BISHOPGATE.
Pecuniary Difficulties and Resources--Choice of a Profession--Shelley
walking a Hospital--Dropt by Acquaintances--Birth of Mary Godwin’s
first Child--Sir Bysshe Shelley’s Death--Differences and Tiffs between
Mary and Claire--Characteristics of the Sisters--Trip to South
Devon--At Work on _Alastor_--Publication of the Poem--_Essay on
Christianity_--Life at Bishopgate--Shelley’s Idolatry of Byron--Birth
of Mary Godwin’s first-born Son--Claire and Byron--Second Trip to
Switzerland--Shelley’s Pretext for leaving England--Strange Scene
between Shelley and Peacock--Semi-Delusions--Another Hallucination.
So much fantastic stuff has been written about Shelley’s poverty at
manhood’s threshold, and the sufferings which came to him from his
father’s cruel parsimony, that it is well to observe he never made a close
and enduring acquaintance with the penury, which has nursed so many
rhymesters into poets of deathless song. Poverty is of course a
comparative term. In the story of Shelley’s career it must be construed as
little more than a figure of speech. In Poland Street he was supplied
bountifully with money by relatives and other friends. From the date of
the arrangement, to which the Squire was a party not long after his boy’s
expulsion from Oxford, he enjoyed a sufficient and even liberal allowance,
till he ran off to Scotland with Harriett; and from the day of the
elopement till the moment of his withdrawal from his first wife he had an
adequate income, and the means of living far beyond it. Between 28th July
and 13th September, 1814, he spent (in ready money) 98_l._, besides the
money with which he journeyed from London to Calais and posted from Calais
to Paris. The young man who spent money at this rate, like most other
outrunners of the constable, was often without money in hand for the
requirements of his wasteful career,--often without a guinea in his
pocket. But it is absurd to assign to poverty the immediate results of
habitual prodigality. If he ever suffered from what can be fairly styled
poverty, the brief experience belonged to the period between his return
from the Continent in September, 1814, and the early month of the ensuing
year, when by accepting the easy terms offered to him by his father with
the Duke of Norfolk’s approval, he stept into a clear revenue of 1000_l._
a-year. In compliance with the arrangement which afforded him this assured
allowance during his father’s life, the poet surrendered only a small
portion of his interest in the settled estates, A and B.
At divers times between September, 1814, and the arrangement which
afforded him a thousand a-year, Shelley doubtless endured numerous
annoyances and humiliations from want of money. Once and again he was
tracked by bailiffs; and as often he was constrained to keep away from his
lodgings and conceal himself from the emissaries of the law. There were
days together during which he and Mary could safely meet one another only
by appointment at places away from her abode. But even at these hard times
he could raise money for his immediate necessities, albeit at heavy rates
of interest. The poet, who in the time of his most urgent need of money
could give Mary Godwin 90_l._ for the mitigation of her father’s pecuniary
distress, knew nothing of biting penury, little of vexatious poverty, even
when his difficulties were at their worst. Still it cannot be questioned
that in the winter of 1814-15, Shelley was so sensibly touched by
pecuniary trouble as to awake from the golden dreams which had so long
given him a delusive view of his financial position, and to think he
should in common prudence qualify himself to earn his living in one of the
liberal professions.
By this time his debts were no less considerable than harassing; and he
had discovered that no sum he could raise in the money-market on his
expectations would satisfy the demands of his numerous creditors, and
afford a surplus sufficient for his maintenance in scholarly idleness. In
the previous spring a lawyer, whom he had consulted on the state of his
affairs, described him in a professional letter as having ‘used the utmost
of his endeavours to raise money for the payment of his debts, _without
success_.’ Having vainly tried to raise enough money for the mere payment
of his debts, he may well have despaired to raise enough for the
satisfaction of his creditors, and his own subsistence to the end of his
days. Under these circumstances, it was natural for him to think of
choosing a profession. Which of the professions should he enter? The
Church? the Bar? or Medicine? The notion of taking holy orders and seeking
the needful morsel of bread in a parsonage, covered with corchorus in
full flower, was only a passing fancy. For the law, of which he knew
nothing, he had a poet’s natural aversion. The army was out of the
question to the sentimentalist, who regarded war with abhorrence, and
rated soldiers with murderers. Not because he had any natural aptitude or
inclination for the calling, but chiefly because it was less distasteful
to him than any other vocation by which he could win his daily bread
without disgrace, and in a slight degree because some of his forefathers,
and several of his near kindred, had followed, or were following it,
Shelley thought of qualifying himself for service in the vocation, by
which his great-grandfather had prospered in America before marrying the
widow Plum. In this selection of a calling he may also have been
influenced by his cousins, the Groves, a family of doctors.
To guard him from a suspicion of being actuated in this matter by purely
selfish motives, and to account in an elegant manner for his choice of a
profession, which, though sufficiently honourable for persons of
undistinguished lineage, is seldom followed by gentlemen of high ancestral
dignity, successive biographers have represented that, in deciding to
become an apothecary and surgeon, he was moved chiefly by concern for the
interests of the poor. Indeed, Lady Shelley insists that her husband’s
father was governed wholly in this matter by benevolent considerations.
‘In the winter months at the commencement of this year,’ she says,
‘Shelley walked a hospital for the purpose of acquiring some slight
knowledge of surgery, which might enable him to alleviate the sufferings
of the poor.’ It makes, however, against this elegant apology for the
poet’s condescension to medicine, that on coming into an assured income of
1000_l._ a-year he ceased to walk his hospital.[3]
Instead of coming to him from poverty, Shelley’s keenest annoyances in the
winter of 1814-15 came to him from the coldness of persons who, after
courting him in the summer and autumn of 1813, made it clear they no
longer wished for his acquaintance. ‘Some of his few friends,’ says
Peacock, ‘of the preceding year had certainly at that time fallen off from
him.’ Ladies, who had compared him to a rose drenched with rain, and a
bird rejoicing in the sunshine, now thought less favourably of him.
Instead of running after him for sweet converse touching the
perfectibility of the species, they spoke of him as a very bad young man,
who had treated his charming little wife most cruelly and shamefully, and
in other ways proved himself a monster. Because it amuses gentlewomen to
listen in a drawing-room to a young poet’s eloquent exhibitions of his
daring and delightful and original views about society, and the
affections, and ‘all that sort of thing,’ it does not follow that they
will care to flutter about him and smile upon him, when he has acted on
his startling and charming theories. Talk that is piquant and innocent,
from the lips of a young gentleman who is living virtuously with a
charming little wife, strikes gentle listeners as superlatively shocking
and offensive, from a young man who is known to have transferred his
affections from the charming little wife to a young lady who isn’t his
wife. However much he was pained and astonished by her altered demeanour,
Maimuna may be pardoned for declining to call on Miss Mary Godwin. Had she
not a daughter and grandchildren (to say nothing of her character in
Pimlico) to think for? So Shelley was dropt by the Boinvilles and Newtons,
and other no less charming and exemplary people, whilst he lived with Mary
and Claire in lodgings, where the trio--shut out from the Skinner-Street
house, and avoided by all the members of William Godwin’s ‘set’--seldom
had a call from any one but Peacock and Hogg.
One of the incidents of this troublous and vexatious period was the birth
of Mary Godwin’s first child,--a seven months’ girl, who drawing her first
breath on 20th February, 1815, breathed her last a few days later. The
infant’s premature appearance was of course fruitful of scandalous gossip,
which in the total absence of justificatory evidence may be dismissed as
mere gossip. Mary’s earliest issue was, no doubt, a seven months’ child.
