FROM THE OLD TO THE NEW LOVE.
Shelley’s Refusal to join in the Resettlement of A and B--His Places
of Residence in Two Years and Eight Months--_A Refutation of
Deism_--Mr. Kegan Paul’s Inaccuracies--Discord between Shelley and
Harriett--Their Remarriage--Miss Westbrook’s Withdrawal--Shelley’s
Desertion of Harriett--The Desertion closes in Separation by mutual
Agreement--‘Do what other women do!’--Causes of the Separation--How
Shelley’s Evidence touching them should be regarded--Peacock’s
Testimony for Harriett--Shelley in Skinner Street--‘The Mask of
Scorn’--Mary Godwin _not_ bred up to mate in Free Contract--Old St.
Pancras Church--At Mary Wollstonecraft’s Grave--Claire’s Part in the
Wooing--Excuses for Mary Godwin--The Elopement from Skinner
Street--From London to Dover--From Dover to Calais--A ‘Scene’ at
Calais--The Joint Journal--Mrs. Shelley convicted of Tampering with
Evidence--The Six Weeks’ Tour--Shelley begs Harriett to come to him in
Switzerland--Byron’s Hunger for Evil Fame--Shelley’s Self-Approbation
and Self-Righteousness--Godwin’s Wrath with Shelley--Their subsequent
Relations--Shelley’s Renewal of Intercourse with Harriett--Tiffs and
Disagreements between Claire and Mary--Claire’s Incapacity for
Friendship--She wants more than Friendship from Shelley.
On coming of age, Shelley was pressed to join in the resettlement of the
estates A and B, in accordance with the directions of his grandfather’s
will and codicil. Instead of yielding to this pressure, he firmly refused
to join in the arrangement on which his father and grandfather were set;
and by so refusing he forfeited for himself and issue all the interest
assigned to him and them, in the far larger property, by the will. The
choice was given to him to elect between surrendering the estate secured
to him by existing settlements, and taking in lieu thereof the position
and interest appointed to him by his grandfather’s will in the greater
estate, or retaining his interest in A and B, and foregoing participation
alike for himself and issue in C. Shelley deliberately elected to hold
what was already secured to him, and to forego all interest under his
grandfather’s will. On 21st June, 1813, he wrote to Mr. Medwin, Senr., in
his own perverse way about what was his _grandfather’s_ arrangement:
‘Depend upon it, that no artifice of my _father’s_ shall induce me to
take a life-interest in the estate;’ and he held to this resolution. By
being as good as his word on this matter, he may be said to have
disinherited himself and his issue out of the very large entailed estate,
created by his grandfather’s wealth. Religious sentiment and political
opinion had nothing whatever to do with the arrangement in which he
refused to concur. There must be an end to the romantic notion that the
poet was disinherited, or in some way extruded from his boyhood’s home and
proper place in his family, by the merciless elders of his house, at the
instigation of religious bigotry and political resentment.
Shelley’s refusal to concur in the arrangement could be more easily
accounted for, if there were evidence before the world that his
grandfather and father required him to take a mere life-interest in lieu
of his larger interest in A and B, and during their lives to rely wholly
on their generosity for an income, sufficient for his necessities and the
payment of the considerable debts contracted by him during his
minority,--debts for which he was responsible in honour, though not in
law. But whilst there is no evidence before the world that the sire and
grandsire made any such requirement, there exists considerable (though by
no means conclusive) evidence that by acceding to the wishes of his
domestic elders in respect to the resettlement of A and B, he would have a
large assured income during their lives:--even (according to one account)
so large an income as 2000_l._ a-year, which would certainly have been
sufficient for his current necessities and the payment of his creditors.
One would like to know more of the negotiations between the young man and
his elders, that resulted in his final refusal to re-settle A and B,
notwithstanding the purport of the momentous codicil. Field Place,
doubtless, could impart the desired knowledge; but Field Place is not
likely to throw fuller light on the romantic inaccuracies of Lady
Shelley’s _Shelley Memorials_.
My impression is that Mr. Medwin, the elder, was mainly accountable for
the action by which Shelley put himself outside his original domestic
circle, and closed the doors of his ‘boyhood’s home’ against himself for
ever. The solicitor, who undertook in the summer of 1813 to see his young
friend ‘through his difficulties,’ had reasons of self-interest, and also
of resentment, for drawing him into deeper difficulty. He had lent him
money, and saw it would be more to his advantage to have for his client
the tenant in tail male of A and B in remainder expectant, than to have
for his client a young man with nothing but a contingent life-interest in
an estate to which he might never succeed. At the same time, the Horsham
solicitor participated in his youthful client’s animosity against the
Squire of Field Place, who had on a recent occasion treated him with
insolence, if not with personal violence. The evidence is clear that the
lawyer encouraged his youthful client to oppose his father and
grandfather; and like most wilful men, Shelley was ever easily managed by
the person to whom he gave his confidence for the moment. The lawyer’s
influence and his youthful client’s antagonism to the elders of his House
are sufficient to account for Shelley’s firmness in ‘holding his own’ at a
great sacrifice; but the evidences are still wanting for a perfect account
of the motives which made him disinherit himself and his issue out of the
bulk of the family property. After taking a course attended with painful
consequences, it was like Shelley to call it the course of duty and
self-sacrifice. Readers may dismiss with a smile the notion that he
declined to resettle A and B _as_ C, because his conscience would not
permit him to join in an immoral arrangement which, whilst diminishing his
own capacity for beneficent action, might put vast power in the hands of a
fool or scoundrel. Religious sentiment and political morality had no more
to do with Shelley’s refusal than with Sir Bysshe’s codicil.
Returning from Scotland to London shortly before Christmas, 1813, Shelley,
after a brief stay in town, took a furnished house for two or three months
at Windsor, whence he migrated in the early spring to Binfield, where he
still nominally resided at the time of his withdrawal from his wife. Thus
during the two years and nine months of their association in wedlock,
Shelley and Harriett stayed for six weeks in (1) Edinburgh, sojourned for
awhile at (2) York, tarried for three months at (3) Keswick, lived nine
weeks at (4) Dublin, tarried for something over two months at (5)
Nantgwillt, spent something more than nine weeks at (6) Lynton, lived for
a fortnight or so at (7) Tanyrallt, came for six weeks to (8) London,
returned for something like fourteen weeks to (9) Tanyrallt, made a second
trip to (10) Dublin, flew off to (11) Killarney, passed a season in (12)
London, tenanted a cottage in (13) Bracknell, revisited (14) the
Cumberland lakes and (15) Edinburgh, inhabited a house at (16) Windsor,
and dwelt in a cottage at (17) Binfield. To realize their restlessness,
the reader must remember that they had two and even three successive
places of abode in some of the parishes they visited. Besides hotels which
they entered for bed and board in the course of their wanderings, they
inhabited some nineteen different houses or sets of lodgings in
thirty-three months. What a life of vagabondage! How little calculated was
such a way of living to dispose the ramblers to seek enjoyment in simple
domestic interests! Hogg laughs at Harriett’s ignorance of housewifely
arts, and her inability even to order the wretched dinners served in her
successive lodgings. No wonder that the poor child, who never had a house
of her own to keep, was a simpleton at house-keeping!
