LAST WORDS.
A Schedule of significant Matters--Delusion and Semi-Delusion--Certain
phenomenal Peculiarities of Shelley’s Mind--The Psychological
Problem--The Story that would have opened Southey’s Eyes--How it would
be Received by Critical Persons--Misconceptions of Field
Place--Bootlessness of publishing the Story--Shelley and Socialistic
Literature--Marian Evans’s Great Error--Her Marriage--Mischievous
Effects of the Apologies for Shelleyan Socialism--The Homage to which
Shelley is entitled--The Homage to which he has no Title.
In this concluding chapter of my exhibition of the evidences respecting
Shelley’s character and career, it will be well for readers to review,
judicially, some of his many statements that, whether they are referable
to falsehood, delusion, or ‘semi-delusion,’ were one and all untrue
statements, in that they were statements contrary to fact, together with a
few other matters which should dispose readers to accept his
representations with suspicion and extreme caution.
(1) In or about 1800, little Bysshe Shelley entertained his sisters with
an imaginary account of the visit he represented himself as having paid to
the ladies (with a delightful garden), whom he had not visited; an
incident of the poet’s childhood which, showing he resembled many other
children in a particular kind of imaginativeness, points to his
constitutional propensity, from an early age, to mistake the impressions
of fancy for veritable cognition.
(2) In or about 1804, the Shelley of Sion House, Brentford, gave in to Dr.
Greenlaw the two lines from Ovid as verses of his own composition; an
incident showing that, instead of being so remarkably truthful in his
infancy, as eulogistic biographers have declared him, he was, in his
childhood, capable of the petty falsehoods and acts of deceit, of which
children are often guilty.
(3) In or about the same year (1804), whilst a pupil at Sion House,
Shelley volunteered to do his schoolmate’s (Gellibrand’s) Latin exercise
for him; and, instead of keeping his word and doing it in a way to satisfy
their master, deliberately did it in a way that could not fail to bring
his friend Gellibrand to punishment; an incident showing that, instead of
being the generous and loyal child his idolaters delight in imagining him,
he was, in his childhood, capable of the little acts of treachery of which
children are sometimes guilty. Whilst smiling at the incident and its
consequences, the reader must admit that in this matter the child-Shelley
broke his word of honour to his comrade.
(4) At Eton, whilst living under the influence of the virtuous Dr. Lind,
Shelley became an habitual fabricator of mendacious letters, each of the
epistles being made up of false statements, for which the power and
activity of his imagination can in no degree be held accountable. The
suggestion is not to be entertained that, when luring an ignorant
correspondent into displaying his ignorance for the sake of the pleasure
of laughing at him, Shelley sincerely imagined himself a genuine searcher
after truth; seeking an enlargement of his knowledge from the person he
addressed. When he signed himself ‘John Jones,’ Shelley cannot have
imagined it was his real name. When he gave a false address for the
purpose of concealment, Shelley cannot have imagined it was a real
address.
(5) Whilst he was an Etonian, Shelley had, at Field Place, the illness
attended with delirium, in which he appears to have been first visited
with the monstrous and revolting notion that his father designed to lock
him up in a madhouse. Long after this illness, he either suffered from
this hallucination, or, with deliberate untruthfulness, slandered his
father in declaring him to have entertained so monstrous a purpose. He
told this story to his father’s infamy to Hogg at Oxford, to Peacock in
later time, and various other persons. He used this story to compass his
own selfish ends. It comes to us from Mary Godwin’s pen, that he used this
story to stir her compassion for him when he was endeavouring to lure her
to live in Free Contract with him, and that he used it to good purpose.
Peacock, who knew him well, maintains that Shelley was haunted throughout
life by this notion of his father’s enormous wickedness and revolting
design to lock him up in a madhouse. Yet the evidence is certain that the
kindly Squire of Field Place never entertained any such design against the
boy, whose consent would be needful on his coming of age to the
resettlement of the family estates A and B. It is certain that in this
matter Shelley slandered his own father throughout successive years, and
to various persons, his various utterances and re-utterances of the
monstrous slander being one and all referable to deliberate falsehood,
delusion, or what Peacock styles semi-delusion.
(6) In the year 1810, Shelley induced a London publisher to publish a
collection of verses on the assurance that they were original poetry, and
to offer the verses under a title proclaiming their originality, though he
cannot have been unaware they were deficient in the alleged originality.
Writing from memory, more than sixteen years after the event, the rascally
and mendacious Stockdale declared that, on the discovery of the
plagiarism, Shelley laid the blame of the fraud on his coadjutor. As
Shelley’s coadjutor was his own sister, to believe Stockdale’s unsupported
assertion is to take an even more unfavourable view of Shelley’s part in
the affair.
(7) In the Christmas holidays of 1810-11, Shelley wrote from Field Place
to Hogg at Oxford, that he meant to have recourse to deception to members
of his own domestic circle, and having declared this intention, he told
untruths to the persons he meant to deceive. For these untruths the power
and liveliness of his imagination can be held in no degree accountable.
(8) In 1810, in order to become a member of the University of Oxford,
after ceasing to be a Christian, he subscribed the Thirty-nine Articles,
and solemnly declared himself a believer in Christianity.
(9) In 1810 and 1811, during his residence at Oxford, Shelley was a
wholesale fabricator of mendacious letters; the letters being written
under false pretences of motive and mental temper to the persons whom he
lured, or tried to lure, into religious controversy, some of the epistles
being signed with a false name, and dated from a false address, and one of
them at least representing the writer of it to be a young woman troubled
with religious doubts. For the countless falsehoods of these letters,
written thus deceptively for purposes of concealment and security, the
force and liveliness of the writer’s imagination cannot be held
accountable. It is not to be supposed that whilst writing to the Bishop of
the Church of England in a feminine style and under a feminine signature,
Shelley imagined he was a woman.
