The beautiful face of Shelley is one that is familiar to all students of
literary biography, and contends with that of Byron for the distinction
of being the handsomest among the men of letters of his day. Burns was
also a picture of manly beauty, whose features have long been familiar
in engravings; but Byron and Shelley look the ideal poet far more than
their sturdier Scottish brother. The face of Schiller was also one of
great charm, and Tennyson and Longfellow in their youth were also
beautiful; but the world is more familiar with the representations of
their later years, and has almost forgotten the alluring eyes and the
flowing locks of the youthful bards.
Shelley always had a girlish look, caused perhaps by a feeble
constitution, and he suffered much from poor health, which added to the
delicacy of his face. But there was a wonderful charm about his
countenance even in childhood, and his eyes seemed like wells into which
one might fall. There was rare sweetness in his smile, too. He was a
tall man and very slender, with a certain squareness of shoulder, and
great bodily litheness and activity. He had an oval face and delicate
features. His forehead was high. His fine dark-brown hair disposed
itself in beautiful curls over his brow and around the back of his neck.
The eyes were brown, and the coloring of his face as soft as that of a
girl's, in youth, though he bronzed somewhat during his life in Italy.
His countenance changed with every passing emotion; his usual look was
earnest, but when joyful he was very bright and animated in expression.
When sad there was something peculiarly touching in his face, and there
was sometimes expressed in his look a mournful weariness of everything.
But there was something noble and commanding in his aspect through all
changes, something hinting of his high and noble birth, as well as of
his genius. He had a peculiar voice, not powerful, but musical and
expressive, and fine agreeable manners when once the shyness of youth
had worn off.
That youth was a period of great unhappiness in many ways. He was
irritable and sensitive, and much given to reading and brooding, at
which the other children--or, as he called them "the little
fiends--scoffed incessantly." He had thoughts beyond his years, and
found in these his greatest happiness. He was impatient and full of
impulse, with a strong dash of egotism, like most men of genius.
That he was eccentric beyond the usual eccentricities of genius is known
to all the world. That he set out fully determined to live the ideal
life and to reform the world, is as well known; also, that he failed in
both these attempts,--partly through the limitations of his own nature,
and partly that the contract was too large, even for a man of his
undoubted genius.
Shelley was born in the County of Sussex, on the 4th of August, 1792.
His most characteristic childish amusement seems to have been the making
of chemical experiments; and his brothers and sisters were often
terrified at the experiments in electricity which he tried upon them. He
was also fond of making the children personate spirits or fiends, while
he burned some inflammable liquid.
He was full of cheerful fun, and had all the comic vein so agreeable in
a household. His benevolent impulses displayed themselves in his
earliest childhood in his wish to educate some child; and he talked
seriously of purchasing a little girl for that purpose, and actually
entered into negotiations to that effect with a tumbler who came to the
back door. His hatred of tyranny also showed itself at the earliest age,
in rebellion against the rule of the old schoolmistress who educated his
sisters.
He was exceedingly precocious, and was thus sent to Eton at an age much
younger than other boys. He was perhaps a little proud of his birth and
breeding; but it was probably more from his inborn hatred of tyranny
than from the former reason, that he utterly refused to "fag" for the
older boys, and in this way got himself at once into trouble in the
school. Neither the cruel vituperation of his fellows nor menaces of
punishment upon the part of his superiors could bend his will to an
obedience which could only be yielded at the expense of self-respect. He
was soon withdrawn from Eton, and was afterwards sent to Oxford. Here
his first great enthusiasm was for chemistry; and the appearance of his
room is thus described by a fellow-student:--
"Books, boots, papers, shoes, philosophical instruments, clothes,
pistols, linen, crockery, ammunition, and phials innumerable, with
money, stockings, paints, crucibles, bags, and boxes, were
scattered on the floor and in every place; as if the young chemist,
in order to analyze the mystery of creation, had endeavored first
to reconstruct the primeval chaos. The tables, and especially the
carpet, were already stained with large spots of various hues,
which frequently proclaimed the agency of fire. An electrical
machine, an air-pump, the galvanic trough, a solar microscope, and
large glass jars were conspicuous amidst the mass of matter. More
than one hole in the carpet could elucidate the ultimate phenomena
of combustion,--especially a formidable aperture in the middle of
the room, where the floor had also been burned by spontaneous
combustion; and the horrible wound was speedily enlarged by
rents,--for the philosopher as he hastily crossed the room in
pursuit of truth, was frequently caught in it by the foot."