In 1814 (according to Hogg, at the beginning of the year) Shelley
published (in the legal, if not in the commercial sense of the term) _A
Refutation of Deism: In a Dialogue_.
Had it been Shelley’s purpose to give a suitable title to the performance,
which in style contrasts so favourably with his earlier prose writings, he
would have named it ‘A Dialogue for the Fuller Demonstration of the
Necessity of Atheism.’ But it was his design to give the pamphlet a title,
that should throw dust in the eyes of his orthodox enemies, and cause
persons to buy the book, who would not wilfully open an atheistical
treatise. With the same deceptive purpose he concocted the preface, which
opens with these words:--
‘The object of the following dialogue is to prove that the system of
Deism is untenable. It is attempted to show that there is no
alternative between Atheism and Christianity; that the evidences of
the Being of a God are to be deduced from no other principles than
those of Divine Revelation. The author endeavours to show how much the
cause of natural and revealed religion has suffered from the mode of
defence adopted by Theosophistical Christians. How far he will
accomplish what he proposed to himself, in the composition of this
dialogue, the world will finally determine.’
In the whole range of English literature, it would be difficult to point
to a preface, containing a larger number of misstatements and false
suggestions in so few words. The object of the dialogue is to prove that
Christianity and Deism are alike untenable. Shelley’s aim in the dialogue
is to prove that the evidences of the Being of God can be deduced neither
from the principles of Deism, nor from those of the so-styled Christian
Revelation, and that, after reviewing the arguments for Christianity and
the arguments for Atheism, the logical reader will not hesitate to embrace
the latter.
Were it not for his want of a quality so conspicuous in Byron, one would
suspect Shelley of grim humour in making the arguments for Atheism proceed
from a Christian’s mouth. But Eusebes, the Christian of the dialogue, is
not so much a Christian as an Atheist disguised as a Christian,--the
disguise being one of the mystifications employed by the author to veil
his insidious purpose. Whilst the Christian of the dialogue may be
described as an Atheist in disguise, Theosophus is less a Deist than a
mere derider of Christianity. He urges little in favour of Deism, and that
little he utters faintly, in comparison with his arguments against
Christianity. For every page of the Deist’s arguments in support of Deism,
the dialogue affords nearly eight pages to the direct discredit of
Christianity. The mystification, that results from the author’s adroit
handling of his two argumentative puppets, is even more effective than the
mystification resulting from the title-page and preface. What the author,
with all his boldness, would have hesitated to say in his own person, to
the dishonour of the national faith, he felt he could utter with
comparative safety through the lips of a Deist, who is thoroughly beaten
on the deistical questions by a Christian. On the other hand, the
atheistical arguments that could scarcely fail to expose him to
prosecution for blasphemy, Shelley thought he could utter with impunity,
or at least with smaller risk of legal chastisement, if he uttered them
through the mouth of a Christian, who should be represented as offering
them to his companion, merely for the sake of purging his mind of
deistical trash, and driving him to embrace Christianity.
Theosophus (the derider of Christianity who affects to be a Deist) having
done his best to demolish Christianity, Eusebes (the Atheist who affects
to be a Christian) directs the fire of his polemical guns against the
belief in a supreme Deity; and it is in this later portion of the dialogue
that the reader comes upon the most important of the arguments, that are
mere developments of the reasonings of _The Necessity of Atheism_ and the
Atheistical Note to _Queen Mab_.
It has been observed how Shelley reproduced in the _Letter_ to _Lord
Ellenborough_ one of the prime doctrines of _The Necessity of
Atheism_,--viz., that belief is independent, and beyond the control of
volition. Hence, Shelley reproduced the reasoning of _The Necessity of
Atheism_ in three successive publications, (1) the _Letter to Lord
Ellenborough_, (2) _Queen Mab_, (3) the _Refutation of Deism_. Yet Mr.
Garnett requires us to believe that in writing _The Necessity of Atheism_,
Shelley was merely throwing off a squib, that did not express his serious
convictions.
It is needful for the present biographer to call attention to another
cluster of inaccuracies in Mr. Kegan Paul’s _William Godwin; his Friends
and Contemporaries_, wherein it is written,--
‘In 1813 Shelley was again in London for _a short time during the
summer, but Mary was absent in Scotland_. She was not strong, and as a
growing girl needed purer air than Skinner Street could offer; she had
therefore gone to Dundee with her father’s friends, Mr. Baxter and his
daughter; and remained with them for six months. It was not until the
summer of 1814 that Shelley and Mary Godwin became really acquainted,
when he found the child _whom he had scarcely noticed two years_
before had grown into the woman of nearly seventeen summers....
_Shelley came to London on May 18th_, leaving his wife at Binfield,
certainly without the least idea that it was to be _a final separation
from him_, though the relations between husband and wife had for some
time been increasingly unhappy. _He was of course received in Godwin’s
house on the old footing of close intimacy, and rapidly fell in love
with Mary._ Fanny Godwin was away from home visiting some of the
Wollstonecrafts, or she, three years older than Mary, might have
discouraged the romantic attachment which sprang up between her sister
and their friend. _Jane Clairmont’s influence was neither then, nor at
any other time, used, or likely to be used, judiciously._’
I have ventured to print certain words of the above extract in italics.
(1) As Mr. Kegan Paul ought to have known that Shelley was in London from
an early time of April till after the middle of July, 1813, he should not
have written, ‘In 1813 Shelley was again in London for a short time during
the summer;’--words implying that the poet was in London _only_ for a
short time.
(2) Nor should Mr. Kegan Paul have written in continuation of the same
sentence, ‘but Mary was absent in Scotland;’--words implying that she was
in Scotland during the whole time Shelley was in London, _i.e._ from about
the end of the first week of April, 1813, till after the middle of July,
1813.
