Don Juan counted, however, without the energy of Elvira. Claire had made up her mind to follow him to Switzerland, and this dark-eyed girl was a flame and a force. She arranged that the Shelleys should chaperon her, knowing that they, too, would welcome the idea of a change.

Since she left them, they had been living at Bishopsgate, on the border of Windsor Forest, and beneath the oak-shades of the Great Park Shelley had composed his first long poem since Queen Mab. This was Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude, an imaginative interpretation of his spiritual experiences, and a record of the exquisite mountain, river, and woodland scenery of the past year. The tone differs from that of his previous works. Melancholy and resignation soften down the confident assertions of earlier years, and religious and moral theories, if still serving as a peg, get somewhat pushed into the background.

In the preface he shows the Poet thirsting for love and dying because he cannot find it. But, says Shelley, it is better to die than to live as do the comfortable worldlings, “who, deluded by no generous error, instigated by no sacred thirst of doubtful knowledge, duped by no illustrious superstition, loving nothing on this earth, and cherishing no hopes beyond—yet keep aloof from sympathies with their kind, rejoicing neither in human joy, nor mourning with human grief; these and such as they have their appointed curse. . . . They are morally dead. They are neither friends, nor lovers, nor fathers, nor citizens of the world, nor benefactors of their country . . . they live unfruitful lives, and prepare for their old age a miserable grave.”

While Shelley had no regrets for his actions, all the same, life in England had become odious to him. Mary, as an unmarried wife, suffered from her social ostracism, and thought that if they went abroad, where their story would be unknown, she would have more chance of making friends.

She had given birth to a second child in January, 1816, a fine little boy whom she had named William, after Godwin. The expenses of the household, with the addition of a nurse, were heavy, the income small. Life in Switzerland was said to be cheap; Claire, at least, had little difficulty in persuading her that it was so.

As in the time of their first flight from London the extraordinary trio crossed France, Burgundy, the Jura, and, reaching Geneva, settled down at Sécheron, one of its suburbs, in the Hôtel d’Angleterre. The house was on the edge of the lake, from its windows they saw the sun sparkling on every wave-crest of the blue water, and in the distance the black mountain-ridges that seemed to quiver in the sunny atmosphere. Farther away still, a brilliant and solid-looking white cloud spoke of the snow peaks of the Alps. The change to this golden climate after English greyness and London gloom was delicious. They hired a boat, and passed long days upon the water, reading and sleeping.

⁂

While they lived thus, a band of happy children, with the blue sky above them, and the blue lake beneath, Childe Harold in the most sumptuous of travelling carriages was crossing Flanders on his way to join them. England, in one of those crazy fits of virtue which alternate with periods of the most amazing licence, had just hounded Byron from her shores. When he entered a ball-room every woman would leave it, as though he were the devil in person. He determined to shake for ever from his shoes the dust of so hypocritical a land.

His departure was accompanied by the most frenzied curiosity. Society, which punishes cruelly any revolt of the elemental instincts, nevertheless, in her heart of hearts, admires the rebel and envies him. At Dover, where the Pilgrim embarked, a double line of spectators stood on either side of the gangway. Great ladies borrowed the clothes of their chamber-maids, so as to mix unobserved with the crowd. People pointed out to one another the enormous packing-cases containing his sofa, his books, his services of china and glass.

The sea was rough, and Byron reminded his travelling companions that his grandfather Admiral Byron was nicknamed “Foul-weather Jack” because he never put to sea without a squall blowing up. He took a certain pleasure in painting his own portrait against this traditional stormy background. Unfortunately, he would have his misfortunes transcendent.

⁂

A few days later there was great commotion at the Hôtel d’Angleterre. Every one was on edge expecting the arrival of the noble lord. Claire was tremulous in spite of her audacity, Shelley, in the happiest spirits, was impatient. He was not shocked by the affair between Byron and Claire. On the contrary he hoped to see the same ties formed between Byron and his sister-in-law as existed between himself and Mary.

The Shelleys were not disappointed by Byron’s first appearance. His beauty was extraordinary. To begin with, you were struck by his air of pride and intellect; next, you noticed the moonlight paleness of his skin, his splendid dark blue eyes, his black and slightly curling hair, the perfect line of his eyebrows. The nose and chin were firm and well-drawn, the mouth full and voluptuous. His only defect appeared in his walk. “Club-footed” was said of him. “Cloven-footed” he insinuated of himself, for he preferred to be considered diabolic rather than infirm. Mary saw that his lameness embarrassed him, for whenever he had to take a few steps before spectators he made some satanic jest. In the register-book of the hotel, against the word “age” he wrote “a hundred.”

