering one may cause without wishing it, or knowing it; How one may live in presence of the most profound, sometimes of the most despairful feelings without even suspecting their existence!”

It does not suffice therefore to be sincere, nor to have good intentions. You can do just as much harm through not understanding as through unkindness.

He was plunged into a blank despondency.

Shelley’s one wish also was to depart. The ties of family, of friendship, of business, had raised round him intangible walls behind which he was stifling.

His will was rock-like, but life’s little waves, perfidious and unconcerned, ate away at it ceaselessly.

In England where the highest legal dignity had taken from him his civic rights, he had the sensation of standing always in the pillory.

This led him on to speak of the wickedness of humanity which he judged to be infinite. “

Men are filled with hatred of one another, to expect or hope for anything else is the mark of the visionary.

”

“Always the same Shelley!” laughed Byron. “Infidel and blasphemer! You who can’t swim, beware of providence! But you spoke just now of vanquishing our instincts. Does it not seem to you that this spectacle rather is an image of our life?

Conscience is the bell that calls us to virtue.

We obey it like the madmen without knowing why. Then the sun sets, the bell stops, it is the night of death.”

Discontented and tired of Naples they decided to return to Rome.

A need of constant change ate up their tranquillity; they were like a sick man who for ever seeks a fresher, cooler place in the bed, and seeks in vain since he takes with him his fever wherever he moves.

The heat of the southern spring had tired the little boy, “Willmouse,” his father’s darling. The doctor advised them to take him northwards immediately to Lucca. They were on the point of starting when he was seized with a violent attack of dysentery.

When the moment for Mary’s confinement was near, they went on to Florence, in order to be within reach of a good doctor.

But the best doctor was Florence herself, a city in which solitude has no bitterness.

At Florence one lives with Dante; one sits by the side of Savonarola; one watches Giotto pass by. In the churches Brunelleschi and Donatello are still in friendly rivalry. The statues in the streets live with a more intense life than anywhere else.

She had her son christened Percy Florence.

Everything in life comes in series. One friend brings another.

Mary and Percy, after suffering so much from loneliness, suddenly found themselves, without having sought it, the centre of a gay and pleasant circle.

The two couples became great friends and at last the Shelleys knew the delights of informal visiting, of ungrudging admiration and praise, and of the perfect confidence which makes the joy of any real friendship.

The moment a social circle exists it attracts to its centre all the lonely souls drifting round its circumference.

Thus, came Taaffe, the Irish count; Mavrocordato, the Greek prince; and an extraordinary Italian priest with the diabolic and piercing eye of a Venetian inquisitor.

And Shelley added: “I cannot look at my poem! The person whom it celebrates was a cloud instead of a Juno. . . .

I think one is always in love with something or other; the error—and I confess it is not easy for spirits cased in flesh and blood to avoid it—consists in seeking in a mortal image the likeness of what is, perhaps, eternal.

”

His early conception of love had been of a unity of ideas and actions so perfect that any explanation was quite uncalled for between lovers. But life had taught him that perfection is not to be had, and something short of it must be accepted.

There are certain persons for whom pure Truth is a poison.

Mary could not take it except in very diluted doses.

In society Shelley was bored and did not hide it. In questions of morality it was easy to guess that he put the Spirit before the Letter, that he believed in Redemption rather than in Original Sin.

Faith in the perfectibility of man is naturally the most heinous of crimes, since if believed in, it would force one to work for man’s perfectibility.

The mere smell of it makes society fly to arms for its destruction. All “nice” women treated the Shelleys as pariahs and outcasts.

It is true that when Trelawny was absent, Byron said of him: “If we could get him to wash his hands and not to tell lies, we might make a gentleman of him,” but when he was present Byron treated him with the greatest respect.

Like all artists, Byron and Shelley wrote in order to console themselves for not living, and a man of action appeared to these two men of dreams as a strange and enviable phenomenon.

Shelley consulted Trelawny as to nautical terms, and drew with him, on the sandy shores of the Arno, keels, sails, and sea-charts. “I’ve missed my vocation,” said he. “I ought to have been a sailor.”

Thus spoke the chorus in unanimity, and did not perhaps perceive that their adoration of Shelley fed and grew on his misfortunes.

We are more inclined to love that which we can pity than that which we must admire.

Man finds in the spectacle of unmerited failure flattering arguments which explain his own ill-luck. The blend of admiration and compassion is one of the surest recipes for love.

“The river flows by like Time, and all the sounds of Nature harmonize. . . .

It is only the human animal that is discordant and disturbs me.

Oh, how difficult it is to know why we are here, a perpetual torment to ourselves and to every living thing!”

But he had never been able to endure Hunt’s wife, whom he considered a dowdy and disagreeable woman as impertinent as she was silly.

Marianne Hunt was a type of the equalitarian who can never for a moment forget inequalities.

To show that she was not impressed by Byron’s wealth and position, she treated him with an insolence that a chimney-sweep would not have tolerated. With the kind-hearted and charming Countess Guiccioli she put on the airs and graces of an outraged British matron.