Shelley's Suspicion of Hogg--His Conviction of Hogg's Guilt--
Did Hogg make the Attempt?--The Manipulated Letter--Hogg's
Object in publishing it--His Purpose in altering it--The
Great Discovery--Evidence of Hogg's Guilt--Sources of the
Evidence--Shelley's Correspondence with Miss Hitchener--His
Letters from Keswick to Hogg--Their vehement
Affectionateness--Eliza Westbrook in Office--Shelley under
Training--Sisters in Council--Shelley's Conferences with
Harriett--Proofs of Hogg's Innocence--_Primâ Facie_
Improbability--Why Hogg was not charged at York--His
Arraignment at Keswick--Condemned in his Absence--The
Reconciliation--Divine Forgiveness--Hogg's Restoration to
Intimacy with Harriett--Shelley's subsequent Intimacy with
Hogg--Hogg's Intimacy with Mary Godwin--Shelley's
Acknowledgment of Delusion--He begs Pardon of Hogg--Hogg's
Denials of the Charge--Hypothetical Letters--Concluding
Estimate of Harriett's Evidence--If Hogg should be proved
Guilty--Consequences to Shelley's Reputation.
THE REAL SHELLEY.
CHAPTER I.
THE SHELLEY OF ROMANTIC BIOGRAPHY.
Creators of The Romantic Shelley--Clint's Fanciful Composition--The
Poet's Personal Appearance--His Little Turn-up Nose--His Ancestral
Quality--Sussexisms of his Speech and Poetry--His Phenomenal
Untruthfulness--His Temperance and Intemperance--A Victim of Domestic
Persecution--Was _The Necessity of Atheism_ a mere Squib?--Lord
Eldon's Decree--The Slaughter of Reputations--The Poet's
Character--His Treatment of his familiar Friend--Biographic
Fictions--Extravagances of Shelleyan Enthusiasm.
From a time considerably anterior to the day on which Hogg undertook to
write the _Life_ of his college friend, three separate forces,
(_a_) Field Place,
(_b_) The Shelleyan Enthusiasts,
(_c_) The Shelleyan Socialists,
have been steadily working to withdraw the Real Shelley from the world's
view, and to replace him with a Shelley, altogether unlike the poet, who
carried Mary Godwin off to the Continent, and wrote _Laon and Cythna_.
By 'Field Place,' I mean those members of the poet's family (living or
dead), who in their pious devotion to his memory, and laudable concern for
the honour of their house, have busied themselves in creating this
fanciful and romantic Shelley, and substituting him for the Real Shelley.
By designating these members of the Shelley family by the name of the
house that is Shelley's shrine, even as the Stratford birthplace is
Shakespeare's shrine, and Newstead Abbey is Byron's shrine, I shall be
able to refer with the least possible offensiveness to excellent
individuals, from whom I am constrained to differ on a large number of
Shelleyan questions.
By 'The Shelleyan Enthusiasts,' I mean vehement admirers of Shelley's
poetry, who, without ever thinking about his social views, delight in
imagining that the poet's character and career resembled his genius in its
grandeur, and his song in its loftiness and beauty.
By 'The Shelleyan Socialists' I mean those conscientious though misguided
persons, who, valuing Shelley for his mischievous social philosophy, and
thinking of Marriage somewhat as the pious John Milton thought of it in
the seventeenth century, and somewhat as the devout Martin Bucer thought
of it in the sixteenth century, regard with various degrees of approval or
tolerance Shelley's daring, though by no means original, proposal for
abolishing lawful marriage, and replacing it with the Free Contract, from
which each of the contracting parties is free to retire on the death of
their mutual affection, and who, in accordance with their various degrees
of approval or tolerance of the proposal, have contributed or are
contributing, by written words or by spoken words, either to the opinion
that society should adopt the proposal, or to the opinion that, without
abolishing lawful marriage, society should recognize the Free Contract as
a kind of marriage, to the extent of holding persons who live under it
conscientiously, as blameless or not greatly blameworthy for doing so.
The work of creating the romantic Shelley, and endowing him with personal
and moral graces, never conspicuous in the real Shelley, was begun not
long after the poet's death, when Mrs. Shelley and Mrs. Williams induced
Clint to compose the fancy picture, to which the world is, through the
engraver's art, indebted for its very erroneous conception of Shelley's
personal aspect. Who has not, through the engraver's art, gazed on the
face of that charming portraiture: a face so remarkable for gentle
delicacy and symmetrical loveliness? Gazing on the beauteous face, who has
not observed the rather large, straight, delicately-modelled,
finely-pointed nose?--The original of the lovely picture had a notably
unsymmetrical face, and a little turn-up nose.
Having replaced his unsymmetrical visage with a face of exquisite
symmetry, the cunning idolaters have introduced the poet as a gentleman of
high ancestral dignity, to a world ever too quick to honour men of ancient
gentility. His remote forefathers have been proclaimed persons of knightly
rank and virtue. His house (founded though it was by a comparatively
self-made man, who won his baronetcy years after the poet's birth) has
been declared a branch of the Michelgrove Shelleys. Cynics and humourists
may well smile to recall all that has been written of the poet's mediæval
ancestors and his shield of twenty-one quarterings, whilst they remember
at the same time that his grandfather was the younger son of a Yankee
apothecary, that his earlier people of the eighteenth and seventeenth
centuries were undistinguished though gentle persons, the squireens and
farmers, of whose claim to be rated with the great families of Sussex more
will be said in a subsequent chapter.
Endowing him with aristocratic descent, the Shelleyan idolaters have
discovered indications of nobility in the Sussex provincialisms that
qualified the utterances of the poet's singularly disagreeable voice, and
may be now and then detected in his outpourings of song: provincialisms to
remind the reader of Byron's scarcely perceptible Scotch accent, and the
Scotticisms of expression that are occasionally discoverable in his poems.
The Sussex peasantry seldom sound the final _g_ of words ending with that
letter, and Sussex gentlemen are sometimes heard to say 'Good mornin' to
one another.' Shelley was sometimes guilty of this provincialism. For
instance, in _Laon and Cythna_ (1817), and again in _Arethusa_ (1820), he
makes _ruin_ rhyme to _pursuing_. Mr. Buxton Forman regards the
provincialism as an indication of the poet's aristocratic quality. 'I need
not,' says the enthusiastic editor, 'tell the reader that, to this day, it
is an affectation current among persons who are, or pretend to be, of the
aristocratic caste, not only to drop the final _g_ in these cases
themselves, but to stigmatize its pronunciation by other people as
"pedantic."'
Englishmen like people to be truthful, and in the long-run never fail to
honour the man, who, having the courage of his opinions, proclaims them
fearlessly, even though they may quarrel with him for a season, because he
tells the truth too pugnaciously, or persists in telling them truths they
don't wish to think about. To commend him to lovers of truth, the
Shelleyan idolaters declare the poet to have been, from his boyhood till
his death, daringly, unfalteringly, unwaveringly, invariably truthful.
Lady Shelley insists that at Eton he was more truth-loving than other
boys,--was, indeed, chiefly remarkable for unswerving and audacious
veracity. In half-a-dozen different biographies he is extolled for his
intolerance of falsehood. Most of the misfortunes that befel him are
attributed to his habit of telling the truth in season and out of season.
It is, indeed, admitted even by some of his panegyrists that he now and
then made statements at variance with fact. But on these occasions he is
declared to have spoken erroneously through the delusive influence of a
too powerful imagination. The inordinately vigorous fancy, that enabled
him to write _Queen Mab_, caused him sometimes to imagine things to have
taken place, when they had not taken place. His mis-statements resulted
altogether from misconception, and should not be regarded as in any way
affecting the overwhelming evidence that he loved truth more than life;
that he made great sacrifices for the truth's sake, that he was, in fact,
a martyr for the truth. It is, however, all too certain that he uttered
mis-statements, for which the force of his imagination cannot in any
degree whatever have been accountable; and that, instead of being more
truth-loving than most men, he was phenomenally untruthful. Telling fibs
in order to escape momentary annoyance or gain a trivial advantage, he
could instruct other persons to tell fibs in his interest. He was singular
amongst men of his degree for being able to declare his intention of
practising deceit, and forthwith being as bad as his word. Instances of
this candour in falsehood are given in the ensuing pages. When he tells a
fib, a gentleman is usually too much ashamed of the matter to take any one
into his confidence on the subject. There were times, when no such sense
of shame troubled Shelley.
Much has been written to Shelley's honour about his habitual temperance
and general disregard for the pleasures of the table. It has been
accounted to him for righteousness that he seldom drank wine, and for
months together ate nothing but vegetable food. As Shelley at one period
of his career found, or fancied, that his health was better, his mind
lighter and more vigorous, his whole soul in higher contentment, when he
lived wholly on vegetable food, than when he ate flesh, I cannot see why
it was eminently virtuous in him to take the food that seemed to suit him
best. As he drank fresh water and strong tea, because he liked them better
than mild ale and stiff toddy, it remains to be shown why he should be so
much commended for drinking what he liked best. Still temperance in diet
is one of the minor virtues. But was Shelley a temperate man in his
drinks? If he never drank wine immoderately, and in some periods of his
career was a total abstainer from all the usual alcoholic drinks, it is
certain that he was at times a heavy laudanum-drinker; and it is not
obvious why it is less intemperate to be sottish with spirits of wine, in
which opium has been macerated; than to be sottish with gin, in which
gentian has been macerated.
Misrepresenting the poet's story in the smaller matters, the Shelleyan
apologists have misrepresented it even more daringly in the larger
matters. Endeavouring to explain away his gravest academic offence, they
maintain that _The Necessity of Atheism_ was a trivial essay, a little
argumentative syllabus, a humorous _brochure_, that did not exhibit his
real opinions on matters pertaining to religion; that it was printed only
for private circulation amongst the learned; that it was never offered for
sale to the general public. Yet it is certain that he reproduced some of
its argument in the _Letter to Lord Ellenborough_; that more than two
years after its first publication, he revised, amended, and reprinted it
in the notes to _Queen Mab_; that later still he reproduced some of its
reasoning in the _Refutation of Deism_, and that it was offered for sale
to anyone who cared to buy it at Oxford. Mr. Garnett declares the essay to
have been nothing more than 'a squib,' and gives Hogg as his authority for
the staggering statement. Yet it is certain that Hogg makes no such
statement; but is, on the contrary, most careful and precise in declaring
how completely earnest and sincere Shelley was in the matter. Declaring
that the essay was no expression of the author's genuine opinions, the
Shelleyan apologists almost in the same breath declare it to have been an
utterance of his real convictions, and applaud him for his courage in
putting forth clearly what he believed to be true.
One of the prime biographic fictions about Shelley is, that he endured
persecution for publishing this equally sincere and insincere profession
of no faith, not only at Oxford but in his domestic circle. It is asserted
that he was treated cruelly by his father, excluded from Field Place,
driven from his boyhood's home, and even disinherited, for this and other
bold declarations of what he believed to be true. Sympathy and admiration
are demanded for him as a martyr for the truth's sake. 'On the sensitively
affectionate feelings of the young controversialist and poet,' Lady
Shelley says, 'this sentence of exclusion from his boyhood's home
inflicted a bitter pang, yet he was determined to bear it for the sake of
what he believed to be right and true.' With the perplexing perversity
that characterised so many of his utterences about his private affairs,
Shelley himself, after surrendering by his own act, and of his own will,
the position assigned to him in respect to his grandfather's property by
his grandfather's will, used to speak of himself as having made great
sacrifices of his material interests for the truth, and to offer himself
to the sympathy and admiration of his friends as a martyr for conscience's
sake. Yet it is certain that he was treated kindly by his father in
respect to the causes and immediate consequences of his academic disgrace;
that he was excluded from Field Place in the first instance, not on
account of his religious opinions, but on account of his outrageous
disregard for his father's wishes in respect to other matters; that he was
excluded from Field Place in 1811 only for a few weeks, during which time
so far from 'being determined to bear it for the sake of what he believed
to be right and true,' he never for a moment designed to respect the
sentence of banishment, but intended to return to his boyhood's home as
soon as it should please him to do so; and that, the few weeks of discord
having passed, he was received at Field Place by his father and endowed
with a handsome yearly allowance of pocket-money. No less certain is it
that he was never driven from his boyhood's home; that on eventually
withdrawing from the old domestic circle, he left it of his own accord, to
make a runaway match with a licensed victualler's daughter; and that,
instead of resulting from differences of opinion on questions of religion
and politics (differences which at most only aggravated and embittered a
quarrel due to other causes), his estrangement from and rupture with his
family resulted from (1) their reasonable displeasure at his
_mésalliance_, and (2) the reasonable displeasure of his grandfather, and
father, at his refusal to concur with them in effecting a particular
settlement of certain real estate.