Byron and Shelley got on well together. Byron was glad to find him a man of his own class, who in spite of hardships had retained the charming ease of manner peculiar to the young aristocrat. His cultivation was astounding. Byron, too, had read enormously, but without Shelley’s serious application. Shelley had read to know, Byron had read to dazzle, and Byron was perfectly well aware of the difference. He felt, too, the instant conviction that Shelley’s will was a force, a bent bow, while his own floated loose on the current at the mercy of his passions and of his mistresses.

Shelley, the least vain of men, did not observe this admiration for him, which Byron took care to hide. While listening to the third canto of Childe Harold he was moved to enthusiasm and discouragement. In the superb energy of the poem, which rose and swelled, irresistibly like a flood, he recognized genius and despaired of ever equalling it.

But if the poet filled him with admiration, the man filled him with astonishment. He had expected a Titan in revolt, and he found a wounded aristocrat fully alive to the pleasures and pains of vanity, which seemed to Shelley so puerile. Byron had outraged convention, but, all the same, he believed in it. It had stood in the path of his desires, and he had flung it aside, but with regret. That which Shelley had done ingenuously, he had done consciously. Banished from society, he valued nothing so much as social success. A bad husband, it was only to legitimate love that he paid respect. His mouth overflowed with cynicism, but it was by way of reprisals, not from conviction. Between marriage and depravity he recognized no middle path. He had sought to terrify his compatriots by acting an audacious part, but only because he had despaired of conquering them by acting a traditional one.

Shelley looked to women as a source of exaltation, Byron as a pretext for idling. Shelley angelic, too angelic, venerated them. Byron human, too human, desired them and talked of them in the most contemptuous fashion. “It is the plague of these women,” said he, “that you cannot live with them or without them. . . . I cannot make up my mind whether or not women have souls. My beau-ideal would be a woman with talent enough to understand and value mine, but not sufficient to be able to shine herself.”

The upshot of certain of their conversations was surprising. Shelley, mystical without knowing it, managed to scandalize Byron, a Don Juan in spite of himself.

This did not prevent them from being excellent company one for the other. When Shelley, always a great fisher of souls, tried to win over his friend to a less futile conception of life, Byron defended his point of view by brilliant paradoxes which delighted Shelley the artist, as much as they pained Shelley the moralist. Both were passionately fond of the water. They bought a boat, keeled and clinker-built, in which they went on the lake every evening with Mary, Claire, and Byron’s medical attendant, the handsome young Italian, Polidori. Byron and Shelley, sitting silent, would ship their oars to follow with their gaze fleeting shapes amidst the moon-lit clouds; Claire would sing, and her warm, delicious voice carried their thoughts with it over the starry waters in a voluptuous flight.

One night of strong wind Byron, defying the storm, said he would sing them an Albanian song. “Now be sentimental and give me all your attention.” It was a strange wild howl that he gave forth, laughing the while at their disappointment, who had expected a wild Eastern melody. From that day onward Mary and Claire named him “the Albaneser,” and “Albé” for short.

The two poets made a literary pilgrimage round the lake. They visited the spot where Rousseau has placed his Nouvelle Héloïse, “Clarens, sweet Clarens, birthplace of deep Love”; and Lausanne and Ferney, full of memories of Gibbon and Voltaire.

Shelley’s enthusiasm gained Byron, who wrote under its influence some of his finest lines. Near Meillerie one of the sudden lake-storms nearly upset the boat. Byron began to strip. Shelley, who could not swim, sat still with folded arms. His calmness increased Byron’s admiration for him, although he hid it more carefully than ever. Long afterwards Shelley, speaking of this storm, said, “I knew that my companion would try to save me, and it was a humiliating idea.”

Sick of hotel life and the impertinent curiosity of their fellow-boarders, the Shelleys hired a cottage at Coligny on the edge of the lake. Byron settled himself at the Villa Diodati, a short distance away. The two houses were only separated by a vineyard. Here, some vine-dressers at work in the early morning saw Claire come out of Byron’s villa and run across to Shelley’s. She lost a slipper on the way, but ashamed of being seen did not stop to pick it up. The honest Swiss peasants, chuckling hugely, made haste to carry the slipper of the English “Miss” to the mayor of the village.

Her love affair did not prosper. She was with child, and Byron was utterly tired of her. He let her see it. For a moment perhaps he had admired her voice, and her vivacity, but very soon she bored him. Nor did he feel himself in any way bound to this young woman who had thrust herself upon him with such pertinacity. . . .

“ ‘Carry off’ quotha! and ‘girl.’ I should like to know who has been carried off except poor dear me. I have been more ravished myself than anybody since the Trojan War. I am accused of being hard on women. It may be so, but I have been their martyr. My whole life has been sacrificed to them and by them.”

