The roses of Lynmouth were fading, and autumn winds swept the loose clouds like dead leaves across the sky. Miss Hitchener’s star was about to set. The constant presence of a stranger wearied Harriet. Shelley himself saw the dream dissolve, revealing grosser forms, and was surprised to find installed at his side a mediocre and twaddling woman. He sought his heroine in vain, and repented of his folly.

After having insisted so strenuously in dragging her from her school it was difficult to send her back there. Yet to go on living with her in an autumnal solitude was becoming unbearable. Perhaps in a big city other friends and other distractions might help him to forget the obsession of her company. At the same time, Godwin urged the Shelleys to come back to London. They resolved to go and make a long stay.

⁂

It was with great excitement that one day in October 1812, they left their hotel in St. James’s Street to pay their first visit to Godwin and his family. Harriet, tiny, fair, and rosy, tripped by the side of her tall and round-shouldered boy-husband. They wondered what sort of welcome the Great Man was going to give them? Miss Hitchener, who had called in Skinner Street on her way through London, had met with a cold welcome. But maybe that proved nothing but the perspicacity of Godwin.

They found the whole family gathered together in the dwelling-house above the Juvenile Library, for the Godwins, on their side, were devoured with curiosity to see the Shelleys. There was the Philosopher himself, short, fat, bald, intellectual-looking, with the appearance of a Methodist parson, like almost all the theorists of Revolution.

The second Mrs. Godwin had put on her best black silk, and only wore the green-glasses just for the time needed to take stock of the Baronet’s grandson and his pretty wife. The Shelleys had been warned that she was a back-biter, but on this occasion she showed herself amiable.

Fanny Imlay was there too, gentle and pensive; and Jane Clairmont, a beautiful and vivacious brunette of the Italian type.

“The only one absent,” said Godwin, “is my daughter Mary now in Scotland. She is very like her mother whose portrait I will show you.”

He took the young couple into his study, and Shelley, much moved, looked long at the portrait of the fascinating Mary Wollstonecraft. Then every one sat down and Godwin and Percy talked of the relativity of matter to spirit, of the position of the clergy, and of German literature. The women listened in mute admiration. Harriet thought that Godwin resembled Socrates; he had the same bulgy forehead; and that Percy sitting beside him was like one of the handsome Greek youths whose ardent impatience was tempered with respect.

⁂

A close intimacy began between the Shelleys and the Godwins. Godwin often came round to the hotel to take Shelley for a walk, or Mrs. Godwin invited Harriet and Percy to dinner. She even invited Eliza and Miss Hitchener, but the last very unwillingly. Sometimes Harriet ventured to give a dinner herself.

On the 5th November, Guy Fawkes’ Day, the Shelleys dined with the Godwins. After dinner little William Godwin, aged nine, said he was going round to let off fireworks with his friend and neighbour, young Newton. Shelley at this moment was discussing some profound question or other with his venerated friend. But the word “fireworks” instantly brought to life the alchemist of Field Place. He hesitated just a second between Godwin and his discourse, and the joy of rockets and catherine wheels lighting up with their many-coloured fires the old London streets.

Then, “I’ll go with you,” he said to the little boy, and off they went.

When the fireworks were over, young Newton, enchanted by this grown-up friend who played like a boy and could tell such wonderful stories, took him home to introduce him to his parents. Shelley made no resistance, and never had to regret it. He found the Newtons adorable. They fell at once into free, cultured and agreeable talk.

Newton was just the man to please Shelley. He had endless theories which he put into practice. One of his favourite ideas was that when Man migrated from the equatorial regions and pushed northwards, he adopted unnatural habits and that from these sprang all his woes. One of such bad habits was the wearing of clothes: Newton’s children ran about the house entirely naked. Another bad habit was the eating of flesh food; the whole Newton family was vegetarian. Nothing could arouse more surely Shelley’s enthusiasm, and Mr. Newton supplied him with new arguments.

“Man has no similarity with any carnivorous animal; he is without claws to hold his prey; the formation of his teeth points out that his food should be vegetables and fruit. He first knew sickness after taking to flesh-eating which, for him, is poison. Here you have the meaning of the story of Prometheus which is evidently a vegetarian myth. Prometheus, that is to say Man, discovered fire and invented cooking; immediately a vulture began to gnaw at his liver. The vulture is hepatitis, that’s quite clear.”

Since the Newtons had taken to vegetarianism they had never needed any doctors nor any drugs. The children were the healthiest in the world, and Shelley, who had many opportunities of seeing the little girls, found them beautiful as sculptor’s models.

