Essays in criticism

Nowadays all things appear in print sooner or later; but I have heard from a lady who knew Mrs. Shelley a story of her which, so far as I know, has not appeared in print hitherto. Mrs. Shelley was choosing a school for her son, and asked the advice of this lady, who gave for advice—to use her own words to me—“Just the sort of banality, you know, one does come out with: Oh, send him somewhere where they will teach him to think for himself!” I have had far too long a training as a school inspector to presume to call an utterance of this kind a banality; however, it is not on this advice that I now wish to lay stress, but upon Mrs. Shelley’s reply to it. Mrs. Shelley answered: “Teach him to think for himself? Oh, my God, teach him rather to think like other people!”

To the lips of many and many a reader of Professor Dowden’s volumes a cry of this sort will surely rise, called forth by Shelley’s life as there delineated. I have read those volumes with the deepest interest, but I regret their publication, and am surprised, I confess, that Shelley’s family should have desired or assisted it. For my own part, at any rate, I would gladly have been left with the impression, the ineffaceable impression, made upon me by Mrs. Shelley’s first edition of her husband’s collected poems. Medwin and Hogg and Trelawny had done little to change the impression made by those four delightful volumes of the original edition of 1839. The text of the poems has in some places been mended since; but Shelley is not a classic, whose various readings are to be noted with earnest attention. The charm of the poems flowed in upon us from that edition and the charm of the character. Mrs. Shelley had done her work admirably; her introductions to the poems of each year, with Shelley’s prefaces and passages from his letters, supplied the very picture of Shelley to be desired. Somewhat idealized by tender regret and exalted memory Mrs. Shelley’s representation no doubt was. But without sharing her conviction that Shelley’s character, impartially judged, “would stand in fairer and brighter light than that of any contemporary,” we learned from her to know the soul of affection, of “gentle and cordial goodness,” of eagerness and ardor for human happiness, which was in this rare spirit,—so mere a monster unto many. Mrs. Shelley in her general preface to her husband’s poems: “I abstain from any remark on the occurrences of his private life, except inasmuch as the passions which they engendered inspired his poetry; this is not the time to relate the truth.” I for my part could wish, I repeat, that that time had never come.

But come it has, and Professor Dowden has given us the Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley in two very thick volumes. If the work was to be done, Professor Dowden has indeed done it thoroughly. One or two things in his biography of Shelley I could wish different, even waiving the question whether it was desirable to relate in full the occurrences of Shelley’s private life. Professor Dowden holds a brief for Shelley; he pleads for Shelley as an advocate pleads for his client, and this strain of pleading, united with an attitude of adoration which in Mrs. Shelley had its charm, but which Professor Dowden was not bound to adopt from her, is unserviceable to Shelley, nay, injurious to him, because it inevitably begets, in many readers of the story which Professor Dowden has to tell, impatience and revolt. Further, let me remark that the biography before us is of prodigious length, although its hero died before he was thirty years old, and that it might have been considerably shortened if it had been more plainly and simply written. I see that one of Professor Dowden’s critics, while praising his style for “a certain poetic quality of fervor and picturesqueness,” laments that in some important passages Professor Dowden “fritters away great opportunities for sustained and impassioned narrative.” I am inclined much rather to lament that Professor Dowden has not steadily kept his poetic quality of fervor and picturesqueness more under control. Is it that the Home Rulers have so loaded the language that even an Irishman who is not one of them catches something of their full habit of style? No, it is rather, I believe, that Professor Dowden, of poetic nature himself, and dealing with a poetic nature like Shelley, is so steeped in sentiment by his subject that in almost every page of the biography the sentiment runs over. A curious note of his style, suffused with sentiment, is that it seems incapable of using the common word child. A great many births are mentioned in the biography, but always it is a poetic babe that is born, not a prosaic child. And so, again, André Chénier is not guillotined, but “too foully done to death.” Again, Shelley after his runaway marriage with Harriet Westbrook was in Edinburgh without money and full of anxieties for the future, and complained of his hard lot in being unable to get away, in being “chained to the filth and commerce of Edinburgh.” Natural enough; but why should Professor Dowden improve the occasion as follows? “The most romantic of northern cities could lay no spell upon his spirit. His eye was not fascinated by the presences of mountains and the sea, by the fantastic outlines of aërial piles seen amid the wreathing smoke of Auld Reekie, by the gloom of the Canongate illuminated with shafts of sunlight streaming from its interesting wynds and alleys; nor was his imagination kindled by storied house or palace, and the voices of old, forgotten, far-off things, which haunt their walls.” If Professor Dowden, writing a book in prose, could have brought himself to eschew poetic excursions of this kind and to tell his story in a plain way, lovers of simplicity, of whom there are some still left in the world, would have been gratified, and at the same time his book would have been the shorter by scores of pages.

