Project Gutenberg's The Real Shelley, Vol. I (of 2), by John Cordy Jeaffreson
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
Title: The Real Shelley, Vol. I (of 2)
New Views of the Poet's Life
Author: John Cordy Jeaffreson
Release Date: December 31, 2012 [EBook #41747]
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE REAL SHELLEY, VOL. I (OF 2) ***
Produced by The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images
generously made available by The Internet Archive.)
THE REAL SHELLEY.
VOL. I.
THE REAL SHELLEY.
NEW VIEWS OF THE POET'S LIFE.
BY JOHN CORDY JEAFFRESON,
AUTHOR OF 'THE REAL LORD BYRON,'
'A BOOK ABOUT DOCTORS,'
'A BOOK ABOUT LAWYERS,' &c. &c.
IN TWO VOLUMES.
VOL. I.
LONDON:
HURST AND BLACKETT, PUBLISHERS,
13 GREAT MARLBOROUGH STREET.
1885.
_All Rights reserved._
LONDON:
PRINTED BY STRANGEWAYS AND SONS,
Tower Street, Upper St. Martin's Lane.
CONTENTS OF THE FIRST VOLUME.
PAGE
CHAPTER I.
THE SHELLEY OF ROMANTIC BIOGRAPHY 1
Creators of The Romantic Shelley--Clint's Fanciful
Composition--The Poet's Personal Appearance--His Little
Turn-up Nose--His Ancestral Quality--Sussexisms of his Speech
and Poetry--His Phenomenal Untruthfulness--His Temperance and
Intemperance--A Victim of Domestic Persecution--Was _The
Necessity of Atheism_ a mere Squib?--Lord Eldon's Decree--The
Slaughter of Reputations--The Poet's Character--His Treatment
of his familiar Friend--Biographic Fictions--Extravagances of
Shelleyan Enthusiasm.
CHAPTER II. THE SHELLEYS OF SUSSEX 13
Medwin's Blunders--Lady Shelley's Statement of the Case--The
Michelgrove Shelleys--Sir William Shelley, Justice of The
Common Pleas--The Castle Goring Shelleys--Their Pedigree at
the Heralds' College--Evidences of the Connexion of the Two
Families--John Shelley, 'Esquire and Lunatic'--Timothy
Shelley, the Yankee Apothecary--Bysshe Shelley's Career--His
Runaway Match with Catherine Michell--His Marriage with the
Heiress of Penshurst--His Great Wealth--The Poet's Alleged
Pride in his Connexion with the Sidneys--His Gentle, but not
Aristocratic, Lineage.
CHAPTER III. SHELLEY'S CHILDHOOD 27
The Poet's Father--Shelley's Birth and Birth-Chamber--Miss
Hellen Shelley's Recollections--The Child-Shelley's Pleasant
Fiction--His Aspect at Tender Age--His Description of his
own Nose--The Indian-Ink Sketch--Miss Curran's 'Daub'--
Williams's Water-Colour Drawing--Clint's Composition--
Engravings of 'The Daub' and 'The Composition'--The Poet's
Likeness in Marble--Shelley and Byron--Peacock and Hogg on
Shelley's Facial Beauty--The Colnaghi Engraving.
CHAPTER IV. THE BRENTFORD SCHOOLBOY 43
Dr. Greenlaw's Character--Quality of his School--Medwin's
Anecdotes to the Doctor's Discredit--Mr. Gellibrand's
Recollections of the Brentford Shelley--The Bullies of the
Brentford Playground--Shelley's Character at the School--His
Disposition to Somnambulism--His Delight in Novels--His
Wretchedness at School--Shelleyan Egotism--Byronic
Egotism--Byron's Influence on Shelley--Enduring Influence of
Novels on Shelley's Mind--Stories of Boating--Easter Holidays
in Wiltshire--'Essay on Friendship'--Its Biographical Value.
CHAPTER V. THE ETON SCHOOLBOY 69
First year at Eton--Creation of the Castle-Goring Baronetcy--
Sir Bysshe Shelley's Last Will--Timothy Shelley's Children--
Miss Hellen Shelley's Recollections--The Etonian at Home--
The Big Tortoise--The Great Snake--Dr. Keate--Mr. Packe at
fault--Walter Halliday--Mr. Hexter--Mr. Bethell--Fagging--Mad
Shelley--'Old Walker'--Enthusiasm for Natural Science--The
Rebel of the School--Lord High Atheist--Dr. Lind's Pernicious
Influence on Shelley--Poetical Fictions about Dr. Lind--
Shelley's Illness at Field Place--His Monstrous Hallucination
touching his Father--John Shelley the Lunatic--_Zastrozzi_--
Premature Withdrawal from Eton.
CHAPTER VI. ZASTROZZI; A ROMANCE. BY P. B. S. 110
Literary Ambition--Biographical Value of _Zastrozzi_--The
Etonian Shelley's Disesteem of Marriage--Review of the
Romance--Julia and Matilda--Conceits of the Romance
reproduced in _Laon and Cythna_--Egotisms of the Prose Tale
and the Poem--The Original of Count Verezzi and Laon.
CHAPTER VII. BETWEEN ETON AND OXFORD 123
Literary Interests and Enterprise--A.M. Oxon. Letter--
Shelley's Hunger for Publisher's Money--Winter 1809-10--
Nightmare--_The Wandering Jew_--Medwin in Lincoln's Inn
Fields--The Fragment of Ahasuerus--Its Influence on Byron and
Shelley--Matriculation at Oxford--Shelley at the Bodleian--
John Ballantyne and Co.--Shelley in Pall Mall--Stockdale's
Scandalous _Budget_--_Victor and Cazire_--Their Original
Poetry--Who was Cazire?--Felicia Dorothea Browne--
Illumination of Young Ladies--Harriett Grove--The Groves and
Shelleys in London--Shelley's Interest in Harriett Grove.
CHAPTER VIII. ST. IRVYNE; OR, THE ROSICRUCIAN: A ROMANCE. BY A
GENTLEMAN OF THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD 153
Venal Villains--'Jock' instructed to 'Pouch' them--At Work on
another Novel--The Dog of a Publisher--Devil of a Price--_St.
Irvyne_--Irving's Hill--Review of _St. Irvyne_--Wolfstein the
Magnanimous--Megalena de Metastasio--Olympia della Anzasca--
Eloise St. Irvyne--The Virtuous Fitzeustace--Ginotti's Doom--
The Oxonian Shelley's Repugnance to Marriage--His
Commendation of Free Love--Parallel Passages of _Zastrozzi_
and _St. Irvyne_--The Verses of _St. Irvyne_.
CHAPTER IX. MR. DENIS FLORENCE MACCARTHY _v._ THOMAS JEFFERSON
HOGG 168
Shelley's Matriculation at Oxford--Hogg's Matriculation at
Oxford--Hogg's First Arrival at Oxford--Lord Grenville's
Election--Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy's Blunders--Hogg's
'New Monthly' Papers on Shelley at Oxford--Mrs. Shelley's
Reason for not Writing her Husband's 'Life'--Peacock's Reason
for not Writing it--Leigh Hunt's Reason for not Writing
it--Hogg undertakes the Task--Hogg's Two Volumes--Their
Merits and Faults--Hogg dismissed by Field Place--His
Mistakes and Misrepresentations--Some of his
Misrepresentations adopted by Field Place.
CHAPTER X. AT OXFORD: MICHAELMAS TERM, 1810 179
Hogg's Toryism--Shelley's Liberalism--In Hogg's Rooms--
Shelley's Looks and Voice--Patron and Idolater--The Ways of
Passing Time--Hogg's Reminiscences--Nocturnal Readings and
Conversations--Country about Oxford--Pistol Practice--Playing
with Paper Boats--Windmill and Plashy Meadow--The Horror of
it--Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson--University
Tattle and Laughter--Eccentric Inseparables--Pond under
Shotover Hill--Pacing 'The High'--Dons' Civility to Shelley--
His Incivility to Dons--Uninteresting Stones and Dull
People--'Partly True and Partly False'--The Fiery Hun!--'My
Dear Boy'--Shelley offers his Sister to Hogg in
Marriage--Hogg entertains the Proposal--End of Term.
CHAPTER XI. THE CHRISTMAS VACATION OF 1810-11 210
Presentation copies of _St. Irvyne_--Shelley resorts to
Deception--Shelley in Disgrace at Field Place--Harriett
Grove's Dismissal of her Suitor--The Squire's Anger--Mrs.
Shelley's Alarm for her Girls--Shelley's Troubles--His Rage
against Intolerance--His Wild Letters to Hogg--'Married to a
Clod'--Stockdale's Design--His Intercourse with Shelley's
Father--More Negotiations with the Pall-Mall Publisher--
Shelley a Deist--Controversial Correspondence--Shelley's
Attempt to enlighten his Father--His Passage from Deism to
Atheism--The Squire relents to his Son--Hogg invited to Field
Place--Stockdale's Disappointment--Stockdale's Character--His
Scandalous _Budget_.
CHAPTER XII. MR. MACCARTHY'S DISCOVERIES TOUCHING THE OXONIAN
SHELLEY 234
_A Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things_--Evidence
that the Poem was Published--Reasons for Thinking it may
never have been Published--Reasons for Thinking that, if the
Poem was Published, it was promptly Suppressed--Did Shelley
contribute Prose and Poetry to the _Oxford Herald_?--Spurious
Letter to the Editor of the _Statesman_--Shelley's First
Letter to Leigh Hunt--His way of Introducing himself to
Strangers--Did he at the Same Moment Think Well and Ill of
his Father?--Miss Janetta Phillips's Poems--E. & W. Phillips,
the Worthing Printers.
CHAPTER XIII. SHELLEY'S SECOND RESIDENCE-TERM AT OXFORD 251
Harriett Westbrook--Her Character and Beauty--How Shelley
came to care for her--Her Subscription for Janetta Phillips's
Poems--Shelley's first Visit to Harriett's Home--His
Intention to compete for 'the Newdigate'--Thornton Hunt's
scandalous Suggestion--Obligations of the Oxford
Undergraduate--Mary Wollstonecraft on the Guinea Forfeit--
Shelley's False Declaration--His numerous Untruths--_The
Necessity of Atheism_--Was it a Squib?--Lady Shelley's
Inaccuracies--Mr. Garnett's Misdescription of the Tract--His
Misrepresentation of Hogg--The _Little Syllabus_ printed at
Worthing--More Untruths by Shelley--The Tract offered for
Sale in Oxford--Shelley called before 'the Dons'--His
Expulsion from University College--Hogg's Impudence and
Craft--His Misrepresentations--Shelley and Hogg leave Oxford.
CHAPTER XIV. THE SPRING AND SUMMER OF 1811 292
Arrival in Town--The Poland-Street Exiles--The Squire's
Correspondence with Hogg's Father--His gentle Treatment of
Shelley--Dinner at Miller's Hotel--Hogg's Testimony to the
Squire's Worth--Shelley's Nicknames for his Father--Shelley
rejects his Father's Terms--Shelley offers Terms to his
Father--The Squire's Indignation--He Relents--He makes
Shelley a Liberal Allowance--Lady Shelley's
Misrepresentations--The Exiles about Town--The Separation of
'The Inseparables'--Shelley's Intimacy with the Westbrooks
Shelley's Intimacy with the Westbrooks--John Westbrook's
Calling and Character--Taking the Sacrament--Harriett
Westbrook's Conversion to Atheism--Her Disgrace at School--
Shelley's Measures for illuminating his Sister Hellen--
Tourists in Wales--The Change in Elizabeth Shelley--
Arrangements for a Clandestine Meeting--Mrs. Shelley's
Treatment of her Son--Captain Pilford's Kindness to his
Nephew--Harriett Westbrook's Appeal to Shelley--Her Decision
and Indecision--From Wales to London--Hogg's Influence--The
Elopement to Scotland--Hogg starts for Edinburgh.
CHAPTER XV. MOTIVE AND INFLUENCES 330
The fatal Marriage--Was Shelley trapt into it?--Mr. Garnett's
Assurances--The Fiction about Claire--Lady Shelley's Use of
Hogg's Evidences--The Prenuptial Intercourse--Was it
slight?--Shelley's Opportunities for knowing all about
Harriett--His Use and Abuse of those Opportunities--Mr.
Westbrook's Action towards Shelley--His Endeavour to preserve
Harriett from Shelley--Eliza Westbrook's part in making up
the Match--The Tool's Reward--The Etonian Free Lover--The
Social Condition of the Westbrooks and Godwins--Harriett
Westbrook's Beauty--Her Education--Her Knowledge of French--
Her quick Progress in Latin--What Wonder that Shelley fell in
love with her?
CHAPTER XVI. EDINBURGH, YORK, AND KESWICK 338
The Scotch Marriage--The Trio at Edinburgh--'Wha's the
Deil?'--Posting from Edinburgh to York--Dingy Lodgings and
Dingy Milliners--Shelley's run South--Did Harriett accompany
him?--The Squire stops the Supplies--The Earl's Description
of Harriett Westbrook--The Squire's Anger at the
_Mésalliance_--The Course Shelley could not take--Eliza
Westbrook in Possession--The Ouse at full Flood--One too
many--Designs on Greystoke Castle--Shelley's Appeal to the
Duke of Norfolk--The Codicil to Sir Bysshe's Will--The Flight
to Richmond--Miss Westbrook strikes her Enemy--The Trio at
Keswick--Shelley's affectionate Letters from Keswick to Hogg
at York--John Westbrook's Daughters at Greystoke Castle--
Ducal Benignity and Policy--The Calverts of Greta Bank--
Shelley's Means during his first Marriage--How to live on
Three Hundred a-year--How not to live on Four Hundred a-year.
CHAPTER XVII. GRETA BANK 380
Shelley wishes for a Sussex Cottage--His Friends at Keswick--
Southey at Home--Poet and Schoolmaster--Southey's Way of
handling Shelley--Shelley caught Napping--Mrs. Southey's
Tea-cakes--Eggs and Bacon on Hounslow Heath--At Home with the
Calverts--Shelley's remarkable Communications to Southey--His
Story of Harriett's Expulsion from School--The Story to
Hogg's Infamy--Mr. MacCarthy on the _Posthumous Fragments_--
Miss Westbrook's transient Contentment--Shelley's _For Ever_
and _Never_--His Interest in Ireland--Burning Questions--
Southey and Shelley at War--The _Address to the Irish
People_--Letters to Skinner Street--Godwin tickled by them--
Shelleyan Conceptions and Misconceptions--Shelley forgets all
about Dr. Lind--Preparations for the Irish Campaign--Letter
of Introduction to Curran--Project for a happy Meeting in
Wales--Miss Eliza Hitchener--Bright Angel and Brown Demon--
Shelley's Delight in her--His Abhorrence of her.
CHAPTER XVIII. SHELLEY'S QUARREL WITH HOGG 407
Shelley's Suspicion of Hogg--His Conviction of Hogg's Guilt--
Did Hogg make the Attempt?--The Manipulated Letter--Hogg's
Object in publishing it--His Purpose in altering it--The
Great Discovery--Evidence of Hogg's Guilt--Sources of the
Evidence--Shelley's Correspondence with Miss Hitchener--His
Letters from Keswick to Hogg--Their vehement
Affectionateness--Eliza Westbrook in Office--Shelley under
Training--Sisters in Council--Shelley's Conferences with
Harriett--Proofs of Hogg's Innocence--_Primâ Facie_
Improbability--Why Hogg was not charged at York--His
Arraignment at Keswick--Condemned in his Absence--The
Reconciliation--Divine Forgiveness--Hogg's Restoration to
Intimacy with Harriett--Shelley's subsequent Intimacy with
Hogg--Hogg's Intimacy with Mary Godwin--Shelley's
Acknowledgment of Delusion--He begs Pardon of Hogg--Hogg's
Denials of the Charge--Hypothetical Letters--Concluding
Estimate of Harriett's Evidence--If Hogg should be proved
Guilty--Consequences to Shelley's Reputation.
THE REAL SHELLEY.
CHAPTER I.
THE SHELLEY OF ROMANTIC BIOGRAPHY.
Creators of The Romantic Shelley--Clint's Fanciful Composition--The
Poet's Personal Appearance--His Little Turn-up Nose--His Ancestral
Quality--Sussexisms of his Speech and Poetry--His Phenomenal
Untruthfulness--His Temperance and Intemperance--A Victim of Domestic
Persecution--Was _The Necessity of Atheism_ a mere Squib?--Lord
Eldon's Decree--The Slaughter of Reputations--The Poet's
Character--His Treatment of his familiar Friend--Biographic
Fictions--Extravagances of Shelleyan Enthusiasm.
From a time considerably anterior to the day on which Hogg undertook to
write the _Life_ of his college friend, three separate forces,
(_a_) Field Place,
(_b_) The Shelleyan Enthusiasts,
(_c_) The Shelleyan Socialists,
have been steadily working to withdraw the Real Shelley from the world's
view, and to replace him with a Shelley, altogether unlike the poet, who
carried Mary Godwin off to the Continent, and wrote _Laon and Cythna_.
By 'Field Place,' I mean those members of the poet's family (living or
dead), who in their pious devotion to his memory, and laudable concern for
the honour of their house, have busied themselves in creating this
fanciful and romantic Shelley, and substituting him for the Real Shelley.
By designating these members of the Shelley family by the name of the
house that is Shelley's shrine, even as the Stratford birthplace is
Shakespeare's shrine, and Newstead Abbey is Byron's shrine, I shall be
able to refer with the least possible offensiveness to excellent
individuals, from whom I am constrained to differ on a large number of
Shelleyan questions.
By 'The Shelleyan Enthusiasts,' I mean vehement admirers of Shelley's
poetry, who, without ever thinking about his social views, delight in
imagining that the poet's character and career resembled his genius in its
grandeur, and his song in its loftiness and beauty.
By 'The Shelleyan Socialists' I mean those conscientious though misguided
persons, who, valuing Shelley for his mischievous social philosophy, and
thinking of Marriage somewhat as the pious John Milton thought of it in
the seventeenth century, and somewhat as the devout Martin Bucer thought
of it in the sixteenth century, regard with various degrees of approval or
tolerance Shelley's daring, though by no means original, proposal for
abolishing lawful marriage, and replacing it with the Free Contract, from
which each of the contracting parties is free to retire on the death of
their mutual affection, and who, in accordance with their various degrees
of approval or tolerance of the proposal, have contributed or are
contributing, by written words or by spoken words, either to the opinion
that society should adopt the proposal, or to the opinion that, without
abolishing lawful marriage, society should recognize the Free Contract as
a kind of marriage, to the extent of holding persons who live under it
conscientiously, as blameless or not greatly blameworthy for doing so.
The work of creating the romantic Shelley, and endowing him with personal
and moral graces, never conspicuous in the real Shelley, was begun not
long after the poet's death, when Mrs. Shelley and Mrs. Williams induced
Clint to compose the fancy picture, to which the world is, through the
engraver's art, indebted for its very erroneous conception of Shelley's
personal aspect. Who has not, through the engraver's art, gazed on the
face of that charming portraiture: a face so remarkable for gentle
delicacy and symmetrical loveliness? Gazing on the beauteous face, who has
not observed the rather large, straight, delicately-modelled,
finely-pointed nose?--The original of the lovely picture had a notably
unsymmetrical face, and a little turn-up nose.
Having replaced his unsymmetrical visage with a face of exquisite
symmetry, the cunning idolaters have introduced the poet as a gentleman of
high ancestral dignity, to a world ever too quick to honour men of ancient
gentility. His remote forefathers have been proclaimed persons of knightly
rank and virtue. His house (founded though it was by a comparatively
self-made man, who won his baronetcy years after the poet's birth) has
been declared a branch of the Michelgrove Shelleys. Cynics and humourists
may well smile to recall all that has been written of the poet's mediæval
ancestors and his shield of twenty-one quarterings, whilst they remember
at the same time that his grandfather was the younger son of a Yankee
apothecary, that his earlier people of the eighteenth and seventeenth
centuries were undistinguished though gentle persons, the squireens and
farmers, of whose claim to be rated with the great families of Sussex more
will be said in a subsequent chapter.
Endowing him with aristocratic descent, the Shelleyan idolaters have
discovered indications of nobility in the Sussex provincialisms that
qualified the utterances of the poet's singularly disagreeable voice, and
may be now and then detected in his outpourings of song: provincialisms to
remind the reader of Byron's scarcely perceptible Scotch accent, and the
Scotticisms of expression that are occasionally discoverable in his poems.
The Sussex peasantry seldom sound the final _g_ of words ending with that
letter, and Sussex gentlemen are sometimes heard to say 'Good mornin' to
one another.' Shelley was sometimes guilty of this provincialism. For
instance, in _Laon and Cythna_ (1817), and again in _Arethusa_ (1820), he
makes _ruin_ rhyme to _pursuing_. Mr. Buxton Forman regards the
provincialism as an indication of the poet's aristocratic quality. 'I need
not,' says the enthusiastic editor, 'tell the reader that, to this day, it
is an affectation current among persons who are, or pretend to be, of the
aristocratic caste, not only to drop the final _g_ in these cases
themselves, but to stigmatize its pronunciation by other people as
"pedantic."'
Englishmen like people to be truthful, and in the long-run never fail to
honour the man, who, having the courage of his opinions, proclaims them
fearlessly, even though they may quarrel with him for a season, because he
tells the truth too pugnaciously, or persists in telling them truths they
don't wish to think about. To commend him to lovers of truth, the
Shelleyan idolaters declare the poet to have been, from his boyhood till
his death, daringly, unfalteringly, unwaveringly, invariably truthful.
Lady Shelley insists that at Eton he was more truth-loving than other
boys,--was, indeed, chiefly remarkable for unswerving and audacious
veracity. In half-a-dozen different biographies he is extolled for his
intolerance of falsehood. Most of the misfortunes that befel him are
attributed to his habit of telling the truth in season and out of season.
It is, indeed, admitted even by some of his panegyrists that he now and
then made statements at variance with fact. But on these occasions he is
declared to have spoken erroneously through the delusive influence of a
too powerful imagination. The inordinately vigorous fancy, that enabled
him to write _Queen Mab_, caused him sometimes to imagine things to have
taken place, when they had not taken place. His mis-statements resulted
altogether from misconception, and should not be regarded as in any way
affecting the overwhelming evidence that he loved truth more than life;
that he made great sacrifices for the truth's sake, that he was, in fact,
a martyr for the truth. It is, however, all too certain that he uttered
mis-statements, for which the force of his imagination cannot in any
degree whatever have been accountable; and that, instead of being more
truth-loving than most men, he was phenomenally untruthful. Telling fibs
in order to escape momentary annoyance or gain a trivial advantage, he
could instruct other persons to tell fibs in his interest. He was singular
amongst men of his degree for being able to declare his intention of
practising deceit, and forthwith being as bad as his word. Instances of
this candour in falsehood are given in the ensuing pages. When he tells a
fib, a gentleman is usually too much ashamed of the matter to take any one
into his confidence on the subject. There were times, when no such sense
of shame troubled Shelley.
Much has been written to Shelley's honour about his habitual temperance
and general disregard for the pleasures of the table. It has been
accounted to him for righteousness that he seldom drank wine, and for
months together ate nothing but vegetable food. As Shelley at one period
of his career found, or fancied, that his health was better, his mind
lighter and more vigorous, his whole soul in higher contentment, when he
lived wholly on vegetable food, than when he ate flesh, I cannot see why
it was eminently virtuous in him to take the food that seemed to suit him
best. As he drank fresh water and strong tea, because he liked them better
than mild ale and stiff toddy, it remains to be shown why he should be so
much commended for drinking what he liked best. Still temperance in diet
is one of the minor virtues. But was Shelley a temperate man in his
drinks? If he never drank wine immoderately, and in some periods of his
career was a total abstainer from all the usual alcoholic drinks, it is
certain that he was at times a heavy laudanum-drinker; and it is not
obvious why it is less intemperate to be sottish with spirits of wine, in
which opium has been macerated; than to be sottish with gin, in which
gentian has been macerated.
Misrepresenting the poet's story in the smaller matters, the Shelleyan
apologists have misrepresented it even more daringly in the larger
matters. Endeavouring to explain away his gravest academic offence, they
maintain that _The Necessity of Atheism_ was a trivial essay, a little
argumentative syllabus, a humorous _brochure_, that did not exhibit his
real opinions on matters pertaining to religion; that it was printed only
for private circulation amongst the learned; that it was never offered for
sale to the general public. Yet it is certain that he reproduced some of
its argument in the _Letter to Lord Ellenborough_; that more than two
years after its first publication, he revised, amended, and reprinted it
in the notes to _Queen Mab_; that later still he reproduced some of its
reasoning in the _Refutation of Deism_, and that it was offered for sale
to anyone who cared to buy it at Oxford. Mr. Garnett declares the essay to
have been nothing more than 'a squib,' and gives Hogg as his authority for
the staggering statement. Yet it is certain that Hogg makes no such
statement; but is, on the contrary, most careful and precise in declaring
how completely earnest and sincere Shelley was in the matter. Declaring
that the essay was no expression of the author's genuine opinions, the
Shelleyan apologists almost in the same breath declare it to have been an
utterance of his real convictions, and applaud him for his courage in
putting forth clearly what he believed to be true.
One of the prime biographic fictions about Shelley is, that he endured
persecution for publishing this equally sincere and insincere profession
of no faith, not only at Oxford but in his domestic circle. It is asserted
that he was treated cruelly by his father, excluded from Field Place,
driven from his boyhood's home, and even disinherited, for this and other
bold declarations of what he believed to be true. Sympathy and admiration
are demanded for him as a martyr for the truth's sake. 'On the sensitively
affectionate feelings of the young controversialist and poet,' Lady
Shelley says, 'this sentence of exclusion from his boyhood's home
inflicted a bitter pang, yet he was determined to bear it for the sake of
what he believed to be right and true.' With the perplexing perversity
that characterised so many of his utterences about his private affairs,
Shelley himself, after surrendering by his own act, and of his own will,
the position assigned to him in respect to his grandfather's property by
his grandfather's will, used to speak of himself as having made great
sacrifices of his material interests for the truth, and to offer himself
to the sympathy and admiration of his friends as a martyr for conscience's
sake. Yet it is certain that he was treated kindly by his father in
respect to the causes and immediate consequences of his academic disgrace;
that he was excluded from Field Place in the first instance, not on
account of his religious opinions, but on account of his outrageous
disregard for his father's wishes in respect to other matters; that he was
excluded from Field Place in 1811 only for a few weeks, during which time
so far from 'being determined to bear it for the sake of what he believed
to be right and true,' he never for a moment designed to respect the
sentence of banishment, but intended to return to his boyhood's home as
soon as it should please him to do so; and that, the few weeks of discord
having passed, he was received at Field Place by his father and endowed
with a handsome yearly allowance of pocket-money. No less certain is it
that he was never driven from his boyhood's home; that on eventually
withdrawing from the old domestic circle, he left it of his own accord, to
make a runaway match with a licensed victualler's daughter; and that,
instead of resulting from differences of opinion on questions of religion
and politics (differences which at most only aggravated and embittered a
quarrel due to other causes), his estrangement from and rupture with his
family resulted from (1) their reasonable displeasure at his
_mésalliance_, and (2) the reasonable displeasure of his grandfather, and
father, at his refusal to concur with them in effecting a particular
settlement of certain real estate.
To give yet another example of the audacious way in which Shelley's story
has been mistold in respect to its principal incidents. Every one has
heard how Shelley was deprived of the custody of his children by Lord
Eldon; how, on account of his religious opinions, and for no other cause,
he was robbed of his dear babes by the cruel and fanatical Lord
Chancellor. Lady Shelley speaks furiously of 'the monstrous injustice of
this decree.' In an article, written to the lively gratification of the
Shelleyan Enthusiasts and the Shelleyan Socialists, the _Edinburgh Review_
not long since (October, 1882) declared that the judgment was formed and
the decree delivered, 'on the ground, not of Shelley's misconduct to his
wife, but of the opinions expressed in his writings.' The words of the
Edinburgh Reviewer are absolutely erroneous. The judgment was formed in
steady consideration of the poet's misconduct to his first wife; and in
its delivery the Chancellor was careful to say, not once, but repeatedly,
that he decreed against the poet's petition, _not_ on account of any
opinions expressed in his writings (considered apart from conduct), _but_
on account of his _conduct_ (the word conduct, conduct, conduct, being
reiterated by the Chancellor, till the reader of the decree grows weary of
it)--on account of his _conduct_ in respect to his wife; _conduct_ showing
his resolve to act on the Free Contract principles, set forth in the
anti-matrimonial note to _Queen Mab_; _conduct_ justifying the opinion
that if Harriett Westbrook's children were delivered to him, he would rear
them to hold his own anti-matrimonial views. That so respectable an organ
of public opinion should make this statement is significant. It indicates
how great is the force with which I venture to contend, not without hope
that my weak hands may be strengthened by all who reverence marriage.
A matter to be noticed, in connection with the efforts to substitute the
romantic for the Real Shelley, is that their success will involve the
discredit, if not the absolute infamy, of nearly all the principal
persons, whom the poet encountered in friendship or enmity, on his way
from birth to death. To accept the extravagant stories told by Shelley or
his idolaters is to believe, that the poet's father was a prodigy of
parental wickedness; that his mother was hatefully deficient in maternal
affection; that Dr. Greenlaw was a malicious, base-natured pedagogue; that
the Eton masters (from Dr. Keate to Mr. Bethell) delighted in persecuting
their famous pupil; that the Master and Fellows of University College were
actuated by the basest motives (including sycophancy to a powerful
minister) in requiring the poet to leave Oxford; that Hogg was a nauseous
villain, who attempted to seduce his friend's wife within a few weeks of
her wedding-day; that the first Mrs. Shelley broke her marriage-vow; that
William Godwin, instead of feeling like the honest man he affected to be
at his daughter's flight, chuckled in his sleeve at his girl's good
fortune in winning a rich baronet's son for her paramour and eventual
husband; that Lord Chancellor Eldon was an unjust judge, who delivered a
monstrous decree at the instigation of religious bigotry and political
resentment; that Peacock was either a simpleton or traitor in bearing
testimony to the first Mrs. Shelley's conjugal goodness; that William
Jerdan was a virulent slanderer; that Sir John Taylor Coleridge was a
malignant calumniator; that Byron, whom Shelley throughout successive
years honoured as a supremely great man, and for a while worshipt as a
god, was the meanest, paltriest, dirtiest knave that ever broke a sacred
trust, and stole a letter. It is thus that the creators of the romantic
Shelley deal with the persons most influential on the poet's career and
reputation. It is true they have good words for the hard-swearing Windsor
apothecary, who gave the Etonian Shelley lessons in commination and
chemistry; and for Leigh Hunt, the equally insatiable and charming
parasite, who took all he could get from his young friend's pocket. The
Squire of Field Place, Dr. Greenlaw, Dr. Keate, Mr. Bethell, the Master
and Tutors of University College, Hogg, William Godwin, Lord Eldon,
Peacock, William Jerdan, Sir John Taylor Coleridge, Byron, were all odious
in different ways. The only good and true men, of all the many notable
men, Shelley encountered on his way through life, were Dr. Lind and Leigh
Hunt. Surely there must be something wrong in the story, that slays so
many reputations, whilst it selects Dr. Lind and Leigh Hunt for approval.
Were there not another and very different side to the story, this book
would not have been written. Unless I read it amiss (and I am sure I read
it aright, for I have studied it carefully, and in doing so have found it
to have been perused only in parts, and in some parts with strange
carelessness, by all previous biographers), it stands out clear upon the
record, that from his boyhood Shelley was disposed to rise in rebellion
against all persons placed in authority over him; that instead of having
the gentle nature attributed to him by fanciful historians, he was
quick-tempered and resentful; that without being desperately wicked, his
heart was strangely deceitful towards himself; that he was a bad and
disloyal son to a kind-hearted and well-intentioned father, and by no
means a good son to a gentle-natured and conscientious mother; that he was
a bad husband to his first wife, and far from a faultless husband to his
second wife; that, together with several agreeable characteristics, he
possessed several dangerous qualities; and that he was, at least towards
one person, a bad friend.
So strangely has Shelley's story been mistold, that this last assertion is
likely to make readers start with surprise and revolt against the author.
Let it, therefore, be justified at once. The poet had a familiar friend,
from whom he had received much kindness, for whom he professed cordial
veneration, and with whom he lived in close intimacy. This friend had an
only daughter, a bright, lively, romantic, lovely girl, still only sixteen
years old. Reared within the lines of religious orthodoxy, this young girl
had been educated to think of marriage just as other young English girls
are usually taught to think of it. Though he had in former time been an
advocate of the Free Contract, her father had changed his views about
marriage before her birth, and had abandoned his Free Contract views when
she was still a nursling. Soon after making this girl's acquaintance,
Shelley passed into discord with his wife; and soon after ceasing to love
his wife, he fixed his affections on his friend's daughter. Without
speaking to his friend on the subject, or giving him occasion to suspect
what he was about, Shelley paid his addresses to this child, and had won
her heart, ere ever it occurred to her father that they might be living
too intimately and affectionately with one another. It was with great
difficulty Shelley overcame the child's notions of right in which she had
been educated; but, eventually, he accomplished his purpose. A few days
later, leaving his wife in England, Shelley stole this young child from
her home, and, carrying her off to the Continent, lived with her as though
she were his wife. He did this, though she was his most intimate friend's
only daughter, though she was only sixteen years old, and though he had no
prospect of ever being able to marry her. The creators of the romantic
Shelley deal with this episode of Shelley's story as though it were a
pleasant and unusually interesting love-passage. Some of them are unable
to see that Shelley was at all to blame in the business. Those of them,
who admit it was not altogether right of him to act thus towards so young
a girl, maintain that the author of such superlatively fine poetry as
_Adonais_ and _The Cenci_ cannot have been very wrong in the affair, and
should not be judged in respect to the matter, as though he were a young
man incapable of writing fine poetry. No one of them has a word of
compassion for the girl's father. Mr. Froude is of opinion that in this
matter Shelley was guilty of nothing worse than 'the sin of acting on
emotional theories of liberty,' and should be judged tenderly, because he
was young and enthusiastic! Differing from Mr. Froude, I venture to say
that, in acting thus ill towards the girl, Shelley was guilty of very
hateful treason towards his friend. I ask English fathers with young
children about them, and English brothers with young sisters for
playmates, to judge between me and my adversary.
Since it dismissed Hogg with scant courtesy for being too realistic and
communicative, Field Place has done much to gratify the Shelleyan
enthusiasts and socialists. Soon after publishing the uniformly erroneous
_Shelley Memorials_, Field Place promised to produce, in due season,
evidence that Shelley was not seriously to blame in his treatment of his
first wife. For years Field Place has gathered evidences for the poet's
vindication. Field Place aided Mr. Buxton Forman in producing his stately
and careful edition of the poet's works. In comparatively recent time the
Field Place muniments have enabled a well-known writer to produce the
memoir of the poet's father-in-law (William Godwin), and a memoir of Mary
Wollstonecraft, in which she is styled Gilbert Imlay's wife, and is said
to have thought herself his wife before God and man, though they were
never married. And now Field Place is enabling another writer to produce
another authoritative history of Shelley and Mary, that shall raise Mary
Godwin yet nearer to the angels, and bring her husband's story into more
perfect harmony with the straight nose and symmetrical lineaments of
Clint's composition.
It is not surprising that Field Place should wish to produce some more
adequate memoir of its poet than Lady Shelley's _Shelley Memorials; from
Authentic Sources_. But however cleverly it may be executed, only the most
hopeful can hope that the promised biography will afford satisfaction to
the general public. It is simply impossible for it to satisfy those who
want the truth about Shelley, and at the same time to satisfy the
enthusiasts who would be pained by the truth, and the Shelleyan
Socialists who are chiefly desirous that the truth should not be told. To
satisfy those who want the truth and the whole of it: to produce a memoir
that shall be worth the paper on which it is printed, it will be necessary
for the official biographer to show that Lady Shelley's work is from first
to last a book of mistakes--that it is wrong in every page; wrong in its
views of the poet's character; wrong in its general outline of his career;
wrong in its incidents; wrong in its names and dates; wrong, even in its
particulars of domestic affairs, legal matters, and pecuniary
arrangements--particulars in respect to which a biographer, with access to
authentic sources of information, has no excuse for blundering. Can such
candour be looked for from the source which gave us the _Shelley
Memorials_? Is it conceivable that the new official scribe will be
permitted to deal thus honestly with Lady Shelley's book from authentic
sources? If he is required to make his book agree with this thing from
authentic sources, he must dismiss the hope of pleasing the general
public.
On the other hand, to please the enthusiasts and the more fervid Shelleyan
Socialists he must tell that Shelley was sinless, stainless, divine; that
Mary Wollstonecraft was married, in the sight of God and man, to the
American adventurer, who never married her; and that Mary Godwin showed a
justifiable disregard of social prejudices, when she went off to
Switzerland with another woman's husband. He must produce a work more or
less calculated to illuminate the English people out of their reverence
for marriage, and educate them into a philosophical tolerance of the Free
Contract. Nothing less thorough will appear to the more fervid of the
Shelleyan Socialists a sufficient vindication of the poet's superhuman
excellence.
For in these days, to please both sets of zealots, it is not enough for a
biographer to delight in Shelley's verse; to render homage to his genius;
to think him--as all men of culture and poetical sensibility concur in
thinking him--the brightest, most strenuous, and most musical of lyric
poets; and at the same time, taking a charitable view of his failings and
indiscretions, to palliate them in all honest ways, or look away from
them, when they admit of no honest palliation. This is not enough for the
enthusiasts, who insist that the poet's character and career were
altogether in harmony with his art. It only exasperates the most
strenuous of the social innovators, who honouring him for his social
philosophy even more than for his poetry, have no word of cordial censure,
and scarcely a word of regret, for the way in which he acted on 'his
emotional theories of liberty.' Readers must not blink the fact, that the
more able and resolute of the Shelleyan enthusiasts recognize in Shelley a
great social teacher and regenerator, as well as a great poet. To Mr.
Buxton Forman, the author of _Laon and Cyntha_ is 'that Shelley who, in
some circumstances, might have been the Saviour of the World.' It is
needless for me to express my opinion of the comparison instituted by
these words. It is enough for me to say that the words are Mr. Buxton
Forman's words, and that he represents favourably the learning and
sentiment of a body of gentlemen, whose generous fervour appears to me
more commendable than their discretion.
When it is possible for such words to be written by an eminent Shelleyan
specialist, and to be read with approval by men of high culture, it must
surely be admitted that Shelleyan enthusiasm has gone quite far enough;
and that it is well for a writer to produce a truthful account of the
poet, who is thus offered to universal homage.
I have not discovered the Real Shelley. The poet of these volumes is the
same Real Shelley, who appears in his most agreeable aspects in Hogg's
biography, the delightful book that was stopped midway, because its
realism offended the Hunts and Field Place. I mean to show that Shelley
was judged fairly, though severely, by those of his contemporaries who,
whilst recognizing his genius, condemned his principles, conduct, and
social theories. In respect to the Real Shelley, I shall merely bring to
light what has been hurtfully withdrawn, or hurtfully withheld from view.
As for the fictitious Shelley, with which the Real Shelley has been
replaced, I mean to demolish it. In destroying it, I shall be animated by
a desire to do something before I go away, to counteract the strong stream
of literature--a literature of books, pamphlets, magazine-articles, and
articles in powerful journals--which for more than a quarter of a century
has been educating people to approve or tolerate the pernicious social
philosophy, that requires sound-hearted England to abolish marriage and
replace it with the Free Contract.
CHAPTER II.
THE SHELLEYS OF SUSSEX.
Medwin's Blunders--Lady Shelley's Statement of The Case--The
Michelgrove Shelleys--Sir William Shelley, Justice of The Common
Pleas--The Castle Goring Shelleys--Their Pedigree at the Heralds'
College--Evidences of the Connexion of the Two Families--John Shelley,
'Esquire and Lunatic'--Timothy Shelley, the Yankee Apothecary--Bysshe
Shelley's Career--His Runaway Match with Catherine Michell--His
Marriage with the Heiress of Penshurst--His Great Wealth--The Poet's
Alleged Pride in his Connexion with the Sidneys--His Gentle, but not
Aristocratic, Lineage.
So much has been written in the ways of sycophancy or vaingloriousness
about Shelley's Norman descent and aristocratic quality, it is necessary
to glance at some of the facts of his ancestral story.
The poet's friend, from the time when they were schoolfellows at
Brentford, Thomas Medwin the Younger, was also the poet's kinsman--his
third cousin, through Sir Bysshe Shelley's marriage with Mary Catherine
Michell, and his second cousin, through Sir Timothy Shelley's marriage
with Elizabeth Pilford. It might have been supposed that a biographer,
thus related to Shelley by blood and friendship, would know the prime
facts of his friend's pedigree, and state them without egregious error.
But poor Tom Medwin was not remarkable for accuracy.
To rely in this affair on the whilom _littérateur_ and cavalry officer, is
to believe that the poet was a lineal descendant of Sir John Shelley of
Maresfield Park, who was created a baronet in 1611; to believe that this
Sir John Shelley's son (William) was a Justice of the Common Pleas; and to
believe that the poet's great-grandfather (Timothy Shelley, of Fen Place,
Co. Sussex) was a lineal descendant, in the ninth descent, of the
aforesaid baronet of James the First's time. 'I will only say,' Medwin
remarks lightly, 'that Sir John Shelley, of Maresfield Park, who dated his
Baronetage from the earliest creation of that title in 1611, had besides
other issue, two sons, Sir William, a Judge of the Common Pleas, and
Edward; from the latter of whom, in the seventh descent, sprung Timothy,
who also had two sons, and settled--having married an American lady--at
Christ's Church, Newark, in North America.'
Medwin is wrong in all the really important allegations of the brief
statement. Sir John Shelley of Michelgrove (the baronet referred to) had
two sons; but neither of them was named Edward; neither of them became a
Justice of the Common Pleas; neither of them was in any way or degree
accountable for Percy Bysshe Shelley's appearance on the earth's surface.
The poet was no more descended from Sir John Shelley, the first of the
Michelgrove baronets, than he was descended from the man in the moon. How
could the poet's great-grandfather (Timothy, born in 1700 A.D.) be the
eighth in descent from the first Michelgrove baronet, the seventh in
descent from either of the baronet's sons? Human generations do not come
and go at the rate of seven to a century.
To pass for a moment from Tom Medwin (of whose egregious mis-statements
something more must be said) to the present Lady Shelley, the poet's
daughter-in-law. 'At the close of the last century,' says this lady in her
_Shelley Memorials: from Authentic Sources_, 'the family of the Shelleys
had long held a high position among the large landholders of Sussex.
Fortunate marriages in two generations preceding the birth of the poet
considerably increased the wealth and influence of the house, the head of
which was a staunch Whig.' Lady Shelley's book from authentic sources
contains several statements of no authenticity. For each of the principal
statements of the above-quoted words, she had, however, good authority.
But instead of coming to her from a single authentic source, the facts
embodied in the quotation were drawn from two different authentic sources,
the archives of the Michelgrove Shelleys, and the archives of the Castle
Goring Shelleys; and by cleverly combining the two sets of facts, Lady
Shelley conveys to her readers a very erroneous impression respecting the
condition of the poet's seventeenth-century ancestors. Unquestionably, the
Sussex Shelleys, at the close of the eighteenth century, had long held a
high position among the large landowners of the county. But these
fortunate Shelleys were not the family of which the poet was the brightest
ornament. They were the Michelgrove Shelleys; whereas the poet came of
people, differing greatly from the Michelgrove people in social quality.
He was of the Castle Goring Shelleys--a family that, instead of being
merely enriched, was created and established by the fortunate marriages to
which Lady Shelley refers. Before the first of those marriages, wedlock
had done much for the advantage of these inferior Shelleys. For instance,
the marriage, in 1692, of John Shelley, of Fen Place, _jure uxoris_, with
Helen, co-heir of Roger Bysshe, of Fen Place, Co. Sussex, had reclaimed
the poet's direct male ancestors from a state of territorial vagrancy, and
given them a permanent, though modest, abiding-place. But for a
considerable period after that marriage, the direct ancestral precursors
of the Castle Goring Shelleys were no such house as the readers of Lady
Shelley's book are likely to imagine. The Michelgrove Shelleys were one
'house,' the Castle Goring Shelleys were quite another house; though it
has for some time been the fashion of biographers to mix the two houses,
and speak of them by turns as one house, or as branches of the same house.
The Michelgrove Shelleys were an ancient house. The Castle Goring Shelleys
were a mushroom family, disdainfully regarded by the Michelgrove people,
at the opening of the nineteenth century.
Something more must be said of the older of these houses. The Michelgrove
Shelleys are said, for reasons no longer discoverable, to have entered the
country with the Conqueror. They may have done so. There is better
evidence that they had lands in Kent in the times of Edward I. and Edward
II., before they established themselves in Sussex; and still better
testimony, that one of the clan (John Shelley) was Member of Parliament
for Rye from 1415 to 1428. With this parliamentary personage, the house,
or rather the family from which the house proceeded, comes into the clear
light of history. Two long generations later (generations so lengthy that
one has reason to suspect a failure of the record) the house acquired a
dignity, which gave it an enduring place amongst the historic families of
the realm.
Bred to the law, William Shelley (the grandson, or maybe the
great-grandson, of the afore-mentioned Member for Rye) became Reader of
the Inner Temple in 1517, and after holding successively the office of a
Judge of the Sheriff's Court and the office of Recorder of the City of
London, rose to be a Judge of the Common Pleas somewhere about the
beginning of 1527. Before mounting to this eminence he had represented the
City in Parliament, and practised for six years as a Serjeant-at-law in
Westminster Hall. Those who know Cavendish's _Wolsey_ do not need to be
reminded of the part taken by this fortunate lawyer in the negotiations
that closed with the Cardinal's surrender of York House to Henry the
Eighth. 'Tell his Highness,' said the fallen Cardinal to the Judge of the
Common Pleas, 'that I am his most faithful subject and obedient beadsman,
whose command I will in no wise disobey; but will in all things fulfil his
pleasure, as you the father of the law say I may. I therefore charge your
conscience to discharge me, and show His Highness from me that I must
desire His Majesty to remember there is both heaven and hell;' a message
which the judge probably forgot to deliver, as he lived to entertain the
King at Michelgrove, and was continued in his office till Henry's death.
Surviving the sovereign, whom he served on the bench of the Common Pleas
for twenty years, Sir William Shelley served Edward the Sixth in the same
capacity, to the day of his own death, which occurred between November 3,
1548 (the date of his last fine), and May 10, 1549, the date of his
successor's appointment.
Fortunate in his professional career, Sir William Shelley was no less
fortunate in his domestic affairs. Marrying an heiress, he had, with other
children, John, the grandfather of the first Michelgrove baronet, and Sir
Richard Shelley, the last English Prior of St. John of Jerusalem.
Not much less than a century wrong in assigning the legal eminence of
Henry the Eighth's judge to the eldest son of James the First's baronet,
Medwin wrote under a general impression that the Shelleys to whom he was
related, had somehow or other descended from the Michelgrove house, an
impression which the poet seems also to have cherished, and imparted to
his college-friend and biographer, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, who writes in
serio-comic vein of Sir Guyon de Shelley and Sir Richard Shelley (the
Knight of Malta), as though the Grand Prior of the sixteenth century and
the Paladin with the three conchs were veritable forefathers of the Castle
Goring Shelleys.
That these Shelleys of the junior house were no family of singular
antiquity or overpowering dignity, is shown by the pedigree of Percy
Bysshe Shelley, published in the first volume of Mr. Forman's edition of
the poet's prose works. A pedigree of only nine generations, beginning
with mention of Henry Shelley, of Worminghurst, Co. Sussex, who died in
1623, this evidential writing puts it beyond question that the poet, of
whose ancestral grandeur so much has been written, was no man of noble or
otherwise splendid lineage; puts it beyond question, that whether regard
be had to the number of its generations, the antiquity of the earliest
dates, or the importance of the persons commemorated in its entries, it is
(from the date of Henry Shelley's death _temp._ James I. to Percy Bysshe
Shelley's birth in 1792) nothing more than such a pedigree as could be
displayed by the majority of the gentle families of the middle way of
English life, who never for a moment think of rating themselves as
families of patrician worth.
One or two rather awkward matters excepted, this pedigree is a fair and
honest record of the births, marriages, and deaths, of nine successive
generations of gentle people; but as an exhibition of familiar grandeur,
it is no more impressive than any pedigree one would regard as a matter of
course in the muniment room of a country gentleman, tracing his descent
from a gentle yeoman of the Elizabethan period. It mentions eight of the
poet's forefathers in the direct right line. Describing some of these
eight individuals as 'esquires,' and some of them as 'gentlemen,' the
record shows that no one of them bore any hereditary honour, or even the
dignity of knighthood before the poet's birth. It shows that no one of
them married a woman of higher quality than the degree of a simple
gentlewoman. Doubtless they were (with a single exception) gentlewomen in
the heraldic sense of the term,--daughters of gentlemen bearing arms,--but
to use an old-world phrase, no one of them was 'a woman of quality.' The
record shows, that at the time of the poet's birth, no one of his eight
male ancestors in the direct right line had served the State with
distinction, won a foremost place in one of the learned professions, or
attained to any social eminence higher than a place in a Commission of the
Peace.
Such is the evidence of the document of which Mr. Forman justly remarks,
'the pedigree speaks for itself to any careful reader.' And this evidence
is the more impressive, because the carefully elaborated record is the
pedigree deposited at the Heralds' College on 6th March, 1816, by Mr. John
Shelley Sidney (the poet's uncle by the half-blood), at a moment when he
was especially desirous of figuring to the best possible advantage in the
esteem of heralds and their employers. Regard being had to this
gentleman's character and social ambition, and his pride in his descent
from the Sidneys, it cannot be questioned that he made his genealogical
record showy and impressive to the utmost of his ability,--that he would
fain have driven it back another generation,--that could he have
demonstrated a connection between the Castle Goring and Michelgrove
Shelleys, he would not have omitted to prove them two branches of the same
tree.
Mr. John Shelley Sidney's forbearance from pushing the genealogical record
a single stage backwards beyond the certain evidences, is the more
noteworthy and creditable, because he can scarcely have been ignorant of
the inconclusive, though by no means inconsiderable, testimony that the
Henry Shelley, who died at Worminghurst in 1623, was the grandson of
Edward Shelley of the said parish, and that this Edward Shelley was the
younger brother of the Judge of the Common Pleas, who was the actual
founder of the Michelgrove family.
What are the inconclusive, though considerable, evidences of this descent
of the Castle Goring Shelleys and the Michelgrove Shelleys from a common
ancestor, John Shelley, the judge's father? A manuscript, in the
possession of the present Sir Percy Shelley, bears witness that the Henry
Shelley, of Worminghurst, mentioned in the first entry of the pedigree
(deposited by Mr., afterwards Sir John Shelley Sidney in the Heralds'
College), was the son of Henry Shelley of the same parish. Consequently,
if reliance may be placed on this manuscript, the most ancient of the male
ancestors in the right line, from whom Mr. John Shelley Sidney traced his
descent, was preceded by his father at Worminghurst, a fact carrying the
poet's lineage another generation backwards, into the closing term of the
Tudor period. There is, moreover, in the chancel of Worminghurst Church, a
brass, of sixteenth century workmanship, to the memory of Edward Shelley,
Esq., one of the four masters of the royal household, in the successive
reigns of Henry the Eighth, Edward the Sixth, and Mary Tudor. There are
grounds for believing that this Edward Shelley was a son of John Shelley,
of Michelgrove, and younger brother of Sir William Shelley, Justice of the
Common Pleas. The archives of the Michelgrove Shelleys certify that Sir
William Shelley, the judge of the Common Pleas, had a younger brother
named Edward. That the poet's certain male ancestors in the right line
bore the same arms as the Michelgrove Shelleys in the seventeenth century,
that vigilant heralds permitted them to bear those arms, and that no
baronet of the Michelgrove Shelleys ever questioned their right to bear
those arms, are noteworthy pieces of testimony that the two families came
from the same source. In the absence of positive evidence of the fact, it
cannot be denied that Sir Bernard Burke had sufficient presumptive
testimony, to warrant him in recording that the poet was a lineal
descendant of Edward Shelley, the judge's younger brother. There is also
fair presumptive testimony that the judge's younger brother Edward was the
Edward Shelley, who held office as one of the Masters of Henry the
Eighth's household, and found his grave in Worminghurst. Such evidence
would not be sufficient to establish a claim to a dormant peerage, or to
the reversion of a great estate; but it is sufficient for the purpose of
Shelley's personal historian.
'The house,' which Lady Shelley regards as having been merely enriched by
the fortunate marriages that created it, was a curiously vagrant family
for a house 'holding a high position among the large landholders of
Sussex.' Leaving Worminghurst, Co. Sussex, on the demise of Henry Shelley
('esq.,' as he is described in the official pedigree), who died there in
1623, the house moved to Ichingfield, in the time of Richard Shelley
('gent.,' as he is modestly defined in the same genealogical chart). Under
the government of John Shelley, 'esq.,' who died in 1673, the house rested
at Thakeham, whence it migrated to Fen Place, in the parish of Worth, Co.
Sussex, on the marriage, in 1692, of John Shelley (of Fen Place, _jure
uxoris_, Co. Sussex, esq.), with Hellen, younger of the two daughters and
co-heirs of Roger Bysshe, of Fen Place, aforesaid. Of the eight children
of this marriage, the reader of the present work is invited to take notice
of no more than two, John Shelley, the second, and Timothy Shelley, the
third son. Born at Worth in 1696, this last-named John Shelley, who died
in 1772 at Uckfield, is handed down to all future time by the pedigree as
'an esquire and lunatic.' That there was a strain of insanity in the
Castle-Goring Shelleys is a matter to be borne in mind by those who are
interested in the poet and his nearest kindred. Percy Bysshe was
great-great-nephew of this lunatic, and great-grandson of the lunatic's
brother, Timothy, of whom further mention must be made.
Born at Worth, in April 1700, the third son, and fifth child, of a petty
squireen, who lived to have nine children to set going in the world,
Timothy, on coming to man's estate, emigrated to the American plantations,
with a slender purse and an abundant store of physical energy. It is
probable that he also carried across the Atlantic some knowledge of
medicine and surgery, acquired during an apprenticeship to a country
apothecary. As there is no evidence that he passed, or tried to pass, an
examination at the Apothecaries' Hall, or Surgeons' Hall, nor any evidence
that the adventurer underwent any medical training before he crossed the
Atlantic, Medwin may have been right in believing that he fought life's
battle in the New World as 'a quack doctor.' It should, however, be borne
in mind that, if he had served an apprenticeship to a Sussex apothecary,
this Timothy would have possessed all the legal qualification to kill and
cure, that was required of provincial apothecaries in the mother country
prior to the Medical Act of 1814. Anyhow, with or without qualification,
the adventurer established himself as a medicine man, and with quackery,
or without it, throve in his adopted calling. Practising at Christ's
Church, Newark, he married a widow with money. In this last particular he
held firmly to the main article of Shelleyan worldly wisdom. The poet's
ancestors may have married for love, but they usually required a
substantial compensation for the loss of celibatic freedom. The widow to
whom Timothy surrendered himself was the widow of a New York miller, named
Plum; and it is believed that her purse satisfied the hopes planted in her
admirer's breast by so suggestive a name. Marrying thus prudently, Timothy
Shelley, of Newark, became the father of his first-born son, John Shelley,
on the 10th of December, 1729, and of his second son, Bysshe Shelley (the
first of the Castle Goring baronets), on the 21st of June, 1731.
It is doubtful when Timothy of Newark returned to England, where his
father died in 1739, after surviving his eldest and issueless son by some
six years. He may have sailed 'for home,' on news coming to him in Newark
of his father's death. That he became the actual chief of the family on
his father's demise may be inferred from the fact that he is styled in
the pedigree his father's 'heir.' After setting his English affairs in
order, he may have returned to America for awhile. It is more probable,
however, that, returning to England with his two boys, when the elder of
them was some _ten_, and the younger some _eight_ years old, he was
content to play the part of a modest Sussex squireen to the day of his
death. Anyhow it is certain the equally adventurous and fortunate
apothecary (or 'quack doctor,' if any reader prefers Tom Medwin's word)
was the squire of Fen Place for a considerable term of years, before he
was coffined, and put under the floor of Warnham Church, in 1770, some two
years and six months before the death of his elder and lunatic brother.
What became of this fortunate apothecary's two sons, John (the elder) and
Bysshe (the younger)? Becoming the head of 'the House' on his father's
demise in 1770, the apothecary's elder son married the daughter of a
Sussex gentleman, led a comparatively uneventful life at Field Place, near
Horsham, and dying childless in 1790, was buried in Warnham Church; being
succeeded by his younger brother, a man far superior to him in address and
energy, if not in benevolence and piety. Planted by the petty squireen,
who took possession of Roger Bysshe's daughter and home, and watered by
the apothecary who had followed fortune, and found money in America, the
family that gave England her brightest, and sweetest, and most passionate
lyric poet, was raised to the dignity of a house, by the craft, greed, and
penuriousness of Bysshe Shelley, the first baronet of Castle Goring.
The several excellent writers, who have been misled on the matter by
Medwin, the Misleader, may take the present writer's assurance that the
gentleman, who won a baronetcy in his old age, never 'exercised the
profession of a quack doctor' in America. There is, however, sufficient
evidence that the Newark apothecary's younger son was designed to follow
his father's calling. In his sordid and eccentric old age, when the lord
of Castle Goring inhabited a small house hard by his favourite tap-room in
Horsham, it was generally believed that he had at one time practised
medicine in London. It may also be put upon the present record, that he
was believed to have been a partner in the professional activities of Dr.
James Graham, the notorious mesmeric charlatan, in whose Temple of Health
the fair and frail Emma Harte officiated as the Goddess Hygeia, before
she became Sir William Hamilton's wife and Nelson's mistress. Percy
Bysshe, the poet, told Hogg, that his grandfather supplied the money which
enabled Graham to set up his preposterous purple chariot. Percy's
statements, however, should be regarded suspiciously, when they tend to
the discredit of his sire and grandsire.
Whatever the means he used for making money, it is certain that the man,
who in his old age was remarkable for the stateliness of his presence, and
in his milder moods for the courtesy of manner, possessed in his youth no
ordinary charms of appearance and address. Tall, even as his famous
grandson, and qualified by his blue eyes and brown curls to captivate
heedless womankind, he had not crossed the threshold of manly estate, when
he found favour in the eyes of Miss Mary Catherine Michell, only child and
heir of the late Reverend Theobald Michell, clk., formerly of Horsham. The
young lady (only eighteen years old) having considerable possessions, it
is probable that her guardians thought she could do better for herself
than marry the boyish medical student, who was only the younger son of the
squire and whilom apothecary of Fen Place. Possibly they only expressed a
strong opinion, that the young man should wait awhile, and thereby avoid
the evils of precipitate wedlock. Possibly they had no opportunity of
expressing an opinion on the matter, until remonstrance would have been
out of time. To the young people it appeared a case for elopement and
irregular marriage; and, acting on this romantic view of their position,
they hastened to town and were married in 1752, at Keith's Chapel, Mayfair
(the fashionable place for Fleet marriages done in the west end of the
town). From Keith's Chapel they hastened to Paris, where the bride fell
ill of small-pox, and narrowly escaped the death that would have made Tom
Medwin's mother the heir of the late Rev. Theobald Michell's estate. Eight
years later, the lady died after giving birth to three children, and Mr.
Bysshe Shelley was at liberty to look out for a second heiress willing to
become his wife. The only son of this marriage was Timothy Shelley, the
poet's father, who became M.P. for New Shoreham, Co. Sussex.
Nine years after his first wife's death, Mr. Bysshe Shelley fixed his
affections on another heiress--the heiress of an historic line and an
historic estate--Miss Elizabeth Jane Sidney Perry, only daughter and heir
of William Perry, Esq., of Turvill Park, Bucks, Wormington, Co.
Gloucester, and Penshurst Place, Co. Kent. It is remarkable that an
heiress of so bright a lineage and so noble an estate--an heiress who, in
descent and fortune, was a fit match for an earl--an heiress lineally
descended from the Sidneys, Earls of Leicester--should have lived in
singleness to her twenty-ninth year. Perhaps this remarkable fact gave the
younger son of the Newark apothecary the requisite courage for a daring
exploit.
Thirty-eight years old, he was no longer young when he first conceived the
purpose of winning so notable an heiress. But though well on in middle
age, he had the figure, and face, and audacity, of a youngster. Taking up
a position, suitable for his purpose, in a little inn near the Park,
celebrated by Jonson's verse, and glorified by the loves of Waller and
Saccharissa, he crossed the lady's path in her walks, regarded her
worshipfully when she attended the services of Penshurst Church, knelt to
her beneath the spreading branches of 'the Lady's Oak.' Is it marvellous
that a suitor, so eager and vigilant, so comely and daring, achieved his
purpose, notwithstanding the disadvantages of inferior station and growing
years? Is it wonderful that the gentlewoman eloped with the suitor, who
valued her far more for her broad acres than her descent from the Sidneys?
Whatever the motives to the suit, Mr. Bysshe Shelley won, in gallant
fashion, the lady by whom he had his second lot of children,--five sons
and two daughters.
In the year following this marriage, the Newark apothecary was entombed in
Warnham Church; and eleven years later (May 1781) Mr. Bysshe Shelley again
found himself a widower when he was still in his fiftieth year. Henceforth
he devoted himself chiefly to the pursuit of money,--a pursuit in which he
was favoured by the death of his childless brother in 1790, when he
succeeded to the Fen Place and Field Place estates.
The family having come to his hands, he made 'a House' of it. In
1806,--when his little grandson, the future poet, was on the point of
going to Eton,--Mr. Bysshe Shelley became Sir Bysshe Shelley, baronet, of
Castle Goring; the dignity being the price, with which the Duke of Norfolk
rewarded him for former electioneering service, and prepaid him for
similar service to be rendered to the Howards and the Whig party to the
end of his days. At the date of this social promotion, Sir Bysshe Shelley
had already begun to build the egregious Castle which he never finished,
though he is said, by the unreliable Medwin, to have spent 80,000_l._ upon
it.
If he ever hoped for happiness in his later time, the hope was
disappointed. After he had married his daughters, and sent his sons into
life, the passion for money, which had long overpowered the other forces
of his nature, developed even to miserly madness. In other respects the
strain of insanity, that had given him a lunatic for an uncle, displayed
itself in his manifold eccentricities. Living at Horsham, in a little
house, and finding his most congenial associates in the tap-rooms of the
Horsham taverns, whilst his grandson went to school at Brentford and Eton,
the founder of the Castle Goring Shelleys disliked his son so cordially,
that he is said to have seldom greeted him without an outbreak of
passionate malevolence. Percy, the future poet, used to entertain his
comrades at Eton by cursing his absent sire; and at Oxford, he assured
Hogg, that he had acquired this singular taste for cursing his father
behind his back, from hearing old Sir Bysshe curse him to his face. It was
thus that this chief of the Castle Goring Shelleys lived from the creation
of his baronetcy in 1806 to his death in 1815, when he left vast wealth in
money and lands, _In Trust_, for the creation of the big entailed estate,
that should perpetuate the grandeur of 'the House' he had laboured so
resolutely to found. Medwin (no safe authority on details) says the old
man left to his descendants 300,000_l._ in the English funds, and landed
estates yielding a yearly revenue of 20,000_l._, besides the banknotes to
the amount of 10,000_l._ that were hidden in the books and other furniture
of the room, where he drew and yielded his last breath.
Another thing to be noticed in the evidences of this family is the
testimony to the newness of its grandeur, that may be gathered from the
records of its territorial possessions. Fen Place came to these Shelleys,
through the wedding-ring, so recently as the last decade of the
seventeenth century. They acquired Field Place by purchase in the earlier
half of the following (the eighteenth) century. For their place 'among the
large landholders of Sussex,' they are mainly indebted to the Newark
apothecary's younger son, who flourished in George the Third's time, and
died only a few months before the battle of Waterloo.
To take a true view of the poet's lineage and ancestral quality, the
reader must bear in mind the distinctness of the Michelgrove Shelleys and
the Castle Goring Shelleys,--a distinctness that would not be affected by
the production of positive and indisputable evidence, that the two
families had for their common progenitor, a gentle yeoman of Henry the
Eighth's time. Should this remote connexion of the two families ever be
put beyond question, it would be none the less true that, instead of being
of aristocratic descent, as so many biographers have asserted, the poet
came of a line of forefathers who were nothing more than 'gentle yeomen'
till the later time of George III. The poet was no lineal descendant of
the Justice of the Common Pleas, who may be fairly styled the founder of
the Michelgrove House. From the date of that slightly historic personage,
the Michelgrove family was a knightly house. Baronets from the creation of
the order, they intermarried with knightly and noble houses before and
after 1611, drawing to their veins the blood of the Belknaps,
FitzWilliamses, Sackvilles, Lovells, Reresbys, Vantelets, and Nevills. On
the other hand, from the earliest date of his genealogical record, the
poet's ancestors were mere gentle yeomen, intermarrying with families of
no higher gentility, till the poet's grandfather carried off the heiress
of the Penshurst Sidneys.
As no drop of Sidney blood came to his veins from his grandfather's second
marriage, and as his kindred of the half-blood at Penshurst were not
over-fond of their half-cousins at Field Place, it is scarcely conceivable
the poet was so proud of his connexion with the Sidneys as Medwin
represents. It may, however, have been so. For with all his vaunted
superiority to aristocratic prejudice, and all his sincere hostility to
aristocratic privilege, Shelley was by no means exempt from the weakness,
which disposed Byron in his vainer moods to think too much of his
nobility. The advocate of republican ideas, the apostle of freedom and
equality, he was sometimes curiously careful to remind his admirers that
he was no demagogue of vulgar origin, but resembled the Lionel of
_Rosalind and Helen_, in being the heir to 'great wealth and lineage
high.' When this humour prevailed within him, it is possible that he
sometimes looked away from the father whom he hated, the grandsire he
despised, the obscure yeomen whom he distasted, and could persuade
himself that, like his half-cousins at Penshurst, he, too, had somehow or
other descended from the Sidneys. But no such innocent exercise of fancy
would touch the facts or qualify the complexion of his genealogy. It is
nothing to the poet's dishonour to say that, though better born than
Shakespeare, he was no more fortunate in his ancestral story than the
majority--or, at least, a large minority of English gentlemen, moving in
the middle ways of gentle life.
CHAPTER III.
SHELLEY'S CHILDHOOD.
The Poet's Father--Shelley's Birth and Birth-Chamber--Miss Hellen
Shelley's Recollections--The Child-Shelley's Pleasant Fiction--His
Aspect at Tender Age--His Description of his own Nose--The Indian-Ink
Sketch--Miss Curran's 'Daub'--Williams's Water-Colour Drawing--Clint's
Composition--Engravings of 'The Daub' and 'The Composition'--The
Poet's Likeness in Marble--Shelley and Byron--Peacock and Hogg on
Shelley's Facial Beauty--The Colnaghi Engraving.
Whatever the failings of the Newark apothecary's younger son, it must be
recorded to his credit that he gave his son an education befitting the
chief of a territorial family. Inferior though he was in tact and
politeness to the great Chesterfield, whose precepts and example are said
to have been largely accountable for his manners and morality, Mr. Timothy
Shelley (Sir Bysshe's son and heir by Mary Catherine Michell) received the
training, and, notwithstanding the eccentricities that provoked the smiles
of London drawing-rooms, had the port and temper of an English gentleman.
It has been the fashion of biographers to decry this gentleman. Readers,
however, should decline to accept the poet's estimate of the second
baronet of Castle Goring, though the much-maligned gentleman wrote
comically ungrammatical letters, thought too highly of himself, talked
boastfully over his second bottle, swore well up to the mark of Georgian
good breeding, and believed himself the originator of every strenuous
argument in Paley's _Evidences_. The good landlord and kindly patron of
aged servants, the squire whose virtues blossomed in the dust, the amiable
father whose parental excellences were gratefully remembered by all his
surviving children, was neither the fool nor the barbarian his eldest son
thought him.
The Shelleyan enthusiasts have little charity for the poet's sire, even
the most discreet of them regarding him as a deplorably inconvenient
father for so marvellous a son. It is not clear what kind of father would
have won Percy's filial loyalty. In fairness to this sire, it should be
remembered that, if he was not the right kind of father for the poet, he
proved an excellent father to all his other children; and that, if the
poet should have had a more congenial father, Squire Timothy could not
well have had a more trying son than the boy of latent genius, who lived
to cover his house with glory.
After keeping his terms at the same Oxford College, from which his son was
expelled in the following century, Mr. Timothy Shelley made 'the grand
tour,' returning in due course with a smattering of French, an extremely
bad picture of the Eruption of Vesuvius, and 'a certain air' (if Medwin
may be trusted) of having seen the world. Having surveyed mankind in
European capitals, and entered middle age, he married Miss Elizabeth
Pilfold, a gentlewoman of good family and great beauty, who is lightly
regarded by the Shelleyan enthusiasts, because, in the conflict of her
husband and her son, she held loyally to the former, and declined to be
the partisan of the latter. It has even been urged to this lady's
discredit that, when her wilful boy would fain have shaken his sister's
confidence in the doctrines of the Church of England, she, in her mental
narrowness, was alarmed for the spiritual safety of her girls, and thought
it well that at least for a time they should be guarded from his
influence.
Had these parents foreseen the trouble that would come to them from their
first-born child, they would have welcomed him coldly on his arrival in
the room (at Field Place), one of whose walls has in recent time been
illustrated with this inscription:--
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
WAS BORN IN THIS CHAMBER
AUGUST 4TH, 1792.
SHRINE OF THE DAWNING SPEECH AND THOUGHT
OF SHELLEY SACRED BE
TO ALL WHO BOW WHERE TIME HAS BROUGHT
GIFTS TO ETERNITY.
Of Shelley, the little fellow of Dr. Greenlaw's school at Brentford, we
know much from Tom Medwin's occasionally accurate pages, and from other
sources of information, which enable us to check the statements of that
more entertaining than reliable biographer. Respecting Shelley at Eton,
there is almost a redundance of evidence. Of the Etonian's ways of amusing
himself at Field Place during his holidays, there is no lack of
information;--thanks to Miss Hellen Shelley's goodness in committing all
she could remember of her brother to paper, for the assistance of his
biographer and fellow-collegian, Hogg, the cynical humourist and clever
lawyer. But of Shelley, the nursling of the Field Place nursery, and child
of the Field Place schoolroom, few facts are on the record;--scarcely
anything besides the three or four matters, which Miss Hellen placed
amongst her personal recollections, as matters of domestic tradition,
coming to her from times before she was of an age to take clear and
enduring cognizance of her brother's doings.
Seven years his junior, the lady, plying her pen in 1856 (four-and-thirty
years after his death), can scarcely have retained any clear memories of
him, from a time previous to the opening of her ninth year. Barely seven
years old, when her brother went for the first time to Eton, she had in
1856 a memory of uncommon retentiveness, if it afforded her a clear
picture of him, as he appeared during the first of his Eton holidays.
Fortunately, however, she touches on affairs and incidents of an earlier
date; such, for instance, as his visits to the Warnham Vicar, who taught
him the rudiments of Latin, visits that began when he was only six years
old, and she was still unborn. To this gentle and delightful chronicler,
speaking for the moment from memory of her mother's gossip, we are
indebted for our knowledge of the astonishment little Bysshe (whilst a
Latin scholar at the Vicar's school) caused the elders of Field Place, by
repeating aloud, word for word, and without an error, Gray's lines on the
Cat and the Gold Fish, after a single reading of the composition.
Without precisely declaring herself indebted to hearsay for the story,
Miss Hellen seems to be speaking of a matter anterior to the earliest of
her personal observations, when she gives us the particulars of the
marvellous 'invention' with which Percy in his tender childhood
entertained and perplexed the people of his home. The essay in romantic
fiction was this: Assuring his sisters (Hellen's elder sisters) that he
had just returned from paying a visit to certain ladies of their village,
he recounted to them, minutely, how the ladies received him, how they
occupied themselves during his visit, and more particularly how he and
they wandered through a delightful garden, well known to the boy's
auditors for its filbert bank and undulating turf bank. On inquiry, it was
found that the imaginative urchin had not been to the ladies, their house,
or their garden. The whole statement was made up of fibs; 'but' (says the
recorder of the characteristic incident) 'it was not considered as a
falsehood to be punished.' Perhaps it would have been better in the long
run for little Bysshe, had a less lenient view been taken of the affair
that, if not the first, was one of the earliest of those countless
deviations from strict historical veracity, which have occasioned so much
controversy between his extravagant idolaters and his temperate admirers.
Of the droll things written of the poet by his enthusiastic worshipers,
few are droller than the pages in which this exercise of childish fancy is
dealt with, as an early exhibition of the peculiar genius that placed him
eventually in the highest rank of imaginative artists. Had they not been
too engrossed with the affairs of their own home to take nice cognizance
of their neighbours' children, the elders of Field Place, whilst rightly
regarding the fib as no flagrant offence, would not have 'mentioned it as
a singular fact.' To those who are familiar with the ways and humours of
children, it is needless to say, that little Bysshe's 'invention' is an
example of the commonest kind of the harmless fibs, that come from the
proverbially truthful mouths of babes and sucklings. Poets would be
unendurably abundant, if all the little boys and girls, who 'romance' in
this innocent fashion, were destined for the service of the Muses.
In Shelley's case, however, the story has an exceptional interest, because
he never survived the disposition, which thus early in his career caused
him to proclaim himself the recipient of civilities that had not been
offered to him,--the graceful actor in a domestic drama that had not been
performed. All through life, Shelley had a practice of uttering for the
truth statements that were not true. All through life, his familiar
friends received his communications, with reference to this propensity.
Out of their affection for the man, they palliated the weakness with more
or less sincere excuses, that relieved the infirmity of the odium of
deceitfulness. Some of his friends called attention to the poetical
verity, underlying the least veracious statements; others persuaded
themselves that the speaker of untruths was the victim of an inordinately
powerful imagination. Others, unable to shut their eyes to the sure
indications that he was not altogether unaware of the fictitious nature of
his statements, maintained that the fables were due partly to
hallucination, and only in some degree to wilful inventiveness. Whilst
Hogg talked of the poetic verity of the egregious fictions, and of their
utterer's inordinately powerful imagination, Peacock originated the theory
of 'semi-delusion.'
From the few glimpses to be had of him in Miss Hellen Shelley's letters,
and Medwin's reminiscences, and from bits of testimony which, though found
in records of his later boyhood, are evidential to certain particulars of
his earlier infancy, the cautious historian can produce the principal
characteristics of the little fellow, who used to play with his sisters in
the Field Place gardens, and ride on his pony about the Warnham lanes, in
years anterior to his first departure from home for boarding-school. It is
manifest that the child, who from his seventh to his eleventh year went
daily to the Warnham Vicar for instruction in Latin, and received his
other lessons in his sisters' schoolroom, may be thought of as a shy,
nervous, timid, small-headed urchin; tall for his years, but delicately
fashioned. Narrow-chested and slightly round-shouldered, he had the look
of a little fellow, scarcely strong enough to enjoy the sports of robust
children. A slight slip of a lad, more given to loitering than running
about the Field Place gardens; more often seen sitting by the fire, than
dancing on the carpet of his sisters' play-room; he was gentle in his
happier moods with a girlish gentleness, and sometimes fretful with a
girlish fretfulness. Deficient in boyishness, the boy had a face, chiefly
remarkable for the fawn-like prominence of its deep blue eyes, the
delicate, though imperfect, shapeliness of its mouth, the rather comical
meanness of its little tip-tilted nose, and the red-and-white of its
singularly bright complexion; the general girlishness of his appearance
being heightened by the profusion of the silky hair, falling and flowing
in blond-brown ringlets about his long neck and weedy shoulders.
Years later, musing on his conception of his former self, when he
preferred the society of his little sister to the company of the rough
boys of the Vicar's schoolroom, Shelley wrote in _Rosalind and Helen_, of
Helen's docile child:--
'He was a gentle boy,
And in all gentle sports took joy;
Oft in a dry leaf for a boat,
With a small feather for a sail,
His fancy on that spring would float,
If some invisible breeze would stir
Its marble calm.'
In like manner, 'Abdallah' and 'Maimuna' (the little Bysshe and Bessie of
_The Assassins_) used to float their toy-boats upon the water of their
smiling creek. Shelley's delight in toy-flotillas may have arisen for the
first time (as some of his biographers aver) long after his childhood.
Possibly he was the fool of his own fancy in thinking he cared to play
with toy-boats in his infancy. It is, however, certain, that gentleness
characterized the child, who, on attaining manhood, meditated complacently
on the delight he took in gentle sports when he was a gentle boy.
From what has been said of the facial show of the little fellow, who used
to play in the Field Place gardens, and ride his Shetland pony about the
Warnham lanes, in the closing years of the last, and the opening summers
of the present century, it follows that the picture published by Mr.
Colnaghi, in 1879, as a veritable portraiture of Shelley in his childhood,
is an unauthentic and delusive performance. An exquisite example of
childish beauty, the little boy of Mr. Colnaghi's engraving has a
straight, finely-pointed nose, and a face of faultless symmetry; a nose
that could not have developed into the distinctly tip-tilted nose of the
poet's later visage; a face, that could not have departed so far from its
normal mould, as in later time to bear any resemblance to the poet's
countenance, which is represented by all the several persons of his
familiar acquaintance, who wrote about it, as having been no less wanting
in symmetry than fortunate in the charms of expressiveness. Whilst
declaring the singular comeliness of the poet's face in its happier
moments, Hogg records that its 'features were not symmetrical.' Medwin,
ever quick to glorify his cousin, admits that his features were 'not
_regularly_ handsome.' Though she busied herself to impose upon the world
the picture of a beautifully symmetrical face as Shelley's veritable
semblance, and was even more accountable than Mrs. Shelley for the
prevailing misconceptions respecting his facial aspect, Mrs. Hogg (the
Mrs. Williams of Shelleyan annals) admitted to Mr. Rossetti, in Trelawny's
presence, on March 13, 1872, that the poet 'could not be called handsome
or beautiful, though the character of his face was so remarkable for
ideality and expression;' the lady, at the same time, confirming what Hogg
and Peacock tell us of the unmusical character of the poet's voice. In the
opinion of the lady, whose singing was unutterably sweet to her spiritual
worshiper, Shelley's 'voice was decidedly disagreeable.' On seeing the
familiar pictures of Shelley, that serve as the frontispieces in Hogg's
_Life_, and Trelawny's _Recollections_, Peacock declined to regard them as
likenesses of his former friend; putting them aside not merely as
ineffective and unsatisfactory likenesses, but as no likenesses whatever
of the individual they professed to represent. 'The portraits,' he
remarked in _Fraser_, 'do not impress themselves on me as likenesses; they
seem to me to want the true outline of Shelley's features, above all, to
want their true expression.' How could he honestly speak otherwise of the
spurious and delusive portraits, 'in which' (to repeat his own words) 'the
nose has no turn-up?' That Shelley had a small and distinctly tip-tilted
nose, instead of the straight and rather large (though delicately moulded)
nose of the lying pictures, appears from words penned by himself to
Peacock, from Leghorn, in August, 1819. After speaking derisively of John
Gisborne's quite Slawkenbergian nose as a thing that, weighing upon the
beholder's imagination, and transforming all its owner's g's into k's, was
a feature scarcely to be forgiven by Christian charity, Shelley observed,
'_I, you know, have a little turn-up nose_; Hogg has a large hook one; but
add them together, square them, cube them, you would have but a faint
notion of the nose to which I refer.' Shelley having written in this way
of the defective shape and size of a principal feature of his face, it is
not surprising that, whilst avoiding such words as 'unsymmetrical' and
'irregular,' Lady Shelley admitted reluctantly in her _Shelley Memorials_,
that the poet's 'features were not _positively_ handsome.' The wonder is
that, after making this admission in the text, the lady told a different
story in the frontispiece of her book. The evidence is superabundant that,
instead of being positively handsome, Shelley's little nose was positively
tip-tilted, and his face positively unsymmetrical.
To see the real Shelley, as he appeared during life to persons who
regarded him through no such disturbing medium as romantic glamour, it is
needful to get the better of misconceptions, arising from the delusive
portraitures of him, to be found in familiar biographies--the fanciful
pictures, which are the more intolerable for being fruitful of
misapprehensions respecting the poet's moral endowments.
The epithet applied to the delusive portraitures, was chosen with
deliberation. 'Fanciful' in effect, they had their origin in fancy, and
may be fairly described as the offspring of fancy working upon fancy, at
different times and under various conditions. Shelley never sate to a
professional painter. From the year that produced the Indian-ink sketch of
a young gentleman, wearing the scant gown and leading bands of an Oxford
undergraduate, to the year of his death, Shelley never gave a competent
painter an opportunity for producing a work, that would have prevented the
fanciful misrepresentations from gaining any credit--possibly would even
have prevented them from coming into existence.
It would have been better for his readers, and certainly no worse for his
fame, had he never consented to sit to an amateur. But it was fated that
the man, who suffered so much in more important matters from sterner
adversaries, should suffer considerably from two dabblers in the fine
arts. At Rome (Lady Shelley says in 1818, Trelawny says in 1819) Miss
Curran began the portrait in oil, which she never finished, of the poet in
his twenty-eighth year--the sketch which, dropped and relinquished by the
fair limner, possibly because she felt she had made 'a bad beginning,' was
destined to be the chief source of all the artistic falsities, that have
been manufactured to his injury since his death. Trelawny says this
failure was 'left in an altogether flat and inanimate state'--a
description to be kept in mind.
An amateur in oil (of the gentler sex) having thus attempted and failed to
paint the poet when he was at Rome, two or three years later (1821 or
1822) Shelley surrendered himself to a masculine dabbler in
water-colours--to Williams, the companion of his voyage to death.
Possibly, this sketch (which differed from Miss Curran's effort, in being
finished) would have been preserved, had it accorded with the spurious
portraitures, given so profusely in later time to a credulous and
undiscerning public. But it has disappeared; and at the present date no
one can say how far it merited the praise given to it by Trelawny, whose
favourable opinion of the 'spirited water-colour drawing' would deserve
more consideration, had he known half as much about the fine arts as he
knew about horses and yachts. The Indian-ink sketch of a boy in the
academicals of an Oxford undergraduate, the unfinished daub in oil, and
the 'spirited water-colour drawing,' are the only portraits of the poet,
known to have been produced by artists of any qualification or incapacity
during his life.
Possibly, the Indian-ink sketch, which De Quincey saw somewhere in London,
was the best of the three performances. It cannot have been much more
absurd than Miss Curran's absurdity, though from De Quincey's words it
seems to have been a sufficiently ludicrous production. 'The sketch,' says
the Opium-Eater, 'tallied pretty well with a verbal description which I
had heard of him in some company, viz.: that he was tall, slender, and
presenting the air of an elegant flower, whose head drooped from being
surcharged with rain'--a description censured by the essayist for giving
the equally false and disagreeable impression that the youthful
_littérateur_ 'was tainted, even in his external deportment, by some
excess of sickly sentimentalism, from which, however, in all stages of his
life, he was remarkably free.' Though, possibly, more like the man than
Miss Curran's fanciful oil-daub and Mr. Williams's 'spirited' achievement
in water-colour, this performance in Indian-ink, which made a young
Englishman look like a dripping lily or a rose well wetted at a pump, was
certainly a libel on the scandalous undergraduate.
Perhaps it would have been well had the spirited water-colour disappeared
sooner. It would have been better than well had Miss Curran's 'failure'
been tossed into the Tiber as soon as she despaired of making a decent
picture of it. Unfortunately, the thing that was only begun by a woman,
and the thing that was finished to the last touch by man, survived the
poet; so that Mrs. Shelley (through Mrs. Williams) was able to put them
into the hands of Mr. Clint, with a request that out of such sorry
materials, her own reminiscences--the recollections of a widow who liked
to speak of herself as 'the chosen mate of a celestial spirit'--and his
sense of the fitness of things, he would compose a picture, worthy of
being handed down to posterity, as the veritable and unquestionably
historic likeness of the greatest lyrical poet of the nineteenth century.
The fancy picture, that was 'composed' under these less unusual than
laughable circumstances, may not be more untruthful, but certainly is not
more veracious, than the majority of fancy portraits. 'Of these
materials,' Trelawny wrote in 1858, 'Mrs. Williams, on her return to
England after the death of Shelley, got Clint to compose a portrait,
which the few who knew Shelley in the last year of his life thought very
like him. The water-colour drawing has been lost, so that the portrait
done by Clint is the only one of any value.' What evidential value can
attach to a portrait 'composed' and 'done' under such circumstances? Apart
from his weakness (one might, perhaps, say his dishonesty) in consenting
to the prayer of the poet's widow and her friend (Mrs. Williams), no blame
belongs to Clint. Doing as portrait-painters are wont to do, when they
agree to manufacture posthumous likenesses of people they have never seen,
Clint worked up a fancy picture out of the two performances by amateurs;
assuming that he might rely on those performances for correct information
as to the principal features and general effect of the poet's countenance.
On points where the two performances gave incongruent evidence, he relied
on the widows (Mrs. Williams and Mrs. Shelley) to instruct him as to which
of the two performances was the more trustworthy. The portrait having been
'composed' and 'done' in this way, the final touches were added in
accordance with further information from Mrs. Williams and further
suggestions by 'the chosen mate of a celestial spirit.'
The falseness and absurdity of the composition are mainly referable to the
romantic view Miss Curran took of the poet's appearance, and to her
romantic desire to give him the beauty which she deemed appropriate to the
author of incomparably beautiful poems. Rating him with the angels, the
lady was determined he should look like an angel--on her canvas. Beginning
with this ambition, it is no matter for surprise that she made only 'a
beginning.' If he was instructed to rely on the daub in oil, rather than
on the spirited water-colour, it is not wonderful Clint went wrong. In her
resolve to make Shelley look like an angel, Miss Curran decided to make
the principal feature of his portrait altogether unlike the most prominent
feature of his face. In the face, this feature wanted the size and contour
needful for the romantic beauty, with which the lady would fain have
endowed her bard. In the picture, this particular feature has every
quality required in a feature of its kind by connoisseurs of romantic
beauty--connoisseurs, that is to say, of the conventional school to which
the lady and her friends (Mrs. Williams and Mrs. Shelley) belonged.
The artist was not more interested than either of the other ladies in
misrepresenting the poet in this particular feature. Mrs. Williams was
animated with sentimental tenderness for the poet, who wrote her so much
beautiful poetry. It was natural for this romantic mourner to wish that in
his historic portrait, her Platonic lover should be relieved of a facial
defect, that in her opinion amounted to disfigurement. Whilst mourning
sincerely for her husband, Mrs. Williams mourned romantically for the poet
who had perished with her husband in the same wild storm. In like manner,
Mrs. Shelley (whose notions of the beautiful were purely conventional) was
desirous that this particular feature should be dealt with tenderly,
delicately, lovingly, in the portrait that would represent her husband's
facial show to future ages. Hence it was, that whilst he was composing the
great historic portrait chiefly out of Miss Curran's artistic falsehood,
neither of the ladies, on whose guidance he relied, was in a mood to tell
Mr. Clint in what respect the oil-daub was especially misleading, or even
to hint it was likely to mislead him in any way. Sixty years since, a
little turn-up nose was universally regarded as a nose wholly unbefitting
a poet. In their measures for rendering their poet altogether admirable
and lovely to unborn ages, both ladies were especially desirous that on
the historic canvas he should be endowed with a nose wholly unlike the one
that had been, in their eyes, the great blemish of his earthly tabernacle.
If Trelawny's evidence may be accepted, Clint did his work to the
satisfaction of 'the few who knew Shelley in the last year of his life.'
As Trelawny was one of those few, the 'composition' may be assumed to have
had his approval. But Trelawny knew nothing of pictures, and little of the
poet with whose story he will be associated to the end of time. The whole
term of their friendly intercourse exceeded six months by no more than two
or three days. And throughout that term the Cornish gentleman, with his
simple reverence for literature and men of letters, regarded the poet
through the glamour that makes things seem other than they are. On being
shown the portrait for the first time, with an assurance that people
approved it, Trelawny was not the man to discover anything wrong in it.
When he saw it for the first time, a considerable number of long years had
elapsed since the death of his acquaintance for six short months. Under
these circumstances, Trelawny's good word goes for nothing in the
estimate of the spurious performance. That Hogg resembled Peacock in
rating the picture at its proper worthlessness is matter of certainty; for
though an engraving of the artistic imposture faces the title-page of his
first volume, the biographer shows himself fully alive to the fictitious
nature of the composition, by his vivid and minute verbal portraitures of
the poet at Oxford and in later stages of his career.
Since Trelawny published Vinter's lithograph of the picture as a
frontispiece to the _Recollections_ (1858), numerous engravings have
appeared on wood, stone, or metal, of the posthumous 'composition' which
the Cornish gentleman, at the time of his book's appearance, regarded as
the only reliable painting of the poet. 'The water-colour drawing has been
lost,' Trelawny wrote in 1858, 'so the portrait done by Clint is the only
one of any value.' At that time he was far from imagining that the
oil-sketch, which Miss Curran 'never finished, and left in an altogether
flat and inanimate state,' would ever compete in public confidence with
the posthumous 'composition.' To the present writer it has not seemed
worth the while to inquire what (if anything) was done to Miss Curran's
'failure,' to bring it out of the 'altogether flat and inanimate state,'
and put it into a condition to be regarded (_on the authority_ of words
spoken by Sir Percy Shelley, _on the authority_ of his mother) as the
'best portrait extant' of the poet. It is enough for the present writer
and his readers to know that Miss Curran's beginning of a portrait has
risen to this place in Sir Percy's esteem--to know that it rose eventually
to an equally high place in Mary Godwin Shelley's esteem--to know from
Lady Shelley's assurance that the frontispiece of the third edition of her
_Shelley Memorials: From Authentic Sources_, is an engraving from (to use
her ladyship's words) 'the original picture by Miss Curran, painted at
Rome in 1818, now in Sir Percy Shelley's possession'--to know, from Mr.
Buxton Forman's authoritative assurance, that the frontispiece to the
first volume of his edition of _The Poetical Works_ is an engraving from
the same 'best portrait extant,' and not an engraving of Clint's
posthumous 'composition'--to know that engravings from this 'best portrait
extant' have, like the engravings at first hand of the 'composition,' been
repeatedly re-engraved (with or without variations to suit the
requirements of editorial taste),--and, _lastly_, to know that all the
engravings and re-engravings of the two delusive originals are flagrant
and altogether-to-be-repudiated misrepresentations of the poet's actual
appearance.
After what has been said of Miss Curran's unfinished oil-sketch, and
Clint's posthumous 'composition,' which was mainly made up from the lady's
derelict absurdity, it is needless to say that all the engravings and
re-engravings of the abandoned fib and the elaborate falsehood bear a
close resemblance to one another. Resembling one another in the contour of
the features, the arrangement of the hair (even to the tips of the curls),
the items of costume (even to the shape of the rumpled Byronic collars),
these engravings and re-engravings might be mistaken for reproductions of
the same original picture--allowance being made for the taste and whims of
engravers, the fancies and requirements of editors. The only difference
between the avowed engravings from Miss Curran's daub and the engravings
of Mr. Clint's composition is that the former are something more unnatural
and unsatisfactory than the latter. The poet of the former lot of
engravings is a somnambulant girl--a sleepwalker from dyspepsia, who, on
leaving her bed somehow or other, contrived to put on her brother's
walking-coat instead of her own bodice. The poet of the latter set of
engravings is a very pretty girl, exhibiting no sign of disease, apart
from the indications of a desire to look something wiser and prettier than
she really is. Like the somnambulant girl of the more disagreeable
picture, the young lady of these less disagreeable engravings has put on
her brother's coat, wears Byronic shirt-collars, has a quill pen in her
lily-white hand, and is so posed that her right fore-arm is resting on an
open manuscript. Of the dozen or more engravings of this young lady now
lying open before the present writer's desk, the one to which he would
direct his readers' attention--in consideration of its being the most
agreeable, typical, and artistic of them all--is the engraving by that
fine engraver, Francis Holl, which does duty as frontispiece to the first
volume of Hogg's (unfinished) _Life_.
What is offered to the eye by this frontispiece? It is the picture of a
man, to judge of it from the coat, the folds of the Byronic shirt-collar,
and the absence of the developments of the breast that are such powerful
elements of feminine loveliness. It is the picture of a beautiful girl, to
judge of it by the girlish face and hair, the girlishness of the long,
slender neck. The first thing to strike the beholder of this girl's face
is the symmetrical character of its delicate beauty. The symmetry is
perfect--too perfect, even for a girl of seventeen. The fine pencillings
of the eye-brows, the curves immediately beneath the eyes, the superior
contours of the cheeks, the line and shadow-line of the long, straight
nose, the outlines of the lower parts of the countenance, the curlings of
the small kissable lips and dainty chin, are all finely, unsurpassably
symmetrical. If the word may be applied to things so lovely and delicate,
symmetry is carried even to caricature in the details of this girlish
face. Of course the face, so delicately girlish, is deficient in the
strength, the indications of force, active or latent, always to be looked
for and, in some degree, invariably discernible in the countenance of a
man of mark.
Though he never sate to professional painter, Shelley sate to a sculptor
of sufficient ability, whose chisel produced a work of art that,
indicating with sufficient clearness the two chief defects of the poet's
least comely feature, fortunately, still exists, to give the lie to the
foolish pictures, and to protest with mute eloquence against the policy of
misrepresentation, which pursues its ends with insolent disregard for the
rights of the many thousands of persons, who are interested in knowing the
truth and the whole truth, and in believing nothing but the truth, about
one of the most remarkable Englishmen of the present century.
But though it offered violence to romantic and conventional notions of
poetical beauty, and gave his countenance a contour very different from
the profile of the delusive portraits, it may not be imagined that the
'little turn-up nose' caused Shelley to be otherwise than a man of a
singularly striking and charming appearance. Tall for his years, from his
childhood till he attained the fullness of his stature, Shelley had a
slender figure that would not have wanted elegance, had it not been for
the slight drooping and roundness of his shoulders, the narrowness of his
chest, and the forward inclination of his long neck and minute
head--peculiarities scarcely reconcilable with all that has been written
about his personal stateliness. To imagine that the young man who paced
the streets of Oxford and London 'with bent knees and outstretched neck'
(in the manner described by Hogg), was remarkable for the grace and
dignity of his carriage, is to surrender one's judgment to the sway of
romantic biographers. None the less certain, however, is it that there
were moments when Shelley's countenance might be commended for loveliness.
Remarkable for a complexion, in which carmine-red and delicate white,
instead of being blended, were separately conspicuous, even when it was
most freckled by exposure to the sun, the face surmounting his long and
slender frame was singularly expressive of intelligence, sympathy, nervous
alertness, enthusiasm, and sincerity. Dull in moments of contemplation,
the prominent deep-blue eyes of Trelawny's stag-eyed Shelley were
comparable with Byron's grey-blue eyes, for overpowering vehemence under
the impulses of strong and sudden emotion. Though inferior to Byron's
feminine mouth in beauty, and even more deficient than Byron's mouth in
power, Shelley's mouth--the one symmetrical part of his unsymmetrical
countenance--was notable for shapeliness, and alike expressive of
sensibility and refinement.
In other particulars, Shelley's head and face were comparable with Byron's
head and face. Like Byron, the author of _Laon and Cythna_ had a head of
striking smallness. It is a matter to be pondered by the physiologists,
who maintain no man can be mentally powerful unless he has a big bulk of
brain and a big pan to hold it, that the two greatest poets of the
nineteenth century were, perhaps, the _two_ smallest-headed Englishmen of
their time. Though it wanted the auburn under-glow, the feathery softness,
and careful keeping of the Byronic tresses, Shelley's brown shock--blonde
brown in childhood, deep brown ere it began prematurely to turn
grey--resembled the locks of his familiar friend and fellow-poet in
curling naturally. The most prominent feature of either poet's face was
the one in which he differed most conspicuously from the other. In that
feature Byron had greatly the advantage. Had he not grudged the poet whom
he hated this personal advantage over the poet whom he loved, Leigh Hunt
would not have been at so much pains to describe the faults of Byron's
nose--its excessive massiveness, and its appearance of having been put
upon the face, rather than of growing out of it. But whilst inferior to
Byron's face in that important feature, Shelley's face, in its naturalness
and seraphic gentleness, its candour and high simplicity, was possessed of
charms no one would venture to attribute to Byron's more earthly
loveliness. In spite of its grand defect, Shelley's was a face that
reminded his two closest friends of works of Italian art. Whilst Peacock
speaks of his vanished friend's resemblance to the portrait of Antonio
Leisman in the Florentine Gallery, Hogg likens the sweetest and loftiest
element of the poet's facial beauty to the air of profound religious
veneration that may be observed in the best frescoes of the greatest
masters of Florence and Rome.
There is no need to inquire how the lovely face of Mr. Colnaghi's
engraving came to be regarded as a portrait of Shelley in his childhood.
Still less is there any need to inquire whether the original picture was
the work of the exiled French prince to whom it has been attributed. The
present writer has no wish to deal disrespectfully with any part of the
picture's story that does not touch the poet's record. For this work's
purpose it is enough to say authoritatively that the child, whose delicate
and exquisitely symmetrical lineaments are exhibited in the Colnaghi
engraving, cannot have been the infantile Shelley, because it is not in
the nature of things that the poet of unsymmetrical visage and 'little
turn-up nose' was the development of the child, whose facial loveliness
was so perfect an example of facial symmetry, and whose nose could not by
any possibility have changed into the tip-tilted feature, described so
precisely by the poet himself. Portraits are often strangely mis-assigned;
but it is seldom for a portrait to be so egregiously mis-assigned as this
so-called picture of the child Shelley. Had not Mrs. Shelley and Mrs.
Williams succeeded in palming off on romantic credulity their symmetrical
and straight-nosed 'composition' as a veritable picture of 'The Real
Shelley,' it would never have occurred to any one to suggest that the
original of the Colnaghi engraving was the poet Shelley at a tender age.
CHAPTER IV.
THE BRENTFORD SCHOOLBOY.
Dr. Greenlaw's Character--Quality of his School--Medwin's Anecdotes to
the Doctor's Discredit--Mr. Gellibrand's Recollections of the
Brentford Shelley--The Bullies of the Brentford Playground--Shelley's
Character at the School--His Disposition to Somnambulism--His Delight
in Novels--His Wretchedness at School--Shelleyan Egotism--Byronic
Egotism--Byron's Influence on Shelley--Enduring Influence of Novels on
Shelley's Mind--Stories of Boating--Easter Holidays in
Wiltshire--'Essay on Friendship'--Its Biographical Value.
The slight slip of a boy, who under the name of Percy Bysshe Shelley,
appeared for the first time in his eleventh year (the third year of the
present century) amongst the boys of Dr. Greenlaw's school at Sion House,
Brentford, was no child to prefer the society of overbearing boys to the
society of his little sisters, whose playmate he had hitherto been.
Dr. Greenlaw's home for young gentlemen was a house of forbidding aspect.
More than once as they walked from London to Bishopgate (familiar to those
who are in the habit of entering Windsor Park from Englefield Green),
Shelley directed Hogg's attention to the gloomy walls of his first
boarding-school. The house was unalluring, the master not incapable of
outbreaks of anger, the boys by no means innocent of puerile rudeness and
inhumanity. But the present writer, who in former time knew some of Dr.
Greenlaw's scholarly descendants, has reason to believe the doctor was a
kindlier gentleman, and his school a much less defective establishment,
than Mr. Medwin made the world imagine.
Taking much credit to himself for having been at Brentford a sympathetic
and condescending senior schoolmate to his little far-away cousin, Tom
Medwin speaks with ungenerous resentment of the seminary where they sipt
the Pierian spring. All that his bitter words amount to is that Dr.
Greenlaw was a pedagogue, and Sion House a seminary, 'of an old school.'
If the bread served to the boys at breakfast and supper was parsimoniously
dressed with butter, the fare was neither better nor worse than the bread
and butter usually provided for schoolboys eighty years since. If the
Saturday's pie was a scrap-pie, and a poor specimen of its inferior kind
of pie, it was only such a thing as schoolboys of the period were expected
to eat with thankfulness. A schoolboy's toilet, in the days of our
grandfathers, was always a short and simple business. As the boys seldom
saw the lady, who never harassed or troubled them in any way, Mr. Medwin
might as well have forborne to sneer at Mrs. Greenlaw for priding herself
less on her husband's calling, than on being distantly related to the Duke
of Argyll. Mr. Medwin was not a little proud of his slight relationship to
the Castle Goring Shelleys, though they were not (to put the case mildly)
the best of the Sussex families. He might, therefore, have spoken
leniently of Mrs. Greenlaw's sense of the dignity of her people, or been
silent about the matter. Himself the son of a country attorney, Mr. Medwin
should have written a little less disdainfully of his old schoolfellows,
for being 'mostly the sons of London shopkeepers.' Nor is the Rev. Dr.
Greenlaw (he was in holy orders and had a Scotch degree) to be severely
judged if, when pupils were few, he was something less inquisitive than he
might have been about the quality of parents. To live, schoolmasters must
fill up their beds; and to be placed at school in the same dormitory with
a cheesemonger's son is an indignity, to be forgiven (after forty years)
even by the son of a solicitor of the High Court of Judicature.
It may, however, be conceded that Sion House was no more a fit school for
the heir of a great county family, than the Clapham school, where the
poet's sisters received their higher education, was a suitable seminary
for the daughters of an aristocratic house. Whilst little Bysshe was still
making Latin verses in the company of tradesmen's sons, the elder of his
sisters went to the Clapham school, where Harriett Westbrook (the daughter
of a licensed victualler) in later time learnt something of French and the
answers to Mangnall's Questions. It may not, however, be inferred that Mr.
and Mrs. Shelley, of Field Place, were deficient in proper care for their
own dignity, or in proper concern for the welfare of their offspring.
Though no place of education for the sons of the English aristocracy, Sion
House was greatly superior to the 'commercial schools' where tradesmen
sent their boys to be trained for the counter and the counting-house. It
was a 'classical school' for the sons of ordinary professional men (boys
like Tom Medwin), and the sons of well-to-do and ambitious tradesmen,
bent on putting their boys into the liberal professions. The Clapham
school for girls was a school of corresponding quality,--a place of
education for the daughters of people moving in the middle way of life.
That he sent his children to such schools merely shows that the Squire of
Field Place was not possessed by the spirit of exclusiveness, that is a
characteristic of aristocratic personages; that he was still far from
rating himself with the aristocracy of his county, though he had taken a
degree at Oxford, made the grand tour, and risen to represent New Shoreham
in the House of Commons. That the children were sent to such schools shows
how far the head of the family (old Mr. Bysshe Shelley, the son of the
Newark apothecary and the friend of Graham, the quack) was from
over-estimating his social position; how far he was from deeming himself
one of the dignitaries of his shire, though he had married the heiress of
Penshurst, and adding acre to acre, was rich enough to spend tens of
thousands on the big castle, which he never finished or inhabited.
Instead of enjoying the status, which delusive biographers declare them to
have enjoyed for successive centuries, the poet's people were in his
childhood only emerging from the middle class of society. Planted though
they had been for some time within the outer breastworks of provincial
gentility, they were still regarded by their patrician neighbours as
people of ambiguous quality,--too wealthy to be rated with mere 'gentle
populace,' and at the same time, too wanting in local influence and
ancestral dignity to be rated with the _élite_ of 'the county.' Fortunate
though it had been, old Mr. Bysshe Shelley's career was more calculated to
provoke scandal than conciliate social sentiment. Though it had done much
for his enrichment, his second marriage had also caused leading families
of Sussex and Kent to regard him with animosity, and speak of him with
disapproval. Strange stories were told of the ways in which the old man
had made money,--was still making money. The sordid tastes and habits,
that rendered him equally despicable and pitiable in his senility, were
already revealing themselves, and confirming people of honest pride and
good principle in their resolve to hold aloof from him. To personages of
the county, who had long looked down upon them as obtrusive upstarts, the
father and son grew more distasteful in proportion as they grew richer.
Instead of being diminished, this disfavour was for a time quickened by
the civilities, which for political reasons the Duke of Norfolk thought
fit to offer to the Horsham capitalist and the Member for New Shoreham.
Both within and without the lines of the Liberal party, dislike of these
'new men' was stimulated by the growing opinion that, if the younger kept
his seat for the Sussex borough, and voted steadily in accordance with the
Duke's pleasure, the elder of them would in a few years be raised to the
dignity for which he had long hungered.
Thus regarded in Sussex, it is not surprising that the poet's father and
grandfather lived more within the lines of their proper middle-class
connexion, than with the higher gentry of their neighbourhood, and that,
in selecting schools for his children, Mr. Timothy Shelley acted in
harmony with the views of his middle-class friends and relations. It is
not surprising that little Bysshe was sent to the school that was good
enough for the boys of people like the Medwins, and none too good for the
tradesmen's sons who came between the wind and Tom Medwin's nobility. Nor
is it surprising that in later time little Bysshe's sisters were sent to
the suburban academy, where the youngest of them became intimate with
Harriett Westbrook,--the lovely child of 'Jew Westbrook,' the licensed
victualler. Had he in 1802 felt more certain of getting the baronetcy for
which he was playing (and won only four years later--1806), it is probable
that the Horsham money-maker would have loosened his purse-string, and
told his son (the M.P.) that Sion House was not good enough school for the
heir of the Castle Goring Shelleys. Had the father and son foreseen what
embarrassment and scandal would come to the Castle Goring Shelleys from
friendships made at the Clapham girls'-school, it is probable that the
poet's sisters would have been sent to a more select seminary, or have
been educated, even to the finishing touches of their education, at Field
Place.
That the Reverend Dr. Greenlaw was a fairly sufficient pedagogue may be
inferred even from the reluctant admissions of the writer, who is our
chief source of information respecting little Bysshe's life at Sion House.
Whilst telling apocryphal stories to the discredit of his scholarship,
Medwin concedes that the Doctor was 'a tolerable Greek and Latin scholar,'
drilled his pupils assiduously in Homer, and carried them 'in his own way'
through some of the plays of Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Mr.
Medwin was not so precisely accurate a writer that we must accept all his
statements to the schoolmaster's disadvantage. Possibly, in recalling the
teacher's way of 'driving straightforwards in defiance of obstacles,' the
biographer only remembered his own way of dealing with choruses and other
perplexing passages of the Greek dramatists. The historian who misquoted
the Ovidian verses, in his worst and most damaging story against the
Doctor, may also have misquoted the sorry verses inscribed on the Scotch
mull which Charles Mackintosh (a former pupil at Sion House) gave his
preceptor. If the verses of the mull were as bad as the biographer
represents, and were (as the same authority alleges) the production of the
Doctor's own head and hand, their extreme badness disproves the assertion
that the Doctor 'was a tolerable Greek and Latin Scholar.' However much
misquoted in Medwin's _Life of Shelley_, the verses must have been bad;
but it is more probable that 'Carolus Mackintosh ... _alumnus_' composed
the lame lines inscribed upon his gift, than that they were put together
by 'the tolerable Greek and Latin scholar,' who had grown grey in teaching
boys to make Latin verses. Recollections after a lapse of forty years,
touching the infirmities of former schoolmasters, should be regarded with
suspicion, even when they proceed from habitually careful narrators. But
when a gentleman of almost proverbial inaccuracy entertains the world with
irreconcilable reminiscences of the same individual, he may be regarded as
labouring for a moment under the besetting infirmity, that always weakens
Mr. Medwin's testimony, and sometimes deprives it of all value.
That the successful schoolmaster (bound alike by his interest and the
obligations of his office to be mindful of the proprieties) disgusted
little Bysshe, and delighted the rest of the class with obscene jocosity
in reference to a familiar passage of the _Æneid_, is less probable than
that Tom Medwin's memory betrayed him. It is easier to believe that in a
mood of unusual irritability and dullness Dr. Greenlaw discovered
execrable Latinity in the Ovidian lines:
'Me miserum! quanti montes volvuntur aquarum!
Jam, jam tacturas sidera summa putes,'--
which little Bysshe 'gave in' as verses of his own manufacture. '_Jam,
jam!_' the Doctor is said to have exclaimed during the course of
animadversions that were emphasized with slaps administered to the child's
small cheeks and ears. '_Jam, jam!_ Pooh, pooh, boy! raspberry jam! Do you
think you are at your mother's? Don't you know that I have a sovereign
objection to those two monosyllables, with which schoolboys cram their
verses? haven't I told you so a hundred times already? "_Tacturas sidera
summa putes_,"--what, do the waves on the coast of Sussex strike the
stars, eh?--"_summa sidera_,"--who does not know that the stars are high?
Where did you find that epithet?--in your _Gradus ad Parnassum_, I
suppose. You will never mount so high. "_Putes!_" you may think this very
fine, but to me it is all balderdash, hyperbolical stuff. There' (with a
final box on the little fellow's nearest ear), 'go now, sir, and see if
you can't write something better!'
It is consolatory to reflect that, though he should not have been cuffed
and exposed to the riotous ridicule of his school-fellows for writing
Latin verses as badly as Ovid wrote them, the culprit merited some kind of
punishment for 'giving in' as his own the verses that were not his
own,--an act of deception common enough with schoolboys, but scarcely
reconcilable with the severe truthfulness, which is said (by the Shelleyan
enthusiasts) to have distinguished him from his childhood to his last
hour. 'He was,' says Lady Shelley in her _Shelley Memorials: From
Authentic Sources_, 'more outspoken and truth-loving than other boys.'
With this anecdote of Latin verses, given in to the Doctor of the
Brentford school, may be coupled a story, which the late Mr. Gellibrand
used to tell, somewhat to the discredit of little Bysshe. Just about
Shelley's age, though placed in a lower form of the school than Shelley's,
Gellibrand was trying to put together a nonsense Latin verse in the way of
scholastic duty, when Bysshe said, 'Give me your slate, and I will do it
for you and you can go.' Trusting his friend, Gellibrand surrendered his
slate and went off to play. The verses Shelley wrote on the slate ran,--
'Hos ego versiculos scripsi,
Sed non ego feci.'
On being 'given in,' by a boy who could not make a nonsense 'line' without
racking his brain, these verses may well have attracted the master's
attention. To the question, 'Did you write this?' Gellibrand of course
answered 'Yes.' Of course, also, the matter was inquired into further; the
result being that Gellibrand received a whipping, for which he paid
Shelley out with a 'pummelling.'
Though heavy, the blows he received for the Jam-jam verses were by no
means the sharpest and most penetrating that came from time to time to
little Bysshe Shelley from the same hand. Eighty years since our boys were
taken from the nursery and confided to the schoolmaster, in the same way
that pups of choicest breed were given over to the very slender mercy of
the under-gamekeeper. In either case it was known what was in store for
the young and helpless creatures. It was needful for these young things to
be licked into shape and form and good behaviour,--for the small boys to
be whipt into bigger boys, and then into serviceable men; and for the
young dogs to be whipt into good sporting dogs. Relying on the wisdom of
his ancestors, the English gentleman believed in the Coptic proverb, which
declares that 'the stick came down from heaven,' To train boys and dogs
the stick was needful. Whilst the tender-hearted father hoped silently
that much of the stick would not be needed, the father of no more than
average humanity was jubilant about the stick, confident that youngsters
needed it, jocular about its power to do them good. Like George the Third,
who told his sons' tutors to whip them when they wanted it (but for this
order, how badly George the Fourth might have turned out!). Mr. Timothy
Shelley, M.P. for New Shoreham, sent little Bysshe to Sion House, with the
understanding that he would be whipt, and well whipt too, when he wanted
it. Mrs. Shelley knew what was in store for the little fellow, when she
put the plum-cake into his box and hoped he would enjoy it. The
foreknowledge did not make the lady sorrowful. Was it not written, that to
spare the rod was to spoil the child? It is hard on schoolmasters that
they should be required to bear the odium of an educational method, so
universally approved two generations since, and sanctioned by the highest
authority.
Elderly (not to say old) gentlemen of 'the old school' still talk and
write cheerily of the good old birch. In his later novels the late Lord
Lytton uttered several pleasantries about the antique instrument of
domestic torture. But he probably took another view of the matter, when he
was under it. Though the great Thackeray wrote with characteristic
sprightliness and piquancy of interviews with 'the Doctor' in his
study,--interviews attended with swishing sounds and shrill cries of
puerile protest, audible through the strong doors of the same awful
room,--he was alive to the tragic side of the comic business. Only a few
years before his death, he spoke to an attentive mahogany-tree of one of
these 'interviews with the Doctor,' in which he had figured as passive
principal at a preparatory school, where he acquired some of the rudiments
of human knowledge, before going to Charterhouse. 'And can you still
remember what it felt like?' inquired one of the listeners. 'Remember it!
