SECOND RESIDENCE IN LONDON, AND SEPARATION FROM HARRIET.
Early in May the Shelleys arrived in London, where they were soon joined
by Eliza, from whose increasingly irksome companionship the poet had
recently enjoyed a few weeks' respite. After living for a short while in
hotels, they took lodgings in Half Moon Street. The house had a
projecting window, where the poet loved to sit with book in hand, and
catch, according to his custom, the maximum of sunlight granted by a
chary English summer. "He wanted," said one of his female admirers,
"only a pan of clear water and a fresh turf to look like some young
lady's lark, hanging outside for air and song." According to Hogg, this
period of London life was a pleasant and tranquil episode in Shelley's
troubled career. His room was full of books, among which works of German
metaphysics occupied a prominent place, though they were not deeply
studied. He was now learning Italian, and made his first acquaintance
with Tasso, Ariosto, and Petrarch.
The habits of the household were, to say the least, irregular; for
Shelley took no thought of sublunary matters, and Harriet was an
indifferent housekeeper. Dinner seems to have come to them less by
forethought than by the operation of divine chance; and when there was
no meat provided for the entertainment of casual guests, the table was
supplied with buns, procured by Shelley from the nearest pastry-cook. He
had already abjured animal food and alcohol; and his favourite diet
consisted of pulse or bread, which he ate dry with water, or made into
panada. Hogg relates how, when he was walking in the streets and felt
hungry, he would dive into a baker's shop and emerge with a loaf tucked
under his arm. $This he consumed as he went along, very often reading at
the same time, and dodging the foot-passengers with the rapidity of
movement which distinguished him. He could not comprehend how any man
should want more than bread. "I have dropped a word, a hint," says Hogg,
"about a pudding; a pudding, Bysshe said dogmatically, is a prejudice."
This indifference to diet was highly characteristic of Shelley. During
the last years of his life, even when he was suffering from the frequent
attacks of a painful disorder, he took no heed of food; and his friend,
Trelawny, attributes the derangement of his health, in a great measure,
to this carelessness. Mrs. Shelley used to send him something to eat
into the room where he habitually studied; but the plate frequently
remained untouched for hours upon a bookshelf, and at the end of the day
he might be heard asking, "Mary, have I dined?" His dress was no less
simple than his diet. Hogg says that he never saw him in a great coat,
and that his collar was unbuttoned to let the air play freely on his
throat. "In the street or road he reluctantly wore a hat; but in fields
and gardens, his little round head had no other covering than his long,
wild, ragged locks." Shelley's head, as is well known, was remarkably
small and round; he used to plunge it several times a day in cold water,
and expose it recklessly to the intensest heat of fire or sun. Mrs.
Shelley relates that a great part of the "Cenci" was written on their
house-roof near Leghorn, where Shelley lay exposed to the unmitigated
ardour of Italian summer heat; and Hogg describes him reading Homer by a
blazing fire-light, or roasting his skull upon the hearth-rug by the
hour.
These personal details cannot be omitted by the biographer of such a man
as Shelley. He was an elemental and primeval creature, as little subject
to the laws of custom in his habits as in his modes of thought, living
literally as the spirit moved him, with a natural nonchalance that has
perhaps been never surpassed. To time and place he was equally
indifferent, and could not be got to remember his engagements. "He took
strange caprices, unfounded frights and dislikes, vain apprehensions and
panic terrors, and therefore he absented himself from formal and sacred
engagements. He was unconscious and oblivious of times, places, persons
and seasons; and falling into some poetic vision, some day-dream, he
quickly and completely forgot all that he had repeatedly and solemnly
promised; or he ran away after some object of imaginary urgency and
importance, which suddenly came into his head, setting off in vain
pursuit of it, he knew not whither. When he was caught, brought up in
custody, and turned over to the ladies, with, Behold, your King! to be
caressed, courted, admired, and flattered, the king of beauty and fancy
would too commonly bolt; slip away, steal out, creep off; unobserved and
almost magically he vanished; thus mysteriously depriving his fair
subjects of his much-coveted, long looked-for company." If he had been
fairly caged and found himself in congenial company, he let time pass
unheeded, sitting up all night to talk, and chaining his audience by the
spell of his unrivalled eloquence; for wonderful as was his poetry,
those who enjoyed the privilege of converse with him, judged it even
more attractive. "He was commonly most communicative, unreserved, and
eloquent, and enthusiastic, when those around him were inclining to
yield to the influence of sleep, or rather at the hour when they would
have been disposed to seek their chambers, but for the bewitching charms
of his discourse."
