LONDON AND BRACKNELL.
Imprint of _Queen Mab_--The Poem’s Notes--The Author’s Views touching
Marriage--Places of Abode in London--Presentation Copies--Shelley ‘a
Lion’--Half-Moon Street--Diet and Discomfort--Quacks and
Crotchet-Mongers--‘Nakedized Children’--Cornelia Newton--Maimuna and
her Salon--Elephantiasis--‘The Hampstead Stage’--Dinner Party at
Norfolk House--The Duke’s Mediation between the Father and
Son--Failure of the Negotiations--Shelley declines to be ‘a miserable
Slave’--At the Pimlico Lodgings--Correspondence with Mr. Medwin, of
Horsham--Birth of Ianthe Eliza--Shelley as a Father--Conflict of
Evidence respecting his Parental Character--Shelley’s Kindness to
Children--The Poet sets up his Carriage--His Prodigality in
London--His Life at Bracknell--Maimuna at her Country-House--Last
Visits to Field Place--Captain Kennedy’s Reminiscences--Medwin’s
Gossip--The Trip to Scotland--Dissensions and Estrangements--Shelley
and Harriett drifting apart--_Queen Mab’s_ Vegetarian
Note--_Refutation of Deism_.
(8).--LONDON.
If Mr. Westbrook did not change his house in Chapel Street, between 11th
January, 1811, when Shelley ordered a copy of _St. Irvyne_ to be sent to
Harriett at No. 10, and the following October, when he directed Mr. Medwin
to write to him at No. 23 of that thoroughfare, the author of the novel
may be assumed to have given his publisher a wrong address. Anyhow, it is
almost as certain that Mr. Westbrook was living at No. 23 of his street,
in the spring of 1813, as that Shelley put the said address on the
title-page of his private edition of _Queen Mab_, and again in the
concluding imprint of the work (‘Printed by P. B. Shelley, No. 23, Chapel
Street, Grosvenor Square, London’), as though the book had been printed by
him at that address. It is almost needless to say there was no
printing-press at 23 Chapel Street, and that Shelley was not a printer in
the sense indicated by the imprint.
The poet, who, on the eve of Daniel Hill’s arrest in Barnstaple, wrote to
Mr. Thomas Hookham, ‘a poem is safe; the iron-souled Attorney-General
would scarcely dare to attack,’ had made considerable additions to his
knowledge of the law touching seditious and heterodox publications, and
the publication of printed papers, since those words were penned. Daniel
Hill’s punishment ‘for publishing and dispersing printed papers without
the printer’s name being on them,’ had taught Daniel Hill’s master a
lesson he took to heart. If Shelley pressed Mr. Hookham to put himself
before the world as the publisher of the poem, the bookseller declined to
afford the Attorney-General an opportunity for showing the degree of
audacity Shelley had declared impossible even in a Crown lawyer. It may be
assumed that Shelley had inquired in vain for a competent printer, brave
enough to print openly what no publisher would publish, before he
relinquished his design of publishing the poem, and decided to produce the
book for private circulation under a false imprint. Anyhow, an edition (of
250 copies) of the book (which Mr. Moxon was prosecuted for re-publishing
seven-and-twenty years later) was printed by some unknown printer at some
undiscovered press in the spring of 1813, with an untruth on its
title-page, and a repetition of the untruth on the concluding leaf.
As criticism of Shelley’s poetry does not fall within the scope of the
present work, I am silent respecting the poetical merits of _Queen Mab_;
but it is incumbent on the poet’s biographer to say something of two of
the lengthy notes appended to the performance,--notes so little known to
the admirers of Shelley’s verse, that it may be questioned whether one out
of every hundred persons who have read the poem attentively has ever
glanced at the notes. The Anti-matrimonial Note and the Atheistical Note
should be perused by all readers who would know The Real Shelley; the
former being studied in connexion with the circumstances that resulted in
his abandonment of his first wife; and the latter being studied in
connexion with the evidence that, instead of being a mere syllabus of
reasonings put together for the convenience of scholastic disputants (as
Hogg and Lady Shelley declare it to have been), or the mere squib (which
Mr. Garnett would have us think it), _The Necessity of Atheism_ was a
serious exposition of certain of the author’s views on matters pertaining
to religion.
The Note, headed ‘There is no God,’ opens with a reproduction of the tract
which caused the author’s extrusion from Oxford,--a reproduction differing
from the original essay only in occasional amendments of the language,
made for the sake of greater precision and elegance; such alterations in
fact as are looked for in a new edition of a work by an author, who holds
steadily to the principles and argumentative details of the original
composition. Can stronger evidence be required that the tract was a
serious and genuine declaration of the writer’s views in 1811, and that in
the spring of 1813 he held the same views about _The Necessity of Atheism_
as he held in the spring of the earlier year?
The Note, headed ‘Even love is sold,’ contains the following passages of
especial interest:--
‘Not even the intercourse of the sexes is exempt from the despotism of
positive institution. Law pretends even to govern _the indisciplinable
wanderings of passion_, to put fetters on the clearest deductions of
reason, and, by appeals to the will, to subdue the _involuntary
affections_ of our nature. _Love is inevitably consequent upon the
perception of loveliness...._
‘_How long then ought the sexual connection to last?_ What law ought
to specify the extent of the grievances which should limit its
duration? _A husband and wife ought to continue so long united as they
love each other: any law which should bind them to cohabitation for
one moment after the decay of their affection, would be a most
intolerable tyranny, and the most unworthy of toleration. How odious
an usurpation of the right of private judgment should that law be
considered, which should make the ties of friendship indissoluble, in
spite of the caprices, the inconstancy, the fallibility, and capacity
for improvement of the human mind. And by so much would the fetters of
love be heavier and more unendurable than those of friendship, as love
is more vehement and capricious, more dependent on those delicate
peculiarities of imagination, and less capable of reduction to the
ostensible merits of the object...._
‘But if happiness be the object of morality, of all human unions and
disunions; _if the worthiness of every action is to be estimated by
the quantity of pleasurable sensation it is calculated to produce,
then the connection of the sexes is so long sacred as it contributes
to the comfort of the parties, and is naturally dissolved when its
evils are greater than its benefits. There is nothing immoral in this
separation. Constancy has nothing virtuous in itself, independently of
the pleasure it confers, and partakes of the temporizing spirit of
vice in proportion as it endures tamely moral defects of magnitude in
the object of its indiscreet choice._ Love is free: _to promise for
ever to love the same woman, is not less absurd than to promise to
believe the same creed: such a vow, in both cases, excludes us from
all inquiry. The language of the votarist is this: The woman I now
love may be infinitely inferior to many others; the creed I now
profess may be a mass of errors and absurdities, but I exclude myself
from all future information as to the amiability of the one and the
truth of the other, resolving blindly, and in spite of conviction, to
adhere to them. Is this the language of delicacy and reason? Is the
love of such a frigid heart of more worth than its belief?..._
‘Prostitution is the legitimate offspring of marriage and its
accompanying errors.... _Chastity is a monkish and evangelical
superstition, a greater foe to natural temperance even than
unintellectual sensuality; it strikes at the root of all domestic
happiness, and consigns more than half of the human race to misery,
that some few may monopolize according to law. A system could not well
have been devised more studiously hostile to human happiness than
marriage._
‘I conceive that, from the abolition of marriage, the fit and natural
arrangement of sexual connection would result. I by no means assert
that the intercourse would be promiscuous: on the contrary; it
appears, from the relation of parent to child, that this union is
generally of long duration, and marked above all others with
generosity and self-devotion. But this is a subject which it is
perhaps premature to discuss. That which will result from the
abolition of marriage, will be natural and right; because choice and
change will be exempted from restraint.’
After perusing this Note of _Queen Mab_, readers who would have a perfect
view of Shelley’s opinions (in 1812-16) respecting the relations of the
sexes, should look at the letter he wrote from Lynton, on 17th August,
1812, to Sir James Lawrence (_alias_ the Chevalier de Lawrence), the
eccentric _littérateur_ who is chiefly memorable at the present date for
his _Empire of the Nairs_.
From this letter and Note of _Queen Mab_, it appears that when, by his own
admission, he was living happily with the _beautiful_ girl, whom he had
illuminated out of the Christian faith and instructed to regard the rite
and obligations of marriage with levity, the chivalric Shelley held these
views touching the intercourse of the sexes:--
(1) The wanderings of amatory passion are indisciplinable, and every
attempt to stay those wanderings of desire is a futile effort ‘to subdue
the involuntary affections of human nature.’
(2) ‘Love’ being ‘inevitably consequent upon the perception of
loveliness,’ it is natural and necessary for a sensitive and rightly
constituted man to regard with love every woman in whom he perceives a
high degree of loveliness.
(3) Love lying no less completely than religious belief beyond the domain
of volition, it is no less absurd for a man ‘to promise for ever to love
the same woman’ than for him ‘to promise to believe the same creed,’ as
circumstances may at any moment put it beyond his power to keep the
promise.
(4) A man’s obligation to fulfil an engagement being necessarily dependent
on his power to do so, it follows from the nature of things that on
becoming unable to love any longer the woman he has promised to love
steadily, a man ceases to be bound by the promise.
(5) On ceasing to love her, every man should be at liberty to withdraw
from the society of his wife and take a congenial mate.
(6) It being immoral for a man to enter into engagements without a
reasonable prospect of being able to fulfil them, more especially into
engagements affecting in a high degree the happiness of the person or
persons with whom he makes them; and the conditions of human nature
precluding every human creature from a reasonable certainty of being able
to love the same person for ever, it is immoral for a man and woman to
promise to love one another for ever, _i.e._ till death, as influences
lying wholly beyond their control may at any moment take from either of
them the power of fulfilling his or her part of the contract.
(7) The moral and reasonable man’s largest promise of enduring affection
to the woman of his choice should be nothing more than a sincere
declaration, that his passion is so strong as to justify him in declaring
it a state of feeling likely to endure for a considerable period.
(8) Love being a more or less transient state of the affections, marriage
ought to be replaced by Free Love, _i.e._ by cohabitation so arranged that
either party to the affectionate league is free to retire from the
association at will.
