Pass ?K 543 1 Book .Gr? P^ OORBACH, MZVfYOnK, COPYRIGHT. 1689. BY HAROLD ROORBACM: 2lv00lJ)acJ)*S full PfSrriptibC ffintnlogue of Dramas, Comedies, Comediettas, Farces, Tabieaux-vivants, Guide-books. Novel entertainments for Church, School and Parlor Exhibitions, etc.. containing complete and explicit information, will be sent to any addre«| 1 receipt of a stamp for return postage. Address as above. PREFACE There is one charge which every biographer of Shelley must be prepared to face. A certain number — though it may be only a small number — of critics will infallibly arise and reprove him, with solemnity, for indulging in " chatter about Harriet." It is a way, like another, of asserting moral and intellectual superiority ; but it may itself be made the object of criticism. For no biographer plunges into *' chatter about Harriet " out of sheer wantonness. The pur- pose of such chatter is to enable, first the writer, and then the reader, to " see Shelley plain." Any man who chooses may say, of course, that he does not want to see Shelley plain ; and that, equally of course, is final. One can no more argue with such a man than one can discuss the intricacies of arithmetic with the man who proclaims that he does not care whether two and two make three or four or five. He is en- titled to his indifference, and the road is clear for him to pass by on the other side. But if one does wish to see Shelley plain — if one would V PREFACE like to know him as one knows the most intimate of one's friends — ^then it is imperative that the chatter about Harriet should be sifted. Sainte- Beuve said so; and few critics deny the weight of Sainte-Beuve's authority. Nor does the repetition of such chatter imply the least disparagement of Shelley as a man or a poet. The idea that an interest in Shelley's relations with Harriet (and with Mary, and Emily, and the two Janes) is incompatible with an enthusiastic appreciation of the " Prome- theus," the " Cenci," and the " Epipsychidion," is the fixed notion of a few pompous people; but it should be shaken out of them. The men who knew Shelley best, and loved and admired him most, did not share it. Hogg speaks of Shelley as his " incomparable friend " ; Med win thought him the greatest poet of his time; Trelawny worshipped him almost as a god. Yet Hogg chatters about Harriet in the most de- lightful vein of comedy; and Medwin discusses Emily without setting any bridle on his tongue; and Trelawny is very anxious that the world should see Mary as she really was, in order that it may judge Shelley justly. The books of these writers — ^who, in spite of their inaccuracies, at least knew their man — are still the chief sources from which the material for the picture must be sought; but there are vi PREFACE other sources which have recently been made available, — a good many sources, indeed, which were not opened up until after the publication of Professor Dowden's important work. Harriet Shelley's Letters to Mrs. Nugent, freely quoted in these pages, are the chief of them. They give us Harriet's own view of the circumstances of her separation from her husband ; and another, and very interesting, view of that grave event is contained in a letter, also given in these pages, written by Charles Clair- mont to Francis Place, and included in a collec- tion of autographs recently acquired by the manuscript department of the British Museum. On the vexed question of Shelley's relations with Jane Clairmont, fresh light is thrown by the " Talks with Jane Clairmont,'*' published by Mr. William Graham in his Last Links with Byron, Shelley, and Keats ; by some of the letters from Jane Clairmont to Byron, published in Mr. Prothero's edition of Byron's works ; and by some passages in Trelawny's Letters recently published by Mr. Buxton Forman. The queer story of the attempt on Shelley's life at Tanyrallt is elucidated by a recent contributor to the Century Magazine ; and the Memoirs of a Highland Lady, who was on a visit to the Master of University College, Oxford, when Shelley was an undergraduate, supplements Hogg's narrative in vii PREFACE some particulars, and invites a revision of our estimate of that catastrophe. Finally, the Sequel is new. The story there told of the courtship of Mary Shelley by the author of " Home, Sweet Home," and of Mary Shelley's affectionate regard for Washington Irving, is based upon a correspondence only dis- covered, in circumstances to be related, a few years ago, and, as yet, only privately printed by the Boston Bibliophile Society. Vlll CONTENTS CHAP. I THE COUNTY FAMILY II ANCESTORS AND PARENTS Ill THE ACADEMY FOR YOUNG GENTLEMEN . IV ETON V UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, OXFORD .... VI FIRST LOVE AND NEW THEOLOGY .... VII "the NECESSITY OF ATHEISM" — EXPULSION FROM OXFORD VIII POEMS ADDRESSED TO HARRIET GROVE — LIFE IN LONDON — RETURN TO FIELD PLACE IX MISS KITCHENER AND HARRIET WESTBROOK X ELOPEMENT WITH HARRIET WESTBROOK XI MARRIAGE — THE HONEYMOON AT EDINBURGH — LIFE IN LODGINGS AT YORK XII HOGG, HARRIET AND ELIZA WESTBROOK — HOW MIS- CHIEF WAS MADE ' >.>»«-'-*^-«i'iii^ AT KESWICK — Shelley's reconciliation with his FATHER — HIS RELATIONS WITH SOUTHEY — HIS COR- RESPONDENCE WITH WILLIAM GODWIN XIV THE EXPEDITION TO IRELAND . . . • XV IN WALES AND AT LYNMOUTH — THE SHELLEYS JOINED BY MISS HITCHENER XVI DEPARTURE FROM LYNMOUTH — LIFE AT TANYRALLT — A SECOND VISIT TO IRELAND . . . • XVII ESTRANGEMENT FROM HARRIET .... PAQB 13 19 27 33 47 59 67 78 89 101 117 128 142 157 170 182 194 ix CONTENTS CHAP. PAGE XVIII SEPARATION FROM HARRIET AND ELOPEMENT WITH MARY GODWIN 208 XIX CHARLES CLAIRMONT ON THE SEPARATION . . 219 XX SHELLEY, MARY AND JANE CLAIRMONT IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND — DARK HOURS IN DINGY LONDON LODGINGS — DEATH OF SIR BYSSHE SHELLEY AND IMPROVEMENT IN SHELLEY's CIRCUMSTANCES . 226 XXI THE DEATH OF HARRIET — THE CHANCERY SUIT . . 238 XXII AT CLIFTON AND BISHOPGATE — MARY's RELATIONS WITH JANE CLAIRMONT 247 XXIII JANE CLAIRMONT's RELATIONS WITH BYRON . . 257 XXIV AT GENEVA AND GREAT MARLOW — ^SHELLEY's SECOND MARRIAGE 268 XXV DEPARTURE FOR ITALY — THE " ESCAPE FROM LIFE " — THE SOCIAL BOYCOTT 281 XXVI ROME AND NAPLES — MELANCHOLY AND THE CAUSE OF IT — JANE CLAIRMONT's LOVE FOR SHELLEY . . 294 XXVII AT PISA — EMILIA VIVIANI 307 xxviii Mary's confession of failure .... 320 XXIX TRELAWNY's notes on the life at PISA . . 329 XXX JANE WILLIAMS 343 XXXI CASA MAGNI 351 THE SEQUEL MARY Shelley's suitors ..... 361 Index 385 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Facing page PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY .... Frontispiece (Frmn a crayon drawing in tlie Bodleian Library) SHELLEYS MOTHER {From a painting in the possession of Sir John Shelley, Bart. ) WILLIAM GODWIN {From a painting by Northcote in the National Portrait Gallery) MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY .... {From a drawing in the Bodleian Library) JANE WILLIAMS {From a painting in the Bodleian Library) E. J, TRELAWNY 86 152 208 346 362 XI f ROMANTIC LIFE 9F SHELLEY y N^ t CHAPTER I K V y^^ THE COUNTY FAMILY The genius of Shelley is, as it were, a rare and radiant flower found blossoming, by some inexplicable accident, on the genealogical tree of an obscure but wealthy county family. There is just one kind of genius which the head of such a family may be relied upon to understand and foster : the genius which con- sists in the possession of ordinary talents raised to a high power. For the man of genius who differs from the average man, not in kind, but only in degree, the path, if he be born into a county family, is made very smooth. He takes x^ orders, or is called to the bar, or enters Parlia- ^ ment ; he grows up, amid sympathetic applause, ;.]i to be a bishop, or a judge of the High. Court, Vf^^ or a Minister of the Crown. If Shelley had entertained any one of these ambitions, he would almost certainly have achieved it. He was quite clever enough; and his father and grandfather had £20,000 a year to spend in pushing his fortunes. His advan- l^tages, in that respect, were greater than those I f ^- '^ THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY of the most brilliant of the boys whose names one finds grouped with his in an old list of the Upper Fifth at Eton : Bishop Sumner and Sir John Taylor Coleridge. He might have suc- ceeded in life as conspicuously as they did if, like them, he had been satisfied to take the wisdom of his forefathers for granted and walk in the way prescribed for him. " Instead of which," he wrote The Necessity of Atheism ; and his county family could not have been more horrified if he had gone about stealing ducks. One must not blame them overmuch, however, or pretend to think that Shelley's genius would have been appraised more justly in a suburb or a provincial town. There are quite as many prejudices in semi-detached villas as in country houses; and the feeling that everybody ought to be, alike in word and deed, exactly like every- body else, is one of the most deeply-rooted instincts of human nature. Cannibals share that sentiment with County Magistrates; devil-wor- shippers with dignitaries of the Church. They are at one as to the necessity of conforming, and differ only as to the ideal to which it is proper to conform; the ears of the reformer being nailed to the pump for precisely the same reason for which the bones of the missionary are thrown into the stockpot. On the whole, therefore, Shelley gained more than he lost by membership of a county family. He gained, at any rate, a good education and good manners, — the power to conciliate and 14 THE COUNTY FAMILY charm. Any society to which he might have belonged would have esteemed him a rebel, and treated him accordingly, — ^bullied him, and at- tempted to suppress him. But any society to which he might have belonged would also have set its mark on him in the impressionable years; and the mark of Field Place, Eton, and Oxford is, at any rate, more pleasing than that of the suburb, the Commercial Academy, and the counting-house. One is sensible of this imprint of the country- house, the public school, and the University, from the beginning to the end of Shelley's career. One is specially sensible of it when one finds him saying and doing the outrageous things which conflict most strikingly with public school and University traditions. Even when he is out- rageous he is never uncouth. He never gives the impression, as so many rebels, reformers and original thinkers do, of a strange fowl which has strayed into the wrong farmyard by mistake. He revolts with the air of one who is sure of himself socially as well as intellectually, and also with a certain underlying sweet reason- ableness which dissolves rancour and disarms hostility. Not, of course, all hostility. The savage Cordy Jeaffreson, for one, has written of Shelley in the tone of a ruffled house-wife scolding a maid-of-all-work. The fastidious Matthew Arnold, for another, has written of him as of some obnoxious insect picked up reluctantly 15 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY with a pair of tongs. But the men who knew him loved him. Byron, who praised few of his contemporaries, praised him without reserve; Trelawny's affection touched the point of hero- worship; and the magic of his personahty still, after the lapse of years, makes fresh friends for him across the ages. Perhaps, however, we may justly say that Shelley's friends and enemies have this in com- mon : that they both tend to take his youthful ebullitions a shade too seriously. The latter give one the impression of brawny blacksmiths smash- ing a butterfly with sledge-hammers ; the former are prone to cut the figure of bearded men sitting, in exaggerated humility, at the feet of a boy- preacher; neither gesture is quite compatible with a true sense of humour or of the fitness of things. The essential fact which Shelley's biographer must bear in mind is that he has not a complete, but only a truncated life to write about : a life cut short before it could draw its own moral as lives have a way of doing. In the survey of a life extending to the normal span, the things said and done before the age of thirty count, as a rule, for very little, — and Shelley died at twenty-nine. The case is hardly one, therefore, for approval or disapproval, — or even for agree- ment or disagreement. It will suffice, in the main, to view the fragment of life before us as a spectacle, — a fragment of a tragi-comedy which leaves off instead of ending. 16 THE COUNTY FAMILY It is a spectacle of a boy fumbling with life, and making experiments with it, — beginning to play the game of life with deadly earnestness, long before he has any adequate knowledge of the rules. Most boys do that to some extent; but Shelley did it in an exceptionally spectacular and striking way, scornfully refusing to take the rules of the game on trust from his elders, but trying to deduce them from first principles by means of pure reason; resolved to learn what there was to be learnt about the game from his own and not from other people's experience. His experiments brought him adventures, — not one adventure only, but a vivid series of adventures. He faced the adventures — he went out to look for them, indeed — with the courage of his convictions, and the vitality of his years. He has been charged with a want of humour — an " inhuman want of humour," according to Matthew Arnold ; but what of that ? Don Quixote also lacked humour, and so did the Knights of the Round Table ; and yet they are among the most treasured figures of romance. Shelley took life pretty much in their temper, inspired by their passion for " riding about '* as well as for " redressing human wrong." Humour would doubtless have come to him later if he had lived ; but, in the years of experi- ment, there was neither room nor time for humour. Experiment spelt mistake; and every mistake suggested a fresh experiment; and each fresh experiment brought a fresh adventure. B 17 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY The Human Comedy, after all, is always more visible to the spectator than to the player, who is by no means called upon to be amused by the entertainment which he provides; and that con- sideration shall assign the limits of the present biographer's task. He hopes not to be censorious after the manner of the Philistines. He hopes also to put aside the idea that Shelley should be regarded as the founder of the philosophy of all those who agree with his opinions. His quest is rather for Romance, and for the Human Comedy which runs through Romance, giving it sometimes, it may be, a sub-acid flavour; and having thus announced his programme, he may hark back to that genealogical tree, from the shade of which he wandered to make these introductory remarks. 18 CHAPTER II ANCESTORS AND PARENTS Shelleys begin to be heard of soon after the Norman conquest, and continue to be heard of from time to time through the Middle Ages. A Sir Thomas Shelley was Ambassador to Spain in the reign of John; and another Shelley was Judge of the Common Pleas in the reign of Henry VIII. Perhaps one may best give the measure of the importance of the Shelleys of those days, by saying that they were just important enough to have to forfeit their heads if they took the losing side in civil strife. Sir William Shelley, the Ambassador's brother, lost his head for " endeavouring to set up Richard II " ; and it is from him that Percy Bysshe Shelley's descent is traced in Berry's County Genealogies : Sussex. This younger branch of the house, however, fell upon comparatively evil days. Their sove- reigns lost the habit of knighting them, and they were in a fair way to decline from the state of squires to that of yeomen, when first Timothy Shelley (the poet's great-grandfather) and then Bysshe Shelley (his grandfather) restored the fortunes of the family by means of wealthy marriages and political activities. B2 19 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY The case of Timothy Shelley, indeed, was like that of Saul, who sought his father's asses and found a kingdom. He went to America to practise as a doctor — a " quack doctor," accord- ing to Medwin, but we need not insist — and married a wealthy widow of the appropriate name of Plum : one of the earliest recorded examples of those transatlantic marriages which have brought American dollars across the ocean to replenish European coffers. Returning to England at an unknown date, he became the squire of Fen Place, Warnham, where he died in 1770, leaving two sons, John and Bysshe. John, who married the daughter of William White of Horsham, lived at Field Place, where he died, childless, in 1790. Of Bysshe there is more to be said. It had been stated that Bysshe Shelley, like his father, practised medicine, and was, for a time, in partnership with James Graham, the mesmerist in whose establishment Nelson's Lady Hamilton (then Emma Harte) sustained the role which her biographers have described. Be that as it may, however, he cannot have practised long; for he was hardly more than thirty when he began his successful matri- monial career. He was a man, apparently, who combined a keen eye for romance with an equally keen eye for the main chance. He married twice; he eloped with each of his two wives; and each of them was a great heiress. The first wife was Mary Catherine Michell, only child and 20 ANCESTORS AND PARENTS heiress of the Reverend Theodore Michell of Horsham; the second was EUzabeth Jane Sidney Perry, only daughter and heiress of WiUiam Perry of Turvil Park, Bucks, Wormington, Gloucestershire, and Penshurst, Kent. Having thus enriched himself, Bysshe Shelley took an interest in politics on the Whig side. Political services rendered to the Duke of Norfolk — the Duke who is chiefly famous as the heaviest drinker of his age, with the single exception of the father of Chateaubriand's Charlotte Ives^ — were rewarded with a baronetcy by the Whig Administration of 1806; but his habits were queer, and his old age was misanthropic. He was a miser of a rare kind : a miser of a fine presence and a certain stately grace, who spent £80,000 in building, but lived, a lonely widower, in a cottage, with only one servant to wait on him, and, if we may trust Medwin, " used to frequent daily the tap -room of one of the low inns in Horsham, and there drank with some of the lowest citizens." Another authority states that he did not drink with the company, but only argued with them; but that is a minor detail of little moment even to teetotallers. By his second marriage Sir Bysshe Shelley was the ancestor of Baron de Lisle and Dudley; but the fortunes of his second family are outside the scope of this work. The children of the ^ The Duke and Mr. Ives once drank against each other for a wager. The parson drank The Duke under the table, and then rang for a tumbler of brandy and water, — "hot and strong." 21 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY first marriage were Hellen, who married Robert Parker of Maidstone, Mary Catherine, who died unmarried in 1784, and Timothy, born in 1753, who married in 1791, EUzabeth, daughter of Charles Pilfold, of Eifingham, in Surrey, — a woman of great beauty, as Romney's portrait of her attests. Timothy Shelley and his wife lived at Field Place, and there Percy Bysshe Shelley was born on August 4, 1792, — the eldest of a family of seven, of whom two died in in- fancy, but Elizabeth, Hellen, Mary, and Margaret survived. That is enough of genealogy for the present; but, as the story of Shelley's life begins as the story of a boy's revolt against his parent's fixed ideas, Medwin's thumb-nail sketch of Timothy Shelley must be given. Inaccurate as he is on many points, Medwin may be trusted here, for he knew Sir Timothy fairly well. He tells us how Sir Bysshe, for all his miserliness, gave his son a good education, sending him to University College, Oxford, and allowing him to take the Grand Tour ; but he continues : — " He was one of those travellers who, with so much waste of time, travel for the sake of saying they have travelled ; and after making the circuit of Europe, return home, knowing no more of the countries they have visited than the trunks attached to their carriages. All, indeed, that he did bring back with him was a smattering of French, and a bad picture of an eruption of 22 ANCESTORS AND PARENTS Vesuvius, if we except a certain air, miscalled that of the old school, which he could put off and on as occasion served. " He was a disciple of Chesterfield and La Rochefoucauld, reducing all politeness to forms, and moral virtue to expediency; as an instance of which he once told his son, Percy Bysshe, in my presence, that he would provide for as many natural children as he chose to get, but that he would never forgive his making a mSsalliance.^^ It is a convincing picture, made more con- vincing by the further statement that Timothy Shelley " occasionally went to the parish church," but required his servants to do so regularly. One infers from it an empty-headed, muddle- headed man, generally lax in practice but prone to be obstinate in theory; a man who con- fused his ideals and saw only a blurred line dividing the worship of God from the worship of Mammon; a man who would tolerate a good deal if " taken the right way," but would bring all the intolerance of stupidity to bear upon an attempt to put him in the wrong by defending an unusual course with arguments which he did not see his way to answer. His portrait, it may be added, supports that estimate of him. It is the portrait of a very handsome man, but also of a very silly man, sure to be baffled by new ideas, or even by old ideas if presented to him in a new shape. He might 23 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY have done well, and gone to his grave universally respected if only he could have passed through life without ever having to cope with a moral or intellectual emergency. Unfortunately for his reputation, the unexpected happened; and he first lost his temper, and then sulked — a ludicrously cantankerous figure. Nor was his wife much more fit to be the mother than he to be the father of a boy of preco- cious and eccentric genius. ' ' Mild and tolerant, yet narrow-minded," was her son's ultimate verdict on her. Her fixed ideas were not the same as her husband's; but they were equally fixed, and equally foolish, — the foolish fixed ideas which prevailed in the county society of the period. The noblest work of God, in her opinion, was the successful sportsman. She thought that, in the circles in which she moved, a man's worth should be measured by the contents of his game-bag; and she had a difficulty in applying any more subtle test. She scolded her son and drove him to the pursuit of fish and birds; he bribed the game-keeper to catch the fish and shoot the birds for him, while he lay under a tree with a book. It would be absurd, however, to base a theory of an unhappy childhood on such an incident as that. The conflict between the boy's view that it was better to dream than to shoot, and the mother's view that dreaming was all nonsense and shooting the one thing needful, may be read as symbolical of graver conflicts to follow; but it meant little at the time. If there was a general 24 ANCESTORS AND PARENTS lack of sympathy for Shelley at Field Place, there was no particular oppression. On the whole he was free to go his own way and dream his own dreams, if he insisted; the dreams being of nothing more disturbing to the Philistine mind than ghosts, fairies, secret chambers, and haunted ruins. War with the world — the painful sense of being very different from other people in a society which held it to be the whole duty of man to resemble other men — was not to begin until he was sent to school. But then, to quote the familiar lines from the Dedication of " Laon and Cythna " : — Thoughts of great deeds were mine, dear Friend, when first The clouds which wrap this world from youth did pass. I do remember well the hour which hurst My spirifs sleep : a fresh May -dawn it was, When I walked forth upon the glittering grass. And wept, I knew not why ; until there rose From the near school-room, voices that alas ! Were hut one echo from a world of woes — The harsh and grating strife of tyrants and of foes. And then I clasped my hands and looked around — But none was near to mock my streaming eyes. Which poured their warm drops on the sunny ground — 25 THE RO^IANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY So xvithoui shame, I spake : — " / ivill he ivisCy And just, and free, and niihi, if in nie lies Siieh po'iCer, for I ^roic iveari/ to hehohi The selfish and the strong still ti/rannise Ulthout reproach or eheck.^^ I then con- t routed jMi/ tears, nuj heart greiv calm, and I teas meek and bold. And from that hour did I zvith earnest thought Heap knoicledge from forbidden mines of lore^ Yet nothing that my ti/rants kneiv or taught I eared to learn, but from that secret store Wrought linked ar}nour for )ni/ soul, before It might ivalk forth to icar among mankind ; Thus power and hope icere strengthened more and nunr ]Vithin me. till there canu' upon )ny mind A sense of loneliness, a thirst zcith ivhich I pined. That is the poet's memory-picture of his school-days. He sees the school as the world in mmiatiire, and himself attacked and perse- cuted by the world — misunderstood, hunted, hounded, and mobbed — yet guarding his spirit unbroken, and resolving, not only to resist, but, in the end, to overcome the world. One does not, of coiu'se, expect the prose truth to corre- spond, in every detail, to the poetical fancy; but the resemblance is nevertheless very close, as we shall see when we dig up and array the testimony of sehool-fellows. 26 CHAPTER III THE ACADEMY FOR YOUNG GENTLEMEN Shelley's first school, after he had passed through the hands of a private tutor — a Mr. Edwards of Warnham — ^was Dr. Greenlaw's Academy for Young Gentlemen, at Sion House, Isieworth. Three of his school-fellows have re- corded their recollections of him : his cousin and biographer, Tom Medwin, Sir John Rennie, the engineer who built Waterloo Bridge, and a Mr. Gellibrand, who lived to be ninety-two, and to tell his story to Mr. Birrell, who communicated it to the Athenaeum on his informant's death in 1884. Mr. Gellibrand 's principal recollection was that Shelley once wrote a set of Latin verses for him, but inserted a final line — Hos ego versiculos scripsi, sed non ego feci — which raised doubts as to their authorship, with the result that Dr. Greenlaw caned Mr. Gellibrand, and Mr. Gelli- brand punched Shelley's head. The only further detail is a picture of Shelley as " like a girl in boys' clothes, fighting with open hands, and rolling on the floor when flogged, not from the pain, but from a sense of indignity." Sir John Rennie's brief note, in his Auto- biography, is as follows : — 27 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY " His imagination was always roving upon something romantic and extraordinary, such as spirits, fairies, fighting, etc., and he not un- frequently astonished his school-fellows by blow- ing up the boundary palings of the playground with gunpowder, also the lid of his desk in the middle of school-time, to the great surprise of Dr. Greenlaw himself and the whole school. In fact at times he was considered to be almost upon the borders of insanity; yet, with all this, when treated with kindness, he was very amiable, high-spirited, and generous." Medwin tells us rather more. He pictures the head-master as a " choleric man, of a sanguinary complexion, in a green old age, not wanting in good qualities, but very capricious in his temper, which, good or bad, was influenced by the daily occurrences of a domestic life, not the most harmonious, and of which his face was the barometer, and his hand the index." He says that the boys were " mostly the sons of London shopkeepers, of rude habits and coarse manners," who " made game " of Shelley's " girlishness " and despised him because he was not " one of them," and did not care to " enter into their sports, to wrangle, or fight; " and he thus pictures the scene of the new boy's arrival : — " All tormented him with questionings. There was no end to their mockery, when they found that he was ignorant of peg-top, or marbles, or 28 ACADEMY FOR YOUNG GENTLEMEN leap-frog, or hopscotch, much more of fives and cricket. One wanted him to spar, another to run a race with him. He was a tyro in both these accomphshments, and the only welcome of the Neophyte was a general shout of derision. To all these impertinences he made no reply, but, with a look of disdain written in his countenance, turned his back on his new asso- ciates, and, when he was alone, found relief in tears." A further picture, equally characteristic, is this : — " He passed among his school-fellows as a strange and unsocial being, for when a holiday relieved us from our tasks, and the other boys were engaged in such sports as the narrow limits of our prison-court allowed, Shelley, who entered into none of them, would pace backwards and forwards — I think I see him now — along the southern wall, indulging in various vague and undefined ideas, the chaotic elements, if I may say so, of what afterwards produced so beautiful a world." Furious Philistines, of the school of Cordy Jeaffreson, quote statements of that sort, and infer that Shelley was a " muff." Their ideal boy is Tom Brown, the wooden-headed police- man of a young society, rendering invaluable service to his generation by licking the Arthurs 29 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY of his little world into shape, clapping stoppers on their individualities, and persuading them to model themselves on our admirable average men. They cannot see, any more than Tom Hughes himself could see, that the story of the moulding of Arthur into a sort of refined and etherealized Tom Brown, is one of the most pathetic things in literature, — ^that Arthur was worthy of better things, just as his pro- totype. Dean Stanley, was worthy of a better fate than to become a courtier theologian whose occasional bursts of broad-minded tolerance never quite prevented his intellect from letting " I dare not " wait upon " I would." Shelley, however, though he differed widely from Tom Brown, and hardly less widely from Arthur (whose conversion to cricket is presented to us as an event of hardly less world-shaking significance than Constantine's conversion to Christianity), was very far from a "muff." He lacked neither physical nor moral courage, and he had all the high-spirited vitality which belongs to boyhood. One sees that from the stories just related of his attempts to blow up his desk and blow down the palings; and, in truth, he chiefly differed from other boys in the possession of certain precocious sentiments and curiosities. His view of flogging — that the pain was nothing to the degradation — is just the view that grown men might be relied upon to express if it were proposed so to punish them for exceeding the speed-limit in their motors. His view of 30 ACADEMY FOR YOUNG GENTLEMEN games was approximately Swift's view, — that " games are the recreations of people who do not think." The world, he felt, was so " full of a number of things " that it was absurd to waste time on such trivialities as pegtops and marbles. Elderly gentlemen might appropri- ately play with marbles or pegtops (just as elderly gentlemen nowadays play golf), in order to divert their minds from anxiety as to the price of stocks and shares; but why should a boy do so when life lay like a fairy land, begin- ning at his door, and inviting him to explore it ? Gunpowder, electricity, burning-glasses, micro- scopes, and " penny dreadfuls," — all these things appealed to Shelley's imagination as marbles and pegtops did not; and, if neither burning-glasses nor penny dreadfuls were to hand, he would far rather dream than play. So he argued with himself; but it would have been idle for him to argue thus with his associates. They had their own standards, and would not judge him by any other. It was everybody's business to be exactly like everybody else; and the new boy must con- form or be harried. Shelley did not conform, and was harried, as a cat might be by a pack of hounds, until Sion House became, as Medwin says, " a perfect hell to him." That is practically all that there is to be said about his life at Sion House; and the same thing will have to be said over again, albeit with certain qualifications, when we follow him to Eton, where 31 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY he was sent in 1804, — Goodall being then head- master, and the more famous Keate the master of the Lower School in which he was placed. The standards of Eton, of course, differed from those of Sion House. The doctrine that everybody must try to be exactly like every- body else ordained conformity with a somewhat different code ; and it was a doctrine which a boy of character could overcome, as he rose in the school, winning applause in the act of over- coming it. The rebel, that is to say, against the tyranny of the mob might ultimately rise to distinction as a rebel against the authority of masters; and that, in so far as one can sum the matter up in a sentence, is what Shelley did. Like Byron at Harrow, he " was a most unpopular boy but led latterly ; " like Byron, too, he was, at one time, within an ace of being expelled; like Byron, finally, he was called an " atheist," though he did not, like Byron, regard the epithet as offensive. But this is to anticipate. The story of Shelley's Eton days requires a chapter to itself. 