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THE REAL SHELLEY.

VOL. II




  THE REAL SHELLEY.

  NEW VIEWS OF THE POET’S LIFE.


  BY JOHN CORDY JEAFFRESON,
  AUTHOR OF ‘THE REAL LORD BYRON,’
  ‘A BOOK ABOUT DOCTORS,’
  ‘A BOOK ABOUT LAWYERS,’ &c. &c.


  IN TWO VOLUMES.

  VOL. II.


  LONDON:
  HURST AND BLACKETT, PUBLISHERS,
  13 GREAT MARLBOROUGH STREET.
  1885.
  _All Rights reserved._




  LONDON:
  PRINTED BY STRANGEWAYS AND SONS,
  Tower Street, Upper St. Martin’s Lane.




CONTENTS OF THE SECOND VOLUME.


                                                                      PAGE

  CHAPTER I. WILLIAM GODWIN                                              1

    Mr. Kegan Paul’s Inaccuracies--Godwin’s Early Story--From
    Socinianism to Deism--In the Service of Publishers--
    Hack-Work--_Political Justice_--_Caleb Williams_--Temperance
    and Frugality--Godwin’s two imprudent Marriages--His
    consequent Impoverishment--His personal Appearance--His
    Speech and Manner--His morbid Vanity--His Sensitiveness for
    his Dignity--His Benevolence and Honesty--Good Husband and
    good Father--Looking out for a suitable Young Woman--Mary
    Wollstonecraft--Godwin’s Regard for her--Mary in Heaven--A
    Blighted Being.

  CHAPTER II. MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT                                       12

    The new Settler in George Street, Blackfriars--Mary’s earlier
    Story--Woman of Letters--Her Five Years’ Work--Her Attachment
    to Mr. Johnson--Coteries of Philosophical Radicalism--
    _Anti-Jacobin_ on the Free Contract--Godwin’s Apostasy--From
    Blackfriars to Store Street--The Slut become a modish
    Woman--Her Passion for Fuseli--Her Appeal to Mrs. Fuseli--Mr.
    Kegan Paul’s strange Treatment of Mr. Knowles--_Rights of
    Woman_--Plain Speech and Coarseness--Mary goes to Paris--She
    makes Imlay’s Acquaintance--Her Assignation with him at the
    Barrier--Their Association in Free Love--Mr. Kegan Paul
    speaks deliberately--His Apology for Mary’s Action--He falls
    between Two Stools--Wife in the eyes of God and Man--Letters
    to Imlay--Badness of Mary’s Temper--Her consequent Quarrels
    with Imlay--Her Sense of Shame at her Position--Birth of her
    illegitimate Child--Her Withdrawal from France--Her Norwegian
    Trip--Her Wretchedness and Rage--Dissolution of the Free Love
    Partnership--Mary’s Attempt to commit Suicide--Was she out
    of her Mind?--Her Union with Godwin in Free Love--Their
    subsequent Marriage--Their Squabbles and Differences--Their
    Daughter’s Birth--Mary Wollstonecraft’s Death--Mrs. Shelley’s
    biographical Inaccuracies.

  CHAPTER III. THE SECOND MRS. WILLIAM GODWIN                           60

    The Blighted Being--Miss Jones’s Disappointment--The Blighted
    Being goes to Bath--He proposes to Miss Harriet Lee--Is
    rejected by Mrs. Reveley--Is accepted by Mary Jane
    Clairmont--Who was she?--Her Children by her first
    Marriage--Their Ages in 1801--Points of Resemblance in Mary
    Wollstonecraft and Mary Jane Clairmont--The Blighted Being
    marries Mary Jane Clairmont--Mr. Kegan Paul’s serious
    Misrepresentations of Claire’s Age--The Use made of this
    Misrepresentation--Mr. Kegan Paul convicted by his own
    Evidences--Charles Clairmont’s Boyhood--Godwin’s Regard for
    his second Wife--Misrepresentations touching the second Mrs.
    Godwin--Childhood of Mary and Claire--Education of Godwin’s
    Children and Step-children--Charles Clairmont’s Introduction
    to Free Thought--Godwin’s Care to withhold Mary from Free
    Thought--She is reared in Ignorance of her Mother’s Story--
    The Book-shop in Hanway Street--The Godwins of The Polygon--
    Their Migration to the City--The Godwins of Skinner Street.

  CHAPTER IV. THE IRISH CAMPAIGN, AND THE STAY AT NANTGWILLT            78

    Opium and Hallucination at Keswick--Migration to Ireland--
    Shelley’s Letters to Miss Hitchener--Curran’s Coldness to the
    Adventurer--Publication of the _Address to the Irish People_--
    Measures for putting the Pamphlet in Circulation--Harriett’s
    Amusement--Shelley’s Seriousness--Shelley’s other Irish
    Tract--Public Meeting in the Fishamble Street Theatre--
    Shelley’s Speech to the Sixth Resolution--Various Accounts of
    the Speech--Mr. MacCarthy’s bad Manners--Honest Jack
    Lawless--His Project for a History of Ireland--His Way of
    handling Shelley--William Godwin’s Alarm--Shelley’s
    Submission--His Intercourse with Curran--His Withdrawal from
    Ireland--Seizure of his Papers at the Holyhead
    Custom-House--Harriett’s Letter to Portia--The Shelleys in
    Wales--Miss Hitchener’s ‘Divine Suggestion’--Harriett and
    Eliza don’t think it ‘Divine’--Shelley at Nantgwillt--His
    Scheme for turning Farmer--His comprehensive Invitation to
    the Godwins--His sudden Departure from Nantgwillt--Cause of
    the Departure--Mr. MacCarthy again at Fault.

  CHAPTER V. NORTH DEVON                                               100

    Mr. Eton’s Cottage near Tintern Abbey--Shelley’s Reason for
    not taking the Cottage--His Letter to Mr. Eton--Godwin’s
    expostulatory Epistle--His Grounds for thinking Shelley
    prodigal--Reasonableness of Godwin’s Admonitions--Hogg and
    MacCarthy at fault--Shelley’s Letters from Lynton to Godwin--
    Miss Hitchener at Lynton--Porcia _alias_ Portia--_Letter_ to
    Lord Ellenborough--Printed at Barnstaple--Mr. Chanter’s
    _Sketches of the Literary History of Barnstaple_--Fifty
    Copies of the _Letter_ sent to London--Shelley’s Measures for
    the political Enlightenment of North Devon Peasants--His
    Irish Servant, Daniel Hill--Commotion at Barnstaple--Daniel
    Hill’s Arrest and Imprisonment--Mr. Syle’s Alarm--Shelley’s
    humiliating and perilous Position--His Flight from North
    Devon to Wales--William Godwin’s Trip from London to
    Lynton--His Surprise and Disappointment--His ‘Good News’ of
    the Fugitives.

  CHAPTER VI. NORTH WALES AND THE SECOND IRISH TRIP                    120

    William A. Madocks--The Tremadoc Embankment--Shelley’s Zeal
    for the People of Tremadoc--His big Subscription to the
    Embankment Fund--Tanyrallt Lodge--Shelley in London--Sussex
    Selfishness--The Reconciliation with Hogg--Miss Hitchener in
    Disgrace--She is banished from ‘Percy’s Little Circle’--Brown
    Demon and Hermaphroditical Beast--Shelley in Skinner Street--
    Claire and Mary--Fanny Imlay’s Intercourse with Shelley--The
    Worth and Worthlessness of Claire’s Evidence-- Shelley’s
    Prodigality--Back at Tanyrallt--At Work on _Queen Mab_--At
    War with Neighbours--Embankment Annoyances--Livelier Delight
    in Harriett--Wheedling Letter to the Duke of Norfolk--Diet
    and Dyspepsia--The Hunts in Trouble--Shelley’s Contribution
    for their Relief--The odious Leeson--Daniel Hill’s Liberation
    from Prison--His Arrival at Tanyrallt Lodge--The Tanyrallt
    Mystery--Shelley’s marvellous and conflicting Stories--
    Exhibition of the Evidence--Inquisition and Verdict--
    Shelley’s ignominious Position--His virtuous Indignation at
    the World’s Villany--His undiminished Concern for Liberty and
    Virtue--His Withdrawal from Wales to Ireland--He hastens from
    Dublin to Killarney--Hogg in Dublin--The Shelleys back in
    London.

  CHAPTER VII. LONDON AND BRACKNELL                                    164

    Imprint of _Queen Mab_--The Poem’s Notes--The Author’s Views
    touching Marriage--Places of Abode in London--Presentation
    Copies--Shelley ‘a Lion’--Half-Moon Street--Diet and
    Discomfort--Quacks and Crotchet-Mongers--‘Nakedized
    Children’--Cornelia Newton--Maimuna and her Salon--
    Elephantiasis--‘The Hampstead Stage’--Dinner Party at Norfolk
    House--The Duke’s Mediation between the Father and Son--
    Failure of the Negotiations--Shelley declines to be ‘a
    miserable Slave’--At the Pimlico Lodgings--Correspondence
    with Mr. Medwin, of Horsham--Birth of Ianthe Eliza--Shelley
    as a Father--Conflict of Evidence respecting his Parental
    Character--Shelley’s Kindness to Children--The Poet sets up
    his Carriage--His Prodigality in London--His Life at
    Bracknell--Maimuna at her Country-House--Last Visits to Field
    Place--Captain Kennedy’s Reminiscences--Medwin’s Gossip--The
    Trip to Scotland--Dissensions and Estrangements--Shelley and
    Harriett drifting apart--_Queen Mab’s_ Vegetarian
    Note--_Refutation of Deism_.

  CHAPTER VIII. FROM THE OLD TO THE NEW LOVE                           205

    Shelley’s Refusal to join in the Resettlement of A and B--His
    Places of Residence in Two Years and Eight Months--_A
    Refutation of Deism_--Mr. Kegan Paul’s Inaccuracies--Discord
    between Shelley and Harriett--Their Remarriage--Miss
    Westbrook’s Withdrawal--Shelley’s Desertion of Harriett--The
    Desertion closes in Separation by mutual Agreement--‘Do what
    other Women do!’--Causes of the Separation--How Shelley’s
    Evidence touching them should be regarded--Peacock’s
    Testimony for Harriett--Shelley in Skinner Street--‘The Mask
    of Scorn’--Mary Godwin _not_ bred up to mate in Free
    Contract--Old St. Pancras Church--At Mary Wollstonecraft’s
    Grave--Claire’s Part in the Wooing--Excuses for Mary
    Godwin--The Elopement from Skinner Street--From London to
    Dover--From Dover to Calais--A ‘Scene’ at Calais--The Joint
    Journal--Mrs. Shelley convicted of Tampering with Evidence--
    The Six Weeks’ Tour--Shelley begs Harriett to come to him in
    Switzerland--Byron’s Hunger for Evil Fame--Shelley’s
    Self-Approbation and Self-Righteousness--Godwin’s Wrath with
    Shelley--Their subsequent Relations--Shelley’s Renewal of
    Intercourse with Harriett--Tiffs and Disagreements between
    Claire and Mary--Claire’s Incapacity for Friendship--She
    wants more than Friendship from Shelley.

  CHAPTER IX. BISHOPGATE                                               257

    Pecuniary Difficulties and Resources--Choice of a Profession--
    Shelley walking a Hospital--Dropt by Acquaintances--Birth of
    Mary Godwin’s first Child--Sir Bysshe Shelley’s Death--
    Differences and Tiffs between Mary and Claire--Characteristics
    of the Sisters--Trip to South Devon--At Work on _Alastor_--
    Publication of the Poem--_Essay on Christianity_--Life at
    Bishopgate--Shelley’s Idolatry of Byron--Birth of Mary
    Godwin’s first-born Son--Claire and Byron--Second Trip to
    Switzerland--Shelley’s Pretext for leaving England--Strange
    Scene between Shelley and Peacock--Semi-Delusions--Another
    Hallucination.

  CHAPTER X. THE GENEVESE EPISODE                                      287

    Shelley’s Arrival at Geneva--Byron and Polidori--At the
    Sécheron Hotel--Union of the two Parties--Tattle of the
    Coteries--The Genevese Scandal--Its Fruit in _Manfred_ and
    _Cain_--Its Fruit in _Laon and Cythna_--The Shelleys’ Return
    to England--Their Stay at Bath--Their Choice of a House at
    Great Marlow--Fanny Imlay’s Suicide--Her pitiable Story--
    Harriett’s Suicide--Review of Shelley’s Treatment of her--His
    Responsibility for her Depravation and Ruin--Witnesses to
    Character and Conduct--Shelley’s Grief for Harriett--His wild
    Speech about her--His Marriage with Mary Godwin--Birth of
    Allegra.

  CHAPTER XI. THE CHANCERY SUIT                                        304

    Mr. Westbrook’s Petition to the Court of Chancery--Date of
    Hearing--The _Edinburgh_ Reviewer’s Strange
    Misrepresentation--Lord Eldon’s Decree--Arrangements for
    Harriett’s Children--Lady Shelley’s strange Mistake touching
    those Arrangements--Lord Eldon’s Justification--Mrs.
    Shelley’s Regard for Social Opinion--Shelley’s keen Annoyance
    at the Chancellor’s Decree--Delusive Egotisms of _The Billows
    of the Beach_--Shelley’s Pretexts for going to Italy--His
    real Reasons for withdrawing from England.

  CHAPTER XII. GREAT MARLOW                                            317

    The Misleading Tablet--House and Garden--Claire at Marlow--
    Shelley’s Delight in Claire’s Voice--_To Constantia
    Singing_--Source of the Name--Trips to London--_The Marlow
    Pamphlets_--_Rosalind and Helen_--Other Literary Work at
    Marlow--Mary’s Treatment and Opinion of Claire--Shelley makes
    his Will--Date of Probate--The Will’s various Legacies--
    Significant Legacies to Claire--Object of the Second Legacy
    of £6000--Did Shelley mean to leave Claire so much as
    £12,000?--Mr. Froude’s Indiscretion--His Ignorance of the
    Will.

  CHAPTER XIII. LAON AND CYTHNA                                        329

    Origin of the Free-Contract Party--Divorce in Catholic
    England--Nullification of Marriage--Consequences of the
    Reformation--Edward the Sixth’s Commissioners for the
    Amendment of Ecclesiastical Laws--Martin Bucer’s _Judgment
    touching Divorce_--John Milton on Freedom of Divorce--
    Denunciations of Marriage by the Godwinian Radicals--Poetical
    Fruits of the Genevese Scandal--Byron’s Timidity--Shelley’s
    Boldness--His most extravagant Conclusions touching Liberty
    of Affection--Appalling Doctrine of _Laon and Cythna_--
    Shelley’s Purpose in publishing the Poem--Alarm of the
    Olliers--Shelley’s Instructions to the frightened
    Publishers--Suppression of the monstrous Poem--Friends in
    Council--_Laon and Cythna_ manipulated into the _Revolt of
    Islam_--The _Quarterly Review_ on the original Poem--
    Consequences to Shelley’s Reputation--Irony of Fate.

  CHAPTER XIV. FROM MARLOW TO ITALY                                    351

    The Hunts and the Shelleys--Their Intimacy--Pecuniary
    Difficulties--Dealings with Money-lenders--Leigh Hunt
    relieves Shelley of £1400--His Testimony to Shelley’s
    virtuous Manners--Shelley’s Benevolence at Marlow--At the
    Opera--Departure for Italy--The fated Children--Shelley’s
    literary Work and studious Life in Italy--Milan--Allegra sent
    to her Father--Elise the Swiss Nurse--Her Knowledge and
    Suspicions--Claire and her ‘Sister’--Their Affectionate
    Intercourse and Occasional Quarrels--Shelley’s Affection for
    Claire--Vagrants in Italy--Pisa--Leghorn--Maria Gisborne--Her
    Husband and Son--Claire and Shelley at Venice--Trick played
    on Byron--His Civilities to the Shelleys--Little Clara’s
    Death--Paolo the Knave--He falls in Love with Elise--Their
    Marriage--Paolo’s Wrath and Vengeance--Emilia Viviani--
    Shelley’s Adoration of Her--The three-cornered Flirtation--
    Mrs. Shelley’s Attitude and Action--Shelley’s Fault in the
    Affair--His subsequent Shame at the Business--The imaginary
    Assault at the Pisan Post Office.

  CHAPTER XV. PISAN ACQUAINTANCES                                      391

    The Williamses--Shelley at Ravenna--The Shelley-Claire
    Scandal--Shelley’s startling Letter to Mrs. Shelley--
    Examination of the Letter--Its wild Inaccuracies--Mrs.
    Shelley’s vindicatory Letter to Mrs. Hoppner--Demonstration
    that Byron was authorized by Shelley to withhold the
    Letter--Explanation of the Shelley-Claire Scandal--Shelley’s
    Visit to Allegra at Bagna-Cavallo--Project for starting the
    _Liberal_--Leigh Hunt invited to edit the _Liberal_--
    Shelley’s Change of Plans--His Pretexts and Reasons for
    changing them--Leigh Hunt’s Way of dealing with his
    Friends--His Concealment of his financial Position--Byron at
    Pisa--Hunt’s Misadventures on his Outward Voyage--Byron’s
    Discouragement in respect to the _Liberal_--Differences
    between Byron and Shelley--Shelley’s Position between Byron
    and Hunt--The Byron-Shelley ‘Set’ at Pisa--Shelley and Hunt
    in secret League against Byron--Shelley’s Change of Feeling
    towards Byron--Was Byron aware of the Change?

  CHAPTER XVI. CLOSING SCENES                                          423

    Shelley’s Attachment to Jane Williams--Her Womanly Goodness--
    Her Devotion to her Husband--_The Serpent is shut out from
    Paradise_--_Essay on the Devil_--Shelley’s Happiness and
    Discord with Mary--Her Remorseful Verses--Trials of her
    Married Life--_Essay on Christianity_--San Terenzo and
    Lerici--The Casa Magni--Mary’s Illness and Melancholy at San
    Terenzo--Arrival of the ‘Don Juan’--Mutual Affection of Mrs.
    Shelley and Mrs. Williams--Shelley’s latest Visions and
    Hallucinations--Leigh Hunt’s Arrival in Italy--Shelley sails
    for Leghorn--Meeting of Shelley and Hunt--Improvement in
    Shelley’s Health--His Mediation between Hunt and Byron--The
    Hunts in the Palazzo Lanfranchi--Lady Shelley’s Account of
    the Difficulties between Byron and Shelley--Shelley’s
    Contentment with his Arrangements for the Hunts--He sets Sail
    for Lerici--The Fatal Storm--Cremation on the
    Sea-shore--Grave at Rome.

  CHAPTER XVII. SHELLEY’S WIDOW AND HER SISTER-BY-AFFINITY             453

    The Widow in Italy--Her Return to England--Sojourn in the
    Strand--Life at Kentish Town--Residence at Harrow--She is
    forbidden to write her Husband’s ‘Life’--‘Moonshine’ and
    ‘Celestial Mate’--Her closing Years--Claire in her Later
    Time--Trelawny’s inaccurate Talk about Shelley’s Will--
    Claire’s Double Legacy--She becomes a Catholic--Dies in the
    Catholic Faith.

  CHAPTER XVIII. LAST WORDS                                            458

    A Schedule of Significant Matters--Delusion and
    Semi-delusion--Certain phenomenal Peculiarities of Shelley’s
    Mind--The Psychological Problem--The Story that would have
    opened Southey’s Eyes--How it would be received by Critical
    Persons--Misconceptions of Field Place--Bootlessness of
    publishing the Story--Shelley and Socialistic Literature--
    Marian Evans’ Great Error--Her Marriage--Mischievous Effects
    of the Apologies for Shelleyan Socialism--The Homage to which
    Shelley is entitled--The Homage to which he has no Title.




THE REAL SHELLEY.




CHAPTER I.

WILLIAM GODWIN.

    Mr. Kegan Paul’s Inaccuracies--Godwin’s Early Story--From Socinianism
    to Deism--In the Service of Publishers--Hack-Work--_Political
    Justice_--_Caleb Williams_--Temperance and Frugality--Godwin’s two
    imprudent Marriages--His consequent Impoverishment--His personal
    Appearance--His Speech and Manner--His morbid Vanity--His
    Sensitiveness for his Dignity--His Benevolence and Honesty--Good
    Husband and good Father--Looking out for a suitable Young Woman--Mary
    Wollstonecraft--Godwin’s Regard for her--Mary in Heaven--A Blighted
    Being.


To guard against imputations of error, that may be unjustly preferred
against this work on the authority of another man of letters, it is
needful for me to call attention to certain inaccuracies of Mr. Kegan
Paul’s chief literary performance. In Chapter VII., Vol. II., of _William
Godwin; his Friends and Contemporaries_, Mr. Kegan Paul remarks, ‘The
attraction which Godwin’s society always possessed for young men has often
been noticed, nor did it decrease as years passed on. Two young men were
drawn to him in the year 1811, fired with zeal for intellectual pursuits,
and desiring help from Godwin. They were different in their circumstances,
but were both unhappy, and both died young. The first was a lad named
Patrickson, the second Percy Bysshe Shelley.’ In this characteristic
sentence, Mr. Kegan Paul makes at least three blunders. As Patrickson was
corresponding with William Godwin in December, 1810, the youth was drawn
to the man of letters before 1811. As Shelley never saw William Godwin,
never wrote him a line, before 1812 (though Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy
states otherwise, on the strength of a misread passage of one of the
Oxonian Shelley’s epistles), he certainly did not make Godwin’s
acquaintance in 1811. As he was corresponding with him for many months
before he set eyes on him, Shelley was not in the first instance drawn to
the author of _Political Justice_ by his social charms. It is
characteristic of Mr. Kegan Paul that the page on which he declares
Patrickson to have made Godwin’s acquaintance, no earlier than 1811, faces
the very page that exhibits the greater part of a letter from the man of
letters to his ill-fated _protégé_, dated ‘Skinner Street, London,
December 18th, 1810.’

At the opening of the next chapter of his book of blunders, Mr. Kegan Paul
holds stoutly to his statement that Shelley and Godwin were in
correspondence twelve months before they exchanged letters. Instead of
being headed ‘1812-14,’ as it would have been, had it not been for this
droll misconception, Chapter VIII., Vol. II., of the book is headed ‘The
Shelleys, 1811-14,’ and opens with a short paragraph containing these
words, ‘The first notice of Shelley in the Godwin Diaries is under date
January 6th, 1811, “Write to Shelley.”’ To heighten the confusion, for
which I am slow to think Godwin’s diary in any degree accountable, the
biographer says in his next paragraph, ‘Shelley was at this time living at
Keswick, in the earlier and happier days of his marriage with Harriet
Westbrook.... He had already, in this manner, made the acquaintance of
Leigh Hunt, when, in January, 1811, he wrote thus to Godwin’:--the letter
thus submitted to the reader’s notice being Shelley’s well-known first
letter to Godwin, which appears in Hogg’s _Life_ under the right date,
‘January 3rd, 1812,’ but in Mr. Kegan Paul’s medley of mistakes under the
wrong date of ‘January 3rd, 1811.’ As Shelley’s first letter to Leigh Hunt
was dated 2nd March, 1811, it was not written before 3rd January, 1811. As
Leigh Hunt took no notice of that letter, Shelley did not make Leigh
Hunt’s acquaintance by writing it. Though Leigh Hunt saw and spoke with
Shelley on one or two occasions of earlier time, he cannot be fairly said
to have made his acquaintance before a day long subsequent to 3rd
February, 1815.

What an assemblage of errors in half-a-page of print! It is conceivable
that the usually careful Godwin in his diary gave the wrong number to the
new year,--a mistake made occasionally even by precise journalists. But if
it was so, instead of being misled by the slip into a series of bad
blunders, Mr. Kegan Paul should have detected and amended it. Here is the
list of blunders:--

_Blunder No. 1._--A wrong date of 1811 for 1812 at the head of the
chapter.

_Blunder No. 2._--The same wrong date to the extract from the diary.

_Blunder No. 3._--The same wrong date in the author’s original writing.

_Blunder No. 4._--The same error in the date given to the letter.

_Blunder No. 5._--The biographer’s own mistake of saying that Shelley was
living at Keswick in January, 1811,--months before his expulsion from
Oxford.

_Blunder No. 6._--The biographer’s own mistake of saying that Shelley and
Harriett Westbrook were husband and wife on 3rd January, 1811,--eight
calendar months before the date of their wedding.

_Blunder No. 7._--The biographer’s own mistake of saying Shelley’s first
letter to Leigh Hunt was dated before 3rd January, 1811.

_Blunder No. 8._--The biographer’s own mistake of saying Shelley made
Leigh Hunt’s acquaintance by writing that letter.

_Blunder No. 9._--The biographer’s own mistake (of years), touching the
date when Shelley made Leigh Hunt’s acquaintance.

Nine errors of fact in half-a-page of light print by a gentleman who has
put himself before the world as an authority on matters of Shelleyan
story, and who in doing so has done not a little for the obscuration of
the record. Mr. Kegan Paul is one of those accurate writers, from whom Mr.
Froude has warned me not to differ. In due course something more will be
said of Mr. Kegan Paul’s services to Shelleyan research, but for the
moment readers are invited to give their attention to a more notable man
of letters.

Born at Wisbech, Co. Cambridge, on 3rd March, 1756, William Godwin was in
his fifty-sixth year when he received Shelley’s letter of entreaty for
sympathy and guidance. The son of a Dissenting minister, who never rose to
any eminence or a higher stipend than 60_l._ a-year in his vocation,
William Godwin was reared amongst people of lowly fortune and rude
manners, in the eastern counties, receiving in his boyhood, from teachers
of no singular efficiency, an education neither greatly better nor
greatly worse than the training ordinarily given to English boys of his
social degree in the later half of the last century. On escaping from
these schoolmasters, one of whom he had served in the capacity of an
usher, the future man of letters went to the Hoxton College in order to
qualify himself for his father’s calling; and on leaving that seminary he
officiated for a few years as a Non-conforming minister, preaching and
otherwise labouring in a way of life for which he soon discovered his
unfitness, first at Ware in Hertfordshire, then at Stowmarket in Suffolk,
and then at Beaconsfield, Co. Bucks. A volume of sermons, published some
while after their delivery to rural congregations, still remains in
evidence that if Godwin in his days of irregular reverence was as good a
preacher as the average Non-conforming pulpiteers of his period,
Dissenters were edified in George the Third’s earlier time with worse
sermons than is generally supposed.

Ere long the young minister discovered that he could not believe what he
was bound to teach. That from manhood’s threshold he was more than
slightly disposed to religious scepticism is shown by the curious
disputation he held on paper, during his last year at Hoxton, with a
fellow-student, the question of the strictly private and confidential
controversy being the existence of the Deity. Could he have proved to his
satisfaction the existence of the Almighty, Godwin conceived he would be
troubled by no doubt of the truth of Christianity, nor by any disposition
to quarrel with the refinements of Calvinistic doctrine. Under these
circumstances Godwin took the negative side in the secret controversy,
hoping that his arguments would be demolished and his faith settled by his
fellow-collegian. The result of the conflict does not appear. Possibly the
paper war satisfied the doubter that he could conscientiously enter the
ministry. If so, it only suppressed for a period the doubts that
determined Godwin a few years later to seek another means of livelihood.
At Beaconsfield (1783) he was converted to Socinianism by Priestley’s
_Institutes_. Five years later he had passed through Socinianism into
Deism.

On becoming a Unitarian he took the ordinary course of a young man who,
too poor to live in idleness, and too honest to live by daily falsehood,
possesses studious tastes and literary aptitude. Coming to London he
sought employment of the publishers, and contrived to live hardly,
painfully, temperately, as a book-maker and publisher’s hack, whilst he
persisted in the labours of a student. Producing in his twenty-eighth year
a _Life of Lord Chatham_, for which he got nothing, and the _Defence of
the Rockingham Party_, for which Stockdale paid him five guineas, he went
on reading strenuously and writing as he best could,--throwing off
articles for the _English Review_ at two guineas a-sheet, turning out
forgotten novels for which he was paid from five to twenty guineas,
translating for Murray the French MS. _Memoirs of Simon Lord Lovat_; doing
whatever work came to hand, till he was appointed at sixty guineas per
annum to write the historical part of Robinson’s _New Annual Register_,
and to contribute articles to the _Political Herald_,--two engagements
that, coming to him in his thirtieth year, gave him at the same time a
sense of success and a sense of financial security.

The poverty and hardship, in which he had been trained from childhood till
he dropt the title of ‘Reverend’ and determined to live honestly by the
pen instead of living dishonestly by the pulpit, were serviceable to the
booksellers’ hack, whom they had taught how to live with comfort and
contentment on a precarious number of weekly shillings. The young man, who
dined sufficiently well on a chop and potato, and conceived himself to
have dined luxuriously after consuming a large beefsteak and a pint of
porter, had in some respects the advantage of literary competitors, who
together with higher culture had acquired at Oxford or Cambridge a taste
for higher living. On approaching middle life he could, however, have
afforded to relinquish the frugal habits formed during his early
struggles. The persevering hack, who steadily prosecuted various studies
whilst toiling for the publishers; the religious inquirer, who passed
through Socinianism on his way from Calvinism to Deism; the resolute
Radical, who sought the justification of his political sentiments in
philosophical principles, whilst living in close friendship with Thomas
Holcroft, and cordial good fellowship with Thomas Paine, was a man,
certain to achieve eminence sooner or later in the republic of letters. If
it came to him less than soon, celebrity came to Godwin none too late for
its perfect enjoyment. He was still in his thirty-eighth year, when he
published _Political Justice_,--the work for which Robinson is said to
have paid him, at different times, sums amounting to a thousand guineas;
the work that made him famous as a teacher of philosophical Radicalism.
If it made him the best-abused man of the three kingdoms, this daring and
in some respects superlatively unsound book rendered him the idol of
political enthusiasts in every quarter of the country. Unalluring in
design, repellent in style, usually guarded in expression, sold at a price
that kept it from the hands of the multitude whom it was intended chiefly
to benefit, the frigid and passionless work, whose principles could not
fail to make it regarded with disfavour by the majority of the wealthier
class, possessed no feature or quality, apart from its attractive title,
its aims and its general audacity, to humour the popular taste and win
popular applause. For such a work shrewd judges of the book-market might
well have predicted commercial failure. It was, however, successful from
every point of view. Successful for its immediate and later effect on the
readers it was especially intended to influence, it was fortunate in a
sale that exceeded the anticipations of author and publisher, and
fortunate in the determination of the Government to take no measures to
check its circulation.

Published in 1793, _Political Justice_ was still rising in public esteem,
when Godwin produced (in May 1794) _Caleb Williams_; a novel that was
largely indebted for its singular popularity to the influence of the
political treatise. The books may be said to have run together, and united
in placing their author amongst the most famous writers of his
generation,--the success of the novel stimulating the success of the
scientific study, whilst admiration of the philosopher’s reasonings
quickened the interest in his work of fancy. Whilst readers hastened
eagerly from the tale of terror to the work of unemotional demonstration,
others passed with curiosity from the volumes of the political philosopher
to the pages of the enthralling story. In the annals of English letters
there is no other case of an author, achieving almost at the same moment
so sensational a celebrity in two such different departments of literary
enterprise.

In the days when _Political Justice_ and _Caleb Williams_ were new
literature, eminently successful authors derived less emolument from their
most popular writings, than comes now-a-days to authors of inferior merit
from works of only average popularity. But putting him in pecuniary ease
for the moment, Godwin’s double triumph (though he sold the novel for a
curiously small sum) placed him in a position that, to a man of his
industry and frugal habits, was a promise of security from financial
discomfort, so long as he retained his power of working, and persisted in
the ways of prudence. That he was not likely to fall into poverty through
self-indulgence appeared from his way of living when fortune smiled upon
him. Remaining in the little house in Somers Town, where his yearly
expenditure never exceeded 130_l._, he showed no disposition either for
the pleasures of luxury or the pleasures of ostentation.

How came it that the man of letters, so averse to every kind of
prodigality, dropt in a few years into the very troubles from which his
industry and temperance seemed certain to preserve him, and, after falling
into poverty in life’s middle term, whilst the productions of his pen were
still fairly remunerative, passed the long remainder of his laborious
years in one, vain humiliating conflict with financial embarrassment? The
answer is that, with every good reason for persisting in celibacy, and no
single sound excuse for surrendering the advantages of singleness, he made
two imprudent marriages,--the second of which was only a few degrees less
imprudent and unfortunate than the earlier alliance with Mary
Wollstonecraft. In other than financial respects Godwin suffered severely
from these unions. It might almost be thought that the divine powers, who
have been assumed to concern themselves especially with the affairs of
lovers, determined to punish the arch-maligner of lawful matrimony, by
luring him into the estate he had decried, and then rendering him a signal
example of some of the evils that may ensue from wedlock. It is strange
that the man, who in celibatic freedom spoke so hardly of marriage,
endured in later time so much from the honourable estate he had warned
others to avoid. Strange also that, instead of being confirmed in his
philosophic disapproval of wedlock by what he endured in his own person
from marriage, he survived his repugnance to the whilom detestable
institution, and towards the close of his career stoutly maintained he had
never regretted either of the marriages for which he paid so dearly.

Though it is impossible for a sane biographer to write of William Godwin
with enthusiasm, or any kind of cordial admiration, no fair one can deny
that, if he was deficient in the graces requisite for a hero of
biographical romance, the author of _Political Justice_ possessed several
admirable qualities. To take a fair view of the man, who suffered severely
for kindness shown to Shelley, readers should toss aside as a mere
humorous fabrication Miss Mitford’s story of the way in which the
bookseller of Skinner Street used to go ‘down on his knees, flourishing a
drawn dagger’ at Shelley’s feet, and ‘threaten to stab himself if his
dutiful son-in-law would not accept his bills.’ They must also throw away
as vile tattle all the stories of William Godwin’s delight at finding
himself the father-in-law of a young gentleman who might some day be a
baronet. Whatever his failings, William Godwin was no such creature as
these anecdotes imply,--no such snob as snobs have declared him. In the
financial difficulties of his later time, and in the moral debasement that
almost invariably results in some degree from long exposure to such
difficulties, he was capable of begging for gifts from exalted persons,
and getting up a pecuniary testimonial in acknowledgment of his own public
services. But these were the acts of his declining age, when his brain was
losing its alertness and his pen its cunning; when publishers treated him
coldly as a man ‘no longer what he was,’ and children (not his own) hung
about him, asking him, not only for bread, but for costly education. They
were also acts done in a period when men of letters were taught by social
usage to be something less than self-dependent. At his worst, Godwin never
(like Leigh Hunt) sought the gifts of rich people in order that he might
enjoy indolence and luxuries. Ever industrious to the utmost of his
ability, and ever glad to be so, Godwin at the worst sought help only that
he might be more helpful to those who were dependent on him. Moreover,
Godwin was one of the men who have so strong a title to the world’s
tenderness and even to its reverence, that whilst gratitude enjoins us to
judge them at their best, justice forbids us to judge them at their worst.

Flattered on Northcote’s canvas, and flattered still more in Mr. Kegan
Paul’s photograph of Northcote’s picture, William Godwin’s presence was on
the whole by no means agreeably impressive; but for the badness of the
worst feature of his more remarkable than pleasing countenance he was
almost compensated by the goodness of his eyes. ‘He has,’ Southey wrote in
1797, ‘large noble eyes, and a nose,--oh, most abominable nose! Language
is not vituperatious enough to describe the effect of its downward
elongation.’ Interfering with the effect of a shapely mouth, this
grotesquely elongated nose seemed set on moving down to the chin of
corresponding prominence. From the portrait to which reference has been
made, Godwin seems in his earlier middle age to have had a visage
remarkable rather for tenuity than massiveness; but Hogg’s account of the
philosopher’s appearance affords evidence that delicacy was no
characteristic of the Skinner-Street bookseller’s personal aspect. It
would have been well if, on dropping his title to reverence, the young
_littérateur_ had also dropt the garb and manner that long afterwards
reminded beholders of his original calling. When he dined _tête-à-tête_,
and for the first time with William Godwin, Hogg observed that the ‘short,
stout, thickset old man, of very fair complexion,’ and a head no less
remarkable for baldness than magnitude, had altogether the ‘appearance of
a Dissenting minister;’--a statement to be regarded as sufficient
testimony that the author of _Caleb Williams_ had not altogether the
appearance of a gentleman, at least in the opinion of Mr. Hogg, ever
disdainful of Dissenters.

Another thing to come under the saucy young Templar’s notice was that,
whilst having altogether the ‘appearance of a Dissenting minister,’ his
companion lacked the colloquial address of a gentleman of society and
breeding. His articulation wanted distinctness, and his uneasy utterance
was attended by a show of effort and distress, that might almost be called
an impediment. But though painful on being noticed for the first time,
this difficulty ceased to trouble listeners when they grew accustomed to
it, and even gave an agreeable distinctiveness to a somewhat harsh and
discordant voice.

William Godwin’s moral nature resembled his appearance and manner, in
comprising several agreeable and commendable qualities, without being
altogether pleasing or in any degree remarkable for dignity. To the last,
also, it resembled them in affording indications of the humility of his
original condition and earlier circumstances. The man of intellect, whose
costume and bearing reminded people that he had formerly been a Dissenting
minister in small market-towns, never survived the influence of the rural
conventicle; never outlived the social influences of the humble and
unrefined people, who had surrounded him in his days of ministerial
service. The egregious vanity, that animated him from youth to old age,
was not the almost generous infirmity to be observed in the elegant and
refined, but the mean and despicable vanity of the rude and
vulgar-minded. Ever accessible to flatterers, he swallowed the grossest
adulations with keen relish;--with ludicrous greed, if it were prepared
for his palate by feminine artifice. When the postman laid a letter on his
Skinner-Street shop-counter, the philosopher’s countenance flushed if he
saw himself designated in the superscription ‘Mr. Godwin,’ instead of
‘William Godwin, _esquire_.’

On the other hand, he had numerous good qualities. He was, upon the whole,
truthful and honest; just to men he disliked and principles he
disapproved, and altogether the benevolent man he commended himself for
being. In all that related to, his opinions on politics, religion, and the
social virtues, and his ways of promulgating and enforcing those opinions,
he was sincere as sunlight, and absolutely cantless. The only fault of his
sympathetic and judicious benevolence was that it sometimes exceeded his
means. Alike in the days when he was a needy hack, in his brief term of
prosperity, and in the long period of his financial difficulties, poor
people hung about him and had money from him. Beneficent to his indigent
relatives, he was no less beneficent to persons not of his kindred. The
interest he displayed in young men, and the pains he took for their
mental, moral, and material welfare, cannot be too highly commended. From
the date of his marriage with Mary Wollstonecraft, he was a bright example
of domestic virtue. A good husband to that curious woman, who, during
their brief association, tried him not a little with her captious and
querulous temper; he was a good husband to his second wife, who (though by
no means so bad a person as the wilder Shelleyan enthusiasts would have us
believe) tried him for a long period almost as vexatiously as Mary
Wollstonecraft tried him for a short one. A man is not to be extolled for
being good to his own children. But it is much to Godwin’s credit that,
whilst he was a good father to his daughter by Mary Wollstonecraft, and to
his son by his second wife, he was quite as good a father to his three
step-children--to Mary Wollstonecraft’s illegitimate daughter Fanny, to
Charles Clairmont (the second Mrs. Godwin’s son by her former husband),
and to Charles’s sister Jane,--the Jane Clairmont _alias_ Claire of
Byronic story.

But though he is to be respected for all these good, honest, wholesome
qualities, it remains that Godwin’s unemotional nature and unrefined
homeliness forbid the biographer to write rapturously about him. No
considerable man of letters has, in recent times, been more curiously
wanting in the mental, moral, and personal graces, which the fancy is apt
to associate with famous followers of the higher arts. Though he wrote
many novels (one of them being a tale of no uncommon vigour), he was
curiously wanting in romantic fervour and imaginativeness. Though he was
ambitious of writing for the stage, and made several essays in dramatic
literature, he was absolutely devoid of poetical sensibility. Capable of
firm, though cold, friendship, he was absolutely incapable of love. When
it occurred to him, in his twenty-ninth year, that he might as well have a
wife to cook his daily chop and look after his shirt-buttons, he
commissioned his sister to look out for a suitable young woman. In
middle-age, when he slipped from ordinary friendship into a closer
alliance with Mary Wollstonecraft, he was careful to provide himself with
a peculiar and private lodging at a convenient distance from their common
home in ‘The Polygon,’ Somers Town, in order that he might be able to
spend most of his time well out of her way. Some ten or twelve months
later, Mary Wollstonecraft was on her death-bed, sinking tranquilly, even
happily, out of this life, under the soothing influence of an anodyne,
given her a short time before by her medical attendant. ‘Oh, Godwin, I am
in heaven!’ she ejaculated, in gratitude for the effect of the medicine,
to her husband, standing over her. ‘You mean, my dear,’ he replied with
more self-command than tenderness, ‘that your physical sensations are
somewhat easier.’ It is all well, and very amusing, for Mr. Kegan Paul to
gush over the ‘blight’ that came to Godwin’s heart and life, from his
‘untimeous’ loss of the woman he never loved,--the woman whose tenderest
feelings for him differed widely from the emotions of love. But readers of
this page can need no assurance that the materialist, who reproved his
wife so drolly for thinking herself in heaven, never took her to his
embrace because he thought her an angel.




CHAPTER II.

MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT.

    The new Settler in George Street, Blackfriars--Mary’s earlier
    Story--Woman of Letters--Her Five Years’ Work--Her Attachment to Mr.
    Johnson--Coteries of Philosophical Radicalism--_Anti-Jacobin_ on the
    Free Contract--Godwin’s Apostasy--From Blackfriars to Store
    Street--The Slut becomes a modish Woman--Her Passion for Fuseli--Her
    Appeal to Mrs. Fuseli--Mr. Kegan Paul’s strange Treatment of Mr.
    Knowles--_Rights of Woman_--Plain Speech and Coarseness--Mary goes to
    Paris--She makes Imlay’s Acquaintance--Her Assignations with him at
    the Barrier--Their Association in Free Love--Mr. Kegan Paul speaks
    deliberately--His Apology for Mary’s Action--He falls between Two
    Stools--Wife in the eyes of God and Man--Letters to Imlay--Badness of
    Mary’s Temper--Her consequent Quarrels with Imlay--Her Sense of Shame
    at her Position--Birth of her illegitimate Child--Her Withdrawal from
    France--Her Norwegian Trip--Her Wretchedness and Rage--Dissolution of
    the Free Love Partnership--Mary’s Attempt to commit Suicide--Was she
    out of her Mind?--Her Union with Godwin in Free Love--Their subsequent
    Marriage--Their Squabbles and Differences--Their Daughter’s
    Birth--Mary Wollstonecraft’s Death--Mrs. Shelley’s biographical
    Inaccuracies.


On or about St. Michael’s Day of 1787, a woman, whose dress betrayed an
unfeminine indifference to the refinements of costume, and whose
intelligent countenance possessed no beauty superior to ordinary
comeliness, took possession of her new quarters in a small house in George
Street, Blackfriars, which had been hired for her occupation, and provided
with a few needful articles of furniture, by Mr. Joseph Johnson, the
bookseller and publisher of St. Paul’s Churchyard. No longer young, though
courtesy would still style her so, this woman,--whose abundant
brown-auburn tresses showed no threads of grey, whose clear and clever
brown eyes would have been more effective had not one of them suffered
from a slight paralytic drooping of the lid, whose complexion preserved a
girlish freshness, and whose countenance would have been more agreeable
had it not been for certain indications of sadness and asperity,--was in
the middle of her twenty-ninth year, when she crossed the threshold of
her new home for the first time. At that season of her history, no casual
observer of her face was likely to regard it with admiration; but few
attentive scrutinizers of its lineaments failed to discover in them the
signs of intellectual force. To take a fair view of this woman’s future
behaviour, and see how far she has been misrepresented by censors and
flatterers, it is needful to glance at her earlier story.

The granddaughter, on her father’s side, of a Spitalfields manufacturer,
the daughter of a man rich enough to live in idleness, Mary Wollstonecraft
began her life’s battle with a miserably slender education and an
embittering sense of having been defrauded of her birthright to gentility
by her father’s vicious weakness. Regarding herself as a gentlewoman by
reason of her grandfather’s opulence and the respectability of her
mother’s ancestors, this daughter of a drunken father (with several
children,--three sons and three daughters) found herself in a position
that, denying her the enjoyments to which she had once thought herself
entitled, required her to shift and provide for herself in default of a
father capable of providing for her. It is not surprising that the girl,
with a fervid and far from amiable temper, thought contemptuously of a
sire, so careless for his wife’s happiness and the interests of his
offspring. Other matters quickened her sense of life’s hardship. At the
threshold of her twenty-second year she lost her mother (whom her
self-indulgent father speedily replaced with a second wife), and became
the indignant witness of the domestic troubles of her favourite sister,
Eliza, who was married to a dissolute and brutal man, named Bishop. Under
these circumstances, she could think her father and brother-in-law
exceptionally bad men; or, rating them as average examples of masculine
nature, she could form an equally unfavourable and unjust estimate of the
sex they discredited. For a while Mary Wollstonecraft took the latter
course. Had she possessed an admirer in the ranks of the hateful sex, she
would no doubt have taken the other view of her sire and her sister’s
husband. But in those days the woman, who became almost handsome in middle
age, missed little of downright ugliness, and from personal experience
knew nothing of masculine homage. The woman of quick temper and vehement
emotionality may be presumed to have felt acutely the neglect coming to
her from her want of girlish attractiveness.

Going out into the world, when fortunate girls are choosing their
bridesmaids, Mary fought poverty in various ways,--now in the company of
her friend Fanny Blood and Fanny’s mother (who took in needlework), now in
the company of her sisters, and now in the dwellings of strangers. For a
while she earned her livelihood with the needle. Then the sisters kept a
school at Stoke Newington, one of London’s northern suburbs,--a school
that declined to return the compliment and keep the enterprising sisters.
Newington Green is memorable in Mary’s annals for other matters, besides
this ungrateful seminary for young ladies. It was there that she wrote her
first book, _Thoughts on the Education of Daughters_, for which she
received ten guineas; and it was from the same Green that she started for
her run to Lisbon, at the entreaty of her vehemently beloved Fanny Skey
(_née_ Blood), who lived just long enough to die in her friend’s arms. On
Mary’s return from Portugal to the north London suburb, the unremunerative
school was given up; and parting from her sisters, Mary went off to
Ireland to serve a dame of fashion and high quality (Lady Kingsborough) in
the capacity of governess to her ladyship’s daughters, with a yearly
salary of 40_l._,--a situation procured for her by the Rev. Mr. Prior (an
Assistant-Master at Eton, and one of the several clergymen who befriended
her at the outset of her career); the situation in which she found time to
go forward with her French studies, and write some stories for her
publisher; the situation in which, though treated with abundant kindness,
Mary was more than slightly miserable (as a young woman of her quick and
querulous temper was bound to be anywhere). Thus she had spent her time
from the middle of her twenty-second to the middle of her twenty-ninth
year. She had worked by turns with her needle and her pen; she had failed
at school-keeping, and been miserable as a governess, in a great family;
and now she has just settled herself in the little house in George Street,
Blackfriars, with the intention of earning her livelihood as a
bookseller’s hack and author by profession.

Johnson, the bookseller and publisher, showed himself a shrewd man of
business in engaging the young woman, who had been introduced to him by
the scholarly and benevolent Rev. John Hewlett. Seeing from the little
books he had already taken of her that she possessed the ‘literary knack,’
seeing also, from personal intercourse with her, that she was industrious
and resolutely set on winning a position amongst women of letters, the
publisher came to the conclusion that she would prove a more serviceable
instrument in his hands than any of the tippling scholars he was in the
habit of employing to write essays, translate French pamphlets, and dress
manuscripts for the press. The woman, who, in her delight at finding
herself in regular literary employment, regarded her publisher as her
benefactor,--the woman, who seldom ate meat and rarely drank anything but
water or tea, was a more intelligent, punctual, and manageable scribe,
than any hack Mr. Johnson could have picked from the taverns, frequented
by indigent men of letters. Temperate, sedulous, quick with her pen, and
especially desirous to please her employer, the clever woman was glad to
work twelve hours a-day in her tiny tenement, and deemed herself well
rewarded by fair payment and the almost parental interest the publisher
took in her proceedings. Working strenuously six days of the week, she
usually dined on Sunday at Mr. Johnson’s table, where she met some of the
most notable scholars, artists, and writers of the period.

For five years she led this laborious and upon the whole not unhappy life,
re-writing the English translation (from the Dutch) of _Young Grandison_;
translating _Necker on Religious Opinions_ and _Lavater’s Physiognomy_
from the French; compiling the _French Reader_; producing _Elements of
Morality from the German_; working at a novel, entitled _The Cave of
Fancy_; throwing off countless articles and critical notices for _The
Analytical Review_; putting into English numerous French political
pamphlets, that, keeping her _au courant_ in the public affairs of France,
quickened her sympathy with the revolutionary movement, and her admiration
of the revolutionary leaders of that country; and together, with other
original essays, sending through the press the _Answer to Burke_, and the
_Vindication of the Rights of Woman_, written during the first outcry
against the first part of _The Rights of Man_, by Thomas Paine, whose
acquaintance she had made before she was so imprudent as to christen her
comparatively inoffensive essay after his notorious book, and thereby to
associate herself in the popular imagination with the man of evil fame,
and with the work that only a few months later was declared by the King’s
Bench jury ‘a false, scandalous, malicious, and seditious libel.’ In the
five years, during which she was thus busily employed, Mary
Wollstonecraft helped her brother and sisters largely with her earnings,
whilst in order to do so she denied herself comforts to which she cannot
have been wholly indifferent, and pleasures which so lively and emotional
a woman must have desired. Mr. Johnson, in his later time, was of opinion
that she could not have spent in this period less than 200_l._ on her
needy relatives; and there is no reason to think the publisher’s rough
estimate excessive. The woman, who, whilst subsisting chiefly on
vegetables and exercising a severe economy in every department of her
strictly personal expenditure, used in this manner so large a proportion
of her slender and toilsome earnings was, at least, a woman to be honoured
on certain grounds and from certain points of view.

During the first four of these five years, Mary Wollstonecraft remained in
the modest quarters, in George Street, taken and furnished for her in 1787
by Mr. Johnson, of whose tender and humane treatment of her she wrote with
gratitude and affection. Writing and speaking in this strain of his
goodness and tenderness, she was at no pains to conceal from the
bookseller the feelings with which she regarded him. But though she
sometimes styled it ‘love,’ there is no reason to think her liking for the
staid and rather formal publisher resembled in any way or degree the
idolatrous admiration she soon displayed for Fuseli the painter, or the
passionate tenderness she somewhat later lavished on Imlay, the American
man of letters. It was the affection a woman, of Mary’s essentially
generous nature and peculiar circumstances, would necessarily feel for the
man, greatly her senior, who had befriended her with equal delicacy and
kindliness; had instructed her without assuming any air of authority over
her; and had helped her out of difficulties, and introduced her to
remunerative employment and congenial friends, without letting her feel
herself patronized. At the end of her fourth year in the little house in
George Street (Michaelmas, 1791), Mary Wollstonecraft moved to Store
Street, where she resided till her departure for France in December, 1792,
seeing probably something less of the Radical bookseller, but feeling no
less affectionately towards him, working no less sedulously for him.

During these five years Lady Kingsborough’s whilom governess changed
considerably in her views of life and society, her mental characteristics,
and her appearance. Partly due to time and natural development, these
changes were in a greater degree due to the influence of her professional
pursuits, of the books she read, of the circles in which she found
recreation, and of the friendships she formed in those circles. Strongly
disposed to liberalism before she settled in George Street, she would
probably, under any circumstances, have developed into an ultra-liberal.
It was therefore a matter of course, that the publisher’s hack, who in the
way of her profession became a translator of revolutionary pamphlets,
quickly adopted the views and conclusions of the revolutionists and
republicans. It was also a matter of course that the emotional and
sympathetic woman, who affected powerfully the sensibilities of those she
encountered, was in like manner affected by them. Nor is it surprising
that the woman who, after entering her thirtieth year, became better
looking every year she lived, was in the earlier term of middle life more
thoughtful of her appearance, and more anxious to exhibit it to the best
advantage, than she had been when she was a plain and unattractive young
person. In this last respect the change in Mary Wollstonecraft was almost
comically striking to those who, on greeting her as a former acquaintance
in Store Street, had not seen her since the opening of her second year in
George Street. During her residence in Blackfriars, dressing with severe
economy (partly in order that she might have more money to give to her
brothers and sisters, and partly because personal vanity was still foreign
to her nature), she was the veriest caricature of a philosophical sloven.
Her costume in the streets consisted of an ill-fitting habit of such
coarse cloth, as was generally worn by London milk-women of the succeeding
generation, a badly kept beaver hat, black stockings and clumsy shoes.
Indoors she wore the same coarse habit when the weather was cold. In
summer she sate at her desk in a cotton dressing-gown, or with no garment
over her stays. On changing the place of her abode she changed her
dressmaker and consulted a milliner. A slut in Blackfriars, she dressed
like a woman of fashion in Store Street. Though he was not the sole cause
of it, Fuseli was largely accountable for this in Miss Wollstonecraft’s
outward style.

Of all the numerous acquaintances she made in the coteries of Philosophic
Radicalism, the three persons to influence Mary Wollstonecraft most
powerfully and enduringly were Thomas Paine, Henry Fuseli, and William
Godwin. Long before William Godwin loved her, so far as it was possible
for a man of his cold nature to love any woman; long before it ever
occurred to her that she would live to be his wife, or even to have a
liking for him, William Godwin’s declarations against marriage converted
her to an open approval of the doctrines of Free Love, making her a Free
Lover in principle, some while sooner than the time when she became a Free
Lover in practice.

Of all this philosopher’s doctrines on social questions, none were more
acceptable to his admirers than those that aimed at discrediting lawful
wedlock, as an arrangement fruitful of misery and moral disease; fruitful
of no kind of felicity, that would not flow in clearer and more liberal
streams from a system of virtuous concubinage, under which spouses would
be drawn together by love and a sense of mutual affinity, and remain at
liberty to part from one another, as soon as they should cease to love,
and should discover their unfitness for, one another. Whilst vicious
libertines applauded the doctrines that seemed to justify, or at least to
palliate, their immorality, and extolled the arrangement with which it was
proposed to replace the old-fashioned wedlock, because it seemed to them
an arrangement under which a profligate might have half-a-hundred
mistresses in succession, without incurring the annoyances of social
obloquy, virtuous libertines--enthusiasts of both sexes, wholly pure of
wicked passion, with no fire of lust in their veins, no taint of
lasciviousness in their blood--saw in Free Love the one wholesome remedy
for certain of the worst ills of civilization. An entire bookcase might be
filled with the literature that streamed from the press in commendation of
Free Love (as a righteous substitute for debasing matrimony), during the
last twenty years of the last century. The _Anti-Jacobin_ made good fun of
this literature on 18th December, 1797, in the letter written to the
_Anti-Jacobin’s_ editor, by Miss Lætitia Sourby, about certain deplorable
changes for the worse in her papa’s temper, principles, and demeanour.

    ‘But’ (says Miss Lætitia) ‘to return to my father--who is now always
    reading Books and Pamphlets that seem quite wicked and immoral to my
    mind and my poor Mother’s, whom it vexes sadly to, hear my Father talk
    before company, that Marriage is good for nothing, and ought to be
    free to be broken by either party at will. It was but the other day
    that he told her, that if he were to choose again, by the New Law in
    the only Free Country in the world, he would prefer Concubinage--so he
    said in my hearing.’

Thus it was that the _Anti-Jacobin_ ridiculed the Free Lovers and their
literature at the close of the very year in which they were thrown into
lively commotion by William Godwin’s shameful act of apostasy from his own
lovely doctrines, in making Mary Wollstonecraft his lawful wife at St.
Pancras Church:--a commotion curiously comparable with the stir of
surprise and indignation, that greatly agitated the favourers of the Free
Contract only a few years since, when Marian Evans (after living in free
promise with George Henry Lewes till his death) gave herself to an
excellent gentleman, and took him for better and worse _not_ in Free
Contract, but in holy matrimony, duly solemnized in a place of public
worship, in accordance with the ordinances and requirements of the Church
of England. The favourers of the Free Contract (who had for many years
talked of Marian Evans and her genius as though they had a peculiar
property in them, and of her _nom-de-plume_ as though it were sheer
profanity to hint that George Eliot could be wrong about anything) were
comically moved and troubled by the incident, which told them how little
(with all their fussy talkativeness) they had known of the great
novelist’s reverence for the sanctity of marriage, and for every usage
tending to hallow it in the minds of men and women. In like manner were
the enemies of Marriage disturbed some ninety years since on hearing that,
after all he had written and said against lawful wedlock, and after living
with her for months in Free Love, William Godwin had taken Mary
Wollstonecraft to St. Pancras Church.

Having accepted Godwin’s doctrines touching Marriage, and become a Free
Lover in principle, during her residence in George Street, Mary
Wollstonecraft conceived a strong sentiment of affectionate admiration for
Henry Fuseli; a sentiment so fervid that, instead of being able to nurse
it secretly in her breast, she was constrained to reveal it to him, and
entreat him to give her place in his heart. Born in 1741, Fuseli was
eighteen years her senior, and about fifty years of age, when he was thus
entreated for affection by a woman, who at the time of making the prayer
knew he was a happily married man. In justice to Miss Wollstonecraft it
must be clearly put on the record, that Fuseli could have complied with
the precise terms of her entreaty, without doing aught that would have
rendered him guilty of conjugal infidelity, in the legal sense of the
term. Averring to her friends (for beside worrying Fuseli with
love-letters, she spoke freely of her passion for him to divers of her
friends) that she fully recognized Mrs. Fuseli’s right to the person of
her husband, Mary Wollstonecraft only desired that she and he should live
together in sentimental union; that he should admit her to his confidence
as a spiritual partner, and she be suffered to worship him as her
spiritual mate; that they should cherish one another with mutual platonic
fondness. It is not surprising, or much to her discredit, that she admired
thus dangerously a man of Fuseli’s genius, personal attractiveness, and
conversational brilliance; though it certainly does not speak much for her
delicacy that she was so communicative to him and others respecting her
passion and his cruelty in declining to respond, to it. What might have
happened, had Fuseli been less resolute in the right way, may be left to
the reader’s imagination. Enough for the present writer to speak of what
actually took place. Touched by love, piqued by the coldness of the man
she adored, Mary strove to lure him into regarding her case more tenderly
and mercifully. Taking blame to herself for the ill-success of her suit,
it occurred to her that she would fare better if she were more careful of
her personal appearance. Hence the choice of a new dressmaker and the
conference with a fashionable milliner.

Moving to a brighter quarter of the town, Mary arrayed herself elegantly.
At the same time she rained down letters on the man who, neglecting to
answer them, sometimes kept them for days together in his pocket without
opening them. More than once Fuseli expostulated with her on her unworthy
behaviour, and begged her to act more reasonably. ‘If I thought my passion
criminal,’ she answered, ‘I would conquer it, or die in the attempt; for
immodesty, in my eyes, is ugliness, and my soul turns with disgust from
pleasure tricked out in charms which shun the light of heaven.’ Mary’s
last attempt to achieve her purpose may surely be taken as evidence that
she spoke sincerely of the purity of her passion. Going straight to Mrs.
Fuseli, she implored the lady to receive her into her family, adding, ‘As
I am above deceit, it is right to say that this proposal arises from the
sincere affection I have for your husband; for I find that I cannot live
without the satisfaction of seeing and conversing with him daily.’
Naturally Mrs. Fuseli declined to accede to the proposal, and thought it
best for her and her husband to withdraw from an engagement to accompany
Mary on a six weeks’ trip to Paris.

This is the outline of John Knowles’s account of an affair that, known to
many people through Mary’s extravagantly indiscreet communicativeness, was
of course told in various ways, more hurtful than the true way to her
character. The evidence of the story, so true to Mary Wollstonecraft’s
human nature, is unimpeachable. Who was the narrator of the story?
Fuseli’s intimate friend, executor, and biographer, John Knowles, Fellow
of the Royal Society, was also Mrs. Fuseli’s intimate friend, after her
husband’s death. A gentleman of high place in the Navy Office, of good
social position, of known integrity, Mr. Knowles gives his account of
Fuseli’s relations with Mary Wollstonecraft in the biography of the
artist, which he wrote at Mrs. Fuseli’s request and with her assistance,
from the great painter’s papers. The account, thus given to the world, and
given (be it observed) in Mary Wollstonecraft’s interest, even more than
for the sake of the painter’s reputation, is introduced to the readers of
the biography with these words: ‘Several publications having gone so far
as totally to misrepresent the nature of his intercourse with this highly
gifted lady, it becomes the duty of his biographer to give a plain
statement of facts.’ Written to clear Fuseli and his fair friend of
imputations, more discreditable to her than to him, this plain statement
is supported in several of its principal assertions by quotations from
Mary’s letters to Fuseli; for the accuracy of which passages the historian
of unimpeachable credit, and conscientious carefulness, pledges his honour
in these words, ‘This and subsequent quotations respecting Mrs.
Wollstonecraft are taken from her letters to Fuseli.’ One of these
quotations (already given in this work) is the passage from one of her
letters in which she avows her passion for the painter, whilst declaring
that, were it criminal, she would conquer it, or die in the attempt. In
another of the quotations she declares her hope of uniting herself to the
painter’s mind. In a third quotation, after the failure of her application
to Mrs. Fuseli, Mary begs the painter’s pardon ‘for having disturbed the
quiet tenour of his life.’ A fourth quotation gives the whole of the angry
letter (signed ‘Mary’) in which, after her return from France to England
(and long after the death of her passion for the painter), she scolds
Fuseli for not returning a visit she paid him;--a letter curiously in
harmony with Mr. Knowles’s narrative. Thus the character of the narrative
is supported by the high character of the narrator; by his singularly good
opportunities for ascertaining the truth; by the fact that he was Fuseli’s
most confidential friend; by his intimacy with Mrs. Fuseli; and by the
conclusive quality of his superabundant documentary evidence. The
statement is in perfect harmony with Mary Wollstonecraft’s career. It is a
statement in which Fuseli, his wife, John Knowles, and Mary Wollstonecraft
herself, may be said to stand forth as witnesses to its truth. Yet
further, the statement is supported in its most important assertion by
Godwin himself, who speaking, in his memoir of his first wife, of her
intimacy with Fuseli, expresses a strong opinion that, had he been
unmarried, she would have wished to become the painter’s wife.

How are this statement and the superabundant evidence of its accuracy
dealt with by one of the several gentlemen who, not content with
white-washing and painting Shelley into a respectable member of a
respectable county family, and white-washing Mary Godwin into a suitable
wife for so respectable a member of so respectable a county family, must
needs whitewash Shelley’s second mother-in-law into a suitable mother for
so suitable a wife for so respectable a member of so highly respectable a
county family? In his _Life of William Godwin_, Mr. Kegan Paul ventures to
say that ‘Mr. Knowles is so extremely inaccurate in regard to all else
that he says of her, that his testimony,’ respecting Mary Wollstonecraft’s
intimacy with Fuseli, ‘may be wholly set aside.’ This astounding statement
is made by a gentleman who does not give a single fact in support of the
baseless charge of inaccuracy. It is directly the reverse of fact that Mr.
Knowles is extremely inaccurate in what he says about Mary Wollstonecraft.
In the memoir of Mary, forming the preface of his edition of her _Letters
to Imlay_, Mr. Kegan Paul calls Knowles’s careful and accurate statement a
‘preposterous story,’ _i.e._ a story contrary to nature and reason; a
wrong, foolish, monstrous, absurd story. Fortunately Mr. Kegan Paul gives
his reasons for thus stigmatizing a truthful story and conscientious
writer. (1) Mr. Kegan Paul says, ‘I have failed to find any confirmation
whatever of this preposterous story.’ (2) He says, ‘I find much which
makes directly against it, the strongest fact being that Mary remained to
the end the correspondent and close friend of Mrs. Fuseli.’ What reasons
for declaring the story ‘preposterous’! It is proved completely, proved
(as the phrase goes) up to the very hilt; but it must be false because Mr.
Kegan Paul has failed to discover any additional confirmatory evidence of
its truth,--evidence needed by no discreet reader. It must be false,
because Mrs. Fuseli corresponded with Mary to the last! This is Mr. Kegan
Paul’s _strongest fact, making directly against_ the statement.

This strongest fact is quite accordant with Knowles’s statement, that Mary
wanted from Fuseli nothing but such affection as he might have given her
without breaking his marriage vow;--the statement made for the demolition
of the stories that she had been guilty of criminal intercourse with him.
Had the statement countenanced and confirmed these scandalous stories, the
fact of Mrs. Fuseli’s intimacy with Mary would no doubt have made against
Knowles. But according to the statement, there was no reason why Mrs.
Fuseli should have ceased to be friendly with Mary, though at the close of
1792 she thought Mary had better keep away from Fuseli’s house and
presence for a short time. On the other hand according to the statement,
there were several reasons why Mrs. Fuseli should think generously and
tenderly of Mary, who in the heat of her wild and fantastic passion had
not wronged her, or wished to wrong her; had dealt frankly and fairly with
her, and thrown herself upon her with entreaties for sympathy. As he
admits this fact is his _strongest fact_ against the story, Mr. Kegan Paul
admits he has no facts whatever wherewith to discredit the story which he
ventures to call ‘preposterous.’ The explanation of the matter is this.
Published in 1831, the statement was offensive to Mrs. Shelley, who was
just then writing a lot of fantastic, and inaccurate, and romantic
nonsense about her mother, declaring her ‘one of those beings who appear
once, perhaps, in a generation, to gild humanity with a ray,’ &c., &c. In
a pet Mrs. Shelley condemned the truthful story as preposterous. Hence, it
became an article of the Field Place creed and duty to think and declare
the story preposterous. It follows that, writing in the interest and for
the pleasure of Field Place, Mr. Kegan Paul took Mrs. Shelley’s view of
the story and thought it preposterous. Thinking the story preposterous, it
was natural for Mr. Kegan Paul to discover egregious inaccuracy in one of
the most conscientious and careful biographers of English literature.

Before they cross the Channel in the company of Mary Wollstonecraft, and
take a look at revolutionary Paris, readers of this work should be told
something more of her _Vindication of the Rights of Woman, with Strictures
on Political and Moral Subjects_. In christening this book after Thomas
Paine’s notorious work, and thereby rendering him the sincerest kind of
flattery, Mary Wollstonecraft did herself a serious injury; for the
inappropriate title caused her to be associated in public sentiment with
her friend’s evil repute and evil principles,--an association from which
she suffers to this hour. So named, the treatise on feminine
disqualifications and grievances was naturally assailed with excessive
virulence by all persons, who held Paine in abhorrence. Appearing under an
inoffensive title, the treatise would have displeased the majority of
educated Englishwomen, and been severely handled by reviewers; but it
would not have sent its author down to posterity hand in hand with the
scurrilous politician and flippant freethinker.

The _Rights of Woman_ is a statement of woman’s need for a higher and
healthier education; a demand that women should have equal educational
advantages with the other sex; should be raised by education as nearly as
possible to intellectual equality with men, and for this end should from
earliest childhood be taught from the same books and trained in the same
schools as persons of the male gender. The proposal that girls should be
educated in the same schools with boys; that young women should pursue
their higher studies in the same classrooms and colleges with young men;
that from infancy to adult age, the young of both sexes should be reared
and trained side by side, was a proposal certain ninety years since to
provoke angry disapproval;--certain, even in these days of liberality and
innovation, to cause fierce disputes, should it be put forward, as a
serious suggestion to be acted upon by people of all classes throughout
the country. But this bold and startling proposal was not the chief cause
of the outcry against the _Rights of Woman_. To show their urgent need of
a better education, the author gave a picture of the women of her period
and country that stung them to fury, and in so doing, caused their
fathers, and sons, and brothers, to rise in wrath against so merciless an
assailant of the gentler sex. Mary Wollstonecraft’s charge against
Englishwomen was that they were frivolous, silly, deceitful, mean-natured,
violent in their tempers, querulous, peevish, indolent, immodest,
uncleanly in their habits, wanting in delicacy; so wanting in common
decency as to be in the habit of exposing their persons shamelessly to one
another, although they affected to be unutterably shocked if by any
accident they let a man get a view of their ankles. All this Mary
Wollstonecraft said of Englishwomen of her own social degree; and she said
it coarsely. No wonder there was an outcry against the author of the
_Rights of Woman_! No wonder that simple English ladies spoke of her
bitterly, as the arch-libeller of their sex; spoke of her with mingled
terror, disgust, and indignation! No wonder that honest English gentlemen
sided cordially with these simple English ladies.

Some of the coarseness of this censor of her sex may, no doubt, be
regarded as a mere affair of superficial style, and was referable to the
tone of the coteries in which she had been living for several years:--the
coteries of Philosophic Radicalism, where speech was even more free than
thought. But some of Mary Wollstonecraft’s coarseness was due to natural
want of refinement and a vein of vulgarity that, instead of playing only
on the surface of her life, had its source in the depths of her soul. Her
view of men and their feelings was as sordid as her view of women and
their failings. Her conception of love as a force in human affairs would
have discredited a chambermaid. Having its source in sensation, the
tenderest and most delicate passion rose and fell with the variations of
bodily desire. The result of purely physical causes, it waxed and waned
with increase and decrease of nervous excitement. According to Miss
Wollstonecraft’s view of the relations of the sexes, wives were so many
toys preserved for the diversion of the men who had appropriated them for
their enjoyment, in compliance with a nervous disposition that, always
more or less transient, was certain to perish in no long time. From its
nature the sexual affection was the most inconstant and fickle of human
forces. On marrying, every woman is admonished to anticipate the
inevitable moment when her husband’s tenderness will cease, her power of
pleasing come to end,--the time when, on discovering her inability to
charm her proprietor any longer, she will, most likely, survive her desire
and desist from her efforts to please him. ‘When the husband,’ says Mary
Wollstonecraft, ‘ceases to be a lover--and the time will inevitably
come--her desire’ (_i.e._ the young wife’s desire) ‘will grow languid, or
become a spring of bitterness; and love, perhaps, the most evanescent of
all passions, will give place to jealousy or vanity,’ On a later page of
her treatise, she says in the same hopeless strain, ‘Love, from its very
nature, must be transitory.... The most holy band of society is
friendship. It has been well said, by a shrewd satirist, that “rare as
love is, true friendship is still rarer.”’ Provided with the higher
knowledge, brighter cleverness, finer tact, coming to her from higher
education, a woman would be able to hold her husband’s love for the
longest possible period, and in some cases be able to retain his
friendship after he has ceased to love her. In all cases, where the former
lover declines to sink in the sober friend, the woman of higher education
would be able to make herself fairly comfortable, without either his love
or his friendship. It was mainly on these grounds, and for these
considerations, that Mary Wollstonecraft insisted on woman’s right to
better training.

What doctrine,--what a teacher for Englishwomen! It was by such doctrine
that Mary Wollstonecraft hoped to raise her sex from slavery and
debasement to freedom and dignity. Such was the teacher of whom Mrs.
Shelley wrote, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft was one of those beings who appear
once, perhaps, in a generation, to gild humanity with a ray which no
difference of opinion nor chance of circumstances can cloud.’ It must be
remembered that _The Rights of Woman_ is the only important original work
by her pen that deserves serious consideration,--the solitary work in
which she made a strenuous effort to influence the life and future of
humanity. The busy woman of letters produced translations, compilations,
slight essays, brief tales, critical notices by the score. A clever
letter-writer, she produced during her life a charming volume of letters
touching Sweden and Norway; and left behind her, for posthumous
publication, other _Letters to Imlay_,--letters curiously and dismally in
harmony with the sentiments and feeling of the essay on English womankind.
But _The Rights of Woman_ was her sole _important_ original work. The one
work, to be studied for information respecting her social theories, it is
the one work by which she must be judged as a social teacher. Whatever
their merits (and the works are by no means meritless), her other writings
afford nothing to justify her younger daughter’s estimate of her services
to humanity. From what has been said of _The Rights of Woman_, readers may
judge whether it was a work ‘to gild humanity with a ray’ of moral
sunshine, or a work to darken and depress humanity with dismal notions.

Unobservant of his heroine’s deep-seated and ingrained coarseness of
sentiment, Mr. Kegan Paul cannot shut his eyes to what I term her
superficial coarseness,--the coarseness of diction that is in some degree,
though by no means altogether, referable to the tone of the coteries in
which she had lived chiefly for some five years.

    ‘It may, however,’ he says of her book, ‘be admitted that her
    frankness on some subjects is little less than astounding, and that
    matters are discussed which are rarely named even among members of the
    same sex, far less printed for both.... Yet for extreme plain
    speaking, there was much reason and excuse. The times were coarser
    than ours, the days were not so far distant when the scenes were
    possible and the dangers real which Richardson’s novels portray.’

Readers may infer from these admissions (by a biographer who would fain
have us think Mary Wollstonecraft an angel) that the plain speaking to
which Kegan Paul refers is _extremely_ plain. Mr. Kegan Paul’s admissions
on these points are significant of much more than he says, to the
disadvantage of the angelic Mary. Significant also are the commonplaces
with which he palliates what he is constrained to acknowledge. From these
commonplaces one might imagine gentlewomen of George the Third’s time were
so tainted with prevailing coarseness, as to be incapable of thinking and
writing like gentlewomen. Sufficient evidence to the contrary may be found
in the writings of Catharine Macaulay, Hester Chapone, Sophia Lee, Harriet
Lee, Ann Radcliffe, Sarah Trimmer, Hannah More, Frances Burney, Lætitia
Barbauld. Madame D’Arblay could exhibit the want of refinement, noticeable
in the vulgar of her time, without ceasing to write like a woman of
refinement. Though Elizabeth Inchbald lived in the same cliques as Mary
Wollstonecraft, her pages are innocent of the ‘plain speaking’ that
revolts the reader of _The Rights of Woman_ and the _Letters to Imlay_.
The simple fact is that, though her worst failing was aggravated by the
society she kept, Mary Wollstonecraft sometimes wrote coarsely because she
sometimes thought coarsely.

It is not surprising that at the close of 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft went
to Paris, the capital to which all Englishmen and Englishwomen of
revolutionary sentiment had for some time been looking with keen interest
and enthusiastic hopefulness. ‘Well up’ in contemporary French politics,
the woman, who had translated the pamphlets of French politicians into
English, and was known in Paris as their translator, naturally wished to
see the people who had engaged so much of her thought, and to pass a few
weeks in the capital where, without having seen it, she was no stranger.
_The Rights of Woman_ had been translated into French and praised by
Parisian reviewers. It was sold on the boulevards and at the bookstalls on
the quays, as a companion-book to _The Rights of Man_. At Paris she would
be welcomed as a celebrity, honoured as one of the very few Englishwomen,
clever and brave enough to be revolutionary,--the only Englishwoman who
had at present rendered the Revolution good service with her pen. In the
reception accorded so recently to Thomas Paine, by the garrison and
municipality of Calais, and by the National Convention at Paris, she saw
the honour and enthusiasm with which she would be welcomed at the port and
the capital. Even though they forbore to plant the tricolour in her
bonnet, the people of the department of Calais would hail her on landing
as the friend and fellow-worker of Tom Paine, whom they had so lately
chosen to represent them in the National Convention. At Paris she would
receive the homage due to her literary success, and be welcomed as a
daughter of ‘the Revolution.’

In the spring of ’92 she and the Fuselis had planned a six weeks’ trip to
Paris. Through incidents, of which enough has been already said, this plan
for a summer’s trip came to nothing. It remained for Mary Wollstonecraft
to relinquish her scheme of going to Paris, to make it with other
companions, or to go to France by herself. To relinquish the scheme she
could not; for the course of events made her more and more desirous to go
to Paris. Possibly she tried and failed to find other companions of the
voyage. Anyhow she started for France alone on the 8th of December, 1792,
going thither alone, and arriving at the capital, in the midst of the
series of exciting incidents that closed with the King’s execution.

Going thither openly and in her own name (a name of notoriety in Paris),
she made her abode first under the roof of Madame Fillietaz, _née_
Bregantz, a lady in whose school at Putney, Eliza Wollstonecraft (Mrs.
Bishop), and Everina Wollstonecraft, had been assistant-governesses. Thus
suitably placed in the house of her sisters’ former employer, she remained
there for awhile, working hard at the language in whose accent she was
greatly deficient. On getting a sufficient command of the French tongue,
she went into Parisian society, and was so engrossed by its excitements
that, instead of staying for only a few weeks, she remained at Paris for
months, staying over February, though she had received ample warning that,
if she would return to England, she should leave France promptly, before
the declaration of war. Safe for the moment alike from danger, and the
dread of it, Mary stayed on, congratulating herself on being the
eye-witness of events of which she meant to be the historian. Entering
France for a brief stay she remained in the country for two years and four
months.

Going much into the world, she made the acquaintance (during the spring of
1793, if not earlier) of Captain Gilbert Imlay, citizen of the United
States of America,--a handsome, clever gentleman of war, letters, and
commerce; a soldier who had led his company in the struggle for American
Independence; an author who had produced in a series of excellent letters
a _Topographical Description of the Western Territory of North America_; a
smart adventurer, who had come to Europe to act for the sale of land in
America, and push his way to fortune in commercial enterprise. With a
smooth and plausible tongue, Captain Imlay made a favourable impression on
Mary, who (now grown into an almost handsome woman) found no difficulty in
making a similar impression on him. In the course of their sentimental
conversations on love and marriage, it struck both of them that it would
be well for them to enjoy the former without assuming the fetters of the
latter. It was enough for the handsome American that Mary returned his
passion. As she consented to love him, and give him all he required, it
was not for him to dictate the terms on which he would accept her
kindness. As she had conscientious and philosophic objections to marriage,
he was too gallant to draw her into an estate so repugnant to her sense of
right. They loved one another. Mutual love was a sufficient sanction for
the fulfilment of its own desire. As they loved one another, it was better
for them to do so on terms, that would leave them at liberty to retire
from one another when their mutual love, ‘the most evanescent of all human
passions’ (_vide_ _Rights of Woman_) should have perished. They agreed to
dote on one another, not in lawful wedlock, but in Free Love.

Mr. Kegan Paul takes two different and quite irreconcilable views of
Mary’s action in this business. _In the first place_, he insists that she
determined to associate herself with handsome Gilbert Imlay, because she
disapproved of lawful marriage. ‘She ran counter,’ Mr. Kegan Paul says, in
the _Memoir_, p. v., ‘to the customs of society, yet not wantonly or
lightly, but with forethought, in order to carry out a moral theory
gravely and religiously adopted.’ Further on, p. xxxviii., Mr. Kegan Paul
says, ‘Her view was that a common affection was marriage, and that the
marriage-tie should not bind after the death of love, if love should die.’
Hence Mr. Kegan Paul’s readers are in the first place required to believe
that Mary acted on and from religious principle in this business, and to
honour her for so acting on and from principle, although ‘she yet made the
grand mistake of supposing that it is possible for one woman to undo the
consecrated custom of ages; to set herself in opposition to the course of
society, and not be crushed by it.’ _In the second place_, and almost in
the same breath, Mr. Kegan Paul declares that religious principle was not
Mary’s motive in this affair; but that she went into Free Love with Imlay,
because a legal marriage could not have been readily effected between him
and her, as she was the subject of a sovereign with whom France was at
war; and that she would probably have insisted on being lawfully
married--_i.e._ would have acted against her principles--if that course
had at the same time been practicable and safe. It is obvious that if she
acted on and from principle, Mary Wollstonecraft did not go to Imlay’s
arms in Free Love, merely because the way by lawful marriage was for the
moment blocked; and that if she would have married him if she could, she
is not to be commended for sacrificing herself in this matter on the
shrine of religious principle. It is too much to require us at the same
moment to admire her for acting courageously from principle, and at the
same moment to believe she would have acted against her principle, had
there been no legal impediment to the latter course. Mr. Kegan Paul should
have seated himself on one stool or the other. He is undergoing the
proverbial punishment of the man who tries to sit between two stools.

What are Mr. Kegan Paul’s grounds for saying that a legal marriage with
Imlay was certainly difficult, apparently impossible, to Mary
Wollstonecraft in Paris, in the spring of 1793? His grounds for this quite
erroneous opinion are (1) that she was a British subject; (2) that
England and France were at war; (3) that her position as a British subject
was full of danger; (4) that even if a marriage with Imlay was possible to
her, she could not have made it without declaring her nationality to the
civil officer; (5) that in Madame de Stael’s novel of _Corinne_, Lord
Nelvil could not marry Madame d’Arbigny, because to marry her he would
have had to declare himself to the civil officer. In answer to these
considerations, it is enough to say (1) that, though she was a British
subject, Mary Wollstonecraft, as the child and favourer of revolution, and
a famous writer, enjoying the friendship of Thomas Paine, and other
powerful members of the National Convention, was in the spring of 1793
exempt from the perils and inconveniences pertaining to ordinary British
subjects living at that time in Paris; (2) that, even had her position
been perilous, it would not have been rendered more so by the declarations
requisite for a marriage, as so celebrated an Englishwoman, living openly
in Paris, was already well known to the civil functionaries; (3) that the
case of the English noble_man_ in Madame de Stael’s novel does not apply
to circumstances of the English_woman_ in Paris,--Mary being a woman
already known to the civil officer, and a woman, whose nationality would,
on the moment of marriage, merge in the nationality of her husband, and
remain therein during coverture. Mr. Kegan Paul is wrong alike in his
facts and his law. Though she was at war with England, France was in
cordial alliance with the United States of America; and the citizen of
those States could have married Mary Wollstonecraft almost as easily in
Paris as he could have married her in New York. Mr. Kegan Paul’s
hypothesis that Mary might have found it difficult and perilous to marry
Imlay is a mere fancy, arising from misconceptions.

Further, Mr. Kegan Paul would have us believe that one of Mary
Wollstonecraft’s reasons for making a contract of Free Love with Gilbert
Imlay was that she might have the security that would pertain to her from
_appearing_ to be the American gentleman’s wife. The answer to this is,
that instead of giving her the position and appearance of being his wife,
the contract of Free Love (on its becoming known to her friends in France)
only gave her the position and appearance of being his mistress; that her
friends in France never regarded her as Imlay’s wife; and that no security
(in the sense suggested by Mr. Kegan Paul) either came, or could be
expected to come, to her from her notorious position, though, to palliate
her action to her sisters, she used language in some letters that would
countenance a different opinion. Events moved rapidly in France. Before
the end of the year Thomas Paine had been turned out of the Convention and
was in prison, whence he had reason for thinking he would be sent to the
guillotine. Secure enough for the moment in the spring of 1793, Mary
Wollstonecraft’s position became perilous some months later; and there is
abundant evidence that when her position became uneasy, and even
hazardous, her relations with Imlay neither gave her security, nor
diminished her sense of insecurity.

Mr. Kegan Paul assures the gentle matrons and the young gentlewomen of
England that from the commencement of her association in Free Love with
Imlay, Mary Wollstonecraft was his _wife_! In his biography of William
Godwin, Mr. Kegan Paul says of her position towards Imlay, and her letters
to him:--

    ‘She believed that his love, which was to her sacred, would endure. No
    one can read her letters without seeing that she was a pure,
    high-minded, and refined woman, and that she considered herself, in
    the eyes of God and man, his wife.... But they are the letters of a
    tender and devoted _wife_, who feels no doubt of her position.’

In the _Memoir_ of the heroine, whom he thus exhibits to the admiration of
our wives, and sisters, and daughters, Mr. Kegan Paul says:--

    ‘The kindness he’ (_i.e._ Imlay) ‘showed Mary Wollstonecraft disposed
    her to look on him favourably; _she soon gave him a very sincere
    affection, and consented to become his wife_. _I use this word
    deliberately, although no legal ceremony ever passed between them._’

In these passages Mr. Kegan Paul states much that is the reverse of fact;
much also that is disproved by the letters which he so strangely
misrepresents.

Containing many passages that are winningly piquant and innocently
charming; affording abundant evidence that their writer’s affections were
strongly concerned in this wretched _liaison_; betraying no few
indications of a spirit almost to be styled high-mindedness; yielding
superabundant evidence of the writer’s cleverness and brilliancy, these
letters are not the letters of a refined woman, or the letters of a woman
who considers herself the wife of the man to whom they are addressed.
Still less are they the letters of a woman who feels herself secure of her
position. Had she been a woman of nice refinement, she could not have
written so lightly and copiously as she does of matters that a gentlewoman
of refinement tells only to her physician, her nurse, her closest female
friends, and shrinks from naming to her husband. Had she been the woman of
singular refinement we are asked to believe her, she would have been less
communicative to her correspondent about her health. Regard for the
feelings of my readers forbids me to speak, even in the most guarded
terms, of the more disagreeable details of these too circumstantial
communications. In this respect, the letters are just such letters as, in
the absence of positive testimony, the author of the _Rights of Woman_
might be imagined to have written to the man, with whom she was living in
Free Love. Instead of being the letters of a woman who considers herself a
wife, she does not venture, even in her confidential communications to
Imlay, to style herself his wife, whilst hinting how strongly she wished
to be privileged to do so. Instead of being the letters of a woman
‘feeling herself secure of her position,’ nothing in them is more striking
and pathetic than the evidence how painfully aware she was, that she held
her admirer by only the slenderest thread.

Mr. Kegan Paul says that she believed Gilbert Imlay’s love would endure.
What a strange belief for a woman who thought no man’s love capable of
endurance; who wrote in the _Rights of Woman_ that ‘love, from its nature,
must be transitory,’ and was ‘perhaps the most evanescent of all
passions;’ who had taught in the same book that every woman should
anticipate the _inevitable_ death of her husband’s love for her! Anyhow,
ere the first four of the seventy-seven letters to Imlay had been written,
she knew him to have been a fickle lover:--

    ‘I have found out,’ she wrote from Paris to Imlay at Havre, in
    September, 1793, in the fourth of the long series of letters, ‘that I
    have more mind than you, in one respect: because I can, without any
    violent effort of reason, find food for love in the same object, much
    longer than you can. The way to my senses is through my heart; but,
    forgive me! I think there is sometimes a short cut to yours.’

Surely, this is good evidence that, from an early date of their
acquaintance, she knew he was a fickle worshiper of womankind and a
libertine. Moreover, what a confession to be made by Mr. Kegan Paul’s
bright example of feminine purity and delicacy,--the woman who is said by
Mr. Kegan Paul to have come to Paris without having had any affair of the
heart! She had learnt in September, 1793, that the way to her _senses_ was
through her _heart_, and that she could ‘find food for love in the same
object’ longer than her correspondent could. A great deal for a woman to
learn between the end of December and the middle of the following
September! It must, however, be admitted that Paris, at the end of the
last century, was a school where a woman picked up such knowledge fast.

Mr. Kegan Paul is sure that, from the commencement of her association with
Imlay in Free Love, Mary Wollstonecraft considered herself as his _wife_
‘in the eyes of God and man;’ and Mr. Kegan Paul, ‘using this word
deliberately,’ styles her the _wife_ of Gilbert Imlay. Let us look into
this matter. At the commencement of this virtuous association, Gilbert and
Mary were not living under the same roof; but having separate places of
abode, they met secretly by assignation for the enjoyment of their
conjugal privileges. One of their places, perhaps their only place, of
assignation, was a certain ‘barrier’ of the French capital, near which
barrier the act occurred, that resulted in the birth of Mary
Wollstonecraft’s illegitimate daughter in April, 1794. The pleasure of
these meetings at the barrier was referred to by Mary, when, in the
twenty-third of the famous series of letters, she wrote on 22nd September,
1794, from Paris to Imlay:--‘Bring me, then, back your barrier-face, or
you shall have nothing to say to my barrier-girl.’ On the following day,
she wrote in the same vein:--

    ‘I desired you, in one of my other letters, to bring back to me your
    barrier-face--or that you should not be loved by my barrier-girl. I
    know that you will love her more and more, for she is a little
    affectionate, intelligent creature, with as much vivacity, I should
    think, as you could wish for.’

When writing thus to her already cold and remiss partner in Free Love,
Mary pined to see once again the radiant face of the lover, whose
‘barrier-girl’ was with her at Paris,--a five-months’ infant, delighting
in three things, ‘to ride in a coach, to look at a scarlet waistcoat, and
hear loud music.’

Mary and Gilbert were still living apart and meeting one another by
assignation, when she wrote to him on some unknown day of August, 1793:--

    ‘You can scarcely imagine with what pleasure I anticipate the day,
    when we are to begin almost to live together; and you would smile to
    hear how many plans of employment I have in my head, now that I am
    confident my heart has found peace in your bosom.... I will be at the
    barrier a little after ten o’clock to-morrow.’

By this time they had arranged ‘almost to live together,’ but they had not
begun to do so. Mary’s disagreeable communicativeness about her attacks of
faintness and the movements of her little ‘twitcher’ leaves no room for
question that her child, born at Havre in April, 1794, was not born
prematurely. It is therefore a matter of certainty that Mary was on the
way to become a mother, before the lovers ceased to have separate places
of abode and to meet by assignation. Even by Mr. Kegan Paul it must be
admitted that this was a curious way of living for the woman, who already
considered herself the wife of Imlay in the eyes of God and _man_. Anyhow
at first Mary did her best to escape the eyes of man.

After living under the same roof with her for some six weeks, Captain
Imlay (for the prosecution of affairs of business, and possibly also in
pursuit of pleasure) went off to Havre, where he had commercial concerns,
and to other places requiring his presence; Mary being left to her own
devices for several months in Paris, whence she wrote to her partner in
Free Love some of the most interesting of the letters, of which Mr. Kegan
Paul speaks so highly. Misrepresenting matters so as to adapt them to his
fanciful conception of Mary’s life and character, Mr. Kegan Paul also
commits errors without any apparent object for doing so. For instance, he
says, ‘Towards the close of 1793 Mary joined Imlay at Havre, and there in
the spring of 1794 gave birth to a girl, who received the name of Fanny,
in memory of the dear friend of her youth;’ saying this in spite of the
evidence afforded by the letters he is editing, that Mary remained at
Paris well into February, 1794. From Paris she wrote Imlay _one_ published
letter in September, 1793; one published letter in November, 1793; _four_
published letters in December, 1793; _four_ published letters in January,
1794; _four_ published letters in February, 1794. All these fourteen
letters were written by her at Paris; the last of them (penned at the
moment of her departure from the capital for Havre) ending with these
words:--

    ‘I am well, and have no apprehension that I shall find the journey too
    fatiguing, when I follow the lead of my heart. With my face turned to
    Havre my spirits will not sink; and my mind has always hitherto
    enabled my body to do whatever I wished--Yours affectionately, MARY.’

In an editorial note Mr. Kegan Paul admits that all these letters were
written during Mary’s ‘separation of several months from Imlay;’ and yet
in the _Memoir_ he represents that the separation ended in December, and
that she joined Imlay at Havre ‘towards the close of 1793.’ This is the
way in which the writers, whose _care_ has been commended so
enthusiastically by Mr. Froude, deal with their evidences. Doubtless they
are accurate enough for Mr. Froude, and quite as accurate as he is
himself.

The letter she wrote to Imlay from Paris on 30th December, 1793 (Monday
night) contains this remarkable passage, to which the reader should give
his best attention:--

    ‘A melancholy letter from my sister Eliza has also harassed my
    mind--that from my brother would have given me sincere pleasure; but
    for.... There is a spirit of independence in his letter, that will
    please you; and you shall see it, when we are once more over the fire
    together. I think that you would hail him as a brother, with one of
    your tender looks, when your heart not only gives a lustre to your
    eye, but a dance of playfulness, that he would meet with a glow half
    made up of bashfulness, and a desire to please the ----; where shall I
    find a word to express the relationship which subsists between us?
    Shall I ask the little twitcher? But I have dropt half the sentence
    that was to tell you how much he would be inclined to love the man
    loved by his sister. I have been fancying myself sitting between you,
    ever since I began to write, and my heart has leapt at the thought!
    You see how I chat to you.’

Written in her brightest, tenderest, most womanly vein, this exquisite
piece of writing shows not only the affectionateness of Mary’s nature, but
also how far she was from considering herself a wife in the eyes of God
and man, and how acutely she felt the shame and inconveniences of her
position towards Imlay. One would like to see the words omitted from the
passage,--probably the words of a declaration that she could not enjoy her
younger brother’s letter from the sense of humiliation coming to her from
thinking, how she could nerve herself to tell him of the relation, in
which she and Imlay stood to one another. ‘Where,’ she writes with pathos
and tact, ‘shall I find a word to express the relationship which subsists
between us?’ She wants a word she could give her brother, without fearing
it would drive all care for her from his heart. Had she considered herself
a wife in the eyes of man, she would not have wanted the word. ‘Shall I
ask the little twitcher?’ asks the woman, within four months of her
accouchement. Could a woman ask more touchingly and winningly for the
lawful marriage, that would make her what she wanted to be in the eyes of
the world; would save her child from the ignominy of shameful birth; would
give her the name she could utter to her brother, without burning blush
and scalding tears? ‘Considered herself a wife in the eyes of God and
man!’ Did she so consider herself? Then why this touching prayer to the
man whom she dared not call her husband, even in the privacy of a letter,
beginning with ‘My Best Love?’

There is another passage in the letters, to be remembered in connexion
with the foregoing evidence that, instead of considering herself a wife in
the world’s eyes, she could not even consider herself a wife in Imlay’s
eyes. ‘Finding,’ she wrote to him from Paris on 1st January, 1794, ‘that I
was observed, I told the good women, the two Mrs. ----s, simply that I was
with child: and let them stare! and ----, and ----, nay, all the world may
know it for aught I care! Yet I wish to avoid ----’s coarse jokes.’ Had
she been a wife in the eyes of society (as Mr. Kegan Paul insists she
was), the ladies would not have stared, would have seen no cause to stare,
on the announcement of the matter, with which Mary caused them to open
their eyes with astonishment. Had she been regarded as a wife by her
Parisian friends, she would have had no cause to fear coarse jests about
her health. It is clear the woman, who could not venture to style herself
‘his wife’ even to Imlay, had not ventured to style herself his wife to
her Parisian friends.

Now-a-days the less scrupulous of our Free Lovers make so free with the
queen’s English as to style themselves husband or wife, and declare
themselves married people, without having gone through any form of
marriage. Speaking deliberately, Mr. Kegan Paul says they have a right to
do so, the word wife being in his opinion strictly applicable to a female
Free Lover. Speaking deliberately, I say they have no right to apply to a
woman, who is not lawfully married, a familiar title assigned by social
rule and law of language, as a description of their legal estate, to women
who are lawfully married; or, on the other hand, to apply the correlative
title to men who are not lawfully married. I say they have no right to
change at their will the signification of familiar English words, so as to
bring them into accordance with their notions touching the relations of
the sexes.

In the dictionaries of the English language ‘husband’ is defined as ‘a man
contracted or joined to a woman by marriage;’ ‘wife’ is defined as ‘a
woman who is united to a man in the lawful bonds of wedlock;’ and
‘marriage’ is defined as ‘the legal union of a man and woman for life.’
The world accepts these definitions, acts upon them, and will, I trust,
continue to act upon them. Speaking deliberately, I say (Mr. Kegan Paul
notwithstanding) that persons who use these words for the misdescription
of Free Lovers, with an intention to deceive their hearers, are guilty of
falsehood. I say this deliberately, though Marian Evans (noble creature
though she was, and exemplary in all matters, apart from her miserable
association with George Henry Lewes) used to speak and write of him as her
‘husband.’ Possibly Marian Evans did not so misdescribe her relation to
George Lewes _with an intention to deceive_. I have no evidence that she
ever so misdescribed herself and Lewes to any person, without having
reason to think the person cognizant of the facts of the case. And _I do
know_ that to certain gentlewomen, she was honourably communicative on the
matter, so that they might not associate with her, under a misapprehension
respecting her domestic position. But her conduct cannot affect the
obligation of Free Lovers to be truthful. Having the courage of their
opinions, they should tell the world openly what they are. They might
style themselves ‘bosom-friends,’ or call themselves ‘free husbands and
free wives.’ But they have no right to call themselves ‘husbands’ and
‘wives.’ Out of respect for themselves and their principles they should
refrain from the ordinary untruthful practice of ‘kept mistresses’ and
their keepers.

Ninety years since the woman (who according to Mr. Kegan Paul considered
herself a wife in the eyes of God and _man_) did not presume to style
herself Imlay’s wife even to her own sisters. All she could do was to
speak of herself truthfully as living in France under his ‘protection,’
when on 10th March, 1794, she wrote from Havre to her sister Everina, ‘If
any of the many letters I have written have come to your hands or Eliza’s,
you know I am safe, through the protection of an American, a most worthy
man, &c.;’--words committed to paper, when she was within a few weeks of
giving birth to her illegitimate child. To her own sister Mary
Wollstonecraft described herself as a woman living under ‘protection.’ Mr.
Kegan Paul published the letter in which she thus describes herself; and
yet he says she considered herself as wife in the eyes of her
fellow-creatures.

It has been already remarked that Mary Wollstonecraft had an unhappy
temper. Even by Mr. Kegan Paul it is admitted that his angelical Mary was
‘excitable and hasty-tempered, apt to exaggerate trifles, sensitive to
magnify inattention into slights, and slights into studied insults.’ Put
into plain terms this is an admission that she was a violent-tempered and
bad-tempered woman. She was no woman to live happily with a man, either as
wife or Free Lover. Even before their first brief term of cohabitation,
she had tried Imlay by her caprice and pettishness. In the letter (of
August, 1793), in which she anticipates the delight of ‘beginning almost
to live together’ with him, she says:--

    ‘Cherish me with that dignified tenderness, which I have only found in
    you; and your own dear girl will try to keep under a quickness of
    feeling, that has sometimes given you pain. Yes, I will be _good_,
    that I may deserve to be happy; and whilst you love me, I cannot again
    fall into the miserable state which rendered life a burden almost too
    heavy to be borne.’

Let the reader consider these words. In Letter vi. (a genuine
love-letter), dated from Paris to Imlay at Havre, she writes: ‘No; I have
thy honest countenance before me--Pop--relaxed by tenderness; a
little--little wounded by my whims.’ In Letter xi., of January, 1794, she
entreats, ‘with eyes overflowing with tears and in the humblest attitude,’
to be pardoned for worrying her admirer with unreasonable epistles to
which he has replied in a ‘kind and rational letter;’--adding, ‘It is time
for me to grow more reasonable, a few more of these caprices of
sensibility would destroy me.’ In the same month she writes to him:--

    ‘Yesterday, my love, I could not open your letter for some time; and,
    though it was not half as severe as I merited, it threw me into such
    a fit of trembling, as seriously alarmed me.... One thing you mistake
    in my character, and imagine that to be coldness which is just the
    contrary. For, when I am hurt by the person most dear to me, I must
    let out a whole torrent of emotions, in which tenderness would be
    uppermost, or stifle them altogether; and it appears to me almost a
    duty to stifle them when I imagine _that I am treated with coldness_.’

The letters abound with similar evidence that, quarrelling from an early
date of their association, they went on quarrelling and making it up, till
they grew heartily sick of one another, and saw little of one another. At
the most, be it observed, the whole period of their association (from
their first introduction to one another till their final parting) did not
exceed two years and ten months, and at the fullest computation they did
not spend more than twelve months of this time in one another’s society.
Whilst Mary was at Paris, Imlay was for months together at Havre, or other
places, away from her. For the greater part of her stay at Havre, he was
at Paris. Soon after her return to Paris, he went off to London. Running
from England to France to see her for a short time, he returned by himself
to England. Soon after her return to England, she went off with her child
and nurse in the summer of 1795, for her trip to Sweden, Norway, and
Denmark.

I am no apologist for Imlay. In a memoir I wrote of Mary Wollstonecraft
twenty-eight years since, I called him ‘a pitiful scamp;’ and though I may
doubt whether I should have spoken of him quite so disdainfully, I am
still disposed to think him a mean-spirited, though clever, creature. The
evidence respecting his character and ways of life is far from complete.
Hitherto only one side has been told of the story of his relations with
Mary Wollstonecraft; _her_ side of the story, dressed and redressed by her
friends and admirers. From the insufficient evidence, he appears to have
differed morally in no important respect or degree from the ordinary run
of the men, who used to be styled men of the world, men of pleasure, and
men of gallantry. Whilst it is certain that Mary Wollstonecraft entered
the association with no confidence that it would last ‘for ever,’ there is
no reason to suppose that he entered it with any desire for its
permanence. Whilst it is certain that the faults of her temper were
largely accountable for the unhappiness of the association, it is fair to
assume there were corresponding faults of temper on his side. If he was
not qualified to make any woman happy for long, Mary Wollstonecraft was
not a woman to live happily with any man for any long time. There can be
no question they were an ill-assorted couple; but with any man Mary would
have been unhappily matched. It is not wonderful that Imlay had not been
associated for many months with the woman, who worried him incessantly
with her temper, before he began to think of withdrawing from the
association.

In leaving Mary Wollstonecraft, Imlay took a step that, from the
commencement of their association, must have been foreseen as a probable
contingency by the woman, who regarded love as the most evanescent of the
human passions. In leaving her he merely exercised the right of
retirement, which had been reserved alike to him and her by the conditions
of their lawless contract. Yet his disposition to leave her was no sooner
known to the Free Lovers of her English acquaintance, than they began to
think very ill of him. On being assured of his purpose to quit her,
because he could not live harmoniously with her, they were quick in
declaring him a prodigy of conjugal faithlessness. It is not manifest at
the first glance why these enthusiastic advocates of the Free Contract
were so indignant with him for retiring from the partnership in accordance
with the terms on which he had entered it,--_i.e._ on the understanding
that he should be at liberty to get out of it when he pleased, and that
Mary should be at liberty to retire from it when she pleased. The
advantage claimed by the Free Lovers for their conjugal arrangement over
marriage is, that spouses have this liberty of withdrawing from one
another on the death of their mutual affection. Why, then, was Imlay so
severely blamed for using the liberty especially reserved to him by the
contract he formed with Mary,--by the terms that may be fairly called her
own terms? The Free Lovers spoke of him as though, instead of entering
into a contract of Free Love with a middle-aged (thirty-four years old)
woman, who was a Free Lover in principle before she knew him, he had
engaged the affections of a young girl, and lured her into lawful wedlock.
They stigmatized him as the heartless betrayer of virginal simplicity and
innocence. They charged him with monstrous wickedness in retiring from the
contract, which by their own rule he was free to withdraw from as soon as
he liked.

The fact is the Free Lovers of ninety years since were angry with Imlay
for leaving Mary, _not_ because he acted in violation of their principles
or broke the terms of his contract with Mary, but because his rupture with
the woman of letters afforded a strong example of the badness of their
conjugal method, and tended to discredit their substitute for lawful
marriage. The opponents of Free Love were and are in the habit of
insisting that libertines would use its freedom, to desert their conjugal
mates for slight causes. Imlay’s secession from Mary countenanced this
view of Free Love. The opponents of Free Love opposed it on the ground
that, if conjugal partnerships could be withdrawn from at pleasure, they
would be entered into lightly and without due preliminary inquiry and
forethought. The levity with which Mary entered into a contract of Free
Love with Imlay, soon after making his acquaintance, and before she learnt
his real character (as her friends insist), countenanced this view. Hence
the rage of the Free Lovers against Imlay, who retired from the
partnership, whilst Mary wished to retain him in it.

Though it seems to have revived some months later, and after its temporary
extinction to have regained all its original passionateness, it is not to
be imagined that Mary Wollstonecraft’s love of Gilbert Imlay continued to
burn steadily after the death of his affection for her. All the more
instructive and pathetic are the efforts she made, for her child’s sake,
and her own honour’s sake, to hold him to herself, for months after his
first manifestation of a desire to be quit of her. Striving to make
herself useful to him, in the hope that a care for his selfish interests
would retain him in the partnership from which he wished to retreat, she
took an interest in his commercial concerns, and went on the voyage to
Denmark and Norway, not more for the sake of her own health, than for the
advantage of his affairs in those countries. This she did (as Mr. Kegan
Paul says) after ‘Imlay’s affection had ceased, and his desertion’
(retirement would be a better word) ‘had practically begun.’ Striving to
be useful to him, she tried to please him, even feigned still to love him,
though strong affection for him had perished from her heart. To qualify
her to do business for him in the foreign lands for which she was bound,
Imlay gave her a power-of-attorney, in which he styled her ‘Mary Imlay, my
best friend and wife,’--‘a document,’ says Mr. Kegan Paul, ‘which in many
cases and countries would be considered as constituting marriage:’ as
though it gave the poor woman a colour of matronly honour in history, and
were somehow or other a proof that she had, from the commencement of the
Free Love contract, ‘considered herself his wife in the eyes of God and
man.’ No doubt the document would have been proof of marriage in Scotland
to this century, and in other countries previous to the Council of Trent.
But Imlay and Mary were not living in Scotland. Nor were they living in
times prior to the Council of Trent. The power-of-attorney was signed by
Imlay when he had made up his mind never to make her his wife; and she
took it abroad with her, when she knew he had ceased to love her and had
_not_ made her his wife. For those who peruse them, by the light of the
hints given in these and previous pages, there is pathetic instruction in
the letters Mary sent her no-longer-loving ‘protector’ from abroad. They
are the letters of a woman alternately hoping against hope to revive in
Imlay’s breast his old love of her, and despairing to hold him much longer
as a friend or even as an acquaintance. From pity, kindness or
self-interest (possibly from all three) he wrote to her sometimes in the
language of a lover,--letters animating her with hopes, to be dashed by
the next post. Returning to England (not in late autumn, as Mr. Kegan Paul
asserts, but) on 4th October, 1795, she soon found the vanity of all her
hopes and efforts to retain him. By this time Imlay had formed another
attachment, had entered into another contract of Free Love,--a fact all
the more galling to Mary, because he called his new passion a sacred
passion, and justified it with the familiar arguments of the Free Lovers.
Resolute to exercise his Free-Love right to retire from the association
that had become distasteful to him, he was set on fulfilling the moral
engagements of the new partnership in mutual tenderness. His language and
tone on these matters were the more exasperating to Mary, because of their
conformity to the doctrines of her own philosophic school. In justice to
him it must be admitted, even by Mary’s partisans, that he showed no wish
to shirk the pecuniary sacrifices, expected from a man of honour, when he
transfers his affections from an old to a new mistress. Offering her,
pressing upon her, money for her necessities, he undertook to make proper
settlements on Mary and her child. With proper spirit she rejected
indignantly these offers for herself, though she consented to his proposal
to make a settlement on their child. But the bond he gave for this
purpose was of no advantage to the child, as neither the principal nor
interest of the promised sum was paid; probably because the man of divers
financial speculations fell into poverty.

There are passages in the concluding Letters to Imlay fit to be given in
evidence that, as the hour of their final separation drew nearer, Mary’s
love for him revived and regained all its former force; and it is
conceivable that, under the influence of jealousy of the object of Imlay’s
new attachment, Mary loved him again in a wild, tempestuous way, as all
hope of recovering him to herself and her child died in her breast.
Certainly she acted like a woman driven to distraction by the anguish of
despised and disappointed love. On the other hand, she did nothing more
than many a violent woman has done under the goadings and torture of
wounded vanity and injured pride. In her rage and misery, Gilbert Imlay’s
whilom mate in Free-Love went one cold and dismal winter’s day to the
river’s side near Putney Bridge. On coming to the scene, where she
intended to escape from life, she either walked into the river and stood
in it, or walked on the Bridge in the pouring rain, until the skirts of
her clothing were saturated and heavily charged with water. This having
been done, so that a few minutes later her garments should operate as a
dead weight in drawing her beneath the tide’s surface, and, at the same
time, deprive her limbs of the power to struggle against the cold current,
she climbed the parapet of the Bridge,[1] and threw herself into the deep
stream. This deliberate attempt at self-murder was, however, unsuccessful,
Mary being picked up and saved by the watermen of a passing boat.

Self-murder being a form of wickedness denied by the moral and social
proprieties to all persons in their minds, not belonging to the lower
orders, and being, therefore, a departure from righteousness that would
disqualify Mary for her place of honour in the annals of a respectable
county family, it has been decreed by Mary Wollstonecraft’s admirers that
she was out of her right mind, to the extent of not knowing what she was
doing when she thus attempted to kill herself. Is it not written in Mr.
Kegan Paul’s book that Mary’s attempt to drown herself was made when she
was ‘driven to despair and was for a time quite out of her mind?’ In
connexion with this verdict, it is well to remember that, some time before
going down to Putney, Mary wrote a very powerfully worded letter to Imlay,
saying therein, ‘I go to find comfort, and my only fear is, that my poor
body will be insulted by an endeavour to recall my hated existence. But I
shall plunge into the Thames, where there is the least chance of my being
snatched from the death I seek.’ After writing this quite lucid and
well-worded letter, Mary went down to Putney; and, after providing in the
most deliberate manner for the achievement of her purpose, she climbed
over the side of the Bridge and threw herself into the deep water. When
she did all this she was so completely out of her mind, that she should
not be deemed accountable for her actions, and cognizant of what she was
doing. This is Mr. Kegan Paul’s view of the matter.

It is impossible to trace precisely the course of Mary Wollstonecraft’s
life in the last three months of 1795 and the first month of 1796 (from
the stormy, hysterical, changeful epistles, that conclude the series of
published _Letters_ to Imlay, and other letters of the same period, which
I have examined for the illustration of her story); but in December she
was still writing to him with a faint, flickering hope of recalling him to
her side. On some day of December, subsequent to the 8th of that month,
she wrote to him in these words:--

    ‘Imlay, believe me, it is not romance, you have acknowledged to me
    feelings of this kind. You could restore me to life and hope, and the
    satisfaction you would feel would amply repay you. In tearing myself
    from you, it is my own heart I pierce; and the time will come, when
    you will lament that you have thrown away a heart that, even in the
    moment of passion, you cannot despise. I would owe everything to your
    generosity, but, for God’s sake, keep me no longer in suspense! Let me
    see you once more.’

This letter is followed by another, written in the same month, ending
with ‘I part with you in peace.’ But the final parting was still later.
Even so late as 26th January, 1796, she is writing to Mr. A. Hamilton
Rowan in terms which indicate a faint, lingering hope that even yet Imlay
would at some time of the future, change and return to her. ‘Mr. Imlay,’
she says, ‘would be glad to supply all my pecuniary wants; but unless he
returns to himself, I would perish first;’--words showing that, even so
late as the last week of January, 1796, she could think of what she would
do if Imlay should return to himself, _i.e._ to her.

Mary Wollstonecraft’s daughter by William Godwin, the daughter who lived
to be Mrs. Shelley and mother of the present Sir Percy Florence Shelley,
was born on 30th August, 1797, just five calendar months after the
marriage (celebrated at old St. Pancras Church, on 29th March, 1797), that
united the author of _The Rights of Woman_ and the author of _Political
Justice_ in lawful wedlock, when they had already been living several
months together in Free Love. The date of the commencement of their
association in Free Love is unknown; but whilst it must have been as far
back as December, 1796, there is reason for thinking the free-contract was
entered into some weeks earlier. It follows, therefore, that the woman who
leapt from Putney Bridge in the winter of 1795-6, and had not absolutely
despaired, on 26th January, 1796, of seeing her Free Lover Imlay return to
himself and her, in something much less than a year, probably in so short
a time as nine months, possibly in a much shorter time than nine months,
was living in Free Love with her old friend William Godwin,--who was in
his forty-first year when he thus took Mary Wollstonecraft Imlay, _ætat._
thirty-seven, under his protection.

An extant note shows that Godwin met Mary Wollstonecraft, or, at least,
accepted an invitation to meet her, at the residence of their common
friend, Miss Hayes, in January, 1796; and there is reason to believe that
the appointment agreed to by this note of acceptance was the first
occasion on which Godwin met Mary Wollstonecraft since her return from
Norway. That their acquaintance was of much older standing, and had been
much more fruitful of intercourse, than Mr. Kegan Paul represents, and
Mrs. Shelley imagined, is certain. That Godwin now renewed his
acquaintance with her under circumstances, disposing him to think far more
favourably of her than he had heretofore done, is also certain. On
meeting her again in 1796, the philosopher, who had made her a Free Lover,
recognized a martyr to his anti-matrimonial doctrines in the woman, whom
he had some four years earlier regarded as too talkative and eager for
admiration. Bound, by his principles, to approve the terms of her
association with Imlay, he could not withhold his sympathy from a woman
who had suffered so severely from her devotion to Free Love doctrine.
Approaching her as a fair disciple, who had suffered for the truth’s sake,
and for the cause of which he was the chief living representative and
vindicator, he desired to show his respect for her, and to comfort her. ‘I
found a wounded heart; as that heart cast itself upon me, it was my
ambition to heal it,’ he wrote to her soon after their lawful marriage, in
reference to the renewal of their acquaintance. They are notable words:
indicating, as they do, who made the first advances to the state of mutual
regard, that resulted in their marriage. He found in her what he was
prepared to find--a wounded heart. The owner of the wounded heart cast
herself on the philosopher, who desired to soothe its sorrow.

Recalling their course from friendship to love, Godwin wrote after her
death:--

    ‘The partiality we conceived for each other was in that mode which I
    have always considered as the purest and most refined style of love.
    It grew with equal advances in the mind of each. It would have been
    impossible for the most minute observer to have said who was before
    and who was after. One sex did not take the priority which
    long-established custom has awarded it, nor the other overstep that
    delicacy which is so severely imposed. I am not conscious that either
    party can assume to have been the agent or the patient, the toil
    spreader or the prey, in this affair. When, in the course of things,
    the disclosure came, there was nothing, in a manner, for either party
    to disclose to the other.... There was no period of throes and
    resolute explanation attendant on the tale. It was friendship melting
    into love.’

Though in the privacy of the domestic circle a husband may sometimes
jocularly charge his wife with having made the first advances to the
offer, or even the offer itself, that resulted in their marriage, no man
of common self-respect, or with the slightest care for his wife’s
reputation, could seriously assure the public, she so far ‘overstept the
delicacy which is so severely imposed’ on her sex, as to have pursued him
and dragged him into marriage, or even to have given him any kind of
intimation that she required an offer of marriage from him. The more
remarkable, therefore, is it, that in words, written with a view to
publication, whilst expressly guarding his former wife from the imputation
of any such indelicacy, Godwin states so positively that the first
advances from their friendship to love were not made by him alone; that
his suit for affection in no degree preceded hers; that in the progress to
warmer feeling they moved together step by step. This historic statement,
made for the world’s consideration, must be read in conjunction with the
serious statement put on paper for her eye alone:--‘I found a wounded
heart. As that heart cast itself upon me, it was my ambition to heal it.’
Here is the statement of the whole case. Godwin’s expressions of sympathy
caused the ever-impetuous, and often too demonstrative woman to throw
herself on his sympathy; his ambition to heal her wounded heart was
preceded by her display of feeling. Few readers of the two statements will
question that, notwithstanding what Godwin says to the contrary, the first
advances were made with unmistakable significance by the lady.

Passing in this manner from Imlay to Godwin, in less than a year from her
final separation from the former, Mary Wollstonecraft was living with the
latter in Free Love at his house in The Polygon, Somers Town, in the last
month of 1796. So living with him, was she (to use Mr. Kegan Paul’s words)
a wife in the eyes of God and man? She certainly was not so in the eyes of
man. She and Godwin had lived in this manner for weeks, for months, before
any clear announcement of the nature of their intimacy was made to their
most intimate friends. People who had the _entrée_ of the little house in
Somers Town, gossiped together,--asking one another what it meant. Had
Godwin, in his compassion for Mary’s forlorn condition, merely brought her
to his house as a guest for a long visit, or as a housekeeper, or in a
closer and more affectionate relation? What the various gossips said, and
how they said it, may be left to the reader’s imagination. In February,
1797, Mary Wollstonecraft, living as the somehow or other mistress of
Godwin’s house in The Polygon, entertained her sister Everina for some
time; but so far was she from considering herself a wife in the eyes of
man, she did not venture to reveal the nature of her position in the house
even to her own sister. Throughout her visit in ‘The Polygon,’ Everina
was kept in the dark, and she went off to her place of governess in the
Wedgwood family, at Etruria, without having learnt that her sister and
Godwin were living in Free Love. In the following month (March, 1797),
Southey, whilst in London, saw Mary Wollstonecraft, and on the 13th of
that month wrote of her to Cottle:--

    ‘Of all the lions or _literati_ I have seen here, Mary Imlay’s
    countenance is the best, infinitely the best; the only fault in it is
    an expression somewhat similar to what the prints of Horne Tooke
    display,--an expression indicating superiority; not haughtiness, not
    sarcasm, in Mary Imlay, but still it is unpleasant. Her eyes are light
    brown, and although the lid of one of them is affected by a little
    paralysis, _they_ are the most meaning I ever saw.’

Speaking of the Free Love association as marriage, Mr. Kegan Paul says
that its existence was ‘understood’ in Godwin’s circle at the date of
Southey’s letter to Cottle. Doubtless Godwin’s circle ‘understood’ what
was going on in his house; but the understanding was in no way due to
Godwin’s communicativeness. The understanding was the result of vigilant
observation, surmise, inference, conjecture, gossip, tattle. The
association was a sly, furtive, secret, deceptive business till the legal
but secret marriage in old St. Pancras Church on 29th March, 1797, and for
some days afterwards. How uncertain the ‘understanding’ was, how far some
of Godwin’s closest friends felt that after all they might be mistaken in
the ‘understanding,’ appears from the fact, that, in his reply to the
letter in which Godwin briefly announced his recent marriage in St.
Pancras Church without mentioning the lady’s name, so intimate a friend as
Holcroft wrote, ‘I cannot be mistaken concerning the woman you have
married. It is Mrs. W. Your secrecy a little pains me.’

How did the marriage, into which Godwin sneaked in this fashion, turn out?
Was it, during its short course, a happy marriage? Was its tenour such as
to justify an opinion that it would, on the whole, have been a happy
union, had Mary’s life been prolonged for another ten or twenty years? Mr.
Kegan Paul answers these questions confidently in the affirmative. Gushing
over Mary’s untimeous end, he speaks of Godwin’s life as blighted by her
death. It is therefore needful to state clearly, that brief though it was,
the marriage was by no means a happy union, and that it was fruitful of
incidents which at least make it certain that Godwin would have found
Mary Wollstonecraft a very difficult woman to live with, had her days been
so prolonged. This stands out clearly on the record.

No sooner had Mary Wollstonecraft carried the point, for which she may be
assumed to have played steadily from the moment of her discovery that she
was likely to have another child; no sooner had she induced Godwin, at a
great sacrifice of his doctrine against matrimony, to take her to old St.
Pancras Church, than she gave the reins to her unhappy temper, and began
to worry him precisely as she had in former time worried Imlay. No more
than three weeks had passed since that marriage, when she spoke to Godwin
(certainly no inconsiderate and unkindly man; certainly a husband who had
given proof of his wish to render her a happy woman) in such a strain,
that he retired in acute distress from his house in The Polygon to his
quite needful retreat in Evesham Buildings (or Place; it is described in
both ways). From the study, with which he had fortunately provided
himself, he wrote his wife a brief and pathetic note,--averring that he
had studied her happiness in everything; imploring her to act so that he
should not be wholly disappointed in her; and reminding her that he had
not undertaken to heal her wounded heart until she had cast herself upon
him.

Admitting that during their brief married life Godwin and Mary
Wollstonecraft had several lively quarrels; and admitting that they arose
from her ‘extreme sensitiveness and eager quickness of temper,’ Mr. Kegan
Paul requires us to consider the outbreaks of her passionate querulousness
as nothing more serious than ‘slight clouds,’ How differently the
biographer speaks of the second Mrs. Godwin’s similar exhibitions of
ill-temper! Slight clouds! What a pretty phrase for an ugly fact. Anyhow
they were clouds no less significant than slight. It must have been a
dismally significant cloud that caused Godwin to write her such a letter!

Let the reader consider the particulars of one of this angelical Mary’s
exhibitions of ill-temper; an affair mentioned lightly by Mr. Kegan Paul
as a ‘little outburst.’ In the June of 1797, Godwin (a man with a right to
a short summer’s holiday, if ever a hard-working man had a right to one)
went for a driving tour of just two weeks and three days in the company of
his particular friend Mr. Basil Montagu. Hiring a horse and gig, they
drove through parts of Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire, and Warwickshire,
into Staffordshire, visiting Beaconsfield, Oxford, Birmingham, and
Stafford, in the earlier days of the excursion; and in the closing days of
the brief vacation taking peeps at Derby, Coventry, and Cambridge. Let it
be borne in mind that the tour was made in times long before the country
was covered with telegraph wires, and when country towns had not three or
four postal departures and deliveries a-day. Also, be it remembered, that
Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft had mated on the understanding, that they
should not have too much of one another’s company, or pester one another
with incessant attentiveness. It had been arranged that Godwin, an early
riser, should go from his bed in The Polygon to his study in Evesham
Buildings at an early hour, and in the ordinary way of his life should not
after leaving bed see Mary before their four-o’clock dinner. It had been
arranged between them that each should be free to go into society without
the other, going by themselves to different parties, going apart on the
same evenings to different theatres, or to different parts of the same
theatre. Settled even to minute particulars had it been that they should
show their superiority to ordinary husbands and wives, by doing what they
liked, and exacting no petty services from one another. Free in their love
they would be free in their lives.

Driving out of London for this tour on Saturday, 3rd June, Godwin returned
to London on Tuesday, 20th June, having in the interval written his wife
six long letters. He wrote to his wife on the 5th, 7th, 10th, 12th, 15th,
and 17th of June. The letters were no brief and hasty notes; they were
long letters of bright, cheery chat, and affectionate gossip; letters
showing he thought much of her during his absence from her, and wished to
make her by means of his pen the sharer of his enjoyments. All these long
letters came to Mary’s hands; and she knew he was not a rapid writer,
capable of dashing off a long epistle in twenty minutes. There had been no
hour or day fixed upon precisely for his return, though the tour had been
spoken of beforehand as a fortnight’s ‘outing.’ Time having been lost by
unforeseen accidents and _contretemps_, as time is apt to be lost in such
trips, Godwin (the husband who, by special agreement, was to retain as
much as possible of his bachelor freedom after marriage) stayed out three
days longer than his wife expected. He did not return to The Polygon on
Saturday night; Mary fretted all Sunday. He did not return on Sunday
night; Mary went to bed to fret and fume over his cruel neglect of her.
Rising on Monday with a clouded brow, she spent the day musing over her
wrongs, and resolving on measures to preserve herself from such inhuman
treatment in the future. On Monday night (whilst the cup of Godwin’s
iniquity was only two-thirds full) she wrote her husband a piece of her
mind in a letter to catch his eye and conscience either on his arrival at
his own door, or at his last resting-place on his homeward way. To see the
angelic Mary in one of her tantrums, readers should refer to Mr. Kegan
Paul’s book, and peruse this letter, dated ‘June 19th, Monday, almost 12
o’clock.’ Though absence had, for a while, quickened her affection for
him, coldness and neglect had diminished it. The letters he had sent her
might serve to remind him where he had been, but they were no mementos of
love for her to value. If tenderness for her had animated him on his
departure from town, it had evaporated during his trip. Though she had
requested him to let her know beforehand the time of his return, he had
tormented her by keeping her in suspense. Godwin having written to her
copiously about the people he had seen in his brief tour, it seemed well
to the amiable Mary to charge him with being influenced by ‘the homage of
vulgar minds.’ In waiting to see a show at Coventry, instead of hastening
back to Somers Town, he had offered her an affront. What had happened on
the way that it took him from Saturday to Sunday night to make the journey
from Coventry to Cambridge? And now he was still away, though it was near
midnight. What want of consideration for her feelings! ‘Unless,’ wrote the
angry woman, ‘you suppose me to be a stick or stone, you must have forgot
to think as well as to feel, since you have been on the wing.’