(3) Can Mr. Kegan Paul produce any sufficient evidence that Mary Godwin
was in Scotland for a single day of that period? On the 8th June, 1814,
the day when Hogg saw her for the first time, in the parlour over her
father’s shop in Skinner Street, Mary Godwin had recently returned from
her sojourn in Scotland, and was wearing ‘a frock of tartan, an unusual
dress in London at that time.’ We have Mr. Kegan Paul’s assurance, made on
the evidence of the Field Place papers, that Mary Godwin’s stay in
Scotland was for six months; and there is other evidence that she stayed
there for about that time. Mary Godwin was certainly back in London on the
8th June, 1814. Mr. Kegan Paul’s words imply that she had returned very
much before the 18th May, 1814; but there are grounds for thinking that
she did not return much earlier. Let us suppose she returned at the
beginning of the month. In that case she went to Scotland, for her six
months’ visit, at the end of October or the beginning of November 1813,
when Shelley was either at or approaching Edinburgh,--more than three
months after Shelley’s stay in London (from the first week of April to the
middle of July, 1813) came to an end.
(4) Shelley returned from Scotland to London shortly before Christmas
1813, and made a brief stay in town. But it will not clear Mr. Kegan Paul
from this charge of serious inaccuracy for him to say his printed words
refer to this brief visit _at the end_ of the year. Mr. Kegan Paul speaks
of Shelley’s stay in London in the summer of 1813.
(5) As Mary Godwin was in London during the time Shelley lived in
Half-Moon Street and Pimlico, and as Shelley saw her during that time,
_i.e._ between the end of the first week of April and the middle of July,
1813, Mr. Kegan Paul should not have written, ‘It was not until the summer
of 1814 that Shelley and Mary Godwin became really acquainted, _when_ he
found the child whom he had scarcely noticed two years before had grown
into the woman of nearly seventeen summers;’--words implying that on
seeing Mary Godwin in May, 1814, he had not seen her for two years.
(6) Mr. Kegan Paul should not have written that, two years before seeing
her in May, 1814, Shelley had seen Mary Godwin and scarcely noticed the
child, for in May, 1812, _Shelley had never set eyes on the child_. At the
beginning of May, 1812, five months had still to elapse before Shelley saw
Mary for the first time. In May, 1814, he had known her for only one year
and seven months. He cannot from personal observation have regarded Mary
as a child, five months before he ever saw her.
(7) Mr. Kegan Paul should not have suggested that, after returning from
London to Tanyrallt in November 1812, Shelley had no opportunity of
holding personal intercourse with Mary Godwin, till the 18th May, in 1814,
when he ought to have known that, during the season of 1813, Shelley was a
frequent visitor at the Skinner-Street house.
(8) Mr. Kegan Paul would not have written of Mary Godwin as a ‘woman of
nearly seventeen summers’ in May 1814 when on the 1st morning of that
month she was only sixteen years and eight months of age, had he not
wished to make her seem as old as possible.
(9) As Mr. Kegan Paul’s book affords evidence that Mary and Claire were of
about the same age he should not have suggested (what elsewhere in his
book he says outright) that Jane Clairmont was considerably Mary’s senior,
and should therefore be held accountable for her sister’s misconduct.
It is needless to say that Shelley’s reputation gains nothing from such
misrepresentations, which are calculated to make readers suspect that the
poet’s intercourse with Mary in the spring and summer of 1813 was attended
with incidents, creditable to neither of them.
Differences, each of which was fruitful of estrangement, having arisen
between them in the later months of 1813, it was not to be expected that
Shelley and Harriett would return to their former harmony. Like other
husbands and wives who take to bickering, they contended about little
things which they magnified into great ones. To Shelley, who had argued
himself into believing that all the evils of human nature and society were
referable to the diet denounced by vegetarians, it was a serious grievance
that his wife enjoyed a mutton-chop and a glass of ale; that instead of
being ‘slightly animal,’ as she was at Tanyrallt, she ridiculed the
Newtons and their crotchets, and insisted on eating and drinking like most
other young women. It has been suggested that before Shelley ceased to
live with her, she sometimes took too much wine, and in other ways
displayed a disposition, which a year or two later developed into
intemperance. But though her subsequent career accorded with the
imputation, readers of this page will decline to attach much weight to a
charge, resting wholly on the evidence of the poet, who, while drinking
laudanum with an easy conscience, remembered with remorseful shame that at
Oxford he had enjoyed a tumbler of stiff white-wine negus. Differing on
questions of diet, Percy and Harriett bickered on other matters. Whilst
she resented his devotion to Maimuna, he resented her jealousy of the
lady, whom he worshipt for the subtlety and delicacy of her understanding
and affections. Ceasing to delight in Harriett’s beauty, though he could
still speak of her as ‘a noble animal,’ Shelley ceased to direct the
studies of the young woman, who could ‘neither feel poetry nor understand
philosophy.’ On the other hand, there were signs of deterioration of the
girlish wife who, desisting from the studies Percy no longer cared to
direct, withdrew her attention from books and turned it to bonnets.
Turning from authors she could not understand, Harriett gave her mind to
millinery. No marvel, that the disagreements grew in number and
bitterness; that Miss Westbrook, ever of course on her sister’s side, grew
hourly more hateful to her brother-in-law; that to escape from the
child-wife who irked him, and from the sister-in-law who exasperated him,
Shelley withdrew from the furnished house at Richmond, and flying to
Maimuna for counsel and consolation, remained under her roof at Bracknell
from about the middle of February, 1814, to a day something later than the
middle of March, _without his wife_. If Shelley found solace, he missed
contentment in the society of the white-haired lady, whose influence over
him at this point of his career was no less mischievous than powerful.
From Bracknell he wrote to Hogg a letter of despair on 16th March, 1814,
having a few days earlier addressed Maimuna in the melancholy verses, ‘Thy
dewy looks sink in my breast.’
What poison had Maimuna’s gentle words stirred in his breast, how had her
dewy looks troubled him, that he had lost the repose of despair, and was
crushed by the thought of persisting in the path of duty? Readers should
reperuse the verses and letter, in order to get a view of the miserable
position of the youthful sentimentalist, whose expiring flame of life had
been revived by Maimuna and friends;--the young man who, having found a
happy home at a distance from his wife’s dwelling, could not endure the
thought of returning to Harriett and her child, because he could not
return to them without encountering the ‘blind loathsome worm’ that was
ever hanging about his infant. The letter of despair was dated from
Bracknell, on 16th March, 1814. Eight days later,--_only_ eight days
later; on 24th March, 1814, Shelley re-married Harriett Westbrook in the
church of the parish of St. George, Hanover Square. This re-marriage was
done by license; the officiating clergyman being Mr. Edward Williams,
curate, and the two witnesses being John Westbrook and John Stanley. In
the registration of the marriage it is recorded that the parties had been
‘already married to each other according to Rites and Ceremonies of the
Church of Scotland,’ and that the marriage was solemnized on the present
occasion, ‘in order to obviate all doubts that have arisen, or shall or
may arise, touching or concerning the validity of the aforesaid marriage.’