82 CHAPTER IV ETON The best known of the Eton stories about Shelley is the story of his fight, related by Captain Gronow : — " It was announced one morning that Shelley, the future poet, had actually accepted wager of battle from Sir Thomas Styles. Whether he had received an insult, and that vast disparity in size gave him confidence, or that, over-full of the war-like descriptions of Homer's heroes, he was fired to imitate their exploits against some one or other, remains a secret. Meet, however, they did, after twelve, in the playing-fields. The usual preliminaries were arranged — a ring was formed, seconds and bottle-holders were all in readiness, and the combatants stood face to face. The tall lank figure of the poet towered above the diminutive thick-set little baronet by nearly a head and shoulders. In the first round no mischief was done; Sir Thomas seemed to be feeling his way, being naturally desirous of ascer- taining what his gigantic adversary was made of; and Shelley, though brandishing his long arms, had evidently no idea of their use in a pugilistic point of view. After a certain amount c 33 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY of sparring without effect, the combatants were invited by their seconds to take breath. The baronet did not hesitate to accept the offer to sit upon the knee of his second; but Shelley disdainfully declined to rest, and, calculating upon finishing the fight in a single blow, stalked round the ring, looking defiance at his little adversary. " Time was called, and the battle was renewed in earnest. The baronet, somewhat cautious, planted his first blow upon the chest of Shelley, who did not appear to relish it. However, though not a proficient in the art of self-defence he nevertheless went in, and knocked the little baronet off his legs, who lay sprawling upon the grass more dead than alive. Shelley's con- fidence increased ; he stalked round the ring as before, and spouted one of the defiant addresses usual with Homer's heroes when about to com- mence a single combat; the young poet, being a first-rate classical scholar, actually delivered the speech in the original Greek, to the no small amusement of the boys. In the second and last round, Styles went to work like a first-rate artist, and after slighter blows, delivered what is called in the prize-ring " a heavy slogger " on Shelley's bread-basket; this seemed positively to electrify the bard, for, I blush to say, he broke through the ring, and took to his heels with a speed that defied pursuit. His seconds, backers, and all who had witnessed the fight, joined in full cry after him, but he outran them 34 ETON all, and got safe to the house of his tutor, Mr. Bethel." The story was too dramatic to be left untold; but it is obviously untrue, and illustrates nothing except the mythopoeic instinct of schoolboys. If any reader of these pages imagines that the effect of a so-called " slogger " in the so-called " bread-basket " is to increase the velocity and general activity of the recipient, such a one should offer his own bread-basket to a friend (or, better still, to an enemy) for experiment, and make a careful note of the result. That said, we may pass on to better attested stories concerning the bullying of Shelley. Dr. Hawtrey, who, when Shelley was a small boy, was in one of the higher forms, and who grew up to succeed Keate (who had succeeded Goodall) in the head-mastership of Eton, may be our first, and principal witness. " I remember his sending for me one evening " (writes Arthur Duke Coleridge in his Eton in the ^Forties), " to invoke my authority as a sixth-form boy on behalf of a lad whose notorious oddity and awkwardness seemed to mark him out as a butt for all professional bullies. ' They used to call Shelley mad Shelley,'' he said. ' My belief is that what he had to endure at Eton made him a perfect devil.' " A doctrine developed by Hawtrey in a sermon C2 35 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY preached in the ehnpel, and afterwards privately printed, wherein he first spoke of the harm whieli might be done by " wanton abuse of authority," and then proceeded to denounce the errors belonging to *' mere strength of body," which are " more oppressive, more frequent, and always more mortifying to the sufferer." " The objects of such kind of ill-usage," he said, " are not those over whom there is any lawful or con- ventional right; they are the weak, the timid, the eccentric, and the unsociable." The effect of such treatment, he continued, upon a sensi- tive mind was often to " waste and devour it," until its victims fell into the error " of madly imagining that Christianity itself is a fable because those who call themselves Christians have acted, in pure recklessness, as if they were heathens." And then followed the instances : — " Two ^ such I knew in other days — one of them when I was too young to feel and under- stand what I do understand now. Both of them are long since gone to their account. The talents of the first, however abused, earned for him a reputation which will probably not perish while one language shall be spoken. But his life here w\as miserable from this kind of in- justice, and if his mind took a bias leading him to error — which the Almighty may forgive; for He is all merciful, and makes allowance for His ^ The other was T. S. Walker, a brilliant classical scholar, who died young. 36 ETON creatures which we in our self-approving severity seldom make — they who remember those days well know how that mind was tortured, and how much the wantonness of persecution con- tributed to pervert its really noble and amiable qualities." The details of the persecution thus rhetorically sketched are not very easy to get at, but not very difficult to imagine. The best attested fact is that Shelley refused to fag for Henry Matthews, the subsequent author of The Diary of an Invalid ; and the fate of rebels of that order, though various, is uniformly painful. For the rest we hear of muddy footballs being kicked at Shelley in the corridors; of his books, or whatever he carried, being knocked out of his hands; of a mob surrounding him, bawling his name, and pointing derisive fingers at him : mere trifles, no doubt, to the harder natures, and not easily represented, in cold print, as serious, but infinitely tormenting to the weak, and sensitive, and self-conscious, giving them the impression that they are alone in a lonely world, and always will be — poor Pariahs in the midst of rough and insolent Brahmins. " I have seen him " (writes one of the wit- nesses) " surrounded, hooted, baited like a maddened bull, and, at this distance of time, I seem to hear ringing in my ears the cry which Shelley was wont to utter in his paroxysm of revengeful anger." 87 THE ROINIANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY The fury to \Yhich he was goaded is also said to have '* made his eyes flash Hke a tiger's, his cheeks grow pale as death, his hmbs quiver; " and there is a story of his ha\'ing, in one fit of passion, pinned one of his perseeutor's hands to a desk with a fork or a pen-knife. It is quite hkely that he tried to do something of the sort, but very unhkely that he aetually did it; and the one tiling really eertain is that, whereas bullying broke the spirit of T. S. Walker, it did not break Shelley's spirit. Tlie ordeal lasted for a year or two: but he lived through it, con- quered his right to inimolested eccentricity, and so reached the stage at which Hawtrey de- scribes him as having been '* a perfect devil." Allowance nuist be made here, however, for clerical rhetoric and the pedagogic point of view. Hawtrey was an excellent man — a sym- pathetic schoolmaster, and a tolerant divine; but still he was both divine and schoolmaster, and consequently committed to certain fixed opinions with regard alike to theological specu- lation and the sinfulness of little sins. He, no less than the boys, would have preferred Shelley to be like other people, though he disapproved of the boys' methods of compelling him to be so; and though he was too fair-minded — one may even say too nuich of a gentleman — to denounce him as an enemy of the human race, he could not help weeping over him as a backslider. "NMiether the case for tears would have stood the test of cross-examination is another matter; and 88 ETON Hawtrey certainly could have been confronted with witnesses who gave very different evidence. " I loved Shelley," says one of them, " for his kindliness and affectionate ways." " I always liked him," says another; " he was such a good, generous, open-hearted fellow;" while Canon Harvey, who fagged for ?iim (or was supposed to do so), spoke of him as a most kind and con- siderate fag-master. There is clearly no trace of the " perfect devil " in these depositions. The epithet, if founded on fact at all, must be based upon breaches of discipline and defiance of authority; so we will enumerate, and tabulate, as far as the records permit, the incidents which Hawtrey might have cited in support of his allegation : — 1. Shelley hid a savage bull-dog in the desk of Dr. Keate. 2. Shelley pursued the college cook with a roasting spit. 3. Shelley stood up and cursed King George III. 4. Shelley set alight to a tree in the college grounds with a burning-glass. 5. Shelley procured an electric battery, and lured his tutor into laying hands on it unawares, and so receiving an electric shock. 6. Shelley, when summoned to his tutor's rooms to be reprimanded, spilt corrosive acid on the carpet. That is all that one can rake together from all 39 THE ROIM ANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY the available sources. It amounts, after all, to very little; and there is no reason to doubt that each act received, at the time, the punishment Avhioh it seemed to call for. Tlie secretion of the bull-dog in Keate's desk, for instance, strikes one as no worse a misdemeanour (though a more himiorous one) than that of Thring, the future head-master of ITppiughjim, who tied a string to Ilawtrey's own bell-rope, and rang it repeatedly and surreptitiously, with the result that the class was interrupted, every live minutes or so, by the arrival of Hawtre^'s servant to inquire what Avas wanted: and if Shelley's offences were no more grave than Thring's, then '' perfect devil " is as unfit an epithet for the one offender as for the other. Nor is there a a\ ord of truth in Cordy Jeaff re- son's statement that Shelley left Eton in dis- grace in consequence of this, or some other, act of insubordination. His own letters show that he was still at Eton in the term immediately pre- ceding that in which he went into residence at Oxford ; and though it is doubtless true that his behaviour was of an embarrassing ebullience, it is equally true that he did his work creditably, being specially remarked for his prohciency in Latin verse, and played a proper part on cere- monial occasions, such as speech-day and IMontem, while, at the same time, cultivating intellectual interests outside the classical curriculum. There is a fancy picture of him by Moultrie, who came to Eton while his memory was still 40 ETON green there, as " a stripling, pale and lustrous eyed " :— Small sympathy he owned or felt, I ween. With sj)orts or pastimes of his young compeers, Nor 7ningling in their studies oft was seen, Nor shared their joys or sorrows, hopes or fears : Pensive he was and grave beyond his years, And happiest seemed when in some shady nook (His wild sad eyes suffused with silent tears), O^er some mysterious and forbidden book Tie pored until his frame with strong emotion shook. The " forbidden book," according to Medwin, was generally a handbook of chemistry. lie quotes a note to himself from Shelley's father in which he writes : " I have returned the book on chemistry, as it is a forbidden thing at Eton." It may just as well, however, have been (Godwin's Political Justice, which Shelley is be- lieved to have read at Eton (and wliieh Eton masters would probably have regarded as an improper book for Eton boys to possess) ; or it may have been one of those " penny dreadfuls," as we should call them, through which Shelley had, already, at Sion House, approached the literature of the imagination. All the lines of thought opened up by all the books that came into his hands seem, at this stage, to have attracted him equally in turn. 41 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY He was a scholar, of course, — a clever boy at Eton becomes a scholar as inevitably as a child picks up a foreign language from a foreign nurse. Beyond that, however, it would have been impossible to predict what " particular kind of man," as Alfred de Musset puts it, he was likely to become. There was equal promise in his many-sided precocity of a grave and earnest political philosopher of the style of John Stuart Mill; of a brilliant scientific showman of the calibre of Professor Pepper; of a purveyor of stories of mystery and crime of the school of Messrs. Heath Hosken and William Le Queux. He was destined, in fact, for greater accomplish- ments than even the greatest of these; but it was in the class of Messrs. Le Queux and Heath Hosken that he first competed by writing and publishing Zastrozzi. One need not trouble to say anything about Zastrozzi, except that it was obviously inspired by the writings of " Monk " Lewis and Mrs. Radcliffe; but two of Shelley's letters about it are worth quoting. The first is to Messrs. Longman, to whom he writes : — '' My object in writing it was not pecuniary, as I am independent, being the heir of a gentle- man of large fortune in the county of Sussex, and prosecuting my studies as an Oppidan at Eton; from the many leisure hours I have, I have taken an opportunity of indulging my favourite propensity in writing. Should it pro- 42 ETON duce any pecuniary advantages, so much the better for me ; I do not expect it." The second letter is to Edward Fergus Graham, a yroUge of Timothy Shelley, then living in London, and studying music at Timothy Shelley's expense. To him Shelley writes : — " We will all go in a posse to the bookseller's in Mr. Grove's barouche and four. — Show them that we are no Grub Street garetteers. . . . " We will not be cheated again — let us come over Jock, for if he will not give me a devil of a price for my Poem, and at least £60 for my new Romance in three Volumes, the dog shall not have them. " Pouch the reviewers — £10 will be sufficient I should suppose, and that I can with the greatest ease repay when we meet at Passion Week. Send the reviews in which Zastrozzi is mentioned to Field Place, the British Review is the hardest, let that be pouched well. — ^My note of hand if for any larger sum is quite at your service, as it is of consequence in fiction to establish your name as high as you can in the literary lists." The " Jock " here mentioned is presumably J. Robinson, who, for whatever reason, pub- lished Zastrozzi instead of Messrs. Longman. His school-fellow, Mr. Packe, says that he re- ceived £40 for it, and that "with part of the 43 rilK FxOMANTlC T.IFK OF SHELLEY proooods ho ii"avo a most luaguitioout baiiquet to eight of his friends, among ^vhom I was iueluded/' On the Nvhole, it is easier to behevo that Shelley gave the banquet tlian that the piibhslier prvnided the means of paying for it; for pubhshers are n\en of busiiiess. That is a detail, however, and does not matter. What does matter sutVieiently to arrest the ivader is the general tone of the letter : the burst of high spirits whieh it manifests. ** Foueh," of course, is the slang of tlie pericxi for " tip." "NVe tu\d Byron, in one of his letters, speaking of the ntvessity of '* pouching " an Eton bo) : and the Eton boy's belief that the whole of Fleet Street can be corrupteii with a ten-poiuid note is delightfully boyish if not sptx'itically Etonian. It is a curious coincidence, too. that Byron claimed in jest (in Don Juan) to have corrupted the editor of that Brithh Ktiinv which Shelley speaks of as ** the haixiest," with precisely the sun\ which Shelley judged suthcient for the corruption of the entirt^ litenm' Fress. But the main thing notable, after all, is the mental and moral condition in which the letter shows Shelley to liave ended his Eton carxx^r. It shows that Hawtrty must have exaggt^rated, not indeed the pei-stvution intlicted upon him as a small boy, but the efftx't of that pei-stxution upon his character and opinions. Though his sch<.x^l-days doubtless wert\ as Packe put it, ** more adventurous than happy," he does not 44 ETON write, in his last year, as a boy whose adventures have eruslied, or saddened, or embittered him; and the idea that he lost his faith in Christianity beeaiise Christians knoeked books from under his arm and kieked muddy footballs at him does not earry eonvietion. Bullies do not, at Eton any more than any^vhere else, do that sort of thing in the name of Christianity, or make loud Christian professions while doing it; and Haw- trey's theory of the association of ideas in Shelley's mind requires that missing link, to be eomplete. Hawtrey's doctrine, in short, is vitiated by the common clerical assumption that, when a man of genius differs from a clergyman on a point of speculative theology, the clergyman is necessarily in the right and should show the breadth and depth of his sympathy with genius by weeping over the man of genius as a back- slider. The general truth is, however, that clergymen have no better title than, say, solicitors or stockbrokers — or dustmen or district visitors — to detine the limits within which the human intelligence shall be free to "' energize " ; and the particular truth is that Shelley's questionings of theological propositions were due to the natural activity of his mind. It was as natural for him to exercise his mind as it is for some people to exercise their limbs, — as natural for him to think as for other boys to run, or to play leap-frog. He asked questions, and, getting no satisfactory answers to them, 45 rilK PxO^lANTlC MFK OF SHELLFA' thought the nunv. — trying to povfoot hiiusoU as ai\ iutolUvtual gUidiatov in tho Si\nio spirit in >vhioh other boys try to perfect thomsolvos at cricket. Theiv is no nwson to look (or any n\oiT iwondite cxphuiation of his hetenxioxy, for people ^vho think are ahvays heter^xiox. Shelley's case in that respect is pix^tty much hke the case of Mr. Hernaixi Shaw. If he did not think as wittily as ^Ir. Bernard Shaw, at least he thought as joyously. Thought was a joyous adventiuv to him. — the most joyous part of the joyous advent mv of life. lie went to the adventinv in the true spirit of tvii adventuivr; and that temper was probably at its keenest at the time when he left Eton for Oxfon.1. 4G CHAPTKR V UNlVKUSirV COl.l.KC.E. OXFORD OxK may holp oneself to realize the Oxford of Shelley's time by enumerating some of his eon- temporaries. Arnold of Corpus was the future headmaster of Rugby, and Keble of Corpus was the future author of The Chri.^tian Year. \M\ately of Oriel was the future Arehbishop. and Milman of B.N.C. was the future Dean. Senior of Magdalen was Nassau Senior the Economist, and Loekhart of Balliol was Scott's son-in-law and biographer. Those were the great men among the under- graduates of the date, — the men who graduated in high honours, won University prizes, retltx^ted credit on their respective colleges, and pro- ceeded, after graduation, by straight paths, to distinction and success in life. There is no evidence, however, that Shelley knew any one of them: and there arc few of them with whom one can picture hin\ associating cordially. He and Wiately, perhaps, might have discovered points of syn\pathy: but Keble's business in life was to be to preach at, and Arnold's to suninion to his study and tlog, those who, like Shelley, were *' tameless, and swift, and proud." Among out-college men, Shelley's only friends 47 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY appear to have been a few Etonians. It is said that he was always glad to see them when they called, but equally glad to lose sight of them when they went. The men of his own college, too, saw very little of him, — always excepting his intimate friend, and future biographer, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, who is almost our sole witness for this period of his life. The romantic Trelawny, whose acquaintance we shall make presently, speaks of Hogg as a hard-headed man of the world who looked upon literature with contempt. It is quite possible that he gave casual acquaintances that im- pression in later life, when he was a Revising Barrister and a Municipal Corporation Com- missioner. One would infer as much from the fact that his wife, Jane Williams (the widow of the Williams who had shared a house with the Shelleys in Italy), only accepted his offer of marriage on condition that he should first " qualify himself " by a long course of con- tinental travel. His acceptance of the condi- tion, however, betokens a character not altogether unromantic. Even in those hard-headed days he said that he regarded the Greek language, equally with the English newspapers, as "a prime necessary of life; " and one imagines that, in 1810, he would have been remarked not only as an ebullient, but also as a romantic and chivalrous young man. He and Shelley made each other's acquaint- ance by sitting next to each other in hall, though 48 UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, OXFORD Hogg assures us that " such famiharity was unusual " — an interesting precedent for the al- leged rule that one Oxford man must not pre- sume even to rescue another from drowning unless he has been introduced to him. They fell into conversation on the comparative value of German and Italian literature, and, after hall, continued the discussion in Hogg's rooms, and sat up nearly all night over it, — each of them ultimately confessing to the other that he had argued for the sake of arguing, and without even a superficial knowledge of the subject. On the following afternoon they met by appoint- ment in Shelley's rooms; and after that, they were inseparable. Their Oxford, it must be remembered, was the early Oxford in which no games were played. There was no " tubbing " in those days, and no practising at the nets. Unless men haunted the prize-ring and the rat-pit, their one way of amusing themselves was to walk and talk, and no sporting " shop " could cast its monotonous shadow over their conversation. The question whether the college eight was more likely to bump or to be bumped did not arise, and no man burdened his brain with tables of " records " or " averages." The talk was about literature, about philosophy, and, sometimes, about re- ligion ; and daring young thinkers hammered out for themselves a good many subjects on which they were not called upon to be examined. That was the case with Arnold and Keble of Corpus D 49 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY no less than with Shelley and Hogg of Univ; though the latter pair of friends pursued their speculations with more independence and more courage, — perhaps one should also say with stronger prepossessions in favour of intellectual honesty. Shelley's activities, indeed, were marvellous and multitudinous. Hogg says that he read (not for " the Schools " but for his pleasure) about sixteen hours a day ; also that he was continually making malodorous or sensational chemical and electrical experiments, — so meriting the style of " Stinks Man," elaborated by the wit of a later generation; also that he took long country walks, returning so late and so tired that he " cut hall " and curled himself up to sleep on the hearth-rug. We know, furthermore, that he wrote a great deal in both prose and verse; and there are, finally, indications that he found time to be one of the rowdiest men in a rather rowdy college. Hogg, it is true, repudiates this last charge. Shelley, he says, had been nicknamed " the Atheist " at Eton, not on account of atheism, but on account of rowdiness,^ and certain Etonians asked him whether he intended to continue to be that kind of Atheist at Oxford. Whereto he reports Shelley replying : " Certainly not. There is no motive for it; there would be no use in it; they are very civil to us here ; they never inter- fere with us." Even in Hogg's narrative, how- 1 The veracity of this story is questioned by Etonians, 50 UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, OXFORD ever, there appear hints of differences with the dons, none too deferentially expressed. There is a story of Shelley walking out of a lecture- room because the lecture bored him, and up- setting a chair as he went; and there is the story of his interview with the tutor who exhorted him to read Aristotle : — " ' You must begin Aristotle's Ethics, and then you may go on to his other treatises. It is of the utmost importance to be well acquainted with Aristotle.' This he repeated so often that I was quite tired, and at last I said, ' Must I care about Aristotle ? What if I do not mind Aristotle ? ' I then left him, for he seemed to be in great perplexity." That is not the manner of a man who likes dons, or whom dons like; and the practical importance of the incompatibilities between Shelley and the dons will soon appear. Mean- while we may note other evidence which is to the same effect as Hogg's testimony " only more so." Ridley, then a junior Fellow, and after- wards Master of University, wrote, at the time, that " there were but few, if any, who were not afraid of Shelley's strange and fantastic pranks; " and this view is confirmed by a niece of the Master of 1810, who was then on a visit to her uncle. She was a Miss Grant, afterwards Mrs. Smith, and her reminiscences, to which Professor Dowden could not refer, were edited by Lady Strachey and published by Mr. D 2 51 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY Murray, in 1898, under the title of Memoirs of a Highland Lady. Miss Grant, indeed, was equally impressed by the " pranks " of the undergraduates and by the dulness and inadequacy of the dons; and as we are presently to see Shelley and the dons at open war, we may as well have her estimate of both parties to the dispute before us. " Stupidity and frivolity," she says, were the distinguishing characteristics of the latter; and she particularizes : — " It was not a good style ; there was little talent and less polish and no sort of knowledge of the wprld. Of the lesser clergy there were young witty ones, odious, and young learned ones, bores, and elderly ones, pompous; all, of all grades, kind and hospitable. But the Chris- tian pastor, humble and gentle, and considerate and self-sacrificing, occupied with his duties, and filled with the ' charity ' of his Master, had no representative, as far as I could see, among these dealers in old wines, rich dinners, fine china, and massive plate." She adds that " the education was suited to the divinity " : — "A sort of supervision was said to be kept over the young riotous community, and to a certain extent the Proctors of the University and the Deans of the different colleges did see that no very open scandals were committed. There 52 UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, OXFORD were rules that had in a general way to be obeyed, and there were lectures that must be attended, but as for care to give high aims, provide re- fining amusements, give a worthy tone to the character of responsible beings, there was none ever even thought of. . . . The only care the Heads appeared to take with regard to the young minds they were supposed to be placed where they were and paid well to help to form, was to keep the persons of the students at the greatest possible distance. They conversed with them never, invited them to their homes never, spoke or thought about them never. A per- petual bowing was their only intercourse ; a bow of humble respect acknowledged by one of stiff condescension limited the intercourse of the old heads and the young, generally speaking." When we come to see Shelley tilting at the champions of orthodoxy, this impartial picture of their manners and customs will be instructive. Meanwhile we will glance at Miss Grant's picture of the manners and customs of the undergradu- ates. Several of them, it seems (though Shelley was not of the number), tried to get up flirta- tions with her when she sat under a mulberry tree in the Master's garden. One sought to attract her attention by declaiming poetry from the window ; another by tootling on a horn ; and more than once Miss Grant found herself, in a corner of the garden, "chatting and laughing merrily with about a dozen commoners." 53 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY Next, after relating this pleasant incident, Miss Grant describes how her young friends " ragged " the Dean : — " Mr. Rowley, having made himself disagree- able to some of his pupils, who found it suit their healths to take long rides in the country, they all turned out one night to hunt the fox under his window. A Mr. Fox, in a red waist- coat and some kind of a skin for a cap, was let loose on the grass in the middle of the quadrangle, with the whole pack of his fellow-students barking around him. There were cracking whips, shrill whistles, loud halloos, and louder hark-aways, quite enough to frighten the dignitaries. When those great persons assembled to encounter this confusion, all concerned skipped off up the different staircases, like rats to their holes, and I don't believe any of them were ever regularly discovered. . . . My uncle was very mild in his rule; yet there were circumstances which roused the indignation of the quietest colleges." The Mr. Rowley against whom the rioters demonstrated was Shelley's tutor, so that the climax follows naturally ; — " The ringleader in every species of mischief within our grave walls was Mr. Shelley, after- wards so celebrated, though I should think to the end half-crazy. He began his career by every kind of wild prank at Eton, and when kindly remonstrated with by his tutor, repaid the well-meant private admonition by spilling an 54 UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, OXFORD acid over the carpet of that gentleman's study, a new purchase, which he thus completely destroyed. He did no deed so mischievous at University, but he was very insubordinate, always infringing some rule, the breaking of which he knew could not be overlooked. He was slovenly in his dress, and when spoken to about these and other irregularities, he was in the habit of making such extraordinary gestures, expressive of his humility under reproof, as to upset first the gravity, and then the temper, of the lecturing tutor. Of course these scenes reached unpleasant lengths, and when he pro- ceeded so far as to paste up atheistical squibs on the chapel doors, it was considered necessary to expel him." The hour for expulsion, however, was not yet ; but it is significant to find Shelley behaving himself, from the first, in such a way as to make the dons glad of any handle which he might subsequently give them. They probably ob- jected to his addiction to " Stinks," for the Natural Sciences had not yet come into their kingdom at the Universities; and rowdiness is (most naturally) doubly offensive to dons if the offender is rude when they rebuke him. Still there was, for the moment, no handle for the dons to seize; and Shelley was enjoying himself. He would have liked, as, indeed, most of us have at some period felt that we should like, to remain at Oxford for ever. " It would be a cruel calamity," he once said 55 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY to Hogg, as if in ominous anticipation of what was to happen, "to be interrupted by some untoward accident, to be compelled to quit our calm and agreeable retreat ; " and he continued : — " I regret only that the period of our residence is limited to four years ; I wish they would revive, for our sake, the old term of six or seven years. If we consider how much there is for us to learn, we shall allow that the longer period would still be far too short." He rejoiced, too, in the privilege of sporting his oak, — " the oak alone goes far towards making this place a paradise; " and the high spirits in which he conducted his metaphysical specula- tions are evident from Hogg's familiar story of his attempt to test, as it were, by experiment, that Platonic doctrine that all our knowledge is " reminiscence " of things known in a previous existence, — that, as Wordsworth puts it, " Heaven lies about us in our infancy " and " our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting." He snatched a baby, so Hogg tells us, out of its mother's arms on Magdalen Bridge, and, while the mother clung desperately to its swaddling clothes in an agony of terror lest it should be dropped into the Cherwell, he gravely questioned her : — " Can your baby tell us anything about pre- existence, madam ? " he asked, in a piercing voice, and with a wistful look. " He cannot speak, sir," answered the mother stolidly. 56 UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, OXFORD " Surely he can speak if he will," Shelley- insisted, " for he is only a few weeks old. He cannot have entirely forgotten the use of speech in so short a time." But the mother was as firm as the under- graduate. "It is not for me to argue with college gentlemen," she rejoined, " but babies of that age never do speak so far as / know; " and with that she begged that her infant might be returned to her; and so the incident terminated. Many similar stories of Shelley's strange say- ings and doings in his country walks might be told if space allowed; but those who are curious to read them must be referred to Hogg's un- deservedly neglected pages. They all show Shelley as a wild youth, — but of a delightfully fantastic wildness, — long-haired in an age in which it was the fashion for men to wear their hair close-cropped like grooms — standing, or rather, walking, aloof from the conventional studies and normal amusements of Oxford, but rejoicing in his newly-found freedom, and the adventures which it brought. In particular we find him pursuing and rejoicing in literary adventures. These were at first smiled upon by an un- suspecting father. Timothy Shelley, M.P., when he brought his son to Oxford, took him to the shop of Messrs. Munday and Slatter, booksellers, in the High, and introduced him to one of the partners. " My boy here," he said, pointing proudly to the long-haired, wild-eyed youth, — " my boy here 57 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY has a literary turn. He is already an author, and do pray indulge him in his printing freaks." The member for Shoreham imagined, appar- ently, that his son, having begun his literary career by writing a penny dreadful, would continue to write penny dreadfuls until he entered Parlia- ment, and settled down. Apparently, too, that was the kind of literature that Timothy Shelley understood and approved of. What he did not understand was that his son was growing up in a sense in which he himself had never grown up, and that certain influences, which he himself had never undergone, were at work on him. The first influence was that of books — ^books which, from the point of view of Timothy Shelley, were merely dull and stodgy incumbrances on the shelves. Instead of Aristotle the boy had been reading Locke and Hume. Hume, in particular, had waked him, as it waked Kant, from " dogmatic slumbers " ; but he had not Kant's metaphysical narcotic to send him to sleep again. And Hume's scepticism is rather disturbing to intelligent readers who have been reared in orthodoxy, especially if they have not the Critique of Pure Reason to check it. That was Shelley's case ; and that was the first influ- ence which was tempting him to put pen to paper for other purposes than the composition of those penny dreadfuls which satisfied his father's simple tastes. The second influence was love ; and that obliges us to interrupt our account of Shelley's Oxford career in order to speak of his first love affair. 