These reserves being made, I have little except praise for the manner in which Professor DowdenDowden has performed his task; whether it was a task which ought to be performed at all, probably did not lie with him to decide. His ample materials are used with order and judgment; the history of Shelley’s life develops itself clearly before our eyes; the documents of importance for it are given with sufficient fulness, nothing essential seems to have been kept back, although I would gladly, I confess, have seen more of Miss Clairmont’s journal, whatever arrangement she may in her later life have chosen to exercise upon it. In general all documents are so fairly and fully cited, that Professor Dowden’s pleadings for Shelley, though they may sometimes indispose and irritate the reader, produce no obscuring of the truth; the documents manifest it of themselves. Last but not least of Professor Dowden’s merits, he has provided his book with an excellent index.

Undoubtedly this biography, with its full account of the occurrences of Shelley’s private life, compels one to review one’s former impressionimpression of him. Undoubtedly the brilliant and attaching rebel who in thinking for himself had of old our sympathy so passionately with him, when we come to read his full biography makes us often and often inclined to cry out: “My God! he had far better have thought like other people.” There is a passage in Hogg’s capitally written and most interesting account of Shelley which I wrote down when I first read it and have borne in mind ever since; so beautifully it seemed to render the true Shelley. Hogg has been speaking of the intellectual expression of Shelley’s features, and he goes on: “Nor was the moral expression less beautiful than the intellect; for there was a softness, a delicacy, a gentleness, and especially (though this will surprise many) that air of profound religious veneration that characterizes the best work and chiefly the frescoes (and into these they infused their whole souls) of the great masters of Florence and of Rome.” What we have of Shelley in poetry and prose suited with this charming picture of him; Mrs. Shelley’s account suited with it; it was a possession which one would gladly have kept unimpaired. It still subsists, I must now add; it subsists even after one has read the present biography; it consists, but so as by fire. It subsists with many a scar and stain; never again will it have the same pureness and beauty which it had formerly. I regret this, as I have said, and I confess I do not see what has been gained. Our ideal Shelley was the true Shelley after all; what has been gained by making us at moments doubt it? What has been gained by forcing upon as much in him which is ridiculous and odious, by compelling any fair mind, if it is to retain with a good conscience its ideal Shelley, to do that which I propose to do now? I propose to mark firmly what is ridiculous and odious in the Shelley brought to our knowledge by the new materials, and then to show that our former beautiful and lovable Shelley nevertheless survives.

Almost everybody knows the main outline of the events of Shelley’s life. It will be necessary for me, however, up to the date of his second marriage, to go through them here. Percy Bysshe Shelley was born at Field Place, near Horsham, in Sussex, on the 4th of August 1792. He was of an old family of country gentlemen, and the heir to a baronetcy. He had one brother and five sisters, but the brother so much younger than himself as to be no companion for him in his boyhood at home, and after he was separated from home and England he never saw him. Shelley was brought up at Field Place with his sisters. At ten years old he was sent to a private school at Isleworth, where he read Mrs. Radcliffe’s romances and was fascinated by a popular scientific lecturer. After two years of private school he went in 1804 to Eton. Here he took no part in cricket or football, refused to fag, waswas known as “mad Shelley” and much tormented; when tormented beyond endurance he could be dangerous. Certainly he was not happy at Eton; but he had friends, he boated, he rambled about the country. His school lessons were easy to him, and his reading extended far beyond them; he read books on chemistry, he read Pliny’s Natural History, Godwin’s Political Justice, Lucretius, Franklin, Condorcet. It is said he was called “atheist Shelley” at Eton, but this is not so well established as his having been called “mad Shelley.” He was full, at any rate, of new and revolutionary ideas, and he declared at a later time that he was twice expelled from the school but recalled through the interference of his father.