The principal arguments by which Shelley brought himself to this
conclusion comprise,--(_a_) Arguments based on consideration of the misery
and moral injury coming to spouses, who are constrained to live together
after ceasing to love one another; (_b_) arguments based on consideration
of the happiness withheld by matrimonial law from uncongenial spouses,
who, were it not for that law, would part company and find felicity or
contentment with other mates; (_c_) arguments drawn from consideration of
the moral injury resulting from legal wedlock to spouses, who are rendered
careless of one another’s feelings by the sense of security from the
proper and natural punishment of habitual perversity and ill-humour;
whereas the overbearing husband would restrain his tyrannical
disposition, if he knew his wife could leave him should he worry her
beyond endurance, and in like manner the scolding wife would put a bridle
on her tongue, if she knew her lord could dismiss her at a moment’s
notice, and engage another woman in her place; (_d_) arguments arising
from a consideration of the misery and evils resulting from marriage to
individuals, other than unhappily mated husbands and wives.
(9) Of all his arguments against marriage, the one which Shelley valued
perhaps most highly was the argument, grounded on his conviction that
lawful wedlock and its attendant errors were accountable for prostitution,
and that to sweep away the former would be to put an end to the latter.
Were matrimony put on a natural footing, and made an estate from which the
dissatisfied spouse could retire as easily as from any ordinary commercial
contract, young men, no longer afraid to commit themselves to the perils
of familiar association with modest and accomplished women, would cease to
have intercourse with abandoned women. Liberated from the debasing
sentiment of chastity, which retains them in servile bondage to men whom
they secretly abhor, women would pass without dishonour to men, whom they
could love and who would gladly provide themselves with virtuous mates on
reasonable terms. The men put at liberty to take new spouses would often
find them in girls, who under the existing restrictions and temptations
become lodgers in immoral houses. Under Free-Love ‘the social evil’ would
soon disappear, partly through the livelier masculine repugnance to
feminine immorality, and partly through the larger demand for virtuous
female spouses.
(10) Far from thinking the abolition of marriage would result in a state
of things that would not differ greatly from promiscuous intercourse of
the sexes, on account of the general brevity of the periods of
cohabitation, Shelley was disposed to think that under Free Love the
majority of couples would have no desire to separate, when they had been
drawn closely together by common interest in common offspring. It would
still remain the rule for the mated pair to live together till death; but
under Free Love they would live together from preference and mutual
affection, instead of living together from compulsion and in spite of
mutual dislike. Still he was of course prepared for much changing and
interchanging of spouses. The freedom he required was a freedom to be
enjoyed and used, as well as talked about.
(11) When it occurred to John Milton that Freedom of Divorce would be
abused by many a wicked man, in order to get quit of a faithful and
virtuous wife, he comforted himself by reflecting that even in so evil a
case the freedom would work advantageously for the good and injured woman,
by relieving her from the necessity of living under the dominion of a bad
husband. In like manner had any one objected to Shelley, that under Free
Love a woman would often desert a good spouse from mere wantonness, and
that a man would often desert a virtuous help-mate from sheer profligacy,
he would have answered, ‘Better for the good man to be at liberty to seek
for a woman worthy of his love, and for the good woman to be at liberty to
find an honest mate.’
(12) It is obvious that the Free Love, which Shelley recommended as a
wholesome substitute for antiquated wedlock, would permit the ordinary
seducer to pursue his favourite diversion with absolute impunity; and that
Shelley, with all his avowed abhorrence of seducers, would at least have
regarded leniently several practices, that in the opinion of most men
amount to seduction. In ordinary parlance, the man who takes a hitherto
virtuous girl under his protection, and uses her as his mistress, is
termed her seducer, and the proceeding by which the girl is brought to so
discreditable a position is called her seduction. For instance, though he
would have indignantly denied the charge, Byron’s intercourse with Claire
would by most persons be regarded as a sufficient reason for holding him
guilty of an offence of which even libertines do not like to be thought
capable. Shelley certainly cannot have used the word in this sense when he
wrote to the Chevalier de Lawrence that seduction was ‘an enormous and
desolating crime, of which he should shudder to be accused;’ for after
showing positive sympathy with Byron’s tenderness for Claire in the
earlier stages of the fleeting passion, he exerted himself to bring about
a renewal of their association, just as though he were a brother set on
arranging some discord between his sister and her husband. It is not easy
to see in what sense he used the word when he wrote to the Chevalier that
‘seduction ... could have no meaning in a rational state of society.’
Questioned on the point, he would probably have said that to pursue a
woman for purely sensual ends, with false assurances of sentimental
preference and affectionate devotion, was ‘the enormous and desolating
crime.’
(13) In obedience to sincere and vehement passion for a woman, whether she
were maid or wife, every man was by the Shelleyan doctrine at liberty to
solicit her for corresponding affection, and to his utmost, in all
truthful ways, to render himself no less loveable in her eyes than she
seemed loveable to him. Whilst thinking that in the majority of cases such
a passion would prove of considerable duration, he saw also that in a
minority of cases it would speedily wane and perish, either through the
discovery of previously existing, though unobserved, defects in its
object, or through the mental, moral, or physical deterioration of the
idolized person, or through the attachment’s extinction by a more powerful
passion for a more perfect and loveable being. On the occurrence of any
such contingency, Shelley was of opinion that, on seeing it would be more
conducive to _his own_ enjoyment of life to withdraw from a no longer
congenial mate, a man should act promptly in doing so, and not be
restrained from pursuing his own happiness by any pitiful notion that
honour and morality required him to remain in discontent, out of regard to
the feelings and interests of his conjugal partner. ‘Constancy,’ in his
opinion, ‘had nothing virtuous in itself, independently of the pleasure it
conferred’ on the persisting person. In ridiculing George the Third’s
‘household virtue, most uncommon,
Of constancy to a bad, ugly woman,’
Byron placed conjugal constancy amongst the domestic virtues. Shelley took
another view of the quality, which, appearing to him (at its best) as
nothing better than a particular kind of selfish prudence, ‘partook of the
temporizing spirit of vice in proportion as it endured tamely moral
defects of magnitude in the objects of its indiscreet choice.’
(14) It must be remembered that Shelley did not propound these views as
mere theories for discussion amongst philosophers, without any serious
desire that they should become rules of personal conduct under existing
social circumstances, but as principles of social science and morals, on
which men would do well to act. Unlike William Godwin, who backed out of
his own more fantastic theories as soon as the accidents of life afforded
him a good opportunity for putting them in practice, Shelley was
‘thorough’ at this period of his life, and ready at any moment to do any
wild thing which, with boyish impetuosity and self-sufficiency, he had
talked himself into thinking a thing that ought to be done. Holding these
views in the spring of 1813, he acted upon them in the summer of 1814.
(15) To this extreme point had he gone in the social philosophy of the
Free Lovers, the more moderate of whom discovered much to question, and no
little to dissent from, in his manifesto on matters touching the
intercourse of the sexes. But far as he had gone in Free Love, Shelley was
appointed to go much further, and in the same department of social inquiry
to arrive some three or four years later at a conclusion, far stronger and
more startling than anything to be found in _Queen Mab’s_ Anti-matrimonial
Note.
There is no little of direct discrepancy and general confusedness in the
many things told us by the authorities respecting Shelley’s several places
of residence in London during the season of 1813. To believe all the
authorities tell us is to believe that, after resting for a night or two
in Chapel Street, he and Harriett lived for several weeks (and even
months) in different London hotels, then for several months in lodgings in
Half-Moon Street, and then for several weeks in lodgings at Pimlico, and
also to believe that they lived some time in Cooke’s Hotel, Dover Street,
and in the Half-Moon-Street lodging-house simultaneously, before they
settled at Bracknell, in the third week of July, 1813;--which clearly is
more than could have been accomplished, even by such singular persons as
the Shelleys, between the 7th or 8th of April and the 20th or 21st of the
following July.
The conflict of the authorities respecting Shelley’s several homes during
these fifteen weeks is in a large measure due to the indiscretion of
writers, who infer from the dates of letters that he was residing at the
hotel where the epistles were written. For instance, from the dates or
post-marks of letters written by the poet in May, 1813, to his father and
the Duke of Norfolk, and to Mr. Medwin of Horsham on 16th June, 21st June,
28th June, and 6th July, of the same year, it has been inferred that he
was living in Cooke’s Hotel, Dover Street, instead of merely frequenting
the hotel, in those months,--an inference that will be declined by
readers who remember how hotels were used by their mere frequenters in the
early days of the present century. To those who remember that between the
middle of April and the middle of July, Shelley lodged successively in
Half-Moon Street and Pimlico, and occupied each set of rooms for several
weeks, the dates of the aforementioned letters are mere evidence that,
whilst sleeping in Half-Moon Street and Pimlico, he was a frequenter of
the hotel, in which he had previously occupied a bedroom, and that he
continued to use the hotel as a place of address for some of his
correspondents, also as a place for interview with those of his
acquaintances, whom he did not care to receive at his lodgings.
It follows that I question whether the accouchement, resulting in the
birth of Shelley’s first-born child, took place at the hotel in Dover
Street on 27th June, 1813, though he wrote on the following day from the
hotel:--
‘MY DEAR SIR,--I am happy to inform you that Mrs. Shelley has been
safely delivered of a little girl, and is now rapidly recovering. I
would not leave her in her present state, and therefore still consider
your proposal of fixing the interview in London as the most eligible.’
In saying that he could not leave his wife in her present state, the
writer can scarcely have meant he could not leave for a few hours the
house in which she was lying, though affectionate concern forbade him to
leave her for so long a time as would be consumed by journeying to Horsham
and back. Notwithstanding some statement to the contrary, which had come
under his notice, Hogg remained under the impression that Harriett’s first
_accouchement_ took place at the Pimlico lodgings, and (for reasons with
which I will not trouble the reader, as the question is of scarcely any
importance) I have little doubt Hogg was right on this point.
In reviewing Shelley’s course during the spring and summer of 1813,
readers may be certain that, after resting a night or two in Chapel
Street, he stayed for awhile (perhaps a fortnight) with his wife at
Cooke’s Hotel; that he then went with her into the lodgings in Half-Moon
Street, which they occupied for several weeks (possibly eight or nine
weeks;--in speaking of them as living in the Half-Moon Street for ‘several
months,’ Hogg used too ample an expression); that, on leaving Half-Moon
Street, the young couple went to the Pimlico lodging-house, before going
to Bracknell; and that after ceasing to reside at the Dover-Street Hotel,
Shelley often went to it in May, June, and July, to see friends and write
letters. It is, of course, conceivable that he lived at the hotel for some
days and nights between the stay in Half-Moon Street, and the migration to
Pimlico, and again between his withdrawal from the Pimlico lodging-house
and his retirement to Bracknell, where he had his home, towards the end of
July, 1813.