It was like ----!' screamed the witness to his own early grief, raising
his voice and eyebrows till they were comically eloquent of pain and
affright, as he named a place whither so excellent a novelist cannot be
supposed to have gone. Like little Makepeace, little Bysshe had interviews
with the Doctor between the four walls of the Doctor's study,--interviews
from which the nervous boy retired, with fury and horror in his face and
at his heart, to the schoolroom full of heartless boys, whose only
expression of concern at his misadventure was to ask him 'how he liked
it.' All this is so much a matter of course that nothing would be said of
it in these pages, were it not for the general opinion that this medicine
of childhood (as an old writer pleasantly designates the discipline of the
rod) not only caused the future poet the usual amount of transient
physical annoyance, but had also an enduring and by no means beneficial
effect on his temper and his disposition towards every kind of human
government. It has been urged by successive biographers that this bitter
physic, instead of curing his infantile ill-humours, aggravated them
seriously, and was one of the several influences that set him at war with
society from the outset of his career. Mrs. Shelley and Lady Shelley (the
poet's second wife and his daughter-in-law) both take this view of the
discipline that vexed him both at Brentford and Eton. And though he does
not hold the birch largely accountable for _Queen Mab_, the present writer
is by no means certain that the two ladies are so entirely wrong on this
matter, as they are on other matters of the poet's character and story.
Notwithstanding the incidents, which may have disposed him to rate his
Brentford preceptor as one of his earlier tyrants, there is evidence that,
after coming to manhood, Shelley remembered Dr. Greenlaw with qualified
approval, if not with affection. As they walked past the gloomy brick
house to which he had just called his companion's attention, Shelley
'spoke of the master, Doctor Greenlaw, not without respect, saying, "he
was a hard-headed Scotchman, and man of rather liberal opinions."' To be
tinctured with liberality of sentiment was, in Shelley's opinion, to have
a quality of goodness.
If Medwin was justified in saying that 'Sion House was a perfect hell' to
Shelley, it is probable that the bullies of the playground were more
accountable than the discipline of the schoolroom for the boy's hatred of
the place. Numbering about sixty scholars, some of whom were seventeen or
eighteen years old, the school--governed out of school-hours by bullies,
who might bully any one weak enough to be bullied, instead of by 'masters'
entitled to bully only their own fags--was just the place to be fruitful
of misery for a shy, nervous, mammy-sick lad; lacking the muscle and pluck
to hold his own with boys of his own age. On appearing for the first time
in the playground--fenced with four high walls, and adorned with the
solitary tree, to which the school-bell was hung--the child from Field
Place found himself surrounded by a mob of inquisitive urchins, who at a
glance saw he had neither the strength nor the courage to answer a rough
word with a ready blow. Could he play at pegtop? at marbles? at hopscotch?
at cricket? As each of these questions was answered in the negative, a cry
of derision went up from his inquisitors. His girlish looks and long hair,
his red-and-white complexion and the slightness of his long (not oval)
face provoked uncomplimentary criticism. Then came questions about his
home. Had he any sisters? What were their names? Where did they live? Had
he a mother? What was his father? What was he 'blubbing' about? On hearing
that his father was a Member of Parliament, some of the boys (possibly the
tradesmen's sons) intimated that he had better not give himself airs.
Resembling Byron in divers matters already submitted to the reader's
consideration, and in other matters to be noticed in later pages of this
work, Shelley resembled him also, from childhood to his latest hour, in
being a singular combination of feminine weakness and masculine strength.
Remarkable for boyish resoluteness and energy, the Byron of Aberdeen,
Harrow, and Cambridge, was no less remarkable for girlish sensibility and
softness. Feminine in the emotional forces of his nature, the Byron of
'the Pilgrimage,' the London drawing-rooms, the Italian exile, and the
expedition to Greece, was rich also in manly daring and combativeness. A
similar account may be given of Shelley's constitution and temper. In his
earlier time a boy on one side of his nature, he was a girl on the other.
If 'his port' (to use Hogg's words) 'had the meekness of a maiden' in his
later time, it possessed also the dignity of manliness. In moments of
sudden peril it was discovered that fear had no chamber in the heart, of
which Hogg wrote 'the heart of the young virgin, who had never crossed her
father's threshold to encounter the rude world, could not be more
susceptible of all the sweet charities than his.' It is remarkable how
these two inseparable poets (inseparable for ever! notwithstanding all the
efforts of the Shelleyan enthusiasts to disassociate them) impressed their
closest friends alternately by their manliness and their womanliness. The
biographer, who is eloquent about the manliness of Shelley's carriage,
could not recall this friend of his heart and holder of his admiration,
without remembering his meek and maidenly bearing and virginal
sensibility. Even when he was bearing testimony to Byron's manly
endowments, Hobhouse could not refrain from glancing at those of the
poet's weaknesses, that, resembling 'a portion of his virtues, were of a
feminine character--so that the affection felt for him was as that for a
favourite and sometimes froward sister.'
At Brentford the girlish elements of Bysshe's nature were in the
ascendant, the masculine elements altogether in abeyance. Possibly the
latter elements had never manifested themselves at Field Place, where the
little fellow, with younger sisters for his playmates, had lived at the
end of his mother's apron-string something too long. If they had shown
themselves in his earlier childhood, they seem to have retired from view
during his stay at Dr. Greenlaw's school. Bearing a stronger likeness to
the Geordie Byron, of Aberdeen High School, who fell a-weeping before his
classmates, on being required for the first time to answer to the proud
title of 'Dominus,' than to the Geordie Byron of the same school, who,
notwithstanding his lameness, used to spring (in his hopping way) with
clenched fists and flashing eyes at boys of superior size and strength,
little Bysshe seems throughout his time at Sion House to have justified
the disdain in which he was held, alike by the big and the small bullies
of the dismal playground, as a chicken-heart and a milk-sop. His old
schoolfellow, Gellibrand, who died something over twelve months in his
ninety-third year, used to describe the Shelley of Dr. Greenlaw's
seminary as a 'girl in boy's clothes, fighting with open hands and rolling
on the floor when flogged, not from the pain, but "from a sense of
indignity."' (_Vide_ Mr. Augustine Birrell's letter to the _Athenæum_ of
3rd May, 1884.)
Scared and cowed by the first greetings of the playground, he seems never
to have gained heart to learn the games, of which he had been compelled to
confess a shameful ignorance, or to repay with boyish energy and in proper
style the snubs and blows of boys as small as himself. Every boy's hand
was raised against him; and when he raised his own in retaliation, it was
to slap with open palm. What the big bullies bade him do, he did meekly
and often to his cost. When they ordered him to run after their balls, he
obeyed till he was ready to drop with fatigue. When they ordered him to
fetch books from the circulating library, to 'truck' Latin dictionaries
and other scholastic volumes (appraised by avoirdupois weight) with the
grocer for lumps of cheese or sweetstuff, he broke bounds and did their
commands, earning once and again a smart punishment 'from the Doctor,' by
his submissiveness to lawless orders. But he never joined of his own will
in the pastimes of his schoolfellows, great or small. Moping in corners by
himself, when the other boys were playing clamorously at prisoners' bars
or leap-frog, with their marbles or their tops, he counted the days till
next breaking-up day, recalled the pleasures of the garden where his
little sisters had been his sturdiest playmates, or conned the pages of
stories, borrowed from the circulating library. Sometimes on half-holidays
he loitered for the hour together under the southern wall of the
playground, as far as possible out of the way of his uncongenial
companions. Sometimes out of pity for the child's solitariness and misery,
Medwin left the sports of the yard, and walked with his little cousin to
and fro under the high wall. It pleased the senior cousin long after the
younger cousin's death to imagine, that Shelley was mindful of these walks
and the kindness thus shown him when, in the description of an antique
group, he wrote, 'Look, the figures are walking with a sauntering and idle
pace, and talking to each other as they walk, as you may have seen a
younger and an elder boy at school, walking in some grassy spot of the
playground, with that tender friendship for each other which the age
inspires.'
In this stage of his existence, little Bysshe resembled Geordie Byron at a
somewhat earlier age, in having the nervous diathesis that often disposes
children to walk in their sleep, when suffering from derangement of the
stomach. At least, on one occasion, Geordie Byron was a somnambulist at
Aberdeen. At least, on one occasion, Bysshe Shelley was a somnambulist
during the time he passed under Dr. Greenlaw's government. More than forty
years later, Medwin remembered how the boy looked, when after leaving his
proper bedroom he advanced with slow steps, one summer night, to the open
window of the dormitory he had no right to enter. Seeing that he was
asleep, and unaware that sleep-walkers should be awakened gradually,
Medwin jumped from bed and, seizing him quickly, roused the somnambulist
with a suddenness that gave him a painful shock, attended with severe
nervous erethism. In the morning Shelley paid another penalty for the
misbehaviour of his nerves. Boys taken at night in a wrong bed-room were
offenders against a wholesome domestic rule, to be punished even though
the offence was unintentional. 'I remember,' says Medwin, 'that he was
severely punished for this involuntary transgression.' It does not appear
how he was punished, or whether it was known to the punisher that the
breach of law had been committed during sleep.
Though he was not guilty of another walk in his sleep, the nervous and
delicate boy was still visited by 'waking dreams, a sort of lethargy and
abstraction that became habitual to him.' Whilst he was under the
influence of these day-dreams, his prominent blue eyes were glazed with a
peculiar dullness, and were equally inexpressive and insensible of
external objects. As soon as the visitations were over, his eyes flashed,
his lips quivered, and he spoke with a tremulous voice that was strangely
and painfully indicative of nervous agitation and distress. 'A sort of
ecstasy,' says Medwin, 'came over him, and he talked more like a spirit or
an angel than a human being.' As the words convey the intended impression,
there is no need to inquire in what respect the speech of a human creature
differs from the speech of a spirit, or to imagine the circumstances under
which Mr. Medwin may have been permitted to overhear the talk of angels.
Under the manifold vexations and sorrows that preyed upon his feelings at
Sion House, Shelley found solace and intermissions of grief in the
perusal of blue books,--no folios of parliamentary manufacture and
information; but the little blue-covered volumes of extremely exciting and
unwholesome prose-fiction, that were to be bought at sixpence a-piece of
ordinary booksellers in the earlier decades of the present century. He was
also a greedy devourer of tales (touching haunted castles, magicians,
picturesque brigands, and mysterious murderers) that proceeded from
writers, who did not condescend to offer their productions to the public
eye, in the vulgar little 'blue books,' or in any form less acceptable to
connoisseurs of elegant literature than board-bound volumes. It is
something to the honour of prose-fiction that the two greatest poets of
the nineteenth century may be said to have been mentally suckled and
reared on novels from infancy to adult age,--taught by novels how to think
and feel, and how to make others think and feel. It is alike true of Byron
and Shelley, that the germs of much that is most delightful and admirable
in their finest poems must be sought in old novels. John Moore's _Zeluco_
was not more influential in the production of _Childe Harold_, than
_Zofloya or the Moor_ was influential in the production of _Zastrozzi_ and
_St. Irvyne_, those crude and unutterably ridiculous achievements of
Shelley's youthful pen, which, offering to their amused perusers the
feeble fancies and puerile conceits that, appearing and reappearing in
successive volumes, developed eventually into vigorous creations and
exquisite examples of poetic imagery,--exhibit also the rude notions and
embryonic reasonings, that in the course of a few years grew and shaped
themselves in the fundamental principles and main features of his
philosophy on matters pertaining to politics, social economy, and
religion.
It is a question whether the recollections of misery endured at school,
which occupy three of the familiar stanzas to 'Mary,' should be regarded
as reminiscences of trials the poet underwent at Sion House, or of sorrows
that moved him to tears at Eton. Mrs. Shelley had no doubt the stanzas
referred to the public school; and Lady Shelley is no less confident that
her father-in-law was thinking of the Eton playing-grounds, when he wrote
in the dedicatory prelude to _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 burst
My spirit's 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 schoolroom, voices, that, alas!
Were but 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--
So without shame, I spake:--"I will be wise,
And just, and free, and mild, if in me lies
Such power, for I grow weary to behold
The selfish and the strong still tyrannise,
Without reproach or check." I then controuled
My tears; my heart grew calm, and I was meek and bold.
'And from that hour did I with earnest thought
Heap knowledge from forbidden mines of lore;
Yet nothing that my tyrants knew or taught
I cared to learn, but from that secret store
Wrought linked-armour for my soul, before
It might walk forth to war upon mankind;
Thus power and hope were strengthened more and more
Within me, till there came upon my mind
A sense of loneliness, a thirst with which I pined.'
It has been usual with Shelley's biographers to deal with these verses as
though, besides referring to Eton, they afford a substantially accurate
account of trouble undergone, resolutions formed, and action taken by the
poet whilst he was at Eton. To the Shelleyan enthusiasts, it is heresy to
question the strict and severe historic veracity of any particular
statement of this piece of melodious egotism. To them it is an affair of
certainty that the grass glittered, the boy wept, the voices came from the
school-house, the weeping youth made virtuous resolves, precisely as, and
when, the poetry represents. The verses are given in evidence that Shelley
neglected Latin and Greek in order that he might devote all his best
energies to chemistry, astronomy, electricity, pneumatics,--in brief, to
those 'scientific pursuits,' about which so much fantastic nonsense has
been printed by the more fervid and less discreet of his eulogists. To
this way of reading and handling these verses, is mainly referable the
equally general and false notion that Shelley's principal employment at
Eton was to make 'linked armour for his soul' out of materials prohibited
to ingenuous youth by the teachers of his despotic school,--and that his
one purpose in forging this linked armour for his soul, was that he might
equip himself for 'walking forth to war among mankind,' _i.e._ for playing
the part of a political revolutionist and social reformer, as soon as he
should be his own master.
There is the less need to trouble oneself seriously with the question
whether the verses refer to Sion House or Eton, because it is certain they
do not correspond, in all their chief particulars, to his life at either
school. Whilst it is certain that his studies at the private school were
the studies prescribed by Dr. Greenlaw (unless the not-actually-prohibited
perusal of novels is to be rated as 'study'), it is no less certain that
he never grossly neglected the studies of either school. Far from
neglecting the ordinary scholastic exercises of an Eton boy in the degree
implied by the words,
'Yet nothing that my tyrants knew or taught
I cared to learn,'
it is certain that, without holding steadily a high place in any of the
higher forms, he acquired something more than a fair amount of the only
learning imparted to boys at Eton eighty years since, and displayed
remarkable aptitude and skill in making Latin verses,--an important part
of what his tyrants knew and taught. The evidence is conclusive that, at
Eton he was a facile and clever maker of Latin verses. Medwin speaks to
'his capacity for writing Latin verses,' and gives some examples of the
capacity, that may, at least, be styled creditable performances for a
public school-boy. Long after his abrupt withdrawal from the school, the
excellence of Shelley's Latin verses was remembered by old Etonians.
Whilst his readiness in the verse-maker's art was described as 'wonderful'
by Mr. Packe, another of his former schoolmates at Eton (Mr. Walter S.
Halliday) wrote of the same faculty to Lady Shelley, 'his power of Latin
versification' was 'marvellous.' Hogg certifies that, though more than a
year elapsed between his retirement from Eton and his going into residence
at University College--a period during which he certainly omitted to
enlarge his classical attainments--Shelley came up to Oxford an expert and
singularly quick Latin verse-maker, and a ready writer of Latin prose. So
much for the poet's vaunt that he did not care to learn what the Eton
masters could teach him.
On the other hand, it is certain that, whilst carrying away from Eton
something more than a creditable amount of the learning to be acquired in
the classes, Shelley learnt nothing at the school by irregular and
unrecognized study to justify the assertion that, whilst a schoolboy, he
gathered 'knowledge from forbidden mines of lore,' and armed himself for
the battle of life with weapons his official teachers would fain have kept
from his hands. His scientific studies were the mere sports of a
schoolboy, playing idly with an air-pump, an electrical battery, and a few
acids and alkalies. Instead of spending his leisure at Eton in the serious
pursuits of natural science, he employed it chiefly in literary essays,
that show him to have been possessed by an ambition scarcely compatible
with an enthusiasm for scientific investigation and a yearning for
scientific celebrity.
That both Mrs. Shelley and Lady Shelley had considerable, though
insufficient, grounds for regarding the dedicatory stanzas as a record of
the poet's experiences at Eton, is unquestionable. Mrs. Shelley could,
doubtless, have defended her view of the verses with words spoken by her
husband, who entertained her with several equally strange and delusive
stories of his life at the public school. Besides the poet's authority,
Lady Shelley could, perhaps, produce other evidence to justify her
concurrence with Mrs. Shelley's opinion. Whilst he deems it possible that
Shelley was thinking more of Eton than Brentford, when he committed the
verses to paper, the present writer has no doubt whatever that the poet,
soon after their composition and ever afterwards, regarded the three
stanzas as veracious autobiography--as a faithful poetical record of what
he had suffered, resolved, and done, when he was under Dr. Keate's
rigorous government. But the poet's words may not be produced as sure
evidence respecting the tenor and chief incidents of his career. From
manhood's threshold to his last hour, he was subject to strange delusions
about his own story; some of the marvellous misconceptions having
reference to matters of quite recent occurrence. 'Had he,' says Hogg,
'written to ten different individuals the history of some proceeding in
which he was himself a party and an eye-witness, each of his ten reports
would have varied from the rest in essential and important circumstances.
The relation given on the morrow would be unlike that of to-day, as the
latter would contradict the tale of yesterday.' Peacock, who also knew
and loved him well, bears similar testimony to the looseness and
inaccuracy of the poet's statements about his own affairs, even about
those of his affairs, respecting which (had he been a man of ordinary
exactness and fidelity to facts) he would be naturally regarded as the
best source of information. To escape the disagreeable necessity of
thinking him deliberately untruthful, Thomas Love Peacock had recourse to
the notion that his friend was the victim of 'semi-delusions.' With all
his desire to palliate his friend's besetting frailty, so as to relieve it
of the odium of sheer untruthfulness, Peacock, in his inability to rate
the delusive fancies as sincere and perfect delusions, came to the
conclusion that they were only 'semi-delusions;' that the mis-statements
of the poet's mouth and pen were referable in equal proportions to
delusive fancy and influences distinct from delusion. Whatever their show
of autobiographic purport and sincerity, it is obvious that the verses of
a poet, suffering from so perplexing an infirmity, differ widely in
evidential value from the autobiographic statements of an ordinary
individual.
How far the Byronic poems should be held accountable for Shelley's Byronic
way of dealing with his personal story in poems offered to the world, is a
question deserving more consideration than can be given to it in this
chapter. At this early point of an attempt to exhibit 'the Real Shelley,'
it is, however, well to indicate why criticism should deal with the
egotisms of the Shelleyan poems precisely as criticism has long dealt with
the egotisms of the Byronic poems.
However people may differ about the respective merits of the two poets,
all persons must allow that Byron and Shelley were both egotists in the
superlative degree,--and that differing from other poets in more unusual
and admirable qualities, they differ from them also in surcharging their
magnificent poetry with more or less misleading references to their
private concerns, and with emotion and sentiment arising from their purely
personal interests,--often from their purely personal discontents. In this
respect, both poets strayed from the high poetic path; sacrificing art to
egotism, fame to foible, greatness to vanity. If _Childe Harold_ was the
wail of a single romantic sufferer for his own sake, _Laon and Cythna_ was
the cry of a single romantic sufferer for his own as well as the world's
sake. The poet's personality is forced upon the reader's notice no less
resolutely in Shelley's than in Byron's poem. If it was Byron's vanity to
demand human sympathy as the victim of fate, it was Shelley's vanity to
solicit it as the victim of persecution.
Whilst the man of sin and mystery invited the world to admire his proud
endurance of the doom that distinguished him from all other mortals, the
angel of goodness and light invited mankind to worship him, for his
unselfishness, his impatience of evil, his abhorrence of oppression, his
ineffable benevolence, his heroic readiness to perish for the good of his
species. Both actors were equals in sincerity and in dishonesty. The man
who has still to discover that sincerity underlies almost every display of
human affectation, is a man who has failed in justice to a considerable
proportion of his species. The pretender ever plays the character he
desires in the most secret chamber of his heart to be mistaken for. Byron
and Shelley were alike actors and alike sincere, each taking a part
accordant with his conceptions of the sublime and admirable in human
nature. In assuming the character of a libertine,
'A shameless wight,
Sore given to revel and ungodly glee,'
Byron assumed the character that interested and fascinated him. In
assuming the character of the social martyr, Shelley, true to his own
nature, selected the character that appeared to him the most admirable.
Both characters were taken from the marvellous creations of the romantic
literature on which the two poets fed from childhood to years of
discretion. It was a literature that may be styled the romantic literature
of the good principle and the evil principle. In taking a representative
of the evil principle for his model, Byron displayed his genuine
disposition which, in spite of his engaging qualities and several generous
endowments, was a disposition towards evil. In determining to be a
representative of the good principle of human existence, as that existence
was exhibited in the 'blue books,' and other literature of the circulating
libraries, Shelley made a choice no less true to his own more gentle and
earnest nature. Mere boys when they forced themselves into notoriety,
neither of them could readily relinquish the part,--chosen so easily and
naturally. Shelley determined to be on the side of the angels, because his
disposition was in the main towards goodness; Byron went with the devils,
because he found them upon the whole better and more congenial company
than the angels of light.
In other respects, their resemblance was striking. Endowed with a memory
that equalled Byron's memory in retentiveness, though more liable to
illusions, an imagination even more powerful than Byron's imagination, and
a sensibility no less acute than Byron's sensibility, Shelley resembled
Byron also in his habit of brooding over old sorrows, intensifying them by
the exercise of fancy, and using them as instruments of self-torture.
Certainly in some degree, probably in a high degree, this habit is
referable to the influence of Byron's genius,--to the influence of the
Byronic poems, and also of their popularity. Whilst success never fails to
produce imitators, the affectations of the successful are curiously
infectious. This was notably the case with Byron's success, that putting
the younger poets and poetasters into turn-down collars, caused them to
train their voices to notes of what they deemed Byronic melancholy, and to
set their features into what they deemed expressions of Byronic
bitterness, and melancholy. It is not suggested that Shelley was for a
single minute one of the Byro-maniacal apes. It is not hinted that he ever
imitated Byron, except in the way in which a loyal, enthusiastic, and
altogether honest disciple may be seen to imitate a great master.
From his boyhood to his last year, Shelley regarded Byron with a generous
admiration, that once and again expressed itself in almost idolatrous
language. Unlike the Shelleyan fanatics, who seek to exalt their favourite
by decrying the only modern English poet likely to be rated as his
superior, Shelley ever regarded Byron as the greatest living master of
their art. Scott, Wordsworth, Southey, Coleridge, Keats, Tom Moore, Leigh
Hunt, to say nothing of minor minstrels, all had a share of Shelley's
never-stinted homage, but he never for any long time thought of putting
the best and strongest of them on equality with the incomparable Byron. To
remember the terms in which he wrote and spoke of Byron, is to think with
a smile of all that has been written in these later years by poetasters
and critics to Byron's discredit.
The enthusiasts, who have so clear a perception of the signs of Shelley's
influence over Byron in the Third Canto of _Childe Harold_, are curiously
blind to the far more important and conspicuous indications of Byron's
influence on Shelley in _Laon and Cythna_. When the most has been said of
the manifestations of Shelleyan thought in Byron's poem, it cannot be
questioned that had the younger of the two poets never lived, the four
Cantos of _Childe Harold_ would have been substantially the same poem they
now are. On the other hand, it is impossible for any one but a Shelleyan
enthusiast to believe that _Laon and Cythna_ would have been the same poem
it now is, had Byron never come into existence. Written in the summer of
1817, when the poet had been for five years, like all the younger poets of
his time, living under the domination of Byron's intellect, and had been
for a still longer period an enthusiastic admirer of Byron's writings;
written in the summer following the one in which the still youthful
aspirant to poetical renown had come under the personal influence of the
great poet, whom he had so long desired to know personally, and had made
at least one futile attempt to approach, _Laon and Cythna_ bears the most
distinct marks of Byron's influence in Shelley's selection of the
Spenserian measure, in the poem's Byronic egotisms, and in the pains taken
by the poet to identify himself with the hero of the narrative. In all
these particulars (to say nothing of other particulars which the reader of
these pages can discover for himself), _Laon and Cythna_ resembles _Childe
Harold_, just as the painting by a young artist, abounding in originality
and natural vigour, is often seen to resemble the painting of an older
artist, whose notions and treatment of colour, and whose manipulatory
address, have been a manifest force in the aspirant's education. Just as
the painting of the younger artist in form and colour, without being
either 'a copy,' or even 'an imitation,' in any dishonourable sense of the
term, bears to the painting of the master a certain resemblance (of tone
and treatment) that causes both works to be regarded in later times as
'works of the same school,' Shelley's great poem resembles Byron's great
poem.
Byron was in no degree accountable either for the 'story' of Shelley's
poem, or for its incidents and conceptions of character. The same may be
said of the prevailing sentiments, subordinate aims, and main purpose of
the poem. Whilst the prevailing sentiments of the poem are altogether
foreign to Byron's views on the religious, political, and social questions
dealt with in _Laon and Cythna_, his writings are in evidence that he must
have regarded Shelley's approval of 'Laon's' incest with his own sister
as revolting in the highest degree. But though the substance of this
extraordinary poem could not have proceeded from Byron's brain and pen,
the form of the work is distinctly Byronic. Shelley cannot have been
unconscious of this resemblance of his poem to what was at that time
Byron's greatest achievement in song. _Qui s'excuse s'accuse._ The very
words of the Preface, in which he anticipates a charge of 'presuming to
enter into competition with our greatest contemporary poets,' and, whilst
disclaiming the presumption, declares his 'unwillingness to tread in the
footsteps of any who preceded him,' are words of evidence that he was
fully and uneasily alive to the resemblance. His curious way of accounting
for his choice of the measure which Byron's poem had rendered more popular
for the moment than any other measure, is only the poet's attempt to shut
his eyes to the fact, that he selected the measure because _Childe Harold_
had rendered it more agreeable to his own ear than any other, and had also
made it the measure most likely to commend his poem to the public taste.
'I have,' he says, 'adopted the stanza of Spenser (a measure inexpressibly
beautiful), not because I consider it a finer model of poetical harmony
than the blank verse of Shakespeare and Milton, but because in the latter,
there is no shelter for mediocrity; you must either succeed or fail.'
Though Byron doubtless smiled at this reason for the adoption of the
measure, which he had in a certain sense made his own, he must have been
gratified by the delicate compliment to the poet who had adopted it with
success.
Using the Byronic measure (for the Spenserian measure had become for the
moment Byron's property), Shelley made a Byronic use of matter taken from
romances devoured in his childhood. 'Treading in the footsteps' of his
master, notwithstanding his assertions to the contrary, Shelley followed
the Byronic example in attaching his own personality to the hero of his
poem. Not content with hinting poetically in the Dedicatory Stanzas to
Mary that he and Laon are one, the author of _Laon and Cythna_ is at pains
to declare more fully and precisely in the prose of his Preface that
Laon's views on matters of religion and politics, on questions of
government and misgovernment, on the vices of ecclesiasticism and the
merits of vegetarianism, on the relations of the sexes and the æsthetics
of love, are the views of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Esq., who has studied
human nature in Switzerland as well as England, and who, in consideration
of his 'having trodden the glaciers of the Alps, and lived under the eye
of Mont Blanc,' should be regarded as a gentleman especially educated and
peculiarly qualified to dogmatize on such matters to English persons who
have never crossed the Channel. Both in the poem and dedicatory prelude he
seizes every opportunity to impress on the reader that Percy Bysshe
Shelley is Laon, the apostle of 'Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality,' and
that this Preacher of the 'New Evangel,' who at the close of the poem
sails into Paradise with his sister and the offspring of their incestuous
intercourse in a boat made of
'one curved shell of hollow pearl,
Almost translucent with the light divine
Of her within,'
is no other than Percy Bysshe Shelley, Esq., eldest son of the Member of
Parliament for New Shoreham, and heir-apparent to a Sussex baronetcy. In
these Shelleyan egotisms the critical reader of the marvellous poem
recognizes the very touch and trick of Byron's way of dressing up details
of his domestic woes and personal story for the delight and mystification
of his readers. One of the most pathetic and effective of the egotisms is
the poet's account of the misery he endured from hard-hearted masters and
malicious boys whilst he was at school.
Just as Byron seasoned the introductory stanzas of _Childe Harold's_ first
canto with more or less imaginary particulars of his misspent youth, when
'Few earthly things found favour in his sight,
Save concubines and carnal companie,
And flaunting wassailers of high and low degree,'
Shelley seasoned the dedicatory verses of _Laon and Cythna_ with
references to the wretchedness that preyed upon him when, walking forth
upon the glittering grass, he wept and
'knew not why; until there rose
From the near schoolroom, voices, that, alas!
Were but one echo from a world of woes--
The harsh and grating strife of tyrants and of foes.'
Both descriptions were equally truthful and untruthful. The basis of truth
in Byron's poetical narrative of his misspent youth is that he kept the
girl at Brompton who used to ride and walk about London in boy's clothes,
and that when he entertained three or four old college friends at
Newstead, they talked a good deal of nonsense and drank rather more
champagne than was good for them. The basis of truth in Shelley's
narrative of his wretched boyhood is that he was often unhappy at school
(_very_ unhappy at Brentford), and that being of a soft and girlish
temperament when he was at Sion House, he sometimes fell a-weeping because
the 'boys were so unkind to him.' The Shelleyan narrative is not
historically exact to his doings and experiences in either of his two
schools. At Brentford he was not remarkably insubordinate (as he was at
Eton), and did nothing to give the faintest justificatory colour to his
vaunt of having devoted himself to studies prohibited or discountenanced
by the masters of the establishment. At Eton (where, though often unhappy,
he was less given to crying than in his Brentford days), instead of
neglecting the studies of the college, he attained to considerable
excellence in them. Upon the whole, the weeping boy 'upon the glittering
grass' bears more resemblance to the chicken-heart and milksop of Dr.
Greenlaw's playground than to the unruly, fitfully riotous, and
inordinately blasphemous young rascal, who was eliminated from Eton with
the least possible disgrace, even as in later time he was expelled in an
irregular way, and with no needless humiliation, from Oxford. And in
consideration of this greater resemblance, the present writer has thought
right to deal, in this chapter about the Brentford schoolboy, with the
verses that, in Mrs. Shelley's opinion and Lady Shelley's opinion, are a
faithful picture of the lad at Eton.
It is certain that the little Bysshe was an unhappy child at Sion House,
even to the time of his withdrawal from the school, when he had grown
almost too tall, though certainly not too robust, to be called 'little.'
But miserable children are curiously, pathetically clever in escaping from
their misery. The smart of them over, Bysshe soon dismissed from his mind
those disagreeable visits to the Doctor's study. In the pages of his
ghost-stories and banditti-stories, his tales of satanic malice and
knightly heroism, he forgot all about those very unkind boys. Most of
those delightful books he borrowed from the circulating library, but
doubtless he had in his schoolroom 'locker' his own copies of his
favourite novels. It cannot be questioned he had a peculiar and
inalienable copy of _Zofloya, or The Moor_, which, yielding flowers of
romance to be found in the ineffably absurd novels which he published in
the opening term of his literary career, gave him also fine pieces of
descriptive writing that, after doing service in _Zastrozzi_ and _St.
Irvyne_, were worked with skilful art into the lofty song of _Laon and
Cythna_.
The urchin enjoyed his frequent walks under the playground's southern wall
with his cousin Tom Medwin, till the latter left Dr. Greenlaw's sadly
plebeian school, and went off to the public school which prepared him for
Oxford. Though he cannot rely so confidently as he could wish on Tom
Medwin's assurance, the present writer likes to imagine Mr. Medwin had
better ground than his treacherous memory for saying that, when they were
schoolfellows at Sion House, he and his young cousin more than once played
the truant; and rowing on the river more than once to Kew, went on one
occasion by water to Richmond, where they visited the theatre and saw Mrs.
Jordan in the 'Country Girl.' One would fain believe this of the little
boy who, on growing to be a man, disliked the theatre almost as cordially
as he had in former time hated Professor Sala's dancing academy.
But one hesitates to trust in this matter to the biographer who seems to
have erred in recording that Shelley acquired a taste for boating, even at
a time considerably prior to the period in which this secret and lawless
trip to the Richmond Theatre is said to have been made. Peacock, who can
scarcely have been mistaken, was certain the poet's 'affection for boating
began at a much later date' than his time at Eton. Walter S. Halliday
(Shelley's friend at the public school) was no less certain, in February,
1857, that at Eton Shelley 'never joined in the usual sports of the boys,
and, what is remarkable, never went out in a boat on the river.' Had
Shelley enjoyed boating at Sion House, it is inconceivable that he (so
passionately fond of the water in later time) would have avoided the
river, or could have been kept from it at Eton. As Halliday was no such
reliable authority as successive writers have thought, I should have
hesitated to prefer his evidence to Medwin's testimony on this point, had
not the Etonian witness been so emphatically sustained by Love Peacock. In
regard to what he says of Shelley's boating at Brentford, Mr. Medwin
professes to speak from his own knowledge. On the other hand, he
acknowledges that, with respect to the poet's alleged love of boating at
Eton, he speaks on the worst possible authority--the poet's own equally
delusive and retentive memory. 'He told me,' says Medwin, _vide_ _The
Life_, v. I., p. 52, 'the greatest delight he experienced at Eton was from
boating, for which he had, as I have already mentioned, early acquired a
taste.' Such unsupported evidence from Shelley is scarcely anything better
than no evidence at all, on being opposed by such witnesses as Halliday
and Peacock.
From this chapter on Shelley's school-days at Brentford, one should not
omit a pleasant glimpse that is afforded of the boy (in the company of his
cousins, the Groves, sons of Thomas Grove, of Fern House, Wiltshire, who
married Charlotte Pilford, sister of the poet's mother) by a letter, dated
to Hogg, February 16th, 1857, by Charles Henry Grove. At that date it was
in the memory of Charles Henry Grove how, when a tender Harrovian, _ætat._
nine, he saw his cousin Bysshe for the first time. On this occasion the
nine-year old Harrovian, attended by his brother George, _ætat._ ten, and
protected by a sufficient body-servant, picked Bysshe up at Brentford and
carried him off, on the roof of the stage-coach to Wiltshire, for the
Easter holidays. It lived in Charles Grove's memory, how, during these
holidays he and his brother joined Shelley in a feat of mischief that no
doubt made the Squire of Fern wish them back at school. Acting on Bysshe's
suggestion, the three took the carpenter's axes, and set to work cutting
down some of the young fir-trees of Fern Park. As Charles Grove, _ætat._
nine at the time of this occurrence, was born in 1794 (_vide_ Burke's
_Landed Gentry_), and Shelley was born in August, 1792, this pretty 'piece
of boys' mischief' may be assigned to the Easter holidays of Bysshe's
twelfth year,--_i.e._ Easter, 1804; about the middle of his whole time at
Sion House.
It seems to have been towards the end of his time at Brentford, that
Shelley experienced the delights of his tender attachment to the gentle
schoolmate of his own age, with whom he used to hold romantic converse in
the playground, and exchange 'good-night kisses' at the time for going to
bed--the childish attachment so sweetly commemorated in the _Essay on
Friendship_. What is the biographical value of that charming story, which
one could believe no less readily than gladly, were it not told _of_
Shelley _by_ Shelley?
Had it proceeded from a man far less imaginative than Shelley, and far
less prone to mistake the creations of his fancy for sincere
recollections, no cautious reader would regard this pleasant record of
infantile affection as faithful in every particular to the actual
circumstances of the childish attachment. On the other hand, the coldest
and most suspicious peruser will be disposed to think the story
substantially truthful, due allowance being made for the force of
imagination, the deceitfulness of the equally retentive and fallacious
memory, and the peculiar infirmity of the man who could not be trusted to
give twelve fairly consistent accounts of any matter, however much he
might desire to be precisely accurate. It is in favour of this estimate of
the story that the essayist's portraiture of his former self harmonizes
with the several other accounts he has given elsewhere of his character in
childhood. In his later time Shelley always thought of the child, from
which he had developed, as a mild-mannered, tractable, gentle child. The
attachment being remembered, as an affair of his twelfth or thirteenth
year, it may be presumed to have stirred and held his heart towards the
close of his time at Brentford,--probably after Tom Medwin (who says
nothing of the matter) left Sion House. To see the Brentford schoolboy's
prominent blue eyes overflowing with tears of delight, under the music of
his friend's voice, to watch the two urchins exchanging kisses, is to
remember the girlishness of Byron's early attachments, as well as the
girlishness of his affectionate care for his Harrow 'favourites.' From his
first to his last hour at Sion House the masculine forces of Bysshe's
two-sided nature were in abeyance. He was a gentle English girl rather
than a gentle English boy.
CHAPTER V.
THE ETON SCHOOLBOY.
First year at Eton--Creation of the Castle-Goring Baronetcy--Sir
Bysshe Shelley's Last Will--Timothy Shelley's Children--Miss Hellen
Shelley's Recollections--The Etonian at Home--The Big Tortoise--The
Great Snake--Dr. Keate--Mr. Packe at fault--Walter Halliday--Mr.
Hexter--Mr. Bethell--Fagging--Mad Shelley--'Old Walker'--Enthusiasm
for Natural Science--The Rebel of the School--Lord High Atheist--Dr.
Lind's Pernicious Influence on Shelley--Poetical Fictions about Dr.
Lind--Shelley's Illness at Field Place--His Monstrous Hallucination
touching his Father--John Shelley the Lunatic--_Zastrozzi_--Premature
Withdrawal from Eton.
Respecting the year of Shelley's first term at Eton, the authorities
differ: one set of writers averring that he entered the school in his
fourteenth year (1806), whilst other biographers record that he entered it
in his fifteenth year (1807). Lady Shelley says, 'At the age of _thirteen_
Shelley went to Eton.' On the other hand, the usually exact Thomas Love
Peacock says, 'On leaving this academy' (_i.e._ Sion House) 'he was sent
in his fifteenth year to Eton,' and Mr. William Rossetti says, 'He passed
to Eton in his fifteenth year.' Though no prudent writer ventures to set
aside lightly a date given by so careful and conscientious a biographer as
the author of the _Memoir of Shelley_, I venture to think that Mr.
Rossetti is at fault in this particular, having perhaps erred through
reasonable reliance on the accuracy of Mr. Peacock, who seems, in taking a
date from one of the books he was reviewing for _Fraser's Magazine_ (June,
1858), to have gone a barley-corn beyond Mr. Middleton's words. Instead of
saying that Shelley _went_ to Eton in his fifteenth year for the first
time, Mr. Middleton (in his _Shelley and his Writings_, 1858) keeps to
historic truth in merely stating, 'In 1807, when Shelley was in his
fifteenth year, we find him at Eton.' He neither says nor implies that the
future poet could not have been found there in the previous year. On the
contrary, his words indicate uncertainty as to the precise date of the
poet's first appearance at the school. Gaining his knowledge of the poet's
career at Eton from old Etonians who were schoolmates there, Mr.
Middleton was probably instructed in this matter by an old Etonian who,
whilst certain Shelley was at the school in 1807, could not speak
positively to his being there in an earlier year.
Though the author of the _Shelley Memorials_ is curiously deficient in the
communicativeness and accuracy to be looked for in a biographer professing
to gather her materials 'from Authentic Sources,' it may be assumed that
Lady Shelley is right on a matter from which the schoolboy's preserved
letters and his father's domestic memoranda of the year 1806 would save
her from going wrong. It favours this view of Lady Shelley's statement,
that old Mr. Bysshe Shelley was created a baronet by the Duke of Norfolk's
influence on the 3rd of March, 1806, when he was in his seventy-fifth
year. At length the Castle-Goring Shelleys had risen from the status of
prosperous middle-class folk to the honour of the baronetage. Having
become a dignified commoner, with a dignity transmissible to his
descendants, the Horsham miser (who had sent his son to Oxford) naturally
felt that, instead of associating any longer with tradesmen's sons at Sion
House, his grandson (the heir of the heir to the Castle-Goring baronetcy)
should make the acquaintance of the sons of the nobility and other
territorial gentry. Much though he grudged the fees for his baronetcy, and
dreaded the school-bills, Sir Bysshe determined that his grandson should
be educated up to his rank, and sent forthwith to Eton.
The future poet was still under Dr. Greenlaw's government, and his
grandsire was counting the days still to elapse before he should clutch
the long-coveted honour of the bloody hand, when the veteran took an
important step (on 28th November, 1805) for the achievement of the grand
ambition of his riper age and failing years. This ambition was to make the
Shelleys of his loins into the House of the Castle-Goring Shelleys, and to
endow the new house with a large and strictly entailed estate in land,
that should place it securely amongst the great territorial families of
Sussex; a common-place ambition, that was the natural and matter-of-course
ambition for a man of old Bysshe Shelley's character, career, and age. As
he was his father's eldest son, Mr. Timothy Shelley (the poet's father)
naturally approved this design for making a big entailed estate, to which
he would succeed on his sire's death. Though they squabbled and wrangled
with one another on minor pecuniary questions, the veteran and his son
were of one mind on this point. Whilst the old man was set on making a big
entailed estate, his son was of opinion that the estate ought to be made.
The materials of which it was proposed to construct this big estate
were,--
(A) Certain real estate, settled by deed of appointment (dated 20th
August, 1791) on Mr. Bysshe Shelley for life, and then on his son Timothy
for life, with, &c.
(B) Certain other real estate, settled, by certain indentures of Lease and
Release (dated respectively 29th and 30th April, 1782) on the same Bysshe
Shelley for life, and then on his same son Timothy for life, with, &c.,
and
(C) Certain unsettled lands, the property and disposal of which were
wholly in the same Bysshe Shelley: and one half of the same Bysshe
Shelley's personal estate.
After what has been said of old Bysshe Shelley's success in making money,
it is needless to inform readers that C was by far the most important of
these three several lots of estate:--that, though of considerable value, A
and B were insignificant in comparison with C.
What was the precise yearly revenue of A and B does not appear. At a time
when he had no clear knowledge of the matter, the poet used to speak of
the revenue as 6000_l._ per annum. But whilst he certainly did not
understate the income, there is reason for thinking he greatly exaggerated
it. The rental may (for all I know positively to the contrary) have been
6000_l._ a-year; but in estimating the poet's financial position, readers
had better assume that the yearly income from A and B did not exceed, and
may have been considerably less than, 4000_l._ a-year. If the two lots of
estate yielded a clear income of 4000_l._ they were worth about 80,000_l._
If they yielded as much as 6000_l._, they were worth about 120,000_l._
Under the settlements, to which reference has been made, Percy Bysshe
Shelley (the poet) was, in the language of lawyers, tenant in tail male of
A and B in remainder expectant on the deaths of his father and
grandfather. That is to say, the fee simple of A and B would devolve on
him absolutely after the deaths of his sire and grandsire. For the more
clear information of non-legal readers, let it also be observed that,
having this estate in A and B under existing settlements, Percy had in A
and B an interest that would vest in him at the attainment of his
majority,--an estate which, on his coming of age, he would be able to
charge, aliene, or will away from his kindred; an estate on which he would
be able to borrow money, and could sell, or dispose of by testament,
during the lives of his father and grandfather, or the life of either of
them, no less than when on the deaths of both of them he should come in
actual possession of the land.
This being so, old Bysshe Shelley (son of the Yankee apothecary) made a
will on 28th November, 1805, whereby he devised his unsettled lands (of C)
to trustees, In Trust to settle the same, in what lawyers designate
'strict settlement,' on his son Timothy Shelley for life, Percy Bysshe
Shelley for life, and Percy Bysshe Shelley's sons successively, according
to their seniorities in tail male, and then in default, &c., on other sons
of Timothy Shelley aforesaid born in the testator's lifetime and their
sons successively in tail male, and then in default, &c., on other sons of
the same Timothy, born after the testator's death, successively according
to their seniorities in tail male; with similar limitations in default,
&c., in favour of John Shelley Sidney, and Robert Shelley (Timothy's
younger brothers by half-blood), and their respective issue male. By his
will the testator further bequeathed his personal estate to trustees, and
directed half of it to be invested in land, to be settled in the same way
as the already-mentioned lands. It is further directed by the will that
all persons entitled to A shall concur in settling A as C, or forfeit for
themselves and issue all the interest pertaining to them under the will in
C. By the will, therefore, Percy Bysshe Shelley stood to succeed on his
father's death as tenant for life to the whole entailed estate, provided
he concurred in arrangements whereby the real estate A (of which he was
tenant in tail male in remainder expectant on the deaths, &c., &c.) would
become part of the entailed estate. To take his place in succession to the
very large estate, to be created by his grandsire's will, he was only
required, on coming of age, to surrender his eventual absolute interest in
a comparatively small estate, and take in lieu thereof a life-interest.
Nothing was required of him that is not often required of heirs under
similar circumstances. Nothing was required of him that (in case of his
death in his nonage) would not have been required of his younger brother,
or any other person similarly interested in A. Such was the will of old
Bysshe Shelley made in 1805 in abundant grand-paternal affection for the
poet, long before any differences touching religion and politics had risen
between the youngster and his father. This same will was in due course
proved as the last testament of Sir Bysshe Shelley, Bart., in Doctors'
Commons, in 1815.
At the moment of the future poet's departure for Eton, it is well to
remind the readers of his story, that he was the eldest child of his
parents,--being senior to his eldest sister by a year and nine months.
Mistakes having been made about the poet in his earlier years, which would
not have been made by his biographers, had they been aware of this fact,
it is necessary to warn readers not to mistrust their present guide
because he differs on this matter from several previous authorities. Here
is the list of the offspring of Mr. and Mrs. Timothy Shelley, of Field
Place, with some particulars of the children, taken from the pedigree,
mentioned in a previous chapter:--
1. Percy Bysshe Shelley, eldest son and heir-apparent, born at Field
Place 4th August, 1792, baptized at Warnham 7th September following.
2. Elizabeth Shelley, eldest daughter, born 10th May, 1794, baptized
at Warnham 2nd July following.
3. Hellen Shelley, 2nd daughter, born 29th January, 1796, baptized
27th February following; died an infant, buried at Warnham 25th May,
1796.
4. Mary Shelley, 3rd daughter, born 9th June, 1797, baptized at
Warnham 17th of July following.
5. Hellen Shelley, 4th daughter, born 26th September, 1799, baptized
at Warnham 6th October following.
6. Margaret Shelley, 5th daughter, born 20th of January, 1801,
baptized at Warnham 12th March following.
7. John Shelley, 2nd son, born 15th of March, 1806, baptized at
Warnham 14th of August following.
A child of six years, when her brother went to Eton for the first time,
Miss Hellen Shelley (who lived to be in her later middle age the chief
source of information respecting his boyhood) may have still been in her
seventh year, cannot have exceeded her seventh year by three full months,
when he returned from Eton to Field Place for his first Etonian holidays.
It follows that, instead of pertaining to an earlier period of his
boyhood, Miss Hellen Shelley's recollections of her brother relate to the
Eton schoolboy; to the youth between the date of his gentle extrusion from
Eton and entrance into Oxford, to the University undergraduate, and to the
youthful lodger in Poland Street, immediately after his by no means
undeserved expulsion from his Oxford college. It is not in the nature of
things that his sister Hellen (his junior by seven years and something
more than seven weeks) should have remembered aught of her brother
previous to his Eton time, so clearly as she remembered the things
narrated of him, by virtue of her own memory, in the letters of her pen
published in Hogg's first volume. It follows, therefore, that for a
biographer to make the Shelley of the Warnham day-school, and the
Brentford boarding-school, out of these reminiscences, is to produce a
precocious infant very much unlike what the schoolboy can have been in his
earlier childhood; in fact, to set the reader wrong at the story's outset
with a false Shelley, instead of the real Shelley.
If Miss Hellen Shelley may be trusted (and there is no reason to question
the general fidelity of the lady's reminiscences), the Etonian, at home
for the holidays, taught his little sisters to personate angels of light
and angels of darkness, spirits of the air and spirits of the fiery
depths, with such eccentric and fantastic articles of clothing or other
drapery as the children of big country-houses can usually discover in
out-of-the-way wardrobes and closets when they have mind to 'play at
dressing up' in the Christmas holidays. He used also to play under their
curious eyes, and to their alternate delight and terror, with his chemical
toys and electrical apparatus. Good cause had little Hellen to hold her
breath with alarm, and wonder what would come of the magical performance,
when the mysteriously clever and daring Bysshe was seen running through a
principal passage of the old home towards the kitchen, whilst bearing in
his outstretched hands a dish, that sent blue flames upwards even to the
ceiling. Better reason still had the small damsel to cry aloud, in strains
that brought the elders of the family to her rescue, when the scientific
experimentalist (who had on previous occasions inspired her with a
reasonable aversion to his electrical jar) declared his humane purpose of
curing her chilblains with a series of small shocks.
Himself a glutton of horrible tales, the Etonian-at-home was ever ready
with a harrowing narrative of tragic crime and ghastly consequences, when
the girls begged him to tell them something terrible, by the flickering
light of their play-room fire. He overflowed, also, with stories about the
alchemist, Cornelius Agrippa, who was represented as living up aloft in a
spacious garret, under the roof of Field Place, directly over the heads of
the excited children, grouped about this playroom's only source of light.
To their frequent entreaties for a personal introduction to the mysterious
and benevolent Cornelius, Percy used to assure his sisters that in due
course they should see the philosopher, his books, his lamp, his venerable
beard, when he should migrate from the garret to the cave, soon to be dug
for him in the orchard, and furnished with all the apparatus needful for
his investigations and experiments.
At other times Percy entertained his sisters with anecdotes of the Great
Tortoise, that had lived for centuries and grown to enormous magnitude in
and near Warnham Pond. What he told them of the fabulous tortoise does not
appear. It is so difficult to get anything but turtle-soup and hair-combs
out of a tortoise of any kind, one would like to know how the boy
contrived to inspire his auditors with a vivid interest in this creature
of his imagination. To do so he may be presumed to have talked freely and
with wild disregard for the teaching of the best authorities on natural
history.
Towards the close of his Eton time (or possibly somewhat later, between
his withdrawal from Eton and departure for Oxford) Percy Bysshe discarded
the Big Tortoise and replaced it with the Great Snake, that was supposed
to have lived for three hundred years in the Field Place gardens, before
it was killed by the scythe of the careless or ruthless gardener, during
the childhood of its imaginative historian. Biographers, who smile at the
Shelleyan girls for putting faith in their brother's taradiddles about the
Big Tortoise, are firm believers in his taradiddles about the monstrous
and Venerable Serpent. Indeed, they are apt to be indignant with flippant
sceptics, who declare themselves as ready to believe in the Warnham
Tortoise as in the Field Place Snake. How the snake had amused itself for
three hundred years in the grass and flower-beds of the garden is not on
the record. Nor does it appear how the young historian came upon the
evidence of its longevity.
At Oxford, Hogg heard strange tales of the Field Place Snake; and
listening to them, as they came from his young friend's lips, the
hard-headed north-countryman may well have wondered why his young friend
told so many more lies than were necessary. But if Hogg dismissed the
Great Snake legends from his mind, as mere levities undeserving of
remembrance, some of the poet's historians would have them treated more
respectfully. Believing in the Great Snake, and gushing over it in a style
that appears slightly comical to unbelievers, Mr. Buxton Forman
ejaculates, 'We think of these things, and remember the anecdote of the
"great old snake" of Field Place, beloved of the little Percy, and killed
by the scythe of the gardener, and almost wonder what inarticulate dirge
the little boy uttered over his mutilated favourite'!!! It still remains
for a Royal Academician to put on canvas this pathetic scene:--The Child
Shelley uttering an inarticulate dirge over the corse of his mutilated
favourite, whilst the remorseless and all unfeeling gardener pursues his
daily wages with the fatal knife.
Other facts touching the Etonian may be gleaned from Miss Hellen Shelley's
letters, or the pages of less delightful writers. Sometimes he is seen
taking his sisters for country walks. At other times he is seen on his
pony, riding, perhaps, to 'the meet' of his grandsire's hounds; for much
as he loved money, and much as he may have grudged the cost of his kennel,
old Sir Bysshe kept hounds, and a huntsman and 'whips' almost to the last.
There were times when he walked forth shooting, with a gun in his hand and
a dog at his heels. On one occasion the humour seized him to don the garb
of a farmer's hind, and bearing a truss of hay on his back walk across the
Field Place lawn, and under the very windows through which his sisters
were looking. It was, doubtless, some two years or more before this bit of
rural masquerading, that he used to walk out in the evening, to look at
the moon and stars, moving to and fro in the park, and in the Warnham
lanes, with the butler at his heels, to watch over him and take care of
him. There was also a day, when this--in his sisters' eyes, so
marvellous--Etonian spoke to them seriously of his intention to buy a
little gipsy-girl, and train her to love him and depend upon him. But
nothing in all Miss Hellen Shelley's reminiscences is more eloquent of the
pride she took in her marvellous brother, than her recollection of the
pleasure she took in admiring 'the beautifully fitting silk pantaloons,'
and other sumptuous raiment he was allowed to order 'according to his own
fancy at Eton.' Little Hellen's delight was perfect when she saw this
exemplary Etonian standing, after the fashion of men and boys, with his
back to the fire, posturing, and playing with his coat-tails, so as to
display his slight figure and exquisite nether-garments to the best
advantage. What though this superb brother now and then stained his little
sister's pinafores and frocks with lunar-caustic, and otherwise injured
them with the chemicals he used in his scientific experiments?
Going to Eton in 1806 (probably in the early autumn) Shelley left the
school in disgrace, some time towards the close of 1809. The exact date of
his withdrawal from the college has never been revealed by the authorities
of Field Place, who have been no less reticent respecting the
circumstances that resulted in his premature removal from the seminary,
where he failed to win the approval of the masters, though he succeeded
eventually in making himself acceptable to the boys. Why Lady Shelley,
writing 'from authentic sources,' was thus silent on particulars of no
slight moment, the present writer makes no suggestion. All he can say
positively on these points is that Shelley left the school in disgrace,
which there is reason for thinking he richly merited, and left it at the
time already stated. His Eton career, therefore, cannot have exceeded
three years by very many weeks. In so short a time, however, he endured
more suffering than falls to the lot of an ordinary schoolboy, and at the
same time achieved a reputation that long survived his departure from the
school, and would have lived for several years in its traditions, even if
his subsequent career had not given his former comrades at the famous seat
of learning, other and stronger reasons for holding him in remembrance.
On the girlish side of his nature, Bysshe was no boy to conciliate the
riotous, overbearing urchins of the public school. When the masculine
elements of his constitution came to be in the ascendant, he made enemies
of the masters; and at Eton, in 'old Keate's time,' to have a bad
character with the masters was to come under the lash of a gentleman who
surpassed Mulcaster and Busby as a severe disciplinarian. If any kind of
posthumous renown is better than none, this gentleman may be numbered
amongst the fortunate members of his profession; for his fame will not
perish so long as Orbilius is remembered. Shelley soon learnt that Dr.
Greenlaw's hand was light in comparison with the hand of the Etonian
master-in-chief; that his rods were feathers in comparison with the
implements of torture wielded by Dr. Keate. Succeeding a head-master, the
mildness of whose rigour had rendered him the scorn of pedagogues and the
jest of schoolboys, Dr. Keate ascended his throne with a purpose of
restoring the discipline of the school to the ancient standard of Etonian
severity. Just the man to accomplish this ambition, he failed only by
raising the discipline something higher than the standard he proposed to
his energies. It is recorded of this squat, stout, thickset,
crooked-legged man, that a look of cruel glee played over his countenance
as he conned the names of a heavy flogging-bill. A man of humour and a
lover of good cheer, he was a hospitable entertainer; and it has been told
admiringly of him, how he would leave his guests over their wine, and
half-an-hour later return to them with heightened gaiety after flogging a
batch of gentlemanly young culprits. If he has not been strangely maligned
by history and tradition, he used to stand for the hour together over the
penal block with his right shoulder well thrown back, and his right arm
moving like a piece of machinery. He is said to have flogged eighty boys
on a single morning, throwing his whole force into every stripe, smiling
grimly as he went on in the path of duty, and finally retiring to his
breakfast with an air of serene complacence pervading the visage, that
bore so striking a resemblance to the visage of a bull-dog. Prominence is
here given to these matters out of deference to those of the Shelleyan
enthusiasts who, like Mrs. Shelley and Lady Shelley, insist that harsh and
ferocious schoolmasters are to be held accountable for whatever was
slightly amiss in the poet, before he shone forth a faultless creature.
Arising in no way from deficiency of materials, which, save in respect to
one or two matters, are superabundant for the biographer's purpose, the
chief difficulty in describing Shelley's course at Eton is the difficulty
of discriminating between the trustworthy and delusive materials, and
especially of separating the threads of pure fact from the threads of pure
fiction used in about equal proportion in the manufacture of statements
that, without the exercise of cautious and nice discernment, might be
accepted as wholly true or altogether devoid of evidential value. For
instance, in dealing with the statements by Mr. Packe, touching Shelley's
career at Eton--statements to which Lady Shelley accords her unqualified
credence and conclusive 'imprimatur'--it is by no means easy to separate
the threads of truth from the threads of fable.
'Among my latest recollections of Shelley's life at Eton,' says Mr.
Packe, at the end of his letter, 'is the publication of _Zastrozzi_,
for which, I think, he received 40_l._ With part of the proceeds he
gave a most magnificent banquet to eight of his friends, among whom I
was included.'
In these few words there are three mis-statements. As Shelley left Eton in
the later part of 1809, and _Zastrozzi_ was not published before the 5th
of June (or, at the earliest, before the end of May), 1810, it is certain
that the publication of the novel was no incident of Shelley's life at the
school. It being certain that Shelley received never a farthing of
publisher's money for the absurd performance, Mr. Packe must have been
wrong in saying the author was paid 40_l._ for it. [Mr. Packe's words,
'for which, I think, he received 40_l._,' are, of course, to be read 'for
which he received, I think, 40_l._'--_i.e._ as the statement of a witness,
certain that a considerable sum was paid, though uncertain whether 40_l._
was the precise sum.] As the author received no money for the book, he
cannot have given 'with part of the proceeds' (_i.e._ part of nothing) 'a
most magnificent banquet to eight of his friends.' But though he gives
three pieces of delusive evidence in three lines of type, it does not
follow that the lines are of no evidential value. An honest person,
writing in good faith, Mr. Packe may be fairly regarded as a person,
remembering something about _Zastrozzi_ in connexion with Eton (where the
novel, or some part of it, was certainly written); with remembering
something, also, of Shelley's farewell feast to a party of friends at
Eton; with remembering, moreover (or, at least, believing that he
remembered), that Shelley was said to have been paid 40_l._, more or less,
for the literary production. These recollections (albeit the recollections
of a very mistaken and very much misinformed witness) are not to be
rejected as altogether valueless, but kept in reserve as honest statements
and possibly veritable recollections, unfit to be used as testimony by
themselves, but quite fit to be used in confirmation of similar
recollections by other people. Could it be shown in like way that each of
the other guests, either at the time of the banquet or some time
afterwards, was under the impression that the feast was paid for with
publisher's money, no person competent to sift and weigh evidence would
hesitate in coming to the conclusion that the banquet was given by
Shelley as a thing bought with money he had received from a
publisher,--that the common impression of the eight independent witnesses
was the result of representations made by the giver of the feast.
But what was Lady Shelley about, when she--drawing her information from
'authentic sources,' and proclaiming the superiority of her book to all
Shelleyan biographies from 'unauthentic sources'--allowed the three lines
of Mr. Packe's letter, and other equally faulty lines of it, to go before
the public as sure and trustworthy information? If biographies from
'authentic sources' are made up in this fashion, readers may with reason
come to prefer biographies 'from unauthentic sources.' As Lady Shelley has
forced her literary method and address into contrast with those of the man
of letters, whom she discharged with strange discourtesy, she must not
resent the assurance that the comparison she has provoked is not to Mr.
Hogg's disadvantage.
In the sufficient evidences respecting Shelley at Eton, critical readers
make the acquaintance of two very different Shelleys:--the girlish Shelley
(of Mr. Walter Halliday's letter) who 'was not made to endure the rough
and boisterous pastime at Eton,' never 'joined in the usual sports of the
boys, and, what is remarkable, never went out in a boat on the river,' but
preferred to ramble about Clewer, Frogmore, and Stoke Park, by himself, or
with a single companion of congenial gentleness; and the combative
Shelley, whose unruliness and contumacious behaviour to his masters gained
for him the office and title of 'The Atheist' of the school. Differing
little from the moping and discontented lad of his last year at Sion
House, the girlish Etonian exhibits several points of resemblance to Byron
in the earlier part of his unhappy time at Harrow; and in like manner when
he has risen to be the arch-rebel of the school, the saucy and combative
Etonian reminds one of the combative Byron, leading the riotous
Harrovians, and rising with atheistical impudence against Dr. Butler's
authority.
In one respect Shelley entered Eton under circumstances far more
advantageous than those that caused Byron to hate his public school in the
opening terms of his connexion with it. Unlike Byron, who went to Harrow,
so badly prepared for its studies, that, had it not been for Dr. Drury's
sympathetic consideration, he would have been put (to his poignant
humiliation) in a form of quite little boys, much younger than himself,
Shelley went to his public school well grounded in Latin and Greek. 'He
had,' says Medwin, 'been so well grounded in the classics, that it
required little labour for him to get up his daily lessons.' Medwin's
testimony on this point is sustained by the evidence of Messrs. Packe and
Halliday, two of the poet's contemporaries at Eton.
During his stay at the public school, Shelley seems to have resided
successively at two different houses. Getting his information from old
Etonians, who had known the author of _Laon and Cythna_ at Eton, Mr.
Middleton certifies that the future poet boarded, in 1807, at the house of
Mr. Hexter, the writing-master, 'one of those extra masters, some of whom
resided at the College, and, holding an amphibious rank between the tutor
and the dame, were allowed to take boarders.' Subsequently he is found in
the house of Mr. Bethell, the tutor whom Mr. Packe (possibly with no more
justice than generosity) described half-a-century later as 'one of the
dullest men in the establishment.' What Mr. Packe's qualifications were
for passing judgment in this style on one of his former preceptors does
not appear; but the solitary epistle, which gives him a place in these
pages, would not warrant a confident opinion that brightness was Mr.
Packe's distinguishing characteristic. Fortunately, for school-masters,
evidence given to their discredit by former pupils is never regarded as
evidence of the highest quality by persons of discretion and judicial
fairness. Possibly Mr. Packe was as wrong about Mr. Bethell's intellect,
as he was about the date of the publication of _Zastrozzi_. But an idle
word to the defamation of the Eton tutor, with whom Shelley came into
conflict, was no word for Lady Shelley to withhold from the world. It has
long been the practice of the Shelleyan enthusiasts to think and speak the
worst of every one with whom the poet had a difference,--to blacken every
reputation that could be suspected of lowering the lustre of the poet, who
under auspicious circumstances 'might have been "the Saviour of the
World."'
That Shelley, on the girlish side of his nature, was no boy 'to take
kindly to fagging,' and on the masculine side of his nature was precisely
the boy to detest a system under which he might be licked with a bamboo or
a leather strap for hard-boiling an egg which he had been told to boil
lightly, no one is likely to question. But though it is certain he
disliked being made to fag, and more than probable that he showed this
dislike in ways to be resented, not only by the proprietors of fags, but
also by the most infantile of Etonian conservatives, readers are under no
obligation to accept for truth all the fine and melodramatic accounts of
the efforts made, and sufferings endured by the poet, in order to put an
end to so revolting a system of domestic tyranny.
Getting her fanciful notions of the matter from her husband's lips, Mrs.
Shelley would have us believe that repugnance to fagging was the offence
which brought him so often to the block, and rendered him alike unpopular
with masters and boys. It is even averred that to put down fagging he
organized a conspiracy of the junior Etonians against the barbarous
practice. That no such conspiracy was begotten and fostered by Shelley is
certain; for the old Etonians, of whom Medwin and Middleton certainly
(Peacock and Hogg almost certainly) made inquiries about the matter, had
never heard anything of a movement which could not have failed to come to
their knowledge, had it ever been an incident of scholastic politics in
their time. The truth underlying these fictions is that Shelley, like most
junior boys, conceived a hatred of 'fagging,' suffered much from it, and
having, unlike most junior boys, the rashness to declare the hatred, paid
the penalty of his rashness, in being cuffed, licked, and silenced in
various painful and exasperating ways. This seems to be the whole of the
case, which he magnified in later time into a far greater affair. To
Peacock, he used to speak of the cruelties practised upon him by senior
boys at Eton, with a show of abhorrence only surpassed by his display of
indignation and disgust at the monstrous barbarities done him by Lord
Chancellor Eldon. In still later time he doubtless spoke even more
passionately to his wife of the fires of Etonian persecution. Men
sometimes say strange things to their wives; and, in certain moods, wives
are even quicker to believe the strange things, than in other moods to
suspect untruth in the commonplace things told them by their lords. After
brooding for twelve years or more over the sorrows and wrongs he endured
at Eton, the poet believed all he imagined about them.
Though Shelley suffered no little at Eton from 'fagging,' he suffered far
more from the particular bullying that flourishes under the system he
detested, quite as much as in schools where fags are unknown, and senior
boys have no especial and peculiar slaves. In behalf of 'fagging' it is
justly urged that if the master licks his 'fag,' he is quick on the score
of dignity and ownership to protect him from maltreatment by other senior
boys;--that if the 'fag' is bullied by his proper lord, he is secured by
'the system' from being bullied by a score of tyrants. None the less true
is it that, though the system saves a junior boy from the tyranny of
several tyrants acting individually and separately, it is powerless to
guard him from the oppression of many tyrants acting conjointly and in
mass. Subject to the certain tyranny (more or less severe and irritating)
of a single despot, the fag is also liable to the uncertain tyranny of the
playground (_i.e._, of the multitude of his schoolmates, acting in
unison), a tyranny which his peculiar owner can do little or nothing to
moderate. In his earlier time at Eton, Shelley suffered more than most
boys of his age from the tyranny of the playground.
Boys are quick to discover the peculiarities of their companions, and no
less quick to discover something offensive in those peculiarities. Having
discovered the offensiveness, they conceive themselves morally
entitled--and, indeed, by honour bound--to chastise the individual who by
force of his disagreeable peculiarities offends them. Of all peculiarities
likely to offend a multitude of schoolboys and set them at war with a
junior boy, none is more certain to give offence than a 'general
queerness,' allied with unsociability. The shy, nervous, moping boy from
Field Place had not been a week at Eton before he was found guilty of
'general queerness.' He had not been there a month before he was found
guilty of unsociability. These facts having been found against the boy who
held aloof from other boys, the playground began to ridicule him, hoot at
him, mob him. Under these provocations the nervous and excitable boy
vented his rage with shrill screams of fury. Obviously, the boy who
responded in this violent style was a boy worth the trouble of 'baiting.'
It was good fun to hem him in, mimic his cries of rage, point derisive
fingers at him, and burst into clamorous laughter, when he uttered a more
than ordinarily shrill shriek of rage and anguish. When he clenched his
fist, and rushed at the nearest of his tormentors with the intention of
striking him, the playground fled before him--not in real terror, as Lady
Shelley imagines--but with a mere show of fright simulated for his further
annoyance, the promotion of general hilarity, and the maintenance of
'sport.'
It was the practice of Etonians, in Shelley's earlier time, to assemble on
dark winter evenings under the cloisters, and amuse themselves in this
droll fashion. The name of a particular boy (one known probably to be in
the rear of the multitude coming from the playing-grounds) was shouted
aloud, as though he were needed for some urgent business. The cry having
been thus raised, it grew louder and louder from the increasing energy and
growing number of the voices. On the appearance of the boy owning the
name, the clamour was redoubled. Everyone drew to one side or the other to
make a way for him. It was useless for him to proclaim his presence and
beg the shouters to spare their lungs. No words of his utterance could be
heard in the uproar. Could they have been heard, any words from him would
only stimulate the shouters to shout yet louder. There was no course open
to him but to walk straight on through two lines of excited faces to the
point, where the demand for his presence had originated. On coming to that
point he found (if he did not know it before) that nobody wanted him, and
was received with peals of laughter. In its origin the game was doubtless
a lively, piquant, and comparatively inoffensive practical joke at the
expense of a lad, who, imagining himself called for some serious cause,
hastened at full speed to discover he had been summoned for nothing. But
it is in the nature of practical jokes to degenerate into cruel jokes,
however amiable they may have been in the first instance. As soon as this
particular joke had lost its newness, the boy thus shouted for knew that
he was being made a fool of, felt himself insulted, grew angry; his anger
being further stimulated by some new variation of the game of torture.
It having been discovered that Shelley suffered keenly from the ridicule
of the playing-fields, he was selected evening after evening for this
particular 'baiting.' Evening after evening the cry was raised of
'Shelley, Shelley, Shelley!' As he ran the gauntlet of derisive faces and
voices, fingers were pointed at him. Not seldom he came in for rougher
usage. If he was carrying books under his arm, a blow from behind
scattered them on the ground. His clothes were pulled and torn. More than
once a muddy football, deriving its impetus from a well-planted kick, came
with the force of a spent shot down the narrow alley of deriders, caught
him in his shirt-front, and bounding upwards, made his face as dirty as
his frill. Mr. Middleton was assured by an eye-witness of these scenes
that the fury, to which Shelley was goaded by his tormentors, 'made his
eyes flash like a tiger's, his cheeks grow pale as death, his limbs
quiver, and his hair stand on end.' It is probable that the boy's shrill
screeches of rage, wild gesticulations, and frantic appearance, whilst he
was thus baited and ridiculed by the whole school, first suggested to his
persecutors that 'mad' was the fittest epithet to put before his surname.
Anyhow, he was known in the school as 'Mad Shelley,' both before and after
he had earned the less opprobrious designation of 'The Atheist.'
At a time when 'Mad Shelley' was the butt of the playing-grounds, Eton was
visited by an itinerant lecturer, who received permission to deliver a
course of lectures on astronomy, chemistry, electricity, and mechanics, to
the boys of the school. Familiarly designated 'Old Walker,' this vagrant
professor used to go about the country with his assistant-demonstrator,
orrery, solar microscope, electrical machine, and other scientific
apparatus; lecturing at the superior boys' schools and girls' schools of
the provincial towns. Without Medwin's testimony to the point, it would
have been safe to assume that the wandering lecturer, who was permitted to
enlighten the boys of the most aristocratic of our great public schools,
had also the honour of rendering the same service to the boys of Dr.
Greenlaw's academy. Medwin, however, speaks so precisely of the visit Old
Walker paid Sion House during Bysshe's second or third year at the school,
and of the lively interest taken by Shelley in the professor's
demonstrations, that he is not, in consideration of his frequent
inaccuracies, to be declared guilty of error on the main facts of this
part of his narrative. It is, of course, conceivable that blundering Tom
Medwin assigned to the great room of the Brentford Academy incidents of a
later date and another scene. But it is more probable he was guiltless of
the mistake. Anyhow, Shelley had not long suffered under imputations of
madness at Eton, when he heard Old Walker's course of lectures for the
second time, if Medwin was right--for the first time, if Medwin was wrong
in the matter.
At Eton, 'Old Walker' had an eager devourer of his words, a delighted
witness of his experimental demonstrations, in Mad Shelley. The lectures
had on Shelley all the effect they were designed to produce on intelligent
lads. Producing on him all the effect desired by the Professor, they were
also fruitful of results, that in the opinion of the Eton masters far
exceeded the limits of wholesome interest. It is conceivable that, had Dr.
Keate, and Mr. Bethell, and Mr. Hexter, known how the boy would be stirred
and excited by the lectures, Old Walker would not have received permission
to deliver them to the collegians, or Mad Shelley would not have been
allowed to be present at their delivery. Like many other boys before and
after his time, Mad Shelley was so taken by the lectures, that it is only
a permissible figure of speech to say, he 'went mad' on natural science.
Before Old Walker cleared out of Eton, the boy had become the owner of a
solar microscope, and bought an electrical machine of Old Walker's
assistant.
In Mr. Hexter's house the boy (_ætat._ thirteen and fourteen) had shown
more concern for English literature than for any other accessible means of
pastime,--reading works of prose (as he had done at Brentford), learning
by rote passages from the English poets, and composing childish dramas
with the assistance of a fellow-pupil and fellow-fag of the same house,
named Amos; amusing himself, in short, in accordance with his genuine and
strongest intellectual taste and ambition. One of the happiest and most
agreeable glimpses to be had of Mad Shelley in his earlier time of Eton,
affords a view of the boy, running nimbly up and down the stairs of Mr.
Hexter's house, and singing out cheerily the witches' song of _Macbeth_:--
'Double, double, toil and trouble:
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.'
Of the plays composed by the two boys nothing is known at the present
date, save that they were performed by the author before a third fag of
their house, Matthews, who was the solitary witness of the performances,
and, it may be hoped, an enthusiastically applausive one.
In the new excitement and interests, to which Old Walker's lectures gave
birth, Shelley's care for English literature languished. Like other
children he cared only for the new toy. Like other boys possessed by the
scientific mania, he for a while delighted in nothing but his scientific
apparatus, contrivances, experiments. For a time it was true that he
cared for no learning that his masters taught. During this passion for the
experimental study of scientific phenomena, one of his exploits was to lay
a long train of gunpowder between a decaying tree and a point, at some
distance from the tree, and then to fire the gunpowder by means of a
burning-glass,--with a result altogether satisfactory to the youthful
experimentalist,--but less satisfactory to the owner of the ancient tree,
and by no means to the approval of the masters, who were responsible for
the behaviour of the boys, and for the safety of the buildings of Eton
College. On another occasion, after his transference from Mr. Hexter's
house to the house of the gentleman described by Mr. Packe as 'one of the
dullest men of the establishment,' he was busy at dead of night in his
bedroom with his 'chemical studies' (as they are grandly styled by the
Shelleyan enthusiasts), when he upset a frying-pan full of ingredients
into the fire, with consequences that roused all the sleepers in the
house, and made them in the morning congratulate themselves on not having
been burnt to death in their beds by Mad Shelley.
It certainly does not sustain Mr. Packe's contemptuous opinion of the
tutor, that Mr. Bethell was bright enough to think he had better check his
pupil's enthusiasm for scientific inquiry. It can scarcely be regarded as
evidence of his dullness that this gentleman felt it his duty to see what
Mad Shelley was after, and take steps to preserve his house and its
inmates from the quick destruction, with which they were threatened by the
rather lawless proceedings of an eccentric boy. With this purpose in view,
Mr. Bethell paid Shelley's room a visit at a moment, when the young
gentleman was then and there enlarging his knowledge of nature, by the
scientific production of a blue flame, though the boys of Mr. Bethell's
house had been forbidden to produce blue or any other flame in their
bedrooms.
'Chemical experiments,' airily remarks Lady Shelley, who, taking the
story from the page of a previous writer, seems to think it even more
to her father-in-law's credit than to the tutor's manifest shame,
'were prohibited in the boys' chambers; and the tutor (Mr. Bethel)
somewhat angrily asked what the lad was doing. Shelley jocularly
replied that he was raising the devil. Mr. Bethel seized hold of a
mysterious implement on the table, and in an instant was thrown
against the wall, having grasped a highly charged electrical machine.
Of course the young experimentalist paid dearly for this unfortunate
occurrence.'
And equally, of course, he deserved to pay dearly for the 'unfortunate
occurrence.'
Positively this story is told in proof that young Bysshe Shelley was a
youth of parts, genius, and exceeding sweetness of disposition. A boy
(probably fifteen years old, possibly a year older by this time) is caught
in his bedroom doing what he has been forbidden to do. Coming upon the boy
when he is so occupied, his tutor says, somewhat angrily, 'What are you
doing?' Instead of answering this by no means impertinent question in the
respectful tone required by mere good breeding, the boy answers 'cheekily'
(the Shelleyan enthusiasts must pardon me for using a schoolboy's word, to
describe the schoolboy's misdemeanour), 'I am raising the devil.' On
seeing his tutor approach a powerfully charged electric battery, with
outstretched hand, instead of crying out 'Don't touch it, sir; it will do
you injury,' the boy ('the young experimentalist!'), holding his tongue,
allows his tutor to touch the machine, and to be thrown violently against
a wall. Lady Shelley would have us think this 'young experimentalist' a
nice, loyal, fine-natured, gentlemanly boy; would have us join in a shout
of derision at 'one of the dullest men of the establishment;' would have
us think this pleasant boy badly treated, because he was whipt for his
misbehaviour. I cannot do as Lady Shelley would have me. On the contrary,
knowing the temper and gracious qualities of public schoolboys, I have no
doubt they will, for the most and best part, concur with me in saying,
that Shelley (superb poet though he became in later time) behaved badly in
this business, and deserved all that he 'caught' from Dr. Keate for
unruliness, so wholly 'out of form.'
Shelley having caused so much trouble with his experimental excesses, it
was decided that, to prevent them from turning their bedrooms into
laboratories and setting fire to rotten timber, the boys should at least
for awhile be forbidden to play at being chemical students. A book on
chemistry, which Shelley had borrowed of Mr. Medwin, the Horsham attorney
(Tom Medwin's father), being found in the lad's room, it was sent by his
tutor to Mr. Timothy Shelley, of Field Place, who passed the volume on to
its owner, saying in a note (referred to in the younger Medwin's _Life of
Shelley_), 'I have returned the book on chemistry, as it is a forbidden
thing at Eton.' As chemistry, thus forbidden in 1808, cannot be supposed
to have been forbidden in the school when Old Walker was permitted to
make the boys take an interest in the science, it is a fair inference that
the prohibition resulted in some degree from annoyances, coming to the
school through the lecturer's most interested auditor. Mad Shelley's
electrical machine, and other scientific apparatus, would probably have
been sent to Field Place, together with the volume on chemistry, had he
not already deposited them for safe keeping in the hands of a certain
white-headed gentleman, who will soon receive the attention he merits at
the hands of the present writer.
Those who knew Shelley best in his boyhood did not imagine at the time,
that the 'prohibition of chemistry' would dispose him to desist from the
forbidden pastime. Those who knew him best in later time concurred in
thinking that the order to refrain from chemical inquiry and experiments
would only quicken his enthusiasm for the proscribed amusement.
'Might not this extraordinary prohibition,' asks Mr. Medwin, speaking
from his personal knowledge of his cousin in boyhood and manhood,
'have the more stimulated Shelley to engage in the pursuit?' In the
same spirit, Mr. Rossetti remarks, with equal sagacity and justice.
'No doubt the great turn for chemical experiment which he developed at
Eton, and which became his chief passion there, had as much to do with
an impressible fancy, and with the fact that chemical practice was
prohibited to the schoolboys in their chambers, as with scientific
tendencies.'
It is certain, that instead of having any natural aptitude for the
practice, Shelley was unusually deficient in the qualities, requisite in a
scientific experimentalist. A dreamer, a visionary, and an enthusiast, he
wanted the nice touch, the fine perception of minute phenomena, the
intellectual patience, the mental disposition for accuracy in the smallest
details. It is certain that the man, who, even in his proper art, was
curiously careless of verbal details, never had any sincere disposition
for pursuits, in which nothing can be done without incessant attention to
minutiæ,--for pursuits which repel the student, who does not delight in
the painful vigilance and methodical exactness of scientific inquiry. Had
he played with the microscope to the last hour of a long life, as he
played with it fitfully for several years after leaving Eton, he would
never for a single hour have been 'a worker' with it. He was singularly
wanting in what Mr. Rossetti calls 'scientific tendencies.'
On the other hand, it is no less manifest that in his earlier time a
certain mental and moral perversity--a perversity by no means uncommon in
young people, and only a few degrees less common in persons of mature
age--gave him a keen appetite for fruit he was forbidden to pluck, and a
distaste for whatever fruit he was required to enjoy. The majority of boys
take to smoking (a very disagreeable pastime to beginners), even as Thomas
Carlyle confessed he took to it,--'for the pure sin of it.' Just as the
Chelsea sage began smoking because he was ordered not to smoke, the
Etonian Shelley pursued chemistry because he was ordered not to pursue it.
Had it not been for the needful prohibition of the pastime, that threw the
school into disorder and threatened boarding-houses with destruction, the
enthusiasm for science, for which Old Walker's lectures were in the first
instance accountable, would soon have died out. Forbidden to play with his
chemical apparatus and munitions, Shelley cared for no other pastime, and
maintained that the pastime was a serious pursuit. Had the authorities of
the school ordered every boy to study chemistry and astronomy, and put
their ban on the pursuit of classical lore, Shelley would soon have
declared natural science a profitless kind of busy idleness, and would
have 'wrought linked-armour for his soul' out of Latin and Greek books.
This perversity must be borne in mind by those who would take a true view
of the Shelley of later times,--the Shelley who at Oxford soon ceased to
care for the 'experimental studies' in which he was at liberty to waste
his whole time, and cared especially for the sceptical writers whom he was
admonished to avoid; the Shelley who, on coming from the university into
the wider world, threw himself into the arms of the revolutionary
doctrinaires (before he had given three weeks to the study of political
science), because his natural advisers,--the persons with the strongest
title to direct him authoritatively,--bade and entreated him to give no
heed to such dangerous teachers.
Having come into conflict with the Eton masters on the blue-flame
question, and the natural right of every Eton boy to possess an electrical
machine and use it at his pleasure for the humiliation of his tutor,
Shelley was nearing the time when the unanimous voice of the forms
(_minus_ the masters) proclaimed him 'The Atheist' of the school. Under
the persecutions of the playground, which had goaded him out of his
girlishness into thought and action, that revealed the masculine forces
of his nature, Shelley was ceasing to be the Sion House 'faint heart' and
'milksop,' when Old Walker visited Eton. In the subsequent battle for
freedom of scientific inquiry, the boy's combativeness became daily more
and more apparent; his carelessness for his own skin and his contempt for
Dr. Keate's rods more and more sublime, till Mad Shelley, ceasing to be
everybody's butt, became a boy of pluck and merit to the whole school,--a
possible martyr in the sacred cause of scholastic disorder,--a lad who
cared not a fig for Keate or any of Keate's underlings. From the mad-dog
of the Eton playing-grounds, he had risen to the proud position of The
Eton Atheist. The girlish Shelley had for the moment become 'a boy,'--a
very naughty boy!
Let there be no misunderstanding about this rather sensational title. A
boy might be The Eton Atheist, and at the same time be a sound and
unwavering believer in every doctrine of the Thirty-nine Articles. The
gods of Eton were only the masters of the school; the sceptics of Eton
were nothing more terrible than those naughty boys who held these masters
full cheap, and questioned their natural fitness for the authority given
into their hands. The Atheist of Eton was the boy who surpassed all the
other naughty boys in contempt for the masters, and not content with
questioning their natural fitness for their official eminence, boldly and
utterly denied it. No Etonian sceptic could question, no Etonian Atheist
could deny the existence of gods who daily entered boys' names on
flogging-bills. Dr. Keate's rods were no things to be ignored; the wielder
of those rods was a person, whose existence could not be questioned. His
character, however, was open to criticism, and the Lord High Atheist spoke
his mind about it with freedom.
Before an Etonian could rise to the position of Lord High Atheist, or even
become a candidate for the office, it was needful for him to distinguish
himself from ordinary deriders of the pedagogic species by some
super-puerile extravagance of audacity. The youngster, who preceded
Shelley in the Atheist's chair, had one dark winter's night taken
possession of the huge, richly-gilded bunch of grapes, which hung in front
of 'The Christopher Tavern,' and having so taken into his keeping the
inn-sign, suspended it over the door of the head-master's house. In the
morning, on rushing over his threshold to get to chapel in time for sacred
service, this head-master ran full butt into the bunch of grapes, with
consequences altogether satisfactory to the contriver and doer of the
practical joke, who witnessed the successful issue of his arrangements
from a convenient corner. It is needless to say that, after executing this
feat in contempt of the greatest of the Etonian gods, the borrower of the
grapes was declared Lord High Atheist before he had lived another day. It
is uncertain what egregious act of profanity raised Shelley to the same
eminence. Possibly the affair with the electric battery, that hurled Mr.
Bethell against the bedroom wall, may have contributed to the future
poet's elevation to an office, which he does not seem to have disgraced.
Anyhow, it is certain that Shelley became the Lord High Atheist of the
school, and that he would not have attained to this distinction, had he
not been regarded by his comrades as the most unruly and impudent boy of
the establishment.
Whilst holding this office, not content with deriding the masters and
disobeying their orders at every turn, the boy also distinguished himself
by the fervour and blasphemous ingenuity with which he used to curse the
King (George the Third), and used also to curse his own father. It speaks
ill for the tone of Etonian manners during the poet's time at the public
school, that the boys used to gather round the Lord High Atheist on a hint
that he meant forthwith to curse his own father. The willing listeners
never seem to have expressed disgust at the comminatory performance. On
the contrary, the frequently repeated entertainment was thought so droll
and piquant that, during his short stay at Oxford, Shelley was entreated,
at least on one occasion, to curse his father yet again for the
gratification of two or three of his former schoolfellows. Hogg, who was
present on this occasion, records that Shelley yielded reluctantly to the
entreaty; but he _did_ consent to the importunity of the old Etonians, and
'delivered with vehemence and animation a string of execrations, greatly
resembling in its absurdity a papal anathema.' Though he joined in the
'hearty laugh,' that rewarded the performer, Hogg, on the departure of the
two or three Etonians, exclaimed, 'Why, you young reprobate, who in the
world taught you to curse your father,--your own father?'--an inquiry to
which Shelley replied:--
'My grandfather, Sir Bysshe, partly; but principally my friend, Dr.
Lind, at Eton. When anything goes wrong at Field Place, my father does
nothing but swear all day long afterwards. Whenever I have gone with
my father to visit Sir Bysshe, he always received him with a
tremendous oath, and continued to heap curses upon his head so long as
he remained in the room.'
Ever ready, though he was, to give evidence to his father's discredit, the
undergraduate did not venture to charge his father with retorting Sir
Bysshe's maledictions. Whilst Mr. Timothy Shelley appears only to have
sworn after a bad fashion of the period, the first baronet of Castle
Goring exceeded the licence of blasphemy accorded to gentlemen by a
custom, more honoured in the breach than the observance.
It remains to be seen how the Shelleyan enthusiasts will deal with the
record of Shelley's habit of cursing his father, when the public shall
have been educated to approve every act of the poet's life; but at present
they glide lightly over the ugly business in memoirs for the general
reader, glossing it with suggestions of wilful misstatement or unconscious
exaggeration on the part of the poet's earliest biographer. Even Mr.
Forman forbears to hint that Shelley's resemblance to the Saviour of the
World is heightened by the poet's behaviour to his father. In the
coteries, however, where the Shelleyan apologists speak with less caution,
these cursing bouts are sometimes referred to for evidence that, even in
his boyhood, the author of _Laon and Cythna_ was a person of infinite jest
and subtle humour. These apologists must bear with a writer who sees much
to condemn, and nothing to admire, in such exhibitions of unfilial rancour
and profanity. There are jokes and jokes;--those that can be enjoyed,
those that can be tolerated, and those that are absolutely intolerable.
The joke of a boy cursing his own father for the amusement of his
schoolfellows is one of the intolerable kind. The reader may be safely
left to select a fitter word than 'humourist' for the designation of the
young gentleman, who amused himself and his friends in so revolting a
manner.
Mr. Walter S. Halliday, by the way, must have forgotten all about these
cursing-bouts, when he wrote to Lady Shelley, 'He' (_i.e._, the poet at
Eton) 'had great moral courage and feared nothing, but what was base,
false, and low.' Surely it is base and low for a boy to curse his own
father for the pure fun of the thing.
Who was Dr. James Lind, chiefly famous (and infamous) as Shelley's chief
instructor in the science and art of cursing? Drawing her facts from
'authentic sources,' Lady Shelley speaks of him as 'an erudite scholar and
amiable old man, much devoted to chemistry, at whose house Shelley passed
the happiest of his Eton hours.' 'He was a physician,' the lady adds, 'and
also one of the tutors.' Recording that Dr. James Lind bore 'a name well
known among the professors of medical science,' Mrs. Shelley has also put
it on record that 'the Doctor often stood by to befriend and support the
persecuted, and that her husband never, in after-life, mentioned his name
without love and reverence.' Shelley himself used to say of this amiable
and erudite old man, 'He loved me, and I shall never forget our long
talks, where he breathed the spirit of the kindest tolerance and the
purest wisdom.' Without alleging that he speaks from other and better
authorities than the poet, his widow and his daughter-in-law, Mr. Rossetti
says of Shelley and his peculiar patron, 'The only official person whom he
really liked there' (_i.e._ Eton) 'was Dr. James Lind of Windsor, a
physician, chemist, and tutor, and a man of erudition, who superintended
the youth's scientific studies.' Had he only deserved half the praise
lavished upon him, Dr. Lind would have been a man of extraordinary
goodness. But, unfortunately, it is only too clear that he was a
mischievous, malignant, hard-swearing old man, who gained great influence
over the Etonian Shelley, and used it hurtfully.
Possibly Lady Shelley and later biographers were justified in writing of
this bad old man, as though he held a tutorial office on the Eton
establishment; but without being in a position to speak positively to
their discredit, the present writer ventures to entertain a doubt of their
accuracy on this matter, and to give Dr. James Lind the full benefit of
the doubt. If the Doctor was one of the Eton tutors, he was even a worse
man than he is declared in these pages; for in that case the man, who
encouraged Shelley to study chemistry in defiance of the recent
prohibition, and to persist in his contumacy to the masters of the school,
was guilty of encouraging the boy to rebel against authority, which he was
bound by honour and official obligations to maintain. The grey-headed
tutor, who secretly stimulated the boy's rebellious spirit, and applauded
him for it, was wanting in loyalty, and not guiltless of treachery, to his
comrades in tutorial service. But in the absence of clear evidence to the
contrary, it may be assumed that the amiable and extremely benevolent old
gentleman, who taught a fifteen-or sixteen-years-old boy to curse his
father, was under no especial obligation to have a care for the lad's
moral health, apart from the general duty of every man to encourage what
is virtuous, and discountenance what is vicious in all persons, over whom
he has any influence.
If Mrs. Shelley was right in saying Dr. James Lind made himself famous
among the professors of medical science, it is strange that the fame at
this date rests chiefly on the lady's certificate. Though he has inquired
of the persons most likely to have heard of Dr. Lind's services to
science, the present writer has learnt nothing of the deeds from which so
bright a fame should have proceeded.
All that is known with certainty at this present date about this amiable
and benevolent old man, apart from his pernicious intimacy with the young
Etonian, is that during Shelley's time he was a medical practitioner
(certainly no physician of the London College) following his vocation at
Windsor, that he had for his housekeeper a Miss Lind (his daughter or
sister), that he was a hard swearer, and that, conceiving himself to have
been badly treated by George the Third, he used to make much of his
grievance, and waste many words and much time in cursing the King who had
done him evil. What the man's grievance was, that made him think so ill of
poor old George the Third, is wholly a matter for conjecture. The Doctor
may have been employed for awhile at 'the Castle,' and been superseded by
a younger doctor. He may have failed in some candidature for a medical
office within the royal borough, and discovered grounds for attributing
his misadventure to the influence of the Castle. The grievance may have
been a real one, or an affair of the imagination. All that can be told of
the matter, in this year of grace, is that the Doctor believed himself to
have been 'infamously treated' by the King, and that, in a manner scarcely
accordant with all that has been written of his amiability and
benevolence, seldom allowed a day to pass without doing his best to
consign his royal enemy to the lowest and darkest pit of perdition.
The Lord High Atheist of the Etonians used to join Dr. and Miss Lind over
their tea-table twice or thrice a-week, and after the meal spend in their
society those happy hours (mentioned by Lady Shelley) during which he
learnt how to curse his father more strenuously by hearing the Doctor
curse his King. The Shelleyan enthusiasts are sometimes heard to suggest
that Hogg may have made too much of what Shelley told him about the
physician's comminatory taste and achievements. But there is no evidence
that Hogg was guilty of the exaggeration. Nor is there any reason to
suppose Shelley was more than just to his teacher's consummate mastery of
malediction. Yet it was of this Doctor, who swore so heavily over his
willow-pattern tea-cups, whose swearing was so inexpressibly piquant to
its youthful auditor, that Shelley wrote some eight years later in _Laon
and Cythna_, as though the man of oaths and imprecations were chiefly
remarkable for philosophic dignity, sweetness of speech, mildness of
manners. It was of his intercourse with this embittered and scurrilous
apothecary, that the poet wrote in _Prince Athanase_ with equal melody and
falseness:--
'Prince Athanase had one belovèd friend,
An old, old man, with hair of silver white,
And lips where heavenly smiles would hang and blend
With his wise words;
* * * * *
Such was Zonoras; and as daylight finds
One amaranth glittering on the path of frost,
When autumn nights have nipt all weaker kinds,
Thus through his age, dark, cold, and tempest-tost,
Shone truth upon Zonoras; and he filled
From fountains pure, nigh overgrown and lost,
The spirit of Prince Athanase, a child,
With soul-sustaining songs of ancient lore
And philosophic wisdom, clear and mild.
And sweet and subtle talk now evermore,
The pupil and the master shared; until,
Sharing that undiminishable store,
The youth, as shadows on a grassy hill
Outrun the winds that chase them, soon outran
His teacher, and did teach with native skill
Strange truths and new to that experienced man;
Still they were friends, as few have ever been
Who mark the extremes of life's discordant span.'
It was to this amiable and wise physician that Shelley was indebted for
another practice, scarcely less hurtful to his moral character, and far
more fruitful to him of disaster at the outset of life, than his revolting
habit of cursing his own father. Not content with teaching him to curse
his parent, Dr. Lind taught the boy it was good fun to inveigle unwary
people into scientific controversies, to trip them up with
catch-questions, and then to laugh at them for being fools. By this
mild-natured and benevolent physician (who is usually described as
satisfying the boy's hunger for wholesome knowledge, and ministering to
his spiritual needs) Shelley, whilst at Eton, was taught to write letters
under assumed names to persons interested in, but only slightly acquainted
with, chemistry,--in order to discover their ignorance, and then have the
pleasure of laughing insolently at it. The letters written for this
amiable purpose (under Dr. Lind's instruction) were for the most part
written deceitfully,--_i.e._ with a false show of being written by a young
and ingenuous inquirer after truth, and with a false name and address. Can
any diversion be imagined more likely to infuse a boy with self-conceit
and arrogance, to inspire him with the temper most foreign to genuine love
of knowledge, and giving him a taste for underhand trickery, to train him
how to indulge it habitually? Yet the good and wise Dr. Lind taught the
boy to amuse himself in this ungenerous and deceitful way. By-and-bye, the
disastrous consequences of this practice on the boy's career at Oxford
will be seen. That Shelley on coming to Oxford was so disputatious, so
overflowing with scorn for minds he deemed weaker than his own, so
ungenerously eager to prove himself wiser than his teachers, so
ungenerously quick to show people they were fools, and mock them for being
fools, must be attributed in a great degree to his premature introduction
(by the humane and judicious Dr. Lind) to the violent delights of
controversy. One of the correspondents, whom the boy thus lured into
profitless disputation, is said to have threatened him with a flogging
from Dr. Keate; a threat that is said to have determined the Etonian
henceforth to approach strangers under cover of a false name and address.
Had the threat been carried out and the flogging given, the boy would have
taken no more than he deserved for his bad manners.
To Dr. Lind the poet was also indebted for his earliest lessons in Free
Thought on matters pertaining to religion. Hogg is a good authority for
this statement. Having thus sown the seeds of religious scepticism in the
mind of his young friend, this exemplary physician left them to grow in a
congenial soil. It does not appear that the doctor ever troubled himself
to observe the consequences of his action in this matter, after his pupil
left Eton. Nor does it appear that, after leaving Eton, Shelley ever
troubled himself to visit, or correspond with, the virtuous sage to whom
he declared himself so deeply indebted. For good or evil it cannot be
questioned the boy of tender age was influenced in no slight degree by the
tutor who educated him to write false epistles, to curse his father, and
to repudiate Christianity.
On finding themselves disposed to regard the 'egotisms' of the Shelleyan
poems as passages of veracious autobiography, readers should correct the
tendency to error by remembering, how the hard-swearing Windsor doctor was
idealized into the virtuous hermit of _Laon and Cythna_ and the no less
virtuous philosopher of _Prince Athanase_; how the boy (the poet's former
self), who delighted in the doctor's profane and scurrilous utterances,
was idealized into the young Prince whose heart harboured 'nought of ill,'
whose 'gentle, yet aspiring mind,' was alike remarkable for justice,
innocence, and various learning; and how, in course of time, the poet
believed so completely all his fanciful pen had written to the Doctor's
honour, that he used to speak of him as an example of wise, stately, and
virtuous old age. According to words, spoken by the poet to his second
wife, Dr. Lind's benevolence and dignified demeanour were qualified by
youthful ardour. His locks were white, his eyes glowed with supernatural
expressiveness, his countenance and mien were eloquent of amiability. 'I
owe to that man,' Shelley used to ejaculate, 'far, ah! far more than I owe
to my father; he loved me, and I never shall forget our long talks, when
he breathed the kindest toleration and the purest wisdom.'
In this strain Shelley used to talk of the man who taught him to curse his
own father,--of the man whom he would have remembered only as a profane
old reprobate, had he been less completely the victim of his own delusive
fancy.
It has already been told how Shelley spent his Eton holidays at Field
Place; how he took his sisters for walks, entertained them with his
scientific toys, amused them with romantic stories, and dazzled them with
his Eton air and stylish clothing; and how he strolled forth by starlight
and moonlight to gaze at the heavenly bodies. But precise mention has
still to be made of an incident of the Etonian's life under his father's
roof, to which readers may well give their best attention.
At a time when Dr. Lind's pernicious influence over him was at its height,
Shelley suffered at Field Place from a febrile attack attended with
delirium,--the illness of which he spoke to William Godwin's daughter,
before her elopement with him, in these words--
'Once when I was very ill during the holidays, as I was recovering
from a fever which had attacked my brain, a servant overheard my
father consult about sending me to a private madhouse. I was a
favourite among all our servants, so this fellow came and told me as I
lay sick in bed. My horror was beyond words, and I might soon have
been mad indeed, if they had proceeded in their iniquitous plan. I had
one hope. I was master of three pounds of money, and, with the
servant's help, I contrived to send an express to Dr. Lind. He came,
and I never shall forget his manner on that occasion. His profession
gave him authority; his love for me ardour. He dared my father to
execute his purpose, and his menaces had the desired effect.'
These words were spoken by Shelley to Mary Godwin on the 'night that' (to
use her own words) 'decided her destiny; when he opened at first with the
confidence of friendship, and then with the ardour of love, his whole
heart to me.' Mrs. Shelley is at great pains to impress her readers with a
sense of the precise accuracy of her report of the words, which, it is
suggested, determined her, or at least were largely influential, in
determining her, to fly with the object of such atrocious paternal
malignity. The substantial accuracy of the lady's report is put out of
question by Hogg, who declares that he heard 'Shelley speak of his fever
and this scene at Field Place more than once, in nearly the same terms as
Mrs. Shelley adopts.' It appears, therefore, that, whilst the accuracy of
Mrs. Shelley's report is unquestionable, the statement made to her by her
husband is one of the few statements respecting himself, which he repeated
at different times with no important variation; the substantial
consistency of his several accounts being evidential at least of the
earnestness with which he pondered the narrative, and in some degree of
the sincerity of his avowals of its truthfulness.
Like so many of the poet's stories about himself, it was a curious mixture
of fact and fiction. As the story, so thoroughly believed and steadily
repeated by its teller, points to the period when Shelley began to regard
his father with morbid fear and aversion, and also to the circumstances
that gave birth to so unnatural a state of feeling, it is well to inquire
how much of this marvellous story was true, and how much of it was
illusion. No discreet and judicial hearer of the story ever gave the
slightest credit to the chief and most painful statements of the
narrative,--viz., that Mr. Timothy Shelley intended to send his
fever-stricken boy to a madhouse, and had been heard to express this
intention. The evidence being conclusive that he was an affectionate
father and kindly gentleman, the notion that he was capable of any such
atrocity can have been nothing more than one of the sick boy's delirious
fancies. Had Mr. Timothy Shelley been a less amiable person, his abundant
sensitiveness for the honour of Field Place (the honour of the
newly-created Castle Goring family), and his nervous care for the world's
opinion, would have saved him from the blunder of sending the sick boy to
a lunatic asylum; the blunder, moreover, of consigning to a madhouse the
son who, as a lunatic, could not have concurred in the resettlement of
family estates, for which his concurrence was requisite, and the Squire
was greatly desirous. Old Sir Bysshe was not more desirous than his son
Timothy for the resettlement of the estates A and B. A man of affairs, Mr.
Timothy Shelley, would have known that, whilst imprisoned as a lunatic,
his son could not resettle the estates; knew also that, by barbarously
throwing him into a madhouse, he would create in his son's mind a state of
feeling that would be fatal to the scheme for getting him to join in the
resettlement, on his liberation or escape from the madhouse. Had he been
morally capable of so atrocious an offence, self-interest would have
preserved the Squire of Field Place from the iniquitous purpose, about
which Shelley's wild story made him gossip lightly and loudly. Hogg gave
not a moment's credence to the ghastly and revolting particulars of the
story. The other hearers of the story, to whom Hogg makes reference,
concurred with him in ascribing these particulars to hallucination, which
continued to prey on the patient's light and flighty brain, long years
after his recovery from the fever that gave birth to the morbid fancy.
Even Lady Shelley seems to take the only sensible view of this part of
the affair, though she does not go the length of saying her father-in-law
was the victim of hallucination--
'From the indiscreet gossip,' she says, 'of a servant, who had
overheard some conversation between his father and the village doctor,
Bysshe had come to the conviction that it was intended to remove him
from the house to some distant asylum:--'
language certainly implying that the sick boy's fancy was erroneous. Hogg
says:--
'It appeared to myself and to others also, that his, _i.e._ Shelley's
recollections, were those of a person not quite recovered from a
fever, which had attacked his brain, and still disturbed by the
horrors of the disease. Truth and justice demand that no event of his
life should be kept back, but that all materials for the formation of
a correct judgment should be freely given.'
Other particulars of the story may have been no less baseless. That a
servant told him of his father's purpose, that he gave this servant orders
and means to despatch a messenger to Dr. Lind, may have been mere fancies
of the delirious brain. On the other hand, Lady Shelley may have had
better authority than the poet's words for attributing the painful
conviction to a servant's gossip. It can also be readily imagined that the
sufferer from the distressing fancy gave his pocket-money to a servant,
and bade him be off to Windsor for the doctor. These are points on which
the reader may be left to form his own opinion, but he must altogether
acquit Mr. Timothy Shelley of intending to send his boy to a madhouse.
The indisputable facts of the story are these:--The boy had a febrile
illness attended with delirium; whilst ill he suffered from a fancy that
his father meant to send him to a lunatic asylum; after this notion had
fastened on the disordered brain, Dr. Lind was sent for; in compliance
with the summons Dr. Lind came from Windsor to Field Place, and attended
the boy till he was better. A reasonable view of these facts is that
during his delirious sickness the patient expressed a strong desire to see
Dr. Lind, and that, in their natural desire to do the best for their
child's comfort and recovery, Mr. and Mrs. Shelley invited the doctor to
come to Field Place. Even Dr. Lind with all his eccentricity would not
have presumed to visit Field Place without an invitation from the master
of the house. Still less would he have ventured to force his way into the
sick chamber against Mr. Timothy Shelley's wish. The statement that he
dared Mr. Shelley 'to execute his purpose,' and brought him to a sense of
decency by 'menaces,' is simply ridiculous. Ever reluctant though she is
to discredit any of the poet's statements, Lady Shelley shows her opinion
of the wildest extravagances of his marvellous story by being silent about
them.
Something should be said about the probable time of this illness.
Circumstances point to the latter part of 1808 as the period in which Dr.
Lind attended Shelley in Field Place. Shelley may have been right in
regarding the illness as an incident of one of his 'holidays;' but there
are grounds for thinking it more probable that the illness ran its course
during one of the Eton terms. Four-and-thirty years after the poet's
death, Miss Margaret Shelley could remember that, whilst her sister Hellen
was at school at Clapham, Bysshe was sent home from Eton to be nursed
through an illness.
'I went to school before Margaret,' Miss Hellen Shelley wrote in 1856,
'so that she recollects how Bysshe came home in the midst of the
half-year to be nursed; and when he was allowed to leave the house, he
came to the dining-room window, and kissed her through the pane of
glass.'
Hellen's age (she was born in 1799) seems to indicate that this illness
cannot have taken place earlier than the autumn of 1808. Even then she
would have been young to go to boarding-school. If this was the illness
mentioned in the poet's strange story, Dr. Lind's visit to Field Place is
a simple affair. Sent home when he was already sickening for an illness,
the patient had been under Dr. Lind's medical treatment before he was sent
home to be nursed through an illness that would probably prove a severe
one. What more natural and in the ordinary course of things, when the boy
grew worse, and the village apothecary wished for 'a second opinion,' than
for Mr. Timothy Shelley to summon the Windsor doctor who had seen the
patient in the earliest stage of the malady. The conversation between Mr.
Timothy Shelley and the village apothecary, which is said to have been so
indiscreetly reported to the sick boy, may have turned wholly on the
question, whether Dr. Lind should be sent for. Dr. Lind unquestionably was
summoned; and as Mr. Shelley was at Field Place at the time, no one else
is likely to have dispatched the summons. Had he imagined Dr. Lind had
already been, or would soon be, the boy's instructor in hard swearing, Mr.
Shelley would, doubtless, have sent for another doctor. As the future poet
left Eton towards the end of 1809; as the illness of the marvellous story
occurred during the height of Dr. Lind's influence over the boy; as that
influence was certainly an affair of the later half of Bysshe's stay at
Eton (1808-9); and as Shelley was certainly sent home from Eton to be
nursed through an illness when his sister Hellen (born in September, 1799)
was already at school and in 'the middle of her half-year,' most readers
will concur with the present writer in thinking the illness mentioned in
the story and the illness mentioned in the letter were one and the same
illness,--and that the illness at the earliest took place in the autumn of
1808, at the latest in the spring of 1809, _i.e._ when Shelley was sixteen
years old. If this manner of dealing with sure facts is acceptable to
readers, they may congratulate themselves on having discovered the six
months, at the beginning or end of which, the poet was first possessed by
the fancy that his father was looking out for a pretext for locking him up
in a madhouse:--the hideous fancy that (to use Love Peacock's words)
'haunted him throughout life.'
How came this ghastly and absolutely groundless fancy to take this early
and enduring hold of his mind? The answer must be sought in the poet's
ancestral story, the characteristics of the romantic literature of which
he had been a greedy devourer from his early childhood, and the conditions
of his life at Eton. The answer to be extorted from these three sources of
information is doubtless an answer, resting on inference and conjecture
from facts, almost as much as upon facts themselves. Still it is an answer
worth having, though veined with uncertainties. The Shelleys, who
eventually blossomed into the Castle Goring house, resembled the
eighteenth and nineteenth century Byrons in having a distinct strain of
madness. Mention has already been made of the Newark apothecary's elder
brother, whose story is told in the following words of the Castle Goring
pedigree:--
'John Shelley, of Fen Place, aforesaid, esq., 2nd son, _a lunatic_.
Bapt. at Worth 1st September, 1696; died unmarried at Uckfield, 7th
October, 1772, buried at Worth 18th same month.'
This long-lived lunatic, who did not escape from his dismal doom in this
world, till he had entered his seventy-seventh year, is a significant
feature of the poet's ancestral story. Brother of the Newark apothecary,
this madman, whose affliction caused him to be set aside in the
arrangements of the family (to his younger brother's advantage), was the
first baronet's uncle, the poet's great-great-uncle. The obscurity of the
families, with whom this lunatic's ancestors intermarried before his
period, precludes the discovery of the number of the various channels
through which insanity may have come to his brain. But it is not to the
physiological credit of the Castle Goring Shelleys, that their ancestors
married so many heiresses. Families, whose men have married for money in
successive generations, are usually seen to suffer in bodily stamina and
mental health from what has come together with money to the family story.
There is, of course, no reason why an heiress should not be as healthy as
a poor parson's daughter. But there is nothing in money to exempt its
possessor from struma in its various forms; and so long as he can win in
his bride the first object of his desire, money, the male fortune-hunter
is apt to shut his eyes to the indications that the advantages of the
money must be taken with serious attendant drawbacks. Families, famous for
marrying heiresses, whether they intermarry with noble stocks, or, like
our poet's ancestors, with mere gentle yeomanry (_i.e._ squireens entitled
to bear arms), are seldom famous for the qualities that render individuals
gracious and existence delightful. If they endure for centuries, such
families often do so by suffering for centuries.
To account for the same revolting fancy, allowance must also be made for
the morbid literature on which the boy had been mentally suckled from his
tender infancy,--the tales of domestic horror and cruelties, in which he
had revelled from early childhood. To the producers and readers of that
literature, no character was more attractive than a wretched being
unjustly dealt with as a lunatic by barbarous relations. It is at least
probable that the stories of such cruelty, flowing as they did from the
press in the period when Monk Lewis threw the audience of a crowded
theatre into hysterical anguish by his monodrama of _The Captive_, may
have inspired the boy with a morbid apprehension of life-long imprisonment
in a mad-house.
Even more likely to produce the same agonizing apprehension, were some of
the more painful incidents of his life at Eton, if their terrorizing power
was intensified by the knowledge that one of his not very remote
collateral ancestors had been confined justly or unjustly as a lunatic.
The nervous boy who was hunted and baited in the Eton playing-grounds, by
a multitude of lads, shouting at the top of their voices, 'Mad Shelley,
Mad Shelley, Mad Shelley!' had good reason to suspect that something in
his behaviour and idiosyncrasy must have suggested the imputation of
insanity.
'I have seen him,' says one of the spectators of these frequent scenes
of cruelty and suffering, 'surrounded, hooted, baited like a maddened
bull; and, at this distance of time (forty years after), I seem to
hear ringing in my ears the cry which Shelley was wont to utter in his
paroxysms of revengeful anger.'
The torture, which made so deep and enduring an impression on the boy who
only witnessed it, affected far more strongly the boy who was the object
of the persecution. To the end of his life, the poet (given like Byron to
brood over the sorrows of his childhood) used to speak with passionate
resentment of the barbarous malice of the boys, who either exasperated him
with an accusation they knew to be groundless, or, worse still (if they
really thought him insane), mocked him for the affliction that entitled
him to their compassion.
In his later time at Eton, when he was distinguishing himself by contumacy
and insolence to the masters of his school, his father was of course
informed of his insubordination and other scholastic offences. Could his
word be taken (which it may not be) on the matter, Shelley was twice
expelled from Eton, and twice (at his father's entreaty) re-admitted to
the school, before he was dismissed from it for the third and last time.
It cannot be doubted the Atheist of College gave the masters good reasons
for wishing him away from the school, and for requesting Mr. Shelley to
remove him from an establishment that, fruitless of benefit to him,
suffered not a little from his disorderliness. It is probable that the
Squire of Field Place was aware of the maledictions poured upon him by the
Etonian scapegrace. It is unlikely that the boy, so unruly and
contumacious at school, was submissive and respectful to his father in the
holidays. There is no evidence before the world that the lad received
personal chastisement at his father's hands. But it is conceivable he was
so corrected by the Member for New Shoreham, in days when fathers of
unimpeachable humanity and affectionateness applied the bamboo and the
birch to their sons in a way, that would now-a-days be justly stigmatized
as barbarous and revolting. It is, however, certain that the essentially
amiable, though rather choleric, squire, had much trouble to manage his
heir, and that their inharmonious intercourse was attended with friction
and collisions, that could not fail to make such a son regard his sire
with suspicion and aversion. If he was familiar with the story of the
Uckfield lunatic, either from the gossip of old servants, or from the free
speech of that lunatic's nephew (old Sir Bysshe), what more likely and
natural than for the Etonian scapegrace to think that his fate might
resemble his great-great-uncle's fate,--that he might be set aside as a
lunatic to his little brother's advantage in the arrangements of his
family,--that his father was already looking about for a pretext and an
occasion for sending him to a mad-house?
But, it may be asked, was Peacock justified in going so far as to say of
the poet, that 'the idea, that his father was continually on the watch for
a pretext to lock him up, haunted him through life?' Was the delusion so
absolutely unintermitting? Were there no times when the hideous fancy
passed from his brain? No lucid intervals when he saw he had in this
matter been the dupe of his own imagination? No times, moreover, when he
forced himself back into the delusion by an effort of will and fancy,
similar to those imaginative exercises in which Byron was so expert and
curious an operator? In answer to these questions, it can only be said
that there is no evidence of intermissions in the delusion, and that
Peacock probably intended to say no more when he remarked that the morbid
fancy, which certainly held the poet's mind in his later time, 'haunted
him through life.'
To the present writer, indeed, it is conceivable that there were times
when the poet's mind got the better of the most hideous of the several
delusions that troubled it from time to time. The present writer can also
conceive there were times when the poet, by the exercise of his will,
sustained his belief in the delusion, even as the dreamer can for a few
seconds by pure volition persist in believing a dream, which may be
described as overlying his consciousness of its unreality. One of the
prime dogmas of the school of metaphysicians, whose tenets Shelley
embraced with cordial conviction of their truth, is that belief is
independent of volition. The dogma is true in respect to perfectly
logical and altogether sound minds. But there are unsound minds that are
capable of shaping their opinions and determining their belief by
processes of volition. Minds subject to manifest and distressing illusions
are not to be rated as perfectly logical and altogether sound. Shelley's
mind certainly was liable to such delusions. It is conceivable he would
not have insisted on the separateness of belief and volition with so much
needless emphasis and passion, had he not been uneasily
conscious,--troubled and irritated by a criminatory
sub-consciousness--that in some matters (such for instance as his delusion
respecting his father) he believed what he ought not to believe, and could
by strenuous volition save himself from believing. Some such thought as
this was perhaps in Peacock's mind, when he spoke of the 'semi-delusions'
of the man whom he loved so heartily.