This ‘little outburst’ did not, we are assured by Mr. Kegan Paul, affect
the cordial affection of the husband and wife. One would like to hear
Godwin on that point. What a letter for him to receive from the woman he
had so recently married! What a selfish, exacting, unendurable virago! Yet
the Shelleyan zealots commend her for her womanly goodness and sweetness;
insisting that she appeared on earth to ‘gild humanity with a ray,’ &c.,
and that Godwin’s life was darkened and lowered to its last hour by her
death.

Before we pass on to pay our respects to the second Mrs. Godwin, it is
well to notice what is said of the marriage of the first Mrs. Godwin by
her daughter (Mrs. Shelley), whose statements respecting her mother and
husband are too generally accepted as authoritative in the Shelleyan
coteries. In Mrs. Shelley’s fanciful account of her mother’s virtues,
which are declared ‘to gild humanity with a ray, &c.,’ it is thus
written:--

    ‘Godwin met her at a moment when she was deeply depressed by the
    ingratitude of one utterly incapable of appreciating her excellence;
    who had stolen her heart, and availed himself of her excessive and
    thoughtless generosity, and lofty independence of character, to plunge
    her in difficulties and then desert her. Difficulties, worldly
    difficulties, indeed, she set at nought.... It was at this time that
    Godwin again met her at the house of her friend Miss Hayes, having
    done so occasionally before she went to Norway.’

Further, in a note on the marriage of her parents, Mrs. Shelley says--

    ‘At the beginning of this year (1797) Mr. Godwin married Mary
    Wollstonecraft. The precise date is not known; he does not mention it
    in his journal, and the ceremony had taken place some time before the
    marriage was declared. This secrecy partly arose from a slight
    shrinking on Mr. Godwin’s part from avowing that he had acted in
    contradiction to his theories.... They both however looked on this
    sort of struggle, in which they had been born, and had always lived,
    as a very secondary matter, and after a short period of deliberation
    they, in the month of April, declared the marriage which had before
    been solemnized.’

(1.) By difficulties, worldly difficulties, Mrs. Shelley obviously means
‘pecuniary difficulties.’ However ill people may think of Imlay’s
treatment of Mary Wollstonecraft, it must be admitted that Imlay did not
leave her without wishing and seeking to free her from immediate pecuniary
difficulties and to put her in easy circumstances for the moment. She
showed proper spirit in refusing to take money of him under the
circumstances; but as he offered it, he cannot be fairly charged with
selfish indifference to the difficulties.

(2.) Mrs. Shelley does not say how long it was before her mother’s
departure for Norway, when Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft had occasional
meetings at Miss Hayes’s house. Nor does she actually say that Godwin saw
Mary Wollstonecraft for the first time at one of those meetings. But her
words are calculated to give, and have given, the impression that Godwin
met Mary Wollstonecraft for the first time shortly before her departure
from London for Norway, in the summer of 1795. But this impression is
erroneous. Thomas Paine escaped from England to France in September, 1792,
and never revisited his native country. He was present on the occasion
when Godwin, in London, met Mary Wollstonecraft for the first time, and
was displeased with her loquaciousness and apparent desire to engross
Paine’s attention. This meeting, therefore, must have taken place before
September, 1792. There is also other evidence that Mary Wollstonecraft
knew William Godwin before she went to France.

(3.) As he was not ‘acting in contradiction to his theories,’ whilst
living in Free Love with Mary Wollstonecraft, it is obvious that Mrs.
Shelley’s words, touching the marriage of her parents, refer to their
lawful marriage. Mrs. Shelley says this marriage was solemnized at the
beginning of 1797. She is wrong; for the marriage was solemnized at Old
St. Pancras Church on 29th March, 1797.

(4.) Mrs. Shelley says of this marriage, ‘the precise date is not known.’
She is wrong. The precise date may not have been known to Mrs. Shelley,
but it was known to other people,--to all people who had taken sufficient
trouble to inquire about the matter. There never could have been any
uncertainty respecting the place of the wedding; for both Godwin and Mary
were well known to be inhabitants of St. Pancras parish at the time of the
event. To ascertain the precise date it was, therefore, only needful to
search the parish register.

(5.) Mrs. Shelley says of this marriage, ‘the ceremony had taken place
some time before the marriage was declared’ in April; leaving the reader
to infer that three months elapsed between the performance and the
publication of the ceremony. She is wrong. The marriage was announced to
Godwin’s most intimate friends within a few days of the performance of the
ceremony. Holcroft acknowledged on 6th April, 1797, the announcement made
to him by Godwin of what had taken place at Old St. Pancras Church on 29th
March, 1797.

(6.) Speaking of the secrecy of the marriage, Mrs. Shelley says, ‘This
secrecy partly arose from a slight shrinking on Mr. Godwin’s part from
avowing that he had acted in contradiction to his theories;’ readers being
thereby led to infer that Godwin kept the marriage a secret from the
beginning of the year till April, from reluctance to avow an act so
inconsistent with his theories. Mrs. Shelley is wrong. Instead of
postponing the announcement for three months from such a cause, her father
announced the marriage within a few days of its solemnization.

(7.) Still writing as though what occurred on 29th March had taken place
at the beginning of the year, Mrs. Shelley says,--

    ‘Another cause for the secrecy at first maintained was the stern law
    of poverty and necessity. My father narrowly circumscribed both his
    receipts and disbursements. The maintenance of a family had never been
    contemplated, and could not at once be provided for. My mother,
    accustomed to a life of struggle and poverty, was so beloved by her
    friends, that several, and Mr. Johnson in particular, had stood
    between her and any of the annoyances and mortifications of debt. But
    this must cease when she married.’

In other words, according to Mrs. Shelley, her father kept his marriage a
secret from the beginning of the year till April, in order that he might
derive advantage from money, given to Mary Wollstonecraft by Mr. Johnson
and other friends, under the impression that she was a single woman with
no husband to maintain her; which money they would not have given her, had
they known of her marriage. This is what Mrs. Shelley says of William
Godwin. What baseness for a daughter to attribute to her own father, and
put on record against him! I wish I could say that nothing in Godwin’s
life, till his powers languished under increasing embarrassments,
countenances the opinion that he was capable of such baseness.
Unfortunately, however, there is evidence that, whilst Mary Wollstonecraft
was living in secret Free Love with him in The Polygon, he prevailed on
Mr. T. Wedgewood to lend him a considerable sum of money, saying, when he
asked for the loan, that he did not want it for himself, but for the use
of another person. As this other person was Mary Wollstonecraft, and as a
contract of Free Love was marriage in Godwin’s opinion, the money he
wanted for her use was money borrowed for his own use. Why did he not tell
Mr. Wedgewood outright that he wanted it for Mary Wollstonecraft? Because
he thought it possible that some rumour of his arrangement with Mary had
come to Mr. Wedgewood, in which case the benevolent manufacturer, instead
of lending the money, would say, ‘No, you must support your own
“bosom-friend.”’ Why did he not tell Mr. Wedgewood that he was living in
Free Love with Mary? For much the same reason; from a fear that, instead
of lending the money, Mr. Wedgewood would say, ‘No; for I see why you want
the money, and I think you ought to keep your own wife.’ Wedgewood lent
the money in ignorance of the purpose for which it was needed.

After the declaration of his marriage Godwin confessed that he had wanted
the money for Mary Wollstonecraft, and at the same time begged for a
further loan of 50_l._; saying, as he made this confession and prayer for
further help, ‘I trust you will not accuse me of duplicity in having told
you that it was not for myself that I wanted your assistance.’ Though he
complied with the petition for another 50_l._, Mr. Wedgewood cannot have
acquitted his friend of duplicity in the former application. Hence it is
certain that Godwin kept the Free Love contract a secret to one particular
friend, lest by revealing it he should lessen his power to draw money from
his own friend. It is, therefore, only too probable that he was guilty of
the meanness attributed to him by his daughter, and also refrained from
publishing the Free Love contract, lest the publication should lessen the
readiness of Mary’s friends to give her money. But though he was
influenced by pecuniary considerations in keeping his relations with Mary
Wollstonecraft a secret, it none the less remains that Mrs. Shelley was
wrong in representing that he was moved by such considerations to keep his
lawful marriage secret from the beginning of the year till April. As we
have said more than once the marriage of 29th March, 1797, was declared in
the first week of April.

How are these inaccuracies to be regarded?--as mistakes arising wholly or
chiefly from misconception? or as deliberate untruths? Let us fix our
attention on the two first misstatements; the assertion that the marriage
was solemnized at the beginning of the year and the assertion that the
date of the marriage was unknown. Did Mrs. Shelley make these
misstatements innocently? in ignorance of the truth, or with a knowledge
of the truth? It is not easy to believe that Mrs. Shelley, a woman of
letters, curious about her mother’s history, and in her later time engaged
in biographical inquiries for the illustration of her husband’s life, her
own career, her father’s life, and her mother’s story, omitted to
ascertain a fact so easily discovered, as the date of her father’s
marriage. If she knew the date, she had obvious motives for putting the
ugly fact out of sight, under specious and delusive verbiage. In her later
time the woman, who in girlhood had been strangely lawless and defiant of
the world’s opinion, was chiefly desirous of clothing herself with
respectability, of toning and colouring her story into accordance with the
social condition of the family into which she had married. The woman who
would fain have justified her husband’s life to the world, was only a few
degrees less desirous of rendering her own story the same service. What
more natural than for such a woman to wish to cover up the ugly fact, that
she was born only five calendar months after her mother’s marriage? She
could not tamper with the evidences of the date of her own birth. They
were too numerous and too well known. But by pushing the date of her
mother’s marriage some two or three months back, she would cause the world
to think her the child of a premature birth, who had entered the world
none too soon for her mother’s credit. By doing so, she may well have
conceived herself discharging a filial duty, as well as a duty to herself
and her husband’s respectable family. She must have wished to think of
herself as differing, in this respect, altogether from her base-born
sister Fanny, who committed suicide whilst still young. She must have
shrunk from the thought that, had it not been for so late a marriage as
the one which preceded her own birth by only five months, she would have
resembled her sister Fanny in being a bastard. Hence, whilst it is not
easy to think her ignorant of the real date of her mother’s marriage, her
motive for wilfully misstating the case is obvious. Thus much on the
assumption that the main inaccuracy was a deliberate untruth.

It is, however, just conceivable that she did not know the date of her
mother’s marriage, and had a sincere belief that it occurred somewhere
about the beginning of 1797. This belief may have been due to words spoken
to her by Mrs. Gisborne, who, her friend in Italy, had been her mother’s
friend in the previous century. She may even have gone to the St. Pancras
registry, and paid fees to the registrar for searching for evidence of the
marriage amongst the records of marriages, solemnized in the parish in the
later months of 1796 and the first month of 1797. She may have taken some,
though insufficient, pains to arrive at the evidence of the marriage, and
imagined herself to have taken all possible pains, and come to the
conclusion that she might honestly write of her mother’s marriage, ‘the
precise date is unknown.’

Even so, though she would be innocent of wilful falsehood, she would
remain guilty of writing positively on a mere assumption (a serious fault
in an historian), and offering her readers as sure facts a series of
inferences from a mere assumption, or a belief unsustained by positive
testimony. Her narrative of her parents’ marriage, if not a tissue of
untruths, would remain a thing made up of inaccuracies. It is important
for readers to bear this in mind, whilst and _after_ reading this book.
Mrs. Shelley did not die without leaving much biographical material behind
her in the shape of printed notes to her husband’s works, and also in the
shape of MS. notes and memoranda for the use of future historians;--stuff
that would have appeared in her justificatory _Memoir_ of her husband, had
not Sir Timothy checked her biographical zeal by the stern order,
‘Silence, or no allowance!’ But on being brought under critical scrutiny,
all the passages, and bits, and scraps of her biographical sketches, at
present before the world, are found so curiously inaccurate, that every
one of her biographical statements should be read with nervous caution,
lively suspicion, and watchful distrust, by those who would avoid error on
matters of Shelleyan story.

I do not say she was an untruthful woman, though on some occasions she
unquestionably rouses serious suspicion of her veracity. Like Lady Byron
she enjoyed in her girlhood a reputation for sincerity of speech. But
people often say things that are untrue without intending to be
untruthful. It was often so with Mrs. Shelley, in some degree before her
husband’s death, and in a greater degree after that event. An imaginative
and highly emotional woman, she sometimes saw things in a wrong light. Not
seldom, her mental vision was affected by the delusive media of
sentimentality or anger, through which it regarded matters that stirred
her feelings. In speaking of herself she was sometimes strongly influenced
by romantic egotism. Affection and combativeness combined to render her an
unreliable witness about matters touching her husband’s honour. Resembling
Lady Byron in being a vehement and steady hater, she from her girlhood
cordially disliked her step-mother and after loving her sister Claire with
the romantic fervour described in the _Real Lord Byron_, came to detest
her almost as cordially as Lady Byron, long after Byron’s death, detested
her sister-in-law. All that she said or wrote to the discredit of her
step-mother and sister-by-affinity should be received with extreme
caution, and large allowance for her animosity against them.




CHAPTER III.

THE SECOND MRS. WILLIAM GODWIN.

    The Blighted Being--Miss Jones’s Disappointment--The Blighted Being
    goes to Bath--He proposes to Miss Harriet Lee--Is rejected by Mrs.
    Reveley--Is accepted by Mary Jane Clairmont--Who was she?--Her
    Children by her first Marriage--Their Ages in 1801--Points of
    Resemblance in Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Jane Clairmont--The
    Blighted Being marries Mary Jane Clairmont--Mr. Kegan Paul’s serious
    Misrepresentations of Claire’s Age--The Use made of this
    Misrepresentation--Mr. Kegan Paul convicted by his own
    Evidences--Charles Clairmont’s Boyhood--Godwin’s Regard for his second
    Wife--Misrepresentations touching the second Mrs. Godwin--Childhood of
    Mary and Claire--Education of Godwin’s Children and
    Step-children--Charles Clairmont’s Introduction to Free
    Thought--Godwin’s Care to withhold Mary from Free Thought--She is
    reared in Ignorance of her Mother’s Story--The Book-shop in Hanway
    Street--The Godwins of The Polygon--Their Migration to the City--The
    Godwins of Skinner Street.


By Mary Wollstonecraft’s death, Godwin was left with two motherless
infants on his hands,--Fanny Imlay, three years and from four to five
months old, and Mary, just ten days old. According to Mr. Kegan Paul, he
was also left with a blighted existence. Let us see what Godwin did with
his blighted existence in the years immediately following Mary
Wollstonecraft’s death. For some time the infants in The Polygon, Somers
Town, were cared for by Miss Louisa Jones, who would fain have become the
step-mother of Mary Wollstonecraft’s legitimate child, and the tender
guardian of Fanny.

Miss Jones, however, was not allowed to settle herself for life in this
manner; for though he saw the necessity of finding a mother for the
children, the widower with a blighted existence did not think highly of
Miss Louisa.

Mary Wollstonecraft had been just six months in her grave; when the
blighted being determined to woo one of the two Misses Lee, of
Bath,--Sophia and Harriet Lee, daughters of John Lee, the Covent Garden
actor, and authors of _The Canterbury Tales_; who, as writers with many
readers, and school-mistresses with a flourishing seminary for young
ladies, were notable personages in the City of Health and Invalids. Going
to Bath in March, 1798, Godwin saw enough of Miss Harriet Lee, on four
different occasions, to resolve on laying siege (by letters from London)
to her mature affections. In April 1798 Miss Harriet Lee received the
first of the letters from London, that were intended to induce her to
dissolve partnership with her sister, and enter into a different kind of
partnership with the author of _Political Justice_. Barely seven months
had passed since Mary Wollstonecraft’s death, when her former and
inconsolable husband is making love to another woman. This seems quick
work for a blighted being. Is it usual for a blighted being to think of
re-marriage so soon after bereavement? If so, blighted beings do not
deserve more compassion than other widowers. But the suit was
unsuccessful. There were several things to make Miss Harriet Lee think
thrice before accepting William Godwin. There was his strong writing
against the honourable estate into which he desired to lure Miss Harriet
Lee; there was the unpleasant rumour that he had lived for months in Free
Love with Mary Wollstonecraft; there were Mary Wollstonecraft’s two
infants in The Polygon, Somers Town. Moreover, as a gentlewoman of elegant
letters and a respectable schoolmistress, Mrs. Harriet Lee may have been
prejudiced against the man who had admired the author of the _Rights of
Woman_. Miss Harriet Lee thought thrice; and in August, 1798, the author
of _Political Justice_ knew he must look elsewhere for a step-mother to
his little daughter.

What next with the blighted being? One of the most unpleasant of the
several ladies, with whom Shelley associated in Italy, was a certain Mrs.
Gisborne, whilom Mrs. Reveley, of whom he wrote to Peacock in August, 1819
(giving her a character not more applicable to her in her advanced middle
age than in 1799):--‘Mrs. Gisborne is a sufficiently amiable and very
accomplished woman; she is δημοκρατικη and αθεη--how far she may
φιλανθρωπη I don’t know, for she is the antipodes of enthusiasm.’ On 6th
July, 1799, this gentlewoman lost her first husband, who died no long
while after showing much uneasiness at her intimacy with the blighted
being. Within a month of Mr. Reveley’s death, Godwin pressed the widow to
give him personal interviews, in order that he might show reason why she
should hasten to become his wife;--a request that was declined by the
widow, who, though an atheist, a democrat, and a cold-blooded creature,
had some faint notions of decency, and of what was due to the memory even
of the husband with whom she had lived unhappily. Is it usual for a
blighted being to behave in this way? In something more than a year from
his wife’s death to offer a married lady attention that stirs her husband
to indignation, and in less than two years from the blighting bereavement
to make an offer of marriage to this same lady, within a month of her
husband’s death? In the name of all the domestic affections, what is it to
be a blighted being? What is blight of heart and life? It must surely be
something that impels an inconsolable widower to make an offer of marriage
to nearly every other woman who crosses his path.

Instead of marrying the man of blighted life, Mrs. Reveley in May, 1800,
gave herself in marriage to Mr. Gisborne, whose Slawkenbergian nose is
curiously associated with Shelley’s own ‘little turn-up nose;’ her action
in this matter being (Mr. Kegan Paul assures us) ‘a severe blow to Godwin,
who had never abandoned the hope he might overcome the lady’s objections
to a marriage with him!’ Twelve months later (May 1801), the blighted
being was in love with Mrs. Mary Jane Clairmont, _alias_ Clermont, whom he
married in the following December,--just four years and three months from
the day of Mary Wollstonecraft’s funeral.

My information respecting the second Mrs. William Godwin’s first husband
is slight and shadowy, though I have done my best to make it more
substantial. There is reason to believe he was a bookseller; but my
evidence on this point is not conclusive. If he was in ‘the trade,’ the
fact would account for the second Mrs. Godwin’s knowledge of printing and
publishing matters, and of the confidence with which she urged Godwin to
become a publisher of books for children. For the main purpose of this
paragraph it is enough to say, that his surname is (as I remarked in the
_Real Lord Byron_) variously spelt in Byronic and Shelleyan biography, and
that one comes upon it in the fashion of Clermont, Claremont, Clairemont,
and Charlemont, as well as Clairmont. For sufficient and obvious reasons,
in the _Real Lord Byron_ I spelt the name Clermont,--the spelling used in
the British Museum Catalogue, for the reference to Claire’s well-known
letter to Byron, preserved in the Egerton MSS. For no less sufficient and
obvious reasons I spell the name in this chapter ‘Clairmont,’--Godwin’s
way of spelling the name. Readers, therefore, must bear in mind that ‘Jane
Clairmont’ and ‘Jane Clermont’ signify the same Claire (Mrs. Shelley’s
sister-by-affinity), who was Byron’s mistress and the mother of Allegra.

By the Shelleyan apologists, who draw their inspiration from Field Place,
the first Mrs. William Godwin and the second Mrs. William Godwin have been
dealt with differently. It appearing to those apologists that to place
Mary Wollstonecraft amongst the angels is to raise a presumption that the
daughter of so pure and bright a spirit was also of angelical nature,--a
presumption favourable to the poet and his family,--they have tortured the
English language to make her into an angel. On the other hand, it
appearing to the same apologists that to exhibit the second Mrs. Godwin as
a harsh and odious step-mother is to justify Mary Godwin’s desire to get
away from so hateful a ruler, and even to palliate the young lady’s
conduct in running away to Switzerland with another woman’s husband, they
have tortured and strained the English language even more cruelly, to
prove that the second Mrs. Godwin was a superlatively disagreeable woman.
Being no partisan, the present writer declines either to think the first
Mrs. Godwin an angel of grace, or to think the second Mrs. Godwin a very
hateful person. Seeing that Mary Wollstonecraft had various faults, he
sees that Mary Jane Clairmont had several imperfections. Whilst declining
to join with the Shelleyan enthusiasts in glorifying Mary Wollstonecraft
because her daughter Mary lived to be Shelley’s second wife, and in
decrying the second Mrs. Godwin for the advantage of her step-daughter’s
reputation, he is none the less disposed to think favourably of Mrs. Mary
Jane (Clairmont) Godwin, because she cordially disapproved of the views
about marriage, which Godwin had successively promulgated and abandoned.

In several important particulars the second Mrs. William Godwin resembled
the first Mrs. William Godwin. A woman of considerable cleverness and some
education, she was an industrious woman of letters. Cleverer with her pen
at translation than in original writing, she was enthusiastic and
decidedly well looking. Even by her arch-enemy, Mr. Kegan Paul, she is
said to have been ‘clever, enthusiastic, and _handsome_.’ Having somewhat
the advantage of Mary Wollstonecraft in temper she resembled her in
disposition. Both women were quick-tempered, captious, quarrelsome, given
to imagine themselves slighted and to sulk. But the second Mrs. Godwin was
by no means so violent and outrageous in wrath as Mary Wollstonecraft. In
other respects Mary Jane had the advantage of Mary Wollstonecraft. In
social reputation she was far superior to Mary Godwin’s mother. Having
never produced so scandalous a book as the _Rights of Women_, she had not
lived in Free Love with two men or any man; she had never given birth to
an illegitimate child; her name had never been discreditably associated
with another woman’s husband; nor had she ever thrown herself in a fit of
white rage off Putney Bridge. On another point the advantage is with the
second Mrs. Godwin. On mating with her Godwin matched _evenly_; whilst the
unevenness of his match with Mary Wollstonecraft had been to his
disadvantage. On coming to her childless husband Mary Wollstonecraft
brought an illegitimate child in her arms. Godwin had _two_ children to
maintain, when Mary Jane Clairmont entered his house with a child on
either hand.

In the spring of 1801 Mrs. Mary Jane Clairmont took possession of the
tenement adjoining Godwin’s house in The Polygon, Somers Town, bringing
with her to the new home her little girl Jane (afterwards ‘Claire’), at
that time in her fourth or fifth year (older, perhaps, by a few months
than little Mary Godwin), and her elder brother, who may be regarded as
having been born on or about 4th June, 1795,--possibly on or about 4th
June, 1796. My knowledge of the month in which the little boy (Charles
Clairmont) was born came to me from a letter, dated 5th June, 1806,
written to Mrs. Godwin (at Southend) by William Godwin, who says therein,
‘Yesterday (was that right or wrong?) we kept Charles’s birthday, though
his mother was absent.’ My information about the year of the boy’s birth
is less precise, but I put it in 1795. It is certain that he was older
than his sister. On this point Mr. Kegan Paul has no doubt; if he had any
I could remove it. Hence, at the time of Mrs. Clairmont’s entry into the
house adjoining Godwin’s home in The Polygon, Somers Town, the ages of the
four children of the two households stood thus:--(1) Fanny Imlay, b.
April, 1794, _ætat._ just seven years; (2) Charles Clairmont, b. 4th June,
1795, _ætat._ five years and ten months; (3) Jane Clairmont, in her fourth
(or possibly even in her fifth) year; (4) Mary Godwin, b. 30th August,
1797, _ætat._ three years and some seven or eight months.

A great deal turns on the ages of these children. In their desire to
whitewash Mary Godwin, and exhibit her as a worthy mate for so faultless a
person as Shelley, the Shelleyan enthusiasts have discovered that she was
much younger than Claire; the discovery being used as a reason why Mary’s
grand misdemeanour should be entered in the tale of Claire’s offences, and
why, instead of censuring Mary Wollstonecraft’s daughter for running off
with her friend’s husband, we should be indignant with the mature Claire
for not taking better care of her younger sister. It is well to inquire,
whether the discovery, of which so much is made, is aught else than a
misrepresentation.

Byron thought Mary and Claire were, within a few months, of the same age.
Writing of them in 1820, in the famous _Observations_, he put the case
thus ungrammatically, ‘Neither of them were, in 1816, nineteen years
old,’--_i.e._ in the months of 1816, which they passed chiefly in his
society at Geneva. It may be observed that Byron, often an inaccurate, was
sometimes an untruthful writer. But spite against Claire, with whom he was
quarrelling bitterly in 1820, would have disposed him to exaggerate her
age. Whilst habitually truthful people sometimes tell fibs, persons never
too nice about the truth sometimes tell it. On this occasion Byron seems
to have told the truth. He was right as to the age of Mary Godwin, who did
not complete her nineteenth year till 30th August, 1816. He certainly was
not far wrong about Claire’s age.

What is said about Claire’s age by Mr. Kegan Paul, who tells two different
stories about it? ‘This,’ he says of Mrs. Clairmont and her coming to The
Polygon (_vide_ pp. 57, 58, vol. ii. of _William Godwin: his Friends and
Contemporaries_), ‘was a Mrs. Clairmont, a widow, with a son then at
school, and one little daughter _somewhat older_ than Fanny, who came to
occupy the next house to Godwin in the Polygon.’ The italics of two words
of this quotation are mine. Farther on, in his book, when he comes to work
on the discovery, so as to make it appear that Claire was much older than
Mary, Mr. Kegan Paul (vol. ii., p. 213) says, ‘Jane Clairmont was only at
home for two nights during the six weeks Shelley spent in London. _She was
several years older than Fanny_, and even then led a somewhat independent
life apart from her mother and step-father, presumably as a governess,
since that was the occupation she afterwards followed in Italy, during the
intervals of her residence with the Shelleys.’ This extract (seven words
of which I print in italics) refers to Shelley’s stay in London in the
October and November, 1812. It is made up of inaccuracies. (1) Claire,
like Mary, was only fifteen years old. (2) She may have been a
pupil-teacher in some school where she was being educated; but she was not
living in independence of her stepfather and her mother. (3) She was not
several years older than Fanny.

Several years older! First, Mr. Kegan Paul says _somewhat older_, and then
_several years older_; the difference between the two expressions making
the two passages tell two different stories. The purpose of the larger
expression is obvious. Mr. Paul wishes us to think Claire several years
older than Fanny Imlay, in order that we may think her very much Mary’s
superior, by the authority of age. Several years may mean anything from
three or four years to ten or twelve. Let us put the expression at four
years. Then, as Fanny (born in April, 1794) was already eighteen years
old, Claire must, according to Mr. Kegan Paul, have been twenty-two years
old in 1812, and must have been born at least as early as April, 1790. It
follows, according to Mr. Kegan Paul, that Claire’s brother, older than
she, must have been born, at the latest, on 4th June, 1789,--might,
indeed, be fairly taken as having been born a year earlier.

Charles Clairmont was therefore, according to Mr. Kegan Paul, rising
twelve years old, when his mother came to her new house in the Polygon.
Was he?

(1) In 1802, when Charles (according to Mr. Kegan Paul’s statement) was
thirteen years old, William Godwin is admitted by Mr. Kegan Paul to have
taken much pains to put the boy into Christ’s Hospital. Had Godwin
succeeded in getting the admission, the boy would have been fourteen
before he went into the school, where boys, eighty years since, used to be
admitted, no less than now-a-days, in quite tender years. Is it probable
Godwin would have sought for the admission when the boy was so old?

(2) As an admission in the Bluecoat School could not be got for the boy,
we know from a letter, published in Mr. Kegan Paul’s own book, that
Charles Clairmont was sent to Charterhouse in the summer of 1805, and
kept at his studies there for six years. ‘I observed,’ Godwin wrote to Mr.
Fairley on 5th October, 1811, about the boy, ‘that I had kept him for six
years at the Charterhouse, one of our most celebrated schools, not without
proportionable profit, and that he has since been several months under one
of our most celebrated arithmeticians.’ If Charles was born on 4th June,
1789, he was sixteen years old when he first entered the Charterhouse
school, and twenty-two when he left it. Does Mr. Kegan Paul think this
probable or possible?

(3) Let us take some more evidence from one of the letters, which Mr.
Kegan Paul seems to have pitchforked into his book without reading them.
On 5th June, 1806, William Godwin wrote about the boy (who had been
naughty just before his birthday) to his wife at Southend, in these
words:--

    ‘Do not imagine that I took Charles into my good graces the moment
    your back was turned.... So that I had only just time to forgive him
    for his birthday. I wish to impress you with the persuasion that he is
    infinitely more of a child, and to be treated as a child, than you
    imagine. Monday I sent him for a frank, and set all the children to
    write letters, though by his awkwardness the occasion was lost. The
    letter he then wrote, though I took some pains previously to work on
    his feelings, was the poorest and most soulless thing ever you saw. I
    then set him to learn the poem of “My Mother,” in Darton’s _Original
    Poetry_.... I went upstairs to his bedside the night before you left
    us, that I might impress upon him the importance of not suffering you
    to depart in anger; but instead of understanding me at first, he, like
    a child, thought I was come to whip him, and with great fervour and
    agitation, begged I would forgive him.’

(4) Had he been born on 4th June, 1789, as we are asked to believe by Mr.
Kegan Paul, Charles (a decidedly clever boy, who made a good position for
himself in early manhood by his mental force) was just upon seventeen
years old, when he was scolded and punished for being naughty,--was set to
learn by heart ‘My Mother’ in Darton’s _Original Poetry_, and was thrown
into lively agitation by fear that his stepfather had come upstairs to
whip him. Can Mr. Kegan Paul seriously believe that a clever boy of
seventeen years would have cried out for forgiveness, and in childish
alarm have begged his step-father not to smack him?

(5) At the close of October, 1811, when, according to Mr. Kegan Paul, he
was twenty-two years, Charles (the clever boy, who was still a mere lad
when he became a tutor in the Imperial family of Austria) was sent to Mr.
Thomas Constable’s publishing house for two years to learn business; it
being arranged that the lad should receive a yearly salary of 15_l._, to
which his stepfather should add 30_l._ for his sufficient maintenance. Can
Mr. Kegan Paul believe that this arrangement was made for so promising a
young man when he was twenty-two years old?

(6) Now let us see how Charles’s probable birthday of 4th June, 1795, fits
in with the known dates of his story. Born on that day he would be seven
years old in June, 1802; an age at which persons, wishing to get him into
Christ’s Hospital, would be on the look-out for a nomination. Born on that
day he was ten years old in 1805, when he went for the first time to the
Charterhouse,--a fit age (as matters went seventy years since) at which to
send him into the school. Born on that day, he would be still ten years
old, when he was scolded, set to learn ‘My Mother,’ and thrown into noisy
agitation by fear of being whipt. Godwin’s letter gives a picture of a
rather childish boy of ten years, not of a young man seventeen years old.
Born on that day, he would be sixteen, when he left school in 1811, and
went as a clerk into the Edinburgh publishing-house. Let it be added
(though more than enough has been said about the youngster’s age) that the
boy’s letters, published in Mr. Kegan Paul’s book of blunders, are enough
to show him to have been six or seven years younger than the book-maker
requires us to think him.

(7) Another piece of evidence touching Claire’s age, taken from Mr. Kegan
Paul’s book. If she was born, as Mr. Kegan Paul would have us believe, no
later than April, 1790, she was twenty-one years old in May, 1811. In that
month of May, Mrs. Godwin went to Ramsgate for change of air, taking her
stepdaughter, Mary, with her for the trip, whilst her own daughter Jane
(Claire) remained in London with her father and Fanny Imlay. Writing from
London to Mrs. Godwin at Ramsgate, on 18th May, 1811, William Godwin
says:--

    ‘I have just been into the next room to ask the children if they have
    any messages. They are both anxious to hear from you. _Jane says she
    hopes you stuck on the Goodwin Sands, and that the sailors frightened
    you a little._’

This message from thirteen-years-old Jane was a piquant piece of sauciness
from the child to her mamma. From a young woman of twenty-one years it
would have been a piece of silliness, that Godwin certainly would not have
passed on to his wife, in order to heighten the enjoyment of her holiday.
Enough surely has been said to satisfy readers that Byron was right in
regarding Claire and Mary as girls of about the same age, _i.e._ as being
both of them only eighteen years old when they were at Geneva in 1816; and
that Mr. Kegan Paul is guilty of a serious error in making it seem that
Claire was older than Mary by at least seven years and four months. Claire
may have been older than Mary by some months; but she certainly was not
older than Fanny by several years.

Repeating a piece of malicious domestic tattle, in order to make the lady
ridiculous and contemptible, Mr. Kegan Paul says, that soon after entering
her new home in The Polygon, Mrs. Clairmont, from the balcony outside her
drawing-room window, addressed Godwin (sitting in the balcony outside his
drawing-room window) in these words, ‘Is it possible that I behold the
immortal Godwin?’--words that, tickling the philosopher’s inordinate
vanity, are represented as going far to enslave him. Let it be assumed
that the widow made the first advances to acquaintanceship with her
neighbour in this absurd fashion; that she set her cap at the widower,
angled for him, caught him. Why should so much be made of this to the
second Mrs. Godwin’s discredit, by writers who have nothing but eulogy for
Mary Wollstonecraft, though she ran wildly after Fuseli, and certainly did
not leave it to Godwin to make the first advances to her? We have Godwin’s
published word that he made no such advances to her; and we have his
serious declaration, in the private note intended only for Mary
Wollstonecraft’s eye, that his ambition to heal her wounded heart resulted
from her action in throwing herself on his compassionate sympathy.

It is urged by Mr. Kegan Paul, that Godwin’s second marriage was not a
remarkably happy one; that Godwin would have lived on the whole more
serenely, from middle to old age, had he not wedded the widow Clairmont;
that they had two or three lively quarrels, and divers keen disputes; that
some of his old friends disliked her so much that they visited her husband
less frequently; that she was a ‘managing,’ domineering woman, with a far
from happy temper. All this must be admitted, though every count of the
indictment is pressed against the lady with extravagant exaggeration.
When all has been urged that can be fairly urged to the discredit of her
temper, the second Mrs. Godwin was a less irascible and overbearing woman
than Mary Wollstonecraft. There are grounds for a strong opinion that had
Godwin been Mary Wollstonecraft’s domestic mate for thirty years, instead
of some ten or eleven months, he would have suffered far more from her
temper, than he suffered from his second wife’s temper during more than
thirty years. If in one of their squabbles arising from paltry questions,
Godwin and his second wife talked about separating from one another when
they had been married only a year and ten months, let it be remembered in
what terms he was moved to write to Mary Wollstonecraft, when he had been
(legally) married to her only three weeks. If the man of letters and his
second wife had another lively difference in August, 1811, when they had
been married nine years and seven months, the quarrel ended under
circumstances, affording evidence of much good feeling on Mrs. Godwin’s
part, and also of the strong mutual affection of the husband and wife. The
documents of Mr. Kegan Paul’s book (documents he cannot be supposed to
have read) yield conclusive testimony that, whilst falling out with her,
and scolding her roundly once in a while, Godwin had a high regard for his
second wife’s energy, a corresponding respect for her good sense and
discretion in affairs of business, a genuine admiration for several of her
qualities, a curious pride in the gentility of her birth, and a steady
affection for her,--in truth, all the sentimental fondness so cold a man
could feel for any woman. There is a homely saying in Wiltshire that
‘married people are made to bicker and breed.’ Godwin and his wife
bickered barely up to the standard of Wiltshire morals; and their recorded
bickerings are never without indications of a homely (albeit quite
unromantic) liking for one another. Of their petty tiffs and short-lived
quarrels, biography would never have said a word, had not the Shelleyan
enthusiasts thought it needful to hunt up materials for palliating Mary
Godwin’s conduct, in running away from her father’s house with another
woman’s husband.

‘The old acquaintances,’ Mr. Kegan Paul says in his general account of
Godwin’s life in 1802-3, the first year of his married life with his
second wife, ‘did not like Mrs. Godwin, and she did not like them; she was
a harsh stepmother, whom his children feared.’ There are, of course, two
sides to the story of Mrs. Godwin’s dislike of her husband’s old friends.
The dislike has in some cases been exaggerated; and her dislike of some of
the people was reasonable and even creditable to her. Possibly her
children feared her; for the way, in which children were generally
governed in English homes eighty years since, caused them often to fear
parents who abounded in parental affection. But there is no evidence that
she was a ‘harsh stepmother,’ in any fair sense of the term, apart from
Mrs. Shelley’s vindictive words against her. Such scanty evidence as Mr.
Kegan Paul gives us from the Field Place papers, goes in the other
direction. On this point Mr. Kegan Paul makes strong assertions without
supporting them with facts, which he certainly would have done, had the
facts been to hand. He says (speaking of 1802-3):--

    ‘She’ (_i.e._ the second Mrs. Godwin) ‘had strong views, in which many
    would agree, that each child should be educated to some definite
    duties, and with a view of filling some useful place in life; but this
    arrangement soon had at least a show of partiality. It was found that
    Jane Clairmont’s mission in life, according to her mother’s view, was
    to have all the education, and even accomplishments, which their
    slender means would admit, and more than they would admit; while
    household drudgery was from an early age discovered to be the
    life-work of Fanny and Mary Godwin.’

This is the case against Mrs. Godwin, as it is put by the gentleman who
insists that Claire (in after-life a governess) was six or seven years
older than Mary. As they were of the same age, it was incumbent on Mrs.
Godwin to treat them alike in respect to educational advantages; but it is
droll that Mr. Kegan Paul, who declares Claire to have been so much the
older of the two girls, should be so severe on Mrs. Godwin for spending
more money on the education of the elder girl (so soon to be a governess),
than on the younger who was still a little child. What accomplishments can
Mary (from five to six years old in 1802-3) have been denied by her harsh
stepmother, that so much should be made of the denial? The truth is that
the two girls of about the same age were educated precisely in the same
way, by the same governess, and with the same books. In other matters they
were treated in the same way; taking their childish ‘treats’ together or
by turns, and taking their punishments in proportion to their naughtiness.
It has already been seen, how Mary went with her stepmother in May, 1811
(a rare ‘outing’ for the Skinner-Street people in those days!), Claire
being left at home. Had Mrs. Godwin taken Claire and left Mary in Skinner
Street, what a fuss the Shelleyan apologists would have made about Mrs.
Godwin’s galling neglect of Mary and partiality for her own girl! The
alleged difference in the treatment of the two children existed only in
the imagination of Mary, who inherited some of the worst defects of her
mother’s temper.

These two children, of the same household and about the same age, were
fifteen years old, when Godwin received a letter from a stranger, begging
for information respecting Mary Wollstonecraft’s daughters, and asking
especially whether they were educated in accordance with their mother’s
educational theories,--an inquiry to which Godwin replied with a statement
that Mary Wollstonecraft’s daughters had not been educated in accordance
with their mother’s educational notions. ‘They are,’ he wrote, ‘neither of
them brought up with an exclusive attention to the system and ideas of
their mother.’ At the same time, Godwin told his unknown correspondent
that he was chiefly moved to marry his second wife by considerations
arising from his sense of his own incompetence to educate his daughters.
Further, he remarked that he and his wife were too fully occupied by the
labour of maintaining their family, to ‘have leisure enough for reducing
theories to practice;’--a series of significant admissions.

There is another piece of remarkable evidence, respecting the education
Godwin gave his children, to be found amongst the excellent materials of
Mr. Kegan Paul’s book of blunders. Four days after the boy’s withdrawal
from the Charterhouse School, Godwin sent his step-son Charles a book,
instead of another work the lad had been advised to read. On sending the
book to Ramsgate, where Charles was staying with his mother, Godwin, on
24th May, 1811, wrote to Mrs. Godwin in these words:--

    ‘I send Charles’s book agreeably to his desire.... The very choice of
    the book is taken out of my hands; T. T. undertook to procure for him
    Paine’s _Age of Reason_; this I objected to. It is written in a vein
    of banter and impudence, and though I do not wish the young man to be
    the slave of the religion of his country, there are few things I hate
    more than a young man, with his little bit of knowledge, setting-up to
    turn up his nose, and elevate his eyebrows, and make his sorry joke at
    everything the wisest and best men England ever produced, have
    treated with veneration. Therefore I preferred a work by Anthony
    Collins, the friend of Locke, written with sobriety and learning, to
    the broad grins of Thomas Paine.... Observe, I totally object to
    Mary’s reading in Charles’s book. I think it much too early for him,
    but I have been driven, so far as he is concerned, from the standing
    of my own judgment by the improper conduct of T. T.’

It is instructive to observe how William Godwin fell away from his
philosophical theories as soon as he was required to put them in practice.
It is one thing for a scholar to theorize in his arm-chair for the
guidance of individuals, who are unknown to him; another thing for him to
act on his precepts, in the education of persons to whom he is drawn by
parental affection. In theory an enemy to marriage, when Mary
Wollstonecraft gave him her wounded heart, he had lived with her in Free
Love for only a few months, when he discovered that he had better marry
her. From the day of his marriage he moved further away from his old
hostility to wedlock, till he altogether abandoned his former views
against marriage, and became a supporter of the institution he had so long
derided. A theorist on education, he no sooner had little girls to care
for at his own hearth, than he discovered his ‘incompetence for the
education of daughters,’ and bethought himself that he had better find a
second wife, who would bring them up in the old-fashioned way. A bold
Deist whilst he was a bachelor, he became a timid Deist in private life on
becoming a father. When Charles Clairmont came to reasonable years, Godwin
shrunk from the thought of giving him the _Age of Reason_ and would fain
have postponed his introduction to Free Thought. On putting Anthony
Collins’ moderate book in the hands of the sixteen-years-old boy, he was
urgent that his daughter (in her fourteenth year) should not be allowed to
look into the book.

Godwin’s reluctance to act on his theories, his absolute abandonment in
mature middle age of several of his social views (especially his notorious
theories respecting marriage), must be borne in mind by readers, who would
judge between him and Shelley, in regard to matters that must soon be
narrated. Orthodox cynics have laughed over the old man’s chagrin at his
daughter’s elopement with another woman’s husband, and have declared him
properly punished by the scandalous incident for his denunciations of
wedlock. Men of the world, like Trelawny (a true sailor to the last in
finding a new love wherever he harboured), have made merry over Godwin’s
displeasure and wrath at the elopement. In his old age, Trelawny used to
maintain stoutly that, as Shelley acted in this matter in accordance with
the philosopher’s published doctrine, the latter had no right to complain
of the poet’s action towards Mary. By the majority of the Shelleyan
apologists, it is declared or suggested that Godwin, with a marriageable
daughter in his house, was bound by the words he uttered against marriage
long before he had a daughter; as though he had no right to change his
views after coming to mature age. Whilst questions, touching Godwin’s
relations with, and conduct to, Shelley are debated in this fashion, it
cannot be stated too plainly that his views about marriage in 1814, and in
many previous years, had nothing in common with what he thought against
marriage, before his union with Mary Wollstonecraft.

In his _Leaf from the Real Life of Lord Byron_, the rash and deplorable
article on matters about which he knew nothing, Mr. Froude asserted that
Mary Godwin was, in her childhood, ‘bred up to regard love as the
essential part of marriage;’ these words being used in a sense which
caused the essayist to assert that, notwithstanding this breeding-up, she
was ‘a perfectly pure innocent woman.’ This assertion that in her
childhood Mary was indoctrinated in the anti-matrimonial views her father
had abandoned, is absolutely the reverse of fact. Godwin’s children and
step-children were educated much like other English children of their
social degree; just as they would have been educated had he, instead of
being a Deist, been a lukewarm member of the Church of England. Sent to a
Church of England school, Charles Clairmont was in no way introduced to
Free Thought till he had entered his seventeenth year, and had it not been
for T. Turner’s busybodyism, the young man’s introduction to Free Thought
would have been deferred till he was much older. Instructed by
professional governesses and men-teachers, Mary Godwin and Claire were
taught chiefly out of the books produced by their parents in the way of
their business, for use in Church-of-England and other Denominational
Schools. Their minds were not led prematurely to think about marriage. No
eccentric notions touching the intercourse of the sexes had been put into
Mary’s mind, when Shelley made her acquaintance. It may be assumed
confidently, from the way in which she was educated, that she had never
known anything of her mother’s painful history and peculiar views, till
Shelley spoke to her about them, and used them as arguments for inducing
her to become his mistress. It is certain from her own written words that,
instead of regarding marriage as an idle form, she regarded it as a sacred
and momentous ceremony. As Godwin was so urgent that she should not be
allowed to look into ‘Charles’s book,’ and thought sixteen years a ‘much
too early’ age for Charles’s introduction to Free Thought, we may be sure
he thought the age _very_ much too early for a clever girl’s initiation in
the views of Free-thinkers.

Enough has been said to show that, though her temper was defective, the
_Edinburgh Review_ (October, 1882) had no sufficient justification for
saying, on the authority of Mr. Kegan Paul, that the second Mrs. Godwin
‘was a person who rendered life intolerable to those who shared it with
her.’ The evidence is superabundant that she did not render life
intolerable, or otherwise than fairly enjoyable, to her husband, her elder
son Charles, her younger son William, and Mary Wollstonecraft’s
illegitimate daughter Fanny. That Fanny got on pleasantly with Mrs.
Godwin, and that Mrs. Godwin proved a good and kind mother to this child
of shameful birth, are sufficient testimony that Mary’s stepmother was by
no means so bad a woman as certain of the Shelleyan apologists would have
us think her. The fault was not wholly on Mrs. Godwin’s side that, on
entering the period in which girlhood passes imperceptibly into
womanhood,--the period when high-spirited girls are sometimes very
difficult persons to control,--Mary and Claire went into rebellion against
her. Godwin’s admission to his unknown correspondent, that his favourite
child was ‘singularly bold, somewhat imperious,’ points to some of the
difficulty Mrs. Godwin experienced in managing the girl, who had inherited
a liberal share of Mary Wollstonecraft’s quick, fervid, and querulous
nature. Beautiful in different styles, clever in different ways, these two
wilful, daring, saucy pusses, would have tried the temper and skill of the
most judicious governess. Mrs. Godwin being what she was, it is not
surprising that they went into rebellion against her government, and
constituted themselves ‘the opposition’ in the Skinner-Street Parliament.
It was a grievous misfortune of both damsels, that Shelley (ever quick to
sympathize with ‘the victims of domestic tyranny’) made their
acquaintance, when they were in this dangerous period of girlhood.

That the handsome, clever, managing Mrs. Godwin had great influence over
her husband, is shown by the way in which she induced him to become a
publisher and retail seller of children’s educational books,--the business
being so arranged that she was for some time its nominal and actual
manager, whilst he, keeping in the background of the affair, avoided
public observation. Knowing much of printing and the book-trade, it
occurred to the managing lady that she and her husband would do well to go
into this business. There was much to be said in favour of the project in
1805, when in the fourth year of their married life, Mr. and Mrs. Godwin
were no richer than they had been on their wedding-day. Still earning an
income that would have been wealth to him as a bachelor, Godwin had not
‘done well’ of late years. Since his second marriage things had been going
ill with him. His income was waning, his family had increased. Fanny was
rising twelve; Charley was ten; Jane (_i.e._ Claire) and Mary were rising
eight; Willie, the babe of the household, was nearing the end of his
second year. How were these children to be clothed, fed, taught, and
raised creditably into young men and women, on an income that, already
barely sufficient for present necessities, seemed likely to dwindle to
smaller revenue? With all their industry, Godwin and his wife had barely
kept things going; and they were now nearing a time of life (Godwin was in
his fiftieth year), when even the most improvident people begin to
anticipate the usual incidents of life’s decline.

Under these circumstances, the shop was opened in 1805, in Hanway Street,
Oxford Street, under the name of M. J. Godwin and Co.; the M. J. Godwin
being Mary Jane, whose Co. at The Polygon, and on the shop-front, went to
work bravely in throwing off copy for new Children’s Books, to be
published under the _nom-de-plume_ of Baldwin. Mrs. Godwin also worked
hard with her pen, whilst she went daily from The Polygon to the little
shop near Oxford Street, to look after the person who had been engaged to
wait on customers; Godwin keeping in the background, because his
reputation might be hurtful to the venture, were the shop known to be his
shop, and many of the books sold in it known to be by his pen. Something
less than two years later, when the business (which, beginning in this
modest way, became a considerable affair) was moved to Skinner Street, it
was decided with questionable discretion that Godwin should live over his
own shop, and, dropping all concealment, work the business under his own
name. The business was thus removed to Skinner Street in May, 1807.

Thus it was that the Godwins of The Polygon, Somers Town, became the
Godwins of Skinner Street. There is room for two opinions respecting the
policy of the enterprise, that made Godwin for the remainder of his
working days a struggling tradesman; whilst with failing powers he
persisted in literary toil. But much may be said against the view taken by
the partisans who, never finding aught to commend in anything for which
Mrs. Godwin was accountable, maintain it was an evil day for the man of
letters when he was persuaded by his meddlesome wife to go into ‘the
trade.’ Burdened with a wife and five children, Godwin’s only prospect,
towards the close of his time at Somers Town, was one of incessant labour
and anxiety about money. Had he kept out of business, he would, perhaps,
have needed the help of his friends in a greater degree. On the whole, I
am disposed to think that, whilst his difficulties were somewhat lighter,
his means of supporting his family were somewhat greater, than they would
have been had he remained in The Polygon, and kept clear of the commercial
side of literature. Sending his boys to good schools, he gave his girls
the usual training, together with some of the accomplishments and
pleasures, of young gentlewomen. In some respects it might have been
cheerier without being in any way costlier or more luxurious; but the
house in Skinner Street was a fairly happy home for the five young people
who, one and all, called Godwin ‘papa’ and Mrs. Godwin ‘mamma.’




CHAPTER IV.

THE IRISH CAMPAIGN, AND THE STAY AT NANTGWILLT.

    Opium and Hallucination at Keswick--Migration to Ireland--Shelley’s
    Letters to Miss Hitchener--Curran’s Coldness to the
    Adventurer--Publication of the _Address to the Irish People_--Measures
    for putting the Pamphlet in Circulation--Harriett’s
    Amusement--Shelley’s Seriousness--Shelley’s other Irish Tract--Public
    Meeting in the Fishamble Street Theatre--Shelley’s Speech to the Sixth
    Resolution--Various Accounts of the Speech--Mr. MacCarthy’s bad
    Manners--Honest Jack Lawless--His Project for a History of
    Ireland--His Way of handling Shelley--William Godwin’s
    Alarm--Shelley’s Submission--His Intercourse with Curran--His
    Withdrawal from Ireland--Seizure of his Papers at the Holyhead
    Custom-House--Harriett’s Letter to Portia--The Shelleys in Wales--Miss
    Hitchener’s ‘Divine Suggestion’--Harriett and Eliza don’t think it
    ‘Divine’--Shelley at Nantgwillt--His Scheme for turning Farmer--His
    comprehensive Invitation to the Godwins--His sudden Departure from
    Nantgwillt--Cause of the Departure--Mr. MacCarthy again at Fault.


That they may realize the physical condition of the young man who was so
easily educated into thinking prodigious evil of Thomas Jefferson Hogg,
readers should remember that Shelley was taking laudanum whilst he was at
Keswick. The letter which affords evidence of this important fact is
believed by Mr. Rossetti to be the earliest of the numerous writings,
touching the poet’s use of the tincture of opium; but it may not be
inferred that he came to Keswick without having made acquaintance with the
drug, of which he was a free consumer in subsequent stages of his life.

Making acquaintance with opium at a somewhat earlier time of life than
Byron, though probably in the same year of grace as the older poet,
Shelley was so liberal an opium-taker that the drug’s influence on the
nervous system must be borne in mind by those, who would account for his
successive hallucinations, and other exhibitions of nervous disorder. Even
by the medical observer, the effects of laudanum are sometimes mistaken
for manifestations of lunacy. Mr. Rossetti certainly had good grounds for
suggesting that laudanum was at the bottom of the marvellous tale, with
which Shelley thrilled the nerves of Eliza and Harriett in the last week
of his stay at Keswick. The story, told with every show of sincerity by
the victim of hallucination, or perplexing semi-delusion, if he is not to
be regarded as the utterer of a deliberate invention, was that on
returning from a walk to his home, he had been assailed by a robber, with
consequences that might have been tragic, had not the assault been
fortunately made under the very eaves of Mr. Calvert’s roof. By falling
over his own door-step, Shelley had been so fortunate as to fall out of
the bandit’s grasp. Few readers will hesitate in the opinion that if this
wondrous tale was not in some degree an affair of hallucination, it was
altogether untruth.

Shelley would have gone to Ireland with firmer confidence in his measures
for emancipating the Catholics, and Repealing the Union, had he been
attended to the field of philanthropic action by that equally sublime and
swarthy young woman, Miss Eliza Hitchener, schoolmistress of
Hurstpierpoint. Could this young woman, who seized every occasion for
sowing the seeds of Deism and Republicanism in the minds of her infantile
pupils, have been induced to throw up her school and start for Dublin at a
moment’s notice, Shelley’s Irish expedition might have had a different
ending. The need for Miss Hitchener’s presence on the field of moral and
political illumination was felt so strongly by Shelley, that he had
scarcely taken possession of furnished lodgings at No. 7 Sackville Street,
Dublin, when he wrote to her, imploring she would come to him
instantly--and for ever. But Miss Hitchener could not be moved so easily.
Having charge of certain little Americans, a source of income not to be
surrendered recklessly, she wished for time in which to dispose of the
goodwill of her school, ere she flitted to Dublin for the sake of the poor
Irish. Smuggler’s daughter though she was, Miss Hitchener lacked the
spirit to think cheerily of crossing the Irish Channel without any escort.
So Shelley was constrained to do his best for Ireland without her personal
co-operation. It being clear that his reunion with Miss Hitchener must be
deferred till he should have settled the Irish question, saved Ireland,
and retired for ever to some delightful cottage in North Wales, Shelley
wrote from 7 Sackville Street, Dublin, to the incomparable lady on 14th
February, 1812, that he looked forward to the pleasure of meeting her in
Wales, in the following summer. Joining hands once more in Wales, they
would never again part company.

(1) _Dublin: from 12th February, 1812, to 7th April, 1812: just seven
weeks and five days!_--Leaving Whitehaven for the Isle of Man on 3rd
February, 1812, Shelley, with his two travelling companions (Eliza and
Harriett), reached Dublin somewhere during the night of the 12th of the
same month, after enduring manifold discomforts in the course of a journey
that, rough and wretched by land, was yet rougher and more wretched by
sea. After recovering from fatigue of travel, the three adventurers
bestirred themselves for the good of Ireland, and in doing so, took two or
three steps that may at least be declared not wholly and directly at
variance with common sense. To avoid the costlier discomforts of a hotel,
they lost no time in exposing themselves to the cheaper discomforts of a
Sackville Street lodging-house. Having thus planted himself in the capital
of the country he had visited from philanthropic motives, Shelley called
(with Godwin’s letter of introduction in his hand) on the Master of the
Rolls (Curran),--an attention the Master of the Rolls was in no hurry to
repay; though Shelley came to Dublin with a not altogether groundless hope
of being welcomed cordially by the great orator who, having done fairly
well for himself by patriotism, had for several years held the official
place that, whilst lowering his zeal for patriotic agitation, required him
to exercise a certain amount of circumspection in admitting patriots to
his domestic circle. Fortunately for Curran, he was ‘not at home’ on the
occasion of Shelley’s first call; and it is conceivable that, having been
so fortunate in all honesty, the Master of the Rolls decided to be equally
fortunate on subsequent occasions of a visit from the adventurer, until
more satisfactory information respecting William Godwin’s young friend
should come to hand.

After leaving his card on the Master of the Rolls, Shelley took measures
for offering his views on Irish affairs to the people whom he had come to
serve and save. It is said that he tried in vain to find a regular
publisher for his _Address to the Irish People_. For this statement,
though there is other, I know of no better, authority than certain
scarcely reliable words of the letter, written from Lynton by Shelley to
Mr. Hookham, in 1812, just before Daniel Hill’s arrest. Certainly, the
work was not a production with which a prudent bookseller, desirous of
standing well in official circles, would care to connect himself. Nor was
the youthful author (who, whilst numbering no more than nineteen, had the
aspect of only fifteen years) a person to win the confidence of wary
booksellers, who could learn nothing about him besides what he was moved
to say of himself. If Shelley went about Dublin in search of a publisher,
he certainly wasted no long time in the search, for the pamphlet was
printed (in execrably bad type, and on paper of corresponding badness)
before he had been fully twelve days in the Irish capital.

Whilst the pamphlet was passing through the press, Miss Westbrook
bestirred herself for Ireland’s regeneration, by collecting ‘useful
passages’ out of Tom Paine’s works, with a view to their publication. At
the same time, the lady constituted herself keeper of the purse, and made
a red cloak.

Fifteen hundred copies of the _Address_ having been printed and delivered
to the author, he lost no time in offering them to the people he wished to
illuminate. A copy of the work was left at each of the sixty principal
public-houses. An Irishman, named Daniel Hill, was sent about Dublin with
a supply of the pamphlets, and ordered to sell them at five-pence a-piece
to all who would buy, and to use his discretion in giving them to persons
who could not afford to buy them. At the same time, Shelley and Harriett
dropt the pamphlet from the balcony of their windows to passers in
Sackville Street, and never went abroad without copies for distribution.
To Harriett, ‘ready to die with laughter’ at their measures for scattering
the seeds of wholesome principles amongst the Irish people, the whole
affair was a frolic. But what she regarded as comical pastime was the most
serious business to Shelley, whose countenance wore its gravest
expression, when he dropt his little books into the hands of wayfarers
from his Sackville Street balcony, or in his walks about the town
furtively slipt a copy of the _Address_ into the hood of an old woman’s
cloak. Having made away with four hundred copies in this manner, Shelley
congratulated himself on having caused a prodigious sensation, and being
far on the way to a peaceful revolution.

The _Address to the Irish People_, perhaps the weakest and most puerile
piece of political pamphleteering that ever proceeded from the pen of a
youth of Shelley’s years and education, was followed at a brief interval
by another pamphlet of his composition, entitled, _Proposals for an
Association of those Philanthropists who, convinced of the Inadequacy of
the Moral and Political State of Ireland to produce Benefits which are
nevertheless attainable, are willing to unite to accomplish its
Regeneration_; this second tract being followed after a longer interval by
the _Declaration of Rights_, a broadside manifesto of wholesome
revolutionary principles, in thirty-one numbered articles, with a
concluding appeal to all mankind to ‘Awake! Arise! or be for ever fallen!’
The first of the thirty-one articles (plagiarized without acknowledgment,
as Mr. Rossetti has shown, from two documents of the French Revolution,
(_a_) The Declaration by the Constituent Assembly in August, 1789, and
(_b_) the Declaration proposed by Robespierre in April, 1793), announced
to all Irishmen interested in the matter,--‘Government has no rights; it
is a delegation from several individuals for the purpose of securing their
own.’

A copy of the _Address_ was sent to Curran, who, of course, took no notice
of the performance. Fretting at Curran’s disdainful indifference to his
efforts for the regeneration of Ireland, Shelley wrote to Miss Hitchener
of his mean opinion of the lawyer who had consented to serve a tyrannical
Government as Master of the Rolls. But in leaving the trio to amuse
themselves at their pleasure, without checking or discouraging them,
Curran gave Shelley only the same cause of offence, as was given him by
all Dublin society during the earlier weeks of his stay in the capital. If
Expectation (to use the expression of one of Shelley’s letters to Miss
Hitchener) was on the tiptoe respecting the purpose of the three lodgers
at 7 Lower Sackville Street, she gave no other sign of interest in their
proceedings. There may have been a little tittering in the highways, in
Trinity College, and in the Four Courts, at the eccentric demeanour of the
young gentleman and two ladies, who went about the town forcing copies of
a foolish tract into the hands of wayfarers; but few people offered to pay
for the literature thus put under their eyes. No one of social influence
sought out the author who, after crossing the Channel for the benefit of
Ireland, found the Irish people much less ready to know him, than he was
ready to make their acquaintance. The trio had been a fortnight in Lower
Sackville Street, when Harriett wrote of the Irish people to Miss
Hitchener, ‘We have seen very little of them as yet; but when Percy is
more known I suppose we shall know more at the same time.’ The ink with
which Harriett wrote these words had been dry for little more than
twenty-four hours, when Shelley was brought face to face with the Irish
people, on the evening of 28th February, 1812, at the ‘Aggregate Meeting
of the Catholics of Ireland,’ held in the Fishamble Street Theatre for the
furtherance of Catholic Emancipation,--a meeting at which O’Connell was
chief orator, and Shelley spoke as seconder of the sixth resolution, ‘That
the grateful thanks of this Meeting are due, and hereby returned to Lord
Glentworth, the Right Hon. Maurice Fitzgerald, and the other distinguished
Protestants who have this day honoured us with their presence.’

To second the sixth resolution at a public meeting is not to take an
important part in its proceedings. Under ordinary circumstances it is to
utter a few words, that are heard by few in the stir and hubbub of the
breaking up of the assembly, and are rated by the reporters for the press
as a mere formality, undeserving commemoration in a separate paragraph.
Shelley’s speech certainly attracted some attention at the moment of its
delivery, and caused some subsequent talk. But it was only one of the
concluding and insignificant incidents of an important demonstration.
Chief-constable Michael Farrell disposed of the eloquence, that commended
the sixth resolution to the aggregate Catholics, in this brief sentence,
‘Lord Glentworth said a few words; a Mr. Bennett spoke, also a Mr.
Shelley, who stated himself to be a native of England.’ In an official
report of an inferior constable, Shelley’s name does not appear; nor does
the report contain any reference to his speech, unless Mr. Manning made
the mistake of attributing to another youthful orator the words that
proceeded from Shelley’s lips. Whilst the constables dealt thus lightly
with Shelley’s oration, the reporters for the press noticed it in
significant paragraphs. The _Freeman’s Journal_ (29th February, 1812)
honoured it with eighty words. The _Dublin Evening Post_ gave it 216
words. The _Patriot_ of the 2nd of March thought it worthy of 345
commemorative words. It is, therefore, well upon the record that Shelley
spoke a piece of his mind to what Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy calls ‘an
immense assembly.’

The speech was certainly made. But there is a curious conflict as to the
length and tenor of the speech, the style in which it was delivered, and
the way in which it was received. Lady Shelley wishes us to believe that,
by an unreasonable display of tolerance for the Irish Protestants,
Shelley provoked savage yells from his Catholic auditors. Mr. Denis
Florence MacCarthy produces half-a-dozen scraps of old newspapers in
evidence, that the young poet’s maiden essay in political oratory charmed
and moved its hearers in a singular degree, causing them to hail him with
delight, ‘whilst joy beamed in every countenance and rapture glistened in
every eye.’ Whilst the circumstances of the case, including the reports of
the newspapers, dispose the discreet reader to think it probable that the
speech held the attention of the meeting for five or ten minutes, persons
who believe Shelley incapable of anything in the way of misstatement are
convinced by a passage in one of his letters to Miss Hitchener that he
spoke for upwards of an hour.

Though it is not to be imagined that the seconder of the sixth resolution
was allowed to talk for more than an hour, there is sufficient evidence
that, after rising on his legs, Shelley took occasion to introduce himself
with unusual particularity to his hearers, and to inform them of the
considerations and purpose that had brought him to Ireland. It is also
certain that his utterances were received with alternate expressions of
approval and dissent; that he was applauded for expressing his abhorrence
of English misrule, and checked with even more emphatic indications of
displeasure, when he spoke of mere differences of religious opinion, as
trivialities that should not be allowed to divide the people of the same
nation. Shelley himself certainly made none too much of the expressions of
dissent when he wrote to Miss Hitchener on 14th March, 1812 (from 17
Grafton Street, to which address he had moved from 7 Lower Sackville
Street), that his speech was misunderstood; that, though he won some
applause by stating the objects of his expedition to Ireland, he was
hissed for his remarks touching religion; and that ‘the newspapers,’ which
gave significant prominence to his speech, ‘only noted that which did not
excite disapprobation.’

With this confession of oratorical misadventure under their eyes, most
readers will think Hogg right in saying:--

    ‘On one occasion he’ (_i.e._ Shelley) ‘told me that at a
    meeting--probably at the meeting of the philanthropists--so much
    ill-will was shown to the Protestants that, thereupon, he was provoked
    to remark that the Protestants were fellow Christians, fellow
    subjects, and as such were entitled to equal rights, to equal
    charity, toleration, and the rest. He was forthwith interrupted by
    savage yells; a tremendous uproar arose, and he was compelled to be
    silent.’

If Shelley showed himself so comically ignorant of Irish politics, as to
assure a meeting of Dublin Catholics that religious equality with the
majority of the Irish nation should at least be accorded to the Protestant
minority, it is not surprising that he was silenced. Hogg may have
exaggerated what Shelley told him with exaggeration, and his way of
writing about ‘the Catholics’ and ‘the philanthropists,’ as though the
terms meant the same thing, is not the only example of reprehensible
looseness in his account of Shelley’s Irish campaign. But in the main the
biographer’s account of the poet’s campaign is by no means too
unfavourable to the youthful adventurer; and Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy
is guilty of bad temper and worse manners, in stigmatizing the author of
the faulty narrative a ‘liar of the first magnitude.’

That Shelley found an opportunity for introducing himself to the Irish
people in Fishamble Street was due to the influence of Mr. John Lawless,
whose acquaintance he had made shortly before the meeting. A keen
politician, who enjoyed in his party the equally flattering and suspicious
designation of ‘honest Jack Lawless,’ and a flighty gentleman of letters,
who produced two years later an absolutely meritless contribution to _The
History of Ireland_, Mr. Lawless was quick to recognize in Shelley a young
gentleman, whom he would do well to befriend. An organizer of the
aggregate meeting, Mr. Lawless used his influence to put the young
gentleman to the fore. Had it not been for honest Jack, the Dublin papers
would have been silent about the points of Shelley’s speech that ‘did not
excite disapprobation,’ and more or less communicative about the points
that occasioned uproar. After affording Shelley an opportunity for
introducing himself to the Dublin public, and nursing him through the
reports of the meeting, ‘honest Jack’ took occasion to introduce the
youthful adventurer, yet more fully to the Irish people, in the article
that appeared in the _Dublin Weekly Messenger_ of ‘March, 1812;’ the
article that was at the same time a personal memoir of the adventurer, and
a critical review of his _Address to the Irish People_; the article that,
after speaking of Shelley as the son of ‘a member of the Imperial
Parliament’ and ‘the _immediate_ heir to one of the _first_ fortunes in
England,’ concluded with a handsome reference to the ‘very beautiful poem’
which he had written for the benefit ‘of our distinguished countryman, Mr.
Finerty.’

At the same time Mr. Lawless took occasion to introduce Mrs. Honest Jack
Lawless to Shelley’s womankind, and to welcome the trio to his hearth,
where he entertained them with the best fruit and vegetables of the Dublin
market, and would have fed them on richer fare, had they not recently
joined the Nineteenth Century Pythagoreans, and as Pythagoreans bound
themselves to abstain from flesh and fermented liquors.

It is not to be imagined that honest Jack showered these civilities on the
Shelleys without a thought for civilities, to be rendered by the Shelleys
in return. One may need money without being an Irishman. It is not to
bring a blush to Erin’s cheek, that honest Jack is mentioned on this page
as an Irish gentleman whose command of gold was insufficient for his
necessities. Though he appeared very much a minor, ‘the _immediate_ heir
to one of the first fortunes of England’ was a person whom honest Jack
regarded as a person who might prove a profitable acquaintance. A man of
the world, more than thirty years old, Mr. Lawless was not so absolutely
undeserving of his peculiar epithet, as to be capable of robbing so young
a gentleman without throwing a show of honesty into the predatory
business. Moreover, Mr. Lawless saw at a glance that his new acquaintance,
who went to Miss Westbrook for sixpences as he wanted them, was no youth
to be plucked at a card-table or plundered on a racecourse. The young
gentleman who lived on milk and vegetables, and seldom had more than
half-a-crown in his pocket, was no young gentleman to be bled and fleeced
in the ordinary way. Mr. Lawless conceived the happy thought of drawing
Shelley into partnership in a great and beneficent literary enterprise.

Himself a man of letters, Mr. Lawless wished to write a _History of
Ireland_, that would exhibit the grandeur and misfortunes of the Irish
people, and educate its readers in the sacred principles of Irish
patriotism. Having already written the opening chapters of such a history,
Mr. Lawless saw in the immediate heir to one of the first fortunes of
England a fit coadjutor in so glorious an enterprise. Men of letters, they
both burned to liberate Ireland. What more beautiful than for two such
friends to co-operate for so sublime a purpose? For their needful
enlightenment, the Irish people required above all things a good _History
of Ireland_. To give Ireland what she most needed, the Irish politician
and the English scholar must work in unison, throwing all their energies
into the undertaking, and deeming no sacrifice too great for so grand an
object. Mr. Lawless felt this and said it. On hearing honest Jack’s
opinion, Shelley concurred in it cordially. To both gentlemen it was
obvious that their enterprise would require money. To both it seemed
preposterous and unendurable, that the Irish people should remain in
ignorance of their country’s story, through the difficulty of raising the
insignificant sum of two hundred and fifty pounds, which would suffice to
put the presses to work. It might, perhaps, be necessary to spend another
hundred pounds or so; but should the first volume have the sale, to be
anticipated for the initial tome of an enthralling narrative, the
ridiculously small sum of 250_l._ (a sum that would, of course, be repaid
again and again by the profits of the publication) would suffice to break
the fetters from Erin’s bruised and wounded limbs, and chase the darkness
of ignorance from a liberated country. Was such a work to be deferred for
the want of a miserable 250_l._, whilst John Lawless was known for his
honesty in every castle and cabin, south of the Giant’s Causeway, and
whilst his young friend was the immediate heir of one of the first
fortunes of England? To obtain the equally trivial and necessary sum,
Shelley seized a pen and wrote (_vide_ Medwin’s _Life of Shelley_) to Mr.
Medwin, the Horsham lawyer,--saying how he was engaged with a literary
friend in producing a voluminous _History of Ireland_, and needed 250_l._
for the execution of the enterprise. Of course, the Horsham lawyer was
assured by his youthful client, that the sale of the _History_ would yield
great profit, and that the 250_l._ would be repaid in eighteen months. It
is more curious and remarkable that, in pressing Mr. Medwin to provide the
needful money for the project, Shelley assured the lawyer that two hundred
and fifty pages of the work were already printed:--a statement for which
the vigour and liveliness of the writer’s imagination may perhaps be held
accountable.

It speaks less for Mr. Lawless’s honesty, than for his cleverness, in
drawing wind to his sails from every passing breeze, that this letter was
written when Shelley had been barely five weeks in Dublin, and possibly
had not known him for a month. How Mr. Medwin answered the letter does
not appear; but it may be assumed confidently that if he provided the
250_l._, he required that the transaction should be withheld from the
knowledge of Shelley’s father. Nor does it appear whether Mr. Lawless drew
money for his literary project out of his young friend’s pocket. But the
known circumstances of their intimacy leave little room for doubt that
Shelley’s purse was accountable for the Irish gentleman’s persistence in
the labours, that resulted in his _Compendium of the History of Ireland,
from the Earliest Period to the Reign of George I._ (1814);--a work on
which he was engaged between the dates of Shelley’s two visits to Ireland.

During his stay in Dublin, Shelley continued to correspond with the
philosopher of Skinner Street, writing him at least three long letters,
dated respectively on 24th February, 8th March, and 18th March; letters to
which Godwin replied on 4th March, 14th March, and 30th March. Resembling
in their adulatory and reverential extravagances his earlier epistles from
Keswick to the same correspondent, Shelley’s letters from Dublin to
William Godwin are chiefly remarkable for evidence that he was looking
yearningly for the pleasures of personal intimacy with the sage, whom he
was pleased to regard and address as his intellectual guide and guardian.

Whilst Shelley addressed him in the most deferential strain, Godwin
abounded with almost parental anxiety for the young man, who appeared to
the literary veteran to have gone to Ireland on a mission, that could not
fail to result in discredit to the adventurer, and might be fruitful of
insurrection and bloodshed. Godwin would have been less apprehensive for
his correspondent’s safety, had he known him personally, and would have
had no fear whatever for the peace of Ireland, had he realized the
indifference (qualified by the slightest sense of amusement) with which
the Dublin police and populace regarded the proceedings of the boyish
agitator.

The substance of Godwin’s admonitions to his youthful correspondent was
just this:--Get out of Ireland promptly, or mischief will ensue to
yourself and others from your madcap expedition; and after leaving
Ireland, get the better of the misconceptions and self-conceit that make
you think yourself competent to settle perplexing questions, that have
proved too much for the wisest statesmen. It is to Shelley’s credit that
he took such advice in good part, and wrote from 17 Grafton Street, on
18th March, 1812, to his Mentor, that, in deference to the expostulations
and counsels of the author of _Political Justice_, he had withdrawn his
Irish pamphlets from circulation, and was making ready to quit Dublin.
Acknowledging the indiscretion, insufficiency, and unseasonableness of his
measures for dealing with the grievances of Ireland, he declared his
intention to leave the Irish, at least for a while, to manage their own
affairs.

It was thus that, at the close of his fifth week in Dublin, and two days
before writing to Mr. Medwin, of Horsham, for 250_l._ to be spent on the
production of a new and voluminous _History of Ireland_, Shelley desisted
from his efforts to force his two pamphlets upon public attention, and
acknowledged the unsoundness of the measures they recommended. It does
not, however, follow that Godwin was so largely accountable for this
change of opinion as he had reason to imagine himself. One of the few
points on which Mr. Hogg and Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy are of the same
mind is, that Godwin’s arguments and expostulations had little or nothing
to do with the speedy extinction of Shelley’s confidence in his own
remedies for Irish grievances; and though the concession is by no means
favourable to Shelley’s reputation for sincerity, it may be conceded that
the point, on which the two biographers are thus unanimous, is also one of
the points in respect to which both biographers are in the right. The fact
is, that Shelley’s enthusiastic concern for the Irish people had played
itself out when the second of Godwin’s expostulatory letters gave him a
convenient pretext for retiring from a position that no longer afforded
him congenial excitement. Hence the letter which moved Godwin to write to
Curran, begging him even yet to pay some attention to the young
enthusiast, who had shown so commendable and engaging a readiness to shape
his course in obedience to the advice of his superiors by age and
experience.

Whilst Godwin overflowed with approval of his young friend’s
submissiveness to reason, Shelley could congratulate himself on the
results of his announcement that, for the present, he should leave the
Irish to manage their own affairs. Raising him in the regard of the
philosopher, whose favour he was especially desirous of winning, the
announcement brought him invitations to Curran’s dinner-table, where he
discovered to his mortification, that a famous patriot may, in his
declining years, love good cheer almost as much as his country, and be
scarcely more distinguished by devotion to liberty than by a taste for
obscene stories.

Enough has been said of Shelley’s ‘Irish campaign’ to show that, so far as
his reputation is concerned, the kindest way of dealing with the farcical
affair is to make fun of its absurdities; and that he suffers less from
biographers who, dealing lightly with the expedition, palliate its
foolishness with kindly reference to the adventurer’s juvenility, than
from the apologists who discover wisdom and political sagacity in the
extravagances of a puerile escapade. To laugh at the droll business is to
be in good humour with the boy, whose self-sufficiency is only brought
into offensive prominence by attempts to justify it. In this particular
the poet’s admirers may well prefer Hogg’s pleasantry to Mr. MacCarthy’s
seriousness. In other ways the later biographer defeats his own purpose.
It is curious, how he produces evidence, supporting the very assertions
whose accuracy he impugns. Maintaining that Shelley’s speech in Fishamble
Street was favourably received, he prints the poet’s confession that he
was checked with angry clamour against utterances, to which the newspapers
made no reference. Indignant with Hogg for saying the poet was mortified
by the miscarriage of his efforts for Ireland, he publishes the very words
in which Shelley acknowledges the failure of his schemes. Maintaining that
Shelley left Dublin ‘at the precise time he had originally arranged to
leave it,’ he sets forth the testimony that, whereas he withdrew from
Ireland on the 7th April, 1812, he had originally designed to stay in
Dublin till ‘the end of April.’ It is thus the author of _Shelley’s Early
Life_ by turns disproves his own charges against Hogg’s accuracy, or shows
himself more inexact than the biographer whom he accuses of falsehood.

Though it was less sudden and hasty than Hogg imagined, Shelley’s
withdrawal from Ireland was made three weeks sooner than the time he
appointed for the departure, when he was still hopeful for the success of
his intervention between the Irish people and their despotic rulers.
Whilst writing his last letter from Ireland to William Godwin (the letter
in which he says nothing of his project for a new _History of Ireland_ to
the philosopher, whom he affects to treat with unqualified confidence),
Shelley had determined to leave Dublin in the first week of the ensuing
month, and was already making arrangements for migrating to Wales. One of
his preliminary measures was to fill a large deal box with the few copies
of his _Address to the Irish People_ still remaining on his hand, the much
larger number of his second Irish pamphlet yet resting in his possession,
and the greater part of the edition of his _Declaration of Rights_,--the
broadsides with which he hoped to rouse the farmers of his native county
to a perception of their political grievances. This large deal box was
addressed to Miss Hitchener, Hurstpierpoint, Sussex, and sent on board the
boat for Holyhead, whence Shelley imagined it would pass without
observation to the philosophical schoolmistress. In the absence of any
person, duly authorized by its owner to pass it through the custom-house,
this heavy box was in due course opened, and searched at Holyhead, by Mr.
Pierce Thomas, Surveyor of Customs, who, writing to the Secretary of State
for the Home Office an account of the inflammatory literature discovered
in the chest, also put himself in communication with the Holyhead agent of
the General Post Office. Hence the correspondence (still preserved at the
Record Office) between secretaries of high degree and local officers of
mean estate respecting the big box and its criminatory contents, nothing
of which was more likely to agitate the official mind than the following
letter from Harriett Shelley to her husband’s dear and incomparable friend
Miss Hitchener, who had recently adopted the name of Portia, in lieu of
her rightful Christian name Eliza (a name already appropriated in ‘Percy’s
little circle’ to Miss Westbrook):--

    ‘_Dublin, March 18th, 1812._

    ‘MY DEAR PORTIA,--As Percy has sent you such a large box, so full of
    inflammable matter, I think I may be allowed to send a little, but not
    of such a nature as his. I sent you two letters in a newspaper, which
    I hope you received safe from the intrusion of Postmasters. I sent one
    of the pamphlets to my Father in a newspaper, which was opened and
    charged; but which was very trifling compared with what you and Godwin
    paid.

    ‘I believe I have mentioned a new acquaintance of ours, a Mrs. Nugent,
    who is sitting in the room now and talking to Percy about Virtue. You
    see how little I stand on ceremony. I have seen her but twice before,
    and I find her a very agreeable, sensible woman. She has felt most
    severely the miseries of her country, in which she has been a very
    active member. She visited all the prisons in the time of the
    Rebellion, to exhort the people to have courage and hope. She says it
    was a most dreadful task; but it was her duty, and she would not
    shrink from the performance of it. This excellent woman, with all her
    notions of Philanthropy and justice, is obliged to work for her
    subsistence--to work in a shop, which is a furrier’s; there she is
    every day confined to her needle. Is it not a thousand pities that
    such a woman should be so dependent on others? She has visited us this
    evening for about three hours, and is now returned home. The evening
    is the only time she can get out in the week; but Sunday is her own,
    and then we are to see her. She told Percy that her country was her
    only love, when he asked her if she was married. She calls herself
    _Mrs._, I suppose, on account of her age, as she looks rather old for
    a _Miss_. She has never been out of the country and has no wish to
    leave it.

    ‘This is St. Patrick’s night, and the Irish always get very tipsy on
    such a night as this. The Horse Guards are pacing the streets and will
    be so all the night, so fearful are they of disturbances, the poor
    people being very much that way inclined, as provisions are very
    scarce in the southern counties. Poor Irish people, how much I feel
    for them! Do you know, such is their ignorance, that when there is a
    drawing-room held, they go from some distance to see the people who
    keep them starving to get their luxuries; they will crowd round the
    state carriages in great glee to see those who have stript them of
    their rights, and who wantonly revel in a profusion of ill-gotten
    luxury, whilst so many of those harmless people are wanting bread for
    their wives and children? What a spectacle! People talk of the fiery
    spirit of these distressed creatures, but that spirit is very much
    broken and ground down by the oppressors of this poor country. I may
    with truth say there are more beggars in this city than any other in
    the world. They are so poor they have hardly a rag to cover their
    naked limbs, and such is their passion for drink that when you relieve
    them one day you see them in the same deplorable condition the next.
    Poor creatures! they live more on whiskey than anything, for meat is
    so dear they cannot afford to purchase any. If they had the means I do
    not know that they would, whiskey being so much cheaper, and to their
    palates so much more desirable. Yet how often do we hear people say
    that Poverty is no evil. I think if they had experienced it they would
    soon alter their tone. To my idea it is the worst of all evils, as the
    miseries that flow from it are certainly very great; the many crimes
    we hear of daily are the consequences of poverty, and that, to a very
    great degree. I think the laws are extremely unjust--they condemn a
    person to death for stealing thirteen shillings and fourpence.

    ‘Disperse the Declarations. Percy says the farmers are very fond of
    having something posted upon their walls.

    ‘Percy has sent you all his Pamphlets with the _Declaration of
    Rights_, which you will disperse to advantage. He has not many of his
    first Address, having taken pains to circulate them through the city.

    ‘All thoughts of an association are given up as impracticable. We
    shall leave this noisy town on the 7th of April, unless the Habeas
    Corpus Act should be suspended, and then we shall be obliged to leave
    here as soon as possible. Adieu.’

Though he married for love, Shelley did not live many weeks with Harriett
before he felt the need of another companion. Had his girlish wife been
all the world to him in their honeymoon, and the days immediately
following it, he would not have welcomed Hogg so cordially to the
Edinburgh lodgings, or left her at York, whilst he made the flying trip to
London and Sussex. That he surrendered himself so completely to his
sister-in-law’s control, was due chiefly to the insufficiency of the
pleasure afforded him by Harriett’s society. Had he delighted in the music
of her voice, the charms of her beauty, and the manifestations of her
sensibility, as he would have delighted in them had she been his perfect
mate, there would have been in his breast no yearning for another
companion, whose presence and sympathy would perfect his felicity. At the
moment of setting forth for Ireland, and at the moment of arriving at
Dublin, he entreated Miss Hitchener to come to him and Harriett and Eliza,
so that an imperfectly happy trio might with her co-operation become a
happy party of four. Throughout his sojourn in the Irish capital, he
needed Portia for his contentment; and after Portia’s refusal to come to
him in Ireland, was looking forward to the meeting in Wales or elsewhere,
when the Sussex schoolmistress would make it possible for him and Harriett
and Eliza to be happy for ever. Had he been fitly mated, he would not so
soon after his wedding have desired the society of any woman but his wife.
Had Harriett been to him all that a bride usually is to her mate, Miss
Hitchener would have been no less out of his mind than she was out of his
sight.

As he needed Portia for the completion of his own happiness, the equally
vehement and egotistic Shelley imagined she was no less needful for the
contentment of his companions. Whilst it says much for his egotism, it
speaks no less strongly of his ignorance of feminine nature, that he could
think his wife and her sister especially desirous of associating
themselves closely with the young woman, of whose wisdom and goodness he
was so extravagantly eloquent. It also speaks for his ignorance of womanly
nature, that he imagined the Hurstpierpoint schoolmistress would be eager
to make the acquaintance of Mrs. Shelley and her sister on terms that
would render it difficult for her to get away from them, should she find
them otherwise than congenial companions. That he erred so egregiously on
these points, is the more remarkable, because the ladies displayed no
strong desire for the arrangement on which he was set.

Instead of fixing herself on the trio, as soon as Shelley afforded her an
occasion for doing so, Miss Hitchener more than once displayed a
reasonable reluctance to surrender her independent position at
Hurstpierpoint for the questionable advantages of a perilous connexion
with the sisters whom she had never seen. On the other hand, though they
humoured Shelley in writing cordially to his friend at Hurstpierpoint, it
is obvious, from several matters, that Mrs. Shelley and her sister were no
less doubtful than Miss Hitchener, whether Shelley’s scheme for a happy
domestic circle would be fruitful of felicity to any one of the party.

Entreated, from Keswick, by Shelley to accompany him to Ireland, Miss
Hitchener declined the invitation, on account of her engagements at
Hurstpierpoint. Entreated by Shelley to come to him and his wife at
Dublin, she held to her purpose of remaining in Sussex. To the proposal
that she should come to Wales in the spring, and there make the
acquaintance of her Percy’s wife and sister-in-law, Miss Hitchener
assented; but when spring came, instead of acting on the invitation, she
discovered new reasons for remaining at Hurstpierpoint, and wrote to
Shelley that, instead of requiring her to break up her school, it would be
better for him to bring his wife and sister-in-law to her in Sussex. That
Shelley would have relinquished the notion of a meeting in Wales, and
acted on this proposal for a meeting in Sussex, had he been master of his
own movements, instead of being under the government of two ladies who had
no strong desire to make Miss Hitchener’s acquaintance, appears from the
letter he wrote to the schoolmistress from 17 Grafton Street, Dublin, on
10th March, 1812. ‘Your new suggestion,’ he exclaims gushingly in this
curious epistle, ‘of our joining you at Hurst is divine. It shall be so. I
have not shown Harriett or E. your letter yet; they are walking with a Mr.
Lawless (a valuable man), whilst I write this.’ The words exhibit the
whole position. To Shelley, yearning for reunion with Miss Hitchener, the
proposal for a speedy restoration to her society was so delightful, that
no word less eloquent of felicity than ‘divine’ could express the
gratification he anticipated from the meeting. ‘It shall be so,’ he wrote
bravely, before conferring on the matter with the ladies who owned him.
But when those ladies returned from their walk with the valuable Jack
Lawless, and were invited to join in the assurance that ‘it should be so,’
the enthusiasm of the subject man was checked by their decision that ‘it
should _not_ be so.’

Thinking in their hearts that the meeting with Miss Hitchener could not be
deferred for too long a time, and having obvious and sufficient reasons
for thinking Sussex the particular county in which a close intimacy with
Miss Hitchener would be most hurtful to their interests, Harriett and Miss
Westbrook discovered nothing delightful in the suggestion which had seemed
‘divine’ to Percy. If they must be brought into familiar intercourse with
Percy’s schoolmistress, Mrs. Shelley and her sister would rather live with
her in Wales, or Devonshire, or Scotland, than at a village within a drive
of Field Place, and a stone’s throw of Cuckfield. Hence the firmness with
which they overruled Shelley’s ‘it shall be so.’ They declined to forego
the pleasures of the Welsh trip, to which they had been looking forward so
long, simply because Miss Hitchener could not join them. Of course, the
pleasure of living in Wales would be enhanced to both of the ladies by the
presence of so sympathetic and delightful a woman as Miss Hitchener. But
to give up Wales, and travel all the way to Sussex for her acquaintance,
would be to pay too high a price for the delight of knowing her. They must
go to Wales, hoping that Portia would even yet arrange her affairs so as
to join them before they should withdraw from the Principality. The divine
suggestion was dismissed as an impracticable suggestion. So sagacious a
young woman as Miss Hitchener had no need to ask Shelley why he had, on
second thoughts, changed his mind with respect to the suggestion which had
pleased him so vastly at first view. By those who know aught of human
nature, it will not be questioned that the fight between Miss Westbrook
and Miss Hitchener began some months before the July day on which they
kissed one another for the first time at Lynton, in North Devon.


(2.)--NANTGWILLT, RHAYADER, RADNORSHIRE, SOUTH WALES.

Crossing a rough sea from Dublin to Holyhead, the trio (attended probably
by their Dublin bill distributor, who was certainly in their service in
the ensuing summer) traversed Anglesey, made the passage of the Menai
Straits, and journeying leisurely through North Wales into the southern
shires of the Principality, came, somewhere about 21st April, 1812, to
Nantgwillt, five miles from Rhayader, Co. Radnor, where they resided for
about seven weeks at Nantgwillt House, at that time in the hands of an
insolvent farmer. Delighted with the house, in a familiar part of
Radnorshire, and the thought of having his cousin, Tom Grove, for a
sociable neighbour, Shelley conceived a desire to settle at Nantgwillt for
a considerable time, if not for ever. Here was a bankrupt farmer on the
point of leaving a delightful place. Here was a delightful place, whose
proprietor would, of course, be only too glad to have so eligible a tenant
as the heir of the Castle Goring Shelleys. What, thought Shelley, could be
more agreeable to him than to turn farmer? With a bailiff at his elbow to
look after matters of vulgar business, he could farm to a profit. The
holding comprised a hundred and thirty acres of land under cultivation,
and seventy acres of wood, scrub, briery, and mountain; woods in which he
and Harriett and Eliza could saunter with their friends, when the summer’s
sun should be oppressive; hills they could climb in the colder seasons for
the enjoyment of the invigorating breeze. Whilst the farm would yield them
corn and milk, fruit and vegetables, it would also yield them just the
additional money that was needful for their requirements. Whilst the farm
would afford them prosperity, they would have leisure for their
intellectual pursuits, and larger ability to help their poorer neighbours.
The rent for this alluring farm was positively under a hundred a-year. It
was _only_ 98_l._ a-year; and the lease and stock, including the furniture
of the house, could be had for 700_l._ at the outside price! Even this
small sum need not be paid till he should have come of age; as the
assignees under the bankruptcy would give him credit for eighteen months,
provided he found a sufficient friend to be security for the payment of
the money, a year and half hence. Feeling he should not let such a chance
escape him, Shelley had not been three days at Nantgwillt before he
hurried to Cwm Elan to talk the matter over to Tom Grove. Poor talkers,
the Groves were excellent listeners; and Mr. Thomas Grove listened whilst
Shelley declared his wish to turn Welsh farmer and settle at Nantgwillt.
After hearing the poet’s statement of the case, Mr. Grove, without
offering to supply the needful money, opened his lips to remark that he
should have much pleasure in finding his cousin a suitable person to look
after his interests at the valuation. Duly sensible of his kinsman’s
kindness, Shelley lost no time in writing the characteristic letter
(_vide_ Medwin’s _Life of Shelley_) in which he asked Mr. Medwin, the
Horsham lawyer, to become security for the payment of the 600_l._ or
700_l._

Mr. Medwin may well have perused this letter with a sense of amusement. No
long time had passed since he was entreated to supply 250_l._ for the
literary venture, that could not fail to bring the _littérateur_ money and
fame; and now he was required to become security for the payment of seven
hundred pounds, to put the man of letters into a Welsh farm. Mr. Medwin
had a good practice and money of his own, as well as the command of money
belonging to his clients. He had, moreover, made up his mind to draw his
young kinsman into his hands, both for the sake of making money out of
him, and in order to annoy the Squire of Field Place and old Sir Bysshe,
whom he did not love. But knowing Percy would not be happy at Nantgwillt
for twelve months, there were obvious reasons why he should think twice
before drawing a cheque or signing a bond, to put the youngster into the
farm in the loveliest spot of all Radnorshire.

Writing, on 25th April, 1812, to Sussex for the means of taking the farm,
Shelley wrote on the same day to London for the friends whom he should
need a few months later, for his full enjoyment of the delightful place.
His new home was surrounded by scenes of unutterable beauty. Defended by
rocks and mountains, that shut out the world’s tumult, his chosen valley,
peopled by guileless peasants, would afford him all he needed of earthly
happiness, when he should have the honour and delight of entertaining the
revered William Godwin, together with Mrs. Godwin and all the
Skinner-Street family. The philosophic bookseller was entreated to escape
from the cold hurry of business, and come with his wife and children to
Wales.

How Mr. Medwin, of Horsham, answered Shelley’s letter does not appear; but
he seems from the event to have dissuaded his youthful client from
throwing himself so impulsively into a business of which he knew nothing.
Anyhow, Shelley’s scheme for turning farmer fell through, and on June 11,
1812, he wrote to Skinner Street, explaining that he could no longer look
forward to the pleasure of receiving the Godwins at Nantgwillt House, as
he had already retired from that delightful abode to temporary quarters at
Cwm-Rhayader.

    ‘We are,’ he wrote to the sage of Skinner Street, ‘unexpectedly
    compelled to quit Nantgwillt. I hope, however, before long time has
    elapsed, to find a home. These accidents are unavoidable to a minor. I
    hope wherever we are, you, Mrs. Godwin, and your children will come to
    us this summer.’

Homeless for the moment, the minor deferred the happiness of seeing his
London friends until he had found a home in which to receive them. From
this light and airy announcement of his sudden and enforced withdrawal
from Nantgwillt House, Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy is inclined to infer
that the farmer told the trio to leave his homestead, because he
questioned their ability to pay for their entertainment.

    ‘Shelley,’ says the author, whose abuse of Hogg determined some of the
    Shelleyan enthusiasts to declare him a high authority on the poet’s
    ‘Early Life,’ ‘resided at Nantgwillt for seven weeks. He changed his
    residence, not through any restlessness of disposition, for it is
    evident he was reluctant to leave it, _but, perhaps_, owing to the
    doubts of the “farmer” as to the security of his rent. Such is the
    interpretation I put on the following passage in a letter to Godwin,
    dated “Cwm-Rhayader, June 11th, 1812:--“We are unexpectedly compelled
    to quit Nantgwillt. I hope, however, before long time has elapsed, to
    find a home. These accidents are unavoidable to a minor.”’

Shelley’s letter to Mr. Medwin disposes of the suspicion which should not
have been entertained by the authoritative writer on Shelleyan evidences,
though it may well have occurred to Godwin in June, 1812, as a reasonable
way of accounting for the unexpected change of residence. Coming to
Nantgwillt House at the very moment when the bankrupt farmer was about to
leave the holding, and his assignees were looking out for some one to take
the remainder of his lease, Shelley may be assumed to have retired from
the house at the request of an incoming tenant, who required all the rooms
for his own use. In the failure of his attempt to take the farm, there is
enough to account for Shelley’s way of speaking of his change of abode as
unexpected and involuntary. The incoming tenant’s conceivable reluctance
to entertain lodgers would be another disappointment of the poet’s
expectations. There is no direct evidence that Shelley was just then
suffering from financial distress in a degree to make the Nantgwillt
farmer suspect his solvency. On the contrary, his ability to continue his
southward journey within a few days of his retirement from the farmhouse
points to the opposite conclusion.




CHAPTER V.

NORTH DEVON.

    Mr. Eton’s Cottage near Tintern Abbey--Shelley’s reason for not taking
    the Cottage--His Letter to Mr. Eton--Godwin’s expostulatory
    Epistle--His Grounds for thinking Shelley prodigal--Reasonableness of
    Godwin’s admonitions--Hogg and MacCarthy at fault--Shelley’s Letters
    from Lynton to Godwin--Miss Hitchener at Lynton--Porcia _alias_
    Portia--_Letter_ to Lord Ellenborough--Printed at Barnstaple--Mr.
    Chanter’s _Sketches of the Literary History of Barnstaple_--Fifty
    copies of the _Letter_ sent to London--Shelley’s Measures for the
    political Enlightenment of North Devon Peasants--His Irish Servant,
    Daniel Hill--Commotion at Barnstaple--Daniel Hill’s Arrest and
    Imprisonment--Mr. Syle’s Alarm--Shelley’s humiliating and perilous
    Position--His Flight from North Devon to Wales--William Godwin’s Trip
    from London to Lynton--His Surprise and Disappointment--His ‘Good
    News’ of the Fugitives.


(3.)--LYNTON, NEAR LYNMOUTH, NORTH DEVON.

Hogg having erroneously inferred from certain letters of the
Shelley-Godwin correspondence, which he failed to read with lawyer-like
care, that Shelley went from the neighbourhood of Rhayader to Lynmouth, in
North Devon, in order to settle himself in a cottage belonging to a
certain Mr. Eton, at the last-named place, he has been followed in one of
the several errors of his book by Mr. MacCarthy, and other biographers,
who are scarcely more clever in discovering mistakes in those pages of the
lawyer’s narrative, that are altogether accurate, than ready to rely on
those of his statements that are seriously inexact. Instead of lying in
Lynmouth, Mr. Eton’s cottage lay in the neighbourhood of Tintern Abbey, as
Hogg might have discovered from the letter in which William Godwin
expressed his surprise and regret to Shelley that, after looking at the
little house, he should have declined to take it on account of its
smallness.

Mrs. William Godwin had suggested that the Shelleys should settle for a
time in Mr. Eton’s cottage near Tintern Abbey, and ‘all the females’ (to
use Godwin’s expression) of the Skinner-Street household ‘were on the
tiptoe to know,’ whether the Shelleys would act on the suggestion, when
the postman laid on William Godwin’s shop-counter a letter, addressed by
Shelley’s hand to Mr. Eton. As there could be no secrets from them,
between Shelley and their friend, the curious and excited people in
Skinner Street opened the epistle and read it, before passing it on to Mr.
Eton. To Godwin’s slight surprise, and to his wife’s slight
disappointment, the epistle announced that Shelley declined to take the
cottage, because it was too small for his purpose. The consequence was
that Godwin, whilst stating how the letter’s purport came to his knowledge
sooner than to Mr. Eton’s cognizance, wrote to Shelley these words:--

    ‘I am a little astonished, however, with the expression in your
    letter, that “the insufficiency of house-room is a vital objection.”
    This would sound well to Mr. Eton from the eldest son of a gentleman
    of Sussex, with an ample fortune. But to me, I own, it a little alarms
    me.... But you, my dear Shelley, have special motives for wariness in
    this matter, you are at variance with your father, and I think you say
    in one of your letters that he allows you only 200_l._ a-year. If by
    unnecessary and unconscientious expense you heap up embarrassments at
    present, how much do you think that will embitter your days and
    shackle your powers hereafter?... Prudence, too, a just and virtuous
    prudence, in this most essential point, the dispensation of property,
    will do much to make you and your father friends: and why should you
    not be friends?’

The letter, from which these passages have been transcribed, is given in
Hogg’s book without date or address; but whilst the contents show it to
have been written before Godwin had heard either of Shelley’s arrival at
Lynton, or of his intention to journey thither, the evidence is conclusive
that it was addressed to Shelley at Chepstow;--a fact to be held in
remembrance by the critical reader of the absurd passage of Mr. Denis
Florence MacCarthy’s very absurd book, in which it is suggested that the
sharpness of Godwin’s reflections (in the undated letter), on Shelley’s
manifest inclination to live beyond his means, was due to the
philosopher’s petty pique at the terms in which Shelley wrote to him, from
Lynmouth, on 5th July, 1812, about Miss Hitchener’s virtues and services
to humanity.

Though he seldom says anything, that is comparable for absurdity with Mr.
MacCarthy’s wilder notes on Shelleyan questions, Hogg provokes ridicule by
his animadversions on Godwin’s undated letter. Insisting that it was for
Shelley to decide whether the cottage was large enough for his purpose,
he smiles disdainfully at the impertinent busy-bodyism of Godwin’s
admonitory epistle, and insinuates that it would not have been written,
had not the philosopher’s temper been curiously ruffled by his young
friend’s audacity, in presuming to decline the modest mansion, which Mrs.
Godwin had advised him to hire of one of her friends. On perusing the
letter and reviewing all the circumstances that resulted in its
composition, the discreet and impartial reader fails to discover the
writer’s ill-temper, or the grounds for charging him with exceeding the
limits of the position, into which he had been drawn by his
correspondent’s repeated solicitations for parental counsel and guidance.

Had Godwin no grounds for thinking Shelley was disposed to live beyond his
means? Shelley had himself told Godwin, that his allowance from his father
was no more than 200_l._; and the veteran of letters may at that time have
had no reason for supposing that his young friend received any allowance
from his father-in-law, or had any means in addition to the money from his
father. At the most Shelley’s precarious income was only 400_l._ a-year;
and though Godwin probably thought it so much, he cannot have thought it
more, and may have thought it less than that amount by one half.
Immediately on coming to Nantgwillt, Shelley had invited the whole Godwin
family (six persons, viz., Godwin, Mrs. Godwin, Fanny, Mary, Claire, and
the small boy William) to visit him at Nantgwillt House. At the same time,
Godwin had been informed by Shelley of his intention to invite another
dear friend to stay with him at Nantgwillt during their sojourn with him.
Godwin had no reason to suppose that he and his people and the one other
dear friend (viz. Miss Hitchener) were all the persons, whom Shelley
designed to entertain during the summer. On the contrary, he had reason to
assume Shelley was no less hospitably disposed to old Oxford friends, and
half-a-hundred other people, than to persons whom he had not yet seen.
Some few weeks after receiving the invitation to Nantgwillt, Godwin is
informed by Shelley that the smallness of Mr. Eton’s cottage was a
sufficient reason why he should not take it, the rooms being too few for
the requirements of his family and friends. Godwin may well, under these
circumstances, have come to the conclusion that his young friend--a minor,
with certainly no more than 400_l._ a-year, set on taking a large house
and filling it with company--was disposed to outrun the constable. At the
same time, it is conceivable that Godwin suspected the suddenness of
Shelley’s withdrawal from Nantgwillt House was due to financial distress.
For (as I remarked in the last chapter) the sage of Skinner Street, with
no information respecting the farm and its recent change of occupiers, may
well have drawn the inference and entertained the suspicion, which Mr.
Denis Florence MacCarthy (with better means of information) had no excuse
for drawing and entertaining.

With these grounds for conceiving that Shelley was disposed to live beyond
his means, it was creditable in Godwin that, at the risk of offending the
young gentleman, he warned him to avoid the hurtful inconveniences of
financial extravagance. In giving the advice, that was so needful, Godwin
used no needlessly irritating language. Doubtless Godwin’s marital
sensitiveness would have been gratified, had Shelley decided to act on
Mrs. Godwin’s suggestion. Perhaps he was pained by Shelley’s off-hand way
of declining to act upon the lady’s advice. But no passage of the epistle
countenances the suggestion that the writer would have written otherwise,
had he not been piqued by what he thought disrespectful to his wife’s
judgment. Neither impertinent in substance nor pettish in tone, the letter
was in every respect a suitable epistle for Godwin to write to the young
man, who, with every appearance of sincerity, had entreated the
philosopher to enlighten his intellect and form his character. It is also
to Godwin’s honour that, whilst writing in a quasi-parental capacity to
his singular correspondent, he reminded the young man that one of his
first objects should be the recovery of his father’s favour and affection.

Leaving the neighbourhood of Rhayader in the middle of June, 1812, the
Shelleys journeyed to Tintern and Chepstow, and after looking at Mr.
Eton’s cottage between Tintern Abbey and Piercefield, proceeded to
Lynmouth, North Devon. During their sojourn of nine weeks and three days
in this locality, the trio lodged in a house, that standing in Lynton, on
the hill above the fishing-village, was within a few hundred yards of the
Valley of Bocks. In a letter, dated from ‘Lynmouth, Valley of Stones,
Sept. 19th, 1812,’ Godwin wrote to his wife in London: ‘Since writing the
above, I have been to the house where Shelley lodged, and I bring good
news. I saw the woman of the house, and I was delighted with her. She is a
good creature, and quite loved the Shelleys. They lived here nine weeks
and three days;’--words that, giving us the length of the poet’s sojourn
in the loveliest part of North Devon, point to the day on which the trio
came to the charming spot, either by water from the Mouth of the Severn,
or by land along the ridge of the Somerset coast. Speaking possibly from
documentary evidence (though her ‘authentic sources’ of information are
too often sources of error) Lady Shelley says, that the poet, with his
attendant womankind, left Lynmouth on 31st August, 1812. If Lady Shelley
is right on this point (and even Lady Shelley is right sometimes), Godwin
was wrong by two days in writing on the 19th of September, ‘My Dear Love.
The Shelleys are gone! Have been gone these three weeks.’ The philosopher
may of course have thrown nineteen days into the round number of weeks;
but I am slow to think this of the narrator who, with his customary
exactness in small matters, is careful to record the precise number of
days, by which Shelley’s stay in the lodgings, exceeded nine weeks.

When the trio had settled down in the lodging-house (situated in Lynton,
though Shelley dated his letters from Lynmouth, which he spelt in
accordance with local pronunciation), correspondence was renewed between
Godwin and his young friend. Dating from North Devon on 5th July, 1812,
before the philosopher’s expostulatory letter had come to his hands,
Shelley wrote to the sage of Skinner Street:--

    ‘We were all so much prepossessed in favour of Mr. Eton’s house that
    nothing but the invincible objection of scarcity of room would have
    induced us, after seeing it, to resign the predetermination we had
    formed of taking it.... The expenses incurred by the failure of our
    attempt, in settling at Nantgwillt, have rendered it necessary for us
    to settle for a time in some cheap residence, in order to recover our
    pecuniary independence. I still hope that you and your estimable
    family will, before much time has elapsed, become inmates of our
    house.... As soon as we recover our financial liberty, we mean to come
    to London.’

Two days later (7th July, 1812), when the expostulatory letter (forwarded
from Chepstow) had been some twenty-four hours in his hands, Shelley again
refers to the considerations which determined him to decline Mr. Eton’s
house near Tintern Abbey, and ‘to seek an inexpensive retirement,’ in
another part of the country. ‘It is a singular coincidence,’ he remarks,
in the _second_ of his letters from Lynmouth, to Godwin, ‘that in my last
letter I entered into details respecting my mode of life, and unfolded to
you the reasons by which I was induced, on being disappointed in Mr.
Eton’s house, to seek an inexpensive retirement;’--words that, even in the
absence of other evidence to the point, should have preserved Hogg from
putting Mr. Eton’s cottage in Lynmouth. In the same epistle Shelley says,
‘My letter, dated on the 5th,’ (_i.e._ the day before the day on which he
received the expostulatory letter) ‘will prove to you that it is not to
live in splendour, which I hate,--_not_ to accumulate indulgences, which I
despise, that my present conduct was adopted.’ From this letter of the 7th
July, it is obvious that Shelley did not regard Godwin as having overstept
the privileges of his position, in expostulating with him on his pecuniary
imprudence in the undated letter, which reached him only on the 6th, when
his letter of the 5th was well on its way to Skinner Street. ‘I feel my
heart,’ Shelley says on the 7th July, in reference to his previous letter
of the 5th instant, ‘throb exultingly when, as I read the misgivings in
your mind concerning my rectitude, I reflect that I have to a certain
degree refuted them by anticipation.’ It never occurred to Shelley to take
offence at the freedom of Godwin’s expostulatory letter. It was enough for
him, on the 7th of July, to exult in knowing that he had on the 5th
answered by anticipation the principal matters of the epistle, before
opening it on the 6th. The undated expostulatory letter, which thus
travelled from London to Lynmouth, _viâ_ Chepstow, and came to Shelley’s
hands at Lynmouth on the 6th July, cannot have left London later than the
2nd instant. It is more probable that Godwin wrote the epistle on one of
the concluding days of June, than on the 1st or 2nd of July. Yet Mr. Denis
Florence MacCarthy and other gentlemen, claiming as Shelleyan specialists
a peculiar right to dogmatize on Shelleyan questions, insist that this
particular epistle, which _cannot_ have been posted later than the 2nd of
July, would never have been written by Godwin, had not his vanity been
acutely piqued by the passage of the letter, dated to him by Shelley on
the 5th of July, in which he spoke with extravagant eulogy of the
Hurstpierpoint schoolmistress, as a Deist and Republican, who openly
instructed her little pupils in her religious and political views, and
seemed to have formed her mind by the precepts of _Political Justice_,
before it was her good fortune to peruse the pages of that immortal work.

Shelley was urgent in the same letter that Fanny Imlay, _alias_
Wollstonecraft, _alias_ Godwin, might be allowed to journey from London to
Devonshire in Miss Hitchener’s company, and stay with him and Harriett at
Lynton till the autumn, when they would bring her back to Skinner Street.
As Godwin had not educated the young lady, or any of the girls of his
curiously composed family, in religious Free Thought, it is not surprising
that Mary Wollstonecraft’s illegitimate daughter was not allowed to travel
from London to Lynmouth in the company of the Deistical schoolmistress,
who joined the trio in North Devon some time about the middle of July.
Though there is no conclusive evidence to the point, it has been no less
reasonably than generally assumed, that this exemplary young
schoolmistress brought with her to the Lynton cottage the large box of
inflammatory literature, that had been opened at Holyhead, under
circumstances and with consequences already set forth. Anyhow, it is
certain that soon after her arrival at Lynton, Shelley had in his keeping
at Lynton many copies of the printed compositions that were found in the
big box by the Holyhead officials.

For some days Shelley may be presumed to have greatly enjoyed the society
of the incomparable Por_t_ia (in Percy’s little circle the Shakespearian
spelling of the name seems to have been preferred to Porcia) who had at
length broken away from Hurstpierpoint, and joined the little circle in
which he could now be hopeful of finding happiness for ever. Readers may
be left to imagine how the elated Percy escorted his dear Portia to the
Valley of Rocks, and other especially picturesque scenes of the delightful
region; how he discoursed with her on human perfectibility and other lofty
themes in language very much beyond Harriett’s comprehension; and how
Portia hung on his words with philosophic acquiescence, that was something
too adorative and manifestly acceptable to her husband for Mrs. Shelley to
be altogether pleased by it, though she did her very best to think it all
right and reasonable, and to regard Percy’s incomparable female worshiper
as a superlatively clever and good and charming woman. Readers may also be
left to imagine how Miss Westbrook scrutinized her dearest Portia, studied
her voice and manner, watched her movements, and took note of her
philosophic utterances, whilst, even from the first day of their personal
intercourse, she laid her plans for ejecting the dark-eyed and
foreign-looking intruder from the little circle, which she entered for the
gratification of only one of the three persons, who had joined in begging
her to come to them. In those days of his unutterable felicity, far was
Shelley from imagining how cordially he would, in a few months, hate the
young woman, who had come all the way from Sussex to make him happy for
ever. Miss Westbrook, however, would have been less cheerful and
complaisant to Portia in the earlier weeks of their association, had she
not been reasonably hopeful in July, that before the end of November Percy
would have seen quite enough of his incomparable Miss Hitchener.

Memorable in the story of Shelley’s life, as the place where he welcomed
Portia to his domestic circle, Lynton is also memorable as the place where
he busied himself with a literary enterprise, not unworthy of the young
gentleman who had failed to regenerate Ireland with two pamphlets and a
revolutionary broadside, and to demolish Christianity with a little
syllabus. He had not been many days in North Devon before it occurred to
the youthful enthusiast, that he could employ his leisure serviceably by
sowing the seeds of revolutionary sentiment in Lynmouth and Barnstaple,
and the several villages lying between the fishing-village whence he dated
his letters, and the tranquil little borough whose inhabitants are pleased
to style it ‘the metropolis of North Devon.’

For some weeks he had been contemplating with disgustful abhorrence the
circumstances, under which a man named Eaton had been tried and punished
by Lord Ellenborough for printing and publishing the Third Part of Tom
Paine’s _Age of Reason_. This daring violator of law, with which as a
printer and publisher he was quite familiar, had been indicted, tried,
convicted, and sentenced in the ordinary way to undergo the severe
punishment, to which he had rendered himself liable. Lord Ellenborough’s
connexion with the affair was, that it devolved on him, as Lord Chief
Justice, to try the prisoner in the ordinary way of his official duty, and
after the culprit’s conviction to pass sentence upon him. Doubtless the
Chief Justice was at pains to secure a conviction, because the evidence
was conclusive, and the case a serious case; at least, in the opinion of
the Chief Justice and the overwhelming majority of educated Englishmen.
Doubtless, also, he passed a severe sentence, as he would none the less
have been bound to do, even had he secretly questioned the wisdom of the
law he was required to administer. There is, of course, room for
difference of opinion on the question whether the law, under which this
person, Eaton, suffered a severe punishment, was politic, salutary, and
therefore humane. But even in these days of general disapproval of laws
for the restraint of religious opinion, there can be no question that Lord
Ellenborough was bound to administer the law. To Shelley it appeared
otherwise. Had the Chief Justice been at less pains to secure a
conviction, and passed a somewhat lighter sentence on the culprit, Shelley
would perhaps have been less stormily indignant; but he would have been no
less certain that the judge had ‘wantonly and unlawfully infringed the
rights of humanity’ in merely discharging a function of his office. It was
not in Shelley’s power to see that the main question of the case was not,
whether Eaton had been guilty of an offence against natural morality; but
whether he had been guilty of an offence against the law of the land.
Discovering nothing to condemn, but, on the contrary, much to approve, in
the publisher’s action, on the score of natural morality, Shelley spoke
and thought of Eaton as a wholly guiltless person. It followed by
Shelley’s logic that the judge who passed sentence on this guiltless
person was a judge to be denounced as a ruthless persecutor of the
innocent.

Taking this view of the matter, Shelley, on the eve of his withdrawal from
Radnorshire (_vide_ his letter of 11th June, 1812, to Godwin) was planning
an Address to the public on the wickedness of the prosecution, and the
iniquity of the judge.

The outline of the essay, begun in Radnorshire, was filled in as the
writer made his leisurely progress to North Devon, where he put the last
touches to the Letter to _Lord Ellenborough, occasioned by the Sentence
which he passed on Mr. D. I. Eaton, as Publisher of the Third Part of
Paine’s Age of Reason_,--an essay which in respect to literary style, is a
great advance on the author’s previous prose writings, without containing
a single passage to justify the praise lavished by the poet’s idolaters on
the perverse performance. The epistle having been touched in to his
satisfaction, and most likely read to Portia (I adhere to Harriett’s way
of spelling the name), Shelley took the manuscript to Barnstaple and
requested Mr. Syle, the principal bookseller and printer of the borough,
to put it in type and furnish him with a thousand copies. The matter,
which the bookseller was thus commissioned to make into a printed
pamphlet, was a strenuous and pungent libel on the Lord Chief Justice.
Whilst the pamphlet was passing through the press, it appears from Mr.
Chanter’s _Sketches of the Literary History of Barnstaple_, that Shelley
came from time to time to Mr. Syle’s place of business, for the purpose of
correcting proofs and revises. That Shelley journeyed to and fro between
Lynton and Barnstaple for this purpose, there is no doubt in the mind of
the present writer, who knows too much of his good friend, Mr. John
Roberts Chanter, to be capable of questioning the accuracy of his written
statements. The work, that was intended to cover Lord Ellenborough with
historical infamy, seems to have been corrected for press to the last
point as early as 16th August, 1812. Anyhow, on the 18th of that month the
author dispatched from Lynmouth fifty copies of the _Letter_ to his friend
Mr. Hookham, of London, the Old-Bond-Street bookseller; saying with his
pen, ‘I enclose also two pamphlets which I printed and distributed whilst
in Ireland some months ago (no bookseller daring to publish them). They
were on that account attended with only partial success, and I request
your opinion as to the probable result of publishing them with the annexed
suggestions in one pamphlet, with an explanatory preface in London.’ Had
Shelley been so much more truth-loving than other men, as his idolaters
declare him, he would have told Mr. Hookham that the failure of the two
Irish pamphlets had been complete, instead of representing they had
achieved a partial success. The statement that the pamphlets had been in
some degree successful was a petty untruth, which is more than slightly
offensive, from being told to the bookseller who was asked to reprint the
two failures. The Shelley, who wrote on this matter of business to Mr.
Hookham, was the same Shelley who planted the _Victor-and-Cazire_ piracies
on Mr. Stockdale.

Before Mr. Hookham received the fifty copies of the _Letter to Lord
Ellenborough_, much had taken place at Barnstaple. There was commotion in
the ‘metropolis of North Devon,’ the fishing village beneath Lynton, and
the petty townlets of the intervening seventeen miles. On a previous page
a doubt was expressed whether Daniel Hill (_alias_ Healey) attended the
trio from Dublin to Holyhead. Whether the Irish lout accompanied the trio
to Radnorshire, waited upon them at Nantgwillt House, and travelled at
their heels to North Devon _viâ_ Chepstow, is questionable; but he
certainly was in Shelley’s service at Lynton soon after the three
wanderers settled there. Certain also it is that Daniel Hill was employed
by Shelley to distribute in North Devon the various literary performances,
by which he hoped to revolutionize quietly the down-trodden, and
far-too-contented peasants of that charming part of England, viz.:--(1)
The comparatively innocuous _Proposals for an Association_, which had been
composed for revolutionary use in England as well as Ireland; (2) _The
Devil’s Walk_, the poetical broadside (printed perhaps in Dublin) designed
to bring the Prince Regent and his sycophants into universal contempt; and
(3) the _Declaration of Rights_ broadside, demonstrating sententiously
that everyone has a plenitude of rights, with the exception of the
Government, which is declared in the first four words of the _Declaration_
to have no rights whatever.

Whilst the _Letter to Lord Ellenborough_ was in Mr. Syle’s hands, Daniel
Hill found his chief occupation in distributing copies of these three
publications. At the same time Daniel Hill, in the faithful execution of
Shelley’s orders, posted some of the broadsides on convenient walls and
hoardings. It was Shelley’s intention that Daniel Hill should in like
manner distribute copies of the _Letter to Lord Ellenborough_. But it is
not for every man to accomplish his intentions. Before he had been
entrusted with copies of the libel on Lord Ellenborough, the Barnstaple
magistrates laid Daniel Hill by the heels in the borough gaol on the 19th
of August, whilst the fifty copies of the _Letter_ were on the way to Mr.
Hookham’s shop in Old Bond Street.

It being Shelley’s practice to be abundantly communicative respecting his
birth, parentage, education, and quality, to all persons showing any
curiosity in his proceedings, he had not been a fortnight in North Devon,
before it was generally known in Lynmouth and Barnstaple that he was young
Mr. Shelley, son of Mr. Timothy Shelley, M.P. for New Shoreham, and
immediate heir (as honest Jack Lawless put the case) to one of the first
fortunes of England. The proceedings of a young gentleman of such superior
quality were of course fruitful of much gossip in the parishes visited by
Daniel Hill, whose pamphlets and broadsides were the more interesting to
mechanics, farmers, and justices of the peace, because he was known to be
the young gentleman’s servant. Whilst gossips clacked to one another about
the young gentleman’s _Declaration of Rights_ and _The Devil’s Walk_, he
was known to be in communication with Mr. Syle, of Barnstaple, and to have
commissioned that enterprising bookseller to print something even more
racy than those piquant broadsides. Compositors at press, in a small
provincial town, who seldom work at ‘copy’ more diverting than
auctioneers’ catalogues or tradesmen’s lists of prices, are apt to grow
excited and loquacious when they are employed to put in type a smart
electioneering squib, or a pamphlet for the discomfiture of a local
dignitary. It was not in the nature of Mr. Syle’s provincial journeymen
and apprentices to be silent to their neighbours about the stinging letter
to the Lord Chief Justice, which they were ‘setting up.’ Before the author
had seen a first proof, the _Letter_ was talked about in the parlours of
the two contiguous taverns, where the political leaders of the borough met
every evening of the week to confer on matters of Imperial or local
politics. At the Whig tavern, feeling went in some degree with the
youthful author of the daring essay; but at the adjoining house, where
Tories held council, it was urged and agreed that measures should be taken
promptly for the maintenance of social order, and the timely stay of
seditious practices. By the chiefs of both parties it was agreed that
young Mr. Shelley, even though he were the son of half-a-dozen Members of
Parliament and heir to half-a-hundred baronetcies, should not be allowed
to break the law in North Devon with impunity. Hence the arrest of the
young gentleman’s Irish servant.

From evidence preserved at _The Record Office_, it appears that the
Barnstaple authorities acted in this business under guidance and
instructions from the Solicitor to the Treasury. The publications being
seditious, it was of course competent for the Ministry to proceed against
Shelley, as the author and actual promulgator of the writings. That he was
not proceeded against in his own name and person may have been due, in
some degree, to regard for his father’s feelings and respectability.
Consideration also for the offender’s youthfulness may have determined the
powers to forbear from prosecuting the erratic stripling. But other
considerations doubtless operated with the legal advisers of the Crown. It
might be difficult to produce _legal_ proof that Shelley was the author of
the writings, or even that he was their publisher. If it could not be
proved to a jury that he was the actual instigator and director of his
servant’s political activity, the proceedings against him would result in
miscarriage, discreditable to those who instituted them. Moreover, if his
conviction could be secured, to prosecute him would magnify him into a
martyr and make far too much of his puerile sauciness. To act as though
the reputation of the Lord Chief Justice could be affected by a
schoolboy’s pen would not tend to stimulate the general reverence for the
majesty of the law. Under these circumstances it was thought best to
proceed only against the servant; but, whilst affecting to take no notice
of the culprit in the background, to deal with the servant in such a
manner that his youthful master should be punished.

Some of the seditious compositions, posted or otherwise dispersed by
Daniel Hill, bore no printer’s name; and it was provided by 39 George III.
c. 79, section xxvii. that ‘... every person, who shall publish or
disperse, or assist in publishing or dispersing, either _gratis_ or for
money, any printed Paper or Book, which shall have been printed after the
passing of this Act, and on which the name and place of abode of the
person printing the same shall not be printed as aforesaid, shall, for
every copy of such paper so published or dispersed by him, forfeit and pay
the sum of twenty pounds.’ By the same statute it was further provided
that every person convicted under it, who should neither pay the penalties
nor be possessed of goods on which they could be levied, should forthwith
be sent to prison ‘for any time not exceeding six calendar months, nor
less than three calendar months.’ Hence it was possible to punish Daniel
Hill, and through him to punish his master, without making too much of the
dangerous character of the writings. Convicted in the Mayor’s Court at
Barnstaple, of publishing and dispersing Printed Papers in violation of 39
George III. c. 79, the Irish servant was sentenced to pay fines amounting
to 200_l._ or go to prison for six months.

    ‘Daniel Hill,’ the town-clerk of Barnstaple wrote to Lord Sidmouth,
    when the case had been dealt with in this manner, ‘has been convicted
    by the Mayor in ten penalties of 20_l._ each, for publishing and
    dispersing Printed Papers, 39 George III. c. 79, and is now committed
    to the common gaol of this Borough for not paying the penalties, and
    having no goods on which they could be levied.’