He became a constant visitor, and the moment his voice was heard in the hall the five children rushed downstairs to meet him, and take him up with them to the nursery. Mrs. Newton and her sister Madame de Boinville were just as infatuated with him as were the children.

At Godwin’s Fanny and Jane passed whole evenings in listening to him with ecstasy. They raved of his beauty, and his arguments appeared to them unassailable. Even in a family of republicans this young aristocrat, heir to an immense fortune and so disdainful of money, shone with a romantic light.

As for him, between the two young girls, Fanny, gentle and reserved, Jane, hot-blooded and vehement, he seemed to be back again in those happy days of youthful fervour and high enthusiasm, when a bevy of adoring sisters and cousins clipt him round.

Harriet pleased the Godwin girls less. They noticed that she never thought for herself but simply repeated her husband’s favourite phrases and that her grammar was faulty.

“Poor dear Shelley!” said they, as soon as the couple had left them. “He certainly has not got the wife he ought to have.”

This is an impression very general amongst young women who see the man they would have liked themselves in the possession of another. They even ventured to attack Harriet, in her absence, with tiny pin-pricks; they guessed intuitively those criticisms to which her doctrinaire husband would be most sensitive.

“Harriet frightens me,” wrote Fanny, “she is such a fine lady.” Shelley was indignant.

“Harriet a ‘fine lady’? And it is you who accuse her of this crime, in my eyes, the most unforgivable of any. The ease and simplicity of her manners have always been her greatest charm, and are incompatible with the vulgar brilliancy of fashionable life. You will not convert me to your opinion, so long as I have before my eyes the living witness of its falsity.”

Later on, this letter of Fanny’s came back to Shelley’s mind.

Hogg, now fully reconciled with his family, returned to London after a year’s exile at York to finish his law studies.

One evening as he sat reading in a comfortable arm-chair wrapped in a warm dressing-gown, a pot of hot tea by his side, he heard a tremendous knocking at the outer door of the house. Then this door was flung violently back against the wall, so that the whole building shook; Hogg recalled a pair of luminous eyes, a tall and stooping figure. . . .

“If Shelley were still friends with me, I should imagine . . .”

Some one rushing upstairs recalled rapid footsteps heard long ago on an Oxford staircase.

“No one but Shelley ever ran upstairs like that!”

The room-door opened, and there Shelley stood, hatless, with shirt-collar wide open, wild-looking, intellectual, always the image of some heavenly spirit come down to earth by mistake.

“I got your address from your ‘special pleader’ fellow, and not without trouble! He took me for a swindler of some kind and didn’t want to give it to me. What has become of you all this last year? . . . I’ve just got back from Ireland. . . . I went to preach humanity to the Irish Catholics. . . . Then we returned to Wales, a lovely country. . . . Harriet’s all right . . . she expects a child. . . . Have you read Berkeley? . . . At this moment I’m reading Helvetius . . . very clever, but dry stuff. . . .”

Hogg looked at him with the admiration, affection, and irony, of former days. Who but Shelley would start off to discuss Helvetius with a friend from whom he had parted on such bad terms a year back?

Shelley, full of animation and joy, walked about the room, opened books, put questions to which he never waited the answers, and seemed to have forgotten completely that Hogg had ever offended him.

He talked far into the night, and the men in the chambers next to Hogg knocked furiously on the walls to warn him that the high and piercing voice of his visitor prevented them from sleeping.

Hogg, alarmed for his good name, suggested Shelley should go. Shelley continued to talk. He explained that he had just opened a subscription list to finish a dyke which would enable the Welsh at Tremadoc to regain 5,000 acres of land from the sea. He had headed the list with £100 and he was devoting his life, his strength, and his fortune to the enterprise. . . . Hogg taking him gently by the arm led him to the door, but he resisted.

“Your neighbours bore me! They are brutes who don’t understand that it is only during the night that the soul feels really free.”

Hogg had managed to get him out upon the landing.

“I’ll go, but on one condition, and that is that you come and dine with us to-morrow. Harriet will be delighted to see you. I apologize for having a horrible creature with us, Miss Hitchener . . . but she will be leaving in a day or two.”

“Miss Hitchener? The sister of your soul?”

“She, the sister of my soul?” cried Shelley. “She’s a crawling and contemptible worm. . . . We call her the Brown Demon.”

But they had now reached the street. Hogg gently pushed his friend out of the house and closed the door behind him.

⁂

Next day at six o’clock, Hogg sent in his name to Harriet. She received him with enthusiasm. She looked younger, more blooming, and lovelier than ever.