From Half Moon Street the Shelleys moved into a house in Pimlico; and it
was here, according to Hogg, or at Cooke's Hotel in Dover Street
according to other accounts, that Shelley's first child, Ianthe Eliza,
was born about the end of June, 1813. Harriet did not take much to her
little girl, and gave her over to a wet-nurse, for whom Shelley
conceived a great dislike. That a mother should not nurse her own baby
was no doubt contrary to his principles; and the double presence of the
servant and Eliza, whom he now most cordially detested, made his home
uncomfortable. We have it on excellent authority, that of Mr. Peacock,
that he "was extremely fond of it (the child), and would walk up and
down a room with it in his arms for a long time together, singing to it
a song of his own making, which ran on the repetition of a word of his
own coining. His song was Yáhmani, Yáhmani, Yáhmani, Yáhmani." To the
want of sympathy between the father and the mother in this matter of
Ianthe, Mr. Peacock is inclined to attribute the beginning of troubles
in the Shelley household. There is, indeed, no doubt that the revelation
of Harriet's maternal coldness must have been extremely painful to her
husband; and how far she carried her insensibility, may be gathered from
a story told by Hogg about her conduct during an operation performed
upon the child.
During this period of his sojourn in London, Shelley was again in some
pecuniary difficulties. Yet he indulged Harriet's vanity by setting up a
carriage, in which they afterwards took a hurried journey to Edinburgh
and back. He narrowly escaped a debtor's prison through this act of
extravagance, and by a somewhat ludicrous mistake Hogg was arrested for
the debt due to the coach-maker. His acquaintances were few and
scattered, and he saw nothing of his family. Gradually, however, he
seems to have become a kind of prophet in a coterie of learned ladies.
The views he had propounded in "Queen Mab", his passionate belief in the
perfectibility of man, his vegetarian doctrines, and his readiness to
adopt any new nostrum for the amelioration of his race, endeared him to
all manners of strange people; nor was he deterred by aristocratic
prejudices from frequenting society which proved extremely uncongenial
to Hogg, and of which we have accordingly some caustic sketches from his
pen. His chief friends were a Mrs. Boinville, for whom he conceived an
enthusiastic admiration, and her daughter Cornelia, married to a
vegetarian, Mr. Newton. In order to be near them he had moved to
Pimlico; and his next move, from London to a cottage named High Elms, at
Bracknell, in Berkshire, had the same object. With Godwin and his family
he was also on terms of familiar intercourse. Under the philosopher's
roof in Skinner Street there was now gathered a group of miscellaneous
inmates--Fanny Imlay, the daughter of his first wife, Mary
Wollstonecraft; Mary, his own daughter by the same marriage; his second
wife, and her two children, Claire and Charles Clairmont, the offspring
of a previous union. From this connexion with the Godwin household
events of the gravest importance in the future were destined to arise,
and already it appears that Fanny Imlay had begun to look with perilous
approval on the fascinating poet. Hogg and Mr. Peacock, the well-known
novelist, described by Mrs. Newton as "a cold scholar, who, I think, has
neither taste nor feeling," were his only intimates.
Mrs. Newton's unfair judgment of Mr. Peacock marks a discord between the
two chief elements of Shelley's present society; and indeed it will
appear to a careful student of his biography that Hogg, Peacock, and
Harriet, now stood somewhat by themselves and aloof from the inner
circle of his associates. If we regard the Shelleys as the centre of an
extended line, we shall find the Westbrook family at one end, the
Boinville family at the other, with Hogg and Peacock somewhere in the
middle. Harriet was naturally drawn to the Westbrook extremity, and
Shelley to the Boinville. Peacock had no affinity for either, but a
sincere regard for Harriet as well as for her husband; while Hogg was in
much the same position, except that he had made friends with Mrs.
Newton. The Godwins, of great importance to Shelley himself, exercised
their influence at a distance from the rest. Frequent change from
Bracknell to London and back again, varied by the flying journey to
Edinburgh, and a last visit paid in strictest secrecy to his mother and
sisters, at Field Place, of which a very interesting record is left in
the narrative of Mr. Kennedy, occupied the interval between July, 1813,
and March, 1814. The period was not productive of literary masterpieces.
