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Footnote 44:
Published in _The Nineteenth Century_, January, 1888.
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Nowadays all things appear in print sooner or later; but I have heard
from a lady who knew Mrs. Shelley a story of her which, so far as I
know, has not appeared in print hitherto. Mrs. Shelley was choosing a
school for her son, and asked the advice of this lady, who gave for
advice—to use her own words to me—“Just the sort of banality, you know,
one does come out with: Oh, send him somewhere where they will teach him
to think for himself!” I have had far too long a training as a school
inspector to presume to call an utterance of this kind a _banality_;
however, it is not on this advice that I now wish to lay stress, but
upon Mrs. Shelley’s reply to it. Mrs. Shelley answered: “Teach him to
think for himself? Oh, my God, teach him rather to think like other
people!”
To the lips of many and many a reader of Professor Dowden’s volumes a
cry of this sort will surely rise, called forth by Shelley’s life as
there delineated. I have read those volumes with the deepest interest,
but I regret their publication, and am surprised, I confess, that
Shelley’s family should have desired or assisted it. For my own part, at
any rate, I would gladly have been left with the impression, the
ineffaceable impression, made upon me by Mrs. Shelley’s first edition of
her husband’s collected poems. Medwin and Hogg and Trelawny had done
little to change the impression made by those four delightful volumes of
the original edition of 1839. The text of the poems has in some places
been mended since; but Shelley is not a classic, whose various readings
are to be noted with earnest attention. The charm of the poems flowed in
upon us from that edition and the charm of the character. Mrs. Shelley
had done her work admirably; her introductions to the poems of each
year, with Shelley’s prefaces and passages from his letters, supplied
the very picture of Shelley to be desired. Somewhat idealized by tender
regret and exalted memory Mrs. Shelley’s representation no doubt was.
But without sharing her conviction that Shelley’s character, impartially
judged, “would stand in fairer and brighter light than that of any
contemporary,” we learned from her to know the soul of affection, of
“gentle and cordial goodness,” of eagerness and ardor for human
happiness, which was in this rare spirit,—so mere a monster unto many.
Mrs. Shelley in her general preface to her husband’s poems: “I abstain
from any remark on the occurrences of his private life, except inasmuch
as the passions which they engendered inspired his poetry; this is not
the time to relate the truth.” I for my part could wish, I repeat, that
that time had never come.
But come it has, and Professor Dowden has given us the Life of Percy
Bysshe Shelley in two very thick volumes. If the work was to be done,
Professor Dowden has indeed done it thoroughly. One or two things in his
biography of Shelley I could wish different, even waiving the question
whether it was desirable to relate in full the occurrences of Shelley’s
private life. Professor Dowden holds a brief for Shelley; he pleads for
Shelley as an advocate pleads for his client, and this strain of
pleading, united with an attitude of adoration which in Mrs. Shelley had
its charm, but which Professor Dowden was not bound to adopt from her,
is unserviceable to Shelley, nay, injurious to him, because it
inevitably begets, in many readers of the story which Professor Dowden
has to tell, impatience and revolt. Further, let me remark that the
biography before us is of prodigious length, although its hero died
before he was thirty years old, and that it might have been considerably
shortened if it had been more plainly and simply written. I see that one
of Professor Dowden’s critics, while praising his style for “a certain
poetic quality of fervor and picturesqueness,” laments that in some
important passages Professor Dowden “fritters away great opportunities
for sustained and impassioned narrative.” I am inclined much rather to
lament that Professor Dowden has not steadily kept his poetic quality of
fervor and picturesqueness more under control. Is it that the Home
Rulers have so loaded the language that even an Irishman who is not one
of them catches something of their full habit of style? No, it is
rather, I believe, that Professor Dowden, of poetic nature himself, and
dealing with a poetic nature like Shelley, is so steeped in sentiment by
his subject that in almost every page of the biography the sentiment
runs over. A curious note of his style, suffused with sentiment, is that
it seems incapable of using the common word _child_. A great many births
are mentioned in the biography, but always it is a poetic _babe_ that is
born, not a prosaic _child_. And so, again, André Chénier is not
guillotined, but “too foully done to death.” Again, Shelley after his
runaway marriage with Harriet Westbrook was in Edinburgh without money
and full of anxieties for the future, and complained of his hard lot in
being unable to get away, in being “chained to the filth and commerce of
Edinburgh.” Natural enough; but why should Professor Dowden improve the
occasion as follows? “The most romantic of northern cities could lay no
spell upon his spirit. His eye was not fascinated by the presences of
mountains and the sea, by the fantastic outlines of aërial piles seen
amid the wreathing smoke of Auld Reekie, by the gloom of the Canongate
illuminated with shafts of sunlight streaming from its interesting wynds
and alleys; nor was his imagination kindled by storied house or palace,
and the voices of old, forgotten, far-off things, which haunt their
walls.” If Professor Dowden, writing a book in prose, could have brought
himself to eschew poetic excursions of this kind and to tell his story
in a plain way, lovers of simplicity, of whom there are some still left
in the world, would have been gratified, and at the same time his book
would have been the shorter by scores of pages.