Shelley went to talk with him of Claire’s future, and of the child’s. As to Claire’s, Byron was perfectly indifferent. All he wanted was to get rid of her as soon as possible and never to see her again. Shelley had nothing to say on this point, but he defended the rights of the unborn child.

At first Byron had the idea of confiding it to his sister Augusta. Claire refusing her consent, he then undertook to look after the child himself as soon as it was a year old, on condition that he should be absolutely master of it.

It became difficult for the Shelleys to remain in his neighbourhood. Not that there was any coldness between the two men, for while Shelley had found the negotiations for Claire painful, they had seemed to him perfectly natural. But Claire herself suffered, and Mary was often indignant at Byron’s cynical talk. When he declared that women had no right to eat at the same table with men, that their proper place was in the harem or gynæceum, the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft trembled with anger. Once more she was homesick for English scenes. A house beside some English river now appeared to her, at this distance away, a haven of peace. Shelley wrote to his friends, Peacock and Hogg, to find something for them, and the journey home began.

⁂

After they had gone, Byron wrote to his sister:

Shelley remained in correspondence with Byron and did not give up hopes of “saving” him. Mingled with an immense deference for the great poet, Shelley’s letters show a trace of haughty disapproval of the character of the man. He opposed to Byron’s constant anxiety concerning his reputation, his success, and what was said of him in London, a picture of true glory.

Lord Byron, who was then on his way to Venice, read these lofty counsels with a weary indifference. Exacting veneration bored him.

Of the three young girls who had given life and gaiety to the house in Skinner Street, one only, Fanny Imlay, was left. She alone, who was neither Godwin’s child, nor yet Mrs. Godwin’s, lived at home with them and called them “papa” and “mamma.” She alone, so gentle and so loving, had found neither lover nor husband. Modest and unselfish, these are virtues which men praise—and pass by. For a moment she had wondered whether Percy would not think of her, and with a beating heart had begun a correspondence with him. But Mary’s hazel eyes had quenched the hopes to which the timid Fanny had never given definite form.

In this silent home, saddened by money-worries, it was on Fanny that Mrs. Godwin wreaked her ill-humour, while Godwin let her understand that he could not continue to keep her, and that she ought to see about earning her own living. She asked nothing better, and would have liked to become a teacher, but the flight of Mary and Jane had thrown a mantle of disrepute over the household, and the heads of schools distrusted the way in which the Godwin girls had been brought up.

Sick at heart and with a touch of envy, Fanny admired from afar her sisters’ life of wild adventure, a life which was sometimes dangerous, but always amusing. How she, too, would have loved to be over there at Lake Leman, in the company of the famous Lord Byron, of whom all London was talking!

Mary and Claire would read these charming letters with a condescending pity. Poor Fanny! How Skinner Street! Always thinking that Godwin’s novels, Godwin’s debts, and Mrs. Godwin’s bad tempers were the most important things in the world! Fanny’s slavery gave the two others a more vivid appreciation of their own freedom. Her loneliness enhanced for them the value of their lovers’ society, and, in their compassion for her, Mary got Shelley to buy her a watch before leaving Geneva.

When the Shelleys and Claire came back to England, to settle down at Bath, they saw Fanny as they passed through London. She was depressed, and spoke of nothing but her loneliness and her uselessness; no one wanted her. In saying good-bye to Shelley, her voice quivered. Yet she wrote to him at Bath with the same affectionate frankness as before, although her letters now had that indefinable note of reproach which those who lead a death-in-life feel towards those whose life is filled with living. Godwin, his literary work broken into by fresh money troubles, became more and more grumpy; an aunt, Everina Wollstonecraft, who had promised to take Fanny as governess in her school, wrote to say that a sister of Mary and Claire would certainly be too terrifying a teacher for the narrow-minded middle-class parents.

One morning the Shelleys received from Bristol a curious letter, in which Fanny bade them farewell in mysterious sentences: “I am going to a place whence I hope never to return.”

Mary implored Shelley to go to Bristol at once. He came home during the night without any news. Next morning he went again, and this time brought Mary lamentable tidings. Fanny had left Bristol for Swansea by the Cambrian Coach, and had put up at the Mackworth Arms Inn. She had gone at once to her room telling the chamber-maid that she was tired. When she did not come down next morning, her door was forced, and she was found lying dead, her long brown hair spread about her. By her was the little Genevan watch given her by Mary and Shelley. On the table was a bottle of laudanum and the beginning of a letter:

Godwin had taught in Political Justice that suicide is not a crime; the only difficulty being to decide in each individual case whether the social advantage of thirty supplementary years of life forbids recourse to a voluntary death. After the tragedy he wrote to Mary for the first time since her flight. It was to implore the three outcasts to avoid anything leading to publicity, “which to a mind in anguish is one of the severest of all trials.”