Enough has been said of the will, with its momentous codicil, of Sir
Bysshe Shelley, Bart., who died on 6th January, 1815, in his eighty-fourth
year. Enough also has been said of the way in which the poet disinherited
himself and his issue out of the large entailed estate created by that
will. Henceforth, in regarding the poet’s financial position, readers must
think of him as a man with an assured income of 1000_l._ during his
father’s life, and a vested interest in the fee-simple of estates A and B
on the extinction of his father’s life-interest in them, _minus_ the
portion of his interest in the same estates, which he surrendered to his
father in consideration of the 1000_l._ a-year assured to him during his
father’s life.
It is not to be supposed that after taking Claire and Mary through Miss
Wollstonecraft’s _Letters to Imlay_, and Sir James Lawrence’s _Empire of
the Nairs_, and showing them why chastity was a mere monkish superstition
and conjugal constancy a mere matter of expedience, which on ceasing to be
expedient became actually vicious, Shelley was so greatly scandalized, as
Mr. Froude imagines, by Claire’s sprightly talk about ‘community of
women.’ Nor is it to be imagined that Mary was so profoundly shocked and
deeply disgusted as the same historian fancies by her fellow-pupil’s
misconceptions respecting a state of human society, that necessarily came
under their consideration in the course of study and discussion through
which Percy was taking them. In October, 1814, Mary had for several months
been undergoing an education, that saved her from all acutely painful
emotions of horror and repugnance at her class-mate’s equally erroneous
and ridiculous conclusions. Possibly Mary’s diary contains some edifying
memoranda, capable of being used as evidence that she regarded Claire as
wild, even to wickedness, on one or two subjects that rarely come under
the cognizance of English girls or even of English matrons; but such
entries of the joint-journal should be read and construed with reference
to Mary’s familiarity with such topics, and also with reference to the
multifarious incidents and circumstances that had resulted in her
enlightenment on matters, about which both girls should have been kept in
darkness.
None the less certain, however, is it that on coming in October, 1814, to
differences of sentiment on a decidedly unsavoury question, Claire and
Mary had a cause of disagreement which, passionately as they had loved one
another in former time (transient tiffs notwithstanding), could scarcely
fail to engender the friction and heat of lively discord between them.
Differing greatly in personal appearance, these sisters of about the same
age and the same training, were alike remarkable for intellectual and
moral characteristics that, under any circumstances, would have caused
them to clash and quarrel at times, even whilst strongly attached to one
another in their hearts. In some particulars of outward show, each of
these charming and sadly misguided girls had the advantage of the other.
Together with an intellectuality of expression, differing from, but in no
degree inferior to, the mental expressiveness of Claire’s countenance,
Mary the Blonde (albeit with eyes more brown than blue) had a singularly
lovely profile, and finely moulded features, that gave her, in respect to
facial contour and shapeliness, manifest and unquestionable superiority
over her sister-by-affinity. Though not absolutely defective in stature
(indeed one of Godwin’s letters describes her as though she were tall),
Mary lacked the full height requisite for personal impressiveness; but her
figure, good even in girlhood, developed in her maturity into the
exuberant loveliness of antique sculpture. On the other hand, Claire the
Brown had a tall, lissom figure of matchless elegance; a figure which,
though striking beholders at first sight as chiefly remarkable for
delicacy and slightness, was seen at a second glance to be in no degree
wanting in the developments that are requisite for female attractiveness.
Small at the waist and long-necked, Claire had perfectly fashioned
shoulders and arms, tiny hands, and feet minute and nimble enough to have
won Sir John Suckling’s approval. The worst feature of her face was a nose
that resembled Shelley’s in being tip-tilted; but she had the shapely
mouth that is never seen apart from cleverness, pink lips, white teeth,
and dark eyes that shone soft as sunshine through their long lashes when
she was in a good temper, but flashed with a terrifying vehemence when she
was whipt to fury by a cruel tongue. Whilst the colour of Mary’s hair
accorded with her complexion, Claire had a wealth of darksome tresses. In
aspect and air Mary was piquant, lovely, and good; Claire, brilliant,
distinguished, and dangerous.
Both girls were hot-tempered, peevish, and resentful, as well as
vehemently affectionate; Mary animated with the fervour and captiousness
of her mother’s stock, whilst Claire was as impetuous and unruly as any
girl of southern blood ripened by southern suns. Both girls were
quick-witted, imaginative, and ambitious. Reared during their earlier
childhood in Somers Town, discovered by Shelley in the rooms over the
Skinner-Street shop, they were both fashioned to make a figure in the
world; and even in the nursery, where Shelley may be said to have found
them, they conceived the design of making themselves personages of
celebrity. Slovens so long as they were poor, they developed a taste for
dress and personal display as soon as they were rich enough to wear silk
and velvet. Under favourable circumstances (never granted to either of
them) Mary would have developed into a good and greatly useful woman;
Claire into a generous and powerful, though possibly mischievous, woman.
Under such circumstances, Mary would have been precisely conscientious and
as truthful as sunshine (which she certainly was not in her later time),
but Claire would all the same have been something of a schemer and an
_intriguante_, and have valued propitious fortune chiefly on account of
the greater power it afforded her for playing with men and women, as
though they were mere cards and counters. Each of these girls, predestined
to embittering disappointment by the malicious fate that for a brief hour
stirred them both with a sense of dazzling success, numbered amongst their
social endowments a degree of colloquial piquancy and conversational
address that, in the absence of all her other natural excellencies, would
have given her the advantage over ordinary women. Whilst Mary’s sparkling
gossip sometimes smiled with humour (according to Thackeray a rare faculty
in woman), Claire’s higher raillery smacked of the satire that, under the
spur of anger, rolled in torrents of scornful irony from her writhing
lips. The time was coming when Byron whitened and trembled under her
scathing sarcasm. But Claire’s voice was made for better work than cruel
speech. Music was her chief accomplishment; and whilst figuring creditably
amongst professional performers as an instrumentalist, she only just
missed the vocal excellence that would have enabled her to achieve her
ambition to be an operatic singer. That she became so bright and vivid a
force in Florentine drawing-rooms during Shelley’s later years, and after
his death, was in no small degree owing to his admiration of her noble
voice, and the care he took to provide her with good musical instruction
whilst she lived with him and Mary at Marlow and in Italy.
It is not surprising that after living together for seven months, Claire
and Mary determined to dwell apart. In truth the reasons why they should
not cohabit (to use one of Godwin’s favourite words) were so numerous and
weighty that nothing but the strength of the mutual affection, underlying
their mutual jealousies and emotional discrepancies of sentiment, will
account for the long postponement of the outbreak of temper on either side
that, in the spring of 1815, severed them for awhile. A young married
woman usually likes to have her home to herself and her husband, and
though she was not Shelley’s wife it was natural for Mary to rate herself
as his wife, and all the more for the peculiarity of her alliance with him
to wish for the full measure of the domestic privacy, to which a wife is
entitled. Mary was too well acquainted with the troubles arising from Miss
Westbrook’s permanent residence with Percy and Harriett, not to fear that
similar troubles might ensue to him and herself should Claire be always
with them. She was the more desirous for Claire to leave them to
themselves, because, though she had no doubt of the strength and
completeness of Shelley’s attachment to herself, she could not blind
herself to his admiration of and liking for Claire,--an admiration and
liking that influenced him to the day of his death, although his affection
for her was sometimes sorely tried by Claire’s waywardness and freakish
impetuosity. At the same time, though the witty and vivacious girl amused
and delighted him even when she was most perverse and unmanageable,
Shelley had in former times suffered too much from a sister-in-law’s
influence and continual presence at his hearth, not to shrink from the
thought of having another sister-in-law incessantly on his hands. Hence it
came to pass that, on 11th March, 1815, Mary wrote in her diary,--
‘March 11th, 1815.--Talk about Claire’s going away. Nothing settled. I
fear it is hopeless; she will not go to Skinner Street. Thus our
house, I see plainly, is the only remaining place--what is to be
done?’