When the servant was fined thus heavily, the Mayor and other acting
magistrates assumed that the penalties would be paid by Shelley,--at once
and on the spot, if he had so much money in hand; or in a few days should
it be necessary for him to communicate with his father or lawyer, in order
to put his servant at large. At the trial, Daniel Hill’s defence was that
he had meant no harm in posting the bills in accordance with the
directions of ‘the gentleman,’ who had given him the broadsides for that
purpose, and paid him 2_s._ 6_d._ for the job. Everyone in court, of
course, smiled at the poor fellow’s attempt to make the magistrates
believe, that the ‘gentleman’ was a stranger whom he had come upon
accidentally between Lynton and Barnstaple, and that the day’s work which
had brought him to trouble was a solitary ‘job’ of casual employment; it
being known alike to the Justices on the bench and the public in the body
of the court, that the gentleman, who had set Daniel Hill to disperse the
seditious bills, was Mr. Shelley, the Lynton lodger.

That young Mr. Shelley could not pay so large a fine at a moment’s notice
can have caused the borough magistrates no surprise. That Daniel Hill
should pass a few days under penal discipline, whilst his master should be
getting the money needful for his liberation, was probably desired by the
municipal authorities, to whom it may well have appeared no less salutary
than reasonable that, instead of going from the dock scot-free, he should
endure for a week or so the wholesome rigour of offended justice. But for
a few days, neither to the powers of the bench nor to the multitude living
under their sway, did it appear probable that the servant would remain in
durance for six calendar months, whilst the gentleman who had brought him
to trouble escaped with perfect impunity. In bare justice to all that was
generous in his faulty nature, it should be taken for certain that could
he have paid them, either at once or by drawing money for the purpose from
any source at his command, Shelley would have paid the cumulated fines as
quickly as possible, even though they had amounted to 2000_l._ But he was
no more able to lift Lynton in his palm and pitch it down upon Lynmouth,
than to open the gate of Barnstaple’s common gaol to his Irish varlet.
What could he do for such a purpose? Instead of having 200_l._ at his
command he could not just then have laid his hand on as many shillings,
even though Harriett and Eliza, and the incomparable Portia, had given him
the contents of all their several pockets, to the last sixpence. Next
quarter-day, when he hoped to ‘recover his financial liberty’ (his own
elegant Micawberism), the young gentleman, of enterprises so
disproportionate to his means, would come into possession of 100_l._
_minus_ what he should have spent in the interim on his necessities.
Already in debt to Mr. Syle of Barnstaple for printing the _Letter to Lord
Ellenborough_, he was for the moment in such a stringent state of
financial bondage, that he must either withdraw from the Lynton
lodging-house at the end of the current week, or run in his landlady’s
debt for room-rent, bread, butter, milk, and vegetables. Over and beyond
the several sums to be paid to the most urgent of his local creditors,
should he linger in North Devon till Michaelmas, enough might remain to
him of his next quarterly hundred pounds, to cover the charges of
travelling to London and living till Christmas 1812. This was the extent
of the ‘financial liberty’ for which he was longing. To whom could he
apply for the money wherewith to pay the 200_l._ and costs? To his
father?--his father’s solicitor? He could not write for help to Hogg, whom
he suspected, or at least had recently believed guilty, of trying to
seduce Harriett. For failing to do what was completely out of his power,
he is less to be blamed than commiserated. The poet’s historian wishes he
could record that in his inability to protect his servant with his purse,
he stood by him manfully, declaring that the ignorant fellow had only
obeyed his employer’s order, and avowing himself the actual culprit; but
this chivalric course was not taken by Shelley. He cannot be imagined to
have found much enjoyment at Lynton, whilst Daniel Hill was undergoing
punishment. On the contrary, regard being had to his sensibility and his
mode of dealing with certain of its consequences, it may be assumed that
he suffered from mental and bodily distress, which had an effect on the
petty-cash receipts of the nearest dealer in laudanum.

When it appeared that the young gentleman, who had brought the ignorant
Irishman into trouble, would altogether escape punishment, local sentiment
passed to warmer indignation against the misdemeanant of superior social
condition. Unmindful of his sentimental distress, ‘society’ came to the
very wrong conclusion that he suffered nothing at all. Whilst Daniel Hill
lived in the popular imagination as a poor fellow undergoing the rigour of
prison discipline, the young gentleman was supposed to be enjoying
himself at Lynton. It was whispered that the magistrates had not acted
rightly in dealing so hardly with the poor and ignorant man, whilst they
allowed the rich and educated one to go scot-free. Though they had acted
with the best intentions and under the best advice, the magistrates felt
there had been a serious miscarriage of justice. To some of them it was
consolatory to reflect that measures could still be taken for the
punishment of the youthful libeller of the Lord Chief Justice.

That it was in contemplation to proceed against the author and printer of
the _Letter to Lord Ellenborough_, or at least that the talk of Barnstaple
turned on proceedings for their punishment, may be inferred from Mr.
Syle’s alarm and vain endeavours to recover the fifty copies of the
_Letter_, delivered to Shelley a day or two before Daniel Hill’s arrest.
Alarmed by the arrest, Mr. Syle was quick to destroy all copies of the
pamphlet lying in his office; the _Letter to Lord Ellenborough_ being the
third (possibly, the fourth) of Shelley’s juvenile productions to be
suppressed by a panic-struck printer.

My good friend, Mr. Chanter, of Barnstaple, is certain that Mr. Syle had
several interviews with Shelley, in order to recover the fifty copies of
the _Letter_ which had been sent to London. It is needless to say that
these ‘several interviews’ were unsatisfactory to Mr. Syle. It may be
assumed that to account for his refusal to surrender the printed copies,
Shelley declared his inability to restore them, as they had already passed
from his keeping. As the printer would have thought it worth his while to
be at much pains and cost to follow the fifty copies or any one of them,
it may be assumed that he asked Shelley, whither they had gone,--to whom
and by whom they had been distributed. Having a strong opinion that they
had not been distributed by Daniel Hill, on whose person none of the
_Letters_ had been found, Mr. Syle had good reason for thinking that, if
they had really passed from Shelley’s hands, they must have been dispersed
either by the writer himself or the ladies of his party. We may,
therefore, be sure that Shelley was pressed strongly to give or procure
precise information respecting the circumstances of their distribution.
With equal confidence it may be assumed that Shelley withheld from the
printer, that the fifty copies had been sent to Mr. Hookham. Writing from
information, that came to him directly or indirectly from persons
concerned in printing the libellous writing, Mr. Chanter says, ‘He’
(_i.e._ Mr. Syle) ‘at once suppressed and destroyed the remaining sheets,
and had several interviews with Shelley to endeavour to get back the ones
previously delivered, but unsuccessfully, as they had been mostly
distributed’:--words implying a gradual distribution in the neighbourhood.
Had Shelley told the printer what had been done with the pamphlets, it
would scarcely have lived in local tradition, that they had been dispersed
in the manner indicated by Mr. Chanter’s words. Moreover, on discovering
what trouble might come to him from the affair, Shelley (a capital keeper
of a secret he was interested in keeping) had a good reason for
withholding from the Barnstaple tradesman a piece of information, which he
might under pressure and for his own safety communicate to the magistrates
of the borough, with consequences inconvenient to Mr. Hookham and Mr.
Hookham’s correspondent.

The evidence that Shelley’s withdrawal from North Devon was connected with
the stir and ferment occasioned by the publication of seditious
literature, is only circumstantial; but it is such strong evidence of its
weak kind that few readers will think it insufficient for the conclusion,
to which it has brought the present writer. Settled at Lynton, with the
purpose of remaining there till by economical living he should have
recovered his ‘financial liberty’--_i.e._ till next quarter-day--Shelley
likes his lodgings and his landlady, and in various ways seems confirmed
in his resolve to stay there for several weeks; when within twelve days or
a fortnight he moves hurriedly into another county, lying well away from
Devon. Making this migration soon after his servant’s arrest, he makes it
at a moment when people are saying he ought to be sent to Barnstaple Gaol
to keep Daniel Hill company, and the Barnstaple bookseller is fearful of
being prosecuted for _publishing_ what his customer has _written_.

The prosecution of which Mr. Syle was fearful would have been a
prosecution in which he, as publisher, would have been associated in the
dock with Shelley, as author. Had Mr. Syle’s alarm been justified by the
event, he and Shelley would have been tried together. All that Mr. Syle
feared for himself, Shelley had reason to fear for himself. Is it to be
supposed that, whilst the bookseller was agitated with terror, Shelley,--a
youthful, nervous, excitable laudanum-drinker,--was free from fear? At
this moment of terror, and real or imaginary peril, Shelley runs along the
coast from Lynton to Ilfracombe, and crossing the water with his three
female companions gets into Wales. This flight is made at a moment when
there are stringent pecuniary reasons why they should remain at Lynton.
Surely here is a body of circumstantial evidence strong enough to justify
something more than a strong suspicion that in running from North Devon to
Wales, Shelley was impelled by apprehension of the same legal proceedings,
which poor Mr. Syle was anticipating with terror! In North Devon he was
liable to arrest at any moment. In South Wales he would be secure from
immediate seizure. Hidden in a secluded corner of Carmarthenshire, he
would not be easily tracked and discovered.

The flight had been made something less than three weeks, when William
Godwin, relying on his young friend’s frequent and pressing invitations,
determined to pay him a visit at Lynton. Mounting coach in London, the
philosopher travelled smoothly enough to Bristol, whence he passed over
stormy waters to Lynmouth, enduring discomforts (scarcely to be imagined
in these luxurious days) during the trip, so humorously touched upon by
Hogg, and so graphically described by the voyager himself. After
recovering from sea-sickness the disappointed traveller gave his wife some
particulars, which he was pleased to call ‘good news,’ respecting the
erratic people, whom he had hoped to find near the Valley of Rocks. He had
seen the worthy woman, in whose house the Shelleys had lodged for nine
weeks and three days. Leaving Lynton precipitately, the Shelleys had gone
off in debt to their landlady and two other people: in debt to her for
room-rent and necessaries, and for 29_s._ of borrowed money, besides
3_l._, which she had induced a neighbour to lend them. Godwin erred in
thinking the fugitives had been constrained to borrow this 4_l._ 9_s._,
because they could not get change at Lynmouth for the two halves of a
bank-note; for at the moment of running off, they had not received the
second half of the divided note. It delighted Godwin to observe the
affectionate warmth with which the landlady spoke of her late lodgers; and
he was pleased at learning from her, that they would be in London in a
fortnight.

In their desire to get away from Lynton as quickly as possible, the four
friends left Lynton in debt, and could not have left it so soon, had they
not induced two of the villagers to lend them four pounds and nine
shillings. One of the adventurers (probably Shelley) was in possession of
the one half of a bank-note, the second half of the divided paper having
not yet come to hand. From what source this note came does not appear. It
looks as though Shelley had written to some friend for a small loan to
enable him to escape quickly from a perilous position, and that the
half-note in hand was the first half of a consequent remittance. Anyhow it
points to the precipitateness of the departure, that the fugitives did not
like to wait till the post should bring the second half of the negotiable
paper. Hastening off with the half-note and borrowed money the adventurers
went to Ilfracombe, whence they returned the four pounds and nine
shillings to the two several lenders,--3_l._ to Mrs. Hooper’s friend, and
29_s._ to the landlady herself, to whom they had given ‘a draft upon the
Honourable Mr. Lawleys, brother to Lord Cloncurry,’ for the full payment
of the amount in which they were indebted to her. There is no doubt that
the gentleman so strangely misdescribed was ‘honest Jack,’ who was nothing
more than a distant relation to Lord Cloncurry. The draft is not in
evidence to show whether honest Jack was so suspiciously misdescribed on
the document itself; but it cannot be questioned that the simple
lodginghouse-keeper had been talked into believing that the order for
payment, instead of being addressed to a penniless _littérateur_, was
drawn upon a personage of social importance.

I wish I could think honest Jack had not been so misdescribed to this
simple soul of a North Devon village, in order that she should the more
readily be induced to accept the dubious draft in payment of her little
account. Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy remarks jocosely on this business,
‘We trust that the good Mrs. Hooper of Lynmonth was not kept out of her
money until the “enormous profits” which Shelley so sanguinely expected
from the publication of _The History of Ireland_ were realized.’ Even at
this remoteness from the end of the poor woman’s earthly cares the reader
of this page may well repeat seriously what Mr. MacCarthy says jestingly;
for many a poor widow has been brought to the workhouse by her simplicity
in taking a worthless cheque from a lodger, who ought to have paid what he
promised to give her--ready money.

For the present enough has been said of Shelley’s reasons for wishing to
leave North Devon, and of the manner of his flight. Enough has been said
to show how far Lady Shelley is justified in ascribing the poet’s abrupt
withdrawal from Lynton to Tanyrallt, altogether to ‘the restlessness of
his disposition.’




CHAPTER VI.

NORTH WALES AND THE SECOND IRISH TRIP.

    William A. Madocks--The Tremadoc Embankment--Shelley’s Zeal for the
    People of Tremadoc--His big Subscription to the Embankment
    Fund--Tanyrallt Lodge--Shelley in London--Sussex Selfishness--The
    Reconciliation with Hogg--Miss Hitchener in Disgrace--She is banished
    from ‘Percy’s Little Circle’--Brown Demon and Hermaphroditical
    Beast--Shelley in Skinner Street--Claire and Mary--Fanny Imlay’s
    Intercourse with Shelley--The Worth and Worthlessness of Claire’s
    Evidence--Shelley’s Prodigality--Back at Tanyrallt--At Work on _Queen
    Mab_--At War with Neighbours--Embankment Annoyances--Livelier Delight
    in Harriett--Wheedling Letter to the Duke of Norfolk--Diet and
    Dyspepsia--The Hunts in trouble--Shelley’s Contribution for their
    Relief--The odious Leeson--Daniel Hill’s liberation from Prison--His
    Arrival at Tanyrallt Lodge--The Tanyrallt Mystery--Shelley’s
    marvellous and conflicting Stories--Exhibition of the
    Evidence--Inquisition and Verdict--Shelley’s ignominious Position--His
    virtuous Indignation at the World’s Villany--His undiminished Concern
    for Liberty and Virtue--His Withdrawal from Wales to Ireland--He
    hastens from Dublin to Killarney--Hogg in Dublin--The Shelleys back in
    London.


(4.)--TANYRALLT, CARNARVONSHIRE, N.W.

In default of data, by which their course could be traced precisely, the
historian can only say of the movements of the four adventurers between
Ilfracombe and Tremadoc, that they appear to have arrived at the latter
place without greatly exceeding the time that would be usually spent by
tourists in a trip from North Devon, across the Bristol Channel, and
onwards from Cardiff to Carnarvon. Readers will not be far wrong in
assuming that on the day of William Godwin’s arrival at Lynmouth (18th
September, 1812), his young friend had been two or three days at Tremadoc.
Either from the moment of his arrival at Tremadoc, or from a quickly
following day, Shelley was for some time in a scene of excitement that
diverted his mind from the painful circumstances of his flight from
Lynton. In September, 1812, an unusually high tide swept away portions of
the breakwater and embankment, that had been raised a few years earlier by
a considerable landowner of the neighbourhood (William A. Madocks, Esq.,
Fellow of All Souls’ College, Oxford, and Member of Parliament) for the
preservation of lands, which he was set on reclaiming from the sea. The
immediate consequence of the injury to the insufficient works was a flood
that, sweeping across the imperfectly reclaimed lands, inflicted much
suffering and loss on humble tillers and other occupants of the soil.
Whether the flood preceded, or followed Shelley’s arrival at Tremadoc by a
few days, or was precisely coincident with it, does not appear; but it is
certain that he was deeply stirred by the results of the calamity.

Commiserating the poor people, driven from their tenements by the sea, he
sympathized also with the wealthier sufferers. Approaching Mr. Madocks,
seignior of Tremadoc, and Mr. Williams, the great man’s agent, with
appropriate expressions of concern for the trouble that had befallen them
and their dependents, Shelley explained to them _more suo_, that he was
the eldest son of Mr. Timothy Shelley, of Field Place, in the county of
Sussex, and eventual inheritor of the baronetcy and broad acres of his
grandfather, Sir Bysshe Shelley. At present a minor, with his hands tied
as the hands of minors ever are, he was in the twenty-first year of his
minority; but next August, on attaining his majority, he should be in a
position to contribute handsomely to the fund that must be raised to
restore Tremadoc to prosperity. In fact, he spoke to the gentlemen of
Tremadoc just such brave words of himself, as a few months since had
caused honest Jack Lawless to write of him as the immediate heir to one of
the first fortunes of England, and a young gentleman who would do great
things for the benefit of Ireland.

It is not wonderful that the Tremadoc gentry were caught by these promises
of assistance. A man of politics and affairs, a Fellow of All Souls, and a
student of human nature, Mr. Madocks saw the young man’s enthusiasm was
sincere, and knew just enough of his history to have no hesitation in
taking the young gentleman, at his own valuation. It was not for Mr.
Madocks to cross-examine the young gentleman who spoke so frankly of his
parentage and prospects. In truth, there was nothing in Shelley’s talk to
move either Mr. Madocks, or his local agent (Mr. Williams), to suspicion.
Young gentlemen often come into easy circumstances on coming of age, even
though they must wait for their father’s estates. Sir Bysshe Shelley had
the reputation of being the wealthiest commoner of his county. The whole
House of Commons knew the Member for New Shoreham would, in the usual
course of things, succeed to great wealth. What more natural than for the
eldest son of so considerable a squire, the grandson of so wealthy a
baronet, to step into money on the attainment of his majority?

By the elders of Tremadoc a scheme, that showed excellently on paper, was
devised for the future security and welfare of the town. The old
breakwater and embankment having proved ineffectual for the protection of
the imperfectly reclaimed five thousand acres of land, it was determined
to build a stronger and more imposing embankment, and make on its top a
coach-road, that, uniting two Welsh counties, would be advantageous to
England and Ireland, as well as Wales, by shortening the journey from
Dublin to Bath and London. There being no question with the projectors
respecting the fertility of the land, if it could be duly guarded from the
salt-water, it was estimated that the four or five thousand acres of
reclaimable soil would soon yield a rental of from 8000_l._ to 10,000_l._
a-year. These advantages would result from an embankment, made at an
estimated cost of 20,000_l._

To practical critics it may appear that, unless this scheme were not based
on misconception, the owners of the reclaimable land must have been
strangely neglectful of their interests. To the same critics it may seem
that, as the embankment would yield a revenue of from 8000_l._ to
10,000_l._ a-year to the owners of the land, they were the persons to
provide the 20,000_l._ To the Tremadoc elders, however, it appeared only
reasonable that the capital, to be so expended for the enrichment of these
landowners, should be provided by all persons of the general public,
wishing well to Tremadoc and the United Kingdom, of which Tremadoc was
part. It does not appear what interest, or whether any interest, was to be
paid for money advanced by subscribers. From the way in which she commends
Shelley for the largeness of his subscription, it is obvious Lady Shelley
regards the moneys proffered by subscribers as differing in no respect
from moneys given to a benevolent enterprise.

Shelley thought that the landowners, who would be so greatly benefited by
the embankment, should be invited to subscribe liberally. Acting on this
view, the impetuous minor assailed several of the neighbouring gentry with
personal entreaties for money, for the good cause;--entreaties he could
make with a good grace, since, to set richer folk a good example, he had
headed the subscription list ‘with a donation’ (says Lady Shelley) ‘of
500_l._, though his means, as the reader has seen, were small.’ It was,
doubtless, understood by Messrs. Madocks and Williams, that the young
gentleman should not be asked to pay anything for this spirited stroke of
his pen, until he should have entered on the financial plenitude, that
would follow the attainment of his majority. At the same time the
enthusiastic youth undertook to gather subscriptions in his native county,
and more especially from his friend, the Duke of Norfolk.

Seeing how set Shelley was on furthering the interests of Tremadoc, it was
only natural for Mr. Madocks to have pleasure in letting his young friend
a certain furnished cottage at Tanyrallt. Called a cottage, Tanyrallt
Lodge differed greatly from the tenement in which the adventurers had been
lodging at Lynton. A cottage of gentility, with a billiard-room and
circumambient lawns, this lodge almost justified Shelley in writing of it
to Hogg, as ‘a cottage extensive and tasty enough for the villa of an
Italian Prince.’ Good taste, of course, forbade the Lord of Tremadoc to
name a rent beneath the dignity of a tenant who, besides being a gentleman
of quality, would soon be in easy circumstances. Even Shelley thought the
rent ‘large, but,’ as he wrote with winning candour to Hogg, ‘it is an
object with us that they allow it to remain unpaid till I am of age.’ The
place was worth the deferred rent; and the landlord lived with his tenant
on the friendliest terms; speaking to him confidentially of the descent of
Madockses, of Tremadoc, from Prince Madoc, and doubtless listening with
proper interest to his youthful tenant’s stories of the Shelleys of olden
time, and the ancient snake of the Field Place gardens. At the same time
Mrs. Madocks and Miss Westbrook became fast friends, after the wont of
gentlewomen, who conceive it is to their interest to be very intimate with
one another.

Shelley had done well for himself and his attendant gentlewomen in
migrating from North Devon to Carnarvonshire, and throwing himself so
impetuously into the embankment business. At Tanyrallt he and they lived
(pleasantly for awhile) with the best people of the neighbourhood; and
enjoyed the change of scene and society all the more, because in
pre-railway days Tremadoc was too far a call from Lynton, for them to fear
the talk of the Lynmouth tattlers would come to the ears of the quality
round about Tanyrallt. But an altogether wrong view is taken of the
position by readers, who question the genuineness of Shelley’s affection
for Tremadoc, or suspect him of entertaining his new friends with hopes he
intended to disappoint. For the moment he was quite as earnest for the new
breakwater as a few months before he had been for Catholic Emancipation.
He had been for so long a time looking to the attainment of his majority
as a point of his existence, when he should be able to make better terms
with his father, or raise money at a comparatively easy rate on his
expectations, that he was quite honest in speaking of his coming of age,
as a time when he should be able to give 500_l._ to the Tremadoc
embankment, and pay the deferred rent for Tanyrallt Lodge. The impetuous
and imaginative young man had fairly talked himself into conceiving, that
to raise a handsome sum for the embankment fund he had only to carry the
subscription list to the Duke of Norfolk and his other friends in Sussex.


(5.)--LONDON: ST. JAMES’S COFFEE-HOUSE.

Soon (say ten days or a fortnight) after taking possession of the
Tanyrallt Lodge, Shelley went to London with the ladies of his party. The
authorities are at variance respecting the objects, incidents, or duration
of this visit. Hogg, who knew nothing of Shelley’s frequent visits to
Godwin during this period, seems to have been under the impression that
Shelley’s first act, after coming to town, was to seek him out; whereas
the interview of reconciliation did not take place till the poet had been
at least four weeks in town. Working on Hogg’s misconception, and his own
erroneous assumption that Shelley must have left London for Tanyrallt on
Thursday, 12th November, because, on the previous Saturday, he intended
doing so, Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy concludes that Shelley’s ‘brief
visit’ to town ‘lasted little more than a week,’ and that Hogg dined with
the Shelleys only on one occasion during the visit; whereas the visit
exceeded six weeks by a single day, and Hogg dined twice with the Shelleys
at the St. James’s Coffee-house. With respect to the length of the stay in
London, Mr. Kegan Paul is wrong only by a single day. Lady Shelley, of
course, makes several mistakes about the business. (1) Speaking of
Shelley’s exertions for the Tremadoc embankment, she says, ‘But he did not
allow his zeal to stop even here; for, accompanied by his wife, he hurried
up to London to obtain further succour.’ He was accompanied by Miss
Hitchener and Miss Westbrook, as well as his wife; and he went to town on
other matters besides the Tremadoc embankment. (2) Speaking of the poet’s
intercourse with the author of _Political Justice_, Lady Shelley says,
‘During his visit to London, Shelley made the personal acquaintance of
Godwin, with whom he lived for a time;’ whereas it is certain that, though
calling frequently on Godwin and becoming very intimate with the Skinner
Street family, Shelley slept at the St. James’s Coffee-house. (3) Speaking
of Shelley’s intercourse with Fanny Imlay, Lady Shelley calls her Fanny
Godwin, says she was ‘the philosopher’s daughter,’ and adds in a note that
‘Fanny Godwin was the only sister of Shelley’s second wife;’ whereas Mary
Wollstonecraft’s illegitimate daughter, by Gilbert Imlay, had no right to
Godwin’s surname, was _not_ the philosopher’s daughter, and was only the
illegitimate uterine sister of Shelley’s second wife. It is curious to
observe how, whilst pushing poor Claire out of all sisterly relation to
Shelley’s second wife, whose sister-by-affinity she unquestionably was,
Lady Shelley affiliates Mary Wollstonecraft’s illegitimate child on
William Godwin, and promotes her to the dignity of being whole-sister of
Shelley’s second wife. (4) Speaking of Fanny’s death, Lady Shelley says
the poor girl ‘died early in 1815.’ Lady Shelley is doubly wrong in these
few words; for Fanny did not die in 1815, nor did she die early in any
year. She killed herself on 9th October, 1816.

Hurrying up to London (to use Lady Shelley’s expression) Shelley took
rooms at the St. James’s Coffee-house, and whilst in town accomplished
several objects that had quite as much to do with his trip to the capital,
as his avowed purpose of winning subscribers to the Tremadoc embankment.
He left Lynton with the intention of being in London in a fortnight. Set
on making Godwin’s personal acquaintance, he also wished for reconcilement
to Hogg. From the fact that he was a month in town before seeking him out,
it may not be inferred that the poet’s desire for intercourse with his
college friend was a feeble inclination. Shelley knew enough of the
lawyers and their haunts to be aware that he should be only wasting his
time in hunting for Hogg, before the barristers and students of the Four
Inns had returned to town for Michaelmas Term. He had good reason to think
that Hogg, a man of rural birth and nurture, would be slaughtering
pheasants till the end of the Long Vacation. Arriving in London on Sunday,
4th October, 1812, Shelley lost no time in going to Skinner Street,
because he knew Godwin would be there. Whilst going, almost daily for
several weeks, to Skinner Street, he kept away from the Inns of Court,
till he could hope to find Hogg in one of them. On the opening of the
Michaelmas Term he hastened to the Inns, discovered his old friend’s
lodgings, and rushed in upon him at night, in the manner already set forth
in these pages. As Hogg ‘returned from the country at the end of October,
1812’ (_vide_ Hogg’s _Life_, Vol. ii., p. 165), Shelley might have found
his old friend a day or too earlier; but he was right in thinking he would
waste his time and pains in hunting for him much sooner.

For any good he could do the projectors of the embankment Shelley might as
well have stayed at Tanyrallt. In promising to do much for them he had
‘talked too fast,’--a fault of which youthful and impetuous persons of
both sexes are often guilty; and in due course he was punished for his
fast _talk_ by the annoyance that came to him from the pressure, put upon
him to _do_ something in fulfilment of his brave words. From one of his
letters it seems that he made some faint attempts to get subscribers to
the embankment fund in Sussex. Possibly he wrote to his uncle Pilfold and
Mr. Medwin on the subject; but it is certain he received neither from them
nor any one else in the county any assistance for the great scheme. ‘I
see,’ he wrote to Mr. Williams of Tremadoc from the St. James’s
Coffee-house on 7th November, 1812, ‘no hope of effecting, on my part, any
grand or decisive scheme until the expiration of my minority,’--words
comically indicative of the grand and decisive things he had promised to
do for Tremadoc, as soon as he should come of age. In Sussex he met with
no encouragement. The cold and unsympathetic animals of his native shire
cared only for eating, drinking, and sleeping. But his fervid hopes,
ardent desires, and unremitting personal exertions, were all engaged for
the great cause of the Tremadoc embankment, ‘which he would desert but
with his life’:--a declaration not unworthy of Mr. Micawber in his
happiest moments.

At the date of this letter Shelley had not seen, nor does he appear to
have written to, his particular friend, the Duke of Norfolk, on the
enterprise for benefiting owners of property in and near Tremadoc; for he
says in the epistle, ‘The Duke of Norfolk has just returned to London. I
shall call upon him this morning, and shall spare no pains in engaging his
interest, or perhaps his better feelings, in our and our country’s cause.’
If Shelley talked to the Duke of the Tremadoc embankment in the style in
which he wrote about it to the Welsh agent, his Grace of Norfolk must have
found it difficult to refrain from laughing outright at the youngster.

Though it is questionable whether Shelley journeyed from Tanyrallt to
London with a clear purpose of dismissing Miss Hitchener from his little
circle, before he should return to the Principality, there are grounds for
a strong opinion that he did not travel with Portia from Lynton to
Tremadoc, without discovering she was by no means the angelic person he
had formerly imagined her. At Lynton, where she was mistaken for a
foreigner, whilst climbing the cliffs with her Percy, this tall, thin,
rather bony, somewhat masculine, slightly bearded, perceptibly moustached,
all too swarthy, far too loquacious young woman had for some time retained
her power over Shelley, and even given promise of drawing Harriett under
her sway:--facts that did not soften Miss Westbrook to the brown-eyed and
brown-skinned intruder. Before they stole away from Lynton, Portia and
Eliza were at war, more often open than covert, with one another. Touring
under the most favourable circumstances is necessarily attended with
conditions likely to try the tempers of imperfectly congenial
fellow-travellers; and the journey of the four adventurers from North
Devon to North Wales cannot have disposed the ladies-at-war to think less
bitterly of each other. Whilst the schoolmistress thought Eliza no worthy
member of ‘Percy’s little circle,’ the gentlewoman, whose papa belonged to
the highest grade of licensed victuallers, thought any circle too good for
the talkative woman, whose father kept a common ale-house. It is not
strange, therefore, that in London, if not at Tanyrallt, Shelley decided
to banish Portia from his little circle for ever.

On receiving this sentence of extrusion, Portia turned upon her poet with
a demand for pecuniary compensation. Wanting, though it must be declared,
in the delicacy and highmindedness, appropriate to an incomparable Portia,
this demand by a provincial innkeeper’s daughter was not unreasonable.
The demandant’s case was this:--‘When you crossed my path I had the
respect of my neighbours, and a school by which I made a decent
livelihood, both of which valuable things I surrendered at your earnest
entreaty that I would come to you and live with you _for ever_. I did not
force myself on you. On the contrary, I declined your pressing invitations
to come to you in Ireland. Instead of hastening to you in Wales, I asked
you to come to me at Hurstpierpoint. I should not have joined you in North
Devon, had you not persuaded me you could never be happy without me. A few
months of it have sufficed to make you weary of my company; and now you
have had all the amusement I am capable of affording you, you tell me to
be off. At least, you should help me to place myself in as good a position
as the one I surrendered at your request and for your pleasure.’ Shelley
could not deny there was justice in the demand. To be quit of her without
further quarrelling, he promised to make her an allowance. What he engaged
to give in quarterly payments does not appear; but he may be assumed to
have promised her forty or fifty pounds a-year. This matter having been
settled, it was arranged that Miss Hitchener should spend Sunday, 15th
November, 1812, with the trio--dining with them at the St. James’s
Coffee-house, and bidding them farewell for ever, at the close of the
evening.

Calling on the morning of that same Sunday at the St. James’s Coffee-house
to see his friends, Hogg was pressed to be the fifth person at the
farewell dinner. Shelley being precluded from walking with him by some
special engagement, and Harriett being a sufferer from headache, that made
her other than the bright and blooming Harriett with whom he had dined at
the same hotel a few days earlier, Hogg was on this occasion induced to
attend Eliza and Portia for a promenade in the parks before dinner.
Nothing droller can be found in Hogg’s book than his account of his walk
in the parks with the brown demon (Miss Hitchener) on his right arm, and
the black diamond (Miss Westbrook) on his left. Moving between the
belligerent women, Hogg had reason to admire the tone of haughty contempt
with which the Black Diamond tossed her insults at the Brown Demon, and
the meek contumacy with which Miss Hitchener returned her enemy’s fire.
For awhile the fighting was sharp; but in little more than half-an-hour
the victory was with the Brown Demon, whose galling meekness and poisonous
malice fairly silenced her insolent foe. The Black Diamond turning sulky
and silent, Hogg gave his ear for the rest of the walk to the Brown Demon,
who poured from her bearded lips the stream of gentle eloquence that
afforded him new views on the rights of women.

On their return from this pleasant ‘airing’ in the parks, as they were
crossing the threshold of the St. James’s Coffee-house, Miss Eliza
Westbrook said viciously to Hogg, ‘How could you talk to that nasty
creature so much? How could you permit her to prate so long to you? Why
did you encourage her? Harriett will be seriously displeased with you, I
assure you; she will be very angry!’

True to her mission, Portia strove to illuminate Percy’s little circle to
the last moment of her connexion with it. Hogg happening to refer to the
rights of the gentler sex, Miss Hitchener reopened her parable after tea
and discoursed eloquently on the high theme, even to the moment of the
arrival of the hackney-coach, which had been summoned to remove her from
her auditors for ever. Whilst the lady was delivering this final oration,
Percy quitted his chair, and taking up a position before her drank-in the
musical utterances of her wisdom with a comical show of approval.

If Shelley softened to Portia at the moment of parting, the weakness was
transient; for he soon learnt to speak as well as think of her with a
resentment that might almost be styled ferocious. As the hour approached
for the first of the quarterly payments he rose to rage at the mere
thought of the hateful creature.

    ‘The Brown Demon,’ he wrote to Hogg from Tanyrallt on 3rd December,
    1812, ‘as we call our late tormentor and schoolmistress, must receive
    her stipend.... She is an artful, superficial, ugly, hermaphroditical
    beast of a woman, and my astonishment at my fatuity, inconsistency,
    and bad taste, was never so great, as after living four months with
    her as an inmate. What would Hell be, were such a woman in Heaven?’

‘_Hermaphroditical beast of a woman!_’ Surely these are strangely strong
words for a chivalric gentleman to apply to a woman, whatever her failings
may have been!

Whatever disappointments Shelley encountered during this sojourn in
London, none of them can have come to him from his treatment in Skinner
Street. Welcomed by Godwin with open arms, Shelley entered at once on
personal relations with the philosopher, that accorded in every particular
with the relations they had maintained towards one another by written
words. Coming to the eminent man of letters for sympathy, counsel, and
instruction, Shelley received what he sought. So much pitifully snobbish
stuff has been written about the intercourse of William Godwin and
Shelley, as though the author of _Political Justice_ was greatly honoured
and his dwelling glorified by the visits of the heir to a Sussex
baronetcy, that it is necessary to remind the reader of the relation which
Godwin condescended to hold towards Shelley, and of the relation in which
Shelley was reasonably proud to stand in towards Godwin. The position of
Godwin towards Shelley was that of a teacher, patron, benefactor. The
position of Shelley towards Godwin was that of a pupil and worshiper. And
it is to the credit of both that each of the scholars occupied his
respective position gracefully, till one of them was guilty of perhaps the
wildest extravagance of domestic treason recorded in the annals of men of
letters. Whilst Godwin’s condescension and kindness to his youthful
_protégé_ had no tincture of arrogance, Shelley’s acknowledgments of his
teacher’s kindness were rendered in terms of generous homage and grateful
devotion.

At the same time Godwin’s house was open at all hours to Shelley. Let it
be observed (for the servility of certain writers requires the clear
statement of a matter about which good taste would rather be silent) that,
though the Godwins were far from prosperous, the Skinner-Street household
was a family no man of culture and sensibility could enter without feeling
himself in the home of gentle people. If Godwin looked like a Dissenting
minister, and showed signs of his lowly origin, to look into his eyes and
to listen to his speech was to recognize a man of unusual intellect. A
woman of gentle birth and literary achievements, Mrs. Godwin, somewhat too
stout for elegance but none too massive for matronly dignity, was a
bright, clever, vivacious, charming woman in society, though she had a
faulty temper. Possessing no facial beauty apart from the agreeable
expression of her countenance, the eldest daughter of the house (Fanny
Imlay) had the voice, carriage, and air of an agreeable and well-mannered
young gentlewoman. Charles Clairmont was at Edinburgh when Shelley made
the personal acquaintance of the Skinner-Street Godwins; but had the old
Charterhouse boy, of comely face and quick brain, been at home in the
October and November of 1812, Shelley would have met a young man,
qualified by nature and training for an honourable career. Godwin’s son by
his second wife was a promising little fellow. The fifteen-years-old
damsels, Claire and Mary, were already coming into possession of the wit
and personal attractiveness that distinguished them a few years later.
Mainly dependent though they were for their food and raiment and pleasures
on the shop, over which they had their home, the members of this curiously
composed family might be rated with the _bourgeoisie_ from one point of
view; but in manner, taste, tone, intellectual interests and aspirations,
they were as much gentle people as Shelley’s more fortunate relatives.

Beyond thinking them a pair of bright and winsome children, Shelley in the
autumn of 1812 does not seem to have taken much notice of Claire and Mary;
but the evidence is abundant that he was no less strongly than agreeably
interested in Fanny Imlay. Being thus interested in her, it was a matter
of course with Shelley to press her to correspond with him, in order that
he might know her more intimately, and contribute to the development of
her intellectual and moral nature. Probably he invited her to a
correspondence, in the hope that her letters would prove a sufficient
substitute for the diverting letters he had for so many months received
from the Brown Demon, whose longest epistles for the future would be a
mere acknowledgment of her quarterly stipend, should it ever be paid to
her. Instead of accepting this invitation with alacrity, Fanny Imlay
demurred to the proposal on considerations of propriety. She would have
accepted such an invitation from Harriett with glee, but hesitated to
enter on a sentimental correspondence with Harriett’s husband; the
hesitation being due to scruples, that would not have troubled her, had
she been educated in accordance with the theories and proposals of her
mother’s _Rights of Woman_. These scruples were not the less influential
with Fanny in December of 1812, because she had good reason to think that
Shelley and Mrs. Shelley, after enjoying the free run of the
Skinner-Street house during their stay in town, showed her father and
mother scant courtesy in returning to Wales, without bidding them
good-bye.

Notwithstanding his practice of asking young women to correspond with
him, Shelley would scarcely have asked Fanny to write to him, without
feeling an interest in her. Nor is it probable that he made the request,
without thinking he had rendered himself an object of her friendly regard.
Instead of indicating indifference, the hesitancy she displayed in
acceding to his entreaty may be regarded as evidence, that she was
conscious of feeling too warmly for the young man, who after throwing
himself on her family for sympathy and social diversion, had gone away
from them so lightly. Her resentment of his neglect to render her family
the courtesy of a formal adieu, may also be taken as evidence that she was
interested in him.

It is no new story that just four years after Shelley made her
acquaintance, Fanny killed herself at Swansea. It is no new story that
Claire was of opinion that Fanny so destroyed herself, from love of
Shelley. Field Place is sure that Claire never really believed any such
thing, but was only fibbing in her usual wicked way, when she uttered the
story. It is curious to observe, how in the opinion of Field Place, Claire
is by turns a liar and a witness of the highest credibility. When she says
anything that fits-in with the biographical romance, which is to be
substituted for Shelley’s true history, she is a virtuous witness; but
when she utters anything at discord with the fictitious narrative, she
becomes a miracle of mendacity. When she writes, or seems to have written,
that she took Shelley and Mary against their will from London to Geneva;
took them there without letting them know she was Byron’s mistress; and,
living with them there, in the capacity of Byron’s mistress, managed
matters so cleverly that they had no suspicion of her intimacy with
Byron--statements so preposterous that they are not to be believed on any
conceivable evidence--she is declared a witness of the highest
credibility; and Mr. Froude is told-off to declare the preposterous
statements must be true, because Claire made them in a withheld document.
On the other hand, when this exemplary witness makes the quite credible
statement, that Fanny committed suicide for love of Shelley, she is
declared a mendacious witness, and Mr. Kegan Paul is instructed to write
in _William Godwin; his Friends and Contemporaries_:

    ‘The theory, which owes its origin to Miss Clairmont, that Fanny was
    in love with Shelley, and that his flight with her sister prompted
    self-destruction, is one above all others absolutely groundless. To
    Shelley, as to Mary, she was an attached sister; she was never in love
    with him, either before or after her sister’s flight.’

How can Mr. Kegan Paul be justified in making this sweeping statement? He
does not offer evidence, and can have no sufficient evidence, in support
of the comprehensive assertion. At best his statement can be nothing more
than Mrs. Shelley’s confident opinion, that her sister was never in love
with Shelley. Which of the two, Mary or Claire, was the more likely to
know the truth? Mary, who, after her flight with Shelley, saw but little
of her sister Fanny; or Claire, who between the elopement in July 1814 and
the spring of 1816, saw a great deal of Fanny? Mary, from whom Fanny, if
she loved Shelley, would be careful to conceal the cause of her deepening
melancholy; or Claire, to whom Fanny may have confided or unconsciously
revealed the secret of her wretchedness?

‘The theory’ (as Mr. Kegan Paul calls it) certainly was not ‘absolutely
groundless.’ (1) By inviting her to correspond with him, Shelley showed a
strong interest in Fanny, and paid her a compliment which would be likely
to make her take an interest in him, if she had felt none in him before,
or to deepen any concern, she had already entertained for him. (2) Their
intercourse in the ensuing year was of a nature to stimulate and feed her
interest in him. (3) From the date of her sister’s flight with Shelley,
her natural disposition to melancholy steadily deepened:--a fact accordant
with the notion that she loved Shelley.

On the other hand, it must be remembered, that the increase of her
melancholy may be otherwise accounted for. The affectionate girl may well
have fretted about the shame coming to the whole Godwin household from her
sister’s elopement with another woman’s husband. She may also have made
herself greatly miserable about the circumstances of her mother’s story,
which most likely came to her shortly before her sister’s flight. Still,
the steady increase of her gloom from the end of July 1814, to the 9th
October, 1816, is a ground for regarding Claire’s view of the case
respectfully.

Unlike Field Place (to whom Claire is a sufficient witness to prove
anything they wish people to believe), I cannot, having regard to her
unquestionable faculty for fibbing, deem her unsupported testimony
adequate for the settlement of any nicely perplexing question. Having
regard, however, to Claire’s better means of observation, and several
matters giving at least a colour of probability to her view, I would on
this matter rather rely on Claire, who sometimes told fibs, than on the
Mary Godwin, who sometimes said things that were the reverse of fact. In
the absence of sufficient evidence for a confident conclusion, I hold my
judgment in suspense with respect to the question, whether Fanny’s death
resulted from the cause to which Claire attributed it. And I advise the
reader to do likewise.


(6.)--TANYRALLT.

Returning to Tanyrallt in the middle of November, 1812, Shelley remained
there till some day following closely on 26th February, 1813, and left
Carnarvonshire for Dublin on 6th March, 1813. Beginning somewhere about
the middle of September 1812, the whole term of his domestication in the
county of Carnarvon (including the six weeks’ stay in London) was
something less than six months. Before the trip to town he had on his
hands his wife, Miss Westbrook, and Miss Hitchener. Whilst he and Harriett
stayed at the St. James’ Coffee-house, Miss Westbrook probably stayed
chiefly at her father’s house, so as not to increase greatly the charges
her brother-in-law was at in the hotel. Miss Hitchener also may be
presumed to have visited her friends in Sussex, or elsewhere, whilst
Shelley was enjoying the society of the Godwins, so that he was at a
smaller expense for her than he would have been, had she stayed the whole
six weeks at the West-End hotel. Still the cost to Shelley of the
locomotion of so large a party from Tanyrallt to London, and of so long a
sojourn in town, must have been greatly in excess of his narrow means.

After the return to Wales, till the end of February 1813, he lived at
Tanyrallt Lodge (for which he had engaged to pay a ‘large rent’) with his
wife, sister-in-law, and three female servants. At the same time he bought
expensive books of or through Mr. Hookham of Bond Street, incurred a
considerable debt for the printing of _Queen Mab_, and put himself under
an obligation to pay Miss Hitchener a quarterly stipend. These items of
expenditure being taken into account, it may be computed that, from the
middle of September 1812, to the beginning of March 1813, he lived, at the
least, at the rate of 1000_l._ a-year; no account being taken of the
500_l._ which he had promised to give to the Tremadoc Embankment when he
should come of age. This sum being added to the total of his expenditure
during less than six calendar months, it follows that the young gentleman,
with only 400_l._ a-year, was for the same term living at the rate of
2000_l._ a-year,--was in fact living beyond his sufficient income by 400
per cent. It is certain therefore that the letter, in which Godwin warned
his young friend against the inconveniences of financial extravagance, was
no untimely intrusion of needless advice. Following so closely on the
admonitory letter, and the epistle in which he declared his freedom from
the weakness imputed to him, this outbreak of prodigality shows how
cautious the poet’s biographers should be in assuming that his actions
corresponded closely with his words.

Whilst living so much beyond his means, Shelley experienced several
annoyances in the lovely neighbourhood where he had, for a brief moment,
hoped to be happy for ever. Having by the end of the year exhausted the
excitement of figuring before the people of Tremadoc as a benefactor, who
would never desert them nor grow indifferent to their interests, he
discovered in his neighbours the usual qualities of countryfolk, whether
they live on the Welsh coast, or in North Devon, or in the Rapes of
Sussex. By no means devoid of intellectual narrowness, they were animated
with religious bigotry. Believing in Christianity, they mistrusted and
disliked those who scoffed at it. Whilst the gentry were proud and
grasping, the peasantry were poor and cringing. The farmers were ignorant
fools, the squires were (in Shelley’s opinion) insufferably dull fellows.
‘The society in Wales,’ he wrote from Tanyrallt to Hogg, even as early as
3rd December, 1812, ‘is very stupid. They are all aristocrats and saints;
but that, I tell you, I do not mind in the least; the unpleasant part of
the business is, that they hunt people to death who are not so likewise.’

The result, or rather the fruitlessness, of Shelley’s excursion to London
was, of course, a great disappointment to the Tremadoc populace, and to
others of the gentry, besides Mr. Madocks and Mr. Williams. Instead of
returning with a handsome list of subscribers, headed by his particular
friend the Duke of Norfolk, he was constrained to acknowledge he had not
found a single subscriber in London or Sussex. It was clear to the
Welshmen that the young gentleman had been talking too fast, and that they
had been taken-in by his plausible speech. Angry with themselves for being
such simpletons, some of them were disposed to punish him for their own
folly. In his annoyance at feeling that his Tremadoc friends had
discovered the value of his grand talk, Shelley wrote bitterly, from
Tanyrallt on 7th February, 1813, to Hogg of ‘the variety of discomfitures’
coming to him from ‘the embankment affairs, in which he had thoughtlessly
engaged!’

Indications are not wanting that for a brief while after coming to
Tremadoc, Shelley was less loquacious than he had been for some years
about those of his views on politics and religion, that could not fail to
be as offensive to the people of Carnarvonshire as they had proved to
persons of other counties. But it was not in his nature to be so discreet
for many weeks together. Hence it came to pass that before leaving Wales
he was superlatively distasteful to several of his Tanyrallt neighbours on
account of his infidelity and ultra-radicalism. By some means or other one
of his Irish pamphlets fell into the hands of a certain Mr. Leeson, who,
discovering treason in the essay, sent it up to the Government, and then
went about the neighbourhood, saying the author of the pamphlet was a
pestilent Republican, who ought to be driven out of the country. Shelley
and Harriett tried to persuade themselves that Mr. Leeson’s animosity
against them was due to their firmness in refusing to receive him within
their doors, because they knew him to be ‘malignant and cruel to the
greatest degree,’--a view of the case that, on coming to Mr. Leeson’s
ears, cannot have rendered him less desirous of ridding the neighbourhood
of those pestilent Shelleys.

In one of the earlier weeks (probably towards the end of the second week)
of November, 1812, whilst the Shelleys were still at the St. James’s
Coffee-house, Hogg appears to have urged his friend for pecuniary ends to
make overtures for a reconciliation with his father, and to appeal to the
Duke of Norfolk for his good offices in rendering the overtures
successful. It being obvious to Hogg that the Shelleys were living greatly
beyond their means, he may well have pressed this scheme upon them as the
only plan of preserving them from a scandalous exposure of their financial
troubles. The advice thus given in the first instance by word of mouth,
was renewed by words of the pen, to which Shelley (more truth-loving, be
it remembered, than most men) replied from Tanyrallt, on 3rd December,
1812, in a letter, containing these remarkable words:--‘_I_ will, this
instant, sit down and do penance for my involuntary crime by writing a
long wheedling letter to his Grace, and you shall be informed of the
success of the experiment.’ At the same time, whilst avowing his despair
of influencing his father by any but selfish considerations, Shelley
declared his intention of approaching old Killjoy with an air of good
humour and a conciliatory countenance, and essaying to conquer his
austerity with civil speeches. ‘When I see him,’ he remarks, ‘though I
shall say the civilest things imaginable, yet I shall not look as if I
liked him, because I do not like him.’

To wheedle, is to entice, coax, cajole with flattering and false words for
the attainment of an end. To write a wheedling letter is to write false
and flattering words for the attainment of an end. Such a letter Shelley
coolly declares his intention of writing to his father’s patron, in order
to get money by doing so. At the same time he coolly declares his
intention to say ‘the civilest imaginable things’ to his father (whilst
hating him cordially), in order to get money out of his pocket.

An incident of English public affairs to stir Shelley greatly during his
residence at Tanyrallt was the punishment of the Hunts for libelling the
Prince Regent in the _Examiner_ newspaper, the sentence on each of the
brothers being a fine of 500_l._ with imprisonment for two years. Though
the facts of the case have been strangely misrepresented (the virulent
libel on the Prince Regent in his private character having been minimized
into a saucy reference to his age and corpulence), there is no need to set
them forth precisely in this chapter. Whether the libel was well deserved
(as Mr. Rossetti avers, whilst admitting with his usual honesty the
extreme virulence of the attack) is a question beside the main question,
viz., whether the ministers responsible for the efficient government of
the country would have been justified in allowing clever and resolute
journalists to use such violent and scurrilous language, in order to
inflame the public against the individual who was the _ipso facto_
sovereign. On this question no opinion is here offered. It is enough to
record that the poet (by this time slightly acquainted with Leigh Hunt)
felt that the Hunts had been punished with excessive severity, and should
be relieved of the pecuniary part of their punishment. Acting on this
sentiment Shelley wrote, on some day of February, 1813, from Tanyrallt, to
Mr. Hookham of Old Bond Street,--‘I am rather poor at present, but I have
20_l._ which is not immediately wanted. Pray begin a subscription for the
Hunts; put my name down for that sum, and, when I hear that you have
complied with my request, I will send it to you.... P S.--... On second
thoughts I enclose the 20_l._’

Applauding Shelley for subscribing 500_l._ for the Tremadoc embankment,
Lady Shelley applauds him for coming forward with 20_l._ ‘to vindicate and
support an oppressed fellow-struggler for liberty and justice.’ A matter,
to be mentioned in connexion with the gift to the Hunts, is that Shelley
was in debt to divers of the petty tradesmen of his neighbourhood, who, in
the opinion of some readers, may have had a stronger claim to the money so
gallantly sent off to the journalists in trouble; his debts to small
tradesmen being the more worthy of notice, because they did not give him
their goods on the understanding that they should wait for payment till he
came of age.

Shelley’s letters from Tanyrallt show that he was reading history and
philosophy in the last month of 1812 and the opening months of 1813. The
books sent him in this period by his London bookseller comprise works by
Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Plutarch, Spinoza, and Kant, it being
worthy of notice that, whilst ordering Greek classics, he requires
editions having ‘Latin or English translations printed opposite.’

At the same time he is at work on _Queen Mab_. In a former chapter
reference was made to metrical compositions, that were in course of time
expanded and worked into _Queen Mab_. But though there are grounds for a
confident opinion, that it comprised a considerable quantity of his
earlier verse, the first of Shelley’s compositions to be mentioned amongst
the fruits of his poetical genius, was the production of 1812 and the
opening months of 1813. _Queen Mab_ was unquestionably the work of which
he wrote on 18th August, 1812, from Lynton to Mr. Thomas Hookham: ‘I
conceive I have matter for six more cantos.... Indeed, a poem is safe; the
iron-souled Attorney-General would scarcely dare to attack.’ Writing of
the same poem from Tanyrallt to Hogg on 7th February, 1813, he says,
‘_Mab_ has gone on but slowly, although she is nearly finished.’ On a
later day of the same month he wrote to Mr. Hookham, ‘_Queen Mab_ is
finished and transcribed.’ The use made of old material does not touch the
fact that the poem was mainly written in his twenty-first year, instead of
his nineteenth year. When he wrote (June, 1821) in the _Examiner_ the
words, ‘a poem, entitled _Queen Mab_, was written by me at the age of
eighteen--I dare say in a sufficiently intemperate spirit,’ he was guilty
of an error to be grouped with his misstatements to Godwin, respecting the
time when he wrote _Zastrozzi_ and _St. Irvyne_. After announcing the
completion of the poem to Hookham, the poet adds, ‘I am now preparing the
notes, which shall be long and philosophical.’ It is worthy of remark that
he was working upon the notes when he was at a distance from Godwin, who,
on no evidence whatever, has been declared personally accountable for the
note touching love and marriage,--a note comprising sentiments which
Godwin had promulgated when Shelley was playing with his corals, and
abandoned before the close of the last century.

The most agreeable aspect of Shelley’s life at Tanyrallt affords a view of
his intercourse with his wife. As she gave birth to Shelley’s eldest
child, Ianthe Eliza, in London, on 28th June, 1813, Harriett, at the turn
of the year 1812-13, had for some time been in a state of health, to
animate Shelley with a renewal of tenderness for her, and to quicken their
mutual affection. Stirred with the hope of becoming a father in the
ensuing summer, the poet who had longed at Dublin and Nantgwillt for the
delights of conversation with his philosophical school-mistress, now found
in his wife the sufficient mate she had not been to him either in Ireland
or at Keswick. Possibly his discovery of a Brown Demon in the whilom
angelical Miss Hitchener was, in some degree, accountable for his
contentment with the wife who promised soon to give him an heir. Anyhow
there can be no question that the moderate satisfaction with which he may
be said to have regarded his bride for several months after the subsidence
of the first excitements of the honeymoon, was now replaced by a state of
feeling that caused him to write of her with mingled pride and gladness.
The letter in which, whilst defending her from the imputation of being ‘a
fine lady,’ he spoke admiringly of ‘the uncalculating connexion of her
thoughts and speech,’ was dated to Fanny Imlay on 10th December, 1812. In
a letter of later date, referring to his unconcern whether he came to
terms with his father, he associates Harriett’s happiness with his own
contentment;--‘Harriett is very happy as we are, and I am very happy.’
Though he writes complainingly in a yet later letter (7th February, 1813)
of vexation coming to him from ‘the embankment affair,’ he speaks of his
home as a place where he forgets the annoyance, and knows nought but joy
in Harriett’s society;--‘for when I come home to Harriett I am the
happiest of the happy.’ Whilst reading Greek classics with the help of
‘cribs,’ he is teaching Harriett Latin so as to give her a general notion
of Horace’s _Odes_ and Ovid’s _Metamorphoses_. ‘Harriett,’ he writes to
Hogg on the 7th February, 1813, ‘has a bold scheme of writing you a Latin
letter. If you have an Ovid’s _Metamorphoses_, she will thank you to bring
it.’

Whilst Hogg (who had promised to stay with his friends at Tanyrallt in the
next month) is thus invited to take part and interest in her higher
education, Harriett is corresponding with the man who (according to the
Shelleyan idolaters) was guilty of trying to seduce her some sixteen
months since. Even to these idolaters it must appear that Shelley’s
confidence in his wife’s goodness was perfect, when he encouraged her to
live in affectionate intimacy with the man whom he still (according to the
idolaters) thought guilty of having so recently essayed to seduce her. By
them also it must be admitted that this confidence in her goodness was at
Tanyrallt associated in Shelley’s breast with lively affection for her.
The happy state of feeling was in its brightest season and tenderest hour
when Shelley produced the famous dedicatory lines of _Queen Mab_.

  ‘TO HARRIET * * * * *

  ‘Whose is the love that, gleaming through the world,
  Wards off the poisonous arrow of its scorn?
        Whose is the warm and partial praise,
        Virtue’s most sweet reward?

  Beneath whose looks did my reviving soul
  Riper in truth and virtuous daring grow?
        Whose eyes have I gazed fondly on,
        And loved mankind the more?

  Harriet! on thine:--thou wert my purer mind;
  Thou wert the inspiration of my song;
        Thine are these early wilding flowers,
        Though garlanded by me.

  Then press into thy breast this pledge of love;
  And know, though time may change and years may roll,
        Each floweret gathered in my heart
        It consecrates to thine.’

In representing that these verses were written in 1810, and addressed in
the first instance to Harriett Grove, Medwin committed the most ludicrous
blunder of his unreliable book;--the mistake, moreover, that, of all his
multitudinous blunders about Shelley, is most easily shown to be a
mistake. (1) The critical reader has only to compare these verses with the
puerile sets of rhymes in _St. Irvyne_ to be satisfied that in 1810
Shelley could not have written them, to save his own life or compass his
father’s death. (2) The first two stanzas are so completely out of harmony
with the certain facts of Shelley’s pursuit of his cousin’s affection, as
to prove conclusively that she was not in his mind when he wrote the
verses. Instead of ‘gleaming through the world,’ Harriett Grove’s love of
her cousin was less than apparent even to his own sister. Instead of
warding off the poisonous arrow of the world’s scorn, the world had no
sooner displayed a disposition to speak scornfully of him, than Harriett
Grove told him to go about his business. Instead of speaking of him with
‘warm and partial praise,’ Harriett Grove never discovered anything to
commend in him. Shelley and Harriett Grove had parted company for ever,
months before he had endured the disgrace, from whose withering effects he
describes himself as recovering under the sympathetic looks of the
Harriett to whom the poem is addressed. (3) On the other hand, the
descriptive lines are appropriate to the circumstances under which he won
Harriett’s love, and she gave him her heart, whilst social disgrace was
new to him. (4) In June, 1821, though forgetful of the exact year of his
life in which _Queen Mab_ was written, Shelley remembered so clearly
having dedicated the poem to his first wife that he wrote from Italy to
Mr. Ollier in that month:--

    ‘I ought to say, however, that I am obliged to this piratical fellow
    in one respect: that he has omitted, with a delicacy for which I thank
    him heartily, a foolish dedication to my late wife, the publication of
    which would have annoyed me, and indeed is the only part of the
    business that could seriously have annoyed me, although it is my duty
    to protest against the whole.’

These facts notwithstanding, some of the Shelleyan enthusiasts (in their
reluctance to believe that Shelley ever cared much for Harriett Westbrook)
insist that Medwin may have been right in this business, because the
verses appeared in the original edition of _Queen Mab_ under this
heading, ‘To Harriet *****,’ the number of the asterisks being the same as
the number of the letters in the surname ‘Grove,’ whereas there are _nine_
letters in ‘Westbrook,’ and _seven_ in ‘Shelley.’ ‘The number of
asterisks,’ says Mr. Buxton Forman, ‘it will be observed, corresponds with
the name of Grove; and they might have been left simply by oversight when
the dedication went to press as for Harriet Shelley.’

For the argument to have the faintest force, it would be needful to show
that, when indicating a name by asterisks, Shelley was careful to use the
same number of asterisks as the name had letters. Was this Shelley’s
practice? Though the _History of a Six Weeks’ Tour_ was made up chiefly of
a journal kept by Mary Godwin, it comprises letters and other original
writing by Shelley, who saw the little book through the press, and made
himself responsible for its typographical details. In the ‘journal’
‘Shelley’ (a name of seven letters) is indicated by ‘S***,’ the initial
letter and _three_ asterisks; ‘Claire,’ a name of six letters, being also
indicated by ‘C***,’ the initial letter and three asterisks. In the
original writing by Shelley, the names ‘Mary’ and ‘Claire’ are indicated
thus: ‘We dined (M***, C***, and I) on the grass:’ the initial of the name
of four letters and the initial of the name of six letters being alike
followed by _three_ asterisks.

Though he was happy in Harriett’s society, there is reason for thinking
Shelley was much out of health towards the end of his stay at Tanyrallt.
In the middle of February, 1813, he had been living for three months on
vegetables. Living at this period of his story ‘on what he could get,’
_i.e._ chops and steaks, when he was on journeys and feeding at inns,
Shelley persisted in the diet of vegetarians when he was at home. ‘I
continue vegetable,’ he wrote to Hogg on 27th December, 1812; ‘Harriet
means to be slightly animal until the arrival of spring.’ Of course, he
persuaded himself that this diet favoured his health; but we know from
Peacock, who may be termed the physiological observer of his friend’s
peculiarities, that, instead of being good for him, it was hurtful to the
delicate and nervous Shelley in various ways.

    ‘When,’ says Peacock, ‘he was fixed in a place, he adhered to this
    diet consistently and conscientiously, but it certainly did not agree
    with him: it made him weak and nervous, and exaggerated the
    sensitiveness of his imagination. Then arose those thick-coming
    fancies which almost invariably preceded his change of place.’

The maker of these discreet observations gives a remarkable example of the
quickness, with which Shelley rose from a condition of physical weakness
to a high state of bodily vigour and enjoyment under the stimulus of
animal food. During the excursion (August, 1815) on the Thames, from Old
Windsor to Lechlade in Gloucestershire, Shelley, on ‘the way up,’ was so
weak and otherwise out of order, as to feel he ought to return. Having
taken medical advice at Oxford with no apparent advantage, he was
entreated by Peacock to eat three well-peppered mutton-chops. Acting on
the wise counsel, Shelley forthwith ate with keen relish three
well-peppered mutton-chops, and went on his way rejoicing. ‘He lived in my
way,’ says Peacock, ‘for the rest of our expedition, rowed vigorously, was
cheerful, merry, overflowing with animal spirits, and had certainly one
week of thorough enjoyment of life.’ Living thus carnivorously at the
comfortable inn at Lechlade, where the party rested for two nights, he
there wrote the _Lines in Lechlade Churchyard_.

How Byron and Shelley came to resemble one another in eccentricity of diet
is uncertain. The older poet had recourse to his regimen of Epsom salts
and vegetarian starvation in the first instance for the reduction of his
fatness; but Shelley’s natural habit of body forbids the suspicion that he
took to abstinence for the same purpose. Nor can the influence of the
vegetarians, with whom he lived intimately in London and at Bracknell, be
held accountable for his first trial of a diet, which he adopted in
Dublin, before making their acquaintance. Perhaps he adopted the Byronic
diet just as he adopted the Byronic shirt-collar, in imitation of the poet
whom he admired so greatly. It is conceivable that, had he not heard of
Byron’s dinners of hard biscuits or mashed vegetables, washed down with
soda-water, he would have continued to eat and drink, as he had done from
boyhood to the middle of his twentieth year. Anyhow, it is certain that
Shelley’s vegetarianism, attended with intermissions of the regimen when
he was on his journeys and ‘ate what he could get,’ differed little from
Byron’s general rule of abstinence from the luxuries of the table, broken
with occasional dinners and suppers, at which he devoured whatever came in
his way. For thus feeding themselves, the two poets have fared
differently at the hands of history. Whilst Byron has been generally
ridiculed for living low in order to preserve his beauty; Shelley has been
no less generally applauded for his indifference to the pleasures of the
table.

The diet, which affected them so differently in reputation, had the same
results on their nerves and health. Under the regimen of starvation
(accompanied in the case of Byron, by far the stronger man, with a more
free use of purgative medicine) they became weak and nervous sufferers
from a peculiar kind of spasmodic dyspepsia, that in its sharper assaults
disposed them to seek relief from pain in laudanum, and may perhaps have
been the first and chief cause of their perilous familiarity with opium.
In drinking laudanum to deaden the pangs of spasmodic dyspepsia,
consequent on long persistence in a lowering, and otherwise hurtful diet,
Shelley (be it observed) took opium when he had been slowly reduced to a
condition, that rendered the drug more powerful to derange his nerves for
several days, than it would have been had he been previously sustained by
sufficient food. This is a matter for readers to bear in mind whilst
considering circumstances soon to be narrated.

It follows that, after living for three months on the diet usual with him
in this period of his career, Shelley may be regarded as in a state of
health that, besides making him restless and disposing him to have
recourse to opium, would be fruitful of ‘those thick-coming fancies which
almost invariably preceded his change of place.’

Several circumstances, apart from his health, may also be assumed to have
disposed him just then to think of getting away from Tanyrallt. He had
just finished _Queen Mab_; and the act of completing an intellectual
enterprise, that has engaged a scholar’s faculties for several months, is
often followed by a yearning for diversion in new scenes. At war with some
of his neighbours, living on uneasy terms with others, and sick of the
embankment folly, that had for some time been fruitful of annoyances, he
may well have wished to fly off from a place that had lost the charms of
novelty. Pecuniary considerations may also have disposed him to fly from
Tremadoc. If he remained at Tanyrallt for another six months, Mr. Madocks
would be pressing him for payment of a certain deferred rent; Mr. Williams
would be pressing him for the settlement of certain other small affairs
of business; and the projectors of the new embankment would be asking when
he would find it convenient to pay the promised 500_l._ Another affair,
that may be presumed to have troubled Shelley in the middle of February,
1813, was the near approach of the day when Daniel Hill would appear at
Tanyrallt with a reasonable expectation of being again taken into the
service of the master, who had caused him to be imprisoned in North Devon.
It is not suggested that Shelley was meditating flight from North Wales in
order to get out of Daniel Hill’s way. By showing that Shelley had given
Daniel Hill timely information where to find him, the servant’s arrival at
Tanyrallt on the 26th of February, 1813, would of itself be sufficient to
show the injustice of any such suggestion. But though he was ready to
befriend the Irishman, who had suffered so much in his service, Shelley
may well have wished to leave his corner of Carnarvonshire, as soon as
Daniel should appear in Mr. Leeson’s neighbourhood. The inquisitive,
prying, malevolent, relentless Mr. Leeson would, of course, think it his
duty to learn whence Daniel had come, and what he had been doing since his
master’s arrival at Tremadoc. Shelley had reason to apprehend that Mr.
Leeson (already in correspondence with the Solicitor of the Treasury about
the poet) would receive official information of Daniel’s recent trouble,
and his master’s not remote activity in North Devon. In which case there
would be talk in Tremadoc, that would make Tanyrallt an especially
disagreeable place of abode for Daniel Hill’s master.

Such was the position of affairs in North Wales, when, during the night of
26th February, 1813 (and within a few hours of the Barnstaple gaol-bird’s
appearance at the villa, fit for an Italian prince), Tanyrallt became the
scene of certain curious incidents. The weather was cold and stormy, the
wind in its violence made an uproar loud as thunder about the gables and
chimneys of Tanyrallt Lodge, and the rain fell in torrents, when Shelley
loaded a pair of pistols, under strong impression that he should have
occasion to use them during the night. Having loaded the weapons, the poet
went to bed between the hours of ten and eleven p.m., and remained in bed
for about half-an-hour, when, on hearing a noise in one of the parlours,
he rose from Harriett’s side, and, taking his pistols, went downstairs. A
minute or two later, the sound of a pistol-shot was heard in the house.
This pistol-shot was followed at a brief interval by a second explosion
of the same kind. Audible to Harriett in her bedroom, to Miss Westbrook in
her bedroom, and to the domestic servants (three maids and Daniel Hill),
who, though in the act of going to rest, had not yet got into their beds,
the firing caused the ladies and servitors to assemble hurriedly in the
chief parlour of the house, where Shelley gave them this stirring account
of what had taken place.

On getting to the bottom of the stairs he went to the billiard-room, where
the noise of steps was audible. Following these steps he went through the
billiard-room into the little room, called ‘the office,’ where he saw a
man in the act of quitting the room through the glass-door, opening into
the shrubbery. Shelley was so fortunate as to avoid the shot of the
pistol, which the retreating miscreant fired at him. Shelley did his best
to return the shot, but by ill-luck his pistol only flashed in the pan.
The next incident of the affair was that the assassin knocked Shelley
down;--an incident that afforded the assassin an opportunity of flying
into the outer darkness. Instead of making off, the assassin grappled with
Shelley and struggled with him on the floor. During this struggle, the
narrator drew his second pistol and fired a shot, that caused the man to
shriek, as he rose from the floor and went away into the shrubbery. The
assassin had fled, but not without being wounded in the shoulder, if
Shelley estimated rightly the effect of his second shot. A very remarkable
incident of the affair was, that, after seeming to be wounded in the
shoulder, and just before turning to fly, the assassin delivered himself
of this rather too melodramatic utterance:--‘By God, I will be revenged! I
will murder your wife; I will ravish your sister! By God, I will be
revenged!’

One can imagine how poor little Harriett shuddered and cried, ‘Oh, the
wretch!’ It is more difficult to realize Miss Westbrook’s sensations. Of
course, the party of seven did not separate immediately after hearing
Shelley’s horrible tale. On the contrary, they remained in the parlour for
about two hours, before Shelley (thinking it highly improbable that the
wounded assassin would return before the morning, to execute his atrocious
menaces) advised the two ladies to retire to rest. In accordance with this
advice, the women went off to bed, leaving Shelley and Daniel Hill to sit
up and keep guard, in case the villain should make a second attack.

In declaring it improbable that the assassin, with a bullet in his
shoulder, would return before daybreak to murder Harriett and ravish her
sister, the author of _Zastrozzi_ showed how imperfectly he realized the
possibilities of the position. After returning to her bed at about one
a.m., Harriett had occupied it just upon three hours, when at about 4
a.m., she heard a third pistol explosion, which caused her immediately to
rise from her couch, and run downstairs to her husband, who received her
with a thrilling statement of his narrow escape from death by the pistol
that had just gone off. His story was this:--He had sent Daniel Hill out
of the room to see what o’clock it was, when, in the servant’s absence, he
heard a noise at the parlour window, and, on approaching the window, saw a
man thrust his arm _through the glass_ and fire a pistol at him. Hence the
broken window and the explosion that had brought Harriett from her
bedroom. Thank Heaven! instead of bedding itself in his body, the pistol’s
ball had passed through his flannel night-shirt, without even grazing his
skin. Had he not been standing sideways towards the window, Shelley said
he must have been killed. In support of these statements, he pointed to
the broken window and the holes made in his flannel night-dress by the
bullet. Further, he assured Harriett that, after so narrowly escaping
death, he aimed and pulled the trigger of his pistol, but it would not go
off:--this being the second time for him to draw trigger, with no result
save a flash in the pan. His pistol having failed him again, Shelley aimed
a blow at his assailant with an old sword, which the miscreant had almost
succeeded in wresting from him, when Daniel Hill rushed into the room. On
Daniel Hill’s appearance, the twice-baffled assassin let go his hold of
the old sword, and again disappeared in the darkness. All this took place
during the night of Friday, 26th February, 1813. On Saturday, the 27th
instant, Shelley went off with his marvellous story (differing in
important particulars from the narrative of the previous pages) to the
Solicitor-General of the county, who lived at a distance of some twelve
miles from the scene of the outrage.

My account of what took place, and of what was alleged by Shelley to have
taken place in Tanyrallt Lodge on the night of 26th February, 1813, is
made from the statements of what may be called the circular letter which
Mrs. Shelley sent at her husband’s request, to divers of his friends, whom
they wished to inform precisely of a matter, likely to be greatly
misrepresented. As this letter was intended to be the enduring and
authoritative record of the strange and perplexing business, I have used
it for my narrative. It should, however, be observed, that the account of
the matter so given by the Shelleys, some ten or fourteen days after the
affair, differs materially from what Shelley himself seems to have told
the Solicitor-General and Mr. Madocks of the affair on the 27th of
February. Medwin’s report of what Mr. Madocks told him of Shelley’s own
statement, is to this effect:--That, whilst sitting in the study on the
eventful night, Shelley ‘heard a noise at the window, saw one of the
shutters gradually unclosed, and a hand advanced into the room armed with
a pistol;’ that the weapon having missed fire, Shelley ran to seize the
ruffian who had pulled the trigger; that, on passing through the door into
the garden, to get at the villain, Shelley found himself face to face with
his assailant; that the villain made a second attempt to shoot Shelley
with a pistol, which, like the other pistol, missed fire; that, after this
second essay at shooting, the poet and his assailant wrestled with one
another desperately in the garden, till the latter escaped from the lawn
to the shrubbery, and disappeared. The inaccurate Medwin’s report of what
Mr. Madocks told him at Florence long after 1813, is, of course, to be
read with suspicion and distrust. On one or two points of his account of
the affair, Medwin is guilty of mistakes of fact, for which he alone is to
be held accountable. But it was not in Shelley’s power to tell the
exciting story twice in the same fortnight, or on two following days,
without discrepancies. That his story to Mr. Madocks on 27th February,
1813, gave particulars of ‘long and painful wrestling on the lawn’ is more
than probable; the lawn having been trodden and rolled upon by some person
or persons, so as to give it the appearance of having been the scene of
violent wrestling.

The story, of course, flew like wildfire. In Tremadoc it was received with
general incredulity and derision, as a tale made up by young Mr. Shelley,
in order to have a pretext for leaving the neighbourhood in a trice
without paying his bills; but Shelley and Harriett begged their friends to
understand that the story would not have been received in this insulting
way, had it not been for the malevolent action of Mr. Leeson, who
hastened to assure the Tremadoc shopkeepers they were being trifled with
by an impostor.

The affair having been reported by Shelley to the Solicitor-General, it
became the subject of careful investigation. Not only was the evidence of
the alleged attack sifted, but it was sifted by persons peculiarly
qualified to examine it. The Solicitor-General of the county (an expert in
evidence touching assaults and other outrages against the law),
keen-witted Mr. Madocks (a man of affairs, familiar with the people of the
neighbourhood), Mr. Williams (Mr. Madocks’s agent, a shrewd Welshman), Mr.
Williams’s brother (a man of similar shrewdness) were amongst the persons
to look into the matter. All these persons were friendly to Shelley,
though they had for some time thought him given to talk too fast. All four
were on familiar terms with him. The Solicitor-General received the
Shelleys into his own house, and entertained them there from 27th February
to the day in the first week of March, on which they left North Wales for
Ireland. Consequently the investigation was directed, made, carried out by
the gentleman, who was at the moment of the investigation Shelley’s host.
Mr. Madocks and the Messrs. Williams had a distinct interest in keeping on
friendly terms with Shelley, and doing all that was just for the
maintenance of his credit. Consequently the investigation was in the hands
of Shelley’s especial friends. Yet the unanimous verdict of local opinion
was that no attack had been made, and that Shelley’s allegations
respecting the attacks said to have been made on him during the night of
the 26th of February were baseless and untruthful,--their untruthfulness
being referable either to delusion or falsehood on his part. No single
voice (except the voices of Harriett, Miss Westbrook, Shelley, doubtless
Daniel Hill, and possibly the other servants of the house,) was raised in
Carnarvonshire against the result of an investigation, which, be it
observed, was (from the wetness of the ground about the lodge, at the time
of the alleged assaults) made under peculiarly favourable conditions. With
the single exception of Mr. Hookham (who seems, at least for a moment, to
have believed the wild story), Shelley’s London friends were no less
unanimous in thinking the verdict of the inquisitors a just one. Hogg says
of the alleged attack, ‘Persons acquainted with the localities and with
the circumstances, and who had carefully investigated the matter, were
unanimous in the opinion, that no such attempt was ever made. _I never met
with any person who believed in it._’ In the summer of 1813 (within a few
months of the alleged attack), Peacock, who had made Shelley’s
acquaintance in the previous autumn, went from London to Wales, and
prosecuted inquiries on the spot respecting this Tanyrallt business; the
result being that he had no doubt the attacks were never made, and that
Shelley’s perplexing part in the affair was referable to
‘semi-delusion,’--the condition of mind in which Shelley, according to
Peacock, was partly deluded and partly untruthful.

How could the investigators come to any other conclusion on the main
question than that the attacks had not been made?

(1) It did not escape them that Shelley, living in a peaceful nook of
Carnarvon, loaded his pistols before going to bed under circumstances,
indicating in some degree a mental predisposition to find an occasion for
using the weapons during the night.

(2) It did not escape them, that of the seven persons in the house, no
one, with the exception of Shelley, professed to have seen the assassin,
either on the occasion of attack No. 1 in the little office, or on the
occasion of attack No. 2, at the parlour window.

(3) It did not escape them, that Shelley admitted no third person was
present on the occasion of either his first or his second conflict with
the assassin.

(4) It did not escape them, that no one of the seven persons, with the
exception of Shelley, could speak to having heard a sound, that might not
be referred either to the storm, or Shelley’s action, or to the action of
some person lawfully in the house.

(5) It did not escape them, that the two pistol explosions in the little
office might have been caused by Shelley’s two pistols, there being no
evidence (apart from his bare assertion) that one of his pistols had only
flashed in the pan during affair No. 1.

(6) It did not escape them, that, as he was passing through the window
into the shrubbery at the very moment of Shelley’s appearance in the
little office, the assassin acted very strangely in suddenly changing his
mind and attacking Shelley, when he had it in his power to accomplish his
purpose of passing into the outer darkness.

(7) It did not escape them, that, after knocking Shelley clean down, the
assassin surrendered the advantage coming to him from the _coup_, so far
as to throw himself on the floor, and struggle with his adversary, instead
of kicking him on the head.

(8) It did not escape them, that, after shrieking from Shelley’s
pistol-shot and recovering his feet, the assassin acted in a very
unbusiness-like way, in saying, ‘By God, I will be revenged! I will murder
your wife; I will ravish your sister! By God, I will be revenged!’

(9) Questions were, of course, put to Shelley respecting the light, which
enabled him to see his assailant in the act of quitting the room ‘through
a glass-door which opened into the shrubbery.’ It being a starless,
pitch-dark night (for the rain descended in torrents), Shelley, if he saw
an assailant, must have discerned him by artificial light. It is not to be
imagined that the billiard-room and little office were illuminated with
many candles, so as to give the combatants a good view of one another.
Shelley would scarcely have gone in search of nocturnal enemies with a
candle in his hand. If he took a candle into the little office, it must
surely have been extinguished soon after he entered the small chamber. The
proximity of the shrubbery outside the glass door, would not have lessened
the darkness of the room or of the space on which the glass-door opened.
What questions were put to Shelley, and what he said, about the light,
which rendered the assassin visible, does not appear.

(10) To the investigators it must have appeared strange that the assassin,
either with or without a bullet in his shoulder, returned in three hours
to make a second attempt on Shelley’s life.

(11) To the same inquisitors it must have seemed remarkable that the
assassin preluded this second essay at murder, by thrusting his arm
through the glass, and thereby smashing the window. It is unusual for
nocturnal assailants to be so noisy in their preliminary movements.

(12) Through the wetness of the ground about the house, the assassin could
not have approached the parlour window for the accomplishment of his
deadly purpose, or after the second futile attempt at murder, without
leaving clear footprints on the soaking-wet lawn. There were marks of
footsteps on the grass, to which the investigators paid particular
attention. On visiting Tremadoc and Tanyrallt in the summer of 1813, when
all the circumstances of the alleged assaults were fresh in the memory of
the people in those parts, Peacock received information, that years
afterwards caused him to write these words:--‘Persons who had examined the
premises on the following morning had found that the grass of the lawn
appeared to have been much trampled and rolled on, but there were no
footmarks on the wet ground, except between the beaten spot and the
window.’ Why was the lawn thus trampled and rolled upon at some distance
from the parlour window? To give the ground an appearance that would
accord with some account given by Shelley of his final struggle with the
assassin, other than the account given of the contention in Harriett’s
well-known letter on this subject? Who had trampled and rolled about on
the wet grass, so as to give it the appearance of having been the scene of
a struggle? Shelley? or Daniel Hill? or both of them? As there were no
footmarks on the wet ground, except between the beaten spot and the
window, it was, of course, obvious to the investigators, that the persons,
accountable for the hard usage of the turf in one particular spot of the
lawn, had entered the house and remained there, after so trampling and
disordering the surface of the sward; and also, that no persons had been
about the garden during the night, with the exception of persons of the
house. Of course, the investigators narrowly scrutinized the footprints,
which certainly occupied much of their intention. Doubtless the
Solicitor-General satisfied himself whether any of the footprints
corresponded with the soles of Shelley’s shoes, the soles of Daniel Hill’s
boots, the soles of boots and shoes worn by the women of the house. Of the
particulars of the Solicitor-General’s conclusions respecting these
damnatory marks on the wet grass there is no record. There is no reason to
regret the absence of such particulars from the record. It is enough to
know that the investigators examined the footprints, and came to the
conclusion that they were made by no foreigner to the household.

(13) But it still remains to state the most remarkable matter of evidence
that came under the notice of the investigators. On coming to Shelley in
the parlour immediately after the second of the alleged attacks, Mrs
Shelley perceived that the window-curtain and her husband’s flannel
night-shirt had been penetrated by a bullet. Shelley told her that this
injury had been done to the curtain and his night-dress by the ball of the
pistol that had been fired at him by the assassin,--firing _from_ the
window into the room. The mark of this ball was found by the inquisitors
in the wainscot near the window; the position and character of the mark
showing that the pistol, instead of being fired _from_, had been fired
_towards_ the window;--that, instead of being fired by the assassin
outside the window, the pistol had been fired by Shelley _from_ the
interior of the room.

This piece of dynamical evidence satisfied the inquisitors that Shelley’s
baffled assassin was an imaginary caitiff. Till it can be shown that a
ball, issuing from a pistol pointed due south, must necessarily take a
course due north, Shelley (all his superb poetry notwithstanding) must be
held to have said what was directly the reverse of the fact, when he told
his wife that the bullet, which, after passing through his flannel shirt
and the window-curtain, penetrated the wainscot near the parlour window,
was shot from the window in the direction of the opposite wall. The
discovery of that bullet-mark gave the _coup-de-grace_ to whatever
remained of the favourable regard in which Shelley had been held by the
people of Tremadoc.

It is probable that Peacock first hit upon his curious term
‘semi-delusions,’ after reviewing all the facts that came to his knowledge
about this singular affair in the summer of 1813. How much of Shelley’s
chief part in the strange affair should be attributed to hallucination?
How much to deceptive intention? I would fain attribute the whole of it to
delusion. But I cannot do so. In previous pages prominence has been given
to every consideration, that may be produced honestly, in order to dispose
the reader to think delusion chiefly accountable for the poet’s final
escapade at Tanyrallt. There is no positive evidence that he was seriously
out of health, or under the dominion of morbid fancy, or taking laudanum
with extraordinary freedom at this particular time; but for his
reputation’s sake I have been careful to adduce every matter favourable to
the opinion that his action in what is usually called ‘the Tanyrallt
mystery,’ should be referred to nervous derangement rather than to moral
obliquity. In a previous chapter especial notice was taken of his
imaginary escape at Keswick from the grasp of an imaginary robber--a
delusion which seems to have been in no degree complicated with deceitful
designs--in order that the incident should be remembered to his
advantage, when the readers of this work should be invited to decide for
themselves how far he was deluded, and how far false, in this Tanyrallt
business.

Notwithstanding the numerous and obvious reasons for thinking he acted
dishonestly throughout the whole affair, it is conceivable that he was
under the influence of delusion in the earlier passages of the drama. In
loading the pistols before he went to bed, and declaring a fear that he
would have occasion to use them before the morning, he only did and said
what has been done in nervous apprehension by countless men, whose honesty
has never been called in question. In leaving his bed so soon after his
retirement to the couch, and going downstairs with his weapons to look for
a housebreaker, he displayed only the alarm that was likely to ensue from
the anticipation of disturbance. The nervous man, who passes at night
through dark passages in search of a burglar, is apt to imagine he sees
the intruder for whom he is looking. All the imaginary incidents of the
imaginary encounter in the little room are reconcilable with the theory
that Shelley acted sincerely in the whole affair. It was natural for the
author of _Zastrozzi_ to imagine himself addressed by the imaginary
assassin in such language, as might have proceeded from any one of the
villains of that marvellous romance. In spite of the suspicious
circumstance that he sent Daniel Hill out of the room before seeing the
assassin again at the window of the parlour, I can just conceive it
possible that Shelley really believed he saw the villain at the window.

But at this point my ability to imagine, that he may have acted and spoken
from misconception, comes to an end. His pistol may have exploded
accidentally, though it is more reasonable to think he fired it with
design;--intending that the ball should pass through his night-dress, and
holding the flannel well out from his body with the left hand, so that the
bullet in passing through the night-dress should not graze the skin of his
body. But it is inconceivable that he attributed the explosion of his own
pistol to the imaginary weapon of an imaginary assassin. As the ball of
Shelley’s weapon struck and pierced the wainscot of the window, it cannot
be supposed to have smashed the window. To Shelley’s muscles, acting upon
glass and frame in Daniel Hill’s absence, it must be attributed that the
window was injured in a manner, accordant with what he a few minutes later
told Mrs. Shelley of his conflict with the assassin. The old sword, which
the imaginary assassin was alleged to have tried to wrest from him, seems
to have been used by Shelley as an instrument for smashing the window.

Even by those, who can believe the poet imagined himself struggling
desperately with an assailant _on the other side of the window frame_
whilst he was thus smashing the window, it will be conceded that the
indications of struggling, put subsequently on the wet grass of the lawn
at a considerable distance from the house, must have been put on the turf
for evidential ends, and with a deceptive purpose. The turf cannot have
been trampled upon, stamped down and rolled upon, in order to keep a
nocturnal assailant out of the house. The grass must have been so treated
in order to give it a show of having been the scene of a violent struggle
between persons, alternately wrestling with and rolling over one
another:--a show that should on the morrow accord with Shelley’s original
account to the Solicitor-General, which seems to have differed materially
from his account of the struggle to Harriett. Shelley cannot be imagined
to have gone out of his house at an early hour of a cold February morning,
immediately after a night of alarm and wakefulness, and to have danced and
rolled upon the grass of his wet lawn for mere amusement. Nor are servants
wont to act in so insane a fashion for the mere fun of the thing. For what
end, but the one already stated, can the grass have been thus danced,
trodden, and rolled upon? Whether the signs of a struggle were put upon
the grass by Shelley himself, or by some other person or persons of his
household, the work of disordering the turf’s surface must be regarded as
_his_ work.

But though the evidence is so conclusive that Shelley was _not_ attacked
by an assassin at Tanyrallt on the night of 26th February, 1813, and that
he with his own pistol shot through the flannel night-dress the bullet,
which he declared to have been shot through it by another person, his
wildest idolaters insist that he was so attacked and shot at. Lady Shelley
says, ‘Yet this continual beneficence could not save Shelley from an
attempt on his life of a most atrocious and extraordinary kind.’ Mr. Denis
Florence MacCarthy wishes us to believe that the baffled assassin was no
other person than Miss Hitchener’s father.

Assuming that the first quarterly allowance of Miss Hitchener’s stipend
was not paid; assuming that ineffectual demands had been made to Shelley
for payment of the money; assuming that Miss Hitchener’s account of
Shelley’s treatment of her had caused much angry talk against him in her
father’s tap-room; assuming that this angry talk incensed Miss Hitchener’s
papa against the Shelleys; assuming that Miss Hitchener’s papa (formerly a
smuggler) journeyed from his Sussex village to Carnarvonshire, in order to
wreak his wrath on the hateful trio; Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy argues
that Miss Hitchener’s papa was the villain who tried to shoot Shelley in
the little room opening into the shrubbery, and who, some hours later,
appeared at the parlour window and shot the bullet through Shelley’s
flannel shirt:--a bullet that, according to Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy,
must have passed from the window, through the window-curtains, and through
Shelley’s flannel-shirt, and then turning round in the parlour have come
straight back to the wainscot on the window side of the room. Positively
Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy has given this explanation of the Tanyrallt
mystery, and been cordially applauded by Shelleyan enthusiasts for the
sagacity and reasonableness of his way of showing, that Shelley was shot
at in the manner declared by him. This is the way in which Shelley’s
biography has been dealt with by a ring of gentlemen, of whose acuteness
and discretion Mr. James Anthony Froude has the highest opinion.

It is not surprising that Shelley hastened in a few days from the scene of
his humiliating exposure. He would have left Carnarvonshire sooner, had he
not been detained by want of money. To get the means of flight the young
gentleman, who a few days earlier sent 20_l._ to Mr. T. Hookham for the
relief of the Hunts, now wrote a hasty note to Mr. T. Hookham for the
restoration of the money, in order that he might have the means of getting
away from Tremadoc. To this brief note by the excited poet Mrs. Shelley
added a postscript in somewhat less agitated style:--

    ‘_Tanyralt, March 3rd, 1813_.

    ‘DEAR SIR,--I have just escaped an atrocious assassination. Oh send
    the twenty pounds, if you have it! You will probably hear of me no
    more!--Your Friend,

      PERCY SHELLEY.’

    ‘Mr. Shelley is so dreadfully nervous to-day from being up all night
    that I am afraid what he has written will alarm you very much. We
    intend to leave this place as soon as possible, as our lives are not
    safe as long as we remain. It is no common robber we dread, but a
    person who is actuated by revenge,--who threatens my life and my
    sister’s as well. If you can send us the money it will add greatly to
    our comfort.--Sir, I remain your sincere friend,

      H. SHELLEY.’

The printed transcripts of this note and postscript differ in several
minute particulars from the printed transcripts of the same writings in
Lady Shelley’s book; but the only important difference between the two
sets of printed transcripts is that, whilst it is given without any date
in Lady Shelley’s book, the note is given in Hogg’s version with an
obviously erroneous date.

One of the mistakes of Lady Shelley’s inaccurate book is the
representation that, in writing the brief note to Mr. T. Hookham, Shelley
merely asked the bookseller for a loan of 20_l._ ‘It would appear,’ the
lady says, ‘that after sending off the 20_l._ for the Hunt subscription he
was in want of money. Hence the request to Mr. Hookham for a little
temporary accommodation to enable him to make the necessary removal from
Tanyrallt.’ It is, however, certain that Shelley wished the receiver of
his note to regard him as asking for the restoration of _the_ 20_l._ sent
a few days earlier to Bond Street, as a contribution to the Hunt fund. It
has been already remarked that the letter accompanying this remittance to
Mr. Hookham for the Hunt Fund was dated, ‘February, 1813,’ without a note
of the particular day. Hence the precise day on which the money was
despatched from Tanyrallt to London is unknown. But there is evidence for
fixing the approximate date of the remittance. On 7th February, 1813,
Shelley wrote to Hogg from Tanyrallt, ‘_Mab_ has gone on, but slowly,
although she is nearly finished.’ In the subsequent letter to Mr. Hookham,
accompanying the contribution to the Hunt Fund, Shelley says, ‘_Queen Mab_
is finished and transcribed.’ Consequently between the date of the earlier
letter and the composition of the later epistle, Shelley had _finished_
and _transcribed_ his poem,--work that may be computed to have given him
occupation for a fortnight. This computation would give the 22nd February
as the approximate date of the letter, accompanying the remittance for the
Hunt Fund, to Mr. Hookham. Written and posted on Monday, 22nd February at
Tanyrallt, or Tremadoc, the letter would start on its journey by mail for
London in the early morning of Tuesday, 23rd February, and arriving in
London on the evening or night of Thursday, 25th February, would be
delivered in Old Bond Street on the morning of Friday, 26th February--the
morning of the very day, on whose night the first of the imaginary
attacks was made by the imaginary assassin at Tanyrallt. According to this
calculation Shelley found himself in urgent need of the money he had so
recklessly given away, just twenty-four hours after the note or notes for
the money came to the hands of the Bond-Street bookseller.

There are differences between Hogg’s transcript of the assassination-note
to Mr. Hookham and Lady Shelley’s transcript of the same note. One of the
discrepancies is that Lady Shelley gives us ‘Oh! send me 20_l._, if you
have it,’ whereas Hogg gives us ‘O send the twenty pounds, if you have
it.’ Whichever of the two versions is taken, it is clear that ‘if you have
it’ signifies ‘if you have not parted with it to the Hunt Fund Committee,’
and that Shelley was asking for the return of his own money. As he had no
reason to suppose the prosperous bookseller might be without twenty pounds
either in his till or at the bank, by ‘if you have it’ Shelley cannot have
meant ‘if you are the possessor of so much money.’ Affording no indication
that Shelley felt he was putting himself under a pecuniary obligation to
the man of business, the language of the note precludes the assumption
that he was asking outright for a loan of money. Though he may have felt,
and probably did feel, that his note would move Mr. Hookham to lend him
20_l._ if he had parted with the subscribed 20_l._, Shelley asked for the
restoration of his own 20_l._ Much the same may be said of Mrs. Shelley
and her postscript. Instead of writing as though she and her husband were
asking Mr. Hookham to do them a considerable kindness, she wrote as though
she were merely asking for their own money.

When the assassination-note came to Mr. Hookham’s hands on the morning of
Tuesday, 3rd March, he had passed Shelley’s gift on to the Hunt Fund. In
his inability to return the subscribed money, the bookseller sent him
20_l._ as a loan; a loan which Shelley acknowledged from Bangor Ferry, on
6th March, 1813, in terms affording proof that the present writer has not
misconstrued the assassination-note. Lady Shelley’s printed transcript of
the letter from Bangor Ferry, makes Shelley write thus,--

    ‘From the tenor of your letter I augur’ (_argue_ ?) ‘that you have
    applied the 20_l._ I sent to the benefit of the Hunts.... By your
    kindness and generosity we are perfectly relieved from all pecuniary
    difficulties. We only wanted a little breathing time, which the
    rapidity of our persecutions was unwilling to allow us. We shall
    readily repay the 20_l._ when I hear from my correspondent in London;
    but when can I repay the friendship, the disinterestedness, and the
    zeal of your confidence?’

Mr. Hookham having sent Shelley 20_l._ as a loan, instead of returning the
subscribed money, the poet argues from the bookseller’s action and
epistle, that the latter has ‘applied the 20_l._’ (sent for that purpose)
‘to the benefit of the Hunts.’

Within a few hours of writing the assassination-note to Mr. Hookham,
Shelley wrote to Mr. Williams, begging for 25_l._ he needed for the
payment of ‘little debts;’ observing in the same note, ‘I am surprised
that the wretch who attacked me has not been heard of. Surely enquiries
have not been sufficiently general, or particular?’

Whilst Mrs. Shelley’s words, ‘Mr. Shelley is so dreadfully nervous to-day,
_from being up all night_,’ indicate that the assassination-note to Mr.
Hookham was written on the morrow of the imaginary attacks at Tanyrallt,
the manner in which Shelley here refers to measures for discovering the
assassin shows that the note to Mr. Williams must have been written at a
time when ‘the investigations’ were in an early stage of their progress to
a damnatory conclusion. Had he known of the discovery of the bullet-mark
in the wainscot, Shelley could scarcely have suggested that the
investigations of the case had not been sufficiently ‘particular.’ A few
hours later, when he heard how particular they had been, his slight face
must by turns have flushed with annoyance and then whitened with shame.

The evidence is abundant that Shelley was touched acutely by the shame of
his position, during the last days of his sojourn in Carnarvonshire. There
is a pathetic note of sincerity in one passage of the insincere letter he
wrote from Bangor Ferry to the bookseller of Old Bond Street;--the passage
in which he declared he was less delighted by the arrival of Mr. Hookham’s
remittance, because it rescued him from ‘a situation of peculiar
perplexity,’ than because it assured him he still retained the confidence
of at least one friend, whose generous conduct ‘made amends to’ his
‘feelings, wounded by the suspicion, coldness, and villany of the world.’
It was thus that the young man, with a singular aptitude for thinking
himself persecuted by any one who presumed to call him to order, spoke of
his Carnarvonshire neighbours, because they were offended by his attempt
to trifle with their credulity. Those of them who kept out of his way, or
otherwise showed a disinclination to speak to him of his latest escapade,
were frigid, unfeeling, hard-hearted. Those, who hinted their inability to
see how a bullet issuing from a pistol pointed due south could take a
course due north, were meanly suspicious. Those, who frankly declared
their disbelief of the assassination-story, were sheer villains. Though
the discovery of the bullet-mark in a place it could not have reached,
after passing from the window through his night-dress, must have convinced
him (if he needed to be convinced) that the ball had issued from his own
pistol, he persisted in declaring the ball had proceeded from the weapon
of his imaginary assailant. ‘The ball,’ he wrote from Bangor Ferry, ‘of
the assassain’s pistols (he fired at me twice), penetrated my night-gown
and pierced the wainscot;’--omitting to add, for his correspondent’s
information, that the ball struck the wainscot in a way proving the bullet
to have issued from his own pistol. As might be expected of the young man,
who three years earlier had declared his intention to have recourse to
deception because it would answer his purpose, and just three months
earlier had declared his intention to write a wheedling letter to the Duke
of Norfolk because he might get some money by doing so, Shelley stuck to
his erroneous statements when he must have known them to be misstatements,
however much he may have been under the influence of pure hallucination,
when he first uttered them. His stubborn adherence to the misstatements,
in the letter to Mr. Hookham, is rendered the more offensive by the
Pecksniffian style in which he, in the same letter, proclaims his delight
in contemplating truth and virtue. ‘If,’ he remarks, ‘the discovery of
truth be a pleasure of singular purity, how far surpassing is the
discovery of virtue!’ In the same vein he observes in the
postscript,--‘Though overwhelmed with our distresses, we are by no means
indifferent to those of liberty and virtue!!!’


(7.)--DUBLIN AND KILLARNEY.

Preserving amidst his varied distresses this honourable concern for the
interests of liberty and virtue, Shelley journeyed from Bangor to
Holyhead, and after a tedious and rough sea-passage (of forty hours
duration) arrived on Tuesday, 9th March, 1813, at Dublin, where he passed
several days at 35 Cuffe Street, Stephen’s Green, the residence of Mr.
John Lawless.

Ignorant of his friend’s intimacy with the Irishman of letters, who in
1813 was at work on the _Compendium of the History of Ireland_, Hogg may
well have been at a loss how to account for Shelley’s second visit to the
people, whose wrongs he had failed to redress with two pamphlets and a
broadside. But with their imperfect knowledge of the poet’s relations with
honest Jack Lawless, the readers of this page can readily discover motives
for the second visit to the land of greenness and thraldom. There is no
positive evidence that Shelley procured money either from Mr. Medwin or
anyone else for the publication of a voluminous _History of Ireland_. But
a _Compendium_ (though scarcely a voluminous one) _of Irish History_ was
produced by honest Jack Lawless in 1814; and twenty-eight years later,
Frederick William Conway (who was editor of the _Dublin Weekly Messenger_
in 1812-13, with good opportunities for observing the nature of honest
Jack’s intercourse with the _immediate_ heir to one of the first fortunes
of England), referred to Shelley in the _Dublin Evening Post_ (November
17th, 1842), as having been ‘made the pecuniary dupe of a person not less
sincere in his politics, but in money matters less honest,’--words that
unquestionably referred to honest Jack Lawless’s pecuniary dealings with
the youthful poet. Other evidence has already been given that Lawless’s
friendly relations with Shelley were attended with pecuniary arrangements.
Harum-scarum youngster though he was, Shelley would scarcely have given
his Lynton landlady the draft on ‘Lord Cloncurry’s brother,’ without any
grounds for thinking that Jack Lawless was under an obligation to honour
the writing. One would like to know more of honest Jack’s literary and
financial relations with the immediate heir to one of the first fortunes
of England; but enough is known to justify readers in assuming that,
besides going to Ireland in March, 1813, to receive the solace of his
friend’s sympathy with his distress, Shelley went to 35 Cuffe Street,
Stephen’s Green, Dublin, to see how his ‘literary friend’ was getting on
with ‘the work,’ that on its publication could not fail to ‘produce great
profits.’

It is in the reader’s memory that Hogg promised to visit the Shelleys in
Carnarvonshire, and pass a few days with them at Tanyrallt, in March,
1813,--an arrangement that could not be carried out, when the poet, with
his wife and sister-in-law, had left Wales for Ireland. To spare him the
annoyance (similar to the annoyance Godwin endured half-a-year earlier)
of journeying to Tanyrallt, only to find they had departed, Mrs. Shelley
had given Hogg timely information of the circumstances which had
determined her and her husband to fly to Ireland. As the letter, which
afforded him this information, was ‘written from Tanyrallt, a day or two
after the catastrophe,’ Hogg was guilty of a curious slip when (writing
from memory of the lost epistle) he declared that, to the best of his
recollection, apart from the different date, it was ‘precisely similar,
word for word,’ indeed, to the letter Harriett wrote to Mr. Hookham of Old
Bond Street, from Dublin on the 12th (Lady Shelley says 11th) of March,
giving the details of the alleged attacks. As Harriett’s later letter to
Mr. Hookham began with the words, ‘My Dear Sir, We arrived here last
Tuesday, after a most tedious passage, during the whole of which time we
were dreadfully ill,’ it cannot have corresponded so precisely, as Hogg
represents, with her earlier letter from Tanyrallt. Had the Shelleyan
enthusiasts noticed this droll slip, they would have discovered in it yet
another proof of Hogg’s incomparable villany, instead of attributing the
excessive statement to the writer’s honest purpose of saying emphatically
that, in so far as it related to the alleged attempts at assassination,
the later epistle to Mr. Hookham seemed like a copy of the earlier letter
to him. It appeared also that Harriett (_not_ Shelley) wrote similar
accounts of the assassination-incidents either from Tanyrallt or Ireland,
to other persons, besides Mr. Hookham and Hogg. ‘I have been informed,’
says the biographer, ‘that she also sent to other persons a narrative of
the nightly fears in the same terms, writing descriptive circulars, and
dispatching them in different directions.’ Why were these letters of
intelligence written by Harriett instead of her husband, who certainly was
the natural and fittest person to put on record the matters, so closely
touching his honour? Though she made it to one of her correspondents,
readers may smile at the statement, that Harriett wrote the letters, in
order to spare her husband the pain of recalling again and again the
horrors of that awful night.

Having made arrangements for the long journey to Carnarvonshire, Hogg
determined to make the longer trip to Dublin, in accordance with his
friends’ entreaties that he would join them at 35 Cuffe Street. The result
of the determination was, that some few days later he experienced in the
Irish metropolis just such a disappointment as William Godwin had
experienced at Lynton. On coming to Cuffe Street, after an unusually
rough and trying journey, he learnt that the Shelleys, with Miss
Westbrook, had gone off to Killarney. Of course he lost no time in asking
the fugitives, through the post, why they had treated him so unhandsomely,
and whilst awaiting their reply amused himself as he best could in
exploring Dublin, and studying the manners and humours of the people with
whom he became acquainted, chiefly through Jack Lawless’s friendly
offices. For a moment readers of this page may well imagine, that Shelley
had relapsed into his former hallucination respecting Hogg’s intentions
towards Harriett, and had carried her off to Killarney in order to keep
her out of his way. But Shelley’s action, on hearing of his friend’s
arrival in Dublin, disposes of the suspicion. There had been
misunderstanding on the part of the Shelleys, attended with uncertainty
whether Hogg would cross the sea. A sudden whim for visiting Killarney was
enough to convert this uncertainty respecting his purpose into a
confidence that he would not come to them. So off they went to Killarney,
in the very worst season for viewing the Lakes, a few days before Hogg
appeared at Jack Lawless’s door.

Mr. Lawless advised Hogg to run to Killarney and join his friends there;
but Hogg did not think it advisable to spend money in running south after
the trio who might have already started for the Giant’s Causeway. After
spending nearly all the time and money at his disposal, the young Templar
returned to London without coming to the presence of the people he had
travelled so far to see; but not without gathering materials for a
singularly vivid and humorous account of life and manners in Dublin
seventy years since. Bidding his Irish acquaintances adieu, Hogg started
on his homeward journey some four-and-twenty hours before Shelley and
Harriett arrived at the Cork Hotel, Dublin, after covering two hundred and
forty English miles in less than forty-eight hours. Intelligence of Hogg’s
appearance in Dublin having come to them at noon on Monday, 29th March,
1813, Shelley and his wife (now within three calendar months of her
accouchement), without Miss Westbrook, started for the capital, posting to
Cork, where they caught the mail that deposited them in Dublin at 3 p.m.
of Wednesday, 31st March. Though Lady Shelley says they did not return to
London till May, 1813, it is certain that Shelley and Harriett were at 23
Chapel Street, Grosvenor Square, in the second week of April.




CHAPTER VII.

LONDON AND BRACKNELL.

    Imprint of _Queen Mab_--The Poem’s Notes--The Author’s Views touching
    Marriage--Places of Abode in London--Presentation Copies--Shelley ‘a
    Lion’--Half-Moon Street--Diet and Discomfort--Quacks and
    Crotchet-Mongers--‘Nakedized Children’--Cornelia Newton--Maimuna and
    her Salon--Elephantiasis--‘The Hampstead Stage’--Dinner Party at
    Norfolk House--The Duke’s Mediation between the Father and
    Son--Failure of the Negotiations--Shelley declines to be ‘a miserable
    Slave’--At the Pimlico Lodgings--Correspondence with Mr. Medwin, of
    Horsham--Birth of Ianthe Eliza--Shelley as a Father--Conflict of
    Evidence respecting his Parental Character--Shelley’s Kindness to
    Children--The Poet sets up his Carriage--His Prodigality in
    London--His Life at Bracknell--Maimuna at her Country-House--Last
    Visits to Field Place--Captain Kennedy’s Reminiscences--Medwin’s
    Gossip--The Trip to Scotland--Dissensions and Estrangements--Shelley
    and Harriett drifting apart--_Queen Mab’s_ Vegetarian
    Note--_Refutation of Deism_.


(8).--LONDON.

If Mr. Westbrook did not change his house in Chapel Street, between 11th
January, 1811, when Shelley ordered a copy of _St. Irvyne_ to be sent to
Harriett at No. 10, and the following October, when he directed Mr. Medwin
to write to him at No. 23 of that thoroughfare, the author of the novel
may be assumed to have given his publisher a wrong address. Anyhow, it is
almost as certain that Mr. Westbrook was living at No. 23 of his street,
in the spring of 1813, as that Shelley put the said address on the
title-page of his private edition of _Queen Mab_, and again in the
concluding imprint of the work (‘Printed by P. B. Shelley, No. 23, Chapel
Street, Grosvenor Square, London’), as though the book had been printed by
him at that address. It is almost needless to say there was no
printing-press at 23 Chapel Street, and that Shelley was not a printer in
the sense indicated by the imprint.

The poet, who, on the eve of Daniel Hill’s arrest in Barnstaple, wrote to
Mr. Thomas Hookham, ‘a poem is safe; the iron-souled Attorney-General
would scarcely dare to attack,’ had made considerable additions to his
knowledge of the law touching seditious and heterodox publications, and
the publication of printed papers, since those words were penned. Daniel
Hill’s punishment ‘for publishing and dispersing printed papers without
the printer’s name being on them,’ had taught Daniel Hill’s master a
lesson he took to heart. If Shelley pressed Mr. Hookham to put himself
before the world as the publisher of the poem, the bookseller declined to
afford the Attorney-General an opportunity for showing the degree of
audacity Shelley had declared impossible even in a Crown lawyer. It may be
assumed that Shelley had inquired in vain for a competent printer, brave
enough to print openly what no publisher would publish, before he
relinquished his design of publishing the poem, and decided to produce the
book for private circulation under a false imprint. Anyhow, an edition (of
250 copies) of the book (which Mr. Moxon was prosecuted for re-publishing
seven-and-twenty years later) was printed by some unknown printer at some
undiscovered press in the spring of 1813, with an untruth on its
title-page, and a repetition of the untruth on the concluding leaf.

As criticism of Shelley’s poetry does not fall within the scope of the
present work, I am silent respecting the poetical merits of _Queen Mab_;
but it is incumbent on the poet’s biographer to say something of two of
the lengthy notes appended to the performance,--notes so little known to
the admirers of Shelley’s verse, that it may be questioned whether one out
of every hundred persons who have read the poem attentively has ever
glanced at the notes. The Anti-matrimonial Note and the Atheistical Note
should be perused by all readers who would know The Real Shelley; the
former being studied in connexion with the circumstances that resulted in
his abandonment of his first wife; and the latter being studied in
connexion with the evidence that, instead of being a mere syllabus of
reasonings put together for the convenience of scholastic disputants (as
Hogg and Lady Shelley declare it to have been), or the mere squib (which
Mr. Garnett would have us think it), _The Necessity of Atheism_ was a
serious exposition of certain of the author’s views on matters pertaining
to religion.

The Note, headed ‘There is no God,’ opens with a reproduction of the tract
which caused the author’s extrusion from Oxford,--a reproduction differing
from the original essay only in occasional amendments of the language,
made for the sake of greater precision and elegance; such alterations in
fact as are looked for in a new edition of a work by an author, who holds
steadily to the principles and argumentative details of the original
composition. Can stronger evidence be required that the tract was a
serious and genuine declaration of the writer’s views in 1811, and that in
the spring of 1813 he held the same views about _The Necessity of Atheism_
as he held in the spring of the earlier year?

The Note, headed ‘Even love is sold,’ contains the following passages of
especial interest:--

    ‘Not even the intercourse of the sexes is exempt from the despotism of
    positive institution. Law pretends even to govern _the indisciplinable
    wanderings of passion_, to put fetters on the clearest deductions of
    reason, and, by appeals to the will, to subdue the _involuntary
    affections_ of our nature. _Love is inevitably consequent upon the
    perception of loveliness...._

    ‘_How long then ought the sexual connection to last?_ What law ought
    to specify the extent of the grievances which should limit its
    duration? _A husband and wife ought to continue so long united as they
    love each other: any law which should bind them to cohabitation for
    one moment after the decay of their affection, would be a most
    intolerable tyranny, and the most unworthy of toleration. How odious
    an usurpation of the right of private judgment should that law be
    considered, which should make the ties of friendship indissoluble, in
    spite of the caprices, the inconstancy, the fallibility, and capacity
    for improvement of the human mind. And by so much would the fetters of
    love be heavier and more unendurable than those of friendship, as love
    is more vehement and capricious, more dependent on those delicate
    peculiarities of imagination, and less capable of reduction to the
    ostensible merits of the object...._

    ‘But if happiness be the object of morality, of all human unions and
    disunions; _if the worthiness of every action is to be estimated by
    the quantity of pleasurable sensation it is calculated to produce,
    then the connection of the sexes is so long sacred as it contributes
    to the comfort of the parties, and is naturally dissolved when its
    evils are greater than its benefits. There is nothing immoral in this
    separation. Constancy has nothing virtuous in itself, independently of
    the pleasure it confers, and partakes of the temporizing spirit of
    vice in proportion as it endures tamely moral defects of magnitude in
    the object of its indiscreet choice._ Love is free: _to promise for
    ever to love the same woman, is not less absurd than to promise to
    believe the same creed: such a vow, in both cases, excludes us from
    all inquiry. The language of the votarist is this: The woman I now
    love may be infinitely inferior to many others; the creed I now
    profess may be a mass of errors and absurdities, but I exclude myself
    from all future information as to the amiability of the one and the
    truth of the other, resolving blindly, and in spite of conviction, to
    adhere to them. Is this the language of delicacy and reason? Is the
    love of such a frigid heart of more worth than its belief?..._

    ‘Prostitution is the legitimate offspring of marriage and its
    accompanying errors.... _Chastity is a monkish and evangelical
    superstition, a greater foe to natural temperance even than
    unintellectual sensuality; it strikes at the root of all domestic
    happiness, and consigns more than half of the human race to misery,
    that some few may monopolize according to law. A system could not well
    have been devised more studiously hostile to human happiness than
    marriage._

    ‘I conceive that, from the abolition of marriage, the fit and natural
    arrangement of sexual connection would result. I by no means assert
    that the intercourse would be promiscuous: on the contrary; it
    appears, from the relation of parent to child, that this union is
    generally of long duration, and marked above all others with
    generosity and self-devotion. But this is a subject which it is
    perhaps premature to discuss. That which will result from the
    abolition of marriage, will be natural and right; because choice and
    change will be exempted from restraint.’

After perusing this Note of _Queen Mab_, readers who would have a perfect
view of Shelley’s opinions (in 1812-16) respecting the relations of the
sexes, should look at the letter he wrote from Lynton, on 17th August,
1812, to Sir James Lawrence (_alias_ the Chevalier de Lawrence), the
eccentric _littérateur_ who is chiefly memorable at the present date for
his _Empire of the Nairs_.

From this letter and Note of _Queen Mab_, it appears that when, by his own
admission, he was living happily with the _beautiful_ girl, whom he had
illuminated out of the Christian faith and instructed to regard the rite
and obligations of marriage with levity, the chivalric Shelley held these
views touching the intercourse of the sexes:--

(1) The wanderings of amatory passion are indisciplinable, and every
attempt to stay those wanderings of desire is a futile effort ‘to subdue
the involuntary affections of human nature.’

(2) ‘Love’ being ‘inevitably consequent upon the perception of
loveliness,’ it is natural and necessary for a sensitive and rightly
constituted man to regard with love every woman in whom he perceives a
high degree of loveliness.

(3) Love lying no less completely than religious belief beyond the domain
of volition, it is no less absurd for a man ‘to promise for ever to love
the same woman’ than for him ‘to promise to believe the same creed,’ as
circumstances may at any moment put it beyond his power to keep the
promise.

(4) A man’s obligation to fulfil an engagement being necessarily dependent
on his power to do so, it follows from the nature of things that on
becoming unable to love any longer the woman he has promised to love
steadily, a man ceases to be bound by the promise.

(5) On ceasing to love her, every man should be at liberty to withdraw
from the society of his wife and take a congenial mate.

(6) It being immoral for a man to enter into engagements without a
reasonable prospect of being able to fulfil them, more especially into
engagements affecting in a high degree the happiness of the person or
persons with whom he makes them; and the conditions of human nature
precluding every human creature from a reasonable certainty of being able
to love the same person for ever, it is immoral for a man and woman to
promise to love one another for ever, _i.e._ till death, as influences
lying wholly beyond their control may at any moment take from either of
them the power of fulfilling his or her part of the contract.

(7) The moral and reasonable man’s largest promise of enduring affection
to the woman of his choice should be nothing more than a sincere
declaration, that his passion is so strong as to justify him in declaring
it a state of feeling likely to endure for a considerable period.

(8) Love being a more or less transient state of the affections, marriage
ought to be replaced by Free Love, _i.e._ by cohabitation so arranged that
either party to the affectionate league is free to retire from the
association at will.

The principal arguments by which Shelley brought himself to this
conclusion comprise,--(_a_) Arguments based on consideration of the misery
and moral injury coming to spouses, who are constrained to live together
after ceasing to love one another; (_b_) arguments based on consideration
of the happiness withheld by matrimonial law from uncongenial spouses,
who, were it not for that law, would part company and find felicity or
contentment with other mates; (_c_) arguments drawn from consideration of
the moral injury resulting from legal wedlock to spouses, who are rendered
careless of one another’s feelings by the sense of security from the
proper and natural punishment of habitual perversity and ill-humour;
whereas the overbearing husband would restrain his tyrannical
disposition, if he knew his wife could leave him should he worry her
beyond endurance, and in like manner the scolding wife would put a bridle
on her tongue, if she knew her lord could dismiss her at a moment’s
notice, and engage another woman in her place; (_d_) arguments arising
from a consideration of the misery and evils resulting from marriage to
individuals, other than unhappily mated husbands and wives.

(9) Of all his arguments against marriage, the one which Shelley valued
perhaps most highly was the argument, grounded on his conviction that
lawful wedlock and its attendant errors were accountable for prostitution,
and that to sweep away the former would be to put an end to the latter.
Were matrimony put on a natural footing, and made an estate from which the
dissatisfied spouse could retire as easily as from any ordinary commercial
contract, young men, no longer afraid to commit themselves to the perils
of familiar association with modest and accomplished women, would cease to
have intercourse with abandoned women. Liberated from the debasing
sentiment of chastity, which retains them in servile bondage to men whom
they secretly abhor, women would pass without dishonour to men, whom they
could love and who would gladly provide themselves with virtuous mates on
reasonable terms. The men put at liberty to take new spouses would often
find them in girls, who under the existing restrictions and temptations
become lodgers in immoral houses. Under Free-Love ‘the social evil’ would
soon disappear, partly through the livelier masculine repugnance to
feminine immorality, and partly through the larger demand for virtuous
female spouses.

(10) Far from thinking the abolition of marriage would result in a state
of things that would not differ greatly from promiscuous intercourse of
the sexes, on account of the general brevity of the periods of
cohabitation, Shelley was disposed to think that under Free Love the
majority of couples would have no desire to separate, when they had been
drawn closely together by common interest in common offspring. It would
still remain the rule for the mated pair to live together till death; but
under Free Love they would live together from preference and mutual
affection, instead of living together from compulsion and in spite of
mutual dislike. Still he was of course prepared for much changing and
interchanging of spouses. The freedom he required was a freedom to be
enjoyed and used, as well as talked about.

(11) When it occurred to John Milton that Freedom of Divorce would be
abused by many a wicked man, in order to get quit of a faithful and
virtuous wife, he comforted himself by reflecting that even in so evil a
case the freedom would work advantageously for the good and injured woman,
by relieving her from the necessity of living under the dominion of a bad
husband. In like manner had any one objected to Shelley, that under Free
Love a woman would often desert a good spouse from mere wantonness, and
that a man would often desert a virtuous help-mate from sheer profligacy,
he would have answered, ‘Better for the good man to be at liberty to seek
for a woman worthy of his love, and for the good woman to be at liberty to
find an honest mate.’

(12) It is obvious that the Free Love, which Shelley recommended as a
wholesome substitute for antiquated wedlock, would permit the ordinary
seducer to pursue his favourite diversion with absolute impunity; and that
Shelley, with all his avowed abhorrence of seducers, would at least have
regarded leniently several practices, that in the opinion of most men
amount to seduction. In ordinary parlance, the man who takes a hitherto
virtuous girl under his protection, and uses her as his mistress, is
termed her seducer, and the proceeding by which the girl is brought to so
discreditable a position is called her seduction. For instance, though he
would have indignantly denied the charge, Byron’s intercourse with Claire
would by most persons be regarded as a sufficient reason for holding him
guilty of an offence of which even libertines do not like to be thought
capable. Shelley certainly cannot have used the word in this sense when he
wrote to the Chevalier de Lawrence that seduction was ‘an enormous and
desolating crime, of which he should shudder to be accused;’ for after
showing positive sympathy with Byron’s tenderness for Claire in the
earlier stages of the fleeting passion, he exerted himself to bring about
a renewal of their association, just as though he were a brother set on
arranging some discord between his sister and her husband. It is not easy
to see in what sense he used the word when he wrote to the Chevalier that
‘seduction ... could have no meaning in a rational state of society.’
Questioned on the point, he would probably have said that to pursue a
woman for purely sensual ends, with false assurances of sentimental
preference and affectionate devotion, was ‘the enormous and desolating
crime.’

(13) In obedience to sincere and vehement passion for a woman, whether she
were maid or wife, every man was by the Shelleyan doctrine at liberty to
solicit her for corresponding affection, and to his utmost, in all
truthful ways, to render himself no less loveable in her eyes than she
seemed loveable to him. Whilst thinking that in the majority of cases such
a passion would prove of considerable duration, he saw also that in a
minority of cases it would speedily wane and perish, either through the
discovery of previously existing, though unobserved, defects in its
object, or through the mental, moral, or physical deterioration of the
idolized person, or through the attachment’s extinction by a more powerful
passion for a more perfect and loveable being. On the occurrence of any
such contingency, Shelley was of opinion that, on seeing it would be more
conducive to _his own_ enjoyment of life to withdraw from a no longer
congenial mate, a man should act promptly in doing so, and not be
restrained from pursuing his own happiness by any pitiful notion that
honour and morality required him to remain in discontent, out of regard to
the feelings and interests of his conjugal partner. ‘Constancy,’ in his
opinion, ‘had nothing virtuous in itself, independently of the pleasure it
conferred’ on the persisting person. In ridiculing George the Third’s

          ‘household virtue, most uncommon,
  Of constancy to a bad, ugly woman,’

Byron placed conjugal constancy amongst the domestic virtues. Shelley took
another view of the quality, which, appearing to him (at its best) as
nothing better than a particular kind of selfish prudence, ‘partook of the
temporizing spirit of vice in proportion as it endured tamely moral
defects of magnitude in the objects of its indiscreet choice.’

(14) It must be remembered that Shelley did not propound these views as
mere theories for discussion amongst philosophers, without any serious
desire that they should become rules of personal conduct under existing
social circumstances, but as principles of social science and morals, on
which men would do well to act. Unlike William Godwin, who backed out of
his own more fantastic theories as soon as the accidents of life afforded
him a good opportunity for putting them in practice, Shelley was
‘thorough’ at this period of his life, and ready at any moment to do any
wild thing which, with boyish impetuosity and self-sufficiency, he had
talked himself into thinking a thing that ought to be done. Holding these
views in the spring of 1813, he acted upon them in the summer of 1814.

(15) To this extreme point had he gone in the social philosophy of the
Free Lovers, the more moderate of whom discovered much to question, and no
little to dissent from, in his manifesto on matters touching the
intercourse of the sexes. But far as he had gone in Free Love, Shelley was
appointed to go much further, and in the same department of social inquiry
to arrive some three or four years later at a conclusion, far stronger and
more startling than anything to be found in _Queen Mab’s_ Anti-matrimonial
Note.

There is no little of direct discrepancy and general confusedness in the
many things told us by the authorities respecting Shelley’s several places
of residence in London during the season of 1813. To believe all the
authorities tell us is to believe that, after resting for a night or two
in Chapel Street, he and Harriett lived for several weeks (and even
months) in different London hotels, then for several months in lodgings in
Half-Moon Street, and then for several weeks in lodgings at Pimlico, and
also to believe that they lived some time in Cooke’s Hotel, Dover Street,
and in the Half-Moon-Street lodging-house simultaneously, before they
settled at Bracknell, in the third week of July, 1813;--which clearly is
more than could have been accomplished, even by such singular persons as
the Shelleys, between the 7th or 8th of April and the 20th or 21st of the
following July.

The conflict of the authorities respecting Shelley’s several homes during
these fifteen weeks is in a large measure due to the indiscretion of
writers, who infer from the dates of letters that he was residing at the
hotel where the epistles were written. For instance, from the dates or
post-marks of letters written by the poet in May, 1813, to his father and
the Duke of Norfolk, and to Mr. Medwin of Horsham on 16th June, 21st June,
28th June, and 6th July, of the same year, it has been inferred that he
was living in Cooke’s Hotel, Dover Street, instead of merely frequenting
the hotel, in those months,--an inference that will be declined by
readers who remember how hotels were used by their mere frequenters in the
early days of the present century. To those who remember that between the
middle of April and the middle of July, Shelley lodged successively in
Half-Moon Street and Pimlico, and occupied each set of rooms for several
weeks, the dates of the aforementioned letters are mere evidence that,
whilst sleeping in Half-Moon Street and Pimlico, he was a frequenter of
the hotel, in which he had previously occupied a bedroom, and that he
continued to use the hotel as a place of address for some of his
correspondents, also as a place for interview with those of his
acquaintances, whom he did not care to receive at his lodgings.

It follows that I question whether the accouchement, resulting in the
birth of Shelley’s first-born child, took place at the hotel in Dover
Street on 27th June, 1813, though he wrote on the following day from the
hotel:--

    ‘MY DEAR SIR,--I am happy to inform you that Mrs. Shelley has been
    safely delivered of a little girl, and is now rapidly recovering. I
    would not leave her in her present state, and therefore still consider
    your proposal of fixing the interview in London as the most eligible.’