⁂

Shelley’s nerves were badly shaken by Fanny’s terrible death, and Mrs. Godwin in her amiable way insinuated she had killed herself for love of him. He then remembered certain signs of emotion he had seen in her, and reproached himself for having always considered her as of a slightly lower status. Perhaps he had, though quite unwittingly, awakened her love at the moment when, deserted by Harriet, he sought a shelter in any feminine tenderness. Perhaps she had weighed and counted and analysed with care, words and glances, into which he had meant to put mere friendliness. “How difficult it is to understand the soul of another; How much suffering one may cause without wishing it, or knowing it; How one may live in presence of the most profound, sometimes of the most despairful feelings without even suspecting their existence!” It does not suffice therefore to be sincere, nor to have good intentions. You can do just as much harm through not understanding as through unkindness. He was plunged into a blank despondency.

To shake it off, he went to spend a few days alone with a young literary critic, Leigh Hunt, who had praised his poetry with intelligence and enthusiasm. Hunt lived on Hampstead Heath in the Vale of Health, a spot as tree-embowered and almost as charming to-day as it was then. His wife Marianne was homely and hospitable. He had a whole brood of jolly children with whom Shelley could walk and play. There, he could forget for a time poor Fanny and Godwin. The visit was short but delicious, and he came home much cheered.

On his return, he found awaiting him a letter from Hookham, which he opened eagerly, for he had asked Hookham to find out for him what Harriet was doing. He had had no news of her for two months. She had drawn her allowance in March and in September, being then in her father’s house. But since October nothing was known of her.

Shelley went up to town in an agonizing condition of mind. With horror he saw in imagination the blonde and childlike head, which he had so loved, befouled by the mud of the river-bed, green and swollen through its sojourn in the water. He asked himself how was it possible she could have abandoned her children and chosen so dreadful a death.

The Hunts and Hookham showed him every kindness, and told him all they knew. A paragraph in The Times stated: “On Thursday a respectable female far advanced in pregnancy was taken out of the Serpentine river, and brought home to her residence in Queen Street, Brompton, having been missed for nearly six weeks. She had a valuable ring on her finger. A want of honour in her own conduct is supposed to have led to this fatal catastrophe, her husband being abroad.”

The gossips of Queen Street repeated the little they had gleaned: Harriet no longer received letters from her husband, because her former landlady had failed to forward them, and she had given up all hope of his ever coming back to her. She had fallen, from despair. Living first with an army officer, he had been obliged to leave her on his regiment being ordered to India. Then, unable to endure the loneliness of life, she found a protector of humble grade, said to be a groom, and that he deserted her. The Westbrooks had deprived her of her children, and refused to receive her back. She was said to be in the family way, absolutely alone, and terrified at the approaching scandal. Then, came the body in the river.

Shelley passed an appalling night. . . . “Far advanced in pregnancy. . . .” What an end to her life . . . what madness. . . . Detailed and intimate memories of poor Harriet crowded back into his mind against his will, and he saw in imagination with terrible vividness the last scenes. . . . Harriet in love, Harriet in terror, Harriet in despair . . . every expression he knew too well. Ah, this name which during a few years had meant the whole world to him, for the future he must associate with all that is basest and most vile! “Harriet, my wife, a prostitute! Harriet, my wife, a suicide!”

There were moments when he asked himself if he were not responsible, but he pushed this idea from him with all his strength. “I did my duty. Always on every occasion in life, I have done what seemed to me the loyal and disinterested thing to do. When I left her, I no longer loved her. I assured her existence to the utmost of my means, and even beyond them. Never have I treated her with unkindness . . . it is those odious Westbrooks alone. . . . Ought I to have sacrificed my sanity and my life, to one who was unfaithful to me, and second-rate?”

His reason told him “No.” Hogg and Peacock, who surrounded him with affectionate attentions, told him “No.” He besought them to repeat it to him, for at instants he seemed to glimpse some mysterious and super-human duty towards Harriet, in which he had failed. “In breaking traditional ties one sets free in man unknown forces, the consequences of which one cannot foresee. . . . Freedom is only good for the strong . . . for those who are worthy of it. . . . Harriet’s soul was weak. . . .” Ah, little head, blonde and childlike, of drowned Harriet. . . .

Next day he wrote a tender letter to Mary, eager to dwell by contrast on her gentle serenity. He asked her to become a mother to his “poor babes, Ianthe and Charles.” His counsel had just informed him that the Westbrooks would take action to contest his guardianship of the children, on the pretext that his irreligious opinions, and his living in concubinage with Miss Godwin, rendered him unfit to bring them up.