These reserves being made, I have little except praise for the manner in
which Professor Dowden has performed his task; whether it was a task
which ought to be performed at all, probably did not lie with him to
decide. His ample materials are used with order and judgment; the
history of Shelley’s life develops itself clearly before our eyes; the
documents of importance for it are given with sufficient fulness,
nothing essential seems to have been kept back, although I would gladly,
I confess, have seen more of Miss Clairmont’s journal, whatever
arrangement she may in her later life have chosen to exercise upon it.
In general all documents are so fairly and fully cited, that Professor
Dowden’s pleadings for Shelley, though they may sometimes indispose and
irritate the reader, produce no obscuring of the truth; the documents
manifest it of themselves. Last but not least of Professor Dowden’s
merits, he has provided his book with an excellent index.
Undoubtedly this biography, with its full account of the occurrences of
Shelley’s private life, compels one to review one’s former impression of
him. Undoubtedly the brilliant and attaching rebel who in thinking for
himself had of old our sympathy so passionately with him, when we come
to read his full biography makes us often and often inclined to cry out:
“My God! he had far better have thought like other people.” There is a
passage in Hogg’s capitally written and most interesting account of
Shelley which I wrote down when I first read it and have borne in mind
ever since; so beautifully it seemed to render the true Shelley. Hogg
has been speaking of the intellectual expression of Shelley’s features,
and he goes on: “Nor was the moral expression less beautiful than the
intellect; for there was a softness, a delicacy, a gentleness, and
especially (though this will surprise many) that air of profound
religious veneration that characterizes the best work and chiefly the
frescoes (and into these they infused their whole souls) of the great
masters of Florence and of Rome.” What we have of Shelley in poetry and
prose suited with this charming picture of him; Mrs. Shelley’s account
suited with it; it was a possession which one would gladly have kept
unimpaired. It still subsists, I must now add; it subsists even after
one has read the present biography; it consists, but so as by fire. It
subsists with many a scar and stain; never again will it have the same
pureness and beauty which it had formerly. I regret this, as I have
said, and I confess I do not see what has been gained. Our ideal Shelley
was the true Shelley after all; what has been gained by making us at
moments doubt it? What has been gained by forcing upon as much in him
which is ridiculous and odious, by compelling any fair mind, if it is to
retain with a good conscience its ideal Shelley, to do that which I
propose to do now? I propose to mark firmly what is ridiculous and
odious in the Shelley brought to our knowledge by the new materials, and
then to show that our former beautiful and lovable Shelley nevertheless
survives.
Almost everybody knows the main outline of the events of Shelley’s life.
It will be necessary for me, however, up to the date of his second
marriage, to go through them here. Percy Bysshe Shelley was born at
Field Place, near Horsham, in Sussex, on the 4th of August 1792. He was
of an old family of country gentlemen, and the heir to a baronetcy. He
had one brother and five sisters, but the brother so much younger than
himself as to be no companion for him in his boyhood at home, and after
he was separated from home and England he never saw him. Shelley was
brought up at Field Place with his sisters. At ten years old he was sent
to a private school at Isleworth, where he read Mrs. Radcliffe’s
romances and was fascinated by a popular scientific lecturer. After two
years of private school he went in 1804 to Eton. Here he took no part in
cricket or football, refused to fag, was known as “mad Shelley” and much
tormented; when tormented beyond endurance he could be dangerous.
Certainly he was not happy at Eton; but he had friends, he boated, he
rambled about the country. His school lessons were easy to him, and his
reading extended far beyond them; he read books on chemistry, he read
Pliny’s _Natural History_, Godwin’s _Political Justice_, Lucretius,
Franklin, Condorcet. It is said he was called “atheist Shelley” at Eton,
but this is not so well established as his having been called “mad
Shelley.” He was full, at any rate, of new and revolutionary ideas, and
he declared at a later time that he was twice expelled from the school
but recalled through the interference of his father.