In the spring of 1810 Shelley, now in his eighteenth year, entered University College, Oxford, as an exhibitioner. He had already written novels and poems; a poem on the Wandering Jew, in seven or eight cantos, he sent to Campbell, and was told by Campbell, that there were but two good lines in it. He had solicited the correspondence of Mrs. Hemans, then Felicia Browne and unmarried; he had fallen in love with a charming cousin, Harriet Grove. In the autumn of 1810 he found a publisher for his verse; he also found a friend in a very clever and free-minded commoner of his college, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, who has admirably described the Shelley of those Oxford days, with his chemistry, his eccentric habits, his charm of look and character, his conversation, his shrill discordant voice. Shelley read incessantly. Hume’s Essays produced a powerful impression on him; his free speculation led him to what his father, and worse still his cousin Harriet, thought “detestable principles”; his cousin and family became estranged from him. He, on his part, became more and more incensed against the “bigotry” and “intolerance” which produced such estrangement. “Here I swear, and as I break my oaths, may Infinity, Eternity, blast me—here I swear that never will I forgive intolerance.” At the beginning of 1811 he prepared and published what he called a “leaflet for letters,” having for its title The Necessity of Atheism. He sent copies to all the bishops, to the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford, and to the heads of houses. On Lady Day he was summoned before the authorities of his College, refused to answer the question whether he had written The Necessity of Atheism, told the Master and Fellows that “their“their proceedings would become a court of inquisitors but not free men in a free country,” and was expelled for contumacy. Hogg wrote a letter of remonstrance to the authorities was in his turn summoned before them and questioned as to his share in the “leaflet,” and, refusing to answer, he also was expelled.

Shelley settled with Hogg in lodgings in London. His father, excusably indignant, was not a wise man and managed his son ill. His plan of recommending Shelley to read Paley’s Natural Theology, and of reading it with him himself, makes us smile. Shelley, who about this time wrote of his younger sister, then at school at Clapham, “There are some hopes of this dear little girl, she would be a divine little scion of infidelity if I could get hold of her,” was not to have been cured by Paley’s Natural Theology administered through Mr. Timothy Shelley. But by the middle of May Shelley’s father had agreed to allow him two hundred pounds a year. Meanwhile in visiting his sisters at their school in Clapham, Shelley made the acquaintance of a schoolfellow of theirs, Harriet Westbrook. She was a beautiful and lively girl, with a father who had kept a tavern in Mount Street, but had now retired from business, and one sister much older than herself, who encouraged in every possible way the acquaintance of her sister of sixteen with the heir to a baronetcy and a great estate. Soon Shelley heard that Harriet met with cold looks at her school for associating with an atheist; his generosity and his ready indignation against “intolerance” were roused. In the summer Harriet wrote to him that she was persecuted not at school only but at home also, that she was lonely and miserable, and would gladly put an end to her life. Shelley went to see her; she owned her love for him, and he engaged himself to her. He told his cousin Charles Grove that his happiness had been blighted when the other Harriet, Charles’s sister, cast him off; that now the only thing worth living for was self-sacrifice. Harriet’s persecutors became yet more troublesome, and Shelley, at the end of August, went off with her to Edinburgh and they were married. The entry in the register is this:—

After five weeks in Edinburgh the young farmer and his wife came southwards and took lodgings at York, under the shadow of what Shelley calls that “gigantic pile of superstition,” the Minster. But his friend Hogg was in a lawyer’s office in York, and Hogg’s society made the Minster endurable. Mr. Timothy Shelley’s happiness in his son was naturally not increased by the runaway marriage; he stopped his allowance, and Shelley determined to visit “this thoughtless man,” as he calls his parent, and to “try the force of truth” upon him. Nothing could be effected; Shelley’s mother, too, was now against him. He returned to York to find that in his absence his friend Hogg had been making love to Harriet, who had indignantly repulsed him. Shelley was shocked, but after a “terrible day” of explanation from Hogg, he “fully, freely pardoned him,” promised to retain him still as “his friend, his bosom friend,” and “hoped soon to convince him how lovely virtue was.” But for the present it seemed better to separate. In November he and Harriet, with her sister Eliza, took a cottage at Keswick. Shelley was now in great straits for money; the great Sussex neighbor of the Shelleys, the Duke of Norfolk, interposed in his favor, and his father and grandfather seem to have offered him at this time an income of £2000 a year, if he would consent to entail the family estate. Shelley indignantly refused to “forswear his principles,” by accepting “a proposal so insultingly hateful.” But in December his father agreed, though with an ill grace, to grant him his allowance of £200 a year again, and Mr. Westbrook promised to allow a like sum to his daughter. So after four months of marriage the Shelleys began 1812 with an income of £400 a year.

