In 1792 the French Revolution burst into flame, the mob of Paris
stormed the Tuileries, the King of France was cast into a dungeon to
await his execution, and the wild sons of anarchy flung their gauntlet
of defiance into the face of Europe. In this tremendous year was born
young Shelley; and perhaps his nature represented the spirit of the
time.
Certainly, neither from his father nor from his mother did he derive
that perpetual unrest and that frantic fondness for revolt which blazed
out in the poet when he was still a boy. His father, Mr. Timothy
Shelley, was a very usual, thick-headed, unromantic English squire. His
mother--a woman of much beauty, but of no exceptional traits--was the
daughter of another squire, and at the time of her marriage was simply
one of ten thousand fresh-faced, pleasant-spoken English country girls.
If we look for a strain of the romantic in Shelley's ancestry, we shall
have to find it in the person of his grandfather, who was a very
remarkable and powerful character.
This person, Bysshe Shelley by name, had in his youth been associated
with some mystery. He was not born in England, but in America--and in
those days the name "America" meant almost anything indefinite and
peculiar. However this might be, Bysshe Shelley, though a scion of a
good old English family, had wandered in strange lands, and it was
whispered that he had seen strange sights and done strange things.
According to one legend, he had been married in America, though no one
knew whether his wife was white or black, or how he had got rid of her.
He might have remained in America all his life, had not a small
inheritance fallen to his share. This brought him back to England, and
he soon found that England was in reality the place to make his
fortune. He was a man of magnificent physique. His rovings had given
him ease and grace, and the power which comes from a wide experience of
life. He could be extremely pleasing when he chose; and he soon won his
way into the good graces of a rich heiress, whom he married.
With her wealth he became an important personage, and consorted with
gentlemen and statesmen of influence, attaching himself particularly to
the Duke of Northumberland, by whose influence he was made a baronet.
When his rich wife died, Shelley married a still richer bride; and so
this man, who started out as a mere adventurer without a shilling to
his name, died in 1813, leaving more than a million dollars in cash,
with lands whose rent-roll yielded a hundred thousand dollars every
year.
If any touch of the romantic which we find in Shelley is a matter of
heredity, we must trace it to this able, daring, restless, and
magnificent old grandfather, who was the beau ideal of an English
squire--the sort of squire who had added foreign graces to native
sturdiness. But young Shelley, the future poet, seemed scarcely to be
English at all. As a young boy he cared nothing for athletic sports. He
was given to much reading. He thought a good deal about abstractions
with which most schoolboys never concern themselves at all.
Consequently, both in private schools and afterward at Eton, he became
a sort of rebel against authority. He resisted the fagging-system. He
spoke contemptuously of physical prowess. He disliked anything that he
was obliged to do, and he rushed eagerly into whatever was forbidden.
Finally, when he was sent to University College, Oxford, he broke all
bounds. At a time when Tory England was aghast over the French
Revolution and its results, Shelley talked of liberty and equality on
all occasions. He made friends with an uncouth but able fellow student,
who bore the remarkable name of Thomas Jefferson Hogg--a name that
seems rampant with republicanism--and very soon he got himself expelled
from the university for publishing a little tract of an infidel
character called "A Defense of Atheism."
His expulsion for such a cause naturally shocked his father. It
probably disturbed Shelley himself; but, after all, it gave him some
satisfaction to be a martyr for the cause of free speech. He went to
London with his friend Hogg, and took lodgings there. He read
omnivorously--Hogg says as much as sixteen hours a day. He would walk
through the most crowded streets poring over a volume, while holding
another under one arm.
His mind was full of fancies. He had begun what was afterward called
"his passion for reforming everything." He despised most of the laws of
England. He thought its Parliament ridiculous. He hated its religion.
He was particularly opposed to marriage. This last fact gives some
point to the circumstances which almost immediately confronted him.