In saying that he could not leave his wife in her present state, the
writer can scarcely have meant he could not leave for a few hours the
house in which she was lying, though affectionate concern forbade him to
leave her for so long a time as would be consumed by journeying to Horsham
and back. Notwithstanding some statement to the contrary, which had come
under his notice, Hogg remained under the impression that Harriett’s first
_accouchement_ took place at the Pimlico lodgings, and (for reasons with
which I will not trouble the reader, as the question is of scarcely any
importance) I have little doubt Hogg was right on this point.

In reviewing Shelley’s course during the spring and summer of 1813,
readers may be certain that, after resting a night or two in Chapel
Street, he stayed for awhile (perhaps a fortnight) with his wife at
Cooke’s Hotel; that he then went with her into the lodgings in Half-Moon
Street, which they occupied for several weeks (possibly eight or nine
weeks;--in speaking of them as living in the Half-Moon Street for ‘several
months,’ Hogg used too ample an expression); that, on leaving Half-Moon
Street, the young couple went to the Pimlico lodging-house, before going
to Bracknell; and that after ceasing to reside at the Dover-Street Hotel,
Shelley often went to it in May, June, and July, to see friends and write
letters. It is, of course, conceivable that he lived at the hotel for some
days and nights between the stay in Half-Moon Street, and the migration to
Pimlico, and again between his withdrawal from the Pimlico lodging-house
and his retirement to Bracknell, where he had his home, towards the end of
July, 1813.

The state of Shelley’s purse is enough to account for the fact that he and
Harriett journeyed from Killarney to London, unattended by Miss Westbrook,
whom they left in charge of ‘the many useful volumes’ which the trio
carried with them from Tanyrallt to Dublin, and from Dublin to the South
of Ireland, where Eliza possibly sold them for the money that enabled her
in the course of a few days to follow her sister and brother-in-law.
Having barely enough money in hand for the charges of posting to Cork and
‘mailing’ on to Dublin, Shelley and Harriett would have been constrained
to leave their sister behind, even had they wished for her company. It is,
however, certain that, whilst Shelley was greatly delighted, Harriett was
in no degree pained by the circumstances which enabled them to escape for
a brief while from Miss Westbrook’s society.

Printed on the fine paper especially ordered by the author (for the
gratification of his natural pride in the offspring of his brain, and
also, as he averred, that the work might be more attractive to the sons
and daughters of aristocrats), the first ‘bound copies’ of _Queen Mab_ may
be assumed to have come to Shelley’s hands soon after he took possession
of the lodgings in Half-Moon Street. It may also be assumed that, in the
earlier weeks of their residence in the thoroughfare, which seventy years
since enjoyed the favour of fashion, both Harriett and Shelley found
congenial diversion in sending out copies of the new book to men of
letters whom they knew, to men of letters whom they wished to know, and to
those persons of their small circle of acquaintance who, without being
ambitious of literary distinction, were of a philosophical quality that
rendered the young poet desirous of standing high in their regard, or of
converting them to his particular views.

An early copy was despatched to Byron, still in the enjoyment of the
celebrity, pertaining to him as the author of _Childe Harold_. But Byron
failed to acknowledge the book, as he, of course, and in mere courtesy,
would have done, had it not been for the miscarriage of the letter, which
would have given him Shelley’s address. Having been on his pilgrimage
during the occurrences, that had rendered the younger poet somewhat (but
only in a slight degree) notorious, it is more than probable that, on
looking for the first time on _Queen Mab’s_ title-page, Byron had never
heard anything of Shelley’s personal story,--never even heard his name.
Anyhow, Byron took no notice of the book. To Shelley, yearning to know the
author of _Childe Harold_, and ignorant of the circumstances that were
accountable for the apparent disrespect, Byron’s silence must have been
extremely mortifying.

Society, in the larger and higher sense of the word, of course, knew
nothing of the poem which appeared in no bookseller’s shop, and which
would have been inquired for in vain at the circulating libraries, whilst
it was being secretly lent under the rose to their friends by the hundred
or more persons, who had been so fortunate as to get copies of the
surreptitious publication. It is unknown how many of the 250 copies were
thus floated into covert circulation; but it is certain that the work was
read and talked about by a sufficient number of people (the majority of
them being Londoners), for Shelley to acquire from it,--at least, in the
cliques and coteries of literary London,--a certain measure of poetical
reputation, and a recognized place amongst the young and rising poets of
the period. In certain circles the precautions he had taken for his safety
quickened the desire to see the daring poem, and win a personal
introduction to the author. One can readily believe what Hogg tells us of
the way in which strangers of both sexes forced their way into the
Half-Moon-Street lodgings, in order to make the acquaintance of the author
of _Queen Mab_; but, in professing to be offended and irked by these
intrusive worshipers of his genius, Shelley was no more sincere than when
he affected, in one of his letters to Godwin, to have perused with
indifference the eulogia of the article which, although he knew the
commendations to have proceeded from honest Jack Lawless’s pen, delighted
him so greatly, that he entreated Miss Hitchener to compass its
reproduction in the Sussex newspapers.

Though she now and then gave signs of emancipation from Miss Westbrook’s
authority, Harriett still lived in friendliness with the admirable
sister, who, whilst residing again under her father’s roof in Chapel
Street, seldom allowed a day to pass without spending a few hours with her
child in Half-Moon Street. That Shelley had, at least for the moment,
passed from her control, Miss Westbrook cannot have been insensible; but,
as the rapid development of Harriet’s person required more and more
liberal rearrangements of her dresses, it is probable that the elder
sister cheered herself by looking forward to a time, when she would be in
a position to reclaim Percy from a state of mutiny, and re-establish her
dominion over him. In the meantime, though she came almost daily to her
sister’s lodgings, Miss Westbrook did nothing for the comfort of its
proper occupants, who, at an expenditure which, with good management,
would have maintained them in luxury, lived as wastefully and
comfortlessly as any young couple of their condition ever lived, on the
drawing-floor of a West-End lodging-house. In partaking of such dinners as
Harriett set before him in the front drawing-room, Hogg certainly gave no
ordinary proof of attachment to his friends. To say that Shelley was a
stricter vegetarian in the spring and summer of 1813, is not to say much
of his abstinence from the more luxurious fare of his own table; for the
bread and raisins, the penny-buns and raspberry tartlets, from the nearest
confectioner’s shop, were the daintiest food offered to his guests, either
in the Half-Moon-Street or Pimlico lodgings. The poet’s favourite food at
this stage of his career was cold bread-poultice (made like the poultices
of medical practice), which he devoured with the keenest relish, after
sprinkling them with powdered lump sugar and grated nutmeg. A few months
later he was living chiefly on pulse.

The strange people who gathered about Shelley in the two sets of rooms
were, with two or three exceptions, of no finer quality than the fare with
which he regaled them. For the most part, enthusiastic vegetarians, and
fervid believers in the perfectibility of the human species, they
exercised themselves in debating the best and quickest means of raising
mankind to the perfection of which it was capable, and in disputing
whether it was lawful for vegetarians to eat eggs and butter, to drink
milk and put cream to their strawberries. In comparison with most of the
men, who talked excitedly on these momentous questions, the Chevalier de
Lawrence was a discreet and sober intellect. But the men were surpassed by
the women of the coterie in piquant eccentricity and grotesque
fancifulness. With her placid interest in self-murder, and her avowed
purpose of putting an end to her own existence, should it become a few
degrees less tolerable, Harriett may be presumed to have sympathized with
the dejection of the equally languid and miserable gentlewoman, who would
have perished under the burden of her imaginary woes, had it not been for
the solace of Petrarch sonnets.

Another gentlewoman of the circle was chiefly remarkable for holding that,
to enjoy perfect health of mind and body, it was necessary for the British
matron to begin every day by sitting for three or four hours in
unqualified nudity,--hours which, of course, every fair practitioner of
nakedness was expected to pass in the strictest privacy; it being further
recommended that she should employ them in reading high literature or in
writing letters. In society, after telling how she had passed the first
three hours of the well-spent morning, she sometimes added, for the
edification of listeners, ‘I feel so innocent during the rest of the day.’
Finding the regimen of matutinal nakedness so beneficial to herself, this
exemplary gentlewoman trained her children to go without clothing about
the house for the greater part of the day. One of the drollest pages of
Hogg’s delightful book tells how, on hearing Shelley’s familiar rap at the
front door, this lady’s brood of infants (a twelve-years old boy, a girl
_ætat._ ten, a boy _ætat._ nine, and two wee girls, the younger of whom
was only five years of age) rushed downstairs in perfect nudity, in order
to greet so favourite a friend even on the door-mat.

But of all the ladies who thronged about Shelley in Half-Moon Street (to
Harriett’s perplexity and Eliza Westbrook’s secret wrath), even as women
of higher quality crowded round and ‘suffocated’ Byron in the salons of
lordly houses, none had more influence over the author of _Queen Mab_ from
the spring of 1813, to the end of the spring of 1814, than Mrs.
Boinville--an Englishwoman by birth and education, who was indebted to a
French husband for her style and tastes, as well as for the name which
gives her peculiar distinctiveness in the Shelleyan annals. The
mother-in-law of Mr. Newton (the vegetarian enthusiast, who, after living
in affectionate intimacy with Shelley during the greater part of 1813,
quarrelled with him in an early month of the following year), Mrs.
Boinville, at the time of making Shelley’s acquaintance, was through her
daughter, Cornelia (Mr. Newton’s wife), the grandmother of a brood of
handsome children. Nor were these children the only evidence that Mrs.
Boinville had come to an age when it is unusual for an Englishwoman to
conceive a sentimental fondness for a youngster in his nonage. The
whiteness of her abundant tresses proclaimed her old enough for
grand-maternal dignity. She was, however, a young-looking woman for her
age; the contrast of her snow-white hair and comparatively girlish face
causing Shelley to name her Maimuna, after the poetical creation of whom
it is written in Southey’s _Thalaba_:

  ‘Her face was as a damsel’s face,
    And yet her hair was grey.’

Doting on her in 1813, for the perfection of her manners and character,
Shelley some five years later remembered Maimuna as a person ‘whose
extreme subtlety and delicacy of understanding’ were incompatible with
perfect guilelessness and constancy. And coming to think less favourably
of his whilom spiritual mate, it was natural for the poet to tell others
of her insincerity and fickleness.

Admiring her from the first hour of their brief association for an
appearance, that combined in so peculiar and piquant a manner the
loveliness of youth and age, he delighted in the winning sweetness of her
voice, and discovered in her conversation and mien the charms of
intellectual subtlety and moral elevation. Concurring with him on the
several religious and social questions, that were holding his attention,
she exulted in his song no less frankly than he exulted in her beauty. It
is no exaggeration to say that the stripling, who still wanted several
months of his majority, was platonically enamoured of the woman with
snow-white hair and girlish face, whose years cannot have been much under
fifty. Pouring into her sympathetic ear the long and stirring tale of his
multifarious domestic distresses, he consulted her on nice questions of
poetry and metaphysical science, and never conferred with her on such
matters without discovering new reasons for admiring the subtlety and
self-dependence of her intellect; though it is conceivable that, when he
was most deeply impressed by her mental acuteness and originality, she was
only returning to him the thoughts that had come to her from his lips on
the previous evening.

Nor was Maimuna the only influence that rendered her house far more
agreeable to the youthful poet than his comfortless lodgings in Half-Moon
Street, where Eliza became more and more distasteful to her
brother-in-law, and Harriett less shapely and beautiful. For the charming
and highly sentimental Mrs. Boinville had a scarcely less charming and
sentimental sister, as well as a daughter who, without possessing all her
mother’s excellencies, was not unworthy of so fascinating a parent. In
adorative tenderness for Percy, the youngest of these three ladies seems
to have surpassed her aunt and equalled Mrs. Boinville. It was she who
discovered that, seen from the pavement below, whilst sitting book-in-hand
at the little projecting window of the Half-Moon Street drawing-room,
Percy would have looked ‘like some young lady’s lark, hanging outside for
air and song,’ had he only been provided with ‘a pan of clear water and a
fresh turf.’ Surely the lady who discovered this resemblance must have
been the author of the happy thought, that Shelley had the appearance of a
moss-rose still drenched by the tears of heaven.

The Pimlico drawing-room would have been a bower of delight to the young
poet, had he found no other worshipers there; but it was the favourite
gathering place of a coterie of sentimentalists and free-thinkers of both
sexes, who rendered the salon even more agreeable to the author of _Queen
Mab_, by being at much pains to make him see that he was superlatively
acceptable to them. Mr. Hogg may, perhaps, have been justified in thinking
meanly of Mrs. Boinville’s circle, and in suggesting that before the end
of the season Shelley was secretly ashamed of himself for spending so much
of his time in it. But the poet, who had long yearned for social
recognition, may be pardoned for not being nicely fastidious respecting
the quality of the first coterie to welcome and worship him as a man of
genius. Moreover, though it may have comprised several arrant charlatans,
together with a considerable percentage of individuals to be fairly rated
by a humorous annalist as so many sentimental medical students and
revolutionary tinkers, the crowd, that thronged Mrs. Boinville’s staircase
on her evenings of reception, doubtless held a far larger proportion of
well-mannered gentle people, who were all the better company because
their social crotchets declared them likely to die in a lunatic asylum.
Certainly it contained a fair proportion of clever and lovely girls, whose
mental and personal endowments may well have caused the principal poet of
the assemblies to recall with a sense of shame, how recently he had hung
upon the words of the Hurstpierpoint prophetess. It was at Mrs.
Boinville’s house that Shelley met the chosen and especially favoured
young ladies, with whom (after the departure of the other visitors) he
used to drink strong tea and converse on lofty themes from midnight to
early dawn, and sometimes from early dawn to broad daylight. On crossing
Piccadilly an hour or so after daybreak, as the market-carts rolled slowly
towards Covent Garden, it was natural for Shelley to wish his lodgings
were something nearer the house he visited at least once in every
twenty-four hours; and so wishing, it was natural for him to think it
would be well for his dear Harriett’s sake, that he should take lodgings
in Pimlico, so as to be able to drop in at any moment on the dear
Boinvilles for a short call, without leaving her for hours together during
the illness that would soon be upon her.

Though I cannot speak positively on the point, I have little doubt that
Mrs. Boinville’s was the house where Shelley, during this same London
season of 1813, caused much commotion by passing down a line of charming
young ladies (who were ranged on one side of the drawing-room for the
country dance), and closely examining the skin of each of the astonished
but unresisting damsels. It was not enough for Shelley to put his eyes
within a few inches of each young lady’s unconcealed developments, so as
to get the closest and clearest view of her neck, shoulders, and bosom. To
effect his purpose it was requisite to examine the parts, in which he was
greatly interested, by touch as well as by sight. It was not till, with
the look and air of a concern no less reverential than pitiful, he had
pressed and otherwise felt the skin of several necks, bosoms, and pairs of
shoulders, that the hostess, on seeing what he was about, caused him to
desist from his too intrusive observations, by assuring him with proper
earnestness and gravity, that no one of the lovely damsels standing before
him was suffering from elephantiasis.

For some days Shelley had been afflicted by a fancy that he had caught
that rare and terrible disease from an old woman, whom he had met in a
stage-coach, and for the preposterous magnitude of whose ankles he could
account only by assuming that she was afflicted with elephantiasis in the
legs. In vain was he assured by the doctors, whom he consulted on the
subject, that he had not caught elephantiasis, and that, had the old woman
been a sufferer from the disease in the degree he imagined, she could not
have endured the motion of the stage-coach. No doctor, no number of
conspiring doctors, could persuade him he had not caught elephantiasis, or
make him believe the signs of disease, so easily caught, could not be
detected in the skin of persons unaware of their deplorable condition. To
prove himself right on the first point, he was ever and again scrutinizing
his own skin. To show he was right on the second point, he seized every
opportunity of examining the skin of other people. Hence the extraordinary
examination of the young ladies, who, in their confidence in the rectitude
and innocency of his purpose, were willing to allow him any license
requisite for the completion of his inquiries.

Apocryphal biography requires us to believe that Shelley met another
disagreeable old woman in a stage-coach,--the old lady whom he at the same
time drove out of the carriage and her wits, by seating himself on the
floor of the vehicle, and ejaculating with passionate pathos--

  ‘For heaven’s sake, let us sit upon the ground,
  And tell sad stories of the death of kings!
  How some have been deposed, some slain in war,
  Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed,
  Some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping killed;
  All murdered.’

The story (known to every one) proceeds to tell how in her alarm at the
words, the thrilling accents in which they were delivered, and the
dolefully maniacal visage of their utterer, the poor old woman screamed to
the guard to open the door and allow her to escape from the company of the
raving lunatic, who wanted her to join with him in talking about kings and
their deaths in so disloyal a fashion; and how, on the door being opened,
she cleared herself out of the coach, with her basket of mellow apples and
her other basket of onions. There are several versions of this equally
piquant and doubtful story. To believe everything in Leigh Hunt’s
_Autobiography_, is to believe that the farce was originally enacted, to
the poor woman’s terror, in his presence _in_ ‘the Hampstead stage,’ as he
and Shelley were travelling by that vehicle into town. But even if it
could be proved that he had no part in the conception of the story, or in
the incidents out of which it grew, the fiction would be fitly given as an
example of the kind of humour that was acceptable to, perhaps, the least
humorous of our supremely great poets; for Shelley told the story so often
_of_ himself, that he eventually believed it as thoroughly as any of his
numerous fictions about himself.

Whilst Shelley was living in lodgings, and dating some of his letters from
Cooke’s Hotel, Dover Street, he met his father at least on one occasion in
society. The poet and Harriett were lodging in Half-Moon Street, when, on
coming there to dine with them by invitation, Hogg was received by
Harriett with excuses for the absence of her husband, who was dining at
Norfolk House. Having called in the morning at the house, to pay his
respects to the Duke, he was asked to return a few hours later to a dinner
party. Considerations of prudence having made him accept the invitation
Bysshe had gone to the dinner, leaving word that he would get away from
the great people at Norfolk House as soon as possible. In Bysshe’s
absence, therefore, Hogg dined with Harriett, who was reading aloud to him
over the tea-cups when, after much vehement rapping at the street door,
Shelley rushed into the room, ‘tumbling upstairs, with a mighty sound,
treading upon his nose, as I accused him of doing, and throwing off his
neckcloth, according to custom, stood staring about for some moments, as
wondering why he had been in such a hurry.’ At the Norfolk House dinner (a
large party of men) Percy, sitting at the bottom of the table, found
himself next the Earl of Oxford, who (according to Bysshe’s account of the
affair) inquired of him, ‘Who is that very strange old man at the top of
the table, sitting next his Grace, who talks so much, so loudly, and in so
extraordinary a manner, and all about himself?’

‘He is my father, and he is a very strange old man indeed!’ replied
Shelley, who, on coming away from Norfolk House, was accompanied to the
door of his lodgings by the Earl.

The Duke of Norfolk doubtless invited Bysshe to this dinner, in the hope
that the meeting of the father and son, at war since the early autumn of
1811, might result in their reconciliation, or at least dispose the
Squire to make the youngster a larger allowance, now that he was within a
few months of his majority, and likely to have a child in a few weeks. Of
course the Duke, under whose surveillance, influence, and approval, the
Squire of Field Place had acted towards his son since the spring of 1811,
was of opinion that Shelley should show larger consideration for his
father’s feelings, before asking for a more liberal share of his father’s
bounty; that concessions on the sire’s part must necessarily be preluded
by concessions and conciliatory assurances on the part of the son; that
the boy, in fact, must return clearly within the lines of filial
dutifulness, before looking to his father for paternal sympathy and
further pecuniary assistance. At the same time it may be assumed that
Shelley’s ‘wheedling letter,’ written from Tanyrallt, had caused the Duke
to think the youngster was returning to a reasonable frame of mind, and
had determined to make concessions and promises, that would probably end
in a satisfactory arrangement of his differences with his father. Hence it
came about that, perhaps before the end of April, certainly not much later
than the third week of May 1813, Shelley was in negotiation with his
father, for a reconciliation that would be beneficial to himself.

It is not surprising that these negotiations were fruitless of better
feeling between the father and the son. Since his elopement with Harriett
to Edinburgh, Shelley had certainly done nothing to appease his father’s
wrath. How far the Squire of Field Place had been kept _au courant_ with
his son’s doings in Dublin, at Lynton and Tanyrallt, does not appear; but
several circumstances countenance the opinion that of Shelley’s doings in
those places enough must have come to the Squire’s ears to confirm him in
his unfavourable opinion of his heir. As Shelley instructed Miss Hitchener
to send particulars of his doings in Dublin to the Sussex papers; as he
sent the same lady copies of his revolutionary broadside (the _Declaration
of Rights_) in order that they should be pasted on the walls of Sussex
farmers; as during his first sojourn in Ireland he was incessantly writing
to the lady letters, that may be presumed to have afforded much piquant
gossip to her Hurstpierpoint acquaintance; as Shelley was at other pains
to advertise his friends in Sussex of his Irish doings, the Squire of
Field Place must have heard enough of those doings, to be acutely annoyed
by them. It cannot have pleased him to hear in the summer of 1812, that
the young schoolmistress had deserted her employment, and gone off to live
with his son. Something had probably come to the Squire about that ugly
business in Lynton. As Shelley asked the Duke of Norfolk to provide money
for the Tremadoc Embankment, and seems to have sought in Sussex for other
subscribers to the fund, it must have come to the Squire’s knowledge, that
his son was busying himself with land-speculators in North
Wales;--information which could not fail to confirm the Squire in his
opinion, that old Sir Bysshe had done well to require by the codicil to
his will, that Percy should resettle the estates A and B, under pain of
forfeiting for himself and issue all the interest assigned to him and his
issue by the testament. What wonder that the negotiations came to nothing?

That they came to nothing before the end of May, 1813, we know from a
letter dated on the 26th day of that month by the Squire of Field Place to
his son:--The letter (to be found in _Notes and Queries_: Second Series,
vol. vi., p. 405) in which, after declining to have further communication
with his son, till the latter should show signs of a change for the
better, in respect ‘to some of the most unfavourable traits of his
character,’ the Squire of Field Place remarked that, had he not imagined
the change for the better to have already taken place, he should have
persisted in his resolution to receive no communication from his dear boy,
‘but through His Grace the Duke of Norfolk.’ Thus closing the
correspondence in terms less lucid than firm; the Member for New Shoreham
still declared himself to be his dear boy’s ‘affectionate father.’

With this epistle the negotiations appear to have come to an end. To those
who concur with Mr. Buxton Forman in thinking, that the author of _Queen
Mab_ and _Laon and Cythna_ might under favourable circumstances have been
‘the Saviour of the World,’ the Squire of Field Place of course appears
guilty of egregious impudence and irreverence in presuming to address his
sacred son so familiarly; and it must be confessed that ‘my dear Boy’
appears a most inappropriate description of a young gentleman, worthy of
being worshipt with the Deity. To persons, who concur with Mr. Froude, in
thinking any extravagances and indiscretions should have been pardoned in
Shelley, because he was young and enthusiastic, it must of course appear
that, on receiving his son’s assurance that he had changed for the better,
the Squire of Field Place should have hastened to Cooke’s Hotel, thrown
his arms about the dear boy’s neck, and settled two thousand a-year upon
him. To those of the Shelleyan enthusiasts who, because he lived to write
incomparably fine poetry, think Shelley must always have been as faultless
as his best verse, should never have been birched by the profane Keate,
should never have been called to order by his father, it naturally seems
insufferable insolence for a mere Member of Parliament, capable of writing
nothing loftier than a barely intelligible letter, to venture to lecture
so sublime a son on ‘the most unfavourable traits of his character.’ But
to sober persons, who can enjoy fine poetry without thinking its producers
demigods, it is not obvious why the poetic faculty should be held to
exempt its possessor from any of the obligations of morality, or why a
father should hesitate to reprove his son’s misconduct, because the
youngster gives promise of developing into a man of genius. Even by those
who recognize in Shelley’s character and career the resemblance which Mr.
Buxton Forman was the first to detect in them, it will be conceded that
the historic parallel would be closer, had the poet in his nonage shown
more consideration for the feelings of his parents, and greater readiness
to ‘be subject unto them.’

Of this brief letter nothing, perhaps, is more noteworthy than its
announcement that, had it not been for misapprehension respecting his
son’s temper and attitude, the writer should have declined to receive any
communication from him except ‘through his Grace the Duke of Norfolk,’ on
whom he relied for guidance in his chief domestic perplexity, no less than
for protection from any social censure and discredit, likely to ensue from
unjust reports of his action in respect to that trouble. After hearing so
much during the last thirty or forty years of the sufferings Shelley
endured from his father’s harshness and cruelty, it is well for the world
to glance at the other side of the story, and commiserate the pain and
shame that came to the Squire of Field Place from his son’s perversity and
malice. The man may well be compassionated who is constrained to put his
honour in the custody of another person, albeit of so august a personage
as a duke of the realm. A little sympathy is due to the father, who relied
on his patron to protect him from slanderous misrepresentation of his
parental character and conduct.

After perusing the epistle, that closed the fruitless negotiations,
Shelley sent it to the Duke of Norfolk with a ‘wheedling’ note (also to
be found in _Notes and Queries_: Second Series, vol. vi., p. 405) in
which, after suitable expressions of regret for the failure of the Duke’s
intervention, and similar expressions of gratitude for His Grace’s
sympathy and good offices, the writer observed,--

    ‘I was prepared to make my father every reasonable concession, but I
    am not so degraded and miserable a slave, as publicly to disavow an
    opinion which I believe to be true. Every man of common sense must see
    that a sudden renunciation of sentiments seriously taken up is as
    unfortunate a test of intellectual uprightness as can possibly be
    devised. I take the liberty of enclosing my father’s letter for your
    Grace’s inspection. I repeat what I have said from the commencement of
    this negociation, in which private communications from my father first
    induced me to engage, that I am willing to concede anything that is
    reasonable, anything that does not involve a compromise of that
    self-esteem without which life would be a burden and a disgrace.’

Had he written in this strain of the failure of the negotiation to William
Godwin or Hogg, or indeed to almost any one but the Duke of Norfolk,
cautious readers would hesitate to infer from the epistle that the Member
for New Shoreham had made any demand, so extreme as to justify in any
degree the poet’s way of referring to it. But in writing to the Duke whom
he knew to be cognizant of the terms offered to him by his father, it is
scarcely conceivable that Shelley permitted himself to speak of them in a
style, that was without even the faintest colour of justification. It does
not, however, follow that the Squire had any desire to reduce his son to
the position of a ‘degraded and miserable slave,’ or made any demand to
which no young man of honour and sensibility could assent, without losing
his self-respect.

In the absence of the evidence, which would alone qualify the reader to
take a judicial view of the Squire’s requirements, it may be assumed that
they comprised some stipulation which, having reference to his son’s
religious and political sentiments, and going further than the former
request for mere abstinence from public controversy, demanded some action
which Percy could regard as public recantation of his published opinions.
Possibly the unreasonable requirement was that, recalling to his hands
every recoverable copy of _Queen Mab_, he should destroy all copies of the
book within his reach, and promise never again to put the work, or any
similar work, in circulation. Shelley would not have failed to regard any
such condition, as a demand for his ‘sudden renunciation of sentiments
seriously taken up.’ The Shelleyan enthusiasts of course take the
expressions of the epistle literally, and argue from them that the
proposals he declined with so much spirit and generous resoluteness
involved some extravagant and humiliating concession, which should not
have been demanded of him. One of the strongest reasons for thinking the
zealots err on this point, is the certainty that no such extreme and
insolent demand would have been sanctioned by the Duke of Norfolk, whose
‘exalted mind’ determined the course taken by Mr. Timothy Shelley in the
business. I am prepared for evidence that the terms, so warmly rejected by
Shelley, were hard terms. But should sufficient evidence ever appear that,
in his growing irritation with a singularly exasperating son, the Squire
insisted on terms, that besides being hard were cruel and unreasonable, it
would still remain for readers to smile contemptuously at the Pecksniffian
style in which Shelley (the writer of wheedling letters, who did not blush
to declare to his familiar friend his deliberate intention of having
recourse to deception) wrote of himself in this particular epistle, as
though he were incapable of deviating by a hair’s breadth from the
straight path of truth.

Another point to be noticed in this curious epistle is Shelley’s
statement, that the futile negotiation, was a ‘negociation, in which
private communications from his father first induced him to engage.’ As
Shelley knew it to be within the Duke’s knowledge, whether the overtures
for the fruitless negotiation came from him to his father, or from his
father to him, he may be assumed to have written accurately respecting the
preliminary ‘private communications.’ It may therefore be taken for
certain that the Squire (acting doubtless at the Duke of Norfolk’s
instance) made the overtures to his son for a friendly settlement of their
differences;--a fact indicative of a disposition, rather than of an
indisposition, on the Squire’s part, to come to friendly terms with his
son. None the less certain, however, is it that Shelley himself (acting on
Hogg’s advice) was the person, who for purely selfish ends (to get money)
wrote the wheedling letter and made the insincere professions, which moved
the Duke of Norfolk to advise the Squire to approach his boy with
conciliatory overtures.

Three weeks after the fruitless negotiation, dating from Cooke’s Hotel
(though I have but little doubt that he and Harriett were living in
Pimlico, within a stone’s-throw of Maimuna’s drawing-room windows),
Shelley, in mid-June, asked Mr. Medwin to be his legal adviser, in respect
to the difficulties he would encounter on coming of age. ‘I know,’ he
wrote to the Horsham Lawyer, ‘that I am heir to large property. Now, are
the papers to be seen? Have you the least doubt that I am the sole heir to
a large landed property? Have you any certain knowledge on the subject?’

In spite of the decisiveness of the words, ‘I know that I am the heir to
large property,’ it is obvious, from the ensuing words, that, as his
twenty-first year neared its end, the poet realized vividly how small his
knowledge was of the nature and magnitude of the patrimony, about which he
had written and spoken so much, with equal looseness and boastfulness. He
begs his lawyer to say whether he has any doubt that he is the heir to a
large landed property. ‘Have you,’ he asks of the man of business, who was
his relative, and had formerly been in some degree cognizant of the
affairs of the Shelleys, though he may never have been greatly in the
confidence of either Sir Bysshe or Sir Bysshe’s son, ‘Have you any certain
knowledge on the subject?’ He would not have asked in this nervous style
for his attorney’s ‘certain knowledge on the subject,’ had he not been
himself painfully in want of such knowledge. Seventeen months since, he
had written confidently to William Godwin, ‘I am heir by entail to an
estate of 6000_l._ per annum;’ and now in mid-June, 1813, he is writing
almost with the excitement of panic to the Horsham lawyer, ‘Have you any
certain knowledge on the subject?’ It seems as though the nervous creature
were possessed by a fear that he might, after all his fine talk, find
himself heir to nothing,--the fool of a fool’s paradise,--the dupe of a
long, delightful, golden dream, passing away quickly in the chilling dawn
of penury. Of course, any such state of alarm was transient. He had
sufficient grounds for believing himself the heir (somehow or other) to
considerable property. At the same time, he was painfully alive to his
need of precise information respecting the property.

Four or five days later (21st June, 1813), after receiving a letter of
reassuring information from Mr. Medwin, he wrote to the lawyer, ‘Depend
upon it, that no artifice of my father’s shall induce me to take a
life-interest in the estate;’--words, seeming to indicate that the lawyer
(who had lent him money, and was otherwise interested in encouraging him
to surrender nothing of his estate) had already been instructing him to
disappoint his grandfather’s and father’s design to compass the
re-entailment of the property. ‘I feel with sufficient force,’ the writer
continues, in respect to the proposal that he should take a life-interest
in the estate, ‘that I should not by such conduct be guilty alone of
injustice to myself, but to those who have assisted me by kind offices and
advice during my adversity:’--_i.e._ those who had lent him money during
his minority.

Six days after the date of this last-mentioned letter, Harriett gave birth
to her first-born child, who was named Ianthe Eliza, the second of the two
names indicating that Miss Westbrook continued to hold her sister’s
affection, and to have an influence in her brother-in-law’s home, after he
had come to regard her with a dislike, that developed rapidly into
unqualified aversion. That Hogg was right in thinking the child was born
in Pimlico, instead of Dover Street, I have little doubt, though
immediately before and after the birth Shelley was dating letters from
Cooke’s Hotel.

The question has been raised whether Shelley ever felt any strong
affection for Harriett’s daughter, though he spoke and wrote passionately
of the barbarous decree of the Court of Chancery, that declared him unfit
to have any part in the child’s education. It has also been questioned
whether Harriett ever delighted in the little girl, who suffered from a
congenital defect of one of her eyes, that was at least in some degree
removed by the surgical operation, which afforded Mrs. Shelley an
opportunity of displaying her self-control or insensibility, less to the
admiration than to the astonishment of the surgeon who, after vainly
endeavouring to persuade her to be absent whilst the patient was under the
knife, was surprised at the apparent indifference with which she heard the
cries and regarded the sufferings of the infant. It would, however, be
unjust to draw conclusions unfavourable to Harriett from her demeanour on
this occasion; for she may have been moved by maternal solicitude to
remain in the room during the operation, and having decided to remain
there, she was bound by care for her child’s welfare and the surgeon’s
convenience, to keep her feelings under command. Nor should any positive
inference to Harriett’s disadvantage be drawn from the fact, that,
instead of being suckled by her mother, little Ianthe took her first
nourishment from a wet-nurse; for though her _accouchement_ was an easy
affair, from which she recovered quickly, Harriett may have been compelled
to employ a nurse to discharge a duty, which she would have been only too
glad to perform personally. Again, though Hogg attributed the weakness to
her shame at knowing ‘that one so nearly connected with herself was not
perfectly beautiful,’ Harriett’s sensitiveness in respect to her infant’s
slight facial deformity,--a sensitiveness that caused her to shrink from
showing the child even to so intimate a friend as her husband’s future
biographer, may have originated in maternal tenderness, quite as much as
in wounded maternal vanity. Still, though no one of them would warrant an
unhesitating inference to her disadvantage, and all of them are
susceptible of explanation that would relieve her maternal character of
the imputation resulting from them, it must be admitted that the morbid
sensitiveness, the employment of the wet-nurse, and the extraordinary
self-possession or apathy during the operation, are three facts, to
justify a suspicion that the young mother was deficient in parental
tenderness.

But to prove that her nature was defective in this respect, would raise no
presumption that she was characterized by similar coldness towards her
husband. The presumption would, indeed, be in the contrary direction; for
instances are afforded at every turn to the social observer, of women who,
whilst cold to their offspring, are passionately devoted to their
husbands. There is no evidence that Harriett ever evinced any
extraordinary devotion to her husband, or any love of him surpassing a
girl’s ordinary liking for a youthful husband. Having regard to all the
circumstances of her married life,--circumstances peculiarly unfavourable
to the development of the domestic affections,--most readers of this page
will concur with me in holding, that it would have been very strange, had
Harriett loved her husband in the highest conceivable degree, or indeed
with any fervour surpassing the warmth of ordinary conjugal attachment.
Still, in justice to her, it should be borne in mind that a young woman
may be at the same time a coldly amiable mother and a passionately loving
wife.

It would be more important to ascertain, in what degree Shelley was
animated by parental affectionateness. On this point the authorities are
in conflict. Whilst Hogg thought his friend singularly wanting in parental
tenderness and emotionality, so far as Ianthe was concerned, Peacock
declares Shelley to have been ‘extremely fond’ of Ianthe when she was an
infant-in-arms. To put implicit confidence in Hogg is to believe that
Ianthe’s arrival neither ‘afforded’ her father ‘any gratification,’ nor
‘created an interest’ in him. Never _speaking_ to Hogg of the infant,
Shelley never _wrote_ to him about her, except in the single letter, dated
from Bracknell on 16th March, 1814, where he rails against his
sister-in-law as ‘a blind and loathsome worm,’ even as he had formerly in
an epistle to the same correspondent railed against the Brown Demon, who,
after being worshipt by him for her angelic excellencies, became in a few
months ‘the hermaphroditical beast of a woman.’

On the other hand, in support of his opinion that Shelley was ‘extremely
fond’ of Ianthe, Peacock tells how the father ‘would walk up and down a
room with it in his arms for a long time together, singing to it a
monotonous melody of his own making.’ Peacock says further, ‘His song was,
_Yáhmani, Yáhmani, Yáhmani, Yáhmani!_ It did not please me; but, what was
more important, it pleased the child, and lulled it when it was fretful.
Shelley was extremely fond of his children. He was pre-eminently an
affectionate father.’ To most readers Peacock’s example of the poet’s
parental tenderness will fail to prove the large allegation that he ‘was
pre-eminently an affectionate father.’ Ordinary humanity and selfishness
will account for the pains he took to lull the child, as he could not fly
to Maimuna’s drawing-room whenever it raised its sharp, wailing cry. To do
what Shelley did, is only to do what is done by almost every young father
who, with a babe in his home, has not a good nursery at a convenient
distance from the room he inhabits, but must perforce endure its screams
or make it leave off screaming.

Fortunately there is another witness to be called, who is in some respects
a better witness than either Peacock or Hogg; for, on making his
observations, he had come to a period of life entitling him to be credited
with more discretion than either of them possessed in 1813. Moreover, in
1822, when, Trelawny knew the poet, Shelley had arrived at a period of
life when parental love is invariably stronger than at manhood’s
threshold, and in burying his eldest boy by Mary Godwin, had made
acquaintance with the sorrow that never fails to quicken the sufferer’s
disposition to love his offspring. On the other hand, it must be admitted,
somewhat to his discredit, that this witness opens his evidence with a
most erroneous statement. A clever man of the world, and a shrewd student
of character, Trelawny came to a confident opinion that Shelley was not
the ‘pre-eminently affectionate father’ Peacock declares him. Trelawny’s
testimony to this point is weakened by the fact that he prefaced it with a
declaration which no student of the poet’s story will hesitate to reject
as wrong. On 22nd April, 1872, towards the close of his career, Trelawny
reiterated to Mr. Rossetti an opinion, which he had expressed on previous
occasions, ‘that Shelley cared nothing for children;’ and in illustration
of the poet’s comparative indifference for his own child, told how in his
presence ‘Shelley stepped over his own child, Percy, near the threshold of
the house, without observing that it was Percy until the nurse told him.’
On this occasion, to Trelawny’s jocular reference to the proverbial saying
that a man must be wise to know his own children, the poet remarked, ‘A
wise man wouldn’t have any.’

In saying that Shelley cared nothing for children, Trelawny, of course,
made a mistake, showing how little the shrewd man of the world knew of the
poet; a mistake to be regarded as a rash inference from insufficient data.
To remember how Shelley fed the little girl with bread-and-milk at Oxford;
to remember how the troop of nakedized children rushed downstairs on
hearing his rap at the street-door; to remember how he nursed Allegra in
her infancy, rolled the billiard-balls about the table with her at Venice,
and raced at her heels along the passages of the Bagna Cavallo convent; to
remember all the pleasant stories of his intercourse with little people,
is to remember how he resembled Byron in liking to make playmates of
children. But, though Shelley certainly cared enough for children to enjoy
their prattle, it does not follow that Trelawny (an honest and
unimaginative man) is otherwise than a good witness to facts which took
place under his eyes. Wrong in the mere matter of opinion, he holds the
confidence of his hearers when he speaks to facts. Few readers will
hesitate in accepting the Cornish gentleman’s evidence that he saw Shelley
step over his little boy, and could remember Shelley did not recognize the
minute urchin till the nurse spoke to him. The man, who, on stumbling
over the infant, failed to recognize his own two-years-old child (a child
ever about the house; a child with whom he had played for hours together
in the previous year) cannot have been a father, in whom parental instinct
was strongly operative. Such a man may be a conscientious and beneficent
parent, but it is impossible for him to be a pre-eminently affectionate
father to his children during their tender infancy. To enjoy playing with
children is not the same thing as to love them. A kindly man will soothe
them when they are fretful, and yet feel for them no sort of tenderness
that is akin to parental affection. That Peacock inferred too much from
Shelley’s practice of nursing and lulling Ianthe, appears from the fact
that at Marlow he acted in the same way to Allegra.

To say that parental affection was not powerful in Shelley is not to raise
a question respecting his general elevation of character, for the mere
strength and activity of the parental sentiment afford no data for
estimating the degree in which a man is endowed with the higher virtues.
The mean and selfish often delight in their children, and on the other
hand the humane and lofty-natured are sometimes by no means remarkable for
solicitude for their own offspring. Why then am I at so much pains to call
attention to the evidence that Shelley was not strongly interested in his
first-born child, and that in this particular Harriett resembled him? In
order that, whilst considering the circumstances which resulted in the
poet’s separation from his wife, the reader may remember there is no
reason for thinking the youthful couple were strongly influenced by the
affection, that so often draws a husband and wife into stronger sympathy,
and sometimes counteracts the forces that, but for it, would drive them
asunder.

It was probably before Harriett’s accouchement, and whilst her physical
condition, without disposing her to keep indoors, rendered bodily exercise
more and more trying to her, that Shelley gave his wife the carriage which
afforded Hogg the materials for one of his drollest anecdotes. How the
carriage was horsed, and in what way the occupant of lodgings procured the
servants needful for putting the vehicle on the London pavement, does not
appear. Probably the requisite men and animals were provided on credit by
the keeper of the livery-yard where the carriage was housed. It is,
however, certain that, instead of being ‘jobbed,’ the vehicle was bought
by Shelley of a coach-maker, who had not parted with the coach many weeks
when he sued his customer for its price, one of the consequences of the
tradesman’s efforts to get his money being that Hogg, through the
blundering of a brace of bailiffs, was momentarily arrested on the writ
issued for his friend’s apprehension. The coach-builder’s action shows
clearly that, in selling the carriage to Shelley, he imagined himself
selling it to a customer of legal age. It does not, however, follow that
Shelley made any misstatement of his years in order to get possession of
the vehicle. On buying the carriage, it was, of course, incumbent on him
to let the tradesman know he was dealing with a minor; and it is
conceivable that Shelley either spoke to the man in terms which should
have enlightened him on this point, or had reason for believing the
tradesman knew him to be under age. Had Shelley been heir to an estate,
into the actual possession of which he would come a few months later, the
purchase of the coach would have been no act of egregious imprudence, but
as the estate to which he might eventually succeed would not come to him
till the death of his father, the poet’s action in setting up his
carriage, when he was deeply in debt, and had no income apart from the
precarious 400_l._, may be fairly called a droll extravagance.


9.--BRACKNELL.

Under the circumstances, no reader will suspect Lady Shelley of wanting
evidence to support her statement that, in the summer of 1813, ‘Shelley
was in severe pecuniary distress.’ However successful they may be in
getting credit and staving off their creditors, people who live showily on
just nothing a-year are usually in severe pecuniary distress. What with
the cost of producing 250 copies of _Queen Mab_ on fine paper, the cost of
lodgings in so fashionable a thoroughfare as Half-Moon Street, the
expenses of Harriett’s carriage, the fees to the taciturn Quaker physician
who attended her, and now the wages of Ianthe’s wet-nurse, Shelley
certainly lived in London from April to mid-July as extravagantly as he
had lived at Tanyrallt. It is, therefore, conceivable that, before ‘going
out of town,’ Shelley often found himself sorely in want of a five-pound
note, a sovereign, ay, even of half-a-crown.

Conceivable also is it that Shelley imagined he could retrench his
expenses at Bracknell, and that therefore Lady Shelley may be in
possession of documentary evidence that he spoke of his migration to
Bracknell as an economical movement. But writing ‘from authentic sources’
of information, Lady Shelley can scarcely have been justified in writing
of her husband’s father that, ‘for the purpose of economy, he retired to a
small cottage in Berkshire,’ as though he went to Bracknell solely for
cheap rural existence. Shelley went to Bracknell in order to be near
Maimuna, who had her country-house there. Lady Shelley, with her
‘authentic sources,’ cannot have been unaware that the youthful poet moved
to Bracknell for the enjoyment of gentle and soothing intercourse with
Maimuna. It is inconceivable that Lady Shelley never heard of Maimuna, her
home at Bracknell, and Shelley’s passion for her. Yet she represents that
Shelley’s motive for going to Bracknell was purely economical. There is no
reference to Maimuna in the whole of Lady Shelley’s book. It is thus that
Shelley’s extravagant admirers produce biography of him from ‘authentic
sources.’

Taking a cottage at Bracknell, in order to be near Mrs. Boinville,
Shelley, during his tenure of the ‘High Elms,’ lived in a way that,
instead of being economical, might almost be styled prodigal. He made a
costly trip to Edinburgh and the English lakes, posting in his carriage.
He was frequently running from the Berkshire parish up to town, journeying
sometimes on foot, but necessarily spending money or running deeper into
debt for accommodation at London hotels. At least, on one occasion, he had
seven guests staying with him in his Berkshire cottage at the same time,
the whole family of the vegetarian Newtons. It is true that Shelley at
this period of his career was a vegetarian, and abstained from wine and
all spirits, except the spirit that came to him through the neck of the
laudanum-bottle; but at times during this term he drank laudanum freely,
and laudanum, bought of West-London druggists, is no cheap drink. There
was not much economy in this way of living.

There is a conflict between the authorities as to the particular year in
which Shelley paid his last visit to Field Place; for whilst Hogg
represents the visit to have been made in the early summer of 1814, Lady
Shelley is no less certain that it was an affair of the late summer of
1813. Though with all his inaccuracy Hogg is much less inaccurate than
Lady Shelley, several circumstances cause me to think the lady right on
this point, albeit two or three matters dispose me to think she may have
been mistaken. The balance of the evidence is, however, so greatly in her
favour that (whilst cautioning readers that they may even yet be required
to postpone the visit into the following year) I venture to record that,
soon after migrating to Bracknell, Shelley started from his cottage on
foot for his old home, whither his mother had invited him to come in the
absence of his father and the three younger children.

At Field Place the poet was received cordially by his mother and two
eldest sisters, and had the society of Mr. Kennedy, a young officer
(_ætat._ 16) stationed at Horsham, to whose pen we are indebted for the
greater part of what is known of Bysshe’s last visit to his former home.
From this chronicler it appears that Bysshe accepted his mother’s
invitation on the understanding that his father and the younger children
would be away, and that his visit would be withheld from the Squire’s
knowledge. There are, however, grounds for suspecting that the Squire on
leaving his home for a few days was aware who would visit it in his
absence, though Shelley came to Field Place under the impression that, to
shield his mother from the wrath that would visit her in case of
discovery, he must take care to keep his presence at the house from the
cognizance of neighbours.

Some thirty or more years later Captain Kennedy recalled how, before
setting out for a walk beyond the limits of the Field Place demesne, he (a
sixteen-years-old ensign) and the poet used to exchange their outer
garments, so that the disguise of a scarlet uniform should render the
Warnham peasants less likely to recognize their Squire’s son. It lived in
Captain Kennedy’s recollection how, though he had a small pate, his
military cap was so much too large for Percy that it was found needful to
pad the lining liberally for his use. But because Shelley saw a necessity
for dressing himself out in this fashion, and, doubtless, enjoyed the fun
of masquerading about the Warnham lanes in a red coat, it does not follow
there was any need for the disguise. That Captain Kennedy resembled the
biographer for whose benefit he racked his recollection, and all other
persons who try to recall clearly what they can only remember vaguely, in
permitting his fancy to aid his memory, appears from one or two passages
of his entertaining narrative. Though the exchange of costumes was a
matter to live in the memory of either masquerader, it is difficult to
believe the Captain could recollect (some thirty or forty years
afterwards) that Shelley wore ‘an old black coat,’ which had been ‘done
up, and smartened with metal buttons and a velvet collar.’ To believe all
the Captain says about this seedy and re-trimmed garment, is to believe
that Shelley (the young gentleman who a few weeks since had set up his
carriage) dressed thus meanly because he was too generous ever to have any
money in his pocket, and too precisely honourable to run in debt.

A passage from the Captain’s narrative, as it was originally offered to
the world in Hogg’s second volume, may be given both as an example of the
deponent’s evidence, and as an illustration of the editorial carelessness
by which Hogg enabled his enemies to charge him with falsifying
documents:--

    ‘He told me,’ says Captain Kennedy, ‘Sir James was intimate with one
    to whom, as he said, he owed everything; from whose book, _Political
    Justice_, he had derived all that was valuable in knowledge and
    virtue. He discoursed with eloquence and enthusiasm, but his views
    seemed to me exquisitely metaphysical, and by no means clear, precise,
    or decided. He told me he had already read the Bible in Hebrew four
    times. He was then only twenty-two years of age. _Shelley never learnt
    Hebrew; he probably said in Greek, for he was much addicted to reading
    the Septuagint._ He spoke of the Supreme Being as of infinite mercy
    and benevolence. He disclosed no fixed views of spiritual things; all
    seemed wild and fanciful.’

Observe the words of the extract which I have printed in italics. To any
careful peruser of those words and their context, it is obvious that the
words, though printed as a substantial part of the Captain’s narrative,
were not penned by him. The words ‘twenty-two years of age,’ that
immediately precede them, and the words ‘He spoke of the Supreme Being,’
that follow them immediately, are words of the Captain’s writing. But he
cannot be imagined to have written the words, ‘Shelley never learnt
Hebrew; he probably said in Greek, for he was much addicted to reading the
Septuagint.’ The interpolation is one of Hogg’s editorial notes, which he
intended to be printed between brackets and duly ‘initialed.’ Printed
thus, ‘(Shelley never learnt Hebrew; he probably said in Greek, for he was
much addicted to reading the Septuagint. T. J. H.)’ the interpolation
could not have been maliciously declared a falsification of the text.

When Lady Shelley, after staying Hogg’s work midway and discharging him
with public discourtesy, produced her not invariably accurate _Shelley
Memorials_, she reproduced Hogg’s portions of Captain Kennedy’s narrative
with alterations in amendment, omitting (as she surely had a right to do)
Hogg’s editorial interpolation; omitting Captain Kennedy’s words ‘in
Hebrew’ (which she surely had no right to do without stating she had the
Captain’s authority for doing so), and changing ‘twenty-two years old’
into ‘twenty years’ (an alteration she would have been fully justified in
making on the strength of sufficient documentary evidence without
consulting Captain Kennedy on the point). One point more in respect to
Captain Kennedy’s narrative. As Shelley had no sure belief in the
existence of the Supreme Deity at this period of his existence, it must be
concluded either that he did not speak of the Supreme Being’s infinite
mercy and benevolence in the manner alleged by Captain Kennedy, or that
he, in so speaking, was insincere.

In connection with Shelley’s last visit to his home a few words may be
here said more appropriately than they would have been said in a previous
chapter. In the letter written by Shelley on 26th November, 1811, from
Keswick to Mr. Medwin, Sen., appear these words:--

    ‘Whitton has written to me to state the impropriety of my letter to my
    mother and sister; this letter I have returned with a passing remark
    on the back of it. I find that the affair on which those letters spoke
    is become the general gossip of the idle newsmongers of Horsham--they
    give me credit for having invented it. They do my invention much
    honour, but greatly discredit their own penetration.’

From these words it is obvious that Shelley, before 26th November, 1811,
had written to his mother and sister a letter that appeared to his father
an epistle, to be answered by the family solicitor, Mr. Whitton. It is
also obvious that the letter, so answered by the family solicitor, and the
letter written in reply to it by the same solicitor, related to some
affair which, on coming to the knowledge of certain persons of Horsham,
had caused them to declare it no true affair, but a thing invented by
Shelley. Apart from this information respecting the affair which Horsham
people declared a falsehood, I know nothing, except that Medwin (_vide_
_Life_, p. 169, 170) speaks of it thus:--

    ‘The affair here referred to is little to the purpose; but during Sir
    Timothy’s absence in London, on his parliamentary duties, Lady
    Shelley invited Shelley to Field Place, where he was received, to use
    his own words, with much _shew-affection_. Some days after he had been
    there his mother produced a parchment deed which she asked him to
    sign, to what purport I know not; but he declined so doing, and which
    he told me he would have signed had he not seen through the false
    varnish of hypocritical caresses. This anecdote is not idle gossip,
    but comes from Shelley himself.’

If Shelley had the folly in or before his twentieth year to write or say
that, when only just nineteen years old or younger, he was at a private
conference between them entreated by his mother to sign a legal
instrument, which she then and there produced for him to sign, the Horsham
gossip-mongers on coming to hear the story may well have burst out
laughing and declared it an invention. But till I have better evidence to
the point than this statement by Medwin, I must decline to believe that
his note describes accurately ‘the affair,’ which occasioned the exchange
of letters, though I am quite prepared to find that the correspondence
referred to some cock-and-bull story. I cannot, however, refuse to believe
that Shelley, on being spoken to about the passage of the Keswick letter,
did really give the explanation which Medwin declares he received from
Shelley himself. Medwin’s inexactness is proverbial. He is almost as
inaccurate as Lady Shelley. But none of his inaccuracies, nor all of them
taken together, raise suspicion of his good faith. He was gullible and at
times curiously addle-pated; but he was no inventor of untruths. When the
errors of his book about Byron raised an outcry, he could produce
note-books to show he was an honest collector of gossip, though a
credulous and undiscerning one. The wild fictions of the _Conversations_
were not Medwinian falsehoods, but pure Byronic ‘bams.’ Distrustful though
I am of Medwin’s statements, I have no mistrust of his honour. When he
gives me his word of honour that a certain statement was made to him, I
neither doubt that some such statement was made, nor doubt that he reports
honestly, though with a greater or less degree of inexactness. I do not
question that Shelley spoke to him about the affair, and the passage of
the Keswick letter; and I am disposed to think that, on being questioned
about the passage of the epistle, Shelley may have imagined it to refer,
and said that it referred, to some vaguely remembered matter, which
instead of taking place in 1811 was an incident of his last visit to Field
Place in 1813.

Be it remembered that two distant cousins and close companions have
several points of mental resemblance; one of them being the inexactitude
that renders Medwin’s volumes so comparatively worthless, and Shelley’s
soberest statements about his personal story so unreliable. It is
conceivable that what Shelley said about his mother’s endeavour to lure
him into signing a parchment-deed, was his vague and inexact recollection
of some incident of his last visit to the old home. Of course, it is not
to be imagined she produced a legal instrument and asked him to put his
signature forthwith to the writing. But it is conceivable that, feeling
with her husband on the question of entailing the estate, and knowing the
purport of the memorable October, 1811, codicil of Sir Bysshe’s will
(which would require her son to join in the entailment of the estates A
and B on pain of forfeiting all interest in his grandsire’s much larger
possessions) she undertook to use her influence to win from him a written
promise, that he would in due course join in the arrangement, which was
desired by his parents even more for his sake than for the sake of ‘the
family.’ What more natural than for the lady to say to her husband, ‘Leave
me to deal with Bysshe, and I will do my best to persuade him to act
rightly’?

In the autumn following this last visit to Field Place (if Lady Shelley is
right in assigning the visit to the summer of 1813, which I think her to
be), or the autumn preceding the same visit (if Hogg is right in ascribing
the visit to the early summer of 1814), Shelley,--moving about for the
sake of change, and also perhaps because domestic considerations made him
feel it would be well for him to pass a few weeks at a distance from
Maimuna’s abode,--made the already mentioned trip to Scotland and the
Cumberland lakes, with his wife, Miss Westbrook, and Thomas Love Peacock.
At Edinburgh on 21st October, 1813, the tourists were still there on 26th
November, 1813, when Shelley wrote Hogg a letter containing six
superlatively noteworthy words in this otherwise noteworthy sentence:

    ‘I am happy to hear that you have returned to London, as I shall
    shortly have the pleasure of seeing you again. _I shall return to
    London alone._ My evenings will often be spent at the N’s, where, I
    presume, you are no unfrequent visitor.’

Though no critic has hitherto called attention to the general inaccuracy
of her misleading book, Lady Shelley had scarcely published her _Shelley
Memorials: From Authentic Sources_, when she was assailed with unusual
severity for the utter wrongness of a particular statement which, had it
not been for the context, would have deserved no reprehension. On coming
to speak of Shelley’s severance from Harriett, Lady Shelley gives these
words in a separate paragraph:--

    ‘Towards the close of 1813 estrangements, which for some time had been
    slowly growing between Mr. and Mrs. Shelley, came to a crisis.
    Separation ensued; and Mrs. Shelley returned to her father’s house.
    Here she gave birth to her second child--a son, who died in 1826.’

Had Mr. Peacock objected to this curious specimen of close writing that,
by omitting all reference to the graver estrangements of the earlier
months of 1814, Lady Shelley gave her readers the erroneous impression
that the estrangements and crisis of 1813 were the immediate and only
cause of the separation that took place towards the middle of the ensuing
year, he would have had the general concurrence of discreet and critical
readers of the Shelleyan story. But Peacock contended that no
estrangements had occurred in 1813 between Shelley and Harriett, and that
therefore no estrangements between them could have come to a crisis
towards the close of that year. ‘Thus,’ says Mr. Peacock, ‘there had been
no estrangement to the end of 1812. My own memory sufficiently attests
that there was none in 1813,’--strong and notable language from the
eminent man of letters, who, accompanying the Shelleys to the Cumberland
lakes, Edinburgh, and other places (including Matlock), in October and
November, was their close companion till the end of the year; very notable
language from the man who was the daily companion of the youthful husband
and wife in the northern capital, whence Shelley dated the letter to Hogg
containing those six words, ‘I shall return to London alone.’

To apprehend the significance of these six words, readers must remember
that in 1813 a journey to Edinburgh was a more laborious and costly affair
than a trip to Rome in these days of punctual steamers and fast trains. If
a party of four persons,--a young husband with his young wife,
sister-in-law, and a male friend,--should start now-a-days from London for
a trip to Rome, with the intention of staying there six weeks, and before
the expiration of the time the young husband (being no man of affairs,
likely to call him suddenly back to England) should write to a familiar
friend in London, ‘I shall shortly have the pleasure of seeing you again.
I shall return to London alone,’ what inference would the receiver of the
epistle naturally draw from so startling an announcement? Surely he would
conclude that there was discord in the party, that ‘something had gone
wrong,’ and that the disagreement affected the young wife’s relations with
her husband, who had resolved to return to England by himself, leaving her
to follow him.

On reviewing the chief features of the poet’s life at Bracknell in the
summer and early autumn, no reader can question that they indicated on
Shelley’s part discontent with his home, and on Harriett’s part more or
less annoyance at finding herself an insufficient companion for him. In
her rural retirement she had even less of his society than when they were
in London. Most of the time spent by him at home he spent with a book or
pen in hand. As soon as he had done reading and writing, he took his hat
and went for a solitary walk that, wherever else his path led him, never
failed to take him to Maimuna’s house standing at a considerable distance
from Harriett’s cottage:--to the house of the woman whom he regarded and
declared ‘the most admirable specimen of a human being he had ever seen.’
Going daily to Mrs. Boinville’s house, he spent hours at a time with her,
reading poetry and philosophy with her, communing with her on fine
questions touching the perfectibility of the human species, and still more
delicate questions about the source, nature, and activity of the emotional
energies,--conversations that afforded him daily opportunities, for
studying ‘the extreme subtlety and delicacy of Mrs. Boinville’s
understanding and affections.’ If he went to her house in the evening it
was no uncommon thing for him to stay with her and her friends, talking
and drinking strong tea till long after midnight, and to re-enter his
cottage at dawn. Consulting Maimuna on the affairs of his highest
intellectual interests, he consulted her also on his divers domestic
anxieties and mere matters of the house. Is it conceivable that Harriett
liked all this?

In her annoyance at Percy’s devotion to his spiritual bride, the whiteness
of Maimuna’s tresses afforded Harriett little comfort. To the young wife
it was a poor consolation to reflect that the enchantress was old enough
to be Percy’s mother, that he valued her chiefly for the subtlety of her
intellect and the delicacy of her affections, that he worshiped her
platonically. Of given forces, acting under certain conditions, the
scientist can predict the consequences with unerring precision. The
chemist does not require evidence of what ensued from the combination of
particular elements in stated proportions. In like manner the competent
personal historian knows what must have resulted from certain positions.
Without direct documentary evidence to their existence, Lady Shelley would
have been justified in saying that towards the close of 1813
‘estrangements had been slowly growing between Mr. and Mrs. Shelley,’ and
that the estrangements came at that time to _a_ crisis. But she had
documentary evidence for both assertions. Towards the close of 1813
Shelley wrote those six words to Hogg, ‘I shall return to London alone.’

If Peacock knew nothing of these dissensions, it only shows that Shelley
and Harriett had the good taste and discretion to keep their discord from
his cognizance. It is, however, conceivable that he was aware of the
Edinburgh dissensions, without regarding them of sufficient magnitude to
be termed estrangements. A subsequent passage of his second Shelleyan
paper indicates that this was the case. There are, of course,
estrangements and estrangements; and it is usual for conjugal
estrangements to have several crises before coming to the extreme
crisis--of separation. An estrangement may be nothing more than a serious
quarrel, which, though ‘made up,’ results in a weakening of mutual
affection; it may be a more or less complete alienation of affection,
unattended with personal severance, or even any wish for personal
severance; it may be such a state of discord as quickly results in
personal severance; it may be the total cessation of all intercourse.
Peacock was obviously thinking of one or the other of the two most
aggravated kinds of estrangement when he wrote, ‘There was no
estrangement; no shadow of a thought of separation, till Shelley became
acquainted, not long after the second marriage, with the lady who was
subsequently his second wife.’ Peacock may have been right in this
opinion, and certainly had fairly good grounds for it, though I question
whether they were sufficient. But if he, using the word in one of its
extreme senses, was justified in holding his opinion, it would still
remain that Lady Shelley, using the word in one of the less vehement
senses, was justified in speaking of the estrangements, which came to _a_
crisis before the end of 1813. But even so, Lady Shelley was wrong in
writing so as to lead her readers to infer that the crisis of 1813 was
the direct and immediate cause of the separation of 1814.

One of the noteworthy facts connected with Shelley’s journey in the autumn
of 1813 to the Cumberland lakes, and Edinburgh, is that he made the trip
in his own carriage drawn by post horses,--the costliest way of travelling
seventy years since. In London he could get horses from a livery-stable on
credit; but for post-horses taken for the stage, ‘the immediate heir to
one of the first fortunes of England’ must have paid at once. As Peacock
was at that time a poor man of letters he cannot be supposed to have
contributed anything towards the cost of the journey, though he possibly
paid his own hotel-bills. The charges of the trip must have fallen
chiefly, if not altogether, on Shelley,--the young gentleman who, at this
term of his career, is represented as wearing furbished-up clothes,
because he could not afford to buy new ones. Mr. Medwin, of Horsham, could
probably have told how his youthful client obtained the money that enabled
him to execute this feat of prodigality.

Before the present narrative deals with incidents of 1814 notice should be
taken of a trivial literary performance, and a piece of important literary
labour, that pertain to the record of the year in which the poet attained
his majority. Reprinting the Vegetarian Note to _Queen Mab_, with a few
alterations and additions of no moment, he published it in the form of a
tract that was offered for sale by a medical bookseller at eighteen pence
a copy; the date of publication being subsequent to the secret issue of
the poem. To the later months of the same year may also be attributed the
labour of writing the _Refutation of Deism_, which is believed to have
been published (at least in the _legal_ sense of the term) at the
beginning of 1814,--the year given on the title-page.




CHAPTER VIII.

FROM THE OLD TO THE NEW LOVE.

    Shelley’s Refusal to join in the Resettlement of A and B--His Places
    of Residence in Two Years and Eight Months--_A Refutation of
    Deism_--Mr. Kegan Paul’s Inaccuracies--Discord between Shelley and
    Harriett--Their Remarriage--Miss Westbrook’s Withdrawal--Shelley’s
    Desertion of Harriett--The Desertion closes in Separation by mutual
    Agreement--‘Do what other women do!’--Causes of the Separation--How
    Shelley’s Evidence touching them should be regarded--Peacock’s
    Testimony for Harriett--Shelley in Skinner Street--‘The Mask of
    Scorn’--Mary Godwin _not_ bred up to mate in Free Contract--Old St.
    Pancras Church--At Mary Wollstonecraft’s Grave--Claire’s Part in the
    Wooing--Excuses for Mary Godwin--The Elopement from Skinner
    Street--From London to Dover--From Dover to Calais--A ‘Scene’ at
    Calais--The Joint Journal--Mrs. Shelley convicted of Tampering with
    Evidence--The Six Weeks’ Tour--Shelley begs Harriett to come to him in
    Switzerland--Byron’s Hunger for Evil Fame--Shelley’s Self-Approbation
    and Self-Righteousness--Godwin’s Wrath with Shelley--Their subsequent
    Relations--Shelley’s Renewal of Intercourse with Harriett--Tiffs and
    Disagreements between Claire and Mary--Claire’s Incapacity for
    Friendship--She wants more than Friendship from Shelley.


On coming of age, Shelley was pressed to join in the resettlement of the
estates A and B, in accordance with the directions of his grandfather’s
will and codicil. Instead of yielding to this pressure, he firmly refused
to join in the arrangement on which his father and grandfather were set;
and by so refusing he forfeited for himself and issue all the interest
assigned to him and them, in the far larger property, by the will. The
choice was given to him to elect between surrendering the estate secured
to him by existing settlements, and taking in lieu thereof the position
and interest appointed to him by his grandfather’s will in the greater
estate, or retaining his interest in A and B, and foregoing participation
alike for himself and issue in C. Shelley deliberately elected to hold
what was already secured to him, and to forego all interest under his
grandfather’s will. On 21st June, 1813, he wrote to Mr. Medwin, Senr., in
his own perverse way about what was his _grandfather’s_ arrangement:
‘Depend upon it, that no artifice of my _father’s_ shall induce me to
take a life-interest in the estate;’ and he held to this resolution. By
being as good as his word on this matter, he may be said to have
disinherited himself and his issue out of the very large entailed estate,
created by his grandfather’s wealth. Religious sentiment and political
opinion had nothing whatever to do with the arrangement in which he
refused to concur. There must be an end to the romantic notion that the
poet was disinherited, or in some way extruded from his boyhood’s home and
proper place in his family, by the merciless elders of his house, at the
instigation of religious bigotry and political resentment.

Shelley’s refusal to concur in the arrangement could be more easily
accounted for, if there were evidence before the world that his
grandfather and father required him to take a mere life-interest in lieu
of his larger interest in A and B, and during their lives to rely wholly
on their generosity for an income, sufficient for his necessities and the
payment of the considerable debts contracted by him during his
minority,--debts for which he was responsible in honour, though not in
law. But whilst there is no evidence before the world that the sire and
grandsire made any such requirement, there exists considerable (though by
no means conclusive) evidence that by acceding to the wishes of his
domestic elders in respect to the resettlement of A and B, he would have a
large assured income during their lives:--even (according to one account)
so large an income as 2000_l._ a-year, which would certainly have been
sufficient for his current necessities and the payment of his creditors.
One would like to know more of the negotiations between the young man and
his elders, that resulted in his final refusal to re-settle A and B,
notwithstanding the purport of the momentous codicil. Field Place,
doubtless, could impart the desired knowledge; but Field Place is not
likely to throw fuller light on the romantic inaccuracies of Lady
Shelley’s _Shelley Memorials_.

My impression is that Mr. Medwin, the elder, was mainly accountable for
the action by which Shelley put himself outside his original domestic
circle, and closed the doors of his ‘boyhood’s home’ against himself for
ever. The solicitor, who undertook in the summer of 1813 to see his young
friend ‘through his difficulties,’ had reasons of self-interest, and also
of resentment, for drawing him into deeper difficulty. He had lent him
money, and saw it would be more to his advantage to have for his client
the tenant in tail male of A and B in remainder expectant, than to have
for his client a young man with nothing but a contingent life-interest in
an estate to which he might never succeed. At the same time, the Horsham
solicitor participated in his youthful client’s animosity against the
Squire of Field Place, who had on a recent occasion treated him with
insolence, if not with personal violence. The evidence is clear that the
lawyer encouraged his youthful client to oppose his father and
grandfather; and like most wilful men, Shelley was ever easily managed by
the person to whom he gave his confidence for the moment. The lawyer’s
influence and his youthful client’s antagonism to the elders of his House
are sufficient to account for Shelley’s firmness in ‘holding his own’ at a
great sacrifice; but the evidences are still wanting for a perfect account
of the motives which made him disinherit himself and his issue out of the
bulk of the family property. After taking a course attended with painful
consequences, it was like Shelley to call it the course of duty and
self-sacrifice. Readers may dismiss with a smile the notion that he
declined to resettle A and B _as_ C, because his conscience would not
permit him to join in an immoral arrangement which, whilst diminishing his
own capacity for beneficent action, might put vast power in the hands of a
fool or scoundrel. Religious sentiment and political morality had no more
to do with Shelley’s refusal than with Sir Bysshe’s codicil.

Returning from Scotland to London shortly before Christmas, 1813, Shelley,
after a brief stay in town, took a furnished house for two or three months
at Windsor, whence he migrated in the early spring to Binfield, where he
still nominally resided at the time of his withdrawal from his wife. Thus
during the two years and nine months of their association in wedlock,
Shelley and Harriett stayed for six weeks in (1) Edinburgh, sojourned for
awhile at (2) York, tarried for three months at (3) Keswick, lived nine
weeks at (4) Dublin, tarried for something over two months at (5)
Nantgwillt, spent something more than nine weeks at (6) Lynton, lived for
a fortnight or so at (7) Tanyrallt, came for six weeks to (8) London,
returned for something like fourteen weeks to (9) Tanyrallt, made a second
trip to (10) Dublin, flew off to (11) Killarney, passed a season in (12)
London, tenanted a cottage in (13) Bracknell, revisited (14) the
Cumberland lakes and (15) Edinburgh, inhabited a house at (16) Windsor,
and dwelt in a cottage at (17) Binfield. To realize their restlessness,
the reader must remember that they had two and even three successive
places of abode in some of the parishes they visited. Besides hotels which
they entered for bed and board in the course of their wanderings, they
inhabited some nineteen different houses or sets of lodgings in
thirty-three months. What a life of vagabondage! How little calculated was
such a way of living to dispose the ramblers to seek enjoyment in simple
domestic interests! Hogg laughs at Harriett’s ignorance of housewifely
arts, and her inability even to order the wretched dinners served in her
successive lodgings. No wonder that the poor child, who never had a house
of her own to keep, was a simpleton at house-keeping!

In 1814 (according to Hogg, at the beginning of the year) Shelley
published (in the legal, if not in the commercial sense of the term) _A
Refutation of Deism: In a Dialogue_.

Had it been Shelley’s purpose to give a suitable title to the performance,
which in style contrasts so favourably with his earlier prose writings, he
would have named it ‘A Dialogue for the Fuller Demonstration of the
Necessity of Atheism.’ But it was his design to give the pamphlet a title,
that should throw dust in the eyes of his orthodox enemies, and cause
persons to buy the book, who would not wilfully open an atheistical
treatise. With the same deceptive purpose he concocted the preface, which
opens with these words:--

    ‘The object of the following dialogue is to prove that the system of
    Deism is untenable. It is attempted to show that there is no
    alternative between Atheism and Christianity; that the evidences of
    the Being of a God are to be deduced from no other principles than
    those of Divine Revelation. The author endeavours to show how much the
    cause of natural and revealed religion has suffered from the mode of
    defence adopted by Theosophistical Christians. How far he will
    accomplish what he proposed to himself, in the composition of this
    dialogue, the world will finally determine.’

In the whole range of English literature, it would be difficult to point
to a preface, containing a larger number of misstatements and false
suggestions in so few words. The object of the dialogue is to prove that
Christianity and Deism are alike untenable. Shelley’s aim in the dialogue
is to prove that the evidences of the Being of God can be deduced neither
from the principles of Deism, nor from those of the so-styled Christian
Revelation, and that, after reviewing the arguments for Christianity and
the arguments for Atheism, the logical reader will not hesitate to embrace
the latter.

Were it not for his want of a quality so conspicuous in Byron, one would
suspect Shelley of grim humour in making the arguments for Atheism proceed
from a Christian’s mouth. But Eusebes, the Christian of the dialogue, is
not so much a Christian as an Atheist disguised as a Christian,--the
disguise being one of the mystifications employed by the author to veil
his insidious purpose. Whilst the Christian of the dialogue may be
described as an Atheist in disguise, Theosophus is less a Deist than a
mere derider of Christianity. He urges little in favour of Deism, and that
little he utters faintly, in comparison with his arguments against
Christianity. For every page of the Deist’s arguments in support of Deism,
the dialogue affords nearly eight pages to the direct discredit of
Christianity. The mystification, that results from the author’s adroit
handling of his two argumentative puppets, is even more effective than the
mystification resulting from the title-page and preface. What the author,
with all his boldness, would have hesitated to say in his own person, to
the dishonour of the national faith, he felt he could utter with
comparative safety through the lips of a Deist, who is thoroughly beaten
on the deistical questions by a Christian. On the other hand, the
atheistical arguments that could scarcely fail to expose him to
prosecution for blasphemy, Shelley thought he could utter with impunity,
or at least with smaller risk of legal chastisement, if he uttered them
through the mouth of a Christian, who should be represented as offering
them to his companion, merely for the sake of purging his mind of
deistical trash, and driving him to embrace Christianity.

Theosophus (the derider of Christianity who affects to be a Deist) having
done his best to demolish Christianity, Eusebes (the Atheist who affects
to be a Christian) directs the fire of his polemical guns against the
belief in a supreme Deity; and it is in this later portion of the dialogue
that the reader comes upon the most important of the arguments, that are
mere developments of the reasonings of _The Necessity of Atheism_ and the
Atheistical Note to _Queen Mab_.

It has been observed how Shelley reproduced in the _Letter_ to _Lord
Ellenborough_ one of the prime doctrines of _The Necessity of
Atheism_,--viz., that belief is independent, and beyond the control of
volition. Hence, Shelley reproduced the reasoning of _The Necessity of
Atheism_ in three successive publications, (1) the _Letter to Lord
Ellenborough_, (2) _Queen Mab_, (3) the _Refutation of Deism_. Yet Mr.
Garnett requires us to believe that in writing _The Necessity of Atheism_,
Shelley was merely throwing off a squib, that did not express his serious
convictions.

It is needful for the present biographer to call attention to another
cluster of inaccuracies in Mr. Kegan Paul’s _William Godwin; his Friends
and Contemporaries_, wherein it is written,--

    ‘In 1813 Shelley was again in London for _a short time during the
    summer, but Mary was absent in Scotland_. She was not strong, and as a
    growing girl needed purer air than Skinner Street could offer; she had
    therefore gone to Dundee with her father’s friends, Mr. Baxter and his
    daughter; and remained with them for six months. It was not until the
    summer of 1814 that Shelley and Mary Godwin became really acquainted,
    when he found the child _whom he had scarcely noticed two years_
    before had grown into the woman of nearly seventeen summers....
    _Shelley came to London on May 18th_, leaving his wife at Binfield,
    certainly without the least idea that it was to be _a final separation
    from him_, though the relations between husband and wife had for some
    time been increasingly unhappy. _He was of course received in Godwin’s
    house on the old footing of close intimacy, and rapidly fell in love
    with Mary._ Fanny Godwin was away from home visiting some of the
    Wollstonecrafts, or she, three years older than Mary, might have
    discouraged the romantic attachment which sprang up between her sister
    and their friend. _Jane Clairmont’s influence was neither then, nor at
    any other time, used, or likely to be used, judiciously._’

I have ventured to print certain words of the above extract in italics.

(1) As Mr. Kegan Paul ought to have known that Shelley was in London from
an early time of April till after the middle of July, 1813, he should not
have written, ‘In 1813 Shelley was again in London for a short time during
the summer;’--words implying that the poet was in London _only_ for a
short time.

(2) Nor should Mr. Kegan Paul have written in continuation of the same
sentence, ‘but Mary was absent in Scotland;’--words implying that she was
in Scotland during the whole time Shelley was in London, _i.e._ from about
the end of the first week of April, 1813, till after the middle of July,
1813.

(3) Can Mr. Kegan Paul produce any sufficient evidence that Mary Godwin
was in Scotland for a single day of that period? On the 8th June, 1814,
the day when Hogg saw her for the first time, in the parlour over her
father’s shop in Skinner Street, Mary Godwin had recently returned from
her sojourn in Scotland, and was wearing ‘a frock of tartan, an unusual
dress in London at that time.’ We have Mr. Kegan Paul’s assurance, made on
the evidence of the Field Place papers, that Mary Godwin’s stay in
Scotland was for six months; and there is other evidence that she stayed
there for about that time. Mary Godwin was certainly back in London on the
8th June, 1814. Mr. Kegan Paul’s words imply that she had returned very
much before the 18th May, 1814; but there are grounds for thinking that
she did not return much earlier. Let us suppose she returned at the
beginning of the month. In that case she went to Scotland, for her six
months’ visit, at the end of October or the beginning of November 1813,
when Shelley was either at or approaching Edinburgh,--more than three
months after Shelley’s stay in London (from the first week of April to the
middle of July, 1813) came to an end.

(4) Shelley returned from Scotland to London shortly before Christmas
1813, and made a brief stay in town. But it will not clear Mr. Kegan Paul
from this charge of serious inaccuracy for him to say his printed words
refer to this brief visit _at the end_ of the year. Mr. Kegan Paul speaks
of Shelley’s stay in London in the summer of 1813.

(5) As Mary Godwin was in London during the time Shelley lived in
Half-Moon Street and Pimlico, and as Shelley saw her during that time,
_i.e._ between the end of the first week of April and the middle of July,
1813, Mr. Kegan Paul should not have written, ‘It was not until the summer
of 1814 that Shelley and Mary Godwin became really acquainted, _when_ he
found the child whom he had scarcely noticed two years before had grown
into the woman of nearly seventeen summers;’--words implying that on
seeing Mary Godwin in May, 1814, he had not seen her for two years.

(6) Mr. Kegan Paul should not have written that, two years before seeing
her in May, 1814, Shelley had seen Mary Godwin and scarcely noticed the
child, for in May, 1812, _Shelley had never set eyes on the child_. At the
beginning of May, 1812, five months had still to elapse before Shelley saw
Mary for the first time. In May, 1814, he had known her for only one year
and seven months. He cannot from personal observation have regarded Mary
as a child, five months before he ever saw her.

(7) Mr. Kegan Paul should not have suggested that, after returning from
London to Tanyrallt in November 1812, Shelley had no opportunity of
holding personal intercourse with Mary Godwin, till the 18th May, in 1814,
when he ought to have known that, during the season of 1813, Shelley was a
frequent visitor at the Skinner-Street house.

(8) Mr. Kegan Paul would not have written of Mary Godwin as a ‘woman of
nearly seventeen summers’ in May 1814 when on the 1st morning of that
month she was only sixteen years and eight months of age, had he not
wished to make her seem as old as possible.

(9) As Mr. Kegan Paul’s book affords evidence that Mary and Claire were of
about the same age he should not have suggested (what elsewhere in his
book he says outright) that Jane Clairmont was considerably Mary’s senior,
and should therefore be held accountable for her sister’s misconduct.

It is needless to say that Shelley’s reputation gains nothing from such
misrepresentations, which are calculated to make readers suspect that the
poet’s intercourse with Mary in the spring and summer of 1813 was attended
with incidents, creditable to neither of them.

Differences, each of which was fruitful of estrangement, having arisen
between them in the later months of 1813, it was not to be expected that
Shelley and Harriett would return to their former harmony. Like other
husbands and wives who take to bickering, they contended about little
things which they magnified into great ones. To Shelley, who had argued
himself into believing that all the evils of human nature and society were
referable to the diet denounced by vegetarians, it was a serious grievance
that his wife enjoyed a mutton-chop and a glass of ale; that instead of
being ‘slightly animal,’ as she was at Tanyrallt, she ridiculed the
Newtons and their crotchets, and insisted on eating and drinking like most
other young women. It has been suggested that before Shelley ceased to
live with her, she sometimes took too much wine, and in other ways
displayed a disposition, which a year or two later developed into
intemperance. But though her subsequent career accorded with the
imputation, readers of this page will decline to attach much weight to a
charge, resting wholly on the evidence of the poet, who, while drinking
laudanum with an easy conscience, remembered with remorseful shame that at
Oxford he had enjoyed a tumbler of stiff white-wine negus. Differing on
questions of diet, Percy and Harriett bickered on other matters. Whilst
she resented his devotion to Maimuna, he resented her jealousy of the
lady, whom he worshipt for the subtlety and delicacy of her understanding
and affections. Ceasing to delight in Harriett’s beauty, though he could
still speak of her as ‘a noble animal,’ Shelley ceased to direct the
studies of the young woman, who could ‘neither feel poetry nor understand
philosophy.’ On the other hand, there were signs of deterioration of the
girlish wife who, desisting from the studies Percy no longer cared to
direct, withdrew her attention from books and turned it to bonnets.
Turning from authors she could not understand, Harriett gave her mind to
millinery. No marvel, that the disagreements grew in number and
bitterness; that Miss Westbrook, ever of course on her sister’s side, grew
hourly more hateful to her brother-in-law; that to escape from the
child-wife who irked him, and from the sister-in-law who exasperated him,
Shelley withdrew from the furnished house at Richmond, and flying to
Maimuna for counsel and consolation, remained under her roof at Bracknell
from about the middle of February, 1814, to a day something later than the
middle of March, _without his wife_. If Shelley found solace, he missed
contentment in the society of the white-haired lady, whose influence over
him at this point of his career was no less mischievous than powerful.
From Bracknell he wrote to Hogg a letter of despair on 16th March, 1814,
having a few days earlier addressed Maimuna in the melancholy verses, ‘Thy
dewy looks sink in my breast.’

What poison had Maimuna’s gentle words stirred in his breast, how had her
dewy looks troubled him, that he had lost the repose of despair, and was
crushed by the thought of persisting in the path of duty? Readers should
reperuse the verses and letter, in order to get a view of the miserable
position of the youthful sentimentalist, whose expiring flame of life had
been revived by Maimuna and friends;--the young man who, having found a
happy home at a distance from his wife’s dwelling, could not endure the
thought of returning to Harriett and her child, because he could not
return to them without encountering the ‘blind loathsome worm’ that was
ever hanging about his infant. The letter of despair was dated from
Bracknell, on 16th March, 1814. Eight days later,--_only_ eight days
later; on 24th March, 1814, Shelley re-married Harriett Westbrook in the
church of the parish of St. George, Hanover Square. This re-marriage was
done by license; the officiating clergyman being Mr. Edward Williams,
curate, and the two witnesses being John Westbrook and John Stanley. In
the registration of the marriage it is recorded that the parties had been
‘already married to each other according to Rites and Ceremonies of the
Church of Scotland,’ and that the marriage was solemnized on the present
occasion, ‘in order to obviate all doubts that have arisen, or shall or
may arise, touching or concerning the validity of the aforesaid marriage.’

Two different views are taken of this marriage by Shelleyan writers.
Whilst Peacock, and the writers who follow him, declare it a sufficient
evidence that Shelley was living in harmony with his wife, and can have
had no disposition to separate from her so late as 24th March, 1814, it is
maintained by other writers, that Shelley’s only motive in the marriage
was to put the legitimacy of his next child beyond question. Whilst I am
certain that error lies with the former set of writers, I cannot concur
with the latter. There is no need for the threatened publication of
unsavoury particulars about Harriett, to bring readers to the conclusion
that Shelley and his wife had ceased to live happily together before the
date of their re-marriage. People who, after perusing the evidence of the
foregoing pages, can believe that Shelley and Harriett were living
harmoniously in February and March, 1814, would continue in that belief,
even though it were proved that he ran off from his own home to Maimuna’s
house, because he caught her with her arm round another man’s waist. The
evidence of their estrangement in those and earlier months, is not
discredited by what Mr. Peacock says of their concord at the time of their
re-marriage.

On the other, I cannot refer the re-marriage to any wish on Shelley’s part
to put the legitimacy of his next child beyond question. Mr. Rossetti is
of opinion that Shelley re-married Harriett because he knew her to be in
the way to give him a second child, and therefore thought it prudent to
put the infant’s legitimacy beyond question. Whatever is urged by Mr.
Rossetti deserves consideration; but on these points I see grounds for
differing from him. Shelley can scarcely have felt any need for the
precaution. The _Edinburgh Reviewer_ (October, 1882) speaks of the
‘doubtful validity of the previous Scotch marriage,’ but the doubt can
scarcely have troubled Shelley, though he may have ascribed his action to
the uncertainty. Soon after the Scotch marriage, Shelley had declared his
intention to be re-married in England. That he did not act on this
intention was, doubtless, due to sufficient legal assurance that the
marriage was valid. Whilst Harriett was in her previous progress to
maternity, it had never occurred to him that he ought to re-marry his wife
in order to place the legitimacy of her issue beyond question. Why then
should he entertain the doubt in 1814? With a legal adviser in the elder
Mr. Medwin, a legal friend in Hogg, he cannot have feared his wife’s
possible heir might be declared illegitimate, unless he re-married
Harriett by the Anglican form. Mr. Westbrook, however, may have been
uneasy about the legal question, or have desired the re-marriage for his
social credit’s sake.

The re-marriage having been accomplished, Shelley returned to Maimuna, to
consult her on his future movements. The enchantress, with snow-white
tresses and ‘dewy looks,’ was, of course, the influence that caused the
poet to settle for a while at Binfield. On 18th April, 1814, Shelley was
again at a distance from his wife, who had gone with Miss Westbrook up to
London, whence it was understood the elder sister would soon journey to
Southampton, for the purpose of living there. Thus it was, that ‘the blind
and loathsome worm’ passed, all too late, from her brother-in-law’s
domestic life. Peacock may have been right in assuming that Shelley and
Harriett were staying together in Mrs. Boinville’s house in April; but
instead of being the lady’s guests at Bracknell, the husband and wife may
have been only her neighbours at Binfield. Anyhow, they were living at
Binfield a month later, when Shelley went up to town and gave his heart to
Mary Godwin, looking more than usually bright and charming in her ‘frock
of tartan.’ Coming up to London on the 18th of May, Shelley left Harriett
at Binfield, little imagining (it is said) that he would never again live
as a husband with the woman he had so lately re-married. ‘Shelley,’ says
Mr. Kegan Paul, writing from Field Place evidences, ‘came to London on May
18th, leaving his wife at Binfield, certainly without the least idea that
it was to be a final separation from him.’ A momentous date and admission
by a writer drawing his facts from Field Place archives. In admitting
that, when Shelley left his wife, she had no conception that their
conjugal intercourse would not be renewed, Mr. Kegan Paul admits that
Shelley deserted her--the charge against the poet, which has been so often
and indignantly denied by some of his admirers.

Mr. Kegan Paul forbears to say that Shelley left Binfield on 18th May,
1814, _with_ a secret resolve never to return to conjugal association with
Harriett. All that can be gathered from Mr. Paul’s words on this point is
that, if Shelley formed the resolve before leaving Binfield, he forbore to
impart it to her. In judging his conduct, it matters little whether he
left Binfield with the resolve or without it. If the resolution was not
formed before he left Berkshire, it was formed soon after his arrival in
London, and for some considerable time before he communicated his purpose
to her. In either case he deserted her. After determining to remain away
from Harriett, Shelley omitted to give her timely notice of his purpose to
keep away from her. He neither told her of his intention, nor sent her his
address in London, so that she might be able to communicate with him.
Besides withdrawing from her, he concealed himself from her. A husband
who, withdrawing from his wife, neither advertises her of his purpose to
keep away from her, nor sends her his address so that she may communicate
with him, is guilty of deserting his wife in an especially unfeeling and
cruel manner. For grave reasons a chivalric man may withdraw from his
wife. On doing so, a chivalric man is careful to inform her of his purpose
and reasons. He forbears to sharpen the pain and humiliation he deems
himself constrained to inflict, by an insolent or inconsiderate silence,
that exposes the object of his displeasure to the tortures of uncertainty
and suspense. He does not leave her and her child-in-arms without any care
whether or no she has money for her immediate necessities. Shelley did
thus leave and keep away from his wife for a considerable period. On being
thus deserted by her husband, Harriett is said to have had only fourteen
shillings in her pocket. Had Shelley been the essentially chivalric
creature his eulogists declare him, he could not have left his wife in
this way, even though her offences had been far more repulsive than her
sternest censors declare them.

It is true that the abandonment was of no long duration; but the period
during which Shelley forbore to communicate with his wife was so long,
that his silence may be fairly described as persistent cruelty to a woman
who, whatever her misconduct may have been, had far stronger claims to his
consideration than greatly offending wives usually have to the
consideration of their offended husbands. Mr. Rossetti speaks of a letter,
written by Harriett ‘on or about the 5th of July,’ which shows her to have
heard from Shelley ‘about the 1st of the same month.’ If she heard so soon
from Shelley, the epistle seems to have afforded her information neither
of his place of residence nor of his intention never to return to her; for
Peacock declares that, on 7th July, 1814, she wrote to one of his friends
a letter in which ‘she expressed a confident belief that he must know
where Shelley was, and entreated his assistance to induce him to return
home.’ Peacock adds, ‘She was not even then aware that Shelley had finally
left her.’ Still, let us suppose that Shelley’s silence to Harriett ceased
on the earlier date, and ceased in such a way as to make her feel she was
an object of his affection and that he would return to her ere long. Even
in that case, the period of abandonment, in its most cruel form,--of
abandonment attended with silence and concealment--covered full six weeks:
a long period for a woman to be held in sharp anxiety.

The period of abandonment, in its most cruel form, certainly ended before
the middle of July, 1814. On the 14th of that month Harriett arrived in
London; on the two following days she was in personal communication with
Shelley and William Godwin. By this time, though still ignorant of her
husband’s purpose to fly with Mary Godwin, Harriett was assured of his
purpose to keep away from her. In vain Godwin strove to bring about the
reconcilement of the youthful husband and wife. Finding that Shelley was
bent on separation, insisted on separation would for the moment be
satisfied with nothing less than separation, Harriett yielded to the fate
she could not resist, accepted the position she could not avoid, and
_assented_, by acts as well as by tacit submission, to the arrangement
that was forced upon her. She assented, by forbearing to resist her
husband’s will; she assented, by holding sullen, but in some degree
friendly, communication with him, whilst he lived with Mary Godwin; she
assented to the arrangement by corresponding with him, receiving his
visits, taking money from him, as gifts coming from his bounty--not as
payment exacted by process of law, whilst Mary Godwin was living under his
protection. This is a series of facts provable by superabundant evidence,
that may be fairly said to justify the most precise and scrupulous writer
in saying that the separation became, after some brief while, ‘a
separation by mutual consent,’ and passed from an affair of conjugal
abandonment into ‘an amicable agreement effected in virtue of a mutual
understanding.’ The impression prevails that there exists some piece of
legal draughting, some ‘regular agreement’ (as the phrase goes, duly
signed and sealed, in evidence of this agreement), and that Lady Shelley
and Mr. Garnett have, in some way, pledged themselves to produce this
document for the satisfaction of the world. I cannot take this view of the
case. Whilst Lady Shelley has not (to my knowledge) published separately
and in her own name a single line, to account for this impression, Mr.
Garnett, in his studiously guarded words, appears to abstain with nice and
nervous caution from stating that any such legal instrument either exists
or ever was executed. All he promises is ‘the publication of documents
hitherto withheld,’ which will prove that the separation resulted from
‘long-continued unhappiness,’ and was ‘an amicable agreement effected in
virtue of a mutual understanding,’--statements of whose truth there is
abundant evidence. That Harriett eventually consented to what she could
not help is certain. Moreover, it may be fairly argued that Harriett’s
successive acts of consent to the arrangement, thus forced upon her,
partook of the nature of condonation of the abandonment, so far as to
qualify the sheer cruel desertion into an incident of the series of mere
disagreements. There may, for all I know, be amongst the Field Place MSS.
a regular signed and sealed agreement of separation, with stipulations
touching the moneys to be paid by Shelley and received by Harriett,--an
agreement comprising all the usual common-form assertions of free-will and
qualified goodwill on the part of each of the parties. But to produce any
such agreement would not be to disprove, or otherwise affect, what has
been said of the desertion, which was the first stage of the separation.

None the less natural and reasonable for these acts of assent and
condonation was it for Harriett, when her husband had departed for the
Continent with Claire and Mary, to speak of the whole affair as something
that had been done wholly against her will and without her sanction,--to
speak of it in terms that were calculated to make Peacock, in later time,
confident she had never spoken of the separation (soon after its
occurrence) as a matter to which she had consented. An honest and
otherwise reliable witness, Peacock declares that, when she spoke of the
separation to him at her father’s house, soon after Shelley’s flight
across the water, Harriett spoke of it in terms, that ‘decidedly
contradicted the supposition of anything like separation by mutual
consent.’ About the same time she spoke to William Jerdan of the
separation as a state of things forced upon her, in spite of her vehement
protests. Recounting to Jerdan what passed between her and Shelley, when
he told her their conjugal association was at an end, she said that, on
hearing her doom, she exclaimed imploringly, ‘Good God, Percy! what am I
to do?’ In answer to this pathetic question Shelley, extending his right
hand to her in vehement gesticulation (and screeching, even as Byron used
to screech under the agitations of overpowering rage), replied in the
highest and most discordant pitch of his voice, ‘Do? Do?--Do what other
women do. They know what to do. Do as they do.’

The words unquestionably admit of the construction[2] Jerdan put upon
them. At the same time, coming from an angry man, such words may merely
signify that he is beside himself with rage; and it would be unjust to
judge any man, young or old, by words he utters under a sudden and
overpowering gust of fury. It must, moreover, be remembered that we have
only Harriett’s hearsay word that he made the violent speech. Still the
alleged utterance was just such a one as might have come from the raging
Shelley, who, in spite of all that is said of his gentleness, is known,
from Mr. Kegan Paul’s book about ‘Godwin,’ to have been a man of violent
temper.

Apart from the influences to which the reader’s attention has been called
in previous pages, was there aught in the circumstances and conditions of
Shelley’s life, that can be held accountable for his determination to
withdraw from Harriett and replace her by Mary Godwin? To show that he had
been strongly interested in Mary Godwin, when he was lodging successively
in Half-Moon Street and Pimlico, would be to suggest that the interest
had, in the ensuing autumn and winter, matured into a romantic passion for
her, or at least had predisposed him to fall violently in love with her in
the following June. But though he saw her in the spring and summer of
1813, and must have observed that the bright and charming child gave
promise of developing into a lovely woman, there are no sufficient grounds
for thinking he either took much notice of her, or felt any especial
concern in her at that time. Indeed, apart from the suspicious pains taken
by Mr. Kegan Paul to make it seem that he never saw her for a single
interview in 1813, I am not aware of any reason for conceiving it
possible, that the passion which dominated him in the summer of 1814 may
have proceeded from a sentiment of earlier date. And in respect to this
cause for suspicion, I do not question that both Shelley and Mary may be
said to suffer from the indiscretion of a single biographer. From an early
day of his long sojourn in western quarters of the town, Shelley was too
completely under Maimuna’s influence to have much tender care for the mere
school-girl. Moreover, in the summer of 1814, Shelley’s friends were
unanimous in thinking his passion for Mary a sentiment of quite recent
birth. Whilst Hogg had no suspicion of its existence before the 8th of
June, 1814, Peacock was confident that the passion was no less sudden than
violent. ‘Nothing,’ says Peacock, ‘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 upon him in London.’

In addition to the already indicated causes of estrangement, had Shelley,
before going up to town on 18th May, 1814, discovered in Harriett’s
conduct any serious cause for dissatisfaction, likely to extinguish his
fondness for her in a moment, and replace it with a feeling of lively
repugnance? For a long time it has been an open secret in Shelleyan
coteries that documents are in existence which, if reliance could be
placed on Shelley’s statements about his own affairs, would constitute a
strong body of _primâ facie_ and _ex parte_ evidence that, before he
withdrew from her in May, 1814, he had found Harriett guilty of
misconduct, that would have entitled him to divorce from her, had he
sought it in the usual legal way.

It being probable that these documents, or their substance, will at no
distant time be offered to the world as so much certain and indisputable
evidence, that Shelley had good moral ground for breaking from his wife,
it will be well for readers to anticipate the publication by settling in
their minds what effect any such evidence--whether coming from Shelley’s
pen, or from the pens of writers deriving their information _from
him_--should have on discreet and logical persons. Enough has been said of
Shelley’s veracity to show that it was not unimpeachable. The man, who had
recourse to deception, when his convenience required him to use it; the
man who, in 1811, made a statement about his mother and sisters, which his
neighbours at Horsham did not hesitate to call an untrue statement; the
man who wrote the wheedling letter to the Duke of Norfolk, in order to get
money out of his father’s pocket, cannot (to put the case mildly) be
regarded as a strictly truthful person. It has also been shown that he was
liable to delusions incompatible with perfect sanity. It will be shown in
ensuing pages that thus untruthful and liable to insane delusions, in his
earlier time, Shelley was no less untruthful and subject to delusions and
(to use Peacock’s term) semi-delusions, after leaving his wife. Bearing
all this in mind, how should judicious persons regard any statements made
by Shelley (or made by individuals speaking directly or indirectly on
_his_ authority, or in obedience to his influence), that before leaving
Harriett he found her guilty of flagrant misconduct?

Surely, judicious persons will say of such evidence, ‘These are mere _ex
parte_ statements. They are of less weight than most _ex parte_
statements, because they proceed from a witness, who was on some occasions
untruthful, and on several occasions the victim of extravagant and insane
hallucinations. Coming from the chief actor in the Tanyrallt affair, from
the man who for a time thought similar evil of his dearest male friend,
these statements to the dishonour of the wife he deserted must be
considered with reference to one of his chief moral infirmities, and with
reference to his mental peculiarities. These statements are not so much
evidence of guilt in Harriett, as of delusion in her husband.’

The incredibility of such statements would, of course, be affected by the
production of a clear confession by Harriett, that, before he left her,
she had been conjugally faithless to him; or by the production of
reasonable evidence that she did admit so much to her shame. But even such
an admission would have to be considered with jealous regard to the
influences and circumstances under which it was made, and also with
reference to the curious fact that she had been in former time brought to
believe, or to act as though she believed, that Hogg had made an attempt
on her honour, which he did not make upon it.

There are other reasons for an opinion that Harriett cannot have been
guilty of the offence which has been so long charged against her in the
Shelleyan coteries. Peacock (Shelley’s most intimate friend and executor),
who knew Harriett intimately in the later months of 1813, and the earlier
half of 1814, was confident she had been a true wife. ‘I feel it,’ he
writes, ‘due to the memory of Harriet to state my most decided conviction
that her conduct as a wife was as pure, as true, as absolutely faultless
as that of any who for such conduct are held most in honour.’ This
evidence to character should have more weight with judicial minds than any
unsupported evidence to the contrary by her husband, who, in the middle of
August, 1814, wrote to her from Troyes, begging her to join him and
Claire, and Mary in Switzerland, and be happy in their society; and who,
after his return to England, was desirous that she should live under the
same roof with him and Mary Godwin. One hesitates to say where a man,
holding Shelley’s unusual views respecting the intercourse of the sexes,
would draw the line between venial indiscretion and unpardonable depravity
in feminine demeanour. Whatever her misconduct, Harriett was certainly
entitled to a large measure of charitable consideration from the husband,
who had taught her to think ‘chastity ... a monkish and evangelical
superstition, a greater foe to natural temperance even than unintellectual
sensuality.’ But it is scarcely conceivable that even Shelley would have
invited the wife, on whose finger he had put a wedding-ring, to come to
him and his ringless bride in Switzerland, had she to his knowledge, only
a few months earlier, been guilty of the offences that have long been
whispered against her.

Coming up to town on 18th May, 1814, Shelley (says Mr. Kegan Paul, in his
light and happy style) ‘was, of course, received in Godwin’s house on the
old footing of close intimacy, and rapidly fell in love with Mary.’ He
_was_ so received with cordial greeting and hospitable confidence by Mr.
Godwin and Mrs. Godwin. The girls (Mary and Claire being at home, during
Fanny’s absence to some one or another of her maternal relatives) also
welcomed the youthful poet heartily. To most readers it may appear that,
because ‘he was, _of course_, received in Godwin’s house on the old
footing of close intimacy,’ he was under stringent obligations to respect
the confidence thus reposed in him;--obligations so sacred as well as
stringent, that his action to his host and his host’s only daughter, to
his hostess and her only daughter, must be declared one of the most
shocking examples of domestic treason recorded in literary annals.

In three successive years--1812, 1813, 1814--Shelley had been received in
Godwin’s house on a ‘footing of close intimacy.’ The house was open to him
whenever he cared to visit it. The master of the house, whom Shelley
persisted in styling his teacher, friend, benefactor, was ever ready with
counsel and sympathy for the young man. Had he been unmarried, the Godwins
would have been slow to suspect evil in the young man of pleasant aspect
and winning address. As he was married to a lovely girl, with whom they
had every reason to think him living in mutual love, it never occurred to
William Godwin and his wife that they should watch his behaviour to their
children, as they would have observed it, had he been in a position to
make one of them an offer. The confidence reposed in his honour was
without limit or qualification. How did he respect this confidence, repay
this trustful hospitality? Mr. Kegan Paul answers the question in seven
words, ‘He ... rapidly fell in love with Mary.’

On 8th June, 1814, when exactly three weeks had passed since his arrival
in town, Shelley ran upon Hogg in Cheapside, as the latter was returning
from the scene of Lord Cochrane’s trial to Gray’s Inn. Bound for different
places in the same direction, the friends walked together from Cheapside
to Skinner Street, when, on coming to the door of Godwin’s shop, Shelley
said to his companion, ‘I must speak with Godwin; come in; I will not
detain you long.’ Passing through the shop, which was the only way of
passage to the living-rooms of the house, the young men went straight
upstairs to the quadrant-shaped parlour on the first floor, where Shelley
expected to find his familiar friend and benefactor. That Shelley went
upstairs in this fashion, without rapping or ringing, or sending any one
from the shop to announce his arrival, indicates his close intimacy with
Godwin and Mrs. Godwin,--shows how they allowed him the free run of the
house, permitting him to come and go at his pleasure, as though the place
were his own home. To Shelley’s disappointment and discomposure Godwin was
away from home. ‘Where is Godwin?’ he asked several times of Hogg, as
though the latter were in Godwin’s confidence and somehow accountable for
his absence. Shelley was still fussing about in this way; when the door of
the room was opened by a young girl, who exclaimed in a thrilling voice,
‘Shelley!’ Answering the ejaculation with one word, Shelley hastened from
the room, leaving Hogg to meditate in solitude, and marvel at the
momentary apparition of the ‘very young female, fair and fair-haired, pale
indeed, and with a piercing look, wearing a frock of tartan, an unusual
dress in London at that time,’ who had appeared for an instant, like a
quick gleam of sunlight, only to disappear with her lover. Hogg saw no
more of William Godwin’s lovely child on that occasion. In a minute or two
Shelley re-entered the room, saying ‘Godwin is out; there is no use in
waiting.’ Godwin’s absence had defeated the poet’s plan for getting a long
‘lover’s interview’ with his heart’s idol, whilst Godwin should be talking
with Hogg. Had the poet passed Hogg with a nod in Cheapside, he would have
had the desired interview with Mary in her father’s absence. As it was, he
had allowed Hogg to discover an interesting secret. Under the
circumstances, Shelley saw that his only chance of keeping the truth from
the vigilant and humorous Hogg required him to continue the walk towards
Gray’s Inn, as though he had dropt in at the Juvenile Library, solely for
the purpose of seeing Mary’s father.

‘Who is she?--a daughter?’ Hogg inquired of Shelley, as they walked to the
West.

‘Yes.’

‘A daughter of William Godwin?’

‘The daughter,’ replied Shelley, ‘of Godwin and Mary.’

The brief answer was enough for Hogg. The whole position had been revealed
to Hogg, who, on his westward way at his friend’s side, may be presumed to
have debated, in a breast by no means devoid of trouble, how much and how
little Harriett knew or suspected of what was going on in Skinner Street.

On some day of June, possibly preceding, but more probably following at a
brief interval the day of Hogg’s first brief glimpse of Mary Godwin’s
beauty, Shelley gave the girl the well-known verses, ‘Mine eyes were dim
with tears unshed;’ the verses with the concluding stanza:--

  ‘Gentle and good and mild thou art,
    Nor can I live if thou appear
  Aught but thyself, or turn thine heart
    Away from me, _or stoop to wear
  The mask of scorn, although it be
  To hide the love thou feel’st for me_.’

Though an attempt has been made to force another meaning on the lines here
printed in italics, few readers will decline to regard them as pointing to
the deception which Mary Godwin was practising at this time, in order to
conceal from her family that Shelley regarded her with passion to which
she responded. The blame provoked by the deceitfulness of the girl, who
veiled her affection for the poet from observers in Skinner Street with an
air and tone of scorn, should, of course, be given to the man who had won
her heart, rather than to the child, who had recourse to artifice in his
interest and her own. In other respects, also, the blame of a miserable
business should be awarded to the married man, rather than the girl who
was just five years his junior. She may be wholly acquitted, she is not to
be suspected, of deliberately luring Shelley from his wife, and
supplanting her in his affections. It should not be questioned that he
made all the overtures and advances to Mary; and that he found it very
difficult to persuade her to fly with him. It would have been strange had
he found her an easy conquest; for (notwithstanding all that has been
urged to the contrary) it is certain that she had been reared within the
lines of conventional decorum and orthodoxy.

When he wrote that, though Mary Godwin ‘had been bred up to regard love as
the essential part of marriage, she was a perfectly pure and innocent
woman,’ (meaning, of course, that she was trained in childhood to hold
certain of her parents’ earlier and notorious views respecting marriage,
_i.e._ that love was a sufficient sanction of conjugal union, and that
where such love existed it was better for spouses to live together in Free
Love than in the bondage of Lawful Wedlock), Mr. Froude only showed his
absolute ignorance of the matters on which he wrote so rashly, under the
insufficient instructions of the person or persons who should have
instructed him better. It is certain that, during their brief association,
William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft modified those views of marriage so
far as to be lawfully married to one another; that soon after Mary
Wollstonecraft’s death, if not during her life, Godwin abandoned them
altogether; and that his daughter by her was _not_ educated to regard the
matrimonial rite as an idle form.

In a former chapter of this work evidence has been given, under Godwin’s
own hand, that Mary Wollstonecraft’s children were _not_ educated in
accordance with their mother’s peculiar views; that he deemed so clever a
boy as Charles Clairmont was in his seventeenth year far too young for
initiation in Free Thought; that on sending the boy Anthony Collins’s
sober and moderate book, he was urgent that Mary should not be allowed to
see a line of it. Never touched with Free Contract sentiment, the second
Mrs. Godwin held the Free Contract people in aversion, and their doctrines
in contemptuous detestation. Had it been otherwise, she would have been
spoken of less harshly by some of her husband’s friends.

Mary was educated by her father and his second wife, and by governesses of
their selection. Is it conceivable that she was educated by her father and
stepmother in principles which the former of the two abandoned in her
infancy, and the latter had never tolerated? If Mary Godwin left behind
her any writing in evidence that she was educated to mate in Free
Contract, she left behind her a piece of false testimony. To show how far
she was from favouring the Free Contract, how absolutely free from Free
Contract sentiment, she was before she came under Shelley’s influence, it
is enough to say that, even so late as July, 1814, after surrendering her
heart so completely to him as to conceive herself incapable of loving any
one else, she declared it impossible for her to live with him conjugally
during his wife’s existence. At the same time, in the fervour of her
passion for him she declared she would never marry any other man. In her
respect for the matrimonial rite, even at the very moment of avowing
herself incapable of giving herself to any other man, she deemed it
absolutely impossible for her to live with Shelley till death shall have
put him in a position to make her his lawful wife. Mr. Froude admits that
this was so. Yet he insists that she was educated to regard the Free
Contract with tolerance.

Lady Shelley speaks even more precisely on this point than Mr. Froude:--

    ‘The theories,’ says Lady Shelley, ‘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.’

This whole passage is made up of statements that, so far as Mary Godwin is
concerned, are absolutely the reverse of historic truth. What? Mary’s
education in Free Contract principles ‘spared her from any conflict
between her duty and her affection?’ Why at one moment she is declaring
she can’t be Shelley’s mistress, but will never marry any other man; a few
days later she sacrifices her principles and does become his mistress; and
yet there was no conflict of duty and affection!

It is in the highest degree improbable that, till Shelley spoke to her of
her mother’s views and story, using them as arguments why she should not
shrink from becoming his mistress, Mary Godwin had ever heard aught of
Mary Wollstonecraft’s dangerous opinions and discreditable career. William
Godwin’s daughter was only a few days old when her mother died. Only three
years and four months Mary’s senior, Fanny Imlay was too young at her
mother’s death to have, in later time, any recollections to impart to Mary
about their common parent. Who was at all likely to be at pains to
acquaint Mary in her early childhood with her mother’s story? It is not
usual for a man, after taking a second wife and having issue by her, to be
loquacious about his first wife to her children in their tender age. The
cold, unsentimental, unemotional Godwin was not likely to talk of Mary
Wollstonecraft to either of her children. Is it conceivable that whilst
they were of tender age, or in later years, when they had become
inquisitive girls, he revealed to them the particulars of their mother’s
story,--told Fanny that she was of shameful birth; told Mary that her
sister was a bastard; unfolded to their inquiring minds the doctrines of
Free Contract; informed them that their mother held opinions about
marriage which he had himself abandoned as dangerous and pernicious;
instructed them out of pious regard to her memory that they should on
coming to womanly age think of the matrimonial rite as an idle form? Is it
imaginable that the second Mrs. Godwin, intent on holding her curiously
constituted family within the lines of conventional respectability,
enlightened Fanny, and Claire, and Mary, on the very matters she was
especially desirous of keeping from their knowledge?

It is, however, certain that Mary Godwin heard much about her mother from
Shelley’s lips in 1814. The subject, in respect to which Godwin had been
wisely reticent to his child, Shelley did not hesitate to use for the
accomplishment of his purpose. No one knew better than Shelley, that his
familiar friend and benefactor had long since ceased to approve the Free
Contract. No one knew better than Shelley, how careful his familiar friend
had been to withhold from his only daughter those particulars of her
mother’s career that, on being communicated to her, might dispose the
imaginative, generous, fearless, too self-dependent child to adopt her
mother’s earlier views about marriage. At the same time Shelley saw that,
to break down the girl’s reverence for marriage and thereby remove the
grand obstacle to his designs upon her, his best course was to enlighten
the sixteen-years-old girl on those points of her domestic story, which
her father was especially desirous to keep from her knowledge. It is
needless to say that the young man, who had illuminated, or tried to
illuminate, so many girls of tender age out of the views in which they had
been educated, was not withheld from illuminating Mary out of her
superstitious reverence for marriage by any weak sentiment of loyalty to
his familiar friend,--the friend whom he was in the habit of styling his
greatest benefactor.

As the Skinner-Street house, notwithstanding the hospitable freedom
accorded to him within its walls, was no place where he could urge his
suit to Mary and teach her to approve the Free Contract, it appeared well
to Shelley, in his strength, to make appointments for private interviews
with Mary at her mother’s grave in Old St. Pancras churchyard, and well to
the sixteen-years-old Mary, in her weakness and romantic silliness, to
meet him there. Old St. Pancras churchyard was a comparatively secluded
place, and Mr. Kegan Paul is careful to record that ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’s
grave was shaded by a fine weeping willow.’ I cannot see that the
character and magnitude of the tree over Mary Wollstonecraft’s grave ought
to affect the reader’s judgment of what took place under it in the warm
days of June and July, 1814. But Mr. Kegan Paul seems to think otherwise;
and as I wish to handle this matter with a liberal regard for all
extenuating circumstances, I beg my readers to bear in mind that Mary
Wollstonecraft’s grave was shaded by a fine weeping willow.

Whilst gentle breezes made music in the long leaves of this trysting-tree,
Shelley,--with _Queen Mab and_ its notes in his hand, and the writings of
William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft in his memory,--explained to Mary
Godwin why ‘chastity was a monkish and evangelical superstition;’ why her
mother had very properly come to the conclusion that she might live
conjugally with Gilbert Imlay in Paris, without being married to him; why
a few years later her mother had no less virtuously determined to live in
Free Contract with William Godwin; and why she, Mary Godwin (the daughter
of so exemplary and altogether phenomenal a woman as Mary Wollstonecraft),
might with honour and virtue become his wife in the highest sense,
although inhuman laws and tyrannic custom precluded him from making her
his wife in another and altogether trivial sense. Readers may not forget
that Shelley was within a few days of being Mary’s senior by five years;
that he was so greatly Mary’s social superior as to figure in her esteem
as a sort of young prince; that he was a young man of a singularly
pleasant appearance and charming address; that she was only sixteen years
old, and living under the dominion of a stern stepmother, who, besides
insisting that Mary should darn her stockings, was so unreasonable as to
think a girl of her age and social degree should know how to make a
beef-steak pudding.

Instead of suffering from no conflict of duty and affection (as Lady
Shelley avers), it is certain that poor sixteen-years-old Mary was
distracted and cruelly tortured by the conflict of her desire to be good,
with her inclination to be very naughty. She was troubled by thoughts of
Percy’s wife, her own friend; and by thoughts of the shame and sorrow that
would come to her old father, if she did as Percy asked her. She was stung
by a feeling that, as Percy was her father’s young friend, and moreover a
young friend to whom her father had been very good and kind, he should not
ask of her what he was asking. Tears sprung to her eyes as she thought of
the disgrace she would bring on her home and people if she yielded. There
were moments when she could not see why she could be right in doing what
was wrong in her eyes, because her mother was not wrong in doing what
seemed right to her. She implored Percy not to ask so much of her.
Promising to love him for ever, promising that no other man should ever
find a place in her heart, acknowledging that she loved him unutterably,
she entreated Percy, as he was good and clever, so bright a poet, and so
sweet to her soul, to be satisfied with her confession and vows of
perpetual fidelity. But this was not enough for the young gentleman who
‘might have been the Saviour of the World.’ He wanted something more, and
was determined to have all he wanted, although Mary was the only daughter
of his friend and benefactor. Why are readers indignant against this young
man, who was so young and enthusiastic, and only (as Mr. Froude says)
acting on emotional theories of liberty?

Whilst he was having stolen interviews with his familiar friend’s
sixteen-years-old daughter under the willow-tree, he had a remarkable
conference with his friend Peacock, who, on coming from the country to
London for the meeting, found the author of _Queen Mab_ in a state of
extreme excitement. His eyes were bloodshot, his hair disheveled, his
dress disordered; and whilst talking with extravagant energy he caught up
a bottle of laudanum, saying vehemently as he clutched the vessel of
poisonous drink, ‘I never part with this. I am always repeating to myself
your 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.’

In the ensuing conversation (_vide_ Peacock’s collected _Works_) Shelley
did not even suggest that Harriett’s behaviour had afforded him any
serious cause of dissatisfaction. On the contrary, whilst reflecting on
her mental unfitness for the position to which he had so imprudently
exalted her, he admitted that she was a noble animal.

‘Every one, who knows me,’ he said, ‘must know that the partner of my life
should be one who can feel poetry and understand philosophy. Harriett is a
noble animal, but she can do neither.’

‘It always appeared to me,’ replied Peacock, ‘that you were very fond of
Harriett.’

‘But you did not know how I hated her sister,’ rejoined Shelley;
forbearing to say aught in dissent from, or assent to, Peacock’s remark on
his former show of fondness for his wife.

To another of his friends Shelley commended Harriett for being ‘a noble
animal,’ adding words which seemed to imply that, in her nobleness, she
would acquiesce in the transference of his affections from herself to
William Godwin’s daughter.

But because he spoke thus fairly of Harriett to persons, who knew she had
given him no grave cause of offence, it does not follow that he was not at
the same time charging her with serious misconduct to those, who were not
so well qualified to judge between her and him. To those who remember in
what different strains he wrote of his father to the Duke of Norfolk and
William Godwin, it is needless to say that he was capable of speaking
justly of a person, with whom he was displeased, to individuals cognizant
of the real causes of his displeasure, and no less unjustly to persons of
inferior or no information touching the nature of the quarrel.

Whilst Mary Godwin was being illuminated into Free Contract in Old St.
Pancras churchyard, and educated in deceit in Skinner Street, the pupil
and her teacher had a sympathetic confidante in Claire,--the maiden of
bright eyes, olive complexion, Italian features, and southern fervour. It
is needless to remind readers that Claire was not older than Mary by so
much as Mr. Kegan Paul repeatedly asserts in the very book, which affords
evidence that they were nearly of the same age. Elsewhere it has been told
how (though they bickered and quarreled smartly once and again in
Shelley’s life, and came after his death to hate one another cordially)
these daughters of one home, who called the same man ‘papa’ and the same
woman ‘mamma,’ were living together in 1814 in the fullest mutual
confidence, and in affection glowing with the impetuosity of girlish
romance. Cognizant of their meetings under the weeping willow, Claire knew
why Shelley and her sister-by-affinity met so often at the trysting-tree.
In Skinner Street, when Mary, the piquant brown-eyed blonde, wore her
disguise, she did not assume ‘the mask of scorn’ to hide her love of
Shelley from her sister-by-affinity. Delighting in the sentimental affair,
as though it were a mere game played for her amusement in the midsummer
holidays, Claire, the impetuous and saucy, was ever at hand to divert the
attention of the elders from the proceedings of her two playmates. Had
Fanny been at home the game might not have been carried to its calamitous
_dénoument_, for besides being orderly and dutiful, and ever on the side
of authority, the eldest of the three sisters had an influence over
Shelley which would certainly have been exercised for good, had she
detected his evil purpose. It was unfortunate for the two younger girls
that Fanny was away from home. It was unfortunate for Mary, that Claire
was at hand to aid and encourage her and Shelley. Without Claire’s help
Shelley would most likely have failed to accomplish his purpose. But for
her sister’s sympathy and assistance, it is scarcely conceivable that Mary
(remarkable though she was for self-dependence and resoluteness) would
have left her home. It was in no small degree due to Claire’s cleverness,
in covering the actions of the lovers, that the first week of July was
over before their proceedings caused Godwin uneasiness. What, on so late a
day, caused the philosopher to think his young friend too attentive to
Mary, does not appear. Possibly neighbours had told him of the meetings
under the trysting-tree. Possibly Mrs. Godwin had detected something
suspicious in Mary’s countenance, at a moment when she forgot to wear the
mask of scorn. Anyhow, on the 8th of July, Godwin spoke to his daughter
respecting her demeanour to Shelley, and on the same day wrote Shelley a
letter, which was answered in a way that abated the philosopher’s
apprehensions without altogether putting an end to his disquiet. Speaking
of Shelley’s reply to his benefactor’s epistle, Mr. Kegan Paul says, ‘The
explanation was satisfactory.’ The explanation must, therefore, have been
disingenuous, for no honest reply could have been otherwise than most
unsatisfactory. The consequence of the explanation was that the two
familiar friends continued to meet daily, though the veteran decided that
for a brief while Shelley should not dine at Skinner Street. Probably it
was due to Godwin that Mrs. Shelley was at length informed of her
husband’s place of abode. Anyhow, Harriett came up to town and saw both
Godwin and Shelley, the former of whom did his utmost to reconcile the
husband and wife, whilst the latter held to his purpose of making Mary his
mistress. Almost to the last moment it was uncertain what would be the
issue of the fierce conflict between passion and duty in her breast. It is
not surprising that eventually she yielded to his entreaties, and his
pathetic account of the wrongs he had endured in boyhood from the
barbarous father, who would have consigned him for life to a lunatic
asylum, had it not been for Dr. Lind’s timely intervention. How was the
inexperienced and romantic girl to suspect that the thrilling tale was a
tissue of romantic fancies and delusive inventions? Small blame to her for
yielding, in comparison with the blame due to the man, who subdued her to
his will.

On the evening of 27th July, 1814, William Godwin’s household retired to
rest under circumstances which rendered the man of letters, his wife, and
his stepson (Charles Clairmont) wholly unsuspicious of the purpose and
pre-arrangements of the two girls. On the morrow, Mr. and Mrs. Godwin
awoke to learn that Claire and Mary had left the house at daybreak. An
examination of their sleeping apartment discovered that the two girls had
not quitted their home without making preparations for an absence of some
duration, for they had taken enough of their clothing to show that a
speedy return was no part of their plan. Thus it was that they left their
homes at four o’clock a.m., and hastened to the spot where Shelley awaited
them in a carriage. Not content with carrying off his familiar friend’s
sixteen-years-old daughter, Shelley repaid Mrs. Godwin’s hospitality by
carrying off _her_ sixteen-years-old (or, perhaps, seventeen-years-old)
daughter, in order that he and Mary should have an agreeable travelling
companion.

Nothing connected with this miserable business is more strange than that
it has been treated by successive writers as though it were a wholesome
and delightful love-story, redounding, on the whole, to the credit of
both principals. The affair has been handled by these writers so
effectually that many a reader will have to liberate himself from their
influence by a strenuous effort before seeing that, in thus carrying off
his friend’s sixteen-years-old daughter, Shelley was guilty of the crime
which he professed to hold in the highest repugnance. In carrying off John
Westbrook’s sixteen-years-old daughter when he was in a position to marry
her, Shelley committed nothing more than an act of elopement. But in
carrying off his familiar friend’s child when he could not marry her, and
had no prospect of ever being able to marry her, he was guilty of an act
of seduction. If regard is had to his intimacy with her father, the
deception he practised towards him, and the means he employed to overcome
her sense of duty, it cannot be questioned that Shelley’s triumph over his
familiar friend’s daughter was a very bad case of domestic treason. That
an unlooked-for incident enabled him, something more than two years later,
to marry her, and that on the occurrence of this incident he lost no time
in making her his wife, are facts in no way affecting the quality of his
action towards his friend’s sixteen-years-old daughter in 1814. That he
married her as soon as he could is a fact to be remembered to the poet’s
credit in the general estimate of his character, and more especially of
his affection for the girl. But what he did at the end of 1816 could not
affect the legal and moral quality of what he did in the summer of 1814.
There must be no misunderstanding on this point. Till the English people
shall modify and rearrange the English language into accordance with the
crotchets and sensibilities of our favourers of the Free Contract, the man
who shall lure a sixteen-years-old girl from her home and parents, and
induce her to live with him as a mistress, must be declared guilty of an
offence which is deemed odious even by libertines.

Mr. Froude is of opinion that Shelley should be judged leniently for
taking to himself this girl because he was young and enthusiastic. Mr.
Froude is also of opinion that Mary Godwin should be judged leniently
because she was young and enthusiastic. I concur with Mr. Froude in
thinking that Mary should not be severely judged. To her my compassion
goes as freely as Mr. Froude requires. She was a naughty girl. But who can
forbear to make charitable allowance for so young and inexperienced a
girl? She was (as Mr. Froude urges) enthusiastic; she was also young,
very young,--only sixteen years old.

There are other reasons for being lenient and pitiful to this poor child,
reared though she was in honest principles and absolute ignorance of her
mother’s perverse views. Who seduced her? She was not led astray by an
ordinary tempter, but by a young man of singular comeliness, a poet who
clothed his prayers with the images of speech most likely to render them
irresistible. She had done nothing in the hope of winning his love, said
nothing by lip or look to lure him from loyalty to Harriett, when he came
quickly upon her and said ‘You shall be mine!’ She was wooed and won by
Shelley! Remember how (_though_ he was Shelley) she contended with him,
fought him, prayed to him for mercy; how passionately she declared to him,
in spoken words and written words, that, though she loved him wholly, and
would never give herself to any other man, she would not, could not, dared
not, give herself to him till he could marry her.