“What a separation this has been!” she said. “But it will not happen again. We are now going to live in London for ever!”

Eliza sat apart in haughty silence. She gave Hogg a limp hand, without condescending to speak to him.

“You’re looking delightfully well, Harriet.”

“She? Oh, no, poor dear thing!” said Eliza in a lackadaisical voice. “Her nerves are in a fearful state. Most dreadfully shattered!”

Hogg thought, “Nothing is changed in this house, one must take care what one says.”

Shelley at this moment burst into the room like a cannon ball, and dinner was brought up.

After dinner there were mysterious whisperings from Eliza into Harriet’s ear, who came obediently to bid Hogg good night, and to invite him to come again on Sunday morning.

“It’s the day the Brown Demon is going, conversation will be so difficult. But you are always such good fun, you would be the greatest help to us. . . . Percy has told you about our Tormentor?”

At the mention of Miss Hitchener’s name Eliza exhibited a deep but silent disgust.

“She’s a horrible woman,” Harriet went on. “She tried to make Percy fall in love with her. She pretended that he did really love her, and that I was only good for the housekeeping. Percy has promised her £100 a year if only she will go.”

Shelley confirmed this. He saw the imprudence of thus sacrificing a quarter of his income, but it was necessary. The young woman had lost her situation through him, and her reputation and health into the bargain, she added, thanks to their barbarous conduct.

“She is really a horrible creature!” he said shuddering. “A superficial, ugly, hermaphroditical beast of a woman. I’ve never been so astonished at my bad taste as after spending four months with her. . . . How would Hell be, if such a woman were in Heaven? And she writes poetry! She has written an Elegy on the Rights of Woman, which begins:

“All, all are men, the woman like the rest. . . .”

He burst into one of his wild shouts of laughter.

Next day Hogg did not fail to turn up. The Heroine of the day appeared to him boring but inoffensive. She was a big, bony, masculine woman, dark-skinned, and with traces of a beard.

Shelley presently declared he must go out, Harriet had a bad headache and needed quiet; Hogg’s fate was to take the two Eliza’s for a walk.

With the Brown Demon on his right arm, and the Black Diamond, as he nicknamed Eliza Westbrook, on his left, he directed their steps towards St. James’s Park. “I could say, like Cornelia: ‘These are my jewels!’ ” he thought.

The two fair rivals attacked each other across him in phrases of haughty contempt. The languishing Eliza woke up to deal formidable blows with a calm soft acrimony. Miss Hitchener made a show of speaking only to Hogg. She discoursed on the Rights of Woman. Eliza who could not talk on this subject, nor on any other, found herself reduced to ignominious silence.

When they got home she penned Hogg into a corner of the hall.

“How could you talk to that nasty creature so much? How could you permit her to prate so long to you? Harriet will be seriously displeased with you, I assure you! She will be very angry.”

But Harriet merely smiled up at him and asked, “Were you not tired of the Brown Demon?”

When luncheon was over he wickedly led the conversation back to Woman’s Rights, and the Goddess of Reason was at once let loose. Shelley rose from his chair, came and stood before her and fell into animated discussion. The sisters Westbrook looked at him with sorrowful dismay as at one guilty of communication with the enemy.

Eliza whispered to Hogg, “If you only knew how dirty she is you wouldn’t go near her!”

But the moment of release came when the exile’s bags and boxes were piled into a hackney-coach, and the women of Shelley’s household were left dancing and singing for joy.

The few months which followed the departure of Miss Hitchener were happy months. The Shelleys were still penniless wanderers, but an immense interior satisfaction replaced for them money and home. He had begun a long poem, “Queen Mab,” and to work at it made life worth living. Harriet, who was with child, was sunk in an agreeable torpor, reserving all her strength for creative purposes, and so amused by and interested in her own sensations and hopes, as to be quite insensible to boredom.

During this period they made short visits to Wales, and returned a second time to Ireland, but no longer dabbled in politics. To please Percy, Harriet began to learn Latin. He taught her on a method of his own. Discarding grammars he plunged her straight into Horace and Virgil.

While she studied, he went on with his poem or read history. Godwin had assured him that his ignorance of history was one great cause of his errors of judgment, and though he loathed the subject he set at it courageously. In the evening, Harriet sang old Irish songs, “Robin Adair,” and “Kate of Kearney,” or they read the newspapers together, which at that time were filled with accounts of the prosecutions of Liberal writers.

Often to these unknown comrades, condemned for their opinions, Shelley would write offering to pay the fine, but never having ten pounds in hand, he was obliged to borrow at 400 per cent, in order to do so.