Two different views are taken of this marriage by Shelleyan writers.
Whilst Peacock, and the writers who follow him, declare it a sufficient
evidence that Shelley was living in harmony with his wife, and can have
had no disposition to separate from her so late as 24th March, 1814, it is
maintained by other writers, that Shelley’s only motive in the marriage
was to put the legitimacy of his next child beyond question. Whilst I am
certain that error lies with the former set of writers, I cannot concur
with the latter. There is no need for the threatened publication of
unsavoury particulars about Harriett, to bring readers to the conclusion
that Shelley and his wife had ceased to live happily together before the
date of their re-marriage. People who, after perusing the evidence of the
foregoing pages, can believe that Shelley and Harriett were living
harmoniously in February and March, 1814, would continue in that belief,
even though it were proved that he ran off from his own home to Maimuna’s
house, because he caught her with her arm round another man’s waist. The
evidence of their estrangement in those and earlier months, is not
discredited by what Mr. Peacock says of their concord at the time of their
re-marriage.
On the other, I cannot refer the re-marriage to any wish on Shelley’s part
to put the legitimacy of his next child beyond question. Mr. Rossetti is
of opinion that Shelley re-married Harriett because he knew her to be in
the way to give him a second child, and therefore thought it prudent to
put the infant’s legitimacy beyond question. Whatever is urged by Mr.
Rossetti deserves consideration; but on these points I see grounds for
differing from him. Shelley can scarcely have felt any need for the
precaution. The _Edinburgh Reviewer_ (October, 1882) speaks of the
‘doubtful validity of the previous Scotch marriage,’ but the doubt can
scarcely have troubled Shelley, though he may have ascribed his action to
the uncertainty. Soon after the Scotch marriage, Shelley had declared his
intention to be re-married in England. That he did not act on this
intention was, doubtless, due to sufficient legal assurance that the
marriage was valid. Whilst Harriett was in her previous progress to
maternity, it had never occurred to him that he ought to re-marry his wife
in order to place the legitimacy of her issue beyond question. Why then
should he entertain the doubt in 1814? With a legal adviser in the elder
Mr. Medwin, a legal friend in Hogg, he cannot have feared his wife’s
possible heir might be declared illegitimate, unless he re-married
Harriett by the Anglican form. Mr. Westbrook, however, may have been
uneasy about the legal question, or have desired the re-marriage for his
social credit’s sake.
The re-marriage having been accomplished, Shelley returned to Maimuna, to
consult her on his future movements. The enchantress, with snow-white
tresses and ‘dewy looks,’ was, of course, the influence that caused the
poet to settle for a while at Binfield. On 18th April, 1814, Shelley was
again at a distance from his wife, who had gone with Miss Westbrook up to
London, whence it was understood the elder sister would soon journey to
Southampton, for the purpose of living there. Thus it was, that ‘the blind
and loathsome worm’ passed, all too late, from her brother-in-law’s
domestic life. Peacock may have been right in assuming that Shelley and
Harriett were staying together in Mrs. Boinville’s house in April; but
instead of being the lady’s guests at Bracknell, the husband and wife may
have been only her neighbours at Binfield. Anyhow, they were living at
Binfield a month later, when Shelley went up to town and gave his heart to
Mary Godwin, looking more than usually bright and charming in her ‘frock
of tartan.’ Coming up to London on the 18th of May, Shelley left Harriett
at Binfield, little imagining (it is said) that he would never again live
as a husband with the woman he had so lately re-married. ‘Shelley,’ says
Mr. Kegan Paul, writing from Field Place evidences, ‘came to London on May
18th, leaving his wife at Binfield, certainly without the least idea that
it was to be a final separation from him.’ A momentous date and admission
by a writer drawing his facts from Field Place archives. In admitting
that, when Shelley left his wife, she had no conception that their
conjugal intercourse would not be renewed, Mr. Kegan Paul admits that
Shelley deserted her--the charge against the poet, which has been so often
and indignantly denied by some of his admirers.
Mr. Kegan Paul forbears to say that Shelley left Binfield on 18th May,
1814, _with_ a secret resolve never to return to conjugal association with
Harriett. All that can be gathered from Mr. Paul’s words on this point is
that, if Shelley formed the resolve before leaving Binfield, he forbore to
impart it to her. In judging his conduct, it matters little whether he
left Binfield with the resolve or without it. If the resolution was not
formed before he left Berkshire, it was formed soon after his arrival in
London, and for some considerable time before he communicated his purpose
to her. In either case he deserted her. After determining to remain away
from Harriett, Shelley omitted to give her timely notice of his purpose to
keep away from her. He neither told her of his intention, nor sent her his
address in London, so that she might be able to communicate with him.
Besides withdrawing from her, he concealed himself from her. A husband
who, withdrawing from his wife, neither advertises her of his purpose to
keep away from her, nor sends her his address so that she may communicate
with him, is guilty of deserting his wife in an especially unfeeling and
cruel manner. For grave reasons a chivalric man may withdraw from his
wife. On doing so, a chivalric man is careful to inform her of his purpose
and reasons. He forbears to sharpen the pain and humiliation he deems
himself constrained to inflict, by an insolent or inconsiderate silence,
that exposes the object of his displeasure to the tortures of uncertainty
and suspense. He does not leave her and her child-in-arms without any care
whether or no she has money for her immediate necessities. Shelley did
thus leave and keep away from his wife for a considerable period. On being
thus deserted by her husband, Harriett is said to have had only fourteen
shillings in her pocket. Had Shelley been the essentially chivalric
creature his eulogists declare him, he could not have left his wife in
this way, even though her offences had been far more repulsive than her
sternest censors declare them.
It is true that the abandonment was of no long duration; but the period
during which Shelley forbore to communicate with his wife was so long,
that his silence may be fairly described as persistent cruelty to a woman
who, whatever her misconduct may have been, had far stronger claims to his
consideration than greatly offending wives usually have to the
consideration of their offended husbands. Mr. Rossetti speaks of a letter,
written by Harriett ‘on or about the 5th of July,’ which shows her to have
heard from Shelley ‘about the 1st of the same month.’ If she heard so soon
from Shelley, the epistle seems to have afforded her information neither
of his place of residence nor of his intention never to return to her; for
Peacock declares that, on 7th July, 1814, she wrote to one of his friends
a letter in which ‘she expressed a confident belief that he must know
where Shelley was, and entreated his assistance to induce him to return
home.’ Peacock adds, ‘She was not even then aware that Shelley had finally
left her.’ Still, let us suppose that Shelley’s silence to Harriett ceased
on the earlier date, and ceased in such a way as to make her feel she was
an object of his affection and that he would return to her ere long. Even
in that case, the period of abandonment, in its most cruel form,--of
abandonment attended with silence and concealment--covered full six weeks:
a long period for a woman to be held in sharp anxiety.