58 CHAPTER VI FIRST LOVE AND NEW THEOLOGY Shelley's very first love appears to have been a young woman in what such young women call " the confectionery." Our authority is Gronow, who reports Shelley as saying to him : " Gronow, do you remember the beautiful Martha, the Hebe of Spiers' ? She was the loveliest girl I ever saw, and I loved her to distraction." On another page Gronow tells us how he and Keate, after Keate's retirement from the headmastership, chuckled together over the memory of a flirta- tion between this same Martha and Sumner — though whether the Sumner who became Arch- bishop of Canterbury or only the Sumner who became Bishop of Winchester does not appear. Martha must, indeed, have been a girl who adorned the confectionery to have attracted two admirers of such mark; but unhappily the records of their rivalry are lost. Martha left no mark on either life; and the first feminine influence which Shelley underwent was that of Harriet Grove. She was Shelley's cousin; and Medwin, who was cousin to both of them, speaks of her as " like one of Shakespeare's women — like some Madonna of Raphael." She came on a visit to 59 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY Field Place, and Shelley afterwards stayed at her father's house in London. It is agreed that she was of such an ethereal beauty as was likely to efface all thoughts of the girl in the confectioner's shop; but beyond that fact, one gets no very clear impression of her. Her charms are as elusive as those of Byron's Mary Chaworth ; and the effect of them was less enduring, though it was very real for a season, and Shelley dreamt love's young dream in the baseless belief that he had found, in this beautiful girl, an ideal intellectual companion. Harriet, one gathers, was at first dazzled — it would have been strange if she had not been. She was just clever enough to begin to under- stand the boy who was different from other people — ^not clever enough to understand him when he developed beyond the stage which he had reached at the time of their moonlight walks in Timothy Shelley's and the Duke of Norfolk's parks. She heard him gladly when he talked of haunted ruins, spectral apparitions, and the rest of the imaginative stock-in-trade of the writer of penny dreadfuls. She is said to have collaborated with him in Zastrozzi. But he grew up faster than she did; and presently he frightened her. They were too young to be engaged; but there was an " understanding," and a corre- spondence — and Shelley's communications were no ordinary love-letters. He had been reading Locke and Hume; and the conceptions of tiiose 60 FIRST LOVE AND NEW THEOLOGY philosophers found their way into his letters. The boy imagined that the girl was, like himself, a seeker after truth; but the girl, though she joined for a moment in the quest, was soon scared by the quarry started. She had " the will to believe," but not the will to know. Ideas made her shudder far more than ghosts and ancestral curses could. She ran in terror to her elders, and sought counsel from them with the result which might have been foreseen. Her father said that the correspondence must cease and the acquaintance be discontinued. He was obeyed. It would even seem that Harriet obeyed him without much show of reluctance. One gathers, at any rate, from one of Shelley's letters to Hogg, that his sister Eliza- beth pleaded his cause with Harriet, but pleaded it in vain. This is what Harriet is reported to have said : — " Even supposing I take your representation of your brother's qualities and sentiments, which as you coincide in and admire, I may fairly imagine to be exaggerated, although you may not be aware of the exaggeration ; what right have /, admitting that he is so superior, to enter into an intimacy which must end in delusive disappoint- ment, when he finds how really inferior I am to the being which his heated imagination has pictured ? " Perhaps that paragraph is more helpful to us 61 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY in picturing Harriet Grove than anything else that we know about her. Her superficiahty shines through it, hke the sun bursting through a cloud. The common sense of the weak-minded and inadequate is convincingly confused in it with the qualities to which women apply the epithet " cattish." But, of course, Harriet's heart was her own to dispose of; and it was not long before she did dispose of it to a country squire named Heylar. This is how Shelley conveys the news to Hogg:— " She is gone ! She is lost to me for ever ! She^ married ! Married to a clod of earth ; she will become as insensible herself; all those fine capabilities will moulder. Let us speak no more on the subject." But if Shelley spoke no more on the subject, that is only because he had already said so much that nothing remained to be said. He had raved at length ; but the only examples of his ravings which it is worth while to give are those which show how disappointment in love prepared the way for the incident which led to his expulsion from Oxford. He conceived of himself as the victim, not of woman's fickleness, but of man's bigotry. He still speaks eloquently of love : — " Love ! dearest, sweetest power ! how much are we indebted to thee ! How much superior 62 FIRST LOVE AND NEW THEOLOGY are even thy miseries to the pleasures which arise from other sources ! how much superior to ' fat contented ignorance ' is even the agony which thy votaries experience." But this invocation of love is sandwiched between two denunciations of bigotry and an- nouncements that the lover is taking, or means to take, the field against it. This, for instance : — " I shall not read Bishop Pretyman or any more of them, unless I have some particular reason. Bigots will not argue; it destroys the very nature of the thing to argue; it is contrary to faith. How, therefore, could you suppose that one of these liberal gentlemen would listen to scepticism, on the subject even of St. Athana- sius's sweeping anathema." And then this : — " On one subject I am cool, toleration ; yet that coolness alone possesses me that I may with more certainty guide the spear to the breast of my adversary, with more certainty ensanguine it with the heart's blood of Intolerance — hated name ! " Adieu ! Down with Bigotry ! Down with Intolerance ! In this endeavour your most sincere friend will join his every power, his every feeble resource." Nor did Shelley make any secret of his opinions 63 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY at home. On the contrary he aired them in the bosom of his family, sparing only Elizabeth on the ground that he did not " wish to awaken her intellect too powerfully." He attempted even to "enlighten" his father, but with unsatisfactory results : — " He for a time listened to my arguments ; he allowed the impossibility (considered abstractedly) of any preternatural interferences by Providence. He allowed the utter incredibility of witches, ghosts, legendary miracles. But when I came to apply the truths on which we had agreed so harmoniously, he started at the bare idea of some facts generally believed never having existed, and silenced me with a bovine argument, in effect with these words : ' I believe because I do believe.' " That is characteristic of Mr. Timothy Shelley, of whose theological inadequacy we shall have further proofs. Meanwhile, the effect of the boy's theological outpourings on his mother's mind claims notice : — " My mother imagines me to be in the high road to Pandemonium, she fancies I want to make a deistical coterie of all my little sisters; how laughable ! " While as for the collective attitude of the family : "They attack me for my detestable principles; 64 FIRST LOVE AND NEW THEOLOGY I am reckoned an outcast; yet I defy them and laugh at their ineffectual efforts." These letters were written in the Christmas vacation of 1810-1811. They are important as showing us precisely in what frame of mind Shelley returned to Oxford and catastrophe. Not the least significant fact is that he speaks of his principles, not as " atheistical " but as " de- istical " ; and this profession of deism is con- tained in several passages of the letters to Hogg. In one of the letters he goes so far as to speak of " God whose mercy is great." In another we read this : — " The word ' God,' a vague word, has been, and will continue to be, the source of numberless errors, until it is erased from the nomenclature of philosophy. Does it not imply ' the soul of the universe, the intelligent and necessarily beneficent actuating principle ' ? This it is impossible not to believe in ; I may not be able to adduce proofs, but I think that the leaf of a tree, the meanest insect on which we trample, are, in themselves, arguments more conclusive than any which can be advanced, that some vast intellect animates infinity." And then again : — " Love, love infinite in extent, eternal in duration, yet (allowing your theory in that point) perfectible, should be the reward; but can we c 65 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY suppose that this reward will arise, spontaneously, as a necessary appendage to our nature, or that our nature itself could be without cause — a first cause — a God ? When do we see effects arise without causes ? " But, on the other hand : — " I swear — and as I break my oaths may Infinity, Eternity blast me — here I swear that never will I forgive intolerance. . . . You shall see — you shall hear — how it has injured me. She is no longer mine ! she abhors me as a sceptic, as what she was before. Oh, bigotry ! When I pardon this last, this severest, of thy persecutions, may Heaven (if there be wrath in Heaven) blast me. Has vengeance in its armoury of wrath punishment more dreadful ? . . . " . . . Is suicide wrong ? I slept with a loaded pistol and some poison last night, but did not die." These excerpts, thus arranged, clear up the situation. Shelley was not an atheist, any more than Vincent Crummies was a Prussian. His professions of faith, though rather crudely put, hardly strike one as being more advanced than those of the Rev. R. J. Campbell. But he had been treated as an atheist; and he was in a dangerous mood, and ready for mischief. 66 CHAPTER VII "THE NECESSITY OF ATHEISM "—EXPULSION FROM OXFORD The facts which must be borne in mind in order that the story of The Necessity of Atheism may be intelHgible are these : — Shelley was only eighteen, but was taking to controversy as a duck to water, and saw no reason for keeping his religious opinions in a water- tight compartment. His New Theology, which, in so far as it was coherent, was pretty much the New Theology of the City Temple of to-day — a theology based upon the doctrine of Divine Immanence — had lost him a bride, and had consequently caused him to lose his temper. He had a fluent pen, and was never so happy as when employing it. That to begin with, and further- more : — Shelley was a rowdy man ; and, partly for that reason, and partly because he was a Stinks man — one whose rooms were not only furnished, as Hogg says, with " an electrical machine, an air- pump, a galvanic trough, a solar microscope, and large glass jars and receivers," but Avere also pervaded with " an unpleasant and penetrating effluvium " — was persona ingrata with the dons. Of his miscellaneous literary activities it would E 2 67 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY be superfluous to say much; but there are two points to be noted. He was out-growing penny dreadfuls ; and his work was beginning to attract attention in University circles. The last of the penny dreadfuls was St. Irvyne, or the Rosicrucian, advertised as " by a Gentleman of Oxford Univer- sity " ; and this romance was not yet out when the author wrote to his publisher, Stockdale of Pall Mall, declaring his determination to produce something more serious and ambitious : — " I have in preparation a novel ; it is principally constructed to convey metaphysical and political opinions by way of conversation ; it shall be sent to you as soon as completed, but it shall receive more correction than I trouble myself to give to wild Romance and Poetry." The novel thus announced was Leonora, which may or may not have been begun in collaboration with Hogg, and might or might not, if completed, have turned out to be a romance of New Theology- One likes to imagine it as a sketch of a sort of earlier Robert Elsmere; but as it was never printed, or even finished, one cannot make smy definite affirmation. The Avork which interrupted its com- position was a volume of poems — Posthumous Fragments of Mrs. Margaret Nicholson, Widow — which is said to have been begun in a serious spirit but transformed into a burlesque at Hogg's suggestion and with his help; and this was the production which first caused Shelley to be talked about. 68 EXPULSION FROM OXFORD Munday and Slatter, who published the brochure, spoke of it, indeed, as " almost still- born " ; but Hogg's statement that the copies which were not given away " were rapidly sold at Oxford at the aristocratical price of half-a- crown for half-a-dozen pages " is made more probable by a letter written by C. Kirkpatrick Sharpe, and printed in Lady C. Bury's Diary. " Talking of books, we have lately had a literary sun shine forth upon us here, before whom our former luminaries must hide their diminished heads — a Mr. Shelley of University College, who lives upon arsenic, aqua-fortis, half-an-hour's sleep in the night, and is desperately in love with the memory of Margaret Nicholson. . . . The author is a great genius, and, if he be not clapped up in Bedlam or hanged, will certainly prove one of the sweetest swans on the tuneful margin of Cher." A marvellously exact prediction, though there was little to warrant it in the facts before the prophet : a proof, too, that Shelley ceased to be a nonentity while still a freshman. His zeal for literature, however, paled, at this period, before his zeal for controversy; and that zeal for controversy was found in curious conjunction with a passion for practical joking, and for " pulling the legs " of pompous persons. 69 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY His favourite device, suggested to him while he was still an Eton boy, by Dr. Lind — a man of science of the town who had encouraged his taste for chemistry — was to write, under an assumed name to strangers — the most grave and reverend strangers whom he thought likely to reply to him — submitting brief abstracts of some heterodox argument, and appealing for assistance in rebutting it. If the person to whom he wrote " took the bait," says Hogg, he would " fall upon the unwary disputant and break his bones." Once, according to Medwin, he lured a bishop into controversy, by pretending to be a woman, and handled him as the impertinent have delighted to handle the pompous from the beginning of the world. On another occasion, it is said, his antagonist, discovering how he had been " got at " by a schoolboy, wrote to the head- master, demanding that he should be flogged for his presumption; and Keate, as we know, was a head-master who snatched at the smallest excuse for the birch. It was splendid fun, of course — and likely to prove still better fun in a world in which birches were not ; and the fun would reach its acme if it were possible to "get a rise" out of the Vice- Chancellor, the Proctors, the Regius Professor of Divinity, and the Heads of Colleges and Halls. These dignitaries being clergymen, atheism was the obvious card to play. The effect of a pro- fession of atheism on clergymen might fairly be expected to be that of a red rag on a bull — the more 70 EXPULSION FROM OXFORD so if the atheistical conclusions were deduced from works read in the ordinary course of the University curriculum. Shelley, moreover, was the readier to attempt to " draw " them on those lines because his New Theology had been treated as atheism and had, as we have seen, lost him a bride. He was in the mood to say that he would show people what atheism really was. How Hogg was induced to bear a hand in the campaign one does not know, — most likely for no other reason than because he loved a joke, and admired his friend's skill as a controversialist. At all events he and Shelley did put their heads together; with the result that The Necessity of Atheism was produced, and advertised in the Oxford Herald of February 9, 1811, and that copies of it were posted to dons and others, " with the compliments of Jeremiah Stukeley." Nor was that all. There was the off-chance that the dons, scenting a practical joke, might ignore the outrage, and Shelley, avid of publicity, was determined to compel them to take notice. So he came down, with a bundle of his pamphlets under his arm, to Messrs. Munday and Slatter's shop — the very shop in which a lavish and indulgent parent (lavish and indulgent on that occasion at all events) had given out that his " printing freaks " were to be encouraged. He wished those pamphlets, he said, to be offered for sale at sixpence each ; he wished them to be well displayed on the counter and in the window; in 71 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY order that the window might be dressed to his liking, he proposed to dress it himself. He did so with an obliging readiness which overwhelmed the amiable bookseller's assistant. In a moment of time The Necessity of Atheism was displayed in Messrs. Munday and Slatter's shop, much as the first number of a new magazine with a gaudy cover might be displayed on one of the railway bookstalls to-day. It remained so displayed for about twenty minutes ; and then the Rev. John Walker, Fellow of New College — he, apparently, whom Hogg describes as " the pert, meddling fellow of a college of inferior note,^ a man of an insalubrious and inauspicious aspect " — passed the shop, looked into the window to see what new publi- cations had arrived, read the title of Shelley's pamphlet, and, after being surprised and shocked, was moved to action. He walked into the shop, demanded the proprietors, and gave them peremp- tory instructions : — "■ Mr. Munday, and Mr. Slatter ! What is the meaning of this ? " " We beg pardon, sir. We really didn't know. We hadn't examined the publication personally. But, of course, now that our attention is drawn to it " " Now that your attention is drawn to it, Mr. Munday and Mr. Slatter, you will be good enough ^ It is only within comparatively recent years that the reputation of New College has stood high. 72 EXPULSION FROM OXFORD to remove all tlic copies of it that lie on your counter and are exposed in your window, and to take them out into your ))ack kitelien, and there burn tliem." Such was tlie dialogue; as om* gg ! A pretty sort of friend ! You wc>uldu't call him your friend if you knew as much about him as I do. >Vhen the cat's away, you know — Ah ! well, I don't mind telling you. In fact I think you ought to be told. I wouldn't tell you if I didn't know it for a fact. If you don't believe me, you can ask Harriet. We'll ask her together. Harriet, my dear, didn't you just tell me that Mr. Hogg ? " And so forth ; a woman of thirty — a clever woman, who knew lumian nature, and also knew a certain corner of the world — distilling poison into the ear of a boy of nineteen, devoid of the 134 HOW MISCHIEF WAS MADE worldly wisdom wfiif'li cxpcruncA', giv(;s. The poison w.'is bonrui to work. Tint hoy's mind, (IniK^cd flown from the rc/^ions of abstract speculation to th<; unfamiliar lcv(;l of concrete cjilumny, w;i,s bound to be perplexed. TFe misfit have doubted Eli/a's unsuy>[)orted wonJ ; but how conid he douf)t Harriet ? How susf)ect that what Hn,rriet said was what Eli/a fiad contrived that she should say ? W})at could he do, in short, except run to Uo^fff, rep(;;i.tinj^ the cfiargcs and indi^n.'intly demanding (;x[)lanations ? His Jcttcrs show that that was what he did; and it is not diflicult to picture Hogg's embarrass- ment if w(t imagine him to Fiav(; had it on his consci(;n(;e that his manner with Harriet had been a shad(; too fre(; and easy. He could not very well say, in so nmny words, that it had seemed natural to adopt that sort of manner with that sort of girl that he had only treated Harriet as she schemed to expect to b(; treated. Nor could he, on the other hand, if he had so treated her, say bluntly that she was a spiteful little liar. All that he could do was to try to steer an embarrassed middle courses protesting some- what in this style, in the midst of impatient interruptions : — ** Shelley! Shelley I My dear Shelley I What an ama/ing ac;eusation ! Who on earth has been putting such extraordinary ideas into your head ? What's that you say ? Harriet told you herself ? Jlarriet complained to you that I chucked fier under the chin ? Well I 135 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY never — Do I deny it ? you ask. I've no recollec- tion of doing anything of the kind ; but of course I don't like to contradict a lady; and you may be quite sure that, if I did, it was done with the very best intentions. I'd no idea she minded. She didn't seem to at the time. I'm quite willing to beg her pardon if she did. I can't say more than that, can I ? What ! You're not satisfied ? You want to pick a quarrel with me about it ? Well, then, confound it, Shelley, if you insist upon quarrelling ' ' Et cetera. The speeches are, of course, imaginary speeches, suggested in lieu of actual speeches of which there is no record. The game of cross purposes which they illustrate explains the subsequent course of events far better than the theory that Hogg was really treacherous and that Shelley had really acquired convincing proofs of his treachery. It explains alike the hesitations and fluctuations in Shelley's immediate wrath, and the completeness of the pardon which he extended to his friend, after the waning of Eliza's influence, but before the separation from Harriet. In the end Shelley evidently realized that he, the idealistic philosopher, had been fooled by the low cunning of the mischief-making daughter of a licensed victualler. Even at the moment he did not permit himself to be fooled quite without resistance. The struggle proceeding in his mind is apparent not only in the letters in which, with a naivete partly his own and partly 136 HOW MISCHIEF WAS MADE the characteristic of his tender years, he confided his troubles to Miss Hitchener, but also in the letters to Hogg himself. In one of the letters to Miss Hitchener he writes : "I told him that I pardoned him freely." In another : "I leave him to his fate." That is fairly inconsistent, but the inconsistency in the letters to Hogg is even more remarkable. Shelley continued to correspond with Hogg for some time after his departure from York. The tone of the earlier letters is such that some biographers have, most naturally, jumped to the conclusion that the misunderstanding had not yet arisen when they were written. The con- fidences to Miss Hitchener show them to be mistaken. The trouble did, in fact, begin v/hile Shelley was still at York. But we nevertheless find him, after the beginning of the trouble, instructing Hogg to open any letters which may come for him, and even inviting Hogg to visit him. For instance : — " We all greatly regret that ' your own interests, your own real interests ' should compel you to remain at present at York. But pray write often." And also : — " Will you come ? Will you share my fortunes, enter into my schemes, love me as I love you, be inseparable as once I fondly hoped we were ? . . . Cannot you follow us ? — ^why not ? " 137 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY It is not until some weeks later that we come to the letter which temporarily terminated the intercourse of the two friends. Hogg prints the letter as " a fragment of a novel," suppressing Harriet's name ; but there can be no doubt that it is really a fragment of this curious correspond- ence. These are the essential passages : — " You talk of female excellence, female per- fection. Man is, in your declamation, a being infinitely inferior, whose proudest efforts at virtue are but mockeries of his impotence. (Harriet) is the personification of all this contrast to man, the impassionateness of the most ardent passion that ever burned in human breast could never have dictated a compliment (I will not say a piece of flattery) more excessive. She perceived it (for she has shown me your letter), and remarked with such indignation on the repetition of that continued flattery, which you had made your theme ever since she knew you. I wish you would investigate the sources of this passion, my dear friend; you would find it derived its principal source from sensation. " Let your ' too, too great susceptibility of beauty,' your own very sincere expression in your letter to (Harriet) suffice to convince you of the true state of your feelings. This caused your error primarily : nor can I wonder. I do not condemn, I pity; nor do I pity with con- tempt, but with sympathy, real sympathy. I hope I have shown you that I do not regard you 138 HOW MISCHIEF WAS MADE as a smooth-tongued traitor; could I choose such for a friend ; could I still love him with affection unabated, perhaps increased ? Reason, plain reason, would tell you this could not be. How far gone must you have been in sophistry, self- deception, to think sensation in this, in any instance, laudable. " I am not happy. I tell you so. My last letter was written in the acuteness of feeling; but do you wish that I should be happy ? Re- assure yourself, and then be assured that not a wish of my heart will remain ungratified, as respects you. I have but one other wish beside ; to that, at present, I will not allude more. (Harriet) will write to you to-morrow. May I require that, as one proof of self-conquest, you will throw the letter into the fire, suppressing all thoughts of adoration, which I strongly suspect to arrive from mere sensation, sentiment. But the letter will arrive first : it will be pressed to the lips, folded to the heart, imagination will dwell upon the hand that wrote it ; how easy the transition to the wildest reveries of ungratified desire ! " Oh ! how the sophistry of the passions has changed you ! The sport of a woman's whim, the plaything of her inconsistencies, the bauble with which she is angry, the footstool of her exaltation ! Assert yourself, be what you were. Love, adore ; it will exalt your nature, bid you, a man, be a God ! Combine it, if you will, with sensation, perhaps they are inseparable ; be it so. But do not love one who cannot return it, 139 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY who, if she could, ought to stifle her desire to do so. Love is not a whirlwind that it is un- vanquishable ! " That is the ehmax on whieh the curtain of this act of the drama falls. The circumstances which led up to it are left to conjecture ; but the diffi- culties in the way of conjecture are hardly insuperable. Hogg's letters, and the interpre- tation put upon them in Shelley's family circle, are the missing links in the chain which imagina- tion may plausibly supply. Hogg, we must suppose, was too wise a man to accept Shelley's invitation to visit him, but not wise enough to give the right reasons for his refusal, and was an indiscreet and unpractised letter-writer, as boys of his age, entangled in emotional situations of which they have no experience, are apt to be. He felt, no doubt, that it would be brutally bad manners for him to represent himself as insensible to Harriet's charms — it may even be that he was not insen- sible to them. Consequently he let himself go too far in the opposite direction, struck the attitude of a love- sick swain with a blighted heart, and once more paid exaggerated compli- ments — mainly, if not solely, because he sup- posed it to be the proper thing to do, and perhaps with the result of working himself up into a partial belief in his own sincerity. It was a dangerous thing to do in any case — doubly dangerous with such a woman as Eliza 140 HOW MISCHIEF WAS MADE in the house. If EHza got hold of those letters, she could make what she chose out of them — and one knows what she would choose to make. They proved — that is to say, they seemed to prove — that she was right. They proved it easily to Harriet — to whom the idea that a personable young man was pining for love of her need not be supposed to have been repugnant. They proved it, eventually, and by dint of reiteration, to Shelley himself. " I told you so," Eliza was now in a position to say. " His behaviour is, and has been all along, that of the wicked baronet in the novelettes. You really ought to write and tell him so." And Shelley, who was as young as Hogg, and nearly as young as Harriet, and had an irresist- ible passion for putting his most sacred feelings on note-paper, sat down and wrote. He may not have written exactly the letter which Eliza would have liked to see him write ; but he wrote the letter which has been quoted, and it served as well. Indeed, it served better ; for it left the door open for the resumption of friendship at some later date, when Eliza no longer spoke as one having authority, and Hogg and Shelley and Harriet were all old enough to see how silly they had been at her cunning instigation. But we shall come to that in due course, and shall have to follow Shelley upon many pilgrim- ages before we come to it. 141 CHAPTER XIII AT KESWICK— SHELLEY'S RECONCILIATION WITH HIS FATHER— HIS RELATIONS WITH SOUTHEY— HIS COR- RESPONDENCE WITH WILLIAM GODWIN At the end of October, or the beginning of November, Shelley and his party moved from York to Keswick ; hfs purpose being, apparently, not SO much to see the Lakes as to see the Duke of Norfolk, who had a place at Greystoke, in that neighbourhood. As the Duke had made the peace before between the mutinous son and the angry father, there was at least a sporting chance that he might render the same service a second time ; and the need for help was urgent. Shelley had come to the end of his pocket money. He had also come to the end of Eliza's pocket money ; and the Duke's response to his appeal found him in the midst of a desperate correspondence with the elder Medwin about ways and means. " We are now so poor,"" he wrote to Medwin, underlining the words, " a^ to he actually in danger of every day being deprived of the necessaries of life.'' Would it not be possible for him, he asked, in spite of his minority, to borrow on the security of his expectations ? If so, would Medwin at once remit a small sum for immediate expenses ? And the letter proceeds : — 142 AT KESWICK " Mr. Westbrook has sent me a small sum,, with an intimation that we are to expect no more; this suffices for the immediate discharge of a few debts, and it is nearly with our very last guinea that we visit the Duke of N. at Greystock, to-morrow. We return to Keswick on Wednesday. I have very few hopes from this visit." The visit nevertheless marked the turning of the tide. The Duke had already, three weeks before, opened negotiations with Timothy Shelley, as is set forth in an extract from his private Diary first printed in Denis Florence MacCarthy's Early Life of Shelley : — '' 1811, Nov. 7.