We only hear of a "Refutation of Deism", a dialogue between Eusebes and
Theosophus, which attacked all forms of Theistic belief.
Since we are now approaching the gravest crisis in Shelley's life, it
behoves us to be more than usually careful in considering his
circumstances at this epoch. His home had become cold and dull. Harriet
did not love her child, and spent her time in a great measure with her
Mount Street relations. Eliza was a source of continual irritation, and
the Westbrook family did its best, by interference and suggestion, to
refrigerate the poet's feelings for his wife. On the other hand he found
among the Boinville set exactly that high-flown, enthusiastic,
sentimental atmosphere which suited his idealizing temper. Two extracts
from a letter written to Hogg upon the 16th of March, 1814, speak more
eloquently than any analysis, and will place before the reader the
antagonism which had sprung up in Shelley's mind between his own home
and the circle of his new friends:--"I have been staying with Mrs. B--
for the last month; I have escaped, in the society of all that
philosophy and friendship combine, from the dismaying solitude of
myself. They have revived in my heart the expiring flame of life. I have
felt myself translated to a paradise, which has nothing of mortality but
its transitoriness; my heart sickens at the view of that necessity,
which will quickly divide me from the delightful tranquillity of this
happy home,--for it has become my home. The trees, the bridge, the
minutest objects, have already a place in my affections."
"Eliza is still with us--not here!--but will be with me when the
infinite malice of destiny forces me to depart. I am now but little
inclined to contest this point. I certainly hate her with all my heart
and soul. It is a sight which awakens an inexpressible sensation of
disgust and horror, to see her caress my poor little Ianthe, in whom I
may hereafter find the consolation of sympathy. I sometimes feel faint
with the fatigue of checking the overflowings of my unbounded abhorrence
for this miserable wretch. But she is no more than a blind and loathsome
worm, that cannot see to sting."
While divided in this way between a home which had become distasteful to
him, and a house where he found scope for his most romantic outpourings
of sensibility, Shelley fell suddenly and passionately in love with
Godwin's daughter, Mary. Peacock, who lived in close intimacy with him
at this period, must deliver his testimony as to the overwhelming nature
of the new attachment:--"Nothing that I ever read in tale or history
could present a more striking image of a sudden, violent, irresistible,
uncontrollable passion, than that under which I found him labouring
when, at his request, I went up from the country to call on him in
London. Between his old feelings towards Harriet, FROM WHOM HE WAS NOT
THEN SEPARATED, and his new passion for Mary, he showed in his looks, in
his gestures, in his speech, the state of a mind 'suffering, like a
little kingdom, the nature of an insurrection.' His eyes were bloodshot,
his hair and dress disordered. He caught up a bottle of laudanum, and
said, 'I never part from this.'"
We may therefore affirm, I think, with confidence that in the winter and
spring of 1814, Shelley had been becoming gradually more and more
estranged from Harriet, whose commonplace nature was no mate for his,
and whom he had never loved with all the depth of his affection; that
his intimacy with the Boinville family had brought into painful
prominence whatever was jarring and repugnant to him in his home; and
that in this crisis of his fate he had fallen in love for the first time
seriously with Mary Godwin. (The date at which he first made Mary's
acquaintance is uncertain. Peacock says that it was between April 18 and
June 8.) She was then a girl of sixteen, "fair and fair-haired, pale
indeed, and with a piercing look," to quote Hogg's description of her,
as she first appeared before him on the 8th or 9th of June, 1814. With
her freedom from prejudice, her tense and high-wrought sensibility, her
acute intellect, enthusiasm for ideas, and vivid imagination, Mary
Godwin was naturally a fitter companion for Shelley than the good
Harriet, however beautiful.
That Shelley early in 1814 had no intention of leaving his wife, is
probable; for he was re-married to her on the 24th of March, eight days
after his impassioned letter to Hogg, in St. George's, Hanover Square.
Harriet was pregnant, and this ratification of the Scotch marriage was
no doubt intended to place the legitimacy of a possible heir beyond all
question. Yet it seems, if we may found conjecture on "Stanzas, April,
1814," that in the very month after this new ceremony Shelley found the
difficulties of his wedded life insuperable, and that he was already
making up his mind to part from Harriet. About the middle of June the
separation actually occurred--not by mutual consent, so far as any
published documents throw light on the matter, but rather by Shelley's
sudden abandonment of his wife and child. (Leigh Hunt, Autobiography
page 236, and Medwin, however, both assert that it was by mutual
consent. The whole question must be studied in Peacock and in Garnett,
Relics of Shelly, page 147.) For a short while Harriet was left in
ignorance of his abode, and with a very insufficient sum of money at her
disposal. She placed herself under the protection of her father, retired
to Bath, and about the beginning of July received a letter from Shelley,
who was thenceforth solicitous for her welfare, keeping up a
correspondence with her, supplying her with funds, and by no means
shrinking from personal communications.