(10) In 1811, whilst still at Oxford, Shelley produced _The Necessity of
Atheism_, with a preface made up of untruths, for which the force of his
imagination cannot be held in any degree accountable.
(11) In 1811, after leaving Oxford, Shelley, from complaisance or in mere
levity, took the sacrament with Miss Westbrook when he deemed Christianity
a delusion, regarded the sacred rite as a piece of mummery, and was
(according to his statement to Southey at Keswick) busying himself in
making proselytes to Atheism in the Clapham boarding-school, where
Harriett Westbrook was a pupil. Participation in the Sacrament of the
Lord’s Supper being an act of solemn declaration that the participator is
a believer in Christianity and in communion with the Church, I think few
readers will question that in thus taking the sacrament Shelley was guilty
of an act of untruth.
(12) In October, 1811, he wrote words for the purpose of inducing people
to imagine that, instead of having left Harriett with Hogg at York, he had
taken her with him to London and Sussex.
(13) In a letter dated to Mr. Medwin, the Elder, on 26th November, 1811,
there is evidence, under Shelley’s own hand, that shortly before that
date, he wrote to his mother and sisters respecting some ‘affair’ which,
on coming to the ears of some of his old neighbours at Horsham, was
regarded by them as no true affair, but a thing of his invention.
(14) During his stay at Keswick (1811-12), Shelley (speaking, as I
conceive, under delusion) told Southey that Hogg had attempted to seduce
Harriett during the journey back from Scotland to York. That, in thus
speaking of his familiar friend to a slight acquaintance, he spoke under
misconception, we have Shelley’s assurance in eloquent words and still
more impressive acts. Should additional evidence ever show that Hogg
really made the attempt, and that Shelley had good grounds for what he
said and wrote on that matter to his friend’s infamy, he must be adjudged
to have written and acted deceitfully or under egregious misconception, in
respect to what he did and wrote in later times for Hogg’s exculpation.
(15) In 1812 Shelley wrote William Godwin a series of letters teeming with
inaccuracies, some of which were slanderous statements respecting his
father.
(16) In the same year, towards the close of his stay at Greta Bank,
Shelley imagined himself to have been assaulted by a robber under the very
eaves of Mr. Calvert’s house; an hallucination productive of statements
contrary to fact.
(17) In the same year (1812), whilst at Tanyrallt, Shelley undertook to
write a long and ‘wheedling letter’ to the Duke of Norfolk in order to
induce His Grace to take measures for his pecuniary advantage. Neither
laudanum nor imaginativeness can be held accountable for this declaration
of a resolve to write a deceptive letter.
(18) The year 1813 was the year of the Tanyrallt Mystery; an affair
fruitful of inaccuracies of statement, some of which must be ascribed to
untruthfulness on Shelley’s part, though some of them may have been
altogether due to delusion.
(19) In the same year (1813), he produced _Queen Mab_ with a false
imprint.
(20) In the same year (1813), he for several weeks laboured under the
notion that he was suffering from leprosy; a delusion conclusively
evidential of transient mental derangement.
(21) In 1814 he produced a further demonstration of _The Necessity of
Atheism_, under the deceptive title of _A Refutation of Deism_, and with a
Preface made up of untruths. It has been questioned whether this work was
ever published in the commercial sense of the term. It is, however,
certain that the work was written for circulation, and that it was legally
published.
(22) In the same year (1814) he wooed and won Mary Godwin under cover of
deceitful practices, on one occasion allaying William Godwin’s suspicions
and apprehensions with an explanation, which, as it appeared a sufficient
explanation to the anxious father, must have been disingenuous and
deceitful. Moreover, we have Mary Godwin Shelley’s evidence that in wooing
her he told her the wild fiction about his father’s purpose to shut him up
in a lunatic asylum, and of his preservation from such imprisonment
through Dr. Lind’s timely intervention.
(23) In or about 1815 Shelley told Peacock that his sentence of expulsion
from Oxford had been preceded by his formal arraignment before a numerous
assembly on a charge of producing an atheistical work, and that he had
defended himself with a formal oration delivered to this numerous
assembly. At the same time he showed Peacock a report of this oration in
what had the appearance of being a newspaper.
(24) In or about the same year (1815) Shelley, in conversation with
Peacock, gave the inaccurate account of the offence that resulted in his
dismissal from Eton, saying that he was sent from the school for pinning a
boy’s hand to a table with a penknife.
(25) In the year (1816), shortly before he started from England for
Switzerland, with Claire and Mary Godwin, he poured upon Peacock a stream
of misstatements (referable either to falsehood, delusion, or both)
respecting Mr. (Tremadoc) Williams’s alleged visit to Bishopgate and
sojourn in London, and the purpose of his father and uncle to lock him up
in a lunatic asylum, alleging that his object in going abroad was to get
beyond the reach of his father and uncle, who were set on depriving him of
his liberty.
(26) In 1817 Shelley instructed the Olliers to tell the complicated
untruth under cover of which they could withdraw from the position of
principal publishers of _Laon and Cythna_, and put Messrs. Sherwood,
Neely, and Jones in their place.
(27) In 1818, on coming to Venice, Shelley, for a sufficient object, told
Byron that Mrs. Shelley was staying at Padua, though he was at the time
well aware she was at Bagni di Lucca with her children.