— Wrote to T. Shelley that I would come to Field Place on the 10th, to confer with him on the unhappy difference with his son, from whom I have a letter before me. '' To Mr. B. Shelley in answer that I should be glad to interfere, but fear with little hope of success; fearing that his father, and not he alone, will see his late conduct in a different point of view from what he sees it." Dukes, however, are not without influence in determining the point of view from which such things shall be seen by country gentlemen. Their arguments count for much, and their examples count for more. When Shelley, Harriet, and Eliza were invited to Greystoke, to join a house party which included Lady 143 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY Musgrave, Mrs. Howard of Corby, and James Brougham, the brother of the future Lord Chan- cellor, Field Place was bound to be impressed, and Mr. Westbrook to be dazzled. To think that he had once kept a tavern, and that his daughters now adorned baronial halls ! That was indeed a happy ending to what had seemed a rather doubtful experiment. He must show himself no niggard, but must do " the handsome thing," so as to show himself worthy of the unexpected honour. He did it, and so made it difficult for Timothy Shelley to do otherwise. It was not agreeable for Timothy Shelley to think that his son had, as he put it, " set off for Scotland with a young female; " but it hardly suited him to see his son dependent upon the charity of the young female's father. He might yield with a good grace, or with a bad grace; but he must yield. Probably, too, he argued that a young female who was thought good enough for a Greystoke house party could not be such a terrible young female after all; and probably that was what the Duke of Norfolk intended him to think when he invited the young female to join the house party. What the Duke and Duchess really thought of Harriet and Eliza one has no means of knowing. It is not to be supposed that they surveyed them otherwise than from Olympian heights, or judged them by very exigent social standards; but, whatever the test was, they seem to have passed 144 SHELLEY AND HIS FATHER it, — most likely by dint of being careful not to talk too much. One can imagine Harriet's youth, beauty, and shy timidity disarming criti- cism, and the Duchess working herself up into a state of patronizing enthusiasm over the discovery that she did not drop her h's. The upshot of the visit was, at any rate, that Shelley, at the Duke's instance, wrote his father a letter — two letters, in fact — of dignified apology; and that his father, albeit somewhat grudgingly, renewed his allowance of £200 a year. Mr. Westbrook made his daughter an equal allowance ; so that, for the time being, all was well. Nor were any unpleasant conditions attached to the allowances; for Shelley expressly refused to submit to any : — " I hope " (he wrote) " you will not consider what I am about to say an insulting want of respect or contempt; but I think it my duty to say that, however great advantages might result from such concessions, I can make no promise of concealing my opinions in political or religious matters. I should consider myself culpable to excite any expectation in your mind which I should be unable to fulfil." And in the second letter : — " My principles remain the same as those which caused my expulsion from Oxford. When questions which regard the subject are agitated K 145 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY in society I explain my opinions with coolness and moderation. You will not, I hope, object to my train of thinking. I could disguise it, but this would be falsehood and hypocrisy." That is important because the time of Shelley's stay at Keswick was the time at which he really began to " find himself," not indeed as a poet — for his poetry was very poor stuff as yet — but as a speculative thinker and a social reformer; and one may properly insert here a picture of him as he appeared to Southey, who was then living at' Greta Hall : — " Here is a man at Keswick " (Southey wrote to Grosvenor C. Bedford) " who acts upon me as my own ghost would do. He is just what I was in 1794. His name is Shelley, son to the member for Shoreham ... It has surprised him a good deal to meet, for the first time in his life, with a man who perfectly understands him, and does him full justice. I tell him that all the difference between us is that he is nineteen, and I am thirty-seven; and I daresay it will not be very long before I shall succeed in convincing him that he may be a true philosopher and do a great deal of good with £6000 a year, the thought of which troubles him a great deal more at present than ever the want of sixpence (for I have known such a want) did me. God help us ! The world wants mending, though he did not set about it in exactly the right way." 146 HIS RELATIONS WITH SOUTHEY Which shows that Southey, though he observed the surface of things, could not see beneath the surface. He was equally mistaken in expecting that Shelley would ever develop into a man like him, and in supposing that he had ever been a boy like Shelley. Shelley, as an undergraduate, had been abstemious, whereas Southey had been addicted to negus. Southey had been orderly as an undergraduate, avoiding Walter Savage Landor as a " mad Jacobin," even in the days of his Pantisocratic dreams; whereas Shelley had been wild, a ringleader in mischief, and one who set dons at defiance. It would have been supposed, if they had been college contemporaries, that Southey was the more serious thinker of the two ; but there was not only more vivacity in Shelley's revolt against conventional ideas and doings — there was also more intensity, more unselfishness, and more staying-power. Southey, when he soared towards the empyrean, was, in truth, only a captive balloon, secured by cords of common sense, and sure to be drawn back to earth by them after a brief excursion. Shelley's flight suggests, rather, the audacious self-dependence of the aeroplane. When one looks at him in his Oxford days, indeed, it is a little difficult to disentangle his " message " from his desire to shock and startle serious and self-satisfied persons — people, as he put it to Hogg, " who never think." He was a born preacher as surely as his Oxford contempo- K2 147 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY rary Thomas Arnold, albeit born to preach a very different doctrine ; he talked quite as much about Virtue, though he did not always mean by Virtue exactly what other people meant ; but he differed from Thomas Arnold in his passion for preaching the sort of sermon which would cause the members of his congregation to jump out of their boots. That is how The Necessity of Atheism came to be written by one who was not exactly an atheist; and that is why we have to get Shelley away from Oxford before we can begin to take him seriously. At Keswick, where there were no serious self- satisfied persons to shock (though there was Southey to argue with), one may do so. The articles of the faith flash out in the letters to Miss Hitchener, in the midst of lamentations over Hogg's excess of gallantry and appeals to his correspondent to come and. live with him as the sister of his soul ought to do. The creed varies a little from letter to letter in matters of definition and detail; but the writer remains consistent in essentials. He never seems quite sure whether he is atheist, deist, or pantheist; but he loves Virtue and hates Christianity because he believes Christianity to be opposed to Virtue. In particular he objects to the Christian doctrine of rewards and punishments, maintaining that, unless Virtue be disinterested, it is not virtuous. He also believes in the perfectibility of the human race, the rights of man, and the principles of the French Revolution. A cloudy doctrine, no doubt ; but Shelley took 148 HIS RELATIONS WITH SOUTHEY no unfair advantage of its vagueness. On the contrary he made it definite to his detriment, when he was offered £2000 a year on condition that he would allow certain properties to be included in the entailed estate. " With what face," he then exclaimed, " can they make to me a proposal so insultingly hateful ! Dare one of them propose such a condition to my face — ^to the face of any virtuous man — and not sink into nothing at his disdain ? " The suggestion of such a bargain, he added, would " serve to put in its genuine light the grandeur of aristocratical distinctions and to show that contemptible vanity will gratify its unnatural passion at the expense of every just, humane, and philanthropic consideration." That was the temper of the enthusiasm which Southey thought to damp by the time-honoured device of saying that he had felt it himself when he was young and foolish, but was now old enough to know better. He might as well have tried to extinguish the Fire of London with a garden hose. The most that he could do was to make Shelley lose his patience and his temper; and that he quickly did. He invited Shelley to tea, and offered muffins and good advice; but though Shelley accepted muffin after muffin until there were no muffins left on the plate, he refused the good advice as emphatically as a teetotaller refuses whisky. Southey, he con- cluded, was not a matured sage but a " lost leader"; and he let him see that he so thought of him: — 149 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY " Southey has changed. I shall see him soon and I shall reproach him for his tergiversation. He to whom Bigotry, Tyranny, Law was hateful, has become the votary of these idols in a form the most disgusting." He suggested, moreover, that Southey has apostatized for fear of poverty : — " Wordsworth (a quondam associate of Southey) yet retains the integrity of his independence ; but his poverty is such that he is frequently obliged to beg for a shirt to his back." ^ The opinion was momentarily revised when Southey was discovered to be " very kind," and manifested his kindness by persuading Shelley's landlord to reduce his rent. Then points of philosophical agreement were found. " Southey is no believer in original sin : he thinks that which appears to be a taint of our nature is in effect the result of unnatural political institutions : there we agree." Moreover, Southey is admitted to be " disinterested so far as respects his family." But Southey's domestic virtues (which all the world allows) are soon overshadowed, in Shelley's eyes, by his comfortable Conservatism. He is presently irritated by Southey's habit of laying down the law. He finds it hard to be polite to him; he writes about him in language which is very far from polite : — 1 This statement rests, of course, on no authority except Shelley's imagination. 150 HIS RELATIONS WITH SOUTHEY " Southey, the poet, whose principles were pure and elevated once, is now the paid champion of every abuse and absurdity. I have had much conversation with him. He says, ' You will think as I do when you are as old.' I do not feel the least disposition to be Mr. S.'s proselyte." And then again : " Southey 's conversation has lost its charm ; except it be the charm of horror at so hateful a prostitution of talents." The personal relations, indeed, though strained, were not yet strained to breaking-point. Shelley did not openly quarrel with the Tory whose influence had brought about the reduction of a Radical's rent, and who had lent bed and table linen to an ill-provided Radical house- hold. The two men were to correspond cour- teously before they came to correspond acri- moniously. But Shelley, as he had said, would never be Southey's proselyte ; and it was while he was arguing with Southey that he formally seated himself at the feet of William Godwin. To what an extent Godwin's Political Justice had influenced him we have already seen. He had apparently read it at Eton, and he had cer- tainly read it at Oxford. It had long been a fifth gospel to him, if that be a proper expression in the case of a man by whom the four other gospels were rejected. He had supposed — ^that is to say, 151 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY he had assumed without inquiring — that the author, Hke the other evangehsts, was dead; but he now learnt that he was ahve, and only fifty-six years of age. No sooner had he realized that than he sat down, in his usual impetuous style, and wrote to him, begging for the honour of his acquaintance, and so began relations which were to have momentous consequences. For William Godwin had a daughter, and a step- daughter, and an adopted daughter, — all of whom will presently figure in this narrative. Presently, but not immediately. For the moment it suffices to introduce William Godwin himself. Godwin had been a Nonconformist Minister, but had outgrown Nonconformity and become first a Unitarian, and then an atheist, a re- publican, and an advocate of free love. He earned his living, partly as a man of letters, and partly as a bookseller and publisher. On the whole he was the most effective of the English representatives of the French revolutionary creed, being the sort of man at whose feet disciples naturally take their places. The Government had its eye on him. There exists, at the Record Office, a State Paper — " Domestic, Geo. III., 1813. January to March. No. 217." — in which he is charged with trying to instil poisonous principles into the minds of the young by means of insidious school primers. Nothing came of the charge — apparently because the Secretary 152 HIS CORRESPONDENCE WITH GODWIN of State to whom the memorandum was sub- ^ mitted could not be bothered to examine the primers; but their publisher's formal profession of faith was set out in his Inquiry Concerning Political Justice and its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness, and also in Caleb Williams and other novels ; and he had a considerable following among the clever young men of the day. Being a needy teacher, he frequently borrowed money from his disciples; and it is hardly to be doubted that, in his later years, one of his objects in enlarging the circle of his disciples was to extend his possible sources of income. Shelley, however, knew nothing of that as yet. Godwin, for him, was the one great man who could give him illumination. He confided in Godwin as a woman confides in her confessor, — em- broidering the facts a little, as some confessors accuse some women of doing. When Godwin responded encouragingly to his advances, he was as pleased with himself as a Sunday-school scholar who has won a good conduct prize, and began at once to build castles in the air. He would take a mansion in Wales, and Godwin should visit him there. Miss Hitchener, and the pupils into whose minds Miss Hitchener was instilling the principles of true virtue, should also join the party. They and he and Eliza and Harriet would ramble on the hills together by day, and discuss the rights of man and the existence of God by night. Their discussions would be fruitful of enlighten- 153 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY ment, not only to themselves but to the world ; and, in the meantime, Shelley would do some- thing to prove that he was Godwin's worthy pupil, whether Godwin approved of his proceedings or not. He would go to Ireland and — But what Shelley really meant to do in Ireland is a thing which his announcement of his inten- tions does not adequately explain. " We go principally," he wrote to Miss Hitchener, " to forward as much as we can the Catholic Emanci- pation; " and if the idea of the cause of Catholic Emancipation being forwarded by Shelley, at the age of nineteen, is ludicrous, the idea of its being forwarded by Harriet and Eliza is more comic still. Nor do the contemplated means lift the remarkable scheme on to a more serious plane. All that Shelley proposed, apparently, was to issue an address to the Irish People, consisting of "the benevolent and tolerant de- ductions of philosophy reduced into the simplest language." Later, he conceived that a Debating Society and a Philanthropical Association might be helpful; but the essential notes of the pro- gramme are, after all, its vagueness and its earnestness. To Godwin, for instance, Shelley writes : — " I shall devote myself with unremitting zeal, as far as an uncertain state of health will permit, towards forwarding the great ends of virtue and happiness in Ireland, regarding as I do the present state of that country's affairs as an opportunity 154 HIS CORRESPONDENCE WITH GODWIN which if I, being thus disengaged, permit to pass unoccupied, I am unworthy of the character which I have assumed." To Miss Hitchener, whom he implores in vain to join him in his noble undertaking, he ex- claims : — " Oh, my dearest friend, when I think of the uncertainty and transitoriness of human life and its occupations, when I consider its fleeting prospects and its fluctuating principles, how desirous am I to crowd into its sphere as much usefulness as possible ! We have but a certain time allotted to us in which to do its business : how much does it become us to improve and multiply this time; and to regard every hour neglected, misspent, or unimproved, as so much lost to the cause of virtue, liberty, and happiness." It is the language of the pulpit — not a parody of that language, but the thing itself. Not otherwise do Messrs. Torrey and Alexander talk when they call upon us to redeem the time. But the figure which rises before our eyes when we read the eloquent appeal is not at all like that of Dr. Torrey, and not very much like that of Mr. Alexander. There is no modern parallel for it, but there is an old one. We are reminded of nothing so much as the blind enthusiasm of the Knight of La Mancha, so full of chivalry yet so devoid of humour, so eager to ride about re- 155 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY dressing human wrong, yet so incapable of realiz- ing the actualities of the life about him. Shelley, in short, must be pictured, if we would picture him truly, as a Quixote of nineteen, steeped in Godwin's political philosophy — steeped in it far more deeply than Godwin himself — instead of picaresque romance, and sweeping his womankind along with him in the headlong welter of an enthusiasm which they could not help trying to simulate, though they were quite incapable of understanding it. And so, by way of Whitehaven and the Isle of Man, to Dublin. 156 CHAPTER XIV THE EXPEDITION TO IRELAND Shelley's Irish Mission does not seem to have been taken very seriously by any one except Miss Hitchener, who had to be assured, again and again, that the missionary feared no foe, and that the danger of the dagger, the bowl, and even the dungeon, was negligible. Her courage was not screwed up to the point of joining the expedition, even when her attention was directed to the intrepid examples of Harriet and Eliza, who apprehended " no inconveniences but those of a wet night and sea-sickness." Perhaps sea- sickness itself seemed to her too awful a peril to be faced without necessity. Godwin, at the same time, wrote urging Shelley to go slowly; and in truth he had little oppor- tunity of going at any other pace. Ireland was not then looking out for a Saviour — or, at all events, it did not accept Shelley in that char- acter. The public of Dublin, eager as that of Athens to be entertained by " some new thing," viewed him, rather, as it might have viewed an Infant Prodigy or a Boy Preacher. His Irish servant — one Daniel Healey — entered into the spirit of the thing and gave out, to his intense annoyance, that he was only fifteen years of age. 157 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY There is abundance of credible testimony to the effect that he looked no more. So nothing happened which need delay any one except the antiquary who burrows after odds and ends of information. Shelley did, in- deed, address a public meeting; but it was not a meeting called to hear him. He was merely one of the speakers who responded to a vote of thanks to the Protestants who had attended a Catholic gathering; and none of the papers thought the speech worth reporting at any length, though the Dublin Journal printed a letter from a correspondent who wished to bear public witness to his disgust at observing " with what transport the invectives of this renegade Englishman against his native country were hailed by the assembly." As for the Address to the Irish People, which was distributed in the streets of Dublin, and sent to " sixty public- houses," no reader of the present day — not even Sir Edward Carson — would be likely to regard it as an inflammatory manifesto. It is a docu- ment almost as sober as one of Mr. St. Loe Strachey's tracts. There were indiscretions in it, no doubt; but they were the indiscretions of a youthful philo- sopher ingeminating peace where there was none. In his desire to be absolutely fair between Pro- testants and Catholics, Shelley took occasion to remind the latter, not only of the Inquisition and the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew, but also of " the vices of monks and nuns in their con- 158 THE EXPEDITION TO IRELAND vents." Mr. St. Loe Strachey, being a good deal older than Shelley when he took to writing tracts, would doubtless have known better than to do that ; but much of the rest is thoroughly worthy of Mr. Strachey. For instance : — " I wish to impress upon your minds that without virtue or wisdom there can be no liberty or happiness; and that temperance, sobriety, charity, and independence of soul will give you virtue, as thinking, inquiring, reading, and talking will give you wisdom. Without the first the last is of little use, and without the last the first is a dreadful curse to yourselves and others." That, it will be allowed, is more platitu- dinous than revolutionary; and it reminds one of nothing so much as Mr. Strachey trying to defend the pockets of the well-to-do by assuring the destitute that a new way of life is worth many old age pensions. And of course, Shelley failed, just as Mr. Strachey has failed, to con- vince the mass of his hearers that abstract virtues would be more helpful to them than concrete reforms. If Shelley cuts a more romantic figure as a reformer than Mr. Strachey does, that is because he was younger when he plunged into public life than one can easily believe Mr. Strachey to have been even in the nursery. He may have dreamt of the millennium in the spirit of a seer; but he worked for it in the temper of an under- 159 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY graduate. The announcement of "a plan for proselytizing the young men of Dublin College " is dehghtful. "Those," Shelley thinks, "who are not entirely given up to the grossness of dissipation are, perhaps, reclaimable " : a senti- ment which will be specially entertaining to readers familiar with Lever's pictures of under- graduate life in Dublin at this period. Still more delightful is Shelley's description of his method of distributing his tracts : "I stand at the bal- cony of our window, and watch till I see a man who looks likely ; I throw a book to him." A description supplemented in one of Harriet's letters thus : — " I am sure you would laugh were you to see us give the pamphlets. We throw them out of window, and give them to men that we pass in the streets. For myself, I am ready to die of laughter when it is done, and Percy looks so grave. Yesterday he put one into a woman's hood of a cloak ; she knew nothing of it, and we passed her. I could hardly get on, my muscles were so irritated." That was all. Godwin continued to write Shelley letter after letter, imploring him to go slowly and do nothing which might provoke bloodshed ; but there was never any danger of that. The masses were not moved, and the authorities were not alarmed. Even when a box of pamphlets, addressed to Miss Hitchener, was 160 THE EXPEDITION TO IRELAND opened in the Customs House at Holyhead, the Secretary of State took no steps beyond making a few inquiries about Miss Hitchener ; and Shelley himself, like the seconds of French duellists, when they cannot get their principals to fight, decided to regard his mission as terminated. "I submit," he wrote to Godwin; " I shall address myself no more to the illiterate. I will look to events in which it will be impossible that I can share, and make myself the cause of an effect which shall take place ages after I have mouldered in the dust." So he packed and departed for Wales; but before we follow him there we may pause to review his personal relations with his wife and the other women who were presently, and for some time, to constitute, as it were, his smala, or his caravan. Though Ireland received him coldly, regarding him as a freak rather than a prophet, he evidently enjoyed, for a season, the rank of a prophet in his own household. He entirely dominated Har- riet, and he partially dominated even Eliza — partly, one imagines, in virtue of his higher social origin, but mainly by his intellectual superiority and the communicable contagion of his enthu- siasm. The seeds of opposition and revolt were doubtless there. The ideals of the barmaid who does not see what is the use of marrying a gentle- man unless she achieves the position of a great L 161 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY lady were doubtless at the back of the brains of both of them, ready to assert themselves when custom staled Shelley's infinite variety ; but they were, for the time being, dormant. Eliza occupied the privileged position of Trea- surer of the party. She " keeps," Shelley writes, " our common stock of money for safety in some hole or corner of her dress." He did not yet dis- like her, but believed himself in a fair way to convert her from " prejudice " to virtue. Already at Keswick he had written of her as " a woman rather superior to the generality," adding : " She is prejudiced ; but her prejudices I do not con- sider unvanquishable. Indeed, I have already conquered some of them." Now, at Dublin he reports progress, representing Eliza's interests as divided between the useful and the philo- sophical : — " You have not seen Tom Paine's works. Eliza is going to employ herself in collecting the useful passages, which we shall publish. She is now making a red cloak, which will be finished before dinner." The implication is that Eliza was in a hurry to finish the red cloak in order that she might be free to set to work compiling an Anthology of Rationalism. She may have said so; but it is more likely that she was biding her time, play- ing a waiting game, watching for the moment when it would be proper for her to exhort Harriet 162 THE EXPEDITION TO IRELAND to " stand up for herself," put an end to this wandering Bohemian existence, and insist upon an estabHshment worthy of her social station. Harriet, however, was young enough to think it better fun to ramble about in quest of adven- tures than to settle down to sedate respectability. She seems to have enjoyed herself, and to have been really under that hypnotic influence which Eliza only affected to undergo. She did not merely accept her husband's enthusiasms and eccentricities in the spirit in which the wives of City men accept the fact that their husbands must catch the nine-fifteen every morning, and may sometimes be kept late at the office. She actually adopted his enthusiasms (to the best of her knowledge and belief) and wrote letters about them in a prose style which echoed his even to the point of substituting " hath " for " has " and interlarding "thee's" and "thou's" among the " you's." She became enthusiastic, at his bidding, not onl)^ about vegetarianism, which was one of Shelley's hobbies at this time, but also about Miss Hitchener. Her own particular friend in Ireland was a Miss (or Mrs.) Nugent, first referred to as " sitting in the room now and talking to Percy about virtue." She was an elderly needlewoman em- ployed by a furrier; and it is not clear hoAv Shelley came to know her. If she had simply walked into his apartment and proposed a con- versation about virtue he would, at that period of his life, have thought the introduction a L2 163 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY sufficient one. Harriet liked her and asked her to dinner (adding a roast fowl to the diet of herbs for the occasion), and waxed eloquent over her qualities and her misfortunes : — " 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 dependent upon others ? . . . The evening is the only time she can get out in the week. . . . She told Percy that her country was her only love when he asked her if she was married. ..." Et cetera. One notes the circumstance because Harriet and Mrs. Nugent engaged in a consider- able correspondence, first printed in the Nezv York Nation in 1889, Avhich throws fresh light upon some of the incidents of Shelley's life ; but no story arises out of it for the moment, and the most striking point is that this eulogy of Mrs. Nugent, whom Harriet had only met once, was addressed to Miss Hitchener, whom she had never even seen. Her idea was, apparently, that, just as her marriage had been no ordinary marriage, so her husband was no ordinary husband, but must be regarded, rather, as the founder and managing director of a joint-stock company registered for philosophical and philanthropic purposes, and that Miss Hitchener was a fit 164 THE EXPEDITION TO IRELAND and proper person to introduce fresh emotional capital, and join the board. She let her heart overflow and gushed to Miss Hitchener, just as Shelley himself did, addressing her as " My dear Sister," and " My dear Friend." So the appeal to the Sussex school-mistress to join the party came from the girl wife as well as the boy husband. " In compliance," Shelley writes, " with Harriet's earnest solicitations, I entreat you instantly to come and join our circle; to resign your school — all, everything, for us and the Irish cause." He continues : " £400 per an. will be quite enough for us all : our publications would supply the deficiency." As for thoughts of gratitude and obligation — such things may be left to " the grovelling sons of commerce and aristocracy." Evangelists must not entertain them. On the contrary : " Let us mingle our identities inseparably, and burst upon tyrants with the accumulated impetuosity of our acquirements and resolutions." There will be no scandal, for there are no grounds for any : " Who will credit that, when I made a Scotch marriage with a woman who is handsome, any criminality, of the nature of infidelity, can be attached to me ? " As for Miss Hitchener's personal attractions : — " You have said you are not handsome, but, though the sleekness of your skin, the symmetry of your form, might not attract the courtiers of Dublin Castle, yet that tongue of energy and that X65 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY eye of fire would awe them into native insigni- ficance, and command the conviction of those whose hearts vibrate in unison with justice and benevolence." Thus Shelley; and Harriet simultaneously exclaims : — " How good you are thus to busy yourself about us in this way. Amiable woman ! If I had known thee before, it would have been delightful : but I must be content, I know you now." She goes on to tell Miss Hitchener the story of her early life and first affections. First she had doted on soldiers, though she had never wished to marry one — " not so much on account of their vices as from the idea of their being killed." Then she had thought she would like to marry a clergyman : " Strange idea this, was it not ? But being brought up in the Christian religion, 'twas this gave rise to it." Then Shelley had introduced her to atheism, and this had frightened her because she believed in eternal punishment : " Now, however, this is entirely done away with, and my soul is no longer shackled with such idle fears." And there is another notable respect in which her views have expanded : — " You cannot suppose, my dear friend, that I suspect you of jealousy : 'twould be entertaining an idea wholly unworthy of you. Jealousy is a passion known only to the illiberal and selfish part of mankind, who have been corrupted and 166 THE EXPEDITION TO IRELAND spoilt by the world : but this forms no part of you — 'tis utterly impossible." The utterances are those of a commonplace mind temporarily under a spell. The spell, in time, would lose its potency, and Harriet would revert to type, — ^helped to do so by the elder sister who was so many years nearer to their father's tavern. Meanwhile she lived in a dream, making what she could of the vision. She echoed Shelley's phrases about vegetarianism and the wrongs of Ireland; she also echoed his invitation to Miss Hitchener: "Do, dear, hasten your departure for us. To Midsummer ! That will be such an immense time before it arrives." Miss Hitchener, of course, was old enough to know better ; and probably she did know better. If she did not ultimately act as one ^^^^^uld have expected a school-mistress to act, sll least she hesitated as one would have expected a school-mistress to hesitate. She had acquired a certain stock of common sense from the practice of her calling, though she was a silly woman by nature. Apparently she was startled into the bold and foolish course by a sudden outbreak of just that scandal which Shelley had told her that she need not fear on account of his position as a respectable married man. She had not sense enough to hold her tongue about her correspond- ence with the brother of her soul ; and when people heard about it, they began to say — what people invariably do say in such cases. 167 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY Shelley believed that the slander had been launched by Mrs. Pilfold, who wished Miss Hitchener to remain in Sussex as her daughter's governess; but that is incredible. Women in Mrs. Pilfold's position do not entrust their daughters to governesses, however competent, concerning whom such slanders are afloat. It is far likelier that Miss Hitchener boasted of the invitation, and that her neighbours put an obvious, albeit, as it happened, an erroneous interpretation upon it. They said that she was going to the Shelleys in order to be Shelley's mistress ; and then the fat was in the fire to such an extent that even her father saw the blaze. In a moment of expansiveness Shelley had suggested that he too should join the party in a large house which he proposed to take in Wales. There was a farm attached to the man- sion; and Mr. Hitchener might just as well give up his public-house and manage it, while Shelley, his wife, his sister-in-law, and Mr., Mrs., Miss Godwin, and Mrs. Nugent, who had also been invited, were talking about virtue. " It might be a comfort to his declining years," Shelley thought, " to see you independently settled." This at a time when Shelley had not the means either of paying, or of giving security for, the first quarter's rent of the mansion which he talked of taking. It is no wonder, in the circumstances, that Mr. Hitchener attached more importance to the calumnies than to the visionary promise of an independent and secure position. He did so, 168 THE EXPEDITION TO IRELAND and Shelley wrote him a letter in the manner of Jupiter Tonans hurling a thunderbolt : — " I had some difficulty in stifling an indignant surprise in reading the sentence of your letter in which you refuse my invitation to your daughter. How are you entitled to do this ? Who made you her governor ? Did you refuse this refusal from her to communicate to me ? No, you have not. . . . Believe me, such an assumption is as impo- tent as it is immoral. You may cause your daugh- ter much anxiety, many troubles, you may stretch her on a bed of sickness, you may destroy her body, but you are defied to shake her mind. . . . Your ideas of Propriety (or to express myself clearer of morals) are all founded on considera- tions of profit. . . . Neither the laws of Nature nor of England have made children private pro- perty. Adieu, when next I hear from you I hope that time will have liberahzed your sentiments." It is not unamusing to picture the retired smuggler who had become a publican spelling out that communication in the bar parlour ; and we will leave him spelling it out while we return to Shelley. 