The period of abandonment, in its most cruel form, certainly ended before
the middle of July, 1814. On the 14th of that month Harriett arrived in
London; on the two following days she was in personal communication with
Shelley and William Godwin. By this time, though still ignorant of her
husband’s purpose to fly with Mary Godwin, Harriett was assured of his
purpose to keep away from her. In vain Godwin strove to bring about the
reconcilement of the youthful husband and wife. Finding that Shelley was
bent on separation, insisted on separation would for the moment be
satisfied with nothing less than separation, Harriett yielded to the fate
she could not resist, accepted the position she could not avoid, and
_assented_, by acts as well as by tacit submission, to the arrangement
that was forced upon her. She assented, by forbearing to resist her
husband’s will; she assented, by holding sullen, but in some degree
friendly, communication with him, whilst he lived with Mary Godwin; she
assented to the arrangement by corresponding with him, receiving his
visits, taking money from him, as gifts coming from his bounty--not as
payment exacted by process of law, whilst Mary Godwin was living under his
protection. This is a series of facts provable by superabundant evidence,
that may be fairly said to justify the most precise and scrupulous writer
in saying that the separation became, after some brief while, ‘a
separation by mutual consent,’ and passed from an affair of conjugal
abandonment into ‘an amicable agreement effected in virtue of a mutual
understanding.’ The impression prevails that there exists some piece of
legal draughting, some ‘regular agreement’ (as the phrase goes, duly
signed and sealed, in evidence of this agreement), and that Lady Shelley
and Mr. Garnett have, in some way, pledged themselves to produce this
document for the satisfaction of the world. I cannot take this view of the
case. Whilst Lady Shelley has not (to my knowledge) published separately
and in her own name a single line, to account for this impression, Mr.
Garnett, in his studiously guarded words, appears to abstain with nice and
nervous caution from stating that any such legal instrument either exists
or ever was executed. All he promises is ‘the publication of documents
hitherto withheld,’ which will prove that the separation resulted from
‘long-continued unhappiness,’ and was ‘an amicable agreement effected in
virtue of a mutual understanding,’--statements of whose truth there is
abundant evidence. That Harriett eventually consented to what she could
not help is certain. Moreover, it may be fairly argued that Harriett’s
successive acts of consent to the arrangement, thus forced upon her,
partook of the nature of condonation of the abandonment, so far as to
qualify the sheer cruel desertion into an incident of the series of mere
disagreements. There may, for all I know, be amongst the Field Place MSS.
a regular signed and sealed agreement of separation, with stipulations
touching the moneys to be paid by Shelley and received by Harriett,--an
agreement comprising all the usual common-form assertions of free-will and
qualified goodwill on the part of each of the parties. But to produce any
such agreement would not be to disprove, or otherwise affect, what has
been said of the desertion, which was the first stage of the separation.
None the less natural and reasonable for these acts of assent and
condonation was it for Harriett, when her husband had departed for the
Continent with Claire and Mary, to speak of the whole affair as something
that had been done wholly against her will and without her sanction,--to
speak of it in terms that were calculated to make Peacock, in later time,
confident she had never spoken of the separation (soon after its
occurrence) as a matter to which she had consented. An honest and
otherwise reliable witness, Peacock declares that, when she spoke of the
separation to him at her father’s house, soon after Shelley’s flight
across the water, Harriett spoke of it in terms, that ‘decidedly
contradicted the supposition of anything like separation by mutual
consent.’ About the same time she spoke to William Jerdan of the
separation as a state of things forced upon her, in spite of her vehement
protests. Recounting to Jerdan what passed between her and Shelley, when
he told her their conjugal association was at an end, she said that, on
hearing her doom, she exclaimed imploringly, ‘Good God, Percy! what am I
to do?’ In answer to this pathetic question Shelley, extending his right
hand to her in vehement gesticulation (and screeching, even as Byron used
to screech under the agitations of overpowering rage), replied in the
highest and most discordant pitch of his voice, ‘Do? Do?--Do what other
women do. They know what to do. Do as they do.’
The words unquestionably admit of the construction[2] Jerdan put upon
them. At the same time, coming from an angry man, such words may merely
signify that he is beside himself with rage; and it would be unjust to
judge any man, young or old, by words he utters under a sudden and
overpowering gust of fury. It must, moreover, be remembered that we have
only Harriett’s hearsay word that he made the violent speech. Still the
alleged utterance was just such a one as might have come from the raging
Shelley, who, in spite of all that is said of his gentleness, is known,
from Mr. Kegan Paul’s book about ‘Godwin,’ to have been a man of violent
temper.
Apart from the influences to which the reader’s attention has been called
in previous pages, was there aught in the circumstances and conditions of
Shelley’s life, that can be held accountable for his determination to
withdraw from Harriett and replace her by Mary Godwin? To show that he had
been strongly interested in Mary Godwin, when he was lodging successively
in Half-Moon Street and Pimlico, would be to suggest that the interest
had, in the ensuing autumn and winter, matured into a romantic passion for
her, or at least had predisposed him to fall violently in love with her in
the following June. But though he saw her in the spring and summer of
1813, and must have observed that the bright and charming child gave
promise of developing into a lovely woman, there are no sufficient grounds
for thinking he either took much notice of her, or felt any especial
concern in her at that time. Indeed, apart from the suspicious pains taken
by Mr. Kegan Paul to make it seem that he never saw her for a single
interview in 1813, I am not aware of any reason for conceiving it
possible, that the passion which dominated him in the summer of 1814 may
have proceeded from a sentiment of earlier date. And in respect to this
cause for suspicion, I do not question that both Shelley and Mary may be
said to suffer from the indiscretion of a single biographer. From an early
day of his long sojourn in western quarters of the town, Shelley was too
completely under Maimuna’s influence to have much tender care for the mere
school-girl. Moreover, in the summer of 1814, Shelley’s friends were
unanimous in thinking his passion for Mary a sentiment of quite recent
birth. Whilst Hogg had no suspicion of its existence before the 8th of
June, 1814, Peacock was confident that the passion was no less sudden than
violent. ‘Nothing,’ says Peacock, ‘that I ever read in tale or history
could present a more striking image of a sudden, violent, irresistible,
uncontrollable passion, than that under which I found him labouring when,
at his request, I went up from the country to call upon him in London.’