Early in February they left Keswick and proceeded to Dublin, where Shelley, who had prepared an address to the Catholics, meant to “devote himself towards forwarding the great ends of virtue and happiness in Ireland.” Before leaving Keswick he wrote to William Godwin, “the regulator and former of his mind,” making profession of his mental obligations to him, of his respect and veneration, and soliciting Godwin’s friendship. A correspondence followed; Godwin pronounced his young disciple’s plans for “disseminating the doctrines of philanthropy and freedom” in Ireland to be unwise; Shelley bowed to his mentor’s decision and gave up his Irish campaign, quitting Dublin on the 4th of April 1812. He and Harriet wandered first to Nant-Gwillt in South Wales, near the upper Wye, and from thence after a month or two to Lynmouth in North Devon, where he busied himself with his poem of Queen Mab, and with sending to sea boxes and bottles containing a Declaration of Rights by him, in the hope that the winds and waves might carry his doctrines where they would do good. But his Irish servant, bearing the prophetic name of Healy, posted the Declaration on the walls of Barnstaple and was taken up; Shelley found himself watched and no longer able to enjoy Lynmouth in peace. He moved in September, 1812, to Tremadoc, in North Wales, where hehe threw himself ardently into an enterprise for recovering a great stretch of drowned land from the sea. But at the beginning of October he and Harriet visited London, and Shelley grasped Godwin by the hand at last. At once an intimacy arose, but the future Mary Shelley—Godwin’s daughter by his first wife, Mary Wollstonecraft—was absent on a visit in Scotland when the Shelleys arrived in London. They became acquainted, however, with the second Mrs. Godwin, on whom we have Charles Lamb’s friendly comment: “A very disgusting woman, and wears green spectacles!”;spectacles!”; with the amiable Fanny, Mary Wollstonecraft’s daughter by Imlay, before her marriage with Godwin; and probably also with Jane Clairmont, the second Mrs. Godwin’s daughter by a first marriage, and herself, afterwards the mother of Byron’s Allegra. Complicated relationships, as in the Theban story! and there will be not wanting, presently, something of the Theban horrors. During this visit of six weeks to London Shelley renewed his intimacy with Hogg; in the middle of November he returned to Tremadoc. There he remained until the end of February 1813, perfectly happy with Harriet, reading widely, and working at his Queen Mab and at the notes to that poem. On the 26th of February an attempt was made, or so he fancied, to assassinate him, and in high nervous excitement he hurriedly left Tremadoc and repaired with Harriet to Dublin again. On this visit to Ireland he saw Killarney, but early in April he and Harriet were back again in London.

There in June 1813 their daughter Ianthe was born; at the end of July they moved to Bracknell, in Berkshire. They had for neighbors there a Mrs. Boinville and her married daughter, whom Shelley found to be fascinating women, with a culture which to his wife was altogether wanting. Cornelia Turner, Mrs. Boinville’s daughter, was melancholy, required consolation, and found it, Hogg tells us, in Petrarch’s poetry; “Bysshe entered at once fully into her views and caught the soft infection, breathing the tenderest and sweetest melancholy as every true poet ought.” Peacock, a man of keen and cultivated mind, joined the circle at Bracknell. He and Harriet, not yet eighteen, used sometimes to laugh at the gushing sentiment and enthusiasm of the Bracknell circle; Harriet had also given offense to Shelley by getting a wet-nurse for her child; in Professor Dowden’s words, “the beauty of Harriet’s motherly relation to her babe was marred in Shelley’s eyes by the introduction into his home of a hireling nurse to whom was delegated the mother’s tenderest office.” But in September Shelley wrote a sonnet to his child which expresses his deep love for the mother also, to whom in March, 1814, he was remarried in London, lest the Scotch marriage should prove to have been in any point irregular. Harriet’s sister Eliza, however, whom Shelley had at first treated with excessive deference, had now become hateful to him. And in the very month of the London marriage we find him writing to Hogg that he is staying with the Boinvilles, having “escaped, in the society of all that philosophy and friendship combine, from the dismaying solitude of myself.” Cornelia Turner, he adds, whom he once thought cold and reserved, “is the reverse of this, as she is the reverse of everything bad; she inherits all the divinity of her mother.” Then comes a stanza, beginning

