THE RULES OF THE GAME
In what way does a marriage ceremony, religious or civil, add to the
happiness of a pair of lovers, deeply smitten and full of confidence in
one another? The event proved that it can at least make joy blossom on
the countenance of a pedant. Godwin’s exhibited an incredible
satisfaction on learning that “the seducer” was going to make “an honest
woman” of his daughter, and that, eventually, she would become Lady
Shelley. He thus inspired in his ex-disciple a contempt for his
character, full measure, pressed down, and running over.
At first there had been some hesitation as to whether it were decent to
celebrate the marriage so soon after Harriet’s death, but the
authorities on social etiquette declared that it would not do to wait
any longer for the Church’s blessing on a union which Nature had already
blessed twice over.
Just a fortnight after the body of the first Mrs. Shelley had been taken
out of the Serpentine, Mary and Percy were married by a clergyman in the
church of St. Mildred, Bread Street. Godwin, beaming all over his face,
and Mrs. Godwin, simpering and pretentious, signed as witnesses. That
evening, for the first time since they ran away, the Shelleys dined in
Skinner Street.
The family feast was a lugubrious one. There, in the little dining-room,
Fanny had moved to and fro; there, Harriet had sat in her happy early
wedded days; their ghosts, suffering and unsatisfied, continued to haunt
the room and torture the living. It is true that Godwin’s ill-temper had
been changed by the morning’s ceremony into an excess of urbanity, but
too many memories troubled the guests to make any real cordiality
possible.
That night Mary wrote in her journal: “Go to London. A marriage takes
place. Draw. Read Lord Chesterfield and Locke.” Mary had good nerves.
Poor drowned Harriet was never a patch on her.
* * *
Nevertheless, it was but right that the news of so splendid a marriage
should be sent to every Godwin in the land. The Philosopher wrote to
Hull Godwin:
“DEAR BROTHER,
“Were it not that you have a family of your own, and can see by
them how little shrubs grow into tall trees, you would hardly
imagine that my boy, born the other day, is now fourteen, and
that my daughter is between nineteen and twenty. The piece of
news I have to tell, however, is that I went to church with this
tall girl some little time ago to be married. Her husband is the
eldest son of Sir Timothy Shelley, of Field Place, in the county
of Sussex, Baronet. So that according to the vulgar ideas of the
world she is well married, and I have great hopes that the young
man will make her a good husband. You will wonder, I daresay,
how a girl without a penny of fortune should make so good a
match. But such are the ups and downs of the world. For my part,
I care but little comparatively about wealth, so that it should
be her destiny in life to be respectable, virtuous, and
contented.”
The letter closes with a word of cool thanks for a ham and a turkey sent
to the Skinner Street household at Christmas.
But the formal marriage brought about one real advantage. The
“concubinage” argument, advanced by those who wished to deprive Shelley
of his children, fell to the ground. The Westbrooks, however, did not
give in. By the voice of the retired publican, the young Ianthe aged
three, and Charles aged two, addressed a petition to the Lord Chancellor
in which they said: “Our father avows himself to be an Atheist, and has
written and published a certain work called _Queen Mab_ with notes, and
other works, wherein he blasphemously denies the existence of God as the
Creator of the Universe, the sanctity of marriage, and all the most
sacred principles of morality.” For which reasons these precocious and
virtuous infants prayed that their persons and fortunes might not be
placed in the power of an unworthy father, but under the protection of
persons of the highest morality, such as their maternal grandfather and
their kind Aunt Eliza.
Shelley’s counsel took care to say nothing in defence of _Queen Mab_:
there was nothing to be said at that time, and in that place, the Court
of Chancery. He confined himself to denying the importance of a work
written by a boy of nineteen.
“Notwithstanding Mr. Shelley’s violent philippics against marriage, Mr.
Shelley marries twice before he is twenty-five! He is no sooner
liberated from the despotic chains which he speaks of with so much
horror and contempt, than he forges a new set, and becomes again a
willing victim of this horrid despotism! It is hoped that a
consideration of this marked difference between his opinions and his
actions will induce the Lord Chancellor not to think very seriously of
this boyish and silly publication.” As to the proposal of placing the
children with their mother’s family: “We think it right to say that Mr.