Shelley was now about nineteen years old--an age at which most English
boys are emerging from the public schools, and are still in the
hobbledehoy stage of their formation. In a way, he was quite far from
boyish; yet in his knowledge of life he was little more than a mere
child. He knew nothing thoroughly--much less the ways of men and women.
He had no visible means of existence except a small allowance from his
father. His four sisters, who were at a boarding-school on Clapham
Common, used to save their pin-money and send it to their gifted
brother so that he might not actually starve. These sisters he used to
call upon from time to time, and through them he made the acquaintance
of a sixteen-year-old girl named Harriet Westbrook.
Harriet Westbrook was the daughter of a black-visaged keeper of a
coffee-house in Mount Street, called "Jew Westbrook," partly because of
his complexion, and partly because of his ability to retain what he had
made. He was, indeed, fairly well off, and had sent his younger
daughter, Harriet, to the school where Shelley's sisters studied.
Harriet Westbrook seems to have been a most precocious person. Any girl
of sixteen is, of course, a great deal older and more mature than a
youth of nineteen. In the present instance Harriet might have been
Shelley's senior by five years. There is no doubt that she fell in love
with him; but, having done so, she by no means acted in the shy and
timid way that would have been most natural to a very young girl in her
first love-affair. Having decided that she wanted him, she made up her
mind to get Mm at any cost, and her audacity was equaled only by his
simplicity. She was rather attractive in appearance, with abundant
hair, a plump figure, and a pink-and-white complexion. This description
makes of her a rather doll-like girl; but doll-like girls are just the
sort to attract an inexperienced young man who has yet to learn that
beauty and charm are quite distinct from prettiness, and infinitely
superior to it.
In addition to her prettiness, Harriet Westbrook had a vivacious manner
and talked quite pleasingly. She was likewise not a bad listener; and
she would listen by the hour to Shelley in his rhapsodies about
chemistry, poetry, the failure of Christianity, the national debt, and
human liberty, all of which he jumbled up without much knowledge, but
in a lyric strain of impassioned eagerness which would probably have
made the multiplication-table thrilling.
For Shelley himself was a creature of extraordinary fascination, both
then and afterward. There are no likenesses of him that do him justice,
because they cannot convey that singular appeal which the man himself
made to almost every one who met him.
The eminent painter, Mulready, once said that Shelley was too beautiful
for portraiture; and yet the descriptions of him hardly seem to bear
this out. He was quite tall and slender, but he stooped so much as to
make him appear undersized. His head was very small-quite
disproportionately so; but this was counteracted to the eye by his long
and tumbled hair which, when excited, he would rub and twist in a
thousand different directions until it was actually bushy. His eyes and
mouth were his best features. The former were of a deep violet blue,
and when Shelley felt deeply moved they seemed luminous with a
wonderful and almost unearthly light. His mouth was finely chiseled,
and might be regarded as representing perfection.
One great defect he had, and this might well have overbalanced his
attractive face. The defect in question was his voice. One would have
expected to hear from him melodious sounds, and vocal tones both rich
and penetrating; but, as a matter of fact, his voice was shrill at the
very best, and became actually discordant and peacock-like in moments
of emotion.
Such, then, was Shelley, star-eyed, with the delicate complexion of a
girl, wonderfully mobile in his features, yet speaking in a voice high
pitched and almost raucous. For the rest, he arrayed himself with care
and in expensive clothing, even though he took no thought of neatness,
so that his garments were almost always rumpled and wrinkled from his
frequent writhings on couches and on the floor. Shelley had a strange
and almost primitive habit of rolling on the earth, and another of
thrusting his tousled head close up to the hottest fire in the house,
or of lying in the glaring sun when out of doors. It is related that he
composed one of his finest poems--"The Cenci"--in Italy, while
stretched out with face upturned to an almost tropical sun.