Returning to Eton after recovering from the fever, of which so much has
been said in foregoing pages of this chapter, Shelley, to the end of his
time at the public school, continued to be in most respects the same boy
he was on rising to the office of Lord High Atheist. Persisting in
contumacy and unruliness he left the school in disgrace, though not under
any ignominy to preclude him from the advantages of further education at
one of the universities. In one particular, however, he seems to have
changed his course towards the close of his Etonian career. The passion
for scientific amusements (let them not be called 'studies') having in
some degree spent itself, he devoted the greater part of his leisure to
literary exercise, in the hope of winning premature distinction as a man
of letters,--an ambition he certainly would not have entertained, had he
been so seriously set on scientific inquiry, and occupied with scientific
interests, as successive biographers have represented.
On 7th May of 1809, whilst still a boarder in Mr. Bethell's house, Shelley
wrote Messrs. Longman & Co., the eminent publishers of Paternoster Row,
London, a boyish letter, informing them that he was writing a romance, and
expressing his wish for them to publish it. The publishers were informed
that, as he was 'the heir of a gentleman of large fortune in the county of
Sussex,' their correspondent was not writing for money, though he would
gladly take a share of any pecuniary profits, resulting from the
production of his work. As the publishers endorsed this puerile letter
with a memorandum of their readiness to look at the story on its
completion, it may be assumed that the manuscript of perhaps the most
ludicrous tale of all English literature was submitted to the publishers'
reader. As the absurd performance was not published till the end of May,
or an early day of June, 1810, and was then published by Messrs. G. Wilkie
and J. Robinson, of 57 Paternoster Row, it may be assumed that after
considering their reader's opinion of the story, Messrs. Longman & Co.
declined to publish it,--or at least to publish it on terms the author
could consent to accept.
Though it is certain Shelley left Eton prematurely and on account of
misbehaviour, the particular misconduct which resulted in his dismissal
from the school is unknown. To Peacock (who at the time smiled secretly at
the 'semi-delusion,' even as in later time he smiled at it openly in the
pages of _Fraser's Magazine_), Shelley averred that he was sent away from
Eton for striking a penknife through the hand of one of his
school-fellows, and pinning it to a desk. Of course, Shelley said the
ferocious act was the result of extravagant provocation.
To satisfy impartial readers that Shelley did not pin his schoolfellow's
hand to a desk with the blade of a pen-knife, it is enough to say that his
comrades at Eton had no recollection of any such incident in his career at
the school. How Shelley came to account in so remarkable a manner for his
premature withdrawal from the public school, is not left altogether to
conjecture. Though he makes no reference to the affair in his _Fraser_
article, Peacock, on hearing Shelley's astounding story, was doubtless
mindful of the case of the military gamester, whose hand (in an early year
of the present century) was pinned with a steel fork to the table of a
famous gambling-club, as a convenient preliminary to the exposure of what
was concealed between his wrist and cuff.
Whilst it is certain that Shelley was _not_ dismissed from Eton for the
cause he stated, it is by no means improbable that he was sent home on
account of his amiable habit of cursing his own father,--a practice that
cannot have favoured the moral tone of school, and on coming to the
knowledge of the masters would necessarily move them to a strong
expression of disapproval.
It accords with this conjecture, that the Etonians, who called on Shelley
at Oxford in Hogg's presence, obviously regarded his singular way of
proclaiming his hatred of his father as the grandest and most memorable of
his offences at school. The young man, whose reluctance to repeat the form
of cursing for the amusement of his old schoolfellows may be fairly
attributed to regretful shame, would naturally in later time shrink from
confessing he had been sent away from Eton for so heinous a misdemeanour.
But though he left Eton in disgrace with the masters, the Atheist of the
school does not seem to have fallen out of favour with the boys, whose
regard he had won by extravagances of unruliness. Hogg speaks of the books
(Greek or Latin classics, each inscribed with the donor's name) given to
Shelley by his comrades on his withdrawal from the college, and reasonably
urges that the 'unusual number' of these parting gifts is sufficient
evidence of his eventual popularity with his schoolfellows.
CHAPTER VI.
ZASTROZZI; A ROMANCE. BY P. B. S.
Literary Ambition--Biographical Value of _Zastrozzi_--The Etonian
Shelley's Disesteem of Marriage--Review of the Romance--Julia and
Matilda--Conceits of the Romance reproduced in _Laon and
Cythna_--Egotisms of the Prose Tale and the Poem--The Original of
Count Verezzi and Laon.
The literary diversions, that occupied a considerable part of his leisure
at Eton, are note-worthy indications of Shelley's intellectual tastes and
aims at a time, when delusive biography represents him as possessed by a
passion for scientific studies. Having in his earlier terms at the school
found congenial pastime in the composition of childish dramas, he amused
himself, after coming under Dr. Lind's hurtful influence, with translating
some of the earlier chapters of Pliny's _Natural History_. Medwin assures
us it was the boy's intention to produce a complete English version of
that curious medley of fact and fable, but relinquished the enterprise
almost at the threshold, on account of his inability to comprehend the
philosopher's chapters on the stars. In his perplexity the youthful
translator is said to have sought the aid of Dr. Lind, who avoided the
difficulties submitted to his consideration, and at the same time
preserved his credit for masterly erudition, by telling his disciple that
he had better not waste his time on passages which the best scholars could
not understand. In accordance with this prudent counsel, the aspirant to
literary eminence bade adieu to Pliny the Elder, and looked about him for
an easier way of winning the distinction for which he hungered.
In the spring of 1809, he bethought himself that he would compete with the
artists of prose-fiction, and write a novel that should make him as famous
as Mrs. Anne Radcliffe and Mr. Matthew Lewis. If the son of a West Indian
planter could in his nonage write a novel so famous, that he was
universally styled after its title 'Monk' Lewis, surely 'the heir of a
gentleman of large fortune' (as the Etonian described himself in his
letter to Messrs. Longman and Co.) might in his nonage produce a romance
that should cause him to be talked about as Zastrozzi Shelley. To
accomplish this ambition, Shelley went to work on the novel which,
certainly begun in Mr. Bethell's house, and talked about before he left
the school, was perhaps written to the last line at Eton; though, in
consequence of the delays and postponements which usually attend a
literary aspirant's first steps to celebrity, it was not published by
Messrs. G. Wilkie and J. Robinson, of Paternoster Row, till the summer of
1810, when the author had been for some seven or eight weeks a member of
the University of Oxford.
Though the idolaters of Shelley's genius have small reason to thank his
most voluminous editor for recovering so absurd a performance from the
oblivion that covers most of his puerile follies, the poet's biographers,
and all who are interested in his story, have cause for gratitude to Mr.
Buxton Forman, for reprinting in clear type the ludicrous tale, which
enables them to examine the mental stuff and texture of the seventeen
years' old boy (sixteen years and nine months old when he began the story,
seventeen years and ten months old when he published it) who, fairly
forward in Greek, could throw off Latin prose and verse, of more than
average goodness, with singular facility.
Were it not for _Zastrozzi; a Romance_, by P. B. S. (1810), one would be
without evidence that Percy Bysshe Shelley, the poet of Free Love, did not
leave Eton without conceiving the disregard for the religious sanctions of
marriage, which developed into a strong repugnance to the institution, and
a cordial disapproval of all the restraints imposed on wedlock by law and
custom. Readers seriously bent on knowing the Real Shelley, who has been
so artfully and dangerously replaced in these later years by the
Fictitious Shelley, will do well to give their best attention to the
following summary of the story which reveals so much of the poet's
character and disposition, at the moment when he crossed the line that
divides boyhood from manhood.
ZASTROZZI; A ROMANCE. BY P. B. S.
The action and successive tragedies of this curious performance result
from the craft, energy, and diabolical vindictiveness of Pietro Zastrozzi,
the illegitimate son of Olivia Zastrozzi, who in her fifteenth year was
seduced, under promise of marriage, by the Count Verezzi, an Italian
nobleman. More heartless than a majority of the seducers, who impart
piquancy to the novels in which our grand-parents delighted, this
nobleman of a southern clime, instead of allowing her the means of
subsistence usually accorded in romantic literature to cast-off
mistresses, refused to give his victim a crust, when, deserting her and
her child (the villain of the book!), he threw himself into the arms of
the heiress who became his wife,--and in due course the mother of another
Count Verezzi, the virtuous count of the narrative.
Possessing every virtue but womanly discretion and the power to forgive
her enemies, the wretched and exemplary Olivia Zastrozzi died in her
thirtieth year, after enjoining her son, Pietrino, to avenge his mother s
wrongs. Having, in language appropriate to a pious son, mitigated his
mother's mortal agonies with a vow to do her bidding, Pietrino passed from
her grave to the cruel world, with a virtuous resolve to compass the
destruction of his own father (the elder Count Verezzi), his own
half-brother (the younger Count Verezzi), and any persons in whom the same
virtuous young Count should be strongly interested. On coming to full
manhood, Olivia Zastrozzi's son, seizing the happy moment and making the
most of it, plunged a dagger into his father's heart, sending him without
shrift to the pit that is reserved in the nether regions for the seducers
of trustful womankind.
Having disposed of his father in this summary fashion, Pietro Zastrozzi
determines to wreak his vengeance on his half-brother by means more
secret, ingenious, and horrible. Biding his time till the young Count
Verezzi has won the love of Julia Marchesa di Strobazzo, whose affection
he worthily reciprocates, and has also gained unintentionally the love of
Matilda Contessa di Laurentini, whose passion he is most desirous of
avoiding, Pietro Zastrozzi is quick to see his advantage in the mutual
jealousy and aversion of the two ladies, and in the embarrassments certain
to arise from their idolatry of the same man. To afford his exemplary
mother's soul the vindictive satisfaction for which so pure a spirit is
naturally pining, Pietro Zastrozzi approaches these ladies, and, by a
series of subtle stratagems and diabolical contrivances, brings them and
their Count to extremities of passion and despair; and to deaths, that
under the more skilful manipulation of Mrs. Radcliffe or _Monk_ Lewis,
would have rendered _Zastrozzi_ a superlatively thrilling and sensational
romance.
Resembling one another in the nobility of their lineage, and the enormity
of their wealth, and the reputation that had come to them, these two
heroines are alike admirable for their different styles of beauty. Whilst
Julia is a gentle blonde, Matilda is a Cleopatra, with dark rolling eyes,
and breasts made to heave with voluptuous desire. Each of these ladies is
in love with the Count at the beginning of the story, which opens with
particulars of his seizure at an inn near Munich, as he is journeying
southwards to the damsel of his preference.
Captured at this tavern, whilst he breathes heavily and lies helpless
under a stupor of Zastrozzi's contrivance, the Count Verezzi is thrust
into a chariot, and conveyed to his place of imprisonment with all the
celerity attainable on rough roads, in days long prior to the invention
of the steam-locomotive. Drawn by relays of horses, that are put to their
fullest speed by Bernardo (the postillion) the chariot moves rapidly
throughout the day, till on the approach of nightfall it quits the
post-road, and makes slower progress through the rugged underwood of a
forest, to the jaws of a cavern yawning in a darksome dell. In this cavern
the Count--fastened by a chain to the rock of the cavern's inmost recess,
and fed upon bread and water--is confined for several days and nights,
till the rock of his dismal dungeon is broken up during a thunderstorm by
a scintillating flash of lightning!
On the morrow of this remarkable storm, the youthful Count is discovered
in a plight, which causes his persecutors to liberate him from his
manacles, and to call in a physician, who, after carrying the youth out of
brain-fever (quite as skilfully as the Hermit, _alias_ Dr. Lind, in _Laon
and Cythna_ carries Laon out of brain-fever under similar circumstances),
recommends that he should be conveyed, without loss of a single moment, to
a scene of tranquillity. In compliance with this advice, the captive is
lifted again into the chariot, and conveyed by Zastrozzi and his
subordinate villains (Ugo and Bernardo) to a cottage, standing in the
middle of a wide and desolate heath, to which they come after four hours'
rapid posting. In that cottage, tended by an old woman (one of Zastrozzi's
creatures), and watched by Ugo and Bernardo, the Count remains till, on
his convalescence, he knocks Bernardo down-stairs (in the temporary
absence of Zastrozzi, Ugo, and the old woman), and clearing out of the
humble tenement, reaches the vicinity of Passau, where he is sheltered and
hospitably entertained by the peasant Claudine,--an amiable old woman, who
gets her living by raising flowers for the Passau market.
The scene now changes to one of the rural palaces of Matilda La Contessa
di Laurentini--a palace of Gothic architecture, whose battlemented walls
rise high above the lofty trees of the surrounding forest; the palace in
which the Marchesa Julia's faithful servant, Paulo, dies from the fatal
potion, administered to him by Zastrozzi and Matilda. As Paulo's only
offence against La Contessa Matilda is his loyalty to his own mistress,
one is constrained to pity the poor fellow, though he makes matters
needlessly unpleasant by groaning in his death-torments with excessive
loudness, and rolling his eyes in a revolting manner.
Despatching Zastrozzi to Naples to watch the movements of Julia La
Marchesa di Strabozzi, and seize the first opportunity for murdering her,
Matilda La Contessa di Laurentini migrates from her battlemented palace to
her hotel in Passau, on the banks of the Danube, where she passes her time
in meditating schemes for her rival's extinction, and taking measures to
get possession of her beloved Verezzi. On the failure of these measures,
the Countess grows desperate, and in the violence of her despair is on the
point of drowning herself in the Danube, when, instead of dropping in the
water, she falls into the arms of a casual wayfarer. Of course, this
casual wayfarer is Verezzi, who, after saving her from the guilt of
self-murder, carries La Contessa off for the night to Claudine's cottage.
On the morrow, the Countess returns to Passau, attended by Verezzi, who
henceforth lives with the lady till he expires in her presence.
Not that he yields at once to her overtures for his consent to their
union. For a time, La Contessa Matilda gets nothing more agreeable from
her domiciliation with her beloved Verezzi, than the pleasure of
ministering to the brain-sickness and despondency of the invalid Count,
who, regarding her by turns with frigid pity, distrustful tenderness, and
vehement detestation, persists in vexing her ears with rapturous praises
of his adorable Marchesa Julia. Acting on Zastrozzi's advice, Matilda di
Laurentini assures her guest that Julia is dead, and even causes him to
think her dead. But vain the assurance, bootless its success! Instead of
seeking consolation in the arms of La Contessa di Laurentini, the Count
Verezzi persists in idolizing his Marchesa, protesting that he is bound to
her for ever--as much bound to her now that she is dead, as he was bound
to her when she was alive.
But though she cannot draw him to her embrace, Matilda La Contessa gains a
gradually growing influence over the Count by 'her siren illusions and
well-timed blandishments.' Soothing him in his wilder moods, cheering him
in his dejection, Matilda di Laurentini diverts him with piquant speech,
fascinates him with the music of her harp and voice, and animates him with
the society she attracts to her salon. Playing the part of his ministering
angel, she conceals from Verezzi the real nature of the passion, whose
fierceness and animality would revolt him. 'Her breast,' the reader is
told, 'heaved violently, her dark eyes, in expressive glances, told the
fierce passions of her soul; yet, sensible of the necessity of controlling
her emotions, she leaned her head upon her hand, and when she answered
Verezzi, a calmness, a melting expression overspread her features. She
conjured him, in the most tender, the most soothing terms, to compose
himself; and, though Julia was gone for ever, to remember that there was
yet one in the world, one tender friend, who could render the burden of
life less unsupportable.'
At length joy comes to this tender friend, whose demeanour is so mild and
conciliatory to the Count Verezzi, though, in his absence, her bosom often
heaves violently, whilst her dark and lustrous eyes emit glances, eloquent
of the soul's fiercest passion. Matilda La Contessa di Laurentini, and her
idolized Count, have journeyed from Passau to yet another of her stately
homes,--the Castella di Laurentini, standing in a gloomy and remote spot
of the Venetian territory; a palace surrounded by a darksome forest, and
lofty mountains that 'lift their aspiring and craggy summits to the
skies,'--when the lady achieves her purpose by a melodramatic stratagem.
To win the Count, she is admonished by Zastrozzi to 'dare the dagger's
point,' and is, at the same time, instructed by her counsellor _how_ to
dare it. In accordance with the instructions, Matilda La Contessa leads
Verezzi to a convenient spot of her picturesque demesne--a spot where, on
the right hand, the thick umbrage of forest trees would render
indistinguishable any person lurking about; whilst on the left, there
yawns a frightful precipice, at whose base a deafening cataract dashes
with tumultuous violence around misshapen and enormous masses of rock,
lying at the foot of the gigantic and blackened mountain, which rears its
craggy summit to the skies.
Matilda and Verezzi are looking down the precipice, when a man, who has
been instructed to play the part of an assassin, rushes with upraised
dagger on the Count, who deems himself the mark of the bravo's weapon. A
second later, and the Contessa di Laurentini, hurling herself between the
two men, receives the descending poniard in her right arm. Disappearing in
the forest, the sham-bravo leaves the uninjured Verezzi with the wounded
Contessa,--the one overflowing with gratitude to his preserver, whilst the
other exults in the success of her artifice.
Soon after this theatrical scene, the Count, yielding to Matilda di
Laurentini's 'siren illusions and well-timed blandishments,' addresses her
as his wife, adding '_And though love like ours wants not the vain ties of
human laws, yet, that our love may want not any sanction which could
possibly be given to it, let immediate orders be given for the celebration
of our union_.'
Their marriage having received the vain sanction of human laws, Matilda
and Verezzi enjoy a brief term of tempestuous bliss. On her wedding-day,
'Matilda's joy, her soul-felt triumph, is too great for utterance,--too
great for concealment. The exultation of her inmost soul flashes in
expressive glances from her scintillating eyes, expressive of joy
intense--unutterable. Animated with excessive delight, she starts from the
table, and seizing Verezzi's hand, in a transport of inconceivable bliss,
drags him in wild transport and varied movements to the sound of swelling
and soul-stirring melody.' By this time, the virtuous Verezzi has so
completely succumbed to 'siren illusions' that instead of showing any
disapproval of the Contessa's forwardness, or any annoyance at being
dragged about thus sportively, he exclaims with delight, 'Come, my
Matilda, come, I am weary of transport,--sick with excess of unutterable
pleasure.'
In the earlier days of the honeymoon, one circumstance alone moderates
Matilda's happiness. Though the Count thinks Julia la Marchesa is dead,
the Contessa has received no intelligence of a successful issue to her
arrangements for her rival's murder. This source of uneasiness passes
away, however, for a time, when Zastrozzi assures the Countess he has
removed Julia di Strabozzi with poison. But malignant fate soon puts a
period to the feverish felicity of the husband and wife. Ere they have
been married a month, Matilda La Contessa di Laurentini is summoned before
the Inquisition. In their alarm at the letter of citation, the Count
Verezzi and Matilda (albeit the latter has been warned by Zastrozzi to
keep away from the capital) fly to a secluded dwelling in the eastern
suburb of Venice, in the hope of living there in concealment from the
agents of the dread Tribunal.
At Venice Matilda soon discovers that Zastrozzi's warning was not given
without reason. They have not been there many days, when one evening she
and the Count behold the pensive and melancholy Marchesa di Strabozzi,
gliding over the Laguna in her magnificent gondola, surrounded by 'the
innumerable flambeaux which blazing about rival the meridian sun.' Whilst
the Count discovers that the Marchesa, the real possessor of his heart, is
still alive, the Contessa Matilda discovers that Zastrozzi has deceived
her with a false announcement of her rival's death. At the same time, the
pensive and melancholy Julia di Strabozzi discovers that her Count Verezzi
is living on terms of suspicious familiarity with Matilda di Laurentini.
These discoveries are followed by dramatic incidents and tragic scenes.
Sitting with Matilda in the villa of the eastern suburb, the Count Verezzi
is in the act of drinking to her, with protestations of eternal fidelity,
when the pensive and melancholy Julia appears at the supper-table. 'My
adored Matilda!' the Count is saying, 'this is to thy happiness,--this is
to thy every wish; and if I cherish a single thought which centres not in
thee, may the most horrible tortures which ever poisoned the peace of man
drive me instantly to distraction! God of Heaven! witness thou my oath,
and write it in letters never to be erased! Ministering spirits, who watch
over the happiness of mortals, attend! for here I swear eternal fidelity,
indissoluble, unutterable affection, to Matilda!'
No sooner has the Count Verezzi delivered himself of this oration than
Julia comes into the room. The Count has been taken at his word! The
ministering spirits are in attendance! If she has not appeared as a
witness against him, Julia has come to inquire why her affianced suitor is
living so intimately with Matilda. No wonder that Verezzi dashes the
goblet to the ground! that his frame is agitated with convulsions! that,
'seized with sudden madness, he draws the dagger from his girdle, and with
fellest intent raises it high!'
'Raised with fellest intent,' the gleaming poniard is in a trice buried in
the Count's breast. Whilst 'his soul flies without a groan, his body falls
upon the floor bathed in purple blood.' Furious at the spectacle, Matilda
plucks the weapon from her husband's corse, and rushes upon the pensive
and melancholy intruder, who, seeing mischief in the Contessa's flashing
eyes, and danger in the ensanguined weapon, turns and flies towards the
door. 'Nerved anew by this futile attempt to escape her vengeance, the
ferocious Matilda seizes Julia's floating hair, and holding her back with
fiend-like strength, stabs her in a thousand places, and with exulting
pleasure again and again buries the dagger to the hilt in her body, even
after all remains of life are annihilated.' On throwing the dagger from
her, Matilda di Laurentini regards a terrific scene with sullen gaze.
As it takes at least two seconds to plunge a dagger up to the hilt into
the tenderest flesh and to withdraw the weapon for another blow, the
Countess must have spent considerably more than half-an-hour in stabbing
the Marchesa's body. Bearing in mind the amount of muscular effort
requisite for driving a dagger up to the hilt into a human body, one is
not surprised to learn that the murderess exhausted herself. Bearing in
mind also the number of square inches on the surface of a woman's body, no
reader will question that Julia's body was frightfully disfigured by the
thousand stabs in a thousand different places.
Julia's murder is of course followed by the punishment of the murderess,
and of the supreme villain who may be said to have educated her to
perpetrate the monstrous crime. Zastrozzi is racked to death. No
particulars are given of Matilda di Laurentini's last agonies, but the
reader is left under the impression that she has died or will die by the
executioner.
Published in a single duodecimo volume, this tale of horror contains about
as many words as a single volume of an ordinary three-volume novel.
Perhaps more horrors have never been crowded into so short a romance. The
tortures endured by Verezzi during his successive imprisonments afflict
the memory. Verezzi's father is poniarded to death by his bastard son.
Julia's faithful servant, Paulo, dies in the presence of his poisoners,
groaning horribly and writhing in hideous convulsions. Matilda makes a
futile attempt to throw herself into the Danube. The dagger-scene in the
vicinity of the Castella di Laurentini would not have been more terrific
had the mock-assailant been a veritable bravo. The Count Verezzi commits
suicide. Julia is stabbed in a thousand different spots of her body.
Zastrozzi is racked to death. The Contessa di Laurentini is left for
execution.
Affording not a single indication of literary taste or wholesome
sentiment, the story is badly written, morbid, unnatural, and
superlatively foolish, from its first to its last page. To Shelley's
reasonable and honest biographers, the performance is of great value and
interest on account of the view it gives of the future poet's culture,
attainments, and mental condition towards the close of his career at Eton.
Allowance should of course be made for the author's youth, his
inexperience of human nature and society, and the difficulties besetting
every puerile essayist in an arduous department of literature. But when
all allowances have been made, the book remains a thing of evidence to the
utter discredit of all the fine things that have been written by certain
of the poet's adulators about his intellectual precocity. He would not
have laboured at this crude tale in his seventeenth year, corrected it for
the press, and published it in his eighteenth year, hoping to win fame by
it, had he, in his boyhood, acquired the knowledge of English literature,
for which several historians of his earlier career have given him credit,
or had he been the sincere and strenuous student of natural science the
same writers have declared him. Had he perused the works of the higher
English writers with critical discernment as well as delight, the Etonian
would have written his mother tongue with less inelegance and feebleness.
Had his care for natural science exceeded the commonplace curiosity of a
youth, given to play tricks with an air-pump, an electrical machine, and a
chest of chemical materials, his mind would have been too fully occupied
to have a hankering for the miserable distinction that comes to the
writers of bad novels.
Though it is not regarded as a faultless performance in the coteries of
the Shelleyan enthusiasts, passages of considerable merit and indications
of fine feeling have been discovered in this superlatively foolish story,
by some of the gentlemen who have in these later years constituted
themselves the peculiar guardians of Shelley's honour, and the especial
interpreters of his philosophical utterances.
In the superabundance of his veneration for every line written, and every
scrap of paper known to have been touched by the poet, Mr. Buxton Forman,
is educating the English people to regard _Zastrozzi_ as a performance
that, instead of being perused lightly and laughed over merrily, should be
studied with due regard to the various readings of its two different
editions,--the original edition of 1810, and the reprint of 1839, in _The
Romancist and Novelist's Library_. Wherever those editions differ by an
inverted comma, a mark of punctuation, a dropt letter, or a letter too
many, Mr. Buxton Forman calls attention to the difference, as though each
trivial diversity of the two texts were a matter of high importance.
Believing that delicate meanings may be found in the poet's occasional
slips of spelling, Mr. Forman calls attention to the remarkable fact, that
the word 'ceiling' in the reprint is spelt 'cieling' in the original
edition; the no less curious and significant circumstance that the word
'escritoire' of the later edition is spelt _escrutoire_ in the edition
that passed straight to the world from the author's own hand and eye. In
like manner we are invited to notice the difference of a perfectly formed
's' between the 'mishapen' of Shelley's own text, and the 'misshapen' of
the reprint. Mr. Forman calls attention to an even bolder departure from
the original text in the reprint, which may well be regarded with
suspicion and mistrust by the Shelleyan specialists. Whilst the original
edition contains the sentence, 'The most horrible scheme of vengeance at
at this instant glances across Zastrozzi's mind,' the editor of the 1839
edition has the daring (not altogether innocent of irreverence) to omit
the second 'at.' From the standpoint and principles of an editor, who
regards Shelley as a being who might have been the Saviour of the World,
Mr. Buxton Forman is of course right in attaching great importance to
these differences of the two editions, of an almost sacred performance.
But to the profane mind of the present writer, who, instead of thinking
Shelley in any respect comparable with the Saviour of the World, and
conceives him to have been a rather foolish schoolboy in the earlier
months of 1809, a very foolish Oxford undergraduate in the later months of
1810, and a still more foolish undergraduate in the earlier months of
1811, it appears that these differences of the two editions of _Zastrozzi_
are of no more importance than the proverbial difference between
'tweedledum' and 'tweedledee.'
It is, however, interesting to observe how the hero of the puerile novel
corresponds with the hero of _Laon and Cythna_,--to observe also how
Shelley (holding to crudities and fantastic fancies, which any other man
of similar strength would have hurled to his soul's rubbish-bin),
reproduces in the great poem some of the subordinate details of the
immature romance.
The victim of secret enemies and relentless persecutors (even as Laon is
the victim of similar enemies and persecutors, and even as Shelley himself
suffered from a conspiracy headed by his unnatural father, ever watching
for a pretext for locking him up), the Count is torn from Julia di
Strabozzi, and carried to a cavern in a darksome forest, even as Laon,
after being torn from Cythna, is conveyed in a state of unconsciousness to
the cavern of the column-surmounted rock. On entering the cavern in the
wood, Verezzi recovers consciousness, even as Laon recovers his powers of
observation on approaching the 'cavern in the hill.' The darkness of the
tortuous way, by which the Count's enemies lead him to the inmost cell of
the cavern, is qualified by no ray of light, but for awhile the cell is
illumined by Bernardo's solitary torch, even as the cavern under the hill,
which serves as a passage to Laon's grated prison, is lit by the solitary
torch, carried by one of his captors.
In _Zastrozzi_, it is said, 'after winding down the rugged descent for
some time, they arrived at an iron door, which at first sight appeared to
be part of the rock itself. Everything had till now been obscured by total
darkness, and Verezzi, for the first time, saw the faces of his
persecutors, which a torch borne by Bernardo rendered visible.'
In _Laon and Cythna_ it is written,
'They bore me to a cavern in the hill
Beneath the column, and unbound me there;
And one did strip me stark; and one did fill
A vessel from the putrid pool; one bare
A lighted torch, and four with friendless care
Guided my steps the cavern-paths along,
Then up a steep and dark and narrow stair
We wound, until the torch's fiery tongue
Amid the gushing day beamless and pallid hung.'
After bringing him into his prison, the Count Verezzi's persecutors put an
iron chain about his waist, and leave him fast bound to the cruel rock
that cuts his tender flesh, even as Laon is bound with chains in his cage
upon the mountain's top.
In _Zastrozzi_ it is written, 'His triumphant persecutor bore him into the
damp cell, and chained him to the wall. An iron chain encircled his waist;
his limbs, which not even a little straw kept from the rock, were fixed by
immense staples to the flinty floor; and but one of his hands was at
liberty to take the scanty pittance of bread and water which was daily
allowed him.'
In _Laon and Cythna_ it is read,
'They raised me to the platform of the pile,
That column's dizzy height:--the grate of brass
Thro' which they thrust me, open stood the while,
As to its ponderous and suspended mass,
With chains which eat into the flesh, alas!
With brazen links, my naked limbs they bound:
* * * * *
I gnawed my brazen chain, and sought to sever
Its adamantine links, that I might die.'
From the fever which results from the barbarities inflicted upon him in
the forest cavern, and from the terror consequent on the thunderstorm that
shatters the walls of his prison, the Count Verezzi is recovered by the
ministrations of a physician, who, after carrying him through the crisis
of the malady, prescribes conditions of existence more favourable to
mental tranquillity. Very much the same happens to Laon, who is restored
to sanity from the sheer madness, that seizes him and preys upon him in
the brazen cage, by the wise physician who visits him under the guise of a
hermit, and conveys him to the tranquil retreat, where he eventually
regains his faculties.
In _Zastrozzi_ it is written,--'A physician was sent for, who declared
that, the crisis of the fever which had attacked him being past, proper
care might reinstate him; but, that the disorder having attacked his
brain, a tranquillity of mind was absolutely necessary for his recovery.
Zastrozzi, to whom the life, though not the happiness, of Verezzi was
requisite, saw that his too eager desire for revenge had carried him
beyond his point. He saw that some deception was requisite; he accordingly
instructed the old woman to inform him, when he recovered, that he was
placed in this situation, because the physicians had asserted that the air
of this country was necessary for a recovery from the brain-fever, which
had attacked him. It was long before Verezzi recovered--long did he
languish in torpid sensibility, during which his soul seemed to have
winged its way to happier regions. At last, however, he recovered, and the
first use he made of his senses was to inquire where he was.'
In _Laon and Cythna_ the hero of the poem describes his release from
prison and his recovery from fever in the following terms:--
'... in the deep
The shape of an old man did then appear,
Stately and beautiful, that dreadful sleep
His heavenly smiles dispersed, and I could wake and weep.
And when the blinding tears had fallen, I saw
That column, and those corpses, and the moon,
And felt the poisonous tooth of hunger gnaw
My vitals, I rejoiced, as if the boon
Of senseless death would be accorded soon;--
When from that stony gloom a voice arose,
Solemn and sweet as when low winds attune
The midnight pines; the grate did then unclose,
And on that reverend form the moonlight did repose.
He struck my chains, and gently spake and smiled;
As they were loosened by that Hermit old,
Mine eyes were of their madness half beguiled,
To answer those kind looks--he did infold
His giant arms about me, to uphold
My wretched frame, my scorchèd limbs he wound
In linen moist and balmy, and cold
As dew to drooping leaves;--the chain, with sound
Like earthquake, thro' the chasm of the steep stair did bound.
* * * * *
... We came at last
To a small chamber, which with mosses rare
Was tapestried, where me his soft hands placed
Upon a couch of grass and oak-leaves interlaced.
* * * * *
Thus slowly from my brain the darkness rolled,
My thoughts their due array did re-assume
Thro' the inchantments of that Hermit old;
Then I bethought me of the glorious doom
Of those who sternly struggle to relume
The lamp of Hope o'er man's bewildered lot;
And, sitting by the waters, in the gloom
Of eve, to that friend's heart I told my thought--
That heart which had grown old, but had corrupted not.'
From these passages of the puerile romance and the mature poem, readers
may see how Shelley nursed and nourished every fancy that entered his
brain; how, growing gradually in form and beauty under his fostering
egotism, the conceits of his puerile inventiveness developed into the
conceptions of his poetical genius; and how he weaved the story of his own
life out of imaginations as baseless, and in the earlier stages of their
development as grotesque, as the phantasies of departing slumber. The
imprisonment of Laon was the outgrowth of Verezzi's imprisonment. The hero
of the poem resembles the hero of the romance in being the victim of
secret and unscrupulous enemies; and in that respect they resembled the
poet who created them,--the poet who only escaped captivity such as theirs
by repeatedly flying from foes, bent on throwing him into a dungeon. The
fever that seized Laon in the grated cage, and the fever that nearly
killed Verezzi in the gloomy forest were romantic reproductions of the
fever Percy Bysshe Shelley endured at Field Place. The tyrant who put Laon
between brazen bars, and the villain who chained Verezzi in the darksome
cavern, had their prototype in the unnatural father (of the poet's
'marvellous story' to his second wife), who was set on sending his
wretched heir to a madhouse. The physician who, braving a tyrant's
vengeance, rescued Laon from confinement and ministered to his mental
disease, was the same hard-swearing Windsor doctor who, facing the
malicious despot of Field Place, saved Percy Bysshe Shelley from his
appointed doom, and carried him out of brain-fever. It was thus that
Shelley wrote his wild views of his own story into the Byronic 'egotisms'
of his literary productions:--the 'egotisms' which the Shelleyan
enthusiasts would have the world accept as pieces of substantially
veracious autobiography.
CHAPTER VII.
BETWEEN ETON AND OXFORD.
Literary Interests and Enterprise--A.M. Oxon. Letter--Shelley's Hunger
for Publisher's Money--Winter 1809-10--Nightmare--_The Wandering
Jew_--Medwin in Lincoln's Inn Fields--The Fragment of Ahasuerus--Its
Influence on Byron and Shelley--Matriculation at Oxford--Shelley at
the Bodleian--John Ballantyne and Co.--Shelley in Pall
Mall--Stockdale's Scandalous Budget--_Victor and Cazire_--Their
Original Poetry--Who was Cazire?--Felicia Dorothea
Browne--Illumination of Young Ladies--Harriett Grove--The Groves and
Shelleys in London--Shelley's Interest in Harriett Grove.
Having written a large portion of his first publication (_Zastrozzi; a
Romance_) by 7th May, 1809, Shelley had little leisure for 'scientific
studies' between that date and the Christmas holidays of 1810-11. The
literary aspirant during those twenty months worked successfully (in some
of the cases, simultaneously) on (1) _Zastrozzi_; (2) _The Nightmare_; (3)
_Original Poetry of Victor and Cazire_; (4) _St. Irvyne, or The
Rosicrucian_, his second published romance; (5) _The Wandering Jew_; (6)
The Verses to be regarded as the First Sketches for _Queen Mab_; (7) The
_Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson_; (8) The very careful
analysis of Hume's _Essays_ used in the composition of _The Necessity of
Atheism_, that resulted in his expulsion from University College, Oxford;
(9) A novel, described in the letter of 18th December, 1810, to Stockdale,
as 'principally constructed to convey metaphysical and political opinions
by way of conversation,' and (10) a novel (never finished) that was
designed to give the death-blow to intolerance. With so many literary
irons in the fire, he cannot have spent many half-hours in playing with
the scientific instruments and apparatus that figured so conspicuously in
his college rooms. During the same period, he found time for journeys to
and fro between Field Place and Oxford; at least one stay of several weeks
in London; a good deal of miscellaneous reading; much sentimental and
sceptical correspondence, by letter, with Miss Felicia Dorothea Browne;
much correspondence of the same nature with Miss Harriett Grove; long
walks with Medwin in St. Leonard's Forest; long walks with Hogg in the
neighbourhood of Oxford; and some participation in the field-sports,
seldom altogether neglected by country gentlemen.
Whether _Zastrozzi_ (published on or a little before 5th June, 1810) was
written to the last lines at Eton, is uncertain. Bearing in mind every
young author's impatience to see himself in print, and having regard to
the natural consequences of this impatience in the excitable Shelley, I am
disposed to think the book would have appeared sooner, had it been ready
for the printers before the unruly Etonian left the public school. Time,
doubtless, was wasted in the futile negotiation with the Messrs. Longman &
Co. But the delay from this cause would scarcely account for the long
postponement of the publication, if the author finished the MS. under Mr.
Bethell's roof, and on receiving it back from the Longmans, sent it
straight to Messrs. Wilkie and Robinson.
Whilst the external evidence that Shelley wrote the letter is too light
for the scales of criticism, the internal evidence is conclusive that he
was not the contributor of the 'A.M. Oxon's' epistle, in behalf of Lord
Grenville's candidature for the Chancellorship. Medwin's assertion is idle
in respect to the composition, whose style shows it was not, could not
have been, written by the author of the puerile letters to the Messrs.
Longman, Messrs. Wilkie and Robinson, and Stockdale,--the puerile prose of
_Zastrozzi_ and _St. Irvyne_,--and the scarcely less puerile prose of the
letters and addresses written by the poet in Ireland. A comparison of the
'A.M. Oxon' letter of November 1809, with the numerous examples of
Shelley's English prose, will satisfy the critical reader that Shelley did
not, because he could not, write the epistle in behalf of Lord Grenville.
The question is one of those questions where the evidence of style is
conclusive. It is conceivable the 'A.M. Oxon' letter was well spoken of at
Field Place, that it was written at Mr. Timothy Shelley's instance, that
Medwin was told Shelley wrote it, that Shelley claimed the authorship of
the letter. Establish all these points, produce a copy of the letter in
Shelley's hand-writing; and the evidence of style would be none the less
conclusive, that Shelley did not write the letter.
Towards the close of 1809, and throughout the earlier months of 1810,
Shelley was 'at home,' writing briskly for fame, and with a keen appetite
for 'publisher's money,' which Byron, at the outset of his literary
career, was of opinion no nobleman or other gentleman of high degree
could accept, without sullying his honour. In his nonage, the author of
_Zastrozzi_ asked publishers for their money with a steadiness, that would
probably have been less unwavering, had it been old Sir Bysshe's practice
to tip his grandson bountifully. Not that the desire for payment was
wholly due to the need of it. In taking wages for the work of his pen, he
would have regarded them as no less honourable than convenient. The
Etonian, whose friends seem to have thought, that he entertained them with
his literary earnings, was no youth to feel shame in taking publisher's
money, or to miss it for want of asking for it. On the contrary, at the
outset of a literary career (that from the commercial point of view, was
worse than absolutely profitless) he liked to be credited with winning
what he never won, and could ask for payment, though he had only the
faintest hope of getting it.
Throughout his time at Eton, Shelley saw much of Tom Medwin during
vacations. During the winter of 1809-10, the cousin, who would soon go to
Oxford, and the cousin, who would soon leave it for the army, were
inseparable companions. During their long walks through the leafless
glades of St. Leonard's Forest--in the clear frosty air and under the
bright skies, that had a most exhilarating effect on their spirits--these
two young men of common blood and kindred tastes discoursed with more
enjoyment than discretion on the principles of poetry and romantic prose,
of ancient science and modern culture. This was the winter, when they set
to work on the production of a wild story (with a hideous witch for its
principal character), that seems to have justified its title of
_Nightmare_, before they ceased writing alternate chapters of the morbid
tale, and threw themselves with greater enthusiasm into the much higher
and more arduous enterprise of a grand 'metrical romance on the subject of
the _Wandering Jew_,'--an enterprise in which the two cousins were
encouraged and influenced (though not actuated from the commencement) by
one of those accidents, which so often influence, and sometimes determine,
the course of human genius.
On his way through Lincoln's Inn Fields, Tom Medwin picked up at a
bookstall the following passage, from a free English rendering and
adaptation (with variations from the original) of Christian D. F.
Schubart's rhapsodical poem _Der Ewige Jude_.
'Ahasuerus the Jew crept forth from the dark cave of Mount Carmel.
Near two thousand years have elapsed since he was first goaded by
never-ending restlessness to rove the globe from pole to pole. When
our Lord was wearied with the burden of his ponderous cross, and
wanted to rest before the door of Ahasuerus, the unfeeling wretch
drove him away with brutality. The Saviour of mankind staggered,
sinking under the heavy load, but uttered no complaint. An angel of
death appeared before Ahasuerus, and exclaimed indignantly,
"Barbarian! thou hast denied rest to the Son of Man; be it denied thee
also, until He comes to judge the world!"
'A black demon, let loose from hell upon Ahasuerus, goads him now from
country to country; he is denied the consolation which death affords,
and precluded from the rest of the peaceful grave.
'Ahasuerus crept forth from the dark cave of Mount Carmel--he shook
the dust from his beard--and taking up one of the sculls heaped there,
hurled it down the eminence; it rebounded from the earth in shivered
atoms. This was my father! roared Ahasuerus. Seven more sculls rolled
down from rock to rock; while the infuriate Jew, following them with
ghastly looks, exclaimed--And these were my wives! He still continued
to hurl down scull after scull, roaring in dreadful accents--And
these, and these, and these were my children! They _could die_; but I!
reprobate wretch, alas! I cannot die! Dreadful beyond conception is
the judgment that hangs over me. Jerusalem fell--I crushed the sucking
babe, and precipitated myself into the destructive flames. I cursed
the Romans--but alas! alas! the restless curse held me by the
hair,--and I could not die!
'Rome, the giantess, fell--I placed myself before the falling
statue--she fell, and did not crush me. Nations sprung up and
disappeared before me;--but I remained and did not die. From
cloud-encircled cliffs did I precipitate myself into the ocean; but
the foaming billows cast me upon the shore, and the burning arrow of
existence pierced my cold heart again. I leaped into Etna's flaming
abyss, and roared with the giants for ten long months, polluting with
my groans the Mount's sulphureous mouth--ah! ten long months. The
volcano fermented, and in a fiery stream of lava cast me up. I lay
torn by the torture-snakes of hell amid the glowing cinders, and yet
continued to exist.--A forest was on fire: I darted on wings of fury
and despair into the crackling wood. Fire dropped upon me from the
trees, but the flames only singed my limbs; alas! it could not consume
them.--I now mixed with the butchers of mankind, and plunged into the
tempest of the raging battle. I roared defiance to the infuriate Gaul,
defiance to the victorious German; but arrows and spears rebounded in
shivers from my body. The Saracen's flaming sword broke upon my scull:
balls in vain hissed upon me; the lightnings of battle glared harmless
around my loins; in vain did the elephant trample on me, in vain the
iron hoof of the wrathful steed! The mine, big with destructive power,
burst upon me, and hurled me high in the air--I fell on heaps of
smoking limbs, but was only singed. The giant's steel club rebounded
from my body; the executioner's hand could not strangle me, the
tiger's tooth could not pierce me, nor would the hungry lion in the
circus devour me. I cohabited with poisonous snakes, and pinched the
red crest of the dragon. The serpent stung, but could not destroy me.
The dragon tormented, but dared not to devour me.--I now provoked the
fury of tyrants: I said to Nero, Thou art a bloodhound! I said to
Christiern, Thou art a bloodhound! I said to Muley Ismail, Thou art a
bloodhound!--The tyrants invented cruel torments, but did not kill
me.--Ha! not to be able to die--not to be able to die--not to be
permitted to rest after the toils of life--to be doomed to be
imprisoned for ever in the clay-formed dungeon--to be for ever clogged
with this worthless body, its load of diseases and infirmities--to be
condemned to hold for millenniums that yawning monster Sameness, and
Time, that hungry hyæna, ever bearing children, and ever devouring
again her offspring!--Ha! not to be permitted to die! Awful avenger in
heaven, hast thou in thine armoury of wrath a punishment more
dreadful? then let it thunder upon me, command a hurricane to sweep me
down to the foot of Carmel, that I there may lie extended; may pant,
and writhe, and die!'
What consequences ensued from young Medwin's accidental discovery of this
fragment amongst the litter of the London bookstall! The finder of the
scrap carried it to Shelley, Shelley carried it to Byron; and both poets
were powerfully affected, permanently influenced by it. It gave Byron the
thought of the lines in _Manfred_.
'I have affronted death--but in the war
Of elements the water shrunk from me,
And fatal things pass'd harmless--the cold hand
Of an all-pitiless demon held me back,
Back by a single hair, which would not break.
In fantasy, imagination, all
The affluence of my soul--which one day was
A Croesus in creation--I plunged deep,
But, like an ebbing wave, it dash'd me back
Into the gulf of my unfathom'd thought.
I plunged amidst mankind--Forgetfulness
I sought in all, save where 'tis to be found,
And that I have to learn--my sciences,
My long pursued and super-human art,
Is mortal here--I dwell in my despair--
And live--and live for ever.'
So strongly held to his last hour was Shelley by the thought which came to
him, through the scrap of dirty paper taken with worthless stuff from a
bookstall, that whilst Ahasuerus appears once and again in his own
character and personality in the poet's works, the reader of those works
comes no less often on cursory references to the undying wanderer, and on
lines that would never have been penned, had it not been for Shelley's
deep and frequent ponderings of the hideous doom of deathlessness,
accorded to the supreme sinner of Christian romance. Ahasuerus the Jew
figures in _Queen Mab_ (1812-13) and _Hellas_ (1821); he was in the poet's
mind when he meditated the lines of _Alastor_ (1815)--
'O, that God,
Profuse of poisons, would concede the chalice
Which but one living man has drained, who now,
Vessel of deathless wrath, a slave that feels
No proud exemption in the blighting curse
He bears, over the world wanders for ever,
Lone as incarnate death!'
Shelley's subsequent misconception of the way in which the tragic fragment
came into his possession, may be regarded as one of the trivial
consequences, though by no means the least curious consequence, of the
degree in which the fragment possessed his fancy. As there is no evidence
that the author of _Queen Mab_ was in London shortly before the time when
the fragment first came under his eyes, and much evidence that he was away
from London throughout the certain period, covering the uncertain day on
which the fragment was picked up at the bookstall, there is no reason on
the score of Medwin's peculiar mental infirmity to question the accuracy
of his precise statement that he was the finder of the transcript, which
he describes as 'not a separate publication,' but a thing that 'mixed up
with the works of some German poet' seemed to have been 'copied ... from a
magazine of the day.' The words of Medwin's precise averment touching this
matter are--
'Mrs. Shelley is misinformed as to the history of the fragment from
the German, which I, not Shelley, picked up in Lincoln's-Inn-Fields
(as mentioned in my preface to Ahasuerus), and which was not found
till some of the cantos had been written.'
Mrs. Shelley certainly could produce in support of her statement an
authority she was bound to regard as respectable. For at the foot of the
_Queen Mab_ note (1812-13), from which I have just transcribed the
fragment, Shelley says--
'This fragment is the translation of part of some German work, whose
title I have vainly endeavoured to discover. I picked it up, dirty and
torn, some years ago, in Lincoln's-Inn-Fields.'
Thus in the course of something less than three years (a period scarcely
to be described by so comprehensive a term as 'some years ago') Shelley,
whilst remembering the scene of the discovery, had come to imagine himself
the discoverer, a misapprehension not to be omitted from the schedule of
facts, to the credit of those of the poet's nearest and dearest friends,
who have spoken of the little reliance to be placed on his statements
respecting himself and his affairs.
The first glimpse of Shelley at Oxford is obtained immediately after his
matriculation on 10th of April, 1810, when the tall, slight, long-necked
youth, with a square cap on his minute head, and a new gown hanging from
his rather round shoulders, entered the Bodleian Library, in the hope of
seeing the book from which the fragment had been taken. Had the German
book been given him, the freshman would have learnt nothing from it, for
he knew nothing of the German tongue at this point of his career. Ignorant
alike of the title of the book he wished to see, and of the name of its
author, the undergraduate asked for _The Wandering Jew_,--a request that
probably caused the librarian no less amusement than surprise. The
librarian had never heard of a book so entitled, but was not wholly
ignorant of a periodical (edited by one of the wits of the Great
Frederick's court) which bore the name of interest. Having come to the
famous library, under an impression that it contained every book of every
language, Mr. Percy Bysshe Shelley, of University College, was not a
little disappointed at failing to get a view of the only book he for the
moment had a strong desire to look at. The incident points to the time
when the youngster was full of the marvellous Jew, and wanted the book for
aid in his poetical enterprise.
Enough is known of the poem, that was perused by Campbell and offered to
the Ballantynes of Edinburgh, to warrant a strong opinion that originality
of thought was not one of its characteristics. One of the cousins (Medwin)
lived to think it 'a sort of thing such as boys usually write, a cento
from different favourite authors;' and probably the other author would
have described the puerile performance even more unfavourably, had he
written about it in his later time. The vision in the third canto was
taken from Lewis's _Monk_, one of the bad novels in which Shelley
delighted. The crucifixion scene seems to have been lifted bodily into
the manuscript from a published work; it was (to use Medwin's words)
'altogether a plagiarism from a volume of Cambridge Prize Poems.' Bold
play was doubtless made with 'the fragment' by the joint authors, who
differed on one important particular,--Shelley wishing to leave the Jew at
large, whilst Medwin wished to put a period to the wretch's sufferings by
killing him at the end of the last canto. When seven or eight cantos had
been made up in this fashion, the patchwork of shameless plagiarisms was
copied fair from the first to the last line by Shelley, and sent off to
the Edinburgh publishers who, after keeping the authors a long while in
suspense, declined their proposal (without returning the MS.) in the
following terms:--
'_Edinburgh, September 24th, 1810._
'SIR,
'The delay which occurred in our reply to you respecting the poem you
have obligingly offered us for publication, has arisen from our
literary friends and advisers (at least such as we have confidence in)
being in the country at this season, as is usual, and the time they
have bestowed on its perusal.
'We are extremely sorry, at length, after the most mature
deliberation, to be under the necessity of declining the honour of
being the publishers of the present poem;--not that we doubt its
success, but that it is, perhaps, better suited to the character and
liberal feelings of the English, than the bigoted spirit which yet
pervades many cultivated minds in this country. Even Walter Scott is
assailed on all hands at present by our Scotch spiritual, and
Evangelical magazines, and instructors, for having promulgated
atheistical doctrines in the _Lady of the Lake_.
'We beg you will have the goodness to advise us how it should be
returned, and we think its being consigned to the care of some person
in London would be more likely to ensure its safety than addressing it
to Horsham.
'We are, Sir, your most obedient humble servants,
'JOHN BALLANTYNE & Co.'
The religious sentiments, which the publishers thought less likely to
offend English than Scotch readers, were probably the same 'opinions on
religion, whose inconsequence' Medwin declares to be a sufficient
indication that the poem was the composition of two different writers.
That the publishers had reason to think these sentiments little adapted to
the feelings of their fellow-countrymen of North Britain will appear
probable to readers who recall the part played by Ahasuerus in _Queen
Mab_,--a poem that resembled the poem of _The Wandering Jew_ in containing
passages that were the direct offspring of the memorable fragment.
Medwin says that on their completion, Shelley sent the seven or eight
cantos 'to Campbell for his opinion on their merits, with a view to
publication,' and that the author of the _Pleasures of Hope_ returned the
MS. with the remark that there were only two good lines in it:--
'It seemed as if an angel's sigh
Had breathed the plaintive symphony,'
lines, by the way (Medwin adds), 'savouring strongly of Walter Scott.' The
peculiarities of Mr. Medwin's habitual inexactness countenance the
suspicion that, though the poem came under Campbell's critical
consideration _through_ Shelley's act, the author of the _Pleasures of
Hope_ would not have seen it had he not been the particular literary
friend and adviser, whose 'opinion' determined John Ballantyne and Co. not
to publish the work. Anyhow, Campbell read and condemned the poem which
the publishers declined,--the poem which Shelley (on receiving the letter
of 24th September, 1810, from the Edinburgh publishers) lost no time in
offering to John Joseph Stockdale, the Pall Mall (London) publisher, whose
dealings with the poet and the poet's father were laid before the public
in _Stockdale's Budget_ (1827).
In one of the several puerile letters, whose style affords conclusive
testimony that he was not the author of the _A.M. Oxon._ letter, Shelley
wrote to Stockdale from Field Place on 28th September, 1810 (just a month
before he went into 'residence' at Oxford):
'I sent, before I had the pleasure of knowing you, the MS. of a poem
to Messieurs Ballantyne and Co., Edinburgh; they have declined
publishing it, with the inclosed letter. I now offer it to you, _and
depend upon your honour as a gentleman for a fair price for the
copyright_. It will be sent to you from Edinburgh. The subject is _The
Wandering Jew_. As to its containing Atheistical principles, I assure
you, I was wholly unaware of the fact hinted at. _Your good sense will
point out to you the impossibility of inculcating pernicious doctrines
in a poem, which as you will see is so totally abstract from any
circumstances which occur under the possible view of mankind._'
The words, which the present writer has caused to be printed in italics,
should hold the reader's attention for a moment. Whilst the desire for
money, indicated by the earlier set of words, is noteworthy, the second
set of words should be examined as an example of the Oxonian's epistolary
style at a time when some of his adulators have declared him capable of
writing vigorous prose.
Not quite seven weeks after the date of these significant sets of words,
Shelley (now an Oxonian 'in residence') is writing on 14th November, 1810,
to the Pall Mall publisher: 'I am surprised that you have not received
_The Wandering Jew_, and in consequence write to Mr. Ballantyne to mention
it; you will doubtlessly, therefore, receive it soon.' Five days later
(19th November, 1810), writing again to his publisher from University
College, the youthful literary aspirant says, 'If you have not yet got
_The Wandering Jew_ from Mr. B., I will send you a MS. copy which I
possess.' Nearly a fortnight later (2nd December, 1810), he writes from
his college to the same correspondent: 'Will you, if you have got two
copies of _The Wandering Jew_ send one of them to me, as I have thought of
some corrections which I wish to make,--your opinion on it will likewise
much oblige me:'--words showing that Shelley had sent his 'reserved copy'
of the poem to Pall Mall, that he assumed it was in Mr. Stockdale's hands,
and that he thought it possible Mr. Stockdale was also in possession of
the transcript which should have been sent to him from Edinburgh by the
Ballantynes. The words also show that the young author was in some
excitement about the fate of his poem, and eager to hear whether the
publisher would produce the metrical romance, and, 'as a gentleman' pay
him 'a fair price for the copyright.'
Unless Stockdale's memory failed him on the matter in 1827, neither of
these copies came to his hands.--'It is singular,' he says in his
scandalous _Budget_ (1827), 'that, after all, the poem of _The Wandering
Jew_ never reached my hands, nor have I either seen or heard of it from
that time.' From this not altogether reliable statement it seems that
there was a miscarriage of the second and 'reserved' transcript of the
poem, sent by Shelley himself from Field Place to Pall Mall. For the
removal of a scarcely noteworthy misapprehension, it may be observed there
was no similar miscarriage of the other copy; the evidence being abundant
that the MS., sent by Shelley from Field Place to Edinburgh, was _not_
lost through miscarriage on its way from Edinburgh to Pall Mall. This MS.
cannot have miscarried for the simple reason, that it was never
despatched by the Ballantynes to Mr. Stockdale's place of business.
Instead of being sent to London, in accordance with the suggestion made by
the Ballantynes themselves, and in accordance with the instructions sent
to them by Shelley, mainly in consequence of their suggestion, the MS.
rested at Edinburgh till 1831, when, some nine years after the poet's
death, it came to light;--a discovery that was speedily followed by a
publication of some portions of the metrical folly (Medwin says 'four of
the cantos') in _Fraser's Magazine_.
After throwing off _The Wandering Jew_, which even Mr. Buxton Forman, with
all his reverence for every scrap of paper blotted by the poet, has
excluded (with the exception of a few verses) from his authorized edition
of the poet's writings, Shelley, with the assistance of a friend, produced
in the spring or summer of 1810, the volume of poetry entitled _Original
Poetry, by Victor and Cazire_,--the edition of miserable rhymes, noticed
in the _British Critic_ of 1811 (_vide_ Professor Dowden's very noteworthy
article in _The Contemporary Review_ of September, 1884, on 'Some Early
Writings of Shelley'), that was suppressed soon after its untimely birth,
because at least one of the poems was discovered to be scandalously
wanting in originality; to be, in fact, a gross and disgraceful plagiarism
of one of Monk Lewis's pieces of sensational verse.
Ignorant of the name of Shelley's coadjutor in this discreditable
business, Mr. Garnett is at much pains to show, who could not have been
the coadjutor, who may not be supposed to have been the coadjutor, and who
might have been the coadjutor. Hogg could not have been the coadjutor,
because he had not yet made the poet's acquaintance. Tom Medwin was not
the coadjutor. But Mr. Garnett is of opinion that Miss Harriett Grove may
have been the coadjutor. 'A more likely coadjutor,' he says, 'would be
Harriet Grove, Shelley's cousin, and the object of his first attachment,
who is said to have aided him in the composition of his first romance,
_Zastrozzi_.' It is strange that so exemplary a Shelleyan expert as Mr.
Garnett dealt thus respectfully with what Shelley told Medwin, or Medwin
imagined himself to have been told by Shelley, about Harriett Grove's part
in the composition of _Zastrozzi_. There is no more truth in the fable
that Harriett Grove wrote some of the chapters of _Zastrozzi_, than there
is in the fable that she was the Harriett of the Dedicatory Prelude to
_Queen Mab_. Possibly Shelley saw his pretty cousin in her Wiltshire home,
when he went from Brentford to Fern for the Easter holidays, in the
company of her Harrovian brothers. Probably the cousins saw one another on
other occasions, when they were small children; but when they met at Field
Place in the summer of 1810, they came together as new acquaintances.
There is decent, though not conclusive, evidence that they had never
looked on each other before that summer. It is certain that their brief
intimacy, attended with innocent flirtation and cousinly correspondence,
was an affair of the later six months of 1810:--that _Zastrozzi_ had been
written to the last line, sent to Messrs. Longman and Co., declined by
those publishers, sent to Messrs. Wilkie and Robinson, printed by them,
and almost, if not actually published, before the dawn of that brief
intimacy. So much for what has been written about Harriett Grove's
participation in the authorship of the earlier of Shelley's inexpressibly
ludicrous novels.
The poet's coadjutor in the unfortunate business of the _Original Poetry_
was his sister Elizabeth, and it is easy to see how Shelley manufactured
the fanciful name 'Cazire' out of so dissimilar a name as Elizabeth. He
may be presumed to have made it out of the letters of his sister's name
and a single epithet of affection, on principles familiar to students who
are versed in the romantic curiosities and fanciful contrivances of
eighteenth-century English literature. Isabel and Elizabeth are the same
name with differences of garniture. In each case Iza is the veritable
name. To call a woman Izabel, or Izabella, is to call her 'the beautiful
Iza.' To call her Elizabeth (El Iza beata) is to style her 'the blessed
Iza.' In being christened Elizabeth, the eldest of Shelley's sisters was
named Iza. The letters out of which Shelley made the fancy-name 'Cazire,'
were the letters of Cara Iza == dear Iza. Of course he used no letter
twice. Rule of art forbade him to use the same letter twice. First he took
the letters of the name, and by reversing their order made them spell
'azi.' By prefixing to 'azi' the 'C' of Cara, and putting the 'r' of the
same epithet after the 'i' of 'Cazi,' he made the name 'Cazir,'--a name to
which he gave a more feminine appearance by adding to it the initial
letter of his sister's familiar name, Elizabeth. Hence 'Cazire.'
Even as the Byron of Southwell Green employed Ridge, the Newark
bookseller, to print and publish his three first volumes of verse, the
Shelley of Field Place appointed a Horsham printer to make a printed book
of the _Original Poetry_, which he and his sister had put together. The
edition, thus printed at Horsham in the late summer or early autumn of
1810, though it can scarcely be said to have been published there, seems
to have been an edition of fifteen hundred copies. If the youthful authors
looked for a brisk sale in Sussex, that would enable them to pay their
printer as soon as he should ask for his money, they were disappointed. If
the Horsham printer worked off the edition, under the notion that he would
have no difficulty in getting payment of his little bill from the young
gentleman of Field Place, or from the Member of Parliament for New
Shoreham, or from old Sir Bysshe Shelley, he, too, was disappointed. For
in the autumn (towards the end of August or on one of the earliest days of
September), 1810, the Oxford undergraduate entered for the first time the
place of business of Mr. John Joseph Stockdale, and with a countenance
eloquent of anxiety besought the publisher to satisfy the demand of the
importunate Horsham printer, and taking over the stock of printed copies
to offer them for sale in his usual way of business. Had he been a youth
of no social quality, instead of being the eldest son of a well-known
Member of Parliament, who was reputed to be the heir of the wealthiest
commoner of Sussex, the petitioner for relief from an embarrassing
position would probably have been bowed out of the publisher's office with
more promptitude than courtesy. But the heir-apparent of the heir-apparent
of the inordinately rich Sir Bysshe Shelley, Baronet, was no person for
Mr. John Joseph Stockdale to repel. In a few years the beardless
undergraduate might himself be one of the richest of England's dignified
commoners.
An arrangement was made between the man of business and the youth of
quality; and on 17th September, 1810, the Pall-Mall publisher received
from the Horsham printer fourteen hundred and eighty copies of the
_Original Poetry: By Victor and Cazire_, a work forthwith announced in the
principal London papers as on sale 'by Stockdale, Jun., 41, Pall-Mall,' at
the price of 4_s._ per copy, in 'boards.' The book's career, under these
circumstances, was brief. It had not been re-published many days, at the
longest not more than two or three weeks, and the copies sold or put into
circulation cannot, at the boldest computation, have exceeded a hundred,
when, on examining the book closely (examining it, probably, in
consequence of something he had heard to the volume's discredit) the
publisher came to the conclusion that the work must be withdrawn and
suppressed. A fraud on the public, an infringement of at least one
author's copyright, a thing published with a deceptive title-page, the
_Original Poetry_ was found to contain poetry by Monk Lewis. It may be
conceived how surprised Shelley was to find he had induced a London
publisher to accept for the original poetry of himself and his friend,
poetry that, instead of being what he declared it to be, was stolen
poetry. No fine words, no specious phrases, can put out of sight the fact
that this business was an ugly business. Shelley was not a child when he
thus put wares under a false name on a London tradesman. He had entered
his nineteenth year when he did this distinctly discreditable thing.
To separate Shelley as far as possible from what he necessarily regards as
an awkward and humiliating affair, Mr. Garnett has recourse to a
representation which, instead of according with the probabilities of the
case, is discountenanced by several facts. 'It was but too clear,' says
the author of _Shelley in Pall Mall_, 'that Shelley's colleague, doubtless
under the compulsion of the poet's impetuous solicitations for more
verses, had appropriated whatever came first to hand, with slight respect
for pedantic considerations of _meum_ and _tuum_.' What evidence could Mr.
Garnett produce that the pilfered matter was put into the book, not by
Shelley but by his coadjutor? that the poet had pressed his coadjutor
impetuously for more verses? that, in consequence of his impetuous
solicitations for more verses, Shelley's coadjutor took verses out of a
printed book, and palmed them off on him as verses of her own composition?
What evidence could Mr. Garnett produce that Shelley was unaware that the
volume of so-styled original verse contained poetry which had been
'appropriated ... with slight respect for pedantic considerations of
_meum_ and _tuum_?' No evidence of any kind, over and beyond these words
by the mendacious and rascally Stockdale:--
'I fully anticipated the probable vexation of the juvenile
maiden-author, when I communicated my discovery to Mr. P. B. Shelley.
With all the ardour, incidental to his character, which embraces
youthful honour in all its brilliancy, he expressed the warmest
resentment at the imposition, practised upon him, by his coadjutor,
and intreated me to destroy all the copies.'
Of Stockdale's motives of self-interest and vindictiveness, in writing of
Shelley in a laudatory style, something will be said by-and-by. For the
present it is enough to remind the reader that the concoctor of the
scandalous _Budget_ (1827) was writing from memory, more than sixteen
years after the incidents to which he refers. That Shelley's coadjutor was
spurred into wrongful action by 'the poet's impetuous solicitations for
more verses,' is a touch of fiction for which we are indebted to Mr.
Garnett's imagination.
As no copy of the suppressed edition is known to be in existence, and all
our certain knowledge of the contents of the volume comes from Stockdale's
meagre and mendacious narrative, it is useless to inquire what will
probably never be known--what proportion the purloined matter bore to the
original writing of the book, and how far the purloined matter was
manipulated and re-dressed by the pilferer or pilferers? It is scarcely
conceivable that the stolen stuff was lifted from one book to the other
without any verbal alteration. Should a copy of the _Original Poetry_ be
recovered, I should expect to find the least original of its pieces to be
specimens of bold, free, manifest plagiarisms--not verbatim transcripts.
That Shelley was a partner to such plagiarisms in 1810 we know from
Medwin's candid account of the way in which they made up the cantos of
_The Wandering Jew_. That Shelley used to perpetrate such plagiarisms
single-handed, and for his own sole use, in 1810, we know from the
plagiarism from Byron's _Lachin-y-Gair_ (_Hours of Idleness_) to be found
in _St. Irvyne_. Lewis's _Monk_ was boldly pilfered for the benefit of the
third canto of _The Wandering Jew_, a canto altered and added to by
Shelley after Medwin had rough-written it. Monk Lewis's writings were so
much admired by Shelley, and so familiar to him, that whilst he (with a
strong taste for literary imitation) may be assumed, almost as a matter of
course, to have plagiarized some parts of them at some time or other, he
was not likely to have overlooked the quality of any plagiarism from Monk
Lewis in the verses given him by his sister for their joint enterprise.
It follows that, whilst there is no sufficient evidence in support of Mr.
Garnett's account of the affair, several facts point to the probability
that, instead of being perpetrated by Miss Shelley, the plagiarisms,
which made it needful to withdraw and suppress the 'original poetry,' were
done by her brother's own hand. Yet Mr. Garnett declares it not merely
clear, but 'too clear,' that Shelley was nothing more than the simple and
unsuspicious victim of an unworthy coadjutor. At the same time to minimize
the discredit, accruing to Shelley from her misconduct, it is observed
lightly that, instead of stealing, she only 'appropriated whatever first
came to hand, with slight respect for pedantic considerations of _meum_
and _tuum_.' It is thus that disagreeable matters are glossed for the
benefit of the poet, who might have been the Saviour of the World.
Mr. Rossetti, by far the most discreet and able of Shelley's apologists,
would win a favourable verdict for the poet in respect to this _Victor and
Cazire_ business, on the plea that so youthful and unworldly a writer is
not to be supposed to have studied the law of copyright.
'One can but speculate on the question whether Shelley was himself in
fault in this matter, or whether he had been duped by his coadjutor.
There was certainly some tendency to secretiveness in his early
literary attempts; and it may be doubted whether the Etonian
scatterbrain would have seen much harm in appropriating stanzas or
whole compositions from Lewis if they fell in with his notions,--or,
indeed, whether he had ever perceived or pondered the meaning of the
word copyright. Stockdale, at any rate, does not seem to have
considered himself aggrieved by Shelley, as he soon after undertook
the publishing of _St. Irvyne_; in fact, after some serious rows
during their business connexion, he continued enthusiastic as to the
young author's character and honour.'
By all means let Shelley have the benefit of the lenient judgment of a
publisher, who came to ruin through his own dishonourable conduct. The
publisher, who gave English literature _The Memoirs of Harriet Wilson_, is
scarcely the person on whose evidence a proud man would care to rely for
the vindication of his own or his friend's honour. The plea that Shelley
probably knew nothing of the law of copyright, reminds one of the similar
plea, which caused Lord Justice Knight Bruce to declare in his proper
court, that 'to be honest it was not necessary to be an attorney.' In
truth, the question is wholly beside Shelley's knowledge or ignorance of
that law. Every Eton boy knows whether he has done a set of Latin verses
for himself, or copied them from another boy's paper; knows also that he
is telling an untruth when he expressly declares himself the maker of the
verses which another boy has composed for him. If Shelley knew the book
contained poetry, that was written by neither of the individuals indicated
in the title-page,--contained poetry that was _not_ original in the sense
of the title,--he was guilty of an untruth. For reasons already stated, I
cannot question he had this knowledge, and was guilty of an untruth, which
he would not have uttered to the publisher and the world, had he been (as
Lady Shelley declares him to have been) more outspoken and truthful than
other boys; or (as Mr. Walter S. Halliday declares him to have been)
remarkable for 'great moral courage' and dislike of everything that was
'false.' Were it a solitary instance of departure from truth in the poet's
career, his present biographer would be at less pains to call attention to
this matter, as an affair that should not be without effect on our final
estimate of an equally interesting and puzzling character.
After placing the 1480 copies of the _Original Poetry_ in Mr. Stockdale's
hands, Shelley naturally wished the same publisher of light literature to
produce _St. Irvyne; or, the Rosicrucian_,--a novel of which so much will
be said in the next chapter of this volume, that it is enough in the
present page to say the young author was at work upon it in the summer and
autumn of 1810, and probably began to work upon it soon after sending the
copy of _The Wandering Jew_ to John Ballantyne and Co.
Enough has been said of the verses that, written by Shelley in 1809-10
(probably in the earlier half of 1810), may have been the first sketches
and studies for _Queen Mab_. It is, however, well to refer again to the
metrical performances that, engaging Shelley's attention in the autumn of
1810, were published by the Oxford printer and bookseller, J. Munday, in
the middle of the November of that year, under the title of _Posthumous
Fragments of Margaret Nicholson_. In a contemptuous notice of the _Victor
and Cazire_ poems, the _British Critic_ (1811) spoke of the volumes as
'sentimental nonsense and very absurd tales of horror' in terms, that seem
to dispose of Mr. D. F. MacCarthy's suggestion that the _Posthumous
Fragments of Margaret Nicholson_ may be a mere reproduction of the _Victor
and Cazire_ poems, _minus_ the verses that might have brought the
publisher into the Court of Chancery. In comparing Byron's story with
Shelley's story, one is struck by the numerous resemblances and
coincidences of the two careers. Even as Byron employed a country printer
to produce his first volume of boyish verse, Shelley employed a country
printer for the production of his first book of jingle. Even as the
indiscretions of Byron's first book constrained him to suppress it,
Shelley was forced to suppress his first thing of rhymes by fear of
consequences.
What was the year of Shelley's correspondence with Miss Felicia Dorothea
Browne (afterwards Mrs. Hemans), the correspondence, in which he
impregnated her mind with sceptical thought, and so far disturbed her
religious life that Mrs. Browne (Felicia's mother) wrote to Mr. Medwin the
elder, begging him to use his influence with Shelley, so that he should
desist from writing to the girl he had never seen? In the absence of dated
documents, I answer this question with some hesitation by assigning the
interchange of letters to 1810. There are reasons for giving a somewhat
earlier date to the correspondence, and reasons for thinking the boy and
girl were writing to one another even so late as the spring of 1811. But,
speaking doubtfully, I regard the interchange of epistles as an affair of
the spring and summer of 1810.
With his usual ambiguity of expression, Medwin says, or seems to say, that
he made Miss Felicia Dorothea Browne's acquaintance in North Wales at the
beginning of 1808 or somewhat before that year; subscribed for a volume of
her poems when she was sixteen years old; and on his return from North
Wales (in the earlier part of 1808) spoke of her and her writings to
Shelley, in terms that caused him to write to the young lady. The
perplexing Mr. Thomas Medwin writes thus:--
'In the beginning of the first of these two years' (_i.e._ 1808 and
1809), 'I showed Shelley some poems to which I had subscribed by
Felicia Browne, whom I had met in North Wales, where she had been on a
visit at the house of a connexion of mine. She was then sixteen, and
it was impossible not to be struck with the beauty (for beautiful she
was), the grace, and charming simplicity and _naiveté_ of this
interesting girl; and on my return from Denbighshire, I made her and
her works the frequent subject of conversation with.... He desired to
become acquainted with the young authoress, and using my name wrote to
her, as he was in the habit of doing to all those who in any way
excited his sympathies. This letter produced an answer, and a
correspondence of some length passed between them, which, of course, I
never saw, but it is to be supposed that it turned on other subjects
besides poetry. I mean that it was sceptical. It has been said by her
biographer, that the poetess was at one period of her life, as is the
case frequently with deeper thinkers on religion, inclined to doubt;
and it is not impossible that such owed its origin to this interchange
of thought. One may, indeed, suppose this to have been the case, from
the circumstance of her mother writing to my father, and begging him
to use his influence with Shelley to cease from any further
communication with her daughter,--in fact, prohibiting their further
correspondence.'
Medwin is obviously not right in his dates. Born on 23rd September, 1793,
Felicia Browne (Hemans) attained the age of sixteen on 23rd September,
1809. If he made the young lady's acquaintance at the end of 1807, or in
the beginning of 1808, she was only fifteen years of age when he first
made a bow to her. If she was in her seventeenth year when he first saw
her, the meeting took place on some day between 23rd September, 1809, and
23rd September, 1810. It is much more probable that he was right about her
age than about the year. The girl's precise age is much more likely than
the precise number of the year, in which he first saw her, to have lived
in his memory. The admiration with which he regarded and remembered her is
a state of feeling much more likely to have been caused by a girl of
sixteen than a child of fifteen. If he made her acquaintance at the end of
1809, he made it at a time closely preceding the winter in which he saw so
much of Shelley. If he made her acquaintance at the close of 1807, or the
beginning of 1808, he would have had fewer opportunities for speaking
about her to his cousin (still an Eton schoolboy); and in the spring and
summer of 1809, he would scarcely have been cognizant of the
correspondence of the boy at Eton and the girl in Wales. In the winter of
1809-10, and in the following spring, he would naturally know of the
correspondence, and hear something of the letters he was not permitted to
see.
It matters little whether the correspondence was an affair of this year or
that year. The important fact is that, whilst still a stripling, the
future poet opened a correspondence with the young lady, and used the
opportunities of the correspondence to infuse her with sceptical
sentiment, and disturb her faith in the religion in which she had been
trained. What might come to Miss Felicia Browne from his intrusion on her
spiritual life was no question to trouble him. What misery might ensue to
the girl's mother and other kindred from his action was no matter for him
to consider. The rights and feelings of parents were rights and feelings
to which the young gentleman (who might have been the Saviour of the
World) was sublimely indifferent, whenever it pleased him to talk with a
school-girl (whose acquaintance he had made without the sanction or
knowledge of her parents) on the evidences of Christianity, the soul's
immortality, the existence of the Deity. No less heedless was he of his
own mother's wishes, anxieties, fears, hopes, when the humour came upon
him to enlighten his sisters on matters about which she wished them to be
left in ignorance. Himself a passionate disbeliever of the Christian
religion, Shelley was possessed by a passion for making other people
sharers of his disbelief, especially for raising the young ladies of his
acquaintance to his own philosophical contempt for the delusions of
Christianity. Any one who humoured his propensity to win converts to his
own particular infidelity was a philosopher; every one who presumed to
oppose it was an intolerant bigot. In the indulgence of this passion for
making converts to unbelief, he was selfish.
Without receiving or seeking Mrs. Browne's permission to address her
daughter on matters pertaining to religion, or to have any kind of
confidential relations with her, he opened a correspondence with the
sixteen-years-old girl, and did his best to lure her from the religion in
which she had been educated,--and was so far successful as to shake her
faith in Christianity. A few weeks or months later, without receiving or
seeking Mrs. Grove's permission to address her daughter (a young girl of
his own age) on matters of religion, he did his best by spoken words and
written words to lure the girl from Christianity, though he must have
known that he could not effect his purpose without inflicting
inexpressible pain on his mother's sister. Knowing his mother's repugnance
to infidelity, he did his best to lure his eldest sister (a girl of
poetical sensibility and genius, who idolized him) from the Christian
religion. In the following year, finding Harriett Westbrook still a
sixteen-years-old school-girl, who held the usual religious views of an
English school-girl educated within the lines of the Established Church,
he approached her without asking her parents' authority to do so, lured
her from Christianity to Atheism, set her in rebellion against her father,
and having made her an undutiful daughter and an atheist, married
her,--marrying her instead of making her his mere mistress, _only_
because Hogg made him see he was bound in honour to make her his lawfully
wedded wife, before possessing himself of her person. In this period of
his early manhood, he approached other girls of tender age in the same
manner,--addressing them on matters of religion, disturbing their
spiritual life, and shaking their faith in Christianity, when he did not
succeed in his efforts to extinguish it. With the single exception of Miss
Harriett Grove (who does not seem to have suffered from his sophistries)
he seems to have been more or less successful in all his attempts on the
faith of young girls.
In acting thus to young girls, without the sanction or knowledge of their
natural guardians, the apt pupil of the hard-swearing Windsor doctor is
declared by the most fervid of his admirers to have been justified,
because he was a sincere and earnest teacher of what he believed to be the
truth, an enthusiastic assailant of error, and a fervid enemy of
intolerance. Though his action was often strangely wanting in candour and
openness, was sometimes odiously secretive and treacherous towards the
parents of the young girls with whose faith he tampered, the sincerity of
his religious sentiments and utterances is open to no suspicion. It is
unquestionable that he believed what he tried to make others
believe,--that he was wholly convinced and absolutely certain of the
falseness of the opinions which he entreated other people to repudiate as
false. It cannot be doubted he was an enthusiastic assailant of what he
thought to be error, and the majority of his acquaintance thought to be
the reverse of error. In one sense, he was no doubt a disinterested
assailant of what he thought to be error. But how about his tolerance? his
hatred of intolerance? For the moment we are not thinking of the Italian
Shelley, who, after warring wildly with all who differed from him in
opinion, desisted in some degree from the bootless strife,--on discovering
that what was truth to him might be error to higher intelligence, that the
people from whom he differed in opinion had the same right to their
manifestly erroneous opinions as he had to his possibly erroneous views;
that human creatures could not be forced out of their errors by passionate
speech; that disputants fighting with subtle arguments and hot words might
be as essentially intolerant as disputants fighting with instruments of
torture and blazing faggots. To say that the Shelley, who, after
surviving the phrensies of his earlier manhood, wrote the _Essay on
Christianity_, was devoid of tolerance would be unjust. But how about the
Shelley who wrote _Laon and Cythna_, who raved against religion in _Queen
Mab_, and was moved by hatred of error to teach Harriett Westbrook (ætat.
16), Harriett Grove (ætat. 17), his sister Elizabeth (ætat. 16), Felicia
Browne (ætat. 16), that Christianity was made up of monstrous fables and
delusions; that the Christian religion was accountable for the worst evils
of human society; that the sentiment of the Christian faith was pernicious
and execrable. Was this enemy of intolerance chiefly remarkable for
tolerance? Whilst railing at the world's want of tolerance, Shelley was
himself a caricature of intolerance.
In regarding Shelley during the earlier stages of his crusade against
Christianity, more especially in regarding his endeavours to dispel the
religious delusions of Felicia Browne, Harriett Grove, his sister
Elizabeth, Harriett Westbrook and other young ladies of his acquaintance,
readers should judge him at least quite as severely as they would judge
any young man of the present period, whom they should detect in sapping
the religious faith and disturbing the religious life of young girls,
still under their governesses. I might even go a step further and say that
they should judge him even more severely than a young man of the present
period: as in these days of Free Thought, when it is questioned by a
considerable minority of people whether children are the better for being
kept well within the lines of religious orthodoxy, a young man guilty of
infusing the damsels of his familiar circle with sceptical sentiment,
would offend social opinion less flagrantly and universally, than the
Oxford undergraduate who was guilty of such conduct in days, when society
was almost unanimous in attaching the highest value to religious
orthodoxy, and in believing that to depart from it was to lay aside the
only effectual armour against temptations to immorality.
Still, it is enough for readers to judge Shelley in this matter, precisely
as they would judge a youthful delinquent of the present period, when the
wholesome opinion still prevails that the man is guilty of heinous
domestic treachery, who abuses the opportunities of familiar intercourse,
so as to disturb the religious life of the young people of his
acquaintance, and lure them from the tenets in which their natural
guardians have educated them, and desire them still to be educated. What
would the readers of this page say of any clever Etonian or Oxford
undergraduate, whom they should overhear and catch in the very act of
luring a girl of tender age from the religion of her parents (the religion
in which they wish to confirm her) into Atheism? I conceive most readers
of this page would pass judgment on the offender, without reference to the
relative merits or demerits of the religion the girl was being lured to
repudiate. I do not hesitate to say that in such a case I should tell the
youthful apostle of Free Thought my opinion of his conduct, in a few words
of homely English, that would make his ears tingle;--and the words of
homely English would be none the less stinging and disdainful, because I
knew the young gentleman to be a rather clever fellow, and even thought
him likely to write good poetry some years hence.
Why do I presume to say without hesitation that Miss Harriett Grove's
correspondence with, and so-called engagement to, her cousin, Percy Bysshe
Shelley, were affairs of the year 1810, whilst Lady Shelley (writing
'_from authentic sources_') declares them to have been affairs of the
previous year 1809?
The authorities have blundered curiously about this affair of the two
cousins. Mr. Thomas Love Peacock makes a great slip, where he says that
'Shelley's expulsion from Oxford brought to a summary conclusion his
boyish passion for Miss Harriett Grove.' Letters published in Hogg's first
volume put it beyond question that, whilst the brief familiar intercourse
was an affair of the latter half of 1810, it was all over by the end of
that year, or at latest before the end of the Christmas holidays of
1810-11. Shelley had ceased to sigh for Harriett Grove, some weeks before
the expulsion.
In the note, which reveals his disposition to think the dedicatory verses
of _Queen Mab_ may after all have been addressed by the poet in the first
instance to Harriett Grove, Mr. Forman does an injustice (for which he
has, however, a sufficient excuse) to Mr. Thomas Medwin, in representing
him as giving the summer of 1809 as the summer in which the young lady and
the poet 'met for the first time, since they had been children, at Field
Place.' An inexact author must be read with proper regard for his
besetting infirmity, even as an unsound horse must be handled with due
regard for his particular unsoundness. Half-a-score facts show that in
speaking of the winter of 1809 (the winter next after Shelley's
withdrawal from Eton), Medwin was speaking of the winter of 1809-10. From
that date on p. 53, vol. I., of the _Life of Shelley_, the narrative is
carried on throughout the winter and ensuing spring into the summer, when,
on p. 66 of the same volume, the biographer says, 'It was in the summer of
this year that he became acquainted with our cousin, Harriet
Grove;'--obviously meaning the summer of 1810. Lady Shelley, who makes
free use of Medwin's book (blunders and all), probably made her mistake of
the year by reading Medwin, even as Mr. Forman in later time read him,
without sufficient care.
What does Mr. Charles Henry Grove (Harriett's brother) say about the
matter in a very interesting letter? Writing from Torquay on 16th
February, 1857, when still only in his 63rd year, this gentleman (after
mentioning the Brentford schoolboy's visit to Fern for the Easter
holidays), remarks:--
'I did not meet Bysshe again after that till I was fifteen, the year I
left the navy, and then I went to Field Place with my father, mother,
Charlotte, and Harriet. Bysshe was there, having just left Eton, and
his sister, Elizabeth. Bysshe was at that time more attached to my
sister Harriet than I can express, and I recollect well the moonlight
walks we four had at Strode, and also at St. Irvings; that, I think,
was the name of the place, then the Duke of Norfolk's, at Horsham.
[St.[1] Irving's Hills, a beautiful place, on the right-hand side as
you go from Horsham to Field Place, laid out by the famous Capability
Brown, and full of magnificent forest trees, waterfalls, and rustic
seats. The house was Elizabethan. All has been destroyed.] That was in
the year 1810. After our visit to Field Place, we went to my brother's
house in Lincoln's Inn Fields, where Bysshe, his mother, and Elizabeth
joined us, and a very happy month we spent. Bysshe was full of life
and spirits, and very well pleased with his successful devotion to my
sister. In the course of that summer, to the best of my recollection,
after we had retired into Wiltshire, a continued correspondence was
going on, as, I believe, there had been before, between Bysshe and my
sister Harriet. But she became uneasy at the tone of his letters on
speculative subjects, at first consulting my mother, and subsequently
my father also, on the subject. This led at last, though I cannot
exactly tell how, to the dissolution of an engagement between Bysshe
and my sister, which had previously been permitted, both by his father
and mine.'
The bracketed words being regarded as 'editorial comment,' this quotation
from Mr. Charles Henry Grove's letter, and all the rest of the epistle,
are lucid and strenuous. The writer of so good a letter may have
exaggerated the fervour of Shelley's passion for his cousin Harriett, and
made a regular engagement out of a mere appearance of mutual liking that
promised to ripen quickly into a formal betrothal (of these errors I have
no doubt Mr. Charles Henry Grove was in some degree guilty); but he was
not likely to be wrong about the year, remembered as the year in which he
was fifteen, and the year in which he left the navy. That he was right
about the year appears also from divers of Shelley's letters to Hogg.
It requires no great effort of the imagination to create pleasant scenes
and incidents from the little that is recorded of this meeting and
association of the two families of the Wiltshire Groves and Sussex
Shelleys, families having their homes too far apart to see much of one
another in pre-railway time. Harriett and Percy Bysshe had not seen each
other (if we may trust Medwin) since they were children. No wonder the
young man was favourably impressed by his fair cousin,--a singularly
beautiful girl of graceful figure, clear blue eyes, a singular
superabundance of light golden-brown tresses, a complexion comparable with
his own complexion for show of pink and white, but surpassing it in
clearness and freedom from freckles. Cousins of the same age almost to a
day, they resembled one another in several personal particulars; but the
girl had the advantage of her cousin in the delicate symmetry of her
countenance, and the fine straightness of the feature that rendered the
fault of his small, turn-up nose more noticeable. In the dignity and
composure of her carriage she also had the advantage of the Oxford
undergraduate, whose movements were too nervous, and impetuous, and
irregular for stateliness. This difference of bearing and gesture in the
two cousins corresponded with the difference of their temperaments,--his
quick and vehement impulsiveness, her calm self-possession. Perhaps
Shelley liked the lovely girl all the more for her coldness, just as Byron
was fascinated by the frigid placidity of Miss Milbanke's demeanour. That
he had reason to admire her is unquestionable. After a lapse of
six-and-thirty years, Tom Medwin (who was one of the family party at Field
Place in 1810, and in those thirty-six years had seen many charming women
in divers lands) could recall no woman comparable with her for beauty.
Possibly the meeting of the two families had been arranged by the elders
to see if the two cousins were likely to care more than a little for each
other. It was not in human nature for the two families to live together
for two months without thinking that it might result in a wedding. Mr.
Grove (_ætat._ 51, a country gentleman with a large family:--I find no
sufficient reason to credit him with clerical quality, though he is styled
a clergyman by one of the poet's biographers; Burke only styles him
'esquire') may well have liked the thought of matching his lovely daughter
with the heir-apparent of the heir-apparent of the prodigiously wealthy
baronet of Castle Goring. Mrs. Grove would have been a strangely
unreasonable woman to think her nephew no sufficient match for her
beautiful daughter. The Member for New Shoreham and Mrs. Shelley of Field
Place may well have thought an early engagement, with a prospect of early
marriage, precisely the thing to keep their eccentric, troublesome,
scatterbrain boy steady and straight at Oxford.
Whilst the Eton-Oxford man certainly liked his cousin well enough to enjoy
the notion of becoming her husband, at least one member of the family
party was desirous, intent, busy on making a match out of such promising
materials. This would-be match-maker was Bysshe's sister Elizabeth,--the
Iza of Cazire, at the same time her brother's idol and idolater, a girl of
no common beauty and mental endowments, a maiden clever with her pen and
yet cleverer with her pencil. At her own instance, and at his request, to
please her brother and to please herself, she threw herself into his
purpose, and pleaded in his behalf to the Beauty of Fern, declaring he
possessed every noble quality, and was free from every failing of his sex;
insisting that he and the cousin whom he admired so enthusiastically were
designed by Heaven for one another; and imploring the tranquil, too
unresponsive beauty to rate Bysshe at his proper worth, and prize his
expressions of affection far higher than she seemed to prize them.
The poet must have mistrusted his power to win and hold the beauty when he
asked his sister to help him; and before she entreated the beauty to be
merciful, Miss Shelley must have felt her brother sorely needed her
assistance. My impression is that from first to last Shelley never had any
hold whatever on Miss Grove's affections, that he was no clever suitor,
that circumstances were from the outset against him. Before she came to
Field Place there may have been an understanding between the young lady
and the Somerset gentleman whom she married in the following year; an
understanding that, whilst binding her lightly though securely to him,
left her free to amuse herself with a little innocent flirtation with her
cousin of Field Place. I have reason to suspect that when she consulted
her father and mother about Bysshe's sceptical views after corresponding
with him for several months, she produced the letters not so much for the
benefit of their advice as for the assistance they would afford her in
inducing them to relinquish a scheme on which they had set their hearts,
and to sanction a scheme on which she had set her heart nine months since.
I cannot question that Bysshe diminished and weakened any slight chance he
may have had of winning the beauty's hand by talking sceptically to her,
and otherwise carrying her through the primer of infidelity. Instead of
taking the new doctrine to her heart, she was at first a little frightened
by it, and then strongly determined by it to take a path of life, in which
she would not be attended by the scatterbrain heir to the brand-new Castle
Goring baronetcy.
Still every girl likes to be admired, and Miss Grove liked her cousin's
admiration none the less because his sister entreated her so prettily to
accept it responsively. There was no reason why she should disappoint the
brother and sister with a promptitude, that would put a premature period
to an agreeable holiday. The obvious wishes of the elders of both families
may also have disposed the young lady to temporize. That the elders of the
family party wished for the match when the Groves went from Field Place to
town, may be inferred from the arrangement for the speedy reunion of the
young people in Lincoln's Inn Fields. That Bysshe, Mrs. Shelley, and Miss
Shelley, followed the five Groves to London so quickly, and spent a month
with them under the same roof of Lincoln's Inn Fields, is a significant
fact.
In London, as the reader doubtless remembers, the poet had other business
to look after besides the pursuit of his cousin's affection. It was
needful for him to come to an arrangement with a London publisher
respecting those already mentioned fourteen hundred and eighty copies of
_Original Poetry_, by Victor and Cazire. Needful, also, was it that he
should find a publisher for _St. Irvyne, or The Rosicrucian_, which would
soon be ready for the press. The poet's first visit to Mr. John Joseph
Stockdale's place of business in Pall Mall was paid whilst he was staying
with his mother, and his sister, and Harriett the Enchantress, under his
cousin Grove's house, hard by Lincoln's Inn. Since he entered the
publisher's office with a countenance eloquent of anxiety, one can imagine
the relief it was to Cazire (the sharer of his literary toil and anxiety)
to learn from Victor, on his return from Pall Mall, that he thought he saw
a way out of the bother with that embarrassing Horsham printer, who wanted
his money so much sooner than was reasonable and convenient.
But though she cannot have rated him highly as a partner in the dance, and
does not seem at any moment to have thought seriously of taking him for a
partner through life, the cousins played together prettily for two summer
months. The moonlight walks at Strode and about St. Irving's Hills were
followed by no less agreeable visits to the sights of the town. And when
Miss Harriett returned to Wiltshire, and the youthful poet went back to
Field Place, there was a commencement or renewal (Mr. Charles Henry Grove
is uncertain which it was) of their correspondence through the post, that
came to an end in, or shortly before, the ensuing Christmas holidays. It
is not surprising that spectators of the game, who, of course, could see
but little of it, mistook for an engagement what to outsiders seemed so
likely to become an engagement, though it never was an affair (if I read
the facts aright) that could have ended in marriage.
Peacock was justified in saying far too much had been made of this affair.
On Shelley's side, it certainly was no grand passion. On Harriett's side
it probably was nothing more than an innocent, perfectly feminine, and
scarcely avoidable, flirtation. To please her parents rather than herself,
she was something more complaisant to her cousin than she need have been.
To please him, she answered the letters he rained down upon her--letters
it would have been uncivil in her to leave altogether unnoticed. After
fuming for a week or ten days, on being told he might not write to her
again, Shelley never pretended that his heart had been seriously concerned
in the affair, that he was a blighted being, that Harriett Grove had dealt
him a blow comparable with the blow that drove Byron in anguish from
Annesley. In this matter, at least, he was wholly guiltless of
affectation, even whilst in his first annoyance he fumed and blustered in
a very absurd fashion, vowing war to the bitter end with the demon
Intolerance, that had severed him from his Harriett. He played a perfectly
natural, though scarcely heroic, part, when he had taken time to wipe his
eyes and recover his temper. The affair with his cousin had been ended
only a few months, when he went off cheerily to Scotland with the
sixteen-years-old daughter of a licensed victualler.
After leaving Oxford, Shelley never talked any nonsense about Harriett
Grove's unkindness, never affected to have suffered much from her
rejection of his suit, never accused her of having treated him badly. And
so long as he lived, no nonsense was written or talked about the matter by
the poet's friends. But when he had been dead for some few years, it
occurred to the Shelleyan zealots, who were decrying Byron on serious
questions for the advantage of their peculiar bard, that less important
matters might be handled in the same way to the benefit of the poet, whom
(to use an Americanism) they were 'running' against the author of _Childe
Harold_. Hence the extravagant talk about Shelley's ancient lineage and
patrician quality. If the opposition poet was a baron of the realm, a man
of splendid lineage, a descendant from the Norman Buruns, the poet of 'the
zealots' was next in succession to an English baronetcy, a gentleman of
Norman ancestry, a worshipful personage, who had reason to value himself
on his relationship to the Penshurst Sidneys, and on being heir to wealth
that could purchase a score such places as Newstead Abbey. Hence, also,
the talk about Byron's egotistic selfishness, insincerities, and
affectations, which made him show disadvantageously in comparison with
Shelley, who was (of course) so remarkable for simplicity and devotion to
the truth, so invariably considerate for the feelings of other people, and
so incapable of talking about himself in his poetry! Hence, also, the
disparagement of Byron's singular facial loveliness. When he discovered
that Byron's nose was too big for his face, and declared it had the
appearance of having been imposed upon the face instead of growing
naturally out of it, Leigh Hunt was trying (even in respect to so trivial
a matter as a single feature) to reduce the poet he hated, to an equality
with the poet, whose too small nose was 'a turn up,'--a blemish, that the
'Shelleyan enthusiasts' have done their best to withhold from the poet's
posterity.
Hence, also, the practice of making far too much of Shelley's passion for
Harriett Grove, and its disappointment. Readers do not need to be reminded
what good running Byron made during life with his droll piece of romance
about his passion for Mary Chaworth, and the ruin that came to him from
its disappointment;--the fiction, that originated in vanity and
sentimentalism, being subsequently embellished and emphasized at the
instigation of the poet's spite against his unforgiving wife. But the
sympathy and admiration, that came to Byron during his life from this
fantastic and lovely bit of poetical fibbing, were trivial in comparison
with the compassion and charity, lavished upon him in the grave by the
thousands and hundreds of thousands of simple persons, who had been taught
by his verse to believe he would have abounded in all the social virtues,
had it not been for that unfortunate business with Mary Chaworth. Under
these circumstances, it is not surprising that the zealots, who persisted
in 'running' Shelley against Byron, determined to 'run' Harriett Grove
against Mary Chaworth, and to teach mankind that Byron's passion for Mary
was no grander an affair than Shelley's passion for his Harriett (the
First).
CHAPTER VIII.
ST. IRVYNE; OR, THE ROSICRUCIAN: A ROMANCE. BY A GENTLEMAN OF THE
UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD.
Venal Villains--'Jock' instructed to 'Pouch' them--At Work on another
Novel--The Dog of a Publisher--Devil of a Price--_St.
Irvyne_--Irving's Hill--Review of _St. Irvyne_--Wolfstein the
Magnanimous--Megalena de Metastasio--Olympia della Anzasca--Eloise St.
Irvyne--The Virtuous Fitzeustace--Ginotti's Doom--The Oxonian
Shelley's Repugnance to Marriage--His Commendation of Free
Love--Parallel Passages of _Zastrozzi_ and _St. Irvyne_--The Verses of
_St. Irvyne_.
As the hour drew near for the publication of _Zastrozzi_, Shelley was
urgent with his publisher to spend money in getting favourable reviews of
the superlatively foolish book. The publisher declining to part with his
money for that purpose, the literary aspirant (more truth-loving though he
was than other boys, if Lady Shelley may be trusted) discovered a
grievance in Mr. Robinson's niggardly reluctance to bribe the reviewers.
As the man of business would not make needful arrangements with the
'gentlemen of the press,' Shelley declared his intention (in a letter
dated 1st April, 1810), to see that the 'venal villains' were properly
'pouched.' Many a boyish author has talked and written in the same vein,
and even tipt a 'venal villain' for a lying paragraph, without bearing
himself in later time so as to acquire a reputation for untruthfulness or
for labouring under semi-delusions. A biographer might well disdain to
notice so trivial an indication of a readiness to tamper with the truth
and fib by deputy, had Shelley's veracity never been called in question in
later time. Under the circumstances of the case, one does not make too
much of the small matter, in remarking that, whilst it accords with the
action of the young man who offered verse for sale as 'original poetry'
with the knowledge that it was not 'original,' this resolve to buy
insincere praise, in order to deceive the public and win money or homage
from credulous readers, is out of harmony with the fine things that have
been said of the poet's sublime sincerity and passionate abhorrence of
falsehood. If Medwin was right in saying _Zastrozzi_ was favourably
reviewed and declared 'a book of much promise,' the critic must have been
a sufficiently 'pouched' and 'venal villain.'
In the same letter of 1st April, 1810, the poet and novelist, who ten days
later donned cap and gown at University College, is seen at work on
another novel, in the hope that it will bring him 60_l._, and place him
before the world as the author of the _New Romance_ in three volumes. If
'Jock' (otherwise styled Mr. John Robinson, of Paternoster Row) won't pay
him 'a devil of a price' for his new poem, and at least 60_l._ for his new
romance, 'the dog shall not have them.' It was thus the youngster
swaggered over a sheet of paper on April Fools' Day, about his dog of a
publisher, and the devil of a price the dog must pay him for the finest
fruit of his genius. The young man boasting of the 60_l._ he meant to have
for his _New Romance_ in three volumes, was the same boy who seems to have
set it about that he had been paid 40_l._ for _Zastrozzi_. What the poem
was, does not appear. It may have been the 'Original Poetry' that wasn't
original, or the _Wandering Jew_ that was subsequently offered for a devil
of a price, or a gentlemanly price to the Messrs. Ballantyne and Co. of
Edinburgh, and Mr. John Joseph Stockdale, of 41 Pall Mall, or even the
first meagre sketch of _Queen Mab_; but I am inclined to think it was _The
Jew_. _Zastrozzi_ having fallen dead from the press (of course, for no
other reason than the dog's neglect to pouch the villains), Jock was not
in the humour to drop money either on the poem for which 'a devil of a
price' would be nothing more than fair payment, or on the novel that, on
being finished and 'fitted' for the press by a publisher, instead of
filling three volumes was (in bulk) a slighter and meaner book than
_Zastrozzi_. Placed in Mr. Stockdale's hands in September, 1810, and
'fitted' for public perusal by Mr. Stockdale himself, this performance in
prose fiction was published by the Pall Mall bookseller (not on the
payment of 60_l._ to the author, but altogether at the author's cost and
risk) in December, 1810, under the style and titles of _St. Irvyne_, or,
_The Rosicrucian_, the first of the two titles being an adaptation of the
names of the ducal seat (St. Irving's Hills)[2], in whose glades and
gardens he had walked by moonlight with the more cold than faithless
Harriett, not six months since.
For insufficient reasons _St. Irvyne, or, The Rosicrucian_--an even
wilder piece of lunacy than _Zastrozzi_--has been assigned to a German
source. German tale-wrights may have been in some slight degree
accountable for its morbid extravagances, even as they were indirectly
accountable for some of the several hundreds of similar English romances,
that were produced in the poet's boyhood by the imitators of Mrs.
Radcliffe and Monk Lewis. But to speak of it as a tale _from_ the German,
or even _after_ the German, is to be guilty of a misdescription.
Consisting of two separate stories, stitched together by an inexpert
handler of the literary needle, _St. Irvyne_ is just such a performance as
might have been looked for from the author of _Zastrozzi_, eager to
produce a second romance, before 'clearing out' of the state of mental
disease, that was partly the effect and partly the cause of the efforts
that resulted in the earlier story. Something must be said of both parts
of the tale that, dropping still-born from the press, would have been
absolutely forgotten, had it not been for the author's subsequent
celebrity.
PART, NO. I.
Consenting to participate in the adventures and fortunes of the Alpine
Brigands, by whom he has been captured, the youthful and 'high-souled'
Wolfstein--an outcast from his noble family and from the society of his
equals--makes the acquaintance of Ginotti the Rosicrucian, whilst the
latter is acting as First Lieutenant under Cavigni, the captain of the
Banditti. Almost at the same time he falls under the influence of Megalena
de Metastasio, daughter of a wealthy Italian Count, who has been
despoiled, murdered, and thrown down a yawning precipice by the comrades
of the magnanimous Wolfstein. The association of the brigands with
Wolfstein is of no long duration: for when he has made two attempts to
poison their chieftain (the second attempt being successful), the allied
robbers expel Wolfstein of the lofty soul from their brotherhood.
In justice to the magnanimous Wolfstein, it must be admitted he did not
poison Cavigni without provocation. Not only does the robber-chief presume
to force his unacceptable addresses on the lovely Megalena de Metastasio,
but follows up this presumption with a threat of ravishing her. 'Then,'
cries the robber-chief, 'if within four-and-twenty hours you hold
yourself not in readiness to return my love, force shall wrest the jewel
from the casket.' Ere the four-and-twenty hours have passed, Cavigni has
drained the poisoned chalice, and is rolling in torments at his murderer's
feet.
Saved by Ginotti from the death to which other robbers would fain consign
him, Wolfstein goes off with Megalena to Genoa, where they enter the best
society. On the eve of their withdrawal from the Alpine cave, Megalena
shows 'Wolfstein jewels to an immense amount':--a sight that causes the
high-souled Wolfstein to exclaim, 'Then we may defy poverty; for I have
about me jewels to the value of ten thousand zechins.'
When they have settled themselves in their Genoese home, Wolfstein of the
lofty soul shocks Megalena by begging her to become his wife without a
nuptial ceremony. 'And is my adored Megalena,' he asks, 'a victim then to
prejudice?... Does she suppose that Nature created us to become the
tormentors of each other?'--questions that of course convince Megalena she
ought not to stand out for the empty forms of lawful wedlock. 'Yes, yes,'
the young lady exclaims with equal courage and sobriety. 'Prejudice,
avaunt! Once more reason takes her seat, and convinces me that to be
Wolfstein's is not criminal. O Wolfstein! if for a moment Megalena has
yielded to the imbecility of nature, believe that she yet knows how to
recover herself, to reappear in her proper character.' People differ in
their notions of propriety. To old-fashioned persons Megalena may seem to
'reappear in a very improper character.' She and the high-souled Wolfstein
henceforth live together as husband and wife without being husband and
wife. They 'acted on emotional theories of liberty.' But then, as Mr.
Froude would say, they were so young and enthusiastic!
The course of their mutual affections can scarcely be used as an argument
for Free Love. They 'act on emotional theories of liberty' in other
matters. Turning pettish and restless, Megalena plunges into 'dissipated
pleasures.' Less enamoured of his ringless bride than harassed by her
caprice, the high-souled Wolfstein takes to gambling, and forms an
embarrassing intimacy with the ardent and lovely Olympia della Anzasca
(daughter of the Count and Countess of the same rather uncomfortable
name), a young gentlewoman, whose passions, stimulated by 'a false system
of education and a wrong expansion of ideas,' impel her to quit her
father's palazzo one evening, and pay Wolfstein a visit, just as he and
Megalena are sitting down to a late supper.
'To what, Lady Olympia, do I owe the unforeseen pleasure of your visit?
What so mysterious business have you with me?' inquires Wolfstein, on
entering the room to which the untimely and unattended visitor had been
shown.
Acting on an emotional theory of liberty, the Lady Olympia della Anzasca
ejaculates, 'Oh! if you wish to see me expire in horrible torments at your
feet, inhuman Wolfstein, call for Megalena, and then will your purpose be
accomplished!'
Having no wish to see the Lady Olympia die in so unsuitable a place,
Wolfstein, instead of calling for Megalena, replies, 'Dearest Lady
Olympia, compose yourself, I beseech you. What, what agitates you?'
'Oh! pardon me, pardon me,' exclaims the Lady Olympia, with 'maniac
wildness,' 'pardon a wretched female who knows not what she does! Oh!
resistlessly am I impelled to this avowal; resistlessly am I impelled to
declare to you, that I love you! adore you to distraction!--Will you
return my affection? But, ah! I rave! Megalena, the beloved Megalena
claims you as her own; and the wretched Olympia must moan the blighted
prospects which were about to open fair before her eyes.'
With the propriety, to be looked for in a gentleman whose Megalena is
supping in the next room, and may come upon the scene at any moment, the
high-souled Wolfstein exclaims: 'No reflection in the present instance is
needed, Lady. What man of honour needs a moment's rumination to discover
what nature has so inerasibly planted in his bosom,--the sense of right
and wrong? I am connected with a female whom I love, who confides in me;
in what manner should I merit her confidence, if I join myself to another?
Nor can the loveliness of the beautiful Olympia della Anzasca compensate
me for breaking an oath sworn to another!'
On hearing this 'dreadful fiat of her destiny,' Olympia swoons at
Wolfstein's feet, a swoon from which she recovers, just as Megalena sweeps
into the room, at the instance of natural curiosity respecting the cause
of Olympia's visit. At the sight of Megalena's 'detested form,' the
'passion-grieving' Olympia, faintly articulating 'Vengeance!' rushes into
the street and bends her rapid flight to the 'Palazzo di Anzasca.' When
Olympia has thus departed in her 'passion-grief,' Wolfstein protests he
has never given the fair Anzasca's passion any encouragement.
'What further proof,' he asks of Megalena, 'can I give but my oath, that
never in soul or body have I broken the allegiance that I formerly swore
to thee?'
'The death of Olympia!' answers Megalena.
'What mean you?' ejaculates Wolfstein.
'I mean,' says Megalena, 'I mean that, if ever you wish again to possess
my affections, ere to-morrow morning Olympia must expire.'
'Murder the innocent Olympia?'
'Yes.'
'Will nothing else convince Megalena that Wolfstein is eternally hers?'
'Nothing!' says Megalena.
''Tis done then,' replies Wolfstein the Magnanimous, ''tis done. Yet' (he
mutters), 'I may writhe, convulsed in immaterial agony, for ever and
ever--ah! I cannot. No, Megalena, I am again yours; I will immolate the
victim which thou requirest as a sacrifice to our love. Give me a dagger,
which may sweep off from the face of the earth one who is hateful to
thee! Adored creature, give me the dagger, and I will restore it to thee
dripping with Olympia's hated blood; it shall have first been buried in
her heart.'
Armed with the dagger, which Megalena puts in his hand, the high-souled
Wolfstein goes off to the Palazzo della Anzasca (or 'di' Anzasca, the
author uses 'della' and 'di' indifferently), enters it, unobserved follows
Olympia to her bedroom, hides himself in the room till Olympia has put
herself to bed, and remains in his convenient corner of the chamber, till
she breathes the heavy breath of slumber. The moment for the ruthless deed
has come. Dagger in hand, Wolfstein of the exalted soul glides to the
sleeper's bed, watches her angelic features, gazes on the angelic smile
that plays over her countenance, nerves himself to deliver the fatal blow,
raises the poniard, and then--throws it from him. The noise of the falling
dagger rouses Olympia to consciousness. She is awake and recognizes him.
They speak to one another. For a moment Olympia imagines he has relented,
and has come to give her the strongest proof of his affection. Another
moment, and discovering her mistake, she leaps wildly from her bed.
'A light and flowing night-dress,' runs the narrative, 'alone veiled her
form; her alabaster bosom was shaded by the light ringlets of her hair,
which rested unconfined upon it. She threw herself at the feet of
Wolfstein. On a sudden, as if struck by some thought, she started
convulsively from the earth; for an instant she paused. The rays of a
lamp, which stood in a recess of the apartment, fell full upon the dagger
of Wolfstein. Eagerly Olympia sprung towards it, and, ere Wolfstein was
aware of her dreadful intent, plunged it into her bosom. Weltering in
purple gore she fell; no groan, no sigh escaped her lips. A smile, which
the pangs of dissolution could not dispel, played on her convulsed
countenance; it irradiated her features with celestially awful, although
terrific expression. "Ineffectually have I endeavoured to conquer the
ardent feelings of my soul; now I overcome them," were her last words. She
uttered them in a tone of firmness: and, falling back, expired in
torments, which her fine but expressive features declared that she gloried
in.'
The victim of 'a false system of education and a wrong expansion of ideas'
is at rest. All is silent in the chamber of death. As the stir, certain to
ensue on the tragedy of Olympia's bedroom, may render Genoa a perilous
place of residence for the man she adored and the woman she detested,
Wolfstein and Megalena fly to Bohemia, in which country he has recently
succeeded to immense wealth, through his uncle's death.
PART, NO. II.
Consisting of six chapters and a concluding note, the Second Part of this
marvellous combination of two several tales relates chiefly to the
fortunes of Eloise St. Irvyne, who accompanies her dying mother from the
Chateau de St. Irvyne in France to Geneva, where the elder lady expires of
a lingering malady, after solemnly admonishing her daughter to beware of
any man she may encounter, who shall be 'a man enveloped in deceit and
mystery.' Such a man Eloise has already encountered on her journey to
Geneva; and she falls under his fatal influence immediately after her
mother's death. Just as Wolfstein induces Megalena to become his ringless
bride, Nempere prevails on Eloise de St. Irvyne to become his mistress.
Growing weary of his victim's fascinations soon after he has gained
possession of her body, the villain Nempere (who in due course turns out
to be Ginotti, the Rosicrucian) offers Eloise St. Irvyne as a mere _fille
de joie_, in payment of a gambling debt, to the dissolute but essentially
honourable Chevalier Mountfort,--an Englishman of ancient lineage and
noble rank. Too chivalrous to take advantage of the power he has acquired
by purchase over the victim of Nempere's licentiousness and perfidy, the
Chevalier Mountfort places Eloise with an adequate allowance in a
picturesque cottage, under the chivalric surveillance of the exemplary
Fitzeustace (an Irish gentleman), who eventually makes her his wife.
Having thus provided for Eloise, the Chevalier Mountfort goes off in
pursuit of Nempere, to chastise him for his villany.
Eloise is left in good hands. 'He is an Irishman,' the Chevalier has
remarked to Eloise of the gentleman to whose care she is consigned, 'and
so _very moral_, and so averse to every species of _gaieté de coeur_ that
you need be under no apprehensions. In short, he is a love-sick swain,
without ever having found what he calls a congenial female.' The virtues
of this Irish gentleman are regarded by Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy as
indicative that, whilst writing _St. Irvyne_ in the summer of 1810,
Shelley was already disposed to regard the Irish with favour.
In Eloise this 'love-sick swain' discovers the 'congenial female' for whom
he has long been seeking. Admiring her beauty, he hangs upon the music of
her lips, pining for the time when he shall be permitted to salute them.
Nothing in her history moderates his passion for Nempere's abandoned
mistress. In his judgment it is nothing to her disadvantage that she has
been seduced, and is on the point of giving birth to a child of shame.
When she answers his prayer for their immediate union by saying: 'Know you
not that I have been another's?' he replies with passionate fervour: 'Oh,
suppose me not the slave of such vulgar and narrow-minded prejudice. Does
the frightful vice and ingratitude of Nempere sully the spotless
excellence of my Eloise's soul?' When Eloise gives birth to Nempere's son,
Fitzeustace officiates by turns as the mother's doctor and the infant's
nurse. At moments when he is necessarily 'absent from the apartment of the
beloved Eloise, his whole delight is to gaze on the child, and trace in
its innocent countenance the features of the mother he adores.'
Eloise having at length consented to become his wife, this Irish
gentleman remarks: 'But before we go to England, before my father will see
us, it is necessary that we should be married. Nay, do not start, Eloise:
I view it in the light that you do; I consider it as but a chain which,
although it keeps the body, still leaves the soul unfettered; it is not so
with love. But still, Eloise, to those who think like us, it is, at all
events, harmless; 'tis but yielding to the prejudices of the world wherein
we live, and procuring moral expediency at a slight sacrifice of what we
conceive to be right.'
Thus admonished, Eloise consents to the slight sacrifice of what she
conceives to be right, and promises to pass to her Fitzeustace's conjugal
embraces through the narrow gate of lawful matrimony, instead of by the
broad and higher way of Free Love. 'Well, well,' she says reluctantly, 'it
shall be done, Fitzeustace; but take the assurance of my promise that I
cannot love you more.' Partly, in palliation of the lady's weakness and
Fitzeustace's excessive care for the world's opinion in this business, the
author of the romance remarks in his own person: 'They soon agreed on a
point, in their eyes of so trifling importance, and arriving in England,
tasted that happiness, which love and innocence alone can give. Prejudice
may triumph for awhile, but virtue will be eventually the conqueror.'