To give yet another example of the audacious way in which Shelley's story
has been mistold in respect to its principal incidents. Every one has
heard how Shelley was deprived of the custody of his children by Lord
Eldon; how, on account of his religious opinions, and for no other cause,
he was robbed of his dear babes by the cruel and fanatical Lord
Chancellor. Lady Shelley speaks furiously of 'the monstrous injustice of
this decree.' In an article, written to the lively gratification of the
Shelleyan Enthusiasts and the Shelleyan Socialists, the _Edinburgh Review_
not long since (October, 1882) declared that the judgment was formed and
the decree delivered, 'on the ground, not of Shelley's misconduct to his
wife, but of the opinions expressed in his writings.' The words of the
Edinburgh Reviewer are absolutely erroneous. The judgment was formed in
steady consideration of the poet's misconduct to his first wife; and in
its delivery the Chancellor was careful to say, not once, but repeatedly,
that he decreed against the poet's petition, _not_ on account of any
opinions expressed in his writings (considered apart from conduct), _but_
on account of his _conduct_ (the word conduct, conduct, conduct, being
reiterated by the Chancellor, till the reader of the decree grows weary of
it)--on account of his _conduct_ in respect to his wife; _conduct_ showing
his resolve to act on the Free Contract principles, set forth in the
anti-matrimonial note to _Queen Mab_; _conduct_ justifying the opinion
that if Harriett Westbrook's children were delivered to him, he would rear
them to hold his own anti-matrimonial views. That so respectable an organ
of public opinion should make this statement is significant. It indicates
how great is the force with which I venture to contend, not without hope
that my weak hands may be strengthened by all who reverence marriage.
A matter to be noticed, in connection with the efforts to substitute the
romantic for the Real Shelley, is that their success will involve the
discredit, if not the absolute infamy, of nearly all the principal
persons, whom the poet encountered in friendship or enmity, on his way
from birth to death. To accept the extravagant stories told by Shelley or
his idolaters is to believe, that the poet's father was a prodigy of
parental wickedness; that his mother was hatefully deficient in maternal
affection; that Dr. Greenlaw was a malicious, base-natured pedagogue; that
the Eton masters (from Dr. Keate to Mr. Bethell) delighted in persecuting
their famous pupil; that the Master and Fellows of University College were
actuated by the basest motives (including sycophancy to a powerful
minister) in requiring the poet to leave Oxford; that Hogg was a nauseous
villain, who attempted to seduce his friend's wife within a few weeks of
her wedding-day; that the first Mrs. Shelley broke her marriage-vow; that
William Godwin, instead of feeling like the honest man he affected to be
at his daughter's flight, chuckled in his sleeve at his girl's good
fortune in winning a rich baronet's son for her paramour and eventual
husband; that Lord Chancellor Eldon was an unjust judge, who delivered a
monstrous decree at the instigation of religious bigotry and political
resentment; that Peacock was either a simpleton or traitor in bearing
testimony to the first Mrs. Shelley's conjugal goodness; that William
Jerdan was a virulent slanderer; that Sir John Taylor Coleridge was a
malignant calumniator; that Byron, whom Shelley throughout successive
years honoured as a supremely great man, and for a while worshipt as a
god, was the meanest, paltriest, dirtiest knave that ever broke a sacred
trust, and stole a letter. It is thus that the creators of the romantic
Shelley deal with the persons most influential on the poet's career and
reputation. It is true they have good words for the hard-swearing Windsor
apothecary, who gave the Etonian Shelley lessons in commination and
chemistry; and for Leigh Hunt, the equally insatiable and charming
parasite, who took all he could get from his young friend's pocket. The
Squire of Field Place, Dr. Greenlaw, Dr. Keate, Mr. Bethell, the Master
and Tutors of University College, Hogg, William Godwin, Lord Eldon,
Peacock, William Jerdan, Sir John Taylor Coleridge, Byron, were all odious
in different ways. The only good and true men, of all the many notable
men, Shelley encountered on his way through life, were Dr. Lind and Leigh
Hunt. Surely there must be something wrong in the story, that slays so
many reputations, whilst it selects Dr. Lind and Leigh Hunt for approval.
Were there not another and very different side to the story, this book
would not have been written. Unless I read it amiss (and I am sure I read
it aright, for I have studied it carefully, and in doing so have found it
to have been perused only in parts, and in some parts with strange
carelessness, by all previous biographers), it stands out clear upon the
record, that from his boyhood Shelley was disposed to rise in rebellion
against all persons placed in authority over him; that instead of having
the gentle nature attributed to him by fanciful historians, he was
quick-tempered and resentful; that without being desperately wicked, his
heart was strangely deceitful towards himself; that he was a bad and
disloyal son to a kind-hearted and well-intentioned father, and by no
means a good son to a gentle-natured and conscientious mother; that he was
a bad husband to his first wife, and far from a faultless husband to his
second wife; that, together with several agreeable characteristics, he
possessed several dangerous qualities; and that he was, at least towards
one person, a bad friend.
So strangely has Shelley's story been mistold, that this last assertion is
likely to make readers start with surprise and revolt against the author.
Let it, therefore, be justified at once. The poet had a familiar friend,
from whom he had received much kindness, for whom he professed cordial
veneration, and with whom he lived in close intimacy. This friend had an
only daughter, a bright, lively, romantic, lovely girl, still only sixteen
years old. Reared within the lines of religious orthodoxy, this young girl
had been educated to think of marriage just as other young English girls
are usually taught to think of it. Though he had in former time been an
advocate of the Free Contract, her father had changed his views about
marriage before her birth, and had abandoned his Free Contract views when
she was still a nursling. Soon after making this girl's acquaintance,
Shelley passed into discord with his wife; and soon after ceasing to love
his wife, he fixed his affections on his friend's daughter. Without
speaking to his friend on the subject, or giving him occasion to suspect
what he was about, Shelley paid his addresses to this child, and had won
her heart, ere ever it occurred to her father that they might be living
too intimately and affectionately with one another. It was with great
difficulty Shelley overcame the child's notions of right in which she had
been educated; but, eventually, he accomplished his purpose. A few days
later, leaving his wife in England, Shelley stole this young child from
her home, and, carrying her off to the Continent, lived with her as though
she were his wife. He did this, though she was his most intimate friend's
only daughter, though she was only sixteen years old, and though he had no
prospect of ever being able to marry her. The creators of the romantic
Shelley deal with this episode of Shelley's story as though it were a
pleasant and unusually interesting love-passage. Some of them are unable
to see that Shelley was at all to blame in the business. Those of them,
who admit it was not altogether right of him to act thus towards so young
a girl, maintain that the author of such superlatively fine poetry as
_Adonais_ and _The Cenci_ cannot have been very wrong in the affair, and
should not be judged in respect to the matter, as though he were a young
man incapable of writing fine poetry. No one of them has a word of
compassion for the girl's father. Mr. Froude is of opinion that in this
matter Shelley was guilty of nothing worse than 'the sin of acting on
emotional theories of liberty,' and should be judged tenderly, because he
was young and enthusiastic! Differing from Mr. Froude, I venture to say
that, in acting thus ill towards the girl, Shelley was guilty of very
hateful treason towards his friend. I ask English fathers with young
children about them, and English brothers with young sisters for
playmates, to judge between me and my adversary.
Since it dismissed Hogg with scant courtesy for being too realistic and
communicative, Field Place has done much to gratify the Shelleyan
enthusiasts and socialists. Soon after publishing the uniformly erroneous
_Shelley Memorials_, Field Place promised to produce, in due season,
evidence that Shelley was not seriously to blame in his treatment of his
first wife. For years Field Place has gathered evidences for the poet's
vindication. Field Place aided Mr. Buxton Forman in producing his stately
and careful edition of the poet's works. In comparatively recent time the
Field Place muniments have enabled a well-known writer to produce the
memoir of the poet's father-in-law (William Godwin), and a memoir of Mary
Wollstonecraft, in which she is styled Gilbert Imlay's wife, and is said
to have thought herself his wife before God and man, though they were
never married. And now Field Place is enabling another writer to produce
another authoritative history of Shelley and Mary, that shall raise Mary
Godwin yet nearer to the angels, and bring her husband's story into more
perfect harmony with the straight nose and symmetrical lineaments of
Clint's composition.
It is not surprising that Field Place should wish to produce some more
adequate memoir of its poet than Lady Shelley's _Shelley Memorials; from
Authentic Sources_. But however cleverly it may be executed, only the most
hopeful can hope that the promised biography will afford satisfaction to
the general public. It is simply impossible for it to satisfy those who
want the truth about Shelley, and at the same time to satisfy the
enthusiasts who would be pained by the truth, and the Shelleyan
Socialists who are chiefly desirous that the truth should not be told. To
satisfy those who want the truth and the whole of it: to produce a memoir
that shall be worth the paper on which it is printed, it will be necessary
for the official biographer to show that Lady Shelley's work is from first
to last a book of mistakes--that it is wrong in every page; wrong in its
views of the poet's character; wrong in its general outline of his career;
wrong in its incidents; wrong in its names and dates; wrong, even in its
particulars of domestic affairs, legal matters, and pecuniary
arrangements--particulars in respect to which a biographer, with access to
authentic sources of information, has no excuse for blundering. Can such
candour be looked for from the source which gave us the _Shelley
Memorials_? Is it conceivable that the new official scribe will be
permitted to deal thus honestly with Lady Shelley's book from authentic
sources? If he is required to make his book agree with this thing from
authentic sources, he must dismiss the hope of pleasing the general
public.
On the other hand, to please the enthusiasts and the more fervid Shelleyan
Socialists he must tell that Shelley was sinless, stainless, divine; that
Mary Wollstonecraft was married, in the sight of God and man, to the
American adventurer, who never married her; and that Mary Godwin showed a
justifiable disregard of social prejudices, when she went off to
Switzerland with another woman's husband. He must produce a work more or
less calculated to illuminate the English people out of their reverence
for marriage, and educate them into a philosophical tolerance of the Free
Contract. Nothing less thorough will appear to the more fervid of the
Shelleyan Socialists a sufficient vindication of the poet's superhuman
excellence.
For in these days, to please both sets of zealots, it is not enough for a
biographer to delight in Shelley's verse; to render homage to his genius;
to think him--as all men of culture and poetical sensibility concur in
thinking him--the brightest, most strenuous, and most musical of lyric
poets; and at the same time, taking a charitable view of his failings and
indiscretions, to palliate them in all honest ways, or look away from
them, when they admit of no honest palliation. This is not enough for the
enthusiasts, who insist that the poet's character and career were
altogether in harmony with his art. It only exasperates the most
strenuous of the social innovators, who honouring him for his social
philosophy even more than for his poetry, have no word of cordial censure,
and scarcely a word of regret, for the way in which he acted on 'his
emotional theories of liberty.' Readers must not blink the fact, that the
more able and resolute of the Shelleyan enthusiasts recognize in Shelley a
great social teacher and regenerator, as well as a great poet. To Mr.
Buxton Forman, the author of _Laon and Cyntha_ is 'that Shelley who, in
some circumstances, might have been the Saviour of the World.' It is
needless for me to express my opinion of the comparison instituted by
these words. It is enough for me to say that the words are Mr. Buxton
Forman's words, and that he represents favourably the learning and
sentiment of a body of gentlemen, whose generous fervour appears to me
more commendable than their discretion.
When it is possible for such words to be written by an eminent Shelleyan
specialist, and to be read with approval by men of high culture, it must
surely be admitted that Shelleyan enthusiasm has gone quite far enough;
and that it is well for a writer to produce a truthful account of the
poet, who is thus offered to universal homage.
I have not discovered the Real Shelley. The poet of these volumes is the
same Real Shelley, who appears in his most agreeable aspects in Hogg's
biography, the delightful book that was stopped midway, because its
realism offended the Hunts and Field Place. I mean to show that Shelley
was judged fairly, though severely, by those of his contemporaries who,
whilst recognizing his genius, condemned his principles, conduct, and
social theories. In respect to the Real Shelley, I shall merely bring to
light what has been hurtfully withdrawn, or hurtfully withheld from view.
As for the fictitious Shelley, with which the Real Shelley has been
replaced, I mean to demolish it. In destroying it, I shall be animated by
a desire to do something before I go away, to counteract the strong stream
of literature--a literature of books, pamphlets, magazine-articles, and
articles in powerful journals--which for more than a quarter of a century
has been educating people to approve or tolerate the pernicious social
philosophy, that requires sound-hearted England to abolish marriage and
replace it with the Free Contract.
CHAPTER II.
THE SHELLEYS OF SUSSEX.