It has no meaning, he says; it is only written in thought. “It is evident from this pathetic letter,” says Professor Dowden, “that Shelley’s happiness in his home had been fatally stricken.” This is a curious way of putting the matter. To me what is evident is rather that Shelley had, to use Professor Dowden’s words again—for in these things of high sentiment I gladly let him speak for me—“a too vivid sense that here (in the society of the Boinville family) were peace and joy and gentleness and love.” In April come some more verses to the Boinvilles, which contain the first good stanza that Shelley wrote. In May comes a poem to Harriet, of which Professor Dowden’s prose analysis is as poetic as the poem itself. “If she has something to endure (from the Boinville attachment), it is not much, and all her husband’s weal hangs upon her loving endurance, for see how pale and wildered anguish has made him!” Harriet, unconvinced, seems to have gone off to Bath in resentment, from whence, however, she kept up a constant correspondence with Shelley, who was now of age, and busy in London raising money on post-obit bonds for his own wants and those of the friend and former of his mind, Godwin.

And now, indeed, it was to become true that if from the inflammable Shelley’s devotion to the Boinville family poor Harriet had had “something to endure,” yet this was “not much” compared with what was to follow. At Godwin’s house Shelley met Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, his future wife, then in her seventeenth year. She was a gifted person, but, as Professor Dowden says, she “had breathed during her entire life an atmosphere of free thought.” On the 8th of June Hogg called at Godwin’s with Shelley; Godwin was out, but “a door was partially and softly opened, a thrilling voice called ‘Shelley!’ a thrilling voice answered ‘Mary!’” Shelley’s summoner was “a very young female, fair and fair-haired, pale indeed, and with a piercing look, wearing a frock of tartan.” Already they were “Shelley” and “Mary” to one another; “before the close of June they knew and felt,” says Professor Dowden, “that each was to the other inexpressibly dear.” The churchyard of St. Pancras, where her mother was buried, became “a place now doubly sacred to Mary, since on one eventful day Bysshe here poured forth his griefs, his hopes, his love, and she, in sign of everlasting union, placed her hand in his.” In July Shelley gave her a copy of Queen Mab, printed but not published, and under the tender dedication to Harriet he wrote: “Count Slobendorf was about to marry a woman who, attracted solely by his fortune, proved her selfishness by deserting him in prison.” Mary added an inscription on her part: “I love the author beyond all powers of expression ... by that love we have promised to each other, although I may not be yours I can never be another’s,”—and a good deal more to the same effect.

Amid these excitements Shelley was for some days without writing to Harriet, who applied to Hookham the publisher to know what had happened. She was expecting her confinement; “I always fancy something dreadful has happened,” she wrote, “if I do not hear from him ... I cannot endure this dreadful state of suspense.” Shelley then wrote to her, begging her to come to London; and when she arrived there, he told her the state of his feelings, and proposed separation. The shock made Harriet ill; and Shelley, says Peacock, “between his old feelings towards Harriet, and his new passion for Mary, showed in his looks, in his gestures, in his speech, the state of a mind ‘suffering, like a little kingdom, the nature of an insurrection.’” Godwin grew uneasy about his daughter, and after a serious talk with her, wrote to Shelley. Under such circumstances, Professor Dowden tells us, “to youth, swift and decisive measures seem the best.” In the early morning of the 28th of July 1814 “Mary Godwin stepped across her father’s threshold into the summer air,” she and Shelley went off together in a post-chaise to Dover, and from thence crossed to the Continent.

On the 14th of August the fugitives were at Troyes on their way to Switzerland. From Troyes Shelley addressed a letter to Harriet, of which the best description I can give is that it is precisely the letter which a man in the writer’s circumstances should not have written.

Then follows a description of his journey with Mary from Paris, “through a fertile country, neither interesting from the character of its inhabitants nor the beauty of the scenery, with a mule to carry our baggage, as Mary, who has not been sufficiently well to walk, fears the fatigue of walking.” Like St. Paul to Timothy, he ends with commissions:—

Professor Dowden’s flow of sentiment is here so agitating, that I relieve myself by resorting to a drier world. Certainly my comment on this letter shall not be his, that it “assures Harriet that her interests were still dear to Shelley, though now their lives had moved apart.” But neither will I call the letter an odious letter, a hideous letter. I prefer to call it, applying an untranslated French word, a bête letter. And it is bête from what is the signal, the disastrous want and weakness of Shelley, with all his fine intellectual gifts—his utter deficiency in humour.