Reappearing, in the last chapter, to compass the high-souled Wolfstein's
destruction, Ginotti, _alias_ Nempere, is left eventually in the darksome
vaults of St. Irvyne's ruinous abbey, to endure 'a dateless and hopeless
eternity of horror,' as a gigantic and conscious skeleton, with 'two pale
and ghastly flames glaring in his eyeless sockets.' The way in which the
narrative is wound up surpasses all human understanding. After 'fitting'
the manuscript for the press, Mr. John Joseph Stockdale may well have
entreated Shelley to reconsider some passages of the story, and to explain
or alter, certain matters of the _dénouement_. In answer to the
publisher's request for explanations and further instructions, Shelley
wrote lightly from University College, Oxford, on 14th November, 1810:--
'Dear Sir,--I return you the Romance by this day's coach. I am much
obligated by the trouble you have taken to fit it for the press. I am
myself by no means a good hand at correction, but I think I have
obviated the principal objections which you allege.
'Ginotti, as you will see, did _not_ die by Wolfstein's hand, but by
the influence of that natural magic which, when the secret was
imparted to the latter, destroyed him.--Mountfort being a character of
inferior import, I did not think it necessary to state the catastrophe
of _him_, as at best it could be but uninteresting.--Eloise and
Fitzeustace, are married and happy I suppose, and Megalena dies by the
same means as Wolfstein.--I do not myself see any other explanation
that is required.--As to the method of publishing it, I think, as it
is a thing which almost _mechanically_ sells to circulating libraries,
&c., I would wish it to be published on my _own_ account.
'I am surprised that you have not received the _Wandering Jew_, and,
in consequence write to Mr. Ballantyne to mention it; you will
doubtlessly therefore, receive it soon.--Should you still perceive in
the romance any error of flagrant incoherency, &c., it must be
altered, but I should conceive it will (being wholly so abrupt) not
require it.
I am your sincere humble servant,
Percy B. Shelley.
'Shall you make this in one or two volumes? Mr. Robinson, of
Paternoster Row, published _Zastrozzi_.'
The author's explanations in no degree diminish the difficulty of
understanding the story. On the contrary, they rather increase the
difficulty. Having done his duty in calling the author's attention to some
of the story's most glaring absurdities, and having (as he imagined) no
pecuniary interest to be cautious for in respect to a work that was to be
published at the charges of the young gentleman who, sooner or later,
would, of course, be able to pay a heavy bill, Mr. Stockdale sent to the
printers the thing of lunacy, of which Mr. Garnett says: 'Worthless as
_St. Irvyne_ is of itself, it becomes of high interest when regarded as
the first feeble step of a mighty genius on the road to consummate
excellence.'
It was enough for the author of _Zastrozzi_, in the first stage of his
fanatical abhorrence of lawful wedlock, to make the virtuous Verezzi speak
slightingly of the nuptial rite as needless for the consecration of his
spiritual union with the amiable Matilda di Laurentini. In _St. Irvyne_
this repugnance to the fetters put upon passion, that should be left in
absolute freedom, is declared more precisely and emphatically. Whilst the
exemplary Fitzeustace declares his contempt for the ceremony, Eloise makes
it clear she would rather be his mistress than his wife. At the same time,
the author in his own person declares that, when Virtue shall have
triumphed over Prejudice, women, instead of being given and taken in
Marriage, will be given and taken in Free Love. In this matter the Oxonian
surpasses the Etonian, and is seen to have advanced a long step towards
the conclusions that qualified him to proclaim the sanctity of Free Love
in _Laon and Cythna_,--the poem in which he 'startled' (his own word) the
men and women of England by insisting that in a perfect state of society a
brother and sister would be able, with perfect propriety, to live together
in Free Love, and beget children of one another.
In the article entitled 'A Newspaper Editor's Reminiscences,' to be found
in the June, 1841, number of _Fraser's Magazine_, the curious may find
some rather strong, but inconclusive, evidence that at some time between
October[3], 1811, and March, 1812, Shelley tried to sell to three or four
different London publishers, for a sum of 10_l._, certain tales in
manuscript, out of which he composed _Zastrozzi_ and _St. Irvyne_. If
Shelley, after publishing the two 'failures' in prose fiction, tried to
wheedle money out of booksellers for the materials out of which those
failures were made, he did what he should not have done, and received
less than his proper punishment in getting nothing by his pains. But the
evidence is so unsatisfactory that the young man did thus endeavour to get
money for stuff, whose worthlessness he had ascertained, I cannot hold him
guilty of the curious piece of sharp practice. The same newspaper editor's
evidence that one of these tales was either a translation from the German,
or alleged by Shelley to have been a translation from the German, being
still more unsatisfactory, there is no need to trouble the reader of these
volumes to consider the particulars of it.
As he delights in the dreary labour of collating the texts of worthless
books, it is strange that Mr. Buxton Forman (who has wasted a great deal
of time in collating the different editions of Shelley's writings) should
have failed to discover that _St. Irvyne_ consists, in a considerable
degree, of the characters, and positions, and incidents of _Zastrozzi_, so
changed by being turned inside out and differently coloured, as to be
likely to be mistaken, by hasty and unsuspicious readers of both books,
for new actors and positions and incidents. Towards the close of his
career, Thackeray said to a friend, 'I am no prolific creator of
characters. In that respect I have fairly worked myself out. It remains
for me now to redress my old puppets with new bits of riband and tinsel.'
The puppets of the Etonian romance are thus redressed in the Oxford story.
By change of costume, the puppet, who figures as a man in _Zastrozzi_, is
qualified for a woman's part in _St. Irvyne_. By being pulled inside out,
the position that was meant to rouse admiration in the one story, becomes
a position that (in the hands of an abler artist) would stir to pity in
the other. To escape from an humiliating position, Olympia poniards
herself in _St. Irvyne_; even as Verezzi, to escape a melodramatic
embarrassment, poniards himself in _Zastrozzi_. The slumbering Eloise in
the later fiction declares her passion for Fitzeustace to the listening
Irishman, even as the slumbering Verezzi in the earlier romance declares
his passion for Julia to the listening Matilda.
THE DAGGER SCENE IN 'ZASTROZZI.'
'_Madness--fiercest madness--revelled through his brain._ He raised
the poniard high, but Julia rushed forwards, and in accents of
desperation, in a voice of alarmed tenderness, besought him to spare
himself--to spare her--for all might yet be well.
'_"Oh! never, never!" exclaimed Verezzi, frantically, "no peace but in
the grave for me. I am--I am--married to Matilda."_
'Saying this, he fell backwards upon a sofa in strong convulsions, yet
his hand still firmly grasped the fatal poniard.
'Matilda, meanwhile, fixedly contemplated the scene. Fiercest passions
raged through her breast: vengeance, disappointed love--disappointed
in the instant, too, when she had supposed happiness to be hers for
ever, rendered her bosom the scene of wildest anarchy.
'Yet she spoke not--she moved not--but collected in herself, stood
waiting the issue of that event, which had so unexpectedly dissolved
_her visions of air-built ecstasy_.
'Serened to firmness from despair, Julia administered everything which
could restore Verezzi with the most unremitting attention. At last he
recovered. _He slowly raised himself, and starting from the sofa where
he lay, his eyes rolling wildly_, and his whole frame convulsed by
fiercest agitation, _he raised the dagger which he still retained,
and, with a bitter smile of exultation, plunged it into his
bosom!--His soul fled without a groan, and his body fell to the floor,
bathed in purple blood._'
THE DAGGER SCENE IN 'ST. IRVYNE.'
'_"Wilt thou be mine?" exclaimed the enraptured Olympia, as a ray of
hope arose in her mind. "Never! never can I," groaned the agitated
Wolfstein, "I am irrevocably, indissolutely another's."--Maddened by
this death-blow to all expectations of happiness_, which the deluded
Olympia had so fondly anticipated, she leaped wildly from the bed. A
light and flowing night-dress alone veiled her form; her alabaster
bosom was shaded by the light ringlets of her hair which rested
unconfined upon it. She threw herself at the feet of Wolfstein. On a
sudden, as if struck by some thought, she started convulsively from
the earth: for an instant she paused.
'The rays of a lamp, which stood in a recess of the apartment, fell
full upon the dagger of Wolfstein. _Eagerly Olympia sprung towards it;
and ere Wolfstein was aware of her dreadful intent, plunged it into
her bosom. Weltering in purple gore, she fell; no groan, no sigh
escaped her lips. A smile, which the pangs of dissolution could not
dispel, played on her convulsed countenance; it irradiated her
features_ with celestially awful, although terrific, expression.
"Ineffectually have I endeavoured to conquer the ardent feelings of my
soul; now I overcome them," were her last words. She uttered them in a
tone of firmness, and, falling back, expired in torments, which her
fine, her expressive features declared that she gloried in.'
Each of these passages is a fair example of the work from which it is
taken. Surely their resemblance in temper, moral fibre, style, verbiage,
affords sufficient evidence that the two passages were put together by the
same writer. What evidence do they afford that, whilst the passage, taken
from _Zastrozzi_ (the novel universally allowed to be a thing of Shelley's
own manufacture), was written as it is printed by the future poet, the
passage from _St. Irvyne_ (the novel generally assigned to a German
source) is a mere translation from a German original? Why (in the absence
of evidence that Shelley could translate a page of German, and in the
absence of any German novel, out of which _St. Irvyne_ could have been
made) are we to regard the passage of the earlier book as the pure product
of Shelley's mind, and the passage of the later romance as so much of the
translated product of a German writer's mind?
THE BEDROOM SCENE IN 'ZASTROZZI.'
'The morning came--Matilda arose from a sleepless couch, and with
hopes yet unconfirmed sought Verezzi's apartment. She stood near the
door listening. Her heart palpitated with tremulous violence, as she
listened to Verezzi's breathing--every sound from within alarmed her.
At last she slowly opened the door, and though adhering to the
physician's directions in not suffering Verezzi to see her, she could
not deny herself the pleasure of watching him, and busying herself in
little offices about his apartment.
'She could hear Verezzi question the attendant collectedly, yet as a
person who was ignorant where he was, and knew not the events which
had immediately preceded his present state.
'_At last he sank into a deep sleep._--Matilda now dared to gaze on
him; the hectic colour which had flushed his cheek was fled, but the
ashy hue of his lips had given place to a brilliant vermilion. _She
gazed intently on his countenance._
'_A heavenly yet faint smile diffused itself over his
countenance_--his hand slightly moved.
'Matilda, fearing that he would awake, again concealed herself. She
was mistaken: for, on looking again, he still slept.
'She still gazed upon his countenance. _The visions of his sleep were
changed, for tears came fast from under his eyelids, and a deep sigh
burst from his bosom._
'Thus passed several days: Matilda still watched, with the most
affectionate assiduity, by the bedside of the unconscious Verezzi.
'The physician declared that his patient's mind was yet in too
irritable a state to permit him to see Matilda, but that he was
convalescent.
'One evening she sate by his bedside, and gazing upon the features of
the sleeping Verezzi, felt unusual softness take possession of her
soul--an indefinable tumultuous emotion shook her bosom--_her whole
frame thrilled with rapturous ecstasy, and seizing the hand, which lay
motionless, beside her, she imprinted on it a thousand burning
kisses_.
'"_Ah, Julia! Julia! is it you?" exclaimed Verezzi, as he raised his
enfeebled frame; but perceiving his mistake, as he cast his eyes on
Matilda, sank back and fainted._
CHAPTER IX.
'The soul of Verezzi was filled with irresistible disgust, as,
recovering, he found himself in Matilda's arms. His whole frame
trembled with chilly horror, and he could scarcely withhold himself
from again fainting. He fixed his eyes upon her countenance--they met
hers--an ardent fire, mingled with a touching softness, filled their
orbits.'
THE PAVILION SCENE IN 'ST. IRVYNE.'
'Heedless yet of the beauties of nature, the loveliness of the scene,
they entered the pavilion.
'Eloise convulsively pressed her hand upon her forehead.
'"What is the matter, my dearest Eloise?" inquired Fitzeustace, whom
awakened tenderness had thrown off his guard.
'"Oh! nothing, nothing; but a momentary faintness. It will soon go
off: let us sit down."
'They entered the pavilion.
'"'Tis nothing but drowsiness," said Eloise, affecting gaiety; "'twill
soon go off. I sate up late last night: that I believe was the
occasion."
'"Recline on this sofa, then," said Fitzeustace, reaching another
pillow to make the couch easier, "and I will play some of those Irish
tunes which you admire so much."
'Eloise reclined on the sofa, and Fitzeustace, seated on the floor,
began to play; the melancholy plaintiveness of his music touched
Eloise; she sighed, and concealed her tears in her handkerchief. _At
length she sunk into a profound sleep_; still Fitzeustace continued
playing, noticing not that she slept.
'_He approached. She lay wrapped in sleep: a sweet and celestial smile
played on her countenance and irradiated her features with a tenfold
expression of etheriality._
'_Suddenly the visions of her slumber appeared to have changed; the
smile yet remained, but the expression was melancholy; tears stole
gently from her eyelids:--she sighed._
'_Ah! with what eagerness of ecstasy did Fitzeustace lean over her
form._
'He dared not speak, he dared not move; _but pressing a ringlet of
hair, which had escaped its band, to his lips, waited silently_.
'"Yes, yes; I think--it may,--" at last she muttered; but so
confusely, as scarcely to be distinguishable.
'Fitzeustace remained rooted in rapturous attention, listening.
'"_I thought, I thought he looked as if he could love me" articulated
the sleeping Eloise. "Perhaps, though he cannot love me, he may allow
me to love him.--Fitzeustace!_"
'On a sudden again were changed the visions of her slumbers;
terrified, she started from sleep and cried, "Fitzeustace."
CHAPTER XII.
'Needless were it to expatiate on their transports; they loved each
other, and that is enough for those who have felt like Eloise and
Fitzeustace.'
After comparing these two scenes of two sleeping lovers, each, of whom
reveals the heart's secret to an attentive watcher; after comparing the
literary characteristics of the one scene with those of the other, the
structure of the sentences, language, details, touches; after noticing the
identity of the very words used in some parts of the parallel passages,
can any reader think the two scenes were by two different writers? that,
whilst the extract from _Zastrozzi_ is a piece of original writing, the
extract from _St. Irvyne_ is a piece of a translation from the
undiscovered work of an undiscovered German author? These passages are
fair examples of the two books from which they are taken. Can any reader
hesitate in coming to the conclusion that Shelley reproduced in the later
the materials of the earlier romance? The writer may have been unaware he
was reproducing scraps of his former work. The reproduction may have been
the result of mental action, occasioned by the effort of producing the
earlier tale, rather than the consequence of a deliberate design to use
the old stuff for a second time. But the reproduction is obvious.
_St. Irvyne_ contains six sets of verses, that are interesting examples of
the earliest fruits of the poetical disposition, which soon developed into
Shelley's poetical genius. Resembling Byron's _Hours of Idleness_, in
affording only the faintest indications of the author's eventual faculty
for the service of the Muse, these sets of verses are chiefly noteworthy
for their evidence that the _Hours of Idleness_ may be styled 'the
horn-book,' from which Shelley acquired the rudiments of the art of poesy.
The resemblance of one of those pieces of versification to one of the
stanzas of 'Lachin-y-Gair' in the _Hours of Idleness_ is so remarkable,
that the Oxonian's lines may fairly be styled a plagiarism on the lines
that had come a few years earlier from the Byron of Cambridge.
THE STANZA OF 'LACHIN-Y-GAIR.'
'_Shades of the dead! have I not heard your voices
Rise on the night-rolling breath of the gale?_
Surely the _soul of the hero rejoices_,
_And rides on the wind_, o'er his own Highland vale.
Round Loch-na-Garr, while the stormy mist gathers,
Winter presides in his cold icy car;
_Clouds there encircle the forms of my fathers_:
They dwell in the tempests of dark Loch-na-Garr.'
THE VERSES OF 'ST. IRVYNE.'
'_Ghosts of the dead! have I not heard your yelling
Rise on the night-rolling breath of the blast_,
When o'er the dark ether the tempest is swelling,
And on eddying whirlwind the thunder-peal past?
'For oft I have stood on the dark height of Jura,
Which frowns on the valley which opens beneath:
Oft have I brav'd the chill night-tempest's fury,
Whilst around me, I thought, echo'd murmurs of death.
'And now, whilst the winds of the mountain are howling,
_O father! thy voice seems to strike on mine ear_;
In air whilst the tide of the night-storm is rolling,
It breaks on the pause of the elements' jar.
'On the wing of the whirlwind which roars in the mountain
Perhaps _rides the ghost of my sire who is dead_;
On the mist of the tempest which hangs o'er the fountain,
Whilst a wreath of dark vapour encircles his head.'
In a note to _St. Irvyne_ (in his edition of Shelley's 'prose works'), Mr.
Buxton Forman calls attention to the obvious adoption of the two first
lines of the quoted stanza of Byron's poem, as though they were the whole
of the youthful Shelley's 'small debt' in this particular matter, to the
youthful Byron. It cannot have escaped the notice of Shelley's careful
editor that, whilst Shelley speaks of his father's ghost as riding on the
whirlwind and the mist of the tempest, Byron sees 'the forms of his
fathers' in the clouds over-hanging Loch-na-Garr, and sings how the soul
of one of his ancestral heroes 'rides on the wind.' It can scarcely have
escaped the careful editor that the whole thought of Shelley's sixteen
verses was 'lifted' out of Byron's eight verses.
CHAPTER IX.
MR. DENIS FLORENCE MACCARTHY _v._ THOMAS JEFFERSON HOGG.
Shelley's Matriculation at Oxford--Hogg's Matriculation at
Oxford--Hogg's First Arrival at Oxford--Lord Grenville's Election--Mr.
Denis Florence MacCarthy's Blunders--Hogg's 'New Monthly' Papers on
Shelley at Oxford--Mrs. Shelley's Reason for not Writing her Husband's
'Life'--Peacock's Reason for not Writing it--Leigh Hunt's Reason for
not Writing it--Hogg undertakes the Task--Hogg's Two Volumes--Their
Merits and Faults--Hogg dismissed by Field Place--His Mistakes and
Misrepresentations--Some of his Misrepresentations adopted by Field
Place.
In a previous chapter it was stated that Shelley matriculated at Oxford,
and entered University College on 10th April, 1810,--a date given for the
first time to Shelleyan students. Hogg had then been a member of the
University and the same College for more than two months, having
matriculated on 2nd February, 1810,--another date never before given to
Shelleyan students. To those who, unaware how much readier the Shelleyan
enthusiasts are to abuse writers who differ from them than to gather facts
needful for the perfect statement of the poet's story, it may well appear
strange that, after the publication of so many books and articles about
Shelley, it should have been left for me to ascertain from the archives of
University College, Oxford, these two important dates, by whose light the
greater part of Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy's vehement manifesto against
Hogg's account of his academic career is seen to be one big tangle of
blunderings.
Seeing the need for the discovery of these dates, I wrote a letter that
within forty-eight hours received this answer:
'TRINITY COLLEGE, OXFORD,
'_12th February, 1884_.
'DEAR MR. JEAFFRESON,
'The College Register of University College, Oxford, gives the date of
the matriculation of
'PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, 10th April, 1810.
'THOMAS JEFFERSON HOGG, 2nd February, 1810.
'I have this direct from the Master. This testimony, I suppose, will
be sufficient; so I return your stamps. I applied to the College
first, and not to the Registrar of the University.
'Ever yours truly,
'H. B. DIXON.'
In assuming that, because they were both first-year's men on making one
another's acquaintance in the dining-hall of their College, Hogg and
Shelley matriculated and went into residence on or about the same day, and
that, as they met one another for the first time in October, 1810, at the
same dinner-table, they both entered Oxford in the Michaelmas term of that
year, Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy followed half-a-score Shelleyan
specialists in assuming as matters of course, what no old Oxford man would
have thought of assuming, even as mere _primâ facie_ probabilities.
Shelley's academic senior by more than two months, Hogg was his superior
in respect to 'residence' by a much longer time. After matriculating on
10th April, 1810, and passing a few days in the University, during which
time he visited the Bodleian Library, Shelley returned to Field Place,
kept 'grace-terms' in the country, and went 'into residence' in the
following October. Hogg, on the contrary, went into residence on the day
of his matriculation, and from that day till the next Long Vacation
remained at Oxford, with the exception of the brief break of the Easter
holidays, which he spent with friends who lived in counties more
accessible to the undergraduate, than his own home in the northern shire.
In Shelley's time, no less than in the present writer's time at Oxford, it
was usual for freshmen, coming to the University from homes or schools at
no great distance from Alma Mater, to 'go down' after matriculating, and
keep 'grace-terms' in the country, before coming into residence. On the
other hand, it was usual in pre-railway times for the academic freshman,
who could not return to his people without a long and expensive journey,
to matriculate and go 'into residence' at the same time.
For the information of those, who have been induced to regard Mr.
MacCarthy's book of blunders as an authoritative performance, it may be
well to add that the duly matriculated undergraduate, keeping
'grace-terms' in the country, was just as much a member of the University,
as the freshman staying at his College. Both alike had entered the
University, and become members of it. In respect to Hogg's time at Oxford,
it is also well to remark that, though he did not matriculate till 2nd
February, 1810, he came to Oxford from the north country in the previous
autumn. Everyone, who has read his delightful 'two volumes,' remembers
Hogg's account of his first arrival at Oxford, one 'fine autumnal
afternoon.' He may have come to Oxford to read with a tutor before
matriculation. Or on taking his first view of the University, he may only
have been passing through the seat of learning, on his way to friends in
some not remote county. Anyhow, it is certain that the youngster from the
north country visited Oxford, and took something more than a mere
tourist's interest in the place, at a time when the University was
already, or was soon to be, agitated by the fierce conflict of parties,
that resulted-in the election of Lord Grenville to be Chancellor, in the
place of the late Duke of Portland,--a fact to be remembered in connection
with certain of the charges made against the biographer by Mr. Denis
Florence MacCarthy.
The Duke of Portland died on 30th October, 1809; his successor in the
Chancellorship (Lord Grenville) was elected after an unusually vehement
contest on 14th December, 1809, by only thirteen votes over the number of
votes given for Lord Eldon. If he was not at Oxford during the election,
or during the canvass, Hogg was there shortly before the conflict of
closely-matched parties, and was a member of the University when the new
Chancellor had been chosen only seven weeks and one day. Let us now see
the way in which Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy presses charges of
inaccuracy against Hogg, in respect to what the latter says about this
election. After accusing Hogg of serious and suspicious misstatements on
other matters, the author of _Shelley's Early Life_ writes thus:--
'But even on questions which apparently he could have no motive in
misrepresenting, he is just as inexact as Captain Medwin. The
following is an instance of this.... "During the whole period of our
residence there,"--that is, at Oxford, says Mr. Hogg, in one of those
unguarded moments when he enables us to test his statements by
reference to a fixed date,--"the University was cruelly disfigured by
bitter feuds arising out of the _late_ election of its Chancellor; in
an especial manner was our most venerable college deformed by them,
and by angry and senseless disappointment, Lord Grenville had just
been chosen."... A few words will show how utterly irreconcilable
these statements are with the date of Shelley's entrance at University
College.... The candidateship of Lord Grenville, therefore, extended
from the 30th of October to 14th of December, 1809. But in 1809, as we
have seen, Shelley was at Eton and Field Place, _and did not go to
Oxford until the end of October, 1810_--that is, exactly a year after
the candidateship of Lord Grenville commenced, and ten months after he
had been elected. Even the installation of Lord Grenville as
Chancellor preceded _the entrance of Shelley into the University by
four months_. That event took place on June 30, 1810.... As Shelley
_did not enter the University of Oxford until the end of October,
1810_, ... that nobleman (_i.e._ Lord Grenville) had not "just been
chosen" as Mr. Hogg writes; _he had been elected ten months before_.'
Surely as he was speaking of the whole period, covering his own residence
as well as Shelley's residence (_our_ residence is the biographer's
expression), Hogg was not without justification in speaking of an event,
that had preceded his own entrance into residence by only seven weeks and
one day, as a recent occurrence. Whilst censuring Hogg for errors of fact,
Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy persists in saying that Shelley did not go to
Oxford, did not enter the University till the end of October, 1810, though
he might easily have ascertained that the young poet went to Oxford,
entered the University, put his name on the roll of University College,
and as a member of the University visited the Bodleian in the preceding
April, six months earlier than the time at which _Shelley's Early Life_
represents him to have joined the University. Mr. MacCarthy greatly
overstates the case in declaring Hogg as inaccurate as Medwin. Mr.
MacCarthy himself (though curiously inaccurate), is nothing like so
inaccurate as Medwin. And Hogg (though he often trips and sometimes
blunders seriously) is upon the whole nothing like so inaccurate as Mr.
MacCarthy. There is no need to weary readers with a complete list of Mr.
MacCarthy's exhibitions of inexactness. It is enough to have shown that if
Hogg is at times faulty, his censor is by no means faultless.
It is not surprising that Hogg's memoirs of his old college friend are
wanting in accuracy. Some nine years after the poet's death, some twenty
years after his expulsion from University College, in consequence of the
growing admiration of his writings, the increasing interest in his story,
and the general disposition of the literary coteries to regard his
failings charitably, pressure was put on Hogg to recall remote
circumstances, and tell the world what he could remember of his friend at
Oxford in the time of their closest intimacy. The result was that the busy
lawyer in 1832 contributed the Papers on _Shelley at Oxford_ to the _New
Monthly Magazine_, at that time edited by Mr. Edward Lytton Bulwer,
afterwards Lord Lytton. It was in the nature of things that the Papers,
written after so long an interval of time, not from notes made at the time
of each recorded incident, but from recollection, assisted by a few
letters, should be much less than precisely accurate in all their numerous
details. To impart spirit to these reminiscences, to endow them with the
charm of the poet's personality, the writer every now and then called
imagination to the aid of his memory. For instance, to enable readers to
realize the disorderly appearance of the poet's college-room, and the
confusion of its multifarious contents, the author of the Papers, without
exceeding the license of a descriptive illustrator, threw into the
schedule of effects certain articles of furniture, scientific apparatus,
and personal apparel, which he would no doubt have declined to declare in
an affidavit to have been items of the medley. It is obvious that such a
picture was in some degree an imaginative sketch, in respect its details.
Yet Hogg's detractor has dealt with it as though it were an auctioneer's
catalogue of lots. In judging the picture, the question to be asked is,
whether the piece of descriptive writing gives the general appearance of
the room, as Hogg remembered it more than twenty years afterwards. The
very style of the writing is a frank announcement that the words must be
trusted only for their general effect.
In like manner the conversations, which Mr. MacCarthy derides as 'invented
conversations,' were of course given as nothing more than exhibitions of
certain matters, and the kind of matters on which he remembered himself to
have talked with the poet, and of the way in which they talked together to
the best of his recollection after a lapse of more than twenty years. To
the lawyer, familiar with questions of evidence, it never occurred that
'the conversations' would be read in any other way. To the humourist (and
that Hogg was a racy humourist is admitted even by his enemies) the bare
imagination that any supremely matter-of-fact mortal would read 'the
conversations,' as one peruses a short-hand reporter's notes of a legal
cross-examination, would have been provocative of vehement laughter. The
questions for the critic to ask about these conversations are, Do they
faithfully exhibit the kind of subjects on which the two friends
chatted?--the ways in which the talk flowed?--the sentiments and manner of
the young poet? Are they, in fact, faithful exhibitions of what Hogg
remembered, or believed himself to remember, after a lapse of more than
twenty years, of the talk he and Shelley had with one another when they
were undergraduates? No impartial and fairly intelligent reader of the
Papers will hesitate to answer these questions in the affirmative.
However defective, the Papers on _Shelley at Oxford_ were greatly
beneficial to the reputation of the poet, whose writings had found few
readers outside the literary coteries during his life, whose name was
still associated in the minds of the majority of educated Englishmen with
atheism, conjugal faithlessness, and dangerous politics, rather than with
the highest poetry. Written lightly and circulated widely, the sketches,
dealing only with the Oxonian Shelley, created an impression that the
undergraduate had been treated harshly by the authorities of his college,
and left readers in a mood to discover that he had been too severely
punished for the indiscretions of later stages of his career. Henceforth,
instead of being confined to the coteries, the desire for larger knowledge
of the poet's personal story found a voice in general society.
It was felt that the Papers should be followed up and superseded by a
complete biography. By turns, and repeatedly, several of the persons, who
had known him most intimately, were urged to produce a worthy record of so
remarkable a poet. Mrs. Shelley, Peacock, Leigh Hunt, and Hogg, were all
entreated to write the sufficient memoir. William Godwin's daughter would
have written the poet's _Life_ had not old Sir Timothy Shelley informed
her that, if she ventured to publish anything in the way of biography
about his family, she must go her way without the income he provided for
her own and her child's maintenance. Peacock declined to write the _Life_
because he had a strong opinion that it would be impossible to tell the
story honestly, without setting forth matters that, for the poet's sake,
had better be unrecorded. Leigh Hunt (eventually the author of a flimsy
and unsatisfactory memoir of the poet whose pocket had yielded him so many
guineas) was silent from the fear of provoking dangerous resentments.
'The book,' he remarked, in reference to Middleton's _Shelley and his
Writings_, in a letter dated to Edmund Ollier, 2nd February, 1858, 'is
a proof of what I have always said when applied to to write the _Life_
myself, viz., that it would be impossible to give a complete account
of Shelley and his connexions till the latter were all dead and gone;
even if it was possible then for any person to be so thoroughly well
informed or impartial as to do it, because facts would have to be so
coloured as to misrepresent both living and dead, some one way and
some another; or the living would be forced either to enter into the
most unseemly and worse than useless wars with one another, or to
maintain silences the most difficult and distressing to keep out of
delicacy, and the most self-condemning in appearance with some, and in
reality with others.'
Whilst William Godwin's daughter was silent from pecuniary prudence, Leigh
Hunt silent from fear of the consequence, and Peacock silent because he
thought the book (which, if written, should be written honestly) had
better not be written at all, Hogg was reluctant to produce the memoir,
which the success of the Papers had caused most people to think should
come from his pen. No one can charge him with intruding himself
prematurely, or without invitation, into the chair, out of which he was
thrust so discourteously by the very persons who had begged him to take
it. The man of imperturbable temper and adamantine patience (as he is
styled by Peacock) was not pricked into unauthorized action by the amateur
biographers, who, sometimes without acknowledgment, and always without
permission, pillaged his Papers. Medwin's _Life_ appeared in 1847; and
smiling at the _littérateur's_ blunders, the man of imperturbable temper
held his pen. He remained the man of adamantine patience, though rumours
came to him that Mr. Middleton was at work on a _Life_ of the poet, whom
he had never known at all; that Trelawny was threatening to produce a book
of gossip about the poet, whom he had known for only six months; and that
the works of these gentlemen would be followed at no great distance by a
work from the pen of the 'metropolitan versifier' (Leigh Hunt), of whom
his in due course remarked in the preface to his two volumes: 'If it were
a question of assets, of faculties, of effects, the taking of an account
of plunder,--an inventory of sums received, and of moneys to be received,
refunded, and disgorged,--a mere calculation of the wind that had been
raised, this indication of the person best qualified to be the biographer
of a prince amongst poets would be judicious.'
It was not till Field Place felt the necessity of correcting the numerous
misstatements about the man of genius by a complete and authoritative
biography, that the largely employed lawyer declared his willingness to
execute the difficult task, which had been deferred too long. Midway
between sixty and seventy years of age, when he thus accepted the
invitation of Sir Percy Florence and Lady Shelley, the man of many
affairs, and an exacting avocation, did not set to work on the _Life_ till
nearly a quarter of a century had passed since the publication of the _New
Monthly_ Papers; till the poet had been dead nearly thirty-five years;
till full forty-five years had passed since the poet, in the company of
his future biographer, set their faces for London, on leaving University
College, Oxford.
Though it took the outer world by surprise, the immediate result of the
publication of Hogg's two volumes was less surprising to the literary
coteries, and no matter of surprise whatever to the few members of those
coteries, who, knowing that Hogg was a robust enemy of shams, knew that no
biographer would satisfy Field Place, which should fail to accord with the
straight-nosed pictures, and with the notion that Shelley was a being of
stainless purity and angelic holiness.
If, in writing the _Life_, Hogg's first duty was to be thoughtful for the
sensibilities of Field Place, his book must indeed be declared a bad one.
Instead of giving readers the Shelley indicated by the frontispiece of the
first volume, or the Shelley who, under auspicious circumstances might
have been the Saviour of the World, or a Shelley who might have sobered
down into a pheasant-shooting squire and Chairman of Quarter-Sessions, the
biographer makes us acquainted with the wayward, freakish, impulsive,
scarcely sane, and ever restless Shelley of the poet's early manhood,--the
Shelley, whose great wit was divided from madness by a strangely thin
partition; the Shelley, whose earnestness was too often associated with
perversity, whose winning candour was curiously allied with secretiveness,
whose impulsive benevolence was perplexingly linked with indifference to
the feelings and rights of particular individuals; the Shelley, whose
several amiable and generous traits were attended by qualities that were
neither beneficent nor agreeable. Showing that this whimsical Shelley was
a frequent utterer of untruths that were altogether or partly referable to
delusions, Hogg also shows by evidence of the most conclusive kind that
this perplexing Shelley could also utter untruths, knowing them to be
untruths--was capable of telling fibs to escape a trivial
inconvenience,--was capable of writing false and wheedling letters to get
money, and of admitting with a singular, if not absolutely unique,
shamelessness, that he had told a lie, or meant to tell a lie for a very
slight reason.
No wonder that the biographer who dealt thus frankly with his friend's
infirmities is distasteful to the enthusiasts of Mr. Buxton Forman's
school. No wonder that his book was perused for the first time by Sir
Percy Florence and Lady Shelley 'with the most painful feelings of
dismay.' Their dissatisfaction with the biographer would have been more
painful had all four volumes of the _Life_ been published on the day, that
saw the publication of the earlier half of the book. Fortunately for Sir
Florence and Lady Shelley the biographer at the end of the second of the
two published volumes was only coming to the part of the poet's story
which they were especially desirous he should handle with extreme
delicacy. There is much about William Godwin in the two volumes, and a
little about his daughter. But the second volume closes at the moment when
Shelley is only at the threshold of his passion for his familiar friend's
sixteen-years-old child,--closes before he has told the 'marvellous tale'
of his father's cruelty, and barbarous purpose of shutting him up in a
madhouse, to the generous-hearted girl, in order to induce the naughty
child to fly with him to the Continent in the company of her
sister-by-affinity. It was obvious to Sir Percy Florence and Lady Shelley
that they had chosen the wrong historian to write about Mary Godwin, the
judicious treatment of whose scarcely edifying story was so needful for
the honour of the Castle Goring Shelleys. It had been hoped by Field Place
that Mr. Hogg would varnish ugly facts with specious phrases. Disappointed
in this hope, it was obvious to Field Place that the indiscreet biographer
must be sent about his business. Hogg having failed to write the _Life_
into harmony with the pretty picture facing the title-page, as Arthur
Pendennis wrote the verses to suit the picture of the country church, it
was manifest to the authorities of Field Place that they must discharge
their man of letters, and hide their time till they should find a fitter
instrument and happier season for their purpose. This was done. Hogg was
dismissed, and in these later years of grace Field Place has found in Mr.
Anthony Froude a man of letters, capable of writing about the poet's
flight with his intimate friend's sixteen-years-old daughter, as nothing
worse than 'the sin of acting on emotional theories of liberty;' capable
of smiling at their concubinage as a pleasant passage of romance, because
they were so young and enthusiastic.
Though a grievous injury was done to English literature when Hogg was
treated in this manner, it must not be imagined that his book is devoid of
serious faults. Containing numerous trivial inaccuracies, it contains also
some grave blunders. The confusion of its materials may be compared to the
state of disorder in which the author found his friend's room at the
commencement of their acquaintance. The biographer was unwise to reproduce
in the book his early Papers on _Shelley at Oxford_ without first revising
them carefully. Though he would have done ill to keep himself as much as
possible out of view, and was right in regarding passages of his own story
as part of his friend's story,--a part of it, moreover, that could not be
omitted without serious injury to the biographical narrative,--he says far
too much of himself. In some places, the biographer's egotism is
grotesquely garrulous. It is no sufficient excuse for such egregious
self-consciousness and self-intrusiveness, that the egotist is a droll,
piquant, racy, exquisitely humorous egotist. None the less true, however,
is it that,--their eccentricities and extravagancies notwithstanding,--the
two volumes give us a substantially truthful view of Shelley in his youth
and earlier manhood, and, in so doing, bring us face to face with the Real
Shelley. No intelligent and impartial peruser of the two volumes ever
closed them without feeling that Hogg's portraiture of Shelley is a
performance, from whose lines no biographer of the poet can depart widely,
without going widely astray.
There is no need to say more of the confusion, in which Hogg offered the
excellent materials of his book to the world. But so much has been said
about his dishonest treatment of letters, that some notice should be taken
of his various ways of dealing with evidential documents.
It must be admitted that his printed transcripts of epistles are often
inaccurate; a considerable proportion of the inaccuracies being slips, for
which the printer is not to be held accountable.
The letters are, in some cases, mis-dated, through the biographer's
carelessness in taking a postal-date, or the date of an addressee's
endorsement, as the date of the letter itself. Occasionally, also, he errs
by giving, as an ascertained and exact date, what appears, on examination,
to be nothing else than his own calculation of an approximate date.
Regardless of the paragraphical arrangement of a letter, when he is
desirous of saving space, he does not hesitate to bring several written
paragraphs into a single printed one,--an unobjectionable practice, when
it does not affect the force of the written words, in the case of letters
that are not exhibited in type as examples of epistolary style.
It is his practice to condense a letter, by picking out its most important
passages, and putting them together (without points indicative of omitted
words), as though they followed one another on the written paper,
precisely as they appear on the printed page:--a most objectionable
practice.
After condensing a letter in this manner, he sometimes exhibits the
abridgment in a way to make readers think it an entire letter:--also a
most objectionable practice.
In the case of one most important and interesting letter (of whose
contents more will be said in a subsequent chapter), he changes names for
purposes of concealment and mystification; but a fair consideration of his
reasons for thus tampering with an important evidential writing, acquits
him of dishonourable conduct in the curious and suspicious business.
Attention must also be called to the grounds for the gravest charge, that
has been preferred against Hogg's editorial treatment of evidential
writings. He has been declared guilty of altering such evidences by
inserting in his printed transcripts entire sentences that do not appear
in the manuscripts; and it cannot be denied that there are _primâ-facie_
grounds for the serious accusation. On careful examination, some of the
printed transcripts of the _Life_ are found to contain passages (some of
them long passages of several sentences) that do not appear in the
originals of the transcribed documents. As these passages appear without
any typographical indication that they are no part of the original
writings, and have every _primâ-facie_ show of being part of the
transcripts in which they are inserted, they may be fairly described as
'interpolations.' It is not, therefore, surprising that Hogg has been
charged with one of the gravest forms of editorial dishonesty. The
reader's attention has already been called to one of these editorial
notes,--a note printed, indeed, within brackets, but followed by no
indicatory initials. In subsequent chapters, examples will be given of
similar notes, printed without either brackets or initials. For the
present, it is enough to say they may be found in several of Hogg's
printed copies of documents. How can they be accounted for in a way, to
clear the biographer of reasonable suspicion of misrepresenting the
contents of evidential writings?
Instead of making his editorial comments on his transcribed documents in
paginal foot-notes, it was Hogg's most objectionable and dangerous
practice to insert them in the body of the transcripts. Of course, in
doing so, it was his rule to put his initials after each editorial note,
and to place each 'initialed' note between brackets. Thus exhibited
between brackets, with the biographer's initials put immediately before
the second bracket, an editorial note is recognized at a glance by the
most careless reader, as no part of the transcribed document, but a mere
editorial elucidation of the preceding passage. Printed as Hogg intended
them to be, no one of these editorial notes could have been mistaken, even
momentarily, for a part and parcel of the writing, in whose body it was
inserted. But, unfortunately, for the biographer's reputation, these notes
were not always printed as he intended them to be printed. In some cases
the first bracket, in some cases both brackets, are omitted, though the
initials are inserted. There are also cases where a scrap of editorial
explanation is found without either brackets or initials. As Hogg was no
regular author, but a slap-dash rough-and-ready legal draughtsman (plying
his pen, in his proper vocation, with perfect confidence in the ability of
solicitors and law-stationers to correct the literal slips of his
compositions), he wrote copy for the press just as he slapt and dashed
copy off for his ordinary clients. A careless writer, he was also a
careless corrector of proofs. Hence it came to pass that editorial notes,
which he meant to bracket and initial (notes, which, of course, should
have been made at the foot, instead of in the body of his pages), came
under the public eye without the brackets and initials, that should, and
would, have distinguished them at a glance from the printed matter they
were intended to elucidate. That this is the explanation of the
interpolations in Hogg's transcripts, appears from--(1), the biographer's
practice of peppering his transcripts with initialed and bracketed scraps
of editorial comment; (2), the grammatical construction that distinguishes
the interpolations from the text in which they are set; (3), the absolute
inefficacy of the inserted passages for any end a dishonest interpolator
could have in view; and (4), the conclusive fact, that, whilst it is a
mere perplexing disturbance to the narrative, so long as it is taken for
part of the transcript, each of the interpolations becomes an intelligible
and more or less serviceable comment on the context, as soon as the reader
puts it into brackets, and deals with it as an editorial note. In respect
to these interpolations, and also in respect to all the other errors which
the biographer's enemies are pleased to regard as deliberate
misstatements, Hogg must be acquitted wholly of dishonest purpose. Had he
been duly mindful for brackets and initials, the interpolations, of which
so much has been said to his discredit, would never have exposed him to a
suspicion, much less to a direct imputation, of editorial knavery.
It does not follow, however, that the _Life_ is disfigured by no
statements to be fairly rated as deliberate misrepresentations. Resenting
the calumnies, that have been poured on Hogg since his death; resenting
more especially the malice of those, who would fain extort evidence to the
biographer's infamy from what is mere evidence of one of Shelley's wildest
and most unwholesome delusions; I wish I were in a position to declare the
volumes altogether pure of falsehood. It would have been better for Hogg's
character in his life's closing years, and far better for his posthumous
fame, had he in his mature age written with candour and justice of the
incidents that resulted in his academic disgrace, and of the individuals
who only did their clear duty in bidding him and Shelley leave Oxford. But
whilst lacking the courage to be truthful about matters even more
discreditable to himself than to his friend, he wanted the highmindedness
that would have enabled him to speak fairly of the Master and Fellows,
whom he remembered to his last hour with a rancorous animosity that was
singular in the man of usually even and placable disposition. The story of
his academic disgrace was one of the very few subjects, on which the man
of imperturbable temper and adamantine patience could not keep his temper.
Whilst throwing off the papers for the _New Monthly_, Hogg surrendered
himself the more completely to his animosity against the Oxford dons,
because he could persuade himself that, in giving vent to his personal
resentment, he was only vindicating the honour of his friend. The
consequence was an account of Shelley's academic misadventure, so veined
with misrepresentation and loaded with untruth, as to defeat the purpose
for which it was written. It is needless to say that the Shelleyan
enthusiasts have never protested against the egregious perversity and
falseness of this portion of the biography. Attacking the book for its
inaccuracy, in respect to those of its passages that are substantially
honest, they have adopted as good history those of its pages that are
distinctly untruthful. That Field Place saw nothing to censure in the
faultiest part of the biographer's performance appears from the way, in
which Lady Shelley reproduced some of its most glaring misrepresentations
in her _Shelley's Memorials_.
CHAPTER X.
AT OXFORD: MICHAELMAS TERM, 1810.
Hogg's Toryism--Shelley's Liberalism--In Hogg's Rooms--Shelley's Looks
and Voice--Patron and Idolater--The Ways of Passing Time--Hogg's
Reminiscences--Nocturnal Readings and Conversations--Country about
Oxford--Pistol Practice--Playing with Paper Boats--Windmill and Plashy
Meadow--The Horror of it--Posthumous Fragments of Margaret
Nicholson--University Tattle and Laughter--Eccentric
Inseparables--Pond under Shotover Hill--Pacing 'The High'--Dons'
Civility to Shelley--His Incivility to Dons--Uninteresting Stones and
Dull People--'Partly True and Partly False'--The Fiery Hun!--'My Dear
Boy'--Shelley offers his Sister to Hogg in Marriage--Hogg entertains
the Proposal--End of Term.
Though I have spoken warmly of Hogg's general honesty, and resent the
calumnies that have been rained down upon him in the grave, I must admit
that Hogg's friendship was so injurious that it might almost be called
disastrous to the Oxonian Shelley. Though the youth who had distinguished
himself by unruliness at Eton, whose views of life had come to him chiefly
from morbid romances, whose natural perversity disposed him to revolt
against control of every kind, was far more likely to abuse the liberty
and privileges of the academic course than to employ them to his
advantage, the conditions are conceivable under which he would have passed
through the University with honour--or at least without discredit. It
depended chiefly on the friendships he should form immediately upon coming
into residence at his college, whether, taking a new moral and
intellectual 'departure' he would disappoint the evil promise of his Eton
days, or whether he would persist in the perversities in which he had been
encouraged by Dr. Lind. For his welfare in the University, it was needful
that the young man, so sympathetic and fervid, but absolutely wanting in
common sense and mental sobriety, should have for his especial friend a
man devoid of moral levity, and should live in a set of young men who,
together with tastes congenial to his own, possessed the steadiness of
intellect and temper, calculated to restrain and correct the erratic
forces of his peculiar nature;--young men who, by their example, rather
than by their words, would dispose him to regard his University with
pride, his College with affection, his tutors with loyalty. It was a great
misfortune for Shelley that, on coming into residence, he found no such
companions, and took for his chief associate,--indeed, his only familiar
associate,--a young man, whose intellectual vigour and robustness were
curiously allied with an intellectual levity and a cynical sprightliness,
that rendered him a most baneful companion for a stripling of Shelley's
equally fervid and wayward disposition.
A stronger contrast of character is seldom witnessed than the contrast to
be noticed in the two undergraduates, who, through meeting casually, and
talking together freely at the same dinner table 'in hall,' formed at once
a close friendship, that (with the exception of the brief period of
estrangement, which renders the story of their intercourse more singular
and interesting), endured till death divided them for ever. Whilst Shelley
was a Liberal, whose liberalism even at the commencement of this
friendship was revolutionary in its aims and enthusiasm, Hogg was a
caricature of Eldonian Toryism, who held Dissenters in disdain, snapt his
fingers at Catholic Emancipation, and smiled contemptuously at every
reference to Irish grievances. In political sentiment the Hogg, who wrote
the _New Monthly_ Papers on 'Shelley at Oxford' differed from the Oxonian
Hogg, only as the Toryism of a middle-aged man differs from the Toryism of
a boy. The election that 'had just taken place,' when he entered
University College was a choice he disapproved; though animosity against
the Lord Chancellor, who deprived Shelley of his children, and animosity
against those of the Chancellor's supporters who expelled Shelley and
Shelley's friend from Oxford, caused him in later time to write of Eldon,
as though the Chief of the Law were greatly inferior in culture and mental
dignity to his victor in the academic conflict. Doubtless, on coming to
Oxford immediately after the election of Lord Grenville, the young
gentleman declared his disapproval of the triumph of the blue-and-buff
faction:--not passionately, for passion seldom stirred his breast; but
with much droll ridicule of a business so eminently ridiculous, for even
from his boyhood Mr. Hogg (a born humourist and cynic) turned everything,
even his own religious convictions, to jest.
Whilst the Oxonian Shelley, already a half-fledged republican, talked
tenderly of the poor and the populace, Hogg ever a provincial aristocrat
(and by no means devoid of provincial vulgarity), regarded the populace
with disgust, and maintained that all the poor wanted was to be kept in
their proper places and to their proper work. Ever impatient, Shelley was
fervid as fire itself, whilst Hogg, from youth to old age, was remarkable
for imperturbable temper and adamantine patience, on every question that
had no reference to his academic misadventure. Coming from the North of
England to Oxford in the autumn of 1809, some weeks before he donned cap
and gown in February, 1810, Hogg entered the University with the purpose
of taking honours, and had acquired the reputation of 'a reading man'
before the long vacation of 1810.
Coming to Oxford for residence in the autumn of 1810, when Hogg had
acquired status and character amongst the younger members of his academic
house, the sensitive, simple, never worldly-wise Shelley entered
University College with a strong appetite for general knowledge, and an
intention to peruse many books on many subjects for his own amusement, but
with no ambition for academic honours, no intention of competing for them,
no purpose of becoming, in the academic and limited sense of the term, 'a
reading man.' Hogg had not been three months in University College, before
the tutors saw he meant to put his name in a 'first class.' Shelley, on
the other hand, had not been three weeks in College before the tutors saw
he meant to go out with the 'pass men,' and were doubtful whether he would
take a degree.
As it must be held in some measure accountable for the influence he
acquired over Shelley, readers must assign considerable weight to the fact
that Hogg was qualified by several matters--his seniority on the College
books, priority in residence, greater knowledge of the University, higher
status in the lecture-rooms,--to play the part of academic superior to his
new acquaintance. Superlatively trivial to men of _the_ world, the matters
that gave Hogg this precedence and superiority over Shelley in University
College, are no light affairs in the small world of the University, the
still smaller world of a single College. The sensitive Shelley would not
have presumed to invite Hogg to his rooms after their first meeting 'in
hall.' It was for Hogg to pay the compliment to the freshman in his first
term of residence; and no old University man will doubt that Shelley felt
he received a considerable attention, when so notable a personage amongst
the first-year's men as Mr. Hogg said to him, 'Come and have wine at my
rooms.'
As Hogg and Shelley sat over their wine in consequence of this invitation,
the host took an opportunity to examine the aspect of his new acquaintance
more minutely, and to observe that his girlish pink-and-white complexion
was much freckled. 'His complexion,' says Hogg, 'was delicate, and almost
feminine, of the purest red and white; yet he was tanned and freckled by
exposure to the sun, having passed the autumn, as he said, in shooting;' a
piece of description that is referred to by 'the Shelleyan enthusiasts' as
an example of Hogg's imaginativeness. No one (if we may credit Shelleyan
enthusiasts) but a suspiciously imaginative historian would have ventured
to say he could remember, after twenty years, the sun-spots of an old
college friend's complexion. I venture to say that the disfigurement is a
good example of the kind of things, likely to live in the memory of
certain observers.
In respect to a part of what he says of the freckles in Shelley's skin,
Hogg is corroborated in a remarkable manner by Medwin, who (his inaccuracy
notwithstanding) was generally right in the main facts, and not always
wrong in the details of his statements. 'He,' Medwin says of Shelley's
shooting in the winter of 1809 and the autumn of 1810, 'had during
September often carried a gun in his father's preserves; Sir Timothy being
a keen sportsman, and Shelley himself an excellent shot, for I well
remember on one day in the winter of 1809, when we were out together, his
killing, at three successive shots, three snipes, to my great astonishment
and envy, at the tail of the pond in front of Field Place.' The three
successive and successful shots are good examples of the small incidents
likely to live in a sportsman's memory. What old sportsman, with snow upon
his head, cannot remember quite as vividly just as small matters, that
occurred long since on the moors or during a run across country?
Another of the small matters of Hogg's _Life_, that unquestionably lived
in his memory. He remembered how, in the early morning at the close of
Shelley's first visit to his rooms, after 'lighting' the poet downstairs
with the stump of a candle, he 'soon heard him running through the quiet
quadrangle in the still night,'--adding in the words of truth's own music,
'That sound became afterwards so familiar to my ear, that I still seem to
hear Shelley's hasty steps.'
The evidence is clear that whilst Shelley, the freshman (ever a feminine
creature on one side of his nature), regarded Hogg as an exemplary
scholar, great thinker, and worthy leader,--the self-sufficient,
hard-headed, cynical, humorous youngster from the North of England
regarded Shelley as a delightful plaything, a brilliant absurdity, a
piquant joke. When the 'reading man,' who rose from his bed every morning
as the clock struck seven, had spent the first six hours of the day in
strenuous study and attendance at lectures, he went to his 'young friend'
for diversion, never before one o'clock, oftener when the clock had struck
two p.m. It amused the north-countryman, as he lay back in the easiest
chair of his young friend's well-furnished and disorderly room, to watch
his young friend work fiercely at the handle of his electrical machine,
till the crackling and snapping sparks flew forth viciously; to see the
youngster's long locks bristle and dishevel into wildness, surpassing
their usual disorder; to observe the animation of his countenance, the
singular brightness of his prominent blue eyes, and to hear him talk
volubly for half-hours together, in the thin shrill voice that often
screamed as harshly as the voice of a highly excited parrot, about the
blessings that would flow from chemistry to the ill-fed, ill-clad,
ill-treated toilers of the human race.
The excruciating voice, that was so 'intolerably shrill, harsh, and
discordant' to the north-countryman's sensitive ear at the opening of his
acquaintance with this eccentric and delightfully unconventional
undergraduate, became less disagreeable, even in its sharpest notes, to
the critical auditor as it grew more familiar. Moreover, the voice was not
always at torture-pitch. It was only when he was under excitement that the
youngster afflicted his hearers by 'speaking' (to use Peacock's
description of the poet's vocal peculiarity) 'in sharp fourths, the most
unpleasing sequence of sound that can fall on the human ear.' When he
spoke calmly, the voice was not otherwise than agreeable; when he read
poetry that delighted him, the voice became musical, 'was good' (says
Peacock) 'both in tune and in tone; was low and soft, but clear, distinct,
and expressive.' Hogg had not known his young friend many days without
discovering that the voice could be no less melodious and charming than
harsh and screeching. In these vocal characteristics, as in so many other
matters, Shelley resembled Byron, who used to shriek and scream in his
frequent paroxysms of hysterical rage, and yet had a voice sweeter even
than his verse, when he gossiped contentedly with women, and prattled
lovingly with little children.
It is not wonderful that the self-sufficient, critical, humorous Hogg's
interest in his young friend was composed equally of amusement and
admiration, cynical curiosity and amiable contempt; a disposition to love
him, and an even stronger disposition to laugh at him. There was so much
to admire and love in the eccentric boy, who overflowed with pity for the
miseries of mankind, and prattled with almost childish communicativeness
about his cousin Harriett's beauty and his sister Elizabeth's perfections;
so much that was inexpressibly ludicrous in the youthful chemist and
scientific enthusiast who, believing in the 'Elixir Vitæ,' was at the same
time an astronomer and astrologer--in the sceptical philosopher who,
equally credulous and incredulous, spoke no less reverentially of dreams
than irreverentially of the Scriptural miracles, could embrace any fable
provided it were not one of 'the delusions' of Christianity, and had no
doubt he ought to believe in ghosts, whilst deeming it questionable
whether he ought to believe in God. Under Hogg's tuition this last
question was erased from the list of Shelley's moot points. Having
repudiated Christ at Eton, the freshman had not entered on his second term
of residence at Oxford without finding himself under 'the necessity' of
repudiating God; and, though he would probably have come to this
conclusion by himself somewhat later in his career, it is certain he came
to it the sooner for Hogg's assistance and encouragement.
It is uncertain what Hogg's real sentiments on matters pertaining to
religion were at the close of 1810 and 1811. In later time he was one of
those Tories who reflected with pride on the support their party had given
Bolingbroke, and on the protection it had afforded Hume:--one of those
Tories, of gentle birth and culture, who deemed it their peculiar
privilege to think and say amongst themselves whatever they pleased on
ecclesiastical polemics, provided they did nothing to weaken the popular
belief in the doctrines of the Church of England, as by law
established--doctrines that were so eminently conducive to social order,
by disposing persons of the less fortunate classes to do their duty
submissively in that state of life to which God had been pleased to call
them. Whilst commiserating Shelley for being, by education and familiar
conditions, one of those 'buff-and-blue folks' who naturally could not
speak their own minds freely lest their words should be misconstrued into
treason and infidelity, and could not, therefore, carry the poet safe
through the difficulties arising out of his ill-advised publications, Mr.
Hogg, the mature biographer, observed:--
'As to my own family, and my immediate connexions, we were all persons
whose first toast after dinner was invariably "Church and State!" warm
partisans of William Pitt, of the highest Church, and of the high Tory
party; consequently we were anything but intolerant, we were above
suspicion and ordinances.... My relatives felt that they had margin
enough, plenty of sea-room, that whatever might be said or done, their
good principles could not be doubted, but would always carry them
through.... If the _Age of Reason_ had been republished by myself or
one of my earliest friends, the world would have supposed that it was
put forth merely to show the utter futility and impotence and vanity
of the author's arguments.'
The self-sufficient young gentleman, who quickened Shelley's steps to his
final academic disaster, was the veritable father of the man who wrote
thus lightly of what Tories (provided they were highly-educated gentlemen)
might do within the lines of Free Thought. From strong, but not conclusive
evidence, I think that in his Oxford days he might have summarized his
creed by saying: 'There's nothing new, and there is nothing true; and it
don't much sinnify, provided we don't let vulgar people find it out.'
Whatever his belief on sacred questions, he never allowed so immaterial a
consideration to affect his course in discussion. Speaking first on one
side of a question, and then on the other side, and then for a third time
just to show he had been equally and utterly wrong in his arguments on
both sides, Hogg always played the part Shelley wished him to play. What
Shelley said, Hogg contradicted--never angrily (for his temper was
imperturbable), never impatiently (for his patience was adamantine), never
discourteously (for he was courteous by nature, and on principle), often
lightly and with fine raillery (for he was a born humourist), always
considerately (for the reading man delighted in his play-fellow). It was
thus the two young men wrangled together amiably, keeping the ball of
doubt flying to and fro between them till the one or the other sent it
flying out of bounds. A game often congenial to clever youngsters, it was
a game especially congenial to these two undergraduates; all the more so,
because Shelley was altogether in earnest, Hogg altogether at play.
If the reading-man had reason to congratulate himself on finding so good a
playmate for his hours of relaxation, the freshman may well have been
flattered by the attention of a fellow-student, so considerably his senior
in academic status and worldly wisdom. With all his imperfections, Hogg
had no vice or fault to repel his young friend. Shelley, who would have
held aloof from an undergraduate with a propensity to any kind of
dissoluteness, found in Hogg a man no less temperate in eating and
drinking than himself, no less incapable of uttering or relishing an
obscene jest, no less averse to gambling with dice and cards, no less
disdainful of the ordinary dissipations of academic idlers. On the other
hand, Hogg's natural endowments and intellectual attainments were
especially calculated to commend him to Shelley's confidence, and render
him the object of Shelley's admiration. Shelley had enough of classical
taste and culture to respect the reading-man for being so greatly his
superior in Latin and Greek, and to be delighted at the moderate praise
accorded by so considerable a scholar to his performances in Latin prose
and Latin verse. But classical studies were not the only studies to
interest Hogg. The reading-man delighted in English literature, amused
himself occasionally by writing English verse, and had some thought of
writing a book of poetry or romantic fiction, when he should have taken
his 'first class.' Instead of being indifferent to his young friend's
literary ambition, Hogg participated in it. The youngster who had already
published a novel (what a novel it was!), and the young man who was
thinking of writing a novel, were, in their simple, boyish way of
regarding the matter, kindred spirits and men of letters. Their
association at college would prove the first stage of a life-long
friendship!
The relation in which Steerforth and Copperfield stand to one another in
the earlier stages of their friendship is comparable with the relation in
which Hogg and Shelley stood to one another at University College. Hogg
patronized Shelley very much as Steerforth patronizes Copperfield; and
just as Copperfield idolizes Steerforth, Shelley idolized Hogg. At the
present time one may well smile at these relations between the humorous
north-countryman, who never became anything more than a successful
chamber-barrister, and the poet, whose name will never perish from the
story of his race. But it is no unusual thing for time and the development
of mental forces to reverse the relations of ancient comrades; placing
the former idolater on the idol's pedestal, and converting the receiver of
homage into the worshiper. Whilst the Hogg of University College gave
promise of being a very remarkable personage, Shelley had given no promise
of becoming a supremely great poet--on the contrary, had raised
expectations that he would be a very contemptible poetaster. In 1810-11
Shelley was the one of these two friends to render worship, Hogg the one
to receive it.
In the earlier weeks of their friendship, Hogg and Shelley used to
exchange visits; but soon Shelley's room was the usual meeting-place of
the two friends--the choice of the room being made partly (Hogg says
wholly) because Shelley, still delighting in his scientific toys, liked
'to start from his seat at any moment' and play with his air-pump and
electrical machine; and partly (we may surmise) because the hard reader
wished to guard his severely studious hours from the intrusion of his
choicest and most particular friend. But though they never met before
luncheon, save when they passed one another at morning chapel, or on their
ways to and from different lectures, Shelley and Hogg lived together as
completely as they would have done, had they been 'chums' sharing a single
set of rooms, like the 'chums' of older academic time.
Meeting at one or two p.m., they seldom separated before one or two a.m.
In foul weather they read, talked, wrote letters in each other's company,
without going out of college. They read together Locke's _Essay concerning
Human Understanding_, Hume's _Essays_, several of Plato's Dialogues (by
means of Dacier's translations), several of the works of Scotch
metaphysicians, not worthy of being mentioned in the same sentence with
Hume, treatises of Logic, and divers English poets and Latin poets. But
Plato, Locke, and Hume were the authors who held their attention most
often, stirred their minds most deeply, provoking them at every turn to
pass from study to talk, and argue out the questions raised by printed
text. Of Locke's and Hume's writings they made careful notes, that in some
cases were precise abstracts of the author's several arguments on a
question of supreme importance. That Hume whetted Shelley's appetite for
sceptical literature may be inferred from the note, in which (on November
11th, 1810, _Sunday_) he begged Stockdale to look out for a translation
into Greek, Latin, or any of the European languages, of a certain 'Hebrew
essay, demonstrating that the Christian religion is false, that was
mentioned in one of the numbers of the _Christian Observer_, last spring,
by a clergyman, as an unanswerable, yet sophistical argument.'
When the weather was fair, or not so foul as absolutely to prohibit
exercise in the open air, the two friends went for walks in the
country,--sometimes for very long walks, that kept them for four, or even
six hours, in the open air. Excellent pedestrians, they delighted in
walking; and Shelley was never happier than when he and his peculiar
comrade started out for the country in the early afternoon for an unusally
long walk, with the intention of 'cutting hall' (the hour for the
college-dinner in those days was 4 p.m.), and returning in the evening,
for the equally welcome and needful supper, ordered to be ready for them
on their return to the poet's first-floor rooms,[4] in the principal
quadrangle of their college. In these long walks it was that the two
inseparable undergraduates walked repeatedly over and about Shotover Hill;
threaded meandering ways through Bagley Wood; traversed the farmstead in
which the furious dog seized with his teeth, and almost tore off, the tail
of the poet's brand-new blue coat; and leaped through the gap of an aged
fence into the trim garden,--leafless on that mid-winter day, had it not
been for the evergreen shrubs; flowerless, had it not been for the brumal
flowers here and there faintly visible; but still trim, daintily kept, and
eloquent of peacefulness, seclusion, and human care,--the garden where the
poet gathered the first of those seeds of pathos and delicate sentiment,
that slowly germinating in his fancy, bore fruit long years afterwards in
_The Sensitive Plant_.
It was in Hogg's memory, when he wrote the _New Monthly_ sketches, how,
after retreating from this tranquil spot as suddenly as he had entered it,
Shelley spoke of the sacredness of the spot, that of course owed its
attractiveness to the ministrations of feminine goodness and beauty; and
how, after making it the haunt of a single enchantress, he changed the
picture so far as to give her a sister, fair and sensitive as herself, for
the sharer of her gentle toil and pure enjoyment of the garden in brighter
seasons.
In another of these walks, the inseparable undergraduates came, in a
desolate part of the country, on a little girl, so young and small that
she might almost be called a nursling, who had been placed there in her
weariness to await the return of her mother and some other women. Having
waited till she imagined herself deserted, the cold, hungry, miserable
child was weeping and wailing piteously, when Shelley accosted her (ugly
little brat though she was), won something of her confidence, and induced
her to accompany him to the nearest dwelling, where he restored her to
comparative contentment with a bowl of warm bread and milk.
'It was,' says Hogg, 'a strange spectacle to watch the young poet,
whilst ... holding the wooden bowl in one hand, and the wooden spoon
in the other, and kneeling on his left knee, that he might more
certainly attain to her mouth, he urged and encouraged the torpid and
timid child to eat. The hot milk was agreeable to the girl, and its
effects were salutary; but she was obviously uneasy at the detention.
Her uneasiness increased, and ultimately prevailed; we returned with
her to the place where we had found her, Shelley bearing the bowl of
milk in his hand, even to the spot where the child was already being
sought for by her mother and friends.'
To discredit this story, and press it into evidence that Hogg was an
egregious liar, your true Shelleyan enthusiast does not hesitate in crying
triumphantly, 'Is it possible for any man, after a lapse of two-and-twenty
years, to remember whether his friend on a particular occasion knelt on
his right knee or his left knee?' Yet I conceive no judicial reader will
deny that the story bears the brand of substantial truthfulness; that the
incident was just the incident to live in the spectator's memory; that the
story accords with what has come to us from other sources of information
respecting Shelley's womanly concern for children,--the feminine
tenderness with which he nursed little Allegra in her infancy, and his own
babes in their times of sickness.
Other pleasant examples are given by Hogg of the fine human interest
Shelley took in the humble, and sometimes unlovely, children they
encountered in their pedestrian excursions round about Oxford,--such
children as the gipsy girl whom he visited in her parental tent, and her
brother, the little gipsy boy, into whose hands he rolled the big orange,
which he had brought out with him from Oxford, for his own refreshment
during a long walk. It may serve the purpose of Hogg's detractors to decry
these stories as manifest fabrications; but to me they are evidential of
Hogg's substantial truthfulness, because whilst they commemorate just such
characteristic trifles as are apt to survive far more important matters in
our recollections of the dead who were dear to us long ago, they are the
mere trifles which no fraudulent tale-wright would think of inventing.
Only to the narrator, who remembered them feelingly, would such trifles
appear worthy of record.
The walks in the country round about Oxford took the longer time, because
of two of Shelley's favourite diversions--his delight in pistol-practice,
and the pleasure he found in folding and twisting pieces of paper into
little boats, and putting them afloat on the surface of pond or streamlet.
His fondness for the former amusement affords another of his numerous
resemblances to Byron. Like the Byron of Southwell and Cambridge, the
Shelley of Field Place and Oxford, seized every convenient occasion for
blazing away with powder and ball, and perfecting himself in the use of
'the hair-trigger,'--a practice that would have been more remarkable in
each of the poets, had it not been usual in the days of duelling for
youngsters to regard pistol-practice as an important part of the education
of every gentleman, who in his way through life might at any moment be
invited to exchange shots at ten paces. To the biographer of the two
poets, their fondness for this military pastime is the more interesting,
because they lived to fire away at the same mark day after day during
their residence at Pisa. That the sport in which he delighted in the last
year of his life was one of Shelley's favourite amusements at Oxford, we
know from Hogg, who tells how the youthful poet of 'mild aspect and
pacific habits,' used to equip himself for a country walk, with a pair of
duelling pistols and a good supply of powder and ball. On coming to a
solitary spot during a rural ramble, it was his use to fix a card, or some
other suitable object, upon a tree or embankment, and fire away at it till
his ammunition was exhausted. On one occasion he induced Hogg to have a
shot at a slab of wood, about as big as a hearth-rug. Taking the pistol,
Hogg discharged it at an unusally long range for pistol-practice, and sent
his bullet into the very centre of the wooden target. Shelley was amazed
and delighted at the goodness of his friend's firing, and running to the
board gazed intently at the place of the bullet's lodgment. After
satisfying himself that the ball was in the very middle of the board, he
more than once measured the distance from the target to the spot where the
trigger was pulled by the man, who had never before fired a pistol loaded
with ball. 'I never knew any one so prone to admire as he was, in whom the
principle of veneration was so strong,' Hogg remarks, in reference to the
poet's expressions of surprise and delight at the excellence of his
comrade's address with the weapon.
One may well smile at this tribute to the reverential disposition of the
Oxonian, who despised the tutors of his college for their dullness, spoke
contemptuously of his grandfather, held his father up to ridicule, wrote
disdainfully of his mother's mental narrowness, and had fought the whole
tribe of his Eton masters, from Dr. Keate to Mr. Bethell. But the tribute
was not altogether undeserved. All through life Shelley valued men for
their worth, and honoured superior men ungrudgingly for their superiority,
provided they were not placed in authority over him, or had not provoked
him to antagonism. Had Hogg been his tutor, Shelley would soon have
discovered flaws in his friend's character, and unsoundness in his
attainments,--would have found him overbearing, presumptuous,
hypocritical, tyrannical.
Finding the pistol-practice lessen his enjoyment of their country walks,
Hogg, with some difficulty, induced Shelley to relinquish the diversion;
but the north-countryman was unsuccessful in his attempts to wean the poet
from the other pastime, in which he delighted so keenly. On coming to a
large pond in their rambles, Shelley, indifferent to the coldness of wind,
even though it were a 'cutting north-easter,' drew up, took paper from his
pocket, twisted it into a boat, and floated it out upon the glassy
surface. If the frail bark succumbed quickly to the forces of wind and
water, another bark of the same description was speedily fitted and
launched for the perilous voyage. When the paper-boat was wafted safely to
the opposite shore, no child could have been more delighted than the
Oxonian student at so trivial a cause of satisfaction. Sometimes the
player at this curious game floated several paper-boats out upon the water
as nearly as possible at the same moment, and then watched the fortunes of
his fleet with the liveliest interest. After leaving Oxford, Shelley often
amused himself in the same manner, continuing to play thus childishly at
the water's brink, till he had made away with all his provision of
waste-paper to the last scrap. Even then he could not desist from the
fascinating pastime; but would prolong his enjoyment with the sacrifice of
letters written by his dearest friends, and fly-leaves torn from volumes
that he had in his pockets. It was told of him for the first time by an
imaginative humorist, and has been often repeated for true history by
dullards, incapable of recognizing and appreciating a humorous invention,
that on one occasion after consuming in this way all his store of
comparatively valueless pieces of paper, he manufactured a toy-ship out of
a bank-post bill for fifty pounds, which he committed to the water of the
Round Pond in Kensington Gardens, when the miniature lake was more than
usually agitated by a breeze from the northeast. 'The story, of course,'
says Hogg, 'is mythic fable, but it aptly portrays the dominion of a
singular and most unaccountable passion over the mind of an enthusiast.'
The pond at the foot of Shotover Hill, lying on the left of the pedestrian
about to make the ascent, was one of the waters near which Hogg (of the
adamantine patience) was often constrained to wait, whilst Shelley folded
and twisted scraps of paper into boats, with fingers empurpled by the
cold. By that same water the poet used to linger till dusk, 'repeating
verses aloud, or earnestly discussing themes that had no connexion with
surrounding objects.' Ever and again on these occasions the curious boy,
who developed into so marvellous a man, would throw a stone as far away
from himself as possible into the pond, and then exult in the splash and
disturbance of the usually tranquil waters. Hogg could also remember how
his friend, with the blue eyes and disorderly hair, used to split the
slaty stones into thin and flat pieces, with which he would gravely make
ducks-and-drakes on the water's surface.
That Shelley delighted in the scenery of the neighbourhood of Oxford we
know from Hogg's assurances. That the scenes, which delighted him in
1810-11, lived in his memory we know from the poem that was in the main an
outgrowth of his recollections of the quiet garden, to which reference has
just been made; and from the way in which he used in later years to dream
of one particular bit of Oxfordshire landscape.
'I have,' (Shelley wrote in the _Speculations on Metaphysics_, just
five years after this Michaelmas Term), 'beheld scenes, with the
intimate and unaccountable connexion of which with the obscure parts
of my own nature, I have been irresistibly impressed. I have beheld a
scene which has produced no unusual effect on my thoughts. After the
lapse of many years, I have dreamed of this scene. It has hung on my
memory, it has haunted my thoughts, at intervals, with the pertinacity
of an object connected with human affections. I have visited this
scene again. Neither the dream could be dissociated from the
landscape, nor the landscape from the dream, nor feelings, such as
neither singly could have awakened, from both. But the most remarkable
event of this nature, which ever occurred to me, happened five years
ago at Oxford. I was walking with a friend, in the neighbourhood of
that city, engaged in earnest and interesting conversation. We
suddenly turned the corner of a lane, and the view, which its high
banks and hedges had concealed, presented itself. The view consisted
of a windmill, standing in one among many plashy meadows, inclosed
with stone walls; the irregular and broken ground, between the wall
and the road on which we stood; a long low hill behind the windmill,
and a grey covering of uniform cloud spread over the evening sky. It
was that season when the last leaf had just fallen from the scant and
stunted ash. The scene surely was a common scene; the season and the
hour little calculated to kindle lawless thought; it was a tame
uninteresting assemblage of objects, such as would drive the
imagination for refuge in serious and sober talk, to the evening
fireside, and the dessert of winter fruits and wine. The effect which
it produced in me was not such as could have been expected. I suddenly
remembered to have seen that exact scene in some dream of long----
'Here I was obliged to leave off, overcome by thrilling horror.'
To this extraordinary revelation of one of the innermost chambers of a
human soul by the soul's own self, Mrs. Shelley long after her husband's
death appended this note:--
'I remember well his coming to me from writing it, pale and agitated,
to seek refuge in conversation from the fearful emotions it excited.
No man, as these fragments prove, had such keen sensations as Shelley.
His nervous temperament was wound up by the delicacy of his health to
an intense degree of sensibility, and while his active mind pondered
for ever upon, and drew conclusions from, his sensations, his reveries
increased their vivacity, till they mingled with, and were one with
thought, and both became absorbing and tumultuous, even to physical
pain.'
Why this horror, that caused Shelley to drop the pen, at this recollection
of a common-place bit of landscape, justly styled 'a tame and
uninteresting assemblage of objects,' beheld by him for the first time
just five years ago;--no, not this horror _at_ the recollection of so tame
a scene, but this horror _at_ recollecting how often the uninteresting
scene had recurred to him in his dreams? Those who would know the Real
Shelley, whose long locks, peculiar dress, and eccentric aspect, were
matters of tattle and laughter in the common-rooms of the colleges in
1810-11, should ponder this self-revelation of Shelley's own soul, and
should also take heed of his widow's note upon it. Let readers recall what
they have been told of the way in which Byron's memory, sensibility, and
imagination acted and inter-acted upon one another; the memory stirring
the sensibility, the sensibility quickening the imagination, the
imagination stimulating the memory again and again, till the recollections
of old impressions far surpassed the original impressions in vividness and
intensity; and let them then observe how Shelley was similarly
constituted, with a memory singularly retentive of particular impressions,
a sensibility (apt to be roused to morbid activity by these recollected
impressions), and an imagination no less quick at the instance of
sensibility to intensify the pictures of memory. It was thus that the tame
scene, so clearly and deeply printed in his mind as to be repeatedly
offered by memory to his re-awakening consciousness, acquired a vividness
that was in itself terrifying. But the terror begotten of this vividness
was not the terror that made the poet drop his pen. Whilst his sensibility
was being stirred to morbid and distressing activity by recollection and
fancy, he was suddenly surprised by remembering how repeatedly the same
tame scene had come back to him in dreams,--_i.e._ at the moment of the
re-awakening of consciousness,--and in his agitation, heightened by
perplexity at so singular a fact, the surprise affected him with horror,
even as any surprise (one that is the merest trifle to a cool and
self-possessed mind)--a surprise arising from the rustling of a leaf, the
echo of a footfall, the shadow of a spray by moonlight,--is apt to plunge
the agitated and unbalanced mind into the Horror of Perplexity.
Happy in themselves, Hogg and Shelley did not care to be happy with other
undergraduates, either of their own college or of the other colleges. A
few old Etonians, belonging to other colleges, occasionally visited
University College, to see the whilom Atheist of their former school; but
though Shelley was civil to them, and on the eve of his abrupt withdrawal
from the University paid Halliday a farewell call, he showed no
disposition to be intimate with them. Three or four other undergraduates,
to whom the supremely self-sufficient Mr. Hogg refers loftily as harmless
and inoffensive persons, also found themselves now and then in the young
poet's rooms; but no cordial pressure was put upon them to come oftener.
Mr. Hogg and the freshman were sufficient unto themselves.
Necessarily known, under these circumstances, within their own college as
'the Inseparables,' the two close friends were also known throughout the
University as 'the Inseparables.' How could it be otherwise, when they
were seen by walking men and riding men, day after day (weather
permitting) walking along the roads and over the meadows round about
Oxford? Whilst both were almost daily seen together, it was seldom that
either of them was ever seen 'out of college' without the other. Men who
thus 'keep themselves to themselves' are never popular with the multitude
from whom they hold aloof. There was much curiosity about the two singular
young men, after the publication of the _Posthumous Fragments of Margaret
Nicholson_ (published on, or just before, 17th November, 1810), of which
they were generally understood to be joint-authors;--but the curiosity was
not flattering nor even friendly. It was averred that they aimed at
eccentricity in costume and deportment; that they thought too well of
themselves, and said by their looks, 'We are superior to everybody;' that
Shelley's turn-down collars (worn, of course, so that he might be taken
for another Lord Byron, and capable of writing a better satire than the
_English Bards_), and his blue coat with glittering (Birmingham steel)
buttons, were unutterably ludicrous; that his shock of wildly flowing hair
was a disgrace to the University; that known as Mad Shelley, before he was
sent away from Eton in disgrace, he seemed bent on justifying the
nickname.
If the gossip about the young poetaster and novelist had the note of
malice, it had, also, the ring of sincerity, and was not altogether
wanting in justice. Though the morning on which he awoke to find himself
famous was still in the future, Byron had made himself a celebrity before
he started for the East; and had not the success of the _English Bards and
Scotch Reviewers_ (published in 1809) brought his peculiar collars into
vogue with young gentlemen of poetical aspirations, Shelley would never
have thought of wearing them to everybody's amusement at the University.
Possibly, his blue coat with glittering buttons was not more defiant of
the academic orders touching costume than other coats worn by modish
Oxonians of his period; but the freshman who donned it must have meant to
be observed and talked about. Even Hogg admits that his young friend's
appearance was peculiar even to eccentricity, and that his long and bushy
hair was remarkable, when all other undergraduates wore their hair short,
and that, in consequence of the conspicuous superfluity of his tresses,
the 'little round hat upon his little round head' had a 'troubled and
peculiar' air.
Eccentric in his costume, Mr. Bysshe Shelley, of University College, was
even more eccentric in his demeanour in the public ways. The poor scholar
who fights his way to higher knowledge, whilst toiling for his daily bread
as a clerk or craftsman, must needs read as he runs to and fro between his
place of nightly rest and his place of daily labour, must con the printed
page whilst eating his meals, and seize moments for study without care for
his spectators. But though Hogg commends the Oxonian Shelley for seldom
appearing by himself in the High Street without an open volume under his
eyes, most people will attribute the needless show of studious zeal to a
whimsical affectation rather than to sincere delight in learning, and an
insatiable appetite for knowledge. Why could not Mr. Shelley read his
books in those pleasant rooms where he spent so much time daily in writing
letters for mere amusement, in correcting the proof-sheets of a comically
bad novel, in playing with his air-pump and solar microscope, and in
holding desultory conversations with an agreeable companion?
To appreciate this comical parade of scholarly enthusiasm, readers must
remember how much time the undergraduate consumed in playing with paper
boats and 'making ducks-and-drakes' at the pond under Shotover Hill. Why
did the freshman, so prodigal of precious hours, thus affect the part of a
student set on turning every minute of his time to the best account? What
was his motive in figuring under the public gaze in a character so widely
different from his real character? In answering these questions, readers
should forget, as far as possible, the freshman's subsequent greatness,
and thinking of him as the Eton scatter-brain, judge him precisely as they
would judge any youngster, who should behave in the same absurd fashion in
this present year of grace.
The freshman, who read the Latin and Greek classics as he paced 'the
High,' had other ways of calling attention to himself in the public
places of Oxford. On their return from a stroll, in cap and gown, Shelley
and Hogg were holding high discourse on certain Platonic questions, when
they encountered on Magdalen Bridge, a woman with a child in her arms,--an
infant that might have been taken clean out of her arms, had the eccentric
freshman encountered no resistance from the lawful owner of the baby.
'Will your baby tell us anything about pre-existence, Madam?' the excited
disputant asked in a piercing voice, as he suddenly caught hold of the
long-robed infant.
The woman was still in the act of recovering the self-possession, of which
so singular an assault had deprived her for a few moments; when Shelley
repeated the question in the same penetrating tone and with unabated
earnestness.
'He cannot speak, Sir,' the woman replied with respectful seriousness.
'Worse and worse!' cried the eccentric undergraduate, shaking his long
locks in a manner that must have heightened the woman's perplexity and
alarm. 'But surely, Madam, the babe can speak if it will, for he is only a
few weeks old. He may fancy, perhaps, that he cannot, but it is only a
silly whim; he cannot have forgotten entirely the use of speech in so
short a time; the thing is absolutely impossible.'
'It is not for me,' replied the woman, eyeing the two youthful gownsmen,
with mingled deference and consternation, 'to dispute with you, Gentlemen,
but I can safely declare that I never heard him speak, nor any child,
indeed, of his age.'
Having thus troubled and frightened the worthy woman, for no purpose,
except that he might execute an awkward and feeble pleasantry, the
gownsman, who liked to be talked about, pressed the baby's cheeks with his
fingers, and turned away saying to his companion, 'How provokingly close
are those new-born babes! But it is no less certain, notwithstanding their
cunning attempts to conceal the truth, that all knowledge is reminiscence:
the doctrine is far more ancient than the times of Plato, and as old as
the venerable allegory, that the Muses are the daughters of Memory; not
one of the Nine was ever said to be the child of Invention.'
Whilst the freshman amused himself at Oxford in ways glanced at in the
foregoing pages, how did he get on with the tutors of his college, and the
other academic authorities? That he had no cause to complain of their
treatment of him during the earlier weeks of his brief time at Oxford, he
admitted in clear and noteworthy terms, to the Etonian who inquired of him
in Hogg's hearing, 'Do you mean to be an Atheist here, too, Shelley?'
To this inquiry, whether he meant to worry, harass, and defy the tutors of
his college as he had worried, harassed, and defied the persons put in
authority over him at Eton, the University College freshman answered
decidedly, 'No! certainly not. There is no motive for it; there would be
no use in it; they are very civil to us here; they never interfere with
us; it is not like Eton.'
For the precise words of this reply, represented by Hogg as having been
made by Shelley, the biographer was doubtless indebted in some degree to
his imagination. But even the 'Shelleyan enthusiasts' will admit that the
tenor of the reply was something Hogg might have remembered. Bearing in
mind also that Hogg disliked the University College 'dons,' and held them
in bitter remembrance as the authors of his own academic disgrace, the
same enthusiasts will admit that he was not likely to have invented such a
piece of testimony to the general inoffensiveness of 'the dons' he
detested. Even by them, therefore, it will be admitted that at this early
point of his brief 'residence' in college, Shelley admitted that the
'dons' of University College treated him, as gentlemen in their position
should treat a gentleman in his position; that they did not 'interfere'
with him, that he had no grievance against them, or any grounds for
worrying them. They were not like the Eton masters. They were gentlemen.
This admission is the more noteworthy because Hogg (wildly wrong-headed
and considerably less than historically truthful in matters touching his
own and the poet's expulsion from University College) in his bitterness
against those same 'dons,' was at much pains to declare them no gentlemen.
If the 'dons' were civil to Shelley, it must be admitted that he was less
than civil to them. One would like to be able to say otherwise; but the
evidence is conclusive that the undergraduate was uncivil to the 'dons' of
his college, and to 'dons' not of his college, both in his bearing towards
them, and his speech of them.
On the very first evening of their acquaintance, Shelley withdrew from
Hogg's rooms at 6.45 p.m., immediately 'after wine,' in order to attend a
lecture on mineralogy,--leaving his entertainer with a promise to return
to tea. An hour later he reappeared, chilly and disappointed. The evening
was raw and cold, and the lecture had 'bored' him. He would never listen
to another lecture by the dull lecturer.
Coming close up to Hogg, and speaking in a shrill whisper, the young
gentleman said with an arch look,--
'I went away, indeed, before the lecture was finished. I stole away
for it was so stupid, and I was so cold, that my teeth chattered. The
Professor saw me, and appeared to be displeased. I thought I could
have got out without being observed; but I struck my knee against a
bench, and made a noise, and he looked at me. I am determined that he
shall never see me again.'
'What did the man talk about?' Hogg asked.
'About stones! about stones!' answered the freshman (just then
affecting to be an enthusiastic student of natural science). 'About
stones!--stones, stones, stones!--nothing but stones!--and so drily.
It was wonderfully tiresome--and stones are not interesting in
themselves!'
Discreditable to the youngster's intelligence and scientific knowledge,
the story is highly discreditable to his breeding. Instead of being
'uninteresting things in themselves,' stones are things of extreme
interest. If the lecture was dull, he was bound by academic etiquette and
common social courtesy, to remain to the end of it. As the lecture was
poorly attended, he was especially bound by politeness to hear it out to
the last word. Leaving the lecture as he did, blundering out of the room
with noise so as to attract the lecturer's attention, he was guilty of an
extravagance of incivility and rudeness to one of the Professors[5] of his
University. The freshman, who in the first week or ten days of his
'residence in college,' could behave in this way to the lecturer, who had
bored him, was a freshman who on the slightest provocation would be 'an
Atheist' at Oxford, in the same sense in which he had been an Atheist at
Eton.
A few days after this incident, the freshman (the _brilliant_ author of
_Zastrozzi_ and _St. Irvyne_) discovered that the tutors of University
College were '_very dull people_.' One of these very dull people, in the
performance of his official duty, sent for the freshman to speak with him
about the subjects of study to which he should give his mind, and the
lectures he should attend. The interview between the dull person and the
brilliant Mr. Bysshe Shelley (author of _Zastrozzi_ and certain _Original
Poetry_ that was not original) left the younger gentleman with a mean
opinion of his intellectual adviser, and probably left the elder gentleman
with a no less unfavourable opinion of his pupil. What took place at this
interview shall be told here in the words of the pupil, whose _ex parte_
account of the matter (given to his friend, Mr. Hogg) is by no means
creditable to the narrator.--
'They are very dull people here!' the freshman remarked one evening
soon after he came 'into college.' 'A little man sent for me this
morning, and told me, in an almost inaudible whisper, that I must
read. "You must read," he said many times in his small voice. I
answered that I had no objection. He persisted: so, to satisfy him,
for he did not appear to believe me, I told him I had some books in my
pocket, and I began to take them out. He stared at me, and said that
was not exactly what he meant. "You must read _Prometheus Vinctus_,
and _Demosthenes de Corona_, and _Euclid_!" "Must I read _Euclid_?" I
asked sorrowfully. "Yes, certainly; and when you have read the Greek
works, I have mentioned, 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.'
The reader may be left to fill in and expand this brief sketch of an
interview between one of the tutors of University College and the
freshman, who acknowledged that the same tutors were 'very civil' to the
undergraduates of the college. However, filled in and expanded, it must
remain the account of an interview, in which the tutor, behaving with
proper considerateness, and in no degree going outside the lines of his
official duty, was treated with freedom, bordering on gross impertinence,
by the pupil. Can anyone peruse the brief account without coming to the
conclusion that Shelley gave and meant to give Hogg the impression, that
he had treated the tutor saucily, _smoked_ him elegantly (if I may use a
word of obsolete slang), or, as school-boys would say, 'cheeked him' to
his face. Of course Shelley's words come to us through Hogg, who is
stigmatized as a treacherous and false friend by the 'Shelleyan
enthusiasts.' But even they will admit that Hogg (with a personal interest
in making the world imagine that the authorities of University College
treated him and Shelley with unprovoked harshness) was not likely to
misrepresent Shelley in this particular matter to his disadvantage.
Having discovered that the tutors of University College were 'dull
people,'--a sentiment in which his familiar friend concurred,--Mr. Bysshe
Shelley reminded Hogg on a subsequent occasion how very dull they were.
Hogg was looking over one of his friend's Latin exercises, a translation
into Latin of a portion of a paper in the _Spectator_, when he drew
Shelley's attention to 'many portions of heroic verses, and even several
entire verses,' observing that they were 'defects in a prose composition.'
Smiling archly, the freshman replied in his peculiar piercing whisper, 'Do
you think they will observe them? I inserted them intentionally to try
their ears! I once showed up a theme at Eton to old Keate, in which there
were a great many verses; but he observed them, scanned them, and asked
why I had introduced them? I answered, that I did not know they were
there; this was partly true and partly false; but he believed me, and
immediately applied to me the line, in which Ovid says of himself:
"Et quod tentabam dicere, versus erat."'
It was thus that the modest and loyal Shelley (as he is styled by 'the
enthusiasts') dealt with the tutors who were very civil to him,--putting
blemishes into his Latin exercises, in the hope that, by overlooking them,
the dull people would afford him another occasion for ridiculing their
dullness. Surely the freshman, who dealt with and talked of his tutors in
this style, was ripe and yearning to rebel against them, even as he had
rebelled against his masters at Eton. 'I answered,' he says of his reply
to Dr. Keate, 'that I did not know they were there; _this was partly true
and partly false_,'--words to remind the reader of the semi-delusions (as
Peacock called them) of the poet's later time. 'This was partly true and
partly false!' What an admission respecting the Etonian Shelley, who (to
use Lady Shelley's words), was 'more outspoken and truthful than other
boys!'
Though they saw at once he had no intention of throwing himself heartily
into the studies of the place, and had reason to smile at certain of his
more grotesque eccentricities, the tutors of University College discovered
no more serious cause for complaining of the freshman's behaviour during
Michaelmas term. On the contrary, as they of course were not ignorant of
the character he had borne, and the trouble he had given at Eton, and even
of the circumstances that occasioned his premature withdrawal from the
school, the tutors of the Oxford College may well have congratulated
themselves on the general orderliness of his behaviour, and have imagined
if they left him to his own course, and interfered with him as little as
possible, the perverse and contumacious Atheist of Eton would go through
an ordinary academic career without discredit. It is not to their shame
that they neither detected nor suspected his latent genius, which, besides
being latent, was so absolutely dormant, that it may be said to have had
no existence up to a time, considerably later than his expulsion from
Oxford. All they could say of him in the earlier of his two
residence-terms was that he behaved fairly well.
Thus much they could say of him. Living almost entirely with a single
friend (even as Byron in his earliest time at Cambridge lived in shy
seclusion almost entirely with a young chorister and a single friend of
gentle degree), he kept morning chapels with fair regularity, attended a
sufficient number of the college lectures, 'pricked _æger_' (when he was
quite well) no oftener than usage permitted, gave no noisy wine-parties,
had no noisy acquaintances, never 'knocked' into college after the
appointed hours for 'knocking in,' showed no propensity to any kind of
dissipation. It was true that he appeared 'in hall' less often than so
quiet a young gentleman might be expected to appear at the freshmen's
dinner-table; but attendance 'at hall' was not insisted on. True, also,
that he was understood to have written an extremely silly novel and a very
absurd book of poems; but it was well and needful young men should amuse
themselves, and better that they should amuse themselves with pen and ink
than with dice and cards.
Throughout the term, Shelley was more occupied with his literary
diversions than with the serious studies recommended by his tutor. Whilst
correcting the proofs of the _Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson_
(published _on_ or a little before 17th November, 1810, by J. Munday, of
the firm of Munday and Slatter, Printers and Booksellers, _Herald_ Office,
High Street, Oxford), he was in correspondence with Mr. John Joseph
Stockdale, of Pall Mall, about _The Wandering Jew_, and writing verses
that were shown to Hogg, and probably sent without delay to his sister
Elizabeth and Miss Harriett Grove, to each of whom he wrote frequently.
Before there was laughter in the colleges over the _Posthumous Fragments_
(a performance that, doubtless, found more readers than admirers in the
University), he had returned the amended manuscript of _St. Irvyne_ to the
Pall Mall publisher; and before he had done with the proofs of that
singular tale, or, at the latest, before the story was offered to the
circulating libraries, he was at work upon another novel (which never saw
the light, and probably was never finished),--the work of which he wrote
to Mr. Stockdale on 18th December, 1810:--
'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.'
In the same term (probably during the second month of it) he found time to
make, with Hogg's assistance, 'the very careful analysis' (mentioned in
Hogg's _Life_) of Hume's _Essays_, to which he was chiefly indebted for
the theological views of _The Necessity of Atheism_, and for the other
arguments, with which he troubled the minds of the several indiscreet
persons, whom he lured with delusive letters into confidential controversy
on matters pertaining to religion.
From this survey of his literary diversions and other ways of spending his
time during this academic term, it is obvious that the freshman had not
many hours for strenuous study. Few, indeed, were the minutes left to him
out of the twenty-four hours for any purpose, when he had spent _five_
hours in bed, an hour in attending chapel and breakfasting, two or three
hours in attending lectures, an hour in playing with his scientific toys,
an hour or two in writing letters to some of his numerous correspondents,
two hours in correcting proofs and producing fresh copy for the printers,
four hours in walking (with 'breaks' for pistol practice, playing with
paper boats, and 'making ducks-and-drakes' on the water), an hour at
dinner and supper, from two to four hours in his usual evening-nap, and
four hours in conversation with his peculiar friend. Some reading,
together with much talk, was doubtless done by the friends during these
last-mentioned four hours; but though it may be refreshing and otherwise
serviceable, the reading, which two sociable and naturally loquacious
fellow-students get through in each other's company, is never strenuous
and 'hard reading,'--must ever be more or less light and desultory. The
best apology to be made for the freshman's practice of conning the printed
page in the High Street, is that his various diversions left him so little
time for reading in his own rooms.
Whilst amusing himself with his young friend, whose eccentricities
afforded him so much amusement, the lightly humorous and severely
practical Hogg (ever with an eye to the 'first-class' and the
'fellowship,' that should serve him as stepping-stones to higher social
success, if not to social greatness) held to his hard-reading and was a
prudent economist of the time, which the freshman spent in busy idleness.
Rising from his bed at seven, and passing the earlier hours of the day on
the work for which he had come to Oxford, the reading-man never entered
Shelley's rooms before one p.m., and sometimes kept away from them till a
later hour of the afternoon. In the evening he resumed his studies, and
pursued them without interruption, whilst Shelley took his
evening-slumber, lying sometimes on a sofa, but oftener on the hearth-rug
before the large fire, that, ever bright and fierce, never burnt too
fiercely for his comfort. Suddenly overcome by drowsiness the slight and
nervous stripling surrendered himself to torpor almost in an instant, and
dropping on the sofa or rug, lay in deep lethargy for two or three (on
some evenings for four) hours, stretched like a cat before the glowing
fire. If he dropt off in this fashion at six o'clock, he slept for four
hours; if he fell into slumber at eight o'clock he slept for only two
hours. Whatever the time when it began, the nap of profound slumber--never
a short one--ended at ten o'clock, or within a few minutes. That the heat
of the glowing stove affected the sleeper agreeably, was obvious from the
way in which he rolled away from any object that screened him from the
fire, and placed his little head so that it felt more sensibly the ardour
of the burning coals. Occasionally he talked in his sleep, more often his
rest was not less silent than long. Whilst the youngster slept, the
reading-man worked steadily at his books and papers.
Recovering consciousness as suddenly as he lost it, Shelley was no sooner
awake than he was restored to perfect mental alertness. Rising to his feet
with startling alacrity, he was ready for talk as soon as he had rubbed
his eyes and passed his long fingers through his long hair. At the same
instant, the north-countryman looked up from his books and turned away
from his papers. On different evenings, the talk ran on poetry and
science, logic and history, morals and religion, man's relation to the
universe, the soul's immortality, the errors of the creeds, and the
reasons why a reasonable man should not believe in anything. Sometimes the
talk resulted in reference to books, and the reference to books for
particular passages led sometimes to larger reading of them. If it was not
begun and perfected, the 'very careful analysis' of Hume's _Essays_ was
often referred to, reconsidered and amended at these nocturnal
conferences.
At other times, when the youthful philosophers were weary of high and
exhausting themes, the talk turned on their domestic interests, their
kindred and prospects, their respective homes and counties, the humours of
Durham and Yorkshire, and the manners of Sussex. When the gossip played
about these homely topics, the freshman was even more entertaining to his
delightful and incomparable friend, than when they discoursed on loftier
matters. Lying back in his chair, and laughing in his sleeve as he tried
to discriminate between the fact and fiction of his companion's marvellous
communications, Mr. Hogg, of University College, learnt many things that
were not altogether true of Field Place, its inmates, and its traditions.
From the commencement of their friendship, it was obvious to the young
gentleman from the neighbourhood of Stockton-on-Tees, that his friend's
statements were to be taken with allowance for the vigour of a fertile
fancy, and the speaker's propensity for drawing the colloquial long-bow.
When the scientific enthusiast described with needless emphasis and much
extravagant gesticulation how nearly he had killed himself at Eton, by
inadvertently swallowing some mineral poison, the interested but scarcely
sympathetic listener suspected that a lively imagination was in some
degree accountable for the thrilling tale. The stories about the 'Old
Snake' were received in the same sceptical spirit by the auditor, who
regarded the staggering legends as signally wanting in 'the commonplace
truth of ordinary matters of fact,' though doubtless rich in 'the far
higher truth of poetical verity and mythological necessity.' The
Michaelmas Term was still young, when the same sceptical auditor listened
with more interest than credulity to Shelley's account of the way in which
he was saved from the madhouse, to which he would have been consigned by
his inhuman father, had it not been for Dr. Lind's timely and intrepid
action. Before the Term had grown old, Mr. Hogg had heard much, of which
he believed little, to the discredit of the worthy, though curiously
pompous gentleman, who retained the confidence of the New Shoreham
electors, without possessing his eldest son's good opinion.
To say that Shelley told his whole heart and mind to his fellow-collegian
during this season of their closest and most cordial intimacy, would be
saying too much of a young man, whose candour was less real than
apparent:--of the rash and seemingly reckless speaker who, resembling
Byron in the freedom with which he talked of his private affairs to slight
acquaintances and the whole world, resembled him also in having reserves
from those to whom he was most communicative, even at the moments when he
seemed most incapable of secresy or any other kind of self-restraint.
Hogg, however, may well have imagined that nothing was withheld from him
by the freshman, who, talking to him copiously of half-a-hundred matters
he had better have kept to himself, submitted his letters from Field Place
to so recent an acquaintance, letters from his father, and letters
(containing specimens of her poetry) from his sister. Expressing great
admiration of the young lady's verse and prose, Mr. Hogg was vastly
tickled by the peculiarities of Mr. Timothy Shelley's epistles, which he
turned to ridicule with much piquant sprightliness, and to the lively
gratification of their writer's son.
Because these epistles began in kindly fashion with 'My Dear Boy,' the
writer was suspected of wishing to imitate the style of Chesterfield's
Letters, and also of thinking he resembled the courtly Earl in elegance,
accomplishments, and worldly wisdom. It was easy, and no less pleasant
than easy to the two undergraduates, to make fun of the epistles, so
curiously deficient in coherence and perspicacity. Always _franked_ by
the member for New Shoreham, the letters sometimes 'scolded the dear boy
nobly, royally, gloriously.' One of these franked, furious and fiery
missives having moved Hogg to speak of it derisively, and with a sprightly
reference to a familiar line of Campbell's 'Hohenlinden,' Shelley
henceforth took to speaking of his father as 'the fiery Hun.' The son had
other nicknames for the father, whom he so often offended,--sometimes
unintentionally, and sometimes with deliberate and malicious purpose to
rouse and exasperate the irritability, that afforded the two youthful
Oxonians so much diversion;--the irritability which the son (of whose
poetical light and sweetness so much has been written by fantastic
adulators) was bound by filial duty to consider tenderly and soothe to the
utmost of his ability; was bound by honour and care for his own dignity to
screen and palliate. Writing and talking of him as 'the Fiery Hun,'
Shelley could also speak of his father contemptuously as 'Killjoy' and
'the Old Boy,' in the letters that passed between him and Hogg after their
dismissal from University College.
Whilst Hogg was exquisitely droll about the defects of Mr. Timothy
Shelley's letters, he of course heard all about his friend's passion for
his cousin, Harriett Grove, which, though it never touched the boy's
deepest and strongest affections, was still a sufficiently fervid
sentiment to justify him in thinking it a grand and eternal devotion. It
is not surprising that Shelley opened his heart on this interesting topic
to his constant companion. On the contrary, it would be strange had he
done otherwise. It is rare for a boy to pass through his first love-fever
without confiding to a sympathetic hearer of his own sex, how he fares
under the violent delights and still more violent anxieties of his heart's
unrest. In speaking to his dear and incomparable Hogg of Miss Harriett
Grove's beauty and accomplishments, her irresistible voice and richly
radiant tresses, her composure that too nearly resembled coldness, and the
circumspection that might not be imputed to her for unkindness, young
Bysshe Shelley only did as most youngsters would have done under similar
circumstances,--as most youngsters under similar circumstances will do, to
the end of Time and Love.
But though he did nothing unusual or otherwise remarkable in talking of
his love and his Harriett's loveliness to his one familiar male friend,
Mr. Percy Bysshe Shelley did what few young Englishmen of gentle lineage
and culture would have done,--what no young gentleman could do, without
lacking in some degree the delicate fastidiousness and proud reserve
befitting a youth of breeding and quality,--when, out of fraternal concern
for the young lady's welfare, and in the fervour of his generous affection
for so incomparable a friend, he invited Mr. Thomas Jefferson Hogg to
visit Field Place on the first convenient opportunity, for the express
purpose of seeing the eldest daughter of the house, falling in love with
her, and marrying her. It is not often that a young lady (_ætat._ sixteen,
living under the protection of her father and mother) is thus offered in
marriage by her elder brother (_ætat._ eighteen) to a young gentleman whom
she has never seen. It does not seem to have occurred to Mr. Bysshe
Shelley that his father and mother were entitled to a voice on the
disposal of their daughter in marriage, that before entering on
negotiations on so delicate a subject, with a gentleman of whose person
and family they were alike ignorant, he should consult the Fiery Hun on
the business, and learn from the Fiery Hun's wife, whether the arrangement
would be agreeable to her feelings.
From what is known of Mr. Thomas Jefferson Hogg's character and lively
humour in his later time, one may imagine that in the lightness and levity
of his earlier time he was vastly tickled by his young friend's flattering
proposal for this alliance of their respective houses; that he saw the
probable advantage of wedding the daughter of so wealthy a baronet, as Mr.
Timothy Shelley would become on the death of his aged father; and that he
was strongly predisposed to admire his young friend's sister, who was said
to resemble her brother in the colour of her eyes and hair, no less than
in the pink-and-white freshness of her complexion, and to surpass him
greatly in facial comeliness, by virtue of the delicate symmetry of a
countenance, whose most prominent feature was faultless in size and shape.
Anyhow, the undergraduate from the northern county, who, on account of its
remoteness, had no intention of returning to his father's roof at
Christmas or Easter, consented readily to a project that, even if nothing
more came of it, would enable him to pass the shorter vacations in
congenial society at no inconvenient distance from the University.
It was doubtless a matter for regret and apologetic explanation with Mr.
Bysshe Shelley, that, owing to the Fiery Hun's peculiarities, he could
not safely carry his friend with him to Sussex at the close of the
Michaelmas term, but was under the necessity of preceding him to Field
Place and foregoing the delights of his society, until he should be
authorized by the capricious, and too often austere Killjoy, to invite him
thither for the gaieties of Christmas and the New-Year. The evidences are
not conclusive on the point; but they afford particulars from which it may
be fairly assumed that, for several days after Shelley's withdrawal from
the University for the Christmas holidays, Hogg (whether lingering at
Oxford, or staying at the London Hotel, where he received several letters
from Shelley in the closing days of December, 1810, and the opening days
of January, 1811) looked to each successive post for an invitation to
Field Place, and to the presence of the young lady, with whom he was
predisposed to fall in love, and had promised to fall in love, if he found
it in his power to do so.
CHAPTER XI.
THE CHRISTMAS VACATION OF 1810-11.
Presentation copies of _St. Irvyne_--Shelley resorts to
Deception--Shelley in Disgrace at Field Place--Harriett Grove's
Dismissal of her Suitor--The Squire's Anger--Mrs. Shelley's Alarm for
her Girls--Shelley's Troubles--His Rage against Intolerance--His Wild
Letters to Hogg--'Married to a Clod'--Stockdale's Design--His
Intercourse with Shelley's Father--More Negotiations with the
Pall-Mall Publisher--Shelley a Deist--Controversial
Correspondence--Shelley's Attempt to enlighten his Father--His Passage
from Deism to Atheism--The Squire relents to his Son--Hogg invited to
Field Place--Stockdale's Disappointment--Hogg invited to Field
Place--Stockdale's Character--His Scandalous _Budget_.
Leaving Oxford at the end of Michaelmas term, 1810, and journeying to
Sussex by way of London, Mr. Bysshe Shelley was at Field Place on the 18th
of December, on which day he wrote to Mr. John Joseph Stockdale, of Pall
Mall, expressing approval of the publisher's advertisement of _St.
Irvyne_, and begging him to send a copy of the absurd story to each of the
three following persons:--Miss Marshall, of Horsham, Sussex; Thomas
Medwin, Esq., of the same place; and Thomas Jefferson Hogg, Esq., at the
Reverend Mr. Dayrell's, Lynnington (a misspelling of Lillingstone)
Dayrell, Buckinghamshire. At the same time the author requested that six
copies should be sent to himself, and observed, at the close of his brief
note, 'I will enclose the printer's account for your inspection in another
letter;' words of some moment to the reader who would get a view of the
circumstances that soon resulted in the young author's rupture with his
publisher. Under ordinary circumstances, the printer's bill for printing a
book published at the author's risk would be paid by the publisher, and
would not come under the author's notice save as an item of his
publisher's account. Paying the printer with a bill, or with ready-money,
on which discount would be allowed, the publisher would charge the author
with the full sum of the printer's account, making on the transaction a
considerable profit (to the amount of the discount), if he pays the
printer in 'cash' and is promptly repaid by the author. Mr. Stockdale, of
course, would not have been slow to arrange for getting this advantage,
had he not by the middle of December discovered grounds for mistrusting
the author's ability to pay the charges for which he was responsible; or
had he not somehow come to the opinion that the author (a minor) should be
pressed for immediate payment of the costs of producing a book, whose sale
would necessarily be trifling. That Mr. Gosnell, of Little Queen Street,
London (the printer to whom Mr. Stockdale had himself sent 'the copy' of
_St. Irvyne_, after the MS. had been 'fitted for the press'), was thus
asked to press the author for immediate payment for the printing, is alike
significant of the publisher's distrust of the author's solvency, and of
the publisher's unfavourable opinion of the book.
If he was not in trouble and disgrace at Field Place from the first moment
of his return to his boyhood's home, Mr. Percy Bysshe Shelley did not pass
many days of the Christmas vacation in Sussex, before his father spoke to
him sharply, and his mother regarded him with sorrowful disapproval. A
letter he wrote to Hogg on 20th December, 1810--a letter to be found in
Hogg's _Life_--shows that, at so early a time of the holidays, he found
himself in a position of divers annoyances, several humiliations, and much
embarrassment. Acting in the name of their daughter, and also with the
authority pertaining to them as her natural guardians, Mr. and Mrs. Grove,
of Fern House, Wiltshire, had written to Field Place, expressing
reasonable surprise and displeasure at their nephew's conduct in abusing
the privileges of familiar intercourse so far and so outrageously as to
write his cousin Harriett Grove (_ætat._ 17 to 18) letters, whose main
purpose was to draw her into religious controversy, and lure her from
Christianity,--the faith in which she had been educated; the faith of her
parents and kindred. To Mr. and Mrs. Grove, it necessarily seemed that in
thus acting towards their daughter, Bysshe had acted dishonourably, and
shown himself unworthy of the love he required from her; unworthy even of
the friendly intercourse with her, to which he had been entitled as her
near kinsman. Under these circumstances, Shelley was informed that his
correspondence with Miss Harriett Grove must be stayed at least for the
present, and that his hope of marrying her must be dismissed for ever.
Holding old and wholesome views on certain questions of honour, though he
certainly was no person to be compared with the Saviour of the World, Mr.
Timothy Shelley concurred in the sentiments of Fern House on this affair,
and told his son so in terms none too daintily worded. 'The Fiery Hun'
blushed to think he had a son capable of sapping the faith and principles
of a young lady, to whose familiar confidence he had been admitted under
conditions of which no gentleman, old or young, was unmindful. To poor
Mrs. Shelley, the case was even worse. Regarding the point of honour with
her husband's eyes, she thought also of the monstrous wickedness of her
first-born child, who, throwing from him the truths of the Christian
religion, had covered them with ridicule. In alarm, she thought of her
girls. If Bysshe could act thus wickedly to his cousin Harriett, what was
there to withhold him from acting in like manner to his sister Elizabeth?
He and she were so closely attached to one another, that it was their
practice to read and walk and write poetry together. During the whole of
his single term of residence at Oxford, there had been letters passing
between them. Had he already inspired the dear girl with sceptical
sentiment? Instead of submitting to her father and mother, as Harriett
Grove had done, the evil counsel he was giving her, had Elizabeth taken
his impious words to heart? Was she pondering them secretly, and brooding
over them, in doubt whether she should reject them as false, or hold to
them as true? Or had she embraced them no less impetuously and strongly
than furtively? Was she already a disbeliever?--an infidel? Then the
terrified mother thought of her younger girls,--Mary, and Hellen, and
Margaret. If he could tamper with the religious tenets of so young a girl
as Elizabeth, still only sixteen years old, what was there in the
tenderness of their infantile years to render Bysshe more heedful for the
spiritual health and tranquillity of Elizabeth's younger sisters?
It needs no lively imagination to conceive the terror that agitated this
anxious mother, to realize the apprehensions that, fretting her spirits
incessantly, gave her sleepless nights and sorrowful days. Instead of
being touched and subdued by the words and looks, that made him cognizant
of her maternal solicitude, the young gentleman (who might have been the
Saviour of the World) wrote lightly to his fellow-collegian on January 11,
1811, about his mother's alarm. She imagined him on the high road to
perdition. She fancied him set on making infidels of his little sisters.
Could anything be more laughable? It was, however, no laughable matter to
the poor lady; and it should not have been a matter for laughter with her
son. Why was his mother a simpleton for allowing such fears to trouble
her, when the young gentleman was craftily and insidiously sapping his
eldest sister's belief in Christianity, apportioning the new doctrine of
Free Thought with nice consideration for her girlish timidity, and for the
weakness of her intellect,--giving it in doses large enough to awaken and
stimulate curiosity, without stirring her to amazement and horror?
As he was working in this condescending and considerate manner on
Elizabeth's darkness and weakness on the 26th of December, 1810, why was
his mother a mere goose for fearing he might be no less condescending, and
considerate, and slily beneficent to Elizabeth's younger sisters?
Moreover the time was near at hand when, in his fanatical intolerance of
all opinion from which he differed, the youthful philosopher regarded
Elizabeth's younger sisters as quite old enough to digest the crumbs of
truth, that fell from his lips. With all her disposition to minimize and
palliate the feelings of her poet, Lady Shelley admits that such a
youngster as the Oxonian Shelley would be a perplexing member of any
household with a brood of children to be thought for. Indeed, she even
goes the length of saying that, before accusing Mr. Timothy Shelley of
treating his heir with inadequate tenderness, people should ask themselves
how they would like to have in their houses a Spinozist or a Calvinist, so
set on making converts, as to seek them in the butler's pantry or the
children's schoolroom. Lady Shelley is even more particular, in moving
every Christian mother to think, how she would like to entertain for her
guest a Spinozist, desirous of making her 'youngest daughter' concur in
his opinions.
Readers should bear in mind how clearly the author of _Shelley Memorials:
From Authentic Sources_, intimates that, instead of being the absurd and
laughable fancy her son declared it, poor Mrs. Timothy Shelley's fear for
the spiritual safety of her younger girls was nothing less than a
reasonable anticipation of what actually took place in their schoolroom,
in respect to the youngest of them, before the poet turned his back on
Field Place for ever.
Just about the same time at which his attention was called to his son's
sceptical opinions, and his zeal for making converts to them, by Mr. and
Mrs. Grove, of Fern House, Mr. Timothy Shelley received some information,
touching the same matters of painful interest from Mr. John Joseph
Stockdale, of Pall Mall. As the man of business, who lived to be one of
the blackest sheep of 'the trade,' was at no point of his career a person
of extraordinary worth, the readers of the present chapter are not
required to attribute the publisher's action in this particular business
to any sincere concern for the younger gentleman's welfare, or for his
father's happiness. Before he became uneasy about the printer's bill, for
whose payment he was of course responsible, should the undergraduate of
University College fail to pay it, Mr. Stockdale had been warned by
several circumstances to exercise greater caution in his dealings with the
young gentleman, whose _Original Poetry_ had proved so inconveniently
wanting in originality. _Zastrozzi_, of which he doubtless took a view
after learning the name of its publisher, can scarcely have raised the
author of the Victor-and-Cazire book in Mr. Stockdale's estimation. The
quality of _St. Irvyne_, and the pains he had himself taken to fit it for
the press, cannot have disposed the man of business to think highly of the
author's ability. What he had heard about _The Wandering Jew_ cannot have
disposed the publisher to think less contemptuously of the young
gentleman's literary parts and ambition. The note touching the Hebrew
Essay to the discredit of the Christian religion, was only one of several
matters, to indicate to the publisher that his youthful client's reading
would possibly result in perilous writing. One can imagine how the
publisher of novels and inferior poetry received the suggestion that he
should publish the novel on _Metaphysical and Political Opinions_. On the
approach of the Christmas holidays (1810-11), it was clear to Mr.