Could nothing be urged in palliation of her misconduct, but that she was
young and enthusiastic, I should plead less earnestly in her behalf. I
cannot concur with Mr. Froude in holding that youth and enthusiasm should
of themselves be pronounced considerable extenuations of wrongful action,
of which the young and enthusiastic are more likely than other persons to
be guilty. On the contrary, Mr. Froude must pardon a white-headed writer
for telling him frankly, it is ill for a man of his still greater age to
teach (however lightly and elegantly) in a popular magazine, that to act
as Shelley and Mary acted in their elopement, is sometimes to be guilty of
nothing worse than ‘the sin of acting on emotional theories of liberty.’
Moreover, I decline to regard Shelley’s youth in 1814 as a matter to be
urged strongly in mitigation of the sentence to be passed upon him. His
youth unquestionably may be pleaded _in misericordiam_ when he is under
trial for running away with John Westbrook’s daughter. But the offence he
committed in 1814 was no mere elopement, and he had long since ceased to
be a child. When he posted seaward along the Dover Road, with Mary Godwin
by his side, he was within a week of his twenty-third year. Age by the
calendar is not the only thing to be considered in estimating a man’s
moral responsibility. Regard should also be had to the discipline of
circumstances. It wanted now only a month of three years since Shelley
ran off with John Westbrook’s lovely child. A man who is a father, and has
been a husband for nearly three years, is not to be judged as a mere
stripling. He was five years older than Mary. Those five years spent in
the world gave him greatly the advantage over Mary, and he had used the
advantage mercilessly against her. On the threshold of his twenty-third
year a young man has lived quite long enough to know that he should not
seduce his intimate friend’s sixteen-years-old daughter.

Should Mr. Froude write on this question again, he will do well to drop
the plea of youth. Moreover, Mr. Froude, at any sacrifice of feeling, must
throw overboard that elegant euphuism about ‘the sin of acting on
emotional theories of liberty.’ That Shelley was under the influence of
emotion throughout his suit to Mary is certain. It is not unusual for
people to be under the influence of emotion when they are in love. But
there was nothing emotional in Shelley’s theories respecting the Freedom
of Lovers to be off with an old and on with a new love at pleasure. I have
wasted much pains in exhibiting the origin of those theories, and tracing
their growth through his boyish novels and his letters to Hogg and Godwin,
to their development in the anti-matrimonial note to _Queen Mab_, if it is
necessary to remind my readers that Shelley’s views about wedlock--views
in which he persisted to the last hour of his life--were embraced in his
boyhood long before he formulated them in the _Queen Mab_ note. Never were
theories formed with greater deliberation, brooded over more calmly, acted
upon more resolutely by a social innovator. Holding them tenaciously long
before he promulgated them in the famous note, he did not act upon them
till _Queen Mab_ had been in secret circulation for considerably more than
a year. In speaking of them as emotional theories, Mr. Froude shows how
absolutely ignorant he was of the matters about which he wrote so rashly.

A note in one of William Godwin’s diaries indicates that he regarded the
fugitives as having left his house at five o’clock of the early morning.
But there are grounds for thinking the flight began an hour earlier.
Anyhow, long before London was awake and stirring, Shelley and the two
girls were clear of the town and clattering towards the sea. Towards noon
the sun bore down upon them with scorching vehemence, and the remainder
of the journey on wheels was made in heat so intense and overpowering,
that Mary Godwin nearly fainted under it. The journey closed with a
serious disappointment to the travellers. On alighting at Dover at about 4
p.m., they found themselves too late for the Calais packet, and no other
public boat would start for the French port till the following day. To all
three it was of the highest moment that they should cross the Channel as
quickly as possible. Mary and Claire were too well acquainted with their
mother’s energy to have any doubt, that on discovering their flight she
would soon be following them. Had Mary been less than sixteen years of
age, Shelley, in case of his arrest on English ground, would have been
liable, under the circumstances, to imprisonment for two years; and under
a certain contingency, even to five years’ incarceration. But though
Mary’s age exempted him from the heavy punishment to which he would have
been liable had she been a year younger, he was aware that, if he were
overtaken by Mrs. Godwin on this side the Channel, the Mayor of Dover
would aid her effectually in regaining possession of her daughter and
step-daughter. To secure his prize it was needful that he should cross the
water without passing another night on English soil.

As the lovely evening promised a quick and agreeable passage, Shelley
hired some seamen to carry him and the two girls (without their boxes) to
Calais in an open boat; and as soon as Mary had revived herself with a
sea-bath, the trio went on board the frail vessel, hoping to touch the
French sands within two hours. But the weather failed to keep its promise.
At first their progress was slow from lack of wind; but as the moon rose
and night came on, the faint breeze freshened into a gale, attended with
signs of a coming storm. Besides being violent the wind soon became
contrary; and after working well out to sea the sailors began to despair
of reaching Calais, and talked of making for Boulogne. Some hours later, a
squall striking the sail nearly capsized the boat, that seemed likely to
perish in the thunder-storm, which made the mariners fearful. Fortunately
the gale abated, and the wind, changing its course, carried the craft
straight for Calais, where the fugitives,--weary, cold, and drenched to
the skin,--arrived at sunrise; their plight being the more pitiable,
because they had left their boxes at the Dover custom-house, to follow by
the next day’s packet.

Regaining their energy and cheerfulness, whilst waiting for their
luggage, the trio (‘three’ was Shelley’s favourite number for a trip)
remained at their Calais hotel till Saturday afternoon (July the 30th),
when they started for Paris in a cabriolet, drawn by three horses abreast,
under the control of the queer little postillion, who wore a long pig-tail
and _craquéed_ his whip in a style that delighted the girls. But though
they made no long stay at the French port, they tarried there long enough
to have cause for congratulating themselves on having crossed the Channel
so promptly. The sisters had not overrated their mother’s spirit and
alertness. Catching the boat which brought the fugitives their luggage,
Mrs. Godwin surprised them with a visit on Saturday morning; her arrival
at the hotel being announced to them by the landlord, who hastened to
their room with intelligence that a fat English Madame had come to the
house, and was bent on seeing her daughters, with whom (according to
Madame’s account) Monsieur had run away. How Mrs. Godwin was received by
the trio may be imagined. Mary laughed saucily at the step-mother, from
whose authority she had escaped. Claire answered her mother’s sharp speech
by declaring she should not return to London till she had seen something
of the world. If Shelley was not wanting in outward civility to the lady,
of whose bread and salt he had partaken so freely, he was at pains to
record in the journal which he and Mary had already begun to keep, how
disdainfully his friend’s wife had been described by the Calais taverner.
In the memoranda of the second day’s entry it is told how the landlord
announced that ‘a fat lady had arrived who said that I had run away with
her daughter,’ the personal pronoun and whole structure of the phrase
showing that the words were a portion of Shelley’s contribution to the
entry. For this scrap from Shelley’s diary we are indebted to Mr. Kegan
Paul, who wishes the readers of _William Godwin: His Friends and
Contemporaries_, to chuckle over the evidence that Mrs. Godwin was fat,
that a French innkeeper derided her for being fat, and that Shelley was
tickled by what the innkeeper said of the gentlewoman. Had one of Byron’s
numerous diaries contained these same words in ridicule of a lady whose
hospitality he had abused, what a rout the Shelleyan enthusiasts would
have made about the diarist’s ingrained vulgarity!

A few words may here be said of the journal which Shelley and Mary began
to keep at this point of their joint-story, and kept conjointly for a
considerable period. It has been averred by Shelleyan enthusiasts that
this journal was thus kept by the poet and Mary without a single day’s
break up to the date of Shelley’s death. This journal has been declared a
source of information by which every day, every hour of the poet’s life
from the very first day of his association with Mary Godwin, can be
accounted for. The journal has been held out by the Field Place scribes
_in terrorem_ against all persons, presuming to question anything uttered
by a small ‘ring’ of Shelleyan specialists, as a source of evidence that
may at any moment be used to cover such presumptuous persons with
discredit. It is therefore well that in a book written by one of the
presumptuous personages, prominence should be given to the reasons for
questioning whether this joint-journal was kept for so long a period, and
in so unbroken a manner as certain writers have declared; and also to the
far stronger reasons for thinking the journal may have been altered and
‘doctored’ by Mary Godwin after her husband’s death.

On 26th January, 1819, Shelley wrote from Naples (where he was then
staying _with_ his wife) these words, ‘In my accounts of pictures and
things I am more pleased to interest you than the many; ... Besides, I
keep no journal, and the only records of my voyage will be the letters I
send you.’

Observe how Shelley in a confidential letter to one of his closest friends
declares that he is not keeping a journal, and that the letters he is
sending his friend will be the only record of the part of his career to
which the letters refer. If Shelley’s statements about his personal
affairs could be relied upon, the words would be sufficient evidence that
he was not then keeping a journal, that his letters to Peacock were the
only authoritative record of his doings at this particular point of his
career, and that, therefore, to the best of his knowledge and belief, his
wife was not then keeping a record of his doings. If he was at that time
keeping a journal, he wrote to Peacock what was untrue. Unless he had
reason for thinking that no record of his life was being kept at that time
either by his wife or any other person, he was less than truthful. If Mr.
Garnett was right in saying Shelley began a diary in 1814, which accounts
for every day of his life, Shelley was wrong in saying he was keeping no
record of his life in January, 1819. Mr. Rossetti suggests that the
inconsistency between Shelley’s words and Mr. Garnett’s words may be only
apparent, as Shelley may ‘sometimes have intermitted his journalizing, and
then his wife kept it up.’ But this reasonable suggestion does not dispose
of the difficulty. If the suggestion is correct, Mrs. Shelley must have
filled in and kept up the journal with her husband’s knowledge, or without
it. If she kept the diary with his knowledge and sanction, the journal
remained a thing for which he was so far responsible, that it should have
precluded him from saying he kept no journal. If he knew Mrs. Shelley was
keeping a daily record of his doings, he was untruthful in saying the
letters would be the only record of those doings. On the other hand, if
Mrs. Shelley kept the journal without his knowledge, the diary during the
times of its being so kept was not his journal, but simply Mrs. Shelley’s
journal, and Mr. Garnett erred in writing of it as a record for which
Shelley was responsible from first to last.

Let me now pass to the reasons why the statements of this journal should
be received with caution. The journal was in Mrs. Shelley’s keeping after
her husband’s death, some portions of it having been published during his
life, whilst other portions are even yet withheld from critical scrutiny.
It will be admitted that _primâ facie_ the poet’s widow was far less
likely to alter the printed and published portions of the record than to
alter the MS. and undivulged entries; since in tampering with the
published portions she would be more or less liable to exposure, whereas
in altering the unpublished portion she would feel secure from detection.
It will also be admitted that to show Mrs. Shelley did, after her
husband’s death, tamper with and alter the published portions, for the
express purpose of removing an important matter of evidence from them, is
to prove her quite capable of tampering with, and altering the unpublished
portions, should she be tempted strongly to do so. I charge Mrs. Shelley
with having thus tampered with the published portions of the record.

In 1814 Mary and Claire were sisters, ever thinking and speaking of one
another as sisters. In 1814 years had still to pass (albeit they often had
smart tiffs and differences) before they ceased to think and speak of one
another with sisterly love and in sisterly fashion. Hence, at Paris in
August, 1814, it was natural for Mary Godwin to write in her journal:--

    ‘We resolved to walk through France; but as I was too weak for any
    considerable distance, and _my sister_ could not be supposed to walk
    as far as S*** each day, we determined to purchase an ass to carry our
    portmanteau and one of us by turns.’

To call attention to ‘my sister’ I have printed the two words in italics.
In December, 1817, when Claire had been for some time Byron’s mistress,
and after being discarded by him had given birth to Allegra, Shelley and
Mary published the journal (in which these words occur), together with
certain well-known letters and the poem on _Mont Blanc_, under the title
of _History of a Six Weeks’ Tour through a part of France, Switzerland,
Germany, and Holland: With letters descriptive of a sail round the Lake of
Geneva and of the Glaciers of Chamouni_: the book being provided with a
preface written by Shelley himself, which contains these words:--

    ‘Those whose youth has been past as their’s (with what success it
    imports not) in pursuing, like the swallow, the inconstant summer of
    delight and beauty which invests the visible world, will perhaps find
    some entertainment in following the author, _with her husband and
    sister_, on foot, through part of France and Switzerland, and in
    sailing with her down the castled Rhine, through scenes beautiful in
    themselves, but which, since she visited them, a great poet has
    clothed with the freshness of a diviner nature.’

Thus in the journal, which has been dealt with by the Shelleyan
specialists as the joint-production of Shelley and Mary, and in the
Preface of which Shelley was the sole author, Claire is styled Mary’s
_sister_. This is conclusive evidence of the regard in which Claire was
held by Shelley and Mary from 1814 to the end of 1817. Jointly they style
her ‘sister.’ Shelley by himself styles Claire his wife’s sister. What
does Mrs. Shelley do in 1840, when she has ceased to love Claire, and
lived to think of her as a vexatious and discreditable connexion? In the
last named year, on producing a new edition of the _Six Weeks’ Tour_, she
does her utmost to obliterate the evidence of her relationship to her old
playmate and travelling companion, by substituting the word ‘friend,’ for
the word ‘sister,’ in each of the above-given passages. She thus tampers
with the text of the journal of which her husband was joint-author, and
the text of the Preface, written altogether by her husband, in order to
withdraw evidence which he put before the world. Am I wrong in saying that
the widow, who dealt thus with her husband’s printed words, was capable
of altering the unpublished entries of diaries kept by herself and her
husband?

Posting to Paris, where they stayed for a week, the trio entered the
French capital with so little money that Shelley was compelled to sell his
watch and chain for eight Napoleons and five francs, a part of which sum
he is said to have remitted to Harriett. On the arrival of a remittance
from England of 60_l._, which is noticed in the diary as setting them
‘free’ from a kind of imprisonment which they found very irksome, the
travellers made a curious plan for enjoying their financial liberty and
acted upon it promptly; in spite of the dissuasive eloquence of their
landlady, who assured Mary and Claire, that in traversing a country
populous with recently disbanded soldiers, they would expose themselves to
insult and to outrage far worse than mere insolence. Mainly from
considerations of economy, though in some degree, perhaps, from appetite
for novel adventure, they determined to walk through France.

With clothing that could be packed in a single portmanteau and a dear
little donkey that, besides carrying the portmanteau, would carry them by
turns, Mary and Claire were certain they could journey to Switzerland with
keen enjoyment and no excessive fatigue; whilst Shelley (an excellent
walker) could, of course, trudge the whole way on foot, bearing a small
basket of provisions for their frugal meals. The scheme looked well on
paper; and had circumstances been as compliant as the adventurers were
imaginative the plan would have worked admirably. The portmanteau would
have been none too heavy and the donkey none too weak; every village in
which they desired to rest would have afforded them clean beds and
sufficient cookery; the weather would never have been too hot, the roads
never too stony. But the circumstances were too rigorous and unyielding.
It was to their misfortune that, instead of buying a competent ass in the
Parisian ass-market, Claire and Shelley selected a diminutive animal, that
in less than twenty-four hours proved insufficient for the place. Still it
was all merriment at the outset to the girls, who prattled merrily on the
way from Paris (which they left at four p.m.) to Charenton, which they
entered some six hours later. Dressed in black silk, the sisters (on
leaving coach and taking the donkey at the barrier) congratulated
themselves on their choice of a costume, the lightness of their
portmanteau, the mild intelligence of their dear little donkey. At the
first view of Charenton in the valley watered by the Seine, Claire (in sly
raillery at Shelley) ejaculated, ‘Oh! this is beautiful enough: let us
live here.’ In the morning, when, on recognizing the donkey’s incompetence
they replaced it with a mule (bought for ten Napoleons), the girls may
have been troubled with doubts whether ‘black’ was the best ‘colour for
standing white dust.’ Soon the temper of the tourists was tested by trials
more grievous than fatigue and the dust of hot highways. The fare of the
_cabarets_ was coarse, the company in them not chiefly remarkable for
refinement, the bedding neither comfortable nor clean. The peasants might
have been something less morose to gentle strangers, in no degree
responsible for the excesses of the brutal Cossacks. On nearing Trois
Maisons, Shelley sprained his ankle so badly that the girls were compelled
to walk an entire day’s journey and let him ride on their mule. At Troyes
he could scarcely put his lame foot to the ground; Mary was ‘dead-beat’
with fatigue; Claire could no longer cry out gleefully, ‘I am glad we did
not stay at Charenton, but let us live here.’ The bright girl’s cheeriest
cry just then may well have been ‘Beds,--and let’s sleep here for ever.’

On the morrow, 13th August, 1814 (and maybe in the absence of Mary and
Claire, capable of strolling through the town), Shelley, whose lameness
kept him a prisoner to the hotel, took pen in hand and wrote his wife a
remarkable epistle. Opening with an assurance that it is written, in order
that she may realize how he holds her in remembrance, this epistle from
Shelley to the wife he has left in England begins with ‘My dearest
Harriett,’ and closes with a declaration of enduring affection for her:--a
declaration preceded by a message of love to their sweet little Ianthe. ‘I
write,’ he says, ‘to urge you to come to Switzerland, where you will, at
least, find one firm and constant friend, to whom your interests will be
always dear,--by whom your feelings will never be wilfully injured.’ It is
scarcely conceivable that in his heart Shelley believed Harriett guilty of
any heinous offence against his honour, when he thus begged her to join
him in Switzerland. After chatting to her about the scenes and
circumstances and incidents of her journey from Paris to the town where he
is staying, Shelley enjoins Harriett ‘not to part with any of her money’
(words implying that he knows her to be in possession of a considerable
sum), and bids her bring with her to Switzerland the two deeds which
Tahourdin has been instructed to prepare for her. The settlement may have
been a deed for her pecuniary benefit. The other two deeds may have been
duplicates of an instrument, defining the terms of their separation, to
which (I think) she may be regarded as having assented (in a legal sense)
before Shelley left England. Thus Shelley wrote from Troyes to his wife,
whom he hoped soon to have the pleasure of welcoming to some sweet retreat
in the Swiss mountains.

By the writer of the well-known _Edinburgh_ ‘Shelley and Mary’ article, it
is remarked of this letter,--

    ‘It is difficult to conceive anything more wild and impracticable--the
    more so as Shelley himself, travelling with another woman who was not
    his wife, invites his wife in terms of endearment to join him in
    Switzerland, which he had not reached, and where he was not going to
    stay. It is the scheme of a reckless child.’

Because this curious, scrambling tour, covered only forty-seven days, is
it so certain that Shelley left England without any intention of remaining
abroad for a longer period? Because he spent only ten days in Switzerland,
does it follow that on the 13th of August he was going there _for_ no
longer time? I venture to differ from the _Edinburgh_ writer. Taken by
itself the letter is evidence, that on the 13th of August, Shelley hoped
to make a sojourn of several months in Switzerland. Had he at that time
intended to scamper into and out of the little Republic, after spending
ten days within its bounds, he would scarcely (harum-scarum creature
though he was) have entreated Harriett to come out to him. But there is
other evidence that he hoped to be away from England for a longer time.
The _History of a Six Weeks’ Tour_ abounds with indications that at the
outset the tour was meant to cover several months instead of a few weeks.
Leaving England with only a little money in his pocket, even Shelley would
not have spent it so lavishly in posting from Calais, had he not hoped to
find an abundant remittance for him at Paris. Instead of awaiting his
arrival at the capital, the remittance did not come till he had waited for
it several days, ‘in a kind of imprisonment.’ When it came the trio were
disappointed by its smallness. Indicated by the epithet applied to the sum
in the diary, this disappointment is revealed yet more fully by the fact
that the smallness of the sum caused the trio immediately to alter their
plans, and on the spur of the moment devise a scheme for a cheap
walking-tour. Had they expected no more than 60_l._ they would have laid
their plans for the cheap expedition on foot, whilst enduring the ‘kind of
imprisonment.’ Between Troyes and Uri they were compelled to spend money
much faster than they intended to spend it; a series of small and
unforeseen misadventures diminishing the resources, which would otherwise
have enabled them to stay longer in the country, where they hoped to make
a temporary home. It is clear from the diary, that on the road from Troyes
to Switzerland, they looked forward to Neufchatel as a place, where they
would possibly find another remittance. Even on the 20th of August, after
getting the 38_l._ in silver from the Neufchatel banker who afforded them
relief, so far were they from thinking of a speedy return to England, that
they ‘resolved to journey towards the lake of Uri, and seek in that
romantic and interesting country some cottage where they might dwell in
peace and solitude.’ In their account of the circumstances which compelled
them to relinquish this delightful scheme, the diarists say, ‘Such were
our dreams, which we should probably have realised, had it not been for
the deficiency of that indispensable article--money, which obliged us to
return to England.’ Even on the 26th of August, when they determine to run
home as quickly and cheaply as possible on their remaining 28_l._, they
are clinging to a hope of money from some uncertain source. ‘The 28_l._
which we possessed,’ they say, ‘was all the money that we could count upon
_with any certainty_ until the following December.’ Hence there is less
reason for astonishment, than the _Edinburgh_ Reviewer imagined, in the
poet’s sufficiently staggering proposal to the ‘noble animal,’ who could
neither ‘feel poetry’ nor ‘understand philosophy.’

Shelley having turned lame, Mary having failed from weakness, and Claire
having had enough of trudging along hot roads, the remainder of the ‘Six
Weeks’ Tour’ was made on wheels or by water. Selling their mule and saddle
(at a sacrifice of several Napoleons) at Troyes, where they bought a
four-wheeled vehicle for five Napoleons, and making a bad bargain with the
impudent peasant, who agreed to convey them and their carriage with his
own mule to Neufchatel, they pushed onwards to Switzerland, where they
arrived, after a series of exasperating misadventures, to discover that
enthusiasts for liberty may be exceedingly uncomfortable, though living
within view of William Tell’s Chapel, and to discover at the end of ten
days that, to escape absolute want, they had better hasten back to
England. Taking the _diligence par eau_ at Lucerne, they made their way in
uncongenial company along the Reuss to Loffenberg, pushed onwards in a
leaky canoe to Mumph, and passed through divers discomforts _en route_
from Mumph to Basle. Leaving the Rhine at Bonn, they posted to Cologne,
travelled by diligence to Cleves, and posted to Rotterdam. Detained by
contrary winds for nearly two days at Marsluys, they had ample time for
spending their last guinea at that scarcely genial place, whilst

    ‘reflecting with wonder that they had travelled eight hundred miles
    for less than thirty pounds, passing through lovely scenes, and
    enjoying the beauteous Rhine, and all the brilliant shows of earth and
    sky, perhaps more, travelling as they did, in an open boat, than if
    they had been shut up in a carriage, and passed on the road under the
    hills.’

On the third day after clearing away from Marsluys, they landed at
Gravesend on the morning of the 13th of September, cold and miserably
exhausted by an unusually rough passage.

Cheap touring now-a-days is more rough than nice. Seventy years since it
was unutterably nasty. To realize what Shelley and the girls endured in
their cheap and nasty tour, is to see our grandfathers and grandmothers
did well to stay at home, when they could not afford to travel
luxuriously. Journeying in the easiest carriages, sailing in the least
crowded boats, resting at the best hotels, wealthy tourists had to endure
no little rough usage and discomfort. But it makes the flesh creep to
think how the poet, and Mary, and Claire, fared during the most
disagreeable passages of their first Swiss trip. Eating coarse food they
were often compelled to eat it in the company of quarrelsome peasants,
heavy with drink and stinking of garlic. Even when they were not
verminous, the beds offered to their weary limbs were comfortless and
unalluring. More than once they remained all night in the open air rather
than repose on the squalid couches of their inn’s worst room. At least on
one occasion the hostess of a rural tavern told them that if they would go
to bed, they must be content to do so in the same chamber as their
coachman. At Brunen, on the lake of Lucerne, where they made a brief and
feeble effort to settle, the best quarters they could get consisted of two
unfurnished rooms in an old, ugly, and dilapidated chateau. The season was
cold and rainy; and when they lit a fire in their living room, the big
stove emitted so unwholesome and stifling a warmth, they were forced to
throw open the windows to the bleak and penetrating wind.

In compensation for serious and sometimes disgusting discomforts, they
experienced those excitements that are enjoyed in the highest degree only
by young, hopeful, and imaginative tourists, moving through new scenes of
surpassing loveliness. From the Alps and the German vineyards, the Swiss
lakes and the glorious Rhine, Shelley returned to England with memories,
to which we are indebted for much of the finest poetry of _Alastor_. Ever
and again, too, in the pages of the _Six Weeks’ Tour_, the tourists are
seen in the enjoyment of pleasures that, instead of being derived from the
surrounding scenery, were only heightened by the influence of its
beauties. On their passage, in a boat laden with merchandise, from Basle
to Mayence, whilst the sun shone pleasantly, Shelley read Mary
Wollstonecraft’s _Letters from Norway_ to the girls, who listened with
delight to a book that was new literature to them.

Landing at Gravesend without three halfpence in their pockets, and leaving
Gravesend in debt to the captain of the vessel that had brought them from
Holland, the trio made their way back to London. It was a doleful return
for the two girls, neither of whom had courage or inclination to go to the
home, from which they had fled so shamefully less than seven weeks since.
As though it were a matter about which his readers might be doubtful, Mr.
Kegan Paul is at pains to record, that, ‘Godwin’s irritation and
displeasure at the step his daughter had taken were extreme.’ ‘Irritation’
and ‘displeasure’ are no terms to describe the veteran’s indignation at
the young man who, after eating his bread and salt, and affecting for
successive years to sit meekly at his feet, in the character of an
idolizing and grateful disciple, had seduced his only daughter. Let there
be an end of the dishonest endeavours to gloss the blackest business of
Shelley’s life into a venial indiscretion, to colour and tone it into a
pretty piece of domestic romance. Truth and morality require that this
spade should be called by no other name.

It is noteworthy that the persons who have displayed the most zeal and
ingenuity in glossing and colouring Shelley’s seduction of Mary Godwin
into a romantic and innocent love-passage, are the very persons who have
been most ostentatious of their righteous indignation and disgust at
Byron’s profligacy. In my _Real Lord Byron_ I gave due prominence (some of
my critics thought me guilty of giving excessive prominence) to his
successive acts of libertinism. But I know of nothing in the whole record
of Byron’s profligacies, that is comparable for deceit and treachery with
Shelley’s course of action to his familiar friend’s daughter. Had Byron
acted towards the daughter of any one of his intimate friends precisely as
Shelley acted to Mary Godwin, what a noise the Shelleyan enthusiasts would
have made about his treacherous profligacy!

In dealing with Shelley’s conduct to his familiar friend’s
sixteen-years-old daughter, the Shelleyan Socialists will not touch the
questions at issue, by urging that he was unhappy with his wife; by
showing that he had good (_even the gravest_) reasons for dissatisfaction
with her; or by arguing that good and wise men have distinguished
themselves by benevolence to their species, and laboured with eminent
advantage to their fellow-creatures, whilst associating conjugally with
women who were not their wives. Every one knows that men of exemplary
beneficence, whose services to their species are commemorated in the
brightest pages of its history, have lived amiably and usefully in the
closest domestic union with women to whom they were not lawfully wedded.
The question is not whether or no, after discovering real cause for
quarrel with his wife, and finding himself unable to live happily with
her, he would, after a considerable lapse of time, have been justified in
going to a woman (already in the maturity of intellect and of years) and
saying to her, ‘I made, in my boyhood, a miserable marriage, from which I
cannot get legal release. You know every particular of my story; nothing
of it has been withheld from you. Your age and your experience qualify you
to estimate the nature, and magnitude, and consequences of the sacrifice I
ask of you. As far as any woman can be in such a position, you are in a
position to justify you in ministering to my happiness, in contravention
of human laws and social sentiment. My prayer is that you may love me as I
love you, and will grant me all that my love requires of you. But in
consideration of the enormity of the sacrifice you will make of your
interests in yielding to my prayer, I cannot allow you to consent
impulsively, but beg you to ponder my proposal with all possible calmness
before you answer.’ The question is not raised whether or no Shelley,
some ten or twenty years after his complete separation from Harriett,
might have spoken in this way to a woman some thirty years of age.

Nor will the Shelleyan apologists touch the main question by repeating one
of their favourite pleas in Shelley’s behalf, viz., that, if he was wrong
in stealthily carrying off his friend’s child, he believed himself quite
right in doing so. It is curious that the lady, who in her girlhood was
thus dealt with by her future husband, should have been the originator of
the extraordinary plea. In her note to _Alastor_, Mrs. Shelley remarks of
her husband, that ‘in all he did, he, at the time of doing it, believed
himself justified to his own conscience.’ What makes this curious plea
especially deserving of notice is its truth. As soon as Shelley wished to
do a thing, it was manifest to him that he had a right to do it; and
having done the thing (however wrong it might be), he could commend
himself for virtue in having done it. Peacock tells a curious story, that
may be repeated in illustration of Shelley’s readiness to discover a good
motive, to justify anything he had a humour to do. One fine day in the
early summer (probably of 1815), the two friends were walking through a
village where there was a good vicarage-house, whose front wall was
covered with corchorus in full bloom. In his delight at the pleasant house
and garden, and the picturesque church near at hand, Shelley remarked
seriously, ‘I feel strongly inclined to enter the church.’

‘What,’ said Peacock, ‘to become a clergyman, with your ideas of the
faith?’

Instead of admitting that a man of his views would be a miserable impostor
to take orders for the sake of a good benefice, Shelley answered, ‘Assent
to the supernatural part of it is merely technical. Of the moral doctrines
of Christianity I am a more decided example than many of its more
ostentatious professors. And consider for a moment how much good a good
clergyman can do.... It is an admirable institution that admits the
possibility of diffusing such men over the surface of the land. And am I
to deprive myself of the advantages of this admirable institution, because
there are certain technicalities to which I cannot give my adhesion, but I
need not bring prominently forward?’

This notion of entering the church was nothing more than a passing fancy;
but with Shelley to entertain the notion was to discover virtuous reasons
for acting on the immoral fancy. All through life Shelley thought of
himself and his doings in this self-justificatory fashion. Whatever he
said or did was right to be said and done. In a former chapter it has been
remarked how Shelley resembled Byron in being a sentimental egotist; and
how the egotism of the one poet differed from the egotism of the other.
Whilst it delighted Byron to figure as the man of sin, Shelley sided with
angels and asked the world to worship him for his celestial qualities.
Whilst Byron delighted in painting himself blacker than he was, Shelley
never wearied of proclaiming himself a creature of angelic purity and
whiteness. Both were actors desirous of being mistaken for the characters
they assumed; each of them having selected his part in obedience to his
natural disposition; Byron wishing to be thought romantically wicked,
because wickedness had a fascination for him, whilst Shelley wished to be
thought romantically virtuous, because he had a genuine preference for
goodness.

Insincere on the surface, the affectation of either poet had its source in
sincerity. In some respects Byron’s affectation was the more piquant, from
being so much more unusual than Shelley’s affectation. Whilst Shelley’s
affectation was commonplace hypocrisy, expressing itself in the finest
figures of poetry, Byron’s hypocrisy was so much out of the ordinary
course of things as to be almost unique. Harness designated it ‘hypocrisy
reversed.’ It was hypocrisy turned inside out. And anything, from a
philosopher’s argument to a fop’s dress suit, on being turned inside out,
is for a while more attractive and entertaining than when it is displayed
in the usual and proper way. To hear a man credit himself with virtues he
does not possess, one has only to stand with open ears at the corner of
any market, where people are noisily employed in over-reaching one
another. But it is rare, and because rare it is amusing and piquant, to
find a man chiefly desirous of persuading his neighbours that he is a very
much worse man than he really is. England will hold her own amongst the
nations of the earth for several centuries, without producing another
great poet so enamoured and ambitious as Byron was of evil fame; but every
generation of her past or future story has produced, or will produce, a
poet with Shelley’s disposition to think and speak too well of himself. It
may, however, be questioned whether England will, in the coming time,
ever produce a poet so supremely great in his art, and at the time so
supremely self-righteous as the author of _Laon and Cythna_.

It is not surprising that William Godwin could not recognize a possible
Saviour of the World in his daughter’s captor. It is not surprising that
for some time he refused to speak with Shelley, or to correspond with him,
except through a solicitor. The worm turns when it is trodden upon. Even a
philosopher may be excused for showing he participates in the infirmities
of ‘the slavish multitude,’ when the young man he has cherished
affectionately repays his kindness by bringing his only daughter to shame.
It is not surprising that, to the hour of the poet’s death, Godwin thought
of him bitterly and resentfully as an evil man. Even to his daughter,
after he had taken her back to his heart, the poor author and struggling
bookseller never disguised from her his low opinion of the man who in
undue course became his son-in-law. Writing to her on 9th September, 1819,
he said, ‘What is it you want that you have not? You have the husband of
your choice, to whom you are unalterably attached, a man of high
intellectual attainments, _whatever I, and some other persons_, may think
of his morality, and the defects under this last head, if they be not (as
you seem to think) imaginary, at least do not operate as towards you.’
From these words, written to his child about her husband, it may be
inferred what Godwin thought of his son-in-law’s morals, and said of them
to people less sensitive than Mary for the poet’s honour, and less
entitled to the old man’s consideration. So much has been written
gushingly about the sweetness of Shelley’s temper, it is well to observe
that Godwin (who may be supposed to have known it better than any of the
poet’s eulogists) wrote to his wife on 14th May, 1817, ‘I knew that
Shelley’s temper was occasionally fiery, resentful and indignant!’

No doubt, Shelley in later time helped Godwin on several occasions with
money. It even appears that in the winter of 1814-15, whilst Godwin was
holding to his purpose of having no renewal of friendly intercourse with
him, Shelley, in the midst of urgent embarrassments, managed to borrow
90_l._, which was sent to the relief of the old man, who was in financial
distress. As the moneys with which he at divers times saved Mary’s father
from bankruptcy, were for the most part, if not altogether, obtained from
money-lenders on post-obits or on loans at heavy interest, charged on the
estates A and B, the amount for which Shelley rendered himself liable for
Godwin’s advantage greatly exceeded the sum that came to the veteran from
his son-in-law. The smaller of the two sums was, however, a large one. One
could wish, for his credit’s sake, that Godwin had never yielded to
necessity so far as to take a single guinea from his daughter’s husband.
It would be easier to respect the veteran had he surrendered his stock to
his creditors, and lived again at the point of pen, rather than take money
from the man who led Mary from the way of womanly duty. But Godwin was now
growing old; his powers and spirit were failing; and there is nothing so
likely as financial distress to deaden a man’s sense of honour. Under that
demoralizing distress, poor Godwin deteriorated lamentably. Several
considerations may, however, be urged in palliation of the incidents that
exposed him to the charge of receiving pecuniary compensation for loss of
honour. He had a wife and a young son still upon his hands; the character
of his business encouraged him to hope that even yet it would prove more
remunerative; and the money he should not have accepted, may well have
seemed to him to come not so much from his son-in-law as from his
prosperous daughter. He may well have felt that in refusing to be helped
by her, he should be reminding her ungenerously of what was shameful in
her ability to help him. In considering these pecuniary transactions,
readers should make an effort to dismiss Shelley from their minds, and as
far as possible think only of the father and daughter.

On returning to London from the six weeks’ tour, Shelley lost no time in
calling on his wife, who, by receiving his visit, may be said to have
justified Mary Godwin in remarking in her diary, that Harriett was
‘certainly a very odd creature.’ This visit to Harriett is said to have
been paid by Shelley on the day following his arrival at Gravesend; and as
Harriett was at that time living under her father’s roof in Chapel Street,
the fair presumption (in the absence of direct evidence to the contrary)
is that the husband and wife saw one another at her father’s house. It is
also certain that in several ensuing months Shelley not only displayed a
desire to live on a friendly footing with Harriett, but that she consented
to his desire so far as to allow him to call upon her, and in divers ways
to make arrangements for her comfort. Whether Mary Godwin called on
Harriett does not appear; but from an entry of her diary, it is obvious
she was disposed to do so. It is scarcely conceivable (though strange
things are conceivable of the Shelleys) that the project for calling on
her would have been seriously entertained until Harriett’s feelings had
been, at least, sounded by Shelley, in order to discover whether it would
be agreeable to his wife to receive a call from his mistress. If the visit
was paid, and, moreover, paid to, and received by, Harriett under her
father’s roof, the affair involved a curious position, and showed that the
Westbrooks resembled the poet in disregard of conventional propriety. That
the intercourse, which certainly took place at this period between Shelley
and Harriett, was fruitful of much enjoyment to either of them is not to
be imagined. Some of their interviews were by no means agreeable to the
sensibilities of the young husband, who on returning from one of them (an
interview that _is said_ to have taken place on the day following that of
the birth of Harriett’s son), complained bitterly to Mary of Harriett’s
demeanour to him. Possibly the mother of Shelley’s heir was not without
materials for a countercharge of the same nature against the young poet,
whom she had just presented with an heir to the Castle Goring baronetcy.
Anyhow, excuses may be made for the young wife and mother (still only
nineteen years of age), should she be proved to have spoken tartly to the
young husband, who had come straight from his mistress’s lodgings to
congratulate her on so interesting an occasion. The matter of chief
importance about these interviews is, that they were made: that Shelley
paid and Harriett received the visits,--a fact fully justifying certain of
Shelley’s biographers in averring that she assented to his withdrawal from
her bed, and that the separation was an affair of mutual consent. Under
these circumstances, as I have already remarked, to produce a regular deed
of separation would not be to give a new colour to the arrangement.

There is some uncertainty as to the precise date of Charles Bysshe
Shelley’s birth. As the matter is of slight or no importance, I have not
been at much pains to ascertain the very day on which Shelley’s son by
Harriett was born. Writing from the Field Place MSS., the writer of the
_Edinburgh_, ‘Shelley and Mary’ article, says that the poet’s first-born
son was born ‘about December 1st,’--a statement following immediately
upon the writer’s testimony that, according to Mary Godwin’s diary,
Harriett left her father’s house on the 20th of October preceding her
accouchement; and that, on so leaving her father’s house, she went to some
place alike unknown to both keepers of the joint-diary. Anyhow, there is
small reason for doubt that the boy was born in his maternal grandfather’s
house in Chapel Street. To this point, Miss Westbrook (in her second
affidavit in the memorable proceedings in Chancery, dated 13th January,
1817) speaks precisely. Affidavits are sometimes loosely drawn; but it is
in the highest degree improbable that Miss Westbrook would have signed
under oath a statement that her nephew was born in her father’s house, and
her own home, unless she remembered him to have been born there. It is no
less improbable that Miss Westbrook’s memory could have betrayed her on
such a point. Consequently, _if_ Harriett’s boy by Shelley was born about
1st December, 1814 (as the Field Place evidences are said to show), and
_if_ (as the same evidences are said to show) Harriett left her father’s
house on the previous 20th October, 1814, she must have returned to her
old home in Chapel Street on some day before the birth of her son.

Whilst he was rendering scarcely acceptable civilities to his wife,
Shelley was not without sentimental embarrassments in the lodgings where
he was living with Mary and Claire,--embarrassments arising chiefly from
Claire’s inability to concur with him respecting the proper limits of his
affectionateness for her. The bright, witty, vivacious girl, who had
favoured and furthered his suit to Mary, and, deserting her mother, had
decided to share the fortunes of the two Free Lovers, saw much to
disapprove, and something to resent, in Shelley’s purpose to treat her
merely as a friend who had rendered him sisterly service. It does not
appear from the record in what particulars Claire felt herself aggrieved;
and in the absence of definite information, readers must be left to
imagine her grounds for discontent with Percy’s treatment of her. The lady
so recently initiated into the principles of Free Love, may possibly have
conceived that its freedom should be limitless. If she was guilty of so
great a mistake, it may be pleaded in her excuse that she had been carried
somewhat too quickly through a course of reading, not unlikely to fill her
young mind with wild and preposterous imaginations. In justice to this
girl of seventeen summers, it should be remembered that in the autumn of
1814 she had been for some months drinking deeply and incessantly of a new
and perilous philosophy. The sharer of her sister’s training for the
higher life, Claire had studied _Queen Mab_ with its Notes, perused Mary
Wollstonecraft’s delightful letters to Gilbert Imlay, pondered William
Godwin’s arguments against marriage, and enlarged her views of life by
earnest application to the Chevalier Lawrence’s elegant work on _The
Empire of the Nairs_. Sure evidence exists that, in the summer and early
autumn, all this stimulating and wildly delusive literature was offered to
the consideration of the two sisters; and it cannot be doubted that,
whenever they needed larger enlightenment and more exact guidance on
questions rising from the texts of the various authors, the girls carried
their difficulties to a tutor who was only too happy to give them more
precise instruction. There is no lack of evidence that Shelley and the
girls went together through this disturbing literature. In a few months
the girls had learnt why chastity should be deemed a monkish superstition;
why conjugal constancy ceases to be virtuous when it ceases to be
agreeable; why love should be lawless. Is it strange that the instruction
afforded to Claire during her passage through such literature, not only by
the books themselves, but also by the more exciting than wholesome
conversations arising from them, was fruitful of misconceptions and wild
fancies in her ardent brain? Mr. Froude is of opinion that by thus
declaring her approval of ‘community of women,’ Claire ‘scandalized even
Shelley himself,’ and proved herself a phenomenally impure and vicious
girl. To me, on the contrary, the declaration of so repulsive a sentiment
only shows how greatly Claire was mentally disturbed and morally injured,
at least for the moment, by the literature and vein of thought to which
Shelley had introduced her.

Was a young man ever in a stranger complication of sentimental
embarrassments than Shelley, living in lodgings with a mistress to whom he
was passionately attached, and her sister so incapable of mere friendship,
whilst he was paying visits of affectionate courtesy to his young wife on
the point of giving birth to his first-born son, or already dandling the
little one in her arms? Whatever the uncertainty respecting his feelings
for Harriett, the position of affairs at his lodgings is clearly defined.
Whilst he would fain cherish Claire with tender and affectionate
friendship, she requires more than friendship of him. On finding that
Claire requires more of his consideration and sympathy than fidelity to
the girl who has sacrificed her honour for his happiness will allow him to
give her, he retires into his sentimental shell, in respect to the girl of
southern complexion and Italian fervour, resolving for the future to bear
himself towards her with circumspection, reserve, and even coldness. Aware
of Claire’s extravagant desire and pretensions, Mary is of course on
Shelley’s side and encourages him to persist in the attitude, which, of
course, appears to her most favourable to domestic virtue. Being in
possession of his heart, she, of course, has no wish to share it with
Claire, and resents Claire’s claim for a part of it as unendurable
presumption.

Had Mary been in Claire’s place, and Claire in her sister’s position, it
is possible Mary would have been guilty of Claire’s egregious
misconceptions, and Claire would have been on the side of domestic virtue.
But having all she wanted Mary was preserved from the erroneous
conclusions, to which new and exciting literature had reduced her
sister-by-affinity. Possessing Percy’s undivided love Mary was saved from
Claire’s painful misconceptions by a natural selfishness,--the vice that
so often renders virtue efficient service. This was the position at
Percy’s lodgings,--a position that, promising much sentimental disturbance
and successive outbreaks of emotional energy, in due course fulfilled the
promise.




CHAPTER IX.

BISHOPGATE.

    Pecuniary Difficulties and Resources--Choice of a Profession--Shelley
    walking a Hospital--Dropt by Acquaintances--Birth of Mary Godwin’s
    first Child--Sir Bysshe Shelley’s Death--Differences and Tiffs between
    Mary and Claire--Characteristics of the Sisters--Trip to South
    Devon--At Work on _Alastor_--Publication of the Poem--_Essay on
    Christianity_--Life at Bishopgate--Shelley’s Idolatry of Byron--Birth
    of Mary Godwin’s first-born Son--Claire and Byron--Second Trip to
    Switzerland--Shelley’s Pretext for leaving England--Strange Scene
    between Shelley and Peacock--Semi-Delusions--Another Hallucination.


So much fantastic stuff has been written about Shelley’s poverty at
manhood’s threshold, and the sufferings which came to him from his
father’s cruel parsimony, that it is well to observe he never made a close
and enduring acquaintance with the penury, which has nursed so many
rhymesters into poets of deathless song. Poverty is of course a
comparative term. In the story of Shelley’s career it must be construed as
little more than a figure of speech. In Poland Street he was supplied
bountifully with money by relatives and other friends. From the date of
the arrangement, to which the Squire was a party not long after his boy’s
expulsion from Oxford, he enjoyed a sufficient and even liberal allowance,
till he ran off to Scotland with Harriett; and from the day of the
elopement till the moment of his withdrawal from his first wife he had an
adequate income, and the means of living far beyond it. Between 28th July
and 13th September, 1814, he spent (in ready money) 98_l._, besides the
money with which he journeyed from London to Calais and posted from Calais
to Paris. The young man who spent money at this rate, like most other
outrunners of the constable, was often without money in hand for the
requirements of his wasteful career,--often without a guinea in his
pocket. But it is absurd to assign to poverty the immediate results of
habitual prodigality. If he ever suffered from what can be fairly styled
poverty, the brief experience belonged to the period between his return
from the Continent in September, 1814, and the early month of the ensuing
year, when by accepting the easy terms offered to him by his father with
the Duke of Norfolk’s approval, he stept into a clear revenue of 1000_l._
a-year. In compliance with the arrangement which afforded him this assured
allowance during his father’s life, the poet surrendered only a small
portion of his interest in the settled estates, A and B.

At divers times between September, 1814, and the arrangement which
afforded him a thousand a-year, Shelley doubtless endured numerous
annoyances and humiliations from want of money. Once and again he was
tracked by bailiffs; and as often he was constrained to keep away from his
lodgings and conceal himself from the emissaries of the law. There were
days together during which he and Mary could safely meet one another only
by appointment at places away from her abode. But even at these hard times
he could raise money for his immediate necessities, albeit at heavy rates
of interest. The poet, who in the time of his most urgent need of money
could give Mary Godwin 90_l._ for the mitigation of her father’s pecuniary
distress, knew nothing of biting penury, little of vexatious poverty, even
when his difficulties were at their worst. Still it cannot be questioned
that in the winter of 1814-15, Shelley was so sensibly touched by
pecuniary trouble as to awake from the golden dreams which had so long
given him a delusive view of his financial position, and to think he
should in common prudence qualify himself to earn his living in one of the
liberal professions.

By this time his debts were no less considerable than harassing; and he
had discovered that no sum he could raise in the money-market on his
expectations would satisfy the demands of his numerous creditors, and
afford a surplus sufficient for his maintenance in scholarly idleness. In
the previous spring a lawyer, whom he had consulted on the state of his
affairs, described him in a professional letter as having ‘used the utmost
of his endeavours to raise money for the payment of his debts, _without
success_.’ Having vainly tried to raise enough money for the mere payment
of his debts, he may well have despaired to raise enough for the
satisfaction of his creditors, and his own subsistence to the end of his
days. Under these circumstances, it was natural for him to think of
choosing a profession. Which of the professions should he enter? The
Church? the Bar? or Medicine? The notion of taking holy orders and seeking
the needful morsel of bread in a parsonage, covered with corchorus in
full flower, was only a passing fancy. For the law, of which he knew
nothing, he had a poet’s natural aversion. The army was out of the
question to the sentimentalist, who regarded war with abhorrence, and
rated soldiers with murderers. Not because he had any natural aptitude or
inclination for the calling, but chiefly because it was less distasteful
to him than any other vocation by which he could win his daily bread
without disgrace, and in a slight degree because some of his forefathers,
and several of his near kindred, had followed, or were following it,
Shelley thought of qualifying himself for service in the vocation, by
which his great-grandfather had prospered in America before marrying the
widow Plum. In this selection of a calling he may also have been
influenced by his cousins, the Groves, a family of doctors.

To guard him from a suspicion of being actuated in this matter by purely
selfish motives, and to account in an elegant manner for his choice of a
profession, which, though sufficiently honourable for persons of
undistinguished lineage, is seldom followed by gentlemen of high ancestral
dignity, successive biographers have represented that, in deciding to
become an apothecary and surgeon, he was moved chiefly by concern for the
interests of the poor. Indeed, Lady Shelley insists that her husband’s
father was governed wholly in this matter by benevolent considerations.
‘In the winter months at the commencement of this year,’ she says,
‘Shelley walked a hospital for the purpose of acquiring some slight
knowledge of surgery, which might enable him to alleviate the sufferings
of the poor.’ It makes, however, against this elegant apology for the
poet’s condescension to medicine, that on coming into an assured income of
1000_l._ a-year he ceased to walk his hospital.[3]

Instead of coming to him from poverty, Shelley’s keenest annoyances in the
winter of 1814-15 came to him from the coldness of persons who, after
courting him in the summer and autumn of 1813, made it clear they no
longer wished for his acquaintance. ‘Some of his few friends,’ says
Peacock, ‘of the preceding year had certainly at that time fallen off from
him.’ Ladies, who had compared him to a rose drenched with rain, and a
bird rejoicing in the sunshine, now thought less favourably of him.
Instead of running after him for sweet converse touching the
perfectibility of the species, they spoke of him as a very bad young man,
who had treated his charming little wife most cruelly and shamefully, and
in other ways proved himself a monster. Because it amuses gentlewomen to
listen in a drawing-room to a young poet’s eloquent exhibitions of his
daring and delightful and original views about society, and the
affections, and ‘all that sort of thing,’ it does not follow that they
will care to flutter about him and smile upon him, when he has acted on
his startling and charming theories. Talk that is piquant and innocent,
from the lips of a young gentleman who is living virtuously with a
charming little wife, strikes gentle listeners as superlatively shocking
and offensive, from a young man who is known to have transferred his
affections from the charming little wife to a young lady who isn’t his
wife. However much he was pained and astonished by her altered demeanour,
Maimuna may be pardoned for declining to call on Miss Mary Godwin. Had she
not a daughter and grandchildren (to say nothing of her character in
Pimlico) to think for? So Shelley was dropt by the Boinvilles and Newtons,
and other no less charming and exemplary people, whilst he lived with Mary
and Claire in lodgings, where the trio--shut out from the Skinner-Street
house, and avoided by all the members of William Godwin’s ‘set’--seldom
had a call from any one but Peacock and Hogg.

One of the incidents of this troublous and vexatious period was the birth
of Mary Godwin’s first child,--a seven months’ girl, who drawing her first
breath on 20th February, 1815, breathed her last a few days later. The
infant’s premature appearance was of course fruitful of scandalous gossip,
which in the total absence of justificatory evidence may be dismissed as
mere gossip. Mary’s earliest issue was, no doubt, a seven months’ child.

Enough has been said of the will, with its momentous codicil, of Sir
Bysshe Shelley, Bart., who died on 6th January, 1815, in his eighty-fourth
year. Enough also has been said of the way in which the poet disinherited
himself and his issue out of the large entailed estate created by that
will. Henceforth, in regarding the poet’s financial position, readers must
think of him as a man with an assured income of 1000_l._ during his
father’s life, and a vested interest in the fee-simple of estates A and B
on the extinction of his father’s life-interest in them, _minus_ the
portion of his interest in the same estates, which he surrendered to his
father in consideration of the 1000_l._ a-year assured to him during his
father’s life.

It is not to be supposed that after taking Claire and Mary through Miss
Wollstonecraft’s _Letters to Imlay_, and Sir James Lawrence’s _Empire of
the Nairs_, and showing them why chastity was a mere monkish superstition
and conjugal constancy a mere matter of expedience, which on ceasing to be
expedient became actually vicious, Shelley was so greatly scandalized, as
Mr. Froude imagines, by Claire’s sprightly talk about ‘community of
women.’ Nor is it to be imagined that Mary was so profoundly shocked and
deeply disgusted as the same historian fancies by her fellow-pupil’s
misconceptions respecting a state of human society, that necessarily came
under their consideration in the course of study and discussion through
which Percy was taking them. In October, 1814, Mary had for several months
been undergoing an education, that saved her from all acutely painful
emotions of horror and repugnance at her class-mate’s equally erroneous
and ridiculous conclusions. Possibly Mary’s diary contains some edifying
memoranda, capable of being used as evidence that she regarded Claire as
wild, even to wickedness, on one or two subjects that rarely come under
the cognizance of English girls or even of English matrons; but such
entries of the joint-journal should be read and construed with reference
to Mary’s familiarity with such topics, and also with reference to the
multifarious incidents and circumstances that had resulted in her
enlightenment on matters, about which both girls should have been kept in
darkness.

None the less certain, however, is it that on coming in October, 1814, to
differences of sentiment on a decidedly unsavoury question, Claire and
Mary had a cause of disagreement which, passionately as they had loved one
another in former time (transient tiffs notwithstanding), could scarcely
fail to engender the friction and heat of lively discord between them.
Differing greatly in personal appearance, these sisters of about the same
age and the same training, were alike remarkable for intellectual and
moral characteristics that, under any circumstances, would have caused
them to clash and quarrel at times, even whilst strongly attached to one
another in their hearts. In some particulars of outward show, each of
these charming and sadly misguided girls had the advantage of the other.
Together with an intellectuality of expression, differing from, but in no
degree inferior to, the mental expressiveness of Claire’s countenance,
Mary the Blonde (albeit with eyes more brown than blue) had a singularly
lovely profile, and finely moulded features, that gave her, in respect to
facial contour and shapeliness, manifest and unquestionable superiority
over her sister-by-affinity. Though not absolutely defective in stature
(indeed one of Godwin’s letters describes her as though she were tall),
Mary lacked the full height requisite for personal impressiveness; but her
figure, good even in girlhood, developed in her maturity into the
exuberant loveliness of antique sculpture. On the other hand, Claire the
Brown had a tall, lissom figure of matchless elegance; a figure which,
though striking beholders at first sight as chiefly remarkable for
delicacy and slightness, was seen at a second glance to be in no degree
wanting in the developments that are requisite for female attractiveness.
Small at the waist and long-necked, Claire had perfectly fashioned
shoulders and arms, tiny hands, and feet minute and nimble enough to have
won Sir John Suckling’s approval. The worst feature of her face was a nose
that resembled Shelley’s in being tip-tilted; but she had the shapely
mouth that is never seen apart from cleverness, pink lips, white teeth,
and dark eyes that shone soft as sunshine through their long lashes when
she was in a good temper, but flashed with a terrifying vehemence when she
was whipt to fury by a cruel tongue. Whilst the colour of Mary’s hair
accorded with her complexion, Claire had a wealth of darksome tresses. In
aspect and air Mary was piquant, lovely, and good; Claire, brilliant,
distinguished, and dangerous.

Both girls were hot-tempered, peevish, and resentful, as well as
vehemently affectionate; Mary animated with the fervour and captiousness
of her mother’s stock, whilst Claire was as impetuous and unruly as any
girl of southern blood ripened by southern suns. Both girls were
quick-witted, imaginative, and ambitious. Reared during their earlier
childhood in Somers Town, discovered by Shelley in the rooms over the
Skinner-Street shop, they were both fashioned to make a figure in the
world; and even in the nursery, where Shelley may be said to have found
them, they conceived the design of making themselves personages of
celebrity. Slovens so long as they were poor, they developed a taste for
dress and personal display as soon as they were rich enough to wear silk
and velvet. Under favourable circumstances (never granted to either of
them) Mary would have developed into a good and greatly useful woman;
Claire into a generous and powerful, though possibly mischievous, woman.
Under such circumstances, Mary would have been precisely conscientious and
as truthful as sunshine (which she certainly was not in her later time),
but Claire would all the same have been something of a schemer and an
_intriguante_, and have valued propitious fortune chiefly on account of
the greater power it afforded her for playing with men and women, as
though they were mere cards and counters. Each of these girls, predestined
to embittering disappointment by the malicious fate that for a brief hour
stirred them both with a sense of dazzling success, numbered amongst their
social endowments a degree of colloquial piquancy and conversational
address that, in the absence of all her other natural excellencies, would
have given her the advantage over ordinary women. Whilst Mary’s sparkling
gossip sometimes smiled with humour (according to Thackeray a rare faculty
in woman), Claire’s higher raillery smacked of the satire that, under the
spur of anger, rolled in torrents of scornful irony from her writhing
lips. The time was coming when Byron whitened and trembled under her
scathing sarcasm. But Claire’s voice was made for better work than cruel
speech. Music was her chief accomplishment; and whilst figuring creditably
amongst professional performers as an instrumentalist, she only just
missed the vocal excellence that would have enabled her to achieve her
ambition to be an operatic singer. That she became so bright and vivid a
force in Florentine drawing-rooms during Shelley’s later years, and after
his death, was in no small degree owing to his admiration of her noble
voice, and the care he took to provide her with good musical instruction
whilst she lived with him and Mary at Marlow and in Italy.

It is not surprising that after living together for seven months, Claire
and Mary determined to dwell apart. In truth the reasons why they should
not cohabit (to use one of Godwin’s favourite words) were so numerous and
weighty that nothing but the strength of the mutual affection, underlying
their mutual jealousies and emotional discrepancies of sentiment, will
account for the long postponement of the outbreak of temper on either side
that, in the spring of 1815, severed them for awhile. A young married
woman usually likes to have her home to herself and her husband, and
though she was not Shelley’s wife it was natural for Mary to rate herself
as his wife, and all the more for the peculiarity of her alliance with him
to wish for the full measure of the domestic privacy, to which a wife is
entitled. Mary was too well acquainted with the troubles arising from Miss
Westbrook’s permanent residence with Percy and Harriett, not to fear that
similar troubles might ensue to him and herself should Claire be always
with them. She was the more desirous for Claire to leave them to
themselves, because, though she had no doubt of the strength and
completeness of Shelley’s attachment to herself, she could not blind
herself to his admiration of and liking for Claire,--an admiration and
liking that influenced him to the day of his death, although his affection
for her was sometimes sorely tried by Claire’s waywardness and freakish
impetuosity. At the same time, though the witty and vivacious girl amused
and delighted him even when she was most perverse and unmanageable,
Shelley had in former times suffered too much from a sister-in-law’s
influence and continual presence at his hearth, not to shrink from the
thought of having another sister-in-law incessantly on his hands. Hence it
came to pass that, on 11th March, 1815, Mary wrote in her diary,--

    ‘March 11th, 1815.--Talk about Claire’s going away. Nothing settled. I
    fear it is hopeless; she will not go to Skinner Street. Thus our
    house, I see plainly, is the only remaining place--what is to be
    done?’

Two months later, after numerous tiffs and interchanges of sarcastic
speech, the two hot-tempered sisters parted for awhile, not more to the
relief and contentment of the one than of the other, Claire taking up her
abode in a solitary cottage (presumably on an allowance made by Shelley),
whilst her sister and the poet entered on the enjoyment of the furnished
house at Bishopgate (the eastern entrance of Windsor Park) that was their
usual place of abode from the summer of 1815 to the early summer (or, to
speak more precisely, the late spring) of 1816. That Mary and Claire
separated none too soon appears from the letter in which the latter wrote
on 15th May, 1815, to Fanny Imlay (_alias_ Wollstonecraft, _alias_
Godwin),--

    ‘I am perfectly happy. After so much discontent, such violent scenes,
    such a turmoil of passion and hatred, you will hardly believe how
    enraptured I am with this dear, quiet little spot. I am as happy when
    I go to bed as when I rise. I am never disappointed, for I know the
    extent of my pleasures.’

Clearly the sisters-by-affinity had spoken smartly to one another before
parting ‘for ever,’--a ‘for ever’ that fell considerably short of twelve
months. At sweet seventeen the mutual resentments of two quick-tempered
sisters blow over and leave no heart-burnings behind them. It would be ill
for our homes were it otherwise. What would become of us were English
girls so incapable, as Mr. Froude imagines them to be, of ‘making it up’
and ‘beginning again’ when they have had a smart tiff? It was all in the
ordinary course of human nature that in the ensuing spring Claire and Mary
were animated by ‘mutual affection, glowing with the impetuosity of
girlish romance.’

Much as they delighted in their new home, Shelley and Miss Godwin needed
the diversion of visiting scenes, even more alluring to lovers of nature
than the glades of Windsor and the rich landscapes of the surrounding
country. Besides making a tour along the coast of south Devon, and staying
at Clifton during the summer, they went, at the end of August, with
Peacock and Charles Clairmont, by the Thames to Lechlade in
Gloucestershire, the river-trip mentioned in a previous chapter. Returning
in September, 1815, to Bishopgate for the enjoyment of the autumnal
colouring of the forest, Shelley may be supposed to have spent the
happiest hours of his existence whilst meditating _Alastor, or the Spirit
of Solitude_, under the oaks of the Great Park,--the poem that was almost
as great an advance from _Queen Mab_ as the _Queen_ was in advance of his
previous poetry. The first of his supremely great works--a poem that, had
he lived to produce nothing greater, would, by itself, have given him a
place amongst the poets who never die--_Alastor_, was published in an
early (if not the earliest) month of 1816, together with the stanzas to
Coleridge, the April-1814 stanzas (from which so many futile efforts have
been made to extort evidence touching the causes of his defection from
Harriett); the verses on Mutability, the lines on the verse from
Ecclesiastes, the Lechlade verses, the sonnet to Wordsworth, the sonnet on
the Fall of Bonaparte, the lines taken from _Queen Mab_ on Religion
(styled _Superstition_ in the reprint, for security’s sake), the sonnet
from Dante’s Italian, the revised fragments of _Queen Mab_, styled _The
Demon of the World_, and the translation from Moschus,--the last-mentioned
item of the miscellany being one of the reasons why successive Shelleyan
biographers and editors have ante-dated the unfinished _Essay on
Christianity_ by five or six years.

Had it not been for this trifle from Moschus in the _Alastor_ volume, and
the passage in Shelley’s letter (dated to Hogg from ‘Bishopgate,
September, 1815’), where he says, ‘I have been engaged lately in the
commencement of several literary plans which, if my present temper of mind
endures, I shall probably complete in the winter,’ it would probably never
have occurred to any editor of Shelleyan MSS. that Shelley produced, in
1815, a composition so foreign to his way of dealing with religious
questions at any time, between the publication of _The Necessity of
Atheism_ and the production of _Laon and Cythna_, as the fragmentary
treatise on the character and teaching of the Saviour of the World. It is
not far to seek how the editorial mind came to commit so strange a
mistake. On the discovery amongst Leigh Hunt’s MSS. of the beginning of a
translation of Moschus’s third idyll (the elegy on Bion), written by
Shelley on the same paper as a missing piece of the _Essay on
Christianity_, it became obvious that the _Essay_ was written at a time
when he was interested in the writings of Moschus. This being manifest the
first of the misleading editors argued thus: The _Essay on Christianity_
was written near the time when Shelley was working at Moschus; the
_Alastor_ volume which passed through the press soon after the composition
of the poem in the autumn and winter of 1815, contains a translation from
the Greek of Moschus, showing that somewhere about that time the poet was
interested in the Moschian idylls; moreover we have Shelley’s assurance
that in September, 1815, he was engaged on several literary enterprises
which he hoped to complete in the course of the ensuing winter. Therefore
one may safely assign the fragmentary _Essay on Christianity_ to the year
1815.

It is obvious that to show the _Essay_ is wholly out of accord with
Shelley’s temper and views on matters of religion in 1815, and on the
other hand to show he was more strongly interested in the Moschian verse
at a later period of his career, when his temper and views were in
accordance with those of the _Essay_, is to sweep away the whole of the
editorial argument. It is not too much to say that in 1815 Shelley could
no more have written the _Essay_, than he could have composed the music of
a great opera. On the other hand, the _Adonais_ affords conclusive
evidence that the poet was influenced by both Bion and Moschus during the
composition of the noble elegy. Besides the translated fragment of the
Elegy on the Death of Bion, by Moschus (written on the same paper as the
portion of the _Essay on Christianity_), Shelley left a translation of
Bion’s _Elegy on the Death of Adonis_, both manuscripts being in the style
of the poet’s later penmanship. Yet further, the Shelleyan manuscript of
the translated fragment of Bion’s _Elegy on the Death of Adonis_ exhibits
on its back a draft of _Pan, Echo, and the Satyr_, translated from the
Greek of Moschus. Thus, whilst the last-named manuscript shows that
Shelley was working about the same time on translations from both Greek
poets, and the _Adonais_ affords conclusive evidence that its author was
influenced in its composition by the same two poets, the manuscript of the
translated fragment of the _Elegy on the Death of Bion_ shows it to have
been produced by Shelley’s pen in the same period as the _Essay on
Christianity_. It follows, therefore, that the _Essay on Christianity_ was
produced at least in the same period as the _Elegy on John Keats_. This
abundant evidence that the _Essay on Christianity_ should be assigned to
the _Adonais_ period of Shelley’s literary career is further confirmed by
these two important facts: (1) That the temper and reasoning of the
_Essay_ are in harmony with Shelley’s views and feeling on religious
matters towards the close of his life; and (2) That in conversation with
Trelawny, who knew the poet only at the close of his career, Shelley ‘said
he had wished to write a _Life of Christ_, revoking the hasty
afterthought’ (expressed in a note to _Queen Mab_) ‘that Jesus was an
ambitious man who aspired to the throne of Judea,’ at the same time adding
‘that he found the materials too deficient for reconstructing a _Life_
having some solidity and authority,’--words indicating that at a time no
long while anterior to his brief association with Trelawny, the poet had
been reconsidering and reshaping his views of the Saviour’s career. Mr.
Rossetti justly remarks that the _Essay on Christianity_ may have been the
out-come of this project. Most readers will also think the out-come,
instead of being ascribed to a period prior to the composition of _Laon
and Cythna_, should be assigned to the _Adonais_ term of the poet’s story.
In truth the discovery of a Shelleyan copy of the _Essay_, dated 1820 or
1821, would not materially strengthen the evidence that Shelley wrote it
in his life’s concluding term.

At Bishopgate, Shelley saw little of his neighbours; the few of them who
called upon him being so little to his mind that they were not encouraged
to call again. Indeed, the only gentleman of the neighbourhood who seems
to have approached the new settler on the verge of Windsor Park, without
impressing him unfavourably, was Dr. Pope, the Quaker doctor of Staines,
who, visiting the poet in the way of professional service, visited him
also for the friendly discussion of religious questions. ‘I like to hear
thee talk, friend Shelley: I see thee art very deep,’ the doctor remarked
on one occasion to the author of _Queen Mab_. With the exception of this
new acquaintance, who was only an occasional caller, and the two familiar
comrades who had held to him staunchly in the previous winter of
harassment and neglect, Shelley seems to have received no one at
Bishopgate on a footing of sociability, from the middle of September,
1815, to the opening of the next spring. But the time of seclusion passed
pleasantly in literary effort and the society of the two friends, with
whom he read Greek authors;--Peacock strolling over to him twice or thrice
a-week from Marlow, whilst Hogg (though a less frequent visitor at the
cottage) seldom let a fortnight pass without walking down from London.
Whilst reading Greek literature with the two scholars, Shelley found time
to bring Mary forward in Latin. ‘Mary,’ he wrote to Hogg in September,
1815, ‘has finished the fifth book of the _Æneid_, and her progress in
Latin is such as to satisfy my best expectations,’--words reminding one
pathetically how, three years earlier, he took a similar interest in
Harriett’s Latin studies, and wrote about them with the same satisfaction
to the same correspondent.

As the time is nearing for Shelley to achieve his ambition of winning
Byron’s friendship, the occasion has arrived for glancing at the regard in
which the more famous poet was held by the author of _Alastor_, and also
for glancing at the efforts made by certain of the Shelleyan enthusiasts
to minimize the idolater’s admiration of the poet they abhor, by insisting
that the admiration was qualified with disapproval, and strictly limited
to certain of Byron’s more creditable literary productions. Let us see, by
Shelley’s own words and acts, how he thought of Byron from 1816, when they
made the personal acquaintance of one another, to the opening of the year
memorable for the fatal boat accident in the Bay of Spezia.

(1)--Of Shelley’s regard for Byron in that year (1816), it is enough, for
the present, to say that, after making Byron’s acquaintance under
remarkable circumstances, and spending some weeks in close intimacy with
him in Switzerland, Shelley was at much pains from that time till the
opening of 1822, to cultivate and preserve his friendship:--a fact which
may, at least, be regarded as conclusive evidence that their intercourse
on the marge of Lake Leman was not fruitful of disappointment in the
younger poet. Admiring the author of _Childe Harold_, whilst he was living
in Free Love with Mary’s sister-by-affinity, Shelley admired him none the
less for dismissing Claire, and in later times worshipt him with a
sentiment of idolatry that will ever remain one of the most remarkable
examples of hero-worship in literary annals.

(2)--It is no slight indication of Shelley’s esteem for Byron in
1817,--when, according to Mr. Froude, he must have regarded the author of
_Childe Harold_ with repugnance, as Claire’s seducer,--that he left Byron
a legacy of 2000_l._ by his will (dated 18th Feb., 1817), and also
appointed him to be an executor of the will, and a trustee for the
performance of its trusts.

In the same year, 1817, when the discarded mistress had given birth to
Allegra, Shelley wrote in the preface to the _Six Weeks’ Tour_ these
words:--

    ‘Those whose youth has been past as their’s (with what success it
    imports not) in pursuing, like the swallow, the inconstant summer of
    delight and beauty which invests this visible world, will perhaps find
    some entertainment in following the author, with her husband and
    sister, on foot, through part of France and Switzerland, and in
    sailing with her down the castled Rhine, through scenes beautiful in
    themselves, but which, since she visited them, _a great Poet has
    clothed with the freshness of a diviner nature_. They will be
    interested to hear of one who has visited Meillerie, and Clarens, and
    Chillon, and Vevai,--classic ground, peopled _with tender and
    glorious imaginations of the present and the past_.’

Thus at a time when, according to Mr. Froude, he secretly revolted from
Byron as a libertine and seducer, Shelley extolled him for clothing the
beauties of the Rhineland with ‘the freshness of a diviner nature,’ and
appointed him an executor and trustee of his will.

(3)--In 1818, in the prefatory note to _Julian and Maddalo_, Shelley wrote
thus of Byron, the original of Count Maddalo:--

    ‘Count Maddalo is a Venetian nobleman of antient family and of great
    fortune, who, without mixing much in the society of his countrymen,
    resides chiefly at his magnificent palace in that city. He is a person
    of the most consummate genius, and capable, if he would direct his
    energies to such an end, of becoming the redeemer of his degraded
    country. But it is his weakness to be proud: he derives, from a
    comparison of his own extraordinary mind with the dwarfish intellects
    that surround him, an intense apprehension of the nothingness of human
    life. His passions and his powers are incomparably greater than those
    of other men; and, instead of the latter having been employed in
    curbing the former, they have mutually lent each other strength. His
    ambition preys upon itself, for want of objects which it can consider
    worthy of exertion. I say that Maddalo is proud, because I can find no
    other word to express the concentered and impatient feelings which
    consume him; but it is on his own hopes and affections only that he
    seems to trample, for in social life no human being can be more
    gentle, patient, and unassuming than Maddalo. He is cheerful, frank,
    and witty. His more serious conversation is a sort of intoxication;
    men are held by it as by a spell. He has travelled much; and there is
    an inexpressible charm in his relation of his adventures in different
    countries.’

In this strain of adulation Shelley wrote of Byron in 1818. Having put the
flattery in clear type and on fine paper, Shelley approached Byron with it
in his hand, and, kneeling, laid it at his idol’s feet.

On 23rd August, 1818, Shelley wrote to his wife from Venice with grateful
fervour, of Byron’s sympathy with his troubles and friendly concern for
his interests:--

    ‘When we disembarked, we found his horses waiting for us, and we rode
    along the sands of the sea, talking. Our conversation consisted in
    histories of his wounded feelings, and questions as to my affairs, and
    great professions of friendship and regard for me. He said, that if he
    had been in England at the time of the Chancery affair, he would have
    moved heaven and earth to have prevented such a decision.’

There is something inexpressibly ludicrous in the notion of Byron ‘moving
heaven and earth’ to stop Lord Eldon’s mouth. The ‘Childe’ must surely
have been laughing in his sleeve when he talked in this style, if, indeed,
he said aught so superlatively farcical.

(4)--To the year 1818 or 1819 may be assigned Shelley’s _Address to
Byron_, the worshipful tone of which composition may be inferred from the
only three lines preserved to us:--

  ‘O mighty mind, in whose deep stream this age
  Shakes like a reed in the unheeding storm,
  Why dost thou curb not thine own sacred rage?’

(5)--To the year 1821 may be assigned the Sonnet to Byron, headed with the
words, ‘I am afraid these verses will not please you, but,’--

  ‘If I esteemed you less, Envy would kill
  Pleasure, and leave to Wonder and Despair
  The ministration of the thoughts that fill
  The mind which, like a worm whose life may share
  A portion of the unapproachable,
  Marks your creations rise as fast and fair
  As perfect worlds at the Creator’s will.
  But such is my regard that nor your power
  To soar above the heights where others climb,
  Nor fame, that shadow of the unborn hour
  Cast from the envious future on the time,
  Move one regret for his unhonoured name
  Who dares these words;--the worm beneath the sod
  May lift itself in homage of the God.’

Can passionate idolatry of a fellow-creature go further in the direction
of abject servility without being lost in it? It is appalling to reflect
that Shelley, a man of high intellect and culture, of gentle breeding and
imperishable achievement in art, thought of Byron in a way to render it
possible for him to utter forth such slavish song. It is asserted by
Medwin (no sure authority on such a point), that this outpouring of
adulation was never actually offered to the hand and eye of the poet, who
could not have contemplated such a tribute of adorative homage without
turning in cordial (though undeclared) scorn from its producer. The sonnet
is said never to have been seen by Byron. But it remains that Shelley
wrote it in Byron’s honour; that he wrote it out (with amendments) on
several slips of paper, and, at least, thought of offering it to the
man, whose contempt of his kind needed no such stimulant.

(6)--Written in June, 1821, _Adonais_ calls on the world to honour Byron
as ‘the Pythian of the age,’ and ‘the Pilgrim of Eternity:’--

   ‘The herded wolves, bold only to pursue;
    The obscene ravens, clamorous o’er the dead;
    The vultures, to the conqueror’s banner true,
    Who feed where Desolation first has fed,
    And whose wings rain contagion;--how they fled,
    When, like Apollo, from his golden bow,
    The Pythian of the age one arrow sped
    And smiled!--The spoilers tempt no second blow,
  They fawn on the proud feet that spurn them lying low.

         *       *       *       *       *

    Thus ceased she; and the mountain shepherds came,
    Their garlands sere, their magic mantles rent;
    The Pilgrim of Eternity, whose fame
    Over his living head like Heaven is bent,
    An early but enduring monument,
    Came, veiling all the lightnings of his song
    In sorrow.’

(7)--In August, 1821, Shelley was so delighted at Byron’s way of living
with another man’s wife, and his consequent progress to moral excellence,
that he wrote to his own wife (the faultless, stainless, high-souled Mary)
from Ravenna, where he was resting as Byron’s guest in the Palazzo
Guiccioli:--

    ‘L[ord] B[yron] is greatly improved in every respect; in genius, in
    temper, in moral views, in health, in happiness. The connexion with la
    Guiccioli has been an inestimable benefit to him. He lives in
    considerable splendour, but within his income, which is now about
    4000_l._ a-year, 100_l._ of which he devotes to purposes of charity.
    He has had mischievous passions, but these he seems to have subdued;
    and he is becoming, what he should be, a virtuous man.’

When Mr. Froude wrote so gushingly, almost in the same paragraph, of
Shelley’s speckless purity of thought and manners, and Byron’s revolting
dissoluteness in living with another man’s wife, he had still to learn
that this guileless and angelic Shelley rated Byron’s _liaison_ with the
Contessa Guiccioli as an eminently virtuous and salutary arrangement.

In the same letter to Mary (mind, Mr. Froude, the letter is written to
Mary _née_ Godwin, the writer’s own exemplary wife), Shelley says:--

    ‘He’ (Byron) ‘has read to me one of the unpublished cantos of _Don
    Juan_, which is astonishingly fine. It sets him not only above, but
    far above, all the poets of the day,--every word has the stamp of
    immortality. I despair of rivalling Lord Byron, as well I may, and
    there is no other with whom it is worth contending. This canto is in
    the style, but totally, and sustained with incredible ease and power,
    like the end of the second canto. _There is not a word which the most
    rigid assertor of the dignity of human nature could desire to be
    cancelled._ It fulfils, in a certain degree, what I have long preached
    of producing,--something wholly new and relative to the age, _and yet
    surpassingly beautiful_.’

On, or about, the same day, Shelley wrote from Ravenna about this same
Canto of _Don Juan_, which he commended so highly to Mary, for its
unqualified purity and surpassing beauty, to his friend Peacock:--

    ‘Lord Byron is in excellent cue both of health and spirits. He has got
    rid of all those melancholy and degrading habits which he indulged at
    Venice. He lives with one woman, a lady of rank here, to whom he is
    attached, and who is attached to him, and is in every respect an
    altered man. He has written three more cantos of _Don Juan_. I have
    yet only heard the fifth, and I think that every word of it is
    pregnant with immortality. I have not seen his late plays except
    _Marino Faliero_, which is very well, but not so _transcendently fine_
    as the _Don Juan_.’

Let it be observed that, in the letter to his wife, Shelley alludes to the
second Canto of _Don Juan_, and more especially to the end of it, as a
piece of literature with which she is familiar. To demonstrate the
excellence of the unpublished Canto he has just read in manuscript,
Shelley assures Mary that, in its style, and the powerful ease with which
it is sustained, it resembles the end of the second Canto,--_i.e._ the
part of the poem which describes, with delicate and insidious
suggestiveness, the mutual passion of Don Juan and Haidee in the cave. Is
it to ‘insult the Shelleys’ (Mr. Froude’s pleasant phrase) to say that
Shelley could not have thus referred to some of the sweetest and most
voluptuous passages of the amorous poem, without knowing that Mary had
perused them with enjoyment and approval? And what is the theme of the
unpublished fifth Canto, which Shelley extols to his wife for bearing, in
every word, ‘the stamp of immortality,’ and for containing ‘not a word
which the most rigid assertor of the dignity of human nature could
desire to be cancelled?’ One of the wittiest and wickedest of the sixteen
Cantos, this highly commended Canto contains the harem scene where
Gulbeyaz vainly solicits Don Juan to minister to her lust. I do not wish
to ‘insult the Shelleys,’ but I cannot conceive that Shelley would have
written so approvingly of the Canto, had he not wished Mary to peruse this
vicious and vitiating piece of Byronic devilry, and felt that it would
please her to read how, in her desperate effort to conquer Don Juan’s
coldness, Gulbeyaz, in an imperial way

                                  ‘laid
  Her hand on his, and bending on him eyes,
  Which needed not an empire to persuade,
  Look’d into his for love....
  ... and pausing one chaste moment, threw
  Herself upon his breast, and there she grew.’

On 14th September, 1821, Shelley wrote from Pisa to Horatio Smith, of
Byron’s determination to write a series of dramas:--

    ‘This seems to me the wrong road; but genius like his is destined to
    lead and not to follow. He will shake off his shackles as he finds
    they cramp him. I believe he will produce something very great; and
    that familiarity with the dramatic forms of human nature, will soon
    enable him to soften down the severe and unharmonizing tints of his
    _Marino Faliero_.’

On 4th November, 1821, Shelley said to Edward Williams of Lord Byron’s
_Cain_, ‘His _Cain_ is second to nothing of the kind.’

(8)--From Pisa, Shelley wrote, in January, 1822, to John Gisborne of the
poet, whom he idolized:--

    ‘What think you of Lord Byron now? Space wondered less at the swift
    and fair creations of God, when he grew weary of vacancy, than I at
    this spirit of an angel in the mortal paradise of a decaying body. So
    I think, let the world envy while it admires, as it may.’

(9)--On 10th April, 1822, when his relations with the great poet had been
shaken and ruffled by gusts of discord, Shelley wrote to John Gisborne,
‘What think you of Lord Byron’s last volume? In my opinion it contains
finer poetry than has appeared in England since the publication of
_Paradise Regained_. _Cain_ is apocalyptic,--it is a revelation not before
communicated to man.’

Of course, Shelley’s idolatry of his hero was not always maintained at
this pitch of enthusiasm. There were moments when the worm turned against
his God, and wrote disparagingly of him. But the foregoing passages from
Shelley’s letters and works exhibit his prevailing view of Byron the poet,
and his worshipful disposition towards the man Byron. Nor may it be
imagined that the worshiper was enabled to think thus reverentially of the
idol, because he was unaware of what was most repulsive in the darker
stages of Byron’s career. For Shelley is the most strenuous and precise of
all the many givers of testimony respecting the Venetian excesses. Writing
to Peacock of Byron’s Venetian life, Shelley says, on 22nd December,
1818:--

    ‘The fact is, that first, the Italian women with whom he associates
    are perhaps the most contemptible of all who exist under the moon--the
    most ignorant, the most disgusting, the most bigoted; countesses [who]
    smell so strongly of garlic, that an ordinary Englishman cannot
    approach them. Well, L[ord] B[yron] is familiar with the lowest sort
    of these women, the people his gondolieri pick up in the streets. He
    associates with wretches who seem almost to have lost the gait and
    physiognomy of man, and who do not scruple to avow practices, which
    are not only not named, but I believe seldom even conceived in
    England.’

None the less able, however, was Shelley to admire the same Byron (of whom
Mr. Froude writes disgustfully, for ‘living with another man’s wife’) as a
being to be worshipt for his divine excellences and beneficent
achievements. None the less could he regard Byron with reverence and
delight, as ‘the spirit of an angel in the mortal paradise of a decaying
body.’

The winter (styled by Hogg ‘a mere Atticism’) had for its chief domestic
incident the birth of Mary’s eldest son, the ‘William’ of his father’s
song, and of the early grave at Rome, who was born on 24th January, 1816,
on the ninth day after Lady Byron’s withdrawal from Piccadilly Terrace to
Kirkby Mallory. Byron’s Ada was only in the seventh week of her life, when
Shelley’s boy entered upon his brief existence. Born within six weeks and
three days of one another, these infants are curiously associated in
literary annals; for whilst Byron gushed for the world’s edification over
his Ada in verse, that set the sentimental mothers weeping throughout the
country, Shelley’s parental devotion to his ‘delightful child’ broke forth
into song that was no less insincere.

Mary Godwin had not risen from her bed, before all England was ringing
with strange stories of Byron’s domestic troubles. That Shelley, who had
created much scandal in a small world of comparatively obscure people by
quarrelling with his wife, some eighteen or twenty months since, was more
cheered than shocked by Byron’s rupture with his spouse, is probable. That
Byron in his domestic trials and social discredit had a sympathizer and
apologist in the younger poet, is certain. To Byron’s idolater, Lady
Byron’s inability to live happily with her superb husband was a sufficient
proof that she was a faulty woman. That on falling out with his wife, so
sublime a creature as Byron could not take another lawful bride, was in
Shelley’s view a signal example of the depraving tyranny of matrimonial
law,--another argument why Wedlock should be replaced by Free Love.

On this exciting subject, Shelley and Mary were in perfect accord, when
Claire ran in upon them, beaming with beauty, radiant with joy, brimming
over with affection and happiness. She had rare news for them. Bent on
going to Switzerland, she implored them to take her there. Switzerland?
Geneva? Why was she so desirous of going thither? Mary had a babe at her
breast, and was still only recovering from her accouchement; Shelley was
busy at home with his books and writing. What reasons could Claire show
why he should leave his study and Mary her home, to escort her to Geneva?
Answering their questions, and disposing of any objections they made to
her astounding proposal, Claire induced them to take her out viâ Paris to
the Sécheron Hotel near Geneva.

There were no steamboats and railways in 1816. No mere jaunt for idlers
and invalids, as it is now-a-days; the journey from London to Switzerland
(as Shelley, Mary, and Claire knew from experience) was a painful and
costly business in 1816. Mary Godwin’s son was still in his third month,
when the vivacious and irrepressible Claire came in upon her with these
words, ‘I am dying to go to Switzerland; the one desire of my heart is to
go to Geneva; and you and Shelley must take me there,--not in August, or
July, or June; but at the turn of April. You must pack at once and take me
out to Switzerland!’ Is it conceivable that Shelley and Mary yielded to
Claire’s vehement entreaty without asking her, _why_ she was so eager to
be off to Geneva; without satisfying themselves that Claire had an object
in view which justified her in asking so much of them, and in putting them
to so much trouble and expense? Is it conceivable that Claire would have
carried her point with her sister and Shelley, had they not regarded her
again with affection, and been of opinion that she had a claim to so large
a measure of their sympathy and assistance? Is it conceivable that in the
month, whose lap is chilled by lingering winter, Mary Godwin with her babe
in her arms would have crossed the Channel, and traversing France made the
long and toilsome journey to Geneva, only to gratify the mere whim of a
girl she disliked?

All these questions are answered in the affirmative by Mr. Froude, and the
other Shelleyan enthusiasts, who require us to believe that Shelley and
Mary Godwin accompanied Claire, _viâ_ Paris, to Geneva, without any
knowledge or suspicion--that Byron was journeying thither with his young
doctor (Polidori) by the Rhine route; that Claire and Byron had arranged
to meet at the Hotel Sécheron; that Claire had for some weeks before
leaving England been Byron’s mistress; that her object in getting out to
Geneva was to throw herself into Byron’s arms. Successive biographers have
represented that the meeting of the two sets of tourists at the Sécheron
was accidental. Till I exhibited in _The Real Lord Byron_ the reasons for
thinking otherwise of this meeting, no biographer had ventured even to
hint that the juncture of the two parties might have resulted from
pre-arrangement. It is now admitted, even by Mr. Froude, that I was right
on this point.

But whilst admitting that the meeting resulted from pre-arrangement, Mr.
Froude now insists that Byron and Claire were the only parties to the
pre-arrangement, which (according to Field Place) was withheld by Claire
from her travelling companions. Further, Mr. Froude maintains that,
instead of being taken to Geneva by Shelley and her sister, Claire took
them thither on her lap. Yet more:--Mr. Froude and his fellow-workers
require us to believe that, when they accompanied her to Switzerland,
without knowing or suspecting _why_ she wished to go there, Shelley and
Mary Godwin disliked Claire extremely,--disliking her for being a
malicious, spiteful, and altogether intolerable girl; regarding her
disgustfully on account of her vicious notions respecting the intercourse
of the sexes. Touring in pre-railway times with an odious companion was
even more vexatious than touring with such a companion now-a-days. Yet Mr.
Froude insists that Shelley and Mary Godwin associated themselves for
several months of foreign touring, with a girl they disliked extremely,
for the pure pleasure of her society. More still:--Mr. Froude wishes us to
believe that, almost to the last day of their sojourn with Claire and
Byron in Switzerland, neither Shelley nor Mary Godwin had the faintest
suspicion that Claire was Byron’s mistress; and that though Byron was at
pains to have his mistress brought out to him, under cover of her
travelling companions, he never saw her at Geneva, except in the presence
of some witness to the propriety of their demeanour to one another.
Admitting that Byron talked to Claire on the most delicate subjects--such
as the arrangements for her accouchement, and plans for the disposal of
her child when it should be born--Mr. Froude insists that, throughout her
stay in Switzerland, she could not easily have been alone with Byron, even
for the shortest interview. Mr. Froude makes this statement, though it is
a matter of sure personal history that, whilst Byron lived in the Villa
Diodati, and Shelley (with Mary and Claire) in a cottage at the villa’s
foot, the trio of the cottage often slept in Byron’s house after sitting
up with him till dawn.

On what grounds does Mr. Froude ask us to believe things, so incredible
that it is difficult to imagine any evidence that would justify us in
believing them? Mr. Froude has nothing whatever _to show_; nothing
whatever to urge, in support of his extravagant assertions, except talk
about a letter, which he may not show, because Sir Percy Shelley thinks it
better not to show it. We are not told when this letter was written, under
what circumstances it was written, for what purpose it was written. Mr.
Froude says the letter was written by Claire. Any statement told by
Claire, to the discredit of their curious views of Shelley and his career,
is unhesitatingly rejected as a falsehood by the Shelleyan enthusiasts.
They do not falter in charging Claire with falsehood in telling the
certain truth, that she was the Constantia of Shelley’s verse. They do not
falter in charging her with falsehood, in saying that Fanny Imlay, _alias_
Wollstonecraft _alias_ Godwin, killed herself for love of Shelley.
According to the Shelleyan enthusiasts Claire went through life, telling
fibs whenever fibs would serve her purpose; and yet a letter, said to have
been written by her (a letter withheld from public scrutiny), is enough to
satisfy them, that Byron, after causing her (his already _enceinte_
mistress) to come out to him in Switzerland, never saw her there except
in the presence of a third party. To believe this is to believe the
incredible.

When it shall be produced to the world, it will be time enough to give an
opinion whether this marvellous letter was written by Claire to screen
Mary from her father’s censure; or at a later time to whitewash her sister
Mary in the eyes of Sussex society; or was a fabrication, for which Claire
was in no degree accountable. Should it appear that Claire really wrote
the letter, it will only be additional evidence of her faculty for
fibbing. To support the letter’s manifest untruths, with words written by
Mary (who, as we have seen, was often curiously inaccurate in her
biographical statements), or with words written by Shelley (who seldom let
a month pass without penning something wholly devoid of historic truth
about himself or his affairs), would be only to produce evidence of a
conspiracy to impose an untruth on human credulity, for some purpose or
other.

My way of dealing inferentially with admitted facts is this: On flashing
in upon her sister and Shelley at Bishopgate, with joy in her face, Claire
told them at once that she had won the great Byron’s heart, and was
holding the place, for which Lady Byron had been found unworthy. On
learning from her how she and Byron had arranged to journey to Geneva by
different routes, in order that public attention should not be called to
their movements and purpose, Shelley and Mary Godwin consented readily to
her prayer, that they would take her out to her lover. In brief, this is
my view of the case. Let readers decide for themselves, whether they
should accept the view as reasonable or reject it as the reverse. What
motive can Claire have had for concealing her tender and romantic
intercourse with Byron from her sister Mary, living in Free Love with
Shelley? Why should Claire have hesitated to avow her friendship with
Byron to the poet and social reformer, who had taught alike, by precept
and practice, that love should be free; that the love which yearned for
marriage was the only sanction its marriage needed. The only motives a
girl in Claire’s position could have for holding her passion from her
sister’s knowledge would be motives of shame and delicacy. Such motives
cannot be supposed to have influenced Claire’s action to her
sister-by-affinity; the girl with whom she had studied _Queen Mab’s_ views
about marriage, and the Chevalier Lawrence’s _Empire of the Nairs_; the
spouse of a man to whom she was not married; the mother of a child who in
the law’s eye, from one point of view, was no one’s child. What could
Shelley discover of evil in Claire’s attachment to Byron? The thing he
approved for himself was no thing for Shelley to disapprove in Byron’s
case. The course which was virtuous for Mary, could not strike him as
vicious for Mary’s sister.

Mr. Froude writes disdainfully of Claire’s probable presumption in
‘perceiving the analogy of Byron’s and Shelley’s situation.’ Mr. Froude
remarks also that, ‘so far from Claire’s position being like that of Mary
Godwin, it must have appeared to Shelley rather a hideous parody of it.’
Why a hideous parody? The cases were too similar for the resemblance to
have escaped any one of the trio. Shelley had quarrelled with his wife and
was living with another woman. Byron had differed from his wife and was
attached to another woman. Separated from their wives by what is called
‘amicable arrangement,’ both poets were living in Free Contract with girls
they could not marry. The similar cases had no doubt their points of
dissimilarity. But on the whole these points tell in Byron’s favour. In
taking Claire under his protection, he had not seduced a girl no more than
sixteen years of age. He had not carried off by stealth the child of his
most intimate friend. Nor had he taken such pains to win Claire as Shelley
took to capture Mary. It is not certain when and how Byron made Claire’s
acquaintance. On this point there are two different stories; one of them
representing that he saw her for the first time at a point of Oxford
Street, to which he had come at her written request; the other and more
reliable story being that their first interview occurred at Drury Lane
Theatre, under circumstances set forth in _The Real Lord Byron_. Anyhow
the poet’s capture of the giddy and clever girl was an easy conquest,
whereas Shelley’s triumph over Mary was a very difficult business. In
palliation of Claire’s evil behaviour it should be remembered, that she
did not act thus lightly until Shelley had educated her out of her early
views, and that in becoming Byron’s mistress she followed an example set
her by Mary.

Though in my _Real Lord Byron_ I followed previous biographers in saying
Shelley and Byron met for the first time at Geneva, I am by no means
confident that they had no intercourse in England before setting out for
their separate journeys to the same foreign capital. Under the known
circumstances it would be so natural for the poets to have a personal
conference in the earlier weeks of April, 1816; that far from causing me
surprise, it would only fulfil one of my reasonable expectations, to come
upon documentary evidence of their having met in London shortly before
Byron sailed for Ostend. For the present, however, readers must be content
with the assurance that Shelley and Byron came together at the Sécheron
Hotel on the 25th of May, 1816.

Having consented to accompany Claire to Geneva, Shelley, in his
preparations for the journey, acted as though he were especially desirous
to prevent his most familiar friends from discovering or suspecting the
real object of the expedition. Had he felt no need for secrecy he would
surely have told so close a friend as Peacock whither he and Mary were
going, and the purpose of the trip. He would have said, ‘Mary’s sister,
who went abroad with us last July twelve months, is set on going to
Geneva, and has persuaded us to take her there.’ But for some reason he
withheld the real purpose of the trip, and went abroad under cover of
misstatements.

It must have been a day of early April, 1816 (though Peacock calls it a
day of ‘early summer’), that witnessed a curious scene in the library of
the Bishopgate cottage. Bethinking himself that he would take a mid-day
stroll, Peacock (a visitor at the cottage) went for his hat to the hall,
where he saw Shelley’s small hat, but looked in vain for his own large
hat. As he did not care to walk about the country hatless, Peacock
returned to the library, where he was joined by Mary Godwin, who at once
gave him the particulars of certain stirring news, brought that very
morning to Shelley by Mr. Williams, of Tremadoc; the particulars thus
passed on by Mary having just come to her from Shelley’s lips. Instead of
showing any excitement at the stirring news, Peacock took Mary’s gossip
coolly, and declared frankly he could not believe Mr. Williams had been to
the house, or believe Shelley had received the news from the Welsh agent.
Slightly astonished, and perhaps slightly nettled at Peacock’s
incredulity, Mary Godwin withdrew from the library. A few minutes later,
Shelley (with Peacock’s big hat in his hand) entered the room. Now for the
scene between the calm, sagacious, stolid Peacock, and the tall, slight,
round-shouldered, stag-eyed, fresh-complexioned, boyish Shelley.

For the full enjoyment of the combat between the two poets, readers must
go to an article preserved in Peacock’s _Collected Works_. In answer to a
remark by his companion, Peacock admitted his inability to believe the
account Mary had given him of Mr. Williams’s brief visit. Insisting on the
truth of the story, Shelley declared that he had seen Mr. Williams and
walked with him to Egham, adding (in reply to a question by Peacock) that,
during the walk to Egham, he wore the hat he still held in his hand. On
discovering how far too big the hat was for his small head, Shelley
admitted having snatcht it up hastily, and remarked that perhaps, instead
of wearing it, he had carried it in his hand the whole way to Egham and
back. Peacock may well have smiled; it being, of course, obvious to him,
that Shelley had snatched up the wrong hat, only a minute or two since, to
put himself into walking costume, and give himself the appearance of
having just returned from a walk.

Seeing that the hat-trick had only confirmed Peacock in his disbelief of
the story, Shelley pleaded how hard it was for him, a man who had devoted
his life to the pursuit of truth, and made great sacrifices and suffered
much for the truth, to be treated as a visionary. It was thus that Shelley
mistook himself for a martyr, and required his friends to regard him as a
martyr for the truth’s sake. How had he proved his devotion to truth? The
only sacrifices he had ever made of his interests were made from
altogether selfish considerations. He had sacrificed his future interest
in his grandfather’s property, _in order_ to preserve his interest in A
and B, on which he could raise money for his immediate use. He had
sacrificed a little of his interest in A and B, _in order_ to get an
immediate income of 1000_l._ a-year. Seeing how little Peacock was
affected by the plea _in misericordiam_, Shelley proposed that on the
morrow they should go to London, and call on Mr. Williams. ‘He told me,’
said Shelley, ‘he was stopping at the Turk’s Head Coffee-house in the
Strand, and should be there two days.’ Mr. Williams, of course, had told
him nothing of the kind. Catching at the suggestion, Peacock declared he
would willingly go to Mr. Williams, for proof that the marvellous story
was a true story.

In accordance with this arrangement Peacock and Shelley set forth the next
morning, to call on Mr. Williams at the Turk’s Head Coffee-house; Shelley
(an excellent walker) putting forth his foot bravely, with the air of a
man confident of achieving the purpose of the walk to London. But on
getting half-way down Egham Hill, Shelley stayed the march to town by
turning suddenly on his companion with a declaration, that after all he
did not think they would find Mr. Williams at the Turk’s Head. Peacock
declared himself of the same opinion. Still holding to his invention, but
altering it in an important particular, Shelley explained that, when
declaring his purpose to stay two days at the hotel, Mr. Williams had
mentioned a contingency, which might cause him to leave London before
night. To this explanation the merciless Peacock replied, that all the
same they might, by going up to town, learn at the hotel whether Mr.
Williams had been there. The suggestion was not acceptable to Shelley.
Shrinking from the proposal to put the truth of his story to the test, he
declared he would find some other way of convincing his incredulous
friend. He would write to Mr. Williams on the matter. For the present, it
would be more agreeable to him to stroll about the forest than walk along
the road to London.

Peacock assenting with a scarcely perceptible smile, the walk to London
was given up, and the friends passed the day in the forest.

A few days later, nothing having been said in the meantime about Mr.
Williams’s visit, the question is reopened by Shelley with an
announcement, that he had received from Mr. Williams a letter and a
diamond necklace, in token and demonstration that the sender of the letter
and necklace had visited Bishopgate in accordance with Shelley’s story.
Would Peacock believe the story, if Shelley showed him the necklace?
Peacock answering stoutly that the exhibition of the diamond necklace
would only prove to him, that somehow or other his friend was in a
position to display so costly an ornament, Shelley forbore to show the
diamonds, and desisted from his efforts to get the better of his
companion’s incredulity.

The matter was then dropt for ever. Shelley never renewed his attempt to
impose the absurd fiction on Peacock’s clear and steady mind. Peacock says
that he had, on one or two previous occasions, argued with his friend
against ‘similar semi-delusions,’ ‘and,’ adds Peacock,

    ‘I believe if they had always been received with similar scepticism,
    they would not have been so often repeated.... I call them
    semi-delusions, because, for the most part, they had their basis in
    his firm belief that his father and uncle had designs on his liberty.
    On this basis his imagination built a fabric of romance, and when he
    presented it as substantive fact, and it was found to contain more or
    less of inconsistency, he felt his esteem interested in maintaining it
    by accumulated circumstances, which severally vanished under the touch
    of investigation, like Williams’s location at the Turk’s Head
    Coffee-house.’

In other words, according to Peacock’s view, Shelley was in these affairs
a victim of delusion at bottom, and a wilful utterer of untruths on the
surface. What does the reader think? There is no question that the
statements made by Shelley were untrue. His father and uncle were not
plotting to put him in a lunatic asylum; Mr. Williams, of Tremadoc, had
not been to call on him; Mr. Williams had not given him intelligence of a
plot for locking him up; Mr. Williams had not sent him a diamond necklace.
Let it be remembered that Shelley was a young man capable of stating on
paper his intention to have recourse to deception and then deliberately
acting on the intention. He was a writer of wheedling letters to get
money. Of all his many spoken or written misstatements, only three or four
are misstatements without an apparent object. All the other misstatements
had a manifest motive and object, sufficient to account for the employment
of untruth. In the present affair his object was to get out of England
without letting people know, or giving them occasion to suspect the real
purpose of the Continental trip. His motive in saying he must go abroad to
escape from his father and uncle, was to hide the fact that he was going
to take Claire out to Byron. What does the reader think? My own mind is
quite clear. My readers are free to think him in this business the victim
of delusions; but I cannot take that view of the case. Anyhow, whether he
was insane or untruthful, or (as Peacock insists) semi-mad and semi-false,
readers must allow he was a gentleman whose letters and other written
statements are not worthy of the credit, to be accorded to the letters and
other written statements of persons of average mental sobriety and
exactness; that he was a gentleman whose diaries may be suspected of
containing a good many inaccuracies and a few wild fictions; that his bare
statement is no sufficient reason for believing that his most intimate
friend was a villain, or that his first wife was a superlatively wicked
woman.

Another thing to be observed is that, as she was cognizant of Peacock’s
disbelief of Shelley’s statement respecting Mr. Williams’s alleged visit
and news, and was in some degree a witness of the curious conflict of the
two friends, Mary Godwin was aware of her husband’s peculiar mental or
moral infirmity, at least as early as April, 1816. From the spring of
1816, she knew he sometimes uttered statements too marvellous for one of
his closest friends to be capable of believing them. Of course, no woman
could live in conjugal confidence with a man occasionally suffering in so
remarkable a manner from hallucination or deceptive propensity, and be for
any long period unobservant of the peculiarity. It is, however, well to
remember from how early a date of their association she was cognizant of
the fact that, either from delusion or wilful untruthfulness, he was
likely to utter statements at variance with fact.

More than five and something less than six years later (1821-2) Shelley
assured the trustful Medwin and the incredulous Byron that, on the night
before he left London for Switzerland in 1816, he had a memorable
interview with a young, rich, and singularly beautiful woman, who had
never before set eyes upon him. A married lady, of noble connexions, this
historically nameless gentlewoman knew the poet only by his writings,
when, on the eve of his departure for the Continent, she sought his
presence in order to declare herself enamoured of the author of _Queen
Mab_, and desirous of being the mistress of so superlative a being.
Offering Shelley her heart, she implored him to respond to her devotion.
Mated in Free Contract with Mary Godwin, the poet could only decline the
lady’s prayer, and soften his refusal of her suit by explaining that his
heart belonged to the woman, whom he had taken in lieu of his wife. Two
years and a half later he discovered that, instead of returning to her
proper home and lord, the lady, whose flattering preference he was
compelled to decline with suitable expressions of gratitude and regret,
followed him and Mary and Claire across the channel, tracked them through
France, and discovering their Genevese retreat, derived a melancholy
satisfaction from regarding their movements. Of course, whilst she
lingered on Leman’s marge, worshiping her poet and envying his mate in
Free Love, this equally interesting and miserable anonyma took all proper
care, that he should neither recognize her nor suspect her proximity. Thus
following and adoring him in 1816, the unseen worshiper of his genius
followed and adored him in 1818-19, till she died at Naples, after
confessing to him how she had found an inadequate solace for her despair
in pursuing him from land to land. Whilst Medwin swallowed this fantastic
invention, Byron (laughing doubtless in his sleeve at the whole business)
ascribed it to nothing worse than ‘an overwrought imagination.’

It is needless to say the whole story is referable to delusion or
falsehood. No lady proffered her heart and person to the poet in May,
1816. No lady followed the trio through France to Switzerland in 1816, and
again pursued them through foreign lands in 1818. No lady died at Naples
in the winter of 1818-19 in the alleged manner. The whole story was a
piece of romance, that may not have engaged the poet’s fancy for any long
time before he communicated it to Byron and Medwin; though for reasons, to
be indicated in a later chapter, I am disposed to think the fable had its
birth during the poet’s sojourn in Naples, in the winter following his
last withdrawal from his native country.




CHAPTER X.

THE GENEVESE EPISODE.

    Shelley’s Arrival at Geneva--Byron and Polidori--At the Sécheron
    Hotel--Union of the two Parties--Tattle of the Coteries--The Genevese
    Scandal--Its Fruit in _Manfred_ and _Cain_--Its Fruit in _Laon and
    Cythna_--The Shelleys’ Return to England--Their Stay at Bath--Their
    Choice of a House at Great Marlow--Fanny Imlay’s Suicide--Her Pitiable
    Story--Harriett’s Suicide--Review of Shelley’s Treatment of her--His
    Responsibility for her Depravation and Ruin--Witnesses to Character
    and Conduct--Shelley’s Grief for Harriett--His wild Speech about
    her--His Marriage with Mary Godwin--Birth of Allegra.


There is a conflict of evidences respecting the dates of the journey from
England to Geneva. Whilst the _Edinburgh_ ‘Shelley and Mary’ Reviewer
exhibits the travellers in Paris on 6th May, and at Geneva on the 13th of
the same month, Mary Godwin’s letter (published in the supplementary
matter of the _Six Weeks’ Tour_) assigns the arrival in Paris to the 8th,
and the arrival at Geneva to 15th inst. I am disposed to think the
_Edinburgh_ Reviewer right, because Shelley’s letter of the 15th inst. to
Peacock implies that the writer had been long enough at Geneva to turn
himself about.

Anyhow, leaving England on an early day of May with Mary, her infant, the
babe’s nurse and Claire, Shelley was in Paris on the 6th or 8th, and at
Geneva on the 13th or 15th of May (something earlier than the time at
which the tourists are represented by successive biographers as reaching
their destination). Dating from the Hotel Sécheron, Geneva, Shelley wrote
to Peacock on the 15th inst.:--

    ‘We are now at Geneva, where, or in the neighbourhood, we shall remain
    probably until the autumn. I may return in a fortnight or three weeks,
    to attend to the last exertions which Longdill is to make for the
    settlement of my affairs.’

When these words were put on paper, ten days had still to elapse before
Byron’s carriages drew up at the door of the hotel. Thus soon after his
arrival, and thus long before Byron’s appearance at Geneva, is Shelley
resolved on staying there till autumn,--the time fixed for the ending of
Byron’s sojourn at the same place. Does Mr. Froude insist that Shelley,
on the 15th, was still kept by Claire in ignorance, that Byron would soon
be with them? If so, even Mr. Froude must admit it was a very strange
coincidence that Shelley had determined to stay at Geneva just as long as
Byron designed to linger there. If Mr. Froude concedes that Shelley knew
all about Byron’s movements on the 15th, he might as well have said less
of the younger poet’s ignorance of Claire’s pre-arrangement with her
lover.

On Byron’s deliberate arrival, some twelve days after Shelley had come in
hot haste to the hotel, the two sets of tourists forthwith acted as though
they had met there by appointment. Joining their forces, the two sets of
tourists became one party. When Byron and Polidori left the hotel, Shelley
and the sisters left the hotel. When Byron and Polidori moved into the
Villa Belle Rive, Shelley moved with the two girls into a little house
near at hand. When Byron and Polidori migrated to the Villa Diodati, the
sisters with Shelley migrated to the pretty cottage lying at the foot, and
under the trees, of Diodati. As the inmates of the cottage repeatedly
passed the whole night at Byron’s mansion, it is, of course, obvious that
Mr. Froude was justified in saying Claire could not easily have been alone
with Byron for a minute! From the day of Byron’s arrival at the Hotel
Sécheron, the two inseparable parties were regarded as one party, by the
visitors in the hotel, the gossip-mongers of every Genevese coterie, the
idlers who, during Byron’s brief stay at the Sécheron, thronged and buzzed
about the poets and their ladies, whenever they went (by daylight, or
twilight, or at night) from the hotel down to the lake, or back from their
boat to the hotel. Whispering that Mary (though styled Mrs. Shelley) was
only the younger poet’s mistress, and that Claire was Mary’s sister in the
fullest sense of the term, these idlers told one another, that Byron had
found in the bright-eyed and brilliant brunette an agreeable substitute
for his unforgiving wife. This was the tattle of the hotel, whilst the
poets, Polidori, and the girls remained there. It is in the nature of such
tattle, that, starting from imperfect truth, it passes quickly to
egregious falsehood. Far worse things were soon said of the four young
people by the Genevese gossip-mongers, than that Mary was Shelley’s
goddess, and that Claire was Byron’s spouse in Free Love.

So much has been written, and is universally known of the Genevese episode
of Byron’s career, that Shelley’s biographer may pass lightly over the
particulars of the poet’s sojourn with Claire and Mary on the marge of
Leman. Every one knows how, to escape from the intrusive inmates of the
Sécheron, Byron with Polidori moved to the Villa Belle Rive, whilst
Shelley with the girls took possession of the not distant Campagne Chapuis
(whence Mary dated the letter of 1st June, published in the supplement to
the _Six Weeks’ Tour_), and how, to escape the telescopes of the Sécheron
windows, which covered the garden and balcony of the Villa Belle Rive, the
author of _Childe Harold_, with his young physician, migrated to the
umbrageous grounds of the Château Diodati, whilst the author of _Queen
Mab_, with Mary and Claire, went into the Campagne Mont Alègre (which gave
Claire’s child a familiar name), lying within the leafy _entourage_ of
their patron’s mansion. There is no need to tell again how, leaving the
two sisters to amuse themselves with letter-writing, and novel-reading,
and graver studies, Byron and Shelley (starting for the expedition on 23rd
June, 1816) made the well-remembered _Eight Days’ Tour_ of the lake, in
the course of which Shelley so narrowly escaped the fate that befell him
six years later. It is in every one’s recollection how, in the squall that
so nearly upset their boat off St. Gingoux, the younger poet’s chief fear
was that, in attempting to save a comparatively insignificant creature,
the superb Byron would sacrifice his own existence, so valuable to
mankind. Every reader recalls the words of the younger poet’s narrative:--

    ‘My feelings would have been less painful had I been alone; but I knew
    that my companion would have attempted to save me, and I was overcome
    with humiliation, when I thought that his life might have been risked
    to preserve mine.’

Readers no less clearly remember how, just upon a month after the _Eight
Days’ Tour of the Lake_, Shelley and the girls, leaving Byron for just the
same length of time to his own devices, made the _Eight Days’ Trip to
Chamouni_, returning to Mont Alègre and Diodati towards the close of July.
Is it not in the whole world’s memory how, when the rain held them
prisoners in Byron’s villa, the poets and the sisters, in the excitement
of reading ghost stories, terrified one another with ghastly tales of
their own invention;--a tournament of wit and terrifying fancy, that bore
enduring fruit in Mary Godwin’s _Frankenstein_? It is enough to remind
readers of this page how, on the 18th of June, after hearing Byron recite
the _Christabel_ verses on the witch’s breast, Shelley shrieked in horror
at his own vivid imagination of a woman with eyes instead of nipples; and
how in the ensuing August, when Monk Lewis had joined the group at
Diodati, Byron, and Mary, and Shelley, and Claire, drew about the
terrifying relater and beset him with their intensely excited faces,
whilst he poured forth strange stories of hideous fancy and grim humour.

That Shelley had no intention in the middle of July of returning to
England straight from Switzerland, but was possessed by a project of
descending the Danube in a boat, visiting Constantinople and Athens, Rome
and the Tuscan cities, and returning by Southern France, appears from a
letter he wrote from Geneva to Peacock on 17th July, 1816, in the interval
between the _Tour of the Lake_ and the _Trip to Chamouni_,--a letter
containing this remarkable passage,--‘On the motives and consequences of
this journey, I reserve much explanation for some future winter walk or
summer expedition!’ How about these words, that refer _not_ to the
‘Eastern scheme which has just seized on our imaginations,’ _but_ to the
trip from London to Geneva?

Had he believed himself to have told the truth at Bishopgate, in
intimating that he was about to leave England in order to escape his
father and uncle, he would have seen neither need nor occasion for saying
more about the motives for the journey. May the words be taken as an
admission, that the Bishopgate fictions were fictions, and that Peacock
had still to learn the full and true story of the motives and purpose of
the trip to Geneva?

Whilst the Genevese coteries were saying evil things of Shelley and Byron,
_each_ of the poets knew the worst of the many bad things said about them
in those cliques. Whether Mary and Claire participated fully in this
knowledge is uncertain. Byron and Shelley may have withheld from the
sisters some of the things said of them in Genevese society. From some
motive of delicacy or considerateness, the two young men may have kept
from the girls all they knew of what was tattled to their shame in the
_salons_ of the city; though one does not see clearly why they should have
been so uncommunicative to the eighteen-years-old girls, whom Shelley had
carried through _The Empire of the Nairs_, and had introduced to all the
reasons for agreeing with the anti-matrimonial note to _Queen Mab_.
Enthusiasts in the new social philosophy, the sisters were prepared for
the misrepresentation and calumny, ever poured upon social reformers by
the slaves of prejudice and ignorance. It is, however, no question that
the story, which Byron a few years later (March, 1820) charged Southey
with circulating (and possibly inventing) in order ‘to blast the character
of the daughter’ of the woman he had formerly loved, was a story well
known to the author of _Childe Harold_ in August, 1816. If, on returning
to England from his Swiss trip, Southey reported (as Byron averred in
March, 1820) that Byron and Shelley were living in promiscuous intercourse
with Mary and Claire, the author of _Thalaba_ only repeated a story,
generally told and believed in Geneva, alike by tourists and residents,
whilst he was living at the Villa Diodati.

Whilst living in retirement from circles which had shown a reluctance to
make his acquaintance, the recluse of Diodati--ever, in his morbid
egotism, no less eager for the gossip that lashed him to fury, than for
the gossip that tickled his self-love--was kept _au courant_ with the talk
of the Genevese tables, by persons who had no difficulty in gathering it.
What with Polidori (acceptable in _salons_, where his employer would not
have been welcome), Hentsch the banker (cognizant of everything that went
on in Geneva), Madame de Staël at Coppet (overflowing with almost maternal
solicitude for Lady Noel’s naughty son-in-law), and Fletcher (cleverest of
valets at gathering the gossip of couriers and lady’s-maids, and ever
privileged to pour it with more than a valet’s freedom into his master’s
ear), Byron was in no want of sure informants about Geneva’s opinions of
himself and his doings. And what he learnt of the current talk about his
affairs, the exile from Newstead passed over to his brother in poetry and
domestic trouble. As soon as Shelley and the girls had left for England,
Byron was no less communicative to the friend, who, on coming to the
Château Diodati (a week or so after the departure of the trio), had not
been many hours in the villa, without hearing all about the scandal, that
was largely influential in determining Byron to break with Claire. So
early as 9th September, 1816, the recipient of Byron’s piquant chatter
wrote to the Hon. Mrs. Leigh, of the Genevese curiosity and gossip about
her brother: ‘There was, indeed, until a fortnight ago, a neighbouring
gentleman who had two ladies living in his house under the Château
Diodati, and, as you may suppose, _both and each of these womankind_, as
Mr. Oldbuck calls them in the _Antiquary_, were most literally assigned to
the person who was accustomed to consider the cases of such kind of
appurtenances, when superfluous or neglected by their lawful owners.’

It may be assumed that, in alluding thus lightly to one-half of the
current scandal, the tattler plied his pen (not only in Byron’s interest,
but also with the poet’s sanction), in order to anticipate rumour, with an
explanation of the report, which would be sure to come to his
correspondent’s ears sooner or later.

Withholding, as he was bound to do, the names of the gentleman and two
ladies, and all particulars touching the peculiar nature of their real
intimacy, the writer of the words (here printed in italics) shows how
fully and precisely he was informed, immediately on his coming to Diodati,
of the rumour, which, affecting the reputation of either poet so
injuriously during his life, and influencing in peculiar and different
ways the poetical labours of both authors, had for its echo the hideous
story given to the world by Mrs. Beecher Stowe. How the scandal stirred
Byron’s imagination may be seen in _Manfred_ and _Cain_. How it affected
Shelley’s fancy and spurred him to the most extravagant of his conclusions
respecting the intercourse of the sexes appears in _Laon and Cythna_. Had
it not been for the Genevese scandal, _Laon and Cythna_ would not have
been brother and sister of the same parents, and Byron would not have
written the poems that vexed poor Lady Byron’s troubled mind in her later
time. But for that scandal both poets would have escaped the still darker
suspicions it generated long afterwards in the minds of men. But for that
scandal, Claire would never have been suspected of the wickedness imputed
to her by later calumny, and the Hon. Mrs. Leigh would never have been
charged with crime of which she was absolutely incapable. Reverberating
far and wide through time, slander is repeated variously by near and
distant echoes. The scandal, that agitated Shelley so profoundly at
Ravenna in 1821, was a revival and development of one-half of the slander
that came to his ears at Geneva in 1816. The scandal, that preyed for a
while on Mrs. Leigh’s reputation till the present writer killed it, was
the distorted outgrowth of the old vile Genevese tattle about her
brother’s intimacy with the two sisters at Diodati. The base story, that
came to Shelley’s ears at Ravenna, was the near echo, the vile story of
Mrs. Beecher Stowe’s book was the distant echo, of the same slanderous
report.

It is not surprising that Byron put an end to his _liaison_ with Claire
soon after hearing what the world said about it. No Free Lover (had he
been one, the favourers of the Free Contract would have dealt less harshly
with his reputation), but a man holding conventional (not to say
fashionable) notions on libertinism, and old-fashioned notions respecting
the matrimonial law, Byron held to the old, hard and fast, line between
wives and mistresses. To him, of course, Claire was never aught more than
his mistress, in the ordinary sense of the term; a mistress whom at the
outset of his fleeting passion he regarded with a romantic tenderness that
seventy years since seldom qualified a young nobleman’s sentimental
condescension to a girl in Claire’s position; a mistress with whom he
wished to live with a secresy which would prevent the affair from coming
to the knowledge of Lady Byron. Regarding Claire in this light and
capacity, precisely as in later time he regarded Marianna Segati and
Teresa Guiccioli, he was hoping for a speedy restoration to his wife’s
favour, and (under Madame De Stäel’s counsel) was actually making
overtures for reconcilement to her, even whilst the trio nestled in the
pretty cottage at the verge of his Swiss tree-garden. The rejection of the
overtures, and the intelligence of the scandal coming to him closely upon
one another, it would under any circumstances have been natural for Byron
to attribute the disdainful reply in some degree to the injurious rumours.
But he had other reasons for thinking Lady Byron would have been less
steady in her unforgivingness, had she not heard of the _liaison_. Not
incapable of resenting a misadventure on its innocent cause, he was likely
to conceive a sudden distaste for an arrangement to which he assigned his
discomfiture, and a simultaneous distaste for his partner in the hurtful
arrangement. Other influences (one of them being Claire’s vehement temper)
may also have concurred in disposing him to retreat from the association
as speedily as possible. But in seeking for the sufficient motive of his
capricious treatment of the too-fervid brunette, readers need look no
further than his disgust at the rumours arising from his intimacy with
her, and his conviction, that but for her bright eyes and racy speech, he
would have been starting for Kirkby Mallory, instead of making his
arrangements for an Italian tour. Anyhow, without letting her see how
completely she had fallen from his favour, or losing the worshipful regard
of either Shelley or Mary (if their words may be trusted), Byron bade
Claire farewell at Geneva. Returning to England with Shelley and her
sister-by-affinity, Claire gave birth in the following January to
Allegra--the girl who, dying in her sixth year at Bagna Cavallo, lived
long enough to survive her mother’s romantic hope, that through her
child’s influence she would recover something of her poet’s love.

By the writers, who insist that Shelley and Mary went to Geneva in
ignorance that Claire and Byron had arranged to meet there, and almost to
the end of their sojourn in Switzerland, remained in their guileless
ignorance of the Byron-Claire _liaison_, it is, of course, maintained that
Shelley and Mary were greatly surprised on learning, towards the end of
August, that Claire was in the way to become a mother. Possibly, the
evidence of Claire’s delusive letter accords with the evidence of other no
less illusory writings. But no letters, however precise and authentic, by
Claire or any other writer, can annul or weaken the conclusive testimony
of the certain and indisputable facts and circumstances of the Genevese
episode.

Returning to London on 7th September, 1816, Shelley passed through town to
Marlow, and stayed a fortnight with Peacock, before going to Bath, where
he and the sisters determined to remain whilst the house, which he had
taken in the Buckinghamshire village for twenty-one years, was being
painted, furnished, and fitted, for their habitation. It was on an early
day of his sojourn at the favourite resort of fashionable valetudinarians,
that Shelley, dating from 5 Abbey Church Yard, 2nd October, 1816, wrote to
Mr. Murray about the proofs of the third canto of _Childe Harold_, which
he had undertaken to see through the press,--a service the younger poet
was well pleased and not a little proud to render his famous friend.

Exactly a week later, on the evening of Wednesday, 9th October, 1816, Mary
Godwin received the ‘very alarming letter’ which caused Shelley to start
immediately for Bristol, only to return to Bath at 2 p.m. ‘with no
particular news’ (_vide_ Mr. Kegan Paul’s _William Godwin_). On Thursday,
the 10th, Shelley went again to Bristol. On Friday, 11th, he was at
Swansea. After posting this letter at Bristol, Fanny Imlay, _alias_
Wollstonecraft, _alias_ Godwin, caught the Cambrian coach and made her way
to the Mackworth Arms Inn, of Swansea, where, soon after her arrival at a
late hour, she went to her bedroom for the long rest that was her last
rest. On the morrow morning (Wednesday, 10th October) she was found lying
dead, the nature of her death being declared by the laudanum bottle on her
table, and the paper on which she had written:--

    ‘I have long determined that the best thing I could do was to put an
    end to the existence of a being whose birth was unfortunate, and whose
    life has only been a series of pains to those persons who have hurt
    their health in endeavouring to promote her welfare. Perhaps to hear
    of my death will give you pain, but you will soon have the blessing of
    forgetting that such a creature ever existed as....’

There was an inquest, with the verdict ‘Found dead.’ This was the end of
Fanny, who, after leaving London on the 7th instant, for a visit to her
aunts, Mrs. Bishop and Everina Wollstonecraft, perished by her own act at
the Swansea tavern. A good, gentle, interesting girl, Fanny inherited all
her mother’s early affectionateness and generosity, without acquiring from
the same source the vehemence and asperity that were amongst the chief
faults of her mother’s temper. But, together with exemption from the
fervour and fierceness of her mother’s nature, Fanny was not so fortunate
as to enjoy exemption from its morbid sensibility. Together with a full
share of the Wollstonecraft sensitiveness, she derived from the
Wollstonecrafts the disposition to melancholy, that qualified her to do in
mild resoluteness what her mother essayed in tempestuous rage.

To account for this desperate act, the reviewer of the poor girl’s career
is not driven to adopt Claire’s explanation of the tragedy. Several
circumstances, distinct from her regard for Shelley, had combined to
trouble her profoundly during the closing term of her existence. It was
natural for her to brood over the melancholy facts of her mother’s story,
which came to her knowledge, directly or indirectly, through the same
channel that made them known to Mary and Claire. Her half-sister’s flight
with Shelley would, under any circumstances, have caused her the keenest
mental torture; but the anguish it caused her heart and soul was the
sharper to so loving and sympathetic a creature, because of the grief,
coming in different ways and degrees, to William Godwin (whom she loved)
and his wife (with whom she lived harmoniously) from the date of the event
which, violently wrenching asunder so many domestic ties, had broken up
the home in Skinner Street,--though the mere shell of the old home, from
which familiar joy had been driven for ever, was still maintained under
conditions of deepening gloom and anxiety. No wonder the poor girl found
the sorrows of her existence too heavy for endurance. Let it not, however,
be imagined that she yielded to despair without brave efforts to conquer
it. Whilst so many writers have used their ingenuity and skill in
colouring Mary Godwin into a heroine, and varnishing her submission to
Shelley’s suit into a romantic love-story, how little has been said in
honour of poor Fanny--the true heroine!--who, hiding her sorrow as she
best could from the old man (who had been a good father to her), and from
the woman (who had been a good mother to her) strove to comfort their
grief and shame, whilst the heart in her own breast was slowly breaking.