169 ( IIATTKR XV IN WALKS .\.\l> Al' LNNIMOI I'll III K Sll l•;|,|,|';^ S .KHNKI) n\ iMiss NIK iii:\i;i{ 'rill', \\v\\ siixjrr ol' I lie pil«^rimjiL»(' WMS Nnnt- ^'vvilll. ill Itmlnorshirc, v\i)sv l<> I he (iTovcs' plncc III (^vm lOInn '' nn old I'nmily house," wrolc Iljinicl lo IMrs. Niiocnl, ''willi .1 JMrm oi" *J()() iicivs meadow Iniul/' Tii.-il is llic Imimi which Shelley iiuiled INlr. Ililelieiier lo m:iHMn(\ inslejui oi' his |)iil>lie house, wiiile I he resi ol the pnrlv were Inlkin;*' nboiil \ irhie. There wns only one ohslnele h) he oxcreoine Ihe paymeni ol" I he I'eid ; but. Hint (lilVuMilty pi-oN'ed insii|>(M:il»le. Shelley had hoped that the elder IMedwiii would enable hiiu to raise Ihe iuou(>y ; but IMedwiu either could not, or would iiol.doso. ('onsecpieiit ly tlu* virtiK' parly had lo be postponed, and Shelley had to \aeaU> Ihe premises in a hurry, aud ask Ihe (iroves lo piil iiim up while he made other arran^'cmeuls. 'There seems to be a beoinniu^ of discoMh'ul. ir iiol ol" pee\ ishuess, in Harriet's 4'omplaiut lo Mrs. Nui>'eul : '* We ar(^ lo beoiu lra\('lliuj»' aji>ain soou, aiul where lo bend our sle[)s I know no!;" aud there are also certain iulVreuees to be drawu from her remarks about I he (Jro\ (\s : — ** l*(>rcy is related lo Mr. (IroNc, and his wile is 170 IN WALKS AND AT LVNINlOIITir a very picnsniil woinnii, llio' Ion lorinMl lo ix^ a)»r('('nl)lc. lie is n \ rvy proud innn. Tin rd'oir, yon may •^ncss liou \\v |>;iss our liinc/' II is I lie cli.'irnrlci'isl ic ii(>U- «►!" Ilic hridc wlu) l'<'('ls lii.'il iicr ImsJMiiwrs iTlMJivcs rcj^inrd her :is '' nol (Hiil.c/' . . . Ihoiiju'h I licy r<'C(;iv(! Iicr Willi <"oiirU'sy I'oi' iicr liushMiKTs sjikc. '"' Sliick lip '' .ind "■ slniid (►llish " nrc Ilic cpil lids \vlii<"li llnrrici would prol>n.l)ly luivc applied lo I ho (■r(»V('S il'slic had spok<'ii in her vcniairnhir. ^^ VVo iiinsi rcMiniii here," she says, "" iiiilil we receive rciiiil lances IVoiii Loixlon ''; and I here is pallios in llial '' innsl." There was l.allv of /.^'oin/.'; lo Ilaly, lull : "" VV<' lliiiik ol' ••oino- lo Hie seaside iiiilil onr passports <'oine." VVIicik'c rererrinn Ihal. Ilic liVhen we arrived at Chepstow wc found the house not half built and by no means large enough for our family." Godwin seems to have considered that it ought to have been large enough for a man of Slielley's age antl income; and he made remarks on the subject which Shelley would have resented if they had been offered by any one for whose char- acter and philosophy he had had less regard. As it was, he politely explained his objections to " pigging it " in a rickety labourer's cottage, and passed on. He started for Ilfracombe, but got no farther than Lynmouth, whence Harriet re- ports progress to jMrs. Nugent in a more con- tented letter than that written from Cwm Elan : — " We have taken the only cottage there was, which is most beautifully situated, conunanding a line view of the sea, with mountains at the side and behind us. Vegetation is more luxurious here tlian in any part of England. We have roses and myrtle creeping up the sides of the house, which is thatched at the top. It is such a little place that it seems more like a fairy scene than anything in reality. All the houses are built in 172 IN WALES AND AT LYNMOUTH the cottage style, and I suppose there are not more than thirty in all. We send to Barnstaple for everything, and our letters come but twice a week. ... It seems as if nature had intended this place should be so romantic, and shut out from all other intercourse with the neighbouring villages and towns." That letter is dated June 30 — a time of the year when it is not difficult to live happily at Lynmouth, even in a cottage which, as Shelley writes to Godwin, " exceeds not in its accommo- dations the dwellings of the peasantry which surround it." Harriet insisted, indeed, that it was not a good enough place to invite Godwin to ; but it was quite good enough for her and her husband ; and there is evidence that she and Shelley were still fairly well pleased with each other. Shelley read, while at Lynmouth, The Empire of the Nairs ; or, the Rights of Woman, by Chevalier Lawrence ; and he wrote to the author, expressing his admiration and defining his own attitude towards the marriage question : — '' I am a young man, not yet of age, and mar- ried to a woman younger than myself. Love seems inclined to stay in the prison, and my only reason for putting him in chains, whilst convinced of the unholiness of the act, was a knowledge that, in the present state of society, if love is not thus villainously treated, she, who is most loved, will be treated worse by a misjudging world. 173 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY In short, seduction, which term could have no meaning in a rational society, has now a most tremendous one." It was understood, however, that love was not to be kept in solitary confinement. There were to be as many visitors as possible to keep the ball rolling in the conversations about virtue. Godwin's adopted daughter Fanny was invited; but Godwin would not let her come, feeling that he ought to make his disciple's personal acquaintance before trusting him so far. Miss Hitchener came, however, having at last given up her school and promised to remain " for ever " ; and Harriet's opinion of the guest thus quartered on her is, of course, the opinion which we are most anxious to hear. We get it in a letter to Mrs. Nugent ; and it is favourable, and even enthu- siastic, though there are points in the enumeration of her merits at which it seems possible to read between the lines : — " Our friend. Miss Hitchener, is come to us. She is very busy writing for the good of mankind. She is very dark in complexion, with a great quantity of long, black hair. She talks a great deal. If you like great talkers she will suit you. She is taller than me or my sister, and as thin as it is possible to be. . . . "... Miss Hitchener has read your letter, and loves you in good earnest — ^lier own expres- sion. I know you would love her did you know 174 SHELLEYS JOINED BY MISS KITCHENER her. Her age is thirty. She looks hke as if she was only twenty-four, and her spirits are excel- lent. She laughs and talks and writes all day." Miss Hitchener was to prove to be shallow; but Harriet, who wrote " like as if," was not to be expected to foresee that. She was, at any rate, disposed to make the best of Miss Hitchener, and does not seem to have doubted that her writings contained an instructive message to her age. One would give a good deal to see them. Medwin quotes, or professes to quote, one line from them — ^the first line of a Feminist Ode, running : " All are men — ivomen and all " ! But it seems fairer to judge her by her published works, even though these belong to a later period of her development, and appeared long after her depar- ture from the Shelleys' roof. There are copies of two such works in the Library of the British Museum. One of them is a long poem of no importance on " The Weald of Sussex," noticeable only for a reference to those lakes and mountains of Wales which the author had seen in Shelley's company, and of which she says that " language is inade- quate to give a just idea of their beauty." The other is " The Fireside Bagatelle containing Enigmas on the Chief Towns of England and Wales " — composed, according to the Preface, in " the hope that it may be found useful " and because the autlior considers " everything, how- ever insignificant in itself, yet acceptable, if in 175 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY the slightest degree ealeulated to exeite in young minds a spirit of inquiry and ^ taste lor litera- ture," and hiunehed under the auspices of a ** Dedicatory Ode affectionately addressed to some Amiable Young Friends '' : Domestic plcasuirs will insure Contenimeni^ health, and ease : Theij all of earthlij Miss secure^ And never fail to please. For Ho)ne\^ the empire of the heart ; Its circle Nature's trace ; Then, jaithful to her wisJi, impart Affection's ivinning grace. It soothes, relines. it softens man. It solaces his care ; In Paradise its source began. And. follozved, leads u^iu> oaunot say. I'or all [Uc a\ailal)lo statoiuouts i>n tho subjiH't aiv t\v parte stato- nionts. Tho inily impartial Nvituoss is lloixu. ^vho saw in tho prooiHclino-s m trial ol' strciiolh botAvooi\ Miss llitohonor aiul Eliza, ami roivanhHl both hidios as oqually objootionablc; but Uno'g's eviibnoo only biars upon tho last, soonos in the strug'olo. Sholloy had bursl in upon lK\ug in his chambors in the Tt inplo, and niado up his ipiarrol with him. Tinio, distance, aaid oxptM"i<\nc'o o{ Miss Eliza West brook's eonversatioual hal^its had evidently taught hin\ to take a Irner \'iew of lU>gg's sup- posed gallantries. Perhaps Harriet had herself confessed to having misunderstood, and there- fore exaggerated, Hogg's attentiims. She and lb\og had both been young enough to be per- mitted to be silly. At all events, it was om'e more glad cont'ident morning between the two friends; and Hogg dined with the Shelleys on the day of ^liss llitehener's departure, and allowed himself to be made useful in keeping up appearances at the hour of strained relations. Shelley said he had an engagement; Harriet said she had a headache; Hogg was told off to take Eliza and ^liss Hitchener for a walk, keeping the peace between them. " With the Brown Demon on my right arm," he writes, " and the Black Diamond on my left, we went forth into St. .lames's Fark, and walked there, and in the neighbouring parks, for a long 178 SIIELLKYS JOINKl) liY MISS IIITCMKNKH time, a very Um^ tiirK-. ' 'i'licso were, my jf:wtls,' us (^)rric;lia proudly cxcluirnrd." 'lM»c ladies sn;i|)j)(;d al: oacli ollur, firing ihc;ir sliots across tficMr (tavJilicr as vv(tll as their o(>j)or- t,iinil,irt. Miss Westbrook was annoye(J ; and wlien she got Hogg aJone, she let him know it. " How (tould yon talk to tluit nasty creature so mu(rh V " she asked. " How c(iuld you permit her to prate; so long to you ? VVhy did you en- coui'agc her ? ilaj'riet will he seriously displeased with you, I assure; you; sFic will be very angry." Hut tJKi) dinner was sftrved ; .'ind immediately alter dinner Miss Hitehener wms handed into her coa-bnhbles on the (h^orstep oi' Ins eottaoe. None tiie less lie was engaged in qneer attempts to drive his thonghts over tlie universe " like winged seeds to qnieken a new birth." He had with him several boxes full of pamphlets, setting fortli, among otlier things, that "■govermnent has no rights '' ; and he eorked them up in empty bottles, and pitehed the bottles into the Bristol Channel, in the same spirit of evangelis- tie zeal in whieh missionaries of another sehool of thought scatter traets in cabs and railway station waiting-rooms. Other copies of the docu- ment were dispersed over Exmoor by means of toy balloons on the clianec that a copy here or there might stir tlie stagnant pool of a bucolic mind. At the same time Shelley engaged Mr. Syle of Barnstaple to print his Letter to Lord Kllen- borough, protesting against the imprisonment of Daniel Isaac Eaton for publishing " a blas- phemous libel on the Holy Scriptures.'' ' His ' From th(^ pni ol' Tom Paiue. 182 DEPARTURE FROM T.YNMOTJTII punisfimcnt, il. scoined to SFifllcy, Mir^ijfyh a less grave matter tlian tho criioKixion oi' Christ, was equally unjustifiable ; and we need not waste words in supportinj^ so of)vious a contention. The holier the Holy Scriptures the less their naad of a testimonial from the Old Bailey. Rut those were the days in which Kcate told the Eton boys that he should enforce purity of heart with the birch ; and Keate's point of view was fairly re- presentative of that of the governing classes. It was not merely an offence in their eyes to speak evil of dignitaries; it was even an offence to dispute with dignitaries. So there was trouble. Shelley's servant was arrested for distributing the tracts in Barnstaple, and was sentenced in the Mayor's Court to six months' imprisorment, or a fine of £200. No doubt Shelley would have paid the fine for him, if he had had the money; but he could no more, at that time, lay his hand on £200 than on £200,000. He decided - urged, as one imagines, by the unanimous entreaties of his womankind — to leave the neighbourhood before worse befell him ; so he drove to Jlfracombe and crossed to Wales, where, at Tanyrallt, he found a landlord who promised to wait for the rent until he came of age. Thence, early in October, he proceeded to London, where he got rid of Miss Ilitchencr, in the circumstances already de- scribed. And that, oi course, was his opportunity of calling on Godwin. Godwin, who spent his summer holiday that 183 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY year at Bristol, had set out down the channel to pay his young admirer a surprise visit, but had not arrived at Lynmouth until about three weeks after his departure. He found his lodg- ing, however, and reported that the landlady " quite loved the Shelleys," — loved them so well that she did not exercise her lien on their luggage, though they left without paying their bill. They paid it afterwards, however, in instalments; so that the fact is only mentioned as a proof of Shelley's power of fascinating women of all ages and classes. He was presently to exercise that power in Godwin's house ; so we will now note Harriet's first impressions of the Godwin household. " We have seen the Godwins. Need I tell you how I love them all ? . . . There is one of the daughters of that dear Mary Wolstoncroft living with him. She is nineteen years of age, very plain, but very sensible. The beauty of her mind fully overbalances the plainness of her countenance. There is another daughter of hers who is now in Scotland. She is very much like her mother, whose picture hangs up in his study. She must have been a most lovely woman. Her countenance speaks her a woman who would dare to think and act for herself." The daughter would also dare to think and act for herself in ways concerning which Harriet would, in due course, have a good deal to say ; but coming events cast no shadows before as yet. 184 LIFE AT TANYRAIJ.T Another fact whicfi fiarriet remarked was that the Godwins were "sometimes very much pressed ior enough ready money; " f)ut she was not to foresee that that circumstance also would affect her. On the whole she was pleased with every- body and everything, voting the second Mrs. Godwin " a woman of very great magnanimity," and finding " very great sweetness marked in her countenance." Of Godwin she says : — " G. is very much taken with Percy. Ho seems to delight so much in his society. It gives me so much pleasure to sit and look at him. Have you ever seen a bust of Socrates, for his head is very much like that ? " A little later, in November, she met Mary Godwin, who had returned from a visit to Scotland, accompanied by her Scotch friend Christy Baxter. Mary, however, was only fif- teen, and made no particular impression on Harriet, who, on her part, made no particular impression on Mary. The only recollection pre- served of that interesting meeting is Christy's; and Christy was chiefly struck by Harriet. Kven in her old age Christy spoke of " her beauty, her brilliant complexion and lovely hair, and the elegance of her purple satin dress;" so that Harriet enjoyed her hour of social triumph while sitting at table with the girl who was to deprive her of her husband. Progress towards intimacy with the Godwins, 185 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY liowever, was slow. Godwin was no longer the enthusiast he had been when he wrote Political Justice. He kept a shop, and was very much married, sometimes inclining to the view of widows which one associates with the elder Mr. Wellcr. As for his disciples, he besought tliem not to take his doctrines too seriously, but to lend him money instead. Tliat was a strain upon Shelley's, as it would have been upon any man's, enthusiasm ; and he does not seem to have foimd Godwin's wife congenial. Godwin's friends, in- deed, seldom did find Mrs. Godwin congenial, and Charles Lamb's sketch of her as a disgusting woman who wore green spectacles seems to have expressed a widespread prejudice. So Shelley, on this occasion, left London without saying good-bye to Godwin; and Harriet changed her mind about his merits : — " Godwin, he too is changed, and filled with prejudices, and besides, too, he expects such universal homage from all persons younger than himself, that it is very disagreeable to be in company with him on that account, and he wanted Mr. Shelley to join the Wig party and do just as they pleased, which made me very angry, as we know what men the Wigs are just noAv. He is grown old and luiimpassioncd, therefore is not in the least calculated for such enthusiasts as we are." Such, with its characteristic faults of ortho- 186 LIFE AT TANYRALI.T grapliy and syntax, is Harriet's reconsidered verdict, delivered from the midst of the Welsh mountains, where she and Shelley remained rather more than three months, — which was rather a long time for Shelley to remain anywhere. His criticisms of life at the time were certainly not those of a Whig. The average Whig is a person who is only prevented from being a Tory by the exigencies of the party system. He prides himself on being rather more aristocratic than the Tories, whom he is always ready to join when the populace comes between the wind and his nobility. Aristocracy, for Shelley, though he was an aristocrat by birth, remained the accursed thing. There was too much aristocracy in Wales to please him ; and he poured out his soul on the subject to Hookham the Bond Street book- seller : — " There is more philosophy in one square inch of any tradesman's counter than in the whole of Cambria. It is the last stronghold of the most vulgar and commonplace prejudices of the aristo- cracy. Lawyers of unexampled villainy rule and grind the poor, whilst they cheat the rich. The peasants are mere serfs, and are fed and lodged worse than pigs. The gentry have all the ferocity and despotism of the ancient barons, without their dignity and chivalric disdain of shame and danger. The poor are as abject as samoyads, and the rich as tyrannical as bashaws." 187 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY All that because an aristocratic old lady of Wales had said that atheists were worse than murderers. It pained Shelley to linger where that view prevailed ; and Harriet seems to have been as little enamoured of her mountain home. Her husband required her to learn Latin, and tried to drag her through the Odes of Horace. A lady whose English grammar was as bad as we have seen Harriet's to be was not likely to make much of those Odes or to desire to do so. Horace is too cynical a poet to appeal to young married women, — especially if they have to look most of the words out in the dictionary; so we may reasonably picture Harriet getting bored — won- dering when the county would call — desiring opportunities of frequenting bonnet shops. Doubtless, however, she was consoled by the thought that her deprivations were unlikely to be permanent : that Shelley would soon come of age, and if he did not exactly " come into his rights," would at least be in a position to raise money on his expectations. Then she might hope to keep her carriage, to wear purple and fine linen, to adorn her dinner table with costly silver plate, and to have delicate dishes handed to her by magnificent footmen in plush breeches, with padded calves and powdered hair. She and Eliza must often have anticipated such glories in their confidential talks. Meanwhile, she could accept her adventures in a tolerably good temper ; and some of the adventures were certainly strange and startling : — 188 LIFE AT TANYRALLT " Dear Sir, " I have just escaped an atrocious assassination. Oh, send £20 if you have it. You will perhaps 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, and who threatens my life and my sister's as well. If you can send us the money, it will greatly add to our comfort. " Sir, I remain your sincere friend, '' H. Shelley." Thus Shelley and Harriet, on the same sheet of paper, to Hookham of Bond Street; and all the biographers have been profoundly exer- cised by the question : What was the trouble about ? What Shelley said was that a mysterious stranger had broken into his house at the dead of night, exclaiming, " By God, I will be revenged ! " threatening, not only to murder him and his wife but also to ravish Eliza. There was, at any rate, no doubt that Shelley fired a pistol, and raised the household, declaring that his assailant had first fired at him, and that the ladies, coming 189 THE nOlNlANTU^ \.\VK OK SllKl>l,F.Y (K>\vivstMirs in {\\c\v uiu;lil>divss(>s s:nv ("vidnioes i>\ ;i sculllo. Itui \\\u\i \\i\x\ hnppiMicd ? TIimI. is a myst.rrv Jibonl, >vliich bi«>or.*i]>luM's \\i\xc nrivucd III i>n\M.l IcngMi. pi'oi)ouudiui;' mniiy Ihcorirs. TluMv is the ilieory iluit il\o iutnutiM* was jiu ordiujiry bnvivlnr: \\\c ll\ry Wuil Shelloy iuxtMitrd the whoU^ story, nud {irvnnijjod lUc inisr- rn-scrnr. in ord« i" \o i»'ive l\inisoll' nn oxcnsr for Unix iiig tho n(Mgld)onrho(Ht xvithont imyinir tlu' tr.'nlos})roplo; the llu^^ry thai ShiMIoy's Irish sorxjinl wMs pnyino- l\is nmstiM' oni. Tor Ins iin- jM'isonnuMil ;it HnrnstapU^ : tho theory thai Miss llilrluMirr had slirrtd up rvil f(chni»' by dc- nonnciuaj Slu^llry io l\is ntMi^iiiionrs as a. niouster oT sedition: llir thoors that Sh(llry had iak(Mi t.oo nnu'h landannni a drui»' t(> which h(> was addiottd and tliat tho whole slory was t,l»c liallni'ination o{ an opiuni-c^vtrr. No one of tliosc th(H>rios is vtM'y ronvinoins;' : and anotlxr. based npon loral tradition, was ]>nl I'orwani l)y INliss IMarii'arti L. Crotts in llir Crnfitri/ Miq^dzinr for Oi'tobi r. 11)05 : " Sliolloy was in the habit of ('hnd>in.s^" np tl\o Konian slops nrar Tanyraht to \]\c rocky hcij^hl wl\ii*li was a. y,ra/.in,y; plact^ Um sliccp. IbTc SlicUcy hjid n\orc tlian ouoc ])nt an end to the Hfo of a. shcop affect I'd with st'ab or sonic other hn^'trinsi diseas(\ It was his habit to carry pisti>ls. aniinl,n,ifi h\uU'\) f;i,rrri(f\ M>i,iri<(l Kohui TjuiI- Iv/jih, Uinl, Iw and liJH Jri« imIii cnrrir down l,o 'r>i,fiyr;i,lll, on Mi/i.t. wild l-'rhninry iii^hl., Jind l'\vu.u lind a tiliol. iJirou^Jj \.\\r window, not, ttunniti^ l-o fnin(i< i .-ujy on<-, hill, lo |nv< I.Ik: irK'on vf.wild< nd with thr- ni^fd, nlarin and thr- sli>i,lhin j/;j.iiK d hin)>ula,r, ;irKl hifi Jri.;i.f)ility to pay liin dehtH, to r;xf>lain the. [*nkt ilillienlty wjih juHt then ;w:ut('; and thr- £'20 wfii<'.fi IIo<*khM.m ,(it\. fiim in ord<-r that he mi^ht "' >{o to Duhhn l.o diKHi[)ttte the unj^leasaat imfjrr-HsionH 191 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY associated with the scene of our alarm " was not sufficient to remove it. " Could you," he wrote to John Williams, en route, " borrow twenty-five pounds in my name to pay my little debts ? " " You would oblige me," he wrote to the same correspondent, on his arrival at Dublin, " by asking your brother to lend me £25." And then, a few days later, as proof at once of the urgency of his needs and the value of his security : " Bed well has written to tell me that all my bills are returned protested. I know not what to do." What he did is not quite clear; but he evidently got a loan from some one ; and, on the proceeds of it, he dashed off to Killarney, where he was staying when Hogg came to pay him a surprise visit at Dublin. Why he went to Killarney, and what he did when he got there, are equally mysterious matters. All that is certain is that he did not, this time, entangle himself in Irish politics or trouble his head about Catholic Emancipation. Thoughts of these things seem to have vanished from his mind as a dream vanishes when the sleeper wakes. No doubt he had other things to think of; and the nature of some of his reflections may be inferred from the fact that, when he quitted Killarney as precipitately as he had quitted Dublin — and Tanyrallt — he managed to leave Eliza behind. Ostensibly Eliza seems to have remained as a hostage for the payment of the rent ; but Shelley 192 A SECOND VISIT TO IRELAND nevertheless was full of triumph at the thought that he had got rid of her by a trick. Or so Hogg says. As a rule, Hogg tells us, Shelley was not much addicted to laughter. " I am convinced," he quotes Shelley as once saying to him, " that there can be no entire regeneration of mankind until laughter is put down." But, on this occasion, he did laugh, feeling that the re- generation of mankind was not at stake, and that the joke was really a good one. " He was evidently weary," Hogg writes, " of angelic guardianship, and exulted with a malicious pleasure that he had fairly planted her at last. He made no secret of his satisfaction, but often gave vent to his feelings with his accustomed frankness and energy. The good Harriet smiled in silence and looked very sly." That is our first hint of feelings which were to culminate in Shelley's description of Eliza as " this miserable wretch " and " a blind and loathsome worm." Things, however, were not yet quite as bad as that ; and Eliza, on her part, was a woman on whom hints were wasted. How she got clear of Killarney is not stated, but it probably would not have been beyond her power to give the landlord his due out of her own pocket. Whatever her methods, she soon followed Shelley and Harriet back to London, where, as Hogg writes, she " resumed her sovereign functions." N 193 CHAPTER XVII ESTRANGEMENT FROM HARRIET We are approaching the moment of Shelley's estrangement from Harriet ; and we must, as in all such cases, distinguish between the immediate occasion of the trouble and its underlying causes. Those underlying causes lurked in the problem from the fii,-st, as they always lurk in the problem created Avhen a gentleman, who is also a man of intelligence nnd taste, marries a young woman genre barmaid. The barmaid in such circum- stances discovers that marriage to a gentleman does not suffice to make her a lady, acceptable to other ladies; while the husband, going into society without his wife, is pained to obsei'X'^e how other ladies differ from barmaids. The lofty doctrine, however sincerely held, that all men (and women) are born equal is inadequate to deliver him from his discomfort ; and various pin-pricks prejudice him in favour of what George Meredith called " leasehold marriages." Shelley had always entertained that prejudice. He had taken it from Godwin, long after Godwin himself had repudiated it ; and he was always poh'gamous in theory even when he was monogamous in practice. He talked of virtue and of free love in the same breath, regarding them, 194 ESTRANGEMENT FROM HARRIET it would seem, as two facets of the same precious jewel. He believed that Harriet shared his views, but did not foresee a time when either of them would be tempted to translate theory into action. " Love," we have seen him writing from Lynmouth to a perfect stranger, " seems inclined to stay in the prison;" but the time was even then approaching when Harriet's luxurious tastes and social ambitions would disconcert him. Our first clue to that is in a letter written from Wales to Fanny Godwin. Exactly what Fanny had said one does not know ; but she had evidently observed a certain pretentiousness in Harriet — a certain affectation of " style," alarming to simpler-minded persons; and Shelley wrote in Harriet's defence : — " How is Harriet a fine lady ? You indirectly accuse her in your letter of this offence — ^to me the most unpardonable of all. The ease and simplicity of her habits, the unassuming plainness of her address, the uncalculated connection of her thought and speech, have ever formed in my eyes her greatest charms ; and none of these arc compatible with fashionable life, or the attempted assumption of its vulgar and noisy eclat y Perhaps— when the spell was fresh, and there was Mrs. Nugent to talk to. Harriet had cer- tainly begun by behaving rather well in trying N 2 195 TIIK KOMyVNTK^ \AVK OK SIIKLLKY (Mrcuinsi.jiiWH's, learning Lnliii with docility, if not with success, :uu\ wjiitiu^ patiently for her hushniul to c*)mc into his rijjfhts. Hut she (lid uol lucjin that sort of thinuj to jjjo on for ivvv, nor did l^^li/a. Underneath the a.])])arent Harriet, so siMi])le aiul studious, liiere was a. real Harriet wilii aspirations after «ijraiid(ur and oortrcoiis apparel : a, Harriet who looked forward lo trealino the lialin (iranunar as HicUy Sharp treated Ihe biUi^lisii diet ionary, and ridinj; in the Park, arrayed like Solonum in all his glory. Fanny (lodwin had divined thai, and Shelley was to discover it. Already, indeed, Harriet was trying to fortify her dubious social position by replenishing her wardrobe in <'oslly style, and clainouring for a carriage and silver ])laie. Tlu* slate of her lu alth she was tlu u expeeling her lirsl child may be a partial explanation of the sudden and inoppor- tun(* Avhiui ; but she may also have argued, not unreasonably, that if ShelUy could rush about raising money for the payment of (Jtxlwin's di'bls and the nH'latuation of Welsh morasses,' he might as well raise souie more while he was about it for the purpose of enabling his w^fc to live as a. lady. At all events she did ])refer such diMuands, - unnecessarily and iut)pportunely. Hogg declares tluvt no ou(> ev( r saw her rid(^ in \\cv carriage, and ' ShrlK'v had iiisln*! IVoiu 'ranyiiilU !(» I>oiuh>n \vi(h a view l(» ori^Mni/ini; ii siil)S('ri|>l it>n to I'DUipUlf mm ciubiinlv- iiuM\l begun ill the lUMghbuurhoDd by n JDi'nl ImulDwiier. 196 ESTRANGEMENT FHOM TTARIMET tliat Sluvllcy wns so little in :i ])()siti<)ii lo pay for it that tlic creditor rcftMTcd I lie mMl.lcr l,o the bniliffs, who, not kuowiii*^ Shelley by sij^hl., I.ricd to jMTcsl. Ilo^^' ill mislake I'or him. Though llo^^ l:ui«^h('(l Uic incidciil off, il. Tniisl. none l\\v less \\i\.vc \)vv\i :\. cjiusc of i'riclion between Siielley and his wile; and, if Shelley had been like most other men, (hen; would ha,ve been a I'nrMier eause ol" rri<'(.ion in lljirriet's gross ineompel.encH; as a. h()usekee])er. Hogg draws a. vivid ])i<'tur(> of the diinicrs whii'h she sel. before him : " Some eonsidernble time after the a,p]K)inted hour a, roasted shoulder of imitton of theeojirsest., toughest grain, graced or disgr.iced the ill- sn])plied table; watery gravy thai; issued from the perverse join!, when it was cul, a, duty cormnonly assigned to me, seemed llx' most a.])t of all things to embody the conce])tion of penury and utl.