Harriet did not accept Shelley’s invitation to join him and Mary in Switzerland. Money difficulties drove the travellers back to England in September. Godwin would not see Shelley, but he sorely needed, continually demanded and eagerly accepted, pecuniary help from his erring “spiritual son.” Between Godwin’s wants and his own, Shelley was hard pressed. He got from Harriet, who still believed that he would return to her, twenty pounds which remained in her hands. In November she was confined; a son and heir was born to Shelley. He went to see Harriet, but “the interview left husband and wife each embittered against the other.” Friends were severe; “when Mrs. Boinville wrote, her letter seemed cold and even sarcastic,” says Professor Dowden. “Solitude,” he continues, “unharassed by debts and duns, with Mary’s companionship, the society of a few friends, and the delights of study and authorship, would have made these winter months to Shelley months of unusual happiness and calm.” But, alas! creditors were pestering, and even Harriet gave trouble. In January, 1815, Mary had to write in her journal this entry: “Harriet sends her creditors here; nasty woman. Now we must change our lodgings.”

One day about this time Shelley asked Peacock, “Do you think Wordsworth could have written such poetry if he ever had dealings with money-lenders?” Not only had Shelley dealings with money-lenders, he now had dealings with bailiffs also. But still he continued to read largely. In January, 1815, his grandfather, Sir Bysshe Shelley, died. Shelley went down into Sussex; his father would not suffer him to enter the house, but he sat outside the door and read Comus, while the reading of his grandfather’s will went on inside. In February was born Mary’s first child, a girl, who lived but a few days. All the spring Shelley was ill and harassed, but by June it was settled that he should have an allowance from his father of £1000 a year, and that his debts (including £1200 promised by him to Godwin) should be paid. He on his part paid Harriet’s debts and allowed her £200 a year. In August he took a house on the borders of Windsor Park, and made a boating excursion up the Thames as far as Lechlade, an excursion which produced his first entire poem of value, the beautiful Stanza in Lechlade Churchyard. They were followed, later in the autumn, by Alastor. Henceforth, from this winter of 1815 until he was drowned between Leghorn and Spezzia in July, 1822, Shelley’s literary history is sufficiently given in the delightful introductions prefixed by Mrs. Shelley to the poems of each year. Much of the history of his life is there given also; but with some of those “occurrences of his private life” on which Mrs. Shelley forbore to touch, and which are now made known to us in Professor Dowden’s book, we have still to deal.

Mary’s first son, William, was born in January, 1816, and in February we find Shelley declaring himself “strongly urged, by the perpetual experience of neglect or enmity from almost every one but those who are supported by my resources, to desert my native country, hiding myself and Mary from the contempt which we so unjustly endure.” Early in May he left England with Mary and Miss Clairmont; they met Lord Byron at Geneva and passed the summer by the Lake of Geneva in his company. Miss Clairmont had already in London, without the knowledge of the Shelleys, made Byron’s acquaintance and become his mistress. Shelley determined, in the course of the summer, to go back to England, and, after all, “to make that most excellent of nations my perpetual resting-place.” In September he and his ladies returned; Miss Clairmont was then expecting her confinement. Of her being Byron’s mistress the Shelleys were now aware; but “the moral indignation,” says Professor Dowden, “which Byron’s act might justly arouse, seems to have been felt by neither Shelley nor Mary.” If Byron and Claire Clairmont, as she was now called, loved and were happy, all was well.

The eldest daughter of the Godwin household, the amiable Fanny, was unhappy at home and in deep dejection of spirits. Godwin was, as usual, in terrible straits for money. The Shelleys and Miss Clairmont settled themselves at Bath; early in October Fanny Godwin passed through Bath without their knowing it, travelled on to Swansea, took a bedroom at the hotel there, and was found in the morning dead, with a bottle of laudanum on the table beside her and these words in her handwriting:—

There is no signature.

A sterner tragedy followed. On the 9th of November 1816 Harriet Shelley left the house in Brompton where she was then living, and did not return. On the 10th of December her body was found in the Serpentine; she had drowned herself. In one respect Professor Dowden resembles Providence: his ways are inscrutable. His comment on Harriet’s death is: “There is no doubt she wandered from the ways of upright living.” But he adds: “That no act of Shelley’s, during the two years which immediately preceded her death, tended to cause the rash act which brought her life to its close, seems certain.” Shelley had been living with Mary all the time; only that!