In addition to the already indicated causes of estrangement, had Shelley,
before going up to town on 18th May, 1814, discovered in Harriett’s
conduct any serious cause for dissatisfaction, likely to extinguish his
fondness for her in a moment, and replace it with a feeling of lively
repugnance? For a long time it has been an open secret in Shelleyan
coteries that documents are in existence which, if reliance could be
placed on Shelley’s statements about his own affairs, would constitute a
strong body of _primâ facie_ and _ex parte_ evidence that, before he
withdrew from her in May, 1814, he had found Harriett guilty of
misconduct, that would have entitled him to divorce from her, had he
sought it in the usual legal way.
It being probable that these documents, or their substance, will at no
distant time be offered to the world as so much certain and indisputable
evidence, that Shelley had good moral ground for breaking from his wife,
it will be well for readers to anticipate the publication by settling in
their minds what effect any such evidence--whether coming from Shelley’s
pen, or from the pens of writers deriving their information _from
him_--should have on discreet and logical persons. Enough has been said of
Shelley’s veracity to show that it was not unimpeachable. The man, who had
recourse to deception, when his convenience required him to use it; the
man who, in 1811, made a statement about his mother and sisters, which his
neighbours at Horsham did not hesitate to call an untrue statement; the
man who wrote the wheedling letter to the Duke of Norfolk, in order to get
money out of his father’s pocket, cannot (to put the case mildly) be
regarded as a strictly truthful person. It has also been shown that he was
liable to delusions incompatible with perfect sanity. It will be shown in
ensuing pages that thus untruthful and liable to insane delusions, in his
earlier time, Shelley was no less untruthful and subject to delusions and
(to use Peacock’s term) semi-delusions, after leaving his wife. Bearing
all this in mind, how should judicious persons regard any statements made
by Shelley (or made by individuals speaking directly or indirectly on
_his_ authority, or in obedience to his influence), that before leaving
Harriett he found her guilty of flagrant misconduct?
Surely, judicious persons will say of such evidence, ‘These are mere _ex
parte_ statements. They are of less weight than most _ex parte_
statements, because they proceed from a witness, who was on some occasions
untruthful, and on several occasions the victim of extravagant and insane
hallucinations. Coming from the chief actor in the Tanyrallt affair, from
the man who for a time thought similar evil of his dearest male friend,
these statements to the dishonour of the wife he deserted must be
considered with reference to one of his chief moral infirmities, and with
reference to his mental peculiarities. These statements are not so much
evidence of guilt in Harriett, as of delusion in her husband.’
The incredibility of such statements would, of course, be affected by the
production of a clear confession by Harriett, that, before he left her,
she had been conjugally faithless to him; or by the production of
reasonable evidence that she did admit so much to her shame. But even such
an admission would have to be considered with jealous regard to the
influences and circumstances under which it was made, and also with
reference to the curious fact that she had been in former time brought to
believe, or to act as though she believed, that Hogg had made an attempt
on her honour, which he did not make upon it.
There are other reasons for an opinion that Harriett cannot have been
guilty of the offence which has been so long charged against her in the
Shelleyan coteries. Peacock (Shelley’s most intimate friend and executor),
who knew Harriett intimately in the later months of 1813, and the earlier
half of 1814, was confident she had been a true wife. ‘I feel it,’ he
writes, ‘due to the memory of Harriet to state my most decided conviction
that her conduct as a wife was as pure, as true, as absolutely faultless
as that of any who for such conduct are held most in honour.’ This
evidence to character should have more weight with judicial minds than any
unsupported evidence to the contrary by her husband, who, in the middle of
August, 1814, wrote to her from Troyes, begging her to join him and
Claire, and Mary in Switzerland, and be happy in their society; and who,
after his return to England, was desirous that she should live under the
same roof with him and Mary Godwin. One hesitates to say where a man,
holding Shelley’s unusual views respecting the intercourse of the sexes,
would draw the line between venial indiscretion and unpardonable depravity
in feminine demeanour. Whatever her misconduct, Harriett was certainly
entitled to a large measure of charitable consideration from the husband,
who had taught her to think ‘chastity ... a monkish and evangelical
superstition, a greater foe to natural temperance even than unintellectual
sensuality.’ But it is scarcely conceivable that even Shelley would have
invited the wife, on whose finger he had put a wedding-ring, to come to
him and his ringless bride in Switzerland, had she to his knowledge, only
a few months earlier, been guilty of the offences that have long been
whispered against her.
Coming up to town on 18th May, 1814, Shelley (says Mr. Kegan Paul, in his
light and happy style) ‘was, of course, received in Godwin’s house on the
old footing of close intimacy, and rapidly fell in love with Mary.’ He
_was_ so received with cordial greeting and hospitable confidence by Mr.
Godwin and Mrs. Godwin. The girls (Mary and Claire being at home, during
Fanny’s absence to some one or another of her maternal relatives) also
welcomed the youthful poet heartily. To most readers it may appear that,
because ‘he was, _of course_, received in Godwin’s house on the old
footing of close intimacy,’ he was under stringent obligations to respect
the confidence thus reposed in him;--obligations so sacred as well as
stringent, that his action to his host and his host’s only daughter, to
his hostess and her only daughter, must be declared one of the most
shocking examples of domestic treason recorded in literary annals.
In three successive years--1812, 1813, 1814--Shelley had been received in
Godwin’s house on a ‘footing of close intimacy.’ The house was open to him
whenever he cared to visit it. The master of the house, whom Shelley
persisted in styling his teacher, friend, benefactor, was ever ready with
counsel and sympathy for the young man. Had he been unmarried, the Godwins
would have been slow to suspect evil in the young man of pleasant aspect
and winning address. As he was married to a lovely girl, with whom they
had every reason to think him living in mutual love, it never occurred to
William Godwin and his wife that they should watch his behaviour to their
children, as they would have observed it, had he been in a position to
make one of them an offer. The confidence reposed in his honour was
without limit or qualification. How did he respect this confidence, repay
this trustful hospitality? Mr. Kegan Paul answers the question in seven
words, ‘He ... rapidly fell in love with Mary.’