(>r dtslilution. There were polaloes in every respect worthy of the nuitton; and the cheese, which was either forgotUui or uneatable, closed the ungeniM,l repjist. Somelimes ihei'e was a huge boiled leg of nuill.on, boiled till the bone was ready to dro]) on! of the meat, whi<'h shrank and started from il. on. all sides, wilhoul. nny sauce, but with turnips raw, and m.inil'esl.Iy unworthy to be boiled any longer. Somelimes there werc^ im])regnal)le beef-steaks — soles for shooting-shoes." One suspects with llogg, that, even tliongli 197 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY Shelley was not like other men, such meals must sometimes have set him sighing for other n('sh-])()ts, and that the horrible luindiwork of Ilarrirt and the lodging-house landladies partially explains his vegetarianism, and his habit of rushing into bakers' shops, buying loaves of bread, and eating them ravenously as he walked down the strec^t. It does not follow that there was no cause for friction because Shelley was barely conscious of it at the time ; and still more dangerous possibilities lurked in the enlarging of his circle of ac(pia.iutances. It was at about this time that Queen Mab was privately ])rinted ; and its appearance made its author something of a personage, albeit only in a small coterie. Through Godwin, too, he came to know n. good many people, mainly cranks, who introduced him to other people, also mainly cranks. Tluy were disposed to make much of him--a good deal more than they w^ere disposed to make of Harriet. The w^omcn, in })nrticular, were disposed to make a good d(al more of him than of Harriet. They did not belong to the society which is now-a-days ciilled " smart." One would look for their modern an;ilogues in Bedford Park rather than in Berkeley Square, or even Ilarley Street, — at the Sesame Club or the Pioneer Club rather than at the Carlton, the Marlborough, the Travellers', or the I5achelors'. Hogg, who was not in sympathy with " movements," writes of them somewhat contemptuously, linding among them, 198 ESTRANGEMENT FROM HARRIET as he says, " two or three sentimental young butehers, an emiiu ntly ])hilos()|)lii<^aJ thinker, and several very unsophistical niedieal praetitioners or niediejil students," rcn)arkal)le for their " Inggledy-pi^^ledy ways " ; but that deseription is evidently an after-thouglit, — ap])Hea])le, per- hai)S, to some of tlie n,<'o('k hrars AviiiKSS Ilia I Mure \v Mie <'oul.ra.ry. It is l\a<'o<'k's Icsliinony tiiat Harriet's letters conlirm ; Muse iiulieatiiig — wlial. Peax'oek also asserts that the birth of lauthe served, for the linK^ beiniits. "I wish," Harriet wrote, ''you <'(tul(l see luy sweet babe. She is so fair, with such blue eyes, that the more I see her, the more beautiful vShc looks." Au(l Shelley, as we know froui l*ea<'oek, took great pleasur(> in nursing the baby, and, in particular, in singing it to sleep, with a tune of his own i'omposition, whieh lulled the infant, though it exasperated otlur listeners. And Harriet wrote further; — '* A little uiore than two years has ]>assed since I uiade njy lirsl. visit here to be united to Mr. Shelley. To nie they havt> btcii the haj>piest and long(^st years of niy life. The rapid sueces- sion of events simr that time uia.k<> the two years apptar unusually long. I think the regular mellu)d of measuring tin\e is by the numbtr of diff(>n ut ideas whieh a ra])id succession of events naturally give rise to. When 1 look back to the time befoiv 1 was uiarricd 1 sccui Id foci A SECOND VISIT TO IHKI.ANI) I luivc lived u. Um*f lime. Tlin' my ji/jjc is but < ij^liLceii, yet I fi'cl ns if I \vn,s mucli older. . . . Mr. Slielley joins me niid VAW/.i in kind rf Ji^e, but no longer heir to the immense |)r()])erty of his sires. They jire tryin;^ to t:ik<" it nvvjiy, nnd will I .iiii afijiid suc(*eed, ns it Jip|)eJirs there is :i. IImw in the (hjivvin/^ U|) of tlu; settlcuK lit, by whieh they ejin de])riv<' him of everythin*^. . . . They luive ])ut it into C-liuneeiy, though I fjUK'y it Villi ;iii(l will Ix U<-|)t an entire secret. . . . Our friends the Newtoiis are trying to do everythin«»' in their ])ower to serve tis; but our doom is deeidcd. Yon who know us muy well jud|,^' of our fe])ointed with each other, — bound, thererore, to be unha})])y. Harriet, to give her her due, would have made a })leasing wife for a licensed victualler; but Shelley's ideal of womanhood differed from that of licensed victuallers, and could not be satisfied by a licensed victualK^r's daughter. There is nothing for the moralist to say (il' he would a\'oid plati- tude) exce})t that both the girl-wife and the boy- husband had begun the game of life too young, with loo little knowledge of the ruUs ; nor can one see that there was anything to be done except to sweep the pieces off the board and start afresh. The trouble was that, while Shelley was eager for the fresh start, Harriet was not. Not that she was any longer passionately in love with him. Tlure is no evidence of that, but nuich ( vidence to the contrary — notably the evidence of certain poems from Shelley's pen, 200 A SECOND VISIT TO lUELAND written in <'()in])ln.int of Iut nnuccnstoincd cold- ness. Thongli i\w ])oen>s })rove nothing us to tlic causes of tlie coldness, they may be taken as ])r()ving the fact. Hut a woinjin's coldness to her hushijnd docs not necessarily imply a desire to «^et rid of him, and is compnlihle with velu'ment indi^nsition at the idea that he sliould wish to ^et rid of her. It })roved, as wc shall see, to be (]nite com})atible with i(, in Harriet's ease. She seems to have argued if one may express her feelinos in terms of reason that, if she* coidd no lonfjjer love Shelley herself, then lie must be content, to ^o unloved ; and there is no doubt whatever, as her letters prove, that she was very anj^ry with Mary Godwin for lovina" him. ii07 CHAPTER XVIII SEPARATION FROM HARRIET AND ELOPEMENT WITH MARY GODWIN In the spring of 1814, Shelley saw a good deal of jNIary Godwin. Her father's linaneial affairs were then passing through one of their periodical crises; and Shelley was trying to help him to raise the money he wanted — ^no less a sum, it is said, than £3,000. It was not a matter, of course, merely of drawing a cheque. Before the money could be lent, it must be borrowed. Godwin is said to have suggested post-obit bonds, and there were, at any rate, elaborate negotiations with lawyers. Shelley was in town attending to the matter, while Harriet remained in the country. Attending to the matter meant calling con- stantly at Godwin's house. Calling at Godwin's house entailed many incidental meetings with the various members of Godwin's complicated family. It will be as well to enumerate them before going further. The eldest was Fanny — the natural daughter of the first Mrs. Godwin, whom we have already discovered in correspondence with Shelley. It has been said that she was in love with him ; but it is quite certain that he was not in love with her. 208 SEPARATION FROM HARRIET A plain girl, but amiuhic and sensible, is the ver- diet of those who knew ficr. Next we may notiee Jane and Cfiarles ('lairrnont — th(i ehildren of th(.* seeond Mrs. (lodwin by her first husband. Jane was both beautiful and enterprising; she and Charles were alike addieted to dashing, roniantie, unpra(;tieal eourses — wild and extra- vagant freaks of whi<;fi thc;y boasted as Clairrnont ehn,raeteristies. Willi;i,rr) (Godwin — the son of Godwin by his seeond wife — who had a career of no particular inten-st as a newspaper reporter, was a (;hild at this time, and does not concern us. There was als(j Mary — as b(;autiful as Jane and cievcrer — sixteen years of age. All the world knows Hogg's story of his visit with Sh(;lley to Godwin's shop and of Mary's sudden app(;aranc(; in the background : — " The door was partially and softly opened. A thrilling voice called ' Shelley ! ' A thrilling voice answered ' Mary ! ' And he dart(;d out of tFie room, like an arrow from the bow of tFie far- sliooting king. A 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, had called him out of the room." . . . . . . " ' Who was that, pray ? ' I asked; ' a daughter ? ' " ' Yes.' " ' A daughter of William Godwin ? ' " ' The daughter of Godwin and Mary.' " o 209 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY All the world knows, again, how Shelley gave Mary a copy of Queen Mab, and how, under- neath the printed dedication to Harriet, he wrote the enigmatic words : " Count Slobendorf was about to marry a woman who, attracted solely by his fortune, proved her selfishness by deserting him in prison." What Mary wrote on the fly leaves at the end of the volume has also been printed. The most significant sentences are these : — " This book is sacred to me, and as no other creature shall ever look into it, I may write what I please. Yet what shall I write ? That I love the author beyond all powers of expression, and that I am parted from him. Dearest and only love, by that love we have promised to each other, although I may not be yours, I can never be another's." It must have been at about the time of that in- scription and of the hesitations which it chronicles, that Peacock called on Shelley and found him with tumbled hair, disordered dress, blood-shot eyes, and a bottle of laudanum beside him, saying, " I never part from this," and quoting from Sophocles : — " MarCs happiest lot is not to he : And when we tread life'^s thorny steep, Most blest are they who, earliest free, Descend to deatKs eternal sleep.^^ 210 SEPARATION FROM HARRIET And he added, Peacock says : " Every one who knows me must know that the partner of my Hfe should be one who can feel poetry and understand philosophy. Harriet is a noble animal, but she can do neither." The date of that in- cident is uncertain ; but it must have been very near the end. On July 14, 1814, Shelley saw Harriet, and told her that he could not live with her any longer. A fortnight later, he had over- come Mary's hesitations, and persuaded her to leave her home and travel with him. The rights and wrongs of this have often been argued ; but they can never be determined. Different moralists judge them from different standpoints; and some of the facts which might influence their judgment are unascertainable. If the present writer joins in the discussion of a point so doubtful, his purpose is not so much to adjudicate as to put fresh statements in evidence and print new documents. Up to the present the only point of view fully and fairly presented has been that of Field Place. We get it alike in Professor Dowden's Life of Shelley, and in Mrs. Marshall's Life of Mrs. Shelley. The source, in both these cases, is The Shelley Memorials : a work nominally com- piled by Lady Shelley, but actually put together, if we may accept a statement in Trelawny's re- cently published letters, by Richard Garnett, of the British Museum. This is the statement : — " He (Shelley) was still extremely young. His 02 211 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY anguish, his isolation, his difference from other men, his gifts of genius and eloquent enthusiasm made a deep impression on Godwin's daughter Mary, now a girl of sixteen, who had been accus- tomed to hear Shelley spoken of as something rare and strange. To her, as they met one event- ful day in St. Pancras' churchyard, by her mother's grave, Bysshe, in burning words, poured forth the tale of his wild past — ^liow he had suf- fered, how he had been misled ; and how, if sup- ported by her love, he hoped in future years to enrol his name with the wise and good who had done battle for their fellow-men, and been true through all adverse storms to the cause of humanity. Unhesitatingly she placed her hand in his, and linked her fortune with his own." Side by side with this should be read Mrs. Shelley's remarks in her edition of Shelley's Poems : — " This is not the time to relate the truth, and I should reject any colouring of the truth. No account of these events has ever been given at all approaching reality in their details, either as regards himself or others; nor shall I further allude to them than to remark that the errors of action committed by a man as noble and generous as Shelley was, as far as he only is concerned, may be fearlessly avowed by those who loved him, in the firm conviction that, were they judged impar- tially, his character would stand in brighter and fairer light than that of any contemporary." 212 SEPARATION FROM HARRIET There is obviously some veiled meaning here — a suggestion of extenuating circumstances which the writer declines, out of consideration for the feelings of others, to disclose. There could be only one extenuating circumstance of which the average reader of the plea would admit the force — misconduct on the part of Harriet. That that was, in fact, the extenuating circumstance which Mrs. Shelley meant to urge appears from a note appended by Jane Clairmont to a copy of some letters addressed by her mother to Lady Mount- cashell : — " He (Shelley) succeeded in persuading her (Mary) by declaring that Harriet did not really care for him; that she was in love with Major Ryan; and the child she would have was cer- tainly not his. This Mary told me herself, adding that this justified his having another attach- ment." That is precise. Harriet a guilty wife, and Major Ryan the accomplice of her guilt — such, when the dots are put on the i's, is the Field Place case. But Jane Clairmont, though she reported the charge, did not believe it. Hogg and Peacock do not seem even to have heard of it. "I feel it my duty," writes the latter, " 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." And to Mrs. Boinville, and Mrs. 213 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY Godwin, the very name of Major Ryan was unknown. That he was a real man is proved, indeed, by mention of his name alike in Mary Shelley's Diary and in Harriet Shelley's letters; and it is credible enough that Harriet had not been too careful of appearances. None of the allusions to Major Ryan, however, are such as to warrant an unfavourable inference ; and it cannot be said that the general tone of Harriet's letters is that of a woman who has preferred a lover to her husband. Those letters can be quoted now, though they could not when either Professor Dowden or Mrs. Marshall wrote. It will be seen that they gradually run up the scale of indig- nation; the first letter, dated August 25, being quite vague : — " Mr. Shelley is in France. You will be sur- prised to find I am not with him ; but times are altered, my dear friend, though I will not tell you what has passed, still do not think that you cloud my mind with your sorrows. Every age has its cares. God knows, I have mine. Dear lanthe is quite well. She is fourteen months old, and has six teeth. What I should have done without this dear babe and my sister I know not. This world is a scene of heavy trials to us all. I little expected ever to go through what I have. But time heals the deepest wounds, and for the sake of that sweet infant I hope to live many years." 214 SEPARATION FROM HARRIET Mrs. Nugent seems to have replied to that that she had always feared and suspected that Mr. Shelley, etc., etc., etc.; and Harriet's next letter assured Mrs. Nugent that her suspicions had indeed been warranted : — " Your fears are verified. Mr. Shelley has become profligate and sensual, owing entirely to Godwin's Political Justice. The very great evil that book has done is not to be told. The false doctrines there contained have poisoned many a young and virtuous mind. Mr. Shelley is living with Godwin's two daughters. . . . Mary was determined to seduce him. She is to blame." Then circumstantial details of Mary's culpa- bility are heaped up : — " She heated his imagination by talking of her mother, and going to her grave with him every day, till at last she told him she was dying in love for him, accompanied with the most violent ges- tures and vehement expostulations. He thought of me and my sufferings, and begged her to get the better of a passion as degrading to him as to herself. She then told him she would die — ^he had rejected her, and what appeared to her as the sublime st virtue was to him a crime. Why could we not all live together ? I as his sister, she as his wife ? He had the folly to believe this possible, and sent for me, then residing at Bath." That, though couched in the language of the 215 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY penny dreadful, is specific. It is, as one would have expected, in flagrant contradiction with the Field Place version of the story. One's first impulse is to dismiss it as incredible and ridi- culous ; but there nevertheless is almost certainly a grain of truth in it. It explains, as Lady Shelley's narrative does not, the amazing letter which Shelley presently addressed to Harriet when he was with Mary at Troyes — ^the letter, derided as " a hete letter " by Matthew Arnold, in which he urged Harriet to " come to Switzer- land, where you will find at last one firm and constant friend, to whom your interests will always be dear, by whom your feelings will never wilfully be injured." It is, of course, more prob- able that Harriet trifled with the truth than that this proposal for a joint menage emanated from Mary; but it is quite clear that Harriet did not invent it ; and her indignation at it is intelligible. She continued : — " You may suppose how I felt at the disclosure. I was laid up for a fortnight after. I could do nothing for myself. He begged me to live. The doctors gave me over. They said 'twas impos- sible. I saw his despair, the agony of my beloved sister; and owing to the great strength of my constitution I lived ; and here I am, my dear friend, waiting to bring another infant into this woful world. Next month I shall be confined. He will not be near me. No, he cares not for me now. He never asks after me or sends me word 216 ELOPEMENT WITH MARY GODWIN how he is going on. In short, the man I once loved is dead. This is a vampire. His character is blasted for ever. Nothing can save him now. Oh, if you knew what I have suffered, your heart would drop blood for my miseries." After her confinement she resumes : — " lanthe has a brother. He is an eight months' child, and very like his unfortunate father, who is more depraved than ever. Oh, my dear friend, what a dreadful trial it is to bring children into the world so utterly helpless as he is, with no kind father's care to heal the wounded frame. After so much suffering, my labour was a very good one, from nine in the morning till nine at night. He is a very fine, healthy child for the time. I have seen his father ; he came to see me as soon as he knew of the event; but as to his tenderness to me, none remains. He said he was glad it was a boy, because he would make money cheaper. Money now, not philosophy, is the grand spring of his actions. Indeed, the pure and enlightened philosophy he once delighted in has flown. He is no longer that pure and good being he once was, nor can he ever retrieve himself." There is more ; but that may suffice. Harriet's defence, it will have been observed, is that offensive defence which military tacticians re- commend. She had not been educated to pick her words, or to endure injustice with com- 217 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY posure. There is no reason to assume that she was careful to tell the exact truth when her case could be made to look stronger by a little divergence from it. Perhaps women with griev- ances seldom are. Harriet's wild assertions, in short, inspire as little confidence as Mary's in- sidious hints; and one has to end as one began by admitting that the rights and wrongs of the case are too confused to be unravelled. At least, however, it will be possible to show that Harriet's picture of Shelley allowing money to become " the grand spring of his actions " is misleading ; and to that end we may call a fresh witness and print an unpublished document. Let Charles Clairmont speak. 218 CHAPTER XIX CHARLES CLAIRMONT ON THE SEPARATION Charles Clairmont, already introduced as the son of the second Mrs. Godwin and her first husband, was a bright, though rather unpractical, youth, who had received a good education at the Charterhouse : not the sort of education that was likely to suggest an eccentric or unconventional attitude towards sexual and social problems. By way of a good, and not at all unconventional, start in life, he proposed to set up in business as a distiller. He hoped to be financed in his distillery by Francis Place, the well-known tailor- reformer; and he was afraid that Francis Place might be prejudiced against him by the news of Mary Godwin's elopement with a married man. So he wrote Francis Place a long letter, which may be read in the Manuscript Room at the British Museum, enlarging upon the rosy pros- pects of the distilling industry, and, at the same time, justifying Shelley's separation from his wife : — " Here," he wrote, "is a young man of the greatest refinement and learning, and the most uncommon talent, by a puerile inexperience thoughtlessly married to a pretty, trifling girl of 219 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY the most slender capacity, whose only pleasures and occupations are balls, theatres, and such frivolous amusements." Perhaps that was what Fanny Godwin meant when she spoke of Harriet as "a fine lady " ; but, of course, the Charterhouse boy was not to be dazzled so easily as the homely girl. He referred to the circumstances of Shelley's first acquaintance with Harriet, and continued : — " He never had for her any strong attachment ; he thought her certainly a pretty woman, and was married to her when quite a boy, under circum- stances so very peculiar as could never have happened to any one but of so very strange a turn of mind as himself. Her love towards him was precisely of the same cold nature; this she most fully proved at the time of their separation. Her love for Shelley was absolutely none ! So long as he was the minister of her pleasures and her respectability, she pretended a sympathy with his principles and an admiration of his character; but so soon as her interest became unconnected with his, she became his secret enemy, and the enemy of all his friends." She became the enemy even of Godwin, though Godwin wrote to her, and called on her, and went out of his way to assure her that he disapproved of Shelley's proceedings. More- over, in money matters she had behaved most reprehensibly : — 220 CLAIRMONT ON THE SEPARATION *' She associated (I do not mean what the world calls criminally) with an Irish adventurer, whom she commissioned to take all possible advantage of Shelley. She knew his embar- rassed circumstances at the time, and yet glutted her revenge by running up the most extravagant and needless bills against him, amongst trades- men where she knew she could obtain credit. In short, it was only her impotence to injure that rendered her innocent of the most wide-spreading, blasting mischief." Charles Clairmont, that is to say, acquits Harriet of the graver charges involving Major Ryan, but also contradicts, in a very circum- stantial manner, her assertions regarding Shelley's grasping greed. " I would not require of her," he continues, " that she should become a crouch- ing, puling, begging suppliant ; she has certainly every right to feel her pride injured ; yet still I cannot think that a woman who sincerely loved could descend to the low revenge of abuse and scurrility." And then follows a contrast between Harriet's and Mary's qualities, and something of the nature of a philosophical disquisition : — " But now, even suppose Mrs. Shelley's passion for her husband had been as intense as that which Shelley felt for my sister ; still I cannot see that this would have been sufficient to entitle her to the preference when it was a question with whom Shelley should associate and domesticate for life. 221 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY A certain portion of unhappiness necessarily falls to her whose love is unreturned ; would cohabit- ation have remedied this evil ? Shelley felt he could not esteem her ; would a generous hypocrisy have produced the effect of passion ? and, if it could, how would the wretched victim of such a melancholy farce, a man of sensibility and virtue, have deserved this hopeless solitude of the heart ? Because he is exquisitely framed to perceive and adore true excellence, must he be everlastingly chained to dulness and sickening folly ? And who is she for whom his happiness and (so far as depends on his life and reason) his usefulness is bartered ? She is totally unlike his companion. She delights in frivolous amusements, and de- spises from her heart all literature or learned employments. Her fondness for her husband induces her to adopt principles and approve con- duct which she has neither the understanding nor the courage to prefer for their intrinsic worthiness. Their intercourse must be full of irritating discomfiture. Their natures are dis- tinguished by antipathies which no despotism but that of marriage could ever attempt to coalesce. I am persuaded that he who leaves such a woman for another in every respect more suited to his intellectual nature, acts neither selfishly nor sensually. If it be true that a person is justified in terminating a connection thus unsatisfactory when the other party has feel- ings in some degree inimical to the proceeding, surely the justice is much more evident when the 222 CLAIRMONT ON THE SEPARATION reluctance to the separation clearly arises out of the most vicious and ignoble motives that can disgrace the human heart. " What love can the person who enjoys frivolity and parade bear to the solitary student ? Love is produced by a real or supposed sympathy of tastes and dispositions. Subtract these causes : what remains but avarice or sensuality ? Perhaps you may think my sentiments too wild and un- digested for a maturer age ; yet, if so, I hope you will agree with them in their bulk and main tenor. I believe you to be a thoroughly un- prejudiced man, and I think I must have been wrong in supposing you would allow your judg- ment to be shackled on this subject. This long account is no doubt troublesome and tedious to you, yet I am afraid it was necessary." Necessary, that is to say, for the purpose of persuading Francis Place to finance the writer in the distilling trade — ^yet failing to serve its pur- pose, for Francis Place's reply was " in the nega- tive." He would be reluctant, he said, to invest money in a distillery, even for his own advantage ; still less did he care to do so for the advantage of another. Nor did he wish, he added, passing to another branch of the subject, to " take the chance of being involved in any transactions be- tween you and Shelley " : a wise refusal, doubt- less, though expressed in the needlessly unpleasant language of a needlessly unpleasant man. That, however, is a side issue, and irrelevant. 223 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY One gives the letter as the deposition of a witness who, if not impartial, was at any rate behind the scenes, and watched the proceedings from closer quarters than either Hogg or Peacock : a witness, too, who had learnt what a public school educa- tion teaches of propriety and morals. For Charles Clairmont, as for Hogg, Harriet was a barmaid- enly maiden who had " caught " the heir to a baronetcy and great estates. He had no sym- pathy with such ; and, indeed, it is difficult, even with all the precepts of all the churches before one, to blame the men who tire of barmaidenly maidens and, tiring of them, leave them. Even a bishop, one supposes, would not easily wax enthusiastic over the spectacle of a sublime poet enduring a superannuated barmaid in the spirit in which the saint submits to his hair shirt. It is not true, at any rate, that Shelley left Harriet alone in a lonely world — as calumniators have said that he did — with only fourteen shillings in her pocket. She was far richer, when they parted, than he was, having liberty to draw on him, as long as there was a balance to his credit, and having also a father who was willing to receive her, and could perfectly well continue his allowance to her of £200 a year. She went to his house, and might have remained in it but for circumstances of which it is enough to say, for the moment, that they were well within her own control. We will leave her, and follow Shelley. Whether Shelley had persuaded Mary, or Mary 224 CLAIRMONT ON THE SEPARATION (as Harriet said) had persuaded him, they were off together to the Continent, posting with four horses, to be sure of eluding pursuit. No one was in their confidence except Jane Clairmont; and Jane went with them, though why they took her with them no man knows. The suggested explanation that they thought her knowledge of French might be useful to them does not inspire confidence. The view that Shelley was (already) in love with Jane as well as Mary is equally un- convincing. Perhaps the clue to the mystery lies in Mary's sense of the impropriety of her pro- ceedings. One can (without too great effort) picture her fancying that the impropriety would be halved if Jane would share it; while Shelley may have humoured the belief from the fear lest her courage should break down if he did not. Be that as it may, however, the three fugitives got into their chaise at the corner of Hatton Garden, and galloped off along the Dover road; and Mrs. Godwin, missing her daughter and step- daughter, and guessing what had become of them, got into another chaise and galloped in their train. She was not far behind them; but they got to Calais first, after a stormy passage, and Shelley said : " Mary, look ; the sun rises over France." 225 CHAPTER XX SHELLKV, MARY AND JANE Cl.AIIlMONT IN FRANCE AND SWirZKRLANI) DARK HOHRS IN DINCJY LONDON l,()D(;iN(iS DEATH OK SIR RVSSIIK SHELLEY AND IMI'ROVEMEN'I" IN SHELLEY'S CIRCUMSTANCES. Mrs. Godwin overtook the i'ugitivos ut Calais, but did not (•a})turc tlu ni. Slic j'oimd Jane as defiant as Mary ; slie could only scold and depart. Perhaps .Jane had been unhappy at home ; perhaps only dull. She was, at any rate, the sort of girl who describes hersell" as " a girl of spirit," and hankers after the adventures for which the conmion round affords no scope. She surpassed Mary in enterprise as nuich as Mary surpassed her in intellect, and took life in the spirit of a girl who has been brought up on boys' books and sighs for a boy's liberty of action. Her character attracts and repels alternately : attracts by its recklessness of revolt, but re})els through a certain lack of tenderness. That, intellect apart, was the main difference between Jane and Mary. Mary, though needing help to screw lier courage to the stick ing-point, could count the world well lost for love. Jane, being bolder, could count the world well lost for excitement — for a part in a thrilling drama which would give her the centre of the stage. That was how, as their lives diverged, she came to despise INIary as a slave, ready to 226 MARY AND JANE CLAIRMONT abase herself in the hope that the hght of Mrs. Grundy's countenance might once more sliine on her. That was wJiy her oavu Hie resolved itself into a series of frasqucs for vvhi(;li slie had to pay the price. And this was her iirst jrasque. Shc^ was out for adventure in the holiday spirit, and in the scorn of consequence, just as Shelley had been when he ran away with Harriet, and Hogg when he hurried to join them on their honeymoon. But so, for that matter, were they all. In each of the three lives the adventure was to mark an epoch. All three of them had taken the first step on a road the end of which they did not know, but from which there could be no turning back to walk in the old paths as before. Shelley had shouldered a far heavier responsibility in abducting the woman whom he loved than in marrying the woman to whom he was indif- ferent. Mary, in crossing the channel, had also crossed that Rubicon which the careful women who remain on the near side of it forbid any female traveller to recross. Jane had phiced her- self under inlluences by which her whole life — and she was to live to be eighty — would be de- flected. Yet they all rushed off, without either money in their ])ockets or the certainty ol" o])tajn- ing any, with what looks like the irres})onsibility of school children breaking bounds. It would be too long a business to follo^v them through all the stages of their journey. The narrative is contained in the History of a Six Weeks' Tour, published in 1817, and based on p 2 227 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY the Diary which Shelley and Mary jointly kept. Professor Dowden supplements it with some ex- tracts from Jane's Diary. The route was from Paris, via Neuchatel, to the Lake of Lucerne, and home by way of the Reuss, the Rhine, and Rotterdam. The story is fascinating; but the secret of its fascination lies less in the adventures than in the temper of the adventurers. Adventures, mdeed, they had none worth speaking of, though they took a certain risk by crossing France on foot, at a time when the country was infested with disbanded soldiers, and the conduct of Cossacks had created a prejudice against foreigners. But they were young and snapped their fingers at care, as long as they could pay their way, convinced, if one may judge from their behaviour, that it was the business of Providence to provide, and that manna would fall if they clamoured for it. They did clamour for it, and for a while it fell. For the first supply, indeed, Shelley's watch and chain had to be sacrificed — the pro- ceeds of the sacrifice being exactly £6 12s. ; but then he found bankers to honour his sig- nature. A Parisian banker dealt out £60. A Neuchatel banker handed over a heavy bag packed with gold and silver coins. Wliether they were transmitting Shelley his own money or lending him some of theirs is not clear; but it is certain that he suddenly woke up to the fact that he had not enough to go on with and must not expect any more. With what celerity he 228 MARY AND JANK CLAIIIMONT (lu'ii p.-uk. This is liow sl\c iiolcs \\\v iH'rwrw Wi'V ; — '' (nl ii|) .mI liv<\ niisllc. loil. Mild Irouhlo; iiu>sl Iniigluiblc lo (liink ol" our j^oiii^ l.o l^iiisjjl.'uui l\\v S(H'«m(l (lay nl'lcr \v<> rnlcn-d i\. new house for six nionllis; nil htrjuisi^ I.Ik' sl.ovt* dou'l. suit. As we Irl'l. l)ov( r jind liUjijljuid's whili^ cliffs wen* rctiriiif*'. I snid lo u>ys<'ir. ' I shall mvrr sec Muse more.' juid U(»\v I .miu jjoiujjj lo l''n^lMi\d ni^aiu dear lOiii'laud. Afhr ha\iuj;' (ravelled and viewed Ihe follies of olher ualit)us. uiy own counlry apjx^ars Ihe niosl reasonable and the mosi enliijhltued." Truly il is aina/.iu}^; and whal is still more ania/,in!.f is Ihal Slulley had. only a few days h< Ion, w rill en lo llarrit^t. inviliuiij lur lo joiu llu" |>arl\. Il(> lioped. he wr«»le. ''soon \o have the pleasure of «'oMuuuuieal inij; lo you in p<>rsou, and of wtMeonunsjf you to some sweit retreat I will proeun^ for you anuino' the uiounlaiiis:" and he <"n joined Harriet to l>rini»' with h<-r certain leji'al doeunieids. 'I'hai <*(M't.aiidy looks as if \\r had nally ( \pt>eled lur to eonie : and wluit. woukl hav(> happened to \\vv if slu^ had eoni(* is an iideM'est iui); uwdtir t)f eonjceture. ShelU y. at. any rate, started for honie without, wnitinjij for h(r .answer te) his letter: and one* is rtnlneed to w«niderin},v wlu t.her \\v had fe>ri»e)t leMi t.hat he had writte n it. '21M) MAKY AND .lANK CLAIUMONT Very likely lie ii.'ul ; lor liis jiclivc miii ol' ils iiiovc- mciils. He jiikI Miiiy jirid Jjific w< it i\n ordimiiy lourisl.s, (iigagcd in onliiiniy si^lil. seeing. 'I^lxy were lujirly ulways rc-uliii^; jiikI wlicii. llH-y vv n;i.m< (I iiarnitive (.li.iri lie d( <"!(!