“My astonishment, and, I will confess, when I have been treated with
most harshness and cruelty by you, my indignation, has been extreme,
that, knowing as you do my nature, any considerations should have
prevailed on you to have been thus harsh and cruel. I lamented also
over my ruined hopes of all that your genius once taught me to expect
from your virtue, when I found that for yourself, your family, and
your creditors, you would submit to that communication with me which
you once rejected and abhorred, and which no pity for my poverty or
suffering, assumed willingly for you, could avail to extort.”
Moreover, though Shelley has no humor, he can show as quick and sharp a
tact as the most practised man of the world. He has been with Byron and
the Countess Guiccioli, and he writes of the latter—
“La Guiccioli is a very pretty, sentimental, innocent Italian, who has
sacrificed an immense future for the sake of Lord Byron, and who, if I
know anything of my friend, of her, and of human nature, will
hereafter have plenty of opportunity to repent her rashness,”
Tact also, and something better than tact, he shows in his dealings, in
order to befriend Leigh Hunt, with Lord Byron. He writes to Hunt:—
“Particular circumstances, or rather, I should say, particular
dispositions in Lord Byron’s character, render the close and exclusive
intimacy with him, in which I find myself, intolerable to me; thus
much, my best friend, I will confess and confide to you. No feelings
of my own shall injure or interfere with what is now nearest to
them—your interest; and I will take care to preserve the little
influence I may have over this Proteus, in whom such strange extremes
are reconciled, until we meet.”
And so we have comeback again, at last, to our original Shelley—to the
Shelley of the lovely and well-known picture, to the Shelley with
“flushed, feminine, artless face,” the Shelley “blushing like a girl,”
of Trelawny. Professor Dowden gives us some further attempts at
portraiture. One by a Miss Rose, of Shelley at Marlow:—
“He was the most interesting figure I ever saw; his eyes like a
deer’s, bright but rather wild; his white throat unfettered; his
slender but to me almost faultless shape; his brown long coat with
curling lambs’ wool collar and cuffs—in fact, his whole appearance—are
as fresh in my recollection as an occurrence of yesterday.”
Feminine enthusiasm may be deemed suspicious, but a Captain Kennedy must
surely be able to keep his head. Captain Kennedy was quartered at
Horsham in 1813, and saw Shelley when he was on a stolen visit, in his
father’s absence, at Field Place:—
“He received me with frankness and kindliness, as if he had known me
from childhood, and at once won my heart. I fancy I see him now as he
sate by the window, and hear his voice, the tones of which impressed
me with his sincerity and simplicity. His resemblance to his sister
Elizabeth was as striking as if they had been twins. His eyes were
most expressive; his complexion beautifully fair, his features
exquisitely fine; his hair was dark, and no peculiar attention to its
arrangement was manifest. In person he was slender and gentlemanlike,
but inclined to stoop; his gait was decidedly not military. The
general appearance indicated great delicacy of constitution. One would
at once pronounce of him that he was different from other men. There
was an earnestness in his manner and such perfect gentleness of
breeding and freedom from everything artificial as charmed every one.
I never met a man who so immediately won upon me.”
Mrs. Gisborne’s son, who knew Shelley well at Leghorn, declared Captain
Kennedy’s description of him to be “the best and most truthful I have
ever seen.”
To all this we have to add the charm of the man’s writings—of Shelley’s
poetry. It is his poetry, above everything else, which for many people
establishes that he is an angel. Of his poetry I have not space now to
speak. But let no one suppose that a want of humor and a self-delusion
such as Shelley’s have no effect upon a man’s poetry. The man Shelley,
in very truth, is not entirely sane, and Shelley’s poetry is not
entirely sane either. The Shelley of actual life is a vision of beauty
and radiance, indeed, but availing nothing, effecting nothing. And in
poetry, no less than in life, he is “a beautiful _and ineffectual_
angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.”