No student ever read more assiduously than he; and one of his chums said
to him, after he had literally read all day:--
"If I read as long as you read, Shelley, my hair and my teeth would
be strewed about on the floor, and my eyes would slip down into my
waistcoat pockets."
It was only by attracting his attention by some extravagance that he
could be drawn away from his books. He seldom stopped to take a regular
meal, but would have his pockets stuffed with bread, from which he ate
from time to time, anywhere he chanced to be. When he was walking in
London he would suddenly run into a baker's shop, purchase a supply, and
breaking a loaf, offer half of it to his companion; if it was refused he
would wonder that his friend did not like bread, and could scarcely
appreciate the joke when they laughed at him for devouring two or three
pounds of dry bread in the streets.
Very early in life he began to have decided opinions upon religious
topics; and for some of his so-called atheistic tendencies, embodied in
his writings, he was expelled from Oxford at the age of seventeen,
without a word of friendly remonstrance upon the part of the
authorities, or any attempt whatever to counteract the errors which he
had imbibed from the reading of French philosophy. We can scarcely
believe it at this day, but it was true.
"At seventeen," says Mrs. Shelley, "fragile in health and frame, of
the purest habits in morals, full of devoted generosity and
universal kindness, glowing with ardor to attain wisdom, resolved
at every personal sacrifice to do right, burning with a desire for
affection and sympathy, he was treated as a reprobate, cast forth
as a criminal."
Even his father cast him off on account of his impious opinions, and
added his curse; and had he been in the way of procuring a _lettre de
cachet_, like Mirabeau's father, he would certainly have sent him to
Newgate and kept him there. As it was, all his friends deserted him, and
he lived in lodgings in London, in a very irregular manner, for some
time. Even his cousin Harriet Grove, with whom he had been in love in
his boyish way for a long time, gave him up, and soon after married
another. The affair was not a serious one upon the part of either; but
it cost Shelley some tears at the time. He soon consoled himself,
however, with a schoolmate of his sisters whom he sometimes met when he
went to visit them. Harriet Westbrook was empowered by his sisters to
convey to Percy such sums of money as they could gather for him; for his
father had refused to assist him, and he was in absolute want at this
time. She appeared to Shelley in the guise of a ministering angel, and
his imagination at once took fire. She was a comely, pleasing, amiable,
ordinary girl, who felt herself oppressed because obliged to go to
school, and excited Shelley's sympathy by appearing unhappy. He soon
became entangled with her and her sister, who was older, and who is
accused of furthering the intrigue out of ambition, thinking that the
son of a baronet must be a great match. He writes to a friend in May,
1811:--
"You will perhaps see me before you can answer this; perhaps not;
Heaven knows. I shall certainly come to York, but Harriet Westbrook
will decide whether now or in three weeks. Her father has
persecuted her in a most horrible way by endeavoring to compel her
to go to school. She asked my advice; resistance was the
answer,--at the same time that I essayed to mollify Mr. W. in vain.
And in consequence of my advice, _she_ has thrown herself upon _my_
protection."
The whole history of Shelley's courtship of Harriet--or of her courtship
of him, as many of his friends put it--will probably never be written.
It seems to have been promoted by others quite as much as by themselves.
