Introduction: Pretty Paganisms and Satanic Schools
Pagans of old, In marble fanes, their votive tribute hung; I in the woods my offerings will unfold, And tender, like the birds, the leaves among, A happy heart, and not ungrateful tongue.
—Horace Smith, “On Unexpectedly Receiving a Letter, with a Sum of Money”1
I now understand why the Greeks were such great poets; and, above all, I can account, it seems to me, for the harmony, the unity, the perfection, the uniform excellence, of all their works of art. They lived in perpetual commerce with external nature, and nourished themselves upon the spirit of its forms.
—Percy Shelley to Thomas Love Peacock, 26 January 18192
In December 1817, at the home of Tom Monkhouse, 22-year-old John Keats was introduced to 48-year-old William Wordsworth, the increasingly conservative poetic elder statesman.3 At the urging of his friend Benjamin Robert Haydon, Keats read from his forthcoming poem Endymion. 4 Haydon’s recollection of the meeting (in a letter to Edward Moxon on 29 November 1845) is worth quoting at some length:
When Wordsworth came to Town, I brought Keats to him, by his Wordsworth’s desire—Keats expressed to me as we walked to Queen Anne St East where Mr Monkhouse Lodged, the greatest, the purest, the most
© The Author(s) 2017
S.L. Barnett, Romantic Paganism, The New Antiquity, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-54723-7_1
unalloyed pleasure at the prospect. Wordsworth received him kindly, & after a few minutes, Wordsworth asked him what he had been lately doing, I said he has just fnished an exquisite ode to Pan—and as he had not a copy I begged Keats to repeat it—which he did in his usual half chant, (most touching) walking up & down the room—when he had done I felt really, as if I had heard a young Apollo—Wordsworth drily said
‘a Very pretty piece of Paganism—
This was unfeeling, & unworthy of his high Genius to a young Worshipper like Keats—& Keats felt it deeply—so that if Keats has said any thing severe about our Friend; it was because he was wounded—and though he dined with Wordsworth after at my table—he never forgave him.
It was nonsense of Wordsworth to take it as a bit of Paganism for the Time, the Poet ought to have been a Pagan for the time—and if Wordsworth’s puling Christian feelings were annoyed—it was rather illbred to hurt a youth, at such a moment when he actually trembled, like the String of a Lyre, when it has been touched.5
Haydon’s recollection of this exchange (to which he was the only witness) occurred twenty-eight years after the event, so we might take his story with the proverbial grain (or perhaps handful) of salt. Though we have no defnitive proof beyond Haydon’s belated account that Keats was “wounded” by or “never forgave” Wordsworth, Keats certainly recorded many ideological and personal differences with the older poet in numerous letters.6
Regardless of Keats’s alleged feelings, Haydon’s story demonstrates two ideas that inform this project: frst, the nature of the younger Romantics’ “paganism”; second, the ways in which that paganism was read as both tasteless and dangerous by their critics, by the religious and political establishments, and even occasionally by frst-generation Romantics such as Wordsworth and Southey.
Wordsworth’s “unfeeling” dismissal of the “Hymn to Pan” as “a Very pretty piece of Paganism” unintentionally identifed a theme of key importance to the young Romantic writers: a reclamation of the mythology and imagery of the classical world characterized not only by philosophy and reason (as it was for many of their eighteenth-century predecessors), but also by wildness, excess, and ecstatic experiences—all of which registered as decidedly un-Christian (even anti-Christian) and potentially subversive.
This episode illustrates that Romantic paganism was subject to both interpretation and controversy, and Wordsworth’s was not the only critical voice that objected to the infux of pagan classicism in the poetry of this period. The younger Romantics’ paganism was a locus where the connected fault lines of politics, religion, and aesthetics converged. When Keats paced up and down the room “chanting” expressions of joyous paganism in lines about hamadryads, fauns, and the “satyr king” Pan, Wordsworth (along with much of the critical establishment) would have heard a former apothecary student-turned-protégé of notorious radical Leigh Hunt glorying in the sensual excesses of a classical world he had no cultural right to appropriate.
Then and now, Romantic paganism raises specifc questions about the literature of the period that otherwise go unasked or asked incompletely, such as: What is the importance of the art, literature, and mythology of the classical world within the framework of Romantic historicism and literary infuence? What connections do we miss when we fail to recognize that approaches to the classical world form a key aspect of the younger Romantics’ intertextualities? What do we lose when we dismiss most of these writers as atheistic because they rejected Christianity as bloody, gloomy, and repressive, even though they themselves suggested that their political and social goals were more aligned with ancient paganism than with atheism?
Keats was hardly alone with his so-called “pretty paganism.” In the middle of the second decade of the nineteenth century, Percy Shelley— who until then had never paid more than passing attention to classical themes—began to adopt fgures such as the Delphic Pythia, Dionysus, and maenads who embodied the pagan ideals of excess, radical selfessness, unrepressed sensuality, and ecstasy (in the Greek sense of “standing out of oneself” as well as the most common contemporary Oxford English Dictionary usage, “the state of trance supposed to be a concomitant of prophetic inspiration”). In a study adorned with newly acquired busts of Apollo and Venus, Shelley translated the Homeric Hymns and Plato’s Symposium, read Homer, Aeschylus, and Sophocles, and drafted his “modern eclogue,” Rosalind and Helen (1818), “On Love,” and “A Discourse on the Manners of the Ancient Greeks Relative to the Subject of Love” (both 1818). He also composed verse abounding with images of ecstatic abandon, including the “wild spirit” and “ferce maenads” of “Ode to the West Wind” (1820), the selfess “extacy” of “Hymn
to Intellectual Beauty” (1817), the transformative power of music in “To Constantia” (1817–1818), and the culmination of his pagan poetics, Prometheus Unbound (1819).
Even in death, Shelley was a pagan. In his account of the burning of Shelley’s and Edward Williams’s bodies after they had drowned in a boating accident in Italy, Edward Trelawny notes that he was careful to acquire for the ceremonies “such things as were said to be used by Shelley’s much loved Hellenes on their funeral pyres.”7 Williams’s “shapeless mass of bones and fesh” was burned frst, and Trelawny, Byron, and Hunt “threw frankincense and salt into the furnace, and poured a fask of wine and oil over the body. The Greek oration was omitted, for we had lost our Hellenic bard.”8 Their “Hellenic bard” Shelley was cremated the following day, and Trelawny describes how the same pagan ceremonies were performed over his disfgured remains: “After the fre was well kindled we repeated the ceremony of the previous day; and more wine was poured over Shelley’s dead body than he had consumed during his life.”9 Shelley’s last rites—the funeral pyre and the ritualistic votives of oil, wine, and spices—were characterized by the same pagan spirit that had animated his fnal years.
These same years also witnessed an abundance of pagan themes in the productions of Shelley’s peers, friends, and collaborators, including Leigh Hunt’s “Bacchus and Ariadne” (1816) and “The Nymphs” (from Foliage, 1818), Hunt’s and Vincent Novello’s Musical Evenings (1820–1821), Thomas Love Peacock’s Calidore (1817) and Rhododaphne (1818), Mary Shelley’s Proserpine and Midas (both written 1820), Barry Cornwall’s “The Rape of Proserpine” (1820), John Hamilton Reynolds’s The Naiad; a tale, with other poems (1816), Horace Smith’s Amarynthus, the Nympholept: A Pastoral Drama, in Three Acts. With Other Poems (1821), and Keats’s Endymion (1818). These works and numerous others experiment with ancient genres and poetic forms while endorsing the democratic ideals of fraternity and community—or what Keats called the “Spirit of Outlawry”10—as well as the unrestrained sensual pleasures that characterized the aesthetic agenda of this circle.
These “pretty paganisms” did not exist solely in the writers’ published works. In their letters to one another, this circle repeatedly referred to itself as “pagan,” “Bacchic,” or “Athenian,” and they described a private world in which Pan danced through the Marlow woods and friends spent afternoons reclining on turf couches to sing and read Catullus together.