Medwin's Blunders--Lady Shelley's Statement of The Case--The
Michelgrove Shelleys--Sir William Shelley, Justice of The Common
Pleas--The Castle Goring Shelleys--Their Pedigree at the Heralds'
College--Evidences of the Connexion of the Two Families--John Shelley,
'Esquire and Lunatic'--Timothy Shelley, the Yankee Apothecary--Bysshe
Shelley's Career--His Runaway Match with Catherine Michell--His
Marriage with the Heiress of Penshurst--His Great Wealth--The Poet's
Alleged Pride in his Connexion with the Sidneys--His Gentle, but not
Aristocratic, Lineage.
So much has been written in the ways of sycophancy or vaingloriousness
about Shelley's Norman descent and aristocratic quality, it is necessary
to glance at some of the facts of his ancestral story.
The poet's friend, from the time when they were schoolfellows at
Brentford, Thomas Medwin the Younger, was also the poet's kinsman--his
third cousin, through Sir Bysshe Shelley's marriage with Mary Catherine
Michell, and his second cousin, through Sir Timothy Shelley's marriage
with Elizabeth Pilford. It might have been supposed that a biographer,
thus related to Shelley by blood and friendship, would know the prime
facts of his friend's pedigree, and state them without egregious error.
But poor Tom Medwin was not remarkable for accuracy.
To rely in this affair on the whilom _littérateur_ and cavalry officer, is
to believe that the poet was a lineal descendant of Sir John Shelley of
Maresfield Park, who was created a baronet in 1611; to believe that this
Sir John Shelley's son (William) was a Justice of the Common Pleas; and to
believe that the poet's great-grandfather (Timothy Shelley, of Fen Place,
Co. Sussex) was a lineal descendant, in the ninth descent, of the
aforesaid baronet of James the First's time. 'I will only say,' Medwin
remarks lightly, 'that Sir John Shelley, of Maresfield Park, who dated his
Baronetage from the earliest creation of that title in 1611, had besides
other issue, two sons, Sir William, a Judge of the Common Pleas, and
Edward; from the latter of whom, in the seventh descent, sprung Timothy,
who also had two sons, and settled--having married an American lady--at
Christ's Church, Newark, in North America.'
Medwin is wrong in all the really important allegations of the brief
statement. Sir John Shelley of Michelgrove (the baronet referred to) had
two sons; but neither of them was named Edward; neither of them became a
Justice of the Common Pleas; neither of them was in any way or degree
accountable for Percy Bysshe Shelley's appearance on the earth's surface.
The poet was no more descended from Sir John Shelley, the first of the
Michelgrove baronets, than he was descended from the man in the moon. How
could the poet's great-grandfather (Timothy, born in 1700 A.D.) be the
eighth in descent from the first Michelgrove baronet, the seventh in
descent from either of the baronet's sons? Human generations do not come
and go at the rate of seven to a century.
To pass for a moment from Tom Medwin (of whose egregious mis-statements
something more must be said) to the present Lady Shelley, the poet's
daughter-in-law. 'At the close of the last century,' says this lady in her
_Shelley Memorials: from Authentic Sources_, 'the family of the Shelleys
had long held a high position among the large landholders of Sussex.
Fortunate marriages in two generations preceding the birth of the poet
considerably increased the wealth and influence of the house, the head of
which was a staunch Whig.' Lady Shelley's book from authentic sources
contains several statements of no authenticity. For each of the principal
statements of the above-quoted words, she had, however, good authority.
But instead of coming to her from a single authentic source, the facts
embodied in the quotation were drawn from two different authentic sources,
the archives of the Michelgrove Shelleys, and the archives of the Castle
Goring Shelleys; and by cleverly combining the two sets of facts, Lady
Shelley conveys to her readers a very erroneous impression respecting the
condition of the poet's seventeenth-century ancestors. Unquestionably, the
Sussex Shelleys, at the close of the eighteenth century, had long held a
high position among the large landowners of the county. But these
fortunate Shelleys were not the family of which the poet was the brightest
ornament. They were the Michelgrove Shelleys; whereas the poet came of
people, differing greatly from the Michelgrove people in social quality.
He was of the Castle Goring Shelleys--a family that, instead of being
merely enriched, was created and established by the fortunate marriages to
which Lady Shelley refers. Before the first of those marriages, wedlock
had done much for the advantage of these inferior Shelleys. For instance,
the marriage, in 1692, of John Shelley, of Fen Place, _jure uxoris_, with
Helen, co-heir of Roger Bysshe, of Fen Place, Co. Sussex, had reclaimed
the poet's direct male ancestors from a state of territorial vagrancy, and
given them a permanent, though modest, abiding-place. But for a
considerable period after that marriage, the direct ancestral precursors
of the Castle Goring Shelleys were no such house as the readers of Lady
Shelley's book are likely to imagine. The Michelgrove Shelleys were one
'house,' the Castle Goring Shelleys were quite another house; though it
has for some time been the fashion of biographers to mix the two houses,
and speak of them by turns as one house, or as branches of the same house.
The Michelgrove Shelleys were an ancient house. The Castle Goring Shelleys
were a mushroom family, disdainfully regarded by the Michelgrove people,
at the opening of the nineteenth century.
Something more must be said of the older of these houses. The Michelgrove
Shelleys are said, for reasons no longer discoverable, to have entered the
country with the Conqueror. They may have done so. There is better
evidence that they had lands in Kent in the times of Edward I. and Edward
II., before they established themselves in Sussex; and still better
testimony, that one of the clan (John Shelley) was Member of Parliament
for Rye from 1415 to 1428. With this parliamentary personage, the house,
or rather the family from which the house proceeded, comes into the clear
light of history. Two long generations later (generations so lengthy that
one has reason to suspect a failure of the record) the house acquired a
dignity, which gave it an enduring place amongst the historic families of
the realm.
Bred to the law, William Shelley (the grandson, or maybe the
great-grandson, of the afore-mentioned Member for Rye) became Reader of
the Inner Temple in 1517, and after holding successively the office of a
Judge of the Sheriff's Court and the office of Recorder of the City of
London, rose to be a Judge of the Common Pleas somewhere about the
beginning of 1527. Before mounting to this eminence he had represented the
City in Parliament, and practised for six years as a Serjeant-at-law in
Westminster Hall. Those who know Cavendish's _Wolsey_ do not need to be
reminded of the part taken by this fortunate lawyer in the negotiations
that closed with the Cardinal's surrender of York House to Henry the
Eighth. 'Tell his Highness,' said the fallen Cardinal to the Judge of the
Common Pleas, 'that I am his most faithful subject and obedient beadsman,
whose command I will in no wise disobey; but will in all things fulfil his
pleasure, as you the father of the law say I may. I therefore charge your
conscience to discharge me, and show His Highness from me that I must
desire His Majesty to remember there is both heaven and hell;' a message
which the judge probably forgot to deliver, as he lived to entertain the
King at Michelgrove, and was continued in his office till Henry's death.
Surviving the sovereign, whom he served on the bench of the Common Pleas
for twenty years, Sir William Shelley served Edward the Sixth in the same
capacity, to the day of his own death, which occurred between November 3,
1548 (the date of his last fine), and May 10, 1549, the date of his
successor's appointment.
Fortunate in his professional career, Sir William Shelley was no less
fortunate in his domestic affairs. Marrying an heiress, he had, with other
children, John, the grandfather of the first Michelgrove baronet, and Sir
Richard Shelley, the last English Prior of St. John of Jerusalem.
Not much less than a century wrong in assigning the legal eminence of
Henry the Eighth's judge to the eldest son of James the First's baronet,
Medwin wrote under a general impression that the Shelleys to whom he was
related, had somehow or other descended from the Michelgrove house, an
impression which the poet seems also to have cherished, and imparted to
his college-friend and biographer, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, who writes in
serio-comic vein of Sir Guyon de Shelley and Sir Richard Shelley (the
Knight of Malta), as though the Grand Prior of the sixteenth century and
the Paladin with the three conchs were veritable forefathers of the Castle
Goring Shelleys.
That these Shelleys of the junior house were no family of singular
antiquity or overpowering dignity, is shown by the pedigree of Percy
Bysshe Shelley, published in the first volume of Mr. Forman's edition of
the poet's prose works. A pedigree of only nine generations, beginning
with mention of Henry Shelley, of Worminghurst, Co. Sussex, who died in
1623, this evidential writing puts it beyond question that the poet, of
whose ancestral grandeur so much has been written, was no man of noble or
otherwise splendid lineage; puts it beyond question, that whether regard
be had to the number of its generations, the antiquity of the earliest
dates, or the importance of the persons commemorated in its entries, it is
(from the date of Henry Shelley's death _temp._ James I. to Percy Bysshe
Shelley's birth in 1792) nothing more than such a pedigree as could be
displayed by the majority of the gentle families of the middle way of
English life, who never for a moment think of rating themselves as
families of patrician worth.
One or two rather awkward matters excepted, this pedigree is a fair and
honest record of the births, marriages, and deaths, of nine successive
generations of gentle people; but as an exhibition of familiar grandeur,
it is no more impressive than any pedigree one would regard as a matter of
course in the muniment room of a country gentleman, tracing his descent
from a gentle yeoman of the Elizabethan period. It mentions eight of the
poet's forefathers in the direct right line. Describing some of these
eight individuals as 'esquires,' and some of them as 'gentlemen,' the
record shows that no one of them bore any hereditary honour, or even the
dignity of knighthood before the poet's birth. It shows that no one of
them married a woman of higher quality than the degree of a simple
gentlewoman. Doubtless they were (with a single exception) gentlewomen in
the heraldic sense of the term,--daughters of gentlemen bearing arms,--but
to use an old-world phrase, no one of them was 'a woman of quality.' The
record shows, that at the time of the poet's birth, no one of his eight
male ancestors in the direct right line had served the State with
distinction, won a foremost place in one of the learned professions, or
attained to any social eminence higher than a place in a Commission of the
Peace.
Such is the evidence of the document of which Mr. Forman justly remarks,
'the pedigree speaks for itself to any careful reader.' And this evidence
is the more impressive, because the carefully elaborated record is the
pedigree deposited at the Heralds' College on 6th March, 1816, by Mr. John
Shelley Sidney (the poet's uncle by the half-blood), at a moment when he
was especially desirous of figuring to the best possible advantage in the
esteem of heralds and their employers. Regard being had to this
gentleman's character and social ambition, and his pride in his descent
from the Sidneys, it cannot be questioned that he made his genealogical
record showy and impressive to the utmost of his ability,--that he would
fain have driven it back another generation,--that could he have
demonstrated a connection between the Castle Goring and Michelgrove
Shelleys, he would not have omitted to prove them two branches of the same
tree.
Mr. John Shelley Sidney's forbearance from pushing the genealogical record
a single stage backwards beyond the certain evidences, is the more
noteworthy and creditable, because he can scarcely have been ignorant of
the inconclusive, though by no means inconsiderable, testimony that the
Henry Shelley, who died at Worminghurst in 1623, was the grandson of
Edward Shelley of the said parish, and that this Edward Shelley was the
younger brother of the Judge of the Common Pleas, who was the actual
founder of the Michelgrove family.
What are the inconclusive, though considerable, evidences of this descent
of the Castle Goring Shelleys and the Michelgrove Shelleys from a common
ancestor, John Shelley, the judge's father? A manuscript, in the
possession of the present Sir Percy Shelley, bears witness that the Henry
Shelley, of Worminghurst, mentioned in the first entry of the pedigree
(deposited by Mr., afterwards Sir John Shelley Sidney in the Heralds'
College), was the son of Henry Shelley of the same parish. Consequently,
if reliance may be placed on this manuscript, the most ancient of the male
ancestors in the right line, from whom Mr. John Shelley Sidney traced his
descent, was preceded by his father at Worminghurst, a fact carrying the
poet's lineage another generation backwards, into the closing term of the
Tudor period. There is, moreover, in the chancel of Worminghurst Church, a
brass, of sixteenth century workmanship, to the memory of Edward Shelley,
Esq., one of the four masters of the royal household, in the successive
reigns of Henry the Eighth, Edward the Sixth, and Mary Tudor. There are
grounds for believing that this Edward Shelley was a son of John Shelley,
of Michelgrove, and younger brother of Sir William Shelley, Justice of the
Common Pleas. The archives of the Michelgrove Shelleys certify that Sir
William Shelley, the judge of the Common Pleas, had a younger brother
named Edward. That the poet's certain male ancestors in the right line
bore the same arms as the Michelgrove Shelleys in the seventeenth century,
that vigilant heralds permitted them to bear those arms, and that no
baronet of the Michelgrove Shelleys ever questioned their right to bear
those arms, are noteworthy pieces of testimony that the two families came
from the same source. In the absence of positive evidence of the fact, it
cannot be denied that Sir Bernard Burke had sufficient presumptive
testimony, to warrant him in recording that the poet was a lineal
descendant of Edward Shelley, the judge's younger brother. There is also
fair presumptive testimony that the judge's younger brother Edward was the
Edward Shelley, who held office as one of the Masters of Henry the
Eighth's household, and found his grave in Worminghurst. Such evidence
would not be sufficient to establish a claim to a dormant peerage, or to
the reversion of a great estate; but it is sufficient for the purpose of
Shelley's personal historian.