In the spring of 1810 Shelley, now in his eighteenth year, entered
University College, Oxford, as an exhibitioner. He had already written
novels and poems; a poem on the Wandering Jew, in seven or eight cantos,
he sent to Campbell, and was told by Campbell, that there were but two
good lines in it. He had solicited the correspondence of Mrs. Hemans,
then Felicia Browne and unmarried; he had fallen in love with a charming
cousin, Harriet Grove. In the autumn of 1810 he found a publisher for
his verse; he also found a friend in a very clever and free-minded
commoner of his college, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, who has admirably
described the Shelley of those Oxford days, with his chemistry, his
eccentric habits, his charm of look and character, his conversation, his
shrill discordant voice. Shelley read incessantly. Hume’s _Essays_
produced a powerful impression on him; his free speculation led him to
what his father, and worse still his cousin Harriet, thought “detestable
principles”; his cousin and family became estranged from him. He, on his
part, became more and more incensed against the “bigotry” and
“intolerance” which produced such estrangement. “Here I swear, and as I
break my oaths, may Infinity, Eternity, blast me—here I swear that never
will I forgive intolerance.” At the beginning of 1811 he prepared and
published what he called a “leaflet for letters,” having for its title
_The Necessity of Atheism_. He sent copies to all the bishops, to the
Vice-Chancellor of Oxford, and to the heads of houses. On Lady Day he
was summoned before the authorities of his College, refused to answer
the question whether he had written _The Necessity of Atheism_, told the
Master and Fellows that “their proceedings would become a court of
inquisitors but not free men in a free country,” and was expelled for
contumacy. Hogg wrote a letter of remonstrance to the authorities was in
his turn summoned before them and questioned as to his share in the
“leaflet,” and, refusing to answer, he also was expelled.
Shelley settled with Hogg in lodgings in London. His father, excusably
indignant, was not a wise man and managed his son ill. His plan of
recommending Shelley to read Paley’s _Natural Theology_, and of _reading
it with him himself_, makes us smile. Shelley, who about this time wrote
of his younger sister, then at school at Clapham, “There are some hopes
of this dear little girl, she would be a divine little scion of
infidelity if I could get hold of her,” was not to have been cured by
Paley’s _Natural Theology_ administered through Mr. Timothy Shelley. But
by the middle of May Shelley’s father had agreed to allow him two
hundred pounds a year. Meanwhile in visiting his sisters at their school
in Clapham, Shelley made the acquaintance of a schoolfellow of theirs,
Harriet Westbrook. She was a beautiful and lively girl, with a father
who had kept a tavern in Mount Street, but had now retired from
business, and one sister much older than herself, who encouraged in
every possible way the acquaintance of her sister of sixteen with the
heir to a baronetcy and a great estate. Soon Shelley heard that Harriet
met with cold looks at her school for associating with an atheist; his
generosity and his ready indignation against “intolerance” were roused.
In the summer Harriet wrote to him that she was persecuted not at school
only but at home also, that she was lonely and miserable, and would
gladly put an end to her life. Shelley went to see her; she owned her
love for him, and he engaged himself to her. He told his cousin Charles
Grove that his happiness had been blighted when the other Harriet,
Charles’s sister, cast him off; that now the only thing worth living for
was self-sacrifice. Harriet’s persecutors became yet more troublesome,
and Shelley, at the end of August, went off with her to Edinburgh and
they were married. The entry in the register is this:—
“_August 28, 1811._—Percy Bysshe Shelley, farmer, Sussex, and Miss
Harriet Westbrook, St. Andrew Church Parish, daughter of Mr. John
Westbrook, London.”
After five weeks in Edinburgh the young farmer and his wife came
southwards and took lodgings at York, under the shadow of what Shelley
calls that “gigantic pile of superstition,” the Minster. But his friend
Hogg was in a lawyer’s office in York, and Hogg’s society made the
Minster endurable. Mr. Timothy Shelley’s happiness in his son was
naturally not increased by the runaway marriage; he stopped his
allowance, and Shelley determined to visit “this thoughtless man,” as he
calls his parent, and to “try the force of truth” upon him. Nothing
could be effected; Shelley’s mother, too, was now against him. He
returned to York to find that in his absence his friend Hogg had been
making love to Harriet, who had indignantly repulsed him. Shelley was
shocked, but after a “terrible day” of explanation from Hogg, he “fully,
freely pardoned him,” promised to retain him still as “his friend, his
bosom friend,” and “hoped soon to convince him how lovely virtue was.”
But for the present it seemed better to separate. In November he and
Harriet, with her sister Eliza, took a cottage at Keswick. Shelley was
now in great straits for money; the great Sussex neighbor of the
Shelleys, the Duke of Norfolk, interposed in his favor, and his father
and grandfather seem to have offered him at this time an income of £2000
a year, if he would consent to entail the family estate. Shelley
indignantly refused to “forswear his principles,” by accepting “a
proposal so insultingly hateful.” But in December his father agreed,
though with an ill grace, to grant him his allowance of £200 a year
again, and Mr. Westbrook promised to allow a like sum to his daughter.
So after four months of marriage the Shelleys began 1812 with an income
of £400 a year.