Modern critics have called the circle “the Cockney School” because that was the epithet hurled at the young poets by Blackwood’s and The Quarterly Review, but that is not what they called themselves; most of them preferred “The Athenians.”
Shelley’s letters invoked the Greeks as “gods” (plural),11 teased Peacock (who often signed his letters “yours in Pan”) about nympholepsy and “Bacchic fury,” and requested that Peacock act as priest to the Shelleys’ household Penates in their absence. Thomas Jefferson Hogg wrote to Peacock about “praying to Mercury”; Peacock retorted with taunts about Hogg chasing nymphs across the countryside and returning to London to be “nipped in the feshy part of the arm by the non-fugient damsels that celebrate the Pervigilium Veneris under the classic arch of Temple Bar.”12 Indeed, the entire circle’s letters are full of these mischievous descriptions that suggest that the pagan classical world was, for these writers, a vital component of both their friendships and their work.13
In exploring Romantic paganism’s roots and ways, the frst chapter of this book will discuss how ancient mythology and religion—or what, in Essay on the Study of Literature (1764), Edward Gibbon calls “the pleasant and absurd system of Paganism”—became, in the eighteenth century, both objects of serious study and a means of challenging the hegemony of Christianity itself. This Enlightenment mythography provided the younger Romantics with a touchstone of religious skepticism that informed their later explorations into the faults of Christianity and the attractions of paganism. Several prose works by the second-generation Romantics directly address these Enlightenment ideas about the emerging discipline of comparative mythography that simultaneously elevated the status of ancient myth to a worthy object of serious inquiry and, in the process, questioned Christianity by examining its own mythic roots.
Mary Shelley’s “The Necessity of a Belief in the Heathen Mythology to a Christian” (1821–1822) pushes the mythography of Sir William Drummond and Sir William Jones even further: in her fragmentary sketch of an essay, she suggests that there is no essential difference between Christian theology and ancient mythology, that both are simply second-hand, fgurative interpretations of the great mysteries of the universe. The fragment opens with a syllogism:
1st. There is as good proof of the Heathen Mythology as of the Christian Religion.
2ndly. that they [do] not contradict one another.
Con[clusion]. If a man believes in one he must believe in both.14
Shelley continues (in note form) to question the reliability of each creed’s texts and witnesses and argues that both Ovid and Josephus, for example, recorded their “creed and proofs of mythology” long after the facts, and therefore “of each of these writers we may believe just what we cho[o]se.”
Similarly, Virgil and Ovid were to ancient mythology what Milton was to Christianity: they all simply interpreted their source materials, with questionable degrees of accuracy. In a few notes, Shelley seems to refute her own opening syllogism by indicating aspects of Greek religion that were actually superior to those of Judeo-Christian tradition: “The revelation of God as Jupiter to the Greeks” was “a more successful revelation than that as Jehovah to the Jews”; “Jehovah’s promises” were “worse kept than Jupiter’s”; “the revelation of the Greeks” was “more complete than to the Jews,” and “prophesies of Christ by the heathens more incontrovertible than those of the Jews” (10–11). Overall, her notes suggest that Shelley was shaking the foundations of religions in order to gauge their strengths, and paganism emerges no less rooted or reliable than Christianity.
Percy Shelley offers another comparison of Christianity and paganism in his “Essay on the Devil, and Devils” (1819).15 Whereas The Necessity of Atheism (1811) and notes to Queen Mab (1813) had confronted Christianity directly and aggressively, by 1819 Shelley’s approach had grown subtler, wittier, and more informed by the pagan referents he had discovered during that interval. The essay attacks what he had earlier called the “large codes of fraud and woe”16 of Christian superstition by identifying the devil as “the weak place of the popular religion, the vulnerable belly of the crocodile” and pressing on that weak point. Especially since by this period belief in the Christian devil had fallen off for even the most orthodox believers, Shelley suggests that the devil has no place in the modern world of astronomy and science, and he offers a pseudo-scientifc examination of whether the sun or perhaps a comet was the most likely home of the damned.17
The Greeks, unlike the Christians, had no devil, a fact that, Shelley intimates, displayed their superior understanding of mankind’s place in the universe:
Those among the Greek Philosophers whose poetical imagination suggested a personifcation of the cause of the Universe seem nevertheless to have dispensed with the agency of the Devil […] They accounted for evil by supposing that what is called matter is eternal and that God in making the world made not the best that he, or even inferior intelligence, could conceive […] The Christian theologians, however, have invariably rejected this hypothesis on the ground that the eternity of matter is incompatible with the omnipotence of God.18
Because the Greeks had a wide variety of gods, goddesses, and spirits that animated the natural world, they had no need for a single monolithic symbol of evil or human error. But Christians demonized the wild pagan gods of the natural world when they assigned their devil—which is, the essay argues, the impotent fction of a dying creed—the qualities that had once belonged to revered natural deities such as Pan:
The Devil after having gradually assumed the horns, hoofs, tail, and ears of the ancient Gods of the woods, gradually lost them again, although wings had been added. It is inexplicable why men assigned him these additions as circumstances of terror and deformity. The sylvans and fauns with their leader, the great Pan, were most poetical personages and were connected in the imagination of the Pagans with all that could enliven and delight. They were supposed to be innocent beings not greatly different in habits from the shepherds and herdsmen of which they were the patron saints. But the Christians contrived to turn the wrecks of the Greek mythology, as well as the little they understood of their philosophy, to purposes of deformity and falsehood.19
While the Christian devil is portrayed in this essay as largely toothless and irrelevant, the “ancient Gods of the wood” were “most poetical personages […] connected in the imagination of the Pagans with all that could enliven and delight.” By contaminating these “innocent” gods with their fantastical ideas about the devil, Christians became as tyrannical as their God, whose perpetual confict with his antithesis became a central tenet in an inherently dualistic belief system. In the same notebook as Shelley’s “Essay on the Devil, and Devils” is a brief fragment entitled “Essay in
Favor of Polytheism”20; while the passage is so short that we cannot know precisely where Shelley might have gone with the idea, he was clearly thinking about the benefts of a multivalent belief system over the dualistic deadlock of Christianity.21 Whereas Christianity was a system of black (evil) and white (good), pagan mythology offered a rainbow of radical possibilities and, almost as importantly, aesthetic beauties. In his 1820 essay “Spirit of the Ancient Mythology,” Hunt paints a similar picture of the variety of ways in which a pagan might commune with the natural world22:
Every forest, to the mind’s eye of a Greek, was haunted with superior intelligences. Every stream had its presiding nymph, who was thanked for the draught of water. Every house had it’s [sic] protecting gods, which had blessed the inmate’s ancestors; and which would bless him also, if he cultivated the social affections: for the same world which expressed piety towards the Gods, expressed love towards relations and friends. If in all this there was nothing but the worship of a more graceful humanity, there may be worship much worse as well as much better. (115)
Like Hunt’s contemporaries who still believed in fairies, pagans had “a link to another world” and were “more impressed with a sense of the invisible world, in consequence of the very visions presented to their imagination, than the same description of men under a more shadowy system” (115). “Shadowy system” is an especially ftting description of the younger Romantics’ stance on Christianity: it is a gloom cast over the world, a veil that obscures mankind’s recognition of the truth and beauty of nature and condemns its desires with the label of “sin,” as in William Blake’s “priests in black gowns” who bind “with briars [mankind’s] joys and desires.”23 This passage also foregrounds Hunt’s belief in the importance of “love towards relations and friends” as an expression of “a more graceful humanity,” an idea that would come to infuence the creation of the cooperative, communal society both in London and in the village of Marlow that, as chapter 5 will demonstrate, shaped the entire circle in these years.