(28) In the winter of 1818-19 (if reliance may be placed on his statements
made to Byron and Medwin at Pisa in 1821-2) he imagined himself the
recipient of singular attentions from a married lady of beauty, wealth,
and noble connections, who, after proffering him her heart in 1816, and
following him in that year from England to Switzerland, followed him, in
1818, from England to Naples, at which place, according to his story, she
expired in the winter of 1818-19, under his sympathetic observation.
(29) In 1820, Shelley told Medwin that, in the summer of the same year, he
had been felled to the ground in the Post Office of Pisa by a man who
preluded the ruffianly blow by exclaiming, ‘What, are you that d----d
atheist, Shelley?’ that, on recovering from the stunning effect of the
blow, he hastened to tell Mr. Tighe of the assault; and that, after
tracking the ruffian to the Tre Donzelle at Pisa, he and Mr. Tighe went to
Genoa in futile pursuit of the assailant. Whether, in the summer of 1820,
Shelley really imagined himself a sufferer from this imaginary assault,
whether he went to Genoa in pursuit of the imaginary assailant, whether
he ever spoke to Mr. Tighe about the assault, are matters respecting which
there is no sufficient testimony; but the evidence is sufficient that he
told Medwin about this assault that was never made upon him. Shelley’s
statement about this affair must be referred to falsehood, delusion, or
semi-delusion.
(30) In 1821-2 Shelley spoke to Byron and Medwin of the enamoured
gentlewoman who, according to his account, followed him, in 1816, from
England to Geneva, and, in 1818, from England to Naples; the whole of his
narrative of the lady, who worshipt him and died of love for him, being a
fiction, referable to falsehood, delusion, or semi-delusion.
(31) In the same year (1821) Shelley wrote from Ravenna to his wife the
letter, crammed and crowded with misrepresentations of what had passed in
conversation between him and Byron, respecting the scandalous account of
his (Shelley’s) intercourse with Claire.
To the careful reader of these volumes it is, of course, apparent that
this schedule of significant matters might be greatly extended and
expanded. But the list is sufficiently comprehensive to justify the
verdict that, from his boyhood to his death, Shelley was apt to utter for
truth things contrary to fact; that he sometimes did things which no
precisely honest man could do; that his word was not a word to be relied
on. To account for his frequent departures from truth, friendly historians
of his career have declared him, in respect to his misstatements, not so
much an untruthful man as a deluded man. Following in the track of these
historians, every reader of this book is left to decide for himself, in
respect to each of the poet’s numerous misstatements, whether its
inaccuracy should be referred to purely deceptive purpose, sheer
misconception, or semi-delusion. In reviewing the many deviations from
truth, it is, however, well for readers to bear in mind that delusion is
one of three distinctive forms of insanity. To be insane is to suffer from
a state of mental disease, attended with incoherence, fatuity, or
delusion. The mind that suffers from any one of these kinds of disorder is
a deranged and insane mind. However eccentric, or feeble, or otherwise
unhealthy, it may be, the mind which displays no one of these three
symptoms of derangement is a sane mind. Hallucination differs in
magnitude, intensity, and persistence. If Shelley was wholly under
hallucination in respect to his father’s purpose of confining him in a
madhouse, and if he was (as Peacock says) haunted by this notion
throughout life, he was the victim of an extremely revolting and very
persistent delusion. There is a certain amount of truth in another poet’s
dictum, that great wits to madness sure are near allied. But if Shelley’s
alert and subtle mind was so steadily, and for so long a period, held by
the notion that his father wished to put him in a madhouse, he was mad in
a degree, that to many readers may well appear incompatible with the
vigour and grandeur of his faculties. In the estimate of his mental and
moral peculiarities to minimize the degree in which he suffered from
hallucination, is to maximize the degree in which he was untruthful. In
proportion as the final verdict shall acquit him of untruthfulness it must
declare him to have suffered from insanity. If he was not contemptibly
untruthful, he was (for all his mental force and poetic sensibility)
pitiably insane,--far more insane than I can think it possible for a man
of his mental power to be. In reviewing his long series of misstatements,
careful psychologists must come to the conclusion that when uttering them
he was either wilfully untruthful, suffering from delusion, or suffering
from what Peacock termed ‘semi-delusion’--the state of mind in which
untruthfulness and morbid imaginativeness joined hands.
But whether they proceeded from hallucination or deceptive purpose, or
from the co-operation of falsehood with ungovernable fancy, the
misstatements had the effect of wilful untruths; and the utterer was a
speaker of words not to be relied on. To be kept steadily in mind by the
students of Shelley’s story, this fact is to be held especially in view at
moments, when the student is considering the evidential value of
statements uttered by the poet to the discredit of individuals.
Apart from grounds of which I refrain from speaking fully, there are
grounds for believing that Shelley accounted for his rupture with Harriett
Westbrook by representations which, had he been constituted like ordinary
English gentlemen, would at least be _primâ facie_ evidence that he had
other and stronger reasons for withdrawing from her than any reasons he
gave to Peacock. It is not probable that he would have succeeded in
withdrawing Mary Godwin from her father’s care, had he not made her
believe he had graver causes for dissatisfaction with the ‘noble animal,’
than her inability to feel poetry and understand philosophy. Reared as
she had been within the lines of religious orthodoxy, and trained to
reverence marriage, it is scarcely conceivable that Mary Godwin fled with
her lover to the Continent, without having been made to believe that her
friend, Harriett Shelley, had by flagrant misconduct forfeited her title
to her husband’s consideration. Though Field Place has not shown much
discretion in its treatment of Shelleyan questions, it would scarcely have
smiled at Peacock for not being in Shelley’s confidence on the subject,
had it not been really possessed by the notion, that it knew more than the
rest of the world about the poet’s real cause of displeasure with
Harriett. Without having a strange story in reserve for the fulfilment of
the promise, Field Place would scarcely have promised to produce in due
season a statement, certain to change greatly the world’s misguided view
of the poet’s treatment of his first wife. I have small doubt that Southey
quite misconstrued the words to which he referred, when in his scathing
August-1820 letter to Shelley, he wrote:--
‘You might have regulated your domestic arrangements, as you say,
quite as conveniently to yourself, if you had descended to the base
thoughts of the vulgar. I suppose this means that you might have
annulled your marriage as having been contracted during your
minority.’--(_Southey’s Correspondence with Caroline Bowles_, 1881.)