Nothing nobler and more lovely, in the way of genuine domestic devotion
and unrecognized heroism, can be conceived than the life of this gentle
girl during the considerable interval between Mary’s flight in July, 1814,
and her own death in October, 1816. Never disdainful of those homely
labours of the kitchen and store-room, which Mary has been commended for
shirking, Fanny, during this long interval of her growing despair, was her
step-mother’s busy housekeeper and cheerful companion. Active in the
kitchen and busy with the needle, she was at the same time her
step-father’s cheery ‘right-hand’ and ministrant,--ever ready to ply her
pen in his service, and ever quick at his call, with bonnet on her head
and smiles on her face, to accompany him in his walks. At last the brave
heart broke, and the grave covered her. Is the world too virtuous to be
incapable of generous compassion for the doer of her own death?

In a former page I have declared my inability to offer an opinion whether
love of Shelley was in any degree accountable for poor Fanny’s fatal
desperation. It has already been said that Claire (a true witness, in the
esteem of the Shelleyan zealots, whenever she supports them with a fib; a
liar, in their esteem, whenever she traverses their misstatements with a
word of truth) gave it as her opinion that her sister Fanny died from love
of Shelley, who was moved to write this elegy on the poor girl’s fate:--

  ‘Her voice did quiver as we parted,
    Yet knew I not that heart was broken,
  From which it came, and I departed,
    Heeding not the words then spoken.
      Misery--oh, Misery!
      This world is all too wide for thee.’

Of course, it would be absurd to torture this utterance of emotion into
evidence on either side of the question. The words would have been
appropriate to the tragedy had he known himself in no way accountable for
it. On the other hand, it cannot be denied that the verses accord with
Claire’s view of the case. Mr. Kegan Paul says roundly that, though an
attached sister to Shelley, Fanny ‘was never in love with him, either
before or after her sister’s flight.’ How can any writer be justified in
uttering so stout a negative? If Fanny loved Shelley, she was not the girl
to tell him so, till he extorted the admission from her by an avowal of a
corresponding passion. Nor was she the girl to make the admission to her
sixteen-years-old sister, before Shelley had made her an offer of
marriage. To suppose her capable of making any such confession to Mary
after the flight would be to suppose Fanny alike devoid of feminine
delicacy and womanly pride. It follows that, if she loved Shelley, her
lips were necessarily sealed to him, and also to Mary, on the subject.
Consequently, any statements (to the point of Mr. Kegan Paul’s negative)
left by Shelley and Mary can, at the most, amount to mere evidence that
they knew nothing of the matter, about which they were not likely to know
anything. Many conceivable circumstances might have qualified either
Shelley or Mary to reply in the affirmative to the question, whether Fanny
ever loved him. But known facts render it more than difficult to conceive
the circumstances which would have qualified them to answer the question
in the negative.

Other doleful news came to Shelley and the girls before they returned from
the West country and settled themselves at Marlow. They were still at Bath
when they received intelligence that Mrs. Shelley’s body had been picked
out of the Serpentine on 10th December, 1816, and carried to her father’s
house in Chapel Street, Grosvenor Square. Some uncertainty covers poor
Harriett’s story during the last and downward stage of her lamentable
career, which thus ended by her own act, in the twenty-second year of her
age; and finding enough for my purpose in facts that have been placed
beyond dispute, I have been at no pains to search for other details of the
closing term of the unhappy girl’s depravation. It is said that, towards
the end of her passage to the grave, she left her father’s house to
associate herself with a partner in Free Love? It may be so. It would be
strange, had she (a married woman, discarded for reasons more or less
light or grave by a husband, who went straight from her arms to another
charmer) hesitated to place herself under the protection of a man who,
inspiring her with affection, caused her to believe that in fidelity he
would not prove inferior to the young poet, who one fine morning left her
with a babe in her arms.

It is said that she took to drinking as her desolated life tapered into
eternity,--drinking, in fact, so deeply that the once bright and lovely
girl became a sot and drunkard. It may be so. Foolish people, and by no
means altogether foolish people, when they sink into sorrow, are apt to
drink for the sake of drowning care, and Heaven knows that poor Harriett
(only twenty-one years old) had care enough to excuse her for trying to
drown it--even in so futile and disgusting a manner. If Harriett drowned
her pain of body and mind with wine and brandy, Shelley drowned his pain
of body and mind with laudanum.

Of late years it has been the fashion of the Shelleyan enthusiasts to
refer to Harriett’s depravation, as though it gave a certain colouring of
justification to the poet’s withdrawal from her. My view of the matter is,
that Shelley alone is to be blamed for the offences, committed by Harriett
either _during_ their association, or after their separation; and that
human compassion for the poor girl’s errors should be larger and warmer in
proportion to their number and magnitude. Let the reader who hesitates to
take this view of Mrs. Shelley’s case ask himself these questions,--Who
caught Harriett as a child on the door-step of her schoolroom? Who
illuminated her when she was just sixteen years old out of the Christian
religion? Who taught her that the matrimonial rite was a piece of
antiquated mummery? Who taught her that the promises made at marriage
were not obligatory? Who taught her to think conjugal constancy a
vitiating sentiment, and chastity a monkish superstition? Who encouraged
her in the habit of talking of suicide as the death that would probably
close her career at an early date? Who, by talking of suicide as the
possible termination of his own days in this world, at least, confirmed
her in the habit of looking to suicide as a convenient and innocent way of
escaping from this life’s wretchedness? All these questions must be
answered by one name.

From previous pages readers have learnt that Shelley’s desertion of his
first wife was not so complete as people at one time had reason to
suppose; that after a brief term the actual abandonment merged into a
peculiar kind of separation by mutual agreement, and that, after she had
consented (at least from a lawyer’s way of viewing such matters) to the
separation, he was for some time mindful for her comfort and pecuniary
interests. It has been told how he sent her money from Paris in 1814,
after having probably given her a considerable sum of money immediately
before he left England. On coming into his 1000_l._ a-year he certainly
set aside a portion of the income for her maintenance. No credit, of
course, is due to him for doing what Harriett could have compelled him to
do by process of law. Nor was the allowance he made so ample as to entitle
him to any praise for free-handedness in the matter. What it was at the
outset I do not know. But as it only rose to a fifth of his clear income,
after it had been raised to the highest point to which it attained, the
allowance never exceeded the sum he was bound in morals and honour to give
her. Possessing a clear income of a thousand a-year, whilst he also
possessed the power (which he exercised freely for his own convenience) of
raising money on his interest in estates A and B, he should never have
thought of allowing her less than 200_l._ a-year, after his final
arrangement with his father. Had he not known that Mr. Westbrook was able
to take care of his child and her children, Shelley would probably have
arranged to give her more. But in doing his duty by his wife and children,
he should have had no consideration of Mr. Westbrook’s ability to do it
for him. In the review of his treatment of his wife, remembrance should
also be had of his desire to live in neighbourliness with her, and his
transient disposition to receive her as a regular inmate into his own
house.

The fact, however, still remains that for some months before her death she
had passed from his sight. He had promised solemnly to cherish her (a
promise certainly within his power of accomplishing in some degree); and
it remains a fact that, instead of keeping his eye on her (as he intended
for a time to do) he suffered her to slip from his cognizance. Regard
being had to her age and the way in which he had uprooted her moral and
religious principles, few persons will hesitate in saying, that he was
under peculiar obligations to ‘look after her,’ and be ready at any moment
to come to her aid, however bad her conduct either before or after their
separation. He is not to be judged in this business as one would judge an
ordinary man, whose wife plunges into immorality of her own free will, and
in obedience to influences and circumstances in no degree referable to his
action. Shelley’s exceptional treatment of his wife placed him under
exceptional obligations to stand by her and befriend her throughout life.
Had he been the superlatively chivalrous and virtuous man his eulogists
declare him, he would have felt this and acted steadily in accordance with
the feeling.

Though most of the ascertained facts touching Mrs. Shelley’s suicide have
been withheld from the public, we are assured by Shelleyan apologists that
the fatal incident was not directly consequent on any action by the
husband, who had for some months lost sight of her. But to relieve Shelley
of the obloquy of being the immediate, is not to relieve him of the shame
of being the indirect, cause of his wife’s death. Following in the steps
of previous writers, Mr. Froude does Shelley the disservice of insisting
that he did not blame himself for his wife’s death. ‘Nor,’ Mr. Froude
adds, ‘did the family lawyers blame him, who knew the facts of the story;’
‘the family lawyers,’ thus produced as witnesses to character, being the
one lawyer Longdill (Shelley’s attorney, _not_ the attorney of the
family). By the _Edinburgh_ ‘Shelley-and-Mary’ reviewer, attention is
called to the fact, that at this dismal moment of his story, Shelley’s
‘friends, Hookham, Longdill, and Leigh Hunt supported him by their
approval.’ What supporters, at such a crisis, for the author of _Alastor_,
the man of superb genius, soon to be the author of _Prometheus
Unbound_!--a bookseller, an attorney, and a parasite!--the bookseller, who
was making much, and hoped to make more money out of him; the attorney,
who knew nothing of the matter but what his not invariably accurate
client had been pleased to tell him; and the parasite, who, after
sucking thousands from Shelley during his life, sponged on his
representatives after his death! What witnesses and what testimony!

Readers need not think so ill of Shelley as Mr. Froude does. It is certain
that Shelley did reproach himself bitterly for his conduct towards
Harriett. The biographical evidence is superabundant that he endured the
keen remorse that is ever attended with self-reproach. How could it be
otherwise? When the lifeless body was fished out of the Serpentine, six
years had not fully passed since Shelley paid his first visit to
Harriett’s home, bearing his sister’s gift for her favourite
school-fellow; only five years and two or three months had passed since he
carried her off, bright and winsome, in her untarnished virginal
loveliness. How could he think of the thing he had made her without
torture? He may well have been appalled at the moment, and in the
after-time been agonized by the consequences of his boyish heedlessness.
That he was capable, not long after her death, of calling her ‘a frantic
idiot,’ is no evidence that he escaped the anguish that is the inevitable
punishment of wrong done in mere thoughtlessness, no less than of wrong
resulting from heartlessness. The bitterness of the indecent speech was
the mere mask of decent and keen regret.

There is, however, no evidence that he suffered aught more than a man of
sensibility would inevitably suffer from so ghastly an incident. The story
(believed by the _Quarterly_ Reviewer of October, 1861) that dismay at
Harriett’s death and grief for her, whose lot he had taken so peculiarly
into his own hands, rendered him ‘actually insane’ for a time, was a pure
fiction. During the brief interval between the recovery of Harriett’s
corpse from the Serpentine and his marriage to Mary he was in constant
correspondence with Peacock through the post; and the letters Peacock
received from him and Mary at that time were conclusive proof, that
remorse did not so completely overpower him before his second marriage.
The first to tell Peacock of Harriett’s death, Shelley at the same time
asked his (at that time) closest male friend, whether propriety required
him to defer for any considerable period his formal marriage with
Mary,--an inquiry that caused Peacock to advise him to marry her promptly.
Three full weeks had not passed since Harriett’s corpse was fished out of
the water when (on 30th December, 1816) Shelley was married privately to
Mary Godwin at St. Mildred’s Church, Bread Street, in the presence of her
father and step-mother. On visiting Peacock shortly after the marriage,
Shelley (though no doubt suffering secretly from the events so closely
preceding his second marriage) showed conclusively by his demeanour, that
he was not overpowered by regretful recollections of his first wife.
Reasonably incensed at the knavish gardener, who had lopt the fine old
wide-spreading holly-tree of the Marlow Garden to a bare pole, Shelley
displayed strong emotion at nothing else. ‘Shelley,’ says Peacock, ‘stayed
with me two or three days. I never saw him more calm and self-possessed.
Nothing disturbed his serenity, but the unfortunate holly.’ That Shelley
never in later time went out of his mind from horror at Harriett’s fate is
certain.

There has been much vain and wholly needless conjecture, as to the
considerations and the individuals that determined Shelley to marry Mary
Godwin. It has been said that Byron advised him to make her his wife. It
has been averred, Godwin constrained him to make Mary an honest woman. If
Shelley spoke to him with any show of reluctance to celebrate the
marriage, Godwin no doubt told him roundly that all intercourse was at an
end between them for ever, should he delay to make Mary his wife. But
there is no reason to suppose Godwin was tempted to speak thus plainly and
threateningly. Nor is there good ground for thinking that Byron’s counsel
determined Shelley’s course. How the matter came about is sufficiently
obvious. Shelley’s disapproval of marriage as a vain and depraving
institution, was attended with a clear perception of the several reasons
why, in an evil state of society, a man should consent to prevailing
superstition and prejudice, so far as to put a bridal ring with the usual
ceremony on the finger of the woman, with whom he intended to live for a
considerable period. By marrying Mary he would qualify any son hereafter
born to him by her, to succeed to the Castle Goring baronetcy, in case
poor Harriett’s son should die without male issue. By marrying Mary he
would confer on her something of the social respectability he wished her
to have, alike from considerations of pride and affection. By marrying
Mary he would inflict another annoyance on his father. On the other hand,
by refusing to marry Mary, or even shilly-shallying about the question, he
would incense her father and, worse still, provoke her anger and
disdain. Under these circumstances how could he hesitate to marry Mary, as
he had previously married Harriett? As to the sacrifice of personal
liberty involved in the act of marriage, experience had taught him that to
a man of his views the _vinculum matrimonii_ was no galling restraint on
individual freedom.

To suppose that Shelley (a few months hence to write _Laon and Cythna_ and
_Rosalind and Helen_) went to St. Mildred’s Church from any respect for
the religious rite would be absurd. I cannot doubt that he went to the
Church because Mary (who at this time had him well in hand) meant him to
marry her, and because he was under a promise to her to do so at the
earliest opportunity. It is improbable that he asked any of his friends
whether or no he should make Mary his lawful wife. Of all his friends
Peacock was the man to whom he would be most likely to put the question;
but on speaking to him so soon after Harriett’s death, Shelley spoke of
the marriage as a step on which he was resolved, and merely asked whether
he might with decency take the step without delay. ‘He was,’ says Peacock
(at that time in almost daily intercourse with him), ‘the first to tell me
of Harriett’s death, asking whether I thought it would become him to
interpose any delay before marrying Mary.’ The announcement and the
question were simultaneous.

It was thus that Shelley married Mary Godwin within a fortnight of the day
on which Claire gave birth to Allegra, who was born on 12th January,
1816.




CHAPTER XI.

THE CHANCERY SUIT.

    Mr. Westbrook’s Petition to the Court of Chancery--Date of
    Hearing--The _Edinburgh_ Reviewer’s Strange Misrepresentation--Lord
    Eldon’s Decree--Arrangements for Harriett’s Children--Lady Shelley’s
    strange Mistake touching those Arrangements--Lord Eldon’s
    Justification--Mrs. Shelley’s Regard for Social Opinion--Shelley’s
    keen Annoyance at the Chancellor’s Decree--Delusive Egotisms of _The
    Billows of the Beach_--Shelley’s Pretexts for going to Italy--His real
    Reasons for withdrawing from England.


It has been repeatedly declared that the first Mrs. Shelley committed
suicide in desperation, consequent on her elder sister’s cruelty in
shutting the door of her old home against her, when she called at the
house in Chapel Street, in order to see her _dying_ father. That Mr.
Westbrook was not dying either in November or December, 1816, appears from
the fact that in the following year he appeared in the Court of Chancery,
as the petitioner in the suit, that resulted in Lord Eldon’s memorable
decree, that Shelley was an unfit person to have the custody and direct
the education of his two children by his first wife.

On settling in his new home it was only natural for Shelley to wish to see
these two children in its nursery. On the other hand, it was natural for
Mr. Westbrook to have a strong opinion, that it would be ill for his
daughter’s two children to be given into the hands of a father, who
(according to Mr. Westbrook’s not altogether unreasonable view of the
case) would educate them to be infidels and Free Lovers. Acting on this
opinion, Mr. Westbrook refused to give the children up to Shelley, and
followed up the refusal by petitioning the Court of Chancery, to take the
children under its protection, and confide them to the care of persons,
more fit (in Mr. Westbrook’s opinion) than their father to rear and
educate them. Filed in January, 1817, with affidavits and exhibits, this
petition came on for hearing in March, 1817, on the 17th day of which
month Lord Eldon delivered judgment in favour of the petitioner; the
result being that the children were formally placed in the
joint-guardianship of their maternal-grandfather Mr. Westbrook, and
their maternal-aunt, Miss Eliza Westbrook, and eventually under the
personal care and tuition of Dr. Hume, a clergyman of the Church of
England.

There is a curious conflict of the subordinate authorities, respecting the
particular day on which the decree was delivered. Medwin says the judgment
was delivered on the 17th of March, 1817, and this date is given by
several subsequent writers; but Mr. Rossetti (so careful and conscientious
a writer that he seldom errs in a statement of fact) represents, on the
authority of a date given in Lady Shelley’s curiously inaccurate _Shelley
Memorials_, that the day of judgment was on or about the 23rd August,
1817. I can have no doubt that on this rather important point Medwin was
right, as the first order, made immediately after the decree, appears in
Jacob’s _Reports_ under the date of 17th March, 1817, and on the record
under the date of 17th March, 1816 (_i.e._ 17th March of the legal year,
1816, and 17th March of the historic year, 1817). Medwin being right on
this point, Shelley was out of his suspense, touching the event of the
suit, on 17th March, and his mind in a better state for working at _Laon
and Cythna_ in the summer.

Of this decree the _Edinburgh_ (‘Shelley-and-Mary,’ October, 1882)
Reviewer remarks, ‘But, as is well known, the paternal claim of Shelley to
his offspring was resisted by their grandfather Westbrook, and rejected by
Lord Eldon on petition, on the ground, not of Shelley’s misconduct to his
wife, but of the opinions expressed in his writings.’ This statement is
precisely contrary to the fact. The claim was rejected, _not_ on account
of opinions expressed in Shelley’s writings, _but_ on account of his
misconduct to his wife, which on inquiry was found to correspond with
rules of action laid down in the anti-matrimonial note to _Queen Mab_. The
misstatement of the _Edinburgh_ has been made in various ways over and
over again, and has as often been corrected. Yet again to tell the truth
of the matter will have no effect on those of the Shelleyan zealots, who
are wont to reply to every correction of any one of their misstatements
with a stubborn reiteration of the error. They will only smile, and repeat
the misrepresentation more authoritatively. Such stubborn persistence in
error has never before been witnessed in literary annals. But for the
benefit of persons, who wish to know the truth of Shelley’s story, I
repeat yet again that Lord Eldon’s decree kept Shelley’s conduct
steadily in view. Conduct, conduct, conduct, is reiterated throughout the
decree, till the reader grows weary of the word. And yet the Shelleyan
enthusiasts go on stubbornly asserting that the poet’s conduct had nothing
to do with the decision.

Fortunately the Chancellor gave his judgment in writing, and fortunately
the decree was printed in Jacob’s _Reports_ from a copy, furnished to the
editor by Mr. (afterwards Vice-Chancellor) Shadwell, counsel in support of
the petition.

Here is the whole judgment, given paragraph by paragraph, with a brief
note by the present writer to each paragraph:--

    Paragraph No. 1.--‘I have read all the papers left with me, and all
    the cases cited.’--No word here touching Shelley’s opinions.

    Paragraph No. 2.--‘With respect to the question of jurisdiction, it is
    unnecessary for me to add to what I have already stated. After the
    example of Lord Thurlow, in _Orby Hunter’s_ case, I shall act upon the
    notion that this Court has such jurisdiction, until the House of Lords
    shall decide that my predecessors have been unwarranted in the
    exercise of it.’--No word here about Shelley’s opinions.

    Paragraph No. 3.--‘I have carefully looked through the answer of the
    defendant, to see whether it affects the representation made in the
    affidavits filed in support of the petition, and in the exhibits
    referred to, of the _principles and conduct_ of life of the father in
    this case. I do not perceive that the answer does affect the
    representation, and no affidavits are filed against the
    petition.’--Shelley’s _principles_ are here referred to, in connection
    with his _conduct_.

    Paragraph No. 4.--‘Upon the case as represented in the affidavits, the
    exhibits and the answer, I have formed my opinion; conceiving myself,
    according to the practice of the Court, at liberty to form it, in the
    case of an infant, whether the petition in its allegations and
    suggestions has or has not accurately presented that case to the
    court, and having intimated in the course of the hearing before me,
    that I should so form my judgment.’--No word here about Shelley’s
    opinions.

    Paragraph No. 5.--‘There is nothing in evidence before me, sufficient
    to authorise me in thinking that this gentleman has changed, before he
    arrived at the age of twenty-five, the _principles_ he avowed at
    nineteen. I think there is ample evidence in the papers, _and in
    conduct_, that no such change has taken place.’--Observe again how the
    Lord Chancellor keeps Shelley’s _conduct_ as well as his avowed and
    unrecanted principles clearly in view.

    Paragraph No. 6.--‘I shall studiously forbear in this case, because it
    is unnecessary, to state in judgment what this Court might or might
    not be authorised to do in the due exercise of its jurisdiction, upon
    the ground of the probable effect of a father’s principles, of any
    nature, whatever upon the education of his children, _where such
    principles have not been called into activity or manifested in such
    conduct in life_, as this Court, upon, such an occasion as the
    present, would be bound to attend to.’--Observe, the Lord Chancellor
    declares, that the case under his consideration is not a case where he
    has to consider a father’s principles apart from his _conduct_; that
    the case is one of a father’s principles having been acted upon by
    him; that the judgment he is about to deliver has been formed on a
    consideration of Shelley’s _conduct_ in connection with his avowed
    principles.

    Paragraph No. 7.--‘I may add, that this case differs also, unless I
    misunderstand it, from any case in which such principles having been
    called into activity, nevertheless, in the probable range and extent
    of their operation, did not put to hazard the happiness and welfare of
    those whose interests are intrusted to the protection of this
    Court.’--Observe how, in this paragraph, principles and conduct are
    both kept in view.

    Paragraph No. 8.--‘This is a case in which, as the matter appears to
    me, the father’s principles cannot be misunderstood, _in which his
    conduct_, which I cannot but consider as highly immoral, has been
    established in proof, and established _as the effect of those
    principles: conduct_ nevertheless, which he represents to himself and
    others, not as _conduct_ to be considered as immoral, but to be
    recommended and observed in practice, and as worthy of
    approbation.’--Again in this paragraph the Lord Chancellor declares
    his judgment to result from the consideration of Shelley’s _conduct_,
    following from his avowed and unrecanted principles.

    Paragraph No. 9.--‘I consider this, therefore, as a case in which the
    father has demonstrated that he must and does deem it to be a matter
    of duty which his principles impose upon him, to recommend to those
    whose opinions and habits he may take upon himself to form, _that
    conduct_ in some of the most important relations of life, as moral and
    virtuous, which the law calls upon me to consider as immoral and
    vicious--_conduct_ which the law animadverts upon as inconsistent with
    the duties of persons in such relations of life; and which it
    considers as injuriously affecting both the interests of such persons
    and those of the community.’--Here again the Lord Chancellor speaks of
    _conduct_; declaring that by _conduct_, resulting from his avowed and
    unrecanted principles, Shelley has shown himself a man likely to
    educate his children to imitate his _conduct_.

    Paragraph No. 10.--‘I cannot, therefore, think that I should be
    justified in delivering over these children for their education
    exclusively, to what is called the care, to which Mr. Shelley wishes
    it to be entrusted.’--No word in this paragraph about either
    principles or conduct.

    Paragraph No. 11.--‘If I am wrong in my judgment which I have formed
    in this painful case, I shall have the consolation to reflect that my
    judgment is not final.’--No word in this paragraph about either
    principles or conduct.

    Paragraph No. 12.--‘Much has been said upon the fact that these
    children are of tender years. I have already explained, in the course
    of the hearing, the grounds upon which I think that circumstance not
    so material as to require me to pronounce no order.’--No word here
    about either principles or conduct.

    Paragraph No. 13.--‘I add, that the attention which I have been called
    upon to give to the consideration, how far the pecuniary interests of
    these children may be affected, has not been called for in vain. I
    should deeply regret if any act of mine materially affect those
    interests. But to such interests I cannot sacrifice what I deem to be
    interests of greater value and higher importance.’--No word in this
    paragraph about either Shelley’s principles or conduct.

    Paragraph No. 14.--‘In what degree and to what extent the Court will
    interfere in the case against parental authority, cannot be finally
    determined till after the Master’s Report.’

    Paragraph No. 15.--‘In the meantime I pronounce the following Order:’

    This Order, forbidding Shelley to take possession of the children or
    meddle in any way with them, was dated on 17th March, 1817.

It appears, therefore, that in no single paragraph does the Lord
Chancellor refer to Shelley’s principles, without at the same time
referring to the _conduct_ referable to those principles. What was the
_conduct_ thus steadily kept in view? The answer can be given briefly. The
petition set forth the circumstances of Shelley’s marriage, withdrawal
from his wife’s society, and cohabitation with Mary Godwin; representing
also that in thus withdrawing from his wife and cohabiting with Mary
Godwin, he was in 1814, and from that year till his wife’s death, acting
on the principles set forth in 1813, in the anti-matrimonial Note to
_Queen Mab_, which was one of the Petitioner’s principal ‘exhibits.’ This
was _the conduct or misconduct_ the Lord Chancellor kept so steadily in
view. Given in a nutshell the Lord Chancellor’s judgment was this, ‘Mr.
Shelley in _Queen Mab_ and the anti-matrimonial note attached thereto,
printed in 1813, declared himself an enemy of lawful marriage; in the
summer of 1814, Mr. Shelley acted on his avowed disregard for the
obligations of marriage; Mr. Shelley’s action and _conduct_ on his avowed
disregard for the obligations of marriage, makes me believe he will
educate these children to hold his views respecting marriage, if they are
committed to his care; taking this view of his _conduct_ to his wife I
decree that the two children shall be withheld from his control.’ The
judgment was based wholly on consideration of the poet’s conduct to his
wife, regarded as the result of his zealous adoption of the views of the
anti-matrimonial innovators.--Yet the _Edinburgh_ Reviewer says that
Shelley’s paternal claim to his offspring was ‘rejected by Lord Eldon on
petition, on the ground not of Shelley’s misconduct to his wife, but of
the opinions expressed in his writings.’

From the substance of the petition, the affidavits supporting the
allegations, the chief ‘exhibit,’ and the terms of the judgment, it is
certain, that the whole suit from petition to decree ‘went’ on what may be
called Free Contract considerations,--the evidence that Shelley had avowed
himself a vehement enemy of lawful marriage in 1813, and acted on the
avowal in 1814 and afterwards:--on the evidence of conduct, in accordance
with, and consequent on the views, set forth in the book, printed when he
was only twenty years of age.

How came the Lord Chancellor to speak of the principles of _Queen Mab_ as
‘avowed at nineteen,’ when the book, though doubtless begun in the poet’s
twentieth year, was mainly written as well as printed in his twenty-first
year? The Lord Chancellor antedated the avowal at least by a fraction of a
year, whilst giving Shelley’s full number of years at the delivery of the
decree. Was the Lord Chancellor’s slight inaccuracy as to the date of
_Queen Mab_, a slip for which he was solely accountable? He may have
miscalculated the time between the date of the book’s title-page and the
day on which he was delivering judgment. Or he may have considered that
the author of a work printed in his twenty-first year might be assumed to
have held and avowed, in his twentieth year, the opinions set forth in the
book. It is however conceivable, and on the whole more probable, that he
merely accepted a date given him in Shelley’s reply (written by himself)
to the petition. There being no copy of that reply in existence, nor any
record of its substance, to speak of its contents is to speak
conjecturally. But in such a paper Shelley could hardly have omitted to
refer to the time when he wrote the book, of which so much had been urged
to his disadvantage by Mr. Westbrook’s counsel; and as he would see his
interest in inducing the Lord Chancellor to regard it as a boyish
performance, not to be accepted as evidence of his present opinions, it
may be reasonably assumed that, in his reference to the important exhibit,
Shelley put its composition as far back as possible. At Pisa, towards the
close of his career, he wrote of the book as a thing proceeding from his
pen when he was only eighteen years old. In the Court of Chancery he
could scarcely ascribe it to so early a time of his existence as his
nineteenth year, but he may be imagined to have assigned its composition
to his twentieth year. To discover a copy of the lost reply would probably
be to discover evidence, that in 1817, the poet assigned to his twentieth
year the poem which in the summer of 1821 he represented himself to have
written ‘at the age of eighteen.’

It is certain that the Chancellor was not referring to the _Necessity of
Atheism_, when he referred to principles avowed by Shelley at the age of
nineteen. The _Necessity of Atheism_ was notoriously published when the
poet was _eighteen_; and it proclaimed no principles, on which he had
acted in the particular _conduct_, set forth in the petition to which the
Chancellor referred.

The judgment having been delivered, it was ordered that Shelley should
contribute a portion of his income towards the maintenance and education
of his children. How much of his income was he required to spend in this
way? _Primâ facie_ this question would seem one which Lady Shelley, with
the Field Place Papers about her, could not fail to answer correctly, if
she undertook to answer it at all. Lady Shelley answers the question with
curious inaccuracy. She says precisely, ‘He was forced, however, to set
aside 200_l._ a-year for their support; and this sum was deducted by Sir
Timothy from his son’s annuity.’ What are the facts? (1) Shelley was _not_
required to contribute 200_l._ a-year to the education of his children; he
contributed only 120_l._ a-year, in equal quarterly payments. (2) Sir
Timothy Shelley did _not_ deduct 200_l._ a-year, or any sum of money
whatever from the 250_l._ which he paid every quarter to his son’s
bank-account. The curious part of this achievement in blundering is that
Lady Shelley publishes in her book the documents which disprove the
statements of her text. The letters that passed between Shelley and Horace
Smith, in March and April, 1821 (a body of correspondence published by
Lady Shelley herself in her _Shelley Memorials_), show that Sir Timothy
paid the 1000_l._ a-year to Shelley without any deduction; that Dr. Hume,
the custodian of the children, received only 120_l._ for his care of the
two children; that instead of looking to Sir Timothy, the Doctor looked to
Shelley for the payment of this sum; that the Doctor was empowered to draw
on Shelley’s London bankers for 30_l._ a-quarter; and that with the
exception of an additional trifle for _postage_ and other extras, 120_l._
per annum was the whole sum of Shelley’s contribution to the maintenance
of the children. It is thus that Lady Shelley deals with facts from her
authentic sources.

It appears, therefore, that these proceedings in the Court of Chancery
left Shelley with the clear income of 880_l._ a-year; a larger revenue by
80_l._ a-year than the yearly income he had reserved for his own use on
raising Harriett’s allowance to its highest sum:--a fact to be borne in
mind, since successive writers have spoken of these proceedings, as
seriously reducing the income at his command before the first Mrs.
Shelley’s death.

From the August of 1817, even to this year of grace, Lord Eldon has been
written of bitterly for depriving so bright a genius and so virtuous a
citizen as Shelley of the care of his own offspring; and so long as organs
of social opinion, so powerful as the _Edinburgh Review_, continue to
misstate the grounds of the Lord Chancellor’s decree, he will continue to
be denounced as a prodigy of intolerance. It will be otherwise, if writers
bear in mind what were the real grounds of the judgment, for which he has
been censured so vehemently.

To say thus much in the Lord Chancellor’s justification is not to say that
his reasonable opinion would have been justified by the event, had Shelley
contrived to get possession of the two children, and carrying them beyond
the limits of the Chancellor’s jurisdiction, educated them in accordance
with his notions of parental duty. On the contrary, I have little doubt
that, had he taken them to Italy together with Willie and Clara, and lived
long enough to form their morals, he would not have educated them in his
anti-matrimonial views, but would have trained them for the most part like
the majority of English boys and girls, living abroad under the control of
liberal-minded Christian parents. I have two reasons for this opinion.
Unless I am greatly mistaken, had he lived well into life’s middle term,
long before the children had attained the age at which he would have
thought of directing their young minds to questions touching the
intercourse of the sexes, the author of _Laon and Cythna_ would have so
far survived his enthusiasm for the Free Contract and his wilder Free Love
phantasies, as to have no wish to see his children avoid the bonds of
lawful marriage. Had it been otherwise with him, I am confident that
Mrs. Shelley would have resisted strenuously and successfully his wish
to educate his children to prefer the Free Contract to lawful wedlock. Of
the girls, whom he tried for any considerable period to illuminate out of
Christianity and conventional respectability, his strong-willed second
wife was perhaps his least submissive pupil. The young woman, who made him
marry her on the earliest opportunity; who at Great Marlow used to order
him about as though he were a child; who had her children christened
before taking them out of England in 1818; who used to attend the services
of the Anglican Church in Italian cities; who during her residence in
Italy hungered for social recognition; and who in her later time was no
less mindful of social opinion than for ‘a brief hour of her girlhood she
had been reckless and defiant of it,’ was not the woman to allow her
children to be educated in disregard for the sanctity of the matrimonial
rite. Nurtured within the lines of orthodoxy, and educated for
respectability by the step-mother, of whom she lived to speak and write
ungenerously, Shelley’s second wife was not a woman to let him train her
own daughters (had they lived), or Harriett’s little Ianthe, to follow in
the steps of Mary Wollstonecraft.

Much romantic and sensational stuff has been written of the anguish that
came to Shelley from Lord Eldon’s barbarity. It has been told again and
again how these interesting babes were torn from his breast. As he had
left the elder of them of his own accord, when he left her mother, and was
content to let them remain in Chapel Street after losing sight of their
mother, they can scarcely be said to have been _torn from_ his breast.
Such writing (like the story of his going clean mad from grief for
Harriett) may go for what it is worth, whilst judicious readers are
content to allow, that Shelley must have been acutely mortified and
incensed by a judgment affecting his honour so darkly and deeply, and that
he probably mistook for torture of wounded affection, what was only sharp
chagrin at an humiliating misadventure. Some of the sensational writers
give curious reasons for thinking Shelley suffered unimaginable anguish
from the violence done to his parental feelings. For instance, Hunt is
sure that Shelley suffered inordinately from the loss of the children
because, after the subsidence of his first violent agitation at the
Chancellor’s cruelty, he _never spoke about them_. That Byron was no more
insincere in gushing to the whole world about the Ada be might not look
upon, than Shelley was in writing _The Billows on the Beach_, is a matter
admitting of proof.

This poem ‘To William Shelley’ has been used by successive writers as sure
evidence that, in leaving England in 1818 with his family, Shelley was
mainly moved by a desire to carry his children beyond the reach of Lord
Eldon, whom he suspected of a design to tear them from him. Dealing with
this poem, as Lady Shelley deals with the poet’s imaginary reminiscences
of his boyhood in _Laon and Cythna_, what do we learn from it? That the
poet carried his son William across the sea, when the sky was black and
the wind boisterous; that he carried the boy over the stormy water, in
order that the servants of the Court of Chancery should not tear them
asunder; that the Court of Chancery had already taken from the boy a
brother and sister who were known and dear to him; that Mrs. Shelley and
her little girl were companions of this voyage over a wind-swept sea; that
little William was alarmed at the rocking of the boat, and the cold spray,
and the wild clamour; that the poet and his wife had reason to think the
storm, with all its dark and hungry billows, less cruel than the Court of
Chancery, and to regard themselves as flying from merciless agents of that
Court; that little William was old enough to be likely to hold in
remembrance the flight over the stormy sea; that, though perhaps not old
enough to apprehend the meaning of the written verses, he was at least old
enough to comprehend their sentiment when put in language, adapted to the
understanding of a young child. It is, no doubt, very absurd to read a
poem in this way, and reduce its figurative expressions into bald
statement. But biographers have not hesitated to deal in this way with the
imaginary reminiscences of _Laon and Cythna_ and _Prince Athanase_.

Now for the facts to set in array beside the statements of the poem.
Instead of being old enough to apprehend the meaning of his father’s
words, and to be likely to remember the voyage as a dream of
long-forgotten days, little William was only two years and two months old
when he crossed the Channel. No brother and sister had been taken from
him. His father and mother were not flying from the Court of Chancery,
when they went abroad. They did not go to Italy to get out of the Lord
Chancellor’s grip. They knew that, in respect to William and little
Clara, they had nothing to fear from the Court. How far did the conditions
and incidents of their passage over the water accord with the descriptive
touches of the poem? Heaven knows. Heaven also knows that the poem was
written months before the voyage was made. The poem _To William Shelley_
was written in 1817, the voyage was made in March, 1818. This fact shows
how cautious people should be in building up the poet’s personal story out
of passages from his poems and letters. Shelley’s accounts of his
school-days in _Laon and Cythna_, or of any other matter of his past
history, were as imaginary as his description of his flight across the
Channel, or any other matter of his future history.

It may be urged, but evidence forbids it to be conceded, that, whilst
writing the imaginary piece of autobiography, Shelley was under the
impression that, unless he took his two children by Mary Godwin abroad,
the Court of Chancery would wrest them from him. Such a fear might have
possessed Shelley before the Chancery suit, but even Shelley could not
have entertained so wild a fancy _after_ the suit, which had made him a
lawyer in respect to the Court’s power to do what he pretended to fear. He
knew that the Court would not have listened to Mr. Westbrook’s suit had he
not made a provision for the children by settling 2000_l._ upon them. He
knew that till some similar provision, in property of some sort, had been
made for William and Clara, no proceedings could be taken in Chancery to
remove them from his control. Moreover, he knew that the Court would not
think of taking them from their mother.

It would not surprise me to come upon letters, written by Shelley to
induce some of his friends to think he suffered from the fear, but they
would not affect my strong opinion that he was never troubled by the
apprehension between the delivery of the Lord Chancellor’s decree and the
departure for Italy, whither he went in 1818 from several motives, any one
of which would have been sufficient to account for his action,--(_a_) from
restlessness; (_b_) from a desire to get away from his creditors, who were
troubling him; (_c_) from a desire to get away from friends who were
sponging upon him and draining his resources extortionately; (_d_) from a
desire to be nearer Byron, a strong attraction to him from 1818 to a few
months before his death; (_e_) from a notion that by going out to Italy
with Clara and little Allegra, instead of sending the child (just a year
and two months old) thither under the charge of a servant, he might
render his wife’s ‘sister’ good service; (_f_) from a notion that his
health required a southern climate. These are the motives that caused him
to go abroad.

In a letter (_vide_ _Shelley Memorials_) to William Godwin (dated from
Marlow, 7th December, 1817) Shelley rested his determination altogether on
the state of his health, in these words:--

    ‘I have experienced a decisive pulmonary attack; and, although at
    present it has passed away without any considerable vestige of its
    existence, yet this symptom sufficiently shows the true nature of my
    disease to be consumption.... In the event of its assuming any decided
    shape, it would be my _duty_ to go to Italy without delay; and it is
    only when that measure becomes an indispensable _duty_ that, _contrary
    to both Mary’s feelings_ and mine, as they regard you, I shall go to
    Italy.’

Had Shelley at this time been under the particular fear of the Lord
Chancellor, he would not have failed to name it as a ground for wishing to
go abroad; as a reason even stronger than his desire to preserve his
health and life, for Mary’s sake and for the sake of her father and her
children.

From this letter it is manifest that Shelley’s disposition to go to Italy
was, up to 7th December, 1817, opposed by his wife, and also by her
father, with whom he was again on friendly, though of course far from
cordial terms. It is noteworthy that in this epistle to Godwin he does not
venture to suggest that he was thinking of taking his children out of
England, in order to keep them under his eye, and at the same time put
them beyond the Lord Chancellor’s grip.

At the time of writing in these terms to his father-in-law Shelley had
already written (_vide_ _Shelley Memorials_) from Hunt’s house thus to his
wife:--

    ‘Now, dearest, let me talk to you. I think we ought to go to Italy. I
    think my health might receive a renovation there, for want of which
    perhaps I should never entirely overcome that state of diseased action
    which is so painful to my beloved. I think Alba ought to be with her
    father. This is a thing of incredible importance to the happiness
    perhaps of many human beings. It might be managed without our going
    there. Yes, but not without an expense which would in fact suffice to
    settle us comfortably in a spot where I might be regaining that health
    which you consider so valuable. It is valuable to you, my own dearest.
    I see too plainly that you will never be quite happy till I am well.
    Of myself I do not speak, for I feel only for you. First, this money.
    I am sure that if I ask Horace Smith he will lend me 200_l._ or even
    250_l._ more. I did not like to do it from delicacy, and a wish to
    take only just enough; but I am quite certain that he would lend me
    the money.’

Thornton Hunt says that it was a characteristic practice with Shelley to
specify _one_ sufficient motive for any course of action, and to ignore
all minor motives; and that he was thus, without any real cause, sometimes
regarded as uncandid or reserved. This is the younger Hunt’s ingenious way
of palliating the ugly fact, that Shelley often alleged one motive for a
course of action, which was really consequent on another motive. But in
this letter to Mary, instead of alleging only one reason for wishing to go
to Italy, he alleges several reasons,--(_a_) his concern for his health;
(_b_) his concern for his dearest Mary’s happiness, which will be never
complete till he is quite well; (_c_) his desire to do the best for
Allegra; and (_d_) his care for the ‘many human beings,’ whose happiness
may possibly be affected by the arrangements for making Byron take a
lively interest in his illegitimate daughter. Here are four motives for
determining to go to Italy; but never a word as to the writer’s desire to
get his own dear babes by Mary outside the Lord Chancellor’s jurisdiction.

Had he been really actuated by the desire, he would surely have specified
it to the _mother_ of the children, as the strongest conceivable argument
for bringing her to his mind respecting the migration to Italy.




CHAPTER XII.

GREAT MARLOW.

    The Misleading Tablet--House and Garden--Claire at Marlow--Shelley’s
    Delight in Claire’s Voice--_To Constantia Singing_--Source of the
    Name--Trips to London--_The Marlow Pamphlets_--_Rosalind and
    Helen_--Other Literary Work at Marlow--Mary’s Treatment and Opinion of
    Claire--Shelley makes his Will--Date of Probate--The Will’s various
    Legacies--Significant Legacies to Claire--Object of the Second Legacy
    of £6000--Did Shelley mean to leave Claire so much as £12,000?--Mr.
    Froude’s Indiscretion--His Ignorance of the Will.


Over the wall (towards the high road) of the house, inhabited for about a
year by Shelley at Great Marlow, may be seen a tablet bearing this
inscription, chiselled at the cost of a gentleman, whose intention to
honour the poet was more creditable than his knowledge of the poet’s
story:--

             This Tablet was Placed A.D. 1867,
                    At the Instance of
             Sir William Robert Clayton, Bart.,
               To Perpetuate the Record that
                   PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
              Lived and Worked in this House
                  And was Here Visited by
                       Lord Byron.

          ‘He is Gone where all Things Wise and fair
          Descend. Oh, Dream not the Amorous Deep
          Will yet Restore him to the Vital air,
  Death Feeds on His Mute Voice, and Laughs at Our Despair.’
                                                  ADONAIS.

Byron having left England for ever long before Shelley entered the house,
it is needless to say that the poets never exchanged words under its roof.

Regarded from the road, this house is, at the present time, a dingy and
mean dwelling; but on entering it, the visitor is agreeably surprised by
the magnitude of the rooms (one of them, _i.e._ Shelley’s library, being,
in Peacock’s opinion, not in mine, large enough for a ball-room); and the
rectangular garden in the rear of the building (a garden, at this present
time, divided into four several plots of ground) is twenty-one yards wide
and two hundred and twenty-five yards long. Readers may rely on the
exactness of these particulars of the garden’s size, which were given to
me for this work by my friend Mr. William Ford Langworthy.

The knavish gardener having lopt the fine holly to a bare pole, Shelley
was at considerable cost in planting this garden with shrubs. About the
same time the house (taken on lease for twenty-one years) was re-decorated
and furnished at no small expense; the library (big enough for a
ball-room) being fitted with shelves and books on terms, that were not
otherwise than advantageous to the ‘unbiased’ Mr. Hookham, of Bond Street.
Without meaning to live in this pleasant house ‘for ever,’ Shelley, no
doubt, intended to make it his home, till he should succeed to estates A
and B. Mrs. Shelley hoped the place would be her home till she should
become Lady Shelley. But human creatures are less the rulers than the
sport of circumstances. Little more than a year had passed since their
settlement at Marlow when, yielding reluctantly to her husband’s
solicitations, Mrs. Shelley went with him to Italy for the remainder of
his days.

It has been the fashion of the Shelleyan partisans to speak of the
Shelleys’ kindness to Claire as though she were a kind of fallen woman,
whom they magnanimously sheltered from social opprobrium. That they were
very kind to her when she needed their sympathy and care, is
unquestionable; but in estimating their conduct towards Claire, the reader
must remember, not only their familiar relationship to her, but also that,
in her intimacy with Byron, Claire had done nothing to forfeit their
respect. So soon after her marriage with the poet, under whose
‘protection’ she had been living for two years and a half, Mrs. Shelley
could scarcely assume an attitude of virtuous superiority and
condescension to her sister, who had lived in the same way with another
poet for a shorter time. That Mrs. Shelley was altogether pleased to have
Claire on her hands, in 1817 and afterwards, is not to be supposed. On the
contrary, a letter of her writing shows that, some time elapsed after her
return from Switzerland, in September, 1816, before she consented to
receive Claire as a permanent inmate of her home. But circumstances
constrained her to consent.

It would have been inhuman in the Shelleys to decline to shelter Claire
during her accouchement. It is not wonderful that they gave her and her
child a home at Marlow. It was necessary that Claire’s babe should be born
under circumstances most likely to keep the affair from her mother and
step-father, who had no knowledge or suspicion of their child’s _liaison_
with Byron. In providing Claire with the retreat, in which she gave birth
to Allegra with the utmost secresy, and in afterwards providing her with a
home, in which to cherish her infant with similar privacy, the Shelleys
were actuated by care for themselves, as well as by affection for her.
Mrs. Shelley had suffered too severely from her father’s displeasure, not
to be very desirous of withholding from him matters which would, on coming
to his and Mrs. Godwin’s knowledge, be sure to occasion its renewal. Now
that the sisters had been pardoned by Skinner Street, and general harmony
been re-established in the family circle, it was obvious that Claire must
live for a while either at Marlow or under Godwin’s roof. On leaving her
sister’s side, she could not keep away from her mother’s house without
giving offence or provoking suspicion. Her return to Skinner Street would
be followed quickly by disclosures, certain to result in a fresh outbreak
of family dissension. On the other hand, so long as they knew her to be
living with the Shelleys at Marlow, Mr. and Mrs. Godwin would not be
uneasy or inconveniently curious about her. Out of her mother’s
observation, she could nurse her child at Marlow in greater security from
detection than anywhere else.

That Shelley found the dark-eyed and charming, though sometimes
exasperatingly freakish, girl, upon the whole an agreeable inmate, and
was, in some degree, rewarded for his hospitality by the delight coming to
him from her faculty of song, may be inferred from Shelley’s poem ‘To
Constantia Singing’ (1817), opening with the stanza,--

  ‘TO CONSTANTIA SINGING.

  Thus to be lost and thus to sink and die,
    Perchance were death indeed!--Constantia, turn!
  In thy dark eyes a power like light doth lie,
    Even though the sounds which were thy voice, which burn
  Between thy lips, are laid to sleep;
    Within thy breath, and on thy hair, like odour it is yet,
  And from thy touch like fire doth leap.
    Even while I write, my burning cheeks are wet;
    Alas, that the torn heart can bleed, but not forget!’

Shelley left behind him fragments of two other poems, addressed to Claire
under the name of Constantia. But why Constantia? Always sagacious in his
suggestions respecting the poet, whose story he told with such admirable
tenderness and fairness, Mr. Rossetti suggests that Constantia was a
fancy-name, taken from Constantia Dudley, the heroine of Brockden Brown’s
_Ormond_,--one of the several novels by a forgotten writer, which Shelley
admired so greatly. None the less certain, however, is it, that the
heroine of the poem was the Claire in whose singing Shelley delighted in
later time, no less than in 1817, and for whose progress in the most
effective of her several accomplishments he was thoughtful during their
stay at Marlow. Of course, Claire was vastly delighted by her
brother-in-law’s approval of her singing, and by the great compliment he
rendered her, in giving poetical expression to the approval. The second
Mrs. William Godwin’s daughter took strange liberties with her name.
Christened Mary Jane (a homely name enough), she usually signed her
letters ‘Claire,’ after inventing that agreeable designation for her
bright and fascinating individuality; and she also caused herself
sometimes to be described, as Clara Mary Constantia Jane
Clairmont;--‘Constantia,’ in commemoration of her association with
Shelley’s poetical achievements; and ‘Clara’ in commemoration of the fact,
that Shelley’s daughter (born at Marlow on 3rd September, 1817) was named
after her mother’s sister-by-affinity,--even as Byron’s Ada was in her
other Christian name styled after her father’s half-sister. Described as
Clara Mary Constantia Jane in a legal instrument, dated long after
Shelley’s death, Claire figures as Mary Jane Clairmont in Shelley’s last
will and testament.

Covering passages of wretchedness, that came to him from grief for his
first wife’s fate, and from his rage against the Lord Chancellor,
Shelley’s time at Marlow covered, also, some of the happiest weeks and
months of his existence,--weeks and months of exciting literary labour;
days spent agreeably with his wife’s father; and days passed, with
livelier contentment, in the society of Peacock, Hogg, and the Hunts. Now
on the water, and now on foot, he took much exercise in the open air.
Sometimes by himself and sometimes with his younger friends, he walked to
and fro between Marlow and London. In their pedestrian excursions to
London (thirty-two miles distant from the Buckinghamshire village), it
was usual for Peacock and Shelley to march to town in the day, stay two
nights in the capital, and march back on the third day.

Holding little intercourse with his immediate neighbours of his own degree
(who, no doubt, gossiped much, and pumped Mr. Furnivall, the surgeon, with
small result, about the ladies and babies of the poetical household), he
received visitors from a distance, together with two or three of the
Marlow residents, and altogether led a more sociable life than at
Bishopgate. His time at Marlow was also a time of great literary
productiveness. In it he threw off the Marlow Pamphlets, (_a_) _A Proposal
for putting Reform to the Vote throughout the Kingdom_, and (_b_) _An
Address to the People on the Death of the Princess Charlotte_, and
published the _History of a Six Weeks’ Tour_--the book that gave Claire
her place in the record of English literature as Shelley’s and Mrs.
Shelley’s sister. It was also the period in which he wrote _Laon and
Cythna, or the Revolution of the Golden City: A Vision of the Nineteenth
Century_. _In the Stanza of Spenser_; wrote the fragmentary _Prince
Athanase_, and began _Rosalind and Helen_, the modern eclogue, which he
finished in the summer of the following year (1818) at the baths of
Lucca,--the three poems which, telling us so much of the poet’s romantic
view of his own character and career, are so rich in the poetical
egotisms, which have been so often handled as though they were reliable
passages of unimaginative biography.

In studying the last-named of these poems, the reader will not fail to
detect Shelley in Lionel (the name under which the poet figures in _The
Boat on the Serchio_), Claire in Rosalind, and Mrs. Shelley in Helen, who
says of her lost Lionel,--

                          ‘To Lionel,
  Though of great wealth and lineage high,
  Yet through those dungeon walls there came
  Thy thrilling light, O liberty!
  And as the meteor’s midnight flame
  Startles the dreamer, sun-like truth
  Flashed on his visionary youth,
  And filled him, not with love, but faith,
  And hope, and courage mute in death;
  For love and life in him were twins,
  Born at one birth.’

It is thus that Shelley, the scion of a middle-class family, the
great-grandson of a Yankee apothecary, boasted of his ‘lineage high,’ to
the admiration of eulogists, who speak disdainfully of Byron’s pride in
his Norman descent. Of her conjugal union to Lionel--a union effected in
accordance with the ways and principles of Free Lovers--Helen says, in
terms descriptive of Mary’s bondless marriage with her father’s familiar
friend,--

  ‘And so we loved, and did unite
  All that in us was yet divided:
  For when he said, that many a rite,
  By men to bind but once provided,
  Could not be shared by him and me,
  Or they would kill him in their glee,
  I shuddered, and then laughing said--
  “We will have rites our faith to bind,
  But our church shall be the starry night,
  Our altar the grassy earth outspread,
  And our priest the muttering wind.”’

A very delightful way of being married, no doubt; but in real life,
marriages done thus lightly and elegantly, without church or chapel,
priest or minister, officer or registrar, sometimes have inconvenient
consequences.

Another thing to render _Rosalind and Helen_ interesting to students of
Shelley’s story, is its evidence that Shelley wrote the poem with a hope,
that it would tend to draw Mary and Claire still closer together, and weld
their hearts into an indissoluble union by the strongest mutual affection.
That it was Mary who induced Shelley, at the baths of Lucca in the summer
of 1818, to finish the poem which had this obvious purpose, is a part of
the evidence that she was then animated by affection for the
sister-by-affinity, whom she had so recently styled her ‘sister’ in a
published book. Yet we are assured by Mr. Kegan Paul that, in 1818, Mrs.
Shelley ‘felt as strongly as Byron that Allegra’s mother was the worst
person possible to train the child.’ Had I not on certain occasions caught
Mr. Kegan Paul, passing from clear evidences to strangely erroneous
conclusions, I should take it for granted that he had sufficient
documentary evidence for so strong and startling a statement. But I am
slow to believe that Mrs. Shelley thought so ill of Claire, either at
Marlow (where she styled Claire her ‘sister’ in a published book), or in
any term of 1818, prior to the time when she encouraged Shelley to resume
work on _Rosalind and Helen_. Under the circumstances, I can conceive
that Mr. Kegan Paul has inferred too much from some words, penned by Mrs.
Shelley, in order to induce Byron to take personal charge of Allegra. In
1817 and 1818, the Shelleys put strong pressure on Byron, to rear Allegra
under his own roof and eye, and in doing so declared the strongest opinion
that he was the fittest person to have charge of the child. But to argue
from any expressions of this opinion, that Mrs. Shelley regarded her
‘sister’ as a person from whose deleterious influence the child should be
preserved, would be alike unjust to the Shelleys and to Claire; it being
certain that Shelley wished Byron to receive _both_ the mother and the
child; that he did his utmost to bring about an arrangement for Claire to
have charge of her offspring _under_ Byron’s roof; and that he strove and
hoped to bring about this arrangement, even _after_ Allegra’s transference
to her father’s house.

I do not say that Mr. Kegan Paul cannot produce evidence to sustain his
staggering statement. On the contrary, I have a feeling that he may be
able to do so. But I do not hesitate in saying, that to produce any
sufficient documentary evidence of Mrs. Shelley’s having written, or
thought so ill of Claire in 1817 or 1818, would be to show how little
William Godwin knew of his daughter’s real character, and to prove that
she was the falsest little minx that ever wore petticoats. If, whilst she
was bearing herself to the world with every show of sisterly affection
for, and confidence in, her _sister_ (her ‘sister’ of the published _Six
Weeks’ Tour_), Mrs. Shelley ever gave anyone to understand that Claire was
unfit to discharge the maternal duties to her own child, she was a woman
with two faces and a double tongue.

Enough has been said to show that, in 1817 and the earlier months of 1818,
Claire had good reason for thinking she possessed her sister’s affection,
and that Shelley had reason to believe his wife held Claire in sisterly
regard. Enough also has been said to show that throughout this same period
Shelley was affectionately disposed to his wife’s sister-by-affinity. My
strongest evidence that Shelley was so disposed towards Claire has,
however, still to be given.

Shelley was still at Bath when he instructed a London lawyer to make the
will, which was in due course executed in London on 18th February, 1817,
and proved as the poet’s last testament in the Prerogative Court of
Canterbury on 1st November, 1844,--more than two-and-twenty years after
his death. Lord Byron and Thomas Love Peacock were appointed executors of
this will. The testator assigned a sum of 6000_l._ for a provision for his
son (Charles Bysshe) by his first wife, another 6000_l._ for a provision
for Ianthe (his daughter by the same wife), and a third 6000_l._ for a
provision for his son (William) by Mary Godwin; the said three sums of
6000_l._ each being bequeathed to the said Lord Byron and Thomas Love
Peacock _In Trust_ for the benefit of the said three children. After
providing in this manner for his children, the testator (speaking of
Claire, under the name of Mary Jane Clairmont) says,--

    ‘I give and bequeath unto Mary Jane Clairmont (the sister-in-law of my
    residuary legatee) the sum of six thousand pounds of like lawful money
    of Great Britain and I also give and bequeath unto the said George
    Gordon Lord Byron and Thomas Love Peacock their executors
    administrators and assigns the sum of six thousand pounds of like
    lawful money of Great Britain upon trust to lay out and invest the
    same in their names in purchase of an annuity for the term of the
    natural life of the said Mary Jane Clairmont and the life of such
    other person as the said Mary Jane Clairmont shall name (if she please
    to name one) and to stand possessed of the said annuity and the
    securities to be obtained for the same upon trust that they the said
    George Gordon Lord Byron and Thomas Love Peacock and the survivor of
    them and the executors administrators and assigns of such survivor
    shall and do during the natural life of the said Mary Jane Clairmont
    when and as the annuity hereinbefore by me directed to be purchased
    with the aforesaid sum of six thousand pounds shall be received by my
    said trustees or the trustee for the time being pay the said annuity
    into the proper hands of her the said Mary Jane Clairmont or unto her
    order to be signified by some note or writing under her hand from time
    to time after the quarterly payment of the same annuity for the
    payment of which such order shall be given shall have actually become
    due and payable but not otherwise to the intent that the same annuity
    may be for the sole and separate use of the said Mary Jane Clairmont
    independently of any husband with whom she may intermarry and to the
    intent that the said Mary Jane Clairmont may not either covert or sole
    make any appointment or assignment by way of anticipation of any
    unaccrued quarterly payment of the said annuity and the receipt or
    receipts of the said Mary Jane Clairmont or of the person or persons
    to whom she shall make such order or appointment as aforesaid shall
    alone be a good and sufficient discharge for the said annuity or for
    so much thereof as in such receipt or receipts shall be expressed or
    acknowledged to be received and from and after the decease of the said
    Mary Jane Clairmont in case the said annuity shall not then have run
    out my said trustees shall then stand possessed thereof in trust for
    such person or persons as the said Mary Jane Clairmont shall by deed
    or will appoint to receive the same and in default of appointment in
    trust for the executors or administrators of the said Mary Jane
    Clairmont I give and bequeath to Thomas Jefferson Hogg of the Inner
    Temple London Esquire the sum of two thousand pounds of like lawful
    money of Great Britain I give and bequeath unto the said George Gordon
    Lord Byron the sum of two thousand pounds of like lawful money of
    Great Britain I give and bequeath unto the said Thomas Love Peacock
    the sum of five hundred pounds of like lawful money of Great Britain I
    give and bequeath unto the said George Gordon Lord Byron and Thomas
    Love Peacock their executors administrators and assigns the sum of two
    thousand pounds of like lawful money of Great Britain upon trust to
    lay out and invest the same in their names in the purchase of annuity
    payable quarterly for the term of the natural life of the said Thomas
    Love Peacock and the life of such other person as the said Thomas Love
    Peacock shall name (if he please to name one) and to stand possessed
    of the said annuity and the securities to be obtained for the same
    upon trust that they the said George Gordon Lord Byron and Thomas Love
    Peacock and the survivor of them and the executors administrators and
    assigns of such survivor shall and do during the natural life of the
    said Thomas Love Peacock when and as the annuity hereinbefore by me
    directed to be purchased with the aforesaid sum of two thousand pounds
    shall be received by my said trustees or the trustee for the time
    being pay the same annuity into the proper hands of the said Thomas
    Love Peacock or unto his order to be signified by some note or writing
    under his hand from time to time after the quarterly payment of the
    same annuity for the payment of which such order shall be given shall
    have actually become due and payable but not otherwise to the intent
    that the said Thomas Love Peacock may not make any appointment or
    assignment by way of anticipation of any unaccrued quarterly payment
    of the said annuity and from and after the decease of the said Thomas
    Love Peacock in case the said annuity shall not then have run out my
    said trustees shall stand possessed thereof in trust for such person
    or persons as the said Thomas Love Peacock shall by deed or will
    appoint to receive the same and in default of appointment in trust for
    the executors or administrators of the said Thomas Love Peacock and I
    do hereby give devise and bequeath all and singular my manors
    messuages lands tenements hereditaments and real estate whatsoever and
    wheresoever situate both freehold and copyhold and whether in
    possession reversion remainder or expectancy and over which I have any
    disposing power and also all and singular my monies stocks funds and
    securities for money mortgages in fee and for years and the lands
    tenements and hereditaments therein comprised for all my estate and
    interest therein and all other my goods chattels and personal estate
    and effects whatsoever and wheresoever (but subject nevertheless and
    charged and chargeable as well my said real as personal estate with
    the payment of all my just debts funeral and testamentary expenses and
    the legacies given by this my Will and also such legacies as I may
    hereafter give by any Codicil or Codicils thereto) unto and to the use
    of my wife Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley her heirs executors
    administrators and assigns for her and their own absolute use and
    benefit for ever Provided always and my will is and I do hereby
    expressly declare that the several legacies hereinbefore by me given
    shall not be paid or payable until my said wife Mary Wollstonecraft
    Shelley her heirs or assigns shall be in the possession of my real
    estate under the devise to her and them hereinbefore contained and in
    that case if my said wife Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley shall regularly
    pay the interest of the several legacies after she obtains possession
    of my said real estate such legacies may remain unpaid for any time
    not exceeding the term of four years at the option of my said wife
    Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.’

Shelley assigned 6000_l._ to each of his three children, living at the
time when he made the will; he bequeathed the same sum (6000_l._) to
Claire, to be paid into her hands for her to deal with according to her
pleasure. Had he done nothing more for her by his will, he would have
dealt with her in the testament precisely as he dealt with his own
children;--a sufficient proof that he felt more than an ordinary brother’s
love for her. But in addition to this large legacy, he left her another
6000_l._, to be invested in an annuity for the term of her natural life,
or for the lives of herself and ‘such other person’ as she should name.
There is small room for doubt that, in making this direction, Shelley had
Allegra in his mind, as the person whom Claire would name as her
co-parcener in the annuity. I have no doubt that he wished to provide for
her child even as he provided for each of his own children, and saw that
to do so directly and openly, with mention of the child’s name, he must
use language that would publish to the world one side of the child’s
parentage, and, whilst exposing the mother to discredit, would raise a
suspicion that he was the child’s father. Anyhow, he left Claire
12,000_l._ (say, a sixth or seventh of all he had to will away). A father
and husband with three living children, and the prospect of having more
children, he bequeathed this large sum to his wife’s ‘sister’; and yet we
have been asked to believe that, at the time of making this bequest, he
disliked Claire!

A good example of the inaccuracy with which Trelawny, in his old age, used
to gossip of Shelley and his affairs, is afforded by what he said to Mr.
Rossetti of this double legacy to Claire. In his _Talks with Trelawny_,
_vide_ the _Athenæum_, 1882, Mr. Rossetti remarked, ‘Trelawny says that
Shelley left Miss Clairmont, by will, no less a sum than 12,000_l._ He had
left 6000_l._ in the body of the will, and then (whether by inadvertence
or otherwise) he bequeathed another 6000_l._ in a codicil.’ There is no
codicil to Shelley’s will. Both bequests were made in the body of the
will. Inadvertence was in no degree accountable for the two several
bequests. Quarrelling bitterly with Claire after her husband’s death on
other matters, Mrs. Shelley also quarrelled with her bitterly about these
bequests,--maintaining that Shelley never intended to leave her more than
6000_l._; insisting that a lawyer’s blunder was the cause of the enormity
of the sum bequeathed to Claire; and arguing that Claire was bound in
honour to forego the legacy of 6000_l._ and be content with the
annuity,--a view of the case not taken by Claire. No lawyer will think a
mistake was made by Shelley’s solicitor, or question that Shelley (a
subtle user and reader of words, and a man by no means without aptitude
for affairs of business) intended to bequeath both sums. The notion that
he was guilty of inadvertence, and slipt in the matter through his
lawyer’s blundering, is absurd.

There is, however, reason for thinking that Claire took more by the will
than Shelley in his last months intended her to take by his last
testament. That Mrs. Shelley had grounds for saying he meant to reduce
some of the legacies of the will, and otherwise alter the instrument, I do
not question. Believing that he made the second bequest of 6000_l._ mainly
for Allegra’s benefit, I think it probable that, after Allegra’s death, in
April, 1822, he intended to revoke the bequest for the purchase of the
annuity. But he died without altering his will in any way. Hence, unless
he told her of his intention to revoke the second legacy, or left clear
evidence of his intention to do so, Claire was entitled in honour no less
than in law to both legacies.

Anyhow, it is certain that on 18th February, 1817,--the February next
following Allegra’s birth, and her mother’s residence with Byron and the
Shelleys in Geneva--Shelley made the will in which he bequeathed to
Claire, out of his moderate estate, no less than 12,000_l._ Is not this
strong evidence of his affection and esteem for her? Is it conceivable
that he would have left Claire so much money had he and Mary concurred in
cordially disliking her? Mr. Froude insists that, regarding Claire with
disapproval and aversion when they accompanied her to Geneva, they were no
less unfavourably disposed to her, when they sheltered her at Bath and
gave her bed and board at Marlow. Here are Mr. Froude’s words:--

    ‘The Shelleys, who had disliked her before, could not have been more
    favourably disposed to her; but they pitied her misfortunes, and
    allowed her to continue to reside with them.’

It is due to Mr. Froude to say that, when writing these words, he had not
seen Shelley’s will; but he had before him my clear account of Shelley’s
affectionate regard for Claire. He chose to deviate from my clear account,
and to rely on the statements of other persons, and he must take the
consequences of his imprudence.




CHAPTER XIII.

LAON AND CYTHNA.

    Origin of the Free-Contract Party--Divorce in Catholic
    England--Nullification of Marriage--Consequences of the
    Reformation--Edward the Sixth’s Commissioners for the Amendment of
    Ecclesiastical Laws--Martin Bucer’s _Judgment touching Divorce_--John
    Milton on Freedom of Divorce--Denunciations of Marriage by the
    Godwinian Radicals--Poetical Fruits of the Genevese Scandal--Byron’s
    Timidity--Shelley’s Boldness--His most extravagant Conclusions
    touching Liberty of Affection--Appalling Doctrine of _Laon and
    Cythna_--Shelley’s Purpose in publishing the Poem--Alarm of the
    Olliers--Shelley’s Instructions to the frightened
    Publishers--Suppression of the monstrous Poem--Friends in
    Council--_Laon and Cythna_ manipulated into the _Revolt of Islam_--The
    _Quarterly Review_ on the original Poem--Consequences to Shelley’s
    Reputation--Irony of Fate.


Enough has been said of the egotisms of _Laon and Cythna_; but something
must be said of the reasons, why this extraordinary fruit of Shelley’s
genius should be withheld from those young people to whom it is now-a-days
offered, in fine type and on rich paper, as one of the choicest poems of
English literature. It must be stated frankly and fearlessly why, till
human nature has changed greatly and till existing human institutions and
sentiments have become mere matters of archæology, this poem, with all its
exquisite beauties of diction, must appear to all righteous and
sober-minded persons a perplexity and a scandal, that may be fruitful of
morbid thought and vicious action in young persons of light fancy and
loose principles.

Successive writers on Shelleyan questions have regarded the Free Contract
movement, in which the poet took so characteristic a part, as one of the
consequences of the great revolution which, towards the close of the last
century, disposed a considerable proportion of our own people, as well as
of the peoples more deeply and violently influenced by novel ideas, to
refer all social evils to existing institutions, and, in their impatience
of prevailing wrongs and wretchedness, to cry aloud for the quick and
total suppression of the social arrangements to which they attributed so
much mischief and misery. But the French Revolution did no more, in this
respect, than quicken a discontent and stimulate a movement that had
affected English life for generations and centuries. To discover the
origin of the Free Contract party in this country the student of social
phenomena must go back to the sixteenth century.

In pre-Reformation times, living under the control of a Church that,
knowing nothing of the larger divorce (_a vinculo matrimonii_ == from bond
of matrimony), and granting only in cases of extreme conjugal infidelity
the minor divorce (_a mensâ et thoro_ == from board and bed), subsequently
designated ‘judicial separation,’ which afforded no liberty of marrying
other spouses to the separated parties, our forefathers in this island
enjoyed practically a freedom of divorce, that under ordinary
circumstances enabled unhappily mated spouses to make lawful marriage with
other persons.

Knowing nothing of the complete divorce, the Church knew a great deal of
nullification of matrimony, and in her Courts throughout the country was
daily liberating uncongenial spouses, by decreeing that they had never
been man and wife. By discovering that they were first, second, or third
cousins,--by demonstrating, with the aid of two conveniently pliant
witnesses, that, at the time of their wedding, one of them was
pre-contracted to a third person,--by showing that on their marriage-day
they stood within the prohibited degrees of consanguinity, affinity or
spiritual affinity,--or by a confession that either of them had, before
their union, held wicked intercourse with a near relation of the other,--a
husband and wife could procure a judgment which declared they had _never
been married_; that they were still bachelor and single woman, and free to
contract matrimony in accordance with the rules of Holy Church. To a
couple bent on perfect liberation from a hateful union, it was always easy
to discover grounds for the nullification of their wedlock, and seldom
difficult to render those grounds apparent to an ecclesiastical judge. Two
spouses, bent on celebrating their union, often experienced great
difficulty in ascertaining that no impediments precluded them from valid
intermarriage; but the impediment which made their wedlock a nullity, were
always readily discoverable by the husband and wife who had come to hate
one another. So long as this state of things lasted, every canonical
impediment to matrimony operated like a turnstile gate, that, whilst
acting as a barrier to persons entering a building, affords a means of
egress to those who wish to leave it.

This state of things, however, came to an end with the Reformation. By
sweeping away all the canonical restrictions on matrimony, not ordered by
Scripture, the statute, 32 Henry VIII., c. 38, increased greatly the
freedom of marriage; but at the same time destroyed the liberty of divorce
enjoyed by our ancestors throughout successive centuries. Rendering
matrimony easier of entrance, it closed all the many gates, which had
hitherto afforded spouses the means of escape from conjugal wretchedness.
The chiefs of the Protestant party in Edward the Sixth’s time had,
however, no wish to perpetuate the condition of affairs, directly
consequent on Henry the Eighth’s mere abrogation of the non-scriptural
impediments to marriage. Condemning strongly the excessive liberty of
separation, which the ecclesiastical tribunals had for generations
afforded to society, they were no less unanimous in condemning the
doctrine of the absolute indissolubility of wedlock. If it was wrong on
the one hand to allow husbands and wives the liberty of separating on
frivolous pretexts, and to provide the fortress of marriage with numerous
gates of egress, whose double locks obeyed the pass-keys of perjury and
corruption; it was on the other hand no less hurtful to society and
impious to God, to constrain a pair of human creatures, in the name of
religion, to persevere in an association, that could not accomplish the
highest purposes of matrimony, and debarred the ill-assorted couple from
the serene and wholesome pleasures of Christian life. These were the views
of the Anglican leaders; views that found precise and memorable expression
in the famous code of ordinances (the _Reformatio Legum Ecclesiasticarum_)
prepared for the reformation of our ecclesiastical laws by Edward the
Sixth’s thirty-two commissioners for that purpose, who, doing away with
the minor divorce (_a mensâ et thoro_), decided that the divorce _a
vinculo matrimonii_ should be the only kind of matrimonial severance known
to English law, and that it should be granted, (1) in cases of extreme
conjugal faithlessness; (2) in cases where a husband, not guilty of
deserting his wife, had been for several years absent from her, under
circumstances which justified her in concluding that he was dead; (3) and
in cases of such violent hatred as rendered it in the highest degree
improbable, that the husband and wife would survive their animosities and
again love one another; it being expressly directed that this last
provision should not be construed as affecting spouses whose quarrels,
though frequent and distressing, were neither incessant nor in the highest
degree vehement. Had Edward the Sixth lived only a little longer these
ordinances would have become the law of the land;--law which, though
suppressed on the accession of Mary Tudor, would have been revived on the
rise of Elizabeth, and handed down to the present time.

Of course, the Anglican reformers conceived themselves to be justified in
disregarding the limitation, which our version of the Scriptures assigns
to liberty of divorce. Whilst some of them were of opinion that this
limitation was applicable only to the Jews, others held that, if a wrong
rendering of a particular word were replaced by its true English
equivalent, Scripture would be found to sanction the dissolution of
marriages, whose infelicity was due to nothing more than some serious
mental or moral disability. Of course, also, the Commissioners’
recommendations were a compromise between the requirements of bold
reformers who wished for a much larger, and of timid reformers, who would
have preferred a smaller, measure of freedom of divorce. Had Martin Bucer
been on the Commission, as he certainly would have been but for his recent
death, it cannot be questioned that the Commissioners would have ordained
a far greater liberty of dissolving unhappy marriages. It was Bucer’s
opinion (_vide_ his _Judgment touching Divorce_, addressed to Edward the
Sixth) that every marriage should be dissolved in which the husband and
wife did not ‘love one another to the height of dearness,’ or the husband
could not rightly govern and cherish the wife, or the wife was flagrantly
disobedient and unprofitable to her lord, or either party ‘defrauded the
other of conjugal benevolence,’--views which commended themselves so
cordially to John Milton, that he produced a new edition of Bucer’s tract,
in the middle of the seventeenth century.

Whilst showing how cordially he concurred in Martin Bucer’s conclusions,
John Milton’s four works on divorce--the _Doctrine and Discipline of
Divorce_, the _Tetrachordon_, the _Colasterion_, and the new edition of
Bucer’s _Judgment touching Divorce_--show also how far he went beyond the
sixteenth-century divine, in declaring every man’s right to secede from
an uncongenial partner, and to associate himself with an acceptable
helpmate. No libertine, for the gratification of vile desire, ever
demanded greater license of re-marriage than Milton, in the name of
religion, demanded for Christian men, for their spiritual advantage.

The old canon law, which insisted on the indissolubility of true
marriages, and, even in cases of adultery, afforded no larger divorce than
the separation from board and bed, having been revived at the close of
Elizabeth’s reign, our ancestors lived for several generations under a
matrimonial law of unprecedented rigour and narrowness, that in its
results demonstrated the sagacity and prudence of Edward the Sixth’s
Commissioners. Had the Commissioners’ proposals become law, England would
have escaped much of the profligacy that, after rendering her seventeenth
century proverbial for domestic libertinism, was less remarkable in the
eighteenth century, only because the usage of successive ages had rendered
society comparatively indifferent to it. Whilst no student of our social
history can question that throughout those centuries the English home
suffered severely from the excessive stringency of the matrimonial law,
every student of literature is cognizant of the stream of written protests
against the harshness and unyielding rigour of that law, from Elizabeth to
Victoria. That Milton shocked the lighter people of his time by his
assaults on the limitations of liberty of divorce is not to be conceived.
That he did not by his writings against those restrictions offend the more
precise and God-fearing of his contemporaries, appears from the regard in
which they held him as a religious poet, after his descent to darkness and
evil days. So far as concerns freedom of divorce, the Free Contract party
of William Godwin’s epoch required nothing that Milton would not have
granted, and urged little that Bucer would have hesitated to approve.

In 1813 (the year in which the anti-matrimonial note of _Queen Mab_ was
written), Shelley regarded marriage with the eyes and by the lights of
eighteenth-century writers, who decried the institution as the source of
human misery and depravation. The evils, that caused these writers to
distinguish themselves in the long war against wedlock, were no imaginary
grievances. On the contrary, they were evils which the Anglican reformers
foresaw would result from a too stringent marriage-law, and for which they
wished to provide by their proposals for divorce. They were evils crying
aloud for remedy throughout the country. Almost every parish of the land
had a miserably mated couple, whose union should have been terminated by
the law. For the mischief there was no remedy but the old cumbrous and
costly proceedings for obtaining the greater divorce,--_i.e._ the suit in
the first instance in the Ecclesiastical Court for the minor divorce from
board and bed, and the subsequent suit for the parliamentary severance of
the bond of marriage:--a process that, making divorce the luxury of the
rich, denied it altogether to the poor. In the first thirty-seven years of
the present century, only seventy suitors (less than two a-year) obtained
special parliamentary enactments for their liberation from wretched
wedlock. In the last thirty-seven years of the previous century, such
divorces were much less frequent. The rich alone could afford to pay for
the parliamentary relief. For the poor, and for the people raised only a
few degrees above poverty, there was no divorce. Under these
circumstances, whilst almost every rural village had a Stephen Blackpool,
there necessarily arose vehement discontent not only with the defective
marriage-law, but with marriage itself. Nothing was said against the
obstacles to entering marriage; but everywhere an outcry was heard against
the impossibility of getting out of marriage. Amongst the populace, social
sentiment permitted a man in many cases to be the physician of his own
trouble, and after deserting his lawful wife, to live with a woman who was
not his wife. The general grievance being the difficulty of escape from
uncongenial wedlock, the Radical writers dealt with this grievance, and
usually forbore to criticise the impediments to marriage, of which no
large number of people complained.

Taking his views from these writers, it was natural for the youthful
Shelley to think and write chiefly of the evils arising from the law,
which forbade a man to leave his wife and straightway attach himself to
another woman. In constructing the note to _Queen Mab_, it was enough for
him to put together, with no common smartness and one or two original
touches, the remarks of previous writers on the troubles resulting from
the permanence of matrimonial obligations. Contemning marriage from his
boyhood, after the fashion of his teachers, he was eloquent about the
difficulty of escaping from it. Apart from a statement of the grand
principle that ‘love was free,’ and that every person should be at
liberty to marry whomsoever he pleased, he does not seem to have troubled
himself about the divers impediments to the first entrance into the
unendurable bondage, before he went to Geneva. It was otherwise on his
return from the residence in Switzerland with Byron.

The startling discovery, that they were believed to be living in
incestuous intimacy with the same two women, caused each of the poets to
ponder the nature of the crime with which rumour charged them. Stirring
and fascinating Byron’s imagination, the scandal bore fruit in _Manfred_
and _Cain_. Stimulating and holding Shelley’s fancy, it resulted in _Laon
and Cythna_. It is interesting to observe how differently the two poets
dealt with the same repulsive subject. For the timid sceptic and
half-hearted innovator, who to the last was (as Shelley put the case to
his wife at Pisa) ‘little better than a Christian,’ it was enough to point
to the crime in _Manfred_, as one of the hideous possibilities of vicious
desire,--as a monstrous and appalling extravagance of wickedness, too
hideous to be spoken of precisely; as an offence so loathsome and
revolting, that poetry could refer to it only by vague hints and obscure
suggestions. In _Cain_ he could refer with cynical mockery to times when,
if _Genesis_ were true, brothers necessarily mated with their sisters, for
the accomplishment of the Creator’s purpose;--mockery, that was not so
much a palliation of the iniquity, as an assault on the credibility of the
Book which seemed to sanction the wickedness.

Shelley handled the subject in a very different way. It was natural for
the thorough and unwavering disbeliever, who had formerly denied and still
questioned the existence of the Deity, and no less natural for the fervid
political theorist, who regarded all human governments and their
subordinate institutions as the mere contrivances of tyranny for the
subjugation and debasement of the peoples, to come to the conclusion that
the impediments to matrimony had no other foundation, and were in no
degree more entitled to the respect of reasonable men, than the
impediments to escape from wedlock. Absolutely ignorant of the social
conditions from which the hindrances to marriage had arisen, and no less
ignorant of the physical and social reasons for regarding most of them as
conducive to domestic purity, and some of them as needful for preserving
the human species from mental and bodily disease and deterioration,
Shelley was only carrying certain of his principles to certain of their
extreme logical conclusions, when he closed his consideration of the
impediments to marriage, by regarding them as so many capricious and
pernicious interferences with natural forces, which, if they were left to
take their own course, without let or hindrance from presumptuous, and
arrogant, and meddlesome mortals, would in due course bring the whole
human race under the dominion of universal love;--a dominion under which
all mankind for countless ages would have enjoyed unqualified felicity,
had it not been for the disastrous activity of tyrants and priests.

It was not in Shelley to distinguish between the various impediments, and
discover grounds for deciding that some of them should be retained, whilst
others might be abolished. To Shelley, a man’s right to marry his deceased
wife’s sister was not more obvious than a man’s right to marry his own
sister. Regarded by the new light, arising from the larger consideration
of the matrimonial law, to which he had been incited by the Genevese
scandal, the artificial hindrances to egress from matrimony were not more
demoralizing than the artificial hindrances to ingress into matrimony. For
human happiness marriage must be relieved of the impediments on its one
side, no less than of the hindrances on its other side. Love must be
restored to Freedom:--to freedom so perfect that a young man would be free
to marry his own sister, without the intervention of priest or the control
of lawyer; and after wearying of her be free to marry her younger sister
under circumstances in no way affecting his freedom in the future. This
discovery was the completion of Shelley’s social philosophy in respect to
the intercourse of the sexes;--the philosophy that is, in the opinion of
some of his admirers, a part of his title to be regarded as a man, who,
under auspicious circumstances, ‘might have been the Saviour of the
World!’

Having made this important discovery after his return from Geneva, Shelley
determined to communicate it to the world in a poem, which should teach
its readers that incest was nothing but an imaginary sin; that ceasing to
have the show of sin, on being rightly regarded, it was seen to be
compatible with the highest virtue; that it was one of the great
‘multitude of artificial vices,’ to whose existence the fewness of ‘real
virtues’ was referable; that instead of being loathsome, nauseous,
hideous, unutterably repulsive and sinful, the conjugal union of a brother
and sister under the Free Contract was permissible in the eyes of
philosophic moralists, and compatible with moral purity and the finest
delicacy in the brother and sister; that besides being altogether
permissible, and in no degree reprehensible, this conjugal union was a
virtuous relation, in which brothers and sisters would often stand towards
one another in a rightly-constituted society. To put this social doctrine
before the world, in the form most likely to commend it to the feelings of
youthful readers, and induce them to further every movement for a state of
things, in which brothers and sisters could so live together without
offending their neighbours, Shelley wrote _Laon and Cythna: or, The
Revolution of the Golden City: a Vision of the Nineteenth Century. In the
Stanza of Spenser._

Brother and sister of the same parents, Laon and Cythna, the hero and
heroine of the poem, are beings endowed with all the virtues conceivable
in perfect human nature, and are still enjoying the scenes of their
childhood in Argolis, when they pass from the state of mutual affection,
that is desirable in a brother of some sixteen or eighteen summers and a
sister (_ætat._ 12), to a state of mutual love that is desirable only
between young people who can in the ordinary course of things marry one
another. What follows from this state of things is indicated with
consummate delicacy by the poet, too wary and artful to shock his readers
in the second canto by clear disclosures, that might determine them to
refrain from perusing any later canto of a long poem. Laon and Cythna are
suddenly torn asunder by the agents of the tyrant, who figures in the poem
as a type of European monarchs in the nineteenth century, and soon after
their severance Cythna gives birth to the lovely child who owes her life
to Laon. In a later passage of the narrative, after he has been released
from the cage on the column’s top, and she, after divers painful
experiences, has been proclaimed the prophetess and supreme directress of
the revolutionists of the Golden City, Laon and Cythna come together under
circumstances, which prevent them from recognizing one another in the
first hour of their reunion. Laon is still uncertain whether she is really
his sister, or only bears a strong resemblance to her, when he hears
Cythna harangue the Golden City revolutionists in these words:--

  ‘My brethren, we are free! the plains and mountains,
  The grey sea shore, the forests and the fountains,
  Are haunts of happiest dwellers;--man and woman,
  Their common bondage burst, may freely borrow
  From _lawless love_ a solace for their sorrow;
  For oft we still must weep, since we are human.
          A stormy night’s serenest morrow,
          Whose showers are pity’s gentle tears,
          Whose clouds are smiles of those that die
          Like infants without hopes or fears,
          And whose beams are joys that lie
          In blended hearts, now holds dominion;
        The dawn of mind, which upwards on a pinion
        Borne, swift as sun-rise, far illumines space,
  And clasps this barren world in its own bright embrace!’

Fearful that the words ‘lawless love’ may frighten simple readers, Mr.
Buxton Forman (who thinks Shelley ‘might have been the Saviour of the
World’), in his most useful edition of Shelley’s works, appends to the
alarming words this note:--‘The words _lawless love_ seem to be used, not
in a conventional sense, but merely to signify _unshackled love_.’ True,
but ‘unshackled’ from what? Cythna meant that tyrant custom, or tyrant
anybody else, having been overthrown and rendered powerless for the
moment, her brethren and sisters were free to marry, and changing about to
remarry, in perfect liberty of affection--in love liberated from _the
shackles of human law_--in matrimony, no less easily entered than easily
quitted--in marriage, alike free from legal impediments to ingress, and
from legal impediments to egress--love, in fact, so perfectly free from
the supervision and control of human law, that it might be rightly styled
‘lawless love.’

Later in the poem’s story, when Cythna has rescued Laon from the tyrant’s
soldiers, and carried him off, on the ‘black Tartarian horse of giant
frame,’ to a picturesque ruin, the brother and sister, after recognizing
one another as whilom playmates in Argolis, pass through emotions, that
are set forth in the following stanzas:--

    ‘The autumnal winds, as if spell-bound, had made
    A natural couch of leaves in that recess,
    Which seasons none disturb, but in the shade
    Of flowering parasites, did Spring love to dress
    With their sweet blooms the wintry loneliness
    Of those dead leaves, shedding their stars, whene’er
    The wandering wind her nurslings might caress;
    Whose intertwining fingers ever there,
  Made music wild and soft that filled the listening air.

    We know not where we go, or what sweet dream
    May pilot us thro’ caverns strange and fair
    Of far and pathless passion, while the stream
    Of life, our bark doth on its whirlpools bear,
    Spreading swift wings as sails to the dim air;
    Nor should we seek to know, so the devotion
    Of love and gentle thoughts be heard still there
    Louder and louder from the utmost Ocean
  Of universal life, attuning its commotion.

    To the pure all things are pure! Oblivion wrapt
    Our spirits, and the fearful overthrow
    Of public hope was from our being snapt,
    Tho’ linkèd years had bound it there; for now
    A power, a thirst, a knowledge, which below
    All thoughts, like light beyond the atmosphere,
    Clothing its clouds with grace, doth ever flow,
    Came on us, as we sate in silence there,
  Beneath the golden stars of the clear azure air.

    In silence which doth follow talk that causes
    The baffled heart to speak with sighs and tears,
    When wildering passion, swalloweth up the pauses
    Of inexpressive speech:--the youthful years
    Which we together past, their hopes and fears,
    _The common blood which ran within our frames,
    That likeness of the features which endears
    The thoughts expressed by them, our very names_,
  And all the wingèd hours which speechless memory claims

    Had found a voice; ...

         *       *       *       *       *

    The meteor shewed the leaves on which we sate,
    And Cythna’s glowing arms, and the thick ties
    Of her soft hair which bent with gathered weight
    My neck near hers, her dark and deepening eyes,
    Which, as twin phantoms of one star that lies
    O’er a dim well, move, though the star reposes,
    Swam in our mute and liquid ecstasies,
    Her marble brow, and eager lips, like roses,
  With their own fragrance pale, which Spring but half uncloses.

    The meteor to its far morass returned:
    The beating of our veins one interval
    Made still; and then I felt the blood that burned
    Within her frame, mingle with mine, and fall
    Around my heart like fire; and over all
    A mist was spread, the sickness of a deep
    And speechless swoon of joy, as might befall
    Two disunited spirits when they leap
  In union from this earth’s obscure and fading sleep.

    Was it one moment that confounded thus
    All thought, all sense, all feeling, into one
    Unutterable power, which shielded us
    Even from our own cold looks, when we had gone
    Into a wide and wild oblivion
    Of tumult and of tenderness? or now
    Had ages, such as make the moon and sun,
    The seasons, and mankind their changes know,
  Left fear and time unfelt by us alone below?

    I know not. What are kisses whose fire clasps
    The failing heart in languishment, or limb
    Twined within limb? or the quick dying gasps
    Of the life meeting, when the faint eyes swim
    Thro’ tears of a wide mist boundless and dim,
    In one caress? What is the strong controul
    Which leads the heart that dizzy steep to climb,
    Where far over the world those vapours roll
  Which blend two restless frames in one reposing soul?

    It is the shadow which doth float unseen,
    But not unfelt, o’er blind mortality,
    Whose divine darkness fled not, from that green
    And lone recess, where lapt in peace did lie
    Our linkèd frames; till, from the changing sky,
    That night and still another day had fled;
    And then I saw and felt. The moon was high,
    The clouds, as of coming storm, were spread
  Under its orb,--loud winds were gathering overhead.

    Cythna’s sweet lips seemed lurid in the moon,
    Her fairest limbs with the night wind were chill,
    And her dark tresses were all loosely strewn
    O’er her pale bosom:--all within was still,
    And the sweet peace of joy did almost fill
    The depth of her unfathomable look:--
    And we sate calmly, though that rocky hill,
    The waves contending in its caverns strook,
  For they foreknew the storm, and the grey ruin shook.

    There we unheeding sate, in the communion
    Of interchangèd vows, which, with a rite
    Of faith most sweet and sacred, stamped our union.--
    Few were the living hearts which could unite
    Like ours, or celebrate a bridal night
    With such close sympathies, for to each other
    Had high and solemn hopes, the gentle might
    Of earliest love, and all the thoughts which smother
  Cold Evil’s power, now linked a sister and a brother.’

At the poem’s close, in reward for all their good deeds in a naughty
world, and all their pains of self-sacrifice for the promotion of human
happiness, this brother and sister (after death), together with the
charming child, who is the issue of their incestuous embraces, are
permitted to enter the boat of hollow pearl, in which they are carried to
the islands of the blest, to repose in everlasting felicity near ‘The
Temple of the Spirit.’

Lest it should be said that I misrepresent the story in a particular,
which, though important, affects in no way the poem’s principal doctrine,
let it be observed that to some readers this charming child appears to
have been the tyrant’s daughter, instead of Laon’s offspring. Sir John
Taylor Coleridge’s memorable article in the _Quarterly Review_ shows that,
whilst recognizing with repugnance, the incest of Laon’s intercourse with
his sister, he regarded the child as the issue of the despot’s passion.
But on this point I conceive the reviewer to have erred through the
mystifications and ambiguities of the narrative. To me it is clear that
Shelley meant to intimate to careful readers of the monstrous story, that
Cythna’s child was Laon’s daughter. The question, however, does not touch
the poem’s main purpose, as offspring would be the natural sequence of the
endearments interchanged by the brother and sister in the picturesque
ruin.

The two actors of the poem, in whom it is sought to interest the reader
most strongly, and for whose stainless purity and unqualified goodness the
author solicits our admiration, are a brother and sister, whose embraces
result in the birth of a little girl, no less lovely in person and mind
than her parents. The main purpose of the poem, which has numerous
subordinate and minor objects, is to plant the incestuous pair in the
reader’s affection, and lure him into regarding so exemplary an instance
of conjugal affection with sympathy and approval. By some of the less
daring of the Shelleyan zealots it has indeed been urged that _Laon and
Cythna_ should be regarded as a mere poetic ‘vision’ (as it is described
on the title-page), and the pure outgrowth of exuberant fancy, and _not_
as a serious contribution to social philosophy, intended to influence the
judgment and conduct of its readers. To this plea a sufficient answer is
found in the pains taken by Shelley to provide the work with a carefully
worded prose preface, in which he intimated, that the poem was addressed
to persons thirsting ‘for a happier condition of moral and political
society;’ that the hurtful institutions and principles assailed in the
poem were the hurtful institutions and principles then dominant in
European society, and especially of English society; that the doctrines of
the poem were offered for the solution of the various religious problems,
political problems, and economical problems, then holding the attention
and troubling the minds of earnest philanthropists; that, notwithstanding
its artistic form and beauty, the poem _was_ offered as a serious
contribution to political and social philosophy, and had been written with
a view to practical results in human conduct.

By others of the less courageous of the Shelleyan zealots, it is urged
that, instead of definitely recommending conjugal love between a brother
and a sister as a relation to be countenanced, or even tolerated by
England in the nineteenth century, _Laon and Cythna_ merely reminds
readers that, instead of violating any principle of natural morals, the
connubial intercourse of a brother and sister would be unobjectionable,
and might even be positively virtuous, in a country whose laws either
encourage or only permit such an association. This apology for the prime
doctrine of _Laon and Cythna_ may as well be considered in connexion with
what the poet says on the subject in the last sentence of _the_ preface,
which runs thus:--

    ‘In the personal conduct of my Hero and Heroine, there is one
    circumstance which _was_ intended to startle the reader from the
    trance of ordinary life. It _was_ my object to break through the crust
    of those outworn opinions on which established institutions depend. I
    have appealed therefore to the most universal of all feelings, and
    have endeavored to strengthen the moral sense, by forbidding it to
    waste its energies in seeking to avoid actions _which are only crimes
    of convention_. It is because there is so great a multitude of
    artificial vices, that there are so few real virtues. Those feelings
    alone _which are benevolent or malevolent, are essentially good or
    bad. The circumstance of which I speak, was introduced, however,
    merely to accustom men to that charity and toleration which the
    exhibition of a practice widely differing from their own, has a
    tendency to promote._ Nothing indeed can be more mischievous, than
    many actions innocent in themselves, which might bring down upon
    individuals the bigotted contempt and rage of the multitude.’

To this last sentence of the preface to _Laon and Cythna_, Shelley
(obviously by an after-thought, and in consequence of the pressure put
upon him by some friend or friends) appended this foot-note--‘The
sentiments connected with and characteristic of this circumstance have no
personal reference to the writer’!!!

The last paragraph of the preface to _Laon and Cythna_ is preceded by
these words, ‘Love is celebrated everywhere as the sole law which should
govern the moral world.’ Having regard to the abrupt transition from the
present to the past tense, the significant difference (in style) of the
last paragraph from the preceding paragraph, and the known conflict that
occurred between the author and publisher before the poem had passed the
press, few critical readers will decline to think with me that the last
paragraph, instead of being part of the preface when it left Shelley’s
pen, was an after-thought, written to meet Ollier’s objections to the
incestuous relation of Laon and Cythna. Nor will it, I think, be
questioned, that the astounding note was an after-thought _to_ the
after-thought, and was put at the foot of the last paragraph, because
Ollier, or Hunt, or Peacock, pointed out to the author that the poem,
commending the incest of brother and sister, would expose him to the most
hideous of imputations.

But what do the statements of the last paragraph amount to? (1) That in
making Laon and Cythna live like a married couple, the poet merely aimed
at startling his readers out of the trance of ordinary life.--(2) That in
so startling his readers he wished to enable them to break away from the
notion, that there was something inherently vicious in a brother’s
connubial association with his own sister.--(3) That Shelley rated such
incest as a mere crime of convention, to be placed in the same category
with offences against the game-laws, the excise-laws, or a custom’s
tariff.--(4) That feelings should not be judged by their results, but by
their effect on the disposition of the person entertaining them.--(5) That
in so startling his readers out of an antiquated repugnance to the
particular kind of incest, he hoped to render them tolerant of, and
charitable towards, persons committing the mere offence against
conventional morality.--(6) That though, in his opinion, no rule of
natural morals forbade a man to marry his own sister, the poet thought his
readers had better refrain from such incest, since, though _innocent in
itself_, the perpetration of it would be likely to infuriate the bigoted
multitude. This from the man who, according to his most fervid idolaters,
would have redeemed the world from sin and wretchedness, had he worked for
its regeneration under auspicious circumstances.

Is the incest of brother and sister a mere crime of convention? The
science of morals, of course, is progressive. What is virtue in a rude
state of society becomes crime in a high state of civilization. Some
countries, lying well within the wide and vague boundaries of
civilization, are behind other countries in the science of morals. What is
crime in England may be honesty in Thibet. There are offences about which
we may hesitate to say off-hand, whether they are offences against natural
morals or mere crimes of convention. But surely action that is maleficent
to the mental and physical welfare of mankind, wherever it may be
practised, is not action about which there can be any uncertainty.
Permitted in the country, where (by his own confession in prose) he
commended it to tolerance and charitable consideration, the license
commended by Shelley would poison the springs of domestic virtue, whilst
producing its universal results on the bodily shape, nervous force, and
moral health of the people. Permitted amongst the settlers on a barbarous
coast, it would in a few generations be fruitful of such physical
infirmity and debasement, as are ever accompanied with moral depravation.
Action so universally maleficent is universally wicked. Though it may be
less mischievous in its consequences, the conduct recommended in _Laon and
Cythna_ is no less essentially wicked, in a small and thinly populated
island, than in a great city.

The poem having been written to the last line, Shelley sent it to Messrs.
C. and J. Ollier, of Welbeck Street, whom he had selected for his
publishers, at the request of their friend Leigh Hunt. As the book was to
be produced at Shelley’s cost, the publishers of course wished to publish
it. But these gentlemen looked for money, instead of disaster, from
business with their client. On finding that the poem was an apology for
incest, they took counsel with one another, and probably with their
lawyer. The result was that, when the poem was nearly, if not altogether
printed, one of the Messrs. Ollier wrote to Shelley, stating they could
not venture to produce a work, so certain to put them in an ignominious
position. Instead of feeling for the men of business, and shrinking from
the thought of injuring them, Shelley urged them to go on in the road to
ruin. But the publishers were less manageable than Shelley hoped to find
them. They repeated their wish to be quit of so dangerous a book.
Whereupon, dating from Marlow, on 11th December, 1817, Shelley wrote _the_
Mr. Ollier (who was attending to the matter) a letter that contained these
words,--

    ‘There is one compromise you might make, though that would still be
    injurious to me. Sherwood and Neely wished to be the principal
    publishers. Call on them, and say that it was through a mistake that
    you undertook the principal direction of the book, as it was my wish
    that it should be theirs, and that I have written to you to that
    effect. This, if it would be advantageous to you, would be detrimental
    to, but not utterly destructive of, my views. To withdraw your name
    entirely, would be to inflict on me a bitter and undeserved injury.’
    (_Vide_ _Shelley Memorials_.)

To see the nature of this advice, readers must remember how usual it was
in former time for several different firms of booksellers to be concerned
in the publication of the same work. The principal publisher in these
joint-enterprises,--_i.e._ the publisher in negotiation with the author,
and to whom the author looked as _his_ publisher--had the direction of,
and chief responsibility in, the business. His name, or the name of his
house, appeared on the title-page before the names of the other
publishers. Thus holding a place of honour, he held also the post of
greatest danger; for in case of proceedings against the author and
publisher of an unlawful publication, it was the way of the law to hold
the first and principal publisher as more responsible than the other
associated booksellers, and even in some cases to regard the latter as
being in no degree morally accountable for the contents of the work. In
accordance with this trade-usage, Messrs. Sherwood, Neely, and Jones, of
Paternoster Row, were associated in 1817, as second and subordinate
publishers with Messrs. C. and J. Ollier, of Welbeck Street.

Shelley’s suggestion was that, as the Olliers were frightened, they should
slip out of the more dangerous position, by inducing Sherwood, Neely, and
Jones to step into it by misrepresentation. The Olliers were instructed by
Shelley to tell the other set of publishers an untruth, that was a rather
complicated untruth. They were instructed to keep their alarm to
themselves, and say to their comrades in the trade, ‘We took the principal
direction of the book _through a mistake_’ (a sheer untruth), ‘as it was
Mr. Shelley’s wish for you to be his principal publishers’ (another sheer
untruth), ‘and therefore as Mr. Shelley has written us to that effect’ (a
third untruth on a point of fact) ‘we think even at this late stage of the
business you had better figure as principal publishers’ (a false
suggestion of motive). That the Olliers did as Shelley thus instructed
them, may be inferred from the fact that, on the title-page (the 1818
title-page) of _Laon and Cythna_, Sherwood, Neely, and Jones, figure as
principal publishers.

_Laon and Cythna_ was published, in so far that a few copies (_three_
copies, according to some writers on the subject, but probably a larger
number) passed into circulation; one of them being the copy, that afforded
the _Quarterly_ Reviewer an opportunity for making his memorable onslaught
on the book. But this had barely been accomplished, when the poem was an
addition to the considerable list of the works, written by Shelley and
speedily suppressed. What was the immediate cause of the renewal of their
alarm does not appear; but the book was no sooner out, than the Messrs.
Ollier decided that not another copy should be issued with their name on
the title-page. Probably they acted on their lawyer’s urgent
representation, that, unless it were promptly suppressed, so scandalous a
book would certainly result in their prosecution. It has been repeatedly
averred that their alarm proceeded chiefly from the freedom with which the
poem dealt with matters of religion and politics. But the changes which
converted _Laon and Cythna_ into _The Revolt of Islam_, show that this was
not the case. Some of the changes, no doubt, modified the terms relating
to the Almighty; but the prime purpose of the alterations was to relieve
the poem of its incestuous sentiment. Unquestionably the publishers were
alarmed by the book’s blasphemy and political extravagance; but their most
serious apprehension was fear of such an outcry against the poem’s
indecency, as would put them on trial for issuing an obscene book. On
reconsideration the publishers saw that in case of such a prosecution, it
would avail them nothing that their name appeared after ‘Sherwood, Neely,
and Jones,’ on the title-page of the book, of which they would be proved
to have been the principal publishers. No wonder they were firm. No wonder
also that Shelley was in the highest state of excitement for his own
interests,--and of indignation at his publisher’s cowardice. What the
Olliers felt was, of course, felt by the other publishers.

Matters were in this position, when it occurred to some ingenious student
of the suppressed poem, that it would be easy to relieve the work of its
incestuous quality and some of its most objectionable passages touching
religion, by cancelling a few leaves and replacing them with leaves, that
would change the character and complexion of the whole performance. By
dropping the final paragraph (with its note) from the Preface, producing a
new title-page, and altering fifty-five lines of the body of the book, it
would be easy to manipulate, at a trifling cost, the printed sheets out of
their egregious offensiveness into comparative innocence. Who was the
originator of this ingenious suggestion does not appear; but the editorial
ingenuity of the proposal inclines one to attribute it to Leigh Hunt.
Anyhow, the suggestion was carried out by a council, consisting of one of
the Messrs. Ollier, the author, Peacock, and some other of the author’s
personal friends (Leigh Hunt and Hogg being, no doubt, of the number).
Never perhaps was stranger work done by a literary committee at successive
meetings. At the sittings of the council, Shelley (says Peacock)
‘contested the proposed alterations step by step; in the end, sometimes
adopting, more frequently modifying, never originating, and always
insisting that his poem was spoiled.’ No wonder he fought his friends
point by point. The poem had been written to demonstrate the purity and
loveliness of the extremest kind of Free Love. By changing Cythna from
Laon’s sister, to a mere orphan, living under the protection of his
parents, the alterations deprived the poem of the prime doctrine it was
intended to inculcate. The poem that should have proclaimed the beauty and
holiness of incestuous Love was manipulated into a mere poetic apology for
Lawless Love of an ordinary and less interesting kind. So castrated, the
Poem of Incest could no longer generate the sentiment, whose activity was
needful, in Shelley’s opinion, for the attainment of ‘a happier condition
of moral and political society.’ As any reader may learn from a careful
study of the poem, enough mischief was left in _The Revolt of Islam_ to
satisfy an ordinary enthusiast for lawless love; but Shelley was an
‘extra’-ordinary enthusiast for wedlock without restrictions. It is
imputed to him for righteousness by his idolaters, that he persisted to
the last in the pure and unqualified doctrine of the unaltered poem. In
reference to Lady Shelley’s quite inaccurate statement that the poet (in
1817-18) was ‘convinced of the propriety of making’ the ‘alterations,’
which converted _Laon and Cythna_ into _The Revolt of Islam_, Mr. Buxton
Forman remarks proudly of the teacher, who might have been the Saviour of
the World, ‘There is nothing in his subsequent history to countenance the
idea that he regarded _Laon and Cythna_ as in any way offensive.’

But before the superlatively offensive poem had been manipulated into a
comparatively inoffensive one, some copies of _Laon and Cythna_ had passed
from the publisher’s hands to the world. Whether these copies were no
more, or several more, than three, does not matter. If they were only
three, they were enough to darken the poet’s fame and cloud his happiness
for the rest of his days. Three hundred copies in circulation could not
have been more disastrous to his social credit than those _three_, one of
which was lent to the _Quarterly_ Reviewer.

Is it wonderful that Shelley, during the few years still remaining to him
of a brief existence, lived under the world’s ban, and though producing
works of incomparable art in quick succession, produced them only to stir
the wrath of critics, and aggravate the pain he endured from the world’s
neglect of his genius? It was known, and could not be gainsaid, in every
coterie of men of letters, how abruptly he had left his first childish
wife; how, on breaking with so young and lovely a creature, he told her to
‘do as other women did’; how within a few weeks of breaking with this
girl, he had carried off his familiar friend’s sixteen-years-old daughter;
and how in language of matchless beauty and vigour, he had used all the
powers of his poetic genius, not only to deride marriage, but to teach his
readers that the most repulsive and blighting of all the several kinds of
incestuous love was wholesome, innocent, and beautiful. Is it surprising
that in less than a year and four months from the publication of _Laon and
Cythna_, he wrote from Rome to Peacock, ‘I am regarded by all who know or
hear of me, except, I think, on the whole, five individuals, as a rare
prodigy of crime and pollution, whose look even might infect?’ Is it
surprising that, critics, fully cognizant of the power and many
excellences of his poetry, forbore to extol his genius, from a
conscientious repugnance to his social philosophy, and a fear that by
applauding the poet they should strengthen the hands of the social
innovator? Is it surprising that, whilst temperate and judicious men of
letters were silent about what they secretly admired, but could not
venture to openly commend, less discerning critics in their abhorrence of
the social innovator, wrote wild nonsense about the stupid trash, the
drivel and buffoonery of his finest productions?

Of course, these less discerning critics had better have imitated the more
temperate and discreet men of letters, and held their peace. But critics
are human; and when men speak under the influence of strong resentment,
they are apt to say wild things. To point to the angry things written to
Shelley’s discredit, when the passions he had stirred were at their
fiercest rage, as evidence of a singular and unaccountable blindness to
the excellences of fine poetry, is to misread the signs of a former time.
Like Byron, the author of _Laon and Cythna_ provoked a storm he was not
permitted to survive; though he would have survived it, had he lived to
middle age and continued to write in the vein of _Prometheus Unbound_ and
_Adonais_. It is not wonderful that violent things were said of the man,
who had done violence to society’s finest sensibilities. What occurred to
his annoyance more than sixty years since would occur now-a-days to a
similar offender,--say, to a novelist of high culture and singular
aptitude for his department of literary art, guilty of producing a novel
whose hero and heroine, born of the same parents, and reared in the same
home, should live and love like Laon and Cythna; the whole romance being
cunningly devised and skilfully worked out, for the purpose of luring
readers to the opinion that brothers and sisters ought to be allowed to
marry one another. After all that has been done during the last fifty
years to make people tolerant of the Free Contract, what would happen if
such a story came to us one fine day from the pen of a young and
remarkably able writer (_ætat._ 25), together with his assurance that the
work was ‘an experiment on the temper of the public mind,’ and an attempt
to bring about ‘happier conditions of moral and political society?’ Would
critics be mealy-mouthed and weigh their words precisely in declaring the
experiment an outrage, and the attempt a monstrous scandal? Would they be
less outspoken on discovering that the young writer, at so early a stage
of his existence, had put away his first wife, seduced his intimate
friend’s sixteen-years-old daughter, written strongly on previous
occasions against chastity and conjugal constancy, and been declared by
the Lord Chancellor a person whose _conduct_ proved him unfit to have the
charge of his children?

One is often asked to explain what is meant by ‘the irony of fate.’ It is
easier to explain a term by an example than by words. It was fate’s irony
that, whilst the poet, who exhibited a brother’s incestuous intercourse
with his sister as sinless and beautiful, escaped the imputation he may be
said to have invited by the personal note at the end of the Preface, the
world was induced to charge the crime passionately on another poet, who
had only written of such incest vaguely as an enormity of wickedness, or
mockingly as the familiar arrangement of a remote period. Another example
of fate’s irony is found in the fact that, when Byron was suffering in
posthumous fame from the Beecher-Stowe calumny, the more fervid of the
Shelleyan enthusiasts and the more fervid of the Shelleyan socialists
combined to decry him as a prodigy of wickedness for practising the form
of Lawless Love, which Shelley had declared compatible with virtue. Fate
also was set upon another exploit in irony, when she determined that the
poem, which a committee of men of the world declared unfit for circulation
during the profligate Regency, should be produced _verbatim_ for the moral
edification of the men, and women, and young people of Victorian England.




CHAPTER XIV.

FROM MARLOW TO ITALY.

    The Hunts and the Shelleys--Their Intimacy--Pecuniary
    Difficulties--Dealings with Money-lenders--Leigh Hunt relieves Shelley
    of £1400--His Testimony to Shelley’s virtuous Manners--Shelley’s
    Benevolence at Marlow--At the Opera--Departure for Italy--The fated
    Children--Shelley’s literary Work and studious Life in
    Italy--Milan--Allegra sent to her Father--Elise the Swiss Nurse--Her
    Knowledge and Suspicions--Claire and her ‘Sister’--Their Affectionate
    Intercourse and Occasional Quarrels--Shelley’s Affection for
    Claire--Vagrants in Italy--Pisa--Leghorn--Maria Gisborne--Her Husband
    and Son--Claire and Shelley at Venice--Trick played on Byron--His
    Civilities to the Shelleys--Little Clara’s Death--Paolo the Knave--He
    falls in Love with Elise--Their Marriage--Paolo’s Wrath and
    Vengeance--Emilia Viviani--Shelley’s Adoration of Her--The
    three-cornered Flirtation--Mrs. Shelley’s Attitude and
    Action--Shelley’s Fault in the Affair--His subsequent Shame at the
    Business--The imaginary Assault at the Pisan Post Office.


It has been already noticed how the Shelleyan apologists deal with the
evidence that, in December, 1816, when Harriett’s suicide held the
attention of the literary coteries, Shelley’s conduct towards her had the
approval of his friend Leigh Hunt and two other unbiased judges,--his
bookseller and his attorney (the same attorney who treated the poet so
scurvily in the spring of 1821). Whilst using Leigh Hunt as a witness to
the excellence of Shelley’s conduct to his wife, the Shelleyan apologists
imply that, in the December of 1816, the two poets had long been intimate
friends. It is, however, certain that, till the end of the autumn of 1816,
the two ‘friends’ knew so little of one another that they were nothing
more than slight acquaintances. How little Hunt cared about the author of
_Alastor_ at any time prior to Harriett’s suicide, appears from his
confession that, on receiving certain sets of verses from the still
youthful literary aspirant, he neither printed them in the _Examiner_ nor
returned them to their author, but after ‘unfortunately mislaying them,’
forgot all about them,--_i.e._ tossed them disdainfully to the waste-paper
basket. Something (weeks or months) later, on seeing reason to render the
_amende honorable_ to the young author whom he had treated so
contemptuously, Hunt put in the _Examiner_ (December, 1816) an article
that, referring to Shelley as one of ‘three young writers, who appeared to
promise a considerable addition of strength to the new school,’ and also
spoke of him as ‘the author of a poetical work entitled _Alastor, or the
Spirit of Solitude_;’ no line of which poem had been seen by the poetical
editor, when he alluded to it thus cautiously in the apologetic note. ‘We
shall,’ Hunt says of the poet, of whose writings he had seen nothing but
the ‘one or two specimens,’ so lightly pitched into the wicker-basket,
after a hasty glance at their contents, ‘procure what he has published,
and if the rest answer to what we have seen, we shall have no hesitation
in announcing him for a very striking and original thinker.’ That these
words of Hunt’s pen appeared in the _Examiner_, so late as 1st December,
1816, is conclusive evidence of how little he cared _for_, and knew _of_,
Shelley up to the very moment of Harriett’s death. Yet in these latest
years of grace, we have been required to believe there can have been
nothing very reprehensible in Shelley’s conduct to his wife, since it had
the approval of so precise a moralist as Leigh Hunt, who, by reason of his
long-standing intimacy with Shelley, must have known all about it.[4]

But if Hunt was tardy in responding to Shelley’s repeated overtures for
friendship, he atoned for previous negligence by his subsequent pains to
plant himself in the affection of the young man, whom he had treated with
scant courtesy. The editor of the _Examiner_ was too sincere a man to
admire aught till he had found it admirable. But on seeing Shelley’s
titles to his homage, he promptly acknowledged them, and on discovering
his virtues, declared his generous admiration of them in no uncertain
voice. The Hermit of Marlow and the poet of Hampstead’s ‘Vale of Health’
became close friends. Whilst Marianne (Mrs. Hunt) discovered her dearest
and ever-loving familiar in Mrs. Shelley, their husbands had all thoughts
and things (money not excluded) in common. Admiring one another’s
writings, the poets backed each other’s bills. Circumstances constraining
him to fly from Lisson Grove, or the ‘Vale of Health,’ and seek a place of
retirement from creditors, Hunt found the needful seclusion at Marlow,
where he stayed, on one occasion, for nearly three months. On the other
hand, towards the close of 1817, when tradesmen were troubling him sorely
to pay certain bills for necessaries, supplied to the late Mrs. Shelley,
the author of _Alastor_ made quick march from Bisham Wood to Hampstead
Heath, and found hospitality with concealment in the ‘Vale of Health,’
where he delighted his host’s children by playing with them in an equally
amiable and frolicsome manner.

It was during this sojourn with the Hunts that Shelley came, one winterly
afternoon, on the poor woman, lying in a fit upon the heath, with a little
boy by her side, and was so greatly incensed by the reluctance of the
nearest householders to open their doors and arms to her. Why Shelley, who
eventually carried the sufferer to Hunt’s quarters (which were near at
hand), did not carry her there in the first instance, does not appear. It
is, however, on the record that, he deferred taking so obvious and
reasonable a course till he had vainly tried to get her admitted to nearer
houses, whose occupants declined to act charitably in the
matter,--possibly, because they thought he might as well take his
_protégée_ to the place where he was himself staying. One of the
individuals, to whose benevolence he vainly appealed in this emergency,
being a gentleman who was stepping out of his carriage at the door of his
own goodly mansion, the indignant poet is said to have told the selfish
householder roundly, that he might expect to have his house burnt over
his head in the quickly-coming revolution, when the poor would settle
accounts summarily with the rich. As it is told, the story redounds to
Shelley’s honour and the rich householder’s shame. But as some of the
story’s truth may be on its unrecorded side, judicious readers will
decline to condemn the householder. It is, however, to the poet’s credit
that, seeing a poor woman in need of help, he eventually helped her in the
best way, by taking her to his own place of abode, and sending for the
nearest doctor.

Fruitful of the pleasures, that usually result from the close and
affectionate intercourse of congenial friends, the intimacy of the two
poets was fruitful also to the elder poet of advantages which he may not
have been base enough to compass deliberately, but was unquestionably base
enough to accept. Towards the close of 1817, Shelley was raising money, in
some cases, by post-obits, and, in other cases, by loans charged on his
eventual estate. How much he raised by these processes in the later months
of 1817 and the earlier months of 1818, does not appear; but probably the
greater part of the heavy debt he put on his estate, between his coming of
age and his death, was created by pecuniary transactions of this
particular period. Of the terms at which he procured ready money, enough
for the reader’s purpose appears from a letter, in which he is seen
raising money at the rate of 2000_l._ in future repayment, for every
1000_l._ put into his hands. At a rough computation from this transaction,
he may be presumed to have received a clear sum of 11,000_l._ for the
22,000_l._, with which he charged his estate before his death. In addition
to the money raised by loans charged on the estate, he also borrowed
largely on post-obits, that were, of course, never paid, as he
pre-deceased his father. Whether they passed through his hands to
tradesmen for value received, or to needy friends, the sums so raised were
paid to, and spent by, him; and it is obvious from what has been said of
the estates to which he was entitled in remainder, that, had Shelley
survived his father (who died 1844), and continued to live as prodigally
from 1822 to 1844, he would have found himself, on the cessation of his
allowance of 1000_l._ a-year, a quite poor, if not an absolutely
penniless, man at his father’s death.

Raising money on these ruinous terms, towards the end of 1817, and in the
opening weeks of the following year, Shelley raised it with the cognizance
of Leigh Hunt. The money came to the younger poet’s hands whilst he was
living in closest intimacy with the gentleman who, whenever money was
passing about, never failed to see why he should not have some of it,
without working for it. Under these circumstances, it is not surprising
that, whilst arranging his own affairs, Shelley was induced to think he
might as well arrange Hunt’s affairs also. Nor is it surprising that Hunt
took the same view of the case. The entire amount sucked from Shelley by
Hunt at this period may have been exaggerated. Miss Mitford may have been
repeating an inaccurate story, when she wrote how the brokers swept off
the younger poet’s chairs, tables, and bedding for the satisfaction of one
of Hunt’s numerous creditors. But it is certain that Shelley (_ætat._ 25)
gave Hunt (_ætat._ 33) 1400_l._ in one gift, and that this was not the
only sum of money to pass in some way or other from the younger poet to
the man of letters who, besides being eight years Shelley’s senior, was
editor and joint-proprietor of a flourishing newspaper. Hunt himself
confesses to have taken this 1400_l._ in one lump from his young friend.
In judging this affair, readers should not lose sight of the difference of
the two men in respect to age,--Shelley being only twenty-five years old,
and much younger than his years in character and worldly experience,
whilst Hunt was a man of middle-age, who had been trained in poverty to be
keenly mindful of his own interest, though affecting to be wholly
regardless of it. Familiar with all the particulars of Shelley’s by no
means prosperous circumstances, cognizant of the means by which Shelley
had obtained the money, aware that the gift of 1400_l._ signified a
withdrawal of twice as much from the not ample estate, which would be
Shelley’s only provision for himself and family after his father’s death,
this mature man of the world took this young man’s money,--not in payment
for work done, but as a gift. The affair is all the more discreditable to
Hunt, because he was the editor of a powerful journal, whilst Shelley was
a literary aspirant, who, in making his senior so enormous a gift, may be
supposed to have been actuated, in some degree, by regard for the editor’s
power to serve him or injure him on the press. To think of Shelley
pressing the notes for 1400_l._ on his friend, and of Hunt taking them
with much effusion after a graceful show of reluctance, is to remember how
Shelley, in his Oxford days, wrote about ‘pouching the villains,’ who had
it in their power to praise his novel.

Some two years after his sojourn of many weeks at Marlow, Hunt, to clear
his friend’s reputation from some of the charges poured upon him by the
_Quarterly_ Reviewer, produced in the _Examiner_ (10th October, 1819) a
vindicatory article, that contains the following account of Shelley’s
manner of living at Marlow:--

    The _Reviewer_, says Hunt in this article, ‘asserts that he’ [_i.e._
    Shelley] ‘is shamefully dissolute in his conduct! We heard of similar
    assertions when we resided in the same house with Mr. Shelley for
    nearly three months; and how was he living all that time? As much like
    Plato himself, as all his theories resemble Plato--or rather, still
    more like a Pythagorean. This was the round of his daily life,--he was
    up early; breakfasted sparingly; wrote this _Revolt of Islam_ all the
    morning; went out in his boat, or into the woods with some Greek
    author or the Bible in his hands; came home to a dinner of vegetables
    (for he took neither meat nor wine); visited, if necessary, the sick
    and fatherless, whom others gave Bibles to and no help; wrote or
    studied again, or read to his wife and friends the whole evening; took
    a crust of bread, or a glass of whey, for his supper; and went early
    to bed. This is literally the whole of the life he led, or that we
    believe he now leads in Italy; nor have we ever known him, in spite of
    the malignant and ludicrous exaggerations on this point, deviate,
    notwithstanding his theories, even into a single action which those
    who differ with him might think blameable. We do not say that he would
    always square his conduct by their opinions as a matter of principle;
    we only say that he acted just as if he did so square it. We forbear,
    out of regard for the very bloom of their beauty, to touch upon
    numberless other charities and generosities which we have known him
    exercise; but this we must say, in general, that we never lived with a
    man who gave so complete an idea of an ardent and principled aspirant
    in Philosophy as Percy Shelley, and that we believe him, from the
    bottom of our hearts, to be one of the noblest hearts as well as heads
    which the world has seen for a long time. We never met, in short, with
    a being who came nearer, perhaps so near, to that height of humanity
    mentioned in the conclusion of an essay of Lord Bacon’s, where he
    speaks of excess of charity, and of its not being in the power of “man
    or angel to come in danger by it.”’

This evidence from a witness who had received 1400_l._ in a lump from the
subject of his eulogy, might be dismissed with a smile, were it not that
it has recently been produced as a valid and conclusive testimony to
Shelley’s moral worth, by a writer who knew everything about him. The
defence having been so dealt with, it is well for readers to recall the
character of the eulogist, and the circumstances of his brief, though
close, association with the man, of whose life he wrote so
authoritatively. It should be remembered that the witness, affecting to
have formed his opinion of Shelley’s character from a long acquaintance,
was the editor who, at the beginning of December, 1816, had not read a
line of _Alastor_, and in his unconcern for the young poet, had recently
‘chucked’ his verses into the waste-paper basket. In writing that, to his
knowledge, Shelley had never committed a single action to be reprehended
by moralists differing from him on matters of opinion, Leigh Hunt showed
either how little he knew of Shelley, or how little he cared for the truth
or falsehood of what he wrote in his friend’s behalf. If Hunt really
believed that Shelley’s conduct towards William Godwin covered no single
blameworthy action, he had been strangely misinformed respecting a chief
and recent episode of his friend’s story. On the other hand, if he wrote
the vindicatory article with a sufficient knowledge of that passage of
Shelley’s career, he wrote it mendaciously. It is not surprising that,
after gushing over Shelley’s goodness to the poor at Marlow, the
vindicator of slandered virtue forbore, ‘out of regard for the very bloom
of their beauty,’ to touch upon ‘the poet’s numberless other charities and
generosities.’ The moral effect of the vindication would not have been
heightened by either a precise declaration or a general acknowledgment of
the extent to which the writer had himself profited by such exhibitions of
virtue.

But though the testimony to character is necessarily affected by our
knowledge of the witness’s peculiar obligations to the giver of great
gifts, it is only fair to Hunt to record that the truthfulness of his
viewy account of Shelley’s manner of living at Marlow is placed beyond
question by the evidence of contemporary letters, and the more precise
statements of witnesses in no degree open to suspicion. Without adhering
rigidly to the diet, which writers imperfectly acquainted with the
philosopher’s doctrine and discipline are wont to style Pythagorean,
Shelley refrained from meat and wine during the greater part of his Marlow
time. Once and again during that period he lapsed suddenly or by degrees
from the rules of the vegetarians, but only to return to them with a
stronger opinion that his health required him to abstain from flesh and
fermented drinks. It was not possible for a man so sympathetic and
observant of human life about him to live anywhere without
compassionating the unfortunate of his own species; and there is a
superabundance of evidence that, living at Marlow during a season of
insufficient employment and keen distress for struggling people, he did
all and more than he could afford for the relief of the poor of his
immediate neighbourhood. Giving money to several families, whom he placed
on the list of his regular weekly pensioners, he visited the recipients of
his bounty in their comfortless cottages, and in other ways showed himself
mindful of the first duty of the rich to their extremely indigent
neighbours. Ministering to the necessities of the poor in this deliberate
manner, he at the same time relieved them fitfully, in obedience to sudden
impulses of pity and benevolence. On the other hand, whilst acting towards
the poor of Marlow precisely as he had acted towards the poor of Tremadoc,
he was in some instances less than duly mindful of another, and no less
sacred, obligation. It would be more pleasant to remember how the Hermit
of Marlow entered a neighbour’s garden without the shoes, which a minute
earlier he had taken from his feet and given to a poor beggar-woman, were
not the story of this rather fantastic act of benevolence associated with
less agreeable stories of unpaid bills. The poet, who gave Leigh Hunt
1400_l._ in a single donation, should not have cleared away from Marlow
without paying his doctor’s charges for medical service.