That Shelley must bear the responsibility of this separation seems to me
quite clear. His justification is to be found in his avowed opinions on
the subject of love and marriage--opinions which Harriet knew well and
professed to share, and of which he had recently made ample confession
in the notes to "Queen Mab". The world will still agree with Lord Eldon
in regarding those opinions as dangerous to society, and a blot upon the
poet's character; but it would be unfair, while condemning them as
frankly as he professed them, to blame him also because he did not
conform to the opposite code of morals, for which he frequently
expressed extreme abhorrence, and which he stigmatized, however wrongly,
as the source of the worst social vices. It must be added that the
Shelley family in their memorials of the poet, and through their friend,
Mr. Richard Garnett, inform us, without casting any slur on Harriet,
that documents are extant which will completely vindicate the poet's
conduct in this matter. It is therefore but just to await their
publication before pronouncing a decided judgment. Meanwhile there
remains no doubt about the fact that forty days after leaving Harriet,
Shelley departed from London with Mary Godwin, who had consented to
share his fortunes. How he plighted his new troth, and won the hand of
her who was destined to be his companion for life, may best be told in
Lady Shelley's words:--
"His anguish, his isolation, his difference from other men, his gifts of
genius and eloquent enthusiasm, made a deep impression on Godwin's
daughter Mary, now a girl of sixteen, who had been accustomed to hear
Shelley spoken of as something rare and strange. To her, as they met one
eventful day in St. Pancras Churchyard, by her mother's grave, Bysshe,
in burning words, poured forth the tale of his wild past--how he had
suffered, how he had been misled, and how, if supported by her love, he
hoped in future years to enrol his name with the wise and good who had
done battle for the fellow-men, and been true through all adverse storms
to the cause of humanity. Unhesitatingly, she placed her hand in his,
and linked her fortune with his own; and most truthfully, as the
remaining portions of these Memorials will prove, was the pledge of both
redeemed. The theories in which the daughter of the authors of
"Political Justice", and of the "Rights of Woman", had been educated,
spared her from any conflict between her duty and her affection. For she
was the child of parents whose writings had had for their object to
prove that marriage was one among the many institutions which a new era
in the history of mankind was about to sweep away. By her father, whom
she loved--by the writings of her mother, whom she had been taught to
venerate--these doctrines had been rendered familiar to her mind. It was
therefore natural that she should listen to the dictates of her own
heart, and willingly unite her fate with one who was so worthy of her
love."
Soon after her withdrawal to Bath, Harriet gave birth to Shelley's
second child, Charles Bysshe, who died in 1826. She subsequently formed
another connexion which proved unhappy; and on the 10th of November,
1816, she committed suicide by drowning herself in the Serpentine. The
distance of time between June, 1814, and November, 1816, and the new
ties formed by Harriet in this interval, prove that there was no
immediate connexion between Shelley's abandonment of his wife and her
suicide. She had always entertained the thought of self-destruction, as
Hogg, who is no adverse witness in her case, has amply recorded; and it
may be permitted us to suppose that, finding herself for the second time
unhappy in her love, she reverted to a long-since cherished scheme, and
cut the knot of life and all its troubles.
So far as this is possible, I have attempted to narrate the most painful
period in Shelley's life as it occurred, without extenuation and without
condemnation. Until the papers, mentioned with such insistence by Lady
Shelley and Mr. Garnett, are given to the world, it is impossible that
the poet should not bear the reproach of heartlessness and inconstancy
in this the gravest of all human relations. Such, however, is my belief
in the essential goodness of his character, after allowing, as we must
do, for the operation of his peculiar principles upon his conduct, that
I for my own part am willing to suspend my judgment till the time
arrives for his vindication. The language used by Lady Shelley and Mr.
Garnett justify us in expecting that that vindication will be as
startling as complete. If it is not, they, as pleading for him, will
have overshot the mark of prudence.