But such as he was, and though he was not yet famous, Harriet
Westbrook, the rosy-faced schoolgirl, fell in love with him, and rather
plainly let him know that she had done so. There are a thousand ways in
which a woman can convey this information without doing anything
un-maidenly; and of all these little arts Miss Westbrook was
instinctively a mistress.
She played upon Shelley's feelings by telling him that her father was
cruel to her, and that he contemplated actions still more cruel. There
is something absurdly comical about the grievance which she brought to
Shelley; but it is much more comical to note the tremendous seriousness
with which he took it. He wrote to his friend Hogg:
Her father has persecuted her in a most horrible way, by endeavoring to
compel her to go to school. She asked my advice; resistance was the
answer. At the same time I essayed to mollify Mr. Westbrook, in vain! I
advised her to resist. She wrote to say that resistance was useless,
but that she would fly with me and throw herself on my protection.
Some letters that have recently come to light show that there was a
dramatic scene between Harriet Westbrook and Shelley--a scene in the
course of which she threw her arms about his neck and wept upon his
shoulder. Here was a curious situation. Shelley was not at all in love
with her. He had explicitly declared this only a short time before. Yet
here was a pretty girl about to suffer the "horrible persecution" of
being sent to school, and finding no alternative save to "throw herself
on his protection"--in other words, to let him treat her as he would,
and to become his mistress.
The absurdity of the situation makes one smile. Common sense should
have led some one to box Harriet's ears and send her off to school
without a moment's hesitation; while as for Shelley, he should have
been told how ludicrous was the whole affair. But he was only nineteen,
and she was only sixteen, and the crisis seemed portentous. Nothing
could be more flattering to a young man's vanity than to have this girl
cast herself upon him for protection. It did not really matter that he
had not loved her hitherto, and that he was already half engaged to
another Harriet--his cousin, Miss Grove. He could not stop and reason
with himself. He must like a true knight rescue lovely girlhood from
the horrors of a school!
It is not unlikely that this whole affair was partly managed or
manipulated by the girl's father. Jew Westbrook knew that Shelley was
related to rich and titled people, and that he was certain, if he
lived, to become Sir Percy, and to be the heir of his grandfather's
estates. Hence it may be that Harriet's queer conduct was not wholly of
her own prompting.
In any case, however, it proved to be successful. Shelley's ardent and
impulsive nature could not bear to see a girl in tears and appealing
for his help. Hence, though in his heart she was very little to him,
his romantic nature gave up for her sake the affection that he had felt
for his cousin, his own disbelief in marriage, and finally the common
sense which ought to have told him not to marry any one on two hundred
pounds a year.
So the pair set off for Edinburgh by stagecoach. It was a weary and
most uncomfortable journey. When they reached the Scottish capital,
they were married by the Scottish law. Their money was all gone; but
their landlord, with a jovial sympathy for romance, let them have a
room, and treated them to a rather promiscuous wedding-banquet, in
which every one in the house participated.
Such is the story of Shelley's marriage, contracted at nineteen with a
girl of sixteen who most certainly lured him on against his own better
judgment and in the absence of any actual love.
The girl whom he had taken to himself was a well-meaning little thing.
She tried for a time to meet her husband's moods and to be a real
companion to him. But what could one expect from such a union?
Shelley's father withdrew the income which he had previously given. Jew
Westbrook refused to contribute anything, hoping, probably, that this
course would bring the Shelleys to the rescue. But as it was, the young
pair drifted about from place to place, getting very precarious
supplies, running deeper into debt each day, and finding less and less
to admire in each other.
Shelley took to laudanum. Harriet dropped her abstruse studies, which
she had taken up to please her husband, but which could only puzzle her
small brain. She soon developed some of the unpleasant traits of the
class to which she belonged. In this her sister Eliza--a hard and
grasping middle-aged woman--had her share. She set Harriet against her
husband, and made life less endurable for both. She was so much older
than the pair that she came in and ruled their household like a typical
stepmother.