Westbrook formerly kept a coffee-house, and is certainly in no respect
qualified to be the guardian of Mr. Shelley’s children. To Miss
Westbrook there are more decided objections: she is illiterate and
vulgar, and it was by her advice, with her active concurrence, and it
may be said by her _management_, that Mr. Shelley, when of the age of
nineteen, ran away with Miss Harriet Westbrook, then of the age of
seventeen, and married her in Scotland. Miss Westbrook, the proposed
guardian, was then nearly thirty, and, if she had acted as she ought to
have done as the guardian and friend of her younger sister, all this
misery and disgrace to both families would have been avoided.”
His counsel’s ingenious notion of winning his client’s case by
renouncing in that client’s name the opinions of his youth, seemed to
Shelley a piece of disgusting hypocrisy. He, therefore, drew up for the
Lord Chancellor a statement in which he set forth that his ideas on
marriage had not changed, and that if he had made his conduct conform to
the customs of society, he in no way had renounced the liberty to
criticize those customs.
The Lord Chancellor in his judgment remarks: “This is a case in which a
father has demonstrated that he must and does deem it to be a matter of
duty to recommend to those whose opinions and habits he may take upon
himself to form conduct as moral and virtuous, which the law calls upon
me to consider as immoral and vicious. . . . I cannot, therefore, in
these conditions, entrust him with the guardianship of these children.”
But the Lord Chancellor refused to confide them to the odious
Westbrooks. He put them under the care of an Army doctor, named Hume, of
Brent End Lodge, Hanwell, who would place the boy, when seven years old,
at a good private school under the superintendence of an orthodox
clergyman. As to the little Ianthe, she would be brought up at home by
Mrs. Hume, who would see that she said her morning prayers, and asked a
blessing on her food. Mrs. Hume would also put into her hands improving
books, and, to a certain extent would encourage the reading of poetry,
Shakespeare for instance, if carefully Bowdlerized. The whole cost, one
hundred a year for each child. Mr. Shelley might visit them twelve times
a year, but in the presence of Dr. and Mrs. Hume. Mr. John Westbrook
might see them the same number of times, but, if he wished it, he might
see them without the Humes being present.
This sentence was very bitter to Shelley. It sanctioned officially so to
say, and in reasonable and moderate formulas, his exile from the
community of civilized men. It was like a brevet of incurable folly.
* * *
While the case was being fought out, he had bought a house in the
pleasant little country town of Great Marlow. Ariel at last consented to
have a home like other people. One room, big enough for a village
ball-room, was fitted up as a library, and decorated with casts of Venus
and Apollo. There was a very big garden: in this during the spring and
summer of 1817 might be seen two babies, William and Clara Shelley, and
a third child of unusual beauty, Alba, daughter of Lord Byron and
Claire. Her father was said to be leading a wild life at Venice. Claire
received no news from him.
Shelley’s recent trials had left their traces on his countenance. He was
thinner, more hectic, and stooped more than ever. A violent pain in his
side prevented him from sleeping, and the doctors, unable to cure it,
said it was “a nervous disorder.”
His state of mind was despondent. Life had brought him so much
suffering, his good intentions had been repaid by such evil results,
that he had taken a horror of every sort of action. He felt an intense
but undefined desire to withdraw from the perilous throngs of men, men
whose reactions cannot be predicted, and who are swayed by such terrible
gusts of passion. The regeneration of the real world now appeared to him
so unrealizable that he no longer sought satisfaction therein for his
loves and hatreds, but looked for it in the more docile and malleable
world of the imagination. Subjects for poems, vague and shadow-like,
floated round him, which feeding on his sorrowful thoughts, gradually
took form at the expense of his powers of action.
The aërial edifices, the crystalline palaces, which with their filmy
vapours had so long hidden from him the actual world, seemed to detach
themselves from earth and to float up as though drawn by an invisible
force. They did not melt away, but swaying with a gentle movement rose
in all their translucent glory to the high realms of pure Poetry. In the
place which they had occupied, Shelley now saw the world as it is, the
brown earth arduous to cultivate, the harsh faces of men, women full of
nerves and hysteria, the cruel and obstructive society from which he
longed to escape.
The poem which occupied his thoughts the oftenest was the story of an
ideal Revolution. He did not want the scenes of bloodshed which ruined
for him the otherwise inspiring story of the French Revolution. He
wanted his Revolution to be the work of a pair of lovers. His personal
experience had taught him that only the love of a woman can inspire a
sublime courage.
Laon and Cythna, two ideal anarchists, were to be the transfigured
portraits of himself and Mary. He would make them die at the stake, for
their ideas, as he would have liked to die himself, exchanging a last
kiss in the midst of the flames, a kiss so delicious that the agony
would become a sort of voluptuous refinement of ecstasy. For him love
did not attain its maximum unless he could associate it with thoughts
and sufferings shared in common. Now that he and Mary, married and
fairly well off, seemed about to begin an easier life, he desired to
escape from this somewhat commonplace happiness, and to live in
imagination the magnificent and perilous destiny which might have been
his in other lands and other ages.