'The house,' which Lady Shelley regards as having been merely enriched by
the fortunate marriages that created it, was a curiously vagrant family
for a house 'holding a high position among the large landholders of
Sussex.' Leaving Worminghurst, Co. Sussex, on the demise of Henry Shelley
('esq.,' as he is described in the official pedigree), who died there in
1623, the house moved to Ichingfield, in the time of Richard Shelley
('gent.,' as he is modestly defined in the same genealogical chart). Under
the government of John Shelley, 'esq.,' who died in 1673, the house rested
at Thakeham, whence it migrated to Fen Place, in the parish of Worth, Co.
Sussex, on the marriage, in 1692, of John Shelley (of Fen Place, _jure
uxoris_, Co. Sussex, esq.), with Hellen, younger of the two daughters and
co-heirs of Roger Bysshe, of Fen Place, aforesaid. Of the eight children
of this marriage, the reader of the present work is invited to take notice
of no more than two, John Shelley, the second, and Timothy Shelley, the
third son. Born at Worth in 1696, this last-named John Shelley, who died
in 1772 at Uckfield, is handed down to all future time by the pedigree as
'an esquire and lunatic.' That there was a strain of insanity in the
Castle-Goring Shelleys is a matter to be borne in mind by those who are
interested in the poet and his nearest kindred. Percy Bysshe was
great-great-nephew of this lunatic, and great-grandson of the lunatic's
brother, Timothy, of whom further mention must be made.
Born at Worth, in April 1700, the third son, and fifth child, of a petty
squireen, who lived to have nine children to set going in the world,
Timothy, on coming to man's estate, emigrated to the American plantations,
with a slender purse and an abundant store of physical energy. It is
probable that he also carried across the Atlantic some knowledge of
medicine and surgery, acquired during an apprenticeship to a country
apothecary. As there is no evidence that he passed, or tried to pass, an
examination at the Apothecaries' Hall, or Surgeons' Hall, nor any evidence
that the adventurer underwent any medical training before he crossed the
Atlantic, Medwin may have been right in believing that he fought life's
battle in the New World as 'a quack doctor.' It should, however, be borne
in mind that, if he had served an apprenticeship to a Sussex apothecary,
this Timothy would have possessed all the legal qualification to kill and
cure, that was required of provincial apothecaries in the mother country
prior to the Medical Act of 1814. Anyhow, with or without qualification,
the adventurer established himself as a medicine man, and with quackery,
or without it, throve in his adopted calling. Practising at Christ's
Church, Newark, he married a widow with money. In this last particular he
held firmly to the main article of Shelleyan worldly wisdom. The poet's
ancestors may have married for love, but they usually required a
substantial compensation for the loss of celibatic freedom. The widow to
whom Timothy surrendered himself was the widow of a New York miller, named
Plum; and it is believed that her purse satisfied the hopes planted in her
admirer's breast by so suggestive a name. Marrying thus prudently, Timothy
Shelley, of Newark, became the father of his first-born son, John Shelley,
on the 10th of December, 1729, and of his second son, Bysshe Shelley (the
first of the Castle Goring baronets), on the 21st of June, 1731.
It is doubtful when Timothy of Newark returned to England, where his
father died in 1739, after surviving his eldest and issueless son by some
six years. He may have sailed 'for home,' on news coming to him in Newark
of his father's death. That he became the actual chief of the family on
his father's demise may be inferred from the fact that he is styled in
the pedigree his father's 'heir.' After setting his English affairs in
order, he may have returned to America for awhile. It is more probable,
however, that, returning to England with his two boys, when the elder of
them was some _ten_, and the younger some _eight_ years old, he was
content to play the part of a modest Sussex squireen to the day of his
death. Anyhow it is certain the equally adventurous and fortunate
apothecary (or 'quack doctor,' if any reader prefers Tom Medwin's word)
was the squire of Fen Place for a considerable term of years, before he
was coffined, and put under the floor of Warnham Church, in 1770, some two
years and six months before the death of his elder and lunatic brother.
What became of this fortunate apothecary's two sons, John (the elder) and
Bysshe (the younger)? Becoming the head of 'the House' on his father's
demise in 1770, the apothecary's elder son married the daughter of a
Sussex gentleman, led a comparatively uneventful life at Field Place, near
Horsham, and dying childless in 1790, was buried in Warnham Church; being
succeeded by his younger brother, a man far superior to him in address and
energy, if not in benevolence and piety. Planted by the petty squireen,
who took possession of Roger Bysshe's daughter and home, and watered by
the apothecary who had followed fortune, and found money in America, the
family that gave England her brightest, and sweetest, and most passionate
lyric poet, was raised to the dignity of a house, by the craft, greed, and
penuriousness of Bysshe Shelley, the first baronet of Castle Goring.
The several excellent writers, who have been misled on the matter by
Medwin, the Misleader, may take the present writer's assurance that the
gentleman, who won a baronetcy in his old age, never 'exercised the
profession of a quack doctor' in America. There is, however, sufficient
evidence that the Newark apothecary's younger son was designed to follow
his father's calling. In his sordid and eccentric old age, when the lord
of Castle Goring inhabited a small house hard by his favourite tap-room in
Horsham, it was generally believed that he had at one time practised
medicine in London. It may also be put upon the present record, that he
was believed to have been a partner in the professional activities of Dr.
James Graham, the notorious mesmeric charlatan, in whose Temple of Health
the fair and frail Emma Harte officiated as the Goddess Hygeia, before
she became Sir William Hamilton's wife and Nelson's mistress. Percy
Bysshe, the poet, told Hogg, that his grandfather supplied the money which
enabled Graham to set up his preposterous purple chariot. Percy's
statements, however, should be regarded suspiciously, when they tend to
the discredit of his sire and grandsire.
Whatever the means he used for making money, it is certain that the man,
who in his old age was remarkable for the stateliness of his presence, and
in his milder moods for the courtesy of manner, possessed in his youth no
ordinary charms of appearance and address. Tall, even as his famous
grandson, and qualified by his blue eyes and brown curls to captivate
heedless womankind, he had not crossed the threshold of manly estate, when
he found favour in the eyes of Miss Mary Catherine Michell, only child and
heir of the late Reverend Theobald Michell, clk., formerly of Horsham. The
young lady (only eighteen years old) having considerable possessions, it
is probable that her guardians thought she could do better for herself
than marry the boyish medical student, who was only the younger son of the
squire and whilom apothecary of Fen Place. Possibly they only expressed a
strong opinion, that the young man should wait awhile, and thereby avoid
the evils of precipitate wedlock. Possibly they had no opportunity of
expressing an opinion on the matter, until remonstrance would have been
out of time. To the young people it appeared a case for elopement and
irregular marriage; and, acting on this romantic view of their position,
they hastened to town and were married in 1752, at Keith's Chapel, Mayfair
(the fashionable place for Fleet marriages done in the west end of the
town). From Keith's Chapel they hastened to Paris, where the bride fell
ill of small-pox, and narrowly escaped the death that would have made Tom
Medwin's mother the heir of the late Rev. Theobald Michell's estate. Eight
years later, the lady died after giving birth to three children, and Mr.
Bysshe Shelley was at liberty to look out for a second heiress willing to
become his wife. The only son of this marriage was Timothy Shelley, the
poet's father, who became M.P. for New Shoreham, Co. Sussex.
Nine years after his first wife's death, Mr. Bysshe Shelley fixed his
affections on another heiress--the heiress of an historic line and an
historic estate--Miss Elizabeth Jane Sidney Perry, only daughter and heir
of William Perry, Esq., of Turvill Park, Bucks, Wormington, Co.
Gloucester, and Penshurst Place, Co. Kent. It is remarkable that an
heiress of so bright a lineage and so noble an estate--an heiress who, in
descent and fortune, was a fit match for an earl--an heiress lineally
descended from the Sidneys, Earls of Leicester--should have lived in
singleness to her twenty-ninth year. Perhaps this remarkable fact gave the
younger son of the Newark apothecary the requisite courage for a daring
exploit.
Thirty-eight years old, he was no longer young when he first conceived the
purpose of winning so notable an heiress. But though well on in middle
age, he had the figure, and face, and audacity, of a youngster. Taking up
a position, suitable for his purpose, in a little inn near the Park,
celebrated by Jonson's verse, and glorified by the loves of Waller and
Saccharissa, he crossed the lady's path in her walks, regarded her
worshipfully when she attended the services of Penshurst Church, knelt to
her beneath the spreading branches of 'the Lady's Oak.' Is it marvellous
that a suitor, so eager and vigilant, so comely and daring, achieved his
purpose, notwithstanding the disadvantages of inferior station and growing
years? Is it wonderful that the gentlewoman eloped with the suitor, who
valued her far more for her broad acres than her descent from the Sidneys?
Whatever the motives to the suit, Mr. Bysshe Shelley won, in gallant
fashion, the lady by whom he had his second lot of children,--five sons
and two daughters.
In the year following this marriage, the Newark apothecary was entombed in
Warnham Church; and eleven years later (May 1781) Mr. Bysshe Shelley again
found himself a widower when he was still in his fiftieth year. Henceforth
he devoted himself chiefly to the pursuit of money,--a pursuit in which he
was favoured by the death of his childless brother in 1790, when he
succeeded to the Fen Place and Field Place estates.
The family having come to his hands, he made 'a House' of it. In
1806,--when his little grandson, the future poet, was on the point of
going to Eton,--Mr. Bysshe Shelley became Sir Bysshe Shelley, baronet, of
Castle Goring; the dignity being the price, with which the Duke of Norfolk
rewarded him for former electioneering service, and prepaid him for
similar service to be rendered to the Howards and the Whig party to the
end of his days. At the date of this social promotion, Sir Bysshe Shelley
had already begun to build the egregious Castle which he never finished,
though he is said, by the unreliable Medwin, to have spent 80,000_l._ upon
it.
If he ever hoped for happiness in his later time, the hope was
disappointed. After he had married his daughters, and sent his sons into
life, the passion for money, which had long overpowered the other forces
of his nature, developed even to miserly madness. In other respects the
strain of insanity, that had given him a lunatic for an uncle, displayed
itself in his manifold eccentricities. Living at Horsham, in a little
house, and finding his most congenial associates in the tap-rooms of the
Horsham taverns, whilst his grandson went to school at Brentford and Eton,
the founder of the Castle Goring Shelleys disliked his son so cordially,
that he is said to have seldom greeted him without an outbreak of
passionate malevolence. Percy, the future poet, used to entertain his
comrades at Eton by cursing his absent sire; and at Oxford, he assured
Hogg, that he had acquired this singular taste for cursing his father
behind his back, from hearing old Sir Bysshe curse him to his face. It was
thus that this chief of the Castle Goring Shelleys lived from the creation
of his baronetcy in 1806 to his death in 1815, when he left vast wealth in
money and lands, _In Trust_, for the creation of the big entailed estate,
that should perpetuate the grandeur of 'the House' he had laboured so
resolutely to found. Medwin (no safe authority on details) says the old
man left to his descendants 300,000_l._ in the English funds, and landed
estates yielding a yearly revenue of 20,000_l._, besides the banknotes to
the amount of 10,000_l._ that were hidden in the books and other furniture
of the room, where he drew and yielded his last breath.
Another thing to be noticed in the evidences of this family is the
testimony to the newness of its grandeur, that may be gathered from the
records of its territorial possessions. Fen Place came to these Shelleys,
through the wedding-ring, so recently as the last decade of the
seventeenth century. They acquired Field Place by purchase in the earlier
half of the following (the eighteenth) century. For their place 'among the
large landholders of Sussex,' they are mainly indebted to the Newark
apothecary's younger son, who flourished in George the Third's time, and
died only a few months before the battle of Waterloo.
To take a true view of the poet's lineage and ancestral quality, the
reader must bear in mind the distinctness of the Michelgrove Shelleys and
the Castle Goring Shelleys,--a distinctness that would not be affected by
the production of positive and indisputable evidence, that the two
families had for their common progenitor, a gentle yeoman of Henry the
Eighth's time. Should this remote connexion of the two families ever be
put beyond question, it would be none the less true that, instead of being
of aristocratic descent, as so many biographers have asserted, the poet
came of a line of forefathers who were nothing more than 'gentle yeomen'
till the later time of George III. The poet was no lineal descendant of
the Justice of the Common Pleas, who may be fairly styled the founder of
the Michelgrove House. From the date of that slightly historic personage,
the Michelgrove family was a knightly house. Baronets from the creation of
the order, they intermarried with knightly and noble houses before and
after 1611, drawing to their veins the blood of the Belknaps,
FitzWilliamses, Sackvilles, Lovells, Reresbys, Vantelets, and Nevills. On
the other hand, from the earliest date of his genealogical record, the
poet's ancestors were mere gentle yeomen, intermarrying with families of
no higher gentility, till the poet's grandfather carried off the heiress
of the Penshurst Sidneys.
