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ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS
EDITED BY JOHN MORLEY.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
BY
JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER 1. BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD.
CHAPTER 2. ETON AND OXFORD.
CHAPTER 3. LIFE IN LONDON, AND FIRST MARRIAGE.
CHAPTER 4. SECOND RESIDENCE IN LONDON, AND SEPARATION FROM HARRIET.
CHAPTER 5. LIFE AT MARLOW, AND JOURNEY TO ITALY.
CHAPTER 6. RESIDENCE AT PISA.
CHAPTER 7. LAST DAYS.
CHAPTER 8. EPILOGUE.
LIST OF AUTHORITIES.
1. The Poetical and Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, edited by Mrs.
Shelley. Moxon, 1840, 1845. 1 volume.
2. The Poetical Works, edited by Harry Buxton Forman. Reeves and Turner,
1876-7. 4 volumes.
3. The Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, edited by W.M. Rossetti. Moxon,
1870. 2 volumes.
4. Hogg's Life of Shelley. Moxon, 1858. 2 volumes.
5. Trelawny's Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author. Pickering,
1878. 2 volumes.
6. Shelley Memorials, edited by Lady Shelley. Smith and Elder. 1 volume.
7. Medwin's Life of Shelley. Newby, 1847. 2 volumes.
8. Shelley's Early Life, by D.F. McCarthy. Chatto and Windus. 1 volume.
9. Leigh Hunt's Autobiography. Smith and Elder.
10. W.M. Rossetti's Life of Shelley, included in the edition above
cited, Number 3.
11. Shelley, a Critical Biography, by G.B. Smith. David Douglas, 1877.
12. Relics of Shelley, edited by Richard Garnett. Moxon, 1862.
13. Peacock's Articles on Shelley in "Fraser's Magazine," 1858 and 1860.
14. Shelley in Pall Mall, by R. Garnett, in "Macmillan's Magazine,"
June, 1860.
15. Shelley's Last Days, by R. Garnett, in the "Fortnightly Review,"
June, 1878.
16. Two Lectures on Shelley, by W.M. Rossetti, in the "University
Magazine," February and March, 1878.
SHELLEY.
CHAPTER 1.
BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD.
It is worse than useless to deplore the irremediable; yet no man,
probably, has failed to mourn the fate of mighty poets, whose dawning
gave the promise of a glorious day, but who passed from earth while yet
the light that shone in them was crescent. That the world should know
Marlowe and Giorgione, Raphael and Mozart, only by the products of their
early manhood, is indeed a cause for lamentation, when we remember what
the long lives of a Bach and Titian, a Michelangelo and Goethe, held in
reserve for their maturity and age. It is of no use to persuade
ourselves, as some have done, that we possess the best work of men
untimely slain. Had Sophocles been cut off in his prime, before the
composition of "Oedipus"; had Handel never merged the fame of his
forgotten operas in the immortal music of his oratorios; had Milton been
known only by the poems of his youth, we might with equal plausibility
have laid that flattering unction to our heart. And yet how shallow
would have been our optimism, how fallacious our attempt at consolation.
There is no denying the fact that when a young Marcellus is shown by
fate for one brief moment, and withdrawn before his springtime has
bought forth the fruits of summer, we must bow in silence to the law of
waste that rules inscrutably in nature.
Such reflections are forced upon us by the lives of three great English
poets of this century. Byron died when he was thirty-six, Keats when he
was twenty-five, and Shelley when he was on the point of completing his
thirtieth year. Of the three, Keats enjoyed the briefest space for the
development of his extraordinary powers. His achievement, perfect as it
is in some poetic qualities, remains so immature and incomplete that no
conjecture can be hazarded about his future. Byron lived longer, and
produced more than his brother poets. Yet he was extinguished when his
genius was still ascendant, when his "swift and fair creations" were
issuing like worlds from an archangel's hands. In his case we have
perhaps only to deplore the loss of masterpieces that might have
equalled, but could scarcely have surpassed, what we possess. Shelley's
early death is more to be regretted. Unlike Keats and Byron, he died by
a mere accident. His faculties were far more complex, and his aims were
more ambitious than theirs. He therefore needed length of years for
their co-ordination; and if a fuller life had been allotted him, we have
the certainty that from the discords of his youth he would have wrought
a clear and lucid harmony.
These sentences form a somewhat gloomy prelude to a biography. Yet the
student of Shelley's life, the sincere admirer of his genius, is almost
forced to strike a solemn key-note at the outset. We are not concerned
with one whose "little world of man" for good or ill was perfected, but
with one whose growth was interrupted just before the synthesis of which
his powers were capable had been accomplished.