On the 28th of July Shelley left London with Mary Godwin, who up to this
date had remained beneath her father's roof. There was some secrecy in
their departure, because they were accompanied by Miss Clairmont, whose
mother disapproved of her forming a third in the party. Having made
their way to Dover, they crossed the Channel in an open boat, and went
at once to Paris. Here they hired a donkey for their luggage, intending
to perform the journey across France on foot. Shelley, however, sprained
his ancle, and a mule-carriage was provided for the party. In this
conveyance they reached the Jura, and entered Switzerland at Neufchatel.
Brunnen, on the Lake of Lucerne, was chosen for their residence; and
here Shelley began his romantic tale of "The Assassins", a portion of
which is printed in his prose works. Want of money compelled them soon
to think of turning their steps homeward; and the back journey was
performed upon the Reuss and Rhine. They reached Gravesend, after a bad
passage, on the 13th of September. Mrs. Shelley's "History of a Six
Week's Tour" relates the details of this trip, which was of great
importance in forming Shelley's taste, and in supplying him with the
scenery of river, rock, and mountain, so splendidly utilized in
"Alastor".
The autumn was a period of more than usual money difficulty; but on the
6th of January, 1815, Sir Bysshe died, Percy became the next heir to the
baronetcy and the family estates, and an arrangement was made with his
father by right of which he received an allowance of 1000 pounds a year.
A portion of his income was immediately set apart for Harriet. The
winter was passed in London, where Shelley walked a hospital, in order,
it is said, to acquire some medical knowledge that might be of service
to the poor he visited. His own health at this period was very bad. A
physician whom he consulted pronounced that he was rapidly sinking under
pulmonary disease, and he suffered frequent attacks of acute pain. The
consumptive symptoms seem to have been so marked that for the next three
years he had no doubt that he was destined to an early death. In 1818,
however, all danger of phthisis passed away; and during the rest of his
short life he only suffered from spasms and violent pains in the side,
which baffled the physicians, but, though they caused him extreme
anguish, did not menace any vital organ. To the subject of his health it
will be necessary to return at a later period of this biography. For the
present it is enough to remember that his physical condition was such as
to justify his own expectation of death at no distant time. (See Letter
to Godwin in Shelley's Memorials, page 78.)
Fond as ever of wandering, Shelley set out in the early summer for a
tour with Mary. They visited Devonshire and Clifton, and then settled in
a house on Bishopsgate Heath, near Windsor Forest. The summer was
further broken by a water excursion up the Thames to its source, in the
company of Mr. Peacock and Charles Clairmont. Peacock traces the poet's
taste for boating, which afterwards became a passion with him, to this
excursion. About this there is, however, some doubt. Medwin tells us
that Shelley while a boy delighted in being on the water, and that he
enjoyed the pastime at Eton. On the other hand, Mr. W.S. Halliday, a far
better authority than Medwin, asserts positively that he never saw
Shelley on the river at Eton, and Hogg relates nothing to prove that he
practised rowing at Oxford. It is certain that, though inordinately fond
of boats and every kind of water--river, sea, lake, or canal--he never
learned to swim. Peacock also notices his habit of floating paper boats,
and gives an amusing description of the boredom suffered by Hogg on
occasions when Shelley would stop by the side of a pond or mere to float
a mimic navy. The not altogether apocryphal story of his having once
constructed a boat out of a bank-post-bill, and launched it on the lake
in Kensington Gardens, deserves to be alluded to in this connexion.
On their return from this river journey, Shelley began the poem of
"Alastor", haunting the woodland glades and oak groves of Windsor
Forest, and drawing from that noble scenery his inspiration. It was
printed with a few other poems in one volume the next year. Not only was
"Alastor" the first serious poem published by Shelley; but it was also
the first of his compositions which revealed the greatness of his
genius. Rarely has blank verse been written with more majesty and music;
and while the influence of Milton and Wordsworth may be traced in
certain passages, the versification, tremulous with lyrical vibrations,
is such as only Shelley could have produced.
"Alastor" is the Greek name for a vengeful daemon, driving its victim
into desert places; and Shelley, prompted by Peacock, chose it for the
title of a poem which describes the Nemesis of solitary souls. Apart
from its intrinsic merit as a work of art, "Alastor" has great
autobiographical value. Mrs. Shelley affirms that it was written under
the expectation of speedy death, and under the sense of disappointment,
consequent upon the misfortunes of his early life. This accounts for the
somewhat unhealthy vein of sentiment which threads the wilderness of its
sublime descriptions. All that Shelley had observed of natural
beauty--in Wales, at Lynton, in Switzerland, upon the eddies of the
Reuss, beneath the oak shades of the forest--is presented to us in a
series of pictures penetrated with profound emotion. But the deeper
meaning of "Alastor" is to be found, not in the thought of death nor in
the poet's recent communings with nature, but in the motto from St.