Two months later, after numerous tiffs and interchanges of sarcastic
speech, the two hot-tempered sisters parted for awhile, not more to the
relief and contentment of the one than of the other, Claire taking up her
abode in a solitary cottage (presumably on an allowance made by Shelley),
whilst her sister and the poet entered on the enjoyment of the furnished
house at Bishopgate (the eastern entrance of Windsor Park) that was their
usual place of abode from the summer of 1815 to the early summer (or, to
speak more precisely, the late spring) of 1816. That Mary and Claire
separated none too soon appears from the letter in which the latter wrote
on 15th May, 1815, to Fanny Imlay (_alias_ Wollstonecraft, _alias_
Godwin),--
‘I am perfectly happy. After so much discontent, such violent scenes,
such a turmoil of passion and hatred, you will hardly believe how
enraptured I am with this dear, quiet little spot. I am as happy when
I go to bed as when I rise. I am never disappointed, for I know the
extent of my pleasures.’
Clearly the sisters-by-affinity had spoken smartly to one another before
parting ‘for ever,’--a ‘for ever’ that fell considerably short of twelve
months. At sweet seventeen the mutual resentments of two quick-tempered
sisters blow over and leave no heart-burnings behind them. It would be ill
for our homes were it otherwise. What would become of us were English
girls so incapable, as Mr. Froude imagines them to be, of ‘making it up’
and ‘beginning again’ when they have had a smart tiff? It was all in the
ordinary course of human nature that in the ensuing spring Claire and Mary
were animated by ‘mutual affection, glowing with the impetuosity of
girlish romance.’
Much as they delighted in their new home, Shelley and Miss Godwin needed
the diversion of visiting scenes, even more alluring to lovers of nature
than the glades of Windsor and the rich landscapes of the surrounding
country. Besides making a tour along the coast of south Devon, and staying
at Clifton during the summer, they went, at the end of August, with
Peacock and Charles Clairmont, by the Thames to Lechlade in
Gloucestershire, the river-trip mentioned in a previous chapter. Returning
in September, 1815, to Bishopgate for the enjoyment of the autumnal
colouring of the forest, Shelley may be supposed to have spent the
happiest hours of his existence whilst meditating _Alastor, or the Spirit
of Solitude_, under the oaks of the Great Park,--the poem that was almost
as great an advance from _Queen Mab_ as the _Queen_ was in advance of his
previous poetry. The first of his supremely great works--a poem that, had
he lived to produce nothing greater, would, by itself, have given him a
place amongst the poets who never die--_Alastor_, was published in an
early (if not the earliest) month of 1816, together with the stanzas to
Coleridge, the April-1814 stanzas (from which so many futile efforts have
been made to extort evidence touching the causes of his defection from
Harriett); the verses on Mutability, the lines on the verse from
Ecclesiastes, the Lechlade verses, the sonnet to Wordsworth, the sonnet on
the Fall of Bonaparte, the lines taken from _Queen Mab_ on Religion
(styled _Superstition_ in the reprint, for security’s sake), the sonnet
from Dante’s Italian, the revised fragments of _Queen Mab_, styled _The
Demon of the World_, and the translation from Moschus,--the last-mentioned
item of the miscellany being one of the reasons why successive Shelleyan
biographers and editors have ante-dated the unfinished _Essay on
Christianity_ by five or six years.
Had it not been for this trifle from Moschus in the _Alastor_ volume, and
the passage in Shelley’s letter (dated to Hogg from ‘Bishopgate,
September, 1815’), where he says, ‘I have been engaged lately in the
commencement of several literary plans which, if my present temper of mind
endures, I shall probably complete in the winter,’ it would probably never
have occurred to any editor of Shelleyan MSS. that Shelley produced, in
1815, a composition so foreign to his way of dealing with religious
questions at any time, between the publication of _The Necessity of
Atheism_ and the production of _Laon and Cythna_, as the fragmentary
treatise on the character and teaching of the Saviour of the World. It is
not far to seek how the editorial mind came to commit so strange a
mistake. On the discovery amongst Leigh Hunt’s MSS. of the beginning of a
translation of Moschus’s third idyll (the elegy on Bion), written by
Shelley on the same paper as a missing piece of the _Essay on
Christianity_, it became obvious that the _Essay_ was written at a time
when he was interested in the writings of Moschus. This being manifest the
first of the misleading editors argued thus: The _Essay on Christianity_
was written near the time when Shelley was working at Moschus; the
_Alastor_ volume which passed through the press soon after the composition
of the poem in the autumn and winter of 1815, contains a translation from
the Greek of Moschus, showing that somewhere about that time the poet was
interested in the Moschian idylls; moreover we have Shelley’s assurance
that in September, 1815, he was engaged on several literary enterprises
which he hoped to complete in the course of the ensuing winter. Therefore
one may safely assign the fragmentary _Essay on Christianity_ to the year
1815.
It is obvious that to show the _Essay_ is wholly out of accord with
Shelley’s temper and views on matters of religion in 1815, and on the
other hand to show he was more strongly interested in the Moschian verse
at a later period of his career, when his temper and views were in
accordance with those of the _Essay_, is to sweep away the whole of the
editorial argument. It is not too much to say that in 1815 Shelley could
no more have written the _Essay_, than he could have composed the music of
a great opera. On the other hand, the _Adonais_ affords conclusive
evidence that the poet was influenced by both Bion and Moschus during the
composition of the noble elegy. Besides the translated fragment of the
Elegy on the Death of Bion, by Moschus (written on the same paper as the
portion of the _Essay on Christianity_), Shelley left a translation of
Bion’s _Elegy on the Death of Adonis_, both manuscripts being in the style
of the poet’s later penmanship. Yet further, the Shelleyan manuscript of
the translated fragment of Bion’s _Elegy on the Death of Adonis_ exhibits
on its back a draft of _Pan, Echo, and the Satyr_, translated from the
Greek of Moschus. Thus, whilst the last-named manuscript shows that
Shelley was working about the same time on translations from both Greek
poets, and the _Adonais_ affords conclusive evidence that its author was
influenced in its composition by the same two poets, the manuscript of the
translated fragment of the _Elegy on the Death of Bion_ shows it to have
been produced by Shelley’s pen in the same period as the _Essay on
Christianity_. It follows, therefore, that the _Essay on Christianity_ was
produced at least in the same period as the _Elegy on John Keats_. This
abundant evidence that the _Essay on Christianity_ should be assigned to
the _Adonais_ period of Shelley’s literary career is further confirmed by
these two important facts: (1) That the temper and reasoning of the
_Essay_ are in harmony with Shelley’s views and feeling on religious
matters towards the close of his life; and (2) That in conversation with
Trelawny, who knew the poet only at the close of his career, Shelley ‘said
he had wished to write a _Life of Christ_, revoking the hasty
afterthought’ (expressed in a note to _Queen Mab_) ‘that Jesus was an
ambitious man who aspired to the throne of Judea,’ at the same time adding
‘that he found the materials too deficient for reconstructing a _Life_
having some solidity and authority,’--words indicating that at a time no
long while anterior to his brief association with Trelawny, the poet had
been reconsidering and reshaping his views of the Saviour’s career. Mr.
Rossetti justly remarks that the _Essay on Christianity_ may have been the
out-come of this project. Most readers will also think the out-come,
instead of being ascribed to a period prior to the composition of _Laon
and Cythna_, should be assigned to the _Adonais_ term of the poet’s story.
In truth the discovery of a Shelleyan copy of the _Essay_, dated 1820 or
1821, would not materially strengthen the evidence that Shelley wrote it
in his life’s concluding term.