August 4, 1792, is one of the most memorable dates in the history of
English literature. On this day Percy Bysshe Shelley was born at Field
Place, near Horsham, in the county of Sussex. His father, named Timothy,
was the eldest son of Bysshe Shelley, Esquire, of Goring Castle, in the
same county. The Shelley family could boast of great antiquity and
considerable wealth. Without reckoning earlier and semi-legendary
honours, it may here be recorded that it is distinguished in the elder
branch by one baronetcy dating from 1611, and by a second in the younger
dating from 1806. In the latter year the poet's grandfather received
this honour through the influence of his friend the Duke of Norfolk. Mr.
Timothy Shelley was born in the year 1753, and in 1791 he married
Elizabeth, daughter of Charles Pilford, Esquire, a lady of great beauty,
and endowed with fair intellectual ability, though not of a literary
temperament. The first child of this marriage was the poet, named Bysshe
in compliment to his grandfather, the then living head of the family,
and Percy because of some remote connexion with the ducal house of
Northumberland. Four daughters, Elizabeth, Mary, Hellen, and Margaret,
and one son, John, who died in the year 1866, were the subsequent issue
of Mr. Timothy Shelley's marriage. In the year 1815, upon the death of
his father, he succeeded to the baronetcy, which passed, after his own
death, to his grandson, the present Sir Percy Florence Shelley, as the
poet's only surviving son.
Before quitting, once and for all, the arid region of genealogy, it may
be worth mentioning that Sir Bysshe Shelley by his second marriage with
Miss Elizabeth Jane Sydney Perry, heiress of Penshurst, became the
father of five children, the eldest son of whom assumed the name of
Shelley-Sidney, received a baronetcy, and left a son, Philip Charles
Sidney, who was created Lord De l'Isle and Dudley. Such details are not
without a certain value, inasmuch as they prove that the poet, who won
for his ancient and honourable house a fame far more illustrious than
titles can confer, was sprung from a man of no small personal force and
worldly greatness. Sir Bysshe Shelley owed his position in society, the
wealth he accumulated, and the honours he transmitted to two families,
wholly and entirely to his own exertions. Though he bore a name already
distinguished in the annals of the English landed gentry, he had to make
his own fortune under conditions of some difficulty. He was born in
North America, and began life, it is said, as a quack doctor. There is
also a legend of his having made a first marriage with a person of
obscure birth in America. Yet such was the charm of his address, the
beauty of his person, the dignity of his bearing, and the vigour of his
will, that he succeeded in winning the hands and fortunes of two English
heiresses; and, having begun the world with nothing, he left it at the
age of seventy-four, bequeathing 300,000 pounds in the English Funds,
together with estates worth 20,000 pounds a year to his descendents.
Percy Bysshe Shelley was therefore born in the purple of the English
squirearchy; but never assuredly did the old tale of the swan hatched
with the hen's brood of ducklings receive a more emphatic illustration
than in this case. Gifted with the untameable individuality of genius,
and bent on piercing to the very truth beneath all shams and fictions
woven by society and ancient usage, he was driven by the circumstances
of his birth and his surroundings into an exaggerated warfare with the
world's opinion. His too frequent tirades against:--
The Queen of Slaves,
The hood-winked Angel of the blind and dead,
Custom,--
owed much of their asperity to the early influences brought to bear upon
him by relatives who prized their position in society, their wealth, and
the observance of conventional decencies, above all other things.
Mr. Timothy Shelley was in no sense of the word a bad man; but he was
everything which the poet's father ought not to have been. As member for
the borough of Shoreham, he voted blindly with his party; and that party
looked to nothing beyond the interests of the gentry and the pleasure of
the Duke of Norfolk. His philosophy was limited to a superficial
imitation of Lord Chesterfield, whose style he pretended to affect in
his familiar correspondence, though his letters show that he lacked the
rudiments alike of logic and of grammar. His religious opinions might be
summed up in Clough's epigram:--
At church on Sunday to attend
Will serve to keep the world your friend.