Hunt, ever opposed to gloom, claims in his preface to Foliage that “my creed, I confess, is not only hopeful, but cheerful,” and his mission is to “spread cheerfulness and a sense of justice among [his]
fellow-creatures” (17).24 Pagan “cheerfulness” was for Hunt not only a rejection of Christianity’s thou-shalt-nots but also a condemnation of the Church’s centuries of bloodshed built on a foundation of intolerance, persecution, and repression. In a May 1817 Examiner editorial that Keats praised as a “Battering Ram against Christianity,”25 Hunt argues for the pleasures of paganism over the violence of Christianity, calling the latter “a religion professing charity” that had become “the most intolerant and sanguinary that has ever existed” and claiming that pagans “dealt in loves and luxuries, in what resulted from the frst laws of nature, and tended to keep humanity alive:—the latter [Christians] have dealt in angry debates, in intolerance, in gloomy denouncements, in persecutions, in excommunications, in wars and massacres, in what perplexes, outrages, and destroys humanity.”26
The New Monthly Magazine was suitably shocked by Hunt’s “perversions” and wondered how it was possible for a man to “be found deliberately attempting to undermine [the Church’s] authority, to pervert her details, to misrepresent her effects, and fnally, in a comparison of consequences to prefer Paganism with all its darkness and horror to the mild and benefcent doctrines of Christianity.”27 Hunt must have been amused at the total reversal of his own beliefs when the critic identifed Christianity as “mild and benefcent” and paganism as full of “darkness and horror.” For Hunt—as for the Shelleys, Peacock, Keats, and their circle—paganism offered a more celebratory, enlightened form of natural religion without the violent and repressive aspects of Christianity.
The circle’s widespread reputation for impiety and immortality led in part to its identifcation by Robert Southey as the “Satanic school,” as will be discussed in chapter 3. Given their well-documented admiration for Milton’s fallen angel, Satan (“the adversary”) might seem like the most obvious foil for these poets who attempted to subvert the strictures of Christian morality.28 But in his preface to Prometheus Unbound, Shelley argues that while Satan was a noble antagonist to the tyrannical God, Prometheus was:
a more poetical character than Satan because, in addition to courage and majesty and frm and patient opposition to omnipotent force, he is susceptible of being described as exempt from the taints of ambition, envy, revenge, and a desire for personal aggrandizement, which in the Hero of Paradise Lost, interfere with the interest. The character of Satan engenders
in the mind a pernicious casuistry which leads us to weigh his faults with his wrongs and to excuse the former because the latter exceed all measure. In the minds of those who consider that magnifcent fction with a religious feeling, it engenders something worse. But Prometheus is, as it were, the type of the highest perfection of moral and intellectual nature, impelled by the purest and the truest motives to the best and noblest ends.29
For Shelley, the pagan Prometheus was a more useful tool against repression than the Christian Satan because Prometheus was more selfess and thus “impelled by the purest and the truest motives” towards mankind. Prometheus was not only older than Satan, he was also a better tool against Christian tyranny because he arose from a more nuanced and balanced theogony. Southey’s “Satanic” attack was less accurate than the many criticisms (also discussed here in chapters 3 and 4) of the circle’s “Greekishness” and affected, sensual indolence, qualities that made them far more pagan than Satanic.
Within her discussion of Thomas Love Peacock’s classicism, Marilyn Butler has claimed that, for the second-generation Romantics, “the rationalism of the eighteenth century no longer seemed an effective weapon against the church: the appeal of the one religion could be matched only by the appeal of another.”30 The idea of using religion against itself was nothing new: as my frst chapter demonstrates, Enlightenment freethinkers such as Baron d’Holbach, Volney, and other writers read and admired by the younger Romantics had already used comparative religion to subvert the status of Christianity. Instead of simply turning their backs on religion altogether, the younger Romantics flled their religious needs (such as they were) not only with science and philosophy but also with joy, music, celebration, and other characteristically pagan pursuits, often enjoyed communally. In the second decade of the nineteenth century, the members of the circle self-consciously adapted distinctly pagan literary and social models as attempts both to remove themselves from a hierarchical, Judeo-Christian duality and as a form of rebellion—both political and aesthetic—against the constraints of conventional religion. They adopted pre-Christian, pagan ideology as a way of living, as literary emblems, and as a philosophical framework. The Shelleys, Keats, Peacock, Hunt, and their collaborators and peers employed the classical world and other non- or pre-Christian sources to form a new aesthetic project characterized by generic experimentation, politicized sexuality, and ecstatic experiences that tested the boundaries of self and other.
“Pagan” for these writers was not simply a way of marking themselves as separate from and opposed to the traditional hierarchical systems of Church and State (though the word does indeed carry that contemporary association). Nor was it merely the employment of particular characters or stories, or allusions to particular ancient authors or thinkers (though such employments do occur). “Pagan,” in the context of this project, was a way of thinking about sexuality and other sensual pleasures, music, excess (both poetic and material), joyous celebration, and communal experiences as both conscious subversion and literary experimentation.
In actuality, the charges of libertinism and titillation continually leveled at Shelley, Keats, and their peers by the conservative press, though fltered through a miasma of panic and paranoia, were also theoretically accurate: these transgressions were quite intentional by this circle of writers who continually professed a pagan belief in radical eroticism in the service of mankind. When we label Shelley an atheist because of a few youthful rebellions; ascribe Keats’s and Hunt’s nymphs, gods, and goddesses to dilettantish escapism; or dismiss Wordsworth’s rejection of Keats as mere snobbery, we fail to consider that paganism was a loaded idea at the turn of the nineteenth century, an idea that entangled religion, politics, and aesthetics in the popular imagination and, quite deliberately, in the poetic projects of the Shelley circle.
Two prominent late-Romantic poets will fgure less conspicuously in this study, for two very different reasons. Lord Byron is an outlier within this discussion of paganism as a mode of resistance against Christianity largely because he was the only professed Christian poet of the group (though he was by no means uncritical of the Church).31 More importantly, Byron was self-exiled from England in precisely the years that the Shelleys, Peacock, Hunt, and the others began to commit themselves to the idea of pagan communality: coming together to walk, read, write, sing, eat, and talk. He simply was not present for the formative activity I show to be both an inspiration for and an expression of the circle’s emerging paganism. And whereas for Shelley and Peacock, Greece was largely a state of mind, Greece was to Byron a vital country embroiled in a bloody War of Independence, a cause for which Byron ultimately gave his life.
Shelley came to the idea of modern Greece at the very end of his career with Hellas (written in 1821, published in 1822), a poem inspired at once by a classical source (Aeschylus’s Persae) and by his acquaintance with Prince Alexandros Mavrocordato.32 Even Hellas, in other words, was actuated more by literary and personal infuences than by any actual
knowledge of the “glorious contest now waging in Greece.”33 Shelley’s declaration in the Preface to Hellas that “We are all Greeks—our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts have their root in Greece,”34 suggests that Greece was, for Shelley (and, arguably, for all of this generation except Byron), less a modern emerging nation than an abstract symbol of human progress and achievement.
Unlike Byron, Keats was very much present for the society of “Athenians” in London and Marlow, but Keats’s Hellenism has already been the object of numerous studies, his every allusion and adoption chronicled by Martin Aske, Alan Bewell, Jeffrey N. Cox, Marjorie Levinson, and numerous others.35 I will argue throughout this book that key defning characteristics of Keats’s poetry—its fondness for antiquity, its excess, and the charges of presumption and libertinism that it provoked—are all related to the larger issue of paganism in the literary circle to which he belonged. Still, I have chosen to focus more particularly on fgures whose “Hellenisms” have been largely unaddressed or not fully understood. My project, I hope, will provide an additional, transformative lens for understanding Keats’s and Byron’s paganisms, even if I do not engage in a comprehensive treatment of them here.