At Bishopgate, Shelley saw little of his neighbours; the few of them who
called upon him being so little to his mind that they were not encouraged
to call again. Indeed, the only gentleman of the neighbourhood who seems
to have approached the new settler on the verge of Windsor Park, without
impressing him unfavourably, was Dr. Pope, the Quaker doctor of Staines,
who, visiting the poet in the way of professional service, visited him
also for the friendly discussion of religious questions. ‘I like to hear
thee talk, friend Shelley: I see thee art very deep,’ the doctor remarked
on one occasion to the author of _Queen Mab_. With the exception of this
new acquaintance, who was only an occasional caller, and the two familiar
comrades who had held to him staunchly in the previous winter of
harassment and neglect, Shelley seems to have received no one at
Bishopgate on a footing of sociability, from the middle of September,
1815, to the opening of the next spring. But the time of seclusion passed
pleasantly in literary effort and the society of the two friends, with
whom he read Greek authors;--Peacock strolling over to him twice or thrice
a-week from Marlow, whilst Hogg (though a less frequent visitor at the
cottage) seldom let a fortnight pass without walking down from London.
Whilst reading Greek literature with the two scholars, Shelley found time
to bring Mary forward in Latin. ‘Mary,’ he wrote to Hogg in September,
1815, ‘has finished the fifth book of the _Æneid_, and her progress in
Latin is such as to satisfy my best expectations,’--words reminding one
pathetically how, three years earlier, he took a similar interest in
Harriett’s Latin studies, and wrote about them with the same satisfaction
to the same correspondent.
As the time is nearing for Shelley to achieve his ambition of winning
Byron’s friendship, the occasion has arrived for glancing at the regard in
which the more famous poet was held by the author of _Alastor_, and also
for glancing at the efforts made by certain of the Shelleyan enthusiasts
to minimize the idolater’s admiration of the poet they abhor, by insisting
that the admiration was qualified with disapproval, and strictly limited
to certain of Byron’s more creditable literary productions. Let us see, by
Shelley’s own words and acts, how he thought of Byron from 1816, when they
made the personal acquaintance of one another, to the opening of the year
memorable for the fatal boat accident in the Bay of Spezia.
(1)--Of Shelley’s regard for Byron in that year (1816), it is enough, for
the present, to say that, after making Byron’s acquaintance under
remarkable circumstances, and spending some weeks in close intimacy with
him in Switzerland, Shelley was at much pains from that time till the
opening of 1822, to cultivate and preserve his friendship:--a fact which
may, at least, be regarded as conclusive evidence that their intercourse
on the marge of Lake Leman was not fruitful of disappointment in the
younger poet. Admiring the author of _Childe Harold_, whilst he was living
in Free Love with Mary’s sister-by-affinity, Shelley admired him none the
less for dismissing Claire, and in later times worshipt him with a
sentiment of idolatry that will ever remain one of the most remarkable
examples of hero-worship in literary annals.
(2)--It is no slight indication of Shelley’s esteem for Byron in
1817,--when, according to Mr. Froude, he must have regarded the author of
_Childe Harold_ with repugnance, as Claire’s seducer,--that he left Byron
a legacy of 2000_l._ by his will (dated 18th Feb., 1817), and also
appointed him to be an executor of the will, and a trustee for the
performance of its trusts.
In the same year, 1817, when the discarded mistress had given birth to
Allegra, Shelley wrote in the preface to the _Six Weeks’ Tour_ these
words:--
‘Those whose youth has been past as their’s (with what success it
imports not) in pursuing, like the swallow, the inconstant summer of
delight and beauty which invests this visible world, will perhaps find
some entertainment in following the author, with her husband and
sister, on foot, through part of France and Switzerland, and in
sailing with her down the castled Rhine, through scenes beautiful in
themselves, but which, since she visited them, _a great Poet has
clothed with the freshness of a diviner nature_. They will be
interested to hear of one who has visited Meillerie, and Clarens, and
Chillon, and Vevai,--classic ground, peopled _with tender and
glorious imaginations of the present and the past_.’
Thus at a time when, according to Mr. Froude, he secretly revolted from
Byron as a libertine and seducer, Shelley extolled him for clothing the
beauties of the Rhineland with ‘the freshness of a diviner nature,’ and
appointed him an executor and trustee of his will.
(3)--In 1818, in the prefatory note to _Julian and Maddalo_, Shelley wrote
thus of Byron, the original of Count Maddalo:--
‘Count Maddalo is a Venetian nobleman of antient family and of great
fortune, who, without mixing much in the society of his countrymen,
resides chiefly at his magnificent palace in that city. He is a person
of the most consummate genius, and capable, if he would direct his
energies to such an end, of becoming the redeemer of his degraded
country. But it is his weakness to be proud: he derives, from a
comparison of his own extraordinary mind with the dwarfish intellects
that surround him, an intense apprehension of the nothingness of human
life. His passions and his powers are incomparably greater than those
of other men; and, instead of the latter having been employed in
curbing the former, they have mutually lent each other strength. His
ambition preys upon itself, for want of objects which it can consider
worthy of exertion. I say that Maddalo is proud, because I can find no
other word to express the concentered and impatient feelings which
consume him; but it is on his own hopes and affections only that he
seems to trample, for in social life no human being can be more
gentle, patient, and unassuming than Maddalo. He is cheerful, frank,
and witty. His more serious conversation is a sort of intoxication;
men are held by it as by a spell. He has travelled much; and there is
an inexpressible charm in his relation of his adventures in different
countries.’
In this strain of adulation Shelley wrote of Byron in 1818. Having put the
flattery in clear type and on fine paper, Shelley approached Byron with it
in his hand, and, kneeling, laid it at his idol’s feet.
On 23rd August, 1818, Shelley wrote to his wife from Venice with grateful
fervour, of Byron’s sympathy with his troubles and friendly concern for
his interests:--
‘When we disembarked, we found his horses waiting for us, and we rode
along the sands of the sea, talking. Our conversation consisted in
histories of his wounded feelings, and questions as to my affairs, and
great professions of friendship and regard for me. He said, that if he
had been in England at the time of the Chancery affair, he would have
moved heaven and earth to have prevented such a decision.’
There is something inexpressibly ludicrous in the notion of Byron ‘moving
heaven and earth’ to stop Lord Eldon’s mouth. The ‘Childe’ must surely
have been laughing in his sleeve when he talked in this style, if, indeed,
he said aught so superlatively farcical.
(4)--To the year 1818 or 1819 may be assigned Shelley’s _Address to
Byron_, the worshipful tone of which composition may be inferred from the
only three lines preserved to us:--
‘O mighty mind, in whose deep stream this age
Shakes like a reed in the unheeding storm,
Why dost thou curb not thine own sacred rage?’
(5)--To the year 1821 may be assigned the Sonnet to Byron, headed with the
words, ‘I am afraid these verses will not please you, but,’--
‘If I esteemed you less, Envy would kill
Pleasure, and leave to Wonder and Despair
The ministration of the thoughts that fill
The mind which, like a worm whose life may share
A portion of the unapproachable,
Marks your creations rise as fast and fair
As perfect worlds at the Creator’s will.
But such is my regard that nor your power
To soar above the heights where others climb,
Nor fame, that shadow of the unborn hour
Cast from the envious future on the time,
Move one regret for his unhonoured name
Who dares these words;--the worm beneath the sod
May lift itself in homage of the God.’