Shelley’s last evening in London (the evening of 10th March, 1818) he
passed pleasantly at the Opera-house, on the occasion of the first
performance in England of Rossini’s _Barbiere di Siviglia_, the part of
Count Almaviva being performed by Garcia, who on the same occasion made
his first appearance in an English house. The first night of the new opera
and the new singer--a singer of Garcia’s celebrity, and an opera of the
_Barber’s_ enduring popularity--still remains a memorable night of our
operatic annals; and it is pleasant to remember that Peacock (a fine
connoisseur of music), Shelley (ever sensitive to music, without being a
nice or scientific critic of its composers), Claire (a musical
enthusiast), and Mrs. Shelley, were at the opera on so interesting an
occasion, and after the performance supped together, after the wont of
play-goers seventy years since.

Early the next morning, Shelley’s carriage (possibly the same carriage in
which poor Harriett paid visits something less than four years since)
rolled slowly from the capital, to which he never returned. Stacked high
and freighted heavily with luggage, the carriage held a numerous
family-party,--Shelley, Mrs. Shelley, Claire, and their Swiss maid, Elise,
besides the three children, _viz._, (1) Willie, two years and a few weeks
of age, (2) Allegra, just a year and two months old, and (3) little
six-months-old Clara. Two of the children, Willie and the wee Clara (named
after her aunt Claire) had been christened on the previous Monday (9th
March, 1816), when Allegra was probably also admitted to the Church
militant here on earth. What a group of babes, journeying, each and all,
to early death in the land of the foreigner! Baby Clara went out of
England to die a few months later at Venice; Willie found his last bed at
Rome in the following year; Allegra perished of fever at the Bagna Cavallo
convent in the April of 1822, only a few months before the poet, who had
nursed her in her earliest infancy, was swept from life by the wild
hurricane. To think of the early deaths of these children, followed thus
speedily by the poet, who took them out with him to Italy, is to imagine
Fate and Death attending the heavily-laden coach as it moved slowly
seaward along the Dover Road,--the same road along which Claire and Mary
had sped with Harriett’s husband, on quicker wheels, little more than
three years and six months since.

Starting for Italy on 11th March, 1818, Shelley was within four years and
four months of his death when he left the country of his birth for
ever:--the four years and four months during which he wrote _Julian and
Maddalo_ (1818), _Lines written among the Euganean Hills_ (1818), _Stanzas
written in Dejection, near Naples_ (1818), _Prometheus Unbound_ (1818-19),
_The Cenci_ (1819), _Ode to Heaven_ (1819), _An Exhortation_ (1819), _Ode
to the West Wind_ (1819), _An Ode to the Assertors of Liberty_ (1819),
_The Mask of Anarchy_ (1819), _Peter Bell the Third_ (1819), _The
Sensitive Plant_ (1820), _A Vision of the Sea_ (1820), _The Cloud_ (1820),
_To a Skylark_ (1820), _Ode to Liberty_ (1820), _Œdipus Tyrannus, or
Swellfoot the Tyrant_ (1820), _Letter to Maria Gisborne_ (1820), _The
Witch of Atlas_ (1820), _Epipsychidion_ (1820-21), _Autumn: A Dirge_
(1820), _Adonais_ (1821), _Hellas_ (1821), the unfinished _Charles the
First_ (1821-22), and the commencement of _The Triumph of Life_ (1822). To
take a general view of Shelley’s industry during this closing and
brightest term of a genius that, after moving slowly to perfect
development, was still in the fulness of its power and promise when it
passed abruptly from the world, readers must recall the strong stream of
minor poems that flowed from his pen during these latest years of his
existence. Remembrance must also be had of the Translations (from Homer,
Euripides, Plato, Bion, Moschus, Virgil, Dante, Calderon), the Notes on
the Roman and Florentine sculptures, the perfect part of the unfinished
_Defence of Poetry_, the _Essay on Christianity_, and the other
multifarious prose writings, including the Italian letters, whose
publication would by themselves have made a reputation for an ordinary
_littérateur_. Such exuberant productiveness in different departments of
the higher literature is comparable only with the profuse and versatile
fecundity of Byron’s genius during the same period. To suggest any other
comparison of the work accomplished by Byron and Shelley, during their
concurrent years of voluntary exile, would be foreign to the purpose of
the present writer, who, in dealing successively with the lives of the two
poets, has studiously and jealously resisted every temptation to be the
critic of either.

It lies, however, well within his province to remark that in the
comparison of their lives in Italy, Shelley, from one point of view, has
greatly the advantage of the poet with whom he will ever be associated.
Perhaps no modern English poet of the highest class (pardon me, Mr.
Swinburne) was ever more devoid than Byron of scholarly enthusiasm.
Relying in his earlier time on Hobhouse for archæology and history, the
author of _Childe Harold_ never made a nearer approach to severe study
than when he helped the Venetian monks of St. Lazarus to produce their
English-Armenian grammar. Denied his poetical genius, he would have
thought a daily newspaper and the _Gentleman’s Magazine_ sufficient
literature for any reasonable English peer. With it, he was usually
content with the intellectual food and excitement, afforded by good
magazines and the best of the current _belles lettres_. Shelley, on the
other hand, had a natural taste and turn for scholarly labour. Under no
conceivable circumstances could he have justified Mr. Buxton Forman’s high
opinion, and become the Saviour of the World; but stript of his faculty of
song, he might, under several different sets of conceivable conditions,
have developed into a great and famous scholar. Never a severe student (in
the severest and technical sense of the term) he was from his boyhood a
fitful, and sometimes a no less laborious than curious, reader of
literature, seldom attractive to those who lack the studious disposition.
Delighting in old Greek authors at Bishopgate, he became in Italy a
strenuous, habitual, and sympathetic reader of authors, who are mere names
to the semi-educated rabble. Rising with the bird he glorified, whilst
Byron was turning from his first into his second sleep, he went to books
for happiness. To show he caught the spirit of the authors he perused, one
needs only to point to the series of his free-handed and sympathetic
Translations. Reading indoors in foul weather, he read in the sunshine
when the skies were cloudless. If he was not thinking or writing, he was
poring over printed or written pages. On starting for walk or ride, his
last thought on crossing the threshold was to make sure he had the book of
the moment in his pocket; and, so wide was the range of his studious
interests, the book might be Greek or Latin, German or Spanish, or an
Arabic manuscript which he was tackling with Medwin’s scarcely adequate
assistance. Whilst Byron was a superb poet and mere man of the world,
Shelley was a keen student as well as a superb poet. These are matters to
be remembered by those who would know the Real Shelley, as he lived out
the latest of his few years in Italy.

Taking his carriage, together with his women, babes, and baggage, across
the Channel, Shelley travelled leisurely from Calais through France, by
the way of Rheims, Langres, and Lyons (whence he wrote to Leigh Hunt on
22nd March, 1818), Les Echelles, and crossing the Alps, entered Milan on
an early day in April, 1818, from which last-named city Allegra was sent
to Byron (at Venice), who, whilst expressing his readiness and wish to
have care of the child, declined to receive the child’s mother. Baby
Allegra was therefore sent to her father’s palazzo on the Grand Canal
under the charge of the female servant, described by Moore in his _Life of
Byron_ as ‘a Swiss nurse, a young girl not above nineteen or twenty years
of age, and in every respect unfit to have the charge of such an infant,
without the superintendence of some more experienced person.’ The nurse,
described thus slightingly by Moore, was Elise, who, on receiving
instructions to convey the child to the palazzo, understood that she would
return to her mistress at Milan, after seeing Allegra settled in her new
home. As Mrs. Shelley had no wish to part with the girl, who, under
maternal surveillance, had proved a sufficient nurse for Willie and
Clara, she had no intention to be without Elise’s services for many days.
In the absence, however, of a nurse, suitable or otherwise, for Allegra at
Byron’s palazzo, Mrs. Shelley consented that Elise should remain in charge
of Claire’s child at Venice, till another arrangement could be made for
her care. Hence it came to pass that Mrs. Shelley was deprived of her
proper nurse till the following August, when Elise returned to her
mistress at Este.

It would be unreasonable to assume that the nurse who brought the child to
the Palazzo Moçenijo had grounds for regarding Byron as the child’s
father. Servants are required all the world over to do what they are told,
without asking why or wherefore. Moreover, it is usual with employers to
be at some pains to prevent their servants from discovering the why and
wherefore of orders they are told to execute, for the furtherance of
affairs of secresy. Some twenty months before Elise took Allegra to
Venice, she (a young Swiss girl) had been hired at Geneva by Mrs. Shelley
to act as her little boy’s nurse. Living with the Shelleys at Geneva,
whilst the city was bubbling with hideous scandal about them, it is not to
be imagined that Elise went to England without having heard something of
the Genevese gossip to her employers’ discredit. Who was more likely to be
waylaid and questioned by the scores of Genevese tattlers, bent on
gathering evidence to the truth of stories, that had already passed from
Switzerland to England? Coming to the girl’s ears, the gossip could not
fail to make her suspicious respecting her master’s intimacy with the
young lady, whom he styled his sister. If she had heard nothing of the
gossip, she, anyhow, soon became an observer of facts that must have
awakened her curiosity and suspicion.

Accompanying the Shelleys and Claire to England, she served them as
nursemaid at Bath and Marlow. At Bath the quick-witted girl observed signs
that Claire would soon be a mother. Soon it devolved on her to look after
Claire’s infant as well as Mrs. Shelley’s little boy. Elise must have
known that Allegra was Claire’s offspring; but the facts coming under the
servant’s observation afforded her no information respecting the child’s
paternity. On that point she was doubtless left to inference and
conjecture. Though they could not help taking her in some degree into
their confidence--at least, could not prevent her from seeing what went on
under her own eyes, and drawing her own inferences from what she saw--it
is not likely that Mary and Claire told their Swiss maid who was Allegra’s
father. Several considerations must have disposed them to be silent to her
on that point. Honour and prudence forbade them to confide so delicate a
secret to the young nurse, who would be almost sure to let it out to her
fellow-servants and the Marlow gossip-mongers, and write about it in her
next letter to her friends at Geneva,--a secret which, if it were blabbed
at Marlow, would soon be talked about in London, and travel to the ears of
William Godwin and Mrs. Godwin, from whom both sisters were especially
desirous to withhold the fact of Allegra’s birth. Moreover, whilst keenly
alive to the reasons for withholding the secret from Elise, the sisters
must have felt they could gain nothing by confiding it to her. Knowing
that Elise would naturally receive with suspicion any story they might
tell her about Allegra’s paternity, they knew that of all stories the
truth was the story she was least likely to believe. The natural course
for two ladies in so embarassing a position to take towards their young
female servant, would be to tell her a more or less romantic fib, that
would not greatly aggravate their trouble if she blabbed it to her
familiars.

Probably Elise was told that her mistress’s sister was married under
circumstances, that compelled her for the present to keep her marriage a
profound secret. At the same time Elise was entreated, with tears and
pathetic assurances of eternal gratitude for her fidelity, to guard the
secret thus confided to her honour. Claire (a clever hand at fibbing, when
fibs might serve her purpose) was just the girl to trick out such a story
in the prettiest style, and Elise was just the quick-witted damsel to
receive the confidence with a proper show of credulity, and laugh in her
sleeve at it as mere fiction.

In the meantime Elise saw what she saw, and (though only a poor Swiss
nursemaid) had a right to draw inferences from what she saw. It did not
escape the smart girl’s notice that, whilst living affectionately with
Claire, Shelley seemed to care for her little girl, quite as much as he
cared for Mrs. Shelley’s little boy,--that he nursed little Allegra, and
sung to her, for the half-hour at a time, just as though she were his own
infant. Is it not told in _Julian and Maddalo_ by Shelley himself, how he
delighted in his sister Claire’s babe, and

                                  ‘nursed
  Her fine and feeble limbs when she came first
  To this bleak world;’

and in the ‘lovely toy’s’ infancy made himself ‘her antient play-fellow?’
Under these circumstances, Elise may well have come to the conclusion that
Allegra’s ‘antient play-fellow’ was also her young father. Elise’s
disposition to take this view of the case would not have been less strong,
had she known how Shelley had provided for Claire and her child by his
will. Though I am dealing conjecturally with mere inferences from admitted
facts, I have little doubt that Elise took this view of Allegra’s
paternity at Marlow, that she went with the child to Italy under the same
impression, and that she held to the same opinion on delivering the little
girl into Byron’s custody at Venice. To show by documentary evidence that,
before starting from Milan with Allegra in her charge, Elise had been
expressly informed of the child’s relation to Byron, would take nothing
from the strength of my suspicion that, in conveying Allegra to her
father, Elise imagined herself to be conveying Shelley’s child to the
famous Lord Byron, in order that he should make arrangements for the
child’s future education:--it having been determined (for reasons obvious
to Elise’s imagination) that her master had better not figure as principal
in arrangements, so likely to fix the little girl’s paternity on him.
Readers who concur with the present writer in this suspicion (which, in
the absence of evidence sufficient for transmuting suspicion to
conviction, is offered as nothing more than a reasonable hypothesis), will
concur with him also in regarding Elise’s misconception and the
circumstances of Allegra’s transference from the Shelleys’ care to her
father’s keeping, as the source of the subsequent story (believed by the
Hoppners, who had it in some shape or other from Elise and her husband)
that Claire had given birth to a child by Shelley, which he had sent to a
Foundling Hospital.

Of one thing there must now be an end in Shelleyan biography,--the
practice of writing about Claire, as though she were a sort of fallen
woman, to whom the Shelleys in their magnanimity showed great kindness,
though she had scarcely any claim upon them for protection. As the family
coach (so heavily laden with babies, and baggage, and womankind) rolled
through France, Claire (so recently acknowledged as their sister by
Shelley and Mary in their _Six Weeks’ Tour_)--Claire, to whom Shelley had
assigned in his will no less than 12,000_l._ of his scarcely ample
estate--never thought of herself as aught else than Mrs. Shelley’s sister.
On the other hand, though these children of the same home were only
sisters-by-affinity, Mary Shelley had no disposition to think herself
anything else than Shelley’s wife and Claire’s sister. If blood is thicker
than water, habit is stronger than either; and the two girls (still only
quite young girls) had been habituated from childhood to think of one
another as sisters. Taught from the same books and by the same governess,
playing with the same toys, placed for punishment in opposite corners of
the same room, whipt with the same rod, kissed every night by the same
‘papa,’ these children of different parents, but the same home, had been
trained to think of one another as sisters, and nothing else than sisters.
Of course they had their tiffs and quarrels. Without blood, they were far
more sisters to one another, than those sisters of the whole blood, Eliza
and Harriett Westbrook. Nor may Claire be regarded as a sister who, like
the too vehemently maligned Eliza, fixed herself on a younger sister and
her husband, and would not allow them to throw her off. Claire and Mary
(as Mr. Kegan Paul shows by the evidences which he contradicts in his
text) were girls of about the same age, though Claire was probably some
months older. Shelley never came to dislike Claire. There were moments
when he admired her, delighted in her, loved her; but never an hour in
which he regarded her with aversion, though the vivacious girl was given
to rally, flout, mock, cross him till he fairly lost his temper. In the
last month of his life (18th June, 1822), Shelley (_vide_ Forman’s edition
of _Shelley’s Prose Works_) wrote from Lerici of this wayward, piquant,
charming creature, ‘She is vivacious and talkative; and though she teases
me sometimes, I like her.’ How greatly he cared for her is shown by the
munificence with which he provided for her and her child by his will.

Going with them to Italy as their sister, Claire (one or two flying trips
excepted) was incessantly with Shelley and her sister for the first twenty
months of their life in Italy. During the last two years and a half of the
term,--when she had taken to giving music and language lessons in
Florence, and was in that capital the animating spirit of the little
circle of admirers whom she drew about her by her riant beauty and
brilliant style, her wit and accomplishments, her gaiety and irresistible
sprightliness,--she looked to ‘the Shelleys’ (whether they were living in
a villa or on a flat) as her home. No doubt she received great kindness
from the Shelleys; but no less certain is it that she repaid them in kind.
If she was unhappy, raging against Byron, dismally wretched (as the too
vehemently happy often are in the intervals between periods of elation),
she made a rush for ‘home,’ On the other hand, when the Shelleys were
languishing and in trouble, their first thought was to signal for Claire,
to fly over to them and brighten them. When Mary was sickening for the
illness, that resulted, at the Casa Magni, in her miscarriage shortly
before the fatal boat accident, Claire was by her side. It was ill for
Mary Godwin’s fame, when Mr. Froude the other day published a few scraps
of ineffectual writing, in evidence that she cordially disliked the
sister, with whom she was merely having a tiff. Far worse will it be for
Mary Shelley’s reputation for sincerity and feminine loyalty, should it
ever appear from scraps of her writing that, whilst living with every show
of affection for her sister, she was thinking unamiably of her, and
putting notes to her discredit in a secret record.

Of course, on leaving England for the last time, Mrs. Shelley had no wish
to have Claire perpetually with her, nor any expectation that she and her
husband would have Allegra’s mother on their hands, in a certain sense,
for more than four years. On the failure of the negotiations with Byron,
it was, of course, Mrs. Shelley’s hope that her lovely sister, after
reconciling herself to Byron’s aversion of her, would win the love of some
more stedfast admirer, and pass from girlish lightness to matronly honour.
In case Claire should not marry, it was doubtless hoped alike by Shelley
and his wife that, after seeing the world for awhile under their
protection, and completing her education, she would strike out a career
for herself. That the two young (_quite_ young) women had their
disagreements of opinion and conflicts of temper in Italy, even as they
had bickered and clashed (whilst loving one another abundantly) in former
time, was a matter of course with two girls, so self-dependent and fervid,
so sensitive and quick-tempered. But one needs only to look at published
letters for a superabundance of evidence that Claire’s intercourse with
the Shelleys from the spring of 1818 to the Midsummer of 1822, though
ruffled now and again by gusts of impetuosity and passages of superficial
discord, was the intercourse of near relations, held together by the usual
forces of mutual liking and genuine attachment.

Writing from Bagni di Lucca on 17th August, 1818, to Mrs. Gisborne,
immediately after Shelley and Claire had started for Venice to see Byron,
Mrs. Shelley (_vide_ _Shelley Memorials_) says, ‘Shelley and C[laire] are
gone; they went to-day to Venice on important business’ (how cautiously
the writer refers to the business!); ‘and I am left to take care of the
house. Now, if all of you, or any of you, would come and cheer my
solitude, it would be exceedingly kind.’ At the Bagni di Lucca, Shelley
and his wife had taken horse-exercise almost every evening, having Claire
for their companion in their rides, till she hurt her knee in falling from
her horse:--an accident that for a time incapacitated her for exercise in
the saddle.

Mrs. Shelley and Claire went together to the _conversazione_, where they
were so vastly amused by the whimsical braggart,--an Englishman who,
speaking Italian fluently with his national accent and intonation, told
the sisters how at Lisbon he, fighting on foot with the brace of pistols,
that never missed fire or aim, put to flight thirty well-armed and
well-mounted robbers. Whilst Mrs. Shelley was listening with outward
civility and secret amusement to this man of valour and brave speech,
Claire’s dark eyes overflowed with fun and piquant gaiety, as she
whispered a saucy speech in her sister’s ear.

In November and December, 1819, Shelley and the sisters were staying at
Florence in the _pension_, whence Mrs. Shelley wrote one of her most
amusing letters to Mrs. Gisborne.

In the letter she wrote for Mrs. Hoppner’s eyes (the letter, some of whose
passages were copied and dressed not long since by Mr. Froude for the
readers of the _Nineteenth Century_) for the exculpation of Shelley and
Claire, from the revolting charge that came to his ears at Ravenna in the
August of 1821, Mrs. Shelley blazed into sisterly wrath at the suggestion
that Claire was capable of the wickedness with which she was charged:--

    ‘I will add,’ writes the indignant sister to Mrs. Hoppner, from Pisa,
    on 10th August, 1821, ‘that Claire has been separated from us for
    about a year. She lives with a respectable German family at Florence.
    The reasons for this were obvious. Her connexion with us made her
    manifest as the Miss _Clermont_’ (_sic_ in Froude’s transcript; but
    Mr. Froude is proverbially inaccurate in handling manuscripts) ‘the
    mother of Allegra. Besides, we live much alone. She enters much into
    society there; and, solely occupied with the idea of the welfare of
    her child, she wished to appear such that she may not be thought in
    after times to be unworthy of fulfilling the maternal duties. You
    ought to have paused before you tried to convince the father of her
    child of such unheard-of atrocities on her part. If his generosity and
    knowledge of the world had not made him reject the slander with the
    ridicule it deserved, what irretrievable mischief you would have
    occasioned her!’

It is of the woman, who writes in this strain of Claire’s devotion to her
child, and strenuous efforts to qualify herself to be a good mother to her
offspring, that Mr. Kegan Paul makes the staggering, though possibly
correct, announcement that she thought her sister unfit to have the charge
of Allegra.

It has been already told how Claire was by her sick sister’s side, when
the latter was dropping into the ill-health, which preceded her
miscarriage at San Terenzo. In the well-known letter to Mrs. Gisborne from
Pisa (dated 15th August, 1822,--five weeks and three days after Shelley’s
death), Mrs. Shelley makes repeated mention of her sister and nurse.
Claire was the sedulous and loving nurse, who administered the brandy and
eau-de-Cologne, and applied the vinegar, that kept her sister from fatal
fainting, during the seven long hours of her most imminent danger. It was
from anxiety for the patient, no less than from ignorance of the way in
which it should be used, that Claire (in the doctor’s absence) lacked the
courage to use the ice, which at the close of those hours Shelley himself
applied so freely and effectually. The helpful, bright, sweet-voiced,
tender-handed Claire remained at the Casa Magni, when Shelley had gone off
to Leghorn and Pisa, leaving his wife in her weakness, to brood with
unutterable melancholy over her previsions of approaching calamity. The
saddest hours Mary spent in that season of deepening gloom, were the hours
when Claire was not by her side, to divert her thoughts, and cheer her
spirits. As soon as Claire and Jane Williams had started for their evening
walk, Shelley’s wife was revisited by the feeling that disaster would
speedily befall her only remaining child. Possessed by wretchedness,
whilst gazing on one of the fairest scenes of all Italy, Mary used to pace
slowly up and down the seaward terrace, sinking momentarily from deep to
deeper dejection, during the needful absence of the sister and friend,
whose society just enabled her to endure the growing burden of grief and
care, that without their sympathy would have been unendurable. Such was
the service of love Claire is known, by the evidence of letters, to have
rendered her sister.

Figuring thus pleasantly in Mrs. Shelley’s letters, Claire shows forth no
less agreeably in the series of Shelley’s letters, that appear in Mr.
Buxton Forman’s edition of the poet’s prose writings. At the Bagni di
Lucca, in July and August, 1818, Claire and Mary are regular attendants of
the Sunday _conversazioni_, though they refrain from dancing for reasons
known doubtless to themselves, whilst Shelley is uncertain whether they
decline to dance from philosophy or Protestantism. Leaving Mary and her
babes at the Bagni in August, Shelley and Claire go off to Venice,
performing part of the journey in the almost springless one-horse
cabriolet, that causing Shelley much discomfort fatigues Claire
exceedingly. Falling in with a German, who has just recovered from an
attack of malarial fever caught in the Pontine Marshes, Shelley is
disposed to travel in his company to Padua, when Claire, by her
entreaties, prevails on him to avoid the stranger from whom he may catch
the fever, dreaded by tourists in Italy. At Venice, where she is received
cordially by the Hoppners, and avoided by Allegra’s father, Claire is seen
flitting hither and thither, on foot or by gondola, under Shelley’s
brotherly escort. By-and-by, when Mary has come with her babes to Este,
the sisters are with Shelley at the villa Byron has lent them;--the house
where Mary’s little Clara sickens of the illness, so soon to end in death
at Venice. When the Shelleys move southward, Claire has her seat in the
heavily laden coach, travelling with them to Rome, and in their company
taking her first cursory view of the manifold attractions of the Holy
City. Shelley having preceded them by a few days, the sisters journey
together to Naples with little Willie and his nurse, and with Paolo for
the charioteer of their private carriage. At Resina, when Shelley and Mary
mount mules for the ascent, Claire seats herself in the chair in which she
is carried up Vesuvius ‘on the shoulders of four men, much like a member
of Parliament after he has gained his election, and looking’ (says Shelley
in his letter of 22nd December, 1818, to Peacock) ‘with less reason,
quite as frightened.’ At Rome with the Shelleys, when their boy’s death
plunges them in wretchedness, Claire is their companion and comforter in
the ensuing months of despair. In the autumn of 1819 she is with them at
Florence, where it amuses Shelley to observe how Lady Mountcashel’s
daughter, fickle as the breeze, is alternately in love and out of humour
with Claire, who is in the highest and brightest of her changeful spirits
at the delightful prospect of setting off in a day or two for Vienna.

Whether this trip was made for business as well as for pleasure does not
appear; but whilst fruitful of delightful anticipations, the run to the
Austrian capital may have had a graver purpose. For, set on being a
self-dependent and self-sustaining young woman, Claire is seldom without a
new scheme for the achievement of her purpose. She means to establish
herself as a teacher of languages and music. She will sing herself into
universal fame as an operatic _prima donna_. She will condescend for a
while to be the resident governess of a family of the highest quality.
Writing and talking of her as _la fille aux mille projêts_, Shelley is
ready at all times to aid her with sympathy, counsel, and money, in
furtherance of each and all of her various schemes for finding suitable
employment. Participating in her hopes, he shares her disappointments.
Words cannot express his disdain for the mental narrowness, and moral
debasement, and perverse wickedness of the gentlewoman who, after
arranging to take Claire for her governess, avoided the compact, on being
told of Miss Clairmont’s recent entanglement with Lord Byron, and of the
relation in which she stood to Byron’s illegitimate daughter.

Shelley’s attachment to Claire is the more remarkable, because the same
fervour and capriciousness, that so often set her at discord with Mary,
rendered her at times alike unruly and unreasonable to him. Alternating
between the highest of high spirits and the most dismal moods of
despondency, Claire suffered also from a temper, whose freakish vehemence
might well have made Shelley despair of keeping on good terms with her.
But though she often hurt and incensed him, she never extinguished his
fondness for her. Probably Shelley liked her all the better for being as
quick to twit and flout him into a pet, as clever in rallying and coaxing
him back into good temper. Possibly the wayward Claire saw she confirmed
him in his attachment to her, by whipping him every now and then into
transient mutiny against her influence. In moments of resentment Shelley
could write angrily and disparagingly of Claire. But all the same it
stands out clear upon the record that in eight long years he never
revolted steadily against the charming girl and brilliant woman, of whom
Byron wearied in much less than the same number of months. ‘Claire is with
us,’ Shelley wrote to John Gisborne, from the Casa Magni, on 18th June,
1822, ‘and the death of her child seems to have restored her to
tranquillity. Her character is somewhat altered. She is vivacious and
talkative; and though she teases me sometimes, I like her,’

It was thus that Shelley and Mary wrote of their ‘sister’ Claire,--the
sister in whose society Mrs. Shelley seemed to delight, and Shelley
certainly delighted; the sister for whose future he had provided by the
two legacies of 6000_l._ each. At the same time the letters, written to
the poet and his wife, overflow with evidence that their correspondents
regarded Claire as a young gentlewoman, to be rated as a member of
Shelley’s domestic circle, and treated with the respect due to his wife’s
sister. Yet Lady Shelley would push Claire from the position thus assigned
to her by Shelley and his wife, and recognized by all their friends. There
must be an end to writing about Claire, as though she were aught else than
Mrs. Shelley’s sister. There must be an end of referring to her as a sort
of fallen woman, to whom Shelley and his wife were magnanimously
beneficent.

In one notable respect Shelley’s life with his second wife in Italy
resembled his life with his first wife in England, Scotland, Ireland, and
Wales. It was a restless and vagrant existence. Students and men of
letters are usually restful and home-loving creatures. But, though
something less of a rover towards the end of his Italian time, than he was
during his first marriage, Shelley never stayed long in the same place. In
1818 he passed about a month at Milan, three or four days at Pisa, a month
or so at Leghorn, between eleven and twelve weeks at Bagni di Lucca,
something more than ten weeks at Venice and Este, three weeks at Rome.
Passing from Rome to Naples in the later part of December, 1818, he
returned to Rome after spending eight or ten weeks in the more southern
capital. From Rome he went again (in the summer of 1819) to the
neighbourhood of Leghorn, where he rested for something over three
months, before migrating to Florence for the winter of 1819-20. In the
February of 1820 he was at Pisa, where he remained (now in the city and
now at the neighbouring baths) for a longer time than at any of the other
places he visited; but even at Pisa, the place in which his roots (to use
his own expression) struck deeper than anywhere else in Italy, he was a
mere settler for the season. Of the twenty-six months (from the earlier
time of February, 1820, to April, 1822), he spent nineteen months at or
near Pisa, including the time passed in the trip to Ravenna and other
excursions; but he never planted himself there so as to touch the soil
beneath the surface. Moving in April, 1822, to Lerici, where he lived less
on land than water, he perished three months later.

At Venice, through his intimacy with such Italian ladies as the Countess
Albrizzi and the Countess Benzoni (countesses with crowded salons, albeit
Shelley may have been justified in saying they smelt of garlic), and his
unedifying familiarity with such women as Marianna Segati and Margarita
Cogni,--and in later Italian time through his close association with
Teresa Guiccioli, the Gambas, and the Romagnese revolutionists,--Byron
knew the Italians and studied them closely, though doubtless under
conditions that disposed him in the end to think too lowly of them. But to
the last Shelley’s knowledge of modern Italy and the modern Italians was
no deeper or more accurate than the knowledge to be picked up by an
observant holiday-maker in a six weeks’ tour.

After staying a month at Milan--a month broken by a brief trip to Como,
whose beauty surpassed everything the poet had ever beheld, with the
exception of the arbutus islands of Killarney,--the Shelleys in May, 1818,
travelled with a diminished party (Allegra having been taken off their
hands, and Elise being detained for awhile at Venice to attend upon her)
to Pisa, whence, in a three or four days, they proceeded to Leghorn, where
they stayed for something like a month, and made the acquaintance of three
individuals, who have their several and very different places in the
Shelleyan story,--(1) Mr. Gisborne, the gentleman of liberal views,
scholarly attainments, failing affairs, familiarity with opium, and
inexpressibly hideous nose, whom Shelley found an oppressive bore, and
therefore had the best right to regard with disfavour; (2) the democratic
and godless Mrs. Gisborne, who, though he found her ‘the antipodes of
enthusiasm,’ became Shelley’s sympathetic tutor in Spanish, and was clever
enough to draw from him the poetical epistle _To Maria Gisborne_, and also
to draw from his purse a good deal of money for her boy’s advantage; and
(3) Henry Reveley (Mrs. Gisborne’s son by her former husband), a youthful
and penniless engineer, for whose benefit the poet was adroitly
manipulated into thinking, that the thing above all other things likely to
promote the happiness of the human species and bring about the comity of
nations, for which all good republicans were praying, was a steamboat
that,--built by the young engineer and no other man,--should ply between
Leghorn and Marseilles, for the advantage of mankind, and the especial
enrichment of the Gisbornes.

Mrs. Shelley and the ‘very amiable, accomplished, and completely
unprejudiced’ Mrs. Maria Gisborne formed an enthusiastic friendship; Mary
of course regarding with interest the woman of mature age, who had been
Mary Wollstonecraft’s friend in the previous century, and might have been
Mary Wollstonecraft’s successor in William Godwin’s affections, whilst
Maria was quick to see that with management she might use Mrs. Shelley’s
influence over her husband for the advantage of the young man, who, had
his mother yielded to William Godwin’s scarcely flattering suit, would
have been Mrs. Shelley’s brother-by-affinity. There was much talk between
the new friends of widely different ages about Mary Wollstonecraft;--talk
in which Mrs. Maria Gisborne gave a delightful account of the personal
charm and graces, the intellectual address and multifarious virtues, of
Gilbert Imlay’s victim. Whilst Mary was delighted, Maria (with proper
maternal concern) bethought herself how Mary’s enthusiasm for her mother’s
ancient friend might be turned to profit. The friendship was fruitful of
much correspondence,--bright, sparkling, superlatively entertaining
epistles by Mary, an admirable letter-writer; and no less characteristic,
though far less commendable letters by Maria; the attitude Maria assumed
to her partner in the friendship being clearly defined in the concluding
words of a letter she wrote her dearest Mrs. Shelley in October,
1819,--the words conveying young Henry Reveley’s affectionate remembrances
to ‘his good friends, _patron and patroness_.’

At the Bagni di Lucca--whither the Shelleys moved after tarrying at
Leghorn for about a month--Paolo, the clever Italian servant, who could
do anything from cooking a dinner to grooming a horse, appears on the
Shelleyan record. The one thing this treasure of a servant could not or
would not do was to keep his accounts accurately; the financial
inaccuracies being always too distinctly to his own advantage, not to
rouse suspicions of his honesty, even from the beginning of his connection
with the poet. At the Bagni, where Mary and Claire took horse-exercise,
and seldom failed to attend the Sunday _conversazione_, though they
declined to dance, _Rosalind and Helen_ was finished at Mrs. Shelley’s
request some time before the poet, on 17th August, 1818, started with
Claire for Venice, leaving his wife (as her letter of that date to Mrs.
Gisborne shows) to take care of the house and her two children;--a letter
from which it also appears that, on bidding her husband and sister adieu,
Mary (who pressed Mrs. Gisborne to ‘come and cheer her solitude’) expected
them both to be away for a considerable time. The next six days, however,
were fruitful of change in the plans and prospects of all three. Holding
steadily to his resolve not to be drawn into renewal of his former
intimacy with Claire, Byron received Shelley with exuberant cordiality,
and showed so much consideration for the feelings of his discarded
mistress, as to grant her the companionship of her child for a week at
Padua, where he imagined Mrs. Shelley to be then staying with her
children. How came he to conceive that, instead of being with her babes at
the Bagni di Lucca, Mrs. Shelley was at Padua?

There is no need for more precise evidence that the business, to which
Mrs. Shelley referred in her letter to Mrs. Gisborne, was Claire’s rather
than Shelley’s business:--that in taking Claire from the Bagni di Lucca to
Venice, Shelley was actuated by the hope of affecting by personal
intercourse with Byron, what he had failed to accomplish by letters. Byron
having made it more than clear that, whilst ready to receive Allegra, he
had no wish to see the child’s mother, it may seem strange that Shelley
could still hope to put matters in train, for Claire’s restoration to her
poet’s affectionate regard. But circumstances countenanced the quickly
disappointed hope. Byron having taken Allegra to his arms, with a
reassuring show of paternal interest in her, information had come to
Shelley and the sisters, that the child grew daily in her father’s favour.
There had been correspondence between Mrs. Hoppner and the
sisters-by-affinity. Happy in the possession of her own lovely little boy
(already in his eighth month), the Consul-General’s wife commiserated the
young mother who was separated from her lovely little girl. Interested in
Byron, who was already consulting her about arrangements for Allegra’s
welfare, and probably over-rating her influence over him, Mrs. Hoppner may
well have imagined that in compassing his reconcilement with Allegra’s
mother, she would use her influence no less beneficially for him, than for
Claire and her child. At the same time it was natural for Shelley to
conceive that Byron’s growing affection for his daughter would occasion a
revival of his tenderness for the child’s mother,--tenderness that, if
they were brought together in a happy moment, might result in the reunion
of their hearts. It was under these circumstances and with this hope that
Shelley and Claire started for Venice.

Making the journey from Padua in a gondola, the voyagers entered their
Venetian hotel at midnight of Saturday, 23rd August, 1818. On the morrow
(Sunday) they went from their breakfast-table to Mrs. Hoppner’s abode,
where Shelley left Claire, on going off at three p.m. to call on Byron. It
is told in _Julian and Maddalo_ how Shelley played with Allegra in the
billiard-room of the Palazzo Moçenijo, whilst waiting for Byron. In a
well-known letter from Shelley to his wife it is told how cordially he was
received by the poet of _Childe Harold_, who, covering his visitor with
flattering civilities, seemed ready to oblige him in every respect but
one. As Byron had no desire to see Claire, but on the contrary wished her
to keep out of his path, it was incumbent on the diplomatic Shelley to
account for her appearance at Venice in a way that should not reveal too
abruptly one purpose of her long journey. A statement that she had come
all the way from the Bagni di Lucca, only to get a peep at her child, was
no announcement for Byron to receive without suspicion. It might move him
to quick anger. A statement that she had come so far for the mere delight
of seeing him would cause him to blaze into wrath. For the moment it was
necessary to attribute Claire’s arrival on the Grand Canal to maternal
impulse; but it would be imprudent to ascribe the labour and expense of so
long a journey to so slight a motive. But on being given to understand
that Mrs. Shelley and her family were at Padua, Byron would think it only
natural for Claire to run by water from the University town to Venice.
Hence the white fib which caused Byron to think Mrs. Shelley at
Padua,--the misconception, on which the wily negotiator between Claire
and her former admirer hastened to base an entreaty, that she might be
allowed to take her child to Padua for a few days:--the misconception that
caused Byron to place I Cappucini (the Este villa he had recently taken
off Hoppner’s hands) at his friends’ service, and urge Shelley to lose no
time in carrying his wife and her babes to the rural retreat, some twenty
miles distant from hot and stuffy Padua.

It is not surprising that Byron was thus quick to put I Cappucini at
Shelley’s service. It was needful for him to show the Shelleys some
hospitable civility, on their coming to his part of Italy. At the same
time he could not think of entertaining them at his home on the Grand
Canal. The Palazzo Moçenijo was no place for the entertainment of
gentlewomen; and even had it been an establishment to which he could have
invited gentlewomen with propriety, Byron would not have asked the
Shelleys and Claire to stay with him there. To Shelley he would gladly
have given bed and board in the Palazzo; but nothing could have induced
the poet, ever hankering for reconcilement with his wife, to welcome
(under the observation of all Venice) as guests to his house the two
ladies, whose presence there would not fail to revive the revolting
Genevese scandal. Wishing to pay the Shelleys a full measure of hospitable
courtesy, he also wished to keep the ladies at a safe distance from
Venice. At I Cappucini (a villa not generally known to be in his tenure)
they would be out of his way and concealed from the Venetian
scandal-mongers, whilst receiving from him a considerable civility. Hence
the offer at which Shelley caught so quickly, that before going to bed for
a second time at Venice he wrote off to Mary, ordering her to pack her
traps, and come at once to Venice under Paolo’s escort.

Were there no other evidence to the point, the mere fact that for some ten
weeks they were Byron’s guests at I Cappucini would of itself show, how
little cause the Shelleys saw to resent his treatment of Claire. Indeed,
why should they,--how could they, conceive themselves injured in the
matter by Byron, who in every stage of the affair had acted precisely in
accordance with the rules of the social arrangement, which Shelley
commended as a graceful and wholesome substitute for lawful marriage? On
coming to regard Lady Byron resentfully and Claire with affection, Byron
had only exercised the sacred privilege of a Free-Contract spouse in
giving his heart to Claire, to have and hold it until he should be moved
to give it to some one else. On ceasing to regard Claire tenderly, he had,
in so far as she was concerned, done nothing forbidden by the favourers of
the Free Contract. On the contrary, in every step of the business he
shaped his course by Free Contract morals. To Claire he had said, ‘Our
felicity having perished, in obedience to the forces that cause human
beings to love and cease from loving one another, you go your way, whilst
I go mine. Leaving me to select another object of affection, do you give
your heart to some one who wishes for it. We have been happy together; the
time has come for us to seek happiness apart from one another,’ At the
same time, still speaking like an honourable Lawless Lover, Byron said,
‘But I cannot allow you to suffer in your purse for your goodness to me. I
will take charge of your child, rear it affectionately, provide for it
liberally,’ What was there in this for the Shelleys to resent, however
sorry they might be for poor Claire, the brevity of whose dominion over
Byron’s volatile affections of course disappointed and saddened them? When
Mr. Froude wrote, as though Shelley necessarily regarded Byron as Claire’s
seducer, he only revealed his absolute ignorance of facts, comprising much
of what is most singular and interesting as well as most painful in
Shelley’s story.

It no more occurred to Shelley to take that view of Byron’s conduct to
Claire, than it occurred to him to think of himself as Mary’s seducer. To
the hour of his death Shelley never faltered in saying that Byron behaved
well to Claire’s child. That the Shelleys saw nothing to condemn seriously
in his treatment of Claire herself, however much they regretted his
inability to love her for a longer period, is shown by the friendly
relations they maintained with him, the idolatrous extravagance of
Shelley’s admiration for him, and the regard in which even Mrs. Shelley
held him for some time. Till her admiration of Byron was lowered, and her
confidence in him shaken, by his vacillation about the _Liberal_ and his
treatment of the Hunts, Mrs. Shelley was not wanting in enthusiasm for the
poet with ‘a divine nature,’ though no doubt her enthusiasm had not the
fervour of her husband’s admiration for the divine poet. Even so late as
December, 1821 (_vide_ Lady Shelley’s _Shelley Memorials_) she wrote from
Pisa to Mrs. Gisborne, ‘Lord Byron is now living very sociably, giving
dinners to his male acquaintance and writing divinely. Perhaps by this
time you have seen _Cain_, and will agree with us in thinking it his
finest production.’ The woman who resented Byron’s treatment of her
friends, the Hunts, never seems to have discovered any cause for cordial
anger in his treatment of her sister Claire, and, indeed, it is not easy
to discover what Shelley and Mary, with their views about marriage, could
reasonably condemn in his treatment of Allegra’s mother. By others it has
been made a ground of severe censure, that Byron omitted to provide for
Claire’s failing years. But in extenuation of Byron’s misconduct in this
particular, if not to his perfect justification, it may be urged that,
whilst believing her to have a friend on whom she had a stronger claim
than on himself, he knew how her future had been provided for by the will,
in which he figured as one of Shelley’s two executors and trustees.

At Este, where he wrote _Julian and Maddalo_ and the _Lines written among
the Euganean Hills_, Shelley sorrowed for the death of his little Clara,
the second daughter born to him by his second wife. From Padua, whilst the
infant was languishing into death, Shelley wrote, on 22nd September, 1818,
to his wife, then nursing the sick babe at Este, that though uneasy about
their little one he was confident there was no danger. Two days later
(24th September, 1818) Mary and Claire went to Padua, taking Clara with
them to meet Shelley, who on realizing the infant’s peril hastened with
her to Venice for medical advice,--a journey taken all too late, for the
patient had barely been brought within the city when she died in her
mother’s arms. The first to die of the three children, whom the Shelleys
had taken out of England, Clara was buried in the Lido, beneath whose
sands Byron would have rested had he breathed his last at Venice.

Leaving Este on 7th November, 1818, with his wife, Claire, Elise (who had
returned to her mistress’s side, at the beginning of her residence at
Este), and little William, Shelley journeyed towards Southern Italy in his
own carriage, drawn by his own horses, Paolo acting as coachman,--a mode
of travelling that proved no less tedious and wearisome than economical.
Resting at Ferrara on the 8th, and at Bologna on the 9th inst., they came
on the 19th of November to Rome, from which place Shelley started on or
about the 8th of December (‘about a fortnight ago I left Rome,’ he wrote
to Peacock on 22nd December, 1818, giving the approximate date of the
departure[5]) for Naples, leaving Mary and the others of his party to
follow him three days later, so as to give him time to choose lodgings for
them before their arrival in the southern capital; the lodgings (opposite
the Royal Gardens, with a full view of the bay) for which he paid three
louis a-week.

That, on the occasion of the excursion to Vesuvius, Claire preferred to
sit in a palanquin, whilst Shelley and Mary rode on mules, may have been
due to timidity, referable to her accident at the Bagni di Lucca. It is,
however, more probable that ill-health determined her to ascend the
mountain in the least fatiguing manner. Anyhow, it is both certain and
noteworthy that, on coming to Naples, Claire suffered so severely from
bodily indisposition, that some two years and a half later, on having
painful reasons for recalling all the domestic circumstances of their stay
near the Royal Gardens, Mrs. Shelley, in her vindicatory epistle to Mrs.
Hoppner (August, 1821), thought it right to speak of her sister’s
Neapolitan illness. The illness, thus remembered by Mrs. Shelley, after an
interval of two years and a half, as a matter likely to be misrepresented
by her husband’s and Claire’s defamers, was no trifling ailment.

Before the last week of January, 1819, whilst Claire’s sickness was
causing them much anxiety, the Shelleys were in trouble with the servants,
whose chattering tongues caused them so much annoyance in later time.
Cheating them at the Bagni di Lucca, Paolo--the clever knave, ever quick
to serve his employers and himself at the same time--continued to cheat
the Shelleys till the opening of the next year. Serving them by turns as
cook, valet, groom, coachman, courier, and accountant, the fellow had
opportunities for cheating them in each capacity, and doubtless made the
most of the opportunities. Dealing with no one but Shelley, he might have
played his game with impunity; but the scoundrel’s accounts were audited
by Mrs. Shelley, who, whilst consenting to his mere petty pilferings, made
a stand against his measures for positive plunder. The result was that
Shelley discharged the man with warm words, which were perhaps something
stronger and more caustic, through the poet’s deficient knowledge of
Italian, than he meant them to be. The gentleman, who gives vent to his
indignation in a language he has not mastered perfectly, is apt to say
outrageous things. Anyhow, refusing to submit to an egregious attempt at
extortion, Shelley discharged the rascal, who, in the usual way of fellows
of his sort, covered his discomfiture with abuse and threats of vengeance.
The man having been sent about his business, the Shelleys hoped to hear no
more of him. But the hope was disappointed. Shelley and his wife had
barely congratulated themselves on being quit of the rascal, when Elise
married him.

Elise does not appear to have been an evil creature. But gossiping no less
freely, servants gossip even more habitually, about their masters and
mistresses, than their employers gossip about them. On their way from Este
to Naples, Paolo and Elise, as they fell in love with one another, were
communicative about their master and mistress. If Elise had more than
Paolo to say on the interesting subject, Paolo, with his greater knowledge
of the world, could tell her how her highly interesting facts ought to be
regarded and dealt with inferentially. After telling Paolo where she was
born, and giving him a general view of her childhood, Elise told him how
she had been hired by Mrs. Shelley at Geneva, and travelling with her
master and mistress to England, had lived with them at Bath and Marlow in
that country. No doubt, also, she told him how Allegra had been born in
England, taken to Milan, and by her (the deponent) carried to the great
Lord Byron at Venice, in whose palace she (Elise, the deponent) had stayed
for successive weeks. There was much talk between the Italian knave and
the Swiss nurse about Miss Claire, and Mr. Hoppner (the Consul-General at
Venice) and Madame Hoppner, the lady born of Swiss parents in Elise’s
native land. Can it be questioned that, on arriving at Naples, the subtle
Paolo and the quick-witted Elise conceived themselves to be in possession
of an important family secret, their knowledge of which placed Monsignor
Shelley and the Signora Shelley, and the Signora’s ‘cara sorella’ Claire,
at their mercy? Paolo was jubilant. The next time the signor and signora
were disagreeable on a matter of accounts, they should know, that _he_
knew what _they_ knew. Feeling tenderly to Mrs. Shelley and Miss Claire,
for both had been very good to her, Elise hoped that Paolo would not be
indiscreet. But Elise was a Swiss, and what can poor servants do, but make
the most of their poor chances? A few weeks later Paolo, after dismissal
from the service of a master and mistress whom he had plundered for six
months, went his way, vowing to have his vengeance, unless the Signor
Shelley paid him those other sequins. Two years and a half later Elise was
writing to Madame Shelley for money, having received several gifts of
money from the same lady, since leaving her service.

At Naples it is certain that Shelley was far from happy. The fancy seems
to have possessed him that he was encountered there by the same lady, whom
he imagined to have pressed her love upon him (under circumstances set
forth on a previous page of this work) in 1816, just before he started for
Geneva with Mary and Claire. The whole affair was imaginary. No woman’s
heart was offered to him in 1816. No lady was in that year guilty of
unwomanly extravagance, through admiration of his poetry. As she was a
mere creature of his fancy, the lady, who paid him so remarkable and
embarrassing a compliment, cannot really have met him in Naples, and told
him that she had in two different years tracked him through Europe, in
obedience to her hopeless affection for him. It does not follow, however,
that he recognized the unreality of his impressions, and was deliberately
untruthful (in 1821-2) in speaking of his intercourse with the lady, who
cannot have died in the winter of 1818-19, as she had never breathed the
breath of life. It is impossible to say how far Shelley was the fool of
his own fancy in this matter, _if_ he was aught less than the master of
it. As he was certainly in several matters untruthful, in the most precise
and literal sense of the word, it is not unfair to suspect him of pure
imposture in this curious business. Upon the whole, however, it appears
more probable that he in course of time became a fitful believer in the
story, of whose imaginary character he was cognizant at the season of its
inception; that in the latter stages of the hallucination he was the dupe
of a trick he had practised on his own mind. It accords with this theory,
that the victim of semi-delusion was sometimes very miserable at Naples,
expressing his wretchedness in pathetic verses which he hid from Mary,
whilst acting in divers ways, so as to make his wife imagine him to be
set on concealing from her some cause of mental anguish.

Leaving Naples on 26th February, 1819, Shelley (making the return journey,
even as he had travelled southwards, with his own horses) retraced his
steps to Rome, where he remained for something over three months, during
which time he underwent no slight annoyance from indications of the
disfavour with which he was regarded by the English tourists. ‘Such is the
spirit of the English abroad as well as at home,’ he wrote bitterly to
Peacock, after remarking that, with the exception of five individuals at
the utmost, he was regarded ‘as a rare prodigy of crime and pollution,
whose look even might infect.’ Whilst insisting that he magnified and
multiplied the signs of disapproval, that touched him so keenly, his widow
could not venture to assert he had no real ground for the despondency,
which she referred to his sense of being shunned, in the land of the
stranger, by people of his own nation. There is something droll and
touching in the pains taken by the poor lady to inform posterity that, if
her Shelley suffered much from the insolence of some of the more vulgar of
the travelling English, he was called upon by the Earl of Guildford and
Sir William Drummond, during his stay at Rome; the pains thus taken to
relieve the poet of dishonour being all the more pathetic, because the
asperity of the lady’s reflections on vulgar English tourists reveals how
sensible William Godwin’s daughter was, that she was in no small degree
accountable for the slights offered to her husband. Poor Mrs. Shelley had
better have been silent. The English who visited Rome two generations
since were seldom remarkable for vulgarity; the least exalted and refined
of them being at least fit companions for the young lady who, at the dawn
of a certain July morning, slipt through her father’s shop to the arms of
her lover. They may have been victims of prejudice, but it was not a sign
of vulgarity that English gentlemen, travelling with ladies in Italy,
thought it best to keep out of Shelley’s way, and that the ladies did not
care to make his wife’s acquaintance. In attributing the seclusion of
their Roman life to the narrowness of her husband’s means and the delicacy
of his health, Mrs. Shelley only drew attention to the real causes of the
exclusion from society he would have enjoyed, and she was pining to enter.

Towards the close of April, 1819, it was the intention of the Shelleys to
withdraw from the capital where they were ill at ease, and to return to
Naples after the first week of the ensuing month; but changing their plans
they lingered at Rome till they were visited with trouble, far more
oppressive and blighting, than the pain of being slighted and left to
themselves. They were still at Rome when their little William (the second
to die of the three fated children) passed from them, after a short
illness, in the middle of his fourth year, breathing his last breath on
the 6th or 7th of June; on the earlier day according to one of Mrs.
Shelley’s letters, but on the later according to the stone, placed to his
memory in the Protestant cemetery of the Italian capital. Henceforth Rome
was associated in the minds of either parent with a supreme sorrow. Whilst
Shelley was deeply moved by the child’s death, Mary yielded to melancholy,
that was only mitigated by the birth of her second son (the present Sir
Percy Florence Shelley) in the ensuing November.

Withdrawing from Rome as soon as they had laid their boy in the grave,
Shelley and his wife (with Claire for their comforter) carried their
sorrow to Leghorn, where they rested at the Villa Valsovano, midway
between the city and Monte Nero, till they moved at the end of September
to Florence, Shelley having already made a flying trip from the Villa
Valsovano to the last-named city, to select pleasant apartments for six
months.

At the close of the next January, leaving Claire behind them at Florence,
Shelley moved with his wife and their babe to Pisa, where he resided
chiefly (either in the city or at the neighbouring baths of St. Julian)
till the fatal migration to San Terenzo. Of all his several Italian
resting-places, Pisa is the spot to which the mind turns most often, and,
on the whole, most agreeably, in the survey of the poet’s later years. It
was at Pisa that he nursed his cousin Medwin in sickness, would fain have
cherished the dying Keats, wrote _Adonais_, worshipt Emilia Viviani, lived
closely with Byron (first on friendly and then on uneasy terms), made the
acquaintance of the Williamses, joined hands with Trelawny, and again
befriended the Hunts. But of all the Shelleyan associations with Pisa,
none is more interesting to the student of the poet’s nature, or perhaps
more memorable to lovers of his song, than his sentimental idolatry of the
Contessina, with whom Mrs. Shelley bravely maintained a romantic
correspondence, as though she were a cordial sharer of her husband’s
affectionate regard for the imprisoned beauty.

There is no need to reproduce what Medwin tells so agreeably, and perhaps
with less than his usual inaccuracy, of the Contessina, whose dreamily
voluptuous eyes, Grecian contour, darksome tresses, pale complexion,
musical voice, and winning air of gentle sadness, stirred Shelley to
discover in her conventual home a scene of barbarous captivity;--to
inveigh against the cruelty of the father, who could immure so radiant a
creature in so gloomy a building; to conceive himself defrauded of his
proper felicity by the circumstances which rendered their union
impossible; and in his tumultuous yearnings for the unattainable to cry
aloud unto her:--

  ‘Seraph of Heaven! too gentle to be human,
  Veiling beneath that radiant form of Woman
  All that is insupportable in thee
  Of light, and love, and immortality!
  Sweet Benediction in the eternal Curse!
  Veiled Glory of this lampless Universe!
  Thou Moon beyond the clouds! Thou living Form
  Among the Dead! Thou Star above the Storm!
  Thou Wonder, and thou Beauty, and thou Terror!
  Thou Harmony of Nature’s art! Thou Mirror
  In whom, as in the splendour of the Sun,
  All shapes look glorious which thou gazest on!

         *       *       *       *       *

  I never thought before my death to see
  Youth’s vision thus made perfect. Emily,
  I love thee; though the world by no thin name
  Will hide that love, from its unvalued shame.

         *       *       *       *       *

  Spouse! Sister! Angel! Pilot of the Fate
  Whose course has been so starless! O too late
  Belovèd! O too soon adored, by me!
  For in the fields of immortality
  My spirit should at first have worshipped thine,
  A divine presence in a place divine;
  Or should have moved beside it on this earth,
  A shadow of that substance, from its birth;
  But not as now: ... I love thee; yes, I feel
  That on the fountain of my heart a seal
  Is set, to keep its waters pure and bright
  For thee, since in those _tears_ thou hast delight.

         *       *       *       *       *

  Thy wisdom speaks in me, and bids me dare
  Beacon the rocks on which high hearts are wreckt.
  I never was attached to that great sect,
  Whose doctrine is, that each one should select
  Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend,
  And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend
  To cold oblivion, though it is in the code
  Of modern morals, and the beaten road
  Which those poor slaves with weary footsteps tread,
  Who travel to their home among the dead
  By the broad highway of the world, and so
  With one chained friend, perhaps a jealous foe,
  The dreariest and the longest journey go.

         *       *       *       *       *

                                    Emily,
  A ship is floating in the harbour now,
  A wind is hovering o’er the mountain’s brow;
  There is a path on the sea’s azure floor,
  No keel has ever ploughed that path before;
  The halcyons brood around the foamless isles;
  The treacherous ocean has forsworn its wiles;
  The merry mariners are bold and free:
  Say, my heart’s sister, wilt thou sail with me?’

Whilst Shelley’s passion for Emilia was running its brief course, between
some time (probably a late one) of autumn, 1820, and an early day of
spring, 1821, they exchanged letters; Emilia in her letters usually
addressing her worshiper as ‘Caro Fratello,’ but once in a while honouring
him with the loftier and warmer title of ‘Adorato Sposo,’--a term the
young lady doubtless used in a spiritual sense, and with unqualified
confidence that he would construe it in no other sense. At the same time
Emilia and Mrs. Shelley, exchanging visits and other courtesies,
appropriate to gentlewomen affectionately disposed to one another,
maintained a sisterly correspondence with the pen, each styling the other
‘Cara Sorella.’ Mr. Rossetti is of opinion that no one, not even ‘a
scandal-monger beyond belief,’ has ever ventured to insinuate that the
mutual affection of Shelley and Emilia ‘was other than platonic.’ And in
the sense, in which the word is used by those who think it applicable to
every cordial attachment of two persons of opposite sex, that is attended
by no incident likely to increase the population, there can be no question
the affair was platonic. How could it have been otherwise? The daughter of
an Italian nobleman, Emilia, living under the discipline and surveillance
of a religious house, never saw Shelley under circumstances affording
either of them an opportunity for throwing aside the restraints of
etiquette and decorum. It does not, however, follow that the sentiment of
_Epipsychidion_, overflowing in some of its tenderest passages with
vehement admiration of Emilia’s personal charms, falls within the most
liberal definition of the elastic term.

That Shelley’s pulses were quickened for a single instant during either
his interviews with Emilia, or the meditations resulting in the poem, by
emotions which (to use his own phrase) would have ‘approximated him to the
circle of a servant girl and her sweetheart,’ I have not the faintest
suspicion. And this book has failed in one respect if its readers find
much difficulty in believing that robust sensuous fervour was in no degree
accountable for the composition of the finest love poem in the literature
of the universe. Had he been conscious of emotion, hovering however
lightly over the confines of desire, it is inconceivable that Shelley
would have made his wife an accomplice in his addresses to Emilia’s
feelings. It was due to the prime defect of his lower nature, that he was
capable of inducing Mary to play a part in the three-cornered flirtation.

In writing to Peacock after the game had been played out, that he had
‘made acquaintance in an obscure convent with the only Italian for whom he
ever felt any interest,’ Shelley declared the full measure, and the real
quality and complexion, of his genuine concern in Emilia. He had been
interested in a charming girl. Gratified in his artistic sensibility by
her personal loveliness, precisely as a connoisseur is gratified by the
beauty of an exquisite piece of sculpture, and stirred to sympathetic
curiosity by what was to him novel and singular in her altogether
commonplace position and story, he, for the first time during his
residence in Italy, felt a strong interest in one of its people,--an
interest that, disposing him to think well of her, moved him to credit her
with all the excellencies of womankind. All that followed was the result
of the excitement of a powerfully imaginative brain, acting with equal
vigour and subtlety, whilst it perfected its conceptions with the
self-concentrated energy of a power, wholly disconnected from the animal
that possessed it. Endowing Emilia with all the conceivable virtues of
womankind, he worshipt a being that was less a reality than the offspring
of his fancy.

Whether he showed as much of chivalric feeling as he did of egotistic
waywardness in distempering with egregious flattery the mind of the young
woman, who was designed by her father to pass from her convent into
wedlock with a man of her own social degree, is a question that may be
left for the reader’s unaided consideration. Left also for the present may
be the question whether the chivalrous Shelley showed proper chivalric
care of his wife’s feelings in constraining her to witness and to further
his platonic suit, when a moment’s consideration would have told him that,
even if the suit did not vex her to vulgar jealousy, to hear him pour the
idolatries of _Epipsychidion_ on the object of his imaginary passion,
would necessarily cause her the keenest anguish which a sensitive and
sentimental wife can experience,--the pain of discovering herself far
beneath her husband’s ideal standard of feminine excellence; the pain of
discovering him capable of rendering greater homage to another woman than
to herself; the pain of feeling herself much less than necessary to his
happiness.

In judging an enthusiast one must ever make allowance for his particular
enthusiasm. Were it otherwise, one would attribute singular indelicacy, as
well as defective knowledge of feminine nature, to those of the Shelleyan
zealots who argue that Mary had no reason to resent or disapprove the
attachment, which she could not think ‘other than platonic,’ as though it
were not in the nature of every sensitive and sentimental woman (and Mary
possessed both qualities in an eminent degree) to prize her husband’s
admiration of her mental endowments, his regard for her moral graces, his
sympathy with, and loyalty to, her spiritual nature, far more highly than
his matter-of-course consideration for those of her domestic privileges
and personal rights, in respect to which the law would afford her some
measure of inadequate protection and miserable remedy, should he venture
to violate them. From what these zealots say, it would seem that, whilst
he was chiefly admirable and delightful for his mental powers and
spiritual graces, Mrs. Shelley had no right to feel aggrieved when he used
them to declare his intellectual and sentimental preference for another
woman, because she had every reason to know the lower forces of his nature
were in no way affected by the spiritual idolatry.

By others of the Shelleyan apologists it is argued that Mrs. Shelley’s
conduct, in becoming as it were an accomplice in her husband’s idolatry of
Emilia, is evidence that her feelings were in no way wounded by his
attention to the beautiful girl. But to argue in this way is to attribute
to Mrs. Shelley an insensibility, wholly foreign to a nature by no means
wanting in womanly feeling, discernment, spirit, and fervour. Because she
showed what is usually called ‘good sense’ in concealing her annoyance,
whilst consenting prudently to what a less clever woman would have
resisted indignantly, it is not to be imagined that she really loved the
_cara sorella_ to whom she paid visits and wrote gushing letters, or
would, at any moment of their acquaintance, have been sorry to hear that
Emilia, with the darksome tresses and voluptuous eyes, had gone off to
Jericho. What Shelley’s wife felt for the Contessina is not to be learnt
from the letters that passed between the two young women, nor from the
epistles Mrs. Shelley wrote about her _cara sorella_ to Leigh Hunt and
divers other people, _whilst_ her husband was passing through the
agitations of his spiritual love for Emilia the Matchless. It was not for
the young wife, humouring her husband for the sake of preserving her power
over him, to tell his friends he was making a goose of himself, or to
write bitter things against Emilia which would only bring upon her the
imputation she was most anxious to avoid--the imputation of being jealous
of her spiritual rival. But when Emilia the angelic had passed from the
Pisan convent into marriage with the Italian gentleman whom she soon
worried into hating her, and Shelley having survived his passion for her,
had passed to the dominion of another spiritual mistress, Mrs. Shelley
told Mrs. Gisborne, with equal candour and piquancy, what she really
thought of Emilia, of Shelley’s love of the young lady, and of her rather
different love of him.

Reflecting disdainfully on her ‘dirty enough’ Pisan acquaintances, Mrs.
Shelley gave Mrs. Gisborne to understand that, not content with the cakes,
wine, and sugar-candy of spiritual love, Emilia, to her worshiper’s
horror, asked him to give her a considerable sum of money,--a demand that
may acquit him of want of gallantry in writing (_vide_ Forman’s edition of
Shelley’s _Prose Works_) to John Gisborne from Lerici on 18th June, 1822,
just three weeks before the fatal boat-accident:--

    ‘The _Epipsychidion_ I cannot look at; the person whom it celebrates
    was a cloud instead of a Juno, and poor Ixion starts from the centaur
    that was the offspring of his own embrace.’

Whilst penning these lines, Shelley was still moving along the
comparatively tranquil stream of his melancholy attachment to Jane
Williams, the last of his spiritual brides, to whose singing and guitar he
listened on the evening after writing the letter, as he paced to and fro
on the Casa Magni terrace, whilst Mary lay a-bed faint and exhausted by
her recent miscarriage.

Before he passes to the concluding term of Shelley’s residence at Pisa,
the reader should be informed of another of those imaginary incidents,
which would have had prominence in the record, had Shelley lived to be his
own biographer. In the summer of 1820, whilst Mr. Tighe (son of the still
famous Mrs. Tighe) was staying at Pisa, Shelley came in high excitement to
that gentleman (or at least told Medwin he had gone to Mr. Tighe) with
this strange story. He (Shelley, the narrator of the affair to Medwin, if
not to Tighe) had gone to the Post Office of Pisa for letters, and had
barely uttered his name to the clerk of the Poste-restante bureau, when a
stranger, with a military cloak hanging from his shoulders, exclaimed,
‘What, are you that d----d atheist, Shelley?’ and forthwith felled him to
the ground with a stunning fist-blow,--a blow rendering the poet
unconscious, whilst the doer of the violent deed went off, cloak and all.
According to the story, given to Medwin some three months or so after the
alleged occurrence, Shelley and Tighe tracked the ruffianly assailant to
the Tre Donzelle of Pisa, and on learning he had started for Genoa,
hastened thither in the hope of overtaking and punishing him. Mr. Rossetti
suggests that, in respect to this alleged assault, Medwin, the original
historian of the affair, may have given a loose account of some adventure
that is said to have taken place at Rome. But I see no reason to accept
this suggestion. Though comically inaccurate in his reminiscences, Medwin
was an honest gentleman and a precise note-taker. On coming to Pisa to
stay with Shelley in the late autumn of 1820, he was a diarist who took
pains to record exactly the things seen by him, and the things (true or
false) told to him by other people. Without giving Shelley as his
authority for the narrative, he tells the story of the assault as one of
the matters which came to his knowledge soon after his arrival at Pisa,
during his familiar intercourse with his cousin. Whilst fully cognizant
of the gentleman’s literary defects, I do not question that he had the
story of the assault from Shelley’s lips, and passed it on through one of
his note-books with substantial accuracy. It is certain no such attack was
made on Shelley at Pisa. The marvellous story must be regarded as an
affair of delusion, semi-delusion, or sheer untruth.




CHAPTER XV.

PISAN ACQUAINTANCES.

    The Williamses--Shelley at Ravenna--The Shelley-Claire
    Scandal--Shelley’s startling Letter to Mrs. Shelley--Examination of
    the Letter--Its wild Inaccuracies--Mrs. Shelley’s vindicatory Letter
    to Mrs. Hoppner--Demonstration that Byron was authorized by Shelley to
    withhold the Letter--Explanation of the Shelley-Claire
    Scandal--Shelley’s Visit to Allegra at Bagna-Cavallo--Project for
    starting the _Liberal_--Leigh Hunt invited to edit the
    _Liberal_--Shelley’s Change of Plans--His Pretexts and Reasons for
    changing them--Leigh Hunt’s Way of dealing with his Friends--His
    Concealment of his financial Position--Byron at Pisa--Hunt’s
    Misadventures on his Outward Voyage--Byron’s Discouragement in respect
    to the _Liberal_--Differences between Byron and Shelley--Shelley’s
    Position between Byron and Hunt--The Byron-Shelley ‘Set’ at
    Pisa--Shelley and Hunt in secret League against Byron--Shelley’s
    Change of Feeling towards Byron--Was Byron aware of the Change?


Though leading a life of seclusion and studious industry, Shelley escaped
at Pisa from the social estrangement, almost amounting to social
isolation, which had alternately irritated and depressed him during the
earlier stages of his residence in Italy, and would have affected him
still more painfully, had it not been for Claire’s exhilarating
vivaciousness. If he made no friends in the Tuscan city, Pisa at least
afforded him acquaintances,--Vacca the physician (who wisely treating the
poet as a _malade imaginaire_ told him to confide in nature for the proper
treatment of his maladies); Sgricci the improvisatore, whose peculiar
faculty stirred the poet’s curiosity and admiration; and the dissolute
Professor who introduced him to Emilia Viviani. Receiving his cousin Tom
Medwin in the late autumn of 1820 for a long visit, he made the
acquaintance of Medwin’s especial friends, the Williamses, early in the
following year,--Edward Williams, whilom lieutenant in the 8th Dragoons,
and in still earlier time a midshipman of the Navy, who, boasting a lineal
descent from Oliver Cromwell, and displaying at least an amateur’s
aptitude for literature and the fine arts, possessed various mental and
moral qualities, to render him no less acceptable to Mary than her
husband; and Jane Williams, the last of the several women, fair or
otherwise, to move Shelley to platonic affection. From time to time, also,
at Pisa, Shelley saw something of Lady Mountcashel, whose acquaintance he
had made at Florence,--the gentlewoman of letters, who, whilst
corresponding regularly with her old friend, Claire’s mother, had her
reasons for living abroad under the name and style of Mrs. Mason, together
with her cold and capricious daughter, who ranged herself for a while with
Claire’s admirers. But of all Shelley’s Pisan associates, in the time
preceding Byron’s tenure of the Palazzo Lanfranchi, none is more deserving
of commemoration than the Prince Mavrocordatos, with whom Shelley played
chess and lived for awhile on terms of domestic intimacy, before
dedicating _Hellas_ to him, as ‘an imperfect token’ of the author’s
‘admiration, sympathy, and friendship.’ That Shelley had some other and
less creditable associates at the Tuscan city and the adjacent Baths, may
be inferred from the contemptuous and even disgustful severity with which
Mrs. Shelley spoke of their Pisan acquaintances as a ‘dirty enough’ lot of
people.

In July, 1821, the Shelleys designed to spend the next winter in Florence
with Mr. and Mrs. Horace Smith, whom they had promised to introduce to the
glories of the Uffizi and Pitti galleries; and in accordance with this
purpose Shelley went to Florence at the end of July to choose a suitable
residence. But this scheme for the winter fell through; Mrs. Smith’s ill
health determining Horace Smith to postpone their Italian trip,--an
opportune change of purpose, that liberated the Shelleys from their
engagement to winter at Florence, just as they were wishing for a decent
pretext for throwing the Smiths over, and wintering again at Pisa, where
they would be members of the great Byron’s especial circle.

Five days after writing from Florence to his wife at Bagni di Pisa,
Shelley was writing (6th August, 1821) to her from Bologna, as he was on
the point of starting for Ravenna, to visit Byron at the Palazzo
Guiccioli, which he entered at 10 p.m. of the same date. Crossing at this
late hour his entertainer’s threshold, Shelley was not permitted to retire
to rest, by daylight, until he had heard a piece of scandal that cannot
have disposed him for slumber. The promptitude, with which Byron poured
this piece of tattle into his guest’s ear, will remind readers how at
Diodati he seized the earliest moment to chatter to another friend about
the revolting Genevese scandal. Before Shelley went to bed for the first
time, at five o’clock a.m. at the Palazzo Guiccioli, he had heard that
rumour charged him with being the father by Claire of a child, whom she
had put into a Foundling Hospital. It was of course the easier for Byron
to speak to Shelley of so indelicate a matter, because they had spoken
freely together just five years since on the details of the Genevese
scandal. Going to bed at five or six a.m. it was Byron’s practice to rise
in the afternoon; and the poet, who thus turned night into day, was still
only in his second sleep, when Shelley, at 11 a.m. on the 7th August,
1821, was writing to his wife in these terms,--

    ‘Lord Byron has told me of a circumstance that shocked me exceedingly,
    because it exhibits a degree of desperate and wicked malice, for which
    I am at a loss to account. When I hear such things my patience and
    philosophy are put to a severe proof, whilst I refrain from seeking
    out some obscure hiding-place where the countenance of man may never
    meet me more.... It seems that Elise, actuated either by some
    inconceivable malice for our dismissing her, or bribed by my enemies,
    or making common cause with her husband, has persuaded the Hoppners of
    a story, so monstrous and incredible, that they must have been prone
    to believe any evil to have believed such assertions upon such
    evidence. Mr. Hoppner wrote to Lord Byron, to state this story as a
    reason why he declined any further communication with us, and why he
    advised him to do the same. Elise says that Claire was my mistress;
    that she was brought to bed; that I immediately tore the child from
    her and sent it to the Foundling Hospital. I quote Mr. Hoppner’s
    words--and this is stated to have taken place in the winter after we
    left Este (1819-20).--[_sic_, in the proverbially inaccurate Mr.
    Froude’s transcript. The winter of the stay at Naples was the winter
    of 1818-19.] In addition she says that both I and Claire treated you
    in the most shameful manner; that I neglected and beat you, and that
    Claire never let a day pass without offering you insults of the most
    violent kind, in which she was abetted by me.--As to what reviews and
    the world say I do not care a jot; but when persons who have known me
    are capable of conceiving of me, _not that I have fallen into a great
    error--as would have been the living with Claire as my mistress_--but
    that I have committed such unutterable crimes _as destroying_ or
    abandoning a child, and that my own! Imagine my despair of good!
    Imagine how it is possible that one of so weak and sensitive a nature
    as mine can run the gauntlet further, through this hellish society of
    men. _You_ should write to the Hoppners a letter refuting the charge,
    in case you believe, and know, and can prove it to be false; stating
    the grounds and proof of your belief.... If you will send the letter
    to me here, I will forward it to the Hoppners. Lord Byron is not up,
    I do not know the Hoppners’ address, and I am anxious not to lose a
    post.’

For the italics of the foregoing extract the present transcriber is
responsible.

It is in the memory of some readers of this book, that the afore-given
passage, from Shelley’s letter of 7th August, was a chief feature of the
article, which Mr. Froude wrote for the August-1883 _Nineteenth Century_,
to the discredit of my _Real Lord Byron_, and for Byron’s defamation. It
is therefore in some degree for the defence of my own reputation (a matter
of importance to at least one person), though chiefly for the vindication
of Byron’s honour from the latest of his defamers’ countless calumnies,
and for the fuller exhibition of certain aspects of Shelley’s character,
that I proceed to examine the passage of Shelley’s 7th August-1821 letter
to his wife, certain parts of her reply to it, and the use made by Mr.
Froude of the poet’s letter and Mrs. Shelley’s vindicatory answer.

The shameful conduct, charged against Shelley and Claire, was (according
to Shelley’s letter) alleged to have taken place in the winter of 1818-19,
_i.e._ when they were at Naples. The indictment (according to the same
letter) comprised several counts:--(1) That Shelley had taken Claire for
his mistress under his wife’s roof; (2) That he and Claire had joined in
treating his wife cruelly in other ways; (3) That he had beaten his wife
and neglected her; (4) That he tore from Claire the child to which she had
given birth; (5) That he had sent the child into a Foundling Hospital; (6)
That he had destroyed or abandoned the child,--_i.e._ that, if he had not
put the child into a Foundling Hospital, he had destroyed it. According to
the letter Elise had made these charges, and the Hoppners believed
them,--_i.e._ deemed him guilty of the first five charges, and further
guilty of abandoning or murdering his own offspring. I say, _according to
Shelley’s letter_; for this excited epistle by a man, who in the opinion
of his most intimate friends was absolutely incapable of writing a
precisely accurate account of any agitating passage of his own quite
recent affairs, is our only account of the substance and particulars of
Byron’s speech at or after midnight to the greatly excited and indignant
Shelley. Is it likely that this account is precisely or substantially
accurate?

From Byron’s March-1821 note to Hoppner we _know what_ ill things they
charged against Shelley and Claire. We _know_ they believed that Claire
was Shelley’s mistress, that Claire had given birth to a child, and that
_she_ (_not_ Shelley) had put this child into a Foundling. Byron’s words
to Hoppner are precise. ‘The moral part of this letter,’ he wrote to
Hoppner in March, 1821, about Claire’s epistle, ‘upon the Italians, &c.,
comes with an excellent grace from the writer now living with a _man_ and
his _wife_, and having planted a child in the Foundling.’--They did not
imagine that Shelley had torn the child from Claire’s breast, and sent it
to a Foundling against her will. On the contrary they believed the child
to have been put into the Foundling by Claire. At the worst they believed
Shelley guilty, on this point, of mere acquiescence in _her_ arrangement
for getting rid of the child. They thought that the child was sent to a
Foundling. It never occurred to them to suspect Shelley of having
destroyed the child. One difficulty of the matter is that Byron, to say
the least of it, was not quite, but almost, as untruthful as Shelley. But
it was not in the way of his peculiar untruthfulness, to say in cold blood
that Hoppner believed Shelley to have torn the child from Claire’s breast,
and sent it to a Foundling against her will, _or_ perhaps destroyed it,
when he knew Hoppner thought nothing of the kind. In his hatred of Claire,
Byron hugged the notion that _she_ had planted her child in a Foundling;
and his hatred of her would alone have prevented him from telling a lie,
that would have represented her as innocent of that offence, at least in
Hoppner’s opinion. Yet Shelley (so prone to write with wild inaccuracy
about his personal affairs) wrote to his wife that Byron had told him
certain things (over and above the real communications) which it is
inconceivable Byron told him.

Another remarkable feature of Shelley’s letter is the way in which he
refers to the first count of the indictment. Writing to _his own wife_,
Shelley (the poet, who according to his idolaters might have been the
Saviour of the World) positively tells _her_, that, if he had lived in
adultery with her sister-by-affinity under her own roof, he would have
been guilty of nothing worse than ‘a great error!’ He would not have
committed prodigious immorality, and a revolting outrage of social
decency. He would not have been guilty of loathsome domestic uncleanness.
He would only have fallen into ‘a great error.’ He wrote this of _himself_
to his _own wife_! This fact should be pondered by those, who not long
since were so indignant with Byron for imagining Shelley could have
sinned with Claire in his wife’s house. Here is Shelley, instructing his
own wife that the enormity would have been nothing more heinous than a big
blunder.

Moved by Shelley to write a vehement denial of the slanders, Mrs. Shelley
(best of letter-writers) seized her pen, and produced an epistle that
cannot be commended too highly as an exhibition of womanly feeling. On
some subordinate points it is not free from confusion and inconsistency,
and in one or two passages the writer _seems_ guilty of several material
inaccuracies; but this appearance may be wholly due to the carelessness of
transcribers of the printed copies of Shelley’s letter to her. For
instance, whilst Shelley in the printed passages of his letter merely
says, ‘Elise ... has persuaded the Hoppners,’ and ‘Elise says,’ Mrs.
Shelley in her vindicatory epistle says of her husband’s letter, ‘It tells
me that Elise _wrote to you_’ (_i.e._ to Mrs. Hoppner) ‘relating the most
hideous stories against him,’--words certainly not justified by the
published passages of Shelley’s letter. Dealing thus, in the opening of
her letter, with Elise, as though she were the actual slanderer, Mrs.
Shelley in a later passage seems to hold Paolo altogether accountable for
the calumnies, and to acquit Elise of complicity in his wickedness. Yet,
towards the close of the epistle (addressed to Mrs. Hoppner), reflecting
bitterly on her former nurse, Mrs. Shelley bids Mrs. Hoppner withdraw her
confidence from ‘one so vile as Elise.’ Both in her letter to Mrs. Hoppner
and in the accompanying note to her own husband, Mrs. Shelley refers to
Byron’s disbelief of the slanders; whereas the published passages of
Shelley’s letter afford no grounds for these references to Byron’s
incredulity, and even justify a suspicion that the generous disbelief for
which Mrs. Shelley was so grateful, was merely her presumption. Possibly
the production of the original documents would dispel these apparent
inconsistencies and inaccuracies. As they stand before the world, however,
the published passages of Mrs. Shelley’s letter comprise several
perplexing sentences. On the main points of the slanders, however, Mrs.
Shelley is direct, and admirably strenuous. Nothing of its kind can well
be stronger than this:--

    ‘But now I come to the accusations, and I must summon all my courage
    while I transcribe them, for tears will force their way, and how can
    it be otherwise? You knew Shelley. You saw his face, and could you
    believe them?--believe them only on the testimony of a girl whom you
    despised? I had hoped that such a thing was impossible, and that,
    although strangers might believe the calumnies that this man
    propagated, none who had ever seen my husband could for a moment
    credit them. He says Claire was Shelley’s mistress--that--upon my word
    I solemnly assure you that I cannot write the words. I send you a part
    of Shelley’s letter, that you may see what I am now about to refute;
    but I had rather die than copy anything so vilely, so wickedly false,
    so beyond imagination fiendish.--But that you should believe it! That
    my beloved Shelley should stand thus slandered in your minds--he, the
    gentlest, the most humane of creatures--is more painful to me--oh far
    more painful--than words can express. Need I say that the union
    between my husband and myself has never been disturbed? Love caused
    our first imprudence; love which improved by esteem, a perfect trust
    one in the other, a confidence and affection which, visited as we have
    been by severe calamities (have we not lost _two_ (_sic_) children?),
    has increased daily, and knows no bounds. I will add that Claire has
    been separated from us for about a year.... You ought to have paused
    before you tried to convince the father of her child of such
    unheard-of atrocities on her part. If his generosity and knowledge of
    the world had not made him reject the slander with the ridicule it
    deserved, what irretrievable mischief you would have occasioned her!
    Those who know me will believe my simple word. It is not long ago that
    my father said, in a letter to me, that he had never known me utter a
    falsehood; but you--easy as you have been to credit evil, you may be
    more deaf to truth--to you I swear by all that I hold sacred in Heaven
    and Earth, by a vow which I should die to write if I affirmed a
    falsehood,--I swear by the life of my child--my blessed, beloved
    child--that I know the accusation to be false.’

Addressed to Mrs. Hoppner, this letter was sent to Shelley at Ravenna, for
him to forward it to the lady at Venice; the note which accompanied it to
Shelley’s hands, contained the writer’s earnest request to him, to copy
the epistle, before sending it on. ‘Pray,’ said Mrs. Shelley, ‘get my
letter to Mrs. H. copied, for a thousand reasons,’--meaning, of course, to
keep the copy in evidence of what she had written in the original, that
would go to Mrs. Hoppner. She had previously said in the same letter, ‘If
the task be not too dreadful, pray copy it for me.’ Shelley’s way of
dealing with this natural request is equally curious and significant:--

    ‘I have not,’ he remarked in a subsequent letter from Ravenna to his
    wife, ‘recopied your letter--such a measure would destroy its
    authenticity, but have given it to Lord Byron, who has engaged to send
    it with his own comments to the Hoppners. People do not hesitate, it
    seems, to make themselves panders and accomplices to slander, for the
    Hoppners had exacted from Lord Byron that these accusations should be
    concealed from _me_. Lord Byron is not a man to keep a secret, good or
    bad, but in openly confessing that he has not done so, he must observe
    a certain delicacy, and therefore he wished to send the letter
    himself, and indeed this adds weight to your representations.’

It is inconceivable that Shelley really thought what he pretended to
think, viz., that his wife wished him to make a fair copy of her letter,
for Mrs. Hoppner’s perusal. He knew right well _why_ Mary told him to copy
the letter. He misconstrued her words wilfully, because he did not wish
her to have a copy of the letter at her hand,--to remind her of the
circumstances that had caused her to write it. Paying proper regard to her
repeated injunction, he would have copied not only her written words, but
also that part of his own letter of the 7th instant, which she had made a
substantive part of her own epistle. This she asked him to do. Instead of
doing what she told him, he pretended to have misunderstood her request,
and at the same time informed her that her vindicatory letter had been
given to Byron, for transmission to Mrs. Hoppner.

This vindicatory letter was _not_ transmitted by Byron to Mrs. Hoppner. On
the contrary, after Byron’s death, it was found amongst his papers, and at
some later time passed to the hands of the present Sir Percy Shelley. With
law and logic resembling his knowledge of the simplest rules of evidence,
Mr. Froude wrote of this letter in his notorious _Nineteenth-Century_
article, ‘It was not addressed to Byron; it therefore never belonged to
Byron; and a property which was not his own could not descend to his
representatives.’ What egregious nonsense! What should be thought of the
readers of the _Nineteenth Century_, who accept such foolishness as sound
literature? What living writer but Mr. Froude could venture to declare it
impossible for a man to acquire property in a letter, _not_ addressed to
him? Were the _dictum_ good law, the trustees of the British Museum would
have no property in any one of their several thousands of ancient letters.
Mr. Alfred Morrison would not have property in any of his thousands of
epistles, _not_ addressed to himself. On coming to Shelley’s hands at
Ravenna, Mrs. Shelley’s vindicatory letter was as much his property as any
ring on his finger. Written by his own wife (who had no property of her
own) on paper bought with his money, the epistle belonged to Shelley. The
legal property of the document was in him and no one else. He had as
perfect legal power to give the epistle to Byron, as to give any other of
his lawful possessions to Byron. There are grounds for the strongest
opinion that Shelley did give the letter to Byron--_not_ to transmit to
Mrs. Hoppner, _but_ to do what he liked with it; and that, therefore, the
letter at his death passed to his representatives.

Shelley himself admits that he gave the letter. ‘I have,’ he writes to his
wife, ‘given it to Lord Byron,’ adding that Byron ‘has engaged to send it
with his own comments, to the Hoppners.’ Apart from these words, there is
no evidence whatever that Byron promised to transmit the letter to the
Hoppners;--words written by a man of such singular mental inexactness,
that his most intimate friends held him absolutely incapable of giving an
accurate account of any matter of his personal affairs;--a man, who wrote
wheedling letters, and deliberately deceitful letters, whenever he was
tempted to do so;--a man, who only the other day had written his wife a
flagrantly inaccurate account of what Byron had told him of the Claire
scandal. Is the bare statement of so inexact a letter-writer to be held
good evidence, that Byron withheld a letter he was bound in honour to pass
on to Mrs. Hoppner? Is it probable that Shelley had authority for writing
to his wife, that Byron had promised to transmit the letter and enclosure?
If he was inaccurate in this statement, Shelley was merely guilty of an
inaccuracy, comparable with scores of similar inaccuracies to be found in
his private epistles. Is it conceivable that Byron promised to transmit to
the Hoppners an epistle, which represented him as having said of them
divers things which he certainly had not said of them?

Shelley’s letter of the 7th instant to his wife was posted to her before
Byron had risen from bed. Dates and the lady’s words show that Mrs.
Shelley answered it immediately,--that her indignant reply was dashed off
_currente calamo_, when she, too, was in a state of excitement
incompatible with mental exactness. Thus written, her epistle was
despatched immediately, so that no time might be lost. In due course the
vindicatory letter, together with the piece of Shelley’s own writing which
had been constituted a part of the vindicatory epistle, came under Byron’s
observation at Ravenna. What ensued forthwith, between the two poets, can
be readily imagined. After perusing the two documents of the reply,
Byron, of course, spoke to Shelley to this effect: ‘My dear Shelley, in
your excitement you gave Mrs. Shelley a strangely inaccurate account of
what passed between us on the night of your arrival. What I told you was,
that the Hoppners had been induced to regard Claire as your mistress, to
think _she_ had given you a child, and to think _she_ had sent the child
to a Foundling. This was what I told you. But you have told your wife a
very different story. The Hoppners never spoke of you as tearing the child
from Claire’s breast; they never accused you of sending the child to a
Foundling against her will; they never hinted to me that, instead of
sending the child to a Foundling, you might have destroyed it. Such
thoughts of you never entered their heads. How came you to conceive they
had such suspicions? They never wronged you in the way you have
represented to Mrs. Shelley. They told me you had made a domestic
arrangement with Claire, which (as you remark to Mrs. Shelley) would have
been no heinous crime, but only “a great error,” had you and she entered
into the arrangement. They told me Claire had given you a child, even as
she gave me one a few years since,--_i.e._ they believed that the
arrangement, which in your opinion would have been no worse than “a great
error,” had been attended with a natural result. Further, they told me
that they believed the offspring of the arrangement had been dealt with as
illegitimate children are often dealt with in this country. To think this
of you is not to believe you tore the child from Claire’s breast, disposed
of it violently and without her consent, abandoned it _or_ perhaps
destroyed it. This letter and enclosure may not be sent to Mrs. Hoppner;
for they imply that I have told you prodigious untruths. As the epistle
touches my honour so acutely, leave it in my hands, and trust to me to
communicate with the Hoppners, so as to disabuse their minds completely of
their erroneous impressions about you. But do let me retain possession of
those sheets of paper, which so strangely misrepresent my confidential
speech to you.’

Byron must necessarily have put the case in this way to Shelley. After
speaking in this way, it is inconceivable that he promised to send the
letter and enclosure to Venice. After being so spoken to by Byron, it is
inconceivable that Shelley wished the documents to be sent to Mrs.
Hoppner, or was otherwise than well pleased to know Byron could be trusted
to keep them from her eyes. It must have been a great relief to him to
think that, instead of sending to Venice the writings which, on coming to
the Hoppners, would have been fruitful of mischief, he had shown them to
Byron. Of course he made no copy of Mary’s letter and enclosure, to remain
in evidence how egregiously he had exaggerated the scandalous report, and
misrepresented a confidential conversation. But it was necessary for him
to acknowledge to Mary his receipt of the documents; to acknowledge them,
moreover, in such a way, that she would not be looking to every post for a
letter from Mrs. Hoppner; that she should feel assured proper measures
were being taken to kill the scandal; that she should not be angry with
him for neglecting to copy the papers; and that she should not lose all
power of ever again relying on his statements of fact. The author of _Laon
and Cythna_ was in a very embarrassing and rather humiliating position.
His way of accounting for his neglect to copy the documents is
sufficiently significant of disingenuousness. It was necessary for him to
conceal from his wife that her epistle, so eloquent of fine and womanly
feeling, would not be sent on to Mrs. Hoppner; it was necessary for him to
allay her impatience for a letter from Mrs. Hoppner, by giving her to
understand that she must not expect the lady’s reply to come quickly; it
was necessary for him to provide against further importunity on her part
for copies of the documents. In submission to these necessities he had
recourse to misrepresentation. Affecting to have mistaken her purpose in
requesting him to take copies of the writings, he informed her he had
given her epistle, with the piece of his own epistle, to Byron,--an
announcement calculated to make her feel she could scarcely repeat her
request for copies without implying distrust of Lord Byron’s discretion
and zeal. At the same time, he assured her that Byron ‘had engaged to send
the letter with his own comments to the Hoppners,’ whilst knowing that
Byron had only engaged to give the substance of certain passages of the
letter, together with his comments on the case.

Whilst this explanation of Byron’s retention of a letter (which on
reflection Shelley can have been no less desirous than Byron to keep from
the Hoppners), acquits him of the egregious villainy of withholding an
epistle he had pledged his honour to forward to Mrs. Hoppner, it only
requires the readers of this work, so far as Shelley is concerned, to
believe that, under the pressure of a rather comical embarrassment, he
practised on his wife the kind of deceit he so often employed in his
dealings with other people. Acquitting Byron of the villainy imputed to
him by Mr. Froude, a villainy very different from the immoralities with
which he is justly chargeable, it merely imputes to Shelley the particular
kind of underhandedness and inaccuracy, of which so many examples may be
found in his dealings with various people. Had Byron sent the letter to
Mrs. Hoppner, it would of course have been accompanied with explanations,
showing that he was not accountable for the exaggerations and staggering
misstatements of Shelley’s letter (of 7th August) to his wife. Knowing
this, Shelley had even a stronger motive than Byron for stopping the
letter. Under these circumstances, it is absurd to argue from the mere
retention of the letter, that it was retained dishonestly by the elder
poet, in breach of a solemn promise.

There is no reason to suppose Byron was wanting in fidelity to Shelley in
any stage of this business. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, he
must be assumed to have kept his promise, to do his utmost to convince the
Hoppners of the untruth of the scandalous story, so far as it affected the
Shelleys. There is at present no evidence that he either failed to keep
this promise, or failed to satisfy the Hoppners of Shelley’s innocence.
Under existing circumstances, the only fair assumption is that he wrote to
the Hoppners on the matter, and made it clear to them that Shelley neither
was nor ever had been the father of a child by Claire. It makes nothing
against the reasonableness of this assumption, that Mrs. Shelley received
no letter from Mrs. Hoppner on the subject, and that the Hoppners never
again had any intercourse with her. Having received no letter from Mrs.
Shelley on the matter, Mrs. Hoppner was under no obligation to write to
her about it. Indeed, under the circumstances, it would have been
something worse than an insulting impertinence, had the Consul-General’s
wife written to Mrs. Shelley on so unsavoury a business. To set the ugly
matter right, it was not necessary for Byron to let Mrs. Hoppner know her
name had been mentioned to the Shelleys in connexion with the scandal; and
the reasons why he should be silent on that point are obvious. That the
Hoppners never again communicated with Mrs. Shelley is no evidence that
they continued to think ill of her. Mrs. Shelley and Mrs. Hoppner had
never corresponded with one another for any considerable time. Mrs.
Shelley’s intercepted letter (of 10th August, 1821) opens with these
words: ‘My dear Mrs. Hoppner, after silence of _nearly two years_, I
address you again,’--words showing conclusively the shortness of the
period, during which the two ladies (who met for the first time no earlier
than the autumn of 1818) were in the habit of writing to one another.
Correspondents only for a single year, they had, in August, 1821, ceased
to correspond for nearly two years. In truth, though the Shelleys, during
their 1818 visits to and sojourn near Venice, received great kindness from
the Hoppners (especially at the moment of little Clara’s death), the two
ladies were casual acquaintances,--slight acquaintances, notwithstanding
their intimacy for a brief period. How common is it for people to live
sociably with persons for a few months, and then see no more of them! Had
Mrs. Shelley in her later time met the Hoppners, she would probably have
been greeted by them in a way to satisfy her, that they had no wish to
avoid her as a discreditable person. But never meeting them after 1818,
she went from 1821 to her grave, imagining they persisted in thinking evil
of her.

Though Byron’s March-1821 note to Hoppner defines the main facts of the
scandalous story, it gives none of the minor details of the slander, that
seems to have originated in Elise’s general knowledge of the Genevese
scandal and her subsequent misconceptions respecting Allegra’s paternity.
Had that note been as ample as it was precise, it would have enabled us to
see how far the slander (credited by Byron and Hoppner) was the pure
outgrowth of Elise’s misconceptions, and in what degree it resulted from
Paolo’s malicious inventiveness,--and also to gauge more precisely the
element of inaccuracy in Shelley’s letter of exaggerations. There is, of
course, a great difference in detail between the story Elise may be
conceived to have told Paolo about Allegra’s birth in England in January,
1817, and the slanderous statement about a second child, alleged to have
been born at Naples in the winter of 1818-1819. But it is in the nature of
scandal to change in its details and colour, no less than in its
magnitude, as it passes from mouth to mouth; and before it reached Mrs.
Shelley at Bagni di Pisa, the scandalous story about Claire had passed
through several hands. Originating with Elise, it had passed from her to
Paolo; through Paolo to Hoppner; through Hoppner to Mrs. Hoppner; from
the Hoppners to Byron; from Byron’s cynical lips to Shelley’s heated
brain; through Shelley’s inaccurate pen to Mrs. Shelley. Elise, Paolo (a
liar of great ability), Hoppner, Mrs. Hoppner, Byron (not remarkable for
accuracy of statement), and Shelley (a prodigy of historical
inventiveness):--all and each of these six persons had worked in some way
or other on the scandal, before it came to Mary at Bagni di Pisa! No
wonder the story was a marvellous and extremely exciting story on coming
to poor Mrs. Shelley.

The liar in the business was, of course, Paolo, the clever, vindictive,
unscrupulous knave, set on avenging himself on the master, who had
declined to be cheated beyond a hundred per cent. Certainly guilty of the
venial offence of indiscreet and disloyal loquacity, Elise was probably
also guilty of encouraging her husband in his purpose to extort more money
from her bountiful employers. Her passionate assertion that she had said
nothing against the Shelleys _to Mrs._ Hoppner (‘_Je vous assure, ma chère
Madame Shelley_,’ she wrote in reply to a letter from her former mistress,
‘_que je n’ai jamais rien dit à Madame Hoppner ni contre vous, ni contre
Mademoiselle, ni contre Monsieur, et de quelque part que cela vienne c’est
un mensonge contre moi_’) does not acquit her of talking freely to her
husband against them. It tells much and suggests more against the smart
Elise that, for months after her husband had put himself (with his wife’s
cognizance) in communication with the Hoppners, she was writing to Mrs.
Shelley for money;--a kind of demand the woman would, of course, have
never made on her former mistress, had she not felt she had a most unusual
claim on her. Only a day or two before Mrs. Shelley perused her husband’s
staggering letter from Ravenna, Mrs. Shelley had received a letter from
Elise, asking for more money. ‘The other day,’ Mrs. Shelley wrote in her
intercepted letter to Mrs. Hoppner, ‘I received a letter from Elise,
entreating, with great professions of love, that I would send her
money’!!! More than two and a half years had passed since she quitted the
Shelleys’ service, and yet Elise was writing for money to her former
mistress. Elise had never said anything _to Mrs. Hoppner_ against either
Mrs. Shelley or Mademoiselle Claire or Shelley; but she had said things
against all three _to Paolo_, who had carried them to _Mr._ Hoppner.

In declaring so indignantly that she had never spoken disparagingly of her
former employers _to Mrs._ Hoppner, Elise was alike true in the letter and
false in the spirit of her words. The person _to whom_ she had spoken was
Paolo, who, carrying her communications to Mr. Hoppner, had modified them,
amended them, expanded them, as he saw the need of doing so, from the
Consul-General’s countenance. On seeing that Monsieur Hoppner made light
of the partly true story about the baby born in England, Paolo was quick
to enlarge his narrative with a story of another baby born in Italy;--the
story, told so cleverly, that the Consul-General and Mrs. Hoppner and
Byron all believed it. This is the reasonable explanation of the monstrous
fiction that Claire had a child by Shelley in Italy.

Before his stay at Ravenna came to an end Shelley rode over to Bagna
Cavallo (rendered _Bagrea Cava_ by Mr. Froude, and _Bazin-carello_ by the
_Edinburgh_ Reviewer) to see Allegra at the convent, where the greedy and
by no means exemplary little damsel had been under discipline for some
months; affectionate concern for Claire being his chief motive for riding
so far (25 miles) in the saddle, to visit the little school-miss, of whose
beauty and costume he wrote so pleasantly to his wife on his return to
Ravenna;--a letter written less for the gratification of Mary, to whom it
was addressed, than for the gratification of Mary’s sister.

Shelley had for some time been exercising his mind to discover some way of
arranging for the child’s nurture, less displeasing to her mother than
this conventual education. Acknowledging that, while Italy was stirred
with revolutionary excitement and the Romagna plotting for a general
insurrection, Byron did well in sending the child to the convent, Shelley
wished her now to be placed at some place where her mind would be less
subject to clerical influence, and her mother could visit her
occasionally, without inconvenience to herself or annoyance to Byron. One
of his notions for Allegra’s advantage was that Mrs. Mason (Lady
Mountcashel, who had written educational books for children, and affected
to be wise about the training of girls) should be moved to take charge of
Claire’s little one. For a moment he thought of the Pisan Convent of St.
Anna (Emilia Viviani’s convent), but only to decide that it was precisely
the place to which Allegra ought _not_ to be sent. Now that the Gambas and
Teresa Guiccioli, banished from the Papal territory, were waiting at
Florence for marching orders from Byron, whose sojourn at Ravenna had for
some time been prolonged only by indecision as to his future movements,
Shelley was urgent that Byron should withdraw the child from the nuns, to
whose custody she had been committed, only till some more eligible home
could be found for her.

It cannot be said that Shelley’s intercourse with Byron at Ravenna was
fruitful of wise decisions. Concluding that the question of Allegra’s
future education might stand over (a conclusion for which the elder poet’s
mental unsteadiness and Shelley’s inability to propose a better plan for
her nurture were equally accountable), Byron, on withdrawing from Ravenna,
at the end of October, 1821, left the child at Bagna Cavallo, to die there
of fever in the ensuing spring,--the last of the three fated children to
perish from the ways of man. In determining to take a Palazzo at Pisa, at
Shelley’s instance, though not altogether out of deference to his judgment
and counsel, Byron decided on a step that in no long time could not be
favourable to the cordial and even idolatrous sentiment, with which the
younger poet regarded him. On its death such enthusiastic and extravagant
hero-worship would necessarily be followed by feeling of an opposite kind;
and for the preservation of the sentiment of condescending respect on the
one side, and the sentiment of affectionate idolatry on the other side, it
was especially needful that the two poets should not be daily associates
for any considerable period. Had they continued to live on different sides
of Italy, Shelley might have idolized Byron to his last hour, and Byron
would never have been irritated by Shelley. In deciding to become
neighbours and almost daily companions at Pisa they resolved on a course
which, even without the annoyances coming to each of the poets from what
may be called the Leigh-Hunt complications, was certain to result in a
diminution of their friendliness for one another. It was also in the
highest degree inauspicious for their mutual good feeling that the two
friends in council agreed in thinking Leigh Hunt the very man who should
be invited to the editorial position which Tom Moore had prudently
declined to accept.

It devolved on Shelley to write the letter, which invited Leigh Hunt to
come out from England and join his correspondent and ‘noble friend’ Lord
Byron, in establishing _The Liberal_; and in his elation at the prospect
of again embracing his equally extortionate and delightful admirer, and at
finding himself in a position to render his charming friend a substantial
service, Shelley (writing to Hunt from Pisa on 26th August, 1821,)
invested the project with the roseate colouring most likely to heighten
its attractiveness to Hunt. He even went so far as to assure Hunt that he
would be Byron’s partner on equal footing and equal terms; that, whilst
taking one-half of the revenue from the magazine, he would contribute,
though in a different manner, no less than Byron to the success of their
joint enterprise. How far was Shelley sincere in such extravagance? There
is, no doubt, such a thing as honest adulation; and it is possible that
for the moment Byron and Leigh Hunt were equals in fame and achievement to
the poet, who, a short while earlier or later, declared himself a mere
earthworm in comparison with the godlike author of _Cain_,--

                  ‘the worm beneath the sod
  May lift itself in homage of the God.’

Declaring he would participate neither in the profits nor the borrowed
splendour of such a partnership, as should give the world a successful
_Liberal_, Shelley was ready to act as the connecting link between the two
poets, who were in the same degree superior to him in literary eminence
and power. With all his vanity and intellectual arrogance, Hunt had, of
course, enough worldly knowledge and mental sobriety to be aware that he
and Byron were other than equals; but all the same it tickled his
self-complacence to be told that the author of _Rimini_ was no less
considerable a personage than the author of _Childe Harold_. Moreover, the
excessive praise was an agreeable indication to Hunt that, in the distress
and confusion of his affairs, he might look confidently for further
assistance to the young enthusiast (‘Mr. Shelley,’ as Hunt always called
him in a deferential tone), whose pocket he had a few years since
lightened of 1400_l._ in a single sum, to say nothing of smaller sums. At
the same time, whilst accounting for his inability to send him a
remittance for travelling expenses from Byron’s purse, Shelley intimated
that he would obtain from another source the funds needful for his dearest
Hunt’s journey, with his wife and babes to Leghorn.

Since he found shelter from bailiffs at Marlow, and in return afforded the
author of _Alastor_ similar protection from clamorous creditors, things
had gone with Hunt from bad to worse, and from worse to a state of affairs
differing in little but name from actual bankruptcy. Drowning men catch at
straws, and the sinking Hunt was glad to clutch at so substantial a plank
as the proposal from Italy, which, under the smiles of fortune, might
prove a seaworthy craft. Knowing well that the proposal was made not so
much to Leigh Hunt the poet, as to Leigh Hunt the journalist, who was
supposed to be still editor and joint-proprietor of the _Examiner_, and
that the proposal was made to him in consideration, or at least not
without consideration, of his editorial power to commend the new
periodical to public favour, it was of course Hunt’s duty, before he
closed with the offer, to let both projectors know they might no longer
count upon the _Examiner_ as an influence for compassing the success of
the _Liberal_. Had he been actuated by any sentiment of honour, or by bare
commercial honesty, he would not have arranged to leave England without
first writing to both Byron and Shelley, ‘Your offer having been made
under, if not from, a misapprehension respecting my circumstances, I
cannot accept it unless you renew it after learning I have ceased to be
editor of the _Examiner_.’ Instead of treating Byron and Shelley with the
candour, which is a chief element in fair dealing between friends, he
started for Italy without a shilling of his own money in his pocket,
without an income of any kind from any source whatever, and without
letting either of them know he had determined his editorial connexion with
the powerful newspaper. It was a surprise alike to Shelley and Byron to
learn from Hunt, after his arrival at Leghorn, that he was no longer
editor of the _Examiner_. There is no escape from the ugly truth that the
brilliant, scholarly, irresistibly charming Leigh Hunt went to Italy with
the purpose of fixing himself, his wife and children on a nobleman, with
whom he had only the slightest acquaintance, and on a far from prosperous
friend whose purse he had repeatedly laid under heavy requisitions, and
with a clear intention of making them wholly responsible for the
maintenance of himself and family for a considerable period. It is also
certain that he thus went out to Italy without giving Byron and Shelley
any intimation of his purpose, or any grounds for suspecting it.

Under no conceivable circumstances could the three poets have worked
together harmoniously for as many years. They might, however, under
conceivable conditions, have accomplished the immediate purpose of their
partnership and avoided quarrelling, for eighteen months or even a couple
of years, had Hunt been able to get out to Pisa before the end of the
autumn, or at the latest by the end of December. But the winds and waves
combined with Moore and Murray to defeat the enterprise, to which Hunt
looked for preservation from utter financial ruin. It was not his fault
that it was near the end of June, 1822, before he entered Leghorn harbour.
Showing abundant alacrity in his preparations for leaving England, he
would have started for the sunny South at the end of September, had not
the vessel, in which he took berths for himself and his numerous family,
been detained in England till the 16th of November. From that day till the
end of June, his course was a series of vexatious misadventures. Detained
for three weeks by bad weather at Ramsgate, he was beaten up and down
Channel till the 22nd of December, when his ship put in at Dartmouth. Mrs.
Hunt being by that time too ill to proceed, the Hunts migrated to
Stonehouse (Plymouth), where they tarried till 22nd May, 1822, on which
day they set forth again for Leghorn, in another vessel, that was so
fortunate as to reach its destination at the close of June; when nine
months had elapsed since the berths were taken on the first vessel.

In the meantime, persons, who disapproved of Byron’s alliance with Shelley
and Hunt, had been at work to detach him from such dangerous associates,
and put him out of conceit with his new literary project. Entreated for
his reputation’s sake to be less intimate with Shelley, and warned of the
risks he ran in calling Hunt to his confidence, Byron was assured by
Hobhouse and Moore that even his genius and influence could not preserve
from ignominious failure an enterprise, in which he would be discredited
by his coadjutors. Time was in this affair even more prejudicial to Hunt’s
interests than the mischief-makers, who, having Byron’s ear, knew well how
to play on his least generous qualities. Before Hunt made his second
start for Italy, the friendship of the two Pisan exiles had been rudely
shaken by differences.

It is impossible to refrain from smiling at the recollection of the
letter, in which Shelley (who declined Polidori’s challenge at Geneva on
conscientious grounds, and at all stages of his career regarded duelling
with reasonable repugnance) averred that, were it not for considerations
moving him to do nothing of the kind, he would leave Italy forthwith, and
never enter a country inhabited by Byron, unless it were to arrange their
difficulties without words. To write in this vapouring vein to a
sympathetic correspondent is, of course, a very different thing from
sending a message of war at ten paces to so good a shot as the author of
_Don Juan_. Enough also is known of Shelley’s letters to render it
probable that (his brave words to the contrary notwithstanding) he never
for sixty consecutive moments seriously thought of ‘calling Byron out.’
There is no reason to think Shelley an exception to the general rule, that
men who mean fighting keep their purpose to themselves till they act upon
it. But none the less does the laughably valorous epistle point to a state
of discord between the recently harmonious poets, that cannot have tended
to quicken or strengthen Byron’s friendliness for Hunt, whom he had valued
chiefly for being Shelley’s _protégé_, and had selected for his literary
coadjutor at Shelley’s request.

Whilst Hunt necessarily suffered in Byron’s regard from the mere decline
of the last-named poet’s friendliness for Shelley, he suffered in the same
respect also from a singular indiscretion into which Shelley was betrayed
by his desire to serve the author of _Rimini_. Driven to Plymouth by
stress of weather and the state of his wife’s health, Hunt, who had made
the false start for Italy with an insufficiently furnished pocket, soon
found himself under the necessity of begging Shelley to send him money
from Pisa. To the weather-bound adventurer it, of course, appeared that,
as he was bound for Italy at Byron’s invitation to co-operate with him in
an important enterprise, he had a moral right to look to him for a
remittance; and had he, in regard to his financial position, dealt frankly
with the famous and affluent poet, few readers would decline to recognize
Hunt’s title to needful assistance. It was under these circumstances that,
instead of writing straight to Byron on the subject (which would have been
the manlier course), Hunt wrote from England not once, but repeatedly, to
Shelley, to do for his benefit what he should have done for himself, in a
letter addressed to Byron. Explaining the causes of his urgent need of
money, Hunt moved Shelley to ask Byron for it. As it would doubtless have
been less disagreeable to him to increase his more considerable than
burdensome debt to Shelley, than to open his business relations with Byron
by asking for a not trifling loan, it is probable that the request to
Shelley to get the money from Byron was only Hunt’s way of asking Shelley
to supply it from his own pocket. Anyhow, the request caused Shelley to
empty his pocket into Hunt’s hands, rather than apply for money to Byron
(with whom he was still on uneasy terms, though they had recently arranged
their differences) and send Hunt 150_l._--a gift that reduced to less than
40_l._ the donor’s reserve of money for his own current expenses.

In addition to the 150_l._ sent to Hunt, Shelley was ready to give him any
sum for which _Charles the First_ could be sold. In brief, Shelley was
ready to do anything for the relief of his _protégé_, with the exception
of going either to Lord Byron or to the Jews. But all he could do, without
taking either of these steps, was insufficient for Hunt, who, pocketing
the remitted money, wrote back to Pisa that Byron must be pressed for
more. Thus driven, Shelley committed the indiscretion (to which reference
has been made) in writing Byron this remarkable letter:--

    ‘_Pisa, February 15th, 1822._

    ‘MY DEAR LORD BYRON,

    ‘I enclose you a letter from Leigh Hunt, which annoys me on more than
    one account. You will observe the postscript, and you know me well
    enough to feel how painful the task is set me in commenting upon it.
    Hunt had urged me more than once to ask you to lend him this money. My
    answer consisted in sending him all I could spare, which I have now
    literally done. Your kindness in fitting up a part of your own house
    for his accommodation I sensibly felt, and willingly accepted from you
    on his part, but, believe me, without the slightest intention of
    imposing, or, if I could help it, allowing to be imposed, any heavier
    task on your purse. As it has come to this, in spite of my exertions,
    I will not conceal from you the low ebb of my own money affairs in the
    present moment, that is, my absolute incapacity of assisting Hunt
    farther.

    ‘I do not think poor Hunt’s promise to pay in a given time is worth
    very much; but mine is less subject to uncertainty, and I should be
    happy to be responsible for any engagement he may have proposed to
    you. I am so much annoyed by this subject that I hardly know what to
    write, and much less what to say; and I have need of all your
    indulgence in judging both my feelings and expressions. I shall see
    you by-and-by.

      ‘Believe me, yours most faithfully and sincerely,
        ‘P. B. SHELLEY.’

Written to support Hunt’s direct application to Byron for a remittance,
Shelley’s affectionate concern for the whole of the Hunt party puts it
beyond question, that this epistle was written sincerely in the interest
of the unfortunate man of letters, and without a notion of the injury it
would do him in Byron’s esteem. It was Shelley’s way of saying, ‘Do lend
the poor fellow the money on _my_ personal security;’ and to readers
bearing in mind the delicacy and tension that had succeeded the previous
friendly relations of the two poets, it cannot be surprising that Shelley
found himself unable to make such a request of Byron, without saying at
the same time that he had done his utmost for his friend’s relief. All the
same, the letter gave a view of Hunt’s character and dealings, that
lowered him in the regard of the poet, who with generous incaution had
fitted up rooms for the necessitous family in the Palazzo Lanfranchi.
Opening Byron’s eyes to several matters, it informed him, that Hunt had
for some time been sponging on the slender resources of his too yielding
friend; that Hunt had for some time been pressing Shelley to apply to the
Palazzo Lanfranchi for money; that Hunt’s direct application to the lord
of that palazzo had not been made till the petitioner had done his utmost
to force Shelley to prefer the request for him; that the applicant for a
remittance had constrained Shelley to join in the request he had refused
to make by himself. The letter must have caused Byron to suspect that Hunt
had in former years bled Shelley copiously, and have shown him how
powerless Shelley was to hold his own against the cool and clever
practitioner of the art of getting money, without either earning it or
stealing it. Byron’s comment on Shelley’s letter must have been to this
effect: ‘So that is Mr. Hunt’s way of handling Shelley, is it? He won’t
handle me so easily.’

Byron’s treatment of the Hunts in Italy displayed some of his least
amiable traits. He should not have failed in courtesy to Mrs. Hunt, who
was a _woman_ and an invalid. He might have been more gracious, without
being less firm, to the _man_. It was paltry of him, in his reasonable
annoyance with the equally elegant and unscrupulous adventurer, to give an
untrue account of the circumstances that determined him to start the
_Liberal_. But on learning, at the end of June, from Hunt’s lips, that he
had ceased to be editor of the _Examiner_, and was for the moment without
a crown in his pocket, or without any means whatsoever for paying the
weekly bills of his numerous family in the lower rooms of the Palazzo
Lanfranchi, the author of _Don Juan_ had good reason for feeling that,
besides being on his guard against pecuniary imposition, he had better let
Hunt see clearly, and at once, that he (the author of _Don Juan_) would
not submit tamely to exaction.

No less ignorant than Byron of the desperate state of his friend’s
pecuniary affairs,--a state amounting to absolute destitution so far as
the term is applicable to a clever man of letters,--till he spoke with
Hunt at Leghorn, Shelley must have felt himself in a peculiarly delicate
and painful position in regard to Byron, on hearing that their partner in
the _Liberal_ was alike without income and any prospect of income, apart
from the literary project, which was still only a project. For months he
had been aware of the degree in which Byron was influenced by the
advisers, who were entreating him to withdraw even at the last moment from
his entanglement with the Hunts. For months he had been aware in how great
a degree Byron had lost confidence in the literary venture, and how gladly
he would have discovered a way of withdrawing honourably, and at no
excessive cost, from an enterprise which he deemed foredoomed to failure.
For months he had, in Hunt’s interest, maintained a hollow show of his
former admiration for, and of his former attachment to, Byron, encouraging
him to recover his former confidence in their joint enterprise, and to be
assured that, on the arrival of the _Examiner’s_ editor, his anticipations
of catastrophe would be speedily followed by the triumph of the
undertaking, in which they would be comrades. All this Shelley had endured
and done for Hunt’s sake, in the hope of keeping the poet of overpowering
popularity and sufficient purse in humour with the project, which under
auspicious conditions would make Hunt prosperous for life. Byron’s
repeated expressions of distrust in Hunt’s adequacy for his part in the
undertaking had been met by Shelley with repetitions of the statement that
‘Hunt was editor of the _Examiner_.’ When Hunt at length appeared on the
scene, he was _not_ editor of the _Examiner_.

Entering his Pisan home on the 1st November, 1821, Byron took up his abode
in the stately house at a time when his relations with Shelley were
altogether cordial, and Shelley’s admiration of him was at its highest
extravagance. Delighted with his reception and treatment at Ravenna in the
previous August, Shelley had now spent more than two months in emotions of
generous and romantic worship of Byron’s greatness; and it was his
fortune, perhaps his good fortune, to regard Byron with the same
idolatrous enthusiasm for something more than another two months, before
his admiration of so angelic a being was qualified by painful suspicions
that he had rated his idol somewhat too highly,--suspicions followed at a
brief interval by the differences which, but for his concern for Hunt’s
interests, would, perhaps, have caused ‘the worm’ to turn and writhe in
open mutiny against ‘the God.’

Fascinated at Ravenna by the great poet’s courtesies and flattering
manifestations of confidence, Shelley exulted for a brief while in the
prospect of figuring before the world as the great Byron’s peculiar and
most influential friend. Whilst it is curious to observe in his letters
from Ravenna to his wife, and in some of his subsequent epistles to Horace
Smith, Peacock, and Gisborne, how greatly he was impressed by the pomp and
grandeur of his ‘noble friend’s’ domestic arrangements, it is even more
interesting to contemplate in the same letters the boyish simplicity and
exultation, with which Shelley spoke of the great Byron’s regard for him,
and of the advantages that would accrue to him from familiar association
with so superlative a personage. Possessing the great poet’s ear, he
enjoyed his confidence. Byron was moving to Pisa in compliance with his
advice. It was he (and no other man) who had taken the finest palace on
the Lung’Arno of Pisa for the great Byron’s sufficient accommodation.

To read attentively certain of the published letters that passed between
Shelley and his wife whilst he was at Ravenna, is to see how they
frightened one another through the post into imagining themselves the
victims of a conspiracy that aimed at rendering their lives miserable and
insecure;--to see also how, for several days after their reunion, they
continued to nurse the wild and terrifying fancy that, to protect
themselves against fanatical enemies, working for their destruction, to
guard themselves and their child from death by poison or the knife, it was
needful for them to surround themselves with powerful friends.

That Mary might not resist his purpose of staying another winter and
spring in the city, where he would have Byron for his neighbour and most
familiar associate, Shelley instructed her to rate at their proper worth
the security and protection she and her husband would derive from Byron’s
countenance:--security and protection they might sorely need at Florence
or any other Italian capital, now that they had been selected for
exemplary persecution by the fanatical enemies of Free Thought. That they
had provoked the animosity of implacable adversaries was manifest from
what had come to his ears at Ravenna. Instructing his wife that the
current calumnies about himself should be regarded as preliminary measures
for their destruction, taken by subtle and resolute foes, who would be
satisfied with nothing less than his and her ruin, Shelley wished her to
realize the perils of their position and determine what course they had
better adopt for the preservation of life, liberty, happiness. Though
attractive to them for divers considerations, Florence, for reasons darkly
hinted at in the correspondence, would now abound with dangers to which
they had better not expose themselves. For himself he would like nothing
better than to retire with his Mary and her child to an island inhabited
by no one but themselves, and there devote either to oblivion, or to
future generations, the overflowings of a mind which, timely withdrawn
from the contagion, would be kept fit for no baser object. If they
determined on settling on a desert island, they should have the courage to
go to it in no company but their own. There should be no compromise in the
matter, no concession to weaknesses, begotten of long intercourse with the
human race. If they took two or three chosen companions with them, the
devil would be sure to appear amongst them. No, should they decide to
emigrate to a desolate island, they must make the voyage by themselves. In
brief, they should build a boat and shut upon their retreat the
flood-gates of the world. On second and saner thoughts, however, he was of
opinion they had better not build a boat and retreat behind the
flood-gates.

The proposal for emigration to a solitary island having been dismissed as
an impracticable project, Shelley begged Mary to consider another plan
for defeating the enemies, banded together for their destruction. Instead
of retiring to a desolate island, or offering their breasts to the
assassin’s dagger at Florence, they might remain at Pisa under conditions
that would render existence at the same time safer and more agreeable than
heretofore. Instead of traversing the treacherous sea in an open boat to a
tenantless island, it would surely be better for her and himself to stay
where they were, to surround themselves with a few congenial people, even
though the devil should be one of them, and in short to do their best to
make themselves happy at Pisa, and the neighbouring Baths, for another
twelve months. The Williamses would remain at Pisa, if she and he decided
to remain there. The Hunts also would be at Pisa at least for the winter,
should Leigh Hunt determine on migrating to Italy. Lord Byron and his
Italian friends would be there also; and though the Gambas and Teresa
Guiccioli might not be desirable acquaintances from every point of view,
Byron’s friendship would be invaluable. What had occurred to account for
so quick a change of sentiment respecting Florence and the plan of
wintering there? Positively nothing besides Byron’s determination to
settle at Pisa for a few months or years.

As the choice of alternatives lay between emigration to a solitary island
and another term of residence at Pisa, it is not surprising that Mrs.
Shelley decided in favour of the latter. Whilst few women were less
qualified for seclusion, few had a keener appetite for society, than
William Godwin’s clever and brilliant daughter. The woman, who fretted at
the isolation and monotony of her existence at Naples and Rome, would have
died of _ennui_ or gone mad in a month in the severe seclusion of a
sea-girt paradise, with no companions but her husband and her little boy.
It had not been her intention to stay another year at Pisa. For several
reasons she would have preferred wintering at Florence with the Horace
Smiths. She had seen enough of Pisa, and more than enough of some of her
‘dirty enough’ Pisan acquaintances. But weeks before Byron, with his
bodyguard of liveried lacqueys and his menagerie of domesticated animals,
took possession of the Palazzo Lanfranchi, she was well pleased with the
notion of staying longer at Pisa.

So the circle was formed towards the close of 1821 under favourable
auspices:--the circle whose life was described so fully in _The Real Lord
Byron_, that its doings need only be alluded to cursorily in the present
chapter. It was the circle of Teresa Guiccioli and the Gambas (Teresa’s
father and brother, with whom she lived at a short distance from the
Lanfranchi palace); the Williamses, of whose social endowments mention has
been made on a previous page; pleasant Tom Medwin, whose books afford only
faint indications of the elegant taste and generous qualities that
endeared him to the author of _Adonais_; handsome, shrewd, adventurous,
high-hearted Trelawny, who joined the party at the opening of the year
1822; and Taafe, the blundering rider and writer, whose clumsy
horsemanship occasioned the fracas with the serjeant-major and the guard
at the city, that eventually resulted in Byron’s migration to Genoa,--the
circle of charming and diversely memorable men and women, that had Byron
for its planet and Shelley for its chief subordinate luminary. Had the
Hunts fulfilled the hopes of their especial friends, and entered Leghorn
Harbour in time to keep Christmas at Pisa, the Shelleys would have been,
at least for a time, altogether satisfied and delighted with this circle
of new and old acquaintances, who had gathered about _them_ rather than
about the poet of brighter and wider celebrity, whom they had drawn to
what may be called their own coterie:--a circle which, though keeping its
virtues as far as possible to itself, and having little or nothing to do
with the general society of Pisa, or any other set of Pisan visitors,
contributed not a little to the enlivenment of the usually tranquil, not
to say rather torpid, little town.

The excess of Shelley’s enthusiasm for Byron pointed, however, to an
inevitable revulsion of feeling, in which the worshiper would probably
think as much too lightly, as he had in former time thought far too
worshipfully, of his hero. The younger poet’s idolatry was, to use a
familiar expression, too strong to last. No man of sensibility and
self-respect can persist for any great length of time in regarding himself
as a worm and his fellow-man and daily companion as a god. To regard one’s
next-door neighbour as divine to-day, is to regard him as altogether, and
in some respects meanly, human six months hence. There were other
considerations, to satisfy any clear-sighted and judicial observer of the
intercourse of the two poets at Ravenna, and of their regard for one
another, that it was not in the nature of things for the man of rank and
high celebrity, and the man of very inferior rank and no celebrity, to
live together for twelve months without friction and disagreement. In
truth, they were never wholly at ease with one another.