Early in February they left Keswick and proceeded to Dublin, where
Shelley, who had prepared an address to the Catholics, meant to “devote
himself towards forwarding the great ends of virtue and happiness in
Ireland.” Before leaving Keswick he wrote to William Godwin, “the
regulator and former of his mind,” making profession of his mental
obligations to him, of his respect and veneration, and soliciting
Godwin’s friendship. A correspondence followed; Godwin pronounced his
young disciple’s plans for “disseminating the doctrines of philanthropy
and freedom” in Ireland to be unwise; Shelley bowed to his mentor’s
decision and gave up his Irish campaign, quitting Dublin on the 4th of
April 1812. He and Harriet wandered first to Nant-Gwillt in South Wales,
near the upper Wye, and from thence after a month or two to Lynmouth in
North Devon, where he busied himself with his poem of _Queen Mab_, and
with sending to sea boxes and bottles containing a _Declaration of
Rights_ by him, in the hope that the winds and waves might carry his
doctrines where they would do good. But his Irish servant, bearing the
prophetic name of Healy, posted the _Declaration_ on the walls of
Barnstaple and was taken up; Shelley found himself watched and no longer
able to enjoy Lynmouth in peace. He moved in September, 1812, to
Tremadoc, in North Wales, where he threw himself ardently into an
enterprise for recovering a great stretch of drowned land from the sea.
But at the beginning of October he and Harriet visited London, and
Shelley grasped Godwin by the hand at last. At once an intimacy arose,
but the future Mary Shelley—Godwin’s daughter by his first wife, Mary
Wollstonecraft—was absent on a visit in Scotland when the Shelleys
arrived in London. They became acquainted, however, with the second Mrs.
Godwin, on whom we have Charles Lamb’s friendly comment: “A very
disgusting woman, and wears green spectacles!”; with the amiable Fanny,
Mary Wollstonecraft’s daughter by Imlay, before her marriage with
Godwin; and probably also with Jane Clairmont, the second Mrs. Godwin’s
daughter by a first marriage, and herself, afterwards the mother of
Byron’s Allegra. Complicated relationships, as in the Theban story! and
there will be not wanting, presently, something of the Theban horrors.
During this visit of six weeks to London Shelley renewed his intimacy
with Hogg; in the middle of November he returned to Tremadoc. There he
remained until the end of February 1813, perfectly happy with Harriet,
reading widely, and working at his _Queen Mab_ and at the notes to that
poem. On the 26th of February an attempt was made, or so he fancied, to
assassinate him, and in high nervous excitement he hurriedly left
Tremadoc and repaired with Harriet to Dublin again. On this visit to
Ireland he saw Killarney, but early in April he and Harriet were back
again in London.
There in June 1813 their daughter Ianthe was born; at the end of July
they moved to Bracknell, in Berkshire. They had for neighbors there a
Mrs. Boinville and her married daughter, whom Shelley found to be
fascinating women, with a culture which to his wife was altogether
wanting. Cornelia Turner, Mrs. Boinville’s daughter, was melancholy,
required consolation, and found it, Hogg tells us, in Petrarch’s poetry;
“Bysshe entered at once fully into her views and caught the soft
infection, breathing the tenderest and sweetest melancholy as every true
poet ought.” Peacock, a man of keen and cultivated mind, joined the
circle at Bracknell. He and Harriet, not yet eighteen, used sometimes to
laugh at the gushing sentiment and enthusiasm of the Bracknell circle;
Harriet had also given offense to Shelley by getting a wet-nurse for her
child; in Professor Dowden’s words, “the beauty of Harriet’s motherly
relation to her babe was marred in Shelley’s eyes by the introduction
into his home of a hireling nurse to whom was delegated the mother’s
tenderest office.” But in September Shelley wrote a sonnet to his child
which expresses his deep love for the mother also, to whom in March,
1814, he was remarried in London, lest the Scotch marriage should prove
to have been in any point irregular. Harriet’s sister Eliza, however,
whom Shelley had at first treated with excessive deference, had now
become hateful to him. And in the very month of the London marriage we
find him writing to Hogg that he is staying with the Boinvilles, having
“escaped, in the society of all that philosophy and friendship combine,
from the dismaying solitude of myself.” Cornelia Turner, he adds, whom
he once thought cold and reserved, “is the reverse of this, as she is
the reverse of everything bad; she inherits all the divinity of her
mother.” Then comes a stanza, beginning
“Thy dewy looks sink in my breast,
Thy gentle words stir poison there.”