The state of Shelley’s purse is enough to account for the fact that he and
Harriett journeyed from Killarney to London, unattended by Miss Westbrook,
whom they left in charge of ‘the many useful volumes’ which the trio
carried with them from Tanyrallt to Dublin, and from Dublin to the South
of Ireland, where Eliza possibly sold them for the money that enabled her
in the course of a few days to follow her sister and brother-in-law.
Having barely enough money in hand for the charges of posting to Cork and
‘mailing’ on to Dublin, Shelley and Harriett would have been constrained
to leave their sister behind, even had they wished for her company. It is,
however, certain that, whilst Shelley was greatly delighted, Harriett was
in no degree pained by the circumstances which enabled them to escape for
a brief while from Miss Westbrook’s society.
Printed on the fine paper especially ordered by the author (for the
gratification of his natural pride in the offspring of his brain, and
also, as he averred, that the work might be more attractive to the sons
and daughters of aristocrats), the first ‘bound copies’ of _Queen Mab_ may
be assumed to have come to Shelley’s hands soon after he took possession
of the lodgings in Half-Moon Street. It may also be assumed that, in the
earlier weeks of their residence in the thoroughfare, which seventy years
since enjoyed the favour of fashion, both Harriett and Shelley found
congenial diversion in sending out copies of the new book to men of
letters whom they knew, to men of letters whom they wished to know, and to
those persons of their small circle of acquaintance who, without being
ambitious of literary distinction, were of a philosophical quality that
rendered the young poet desirous of standing high in their regard, or of
converting them to his particular views.
An early copy was despatched to Byron, still in the enjoyment of the
celebrity, pertaining to him as the author of _Childe Harold_. But Byron
failed to acknowledge the book, as he, of course, and in mere courtesy,
would have done, had it not been for the miscarriage of the letter, which
would have given him Shelley’s address. Having been on his pilgrimage
during the occurrences, that had rendered the younger poet somewhat (but
only in a slight degree) notorious, it is more than probable that, on
looking for the first time on _Queen Mab’s_ title-page, Byron had never
heard anything of Shelley’s personal story,--never even heard his name.
Anyhow, Byron took no notice of the book. To Shelley, yearning to know the
author of _Childe Harold_, and ignorant of the circumstances that were
accountable for the apparent disrespect, Byron’s silence must have been
extremely mortifying.
Society, in the larger and higher sense of the word, of course, knew
nothing of the poem which appeared in no bookseller’s shop, and which
would have been inquired for in vain at the circulating libraries, whilst
it was being secretly lent under the rose to their friends by the hundred
or more persons, who had been so fortunate as to get copies of the
surreptitious publication. It is unknown how many of the 250 copies were
thus floated into covert circulation; but it is certain that the work was
read and talked about by a sufficient number of people (the majority of
them being Londoners), for Shelley to acquire from it,--at least, in the
cliques and coteries of literary London,--a certain measure of poetical
reputation, and a recognized place amongst the young and rising poets of
the period. In certain circles the precautions he had taken for his safety
quickened the desire to see the daring poem, and win a personal
introduction to the author. One can readily believe what Hogg tells us of
the way in which strangers of both sexes forced their way into the
Half-Moon-Street lodgings, in order to make the acquaintance of the author
of _Queen Mab_; but, in professing to be offended and irked by these
intrusive worshipers of his genius, Shelley was no more sincere than when
he affected, in one of his letters to Godwin, to have perused with
indifference the eulogia of the article which, although he knew the
commendations to have proceeded from honest Jack Lawless’s pen, delighted
him so greatly, that he entreated Miss Hitchener to compass its
reproduction in the Sussex newspapers.
Though she now and then gave signs of emancipation from Miss Westbrook’s
authority, Harriett still lived in friendliness with the admirable
sister, who, whilst residing again under her father’s roof in Chapel
Street, seldom allowed a day to pass without spending a few hours with her
child in Half-Moon Street. That Shelley had, at least for the moment,
passed from her control, Miss Westbrook cannot have been insensible; but,
as the rapid development of Harriet’s person required more and more
liberal rearrangements of her dresses, it is probable that the elder
sister cheered herself by looking forward to a time, when she would be in
a position to reclaim Percy from a state of mutiny, and re-establish her
dominion over him. In the meantime, though she came almost daily to her
sister’s lodgings, Miss Westbrook did nothing for the comfort of its
proper occupants, who, at an expenditure which, with good management,
would have maintained them in luxury, lived as wastefully and
comfortlessly as any young couple of their condition ever lived, on the
drawing-floor of a West-End lodging-house. In partaking of such dinners as
Harriett set before him in the front drawing-room, Hogg certainly gave no
ordinary proof of attachment to his friends. To say that Shelley was a
stricter vegetarian in the spring and summer of 1813, is not to say much
of his abstinence from the more luxurious fare of his own table; for the
bread and raisins, the penny-buns and raspberry tartlets, from the nearest
confectioner’s shop, were the daintiest food offered to his guests, either
in the Half-Moon-Street or Pimlico lodgings. The poet’s favourite food at
this stage of his career was cold bread-poultice (made like the poultices
of medical practice), which he devoured with the keenest relish, after
sprinkling them with powdered lump sugar and grated nutmeg. A few months
later he was living chiefly on pulse.
The strange people who gathered about Shelley in the two sets of rooms
were, with two or three exceptions, of no finer quality than the fare with
which he regaled them. For the most part, enthusiastic vegetarians, and
fervid believers in the perfectibility of the human species, they
exercised themselves in debating the best and quickest means of raising
mankind to the perfection of which it was capable, and in disputing
whether it was lawful for vegetarians to eat eggs and butter, to drink
milk and put cream to their strawberries. In comparison with most of the
men, who talked excitedly on these momentous questions, the Chevalier de
Lawrence was a discreet and sober intellect. But the men were surpassed by
the women of the coterie in piquant eccentricity and grotesque
fancifulness. With her placid interest in self-murder, and her avowed
purpose of putting an end to her own existence, should it become a few
degrees less tolerable, Harriett may be presumed to have sympathized with
the dejection of the equally languid and miserable gentlewoman, who would
have perished under the burden of her imaginary woes, had it not been for
the solace of Petrarch sonnets.
Another gentlewoman of the circle was chiefly remarkable for holding that,
to enjoy perfect health of mind and body, it was necessary for the British
matron to begin every day by sitting for three or four hours in
unqualified nudity,--hours which, of course, every fair practitioner of
nakedness was expected to pass in the strictest privacy; it being further
recommended that she should employ them in reading high literature or in
writing letters. In society, after telling how she had passed the first
three hours of the well-spent morning, she sometimes added, for the
edification of listeners, ‘I feel so innocent during the rest of the day.’
Finding the regimen of matutinal nakedness so beneficial to herself, this
exemplary gentlewoman trained her children to go without clothing about
the house for the greater part of the day. One of the drollest pages of
Hogg’s delightful book tells how, on hearing Shelley’s familiar rap at the
front door, this lady’s brood of infants (a twelve-years old boy, a girl
_ætat._ ten, a boy _ætat._ nine, and two wee girls, the younger of whom
was only five years of age) rushed downstairs in perfect nudity, in order
to greet so favourite a friend even on the door-mat.
But of all the ladies who thronged about Shelley in Half-Moon Street (to
Harriett’s perplexity and Eliza Westbrook’s secret wrath), even as women
of higher quality crowded round and ‘suffocated’ Byron in the salons of
lordly houses, none had more influence over the author of _Queen Mab_ from
the spring of 1813, to the end of the spring of 1814, than Mrs.
Boinville--an Englishwoman by birth and education, who was indebted to a
French husband for her style and tastes, as well as for the name which
gives her peculiar distinctiveness in the Shelleyan annals. The
mother-in-law of Mr. Newton (the vegetarian enthusiast, who, after living
in affectionate intimacy with Shelley during the greater part of 1813,
quarrelled with him in an early month of the following year), Mrs.
Boinville, at the time of making Shelley’s acquaintance, was through her
daughter, Cornelia (Mr. Newton’s wife), the grandmother of a brood of
handsome children. Nor were these children the only evidence that Mrs.
Boinville had come to an age when it is unusual for an Englishwoman to
conceive a sentimental fondness for a youngster in his nonage. The
whiteness of her abundant tresses proclaimed her old enough for
grand-maternal dignity. She was, however, a young-looking woman for her
age; the contrast of her snow-white hair and comparatively girlish face
causing Shelley to name her Maimuna, after the poetical creation of whom
it is written in Southey’s _Thalaba_:
‘Her face was as a damsel’s face,
And yet her hair was grey.’
Doting on her in 1813, for the perfection of her manners and character,
Shelley some five years later remembered Maimuna as a person ‘whose
extreme subtlety and delicacy of understanding’ were incompatible with
perfect guilelessness and constancy. And coming to think less favourably
of his whilom spiritual mate, it was natural for the poet to tell others
of her insincerity and fickleness.
Admiring her from the first hour of their brief association for an
appearance, that combined in so peculiar and piquant a manner the
loveliness of youth and age, he delighted in the winning sweetness of her
voice, and discovered in her conversation and mien the charms of
intellectual subtlety and moral elevation. Concurring with him on the
several religious and social questions, that were holding his attention,
she exulted in his song no less frankly than he exulted in her beauty. It
is no exaggeration to say that the stripling, who still wanted several
months of his majority, was platonically enamoured of the woman with
snow-white hair and girlish face, whose years cannot have been much under
fifty. Pouring into her sympathetic ear the long and stirring tale of his
multifarious domestic distresses, he consulted her on nice questions of
poetry and metaphysical science, and never conferred with her on such
matters without discovering new reasons for admiring the subtlety and
self-dependence of her intellect; though it is conceivable that, when he
was most deeply impressed by her mental acuteness and originality, she was
only returning to him the thoughts that had come to her from his lips on
the previous evening.
Nor was Maimuna the only influence that rendered her house far more
agreeable to the youthful poet than his comfortless lodgings in Half-Moon
Street, where Eliza became more and more distasteful to her
brother-in-law, and Harriett less shapely and beautiful. For the charming
and highly sentimental Mrs. Boinville had a scarcely less charming and
sentimental sister, as well as a daughter who, without possessing all her
mother’s excellencies, was not unworthy of so fascinating a parent. In
adorative tenderness for Percy, the youngest of these three ladies seems
to have surpassed her aunt and equalled Mrs. Boinville. It was she who
discovered that, seen from the pavement below, whilst sitting book-in-hand
at the little projecting window of the Half-Moon Street drawing-room,
Percy would have looked ‘like some young lady’s lark, hanging outside for
air and song,’ had he only been provided with ‘a pan of clear water and a
fresh turf.’ Surely the lady who discovered this resemblance must have
been the author of the happy thought, that Shelley had the appearance of a
moss-rose still drenched by the tears of heaven.