Can passionate idolatry of a fellow-creature go further in the direction
of abject servility without being lost in it? It is appalling to reflect
that Shelley, a man of high intellect and culture, of gentle breeding and
imperishable achievement in art, thought of Byron in a way to render it
possible for him to utter forth such slavish song. It is asserted by
Medwin (no sure authority on such a point), that this outpouring of
adulation was never actually offered to the hand and eye of the poet, who
could not have contemplated such a tribute of adorative homage without
turning in cordial (though undeclared) scorn from its producer. The sonnet
is said never to have been seen by Byron. But it remains that Shelley
wrote it in Byron’s honour; that he wrote it out (with amendments) on
several slips of paper, and, at least, thought of offering it to the
man, whose contempt of his kind needed no such stimulant.
(6)--Written in June, 1821, _Adonais_ calls on the world to honour Byron
as ‘the Pythian of the age,’ and ‘the Pilgrim of Eternity:’--
‘The herded wolves, bold only to pursue;
The obscene ravens, clamorous o’er the dead;
The vultures, to the conqueror’s banner true,
Who feed where Desolation first has fed,
And whose wings rain contagion;--how they fled,
When, like Apollo, from his golden bow,
The Pythian of the age one arrow sped
And smiled!--The spoilers tempt no second blow,
They fawn on the proud feet that spurn them lying low.
* * * * *
Thus ceased she; and the mountain shepherds came,
Their garlands sere, their magic mantles rent;
The Pilgrim of Eternity, whose fame
Over his living head like Heaven is bent,
An early but enduring monument,
Came, veiling all the lightnings of his song
In sorrow.’
(7)--In August, 1821, Shelley was so delighted at Byron’s way of living
with another man’s wife, and his consequent progress to moral excellence,
that he wrote to his own wife (the faultless, stainless, high-souled Mary)
from Ravenna, where he was resting as Byron’s guest in the Palazzo
Guiccioli:--
‘L[ord] B[yron] is greatly improved in every respect; in genius, in
temper, in moral views, in health, in happiness. The connexion with la
Guiccioli has been an inestimable benefit to him. He lives in
considerable splendour, but within his income, which is now about
4000_l._ a-year, 100_l._ of which he devotes to purposes of charity.
He has had mischievous passions, but these he seems to have subdued;
and he is becoming, what he should be, a virtuous man.’
When Mr. Froude wrote so gushingly, almost in the same paragraph, of
Shelley’s speckless purity of thought and manners, and Byron’s revolting
dissoluteness in living with another man’s wife, he had still to learn
that this guileless and angelic Shelley rated Byron’s _liaison_ with the
Contessa Guiccioli as an eminently virtuous and salutary arrangement.
In the same letter to Mary (mind, Mr. Froude, the letter is written to
Mary _née_ Godwin, the writer’s own exemplary wife), Shelley says:--
‘He’ (Byron) ‘has read to me one of the unpublished cantos of _Don
Juan_, which is astonishingly fine. It sets him not only above, but
far above, all the poets of the day,--every word has the stamp of
immortality. I despair of rivalling Lord Byron, as well I may, and
there is no other with whom it is worth contending. This canto is in
the style, but totally, and sustained with incredible ease and power,
like the end of the second canto. _There is not a word which the most
rigid assertor of the dignity of human nature could desire to be
cancelled._ It fulfils, in a certain degree, what I have long preached
of producing,--something wholly new and relative to the age, _and yet
surpassingly beautiful_.’
On, or about, the same day, Shelley wrote from Ravenna about this same
Canto of _Don Juan_, which he commended so highly to Mary, for its
unqualified purity and surpassing beauty, to his friend Peacock:--
‘Lord Byron is in excellent cue both of health and spirits. He has got
rid of all those melancholy and degrading habits which he indulged at
Venice. He lives with one woman, a lady of rank here, to whom he is
attached, and who is attached to him, and is in every respect an
altered man. He has written three more cantos of _Don Juan_. I have
yet only heard the fifth, and I think that every word of it is
pregnant with immortality. I have not seen his late plays except
_Marino Faliero_, which is very well, but not so _transcendently fine_
as the _Don Juan_.’
Let it be observed that, in the letter to his wife, Shelley alludes to the
second Canto of _Don Juan_, and more especially to the end of it, as a
piece of literature with which she is familiar. To demonstrate the
excellence of the unpublished Canto he has just read in manuscript,
Shelley assures Mary that, in its style, and the powerful ease with which
it is sustained, it resembles the end of the second Canto,--_i.e._ the
part of the poem which describes, with delicate and insidious
suggestiveness, the mutual passion of Don Juan and Haidee in the cave. Is
it to ‘insult the Shelleys’ (Mr. Froude’s pleasant phrase) to say that
Shelley could not have thus referred to some of the sweetest and most
voluptuous passages of the amorous poem, without knowing that Mary had
perused them with enjoyment and approval? And what is the theme of the
unpublished fifth Canto, which Shelley extols to his wife for bearing, in
every word, ‘the stamp of immortality,’ and for containing ‘not a word
which the most rigid assertor of the dignity of human nature could
desire to be cancelled?’ One of the wittiest and wickedest of the sixteen
Cantos, this highly commended Canto contains the harem scene where
Gulbeyaz vainly solicits Don Juan to minister to her lust. I do not wish
to ‘insult the Shelleys,’ but I cannot conceive that Shelley would have
written so approvingly of the Canto, had he not wished Mary to peruse this
vicious and vitiating piece of Byronic devilry, and felt that it would
please her to read how, in her desperate effort to conquer Don Juan’s
coldness, Gulbeyaz, in an imperial way
‘laid
Her hand on his, and bending on him eyes,
Which needed not an empire to persuade,
Look’d into his for love....
... and pausing one chaste moment, threw
Herself upon his breast, and there she grew.’
On 14th September, 1821, Shelley wrote from Pisa to Horatio Smith, of
Byron’s determination to write a series of dramas:--
‘This seems to me the wrong road; but genius like his is destined to
lead and not to follow. He will shake off his shackles as he finds
they cramp him. I believe he will produce something very great; and
that familiarity with the dramatic forms of human nature, will soon
enable him to soften down the severe and unharmonizing tints of his
_Marino Faliero_.’
On 4th November, 1821, Shelley said to Edward Williams of Lord Byron’s
_Cain_, ‘His _Cain_ is second to nothing of the kind.’
(8)--From Pisa, Shelley wrote, in January, 1822, to John Gisborne of the
poet, whom he idolized:--
‘What think you of Lord Byron now? Space wondered less at the swift
and fair creations of God, when he grew weary of vacancy, than I at
this spirit of an angel in the mortal paradise of a decaying body. So
I think, let the world envy while it admires, as it may.’
(9)--On 10th April, 1822, when his relations with the great poet had been
shaken and ruffled by gusts of discord, Shelley wrote to John Gisborne,
‘What think you of Lord Byron’s last volume? In my opinion it contains
finer poetry than has appeared in England since the publication of
_Paradise Regained_. _Cain_ is apocalyptic,--it is a revelation not before
communicated to man.’
Of course, Shelley’s idolatry of his hero was not always maintained at
this pitch of enthusiasm. There were moments when the worm turned against
his God, and wrote disparagingly of him. But the foregoing passages from
Shelley’s letters and works exhibit his prevailing view of Byron the poet,
and his worshipful disposition towards the man Byron. Nor may it be
imagined that the worshiper was enabled to think thus reverentially of the
idol, because he was unaware of what was most repulsive in the darker
stages of Byron’s career. For Shelley is the most strenuous and precise of
all the many givers of testimony respecting the Venetian excesses. Writing
to Peacock of Byron’s Venetian life, Shelley says, on 22nd December,
1818:--
‘The fact is, that first, the Italian women with whom he associates
are perhaps the most contemptible of all who exist under the moon--the
most ignorant, the most disgusting, the most bigoted; countesses [who]
smell so strongly of garlic, that an ordinary Englishman cannot
approach them. Well, L[ord] B[yron] is familiar with the lowest sort
of these women, the people his gondolieri pick up in the streets. He
associates with wretches who seem almost to have lost the gait and
physiognomy of man, and who do not scruple to avow practices, which
are not only not named, but I believe seldom even conceived in
England.’