Southey’s conjecture was wide of the mark. Shelley knew too much of the
Scotch marriage law to imagine he could have set aside his marriage on
that ground. What he meant to imply must have been, that if he could have
descended to the base practice of vulgar folk, wishing for divorce, and
rich enough to pay for it in the usual way, he could have obtained a legal
separation from his wife, on account of her misconduct. And that he
ventured to hint so much to his disdainful correspondent is a sufficiently
clear sign that he felt he really had a story (true or fanciful) which,
had he condescended to divulge it, would have made Southey open his eyes
with astonishment at the sufficiency of the grounds on which the author of
_Queen Mab_ retired from John Westbrook’s daughter. It may therefore be
assumed, or at least imagined, that sooner or later the world will be told
in a new way, _why_ Shelley left the girl who had tried his temper not a
little for some months. Possibly the story will be that the author of the
anti-matrimonial note to _Queen Mab_ caught poor Harriett in the act of
lavishing on some man of mean condition attentions she should have
rendered to no one but her husband.
At this date, when poor Harriett’s friends have passed from the scene, it
may appear to Shelley’s idolaters alike easy to get credit for such a
tale, and difficult to discredit it. But critical persons will be less
readily satisfied of the truth of any such story than the Shelleyan
enthusiasts imagine. To offer such a tale to critical persons on Shelley’s
bare and unsupported assertion will be bootless. They will be sure to say,
‘What more natural than for the man, who (under delusion) slandered his
father and Hogg, to put (under delusion) monstrous things on record
against his wife, after quarrelling with her?’ At the moment of breaking
with his wife, Shelley was very anxious for Peacock’s approval of his
action;--so anxious for it as to call him up to London from the country
for a conference on the business. Moreover (though Mr. Froude, out of his
great knowledge of Shelleyan questions, says the reverse), Shelley all
through life was quick to defend himself at the expense of other people.
The critical people will say: ‘Why, if this story is true, and not a
Shelleyan invention, did not Shelley confide it to Peacock? One can see
why the poet (capable of giving two different accounts of the same affair
to the well-informed Duke of Norfolk and the uninformed William Godwin)
would withhold an untrue story from the well-informed Peacock. But why, if
the story were true, did he keep it from Peacock? It can scarcely be
suggested that he shrunk from lowering Harriett in Peacock’s esteem.’
At the time of the Chancery Suit, Shelley did his utmost to regain the
custody of his children. He knew that, if the decree should be given
against him, the decision would be grounded on considerations of his
conduct to his first wife. Harriett was no longer in the world to suffer
from any evidence to her discredit. The other Westbrooks were so hateful
to him, he would gladly have caused them pain by evidence to her
discredit. To prove he had left Harriett for a good and sufficient cause,
would have been to strengthen his case greatly. Yet he did not venture to
embody the facts in an affidavit for the Chancellor’s consideration.
Moreover, Field Place bears witness that he never confided the real cause
of his withdrawal from Harriett to any of the few men, who were his
familiar friends in 1814. Surely the critical people will ask, ‘Why did
he not confide this story to his familiar male friends in 1814? Why did he
not venture to produce this story in the Court of Chancery, and swear to
its truth in 1817?’ Surely, also, the critical people will answer both
these questions in ways, adverse to the credibility of the story. Should
it appear that he told the story to Mary shortly before she yielded to his
suit, the critical people will say with a significant smile: ‘No doubt;
and also to move her to regard him compassionately, he at the same time
told her how his cruel father would have locked him up in a madhouse, had
it not been for the virtuous Dr. Lind’s intervention,’ It will be asked by
critical readers why the statement, which if true should have been given
to the world long since, has been withheld so long? Why it was not put
forth during the life of Thomas Love Peacock (Harriett’s vindicator,
Shelley’s close friend and executor), who, knowing both Shelley and his
first wife intimately, maintained stoutly to the last that she was a
virtuous and loyal wife? These questions will also be answered in ways
unfavourable to the statement.
Given to the world on Shelley’s bare assertion, any such statement will
have little effect on critical readers. Nor will it be more effectual on
judicial minds for being supported by statements by Mrs. Shelley and other
persons, deriving their information from Shelley. Fifty such statements
will be nothing more than Shelley’s own statement, uttered by his lips
through fifty tubes. A statement, having no evidential value on its first
utterance, does not acquire evidential value from mere reiteration. Nor
will it be of any avail for any biographer, drawing his information from
Field Place, to produce the mere substance of any such remarkable
statement, and require critical readers to accept the facts on the bare
authority of Shelley’s representatives. Field Place has been too often
misled by its authentic evidences to wildly erroneous conclusions
respecting Shelley, for critical readers to be in a humour to accept any
more of its quite sincere statements of fact without distrust.
Field Place has been induced by its evidences to think the poet a man of
aristocratic descent, though his lineal ancestors, from Elizabethan to
Georgian time, were at best small landowners, entitled to bear arms.
Field Place has been induced by Clint’s composition to think of the poet’s
face as symmetrically beautiful, and having a straight and
delicately-modelled nose; though he really had unsymmetrical features, and
a little turn-up nose.