In what way does a marriage ceremony, religious or civil, add to the happiness of a pair of lovers, deeply smitten and full of confidence in one another? The event proved that it can at least make joy blossom on the countenance of a pedant. Godwin’s exhibited an incredible satisfaction on learning that “the seducer” was going to make “an honest woman” of his daughter, and that, eventually, she would become Lady Shelley. He thus inspired in his ex-disciple a contempt for his character, full measure, pressed down, and running over.

At first there had been some hesitation as to whether it were decent to celebrate the marriage so soon after Harriet’s death, but the authorities on social etiquette declared that it would not do to wait any longer for the Church’s blessing on a union which Nature had already blessed twice over.

Just a fortnight after the body of the first Mrs. Shelley had been taken out of the Serpentine, Mary and Percy were married by a clergyman in the church of St. Mildred, Bread Street. Godwin, beaming all over his face, and Mrs. Godwin, simpering and pretentious, signed as witnesses. That evening, for the first time since they ran away, the Shelleys dined in Skinner Street.

The family feast was a lugubrious one. There, in the little dining-room, Fanny had moved to and fro; there, Harriet had sat in her happy early wedded days; their ghosts, suffering and unsatisfied, continued to haunt the room and torture the living. It is true that Godwin’s ill-temper had been changed by the morning’s ceremony into an excess of urbanity, but too many memories troubled the guests to make any real cordiality possible.

That night Mary wrote in her journal: “Go to London. A marriage takes place. Draw. Read Lord Chesterfield and Locke.” Mary had good nerves. Poor drowned Harriet was never a patch on her.

⁂

Nevertheless, it was but right that the news of so splendid a marriage should be sent to every Godwin in the land. The Philosopher wrote to Hull Godwin:

The letter closes with a word of cool thanks for a ham and a turkey sent to the Skinner Street household at Christmas.

But the formal marriage brought about one real advantage. The “concubinage” argument, advanced by those who wished to deprive Shelley of his children, fell to the ground. The Westbrooks, however, did not give in. By the voice of the retired publican, the young Ianthe aged three, and Charles aged two, addressed a petition to the Lord Chancellor in which they said: “Our father avows himself to be an Atheist, and has written and published a certain work called Queen Mab with notes, and other works, wherein he blasphemously denies the existence of God as the Creator of the Universe, the sanctity of marriage, and all the most sacred principles of morality.” For which reasons these precocious and virtuous infants prayed that their persons and fortunes might not be placed in the power of an unworthy father, but under the protection of persons of the highest morality, such as their maternal grandfather and their kind Aunt Eliza.

Shelley’s counsel took care to say nothing in defence of Queen Mab: there was nothing to be said at that time, and in that place, the Court of Chancery. He confined himself to denying the importance of a work written by a boy of nineteen.

“Notwithstanding Mr. Shelley’s violent philippics against marriage, Mr. Shelley marries twice before he is twenty-five! He is no sooner liberated from the despotic chains which he speaks of with so much horror and contempt, than he forges a new set, and becomes again a willing victim of this horrid despotism! It is hoped that a consideration of this marked difference between his opinions and his actions will induce the Lord Chancellor not to think very seriously of this boyish and silly publication.” As to the proposal of placing the children with their mother’s family: “We think it right to say that Mr. Westbrook formerly kept a coffee-house, and is certainly in no respect qualified to be the guardian of Mr. Shelley’s children. To Miss Westbrook there are more decided objections: she is illiterate and vulgar, and it was by her advice, with her active concurrence, and it may be said by her management, that Mr. Shelley, when of the age of nineteen, ran away with Miss Harriet Westbrook, then of the age of seventeen, and married her in Scotland. Miss Westbrook, the proposed guardian, was then nearly thirty, and, if she had acted as she ought to have done as the guardian and friend of her younger sister, all this misery and disgrace to both families would have been avoided.”

His counsel’s ingenious notion of winning his client’s case by renouncing in that client’s name the opinions of his youth, seemed to Shelley a piece of disgusting hypocrisy. He, therefore, drew up for the Lord Chancellor a statement in which he set forth that his ideas on marriage had not changed, and that if he had made his conduct conform to the customs of society, he in no way had renounced the liberty to criticize those customs.

The Lord Chancellor in his judgment remarks: “This is a case in which a father has demonstrated that he must and does deem it to be a matter of duty to recommend to those whose opinions and habits he may take upon himself to form conduct as moral and virtuous, which the law calls upon me to consider as immoral and vicious. . . . I cannot, therefore, in these conditions, entrust him with the guardianship of these children.”