None the less able, however, was Shelley to admire the same Byron (of whom
Mr. Froude writes disgustfully, for ‘living with another man’s wife’) as a
being to be worshipt for his divine excellences and beneficent
achievements. None the less could he regard Byron with reverence and
delight, as ‘the spirit of an angel in the mortal paradise of a decaying
body.’
The winter (styled by Hogg ‘a mere Atticism’) had for its chief domestic
incident the birth of Mary’s eldest son, the ‘William’ of his father’s
song, and of the early grave at Rome, who was born on 24th January, 1816,
on the ninth day after Lady Byron’s withdrawal from Piccadilly Terrace to
Kirkby Mallory. Byron’s Ada was only in the seventh week of her life, when
Shelley’s boy entered upon his brief existence. Born within six weeks and
three days of one another, these infants are curiously associated in
literary annals; for whilst Byron gushed for the world’s edification over
his Ada in verse, that set the sentimental mothers weeping throughout the
country, Shelley’s parental devotion to his ‘delightful child’ broke forth
into song that was no less insincere.
Mary Godwin had not risen from her bed, before all England was ringing
with strange stories of Byron’s domestic troubles. That Shelley, who had
created much scandal in a small world of comparatively obscure people by
quarrelling with his wife, some eighteen or twenty months since, was more
cheered than shocked by Byron’s rupture with his spouse, is probable. That
Byron in his domestic trials and social discredit had a sympathizer and
apologist in the younger poet, is certain. To Byron’s idolater, Lady
Byron’s inability to live happily with her superb husband was a sufficient
proof that she was a faulty woman. That on falling out with his wife, so
sublime a creature as Byron could not take another lawful bride, was in
Shelley’s view a signal example of the depraving tyranny of matrimonial
law,--another argument why Wedlock should be replaced by Free Love.
On this exciting subject, Shelley and Mary were in perfect accord, when
Claire ran in upon them, beaming with beauty, radiant with joy, brimming
over with affection and happiness. She had rare news for them. Bent on
going to Switzerland, she implored them to take her there. Switzerland?
Geneva? Why was she so desirous of going thither? Mary had a babe at her
breast, and was still only recovering from her accouchement; Shelley was
busy at home with his books and writing. What reasons could Claire show
why he should leave his study and Mary her home, to escort her to Geneva?
Answering their questions, and disposing of any objections they made to
her astounding proposal, Claire induced them to take her out viâ Paris to
the Sécheron Hotel near Geneva.
There were no steamboats and railways in 1816. No mere jaunt for idlers
and invalids, as it is now-a-days; the journey from London to Switzerland
(as Shelley, Mary, and Claire knew from experience) was a painful and
costly business in 1816. Mary Godwin’s son was still in his third month,
when the vivacious and irrepressible Claire came in upon her with these
words, ‘I am dying to go to Switzerland; the one desire of my heart is to
go to Geneva; and you and Shelley must take me there,--not in August, or
July, or June; but at the turn of April. You must pack at once and take me
out to Switzerland!’ Is it conceivable that Shelley and Mary yielded to
Claire’s vehement entreaty without asking her, _why_ she was so eager to
be off to Geneva; without satisfying themselves that Claire had an object
in view which justified her in asking so much of them, and in putting them
to so much trouble and expense? Is it conceivable that Claire would have
carried her point with her sister and Shelley, had they not regarded her
again with affection, and been of opinion that she had a claim to so large
a measure of their sympathy and assistance? Is it conceivable that in the
month, whose lap is chilled by lingering winter, Mary Godwin with her babe
in her arms would have crossed the Channel, and traversing France made the
long and toilsome journey to Geneva, only to gratify the mere whim of a
girl she disliked?
All these questions are answered in the affirmative by Mr. Froude, and the
other Shelleyan enthusiasts, who require us to believe that Shelley and
Mary Godwin accompanied Claire, _viâ_ Paris, to Geneva, without any
knowledge or suspicion--that Byron was journeying thither with his young
doctor (Polidori) by the Rhine route; that Claire and Byron had arranged
to meet at the Hotel Sécheron; that Claire had for some weeks before
leaving England been Byron’s mistress; that her object in getting out to
Geneva was to throw herself into Byron’s arms. Successive biographers have
represented that the meeting of the two sets of tourists at the Sécheron
was accidental. Till I exhibited in _The Real Lord Byron_ the reasons for
thinking otherwise of this meeting, no biographer had ventured even to
hint that the juncture of the two parties might have resulted from
pre-arrangement. It is now admitted, even by Mr. Froude, that I was right
on this point.
But whilst admitting that the meeting resulted from pre-arrangement, Mr.
Froude now insists that Byron and Claire were the only parties to the
pre-arrangement, which (according to Field Place) was withheld by Claire
from her travelling companions. Further, Mr. Froude maintains that,
instead of being taken to Geneva by Shelley and her sister, Claire took
them thither on her lap. Yet more:--Mr. Froude and his fellow-workers
require us to believe that, when they accompanied her to Switzerland,
without knowing or suspecting _why_ she wished to go there, Shelley and
Mary Godwin disliked Claire extremely,--disliking her for being a
malicious, spiteful, and altogether intolerable girl; regarding her
disgustfully on account of her vicious notions respecting the intercourse
of the sexes. Touring in pre-railway times with an odious companion was
even more vexatious than touring with such a companion now-a-days. Yet Mr.
Froude insists that Shelley and Mary Godwin associated themselves for
several months of foreign touring, with a girl they disliked extremely,
for the pure pleasure of her society. More still:--Mr. Froude wishes us to
believe that, almost to the last day of their sojourn with Claire and
Byron in Switzerland, neither Shelley nor Mary Godwin had the faintest
suspicion that Claire was Byron’s mistress; and that though Byron was at
pains to have his mistress brought out to him, under cover of her
travelling companions, he never saw her at Geneva, except in the presence
of some witness to the propriety of their demeanour to one another.
Admitting that Byron talked to Claire on the most delicate subjects--such
as the arrangements for her accouchement, and plans for the disposal of
her child when it should be born--Mr. Froude insists that, throughout her
stay in Switzerland, she could not easily have been alone with Byron, even
for the shortest interview. Mr. Froude makes this statement, though it is
a matter of sure personal history that, whilst Byron lived in the Villa
Diodati, and Shelley (with Mary and Claire) in a cottage at the villa’s
foot, the trio of the cottage often slept in Byron’s house after sitting
up with him till dawn.
On what grounds does Mr. Froude ask us to believe things, so incredible
that it is difficult to imagine any evidence that would justify us in
believing them? Mr. Froude has nothing whatever _to show_; nothing
whatever to urge, in support of his extravagant assertions, except talk
about a letter, which he may not show, because Sir Percy Shelley thinks it
better not to show it. We are not told when this letter was written, under
what circumstances it was written, for what purpose it was written. Mr.
Froude says the letter was written by Claire. Any statement told by
Claire, to the discredit of their curious views of Shelley and his career,
is unhesitatingly rejected as a falsehood by the Shelleyan enthusiasts.
They do not falter in charging Claire with falsehood in telling the
certain truth, that she was the Constantia of Shelley’s verse. They do not
falter in charging her with falsehood, in saying that Fanny Imlay, _alias_
Wollstonecraft _alias_ Godwin, killed herself for love of Shelley.
According to the Shelleyan enthusiasts Claire went through life, telling
fibs whenever fibs would serve her purpose; and yet a letter, said to have
been written by her (a letter withheld from public scrutiny), is enough to
satisfy them, that Byron, after causing her (his already _enceinte_
mistress) to come out to him in Switzerland, never saw her there except
in the presence of a third party. To believe this is to believe the
incredible.