Field Place has been led by its authentic evidences to ascribe the poet’s
estrangement from his family wholly to the religious and political
differences that at most only embittered the quarrel, which is shown by
Sir Bysshe Shelley’s will and codicil, and the certain facts of the poet’s
story, to have resulted from causes, having no connexion with questions of
religion and politics.
Field Place is under the impression that Mary and Claire were not related
in any way whatever to one another.
Though Mary Godwin was not educated, any more than Amelia Opie or Jane
Austen, to be a Free Lover, Field Place is under the impression that she
was educated to think lightly of the matrimonial rite.
Though Mary Godwin did not give herself to Shelley without enduring a
strong conflict of passion and duty, Field Place is under the impression
that she suffered from no such conflict.
Though the Lord Chancellor’s decree was given in steady consideration of
Shelley’s conduct to his first wife, Field Place is under the impression
that in delivering the decree, which denied to Shelley the custody of his
children by Harriett Westbrook, the Lord Chancellor had no regard to the
poet’s conduct to his first wife.
Holding in its hands the conclusive evidence of Shelley’s great affection
for Claire in 1816 and 1817, Field Place is under the impression that
Shelley regarded her with disapproval and aversion in those years.
Surely, critical students of Shelley’s story have in these facts
sufficient grounds for declining to put implicit confidence in the
biographical discretion and exactitude of Field Place:--sufficient reasons
for saying ‘as Field Place is under so many erroneous impressions
respecting the story of its poet, is it not more than probable that Field
Place is under an erroneous impression respecting his reasons for leaving
his first wife?’
I do not doubt that Field Place could give us some painful and hitherto
undivulged particulars about the poor girl, whom Shelley certainly
illuminated out of Christianity when she was still a child, and who,
according to Shelley’s words (spoken soon after their marriage, to
Southey, at Keswick), was expelled from her Clapham boarding-school for
embracing the opinions, which he offered to her and her schoolfellows.
But what good would come to Shelley’s reputation by the display of any
more details of his victim’s eventual debasement? Southey’s words were no
less true and just, than scorching, when he wrote (see _Robert Southey’s
Correspondence with Caroline Bowles_, 1881) in his August-1820 letter to
Shelley at Pisa: ‘Be this as it may, ask your own heart, whether you have
not been the whole, sole, and direct cause of her destruction. You
corrupted her opinions; you robbed her of her moral and religious
principles; you debauched her mind. But for you and your lessons, she
might have gone through the world innocently and happily.’ As he read
these scathing words, Shelley may well have dismissed all hope of good to
come to his posthumous fame from the vindicatory story, which, even yet,
may be published to his injury. Shelley _was_ accountable for Harriett
Westbrook’s depravation. To exhibit for the first time any peculiarly
revolting feature of that depravation might cause men of honour and
sensibility to realize more vividly than before the consequences of
Shelley’s action towards the unhappy girl; but to do so could not take a
feather’s weight from the heavy burden of his accountability for the ruin
to which he brought her. To point to any incident of that depravation as
something to justify Shelley in ‘leaving her to slide’ into deeper guilt,
would be an extravagance of injustice to the poor girl.
Powerless to palliate at any point his misdeeds to Harriett, the story,
which might, perhaps, account more precisely for his withdrawal from her,
could neither justify, nor tend by a single hair’s-breadth to justify,
Shelley’s action towards Mary Godwin and her father. No injury, done to a
man by A, can justify him in doing B a grievous injury. Yet, to hear some
of the Shelleyan apologists talk, one would imagine that, to show Harriett
did her husband a greater wrong than any she has hitherto been proved to
have done him, would be to clear him of all blameworthiness for dealing
his familiar friend the most cruel blow, that can be given to a loving
father. As no demonstration of her badness would lessen his responsibility
for her depravation, or in any degree justify his way of dealing with his
intimate friend’s sixteen-years-old daughter, it is to be hoped that the
world will not be invited by any biographer to consider the story by which
Shelley thought he could open Southey’s eyes.
The efforts that have been made during the last twenty-five years to prove
Shelley an almost sacred social regenerator, should be considered in
connexion with the literature that has created sympathy and admiration for
the few noteworthy Englishwomen who have, in recent generations, lived
connubially with men to whom they were not married:--the literature (of
countless essays and articles) that has celebrated the virtues of Mary
Wollstonecraft and Mary Godwin, and, not content with rating Marian Evans
at her high proper worth, as the literary equal of Dickens, Thackeray, and
the late Lord Lytton, has dealt with her admirable novels, as though they
were a kind of new sacred scripture.
Of those novels I think far too highly to write aught in their
disparagement. On other than purely literary grounds, I also think too
worshipfully of Marian Evans (let her _nom de plume_ be dropt as a thing
that has served its turn) to wish to take aught from the homage that is
her due. It is proverbially difficult to foretell the degree of esteem in
which a greatly powerful and popular writer will be held by future
generations. But in Marian Evans’s case there is neither difficulty nor
fear in predicting her place throughout all time in the history of English
literature. She may be surpassed by women of future time. But, come what
may, she never can be anything less than by far the first and greatest of
the Victorian Englishwomen of Letters. It was my hope that the splendour
of her literary fame would be spared the honours of biographical
celebration; that the interest of her unique literary personality should
pass down to posterity under her universally familiar _nom de plume_; and
that her strictly personal and private story might be lost sight of as far
as possible.