It has no meaning, he says; it is only written in thought. “It is
evident from this pathetic letter,” says Professor Dowden, “that
Shelley’s happiness in his home had been fatally stricken.” This is a
curious way of putting the matter. To me what is evident is rather that
Shelley had, to use Professor Dowden’s words again—for in these things
of high sentiment I gladly let him speak for me—“a too vivid sense that
here (in the society of the Boinville family) were peace and joy and
gentleness and love.” In April come some more verses to the Boinvilles,
which contain the first good stanza that Shelley wrote. In May comes a
poem to Harriet, of which Professor Dowden’s prose analysis is as poetic
as the poem itself. “If she has something to endure (from the Boinville
attachment), it is not much, and all her husband’s weal hangs upon her
loving endurance, for see how pale and wildered anguish has made him!”
Harriet, unconvinced, seems to have gone off to Bath in resentment, from
whence, however, she kept up a constant correspondence with Shelley, who
was now of age, and busy in London raising money on post-obit bonds for
his own wants and those of the friend and former of his mind, Godwin.
And now, indeed, it was to become true that if from the inflammable
Shelley’s devotion to the Boinville family poor Harriet had had
“something to endure,” yet this was “not much” compared with what was to
follow. At Godwin’s house Shelley met Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, his
future wife, then in her seventeenth year. She was a gifted person, but,
as Professor Dowden says, she “had breathed during her entire life an
atmosphere of free thought.” On the 8th of June Hogg called at Godwin’s
with Shelley; Godwin was out, but “a door was partially and softly
opened, a thrilling voice called ‘Shelley!’ a thrilling voice answered
‘Mary!’” Shelley’s summoner was “a very young female, fair and
fair-haired, pale indeed, and with a piercing look, wearing a frock of
tartan.” Already they were “Shelley” and “Mary” to one another; “before
the close of June they knew and felt,” says Professor Dowden, “that each
was to the other inexpressibly dear.” The churchyard of St. Pancras,
where her mother was buried, became “a place now doubly sacred to Mary,
since on one eventful day Bysshe here poured forth his griefs, his
hopes, his love, and she, in sign of everlasting union, placed her hand
in his.” In July Shelley gave her a copy of _Queen Mab_, printed but not
published, and under the tender dedication to Harriet he wrote: “Count
Slobendorf was about to marry a woman who, attracted solely by his
fortune, proved her selfishness by deserting him in prison.” Mary added
an inscription on her part: “I love the author beyond all powers of
expression ... by that love we have promised to each other, although I
may not be yours I can never be another’s,”—and a good deal more to the
same effect.
Amid these excitements Shelley was for some days without writing to
Harriet, who applied to Hookham the publisher to know what had happened.
She was expecting her confinement; “I always fancy something dreadful
has happened,” she wrote, “if I do not hear from him ... I cannot endure
this dreadful state of suspense.” Shelley then wrote to her, begging her
to come to London; and when she arrived there, he told her the state of
his feelings, and proposed separation. The shock made Harriet ill; and
Shelley, says Peacock, “between his old feelings towards Harriet, and
his new passion for Mary, showed in his looks, in his gestures, in his
speech, the state of a mind ‘suffering, like a little kingdom, the
nature of an insurrection.’” Godwin grew uneasy about his daughter, and
after a serious talk with her, wrote to Shelley. Under such
circumstances, Professor Dowden tells us, “to youth, swift and decisive
measures seem the best.” In the early morning of the 28th of July 1814
“Mary Godwin stepped across her father’s threshold into the summer air,”
she and Shelley went off together in a post-chaise to Dover, and from
thence crossed to the Continent.
On the 14th of August the fugitives were at Troyes on their way to
Switzerland. From Troyes Shelley addressed a letter to Harriet, of which
the best description I can give is that it is precisely the letter which
a man in the writer’s circumstances should not have written.
“MY DEAREST HARRIET (he begins). I write to you from this detestable
town; I write to show that I do not forget you; I write to urge you to
come to Switzerland, where you will at last find one firm and constant
friend to whom your interests will be always dear—by whom your
feelings will never wilfully be injured. From none can you expect this
but me—all else are either unfeeling or selfish, or have beloved
friends of their own.”
Then follows a description of his journey with Mary from Paris, “through
a fertile country, neither interesting from the character of its
inhabitants nor the beauty of the scenery, with a mule to carry our
baggage, as Mary, who has not been sufficiently well to walk, fears the
fatigue of walking.” Like St. Paul to Timothy, he ends with
commissions:—
“I wish you to bring with you the two deeds which Tahourdin has to
prepare for you, as also a copy of the settlement. Do not part with
any of your money. But what shall be done about the books? You can
consult on the spot. With love to my sweet little Ianthe, ever most
affectionately yours, S.
“I write in great haste; we depart directly.”
Professor Dowden’s flow of sentiment is here so agitating, that I
relieve myself by resorting to a drier world. Certainly my comment on
this letter shall not be his, that it “assures Harriet that her
interests were still dear to Shelley, though now their lives had moved
apart.” But neither will I call the letter an odious letter, a hideous
letter. I prefer to call it, applying an untranslated French word, a
_bête_ letter. And it is _bête_ from what is the signal, the disastrous
want and weakness of Shelley, with all his fine intellectual gifts—his
utter deficiency in humour.