On the 30th of December, 1816, Mary Godwin and Shelley were married. I shall pursue “the occurrences of Shelley’s private life” no further. For the five years and a half which remain, Professor Dowden’s book adds to our knowledge of Shelley’s life much that is interesting; but what was chiefly important we knew already. The new and grave matter which we did not know, or knew in the vaguest way only, but which Shelley’s family and Professor Dowden have now thought it well to give us in full, ends with Shelley’s second marriage.

I regret, I say once more, that it has been given. It is a sore trial for our love of Shelley. What a set! what a world! is the exclamation that breaks from us as we come to an end of this history of “the occurrences of Shelley’s private life.” I used the French word bête for a letter of Shelley’s; for the world in which we find him I can only use another French word, sale. Godwin’s house of sordid horror, and Godwin’s preaching and holding the hat, and the green-spectacled Mrs. Godwin, and Hogg the faithful friend, and Hunt the Horace of this precious world, and, to go up higher, Sir Timothy Shelley, a great country gentleman, feeling himself safe while “the exalted mind of Norfolk [the drinking Duke] protects me with the world,” and Lord Byron with his deep grain of coarseness and commonness, his affectation, his brutal selfishness—what a set! The history carries us to Oxford, and I think of the clerical and respectable Oxford of those old times, the Oxford of Copleston and the Kebles and Hawkins, and a hundred more, with the relief Keble declares himself to experience from Izaak Walton,

I am not only thinking of morals and the house of Godwin, I am thinking also of tone, bearing, dignity. I appeal to Cardinal Newman, if perchance he does me the honor to read these words, is it possible to imagine Copleston or Hawkins declaring himself safe “while the exalted mind of the Duke of Norfolk protects me with the world”?

Mrs. Shelley, after her marriage and during Shelley’s closing years, becomes attractive; up to her marriage her letters and journal do not please. Her ability is manifest, but she is not attractive. In the world discovered to us by Professor Dowden as surrounding Shelley up to 1817, the most pleasing figure is Poor Fanny Godwin; after Fanny Godwin, the most pleasing figure is Harriet Shelley herself.

Professor Dowden’s treatment of Harriet is not worthy—so much he must allow me in all kindness, but also in all seriousness, to say—of either his taste or his judgment. His pleading for Shelley is constant, and he does more harm than good to Shelley by it. But here his championship of Shelley makes him very unjust to a cruelly used and unhappy girl. For several pages he balances the question whether or not Harriet was unfaithful to Shelley before he left her for Mary, and he leaves the question unsettled. As usual Professor Dowden (and it is his signal merit) supplies the evidence decisive against himself. Thornton Hunt, not well disposed to Harriet, Hogg, Peacock, Trelawny, Hookham, and a member of Godwin’s own family, are all clear in their evidence that up to her parting from Shelley Harriet was perfectlyperfectly innocent. But that precious witness, Godwin, wrote in 1817 that “she had proved herself unfaithful to her husband before their separation.... Peace be to her shade!” Why, Godwin was the father of Harriet’s successor. But Mary believed the same thing. She was Harriet’s successor. But Shelley believed it too. He had it from Godwin. But he was convinced of it earlier. The evidence for this is, that, in writing to Southey in 1820, Shelley declares that “the single passage of a life, otherwise not only spotless but spent in an impassioned pursuit of virtue, which looks like a blot,” bears that appearance “merely because I regulated my domestic arrangements without deferring to the notions of the vulgar, although I might have done so quite as conveniently had I descended to their base thoughts.” From this Professor Dowden concludes that Shelley believed he could have got a divorce from Harriet had he so wished. The conclusion is not clear. But even were the evidence perfectly clear that Shelley believed Harriet unfaithful when he parted from her, we should have to take into account Mrs. Shelley’s most true sentence in her introduction to Alastor: “In all Shelley did, he, at the time of doing it, believed himself justified to his own conscience.”

Shelley’s asserting a thing vehemently does not prove more than that he chose to believe it and did believe it. His extreme and violent changes of opinion about people show this sufficiently. Eliza Westbrook is at one time “a diamond not so large” as her sister Harriet but “more highly polished;” and then: “I certainly hate her with all my heart and soul. I sometimes feel faint with the fatigue of checking the overflowings of my unbounded abhorrence for this miserable wretch.” The antipathy, Hogg tells us, was as unreasonable as the former excess of deference. To his friend Miss Hitchener he says: “Never shall that intercourse cease, which has been the day-dawn of my existence, the sun which has shed warmth on the cold drear length of the anticipated prospect of life.” A little later, and she has become “the Brown Demon, a woman of desperate views and dreadful passions, but of cool and undeviating revenge!” Even Professor Dowden admits that this is absurd; that the real Miss Hitchener was not seen by Shelley, either when he adored or when he detested.