The Pimlico drawing-room would have been a bower of delight to the young
poet, had he found no other worshipers there; but it was the favourite
gathering place of a coterie of sentimentalists and free-thinkers of both
sexes, who rendered the salon even more agreeable to the author of _Queen
Mab_, by being at much pains to make him see that he was superlatively
acceptable to them. Mr. Hogg may, perhaps, have been justified in thinking
meanly of Mrs. Boinville’s circle, and in suggesting that before the end
of the season Shelley was secretly ashamed of himself for spending so much
of his time in it. But the poet, who had long yearned for social
recognition, may be pardoned for not being nicely fastidious respecting
the quality of the first coterie to welcome and worship him as a man of
genius. Moreover, though it may have comprised several arrant charlatans,
together with a considerable percentage of individuals to be fairly rated
by a humorous annalist as so many sentimental medical students and
revolutionary tinkers, the crowd, that thronged Mrs. Boinville’s staircase
on her evenings of reception, doubtless held a far larger proportion of
well-mannered gentle people, who were all the better company because
their social crotchets declared them likely to die in a lunatic asylum.
Certainly it contained a fair proportion of clever and lovely girls, whose
mental and personal endowments may well have caused the principal poet of
the assemblies to recall with a sense of shame, how recently he had hung
upon the words of the Hurstpierpoint prophetess. It was at Mrs.
Boinville’s house that Shelley met the chosen and especially favoured
young ladies, with whom (after the departure of the other visitors) he
used to drink strong tea and converse on lofty themes from midnight to
early dawn, and sometimes from early dawn to broad daylight. On crossing
Piccadilly an hour or so after daybreak, as the market-carts rolled slowly
towards Covent Garden, it was natural for Shelley to wish his lodgings
were something nearer the house he visited at least once in every
twenty-four hours; and so wishing, it was natural for him to think it
would be well for his dear Harriett’s sake, that he should take lodgings
in Pimlico, so as to be able to drop in at any moment on the dear
Boinvilles for a short call, without leaving her for hours together during
the illness that would soon be upon her.
Though I cannot speak positively on the point, I have little doubt that
Mrs. Boinville’s was the house where Shelley, during this same London
season of 1813, caused much commotion by passing down a line of charming
young ladies (who were ranged on one side of the drawing-room for the
country dance), and closely examining the skin of each of the astonished
but unresisting damsels. It was not enough for Shelley to put his eyes
within a few inches of each young lady’s unconcealed developments, so as
to get the closest and clearest view of her neck, shoulders, and bosom. To
effect his purpose it was requisite to examine the parts, in which he was
greatly interested, by touch as well as by sight. It was not till, with
the look and air of a concern no less reverential than pitiful, he had
pressed and otherwise felt the skin of several necks, bosoms, and pairs of
shoulders, that the hostess, on seeing what he was about, caused him to
desist from his too intrusive observations, by assuring him with proper
earnestness and gravity, that no one of the lovely damsels standing before
him was suffering from elephantiasis.
For some days Shelley had been afflicted by a fancy that he had caught
that rare and terrible disease from an old woman, whom he had met in a
stage-coach, and for the preposterous magnitude of whose ankles he could
account only by assuming that she was afflicted with elephantiasis in the
legs. In vain was he assured by the doctors, whom he consulted on the
subject, that he had not caught elephantiasis, and that, had the old woman
been a sufferer from the disease in the degree he imagined, she could not
have endured the motion of the stage-coach. No doctor, no number of
conspiring doctors, could persuade him he had not caught elephantiasis, or
make him believe the signs of disease, so easily caught, could not be
detected in the skin of persons unaware of their deplorable condition. To
prove himself right on the first point, he was ever and again scrutinizing
his own skin. To show he was right on the second point, he seized every
opportunity of examining the skin of other people. Hence the extraordinary
examination of the young ladies, who, in their confidence in the rectitude
and innocency of his purpose, were willing to allow him any license
requisite for the completion of his inquiries.
Apocryphal biography requires us to believe that Shelley met another
disagreeable old woman in a stage-coach,--the old lady whom he at the same
time drove out of the carriage and her wits, by seating himself on the
floor of the vehicle, and ejaculating with passionate pathos--
‘For heaven’s sake, let us sit upon the ground,
And tell sad stories of the death of kings!
How some have been deposed, some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed,
Some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping killed;
All murdered.’
The story (known to every one) proceeds to tell how in her alarm at the
words, the thrilling accents in which they were delivered, and the
dolefully maniacal visage of their utterer, the poor old woman screamed to
the guard to open the door and allow her to escape from the company of the
raving lunatic, who wanted her to join with him in talking about kings and
their deaths in so disloyal a fashion; and how, on the door being opened,
she cleared herself out of the coach, with her basket of mellow apples and
her other basket of onions. There are several versions of this equally
piquant and doubtful story. To believe everything in Leigh Hunt’s
_Autobiography_, is to believe that the farce was originally enacted, to
the poor woman’s terror, in his presence _in_ ‘the Hampstead stage,’ as he
and Shelley were travelling by that vehicle into town. But even if it
could be proved that he had no part in the conception of the story, or in
the incidents out of which it grew, the fiction would be fitly given as an
example of the kind of humour that was acceptable to, perhaps, the least
humorous of our supremely great poets; for Shelley told the story so often
_of_ himself, that he eventually believed it as thoroughly as any of his
numerous fictions about himself.
Whilst Shelley was living in lodgings, and dating some of his letters from
Cooke’s Hotel, Dover Street, he met his father at least on one occasion in
society. The poet and Harriett were lodging in Half-Moon Street, when, on
coming there to dine with them by invitation, Hogg was received by
Harriett with excuses for the absence of her husband, who was dining at
Norfolk House. Having called in the morning at the house, to pay his
respects to the Duke, he was asked to return a few hours later to a dinner
party. Considerations of prudence having made him accept the invitation
Bysshe had gone to the dinner, leaving word that he would get away from
the great people at Norfolk House as soon as possible. In Bysshe’s
absence, therefore, Hogg dined with Harriett, who was reading aloud to him
over the tea-cups when, after much vehement rapping at the street door,
Shelley rushed into the room, ‘tumbling upstairs, with a mighty sound,
treading upon his nose, as I accused him of doing, and throwing off his
neckcloth, according to custom, stood staring about for some moments, as
wondering why he had been in such a hurry.’ At the Norfolk House dinner (a
large party of men) Percy, sitting at the bottom of the table, found
himself next the Earl of Oxford, who (according to Bysshe’s account of the
affair) inquired of him, ‘Who is that very strange old man at the top of
the table, sitting next his Grace, who talks so much, so loudly, and in so
extraordinary a manner, and all about himself?’
‘He is my father, and he is a very strange old man indeed!’ replied
Shelley, who, on coming away from Norfolk House, was accompanied to the
door of his lodgings by the Earl.
The Duke of Norfolk doubtless invited Bysshe to this dinner, in the hope
that the meeting of the father and son, at war since the early autumn of
1811, might result in their reconciliation, or at least dispose the
Squire to make the youngster a larger allowance, now that he was within a
few months of his majority, and likely to have a child in a few weeks. Of
course the Duke, under whose surveillance, influence, and approval, the
Squire of Field Place had acted towards his son since the spring of 1811,
was of opinion that Shelley should show larger consideration for his
father’s feelings, before asking for a more liberal share of his father’s
bounty; that concessions on the sire’s part must necessarily be preluded
by concessions and conciliatory assurances on the part of the son; that
the boy, in fact, must return clearly within the lines of filial
dutifulness, before looking to his father for paternal sympathy and
further pecuniary assistance. At the same time it may be assumed that
Shelley’s ‘wheedling letter,’ written from Tanyrallt, had caused the Duke
to think the youngster was returning to a reasonable frame of mind, and
had determined to make concessions and promises, that would probably end
in a satisfactory arrangement of his differences with his father. Hence it
came about that, perhaps before the end of April, certainly not much later
than the third week of May 1813, Shelley was in negotiation with his
father, for a reconciliation that would be beneficial to himself.
It is not surprising that these negotiations were fruitless of better
feeling between the father and the son. Since his elopement with Harriett
to Edinburgh, Shelley had certainly done nothing to appease his father’s
wrath. How far the Squire of Field Place had been kept _au courant_ with
his son’s doings in Dublin, at Lynton and Tanyrallt, does not appear; but
several circumstances countenance the opinion that of Shelley’s doings in
those places enough must have come to the Squire’s ears to confirm him in
his unfavourable opinion of his heir. As Shelley instructed Miss Hitchener
to send particulars of his doings in Dublin to the Sussex papers; as he
sent the same lady copies of his revolutionary broadside (the _Declaration
of Rights_) in order that they should be pasted on the walls of Sussex
farmers; as during his first sojourn in Ireland he was incessantly writing
to the lady letters, that may be presumed to have afforded much piquant
gossip to her Hurstpierpoint acquaintance; as Shelley was at other pains
to advertise his friends in Sussex of his Irish doings, the Squire of
Field Place must have heard enough of those doings, to be acutely annoyed
by them. It cannot have pleased him to hear in the summer of 1812, that
the young schoolmistress had deserted her employment, and gone off to live
with his son. Something had probably come to the Squire about that ugly
business in Lynton. As Shelley asked the Duke of Norfolk to provide money
for the Tremadoc Embankment, and seems to have sought in Sussex for other
subscribers to the fund, it must have come to the Squire’s knowledge, that
his son was busying himself with land-speculators in North
Wales;--information which could not fail to confirm the Squire in his
opinion, that old Sir Bysshe had done well to require by the codicil to
his will, that Percy should resettle the estates A and B, under pain of
forfeiting for himself and issue all the interest assigned to him and his
issue by the testament. What wonder that the negotiations came to nothing?
That they came to nothing before the end of May, 1813, we know from a
letter dated on the 26th day of that month by the Squire of Field Place to
his son:--The letter (to be found in _Notes and Queries_: Second Series,
vol. vi., p. 405) in which, after declining to have further communication
with his son, till the latter should show signs of a change for the
better, in respect ‘to some of the most unfavourable traits of his
character,’ the Squire of Field Place remarked that, had he not imagined
the change for the better to have already taken place, he should have
persisted in his resolution to receive no communication from his dear boy,
‘but through His Grace the Duke of Norfolk.’ Thus closing the
correspondence in terms less lucid than firm; the Member for New Shoreham
still declared himself to be his dear boy’s ‘affectionate father.’