Each chapter thus concentrates on an aspect of the circle’s Romanticized paganism in the period from approximately 1812 (when Shelley met Peacock and began to discover both the beauty and the ideological usefulness of the pagan world), through the ensuing years in which each of the members of the circle experimented with pagan imagery in their poetry and prose, and up until the deaths of Keats in 1821 and Percy Shelley in 1822, after which the circle largely collapsed into the void left by its two most prominent voices.
Chapter 2, “‘The Wrecks of the Greek Mythology’: Paganism, Popishness, Atheism, and Decadence in the Eighteenth Century,” examines the idea of paganism in British culture in the eighteenth century, its links with “popishness” and the emerging feld of comparative mythography, and the developing cultural association with specifcally pagan classicism and decadence, excess, and sexuality. Groups such as the Society of Dilettanti and the Medmenham Monks (also known as the “Hell-Fire Club”) adopted Dionysus, Pan, Priapus, and other distinctly “wild” pagan imagery as emblems of pleasure and sexuality. Readings of texts on comparative mythology by Conyers Middleton, Richard Payne Knight, Sir William Jones, Volney, Baron d’Holbach, and Sir William
Drummond, among others, and materials related to the Dilettanti, the Monks, and the French Revolutionary Culte de la Raison establish that, by the end of the eighteenth century, paganism was viewed in England as decadent, sensual, and dangerously radical.
In chapter 3, “‘Cheerfulness and a Sense of Justice’: Dionysus, Nympholepsy, and the Religion of Joy,” I address a question posed by the previous chapter: If eighteenth-century England defned “pagan” as, essentially, “anti-Christian,” what were the ideological and rhetorical implications of the second-generation Romantics’ adoption of pagan imagery, and how did that adoption affect the ways in which these writers were received?
In chapter 4, “‘Prattling about Greece and Rome’”: Paganism, Presumption, and Gender,” I analyze appearances of such quintessentially pagan fgures as Dionysus or Bacchus and his maenads, nymphs, Pan, and the Pythia of Delphi in the works of Mary Robinson, Mary Tighe, William Godwin, and the Marlow society of “Athenians” (the Shelleys, Hunt, Peacock, John Hamilton Reynolds, Horace Smith, and others) and explore how the relationships among the pagan classical world, gender, and class informed contemporary critical attacks on the younger Romantics.
Chapter 5, “‘The Great God Pan is Alive Again’: Peacock and Shelley in Marlow,” re-examines the relationship between Percy Shelley and Peacock as a fruitful collaboration that would prove one of the most important partnerships of Shelley’s poetic life. Peacock’s deeply ingrained classicism was a notable infuence on Shelley, especially after the latter moved to Marlow in 1817, just before his annus mirabilis in which the classical world would be reimagined as an aesthetic and political mode of resistance. The title of chapter 5, taken from a January 1818 Leigh Hunt letter, demonstrates the extent to which an emphasis on community—exemplifed by Hunt’s writing contests, correspondence, and the establishment of salons—made this a fertile time for the pagan imagery that recurred in the work of all of these connected authors. I challenge the conventional reading of the relationship between Peacock and Shelley as one of affectionate satire (typifed by Peacock’s parody of Shelleyan enthusiasm in Nightmare Abbey, for example, or Shelley’s rebuttal in his “A Defence of Poetry” to Peacock’s “The Four Ages of Poetry”) in favor of a more nuanced relationship characterized by infuence and collaboration, exemplifed by their shared study of the classics and the interplays of many of their works of this period (as in Peacock’s Genius of
the Thames and Shelley’s The Esdaile Notebook; Peacock’s Ahrimanes and Shelley’s Laon and Cythna; Peacock’s Calidore and Rhododaphne and Shelley’s “Alastor” and Prometheus Unbound).
Chapter 6, “Shelley’s ‘Perpetual Orphic Song’: Music as Pagan Ideology in Prometheus Unbound,” explores the importance to Shelley’s later work of music, that essentially pagan form of worship and celebration that did not play a signifcant role in Shelley’s life until his residence in Marlow in 1817. My reading of Prometheus Unbound illuminates the ways in which music—particularly opera and ballet—not only infuenced the style of Shelley’s poetics but also transformed it, providing Shelley with a new mode of discourse that could overcome the defciencies of “ineffcient and metaphorical” words. Investigations of contemporaneous theories about music and its relationship to sensibility, of contemporary medical understanding of the human nervous system, of Shelley’s own experiences with music and his early experimentations with its use in poetry, and of Prometheus Unbound’s employment of music as both a symbol and an entirely new kind of discourse allow us to place Shelley’s idea of music within the larger framework of his poetics of desire and the contemporary productions of his Marlow peers. The circle adopted the communal consumption of music as performative paganism, a liberal, taste-based, pastoral indolence and aesthetic luxuriousness often labeled by the Tory press as depraved and obscene sensuality. Music was not merely a pastime for these writers; it was also a way of enacting a pagan, self-sustaining, communal enjoyment of sensual pleasures.
The Afterword, “The Afterlives of Romantic Paganism,” examines how Shelley’s legacy was in part shaped by his paganism and suggests some ways in which the Romantic paganism outlined in this book has surprising afterlives, including modern Neopaganism and the emerging discipline of ecosexuality. While several critics (including Timothy Morton, James McKusick, Kate Rigby, and Jonathan Bate) have made connections between Romanticism and current environmental movements, none so far has attempted to make a similar connection between Romanticism and environmentalism’s theological arm, modern paganism (also known as Neopaganism, earth religion, neo-Druidry, or by several other related names). This rapidly spreading religion—sometimes credited with being the fastest-growing in the world today—can trace its modern origins to the experimentations of the Shelley circle and its emphasis on fellowship, joy, and the pagan value of the natural world.
In “A Defence of Poetry,” Shelley claims that classical Athens, despite its subjugation of women and reliance on slavery, was of all eras in human history the most energetic, beautiful, and “true.”36 “[O]f no other epoch in the history of our species,” he notes, “have we records and fragments stamped so visibly with the image of the divinity in man.”37 He then offers a surprising confation of the ancient poetry that “rendered this epoch memorable above all others” with ancient religion:
But it exceeds all imagination to conceive what would have been the moral condition of the world if neither Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Calderon, Lord Bacon, nor Milton, had ever existed; if Raphael and Michael Angelo had never been born; if the Hebrew poetry had never been translated; if a revival of the study of Greek literature had never taken place; if no monuments of antient sculpture had been handed down to us; and if the poetry of the religion of the antient world had been extinguished altogether with its belief.38
It is at frst startling that Shelley, otherwise so uniformly critical of religious institutions, refers here to “the poetry of the religion of the antient world” in a way that suggests both harmony and solidarity: that frst “of” can be read as referring to poetry about paganism or as a claim that paganism was itself poetry, in the sense of the essay’s initial, broad construal of poetry as any “expression of the imagination.”39 Either reading establishes that Shelley’s attitude towards pagan religion is markedly different from his idea of Christianity as a force of fear, subjugation, and immoral tyranny. If “the moral condition of the world” is contingent upon poetry (identifed elsewhere in “A Defence of Poetry” as the force that strengthens “the organ of the moral nature of man, in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb”), then Shelley’s approval here of “the religion of the antient world” suggests that pagan religion (like pagan drama, poetry, sculpture, and architecture) is another instrument that “enlarges the circumference of the imagination.”40 To Shelley and to other members of his circle who benefted from that contemporary “revival of the study of Greek literature,” pagan religion was not only older than Christianity but also more beautiful, more “poetic,” more aligned with joy than with fear, and, as a result of what Timothy Webb calls Shelley’s “connection between aesthetic beauty and morality,”41 fundamentally more moral as well.42
In an 1817 letter to Peacock, Hogg asks, “What would be the barbarity of the present age, but for the revival of Grecian literature?”43 This idea that “heathen” or “pagan,” pre-Christian literature was a bulwark against “barbarity,” a civilizing and transformative infuence on the modern world, fnds repeated expression in the Shelley circle’s many adoptions of Romantic paganism, from Peacock’s vision of Bacchus and Pan in exile in Calidore, to the Arcadian nymphs who animate the Marlow countryside in Hunt’s “The Nymphs,” to Percy Shelley’s vision of a world transformed by love in Prometheus Unbound, among many other examples addressed in this book.