As no drop of Sidney blood came to his veins from his grandfather's second
marriage, and as his kindred of the half-blood at Penshurst were not
over-fond of their half-cousins at Field Place, it is scarcely conceivable
the poet was so proud of his connexion with the Sidneys as Medwin
represents. It may, however, have been so. For with all his vaunted
superiority to aristocratic prejudice, and all his sincere hostility to
aristocratic privilege, Shelley was by no means exempt from the weakness,
which disposed Byron in his vainer moods to think too much of his
nobility. The advocate of republican ideas, the apostle of freedom and
equality, he was sometimes curiously careful to remind his admirers that
he was no demagogue of vulgar origin, but resembled the Lionel of
_Rosalind and Helen_, in being the heir to 'great wealth and lineage
high.' When this humour prevailed within him, it is possible that he
sometimes looked away from the father whom he hated, the grandsire he
despised, the obscure yeomen whom he distasted, and could persuade
himself that, like his half-cousins at Penshurst, he, too, had somehow or
other descended from the Sidneys. But no such innocent exercise of fancy
would touch the facts or qualify the complexion of his genealogy. It is
nothing to the poet's dishonour to say that, though better born than
Shakespeare, he was no more fortunate in his ancestral story than the
majority--or, at least, a large minority of English gentlemen, moving in
the middle ways of gentle life.
CHAPTER III.
SHELLEY'S CHILDHOOD.
The Poet's Father--Shelley's Birth and Birth-Chamber--Miss Hellen
Shelley's Recollections--The Child-Shelley's Pleasant Fiction--His
Aspect at Tender Age--His Description of his own Nose--The Indian-Ink
Sketch--Miss Curran's 'Daub'--Williams's Water-Colour Drawing--Clint's
Composition--Engravings of 'The Daub' and 'The Composition'--The
Poet's Likeness in Marble--Shelley and Byron--Peacock and Hogg on
Shelley's Facial Beauty--The Colnaghi Engraving.
Whatever the failings of the Newark apothecary's younger son, it must be
recorded to his credit that he gave his son an education befitting the
chief of a territorial family. Inferior though he was in tact and
politeness to the great Chesterfield, whose precepts and example are said
to have been largely accountable for his manners and morality, Mr. Timothy
Shelley (Sir Bysshe's son and heir by Mary Catherine Michell) received the
training, and, notwithstanding the eccentricities that provoked the smiles
of London drawing-rooms, had the port and temper of an English gentleman.
It has been the fashion of biographers to decry this gentleman. Readers,
however, should decline to accept the poet's estimate of the second
baronet of Castle Goring, though the much-maligned gentleman wrote
comically ungrammatical letters, thought too highly of himself, talked
boastfully over his second bottle, swore well up to the mark of Georgian
good breeding, and believed himself the originator of every strenuous
argument in Paley's _Evidences_. The good landlord and kindly patron of
aged servants, the squire whose virtues blossomed in the dust, the amiable
father whose parental excellences were gratefully remembered by all his
surviving children, was neither the fool nor the barbarian his eldest son
thought him.
The Shelleyan enthusiasts have little charity for the poet's sire, even
the most discreet of them regarding him as a deplorably inconvenient
father for so marvellous a son. It is not clear what kind of father would
have won Percy's filial loyalty. In fairness to this sire, it should be
remembered that, if he was not the right kind of father for the poet, he
proved an excellent father to all his other children; and that, if the
poet should have had a more congenial father, Squire Timothy could not
well have had a more trying son than the boy of latent genius, who lived
to cover his house with glory.
After keeping his terms at the same Oxford College, from which his son was
expelled in the following century, Mr. Timothy Shelley made 'the grand
tour,' returning in due course with a smattering of French, an extremely
bad picture of the Eruption of Vesuvius, and 'a certain air' (if Medwin
may be trusted) of having seen the world. Having surveyed mankind in
European capitals, and entered middle age, he married Miss Elizabeth
Pilfold, a gentlewoman of good family and great beauty, who is lightly
regarded by the Shelleyan enthusiasts, because, in the conflict of her
husband and her son, she held loyally to the former, and declined to be
the partisan of the latter. It has even been urged to this lady's
discredit that, when her wilful boy would fain have shaken his sister's
confidence in the doctrines of the Church of England, she, in her mental
narrowness, was alarmed for the spiritual safety of her girls, and thought
it well that at least for a time they should be guarded from his
influence.
Had these parents foreseen the trouble that would come to them from their
first-born child, they would have welcomed him coldly on his arrival in
the room (at Field Place), one of whose walls has in recent time been
illustrated with this inscription:--
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
WAS BORN IN THIS CHAMBER
AUGUST 4TH, 1792.
SHRINE OF THE DAWNING SPEECH AND THOUGHT
OF SHELLEY SACRED BE
TO ALL WHO BOW WHERE TIME HAS BROUGHT
GIFTS TO ETERNITY.
Of Shelley, the little fellow of Dr. Greenlaw's school at Brentford, we
know much from Tom Medwin's occasionally accurate pages, and from other
sources of information, which enable us to check the statements of that
more entertaining than reliable biographer. Respecting Shelley at Eton,
there is almost a redundance of evidence. Of the Etonian's ways of amusing
himself at Field Place during his holidays, there is no lack of
information;--thanks to Miss Hellen Shelley's goodness in committing all
she could remember of her brother to paper, for the assistance of his
biographer and fellow-collegian, Hogg, the cynical humourist and clever
lawyer. But of Shelley, the nursling of the Field Place nursery, and child
of the Field Place schoolroom, few facts are on the record;--scarcely
anything besides the three or four matters, which Miss Hellen placed
amongst her personal recollections, as matters of domestic tradition,
coming to her from times before she was of an age to take clear and
enduring cognizance of her brother's doings.
Seven years his junior, the lady, plying her pen in 1856 (four-and-thirty
years after his death), can scarcely have retained any clear memories of
him, from a time previous to the opening of her ninth year. Barely seven
years old, when her brother went for the first time to Eton, she had in
1856 a memory of uncommon retentiveness, if it afforded her a clear
picture of him, as he appeared during the first of his Eton holidays.
Fortunately, however, she touches on affairs and incidents of an earlier
date; such, for instance, as his visits to the Warnham Vicar, who taught
him the rudiments of Latin, visits that began when he was only six years
old, and she was still unborn. To this gentle and delightful chronicler,
speaking for the moment from memory of her mother's gossip, we are
indebted for our knowledge of the astonishment little Bysshe (whilst a
Latin scholar at the Vicar's school) caused the elders of Field Place, by
repeating aloud, word for word, and without an error, Gray's lines on the
Cat and the Gold Fish, after a single reading of the composition.
Without precisely declaring herself indebted to hearsay for the story,
Miss Hellen seems to be speaking of a matter anterior to the earliest of
her personal observations, when she gives us the particulars of the
marvellous 'invention' with which Percy in his tender childhood
entertained and perplexed the people of his home. The essay in romantic
fiction was this: Assuring his sisters (Hellen's elder sisters) that he
had just returned from paying a visit to certain ladies of their village,
he recounted to them, minutely, how the ladies received him, how they
occupied themselves during his visit, and more particularly how he and
they wandered through a delightful garden, well known to the boy's
auditors for its filbert bank and undulating turf bank. On inquiry, it was
found that the imaginative urchin had not been to the ladies, their house,
or their garden. The whole statement was made up of fibs; 'but' (says the
recorder of the characteristic incident) 'it was not considered as a
falsehood to be punished.' Perhaps it would have been better in the long
run for little Bysshe, had a less lenient view been taken of the affair
that, if not the first, was one of the earliest of those countless
deviations from strict historical veracity, which have occasioned so much
controversy between his extravagant idolaters and his temperate admirers.
Of the droll things written of the poet by his enthusiastic worshipers,
few are droller than the pages in which this exercise of childish fancy is
dealt with, as an early exhibition of the peculiar genius that placed him
eventually in the highest rank of imaginative artists. Had they not been
too engrossed with the affairs of their own home to take nice cognizance
of their neighbours' children, the elders of Field Place, whilst rightly
regarding the fib as no flagrant offence, would not have 'mentioned it as
a singular fact.' To those who are familiar with the ways and humours of
children, it is needless to say, that little Bysshe's 'invention' is an
example of the commonest kind of the harmless fibs, that come from the
proverbially truthful mouths of babes and sucklings. Poets would be
unendurably abundant, if all the little boys and girls, who 'romance' in
this innocent fashion, were destined for the service of the Muses.
In Shelley's case, however, the story has an exceptional interest, because
he never survived the disposition, which thus early in his career caused
him to proclaim himself the recipient of civilities that had not been
offered to him,--the graceful actor in a domestic drama that had not been
performed. All through life, Shelley had a practice of uttering for the
truth statements that were not true. All through life, his familiar
friends received his communications, with reference to this propensity.
Out of their affection for the man, they palliated the weakness with more
or less sincere excuses, that relieved the infirmity of the odium of
deceitfulness. Some of his friends called attention to the poetical
verity, underlying the least veracious statements; others persuaded
themselves that the speaker of untruths was the victim of an inordinately
powerful imagination. Others, unable to shut their eyes to the sure
indications that he was not altogether unaware of the fictitious nature of
his statements, maintained that the fables were due partly to
hallucination, and only in some degree to wilful inventiveness. Whilst
Hogg talked of the poetic verity of the egregious fictions, and of their
utterer's inordinately powerful imagination, Peacock originated the theory
of 'semi-delusion.'
From the few glimpses to be had of him in Miss Hellen Shelley's letters,
and Medwin's reminiscences, and from bits of testimony which, though found
in records of his later boyhood, are evidential to certain particulars of
his earlier infancy, the cautious historian can produce the principal
characteristics of the little fellow, who used to play with his sisters in
the Field Place gardens, and ride on his pony about the Warnham lanes, in
years anterior to his first departure from home for boarding-school. It is
manifest that the child, who from his seventh to his eleventh year went
daily to the Warnham Vicar for instruction in Latin, and received his
other lessons in his sisters' schoolroom, may be thought of as a shy,
nervous, timid, small-headed urchin; tall for his years, but delicately
fashioned. Narrow-chested and slightly round-shouldered, he had the look
of a little fellow, scarcely strong enough to enjoy the sports of robust
children. A slight slip of a lad, more given to loitering than running
about the Field Place gardens; more often seen sitting by the fire, than
dancing on the carpet of his sisters' play-room; he was gentle in his
happier moods with a girlish gentleness, and sometimes fretful with a
girlish fretfulness. Deficient in boyishness, the boy had a face, chiefly
remarkable for the fawn-like prominence of its deep blue eyes, the
delicate, though imperfect, shapeliness of its mouth, the rather comical
meanness of its little tip-tilted nose, and the red-and-white of its
singularly bright complexion; the general girlishness of his appearance
being heightened by the profusion of the silky hair, falling and flowing
in blond-brown ringlets about his long neck and weedy shoulders.
Years later, musing on his conception of his former self, when he
preferred the society of his little sister to the company of the rough
boys of the Vicar's schoolroom, Shelley wrote in _Rosalind and Helen_, of
Helen's docile child:--
'He was a gentle boy,
And in all gentle sports took joy;
Oft in a dry leaf for a boat,
With a small feather for a sail,
His fancy on that spring would float,
If some invisible breeze would stir
Its marble calm.'
In like manner, 'Abdallah' and 'Maimuna' (the little Bysshe and Bessie of
_The Assassins_) used to float their toy-boats upon the water of their
smiling creek. Shelley's delight in toy-flotillas may have arisen for the
first time (as some of his biographers aver) long after his childhood.
Possibly he was the fool of his own fancy in thinking he cared to play
with toy-boats in his infancy. It is, however, certain, that gentleness
characterized the child, who, on attaining manhood, meditated complacently
on the delight he took in gentle sports when he was a gentle boy.
From what has been said of the facial show of the little fellow, who used
to play in the Field Place gardens, and ride his Shetland pony about the
Warnham lanes, in the closing years of the last, and the opening summers
of the present century, it follows that the picture published by Mr.