Stockdale he had better press for a pecuniary settlement with Mr. Percy
Bysshe Shelley; and in case the young gentleman was not likely to pay his
debt, to take measures for getting the money out of the young gentleman's
father. Hence, the publisher's earlier interviews with the Member for New
Shoreham, who was instructed that his son had fallen into evil hands at
Oxford, and was a supporter of sceptical philosophy. How little the
publisher got by his pains, and how he avenged himself on the Member of
Parliament, whom he failed to bleed, are matters for subsequent pages.
When he wrote to Hogg on the 20th of December, 1810, Shelley had endured
and was still enduring several sharp annoyances. Angry words had escaped
'the Fiery Hun,' who scolded his son for writing ridiculous books when he
should be reading learned ones at Oxford; scolded him for running into
debt with a publisher and printer, whom he had no means of paying; scolded
him for adopting the damnable opinions of Hume, Paine, and the other
infidels; scolded him royally for his most ungentlemanlike behaviour, in
trying to lure his cousin Harriett from the sound Christian principles in
which she had been educated by her most virtuous and exemplary parents. It
was the way of fathers to scold their sons thus royally at the beginning
of the present century; and it being part of the paternal style of George
the Third's time, no sound-hearted and loyal-hearted son ever resented so
wholesome, though somewhat turbulent, an exercise of paternal authority.
Now-a-days, fathers bring, or try to bring, their disorderly sons to meet
contrition, with less noise and more dignity, but with speech quite as
galling at the time, and more likely to rankle in the memory. To argue
that Mr. Timothy Shelley was brutal and wanting in natural affection,
because he scolded his naughty boy in this manner, is wild nonsense.
However roundly he was spoken to, Mr. Bysshe Shelley received nothing more
than he deserved. For awhile the father threatened to take his son from
Oxford at once, but the threat was not carried out. It would have been
better for Shelley had his father held to the threat. Mr. Bysshe Shelley's
grand averment that the menace was withdrawn, because he 'would not
consent to it,' is a delicious piece of puerile 'bounce.'
Shelley had reason for discontent. Forbidden to write to his cousin
Harriett, he imagined, for a few days, he had loved her vehemently.
Dismissed by her on account of his opinions, he deemed himself the victim
of religious intolerance. By turns he thought of committing suicide, and
wreaking his vengeance on the religion, which he held accountable for his
greatest trouble. Swearing on what he was pleased to call the altar of
perjured love, he vowed he would put an end to religious intolerance, by
slaying secretly, stabbing secretly, the creed and the sentiment which
generated religious intolerance. Dismissing the thought of killing
himself, he confirmed himself in his purpose to kill superstition; and
whilst maturing his plans for the achievement of this resolve, he
determined to pursue his literary enterprises. But as 'the Fiery Hun'
disapproved of his dealings with publishers, he determined to conceal his
literary designs from his parents. On this point he wrote with instructive
frankness to Hogg. 'There is now,' he wrote to his friend, 'need of all my
art: I must resort to deception.' The deception he practised was to work
on a new novel, with a view to early publication, whilst telling his
father and mother he had no intention of publishing anything again.
'Inconveniences would now result from my owning the novel,' he wrote to
Hogg, 'which I have in preparation for the press. I give out, therefore,
that I will publish no more.' It pleased him to know that every one
believed his false statement, with the exception of the few, who, being in
his confidence, knew that it was a falsehood. One of the persons thus
taken into his confidence was his sister Elizabeth (_ætat._ 16), whom he
thus educated in deceit, by telling her how he was deceiving their
parents. This was the course taken by the singularly outspoken and
truth-loving Shelley in his own home,--towards his father and mother on
the one hand, and towards his sister on the other. At the same time,
whilst deceiving his father and mother, he was debating how he could
impose his new book on a publisher by misrepresenting the tendency and
purpose of the work. He was afraid that, though a thick-skulled man,
Stockdale would detect the falsehood of the statement he was ready to make
about the book.
What further evidence can readers of ordinary intelligence and temper
require that, instead of being more outspoken and truth-loving than other
people, the poet suffered from a deficiency of that repugnance to untruth
which is the prime characteristic of English gentlemen; that he was
capable of telling untruths, and did tell them, for small ends that would
not draw Englishmen of average veracity a single hair's-breadth out of
truth's clear and straight path? Of course the facts, which cannot fail to
bring impartial readers to this painful conclusion, are regarded in
another way, by those 'Shelleyan enthusiasts' who idolize the author of
_Laon and Cythna_ as a being worthy of being likened to the Saviour of the
World. The facts that to impartial minds are evidential of the poet's
untruthfulness, the most extravagant of the Shelleyan zealots regard as so
much evidence that their idol possessed an inordinately powerful
imagination. What stronger evidence can there be of the overpowering
vigour and sway of his fancy, than that so lofty and faultless a being
could imagine himself capable of deceiving his publisher, of telling
falsehoods to his father and mother, of educating his younger sister in
untruth; and could, moreover, deliberately write himself down guilty of
these flagrant offences, of which so faultless a being must have been
innocent as the new-born babe?
Scarcely less noteworthy than his avowal of the deceit he is practising on
his father and mother, are the terms in which Shelley refers to the abrupt
termination of his correspondence with Miss Harriett Grove, and declares
his purpose of avenging himself on Intolerance for the annoyance that has
come to him from the lady's disapproval of his religious scepticism.
As Miss Harriett Grove had never promised to be his wife, but had on the
contrary persisted in assuring her cousin Elizabeth that she might not
anticipate a successful issue to her brother's suit, this talk about
'perjured love' was very much out of place. Still it did no harm; and as
the young gentleman felt it needful to swear on something, and was
precluded by the exigencies of the case from swearing 'on the book,' he,
perhaps, exercised a wise discretion when he elected to 'swear on the
altar of perjured love.' To swear what? That, because he was very much
annoyed at being sent about his business by Miss Harriett Grove, and at
being otherwise reprimanded for troubling her mind with sceptical
sentiments, he would make war upon Intolerance, would fight Intolerance to
the bitter end, would be the death of Intolerance, would 'stab the wretch
in secret.' This was the oath sworn on the altar of perjured love! Having
suffered, more in self-love than in any other of his affections, from a
young lady's disapproval of his religious opinions, and from her parents'
no less cordial repugnance to those opinions, Mr. Bysshe Shelley regarded
himself as a victim of religious intolerance. Yet further,--seeing that
Christians, intolerant of opinions antagonistic to their religious tenets,
would not be intolerant Christians were it not for their Christianity, he
determined to render them tolerant by slaying the religion which he
regarded as the source of their intolerance. 'Indeed, I think it,' he
wrote, 'to the benefit of society to destroy the opinions which
annihilate the dearest of its ties,'--_i.e._ the ties uniting such lovers
as Mr. Bysshe Shelley and Miss Harriett Grove were, before religion
separated them. As the war against Christianity had begun long before the
poet's severance from his cousin, which was, indeed, one of the
consequences of the war, it would, of course, be absurd to attribute the
poet's hatred of the religion to the anger begotten of his dismissal by
Miss Grove. But in accounting for the vehemence with which Shelley pushed
the war, and the spirit in which he extended the field of his operations,
and from being the enemy of a single faith became the foe of all
religions, readers must make allowance for the sense of personal injury
which animated him to swear he would slay Religious Intolerance.
In the letters which Shelley poured upon Hogg, from the 20th of December,
till the end of the academic vacation, one comes upon much more about
Harriett Grove, and his correspondence with her. To skim these flighty and
rhapsodical letters is to miss the information that may be extracted from
them. But to study them carefully is to take the present writer's view of
Shelley's regard for his cousin, from the summer of 1810.
It is clear the cousins never plighted troth to one another. On 23rd
December, 1810, Shelley wishes to know, whether he did wrong in luring his
cousin to correspond with him, in order that they 'might see if by
coincidence of intellect,' it would be well for them 'to enter into a
closer, an eternal union;' the desire for information being clothed in
words, amounting to an admission there had been no regular engagement. In
the same letter, speaking of Miss Grove's coldness, Shelley speaks also of
the failure of his sister's efforts to make the self-possessed beauty
regard him with feelings warmer than those of cousinly kindness. That the
young gentleman's strongest affections were not concerned in the affair
appears from the fact that, within eight days of swearing on the altar of
perjured love, he could write with comparative calmness of his inability
to fall in love at present with any other young lady.
In language that may be suspected of having contributed something to Lord
Dundreary's colloquial style, he wrote to Hogg, on 28th December, 1810,
'at present a thousand barriers oppose any more intimate connexion, any
union with another, which, although unnatural and fettering to a virtuous
mind, are nevertheless unconquerable.' After writing thus calmly, however,
he relapsed into moods, of alternate dejection and fury. He 'slept with a
loaded pistol and some poison last night' (_i.e._ 2nd January, 1811), 'but
did not die.' Again he vowed vengeance on the religious intolerance that
had robbed him of his Harriett. On the 11th January, 1811, he wrote
fiercely to Hogg, 'She is gone! She is lost to me for ever! She is
married! Married to a clod of earth; she will become as insensible as
himself; all these fine capabilities will moulder!'
It may not be inferred from the words 'She is married,' that the
gentlewoman had already become a wife, or that Shelley meant to do more
than announce her engagement to Mr. William Helyar, of Coker Court, Co.
Somerset, whose wife she became in November, 1811, two months after the
future poet's Scotch marriage to Harriett Westbrook. Bearing in mind the
old distinction between marriage and its celebration, and remembering, at
the same time, the ancient doctrine of the Church, that a mere matrimonial
contract was wedlock--though not yet celebrated and sanctified into _holy_
wedlock--readers must take the words as a mere declaration that Miss Grove
had plighted her troth to her future husband. The old ecclesiastical law,
which made matrimonial pre-contract a sufficient ground for nullification
of marriage, was based on the doctrine that an interchange of nuptial
promises was, in itself, marriage. In his 'anti-matrimonialism'--a
sentiment growing more and more powerful in the author of _Zastrozzi_ and
_St. Irvyne_--Shelley, disdainful of the ecclesiastical celebration,
looked upon the interchange of promises ('the engagement' of ordinary
parlance) as the real marriage; and in doing so he was (strange to say) in
accord with the canonists, and with the old matrimonial law that,
surviving in North its extinction in South Britain, was, even to
yesterday, generally known as 'the Scotch marriage-law.'
The clod of earth had a good many acres of land in Wiltshire, Somerset,
and Devonshire, and instead of being the senseless and soulless wretch it
pleased Mr. Bysshe Shelley to imagine him, was a gentleman of good repute
in the three shires, for each of which he was a magistrate. Heir to an
ample estate, he married Miss Harriett Grove in November 1811, and living
with her till death divided them, was never moved to transfer his
affections to another lady. Would life have gone thus pleasantly with the
gentlewoman, who became the mother of children fair and gracious as
herself, had she yielded to the suit of her scatter-brain cousin?
Whilst he was fuming over his sentimental misadventure, and writing
extravagant nonsense about the 'altar of perjured love,' not so much
because he felt his cousin's unkindness acutely, as from a notion that the
poetical proprieties required him to use the language of indignation and
wretchedness, Mr. Bysshe Shelley made frequent mention of his sister
Elizabeth in the letters he sent in steady stream to the young gentleman,
who had been entreated to fall in love with her.
It sadly disarranged the brother's plans for his sister's welfare, that he
could not invite his peculiar friend forthwith to Field Place. The reason
why he could not do so was that his father, already instructed by
Stockdale to attribute his son's scepticism to the influence of his Oxford
friend, had declared his opinion of Mr. Hogg in terms, which satisfied
Bysshe he had better not ask for permission to summon the incomparable
Hogg to Sussex. But though he could not bring them together for the
present, the match-making brother did his best to inspire his sister and
his college-friend with a sentimental regard for one another, that could
not fail to result in mutual love, so soon as they should come together.
Speaking to his sister of his friend in terms of vehement admiration, he
read her the letters that came to him in steady stream from his idolized
and incomparable Hogg. That Hogg (whose sense of humour was allied with a
liberal measure of romantic sensibility) delighted in the notion of
becoming his friend's brother-in-law, and during the holidays even went so
far as to bind himself to fall in love with Miss Shelley, appears from the
letter in which Shelley overflowed with gratitude for so great a
concession to his wishes. 'How,' wrote Shelley to his friend, 'can I find
words to express my thanks for such generous conduct with regard to my
sister, with talents and attainments such as you possess, to promise what
I ought not, perhaps, to have required, what nothing but a dear sister's
intellectual improvement could have induced me to demand?' At Oxford it
had been enough for Shelley to declare a hope that Hogg would become his
brother-in-law. From Field Place, during the Christmas holidays, the
enthusiastic stripling begged Hogg to promise he would satisfy the hope.
Whilst he thus arranged a match between Hogg and his sister, Shelley knew
that his friend was a Freethinker on questions relating to religion. From
what had recently taken place in respect to his sceptical correspondence
with Miss Harriett Grove, he knew that his father and mother concurred
with his uncle and aunt Grove in regarding religious scepticism with
repugnance and horror; knew that his father and mother would regard their
eldest daughter's marriage to a Freethinker as a terrible and supreme
calamity. Yet he was coolly and secretly scheming for such a marriage of
their sixteen-years-old daughter, and was cautiously 'illuminating' her
out of the Christian religion, and otherwise training her to become the
fit wife of a man, whom he had good reason to know her parents would never
consent to accept for their son-in-law. The young gentleman does all this
in absolute indifference to the rights and feelings of his own father and
mother--with absolute carelessness for the serious trouble he is preparing
for his father, the agonizing sorrow he is preparing for his mother. Am I
wrong in saying that the young man (_ætat._ 18), who acted in this manner
to his father and mother and his younger sister, was guilty of domestic
treason?
What was the literary enterprise on which Shelley was at work during the
earlier weeks of this Christmas recess (1810-11)?--the work that was
offered to Mr. Stockdale during the recess?--the work about whose
publication Mr. Hogg, whilst staying at a London hotel, had several
interviews with the Pall-Mall publisher, who, sixteen years later,
professed to have been most unfavourably impressed by the Oxonian's
appearance, speech, and manner, at those interviews? The general opinion
of the 'Shelleyan enthusiasts' is that the work thus submitted to the
bookseller was _The Necessity of Atheism_, the pamphlet that resulted in
Shelley's expulsion from his college? Mr. Garnett has no doubt that the
work was 'either the unlucky pamphlet which occasioned Shelley's expulsion
from Oxford, or something of a very similar description.' Mr. Denis
Florence MacCarthy goes a step further, and speaks of it roundly as the
manuscript of _The Necessity of Atheism_. That the manuscript, which
afforded Stockdale another opportunity for warning Mr. Timothy Shelley to
remove his son from Mr. Hogg's pernicious influences, was a sceptical
performance is unquestionable. But there are grounds for a strong opinion
that it was neither _The Necessity of Atheism_, nor any tract written on
the same lines as that notorious pamphlet. The evidence is conclusive that
up to the time, and beyond the time, when Stockdale was invited to publish
the pamphlet, Shelley believed in the existence of a supreme Deity. He had
for a considerable period ceased to be a Christian. But he still believed
in God. To hold, therefore, that the manuscript declined by Stockdale was
_The Necessity of Atheism_, or 'something of a _very similar
description_,' is to hold that whilst believing in God Shelley wrote a
book to prove there was no God; that whilst believing in the existence of
the Deity he set himself deliberately to work, to force other people into
pure atheism. I cannot believe with Mr. Garnett, and Mr. Denis Florence
MacCarthy, that Shelley was capable of such amazing impiety. Nothing is
stranger in Shelley's story than that the hardest things said of him
should, in so many cases, be uttered by his extravagant idolaters. My
conception of the Oxonian Shelley is that he was an impetuous, unruly,
combative young scatterbrain; disloyal and deceitful to his parents;
certainly capable of falsehood in comparatively small matters to other
people; but I cannot believe he could have been so false to his own soul,
so prodigiously false to his own convictions on the most awful of all
solemn subjects, as to write and seek a publisher for a serious argument
against the belief in God, whilst he himself believed in the Deity.
Let us see from evidences, known to Mr. Garnett, when he wrote his
_Shelley in Pall Mall_, what were some of Shelley's views respecting God,
in the Christmas holidays of 1810-11. On 26th December, 1810, he writes to
Hogg from Field Place:--
'Thanks, _truly_ thanks, for opening your heart to me, for telling me
your feelings to me. Dare I do the same to you? I dare not to myself,
how can I to another, perfect as he may be. I dare not even to God,
whose mercy is great.'
On 3rd January, 1811, the future poet writes to the same correspondent:
'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. If we disbelieve this, the strongest argument in support of
the existence of a future state instantly becomes annihilated.'
Nine days later (12th January, 1811), the future poet writes from Field
Place:--
'I here take God (_and a God exists_) to witness, that I wish
torments, which beggar the futile description of a fancied hell, would
fall upon me; provided I could attain thereby that happiness for what
I love, which, I fear, can never be!... I wish, ardently wish, to be
profoundly convinced of the existence of a Deity, that so superior a
spirit might derive some degree of happiness from my feeble exertions;
for love is heaven, and heaven is love.... I think I can prove the
existence of a Deity--a First Cause.'
After declaring thus emphatically his belief in the existence of a Deity,
Shelley goes on to argue in defence of his conviction.
Thus Shelley is found declaring his belief in the existence of God so late
as 12th January, 1811, when the work declined by Stockdale (the work said
by Mr. Garnett to have been either _The Necessity of Atheism_, 'or
something of a very similar description'), must have already been in the
publisher's hands. The post did not travel seventy years since so quickly
as it travels in these railway times; the work, whatever it was, could not
have been written in a day; brief though it is, _The Necessity of Atheism_
could not have been designed and put on paper in a single morning; yet, on
14th January, 1811, Shelley could write indignantly to Hogg:--
'S[tockdale] has behaved infamously to me; he has abused the
confidence I reposed in him in sending him my work; and he has made
very free with your character, of which he knows nothing, with my
father.'
Moreover, on the 12th January, 1811, Hogg (who saw Stockdale about the
work during his stay in Lincoln's Inn Fields) had left London some six or
eight days. It is, therefore, certain that Shelley was believing in the
existence of God at a time when Mr. Garnett represents him as set on
teaching men that atheism was a necessity.
When did Shelley discard the reasons which had hitherto constrained him to
believe in the existence of God? Clearly at some time subsequent to 12th
January, 1811. Who caused him to discard them?--Mr. Thomas Jefferson Hogg.
To readers of Shelley's afore-mentioned letter of 12th January, 1811, it
is obvious, from the arguments with which he essays to demonstrate the
reasonableness of his belief in a Deity, that, though still clinging to
his belief in God, he was already troubled by, and battling with, his
doubts on the subject. His mind had been so troubled for several days. On
6th January, 1811, he had written from Field Place to Hogg, 'I will
consider your argument against the non-existence of a Deity.' In reply to
Hogg's arguments for _The Necessity of Atheism_, Shelley does his feeble
best (on 6th January, 1811) to demonstrate their unreasonableness. If
Shelley's arguments were sufficient for their purpose, Hogg had argued
with less than his usual ability. Shelley's arguments are puerile, and he
clearly felt their insufficiency, when he followed them up with these
words: 'But I will write again; my head is dizzy to-day, on account of not
taking rest, and a slight attack of typhus.' Hence it appears that from
6th to 12th January, Hogg was arguing against the existence of God, and
Shelley was more earnestly than strenuously arguing for the belief in
Deity. If he was dizzy on 6th January, after replying to Hogg, he was yet
more so on 12th January, 1811, after striving to prove the existence of
God.
The poor lad's head was dizzy, but not from want of sleep, or from typhus
fever: Mr. Thomas Jefferson Hogg had dizzied it with his ingenious
arguments against the existence of Deity. One can conceive how the clever,
hard-headed, humorous young gentleman from the neighbourhood of
Stockton-upon-Tees, smiled over his friend's letters, and exulted at the
signs of his plaything's perplexity. It mattered not a rush to Mr. Hogg,
of University College, Oxford, on which side of a question he argued.
Having done his best to dizzy his young friend out of his belief in God,
and convince him of the necessity of atheism, Mr. Hogg tacked about, and
five or six days later amused himself by constructing some equally
ingenious arguments to convince his young friend of the necessity of
Christianity. On the 12th of January, 1811, after fighting desperately for
the preservation of his belief in God, the poor boy with the dizzy brain
writes to his tormentor: 'But now, to your argument of the necessity of
Christianity, I am not sure that your argument does not tend to prove its
unreality,' All through this perilous game Hogg was at play, whilst
Shelley was in earnest,--far too much in earnest to be capable of
publishing a tract against God's existence, whilst he believed in it. What
was sport to Hogg was death to Shelley,--at least, to his happiness in
this world.
Towards the close of the Christmas vacation, Mr. Timothy Shelley seems to
have worked off his anger with his son, and taken him into affectionate
consideration--though, of course, neither into high favour nor perfect
confidence. Having thrown off his wrath in scolding with tongue and pen,
the Member of Parliament for New Shoreham relented to his scatterbrain
boy, so far as to talk with him sympathetically on the very questions that
had caused their disagreement. This change of feeling may have resulted in
some degree from the advice of judicious counsellors. The Duke of Norfolk,
whose opinion was weighty with Mr. Timothy Shelley in his private
concerns, no less than in his political affairs, may have been one of
these judicious counsellors; for his Grace had already displayed a kindly
interest in the future poet, and in later time was at great pains to
mediate between the father and son, and recover them from open war to an
appearance of mutual friendliness. The Horsham miser, whose word of
definite command was law to the son he hated, may also have used his
influence in favour of the grandson, for whom he cherished in his cold and
selfish breast a secret and curiously malicious tenderness. An atheist
himself, who, on the approach of death, spoke with equal confidence and
contentment of his own utter annihilation, the aged baronet was in no
degree shocked by the youngster's religious, opinions. On the contrary, he
contemplated them with self-complacence as the fruits of his own teaching
and example, and as indications that the lad would develop into a
creditable chief of the Castle Goring Shelleys. Approving his grandson's
heterodoxy, and liking him none the less for being a thorn in his father's
side, Sir Bysshe may be assumed to have given the Squire of Field Place a
significant hint that the boy was not to be rated and denounced out of his
grandsire's favour. In accounting, however, for the alteration of Mr.
Timothy Shelley's demeanour to his heir, it is only fair and reasonable to
suppose that the change was in some degree due to the paternal
affectionateness and good sense of this gentleman, who could not shut his
eyes to the fact that he was his son's father. Anyhow, it is inconsistent
with much which has been written of the father's invariable harshness to
the youthful poet, that towards the middle of January, 1811, he could
invite his son to a friendly conference on the evidences of Christianity.
Ever in the humour for controversy, it is needless to say that Mr. Bysshe
Shelley (whose great grievance against the 'dons' of University College
was that they expelled him _without_ arguing with him) accepted this
invitation without requiring his father to repeat it. For a few minutes
the youngster's brain and heart kindled with a desire to enlighten his
father out of his Christian darkness, and the hope that by winning so
strange a convert he should make himself master of the religious position
at Field Place. For a few minutes the discussion was more than
satisfactory and encouraging to the beardless apostle of Free Thought.
Admitting it was absurd to believe in witches and ghosts, Mr. Timothy
Shelley allowed that the mediæval miracles were the mere offspring of
vulgar fancy and vulgar credulity. But on being pressed to take the same
view of the Scriptural miracles, the worthy gentleman faced about, and
held stoutly to his delusions, making it only too manifest that he could
not be argued and illuminated out of them.
By the considerations which determined him to ascertain his son's
religious opinions, the Squire of Field Place was also brought to see
that, instead of denouncing his son's familiar friend without knowing him,
even as he had denounced his religious views without apprehending
precisely what they were, it would be better for him to look Mr. Hogg
clearly in the face, make his acquaintance, talk to him in friendly wise,
and judge for himself how far the young gentleman from the neighbourhood
of Stockton-upon-Tees had been fairly described, and how far
misrepresented, by the Pall-Mall bookseller. Mr. Timothy Shelley was far
too robust and intelligent a gentleman to put implicit reliance in Mr.
Stockdale's judgment, and to have perfect confidence in the honesty of the
publisher, who, after giving a 'minor' pecuniary credit for conveniences
scarcely to be rated as 'necessaries' for an Oxford undergraduate, was now
looking to the minor's father for payment of 'the little account.' Quite
shrewd enough to see Mr. Stockdale's motive and game, Mr. Timothy Shelley,
whilst listening to him with abundant civility, and thanking him with all
the customary courtesies for his valuable information, saw the necessity
of checking the publisher's statements with intelligence, gained from
other, and possibly less equivocal, sources. Acting like a sensible man of
affairs and the world, the Member of Parliament made inquiries about Mr.
Stockdale, and also inquiries touching Mr. Thomas Jefferson Hogg, and Mr.
Hogg's people in Durham Co. and Yorkshire; the result of the inquiries
being that he thought none too well of the bookseller, and a good deal
better of Mr. Hogg. Hence it was that, whilst adopting a conciliatory tone
to his son on the religious questions, Mr. Timothy Shelley ceased to speak
harshly, and began to speak civilly to his son, of Mr. Thomas Jefferson
Hogg, whom he now knew by good report, as well as by ill report, though
only by report.
At the same time, it became obvious to the Squire of Field Place that he
had better have the friendly regard of the young gentleman, who certainly
had considerable influence over his son. Hence it was that the Squire,
little imagining the conspiracy for marrying his eldest daughter to the
young gentleman he had never seen, told Shelley to invite his
college-friend to Field Place for the next Easter vacation:--a concession
that, attended with other indications of the Squire's change of feeling
for Hogg, caused Shelley to think his father must have received a
favourable account of the Durham Co. and Yorkshire Hoggs, from some of his
friends in the House of Commons.
The visit was never paid by Hogg; but to the date of the catastrophe,
which, driving them from Oxford, was quickly followed by incidents that
rendered Hogg no person to be welcome at Field Place, the friends looked
forward to the Easter recess as a time that would be fruitful of
opportunities for the accomplishment of their designs on the eldest
daughter of the house.
The knavish publisher of 41 Pall Mall, had small reason to congratulate
himself on the success of his machinations for separating Bysshe Shelley
from his friend; for rendering Hogg the object of Mr. Timothy Shelley's
strongest aversion; and for inducing the Squire of Field Place to pay the
costs and charges of the publication of _St. Irvyne_. Instead of
separating the two undergraduates, the schemer had the pleasure of knowing
they were even closer friends at the beginning of February than they had
been in the earlier weeks of December. Instead of rendering Hogg
especially distasteful to Mr. Timothy Shelley, the schemer had only
stimulated the Member for New Shoreham to make inquiries, which disposed
him to think favourably of his son's friend. Instead of making Mr. Timothy
Shelley mistake him for a worthy man, who was entitled to handsome reward
for important service, the schemer got never a shilling for his pains. For
breach of confidence and slanderous tattle, Hogg whipt the dirty fellow
with a scorching letter. For the same offence the paltry creature was
punished in the same manner by Shelley. Having heard the tale-bearer out
to the end of his cunning talk, Mr. Timothy Shelley saw no reason why he
should pay a sixpence of the bill which he had declared no affair of his,
on the first hint that he would act gracefully and generously by settling
the claim. Having exhausted his store of pleasant words for such a
creature, Mr. Timothy Shelley turned from the man with a sufficiently
frank avowal of contempt.
Mr. John Joseph Stockdale was no person to smart acutely from disdainful
words. He was, of course, uneasy to think he had provoked the enmity of
the two young men, who a short while hence might be able to injure him in
his business; but, had it not been for this consideration, he would read
their angry letters with more amusement than annoyance. Mr. Timothy
Shelley's scorn would have passed over his thick skin without causing him
aught more than transient uneasiness, had it been accompanied with a
cheque for the required sum. But it galled Mr. John Joseph Stockdale to
miss the trick for which he had played so meanly,--galled him all the more
because he was conscious of having played his poor cards badly. It must be
confessed that the cards were no less weak than dirty. A cleverer rogue
than Mr. Stockdale would have failed to win with them. Had he, in 1811,
been the rich man he became in later times, Mr. Timothy Shelley might well
have declined to pay the publisher's demand, and thereby encourage other
literary speculators to produce his son's works in the expectation of
being paid by his father. But till Sir Bysshe passed from the world, the
Squire of Field Place, far from being wealthy for his station, was in no
position to spend a hundred guineas lightly. Under these circumstances,
the gentleman with several children and a pecuniary prospect that might
even yet be darkened by the caprice of his eccentric father, was more than
barely justified in saying that his son's publisher must look to his
client, not to his client's father, for remuneration. It was not in Mr.
Stockdale to take this obvious and reasonable view of a simple question.
The money Mr. Timothy Shelley refused to give him was regarded by Mr.
Stockdale as money basely and fraudulently withheld. To the publisher's
imagination the sum he failed to extort became a sum of which he had been
robbed; the injury done him being the more outrageous and exasperating
because he had rendered the doer of the wrong an important service.
In 1827, when the poet had been dead between four and five years, the
publisher took his revenge on the perpetrator of so monstrous an
injustice. By that time the embittered knave had dropt from the ways of
decent trade, and was falling to the deeper disrepute in which he soon
passed from view. A fabricator of scandalous literature as well as a
publisher of it, he had already produced the _Memoirs of Harriet Wilson_,
when he started the _Budget_, that bears his name, as a vehicle for airing
a vanity, which had in some degree deranged a mind long fretted by
imaginary grievances, and as an instrument for venting his spite on those
who had provoked his displeasure, no less than as means of drawing relief
to his indigence from the lovers of personal gossip. In this sordid
serial, the broken and utterly discredited libeller produced a mendacious
narrative of his transactions with Shelley and Shelley's father. As he
could get nothing in 1827 by abusing Shelley, it is not surprising that he
spoke well of him at the instigation of self-interest, vanity, and spite.
The man knew enough of the literary coteries to know the tide of social
feeling had so far turned in Shelley's favour that, whilst disparagement
of the poet would not fail to offend, praise of him would not fail to
conciliate the readers, most capable of commending the _Budget_ to public
favour. For the same reason vanity prompted the fellow to represent
himself as the original discoverer and earliest fosterer of the poet's
genius. In praising the poet he was also actuated by spite against the
poet's father, whose treatment of his son would appear harsh and hateful,
in proportion to the strength of the reader's conviction that the poet
deserved different usage. On the other hand, though chiefly actuated by
malice, the libeller was also animated by vanity and self-interest in what
he wrote to Sir Timothy Shelley's discredit; for whilst it afforded him a
pleasant sense of his own importance to speak authoritatively of a
baronet's misdemeanour, the slanderer knew the growing appetite for words
to the poet's credit was attended with an even keener appetite for
evidence to his father's discredit. Hence, whether he spoke of the poet or
the poet's father, he spoke at the instance of self-interest, vanity, and
malice.
Such was the man, such were the motives of the man, in whose malignant and
nauseous gossip about the poet and his father, Mr. Garnett discovers
'traces of sincere affection' for the author of _Laon and Cythna_. Not
content with gushing over Stockdale's 'sincere affection for the young
author whose acquaintance was certainly anything but advantageous to him
in a pecuniary point of view,' Mr. Garnett deals with the words of this
professional slanderer as good evidence, that in their bitter differences
the poet was guiltless of serious offence, and that the poet's father was
greatly to blame.
'Stockdale,' says Mr. Garnett, of this creditable witness to character
and want of character, 'had frequent opportunities of observing the
uneasy terms on which the two stood towards each other, and
unhesitatingly throws the entire blame upon the father, whom he
represents as narrow-minded and wrong-headed, behaving with extreme
niggardliness in money matters, and at the same time continually
fretting Shelley by harsh and unnecessary interference with his most
indifferent actions.'
What a use to make of the words of a slanderer-by-trade, a libeller
surcharged with rancorous enmity against the poet's father! To insult
Shelley by making his character depend in any degree on the words of such
a rascal as Stockdale, it is necessary that a man of letters should be a
'Shelleyan enthusiast.'
It is not a fact that 'Stockdale had frequent opportunities of observing
the uneasy terms on which the two stood to each other.' With the exception
of the two or three occasions when the father and son came together to the
Pall-Mall shop, Stockdale never saw them together. Doubtless there was
uneasiness between them on those occasions, for they met on matters of
disagreement, and in the presence of the man who, for his own advantage,
was doing his best to render the father more than usually distrustful of,
and anxious about, his son. The whole period of Stockdale's acquaintance
with Mr. Timothy Shelley was covered by the few weeks, during which time
they exchanged letters and had two or three conferences touching the
poet's affairs,--the few weeks during which the unscrupulous tradesman
was vainly endeavouring to wheedle the Member of Parliament into paying
the minor's bill for the publication of _St. Irvyne_. What opportunities
can so brief and slight an intercourse have offered the publisher for
using influence to dispose Mr. Shelley to be a better father? To believe
the fellow's impudent statements, one must believe that during those few
weeks he assumed an almost parental authority over the gentleman on whose
pocket he had designs. In 1827 sixteen years had elapsed since this slight
intercourse of less than two months. How strange that after so many years,
Stockdale should have had so clear a memory of the incidents of this
slight intercourse,--so distinct a recollection of the peculiarities of
the gentleman with whom he spoke on three or four occasions, and exchanged
perhaps as many letters! How strange that 'the Shelleyan enthusiasts'--so
suspicious and distrustful of the accuracy of Hogg's recollections of his
most familiar friend whom he knew thoroughly--should accept so readily the
publisher's recollections of the gentleman, of whom he knew scarcely
anything!
The same reflections are applicable to Stockdale's vivid recollections of
the Oxonian Shelley, and to Mr. Garnett's reliance on the accuracy of
those recollections. Though they exchanged letters in January, 1811, and
had some disagreeable correspondence in later months of the same year, it
does not appear that Shelley ever set eyes on the Pall-Mall publisher
after December, 1810. The whole period of their personal intercourse
cannot have exceeded four months:--months spent chiefly by Shelley at
Oxford or in Sussex, whilst the publisher was attending to his affairs in
London? To assume that during these four months they had a dozen meetings
is to assume too much. It is more probable that they talked with one
another on seven or eight several occasions. What opportunities could such
an acquaintanceship afford the publisher for knowing his young client in
such a way, that sixteen years later he could recall him clearly? Is it
reasonable to suppose that the publisher during these interviews (and from
several letters in no degree calculated to fill their receiver's breast
with tender emotion) conceived a strong affection--or any affection
whatever--for the boy out of whom, or rather out of whose father, he meant
to 'make a bill?'
One might as reasonably imagine a money-lender overflowing with love for
any young gentleman 'in his teens,' to whom he lends 50_l._ on the usual
terms. Are London publishers so very different from other men of business,
that they do business with youthful poets and novelists from impulses of
affection, altogether pure of self-interest? I know something of London
publishers: few men have better reason to think and speak well of them; to
my last hour of consciousness I shall never recall a particular London
publisher, without remembering him as one of the trustiest and dearest of
the many friends who have contributed to my happiness; but still my
impression is, and my experience has been, that a publisher's regard for a
young author has a tendency to rise and fall with the sale of the young
author's works. _St. Irvyne_ having fallen dead from the press, even as
Mr. Stockdale expected it to do, I have no doubt that Mr. Stockdale merely
regarded his young author as a simpleton, whom he would not trust on any
future occasion (during his minority) to pay the printer's bill. To do
Stockdale justice (and even to such a worm I would not be less than just)
it should be remarked that he is no such preposterous 'humbug' as Mr.
Garnett's words imply. Though he whines hypocritically about 'his too
conscientious friendship' for Mr. Bysshe Shelley, of University College,
Oxford, the professional libeller does not profess to have loved the
youth, with whom he was doing 'risky business.' In 1827, the disposition
to think tenderly of Shelley had not gone so far as to produce a crop of
'Shelleyan enthusiasts' capable of believing that the publisher loved the
author of _St. Irvyne_. Had Stockdale claimed credit for loving the dear
boy, who came to his shop about the _Original Poetry_ that was not
original, the original readers of the _Budget_ would have derided him, and
denounced his _Budget_. Though he says civil things of Shelley, to
heighten the effect of the uncivil things said of Shelley's father,
Stockdale forbears to descant on his affection for the future poet. It is
enough for him to say, 'Even from these boyish trifles' (_i.e._ _St.
Irvyne_, and the _Victor-and-Cazire Book_), 'assisted by my personal
intercourse with the author, I at once formed an opinion that he was not
an everyday author.' In saying this (as he meant the ambiguous words to be
construed in the way most complimentary to the poet) the budgeteer told a
lie,--but a lie not too outrageous to be believed. Further (to insult Sir
Timothy Shelley, who in the scribbler's opinion had refused to discharge
'every honest claim upon him'), the libeller spoke highly of the poet's
'honour and rectitude,' declaring him a man to 'vegetate, rather than
live, to effect the discharge of every honest claim upon him.' But to
speak of a man in this style is not to show signs of loving him. I know an
author who certainly is no 'everyday author,' and would (I am sure) be at
great pains to pay his creditors twenty shillings in the pound; but far
from loving him, I would any day rather go without my dinner than eat it
in his company.
Truth to tell, the 'traces of a sincere affection for the young author,'
which Mr. Garnett has discovered in Stockdale's words about Shelley, are
so far from being distinctly apparent, that I have vainly sought for them
in the pages, where they are so manifest to the author of _Shelley in Pall
Mall_. I think Mr. Garnett goes a little too far in saying--
'Percy Shelley captivated all hearts: the roughest were subdued by his
sweetness, the most reserved won by his affectionate candour.... In
spite of his disappointment, Stockdale really appears to have been
captivated by Shelley, and to have been not more forcibly impressed by
the energy of his intellect than by the loveliness of his character.'
Gentlemen given to gushing often say more than they mean. I cannot
conceive Mr. Garnett means all he says in his perplexing article. I have
vainly worked through Stockdale's _Budget_ in search for the proofs, that
Stockdale was forcibly impressed by the intellectual energy and moral
loveliness of the author of _St. Irvyne_. But the 'Shelleyan enthusiasts'
are so apt to weaken their case by exaggeration; they are so excessive in
their statements. The notion that Stockdale the Libeller was a man to be
captivated by moral beauty is comical.
CHAPTER XII.
MR. MACCARTHY'S DISCOVERIES TOUCHING THE OXONIAN SHELLEY.
_A Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things_--Evidence that the
Poem was Published--Reasons for Thinking it may never have been
Published--Reasons for Thinking that, if the Poem was Published, it
was promptly Suppressed--Did Shelley contribute Prose and Poetry to
the _Oxford Herald_?--Spurious Letter to the Editor of the
_Statesman_--Shelley's First Letter to Leigh Hunt--His way of
Introducing himself to Strangers--Did he at the Same Moment Think Well
and Ill of his Father?--Miss Janetta Phillips's Poems--E. & W.
Phillips, the Worthing Printers.
Before returning from Field Place to Oxford at the close of the Christmas
Vacation (1810-11), readers who, in addition to a perfect view of
Shelley's life at the University, wish to have a knowledge of all that has
been written about that part of his career, will do well to consider
certain matters with which Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy may be said to
have cumbered the highway of the poet's academic story. Considerations of
prudence for himself, and of care for the interests of his readers, forbid
the present writer to pass over these matters in silence, as though he
were not cognizant of their existence. At the same time, he is disinclined
to notice them in a chapter, where they would interrupt the narrative of
the undergraduate's second term of residence at University College. He
therefore decides to deal with them in a separate chapter, that may be
lightly 'skimmed' or altogether skipt by the busy peruser of these
volumes, whose curiosity respecting the poet's life is unattended by a
keen appetite for details of Shelleyan controversy.
* * * * *
I. With magniloquence, that may seem comical to persons deficient in Mr.
Forman's ability to venerate every scrap of paper blotted by the poet's
pen, Mr. MacCarthy declares himself to 'have discovered the surrounding
light that indicates the presence of a star,' without being so fortunate
as to have 'detected its nucleus.' This is only Mr. MacCarthy's figurative
and beautiful way of saying that, without coming upon a copy of the work,
he has come upon evidence that Shelley, towards the close of his second
term of residence at Oxford, published _A Poetical Essay on the Existing
State of Things_, for the benefit of Mr. Peter Finerty, then undergoing
imprisonment in Lincoln Gaol for libel on Lord Castlereagh,--that this
poem was a very beautiful poem,--and that it differed from all the poet's
earlier and all his later writings, in having a quick and large sale.
Readers, who take Mr. MacCarthy's view and estimate of the evidence, have
no doubt that the sale of this remarkable poem, after paying the costs of
its production, yielded nearly one hundred pounds to the fund that was
raised for Mr. Finerty's sustenance and comfort in captivity. To persons
who remember the wretched quality of the Oxonian Shelley's prose and
verse, it can scarcely be obvious why a lost poem by his still feeble pen
should be likened to a star, and why the shadowy evidence that he wrote
the poem should be comparable with the surrounding light of the heavenly
body. Let that pass, however; and let it be conceded that evidence of so
successful a poem, by the youthful and hitherto unfortunate aspirant to
literary fame, would be a matter of some interest, even to persons in no
degree touched with Shelleyan madness. What is the evidence that Shelley
produced this successful poem, no copy of which has ever come under the
notice of living man? The evidence consists of,--
(_a_) This advertisement in the 9th March, 1811, number of the _Oxford
Herald_:--
'Literature. Just published, Price Two Shillings, _A Poetical Essay On
The Existing State of Things_.
"And Famine At Her Bidding Wasted Wide
The Wretched Land. Till In The Public Way,
Promiscuous Where The Dead And Dying Lay,
Dogs Fed On Human Bones In The Open Light Of Day."
By A Gentleman Of The University Of Oxford. For assisting to Maintain
In Prison Mr. Peter Finerty, Imprisoned For A Libel. London: Sold by
B. Crosby and Co., And All Other Booksellers. 1811.'
(_b_) Four advertisements of the same poem in London newspapers; two of
them being in the _Morning Chronicle_ for 15th and 21st March, 1811,
whilst the other two may be found in the _Times_ for 10th and 11th April,
1811.
(_c_) These words by an anonymous writer in the _Dublin Weekly Messenger_
of 7th March, 1812:--
'We have but one more word to add. Mr. Shelley, commiserating the
sufferings of our distinguished countryman, Mr. Finerty, whose
exertions in the cause of political freedom he much admired, wrote a
very beautiful poem, the profits of the sale of which, we understand,
from undoubted authority, Mr. Shelley remitted to Mr. Finerty. We have
heard they amounted to nearly an hundred pounds. This fact speaks a
volume in favour of our new friend.'
(_d_) The fact that Shelley sent from Dublin a copy of the paper
containing these words, and particularly called Godwin's attention to the
article in which they appeared.
(_e_) The fact that during his imprisonment Mr. Finerty had the sympathy
of the _Dublin Weekly Messenger_.
These are all the facts Mr. MacCarthy produces in evidence that Shelley
wrote a poem no living man ever saw, no single person of any time is known
to have seen. Of course the gentleman, who is so severe on Hogg's
inaccuracies, blunders and contradicts himself in marshalling so slender
an array of facts. For instance, after stating (p. 100) precisely and
correctly that the earliest of the five advertisements of the poem
appeared in the _Oxford Herald_ of 9th March, 1811, he avers a few pages
later (p. 105) that this same earliest advertisement appeared in the paper
of 2nd March, 1811.
How does this curiously inaccurate gentleman reason from his facts? To Mr.
MacCarthy it appears indisputable that the poem must have been written and
published, as the five advertisements declare it 'Just Published.' But it
is no uncommon thing now, it was no rare thing eighty years since, for
publishers to announce books as 'just published,' before their actual day
of publication. Books have been printed and so announced, and yet at the
last moment have been withheld from publication. Moreover, it would be no
new thing for a literary adventurer to advertise that a work by his pen
would shortly appear, without having any intention or power to fulfil the
promise of the announcement. The books of the British Museum Library would
be more numerous by several thousands, had authors invariably acted up to
their advertisements.
Underscoring the words 'undoubted authority,' Mr. MacCarthy intimates that
Shelley himself must have been the 'undoubted authority.' The assumption
is reasonable, but it is only an assumption. Could he be proved to have
been the sure authority, it would still be noticeable that, though he
declared the poem had been published for Mr. Finerty's benefit, some other
person may have been the journalist's authority for saying the profits
amounted to nearly 100_l._ For, whilst declaring 'from _undoubted
authority_,' that Shelley sent the profits to Mr. Finerty, the
article-writer is curiously silent as to the quality of his authority for
writing, '_We have heard_ they amounted to nearly an hundred pounds.' In
fact, his language implies that, whilst having the best authority for the
first, he had not the best authority for the second, statement.
Again, arguing from Shelley's veracity, Mr. MacCarthy insists that by
sending the article to Godwin without disclaiming any of the grounds on
which he is commended in it, Shelley endorsed the whole statement, and
pledged his honour to its truth.
'This statement, too, it should be remembered, is authenticated by
Shelley himself, for he sends the paper containing it to Godwin, and
pointedly refers to the article in which it is given.'
Was Shelley so precisely accurate in all his statements, that we should be
bound to believe the words, if he could be shown to have written them
himself? To readers who have given due consideration to a certain letter
referred to in the last chapter, it must be comical to hear the author of
_Shelley's Early Life_ arguing that the words of the _Dublin Weekly
Messenger_ must be true, because in sending the paper to Godwin, the poet
did not warn him of their inaccuracy. Readers will have stronger reason
for smiling at Mr. MacCarthy's simplicity, when they know more about the
earlier of Shelley's letters to Godwin,--letters overflowing with the most
staggering misrepresentations.
Yet further, it is argued by Mr. MacCarthy that, having the friendliest
relations with the _Dublin Weekly Messenger_, Mr. Finerty was doubtless a
regular and attentive reader of the paper, must therefore have seen the
words relating to the profits of the poem, and would of course have
contradicted them had they been untrue. As Mr. Finerty did not contradict
the words, his silence must be regarded as tantamount to direct testimony
from his pen, that the poem was published for his benefit, and yielded a
sum of nearly one hundred pounds to the fund raised for his benefit.
'Nothing,' says Mr. MacCarthy, 'published in the _Weekly Messenger_
could possibly have escaped his notice. It is incredible that he would
not have contradicted this statement of the presentation to him of the
profits of a poem if it were not true.'
Against this series of assumptions and the argument founded upon them,
several considerations may be urged. (1) Because the _Dublin Weekly
Messenger_ favoured his cause, it does not follow that a copy of the paper
was sent to Mr. Finerty every week during his imprisonment in Lincoln
Gaol. (2) There is no evidence that the paper was usually sent to him
every week (in times when the rates of postage were heavy), or even that
it was sent on any single occasion to him during that term. (3) As he was
treated with extraordinary severity during his imprisonment, it is by no
means so certain as the author of _Shelley's Early Life_ imagines, that
the prisoner was allowed to see newspapers containing expressions of
sympathy with and admiration of him. (4) On the contrary, though he may
have seen the copies of the _Dublin Weekly Messenger_ that contained no
reference to his case, it is highly improbable that during his
imprisonment he was allowed to see the copies of the journal which spoke
of him eulogistically. (5) It is conceivable that, if he saw the words of
the Dublin newspaper during his imprisonment, he knew them to be
inaccurate, and yet refrained from contradicting them. He may have read
the words in prison without knowing whether they were true or false, as
the business of collecting the money for his benefit was in the hands of a
committee. He may have known that Shelley published a poem for his
advantage, and known also that the publication yielded no profits: in
which case he would not have been so ungracious as to contradict the
statement of the amount of the profits, and thereby call attention to the
literary miscarriage of a well-wisher who, besides subscribing a guinea to
the Finerty Fund, had also recommended the fund to public favour in the
unsuccessful work. If he saw the words of the Dublin newspaper, and knew
them to be untrue, the inaccuracy was no reason why he should call
attention to a misstatement that could do him no harm, was on the contrary
calculated to stimulate the feeling in his favour, and could not be
corrected without risk of giving annoyance to the young gentleman who
anyhow had subscribed a guinea to the Finerty Fund.
Whilst the evidence of the publication of a poem is far from conclusive,
the evidence is very strong that, if a poem was published, its sale must
have fallen far short of the number indicated by the _not_ authoritative
words (the statement made on mere hearsay talk) of the anonymous writer of
the _Dublin Weekly Messenger_. _If_ the poem was published at all, it
appears from the advertisements to have been offered for sale at the price
of two shillings a copy. If a poem was published, it was probably not a
poem of many thousands, or even many hundreds, of lines. Let us suppose
that a poem was published, and the costs of printing, producing,
publishing, and advertising the work were 50_l._--a moderate sum at which
to put the expenses, if the poem contained from five hundred to a thousand
lines. Allowances to the trade being taken into account, there must have
been a sale of at least two thousand copies at the rate of two shillings a
copy, for the sale to bring in 50_l._ for expenses of publication, and
100_l._ for the Finerty Fund. The sum accruing to that fund from the sale
is put by the anonymous writer of the _Dublin Weekly Messenger_ at
something less than 100_l._ On the other hand, account must be taken of
copies sent to reviewers and copies _given_ by the author to his
friends;--copies that, without being paid for, passed into circulation.
These copies may be computed as equal to the number by which the actual
sale of the work fell short of 2000 copies,--_i.e._ the sale that would
have yielded a clear 100_l._ (over the 50_l._ for costs) to the Finerty
Fund. What is the evidence that so large a number of copies of the poem
cannot have been put in circulation?
'"It is," says Mr. MacCarthy, in the preface to _Shelley's Early
Life_, "needless to say that this interesting volume is not to be
found in any of our public libraries. To the courteous librarians of
the Bodleian at Oxford, and of University College" (_sic_) "at
Cambridge, I have specially to return my thanks for the search they
had kindly made for it. A printed circular sent by myself to almost
every second-hand bookseller in the three kingdoms was equally
unsuccessful. To advertisements in the public journals, and special
inquiries instituted by Mr. Quaritch, Piccadilly; Mr. Stibbs, Museum
Street; Messrs. Longmans, Paternoster Row, and others, no reply has
been received."'
Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy seizes every occasion for inaccuracy, and now
and then makes an occasion, in the absence of a decent opportunity, for
blundering. What does Mr. MacCarthy mean 'by University College at
Cambridge?' Oxford has a college styled University College; there is a
college so called in London; but Cambridge has no University College. By
the charitable writer of the present page, it is assumed that by
'University College _at_ Cambridge,' Mr. MacCarthy (who is so merciless
and malignant to Hogg for his occasional inaccuracies) means The Cambridge
University Library. Let it be so assumed by the reader.
It follows, that some years since Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy sought by
printed circular for a copy of this Shelleyan poem (which possibly was
never published) in the shop of nearly every second-hand bookseller in
Great Britain and Ireland; that he caused the Librarians of the Bodleian
Library, and the Cambridge University Library, to search for a copy of the
poem in their libraries; that he induced Mr. Quaritch of Piccadilly, Mr.
Stibbs of Museum Street, and the Messrs. Longmans of Paternoster Row, 'and
others,' to make search by advertisements and special inquiries, for a
copy of the poem,--without coming upon a copy after all the trouble.
Yet more:--Hogg never heard of this poem; Peacock never heard of it, so
far as the evidences go; no one of the poet's friends or relations appears
ever to have heard of it; no review of the poem has come to light; and
(more remarkable yet!) no one of the many published lists of subscriptions
to the Finerty Fund, to be found in the _Morning Chronicle_, and other
papers of the period (examined by Mr. MacCarthy), makes mention of any
single contribution amounting to 100_l._,--of _any_ contributions whatever
as the result of the sale of the poem.
What a labour of searching for a copy of the poem, and for evidence about
the poem, that may never have been written! Surely the searching would
have resulted in the discovery of a copy, had 2000 copies passed into
circulation, or in the discovery of some stronger evidence of the poem's
publication, had the sale of the work yielded any considerable sum of
money to the Fund, which amounted in the course of twelve months to
something more than 1000_l._
The evidence is not even conclusive that Shelley had a serious intention
to produce a poem for Mr. Finerty's advantage. He may have put forth the
advertisements to whip up the public interest in the movement for the
unfortunate journalist's benefit. Evidence so weak can only be used
conjecturally. I am disposed to regard the advertisements as _bonâ-fide_
advertisements, and to think they referred to some poem published by
Shelley for the alleged object. The author may also have published the
poem with an eye to his own advantage; may have hoped to use the
excitement of a political stir as a means of floating into circulation a
poem, which, in case it succeeded, the 'Gentleman of the University of
Oxford' could claim in his own name. He had been for some time thinking of
publishing a satirical poem. 'I am,' he wrote to Hogg from Field Place, on
20th December, 1810, 'composing a _satirical_ poem. I shall print it at
Oxford, unless I find, on visiting him, that R. is ripe for printing
whatever will sell. In case of that, he is my man.' There is evidence
(though of a doubtful quality) that he wrote the first sketches for a
poem, which eventually took shape in _Queen Mab_, in the summer of 1810.
Much of that poem would answer to the title of _A Poetical Essay on the
Existing State of Things_.
Shelley put so many fictions into his earlier letters to Godwin, that the
reader, who is not a 'Shelleyan enthusiast,' hesitates to trust any
statement of those highly imaginative epistles, that is not supported by
another witness. But he may have been writing truth at Keswick on 16th
January, 1812, when he wrote of himself as the author of the _Essay on
Love_, a little poem. This 'little poem,' if it was ever written, may have
been the same poem as the _Political Essay on the Existing State of
Things_, if the latter was ever written. Were it announced to-morrow on
good authority that a copy had been recovered of the poem by Shelley, for
a copy of which Mr. MacCarthy made so vain a search, I should expect to
learn that the poem, published for Mr. Finerty's benefit, proved to be
poetry that was subsequently worked into _Queen Mab_. If the _Poetical
Essay_ (of March and April, 1811) contained some of the more violent and
outrageous passages of _Queen Mab_, the same considerations that caused
the poet's Oxford bookseller to destroy all the copies of _The Necessity
of Atheism_, that were in his hands, would determine him to destroy at the
same time all the copies of the _Poetical Essay_ lying in his premises.
II. What evidence does MacCarthy produce that Shelley was a contributor of
poetry and of prose articles of literary subjects to the _Oxford Herald_,
whilst he was an Oxford undergraduate?
(1) Mr. MacCarthy's sole reason for attributing the _Ode to the Death of
Summer_ to Shelley's pen, is that it possesses the 'peculiar Shelleyan
flavour by which we can so easily recognise his later poems,' the
qualities of feeling and expression, which justify the author of
_Shelley's Early Life_ for saying,--
'As Pope said of Chapman's translation of the _Iliad_, that it was
"something like what one would imagine Homer himself would have writ
before he arrived at years of discretion;" so this little poem may be
offered as something like what Shelley would have sung before he
attained the full faculty of lyrical expression.'
But whilst there is no positive testimony that the Oxonian Shelley could
give his verses the peculiar flavour for which Mr. MacCarthy commends the
'Ode,' which appears in the _Oxford Herald_ of 22nd September, 1810, the
poems of _St. Irvyne_, published three months later, may well dispose
critical readers to question, whether the author of the novel was capable
of producing verses, having any resemblance to the poetry of his later
time. It may, of course, be urged that the verses, put into the ridiculous
romance, were the nerveless efforts of a considerably earlier period; but
it is difficult to believe that, could he have produced the _Ode to the
Death of Summer_ in September, 1810, the Oxonian Shelley could a few weeks
later have offered the public such feeble effusions as the _St. Irvyne_
verses.
(2) Whilst Shelley's title to be regarded as the author of _The Ode_
rests on the 'Shelleyan flavour' of the poem, which in that respect
differs from all the poetry known to have proceeded from his pen before
the end of 1810, his claim to be regarded as one of the producers of the
'prose essays on some of the older English poets' (which appeared in the
_Oxford Herald_ during his residence at the University) rests on the fact
that one of these essays is signed, 'P. S.' 'One of the papers, signed "P.
S."' says Mr. MacCarthy, 'appeared during the period of Shelley's
residence, and may possibly have been written by him.' It is quite as
probable that some Peter Smith, or other person with P. S. for his
initials, wrote the verses.
(3) Consisting altogether of the two initial letters, the evidence which
disposes Mr. MacCarthy to rate the poet with the literary essayists of the
Oxford newspaper, cannot be declared convincingly cogent and conclusive.
It is, however, far less weak and shadowy than the evidence that the
undergraduate of University College, Oxford, produced the English
translations from the Greek _Anthologia_, which appeared in the _Oxford
Herald_ of 5th January, and 12th January, 1811, with the signature 'S'
attached to each set of verses. After identifying Shelley with the
translator by this solitary letter, Mr. MacCarthy next argues that, having
been thus detected in translating verses of the Greek _Anthologia_,
Shelley may be fairly suspected of being, and indeed assumed to be, the
translator of the epigram by Vincent Bourne, that appeared in English
dress in the _Oxford Herald_ of 23rd February, 1811 (signed
'Versificator'); and also the translator (signing himself 'Versificator')
who produced the English versions of two epigrams from the Greek
_Anthologia_, that appeared in the _Oxford Herald_ of 9th March, 1811. To
those, who hesitate in declaring Shelley the producer of the two January
translations, because his surname began with the letter 'S,' it may well
appear considerably less than manifest that Shelley should be regarded as
the producer of Versificator's translations, because he had a taste for
making verses. After arguing that 'S' was Shelley, because the Shelleys
resembled the Smiths in one interesting particular, and that
'Versificator' must have been Shelley, because Shelley had as good a right
as any one else to style himself so, this perplexing Mr. MacCarthy (who is
of so much account with the Shelleyan experts) tells us in a note, that
some one, during Shelley's time at Oxford, sent a translation from Vincent
Bourne to the _Oxford Herald_, signed 'S. S.--Edmonton.' On such trifles
and trifling, weeks and months were wasted by the Shelleyan expert, who,
with all his boastful show of laborious research, never troubled himself
to find out, when Shelley and Hogg became members of their University.
III. For reasons, with which there is no need to trouble the reader of the
present chapter, Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy holds a strong opinion that
the spurious letter, alleged to have been written by Shelley from
University College on 22nd February, 1811, to 'The Editor of the
_Statesman_,' may have been a genuine performance, although it appeared
for the first time to the public in the notorious _Letters of Percy
Bysshe Shelley_ (1852), that passed through Mr. Robert Browning's
editorial hands only to provoke the scrutiny, that was followed quickly by
their suppression. Maintaining that the letter may have been genuine, Mr.
MacCarthy is only a few degrees less confident that the epistle was the
genuine performance of the undergraduate who, ten days later, wrote Leigh
Hunt the epistle that seems to have been studied by the manufacturer of
the forgery.
Opening with a long paragraph, whose style affords conclusive evidence
that it was not composed by the Oxonian Shelley, the epistle of the
earlier date closes with the following sentences taken verbatim from the
letter of later date:--
'The ultimate intention of my aim is to induce a meeting of such
enlightened, unprejudiced members of the community, whose independent
principles expose them to evils which might thus become alleviated;
and to form a methodical society, which should be organized so as to
resist the coalition of the enemies of liberty, which at present
renders any expression of opinion on matters of policy dangerous to
individuals.... Although perfectly unacquainted with you privately, I
address you as a common friend to liberty, thinking that, in cases of
this urgency and importance, etiquette ought not to stand in the way
of usefulness.'
Whilst these two sentences accord in style with the rest of the letter to
which they properly belong (the genuine letter addressed to Leigh Hunt on
2nd March, 1811), they are preceded in the spurious epistle of later
manufacture and earlier date (22nd February, 1811) with writing of this
incongruent style:--
'SIR,--The present age has been distinguished from every former period
of English history by the number of those writers who have suffered
the penalties of the law for the freedom and spirit with which they
descanted on the morals of the age, and chastised the vices or
ridiculed the follies of individuals of every rank of life, and among
every description of society. In former periods of British
civilization, as during the flourishing ages of Greece and Rome, the
oratorical censor, and the satirical poet, were regarded as exercising
only that just pre-eminence to which superior genius and an intimate
knowledge of life and human nature were conceived to entitle them. The
_MacFlecknoe_ of Dryden, the _Dunciad_ and the satirical imitations of
Pope, remained secure from molestation by the Attorney-General; the
literary castigators of a Bolingbroke and a Wharton enjoyed the
triumph of truth and justice unawed by _ex-officios_; and Addison
could describe a coward and a liar without being called to account for
his inuendos by the interference of the judicial servants of the king.
But times are altered, and a man may now be sent to prison for a
couple of years, and ruined perhaps for life, because he calls a spade
a spade, and tells a public individual the very truths that are
obvious to the most partial of his friends.'
So fine a judge of 'Shelleyan flavour' as Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy
ought surely to have observed how greatly this piece of writing differs in
style and quality from the prose of Shelley's novels, his Oxonian letters
to Stockdale and Hogg, his Irish addresses, and all his prose writings of
the same period. Instead of discovering the difference, however, our nice
_connoisseur_ of 'Shelleyan flavour,' and the historic probabilities,
exclaims in a rapturous note to the last sentence of the quotation:--
'This passage proves almost conclusively that the person addressed as
"Editor of the _Statesman_" must have been Mr. Finnerty. The public
individual of whom he published those obvious truths that were
pronounced a libel by Lord Ellenborough was Lord Castlereagh. The
former editor of the _Statesman_, Mr. Lovell, was suffering
imprisonment for a different offence.'
There is no evidence that Mr. Finerty was, or ever had been, the editor of
the _Statesman_. There are no grounds for thinking he ever had been the
editor of that paper. Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy admits he has no reason
to think Mr. Finerty ever was editor of the _Statesman_. Yet he insists
that this spurious letter (genuine epistle as he thinks), dated 22nd
February, 1811, to the Editor of the _Statesman_, must have been addressed
to a man (who was _not_ that paper's editor), _because_ it contains a
reference to the imprisonment of some person in terms quite as applicable
to an imprisoned journalist who _had never been_, as to an imprisoned
journalist _who had been or was_ editor of that paper.
Nothing in the letter to the Editor of the _Statesman_ implies that the
imprisoned journalist had been in any way connected with the paper, or
that the writer of the letter believed the imprisoned journalist to have
been connected with the paper. Yet Mr. MacCarthy is at great pains to show
how the Oxonian Shelley may have come to imagine that the cruelly
entreated Mr. Finerty was editor of the paper, with which he in fact is
not known to have had any professional connexion. The libel on Lord
Castlereagh, for which Mr. Finerty was sent to prison, having been
published in the _Statesman_ as well as the _Morning Chronicle_, it was
natural for Shelley (argues Mr. MacCarthy) to assume that Mr. Finerty was
editor of the _Statesman_. Shelley was by no means such a fool as the
'Shelleyan enthusiasts' would have us think him. The youngster reasoned
wildly sometimes, but he was not likely to think a journalist must be the
editor of one paper because he had been sent to prison for libelling a
Minister in another paper. Knowing well enough that Mr. Finerty (in whose
concerns he took a lively interest) had been committed for eighteen months
to Lincoln Gaol on 7th February, 1811, Shelley was not likely to imagine a
fortnight later he was the Acting Editor of the London _Statesman_.
Knowing right well Mr. Finerty had been sentenced to _eighteen months_,
Shelley was not likely so soon after the sentence to imagine the
journalist had been sent to prison for _two years_. To read Mr.
MacCarthy's perplexing pages is to see that the gentleman was not more
successful in confounding his readers than in confounding himself. Yet
because he threw a new kind of mud on Shelley's earliest biographer, this
superlatively inaccurate and stupefying writer has been cried up as a
great Shelleyan authority.
After setting forth the words of the spurious epistle, Mr. MacCarthy
remarks in his usual style of laborious inaccuracy:--
'This letter, whatever its claim to authenticity may be, is dated
February 22nd, 1811. Six days later--_that is_, on the 2nd of March in
the same year--Shelley addressed, for the first time, another
newspaper editor then personally unknown to him, but who became a few
years later one of his most valued and intimate friends--Leigh Hunt.'
February 22nd, 1811. Six days later--that is, on the 2nd of March in the
same year!--What particularity and what curious persistence in blundering!
The gentleman, who is so severe on Hogg for an occasional slip, is more
than usually fortunate when he is only twenty-five per cent wrong in a
calculation of days. Mr. MacCarthy, however, is right in holding there is
no reason to doubt the genuineness of the youthful Shelley's first letter
to the Editor of the _Examiner_. Written in the Oxonian Shelley's best,
but far from strenuous, style, the epistle (of 2nd March, 1811) to Leigh
Hunt--the epistle Leigh Hunt never answered--could not have proceeded from
any hand but Shelley's hand. Strangely ingenious things have been done in
the way of Shelleyan forgeries, but no fabricator of spurious letters and
other materials for fictitious biography would have thought of
manufacturing the delicious bit of puerile bounce that makes the letter
end in this droll fashion:--
'My father is in parliament, and on attaining twenty-one I shall, in
all probability, fill his vacant seat. On account of the
responsibility to which my residence in this University subjects me,
I, of course, dare not publicly avow all I think; but the time will
come when I hope that my every endeavour, insufficient as they may be,
will be directed to the advancement of liberty.
'Your most obedient servant,
'P. B. SHELLEY.'
From his Eton days to a time considerably subsequent to his expulsion from
Oxford, it was Shelley's practice to open correspondence with strangers by
telling them how greatly he differed in his worldly circumstances and
prospects from ordinary young men. In this strain of boyish boastfulness,
he is known to have approached so many people, that it is reasonable to
suppose it to have been his usual device for putting himself in the
favourable regard of persons, whose acquaintance he sought. To the Messrs.
Longman, of Paternoster Row, he wrote from Eton: 'My object in writing it
was not pecuniary, as I am independent, being the heir of a gentleman of
large fortune in the county of Sussex.' To Stockdale he introduced himself
by word of mouth in much the same fashion. In the earliest days of their
acquaintance, Hogg heard not a little from Sir Bysshe Shelley's grandson,
of matters redounding to the dignity of the Castle Goring Shelleys; the
romantic traditions of his house; the arguments with which the Duke of
Norfolk urged him to look to politics as his proper field of action. 'My
father is in parliament,' he writes on 2nd March, 1811, to the editor of
the _Examiner_, whom he has never seen, 'and on attaining twenty-one I
shall, in all probability, fill his vacant seat.' Ten months later (10th
January, 1812), he is writing to William Godwin, whilst seeking the
philosopher's friendship by letter before seeing him,
'I am the son of a man of fortune in Sussex.... It will be necessary,
in order to elucidate this part of my history, to inform you, that I
am heir by entail to an estate of 6000_l._ per annum. My principles
have induced me to regard the law of primogeniture as an evil of
primary magnitude.'
In the musical egotisms of his poetry, the ear catches the same note of
boastful arrogance and self-complacence. Whilst preaching the gospel of
love, and proclaiming his determination to sacrifice himself for the good
of others on the first convenient opportunity, Shelley knew how to remind
his hearers that he would sacrifice a great deal more than the common sort
of philanthropists; and there were moments when, not content with virtue's
peculiar and sweetest reward,--an approving conscience, he was more eager
to provoke, than avoid, the plaudits of the multitude.
The reader of the epistle to Leigh Hunt may well smile at the youngster's
announcement that, in the course of two years, he would probably occupy a
seat in the House of Commons, through his father's timely retirement from
political life. It is not the wont of even the most affectionate father to
be so considerate for his heir-apparent; and though he was a much kindlier
and more generous parent than the 'Shelleyan enthusiasts' like to admit,
Mr. Timothy Shelley, of Field Place, was by no means a likely man to
retreat into private life, in order that his eldest son might become
Member of Parliament for New Shoreham in his twenty-second year.
Delighting in the status of a member of elective assembly, the
self-complacent and rather pompous gentleman plumed himself on standing
well with his 'party' and 'Mr. Speaker,' and being so highly respected by
'the house' and 'the country' that he gave peculiar weight and moral
influence to the committees to which he was appointed. By no means so
destitute of imagination as numerous detractors have declared him, Mr.
Timothy Shelley resembled his son in an aptitude for conceiving whatever
tended for the moment to put him on good terms with himself. To hear Mr.
Timothy Shelley repeat over his second bottle the compliments whispered
into his ear by Mr. Speaker, was to infer that, if his words were reported
accurately, Mr. Speaker was an habitual and extravagant flatterer, or had
some unaccountable partiality for the Member for New Shoreham. To believe
all the Member for New Shoreham said of himself, was to believe, that no
committee was appointed in the Lower House until he and Ministers had
spoken together respecting its constitution, that few nice questions of
foreign policy were decided until Ministers had asked him what might, and
what might not, be done. The kindly gentleman, who declared he had
furnished Archdeacon Paley (or 'Palley,' as the Member for New Shoreham
pronounced the name) with all the main arguments for the 'Evidences,'
could persuade himself that his smile or frown determined the course of
Ministers and Administrations. Whilst the Oxonian Shelley liked to imagine
himself in parliament, his father delighted in imagining himself the very
soul of parliament. So imaginative a father was not likely to vacate his
seat for the advantage of so imaginative a son.
The mere absence of reasonable grounds for the statement would not,
however, justify a confident opinion that Shelley was guilty of deliberate
untruth when he wrote on 2nd March, 1811, that, on coming of age, he would
probably succeed to his father's vacant place in the House of Commons.
Enough has been said in previous pages of this work to show that, together
with a capacity for saying what he knew to be untrue, the Oxonian Shelley,
no less than the Shelley of later time, possessed a fancy so curiously
vigorous and fertile of inventions, that it may be held in some degree
accountable for some of his numerous misstatements. In their desire to
shield him from the obloquy of wilful and habitual untruthfulness, some of
the poet's friends have, no doubt, exaggerated this consequence of his
imaginative energy. In maintaining that his friend cordially detested
falsehood, and in respect of his frequent inaccuracies of statement, was
the mere 'creature, the unsuspecting and unresisting victim, of his
irresistible imagination,' Hogg not only went beyond his evidences, but
traversed and contradicted them in a manner to provoke suspicion of his
own honesty. Even where he admits that the inaccuracies were referable, in
a large measure, to untruthfulness, Peacock betrays a similar disposition
to make the utmost of the singular imaginativeness, which he held no less
accountable for the poet's frequent deviations from veracity.
By those who would rate none too highly the testimony of these two notable
witnesses to the poet's character, allowance must of course be made for
the partiality of friendship. On the other hand, it must be remembered
that, whilst affording them opportunities for studying his character
closely, their intimacy with so singular and interesting a companion,
offered them the strongest inducements to judge him fairly and know him
thoroughly. If it must be conceded that Hogg and Peacock would never have
thought of referring their friend's imperfect veracity to his excessive
imaginativeness, had he been nothing more to them than a slight
acquaintance, it must also be conceded that the circumstances of their
close and affectionate intercourse with the poet, qualified them to give
the true explanation of his most perplexing utterances and most pitiable
infirmity. Having regard to the general trustworthiness of the witnesses,
and also to the several obvious considerations which may well dispose the
reader to receive their evidence with suspicion and incredulity, I cannot
question that, however much they overstated their respective opinions out
of tenderness for the poet's fame, both Hogg and Peacock had reasonable
grounds for believing that a quick and undisciplined fancy was far more,
or scarcely less, accountable than moral obliquity for their friend's
untruthful assertions. For the moment, therefore (_but only for the
moment_), let it be assumed that, whilst penning the lines to Leigh Hunt,
the undergraduate of University College really believed he was likely to
take his father's seat in parliament in the course of the next two or
three years.
The assumption puts the reader face to face with another difficulty. The
Oxonian Shelley, who made this remarkable announcement to Leigh Hunt, was
the same Oxonian Shelley, who used to declare himself indebted to Dr.
Lind's timely intervention for preservation from the madhouse, to which
his father meant to consign him. Whilst there is evidence of some sort
that one of Shelley's hallucinations haunted him from boyhood to the last
month of his existence, there is no evidence of any kind that his most
transitory hallucinations perished within a few days of the hour, when he
first came under their power. It took him more than a year to get the
better of his morbid fancy that Hogg was set on seducing his first wife.
It took him several weeks to survive his equally ludicrous and distressing
fancy, that he was stricken with leprosy. There is no ground for
suspecting he was visited by hallucinations so fleeting that they might be
styled 'illusions of the hour.' If, at the time of writing to Leigh Hunt,
he really believed he would enter parliament in his twenty-second year,
the hallucination must be regarded as holding his mind for a considerable
period, concurrently with the hallucination touching his father's
determination to confine him for life as a lunatic. If there are grounds
for thinking he really hoped to enter parliament so soon through his
father's affectionate consideration, the grounds are still stronger for
thinking he really apprehended incarceration in a madhouse, through his
father's cruelty. To believe his father capable of retiring from
parliament for the advantage of a son who had occasioned much trouble and
reasonable displeasure, it was necessary for Shelley to think his father a
rare example of parental devotion and beneficence. To believe his father
capable of locking him up in a madhouse, at the instigation of resentment
and notions of domestic policy, it was necessary for Shelley to think his
father a monstrous example of parental malice and cruelty.
If he thought his father capable of such self-sacrifice for his boy's
happiness, Shelley must have thought his father an admirably good parent.
If he thought his father capable of such barbarity to his own offspring,
Shelley must have deemed his father a superlatively cruel and wicked
parent. To have believed his father capable of the parental self-sacrifice
and the parental cruelty, Shelley must in the same moment of time have
regarded his father as one of the very best and one of the very worst
parents. It is not in the power of human sanity or human madness to think
thus differently of the same person at the same moment. If Shelley really
believed his father was watching for an opportunity to shut him up in a
madhouse, he was fibbing when he wrote to Leigh Hunt, that his father
would probably soon retire from parliament in his favour. If Shelley
believed what he wrote to Leigh Hunt, he was fibbing when he talked to
Hogg and others of his cruel father's malignant purpose to shut him up in
a lunatic asylum. Strange creature though he was, it is difficult to
believe even of Shelley that, whilst seeing his father's goodness, he
could be so malignantly wicked to do his utmost to persuade his friends of
his father's inordinate badness. Perhaps it is even more difficult to
imagine, strange being though he was, that whilst thinking his father an
execrably bad parent, Shelley would be so perverse as to invent the story,
which went to prove his father an extraordinarily good one.
To escape from this tangle of difficulties, from this dilemma of _four_
horns, readers are at liberty to assume that the Oxonian Shelley believed
no tittle of either of the marvellous stories. Dismissing the assumption
that the youngster wrote to Leigh Hunt in good faith and simple honesty,
they may take it as proved that, in bragging about the seat he would have
in parliament as soon as he should have taken his degree, the
undergraduate was fibbing, in order that the newspaper editor should form
something more than an adequate notion of his correspondent's importance.
They may also take it as proved, that the undergraduate was no more
sincere in talking about his wicked father's design to lock him up in a
madhouse, than in writing that his father would probably retire from
parliament in his favour. The time, doubtless, came when Shelley believed
his worst fictions to his father's discredit, even as tellers of untruths
usually come in course of time to believe the fabrications which they
persist in repeating steadily and earnestly:--even as 'the nobleman, who
recently languished in captivity at Portland,' has doubtless succeeded in
persuading himself that he is the veritable Sir Roger Tichborne.
But before fancies, born of fierce and violent resentments, acquired the
complexion and force of hideous truths to his disordered judgment, it is
conceivable--ay, it cannot be doubted--that Shelley passed through states
of mental and moral disturbance, which were fruitful of impressions and
misconceptions, so curiously composed of fact and fancy, of truth and
chimera, that he might be well described as a victim of semi-delusions.
Between the period when he was altogether sane and the period when he
suffered from steady hallucination, at least on one subject, and transient
hallucinations on other subjects, there was a period during which he was
neither absolutely free from delusions nor wholly possessed by any
delusion respecting his father's character and conduct.
IV. Yet another 'discovery' respecting the Oxonian Shelley, for which the
'Shelleyan enthusiasts' overflowed with gratitude to Mr. Denis Florence
MacCarthy. To believe all that is told to his honour in _Shelley's Early
Life_ is to believe that Shelley made himself responsible for the costs
and charges of publishing the little volume of verse, which gave Miss
Janetta Phillips her modest place in literary annals. That Miss Janetta
was writing poetry whilst Shelley kept terms at Oxford, that she rose to a
high place in his poetical regard in the spring of 1811, and that whilst
waging war with bigotry and superstition in academic circles, he was at
much pains to get subscribers for her book of poems, are matters of
historic certainty. In the April of that year, when Miss Elizabeth Shelley
was fast falling from her brother's favour, he wrote to Hogg, 'Elizabeth
is, indeed, an unworthy companion of the Muses. I do not rest much on her
poetry now. Miss Phillips betrayed twice the genius; greater amiability,
if to affect the feelings is a proof of the excess of the latter.' The
long list of subscribers to _Poems by Janetta Phillips_. Oxford: Printed
by Collingwood and Co., 1811, affords conclusive evidence that, whilst
regarding her poetical ability with approval, Shelley bestirred himself in
Oxford, London, and Sussex, to further Miss Janetta's literary venture.
Subscribing himself for six copies of the work, he induced his sister
Elizabeth to put her name down for a copy of the metrical effusions, which
'betrayed twice the genius' of her compositions. Miss Hellen Shelley at
the Clapham Boarding School, and her friend Miss Harriett Westbrook, also
produced half-crowns from their little purses for the benefit of Miss
Janetta Phillips. Other members of Shelley's circle ordered the book at
his instance. Mr. Medwin, of Horsham, ordered a copy; Mr. Charles Grove
took a copy; Mrs. Grove, of Lincoln's Inn Fields, put her name down for
three copies. It was, doubtless, at Shelley's solicitation that his Oxford
bookseller consented to subscribe for Miss Janetta's little volume. It is
probable that the young lady had other friends besides Shelley in the
University, where she found no less than eighty subscribers for her
_Poems_. Still, it may be safely assumed, she was considerably indebted to
Shelley's influence in the colleges for the sympathy and money of so many
gownsmen. That Shelley admired Miss Janetta's poetry, and pushed the
fortunes of her book to the utmost of his ability, is certain.
But what proof is there that he generously took upon himself the charges
of publication, and thereby incurred a debt that drained his pocket a few
months later? What are the facts that to this extent 'exhibit Shelley in
the amiable light of being an active encourager of a youthful muse?' Here
is Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy's evidence to the fact. In one of the
undated letters, which he wrote in the summer (say July) of 1811, from
Radnorshire to Hogg at York, Shelley says--'I have at this moment no
money, as Philipps' and the other debt have drained me.' What evidence to
the point! In the spring of the year Miss Janetta Phillips published a
little book, which was so largely subscribed for that, besides paying the
charges of production, it must have put a good many guineas into the
author's pocket. Three or four months later Shelley writes from Wales that
'Philipps' and the other debt have drained' him so completely that he is
without money. It follows, according to Mr. MacCarthy, that at the time of
writing the letter Shelley was suffering from his generosity to Miss
Janetta Phillips. The 'Shelleyan enthusiasts,' who mistook Mr. MacCarthy
for a prophet because he wrote abusively of Hogg, may be assured that
neither of the debts referred to in the epistle had anything to do with
Miss Janetta Phillips's book. Printed whilst the young lady's poetry was
passing through the press at Oxford, Shelley's tract on _The Necessity of
Atheism_--the publication that resulted in his expulsion from University
College, Oxford--was printed by E. and W. _Phillips_, of Worthing. I have
not thought it worth my while to inquire about Miss Janetta's parentage
and history; but I should not be surprised to learn she was the daughter
of one of these Worthing printers, and that Shelley's efforts for the
success of her book proceeded in some degree from friendliness for the
printers, who were just then rendering him secret and confidential
service. One thing is certain about Miss Janetta. Though it occasioned him
considerable trouble at the moment, the publication of her poems caused
him no subsequent discomfort. The debts, referred to in the letter, were
the debt to Stockdale for the production of _St. Irvyne_, and the debt to
the Messrs. E. and W. Phillips, of Worthing, for printing _The Necessity
of Atheism_. Mr. MacCarthy's precious discovery is 'a mare's-nest' for the
cynical reader to chuckle over.
CHAPTER XIII.
SHELLEY'S SECOND RESIDENCE-TERM AT OXFORD.
Harriett Westbrook--Her Character and Beauty--How Shelley came to care
for her--Her Subscription for Janetta Phillips's Poems--Shelley's
first Visit to Harriett's Home--His Intention to compete for 'the
Newdigate'--Thornton Hunt's scandalous Suggestion--Obligations of the
Oxford Undergraduate--Mary Wollstonecraft on the Guinea
Forfeit--Shelley's False Declaration--His numerous Untruths--_The
Necessity of Atheism_--Was it a Squib?--Lady Shelley's
Inaccuracies--Mr. Garnett's Misdescription of the Tract--His
Misrepresentation of Hogg--The _Little Syllabus_ printed at
Worthing--More Untruths by Shelley--The Tract offered for Sale in
Oxford--Shelley called before 'the Dons'--His Expulsion from
University College--Hogg's Impudence and Craft--His
Misrepresentations--Shelley and Hogg leave Oxford.
Though he had not yet seen the child who, in the following September,
became his first wife, Shelley was enough interested in her on 11th
January, 1811, to write to his publisher, Stockdale:--'I would thank you
to send a copy of _St. Irvyne_ to Miss Harriet Westbrook, 10, Chapel
Street, Grosvenor Square;' an order he would scarcely have given, had not
circumstances already caused him to think of her with peculiar
friendliness. At their boarding-school on the north side of Clapham
Common, near the 'Old Town,' Miss Mary Shelley (_ætat._ 13) and Miss
Hellen Shelley (_ætat._ 11) had several schoolmates, of whose looks and
doings they would naturally prattle to their elder brother during the
Christmas holidays, as they sat about the Christmas fire. How was it that,
of all the girls about whom his sisters may be assumed to have spoken in
his hearing, Harriett Westbrook was the one he selected for a compliment
that must have greatly pleased her? Mary and Hellen were the only persons
(with the exception of their elder sister--possibly one of Harriett's
school friends in earlier time) who can be conceived to have gossiped with
him about the loveliest of Mrs. Fenning's pupils, in a way to inspire him
with interest in her. The fair inference from the reasonable assumptions
is that of all the school-girls, of whom his sisters spoke, Harriett
Westbrook seemed the fairest and most fascinating to him and them.
Let it be assumed that, of all their friends at the Clapham
boarding-school, Harriett was the only girl of whom the sisters spoke to
their brother. In that case, the question arises, why the sisters, so
uncommunicative about the others, were eloquent about the girl who soon
became their brother's wife?--eloquent about her in a way to make him
desirous of knowing her? The question must be answered in a way more or
less favourable to the notion that Harriett stood well in the opinion of
the sisters.
There is another reason for thinking Harriett Westbrook was at this point
of her career peculiarly acceptable to the young ladies of Field Place.
Older than Miss Mary Shelley by two years at least, more than three years
older than Miss Hellen Shelley, Harriett Westbrook, besides being one of
the older girls of Mrs. Fenning's seminary, was the acknowledged 'beauty'
of the school; and beauty in a senior school-girl always disposes the
juniors of the school to regard her favourably, when it is not associated
with any irritating moral defect. Harriett's temper was by no means
faultless, but as she was the only serious sufferer from her propensity to
imagine herself an ill-used damsel, it did not lessen the natural
influence of her personal attractiveness.
Fretful towards herself, she was never peevish or wilfully unkind to
others. Her prevailing mood was tranquil melancholy; and there were times
when she played the rebel with a serene sullenness that made worthy Mrs.
Fenning wonder what would be the end of so perplexing a young lady. When
she was more than usually miserable about nothing at Clapham, this young
lady (who eventually committed suicide) used to think she might as well
destroy herself, would even tell the governesses she rather thought she
should destroy herself. But the announcements of suicidal purpose were
made in so placid and passionless a manner, that they caused little or no
alarm. Even in her naughtiest humours she was gentle in speech and bearing
to her classmates, and not devoid of frigid decorum to those who were in
authority over her. In her brighter seasons she was childishly
charming,--so winning and cooingly docile, that Mrs. Fenning and the
subordinate teachers quickly relented to her smiles, and forgiving her in
five minutes for all the trouble she had given throughout twice as many
weeks, fell to kissing and petting her, as though she were the veriest
darling. How could this darling, so irresistible to the governesses she
harassed, be otherwise than popular with the girls whose tempers she never
tried?
One of those beauties, who are seen oftener on the walls than the floors
of drawing-rooms, less a thing of real life than a picture, this girl of
curious and memorable loveliness lived in the recollections of her Clapham
schoolmates, when forty years and more had passed over her grave. Rather
below the average stature of womankind, shapely as a sculptured Venus,
graceful in her movements, she would have possessed all the finer elements
of womanly loveliness, had she not lacked the air and style of mental
force and moral dignity. In 1856 Miss Hellen Shelley recalled Harriett[6]
Westbrook, whom she saw for the last time in 1811, as 'a very handsome
girl, with a complexion quite unknown in these days--brilliant pink and
white,--with hair quite like a poet's dream, and Bysshe's peculiar
admiration.' It lived also in Miss Hellen's recollection that Mrs.
Fenning, and her assistant-governesses, used to talk about Harriett's
beauty, and even spoke of her as qualified to 'enact Venus' at a _fête
champêtre_. In colour her eyes resembled Shelley's prominent blue eyes,
and the profusion of hair, that was his 'peculiar admiration,' was light
brown.
When she committed to paper (in her fifty-seventh year, or thereabouts)
whatever she could remember of the beautiful girl, whom she never beheld
after they became sisters-in-law, it lived in Miss Hellen Shelley's
recollection that her brother was said to have married her because her
name was Harriett. It is in the way of lovers to delight in the names of
those they idolize, even when their devotion is rewarded with coldness. To
the last, Byron's ear discovered music in 'Mary,' the name of the wee
Scotch lassie whom he loved in his tenth year. One can readily imagine
that the charm of her name was the first influence to make Shelley an
attentive listener to his sisters' gossip about 'the beauty' of their
college friend. It is conceivable that their talk about this lovely
Harriett of the Clapham boarding-school was accountable for the frame of
mind in which Miss Harriett Grove's discarded suitor wrote from Field
Place to Hogg on 28th December, 1810: '_At present_, a thousand barriers
oppose any more intimate connexion, any union with another;' words that
would scarcely have fallen from his pen within a fortnight of his final
rejection by the Wiltshire 'belle,' had he not already recovered from the
first and keenest misery of the misadventure, so far as to be capable of
looking forward to a future time when his 'union with another' Harriett
would be possible.
Is it not conceivable, also, that in their sympathy with his distress for
the loss of Harriett Grove, and in their affectionate desire to restore
him to his usual cheerfulness, the sisters at Field Place conspired to
remind him that their cousin Harriett was not the only beautiful Harriett
in the universe, and to lure him into consoling himself for Harriett
Grove's disdain with Harriett Westbrook's devotion? No doubt Miss Hellen
Shelley and Miss Mary Shelley were full young for match-makers. But girls
sometimes take to match-making, no less than to flirtation, before their
teens. Little Hellen (_ætat._ 11) may not have been taken fully, or even
at all, into the confidence of her elder sisters on the romantic project.
They may have encouraged her to prattle about Harriett Westbrook without
letting her suspect their purpose.
The evidence of this conspiracy on the part of three, or two, of Shelley's
sisters for marrying him to Miss Harriett Westbrook, is fragmentary and
flimsy; but few readers will question that divers facts point to the
existence of an influence at Field Place that not only disposed, but
determined, the poet to seek the young lady's acquaintance. But for his
sisters he would, probably, have never heard of Harriett Westbrook. Their
speech about her must be held accountable for his desire to know her. On
11th January, 1811, he requested Stockdale to send her a copy of _St.
Irvyne_. What but his sisters' talk about her can have disposed Shelley to
pay so considerable a compliment to the young lady, of whom he would
probably never have heard, had it not been for them?
Just about the time when he paid her this remarkable attention, Miss
Harriett Westbrook subscribed for a copy of the poems, on the point of
being published, by Miss Janetta Phillips, a young lady in whom he was
warmly interested; a young lady of whom she doubtless heard through him or
his sisters, and whose name would probably have never come to her ear had
it not been for him or them. It is suggested by Mr. Denis Florence
MacCarthy that Harriett Westbrook gave her name to the roll of Miss
Janetta Phillips's subscribers at the instance of Miss Hellen Shelley, and
that the copy of _St. Irvyne_ sent to Miss Harriett Westbrook was
Shelley's acknowledgment of her expression of concern in the enterprise of
his literary _protégée_. Probably the affair should be taken the other way
about. It is more likely that Miss Harriett's subscription to Miss
Janetta's poems was consequent on Shelley's gift of the copy of the novel.
There is no evidence that subscribers for Miss Janetta's poems were being
sought so early as the Christmas holidays (1810-11), and there is good
evidence that the list of those subscribers was not completed and made out
for publication till after Lady-day, 1811. I am, therefore, more disposed
to think Miss Harriett Westbrook subscribed for the poems at Shelley's
instance, and in acknowledgment of his civility in sending her the copy of
_St. Irvyne_, than to regard the gift of the novel as the author's
acknowledgment of her complaisance in subscribing for the poems. But if
Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy is right on this point, Miss Harriett
Westbrook's act in subscribing for the poems _may be_ regarded as an act,
done less for the gratification of one of Shelley's sisters than for the
gratification of Shelley himself, and _must be_ regarded as an act done,
more or less, for the gratification of the young man of whom she can have
heard only through his sisters. Hence the young lady's subscription for
the poems becomes another indication of the existence of an influence at
Field Place, disposing the poet to entertain feelings of friendliness for
'the beauty' of the Clapham boarding-school. Why, it has already been
asked, was Miss Harriett Westbrook the only one of his sisters'
school-fellows to whom he sent a copy of his novel? Why, it must be also
asked, was she the only one of their school-fellows to subscribe for the
poems, for whose success he was so desirous? The questions can only be
answered in a way, pointing to the existence at Field Place of an
influence, to which the act of subscription was directly, or indirectly,
referable.
Whilst readily admitting that the facts of the case sustain and justify a
strong opinion that Miss Hellen Shelley (_ætat._ 11), and Miss Mary
Shelley (_ætat._ 13), talked about their school-fellow Harriett, so as to
make their brother curious about and interested in her, readers may fairly
object (in respect to Miss Elizabeth Shelley) that it is unusual for a
young gentlewoman of the mature age of sixteen years to use her influence,
or be in a position to exercise any influence, over her brother (_ætat._
18) to make him fall in love with a young lady he has not seen. It may
also be further objected that, as she is not known to have been personally
acquainted with Miss Harriett Westbrook, it is especially difficult to
imagine that Miss Elizabeth Shelley made any efforts to compass her
brother's marriage with her younger sisters' school-fellow. There is force
in both of these objections. It must, however, be remembered that, as she
had been a pupil at the Clapham Common school, Miss Elizabeth Shelley (now
in her seventeenth year) may have been at school with Miss Harriett
Westbrook, still only in her sixteenth year. She may (in the absence of
evidence to the contrary) be fairly assumed to have known Miss Harriett
Westbrook by personal observation as well as by report--to have
remembered, as a delightful little girl, the same Harriett who was an
unutterably beautiful 'great girl' in the eyes of Mary and Hellen.
It is of more importance for readers to remember how unusual were the
relations in which Elizabeth stood to her elder brother. It is on the
record (so as to put the facts beyond dispute) that, throughout his suit
to and correspondence with his cousin Harriett, Shelley made a confidante
of his sister respecting his passion for that lovely girl; that he
especially commissioned his eldest sister to plead for him to the object
of his passion; and that in his disappointment at the failure of his suit
to his cousin, he threw himself on his sister for sympathy, consolation,
and counsel. It is no less clear on the record that, during those
Christmas holidays of 1810-11, Miss Elizabeth Shelley, whilst sympathizing
with his sorrow, was for some days in fear that in the agitations of his
grief he would destroy himself. It matters not that Shelley never
seriously thought of committing suicide; it is enough that his sister
believed him to be meditating and capable of self-destruction. 'My eldest
sister,' Miss Hellen Shelley wrote in 1855, or thereabouts, 'has
frequently told me how narrowly she used to watch him, and accompany him
in his walks with his dog and gun.' Moreover, whilst Shelley was in his
trouble seeking consolation and counsel from his eldest sister, he was
influencing her to fall in love with a young man she had never seen, and
to that end was speaking to her of his friend Hogg in terms which made her
fully aware of his purpose. Under these circumstances it would not be
surprising, could it be shown that sister (whom for _her_ happiness he was
training and luring to love a man she had never seen) conceived a purpose
of turning the tables upon him, and making him (for _his_ happiness) fall
in love with a girl on whom he had not set eyes. Under these
circumstances, what more natural than for her to do him a service
corresponding to the service he was set openly on doing her?
Anyhow, it is certain, that having conceived an interest in Miss Harriett
Westbrook, when he can have known nothing of her except from his sisters,
Shelley did not return to Oxford at the close of the Christmas vacation,
without having seen the young lady, and made arrangements for
corresponding with her.
In his article on _Shelley in Pall Mall_, Mr. Garnett is good enough to
promise that, when it shall suit his convenience to do so, he will lay
before the world 'an interesting but unpublished document,' in evidence
that the poet first saw Harriett Westbrook in January 1811. It is very
kind of Mr. Garnett to make this promise; but as it has been known for
more than a quarter of a century to all the world (with the exception of
Shelleyan specialists) that Shelley made Miss Harriett Westbrook's
acquaintance in that month, Mr. Garnett may as well keep his 'interesting
but unpublished document' to himself, if it cannot afford any further
information about the poet. In an extremely entertaining letter, to which
reference has been made in a previous chapter of this work (a letter to be
found in Hogg's much-abused _Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley_), Mr. Charles
Henry Grove, the poet's cousin, says:--
'During the Christmas vacation of that year, and in January 1811, I
spent part of it at Field Place, and when we returned to London, his
sister Mary sent a letter of introduction with a present to her
schoolfellow, Miss Westbrook, which Bysshe and I were to take to her.
I recollect we did so, calling at Mr. Westbrook's house.'
It has been often represented that Shelley was indebted to 'little Hellen'
for his first introduction to the girl who became, a few months later, his
first wife. It has been no less often represented that Shelley made his
first wife's acquaintance only a few weeks before their marriage; that he
made her acquaintance _at_ Mrs. Fenning's house; and that he was inveigled
into the marriage without being allowed the usual opportunities for
studying the girl's character. Readers, therefore, will do well to observe
that he saw her for the first time under her father's roof; that he made
her acquaintance there because he went there for the purpose of making it;
that, on the occasion of this first visit to Mr. Westbrook's house, he
went there with a letter of introduction to the young lady from his sister
Mary; that he, on the same occasion, brought the young lady a present from
his sister Mary; that he made this call upon the young lady in the company
of one of the gentlemen of his family; that this visit must be assumed to
have been paid with the cognizance of Miss Elizabeth Shelley (his eldest
sister); that, from the date of this visit, he and the young lady were in
the habit of exchanging letters; that he did not marry her till he had
corresponded with and otherwise known her intimately for eight full
months; that he did not marry her till he had lured her from Christianity
into atheism; that, instead of marrying her (a sixteen-years-old child)
with her father's consent, he stole her from her father's keeping, even as
(less than three years later) he lured another sixteen-years-old girl from
the roof of her father, who was his intimate friend.
All these statements are matters of fact, and yet Mr. Garnett says the
time will come, when 'it will for the first time be clearly understood how
slight was the acquaintance of Shelley and Harriet, previous to their
marriage; what advantage was taken of his _chivalry of sentiment_, and her
compliant disposition, and the inexperience of both.'
Returning to Oxford for the Lent term, after making Miss Harriett
Westbrook's acquaintance, Shelley returned to the same kind of life, in
which he found various excitements and congenial diversions in the eight
weeks preceding the Christmas holidays. There was no diminution in his
familiarity with and affection for Hogg. Again, the young men took long
walks in the neighbourhood of Oxford, and committed boyish extravagances
of costume and demeanour that made the gownsmen titter over their wine in
the common rooms. They still hoped to be brothers-in-law, and looked
forward to the Easter Vacation as a time for winning Miss Elizabeth
Shelley's acquiescence in their project for the union of their respective
families. They wrote letters, and got through a good deal of desultory
reading, in company with one another. They resumed their old practice of
talking with much volubility and vehemence on subjects of which they knew
little, from ten p.m. till two hours past midnight. Whilst Hogg persisted
in reading for honours, Shelley turned over a good many books for
amusement. Instead of writing to Miss Harriett Grove, he wrote letters to
Miss Harriett Westbrook. At the same time he was making efforts to
lengthen the list of subscribers for Miss Janetta Phillips's poems.
Having in the Christmas holidays scolded off his reasonable displeasure
with his heir, and taken him once again into his favour, Mr. Timothy
Shelley wrote the youngster letters of good advice, begging him to read
hard and distinguish himself at the University; letters which the son and
his friend turned to excellent fun. Whilst the Squire of Field Place thus
evinced a disposition to live on better terms with his boy, there were
signs of a corresponding disposition on Shelley's part, to live on better
terms with his father. Anyhow, it was partly to please the Member of
Parliament for New Shoreham, that the undergraduate promised to compete
for the next Prize Poem,--a promise that vastly delighted the elder Mr.
Shelley, who honoured letters without being qualified to excel in them,
and desired very much to speak of his son as an Oxford Prizeman. The
subject for 'the Newdigate,' was _Parthenon_, and as soon as Shelley had
consented to his father's desire, so far as to say he would go in for the
Prize (eventually awarded to Mr. R. Burdon, of Oriel College), the
jubilant Squire of Field Place went off to his particular friend, the
Reverend Edward Dallaway, Vicar of Leatherhead, and historian of Sussex,
and begged the sound scholar and famous antiquary, to put his erudition at
the service of the poetical undergraduate. The result of this kindly
busy-bodyism on the part of an honest gentleman, who certainly sometimes
did his best to be a good father to a worse than indifferent son, was that
Mr. Percy Bysshe Shelley, of University College, received a long letter
from Mr. Dallaway, together with charts, sketches, and documents, which
might have been useful to the young poet, had he remained long enough at
the University to complete the poem (which he began), and send it in to
the judges.
In one respect, the present writer may have described Shelley's academic
life too favourably. Too much may have been said of the purity of the
poet's personal tastes, and of his aversion to pleasures that are
fascinating only to the sensual. If he has erred in this particular, the
writer has not failed through ignorance of matters, making for another and
less agreeable view of the undergraduate's ways of amusing himself at
Oxford, but through a determination to say nothing on insufficient
evidence to the discredit of a remarkable man, whose life affords too many
occasions for necessary censure.
When anything is needlessly blurted to Shelley's shame, the injurious
statement is usually made by one of his idolaters, acting the proverbial
part of a 'candid friend.' It is so in the case of what has been urged
against the prevailing testimony to the purity and refinement of the
Oxonian Shelley's personal habits and tastes.
'Accident,' says Mr. Thornton Hunt--one of Hogg's vituperators, and
one of Shelley's idolaters--'has made me aware of facts which give me
to understand that in passing through the usual curriculum of a
college life in all its paths, Shelley did not go scatheless; but
that, in tampering with venal pleasures, his health was seriously and
not transiently injured. The effect was far greater on his mind than
on his body.'
It is needless to specify the pleasures to which Mr. Thornton Hunt points.
The pleasures which may be bought, and often attract young men in their
hours of idleness, and sometimes result in consequences permanently
injurious to their health, are not so numerous as to make the reader
doubtful as to the nature of the pleasures thus boldly indicated. But Mr.
Thornton Hunt's statement has features which will dispose readers to
question the sufficiency of his information. As Shelley never passed
'through the usual curriculum of a college life,' he can scarcely have
passed through it 'in all its paths' (whatever that may mean):--but let
that pass. It is enough that Mr. Thornton Hunt is unambiguous as to the
class of the pleasures. It is not, however, so clear how those pleasures,
which can only injure the mind through the body, should in Shelley's case
have been so much less baneful to the body than the mind. As Mr. Thornton
Hunt seems to have gained his facts from a loose talker or writer, it is
only fair and charitable to the poet to suppose that his 'frank friend'
got his facts from an altogether unreliable reporter. It may, of course,
be that in a transient fit of rakishness Shelley was so unfortunate as to
encounter mischance, which habitual rakes may be so lucky as to escape.
But the abundant evidences to the point satisfy me that 'rakishness' was
foreign to Shelley's general way of living at the University,--that, in
respect to common kinds of dissipation, his habits accorded with the
manners of Victorian much more closely than with the manners of Georgian
Oxford.
To pass from a matter about which Mr. Thornton Hunt might as well have
been silent, to an affair of several incidents, which, though notorious,
must be recorded precisely and fully, because they have never been
narrated correctly;--the incidents that closed with Shelley's expulsion
from University College, Oxford.
Whilst rejecting, with his usual good sense, Hogg's apologetic and
untruthful account of Shelley's motives and purpose in writing and
publishing (for he did both) _The Necessity of Atheism_, Mr. William
Rossetti remarks:--
'In this case, as in others, the honestest and boldest course is also
the safest: and we shall do well to understand once for all that Percy
Shelley had as good a right to form and expound his opinions on
theology as the Archbishop of Canterbury had to his. Certainly Shelley
differed from the Archbishop, and from several other students of, and
speculators on the subject, past and present; but, as there was no
obligation on him to agree with all, or any of them, so there is
nothing to be explained away or toned down when we find that in fact
he dissented.'
Had Mr. Rossetti been educated at Oxford or Cambridge in his boyhood, he
would not have put these words in print. Like the Archbishop of
Canterbury, or any other man, Shelley had, of course, a natural right to
hold and declare what he believed to be the truth on questions of
religion. In civilized communities, however, natural rights are in some
cases necessarily put under limitations, or altogether taken from
individuals,--are partially or wholly relinquished by individuals,--for
the welfare and good order of the societies of which they are members.
Archbishop Manners Sutton had, no doubt, like every other man, a natural
right to his own opinions on matters pertaining to religion, and to
proclaim those opinions. But this right was limited in his case not only
by obligations put upon him as a citizen, but also by official obligations
put upon him as Primate of the Anglican Church. So long as he remained in
his sacerdotal office he was bound in conscience to hold no opinions at
variance with the doctrines of the Church of England, and bound even more
stringently in conscience, and by social law, to refrain from publishing
opinions calculated to discredit those doctrines. Had he relinquished his
sacred office and orders, he would have recovered that much of his natural
right to think and say anything he believed to be true, which was not
denied to him by mere obligations of citizenship. On returning as far as
possible to the position and quality of a layman, he would have recovered
the right of a layman to limited freedom of speech on matters of
religion,--_i.e._ so much of the natural right to free thought and
utterance as in his time was allowed by the law of the land to every
person of his nation. But, so long as he remained Archbishop, his natural
right to be heterodox, and to teach heterodoxy, was wholly dormant.
In like manner, as a member of the University of Oxford (a society he had
joined of his own free will; a society from which he did not wish to be
withdrawn when, in December, 1810, his father threatened to withdraw him
from it), Mr. Percy Bysshe Shelley was bound to act as though he were a
sincere son of the National Church, and to do nothing that was likely to
put his orthodoxy in suspicion. Far from being under 'no obligation to
agree with all or any' of the doctrines of the Church of England (as Mr.
Rossetti avers), he was under clear, strong, and stringent obligations to
agree with every one of those doctrines. It may have always been, and
recent legislation has declared that it _was_ (if not in Shelley's time,
at least in later time) unjust and impolitic in the law of the land to
confine the Universities within limits, and hold them under restrictions,
that rendered them at most nothing more than superb seminaries for the
larger part of the nation, instead of seats of learning for the whole
nation. In the present work, however, there is no need to ask whether
those limits and restrictions were ever needful, or whether they were
salutary after ceasing to be needful, or whether they should have been
removed sooner than the recent year (1871) that saw the abolition of the
University Religious Tests. It is enough for Shelley's biographers to know
that, when the poet matriculated at Oxford, no one was allowed to enter
the University without solemnly declaring himself a member of the National
Church, and subscribing the Thirty-nine Articles in demonstration of the
truth of his declaration. Conformity to the doctrines and uses, of the
Church was the condition of admittance to the University. It was also the
condition under which every matriculated student continued to enjoy the
privileges and partake of the benefits of the University. Every member of
the University, besides being a member of the Church, was required to be a
communicant of the Church,--taking the Sacrament at appointed times in the
chapel of his college.
In respect to this last particular, it was usual for the academic 'dons'
to have regard for the religious scruples of undergraduates, whose
consciousness of evil living made them feel they would be guilty of
presumption in coming to the Lord's Table. On going to the Dean of his
college, or his tutor, and making confession of his unfitness to
communicate, the undergraduate of light manners and tender conscience
received permission to be absent from the approaching celebration, on the
understanding that he made a suitable contribution to the alms, gathered
on the occasion for charitable uses. In most colleges it was understood
that the undergraduate who thus avoided the communion should give a guinea
to the offertory; a requirement to which the applicant for the
dispensation could not object on conscientious grounds. Hence the usage
which in course of time gave occasion for the statement that the
dispensation was _bought_ for a guinea, and the still more perverse
statement that undergraduates took the Sacrament at the Universities _in
order_ to escape the exaction of twenty-one shillings. In her remarks on
the defective discipline and morality of our national seminaries, in the
_Vindication of the Rights of Woman_, Mary Wollstonecraft says, 'What good
can be expected from the youth who receives the Sacrament of the Lord's
Supper to avoid forfeiting a guinea, which he probably afterwards spends
in some sensual manner?' The offering, which Mary Wollstonecraft regarded
as a guinea forfeit, was in its origin nothing else than the voluntary
donation of the conscientious student who said to his tutor, 'Though I am
not worthy to be a partaker of the Holy Communion, I may be permitted to
give to the poor.'
Of Shelley, indeed, it is not unfair to say that he was quite capable of
taking the Sacrament in order to have a guinea the more for his pleasure.
It is certain that, whilst openly deriding Christianity, and denying the
existence of God, he could take the Sacrament, from a lighter motive than
a desire to husband his pocket-money. The levity with which he could take
the Sacrament, and afterwards allude to the act as a pretty piece of
drollery, is (to use no stronger language) startlingly offensive. Whilst
lodging in Poland Street, Oxford Street, immediately after his expulsion
from University College, Oxford, he wrote to Hogg (24th April, 1811) of
Harriett Westbrook and her elder sister:--
'My little friend, Harriet W., is gone to her prison-house. She is
quite well in health; at least, so she says, though she looks very
much otherwise. I saw her yesterday. I went with her sister to Miss
H.'s [? F.'s] and walked about Clapham Common with them for two hours.
The youngest is a most amiable girl; the eldest is really conceited,
but very condescending. _I took the Sacrament with her on Sunday!!!_'
With the same levity, he took the Sacrament, seven or eight weeks later,
in Sussex, after returning to Field Place. Writing to Hogg from Horsham on
16th June, 1811, he says, 'I am going to take the sacrament. In spite of
my melancholy reflections, the idea rather amuses and soothes me!!!' This
from the youthful zealot and martyr for Free Thought, who, according to
some of his idolaters, was driven from Oxford because his singular
earnestness and sincerity would not permit him to acquiesce hypocritically
in a faith he disbelieved, or in usages he deemed superstitious!
Whilst the University was held within these religious limits, it was one
of the prime duties of the academic authorities to take due care for the
maintenance of the religious uniformity required by the law of the land.
For the wisdom or impolicy of the law they were no more accountable than
any judge is accountable for the justice or impolicy of the law he is
appointed to administer. It was not for them to make reply or reason why,
but to see that the law for uniformity of religious sentiment was duly
respected by the gownsmen of every academic grade. Had the Master and
Fellows of any college winked at any irregularities tending to defeat the
law within their house, they would have been guilty of a heinous breach of
trust. It is needful to insist on this obvious fact, because, through the
influence of books and articles, written for the most part by gentlemen
who were not educated at either Oxford or Cambridge, the notion has arisen
that the Master and Fellows of Shelley's college might with propriety have
forborne to call him to account for publishing a work at Oxford to
demonstrate the necessity of atheism; that they are chargeable with
mischievous indiscretion, and a flagrant excess of duty, in taking notice
of the tract he wrote and offered for sale at Oxford. Mr. Garnett is of
opinion that by merely leaving Shelley alone 'the Oxford authorities ...
might have preserved an illustrious modern ornament of their University.'
To think with Mr. Garnett on this point is to forget that to preserve to
the University a young gentleman who might one day write excellent poetry
was not the first duty of those authorities. It is to forget that they
were bound to have due care for the religious order and discipline
demanded by the law of the land.
It is easier to discover laxity and indifference than the vexatious
indiscretions of an excessive zeal in the measures employed by those
authorities for the maintenance and preservation of religious uniformity.
Acting too much rather than too little like men of the world, too little
rather than too much like cloistered enthusiasts, they allowed their
undergraduates as far as possible to go their own way, reading whatever
they pleased, saying whatever they liked amongst themselves. When he
remarked approvingly of the authorities of his college, 'They are very
civil to us here: they never interfere with us,' Shelley described
precisely the method of academic government, that, according to Mr.
Garnett, would have preserved Shelley to the University. In respect to
affairs of religion no less than other matters, the undergraduates were
treated civilly; put as gentlemen upon their honour, taken as gentlemen at
their word, allowed the largest possible liberty, interfered with as
little as possible. At matriculation the undergraduate was subjected to no
searching examination, for the discovery of the weak points of his
orthodoxy. It was enough that he made the usual declaration and
subscription with the simple honesty and good faith to be looked for in
young Englishmen. After matriculation he was allowed an almost perilous
freedom. He did not live, like the students of some religious seminaries,
under constant surveillance and espionage. He had no fear that, during his
absence from his rooms, strange eyes would inspect his private books and
search his private papers. He was not harassed with divinity lectures,
attended with questions nicely devised for entrapping him into revelations
of theological unsoundness. Heterodoxy was not sniffed, scented, hunted
down and punished in him and his companions, as heresy was detected and
denounced in the colleges of the sixteenth century by spies and
eavesdroppers. It was enough for the 'dons' of his particular college and
the other authorities of the University, that he attended chapel with
sufficient frequency, and took the Sacrament in accordance with the rules
of 'the house.' Just as he was credited with sincerity at matriculation,
when he subscribed the Articles, it was assumed that he attended chapel as
a sincere member of the Church of England. If he asked for exemption from
attendance at the next celebration of the Lord's Supper, the request was
not regarded as an indication of heterodoxy. Throughout his terms, in the
absence of clear and unlooked-for evidence to the contrary, it was
inferred from his fair observance of religious forms, that he was an
honest Churchman. To what further point could _laisser-faire_ indulgence
be carried with safety? In this manner Shelley was treated in respect to
matters of religion by the rulers of his college, who are said to have
worried him with vexatious interference and insulting requirements. The
boy of eighteen years was dealt with in this fashion. Yet we are told that
all would have gone well with him at Oxford, had the Master and Fellows of
the University only left him alone.
Because religious uniformity was maintained with the least possible
interference with the liberty of individuals, it would be a mistake to
imagine it was not maintained effectually. Of late the fashion has arisen
to speak of the religious forms, that were used for the preservation of
this uniformity, as vain and idle forms. A moment's consideration will
satisfy the fair and judicial reader that this fashion is an unjust one.
Surely the forms were not vain and idle, that excluded from the
Universities the young men of our non-conforming families; that yearly
drove to other and inferior seminaries some three or four hundred young
men of our fairly prosperous families, who, but for those forms, would
have sought their higher education at Oxford and Cambridge. To assume that
those forms were less influential within the Universities than in families
having no connection with the Established Church, is to assume that
English Dissenters surpassed English Churchmen greatly in truthfulness.
Doubtless the Oxonians of Georgian England comprised a small percentage of
undergraduates who were extreme free-thinkers, and a more considerable
percentage of young men, who, after subscribing the Articles in levity,
and with an imperfect knowledge of their contents, passed their academic
terms in frivolity and dissoluteness. But it cannot be doubted that the
religious requirements and observances of the University operated as an
efficacious discipline on the majority of the students. The same
requirements and observances were also influential on every undergraduate,
whatever his secret sentiments and his manner of living, in reminding him
that the University was a school for members of the Church of England and
for no other persons, that as a member of the University he was bound to
live in apparent conformity to the National Church, and that he would
forfeit his right to remain in the University by repudiating the doctrines
of the Church. In Shelley's academic time, every undergraduate knew that
by publishing a work to discredit the fundamental doctrines of
Christianity he would render himself liable to banishment from the
University, and that the authorities of his college would be constrained
by their official obligations to take prompt action for his punishment,
and in case he persisted in his flagrant heterodoxy to expel him. It is
certain that Shelley's view of his academic obligations and
responsibilities differed widely from Mr. Rossetti's erroneous view of
them. That he published _The Necessity of Atheism_ anonymously, that he
made a secret of his authorship of the work, that he declined to answer
'yea' or 'nay' to the inquiry whether he wrote the tract, are sufficient
testimony that he was alive to the nature and consequences of the offence
of which he had been guilty. Evidence under Shelley's own hand has already
been produced that, instead of imagining himself at liberty to hold and
expound any opinions he pleased, he was well aware that, as a member of
the University, he was precluded from publishing certain opinions. On 2nd
March, 1811, at the very moment of publishing _The Necessity of Atheism_,
he wrote from University College, to Leigh Hunt: '_On account of the
responsibility to which my residence in this University subjects me, I, of
course, dare not publicly avow all that I think_.' The writer of these
words was better informed than most of his biographers respecting the
obligations of an Oxford undergraduate.