From the previous generations’ explorations of comparative mythography, the younger Romantics inherited the idea that the pagan world could be wild, sensual, and potentially threatening to Christianity. From their own rediscoveries of classical literature (especially in their more esoteric choices such as the Homeric Hymns), they understood the intrinsic value of ancient mythology and the beauty that characterized the pagans’ relationship with the natural world. From contemporary ideas of the ideology behind the classical world itself—for example, its association with the French Revolution, its class connotations, and its treatment of female sexuality—they gained a valuable tool of rebellion against the religious, political, and critical establishments (the lines between which were often blurred). If “poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man,”44 then the paganism of the younger Romantics presented a “cheerful” and beautiful means of accessing that divinity.
n otes
1. From Amarynthus, the Nympholept: A Pastoral Drama, in Three Acts. With Other Poems (London, 1821), 215.
2. PBSL, 666.
3. Monkhouse was Mary Wordsworth’s cousin and Wordsworth’s host for his visit to town.
4. Some writers—including Leigh Hunt in his Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries (1828)—have mistakenly placed this meeting at the dinner party at Benjamin Haydon’s on 28 December 1817, the subject of Penelope Hughes-Hallett’s The Immortal Dinner: A Famous Evening of Genius & Laughter in Literary London, 1817 (Chicago: New Amsterdam Books, 2000). Although both Wordsworth and Keats were also at that party, the frst meeting of the poets took place about two weeks earlier.
Haydon’s “Immortal Dinner” was attended by Keats, Wordsworth, Charles Lamb and others; Keats was asked to recite from Endymion again and chose the same passage (Hughes-Hallett, Immortal Dinner, 92). Haydon’s halfcompleted Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem hung over the dinner table; the painting includes portraits of Keats and Wordsworth (along with Voltaire and Newton) as members of the crowd gathered around Christ.
5. KC, II, 184–185; all syntactical errors and emphases are in the original. Haydon’s postscript to this letter states that “All Hunts [sic] assertions about it [the poets’ meeting] being at my House is mistake—as well as half his other sayings about both Keats & Shelley—” (KC, 185). The Hunts were actually excluded from the “Immortal Dinner” because of a fallingout over Marianne Hunt’s failure to return promptly some borrowed tableware of Haydon’s (Hughes-Hallett, Immortal Dinner, 72–73).
6. From either defance or stubbornness, Keats chose to recite the same passage before Wordsworth at the “Immortal Dinner” only two weeks later.
7. Edward John Trelawny, Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author. 1858. (New York: New York Review Books, 2000), 140.
8. Ibid., 143.
9. Ibid., 137.
10. “Let us have the old Poets, & robin Hood … I hope you will like them [“Robin Hood” and “Lines on the Mermaid Tavern”] they are at least written in the Spirit of Outlawry” (Keats, in a letter to Reynolds, 3 February 1818; LJK, 62).
11. P. Shelley to Peacock, 23 March 1819: “the Greeks, our masters and creators, the gods whom we should worship” (PBSL, 683).
12. Ath, 60.
13. Pervigilium Veneris is the title of a poem attributed to Catullus or Tiberianus; its literal meaning is “the vigil of Venus,” which would suggest that the “non-fugient damsels” in question are prostitutes.
14. For the text of this fragment, I am using Koszul’s reprinting from the Bodleian manuscript (on pages 10–11 of his edition of Proserpine and Midas; all brackets in original), even though he erroneously credits Percy Shelley; all recent critics (cf. Emily Sunstein, Alan Richardson, and David Armitage) agree that Mary is the author. Armitage explains the fragment’s genesis: “This tract rose immediately from a challenge thrown down to both Shelleys by Byron to refute Charles Leslie’s defense of orthodoxy in his frequently reprinted Short and Easie Method with the Deists (1698). Percy Shelley replied with his ‘Essay on Miracles and Christian Doctrine,’ (218), and Mary Shelley replied with ‘The Necessity of a Belief in the Heathen Mythology to a Christian;’” both were composed between 1821 and 1822. David Armitage, “Monstrosity and Myth in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.” In Monstrous Bodies/Political Monstrosities in Early Modern Europe, ed. Laura Lunger Knoppers and Joan B. Landes (Cornell University Press, 2004), 200–226.
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She spoke these words smilingly, and Amabel answered in the same way.
"Oh no, aunt, we are early risers."
"Why, that is well; we shall suit all the better."
"Yes, we shall suit all the better!" added Mrs. Chloe. "My sister Deborah is a very early riser, and so am I; but poor Philippa is a sad invalid, and she keeps her hours to suit herself. Indeed, she lives quite by herself when she is at home, as you will see."
"Let them see then, and don't keep them to discuss family matters to-night, Sister Chloe!" said Mrs. Deborah, with a little impatience in her tone. "There, good-night."
We were not sorry to find ourselves once more in our own pretty room, which we were so soon to leave. We lighted our candles and sat down to our Bible reading as usual.
"Heigh ho! What pleasant times we have had since we came into this little parlor, and how much we have learned!" said I, as we rose to get ready for bed. "I wonder what sort of room we shall have at Highbeck Hall. I don't believe we shall have one as pretty as this, do you?"
"I am sure I don't know, but I doubt it will not be as pleasant in all ways!" answered Amabel. "However, Mrs. Chloe says Mrs. Philippa keeps her own room a good deal, so I hope she will not be in our way, or we in hers. Did you notice, Lucy, that she never spoke to Aunt Deborah once?"
"I saw she did not. Everything had to go through poor Aunt Chloe. But is it not very kind in the ladies to call me niece? It is much more than I expected, I am sure," said I. "I think we may get on with Mrs. Deborah and Mrs. Chloe well
enough, and as to Mrs. Philippa, why if we cannot coax her round, we must just let her alone as far as possible. I am glad she likes music."
"Yes, it gives one something to take hold of. Well, we can settle nothing beforehand—we can only wait and see. But, Lucy, if I had not learned something more than we knew in the convent—if I had not learned to trust to my Father in Heaven, and to feel sure that He will order everything that is best for us—I should feel as though we were indeed going into banishment. Good-night, dear!"
The next morning, eight o'clock found us in the sitting-room at the Queen's Head. Neither of the ladies was to be seen, but we heard Mrs. Chloe's voice in the next room.
"We talked about buying a new harpsichord, as the old spinet is out of order, but I don't know—Deborah thinks it will be a good deal of expense and trouble."
"Of course she does, since she knows it would please me!" Mrs. Philippa broke in. "That would be enough to set her against it. Mind, Chloe, I will have a harpsichord for these girls, if I have to go out and buy it myself. You can tell Deborah so if you like. I have always been the sacrifice— always had to give up in everything, but I will have my own way in this matter."
"Well, there, don't excite yourself!" said Mrs. Chloe soothingly. And then Tupper's voice chimed in—"I suppose of course you will get up to breakfast, Mrs. Philippa, since the young ladies are coming?"
"No, that I won't!" was the tart reply. "You ought to know better than to think of such a thing, Tupper. I don't think I shall get up to-day; you can bring me some chocolate and an egg, if a fresh one can be had in this odious place, and
some bacon, and jam, and a fresh roll—no, I won't have a fresh roll, I will have some buttered toast, and you may get me out the first volume of Tom Jones. Do go away, Chloe, and let me have my breakfast in peace."