His morality in like manner was purely conventional, as may be gathered
from his telling his eldest son that he would never pardon a
mesalliance, but would provide for as many illegitimate children as he
chose to have. For the rest, he appears to have been a fairly good
landlord, and a not unkind father, sociable and hospitable, somewhat
vain and occasionally odd in manner, but qualified for passing muster
with the country gentlemen around him. In the capacity to understand a
nature which deviated from the ordinary type so remarkably as Shelley's,
he was utterly deficient; and perhaps we ought to regard it as his
misfortune that fate made him the father of a man who was among the
greatest portents of originality and unconventionality that this century
has seen. Toward an ordinary English youth, ready to sow his wild oats
at college, and willing to settle at the proper age and take his place
upon the bench of magistrates, Sir Timothy Shelley would have shown
himself an indulgent father; and it must be conceded by the poet's
biographer that if Percy Bysshe had but displayed tact and consideration
on his side, many of the misfortunes which signalized his relations to
his father would have been avoided.
Shelley passed his childhood at Field Place, and when he was about six
years old began to be taught, together with his sisters, by Mr. Edwards,
a clergyman who lived at Warnham. What is recorded of these early years
we owe to the invaluable communications of his sister Hellen. The
difference of age between her and her brother Bysshe obliges us to refer
her recollections to a somewhat later period--probably to the holidays
he spent away from Sion House and Eton. Still, since they introduce us
to the domestic life of his then loved home, it may be proper to make
quotations from them in this place. Miss Shelley tells us her brother
"would frequently come to the nursery, and was full of a peculiar kind
of pranks. One piece of mischief, for which he was rebuked, was running
a stick through the ceiling of a low passage to find some new chamber,
which could be made effective for some flights of his vivid
imagination." He was very much attached to his sisters, and used to
entertain them with stories, in which "an alchemist, old and grey, with
a long beard," who was supposed to abide mysteriously in the garret of
Field Place, played a prominent part. "Another favourite theme was the
'Great Tortoise,' that lived in Warnham Pond; and any unwonted noise was
accounted for by the presence of this great beast, which was made into
the fanciful proportions most adapted to excite awe and wonder." To his
friend Hogg, in after-years, Shelley often spoke about another reptile,
no mere creature of myth or fable, the "Old Snake," who had inhabited
the gardens of Field Place for several generations. This venerable
serpent was accidentally killed by the gardener's scythe; but he lived
long in the poet's memory, and it may reasonably be conjectured that
Shelley's peculiar sympathy for snakes was due to the dim recollection
of his childhood's favourite. Some of the games he invented to please
his sisters were grotesque, and some both perilous and terrifying. "We
dressed ourselves in strange costumes to personate spirits or fiends,
and Bysshe would take a fire-stove and fill it with some inflammable
liquid, and carry it flaming into the kitchen and to the back door."
Shelley often took his sisters for long country rambles over hedge and
fence, carrying them when the difficulties of the ground or their
fatigue required it. At this time "his figure was slight and
beautiful,--his hands were models, and his feet are treading the earth
again in one of his race; his eyes too have descended in their wild
fixed beauty to the same person. As a child, I have heard that his skin
was like snow, and bright ringlets covered his head." Here is a little
picture which brings the boy vividly before our eyes: "Bysshe ordered
clothes according to his own fancy at Eton, and the beautifully fitting
silk pantaloons, as he stood as almost all men and boys do, with their
coat-tails near the fire, excited my silent though excessive
admiration."
When he was ten years of age, Shelley went to school at Sion house,
Brentford, an academy kept by Dr. Greenlaw, and frequented by the sons
of London tradesmen, who proved but uncongenial companions to his gentle
spirit. It is fortunate for posterity that one of his biographers, his
second cousin Captain Medwin, was his schoolfellow at Sion House; for to
his recollections we owe some details of great value. Medwin tells us
that Shelley learned the classic languages almost by intuition, while he
seemed to be spending his time in dreaming, now watching the clouds as
they sailed across the school-room window, and now scribbling sketches
of fir-trees and cedars in memory of Field Place. At this time he was
subject to sleep-walking, and, if we may credit this biographer, he
often lost himself in reveries not far removed from trance. His
favourite amusement was novel-reading; and to the many "blue books" from
the Minerva press devoured by him in his boyhood, we may ascribe the
style and tone of his first compositions. For physical sports he showed
no inclination. "He passed among his school-fellows as a strange and
unsocial being; for when a holiday relieved us from our tasks, and the
other boys were engaged in such sports as the narrow limits of our
prison-court allowed, Shelley, who entered into none of them, would pace
backwards and forwards--I think I see him now--along the southern wall,
indulging in various vague and undefined ideas, the chaotic elements, if
I may say so, of what afterwards produced so beautiful a world."