With this epistle the negotiations appear to have come to an end. To those
who concur with Mr. Buxton Forman in thinking, that the author of _Queen
Mab_ and _Laon and Cythna_ might under favourable circumstances have been
‘the Saviour of the World,’ the Squire of Field Place of course appears
guilty of egregious impudence and irreverence in presuming to address his
sacred son so familiarly; and it must be confessed that ‘my dear Boy’
appears a most inappropriate description of a young gentleman, worthy of
being worshipt with the Deity. To persons, who concur with Mr. Froude, in
thinking any extravagances and indiscretions should have been pardoned in
Shelley, because he was young and enthusiastic, it must of course appear
that, on receiving his son’s assurance that he had changed for the better,
the Squire of Field Place should have hastened to Cooke’s Hotel, thrown
his arms about the dear boy’s neck, and settled two thousand a-year upon
him. To those of the Shelleyan enthusiasts who, because he lived to write
incomparably fine poetry, think Shelley must always have been as faultless
as his best verse, should never have been birched by the profane Keate,
should never have been called to order by his father, it naturally seems
insufferable insolence for a mere Member of Parliament, capable of writing
nothing loftier than a barely intelligible letter, to venture to lecture
so sublime a son on ‘the most unfavourable traits of his character.’ But
to sober persons, who can enjoy fine poetry without thinking its producers
demigods, it is not obvious why the poetic faculty should be held to
exempt its possessor from any of the obligations of morality, or why a
father should hesitate to reprove his son’s misconduct, because the
youngster gives promise of developing into a man of genius. Even by those
who recognize in Shelley’s character and career the resemblance which Mr.
Buxton Forman was the first to detect in them, it will be conceded that
the historic parallel would be closer, had the poet in his nonage shown
more consideration for the feelings of his parents, and greater readiness
to ‘be subject unto them.’
Of this brief letter nothing, perhaps, is more noteworthy than its
announcement that, had it not been for misapprehension respecting his
son’s temper and attitude, the writer should have declined to receive any
communication from him except ‘through his Grace the Duke of Norfolk,’ on
whom he relied for guidance in his chief domestic perplexity, no less than
for protection from any social censure and discredit, likely to ensue from
unjust reports of his action in respect to that trouble. After hearing so
much during the last thirty or forty years of the sufferings Shelley
endured from his father’s harshness and cruelty, it is well for the world
to glance at the other side of the story, and commiserate the pain and
shame that came to the Squire of Field Place from his son’s perversity and
malice. The man may well be compassionated who is constrained to put his
honour in the custody of another person, albeit of so august a personage
as a duke of the realm. A little sympathy is due to the father, who relied
on his patron to protect him from slanderous misrepresentation of his
parental character and conduct.
After perusing the epistle, that closed the fruitless negotiations,
Shelley sent it to the Duke of Norfolk with a ‘wheedling’ note (also to
be found in _Notes and Queries_: Second Series, vol. vi., p. 405) in
which, after suitable expressions of regret for the failure of the Duke’s
intervention, and similar expressions of gratitude for His Grace’s
sympathy and good offices, the writer observed,--
‘I was prepared to make my father every reasonable concession, but I
am not so degraded and miserable a slave, as publicly to disavow an
opinion which I believe to be true. Every man of common sense must see
that a sudden renunciation of sentiments seriously taken up is as
unfortunate a test of intellectual uprightness as can possibly be
devised. I take the liberty of enclosing my father’s letter for your
Grace’s inspection. I repeat what I have said from the commencement of
this negociation, in which private communications from my father first
induced me to engage, that I am willing to concede anything that is
reasonable, anything that does not involve a compromise of that
self-esteem without which life would be a burden and a disgrace.’
Had he written in this strain of the failure of the negotiation to William
Godwin or Hogg, or indeed to almost any one but the Duke of Norfolk,
cautious readers would hesitate to infer from the epistle that the Member
for New Shoreham had made any demand, so extreme as to justify in any
degree the poet’s way of referring to it. But in writing to the Duke whom
he knew to be cognizant of the terms offered to him by his father, it is
scarcely conceivable that Shelley permitted himself to speak of them in a
style, that was without even the faintest colour of justification. It does
not, however, follow that the Squire had any desire to reduce his son to
the position of a ‘degraded and miserable slave,’ or made any demand to
which no young man of honour and sensibility could assent, without losing
his self-respect.
In the absence of the evidence, which would alone qualify the reader to
take a judicial view of the Squire’s requirements, it may be assumed that
they comprised some stipulation which, having reference to his son’s
religious and political sentiments, and going further than the former
request for mere abstinence from public controversy, demanded some action
which Percy could regard as public recantation of his published opinions.
Possibly the unreasonable requirement was that, recalling to his hands
every recoverable copy of _Queen Mab_, he should destroy all copies of the
book within his reach, and promise never again to put the work, or any
similar work, in circulation. Shelley would not have failed to regard any
such condition, as a demand for his ‘sudden renunciation of sentiments
seriously taken up.’ The Shelleyan enthusiasts of course take the
expressions of the epistle literally, and argue from them that the
proposals he declined with so much spirit and generous resoluteness
involved some extravagant and humiliating concession, which should not
have been demanded of him. One of the strongest reasons for thinking the
zealots err on this point, is the certainty that no such extreme and
insolent demand would have been sanctioned by the Duke of Norfolk, whose
‘exalted mind’ determined the course taken by Mr. Timothy Shelley in the
business. I am prepared for evidence that the terms, so warmly rejected by
Shelley, were hard terms. But should sufficient evidence ever appear that,
in his growing irritation with a singularly exasperating son, the Squire
insisted on terms, that besides being hard were cruel and unreasonable, it
would still remain for readers to smile contemptuously at the Pecksniffian
style in which Shelley (the writer of wheedling letters, who did not blush
to declare to his familiar friend his deliberate intention of having
recourse to deception) wrote of himself in this particular epistle, as
though he were incapable of deviating by a hair’s breadth from the
straight path of truth.
Another point to be noticed in this curious epistle is Shelley’s
statement, that the futile negotiation, was a ‘negociation, in which
private communications from his father first induced him to engage.’ As
Shelley knew it to be within the Duke’s knowledge, whether the overtures
for the fruitless negotiation came from him to his father, or from his
father to him, he may be assumed to have written accurately respecting the
preliminary ‘private communications.’ It may therefore be taken for
certain that the Squire (acting doubtless at the Duke of Norfolk’s
instance) made the overtures to his son for a friendly settlement of their
differences;--a fact indicative of a disposition, rather than of an
indisposition, on the Squire’s part, to come to friendly terms with his
son. None the less certain, however, is it that Shelley himself (acting on
Hogg’s advice) was the person, who for purely selfish ends (to get money)
wrote the wheedling letter and made the insincere professions, which moved
the Duke of Norfolk to advise the Squire to approach his boy with
conciliatory overtures.
Three weeks after the fruitless negotiation, dating from Cooke’s Hotel
(though I have but little doubt that he and Harriett were living in
Pimlico, within a stone’s-throw of Maimuna’s drawing-room windows),
Shelley, in mid-June, asked Mr. Medwin to be his legal adviser, in respect
to the difficulties he would encounter on coming of age. ‘I know,’ he
wrote to the Horsham Lawyer, ‘that I am heir to large property. Now, are
the papers to be seen? Have you the least doubt that I am the sole heir to
a large landed property? Have you any certain knowledge on the subject?’
In spite of the decisiveness of the words, ‘I know that I am the heir to
large property,’ it is obvious, from the ensuing words, that, as his
twenty-first year neared its end, the poet realized vividly how small his
knowledge was of the nature and magnitude of the patrimony, about which he
had written and spoken so much, with equal looseness and boastfulness. He
begs his lawyer to say whether he has any doubt that he is the heir to a
large landed property. ‘Have you,’ he asks of the man of business, who was
his relative, and had formerly been in some degree cognizant of the
affairs of the Shelleys, though he may never have been greatly in the
confidence of either Sir Bysshe or Sir Bysshe’s son, ‘Have you any certain
knowledge on the subject?’ He would not have asked in this nervous style
for his attorney’s ‘certain knowledge on the subject,’ had he not been
himself painfully in want of such knowledge. Seventeen months since, he
had written confidently to William Godwin, ‘I am heir by entail to an
estate of 6000_l._ per annum;’ and now in mid-June, 1813, he is writing
almost with the excitement of panic to the Horsham lawyer, ‘Have you any
certain knowledge on the subject?’ It seems as though the nervous creature
were possessed by a fear that he might, after all his fine talk, find
himself heir to nothing,--the fool of a fool’s paradise,--the dupe of a
long, delightful, golden dream, passing away quickly in the chilling dawn
of penury. Of course, any such state of alarm was transient. He had
sufficient grounds for believing himself the heir (somehow or other) to
considerable property. At the same time, he was painfully alive to his
need of precise information respecting the property.
Four or five days later (21st June, 1813), after receiving a letter of
reassuring information from Mr. Medwin, he wrote to the lawyer, ‘Depend
upon it, that no artifice of my father’s shall induce me to take a
life-interest in the estate;’--words, seeming to indicate that the lawyer
(who had lent him money, and was otherwise interested in encouraging him
to surrender nothing of his estate) had already been instructing him to
disappoint his grandfather’s and father’s design to compass the
re-entailment of the property. ‘I feel with sufficient force,’ the writer
continues, in respect to the proposal that he should take a life-interest
in the estate, ‘that I should not by such conduct be guilty alone of
injustice to myself, but to those who have assisted me by kind offices and
advice during my adversity:’--_i.e._ those who had lent him money during
his minority.
Six days after the date of this last-mentioned letter, Harriett gave birth
to her first-born child, who was named Ianthe Eliza, the second of the two
names indicating that Miss Westbrook continued to hold her sister’s
affection, and to have an influence in her brother-in-law’s home, after he
had come to regard her with a dislike, that developed rapidly into
unqualified aversion. That Hogg was right in thinking the child was born
in Pimlico, instead of Dover Street, I have little doubt, though
immediately before and after the birth Shelley was dating letters from
Cooke’s Hotel.