Had he been so remarkably out-spoken and truth-loving, as Lady Shelley
declares him to have been, Shelley would not have entered Oxford with a
falsehood on his lips, by a solemn declaration that he believed what he
disbelieved. Though he believed in the existence of God till the later
part of the Christmas vacation (1810-11), he had ceased to believe in the
divinity of Christ before he went to Oxford. At the time of his
matriculation he was not a Christian; yet he went before the authorities
of University College and of the University, and declared himself a
believer in Christianity, and an honest member of the Church of England.
How are we to account for the conduct of this singularly out-spoken and
truth-loving Shelley in stating thus deliberately and solemnly what he
knew was untrue?
It may be said that other young men in 1810 told the same untruths for
their convenience and advantage. Doubtless, a few other young men were
guilty of the same untruths. But no one has ventured to extol them for
singular candour, veracity, and moral courage. How came the singularly
out-spoken and truth-loving Shelley to utter the solemn falsehoods? Had he
been so out-spoken and truth-loving, surely he would have said, 'I will
not go to Oxford, because I can only enter the University by means of
enormous untruths.' In the year of his matriculation every English county
had young men, every considerable English town had young men, who would
gladly have gone to Oxford and Cambridge for the advantages of University
education, could they have done so without falsehood;--young men who
entered on the battle of life with inferior culture and at serious
disadvantages, because to get admittance to the Universities it would be
necessary for them to be untruthful. No one has ever thought of commending
these young men for any peculiar elevation of character, because they
refrained from telling a lie and entering on a course of hypocrisy, that
would in some considerable respects have been beneficial to them. They
deserved no such commendation; for their conduct merely proved they were
not wanting in the ordinary truthfulness and honesty, which parliament
assumed ordinary Englishmen to possess, as a matter of course, when it was
determined to exclude Non-conformists from the Universities. How came the
singularly out-spoken and truth-loving Shelley to be so much less than
ordinarily truthful in this business?
It cannot be pleaded in his excuse, as it can be pleaded in behalf of the
many youngsters who subscribed the Articles with commonplace carelessness,
that he had not given much consideration to the Articles and Christian
evidences; that he took it for granted they were all right; that, though
he may have been wrong to trust in so serious a business to vague and
general impressions, he did not know the Articles comprised tenets from
which he differed. It cannot be urged in palliation of his falseness that
by declining to go to one of the Universities he would have thrown away
his only or his best chance of rising to a position of dignity and
comfort. Nor can it be suggested that, knowing his father wished him to go
to the University, and to distinguish himself there, so dutiful and loving
a son did not like to disappoint his sire's paternal ambition. Shelley
went to Oxford merely to please himself; and, in order to have the
pleasure of living at Oxford with congenial companions, he entered the
University under cover of falsehood, declaring he was a Christian when he
knew he was not a Christian. He entered Oxford under cover of this
falsehood, well knowing that to a man of his opinions the usual residence
at Oxford would be a course of hypocrisy. Other young men (though, unless
I err, _not many_ young men) have done likewise. But it would be absurd to
commend them for being especially out-spoken and truth-loving.
During the Michaelmas term of 1810, Shelley amused himself by luring
persons, whom he knew only by name and reputation, into corresponding with
him on religious questions, just as in former time he had drawn strangers
into controversy on questions of natural science. Addressing these people
under a false name and address, he caused them to imagine they were
replying to the letters of a person, troubled with doubts and honestly
desirous of information and guidance for the solution of the difficulties.
To account for the secresy and misrepresentations, with which Shelley
approached the individuals he thus lured into religious controversy, it is
recorded in Hogg's _Life_ that, whilst at Eton, the youthful disputant
about gases was threatened by an angry chemist with exposure to Dr. Keate,
who would not fail to whip him into a healthier state of mind. On being
thus reminded how unfavourable the discipline of his school was to equally
frank and free inquiry, the schoolboy adopted a course that, without
affecting the freedom of his inquiries, would guard him from some of the
consequences of perilous frankness. An anonymous letter-writer at Eton to
save his skin, Shelley was an anonymous letter-writer at Oxford to save
his credit for religious conformity with the 'dons.' Instead of using only
one _nom-de-plume_ in these affairs of deceitful correspondence, Shelley
employed several _aliases_ for his more effectual concealment; and whilst
using different names he misdescribed himself in various ways to the
persons with whom he held intercourse through the post.
Whilst some of his correspondents were given to understand that he was a
sceptical layman, others were led to imagine him a sceptic in holy orders.
The prelates and other learned divines who answered his letters answered
them under misconceptions, arising chiefly or altogether from his
misstatements. At least on one occasion he signed with a woman's name,
that of course accorded with the tenor, tone, and handwriting of the
epistle to which it was appended. The bishop, whom the poet thus lured in
controversy (_vide_ Medwin's _Life_, I. p. 119), was under the impression
that his correspondent was a gentlewoman. Referring to the day he passed
with his cousin at Oxford in Lent term, 1811, Medwin remarks:--
'He showed and read to me many letters he had received in
controversies he had originated with learned divines; among the rest
with a bishop, under the assumed name of a woman.... It is to be
lamented,' Medwin adds, 'that all his letters written at this time
should have perished, as they would throw light on the speculations of
his active and inquiring mind.'
Whether they would materially enlarge our knowledge of the poet's
intellectual and moral constitution is questionable; but it cannot be
doubted the recovery of the vanished epistles would afford some curious
examples of the untruthfulness of which the singularly outspoken and
truth-loving Shelley was capable. Instead of expressing, or hinting
disapproval of his cousin's duplicity, Mr. Medwin only regrets so few
illustrations of so droll a practice should have been preserved. To Mr.
Medwin the whole business of these Shelleyan fabrications appears equally
innocent and diverting; and in this respect he resembles the Shelleyan
enthusiasts of later time, who regard the same evidence of the
truth-loving Shelley's staggering untruthfulness, merely as so much
testimony that he was an exceedingly clever and amusing young gentleman,
and that the learned divines whom he tricked with untruths must have been
stupid fellows and sad simpletons.
To persons of sufficient culture and sensibility, as well as of sufficient
sobriety, to delight in Shelley's poetry, without at the same time
thinking he might have been the Saviour of the World, it is not obvious
why Shelley should be held guiltless of untruth when he wrote to a Bishop
of the Church of England that he was a lady, and as a lady threw himself
upon the same Bishop's charitable consideration. Of course Shelley had a
powerful imagination. That is a fact which the Shelleyan enthusiasts take
care we should not forget. But it is inconceivable (_surely_ it is
inconceivable even to the Shelleyan enthusiasts) that, whilst writing to
the Right Reverend Father in God, the undergraduate of University College,
Oxford, believed that he really was a young lady, and that as a young lady
he might claim a large measure of the Bishop's charitable aid and
sympathy. To sober and fairly intelligent persons it appears, that,
whether it is composed to win confidence which shall be fruitful of a few
half-crowns, or to win such confidence as shall dispose its receiver to
expend time and labour for the sender's advantage, a letter of false
pretences is an act of imposture, of which rogues are likely, and no quite
honest gentleman is at all likely, to be guilty. For myself,--in the
course of every year I receive several letters from strangers asking me to
give them money; and as many letters from strangers of education and
apparent honesty asking me to give them time and labour and judgment, for
their assistance in their literary enterprises. I answer some of the
former letters after inquiry, and I answer all the latter letters without
suspicious inquiry, from a mere wholesome habit of believing what people
say. But should it come to my knowledge that a writer of any of those
latter letters had lured me by false representations into troubling myself
about his affairs, I should naturally think the letter-writer an impostor,
and think myself the victim of imposture.
The letters that passed between Hogg and Shelley during the Christmas
vacation (1810-11) afford evidence that throughout the holidays the future
poet found diversion in incidents arising out of his deceitful and
delusive correspondence with persons, to whom he was not known personally.
Respecting one of his correspondents--the 'W.' whom Mr. MacCarthy mistook
for William Godwin--Shelley wrote on 20th December, 1810:--'I wrote to him
when in London, by way of a gentle alterative. He promised to write to me
when he had time, seemed surprised at what I said, yet directed to me as
the Reverend: his amazement must be extreme.'
No one knew better than this interesting young gentleman, what good cause
W. had for amazement with his reverend correspondent. After the Christmas
vacation, Shelley returned to University College with a strong disposition
to enlarge his correspondence with strangers, and to extend the field of
his operations for disturbing people in their religious opinions. Having
left Oxford in December, believing in the existence of God, he returned to
Oxford in January with the conviction that there was no God. In Michaelmas
term (1810) he had regarded Christianity as a rather narrowing and
otherwise baneful delusion, from which people should be weaned. In Lent
term (1811) he regarded all religions as unutterably hateful, as alike
injurious to human nature and destructive to human happiness. Anger at the
religious steadfastness and intolerance, which determined Miss Harriett
Grove to dismiss him from her acquaintance, had determined him to kill
every religion, so that no religion should be left for people to be
intolerant about. Having left Oxford, in December, with an opinion that
all religions were equally ridiculous, he returned to Oxford, in January,
with the opinion that all religions were equally detestable,--with the
resolve to _slay_ religious intolerance, to _stab her secretly_, by
secretly stabbing and slaying the religious faith that, besides being the
generator, was the vital force, of religious intolerance. To slay
intolerance, the arch-enemy and arch-destroyer of the sweetest human
affections and the most sacred social ties, he would slay creed,--stabbing
her secretly, whilst wearing the disguise of a Christian. In December
(1810) it satisfied him to deride Christianity; at the end of January
(1811) he was determined to kill the belief in God. Any reader who thinks
I have overstated the purpose of this undergraduate (whose feeble pen had
produced nothing stronger than _St. Irvyne_), will cease to think so,
after perusing attentively and judicially the letters which he wrote to
Hogg, during the Christmas holidays.
In the execution of this determination to slay the belief in God (by
stabbing it secretly), this singularly outspoken and truthful Shelley,
whilst still pretending to be a Christian by remaining at Oxford and
attending the religious services of his college chapel, wrote (with Hogg's
help) _anonymously_, and circulated _secretly_ with anonymous or false
letters, the following tract (which readers of this work should peruse
deliberately) on
THE NECESSITY OF ATHEISM.
'A close examination of the validity of the proofs adduced to support
any proposition, has ever been allowed to be the only sure way of
attaining truth, upon the advantages of which it is unnecessary to
descant; our knowledge of the existence of a Deity is a subject of
such importance, that it cannot be too minutely investigated; in
consequence of this conviction, we proceed briefly and impartially to
examine the proofs which have been adduced. It is necessary first to
consider the nature of Belief.
'When a proposition is offered to the mind, it perceives the agreement
or disagreement of the ideas of which it is composed. A perception of
their agreement is termed belief, many obstacles frequently prevent
this perception from being immediate, these the mind attempts to
remove in order that the perception may be distinct. The mind is
active in the investigation, in order to perfect the state of
perception which is passive; the investigation being confused with the
perception has induced many falsely to imagine that the mind is active
in belief, that belief is an act of volition, in consequence of which
it may be regulated by the mind; pursuing, continuing this mistake
they have attached a degree of criminality to disbelief of which in
its nature it is incapable; it is equally so of merit.
'The strength of belief like that of every other passion is in
proportion to the degrees of excitement.
'The degrees of excitement are three.
'The senses are the sources of all knowledge to the mind, consequently
their evidence claims the strongest assent.
'The decision of the mind founded upon our own experience derived from
these sources, claims the next degree.
'The experience of others, which addresses itself to the former one,
occupies the lowest degree.--
'Consequently no testimony can be admitted which is contrary to
reason, reason is founded on the evidence of our senses.
'Every proof may be referred to one of these three divisions; we are
naturally led to consider what arguments we receive from each of them
to convince us of the existence of a Deity.
'1st. The evidence of the senses.--If the Deity should appear to us,
if he should convince our senses of his existence, this revelation
would necessarily command belief:--Those to whom the Deity has thus
appeared, have the strongest possible conviction of his existence.
'Reason claims the 2nd place, it is urged that man knows that whatever
is, must either have had a beginning or existed from all eternity, he
also knows that whatever is not eternal must have had a cause.--Where
this is applied to the existence of the universe, it is necessary to
prove that it was created; until that is clearly demonstrated, we may
reasonably suppose that it has endured from all eternity.--In a case
where two propositions are diametrically opposite, the mind believes
that which is less incomprehensible, it is easier to suppose that the
universe has existed from all eternity, than to conceive a being
capable of creating it; if the mind sinks beneath the weight of the
one, is it an alleviation to increase the intolerability of the
burden?--The other argument which is founded upon a man's knowledge
of his own existence stands thus:--A man knows not only he now is, but
that there was a time when he did not exist, consequently there must
have been a cause.--But what does this prove? we can only infer from
effects causes exactly adequate to those effects:--But there certainly
is a generative power which is effected by particular instruments; we
cannot prove that it is inherent in these instruments, nor is the
contrary hypothesis capable of demonstration; we admit that the
generative power is incomprehensible, but to suppose that the same
effect is produced by an eternal, omniscient, Almighty Being, leaves
the cause in the same obscurity, but renders it more incomprehensible.
'The 3rd and last degree of assent is claimed by Testimony--it is
required that it should not be contrary to reason.--The testimony that
the Deity convinces the senses of men of his existence can only be
admitted by us, if our mind considers it less probable that these men
should have been deceived, than that the Deity should have appeared to
them--our reason can never admit the testimony of men, who not only
declare that they were eye-witnesses of miracles but that the Deity
was irrational, for he commanded that he should be believed, he
proposed the highest rewards for faith, eternal punishments for
disbelief--we can only command voluntary actions, belief is not an act
of volition, the mind is even passive, from this it is evident that we
have not sufficient testimony, or rather that testimony is
insufficient to prove the being of a God, we have before shewn that it
cannot be deduced from reason,--they who have been convinced by the
evidence of the senses, they only can believe it.
'From this it is evident that having no proofs from any of the three
sources of conviction: the mind _cannot_ believe the existence of a
God, it is also evident that as belief is a passion of the mind, no
degree of criminality can be attached to disbelief, they only are
reprehensible who willingly neglect to remove the false medium thro'
which their mind views the subject.
'It is almost unnecessary to observe, that the general knowledge of
the deficiency of such proof, cannot be prejudicial to society: Truth
has always been found to promote the best interests of mankind.--Every
reflecting mind must allow that there is no proof of the existence of
a Deity. Q.E.D.'
On a separate leaf between the title-page and the first page of the text
of the tract the author put this
'Advertisement:--As a love of truth is the only motive which actuates
the Author of this little tract, he earnestly entreats that those of
his readers who may discover any deficiency in his reasoning, or may
be in possession of proofs which his mind could never obtain, would
offer them, together with their objections, to the Public, as briefly
as methodically, as plainly as he has taken the liberty of doing.
Thro' deficiency of proof,--An Atheist.'
In the middle of the title-page appears this title, 'Quod clarâ et
perspicuâ demonstratione careat pro vero habere mens omnino nequit
humana.'--_Bacon de Augment. Scient._; whilst at the foot of the same page
appears this announcement:--'Worthing.--Printed By E. & W. Phillips. Sold
in London and Oxford.' It having been so often asserted that this tract
was neither published nor printed with a view to ordinary publication,
readers should take note of the words, 'Sold in London and Oxford.' The
promise of these words was fulfilled, at least so far as Oxford was
concerned. Duly advertised in the _Oxford Herald_ of 9th February, 1811,
on the eve of its publication, the tract was offered for sale at Oxford in
the usual way. Even by Mr. Buxton Forman it is admitted that the tract
'was "on sale" in Oxford for twenty minutes.' Mr. Forman does not say who
counted the minutes. Possibly the expression was merely meant by Mr.
Forman to signify that the work was on sale for part only of a single day.
That it was no longer on sale within their jurisdiction was, of course,
due to the authorities of the University, whose prompt action for the
suppression of the work may be presumed to have been the direct or
indirect cause of the destruction of the copies of the pamphlet, lying in
the hands of the author's Oxford bookseller.
However they may differ about the literary style and logical force of this
tract, all fair readers must allow that it exhibits no signs of levity, no
indication of having been thrown off in jest as a satire on the class of
performances to which it really belongs. From the first line to the last,
it accords with the Atheist's declaration (in the advertisement) that he
is actuated by a love of truth, and is earnestly desirous that its
arguments may receive serious consideration. Yet it has been described as
a mere harmless piece of fun.
The Shelleyan apologists call attention to the brevity of the monograph,
as though it were a fact in Shelley's favour. It is suggested that serious
books are long books of many pages with many words on a page; and that so
short an essay (even if it was wrong of Shelley to produce it) should be
regarded as a trivial performance, and its publication as nothing worse
than a trivial indiscretion; the implication being that the Master and
Fellows of University College were guilty of monstrous injustice and
cruelty in expelling the author of so small a work. In thus prating about
the insignificant size of the work, these apologists resemble the peccant
maid-servant, who pleaded that, if she had given birth to an infant
without having gone through any form of lawful marriage, it should be
remembered, in palliation of the misdemeanour, that her baby was an
unusually little one. Writing from those 'authentic sources,' which have
afforded her much strange misinformation, Lady Shelley assures us that the
little pamphlet was a 'publication consisting of only two pages;' whereas
if she will only return to her original sources and count the duly
numbered pages, the author of _Shelley Memorials_ will discover that the
text of the small treatise occupies _seven pages_, besides the title-page
and the page exhibiting the 'advertisement,' which is no immaterial part
of the composition. How came Lady Shelley to count the pages so
carelessly? Lady Shelley is curiously wrong on other points about this
little pamphlet. 'In point of fact,' we are told by the lady who suffered
so acutely from Hogg's inaccuracies, 'the pamphlet did not contain any
positive assertion.' Why, the tract is made of positive assertions; it
would not be easy for Lady Shelley to find another tract of the same
length, containing a greater number of positive assertions. The tract
concludes with a sentence of these words:--'Every reflecting mind must
allow that there is no proof of the existence of a Deity;' words followed
by what the lady calls 'a Q. E. D.' What more does this assertion require
to render it 'positive?' Speaking from her original sources, Lady Shelley
tells us that Shelley wrote the little pamphlet 'hastily,' and 'with his
habitual disregard of consequences.' How a pamphlet, made up out of the
'very careful analysis' of Hume's _Essays_, which Shelley and his friend
had prepared in the previous term, can be said to have been written
hastily, is not apparent.
Hogg's narrative, and the extant letter that passed between him and
Shelley in the Christmas holidays, abound with evidence that the latter
came gradually to his opinions touching the non-existence of Deity, and
that the pamphlet was the result of much deliberation. It is no less
certain that instead of publishing the tract with 'habitual disregard of
consequences,' Shelley gave much thought to the consequences of a
discovery that he wrote it. Publishing it anonymously, he was at much
pains to keep the authorship a secret. Yet further we are assured by Lady
Shelley:--
'The publication ... seemed rather to imply, on the part of the
writer, a desire to obtain better reasoning on the side of commonly
received opinion, than any wish to overthrow with sudden violence the
grounds of men's belief.'
The reader who knows the circumstances under, and the end for, which the
pamphlet was produced, and has perused the _ipsissima verba_ of the tract,
may be left to form his own opinion of this example of the way in which
the authorities of Field Place would write the poet's history.
I would not be wanting in courtesy to Mr. Garnett of the British Museum,
of whom I would say nothing worse than that he is wildly and inexplicably
inaccurate in what he has written about _The Necessity of Atheism_. There
is a curious discrepancy between Lady Shelley's account and Mr. Garnett's
description of the famous tract. Whilst Lady Shelley regards the pamphlet
as a serious attempt to strengthen the evidences of the existence of the
Deity, by eliciting 'better reasoning on the side of the commonly
received' view, Mr. Garnett declares that the essay was a mere piece of
caustic playfulness. 'After Hogg's account of it,' says Mr. Garnett, in
his article on _Shelley in Pall Mall_, 'it is sufficiently clear that this
alarming performance was nothing else than a squib, prompted by the
decided success of the burlesque verses the friends had published in the
name of "My Aunt Margaret Nicholson."' A squib, in the sense suggested by
Mr. Garnett, is a flash of humour, a lampoon, a slight satire, a little
censorious writing. A learned gentleman, Mr. Garnett knows well enough
what 'squib' means, when it is applied to a little book. Yet he tells the
readers of _Macmillan's Magazine_ that Shelley's serious argument against
the belief in God was a mere product of caustic fun and humorous
sprightliness. What a charge to make against Shelley! Mr. Garnett is one
of Shelley's friends, admirers, idolaters; and he declares that Shelley
made a jest of the most solemn and awful of all momentous questions; was
so droll a fellow that he styled himself an Atheist, and argued against
the existence of the Deity in pure sportiveness. This is how Shelley is
dealt with by one of his peculiar friends!
What does Mr. Garnett mean by giving Hogg as his authority for saying that
_The Necessity of Atheism_ was a squib, when Hogg is at pains to say the
tract was no such thing? Hogg writes lightly and seriously by turns of the
tract, as he does of other matters of the poet's story. He speaks of the
pamphlet as 'a small pill that worked powerfully.' To minimize the
importance of the work, for which he was even more accountable than
Shelley; to make the least of the serious offence, touching his own
character no less hurtfully than Shelley's reputation, Hogg calls it a
'little pamphlet,' 'a general issue,' 'a compendious allegation in order
to put the whole case in proof,' 'a formal mode of saying, you affirm
so-and-so, then prove it,' 'a little syllabus,' 'an innocent and
insignificant thesis propounded for the delectation of lovers of
logomachy,' a tract that 'was never offered for sale.' In this style Hogg
speaks lightly of the work, that was the central incident of the painful
business, about which he felt too acutely and personally to his last hour,
to be able to speak of it truthfully. The whole affair was one of the few
subjects on which the otherwise substantially honest biographer was
untruthful. Consequently, had he called the tract a squib, in some
sentence at discord with his other statements about the pamphlet, Mr.
Garnett would not have been justified in fathering his own discovery on an
authority, so unworthy of perfect credit on this particular subject. But
Hogg nowhere calls the tract a squib. On the contrary, he guards against
any such misconstruction and misinterpretation of his lighter remarks, and
is at pains to say that, so far as Shelley was concerned, the pamphlet was
an altogether serious performance.
'In describing briefly the nature of Shelley's epistolary
contentions,' Hogg says, 'the recollection of his youth, his zeal, his
activity, and particularly of many individual peculiarities, may have
tempted me to speak sometimes with a certain levity, notwithstanding
the solemn importance of the topics respecting which they were
frequently maintained. The impression that they were conducted on his
part, or considered by him, with frivolity, or any unseemly lightness,
would, however, be most erroneous; his whole frame of mind was grave,
earnest, and anxious, and his deportment was reverential, with an
edification reaching beyond the age--an age wanting in reverence.'
Be it remembered that, in the later weeks of Shelley's second term of
residence, the printed tract was a main feature and chief instrument of
the 'epistolary contentions' to which the biographer refers? How then came
Mr. Garnett to give Hogg as his authority for saying this 'grave, earnest,
and anxious Shelley' diverted himself at Oxford with writing a squib on
the most awful of all sacred subjects? How are we to account for so
staggering a misrepresentation of the evidence of Hogg's book? In his
article on _Shelley in Pall Mall_, Mr. Garnett speaks no less strongly
than precisely of the evidential force of certain Shelleyan documents, not
under the view of the public. What value should we assign to evidence,
respecting documents we cannot examine, from a gentleman who can
misrepresent in so extraordinary a manner the evidence of a printed book
open to the whole world's scrutiny?
When _The Necessity of Atheism_ had been printed by Messrs. E. and W.
Phillips, of Worthing, it was Shelley's practice to send a copy of the
performance to any notable divine or other personage whom he wished to
draw into a controversial correspondence, together with a brief note
(under a false signature and address), saying--
'That he had met with that little tract, which appeared, unhappily, to
be quite unanswerable. Unless,' Hogg continues, 'the fish was too
sluggish to take the bait, an answer of refutation was forwarded to an
appointed address in London, and then in a vigorous reply he would
fall upon the unwary disputant, and break his bones. The strenuous
attack sometimes provoked a rejoinder more carefully prepared, and an
animated and protracted debate ensued: the party cited, having put in
his answer, was fairly in court, and he might get out of it as he
could.'
It was thus that 'the innocent and insignificant thesis propounded for the
delectation of lovers of logomachy' (Hogg's description of the tract) was
floated into circulation, by force of lie upon lie. Instead of being
'propounded for the delectation of lovers of logomachy,' it is stated by
Hogg himself that the tract was composed and put in type because Shelley,
finding strangers slow to notice a written challenge to argument,
conceived they would be attracted by a printed syllabus. True, so far as
it goes, this statement gives only part of the truth. Seeing that a
printed scheme for disputation would be more attractive, Shelley saw also
that he could not spare the time to produce a manuscript syllabus (written
by his own hand) for each of the many persons whose bones he was set on
breaking.
The day on which the undergraduate of University College received his
first lot of printed copies from the Worthing printers is unknown; but it
cannot have preceded by many days the appearance in the _Oxford Herald_
(9th February, 1811,) of this advertisement:--'Speedily will be published,
to be had of the Booksellers of London and Oxford, _The Necessity of
Atheism_. "Quod clarâ et perspicuâ demonstratione careat pro vero habere,
mens omnino nequit humana."--_Bacon de Augment. Scient._' Probably the
appearance of this advertisement in the Oxford newspaper followed closely
upon the arrival at Shelley's rooms in University College of the first lot
of printed copies from Worthing. Anyhow, the authorities of the University
were advertised, so early as the 9th of February, that a work, to
demonstrate the necessity of atheism, would be speedily offered for sale
within their jurisdiction. Inserted in a newspaper, read by many members
of the University, this advertisement came quickly under the eyes of the
Vice-Chancellor and Proctors of the University, the Heads of Houses, and
all other persons especially concerned in the maintenance of academic
discipline at the seat of learning. There was gossip in the common-rooms.
Sitting over their port, Doctors of Divinity and Masters of Arts exchanged
sentiments respecting the audacious announcement. The proctors took
counsel with their pro-proctors, and the acutest and most discreet of 'the
bull-dogs' was ordered to keep a sharp look-out for the first copy of the
atrocious publication that should be offered for sale in any bookseller's
window. Of course it was the opinion of the authorities that Mr. Munday,
the proprietor of the _Oxford Herald_, knew the atheist's real name; at
least could say what induced him to put such a staggering advertisement in
his paper. It cannot be questioned that Mr. Munday's shop, the office of
the _Oxford Herald_, was watched day and night by persons who were
instructed to take note of all individuals visiting the printer's
premises. Doubtless, also, the people at the Post Office were affected by
the measures, taken by the academic authorities for the discovery of the
person or persons, who should venture to sell atheistical literature in
the City of the Church. The Vice-Chancellor and Proctors have good and
sufficient means of observing what is done at Oxford in this present year
of grace, and had even better means of observation seventy years since.
Whilst the academic authorities were taking measures for the discovery of
any persons who should trouble the University with an atheistical
publication, Shelley was sending out copies of the tract, and replying to
the letters of his numerous correspondents. Each of the copies so sent
forth by the author was commended to the careful consideration of its
recipient by several falsehoods,--the untruths of the printed
advertisement, and the untruths of the letter accompanying the work. It
was untrue that the author's 'only motive' in putting the tract in
circulation was 'a love of truth;' he was actuated by resentment against
the religious earnestness which had caused Miss Harriett Grove to dismiss
him from her acquaintance, and by a desire to slay what he called bigotry
and intolerance. It was untrue that he hoped earnestly the recipient of
the pamphlet would show him defects in his arguments; all he desired being
a reply that would afford him an opportunity for breaking the replicant's
bones! It was untrue that he had come accidentally on the little tract,
which he had written himself. It was not true that the apparent
conclusiveness of the arguments caused him unhappiness. The name appended
to his letter was a false name; the address from which he pretended to
write was a falsehood. When he pretended to be a woman he was guilty of
another falsehood. The most offensive of all the falsehoods was the
profession that he was suffering from his religious doubts, and sincere in
asking the stranger to aid him in dispersing them.
It has been repeatedly urged, in palliation of the falsehoods Shelley
employed in provoking and prosecuting 'his epistolary contentions,' that
the scholars of former time, who brought about the revival of letters or
were the offspring of the revival, contended with one another by epistles
as well as by word of mouth, and that their letters, instead of being
signed with their rightful Christian names and surnames, were usually
signed with fanciful names of their own manufacture. The apology, were it
true to the facts of the ancient fashion, would not justify Shelley's
deceits; but it is a misrepresentation of the innocent usage of the old
disputants. The mediæval scholar, who wrangled and wrote under an assumed
name, held steadily to his adopted name, so that he was known by it and by
no other name in the Universities and scholarly guilds. When Gerard's
illegitimate son had once styled himself Desiderius Erasmus, in accordance
with the innocent though fantastic and pedantic fashion of his
contemporaries, he was styled so to his dying hour. The man who thus takes
a name and sticks to it, whether he be a soldier or lawyer, a politician
or dramatic actor, is guilty of no falsehood. Erasmus did not change his
name every day of the week from a deceitful motive; he did not use a
score of _aliases_ at the same time; it was not his habit to write to
charitable people saying that he was a woman, and whilst feigning to be
some one else to pretend he was living in one place whilst he was living
in another place. In his epistolary diversions the singularly outspoken
and truth-loving Shelley was guilty of all these various forms of
misrepresentation. He used a score of different names, misrepresented his
sex, told fibs about his address, said he was unhappy at what caused him
delight, declared himself to have come accidentally on the book written by
his own hand, declared to strangers that he was actuated solely by love of
truth at the moment when he was boasting to Hogg that he was animated by
hatred of religion. It cannot be denied that he was habitually guilty of
all these different forms of deceit. It is admitted he was guilty of them,
even by those who extol him for his singular frankness and sincerity.
The end to Shelley's Oxford career came suddenly. From the day of his
return to College after the Christmas vacation, things had gone pleasantly
with the undergraduate. When Medwin, on passing through Oxford, spent a
day with his cousin, he found him agreeably diverted with the incidents of
his controversial correspondence with learned divines, including the
Bishop who thought him a woman. He was exchanging letters with charming
little Harriett Westbrook. His efforts for the benefit of Miss Janetta
Phillips had been successful. He was on friendly, if not affectionate,
terms with his father, and was at work on the poem for the Newdigate
Prize. In spite of all Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy says to the contrary,
he delighted as much as heretofore in the society of Hogg. The term was
drawing to an end, and in a week or two the young men hoped to be at Field
Place, in the society of the young lady, whose assent to their wishes
would make them brothers-in-law. Nothing had occurred to forewarn him of
the storm so soon to break in fury upon him, when, one fine, bright,
cheery morning, Mr. Percy Bysshe Shelley received a summons to appear
before the Master and some of the Fellows of his College in their
common-room. It does not appear that, together with the summons, Shelley
received an intimation of the business that made the Master and 'dons'
wish to see him. It is more than probable that the messenger who brought
the summons left the undergraduate to conjecture, why he was required to
meet the magnates of the College in their common-room soon after the usual
hour for breakfast. He can scarcely be supposed, however, to have gone to
the common-room without an apprehension that _The Necessity of Atheism_
had something to do with the summons. His suspense was of no long
duration. The Master and two or three Fellows were awaiting his arrival
when he entered the room, and, on his appearance, the Master produced a
copy of _the Little Syllabus_.
How the pamphlet came to the Master's hands is unknown to the present
writer. There is reason to think the work had not been on sale in Oxford
for many days, though its speedy publication had been advertised in the
_Oxford Herald_ on the 9th of the previous month. There is reason for
thinking that 25th March, 1811, the day of Shelley's expulsion, was also
the day on which the tract was first offered for sale in Oxford. After the
author's disgrace, no tradesman of the city would have ventured to offer
the work to customers in the ordinary way of business. As the University
police were doubtless on the look-out for the publication, it is not to be
supposed that the tract had been long on sale before it came to the
Master's hands. I should not be surprised to learn that the first copy
displayed in Mr. Munday's shop-window was snapped up by an officer of the
University within a few minutes of its appearance there, and that the
policeman's act was speedily followed by the delivery of a notice, that
determined Mr. Munday to lose no time in destroying all the copies of the
work remaining in his possession. In fact, I should not be surprised to
learn that Mr. Buxton Forman had good authority for the precise number of
minutes which he represents (figuratively or literally) as covering the
time during which the tract was on sale at Oxford. To imagine all this is,
of course, also to conceive that the authorities of University College had
already completed their inquiries respecting the work, had discovered the
author, and at the break of the 25th day of March, were only waiting for
an act of formal publication, to take promptly a course of action on which
they had previously decided.
Anyhow, they were ready for decisive action on the young author's
appearance before them. They certainly acted on that occasion with vigour
and apparent promptitude; but it does not follow that they acted without
due inquiry and deliberation. Anyhow, they fastened the deed on the door.
They knew that Shelley was one of the authors, if not the sole author, of
the tract. If, as Shelley and Hogg averred, the sentence for Shelley's
expulsion was signed and sealed before he entered the common-room, the
fact merely shows that the authorities came there only to act on the
result of previous inquiry. The fact does not indicate precipitation or
prejudgment of the case,--_i.e._ judgment before sufficient inquiry and
clear discovery. It is not wonderful the Master and Fellows knew all about
the matter; for at Oxford the academic authorities had great facilities
for inquiry into such a business. Through inquiries and observations at
the Post Office, the University police could easily discover to whom
Shelley was writing letters,--to what address in London he was sending
letters. It was easy work in the course of a few weeks to gather
information from persons who had received copies of _the_ pamphlet,
together with letters in the author's handwriting. It was also easy for
the Master and 'dons' of University College to gather additional
information respecting Shelley's previous history. There _is_ now, and
_was_, seventy years since, close and confidential intercourse between the
authorities of the Universities and the authorities of the public schools.
A boy does not leave Eton with a very bad character and enter Oxford with
a good one. From the date of his matriculation the 'dons' of University
College knew what kind of boy Shelley was at Eton. As soon as he began to
trouble them at Oxford, they knew what to expect from him, and how they
must deal with him.
How did the outspoken and truth-loving Shelley act when the Master, taking
the tract from his pocket, inquired whether he wrote it? Did he, in a
manner becoming a martyr for the truth's sake, reply, 'Yes, sir, I wrote
the pamphlet, and it declares faithfully my sincere convictions'? Did he
in a manner suitable to a gentleman (interrogated by his collegiate
superiors on a matter about which they had a clear right to question him,
and about which they were bound to question him) answer frankly, 'Yes,
sir, and I am prepared to take the consequences of my act'? Not a bit of
it. The frank, outspoken, fearless Shelley shuffled and quibbled like an
attorney's copying-clerk. He asked the Master's purpose in putting the
question. He told the Master to produce his evidence. He blustered about
the injustice and illegality of the Master's proceedings. Then, losing
his temper, he became abusive. He accused the Master (who was only doing
his duty) of tyranny, injustice, and vulgar violence. He asked for the
production of evidence, demanded a formal trial, and yet refused to plead
'Not Guilty.' All that is known respecting what passed between the Master
and Fellows on the one hand, and the contumacious undergraduate on the
other hand, within the four walls of the common-room, comes to us from
Shelley himself, by way of Hogg's pen. One would fain have a more reliable
witness. But in default of better testimony, we must be content with the
report of Shelley's evidence against himself.
It had been arranged between the two friends that Hogg should come to
Shelley's rooms at an unusually early hour on the Lady-day of 1811. In
accordance with this appointment, Hogg (little imagining what was even
then going on in the common-room) entered his friend's apartment, whilst
the latter was with 'the dons,' or on his way back from his interview with
them. In a minute Shelley rushed into the room, terribly agitated.
'I am expelled,' he cried in a shrill voice, 'I am expelled! I was
sent for suddenly a few minutes ago; I went to the common-room, where
I found our Master and two or three of the Fellows. The Master
produced a copy of the _little syllabus_, and asked me if I were the
author of it. He spoke in a rude, abrupt, and insolent tone. I begged
to be informed for what purpose he put the question. No answer was
given; but the Master loudly and angrily repeated, "Are you the author
of this book?" "If I can judge from your manner," I said, "you are
resolved to punish me if I should acknowledge that it is my work. If
you can prove that it is, produce your evidence; it is neither just
nor lawful to interrogate me in such a case and for such a purpose.
Such proceedings would become a court of inquisitors, but not free men
in a free country." "Do you choose to deny that this is your
composition?" the Master reiterated in the same rude and angry voice.
Shelley (Hogg continues) complained much of his violent and
ungentlemanlike deportment, saying, "I have experienced tyranny and
injustice before, and I well know what vulgar violence is; but I never
met with such unworthy treatment." I told him calmly, but firmly, that
I was determined not to answer any questions respecting the
publication on the table. He immediately repeated his demand; I
persisted in my refusal; and he said furiously, "Then you are
expelled; and I desire you will quit the college early to-morrow
morning at the latest." One of the Fellows took up two papers, and
handed one of them to me; here it is.' He produced a regular sentence
of expulsion, drawn up in due form, under the seal of the college.
Here we have Shelley's account of the affair; or, to speak precisely,
Hogg's report of Shelley's account of the affair. There appears no reason
to question the substantial accuracy of the narrative. Allowance for
prejudice and partiality must, of course, be made by the reader,
especially in respect to those words that relate to the demeanour of the
Master and Fellows. One can believe the authorities were gracious neither
in their looks nor their voices. There was no reason why they should
affect complaisance. If they were rude and harsh in style, Shelley admits
that he was insolent and abusive. It is noteworthy that as soon as the
collegiate powers, to whose 'civility' he had borne witness on a previous
occasion, presumed to exercise authority over him, the undergraduate (of
whose sweet gentleness we have heard so much) flew at them in a manner
that was neither gentle nor sweet. In a moment he became the same
contumacious youngster who had given his Etonian masters so much trouble.
There is no reason to suppose that Hogg misreported Shelley, or that
Shelley was inaccurate in the words, 'One of the fellows took up two
papers and handed one of them to me.' The other paper was doubtless a
similar writ of expulsion that had been prepared for delivery to Hogg. It
follows, therefore, that before Shelley entered the common-room, the
authorities had determined to dismiss both of the undergraduates from the
college, and that Hogg learnt he was under sentence of banishment from
Shelley's lips.
Like a true Durham-and-Yorkshireman, Hogg seized the bull by the horns.
Seeing he would be expelled, was in fact already under sentence of
expulsion, he saw it would be to his advantage to make it appear that he
had been expelled for loyalty to his friend. It would discredit him with
his kindred near Stockton-on-Tees to be expelled for conspiring with
Shelley to teach atheism; on the other hand it would be rather to his
credit with them, and all other robust hearers of the affair, to be
expelled for sticking pluckily to a comrade in trouble. Seeing the politic
course he took it boldly. Instead of going to his own rooms, where he
would either find a written summons or a messenger inviting him to the
conclave of 'dons' in the common-room, this smart young man seized a pen,
and forthwith wrote the Master and Fellows an impudent letter, enjoining
them to reconsider their action towards Shelley, recall their sentence of
expulsion, retrace their steps, and behave better in the future. Never
was an undergraduate, already under sentence of expulsion, guilty of more
extravagant insolence to the authorities of his college. That Hogg was
guilty of this act of cunning effrontery to the Master and Fellows, about
whose insolence and vulgarity he is so indignant, we know from his own
boastful confession.
'I wrote,' he says, 'a short note to the Master and Fellows, in which,
as far as I can remember a very hasty composition after a long
interval, I briefly expressed my sorrow at the treatment my friend had
experienced, and my hope that they would reconsider their sentence,
since, by the same course of proceedings, myself, or any other person,
might be subjected to the same penalty, and to the imputation of equal
guilt. The note was despatched; the conclave was still sitting; and in
an instant the porter came to summon me to attend, bearing in his
countenance a promise of the reception which I was about to find. The
angry and troubled air of men, assembled to commit injustice according
to established forms, was then new to me; but a native instinct told
me, as soon as I entered the room, that it was an affair of party;
that whatever could conciliate the favour of the patrons was to be
done without scruple; and whatever could tend to impede preferment was
to be brushed away without remorse. The glowing Master produced my
poor note. I acknowledged it; and he forthwith put into my hands, not
less abruptly, the little syllabus. "Did you write this?" he asked, as
fiercely as if I alone stood between him and the rich see of Durham. I
attempted, submissively, to point out to him the extreme unfairness of
the question; the injustice of punishing Shelley for refusing to
answer it.... When I was silent, the Master told me to retire, and to
consider whether I was resolved to persist in my refusal.... I had
scarcely passed the door, however, when I was recalled. The Master
again showed me the book, and hastily demanded whether I admitted or
denied that I was the author of it. I answered that I was fully
sensible of the many and great inconveniences of being dismissed with
disgrace from the University, and I specified some of them, and
expressed a humble hope that they would not impose such a mark of
discredit upon me without any cause. I lamented that it was impossible
either to admit or deny the publication,--no man of spirit could
submit to do so;--and that a sense of duty compelled me respectfully
to refuse to answer the question which had been proposed. "Then you
are expelled," said the Master angrily, in a loud, great voice. A
formal sentence, duly signed and sealed, was instantly put into my
hand; in what interval the instrument had been drawn up I cannot
imagine. The alleged offence was a contumacious refusal to disavow the
imputed publication. My eye glanced over it, and observing the word
_contumaciously_, I said, calmly, that I did not think that term was
justified by my behaviour.'
This is the substance of Hogg's prolix account of his own expulsion; an
account at conflict in one important particular with Shelley's narrative
of his expulsion, and affording several grounds for declaring it
untruthful. Two writs--one of them certainly a writ of expulsion, and the
other presumably a writ of expulsion--having been drawn up before Shelley
entered the common-room, and Hogg having been told that whilst the one
writ was given to Shelley the other was reserved by the 'dons,' the
north-countryman had good ground for thinking the writ so reserved was the
writ eventually given to him. If his account of the affair was truthful,
in respect to the brevity of the conference and quickness of the
proceedings, a third writ could not have been made out and sealed during
so short and stormy a conference. There is no reason (apart from certain
words of Hogg's narrative that seems to have been written disingenuously)
for thinking a third writ was substituted for the reserved writ. Hogg
cannot be supposed to have thought a third writ was so substituted. He
must have assumed at the time that the writ, put into his hand, was the
reserved writ of which Shelley had told him. In suggesting that the writ
put into his hand was drawn up during the warm colloquy (_in what
interval_ of it he could not _imagine_), Hogg must be thought to have
written disingenuously, the object of the disingenuous writing being to
cover a misdescription of the instrument itself. The writ having been
penned before Shelley entered the common-room, it cannot have alleged that
the sentence of expulsion was consequent on a 'contumacious refusal to
disavow the imported publication.' Possibly the offence was not specified
in the document. But if it was mentioned the instrument must have declared
the sentence consequent on the atheistical writing. Hogg's motive for
misdescribing the document is obvious. Smarting under the imputation of
atheism, the Church-and-State Tory freethinker to the last represented
himself to society as a sufferer from loyalty to his friend, and he
misdescribed the writ so as to make it harmonize with the creditable view
of his case.
The evidences are conflicting in some particulars and deficient in others,
but the case may be stated thus:--Hogg and Shelley were the joint authors
of the atheistical pamphlet, the former being on the whole the more
culpable. This tract was put in circulation, and announced for sale, in
Oxford. Having obtained proof that the tract was the production of the
two undergraduates, the authorities of University College determined to
expel the joint-authors as soon as the work should be offered for sale
within the academic bounds. Acting on this resolve they sent in the
forenoon of Lady-day for the culprits, summoning Shelley first as the one
who had employed the printer, and been the busier in putting the tract in
circulation. To put himself in a position to say that he had not been
expelled for writing the atheistical tract, but merely for declining on
grounds of principle to say whether he was concerned in the publication,
Shelley refused to answer 'ay' or 'nay' to the Master's questions. For
this contumacy alone the authorities would have been justified in
dismissing him from the college. But using the writ drawn up before the
refusal to answer questions, they expelled him as the joint author and
promulgator of an atheistical work. Hogg was dealt with in like manner,
and for the same reason, although he tried at the time to put his
inevitable punishment on another ground, and subsequently took credit to
himself for standing chivalrously by his friend, when he might (as he
averred) have escaped punishment by a less generous course. That he knew
he was under sentence of expulsion before he wrote the insolent letter to
the 'dons' is sufficient proof that he was actuated by no chivalrous
motive in writing the epistle. To urge that the 'dons' prejudged the case
and acted with indecent precipitation, because they drew up the instrument
of expulsion before sending for the offenders is absurd, because they knew
the delinquents could not clear themselves. Events justified the action of
the 'dons.' The culprits offered no defence, could not offer any, did not
venture to say that they were innocent of the charge. The 'dons' had
traced the offence to its actual doers before dismissing them from the
college. No one who apprehends the legal constitution of the University,
the obligations of the authorities, and the obligations of the
undergraduates, can question that the writers of the tract were properly
dismissed from University College, as persons who were no longer members
of the Church of England, or deny that the Master and Fellows were under
the circumstances bound to tell the pamphleteers to go about their
business.
In his letter, dated 16th February, 1857, from Torquay (a letter already
referred to more than once in these pages), Shelley's cousin, Charles
Henry Grove, says, indeed, of _The Necessity of Atheism_ and its
consequences, 'The pamphlet had not the author's name, but it was
suspected in the University who was the author; and the young friends were
dismissed from Oxford, for contumaciously refusing to deny themselves to
be the authors of the work;' words of evidence that Shelley's attempt to
misrepresent the cause of his dismissal from the University was not
unsuccessful within the lines of his domestic circle; or at least of
evidence that his near relatives liked to attribute his expulsion to
contumacy rather than to atheism.
The account, given by Shelley of his expulsion to Peacock, differed
notably in certain particulars from the substantially accurate account he
gave on the morning of its occurrence to his fellow-collegian. To Thomas
Love Peacock, the poet averred that 'his expulsion was a matter of great
form and solemnity,' and that 'there was a sort of public assembly, before
which he pleaded his own cause in a long oration, in the course of which
he called on the illustrious spirits who had shed glory on those walls, to
look down on their degenerate successors.' Yet further, in confirmation of
this extravagant story, Shelley showed Peacock an Oxford newspaper, or
what appeared to be an Oxford newspaper, containing a full report of these
theatrical proceedings, together with his own oration at great length.
'His oration,' Peacock adds (_vide_ _Fraser's Magazine_, of June,
1858) 'may have been, as some of Cicero's published orations were, a
speech in the potential mood; one which might, could, should, or
would, have been spoken; but how in that case it got into the Oxford
newspaper passes conjecture.'
To the young gentleman, who made the Bishop imagine him a lady, and had
confidential relations with John Munday (the Oxford bookseller and printer
of the _Oxford Herald_), it is no injustice to suggest that, instead of
being a veritable copy of the _Herald_, the paper exhibited to Hogg may
have been a 'bogus' copy of the journal, made up in accordance with Mr.
Percy Bysshe Shelley's instructions, for his private use. No reader,
acquainted with Oxford and the ways in which things are done in the
University (and in 'the city' whose people stand, or used to stand, in
wholesome awe of the academic authorities), can need assurance that the
business of the expulsion was a strictly private affair; that no
proceedings in the case afforded diversion to a public assembly; that Mr.
Percy Bysshe Shelley delivered no grand oration on the degeneracy of
collegiate establishments; and that it is highly improbable any Oxford
printer ventured to offer the readers of any _bonâ fide_ Oxford journal
any 'such speech in the potential mood.'
On the morning following their expulsion (the morning of 26th March,
1811), Percy Bysshe Shelley and Thomas Jefferson Hogg, formerly of
University College, Oxford, made the journey to London on the outside of a
stage-coach. Thus Shelley passed in disgrace from his University at the
close of his second residence-term; an event that may be regarded as the
termination of the first period of his literary career. What a disastrous
period it was! How fruitful of misadventure, ridicule, catastrophe, and
shame! No literary aspirant, destined for imperishable fame, ever made a
more inauspicious beginning. In his first voyages on literary waters,
Byron encountered stormy weather and rough usage. His first book of poetry
resembled Shelley's maiden volume, in being suppressed for fear of
consequences. Ere his first razor had lost its edge, he was assailed by
the _Edinburgh Review_. But having weathered the gale, that almost wrecked
_The Hours of Idleness_, he enjoyed merry seas and favourable breezes. A
notability before starting for Greece, he returned from the 'pilgrimage,'
to spring to the highest pinnacle of fame. On leaving Oxford, Shelley had
produced the _Victor-and-Cazire_ book (suppressed for want of
originality); two of the feeblest and absurdest novels ever written in the
English tongue; the _Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson_, that,
despite all Hogg says to the contrary, made him the laughing-stock of
Oxford; the advertisements of the _Poetical Essay_ that never saw the
light; and (with Hogg's help) the _little_ syllabus that brought him to
_great_ grief,--to about the greatest disgrace a young man can undergo at
manhood's threshold, without falling in the grip of the criminal law.
CHAPTER XIV.
THE SPRING AND SUMMER OF 1811.
Arrival in Town--The Poland-Street Exiles--The Squire's Correspondence
with Hogg's Father--His gentle Treatment of Shelley--Dinner at
Miller's Hotel--Hogg's Testimony to the Squire's Worth--Shelley's
Nicknames for his Father--Shelley rejects his Father's Terms--Shelley
offers Terms to his Father--The Squire's Indignation--He Relents--He
makes Shelley a Liberal Allowance--Lady Shelley's Misrepresentations--
The Exiles about Town--The Separation of 'The Inseparables'--Shelley's
Intimacy with the Westbrooks--John Westbrook's Calling and Character--
Taking the Sacrament--Harriett Westbrook's Conversion to Atheism--Her
Disgrace at School--Shelley's Measures for illuminating his Sister
Hellen--Tourists in Wales--The Change in Elizabeth Shelley--
Arrangements for a Clandestine Meeting--Mrs. Shelley's Treatment of
her Son--Captain Pilford's Kindness to his Nephew--Harriett
Westbrook's Appeal to Shelley--Her Decision and Indecision--From Wales
to London--Hogg's Influence--The Elopement to Scotland--Hogg starts
for Edinburgh.
Leaving Oxford on 26th March, 1811 (Tuesday), the expelled Oxonians
reached London at the close of the day, and after dining at the
coffee-house near Piccadilly (where they put up for the night) took tea in
Lincoln's Inn Fields with Shelley's cousins, described by Hogg as
'taciturn people, the maxim of whose family appeared to be, that a man
should hold his tongue and save his money.' Though the Groves never wasted
words, it is conceivable that their extreme taciturnity on the present
occasion was in some degree due to Hogg's embarrassing presence. In the
hearing of the stranger, whom they most likely held accountable for the
catastrophe that had befallen their kinsman, they could scarcely talk,
even in their usual guarded manner, of the news the visitors brought with
them from the seat of learning. 'Bysshe,' says Hogg, 'attempted to talk,
but the cousins held their peace, and so conversation remained
cousin-bound.' The position so fruitful of embarrassment cannot have
induced the two comrades in misfortune to prolong the visit to a late
hour; and it may be presumed that before midnight they were at Piccadilly,
in the beds for which the long day on the roof of the stage-coach had
disposed them. The next morning they sallied forth to look for lodgings,
and before dusk they were settled in the Poland Street lodgings, where
they lived together till about 18th April, 1811. Hogg says they 'lived
together nearly a month,' before he went off to North Wales, whence he
journeyed to York, to make the acquaintance of the provincial conveyancer
who had undertaken to introduce him to the mysteries of the law. But as
they did not take possession of the lodgings till 27th March, 1811, and
Shelley's first letter addressed to his absent friend is dated 18th April,
1811, their joint-tenancy of the Poland Street rooms barely exceeded three
weeks.
Mr. Timothy Shelley was not in town when his scapegrace heir alighted from
the coach in Piccadilly; but the news of 'the late occurrence at
University College' was not long in travelling to the Squire of Field
Place, who, putting pen to paper just about the time when the naughty boys
were settling into their temporary quarters in Poland Street, wrote from
Sussex a characteristic note, recalling the invitation Mr. Thomas
Jefferson Hogg had received to visit Field Place in the Easter holidays.
Nine days later (5th April, 1811) the honest and kindly gentleman was in
town, and writing from the House of Commons a no less characteristic and
even more comical letter (_vide_ Hogg's _Life_) to Hogg's father. Thinking
it needful in the highest degree that the Oxonian 'Inseparables' should be
separated, Mr. Timothy Shelley invited Mr. Hogg, senr., to co-operate with
him for that end. 'These youngsters,' the Member for New Shoreham wrote
from the House of Commons, 'must be parted, and the fathers must exert
themselves.' On the same day the Member for New Shoreham (who without
seeing his son had corresponded with him since Lady-day) wrote his 'dear
boy' a kindly, reasonable, and affectionate letter, to be found in Hogg's
book. Alluding briefly to his son's serious disgrace, the father expressed
sympathy with the offender under the shame and trouble he had brought upon
himself by 'criminal opinions and improper acts,'--no harsh words, surely,
for the description of the youngster's misconduct. In this letter (worded
the more cogently because Shelley had already shown his resolve to oppose
his father's wishes) the Squire of Field Place set forth the terms on
which he would forgive his errant child: (1) Shelley was directed 'to go
immediately to Field Place and abstain from all communication with Mr.
Hogg for some considerable time.' (2) The Squire wrote to his son, 'Place
yourself under the care and society of such gentleman as I shall appoint,
and attend to his instructions.' The gentleman, who has been charged with
driving his boy from his boyhood's home for publishing _The Necessity of
Atheism_, only required that the lad (_ætat._ 18) should go straight home,
forego the pleasure of Hogg's society for a time, and pursue his studies
under the direction of a private tutor. Were these terms hard and
unreasonable? After setting them forth, the Squire no doubt wrote a few
big words about his boy's unjustifiable and wicked and diabolical
opinions, in the fashion of fathers of the period. But these were the
father's terms:--Go home, where you will see me next Thursday; keep clear
for awhile of your partner in mischief, and be a good boy with the tutor
who will be found to take charge of you.
On the morrow (6th April, 1811) the honest and troubled gentleman wrote
again (_vide_ Hogg's _Life_) to Mr. Hogg the Elder, urging that their boys
should be parted, instead of being allowed 'to go into professions
together,' as they wished. It was the Squire's intention to use Paley's
arguments for the correction of his dear boy's erroneous views; to make
his young man read Paley's _Natural Theology_; to go through the _Natural
Theology_ with him. 'I shall,' wrote the sorrowful father of Field Place
to the other sorrowful father near Stockton-on-Tees, 'read it with him. A
father so employed must impress his mind more sensibly than a stranger.'
This is droll and comical from one point of view, no doubt. But it is also
pathetic, and very much to Squire Timothy's credit.
Hitherto Mr. Timothy Shelley had not seen his son since 'the late
occurrence at University College;' but on the day following the date of
his second letter to Mr. Hogg, senior--_i.e._ on 7th April, 1811, the
first Sunday of the month--the young men dined with the Member for New
Shoreham, by invitation, at his hotel (Miller's) on the Surrey side of the
river, hard by Westminster Bridge. Leaving Poland Street at an early hour,
the two youngsters prepared themselves for the repast, to which they had
been bidden, with a long walk, during which Shelley read aloud several
passages, to the excessive ridicule of the Jews and their religion, from
some critical work on the Old Testament.
On coming to Miller's Hotel, with faces brightened by exercise in the
spring breezes, and complexions reddened by laughter at their author's
satirical jocosities, they were welcomed with kindness by Mr. Timothy
Shelley, and with cordiality by Mr. Graham, the Squire's 'factotum.' The
reception was courteous, but the genial warmth and courtesy of Mr.
Shelley's manner did not render Mr. Hogg blind to its comical
extravagances. 'He presently,' Hogg remarks of the Squire's demeanour,
'began to talk in an odd, unconnected manner; scolding, crying, swearing,
and then weeping again; no doubt, he went on strangely;'--even as honest
gentlemen of an old school were apt to do under impulses of strong and
conflicting feelings. Glad to see his boy who had offended him, angry with
himself for letting this pleasure appear, and feeling it incumbent on his
parental dignity to affect an air of sternness, Mr. Timothy Shelley was
stirred far too deeply to play the part he wished to play, and 'broke
down' in an absurd and rather ludicrous fashion, scolding a little,
swearing a great deal, and blubbering hysterically in his want of
self-control. Most young men would have been touched by these exhibitions
of feeling, but to Hogg and his friend nothing was more obvious than that
the 'old boy' was going on strangely.
'What do you think of my father?' Shelley inquired in a whisper of Hogg,
whilst the senior was contending with too powerful emotion.
'He is not your father,' Hogg replied slily in reference to the Pater
Omnipotens, of whom they had been reading in the satirical treatise on
their way to the hotel. 'It is the God of the Jews: the Jehovah you have
been reading about!'--an answer that tickled Shelley's never fine sense of
humour so acutely, that he slipt from the edge of his chair, and 'laughing
aloud with a wild, demoniacal burst of laughter,' measured his length on
the floor, to the surprise and alarm of his father, and Mr. Graham, who
hastened to raise him from the ground. If Mr. Shelley the Elder 'went on
strangely,' Mr. Shelley the Younger cannot be said to have behaved in an
orderly and commonplace manner.
Dinner being announced, just as Mr. Timothy Shelley and his factotum had
raised the younger Mr. Shelley to his feet, the party went to the meal,
which passed off agreeably. After dinner (in the absence of Percy Bysshe),
Hogg had some friendly conversation with the Member for New Shoreham,
about his perplexing son.
'You are a very different person, Sir,' said the Squire, 'from what I
expected to find; you are a nice, moderate, reasonable, pleasant
gentleman. Tell me what you think I ought to do with my poor boy. He is
rather wild; is he not?'
'Yes, rather.'
'Then, what am I to do?'
'If he had married his cousin, he would perhaps have been less so; he
would have been steadier.'
'It is very probable that he would.'
'He wants somebody to take care of him--a good wife. What if he were
married?'
'But how can I do that? It is impossible. If I were to tell Bysshe to
marry a girl, he would refuse directly. I am sure he would. I know him so
well.'
'I have no doubt he would refuse, if you were to order him to marry; and I
should not blame him. But if you were to bring him in contact with some
young lady, who, you believed, would make him a suitable wife, without
saying anything about marriage, perhaps he would take a fancy to her; and
if he did not like her, you could try another.'
It has been remarked by Mr. Rossetti that this conversation accords in
some of its particulars with Thornton Hunt's unsatisfactory evidence, that
Shelley indulged at Oxford in dissipation, hurtful to his health. Hogg's
admission that Shelley had been 'rather wild,' followed immediately by
advice that he should be happily married to a young lady qualified to
'take care of him,' would bear this construction; but it may admit of a
different interpretation. Young men may be rather wild without being
rakish; and rakishness is not the only kind of wildness for which early
marriage is often prescribed as a remedy.
Shelley's reappearance (after executing the errand on which his father had
sent him) having put an end to the talk about various young ladies, any
one of whom might be appointed to wean him from wildness, tea was served;
and after tea there was some conversation on matters pertaining to
religion, of which Hogg gives the following example:--
'There is certainly a God,' ejaculated the Squire of Field Place abruptly;
'there can be no doubt of the evidence of a Deity; none whatever.'
No one showing any disposition to question the assertion, the Squire,
turning sharply upon Hogg, inquired, 'You have no doubt on the subject,
sir; have you?'
'None whatever.'
'If you have, I can prove it to you in a moment.'
'I have no doubt.'
'But perhaps you would like to hear my argument?'
'Very much.'
'I will read it to you, then,' exclaimed the Squire, taking out a sheet or
two of letter-paper, on which he had jotted down some familiar arguments
taken from Paley's _Natural Theology_.
'I have heard this argument before,' remarked Shelley in an under-tone to
Hogg.
A minute or two later, whilst the Squire was still delivering from notes
_his_ demonstration of the existence of a Deity, Shelley repeated to Hogg,
'I have heard this argument before.'
'They are Paley's arguments,' said Hogg.
'Yes; you are right, sir,' assented the Squire, as he folded his paper and
restored it to his pocket;--adding with delicious frankness and
self-complacence, 'They are Palley's arguments; I copied them out of
Palley's book this morning myself; but Palley had them originally from me;
almost everything in Palley's book he had from me.'
For a pleasant quarter-of-an-hour readers should refer to Hogg's diffuse
and piquant account of the meeting and talk at Miller's Hotel, but enough
has been taken from the humorous narrative to show how little reason Lady
Shelley had for reprehending the severity, which distinguished the
Squire's treatment of Shelley, immediately after his expulsion from
Oxford.
On Hogg, the born humourist, it is needless to say that Shelley's father
made a most agreeable impression,--none the less agreeable because his
hearty air, grotesque speech, extravagant emotionality, and egregious
self-complacence, afforded so much food and many occasions for merriment.
To the young man from the north country it was manifested his friend's
father was by 'no means a bad fellow!' In later time Hogg used to think
with cynical sadness and humorous regret how differently life might have
gone with Shelley had he only borne himself to his sire as leal and loving
sons are wont to bear themselves to their fathers. Thus thinking, it was
small comfort to the biographer to reflect how impossible it was for a man
of Shelley's brilliant genius and poetic sensibility to pursue the path
of homely filial duty. Small blame to Hogg that he refrained from
reflecting severely on the failings of the son who, instead of gossiping
sociably with his sire over the daily bottle or two of old port, was quick
to show contempt for his understanding, and 'to take umbrage at the poor
man's noise and nonsense.' Loyalty to the former friend forbade the
historian to utter all he knew and felt on this subject. It was enough for
him to intimate lightly that Shelley was no less to blame than his father
for their bitter severance. 'It is,' says Hogg, 'only fair to the poor old
governor to add that he was the kind master of old and attached servants,
and that his surviving children speak of him at this hour with affection.'
It is, however, a matter of reproach to Hogg, that, taking this view of
the elder Mr. Shelley in 1811, he never appears to have urged his friend
to behave with filial loyalty and dutifulness to a substantially good
father; that, on the contrary, he encouraged the son to make a jest of his
sire, to exhibit him to the ridicule of his acquaintance, to write of him
in terms of vulgar flippancy as 'the old boy,' 'the old fellow,' 'the old
buck,' 'old Killjoy,' 'the enemy,' and 'a practitioner of the most
consummate hypocrisy,'--all which expressions are used to the Squire's
discredit in his son's familiar letters to his especial friend, Mr. Thomas
Jefferson Hogg.
Seven days had not passed since the dinner at Miller's Hotel, before the
conflict of the father and son resulted in distinct issues. To the
paternal order that he should 'go immediately to Field Place,' Shelley
replied that for the present it was his intention to stay in Poland
Street. To the requirement that he should 'abstain from all communication
with Mr. Hogg for a considerable time,' Shelley (_ætat._ 18) responded
that he could not for a moment think of foregoing the pleasure of his
friend's society. To the requirement that he should submit to the
government of the tutor to be selected for him, Shelley replied he would
do no such thing. Rejecting his father's requirements, and assuming that
he was the person to offer the terms of reconciliation, Mr. Percy Bysshe
Shelley demanded (1) unrestrained freedom of correspondence with Hogg, and
(2) freedom to choose his own profession, as soon as Hogg should enter one
of the Four Inns of Court, or apply to any other calling. On these terms,
he would consent to visit Field Place and receive his father into favour.
On receiving his son's ultimatum, the Squire of Field Place wrote (14th
April, 1811) in great excitement to Mr. C. (a gentleman who acted for Mr.
Hogg the Elder) a letter of lively animadversion on the presumption of the
two disrespectful, undutiful, 'opinionated youngsters.' To his son's
ultimatum, the Squire of Field Place replied by stopping his pocket-money,
and bidding him keep away from his boyhood's home. There being evidence of
all this, surely there is good evidence that the future poet was not
banished from his home, and denied the society of his mother and sisters,
at the instigation of religious intolerance, _because_ he published _The
Necessity of Atheism_.
How, then, did Mr. Timothy Shelley deal with his son on his expulsion from
Oxford, when the eighteen-years-old boy was lodging in Poland Street? Did
he denounce and discard him? On the contrary, he invited him and his
friend in trouble to dinner. Did this hard-hearted, unnatural father at
once forbid the boy to come into his presence, and order him to keep away
from the home of his infantile years? On the contrary, he bade him go
quickly to his mother and sisters, and resolve to be a better boy under
the private tutor, who would soon be found to take charge of him, than he
had been under his masters at Eton and his tutors at Oxford. Did he speak
of the boy as hopelessly bad and unreasonable? By no means. Taking a
cheery view of the case, he thought the boy could be brought out of his
spiritual disease and mental disorder by a course of 'Palley.' And
believing that the course of 'Palley' would operate more quickly and
efficaciously if the reasonings of the divine were enforced by the
luminous comments of an equally sagacious and affectionate father, the
honest gentleman got down his copy of Paley's _Natural Theology_ and
worked away at it so that he might be ready to be his boy's preceptor. The
absurdity of his proceedings and purpose must be admitted. No doubt, he
went on strangely at Miller's Hotel. His notion that with Paley's help he
could recover his son from infidelity, and bring him back safe and sound
to orthodoxy, is exquisitely droll. But one looks in vain to discover
unnatural harshness and cruelty in his measures for his son's benefit.
Urging that this troubled father should not be utterly condemned for his
action to his son, and speaking of 'some excuse' that may be fairly made
for his conduct, Lady Shelley (writing from those 'authentic sources'
which afford her so little information) says:--'Still, it is to be
regretted that a milder course was not pursued towards one who was
peculiarly open to the teachings of love.' If Mr. Shelley did and said a
few unreasonable things, when his conciliatory action was answered with
unqualified rebellion, it cannot be denied that the line of action he
proposed to take to his boy at the end of March and the beginning of April
was reasonable, moderate, generous, and affectionate. What could be milder
than his requirements, that the eighteen-years-old boy should go home to
his mother and sisters, read with a tutor, and desist from intercourse
with Hogg 'for some considerable time,'--_not for ever_; not for many
years; but for _some considerable time_,--say, till he should come of age
and be master of his own actions?
Was this third requirement preposterous? Mr. Shelley had grounds for
thinking Hogg a hurtful companion for his boy. Whatever his grounds for
it, the opinion was just. Hogg's influence _had been very harmful_ to
Shelley. But for Hogg, it is possible that Shelley would never have been
an atheist. It is certain that if he had gone to atheism without Hogg's
help he would have gone to atheism at slower pace. It is certain that Hogg
was the influence which moved him to the deed that had caused his
expulsion from University College. The two youngsters had got into trouble
and dark disgrace together. What was there harsh in the demand that the
disastrous association, which had been fruitful of so much evil in less
than six months, should be broken for 'some considerable time?' Paternal
authority is an empty name, if a father in Mr. Timothy Shelley's position
may not say to an eighteen-years-old son in the future poet's position,
'Now, my boy, I will do my best for you; but, at least for some time, you
must forbear from intercourse with that young scapegrace who was your
associate in the ugly business which occasioned your expulsion from
Oxford.'
When Lady Shelley speaks of Shelley as 'one who was peculiarly open to the
teachings of love,' she is not writing true biography, but biographical
romance. From the moment, when he comes clearly before us, to the moment
when he sunk beneath the angry waves, Shelley never paid any heed to the
teachings of the love, if they admonished him to do what he could not do,
without sacrifice of his own strongest feelings. Like Byron he had no
care for the feelings of the man or woman with whom he came into conflict.
In his contention with his father it never seems to have occurred to him
that his father had feelings to be considered, rights to be respected. As
he wished to associate with the friend whom he was still set on marrying
to his sister Elizabeth (without consulting her parents on the subject),
he thought it monstrous that he should be required to cease from
associating with him for a considerable time. He would not assent to so
intolerable a demand. Hogg was everything to him,--his father nothing to
him but a dolt, a fool, an ass, a tyrant. It was preposterous that his
father should presume to offer him terms. It was for him to offer terms to
his father. Mr. Percy Bysshe Shelley's terms were that his father should
make him a sufficient allowance; that he, Mr. Percy Bysshe Shelley, should
live where he pleased and do what he pleased; and above all, that he
should be free to maintain the closest intercourse with his dear friend,
Mr. Thomas Jefferson Hogg. This was modest from a young gentleman (_ætat._
18), immediately after his expulsion from his Oxford College!
The ever-choleric Mr. Timothy Shelley was furious for several days, for
some few weeks, at these proposals from the young gentleman whom he had
hoped, with 'Palley's' help, to bring round to religious orthodoxy; and in
his wrath, he said and did foolish things after the wont of extremely
angry fathers. He vowed he would 'stop the supplies,' and so far as his
own pocket was concerned, he did stop them for some few weeks; during
which time the naughty boy lived comfortably enough on money lent him by
Hogg (who was in funds), money sent to him by his sisters, and money given
to him by his uncle, Captain Pilfold. On 18th April, 1811, when his father
was in the purple stage of his fury, Shelley received a present of money
from his mother, which, however, he returned from some scruple of delicacy
or dignity. 'Mr. Pilfold,' he wrote on that day from Poland Street to
Hogg, 'has written a very civil letter; my mother intercepted that--sent
to my father, and wrote to me to come, inclosing the money. I, of course,
returned it.' The 'stopping of the supplies' from the paternal purse made
them flow in all the more plentifully--from irregular sources. The exile
from his home was therefore in easy circumstances so far as money was
concerned. The pictures of the future poet languishing in penury, and
menaced with starvation, whilst his wealthy father fared sumptuously, may
be tossed aside with other biographic fictions.
Whilst he received no money from his father, the exile of 15 Poland Street
was also under order to keep away from Field Place and its inmates,--an
order that may perhaps be referred rather to the Squire's wrath, no less
than to a sincere belief that the youngster's presence there would do his
sisters any serious injury; though, doubtless, Mr. Shelley the Elder
attributed the prohibition to the more creditable motive. It is also
conceivable how the Squire explained the apparent inconsistency of his
conduct in forbidding the boy to do at the end of April, what he had
wished him to do a fortnight earlier. At the beginning of the month, when
he hoped to find his son comparatively docile and tractable after his
humiliating misadventure at Oxford, the Member for New Shoreham doubtless
imagined the scapegrace (out of respect to a paternal injunction to that
effect) would refrain from talking with his sister Elizabeth on religious
questions. His son's defiance of parental authority, in respect to his
intercourse with Hogg, may have caused his father to assume he would be no
less unwilling to respect parental orders touching his intercourse with
his eldest sister,--an assumption that would put Mr. Timothy Shelley in
the way to argue that he was only actuated by care for his daughter, in
forbidding her brother to approach her. If the Squire of Field Place put
the matter thus to his own conscience, he only contrived to deceive
himself as resentful gentlemen are wont to deceive themselves. Anyhow, he
was determined for a few weeks to keep the brother and sister apart.
The order to keep away from Field Place and from his sister, of course,
made Shelley desirous of visiting them. In no hurry to return home, whilst
his father wished him to go there quickly, Shelley had no sooner been
commanded to refrain from entering Field Place than he resolved to go
there.
On hearing that, if he tried to visit his sister at Field Place, she would
be removed from home, the young gentleman declared he would follow her,
whithersoever she should be taken. Jubilant over an assurance that 'the
estate was entailed on him,'--totally out of the power of 'the enemy'
(_i.e._ his father) he declared his intention of entering the enemy's
dominions (_i.e._ Field Place) as soon as he wished to do so. He would
walk into Field Place, whether his father liked or disliked it. And on
this point he was as good as his word: for returning to the place
something sooner than the Squire wished to see him there, he chuckled over
the inefficacy of his father's arrangements for putting restrictions on
his intercourse with his eldest sister.
The quarrel of the father and son was at its fiercest heat when, on 24th
April, 1811, they met one another in the passage of John Grove's house, in
Lincoln's Inn Fields; a scene occurring which (if Shelley reported it
truthfully to Hogg) was creditable to neither of them, but far more
discreditable to the good feeling of the son than to the good sense of the
sire. If the father did ill in returning an inquiry for his health with a
look as black as a thundercloud, the son did worse by answering the look
with a bow, whose extreme lowness rendered the formal show of obeisance a
mere act of insult.
That even in his wrath the Squire of Field Place was not wholly
unreasonable is shown by the shortness of the time that had elapsed since
he 'stopt the supplies,' when he consented to make his son an allowance of
200_l._ a-year. Only five days after the exchange of offensive greetings
in John Grove's passage, the future poet was in high hope that his father
would forthwith allow him 200_l._ a-year.
Sixteen days later (15th May, 1811), the arrangement was made on
conditions that left Shelley free to live and go wherever he liked, so
long as he kept away from York, whither Hogg had gone for twelve months,
to read law and acquire the rudiments of legal draughting in a
conveyancer's chambers. The scapegrace of Field Place had reason to exult
at the liberal terms, for which he was indebted no less to his father's
placability than to the Duke of Norfolk's influence over the Member for
New Shoreham. So soon did the cruel and parsimonious father renew the
current of 'supplies,' after stopping it in a season of fierce anger. No
more than seven weeks and two days had passed since his expulsion from
Oxford, when the future poet was enjoying a sufficient income, granted on
no ignominious conditions.
The smallness of this allowance having been often adduced in evidence of
Mr. Timothy Shelley's niggardliness to his eldest son, readers should
recall what they have already been told respecting the pecuniary
circumstances of the Squire of Field Place up to the date of his father's
death, till which event he was by no means wealthy for his social
position. Dependent on his father, who, loving money more passionately as
his fingers grew more feeble, was incessantly bickering with his
heir-apparent about the excesses of his expenditure, Mr. Timothy Shelley
(with several children on his hands) could not make his son a larger
allowance. Two hundred a-year was a far better bachelor's income seventy
years since than it is now-a-days. Thirty years later it was still
regarded as more than a sufficient allowance for a briefless barrister.
Shelley was still only eighteen years old when it was allotted to him.
Moreover at the time of the arrangement, it was not contemplated that it
would be his only means of subsistence; for it was made in anticipation
that he would be a frequent visitor at his father's house. Had he from
early boyhood lived harmoniously with his father, and been a loving and
dutiful son, Shelley in his nineteenth year could not reasonably have
looked for a larger income from his father during his grandfather's life.
Getting so handsome an allowance from his father so soon after his
expulsion from Oxford, he was treated in money-matters with liberality by
the father, who is generally conceived to have treated him with vindictive
stinginess.
These are the facts of the matter about which Lady Shelley writes in these
words:--
'Exasperated by his son's refusal to conform to the orthodox belief,
he' (_i.e._ Timothy Shelley) 'forbade him to appear at Field Place. On
the sensitive feelings of the young controversialist and poet, this
sentence of exclusion from his boyhood's home inflicted a bitter pang;
yet he was determined to bear it, for the sake of what he believed to
be right and true.'
As Lady Shelley's published book about her husband's father is still
regarded as a work of authority, readers should examine this curious
conglomerate of misrepresentations. (1) Instead of being exasperated by
his son's avowal of atheism, Mr. Timothy Shelley, though naturally shocked
and grieved by the incident, treated the eighteen-years-old youngster with
affectionate consideration and tenderness, in respect to that serious
offence. (2) Instead of excluding him from Field Place for that reason, he
told him to go home quickly, when the boy's Atheism was his only reason
for displeasure. (3) Mr. Timothy Shelley's vehement anger with the
youngster was due to his contumacious refusal to comply with the
reasonable requirement touching his intercourse with Hogg. (4) Lady
Shelley speaks of 'the young controversialist,' as though the profession
of atheism were one of the Liberal professions, and as though Mr. Timothy
Shelley should have been grateful to the boy for embracing so honourable a
vocation. (5) Instead of inflicting a bitter pang on his sensitively
affectionate feelings, the sentence of exclusion from his boyhood's home
merely caused Shelley a little irritation and a vast amount of amusement.
(6) Instead of 'determining to _bear it_, for the sake of what he believed
to be right and true,' Shelley resolved to treat the sentence of exclusion
with contempt; to go to Field Place whenever it should please him to go
there, 'to enter his father's dominions, preserving a quaker-like
carelessness of opposition ... and turning a deaf ear to any declamatory
objections,'--and he was as good as his word. The sentence of exclusion
had been delivered barely a month, when (15th May, 1811) Shelley was back
at Field Place; from which date till the middle of July, 1811, when he
went to stay with his cousins at Radnorshire, he remained in Sussex
staying alternately with his uncle Pilfold at Cuckfield, and with his
mother and sisters in the home of his boyhood, from which he is said to
have been so barbarously excluded. The sentence ceased to be operative as
soon as the exile cared to disregard it. Keeping out of his father's way,
so long as the 'old buck' was in his hottest 'rage' (to use the gentle
Shelley's nice way of talking of his father and his father's displeasure),
the exile of Poland Street went down to Field Place as soon as he thought
life in the country would be pleasanter than life in London. The sentence
of exclusion was from the first a mere _brutum fulmen_. It is absurd to
speak of this exclusion as a real exclusion. At the worst it was nothing
more than such an exclusion from his boyhood's home, as most
undergraduates undergo, when they are 'rusticated' for one or two terms.
It is needful to return to Poland Street, and the time when the exiles
lodged there. Reading divers books, besides _The English Bards and Scotch
Reviewers_, writing letters, and blotting no little paper in the
composition of essays that never found publishers, the expelled students
lived as far as they could in the manner of Oxonians. The cousins Grove
dropt in upon them in the afternoons, and were less taciturn than they had
been in Lincoln's Inn Fields on the evening of March 26th. Sometimes by
themselves, sometimes with a Grove to conduct them by 'the shortest
cuts,' the exiles perambulated the town, and amused themselves after the
manner of young gentlemen from the country, thrown upon the London
pavements seventy years since. One day they dined in the chambers of a
smart Templar (given to talk about duchesses and countesses) on 'steaks
and other Temple messes.' Another day they roamed about Kensington Gardens
to the delight of Shelley, who was charmed with the sylvan aspect of the
timbered lawns. On a third day they walked out to Mrs. Fenning's
boarding-school for young ladies on Clapham Common, where Shelley saw his
little sister Hellen, scampering about with her light locks streaming over
her shoulders. One of their favourite places for lounging was St. James's
Park, where Bysshe, after watching the soldiers at drill, inveighed
against standing armies, as hostile to the liberties of the people. At
least on one occasion Shelley was seen at the British Forum near Covent
Garden, where he harangued the assembled Radicals on the vices of all
governments:--the sentiments of the orator being so acceptable to his
auditors that, when he ceased to scream at them in his shrillest notes,
they rushed upon him to discover who he was and whence he came,--inquiries
to which the apostle of liberty (with a large stock of _aliases_ at
command) replied with a false name and address.
Because the _Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things_ was
advertised in the _Times_ of the 10th April, and 11th April, 1811, and
because Hogg says never a word about that perplexing publication (that in
all probability was never published), Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy
maintains that the poem was on sale during that month in London, and that
(without letting Hogg know aught of the matter), Shelley made daily runs
from Poland Street to Messrs. B. Crosby and Co.'s shop, to inquire how
much the sale of the poem was doing for Mr. Finerty's advantage. It may be
taken for certain that if Shelley made daily calls on the booksellers,
Hogg knew why his friend called on them. It may also be assumed that,
instead of appearing in the _Times_ because the poem was then on sale, the
advertisements appeared in the morning journals because their insertion
had been ordered (with the usual prepayment) from Oxford some three weeks
earlier, when there was, perhaps, an intention to publish the poem, that
probably never was published. But if he never crossed the bookseller's
threshold, Shelley was seen more than once at Mr. Abernethy's anatomical
lectures, and oftener in the dissecting-room of St. Bartholomew's
Hospital, where Charles Henry Grove (nearly two years Shelley's junior)
was at that time a medical student.
Hogg would have us believe that to his people in Durham Co. and Yorkshire,
Mr. Timothy Shelley (known to them by his not uniformly perspicuous
epistles) appeared a 'bore of the first magnitude, and a serious
impediment to carrying into effect any ordinary arrangement.' Facts,
however, make it certain that Mr. Hogg, the Elder of Norton, agreed with
this bore of the first magnitude in thinking their boys must be parted,
and kept from one another, at least for a considerable period. The letter,
in which Mr. Shelley spoke his mind to his afflicted fellow-sufferer,
through the afflicted fellow-sufferer's London agent, was dated 14th of
April, 1811. Four days later (18th April, 1811), Mr. Thomas Jefferson Hogg
was on the roof of a stage-coach, journeying from London towards North
Wales, where he was allowed to visit a few friends, before going into
pupilage under the conveyancer at York. The dates are eloquent. The joint
rebellion against parental authority, which put Shelley in conflict with
the Squire of Field Place, was fruitful of a paternal command to Mr.
Thomas Jefferson Hogg, that he should pack his traps and move out of
London without delay. Mr. Thomas Jefferson Hogg did as he was bid, and for
nearly twenty weeks the young men were separated. Thus rudely severed by
domestic tyranny, they cheered one another through the post.
On Hogg's withdrawal from London, Shelley had more time and a stronger
disposition for the society of the Westbrooks, of Chapel Street, Grosvenor
Square. Something has already been said of charming Harriett Westbrook, of
the influences that caused Shelley to be curious of her, of the
circumstances under which he made the young lady's acquaintance, and of
the correspondence he held with her through the post during his second
term of residence at Oxford. But the time has come for further particulars
about the family, of which the poet became a member by marriage. The
family consisted of Mr. John Westbrook (who must have been in the main a
respectable person, as so little has been discovered to his discredit by
the many persons who, at divers times, have hunted for evidence against
him), his wife Mrs. Westbrook ('a nonentity,' as Mr. Rossetti styles her,
so far as the Shelleyan drama is concerned), his daughter Harriett--the
pretty child with whom Shelley fell in love, and her elder sister
Elizabeth,[7] who has the reputation of making up the match, and the
misery between her sister and the poet. The private residence of these
people was in Chapel Street, Grosvenor Square,--not far from Mr.
Westbrook's place of business in Mount Street.
Who was John Westbrook?--What was John Westbrook?--What was his place of
business? Mr. Westbrook was a successful taverner, and as he was sometimes
styled 'Jew Westbrook,' though he was Christian, it may be assumed that he
was a taverner who (after the wont of successful tavern-keepers in
London's western quarters, in the earlier decades of the present century)
lent money to those of his modish and more trustworthy customers, who
cared to borrow it of him 'on the usual terms.' The development of modern
club-life has affected in various ways the character and quality of the
taverns in the western quarters of London, and nearly extinguished the
sociable, and, in some degree, confidential relations that sometimes
existed between the keepers and frequenters of those places of
entertainment. Before clubs were numerous, modish gentlemen about town
lived very much at their favourite taverns (or coffee-houses as they were
usually styled), eating and drinking and seeing company at them, using
them in fact very much as a gentleman about town now-a-days uses his club.
Using his coffee-house in this fashion, it was natural for the gentleman
about town, after losing heavily at cards, or emptying his pockets at the
hazard-table, to look to his tavern-keeper for relief from urgent
financial embarrassment. On the other hand, the business of a money-lender
fitted in excellently well with the business of coffeehouse-keeper. Living
sociably with his regular customers, who gossiped _of_ one another as well
as _with_ one another, the tavern-keeper gathered from their gossip no
little information that saved him from losses in the money-lending
department of his business. Mr. Westbrook was a coffeehouse-keeper whose
daughters had heard him spoken of as 'Jew Westbrook.' As he was a
Christian by profession and bore a surname which countenances the
assumption, it may be assumed that he was sometimes spoken of as 'Jew
Westbrook,' not because he was of Israel, nor because he had an
Israelitish look, but because he was known to lend money: 'Jew' being a
familiar designation in the days of our grandfathers for every man of
business who lent small sums of money, for short periods, on personal
security.
Mr. Westbrook's two-fold vocation may not have been in the highest social
favour, but it was followed by many respectable men, and there is evidence
that Mr. Westbrook was one of its most creditable followers. Living with
the fear of God and good society before his eyes, he shaped his ways
discreetly. Whilst his tavern was well spoken of for its wines and
dinners, no evil stories were told of the transactions of the little
parlour in which he counted out his money. With the views and tastes of a
self-respecting and slightly ambitious tradesman, he was not wholly
without the manners and feelings of a gentleman. Mrs. Westbrook (the
nonentity) may have been a cook in early life; if so, she was a good cook,
for Mr. Westbrook was not at all likely to have married a bad one. If he
was a butler before keeping a tavern, we may be sure he was an honest
butler. Without having grown inordinately rich by lawful business, he had
acquired the measure of wealth that is styled a 'comfortable independence'
or 'moderate fortune.' It is to his credit that on rising to easy
affluence he withdrew his wife and daughters from the coffee-house, which
was necessarily at times a rather noisy place, and planted them in a
private house, where they lived as far as possible after the manner of
gentle people. It is to his credit that he was at pains and charges to
rear his daughters as far as possible to be ladies. Miss Elizabeth
Westbrook and Miss Harriett Westbrook were every whit as well educated as
Shelley's sisters, that is to say, in all matters of book-learning and
school-culture.
Mr. Percy Bysshe Shelley, late of University College, Oxford, had not been
a week in Poland Street without calling at the house, where he made the
acquaintance of the young lady, with whom he had been corresponding for
more than a couple of months. In walking out to Clapham Common he was
moved by a desire to see his sisters' schoolfellow no less than by a
desire to see his sisters. If she was not a weekly boarder at the Clapham
School, Harriett used to visit her father's house in Chapel Street,
Grosvenor Square, during the scholastic terms, and on these trips to town
used to bring the poet money from his sisters. He saw her also during the
Easter holidays.
Having seen something of the Westbrooks, whilst Hogg was staying in Poland
street, Shelley saw more of them when Hogg had left London. Hogg had
scarcely started for North Wales, when Miss Elizabeth Westbrook called
upon the future poet at his lodgings, bringing her sister with her. On the
evening of the 18th of April, 1811, the day of Hogg's departure, Shelley
wrote to his friend, 'Miss Westbrook has this moment called on me with her
sister. It certainly was very kind of her.' Three days later (Sunday, 21st
April, 1811), Shelley 'took the Sacrament' with the lady who had paid him
so acceptable an attention. Another three days later (24th April, 1811),
Shelley wrote to the same correspondent of the elder Miss Westbrook's
kindness, charity, and goodness. In a subsequent letter, recalling words
he had uttered to her discredit, he commended her for cleverness. Thinking
so well of the lady, with whom he had so lately taken the Sacrament, it
was natural for Shelley to think he ought to illuminate her, as well as
her sister, out of the Christian religion. Resolute to kill religious
intolerance by killing creed, and to slay creed by converting people to
his own views, he thought he should deal heavy and crushing blows to
prevalent superstition by withdrawing John Westbrook's daughters from the
faith in which they had been educated. 'The fiend, the wretch,' he wrote
of Christianity to Hogg on 28th April, 1811, 'shall fall! Harriett will do
for one of the crushers, and the eldest, Elizabeth, with some training,
will do too.'
From the date of Hogg's departure from London (18th April) to the middle
of May, when he went into Sussex, Shelley saw much of both sisters. Seeing
Harriett in Chapel Street, he saw her also at the Clapham school, which he
described as the young lady's 'prison-house.' Accompanying Elizabeth in an
excursion to the 'prison-house,' he on one occasion spent two hours,
walking about Clapham Common with the two sisters. On another occasion, he
hastened in the evening (at the elder sister's invitation) to Chapel
Street, where he found Harriett ill and suffering from headache. After
talking for some time with the elder sister, on love and other
interesting subjects, he found himself closeted with Harriett, in the
absence of Elizabeth, who left the boy and girl together: her complaisance
going so far that Shelley sate in private conference with the beauty of
the Clapham boarding-school till past midnight. Shelley, of course,
availed himself of so good an opportunity for enlarging the child's views
of love and religion. By this time, Harriett had learnt a good deal on
these matters from her future husband, and had proved so apt a pupil as to
be in disgrace at Clapham for uttering sentiments of his teaching. The
girls of the school were holding aloof from Harriett, on account of her
awfully wicked opinions: some of them even going so far as to call her 'an
abandoned wretch.' Shelley was under the impression that his little sister
Hellen was the only one of the girls brave enough to hold friendly
intercourse with Harriett, under the odium she had provoked. In his
delight at his little sister's courage, he determined to seize the
earliest opportunity of illuminating her out of the Christian faith.
'There are,' he wrote to Hogg, 'hopes of this dear little girl: she would
be a divine little scion of infidelity. I think my lesson to her must have
taken effect.' Thus he was already taking measures to convert his little
sister (still in her thirteenth year) to atheism. At Keswick (1811-12)
Shelley told Southey (_vide_ _Correspondence of Robert Southey with
Caroline Bowles_, 1881) that he endeavoured to make proselytes to atheism
in Mrs. Fenning's school; that he succeeded in making a proselyte of
Harriett; and that he married her, because she was expelled from the
school for accepting his doctrine, and doing her best to induce her
schoolfellows to accept it. 'One of the girls,' Southey wrote to Shelley
in August, 1820, 'was expelled for the zeal with which she entered into
your views, and you made her the most honourable amends in your power by
marrying her.... I had this from your own lips.' The words thus spoken by
Shelley to Southey must be read with suspicion, like all Shelley's other
statements about himself and his own affairs. There is the more need for
caution in this case, as Shelley certainly suffered from delusions at
Keswick, and made Southey other statements clearly referable to
hallucination. But his statements at Keswick, respecting his measures for
making proselytes at Clapham in the previous spring, are notably confirmed
in some particulars by what he wrote at the time to Hogg, of his measures
for illuminating Harriett Westbrook and his little sister Hellen.
Writing from Field Place to Hogg on 16th June, 1811, Shelley says, 'I
shall see you in July. I am invited to Wales, but I shall go to York; what
shall we do? How I long again for your conversation!' the invitation being
to Cwm Elan, the place of his cousin, Thomas Grove, five miles distant
from Rhayader, Radnorshire, whither he went for three or four weeks,
towards the middle of July; one at least of his motives for the trip to
Wales being that he might stay with the Westbrooks at Aberystwith. Writing
from Field Place on 21st June, 1811, to Hogg, at York, Shelley says, 'I
shall leave Field Place in a fortnight. Old Westbrook has invited me to
accompany him and his daughters to a house they have at Aberystwith, in
Wales. I shall stay about a week with him in town; then I shall come to
see you and get lodgings.' Hence, at the date of this epistle, the
writer's purpose was to leave Field Place somewhere about 5th July, and,
after staying a week under Mr. Westbrook's roof, in Chapel Street,
Grosvenor Square, to go _viâ_ York to Wales, for the visits to Cwm Elan
and Aberystwith. Changing his plans (for reasons to be mentioned in a
later page), he deferred the visit to York, and went by a less circuitous
route to Rhayader in Radnorshire, whence he wrote to Hogg somewhere about
the middle of July, 'Miss Westbrook, Harriett, has advised me to read Mrs.
Opie's _Mother and Daughter_. She has sent it hither, and has desired my
opinion with earnestness.' A few days later he wrote to Hogg, without
dating his letter, 'I shall see the Miss Westbrooks again soon; they were
very well in Condowell, when I heard last; they then proceed to
Aberystwith, where I shall meet them.' Yet some other few days later (also
in an undated epistle), he writes to Hogg, 'Your jokes on Harriett
Westbrook amuse me; it is a common error for people to fancy others in
their own situation, but if I know anything about love, I am _not_ in
love. I have heard from the Westbrooks, both of whom I highly esteem.'
This disclaimer by Shelley of love for Harriett Westbrook, when he had for
months been in love with her, may well remind readers of the way in which
Byron disclaimed (in his private journal) all love for Miss Milbanke, when
he had for months been loving her. 'I am _not_ in love,' Shelley wrote
from Wales within six weeks of eloping with Harriett Westbrook. 'What an
odd situation and friendship is ours! without one spark of love on either
side!' Byron wrote in his journal of the lady, to whom he had already made
one offer and was still yearning to make his wife.
Including the time spent in journeying to and fro between London and Cwm
Elan, Shelley spent some three weeks and three or four days on the Welsh
trip, which he made in the hope of staying with the Westbrooks at
Aberystwith. Leaving him in Radnorshire readers should return to the
spring of the year, in order to take a view of the future poet's relations
with his sister, his mother and his Uncle Pilfold, from the date of his
expulsion from Oxford to the midsummer of 1811.
Mr. Timothy Shelley's withdrawal of the invitation he had given Hogg to
visit Field Place, and his subsequent conflict with his son, did not cause
the young men to relinquish their hope of becoming brothers-in-law. On the
contrary, the new obstacles to the achievement of their purpose only
quickened their desire for the realization of the romantic project. Whilst
Shelley yearned to call Hogg his brother, the vein of romance, that
mingled with the north-countryman's lively humour and cynicism, caused him
to be enamoured of the young lady, who was known to him only through her
poetical compositions, her letters to her brother, and his report of her
personal, mental, and moral endowments. But the brother, who loved her
passionately so long as she worshipped him without presuming to oppose him
in anything, had not been many days in conflict with his father, before he
was disappointed in his sister, discovered faults in her poetry, suspected
he had thought too highly of her intellect and courage, saw reason to
bewail her mental narrowness, and to fear she was not worthy to be the
wife of his incomparable friend. What caused this change of feeling and
opinion?
On seeing the goal to which her brother's influence and cautious teaching
would carry her, Elizabeth started back in horror. Trustful in his
superior wisdom so long as he only required her to think the legends of
Christianity were in some particulars fabulous, she fell away from her
confidence in the brother who had proclaimed himself an atheist.
Instructed that Hogg's influence had brought her brother to this extreme
point of infidelity, she was of opinion that her father was right in
determining to separate Bysshe from so hurtful a friend. Thinking that in
this determination her father was only showing proper care for his son's
welfare, she thought Bysshe's opposition to his father's will undutiful
and wicked. She was not brave enough to deny the existence of God; she had
the courage to tell her brother he was not behaving like a good son. In
the religious conflict, she was on the side of the Almighty. In the
domestic conflict, she went with her father. No wonder Bysshe was
disappointed by her servility and meanness of spirit. Hogg had barely left
London when he was informed by Shelley of his sister's deflection from the
path of religious freedom and philosophy,--that she was lost to them.
Hogg's reply to this melancholy announcement was to the effect that,
though lost for the moment, she was _not_ lost for ever,--a sentiment
which, on 26th April, 1811, moved the exile of Poland Street, to reply,
'She is _not_ lost for ever? How I hope that may be true! but I fear I can
never ascertain; I can never influence an amelioration, as she does not
any longer permit a _philosopher_ to correspond with her. She talks of
duty to her _Father_. And this is your amiable religion.'
Instead of writing to him in her old vein of enthusiastic and worshipful
admiration, Elizabeth had the presumption to remind him of his and her
duty to their parents; sending him the letters that moved him to charge
her with 'talking cant and twaddle.' Had he not cause to think with sorrow
and bitterness of the 'young female,' who, after asserting for a brief
while her 'claim to an unfettered use of reason,' had returned to the sway
of the bigots. How could he be sanguine of again reclaiming her from the
darkness of mediæval superstition to the clear sunshine of philosophy,
when to do so he must conquer her countless hateful prejudices, teach her
to despise the world's opinion; nerve her to repudiate the doctrines of
'the tremendous Gregory,' and purge her mind of the absurd notion that she
ought to respect her father's wishes. Fretted by her letters, he was
depressed by her subsequent silence. On returning to Field Place in the
middle of May, 1811, it was a relief to him to learn that, instead of
resulting from unconcern for his misery, this silence was due to an attack
of scarlet fever. At times, during her convalescence from this illness, he
could hope faintly that even yet she would show herself worthy of his
former confidence, and not unworthy to be the wife of his incomparable
Hogg. But these passages of flickering hope closed in a renewal of his
conviction, that she was far too weak a creature for the high place and
service to which he had too hastily appointed her. There were moments
when, instead of thinking her changed for the worse, he attributed her
apparent deterioration to his own recently acquired power of perceiving
mental and moral infirmities to which he had been formerly blinded by
fraternal partiality. Possibly the sister, whom he used to adore and extol
to Hogg, had been a creature of his imagination. Obviously it was his duty
to put this view of the case before Hogg, so that so excellent a man
should not be under misconceptions, arising from a friend's
imaginativeness and delusive speech, link himself for life with an
uncongenial and miserably insufficient spouse. To Shelley it was no small
trouble that his pen was powerless to make Hogg believe, either that
Elizabeth was greatly altered, or that she had been greatly misrepresented
to him. Whilst the humorous Hogg laughed secretly at the change of
Shelley's regard for his sister, the romantic Hogg declined to think
either that she had changed for the worse, or that she had been offered in
delusive colours to his fancy. To the humorous and romantic law student,
it was clear that the change in Elizabeth was wholly referable to her
brother's changefulness, and to the lightness and activity of his
imagination. Whilst Hogg refused to be enlightened, Shelley despaired of
showing him by written words, so much less potent than speech, how 'a
change, a great and important change, had taken place in' the girl who had
been offered to him in marriage. Oh, that he could speak with his dear
Hogg face to face! 'Unwilling as I am,' Shelley wrote from Horsham, on
16th June, 1811, 'conviction stares me in the face. _Oh, that you were
here!_'
This wish may have caused Hogg to entertain the notion of making a
clandestine visit to Field Place, to inspect the home of the young lady he
hoped to marry, and to get a furtive view of her personal attractions,
which were still known to him only by her brother's report. Or the wish
may have been followed by a definite proposal from Bysshe that his friend
should come to him. Anyhow, the friends now entertained a project for
seeing one another in Sussex.
The Squire having recalled his invitation to Hogg, and Shelley (in
consideration of his 200_l._ a-year allowance being under bond to hold no
personal communication with his former college-friend), Hogg could not
visit Field Place openly. It was therefore arranged that he should enter
the house secretly, and by night, and that during his clandestine sojourn
in the mansion, he should share Shelley's study and bedroom,--two rooms
never entered by Elizabeth (under the new rules for limiting her
intercourse with her brother), and never entered by any one but Shelley
himself, and the servant who attended to them. Taking his sleep by day, it
was arranged that Hogg should take his exercise by night, when he would be
able to pass through a window into the garden without fear of being
observed. Through the same window, commanding a view of the lawn, he would
be able to get a view of Elizabeth, when she walked in the garden. This
project for a secret meeting of the separated 'Inseparables' at Field
Place was dropt, probably on account of the risks the conspirators would
run in carrying it into effect. But though it was not pursued to a point,
at which the intruder could have been ejected ignominiously from the
Sussex mansion, the boyish scheme came to the Squire's
knowledge,--possibly from the lips of a treacherous servant, in whom the
future poet had confided; but more probably from a letter Shelley had
written and forgotten to post to his especial friend. The project for a
clandestine meeting at Field Place having fallen to the ground, Shelley
(albeit, bound by honour, and the terms of his 200_l._ a-year allowance to
have no personal intercourse with Hogg) bethought himself he would go to
Wales _viá_ York, and pass a few days with his peculiar friend at the
archiepiscopal city. Could he do so without risk of forfeiting his
allowance, he would go there openly _on_ the way to Wales. Should 'old
Killjoy' be too sharp for him he would outwit the 'old buck' by running
from Wales to York under the assumed name of Peyton, in order that his
movements should be less likely to come to the knowledge of the tyrant,
who eventually threatened to stop the allowance, should his son carry out
his purpose of paying Hogg a visit.
Too prudent to take openly a step that might result in a withdrawal of the
allowance, and at the same time too wary to ask for a direct liberation
from his promise to keep away from Hogg, the wily and diplomatic Shelley
bethought himself of alluding to his purpose of visiting York in a letter,
which his father might neglect to answer, or might answer without
referring to the particular project. In either of those cases silence
could be construed as consent; and to any subsequent expressions of
displeasure at his breach of a chief article of their agreement, the son
could reply by pleading that he had not gone to York without giving his
father timely notice of his wish, or without grounds for supposing he had
his father's tacit permission to go there. In thus 'trying it on' with
'the old buck,' at a peculiarly inauspicious moment, Shelley encountered a
rebuff for which he was not unprepared. Instead of overlooking the
announcement, or treating it with indifference, the Squire of Field Place
answered promptly, 'Go to York if you like; but _not_ with my money.'
Finding his father thus resolute in holding him to the terms of their
compact, Shelley deferred his trip to the north, and went straight to
Radnorshire. At the same time he determined that before many weeks had
passed he would go to York under a false name, and breaking his promise do
secretly what he dared not do openly. 'Do not think, however, but that I
shall come to see you long before you come to reside in London; but open
warfare will never do, and Mr. Peyton, which will be my _nom-de-guerre_,
will easily swallow up Mr. Shelley.' In a later letter from Radnorshire,
Shelley says of his motives for deceiving his father in this
business:--'When I come, I will not come under my own name. It were to
irritate my father needlessly; this is entirely a _philautian_ argument,
but without the stream, of which he is the fountain-head, I could not get
on. We must live; that is, we must eat, drink, and sleep, and money is the
necessary procurer of these things!' This from the young gentleman whose
averseness to underhand ways is extolled so cordially by Lady Shelley!
Whilst the future poet was thus at open war and hollow truce with his
father, the evidence is conclusive that he was treated (from the date of
his expulsion from Oxford to the date of his first marriage) with
sympathetic and conciliatory tenderness by his mother, who has been
charged by successive historians with coldness and severity towards her
perplexing and troublesome son. In the letter (of 28th April, 1811), which
declares his disgust at the intolerance of his sister, who 'talks cant and
twaddle,' Shelley speaks of his mother as a woman 'who is mild and
tolerant,' though 'narrow-minded.' On the 15th of May, when the exile has
come to terms with his father, and returned to the home from which he had
been so inhumanly excluded, Shelley writes to Hogg, 'My mother is quite
rational.' She says, 'I think prayer and thanksgiving are of no use. If a
man is a good man, philosopher, or Christian, he will do very well in
whatever future state awaits us. This I call liberality.' It was not in
the nature of the callow philosopher and atheist, who wrote so bitterly of
his sister's 'cant and twaddle,' to bear this evidence to his mother's
liberality, had she vexed him with sorrowful censure or irritated him with
bootless opposition. Between the naturally indignant father and the
unnaturally rebellious son, this anxious and sorely troubled wife and
mother seems to have played a difficult part with exemplary dutifulness
and affectionateness to the husband she honoured and the boy she loved. It
is conceivable, that once and again the Squire of Field Place may have had
grounds for charging her with defective loyalty during the cruel
contention, but the unruly boy certainly had no right to complain of the
imperfect devotion of the mother who, in her desire to hold his affection
and confidence, assured him she was tenderly interested in his friend at
York.
Yet biographers have insisted that Shelley suffered in heart and fortune
from the intolerance and frigid hardness of his mother; the intolerant
mother who spoke to him on their differences of religious opinion with so
much leniency and forbearance and large-hearted sympathy that he was
constrained to extol her liberality: the unsympathetic mother who won so
large a measure of his confidence, that he submitted some of Hogg's
letters to her perusal, and (probably because he had cautiously sounded
her on the subject) was assured she would not use her influence to prevent
the marriage of his sister to his friend.
To complete the view of the future poet's relations with the principal
members of his familiar circle, one must glance at the way in which he was
treated by his Uncle Pilfold, and the characteristic way in which he
repaid the cheery sailor for his good services. Instead of eyeing him
askance, regarding him coldly, holding aloof from him, denouncing him as
an incorrigible young reprobate, this kindly uncle grasped his nephew by
the hand, as though it were a greater honour to be expelled from Oxford
than to win 'the Newdigate.' Welcoming the boy to his house, the old
sailor opened at the same moment his heart and his purse to the youngster
in disgrace. When Mr. Timothy Shelley's wrath at his boy's rebellion had
in ten days or a fortnight scolded off its fiercest heat, Uncle Pilfold
became a mediator between the father and son, inducing the former to let
the boy have intercourse with his sister, and at the same time making the
latter see that he must concede something to his father who, though he had
gone a deuced deal too far in stopping the supplies, was not without
grounds for displeasure. 'I am now with my uncle,' the future poet wrote
from Cuckfield to Hogg, on Sunday, 19th May, 1811; 'he is a very hearty
fellow, and has behaved very nobly to me, in return for which I
illuminated him. A physician, named Dr. J----, dined with us last night,
who is a red-hot saint; the Captain attacked him, warm from _The
Necessity_, and the Doctor went away very much shocked.' Grateful for his
uncle's kindness, Mr. Percy Bysshe Shelley rewarded him with
characteristic munificence,--by illuminating him out of Christianity.
What reason had Shelley to complain of the way in which he was treated by
his kindred in the season of his heavy disgrace? Expelled from Oxford for
the gravest offence of which an undergraduate could be guilty, he was
enjoined by his father to go home before being placed under a sufficient
tutor. Having refused to obey his father's orders, he was angrily told to
keep away from the home he had declined to visit, when ordered to do so.
Consenting for a few weeks to this barbarous exclusion from his boyhood's
home,--an exclusion which he knew he could terminate at any moment by
simply walking into the house, and which he did terminate by that simple
process,--the exile passed a few weeks very agreeably in London. During
this so-called exclusion and banishment he was in affectionate
communication with his mother, his sisters, his Uncle Pilfold, and his
cousins Grove. On returning to his 'boyhood's home,' within a month or
five weeks of the sentence of exclusion, he was received with a measure of
affectionate indulgence and consideration by his mother, that may well
have surprised him. He was also treated affectionately by his sister
Elizabeth, though she kept away from his study, and instead of assenting
to his sceptical opinions, met them with much exasperating 'cant and
twaddle,' and made him despair of illuminating her into a fit mate for his
incomparable Hogg. At the same time he was treated with substantial
kindness by his father (who, in return for a liberal allowance, only
required him to desist for awhile from personal intercourse with Hogg),
and with a flattering show of sympathetic concern by his father's
patron,--the Duke of Norfolk. Unless Shelley's cousin, Charles Henry
Grove, is in error as to the year, his Grace of Norfolk and the Squire of
Field Place talked (in the spring of 1811) over a plan for bringing the
youngster into Parliament, on the earliest opportunity, as Member for
Horsham. It was thus that the future poet was persecuted by his kindred,
and thus that he endured persecution at their hands in the months ensuing
immediately on his expulsion. There must be an end of the wild nonsense
about the poet's sufferings for truth and conscience at this stage of his
career. Perhaps no youngster was ever treated more tenderly by his nearest
kindred, so soon after earning signal disgrace by extravagant
misbehaviour.
Relinquishing his design to go to York before going to Radnorshire, when
he saw the breach of promise and act of disobedience would be fruitful of
pecuniary inconvenience, Shelley went (as we have seen) direct to Cwm
Elan, Rhayader, in the middle of July, 1811, with the intention of staying
there till the Westbrooks should have arrived at Aberystwith, when it was
his purpose to run over to them, and enjoy the society of the young lady,
with whom he was not at all in love. Had the Westbrooks' movements
accorded with Mr. Bysshe Shelley's anticipations and wishes, there is
reason to think he would have eloped with the sixteen-years-old school
girl from Aberystwith, instead of eloping with her from London. Possibly
on leaving town he had not fully made up his mind to do so. Possibly he
took coach for Radnorshire, with no more definite programme of proceedings
than that in the course of three weeks he should be with the Westbrooks at
Aberystwith; after which event he would, somehow or other, be happy with
Harriett for ever. It is, however, sufficiently manifest from the records,
that he accepted his cousin's invitation to Cwm Elan, because it afforded
him a pretext for going to Wales, which would cover the real purpose of
the journey from his father, and because the neighbourhood of Rhayader
would be a convenient resting-place, whence he could slip away to
Aberystwith, some thirty miles distant. Moreover, it is clear in the
superlative degree that Shelley and Harriett had both set their hearts on
meeting one another at Aberystwith; and that it was an occasion of the
sharpest disappointment to both of them, when, after proceeding towards
Aberystwith, as far as the place, called Condowell in one of Shelley's
letters, Mr. Westbrook suddenly faced about, and returned to London, with
the intention of sending his younger daughter again to boarding-school,
when she imagined herself to have 'left school for good.'
What caused this sudden relinquishment of Mr. Westbrook's plans for his
summer holidays is matter for conjecture. But from matters of indisputable
record, it may be safely inferred that the worthy taverner returned to
town because he thought it better Mr. Bysshe Shelley and his younger
daughter should not come together at Aberystwith; and that he was bent on
sending her again to school, because he thought a regular and professional
schoolmistress better qualified than Miss Elizabeth Westbrook to take good
care of the giddy girl. Possibly Mr. Westbrook had peeped into one of the
several letters which Shelley sent the sisters from Rhayader, and learnt
from it enough to convince him he had better return abruptly with his
daughters to London. Anyhow he decided to do so, alike to Shelley's
annoyance and Miss Harriett's chagrin.
Like Byron, Shelley never brooked aught that thwarted his will, or in any
way threatened to withhold from him a pleasure, on which he had set his
heart. On being told she must go back to London and to school, instead of
onwards to Aberystwith, Miss Harriett Westbrook wrote to Shelley for
advice. On receiving Harriett's shocking intelligence, Shelley overflowed
with indignation at the monstrous cruelty of the father, who could think
of sending his sixteen-years-old daughter to school for another half-year.
Should she, Harriett asked in her letter, submit to her father's tyranny
or resist it? Shelley, of course, answered, 'Resist it.' At the same time
he wrote to Mr. Westbrook a letter which, though it was intended to
mollify the stern and inhuman parent, only confirmed him in his hideous
and revolting purpose. Powerless to subdue by tears and tragic threats the
father, who only fumed and sneered at Percy's mollifying epistle, Harriett
wrote to Shelley that she threw herself on his protection, and would fly
with him anywhere. Shelley was delighted. For weeks and months he had been
nursing the hope that his darling Harriett would rise so far superior to
the dwarfing prejudices, which disposed ordinary women to prefer wedlock
to Free Love, as to commit herself to his custody without regard to the
laws of Priests and the requirements of tyrannic custom. For weeks and
months he had been educating her to see in Love a sufficient sanction of
the union requisite for fulfilment of its desire. And here was the fruit
of his instruction. Snapping the ties of parental tyranny and filial
thraldom, Harriett had thrown herself on him for protection, and would fly
with him anywhere,--to be happy with him for ever. Had he not reason, in
the first and liveliest exultations of his triumph, to write to Hogg,
'Gratitude and admiration, all demand, that I should love her for _ever_?'
How could he be sufficiently grateful to the girl who had thus surrendered
herself to his honour, in her absolute confidence in his goodness? How
could he sufficiently admire the girl, whose magnanimity had enabled her
to say to him, 'Do your will with me; take me on your own terms, so long
as you are good enough to make me yours?' If Shelley went to Wales,
without a project for elopement with Harriett Westbrook, he certainly
returned from Radnorshire to London, with the intention of taking her from
her father at the earliest opportunity.
With the judicial fairness and critical moderation, that are not the only
qualities to distinguish him from the poet's other worshipful biographers,
Mr. Rossetti hesitates in inferring from Shelley's words ('she ... threw
herself upon my protection') that, whilst writing to Shelley at Cwm Elan,
Harriett Westbrook was ready to be his mistress. Reminding his readers
that, instead of being the girl's own words, the phrase is at the utmost
nothing more than Shelley's 'summing up' of her expressions,--Shelley's
way of packing into half-a-dozen words the most momentous of her
passionate communications,--Mr. Rossetti also bids his readers qualify
their censure of her indelicacy with considerations, arising from the
reflection that 'the school-girl of sixteen, hardly more than a child,'
had been 'lately philosophised out of the ordinary standard of propriety'
by Shelley himself.
The biographer who writes with so much conscientious circumspection cannot
be charged with straining words to Harriett's disadvantage. Still I am
disposed to think he goes something too far. More doubtful even than Mr.
Rossetti, I hesitate to accept or reject his inference from the words
which, instead of being the school-girl's own words, are nothing more than
Shelley's summary of them. The inexact Shelley's mere summary of the
written words is no evidence to be accepted with unqualified confidence in
its accuracy. Moreover, could it be shown that the summary was a fair
representation of the purport of her written words, it would still be
conceivable that in her haste and excitement the angry girl put them on
paper without seeing their full force and realizing to what they committed
her. Yet, further, it may be urged in palliation of the child's want of
maidenly decorum that, if she was ready for flight without marriage at the
moment of penning the letter, she changed her mind on coming out of her
anger against her father, and subsiding to a temper that permitted her to
reflect with comparative calmness on all that had passed between herself
and her lover. Instead of finding her ready to fly with him on any terms,
when he saw her in London after his return from Wales, Shelley found her
in a state of indecision. 'My unfortunate friend, Harriett,' he wrote from
London to Hogg at York, on 15th August, 1811, 'is yet undecided, not with
respect to me, but herself.'
But though I am far from confident that Harriett ever threw herself on
Shelley's protection in the sense imagined by Mr. Rossetti, or even gave
Shelley sufficient grounds for saying she had done so, I am in no degree
disposed to suspect Shelley of wilfully misrepresenting the nature of her
confidence in, and appeal to, him. On the contrary, I have no doubt that
Shelley meant to make his friend at York understand the girl was ready to
become his mistress, and that he felt himself justified by the words of
her letter in crediting her with this readiness. I have no doubt that the
future poet wrote to Hogg in perfect good faith, and for the mere purpose
of letting his correspondent see the exact state of the case. The
evidences leave no room for doubt that, after spending weeks and months in
training and educating his sister's schoolmate to take a philosophic view
of marriage, he accepted with equal sincerity and delight the expressions
of her tempestuous letter as a declaration that she was willing to be his
mistress, or (in the language of the Free Lovers) to become his wife
without the intervention of the priest and the sanction of legal
matrimony. Under this impression he wrote to Hogg from Rhayader with
jubilant boyishness,--'We shall have 200_l._ a-year; when we find it run
short, we must live, I suppose, upon love!... We shall see you at York....