Augustine placed upon its title page, and in the "Hymn to Intellectual
Beauty", composed about a year later. Enamoured of ideal loveliness, the
poet pursues his vision through the universe, vainly hoping to assuage
the thirst which has been stimulated in his spirit, and vainly longing
for some mortal realization of his love. "Alastor", like
"Epipsychidion," reveals the mistake which Shelley made in thinking that
the idea of beauty could become incarnate for him in any earthly form:
while the "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" recognizes the truth that such
realization of the ideal is impossible. The very last letter written by
Shelley sets the misconception in its proper light: "I think one is
always in love with something or other; the error, and I confess it is
not easy for spirits cased in flesh and blood to avoid it, consists in
seeking in a mortal image the likeness of what is, perhaps, eternal."
But this Shelley discovered only with "the years that bring the
philosophic mind," and when he was upon the very verge of his untimely
death.
The following quotation is a fair specimen of the blank verse of
"Alastor". It expresses that longing for perfect sympathy in an ideal
love, which the sense of divine beauty had stirred in the poet's
heart:--
At length upon the lone Chorasmian shore
He paused, a wide and melancholy waste
Of putrid marshes. A strong impulse urged
His steps to the sea-shore. A swan was there,
Beside a sluggish stream among the reeds.
It rose as he approached, and, with strong wings
Scaling the upward sky, bent its bright course
High over the immeasurable main.
His eyes pursued its flight:--"Thou hast a home,
Beautiful bird! thou voyagest to thine home,
Where thy sweet mate will twine her downy neck
With thine, and welcome thy return with eyes
Bright in the lustre of their own fond joy.
And what am I that I should linger here,
With voice far sweeter than thy dying notes,
Spirit more vast than thine, frame more attuned
To beauty, wasting these surpassing powers
In the deaf air, to the blind earth, and heaven
That echoes not my thoughts?" A gloomy smile
Of desperate hope wrinkled his quivering lips.
For Sleep, he knew, kept most relentlessly
Its precious charge, and silent Death exposed,
Faithless perhaps as Sleep, a shadowy lure,
With doubtful smile mocking its own strange charms.
William, the eldest son of Shelley and Mary Godwin, was born on the 24th
of January, 1816. In the spring of that year they went together,
accompanied by Miss Clairmont, for a second time to Switzerland. They
reached Geneva on the 17th of May and were soon after joined by Lord
Byron and his travelling physician, Dr. Polidori. Shelley had not yet
made Byron's acquaintance, though he had sent him a copy of "Queen Mab",
with a letter, which miscarried in the post. They were now thrown into
daily intercourse, occupying the villas Diodati and Mount Alegre, at no
great distance from each other, passing their days upon the lake in a
boat which they purchased, and spending the nights in conversation. Miss
Clairmont had known Byron in London, and their acquaintance now ripened
into an intimacy, the fruit of which was the child Allegra. This fact
has to be mentioned by Shelley's biographer, because Allegra afterwards
became an inmate of his home; and though he and Mary were ignorant of
what was passing at Geneva, they did not withdraw their sympathy from
the mother of Lord Byron's daughter. The lives of Byron and Shelley
during the next six years were destined to be curiously blent. Both were
to seek in Italy an exile-home; while their friendship was to become one
of the most interesting facts of English literary history. The influence
of Byron upon Shelley, as he more than once acknowledged, and as his
wife plainly perceived, was, to a great extent, depressing. For Byron's
genius and its fruits in poetry he entertained the highest possible
opinion. He could not help comparing his own achievement and his fame
with Byron's; and the result was that in the presence of one whom he
erroneously believed to be the greater poet, he became inactive.