Colnaghi, in 1879, as a veritable portraiture of Shelley in his childhood,
is an unauthentic and delusive performance. An exquisite example of
childish beauty, the little boy of Mr. Colnaghi's engraving has a
straight, finely-pointed nose, and a face of faultless symmetry; a nose
that could not have developed into the distinctly tip-tilted nose of the
poet's later visage; a face, that could not have departed so far from its
normal mould, as in later time to bear any resemblance to the poet's
countenance, which is represented by all the several persons of his
familiar acquaintance, who wrote about it, as having been no less wanting
in symmetry than fortunate in the charms of expressiveness. Whilst
declaring the singular comeliness of the poet's face in its happier
moments, Hogg records that its 'features were not symmetrical.' Medwin,
ever quick to glorify his cousin, admits that his features were 'not
_regularly_ handsome.' Though she busied herself to impose upon the world
the picture of a beautifully symmetrical face as Shelley's veritable
semblance, and was even more accountable than Mrs. Shelley for the
prevailing misconceptions respecting his facial aspect, Mrs. Hogg (the
Mrs. Williams of Shelleyan annals) admitted to Mr. Rossetti, in Trelawny's
presence, on March 13, 1872, that the poet 'could not be called handsome
or beautiful, though the character of his face was so remarkable for
ideality and expression;' the lady, at the same time, confirming what Hogg
and Peacock tell us of the unmusical character of the poet's voice. In the
opinion of the lady, whose singing was unutterably sweet to her spiritual
worshiper, Shelley's 'voice was decidedly disagreeable.' On seeing the
familiar pictures of Shelley, that serve as the frontispieces in Hogg's
_Life_, and Trelawny's _Recollections_, Peacock declined to regard them as
likenesses of his former friend; putting them aside not merely as
ineffective and unsatisfactory likenesses, but as no likenesses whatever
of the individual they professed to represent. 'The portraits,' he
remarked in _Fraser_, 'do not impress themselves on me as likenesses; they
seem to me to want the true outline of Shelley's features, above all, to
want their true expression.' How could he honestly speak otherwise of the
spurious and delusive portraits, 'in which' (to repeat his own words) 'the
nose has no turn-up?' That Shelley had a small and distinctly tip-tilted
nose, instead of the straight and rather large (though delicately moulded)
nose of the lying pictures, appears from words penned by himself to
Peacock, from Leghorn, in August, 1819. After speaking derisively of John
Gisborne's quite Slawkenbergian nose as a thing that, weighing upon the
beholder's imagination, and transforming all its owner's g's into k's, was
a feature scarcely to be forgiven by Christian charity, Shelley observed,
'_I, you know, have a little turn-up nose_; Hogg has a large hook one; but
add them together, square them, cube them, you would have but a faint
notion of the nose to which I refer.' Shelley having written in this way
of the defective shape and size of a principal feature of his face, it is
not surprising that, whilst avoiding such words as 'unsymmetrical' and
'irregular,' Lady Shelley admitted reluctantly in her _Shelley Memorials_,
that the poet's 'features were not _positively_ handsome.' The wonder is
that, after making this admission in the text, the lady told a different
story in the frontispiece of her book. The evidence is superabundant that,
instead of being positively handsome, Shelley's little nose was positively
tip-tilted, and his face positively unsymmetrical.
To see the real Shelley, as he appeared during life to persons who
regarded him through no such disturbing medium as romantic glamour, it is
needful to get the better of misconceptions, arising from the delusive
portraitures of him, to be found in familiar biographies--the fanciful
pictures, which are the more intolerable for being fruitful of
misapprehensions respecting the poet's moral endowments.
The epithet applied to the delusive portraitures, was chosen with
deliberation. 'Fanciful' in effect, they had their origin in fancy, and
may be fairly described as the offspring of fancy working upon fancy, at
different times and under various conditions. Shelley never sate to a
professional painter. From the year that produced the Indian-ink sketch of
a young gentleman, wearing the scant gown and leading bands of an Oxford
undergraduate, to the year of his death, Shelley never gave a competent
painter an opportunity for producing a work, that would have prevented the
fanciful misrepresentations from gaining any credit--possibly would even
have prevented them from coming into existence.
It would have been better for his readers, and certainly no worse for his
fame, had he never consented to sit to an amateur. But it was fated that
the man, who suffered so much in more important matters from sterner
adversaries, should suffer considerably from two dabblers in the fine
arts. At Rome (Lady Shelley says in 1818, Trelawny says in 1819) Miss
Curran began the portrait in oil, which she never finished, of the poet in
his twenty-eighth year--the sketch which, dropped and relinquished by the
fair limner, possibly because she felt she had made 'a bad beginning,' was
destined to be the chief source of all the artistic falsities, that have
been manufactured to his injury since his death. Trelawny says this
failure was 'left in an altogether flat and inanimate state'--a
description to be kept in mind.
An amateur in oil (of the gentler sex) having thus attempted and failed to
paint the poet when he was at Rome, two or three years later (1821 or
1822) Shelley surrendered himself to a masculine dabbler in
water-colours--to Williams, the companion of his voyage to death.
Possibly, this sketch (which differed from Miss Curran's effort, in being
finished) would have been preserved, had it accorded with the spurious
portraitures, given so profusely in later time to a credulous and
undiscerning public. But it has disappeared; and at the present date no
one can say how far it merited the praise given to it by Trelawny, whose
favourable opinion of the 'spirited water-colour drawing' would deserve
more consideration, had he known half as much about the fine arts as he
knew about horses and yachts. The Indian-ink sketch of a boy in the
academicals of an Oxford undergraduate, the unfinished daub in oil, and
the 'spirited water-colour drawing,' are the only portraits of the poet,
known to have been produced by artists of any qualification or incapacity
during his life.
Possibly, the Indian-ink sketch, which De Quincey saw somewhere in London,
was the best of the three performances. It cannot have been much more
absurd than Miss Curran's absurdity, though from De Quincey's words it
seems to have been a sufficiently ludicrous production. 'The sketch,' says
the Opium-Eater, 'tallied pretty well with a verbal description which I
had heard of him in some company, viz.: that he was tall, slender, and
presenting the air of an elegant flower, whose head drooped from being
surcharged with rain'--a description censured by the essayist for giving
the equally false and disagreeable impression that the youthful
_littérateur_ 'was tainted, even in his external deportment, by some
excess of sickly sentimentalism, from which, however, in all stages of his
life, he was remarkably free.' Though, possibly, more like the man than
Miss Curran's fanciful oil-daub and Mr. Williams's 'spirited' achievement
in water-colour, this performance in Indian-ink, which made a young
Englishman look like a dripping lily or a rose well wetted at a pump, was
certainly a libel on the scandalous undergraduate.
Perhaps it would have been well had the spirited water-colour disappeared
sooner. It would have been better than well had Miss Curran's 'failure'
been tossed into the Tiber as soon as she despaired of making a decent
picture of it. Unfortunately, the thing that was only begun by a woman,
and the thing that was finished to the last touch by man, survived the
poet; so that Mrs. Shelley (through Mrs. Williams) was able to put them
into the hands of Mr. Clint, with a request that out of such sorry
materials, her own reminiscences--the recollections of a widow who liked
to speak of herself as 'the chosen mate of a celestial spirit'--and his
sense of the fitness of things, he would compose a picture, worthy of
being handed down to posterity, as the veritable and unquestionably
historic likeness of the greatest lyrical poet of the nineteenth century.
The fancy picture, that was 'composed' under these less unusual than
laughable circumstances, may not be more untruthful, but certainly is not
more veracious, than the majority of fancy portraits. 'Of these
materials,' Trelawny wrote in 1858, 'Mrs. Williams, on her return to
England after the death of Shelley, got Clint to compose a portrait,
which the few who knew Shelley in the last year of his life thought very
like him. The water-colour drawing has been lost, so that the portrait
done by Clint is the only one of any value.' What evidential value can
attach to a portrait 'composed' and 'done' under such circumstances? Apart
from his weakness (one might, perhaps, say his dishonesty) in consenting
to the prayer of the poet's widow and her friend (Mrs. Williams), no blame
belongs to Clint. Doing as portrait-painters are wont to do, when they
agree to manufacture posthumous likenesses of people they have never seen,
Clint worked up a fancy picture out of the two performances by amateurs;
assuming that he might rely on those performances for correct information
as to the principal features and general effect of the poet's countenance.
On points where the two performances gave incongruent evidence, he relied
on the widows (Mrs. Williams and Mrs. Shelley) to instruct him as to which
of the two performances was the more trustworthy. The portrait having been
'composed' and 'done' in this way, the final touches were added in
accordance with further information from Mrs. Williams and further
suggestions by 'the chosen mate of a celestial spirit.'
The falseness and absurdity of the composition are mainly referable to the
romantic view Miss Curran took of the poet's appearance, and to her
romantic desire to give him the beauty which she deemed appropriate to the
author of incomparably beautiful poems. Rating him with the angels, the
lady was determined he should look like an angel--on her canvas. Beginning
with this ambition, it is no matter for surprise that she made only 'a
beginning.' If he was instructed to rely on the daub in oil, rather than
on the spirited water-colour, it is not wonderful Clint went wrong. In her
resolve to make Shelley look like an angel, Miss Curran decided to make
the principal feature of his portrait altogether unlike the most prominent
feature of his face. In the face, this feature wanted the size and contour
needful for the romantic beauty, with which the lady would fain have
endowed her bard. In the picture, this particular feature has every
quality required in a feature of its kind by connoisseurs of romantic
beauty--connoisseurs, that is to say, of the conventional school to which
the lady and her friends (Mrs. Williams and Mrs. Shelley) belonged.
The artist was not more interested than either of the other ladies in
misrepresenting the poet in this particular feature. Mrs. Williams was
animated with sentimental tenderness for the poet, who wrote her so much
beautiful poetry. It was natural for this romantic mourner to wish that in
his historic portrait, her Platonic lover should be relieved of a facial
defect, that in her opinion amounted to disfigurement. Whilst mourning
sincerely for her husband, Mrs. Williams mourned romantically for the poet
who had perished with her husband in the same wild storm. In like manner,
Mrs. Shelley (whose notions of the beautiful were purely conventional) was
desirous that this particular feature should be dealt with tenderly,
delicately, lovingly, in the portrait that would represent her husband's
facial show to future ages. Hence it was, that whilst he was composing the
great historic portrait chiefly out of Miss Curran's artistic falsehood,
neither of the ladies, on whose guidance he relied, was in a mood to tell
Mr. Clint in what respect the oil-daub was especially misleading, or even
to hint it was likely to mislead him in any way. Sixty years since, a
little turn-up nose was universally regarded as a nose wholly unbefitting
a poet. In their measures for rendering their poet altogether admirable
and lovely to unborn ages, both ladies were especially desirous that on
the historic canvas he should be endowed with a nose wholly unlike the one
that had been, in their eyes, the great blemish of his earthly tabernacle.
If Trelawny's evidence may be accepted, Clint did his work to the
satisfaction of 'the few who knew Shelley in the last year of his life.'
As Trelawny was one of those few, the 'composition' may be assumed to have
had his approval. But Trelawny knew nothing of pictures, and little of the
poet with whose story he will be associated to the end of time. The whole
term of their friendly intercourse exceeded six months by no more than two
or three days. And throughout that term the Cornish gentleman, with his
simple reverence for literature and men of letters, regarded the poet
through the glamour that makes things seem other than they are. On being
shown the portrait for the first time, with an assurance that people
approved it, Trelawny was not the man to discover anything wrong in it.
When he saw it for the first time, a considerable number of long years had
elapsed since the death of his acquaintance for six short months. Under
these circumstances, Trelawny's good word goes for nothing in the
estimate of the spurious performance. That Hogg resembled Peacock in
rating the picture at its proper worthlessness is matter of certainty; for
though an engraving of the artistic imposture faces the title-page of his
first volume, the biographer shows himself fully alive to the fictitious
nature of the composition, by his vivid and minute verbal portraitures of
the poet at Oxford and in later stages of his career.
Since Trelawny published Vinter's lithograph of the picture as a
frontispiece to the _Recollections_ (1858), numerous engravings have
appeared on wood, stone, or metal, of the posthumous 'composition' which
the Cornish gentleman, at the time of his book's appearance, regarded as
the only reliable painting of the poet. 'The water-colour drawing has been
lost,' Trelawny wrote in 1858, 'so the portrait done by Clint is the only
one of any value.' At that time he was far from imagining that the
oil-sketch, which Miss Curran 'never finished, and left in an altogether
flat and inanimate state,' would ever compete in public confidence with
the posthumous 'composition.' To the present writer it has not seemed
worth the while to inquire what (if anything) was done to Miss Curran's
'failure,' to bring it out of the 'altogether flat and inanimate state,'
and put it into a condition to be regarded (_on the authority_ of words
spoken by Sir Percy Shelley, _on the authority_ of his mother) as the
'best portrait extant' of the poet. It is enough for the present writer
and his readers to know that Miss Curran's beginning of a portrait has
risen to this place in Sir Percy's esteem--to know that it rose eventually
to an equally high place in Mary Godwin Shelley's esteem--to know from
Lady Shelley's assurance that the frontispiece of the third edition of her
_Shelley Memorials: From Authentic Sources_, is an engraving from (to use
her ladyship's words) 'the original picture by Miss Curran, painted at
Rome in 1818, now in Sir Percy Shelley's possession'--to know, from Mr.