Presently, it was necessary to go back to London as Harriet’s time was near. Shelley was also approaching his twenty-first birthday, an important date for him, for it seemed possible he might then come to terms with his father.

They took rooms at Cooke’s Hotel in Albemarle Street. Eliza, who was with them, looked after Harriet with exaggerated care. Her fussiness annoyed Shelley always in favour of letting Nature have her way. When he was absent Eliza would prime her sister in matrimonial strategy.

“It’s most extraordinary that at twenty-one years of age Percy can’t find a way of making up with his father, so that you could be received by the family, and lead the proper sort of life for a future baronet’s wife! If you were a little more skilful and persuasive with him, things would be very different, I’m sure! You ought to have a town house of your own, your own silver, your own carriage; and all that could easily be had if Percy chose.”

Harriet was of the same mind. She was a pretty woman and she knew it, and for a pretty woman a life without luxury is as hard to bear as a subordinate position for a clever man. The street admiration she meets with tells her of her power, and she knows too that youth’s a stuff that won’t endure. Just as a strongly armed nation desires to ensure her place in the sun, before demobilizing, Woman wishes to exact good terms from her enemy Man, before resigning herself to the pacifism of old age.

Besides which Eliza was continually pitying Harriet, and self-pity comes so naturally to all of us that the most solid happiness can be shaken by the compassion of a fool.

Moved thereunto by Harriet at the instigation of Eliza, and also by renewed counsel from the Duke of Norfolk, Shelley decided to write again to his father. He would not have taken this step had he not judged it to be both honourable and necessary. He desired earnestly to see his mother, and even the Squire seen from a distance of time and place appeared to him a pathetic and inoffensive figure.

Unfortunately, Timothy Shelley, with characteristic wrong-headedness, chose a test of Bysshe’s obedience to which it was impossible for him to submit; he could not write to the authorities of University College that he was now a sincere and dutiful son of the Church. And, failing this, his father declined all further communication with him.

Eliza considered such obduracy absurd. “Thus Harriet, so soon to be brought to bed, will not even have a carriage to save her running about the streets on foot!” Shelley, exasperated, bought a carriage on credit, and refused to use it. He hated being shut up in a closed carriage, and much preferred long tramps with Hogg on foot.

Though sick to death of Eliza at home, there were plenty of pleasant houses where he could take refuge. There was the Godwins’ in Skinner Street, where Fanny and Jane Clairmont always received him with open arms. There was the Newtons’ in Chester Square, where he found affection, intelligence, and old-world courtesy. Mrs. Newton, a first-rate musician, the favourite pupil of Dussek, would sit down to the piano, while Shelley seated on the rug amidst the children would tell them tales of ghosts and phantoms in a low voice.

Very often Madame de Boinville was on a visit to her sister. These two ladies, daughters of a wealthy St. Vincent planter, had received a mixed Anglo-French education that Shelley, tremendous admirer of the French philosophers, much appreciated. Madame de Boinville, in particular, charmed him. Her romantic marriage with a ruined émigré, a friend of André Chénier and of La Fayette, invested her with a poetic fascination. She was a woman with white hair, but with so childlike a face, such speaking eyes, a mind so lively and up-to-date, that one had more pleasure in talking with her than with many a younger woman. For the first time in his life Shelley found, in her and her sister, women whose intellectuality was on a par with his own.

The conversation of Eliza and Miss Hitchener now appeared to him thoroughly despicable.

From living with Harriet, he had fallen into the habit of looking on women as children, for whom an abstract idea must be reduced to its simplest expression. With Madame de Boinville he was astonished to find that he could not only tell her all his ideas, but that by the charm and precision of her language she gave them a new attraction. For her and her sister, as for Shelley himself, the play of thought was the finest of pastimes. Learning is nothing without cultivated manners, but when the two are combined in a woman you have one of the most exquisite products of civilization.

With a secret joy and a delicious feeling of attained perfection, Shelley realized that he had at last found surroundings propitious to his happiness, and that everything he had previously known was grotesquely unworthy of him.

The ladies, on their side, were enchanted by their discovery of Shelley, for this very good-looking and well-born young man loved ideas as they did and expressed them with warmth. He had got rid of the rather intolerant dogmatism of his sixteen years, and now in discussion showed modesty and forbearance. Never had they met a man so selfless, so generous, so free from materialism as he. Generally serious, he yet was capable of fun, and he had the ease of manner, the contempt for ceremony, and the perfect politeness, which is the hall-mark of the young aristocrat. “What more charming,” they asked themselves, “than a saint who is at the same time a man of the world?”