Shelley, on the contrary, stimulated Byron's productive faculty to
nobler efforts, raised his moral tone, and infused into his less subtle
intellect something of his own philosophical depth and earnestness. Much
as he enjoyed Byron's society and admired his writing, Shelley was not
blind to the imperfections of his nature. The sketch which he has left
us of Count Maddalo, the letters written to his wife from Venice and
Ravenna, and his correspondence on the subject of Leigh Hunt's visit to
Italy, supply the most discriminating criticism which has yet been
passed upon his brother poet's character. It is clear that he never
found in Byron a perfect friend, and that he had not accepted him as one
with whom he sympathized upon the deeper questions of feeling and
conduct. Byron, for his part, recognized in Shelley the purest nature he
had ever known. "He was the most gentle, the most amiable, and least
worldly-minded person I ever met; full of delicacy, disinterested beyond
all other men, and possessing a degree of genius joined to simplicity as
rare as it is admirable. He had formed to himself a beau ideal of all
that is fine, high-minded, and noble, and he acted up to this ideal even
to the very letter."
Toward the end of June the two poets made the tour of Lake Geneva in
their boat, and were very nearly wrecked off the rocks of Meillerie. On
this occasion Shelley was in imminent danger of death from drowning. His
one anxiety, however, as he wrote to Peacock, was lest Byron should
attempt to save him at the risk of his own life. Byron described him as
"bold as a lion;" and indeed it may here be said, once and for all, that
Shelley's physical courage was only equalled by his moral fearlessness.
He carried both without bravado to the verge of temerity, and may justly
be said to have never known what terror was. Another summer excursion
was a visit to Chamouni, of which he has left memorable descriptions in
his letters to Peacock, and in the somewhat Coleridgian verses on Mont
Blanc. The preface to "Laon and Cythna" shows what a powerful impression
had been made upon him by the glaciers, and how he delighted in the
element of peril. There is a tone of exultation in the words which
record the experiences of his two journeys in Switzerland and
France:--"I have been familiar from boyhood with mountains and lakes and
the sea, and the solitude of forests. Danger, which sports upon the
brink of precipices, has been my playmate. I have trodden the glaciers
of the Alps, and lived under the eye of Mont Blanc. I have been a
wanderer among distant fields. I have sailed down mighty rivers, and
seen the sun rise and set, and the stars come forth, whilst I have
sailed night and day down a rapid stream among mountains. I have seen
populous cities, and have watched the passions which rise and spread,
and sink and change amongst assembled multitudes of men. I have seen the
theatre of the more visible ravages of tyranny and war, cities and
villages reduced to scattered groups of black and roofless houses, and
the naked inhabitants sitting famished upon their desolated thresholds."
On their return to the lake, the Shelleys found M.G. Lewis established
with Byron. This addition to the circle introduced much conversation
about apparitions, and each member of the party undertook to produce a
ghost story. Polidori's "Vampyre" and Mrs. Shelley's "Frankenstein" were
the only durable results of their determination. But an incident
occurred which is of some importance in the history of Shelley's
psychological condition. Toward midnight on the 18th of July, Byron
recited the lines in "Christabel" about the lady's breast; when Shelley
suddenly started up, shrieked, and fled from the room. He had seen a
vision of a woman with eyes instead of nipples. At this time he was
writing notes upon the phenomena of sleep to be inserted in his
"Speculations on Metaphysics", and Mrs. Shelley informs us that the mere
effort to remember dreams of thrilling or mysterious import so disturbed
his nervous system that he had to relinquish the task. At no period of
his life was he wholly free from visions which had the reality of facts.
Sometimes they occurred in sleep, and were prolonged with painful
vividness into his waking moments. Sometimes they seemed to grow out of
his intense meditation, or to present themselves before his eyes as the
projection of a powerful inner impression. All his sensations were
abnormally acute, and his ever-active imagination confused the
border-lands of the actual and the visionary. Such a nature as
Shelley's, through its far greater susceptibility than is common even
when with artistic temperaments, was debarred in moments of high-strung
emotion from observing the ordinary distinctions of subject and object;
and this peculiar quality must never be forgotten when we seek to
estimate the proper proportions of Dichtung and Wahreit in certain
episodes of his biography. The strange story, for example, told by
Peacock about a supposed warning he had received in the spring of this
year from Mr. Williams of Tremadoc, may possibly be explained on the
hypothesis that his brooding thoughts had taken form before him, both
ear and eye having been unconsciously pressed into the service of a
subjective energy. (Fraser's Magazine, January, 1860, page 98.)