He passed his time among the little islands of the Thames where the
swans build their nests. Lying at the bottom of his boat completely
hidden by the high grasses, he sought his inspiration in gazing up at
the changing skies. The study of fleeting, interweaving colour and form
had always given him immense pleasure, and every day he felt more
strongly that his real mission in life was to seize the most transitory
shades of beauty, and to fix them for ever in words buoyant and
beautiful as themselves.
The entire summer was given to this entrancing work. Then he was obliged
to go up to London. Money was getting scarce; he had so many mouths to
feed. Besides Mary and the children, Claire and Allegra were dependent
on him, and very often the entire Godwin household. His new friend,
Leigh Hunt, with a wife and five children, needed help. He had promised
Peacock a hundred a year so that he might go on writing his fine novels.
Charles Clairmont, who was nothing to him, had fallen in love when in
France with an ugly woman several years older than himself and of course
penniless; it was Shelley who provided the means for marriage. Just as
formerly, he had to go to the money-lenders in order to satisfy these
endless claims. “You’re a thoroughbred,” Godwin once told him, “whom the
horse-flies prevent from taking your spring.”
Happily for him, Mary managed to bring him back to earth, and he forgave
her, seeing her now only as the Cythna of his poem. But she, an
over-anxious hostess, did not care for their too assiduous visitors,
such as Peacock, who dropped in every evening “without being asked,” and
drank up a whole bottle of wine. She wanted Shelley to find a purchaser
for the Marlow House which they had bought too hastily. She saw he
suffered from cold, and wished to take him away to a warmer climate,
perhaps to Italy.
“Dearest love,” she wrote to him in London. . . . “Pray in your letters
do be more explicit! You have advertised the house, but have you given
Madocks any orders about how to answer applicants? And have you settled
yet for Italy or the sea? And do you know how to get money to convey us
there, and to buy the things that will be absolutely necessary before
our departure? And can you do anything for my father before you go? Or,
after all, would it not be as well to inhabit a small house by the
seashore where our expenses would be much less than they are at present?
You have not yet mentioned to Godwin your thoughts of Italy; but if you
determine soon, I would have you do it, as those things are always
better to be talked of some days before they take place.
“I took my first walk to-day! What a dreadfully cold place this house
is! I was shivering over a fire and the garden looked cold and dismal,
but so soon as I got into the road I found to my infinite surprise that
the sun was shining and the air warm and delightful.
“I wish Willy to be my companion in my future walks; to further which
plan will you send down if possible by Monday’s coach, a sealskin fur
hat for him? It must be a fashionable round shape, _for a boy_ mention
particularly, and have a narrow gold ribbon round it, that it may be
taken in if too large. . . . I am just now surrounded by babes. Alba is
scratching and crowing, William amusing himself with wrapping a shawl
round him, and Miss Clara staring at the fire. . . . Adieu, dearest
love! I want to say again that you may fully answer me, how very, very
anxious I am to know the whole extent of your present difficulties and
pursuits.”
One source of annoyance to Mary was the presence of Alba in the house.
The neighbours had been told that she was the child of a lady in London
and had been sent to the country for her health, but anyone could see
from Claire’s behaviour that the child was hers. The pure-minded jumped
at once to the conclusion that Shelley was the father. The old
accusations of promiscuity again reared their heads, and Mary’s
prudishness suffered from it. One of the reasons for which she wished to
go to Italy was that the journey would enable them to take the little
girl out to Lord Byron.
Shelley’s one wish also was to depart. The ties of family, of
friendship, of business, had raised round him intangible walls behind
which he was stifling. His will was rock-like, but life’s little waves,
perfidious and unconcerned, ate away at it ceaselessly. In England where
the highest legal dignity had taken from him his civic rights, he had
the sensation of standing always in the pillory. It seemed to him that
in flying from England, he would become again a free and aërial spirit,
that in a new country his life would be like a sheet of white paper on
which he could compose a new existence in the same way that he could
compose a poem.
When their departure was fixed, Mary asked to have the children
baptized. She thought it was better for them to start in life by
observing the Rules of the Game. Shelley agreed, and at the same time
that William Shelley and Clara Everina Shelley were christened, Byron’s
daughter was christened too under the names of Clara Allegra.