With a tinge of jealousy, but also with affectionate interest, Hogg watched the manœuvrings of all these pretty women round his ingenuous friend. At the Godwins’ the girls called Shelley the Elf-King or the King of Faery; at the Newtons’ he was known as Ariel and Oberon. The moment he appeared the women gathered about him. But he was a Spirit difficult to call up at any fixed hour. He was subject to strange caprices, sudden frights, panic terrors. Sometimes falling into a poetic vision, he forgot that he was expected to a tea-party. At other times, when he was actually caught and supposedly held fast, all at once some imaginary duty called him one knew not where.

“In certain countries,” Hogg told him, “it is believed that goats, which are children of the devil, pass one hour out of every twenty-four in hell. I think you’re like the goats, Shelley.”

On the other hand, when engaged with a woman after his own heart in one of the serious and animated talks which he so much enjoyed, he forgot both time and place. The night waned, and Adonis still led his rather breathless priestesses conversationally onwards. Dawn broke; he was talking still. Then, as it was too late to go to bed, a walk in the delicious morning air rounded things off.

“What the devil were you talking about all night to your circle of beauties?” the puzzled Hogg would inquire.

“I’m sure I don’t know.”

Harriet also wondered what her husband could have to say to all these women. She was now near her term, and seldom went out of doors. Shelley often left her alone. In the houses where he was a favourite, she felt that she was unwelcome. At the Godwins’ she could not get on with Mrs. Godwin. At the Boinville’s she had been thought at first charming because she was so pretty and the wife of a poet, but she was soon set down as a very ordinary woman.

The child was a girl, fair, with blue eyes. Her father named her Ianthe. Her mother added Elizabeth. Thus Ovid and Miss Westbrook clasped hands over the cradle. Shelley walked about with the baby in his arms singing to it a monotonous tune of his own making. The idea of bringing up a new being that he might save from prejudices was delightful to him. As an admirer of Rousseau he expected Harriet to suckle the child herself and he was eager to give the tenderest care to both. In the excitement of his new rôle, the odious Eliza was forgotten.

But Harriet, egged on by her sister, refused to nurse the child. She engaged a wet nurse, “a hireling” as Shelley declared resentfully. But on this point Harriet was gently but firmly obstinate.

A curious change came over her after Ianthe’s birth. It seemed as though she wished to make up for nine months’ inactivity. Her Latin lessons were not resumed. She wanted nothing now but to be out of doors looking into the bonnet-shops and jewellers’ windows. To find pleasure in such idle trifling seemed to Shelley monstrous and unintelligible. He was willing to pay for any of Harriet’s “reasonable” fancies, even at the price of loans and endless annoyances, but to spend the money so necessary to “persecuted writers” and other just causes, on mere “glad rags,” appeared to him scandalous, and he made his wife and sister-in-law feel it.

Eliza was careful to show up Shelley’s failings.

“Percy finds money enough to pay the debts of his dear Godwin, who plucks him and whose wife is rude to us. He finds money to pay the fines for a set of miserable scribblers, but he can’t afford to dress his own wife decently! He’s a fool if he thinks it odd that a young and pretty woman should like bonnets. If you don’t dress now at eighteen, when can you do so?”

Miss Westbrook encouraged at the house the visits of an army man, a certain Major Ryan, whom they had first met in Ireland, and now found again in London. He, too, was of opinion that so charming a young woman as Harriet ought to lead a more normal life. Harriet was inclined to agree with him. Latin and philosophy had really been a great strain on her. She had borne it without complaint because of her love and admiration for Percy. But shopping and gay chatter were just as much to her taste as were the Newtons to Shelley’s, and the pleasure she found in these frivolities contrasted with the rather painful attention she had given to her “lessons.”

Shelley thought that town life and its temptations was the cause of the trouble, and he had the very natural idea of all lovers who feel a shadow falling between them, to go back to these scenes where their love had been unclouded. Harriet’s famous carriage was got ready. Shelley raised £500 by a post-obit bond for £2,000, and, accompanied by the inevitable Eliza, went on pilgrimage to Keswick and Edinburgh.

The constant change of scene on the journey made them forget their worries, and they returned to London in much better spirits, but they had hardly settled down again when the old disagreements were renewed. Harriet and Eliza pined for a fine house, fashionable life, gowns, and a social circle. Shelley detested all these things but detested still more the idea that his wife wanted them. He still loved her, but he began to feel a touch of contempt.