The question has been raised whether Shelley ever felt any strong
affection for Harriett’s daughter, though he spoke and wrote passionately
of the barbarous decree of the Court of Chancery, that declared him unfit
to have any part in the child’s education. It has also been questioned
whether Harriett ever delighted in the little girl, who suffered from a
congenital defect of one of her eyes, that was at least in some degree
removed by the surgical operation, which afforded Mrs. Shelley an
opportunity of displaying her self-control or insensibility, less to the
admiration than to the astonishment of the surgeon who, after vainly
endeavouring to persuade her to be absent whilst the patient was under the
knife, was surprised at the apparent indifference with which she heard the
cries and regarded the sufferings of the infant. It would, however, be
unjust to draw conclusions unfavourable to Harriett from her demeanour on
this occasion; for she may have been moved by maternal solicitude to
remain in the room during the operation, and having decided to remain
there, she was bound by care for her child’s welfare and the surgeon’s
convenience, to keep her feelings under command. Nor should any positive
inference to Harriett’s disadvantage be drawn from the fact, that,
instead of being suckled by her mother, little Ianthe took her first
nourishment from a wet-nurse; for though her _accouchement_ was an easy
affair, from which she recovered quickly, Harriett may have been compelled
to employ a nurse to discharge a duty, which she would have been only too
glad to perform personally. Again, though Hogg attributed the weakness to
her shame at knowing ‘that one so nearly connected with herself was not
perfectly beautiful,’ Harriett’s sensitiveness in respect to her infant’s
slight facial deformity,--a sensitiveness that caused her to shrink from
showing the child even to so intimate a friend as her husband’s future
biographer, may have originated in maternal tenderness, quite as much as
in wounded maternal vanity. Still, though no one of them would warrant an
unhesitating inference to her disadvantage, and all of them are
susceptible of explanation that would relieve her maternal character of
the imputation resulting from them, it must be admitted that the morbid
sensitiveness, the employment of the wet-nurse, and the extraordinary
self-possession or apathy during the operation, are three facts, to
justify a suspicion that the young mother was deficient in parental
tenderness.
But to prove that her nature was defective in this respect, would raise no
presumption that she was characterized by similar coldness towards her
husband. The presumption would, indeed, be in the contrary direction; for
instances are afforded at every turn to the social observer, of women who,
whilst cold to their offspring, are passionately devoted to their
husbands. There is no evidence that Harriett ever evinced any
extraordinary devotion to her husband, or any love of him surpassing a
girl’s ordinary liking for a youthful husband. Having regard to all the
circumstances of her married life,--circumstances peculiarly unfavourable
to the development of the domestic affections,--most readers of this page
will concur with me in holding, that it would have been very strange, had
Harriett loved her husband in the highest conceivable degree, or indeed
with any fervour surpassing the warmth of ordinary conjugal attachment.
Still, in justice to her, it should be borne in mind that a young woman
may be at the same time a coldly amiable mother and a passionately loving
wife.
It would be more important to ascertain, in what degree Shelley was
animated by parental affectionateness. On this point the authorities are
in conflict. Whilst Hogg thought his friend singularly wanting in parental
tenderness and emotionality, so far as Ianthe was concerned, Peacock
declares Shelley to have been ‘extremely fond’ of Ianthe when she was an
infant-in-arms. To put implicit confidence in Hogg is to believe that
Ianthe’s arrival neither ‘afforded’ her father ‘any gratification,’ nor
‘created an interest’ in him. Never _speaking_ to Hogg of the infant,
Shelley never _wrote_ to him about her, except in the single letter, dated
from Bracknell on 16th March, 1814, where he rails against his
sister-in-law as ‘a blind and loathsome worm,’ even as he had formerly in
an epistle to the same correspondent railed against the Brown Demon, who,
after being worshipt by him for her angelic excellencies, became in a few
months ‘the hermaphroditical beast of a woman.’
On the other hand, in support of his opinion that Shelley was ‘extremely
fond’ of Ianthe, Peacock tells how the father ‘would walk up and down a
room with it in his arms for a long time together, singing to it a
monotonous melody of his own making.’ Peacock says further, ‘His song was,
_Yáhmani, Yáhmani, Yáhmani, Yáhmani!_ It did not please me; but, what was
more important, it pleased the child, and lulled it when it was fretful.
Shelley was extremely fond of his children. He was pre-eminently an
affectionate father.’ To most readers Peacock’s example of the poet’s
parental tenderness will fail to prove the large allegation that he ‘was
pre-eminently an affectionate father.’ Ordinary humanity and selfishness
will account for the pains he took to lull the child, as he could not fly
to Maimuna’s drawing-room whenever it raised its sharp, wailing cry. To do
what Shelley did, is only to do what is done by almost every young father
who, with a babe in his home, has not a good nursery at a convenient
distance from the room he inhabits, but must perforce endure its screams
or make it leave off screaming.
Fortunately there is another witness to be called, who is in some respects
a better witness than either Peacock or Hogg; for, on making his
observations, he had come to a period of life entitling him to be credited
with more discretion than either of them possessed in 1813. Moreover, in
1822, when, Trelawny knew the poet, Shelley had arrived at a period of
life when parental love is invariably stronger than at manhood’s
threshold, and in burying his eldest boy by Mary Godwin, had made
acquaintance with the sorrow that never fails to quicken the sufferer’s
disposition to love his offspring. On the other hand, it must be admitted,
somewhat to his discredit, that this witness opens his evidence with a
most erroneous statement. A clever man of the world, and a shrewd student
of character, Trelawny came to a confident opinion that Shelley was not
the ‘pre-eminently affectionate father’ Peacock declares him. Trelawny’s
testimony to this point is weakened by the fact that he prefaced it with a
declaration which no student of the poet’s story will hesitate to reject
as wrong. On 22nd April, 1872, towards the close of his career, Trelawny
reiterated to Mr. Rossetti an opinion, which he had expressed on previous
occasions, ‘that Shelley cared nothing for children;’ and in illustration
of the poet’s comparative indifference for his own child, told how in his
presence ‘Shelley stepped over his own child, Percy, near the threshold of
the house, without observing that it was Percy until the nurse told him.’
On this occasion, to Trelawny’s jocular reference to the proverbial saying
that a man must be wise to know his own children, the poet remarked, ‘A
wise man wouldn’t have any.’
In saying that Shelley cared nothing for children, Trelawny, of course,
made a mistake, showing how little the shrewd man of the world knew of the
poet; a mistake to be regarded as a rash inference from insufficient data.
To remember how Shelley fed the little girl with bread-and-milk at Oxford;
to remember how the troop of nakedized children rushed downstairs on
hearing his rap at the street-door; to remember how he nursed Allegra in
her infancy, rolled the billiard-balls about the table with her at Venice,
and raced at her heels along the passages of the Bagna Cavallo convent; to
remember all the pleasant stories of his intercourse with little people,
is to remember how he resembled Byron in liking to make playmates of
children. But, though Shelley certainly cared enough for children to enjoy
their prattle, it does not follow that Trelawny (an honest and
unimaginative man) is otherwise than a good witness to facts which took
place under his eyes. Wrong in the mere matter of opinion, he holds the
confidence of his hearers when he speaks to facts. Few readers will
hesitate in accepting the Cornish gentleman’s evidence that he saw Shelley
step over his little boy, and could remember Shelley did not recognize the
minute urchin till the nurse spoke to him. The man, who, on stumbling
over the infant, failed to recognize his own two-years-old child (a child
ever about the house; a child with whom he had played for hours together
in the previous year) cannot have been a father, in whom parental instinct
was strongly operative. Such a man may be a conscientious and beneficent
parent, but it is impossible for him to be a pre-eminently affectionate
father to his children during their tender infancy. To enjoy playing with
children is not the same thing as to love them. A kindly man will soothe
them when they are fretful, and yet feel for them no sort of tenderness
that is akin to parental affection. That Peacock inferred too much from
Shelley’s practice of nursing and lulling Ianthe, appears from the fact
that at Marlow he acted in the same way to Allegra.
To say that parental affection was not powerful in Shelley is not to raise
a question respecting his general elevation of character, for the mere
strength and activity of the parental sentiment afford no data for
estimating the degree in which a man is endowed with the higher virtues.
The mean and selfish often delight in their children, and on the other
hand the humane and lofty-natured are sometimes by no means remarkable for
solicitude for their own offspring. Why then am I at so much pains to call
attention to the evidence that Shelley was not strongly interested in his
first-born child, and that in this particular Harriett resembled him? In
order that, whilst considering the circumstances which resulted in the
poet’s separation from his wife, the reader may remember there is no
reason for thinking the youthful couple were strongly influenced by the
affection, that so often draws a husband and wife into stronger sympathy,
and sometimes counteracts the forces that, but for it, would drive them
asunder.
It was probably before Harriett’s accouchement, and whilst her physical
condition, without disposing her to keep indoors, rendered bodily exercise
more and more trying to her, that Shelley gave his wife the carriage which
afforded Hogg the materials for one of his drollest anecdotes. How the
carriage was horsed, and in what way the occupant of lodgings procured the
servants needful for putting the vehicle on the London pavement, does not
appear. Probably the requisite men and animals were provided on credit by
the keeper of the livery-yard where the carriage was housed. It is,
however, certain that, instead of being ‘jobbed,’ the vehicle was bought
by Shelley of a coach-maker, who had not parted with the coach many weeks
when he sued his customer for its price, one of the consequences of the
tradesman’s efforts to get his money being that Hogg, through the
blundering of a brace of bailiffs, was momentarily arrested on the writ
issued for his friend’s apprehension. The coach-builder’s action shows
clearly that, in selling the carriage to Shelley, he imagined himself
selling it to a customer of legal age. It does not, however, follow that
Shelley made any misstatement of his years in order to get possession of
the vehicle. On buying the carriage, it was, of course, incumbent on him
to let the tradesman know he was dealing with a minor; and it is
conceivable that Shelley either spoke to the man in terms which should
have enlightened him on this point, or had reason for believing the
tradesman knew him to be under age. Had Shelley been heir to an estate,
into the actual possession of which he would come a few months later, the
purchase of the coach would have been no act of egregious imprudence, but
as the estate to which he might eventually succeed would not come to him
till the death of his father, the poet’s action in setting up his
carriage, when he was deeply in debt, and had no income apart from the
precarious 400_l._, may be fairly called a droll extravagance.
9.--BRACKNELL.