As Mrs. Chloe came out into the sitting-room and closed the door after her, she did not look as though she were greatly troubled by Mrs. Philippa's determination to stay in bed all day. Indeed, from what I learned afterward, I had no doubt at all, that it was the result of a conspiracy between herself and Tupper, to keep Mrs. Philippa quiet. She was so bent upon having her own way, and upon not being governed, that she habitually chose the exact contrary of everything proposed to her. Mrs. Deborah seldom condescended to manage her sister in this way, but neither Mrs. Chloe nor Tupper scrupled to do so.
We rose, of course, as Mrs. Chloe came in, and she greeted us each with great kindness.
"I am glad to see you, nieces. Sister Deborah is below looking after the horses—she likes to see herself how they are attended to—and Sister Philippa, poor thing, is not well this morning, and will not get up." Then lowering her voice to a whisper—"You must have great patience with your Aunt Philippa, my dears. She is peculiar, without doubt. Even I can see that."
Well she might, poor lady, since she had to bear the brunt of most of these peculiarities.
"But she has always been delicate, and she had a disappointment in early life," sinking her voice still lower. "She has been an invalid ever since, and often keeps her bed for weeks at a time." Here Mrs. Chloe's words were interrupted by a fit of coughing, which seemed enough to
shake her to pieces. "There, never mind, girls, I have had this cough ever since I got over the smallpox. It is not much, only it takes my breath away. If you could fan me a little!"
Amabel hastened to do so, and I took from my pocket a box of comfits Mrs. Thorpe had given me, and offered them to her.
"Yes, that is just the thing—thank you, niece Corbet, I am better now. It is rather trying at times, but when I think how much more poor Philippa suffers, I ought not to complain. Oh yes, I am much better. It is of no consequence. It will soon wear off. And here comes Sister Deborah."
Mrs. Deborah made us welcome, and we sat down to breakfast. The meal was a very pleasant one. Deborah inquired somewhat anxiously how Mrs. Chloe had rested, remarking that she thought she heard her coughing just now.
"Yes, I did cough a little, but my niece Corbet had some comfits for me, and they helped me very much. Oh yes, I assure you, Sister Deborah, I am very much better. I shall be quite well when the frosty weather comes to brace me up a little. Do you know where Mrs. Thorpe found those comfits, niece?"
"I believe she has them for sale," I answered; "but, Aunt Chloe—I beg your pardon, madam," I faltered, confused by the liberty I had inadvertently taken.
"Oh call me Aunt Chloe, my dear," said Mrs. Chloe, evidently pleased. "It sounds as if you loved me already. Sister Deborah, do you not think it has a pretty sound to hear Lucy Corbet say Aunt Chloe?"
"Very pretty," replied Mrs. Deborah. "I am glad Lucy Corbet feels so much at home with us. But what were you going to say, niece?"
"I was going to say, madam, that if I had some hips, and currant jelly, and honey, and poppy-heads, I could make a confection that might help my Aunt Chloe's cough. I learned the recipe at the convent, where we used to make many such things, and I know this medicine did Sister Baptista a great deal of good."
"I should think it very likely," said Mrs. Chloe, with some eagerness. "It sounds like a good recipe. Sister Deborah, don't you think the remedy Lucy Corbet proposes to make for me might be worth trying?"
"I cannot see any hurt it would do," answered Mrs. Deborah; "and as we have abundance of hips about Highbeck there would be no harm in trying. Do you know how to use the still, Lucy Corbet?"
"Yes, Aunt Deborah; I learned to use the lembic and the hot still at St. Jean, but not the worm. There was always talk of buying one, but Sister Bursar never had the money to spare when the time came."
"Was she so stingy as that?" asked Mrs. Deborah.
"No, indeed, madam," I answered with some heat. "Sister Bursar never was stingy. We gave away all the medicines and cordials we made. But there never was more than money enough to buy what was absolutely needful, and not always that."
"Well, well, you shall tell me all about it sometime. I am glad you understand the still, for it is a kind of hobby of
mine. Now if you have finished your breakfast, we will have prayers, and then go into the town. Do you like shopping?"
"Yes, Aunt Deborah, I like it very well when I do not wish to buy anything myself," answered Amabel, to whom the question was addressed.
"I meant to buy you some watches, but I see you have them already," continued Mrs. Deborah. "Did my brother send them?"
Amabel told the story of our watches, and I added that Captain Corbet left his respectful compliments for the ladies, and felt himself greatly obliged to them for giving a home to his niece.
Mrs. Deborah expressed herself very well-pleased, and said she was glad I had found such a friend. She read Prayers herself, requesting Amabel to read a psalm, and then asked us if we could not sing a hymn.
Then we went out into the town and dutifully followed the two elder ladies all the morning, watching to see Mrs. Deborah buy tea, and coffee, and loaf sugar, spices and other foreign commodities. All, these things were very high at that time, in consequence of the war with France. Tea, I remember, was thirteen shillings a pound for the best Bohea. Mrs. Deborah bought a chest of this and one of a cheaper sort, which Mrs. Chloe told me was to give away to the sick poor.
I saw that she paid ready money for every thing, and was very particular as to the quality of all her purchases for the house, while she was very indifferent as to those she made for her own dress. Mrs. Chloe bought two or three gowns for herself and Mrs. Philippa, showing a great deal of solicitude about the latter. She certainly tried her sister's
patience to a considerable extent by her balancings between black lutestring and black paduasoy, chamois gloves and silk gloves, and I thought we should never get through.
At last, in desperation, I ventured to suggest that, as Mrs. Thorpe had the best stock in town, we should go to her, knowing that she had the knack of making her customers know their own minds. † So we got Mrs. Chloe comfortably set down at her counter with Amabel to attend on her, and Mrs. Deborah and I went to finish her marketing, meaning to take her up again.
† Or rather, I think, her own mind. She always made her customers buy what she pleased. A. CAREY.
I was pretty well supplied with money—thanks to the liberal way in which Uncle Andrew filled my purse—and I asked my aunt's permission to buy some tea and sugar for Hannah Tubbs, and some sugar-candy for the children at the schools. This led to an inquiry as to the school, and a proposal to visit it. Aunt Deborah was much edified by the intelligent way in which the elder girls read in the Bible, and she pleased herself and me by giving a guinea toward the expenses of the school.
When we got back to Mrs. Thorpe's, we found Mrs. Chloe comfortably established in an arm-chair, discussing Mr. Thomson's poetry with Mr. Cheriton. Mrs. Thorpe had prepared a collation for us, which Mrs. Deborah was too kind-hearted to mortify her by refusing. Amabel and I were silent as in duty bound, but Mr. Cheriton was very sociable and pleasant with the elder ladies, sent a package of working materials to his mother and sister by Mrs. Deborah
with his duty, and a pound of choice tobacco and snuff to the old rector.
"Do you not take snuff yourself, Mr. Cheriton?" asked Mrs. Deborah.
"No, madam. I was formerly a snuff-taker, but I have left it off of late, finding, as I think, better use for the money. But Mr. Bowring is an old man and an old friend, and I am glad to do him a little pleasure."
"And I am pleased that I can help you to do so!" said Mrs. Deborah. "But how is this Mr. Cheriton? I heard you had turned Methodist and preached against all the pleasures of life."
Mr. Cheriton smiled: "Perhaps if you looked into the matter, madam, you would find that the Methodists are not altogether so black as they are painted."
"But I hope you do not mean to leave the church of England, or lead others away from it!" said Mrs. Chloe, in a tone of some alarm. "I do not think your father and mother would ever forgive you."
"So far from that, Mrs. Chloe, that I have been more complained of for bringing folks to church than for keeping them away. But I hope to have the pleasure of calling upon you before long, and then we will talk the matter over."
We returned to the inn in the afternoon, and found Mrs. Philippa dressed and lying on the sofa, hugely indignant at having been left alone so long, although she had absolutely driven Mrs. Chloe away in the morning. She found fault with all the purchases which had been made for her, presumed that the tea which had been bought chiefly for her benefit,
was unfit for the pigs, and that the new harpsichord (which I forgot to mention in its place), was a cheat.