Two of my reasons for this hope outweighed all the others. So long as her
association with George Henry Lewes should not be brought before the world
in clear and permanent record, it would remain a thing of her privacy, a
matter of which there would be no need for tongue or pen to say a word, an
affair in respect to which good taste and good feeling would dispose every
person to be reticent. But on being offered in clear type to the whole
world’s consideration, on being laid on every library table and every
drawing-room table of the country, for approval or disapproval, ceasing to
be an affair on which one might be silent, it would become an affair on
which every educated person of all the English-speaking peoples would be
bound, _i.e._ constrained by domestic and other social duties, to form an
opinion of approval or disapproval, and to declare it. To give publicity
to the circumstances of that association, would be to raise for discussion
in every family of the English-speaking peoples, the many perilous
questions touching the origin, history, uses, and usefulness of lawful
marriage;--to raise the whole group of dangerous domestic questions, which
Shelley would fain have forced upon universal consideration by the
anti-matrimonial doctrine of _Queen Mab_ and _Laon and Cythna_. I was not
thinking only of Marian Evans’s fame, and of the many hard things that
would necessarily be said of her in controversies about these social
questions, when I hoped that her domestic association with George Henry
Lewes would be withheld as long as possible from general knowledge. The
story has now been told, to the gratification of the enemies of marriage.
I do not blame Mr. Cross for revealing what he may well have deemed
himself powerless to keep from universal consideration for any long time.
He had, I am sure, the best motives for doing what I hoped he would not
do; and it cannot be questioned that, after deciding to give the world a
complete biography of the famous woman, with whose story he is so
honourably associated, he selected the least objectionable way of
accomplishing his purpose.
It needs not many words to show how little the extreme Shelleyan
Socialists are justified in pointing to that story, as evidence that
Marian Evans concurred in their desire for the substitution of lawless for
lawful wedlock. Still a struggling woman of letters, she was living in the
circles of Free Thought, when she came to think of marriage in some such
way as the pious Martin Bucer thought of it in the sixteenth century, as
the devout Milton thought of it in the seventeenth century, as the honest
and temperate William Godwin thought of it before his abandonment of Free
Contract views. It was an error of judgment (arising partly from defective
knowledge of the dangerous forces of human nature, and partly from the
co-operation of the egotism and the modesty, which prevented her from
seeing how greatly she differed in her mental and moral faculties from
other people); but it was certainly in no degree due to any lack of
delicacy or moral sensibility, that she conceived all spouses capable of
living as virtuously and loyally in Free Contract as she knew herself to
be. It was under these circumstances that, whilst regarding certain social
questions in some such way as they are regarded by ‘the flower’ of the
Free Contract party (men abundantly endowed with learning and mental
acuteness, with benevolence and moral rectitude), it devolved upon her to
decide, whether she could live righteously in the closest and tenderest
intimacy with a man, who had won her heart, without being able to make her
his wife.
It is not easy to recall how much she sacrificed of dignity and happiness
by her decision, and at the same time to think patiently of the man, for
whose sake she made such an enormous sacrifice. Had the lot that came to
her in her autumnal age, only befallen her at the perfection of her
powers, her life might have been no less fruitful of happiness to herself,
than it was beneficent to her species. To think that such a lot might have
befallen her, could have scarcely failed to befall her, had she answered
the fatal question in another way, is to feel resentfully against the man
who, at the instigation of mere masculine selfishness, attached himself to
her, and in doing so bemuddled her existence, and shut her out from so
many of life’s sweetest joys. Had he acted the part of a gentleman in the
matter, she would, at the dawn of her celebrity, have married happily, for
she was a woman to inspire love. It is more generally known that she
wanted some of the elements of feminine beauty, than that she was in some
respects personally charming. Together with the brow of mental power, she
had eyes memorably eloquent of genius and sympathy, and a smile that,
startling or rather gently surprising the beholder (seeing it for the
first time), changed all the character of the countenance, which it
brightened into momentary beauty. It is not for printed words to tell, how
this ineffably charming smile changed and beautified the face, that, in
its expressionless moments, was unattractive. Fortunate in the abundance
of her fine rich tresses, she was also fortunate in her musical voice. It
was the music of a gentle and lofty nature; for which alone many a man
would have loved her.
Enough has been said to indicate how Marian Evans came to hold the views
respecting marriage, which made it possible for the woman of lofty nature
and fine moral sensibility to consent to Mr. Lewes’s suit. Compassion for
him may be held largely accountable for her consent and self-sacrifice.
Though he was the cause of his own domestic misfortunes, he was to be
commiserated for them. And, in nine cases out of every ten, when a
fine-natured woman does what she ought not to do, she takes the wrong step
in obedience to a generous impulse. Hence she took the step which she
lived to regret profoundly (no careful reader of her novels can question
_that_), without, however, surviving her affection for him during his
life. Possibly, when she was being drawn into his power, she did not
trouble herself to think much of the possible effects of her example. If
she thought seriously of that matter, she, thinking as she then did of
marriage, may well have concluded that the effects of her example would
not be pernicious, since the Free Contract in which she could live
virtuously appeared to her an estate, in which the rest of her sex might
also live righteously. But the reasons are obvious, why the still
comparatively obscure woman of letters may have thought the social
influence of her example--the act of a single and comparatively unknown
person, hidden from general observation in vast London--was too light a
matter for serious consideration. The case was far otherwise a few years
later; when in the exercise of her art she had enlarged her knowledge of
human nature, had pondered more thoughtfully the several social problems
connected with marriage, had realized the evils certain to ensue from the
substitution of the Free Contract for lawful wedlock, and had won for
herself a place and eminence, necessarily attended, in the case of so
conscientious a woman, with a lively and anxious desire to use her
influence for good ends, and no other ends. When vast power comes to such
a woman, it never fails to create in her a lively, a keen, even at times a
torturing, sense of responsibility.