Hogg came to see them. He found Harriet quite recovered, prettier and more blooming than ever. But she no longer offered to read to him the wise counsels of Idomeneus. She asked him instead to go with her to her milliner’s. She vanished into the shop, leaving him waiting on the pavement. She began to bore him, and as a man has little indulgence towards the woman who has rejected his advances he let Shelley see it. Shelley, too, could no longer hide his impatience. The Shelleys had reached the dangerous moment of confidences with a third person.

⁂

When Madame de Boinville invited Shelley and Hogg to pass a few days with her in the country, they accepted with joy. They found there her daughter Cornelia, who was cultured, pensive and pretty, and her sister Mrs. Newton. Shelley again knew the delightful sensations of former evenings passed with them in town. He called Madame de Boinville, Maimouna, because she reminded him of the heroine of Thalaba whose

The attractive Cornelia gave the two young men lessons in Italian, and Madame de Boinville expounded in her delicious voice the indulgent teaching of the French philosophers. “To enjoy life, and help others to enjoy it, without harming anyone, herein lies the whole of morality.” This dictum of Chamfort’s, which was a great favourite of Madame de Boinville, ought by rights to have roused Shelley’s wrath. Poor Harriet had never said anything so flatly opposed to virtue. . . . But then she would have said it much less well.

At Bracknell even fooling seemed pleasant to Shelley, because there the simplest games were imbued with the cast of thought. Cornelia had the habit, when she first woke up, of reading over and often learning by heart, one of Petrarch’s sonnets. This sonnet she thought over and fed upon all day long. When they said good morning to her, Shelley and Hogg would inquire which the day’s sonnet might be. Sometimes the poem was so moving she did not trust herself to recite it, but opened the little pocket Petrarch always carried with her, and pointed out the passage.

Walking between the two young men in the garden, she would comment the love text with eloquence and simplicity.

“It is so good to begin the day,” she said, “with a draught of tenderness which sweetens all our thoughts, words and deeds until the night.”

These walks, these talks, seemed to Shelley the only things of any real importance. The house, fine yet simple, charmed him by its perfection and the absence of the luxury which disgusted him so much. It was for him a place of repose and of freedom from care. Harriet was invited to join them. Madame de Boinville received her with kindness. “She’s a very pretty little creature,” she told Hogg. “But she seems to me a rather frivolous companion for our dear, delightful Stoic. However, she’s not yet eighteen, I think?”

Harriet, unfortunately, saw quite well that she was not treated on a footing of equality. She saw that Percy took far more pleasure in reading Petrarch with Cornelia than in discussing with his wife how to improve their style of living; and by a reaction against an environment which she dimly felt to be hostile to her in spite of an appearance of cordiality, she put on cold and ironical airs.

When the rest of the party were solemnly debating on Virtue, or the Reform Bill, Shelley saw her exchange mocking smiles with Hogg and Peacock, a new and very sceptical friend they had just discovered.

He could forgive Hogg’s irony. His wife’s irritated him. Hogg’s mind was an entirely different world from his, and he permitted the difference. But Harriet’s mind was his very own handiwork. He had formed it, trained it, cultivated it. He was accustomed to think of it as his echo. On suddenly discovering that this other self had detached itself from him, and could sometimes even make fun of what he said, he was surprised and profoundly hurt.

There is nothing which makes a woman appear stupider than secret jealousy. Instead of attacking the foe openly, which would be natural and pathetic, she criticizes with spite innocent words and inoffensive actions, and showing a terrible want of tact gives an air of meanness to a sentiment which is perfectly justifiable. Harriet found fault with everything at Bracknell because she had good cause to be jealous of Cornelia Turner. But Shelley, who put down her scornful looks and her mocking remarks to an incredible childishness, treated her with cool contempt.

At this her pride was up in arms, and her behaviour became worse. “Eliza is right,” she thought, “Percy is absolutely selfish, and thinks everything he does is perfect. Because he likes this dull life, these silly discussions, and this Italian poetry, he wants to force me to like them too. But what right has he to prevent me from living my life? How is Cornelia Turner reading Petrarch so superior to me? These women whom he admires are neither so young nor so good-looking as I. He would very soon want me back.”

With this idea in her head she announced her intention of returning to London to join Eliza. Her hostesses did nothing to dissuade her, beyond the few words of regret which politeness requires. “Poor Shelley,” these ladies remarked, just as the Godwin girls had done, “he has not got the wife he ought to have.”

Harriet fell into the way of going up to stay with Eliza for weeks at a time, leaving her husband alone at Bracknell. Soon the usual “kind friend” let Shelley know that his wife was going about with Major Ryan. For the first time since his marriage the idea of a possible infidelity occurred to him. It was a question which in the abstract he had always treated with the greatest contempt. Suddenly brought up against it with Harriet and himself as possible actors, he was overwhelmed with the most violent grief he had yet known.