But the Lord Chancellor refused to confide them to the odious Westbrooks. He put them under the care of an Army doctor, named Hume, of Brent End Lodge, Hanwell, who would place the boy, when seven years old, at a good private school under the superintendence of an orthodox clergyman. As to the little Ianthe, she would be brought up at home by Mrs. Hume, who would see that she said her morning prayers, and asked a blessing on her food. Mrs. Hume would also put into her hands improving books, and, to a certain extent would encourage the reading of poetry, Shakespeare for instance, if carefully Bowdlerized. The whole cost, one hundred a year for each child. Mr. Shelley might visit them twelve times a year, but in the presence of Dr. and Mrs. Hume. Mr. John Westbrook might see them the same number of times, but, if he wished it, he might see them without the Humes being present.

This sentence was very bitter to Shelley. It sanctioned officially so to say, and in reasonable and moderate formulas, his exile from the community of civilized men. It was like a brevet of incurable folly.

⁂

While the case was being fought out, he had bought a house in the pleasant little country town of Great Marlow. Ariel at last consented to have a home like other people. One room, big enough for a village ball-room, was fitted up as a library, and decorated with casts of Venus and Apollo. There was a very big garden: in this during the spring and summer of 1817 might be seen two babies, William and Clara Shelley, and a third child of unusual beauty, Alba, daughter of Lord Byron and Claire. Her father was said to be leading a wild life at Venice. Claire received no news from him.

Shelley’s recent trials had left their traces on his countenance. He was thinner, more hectic, and stooped more than ever. A violent pain in his side prevented him from sleeping, and the doctors, unable to cure it, said it was “a nervous disorder.”

His state of mind was despondent. Life had brought him so much suffering, his good intentions had been repaid by such evil results, that he had taken a horror of every sort of action. He felt an intense but undefined desire to withdraw from the perilous throngs of men, men whose reactions cannot be predicted, and who are swayed by such terrible gusts of passion. The regeneration of the real world now appeared to him so unrealizable that he no longer sought satisfaction therein for his loves and hatreds, but looked for it in the more docile and malleable world of the imagination. Subjects for poems, vague and shadow-like, floated round him, which feeding on his sorrowful thoughts, gradually took form at the expense of his powers of action.

The aërial edifices, the crystalline palaces, which with their filmy vapours had so long hidden from him the actual world, seemed to detach themselves from earth and to float up as though drawn by an invisible force. They did not melt away, but swaying with a gentle movement rose in all their translucent glory to the high realms of pure Poetry. In the place which they had occupied, Shelley now saw the world as it is, the brown earth arduous to cultivate, the harsh faces of men, women full of nerves and hysteria, the cruel and obstructive society from which he longed to escape.

The poem which occupied his thoughts the oftenest was the story of an ideal Revolution. He did not want the scenes of bloodshed which ruined for him the otherwise inspiring story of the French Revolution. He wanted his Revolution to be the work of a pair of lovers. His personal experience had taught him that only the love of a woman can inspire a sublime courage.

Laon and Cythna, two ideal anarchists, were to be the transfigured portraits of himself and Mary. He would make them die at the stake, for their ideas, as he would have liked to die himself, exchanging a last kiss in the midst of the flames, a kiss so delicious that the agony would become a sort of voluptuous refinement of ecstasy. For him love did not attain its maximum unless he could associate it with thoughts and sufferings shared in common. Now that he and Mary, married and fairly well off, seemed about to begin an easier life, he desired to escape from this somewhat commonplace happiness, and to live in imagination the magnificent and perilous destiny which might have been his in other lands and other ages.

He passed his time among the little islands of the Thames where the swans build their nests. Lying at the bottom of his boat completely hidden by the high grasses, he sought his inspiration in gazing up at the changing skies. The study of fleeting, interweaving colour and form had always given him immense pleasure, and every day he felt more strongly that his real mission in life was to seize the most transitory shades of beauty, and to fix them for ever in words buoyant and beautiful as themselves.

The entire summer was given to this entrancing work. Then he was obliged to go up to London. Money was getting scarce; he had so many mouths to feed. Besides Mary and the children, Claire and Allegra were dependent on him, and very often the entire Godwin household. His new friend, Leigh Hunt, with a wife and five children, needed help. He had promised Peacock a hundred a year so that he might go on writing his fine novels. Charles Clairmont, who was nothing to him, had fallen in love when in France with an ugly woman several years older than himself and of course penniless; it was Shelley who provided the means for marriage. Just as formerly, he had to go to the money-lenders in order to satisfy these endless claims. “You’re a thoroughbred,” Godwin once told him, “whom the horse-flies prevent from taking your spring.”

Happily for him, Mary managed to bring him back to earth, and he forgave her, seeing her now only as the Cythna of his poem. But she, an over-anxious hostess, did not care for their too assiduous visitors, such as Peacock, who dropped in every evening “without being asked,” and drank up a whole bottle of wine. She wanted Shelley to find a purchaser for the Marlow House which they had bought too hastily. She saw he suffered from cold, and wished to take him away to a warmer climate, perhaps to Italy.