I can get lodgings at York, I suppose.' Under the same exhilarating
impression he journeyed from Wales to London, thinking how he and Harriett
would be journeying northwards a week or ten days later, how happy they
would be for ever in lodgings at York, and how furious his tyrannical
father would be on hearing he had carried Harriett away from her
tyrannical father and taken her to the city he was forbidden to enter,--to
the dear, delightful, incomparable Hogg, with whom he was forbidden to
have personal intercourse. But on arriving in town he found Harriett in no
humour for immediate elopement. She was undecided, not in respect to her
choice of a lover, but in respect to the time _at_ which, and the terms on
which, she should commit herself to his custody.
It is, therefore, by no means so manifest to me as it is to Mr. Rossetti,
that had he cared to take advantage of her simplicity and romantic
trustfulness, Shelley could easily have seduced his sister's schoolfellow,
or, rather (I beg pardon of the Free Lovers), could have made her his wife
without marrying her.
'If the calculating habit is still strong upon us,' says Mr. Rossetti,
'we may compute what percentage of faultlessly Christian young heirs
of opulent baronets would have acted like the atheist Shelley, and
married a retired hotel-keeper's daughter offering herself as a
mistress. To deny that the act was foolish would be absurd under any
circumstances, and doubly so when we reflect upon the ultimate issue
of it to Shelley and Harriett themselves; let us then distinctly
recognize that it was foolish, and no less distinctly that it was
noble.'
With all his desire to deal fairly with Harriett Westbrook's reputation,
Mr. Rossetti is less than fair to her in arguing that up to the moment of
her Scotch wedding she was ready to become Shelley's mistress, because she
threw herself on his protection (by letter) three weeks earlier. Ladies
have a proverbial right to change their minds; and if we must concede that
Harriett had a mind to be Shelley's mistress when he was at Rhayader, it
cannot be questioned she had changed her mind on that particular matter
before he came to her again in London. Living in Chapel Street, Grosvenor
Square, under the eye of an elder sister, who, possessing her confidence,
knew how to keep her well in hand, Harriett was not so completely at
Shelley's mercy as Mr. Rossetti would have us think. It is inconceivable
that Shelley would have been allowed to possess himself of the school-girl
on terms which wanted the elder sister's approval; and it is not to be
imagined that Miss Elizabeth Westbrook, favouring Shelley's suit, partly
from romantic affectionateness, and partly from social ambition, would
have consented to an arrangement for making her sister the mere kept
mistress of a gentlemanly scapegrace, who might one day become a baronet.
The elder Miss Westbrook was no person to allow herself to be treated as a
nonentity, or aught less than a very considerable personage, in an affair
touching her dignity and self-respect so delicately and deeply. Under
these circumstances it is in the highest degree improbable that Miss
Westbrook, who facilitated the elopement which promised to make her
younger sister eventually a lady of title and estate, would have permitted
herself to be made the sister of such a person as Harriett would have
become, on passing to Shelley's keeping without marriage.
There are other reasons for questioning whether Shelley should be credited
with nobility of conduct, in forbearing to do what he would not have been
permitted to do. Had he in May or June made Harriett his mistress
_without_ marrying her, he would only have acted in accordance with his
notions of morality. He did no more at the end of August or the beginning
of September when he made her his wife _by_ marriage. If he should be
credited with distinctly noble conduct merely for taking what he thought
the right course in September, he would have been no less distinctly noble
three months earlier for merely taking what he thought the right and moral
course in May and June. Had the future poet, however, made the girl his
mistress in either of those last-named months, Mr. Rossetti would scarcely
have ventured to credit him with distinct nobility of action in doing so,
merely because he conceived himself under a moral obligation to do so. It
should be observed that Shelley's sentiments respecting marriage were
during this period of his career greatly modified by Hogg's arguments
against them; and that, in commending the future poet's conduct in making
Harriett Westbrook a wife instead of a mistress, Mr. Rossetti applauds him
for conduct largely, if not altogether referable to Hogg's influence, and
may, therefore, be said to give Shelley the praise that should rather be
given to his friend.
The evidence of Hogg's beneficial, though only transient, influence on his
friend in this respect is conclusive. The shrewd and humorous
north-countryman, who nursed the hope of marrying his friend's sister
Elizabeth, was, at this stage of his story, a robust and resolute defender
of matrimony and the laws for its protection; and in the many letters
that passed between him and Shelley in the spring and summer of 1811, he
seized every opportunity for combating and correcting what he deemed his
friend's perverse and erroneous views on the usages and ethics of
marriage. It is to Hogg's credit (at least in the opinion of those who
regard marriage with reverential jealousy) that on seeing his friend more
and more strongly set on some kind of domestic association with Harriett
Westbrook, he made the most strenuous efforts to induce him to marry the
girl in a legal way, instead of uniting himself to her in a way that
would, at least in law and social sentiment, render her only his mistress.
Besides being strenuous, these efforts were successful. Having regard to
the miserable consequences of the match, some readers may, perhaps, regret
that Hogg was so busy and successful. Perhaps it would have been better
for both parties to the disastrous union, had Hogg left ill alone. Had the
north-countryman been less energetic, it is conceivable that Mr.
Westbrook's pretty daughter would have escaped the misery of being
Shelley's wife, without falling to the shame of being his mistress. But
Hogg's action was none the less meritorious, because it may have been
hurtful to the friend he wished to serve.
Shelley's stay in Radnorshire did not end before he admitted the force of
his friend's demonstrations of the convenience and beneficence of lawful
marriage. In the very letter that declared his puerile delight in
Harriett's appeal to him for protection from her inhuman father, he says,
'We shall see you at York. I will hear your arguments for matrimonialism,
by which I am now almost convinced.' Some ten days later (15th August,
1811), when he had passed through London, made a flying visit to Horsham
and Cuckfield, and returned to town for stolen interviews with Harriett,
he wrote to his incomparable Hogg at York, stating most precisely that he
had relinquished his purpose of making Harriett his mistress, and had
determined to make her his wife, in pure submission to Hogg's counsel, and
to the force of the arguments with which that counsel was enforced. 'I am
become,' Shelley wrote, 'a perfect convert to matrimony, not from
temporising, but from _your_ arguments.... The one argument, which you
have urged so often with so much energy; the sacrifice made by the woman,
so disproportioned to any which the man can give,--this alone may
exculpate me, were it a fault, from an inquiring submission to your
superior intellect.' Shelley's words respecting himself and his own
affairs must of course be always used with caution and lively suspicion.
But the words written by him _to_ Hogg himself on 15th August, 1811, are
good evidence that, on finding Shelley set on taking Harriett Westbrook to
himself, either as a mistress or as his wife, and strongly disposed to
take her in the former capacity, Hogg used all his power to make him see
that he was bound to marry her.
It does not speak much for Shelley's innate chivalry and generous
tenderness for womankind, of which so much extravagant stuff has been
written by his idolaters, that he could not discover for himself the most
obvious considerations why no man of honour should place a woman of
sensibility and refinement in the ignominious position of a kept mistress;
that he could not without Hogg's assistance see, how much the woman
sacrifices of her social dignity and legal rights, who humours masculine
insolence and selfishness, by sinking to a position, which, giving her all
the trials and responsibilities, withholds from her all the higher
privileges of a wife. On the other hand, it is something to the credit of
the youngster, who could not discover these facts for himself, that he
could see them when they were pointed out to him, and was withheld by the
timely expostulations of sober common-sense from the sin of acting on his
'hasty decision.'
In the letter, from which the last extract is taken, Shelley says, 'I am
now returned to London; direct to me as usual at Graham's. My father is
here; wondering, possibly, at my London business. He will be more
surprised soon, possibly.' At the same moment, on the same sheet of paper,
he chuckles over the surprise his speedy elopement with Harriett Westbrook
will occasion his father, and pretends to think it unlikely he shall soon
be called upon to make a choice between Marriage and Free Love. It was
like Shelley, to contradict himself in this fashion almost in the same
breath.
The particulars of Shelley's movements between the 15th of August and the
end of the month are unknown, with the exception of a few details, which,
in the absence of positive testimony, the imagination would furnish as
matters of course. For the expenses of the elopement, Shelley obtained
25_l._ from Tom Medwin's father (the Horsham attorney), who lent him the
money without knowing or suspecting the purpose for which it was needed; a
slender sum, that seems to have been reduced considerably before the
future poet paid the fares for two inside places in the mail from London
to Edinburgh. There were secret interviews between the lovers; interviews
of which Mr. Westbrook probably knew nothing, and Miss Eliza Westbrook was
doubtless cognizant, even when she was not present at them. Charles Henry
Grove (younger than Shelley by something less than two years) was in his
cousin's confidence during these days of pleasant excitement and romantic
conspiracy, and accompanied the future poet on some of his visits to
Harriett. There were understandings and misunderstandings, decisions and
changes of purpose, arrangements and re-arrangements. Then came the hour
of early morning when Harriett Westbrook, in all the brightness of her
still childish beauty--the lovely girl who, a few years later, escaped
from unendurable shame and wretchedness by self-murder--stept from her
father's house, and entered the hackney-coach, that conveyed her, together
with the two cousins (Shelley and Charles Henry Grove), to the 'Green
Dragon,' in Gracechurch Street, where they remained all day, till the
northern mail was packed and ready to start. Another minute, and the two
childish adventurers were at the outset of their long journey for
Edinburgh, _viâ_ York, whilst the guard's horn sounded cheerily, and
Charley Grove (left standing on the pavement) waved a last farewell to the
departing vehicle.
It is a question whether the elopement was made at the end of August or in
the beginning of September. I have little hesitation in saying Harriett
left her father's house in September; none in saying she was married to
Shelley in Edinburgh in the first week of that month. The girl may have
crossed her father's threshold on the morning of Saturday 31st August, but
it is more probable she did so on Sunday the 1st, or Monday the 2nd of
September. On passing through York at midnight, after spending an entire
night and the following day (allowance made for the usual stoppages) in
the coach, Shelley, with care for the replenishment of his almost empty
purse, wrote a hasty and careless note to Hogg, begging for the loan of
10_l._, and saying that he and Harriett would 'have 75_l._ on Sunday.'
'On Sunday,' of course, meant 'next Sunday.' After answering the brief
note, as soon as it was brought to him on the following morning by a
messenger from the Inn, Hogg packed his portmanteau, and in the afternoon
of the same day 'in the first week of September,' was on the road to
Edinburgh, where he arrived some two or three days before the Sunday, when
Shelley hoped to get the 75_l._ Dating from Field Place on Sunday, 8th
September, 1811, immediately on hearing his son and Hogg were together in
the Scotch capital, Mr. Timothy Shelley wrote from Field Place on 8th
September, 1811, to Mr. John Hogg, of Norton: announcing that Shelley had
'withdrawn himself from' the writer's 'protection, and set off for
Scotland with a young female.'
Hogg is certain that he answered Shelley's note immediately on getting it,
that he started for Edinburgh in the afternoon of the same day, and that
he made the journey to Edinburgh in the first week of September. Mr.
Timothy Shelley's letter makes it certain the young men were together in
Edinburgh in that week. Had the 'on Sunday' of Shelley's note pointed to
Sunday, 1st September; had he written for the 10_l._ for his expenses
_till_ that Sunday, Hogg's run to the Scotch capital would have been made
in the last week of August.
CHAPTER XV.
MOTIVE AND INFLUENCES.
The fatal Marriage--Was Shelley trapt into it?--Mr. Garnett's
Assurances--The Fiction about Claire--Lady Shelley's Use of Hogg's
Evidences--The Prenuptial Intercourse--Was it slight?--Shelley's
Opportunities for knowing all about Harriett--His Use and Abuse of
those Opportunities--Mr. Westbrook's Action towards Shelley--His
endeavour to preserve Harriett from Shelley--Eliza Westbrook's part in
making up the Match--The Tool's Reward--The Etonian Free Lover--The
Social Condition of the Westbrooks and Godwins--Harriett Westbrook's
Beauty--Her Education--Her Knowledge of French--Her quick Progress in
Latin--What Wonder that Shelley fell in love with her?
Thus it was that Shelley carried off Mr. Westbrook's sixteen-years-old
child, and made her his wife, instead of acting on 'the hasty decision,'
from which Hogg dissuaded him. Did he take this momentous step
inconsiderately? On a slight acquaintance with the young lady? Under
circumstances that denied him fair opportunities for observing the temper
and studying the character of the girl whose singular beauty had
fascinated him? Was he lured, drawn, inveigled, into the marriage by
influences, stronger than those that are usually employed by a girl's
nearest relatives for compassing what they think a good match for her? The
enthusiasts, who draw their inspiration on Shelleyan questions from Field
Place, do not hesitate to answer all these questions in the affirmative.
Mr. Garnett (_vide_ his _Shelley in Pall Mall_) assures us that whenever
certain documents, hitherto withheld from the world, shall be made public,
_i.e._ when Field Place shall issue its authoritative biography for the
ending of all controversies on Shelleyan matters, 'it will for the first
time be clearly understood how slight was the acquaintance of Shelley with
Harriet, previous to their marriage; what advantage was taken of his
chivalry of sentiment, and her compliant disposition, and the inexperience
of both; and how little entitled or disposed she felt herself to complain
of his behaviour.' It is certain that before submitting to what she could
not prevent, Harriett complained with passionate vehemence of her
husband's behaviour to her. Let that matter, however, pass for the
present. What are the grounds for saying that unfair advantage was taken
of Shelley's inexperience, and that Shelley, by reason of the slightness
of his acquaintance with her, when he stole her from her father, knew much
less of Harriett than young men usually know of girls they are on the
point of marrying?
Strange things may of course be looked for from the people, who have
recently required the world to believe that, instead of taking Claire from
London to Byron at Geneva, Shelley and Mary Godwin were taken (like two
little children) _by_ Claire to Switzerland,--and so taken there _by_ her,
although they (as the Field Place story goes) disliked her exceedingly,
even to the point of disgustful aversion. But even the authorities of
Field Place will scarcely declare the documents published in Hogg's _Life_
to be spurious documents. They will scarcely declare that Hogg (the writer
with a peculiar style from which he could not liberate himself for an
instant) forged the multitude of letters, published in his book as letters
written to him by Shelley,--the epistles, some of which Lady Shelley
herself used for evidential purposes in writing her _Shelley
Memorials_,--the epistles which are so Shelleyan in thought and diction,
feeling and language, form and style, that no other human being but
Shelley could have written them. Field Place has dared to do strange
things, but its daring will stop short of this extravagance. To produce
documents, drawn by Shelley's hand or at his dictation, in contradiction
of these letters, would not be to discredit the letters, but only to
produce fresh illustration of one of Shelley's most perplexing
infirmities,--fresh evidence that he often made statements contrary to the
truth.
From documentary evidences of unimpeachable genuineness and irresistible
cogency, it is certain that Shelley made Harriett Westbrook's acquaintance
in January, 1811, eight lunar months before his elopement with her; that
he corresponded with her between the day on which he made her acquaintance
and the date of his expulsion from Oxford; that in the spring of 1811 he
saw her repeatedly at her home and elsewhere,--receiving her at least on
one occasion at his lodgings in Poland Street, attending her from her
father's house to her school on Clapham Common, walking about with her on
Clapham Common, and sitting up with her (at least on one occasion) till
past midnight, at Chapel Street, Grosvenor Square, in the absence of a
third person; that he corresponded with her from March to September; that
the wooing, which began at Oxford by letter, if not on the occasion of
their first meeting, was strenuously prosecuted by Shelley to the day of
the elopement; that he had opportunities for seeing and influencing her,
which enabled him to illuminate her out of Christianity and (to use Mr.
Rossetti's expression) to 'philosophise her out of the ordinary standard
of propriety'; that he had opportunities, and used them, for making her
think lightly of the matrimonial rite; that he had opportunities, and used
them, for encouraging her in rebellion against her own father; that
instead of being kept in the dark as to the chief, and indeed the only
important defect of her temper--a constitutional proneness to
discontent--he was peculiarly interested in her manifestations of this
significant quality, and sympathized cordially with her groundless
grievances and imaginary sorrows. Though he was uncertain as to the day on
which Shelley determined to win Harriett Westbrook's affections, Hogg had
no doubt his friend had begun to woo the girl before he left Oxford.
'Shelley's epistles show the progress of his courtship,' he says, 'and
that his marriage was not quite so hasty an affair as it is commonly
represented to have been. The wooing continued for half-a-year at least,
and this is a long time in the life,--in the life of love, of such young
persons.' The interval, between Shelley's withdrawal from Oxford and his
marriage at Edinburgh, wanted at least three weeks of an entire half-year.
Yet, Field Place requires us to believe slightness was a principal
characteristic of the prenuptial intercourse of these young people!
How about the charge of inveiglement? No one has ever suggested that Mr.
Westbrook was an accomplice in measures for luring the heir of the heir to
a wealthy Sussex baronetcy into wedlock with his younger daughter. On the
contrary there were reasons why he should regard any such project with
disfavour. If he was not a gentleman, Mr. Westbrook was a man of the
world, who came in contact with gentlemen, and knew something of the ways
of the higher world and fashionable society, from the gossip of the
gentlemen who used his public-house. The west-end taverner, who had risen
to comfortable circumstances by attention to his affairs, was not the man
to be keenly desirous of having for his son-in-law the scatterbrain
youngster who only the other day was expelled from Oxford. He had seen
too many youngsters of quality drop to grief and ruin, not to know that a
young gentleman of Shelley's parentage and expectations and story might
prove a very poor match for a prosperous tradesman's daughter. He knew the
value of his money too well, not to be aware that his pretty daughter, to
whom he could make a good allowance during his life and perhaps leave ten
thousand pounds at his death, might do much better for herself than marry
the harum-scarum son of the Member for New Shoreham. Mr. Westbrook did not
need to be told that, so married, his pretty daughter and her children
might drain his pocket to his last hour. Like a prudent man, he did
nothing to hurry his daughter into the unfortunate marriage.
When Shelley came to Chapel Street with his sister's present and letter of
introduction in his hand, he was received with courtesy at the taverner's
private house. Mr. Westbrook received the youngster with civility in the
ensuing spring: a civility that would have seemed less 'strange' to
Shelley (_vide_ Letter to Hogg, of 28th April, 1811), had he not been
conscious how little he deserved it. Though he writes disdainfully of the
tradesman, whom he calls alternately a coffeehouse-keeper and
ex-coffeehouse-keeper, and charges him with pitiful stinginess to his
daughter, whose disobedience raised her so considerably in the scale of
social dignity, Hogg forbears to accuse Mr. Westbrook of imposing his
younger daughter on the youth of quality, who made her so poor a husband.
According to Hogg, Miss Elizabeth Westbrook made up the match, her father
being guilty of nothing worse than prudent and hypocritical anger at the
event on which he secretly congratulated himself. Perhaps Mr. Westbrook,
after the elopement, made the most of Harriett's unfilial disobedience,
and feigned more displeasure than he felt at her misbehaviour, in order to
have and preserve a good pretext for tightening the string of his purse.
But no one can suspect him of busying himself to bring about the match.
Compelling Harriett to return to her prison on Clapham Common after the
Easter holidays, he did nothing to facilitate their intercourse, before
Shelley, in the middle of May, went from town to Sussex. At the beginning
of August, on finding how matters had been going on with the lovers,
without his consent or suspicion, Mr. Westbrook determined to send
Harriett again to school, returned with his wife and daughters to Chapel
Street, and on Shelley's reappearance in the neighbourhood of Grosvenor
Square, shut his door against him.
Miss Elizabeth Westbrook no doubt had a hand in making up the match. But
what of that? To make matches is the privilege and convenient diversion of
mature woman-kind, and a successful taverner's daughter is not to be
denied the rights and privileges of her sex, because her father is a
licensed victualler. In doing what she did to oblige Shelley in the
matter, she was moved partly by affection for her sister, and partly by a
desire to become, sooner or later, the sister-in-law of a wealthy baronet,
the sister of a lady of quality. Actuated by ambition and sisterly
affection, Miss Elizabeth Westbrook obeyed precisely the same motives that
determine any gentlewoman of high condition to make the heir of a peerage,
or any other highly eligible _parti_, duly sensible of her eldest
daughter's manifold graces and virtues. Standing to Harriett in the
relation of a mother rather than a sister, Miss Elizabeth Westbrook merely
did for her younger sister's advantage and her own gratification, what a
mother bent on marrying her daughter advantageously is permitted to do for
the achievement of her purpose. Shelley besought Miss Westbrook for
opportunities of seeing Harriett, as he was disposed to love her, and Miss
Westbrook gave him what he wanted.
If this is to lure and inveigle a young man into wedlock, the elder Miss
Westbrook was guilty of that offence. But I cannot think her action should
be described by such offensive words. She did not seek Shelley; it was he
who in a very remarkable way sought her and her people out. He was not the
mild and compliant youth to be led into wedlock against his will, because
a rather mature maiden told him it would be good for him. Miss Elizabeth
Westbrook of all women was the least qualified to exercise such control
over him. She was not beautiful, and at the outset of their acquaintance
she was by no means acceptable to Shelley. He thought her affected, and
suspected her of unamiability. He felt for her a dislike that almost
amounted to repulsion, and would soon have quickened into aversion, had
she irritated him by opposing his scheme. Till he had made her clearly
understand he did not visit Chapel Street to talk of love with her, but to
talk of it with her sister, and she had consented to his design, Shelley
saw nothing to approve and much to disapprove in the elder Miss Westbrook.
On changing his mind about her, he found the lady amiable merely because
she acquiesced in his scheme. When a person consents to be the tool of
another, the tool usually has a reward. Sometimes in addition to the
reward agreed upon by both parties, the tool has in view an end unimagined
by the person using the tool. Sometimes also it happens that, turning the
tables, the tool becomes the tyrant of its former employer. It was so in
the present instance. After Shelley's marriage, Miss Elizabeth Westbrook
insisted on the reward of former services, and for a while exacted heavier
payment for them than Shelley was willing to pay. Amiable in his eyes,
whilst she was only his tool, Miss Westbrook soon grew hateful to him when
she had become his tyrant.
Why should we assume, why was it ever assumed, that Shelley was inveigled
and drawn into the association, which was so completely an affair of his
own desire and contrivance? The notion that he _was made_ to do the thing
which he did of his own accord, and in spite of numerous obstacles,
probably originated from regard for the disparity of the Westbrooks and
Shelleys in respect to social station. The disparity, no doubt, was
considerable. Though he was not of aristocratic ancestry as biographers
have so stubbornly declared, the young man who, besides being the son of a
Member of Parliament, stood in the direct line of succession to a good
estate and a hereditary dignity, married greatly beneath him when he took
a licensed victualler's daughter for his wife; and in the majority of the
cases, where a young man marries a girl so greatly his inferior in social
quality, the marriage is found on inquiry to have been brought about by
the artifice and influence of a third person. Shelley's marriage, however,
was one of those unequal marriages that are distinctly referable to other
causes. Having in his boyhood a sentimental repugnance to lawful
matrimony, that had steadily grown in power from the time when he wrote
_Zastrozzi_, the Oxonian Shelley had no sooner been discarded by Harriett
Grove, than he desired a conjugal partner, whom he could attach to himself
by a tie less enduring than the bond of marriage,--a girl, in fact, with
whom he could live in Free Love. He could not hope to find such a partner
in his own social grade. The prejudices against Free Love were stronger in
Shelley's time, even as they are at the present time, in the higher than
in the lower grades of English society. In descending from his own social
grade, to the grade of the prosperous London _bourgeoisie_, he descended
no lower than the highest social grade, in which he could conceive it
possible for him to find a girl of beauty, culture, refinement, and
delicacy, whom he would be allowed to 'philosophise out of the ordinary
standard of propriety,' till she should 'throw herself upon him for
protection.' To win Harriett Westbrook, he descended (at least in the eyes
of fashionable society) no lower, than he descended to win Mary Godwin. Of
course, in being a very considerable man of letters, Godwin (in the
opinion of the present writer) was greatly Mr. Westbrook's superior; but
this superiority was in Shelley's time more obvious to persons of
education moving in the middle way of life, than to people of fashion and
patrician quality. Moreover, Godwin's superiority to Mr. Westbrook in this
particular was attended with circumstances that would render 'society'
more than usually indifferent to it. By birth and familiar associations,
William Godwin and Mr. Westbrook were of the same social degree. They were
also of the same social degree in respect to the avocations, by which the
one had acquired sufficient affluence, and the other maintained his family
in Skinner Street. Whilst the prosperous man of business lived with the
port and bearing of a gentleman in Chapel Street, Grosvenor Square, the
man of letters was a struggling and needy bookseller in the city. In
eloping with Mary Godwin in 1814, the poet associated himself with a
family no less distinctly beneath people of quality than the family from
which he took his first wife. Yet it has never been suggested that he was
lured and inveigled into his alliance with the Skinner Street family.
The notion that Shelley was 'caught' and 'trapt,' inveigled and drawn
against his will into his first marriage, becomes still more ludicrous,
when regard is had to the personal charms of Harriett Westbrook,--charms
that, had she been of far lowlier origin, would account for the young
man's action in making her his wife. Shapely in figure and graceful in her
movements, she possessed a face of singular loveliness, and the air of
high breeding that is so often wanting in damsels of high birth. It is no
exaggeration to say that she was a rare and faultless example of the
girlish beauty, which was most delightful and charming to Shelley. Her
features were delicate and regular; her light-brown hair was of a colour
peculiarly acceptable to her admirer; no girl ever had a more transparent
complexion, or alluring lips; and in her sunnier moods, her countenance
brightened with looks curiously expressive of intellectual alertness and
childish _naïveté_. At the same time in a laugh, equally spontaneous and
joyous, and a voice so musical, that people delighted in hearing her read
unentertaining books for the hour together, she possessed two natural
endowments that have been known to inspire passion, when they have been
associated with features plain even to ugliness. The air and style of this
lovely girl were such, that fifteen months after their wedding, Shelley
wrote of her and them, 'The ease and simplicity of her habits, the
unassuming plainness of her address, the uncalculated connexion of her
thought and speech, have ever formed, in my eyes, her greatest charms.'
Speaking of the pleasure he experienced in hearing her read aloud, Hogg
says, 'If it was agreeable to listen to her, it was not less agreeable to
look at her; she was always pretty, always bright, always blooming;
without a spot, without a wrinkle, not a hair out of its place.' Peacock
admired the taste and simplicity with which she arranged her light-brown
tresses, and the simple elegance of her costume. Be it also remarked that
for a girl of her period (more than seventy years since) Harriett was well
educated,--writing excellent letters of gracefully fluent penmanship: so
familiar with French, that during her six weeks' stay at Edinburgh, she
found a congenial occupation in translating one of Madame Cottin's novels
into English; fond of reading sound literature by herself, no less than to
attentive auditors; and possessing so much taste and aptitude for study
that Shelley delighted in teaching her Latin, and brought her so quickly
forward in it, that before the end of 1812, she was reading the Horatian
Odes with interest, if not without difficulty.
Such was the Harriett Westbrook of 1811 and 1812. And yet Field Place
cannot account for Shelley's weakness in wedding so lovely and winsome a
creature, without assuming that he was 'caught' and inveigled into the
match by a designing third person,--the artful and scheming Elizabeth
Westbrook.
CHAPTER XVI.
EDINBURGH, YORK, AND KESWICK.
The Scotch Marriage--The Trio at Edinburgh--'Wha's the Deil?'--Posting
from Edinburgh to York--Dingy Lodgings and Dingy Milliners--Shelley's
run South--Did Harriett accompany him?--The Squire stops the
Supplies--The Earl's Description of Harriett Westbrook--The Squire's
Anger at the _Mésalliance_--The Course Shelley could not take--Eliza
Westbrook in Possession--The Ouse at full Flood--One too many--Designs
on Greystoke Castle--Shelley's Appeal to the Duke of Norfolk--The
Codicil to Sir Bysshe's Will--The Flight to Richmond--Miss Westbrook
strikes her Enemy--The Trio at Keswick--Shelley's affectionate Letters
from Keswick to Hogg at York--John Westbrook's Daughters at Greystoke
Castle--Ducal Benignity and Policy--The Calverts of Greta
Bank--Shelley's Means during his first Marriage--How to live on
Three-Hundred-a-year--How not to live on Four-Hundred-a-year.
During the latest stages of their long journey in the London and Edinburgh
mail, Shelley and Harriett had for their travelling companion a young
Scotch advocate, who, on being taken into their confidence, told them the
right and speediest steps to marriage in accordance with the usage of the
land. Hence, on embracing his friend in the handsome front-parlour of a
high and roomy house in George Street, and taking his first view of
Harriett, 'bright, blooming, radiant with youth, health and beauty,' Hogg
was in the presence of husband and wife.
For particulars of the way in which the young people spent the next three
weeks in the Scotch capital, readers must go to Hogg's much-abused book.
For the purpose of the present chapter, it is enough to indicate how life
went there with the trio, who in the dead season of a never too lively
city, laughed over trivial matters with youth's light-heartedness, and
found in themselves all the society they needed. Hogg's only
disappointment was that Harriett's disinclination for exercise denied him
opportunities for the long walks he had hoped to take in the surrounding
country. Otherwise he was abundantly happy in regarding the happiness of
the incomparable Shelley, and in studying the charms, the character, and
endowments of the girl his friend had taken for better or worse. Rising
for an early breakfast, passing the morning in studious or literary
labour (Shelley was busy on his translation of a treatise by Buffon;
Harriett on her translation of Madame Cottin's _Claire d'Albe_), and
dining in the middle of the day, they spent the afternoon in exploring the
high-ways and by-ways, the grand places and the nooks and corners, of the
picturesque town. Having taken tea freely and talked philosophy with equal
freedom, the young men surrendered themselves to the music of their
official reader (Harriett of the clear and mellifluous voice), till the
deepening shades of evening reminded them it was time to admire the stars,
and gaze at the famous comet that gave our grandfathers the wine, whose
flavour lingers on tradition's tongue.
For their higher happiness indebted to the heavens and themselves, these
young people were indebted to Scotch sabbatarianism for some of their
heartiest peals of laughter. With unintentional profanity the future poet
was laughing in his own peculiarly shrill and vehement fashion in Prince's
Street, on the day that is still the saddest of the seven in North
Britain, when he was admonished for his scandalous levity by the austere
wayfarer, who remarked, 'You must not laugh openly in that fashion, young
man: if you do, you'll most certainly be convened;'--a warning that may
have been fruitful of the curiosity, which determined Shelley on a
subsequent Sabbath to go to kirk, for the purpose of hearing the servants
and children catechized on matters touching religion.
The drollery of Hogg's account of this visit to the kirk is due to the
narrator's lively humour, rather than to any unusual absurdity in the
proceedings for instructing an assemblage of servants and children in the
rudiments of theology. From dullness and shyness, the pupils were slow in
catching their catechist's meaning, and still slower in answering the
questions that were shouted to them by a teacher, whose Scotch accent was
the more effective on his auditors from the south, because at moments of
displeasure, his vocal pitch indicated that he was not devoid of Scotch
irritability. In asking his class 'Who is the devil?' this catechist
cannot be said to have travelled beyond the lines of ordinary official
routine; but his vocal peculiarities and the sharpness of his manner gave
the simple question a startling piquancy and grotesqueness, that, sending
Shelley into shrieks of laughter, drove him to the open streets where,
though inopportune, and highly scandalous, such laughter would be less
outrageous than in a place of religious instruction.
Six weeks having slipt away quickly, after the wont of time that passing
agreeably passes without exciting incidents, the morning came, on which
the trio entered a postchaise and began the return-journey to York. Hogg
would have preferred the mail or the slowest stage-coach to the private
chaise,--a mode of travelling scarcely appropriate to the financial
position of the three travellers; the law-student, who had nothing more
than a liberal allowance for a student from his father, and the happy
pair, who had married on the 200_l._ a-year, which they had reason to
apprehend would be withheld from them by the indignant Squire of Field
Place. But Harriett had suffered too much on her northward journey to be
desirous of resuming her seat in the mail, whilst as a matron of only
sixteen summers she wished to travel in a way more befitting a gentlewoman
of quality. So Shelley, who hated restraint of any kind, and Hogg, ever
averse to costly ostentation, consented to the young lady's desire for a
chaise, in which they could converse freely, and she could read one of
Holcroft's novels to them. Whatever the book had been, Hogg would have
enjoyed hearing it read by so charming a reader. But the tale was tedious
to Shelley, who, after sighing in a significant way, vainly entreated
Harriett to skip some of the less entertaining parts of the narrative. The
conflict on so trifling a matter may be noticed as an indication that,
even thus early in their married life, the poet and his bride had trivial
differences, in which she had her own way, and he was constrained to let
her have it. Not that Harriett insisted on reading aloud the whole of the
time from Edinburgh to York. There were moments when, if not glad to give
her throat a rest, she was pleased to enlarge her knowledge of rural
matters by listening to the talk of her travelling companions. How much it
needed enlargement at this point of her career, appears from the
earnestness with which the little Cockney (as Shelley styled her) besought
her husband to teach her how to discriminate between turnips and barley.
Hogg's comfortable lodgings in York having been let 'over his head' during
his absence in Scotland, the trio had no sooner alighted from the last of
their successive post-chaises, than they went forth in the rainy twilight
to look for other rooms. Hogg suggested, was indeed urgent, that they
should pass the night at an inn, and defer the search for lodgings till
the morrow. But Shelley flatly refused to acquiesce in the proposal;--a
refusal that may well have perplexed Hogg at the moment, as the cause of
the future poet's impatience to get into rooms in a private house did not
appear till the following morning. Shelley declaring thus stoutly for an
immediate entrance on lodgings--any lodgings rather than rooms in a tavern
for a single night,--and Harriett of course concurring with her husband,
Hogg was in a minority, and could not decline to join them in the search
for a temporary home, which, in the course of the damp and chilly October
evening, made them the joint-tenants of certain rooms in 'the dingy
dwelling of certain dingy old milliners' (the Misses Dancer of Coney
Street), who, in the course of a week or ten days, were as glad to be quit
of their lodgers, as the lodgers were glad to be quit of the austere and
reasonably suspicious needlewomen.
On the morrow Hogg, who had overrun his leave of absence by a few days,
went early to the chambers of the conveyancer with whom he was reading;
but he did not return thus early to the scene of legal labour and study,
without having heard of Shelley's intention to start for London by the
next night-mail. The future poet's announcement of this intention to run
southward, whilst leaving his bride at York under his friend's care in the
rooms they had occupied for a single night, of course showed Hogg why
Harriett's youthful and erratic husband had been so urgent for an
immediate choice of lodgings,--so averse to tarrying in a tavern for a few
hours. On the journey from Edinburgh to York, Shelley had been secretly
nursing his project for running off to London and Sussex,--to see his
father's attorney (Mr. Whitton), to take counsel with his Uncle Pilfold,
and to come to a financial understanding, either by personal interview or
through the attorney's intervention, with the Squire of Field Place. The
charges of six weeks' residence at Edinburgh, followed by the charges of
the southward journey, had reduced his money in hand to so insignificant a
sum, that, on approaching York, he could not think of taking Harriett with
him on the meditated trip to Middlesex and Sussex. It was manifest to him
that she must remain at York, whilst he went on the expedition for
'raising supplies.' At the same time it was obvious, even to the
harum-scarum Shelley, that he could not with propriety leave his girlish
bride in a York tavern, where she would not fail to become the one
subject of gossip, with the landlady and her chamber-maids, the gentle
folk of the coffee-room, the bagmen of the commercial-room, the tipplers
and loiterers at the public bar. Left to the accidents of life in a
tavern, the lovely school-girl--staying by herself in a provincial hotel,
without husband or lady's maid, without any companion of her own
sex--would be liable to various kinds of insult and annoyance, from which
she would be secure in a quiet lodging-house. Hence Shelley's
determination to lose not an hour in settling his bride in lodgings after
their arrival at York, as he was set on leaving her for a while, in little
more than four-and-twenty hours.
Hogg had several reasons for opposing his friend's resolve to go south so
abruptly. Seeing what mischief might be made by gossips at York, and by
gossips in London and Sussex, of the young husband's voluntary withdrawal
from his childish wife, at a moment when she stood in peculiar need of his
presence,--when nothing short of overpowering necessity should make him
leave her side for an entire day,--and when the very circumstances of
their union required them to be more than ordinarily thoughtful for
appearances and the world's opinion, Hogg saw the impropriety and
insufficiency of the arrangements for her comfort during Shelley's
absence. Whilst he was too much a man of the world to think himself the
fittest guardian for the lovely girl, on the point of being thrown so
completely and unceremoniously on his hands, or to imagine the ladies of
York would think him so, Hogg had grounds for a strong opinion, that his
friend would gain nothing more by interviews with Mr. Whitton and Mr.
Whitton's client than he could gain from them by letters sent through the
post,--that he would, in fact, be wasting on a profitless journey the few
guineas still remaining to him of borrowed money,--the last lingering
guineas, which in a few weeks he might need for bare necessities. Under
these circumstances, it is not strange that the more worldly-wise of the
two youngsters advised his comrade to postpone the journey for a few days.
Even so short a time would have given Hogg opportunities for introducing
the Shelleys to ladies of the northern city; for inducing some of those
ladies to take an interest in Harriett who, wedded woman though she was,
needed a chaperon as much as any recently emancipated school-girl; and for
withdrawing from a domiciliary relation to the young lady that, during
Shelley's absence, was likely to give rise to equally egregious and
undesirable misconceptions in the northern capital. In pleading for delay,
Hogg could not, of course state frankly his reasons for the prayer. The
questions at issue were too delicate for candour. All the north-countryman
could do was to recommend postponement. Of course, the counsel was in
vain.
Holding to his purpose, Shelley went for the south, leaving his bride and
the incomparable Hogg fellow-lodgers in the same dingy dwelling, and
sharers of the same dingy parlour. Surely the circumstances of the case
may be held to justify, or at least to excuse, suspicion on the part of
the two ancient and austere milliners, careful for their own characters
and the reputation of their house in a provincial city, abounding, like
all other provincial towns, with people more curious about their
neighbours' doings than heedful of their own affairs. Here is the case
from a milliner's point of view.--Late one evening, Mr. Hogg (a sprightly
young bachelor of the city) enters the house, in the company of Mr.
Shelley (a very young gentleman, looking no older than his wife) and
Harriett Shelley (looking less than her sixteen summers); the entrance of
the trio being covered with assertions that the sprightly Mr. Hogg's
juvenile friends are husband and wife. Twenty-four hours later, the young
gentleman with the aspect of a schoolboy goes off by the London mail,
leaving the sixteen-years-old girl in the house, under the charge of the
sprightly Mr. Hogg, whose way of saying strange things makes it doubtful
to maiden ladies of mature age and lowly station, whether they should
smile or frown. Who is the young lady? Who the young gentleman who has
gone off to London? Are they really husband and wife? If so, why has the
young gentleman gone off without her? Why has he left her under the care
of the sprightly Mr. Hogg, of all people in the world? Can it be that the
Scotch marriage, instead of making her the very young gentleman's wife,
made her the sprightly Mr. Hogg's wife? The austere and suspicious
milliners may well have asked themselves these and half-a-hundred other
questions.
Whilst Shelley was away, Harriett spent lonely days at York. The weather
was rainy, but there were hours when the sky cleared or its clouds forbore
to spend themselves on the roofs and open spaces of the city. It speaks
for the girl's uneasiness in a position from which she should have been
preserved, and also for her sense of womanly fitness and delicacy, that
during her boyish husband's absence she kept herself within the doors of
the dingy lodging-house,--forbearing to visit the Minster and other sights
of the city, and declining the many invitations Hogg gave her to take
exercise in the open air under his escort. In Edinburgh she took daily
walks, usually with her husband and Hogg, sometimes with no other
companion than her husband's friend; but at York, during her husband's
absence, she remained at home. 'When it was fair,' says Hogg of her
_triste_ and uneventful days at York, 'she did not go out, having
unfortunately transplanted her London notions of propriety to York: she
considered it incorrect to walk in the streets of that quiet city by
herself.' As Shelley was certainly absent from York on one Sunday (20th
October, 1811),--a day on which Mr. Hogg's work at chambers did not
preclude him from walking about the town--it may be fairly assumed that
Harriett's notions of propriety forbade her to walk in the streets with
him no less than by herself. Certainly in her circumspection the
sixteen-years-young gentlewoman gave the grim and vigilant milliners no
grounds for speaking of her with disapproval, apart from the fact that she
continued to share the same parlour with Mr. Hogg. In this matter, how
could the poor child do otherwise? How could she help herself?
Having so much of her own company by day, whilst her fellow-lodger was 'at
chambers,' Harriett may well have enjoyed Hogg's company in the evening,
when they talked together of her husband, and his projects for the
regeneration of human kind, her papa and his affairs, her Clapham
boarding-school and its discipline, her mamma and sister,--the mamma who
looked so ladylike in black satin, and the sister Eliza (in the fulness of
her Christian name, Elizabeth) who had so elegant a figure and so noble a
crop of black hair. When these and other domestic topics did not hold
their attention, Harriett's fellow-lodger used to sit with unqualified
contentment for hours together, whilst she read aloud to him Holcroft's
_Anna St. Ives_, Dr. Robertson's historical works, and other staid and
instructive books. It may be inferred from expressions in Hogg's book
that, though she often read aloud to him at Edinburgh, Harriett read aloud
to him at York, during Shelley's absence from the city, more copiously
than during any other time of their acquaintance. Noteworthy, also, is
it, that (by Hogg's admission), Harriett's audible readings became much
less frequent and lengthy when Miss Westbrook appeared upon the scene,
just four-and-twenty hours before Shelley returned to the city, and that
they ceased almost entirely before the Shelleys went away abruptly to
Keswick. Possibly, Hogg was wrong in attributing this change of Harriett's
conduct altogether to Miss Westbrook's influence. Possibly, also, he was
mistaken in attributing the copiousness of Harriett's audible readings,
during her husband's absence, altogether to her delight in reading aloud.
Harriett read no less clearly than musically. 'Hers,' says Hogg, 'was the
most distinct utterance I ever heard.' It is conceivable that, instead of
reading thus distinctly either for her own pleasure or for Mr. Hogg's
pleasure, Harriett at York read thus audibly for the protection of her own
character, and the edification of hearers listening in the passage outside
the parlour door.
It cannot be doubted that the poor child, left as she should not have been
left, in a position of vexatious and humiliating embarrassment, knew that
she, Hogg and her husband were each and all objects of suspicion to the
austere and dingy milliners. So placed, she was, of course, painfully
jealous for her reputation, and resolute that she would shape her course,
so as to be able to extort evidence to her goodness from the very women
who suspected her of evil. Never leaving the house, she put it beyond the
power of the austere milliners to accuse her of going about the town in
pursuit of pleasure. Never receiving any visitor but her fellow-lodger,
she confined the milliners' suspicions within narrow limits. Whilst she
and her fellow-lodger were together, it was her practice to be incessantly
conversing with him or reading to him in a voice, clearly audible outside
their room,--so that the milliners should have the evidence of their own
ears, that she and her fellow-lodger were no fit objects of suspicion. I
have no direct and conclusive evidence that Harriett talked and read aloud
for this end. But that she talked and read aloud mainly for this end, is a
fair inference from what Hogg says of her talking, reading, and other
behaviour during her husband's absence. Reading Hogg's evidence in this
way, I have no doubt it was to Harriett's relief, if not at her
suggestion, that Miss Westbrook, immediately after her arrival at York,
forbade the readings as exercises too exhausting for her sister's nervous
system.
In passing through London, Shelley made attempts to see Miss Westbrook and
Mr. Whitton, and, probably, saw both of them. If he did not see the
attorney, he communicated with him by letter, saying that he should
quickly return from Sussex to London. If he saw Miss Westbrook, one may be
sure she told him plainly he had done ill in leaving his bride at York
under Hogg's care, at a moment when he was especially bound to be
thoughtful for her comfort and character. It cannot be doubted that, on
coming to Cuckfield, he found his Uncle Pilfold of Miss Westbrook's
opinion on this matter. If the old sailor did not say so in words, we may
be sure the expression of his countenance told his nephew, that he should
not have come to Sussex without his wife; that in leaving her at York he
had given people another reason for talking lightly of her and to his
disadvantage; that he would do well to withhold from the Field Place and
Horsham people a matter they would not fail to report with unfavourable
comments, should it come to their knowledge. Under these circumstances it
was natural for the young gentleman to take measures to make the Field
Place and Horsham people imagine that Harriett had accompanied him to
Sussex. The evidence in his own hand-writing, which has caused some
writers to imagine she accompanied him to Sussex, is only evidence of the
pains taken by Shelley to conceal the indiscretion of which he had been
guilty. Dating from his uncle's house at Cuckfield, on Monday 21st
October, 1811, the future poet wrote Mr. Medwin (the Horsham attorney) a
letter which has been produced in testimony that, instead of being at York
(as Hogg truthfully represented), Harriett was on that day with her
scatterbrain husband under Captain Pilfold's roof.
Instructing the lawyer that Mrs. Shelley spelt her Christian name with a
second t, Shelley further instructed him to prepare a deed of marriage
settlement (assigning 700_l._ a-year for Mrs. Shelley's provision during
her life, in case of her husband's death). Further, Mr. Medwin was
directed to address to his youthful client 'at Mr. Westbrook's, 23 Chapel
Street, Grosvenor Square.' After giving these directions, and announcing
his purpose of remarrying Harriett (by English form) in the course of
three weeks or a month, before which renewal of his nuptials he intended
to execute the settlement, Shelley added: 'We most probably go to London
to-morrow. We shall probably see Whitton, when I shall neither forget your
good advice, nor cease to be grateful for it.'
The instructions by the nineteen-years-old boy for a deed of settlement on
his wife, to be executed by him in a few weeks, are amusing. What induced
him to say she spelt her Christian name with two t's, when she spelt it in
the ordinary manner with only one, is unknown. The main object of the
epistle was the purpose of the two delusive sentences beginning with
'we,'--sentences intended to create an impression, or to confirm Mr.
Medwin in the impression, that Harriett had accompanied the writer from
York. Even in the absence of evidence to the point, the young gentleman
(who ten months earlier 'resorted to deception' in order to escape a
trivial annoyance) might be presumed to have written other letters to make
the Horsham and Field Place gossips imagine his wife was with him in
Sussex and London, when she was at York. Taken by itself the evidence
that, instead of leaving her at York, Shelley took Harriett with him to
London and Sussex is considerable. Indeed, standing by itself, it would
justify the historian in representing that the boyish husband carried her
southward in his company. But the counter evidence that he left her in
York is so much stronger, that I do not hesitate in adopting Hogg's
narrative, and in regarding the contradictory evidence as fallacious
testimony, arising from Shelley's wish to conceal, and his measures for
concealing, the impropriety of which he had been guilty.
Shelley had better have remained at York in submission to Hogg's counsel,
instead of spending the greater part of his few remaining guineas on the
costly journey, from which he got nothing but disappointment. Refusing to
see him, the Squire of Field Place declined for the present to hold any
communication with him except through Mr. Whitton. At the same time the
Squire declined to give his unruly son any more money, till he should
promise to amend his ways and submit himself to his father's authority
with fit expressions of penitence. Acting doubtless at his client's
instance, Mr. Whitton begged he might not be troubled with a call from his
client's son, who could say all that was needful under the circumstances
on a sheet of paper. The attitude of the Squire and the attitude of the
attorney are clearly defined in two notes dated by the latter to Mr.
Percy Bysshe Shelley on the same day (23rd October, 1811); the one note
being addressed to the poet at Cuckfield, the other being directed to him
at the Turk's Coffee-House, Strand.
The young gentleman, who in August chuckled over anticipations of his
father's surprise and fury at his runaway match with an innkeeper's
daughter, had not made his account for his father's steady persistence in
displeasure. The young gentleman who had just travelled southward by mail
from York, to talk matters over and settle them with the 'old boy'
(Shelley's expression), found the 'old buck' (also Shelley's expression)
in no haste to talk matters over, found him resolute to leave matters as
they were till he could rearrange them in his own way. Kept at a distance
in this way by 'old Killjoy' (also one of the son's nicknames for his
sire), Mr. Percy Bysshe Shelley was treated with similar insolence by old
'Killjoy's' attorney, who enjoined him to say what he wished to say in
writing. It was Mr. Percy Bysshe Shelley's turn to feel surprise and
indignation. Baffled and resentful the young gentleman returned to York
with a heavy heart and a light purse.
At length there was war to the bitter-end between the long-suffering
father who had endured so much, and the son, who had now exhausted his
sire's patience. At length he was excluded from Field Place, _not_ for his
religious opinions, _but_ for his successive extravagances of deceit,
disloyalty, and disobedience to an affectionate father, and for the
_escapade_ by which he sought to introduce a tavern-keeper's daughter to
his mother's drawing-room as the young lady, who in the course of time
would be Lady Shelley of Field Place.
Successive writers have insisted that the poet would never have been drawn
into this disastrous marriage had it not been for the excessive chivalry
of his nature, that placed him at the mercy of the designing, artful,
unscrupulous Eliza Westbrook. A chivalrous boy usually has some care for
the feelings and dignity of the women of his own blood and hearth. If
Shelley really surpassed other boys in chivalry, even as he surpassed them
(according to Lady Shelley) in truthfulness and candour, he would surely
have been more thoughtful for his mother's feelings and his sister's
dignity, than for Miss Westbrook's wishes. It does not appear to have
occurred even for a single moment to this chivalrous youth that, in
choosing a wife, he should not be absolutely without concern for his
mother's sensibility, his sister's honour and social interest. From first
to last he seems to have assumed that his own feelings were the only
sensibilities for which he was required to think. By those who (with the
present writer) think Shelley ran away with Harriett Westbrook because he
was thoroughly in love with her, it may, of course, be urged in his excuse
that love is proverbially selfish, and that in choosing their wives young
men are always more bent on pleasing themselves than on pleasing their
mothers and sisters. But such considerations cannot be urged in the
youngster's behalf by those, who maintain (with Mr. Garnett) that, instead
of marrying the young lady, because he desired her passionately, Shelley
fell with passionless weakness into the _mésalliance_ through Miss Eliza
Westbrook's artful treatment of his sense of chivalry. Moreover, even by
those who believe him to have been honestly in love, it must be conceded
that he was less thoughtful for his mother and sisters, than a generous
and chivalric young man must necessarily be when he is choosing a wife.
Had he thought for a moment how the _mésalliance_ would affect his mother,
he must have seen it would occasion her sorrow and acute mortification.
Had he given a thought for the interests of his sisters, he must have seen
the match would be greatly injurious to them. Had he taken thought for the
honour of the family, which his father and grandfather had raised to the
dignity of a territorial house, he must have seen that the gentlewomen of
many of the neighbouring families would be slow to recognize and visit
John Westbrook's daughter. If he thought with indifference of these sure
consequences of the _mésalliance_, the chivalrous Shelley was strangely
wanting in chivalric care for the women of his nearest kindred. If he did
not think of them at all, his selfishness exceeded the selfishness
permitted to lovers.
When 'society' is invited to consider and pass judgment on a new
_mésalliance_, it is in the nature of things for the unpleasant and
reprehensible features of the affair to be magnified and multiplied by
social sentiment. On hearing that young Shelley of Field Place had
surpassed all his previous offences by running off to Scotland with an
innkeeper's daughter, to his father's unutterable wrath and his mother's
grief and dismay, the Sussex families imagined something far more shocking
than the actual incident. Knowing nothing of Harriett's beauty and
refinement, of her father's respectability, and the care expended on her
education, the people of the county houses thought of what was least
agreeable in inns and innkeepers, and of all that was most disagreeable in
the smart girls usually employed in the inns along the posting roads of
the country; and having thus surrounded themselves with more or less
repulsive recollections of simpering damsels, the Sussex families leapt to
the conclusion that the boy, who was expelled from Oxford last spring, had
thrown himself into the arms of some pert barmaid or saucy chamber-woman.
In the correspondence (preserved at the Record Office) touching the box of
Shelley's pamphlets, that was opened by the Surveyor of Customs at
Holyhead in March, 1812, a letter is preserved, which affords curious
evidence respecting the view taken of Shelley and his marriage by the
great families of the poet's county. Dating from Stanmer, near Brighton,
on 8th April, 1812 (just seven months after the elopement) the Earl of
Chichester--the chief of Sussex Pelhams and Postmaster-General (in
conjunction with ... )--wrote to Mr. Francis Freeling, Secretary of the
Post Office:--
'DEAR FREELING,--I return the pamphlet and declaration. The writer of
the first is son of Mr. Shelley, Member for the Rape of Bramber, and
is by all accounts a most extraordinary man. I hear that he has
married a servant, or some person of very low birth.'
It was thus that the chief of a great Sussex family wrote, and the Sussex
quality spoke, of the lovely girl, whose marriage had raised her to the
honour of being so quaintly and disdainfully misdescribed. For a few weeks
known by report to the county families as an innkeeper's daughter, she was
vaguely remembered by them a few months later as 'a servant, or some
person of very low birth.' A year later the Castle Goring Shelleys were
known in county houses, lying outside the immediate neighbourhood of
Horsham, as people who made low marriages. Such was the kind of discredit
that came to Shelley's kindred from the alliance he had formed in absolute
carelessness for their feelings and interests.
A man of the world (albeit an eccentric one), the Squire of Field Place
was aware of the disrepute that would come to him and his house from his
son's latest escapade. He was also precisely the man to feel acutely the
disrepute, which he had reason to fear would be hurtful to his girls. The
son of the man who had founded a new family, the heir of the old man who
had gathered together enough wealth for the sufficient endowment of
half-a-dozen baronets, the _protégé_ of the Duke of Norfolk, who had for
several years regarded him with growing complaisance, and a Member of
Parliament, who had contrived to persuade himself he was no ordinary
Borough-Member, the honest, kindly, hearty Squire of Field Place, had
hoped that his boy would, under his Grace's favour, pass directly from his
nonage to public life; that his girls (the eldest of them already a
beauty, the three younger ones bearing on their childish faces the promise
of uncommon womanly loveliness,) would marry into the best families of the
county, with whose history his name had been so long associated, though
none of his father's lineal ancestors had ever held place amongst its
aristocracy. Doubtless, the simple, sport-loving, and mildly ambitious
Englishman had cherished the hope that his son, or one of his son's sons,
would wear a coronet. And now all these pleasant and not inordinate hopes
were dissipated by his perverse boy's marriage with the girl, with whom
the county families would decline to associate,--the girl who would be
called the Field Place 'barmaid,'--the girl who, so soon after her
discreditable marriage, lived in the minds of the Sussex grandees as a
servant or other low person.
The Squire's mortification might be deemed his fitting punishment, had he
in pride of purse borne himself insolently to former friends; had he, on
rising to friendship with 'the great,' fawned and cringed to their
grandeur; had he, in his desire for the elevation of his offspring and the
aggrandisement of Castle Goring, attempted to force his son into a
distasteful union, requiring him to marry for more money or higher rank.
But the honest gentleman had committed none of these faults. Addressing
the great without sycophancy, he lived in good-fellowship with all men.
Instead of trying to force his son's affections, he would have been
content to see him marry Harriett Grove,--a girl of no fortune, and of a
family something nearer doubtless, but only something nearer, the
aristocracy than the small squireens and gentle yeomanry from whom he was
himself descended. All he had asked of the boy, who with good conduct
would succeed to a noble fortune, was to marry a gentlewoman, fit to be
his mother's daughter and the sister of his sisters. And what had the boy
done? He had run off with a barmaid!--for, of course, to the Squire, in
his fury, John Westbrook's lovely child was nothing better than a barmaid.
In the autumn of 1811 the Squire of Field Place could not comfort himself
with reflecting that, if he was a much worried father, he was worried by a
marvellously clever boy whom it was an honour to have begotten; for at
that time Shelley had done nothing to indicate he would win a place
amongst men of genius, or even figure amongst men of considerable parts.
His Eton career had been worse than disappointing; his Oxford career had
been eminently disgraceful; his novels were ludicrous performances; _The
Necessity of Atheism_ was not an achievement on which his father could be
expected to think with complaisance. At the worst he had, from his
fifteenth year, been a bad boy; at the best he was a mere scatterbrain.
Having pardoned the boy repeatedly for serious misdemeanours; having again
and again relented towards him and, saying 'let bygones be bygones,' given
him a fresh start, is it wonderful that Mr. Timothy Shelley determined to
make no more bootless concessions, to accept no more imperfect
recognitions of his authority, to have done with half-measures, and to
insist on his son's unqualified submission as the prelude to a renewal of
their intercourse? The father has been charged with enormous severity to
his son, because he required him to behave like other sons, and held
steadily to his determination to keep his son at a distance, until the
youngster had promised to show ordinary consideration for the feelings of
his parents. When Percy said, 'Out of regard to my feelings give me a good
allowance, and let me bring my wife to Field Place,' what was there so
monstrous in the Squire's answer, 'Out of regard to my feelings, your
mother's feelings, your sisters' welfare, forbear from giving expression
to sentiments that offend me, shock her, and bring social disrepute to
your family?' What should the father have done? Hogg was of opinion that
the Squire should have given his son a handsome allowance, and left him at
liberty to say and do what he liked. Bearing in mind that Shelley was
still only nineteen years of age, most readers of this page,--certainly
most fathers with unruly sons still in their nonage,--will see reasons for
differing from Mr. Hogg on this matter.
If Miss Eliza Westbrook was desirous of a good pretext for hastening to
York and taking the young couple under her protection and government, she
found her desire in the singular circumstances under which her sister (a
mere child) had been left at York. Packing her trunks, Miss Westbrook took
the road along which her sister had travelled seven or eight weeks
earlier. She was in possession of her darling, and at war with Hogg in the
dingy lodging-house, whilst Shelley was still on his way back to the
northern city, with a light purse and a heavy heart. On returning to the
dingy house, the boyish husband found both sisters in the dingy parlour.
Having been told by Harriett that her sister was 'beautiful, exquisitely
beautiful,' with an elegant figure, dark bright eyes, and a profusion of
black hair, Hogg was surprised by the indications of age in her
countenance which, instead of being lovely, was chiefly remarkable for
marks of small-pox, and the not translucent pallor common in faces
disfigured by that malady. To Hogg (a prejudiced and strongly biased
witness against the woman he loathed) it appeared that, though dark, Eliza
Westbrook's eyes were dull and meaningless; that, though black and glossy,
her hair was coarse; that her figure was meagre, prim, and graceless; that
her personal charms existed only in her younger sister's imagination.
History has still to discover the year of Miss Westbrook's birth; but it
may be safely assumed she was not so old as Mr. Hogg imagined,--that she
was over five-and-twenty, and under thirty years of age. It may also be
assumed that her appearance was less repulsive to other people than to Mr.
Hogg. If Harriett's fancy erred in one direction, Mr. Hogg's animosity
erred in another. If Harriett's partiality caused her to think too well of
her sister's appearance, Hogg's resentment inspired him to speak too
unfavourably of Miss Westbrook's looks.
Miss Westbrook and Hogg were enemies even before they set eyes on one
another. The lady had travelled to York to encounter the enemy of her
sister's reputation. On hearing she would soon appear in the dingy
lodging-house, Hogg knew that on her arrival he would be face to face with
a foe. At the moment of their first meeting, Shelley's incomparable friend
and Shelley's sister-in-law exchanged glances of aversion. When he bowed
before her, at their introduction to one another in the dingy parlour, the
'barmaid by origin' (to use Hogg's words) scarcely deigned to notice him.
'I thought Bysshe was to have brought you with him,' observed Hogg to the
lady, who, in her haste to shelter her darling, had not waited to travel
with her brother-in-law.
'Oh dear, no!' Miss Westbrook replied, with cold and disdainful
significance.
'Shall I make tea?' Hogg inquired, glancing at the tea-things on the
table; and as he was not forbidden to do so, he brewed the tea, and
brought Miss Westbrook a cup of the beverage, which she regarded
contemptuously when it was placed before her. This was embarrassing to the
gentleman who was joint-tenant of the dingy parlour.
If it was not farce, what followed this meeting of the enemies was very
broad comedy. Miss Westbrook, thinking Hogg in the way, was of opinion he
ought to get out of the way as quickly as possible. Thinking Miss
Westbrook had come where she was not wanted, Hogg was of opinion she ought
to be ordered back to London. On reappearing in the dingy lodging-house
just twenty-four hours after Miss Westbrook's arrival, Shelley found
himself between an incomparable friend who said, 'You must get rid of Miss
Westbrook,' and an incomparable sister-in-law who said, 'You must get quit
of Mr. Hogg.' As Harriett was on her sister's side, the future poet could
not act on Hogg's advice. There was another reason why the youthful
husband could not deal thus summarily with his sister-in-law.
Thinking that Miss Westbrook should be sent back immediately to London,
and seeing that Shelley was scarcely the person to tell her and constrain
her to go home, Hogg was of opinion that his friend ought to put strong
pressure on his bride, to tell her sister she must retire from the scene
where she was unwelcome,--that he should say firmly to Harriett, 'Choose
between me and your sister: I leave York if she doesn't. If you wish me to
remain by your side, you must tell your sister to go and leave us alone.'
Five-and-forty years later, when he reviewed this critical passage of the
poet's career, and all the miserable consequences of Miss Westbrook's
transient power of him, Hogg felt as firmly as ever that Harriett's
husband might have preserved his conjugal contentment for a much longer
period, by saying stoutly to her 'either Eliza goes or I go,' and showing
he would forthwith act on the menace, if the intruder did not at once
retire. The happiness, coming to him from his marriage, might not have
been great and enduring under any circumstances; but by shaking Eliza
from him at York, he would have rid himself of the creature, whose
scheming spirit and false tongue made it so miserably brief and
insufficient. This was Hogg's one-sided and possibly erroneous view of the
case. Holding it honestly, he may well have deplored the weakness that
incapacitated 'the divine Shelley' for casting from him so promptly the
influence which extinguished for ever his confidence and delight in his
young wife, after having placed him for a while at war with the friend,
who induced him to make the lovely child his wife, when he was thinking of
making her his mere mistress.
Thinking Eliza should be dismissed in this fashion, Hogg doubtless told
Shelley so. As Shelley, whilst differing from Byron in being able to keep
a secret, resembled him also in a habit of blabbing to others what he
should have kept to himself, it may be assumed that, if he did not impart
it directly to Miss Westbrook, he communicated Hogg's counsel to his wife,
without requiring her to act upon it. Further, as Harriett's confidence in
her sister was perfect at this point of their curious story, it cannot be
questioned, that whatever Shelley told his wife of Hogg's view of the
position, was speedily communicated by her to Miss Westbrook.
It is not probable that under any circumstances Shelley would just then
have concurred in Hogg's opinion, and decided to act upon it. But even if
he approved the advice on general grounds, circumstances forbade him to
adopt it. Returning to York with an almost empty purse, and no hope that
it would be speedily replenished by his father, Shelley could not afford
to quarrel with his sister-in-law, who had a little money in her pocket,
and was influential with her father, to whom he was already looking for
pecuniary relief. Though he could lend Shelley 10_l._ from time to time,
Hogg (as he tells us) was unable to provide him with enough money for his
own and his wife's maintenance. At that moment, the law-student's store of
money in hand had been reduced to a trifle by the charges of his recent
trip to Scotland. Captain Pilford had already done his utmost for his
nephew's pecuniary relief. Having incurred the Squire's vehement
displeasure by lending Shelley the 25_l._, which enabled him to fly with
Harriett to Edinburgh, Mr. Medwin (the Horsham attorney) was in no mood to
incense his powerful neighbour and relative to fiercer wrath, and to
provoke further censure from the Squire's patron, the Duke of Norfolk, by
lending the young gentleman any more money. Under these circumstances, Mr.
Percy Bysshe Shelley could not afford to quarrel with Miss Westbrook, the
only person to whom he could just then look for the relief of his
immediate necessities,--'the influence' through which he was hoping to get
a regular allowance from his father-in-law.
Seeing that Shelley would not put the needful pressure on his wife, the
brilliant thought occurred to Hogg that, doing what his friend dared not
do, he would indicate the 'necessary course' to Harriett, and urge her
with equal delicacy and firmness to take it. Miss Westbrook spent much
time in brushing the black hair, which Harriett regarded admiringly, and
Mr. Hogg spoke and wrote about with profane flippancy. One day, whilst the
elder sister was brushing her hair, Hogg persuaded Mrs. Shelley to walk
with him to the old Roman bridge, and have a look at the Ouse, which had
just then overflowed its banks, and was in divers ways behaving with
picturesque and sensational extravagance.
'Is it not an interesting, a surprising sight?' remarked Harriett, whilst
viewing 'the floods' from the middle of the bridge.
'Yes,' returned Hogg, 'it is very wonderful. But, dear Harriett, how
nicely that dearest Eliza would spin down the river! How sweetly she would
turn round and round, like that log of wood! And, gracious heaven, what
would Miss Warne say?'--Miss Warne being a maiden lady (daughter of a
London taverner) who held so high a place in Miss Westbrook's affection
and esteem, that the latter, in her ordinary talk on things in general,
was in the habit of referring admiringly to the lady's discretion and
faultless taste.
At this piquant suggestion, that it would be well to pitch Eliza into the
river, and give Miss Warne a fine opportunity for saying something
remarkable, Harriett (says Hogg) 'turned her pretty face away, and
laughed--as a slave laughs, who is beginning to grow weary of an
intolerable yoke.' It speaks much for Hogg's rashness, that he ventured to
speak in this fashion of Miss Westbrook to her younger and admiring
sister;--for his self-sufficiency, that he imagined a few words from him
would put the girl in revolt against her only sister;-for the excessive
familiarity of his bearing to her, that he addressed her as 'dear
Harriett,' as he spoke thus lightly of the 'dearest Eliza,' and her
super-excellent Miss Warne;--for his vanity and ignorance of human nature,
that he imagined Harriett would respect his confidence so far as to keep
his saucy words from her sister. Of course the sixteen-years-old girl did
not deem herself under an obligation of honour to withhold from her only
sister the flippant utterances of so recent an acquaintance. Honour and
loyalty required her to tell Eliza that Hogg wished to separate them,--was
set on compassing their estrangement. On learning that Hogg meant Shelley
and Harriett to discard her, Miss Westbrook resolved that they should
discard him. Whatever may be thought of the means she used for the
achievement of her end, it cannot be denied, that she could plead extreme
provocation in excuse of what was reprehensible in her extreme
measures;--and that it was natural for her to determine her sister and
brother-in-law should banish the man who wanted them to dismiss her. It
was a fight between an angry and unscrupulous young woman and an
overbearing young man. The fight was sharp and short: for the moment, the
victory was with the woman.
In fighting Mr. Hogg,--in taking for his humiliation and discomfiture a
course, which she probably never thought of taking till he struck her, and
possibly would never have thought of taking, had he treated her in a
courteous and conciliatory manner,--it is conceivable that Miss Westbrook
persuaded herself she was actuated by pure concern for her sister's
happiness, and righteous disapproval of masculine wickedness, and in no
degree whatever by personal spite and resentment. The lady was in just the
position to imagine she did altogether for her sister's good what she did
chiefly for the gratification of her own vindictiveness. Travelling
northward to guard her darling from Hogg's indiscretion, she made the
journey in a mood to suspect him of something worse than indiscretion. By
no means wanting in self-esteem, or disposed to underrate her charms, the
lady naturally inferred from Hogg's desire to extrude so fascinating a
person as herself from so small a circle, that her presence was
distasteful to him, because it promised to defeat his insidious designs on
Harriett's honour and happiness. The young man, who would deprive Harriett
of her sister's society and protection, desired to get the dear child into
his power,--to have her at his mercy. For what end did he desire to have
the dear child in his power, at his mercy? The answer to this question
determined Miss Westbrook to preserve the dear child from a villain.
Tractable and docile in the hands of the elder sister, whom she admired
and loved enthusiastically, the dear child in perfect simplicity and
purity of thought provided Miss Westbrook with evidence that Shelley's
incomparable friend was a young man of incomparable wickedness. Here are
the damnatory admissions and confessions of the younger sister. Mr. Hogg
had been extremely attentive to her in Edinburgh, and also (during her
husband's absence) at York. At Edinburgh he had taken her for walks,
unattended by Shelley. He certainly admired her beauty, for he had said so
outright on several occasions. He had paid her extravagant
compliments,--indeed compliments so extravagant, that they caused her
embarrassment. He was very kind and attentive to her; but she had often
wished he would not commend her so immoderately to her face. She had
refused to take walks with him in York during Shelley's absence, but it
cost her no little effort to hold to her decision on this point, so urgent
was he in begging her to walk abroad. When he was not at Chambers, or on
the way to and fro between them and the dingy lodging-house, Hogg had
spent all his time at the house. Taking tea with her every evening, he had
passed the whole of each evening in the dingy parlour with her, till she
retired to rest for the night. It had been very awkward for her, to live
in the same house and share the same parlour with him, during her
husband's absence:-all the more awkward, because he persisted in paying
her such extravagant compliments. The milliners had been disobliging and
suspicious in their bearing to her. Possibly they would have been less so,
had Hogg left her under their protection altogether, or been less
attentive to her in her husband's absence. Such were Harriett's admissions
and confessions to her sister,--admissions and confessions made afterwards
to her husband. Miss Westbrook knew how to manipulate and dress up these
simple admissions into evidence to Shelley, that his friend's gallantry to
Harriett had been excessive, that his admiration of her was embarrassing
to Harriett, that he might have been more thoughtful for the delicate
sensibilities of the simple and innocent child, that they had been too
much together for her contentment and reputation, that the dear child had
been worried and harassed by her admirer, that her husband should put a
distance between them. Care for the dear child's nerves and feelings
required that she should be removed from York as soon as possible.
Committing herself to no statement of fact, in which her sister would not
concur, Miss Westbrook was careful to say nothing that would make Shelley
suspicious of his wife's goodness, or render him wrathful with Hogg. It
was enough for the present to suggest that Harriett's mere beauty had
inspired Hogg with a sentiment of strong admiration, trembling on the
verge of passion;--that, without doing or saying aught to justify Shelley
in quarreling with him outright, Hogg had permitted Harriett to see the
state of feeling which he should have been most careful to conceal from
her; that Harriett was secretly troubled by her sense of Hogg's regard for
her;--a regard for which of course she was in no degree to be blamed, and
he was to be pitied rather than condemned. Of course Miss Westbrook (a
clever woman) knew how the seeds of distrust and jealousy would grow in
the breast to which she was committing them; knew that by charging Hogg at
first with nothing worse than weakness, she would be able to persuade
Harriett's boyish and fanciful husband a few weeks or months later, that
his incomparable friend was a false friend.
Whilst he was being thus educated to regard his friend with distrust and
pity, Shelley was living with his wife and her sister in Mr. Stickland's
(? Strickland's) lodging-house, Blake Street, York;--lodgings to which
they migrated from the dingy dwelling of the austere milliners, within a
day or two of Shelley's return from London. Though certain expressions of
Hogg's second volume would countenance a contrary opinion, it is not
probable that he was permitted to accompany them to this new abode. In the
absence of definite evidence to the point, it may be assumed from divers
circumstances that, whilst the newly constituted trio rested in Mr.
Stickland's house, the fourth member of the party had quarters elsewhere.
If it was so, however, Hogg was a daily visitor on uneasy terms at the
Blake Street lodging-house; talking as freely as heretofore with his
friend and Harriett, but painfully conscious that they spoke less
unreservedly with him, and that forces were in operation to sever him from
them. There seems to have been no distinct rupture between Hogg and his
friend, before the latter went off abruptly for Keswick.
It having been decided by the trio, that they must get away from York and
Hogg, they spoke openly to him of their intention to migrate to Keswick.
He was pressed to go thither with them,--pressed the more cordially
because the trio knew his legal studies and other obligations constrained
him to remain at York. But whilst telling him of their intention to go to
Keswick, and begging him to accompany them, they forbore to tell him their
real reason for selecting Keswick as their next resting place. To the
last, Hogg was under the impression that they were drawn to Keswick by the
picturesqueness and the poetical associations of the district, dwelt in
and beloved by Wordsworth and Southey, Coleridge and De Quincey; and under
the quite erroneous notion that they were pining for the beauties of
Derwentwater and the Lodore Falls, he urged them to postpone their journey
to the lovely region till a season more favourable for the enjoyment of
its scenery. 'If you dislike York,' he urged, 'and the neighbourhood of
York, so much do not remain there--quit it at once; but go to the south,
to a part of the world with which you are acquainted, and where you are
known; to a milder and more genial climate, and where you will be nearer
your supplies? Why expose youselves to the bleak north at this unkindly
season? Why go out of the way of everybody and of everything? Why go out
of the reach of money, and bury yourselves alive amongst rude and
uncivilised barbarians?' The counsel (adds Hogg bitterly and
compassionately) was offered in vain.
To Miss Westbrook the advice was only another reason why she and her young
charges should go farther north. On leaving Mr. Hogg at York, for them to
do the very thing he urged them not to do would be a fit humiliation to
the overbearing gentleman. It would show him how lightly they regarded his
opinion, and make him feel that he was the discarded one. That he might
take this view of their action was another reason with Miss Westbrook, why
he should be kept in ignorance of its chief object. When he told them,
with mingled pomposity and vehemence, that in going to Keswick they would
be going 'out of the way of everybody and everything,--out of the reach of
money,' and into the society of 'rude and uncivilised barbarians,' the
trio smiled in their sleeves at one another. And well might they do so, as
they were set on the journey because they hoped it would bring them to the
house of somebody of no common account, to society in the like of which
their monitor had never moved, and to the money which they so urgently
needed. Thinking the while of Greystoke, and the Duke of Norfolk, and the
exalted people they hoped to meet at 'the Castle,' the sisters could
scarcely keep their smiles in their sleeves, as Mr. Hogg prated of 'rude
and uncivilised barbarians.' Had he known that the march on Keswick was a
march on Greystoke Castle; that the march on the northern potentate had
for its end the conciliation of the southern powers; that instead of going
to Keswick for the pleasure of drinking tea with Southey, the trio were
going thither to fix themselves on the great Duke, who would in ten days
or a fortnight be at his northern seat, Hogg would either have refrained
from opposing the project, or would have opposed it on other grounds. It
shows how completely he had fallen out of favour with the trio, how
completely Eliza and Harriett had extruded him from Shelley's confidence,
that Hogg had no notion why his companions were set on going to the lakes
at a time when the hardiest tourists were leaving them.
From Blake Street, York, without conferring with his incomparable Hogg on
the matter, Shelley on 28th October, 1811, wrote (_vide_ _Notes and
Queries_, second series, Vol. vi., p. 405) to his father's patron, the
Duke of Norfolk, entreating his Grace to use his influence again, even as
he used it in the last spring, to mediate between the writer and his too
indignant father, and induce the same too indignant father to allow his
son a sufficient income. A letter to be looked up by readers, who have the
_Notes and Queries_ volumes on their shelves, this remarkable epistle from
the future poet to his father's patron comprises these extremely
noteworthy words:--
'... As I experienced from you such an undeserved instance of friendly
interposition in the spring, as I am well aware how much my father is
influenced by the mediation of a third person, and as I know none to
whom I could apply with greater hopes of success than to yourself, I
take the liberty of soliciting the interference of your Grace with my
father in my behalf. You have probably heard of my marriage. I am
sorry to say that it has exasperated my father to a great degree,
surely greater than is consistent with justice, for he has not only
withheld the means of subsistence which his former conduct and my
habits of life taught me to expect as reasonable and proper, but has
even refused to render me any the slightest assistance. He referred me
on application to a Mr. Whitton, whose answer to my letter vaguely
complained of the disrespectfulness of mine to my father. These
letters were calculated to make his considerations of my proceedings
less severe. My situation is consequently most unpleasant; under
these circumstances I request your Grace to convince my father of the
severity of his conduct, to persuade him that my offence is not of the
hideous nature he considers it, to induce him to allow me a sufficient
income to live with tolerable comfort. I am also particularly anxious
to defend Mr. Medwin from any accusations of aiding and assisting me,
which my father may bring against him. I am convinced that a statement
of plain truth on this head will remove any prejudice against Mr. M.
from the mind of your Grace. That he did lend me 25_l._ when I left
Field Place is most true. But it is equally true he was ignorant of my
intentions; that he was ignorant of the purposes to which I was about
to apply the money....'
Every sentence of this extract from an important letter should be
carefully weighed by the reader who would apprehend precisely the
relations of Mr. Timothy Shelley and the poet, and observe the pains taken
by the Duke of Norfolk in mediating between the father and son. The letter
shows to whose influence Shelley attributed, and no doubt justly
attributed, the quickness with which his father relented to him in the
spring. In this respect the Squire suffers in some degree from the
testimony of the epistle, which denies him the credit that would otherwise
seem due to his clemency and financial liberality to the son, who had so
recently exasperated him by rebellious extravagances. It does not follow
that left to himself the Squire would not in a somewhat longer time have
subsided from his wrath, and treated his boy with the same generosity. It
must, however, be conceded that the Duke's counsel was accountable for the
quickness with which the Squire dismissed his anger, and offered the terms
which Shelley accepted with exultation, calling the terms 'very good
ones,' when he wrote of them exultingly to Hogg in the middle of May. On
the other hand, by all who would take an impartial view of the father's
treatment of his son, it must be admitted that the Squire's readiness in
deferring to his patron on so delicate a question was creditable to his
moderation, was at least incompatible with the violent and stubborn
wrong-headedness with which he has been unfairly charged. Indicative of a
disposition to do what was right by his boy, this readiness indicates a
conscientious desire to be preserved by judicious counsel from the
vehemence of his own temper, and withheld from errors to which he might be
betrayed by the fervour of his feelings. The evidence is conclusive that
Shelley was not more quick than his father to have recourse to the Duke's
mediation; a fact which must be at least allowed to indicate a desire on
the father's part, that his behaviour to his son should be such as a fair
and high-minded arbitrator would approve. The evidence is no less
conclusive that Mr. Timothy Shelley's treatment of his son had the Duke's
approval; and that his sense of the Duke's approval caused him to look to
his patron as a friend, who would defend his paternal character from
social reprehension.
It is noteworthy that, whilst thanking the Duke for his good services of
the previous spring, Shelley speaks of the pecuniary arrangement resulting
from his Grace's intervention as a 'reasonable and proper' arrangement.
Even more noteworthy is it that, instead of attributing his father's anger
and withdrawal of the allowance to disapproval of his religious and
philosophical views, he attributes them altogether to indignation at his
marriage, and displeasure at his letters. It is not suggested by phrase or
word that the rupture was due in any degree to differences of opinion on
matters of creed. The letter's only complaint against Mr. Timothy Shelley
is that his indignation is 'greater than is consistent with justice'
(words of admission that the writer had given his father cause for
serious, though less extravagant, displeasure): the letter's only prayer
is that the Duke will address himself to the pecuniary consequence of this
displeasure. The Duke is not asked to modify the Squire's religious
intolerance, but to moderate his anger at the _mésalliance_, and induce
him to allow his son 'a sufficient income to live with tolerable comfort.'
There is no suggestion that he was shut out of his 'boyhood's home' on
account of his heterodoxy. On the contrary, the writer speaks of himself
as leaving that home of his own accord to make the match, on which he had
not spoken to his father. Writing to the Duke, who knew the truth of the
case, Shelley could not venture to be otherwise than precisely truthful on
these points. In the letter, therefore, we have Shelley's sincere view of
his relations with his father, and see how he spoke of them to
well-informed persons. By-and-by it will be seen how he wrote of those
relations to William Godwin, who did not know the truth of them.
Just two days before Shelley dated his letter (of 28th October, 1811) from
York to the Duke of Norfolk, old Sir Bysshe Shelley executed a noteworthy
codicil to the will, by which he had directed that all persons entitled to
lands, &c. (designated A in my abstract of the will), whose consent and
co-operation should be needful for the purpose of the testament, should
join in settling the same lands A precisely as the lands, &c. (designated
C) were ordered by the same will to be put in strict settlement. It was
observed in the aforementioned abstract, that the testator's grandson
(Percy Bysshe) was tenant in tail in remainder expectant on the deaths of
his father and grandfather, of two lots of real estate, designated A and
B. By the will he was required to resettle, in accordance with the
testator's purpose, the lands, &c., A; no requirement being made for the
resettlement of lands, &c., B. By the codicil, which old Sir Bysshe
executed on 26th October, 1811, it was directed that any person, being
tenant for life at the same time of A, B, and C, and every person or
persons being tenant in tail of A _and_ B, and at the same time tenant for
life of C, should settle A _and_ B _as_ C, within a year of so becoming
entitled and capable of joining in the resettlement. It was further
provided by this noteworthy codicil that, if any such entitled person or
persons should refuse or neglect to settle A and B as C, then the estates
of such person or persons and their respective issue under the will in
estates C, should be forfeited, and the remainder expectant on such
estates should be accelerated. Yet, further, it was directed by this
remarkable codicil that if, by reason of alienation or charge any person,
at the date of the codicil interested in remainder to any estate in A and
B should not be able to settle A and B _as_ C, there should then be the
same forfeiture of the estate and estates of such person and his issue
under the will, as if he had refused or neglected to settle A and B _as_
C. As this last provision was aimed directly at the future poet, though he
is not mentioned by name in the clause, and as readers of this work should
be under no uncertainty respecting the provision, by which the poet may be
said to have disinherited himself and his issue from participation in his
grandfather's very large property, it is well to put on the present page
the _ipsissima verba_ of the provision, which runs thus:--
'Provided always and I do hereby declare,' says old Sir Bysshe in this
momentous codicil, 'my will and mind to be that, if any person or
persons who is or are now entitled in remainder under or by virtue of
the said Indenture of Appointment of the twentieth day of April, one
thousand seven hundred and ninety-one, and the said Indenture of
Release of the thirtieth day of April, one thousand seven hundred and
eighty-two respectively, to any estate or estates of and in the
hereditaments therein respectively comprised hath or have or shall
alien or charge the same whereby he or they may be prevented from
making or causing to be made the resettlement hereinbefore by me
directed to be made of the said settled estates, then and in such
case, from and after the expiration of the time before limited or
mentioned for making such resettlement, the uses or use estates or
estate by my said will directed to be limited to or for the benefit of
the person or persons who hath or have so aliened or charged or shall
so alien or charge as aforesaid and his or their issue shall,
notwithstanding he or they may be personally willing to make such
resettlement as aforesaid, cease determine and become absolutely void,
and that the manors and other hereditaments by my said will devised
and directed to be settled in trust as aforesaid shall in such case
immediately thereupon go over in the same manner as I have
hereinbefore directed the same to go over in case such person or
persons had refused or neglected to make such resettlement as
aforesaid, and I do hereby expressly declare that my intentions in
respect to the resettlement of the said settled estates shall be
carried into effect by proper clauses and provisoes to be for that
purpose inserted in the settlement in and by said will directed to be
made as aforesaid.'
It is obvious that differences on questions of religion or politics were
in no degree accountable for the codicil, by which the future poet was
required to resettle the real estates, that would devolve on him
absolutely after the lives of his father and grandfather. Himself an
atheist and materialist, it mattered nothing to old Sir Bysshe, whether
his grandson believed in fifty gods or one God, or chose to deny the
existence of a supreme Deity. Himself a man of the people, the son of a
Yankee apothecary by the miller Plum's widow, old Sir Bysshe was not so
strongly prejudiced in favour of aristocratic persons and institutions, as
to be greatly incensed by his grandson's folly in wedding a publican's
pretty daughter. It was a matter of comparative indifference to the aged
cynic, whether the boy held to the Whigs, went over to the Tories, or,
declaring against both political parties, joined the red Republicans. The
one thing he required of his eldest son's eldest son, was that on coming
of age, the youngster should join in a resettlement of the settled
estates, that would make them part and parcel of the big entailed property
of the Castle Goring Shelleys. Let him be compliant on that point, and the
youngster had his grandsire's permission to be as wilful as he pleased on
all other matters. On the other hand, should he prove rebellious and
undutiful in respect to this one requirement, neither he nor his issue
should profit by the grand estate that would be created for the perpetual
dignity of the house, founded by his grandfather. For all the veteran
cared, the youngster might think, say, write, do whatever he pleased,
provided he forbore to cross the purpose of his elders on the one matter
of business. Should he refuse to exchange his larger estate in the settled
lands for a contingent life interest in them, he must be content with that
estate (which, though a comparatively small affair, was sufficient to
maintain a baronet's dignity), and forego all interest for himself and
issue in the lordly revenue, to which he would otherwise succeed in the
course of nature.
Having formed this scheme for the honour of his descendants, at a time
when he never imagined the little Brentford schoolboy might decline to
further it, Sir Bysshe was not the man to relinquish any part of his grand
ambition out of deference to the whim and wildness of an unruly stripling.
From the boy's action in wedding a girl of Harriett Westbrook's condition,
without the consent or knowledge of his parents, it was obvious to the
veteran, that his grandson's regard for the feelings and wishes of his
nearest kindred were not likely to be largely operative in determining him
to concur in the proposed resettlement of family estate. From the
circumstances of the _mésalliance_, the veteran had also reason for
thinking it probable that the youngster would raise money on his future
resources even in his minority; and, unless pressure was put upon him at
the earliest moment to resettle the estates A and B, would be under the
control of money-lenders, soon after the attainment of his majority. Hence
the old man's resolve that the strongest possible appeal should be made at
the earliest moment to the young man's self-interest to put it out of his
power to squander the estates, in which he was interested as tenant in
tail in remainder expectant. The stringent codicil was old Sir Bysshe's
answer to his grandson's mad-cap elopement; and in taking this action on
the boy's latest escapade, the founder of the poet's mushroom 'house' had
no consideration whatever for the young man's religious or political
opinions.
It is uncertain on what day the trio left York. Mr. Denis Florence
MacCarthy is certain they departed on Friday, 29th October, the day next
after the date of the epistle to the Duke of Norfolk, and perhaps the
inaccurate writer does not err on this point. Anyhow it is unquestionable
that they had left York several days, when the Duke's reply (dated 7th
November, 1811) came to Hogg's hands, and was forthwith (on the 9th or
10th of the month) forwarded to Shelley, at Keswick. Moreover, enough is
known of the droll circumstances of the departure, which may indeed be
called a flight, and of the manner in which His Grace the Duke of Norfolk
answered Shelley's judiciously worded letter.
Charles, the eleventh Duke of Norfolk, a keen politician, and methodical
man of affairs, kept a diary; and on 7th November, 1811 (when he was in
his sixty-sixth year) he made this entry in the personal record, 'Wrote to
T. Shelly 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.--That I propose going into the North next week, and will come to
York to see him, provided he will inform me when I may find him there.'
Written to Shelley himself, a letter of this sentiment and tone shows,
even more forcibly than the Earl of Chichester's gossiping note, written
to his official subordinate, what view the great Sussex families took of
the young gentleman's latest _escapade_. To the Duke no less than the
Earl, the marriage with the innkeeper's daughter appeared a discreditable
business; and though in writing to Shelley, he of course made no mention
of her low origin, the Duke told him frankly the marriage was an affair
about which his father had reason to be indignant. In saying the Squire
would not be singular in declining to take Shelley's view of the matter,
the Duke declared, as plainly as courtesy allowed him, that he could not
take that view. Shelley's view, as exhibited in the letter, was a mere
opinion that his father's anger exceeded just and reasonable displeasure;
and from this opinion the Duke dissented. Having in the meanwhile dined
with the angry father at Horsham, the Duke, thirteen days later (23rd
November), wrote Shelley another letter, inviting him, his wife and
sister-in-law, to Greystoke Castle, some twelve miles from Keswick. Of
this invitation, Shelley wrote on 26th November to Mr. Medwin, the Horsham
attorney, 'We dine with the Duke of N. at Graystock this week,' words
implying that this first invitation was only for dinner. On the same day
(26th November), the Duke appears from another entry of his journal to
have sent the trio a second invitation, which enabled Shelley to write on
Saturday (30th November) to the Horsham lawyer, 'We visit the Duke of N.
at Graystock to-morrow. We return to Keswick on Wednesday,' words
indicating an extension of the invitation, and a stronger disposition on
the Duke's part to befriend the young people.
What was there comical in the departure from York? Having gone to chambers
one morning under the impression that the trio would leave York on the
morrow, Hogg was not a little surprised at his dinner-hour to discover
that, whilst he was at work over legal papers, his friends had gone away
in a post-chaise for Richmond. 'When I returned to dinner, such was the
precipitation of the young votaries of the Muses, that the birds were
flown,' says Hogg, in language which, at the first glance, seems to imply
that he lived in the same house as the trio, till the moment of their
departure. But though the evidence is less than conclusive, I have grounds
for thinking that, after retiring from the dingy abode of the dingy
milliners, Shelley and the sisters rested in a tenement which Hogg did not
enter except as their visitor. If I am right on this point, it would seem
that on returning to the lodgings, where he was a daily visitor, he went
there by invitation to a farewell dinner, instead of returning to his
proper place at the common board. Anyhow it is certain that, on going to
the Blake Street lodging-house, he learnt that the friends with whom he
meant to dine had taken their departure. The birds had flown, to Hogg's
surprise and perplexity. Had they at the last moment changed their plans?
or had they gone away in accordance with pre-arrangements, that had been
withheld from him? The blood may well have brightened Hogg's cheek, as he
asked himself these questions. His annoyance was not diminished by the
short note left for him by the fugitives, who merely informed him they
were off to Keswick, and would pass the next night at Richmond, whither he
had better follow them speedily, if he would attend them to the lakes.
As the trio knew he could not leave York, it was impossible for Hogg to
regard their invitation as sincere or flattering. Moreover, he could not
be indifferent to the signal affront they had offered him in running away
without a word of farewell. That the incident was Miss Westbrook's work he
had no doubt; that Mrs. Shelley was an accomplice in her sister's scheme
for his humiliation he may well have suspected. Nor could he acquit
Shelley of being a partner to the insult. It is thus that human schemes
miscarry, and human hopes perish into disappointments. For months Shelley
had looked forward to the pleasure of settling in York, and living there
'for ever,' with his incomparable Hogg and his dearest Harriett. What was
the end of this scheme for perpetual felicity? After so brief a stay in
the ancient city, Shelley was posting to Richmond with his wife and
sister-in-law, in order to get away from the friend whom he had been so
quickly taught to think a dangerous companion for his childish wife.
In the absence of conclusive testimony, the known circumstances of the
flight admit of several different explanations, provoke many curious
conjectures. One may imagine that Shelley, Harriett, and Miss Westbrook,
were confederates on equal terms, and in perfect mutual confidence, for
Hogg's humiliation. Or one may conceive Shelley was not admitted to the
confidence of the ladies, until they had arranged all the particulars of
the departure. Readers are at liberty to imagine no deception was
practised by the trio, or any person of the trio, on Hogg, when he was
informed the departure would be made twenty-four hours later. It is
conceivable the suddenness of the departure was no less real to the
fugitives than apparent to Hogg. Possibly no one of the three was aware
two hours before the departure that they would sleep the next night at
Richmond. Shelley may have been looking for days to the particular hour at
which his chaise eventually rattled out of Blake Street, as the particular
hour at which he would start from York. His taste for making mysteries
about nothing would countenance an opinion that he misled Hogg as to the
pre-appointed day. It makes little for the contrary opinion that, writing
ten days or so later from Keswick, he declared himself to have had no part
in concerting the departure from York, or the later departure from
Richmond. On the other hand, it is conceivable he was carried off at a
moment's notice and in high excitement from York by his clever and
irresistible sister-in-law. There are divers other points of this
business, in respect to which the ingenious reader may be left in the free
exercise of his imagination, and at perfect liberty to think what he
pleases.
My own hypothetical view of the business is, that Shelley was kept almost
to the last moment in ignorance of the time appointed for the departure;
that on this matter he was in the confidence neither of his sister-in-law
nor of his wife during the last days of his sojourn at York; that, in
respect to this affair, Harriett submitted to the judgment and will of her
elder sister, who was for the moment the controlling member of the trio;
and that in thus concealing part of her intentions from Harriett's boyish
husband, Miss Westbrook was actuated partly by malice against Hogg, and
partly by prudent regard for the difficulties she might reasonably
anticipate in tearing the incomparable Hogg and the incomparable Shelley
asunder, when the moment for severance should arrive. Playing her game no
less cautiously than boldly, Miss Westbrook (whilst at York) could not
venture to do more for the severance of the friends, than to hint to
Shelley that Harriett had been placed in a false and embarrassing position
towards Hogg, that one consequence of this false position was Hogg's
inordinate and inconvenient admiration of Harriett, that, without doing
anything distinctly culpable (Harriett's goodness precluding any such
contingency), Hogg had been too demonstrative of a far too affectionate
interest in his friend's wife. The sum of the maiden lady's case against
her 'enemy' at York was, that he had been wanting in discretion and
delicacy and chivalric self-control. At York she could not go much beyond
this in her statements to Hogg's discredit, without inspiring her pupil
with suspicions of his wife's delicacy and discretion; and to urge only
thus much in support of her counsel for prompt withdrawal from Hogg's
society, was to forbear from stirring Shelley to resentments, that would
at once put it out of his friend's power to keep him at York in opposition
to her wish and purpose. Hence, Miss Westbrook had reason to apprehend
Shelley might even at the last hour decline to quit York, unless she
eventually effected her object in his friend's absence, and with an
abruptness for which neither of the young men was prepared. It is
therefore conceivable that four-and-twenty hours before he intended to
leave the city, Shelley was surprised by his sister-in-law with an
announcement that Harriett's nerves required them to clear out of York
instantly. To the execution of such a _coup-de-main_, the aggrieved and
angry lady would also be strongly moved by a desire to inflict sharp
annoyance on her adversary. This hypothesis accords with Shelley's
emphatic assertion that the flight from York was no affair of his
arrangement.
That Shelley did not leave York in any mood of vehement animosity against
Hogg, or with any disposition to accuse him of serious misconduct towards
Harriett, is shown by the affectionate warmth with which he wrote from
Keswick to his incomparable friend. 'You were surprised,' he wrote
immediately after his arrival at Keswick, 'at our sudden departure; I have
no time, however, _now_ either to account for it or enter into an
investigation which we agreed upon.--With real, true interest, I
constantly think of you, believe me, my friend, so sincerely am I attached
to you.'
A few days later Shelley wrote to his friend at York:--'We all greatly
regret that "your own interests, your own real interests," should compel
you to remain at York. But pray, write often; your last letter I have
read, as I would read your soul.... Yours most affectionately, most
unalterably, ...' In another of his undated letters from Keswick to his
friend at York, Shelley writes in this vein of affectionateness:--'If I
thought we were to be long parted, I should be wretchedly miserable,--half
mad!... Cannot you follow us?--why not? But I will dare to be good,--dare
to be virtuous; and I will soon seize once more what I have for a while
relinquished, never, never again to resign it.' In another letter, Shelley
says to his friend at York:--'I did not concert my departure from
Richmond, nor that from York. Why did I leave you? I have never doubted
you,--you, the brother of my soul, the object of my vivid interest; the
theme of my impassioned panegyric.' In another letter he writes to his
friend:--'I do not know that absence will certainly cure love; but this I
know, that it fearfully augments the intensity of friendship.' These
passages from letters which, though undated, were obviously written in the
time between the future poet's first arrival at Keswick and his visit to
Greystoke,--letters affording evidence that, during the earlier weeks of
the residence at Keswick, Hogg was writing to Harriett with her husband's
cognizance and approval, epistles which she submitted to his approval.
Possibly the trio would have tarried a few days longer at York, had they
not felt it would favour their designs on Greystoke Castle that they
should be at Keswick, when the Duke's reply to Shelley's appeal (of
October 28th) should come to their hands. Knowing the Duke would be
journeying to Cumberland in the course of the next month (November, 1811),
the trio had reason for hoping his Grace would propose to see them on his
way through York. On receiving this expression of the ducal pleasure, it
would be well for them to be already at Keswick, so that the meeting
should take place in the neighbourhood of Greystoke, if not _at_ the
Castle itself. Anyhow, they were at Keswick when the Duke's offer (7th
November, 1811) to see Shelley at York came to the hands of the
conspirators, whose reply (dated from Keswick) may be said to have forced
the Squire's patron to invite them to his Cumberland place--barely twelve
miles from that town. That the Duke, on the 23rd of November, invited the
trio to meet him at the Castle appears from his diary; but this first
invitation seems to have been regarded by the adventurers as nothing more
than an invitation to dinner. 'We dine,' Shelley wrote to Mr. Medwin, of
Horsham, on 26th November, 1811, 'with the Duke of N. at Graystock this
week.' A few hours later he received the letter from Greystoke, which
enabled him on the last day of the month to write to the same
correspondent:--'We visit the Duke of N. at Graystock to-morrow. We return
to Keswick on Wednesday.'
Coming to them at a time when they had reason to be thankful for small
mercies, the Duke's second invitation may be supposed to have cheered the
trio, whose spirits had been already raised from the deepest dejection by
another reassuring incident. Influenced possibly by prompt intelligence
that his daughters had been invited to the Duchess of Norfolk's
dinner-table, Mr. Westbrook had sent his son-in-law a few pounds. The gift
may have been accompanied (as Shelley, in his letter of November 30th to
the Horsham attorney, avers it to have been) with an intimation that it
was not to be regarded as the first of a series of similar benefactions;
but, however guarded and qualified it may have been with cautious words,
the remittance was an occasion for thankfulness to the trio, who had for
several days needed money for their immediate necessities. Enabling them
to pay their few debts in Keswick, the gift enabled them to go to
Greystoke, albeit (to use the future poet's words) the visit was paid
almost with their very last guinea.
Going to the Castle on Sunday, 1st December, 1811, for three nights, the
trio stayed there for eight or nine days;--an extension of the visit
which, whilst certainly indicative of the Duke's growing disposition to
befriend the young couple, may also be thought to indicate that he and the
Duchess were favourably impressed by John Westbrook's daughters. Seeing in
her rare beauty a palliation of the youngster's reckless act, the host and
hostess must have been surprised by the charm of Harriett's simplicity,
the music of her voice, the refinement of her tone. At a glance it was
obvious to them she was no saucy barmaid. Before the Sunday dinner was
over, they saw she was one of those girls of lowly origin, who under
auspicious influences may win the confidence and love of the high-born.
Though she lacked her sister's manifold charms, it was no less manifest to
the Duke and Duchess that, instead of being such a young woman as the mere
knowledge of her father's calling had predisposed them to find her, Miss
Westbrook was a person of education and cleverness who might figure
creditably in the drawing-rooms of the subordinate Sussex gentry. And in
their judgment of Shelley's womankind, the Duke and Duchess had the
concurrence of the several other gentle people who were staying in the
Castle,--of Lady Musgrave, of Edenhall and Hartley Castle, Co. Cumberland;
James Brougham, brother of Henry, the future Lord Chancellor; and Mr.
Calvert, of Greta Bank, near Keswick, a Cumberland squire, who, differing
widely from Mr. Timothy Shelley in mental and moral characteristics, seems
to have stood towards the Duke of Norfolk in Cumberland somewhat in the
same relation in which the Sussex Squire stood to his Grace in the
southern county.
Why did the Duke of Norfolk show so much concern and take so much trouble
in the domestic affairs of Field Place? This question should be answered
precisely, as the extravagant notions of the poet's ancestral quality are
mainly referable to misconceptions respecting the nature of the
intercourse of the ducal Howards and the Castle Goring Shelleys. Having
taken Sir Bysshe and the Squire of Field Place under his protection, and
in a certain sense into his familiar friendship, the Duke was doubtless
moved to trouble himself about the Squire's dealings with the future poet,
by a genuine desire for Mr. Timothy Shelley's welfare. Nor can it be
questioned that the powerful noble was influenced at the same time by
affectionate interest in the youth, whose cordial looks and bearing, ever
conciliatory to strangers and slight acquaintances, were none the less
pleasing to the Duke, because the boy's manner towards his father's patron
was gracefully expressive of ingenuous reverence for the age, experience,
and rank of so august a personage. But it would be a mistake to suppose
his Grace's treatment of the Shelleys was chiefly due to these amiable and
altogether disinterested motives. A keen politician, who was charged by
his enemies with sacrificing his religious convictions to his political
interests, the Duke cared for men in proportion as he saw they might be
serviceable to his ambition. Having raised the Shelleys to a higher grade
of local quality, because they could be useful to him, the Duke continued
to cherish them for the same end. The mushroom house, which he had
dignified with the bloody hand, was dear to the Duke as an instrument for
advancing his own greatness, and promoting the grandeur of the Howards. To
such a patron the estate, which at any moment might devolve on the Member
for New Shoreham, represented money and influence that would be employed
by the second baronet at elections for the advantage of the Norfolk
connexion. The estate that might come to-morrow to the Squire of Field
Place was so much social power that, two or three years later, might, by a
gun-accident, a fall in the hunting-field, a violent and fatal illness,
pass from Sir Bysshe's son to the unruly boy, who under the new
circumstances might be no less serviceable to the Howards than his father
promised to be. In Squire Timothy the Duke had a loyal adherent and
thorough Whig partisan; in the Squire's boy, who had come to grief at
Oxford and made a runaway match with an innkeeper's daughter, the Duke saw
a youngster who, after running through the fever of red-republicanism, and
surviving his freakish infidelity, would take sober views of politics and
religion, and settle down into as good a Whig as his father, and on
nearing middle-age be more desirous of ranking with the peers than with
the poets of his country. Hence the pains taken by his Grace last spring
to mediate between the father and son, to induce the former to give his
boy a sufficient allowance, and to talk the latter into a disposition to
live quietly and with due regard for his ultimate interests, until he
should be of an age to enter Parliament and sit there like a sensible
fellow for a pocket-borough. Hence also the Duke's readiness to act again
as mediator between the angry sire and contumacious son. The same view
must be taken of the Duke's condescension,--and, an even more remarkable
fact, the Duchess's condescension,--in asking John Westbrook's daughters
to Greystoke Castle.
As he lived at Greta Bank, less than a mile from the town of Keswick, and
was at home when the trio became his near neighbours, it is not surprising
that Mr. Calvert had made Shelley's acquaintance before meeting him at the
Duke of Norfolk's table. An observant and energetic man, ever vigilant of
the life, and keenly interested in the improvements, of his neighbourhood,
the Squireen of Greta Bank was certain, under any circumstances, to hear
of the arrival of so singular a party of tourists within a fortnight of
their coming to the town, at so inclement a season. It is, however,
probable that the Duke of Norfolk's useful neighbour at Keswick was the
sooner cognizant of the strangers and their proceedings, because he had
been asked by his Grace to be on the look-out for them. Circumstances
indeed warrant something more than a suspicion that Harriett and her
sister were not invited to Greystoke till the Duke had learnt from Mrs.
Calvert that John Westbrook's daughters had the looks and manners of
gentlewomen. Anyhow Shelley and Harriett had encountered Mr. Calvert on
the hills about Keswick before meeting him at the Castle; and on talking
with him at Greystoke it was soon apparent to the future poet that much of
his private affairs had come to the knowledge of his new acquaintance. The
'elderly man,' whose looks impressed Shelley so agreeably, may be presumed
to have gained his surprising knowledge of the youngster's concerns from
the Duke of Norfolk. Other circumstances indicate that, before the
Shelleys came to Greystoke, the Duke and his useful neighbour had
conferred together on what had better be done for the suitable
entertainment of the adventurers from Southern England.
The results of the march on Keswick justified the enterprise from which
Hogg had vainly tried to dissuade the trio. Whilst Harriett's rare beauty
and simple girlishness palliated to her august host and hostess the
_escapade_ that had stirred the Squire of Field Place to natural
indignation, Shelley's speech was no less conciliatory than the tone of
his letter to his father's patron. If she did little to enhance the effect
of her sister's loveliness and her brother-in-law's discreet behaviour,
Miss Westbrook was by no means the combative and offensive person she had
shown herself to Mr. Thomas Jefferson Hogg at York. The young woman, who
ruled her brother-in-law for many months, was clever enough to appear a
fairly sensible and meritorious person for a few days to the Duchess of
Norfolk and Lady Musgrave. Having consented to receive the trio under his
roof, the Duke could not have declined to befriend them any further, even
if they had offended him. But the prolongation of the visit to the ninth
day is conclusive evidence that the visitors won the favour of their
entertainers. Another and even stronger indication of ducal benignity
appears in the arrangement that was made (certainly with the Duke's
approval, and probably at his instance) for providing the trio with a
comfortable home during their sojourn at Keswick, where they seemed likely
to linger to a time considerably later than the day, on which they
eventually started from Cumberland for Ireland.
Before the visit at Greystoke came to an end, it was settled that the trio
should move from their (second) uncomfortable lodgings in Keswick to rooms
under Mr. Calvert's roof at Greta Bank, to which the Duke's useful
neighbour agreed to welcome them in the twofold character of guests and
lodgers;--as guests receiving Mrs. Calvert's hospitable courtesies, and at
the same time as lodgers rendering their entertainer a payment, that would
enable them to live in his house for a considerable period (for several
months, even for two or three years) without incurring an oppressive sense
of pecuniary obligation. That a gentleman of Mr. Calvert's social position
consented to receive the trio on these terms is of itself a clear
indication, that the domiciliary arrangement was expected to last for more
than a few weeks. It is also conceivable that the Duke approved the
pecuniary arrangement as a compact, that would render it easier for him to
induce Mr. Timothy Shelley to renew the yearly allowance to his son. On
hearing that his son and daughter-in-law had been received on such terms
by one of his patron's friends, the Squire of Field Place would of course
feel it incumbent on his honour to put his son in a position to fulfil his
pecuniary obligations to the Duke's friend. This view of the pecuniary
arrangement, and of the effect it could not fail to have on Mr. Timothy
Shelley, accords with the ungracious terms in which the renewal of the
allowance was soon afterwards announced to Shelley by his father's man of
business. Writing on 28th January, 1812, to William Godwin, Shelley says
of his father's action in this matter, 'A little time since he sent to me
a letter, through his attorney, renewing an allowance of two hundred
pounds per annum, but with this remark "that his sole reason for so doing
was to prevent my cheating strangers."' The strangers thus pointed to in
the lawyer's letters were doubtless the strangers (Mr. and Mrs. Calvert)
who had taken the trio into their house.
The date of this letter, whose needless offensiveness (offensiveness, by
the way, that may have been exaggerated by Shelley) was perhaps referable
to the attorney's ill-breeding rather than the Squire's harshness, is
unknown; but it may be assumed that the allowance was renewed soon after
the arrangement with the Squire of Greta Bank came to Mr. Timothy
Shelley's knowledge, _i.e._ within two months of its withdrawal. The
Squire of Field Place having thus again given his son an income (revocable
at will) of 200_l._ per annum, Mr. Westbrook (no doubt mollified and
flattered by the Duchess of Norfolk's civility to his daughters) appears
to have determined to act with equal liberality to his daughter Harriett
and to raise her husband's annual revenue to 400_l._ It has been
questioned by successive biographers whether John Westbrook acted thus
liberally. Even by Mr. Rossetti (an authority, from whom I never venture
to differ without carefully reviewing the facts) it is doubted whether the
poet had so good an income during his first marriage. But I see no grounds
for thinking his yearly income in that term of his career was less than
400_l._
Shelley had no obvious motive to overstate his means to William Godwin and
Miss Hitchener in 1812. On the contrary, there were considerations that
would dispose him to understate his income to those correspondents. Yet he
assured both of them in that year that he had a yearly allowance of
400_l._ Writing on 14th January, 1812, on information given him by
Shelley, Southey says Mrs. Shelley's father allowed her and her husband
200_l._ a-year. A fortnight later (28th January, 1812) Shelley in the
letter to Godwin, speaks of his father's renewal ('a little time since')
of 'an allowance of two hundred pounds per annum.' On the 14th of the next
month Shelley wrote to Miss Hitchener that he had '400_l._ per annum.'
Five months later (5th July, 1812) he wrote from Lynmouth, North Devon, to
William Godwin, 'I am, as you know, a minor, and as such depend upon a
limited income (400_l._ per annum) allowed me by my relatives.' During
the three first months of his married life (_i.e._ the months preceding
the renewal of his father's 200_l._ a-year and his father-in-law's first
concession of a similar allowance) Shelley received considerably more than
100_l._ from different sources (_i.e._ 25_l._ from Mr. Medwin, spent on
the charges of the elopement; 10_l._ from Hogg; 75_l._ sent to him at
Edinburgh; the money [say 25_l._] provided by Miss Westbrook for expenses
at York and the journey to Keswick; and the 'small sum' [say another
25_l._] sent to him at Keswick towards the end of November by Mr.
Westbrook,--sums amounting to 160_l._) There is no reason to suppose that
Mr. Timothy Shelley withheld the allowance of 200_l._ a-year after its
renewal, or that Mr. Westbrook failed to give the other 200_l._ a-year,
till the poet's rupture with his first wife in the spring of 1814. Surely
then there are good grounds for saying Shelley had at least four hundred
a-year from the date of his first marriage to the time of his quarrel with
Harriett:--an income (equivalent to 600_l._ or 700_l._ a-year at the
present time) that certainly acquits Mr. Timothy Shelley of the charges of
scandalous and hurtful niggardliness to his perplexing and contumacious
son.
Further evidence to the same conclusion is afforded by Shelley's way of
living throughout the period, when he is generally supposed to have
suffered severely from insufficient means. So long as he tarried under Mr.
Calvert's roof he lived well within his average monthly income; but with
the exception of this brief period of about three months, Shelley's way of
living from the September of 1811 to the midsummer of 1814 was a way in
which he could not have persisted on less than 400_l._, even if no regard
is had to the costly extravagances with which he indulged his wife in the
later and inharmonious months of their conjugal association. To subsist on
200_l._ or 300_l._ a-year, it would have been necessary for Shelley and
Harriett to live in one place and in the same small house, practising the
petty domestic economies by which a little money may be made to go a long
way. But instead of living in this manner, they chose a life of restless
vagrancy--a way of living that of all modes of existence is the one most
impoverishing to gentle folk of limited means. Economical in clothing and
parsimonious in diet, they were prodigal in travelling expenses. Wandering
hither and thither, from London to Edinburgh, from Edinburgh to York, from
York to Keswick, from Keswick to the Isle of Man, from the Isle of Man to
Dublin, from Dublin to Wales, from Wales back to Ireland, now lingering at
Killarney, and now worshiping Nature in North Wales, they were incessant
tourists at a time when touring (in respect to charges of locomotion) was
far costlier than in these later years of grace. As tourists in Scotland,
Ireland, Wales and England, and in a later stage of their joint-career as
strangers in London, they spent yearly on hotel-keepers and
lodginghouse-keepers twice the sum that would have maintained a cottage
with two servants and a pony carriage in a Sussex village. At the same
time it must be remembered that, though he seldom spent a shilling for
pleasures on which young men of his degree are apt to spend many pounds,
Shelley was by no means a man without 'personal expenses.' Giving much to
beggars and other victims of distress, he was an habitual buyer of books,
and in the execution of his literary enterprises, spent much on printers.
Though he rarely bought wine, he often bought a costlier drink--laudanum,
for his own drinking. How could he live in this way on 400_l._ a-year? Of
course his expenses exceeded 400_l._ a-year. Of course in his wanderings
he resembled the eighteenth-century poet, who dragged at each remove a
lengthening chain of debt. But how could he have met the immediate,
urgent, unavoidable and not-to-be-deferred charges of such incessant
touring on less than four hundred a-year?
CHAPTER XVII.
GRETA BANK.
Shelley wishes for a Sussex Cottage--His Friends at Keswick--Southey
at Home--Poet and Schoolmaster--Southey's Way of handling
Shelley--Shelley caught Napping--Mrs. Southey's Tea-cakes--Eggs and
Bacon on Hounslow Heath--At Home with the Calverts--Shelley's
remarkable Communications to Southey--His Story of Harriett's
Expulsion from School--The Story to Hogg's Infamy--Mr. MacCarthy on
the _Posthumous Fragments_--Miss Westbrook's transient
Contentment--Shelley's _For Ever_ and _Never_--His Interest in
Ireland--Burning Questions--Southey and Shelley at War--The _Address
to the Irish People_--Letters to Skinner Street--Godwin tickled by
them--Shelleyan Conceptions and Misconceptions--Shelley forgets all
about Dr. Lind--Preparations for the Irish Campaign--Letter of
Introduction to Curran--Project for a happy Meeting in Wales--Miss
Eliza Hitchener--Bright Angel and Brown Demon--Shelley's Delight in
her--His Abhorrence of her.
From Shelley's letter of 26th November, 1811, to Mr. Medwin, of Horsham,
it appears that the trio came to Keswick with the purpose of journeying
southward, and settling in some picturesque nook of Sussex, when they
should have succeeded or failed in the main object of their expedition to
the Lake country. The Horsham attorney was instructed to look out for a
cottage, adapted to their means and requirements, near St. Leonard's
forest or in any other part of the county, where they would be at a
distance from soldiers and workshops, and have rural quietude with good
scenery.