Is it strange that Marian Evans was often sad? that the knowledge of her
power over men and women was more fruitful of sorrow than of delight to
her? I may be wrong in thinking, but I like to think, that one of the
motives, which determined her to accept the love of the man, to whom she
gave her hand after Mr. Lewes’s death, was that she might, by the
celebration of her marriage, do her best to preserve her name and fame and
the story of her former life from being used to discredit an institution
and a rite she venerated. Anyhow her marriage was an act, by which she
publicly and impressively declared her disapproval of the great purpose of
the enemies of marriage, and denied their right to speak of her as one of
themselves. The act was thus interpreted by those innovators, who at the
time of the marriage spoke with no little warmth of her miserable
abandonment of their cause and principles. And the deed was not
misconstrued. She could not have proclaimed more effectually her
deliberate opinion that the ordinances of marriage are salutary and
sacred, and that it is the duty of women to comply with them. Instead of
making for the end desired by the extreme Shelleyan Socialists, the story
of the great novelist’s life sets forth nothing more clearly than that she
regarded the main condition of her association with Mr. Lewes,
regretfully.
Is there any reason to fear that the extreme Shelleyan Socialists will
ever see the accomplishment of their desire? None. It is more probable for
Shelley’s poetry to be forgotten, than for his social views to be acted
upon. The churches of the land are strong enough to guard marriage against
its enemies. If the churches were as powerless as fortunately they are
powerful for its preservation, the domestic conservatism of the English
people--a sentiment no less strong in the homes of English liberals than
the homes of their political opponents--could by itself safeguard lawful
wedlock from destruction. The women of England are not so unintelligent
and powerless, that they are likely to be wheedled by specious phrases out
of the dignity and privileges secured to them by matrimony.
There is small reason to fear that the Free Contract of the Shelleyan
innovators will be established on the ruins of an institution, rooted in
the affections of the people, and hallowed by the practice of centuries.
The notion that an institution so venerable and salutary, and all but
universally honoured, may perish, because three or four English women of
letters in the course of a century have consented to live in Free Contract
with lawless spouses, and because a handful of philosophers and
half-a-hundred journalists think it would be well to endow every man with
the power of changing his wife at pleasure, is a notion, too ridiculous
for serious consideration.
But though they are foredoomed to failure, the Shelleyan Socialists have
done and are doing no little harm to individuals. People, who delight in
literature, without knowing how little its producers differ from the
followers of other vocations, are apt to overrate egregiously the wisdom
and virtue of the individuals, to whose writings they are most largely
indebted for mental refreshment and edification. To a veteran, whose way
of life has afforded him good opportunities for observing the lives and
studying the characters of the producers of the higher literature, it may
well seem droll that the author of good books should be so generally and
confidently assumed to live no less well than he writes. But the
disposition of readers to think too highly of their favourite writers
should not be overlooked by those who would take a perfect view of the
various forces, that, resulting in social opinion, determine the conduct
of individuals. Influential in all sorts and conditions of general
readers, this disposition is especially influential amongst the
sympathetic, the imaginative, and the inexperienced. By the many young men
and women of our rural homes--indeed of all homes, lying well away from
the literary coteries--who, drawing their liveliest contentment, take
their clearest views of life, from current _belles lettres_, the works of
supremely powerful poets and novelists are not more prized as sources of
diversion, than as sources of intellectual enlightenment and moral
guidance; and their delight in the literature they admire, is usually
attended with a dangerous readiness to regard with approval whatever they
may know of the personal conduct of its producers.
On a considerable proportion of these young readers, what must be the
effect of the strenuous and fascinating literature which, now in separate
books, now in the pages of popular magazines, and now in the columns of
powerful journals, instructs them, that, whilst living in Free Contract,
Mary Wollstonecraft and Gilbert Imlay were living innocently in the eyes
of God and man; that Mary Godwin should be commended for her generous
courage in flying from her father’s roof with another woman’s husband;
that Marian Evans acted justifiably in associating herself conjugally with
a man who could not marry her; that it is as honourable for a woman to
mate in Free Contract as to become a wife; that reverence for lawful and
holy matrimony should be rated as a mediæval superstition; that Shelley
was only in the smallest degree to blame for carrying off his intimate
friend’s sixteen-years-old daughter.
Can it be questioned that the literature which teaches all this must at
least tend in many cases to weaken, and in some cases to overpower
utterly, the principles and considerations, which in certain seasons of
temptation, withhold young men and women from the shortest and quickest
road to shame and depravation? Can it be doubted that this elegant and
hurtful literature is at this moment causing many a young Englishwoman to
be saying to herself, as she hesitates at the entrance to this common
highway to ruin, ‘Why can it be wrong for me to do what Mary
Wollstonecraft is defended for doing ninety years since; what Mary Godwin
is commended for doing in an early time of the present century; what the
wise and lofty-natured Marian Evans did only a generation since? If it was
not wrong for Marian Evans, and Mary Godwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft to
live connubially with men to whom they were not married, it surely cannot
be wrong for me to do likewise?’
Can it be doubted that, through the influence of the same elegant and
hurtful literature, many a young Englishman is now saying to himself, ‘As
Shelley was guilty of nothing very heinous, nothing more reprehensible
than “the sin of acting on emotional theories of liberty,” in carrying off
his familiar friend’s daughter, when he had no prospect of ever being able
to marry her; as he, notwithstanding this emotional indiscretion, is
offered to our reverential admiration as a man who, might under auspicious
circumstances “have been the Saviour of the World,” it cannot be very
wrong for me to take to my arms in free promise a girl whom I have a fair
prospect of being able to marry a few years hence, and whom I mean to
marry as soon as it shall be convenient for me to do so?’