On 8th June, 1814, when exactly three weeks had passed since his arrival
in town, Shelley ran upon Hogg in Cheapside, as the latter was returning
from the scene of Lord Cochrane’s trial to Gray’s Inn. Bound for different
places in the same direction, the friends walked together from Cheapside
to Skinner Street, when, on coming to the door of Godwin’s shop, Shelley
said to his companion, ‘I must speak with Godwin; come in; I will not
detain you long.’ Passing through the shop, which was the only way of
passage to the living-rooms of the house, the young men went straight
upstairs to the quadrant-shaped parlour on the first floor, where Shelley
expected to find his familiar friend and benefactor. That Shelley went
upstairs in this fashion, without rapping or ringing, or sending any one
from the shop to announce his arrival, indicates his close intimacy with
Godwin and Mrs. Godwin,--shows how they allowed him the free run of the
house, permitting him to come and go at his pleasure, as though the place
were his own home. To Shelley’s disappointment and discomposure Godwin was
away from home. ‘Where is Godwin?’ he asked several times of Hogg, as
though the latter were in Godwin’s confidence and somehow accountable for
his absence. Shelley was still fussing about in this way; when the door of
the room was opened by a young girl, who exclaimed in a thrilling voice,
‘Shelley!’ Answering the ejaculation with one word, Shelley hastened from
the room, leaving Hogg to meditate in solitude, and marvel at the
momentary apparition of the ‘very young female, fair and fair-haired, pale
indeed, and with a piercing look, wearing a frock of tartan, an unusual
dress in London at that time,’ who had appeared for an instant, like a
quick gleam of sunlight, only to disappear with her lover. Hogg saw no
more of William Godwin’s lovely child on that occasion. In a minute or two
Shelley re-entered the room, saying ‘Godwin is out; there is no use in
waiting.’ Godwin’s absence had defeated the poet’s plan for getting a long
‘lover’s interview’ with his heart’s idol, whilst Godwin should be talking
with Hogg. Had the poet passed Hogg with a nod in Cheapside, he would have
had the desired interview with Mary in her father’s absence. As it was, he
had allowed Hogg to discover an interesting secret. Under the
circumstances, Shelley saw that his only chance of keeping the truth from
the vigilant and humorous Hogg required him to continue the walk towards
Gray’s Inn, as though he had dropt in at the Juvenile Library, solely for
the purpose of seeing Mary’s father.
‘Who is she?--a daughter?’ Hogg inquired of Shelley, as they walked to the
West.
‘Yes.’
‘A daughter of William Godwin?’
‘The daughter,’ replied Shelley, ‘of Godwin and Mary.’
The brief answer was enough for Hogg. The whole position had been revealed
to Hogg, who, on his westward way at his friend’s side, may be presumed to
have debated, in a breast by no means devoid of trouble, how much and how
little Harriett knew or suspected of what was going on in Skinner Street.
On some day of June, possibly preceding, but more probably following at a
brief interval the day of Hogg’s first brief glimpse of Mary Godwin’s
beauty, Shelley gave the girl the well-known verses, ‘Mine eyes were dim
with tears unshed;’ the verses with the concluding stanza:--
‘Gentle and good and mild thou art,
Nor can I live if thou appear
Aught but thyself, or turn thine heart
Away from me, _or stoop to wear
The mask of scorn, although it be
To hide the love thou feel’st for me_.’
Though an attempt has been made to force another meaning on the lines here
printed in italics, few readers will decline to regard them as pointing to
the deception which Mary Godwin was practising at this time, in order to
conceal from her family that Shelley regarded her with passion to which
she responded. The blame provoked by the deceitfulness of the girl, who
veiled her affection for the poet from observers in Skinner Street with an
air and tone of scorn, should, of course, be given to the man who had won
her heart, rather than to the child, who had recourse to artifice in his
interest and her own. In other respects, also, the blame of a miserable
business should be awarded to the married man, rather than the girl who
was just five years his junior. She may be wholly acquitted, she is not to
be suspected, of deliberately luring Shelley from his wife, and
supplanting her in his affections. It should not be questioned that he
made all the overtures and advances to Mary; and that he found it very
difficult to persuade her to fly with him. It would have been strange had
he found her an easy conquest; for (notwithstanding all that has been
urged to the contrary) it is certain that she had been reared within the
lines of conventional decorum and orthodoxy.
When he wrote that, though Mary Godwin ‘had been bred up to regard love as
the essential part of marriage, she was a perfectly pure and innocent
woman,’ (meaning, of course, that she was trained in childhood to hold
certain of her parents’ earlier and notorious views respecting marriage,
_i.e._ that love was a sufficient sanction of conjugal union, and that
where such love existed it was better for spouses to live together in Free
Love than in the bondage of Lawful Wedlock), Mr. Froude only showed his
absolute ignorance of the matters on which he wrote so rashly, under the
insufficient instructions of the person or persons who should have
instructed him better. It is certain that, during their brief association,
William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft modified those views of marriage so
far as to be lawfully married to one another; that soon after Mary
Wollstonecraft’s death, if not during her life, Godwin abandoned them
altogether; and that his daughter by her was _not_ educated to regard the
matrimonial rite as an idle form.
In a former chapter of this work evidence has been given, under Godwin’s
own hand, that Mary Wollstonecraft’s children were _not_ educated in
accordance with their mother’s peculiar views; that he deemed so clever a
boy as Charles Clairmont was in his seventeenth year far too young for
initiation in Free Thought; that on sending the boy Anthony Collins’s
sober and moderate book, he was urgent that Mary should not be allowed to
see a line of it. Never touched with Free Contract sentiment, the second
Mrs. Godwin held the Free Contract people in aversion, and their doctrines
in contemptuous detestation. Had it been otherwise, she would have been
spoken of less harshly by some of her husband’s friends.
Mary was educated by her father and his second wife, and by governesses of
their selection. Is it conceivable that she was educated by her father and
stepmother in principles which the former of the two abandoned in her
infancy, and the latter had never tolerated? If Mary Godwin left behind
her any writing in evidence that she was educated to mate in Free
Contract, she left behind her a piece of false testimony. To show how far
she was from favouring the Free Contract, how absolutely free from Free
Contract sentiment, she was before she came under Shelley’s influence, it
is enough to say that, even so late as July, 1814, after surrendering her
heart so completely to him as to conceive herself incapable of loving any
one else, she declared it impossible for her to live with him conjugally
during his wife’s existence. At the same time, in the fervour of her
passion for him she declared she would never marry any other man. In her
respect for the matrimonial rite, even at the very moment of avowing
herself incapable of giving herself to any other man, she deemed it
absolutely impossible for her to live with Shelley till death shall have
put him in a position to make her his lawful wife. Mr. Froude admits that
this was so. Yet he insists that she was educated to regard the Free
Contract with tolerance.
Lady Shelley speaks even more precisely on this point than Mr. Froude:--
‘The theories,’ says Lady Shelley, ‘in which the daughter of the
authors of _Political Justice_ and of the _Rights of Woman_ had been
educated, spared her from any conflict between her duty and her
affection; for she was the child of parents whose writings had had for
their object to prove that marriage was one among the many
institutions which a new era in the history of mankind was about to
sweep away. By her father, whom she loved--by the writings of her
mother, whom she had been taught to venerate--these doctrines had been
rendered familiar to her mind.’