It would have been well, perhaps, for Shelley and his chances of domestic
contentment, had they held to this plan, and settling down in a peaceful
Sussex village, avoided the life of comfortless vagrancy, in which he
spent the rest of his life. It would have been better still, perhaps, both
for him and Harriett, had they been content to lead tranquil and studious
days at Greta Bank for two or three years in the society of the Southeys
at Keswick, of De Quincey and Wordsworth at Grasmere, of Coleridge and
John Wilson. But it was not in his nature, nor, perhaps, was it possible
to a young woman of her peculiar temper, to be happy for many months
together, in any place that wanted the charm of novelty. Anyhow, instead
of biding his time at Greta Bank till De Quincey and Wordsworth, Coleridge
and Wilson, had come about them, Shelley surrendered the advantages of the
home, that had been provided for him by ducal favour, and left Cumberland
at the beginning of February without making any acquaintances at Keswick
with the exception of the Calverts from whom he parted regretfully, and
the Southeys from whom he parted in no kindly temper.
Either through the carelessness of the original writer (who may have made
the common mistake of pre-dating the epistle by an entire month), or
through the carelessness of the copyist of the document, a wrong date
(10th October, 1811) is given in Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy's _Shelley's
Early Life_, to the extract from an unpublished letter, in which the
poetical aspirant says of the author of _Thalaba_, 'Southey hates the
Irish; he speaks against Catholic Emancipation. In all these things we
differ. Our differences were the subject of a long conversation.' As
Shelley had not seen Southey on 10th October, 1811, as he made Southey's
acquaintance at Keswick, which he entered for the first time on some day
of the following month (November, 1811), he cannot have talked in the
earlier days of October, 1811, with the celebrated man of letters on
questions touching Catholic Emancipation and the discontents of the Irish
Catholics. The long conversation and differences about those topics may
have been affairs of November, but it is more probable that the famous
poet and the unknown literary aspirant had no angry altercations about
Ireland's wrongs and Robert Emmett's story before the last month of 1811.
It is, however, certain that they differed on these subjects, and that
their differences of opinion were fruitful of overbearing speech on
Southey's part,--and of much vehement and bitter speech from Shelley.
Shelley came to Keswick with a disposition to have the friendliest
relations with the man of letters who two years since had been his
favourite English poet, and whom he regarded as a great man till personal
intercourse extinguished the favourable opinion. And whilst Shelley went
to 'the lakes' in a mood to render homage to Southey's greatness, Southey
was by no means disinclined to receive the homage in those portions of his
laborious time, in which he condescended to have speech with inferior
mortals. But, notwithstanding Shelley's readiness to admire and Southey's
readiness to be admired, no one familiar with their peculiar infirmities
of intellect and temper would have predicted that the two men would prove
congenial companions. In return for his worship and deference, the
vehement and romantic Shelley looked for encouragement and sympathy from
the famous scholar and poet. Hoping for a cordial welcome to the great
man's heart and library, Shelley was reprimanded with a look of mingled
surprise and displeasure for his presumption in taking books from the
great man's shelves. The welcome accorded to him by the man of fame was
attended with limitations and conditions. The house was open to him, but
only at times when the master could see him. The library was open to him
for the perusal of such books as their owner put into his hands, or rather
for such passages of them as were submitted to his consideration. Eager
for approval and acutely sensitive of disrespect, the youngster was quick
to perceive that Southey listened to his words with supercilious curiosity
and amusement, and in replying to them felt himself talking to an
intellectual inferior,--to a mere whimsical scatterbrain singularly devoid
of mental discretion; to a youth whose exuberant speech ran on matters of
which he knew very little. Taking this view of his young friend, Southey
(whose dictatorial air and eloquence had, in his thirty-eighth year,
assumed all the overbearing insolence that distinguished him in later
time) gave his young friend much equally wholesome and unacceptable
admonition, that would have been less ineffectual for good and far less
effectual for harm, had it been given in a less offensive manner.
Whilst he never failed to take something more than his proper share of the
conversation, in whatever company he found himself at this period of his
life, the argumentative Shelley liked to imagine he controlled the minds
of the listeners, who were more often silenced than swayed by his
excessive loquacity. With comical and characteristic self-complacence he
wrote of Mr. Calvert and the Duke of Norfolk's other guests, soon after
the visit to Greystoke Castle, 'We met several people at the Duke's. One
in particular struck me. He was an elderly man, who seemed to know all my
concerns, and the expression of his face, whenever I held the argument,
_which I do everywhere_, was such as I shall not readily forget.' The
young gentleman who, 'holding the argument everywhere,' pursued his
customary course even in the presence of ducal quality, met in Southey's
house with an entertainer, no less fond of holding the argument; with a
host not at all disposed to be overtalked by a boy, barely half his own
age. In Southey, the poet usually went hand-in-hand with the pedagogue;
but in his dealings with Shelley, the poet disappeared in the pedagogue,
the scholar merged in the schoolmaster,--sometimes in the angry
schoolmaster. Instead of withdrawing into silence, Southey met the
youngster's vehement assertions with scornful counterstatements, traversed
his arguments with caustic speech that turned them to ridicule, or raising
his voice poured upon him torrents of invective, that only stung and
lashed the beardless disputant to wilder extravagances of speech.
Some of Southey's donnish ways to the irrepressible lad were superlatively
exasperating. One of the schoolmaster's tricks was to stop the course of
controversy by taking down a book, opening it, and reading a passage in a
tone, which implied that the quotation closed the discussion for all
minds, accessible to reason. At other times, when Shelley had talked
himself purple, this exasperating Southey was content to remark in a tone
of galling pity and tenderness, 'No doubt, no doubt; I thought and spoke
in just the same way when I was your age.' Few forms of dissent are more
irritating to a callow disputant than a suggestion that he thinks what he
thinks and says what he says, merely because he is very young and
inexperienced. Whilst Southey was writing with sublime compassionateness
of the young 'man at Keswick, who acted upon him as his own ghost would,'
Shelley wrote from Greta Bank to a correspondent, whose personal
acquaintance he had still to make:--'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.' Recalling how he had dealt and differed with Shelley
in Keswick, Southey (_vide_ _The Correspondence of Robert Southey with
Caroline Bowles_, 1881) wrote to the author of _Laon and Cythna_ in June,
1820:--'Eight years ago you were somewhat displeased when I declined
disputing with you on points which are beyond the reach of the human
intellect,--telling you that the great difference between us was, that
you were then nineteen and I was eight-and-thirty.' Southey's letter about
his own ghost was dated 14th January, 1812; Shelley's letter to Godwin,
about 'the poet, whose principles were pure and elevated once,' was dated
just two days later, 16th January, 1812. Whilst Shelley was nothing more
respectable to Southey than a young simpleton of parts, who might survive
his folly and become a sensible man, Southey was nothing less contemptible
in Shelley's eyes than a literary hireling, who defended every abuse and
absurdity he was ordered to defend.
Few were the words spoken in later time to Southey's advantage, many the
words spoken to his ridicule, by the younger poet, with whom he had
wrangled so hotly on the marge of Derwentwater. One of Shelley's stories,
to his enemy's discredit, was the droll account of the way he was led by
Southey into his little upstairs study, locked into the narrow chamber,
and then 'read' into unconsciousness by his merciless captor; the thing
thus read to the captive's stupefaction being one of the captor's poems in
manuscript. Charmed with the beauties of his own creation, the author read
on slowly and distinctly, till the listener would fain have escaped from
the scene of his punishment; read on till the listener nodded from
drowsiness, instead of approval; read on till the whilom unwilling
listener had ceased to listen; read on till the same whilom listener slipt
from his seat to the floor; and still read on till, on looking up from his
manuscript for something more flattering than silent admiration, he looked
in vain for him who should have given it. The Southey of this comical
anecdote may well have been surprised at the listener's unaccountable
disappearance. How had he escaped?--Not by the door, for it was locked;
nor by the window, for it was barred; nor by the chimney, for it was too
narrow. The poet's wonder at the listener's disappearance was exchanged
for wonder at his insensibility and indifference to what was loveliest in
poetic art, when, on looking under the table, he discovered the whilom
listener, lying at full length on the carpet, and wrapt in profoundest
slumber. It is suggested by the humorous Hogg that, if Shelley had kept
his chair and consciousness, during the reading of the long poem, he would
never have been placed by the naturally indignant bard on the roll of the
Satanic School.
Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy, by the way, discovers cause for virtuous
indignation at Hogg's monstrous untruthfulness, in representing that the
poem, which acted thus soporifically on Shelley, was _The Curse of
Kehama_. The poem of _The Curse_ had been published long before Shelley
set foot in Southey's house. Even whilst he was at Oxford, Shelley had
taken from a printed copy of _The Curse_ four lines to serve as a motto
for the title-page of his own sublime and undiscoverable poem (that
possibly was never written), _On the Existing State of Things_. It is
infinitely absurd to suppose Southey read in manuscript one of his _old_
poems to Shelley at Keswick. In saying Southey was guilty of this offence,
Hogg said what was untrue. It follows that Hogg was a reckless writer,
false biographer, and bad man. The fun of the matter is that Hogg does not
say the poem was The Curse of Kehama. On the contrary, he is at pains to
say he is uncertain whether it was _The Curse_, or some other of the
poet's metrical performances. 'The poem, if I mistake not, was _The Curse
of Kehama_,' are the words of the biographer, who is so rashly assailed
for inaccuracy, though in his mere repetition of Shelley's piquant
anecdote, he is so careful to say the poem of the story may _not_ have
been the _Curse_. It is thus that, in his passion for defaming Hogg, Mr.
Denis Florence MacCarthy pelts him with any stone, or stick, or bit of
dirt that comes to hand.
The incident of the story, if it was a real one, cannot be supposed to
have taken place when Mrs. Southey regaled the stranger from southern
England with the tea-cakes, which he devoured so ravenously, after abusing
them with the vehemence of unqualified prejudice. Had he at that time
offered her husband the affront of going to sleep at the poetical-reading,
the lady would scarcely have pressed Shelley so cordially to partake of
the tea and hot buttered tea-cakes, blushing with currants, or sprinkled
with caraway seed, with which she and her poet were regaling themselves,
at the close of washing-day.
'Why! good God, Southey!' the younger poet is reported to have exclaimed,
with a look of disgust at the unromantic fare, 'I am ashamed of you! It is
awful, horrible, to see such a man as you are, greedily devouring this
nasty stuff.'
'Nasty stuff, indeed!' cried Mrs. Southey. 'How dare you call my tea-cakes
nasty stuff?'
To assuage the lady's wrath, Shelley scanned the cakes, sniffed their
savour, took up a piece of one of them, and ate it. Scent and palate
convincing Shelley that it was an occasion for prompt recantation of a
sentiment formed from the mere appearance of things, he went to work at
the remaining tea-cakes, devouring them even more greedily than Southey.
Another plate of the hot and buttered cakes being brought to the board,
Shelley took something more than his full share of them, and was hoping
for the appearance of yet a third plate, when he learnt that more could
not be had, the whole batch having been eaten to the last fragment and
crumb. Hogg had the story of Mrs. Southey's tea-cakes from Harriett
(Westbrook) Shelley, who added, naïvely, 'We were to have hot tea-cakes
every evening "for ever." I was to make them myself, and Mrs. Southey was
to teach me.'
The story has considerable biographical value, as an example of Shelley's
alternate abstemiousness and self-indulgence in food. Resembling Byron in
habitual abstinence and indifference to the quality of the fare that
sustained him, Shelley also resembled Byron in occasional acts of feasting
that might almost be called excesses of greediness. Hogg gives a piquant
account of a meal Shelley made off eggs and bacon, in the parlour of a
humble inn on Hounslow Heath, at a time subsequent to his union with
William Godwin's daughter, when, as a vegetarian, he had for a
considerable period regarded pork with abhorrence. Entering the modest
tavern, at a moment when Hogg was about to assail a goodly dish of the
gross and abominable meat, the hungry poet eyed the bacon with disgust,
looked at it with curiosity, sniffed its alluring savour, regarded it
longingly, just as he had in former time regarded Mrs. Southey's
tea-cakes. 'So this is bacon,' he observed daintily, taking a morsel of
the meat on the end of a fork, and putting it into his mouth. Having
tasted fat, he fell from the purity of abstinence to the uncleanness of
carnal enjoyment. Having consumed a liberal portion of his friend's dish,
he ordered another dish on his own account, and devoured it voraciously.
Sharpened with what it fed upon, his appetite caused him to cry aloud,
'Bring more bacon;' an order that was speedily followed by the appearance
of a third dish. After despatching this third dish, the poet demanded a
fourth, when to his lively annoyance he learnt there was no more bacon in
the house. It was debated whether the landlady should not be sent to
Staines for more bacon; but Hogg prevailed on his friend to put a bridle
on fleshly appetite, and set forth for his cottage at Bishopgate and
Mary's well-furnished tea-table. On coming to that tea-table, Shelley
astonished his wife by exclaiming eagerly, 'We have been eating bacon
together on Hounslow Heath, and do you know it was very nice? Cannot we
have bacon here, Mary?' On hearing he could not have bacon till the
morrow, but must for the present be content with tea and bread and butter,
the poet replied plaintively, 'I would rather have some more bacon.' When
a worthy book shall be written on the Feasts of the Poets, it will not
fail to tell how Byron, after long spells of fasting, used to devour huge
messes of broken potato and stale fish, drenched with vinegar. Nor will it
omit to record how Shelley ate poor Mrs. Southey out of buttered
tea-cakes, and gorged himself with fried bacon at a pot-house on Hounslow
Heath.
Whilst they dispose me to think the famous feast on tea-cakes cannot have
preceded the hour when Shelley fell asleep under Southey's poem,
circumstances also incline me to think the acrimonious disputations on
Irish affairs must have followed the first day of Shelley's entertainment
at Greta Bank. Anyhow, it is certain that the Shelleys and Southeys were
on friendly terms, when the former took up their abode in Mr. Calvert's
house. The garden at Greta Bank was the 'pretty garden' of the piquant
story known to every reader of De Quincey's curiously inaccurate paper
about Shelley. It was to a question, put to her by one of the Southey
party, then calling upon her in her new quarters, that Mrs. Shelley
replied, with winning childishness, 'Oh, no, the garden is not ours; but
then, you know, the people let us run about in it, whenever Percy and I
are tired of sitting in the house;' an utterance that, coming from the
girlish wife, may well have amused the married ladies to whom it was made.
Nor is it conceivable that Southey and Shelley had exchanged hot and
disdainful words on questions of Irish politics, when the younger poet,
overflowing with pitiful speech on subjects about which he should not have
uttered a syllable to so slight an acquaintance, told Southey the story of
Harriett's conversion to Atheism, and the still more revolting tale of
Hogg's attempt to seduce her. By the first of these excesses of
communicativeness, Southey was informed how Shelley had busied himself in
making proselytes in Mrs. Fenning's boarding-school; how Harriett
Westbrook was expelled the school for accepting his doctrine and aiding
him in his purpose; and how he had married her, in order to render her the
_amende honorable_ for the disgrace and trouble he had brought upon her.
The second of the amazing stories was, that on their journey from
Edinburgh to York Hogg had attempted to debauch his friend's bride, so
soon after her marriage. Telling these things to his wife's discredit and
Hogg's infamy, Shelley spoke frankly of his disapproval of marriage. About
the same time, either from Shelley's own lips, or from the lips of some
other informant, it came to Southey's knowledge that, since coming to
Keswick, Shelley had told his wife expressly, that he regarded the
marriage-rite as a ceremony of no binding force, and that he should leave
her on ceasing to love her. Having no doubt the statements thus made to
Harriett _at_ Keswick were a mere repetition of statements made to her by
Shelley _before_ their marriage, Southey had reasons in 1820 for declining
to believe that, after deciding to wed one another by lawful form, either
she or Shelley had entered the compact on the Free Love understanding that
they should be at liberty to separate on ceasing to like one another. One
could wish Southey had stated more precisely how much of his knowledge of
Shelley's nuptial and pre-nuptial relations to Harriett came to him from
Shelley's own lips, and how much from other informants. It is, however,
certain that Southey received from Shelley's own tongue, his information,
or misinformation, touching the circumstances of Harriett's alleged
expulsion from school, touching Shelley's alleged motive for marrying her,
and touching the attempt said to have been made by Hogg on her honour.
Whether the allegation to Hogg's infamy should be deemed good evidence
against the law-student is a question to be considered in a subsequent
chapter. For the present, it is enough to observe that Shelley spoke to
Southey at Keswick on divers delicate personal matters, about which even
he would scarcely have opened mind and heart to so recent an acquaintance
had they already squabbled fiercely on Irish affairs.
Because Shelley introduced a virtuous Irishman into the later part of _St.
Irvyne_, and published in the _Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson_
some metrical trash about a banshee's moan, and a white courser,
bestridden by a shadow sprite, Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy would have us
believe, that Shelley did not leave Oxford without seriously interesting
himself in the history and legends of Ireland, and entertaining a purpose
to redress the wrongs of her miserable people. Here are Mr. Denis Florence
MacCarthy's own words:--
'One of them' (_i.e._ the poems of the _Posthumous Fragments_) '_The
Spectral Horseman_, is interesting as showing that at this early
period, Shelley had begun to take that interest in the history and
legends of Ireland, which led to such extraordinary results two years
later. We have here "The Banshee's moan on the storm;" "A white
courser," like that of O'Donoghue, "bears the shadowy sprite;" "The
whirlwinds howl in the caves of Innisfallen,"--
"Then does the dragon, who, chained in the caverns
To eternity, curses the champion of Erin,
Moan and yell loud at the lone hour of midnight."
_Fragments, page 25._
'Extravagant as all these passages are,--they show Shelley's
sympathies for Ireland had already been awakened, and that his
practical efforts for her benefit at a later period were not the
result of any sudden or passing caprice.'
What evidence that a youngster--living in the times of Moore, and Maturin,
and Sydney Morgan; in times when the popularity of the 'Irish Melodies'
had called into existence a score imitators of their author; in times when
romantic Irish ballads and patriotic Irish ballads lay on every
drawing-room table; in times when to humour the prevailing taste for
fiction about Ireland, and to profit by the demand for Irish tales at
circulating libraries, Lady Morgan christened one of her stories _The Wild
Irish Girl_, though no such girl played a part in the narrative,--was a
serious student of Irish history and legends, and had entered on a course
of inquiry and thought, that naturally resulted in a resolve to visit
Ireland, for the purpose of striking the manacles from the bruised and
bleeding limbs of Fair Erin! Thus is it that Shelley's story has been told
by his fanciful idolaters.
The instruction given (November 26th, 1811) to Mr. Medwin, the Horsham
lawyer, to find a Sussex cottage for the poet's habitation, is a
sufficient proof that Shelley at that time designed to settle ere long in
his native county. When a man speaks to his lawyer on such a matter, he
may be assumed to mean what he says. Shelley's written words to the man of
business were: 'We do not intend to take up our abode here for a
perpetuity, but should wish to have a house in Sussex. Let it be in some
picturesque, retired place--St. Leonard's Forest, for instance. Let it not
be nearer to London than Horsham, nor near any _populous_ manufacturing
town. We do not covet either a propinquity to _barracks_.' The young man
who wrote with this amplitude and precision must have meant what he said.
He could not afford to hire a house and let it stand empty. With no
purpose of staying a long time at Keswick, he wished for a house in Sussex
to retire to, in the company of his wife and sister-in-law, when he should
withdraw from the lakes. This was his plan when he entered Keswick; and
when he had been there some weeks.
What made him relinquish this scheme for a home? Probably he relinquished
it at the advice and with the approval of his wife and her sister, and
also in accordance with his own judgment, immediately after the visit to
Greystoke Castle, and Mr. Calvert's offer to take them into his house.
When they had been received at the Castle--not for a mere formal dinner,
not for a brief three nights' stay, but for a visit of several (eight or
nine) days--the prospect of living for a considerable time at Keswick must
have been acceptable to both the sisters; to the gentle and lovable
Harriett, who had several reasons for thinking such a residence would be
for her husband's advantage,--and to the scheming and ambitious Eliza,
who, in some degree sincerely desirous for Harriett's and Percy's welfare,
was chiefly ambitious of taking rank with gentlewomen. Exulting in her
reception at Greystoke Castle,--a reception that qualified her to speak of
the Duchess of Norfolk as her friend, and gave her the castle-mark of
gentility in the eyes of the 'highest quality' of and near Keswick--Miss
Westbrook, we may be sure, was in no hurry to withdraw from the
neighbourhood, that was the scene of her sweetest social triumph; from the
town that necessarily rated her one of the Greystoke circle. It was
manifest to the prudent and ambitious Miss Westbrook, that nothing could
be more favourable to her own hopes, and aims, and interest, than such a
residence at Keswick as would plant her amongst the local 'quality,' and
result in future invitations to the Castle,--nothing more certain to
please her money-grubbing and upward-looking father; nothing more likely
to conciliate Percy's wrathful father; no course more likely to end in her
own admission to Field Place during the life of Percy's mother.
At the same time it was no less manifest to Miss Westbrook that a better
place of residence than Keswick could not be found for her youthful and
erratic brother-in-law during the next two or three years. Living in
Sussex he would be a perpetual irritant to his irritable father. Living in
Cumberland he would be out of his father's way, and under the fewest
temptations to exasperate him to fiercer anger. Not only would he be out
of his father's way in Cumberland, but living there, in a certain sense,
under the Duke of Norfolk's patronage, he would be passing his time under
conditions most likely to confirm the Duke in his friendly disposition
towards him, and therefore most likely to result in the reconciliation of
the father and son. At Keswick her brother-in-law would have literary
society, form literary friendships, and have access to the libraries of
his literary friends. On hearing her brother-in-law enjoyed the Duke of
Norfolk's favour, and meant to remain for a considerable time at Greta
Bank, Miss Westbrook was hopeful that Mr. De Quincey would soon call upon
him. On their return to the lakes, Mr. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Mr.
John Wilson would make his acquaintance. Mr. Wordsworth might hold aloof
from the new-comers for a time, but in some way or other he would extend
the hand of good-fellowship to them, soon after Coleridge's reappearance
in his favourite haunts. Living with such friends, Percy would read many
books, and write a wonderful poem, that, raising him yet higher in the
omnipotent Duke's good opinion, would restore him to his father's favour,
and open the doors of Field Place to his wife and her sister. These were
Miss Westbrook's views of the position and prospect. No one can say they
were unreasonable views. Had they been so, Harriett would have accepted
them out of her usual submissiveness to so incomparable a sister. But
there was no need for Miss Westbrook to force her views of these matters
on her sister, who, without guidance or instruction of any kind, had come
to the same conclusions. Harriett and Eliza had seldom been of different
opinions on anything up to this point of their story. At least for once,
the concurrence of their sentiments was in no degree due to the elder
sister's authority.
Whilst Harriett and Miss Westbrook both liked the notion of living at
Keswick for a considerable period, Shelley also favoured it. One
consequence of Shelley's enthusiasm and nervous vehemence was that, whilst
he was the most changeable of mortals in some matters, he seldom did a
thing once without at the same time intending to do it 'for ever.' A
restless vagrant from his manhood's threshold to his death, he seldom
entered a picturesque place without declaring he would live in it 'for
ever.' He was perpetually doing things 'for ever,' and undoing them a few
days or weeks later. He never made a friendship with man or woman without
vowing the league should be perpetual. He went to York with the intention
of living there 'for ever.' He declared he would love Hogg 'for ever.' He
vowed he would live 'for ever' in friendship with Miss Hitchener, of
Hurstpierpoint, and no long time afterwards vowed just as passionately and
sincerely to hate her 'for ever.' It mattered not to him in periods of
passionate excitement, that in his opinion love and all other sentimental
preferences were mere consequences of perception and wholly independent of
volition. It mattered not that 'Love was free,' and that in his judgment
'To promise for ever to love the same woman was not less absurd than to
promise to believe the same creed,' because such a vow excluded its maker
from inquiries he might be constrained to make, and from new judgments he
might be compelled to form, and was therefore by the nature of things
powerless to bind its utterer when the mental perceptions required him to
disregard it. All the same, he never desired human affection without
praying for it, in order that he might enjoy it 'for ever,'--never wished
vehemently for anything without hoping, in his emotional intensity, to get
happiness from it 'for ever.' He promised to love Harriett Westbrook 'for
ever,' whilst believing himself to be so constituted that at no distant
time he might be powerless to love her at all. In the same spirit, with
the same fervour, and the same perception of love's fickleness and
instability, he carried off Mary Godwin with avowals that he would love
her 'for ever.' When Claire, in the 'Six weeks' tour,' exclaimed with
delight at each new scene of loveliness, 'Let us live here,' the lively
and humorous girl was laughing in her sleeve at Shelley's practice of
declaring he would 'live for ever' in any place, that pleased him greatly
at first sight. Allowance must be made for Shelley's vehement emotionality
and extravagance of diction by readers who would not be misled by his use
of 'ever' and 'never' in matters of his own personal story.
In the absence of positive evidence to the point, I have little doubt that
Shelley entered the rooms assigned to him in Mr. Calvert's house with a
declaration that he would inhabit them 'for ever,' and that the sisters
who had him in their keeping entered the same rooms with a strong opinion
that he would do well to inhabit them for a considerable time. He would
scarcely have remained in them for seven weeks had he not taken possession
of them with the intention of occupying them for as many years. How was it
then that he withdrew so soon from so eligible an abode? Certainly the
cause was neither a sudden dislike of Keswick, nor a diminution of his
affectionate regard for Mr. and Mrs. Calvert. There exists testimony in
his own handwriting that he left Keswick with regret, and the Calverts
with a hope to see more of them. 'I hope,' he wrote to a friend from
Whitehaven on 3rd February, 1812, as he was on the point of sailing for
Ireland, 'some day to show you Mrs. Calvert; I shall not forget her, but
will preserve her memory as another flower to compose a garland which I
intend to present to you.' How came he then to tear himself away at the
beginning of February, 1812, from a place he liked, and from friends in
whom he delighted? How was it that, on tearing himself from this place and
these friends, he went off to Ireland,--an expedition he certainly cannot
have thought of making when, on 26th November, 1811, he wrote to Mr.
Medwin, of Horsham, about a house in Sussex? How are we to account for the
change of purpose that sent him on a mission to Ireland for the Repeal of
the Union and the Emancipation of the Catholics? Successive writers have
either declared their inability to answer this question, or have answered
it in the wrong way.
Confessing his inability to answer the question, Hogg conjectures that
some Irish frequenter of the Mount Street coffee-house, or some Hibernian
Hampden, encountered by Shelley on the hills of Cumberland, may have
inspired Shelley with an ambition to settle all the Irish questions, and
put a period to all the Irish grievances, by making the voyage to Dublin,
and speaking words of wisdom to its inhabitants. Mr. Denis Florence
MacCarthy is certain that this new project for the pacification of Ireland
was the natural result of Shelley's Oxonian study of Irish history and
legends; that the poet went to Ireland of his own mere motion, after
coming slowly and dispassionately to a strong and reasonable opinion that
he would do Ireland good service, by visiting her capital, and in the
course of a few weeks converting her children to moderation, temperance,
industry, orderliness, and universal political amenity. The present writer
is no less certain that Shelley's Oxonian concern for Irish literature had
nothing to do with his marvellous scheme for settling Irish difficulties;
that his premature departure from Keswick was mainly due to his dislike of
Southey; and that his Irish mission was the outcome of sentiments arising
from his acrimonious disputations with the same poet on questions of Irish
politics.
It is not surprising that the man of letters and his young friend
exchanged their views on questions that engaged the attention of all
persons interested in the politics of the United Kingdom. It would have
been strange had the _Quarterly_ Reviewer and the literary aspirant--the
mature Tory, who spoke disdainfully of his former republicanism as mere
boyish effervescence, and the youthful enthusiast of the revolutionary
school--differed amicably on matters, so calculated to stir the temper of
either disputant. Whilst they were alike fervid and intolerant, each had a
manner peculiarly irritating to the other, as soon as their pulses
quickened under verbal contention. Overbearing and contemptuous, even to
those who agreed with him, Southey soon grew insufferably dogmatic and
disdainful to the boy who had the presumption to contradict him. Never
remarkable for a reverential and conciliatory demeanour to those of his
elders who ventured to teach him what he did not wish to be taught,
Shelley soon ceased to show his opponent the respect due from him to a
man, so greatly his superior by age, experience, and achievement.
Southey's attempts to snub his young friend into submissiveness, and
lecture him into sensible views, only stirred and stung Shelley to declare
in shriller notes his repugnance to the views that were forced upon him in
so dictatorial a manner. On finding that in Southey's study and presence
he was expected to hold silence and take instruction, the young gentleman
(_ætat._ 19), who deemed himself qualified 'to hold the argument
everywhere,' became furious. Of course, everything Southey said in this
insolent style, against the Irish, only made Shelley think, or confirmed
him in thinking, the reverse. The more insultingly he was told that all
Ireland needed was firm government and the steady maintenance of existing
laws, the more clear was it to Shelley that Ireland's chief need was the
gentle rule of new and humane laws. Southey's assertions that reasoning
was wasted on the Irish, for whose government the bayonet was the best
instrument, only made Shelley more positive that the Irish were a gentle,
generous, and reasonable people, who could be reasoned into virtuous
behaviour, and be cured by sympathetic and persuasive speech of their
faults and failings,--faults and failings chiefly, if not altogether, due
to the tyranny under which they had groaned so long.
To show that he was altogether right, and the exasperating Southey
altogether wrong, about Ireland and the Irish, Shelley set to work with
his pen on the production of _An Address to the Irish People_, that,
written at Keswick in the last month of 1811 and the first month of 1812,
was printed and published at Dublin in February, 1812. As the words of
this curious and delightfully boyish composition fell to the paper, it
struck the author that it would be well for him to visit Ireland, and
enforce with his persuasive tongue the wholesome admonitions of his
pen,--and very pleasant for him, and Harriett, and Eliza, to observe in
the streets of Dublin the first signs of that conversion of the Irish
people to thrift, industry, temperance, and tolerance, which could not
fail to be the immediate consequence of the publication of so excellent an
essay. This notion of going to Ireland, for the purpose of contributing
to, and witnessing the success of, his pamphlet, was the more agreeable to
Shelley because he was eager to get away from the odious Southey, and
because, in going to Ireland (of all places of the earth's surface) to get
out of the renegade's way, he would exhibit, in a singularly telling and
emphatic manner, his contempt for all that had been urged to the discredit
of the dear Irish people by the malignant apostate from pantisocratic and
other republican principles. Under these circumstances, is it wonderful
that the later slips of the _Address_ were written in the midst of
arrangements for the author's expedition to the land, that would be so
speedily recovered from rancour and wretchedness to contentment and
prosperity?
Whilst writing the _Address to the Irish People_ at Greta Bank, Shelley
found other employment for his pen, in producing verses to Robert Emmett's
glorification, with other additions to the collection of poems which he
designed to publish in Dublin; and in throwing off letters to Miss Eliza
Hitchener, of Hurstpierpoint, near Brighton, and to a certain famous
author and struggling bookseller, who must have experienced emotions of
amusement and self-complacence on perusing the first of the letters, in
which the author of the _Necessity of Atheism_, approached William Godwin
with expressions of profoundest reverence, several months before he was
permitted to gaze on the altogether human lineaments of the divine
philosopher.
In the first of these letters (a letter dated from Keswick on 3rd January,
1812, though it is one of the many blunders of Mr. Kegan Paul's book about
Godwin to insist that it was written from Keswick ten months before
Shelley set foot in the place) Shelley assures the addressee of the
epistle that 'the name of Godwin has been used to excite in him feelings
of reverence and admiration;' that he has been 'accustomed to consider'
the sublime Godwin as 'a luminary too dazzling for the darkness which
surrounds him;' and that after long regarding the sublime Godwin
regretfully as one of 'the honourable dead,' as a personage 'the glory of
whose being had passed from this earth of ours,' he has learned with
'inconceivable emotions' that so great a benefactor of his species still
has an earthly existence and an earthly habitation in Skinner Street, in
the City of London. 'It is not so,' ejaculates the writer of the adulatory
epistle; 'you still live, and, I firmly believe, are still planning the
welfare of human kind.' It was in this strain of extravagant and
obsequious reverence that Shelley approached, in January, 1812, the man
whose house he entered some months later, whose hospitality he accepted
freely as it was proffered, and whose sixteen-years-old daughter he lured
into Free Love two and a half years later. It is also well for the reader
to know and remember, that at the time of writing this characteristic
epistle, the singularly truth-loving Shelley had not recently discovered
with inconceivable emotion that Godwin was still living and following his
trade in Skinner Street. The evidences are clear that the sentimental
words about the writer's regret for the death of the too dazzling luminary
were untrue words.
The dazzling luminary, who would perhaps have left the letter unanswered,
had not its adulation tickled his self-complacence agreeably, replied in
terms that caused the young enthusiast to produce an autobiographic
fragment for his correspondent's enlightenment. Writing from Keswick on
10th January, 1812, to the philosopher of Skinner Street, Shelley (after
the customary announcement of his filial relation to 'a man of fortune in
Sussex') remarks that his habits of thinking never coincided with his
father's habits of thinking; that it was his misfortune in childhood to be
'required to love, because it was his duty to love' his father, a system
of coercion which, of course, rendered it impossible for him to love his
father; and that he published his two novels (_St. Irvyne_ and
_Zastrozzi_) before he was seventeen years of age,--a statement not a
little wide of historic truth. Instead of publishing these books when he
was at Eton, and only sixteen years of age, he was seventeen years and ten
months old when he published the earlier story, and eighteen years and
four months old when he published the later tale, both romances having
appeared whilst he was a member of University College, Oxford. These
inaccuracies are followed in the letter by a more remarkable example of
the writer's inaccuracy in statements touching his personal affairs.
Representing that he read Godwin's _Political Justice_, and adopted its
views, whilst he was at Eton, he adds, 'No sooner had I formed the
principles which I now profess than I was anxious to disseminate their
benefits. This was done without the slightest caution. I was twice
expelled, but recalled by the interference of my father.' All this is
represented to have taken place at Eton before he 'went to Oxford;' yet it
is certain that he never published anything controversial on the questions
raised in the _Political Justice_ whilst he was at Eton, and no less
certain that he was not twice expelled from the school for doing so.
Though he left Eton prematurely, and with a bad name, his dismissal from
the school differed so widely from expulsion, that he would not have been
justified in speaking of himself as having been expelled once.
In the same letter (of 10th January, 1812, to Godwin) Shelley says of the
circumstances of his expulsion from Oxford,
'I printed a pamphlet, avowing my opinions and its occasion.... Mr.
----, at Oxford, among others, had the pamphlet; he showed it to the
Master and the Fellows of University College, and I was sent for. I
was informed that in case I denied the publication, no more would be
said. I refused and was expelled.'
It is scarcely needful for me to remind the readers of this work, that the
collegiate authorities never told him he could escape punishment by
disclaiming the publication; never urged him to deny the publication;
never expelled him for refusing to deny it. The whole statement is untrue
in every particular. What made him pen these untruths, with or without
cognizance of their absolute untruthfulness? Ever taking the most
charitable view of his friend's most perplexing infirmity, Hogg maintains
that Shelley had no intention of misstating the case when he misstated it
so egregiously.
'This is incorrect,' says Hogg; 'no such offer was made, no such
information was given; but musing on the affair, as he was wont, he
dreamed that the proposal had been declined by him, and thus he had
the gratification of believing that he was more of a martyr than he
really was.'
Yet further Shelley writes in the same delusive style in the same
epistle:--
'It will be necessary, in order to elucidate this part of my history,
to inform you that I am heir by entail to an estate of £6000 per
annum.... My father has ever regarded me as a blot, a defilement of
his honour. He wished to induce me by poverty to accept of some
commission in a distant regiment, and in the interim of my absence to
prosecute the pamphlet, that a process of outlawry might make the
estate on his death devolve to my younger brother. These are the
leading points of the history of the man before you.... I am married
to a woman whose views are similar to my own. To you, as the regulator
and former of my mind, I must ever look with real respect and
veneration.'
Readers should notice and remember each of the several untruthful
statements of this extract. (1) It was untrue that the Squire of Field
Place had 'ever regarded' his son 'as a blot and defilement of his
honour.' (2) It was untrue that the Squire had endeavoured to force his
son to accept a commission in a distant regiment in order that, during his
absence on military service, he might deprive him by legal process of his
birthright to the advantage of his younger brother. (3) It was untrue that
the Squire had put pressure on his son to enter the army, though it has
been suggested by one of the poet's several friendly biographers that,
soon after his expulsion from Oxford, it may perhaps have been suggested
to the unruly boy that he should adopt the military profession, like his
cousin Tom Medwin, who went from the University into a cavalry regiment.
(4) The father who had dealt so leniently and tenderly with his son on
first hearing of his academic disgrace, never for an instant entertained a
thought of compassing the prosecution of the author and printer of the
scandalous tract. Of the malicious purpose and scheme, attributed to the
kindly though irascible Squire of Field Place by the boy to whom he had
been a considerate and good father, Hogg says justly:--
'It is only in a dream that the prosecution, outlawry, and devolution
of the estate could find place. The narration of such proceedings
would have been too strong and strange for a German romance; it would
have been too large a requisition upon the reader's credulity to ask
him to credit them in the father of _Zastrozzi_....'
One may well smile at such egregious ignorance of law and affairs in the
self-confident youth, who was preparing to visit Ireland in order to
Emancipate the Catholics, Repeal the Union, and instruct the whole Irish
people in political science. It is, however, no matter for smiling that
this young scatterbrain, whom his adulators compare with the Saviour of
the World, penned these egregious inventions to his father's discredit in
a letter to a person, with whom he had no domestic connexion,--to a
stranger, of whom he knew nothing, save that he was a writer of
entertaining and clever books.
Readers must settle for themselves whether the untruthful statements were
sheer and wilful untruths, or the fruits of misconception scarcely
compatible with mental sanity, or products of a state of mind that would
justify the critic in adopting Peacock's term, and speaking of them as
results of 'semi-delusion.' On these points there may be room for
differences of opinion; but it must be obvious to all judicious readers
that in putting the erroneous statements on paper, the generous and
chivalric Shelley was actuated by a desire to exhibit his father as an
unnatural and treacherous parent to the man of letters, to whom the
epistle was addressed. Had the Squire of Field Place been the bad father
Shelley declared him, it was not for Shelley to say so in a letter to a
stranger. Even to his nearest and dearest friend--even to so familiar a
comrade as Hogg, in the time of their most affectionate intimacy--Shelley
would have been silent on so painful and shameful a subject, had he been
the loyal and chivalrous being his idolaters would have us think him.
Readers may also reflect on the different strain in which Shelley, only a
few weeks earlier, wrote of his father to the Duke of Norfolk. Godwin, the
stranger, is informed by Shelley that his father regards him as a blot
and defilement; that his father had striven to force him out of the
country into distant military service; that his father had designed to
institute legal proceedings against him for writing _The Necessity of
Atheism_; that his father had desired to despoil him of his birthright,
and place his younger brother next in succession to the family estate.
These statements are made to the stranger, who is not likely to know the
real causes of his correspondent's estrangement from his father. But in
Shelley's letter to the Duke of Norfolk, who knows all about the domestic
question and the Squire's treatment of his son, it is not suggested by
Shelley that 'the pamphlet' had anything to do with his father's anger. On
the contrary, his father's extreme displeasure with him is attributed to
the real cause--his marriage, and the circumstances of the _mésalliance_.
Why this difference? To those who answer that, whereas Shelley was in his
right mind when writing to the Duke of Norfolk, and labouring under
delusions when writing to William Godwin, it must appear curiously
significant and suggestive of another conclusion--that he wrote truthfully
of his affairs to the correspondent who (to his knowledge) knew the truth
of them, and altogether untruthfully about his affairs to the person whom
he had reason to think ignorant of them.
Godwin's answer to the letter containing these inaccurate statements is
not extant; but it is on the evidences that the philosopher's reply
indicated surprise at, and disapproval of, the terms in which his youthful
correspondent had spoken of his father. Finding he had exhibited himself
in an unfavourable light to the author of _Political Justice_, Shelley
hastened to retrieve the false step, and recover his correspondent's good
opinion by writing (14th January, 1812), in his third letter from Keswick
to Skinner Street:--
'You mistake me if you think that I am angry with my father. I have
ever been desirous of a reconciliation with him, but the price which
he demands for it is a renunciation of my opinions, or, at least a
subjection to conditions which should bind me to act in opposition to
their very spirit. It is probable that my father has acted for my
welfare....'
Neither misconception nor semi-delusion can be pleaded for Shelley's
statement that he was not angry with his father. It was not true that he
had 'ever been desirous of a reconciliation with his father.' The two
statements were untruths, told by Shelley in order to set himself right
with his correspondent. For the same purpose he now admits that his father
(charged in the previous letter with an execrable design for depriving him
of his birthright) may have acted for his welfare. Other words of the
extract should have the reader's thoughtful consideration. One of the
charges against the Squire of Field Place being that, after banishing his
son from his boyhood's home at the instigation of religious intolerance,
he required his son's renunciation of his sincere opinions as the
condition for their reconcilement, it is well for readers of the poet's
story to take especial notice of his admission that, instead of being
required to renounce his opinions, he was only required to 'submit to
conditions which should bind him to act in opposition to their very
spirit,' words of qualification which, coming from Shelley, are sufficient
evidence to the moderation and reasonableness of the conditions. There is
a wide difference between a demand for the renunciation of opinions and a
demand for abstinence from noisy and aggressive assertion of them; and the
father who requires a youngster in his nonage to hold his pen and tongue
on certain subjects of difficult and perilous controversy is guilty of no
despotic excess of paternal authority. The forbearance which Mr. Timothy
Shelley had required of his son was in truth nothing more than the
forbearance which William Godwin was already urging the youngster to
exercise for his own advantage. 'I will not again,' Shelley writes to his
newly selected Mentor, 'crudely obtrude my peculiar opinions or my doubts
on the world;' a promise which he, of course, had no intention of keeping;
a promise he was, even at the moment of making it, on the point of
breaking in the imbecile _Address to the Irish People_. Had he made the
same promise to his father and kept it, there would have been peace
between them,--at least on mere matters of opinion.
Writing to William Godwin, on 16th January, 1812, a letter that affords
some curious examples of the obsequious adulation with which he approached
the man of letters, whose friendship he was desirous of winning, Shelley
remarked:--
'I have known no tutor or adviser (_not excepting my father_) from
whose lessons and suggestions I have not recoiled with disgust. The
knowledge which I have, whatever it may be (putting out of the
question the age of grammar and the horn-book), has been acquired by
my unassisted efforts. I have before given you a slight sketch of my
earlier habits and feelings--my present are, in my opinion, infinitely
superior--they are elevated and disinterested; such as they are, you
have principally produced them.'
'I have known no tutor or adviser (_not excepting my father_) from whose
lessons and suggestions I have not recoiled with disgust.' This language
is no less comprehensive than precise. Including all his schoolmasters and
other official teachers, it includes all his advisers and social
monitors--includes even his own father. How about Dr. Lind?--the wise, the
humane, the gentle and large-minded Dr. Lind? the physician who trained
him in science and philosophy, and carried him through brain-fever at
Field Place? the benign hermit of _Laon and Cythna_, the persuasive
teacher of _Prince Athanase_? Readers cannot need to be reminded of all
Shelley told Hogg and his second wife about the wise physician's influence
on his mental and moral development; of the poetic egotisms of _Laon and
Cythna_ and _Prince Athanase_, that glorified the doctor for having been
the beneficent illuminator of his pupil's young mind; the poetic egotisms
which Mrs. Shelley accepted, and the present Lady Shelley regards, as
severely accurate autobiographic evidence. Taking them _au pied de la
lettre_ Lady Shelley argues from these scraps of egotistic verse as though
they were historic _data_ of unimpeachable authority. Lady Shelley is
confident that Dr. Lind ('the erudite scholar and amiable old man,' as she
styles him) was one of Shelley's Eton tutors,--a tutor in whom he
delighted at school, and remembered in after-life with love and
veneration. Yet Shelley assures us that up to January, 1812, he never had
tutor or adviser of any kind from whose lessons and suggestions he had not
recoiled with disgust. Did Shelley really recoil with disgust from the
hard-swearing doctor who taught him to curse his father?--from the
enlightened physician who guided his 'scientific studies?' Or had he clean
forgotten the doctor and all his virtuous ways when he was writing from
Keswick to William Godwin? To those who answer this last question in the
affirmative, it must seem strange that Dr. Lind, with all his virtue and
wisdom, was so completely forgotten by the young gentleman, whom he had
influenced so strongly and agreeably so few years since. If Dr. Lind was
so great a power in the poet's education as trustful readers of his poetry
imagine, it is passing strange that Shelley never remembered him when he
was recalling his teachers and their services in the first month of 1812.
By those who attribute the frequent inaccuracies of his personal
statements to a fertile fancy, an innocent and unconscious inventiveness,
it must be considered that Shelley's unruly and too vigorous imagination
was suspiciously associated with an unreliable (though often strongly
retentive) memory,--that whilst curiously apt to imagine things had taken
place which had never occurred, he was also at times strangely forgetful
of matters that he might well have been thought certain to remember.
On learning from this same Keswick letter of 16th January, 1812, that
Shelley had made up his mind to go shortly to Dublin, with his wife and
sister-in-law, for the purpose of furthering, to the utmost of their joint
powers, the cause of Catholic Emancipation, Godwin (who seems to have been
vastly delighted with the letters from Keswick, whilst seeing much to
disapprove in them) sent his youthful and enthusiastic correspondent a
letter of introduction to Curran, the Irish Master of the Rolls. In the
letter which acknowledged the note of introduction as 'a great and
essential service,' Shelley (28th January, 1812) referred apologetically
to the lawfulness of his union with Harriett Westbrook, as a concession he
made to despotic usage from 'considerations of the unequally weighty
burden of disgrace and hatred, which a resistance to this system' (_i.e._
of lawful wedlock) 'would entail upon his companion' in connubial
felicity. Yet further in defence of his politic 'submission to the
ceremonies of the Church,' and in reference to the uneven consequences of
the other and in some respects better course, he remarked, 'a man in such
a case, is a man of gallantry and spirit--a woman loses all claim to
respect and politeness. She has lost modesty, which is the female
criterion of virtue, and those, whose virtues extend no further than
modesty, regard her with hatred and contempt.'
Unaware how completely Godwin had abandoned certain of his earlier views
respecting wedlock (_i.e._ (1) that in the existing state of English
society the existence of mutual love was a sufficient sanction of the
conjugal association of a man and woman; (2) that where such love existed
it was better for spouses to live together in the liberty of Free Love
than in the bondage of lawful marriage; and (3) that the institution of
lawful matrimony was a demoralizing interference with the liberty of
individuals), Shelley regarded his marriage as a domestic incident, from
which he would suffer in the philosopher's esteem, unless he were duly
informed of the considerations which had determined Harriett's husband to
accommodate his conjugal arrangements to the prejudices of society. But
though he wrote thus apologetically of his marriage, in order to place
himself higher in the philosopher's favour, Shelley wrote honestly. From
his Eton days he had been a favourer of Free Love. But for Hogg, he would
have taken Harriett to his embrace without marrying her. He did not
relinquish his purpose of uniting himself to her in the loose and easy
fashion, until Hogg had made him see the enormity of the disadvantages
that would ensue to him and her from the arrangement. The principal
reasons he gave in January, 1812, for having married her were the same
reasons he gave in the previous August for determining to marry her.
Another thing to be noticed in this statement to Godwin is its evidence
how precisely he saw, and how fully he realized, the shameful character of
the position held by a woman living conjugally with a man not her lawful
husband,--the position in which he, ere long, placed his intimate friend's
sixteen-years-old daughter. Whilst the male partner of such an association
merely acquired a reputation for gallantry and spirit, the female lost all
title to social respect. Whilst he became the gallant keeper of a
mistress, she became nothing less contemptible than a kept mistress. The
youngster of birth and breeding, who saw this in the January of 1812, saw
it no less clearly in the summer of 1814, when he determined to become the
gallant keeper of a mistress, and, in violation of one of the most sacred
laws of hospitality, prevailed on his intimate friend's sixteen-years-old
daughter to accept the position of a mistress.
Shelley did not leave Keswick without a plan for making away with time
agreeably in the ensuing summer, when he should have emancipated the Irish
Catholics, repealed the Act of Union, and withdrawn from the land he had
endowed with perpetual felicity. On 16th January, 1812, he wrote to
Godwin: 'In the summer we shall be in the north of Wales. Dare I hope that
you will come to see us? Perhaps this would be an unfeasible neglect of
your avocations. I shall hope it until you forbid me.' Twelve days later
(28th January, 1812), whilst referring lightly to this project for a
meeting in Wales, Shelley ventured to express his hope that in the ensuing
summer he and Harriett would entertain Mr. and Mrs. Godwin, and their
children, in the same romantic spot, where it was their purpose to receive
another 'most dear friend.' This 'most dear friend' was Miss Eliza
Hitchener of Hurstpierpoint in Sussex, whose acquaintance Shelley had
formed whilst staying under his Uncle Pilford's roof at Cuckfield.
Philosopher, Deist, and Republican, Miss Eliza Hitchener kept a school for
little girls at Hurstpierpoint, and seems to have enjoyed, in her
particular parish of Sussex, a larger measure of social respect than was
accorded to her father, the keeper of a public-house in the same
neighbourhood, who had been in some way or other concerned in the
contraband trade of the Sussex coast, before he changed his name from
Yorke to Tichener and joined the noble army of licensed victuallers. Thus
much was discovered about Miss Hitchener and her father from the letter,
written by Joint-Postmaster-General, the Earl of Chichester, to the
Secretary of the General Post Office on 5th April, 1812:--'Miss Hichener,'
the Earl wrote, 'of Hurstpierpoint, keeps a school there, and is well
spoken of; her Father keeps a Publick House in the neighbourhood; he was
originally a smugler, and changed his name from Yorke to Tichener, before
he took the Publick House.' The statesman, who spelt smuggler with a
single 'g,' and described Mrs. Shelley as 'a servant, or some person of
very low birth,' cannot be said to merit unqualified confidence for the
accuracy of his spelling and personal intelligence; but he may have been
right in representing that the whilom 'smugler' and his daughter assumed
different surnames. As an instructress of children, Miss Hitchener may
have had a professional motive for getting away from her papa's assumed
surname, even as he had a sound prudential motive for getting away from a
proper name, disagreeably familiar to the 'smuglers' of the Sussex coast.
Anyhow, the lady figures as Miss Eliza Hitchener in Shelleyan annals.
Opinions differ respecting Miss Hitchener's character and conduct. Shelley
had not known her long before he thought much ill of her. But there are
sufficient grounds for a confident opinion that she was neither the
angelic creature he imagined her, whilst cherishing her with platonic
affection, nor the superlatively evil being he imagined her when he came
to denounce her, in shrillest notes of abhorrence, for being a brown demon
and an hermaphrodite.
CHAPTER XVIII.
SHELLEY'S QUARREL WITH HOGG.
Shelley's Suspicion of Hogg--His Conviction of Hogg's Guilt--Did Hogg
make the Attempt--The Manipulated Letter--Hogg's Object in publishing
it--His Purpose in altering it--The Great Discovery--Evidence of
Hogg's Guilt--Sources of the Evidence--Shelley's Correspondence with
Miss Hitchener--His Letters from Keswick to Hogg--Their vehement
Affectionateness--Eliza Westbrook in Office--Shelley under
Training--Sisters in Council--Shelley's Conferences with
Harriett--Proofs of Hogg's Innocence--_Primâ Facie_ Improbability--Why
Hogg was not charged at York--His Arraignment at Keswick--Condemned in
his Absence--The Reconciliation--Divine Forgiveness--Hogg's
Restoration to Intimacy with Harriett--Shelley's subsequent Intimacy
with Hogg--Hogg's Intimacy with Mary Godwin--Shelley's Acknowledgment
of Delusion--He begs Pardon of Hogg--Hogg's Denials of the
Charge--Hypothetical Letters--Concluding Estimate of Harriett's
Evidence--If Hogg should be proved Guilty--Consequences to Shelley's
Reputation.
Whilst telling William Godwin of his benevolent purpose towards Ireland,
Shelley was silent on the subject to the incomparable Hogg. How was this?
Hogg had fallen out of Shelley's favour. Incomparable till circumstances
caused Miss Eliza Westbrook to regard him with enmity, Hogg became
incomparably evil in Shelley's eyes before the trio bade the Calverts
farewell with tearful emotion, and set their faces for Whitehaven. What
evil had the alternately ductile and unmanageable Shelley been educated
into thinking of his no longer incomparable friend?
There is no need to answer the question, readers having been already
informed that Shelley did not leave Keswick, without coming to the
conviction that Hogg had attempted to seduce Harriett, either on the
journey from Edinburgh to York, or in the last-named city. Shelley did not
charge Hogg with seducing Harriett, but only with _attempting_ to seduce.
Had he charged Hogg with the larger offence, he would have preferred
against his familiar friend the accusation that, even when it is supported
by considerable _primâ facie_ evidence, is so often found on enquiry to
have proceeded from unreasonable marital jealousy. In charging him with
the mere attempt, Shelley charged his friend with an offence which, though
no less flagitious, is by no means so easily proved as the more
comprehensive crime. There are crimes, whose preliminary circumstances are
necessarily too manifest and unequivocal to admit of any doubt of the
culprit's purpose. But seduction is one of the secret and insidious
offences, that are seldom preceded by circumstances affording evidence of
clear and unmistakable attempt to perpetrate them. No doubt cases arise
from time to time, where a seducer's measures for the accomplishment of
his purpose may be fairly described as a manifest attempt to commit the
crime. But these cases are rare. In most cases, where a man is charged
with attempting to seduce, the accusation rests altogether on
circumstances that, admitting of another construction, are compatible with
the innocence of the accused person.
To Field Place, animated by bitter memories of the biographer's 'two
volumes;' to the Shelleyan enthusiasts, quick to think evil of the
personal historian, who, refusing to write the poet's life into harmony
with the straight-nosed pictures, gave them a faulty instead of a
faultless Shelley; and to the Free Lovers, who, disliking Hogg for his
ridicule of their substitute for lawful marriage, see, in his alleged
attempt on Harriett's virtue, a way of accounting creditably for the
instability of the poet's devotion to his first wife,--Shelley's
conviction is a sufficient proof of Hogg's guilt. Years since, it was
enough for Hogg's enemies to hint vaguely that his intimacy with Harriett
was in no slight degree accountable for the briefness of Shelley's
affection for her. Of late, they have spoken of Hogg's iniquity with
greater freedom and boldness. No long while since, an _Edinburgh_ Reviewer
declared roundly that Hogg essayed to seduce Harriett within a few weeks
of her wedding. At the present time it is the fashion of the Shelleyan
specialists to speak of Hogg's egregious and revolting turpitude, as a
matter admitting of no doubt. To readers, however, who, whilst delighting
in Shelley's verse, are neither Shelleyan zealots, nor Free Lovers, nor
Field Place partisans, it may appear well to make some enquiries
respecting the nature and quality of the evidence that Hogg was so
monstrous an example of perfidy and uncleanness. If Hogg (who, from
certain points of view, was a typical English gentleman) can be proved
innocent of the flagrant iniquity, with which he has been charged, it is
desirable for the credit of his nation and race, that his innocence should
be established. Even by his most vehement admirers it is admitted that,
during his brief stay at Keswick, Shelley suffered from hallucination on
another matter:--that he imagined he suffered from a violent assault, when
no violence had been done him. According to one of his letters (26th
January, 1812) Shelley, only a day or so earlier, was assailed by a
robber, from whose felonious hands he escaped by falling fortunately
_into_ Mr. Calvert's house. No robbery had been attempted on the poet's
person: no robber had assaulted him. He was the victim of hallucination,
in thinking himself attacked by a robber under the very eaves of his
dwelling-place, and in imagining he escaped his assailant, by dropping
within the bounds of his own temporary home. The whole affair was the mere
whimsey of his own freakish imagination. If the fancy originated in
nervous derangement caused by opium, it was none the less a delusion. This
affair happened closely upon the time when Shelley came to think so ill of
Hogg. Even by the most cautious readers it will be admitted that the young
man, who experienced an imaginary attack on his person, was a likely young
man to experience a no less imaginary attack on his honour. The evidence
is superabundant that Shelley suffered at times from grotesque delusions.
This is admitted by his more discreet apologists, who use the mental
infirmity to account for circumstances that, but for the infirmity, would
prove him superlatively untruthful. To show, therefore, that Shelley was
deluded in thinking Hogg an incomparable villain, is only to exhibit him
as suffering from mental disorder, to which he was certainly liable.
Moreover, it is my purpose to show that my view of the circumstances,
resulting in the transient severance of the two friends, is not more
favourable to Hogg's reputation, than needful for Shelley's honour.
What is the evidence that Hogg made _the attempt_? At this distance from
1811, the evidence must be sought for in MSS. or printed pages,
exhibiting,--(1), words written by Shelley, or credibly reported to have
been spoken by him; (2), words written by Hogg, or credibly reported to
have been spoken by him; (3), words written by Harriett, or credibly
reported to have been spoken by her; (4), words written by persons, who
(like Southey at Keswick, or Miss Hitchener at Hurstpierpoint) derived
their information directly or indirectly from Shelley, Hogg, or Harriett,
or from more than one of them, or credibly reported to have been spoken by
persons, so informed directly or indirectly by Shelley, Hogg, or Harriett;
(5), words proceeding from persons who, without being known, may be
reasonably assumed to have derived their information from Hogg, Shelley,
or Harriett. Of statements made by unreliable diarists, letter-writers,
and other literary tattlers, who merely recorded gossip that came to them
from uncertain sources, no account should be taken. There exists no small
mass of matters (written or printed), to be placed in one or another of
these five classes of evidential statements. It is in the nature of things
that the information gained from such sources should be more or less
unsatisfactory. No one of the givers of information can be cross-examined
respecting his or her testimony; much need though there is for such
cross-examination, in order to render the evidence fairly reliable. For
the production of a credit-worthy account of the most puzzling business of
Shelley's perplexing story, all one can do is to pick out from a mass of
matters the apparently credit-worthy statements, and deal cautiously,
whilst dealing inferentially, with them.
Were evidence weighty in proportion to the number of the sources, from
which it is gathered, the evidence of Hogg's guilt would not be light. But
the testimony of a single scrap of paper may countervail and even
annihilate the testimony of a hundred different documents. One fact in
this affair of manifold uncertainties is, however, indisputable:--that for
several months from some date of his residence at Keswick, Shelley
believed Hogg to have made an attempt on Harriett's honour. Shelley spoke
and wrote too freely of Hogg's iniquity for there to be any room for doubt
whether he really thought so ill of his friend. And it cannot be
questioned, that, had Shelley been constituted like most other young
Englishmen of his social degree,--had he been as discreet in judgment, as
accurate in statement, as unlikely to be carried away from common-sense by
the forces of a lawless imagination, as exempt from proneness to delusion,
as most young English gentlemen,--his bare utterance of his deliberate
conviction, that Hogg had essayed to compass Harriett's dishonour, would
be strong _primâ facie_ evidence that the conviction was no less
reasonable than dismal. But Shelley was not constituted like other young
men. Instead of being evenly balanced, his mind was often swayed by
delusive fancies. He was habitually inaccurate in his statements. At the
very time of thinking so ill of his friend, he suffered from hallucination
on another subject. Instead of being an accurate observer of facts, he
could believe himself assailed by a robber, when no one attacked him. The
young man who thought Hogg capable of trying to seduce his wife, was the
young man who thought his father was set on locking him up in a lunatic
asylum. To see how far Shelley's conviction about Hogg was reasonable or
unreasonable, it is needful to know the facts that determined his judgment
in the matter. My view of those facts will soon be given. But before it is
submitted to readers of this chapter, it is well for them to be reminded
that the original mere facts, pointing to Hogg's infamy, can, in the first
instance, have been known to no one but Hogg, Harriett, and Shelley. It is
inconceivable that Hogg attempted to seduce Harriett under the very eyes
of her sister. Whatever he _did_ to provoke the hideous charge must have
been done at some time prior to Miss Eliza Westbrook's arrival at York;
and her knowledge of the criminatory facts must have been derived from one
or more of the three. As Hogg cannot be imagined to have given her any
evidence against himself, she must have gained her knowledge of the
criminatory facts from Shelley or her sister, or from both. Shelley's
knowledge of _facts_, which he came to regard as evidential of his
friend's guilt, may have resulted altogether from his own personal
observation; but he may be presumed to have gathered the knowledge from
his wife's words, no less than from personal observation. Hogg certainly
was not likely to tell his friend, or any other person, anything that
could fairly be construed into evidence that he was a villain. As the
criminatory _facts_ (_i.e._ of Hogg's conduct) cannot have been known in
the first instance to anyone but Shelley, Hogg, and Harriett, all our
knowledge of those facts (in whatever forms and through whatever channels
it has reached us) must have proceeded originally from Hogg, Shelley, or
Harriett. It is not to be supposed that Hogg either confessed having made
the attempt, or admitted to anyone that he had done aught incompatible
with his innocence of so serious an offence. It follows, therefore, that
our knowledge of facts, in any degree evidential of Hogg's guilt, is
referable, in some way or other, to the _ex-parte_ statements of the
husband or wife, or both of them.
That Shelley went from York to Cumberland without thinking that Hogg had
made an attempt on Harriett's virtue, appears,--(1), from the passionate
affectionateness with which he wrote to Hogg from Keswick; (2), from the
fact that, for some time, Hogg was permitted to write letters to Harriett
at Keswick; (3), from the fact that Harriett was permitted and encouraged
by her husband to answer the letters she received at Keswick from Hogg. It
is inconceivable that Shelley would have allowed his young bride to
correspond with the man who, to his belief, had only a few weeks since
tried to seduce her; that he would himself have continued to write
letters, overflowing with protestations of friendship and love, to the man
whom he regarded as having essayed to compass her ruin and her husband's
dishonour. Is it suggested that Shelley's peculiar notions, touching the
intercourse of the sexes, qualified him to live in amity with a man so
lately desirous of seducing his wife? There is conclusive evidence that he
was not a man to consent thus tamely to his own dishonour. On coming to
the conviction that Hogg had been guilty of _the attempt_, Shelley broke
with him promptly, and ceasing to correspond with him denounced him for a
villain. It was thus Shelley acted towards Hogg, after he had been fully
educated into thinking Hogg had not only admired Harriett with
embarrassing and dangerous fervour, but had actually tried to seduce her.
Here, surely, is sufficient proof that, had he thought so ill of Hogg on
leaving York, he could not have written affectionately to him from
Keswick, and at the same time have encouraged Harriett to correspond with
him.
Whilst requiring Hogg to keep away from Harriett, till his admiration of
her should have survived an enthusiasm too passionate for her ease and his
safety, Shelley wrote to him from Keswick, 'Think not I am otherwise than
your friend:--a friend to you now more fervent, more devoted than ever,
for misery endears to us those whom we love. You are, you shall be, my
bosom friend:'--words to be found in the heart of the long and remarkable
epistle, which Hogg published in the second volume of the unfinished
_Life_ (_vide_ pp. 490-497), describing it as a 'Fragment of a Novel,' and
saying of it lightly--'This epistle from Albert to Werter is forcibly
written, with great power and energy; but it wants the warmth, the
tenderness, of Goethe and Rousseau.' The more effectually to disguise the
real nature of the composition from his ordinary readers, the biographer
substituted 'Charlotte' for 'Harriett' in his printed copy of the epistle.
What was the object of this mystification? Why did Hogg thus misdescribe
the letter, and substitute Charlotte for Harriett? These questions are
answered in two very different ways,--by the wildest of the Shelleyan
idolaters, who believe that the biographer (unquestionably guilty of
declining to write Shelley's story into harmony with the delusive
portraits) must have been an unutterably wicked person; and by those of
the poet's discreet admirers, who, whilst recognizing in Hogg's _Life_
many inaccuracies and a considerable element of untruthfulness, believe
the book to have been written on the whole with a sincere design of giving
the world a fair view of the poet's life and nature.
By the wildest of the Shelleyan idolaters it is maintained that Hogg had
scarcely set eyes on his friend's girlish bride, when he tried to lure her
from the ways of wifely goodness; that entertaining this infamous design
on the young lady, who but for him would not have been married at all,
Hogg set about seducing her either at Edinburgh, or on the road from
Edinburgh to York, or in the dingy dwelling of the dingy milliners; that
Shelley withdrew her precipitately from York, in order to remove her from
the baneful influence of his false friend; and that, after vainly
combating Hogg's wicked passion with affectionate expostulations, Shelley
broke with the man who had proved himself so unworthy of his regard, and
ceasing to answer his letters, held no intercourse with him for a
considerable period. To those, who take this view of Hogg's character and
of the incidents that unquestionably resulted in a temporary estrangement
of the two friends, it appears obvious that the misdescription and
misleading alterations of the letter proceeded from Hogg's desire to
conceal the shameful circumstances that caused it to be written.
On the other hand, to those who can admire Shelley's poetry without
shutting their eyes to his various infirmities, and who on more than
sufficient grounds hold a strong opinion that Hogg never entertained evil
designs on his friend's wife, and that Shelley was under an equally absurd
and monstrous hallucination in thinking his familiar comrade capable of
such wickedness, it is no less obvious that the mystification Hogg
practised in his way of dealing with the epistle, instead of resulting
from care for his own honour, proceeded altogether from delicate concern
for the poet's reputation.
In the absence of positive evidence to the point, I do not hesitate to
assume, as a matter of course, that whilst writing his friend's history
Hogg was aware of the gravest and most revolting suspicions entertained of
him by Shelley. It may be just conceivable, but it is in the highest
degree improbable, that Hogg survived Shelley without discovering the
worst of the several evil things the poet thought, said, and wrote of him,
towards the close of 1811 and in the earlier months of 1812. But even if
it could be proved that, whilst discharging the functions of his friend's
biographer, Hogg was in this most improbable ignorance, it would be none
the less certain that he was aware Shelley had deemed him an unsuitable
companion for Harriett; had, in consequence of the monstrous notion,
ceased for several months to correspond with him; and had moreover been
deplorably communicative to certain of his acquaintance respecting his
reasons, for breaking in so singular a manner with so particular a friend.
Aware that he had for a time been the victim of Shelley's marital
jealousy, and that the disturbance of their friendship was known in the
esoteric Shelleyan coteries to have resulted from this jealousy, the
biographer reasonably determined (for his honour's sake no less than for
the sake of his friend's honour) to exhibit to those coteries a document,
so largely and precisely eloquent of the feelings and considerations that
occasioned the breach. At the same time it was no less natural for the
personal historian to shrink from calling universal attention to a matter,
so little calculated to win respect and sympathy for the poet in whose
honour the history was being written.
Wishing to deal frankly with the coteries, and less than frankly with the
multitude, Hogg bethought himself how he could enlighten the coteries on a
matter about which they had a claim to information, without offering
Shelley to the whole world's amusement in the equally ludicrous and
ignoble character of an unreasonably jealous husband. Hence the
biographer's determination to misdescribe and manipulate the document, so
that, whilst accepted in the coteries for what it was (viz. the poet's
confidential letter on matters of the nicest indelicacy), it should be
read by the multitude, as what it was not,--a mere scrap of romantic
fiction.
Several years have now passed since the Shelleyan enthusiasts, with much
clucking over their own critical sagacity, discovered that the 'fragment
of a novel' was a manipulated letter, and that Mr. Hogg was an
inordinately deceitful person in dressing the letter so delusively. From
every point of view the affair is one of the broadest comedy. The
discoverers of the real letter under the false label were comically
jubilant over their cleverness in discovering what was put under their
noses,--jubilant like children, crying with delight at finding what was
hidden from them only that they might have the pleasure of finding it. It
was droll to see how, in their eagerness to expose the biographer's
dishonesty, these discoverers revealed to the irreverent multitude what
the biographer hoped the enthusiasts of the coteries would keep to
themselves, out of tenderness for the poet's reputation. It was very droll
to observe how Hogg was denounced for tampering fraudulently with the
document, which he published thus cautiously for the enlightenment of the
initiated Shelleyans,--could have safely withheld, as it was his own
property; and would not have published even in so guarded a way, had he
not desired to afford sufficient information, on a matter respecting which
he had not the hardihood to be fully communicative.
It being certain that sooner or later the world will be authoritatively
assured of the sufficiency of Shelley's reasons for thinking Hogg designed
and tried to seduce the girlish bride; and that the allegations to this
effect will be made with the two-fold object of destroying the
biographer's credit and raising suspicions of Harriett's discretion and
modesty, even from the very commencement of her association with the poet,
it is right that readers should be forewarned and fore-armed against such
preposterous assertions, by a further exhibition of the influences that
caused Shelley to think so ill of his heretofore closest friend, and by an
adequate exposition of the superabundant reasons for declaring Hogg wholly
and absolutely innocent of the wickedness, which has long been charged
against him.
Enough has been said in a previous chapter of the incidents and
influences, that caused Shelley to regard his wife's intimacy with his
friend as an association which, already fruitful of embarrassment to the
former, threatened to become no less fruitful of moral injury to the
latter. There is no need to remind readers of the train of circumstances
closing with the flight from York to Keswick, or of the abundant
documentary evidence that Shelley arrived at Keswick with undiminished
confidence in his friend's loyalty and honour, though with a lower respect
for his discretion, considerateness, and moral robustness. Had he on
entering Keswick imagined that Hogg had deliberately contemplated to lure
Harriett from the ways of wifely dutifulness, and even taken steps to
compass her seduction, Shelley could not have written to him from Keswick
with the passionate affectionateness, that animates each and all of the
several extant letters he sent his friend at York during the earlier weeks
of the residence at Keswick.
The _Fragment of a Novel_, which I regard as the last of the extant series
of undated epistles from Keswick, affords abundant evidence that, almost
up to the moment of the cessation of his correspondence with Hogg, Shelley
accused his friend of nothing worse than indiscretion, weakness,
insincerity, imbecility:--_i.e._ _indiscretion_, in allowing so much of
passionate fervour to qualify his admiration of Harriett; _weakness_, in
prolonging the intimacy that was causing him perilous excitement;
_insincerity_, in trying to disguise from himself the nature of the
feelings into which he had been betrayed; and _imbecility_, surpassing
mere weakness, in declining to combat the feelings whose indulgence tended
to wickedness. The force of some of the writer's expressions, no doubt,
exceeds the force of anything in his earlier expostulations with
Harriett's too frank and impulsive admirer; the greater energy of the
language showing that Shelley was fast nearing the time, when he passed
suddenly from the state of mind in which he accused Hogg of nothing worse
than indiscretion, weakness, insincerity, and imbecility, to the state of
mind in which he charged him with villany.
But even in this far more cogent and strenuous epistle one comes upon
expressions that expressly acquit Hogg of the wickedness of wishing to
seduce a simple girl, who had been his friend's wife for only a few weeks.
In answer to language, by which Hogg appears to have repelled an
ungenerous suspicion, Shelley says in the letter, 'I admit the distinction
which you make between mistake and crime. I acquit you heartily of the
latter.' Whilst penning them, the writer of these words could not have
imagined Hogg guilty of a design on Harriett's virtue. In reply to other
words, by which Hogg seems to have attempted to disperse certain of his
correspondent's absurd fancies, Shelley says, 'I hope I have shown you
that I do not regard you as a smooth-tongued traitor; could I choose such
for a friend? could I still love him with affection unabated, perhaps
increased?' Curious and abnormal creature though he was, Shelley could not
have written thus, whilst believing his correspondent guilty of the
darkest treason.
After speaking of a letter Harriett has received from Hogg, Shelley says,
'Harriett will write to you to-morrow.' Could Shelley have in this manner
sanctioned his wife's correspondence with a man whom he believed guilty of
trying to seduce her? Shelley's idolaters answer this question in the
affirmative. They are welcome to their opinion; but they must not ask me
to insult him by holding it.
Within a few days of writing thus strenuously to Hogg, that he loved him
as deeply and passionately as ever, and that his wife would write to him
on the morrow, Shelley assured Miss Hitchener of Hurstpierpoint, that this
same Hogg had attempted to seduce Mrs. Shelley. Taking possession of
Shelley's mind, at Keswick, towards the close of 1811, this morbid fancy
held it for several months. The poet's correspondence with the
Hurstpierpoint schoolmistress affords conclusive testimony that, instead
of being a quickly transient delusion, arising from an overdose of opium,
and perishing with the nervous disturbance caused by the drug, this
ghastly hallucination occupied the future poet's brain, at least, from the
middle of his sojourn at Keswick till the close of the ensuing spring.
It is in the nature of things for Platonic friendships to be mistaken by
ordinary observers for less amiable and orderly attachments. When a young
gentleman is seen sauntering about sylvan glades and rural lanes with a
pretty milliner on his arm, or is known to be corresponding through the
post with a publican's daughter, the world is slow to think the intimacy
of the young people, wholly independent of the motives and considerations
that are usually more or less operative, when a young man of gentle rank
lavishes attention on a young woman of plebeian quality. On the contrary,
judging from appearances, with no excessive care for exceptional
idiosyncrasies, the world is apt to refer the unequal association to
certain of the most familiar affections. Though the avowal may move some
readers to smile at my simplicity, I have little doubt Shelley's liking
for Miss Eliza Hitchener was from first to last a purely Platonic
preference. It would, however, have been strange, had the people in and
about Cuckfield and Hurstpierpoint taken this charitable view of an
intimacy, that, causing no little gossip in and around those parishes,
moved local tattlers to declare Miss Hitchener no better than she ought to
be. Readers may not suppose that this view of Miss Hitchener's character
and relations with the poet was confined to the haunters of her father's
tavern. Having for some time regarded her nephew's civility to the
schoolmistress with suspicion, Mrs. Pilfold held a strong opinion in the
spring of 1812, that the continuance of the intimacy, now he had married
Harriett Westbrook, would be simply scandalous. Whether the lady wrote to
her nephew on the subject does not appear. Anyhow, he learnt through some
channel enough of his aunt's unfavourable opinion of the curious
friendship, to hold her chiefly accountable for certain Cuckfield gossip
that, moving him to indignation in April, 1812, caused him, on the 29th of
that month, to write from Nantgwilt to his friend at Hurstpierpoint, 'I
unfaithful to my Harriett! You a female Hogg! Common sense would laugh
such an idea to scorn, if indignation would wait till it could be looked
upon!'--words of evidence that at least to the end of April in 1812, the
writer was held firmly by the fancy that caused him to break with Hogg
towards the close of the previous year.
Eliza Westbrook was chiefly accountable for Shelley's passage from the
state of mind, in which he regarded Hogg as nothing worse than Harriett's
inconveniently emotional but loyal admirer, to the state of mind, in which
he regarded him as a treacherous libertine, set on seducing her. Even as
she had been at York the influence to carry Shelley from a condition of
unqualified confidence in his friend's discretion and moral robustness
into a condition of feverish apprehension for the consequences of his
tempestuous sentimentality, Eliza Westbrook became at Keswick the baneful
tutor, who educated him into thinking Hogg an egregious villain.
From the moment of her arrival at Keswick, to the moment when she could
congratulate herself on having effected her purpose, the woman whom Hogg
had hoped and tried to separate from her sister and brother-in-law, found
her chief occupation in bringing Shelley to the conviction that Hogg was a
black-hearted knave. In justice to the woman who accomplished this evil
work, it should be remembered that she had received no ordinary
provocation. She may have imagined she was rendering good service to her
childish and inexperienced sister. Though she was a person of some culture
and more than average cleverness, it is not to be supposed that John
Westbrook's elder daughter had, together with the superficial refinement,
acquired the delicate sensibility of a gentlewoman. Whilst there is
nothing to countenance an opinion that Miss Westbrook was remarkable for
mental purity and elevation, there is abundant evidence that in feeling
and temper she resembled the average womankind of the London
_bourgeoisie_. Born in a tavern, reared from infancy to girlhood's later
term in a bar-parlour, and shaping her course in accordance with Miss
Warne's canons of feminine propriety, she held on numerous questions the
views and notions, generally favoured, by people of the decent but
unrefined class, in which she had found her earliest teachers. It was
natural for her to think no young man could approach her beautiful sister
without regarding her passionately, and seizing the earliest occasion for
the gratification of his desire. Taking this view of Hogg and his peculiar
intimacy with Harriett, it is conceivable that Miss Westbrook was at times
less mindful of her strictly personal reasons for disliking the young
gentleman, than of the dangers from which she desired to save her sister.
It is not surprising that she resolved to put an end to an intimacy so
likely to tarnish Harriett's reputation, and even make her a faithless
wife.
Nor is it surprising that Miss Westbrook accomplished at Keswick the
purpose she formed at York,--the purpose she could scarcely have
accomplished at York, or anywhere else, so long as Shelley was in daily
personal intercourse with his incomparable friend. At York, with his
radiant smiles and racy humour, his cordial looks and sympathetic hints,
Hogg was more than a match for the enemy who, so long as he was on the
spot to answer precise charges of wickedness, could only hint that her
dear Harriett was embarrassed by his extravagant gallantry. But at Keswick
Shelley was altogether at the mercy of the quick-witted spinster, who,
recalling to his memory countless trivial incidents, knew well how to
give them a suspicious colour, and manipulate them into evidence that,
instead of being Harriett's chivalric admirer, Hogg had been her wicked
pursuer.
Resembling Byron in being easily governed by any woman with whom he was
thrown, so long as he was pleased with her, Shelley went to Keswick in the
best of humours with his wife's sister. Grateful to her for favouring his
pursuit of Harriett, and cheering him in sisterly fashion at a moment of
many troubles, he magnified her considerable cleverness into marvellous
sagacity, and discovered angelic sweetness in her transient complaisance.
At Keswick, and for several weeks after leaving Keswick, the youngster,
who had found a tyrant in his kindly father and rebelled against his
mother's mild control, surrendered himself to the government of his wife's
sister with comical submissiveness. When a freakish and petulant man
consents to petticoat rule, he usually reserves his freedom of action in
regard to a few matters of minor importance. But for awhile no spirit of
petty mannishness put a limit to Miss Westbrook's authority over her
brother-in-law. Pleased to be managed by her in great things, such as his
attitude towards Hogg, he was no less pleased to be governed by so
wonderful a woman in the smallest things. So long as he delighted in his
marvellous sister-in-law, Shelley was content to go about with empty
pockets, and take his sixpences from the diplomatic Eliza as he wanted
them. 'Eliza,' he wrote meekly from Dublin to Miss Hitchener, 'keeps our
common stock of money for safety in some nook or corner of her dress, but
we are not dependent on her, although she gives it out as we want it.'
Of course the lady, who gave money to her two children as they wanted it,
was aware that, to control them for any considerable period, she must be
mindful of their humours and govern them with gentleness; that to retain
her power over them she must drive with a light rein and seldom crack the
whip. Having opened Shelley's eyes to Hogg's iniquity, she was clever
enough to see and say what he saw and said on questions of poetry and
social science. To reward her brother-in-law for banishing the perfidious
Hogg from his breast, she promised to receive Miss Hitchener to her heart
in the ensuing summer, when the Sussex schoolmistress should come to them
in North Wales. In his altercations with Southey she was, of course,
altogether on her brother-in-law's side. If she doubted whether _The
Address_ would do all the author hoped of it, for the good of the Irish
people, she kept the doubt to herself. It may also be assumed confidently
that, on entering Dublin with Harriett's husband, she had never expressed
in his hearing any misgiving of his ability to emancipate the Catholics
and cancel the Act of Union. Miss Westbrook did not govern her erratic
brother-in-law for any long period; but her control over him would have
been less enduring by several months, had she not known that to rule a
freakish and wayward man on matters of moment a woman must agree with him
on matters about which she is indifferent.
How far in her measures for Hogg's humiliation Miss Westbrook was aided by
Shelley's bride; how far the assistance Harriett gave her sister to this
end was given with a clear knowledge of the object for which the latter
was working; and how far Mrs. Shelley was in her sister's confidence, are
questions for differences of opinion. It cannot, however, be questioned
that, either with malice aforethought, or in the heedlessness of girlish
simplicity, Harriett contributed to the matters of testimony which brought
the future poet to the amazing conclusion that Hogg, at some time or times
before the flight from York, had wished and essayed to seduce her. It is
conceivable that from first to last in this unsavoury business the sisters
were in perfect mutual confidence; but I cannot believe that so young a
girl as Mrs. Shelley deliberately conspired with her sister at York to
trump up so monstrous a charge against her husband's closest friend. I
can, however, imagine that in her amazement at the view taken by Shelley
of some of her admissions respecting Hogg's demeanour to her, she may have
lacked the courage to protest against the misconstruction put on innocent
occurrences, and may have been betrayed by such weakness at Keswick into
acquiescing in a hideous story which she knew to be untrue. I can imagine
that _after_ her arrival at Keswick she was schooled and terrorized by her
elder sister into conspiring with her to impose the vile romance on her
husband. After practising alternately on Harriett's imagination and
Shelley's imagination, Miss Westbrook may, by sheer force of will, have
constrained Harriett to think that, to preserve her husband's confidence,
it was necessary for her to affect to think what he thought of Hogg,--that
by speaking in Hogg's defence she would cause Shelley to suspect her of
having connived at his wicked design. Miss Westbrook may even have talked
Harriett at Keswick into thinking Hogg had tried to make her a faithless
wife. It must be remembered how young and inexperienced Harriett was,--and
how greatly under her sister's influence.
But I think it more probable that Harriett was never admitted fully into
her sister's confidence,--was never permitted either by Miss Westbrook or
Shelley to know all the evil they thought of Hogg. Perplexed by the
conditions of her recent association with Hogg, it was natural in the
young wife at York to wish to escape for awhile from an intimacy that,
during her husband's absence, had exposed her to the suspicion of the
prying milliners. On Miss Westbrook's arrival at the lodging-house, it was
natural for the girlish bride to speak to her sister of the uneasiness and
the mingled feelings of irritation and shame she had experienced. On
Shelley's reappearance it was no less natural for her to speak to him on
the same subjects. She may have felt that her position would have been
less trying if Mr. Hogg had been something less attentive to her; that he
would have shown greater delicacy in either withdrawing from the lodgings,
or spending his evenings elsewhere so long as Shelley was away. Feeling
this, she may have said so to Shelley as well as to her sister. It cannot
be questioned that she joined her sister in urging Shelley to withdraw
hurriedly from York; but in doing so Harriett may not have been actuated,
like her sister, by a desire to offer Mr. Hogg a great affront. She may
have been told by Miss Westbrook that Hogg was aware what would take place
during his absence. Anyhow it is certain that Harriett left York without
thinking Hogg guilty of harbouring infamous designs on her honour, and
also without conceiving her sister and Shelley suspected him of such
wickedness. Had she thought either the one or the other, it is
inconceivable that she would have written friendly letters to him from
Cumberland.
At Keswick, during the earlier weeks of November, Shelley and Harriett had
several conversations about Hogg and his behaviour to her; conversations
in which they reviewed all the circumstances of his sojourn with them at
Edinburgh and at York; conversations in which Shelley questioned and
cross-questioned her respecting the incidents of her life in the dingy
lodging-house, whilst he was absent from the cathedral town; conversations
in which they examined critically the letters Hogg had sent her from York
since her arrival at Keswick. Whilst there is good reason to believe
Harriett spoke freely with her husband in these Cumberland conferences,
there is no reason to think she spoke otherwise than honestly. But it is
in the nature of such conferences (where the memory of one speaker feeds
the curiosity of another) to magnify words and deeds of no moment into
matters of the highest moment, and to play strange tricks with the colour
and quality of remembered circumstances. Unconscious inventiveness is ever
at hand to help the memory. If Harriett's recollections were severely
historic, and wholly free from the delusive effects of mental excitement,
she was a strangely cold and unsympathetic young woman. Instead of being
offered to a listener of sober intellect and judicial temper, her
recollections were offered to a young man of quick fancy, impetuous
spirit, vehement emotionality. Given to such a mind, the recollections
were necessarily fruitful of false impressions.
In these conversations Harriett unquestionably played into the hands of
Miss Westbrook, and greatly furthered her elder sister's machinations for
Hogg's chastisement; but I have a strong (though possibly erroneous)
opinion that this aid was rendered by Mrs. Shelley in ignorance of all her
sister's purpose. She certainly had no strong liking for Hogg. She
disliked him to the extent of wishing to be relieved of an embarrassing
intimacy with him, and may even have desired her husband to regard him
coldly. In proportion as she is young and foolish, a bride is apt to
regard her husband's closest male friend with jealousy and antagonism.
Harriett was a mere girl, and no wiser than most girls of her age. Of her
own mere motion she would have been sure to think Hogg was overvalued by
her husband. Living so much under Eliza's influence she necessarily wished
him to stand lower in her husband's favour. But I cannot think she did or
said anything for the purpose of causing Shelley to imagine Hogg had made
an attempt on her virtue.
Whilst these conversations (having for their avowed object the discovery
of the degree in which Hogg's admiration of Mrs. Shelley had exceeded the
limits of conventional propriety and virtuous behaviour) gave an unhealthy
direction to the thoughts of the girlish bride, they worked the nervous
and emotional Shelley into states of excitement favourable to Miss
Westbrook's designs. Each of his conversations with Harriett may be
presumed to have been followed by confidential talk with Eliza, in which
Shelley gave her the particulars of Harriett's latest admissions, and she
(in Harriett's absence) taught Shelley what views to take of those
admissions, what inferences he should draw from them. The preciseness with
which Shelley wrote to Miss Hitchener about Hogg's iniquity justifies a
strong suspicion that Miss Westbrook's operations on her brother-in-law's
jealousy and credulity closed with some definite statement to Hogg's
infamy. It is difficult to imagine that even Shelley could have been
brought to the final conviction by mere hints and inferential suggestions.
On the other hand, it is difficult to conceive any statement, likely to
have been made by Miss Westbrook for her brother-in-law's conviction of
Hogg's guilt, that would not have rudely shaken his confidence in the
virtue of his wife, who had herself written to Hogg from Keswick in
friendly terms. It is enough that the moment came when Shelley wrote of
Hogg to the Hurstpierpoint schoolmistress, 'He attempted to seduce my
wife.'
Chivalry being the last quality I should think of attributing to Shelley,
it is not for me to show how his action in writing thus grossly on so
delicate a subject is compatible with the chivalric delicacy and
generosity for which he is so extravagantly applauded by his idolaters. It
is for them to explain how so chivalric a creature wrote thus coarsely to
the Sussex schoolmistress, whom he had known for only a few months.
Chivalry influences a man's demeanour to men as well as to women,--to his
enemies and friends of the sterner sex as well as to the women whom he
reverences, and the women whom he holds in disesteem. It is also a
self-respecting quality, disposing a man to be thoughtful for his own
honour. People's notions differ, of course, about chivalry, as well as
everything else; but most readers will concur with the present writer in
thinking that, on discovering in his familiar friend such guilt and
baseness as Shelley imagined himself to have discovered in Hogg, a
chivalric man would punish the traitor in accordance with prevailing laws
of honour, or decide to leave him to the punishment of his own conscience,
and then be silent for ever of him and his infamy. Living in the days of
duelling, it was open to Shelley, if not incumbent on him, to do his best
to slay the man, whom he believed to have meditated and essayed his wife's
seduction. It was open to him to refrain from this vindictive course on
conscientious grounds; but it was _not_ open to him, as a man of honour
and chivalry, to tattle and gossip of such an affair to any sempstress of
his acquaintance. Whether he fought Hogg, or left him to go his own way to
perdition, he should, out of tragic regard for their former friendship,
and sublime pity for the once-loved friend, have committed the ghastly
business to _altum silentium_. Had he been a chivalrous man, he could not
have written about a matter, implicating his wife's honour and delicacy in
so hideous a way, to a young woman of Miss Hitchener's social degree.
Writing to Miss Hitchener letters on this subject, about which he should
have told her nothing, Shelley, of course, wrote to other persons, on the
same unsavoury business. As the monstrous story came to Southey's ears
from Shelley's own lips, whilst 'the trio' were at Keswick, it is not
unfair to assume that Harriett's husband was no less communicative on the
revolting topic, by word of mouth, to divers persons, who, knowing little
of him, had no personal knowledge whatever of Hogg. There is rumour in the
air that other letters by Shelley, in addition to those he is known to
have sent Miss Hitchener, will be produced, sooner or later, in evidence
of Hogg's criminality. But instead of being evidence that Hogg felt and
acted vilely, such letters will only be so much additional evidence that
Shelley thought unjustly and ignobly of his old college-friend, who at no
point of his career was any more guilty of trying to seduce his friend's
wife, than the Squire of Field Place was guilty of wishing to lock his son
up in a madhouse. At the most, such letters, even though numbering several
hundreds, can only afford additional evidence respecting the strength of
Shelley's unreasonable conviction, and the number of the persons to whom
he wrote about the unreasonable conviction.
Why is it so certain that in thinking thus ill of Hogg, Shelley was only
labouring under an hallucination,--the wildest and most grotesque, though
not the most obstinate, of the several hallucinations that possessed him
at different times of his career?
(1.) Though the _primâ facie_ improbable often happens in this strange
world, the charge against Hogg is discredited by its egregious
improbability. No one has ever questioned the force and sincerity of
Hogg's affection for Shelley up to the time of the poet's first marriage.
Nothing has ever been proved against Hogg to countenance even a suspicion
that he had in early life any strong propensity for vicious ways,--unless
freedom in philosophic speculation is to be designated a vice. A young
gentleman by birth and culture, he had the tastes and habits of a
gentleman. His moral influence over Shelley had been in some particulars
distinctly beneficial. It was due to him that, instead of making Harriett
a mere mistress, Shelley made her his wife. There was a vein of poetry, a
strong vein of romance, in Hogg's comparatively cold nature. In 1811, he
and Shelley were both at a time of life when well-born and well-bred
youngsters are influenced most strongly by generous sentiments. They had
been close friends at College; and it is no exaggeration to say, that the
mutual affection of two such college friends surpasses the love of
brothers. Their romantic love of one another having continued without
abatement until the September of 1811, Shelley married a charming
girl,--marrying her lawfully (instead of taking her without a
marriage-rite), only because Hogg argued him into doing so. Hastening to
Edinburgh to rejoice in his friend's happiness, Hogg there sees his
friend's wife for the first time, almost, if not actually, on the morrow
of her marriage. He is charged with pursuing her wickedly from so early a
date of their acquaintance; that he (_ætat._ 19) tried to seduce her
before he had known her more than eight weeks. Is it probable that he did
any such thing?
(2.) Only eight weeks elapsed between Hogg's first introduction to
Harriett, at Edinburgh, and her departure from York. It is curious that
the persons who insist most strongly on the truth of the accusation are
the persons who insist most strongly that, instead of passing all this
short time in Hogg's society, Harriett spent some ten days of it in
journeying with her husband fro and to, between York and Sussex. The
story, which Southey heard, was that the attempt on Mrs. Shelley's virtue
was made during the journey from Scotland. But let no deduction be made
from the eight weeks. Is it conceivable that in so short a time Hogg did
that of which he is accused?
(3.) Certainly nothing took place either at Edinburgh or York under
Shelley's observation, to induce him at either of those places to believe
his friend so wicked. This is proved by the fact that he wrote to Hogg
from Keswick a series of vehemently affectionate letters,--letters he
could not have written whilst believing Hogg guilty of the most revolting
offence a man can commit against his friend. It is certain that before she
left York nothing had occurred to make Harriett imagine herself so injured
and outraged as the accusation represents her to have been. For otherwise,
it is inconceivable she would at Keswick have corresponded with him
through the post. No less certain is it that nothing occurred at York
under her observation, which Miss Westbrook could venture to report to
Shelley, as certain evidence of the crime charged against Hogg a few weeks
later; for had any such thing occurred, she would not have failed to
report it to Shelley at once, and forthwith put his guilt beyond question.
(4.) It follows that Shelley's conviction of Hogg's guilt cannot have
resulted immediately from observations, made either by him or by Harriett,
before they left York. At best it was due to his recollections of matters
which at Keswick he imagined to have taken place several weeks since at
Edinburgh or York, or between the two places; to similar recollections by
Harriett; to Miss Westbrook's statements, and to Shelley's inferences from
those recollections and statements. Hogg during his absence was, in fact,
arraigned and tried at Keswick for flagrant treason against his friend,
and his friend's wife, in a court where Shelley sat as judge and acted at
the same time as witness; where Miss Westbrook acted in the threefold
capacity of accuser, judicial-assessor, and witness; and where Harriett
was a witness,--perhaps, only a subordinate witness. Shelley's evidence
for the prosecution consisted of his recollections of matters that, at the
time of their occurrence, cannot have made him think Hogg seriously at
fault. Mrs. Shelley's evidence consisted of her recollections of matters,
that did not prevent her from corresponding with Hogg after her arrival at
Keswick. Miss Westbrook's statements consisted in equal parts of
recollection and invention, and of inference from her own recollections
and inventions, and from the recollections of the other two witnesses. No
defence was offered for the absent Hogg. What was the evidential value of
Shelley's recollection,--the reminiscences of the man who could not at any
time of his life be trusted to give an accurate account of any business in
which he was strongly interested? What was the evidential value of Mrs.
Shelley's recollections,--the recollections of the sixteen-years-old
girl, who wrote friendly letters from Keswick to the man, soon to be
declared guilty of having attempted to seduce her before she left York?
What evidential value may be assigned to Miss Westbrook's statements? How
about the judicial faculty of the judge? What witnesses! What evidence!
What a tribunal!
(5.) But the strongest evidence that Shelley's conviction of his friend's
guilt was mere hallucination remains to be stated. In a few months,
certainly less than twelve months, he had got the better of the morbid
fancy that caused him to break for a while with Hogg, and, having come out
of the delusion and returned to his right mind, he at once declared in the
most impressive manner that he had thought and spoken of Hogg with
injustice. And having so declared in the most impressive manner his own
error and his friend's innocence, Shelley held steadily to this
declaration to his last hour. How was the declaration made? By deeds as
well as by words.
(6.) Migrating from York to London, when he had passed twelve months in
the chambers of his first legal instructor, Hogg became a Middle Temple
law-student in the late spring, or early summer, of 1812. Eating his
dinners in the hall of his Inn, and spending his days in the chambers of
the Special Pleader with whom he was reading, the hard-working student
usually passed his evenings in rooms he occupied in a lodging-house, at
some distance from the Inns of Court. Having recently returned from the
country, at the close of the Long Vacation of 1812, Hogg was sitting in
his quiet lodgings late one evening at the beginning of November, with a
book under his eyes and a tea-pot near at hand, when he heard a violent
knocking at the street-door. Another minute and some one ran furiously
upstairs. Another instant, and Percy Bysshe Shelley rushed into the
student's room. Certainly for more than nine months, possibly for eleven
months, Hogg had received no letter from his friend, had heard nothing of
his movements. For so long a period--a long period in the life of the
young--there had been a total severance of the two friends. How much Hogg
knew then of Shelley's reasons for ceasing to write to him does not
appear. But he knew Shelley was deeply offended with him, and knew the
displeasure was connected with his attentions to Harriett. Though, from
concern for his friend's honour, he could not tell the ludicrous and
painful story outright in pages designed to commemorate the poet's finer
and nobler qualities, Hogg indicates thus much in the _Life_ with
sufficient clearness to all readers capable of reading 'between the lines'
of a printed record. For more than nine months, possibly for eleven
months, the friends had lived asunder; and now they were together again,
by the act of the one who had caused the severance. Having got the better
of his hallucination, and come to London in his right mind, Shelley had
hunted for Hogg at Lincoln's Inn; hunted for him at the Temple; discovered
the chambers where he was a student; declined to wait till the morning for
the much-desired interview with his old college chum; constrained 'the
clerk at chambers' to give him Hogg's address; and gone off impetuously in
quest of the incomparable Hogg at his lodgings, though it was already near
the hour when quiet lodging-houses were usually closed for the night. Thus
it was that Shelley returned to the friend whom he had charged with trying
to seduce his wife. Surely, this return to friendly relations with the man
whom he had imagined capable of such iniquity should be regarded as a
declaration of Hogg's innocence, as an avowal by Shelley that he had
misjudged his friend, and in consequence of monstrous misconception had
calumniated him.
(7.) Shelley's merciless, slanderous idolaters say otherwise. These
'friends' (may heaven preserve all future poets from such friends!) insist
that, when he thus threw himself into his friend's arms, Shelley still
believed Hogg had tried to seduce his wife; still believed him capable of
trying to seduce her, and was only showing his superhuman generosity and
his divine faculty of forgiving, when he thus _forgave_ the man who,
twelve months since, had tried to perpetrate so foul and revolting a
crime. Not by the men who are mindful of his human infirmities, but by the
men who declare his virtuous nature had no alloy of evil, is it asserted
that Shelley rushed into Hogg's arms with these words on his lips: 'It is
true you strove to corrupt my bride twelve months since; but I forgive you
that little error; so let by-gones be by-gones, and once again let us be
"friends for ever!"' Superhuman generosity! divine faculty of forgiveness!
If this is divine forgiveness, I can only say that, so far as I am
concerned, divine beings are welcome to their monopoly of so vicious a
virtue. It is a matter for congratulation that human nature is seldom
capable of such generosity. I am alive to Shelley's failings, but I
decline to join with his idolaters in crediting him with so peculiar a
generosity--a generosity only to be possessed by the meanest of mankind.
(8.) Having thus returned at a late hour of the evening to Hogg's heart,
Shelley insisted the next day on taking him to an hotel near St. James'
Palace, in order that he should there be re-introduced to Harriett, and
once again brought into close and affectionate intimacy with her. Can I be
wrong in saying that, in thus re-introducing Hogg to his wife, Shelley
declared his previous conviction of his friend's guilty purpose to have
been pure misconception?--that Shelley could not have been so careless of
his wife's honour, her virtue, his own honour, as to have thus restored
Hogg in the November of 1812 to his previous intimacy with Mrs. Shelley,
whilst still believing he tried to seduce her in the October of 1811? The
Shelleyan zealots declare me altogether wrong. They maintain that in the
November of 1812 Shelley still believed Hogg made an attempt on Harriett's
virtue in October, 1811, still believed him capable of so dark a crime.
They admit it was strange and remarkable that, under these circumstances,
Shelley should have again invited Hogg to live, and made him live, in
close intimacy with Harriett--still in her eighteenth year. But they
insist that a sufficient explanation of conduct so strange and remarkable
is afforded by Shelley's superhuman generosity and divine faculty of
forgiving.
(9.) Having thus returned to friendship with Hogg, Shelley lived in
friendship with him to the last;--so living in friendship with him (the
Shelleyan zealots insist) whilst he all the while believed him to have
tried to seduce Harriett within eight weeks of her marriage.
(10.) After breaking with Harriett, and joining hands in Free Love with
Mary Godwin, Shelley took an early occasion for inviting Hogg to live as
intimately with Mary, as he had in former time lived with Harriett. Is it
conceivable that Shelley would have invited to this intimacy with his
second spouse the man whom he still believed guilty of trying to corrupt
his first spouse?
(11.) By his will (dated 18th February, 1817, when he, Hogg, and Mary
Godwin were living in affectionate intimacy: and proved more than
twenty-two years after his death, _i.e._ on 1st November, 1844), Shelley
left Hogg a legacy of 2000_l._--a substantial proof of the affectionate
regard in which Shelley to his last hour held his old college friend. It
is unusual for a testator to bequeath 2000_l._ to a man whom he believes
to have tried to seduce his wife.
(12.) Declaring by acts, and by steady persistence in the friendship never
again to be broken or shaken, that he had misjudged Hogg and quarrelled
with him through misconception, Shelley by his pen put it upon record that
he had wronged his early friend in thinking him vile and treacherous. Of
all the egotisms of _Laon and Cythna_, few are of greater biographic value
than the stanzas in which the author, speaking of himself in the character
of Laon, records how in his youth he was so far misled by envious and
deceitful tongues as to bewail the falsehood of his heart's dearest
friend, and in due course discovered that, instead of having been really
found false, his comrade had only seemed so. In the second canto of the
poem it is written:--
'Yes, oft beside the ruined labyrinth
Which skirts the hoary caves of the green deep,
Did Laon and his friend on one grey plinth,
Round whose worn base the wild waves hiss and leap,
Resting at eve, a lofty converse keep:
And that his friend was false, may now be said
Calmly--that he like other men could weep
Tears which are lies, and could betray and spread
Snares for that guileless heart which for his own had bled.'
It is not till he has been torn from Cythna, confined on the column's
dizzy height, freed from bondage, cured of madness, and despatched to lead
the revolutionary patriots of the Golden City, that Laon encounters again
the friend from whom he parted in grief and misconception, and discovers
how wrong he was to think evil of him. Recounting in the poem's fifth
canto the incidents of his first night and morning in the patriots' camp,
Laon says:--
'And now the Power of Good held victory,
So, thro' the labyrinth of many a tent,
Among the silent millions who did lie
In innocent sleep, exultingly I went;
The moon had left Heaven desert now, but lent
From eastern morn the first faint lustre showed
An armèd youth--over his spear he bent
His downward face.--"A friend!" I cried aloud;
And quickly common hopes made freemen understood.
I sate beside him while the morning beam
Crept slowly over Heaven, and talked with him
Of those immortal hopes, a glorious theme!
Which led us forth, until the stars grew dim:
And all the while, methought, his voice did swim,
As if it drownèd in remembrance were
Of thoughts which make the moist eyes overbrim:
At last, when daylight 'gan to fill the air,
He looked on me, and cried in wonder--"Thou art here!"
Then, suddenly, I knew it was the youth
In whom its earliest hopes my spirit found;
But envious tongues had stained his spotless truth,
And thoughtless pride his love in silence bound,
And shame and sorrow mine in toils had wound,
_Whilst he was innocent, and I deluded_;
The truth now came upon me, on the ground
Tears of repenting joy, which fast intruded,
Fell fast, and o'er its peace our mingled spirits brooded.'
Thus it was that, in the poem written during the six brightest months of
1817 (_i.e._ of the summer following the execution of his will), Shelley
gave a penitential account of his quarrel _with_, and transient severance
_from_, his heart's best friend, taking all the error and shame of the
miserable affair to himself; acknowledging he did his friend black
injustice in thinking him false, confessing his weak submissiveness to the
false and envious tongues that misled him; declaring himself altogether
_deluded_, and Hogg altogether innocent of the offences charged against
him--altogether blameless in the whole wretched business, unless it was
that he had been silent from a proud sense of injury, when by free and
candid speech he might have utterly discredited the 'envious tongues,' and
dispelled the misconceptions and delusions resulting from their slanderous
activity. In the way of poetry, what fuller acquittal, what larger
acknowledgment of the wrong done him, could Hogg require than the single
line: 'Whilst _he_ was innocent and I deluded?'
(13.) Some readers may think the acknowledgment would have been more
effective in simple prose,--may think the avowal suffers in force from the
artificiality of its terms,--may think it a pity Shelley did not say in
less artful language what he put so gracefully in verse. One may be sure
the impetuous Shelley poured the same confession in half a hundred forms
of vehement speech into Hogg's private ear. Moreover, he did not pass
from the world without putting the same pathetic confession and prayer in
less than forty words of strenuous prose. When Hogg, some thirty-five long
years after the poet's death, came for the first time on the MS. of _An
Essay on Friendship_--the essay mentioned in a previous chapter of this
work--he found these dedicatory words on the paper: 'I once had a friend,
whom an inextricable multitude of circumstances has forced me to treat
with apparent neglect. To him I dedicate this essay. If he finds my own
words condemn me, will he not forgive?' In Shelley's hand-writing, these
words may well have affected Hogg acutely and profoundly! Penned for his
eye, they penetrated his heart! No writer (that I am aware of) has
ventured to deny boldly and honestly that this dedicatory note was meant
for Hogg, or even to question seriously whether it was not intended for
some one else; but petty scribblers by the score have sneered at Hogg's
egotism and impudence in taking to himself the dedicatory note, that
certainly was meant for no one else.
What more can readers require in the way of evidence that, in respect to
the morbid notion which caused his transient quarrel with Hogg, Shelley
was the victim of monstrous hallucination? Those who require more evidence
on this point, are persons to whom The Real Shelley will never be known.
In arguing this case, I have striven to argue evenly on both sides, as
though I were retained by both plaintiff and defendant to discover the
truth. I have kept cautiously within my evidences. Possibly, evidences
touching the matter have not come under my notice. But I do not think I
have missed any writing likely to affect my arguments or conclusions
materially. All reliable information respecting the affair must come to us
in some way or other from Shelley, Harriett, or Hogg. Any additional
statement from Shelley to Hogg's disadvantage would be the mere statement
of a sufferer from delusion. Possibly, papers exist, in which Harriett,
whilst stating precisely that Hogg attempted to seduce her, gives minute
particulars of the alleged attempt. Let us assume that, in her
correspondence with Miss Hitchener, and other persons, she was thus
communicative, and that Field Place is in a position to produce a bundle
of letters, in each of which she accuses Hogg of trying to seduce her, and
describes minutely the means by which he tried to achieve his purpose.
Such letters, however numerous and precise, would be the mere statements,
in chief, of a witness, whom it is impossible to cross-examine,--a witness
whose veracity is not unimpeachable; a witness who has been freely charged
by Shelleyan apologists with untruth, in respect to several of her
numerous statements to her husband's discredit; a witness, moreover, who,
to use Mr. William Rossetti's words, was, in her seventeenth year,
philosophized by Shelley himself out of the ordinary standard of feminine
propriety. It is no uncommon thing for a young woman to imagine an attempt
has been made on her honour, when no such attempt has been made. Women
have been known to imagine themselves the victims of seduction when no one
has seduced them. A case occurred no long while since in one of our law
courts, where evidence of a woman's criminal intercourse with her alleged
seducer was afforded by notes, made in her own hand-writing, in her
private diary, and yet it was proved conclusively that her own written
confessions of guilt were romantic and purely imaginative records of
incidents that had never really taken place. Some women have a curious
aptitude for suspecting men of wishing to seduce them; and it would not be
unfair to suggest that the sixteen-years-old school-girl, to whose
thoughts Shelley had given an unwholesome direction, was capable of
entertaining such a suspicion groundlessly. Moreover, the discovery of
such letters should neither occasion surprise, nor dispose the judicial
reader to regard them as conclusively evidential of Hogg's guilt; because,
if she wrote about the matter at all in her letters, the girl who, from
terror or motives of policy, or from imaginative influences, certainly
acquiesced in the charge against Hogg, even if she did not deliberately
conspire with her sister to trump it up, would naturally write in
accordance with the accusation, to which she was a party.
How about Hogg,--the third of the sources of information? He denied the
charge. His way of dealing with the Keswick letters was a denial of the
charge,--as clear, precise, and strenuous a denial as he could give to the
accusation, respecting which he could not, for Shelley's honour's sake,
speak precisely to the whole world. He denied the charge again by the way
in which he took to himself the dedicatory note to the _Essay on
Friendship_. He could not have denied the charge more precisely to the
coteries, and every individual cognizant of the vile slander, without
exhibiting the poet to the whole world's derision.
What if evidence should even yet be produced that Hogg actually made the
attempt? For argument's sake, let us conceive what is in the highest
degree improbable, and suppose that letters, written by Hogg himself to
Shelley and Harriett, are, even now, put before the world by Field Place,
to the conclusive demonstration of the writer's guilt,--letters placing it
beyond question that he really made the attempt. What then? The result
would comprise the absolute destruction of Shelley's right to be rated
with men of honour, or even with men of common decency. Such letters would
prove that, within a few days of an attempt on his wife's virtue, and in
sure cognizance of the attempt and the maker of it, Shelley wrote in terms
of passionate affectionateness to the culprit. They would prove that,
knowing Hogg had, only a few weeks since, tried to debauch his bride,
Shelley wrote to him, 'You are my bosom friend.' They would prove that in
less than fourteen months from the attempt, Shelley survived his faint
annoyance at the affair so completely as to be capable of throwing himself
into Hogg's arms, saying to him, 'Let us think no more of that unlucky
business,' and forthwith inviting him to renew his intimacy with the girl,
whom he had tried to seduce. What is the only construction to be put on
the conduct of the husband, who brings again into familiar intercourse
with his wife the very man whom he knows to have recently tried to seduce
her? It cannot be urged that Shelley acted thus on sufficient proof that
Hogg was an altered man; for there had been no intercourse between them,
by letter or otherwise, since Shelley left Keswick. Yet more,--such
evidence of Hogg's guilt would prove that, in introducing him to Mary
Godwin, Shelley brought into close intimacy with his second spouse, the
man whom he knew to have tried to seduce his first wife within a few weeks
of her wedding. Such evidence would, of course, cover Hogg with dark
disgrace. But it would, at the same time, cover Shelley with blackest
infamy. The Shelleyan enthusiasts would have been less eager to prove Hogg
guilty of _the attempt_, had not animosity against Hogg blinded them to
what would ensue to Shelley's reputation, should they succeed in proving
the charge.
END OF VOL. I.
LONDON:
Printed by STRANGEWAYS & SONS, Tower Street, Upper St. Martin's Lane.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] This extract from Charles Grove's letter is taken from the printed
copy of the epistle in Hogg's second volume; and the reader should give
his attention to the words between brackets which are no part of the
letter, but one of the explanatory notes, which the biographer
indiscreetly put into the body of his transcripts of original documents,
instead of printing them as foot-notes. It was his rule to bracket such
editorial notes, and insert his initials after the second bracket. But the
careless scribe, and still more careless proof-corrector, sometimes forgot
to insert his initials, sometimes forgetting also to insert the brackets.
Hence the so-called 'interpolations' of original evidences, for which he
has been unfairly reproached by his detractors.
[2] The right name of this seat seems to have been Hill Place. In the
_Beauties of England and Wales_ (1813), _Sussex_, p. 97, it is written,
'In the same direction on the right of the road, is an old seat called
Hill Place, formerly the property of the late Viscountess Irwin, but now
belonging to the Duke of Norfolk.' 'Lady Irwen's Hill Place' would be
naturally abbreviated after her death into 'Irwen's Hill,' which again
would be corrupted into 'Irving's Hill,' the familiar designation of the
place in Shelley's boyhood.
[3] Shelley, as we shall see, was in London, and in urgent need of more
money, in October, 1811.
[4] Hogg describes Shelley's rooms as 'being in the corner next the hall
of the principal quadrangle of the University College.' 'They are,' he
continues, 'on the first floor, and on the right of the entrance, but by
reason of the turn in the stairs, when you reach them, they will be upon
your left hand.'--HOGG'S _Life_, v. 1, p. 67.
[5] The first Reader in Mineralogy of the University of Oxford, with a
Grant from the Crown, was William Buckland, B.D., subsequently the famous
Dean of Westminster. From the Oxford University Calendar, it appears that
a Crown Grant was assigned to this famous Professor for lecturing on
Mineralogy in 1813. Probably the same lecturer gave lectures in the same
department of science before receiving the grant, and was the gentleman
whose 'dullness' was so afflicting to Mr. Bysshe Shelley.
[6] Biographers differ in spelling Harriett in the case of Miss Westbrook,
and also in the case of Miss Grove. Hogg says Harriett Westbrook signed
herself 'Harriet,' though Shelley instructed Mr. Medwin the elder to give
the name a second _t_. Like Mr. Rossetti, I comply with Shelley's wish.
Miss Grove's Christian name is spelt with a second _t_ in the Grove
genealogy of Burke's _Landed Gentry_, a record corrected by the
representative of the family.
[7] There has been uncertainty about this lady's name. Styled 'Emily' in
at least one of Shelley's letters, she is usually styled Eliza in
Shelleyan biography. But her real Christian name was Elizabeth. In her
affidavit of 10th January, 1817, preserved at the Record Office, the name
is so spelt. It has already been remarked in this work that, though usage
has made the two several and different names, 'Eliza,' 'Elizabeth,'
Isabel, and Isabella, are various forms of the same name, Iza.
End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Real Shelley, Vol. I (of 2), by
John Cordy Jeaffreson
*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE REAL SHELLEY, VOL. I (OF 2) ***
***** This file should be named 41747-8.txt or 41747-8.zip *****
This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
http://www.gutenberg.org/4/1/7/4/41747/
Produced by The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images
generously made available by The Internet Archive.)
Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
will be renamed.
Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules,
set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark. Project
Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission. If you
do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
rules is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
research. They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks. Redistribution is
subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
redistribution.
*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
Gutenberg-tm License available with this file or online at
www.gutenberg.org/license.
Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
electronic works
1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be
used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
works. See paragraph 1.E below.
1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual works in the
collection are in the public domain in the United States. If an
individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
are removed. Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
the work. You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are in
a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States, check
the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no representations concerning
the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
States.
1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
copied or distributed:
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
or charges. If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
1.E.9.
1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms will be linked
to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
Gutenberg-tm License.
1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access to or
distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
form. Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
that
- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is
owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments
must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
returns. Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
License. You must require such a user to return or
destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
Project Gutenberg-tm works.
- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
of receipt of the work.
- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark. Contact the
Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
1.F.
1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
your equipment.
1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
DAMAGE.
1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you with
the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
refund. If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If the second copy
is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
opportunities to fix the problem.
1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS', WITH NO OTHER
WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
the applicable state law. The invalidity or unenforceability of any
provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It exists
because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
people in all walks of life.
Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
and the Foundation information page at www.gutenberg.org
Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
Revenue Service. The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
throughout numerous locations. Its business office is located at 809
North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email
contact links and up to date contact information can be found at the
Foundation's web site and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
For additional contact information:
Dr. Gregory B. Newby
Chief Executive and Director
[email protected]
Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation
Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
status with the IRS.
The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To
SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
particular state visit www.gutenberg.org/donate
While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
approach us with offers to donate.
International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
To donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate
Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
works.
Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
with anyone. For forty years, he produced and distributed Project
Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not necessarily
keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
www.gutenberg.org
This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