Elevated slightly, but only by one or two generations of ancestral
dignity, above people of the middle way of life, Shelley possessed
precisely the degree of aristocratic quality to render him sensitive for
his dignity in his relations with a man of Byron’s superior rank; far more
sensitive than he would have been had he, like Tom Moore, stept, by right
of genius, from a wine-shop to the salons of ‘the great.’ At the same
time, the uneasiness of his attitude towards Byron, whilst chiefly
referable to their difference of social degree, was increased by his sense
of Byron’s superiority in fame and wealth. How this uneasiness affected
Shelley, even when he felt most cordially and idolatrously towards his
‘noble friend,’ appears from the letter he dated on 10th August, 1821,
from Ravenna (_vide_ Moore’s _Life_) to Mrs. Shelley, where he speaks of
his inability to ask money of Byron for Hunt’s benefit. ‘Lord Byron and
I,’ he wrote, ‘are excellent friends, and were I reduced to poverty, or
were I a writer who had no claims to an higher station than I possess,--or
did I possess an higher than I deserve, we should appear in all things as
such, and I would freely ask him any favour. Such is not now the case. The
demon of mistrust and pride lurks between two persons in our situation,
poisoning the freedom of our intercourse.’

Though he did not go to Ravenna _in order_ to confer with Byron on Hunt’s
affairs, Shelley journeyed thither _with the purpose_ of interesting Byron
in them. For some time Shelley had been troubled in his mind by the
thought of his friend’s financial difficulties; and he had not been many
hours in the Palazzo Guiccioli, before he found occasion to speak
sympathetically of Hunt’s pecuniary distress. On hearing how Byron had
given the _Memoirs_ to Tom Moore, and how Moore had sold them to Murray
for 2000_l._, Shelley grudged Moore the gift that would have been so
serviceable to the author of _Rimini_. ‘I wish,’ he wrote to his wife, ‘I
had been in time to have interceded for a part of it for poor Hunt.’
Though the _Liberal_ was altogether Byron’s project, it was at Shelley’s
instance that the projector of the luckless magazine selected Hunt for the
position of editorial coadjutor; and whilst making this selection _in_ his
own interest, though at Shelley’s instance, Byron, no doubt, had pleasure
in feeling that the arrangement, which promised advantage to himself,
would be beneficial to a struggling man of letters. This fact alone gave
the faint colouring of truth to Byron’s subsequent mis-statements,
respecting the benevolent motives and humane purpose that determined him
to start the _Liberal_. At Ravenna (where he carefully refrained from
asking Byron to advance money for Hunt’s travelling expenses) Shelley
could congratulate himself on Byron’s offer to take Hunt for his
_collaborateur_, without regarding it as a favour done to himself, or
thinking of it as a proposal for an arrangement that could, under any
contingency, compromise his own independence of, and freedom from,
obligation to the poet of exalted rank. The case was altered a few months
later, when Byron’s vacillation put Shelley under the necessity of doing
his utmost to hold him to his engagement with Hunt. On exerting himself
for this end, it was natural for the sensitive Shelley to feel that he
might be suspected of speaking in his own, no less than in Hunt’s,
interest; to feel that after all he was asking a pecuniary favour of
Byron. In this sensitiveness for his independence, and jealous care to
avoid every appearance of seeking or accepting material advantage from his
social superior, readers may see the explanation of Shelley’s resolve to
share neither in the profits nor the _éclat_ of the literary enterprise.

Under these circumstances, it would have been passing strange had Shelley
persisted in his reverential regard for Byron. In any case, his idolatry
of so imperfect a hero would have perished more or less abruptly under the
conditions of close intimacy and daily intercourse for a considerable
period; but the annoyance, resulting to the younger poet from a state of
things which compelled him to combat Byron’s irresolution with words, that
might expose him to ungenerous suspicion, accelerated the moment for the
inevitable revulsion of feeling. The differences which, but for Shelley’s
devotion to Hunt’s interest, would perhaps have developed rapidly into
open rupture, were capable of adjustment; but they necessarily resulted in
a permanent change in Shelley’s feeling for Byron. The differences
admitted of adjustment. For a season they were adjusted. None the less
they changed the younger poet’s regard for his noble friend. The transient
revival of Shelley’s hope that, after all, the _Liberal_ would enrich
Hunt, was attended with no renewal of his old enthusiasm for the author of
_Don Juan_, about whom he soon began to write and chatter as much too
disparagingly as he had formerly written and talked too worshipfully.
Instead of flaming into frank rage, he concealed his irritation from his
former idol, whilst venting it from time to time in bitter words whispered
to Mary’s ear, and bitter words written to correspondents, who were not
likely to report them to Byron.

The old story of unreasonable hope, ending in unreasonable disappointment,
was told yet again,--the story told so often in Shelley’s troublous
record! Shelley idolized his eldest sister only to discover in a brief
while how unworthy she was of his good opinion. The first period of his
extravagant admiration of Hogg was followed abruptly by a period in which
he detested him. After mistaking Eliza Hitchener for an angel, he soon
mistook her for a brown she-devil. Delighting in Eliza Westbrook for a
season, he quickly learnt to loathe her. Vowing to love Harriett Westbrook
for ever, he found life intolerable with her in less than three nuptial
years. Vowing to worship his second wife above all other women, he, in due
course, discovered her inferiority to Emilia Viviani and Jane Williams.
Meaning to be happy with Hogg for ever, he soon flitted from York, to get
out of his way. Throwing himself on Byron in August, 1821, with the
intention of delighting in him for ever, he quickly began to vapour about
fighting him. Either Shelley lacked steadfastness of affection, or was
singularly unfortunate in selecting his objects of affection. In this
respect he resembled Byron, whom he also resembled in his unamiable and
undignified practice of writing bitterly of people whom he had ceased to
love.

On passing from affection for his sister Elizabeth, he wrote in angry
disparagement of her. On coming to uneasy terms with his mother, he wrote
disdainfully of her mental narrowness. On ceasing to delight in Eliza
Hitchener, he wrote of her that she was a brown demon and an
hermaphrodite. After idolizing Mrs. Boinville, he wrote about her
insincerity. After quarrelling with Eliza Westbrook, he wrote of her that
she was a loathsome worm. Writing thus of women with whom he was out of
humour, he dealt in the same way with men he no longer liked. Having loved
his father in his childhood, he was only at manhood’s threshold when he
began to write monstrous untruths to his discredit. In the interval
between the first period and the second period of his affection for Hogg,
he wrote of him that he was a treacherous friend, a libertine, and a
seducer. Whilst living in friendship with Thomas Love Peacock, he wrote of
him as though he was attached to a free-handed benefactor by
considerations of self-interest. Soon after worshiping Byron as a god, he
wrote of him (on 2nd March, 1822, to Leigh Hunt) that certain dispositions
of his character, rendered him intolerable as an intimate associate, and
(on 18th June, 1822, to John Gisborne) that he was ‘the nucleus of all
that is hateful and tiresome’ in society. It is thus Shelley wrote of his
former friends after falling out with them. Whilst reflecting with
reasonable severity on Byron’s readiness to ‘libel his friends all round,’
the Shelleyan apologists say nothing of Shelley’s exhibitions of the same
ungenerous propensity.

Whilst Byron vacillated between hope and despair for the success of the
_Liberal_, between a cordial disposition to persist in the enterprise and
a fainthearted inclination to drop it, Shelley (for Hunt’s sake) and Hunt
(for his own sake) were determined to hold their unsteady partner to his
compact with them. If Byron suspected Shelley and Hunt of a design to use
him for their own ends, the suspicion certainly was not groundless.
Shelley and Hunt became in a certain sense confederates against their
partner, in having an understanding and mutual confidence from which he
was excluded. Shelley’s chief, though _not_ sole, interest in the affair
was his concern for Hunt (his senior by eight years). Had he been acting
only for himself, Shelley, on discerning the faintest disposition on
Byron’s part to withdraw from the venture, would have said, ‘If your heart
is not in the enterprise, let it be dropt like so many other designs, as a
mere project not to be acted upon.’ But Shelley was acting in the interest
of a friend, to whom he was in the highest degree desirous of rendering
substantial service; a friend whom he wished to have near him in Italy (a
powerful consideration, that largely qualified the disinterestedness of
his otherwise unselfish action); a friend who (_vide_ Shelley’s letter of
2nd March, 1822--in Forman’s edition of the poet’s _Prose Works_) had
committed to him ‘the task of keeping Byron in heart with the project
until his arrival.’ Consequently, when Byron showed a wish to retire from
the enterprise, Shelley said, ‘You are bound for poor Hunt’s sake to go on
with it.’

Long before Hunt left England, Shelley knew Byron would fain have
withdrawn from the project for starting the _Liberal_, but in his absent
friend’s interest pressed Byron to persist in the enterprise. Long before
he left England, Hunt himself knew that Byron had repented of inviting him
to Italy, and would have dropt the project of the magazine, had it not
been for Shelley. On sailing from England in May, Hunt knew he was setting
out to fix himself on a man who, but for Shelley, would have told him to
remain at home,--a fact not to be overlooked in the estimate of Hunt’s
conduct, in going out to Italy with concealment of the main feature of his
financial trouble. From the moment when they combined to hold Byron to an
arrangement from which he wished to retire, Shelley and Hunt (acting
together in the manner described by Shelley’s own pen) were confederates
against him, in being set on using him for their own ends against his own
will.

One would like to know how far Byron was cognizant of the irritation he
caused Shelley by his vacillations about the literary project. Yet more
one would like to know to what extent he was aware of Shelley’s permanent
change of feeling for him. It is difficult to conceive that so sensitive a
man failed to detect the change of sentiment. But Byron’s egotism may have
blinded him to what his sensibility would otherwise have discovered. On
the other hand, it must be remembered that, in his loyalty to the absent
Hunt, and in his keen desire to nurse Byron’s favour and influence for
Hunt’s benefit, Shelley was at great pains to conceal from his former idol
the deep-seated alteration of his regard for him. It is conceivable that,
notwithstanding the February ‘differences,’ Byron never knew how
completely he had fallen from Shelley’s heart and homage. Anyhow, the two
poets remained in daily intercourse with one another, and maintained a
show of undiminished friendliness. Playing billiards with Byron, and
contending with him in pistol-practice, Shelley often figured in the
Byronic riding-parties, and appeared at the weekly dinner-parties of the
Palazzo Lanfranchi. At the same time Mrs. Shelley lived sociably with
Teresa Guiccioli.




CHAPTER XVI.

CLOSING SCENES.

    Shelley’s Attachment to Jane Williams--Her Womanly Goodness--Her
    Devotion to her Husband--_The Serpent is shut out from
    Paradise_--_Essay on the Devil_--Shelley’s Happiness and Discord with
    Mary--Her Remorseful Verses--Trials of her Married Life--_Essay on
    Christianity_--San Terenzo and Lerici--The Casa Magni--Mary’s Illness
    and Melancholy at San Terenzo--Arrival of the ‘Don Juan’--Mutual
    Affection of Mrs. Shelley and Mrs. Williams--Shelley’s latest Visions
    and Hallucinations--Leigh Hunt’s Arrival in Italy--Shelley sails for
    Leghorn--Meeting of Shelley and Hunt--Improvement in Shelley’s
    Health--His Mediation between Hunt and Byron--The Hunts in the Palazzo
    Lanfranchi--Lady Shelley’s Account of the Difficulties between Byron
    and Shelley--Shelley’s Contentment with his Arrangements for the
    Hunts--He sets Sail for Lerici--The Fatal Storm--Cremation on the
    Sea-shore--Grave at Rome.


The time has come for a few more words about Shelley’s attachment to Jane
Williams,--the last of the series of fair women who successively inspired
him with feelings of adorative fondness, that, differing widely from such
love as animated Byron towards his several mistresses, differed no less
widely from the placid preferences of passionless friendship. No
sympathetic student of the poet’s character and story can entertain even a
momentary suspicion of the refinement and purity of Shelley’s regard for
the gentle and fine-natured woman, to whom he addressed the saddest and
sweetest poetry of his life’s closing term. To say this of the feelings
that swayed his soul in all its successive services of homage towards his
friend’s wife, is indeed to say no more than I would declare of each and
all of the so-called platonic attachments that preceded his worship of
Jane Williams.

I have no shadow of a doubt that the always abundant and sometimes glowing
fervour of these attachments was never touched for a single instant by
desire. On this point my confidence proceeds no less from my clear
apprehension of the peculiarity which I venture to designate Shelley’s
prime physical defect, than from an equally precise perception of his
sentimental idiosyncrasy. But in respect to some of these so-called
platonic attachments, this conviction is raised to still higher certainty
by the conditions, under which Shelley approached the objects of his
sentimental preference, or by the characteristics of the women he
distinguished so highly. Though it would be absurd to infer anything from
the moral rectitude or the delicacy of the young lady, who asked money of
her poetical worshiper, and passed from her convent into wedlock only to
be separated from her husband, after leading him (to use Mrs. Shelley’s
expression) ‘a devil of a life’ for a very brief while, the conditions,
under which Shelley was permitted to have personal intercourse with Emilia
Viviani, put it beyond question that, in their curious intimacy, he never
strayed beyond the lines of social decorum and conventional propriety. In
the case of Emilia’s successor, confidence in the purity of Shelley’s
passion, and in the delicacy of his addresses, is raised even higher,--is
raised, indeed, to absolute certainty,--by the moral excellences of the
lady, and all her domestic circumstances, as well as by all the other
conditions and features of a friendship that, even in the tenderest and
warmest of its emotional developments, could not have been more innocent
had Shelley been a woman.

In some particulars the last of Shelley’s spiritual passions resembled his
wilder and more tumultuous idolatry of Emilia Viviani. Just as he worshipt
Emilia because fancy tricked him into thinking her a realization of his
long-cherished ideal of all that was or could be admirable in womankind,
he idolized Jane Williams as an example of the particular type of feminine
loveliness that swayed his imagination whilst he was composing _The
Sensitive Plant_. Whilst he worshipt Jane as the veritable realization of
a pure anticipatory cognition, even as he had worshipt Emilia a year
earlier for her imaginary correspondence to a more comprehensive
conception of feminine excellence, Shelley rendered the homage of his
spiritual devotion to Mrs. Williams in a way that reminds one of his
manner of wooing Emilia. Associating his wife with himself in his
addresses to Emilia, he made Jane’s husband a sympathetic co-operator in
his addresses to Mrs. Williams, by selecting him for the fittest possible
confidant of his affectionate regard for the lady, and even inducing him
to act as the medium through which she received his friend’s adoration.
There were indeed occasions when Williams and his wife were in this
manner rendered the joint-recipients of the homage which she alone evoked,
Mary being, at the same time, imperfectly cognizant of the course of the
platonic suit to which Jane’s husband consented. In a former page I spoke
of the affair with Emilia Viviani as a kind of three-cornered flirtation.
The same term is applicable to the affair in which Edward Williams was
scarcely less a principal than his wife and Shelley. The two
three-cornered flirtations differed, however, in the fact that the later
of them had a deeply interested, though by no means equally gratified,
spectator of something of the proceedings. This spectator was Mary, who,
whilst cognizant of the general progress of what she cannot be supposed to
have approved, was kept wholly in the dark as to some of its incidents.
Whilst Williams consented sympathetically to an affair of which he knew
every particular, Mrs. Shelley consented submissively (though, of course,
by no means cheerfully) to an affair respecting which she was far from
fully informed.

On 26th January, 1822, when no breath of discord had yet ruffled his
relations with Byron, Shelley, from his own apartment in the same house in
which the Williamses had a set of rooms (a house on the Lung’Arno, but
divided by the river from Byron’s palazzo), sent Williams _The Serpent is
shut out from Paradise_, together with the characteristic note, which
instructed Williams, that he might read to ‘Jane, but to no one else,’ the
poem, containing the confession:

  ‘Therefore, if now I see you seldomer,
    Dear friends, dear _friend_! know that I only fly
        Your looks, because they stir
    Grief that should sleep, and hopes that cannot die:
  The very comfort that they minister
        I scarce can bear, yet I,
    So deeply is the arrow gone,
  Should quickly perish if it were withdrawn.

  When I return to my cold home, you ask
    Why I am not as I have ever been.
        _You_ spoil me for the task
    Of acting a forced part in life’s dull scene,--
  Of wearing on my brow the idle mask
        Of author, great or mean,
    In the world’s carnival. I sought
  Peace thus, and, but in you, I found it not.’

The little effort of literary mystification, to be observed in the note
which accompanied these verses to Edward Williams, affords another point
of resemblance between the Emilia-Viviani affair and the affair with Jane
Williams. Just as the _Epipsychidion_ was offered to the public with a
preface which attributed the composition to the real author’s ‘unfortunate
friend’ who ‘died at Florence, as he was preparing for a voyage to one of
the wildest of the Sporades,’ the verses are offered to Edward Williams as
poetry taken from the portfolio in which the poet’s friend used ‘to keep
his verses,’--the object of this misrepresentation to Williams and Jane,
who were in the real author’s confidence, being less than obvious. Given,
of course, for a reason no less sufficient than manifest, the direction
that the verses should be shown to _no one but Jane_ was, no doubt, duly
observed by the receivers of the poem. Williams, in his diary, may well
have styled the verses ‘beautiful, but too melancholy lines.’ One can
imagine how commiseratingly the happy husband and wife (to whom the verses
were sent, or rather the husband _through_ whom the verses were
transmitted, and the wife _to_ whom they were addressed) spoke of the
wretchedness of their friend who, in his inability to find contentment,
such as their own mutual happiness, in the society of his Mary, spoke of
his chambers in the same house (the Tre Palazzi) as his ‘cold home.’ It is
certainly less surprising that Shelley desired the verses to be withheld
from Mary, than that he was so communicative respecting the cheerlessness
of the apartment, of which she was the mistress.

A brief note on the poem’s first line (‘The serpent is shut out from
Paradise’), written at a time when it was Byron’s humour to call Shelley
‘the serpent’ or ‘the snake.’ Accepting the title in good part, and indeed
as a compliment, Shelley, only a few weeks before sending the verses to
the Williamses, had written to Byron about the culprit, who was _not_
burned at Lucca for scattering the eucharistic wafers from the altar, ‘I
hear this morning that the design, which certainly had been in
contemplation, of _burning my fellow serpent_, has been abandoned, and
that he has been condemned to the galleys.’ Knowing how Shelley regarded
the serpent as typical of the wisdom, that is especially hateful to
bigots, and delighted in regarding himself as akin to the serpent in being
largely endowed with the same wisdom, Byron had of course more reasons
for calling him ‘the snake’ than he troubled himself to declare, when he
observed ‘_Goethe’s Mephistofilus_ calls the serpent who tempted Eve “my
aunt the renowned snake”; and I always insist that Shelley is nothing but
one of her nephews, _walking about on the tip of his tail_’; a peculiarly
Byronic flippancy that appears in the concluding paragraph of Shelley’s
_Essay on the Devil_--‘... before this misconduct it hopped along upon its
tail; a mode of progression which, if I was a serpent, I should think the
severer punishment of the two.’

Few readers will question that this remarkable coincidence of humour and
verbal form in the Byronic utterance and the Shelleyan essay (an essay
withheld from the public eye long after the death of both poets) should be
deemed a clear indication, that Byron either perused the essay or was the
originator of at least one of its humorous sallies. If Byron did not take
the thought and words from the essay, Shelley must be assumed to have
taken them from him. To the present writer the coincidence is part of the
superabundant evidence that, Byron was accountable for the piquancy,
incisiveness, and Don-Juanesque levity that distinguish the _Essay on the
Devil_ from all Shelley’s other prose productions. For the purpose of
exalting the younger at the expense of the elder poet, many extravagant
things have been written about Shelley’s influence on Byron. That Shelley
influenced Byron greatly is unquestionable, but it is not to be supposed
the influences arising from the close, and for a while harmonious,
intercourse of the two poets, were altogether one-sided,--that whilst
receiving much from his familiar companion, Byron gave him nothing. The
_Essay on Christianity_ and the _Essay on the Devil_ are distinctly
assignable to the same period of Shelley’s literary productiveness; and to
turn from the one to the other, is to pass from the society of the Real
Shelley, to the society of Shelley speaking under the inspiration of
Byronic mockery.

At this late point of their brief association, when he is under the sway
of a spiritual attachment that endured till his death, and she is
regarding his services of homage to her familiar friend, the occasion
rises for inquiring, whether Mary has experienced an average share of
felicity since she eloped from the old home in Skinner Street? whether
Shelley has been to her all she hoped of him, when she took the momentous
step of July, 1814? whether, in addition to trouble, for which he is in
no degree to be held responsible, she has endured trouble he either caused
her, or might have preserved her from? whether her anticipations of
felicity from their association have been realized? whether, in brief,
their marriage has been a happy one?

Much has been written of the perfect happiness that came to both Shelley
and Mary from their association. It has been proclaimed by romantic
biography that the soul of each found its perfect complement in the
other’s soul, that their conjugal intimacy was singularly felicitous, and
that, whilst they dwelt together in harmony seldom accorded to spouses,
neither was ever for a single moment disappointed in the other. The
present writer ventures to declare no less confidently that their marriage
was by no means remarkable for happiness,--that they were not a well-mated
couple.

In respect to intellectual endowments and sympathy, it cannot be
questioned for a moment that Shelley was more fitly matched with Mary
Godwin than with Harriett Westbrook; but mental unison is not sufficient
for perfect conjugal concord. I do not suggest that during the eight
years’ interval between their elopement and Shelley’s death they ceased to
care for one another. On the contrary, I have no doubt that, loving him
with girlish vehemence in the summer of 1814, Mary loved Shelley at the
bottom of her heart till the summer of 1822, though (we have her word for
it) she sometimes behaved to him so as to imply that his felicity was by
no means her chief concern. I have also no doubt, that Shelley never
survived his affectionate concern for Mary, though he cannot have
delighted in her greatly when he sighed to Emilia, and instructed the
Williamses not to let his wife suspect how much happier he was in their
rooms of the Tre Palazzi than in his own apartment. It is possible for a
married couple to be held strongly by a deep-seated sentiment of mutual
dependence, and yet to live on uneasy, and even exasperating, terms, with
one another. It was so, at times, with Shelley and Mary. Knowledge comes
to the student of human nature from observing how deep-seated attachment
sometimes survives superficial sympathy in mated couples. Superficial
sympathy must have perished from the mutual regard of Mary and Shelley,
when he looked to other women for the higher felicity she was powerless to
afford him. Yet they persisted in loving one another at the bottom of
their hearts.

Apart from her reasonable grounds of complaint against her husband, Mrs.
Shelley was a woman whose lot was fruitful of trouble and trial. Her
health was far from good, and during the eight years of her connection
with Shelley she endured five (including her miscarriage at San Terenzo)
of those illnesses, which, though desired by wives who have never had
experience of them, are by no means conducive to physical vigour. She gave
birth to four children, and wept over the graves of three of them, losing
two of them when they had lived long enough to gain firm hold of her
heart. Her grief at the last of these bereavements was excessive. An
ardent and strongly affectionate creature (how could Mary Wollstonecraft’s
daughter be otherwise?), she had in girlhood loved her father and her
sisters vehemently. Her half-sister had perished dismally. Through
Claire’s too fervid temper, and the successive ill-consequences of her
luckless alliance with Byron, Mary had (to put the case mildly) derived
more vexation than contentment from her close intercourse with her
sister-by-affinity. Loving her old father and wishing him well, she was
continually receiving doleful intelligence from England that, instead of
mending, his affairs grew steadily more desperate. Pining for the
diversions of society, she had often fretted at being excluded from it in
foreign capitals, no less than in her native country. It was also against
the contentment of this unwilling exile from England, that during her
successive illnesses and her trials with her children, she never had the
consolations of a home, worthy to be called a home. To render existence
fairly comfortable in any transient abiding-place, more especially when
the abiding-place is a single set of rooms, it is needful for a woman to
be an adept in housewifely arts and the smaller domestic economies. But
the woman who in her girlhood shirked the matters of the house, to which
her step-mother wished her to give attention, was as shiftless and
helpless a home-keeper as John Westbrook’s daughter. From this lack of
housewifely knowingness and capacity, she suffered much and Shelley not a
little. One would fain forget that the poet, who has done so much for the
happiness of English firesides, never knew the comforts of a home, after
passing from Field Place, and that he suffered in this respect chiefly
through the incompetence of his wives, both of whom he took from a social
grade in which to keep house cleverly is woman’s first duty. Due in no
small measure to nervous fancies, Shelley’s bodily ailments were due in a
larger degree to comfortless feeding. At the same time he suffered from
causes, in respect to which his wife was blameless. His temperament would
under any circumstances have exposed him to sudden visitations of
melancholy; and in the memories that haunted him--memories of the kindred
from whom he had estranged himself, and the poor girl who drowned herself
in the Serpentine--he had constant sources of sadness.

Even if they had been altogether fitted to one another, Shelley and Mary
would in their Italian life have missed the average of connubial
enjoyment. But they were not precisely adapted to one another. Whilst his
taste was for studious or meditative seclusion, she had been designed by
nature for a career of action and gaiety. ‘She,’ Shelley once said to
Trelawny, ‘can’t bear solitude, nor I society--the quick coupled with the
dead,’ When he was pining for green fields or sea-breezes, she thought of
ball-rooms and assemblies. Under the most auspicious influences their
contrarieties of temper would have brought them into conflict. Habitual
melancholy is perhaps the most trying temper in a husband, for a wife to
endure with patient cheerfulness; and though it was relieved by occasional
moods of blithesomeness and jubilant elation, despondency was Shelley’s
normal condition in his later years. Whilst he harassed Mary with
unseasonable and bootless moanings, she worried him with the perversities
of her Wollstonecraft vehemence and captiousness,--with the temper that
disposed all the Wollstonecrafts to discover egregious insults in trivial
slights, and imagine themselves the victims of human malignity whenever
the wind blew from the wrong point of the compass.

In other respects Shelley was a trying husband, in whom Mary had reason to
be disappointed. At an early stage of their association she discovered how
little reliance could be placed on the accuracy of his statements; a cruel
mortification for the girl, who had sacrificed so much for him in her
romantic belief of all he told her. Natural annoyance at this discovery
can have been only mitigated by her ability to refer all his inaccuracies
of statement to poetic imaginativeness. Throughout his time with her,
Shelley was seeing visions which he mistook for real occurrences, and
telling her stories at manifest discord with historic veracity.

Throughout this biography I have exercised a jealous caution in assigning
biographical value to the egotisms of the Shelleyan verse, and have
repeatedly cautioned readers against dealing with the poet’s references to
his former experiences, as good evidence in respect to matters of fact. On
the other hand I have not hesitated to regard his poetry as evidential of
his temper and sentiment at the moment of its composition. It cannot be
questioned that the _Stanzas, written in Dejection, near Naples_, were the
result of sincere emotion, and could have been composed only in a mood of
the profoundest melancholy. Nor can it be doubted that, whilst displaying
the general state of feeling, the _Stanzas_ reflect no less faithfully the
writer’s particular sentiments, during the sorrowful mood. How does
Shelley write of himself in these memorable lines, when he had been
connubially linked to William Godwin’s daughter for something less than
three and a half years?

  ‘Alas! I have nor hope nor health,
      Nor peace within nor calm around,
  Nor that content surpassing wealth
      The sage in meditation found,
  And walked with inward glory crowned--
      Nor fame, nor power, _nor love_, nor leisure;
  Others I see whom these surround--
      Smiling they live, and call life pleasure:--
  To me that cup has been dealt in another measure.’

Without declining to concur in Mr. Rossetti’s opinion, that Shelley did
not _intend_ the reference to his love-less lot to reflect on his wife, I
venture to say that, had he been sensible of owing much to her devotion,
had she been to him the perpetual spring of gladness that a loving wife
ever is to the man who loves her thoroughly, had their union been as
felicitous as they hoped it to prove, he could not have thus spoken of
himself as alike fameless, powerless, and _love-less_. I even go further,
and say that, had their marriage been a happy one, Shelley in his
miserable mood would have paused in the enumeration of divers woes, to
render grateful acknowledgment of the solace he derived, in the midst of
manifold sufferings, from the knowledge that he was _not_ unbeloved. It is
also a matter of biographical significance that in 1821--the year in which
his passion for Emilia Viviani was succeeded by his milder devotion to
Jane Williams--Shelley wrote in _Ginevra_ of marriage as

          ‘life’s great cheat; a thing
  Bitter to taste, sweet in imagining,’--

words of melancholy meaning from the poet, who in the same year confided
to the Williamses how wretched he was in his own home. Trelawny, whose
acquaintance with Shelley was brief and not of a kind to render him the
confidant of the poet’s most delicate secrets, saw enough of Mary’s
relations with her husband to make him regard them as something less than
altogether happy in their union. That the woman, who in her girlhood had
sharp tiffs and lively altercations with her sister Claire, had similar
differences with her husband--differences that of course arise frequently
between husband and wife without extinguishing their mutual affection, but
still differences that _do not_ arise between altogether congenial and
happily mated couples--we know from Mrs. Shelley’s regretful and
penitential verse. How did the sorrowing widow address the spirit of the
husband whom she often worried with her perversities?--

  ‘Oh, gentle Spirit! *     *     *
    *     *     *     *     *     *
  Now fierce remorse and unreplying death
  Waken a chord within my heart, whose breath,
  Thrilling and keen, in accents audible
  A tale of unrequited love doth tell.
  It was not anger,--while thy earthly dress
  Encompassed still thy soul’s rare loveliness,
  All anger was atoned by many a kind
  Caress or tear, that spoke the softened mind.--
  It speaks of cold neglect, averted eyes,
  That blindly crushed thy soul’s fond sacrifice;--
  My heart was all thine own,--but yet a shell
  Closed in it’s core, which seemed impenetrable,
  Till sharp-toothed misery tore the husk in twain,
  Which gaping lies, nor may unite again.
  Forgive me!’

    (_Vide_ Mrs. Shelley’s _The Choice_, a poem of 159 verses, printed in
    Volume I of Mr. Buxton Forman’s edition of _Shelley’s Works_.)

Penitential utterances, such as this pathetic plaint, should of course be
construed generously; but Mr. Buxton Forman goes much too far beyond the
line, that divides generous construction from sentimental misconstruction,
when he says,--

    ‘I cannot regard this passage as indicating anything more than a
    natural feeling of remorse in the noble heart of a woman who has
    suddenly lost an idolized husband, and fancies all kinds of
    deficiencies in her conduct to him.’

An example of the kind of remorseful confession, to which Mr. Forman’s
words would be fairly applicable, appears in the prose, employed by Mrs.
Shelley on another occasion to exhibit her bitter sense of her own wifely
remissness. Speaking of the melancholy that visited her husband at Naples,
Mrs. Shelley says:--

    ‘... then he escaped to solitude, and in verses, which he hid from
    fear of wounding me, poured forth morbid but too natural bursts of
    discontent and sadness. One looks back with unspeakable regret and
    gnawing remorse to such periods; fancying that, had one been more
    alive to the nature of his feelings, and more attentive to soothe
    them, such would not have existed.’

A general confession of a remorseful sense of not having been all that she
should have been to her husband, of regret that she had not been more
studious _of_ and considerate _for_ his feelings, the prose statement is
at the most an utterance of sorrowful compunction for shortcomings, that
might have been altogether imaginary. Far otherwise is it with the verses
of _The Choice_, comprising several distinct statements of fact, which the
biographer is bound to consider, without regard to the poetical form, in
which they are submitted to his consideration. In them it is asserted by
Shelley’s wife, that she was often angry with him, that she made him fully
aware of her anger, that she used to atone for her ebullitions of temper
by approaching him with tears and appeasing him with caresses, that she
persecuted him with sullenness, that even to the last--when anguish at
losing him stirred her to sincerity, and swept away the delusions of her
vain self-conceit--she was set on making him imagine, and even on
persuading herself, that he was something less than lord and master of her
whole heart. Are we to suppose that, in respect to each of these positive
assertions, Mrs. Shelley was the dupe of her imagination;--that she was
never angry with her husband, never made him sensible of her anger, never
kissed him into forgiving her exhibitions of petulance, never punished him
with sullen and averted eyes, never pretended that her heart was not
wholly in his possession? The Shelleyan vindicators, who never hesitate to
take the poet’s words _au pied de la lettre_, whenever the severest and
most literal way of construing his poetical egotisms favours their belief
in his superhuman goodness, are the last persons who should reduce Mrs.
Shelley’s series of positive assertions into a mere show of natural
regret, that she was not so good a wife as she might have been. To me and
most readers of this page, her statements must remain evidence, on her own
confession, that her life with Shelley was fruitful of the bickerings and
contentions, the petty pettishnesses and paltry petulances, the
divergences of sentiment and conflicts of feeling, that so often qualify
the contentment, and only too often end in extinguishing the mutual
affection, of mated couples.

And small the blame to William Godwin’s daughter, that she was guilty of
all the positive offences with which she charged herself in the
criminatory and penitential verses! Had she erred far more grievously, a
generous sympathy would stir every large-hearted and impartial judge of
her case, to become her advocate at least to the extent of pleading, that
she received from the husband, whom she loved, precisely the slights, so
sensitive and proud and quick-tempered a woman would necessarily find
exasperating and intolerable in the highest degree. In saying that
Shelley’s affection for Mrs. Williams was a sentiment, so refined and
delicate, so absolutely pure of love’s grosser appetency, that her
husband’s ‘genuinely attached friend could without blame both entertain
and avow it,’ Mr. Rossetti says no more than the truth. But we cannot
concur with him in thinking that Shelley could entertain and avow the
sentiment without disloyalty to his own wife. It was not in his power to
entertain the sentiment for two women at the same time. The sentiment was
the ethereal, finer, higher element of the passion he had formerly felt
for Mary; of the love he offered her in 1814, in return for the devotion
and sacrifices he required from her; of the love, whose vehement avowal
had determined her to commit herself to his keeping, in defiance of social
rule and censure. Before he could bestow it on Jane Williams, Shelley had
to take from Mary the sentimental regard which, to a woman of her
sensibility, pride, imaginativeness and sentimentalism, was so far the
larger part of the consideration, as almost to amount to the whole of the
consideration, by which he had acquired possession of her. Endowed with
youth, beauty, intellectual address, wit, imagination, taste, tact, the
liveliest sensibilities, and literary aptitude bordering on genius, Mrs.
Shelley was required to descend from the throne of her husband’s heart, in
order that it should be occupied, now by such an ignoble though lovely
animal as Emilia Viviani, and now by a lady, whose mental powers and
personal attractions were greatly inferior to her own,--a lady whose want
of literary culture he lamented; whose highest accomplishment was a
faculty of singing simple airs to her guitar. To suggest that Mary loved
the Italian girl whom she styled her ‘cara sorella,’ or in the secret
chambers of her fervid and sensitive heart, deemed herself aught else than
grievously wronged by her husband’s devotion to the lady with the guitar,
is to display a startling ignorance of the sentimental forces that animate
and control high-hearted and finely sympathetic women.

Though the passionate ferocity which distinguished Shelley’s earlier
writings against priests and creeds, and the tyrannies of custom, waned
almost to extinction, under the softening and mellowing influences of
time, and of his steadily increasing knowledge of human nature, letters,
dated by his hand in the closing months of his existence, show how
tenacious he was to the last of his principal conclusions on questions of
social philosophy; how even to his final hour he declared against all
existing governments as iniquitous and cruel, against marriage as a
depraving institution, against Christianity as a pernicious delusion.
Though he lived to take larger and sympathetic views of Christ’s character
and career, the author of the _Essay on Christianity_ was no less hostile
than the poet of _Queen Mab_ and _Laon and Cythna_, to the Christianity of
the churches.

On its arrival at Pisa, the intelligence of Allegra’s death operated like
a signal for dispersion to the members of the Byron-Shelleyan coterie,
already disposed to move to other places, by the consequences of the
recent affair with the mounted trooper and the soldiers at the barrier.
Indeed, Byron was already turning his thoughts to villegiatura at
Monte-Nero, and Shelley had despatched the Williamses and Claire to
Spezia, to reconnoitre the country, in order to discover an eligible
summer residence for his party on the coast of the bay. On his return
from Spezia, Williams saw at a glance that Shelley had trouble at his
heart. Appointed to break the calamity to Allegra’s mother, Shelley shrunk
from the task. Deciding to defer the performance of the painful duty, till
Claire should have been withdrawn from the vicinity of the Palazzo
Lanfranchi, he prevailed on her to go back to Spezia on the morrow, in the
company of his wife and Trelawny. Though he was no doubt guided chiefly by
care for her feelings, the course thus taken by Shelley may also have
resulted in some degree from an apprehension that, if the dismal tidings
were communicated to her at the Tre Palazzi, she might in the first
paroxysms of her mental torture escape his control, hasten to the other
side of the Lung’ Arno, and forcing her way into Byron’s presence
overwhelm him with reproaches for sending her child to Bagna Cavallo, in
contemptuous disregard of her expostulations and predictions of disaster.
Anyhow, it was wisely decided that Claire should not make acquaintance
with the sharpest grief of her existence till she should be well away from
Byron, who, though profoundly disturbed by the loss of his illegitimate
daughter, showed no sign of relenting towards his former mistress.

A few days later, the Shelleys, with Claire and the Williamses, were
settled in their narrow and comfortless quarters at the Casa Magni (San
Terenzo), some three miles from the wretched little town of Sarzana, some
four or five minutes (by fast boat) from the equally squalid and
picturesque Lerici, and within an hour’s sail of Spezia. It would be an
exaggeration to say that even in Italy it would be impossible to discover,
amidst scenes of incomparable loveliness, a meaner, dirtier, more
poverty-stricken, more repulsive sea-side village than San Terenzo; but
one keeps well between the lines of severe historic veracity in saying no
English tourists, of the means and social quality of the Shelleys and
Williamses, ever made their abode (from choice and for pleasure) in a more
unclean and ill-favoured Italian village for a considerable period. No
words can commend too highly the peculiar and winning beauties of the
surrounding scenery; but the village itself is doleful, unclean, and
appallingly hideous. The same may be said of the wretched inhabitants of
the village, that contains only a single dwelling, in any degree fit for
the habitation of gentle people. Now that it boasts an upper storey
(built since Shelley’s time) and contains twice as many rooms as it had
when it housed the poet and his companions, the Casa Magni is far from an
alluring and impressive residence. Sixty years since the massive and
unsightly tenement (whilom a Jesuits’ convent) contained on its solitary
floor over a cavernous basement no more than four habitable rooms--(1) a
large dining-hall, (2) the room in which Mrs. Shelley and Claire used to
sleep, (3) the bedroom occupied by the Williamses, and (4) Shelley’s
sleeping apartment; the three bedrooms opening into the grand saloon. In
these four rooms five people (_six_, when Claire was of the party)
contrived to live in what must have been a superlatively comfortless and
‘pigging’ fashion; the cooking for the family being done in some
out-building, where the servants slept and had their meals. Built so close
to the sea, that at high-water the waves tumble noisily about the base of
the structure, this marine abode has at its rear neither a single
olive-tree, nor the space in which to plant one. The one redeeming feature
of this unsatisfactory piece of domestic architecture was (in Shelley’s
time), and still is, a broad terrace supported by arches of strong
masonry, that running along the whole sea-ward front of the edifice, at
the level of the floor of the one set of rooms, served the Shelleys in
fine weather as a fifth room, when no fierce sun drove its occupants to
the backward parts of the house.

The large dining-hall (with the doors of the bed-rooms opening into it)
was the grand chamber, through which Shelley passed without a single
thread of raiment on his person, to the dismay of his friends of both
sexes, when he lost his clothes whilst bathing; it having escaped the poet
that, by merely putting his head into the room and summoning Trelawny or
Williams to his side, he might have compassed the timely retirement of the
ladies, so as to spare their feelings an embarrassing and painful
surprise. The large terrace towards the sea was the place, where Shelley
delighted to sit for hours together (_vide_ Shelley’s letter to John
Gisborne of 18th of June, 1822) in the summer evenings, listening to the
pleasant but comparatively artless music of Jane Williams’s voice and
guitar.

It is not surprising that Mrs. Shelley entered this comfortless and
altogether unsatisfactory place of abode with drooping spirits, and that
every week she spent in it heightened her aversion for the place.
Suffering from a state of health, that promised the birth of another
child towards the close of the year, she would under the most favourable
circumstances have found it difficult to control the irritability, and
combat the depressing languor, that always afflicted her at such a time of
bodily trouble. Placed at the sea-side, when she was pining for green
fields and rural quietude; exposed to the glaring and scorching suns of an
unusually hot and dry season, when she thirsted for cool rivulets and
murmurous trees; told to make herself at home and take life easily in a
house singularly deficient in its arrangements, at the extremity of a
barbarous village, where she could not get the food for her frugal table
without sending for it to Sarzana or Lerici, she may be pardoned for
murmuring at the prospect of passing several months in so distasteful and
even exasperating a place. Shelley, on the other hand, was for a while in
excellent spirits, and finding San Terenzo altogether to his mind was
displeased with his wife for disliking what he enjoyed. He even scolded
her for being discontented without a cause. ‘No words,’ she wrote in
August, 1822 (_vide_ Forman’s edition of _Shelley’s Works_) to Mrs.
Gisborne, ‘can tell you how I hated our house and the country about it.
Shelley reproached me for this--his health was good and the place was
quite after his own heart.’ Whether it was chivalric of Shelley to
reproach his sick wife for disliking what he enjoyed, is a question that
may be left for his extravagant idolaters. For me it is enough to say,
that in this respect he acted as men too often act, when they are
unusually well and their wives are annoyingly ill. No doubt it was
annoying to him. Charmed with the bay of Spezia, when he made a flying
visit to it in the previous summer, he had for months been looking forward
to a term of residence amidst its beauties. It was hard for him, that Mary
could not keep her ailments and discontent to herself. Knowing how he had
been counting on the felicity of living near Lerici, how he and Williams
had for months been looking forward to the delight of sailing about the
bay, and running to and fro between Leghorn and Lerici in the lovely boat,
that was being built for them at Genoa, it was Mary’s manifest duty to
enjoy what he enjoyed, or at least to pretend that she enjoyed it. No
doubt she was in a delicate state of health. But what of that? It is usual
for young wives to be so at times.

Brought round from Genoa by Mr. Heslop and two English seamen, Shelley’s
new boat entered Lerici harbour on 12th May, 1822, and on trial afforded
the liveliest gratification both to the poet and Williams (joint-owners of
the craft), the latter of whom wrote of her performance in his diary, ‘She
fetches whatever she looks at. In short, we have now a perfect plaything
for the summer.’ The perfect plaything was a fatal toy. Henceforth Shelley
and his friend passed most of their time on the water; Mary sometimes
accompanying them in their swift passages over the dancing waves. ‘My only
moments of peace,’ she wrote in the middle of August, 1822, to Mrs.
Gisborne, ‘were on board that unhappy boat when lying down with my head on
his knee I shut my eyes and felt the wind and our swift motion alone.’ But
these moments of peace were of no benefit to her health. Threatened with a
miscarriage on the 8th of June, she endured another week of extreme
discomfort before she was prostrated by the misadventure, that nearly put
an end to her life. It was some alleviation of Mary’s misery, that in her
illness she had two companions of her own rank and sex,--Jane Williams,
the blamelessness of whose behaviour towards Shelley is demonstrated by
his wife’s affection for her; and Claire, who, after withdrawing from San
Terenzo for a few weeks, was by this time again an inmate of the Casa
Magni. But from inexperience and want of nerve, Claire and Jane proved
such poor nurses at the most alarming and perilous crisis of their
patient’s trouble, that she would have died of hemorrhage had not Shelley
(_vide_ his letter of 18th June, 1822, to John Gisborne, and Mrs.
Shelley’s letter of the following August to Mrs. Gisborne), with an
address and boldness for which his brief medical training may have been
accountable, made her sit in ice till the blood ceased to flow.

But if he may be commended for saving her life on this occasion, Shelley
retarded his wife’s restoration by alarming her a few days later by
exhibitions of nervous derangement, that was chiefly referable to his
apprehensions for her safety. At all times liable at any moment to
impulses of fancy, resulting in visions whose vividness, even when they
lacked the persistency and steadiness of distinct hallucination, was
inconsistent with perfect mental sanity, he had in the previous month,
whilst enjoying unusually good health, occasioned the Williamses no little
concern by his excitement at a mere illusion, which for some time he
mistook for an actual occurrence. On the evening of 6th May, 1822, whilst
pacing the Casa Magni terrace, he stopt suddenly, grasped Edward Williams
violently by the arm, and staring stedfastly at the white surf at their
feet, gave signs of acute mental torture. In reply to a question from
Williams, he exclaimed excitedly, ‘There it is again--there!’ The cause of
his disturbance was his vivid imagination that little Allegra, naked and
lovely, rose out of the surf to his view, clapt her hands in joy, and
smiled at him. So powerfully was Shelley affected by this apparition of
the child, for whom he had provided by his will no less liberally than he
provided for his own children, that his friends found it difficult to
induce him to regard it as a mere illusion of his fancy. In the excitement
coming to him from his wife’s illness, Shelley (to use her words)
underwent ‘a return of nervous sensations and visions as bad as in his
worst times;’ one of these visitations being a singularly hideous attack
of nightmare, attended with a repulsive dream that affected him both at
the moment and for some time afterwards, as though it were a real
adventure. During the night of Saturday, 22nd June, 1822, Mrs. Shelley was
roused from her sleep by a scream. Almost at the same moment Shelley
(whose sleeping-room was on the other side of the great dining-hall)
rushed into her room, screaming frantically. Under the impression that he
was asleep, she tried to waken him by calling loudly to him; but instead
of replying to her cries, he continued to scream so violently and
alarmingly, that she sprang from her bed in a panic, and hastening from
her bedroom ran across the dining-hall into the Williamses’ sleeping
chamber, where, in her weakness and fright, she fell to the ground. As
Shelley, on being restored to his senses and soothed into something like
equanimity, declared he had not screamed, his companions came to the
conclusion that he was unconscious during the whole course of his violent
emotion;--that in his alarm at a dream he had crossed the hall and burst
into his wife’s room in his sleep. The dream’s first vision was that
Edward and Jane Williams (with their bodies lacerated and their bones
starting through the skin) approached with these words, ‘Get up, Shelley,
the sea is flooding the house and it is all coming down;’ words that
caused Shelley to imagine he went to his window and saw the sea rushing
into the house. The dream’s second vision was that he saw himself in the
act of strangling his own wife. In the morning, whilst talking with Mary
about the last night’s disturbance, he told her ‘that he had had many
visions lately.’ One of these recent visions (a vision, that is described
in two or three different ways by the poet’s biographers) was that a
cloaked figure approached his bedside and beckoned him out of the bedroom
into the dining-hall, when, lifting the hood of his cloak, the ghostly
visitant, after displaying Shelley’s own features to the agitated dreamer,
inquired in Spanish ‘Art thou satisfied?’ and vanished. On being thus
confronted and tormented by his own wraith, Shelley screamed loud enough
to rouse the house, even as he did on the subsequent occasion when he saw
his own wraith in the act of strangling his own wife. The appearance and
reappearance of his own wraith were distinctly referable to a scene of one
of Calderon’s dramas, that had stirred his imagination profoundly and with
morbid consequences.

The nervous excitement, that came to Shelley from his wife’s recent
illness and consequent debility, was heightened by the knowledge that the
beloved Hunts were at Genoa, and by the expectation of hearing at any
moment of their arrival at Leghorn. On 19th June, 1822, on the third day
from Mary’s imminent danger, he wrote Hunt a letter, in the hope that it
would reach him at the former port; a letter in which the writer promised
to set sail for Leghorn on hearing his friend had left Genoa. For the
fulfilment of this promise, Shelley, on Monday, 1st July, 1822, departed
from Lerici for Leghorn, in the company of Captain Roberts, the builder of
the boat which had been christened the ‘Don Juan’ in compliment to Byron,
and with Edward Williams by his side. It was with no common emotion that
Mary parted with him. Twice, if not thrice, he was on the point of leaving
her, when the poor lady,--who loved him passionately in spite of their
frequent bickerings, and who was possessed by vague previsions of some
approaching calamity,--called him back to her arms, to put yet another
kiss on his slight and sunburnt face, to win yet another smile from his
mobile features, to look once again into his forward-set stag-eyes of
deepest azure, to rest her eyes once again on his flowing tresses, whose
glossy brownness was darkened rather than whitened or tarnished by their
few threads of grey,--to repeat the often uttered declaration that, if he
did not come back to her quickly, she would speedily return with their
child to their rooms (still on their hands) at the Tre Palazzi, on the
Pisan Lung’ Arno. ‘They went,’ she wrote with the awful pathos of sacred
sorrow in the following month, ‘and Jane, Claire, and I remained alone
with the children.’ Well, might she weep! For never more was she to press
her lips against the slight sun-burnt visage, see herself in those
deep-blue eyes, pass her hand over the flowing brown curls, hear the voice
which, harsh though it might be to others,--shrill, sharp, strident under
impulses of anger, as she knew it to be,--was life’s and love’s own music
to her ear and heart. The sense of coming trouble covered and held her.
Not that she feared for _him_. The apprehension of seeing and hearing him
no more never troubled her, nor occurred to her for a single instant. Her
fear was that in his absence she might lose their child;--that death would
enter the Casa Magni, and bear away the darling boy Percy, even as the
ruthless foe of human happiness had with his finger’s point touched her
bright, warm boy Willie into cold, unfeeling clay.

Disaster was far from Shelley’s thoughts as his little schooner--his
perfect plaything for the summer--cut and danced over the waves on its way
to Leghorn, where he would embrace Hunt and Marianne, and kiss their
children. From the beginning of the year, his health (never so weakly as
he persuaded himself and his friends into thinking it) had been steadily
improving. His breast had grown broader, his figure more robust, his limbs
less lathy. If it still wanted massiveness, his countenance had
relinquished its former slightness and look of almost girlish fragility.
Exposure to sea-air and scorching suns had tanned and bronzed the cheeks,
that were never wanting in ruddiness. Of late he had allowed his
moustaches to grow, and though they were poor, downy, boyish things in
Trelawny’s opinion, they gave his aspect a certain degree of manliness
which his face had lacked, on the occasion of his introduction to the
stalwart Cornishman. Now that he had dismissed dull care and nervous
fancies, in the elation of the brief voyage that would bring him to Hunt’s
presence, he had the appearance of a man who might enjoy life for many a
year, and live ‘to make old bones.’ And, indeed, nothing in the ailments,
which he magnified, or in the constitution, which he underrated, forbade
the hope that he would maintain his family’s reputation for longevity.
Without being altogether imaginary, his most serious maladies--dyspepsia
and a certain amount of renal trouble--were no infirmities to preclude a
confident opinion that, in the absence of fatal misadventure, he might
survive to green old age. In truth, though so much has been written of his
physical delicacy and constant sufferings from serious malady, there was
no reason why, with wholesome diet and freedom from excessive mental
trouble, Shelley should not have lived to his grandfather’s age.
Occasionally, no doubt, he suffered from renal stone, the painful malady
that so often attends dyspepsia; but with proper treatment and care for
his food he might in a few years have outgrown his disposition to the
disorder, which, though afflicting, is by no means necessarily fatal. In
deeming himself a sufferer from the malady, which killed the Third
Napoleon, he may not have been the mere victim of nervous fancy; but even
in that case the operation for his relief would not necessarily have
resulted in his death, as he seems to have imagined, whilst penning the
well-known lines of _The Magnetic Lady to her Patient_ (1822):--

  ‘What would cure, that would kill me, Jane:
    And as I must on earth abide
  Awhile, yet tempt me not to break
              My chain.’

Anyhow, he never seemed in better health, nor was in higher spirits, than
when he sprang from his little schooner at Leghorn, and, throwing himself
into Leigh Hunt’s embrace, declared himself ‘inexpressibly delighted,’ and
‘inexpressibly happy.’ For the moment Hunt also (though he had landed with
his numerous family at Leghorn, with just sixty crowns less than nothing
in hand) was unutterably delighted and happy on seeing the pleasant and
cordial face of the friend, on whom he would have preyed steadily and
largely, had not fate stept between them. For the next few days Shelley
was busy with the affairs of his _protégé_, who had come out from England
to fix himself on Byron, though knowing well that the author would fain
have been liberated from his engagement to start the _Liberal_. One of
Lady Shelley’s most notable departures from biographical fairness (to use
no stronger word) appears on p. 195 of _Shelley Memorials_, where she
speaks of Byron’s reluctance in July, 1822, to embark in the _Liberal_, as
though it were a sudden change of purpose that, taking Shelley by
surprise at so late a stage of the preliminary arrangements, would have
justified him in breaking at once and for ever with the vacillating poet.
For months Shelley had been aware of Byron’s regret at having committed
himself to the hazardous enterprise. No doubt (as I have already remarked)
the project was Byron’s own design. Though in proposing to take Hunt for
his literary coadjutor he was actuated in some degree by benevolent
concern for a struggling man of letters, Byron must, of course, be
regarded as having been actuated in a higher degree by a selfish concern
for his own interests. His subsequent assertion that he was wholly
animated in the choice, and even in the project, by benevolence, was a
miserable misrepresentation. It cannot be gainsaid that Byron promised to
start the _Liberal_ and to take Hunt for one of his partners in the
enterprise. It is also indisputable that, when a man gives his word, he
should keep it. All these matters being admitted, it remains, however,
that Byron’s engagement was one from which he should have been liberated
by both Shelley and Hunt, as soon as he showed a wish to be released from
it.

The arrangement of three poets, three men, three gentlemen, for
co-operation in a literary enterprise, differs from an arrangement of
three tradesmen for a purely commercial undertaking. The project for
starting the _Liberal_ was a project from which each of the three
adventurers could honourably retire, on giving the others timely notice of
his purpose to do so. That Byron’s first intimation of a wish to retreat
from the affair was given long before Hunt left England is indisputable.
On receiving it both Hunt and Shelley should have disclaimed the
disposition to cause him any embarrassment. In honour they were the more
bound to do so,--because he was so much the strongest of the three in fame
and purse; because in case of success the venture promised to be so much
more beneficial to themselves than to him; and because they could not
press him to persist in the enterprise against his will, without showing
too lively a regard for their own interests. In taking the other course,
and conspiring to hold Byron to the arrangement for their own ends, Hunt
(for his own advantage) and Shelley (for Hunt’s profit) were guilty at
least of sharp practice. From February to the end of June, they had been
acting together confidentially against their powerful friend. For months
they had known of Byron’s wish to get out of the affair. At the beginning
of July, just four calendar months had passed since Shelley wrote from
Pisa to his fellow-conspirator in England (2nd March, 1822),--‘I imagine
it will be no very difficult task to execute that which you have assigned
me--to keep him in heart with the project until your arrival.’ Yet in her
book Lady Shelley, speaking of the affair as it stood on 1st July, 1822,
says,--

    ‘Byron had _by this time_ been persuaded by Thomas Moore, and some of
    his other friends in London, that the projected magazine, about which
    he had been very anxious at first, would be injurious to his fame and
    interests; and Shelley _now_’ (‘by this time’ and ‘now,’ as though
    Byron now for the first time showed his distaste for the project, in
    which he was constrained to embark by the two confederates)--‘found
    him so desirous of making any possible retreat from his engagements,
    that, had he not feared he might damage his friend’s interests, he
    would have quarrelled outright with the noble poet. He was very much
    out of spirits when he left; and that was the last interview they ever
    had.’

In saying that Shelley parted in dejection from Byron, Lady Shelley is
scarcely in accord with the best authorities touching the result of his
action in Hunt’s behalf. Hopeful that Hunt and Byron would work together
harmoniously for any considerable term, he could not well be, and
certainly was not. But Mrs. Shelley’s words may be taken as conclusive
evidence, that her husband was pleased with the immediate consequence of
his mediation between the poet, who would fain have shipt the Hunts back
to England, and the poet who had come to Italy with the purpose of
planting himself on Byron. Speaking of her husband’s exertions to put the
two partners at least in transient accord, Mrs. Shelley, in her August
letter to Mrs. Gisborne, says:--

    ‘Shelley had past most of the time at Pisa--arranging the affairs of
    the Hunts--and skrewing L. B.’s mind to the sticking place about the
    journal. He had found this a difficult task at first, but at length he
    had succeeded to his heart’s content with both points. Mrs. Mason said
    that she saw him in better health and spirits than she had ever known
    him, when he took leave of her on Sunday, July 7th, his face burnt by
    the sun and his heart light that he had succeeded in rendering the
    Hunts tolerably comfortable.’

This would of itself dispose of Lady Shelley’s assertion that Shelley
retired in depression from his final negotiations of Byron. On Thursday,
4th July, Shelley had written of the Hunts and of Byron’s obligation to
take them at least for a brief while altogether on his hands, ‘Lord Byron
must of course furnish the requisite funds at present, as I cannot; but he
seems inclined to depart without the necessary explanations and
arrangements due to such a situation as Hunt’s. These, in spite of
delicacy, I must procure.’ Three days later (Sunday, 7th August) he is in
high spirits at having brought Byron into better humour with the Hunts,
and made the Hunts fairly comfortable. With Byron he has ‘succeeded’ to
his heart’s content; and in respect to the Hunts he is positively
‘light-hearted.’ Confirmed by several contemporary writings, Mrs.
Shelley’s testimony respecting her husband’s satisfaction with and
consequent elation at his arrangements for the Hunts, represents the view
of Captain Roberts, Trelawny, Lady Mountcashel, the Hunts themselves,
indeed of everyone of Shelley’s friends, who saw him in the last days of
his existence at Pisa or Leghorn. The unquestionable success of his
negotiations with Byron cannot have failed to gratify him. Yet Lady
Shelley requires us to believe that he retired from those negotiations
‘very much out of spirits.’

On finding in July how he had been kept in ignorance of Hunt’s retirement
from the _Examiner_, Byron might reasonably and honourably have used the
concealment as a sufficient reason for breaking at once with the crafty
practitioner. He had invited Hunt, _as_ the Editor of the _Examiner_, to
co-operate with him; he had furnished rooms in his house for the Hunts, on
the understanding that Leigh Hunt had at least a sufficient income for the
payment of his weekly bills; and now, through Hunt’s wary concealment of
the real state of his affairs, he found himself with a numerous and
absolutely destitute family in his house,--found himself, also, required
by Shelley to take the maintenance of this penniless family altogether on
his own hands--at least for a time. Byron had reason for resentment on
finding himself over-reached and imposed upon in this unscrupulous and
impudent manner. But what could he do? Mrs. Hunt was alarmingly ill, her
children were guiltless of wilful complicity in the father’s extortionate
manœuvre. He could not turn the sick woman and her babes out-of-doors. He
could not even turn the wily operator on the pockets of his acquaintances
out-of-doors. The clever, dextrous, irresistibly charming fellow had not a
crown in his purse. For the moment Shelley could not relieve the
necessities of the family, whom he had brought out from England and thrown
upon Byron’s hands in so comical a manner. Shelley stated the situation
precisely to his wife on the 4th of July, when he wrote, ‘Lord Byron must
of course furnish the requisite funds at present, as I cannot.’ One must
needs smile at the thought of the three prime actors in the droll
affair:--at the thrifty Byron’s dismay on being suddenly called upon to
provide board and pocket-money, as well as bed and house-room, for the
impecunious family; at the free-handed Shelley’s clear perception of
Byron’s duty to these equally charming and shiftless Micawbers; at Hunt’s
chagrin at the coldness with which he was welcomed to the Palazzo
Lanfranchi. It is to Byron’s credit that he did all that honour and
humanity required of him under the circumstances; and at the same time to
his discredit that he did it ungraciously. Finding he ‘was in for it,’
without any easy and congenial way of escape, he started the _Liberal_;
carried the Hunts in his train to Genoa; and, without causing Leigh Hunt
more misery than he deserved, did divers things he should for his own
dignity’s sake have left undone. It is not surprising that, after dropping
a good deal of money and credit on the _Liberal_ in a faint-hearted way,
he declined to sacrifice himself yet further, for the advantage of his
unsatisfactory partner.

After spending seven days between Leghorn and Pisa, Shelley set sail for
Lerici in his little schooner with Edward Williams, who was longing to get
back to his wife at the Casa Magni, and Charles Vivian, the young sailor
who was the only regular nautical ‘hand’ on board the swift but unsteady
craft. Contradicting one another even to the latest point of Shelley’s
career, the authorities are at variance respecting the frame of mind in
which he started on his brief voyage to death. On the one hand it is
declared that he left Leghorn in dejection, and on the other that he went
out of port in the highest elation. On seeking information from those who
bade him farewell as he stept into his boat, Mrs. Shelley was assured that
he went off ‘in one of those extravagant fits of good spirits in which’ he
was ‘sometimes seen.’ The truth seems to be that, though dispirited for a
few minutes by a despondent letter from Mary, he speedily recovered the
jubilant air that had distinguished him on the previous day at Pisa, and
in his satisfaction at the latest arrangements for the Hunts started in
the happiest temper. He did not, however, glide out of the harbour
without forewarning of the gale that was rising for his destruction. The
day had been intensely hot, and a violent thunderstorm had broken over the
gulf in the forenoon. Captain Roberts had even hinted that the voyagers
should wait for more settled weather on the morrow:--an ominous hint from
the ‘Don Juan’s’ builder. But though Shelley was faintly disposed to take
the captain’s advice, Edward Williams, in his eagerness for his wife’s
society, would hear of no delay, insisting with the wind then blowing they
should be home in seven hours. Even as the ‘Don Juan’ slipt out of the
harbour the Genoese mate of Byron’s yacht, ‘Bolivar,’ remarked to his
captain, Trelawny, in reference to the dark clouds, rolling up from the
south-west in threatening masses, that ‘the devil was brewing mischief.’
Three hours later the devil of this nautical prediction had for a brief
while his own way with the gulf. It was about three p.m. when the small
schooner scudded away from the Leghorn mole, from whose extremity Captain
Roberts watched her performance till she passed beyond the range of his
unaided vision at the rate of some seven knots an hour. At 6.30 Trelawny,
who had gone to his cabin on board the ‘Bolivar,’ was roused from his
afternoon’s slumber by noises, familiar to his nautical ear. Going on
board he found the sky darkened by fog to almost nocturnal gloom, and
learnt from the disturbances of the air and the commotion of the shipping
in the harbour, that a mighty storm was on the point of breaking over the
sea. A few minutes later the din and hubbub and shrill pipings of
countless mariners were silenced by the thunder and wind and rattling rain
of a wild and overpowering squall. The storm spent its fiercest fury in
twenty minutes,--the brief passage of time during which the ‘Don Juan,’
that perfect plaything for the summer, foundered and sunk beneath the
tumult of the angry billows.

Knowing from the force of the rising wind, even before she had passed from
his view whilst he stood at the mole’s end, that the ‘Don Juan’ was in for
a stiff breeze and hard weather, Captain Roberts went from the mole to the
authorities, who could give him leave to ascend the lighthouse tower. On
getting their permission to do so he climbed the Leghorn lighthouse, from
whose summit he succeeded in sighting the toy-schooner with a glass, when
she was some ten miles out at sea, off Via Reggio. The vessel was in view
long enough for the captain to observe that her crew were in the act of
taking in the top-sails. But it was only a glimpse he got of the boat
before the sea-fog stole it from his sight. The circuit of the sea,
covered by the captain’s glass, was alive with shipping, driven wildly by
the mighty tempest; but when the sky and view cleared, though the gazer
from the lighthouse saw again every other vessel he had held in sight
before the transient obscuration, he looked in vain for the one vessel, in
which he was personally interested.

On her recovery from a depth of from ten to fifteen fathoms of water in
the following September, it was discovered that the ‘Don Juan’ had not
capsized. She had gone under, swamped by an overwhelming sea or overborne
by a felucca that ran her down. The large hole in her stern, and other
signs of violence countenancing the latter conjecture, gave rise to the
suspicion that she had been struck by a felucca in a piratical attempt to
seize her, in the hope of getting possession of the dollars she was
supposed to have on board. At this distance of time there is no need to
examine the unsatisfactory evidence that favours this hideous hypothesis.
That the ‘Don Juan’ was followed from Leghorn Harbour by pirates, set on
making prize of the money she was believed to carry, is not unlikely. She
may have been chased and even run down by pirates, set on plundering her
in the open sea; but even in that case it is more probable that the
immediate cause of her submergence was accidental collision, than that her
piratical pursuers selected a moment for striking so slight a vessel, when
the violence of the storm and the tumult of the waters rendered it
impossible for them to board her. But at this date it matters little why
and how she foundered.

It is more interesting to know that, sudden as it was, the catastrophe
might have come more suddenly:--that the poet and his comrades had at
least a brief minute or two, in which to prepare for the fate that did not
overtake them altogether unawares. That they were taking in their topsails
off Via Reggio is a sufficient indication that they were alive to the
peril of their position before they passed from Captain Roberts’s view.
That on its recovery Edward Williams’s corpse was found almost without
clothing shows that before the little schooner went down he had time to
realize the imminence of the danger, and to prepare for an attempt to save
himself by swimming. On the other hand, the submerged boat and the remains
of the three drowned bodies were found too near the point, at which
Captain Roberts sighted and lost sight of them, for any difference of
opinion respecting the hour or even the approximate minute of the
catastrophe. At the most, they had only a few minutes to live when they
busied themselves in hauling in their top-sails. A minute or two after
passing from the view of the watcher on the lighthouse they were
themselves face to face with death. In September, 1822, the vessel was
discovered off Via Reggio; and on the 22nd of the previous July, just a
fortnight after the fatal storm, the remains of Shelley’s corpse, and the
remains of Edward Williams’s body, were found on shore,--those of Shelley
being found near Via Reggio, on the Tuscan coast, whilst all that remained
of Edward Williams’s manly form and presence had been carried to a point,
some three miles distant, at the Bocca Lericcio, hard by the Migliarino
tower. Three weeks later Charles Vivian’s skeleton was brought to shore by
the waves, at a distance of some four miles from the spot to which Edward
Williams’s corpse had been carried.

How Shelley and Williams acted, as the schooner was already sinking
beneath them, one may infer confidently from the characters and mutual
affection of the two men; from the notable difference in respect to the
clothing of what was recovered of their disfigured bodies; and from what
we know of Shelley’s demeanour on previous occasions (notably and
especially on the occasion of the squall off St. Gingoux in the summer of
1816), when he was in danger of death from drowning. It cannot be doubted
that, whilst hastily stripping himself of his raiment, Williams proposed
to do his best to save his friend as well as himself. To this proposal it
is certain that the poet (who on the former occasion had firmly refused
the help of so expert a swimmer as Byron) answered calmly that he was
ready for death, was even glad to embrace the fate so mercifully offered
to him; and that, after so refusing to diminish his comrade’s chance of
escape, and after enjoining him to bear his love to Mary and Jane and
Claire at the Casa Magni, he anticipated without dismay or vain regret, on
the contrary, welcomed with mingled complacence and curiosity, the moment
when he should pass through the veil that divides the here from the
hereafter,--the moment that would give him the knowledge for which he had
so long hungered and thirsted.

Possibly in that last minute or two, his mind was visited momentarily by
tender and subduing thoughts of old joys and interests, former sorrows and
ambitions, exhausted enmities and profitless contentions, disappointed
hopes and unachieved aspirations. I conceive that thoughts of the old home
and parents, from whose love he had severed himself, of Eton and poor old
Keate, of Oxford and Hogg, of scenes about Keswick and Killarney, together
with thoughts of more recent friends and less distant places, flitted
across his brain, ever so quick and imaginative, now so abnormally active,
and in a trice to be still for ever. Doubtless he thought of his little
boy at San Terenzo, his other boy whom he had buried at Rome; possibly
also of his children in England, and of the lovely girl who had given
birth to them,--the sweet, bright, radiant girl who died in the water of
the cold Serpentine, even as he would now die in the water of the angry
sea. As he sate calmly on the sinking boat, and studied the successive
visions of his own life’s panorama, he may be conceived to have remembered
things he had done, and things he had left undone, to his regret. In his
doubt and curiosity he may also be conceived to have hoped that, should
death prove the gateway to another life for him, it would be a life, in
which the ways of duty and righteousness are more clearly marked and more
easily discovered, than the ways of righteousness and duty in this
darksome, and troublous, and perplexing existence. Thus, as he sate
a-thinking in the foundering boat, Shelley sunk beneath the turbulent and
cruel waves, so remorseless for the woe they work, so heedless of the
lives they devour.

To tell all that needs yet to be told requires few words. All the world
knows how Shelley’s torn, and wasted, and disfigured corpse was reduced to
ashes, and a few fragments of bone (with the exception of the heart that
would _not_ be burnt) on the pyre, that was piled and lit for its
cremation, on the sands of the seashore, to which the relenting waves
carried him all too late. Again and again it has been told how, under the
fierce light of a southern sky and sun, at the marge of the whispering
sea, and within view of the remote Apennines, this revival of a classic
rite was performed with precise care for classic requirements, in the
presence of Byron, Trelawny, Leigh Hunt, and a guard of soldiers. Who
needs to be told again, how the copy of Keats’s last book (found in
Shelley’s pocket, doubled back at the _Eve of St. Agnes_, as though he had
been perusing it, till death’s summons made him put it aside hurriedly)
was thrown upon the blazing pyre? What reader of Mr. Rossetti’s
description of the burning of the great poet’s body has not heard the
cries of the curlew, that wheeling close about the pyre, and screaming
miserably, refused to be driven away? It is the story of every household,
where poetry is prized and genius is honoured, that Shelley’s ashes were
conveyed to Rome, and there deposited in the new Protestant Cemetery
(_not_ the _old_ burial-ground, that holds the dust of Keats and Mary
Godwin’s first-born son), at a spot planted by Trelawny, with laurels and
cypresses, and marked by the stone of this record:--

  PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
  Cor Cordium
  Natus iv Aug. MDCCXCII
  Obiit viii Jul. MDCCCXXII

  Nothing of him that doth fade
  But doth suffer a sea-change
  Into something rich and strange.




CHAPTER XVII.

SHELLEY’S WIDOW AND HER SISTER-BY-AFFINITY.

    The Widow in Italy--Her Return to England--Sojourn in the Strand--Life
    at Kentish Town--Residence at Harrow--She is forbidden to write her
    Husband’s ‘Life’--‘Moonshine’ and ‘Celestial Mate’--Her closing
    Years--Claire in her later Time--Trelawny’s inaccurate Talk about
    Shelley’s Will--Claire’s double Legacy--She becomes a Catholic--Dies
    in the Catholic Faith.


At the close of this attempt to exhibit the Real Shelley, so unlike the
Shelley of biographical romance, a few more words should be said of
William Godwin’s daughter and of Claire.

On her husband’s death, Mrs. Shelley was in a pitiable condition. In Italy
she had no friends, able and at the same time willing to render her
effectual help. The Gisbornes were poor; the Hunts, in losing Shelley, had
lost their surest means of subsistence in the foreign land; for several
years Claire would have enough to do, to shift for herself; Mrs. Williams
was not provided for bountifully; and, apart from them, the poet’s widow
knew in Italy scarcely any one whom she could regard as aught more than a
mere acquaintance. Trelawny, who (without liking her) befriended her nobly
in the crisis of her troubles, she had known for little more than
half-a-year. For months her husband’s and her own relations with Byron had
been strained almost to rupture. Though he recognized her cleverness, and
was not insensible to her beauty, Byron had never delighted in her
greatly; and now that Shelley was gone, he had lost his strongest reason
for trying to regard her cordially. Fretted by the Hunts, he was on uneasy
terms with the woman, who was too closely associated with them, for him
not to think of her position as part of the embarrassment arising out of
the _Liberal_. Knowing they had her affection, he was, of course, aware
that she gave them her sympathy, and thought he treated them badly. Still
he rendered her the civilities to which she was entitled at his hands; and
whilst consulting him on her affairs, she confided to him the delicate and
difficult task of addressing Sir Timothy Shelley in her behalf.

Whilst the widow’s position in Italy was depressing, her prospect in
England was cheerless. Eight years older and poorer than he was on the
July morning that saw her flit from his roof, her father could only give
her sympathy, invite her to a smaller home, and assure her that, should
she be placed in sudden and urgent need of money, he would do his best to
send her a small sum. At Field Place she was known only by name, and by
circumstances that were necessarily regarded there as circumstances to her
discredit. To use Lady Shelley’s expression, the young widow (still only
four-and-twenty years of age) was ‘coldly regarded by her husband’s
family.’ It would have been strange had the family regarded her
affectionately. The persons of all the world, with the exception of her
own kindred, who had suffered most from her career, are scarcely to be
censured for thinking of her with disapproval. What title had she to the
affection of her husband’s father, mother, sisters? She had no doubt a
son, who was Sir Timothy Shelley’s grandson? But in 1822 this little boy
was not heir-apparent to the Castle Goring baronetcy, Shelley’s son
(Charles Bysshe) being the heir-apparent; and it was not till Charles’s
death, in 1826, that William Godwin’s daughter could say, ‘If my boy
survives his grandfather, he will be Sir Percy Florence Shelley.’ It is
not surprising that, whilst recognizing Percy’s claim to his
grand-paternal consideration, Sir Timothy could not see what title the
little fellow’s mother had to his paternal care. In reply to Byron’s
letter, it seemed enough to Sir Timothy Shelley, that he should offer to
take charge of Mary’s boy, should she consent to surrender the little
fellow unreservedly to his custody and government--a proposal which,
stirring William Godwin to indignation, was, of course, declined with
disdainful firmness by his daughter.

Returning with her child to England in the autumn of 1823, Mrs. Shelley
lived under her father’s roof in the Strand, till she moved into the small
house in Kentish Town, from whose window she and Mrs. Williams saw Byron’s
hearse pass slowly on its way from London to Nottinghamshire. Some ten
years later (1833) she moved to Harrow, where she remained during the
period of her boy’s education at the famous school. For some time after
her return to England, she and her child lived on the earnings of her pen;
but at a later time she received from her father-in-law the allowance,
which, towards the end of 1838, he threatened to stop, if she ventured to
write and publish her husband’s life. By her friends Sir Timothy Shelley
was declared guilty of revolting inhumanity in denying her the solace she
would have derived from producing a worthy record of her husband’s
virtues. But in forbidding her to write a book, that could scarcely have
failed to pain him acutely and torture even more sharply the feelings of
his children, Sir Timothy cannot be fairly charged with exceeding the
powers pertaining to him as the chief of his family. There are also
reasons why every judicious admirer of Shelley’s genius, and all sober
worshipers of his memory, should be thankful for the menace that
determined Mrs. Shelley to relinquish the work which she began in the vein
of fantastic egotism, that caused her to proclaim herself ‘the chosen mate
of a celestial spirit’ whom she hoped ‘to join in his native sky,’ and to
speak of herself as ‘moonshine’ destined to ‘be united to her planet and
wander no more, a sad reflection of all she loved on earth.’

The marvellous piece of egotism on the highest of romantic stilts, from
which these scraps are taken, appears at large in the preface to Hogg’s
_Life_, where it is followed by the letter (dated 41 Park Street, Dec. 11,
1838, from Moonshine to her Celestial Spirit’s future biographer)
containing these words: ‘Sir Timothy forbids Biography, under a threat of
stopping the supplies.’ Certainly the present generation has no reason to
regret Sir Timothy’s menace and its consequence. A biography, written in a
vein of such affectation, could not have redounded to the poet’s honour.
Nor would it have been in any way creditable to Moonshine, who, without
ever fulfilling the promise of her first work of fiction, was in her sober
and unaffected moods an equally industrious and capable woman of letters.
The examples given in previous pages of her ways of dealing with matters
of her own, her father’s, and her husband’s history, warrant a confident
opinion, that, had she been allowed to go her own way by the stern Sir
Timothy, Mrs. Shelley’s biography of the poet would not have been
commendable for severe accuracy.

Of Mrs. Shelley’s way of living, from the date of her husband’s to the
moment of her own death, no biographer will venture to speak
disrespectfully, apart from such slight reprehension as may be fairly
awarded to her exhibitions of animosity and vindictiveness against her
stepmother and her stepmother’s daughter. Trelawny, who thought her a
fretful, trying, jealous wife at Pisa, found fault with her in subsequent
years for her nervous sensitiveness of social opinion, and excessive care
for the conventional proprieties. Instead of blaming her for the pains she
took in her later time to stand well with the world, most readers of this
page will probably concur in thinking it to her credit, that she expressed
in so natural and appropriate a manner her regret for the indiscretions of
her girlhood. A good daughter to her old father in his declining years, an
affectionate friend, and a faultless mother, Mary Wollstonecraft’s child
had at least a fair share of the womanly virtues, though she was not the
phenomenally noble creature people have been required to think her.
Surviving her father by about fourteen years and ten months, she died in
February, 1851, nearly seven years after her son’s succession to the
Castle Goring baronetcy. For the one great error of her life, the error of
her girlhood, she rendered ample atonement; and had it not been for the
extravagances of her eulogists, her other failings would by this time have
passed from human interest and recollection.

How about Mary’s sister-by-affinity? Reference has been made in a previous
chapter to the liberality with which Shelley, by his will, provided for
the charming and vivacious Claire, in whose brilliant endowments he
delighted, whilst pitying her for her misfortunes. Trelawny seems to have
been one of those who thought that Claire gained twice as much by the
poet’s testament as he meant to bequeath her. ‘Trelawny,’ says Mr.
Rossetti, in his equally valuable and entertaining _Talks with Trelawny_,
contributed to the _Athenæum_ in 1882, ‘says that Shelley left Miss
Clairmont, by will, no less a sum than 12,000_l._ He had left 6000_l._ in
the body of the will, and then (whether by inadvertence or otherwise) he
bequeathed another 6000_l._ in a codicil. Miss Clairmont, however, did not
manage the money prudently--one unfortunate speculation being the purchase
of a box or boxes in Lumley’s Italian Opera-house, now burned down. She is
still in Florence, Via Valfonda. I asked Trelawny whether he thought I
might call on her if I am at Florence this year; but he considers she
would not be pleased at my doing so. He and I continued talking about
Shelley’s will, which he says was regarded as a remarkable document in a
legal sense.’ In a previous chapter it was remarked how little Trelawny
knew about the will, of which he spoke so freely and confidently to Mr.
Rossetti:--a will drawn by a lawyer, to which no codicil is attached.
Trelawny was, however, right in saying that Claire was neither prudent nor
fortunate in her investments. Mrs. Shelley may well have disapproved of
her husband’s great, and even excessive, testamentary munificence to her
sister-by-affinity; though she was wrong in thinking that the entire
bequest exceeded the testator’s purpose, at the date of the will. Of
course Claire did not come into the legacy till the settlement of the
poet’s affairs after his father’s death, which took place in 1844. Since
29th April, 1873, the date of Mr. Rossetti’s talk with Trelawny about the
poet’s will, Claire passed from this world to the majority of the actors
of the Byronic-Shelleyan drama. In the time when she used to flash about
London after coming into her money, Claire was on friendly terms with more
than one of the present writer’s acquaintance. Surviving most of those,
who knew her in the days of her girlish waywardness and brightest womanly
loveliness, she became a devout member of the Catholic Church (‘a somewhat
bigotted Roman Catholic,’ in Trelawny’s opinion), and did not close her
old age, without having suffered from straitened circumstances and much
painful illness. Possibly affection for her lost child may have been an
influence, disposing her to seek spiritual solace from the Church, in
whose arms they both died. Anyhow it gives another pathetic touch to her
story that Claire lived to embrace the faith, from which she did her
utmost to preserve her little Allegra.




CHAPTER XVIII.

LAST WORDS.

    A Schedule of significant Matters--Delusion and Semi-Delusion--Certain
    phenomenal Peculiarities of Shelley’s Mind--The Psychological
    Problem--The Story that would have opened Southey’s Eyes--How it would
    be Received by Critical Persons--Misconceptions of Field
    Place--Bootlessness of publishing the Story--Shelley and Socialistic
    Literature--Marian Evans’s Great Error--Her Marriage--Mischievous
    Effects of the Apologies for Shelleyan Socialism--The Homage to which
    Shelley is entitled--The Homage to which he has no Title.


In this concluding chapter of my exhibition of the evidences respecting
Shelley’s character and career, it will be well for readers to review,
judicially, some of his many statements that, whether they are referable
to falsehood, delusion, or ‘semi-delusion,’ were one and all untrue
statements, in that they were statements contrary to fact, together with a
few other matters which should dispose readers to accept his
representations with suspicion and extreme caution.

(1) In or about 1800, little Bysshe Shelley entertained his sisters with
an imaginary account of the visit he represented himself as having paid to
the ladies (with a delightful garden), whom he had not visited; an
incident of the poet’s childhood which, showing he resembled many other
children in a particular kind of imaginativeness, points to his
constitutional propensity, from an early age, to mistake the impressions
of fancy for veritable cognition.

(2) In or about 1804, the Shelley of Sion House, Brentford, gave in to Dr.
Greenlaw the two lines from Ovid as verses of his own composition; an
incident showing that, instead of being so remarkably truthful in his
infancy, as eulogistic biographers have declared him, he was, in his
childhood, capable of the petty falsehoods and acts of deceit, of which
children are often guilty.

(3) In or about the same year (1804), whilst a pupil at Sion House,
Shelley volunteered to do his schoolmate’s (Gellibrand’s) Latin exercise
for him; and, instead of keeping his word and doing it in a way to satisfy
their master, deliberately did it in a way that could not fail to bring
his friend Gellibrand to punishment; an incident showing that, instead of
being the generous and loyal child his idolaters delight in imagining him,
he was, in his childhood, capable of the little acts of treachery of which
children are sometimes guilty. Whilst smiling at the incident and its
consequences, the reader must admit that in this matter the child-Shelley
broke his word of honour to his comrade.

(4) At Eton, whilst living under the influence of the virtuous Dr. Lind,
Shelley became an habitual fabricator of mendacious letters, each of the
epistles being made up of false statements, for which the power and
activity of his imagination can in no degree be held accountable. The
suggestion is not to be entertained that, when luring an ignorant
correspondent into displaying his ignorance for the sake of the pleasure
of laughing at him, Shelley sincerely imagined himself a genuine searcher
after truth; seeking an enlargement of his knowledge from the person he
addressed. When he signed himself ‘John Jones,’ Shelley cannot have
imagined it was his real name. When he gave a false address for the
purpose of concealment, Shelley cannot have imagined it was a real
address.

(5) Whilst he was an Etonian, Shelley had, at Field Place, the illness
attended with delirium, in which he appears to have been first visited
with the monstrous and revolting notion that his father designed to lock
him up in a madhouse. Long after this illness, he either suffered from
this hallucination, or, with deliberate untruthfulness, slandered his
father in declaring him to have entertained so monstrous a purpose. He
told this story to his father’s infamy to Hogg at Oxford, to Peacock in
later time, and various other persons. He used this story to compass his
own selfish ends. It comes to us from Mary Godwin’s pen, that he used this
story to stir her compassion for him when he was endeavouring to lure her
to live in Free Contract with him, and that he used it to good purpose.
Peacock, who knew him well, maintains that Shelley was haunted throughout
life by this notion of his father’s enormous wickedness and revolting
design to lock him up in a madhouse. Yet the evidence is certain that the
kindly Squire of Field Place never entertained any such design against the
boy, whose consent would be needful on his coming of age to the
resettlement of the family estates A and B. It is certain that in this
matter Shelley slandered his own father throughout successive years, and
to various persons, his various utterances and re-utterances of the
monstrous slander being one and all referable to deliberate falsehood,
delusion, or what Peacock styles semi-delusion.

(6) In the year 1810, Shelley induced a London publisher to publish a
collection of verses on the assurance that they were original poetry, and
to offer the verses under a title proclaiming their originality, though he
cannot have been unaware they were deficient in the alleged originality.
Writing from memory, more than sixteen years after the event, the rascally
and mendacious Stockdale declared that, on the discovery of the
plagiarism, Shelley laid the blame of the fraud on his coadjutor. As
Shelley’s coadjutor was his own sister, to believe Stockdale’s unsupported
assertion is to take an even more unfavourable view of Shelley’s part in
the affair.

(7) In the Christmas holidays of 1810-11, Shelley wrote from Field Place
to Hogg at Oxford, that he meant to have recourse to deception to members
of his own domestic circle, and having declared this intention, he told
untruths to the persons he meant to deceive. For these untruths the power
and liveliness of his imagination can be held in no degree accountable.

(8) In 1810, in order to become a member of the University of Oxford,
after ceasing to be a Christian, he subscribed the Thirty-nine Articles,
and solemnly declared himself a believer in Christianity.

(9) In 1810 and 1811, during his residence at Oxford, Shelley was a
wholesale fabricator of mendacious letters; the letters being written
under false pretences of motive and mental temper to the persons whom he
lured, or tried to lure, into religious controversy, some of the epistles
being signed with a false name, and dated from a false address, and one of
them at least representing the writer of it to be a young woman troubled
with religious doubts. For the countless falsehoods of these letters,
written thus deceptively for purposes of concealment and security, the
force and liveliness of the writer’s imagination cannot be held
accountable. It is not to be supposed that whilst writing to the Bishop of
the Church of England in a feminine style and under a feminine signature,
Shelley imagined he was a woman.

(10) In 1811, whilst still at Oxford, Shelley produced _The Necessity of
Atheism_, with a preface made up of untruths, for which the force of his
imagination cannot be held in any degree accountable.

(11) In 1811, after leaving Oxford, Shelley, from complaisance or in mere
levity, took the sacrament with Miss Westbrook when he deemed Christianity
a delusion, regarded the sacred rite as a piece of mummery, and was
(according to his statement to Southey at Keswick) busying himself in
making proselytes to Atheism in the Clapham boarding-school, where
Harriett Westbrook was a pupil. Participation in the Sacrament of the
Lord’s Supper being an act of solemn declaration that the participator is
a believer in Christianity and in communion with the Church, I think few
readers will question that in thus taking the sacrament Shelley was guilty
of an act of untruth.

(12) In October, 1811, he wrote words for the purpose of inducing people
to imagine that, instead of having left Harriett with Hogg at York, he had
taken her with him to London and Sussex.

(13) In a letter dated to Mr. Medwin, the Elder, on 26th November, 1811,
there is evidence, under Shelley’s own hand, that shortly before that
date, he wrote to his mother and sisters respecting some ‘affair’ which,
on coming to the ears of some of his old neighbours at Horsham, was
regarded by them as no true affair, but a thing of his invention.

(14) During his stay at Keswick (1811-12), Shelley (speaking, as I
conceive, under delusion) told Southey that Hogg had attempted to seduce
Harriett during the journey back from Scotland to York. That, in thus
speaking of his familiar friend to a slight acquaintance, he spoke under
misconception, we have Shelley’s assurance in eloquent words and still
more impressive acts. Should additional evidence ever show that Hogg
really made the attempt, and that Shelley had good grounds for what he
said and wrote on that matter to his friend’s infamy, he must be adjudged
to have written and acted deceitfully or under egregious misconception, in
respect to what he did and wrote in later times for Hogg’s exculpation.

(15) In 1812 Shelley wrote William Godwin a series of letters teeming with
inaccuracies, some of which were slanderous statements respecting his
father.

(16) In the same year, towards the close of his stay at Greta Bank,
Shelley imagined himself to have been assaulted by a robber under the very
eaves of Mr. Calvert’s house; an hallucination productive of statements
contrary to fact.

(17) In the same year (1812), whilst at Tanyrallt, Shelley undertook to
write a long and ‘wheedling letter’ to the Duke of Norfolk in order to
induce His Grace to take measures for his pecuniary advantage. Neither
laudanum nor imaginativeness can be held accountable for this declaration
of a resolve to write a deceptive letter.

(18) The year 1813 was the year of the Tanyrallt Mystery; an affair
fruitful of inaccuracies of statement, some of which must be ascribed to
untruthfulness on Shelley’s part, though some of them may have been
altogether due to delusion.

(19) In the same year (1813), he produced _Queen Mab_ with a false
imprint.

(20) In the same year (1813), he for several weeks laboured under the
notion that he was suffering from leprosy; a delusion conclusively
evidential of transient mental derangement.

(21) In 1814 he produced a further demonstration of _The Necessity of
Atheism_, under the deceptive title of _A Refutation of Deism_, and with a
Preface made up of untruths. It has been questioned whether this work was
ever published in the commercial sense of the term. It is, however,
certain that the work was written for circulation, and that it was legally
published.

(22) In the same year (1814) he wooed and won Mary Godwin under cover of
deceitful practices, on one occasion allaying William Godwin’s suspicions
and apprehensions with an explanation, which, as it appeared a sufficient
explanation to the anxious father, must have been disingenuous and
deceitful. Moreover, we have Mary Godwin Shelley’s evidence that in wooing
her he told her the wild fiction about his father’s purpose to shut him up
in a lunatic asylum, and of his preservation from such imprisonment
through Dr. Lind’s timely intervention.

(23) In or about 1815 Shelley told Peacock that his sentence of expulsion
from Oxford had been preceded by his formal arraignment before a numerous
assembly on a charge of producing an atheistical work, and that he had
defended himself with a formal oration delivered to this numerous
assembly. At the same time he showed Peacock a report of this oration in
what had the appearance of being a newspaper.

(24) In or about the same year (1815) Shelley, in conversation with
Peacock, gave the inaccurate account of the offence that resulted in his
dismissal from Eton, saying that he was sent from the school for pinning a
boy’s hand to a table with a penknife.

(25) In the year (1816), shortly before he started from England for
Switzerland, with Claire and Mary Godwin, he poured upon Peacock a stream
of misstatements (referable either to falsehood, delusion, or both)
respecting Mr. (Tremadoc) Williams’s alleged visit to Bishopgate and
sojourn in London, and the purpose of his father and uncle to lock him up
in a lunatic asylum, alleging that his object in going abroad was to get
beyond the reach of his father and uncle, who were set on depriving him of
his liberty.

(26) In 1817 Shelley instructed the Olliers to tell the complicated
untruth under cover of which they could withdraw from the position of
principal publishers of _Laon and Cythna_, and put Messrs. Sherwood,
Neely, and Jones in their place.

(27) In 1818, on coming to Venice, Shelley, for a sufficient object, told
Byron that Mrs. Shelley was staying at Padua, though he was at the time
well aware she was at Bagni di Lucca with her children.

(28) In the winter of 1818-19 (if reliance may be placed on his statements
made to Byron and Medwin at Pisa in 1821-2) he imagined himself the
recipient of singular attentions from a married lady of beauty, wealth,
and noble connections, who, after proffering him her heart in 1816, and
following him in that year from England to Switzerland, followed him, in
1818, from England to Naples, at which place, according to his story, she
expired in the winter of 1818-19, under his sympathetic observation.

(29) In 1820, Shelley told Medwin that, in the summer of the same year, he
had been felled to the ground in the Post Office of Pisa by a man who
preluded the ruffianly blow by exclaiming, ‘What, are you that d----d
atheist, Shelley?’ that, on recovering from the stunning effect of the
blow, he hastened to tell Mr. Tighe of the assault; and that, after
tracking the ruffian to the Tre Donzelle at Pisa, he and Mr. Tighe went to
Genoa in futile pursuit of the assailant. Whether, in the summer of 1820,
Shelley really imagined himself a sufferer from this imaginary assault,
whether he went to Genoa in pursuit of the imaginary assailant, whether
he ever spoke to Mr. Tighe about the assault, are matters respecting which
there is no sufficient testimony; but the evidence is sufficient that he
told Medwin about this assault that was never made upon him. Shelley’s
statement about this affair must be referred to falsehood, delusion, or
semi-delusion.

(30) In 1821-2 Shelley spoke to Byron and Medwin of the enamoured
gentlewoman who, according to his account, followed him, in 1816, from
England to Geneva, and, in 1818, from England to Naples; the whole of his
narrative of the lady, who worshipt him and died of love for him, being a
fiction, referable to falsehood, delusion, or semi-delusion.

(31) In the same year (1821) Shelley wrote from Ravenna to his wife the
letter, crammed and crowded with misrepresentations of what had passed in
conversation between him and Byron, respecting the scandalous account of
his (Shelley’s) intercourse with Claire.

To the careful reader of these volumes it is, of course, apparent that
this schedule of significant matters might be greatly extended and
expanded. But the list is sufficiently comprehensive to justify the
verdict that, from his boyhood to his death, Shelley was apt to utter for
truth things contrary to fact; that he sometimes did things which no
precisely honest man could do; that his word was not a word to be relied
on. To account for his frequent departures from truth, friendly historians
of his career have declared him, in respect to his misstatements, not so
much an untruthful man as a deluded man. Following in the track of these
historians, every reader of this book is left to decide for himself, in
respect to each of the poet’s numerous misstatements, whether its
inaccuracy should be referred to purely deceptive purpose, sheer
misconception, or semi-delusion. In reviewing the many deviations from
truth, it is, however, well for readers to bear in mind that delusion is
one of three distinctive forms of insanity. To be insane is to suffer from
a state of mental disease, attended with incoherence, fatuity, or
delusion. The mind that suffers from any one of these kinds of disorder is
a deranged and insane mind. However eccentric, or feeble, or otherwise
unhealthy, it may be, the mind which displays no one of these three
symptoms of derangement is a sane mind. Hallucination differs in
magnitude, intensity, and persistence. If Shelley was wholly under
hallucination in respect to his father’s purpose of confining him in a
madhouse, and if he was (as Peacock says) haunted by this notion
throughout life, he was the victim of an extremely revolting and very
persistent delusion. There is a certain amount of truth in another poet’s
dictum, that great wits to madness sure are near allied. But if Shelley’s
alert and subtle mind was so steadily, and for so long a period, held by
the notion that his father wished to put him in a madhouse, he was mad in
a degree, that to many readers may well appear incompatible with the
vigour and grandeur of his faculties. In the estimate of his mental and
moral peculiarities to minimize the degree in which he suffered from
hallucination, is to maximize the degree in which he was untruthful. In
proportion as the final verdict shall acquit him of untruthfulness it must
declare him to have suffered from insanity. If he was not contemptibly
untruthful, he was (for all his mental force and poetic sensibility)
pitiably insane,--far more insane than I can think it possible for a man
of his mental power to be. In reviewing his long series of misstatements,
careful psychologists must come to the conclusion that when uttering them
he was either wilfully untruthful, suffering from delusion, or suffering
from what Peacock termed ‘semi-delusion’--the state of mind in which
untruthfulness and morbid imaginativeness joined hands.

But whether they proceeded from hallucination or deceptive purpose, or
from the co-operation of falsehood with ungovernable fancy, the
misstatements had the effect of wilful untruths; and the utterer was a
speaker of words not to be relied on. To be kept steadily in mind by the
students of Shelley’s story, this fact is to be held especially in view at
moments, when the student is considering the evidential value of
statements uttered by the poet to the discredit of individuals.

Apart from grounds of which I refrain from speaking fully, there are
grounds for believing that Shelley accounted for his rupture with Harriett
Westbrook by representations which, had he been constituted like ordinary
English gentlemen, would at least be _primâ facie_ evidence that he had
other and stronger reasons for withdrawing from her than any reasons he
gave to Peacock. It is not probable that he would have succeeded in
withdrawing Mary Godwin from her father’s care, had he not made her
believe he had graver causes for dissatisfaction with the ‘noble animal,’
than her inability to feel poetry and understand philosophy. Reared as
she had been within the lines of religious orthodoxy, and trained to
reverence marriage, it is scarcely conceivable that Mary Godwin fled with
her lover to the Continent, without having been made to believe that her
friend, Harriett Shelley, had by flagrant misconduct forfeited her title
to her husband’s consideration. Though Field Place has not shown much
discretion in its treatment of Shelleyan questions, it would scarcely have
smiled at Peacock for not being in Shelley’s confidence on the subject,
had it not been really possessed by the notion, that it knew more than the
rest of the world about the poet’s real cause of displeasure with
Harriett. Without having a strange story in reserve for the fulfilment of
the promise, Field Place would scarcely have promised to produce in due
season a statement, certain to change greatly the world’s misguided view
of the poet’s treatment of his first wife. I have small doubt that Southey
quite misconstrued the words to which he referred, when in his scathing
August-1820 letter to Shelley, he wrote:--

    ‘You might have regulated your domestic arrangements, as you say,
    quite as conveniently to yourself, if you had descended to the base
    thoughts of the vulgar. I suppose this means that you might have
    annulled your marriage as having been contracted during your
    minority.’--(_Southey’s Correspondence with Caroline Bowles_, 1881.)

Southey’s conjecture was wide of the mark. Shelley knew too much of the
Scotch marriage law to imagine he could have set aside his marriage on
that ground. What he meant to imply must have been, that if he could have
descended to the base practice of vulgar folk, wishing for divorce, and
rich enough to pay for it in the usual way, he could have obtained a legal
separation from his wife, on account of her misconduct. And that he
ventured to hint so much to his disdainful correspondent is a sufficiently
clear sign that he felt he really had a story (true or fanciful) which,
had he condescended to divulge it, would have made Southey open his eyes
with astonishment at the sufficiency of the grounds on which the author of
_Queen Mab_ retired from John Westbrook’s daughter. It may therefore be
assumed, or at least imagined, that sooner or later the world will be told
in a new way, _why_ Shelley left the girl who had tried his temper not a
little for some months. Possibly the story will be that the author of the
anti-matrimonial note to _Queen Mab_ caught poor Harriett in the act of
lavishing on some man of mean condition attentions she should have
rendered to no one but her husband.

At this date, when poor Harriett’s friends have passed from the scene, it
may appear to Shelley’s idolaters alike easy to get credit for such a
tale, and difficult to discredit it. But critical persons will be less
readily satisfied of the truth of any such story than the Shelleyan
enthusiasts imagine. To offer such a tale to critical persons on Shelley’s
bare and unsupported assertion will be bootless. They will be sure to say,
‘What more natural than for the man, who (under delusion) slandered his
father and Hogg, to put (under delusion) monstrous things on record
against his wife, after quarrelling with her?’ At the moment of breaking
with his wife, Shelley was very anxious for Peacock’s approval of his
action;--so anxious for it as to call him up to London from the country
for a conference on the business. Moreover (though Mr. Froude, out of his
great knowledge of Shelleyan questions, says the reverse), Shelley all
through life was quick to defend himself at the expense of other people.
The critical people will say: ‘Why, if this story is true, and not a
Shelleyan invention, did not Shelley confide it to Peacock? One can see
why the poet (capable of giving two different accounts of the same affair
to the well-informed Duke of Norfolk and the uninformed William Godwin)
would withhold an untrue story from the well-informed Peacock. But why, if
the story were true, did he keep it from Peacock? It can scarcely be
suggested that he shrunk from lowering Harriett in Peacock’s esteem.’

At the time of the Chancery Suit, Shelley did his utmost to regain the
custody of his children. He knew that, if the decree should be given
against him, the decision would be grounded on considerations of his
conduct to his first wife. Harriett was no longer in the world to suffer
from any evidence to her discredit. The other Westbrooks were so hateful
to him, he would gladly have caused them pain by evidence to her
discredit. To prove he had left Harriett for a good and sufficient cause,
would have been to strengthen his case greatly. Yet he did not venture to
embody the facts in an affidavit for the Chancellor’s consideration.
Moreover, Field Place bears witness that he never confided the real cause
of his withdrawal from Harriett to any of the few men, who were his
familiar friends in 1814. Surely the critical people will ask, ‘Why did
he not confide this story to his familiar male friends in 1814? Why did he
not venture to produce this story in the Court of Chancery, and swear to
its truth in 1817?’ Surely, also, the critical people will answer both
these questions in ways, adverse to the credibility of the story. Should
it appear that he told the story to Mary shortly before she yielded to his
suit, the critical people will say with a significant smile: ‘No doubt;
and also to move her to regard him compassionately, he at the same time
told her how his cruel father would have locked him up in a madhouse, had
it not been for the virtuous Dr. Lind’s intervention,’ It will be asked by
critical readers why the statement, which if true should have been given
to the world long since, has been withheld so long? Why it was not put
forth during the life of Thomas Love Peacock (Harriett’s vindicator,
Shelley’s close friend and executor), who, knowing both Shelley and his
first wife intimately, maintained stoutly to the last that she was a
virtuous and loyal wife? These questions will also be answered in ways
unfavourable to the statement.

Given to the world on Shelley’s bare assertion, any such statement will
have little effect on critical readers. Nor will it be more effectual on
judicial minds for being supported by statements by Mrs. Shelley and other
persons, deriving their information from Shelley. Fifty such statements
will be nothing more than Shelley’s own statement, uttered by his lips
through fifty tubes. A statement, having no evidential value on its first
utterance, does not acquire evidential value from mere reiteration. Nor
will it be of any avail for any biographer, drawing his information from
Field Place, to produce the mere substance of any such remarkable
statement, and require critical readers to accept the facts on the bare
authority of Shelley’s representatives. Field Place has been too often
misled by its authentic evidences to wildly erroneous conclusions
respecting Shelley, for critical readers to be in a humour to accept any
more of its quite sincere statements of fact without distrust.

Field Place has been induced by its evidences to think the poet a man of
aristocratic descent, though his lineal ancestors, from Elizabethan to
Georgian time, were at best small landowners, entitled to bear arms.

Field Place has been induced by Clint’s composition to think of the poet’s
face as symmetrically beautiful, and having a straight and
delicately-modelled nose; though he really had unsymmetrical features, and
a little turn-up nose.

Field Place has been led by its authentic evidences to ascribe the poet’s
estrangement from his family wholly to the religious and political
differences that at most only embittered the quarrel, which is shown by
Sir Bysshe Shelley’s will and codicil, and the certain facts of the poet’s
story, to have resulted from causes, having no connexion with questions of
religion and politics.

Field Place is under the impression that Mary and Claire were not related
in any way whatever to one another.

Though Mary Godwin was not educated, any more than Amelia Opie or Jane
Austen, to be a Free Lover, Field Place is under the impression that she
was educated to think lightly of the matrimonial rite.

Though Mary Godwin did not give herself to Shelley without enduring a
strong conflict of passion and duty, Field Place is under the impression
that she suffered from no such conflict.

Though the Lord Chancellor’s decree was given in steady consideration of
Shelley’s conduct to his first wife, Field Place is under the impression
that in delivering the decree, which denied to Shelley the custody of his
children by Harriett Westbrook, the Lord Chancellor had no regard to the
poet’s conduct to his first wife.

Holding in its hands the conclusive evidence of Shelley’s great affection
for Claire in 1816 and 1817, Field Place is under the impression that
Shelley regarded her with disapproval and aversion in those years.

Surely, critical students of Shelley’s story have in these facts
sufficient grounds for declining to put implicit confidence in the
biographical discretion and exactitude of Field Place:--sufficient reasons
for saying ‘as Field Place is under so many erroneous impressions
respecting the story of its poet, is it not more than probable that Field
Place is under an erroneous impression respecting his reasons for leaving
his first wife?’

I do not doubt that Field Place could give us some painful and hitherto
undivulged particulars about the poor girl, whom Shelley certainly
illuminated out of Christianity when she was still a child, and who,
according to Shelley’s words (spoken soon after their marriage, to
Southey, at Keswick), was expelled from her Clapham boarding-school for
embracing the opinions, which he offered to her and her schoolfellows.
But what good would come to Shelley’s reputation by the display of any
more details of his victim’s eventual debasement? Southey’s words were no
less true and just, than scorching, when he wrote (see _Robert Southey’s
Correspondence with Caroline Bowles_, 1881) in his August-1820 letter to
Shelley at Pisa: ‘Be this as it may, ask your own heart, whether you have
not been the whole, sole, and direct cause of her destruction. You
corrupted her opinions; you robbed her of her moral and religious
principles; you debauched her mind. But for you and your lessons, she
might have gone through the world innocently and happily.’ As he read
these scathing words, Shelley may well have dismissed all hope of good to
come to his posthumous fame from the vindicatory story, which, even yet,
may be published to his injury. Shelley _was_ accountable for Harriett
Westbrook’s depravation. To exhibit for the first time any peculiarly
revolting feature of that depravation might cause men of honour and
sensibility to realize more vividly than before the consequences of
Shelley’s action towards the unhappy girl; but to do so could not take a
feather’s weight from the heavy burden of his accountability for the ruin
to which he brought her. To point to any incident of that depravation as
something to justify Shelley in ‘leaving her to slide’ into deeper guilt,
would be an extravagance of injustice to the poor girl.

Powerless to palliate at any point his misdeeds to Harriett, the story,
which might, perhaps, account more precisely for his withdrawal from her,
could neither justify, nor tend by a single hair’s-breadth to justify,
Shelley’s action towards Mary Godwin and her father. No injury, done to a
man by A, can justify him in doing B a grievous injury. Yet, to hear some
of the Shelleyan apologists talk, one would imagine that, to show Harriett
did her husband a greater wrong than any she has hitherto been proved to
have done him, would be to clear him of all blameworthiness for dealing
his familiar friend the most cruel blow, that can be given to a loving
father. As no demonstration of her badness would lessen his responsibility
for her depravation, or in any degree justify his way of dealing with his
intimate friend’s sixteen-years-old daughter, it is to be hoped that the
world will not be invited by any biographer to consider the story by which
Shelley thought he could open Southey’s eyes.

The efforts that have been made during the last twenty-five years to prove
Shelley an almost sacred social regenerator, should be considered in
connexion with the literature that has created sympathy and admiration for
the few noteworthy Englishwomen who have, in recent generations, lived
connubially with men to whom they were not married:--the literature (of
countless essays and articles) that has celebrated the virtues of Mary
Wollstonecraft and Mary Godwin, and, not content with rating Marian Evans
at her high proper worth, as the literary equal of Dickens, Thackeray, and
the late Lord Lytton, has dealt with her admirable novels, as though they
were a kind of new sacred scripture.

Of those novels I think far too highly to write aught in their
disparagement. On other than purely literary grounds, I also think too
worshipfully of Marian Evans (let her _nom de plume_ be dropt as a thing
that has served its turn) to wish to take aught from the homage that is
her due. It is proverbially difficult to foretell the degree of esteem in
which a greatly powerful and popular writer will be held by future
generations. But in Marian Evans’s case there is neither difficulty nor
fear in predicting her place throughout all time in the history of English
literature. She may be surpassed by women of future time. But, come what
may, she never can be anything less than by far the first and greatest of
the Victorian Englishwomen of Letters. It was my hope that the splendour
of her literary fame would be spared the honours of biographical
celebration; that the interest of her unique literary personality should
pass down to posterity under her universally familiar _nom de plume_; and
that her strictly personal and private story might be lost sight of as far
as possible.

Two of my reasons for this hope outweighed all the others. So long as her
association with George Henry Lewes should not be brought before the world
in clear and permanent record, it would remain a thing of her privacy, a
matter of which there would be no need for tongue or pen to say a word, an
affair in respect to which good taste and good feeling would dispose every
person to be reticent. But on being offered in clear type to the whole
world’s consideration, on being laid on every library table and every
drawing-room table of the country, for approval or disapproval, ceasing to
be an affair on which one might be silent, it would become an affair on
which every educated person of all the English-speaking peoples would be
bound, _i.e._ constrained by domestic and other social duties, to form an
opinion of approval or disapproval, and to declare it. To give publicity
to the circumstances of that association, would be to raise for discussion
in every family of the English-speaking peoples, the many perilous
questions touching the origin, history, uses, and usefulness of lawful
marriage;--to raise the whole group of dangerous domestic questions, which
Shelley would fain have forced upon universal consideration by the
anti-matrimonial doctrine of _Queen Mab_ and _Laon and Cythna_. I was not
thinking only of Marian Evans’s fame, and of the many hard things that
would necessarily be said of her in controversies about these social
questions, when I hoped that her domestic association with George Henry
Lewes would be withheld as long as possible from general knowledge. The
story has now been told, to the gratification of the enemies of marriage.
I do not blame Mr. Cross for revealing what he may well have deemed
himself powerless to keep from universal consideration for any long time.
He had, I am sure, the best motives for doing what I hoped he would not
do; and it cannot be questioned that, after deciding to give the world a
complete biography of the famous woman, with whose story he is so
honourably associated, he selected the least objectionable way of
accomplishing his purpose.

It needs not many words to show how little the extreme Shelleyan
Socialists are justified in pointing to that story, as evidence that
Marian Evans concurred in their desire for the substitution of lawless for
lawful wedlock. Still a struggling woman of letters, she was living in the
circles of Free Thought, when she came to think of marriage in some such
way as the pious Martin Bucer thought of it in the sixteenth century, as
the devout Milton thought of it in the seventeenth century, as the honest
and temperate William Godwin thought of it before his abandonment of Free
Contract views. It was an error of judgment (arising partly from defective
knowledge of the dangerous forces of human nature, and partly from the
co-operation of the egotism and the modesty, which prevented her from
seeing how greatly she differed in her mental and moral faculties from
other people); but it was certainly in no degree due to any lack of
delicacy or moral sensibility, that she conceived all spouses capable of
living as virtuously and loyally in Free Contract as she knew herself to
be. It was under these circumstances that, whilst regarding certain social
questions in some such way as they are regarded by ‘the flower’ of the
Free Contract party (men abundantly endowed with learning and mental
acuteness, with benevolence and moral rectitude), it devolved upon her to
decide, whether she could live righteously in the closest and tenderest
intimacy with a man, who had won her heart, without being able to make her
his wife.

It is not easy to recall how much she sacrificed of dignity and happiness
by her decision, and at the same time to think patiently of the man, for
whose sake she made such an enormous sacrifice. Had the lot that came to
her in her autumnal age, only befallen her at the perfection of her
powers, her life might have been no less fruitful of happiness to herself,
than it was beneficent to her species. To think that such a lot might have
befallen her, could have scarcely failed to befall her, had she answered
the fatal question in another way, is to feel resentfully against the man
who, at the instigation of mere masculine selfishness, attached himself to
her, and in doing so bemuddled her existence, and shut her out from so
many of life’s sweetest joys. Had he acted the part of a gentleman in the
matter, she would, at the dawn of her celebrity, have married happily, for
she was a woman to inspire love. It is more generally known that she
wanted some of the elements of feminine beauty, than that she was in some
respects personally charming. Together with the brow of mental power, she
had eyes memorably eloquent of genius and sympathy, and a smile that,
startling or rather gently surprising the beholder (seeing it for the
first time), changed all the character of the countenance, which it
brightened into momentary beauty. It is not for printed words to tell, how
this ineffably charming smile changed and beautified the face, that, in
its expressionless moments, was unattractive. Fortunate in the abundance
of her fine rich tresses, she was also fortunate in her musical voice. It
was the music of a gentle and lofty nature; for which alone many a man
would have loved her.

Enough has been said to indicate how Marian Evans came to hold the views
respecting marriage, which made it possible for the woman of lofty nature
and fine moral sensibility to consent to Mr. Lewes’s suit. Compassion for
him may be held largely accountable for her consent and self-sacrifice.
Though he was the cause of his own domestic misfortunes, he was to be
commiserated for them. And, in nine cases out of every ten, when a
fine-natured woman does what she ought not to do, she takes the wrong step
in obedience to a generous impulse. Hence she took the step which she
lived to regret profoundly (no careful reader of her novels can question
_that_), without, however, surviving her affection for him during his
life. Possibly, when she was being drawn into his power, she did not
trouble herself to think much of the possible effects of her example. If
she thought seriously of that matter, she, thinking as she then did of
marriage, may well have concluded that the effects of her example would
not be pernicious, since the Free Contract in which she could live
virtuously appeared to her an estate, in which the rest of her sex might
also live righteously. But the reasons are obvious, why the still
comparatively obscure woman of letters may have thought the social
influence of her example--the act of a single and comparatively unknown
person, hidden from general observation in vast London--was too light a
matter for serious consideration. The case was far otherwise a few years
later; when in the exercise of her art she had enlarged her knowledge of
human nature, had pondered more thoughtfully the several social problems
connected with marriage, had realized the evils certain to ensue from the
substitution of the Free Contract for lawful wedlock, and had won for
herself a place and eminence, necessarily attended, in the case of so
conscientious a woman, with a lively and anxious desire to use her
influence for good ends, and no other ends. When vast power comes to such
a woman, it never fails to create in her a lively, a keen, even at times a
torturing, sense of responsibility.

Is it strange that Marian Evans was often sad? that the knowledge of her
power over men and women was more fruitful of sorrow than of delight to
her? I may be wrong in thinking, but I like to think, that one of the
motives, which determined her to accept the love of the man, to whom she
gave her hand after Mr. Lewes’s death, was that she might, by the
celebration of her marriage, do her best to preserve her name and fame and
the story of her former life from being used to discredit an institution
and a rite she venerated. Anyhow her marriage was an act, by which she
publicly and impressively declared her disapproval of the great purpose of
the enemies of marriage, and denied their right to speak of her as one of
themselves. The act was thus interpreted by those innovators, who at the
time of the marriage spoke with no little warmth of her miserable
abandonment of their cause and principles. And the deed was not
misconstrued. She could not have proclaimed more effectually her
deliberate opinion that the ordinances of marriage are salutary and
sacred, and that it is the duty of women to comply with them. Instead of
making for the end desired by the extreme Shelleyan Socialists, the story
of the great novelist’s life sets forth nothing more clearly than that she
regarded the main condition of her association with Mr. Lewes,
regretfully.

Is there any reason to fear that the extreme Shelleyan Socialists will
ever see the accomplishment of their desire? None. It is more probable for
Shelley’s poetry to be forgotten, than for his social views to be acted
upon. The churches of the land are strong enough to guard marriage against
its enemies. If the churches were as powerless as fortunately they are
powerful for its preservation, the domestic conservatism of the English
people--a sentiment no less strong in the homes of English liberals than
the homes of their political opponents--could by itself safeguard lawful
wedlock from destruction. The women of England are not so unintelligent
and powerless, that they are likely to be wheedled by specious phrases out
of the dignity and privileges secured to them by matrimony.

There is small reason to fear that the Free Contract of the Shelleyan
innovators will be established on the ruins of an institution, rooted in
the affections of the people, and hallowed by the practice of centuries.
The notion that an institution so venerable and salutary, and all but
universally honoured, may perish, because three or four English women of
letters in the course of a century have consented to live in Free Contract
with lawless spouses, and because a handful of philosophers and
half-a-hundred journalists think it would be well to endow every man with
the power of changing his wife at pleasure, is a notion, too ridiculous
for serious consideration.

But though they are foredoomed to failure, the Shelleyan Socialists have
done and are doing no little harm to individuals. People, who delight in
literature, without knowing how little its producers differ from the
followers of other vocations, are apt to overrate egregiously the wisdom
and virtue of the individuals, to whose writings they are most largely
indebted for mental refreshment and edification. To a veteran, whose way
of life has afforded him good opportunities for observing the lives and
studying the characters of the producers of the higher literature, it may
well seem droll that the author of good books should be so generally and
confidently assumed to live no less well than he writes. But the
disposition of readers to think too highly of their favourite writers
should not be overlooked by those who would take a perfect view of the
various forces, that, resulting in social opinion, determine the conduct
of individuals. Influential in all sorts and conditions of general
readers, this disposition is especially influential amongst the
sympathetic, the imaginative, and the inexperienced. By the many young men
and women of our rural homes--indeed of all homes, lying well away from
the literary coteries--who, drawing their liveliest contentment, take
their clearest views of life, from current _belles lettres_, the works of
supremely powerful poets and novelists are not more prized as sources of
diversion, than as sources of intellectual enlightenment and moral
guidance; and their delight in the literature they admire, is usually
attended with a dangerous readiness to regard with approval whatever they
may know of the personal conduct of its producers.

On a considerable proportion of these young readers, what must be the
effect of the strenuous and fascinating literature which, now in separate
books, now in the pages of popular magazines, and now in the columns of
powerful journals, instructs them, that, whilst living in Free Contract,
Mary Wollstonecraft and Gilbert Imlay were living innocently in the eyes
of God and man; that Mary Godwin should be commended for her generous
courage in flying from her father’s roof with another woman’s husband;
that Marian Evans acted justifiably in associating herself conjugally with
a man who could not marry her; that it is as honourable for a woman to
mate in Free Contract as to become a wife; that reverence for lawful and
holy matrimony should be rated as a mediæval superstition; that Shelley
was only in the smallest degree to blame for carrying off his intimate
friend’s sixteen-years-old daughter.

Can it be questioned that the literature which teaches all this must at
least tend in many cases to weaken, and in some cases to overpower
utterly, the principles and considerations, which in certain seasons of
temptation, withhold young men and women from the shortest and quickest
road to shame and depravation? Can it be doubted that this elegant and
hurtful literature is at this moment causing many a young Englishwoman to
be saying to herself, as she hesitates at the entrance to this common
highway to ruin, ‘Why can it be wrong for me to do what Mary
Wollstonecraft is defended for doing ninety years since; what Mary Godwin
is commended for doing in an early time of the present century; what the
wise and lofty-natured Marian Evans did only a generation since? If it was
not wrong for Marian Evans, and Mary Godwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft to
live connubially with men to whom they were not married, it surely cannot
be wrong for me to do likewise?’

Can it be doubted that, through the influence of the same elegant and
hurtful literature, many a young Englishman is now saying to himself, ‘As
Shelley was guilty of nothing very heinous, nothing more reprehensible
than “the sin of acting on emotional theories of liberty,” in carrying off
his familiar friend’s daughter, when he had no prospect of ever being able
to marry her; as he, notwithstanding this emotional indiscretion, is
offered to our reverential admiration as a man who, might under auspicious
circumstances “have been the Saviour of the World,” it cannot be very
wrong for me to take to my arms in free promise a girl whom I have a fair
prospect of being able to marry a few years hence, and whom I mean to
marry as soon as it shall be convenient for me to do so?’

Had Field Place merely garnished the poet’s pedigree, and varnished his
portraits, and dressed the main incidents of his career into a pretty
memoir, I should have been silent about the genealogical record and
personal narrative, and held my peace about the falsity of the pictures.
But Field Place has exceeded its reasonable powers and privileges, in
dealing with the story of a remarkable man, whose fame is less the
property of his nearest kindred than of the nation, to whose literature
his genius gave new lustre. Had the Shelleyan Enthusiasts confined their
eulogies to the excellences of their favourite poet’s achievements in his
proper art, I should have concurred cordially in their admiration of his
poetical services, and been content to smile in my sleeve at their
simplicity, in thinking he spoke like a peer, when he was only speaking
like a peasant. But it is not enough for the Enthusiasts, that Shelley’s
incomparably fine poetry should be valued at its full worth. To satisfy
them, we must declare him no less virtuous as a man, than masterly as a
songster. And whilst Field Place and the Enthusiasts have committed
indiscretions, that provoke remonstrance and demand correction, the
extreme Shelleyan Socialists have placed his strongest title to social
homage, on his courageous avowal of sentiments, that are unutterably
distasteful to the great majority of conscientious and right-minded
people.

When a man is taken from the long roll of our mighty poets, and offered to
the world’s admiration as a rare example of all the human virtues, it is
well for people to examine the grounds of such extraordinary commendation.
Now that _Queen Mab_, with its anti-matrimonial note, is put into the
hands of our boys; now that _Laon and Cythna_, with its monstrous
doctrine, is seen on our drawing-room tables; now that the author of so
reprehensible a book is proclaimed a being of unqualified goodness, who,
under auspicious circumstances, ‘might have been the Saviour of the
World,’ it is time for the world to be told, that the recent efforts to
win for Shelley a kind of regard, to which he is in no degree whatever
entitled, are only part of a social movement, that, so far as the extreme
Shelleyan Socialists are concerned, is a movement for the Abolition of
Marriage,--in accordance with the spirit and purpose of his Social
Philosophy.


THE END.


LONDON:

Printed by STRANGEWAYS AND SONS, Tower Street, Upper St. Martin’s Lane.




FOOTNOTES:

[1] The authorities differ respecting these preliminary measures; some
saying that she deliberately walked into the low water, whilst others
represent that she walked on the Bridge in the rain, in order that her
dress should be soaked and weighted with water, before she took the leap
to death. Godwin’s account in the _Memoirs_ is:--‘The rain suggested to
her the idea of walking up and down on the Bridge till her clothes were
thoroughly drenched and heavy with the wet, which she did for half an
hour, without meeting a human being. She then leaped from the top of the
Bridge, but still seemed to find a difficulty in sinking, which she
endeavoured to counteract by pressing her clothes closely round her;’--an
account for which the writer may be assumed to have had Mary
Wollstonecraft’s authority.

[2] What construction Jerdan put upon the words of wrath is known from a
clause of the scorching passage of the famous article of the _Literary
Gazette_, in which he set forth the worst of the evil capabilities to be
looked for in Shelley’s pupils:--‘A disciple following his tenets would
not hesitate to debauch, or, after debauching, to abandon, any woman; to
such it would be matter of perfect indifference to rob a confiding father
of his daughters, and incestuously to live with all the branches of a
family, whose morals were ruined by the damned sophistry of the seducer;
_to such it would be sport to tell a deserted wife to obtain with her
pretty face support by prostitution_; and when the unhappy maniac sought
refuge in self-destruction, to laugh at the fool while in the arms of
associate strumpets.’--_Vide_ _Literary Gazette_, 19th May, 1821.

[3] It should be borne in mind that had he persevered in his design of
following medicine, the expelled Oxonian could not have gained an M.D.
degree in England. The member of a medical family, with cousins following
medicine under different qualifications, Shelley was of course aware that,
though he might take the diplomas of the College of Surgeons and the
Apothecaries’ Hall, he could not as a mere London medical student become
‘a physician.’

[4] In his autobiography it is admitted by Hunt, that, before his
liberation from prison, on 3rd February, 1815, his personal acquaintance
with Shelley was very slight. ‘It was,’ he says, ‘my imprisonment that
brought me acquainted with my friend of friends, Shelley. I had seen
little of him before; but he wrote to me, making me a princely offer,
which at that time I stood in no need of.’ In another place the
autobiographer says, ‘I first saw Shelley during the earlier period of the
_Examiner_, before his indictment on account of the Regent, but it was
only for a few short visits, which did not produce intimacy.’ Hunt does
not seem to have ever visited Shelley at Bishopgate, or, in any fair sense
of the term, to have known Shelley whilst the latter lived there. In the
summer of 1816, Shelley was in Switzerland. On his return from
Switzerland, he went to Bath. There was no intercourse (to be called
friendship) between him and Hunt, till the close of 1816. In April, 1818,
Shelley went to Italy, where in the last week of his existence he again
came face to face with Hunt. Like Trelawny, Hunt made the most of his
personal intercourse with Shelley. Readers should bear in mind that the
period of the personal intercourse of the two poets, _i.e._ the period
during which they saw much of one another, speaking together face to face,
began at the close of 1816, and ended in April, 1818,--a period less than
eighteen months. Till he saw his way to suck money out of the youngster’s
pocket, Hunt never troubled himself about Shelley. In the short year and
half of their _personal_ association, the editor of the _Examiner_ found
Shelley a profitable acquaintance.

[5] Mr. Rossetti makes Shelley arrive at Naples on 1st December, 1818, and
I am far from saying that the careful writer is wrong on the immaterial
point. It is enough to know for certain that the poet made only a short
stay (at the most, a sojourn of less than three weeks) at Rome on the
occasion of his journey from Northern to Southern Italy.