SECOND RESIDENCE IN LONDON, AND SEPARATION FROM HARRIET.
Early in April 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, whose narrative can probably be relied on in
this matter, 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 coachmaker. 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 the 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, her
sister Mrs. Newton, and her daughter Cornelia, Mrs. Turner. 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 most serious import 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 other intimates.
Mrs. Newton’s unfair judgment of Mr. Peacock marks a discord between the
two main 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 sphere 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 changes 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 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 had lost her
interest in his studies. She became more and more an ordinary woman of the
world. 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.”[11]
[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. 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 upon the matter, but rather by Shelley’s
sudden abandonment of his wife and child.[12] 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 their 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
episode 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, 1814, 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, after two days in Uri, to
turn 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 Weeks’ 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_l._ 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 annoyance, did not menace
any vital organ. To the subject of his health it will be necessary to
return at a later period of his 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.[13]
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 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 dæmon, 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 Jan., 1816. In the spring of that year they went together, accompanied
by Miss Clairmont, for a second time to Switzerland. They reached Geneva
about the 15th 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 Mont Alégre 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 large 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 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 und Wahrheit_ 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.[14]
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;[15] 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.[16]
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
her 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
thoroughgoing 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 March, 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 Dr. Hume, to be educated in accordance with principles
diametrically opposed to their parent’s, while Shelley’s income was
mulcted in a sum of 200_l._ for their maintenance. Thus sternly did the
father learn the value of that ancient Æschylean maxim, τῷ δράσαντι
παθεῖν, 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 ought not to be made the 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 Œdipus, he did not apply their doctrine of self-will and
Nemesis to his own fortunes.