Shelley’s power of persuading himself was equal to any occasion; but would not his conscientiousness and high feeling have prevented his exerting this power at poor Harriet’s expense? To abandon her as he did, must he not have known her to be false! Professor Dowden insists always on Shelley’s “conscientiousness.” Shelley himself speaks of his “impassioned pursuit of virtue.” Leigh Hunt compared his life to that of “Plato himself, or, still more, a Pythagorean,” and added that he “never met a being who came nearer, perhaps so near, to the height of humanity,” to being an “angel of charity.” In many respects Shelley really resembled both a Pythagorean and an angel of charity. He loved high thoughts, he cared nothing for sumptuous lodging, fare, and raiment, he was poignantly afflicted at the sight of misery, he would have given away his last farthing, would have suffered in his own person, to relieve it. But in one important point he was like neither a Pythagorean nor an angel: he was extremely inflammable. Professor Dowden leaves no doubt on the matter. After reading his book, one feels sickened for ever of the subject of irregular relations; God forbid that I should go into the scandals about Shelley’s “Neapolitan charge,” about Shelley and Emilia Viviani, about Shelley and Miss Clairmont, and the rest of it! I will say only that it is visible enough that when the passion of love was aroused in Shelley (and it was aroused easily) one could not be sure of him, his friends could not trust him. We have seen him with the Boinville family. With Emilia Viviani he is the same. If he is left much alone with Miss Clairmont, he evidently makes Mary uneasy; nay, he makes Professor Dowden himself uneasy. And I conclude that an entirely human inflammability, joined to an inhuman want of humor and a superhuman power of self-deception, are the causes which chiefly explain Shelley’s abandonment of Harriet in the first place, and then his behavior to her and his defense of himself afterwards.

His misconduct to Harriet, his want of humor his self-deception, are fully brought before us for the first time by Professor Dowden’s book. Good morals and good criticism alike forbid that when all this is laid bare to us we should deny, or hide, or extenuate it. Nevertheless I go back after all to what I said at the beginning; still our ideal Shelley, the angelic Shelley, subsists. Unhappily the data for this Shelley we had and knew long ago, while the data for the unattractive Shelley are fresh; and what is fresh is likely to fix our attention more than what is familiar. But Professor Dowden’s volumes, which give so much, which give too much, also afford data for picturing anew the Shelley who delights, as well as for picturing for the first time a Shelley who, to speak plainly, disgusts; and with what may renew and restore our impression of the delightful Shelley I shall end.

The winter at Marlow, and the ophthalmia caught among the cottages of the poor, we knew, but we have from Professor Dowden more details of this winter and of Shelley’s work among the poor; we have above all, for the first time I believe, a line of verse of Shelley’s own which sums up truly and perfectly this most attractive side of him—

But that in Shelley on which I would especially dwell is that in him which contrasts most with the ignobleness of the world in which we have seen him living, and with the pernicious nonsense which we have found him talking. The Shelley of “marvelous gentleness,” of feminine refinement with gracious and considerate manners, “a perfect gentleman, entirely without arrogance or aggressive egotism,” completely devoid of the proverbial and ferocious vanity of authors and poets, always disposed to make little of his own work and to prefer that of others, of reverent enthusiasm for the great and wise, of high and tender seriousness, of heroic generosity, and of a delicacy in rendering services which was equal to his generosity—the Shelley who was all this is the Shelley with whom I wish to end. He may talk nonsense about tyrants and priests, but what a high and noble ring in such a sentence as the following, written by a young man who is refusing £2000 a year rather than consent to entail a great property!

And again:—

If there is extravagance here, it is extravagance of a beautiful and rare sort, like Shelley’s “underhand ways” also, which differed singularly, the cynic Hogg tells us, from the underhand ways of other people; “the latter were concealed because they were mean, selfish, sordid; Shelley’s secrets, on the contrary (kindnesses done by stealth), were hidden through modesty, delicacy, generosity, refinement of soul.”

His forbearance to Godwin, to Godwin lecturing and renouncing him and at the same time holding out, as I have said, his hat to him for alms, is wonderful; but the dignity with which he at last, in a letter perfect for propriety of tone, reads a lesson to his ignoble father-in-law, is in the best possible style:—