Reason told him he ought to consider himself lucky if he were freed from a very ordinary woman. If at that moment he loved at all, was it not rather the heavenly Cornelia than Harriet whose miserable spite had recently annoyed him so much? And, if he no longer loved her, to break with her would be best. He had always taught that when passion’s trance is over-past each should be free again. But it was in vain that he reasoned thus with himself. He discovered with stupefaction that Percy Shelley and Harriet Westbrook were no longer two separate and free beings. The sum of past memories, caresses, joys, and sufferings enmeshed them both in a web from which there was no escape.

He rushed up to town, determined either to offer Harriet his excuses or to confess his faults. But she received him with harshness and irony. Any heart-to-heart talk was out of the question.

His child-wife, so gentle and submissive only three months ago, now showed herself cold and haughty. How had such a change come about? There were instants when Shelley thought he detected, beneath pride’s hard surface, a fleeting image of the other Harriet, but when he sought to hold it by a loving word, it was gone. Against the steely armour of her heart he knocked in vain.

Wandering about the streets without any object, he thought: “What a fool I have been! Here I am tied for ever to a woman who does not love me, who has never loved me. Evidently she only married me for the money and title. . . . Now that she sees her hopes upset, she punishes me for her mistake. . . .” And he repeated with disgust: “A heart of ice . . . a lump of ice!”

Perhaps had he ever seen her alone he would have succeeded in thawing it, but Eliza, prim, hostile, formidable, stood always between them, and the gallant Major Ryan was in the wings, ready to commiserate the cruelties of a doctrinaire husband.

After struggling for a few days, Shelley’s ardour was suddenly quenched. Capable by fits and starts of an energy when nothing was impossible to him, he fell as formerly after his long tramps at Oxford into an insurmountable torpor, and his will-power like a dying candle-flame threw up a final blaze of light before it expired.

When he saw that Harriet was obdurate, he gave up all hope of saving the remnants of his married happiness, and he wrote to Bracknell to announce he was coming on a month’s visit, and coming alone. He knew well that after a month’s interval he would find Harriet completely ruined by her hateful surroundings, he knew that a catastrophe would be the result of the Bracknell interlude, but he was too tired to carry on the fight.

“What more am I now but an insect warming itself in a ray of sunshine? The next cloud that passes will plunge me into the frozen darkness of death.” And, in melancholy mood, he recited the lines from Burns:

It seemed to him that into the translucent domes of crystal wherein his fancy dwelt, Harriet, Ianthe and Elizabeth had been suddenly flung like so many blocks of living and rebellious matter. In vain did he try with all the forces of logic to drag them out. His feeble weapons were crushed beneath the ponderous reality.

There were days when Shelley, recalling the sweet and childlike face of his eighteen-year-old wife, thought it might still be possible to forget and make up. In a pathetic poem he tried to tell her how miserable it was for one who had lived in the warm sunshine of her eyes to die beneath her scorn. Did the lines move her? He never knew. She shut herself up more and more in feelings of pride and revenge. He had left her on several occasions. No doubt it was as a reprisal that the moment he came back to London she set off with Ianthe for Bath.

Shelley was obliged to remain in town. He had come of age, yet his affairs were no further advanced thereby. His solicitor gave him to understand there might be a family law-suit to deprive him of his rights. Although crippled with debts himself, he persisted in trying to free others from theirs. The Juvenile Library founded by Godwin had been a failure, and the sight of this old fighter for justice, impoverished and saddened by money troubles, was inexpressibly painful to his young disciple and friend.

But three thousand pounds were needed to save Godwin, a big sum. Yet from the moment he knew of Shelley’s wish to save him, he again exhibited great friendliness, and as Shelley was now a “bachelor” in London, his “beauteous half” being in the country for an indefinite period, he was invited to dine in Skinner Street every night.

He accepted all the more readily that he wished to see the girls again, and Godwin had informed him he would find an extra one, Mary, who had at length come home from Scotland. He gave an attractive portrait of her; seventeen years old, quick and lively, a great wish to learn, and immense perseverance. Already Fanny and Jane had described her to Shelley as being as intelligent as she was beautiful. For her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, Shelley had the warmest admiration. He was greatly moved at the thought he was about to meet her unknown daughter.

He needed for his happiness to embody in the form of a beautiful woman the mysterious and benevolent Forces which he imagined as scattered throughout the Universe. Love was, for him, an impassioned admiration, an integral act of faith, an exquisite and perfect mixture of the sensuous and the intellectual.