Buxton Forman's authoritative assurance, that the frontispiece to the
first volume of his edition of _The Poetical Works_ is an engraving from
the same 'best portrait extant,' and not an engraving of Clint's
posthumous 'composition'--to know that engravings from this 'best portrait
extant' have, like the engravings at first hand of the 'composition,' been
repeatedly re-engraved (with or without variations to suit the
requirements of editorial taste),--and, _lastly_, to know that all the
engravings and re-engravings of the two delusive originals are flagrant
and altogether-to-be-repudiated misrepresentations of the poet's actual
appearance.
After what has been said of Miss Curran's unfinished oil-sketch, and
Clint's posthumous 'composition,' which was mainly made up from the lady's
derelict absurdity, it is needless to say that all the engravings and
re-engravings of the abandoned fib and the elaborate falsehood bear a
close resemblance to one another. Resembling one another in the contour of
the features, the arrangement of the hair (even to the tips of the curls),
the items of costume (even to the shape of the rumpled Byronic collars),
these engravings and re-engravings might be mistaken for reproductions of
the same original picture--allowance being made for the taste and whims of
engravers, the fancies and requirements of editors. The only difference
between the avowed engravings from Miss Curran's daub and the engravings
of Mr. Clint's composition is that the former are something more unnatural
and unsatisfactory than the latter. The poet of the former lot of
engravings is a somnambulant girl--a sleepwalker from dyspepsia, who, on
leaving her bed somehow or other, contrived to put on her brother's
walking-coat instead of her own bodice. The poet of the latter set of
engravings is a very pretty girl, exhibiting no sign of disease, apart
from the indications of a desire to look something wiser and prettier than
she really is. Like the somnambulant girl of the more disagreeable
picture, the young lady of these less disagreeable engravings has put on
her brother's coat, wears Byronic shirt-collars, has a quill pen in her
lily-white hand, and is so posed that her right fore-arm is resting on an
open manuscript. Of the dozen or more engravings of this young lady now
lying open before the present writer's desk, the one to which he would
direct his readers' attention--in consideration of its being the most
agreeable, typical, and artistic of them all--is the engraving by that
fine engraver, Francis Holl, which does duty as frontispiece to the first
volume of Hogg's (unfinished) _Life_.
What is offered to the eye by this frontispiece? It is the picture of a
man, to judge of it from the coat, the folds of the Byronic shirt-collar,
and the absence of the developments of the breast that are such powerful
elements of feminine loveliness. It is the picture of a beautiful girl, to
judge of it by the girlish face and hair, the girlishness of the long,
slender neck. The first thing to strike the beholder of this girl's face
is the symmetrical character of its delicate beauty. The symmetry is
perfect--too perfect, even for a girl of seventeen. The fine pencillings
of the eye-brows, the curves immediately beneath the eyes, the superior
contours of the cheeks, the line and shadow-line of the long, straight
nose, the outlines of the lower parts of the countenance, the curlings of
the small kissable lips and dainty chin, are all finely, unsurpassably
symmetrical. If the word may be applied to things so lovely and delicate,
symmetry is carried even to caricature in the details of this girlish
face. Of course the face, so delicately girlish, is deficient in the
strength, the indications of force, active or latent, always to be looked
for and, in some degree, invariably discernible in the countenance of a
man of mark.
Though he never sate to professional painter, Shelley sate to a sculptor
of sufficient ability, whose chisel produced a work of art that,
indicating with sufficient clearness the two chief defects of the poet's
least comely feature, fortunately, still exists, to give the lie to the
foolish pictures, and to protest with mute eloquence against the policy of
misrepresentation, which pursues its ends with insolent disregard for the
rights of the many thousands of persons, who are interested in knowing the
truth and the whole truth, and in believing nothing but the truth, about
one of the most remarkable Englishmen of the present century.
But though it offered violence to romantic and conventional notions of
poetical beauty, and gave his countenance a contour very different from
the profile of the delusive portraits, it may not be imagined that the
'little turn-up nose' caused Shelley to be otherwise than a man of a
singularly striking and charming appearance. Tall for his years, from his
childhood till he attained the fullness of his stature, Shelley had a
slender figure that would not have wanted elegance, had it not been for
the slight drooping and roundness of his shoulders, the narrowness of his
chest, and the forward inclination of his long neck and minute
head--peculiarities scarcely reconcilable with all that has been written
about his personal stateliness. To imagine that the young man who paced
the streets of Oxford and London 'with bent knees and outstretched neck'
(in the manner described by Hogg), was remarkable for the grace and
dignity of his carriage, is to surrender one's judgment to the sway of
romantic biographers. None the less certain, however, is it that there
were moments when Shelley's countenance might be commended for loveliness.
Remarkable for a complexion, in which carmine-red and delicate white,
instead of being blended, were separately conspicuous, even when it was
most freckled by exposure to the sun, the face surmounting his long and
slender frame was singularly expressive of intelligence, sympathy, nervous
alertness, enthusiasm, and sincerity. Dull in moments of contemplation,
the prominent deep-blue eyes of Trelawny's stag-eyed Shelley were
comparable with Byron's grey-blue eyes, for overpowering vehemence under
the impulses of strong and sudden emotion. Though inferior to Byron's
feminine mouth in beauty, and even more deficient than Byron's mouth in
power, Shelley's mouth--the one symmetrical part of his unsymmetrical
countenance--was notable for shapeliness, and alike expressive of
sensibility and refinement.
In other particulars, Shelley's head and face were comparable with Byron's
head and face. Like Byron, the author of _Laon and Cythna_ had a head of
striking smallness. It is a matter to be pondered by the physiologists,
who maintain no man can be mentally powerful unless he has a big bulk of
brain and a big pan to hold it, that the two greatest poets of the
nineteenth century were, perhaps, the _two_ smallest-headed Englishmen of
their time. Though it wanted the auburn under-glow, the feathery softness,
and careful keeping of the Byronic tresses, Shelley's brown shock--blonde
brown in childhood, deep brown ere it began prematurely to turn
grey--resembled the locks of his familiar friend and fellow-poet in
curling naturally. The most prominent feature of either poet's face was
the one in which he differed most conspicuously from the other. In that
feature Byron had greatly the advantage. Had he not grudged the poet whom
he hated this personal advantage over the poet whom he loved, Leigh Hunt
would not have been at so much pains to describe the faults of Byron's
nose--its excessive massiveness, and its appearance of having been put
upon the face, rather than of growing out of it. But whilst inferior to
Byron's face in that important feature, Shelley's face, in its naturalness
and seraphic gentleness, its candour and high simplicity, was possessed of
charms no one would venture to attribute to Byron's more earthly
loveliness. In spite of its grand defect, Shelley's was a face that
reminded his two closest friends of works of Italian art. Whilst Peacock
speaks of his vanished friend's resemblance to the portrait of Antonio
Leisman in the Florentine Gallery, Hogg likens the sweetest and loftiest
element of the poet's facial beauty to the air of profound religious
veneration that may be observed in the best frescoes of the greatest
masters of Florence and Rome.
There is no need to inquire how the lovely face of Mr. Colnaghi's
engraving came to be regarded as a portrait of Shelley in his childhood.
Still less is there any need to inquire whether the original picture was
the work of the exiled French prince to whom it has been attributed. The
present writer has no wish to deal disrespectfully with any part of the
picture's story that does not touch the poet's record. For this work's
purpose it is enough to say authoritatively that the child, whose delicate
and exquisitely symmetrical lineaments are exhibited in the Colnaghi
engraving, cannot have been the infantile Shelley, because it is not in
the nature of things that the poet of unsymmetrical visage and 'little
turn-up nose' was the development of the child, whose facial loveliness
was so perfect an example of facial symmetry, and whose nose could not by
any possibility have changed into the tip-tilted feature, described so
precisely by the poet himself. Portraits are often strangely mis-assigned;
but it is seldom for a portrait to be so egregiously mis-assigned as this
so-called picture of the child Shelley. Had not Mrs. Shelley and Mrs.
Williams succeeded in palming off on romantic credulity their symmetrical
and straight-nosed 'composition' as a veritable picture of 'The Real
Shelley,' it would never have occurred to any one to suggest that the
original of the Colnaghi engraving was the poet Shelley at a tender age.
CHAPTER IV.
THE BRENTFORD SCHOOLBOY.
Dr. Greenlaw's Character--Quality of his School--Medwin's Anecdotes to
the Doctor's Discredit--Mr. Gellibrand's Recollections of the
Brentford Shelley--The Bullies of the Brentford Playground--Shelley's
Character at the School--His Disposition to Somnambulism--His Delight
in Novels--His Wretchedness at School--Shelleyan Egotism--Byronic
Egotism--Byron's Influence on Shelley--Enduring Influence of Novels on
Shelley's Mind--Stories of Boating--Easter Holidays in
Wiltshire--'Essay on Friendship'--Its Biographical Value.
The slight slip of a boy, who under the name of Percy Bysshe Shelley,
appeared for the first time in his eleventh year (the third year of the
present century) amongst the boys of Dr. Greenlaw's school at Sion House,
Brentford, was no child to prefer the society of overbearing boys to the
society of his little sisters, whose playmate he had hitherto been.
Dr. Greenlaw's home for young gentlemen was a house of forbidding aspect.
More than once as they walked from London to Bishopgate (familiar to those
who are in the habit of entering Windsor Park from Englefield Green),
Shelley directed Hogg's attention to the gloomy walls of his first
boarding-school. The house was unalluring, the master not incapable of
outbreaks of anger, the boys by no means innocent of puerile rudeness and
inhumanity. But the present writer, who in former time knew some of Dr.
Greenlaw's scholarly descendants, has reason to believe the doctor was a
kindlier gentleman, and his school a much less defective establishment,
than Mr. Medwin made the world imagine.
Taking much credit to himself for having been at Brentford a sympathetic
and condescending senior schoolmate to his little far-away cousin, Tom
Medwin speaks with ungenerous resentment of the seminary where they sipt
the Pierian spring. All that his bitter words amount to is that Dr.
Greenlaw was a pedagogue, and Sion House a seminary, 'of an old school.'
If the bread served to the boys at breakfast and supper was parsimoniously
dressed with butter, the fare was neither better nor worse than the bread
and butter usually provided for schoolboys eighty years since. If the
Saturday's pie was a scrap-pie, and a poor specimen of its inferior kind
of pie, it was only such a thing as schoolboys of the period were expected
to eat with thankfulness. A schoolboy's toilet, in the days of our
grandfathers, was always a short and simple business. As the boys seldom
saw the lady, who never harassed or troubled them in any way, Mr. Medwin
might as well have forborne to sneer at Mrs. Greenlaw for priding herself
less on her husband's calling, than on being distantly related to the Duke
of Argyll. Mr. Medwin was not a little proud of his slight relationship to
the Castle Goring Shelleys, though they were not (to put the case mildly)
the best of the Sussex families. He might, therefore, have spoken
leniently of Mrs. Greenlaw's sense of the dignity of her people, or been
silent about the matter. Himself the son of a country attorney, Mr. Medwin
should have written a little less disdainfully of his old schoolfellows,
for being 'mostly the sons of London shopkeepers.' Nor is the Rev. Dr.
Greenlaw (he was in holy orders and had a Scotch degree) to be severely
judged if, when pupils were few, he was something less inquisitive than he
might have been about the quality of parents. To live, schoolmasters must
fill up their beds; and to be placed at school in the same dormitory with
a cheesemonger's son is an indignity, to be forgiven (after forty years)
even by the son of a solicitor of the High Court of Judicature.
It may, however, be conceded that Sion House was no more a fit school for
the heir of a great county family, than the Clapham school, where the
poet's sisters received their higher education, was a suitable seminary
for the daughters of an aristocratic house. Whilst little Bysshe was still
making Latin verses in the company of tradesmen's sons, the elder of his
sisters went to the Clapham school, where Harriett Westbrook (the daughter
of a licensed victualler) in later time learnt something of French and the
answers to Mangnall's Questions. It may not, however, be inferred that Mr.
and Mrs. Shelley, of Field Place, were deficient in proper care for their
own dignity, or in proper concern for the welfare of their offspring.