That her father was not averse to her marriage with the eldest son of a
baronet may be taken for granted, and Shelley was the very man to be
duped by designing parties; of this there can be no doubt. He was but
nineteen years old, and she but sixteen, when they eloped,--of which
proceeding there does not seem to have been any especial need,--and
proceeded to Edinburgh, where they were married. By the time they
reached Edinburgh their money was gone, and Shelley laid the case
before his landlord, and asked him to advance money enough so that they
might be married. To this the landlord consented, and the ceremony was
performed. But the landlord, it appears, presumed somewhat upon the aid
he had rendered, and in the evening, when Shelley and his bride were
alone together, he knocked at the door and told them it was customary
there for the guests to come in, in the middle of the night, and wash
the bride with whiskey.
"I immediately," says Shelley, "caught up my brace of pistols, and
pointing them both at him, said to him, 'I have had enough of your
impertinence; if you give me any more of it I will blow your brains
out;' on which he ran or rather tumbled downstairs, and I bolted
the doors."
Even before the honeymoon was over, Harriet's sister Eliza, the evil
genius of the pair, appeared upon the scene. The friend who was with
them at the time thus describes her advent:--
"The house lay, as it were, under an interdict; all our accustomed
occupations were suspended; study was forbidden; reading was
injurious; to read aloud might terminate fatally. To go abroad was
death; to stay at home the grave. Bysshe became nothing; I of
course much less than nothing,--a negative quantity of a very high
figure."
That Harriet already had peculiar notions of her own was soon evident.
The same friend writes:--
"'What do you think of suicide?' said Harriet one day. 'Did you
ever think of destroying yourself?' It was a puzzling question, for
indeed the thought had never entered my head. 'What do you think of
matricide, of high treason, of rick-burning? Did you ever think of
killing any one? of murdering your mother? or setting rick-yards on
fire?' I replied."
But Harriet often discoursed at great length, in a calm, resolute
manner, of her purpose of killing herself some day or other. Of their
after-housekeeping in London lodgings Hogg writes:--
"Our dinners therefore were constructive, a dumb show, a mere empty
idle ceremony; our only resource against absolute starvation was
tea. Penny-buns were our assured resource. The survivors of those
days of peril and hardship are indebted for their existence to the
humane interposition and succor of penny-buns. A shilling's worth
of penny-buns for tea. If the purchase was intrusted to the maid,
she got such buns as none could believe to have been made on earth,
proving thereby incontestably that the girl had some direct
communication with the infernal regions, where they alone could
have been procured."
The married life was on the whole, when not a roaring farce, almost a
tragedy. Harriet's sister was, like the poor, always with them. Shelley
grew to hate her, and tried in every way to be delivered from her
presence, but in vain. Harriet would not live without her, and paid
little attention to anybody else when she was present. Two children were
born to them, but even the children Shelley was not permitted to enjoy
without the constant supervision of Eliza. He became nearly frantic from
the constant annoyance, and finally a separation came about between the
ill-mated pair. The women themselves became tired of the moping and
inefficient youth, who still remained poor and unsettled, with a father
desperately healthy and inexorable. They grew tired and went away,--the
wife, like Lady Byron, refusing to go back to such an aimless,
rhapsodizing husband. And in truth, the hardship of living with such a
man as Shelley, for a woman like Harriet, must have been very great. It
is easy to understand how a limited nature like hers should be worn out
by the exaction and impracticability of one like Shelley; for to her,
most impracticable would seem his lofty and ideal requirements. The
parting was not unfriendly, and Shelley always spoke of her with deep
kindness and pity, and she continued to write to him for some time after
he had formed his connection with Mary Godwin, of which she did not seem
to disapprove. He had found a sort of comfort in his intercourse with
Mary from his first acquaintance with her, and she was probably the
first woman he had ever known who in any way understood or appreciated
him. Some lines have been given in the "Relics," written to her at this
time, which run thus:--
"Upon my heart thy accents sweet
Of peace and pity fell like dew
On flowers half-dead. . . .
"We are not happy, sweet! our state
Is strange and full of doubt and fear;
More need of words that ills abate;--
Reserve or censure come not near
Our sacred friendship, lest there be
No solace left for thee or me."