Under the circumstances, no reader will suspect Lady Shelley of wanting
evidence to support her statement that, in the summer of 1813, ‘Shelley
was in severe pecuniary distress.’ However successful they may be in
getting credit and staving off their creditors, people who live showily on
just nothing a-year are usually in severe pecuniary distress. What with
the cost of producing 250 copies of _Queen Mab_ on fine paper, the cost of
lodgings in so fashionable a thoroughfare as Half-Moon Street, the
expenses of Harriett’s carriage, the fees to the taciturn Quaker physician
who attended her, and now the wages of Ianthe’s wet-nurse, Shelley
certainly lived in London from April to mid-July as extravagantly as he
had lived at Tanyrallt. It is, therefore, conceivable that, before ‘going
out of town,’ Shelley often found himself sorely in want of a five-pound
note, a sovereign, ay, even of half-a-crown.
Conceivable also is it that Shelley imagined he could retrench his
expenses at Bracknell, and that therefore Lady Shelley may be in
possession of documentary evidence that he spoke of his migration to
Bracknell as an economical movement. But writing ‘from authentic sources’
of information, Lady Shelley can scarcely have been justified in writing
of her husband’s father that, ‘for the purpose of economy, he retired to a
small cottage in Berkshire,’ as though he went to Bracknell solely for
cheap rural existence. Shelley went to Bracknell in order to be near
Maimuna, who had her country-house there. Lady Shelley, with her
‘authentic sources,’ cannot have been unaware that the youthful poet moved
to Bracknell for the enjoyment of gentle and soothing intercourse with
Maimuna. It is inconceivable that Lady Shelley never heard of Maimuna, her
home at Bracknell, and Shelley’s passion for her. Yet she represents that
Shelley’s motive for going to Bracknell was purely economical. There is no
reference to Maimuna in the whole of Lady Shelley’s book. It is thus that
Shelley’s extravagant admirers produce biography of him from ‘authentic
sources.’
Taking a cottage at Bracknell, in order to be near Mrs. Boinville,
Shelley, during his tenure of the ‘High Elms,’ lived in a way that,
instead of being economical, might almost be styled prodigal. He made a
costly trip to Edinburgh and the English lakes, posting in his carriage.
He was frequently running from the Berkshire parish up to town, journeying
sometimes on foot, but necessarily spending money or running deeper into
debt for accommodation at London hotels. At least, on one occasion, he had
seven guests staying with him in his Berkshire cottage at the same time,
the whole family of the vegetarian Newtons. It is true that Shelley at
this period of his career was a vegetarian, and abstained from wine and
all spirits, except the spirit that came to him through the neck of the
laudanum-bottle; but at times during this term he drank laudanum freely,
and laudanum, bought of West-London druggists, is no cheap drink. There
was not much economy in this way of living.
There is a conflict between the authorities as to the particular year in
which Shelley paid his last visit to Field Place; for whilst Hogg
represents the visit to have been made in the early summer of 1814, Lady
Shelley is no less certain that it was an affair of the late summer of
1813. Though with all his inaccuracy Hogg is much less inaccurate than
Lady Shelley, several circumstances cause me to think the lady right on
this point, albeit two or three matters dispose me to think she may have
been mistaken. The balance of the evidence is, however, so greatly in her
favour that (whilst cautioning readers that they may even yet be required
to postpone the visit into the following year) I venture to record that,
soon after migrating to Bracknell, Shelley started from his cottage on
foot for his old home, whither his mother had invited him to come in the
absence of his father and the three younger children.
At Field Place the poet was received cordially by his mother and two
eldest sisters, and had the society of Mr. Kennedy, a young officer
(_ætat._ 16) stationed at Horsham, to whose pen we are indebted for the
greater part of what is known of Bysshe’s last visit to his former home.
From this chronicler it appears that Bysshe accepted his mother’s
invitation on the understanding that his father and the younger children
would be away, and that his visit would be withheld from the Squire’s
knowledge. There are, however, grounds for suspecting that the Squire on
leaving his home for a few days was aware who would visit it in his
absence, though Shelley came to Field Place under the impression that, to
shield his mother from the wrath that would visit her in case of
discovery, he must take care to keep his presence at the house from the
cognizance of neighbours.
Some thirty or more years later Captain Kennedy recalled how, before
setting out for a walk beyond the limits of the Field Place demesne, he (a
sixteen-years-old ensign) and the poet used to exchange their outer
garments, so that the disguise of a scarlet uniform should render the
Warnham peasants less likely to recognize their Squire’s son. It lived in
Captain Kennedy’s recollection how, though he had a small pate, his
military cap was so much too large for Percy that it was found needful to
pad the lining liberally for his use. But because Shelley saw a necessity
for dressing himself out in this fashion, and, doubtless, enjoyed the fun
of masquerading about the Warnham lanes in a red coat, it does not follow
there was any need for the disguise. That Captain Kennedy resembled the
biographer for whose benefit he racked his recollection, and all other
persons who try to recall clearly what they can only remember vaguely, in
permitting his fancy to aid his memory, appears from one or two passages
of his entertaining narrative. Though the exchange of costumes was a
matter to live in the memory of either masquerader, it is difficult to
believe the Captain could recollect (some thirty or forty years
afterwards) that Shelley wore ‘an old black coat,’ which had been ‘done
up, and smartened with metal buttons and a velvet collar.’ To believe all
the Captain says about this seedy and re-trimmed garment, is to believe
that Shelley (the young gentleman who a few weeks since had set up his
carriage) dressed thus meanly because he was too generous ever to have any
money in his pocket, and too precisely honourable to run in debt.
A passage from the Captain’s narrative, as it was originally offered to
the world in Hogg’s second volume, may be given both as an example of the
deponent’s evidence, and as an illustration of the editorial carelessness
by which Hogg enabled his enemies to charge him with falsifying
documents:--
‘He told me,’ says Captain Kennedy, ‘Sir James was intimate with one
to whom, as he said, he owed everything; from whose book, _Political
Justice_, he had derived all that was valuable in knowledge and
virtue. He discoursed with eloquence and enthusiasm, but his views
seemed to me exquisitely metaphysical, and by no means clear, precise,
or decided. He told me he had already read the Bible in Hebrew four
times. He was then only twenty-two years of age. _Shelley never learnt
Hebrew; he probably said in Greek, for he was much addicted to reading
the Septuagint._ He spoke of the Supreme Being as of infinite mercy
and benevolence. He disclosed no fixed views of spiritual things; all
seemed wild and fanciful.’
Observe the words of the extract which I have printed in italics. To any
careful peruser of those words and their context, it is obvious that the
words, though printed as a substantial part of the Captain’s narrative,
were not penned by him. The words ‘twenty-two years of age,’ that
immediately precede them, and the words ‘He spoke of the Supreme Being,’
that follow them immediately, are words of the Captain’s writing. But he
cannot be imagined to have written the words, ‘Shelley never learnt
Hebrew; he probably said in Greek, for he was much addicted to reading the
Septuagint.’ The interpolation is one of Hogg’s editorial notes, which he
intended to be printed between brackets and duly ‘initialed.’ Printed
thus, ‘(Shelley never learnt Hebrew; he probably said in Greek, for he was
much addicted to reading the Septuagint. T. J. H.)’ the interpolation
could not have been maliciously declared a falsification of the text.
When Lady Shelley, after staying Hogg’s work midway and discharging him
with public discourtesy, produced her not invariably accurate _Shelley
Memorials_, she reproduced Hogg’s portions of Captain Kennedy’s narrative
with alterations in amendment, omitting (as she surely had a right to do)
Hogg’s editorial interpolation; omitting Captain Kennedy’s words ‘in
Hebrew’ (which she surely had no right to do without stating she had the
Captain’s authority for doing so), and changing ‘twenty-two years old’
into ‘twenty years’ (an alteration she would have been fully justified in
making on the strength of sufficient documentary evidence without
consulting Captain Kennedy on the point). One point more in respect to
Captain Kennedy’s narrative. As Shelley had no sure belief in the
existence of the Supreme Deity at this period of his existence, it must be
concluded either that he did not speak of the Supreme Being’s infinite
mercy and benevolence in the manner alleged by Captain Kennedy, or that
he, in so speaking, was insincere.
In connection with Shelley’s last visit to his home a few words may be
here said more appropriately than they would have been said in a previous
chapter. In the letter written by Shelley on 26th November, 1811, from
Keswick to Mr. Medwin, Sen., appear these words:--
‘Whitton has written to me to state the impropriety of my letter to my
mother and sister; this letter I have returned with a passing remark
on the back of it. I find that the affair on which those letters spoke
is become the general gossip of the idle newsmongers of Horsham--they
give me credit for having invented it. They do my invention much
honour, but greatly discredit their own penetration.’
From these words it is obvious that Shelley, before 26th November, 1811,
had written to his mother and sister a letter that appeared to his father
an epistle, to be answered by the family solicitor, Mr. Whitton. It is
also obvious that the letter, so answered by the family solicitor, and the
letter written in reply to it by the same solicitor, related to some
affair which, on coming to the knowledge of certain persons of Horsham,
had caused them to declare it no true affair, but a thing invented by
Shelley. Apart from this information respecting the affair which Horsham
people declared a falsehood, I know nothing, except that Medwin (_vide_
_Life_, p. 169, 170) speaks of it thus:--
‘The affair here referred to is little to the purpose; but during Sir
Timothy’s absence in London, on his parliamentary duties, Lady
Shelley invited Shelley to Field Place, where he was received, to use
his own words, with much _shew-affection_. Some days after he had been
there his mother produced a parchment deed which she asked him to
sign, to what purport I know not; but he declined so doing, and which
he told me he would have signed had he not seen through the false
varnish of hypocritical caresses. This anecdote is not idle gossip,
but comes from Shelley himself.’
If Shelley had the folly in or before his twentieth year to write or say
that, when only just nineteen years old or younger, he was at a private
conference between them entreated by his mother to sign a legal
instrument, which she then and there produced for him to sign, the Horsham
gossip-mongers on coming to hear the story may well have burst out
laughing and declared it an invention. But till I have better evidence to
the point than this statement by Medwin, I must decline to believe that
his note describes accurately ‘the affair,’ which occasioned the exchange
of letters, though I am quite prepared to find that the correspondence
referred to some cock-and-bull story. I cannot, however, refuse to believe
that Shelley, on being spoken to about the passage of the Keswick letter,
did really give the explanation which Medwin declares he received from
Shelley himself. Medwin’s inexactness is proverbial. He is almost as
inaccurate as Lady Shelley. But none of his inaccuracies, nor all of them
taken together, raise suspicion of his good faith. He was gullible and at
times curiously addle-pated; but he was no inventor of untruths. When the
errors of his book about Byron raised an outcry, he could produce
note-books to show he was an honest collector of gossip, though a
credulous and undiscerning one. The wild fictions of the _Conversations_
were not Medwinian falsehoods, but pure Byronic ‘bams.’ Distrustful though
I am of Medwin’s statements, I have no mistrust of his honour. When he
gives me his word of honour that a certain statement was made to him, I
neither doubt that some such statement was made, nor doubt that he reports
honestly, though with a greater or less degree of inexactness. I do not
question that Shelley spoke to him about the affair, and the passage of
the Keswick letter; and I am disposed to think that, on being questioned
about the passage of the epistle, Shelley may have imagined it to refer,
and said that it referred, to some vaguely remembered matter, which
instead of taking place in 1811 was an incident of his last visit to Field
Place in 1813.