When it shall be produced to the world, it will be time enough to give an
opinion whether this marvellous letter was written by Claire to screen
Mary from her father’s censure; or at a later time to whitewash her sister
Mary in the eyes of Sussex society; or was a fabrication, for which Claire
was in no degree accountable. Should it appear that Claire really wrote
the letter, it will only be additional evidence of her faculty for
fibbing. To support the letter’s manifest untruths, with words written by
Mary (who, as we have seen, was often curiously inaccurate in her
biographical statements), or with words written by Shelley (who seldom let
a month pass without penning something wholly devoid of historic truth
about himself or his affairs), would be only to produce evidence of a
conspiracy to impose an untruth on human credulity, for some purpose or
other.
My way of dealing inferentially with admitted facts is this: On flashing
in upon her sister and Shelley at Bishopgate, with joy in her face, Claire
told them at once that she had won the great Byron’s heart, and was
holding the place, for which Lady Byron had been found unworthy. On
learning from her how she and Byron had arranged to journey to Geneva by
different routes, in order that public attention should not be called to
their movements and purpose, Shelley and Mary Godwin consented readily to
her prayer, that they would take her out to her lover. In brief, this is
my view of the case. Let readers decide for themselves, whether they
should accept the view as reasonable or reject it as the reverse. What
motive can Claire have had for concealing her tender and romantic
intercourse with Byron from her sister Mary, living in Free Love with
Shelley? Why should Claire have hesitated to avow her friendship with
Byron to the poet and social reformer, who had taught alike, by precept
and practice, that love should be free; that the love which yearned for
marriage was the only sanction its marriage needed. The only motives a
girl in Claire’s position could have for holding her passion from her
sister’s knowledge would be motives of shame and delicacy. Such motives
cannot be supposed to have influenced Claire’s action to her
sister-by-affinity; the girl with whom she had studied _Queen Mab’s_ views
about marriage, and the Chevalier Lawrence’s _Empire of the Nairs_; the
spouse of a man to whom she was not married; the mother of a child who in
the law’s eye, from one point of view, was no one’s child. What could
Shelley discover of evil in Claire’s attachment to Byron? The thing he
approved for himself was no thing for Shelley to disapprove in Byron’s
case. The course which was virtuous for Mary, could not strike him as
vicious for Mary’s sister.
Mr. Froude writes disdainfully of Claire’s probable presumption in
‘perceiving the analogy of Byron’s and Shelley’s situation.’ Mr. Froude
remarks also that, ‘so far from Claire’s position being like that of Mary
Godwin, it must have appeared to Shelley rather a hideous parody of it.’
Why a hideous parody? The cases were too similar for the resemblance to
have escaped any one of the trio. Shelley had quarrelled with his wife and
was living with another woman. Byron had differed from his wife and was
attached to another woman. Separated from their wives by what is called
‘amicable arrangement,’ both poets were living in Free Contract with girls
they could not marry. The similar cases had no doubt their points of
dissimilarity. But on the whole these points tell in Byron’s favour. In
taking Claire under his protection, he had not seduced a girl no more than
sixteen years of age. He had not carried off by stealth the child of his
most intimate friend. Nor had he taken such pains to win Claire as Shelley
took to capture Mary. It is not certain when and how Byron made Claire’s
acquaintance. On this point there are two different stories; one of them
representing that he saw her for the first time at a point of Oxford
Street, to which he had come at her written request; the other and more
reliable story being that their first interview occurred at Drury Lane
Theatre, under circumstances set forth in _The Real Lord Byron_. Anyhow
the poet’s capture of the giddy and clever girl was an easy conquest,
whereas Shelley’s triumph over Mary was a very difficult business. In
palliation of Claire’s evil behaviour it should be remembered, that she
did not act thus lightly until Shelley had educated her out of her early
views, and that in becoming Byron’s mistress she followed an example set
her by Mary.
Though in my _Real Lord Byron_ I followed previous biographers in saying
Shelley and Byron met for the first time at Geneva, I am by no means
confident that they had no intercourse in England before setting out for
their separate journeys to the same foreign capital. Under the known
circumstances it would be so natural for the poets to have a personal
conference in the earlier weeks of April, 1816; that far from causing me
surprise, it would only fulfil one of my reasonable expectations, to come
upon documentary evidence of their having met in London shortly before
Byron sailed for Ostend. For the present, however, readers must be content
with the assurance that Shelley and Byron came together at the Sécheron
Hotel on the 25th of May, 1816.
Having consented to accompany Claire to Geneva, Shelley, in his
preparations for the journey, acted as though he were especially desirous
to prevent his most familiar friends from discovering or suspecting the
real object of the expedition. Had he felt no need for secrecy he would
surely have told so close a friend as Peacock whither he and Mary were
going, and the purpose of the trip. He would have said, ‘Mary’s sister,
who went abroad with us last July twelve months, is set on going to
Geneva, and has persuaded us to take her there.’ But for some reason he
withheld the real purpose of the trip, and went abroad under cover of
misstatements.
It must have been a day of early April, 1816 (though Peacock calls it a
day of ‘early summer’), that witnessed a curious scene in the library of
the Bishopgate cottage. Bethinking himself that he would take a mid-day
stroll, Peacock (a visitor at the cottage) went for his hat to the hall,
where he saw Shelley’s small hat, but looked in vain for his own large
hat. As he did not care to walk about the country hatless, Peacock
returned to the library, where he was joined by Mary Godwin, who at once
gave him the particulars of certain stirring news, brought that very
morning to Shelley by Mr. Williams, of Tremadoc; the particulars thus
passed on by Mary having just come to her from Shelley’s lips. Instead of
showing any excitement at the stirring news, Peacock took Mary’s gossip
coolly, and declared frankly he could not believe Mr. Williams had been to
the house, or believe Shelley had received the news from the Welsh agent.
Slightly astonished, and perhaps slightly nettled at Peacock’s
incredulity, Mary Godwin withdrew from the library. A few minutes later,
Shelley (with Peacock’s big hat in his hand) entered the room. Now for the
scene between the calm, sagacious, stolid Peacock, and the tall, slight,
round-shouldered, stag-eyed, fresh-complexioned, boyish Shelley.
For the full enjoyment of the combat between the two poets, readers must
go to an article preserved in Peacock’s _Collected Works_. In answer to a
remark by his companion, Peacock admitted his inability to believe the
account Mary had given him of Mr. Williams’s brief visit. Insisting on the
truth of the story, Shelley declared that he had seen Mr. Williams and
walked with him to Egham, adding (in reply to a question by Peacock) that,
during the walk to Egham, he wore the hat he still held in his hand. On
discovering how far too big the hat was for his small head, Shelley
admitted having snatcht it up hastily, and remarked that perhaps, instead
of wearing it, he had carried it in his hand the whole way to Egham and
back. Peacock may well have smiled; it being, of course, obvious to him,
that Shelley had snatched up the wrong hat, only a minute or two since, to
put himself into walking costume, and give himself the appearance of
having just returned from a walk.
Seeing that the hat-trick had only confirmed Peacock in his disbelief of
the story, Shelley pleaded how hard it was for him, a man who had devoted
his life to the pursuit of truth, and made great sacrifices and suffered
much for the truth, to be treated as a visionary. It was thus that Shelley
mistook himself for a martyr, and required his friends to regard him as a
martyr for the truth’s sake. How had he proved his devotion to truth? The
only sacrifices he had ever made of his interests were made from
altogether selfish considerations. He had sacrificed his future interest
in his grandfather’s property, _in order_ to preserve his interest in A
and B, on which he could raise money for his immediate use. He had
sacrificed a little of his interest in A and B, _in order_ to get an
immediate income of 1000_l._ a-year. Seeing how little Peacock was
affected by the plea _in misericordiam_, Shelley proposed that on the
morrow they should go to London, and call on Mr. Williams. ‘He told me,’
said Shelley, ‘he was stopping at the Turk’s Head Coffee-house in the
Strand, and should be there two days.’ Mr. Williams, of course, had told
him nothing of the kind. Catching at the suggestion, Peacock declared he
would willingly go to Mr. Williams, for proof that the marvellous story
was a true story.