“Dearest love,” she wrote to him in London. . . . “Pray in your letters do be more explicit! You have advertised the house, but have you given Madocks any orders about how to answer applicants? And have you settled yet for Italy or the sea? And do you know how to get money to convey us there, and to buy the things that will be absolutely necessary before our departure? And can you do anything for my father before you go? Or, after all, would it not be as well to inhabit a small house by the seashore where our expenses would be much less than they are at present? You have not yet mentioned to Godwin your thoughts of Italy; but if you determine soon, I would have you do it, as those things are always better to be talked of some days before they take place.

“I took my first walk to-day! What a dreadfully cold place this house is! I was shivering over a fire and the garden looked cold and dismal, but so soon as I got into the road I found to my infinite surprise that the sun was shining and the air warm and delightful.

“I wish Willy to be my companion in my future walks; to further which plan will you send down if possible by Monday’s coach, a sealskin fur hat for him? It must be a fashionable round shape, for a boy mention particularly, and have a narrow gold ribbon round it, that it may be taken in if too large. . . . I am just now surrounded by babes. Alba is scratching and crowing, William amusing himself with wrapping a shawl round him, and Miss Clara staring at the fire. . . . Adieu, dearest love! I want to say again that you may fully answer me, how very, very anxious I am to know the whole extent of your present difficulties and pursuits.”

One source of annoyance to Mary was the presence of Alba in the house. The neighbours had been told that she was the child of a lady in London and had been sent to the country for her health, but anyone could see from Claire’s behaviour that the child was hers. The pure-minded jumped at once to the conclusion that Shelley was the father. The old accusations of promiscuity again reared their heads, and Mary’s prudishness suffered from it. One of the reasons for which she wished to go to Italy was that the journey would enable them to take the little girl out to Lord Byron.

Shelley’s one wish also was to depart. The ties of family, of friendship, of business, had raised round him intangible walls behind which he was stifling. His will was rock-like, but life’s little waves, perfidious and unconcerned, ate away at it ceaselessly. In England where the highest legal dignity had taken from him his civic rights, he had the sensation of standing always in the pillory. It seemed to him that in flying from England, he would become again a free and aërial spirit, that in a new country his life would be like a sheet of white paper on which he could compose a new existence in the same way that he could compose a poem.

When their departure was fixed, Mary asked to have the children baptized. She thought it was better for them to start in life by observing the Rules of the Game. Shelley agreed, and at the same time that William Shelley and Clara Everina Shelley were christened, Byron’s daughter was christened too under the names of Clara Allegra.

The clear sky of Italy, the constant cloudless sky. Once more the caravan of three went down towards the lands of forgetfulness and sunshine. The babies and nursemaids who this time went with it, were hardly any drag on its rapid and whimsical progress.

Milan was reached by way of the Mont Cenis, where the first halt was made to await news of Byron to whom Shelley had written informing him of the arrival of his daughter. Shelley passed his days in the Cathedral reading the Inferno and Purgatorio, in a solitary spot behind the altar where the light of day beneath the storied window is yellow and dim. Churches no longer inspired in him the horror they used to do. He was surprised to find that since he had suffered so keenly, no place now seemed to fit his feelings better or to be a finer background to the greatness of human passions than a church. In the company of Dante, and in the midst of a symphony of warm, rich colours, the Catholic religion no longer seemed to be the invention of charlatans.

Byron’s answer came. Nothing on earth would induce him to see Claire, and he would leave at once any town to which she should come. As to the child, he was willing to undertake the charge of its education, but his possession must be absolute. Shelley considered that this condition was cruel, and pleaded with Byron to soften it. But Byron, who above all things dreaded scenes with Claire, refused to cede an iota. A Venetian met in Milan gave tidings that the “English Lord” was leading a life of debauchery, and keeping a whole harem. Such news was hardly reassuring for Allegra’s education, and Shelley begged Claire to give up all idea of help from Byron rather than let him have the child. As usual he undertook to pay for everything himself. But Claire, proud of Allegra’s birth, wanted to obtain for her all the advantages of it. She had every confidence in Elise the Swiss nurse who had brought the baby up, and she decided to send them both to Venice. In spite of Shelley’s affectionate remonstrances Allegra was handed over to her father.

