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English Men of Letters
EDITED BY JOHN MORLEY
SHELLEY
SHELLEY
BY JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON
1909
_First Edition October 1878
Reprinted October 1878, 1879, 1881, 1884,
with many corrections, 1887, 1895, 1902, 1909
Library Edition 1902, 1907
Pocket Edition 1909_
PREFACE.
This sketch of Shelley’s life was written in the summer of 1878. Since
then Professor Dowden’s _Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley_ (2 vols., Kegan
Paul, Trench, and Co., 1886) has been given to the world. In that
exhaustive work many important documents belonging to the poet’s heirs
have been freely used for the first time. Professor Dowden has thus been
able to elucidate some hitherto obscure points in Shelley’s history, and
to settle several doubtful questions. It is not probable that much more
will be added in the future to our knowledge of his life.
Upon the appearance of Professor Dowden’s biography, I was anxious to
rewrite those portions of my book which required modification by the light
of authentic papers now at length communicated to the public. My
references to the Shelley archives (pp. 81 and 83) in particular required
correction.
This, however, would have involved a disproportionate derangement of the
stereotype plates. I am therefore obliged to content myself with minor
alterations. These are of three kinds. In the present volume I have
introduced such verbal changes as could be made upon the plates. I have
also enclosed some passages in brackets, indicating thereby that I should
prefer to omit these altogether. Finally, I have recast the narrative of
Shelley’s separation from his first wife (pp. 79-83), and have placed this
in an Appendix, to which I earnestly call the attention of my readers.
JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS.
DAVOS PLATZ, _February 1887_.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
CHAPTER I.
BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD 1
CHAPTER II.
ETON AND OXFORD 12
CHAPTER III.
LIFE IN LONDON AND FIRST MARRIAGE 39
CHAPTER IV.
SECOND RESIDENCE IN LONDON, AND SEPARATION FROM HARRIET 72
CHAPTER V.
LIFE AT MARLOW, AND JOURNEY TO ITALY 95
CHAPTER VI.
RESIDENCE AT PISA 131
CHAPTER VII.
LAST DAYS 168
CHAPTER VIII.
EPILOGUE 182
INDEX 199
LIST OF AUTHORITIES.
1. The Poetical and Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, edited by Mrs.
Shelley. Moxon, 1840, 1845. 1 vol.
2. The Poetical Works, edited by Harry Buxton Forman. Reeves and Turner,
1876-7. 4 vols.
3. The Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, edited by W. M. Rossetti. Moxon,
1870. 2 vols.
4. Hogg’s Life of Shelley. Moxon, 1858. 2 vols.
5. Trelawny’s Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author Pickering, 1878. 2
vols.
6. Shelley Memorials, edited by Lady Shelley. Smith and Elder. 1 vol.
7. Medwin’s Life of Shelley. Newby, 1847. 2 vols.
8. Shelley’s Early Life, by D. F. McCarthy. Chatto and Windus. 1 vol.
9. Leigh Hunt’s Autobiography. Smith and Elder.
10. W. M. Rossetti’s Life of Shelley, included in the edition above cited,
No. 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.
17. The Prose Works of P. B. Shelley, edited by H. B. Forman. Reeves and
Turner, 1880. 4 vols.
18. Shelley, a Poem, etc., by James Thomson. Printed for private
circulation at the Chiswick Press, 1884.
19. The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, by Edward Dowden, LL.D. Kegan Paul,
Trench, and Co., 1886. 2 vols.
SHELLEY.
CHAPTER I.
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 _Œdipus_;
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 spring-time has brought 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 Pilfold, 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_l._ in the English Funds, together with estates worth 20,000_l._ a
year to his descendants.
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 not what the world calls 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
_mésalliance_, 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 that 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 schoolfellows 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 linkèd 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
place; 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.