Though no place of education for the sons of the English aristocracy, Sion
House was greatly superior to the 'commercial schools' where tradesmen
sent their boys to be trained for the counter and the counting-house. It
was a 'classical school' for the sons of ordinary professional men (boys
like Tom Medwin), and the sons of well-to-do and ambitious tradesmen,
bent on putting their boys into the liberal professions. The Clapham
school for girls was a school of corresponding quality,--a place of
education for the daughters of people moving in the middle way of life.
That he sent his children to such schools merely shows that the Squire of
Field Place was not possessed by the spirit of exclusiveness, that is a
characteristic of aristocratic personages; that he was still far from
rating himself with the aristocracy of his county, though he had taken a
degree at Oxford, made the grand tour, and risen to represent New Shoreham
in the House of Commons. That the children were sent to such schools shows
how far the head of the family (old Mr. Bysshe Shelley, the son of the
Newark apothecary and the friend of Graham, the quack) was from
over-estimating his social position; how far he was from deeming himself
one of the dignitaries of his shire, though he had married the heiress of
Penshurst, and adding acre to acre, was rich enough to spend tens of
thousands on the big castle, which he never finished or inhabited.
Instead of enjoying the status, which delusive biographers declare them to
have enjoyed for successive centuries, the poet's people were in his
childhood only emerging from the middle class of society. Planted though
they had been for some time within the outer breastworks of provincial
gentility, they were still regarded by their patrician neighbours as
people of ambiguous quality,--too wealthy to be rated with mere 'gentle
populace,' and at the same time, too wanting in local influence and
ancestral dignity to be rated with the _élite_ of 'the county.' Fortunate
though it had been, old Mr. Bysshe Shelley's career was more calculated to
provoke scandal than conciliate social sentiment. Though it had done much
for his enrichment, his second marriage had also caused leading families
of Sussex and Kent to regard him with animosity, and speak of him with
disapproval. Strange stories were told of the ways in which the old man
had made money,--was still making money. The sordid tastes and habits,
that rendered him equally despicable and pitiable in his senility, were
already revealing themselves, and confirming people of honest pride and
good principle in their resolve to hold aloof from him. To personages of
the county, who had long looked down upon them as obtrusive upstarts, the
father and son grew more distasteful in proportion as they grew richer.
Instead of being diminished, this disfavour was for a time quickened by
the civilities, which for political reasons the Duke of Norfolk thought
fit to offer to the Horsham capitalist and the Member for New Shoreham.
Both within and without the lines of the Liberal party, dislike of these
'new men' was stimulated by the growing opinion that, if the younger kept
his seat for the Sussex borough, and voted steadily in accordance with the
Duke's pleasure, the elder of them would in a few years be raised to the
dignity for which he had long hungered.
Thus regarded in Sussex, it is not surprising that the poet's father and
grandfather lived more within the lines of their proper middle-class
connexion, than with the higher gentry of their neighbourhood, and that,
in selecting schools for his children, Mr. Timothy Shelley acted in
harmony with the views of his middle-class friends and relations. It is
not surprising that little Bysshe was sent to the school that was good
enough for the boys of people like the Medwins, and none too good for the
tradesmen's sons who came between the wind and Tom Medwin's nobility. Nor
is it surprising that in later time little Bysshe's sisters were sent to
the suburban academy, where the youngest of them became intimate with
Harriett Westbrook,--the lovely child of 'Jew Westbrook,' the licensed
victualler. Had he in 1802 felt more certain of getting the baronetcy for
which he was playing (and won only four years later--1806), it is probable
that the Horsham money-maker would have loosened his purse-string, and
told his son (the M.P.) that Sion House was not good enough school for the
heir of the Castle Goring Shelleys. Had the father and son foreseen what
embarrassment and scandal would come to the Castle Goring Shelleys from
friendships made at the Clapham girls'-school, it is probable that the
poet's sisters would have been sent to a more select seminary, or have
been educated, even to the finishing touches of their education, at Field
Place.
That the Reverend Dr. Greenlaw was a fairly sufficient pedagogue may be
inferred even from the reluctant admissions of the writer, who is our
chief source of information respecting little Bysshe's life at Sion House.
Whilst telling apocryphal stories to the discredit of his scholarship,
Medwin concedes that the Doctor was 'a tolerable Greek and Latin scholar,'
drilled his pupils assiduously in Homer, and carried them 'in his own way'
through some of the plays of Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Mr.
Medwin was not so precisely accurate a writer that we must accept all his
statements to the schoolmaster's disadvantage. Possibly, in recalling the
teacher's way of 'driving straightforwards in defiance of obstacles,' the
biographer only remembered his own way of dealing with choruses and other
perplexing passages of the Greek dramatists. The historian who misquoted
the Ovidian verses, in his worst and most damaging story against the
Doctor, may also have misquoted the sorry verses inscribed on the Scotch
mull which Charles Mackintosh (a former pupil at Sion House) gave his
preceptor. If the verses of the mull were as bad as the biographer
represents, and were (as the same authority alleges) the production of the
Doctor's own head and hand, their extreme badness disproves the assertion
that the Doctor 'was a tolerable Greek and Latin Scholar.' However much
misquoted in Medwin's _Life of Shelley_, the verses must have been bad;
but it is more probable that 'Carolus Mackintosh ... _alumnus_' composed
the lame lines inscribed upon his gift, than that they were put together
by 'the tolerable Greek and Latin scholar,' who had grown grey in teaching
boys to make Latin verses. Recollections after a lapse of forty years,
touching the infirmities of former schoolmasters, should be regarded with
suspicion, even when they proceed from habitually careful narrators. But
when a gentleman of almost proverbial inaccuracy entertains the world with
irreconcilable reminiscences of the same individual, he may be regarded as
labouring for a moment under the besetting infirmity, that always weakens
Mr. Medwin's testimony, and sometimes deprives it of all value.
That the successful schoolmaster (bound alike by his interest and the
obligations of his office to be mindful of the proprieties) disgusted
little Bysshe, and delighted the rest of the class with obscene jocosity
in reference to a familiar passage of the _Æneid_, is less probable than
that Tom Medwin's memory betrayed him. It is easier to believe that in a
mood of unusual irritability and dullness Dr. Greenlaw discovered
execrable Latinity in the Ovidian lines:
'Me miserum! quanti montes volvuntur aquarum!
Jam, jam tacturas sidera summa putes,'--
which little Bysshe 'gave in' as verses of his own manufacture. '_Jam,
jam!_' the Doctor is said to have exclaimed during the course of
animadversions that were emphasized with slaps administered to the child's
small cheeks and ears. '_Jam, jam!_ Pooh, pooh, boy! raspberry jam! Do you
think you are at your mother's? Don't you know that I have a sovereign
objection to those two monosyllables, with which schoolboys cram their
verses? haven't I told you so a hundred times already? "_Tacturas sidera
summa putes_,"--what, do the waves on the coast of Sussex strike the
stars, eh?--"_summa sidera_,"--who does not know that the stars are high?
Where did you find that epithet?--in your _Gradus ad Parnassum_, I
suppose. You will never mount so high. "_Putes!_" you may think this very
fine, but to me it is all balderdash, hyperbolical stuff. There' (with a
final box on the little fellow's nearest ear), 'go now, sir, and see if
you can't write something better!'
It is consolatory to reflect that, though he should not have been cuffed
and exposed to the riotous ridicule of his school-fellows for writing
Latin verses as badly as Ovid wrote them, the culprit merited some kind of
punishment for 'giving in' as his own the verses that were not his
own,--an act of deception common enough with schoolboys, but scarcely
reconcilable with the severe truthfulness, which is said (by the Shelleyan
enthusiasts) to have distinguished him from his childhood to his last
hour. 'He was,' says Lady Shelley in her _Shelley Memorials: From
Authentic Sources_, 'more outspoken and truth-loving than other boys.'
With this anecdote of Latin verses, given in to the Doctor of the
Brentford school, may be coupled a story, which the late Mr. Gellibrand
used to tell, somewhat to the discredit of little Bysshe. Just about
Shelley's age, though placed in a lower form of the school than Shelley's,
Gellibrand was trying to put together a nonsense Latin verse in the way of
scholastic duty, when Bysshe said, 'Give me your slate, and I will do it
for you and you can go.' Trusting his friend, Gellibrand surrendered his
slate and went off to play. The verses Shelley wrote on the slate ran,--
'Hos ego versiculos scripsi,
Sed non ego feci.'
On being 'given in,' by a boy who could not make a nonsense 'line' without
racking his brain, these verses may well have attracted the master's
attention. To the question, 'Did you write this?' Gellibrand of course
answered 'Yes.' Of course, also, the matter was inquired into further; the
result being that Gellibrand received a whipping, for which he paid
Shelley out with a 'pummelling.'
Though heavy, the blows he received for the Jam-jam verses were by no
means the sharpest and most penetrating that came from time to time to
little Bysshe Shelley from the same hand. Eighty years since our boys were
taken from the nursery and confided to the schoolmaster, in the same way
that pups of choicest breed were given over to the very slender mercy of
the under-gamekeeper. In either case it was known what was in store for
the young and helpless creatures. It was needful for these young things to
be licked into shape and form and good behaviour,--for the small boys to
be whipt into bigger boys, and then into serviceable men; and for the
young dogs to be whipt into good sporting dogs. Relying on the wisdom of
his ancestors, the English gentleman believed in the Coptic proverb, which
declares that 'the stick came down from heaven,' To train boys and dogs
the stick was needful. Whilst the tender-hearted father hoped silently
that much of the stick would not be needed, the father of no more than
average humanity was jubilant about the stick, confident that youngsters
needed it, jocular about its power to do them good. Like George the Third,
who told his sons' tutors to whip them when they wanted it (but for this
order, how badly George the Fourth might have turned out!). Mr. Timothy
Shelley, M.P. for New Shoreham, sent little Bysshe to Sion House, with the
understanding that he would be whipt, and well whipt too, when he wanted
it. Mrs. Shelley knew what was in store for the little fellow, when she
put the plum-cake into his box and hoped he would enjoy it. The
foreknowledge did not make the lady sorrowful. Was it not written, that to
spare the rod was to spoil the child? It is hard on schoolmasters that
they should be required to bear the odium of an educational method, so
universally approved two generations since, and sanctioned by the highest
authority.
Elderly (not to say old) gentlemen of 'the old school' still talk and
write cheerily of the good old birch. In his later novels the late Lord
Lytton uttered several pleasantries about the antique instrument of
domestic torture. But he probably took another view of the matter, when he
was under it. Though the great Thackeray wrote with characteristic
sprightliness and piquancy of interviews with 'the Doctor' in his
study,--interviews attended with swishing sounds and shrill cries of
puerile protest, audible through the strong doors of the same awful
room,--he was alive to the tragic side of the comic business. Only a few
years before his death, he spoke to an attentive mahogany-tree of one of
these 'interviews with the Doctor,' in which he had figured as passive
principal at a preparatory school, where he acquired some of the rudiments
of human knowledge, before going to Charterhouse. 'And can you still
remember what it felt like?' inquired one of the listeners. 'Remember it!
It was like ----!' screamed the witness to his own early grief, raising
his voice and eyebrows till they were comically eloquent of pain and
affright, as he named a place whither so excellent a novelist cannot be
supposed to have gone. Like little Makepeace, little Bysshe had interviews
with the Doctor between the four walls of the Doctor's study,--interviews
from which the nervous boy retired, with fury and horror in his face and
at his heart, to the schoolroom full of heartless boys, whose only
expression of concern at his misadventure was to ask him 'how he liked
it.' All this is so much a matter of course that nothing would be said of
it in these pages, were it not for the general opinion that this medicine
of childhood (as an old writer pleasantly designates the discipline of the
rod) not only caused the future poet the usual amount of transient
physical annoyance, but had also an enduring and by no means beneficial
effect on his temper and his disposition towards every kind of human
government. It has been urged by successive biographers that this bitter
physic, instead of curing his infantile ill-humours, aggravated them
seriously, and was one of the several influences that set him at war with
society from the outset of his career. Mrs. Shelley and Lady Shelley (the
poet's second wife and his daughter-in-law) both take this view of the
discipline that vexed him both at Brentford and Eton. And though he does
not hold the birch largely accountable for _Queen Mab_, the present writer
is by no means certain that the two ladies are so entirely wrong on this
matter, as they are on other matters of the poet's character and story.
Notwithstanding the incidents, which may have disposed him to rate his
Brentford preceptor as one of his earlier tyrants, there is evidence that,
after coming to manhood, Shelley remembered Dr. Greenlaw with qualified
approval, if not with affection. As they walked past the gloomy brick
house to which he had just called his companion's attention, Shelley
'spoke of the master, Doctor Greenlaw, not without respect, saying, "he
was a hard-headed Scotchman, and man of rather liberal opinions."' To be
tinctured with liberality of sentiment was, in Shelley's opinion, to have
a quality of goodness.