Be it remembered that two distant cousins and close companions have
several points of mental resemblance; one of them being the inexactitude
that renders Medwin’s volumes so comparatively worthless, and Shelley’s
soberest statements about his personal story so unreliable. It is
conceivable that what Shelley said about his mother’s endeavour to lure
him into signing a parchment-deed, was his vague and inexact recollection
of some incident of his last visit to the old home. Of course, it is not
to be imagined she produced a legal instrument and asked him to put his
signature forthwith to the writing. But it is conceivable that, feeling
with her husband on the question of entailing the estate, and knowing the
purport of the memorable October, 1811, codicil of Sir Bysshe’s will
(which would require her son to join in the entailment of the estates A
and B on pain of forfeiting all interest in his grandsire’s much larger
possessions) she undertook to use her influence to win from him a written
promise, that he would in due course join in the arrangement, which was
desired by his parents even more for his sake than for the sake of ‘the
family.’ What more natural than for the lady to say to her husband, ‘Leave
me to deal with Bysshe, and I will do my best to persuade him to act
rightly’?
In the autumn following this last visit to Field Place (if Lady Shelley is
right in assigning the visit to the summer of 1813, which I think her to
be), or the autumn preceding the same visit (if Hogg is right in ascribing
the visit to the early summer of 1814), Shelley,--moving about for the
sake of change, and also perhaps because domestic considerations made him
feel it would be well for him to pass a few weeks at a distance from
Maimuna’s abode,--made the already mentioned trip to Scotland and the
Cumberland lakes, with his wife, Miss Westbrook, and Thomas Love Peacock.
At Edinburgh on 21st October, 1813, the tourists were still there on 26th
November, 1813, when Shelley wrote Hogg a letter containing six
superlatively noteworthy words in this otherwise noteworthy sentence:
‘I am happy to hear that you have returned to London, as I shall
shortly have the pleasure of seeing you again. _I shall return to
London alone._ My evenings will often be spent at the N’s, where, I
presume, you are no unfrequent visitor.’
Though no critic has hitherto called attention to the general inaccuracy
of her misleading book, Lady Shelley had scarcely published her _Shelley
Memorials: From Authentic Sources_, when she was assailed with unusual
severity for the utter wrongness of a particular statement which, had it
not been for the context, would have deserved no reprehension. On coming
to speak of Shelley’s severance from Harriett, Lady Shelley gives these
words in a separate paragraph:--
‘Towards the close of 1813 estrangements, which for some time had been
slowly growing between Mr. and Mrs. Shelley, came to a crisis.
Separation ensued; and Mrs. Shelley returned to her father’s house.
Here she gave birth to her second child--a son, who died in 1826.’
Had Mr. Peacock objected to this curious specimen of close writing that,
by omitting all reference to the graver estrangements of the earlier
months of 1814, Lady Shelley gave her readers the erroneous impression
that the estrangements and crisis of 1813 were the immediate and only
cause of the separation that took place towards the middle of the ensuing
year, he would have had the general concurrence of discreet and critical
readers of the Shelleyan story. But Peacock contended that no
estrangements had occurred in 1813 between Shelley and Harriett, and that
therefore no estrangements between them could have come to a crisis
towards the close of that year. ‘Thus,’ says Mr. Peacock, ‘there had been
no estrangement to the end of 1812. My own memory sufficiently attests
that there was none in 1813,’--strong and notable language from the
eminent man of letters, who, accompanying the Shelleys to the Cumberland
lakes, Edinburgh, and other places (including Matlock), in October and
November, was their close companion till the end of the year; very notable
language from the man who was the daily companion of the youthful husband
and wife in the northern capital, whence Shelley dated the letter to Hogg
containing those six words, ‘I shall return to London alone.’
To apprehend the significance of these six words, readers must remember
that in 1813 a journey to Edinburgh was a more laborious and costly affair
than a trip to Rome in these days of punctual steamers and fast trains. If
a party of four persons,--a young husband with his young wife,
sister-in-law, and a male friend,--should start now-a-days from London for
a trip to Rome, with the intention of staying there six weeks, and before
the expiration of the time the young husband (being no man of affairs,
likely to call him suddenly back to England) should write to a familiar
friend in London, ‘I shall shortly have the pleasure of seeing you again.
I shall return to London alone,’ what inference would the receiver of the
epistle naturally draw from so startling an announcement? Surely he would
conclude that there was discord in the party, that ‘something had gone
wrong,’ and that the disagreement affected the young wife’s relations with
her husband, who had resolved to return to England by himself, leaving her
to follow him.
On reviewing the chief features of the poet’s life at Bracknell in the
summer and early autumn, no reader can question that they indicated on
Shelley’s part discontent with his home, and on Harriett’s part more or
less annoyance at finding herself an insufficient companion for him. In
her rural retirement she had even less of his society than when they were
in London. Most of the time spent by him at home he spent with a book or
pen in hand. As soon as he had done reading and writing, he took his hat
and went for a solitary walk that, wherever else his path led him, never
failed to take him to Maimuna’s house standing at a considerable distance
from Harriett’s cottage:--to the house of the woman whom he regarded and
declared ‘the most admirable specimen of a human being he had ever seen.’
Going daily to Mrs. Boinville’s house, he spent hours at a time with her,
reading poetry and philosophy with her, communing with her on fine
questions touching the perfectibility of the human species, and still more
delicate questions about the source, nature, and activity of the emotional
energies,--conversations that afforded him daily opportunities, for
studying ‘the extreme subtlety and delicacy of Mrs. Boinville’s
understanding and affections.’ If he went to her house in the evening it
was no uncommon thing for him to stay with her and her friends, talking
and drinking strong tea till long after midnight, and to re-enter his
cottage at dawn. Consulting Maimuna on the affairs of his highest
intellectual interests, he consulted her also on his divers domestic
anxieties and mere matters of the house. Is it conceivable that Harriett
liked all this?
In her annoyance at Percy’s devotion to his spiritual bride, the whiteness
of Maimuna’s tresses afforded Harriett little comfort. To the young wife
it was a poor consolation to reflect that the enchantress was old enough
to be Percy’s mother, that he valued her chiefly for the subtlety of her
intellect and the delicacy of her affections, that he worshiped her
platonically. Of given forces, acting under certain conditions, the
scientist can predict the consequences with unerring precision. The
chemist does not require evidence of what ensued from the combination of
particular elements in stated proportions. In like manner the competent
personal historian knows what must have resulted from certain positions.
Without direct documentary evidence to their existence, Lady Shelley would
have been justified in saying that towards the close of 1813
‘estrangements had been slowly growing between Mr. and Mrs. Shelley,’ and
that the estrangements came at that time to _a_ crisis. But she had
documentary evidence for both assertions. Towards the close of 1813
Shelley wrote those six words to Hogg, ‘I shall return to London alone.’
If Peacock knew nothing of these dissensions, it only shows that Shelley
and Harriett had the good taste and discretion to keep their discord from
his cognizance. It is, however, conceivable that he was aware of the
Edinburgh dissensions, without regarding them of sufficient magnitude to
be termed estrangements. A subsequent passage of his second Shelleyan
paper indicates that this was the case. There are, of course,
estrangements and estrangements; and it is usual for conjugal
estrangements to have several crises before coming to the extreme
crisis--of separation. An estrangement may be nothing more than a serious
quarrel, which, though ‘made up,’ results in a weakening of mutual
affection; it may be a more or less complete alienation of affection,
unattended with personal severance, or even any wish for personal
severance; it may be such a state of discord as quickly results in
personal severance; it may be the total cessation of all intercourse.
Peacock was obviously thinking of one or the other of the two most
aggravated kinds of estrangement when he wrote, ‘There was no
estrangement; no shadow of a thought of separation, till Shelley became
acquainted, not long after the second marriage, with the lady who was
subsequently his second wife.’ Peacock may have been right in this
opinion, and certainly had fairly good grounds for it, though I question
whether they were sufficient. But if he, using the word in one of its
extreme senses, was justified in holding his opinion, it would still
remain that Lady Shelley, using the word in one of the less vehement
senses, was justified in speaking of the estrangements, which came to _a_
crisis before the end of 1813. But even so, Lady Shelley was wrong in
writing so as to lead her readers to infer that the crisis of 1813 was
the direct and immediate cause of the separation of 1814.
One of the noteworthy facts connected with Shelley’s journey in the autumn
of 1813 to the Cumberland lakes, and Edinburgh, is that he made the trip
in his own carriage drawn by post horses,--the costliest way of travelling
seventy years since. In London he could get horses from a livery-stable on
credit; but for post-horses taken for the stage, ‘the immediate heir to
one of the first fortunes of England’ must have paid at once. As Peacock
was at that time a poor man of letters he cannot be supposed to have
contributed anything towards the cost of the journey, though he possibly
paid his own hotel-bills. The charges of the trip must have fallen
chiefly, if not altogether, on Shelley,--the young gentleman who, at this
term of his career, is represented as wearing furbished-up clothes,
because he could not afford to buy new ones. Mr. Medwin, of Horsham, could
probably have told how his youthful client obtained the money that enabled
him to execute this feat of prodigality.
Before the present narrative deals with incidents of 1814 notice should be
taken of a trivial literary performance, and a piece of important literary
labour, that pertain to the record of the year in which the poet attained
his majority. Reprinting the Vegetarian Note to _Queen Mab_, with a few
alterations and additions of no moment, he published it in the form of a
tract that was offered for sale by a medical bookseller at eighteen pence
a copy; the date of publication being subsequent to the secret issue of
the poem. To the later months of the same year may also be attributed the
labour of writing the _Refutation of Deism_, which is believed to have
been published (at least in the _legal_ sense of the term) at the
beginning of 1814,--the year given on the title-page.