Had Mary not appeared at that juncture, or had she proved a disappointment, the sentiment which hovered and hesitated in his wounded heart, would have dedicated itself to Fanny or to Jane, but Mary came, and his fate was settled.

Her face was very pale and pure, her golden hair arranged in smooth bands on either side of a shapely head, she had a great slab of a forehead, and earnest hazel eyes. An air of sensibility and mournful courage instantly inspired in Shelley the same enthusiasm that he found in reading Homer or Plutarch. He saw something heroic in this delicate young girl, and the mixture of the heroic and the feminine was ever that which most appealed to him.

“What seriousness and what feeling!” thought he, listening with ecstasy to her young fresh voice. A maiden standing where brook and river meet, having the grace of the woman and the intellectual eagerness of the youth, had always seemed to him one of the most exquisite works of art. He longed to put a brotherly arm round those slender shoulders, and to make those questioning eyes sparkle, as he bore her away on some astonishing gallop through the realms of aërial metaphysics.

Harriet Westbrook had only imperfectly realized his ideal. For a moment he had hoped to find in her the delightful blend of beauty and intelligence that he would so greatly have loved, but poor Harriet had not withstood the difficult test of time. She was wanting in any real brain-power; even when she had the air of being interested in ideas, her indifference was proved by the blankness of her gaze. Worst of all, she was coquettish, frivolous, versed in the tricks and wiles of woman, and this alone was sufficient to chill him to the marrow.

But Mary, of the nut-brown eyes, was slim and true as a Toledo blade. Brought up by the author of Political Justice, her mind appeared free from all feminine superstition; and the clear if rather piercing tones of her voice emphasized delightfully its cultivated precision. Dining every evening in the little house in Skinner Street, Shelley passed the time in looking at Mary, while he seemed to listen to Godwin, who explained the regrettable state of his own affairs, and discussed the Budget, or the laws of the Press.

Mary, on her side, was quite ready to fall in love with Shelley. The romance had been prepared by the sisters, who for a month previously had talked of nothing in their letters but the handsome poet. Yet no description of Shelley ever came up to the reality.

Mary saw, at once, how much she interested him. Although he had made no complaint of life—he never did—she realized he was unhappy, and so one evening when they found themselves alone in the room where her mother’s portrait hung she spoke to him of her own troubles. She adored her father, but detested Mrs. Godwin on whose account the home in Skinner Street was become odious to her. The only place in the world where she felt herself at peace was by her mother’s tomb in the churchyard of old St. Pancras. She went there book in hand every fine day to read and meditate. Shelley, thrilled, asked if he might go with her.

⁂

Thus, after an interval of five years, he found himself sitting again at a young girl’s side in a graveyard, but this time his companion was of a serious and impassioned soul. For the second time the Word was made Woman. But, alas, Shelley was no longer free. He felt himself drawn to Mary by an irresistible force. He longed to take her hand, to press his lips to her delicately curved ones, he knew that she desired him, as he did her, and they dared not let their eyes meet. What could he offer her? He was a married man. It is true that marriage is only a convention. When one loves no longer, one is free. He had never promised Harriet more than this; besides, believing her to be the mistress of Major Ryan, he felt no scruples on her account. But his marriage was legally indissoluble. He had nothing to offer Mary but that reprobate existence which he had not dared to impose on his first love, Harriet Grove.

Nevertheless, a love shared, even though hopeless, is better than uncertainty and moral isolation. He determined to tell Mary the whole truth about his wife. Married love, even as it dies, long holds out behind a mask of silence against the world’s assaults, but there comes a moment when a man finds a bitter joy in laying bare his wounds.

Shelley drew a picture of Harriet as he now saw her, and by an unconscious change of values lent, to his very human deception, motives of a spiritual order. He had needed a companion who could appreciate poetry and understand philosophy. Harriet was incapable of either. He took a painful pleasure, also very human, in depreciating the grapes which he had lost.

He gave Mary a copy of Queen Mab. Under the printed dedication of that poem to Harriet, he wrote the words, “Count Slobendorf was about to marry a woman who, attracted solely by his fortune, proved her selfishness by deserting him in prison.” Back in her own room, Mary added, “This book is sacred to me, and as no other creature shall ever look into it, I may write in it what I please—yet what shall I write—that I love the author beyond all powers of expression and that I am parted from him, dearest and only love—by that love we have promised to each other although I may not be yours, I can never be another’s. But I am thine, exclusively thine.