< d lo l»iis<- n novel on il.. lie lind no Hoonei* <'oneeiv<'d Mm* ia<'k to l^'ingl.i.nd, dropping literature, n,t intervals, to ligld, the h.ittic ol" life in un mi- lamiliar tongue with innkee|)ers nnd otiicr ex- tortioners; lighting it in such ;i wuy ns just to hold their own enduring discAJJlMON'J When he heard of his grandfather's death, ShelJey fmrried to Field Place. Not being allowed to enter the liouse, he sat on the door- step reading Milton while the will was being read in the dining-room. Mary being unfit to travel, Jane had eorne with hirn, not indeed as far as tlie door-step, but to a house in the neighbour- hood : a fact which may have had its bearings (HI his exclusion. Referred to Sir Timothy's solicitOT, he returned to London. The next few montfis werc^ passed in various London lodgings. Mary's first baby was bom — a seven months' child — and died after a few days' life ; but she herself made a fairly good recovery. Fanny's desire to see the baby proved stronger than her fear of Godwin ; she came to the Shelleys and spent the night with them. Mrs. Godwin once more satisfied her curiosity by peeping through the windows, and also de- spateiied Cliarles Clairmont with a bundle of baby linen. Charles, on his ])art, was very anxious to share Shelley's good fortune ; and Shelley raised no obje<;tion. His purse, when full, was always at the disposal of his friends; 247 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY and Trelawny declared, after his death, that he himself and Hogg were the only two of his friends who had never taken advantage of his generosity ; whereas Peacock, Leigh Hunt, Charles Clairmont, Tom Medwin, and the others had all plundered him to the best of their ability. Hogg, at this time, became a constant visitor. *' Hogg comes in the evening " is, for many weeks, almost a daily entry in the Diary. Or else it is : " Hogg stays all day with us . . . " ..." Hogg sleeps here." Hogg also read Gibbon to Mary ; Shelley evidently remaining convinced that his old suspicions of Hogg had been un- founded; and Hogg, on his part, evidently realizing that Mary was no barmaidenly maiden, and that the casual manner which he had adopted with Harriet must not be assumed with her. So she could net a purse for him without fear that he would misunderstand her motives; and for the rest, there was a great deal of reading, and a certain amount of sight- seeing. Shelley was absorbed in Seneca, while Mary wrestled with Ovid ; Hogg sometimes helping her in Shelley's absence. Beyond this, we read of visits to the British Museum and walks in Kensington Gardens. It is said that Shelley sailed a paper boat made of a £10 note on the Round Pond : a story which deserves to be true. Mary, however, while struggling with the classics, was also struggling with a personal problem : how best, and most speedily, to get 248 AT CLIFTON AND BISHOPGATE rid of Jane. If she had needed Jane's moral support at the time of the elopement, she was getting very tired of Jane's society now — the more tired of it, no doubt, because Shelley and Jane got on so well together. The reconciliation of the claims of friendship with the monopoly of love is always difficult when one is young; and Shelley, to the end of his life, never mastered it. His manners, in friendship, were apt to resemble those of a lover. It was first his instinct and afterwards his avowed policy to love all lovable women, looking to each to help him, in her special way, to self-development, self-realization, self- expression. Jane said as much to Trelawny, when they exchanged their recollections of Shelley in their old age ; and Trelawny replied brutally that all men were like that in the 'twenties. He certainly was so himself — and not only in the 'twenties; but there is no reason why that re- flection should detain us. Mary, at any rate, did not see things quite as Shelley saw them. Possibly it was a disappoint- ment to her that Shelley's attitude towards Jane was not like his attitude towards Miss Hitchener ; certainly she was not pleased to see Shelley perpetually taking Jane for walks, teaching her Italian, and sitting up late with her. She thought that, if Jane could not, or would not, return to the Godwins, she had better seek a situation as a lady companion. She was bitterly disappointed that a Mrs. Knapp would not receive Jane, though Jane described Mrs. Knapp as " a for- 249 THE R0:MANT1C life of SHELLEY ward, impertinent, and siipcrfieial woman." We also, on Mareh 1 k eome upon this cry of pain : — " Shelley and I go upstairs and tallc of Clara's ^ going; the prospeet appears to me more dismal than ever; not the least hope. This is, indeed, hard to bear." Followed, about two months later, by this cry of joy :— " Clara goes ; Shelley walks with her. . . . I begin a new journal with our regeneration." Jane, in faet, had drawn a prize in a lottery, and had been despatehed to a solitary lodging at Lynmouth. One does not know whether the prize was large enough to pay for her trip ; but it is more probable that Shelley paid for it. It eannot actually be proved that she was hustled off to Devonshire because she had shown herself too fond of Shelley ; but there are striking indi- cations to that effect — and still more striking indications that she herself took that view of her exile, though it was a pleasant exile of which, at first at all events, she did not complain. Our first hint is in a letter which she wrote, immediately on her arrival at Lynmouth, to Fanny : — " After so much discontent, such violent ^ Jane, at. this stage, assumed the more romantic niune of Chira. Afterwards she called herself Claire, and some- times Constantia. 250 AT CLIFTON AND BISHOPGATE scenes, suoh a turmoil of passion and hatred, you will hardly believe how enraptured I am with this dear little quiet spot. ... It is in solitude that the powers eoneentre round the soul, and teach it the calm determined path of virtue and wisdom." That indicates, as clearly as anything can, that there has been unpleasantness with Mary. It might also, if it stood alone, seem to indicate unpleasantness with Shelley ; but it does not stand alone. Our second hint is contained in one of Mary's letters to Shelley. She writes, on July 27, from Clifton, where Shelley has left her while he goes house-hunting in South Devon, begging him to make haste and return to her. This house-hunting, she complains, "is a very, very long job, too long for one love to undertake in the absence of the other " — especially as his and her birthdays are both close at hand. She is " quite sick of passing day after day in this hopeless way"; she would very much prefer "a delightful excursion to Tintem Abbey;" and then she asks a significant question : — " Pray, is Clare with you ? for I have inquired several times and no letters; but, seriously, it would not in the least surprise me, if you have written to her from London, and let her know that you are without me, that she should have taken some such freak." That establishes the fact of Mary's jealousy, 251 rilK ROMANTIC MFK OF SITKLLKV thtniijh it (Itn^s not pn>V(^ tiint ihvrc >vas any iwnson for it. Sholloy. iiuliid. stiins to have rtttniotiul nil tlu> ijirls in \hc (lOiiwin household — .Tnno wo U ss than Mary, antl Fanny no loss than Jano. Fanny was a girl who ijjuardid hor own sooivt; but Jauo was at littU^ pains to guard lid's : — " Tlavr yt>n nr\ or lovoth n\ndnn\o ? '' I asktHl. ** A tit lioato blush suffust-d tho ohot^ks. antl this tinio sho niado no nply, gazinu; on tho ground. " ' ShoUoy ? ' T nun'numn!. *' ' \Vith all my hoart and stml.' sho ropliod, without moving hor oyos from tho ground." That is tho Oin\fossit>n of her old ago, roportod by Mr. \\'illian\ (irahani in his [aisI Links to//// Ih/ron, ShtUrii, (ind Krats. It has not boon iakt^n seriously. Fitlur tht^ lady's or tht^ intorx ii wtn*'s nuMuovy has boon oommonly assunioil to have boon at fault : but tin ro is a riinarkablo I'ontompi^rary oonlirniatit>n, whioh biographers havv^ t>vt>rK)okod. in i>no of Jane's letters to Byrc>n. >\ shall et>me to the story of Jane's relations with Hyvon ahut^st imnu tliatoly : but we may antieipato. IMrs. Marshall saw Jane's letters to l^yron when she was preparing hcv Li/r of Mrs. Sht'llri/. b\it was not allowed to print them. Tho only inforenee whioh she draws from them is that ,]i\nc was not very dee[)ly in love with AT r:fJFTO\ AM) P>JSIfOI*(;ATK iJyron ; but, then: wan arjoUjf:r i/if' f ri<;f. wfiK-.fi «hc. rrii^Fit fiavr: drawn if hIjo ha(J n ac J tii^ rn tnon: carefully. Shelley's name appftarn in them several times. Jane rpiotes Shell':y fr^r, as it wr;re, a t<:stimonial to lier efiarms. If*-. h;j,H tr)lrj h*;r, she says, tfjat she. was " the most engagirj;^ of human creatures; " and slie continues J — " I do not rrf>ort this throu;.^}) vanity; J krir^w SfieJif y is tnd (A me not to be indujj^f-nt, yf:t I tfiink it is an fionourable testimony to that part f>f rny ejjaraetf.r you fiave accused, that the man wfiorn f liavr- loved, and for wfiom I fiave suffered much, should report tfjis of mf;." If this does not me;j.n that love, for Sficllcy — not carefully hidden like Fanny's love, for fiirn — was the <;ause of Jane's preei[>itat/', banisliment to Lynmrjuth, then one does not know what it means. The proof seems clear that Jane was in love withi Shellf;y, tfiou^h not that Sf)eilf;y was in love witfi Jane. His view of love, indeed, so far as one can fiefine it, wa-auh U> have bf;en that it was an infinite emotion, and t})at the ifuXa- physics and mathematics of irjfinity applied to it : that the love which he gave to one wr^man, left the sum-total of tfie love whJeli fie could give to other women unaffeet/;d. Mary, however, would not be r;xpected U) take that view; and no woman will blame fjcr for not taking it. Kvf;n (iieorge Sand could not persua/le [jerw:lf to take it where Chopin was 25« THE HOMAXriC LIFE OF SHKIJ.KV roiu'cnicHl, tlu>ui>h sho hud oxpootrd All'ivil cle IMussot nnd Dr. Pnii^t^lK) to tnko it when her own jifftH'tions \\\>r(^ in a slali> of lliix. Whtit Mary wanted was, naturally, ti> liavo Sht^lK v to her- self: nnd for about a. yc>ar. she iJtot her way. He travelled witli her, after their de})arturc^ Troni the London lodginas, in South Devon : and alter the sojourn at Clil'ton, they settled down, in a, fin'uished house, at Hishopoate, near \>'indsor Park, some time in August, 1815. '* No evc^its, as yon know," Shelley wrote thence to Hogg, '' disturb our tranquillity." No notable events happened, indeed, exetj^t the birth of iNIary's boy William. The exehange of visits with Hogg, who was in London, and Peacock who was at INFarlow ; an excursion with Peacock and Charles Clairmont up the river as far as liCchlade ; negotiations with Sir Timothy about the settlement of the estate^ : correspond- ence with (lodwin, who wanted Shelley to pay further debts, but was too proud and punctilious to take a cheque from him drawn to his own order : — those are the details, and it is not worth while to dwt^ll on tluMU. Nor is it of much moment that Peacock, at this period, in- duced Shelley, vegetarian though he proft^ssed to be, to eat " mutton chops well p(^p})ered," or that the example of Hogg's hunger gave him a taste for baeon. The sojourn is chielly to be remembered for the composition of .iJastor. That, of course, marked an epoch. Before ^ilcuitor Shelley was mainly a dialectician, 25i AT CMFTON AND lUSIIOIHMTK pcrsuudcd tliul. the liiimun mcc vvns jx ii'(;(;tibl(;, und nii^lit he miido p('rf(!ct hy rrioh onitors speaking the lan^ujj|»;< of (nirc reason. VVitfi the wrilin^ of .ilaslar, Llie (lialeel-i<-ian was lost, in tli(; poel, wlio, wil:lioiil- renouneiu^ prohahly without: doubl.in^ jiny ol" the old ])rineiples, I'oufid tliai l-he task' wlii(tli lay nearest to him was, not propagandisrn, huL sell'-rcjili/ation and sell-expression. Mary was resl-iiil es])e(!ially resU'iil when .Jane was oiil, ol' Llie way -and he could wander in I. he woo(Js and reineniher emo- tion in lran(juillil,y foi" I-Ih; (irst time in his tem])esl,uous life. l*erhaps for he Jilways expeeted the; tem- porary to be permanent — he irrui^ined that Jane would remain in her Lynmouth lod^in^ for <'ver. Perhaps Mary too, bein^ so younj; and inex- perienced, cherished the sjim(! d(;lusion. It was the sort of thirif^ that mi)[(ht liappen at the end of a fairy tale. Hut no one in real life ever stays for (;v('r in a Lynmonth lodgin^-liouse ; and .inrie was a very real person. Frasques were; irrii)ossible at J^ynmouth ; and /rasf/ues were fKccssary to lier. Exactly when and how sfie got away from l.ynmoutli — exactly where she w(Mt when she did get away — no one app(;ars to know. A))])}irently she (|uarter<;d herself for a timrr u[)on hei" brotfier Charles, and tl)en [)ro- f)osed herself once more as Mary's guctst. Appa- renlJy sIk; had established herself as Mary's guest at the timet wh(*n she l)urst into Uie house witli the memorabh,' (exclamation : — 255 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY " Percy ! Mary ! What do you think ? The great Lord Byron loves me ! " That brings us to the most daring of all Jane's frasques ; and it will be worth while to get at the exact truth about it. That exact truth certainly is not to be found in Professor Dowden's Life of Shelley, or in Mrs. Marshall's Life of Mrs. Shelley; nor did Cordy Jeaffreson present it in either The Real Shelley or The Real Byron ; nor did Jane herself tell it, when Mr. William Graham interviewed her at Florence. But, if we check Mr. Graham's interview with Jane's letters, printed in Mr. Prothero's edition of Byron's works, we shall find that, while much which has been said can be contradicted, very little need, in the end, be left doubtful. 256 CHAPTER XXIII JANE CLAIRMONT'S RELATIONS WITH BYRON The generally accepted version of the Byron- Jane Clairmont story is as follows : — Jane took it into her head to seek a career on the stage. She called on Byron in his capacity of member of the Committee of Management of Drury Lane. Byron, as Professor Dowden puts it, " was skilled in the dangers which beset a woman's heart," and took advantage of that skill — for, still to quote Professor Dowden, " why should a man of genius set bounds to his appetite for delighted sensations ? " Jane, on her part, " eagerly desired to keep the great event of her life a secret," told neither Shelley nor Mary what had happened, but arranged, without con- fiding in them, either that they should go to Geneva to meet Byron, or else that Byron should go to Geneva to meet them. Cordy Jeaffreson added the conjecture — which Jane endorsed in conversation with Mr. Graham — that the in- trigue was the real cause of the Byron separation. The real causes of the Byron separation are now known; and it is established that Jane Clairmont had nothing whatever to do with them. Her name does not appear in the pre- sentation of Lady Byron's case in Astarte. That R " 257 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY error is the first to put aside; and the next mistake is best presented in Jane's own story, reported by IMr. Graham : — " I called ... on Byron in his capacity of manager, and he promised to do what he could to help me as regards the stage. The result you know. I am too old now to play with any mock repentance. I was young, and vain, and poor. He was famous beyond all precedent, so famous that people, and especially young people, hardly considered him as a man at all, but rather as a god. His beauty was as haunting as his fame, and he was all-pow^erful in the direction in which my ambition turned. It seemed to me, almost needless to say, that the attentions of a man like this, with all London at his feet, very quickly completely turned the head of a girl in my position; and when you recollect that I was brought up to consider marriage not only as a useless but as an absolutely sinful custom, that only bigotry made necessary, you will scarcely wonder at the result which you know." It is very plausible. The story hangs together ; but — litera scripta manet. Documents in Jane's handwriting — to say nothing of documents in Byron's handwriting — contradict most of the statements; and others of them can be contra- dicted from other sources. It was not true that Jane had been brought up in the doctrines of Free Love. Her mother 258 JANE CLATRMONT AND BYRON had never held those doctrines, and her step- father had abandoned them before he married her mother; while both father and mother Iiad quarrelled with Mary and Shelley for putting them in practice. Nor is it true that Jane intro- duced herself to Byron with a view to obtaining a theatrical engagement; or that Byron took the initiative in the matter of " attentions." What really happened was that Jane wrote to Byron under an assumed name from an accom- modation address, making no mention whatsoever of theatrical ambitions, but laying her heart at his feet : — " An utter stranger takes the liberty of ad- dressing you. ... It is not charity I demand, for of that I stand in no need. ... I tremble with fear at the fate of this letter. I cannot blame if it shall be received by you as an impu- dent imposture. ... It may seem a strange assertion, but it is not the less true that I place my happiness in your hands. ... If a woman whose reputation has yet remained unstained, if, without either guardian or husband to control, she should throw herself upon your mercy, if with a beating heart she should confess the love she has borne you many years, if she should secure to you secrecy and safety, if she should return your kindness with fond affection and unbounded devotion, could you betray her, or could you be silent as the grave ? . . . I must entreat your answer without delay. . . . Address R 2 259 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY me as E. Trefusis, 21, Noley Place, Mary le Bonne." That letter removes all question as to who began the love-making. Byron seems not to have answered it; so we find Jane returning to the charge under another nom de guerre : — " Lord Byron is requested to state whether seven o'clock this evening will be convenient to him to receive a lady to communicate with him on business of peculiar importance. She desires to be admitted alone, and with the utmost privacy." That letter is signed " G. C. B." Byron re- plied by making an appointment which he does not appear to have kept; for we next find Jane writing: "I have called twice on you; but your servants declare you to be out of town." This time she drops pseudonyms, and signs her own name; and this is the first letter in which the theatre appears. Jane asks not for help, but for advice : " Is it absolutely necessary to go through the intolerable and disgusting drudgery of the provincial theatres before com- mencing on the boards of a metropolis ? " Byron, in answer, referred Jane to his col- league in management, Douglas Kinnaird ; but Jane did not go to Douglas Kinnaird : a fact which may be taken as giving the measure of the sincerity of her theatrical aspirations. In 260 JANE CLAIRMONT AND BYRON the next letter there is a change of front. Jane's ambitions are no longer theatrical, but literary. She has written " half of a novel or tale," and wants Byron to criticize it. She is afraid he may think her " intruding and troublesome," but — she also feels that she knows him well enough to invite his sympathy by remarks about that married state which, as all the world knows, he has found so unsatisfactory : — " Do you remember his (Dante's) inscription over the gate of hell — Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch'' entrate. I think it is a most admirable description of marriage. The subject makes me prolix. I can never resist the temptation of throwing a pebble at it as I pass by." Still Byron remained unmoved. One gathers as much from Jane's complaint that " there is little in your lordship's stern silence to embolden me ; " but Jane was one of those women with whom a little emboldening goes a very long way. " You bade me believe," she protests, " that it was a fancy which made me cherish an attach- ment to you." She adds that " it cannot be a fancy since you have been for the last year the object upon which every solitary moment led me to muse." And then she makes her final plunge, sending her note by hand to Piccadilly Terrace, and waiting in Hamilton Place for the answer : — 261 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY " I may appear to you imprudent, vicious . . . but one thing at least time shall show you, that I love gently and with affection, that I am incapable of anything approaching to the feeling of revenge or malice : I do assure you your future will, shall be mine. . . . *' Have you then any objection to the fol- lowing plan ? On Thursday evening we may go out of town together by some stage or mail abovit the distance of ten or twelve miles. There we shall be free and unknown; we can return early the following morning. I have arranged everything here so that the slightest suspicion may not be excited. . . . " Will you admit me for two moments to settle with you where ? Indeed, I will not stay an instant after you tell me to go. . . . Do what you will, or go where you will, refuse to see me, and behave unkindly, I shall never forget you. I shall ever remember the gentleness of your manners and the wild originality of your countenance." And so on, and so forth. No one who has analysed that correspondence will ever again believe that Byron took advantage of the inno- cence of a young woman who appealed to him to exert " influence " in favour of her pro- fessional career on the stage. On the contrary, it is as clear as daylight that the young woman in question only pretended that she wanted to be an actress in order to obtain admission to 262 .TANK CLAJRMONT AND IiYlU)N iiyron's Fiousf, and thcD Icfl. him no [x-acj: until \i<' (tonHcntc-d to make her [lis miHtrcss. His own version of tfie matter, n^ported to his sister Aij^njstJi vvfierj he arifJ Jane met again at Geneva, is evidently the true one : — *' Now, dearest, I do most truly tell thee that I eould not hr^lp this, that I did all I could to prevent it, and have at last put an end to it. I was not in love, nor have any love left for any; hut J <;ould not exaetly j>lay the Stole with a woman who had scrambled eight hundred miles to unphilosophise me." That letter seems to dispose of the view that Byron wr:nt to Geneva to meet Jane. The meeting can hardly have been accidental ; and the conclusion follows that Jane went there to meet JJyron. The question remains : Did she get Shelley to take her there by persuading him and Mary that Geneva was a place they really ought to see ? Or did she arrange the meeting with their help and connivance V That is a point on which there is a direct conflict of testi- mony between Jane, and Shelley's and Mrs. Shelley's biographers. Perhaps the least plausible of the theories is that set forth by Mrs. Marshall. Shelley and Mary, she says, were " ignorant and unsuspecting (jf the intrigue " Vjctween Byron and Jane ; but they nevertheless went to Geneva with the idea of meeting Byron, of whose movements Jane had 263 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY informed them. In reply to that it suffices to say that Shelley and Mary must have been very unsuspecting indeed if they had accepted Jane's knowledge of Byron's itinerary as a matter of course and asked no questions about it. Professor Dowden at all events avoids that pitfall. " That Shelley," he writes, " had decided to leave England independently of Clara's solici- tations we know for certain ; it is not improbable, however, that her desire to visit Geneva may have hastened his departure, and may have helped to determine his destination." Professor Dowden adds that Mary, at that date, can be proved by letters which he has seen, not even to have known that Byron and Miss Clair- mont were acquainted. One would like to see his evidence ; and, while awaiting it, one notes that he guards himself against making the state- ment that Shelley shared Mary's ignorance. Jane's own statements, however, if correctly re- ported, are equally at variance with those of both biograpliers. She says that she took Byron down to Marlow to meet Shelley; that she and Byron and Shelley and Mary lunched together at the Marlow inn ; and finally that " early in the following year all was arranged for the meeting at Geneva." And when Mr. Graham asked her whether Shelley and Mary approved of the intimacy : — " Most certainly," she replied briefly. " I 264 JANE CLAIRMONT AND BYRON have already told you — what you know, of course, already — what the Shelleys' opinions on these matters were, or what Shelley's were, because Mary docilely followed his lead in these things; and in a lasting union, as he hoped it would be, between his sister-in-law, as he always called me, and a man whom he at that time considered almost as a god, he saw nothing but what should ardently be desired. He thought that I would be to Byron what Mary was to him. Alas ! alas ! little did any one of us understand what Byron really was then." Thus Jane. But Jane, as we have just seen, was a very inaccurate person. Nothing that Jane says can be believed simply because Jane says it. Jane's story of the Marlow trip does not accord with the evidence of Jane's letters. Her relations with Byron, if they had begun, cer- tainly did not mature until after Shelley had come to London ; so that, if any meeting between the two poets did take place, London was almost certainly the scene of it. Mrs. Marshall, in fact, speaks of a meeting between Byron and Mary, though without naming her authority; but that is a detail. The essential question is : Did Mary and Shelley know ? Did they, as Jane says, approve ? No positive answer to these questions is pos- sible ; but, when we come to balance con- jectures : — 1. There is no iota of suggestion anywhere in 265 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY the published correspondence that their sub- sequent discovery of what had happened shocked, or even surprised, them. 2. A motive is badly wanted — and their knowledge and approval would supply one — for Mary's willingness to accept Jane as the com- panion of her journey. Mary, as we have seen, was so tired of Jane that she moved heaven and earth to get her out of the house. Jane, on her own showing, was an incorrigible flirt. " It was not my fault that men fell in love with me," she said to Mr. Graham, when he suggested that her presence in Shelley's house must have been disconcerting to Mary. We have already seen reasons — and we shall see others — for believing that Mary was jealous; and, if Mary was jealous, nothing would have been more natural than that she should rejoice to see Jane's affections diverted into another channel. She could not have been shocked ; for what Jane was proposing to do was only what she herself had done. On no conceivable grounds could she hold that Byron and Jane were bound to obey conventions which she and Shelley were free to break. At the most she could only fear that Jane might find it easier to get into trouble than to extricate herself from it — as indeed proved to be the case. But that was Jane's affair; and if she had to choose between seeing Jane make love to Byron and seeing her make love to Shelley, she would have been more than 26a JANE CLAIRMONT AND BYRON human if she had not encouraged Jane in her capricious fancy for throwing herself into Byron's arms. Nothing, too, is more natural than that she should afterwards, in the light of all that happened, prefer to forget that she had done so. On the whole, therefore (though nothing is certain), it is with Jane's version of the story that the balance of probability lies. That point made clear, we may once more return to Shelley, and follow him on his Swiss excursion. 267 CHAPTER XXIV AT GENEVA AND (iUKVr MAKLOW— SHELLEY'S SECOND MAKULV(,K The Genevan episode, belonoinsj as it does to Bvron's life as well as Shelley's, has been nuieh written about and may be passed over brielly. How the two parties left their hotel for subur- ban villas: how Byron and Shelley, sailing to- oetlier on the Lake, narrowly eseaped ship- wreek on the roeks at IMeillerie ; how the telling of ghost stories led to the writing of them — and especially to the writing of IMary's Franken- stein ; how Shelley took Mary to Chanionix, and made a memorable entry in a visitor's book '—all these things are well known, and there is nothing to be added. Still, if we are to get things in their true perspective, one point must be made. It was Byron who drew attention to Shelley, who, but for Byron, would almost have eseaped observation. Nobody, in fact, took any notice of Shelley until Byron joined him. The boarders at Dejeante's hotel may or may not have known that he had been expelled from Oxford, had left his wife, and had eloj^d with his friend's daughter ; the}'' certainly did not let their minds dwell upon the matter to the exclusion of other ^ Ei'jui 2^hlning of the noontide ocean Is flashinff, round me, and a tone Arises from its measured motion. How sweet ! Did any heart now share in my emotion ! ' Shelley's symptoms are nof, described with sufficient preeision to permit of a eonlident dia«,'riosis of the ease. Ilis own view— tliat he was sufferin;^ from oe[)liritis — is irriprob;jf>l'-. His f>ains may, very possibly, only have been rheumatie in origin. 295 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY 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. Decidedly there is more there than distress caused by a pain in the side; and Mary herself begins a second paragraph with a second expla- nation : — " We lived in utter solitude. And such is not often the nurse of cheerfulness; for then, at least with those who have been exposed to adversity, the mind broods over its sorrows too intently; while the society of the enlightened, the witty, and the wise, enables us to forget ourselves by making us the sharers of the thoughts of others, which is a portion of the philosophy of happiness. . . . Had not a wall of prejudice been raised, at this time, between him and his countrymen, how many would have sought the acquaintance of one whom to know was to love and to revere ! How many of the more enlightened of his contemporaries have since regretted that they did not seek him ! how very few knew his worth while he lived ! and of those few several were withheld by 296 ROME AND NAPLES timidity or envy from declaring their sense of it." With which compare a letter of Shelley's, written from Rome, but equally applicable — probably even more applicable — to his circum- stances at Naples : — " We see no English society here ; it is not prob- able that we would if we desired it, and I am cer- tain that we should find it unsupportable. The manners of the rich English are wholly unsupport- able, and they assume pretensions which they would not venture upon in their own country." And, of course, there were reasons why admis- sion to English society — whether they would have found it insupportable or not — was difficult for them ; and those reasons were not exactly — at all events not solely — the reasons which Mary gives. She herself must have been the chief obstacle; for social prejudices are stronger than religious prejudices; and if Shelley had offended the latter, she had offended the former. He, from the point of view of the travelling English of those days, was only the brebis egare — and society has a tenderness for such; whereas Mary had never belonged to the exclusive flock. She was, from the point of view of that same society, a tradesman's daughter, who had been her husband's mistress before he married her : a woman, therefore, who could not be called upon. 297 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY But a woman very anxious to be called upon : one for whom the society from which she was excluded had all the fascination of the unattain- able. She was the Peri at the gate of Paradise, — not merely disconsolate, but peevish; and one feels that Shelley's depression must have been, in a large measure, a reflection of hers. A man is never sadder than when the sight of a woman's discontent awakens him from dreams of a life which shall be like a fairy tale. Medwin, however, adds another explanation of the gloom ; — " The night before his departure from London, in 1814, he received a visit from a married lady, young, handsome, and of noble connections, and whose disappearance from the world of fashion in which she moved, may furnish, to those curious in such iniquities, a clue to her identity." The visitor had read Queen Mob, had fallen in love with the author of Queen Mab, and had come to declare her passion on the very eve of his elopement. She had renounced her husband, her name, her family, her friends; and she was " resolved after mature deliberation " to lay her fortune at Shelley's feet, and follow him through the world. He was moved — but of course it could not be. She acquiesced, but begged him to pity a heart torn by his indifference. She spoke of " blighted hopes, a life of loneliness, withered affections; " he replied that her image 298 MELANCHOLY AND THE CAUSE OF IT would never cease to be associated in his mind with " all that is noble, pure, generous, and lovely." They parted ; and Med win continues : — " This meeting, instead of extinguishing, only seemed to fan the flame in the bosom of the Incognita. This infatuated lady followed him to the Continent. He had given her a clue to his place of destination, Geneva. She traced him to Secheron — used to watch him with her glass in his water parties on the lake. On his return to England, he thought she had long forgotten him; but her constancy was untired. During his journey to Rome and Naples, she once lodged with him at the same hotel, en route, and finally arrived at the latter city the same day as himself. " He must have been more or less than man to have been unmoved by the devotedness of this unfortunate and infatuated lady. At Naples, he told me that they met, and when he learnt from her all those particulars of her wanderings, of which he had been previously ignorant; and at Naples — she died." The story has sometimes been waved on one side as a figment of Shelley's luxuriant imagi- nation; and that it is true in the exact form in which Medwin reports it is, indeed, improbable. But Mr. Rossetti says that he got a partial con- firmation of it from Miss Clairmont, who declared that she had seen the lady in question, and even knew her name; and one inclines to think that 299 TIIK KOAIANTIC T-TFE OF SHKT-T,KV I\Ied>vin's elaborate lietion nmst liave been, in some undiseovevnble May, based upon a faet. Mary's peevishness at the siu'ial boyet>tt would have made Shelley more, rather than less, sen- sible to a fresh sentimental attraction. The passion of a stranger who was not peevish— who professed eai::erness to faee the social boycott, with her eyes open, for his sake — may well have tilled his mind, for a little while, with the thouijht that thini^s miojht have been, and ouofht to have been, other than they were. And if the dream ended suddenly — and tragically then the Stanzas written in Dejection wouUl be more plausibly explained than by Mary's suggestion that they were due to an application of caustic for an imaginary disorder. ^ledwin believed the tragedy to have inspired these other lines : — IliU'itt'fi to thi' bridal bed ! Vndenu\iih thf tiravt' lis spread ! In darkness niai/ our lore be hid. Oblivion be our coverlid ! We niaij rest, and )ione forbid. Kiss me ! Oh ! my lips are cold ! Round my neck thine arms enfold. 