In accordance with this arrangement Peacock and Shelley set forth the next
morning, to call on Mr. Williams at the Turk’s Head Coffee-house; Shelley
(an excellent walker) putting forth his foot bravely, with the air of a
man confident of achieving the purpose of the walk to London. But on
getting half-way down Egham Hill, Shelley stayed the march to town by
turning suddenly on his companion with a declaration, that after all he
did not think they would find Mr. Williams at the Turk’s Head. Peacock
declared himself of the same opinion. Still holding to his invention, but
altering it in an important particular, Shelley explained that, when
declaring his purpose to stay two days at the hotel, Mr. Williams had
mentioned a contingency, which might cause him to leave London before
night. To this explanation the merciless Peacock replied, that all the
same they might, by going up to town, learn at the hotel whether Mr.
Williams had been there. The suggestion was not acceptable to Shelley.
Shrinking from the proposal to put the truth of his story to the test, he
declared he would find some other way of convincing his incredulous
friend. He would write to Mr. Williams on the matter. For the present, it
would be more agreeable to him to stroll about the forest than walk along
the road to London.
Peacock assenting with a scarcely perceptible smile, the walk to London
was given up, and the friends passed the day in the forest.
A few days later, nothing having been said in the meantime about Mr.
Williams’s visit, the question is reopened by Shelley with an
announcement, that he had received from Mr. Williams a letter and a
diamond necklace, in token and demonstration that the sender of the letter
and necklace had visited Bishopgate in accordance with Shelley’s story.
Would Peacock believe the story, if Shelley showed him the necklace?
Peacock answering stoutly that the exhibition of the diamond necklace
would only prove to him, that somehow or other his friend was in a
position to display so costly an ornament, Shelley forbore to show the
diamonds, and desisted from his efforts to get the better of his
companion’s incredulity.
The matter was then dropt for ever. Shelley never renewed his attempt to
impose the absurd fiction on Peacock’s clear and steady mind. Peacock says
that he had, on one or two previous occasions, argued with his friend
against ‘similar semi-delusions,’ ‘and,’ adds Peacock,
‘I believe if they had always been received with similar scepticism,
they would not have been so often repeated.... I call them
semi-delusions, because, for the most part, they had their basis in
his firm belief that his father and uncle had designs on his liberty.
On this basis his imagination built a fabric of romance, and when he
presented it as substantive fact, and it was found to contain more or
less of inconsistency, he felt his esteem interested in maintaining it
by accumulated circumstances, which severally vanished under the touch
of investigation, like Williams’s location at the Turk’s Head
Coffee-house.’
In other words, according to Peacock’s view, Shelley was in these affairs
a victim of delusion at bottom, and a wilful utterer of untruths on the
surface. What does the reader think? There is no question that the
statements made by Shelley were untrue. His father and uncle were not
plotting to put him in a lunatic asylum; Mr. Williams, of Tremadoc, had
not been to call on him; Mr. Williams had not given him intelligence of a
plot for locking him up; Mr. Williams had not sent him a diamond necklace.
Let it be remembered that Shelley was a young man capable of stating on
paper his intention to have recourse to deception and then deliberately
acting on the intention. He was a writer of wheedling letters to get
money. Of all his many spoken or written misstatements, only three or four
are misstatements without an apparent object. All the other misstatements
had a manifest motive and object, sufficient to account for the employment
of untruth. In the present affair his object was to get out of England
without letting people know, or giving them occasion to suspect the real
purpose of the Continental trip. His motive in saying he must go abroad to
escape from his father and uncle, was to hide the fact that he was going
to take Claire out to Byron. What does the reader think? My own mind is
quite clear. My readers are free to think him in this business the victim
of delusions; but I cannot take that view of the case. Anyhow, whether he
was insane or untruthful, or (as Peacock insists) semi-mad and semi-false,
readers must allow he was a gentleman whose letters and other written
statements are not worthy of the credit, to be accorded to the letters and
other written statements of persons of average mental sobriety and
exactness; that he was a gentleman whose diaries may be suspected of
containing a good many inaccuracies and a few wild fictions; that his bare
statement is no sufficient reason for believing that his most intimate
friend was a villain, or that his first wife was a superlatively wicked
woman.
Another thing to be observed is that, as she was cognizant of Peacock’s
disbelief of Shelley’s statement respecting Mr. Williams’s alleged visit
and news, and was in some degree a witness of the curious conflict of the
two friends, Mary Godwin was aware of her husband’s peculiar mental or
moral infirmity, at least as early as April, 1816. From the spring of
1816, she knew he sometimes uttered statements too marvellous for one of
his closest friends to be capable of believing them. Of course, no woman
could live in conjugal confidence with a man occasionally suffering in so
remarkable a manner from hallucination or deceptive propensity, and be for
any long period unobservant of the peculiarity. It is, however, well to
remember from how early a date of their association she was cognizant of
the fact that, either from delusion or wilful untruthfulness, he was
likely to utter statements at variance with fact.
More than five and something less than six years later (1821-2) Shelley
assured the trustful Medwin and the incredulous Byron that, on the night
before he left London for Switzerland in 1816, he had a memorable
interview with a young, rich, and singularly beautiful woman, who had
never before set eyes upon him. A married lady, of noble connexions, this
historically nameless gentlewoman knew the poet only by his writings,
when, on the eve of his departure for the Continent, she sought his
presence in order to declare herself enamoured of the author of _Queen
Mab_, and desirous of being the mistress of so superlative a being.
Offering Shelley her heart, she implored him to respond to her devotion.
Mated in Free Contract with Mary Godwin, the poet could only decline the
lady’s prayer, and soften his refusal of her suit by explaining that his
heart belonged to the woman, whom he had taken in lieu of his wife. Two
years and a half later he discovered that, instead of returning to her
proper home and lord, the lady, whose flattering preference he was
compelled to decline with suitable expressions of gratitude and regret,
followed him and Mary and Claire across the channel, tracked them through
France, and discovering their Genevese retreat, derived a melancholy
satisfaction from regarding their movements. Of course, whilst she
lingered on Leman’s marge, worshiping her poet and envying his mate in
Free Love, this equally interesting and miserable anonyma took all proper
care, that he should neither recognize her nor suspect her proximity. Thus
following and adoring him in 1816, the unseen worshiper of his genius
followed and adored him in 1818-19, till she died at Naples, after
confessing to him how she had found an inadequate solace for her despair
in pursuing him from land to land. Whilst Medwin swallowed this fantastic
invention, Byron (laughing doubtless in his sleeve at the whole business)
ascribed it to nothing worse than ‘an overwrought imagination.’
It is needless to say the whole story is referable to delusion or
falsehood. No lady proffered her heart and person to the poet in May,
1816. No lady followed the trio through France to Switzerland in 1816, and
again pursued them through foreign lands in 1818. No lady died at Naples
in the winter of 1818-19 in the alleged manner. The whole story was a
piece of romance, that may not have engaged the poet’s fancy for any long
time before he communicated it to Byron and Medwin; though for reasons, to
be indicated in a later chapter, I am disposed to think the fable had its
birth during the poet’s sojourn in Naples, in the winter following his
last withdrawal from his native country.