"But Mr. Lilburne selected it, Sister Philippa, and he is considered an excellent judge," said Mrs. Chloe, as Mrs. Deborah paid no attention to these amiable remarks. "He plays the organ in Mr. Cheriton's church, who recommended him to us, and has been our niece's instructor."
"Oh, if Mr. Cheriton recommended him, it is all right, no doubt!" said Mrs. Philippa, with an ill-natured laugh. "But you are throwing away all your arts in that quarter, Sister Chloe. It won't do at all. I thought the smallpox might drive that folly out of you."
"Philippa!" said Mrs. Deborah sternly—the first time I had heard her address her sister directly: "If you have no regard for Chloe, you might have some respect for these young girls."
Whereupon Mrs. Philippa called aloud for Tupper, and being assisted to her room, proceeded to go into a screaming and kicking fit of hysterics.
"You should not speak so, Sister Deborah! You know it is poor Philippa's way, and I don't mind," said Mrs. Chloe, looking, however, as though she did mind very much, and beginning to cough.
"You are right, Chloe, and I am wrong!" said Mrs. Deborah. "There, now I have made you cough!"
I noticed, however, that neither of the ladies were at all disturbed at Mrs. Philippa's fits, which gradually subsided as they were not noticed.
That night we stayed at the inn to be ready for the early start we were to make the next morning. Mrs. Tupper came to rouse us at daylight, with cakes and cups of chocolate; but we were already up and dressed, and had put up all our affairs.
The coach, a great roomy lumbering affair drawn by four horses, came to the door, and we all packed ourselves into it. A tight pack it was, but we were all disposed to be goodnatured. Mrs. Philippa traveled by herself in her own chaise with Tupper and Richard—a very fortunate arrangement for us. Our heavy luggage and Mrs. Deborah's purchases were to follow in the wagon.
All young folks like a journey, and Amabel was in good spirits, well-pleased at the prospect of seeing a little more of the world, and by no means ill-pleased that Mr. Cheriton should accompany us, for our first stage. I cannot say that I felt quite as happy—but I did my best to be agreeable, and gradually succeeded in cheering myself.
HIGHBECK HALL.
HIGHBECK Hall was a very long day's journey from Newcastle, in the best of roads. A frost, the first of the season, had set in two or three days before, and the roads were as hard as iron, and rougher than anything I can think of, wherewith to compare them. We had four noble great horses, beside a saddle-horse for Mrs. Deborah to mount when she pleased, for she was a great horse-woman. We had four inside our coach, and two outside, and a man on horseback beside.
The first day's travel was very dreary, and the inn where we stopped at night was not particularly comfortable; though the good people of the house did their very best to accommodate us, and were so civil and obliging, that we could not in conscience find fault. They gave us the best they had for supper—brown bread, and freshly toasted oat cakes, bacon and eggs, and a noble dish of trout from the stream near by, and we had our own tea; so we fared well enough as to eatables.
But the beds were terribly hard, and Mrs. Philippa complained dolefully in the morning that she had not slept a wink, and felt as if all her bones were broken. Amabel and I had a great chamber to ourselves, with a high carved mantel, and a fireplace as big as a chapel, with a great roaring wood fire in it, which did not do much to warm us, and doors opening on all sides into dark closets and passage-ways. The building having once been a fine manorhouse, room was the last thing wanting.
"It is a ghostly-looking place, is it not?" said I, with a little shiver, after we had fastened the doors as well as we could.
"It makes me think of some of the great disused rooms at St. Jean!" answered Amabel. "I suppose the poor old house is left quite alone by this time. How I wish we could hear from the dear mothers and sisters."
"What do you think they would say to what you are doing now?" I asked, for Amabel was at that moment taking our Bibles out of our hand-bags.
"They would be grieved, no doubt!" answered Amabel. "I think of it often, and wonder whether I can really be the same person I was a year ago."
"People would say we had changed our religion very suddenly!" said I. "Only think! It is not yet six months since we first saw a Bible. I don't know how it was with you, but with me, it has been more a finding of religion, than changing one for another. I believed what I was taught, because I knew nothing else; but I cannot say it ever satisfied me."
"If I had had any one to dispute or argue with, I dare say I should have held out longer!" remarked Amabel. "But Mr. Wesley was too wise for that. He just gave us the truth, and left it to make its own way. But Lucy, we must not sit up talking. Let us read our chapters and go to bed, that we may be bright in the morning."
I thought I should certainly lie awake to listen to suspicious noises, but as it happened, the first noise I heard was Tupper's voice at the door, calling us to get up.
The breakfast was a counterpart of the supper, except that as our meal was seasoned with Mrs. Philippa's doleful forebodings, so the other was with her still more doleful complaints. The bed was hard—she had heard strange noises—an owl had screeched close by the window, and a
death-watch had ticked at her head five times over, and then stopped; and she knew it was an omen of her death, which would happen in either five years, five months, five weeks, or five days.
"Or five hours, or five minutes, or perhaps five seconds— who knows?" said Mrs. Deborah, more to herself than her sister.
"Who knows, indeed? I may be dead before I leave these walls. I only hope Sister Chloe will take the pains to see that I have a decent funeral, that's all."
"Oh, don't be alarmed. You shall have the finest funeral money can buy!" said Mrs. Deborah impatiently.
Whereupon Mrs. Philippa began to cry.
"Sister Deborah!" said Mrs. Chloe with gentle reproach.
"Well there, child, I won't do so again. Come, do eat your breakfast, we shall never get away at this rate."
"What is a death-watch?" I ventured to ask.
"It is a little maggot or beetle, rather, which lives in the timbers of old houses and the like, and makes a clicking noise when it gnaws or scratches the wood. It is thought by some to be a sign of death; but I have had one in my room these twenty years, and he has not killed me yet."
"A dozen death-watches would never kill some people!" said Mrs. Philippa spitefully, through her tears.
"But how does the beetle know when one is going to die?" asked Amabel. "It cannot make any difference to him, and it does not seem very likely that God would tell such news to
a little worm in the wall, and hide it from the person it most concerns."
"If you are an infidel, Niece Leighton, you had better keep your infidelities to yourself!" said Mrs. Philippa with great asperity. "I have not come to my time of life, to be reproved by a chit out of a French convent."
"I beg your pardon, aunt!" Amabel answered gravely and gently, though the color rose in her cheeks.
Mrs. Deborah made her a sign to be silent, and helped her to a great piece of marmalade, and the breakfast was finished without another word from any one.
But we were not to get away just yet. It turned out that one of the horses had lost a shoe, and the coach had a screw loose somewhere, so we were fain to wait two hours till the village blacksmith could supply what was wanted. The elder ladies occupied themselves in knitting. Mrs. Deborah being engaged on a substantial pair of hose for some poor person, and Mrs. Chloe on a counterpane, which had been in hand for some years. Mrs. Philippa lay on the hard sofa and fretted at the delay. And Amabel and I explored the great old house, found our way into the kitchen, and made friends with the hostess and her mother, a pretty neat old woman, who sat all day in a warm corner, and read in her great Bible.
"Yes, mother is a grand scholar!" said the good woman proudly. "She reads in the Bible from morning till night, and now she has gotten another book, which a traveling gentleman gave her, who staid here one night. He was one of these new light People—what is this they call them?"
"Methodists!" suggested Amabel.
"Yes, Methodists! Gaffer Thistlethwaite says, they are only Papists in disguise, and mean to bring in the Pretender, and the Pope. Do you think that can be true, mistress?" asked the woman with some anxiety.
"Oh, no!" said Amabel. "They are not in the least like Papists. We know Mr. Wesley very well, and he is a clergyman of the church of England."
"I'm heartily glad to hear it!" answered the good woman, evidently much relieved. "The gentleman was that kind and civil spoken, and said such good words, I did not like to think ill of him. He gave mother a book with fine verses in it. Show it to the young ladies, mother."