Harriet did not accept Shelley’s invitation to join him and Mary in
Switzerland. Money difficulties drove the travellers back to England in
September. Godwin would not see Shelley, but he sorely needed,
continually demanded and eagerly accepted, pecuniary help from his
erring “spiritual son.” Between Godwin’s wants and his own, Shelley was
hard pressed. He got from Harriet, who still believed that he would
return to her, twenty pounds which remained in her hands. In November
she was confined; a son and heir was born to Shelley. He went to see
Harriet, but “the interview left husband and wife each embittered
against the other.” Friends were severe; “when Mrs. Boinville wrote, her
letter seemed cold and even sarcastic,” says Professor Dowden.
“Solitude,” he continues, “unharassed by debts and duns, with Mary’s
companionship, the society of a few friends, and the delights of study
and authorship, would have made these winter months to Shelley months of
unusual happiness and calm.” But, alas! creditors were pestering, and
even Harriet gave trouble. In January, 1815, Mary had to write in her
journal this entry: “Harriet sends her creditors here; nasty woman. Now
we must change our lodgings.”
One day about this time Shelley asked Peacock, “Do you think Wordsworth
could have written such poetry if he ever had dealings with
money-lenders?” Not only had Shelley dealings with money-lenders, he now
had dealings with bailiffs also. But still he continued to read largely.
In January, 1815, his grandfather, Sir Bysshe Shelley, died. Shelley
went down into Sussex; his father would not suffer him to enter the
house, but he sat outside the door and read _Comus_, while the reading
of his grandfather’s will went on inside. In February was born Mary’s
first child, a girl, who lived but a few days. All the spring Shelley
was ill and harassed, but by June it was settled that he should have an
allowance from his father of £1000 a year, and that his debts (including
£1200 promised by him to Godwin) should be paid. He on his part paid
Harriet’s debts and allowed her £200 a year. In August he took a house
on the borders of Windsor Park, and made a boating excursion up the
Thames as far as Lechlade, an excursion which produced his first entire
poem of value, the beautiful _Stanza in Lechlade Churchyard_. They were
followed, later in the autumn, by _Alastor_. Henceforth, from this
winter of 1815 until he was drowned between Leghorn and Spezzia in July,
1822, Shelley’s literary history is sufficiently given in the delightful
introductions prefixed by Mrs. Shelley to the poems of each year. Much
of the history of his life is there given also; but with some of those
“occurrences of his private life” on which Mrs. Shelley forbore to
touch, and which are now made known to us in Professor Dowden’s book, we
have still to deal.
Mary’s first son, William, was born in January, 1816, and in February we
find Shelley declaring himself “strongly urged, by the perpetual
experience of neglect or enmity from almost every one but those who are
supported by my resources, to desert my native country, hiding myself
and Mary from the contempt which we so unjustly endure.” Early in May he
left England with Mary and Miss Clairmont; they met Lord Byron at Geneva
and passed the summer by the Lake of Geneva in his company. Miss
Clairmont had already in London, without the knowledge of the Shelleys,
made Byron’s acquaintance and become his mistress. Shelley determined,
in the course of the summer, to go back to England, and, after all, “to
make that most excellent of nations my perpetual resting-place.” In
September he and his ladies returned; Miss Clairmont was then expecting
her confinement. Of her being Byron’s mistress the Shelleys were now
aware; but “the moral indignation,” says Professor Dowden, “which
Byron’s act might justly arouse, seems to have been felt by neither
Shelley nor Mary.” If Byron and Claire Clairmont, as she was now called,
loved and were happy, all was well.
The eldest daughter of the Godwin household, the amiable Fanny, was
unhappy at home and in deep dejection of spirits. Godwin was, as usual,
in terrible straits for money. The Shelleys and Miss Clairmont settled
themselves at Bath; early in October Fanny Godwin passed through Bath
without their knowing it, travelled on to Swansea, took a bedroom at the
hotel there, and was found in the morning dead, with a bottle of
laudanum on the table beside her and these words in her handwriting:—
“I have long determined that the best thing I could do was to put an
end to the existence of a being whose birth was unfortunate,[45] and
whose life has only been a series of pain to those persons who have
hurt their health in endeavoring to promote her welfare. Perhaps to
hear of my death will give you pain, but you will soon have the
blessing of forgetting that such a creature ever existed as ...”
There is no signature.
-----
Footnote 45:
She was Mary Wollstonecraft’s natural daughter by Imlay.