Two of Shelley's most important biographical compositions undoubtedly
refer to this period of his boyhood. The first is the passage in the
Prelude to "Laon and Cythna" which describes his suffering among the
unsympathetic inmates of a school:--
Thoughts of great deeds were mine, dear Friend, when first
The clouds which wrap this world from youth did pass.
I do remember well the hour which burst
My spirit's sleep: a fresh May-dawn it was,
When I walked forth upon the glittering grass,
And wept, I knew not why; until there rose
From the near school-room, voices, that, alas!
Were but one echo from a world of woes--
The harsh and grating strife of tyrants and of foes.
And then I clasped my hands and looked around--
--But none was near to mock my streaming eyes,
Which poured their warm drops on the sunny ground--
So without shame I spake:--"I will be wise,
And just, and free, and mild, if in me lies
Such power, for I grow weary to behold
The selfish and the strong still tyrannize
Without reproach or check." I then controlled
My tears, my heart grew calm, and I was meek and bold.
And from that hour did I with earnest thought
Heap knowledge from forbidden mines of lore,
Yet nothing that my tyrants knew or taught
I cared to learn, but from that secret store
Wrought linked armour for my soul, before
It might walk forth to war among mankind.
Thus power and hope were strengthened more and more
Within me, till there came upon my mind
A sense of loneliness, a thirst with which I pined.
The second is a fragment on friendship preserved by Hogg. After defining
that kind of passionate attachment which often precedes love in fervent
natures, he proceeds: "I remember forming an attachment of this kind at
school. I cannot recall to my memory the precise epoch at which this
took pace; but I imagine it must have been at the age of eleven or
twelve. The object of these sentiments was a boy about my own age, of a
character eminently generous, brave, and gentle; and the elements of
human feeling seemed to have been, from his birth, genially compounded
within him. There was a delicacy and a simplicity in his manners,
inexpressibly attractive. It has never been my fortune to meet with him
since my school-boy days; but either I confound my present recollections
with the delusions of past feelings, or he is now a source of honour and
utility to every one around him. The tones of his voice were so soft and
winning, that every word pierced into my heart; and their pathos was so
deep, that in listening to him the tears have involuntarily gushed from
my eyes. Such was the being for whom I first experienced the sacred
sentiments of friendship." How profound was the impression made on his
imagination and his feelings by this early friendship, may again be
gathered from a passage in his note upon the antique group of Bacchus
and Ampelus at Florence. "Look, the figures are walking with a
sauntering and idle pace, and talking to each other as they walk, as you
may have seen a younger and an elder boy at school, walking in some
grassy spot of the play-ground with that tender friendship for each
other which the age inspires."
These extracts prove beyond all question that the first contact with the
outer world called into activity two of Shelley's strongest moral
qualities--his hatred of tyranny and brutal force in any form, and his
profound sentiment of friendship. The admiring love of women, which
marked him no less strongly, and which made him second only to
Shakespere in the sympathetic delineation of a noble feminine ideal, had
been already developed by his deep affection for his mother and sisters.
It is said that he could not receive a letter from them without manifest
joy.
"Shelley," says Medwin, "was at this time tall for his age, slightly and
delicately built, and rather narrow-chested, with a complexion fair and
ruddy, a face rather long than oval. His features, not regularly
handsome, were set off by a profusion of silky brown hair, that curled
naturally. The expression of his countenance was one of exceeding
sweetness and innocence. His blue eyes were very large and prominent.
They were at times, when he was abstracted, as he often was in
contemplation, dull, and as it were, insensible to external objects; at
others they flashed with the fire of intelligence. His voice was soft
and low, but broken in its tones,--when anything much interested him,
harsh and immodulated; and this peculiarity he never lost. He was
naturally calm, but when he heard of or read of some flagrant act of
injustice, oppression, or cruelty, then indeed the sharpest marks of
horror and indignation were visible in his countenance."
Such as the child was, we shall find the man to have remained unaltered
through the short space of life allowed him. Loving, innocent,
sensitive, secluded from the vulgar concerns of his companions, strongly
moralized after a peculiar and inborn type of excellence, drawing his
inspirations from Nature and from his own soul in solitude, Shelley
passed across the stage of this world, attended by a splendid vision
which sustained him at a perilous height above the kindly race of men.
The penalty of this isolation he suffered in many painful episodes. The
reward he reaped in a measure of more authentic prophecy, and in a
nobler realization of his best self, than could be claimed by any of his
immediate contemporaries.