The old woman pulled out a book from her pocket, which turned out to be a volume of Mr. Charles Wesley's hymns, then lately put out. She was wonderfully pleased, when we read some of them to her. I never saw a nicer old woman, and it was a pleasure to see her age made so happy, by the consolations of religion, and the respectful care of her daughter and grandchildren. She was able to spin, she told us, and showed us some very nice thread of her spinning.
At last the carriages were ready, and we set out on our travels once more. The second day's journey was much more pleasant than the first, though the roads were no better; for the sun shone brightly, making the poor birds twitter a little in the bushes, and the hips and rowan berries glitter like jewels. For the first two or three hours, Mrs. Philippa chose to ride in the coach, so Mrs. Deborah took to her saddle-horse, while Amabel, Mary Lee, and I, had the smaller carriage to ourselves. We had been gradually rising for some time, and the purple mountains which we had seen ever since the fogs cleared off, seemed to be drawing nearer, so that we could discern the deep valleys and
ravines which divided them. Amabel asked Richard what mountains those were.
"Those be the Cheviot Hills, miss; you will have heard of them, sure," answered Richard. "On the other side of them hills lies Scotland. We shall soon see the hall now, aye, a long time before we come to it."
Accordingly it was not long before Mrs. Deborah, riding to the side of the chaise, pointed out a mansion of considerable size, and built of grey-stone, standing on the hillside which rose in thickly-wooded slopes behind it, dark with fir trees, while higher still it passed into what seemed rocky pastures and moorland. A village church with roofs clustered about it was seen some distance below.
"There is your home, children," said she. "See how brightly the sun shines on the old house. I take it as a good omen."
"And I wish we were there, Mistress Deborah," said Richard. "It will be a stiff pull from the village with this slippery ground."
"We shall do very well, Richard," answered Mrs. Deborah. "I dare say the young ladies and Mary Lee will not mind walking a little to lighten the load."
We at once professed ourselves willing and glad to walk a while. Mrs. Deborah smiled, and bade us keep our strength till it was wanted, as we had seven miles yet to go.
We stopped for our nooning at a farmhouse where Mrs. Deborah was well-known, and where we were received with immense hospitality, and regaled with all sorts of good things—milk and cream, fresh bread and butter, cheese, honey, and cold beef. The good woman would have dressed a fowl for us, but that Mrs. Deborah would not allow.
This was the first time I ever tasted ewe-milk cheese. I should dearly love to see a bit once more, but you might as well talk to the folk hereabout of milking the cat as milking an ewe.
We had come down into quite a deep valley, through which ran a considerable stream, with narrow fertile fields on each side. Mrs. Deborah told us this was our own burn, swollen by the accession of several other streams. We now began to ascend once more, a part of our road lying between fine woods. Then we came to the village, which looked forlorn enough to me. The church was large and handsome, though partly in ruins, and there was a row of very ancient cottages near it built of stone and covered with tiles, which Mrs. Chloe told us were almshouses, maintained by a charge on the estate.
It was near sunset when we came to a great gateway with ramping stone monsters surmounting the posts on either side, and a stone lodge, from which came out a pretty young woman with a little babe in her arms to open the gates.
"Now, young ones, if you like to save the horses a little and try your own legs, you may get out and walk a way," said Mrs. Deborah. "Stop where you see a stone bench and we will take you up again. Keep under the trees and you cannot miss your way."
We descended accordingly, glad of the chance to walk a little. The sun was setting in a great pomp of red and gold, and the moon, near the full and an hour high, hung in the midst of that solemn blue shade which creeps up the eastern sky of a frosty evening. The trees were leafless, of course, but the turf under foot was fresh and green. A low wall bounded the avenue on one side, and on the other
spread a waste of bracken and gorse—fuzz they call it there —on which some honey-buds still lingered.
Presently we came upon a troop of deer, which rushed away in great alarm at the sound of our voices. We could see before us the upper part of the great hall gleaming in the solemn sunset rays. The air was clear and sweet with the peculiar fragrance of peat smoke, and a robin was singing an autumn song in the trees. We walked slowly, for the ascent was a steep one, and the carriages were far behind us.
"Does it not seem as if we were approaching an enchanted castle?" said Amabel, as we reached the bench of which Mrs. Deborah had spoken, and sat down to await the carriages which were slowly toiling up the hill.
"I wonder whether we shall find a sleeping beauty?" said I. "As for the dragon, we have brought that along, I think."
"She is certainly a trial," said Amabel. "I do not so much mind her myself, but it does stir me to hear her speak so to poor Aunt Chloe. Do you know, Lucy, I don't believe Aunt Chloe is long for this world?"
"I think the same thing," I answered; "but she herself believes she is going to get better."
"So does Martha Styles," said Amabel, alluding to a poor consumptive girl we sometimes visited in Newcastle. "Did you observe that she was not at all scared at the deathwatch, which so alarmed poor Aunt Philippa?"
"I think Mrs. Deborah feels troubled about her. Here comes the carriage at last," as the great lumbering machine reached the level ground where we were standing.
We took our seats once more, the coachman cracked his whip, a pair of inner gates flew open, and we drove round a corner and under an archway into a paved court, which made me think at once of St. Jean de Crequi.
A flight of broad stone steps led up into a great hall surrounded by a gallery, to which a broad staircase with landings led up at the farther end. Half a dozen servants, headed by a gray-headed man carrying a silver branched candlestick, were drawn up to receive us, and, to judge by their faces, were well-pleased to have their mistresses among them again.
"Welcome to Highbeck Hall, nieces!" said Mrs. Deborah, turning around on the threshold and giving us each a hand. "Roberts, this is my brother's daughter, Mrs. Leighton, and my brother's adopted daughter, Mrs. Corbet, daughter of Mr. Corbet, of the Black Lee, whom you must remember."
The old man bowed profoundly and the maids curtsied.
"Yes, these are our nieces, Mrs. Leighton and Mrs. Corbet!" echoed Mrs. Chloe, as usual. "Nieces, you are welcome to Highbeck Hall. Sister Philippa, no doubt you welcome our nieces to the Hall?"
"I should welcome myself to my room and my bed, if I could be allowed to get there!" snapped Mrs. Philippa. "What signifies the welcome of a poor invalid like me? I dare say my room has not even a fire in it, and that there is no chocolate ready."
"There has been a good fire in your room all day, and I have your supper ready and waiting, Mrs. Philippa," said a pretty elderly woman, whom I afterwards found out to be the housekeeper.
"Then if it has been waiting, of course it is not fit to touch! I desire that you will make fresh chocolate directly. Tupper, are you ever going to help me to my room, or do you want me to lie down and die on the stone floor, as I seem like to?"
Tupper looked, I thought, as if she would have no particular objection to Mrs. Philippa's following out her fancy in this direction. However, she gave the lady her arm, and they disappeared in one of the galleries above.
"I have prepared the leather room and the turret for the young ladies, Mrs. Deborah, thinking they might like to be together!" said the housekeeper, turning to her elder mistress. "But the blue room is also ready for company."
On Mrs. Deborah referring the matter to us, we at once asked to be put together.
"Very well, you shall do as you please, and your maid can sleep in the turret-room above!" said Mrs. Deborah. "Jenny, do you show the young ladies the way."
An elderly maid-servant led us up stairs, and opened the door of a spacious room, where were candles and a bright fire. The walls were hung with leather, stamped in curious patterns of gilding and silver. There was a great high mantel, and a bedstead hung with curtains of brown damask; another little bed with white curtains, occupied the opposite corner. The toilette-table was of Japan, with many odd boxes and drawers, and hung also with brown damask as were the windows. The floor was bare, save for some foreign-looking rugs, and a square of cross-stitch wool work in the centre of the room, and so slippery with scrubbing and waxing, that it was like ice.