-----
A sterner tragedy followed. On the 9th of November 1816 Harriet Shelley
left the house in Brompton where she was then living, and did not
return. On the 10th of December her body was found in the Serpentine;
she had drowned herself. In one respect Professor Dowden resembles
Providence: his ways are inscrutable. His comment on Harriet’s death is:
“There is no doubt she wandered from the ways of upright living.” But he
adds: “That no act of Shelley’s, during the two years which immediately
preceded her death, tended to cause the rash act which brought her life
to its close, seems certain.” Shelley had been living with Mary all the
time; only that!
On the 30th of December, 1816, Mary Godwin and Shelley were married. I
shall pursue “the occurrences of Shelley’s private life” no further. For
the five years and a half which remain, Professor Dowden’s book adds to
our knowledge of Shelley’s life much that is interesting; but what was
chiefly important we knew already. The new and grave matter which we did
not know, or knew in the vaguest way only, but which Shelley’s family
and Professor Dowden have now thought it well to give us in full, ends
with Shelley’s second marriage.
I regret, I say once more, that it has been given. It is a sore trial
for our love of Shelley. What a set! what a world! is the exclamation
that breaks from us as we come to an end of this history of “the
occurrences of Shelley’s private life.” I used the French word _bête_
for a letter of Shelley’s; for the world in which we find him I can only
use another French word, _sale_. Godwin’s house of sordid horror, and
Godwin’s preaching and holding the hat, and the green-spectacled Mrs.
Godwin, and Hogg the faithful friend, and Hunt the Horace of this
precious world, and, to go up higher, Sir Timothy Shelley, a great
country gentleman, feeling himself safe while “the exalted mind of
Norfolk [the drinking Duke] protects me with the world,” and Lord Byron
with his deep grain of coarseness and commonness, his affectation, his
brutal selfishness—what a set! The history carries us to Oxford, and I
think of the clerical and respectable Oxford of those old times, the
Oxford of Copleston and the Kebles and Hawkins, and a hundred more, with
the relief Keble declares himself to experience from Izaak Walton,
“When, wearied with the tale thy times disclose,
The eye first finds thee out in thy secure repose.”
I am not only thinking of morals and the house of Godwin, I am thinking
also of tone, bearing, dignity. I appeal to Cardinal Newman, if
perchance he does me the honor to read these words, is it possible to
imagine Copleston or Hawkins declaring himself safe “while the exalted
mind of the Duke of Norfolk protects me with the world”?
Mrs. Shelley, after her marriage and during Shelley’s closing years,
becomes attractive; up to her marriage her letters and journal do not
please. Her ability is manifest, but she is not attractive. In the world
discovered to us by Professor Dowden as surrounding Shelley up to 1817,
the most pleasing figure is Poor Fanny Godwin; after Fanny Godwin, the
most pleasing figure is Harriet Shelley herself.
Professor Dowden’s treatment of Harriet is not worthy—so much he must
allow me in all kindness, but also in all seriousness, to say—of either
his taste or his judgment. His pleading for Shelley is constant, and he
does more harm than good to Shelley by it. But here his championship of
Shelley makes him very unjust to a cruelly used and unhappy girl. For
several pages he balances the question whether or not Harriet was
unfaithful to Shelley before he left her for Mary, and he leaves the
question unsettled. As usual Professor Dowden (and it is his signal
merit) supplies the evidence decisive against himself. Thornton Hunt,
not well disposed to Harriet, Hogg, Peacock, Trelawny, Hookham, and a
member of Godwin’s own family, are all clear in their evidence that up
to her parting from Shelley Harriet was perfectly innocent. But that
precious witness, Godwin, wrote in 1817 that “she had proved herself
unfaithful to her husband before their separation.... Peace be to her
shade!” Why, Godwin was the father of Harriet’s successor. But Mary
believed the same thing. She was Harriet’s successor. But Shelley
believed it too. He had it from Godwin. But he was convinced of it
earlier. The evidence for this is, that, in writing to Southey in 1820,
Shelley declares that “the single passage of a life, otherwise not only
spotless but spent in an impassioned pursuit of virtue, which looks like
a blot,” bears that appearance “merely because I regulated my domestic
arrangements without deferring to the notions of the vulgar, although I
might have done so quite as conveniently had I descended to their base
thoughts.” From this Professor Dowden concludes that Shelley believed he
could have got a divorce from Harriet had he so wished. The conclusion
is not clear. But even were the evidence perfectly clear that Shelley
believed Harriet unfaithful when he parted from her, we should have to
take into account Mrs. Shelley’s most true sentence in her introduction
to _Alastor_: “In all Shelley did, he, at the time of doing it, believed
himself justified to his own conscience.”