Shelley and Mary seem to have been very happy with each other from the
first, although they felt the keenest sorrow at his being deprived by
the Court of Chancery of the guardianship of his children, on the
alleged grounds of his atheism, and although they were inexpressibly
pained and shocked at the suicide of Harriet, which occurred about two
years after the separation.
Her death seems to have had no immediate connection with any act of
Shelley's, but he mourned over it with great bitterness to the end of
his life. He married Mary in a legal manner soon after Harriet's death,
and of course a most violent storm of detraction and denunciation burst
upon his head. He soon retired to Italy, where he first met Byron, and
he passed nearly all the rest of his life there. Poor Harriet was only
twenty-two at the time of her tragic death. Whatever may have been the
errors of her life, she had suffered much in their expiation. After her
return to her father's house it appears that she was treated with
unkindness, and fell into some irregularities of life,--how great,
remains still a disputed point. But no one charges anything against her
up to the time of her separation from Shelley, except that she was
almost as foolish and impracticable as himself.
Shelley's fancy for her was that of a mere boy, and his friend Mr.
Peacock thus describes the conflict of his feelings after meeting Mary
Godwin:--
"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
frequently repeated the lines from Sophocles,--
'Man's happiest lot is not to be;
And when we tread life's thorny steep,
Most blest are they who, earliest free,
Descend to death's eternal sleep.'"
Godwin, it appears, tried hard to re-unite Shelley and Harriet, and
disapproved entirely of the new connection. Mary was but seventeen years
old, very beautiful, and possessed of genius; and her father, moral
considerations entirely aside, did not look upon Shelley as a suitable
husband for her. But Shelley had conceived for her the one violent,
uncontrollable passion of his life, and she was very easily brought
under his influence, in spite of the disapproval of her father. Mary had
not been brought up with conventional ideas upon the subject of marriage
(her own mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, having had very unusual opinions
upon that subject), and she fell an easy victim to Shelley's impassioned
eloquence, when he urged her to flee with him from an uncongenial home.
Shelley appeared to Mary as almost a divine being, and her worshipful
love never waned, even during her long widowhood of thirty years'
duration. For Shelley, in the whole matter, there seems to be no valid
excuse. He deliberately defied the world and the world's ways, and even
his memory must bear the fatal consequences. If we allow his genius to
excuse his acts, we are setting up a precedent which we have only to
imagine universally carried out to produce not only moral revolution but
chaos throughout the social world. He sinned like an ordinary mortal, he
suffered also in the same wise, and in the memory of man he must be held
to the same responsibility as his fellows. But his unworldliness may
well be taken into the account. He lived in a sort of dreamworld of his
own, and the thoughts and opinions and feelings of ordinary men upon
matters of life and conduct were so different from his that he could
hardly comprehend the value they had in the eyes of their possessors.
Born to rank and wealth, he desired to induce every rich man to despoil
himself of superfluity, and to create a brotherhood of property and
service, and was ready to be the first one to lay down the advantages of
his birth. Born with the most fanatical love of liberty, he looked upon
all the conventionalities of the world as tyranny, and defied all
restraints of authority from his earliest youth. He believed the
opinions he entertained to be true, and he loved truth with a martyr's
love; he was ready to sacrifice station and fortune and his dearest
affections at her shrine. With the rashness of youth he proclaimed all
the wildest of his opinions, and upheld them with uncompromising zeal.
In his acts he rushed into the face of the world in the same defiant
manner; and the world did not fail to take her revenge upon him. But
posterity will do him justice; it will see him, noble, kind, passionate,
generous, tender, brave, with an unbounded and unquestioning love for
his fellow-men, with a holy and fervid hope in their ultimate virtue and
happiness, and an intense and passionate scorn for all baseness and
oppression.
Already about his grave in a foreign land there gather many pilgrims,
not only from his own country, but from beyond the sea; and as they read
the inscription there,--
"Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea change into something rich and strange,"--
they think that the misconceptions which hung over him during life are
gradually suffering such a change, and they thank God amid their tears.
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