A child was born, and Shelley very generously went through a second
form of marriage, so as to comply with the English law; but by this
time there was little hope of righting things again. Shelley was much
offended because Harriet would not nurse the child. He believed her
hard because she saw without emotion an operation performed upon the
infant.
Finally, when Shelley at last came into a considerable sum of money,
Harriet and Eliza made no pretense of caring for anything except the
spending of it in "bonnet-shops" and on carriages and display. In
time--that is to say, in three years after their marriage--Harriet left
her husband and went to London and to Bath, prompted by her elder
sister.
This proved to be the end of an unfortunate marriage. Word was brought
to Shelley that his wife was no longer faithful to him. He, on his
side, had carried on a semi-sentimental platonic correspondence with a
schoolmistress, one Miss Hitchener. But until now his life had been one
great mistake--a life of restlessness, of unsatisfied longing, of a
desire that had no name. Then came the perhaps inevitable meeting with
the one whom he should have met before.
Shelley had taken a great interest in William Godwin, the writer and
radical philosopher. Godwin's household was a strange one. There was
Fanny Imlay, a child born out of wedlock, the offspring of Gilbert
Imlay, an American merchant, and of Mary Wollstonecraft, whom Godwin
had subsequently married. There was also a singularly striking girl who
then styled herself Mary Jane Clairmont, and who was afterward known as
Claire Clairmont, she and her brother being the early children of
Godwin's second wife.
One day in 1814, Shelley called on Godwin, and found there a beautiful
young girl in her seventeenth year, "with shapely golden head, a face
very pale and pure, a great forehead, earnest hazel eyes, and an
expression at once of sensibility and firmness about her delicately
curved lips." This was Mary Godwin--one who had inherited her mother's
power of mind and likewise her grace and sweetness.
From the very moment of their meeting Shelley and this girl were fated
to be joined together, and both of them were well aware of it. Each
felt the other's presence exert a magnetic thrill. Each listened
eagerly to what the other said. Each thought of nothing, and each cared
for nothing, in the other's absence. It was a great compelling
elemental force which drove the two together and bound them fast.
Beside this marvelous experience, how pale and pitiful and paltry
seemed the affectations of Harriet Westbrook!
In little more than a month from the time of their first meeting,
Shelley and Mary Godwin and Miss Clairmont left Godwin's house at four
o 'clock in the morning, and hurried across the Channel to Calais. They
wandered almost like vagabonds across France, eating black bread and
the coarsest fare, walking on the highways when they could not afford
to ride, and putting up with every possible inconvenience. Yet it is
worth noting that neither then nor at any other time did either Shelley
or Mary regret what they had done. To the very end of the poet's brief
career they were inseparable.
Later he was able to pension Harriet, who, being of a morbid
disposition, ended her life by drowning--not, it may be said, because
of grief for Shelley. It has been told that Fanny Imlay, Mary's sister,
likewise committed suicide because Shelley did not care for her, but
this has also been disproved. There was really nothing to mar the inner
happiness of the poet and the woman who, at the very end, became his
wife. Living, as they did, in Italy and Switzerland, they saw much of
their own countrymen, such as Landor and Leigh Hunt and Byron, to whose
fascinations poor Miss Clairmont yielded, and became the mother of the
little girl Allegra.
But there could have been no truer union than this of Shelley's with
the woman whom nature had intended for him. It was in his love-life,
far more than in his poetry, that he attained completeness. When he
died by drowning, in 1822, and his body was burned in the presence of
Lord Byron, he was truly mourned by the one whom he had only lately
made his wife. As a poet he never reached the same perfection; for his
genius was fitful and uncertain, rare in its flights, and mingled
always with that which disappoints.
As the lover and husband of Mary Godwin, there was nothing left to
wish. In his verse, however, the truest word concerning him will always
be that exquisite sentence of Matthew Arnold:
"A beautiful and ineffectual angel beating his luminous wings against
the void in vain."