On their return to England in September, Shelley took a cottage at Great
Marlow on the Thames, in order to be near his friend Peacock. While it
was being prepared for the reception of his family, he stayed at Bath,
and there heard of Harriet's suicide. The life that once was dearest to
him, had ended thus in misery, desertion, want. The mother of his two
children, abandoned by both her husband and her lover, and driven from
her father's home, had drowned herself after a brief struggle with
circumstance. However Shelley may have felt that his conscience was free
from blame, however small an element of self-reproach may have mingled
with his grief and horror, there is no doubt that he suffered most
acutely. His deepest ground for remorse seems to have been the
conviction that he had drawn Harriet into a sphere of thought and
feeling for which she was not qualified, and that had it not been for
him and his opinions, she might have lived a happy woman in some common
walk of life. One of his biographers asserts that "he continued to be
haunted by certain recollections, partly real and partly imaginative,
which pursued him like an Orestes," and even Trelawny, who knew him only
in the last months of his life, said that the impression of that
dreadful moment was still vivid. We may trace the echo of his feelings
in some painfully pathetic verses written in 1817 (Forman, 3 148.); and
though he did not often speak of Harriet, Peacock has recorded one
memorable occasion on which he disclosed the anguish of his spirit to a
friend. (Fraser, January, 1860, page 102.)
Shelley hurried at once to London, and found some consolation in the
society of Leigh Hunt. The friendship extended to him by that excellent
man at this season of his trouble may perhaps count for something with
those who are inclined to judge him harshly. Two important events
followed immediately upon the tragedy. The first was Shelley's marriage
with Mary Godwin on the 30th of December, 1816. Whether Shelley would
have taken this step except under strong pressure from without, appears
to me very doubtful. Of all men who ever lived, he was the most
resolutely bent on confirming his theories by his practice; and in this
instance there was no valid reason why he should not act up to
principles professed in common by himself and the partner of his
fortunes, no less than by her father and mother. It is, therefore,
reasonable to suppose that he yielded to arguments; and these arguments
must have been urged by Godwin, who had never treated him with
cordiality since he left England in 1816. Godwin, though overrated in
his generation, and almost ludicrously idealized by Shelley, was a man
whose talents verged on genius. But he was by no means consistent. His
conduct in money-matters shows that he could not live the life of a
self-sufficing philosopher; while the irritation he expressed when
Shelley omitted to address him as Esquire, stood in comic contradiction
with his published doctrines. We are therefore perhaps justified in
concluding that he worried Shelley, the one enthusiastic and
thorough-going follower he had, into marrying his daughter in spite of
his disciple's protestations; nor shall we be far wrong if we surmise
that Godwin congratulated himself on Mary's having won the right to bear
the name of a future baronet.
The second event was the refusal of Mr. Westbrook to deliver up the
custody of his grandchildren. A chancery suit was instituted; at the
conclusion of which, in August, 1817, Lord Eldon deprived Shelley of his
son and daughter on the double ground of his opinions expressed in
"Queen Mab", and of his conduct toward his first wife. The children were
placed in the hands of a clergyman, to be educated in accordance with
principles diametrically opposed to their parent's, while Shelley's
income was mulcted in a sum of 200 pounds for their maintenance. Thus
sternly did the father learn the value of that ancient Aeschylean maxim,
to drasanti pathein, the doer of the deed must suffer. His own
impulsiveness, his reckless assumption of the heaviest responsibilities,
his overweening confidence in his own strength to move the weight of the
world's opinions, had brought him to this tragic pass--to the suicide of
the woman who had loved him, and to the sequestration of the offspring
whom he loved.
Shelley is too great to serve as text for any sermon; and yet we may
learn from him as from a hero of Hebrew or Hellenic story. His life was
a tragedy; and like some protagonist of Greek drama, he was capable of
erring and of suffering greatly. He had kicked against the altar of
justice as established in the daily sanctities of human life; and now he
had to bear the penalty. The conventions he despised and treated like
the dust beneath his feet, were found in this most cruel crisis to be a
rock on which his very heart was broken. From this rude trial of his
moral nature he arose a stronger being; and if longer life had been
granted him, he would undoubtedly have presented the ennobling spectacle
of one who had been lessoned by his own audacity, and by its bitter
fruits, into harmony with the immutable laws which he was ever seeking
to obey. It is just this conflict between the innate rectitude of
Shelley's over-daring nature and the circumstances of ordinary
existence, which makes his history so tragic; and we may justly wonder
whether, when he read the Sophoclean tragedies of Oedipus, he did not
apply their doctrine of self-will and Nemesis to his own fortunes.