'They are soft — yet chill and dead. And thy tears upon my heart Burn like points of frozen lead. But that is only Med win's conjecture — wiietlier 800 MKLANCIIOLY AND TIIK CAUSE OF VV trij(; or l';i,ls(! oik- <-iuii\<>\, s;j.y. Oru: (Jor;s nol even know whether the rriystery is related t;o another rnysU ry whieli fx lon^H to the same period, ;i.nd ultiniafcely made a ringing seandal tfirouf^h tiic tallc of Mary's Swiss maid and Shelley's Italian valet, Paolo. Paolo was pressed by the Shelleys to marry Elisc — to '■ make her an honest woman " ; and he was also dismissed from the Sh(;lleys' service for dishonesty. lie-, submitted to marriage with a tranquil mind; but he resented his dismissal, and vowed to be avenged, or, if not t(i be avenged, then to extort bhu^kmail. A lett^-r from Shelley to the Gisbomes, who had gone to London, gives us our first glimpse of Paolo at work, and our first hir»t of the eireurnstances whieh furnished him with a handle : — " My poor little Nea]')olitan, J hear, has a severe attack of dentition, f suppose she will die and leave another memory t<^ thom which aln-ady torture me. . . . Domestic peace; I might have — I may have — if I see you I shall have — but have not, for Mary suffers dreadfully about the state of Godwin's circumstances. I am very nervous, but better in general health. We have had a most infernal business with Paolo, whom, however, we iiave succeeded in crushing. . . . " I have later news of my Neapolitan. I have taken every possible precaution for her, and 301 TlIF, KOMANTIC MFK OF SITFM.KV hope that thov Nvill siu'cood. Slu^ is io cou\c to lis as soon ns she rtwniTs. . . . '* ^ly Noapi^litnn charge is deaih It seems as if the destruetion that is eonsuiwing me were as an atmosphere whieli Nvrapt ami injcctrd cverytluni; eonneeted with me. Tliat rascal Paolo has heen taking advantaije of my situation at Naples in Diven\ber. Iv^lv^. to attempt to extort money by tlireatening to chargi^ me with the n\ost hiMTible crimes. lU^ is connected witli some Fngiisli liere (at Lci^ihorn'^. who liate me with a ferviMir that almost doi-s ereilit to their phlegmatic brains, and listen to and vent the most prodigious falseho^xis." It is very vague. All that appears is that Shelley has a particular interest in an infant, at the teething st^ige, at \aples--and that Mary knows all about it, and is prepared to receive the infant — and that something happened at Naples on which an uncharitable construction could be placed. l\u>lo seems to have been temporarily frightenetl into quiescence by a lawyer's letter: but he talked or he induced Elisc to talk. A year later, when visiting Hynm at Ravenna, Shelley heard what he. or Flise on his behalf, had said. The lloppnei-s. who had been very kind to them at Venice, had annoimecd their intention of having nothing more to do with them on account of *' a story so monstrous and incredible that they nuist have been prone 30-J JANK (XAIKMONT'S r/)Vf': TOR SHKLLKY f,o \k\](:vc ;i.riy fvil to li.'ivf: hf;)J';V('.lajrf: was my rnistrcHs; that is all very well, and so far there if* notFiing new; ;i.ll the world has heard no nriueh, and pftopic rrjay [)f;]ievo or believe; not as they think (/ood. She, tfien proef;f;ds to say that Clain- was with r-hild by me ; that J gave, fier the most violent rnerJi(;ine to produee, abortion; tfuit, this not sueeeedinj^, she was brought to bed, and that J irnmf;diatf:ly tore the ehild from her and sr;nt it to the Found- ling IIosf>it;i,l. . . . Jn addition, she says that botFi 1 uiui ('laire IrcnUA you in the most sharne- liil manner, that I negleetrtd ;i.nd beat you, and that (^lain; never let a day pass without off'-ring you insults of the most violent kind, in which she was abettr^d by me." That is the form in which Shelley reported the scandal to Mary, tfie probability is strong that his heated imagination fiad heightened its colour. Mary, at Shelley's instance, wrote to Mr«. Iloppner, repudiating \}>(: r;alumnies with an equal indignation. Klise, charged with having uttered them, denied that sfjc fiad done so, or that there was any basis for them. But, in Mary's letter U) Shelley, eovering the letter to Mrs. Iloppner, there are these significant sen- tences : " IJo not think me imprudent in men- tioning Claire's illness at Naples. It is well to meet facts." And the letter, as printed in the 803 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY biographies, contains no reference whatever to any illness — as though Mary had changed her mind, and thought it better not to mention it after all. What, then, are the facts which Mary first thought it " well to meet," but afterwards — if there has been no tampering with the text of her letter — decided to ignore ? Our only hint is contained in those Chats with Jane Clairmonty by Mr. Graham, from which so many quotations have already been taken. The conversation had turned on Byron's refusal to surrender Allegra : — " ' Of course,' she went on, ' there was a reason that Byron used as an excuse for his vile conduct in thus robbing me of my child. That vile note at the foot of my letter to him, which he sent on to Hoppner, and which has since been un- earthed, explains it. But it was a lie.' '* As I made no reply, she continued, ' I presume that you think there can be no smoke without fire ? Well, I will tell you the whole truth now, and you may judge for yourself.' " Nothing more, however, shall be written by me on this subject, so highly distasteful to me, until 1909, and not even then, had not Miss Clairmont requested me to give what I know to the world after the lapse of time before mentioned." There is a further note on the subject in Mr. Graham's Preface : — 304 JANE CLAIRMONT'S LOVE FOR SHELLEY " Shelley's indignation, if you will kindly refer to his letter, was not caused by the suggestion that he might be on terms of greater intimacy with Miss Clairmont than is desirable in a well- regulated household, but by the suggestion that she had had a child by him which had been sent to the Florence Foundling, and this was quite a mistake, so far in any case as Shelley was con- cerned. The rights of the story are known to myself, and I do not intend to say anything further thereon until 1901, when, owing to the publication of the Hobhouse Memoirs, I shall be at liberty to deal with Clairmont matters in full, eight years earlier than my promise to the lady would otherwise have permitted me." The Hobhouse Memoirs have appeared, and have revealed nothing. We are now in 1911 ; and the fresh light promised has not yet been thrown. The mystery remains mysterious. Whether Miss Clairmont had an adventure at Naples in which Shelley played no part except that of guarding her secret; whether the Nea- politan infant — supposed by Professor Dowden to have been the ward bequeathed to Shelley by his Inconnue — was in any way related to that adventure; whether Shelley knew more of that adventure than was known to Mary : — these things are riddles, and might still hold an element of doubt, even if we had Mr. Graham's report of Miss Clairmont's statement. But two things are clear. Mary had no know- u 305 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY ledge of any circumstance which could shake her faith in Shelley's loyalty to herself. Shelley still found it impossible to escape from the thorns of life to the peace of dreamland. Life pursued him, clutching at him, and clinging to him, and harassing him. He was not like other people; but he had to live in the same world as other people; and the same things happened to him as to other people, — and hurt him more than they hurt other people, because of his failure to realize the life about him until it disturbed him and forced itself on his attention. 306 CHAPTER XXVII AT PISA— EMILIA VIVIANI From Rome Shelley came north to Leghorn, arriving in June, and remaining until November, when he went to Florence, where he stayed until he moved to Pisa, in February, 1820. He took a villa in the outskirts of Leghorn, and, in a study which he contrived on the roof, wrote The Cenci and began Prometheus. His melancholy did not leave him, however, and his life continued to be solitary. Practically his only friends were the Gisbornes, whose friendship was not quite dis- interested. Mrs. Gisborne's son, Henry Reveley, proposed to build a steamer to ply between Leghorn and Marseilles; and Shelley was asked to finance the adventure. Marine engineer- ing appealed to him as a kind of poetry — a magical stretching of hands across the seas to promote the comity of nations; and he entered into the scheme with enthusiasm, though it came to nothing. Another enterprise which brought him into contact with the hard facts of real life was his attempt to procure the production of The Cenci at Covent Garden, with Miss O'Neill in the principal part, and his letters on the subject illustrate his naive inability to realize actual u 2 307 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY conditions. He considers the question whether incest " would be admitted on the stage," and concludes that " it will form no objection," because the story of The Cenci is true, and has been treated with " peculiar delicacy." Peacock was asked to submit those considerations to the Covent Garden Management; but of course he submitted them in vain. Mr. Harris of Covent Garden declared the subject of the piece so objectionable that he could not even let Miss O'Neill read it; whereupon Shelley protested that the theatre had " rejected it with ex- pressions of the greatest insolence," that he regarded it as " singularly fitted for the stage," and that as for Mr. Harris's motives in declining it, he can imagine none unless it be that he "has guessed at the author." At the same time an article in the Quarterly attacked his character as well as his poetry. He read it in a public reading-room at Florence, and was seen to burst into scofhng laughter over the bathos of the reviewer's peroration ; but the laughter, as his letters show, was more bitter than merry. It led him into a correspondence, from which some quotations have been given, with Southey, whom he believed to be the author of the review, though it is now known to have been the work of his old schoolfellow and College contemporary, John Taylor Coleridge — a writer who afterwards employed his talents to better advantage by writing the Life of Keble. His ill health, too, continued, and there was 308 AT PISA intermittent discord between Mary and Jane, and the usual trouble with Godwin. The way of that needy philosopher was to ask for a large sum of money, and then, if he only received a part of the sum he asked for, to regard the remainder as the balance of an overdue account, and to dun for payment of it in the offensive style of a debt collector. Without even thank- ing Shelley for what he had already given, he clamoured for more, treating his benefactor as he might have treated a man who had lost to him at cards and would not pay. Nor was he content to address his reproaches to Shelley himself. He also complained to Mary of Shelley's selfishness ; and Mary became more and more melancholy, and more and more peevish. He called Shelley " a disgraceful and flagrant person ;" and Shelley, writing to Leigh Hunt, commented bitterly : — " I suspect my character, if measured with his, would sustain no diminution among those who know us both. I have bought bitter know- ledge with £4,700. I wish it were all yours now." Thus business unceasingly broke in upon the dream of self-realization in the sunshine ; and cries, not merely of anger, but of anguish, found utterance in Shelley's letters, — especially those written to Peacock, with whom he discussed the prospects of his return to England : — 309 THK ROMANTIC TJFE OF SITKIJ.KY '"'■ 1 ht'licvc, my dcuv Vcnvock, lluil. you wish lis to come hack to Kiii>laiul, How is it possible ? llciillli, compctenee, tran(|uillity-- all these Italy permits, and h'.n«vln,n(l lakes away. 1 am reoaidid by all who know or hear of me, except, 1 Hunk, on the whole, live individuals, as a rare ])rodioy of crime and ])ollulion, whose look even mijjfht int'eel. This is a laroc com])uta.tion, and I don'l. linuk I eouid mention more than three. Such is Ihe spirit of the Kn<^lish abroad as well as at home. " Few compensate, indeed, lor all the rest, and if I were dlonr, I should laujijh." Rul how shall a man laui;h at the social })oycott, when a peevish woman, to whom it means nuich more than to hinj, is alwaAs beside him whinintj; about it ? Shelley could not; and the regret for Fin<;laiid and ils social amenilies soon reappears: — *■' I mosl devoutly wish I were livin<»- near London. . . . Social (Mijoymenl, in sonic form or ollur, is the alpha and ome«>a of existence. All t hat I see in Italy and fron» my tower windows 1 now see the ma|»nilicenl peaks of the Apeimines half cnclosino" the plain — is nothini*; it dwindles into smoke in Ihe mind, when I think of some familiar forms of scenery, lillle |)erha[)s in Ihem- selv(\s, over which old remembrances have thrown a delightful colour. How we prize what we des[)ised when presenl ! So Ihe ^vhosts of our dead associations rise and liaunt us, in revenue 810 AT IMSA for oiii- having let them starve, and abandoned tlieni lo iKM-isli."" There is no eheerlulness in IhnI, Idler, vvrillcn ei|j[hLe('n rnonLhs al'lci- I lie airivaJ in Italy. Shelley, eonlronled perpel.ually hy Mary's "'depression of spirits," eonid see wo hope oi" (rheerlnlness unless his I'ew rjiilhiiil MiioJish Iriends would eoine out to him. Iiei«rh Hunt, Ilo/^o', Peacock, ;uid IIor:i,ce Smith were all invited in vnin; l)nl. life, neverllu'- iess, hrjnrhlcned soiru^what at Pisa. The hirlli oi" Percy l^'loi-encc Shelley- — tlu; only one ol" Mjiry's three children who j^ievv up — -relieved her dejeclion in some, albeil only a slight-, dcgi'cc. A wise friend, L.uly lMonnl.(uishe]l, discerning the lack ol' harmony in I he household, p(^rsua,de(J Miss (/lairmont to .iccci)! a posl as governess in the family ol" a FlorenI ine professor. Shelley's cousin, Tom Medwin, who had been in I he army and in India, and was now home on ;i loose end, turned up. Mary, it. is true, did not like Medwin. At tJie t ime she (;all(rd him a, " f)ore " ; and she a,(*(MJse(l hiiu, in later y% " and that causes an uncomfortable feeling; but I know that your husband said well when lie saitl that your apparent coldness is only the asli ivliich covers an a(jcdionaie 1i£artr Those passages arc the keys which unlock the situation. Let any woman judge for herself whether Mary is likely to have been pleased to hear another woman, more beautiful than herself, speak of her husband as the image of the divine — whether she is likely to have felt a warmer affection for Emilia than she displayed — whether the frequency of her visits to Emilia in her convent is likely to have been due to any other motive than a desire to keep a close watch n[H>n what must have struck her as a flirtation franght with possibilities perilous to her peace. She watched the danger till it passed; and it passed quickly. The Emilia who had inspired Epipsuchidiou was not the real Emilia but an Emilia created by Shelley's imagination. The real Emilia introduced business into the dream by borrowing money. The real Emilia accepted the husband provideil for her, and, as Mary, with her genius for saying unpleasant things, put it, 318 KMIIJA VIVIANI " led him a devil of a life." Sliellcy himself awoke from this dream, and admitted that his disillusion was eomplete : — " The Epipsychidion,'' he wrote to Gishorne, " I eannot 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. If you are curious, liowever, to fiear what 1 am and have been, it will tell you something thereof. It is an idealised history of my life and feelings. I think one is always in love with some- thing or otljcr; the error and 1 confess it is not easy for spirits cased in flesh and blood to avoid it — consists in seeking in a mortal image the like- ness of what is, perfiaps, eternal." That is all ; and perhaps the letter tells us more even of Shelley's life and feelings than the poem, being vastly easier to understand. He was " always in love with something or other." Per- haps he w(^uld have said that he could not have loved Mary so much, had he not loved Emilia more. The woman, it is to be feared, has not yet been born who would have been an ideal companion for fiim. The letter, more explicitly tfian Epipsychidion, sets forth that Mary was not such a one. He knew it, and she knew it also, and in the end she blamed herself. One is brought to that note at last, whether it properly arises out of the story of Emilia Viviani or not. 310 CHAPTER XXVIII MARY'S (ONFESSION OF FAILURE Mary's confession of failure is contained in the Poem which she wrote on Shelley's death : — Oh, gentle Spirit, tJiou hast often sung How fallen on evil days thy heart zvas ivrung ; Noic fieree remorse and unre plying death Waken a ehord ivithin my heart, :vhose breath. Thrilling and keen, in accents audible, A tale of unrequited love doth tell. It was not anger, — ivhile thy earthly dress Encompassed still thy souVs rare loveliness. All anger zvas atoned by many a kind Caress or tear, that spoke the softened mind. — // speaks of cold neglect, averted eyes, That blindly crushed thy souVs fond sacrifice : — My heart was all thine own, — but yet a shell Closed in its core, which seemed impenetrable. Till sharp-toothed misery tore the husk in twain. Which gaping lies, nor may unite again. Forgive me ! That is as formal as one can expect a confes- sion in verse to be. It is a new rendering of the old lament : Mea culpa ! Mea culpa ! Peccavi. Benedicite ! Mary had sulked and been peevish ; 320 MARY'S CONFESSION OF FAILURE she owned it and repented. If only she had foreseen ! TFiat is the plain prose of the cry over the body whieh the pitiless sea washed up. There is an entry in Mary's Journal, dated on Shelley's last birthday, which should be read in connec- tion with it : — " Seven years are now gone ; what changes ! what a life ! We now appear tranquil, yet who knows what wind — but I will not prognosticate evil; we have had enough of it. When Shelley came to Italy I said, all is well if it were per- manent; it was more passing than an Italian twilight. I now say the same. May it be a polar day, yet that, too, has an end." And, for further ligiit, we may turn to a letter of Shelley's — one of the last letters which he wrote : — " Italy is more and more delightful to me. ... I only feel the want of those who can feel and understand me. Whether from proximity and the continuity of domestic intercourse, Mary cannot. ... It is the curse of Tantalus that a person possessing such excellent powers and so pure a mind as hers should not excite the sympathy indispensable to their application to domestic life." The three passages fit together like the pieces of a Chinese puzzle. One could easily find other passages which would complicate the puzzle in X 321 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY appearance, without really altering it. The resulting picture, in any case, is of a marriage which husband and wife independently admit to have brought them less happiness than they had hoped for. The admission is clear; nnd it only remains to consider how much or how little we will make of it. Something we must make; and no doubt Trelawny, though personally disposed to make too much of it, gives us our clue. He shows us a Shelley who dwelt in the clouds, and a ]\Iary who was of the earth, earthy; a Mary who was at heart a Martha, but an incompetent Martha, — a Martha whose house-keeping was of a Bohemian amateurishness; a Mary whose love of poetry and philosophy was as nothing beside her passion for being received in good society; a Mary who even " affected the pious dodge " and attended the ministrations of the English chap- lain — a chaplain who seized the opportunity to preach against her husband — in the hope of inducing society to open its arms to her. If we start with that, and then discount it liberally — remembering that Trelawny was an impetuous partisan who did not weigh his words — we shall probably have a fair presentation of the case from Shelley's point of view. The " pious dodge," at any rate, is no figment of Trelawny's imagination. Mary, taxed with it, admitted it, albeit with a plea of extenuating circumstances : she had only tried it once a month, not once a week as had been alleged, 322 MARY'S CONFESSION OF FAILURE and even so only " for good neighbourhood's sake," and because the chaplain had politely expressed the hope that he would see her at his services. A small offence truly : very small indeed when we set it side by side with the offence which Shelley committed when, on his return from bathing, he crossed his wife's dining- room, on his way to his bed-room, without even a bathing-dress to cover him, regardless that his wife was giving a dinner-party at the time, and, instead of vanishing, when he discovered the presence of guests, stood still to offer explanations and excuses. The two stories should certainly be read to- gether, for extremes meet in them. They not merely illustrate, but typify, a clashing conflict of ideals; and the majority of unbiassed readers will probably agree that Shelley's rebellion against the conventions was at least as exaggerated as Mary's subservience to them. Even those who lay most stress upon the title of genius to its eccentricities will realize that there were obstacles to the maintenance of perfect harmony between a husband so careless of decorum and a wife who served God and Mammon simultaneously in her Sunday silks. That the lute should be quite without rifts in such a case is almost unimaginable. As matter of fact, it certainly had more rifts than one. As Shelley had outgrown Harriet, so also had he outgrown Mary, — intellectually, emotionally, and morally. Even when she X 2 323 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY studied Greek — even when she studied mathe- matics — she was anxious and troubled about many things : anxious for comfort, and well- cut gowns, and becoming bonnets; anxious for the removal of the social boycott, and for tea- parties, and the common lot of esteemed matrons of the respectable middle-classes. Let it be granted that these are good things and desirable. The fact nevertheless remains that, when a poet idealizes a woman, he does so in the belief that she looks above and beyond them, — and that, when he knows that she does not look above and beyond them, he ceases to idealize her, and is apt to idealize other women whom he does not know so well. That is how Shelley came to idealize Emilia Viviani — whom he found out; that is how he came to idealize Jane Williams — whom he did not live to find out. Mary, no doubt, saw what was happening, and behaved in the way for which she afterwards expressed remorse. But there was no actual estrangement — only a cool- ing of ardour and an occasional misunder- standing. A few of Shelley's phrases reported by Trelawny seem to give us the measure of the trouble : — " Poor Mary ! hers is a sad fate. Come along ; she can't bear solitude nor I society — ^the quick coupled with the dead." And then, again, when Trelawny pointed out 824 MARY'S CONFESSION OF FAILURE a jealous wife, who excused her jealousy on the ground of " excess of love " : — " Shelley answered : — " ' Love is not akin to jealousy ; love does not seek its own pleasures, but the happiness of another. Jealousy is gross selfishness; it looks upon every one who approaches as an enemy : it is the idolatry of self, and, like canine madness, incurable.' " His eyes flashed as he spoke. I did not then know that the green-eyed monster haunted his own house." No more than that — and perhaps not even quite so much. For years after Shelley's death, Mary lived on terms of close intimacy with Jane Williams. She did not quarrel with her until Jane, then married to Hogg, made the foolish and unworthy boast that Shelley had loved her better than he loved Mary; and that would hardly have happened if the green-eyed monster had appeared in any very formidable shape. And Shelley's letters to Mary remain affectionate until the last, — though it is true that he wrote affectionate letters to other women also. There was a moment, within a year of the end, when he faced the question whether he should take a still further flight from society, and live out the rest of his life absolutely alone with Mary. It was at the time of his visit to Byron at 325 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY Ravenna — a visit already mentioned in con- nection with the calumny spread about Shelley and Miss Clairmont. He had left Mary at Pisa; and their future movements were uncertain. Florence had been talked of; there were strong arguments in favour of Florence ; but : — " My greatest content would be utterly to desert all human society. I would retire with you and our child to a solitary island in the sea, and shut upon my retreat the flood-gates of the world. I would read no reviews and talk with no authors. If I dared trust my imagination, it would tell me that there are one or two chosen companions besides yourself whom I should desire. But to this I would not listen — where two or three are gathered together, the devil is among them. And good, far more than evil, impulses, love, far more than hatred, has been to me, except as you have been its object, the source of all sorts of mischief. So on this plan, I would be alone, and would devote, either to oblivion, or to future generations, the over- flowings of a mind which, timely withdrawn from the contagion, should be kept for no baser object." It is the reappearance of the dream of the escape from life — not coupled with any thought of an escape from Mary. Perhaps the thought came as a counsel of despair rather than of hope ; but still it came. Most likely it was for Mary's 826 MARY'S CONFESSION OF FAILURE sake, even more than for his own, that Shelley dismissed it. This is how he goes on i^^ " The other side of the alternative (for a medium ought not to be adopted) is to form for ourselves a society of our own class, as much as possible in intellect or in feelings ; and to connect ourselves with the interests of that society. Our roots never struck so deeply as at Pisa, and the transplanted tree flourishes not* People who lead the lives which we led until last winter are like a family of Wahabee Arabs, pitching their tent in the midst of London. We must do one thing or the other — for yourself, for our child, for our existence. The calumnies, the source of which are probably deeper than we perceive, have ultimately for object the depriving us of the means of security and subsistence. You will easily perceive the gradations by which calumny proceeds to pretext, pretext to persecution, and persecution to the ban of fire and water. It is for this, and not because this or that fool, or the whole court of fools curse and rail, that calumny is worth refuting or chastising." Which means that Byron is coming to Pisa with the Guiccioli, and that there will be a set of a sort in which Mary as well as Shelley will be able to have a recognized social status. It will not mean exactly the removal of the social boy- cott; but it will, at least, mean the creation of circumstances in which the social boycott will 327 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY no longer matter much, — will perhaps matter no more than it mattered in that happy summer when the respectable people in the Geneva hotel spied on the outlaws in the villas through the telescope which their landlord had set up for them. And so, most naturally, the vote was cast for Pisa ; and Shelley engaged a better lodging there, and entered upon the most tranquil time of his tameless and swift career. 328 CHAPTER XXIX TRELAVVN^'S NOTES ON THE LIFE AT PISA The pillar of the Pisa set was, of course, Byron. He was the only one of them whose name was widely known; he was rich, and he lived, as he had travelled en grand seigneur. He lived cleanly now, and not as at Venice. His house was a palace. He kept horses; he enter- tained; he was in touch with England. Travel- ling Englishmen, if they passed through Pisa, esteemed it a privilege to be received by him. It was he, in short, and he alone, who drew the eyes of Europe to Pisa. But for him, nobody would have had any curiosity to know what was happening at Pisa. He figured before the world as the central sun of a lurid system, shedding a reflected glory on the satellites. Some of the satellites took notes of his table-talk with a view to future publication. They all, from time to time, and more or less regularly, rode with him, practised pistol shooting with him, played bil- liards with him, dined with him. Shelley and Mary had never lived so socially since their marriage. At first, at any rate, the change suited them : — " Lord Byron," Shelley wrote to Peacock, " is 329 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY established here, and we are constant companions. No small relief this after the dreary solitude of the understanding and the imagination in which we passed the first years of our expatriation, yoked to all sorts of miseries and discomforts. . . . We live, as usual, tranquilly. I get up, or at least wake, early; read and write till two; dine; go to Lord B.'s, and ride, or play at bil- liards, as the weather permits. . . . My health is better — my cares are lighter." " Our party at Pisa," he writes to Horace Smith, " is the same as when I wrote last. Lord Byron unites us at a weekly dinner, when my nerves are generally shaken to pieces by sitting up contemplating the rest making themselves vats of claret, etc., till three o'clock in the morning." Mary, at the same time, had more society than ever before. " Ride with La Guiccioli " is an entry in her Journal several times repeated; and she was accepted by persons whose social position was less equivocal than La Guiccioli's. " I have been once," Shelley writes to Miss Clairmont, " to Mrs. Beauclerc's, who did me the favour to caress me exceedingly. Unless she calls on Mary I shall not repeat my visit." But Mrs. peauclerc did call, and even sent an invi- tatiorjf, for we read presently in Mary's Diary : " Walk with Jane and to the opera with her in the evening. With E. Trelawny afterwards to 330 TRELAWNY'S NOTES ON LIFE AT PISA Mrs. Beauclerc's ball." It was an indication that doors were opening and might open wider if Mary played her cards well. It was then that the "pious dodge" was tried. We read: " A note to, and a visit from, Dr. Nott. Go to church." It was at this period that Byron formed his final estimate of Shelley's character, expressed in letters written after Shelley's death : — " There is another man gone, about whom the world was ill-naturedly, and ignorantly, and brutally mistaken. It will, perhaps, do him justice now, when he can be no better for it." ' " You were all mistaken about Shelley, who was without exception the best and least selfish man I ever knew." " You are all mistaken about Shelley ; you do not know how mild, how tolerant, how good he was." A striking answer truly to the people who used to stop Horace Smith in the street and ask him whether it was really true that Shelley was such a wicked man, guilty of such enormities; and the tribute is the more remarkable because Shelley and Byron did not, in the end, get on very well together. In part, no doubt, Jane Clairmont's constant lamentations over her wrongs made trouble between them; but there were also deeper incompatibilities with which 331 THE ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY those wronos had nothing to do. Byron posed, and Shelley protested that " the canker of aris- tocracy " needed to be cut out of hin\. He had brought too many of the traditions of the Dandies of the Regency to Pisa to please Shelley, and was too proud of his literary success. SlicUev came to Ihui his personality overpowering and dis- tasteful. It overbore him and sterilized him. " It is of vital importance," we (hid him writing, " that I should put a period to my intimacy with Lord Byron." And again, when the ques- tion of going from Pisa to the sea arises : " I shall certainly take our house far from Lord Byron's, although it may be impossible suddenly to put an end to his detested intimacy." And then — to Leigh Hunt : — *' Certain it is that Lord Byron has made me bitterly feel the inreriority wliic^i the world has presumed to place between us and which sub- sists nowhere in reality but in our own talents, which are not our own but Nature's — or in our rank — which is not our own but Fortune's." How much of that estrangement was due to Jane Clairmont's affairs, and how much to diver- gence of ideals, is matter of conjecture. Jane Clairmont's affairs may liavc been the occasion without being the cause — she had a wild plan for kidnapping AUegra, and wanted Shelley to help her to execute it. The fact of the estrange- ment, at any rate, is well attested ; and Shelley's 332 TRELAWNY'S NOTES ON LIFE AT PISA relations with Byron were, at best, those of a minor with a major potentate. There was admiration — and a httle envy — but no affeetion. Shelley's affeetion was reserved for Medwin, Trelawny, and Captain and Mrs. Williams; and they returned it. No man has ever written of Byron with the ardour of personal devotion which they showed to Slielley. They were not, like him, it must be remem- bered, social Pariahs. If Trelawny was a Bohemian, the others were not. Medwin and Williams were officers on half-pay, eligible for membership of exclusive Service Clubs, if such then existed, qualified by birth and breeding to be pillars of that respectable middle-class society in which the name of Shelley continued to be anathema maranatha. Mrs. Williams — there was no Mrs. Medwin — could perfectly well have taken the line that Mrs. Shelley was not the sort of person whom one could call upon. But Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Indian pre- judices melted in the genial warmth of the Italian sun. Captain and Mrs. Williams pre- ferred Shelley (and Mary also) to the most respectable people of their acquaintance. They came presently to live in a flat in the same house with the Shelleys; they met them daily, and made the sunshine of the last months of Shelley's life. And Shelley, on his part, wove a spell about them which none of their respectable acquaint- ances would have been capable of weaving. To quote Trelawny : — 833 TllK ROMANTIC LIFE OF SHELLEY '' Shollt v's imntal ju'tivity >v;\s infootioiis : ho kept y