Had Field Place merely garnished the poet’s pedigree, and varnished his
portraits, and dressed the main incidents of his career into a pretty
memoir, I should have been silent about the genealogical record and
personal narrative, and held my peace about the falsity of the pictures.
But Field Place has exceeded its reasonable powers and privileges, in
dealing with the story of a remarkable man, whose fame is less the
property of his nearest kindred than of the nation, to whose literature
his genius gave new lustre. Had the Shelleyan Enthusiasts confined their
eulogies to the excellences of their favourite poet’s achievements in his
proper art, I should have concurred cordially in their admiration of his
poetical services, and been content to smile in my sleeve at their
simplicity, in thinking he spoke like a peer, when he was only speaking
like a peasant. But it is not enough for the Enthusiasts, that Shelley’s
incomparably fine poetry should be valued at its full worth. To satisfy
them, we must declare him no less virtuous as a man, than masterly as a
songster. And whilst Field Place and the Enthusiasts have committed
indiscretions, that provoke remonstrance and demand correction, the
extreme Shelleyan Socialists have placed his strongest title to social
homage, on his courageous avowal of sentiments, that are unutterably
distasteful to the great majority of conscientious and right-minded
people.
When a man is taken from the long roll of our mighty poets, and offered to
the world’s admiration as a rare example of all the human virtues, it is
well for people to examine the grounds of such extraordinary commendation.
Now that _Queen Mab_, with its anti-matrimonial note, is put into the
hands of our boys; now that _Laon and Cythna_, with its monstrous
doctrine, is seen on our drawing-room tables; now that the author of so
reprehensible a book is proclaimed a being of unqualified goodness, who,
under auspicious circumstances, ‘might have been the Saviour of the
World,’ it is time for the world to be told, that the recent efforts to
win for Shelley a kind of regard, to which he is in no degree whatever
entitled, are only part of a social movement, that, so far as the extreme
Shelleyan Socialists are concerned, is a movement for the Abolition of
Marriage,--in accordance with the spirit and purpose of his Social
Philosophy.
THE END.
LONDON:
Printed by STRANGEWAYS AND SONS, Tower Street, Upper St. Martin’s Lane.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The authorities differ respecting these preliminary measures; some
saying that she deliberately walked into the low water, whilst others
represent that she walked on the Bridge in the rain, in order that her
dress should be soaked and weighted with water, before she took the leap
to death. Godwin’s account in the _Memoirs_ is:--‘The rain suggested to
her the idea of walking up and down on the Bridge till her clothes were
thoroughly drenched and heavy with the wet, which she did for half an
hour, without meeting a human being. She then leaped from the top of the
Bridge, but still seemed to find a difficulty in sinking, which she
endeavoured to counteract by pressing her clothes closely round her;’--an
account for which the writer may be assumed to have had Mary
Wollstonecraft’s authority.
[2] What construction Jerdan put upon the words of wrath is known from a
clause of the scorching passage of the famous article of the _Literary
Gazette_, in which he set forth the worst of the evil capabilities to be
looked for in Shelley’s pupils:--‘A disciple following his tenets would
not hesitate to debauch, or, after debauching, to abandon, any woman; to
such it would be matter of perfect indifference to rob a confiding father
of his daughters, and incestuously to live with all the branches of a
family, whose morals were ruined by the damned sophistry of the seducer;
_to such it would be sport to tell a deserted wife to obtain with her
pretty face support by prostitution_; and when the unhappy maniac sought
refuge in self-destruction, to laugh at the fool while in the arms of
associate strumpets.’--_Vide_ _Literary Gazette_, 19th May, 1821.
[3] It should be borne in mind that had he persevered in his design of
following medicine, the expelled Oxonian could not have gained an M.D.
degree in England. The member of a medical family, with cousins following
medicine under different qualifications, Shelley was of course aware that,
though he might take the diplomas of the College of Surgeons and the
Apothecaries’ Hall, he could not as a mere London medical student become
‘a physician.’
[4] In his autobiography it is admitted by Hunt, that, before his
liberation from prison, on 3rd February, 1815, his personal acquaintance
with Shelley was very slight. ‘It was,’ he says, ‘my imprisonment that
brought me acquainted with my friend of friends, Shelley. I had seen
little of him before; but he wrote to me, making me a princely offer,
which at that time I stood in no need of.’ In another place the
autobiographer says, ‘I first saw Shelley during the earlier period of the
_Examiner_, before his indictment on account of the Regent, but it was
only for a few short visits, which did not produce intimacy.’ Hunt does
not seem to have ever visited Shelley at Bishopgate, or, in any fair sense
of the term, to have known Shelley whilst the latter lived there. In the
summer of 1816, Shelley was in Switzerland. On his return from
Switzerland, he went to Bath. There was no intercourse (to be called
friendship) between him and Hunt, till the close of 1816. In April, 1818,
Shelley went to Italy, where in the last week of his existence he again
came face to face with Hunt. Like Trelawny, Hunt made the most of his
personal intercourse with Shelley. Readers should bear in mind that the
period of the personal intercourse of the two poets, _i.e._ the period
during which they saw much of one another, speaking together face to face,
began at the close of 1816, and ended in April, 1818,--a period less than
eighteen months. Till he saw his way to suck money out of the youngster’s
pocket, Hunt never troubled himself about Shelley. In the short year and
half of their _personal_ association, the editor of the _Examiner_ found
Shelley a profitable acquaintance.
[5] Mr. Rossetti makes Shelley arrive at Naples on 1st December, 1818, and
I am far from saying that the careful writer is wrong on the immaterial
point. It is enough to know for certain that the poet made only a short
stay (at the most, a sojourn of less than three weeks) at Rome on the
occasion of his journey from Northern to Southern Italy.