This whole passage is made up of statements that, so far as Mary Godwin is
concerned, are absolutely the reverse of historic truth. What? Mary’s
education in Free Contract principles ‘spared her from any conflict
between her duty and her affection?’ Why at one moment she is declaring
she can’t be Shelley’s mistress, but will never marry any other man; a few
days later she sacrifices her principles and does become his mistress; and
yet there was no conflict of duty and affection!
It is in the highest degree improbable that, till Shelley spoke to her of
her mother’s views and story, using them as arguments why she should not
shrink from becoming his mistress, Mary Godwin had ever heard aught of
Mary Wollstonecraft’s dangerous opinions and discreditable career. William
Godwin’s daughter was only a few days old when her mother died. Only three
years and four months Mary’s senior, Fanny Imlay was too young at her
mother’s death to have, in later time, any recollections to impart to Mary
about their common parent. Who was at all likely to be at pains to
acquaint Mary in her early childhood with her mother’s story? It is not
usual for a man, after taking a second wife and having issue by her, to be
loquacious about his first wife to her children in their tender age. The
cold, unsentimental, unemotional Godwin was not likely to talk of Mary
Wollstonecraft to either of her children. Is it conceivable that whilst
they were of tender age, or in later years, when they had become
inquisitive girls, he revealed to them the particulars of their mother’s
story,--told Fanny that she was of shameful birth; told Mary that her
sister was a bastard; unfolded to their inquiring minds the doctrines of
Free Contract; informed them that their mother held opinions about
marriage which he had himself abandoned as dangerous and pernicious;
instructed them out of pious regard to her memory that they should on
coming to womanly age think of the matrimonial rite as an idle form? Is it
imaginable that the second Mrs. Godwin, intent on holding her curiously
constituted family within the lines of conventional respectability,
enlightened Fanny, and Claire, and Mary, on the very matters she was
especially desirous of keeping from their knowledge?
It is, however, certain that Mary Godwin heard much about her mother from
Shelley’s lips in 1814. The subject, in respect to which Godwin had been
wisely reticent to his child, Shelley did not hesitate to use for the
accomplishment of his purpose. No one knew better than Shelley, that his
familiar friend and benefactor had long since ceased to approve the Free
Contract. No one knew better than Shelley, how careful his familiar friend
had been to withhold from his only daughter those particulars of her
mother’s career that, on being communicated to her, might dispose the
imaginative, generous, fearless, too self-dependent child to adopt her
mother’s earlier views about marriage. At the same time Shelley saw that,
to break down the girl’s reverence for marriage and thereby remove the
grand obstacle to his designs upon her, his best course was to enlighten
the sixteen-years-old girl on those points of her domestic story, which
her father was especially desirous to keep from her knowledge. It is
needless to say that the young man, who had illuminated, or tried to
illuminate, so many girls of tender age out of the views in which they had
been educated, was not withheld from illuminating Mary out of her
superstitious reverence for marriage by any weak sentiment of loyalty to
his familiar friend,--the friend whom he was in the habit of styling his
greatest benefactor.
As the Skinner-Street house, notwithstanding the hospitable freedom
accorded to him within its walls, was no place where he could urge his
suit to Mary and teach her to approve the Free Contract, it appeared well
to Shelley, in his strength, to make appointments for private interviews
with Mary at her mother’s grave in Old St. Pancras churchyard, and well to
the sixteen-years-old Mary, in her weakness and romantic silliness, to
meet him there. Old St. Pancras churchyard was a comparatively secluded
place, and Mr. Kegan Paul is careful to record that ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’s
grave was shaded by a fine weeping willow.’ I cannot see that the
character and magnitude of the tree over Mary Wollstonecraft’s grave ought
to affect the reader’s judgment of what took place under it in the warm
days of June and July, 1814. But Mr. Kegan Paul seems to think otherwise;
and as I wish to handle this matter with a liberal regard for all
extenuating circumstances, I beg my readers to bear in mind that Mary
Wollstonecraft’s grave was shaded by a fine weeping willow.
Whilst gentle breezes made music in the long leaves of this trysting-tree,
Shelley,--with _Queen Mab and_ its notes in his hand, and the writings of
William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft in his memory,--explained to Mary
Godwin why ‘chastity was a monkish and evangelical superstition;’ why her
mother had very properly come to the conclusion that she might live
conjugally with Gilbert Imlay in Paris, without being married to him; why
a few years later her mother had no less virtuously determined to live in
Free Contract with William Godwin; and why she, Mary Godwin (the daughter
of so exemplary and altogether phenomenal a woman as Mary Wollstonecraft),
might with honour and virtue become his wife in the highest sense,
although inhuman laws and tyrannic custom precluded him from making her
his wife in another and altogether trivial sense. Readers may not forget
that Shelley was within a few days of being Mary’s senior by five years;
that he was so greatly Mary’s social superior as to figure in her esteem
as a sort of young prince; that he was a young man of a singularly
pleasant appearance and charming address; that she was only sixteen years
old, and living under the dominion of a stern stepmother, who, besides
insisting that Mary should darn her stockings, was so unreasonable as to
think a girl of her age and social degree should know how to make a
beef-steak pudding.
Instead of suffering from no conflict of duty and affection (as Lady
Shelley avers), it is certain that poor sixteen-years-old Mary was
distracted and cruelly tortured by the conflict of her desire to be good,
with her inclination to be very naughty. She was troubled by thoughts of
Percy’s wife, her own friend; and by thoughts of the shame and sorrow that
would come to her old father, if she did as Percy asked her. She was stung
by a feeling that, as Percy was her father’s young friend, and moreover a
young friend to whom her father had been very good and kind, he should not
ask of her what he was asking. Tears sprung to her eyes as she thought of
the disgrace she would bring on her home and people if she yielded. There
were moments when she could not see why she could be right in doing what
was wrong in her eyes, because her mother was not wrong in doing what
seemed right to her. She implored Percy not to ask so much of her.
Promising to love him for ever, promising that no other man should ever
find a place in her heart, acknowledging that she loved him unutterably,
she entreated Percy, as he was good and clever, so bright a poet, and so
sweet to her soul, to be satisfied with her confession and vows of
perpetual fidelity. But this was not enough for the young gentleman who
‘might have been the Saviour of the World.’ He wanted something more, and
was determined to have all he wanted, although Mary was the only daughter
of his friend and benefactor. Why are readers indignant against this young
man, who was so young and enthusiastic, and only (as Mr. Froude says)
acting on emotional theories of liberty?