Shelley’s asserting a thing vehemently does not prove more than that he
chose to believe it and did believe it. His extreme and violent changes
of opinion about people show this sufficiently. Eliza Westbrook is at
one time “a diamond not so large” as her sister Harriet but “more highly
polished;” and then: “I certainly hate her with all my heart and soul. I
sometimes feel faint with the fatigue of checking the overflowings of my
unbounded abhorrence for this miserable wretch.” The antipathy, Hogg
tells us, was as unreasonable as the former excess of deference. To his
friend Miss Hitchener he says: “Never shall that intercourse cease,
which has been the day-dawn of my existence, the sun which has shed
warmth on the cold drear length of the anticipated prospect of life.” A
little later, and she has become “the Brown Demon, a woman of desperate
views and dreadful passions, but of cool and undeviating revenge!” Even
Professor Dowden admits that this is absurd; that the real Miss
Hitchener was not seen by Shelley, either when he adored or when he
detested.
Shelley’s power of persuading himself was equal to any occasion; but
would not his conscientiousness and high feeling have prevented his
exerting this power at poor Harriet’s expense? To abandon her as he did,
must he not have known her to be false! Professor Dowden insists always
on Shelley’s “conscientiousness.” Shelley himself speaks of his
“impassioned pursuit of virtue.” Leigh Hunt compared his life to that of
“Plato himself, or, still more, a Pythagorean,” and added that he “never
met a being who came nearer, perhaps so near, to the height of
humanity,” to being an “angel of charity.” In many respects Shelley
really resembled both a Pythagorean and an angel of charity. He loved
high thoughts, he cared nothing for sumptuous lodging, fare, and
raiment, he was poignantly afflicted at the sight of misery, he would
have given away his last farthing, would have suffered in his own
person, to relieve it. But in one important point he was like neither a
Pythagorean nor an angel: he was extremely inflammable. Professor Dowden
leaves no doubt on the matter. After reading his book, one feels
sickened for ever of the subject of irregular relations; God forbid that
I should go into the scandals about Shelley’s “Neapolitan charge,” about
Shelley and Emilia Viviani, about Shelley and Miss Clairmont, and the
rest of it! I will say only that it is visible enough that when the
passion of love was aroused in Shelley (and it was aroused easily) one
could not be sure of him, his friends could not trust him. We have seen
him with the Boinville family. With Emilia Viviani he is the same. If he
is left much alone with Miss Clairmont, he evidently makes Mary uneasy;
nay, he makes Professor Dowden himself uneasy. And I conclude that an
entirely human inflammability, joined to an inhuman want of humor and a
superhuman power of self-deception, are the causes which chiefly explain
Shelley’s abandonment of Harriet in the first place, and then his
behavior to her and his defense of himself afterwards.
His misconduct to Harriet, his want of humor his self-deception, are
fully brought before us for the first time by Professor Dowden’s book.
Good morals and good criticism alike forbid that when all this is laid
bare to us we should deny, or hide, or extenuate it. Nevertheless I go
back after all to what I said at the beginning; still our ideal Shelley,
the angelic Shelley, subsists. Unhappily the data for this Shelley we
had and knew long ago, while the data for the unattractive Shelley are
fresh; and what is fresh is likely to fix our attention more than what
is familiar. But Professor Dowden’s volumes, which give so much, which
give too much, also afford data for picturing anew the Shelley who
delights, as well as for picturing for the first time a Shelley who, to
speak plainly, disgusts; and with what may renew and restore our
impression of the delightful Shelley I shall end.
The winter at Marlow, and the ophthalmia caught among the cottages of
the poor, we knew, but we have from Professor Dowden more details of
this winter and of Shelley’s work among the poor; we have above all, for
the first time I believe, a line of verse of Shelley’s own which sums up
truly and perfectly this most attractive side of him—
“I am the friend of the unfriended poor.”
But that in Shelley on which I would especially dwell is that in him
which contrasts most with the ignobleness of the world in which we have
seen him living, and with the pernicious nonsense which we have found
him talking. The Shelley of “marvelous gentleness,” of feminine
refinement with gracious and considerate manners, “a perfect gentleman,
entirely without arrogance or aggressive egotism,” completely devoid of
the proverbial and ferocious vanity of authors and poets, always
disposed to make little of his own work and to prefer that of others, of
reverent enthusiasm for the great and wise, of high and tender
seriousness, of heroic generosity, and of a delicacy in rendering
services which was equal to his generosity—the Shelley who was all this
is the Shelley with whom I wish to end. He may talk nonsense about
tyrants and priests, but what a high and noble ring in such a sentence
as the following, written by a young man who is refusing £2000 a year
rather than consent to entail a great property!
“That I should entail £120,000 of command over labour, of power to
remit this, to employ it for benevolent purposes, on one whom I know
not—who might, instead of being the benefactor of mankind, be its
bane, or use this for the worst purposes, which the real delegates of
my chance-given property might convert into a most useful instrument
of benevolence! No! this you will not suspect me of.”