⁂

Disquieting news of the child soon came to trouble Claire. Byron had only kept it a few weeks. At first very proud of its beauty and of seeing it admired and made much of by the Venetians on the Piazza, he soon tired of this and allowed Mrs. Hoppner, wife of the English Consul, to take charge of it. Who was this Mrs. Hoppner? Elise wrote that she was a very kind lady, but Claire began to suffer from terrible remorse. During a whole year she had never been parted from the child for a single hour. She adored it. Allegra was the only creature in the whole world she could call her very own, since her family renounced her, and her lover refused to see her. Shelley, unable to bear the sight of her misery, offered to go with her to Venice. Mary consented to the arrangement in spite of her dislike at seeing these two start on a journey together. Paolo, the servant, who was energetic and seemed reliable, went with them as courier. In order not to irritate Byron who had forbidden Claire to enter any town where he might happen to be, it was decided that she should stop at Padua and wait there the upshot of Shelley’s embassy. But finding herself so near to Allegra, she could not resist going on. She thought that by keeping her presence secret she could manage to see the child, and so she and Shelley took a gondola and went down the Brenta. They crossed the lagoon in the middle of the night, in a violent storm of wind, rain and lightning, while in the distance the lights of Venice shone dimly behind a curtain of mist.

The next morning they went to the Hoppners who received them with courtesy and kindness. Mrs. Hoppner sent at once for Elise and the baby. She was much grown, was pale, and had lost a great deal of her liveliness, but was as beautiful as ever. Then they had a long conversation on the subject of Byron. The Hoppners, worthy people of conventional ideas, young lovers much excited by all the intrigues going on round them though humanized a little by Venetian indulgence, related with many head-shakes:

From the third day of his arrival Byron had provided himself, as he liked to boast, with a gondola and a mistress. The mistress was Marianna Segati, wife of a cloth-merchant, who was the poet’s landlord, for he had let rooms to Byron in his house. A most imprudent proceeding, but the cloth-business was doing badly. Marianna was twenty-two, had splendid black eyes, and a delicious voice. Although belonging to the middle classes, she was received by the aristocracy of Venice on account of her singing. That she should lose her heart to the noble lord who was as generous as he was handsome, and who lived under the same roof, was as inevitable as are the simplest chemical reactions. As to the Merchant of Venice, Byron was free with his ducats, and Venetian morals always permitted one lover. Mrs. Hoppner, a friendly little woman with intelligent eyes, had told this story with that mixture of Christian sorrow and mundane relish which the virtuous employ in talking of the vicious. Her husband, with many hums and haws, added that this was not all. The Venetian populace circulated a tale that somewhere in the city the English Lord had a closed villa, in which, one Muse not sufficing him, he had gathered together the whole Nine. A legendary history was growing up concerning Byron, and the travelling British spoke with bated breath of Nero and Heliogabalus. The lower classes adored him, and at Carnival time the women took advantage of their masks and dominoes to hook themselves on to his person.

Such gossip was far from reassuring to Claire. She asked what ought she to do? The Consul advised her above all things not to let Byron suspect she was in Venice, for he often expressed his extreme horror of her arrival.

At three o’clock Shelley went to the Palazzo Mocenigo to call on Byron, who was delighted to see him, Shelley being perhaps the only man in the world with whom Byron would talk seriously and as crowned head to crowned head. Even when told of the reason for Shelley’s journey, and Claire’s great desire to see the child again, he remained calm and reasonable. He said he understood perfectly Claire’s anxiety, but that he could not send Allegra back to her, because the Venetians who already accused him of capriciousness, would say he had grown tired of her. However, he would think the matter over, and find some way to arrange everything. On which, he invited Shelley to go for a ride with him along the Lido.

The gondola took them across the lagoon, and they disembarked on the long, sandy island which defends Venice from the Adriatic. Nothing grows here but sea-wrack and thistle. They found Byron’s horses waiting for them. Shelley loved all wild and solitary places, and this gallop along the edge of the sea was delightful to him. Only the knowledge that Claire, at the Hoppners’, anxiously awaited his return, spoiled his pleasure.

Byron inveighed against the stupidity of the English. Those who came to Venice persecuted him with their curiosity, and even offered money to his servants to allow them to see his bedroom. Then he spoke of Shelley’s own misfortunes with many protestations of friendship. “Had I been in England at the time of the Chancery affair, I would have moved heaven and earth to get you back your children.”

This led him on to speak of the wickedness of humanity which he judged to be infinite. “Men are filled with hatred of one another, to expect or hope for anything else is the mark of the visionary.”

“Why?” asked Shelley. “You appear to believe that man is the victim of his instincts without being able to direct them. . . . My faith is quite different. I think that our will creates our virtue. . . . And though wickedness may be natural that does not prove it to be invincible.”

Byron pointed out the patrician city that the setting sun suffused with gold and sombre purple. “Let us get into the gondola again,” he said, “I want to show you something.” When they had glided for some moments over the lagoon, “Look over to the west. Don’t you hear the clang of a bell?”

Shelley, looking, saw on a small island a windowless, deformed, and dreary building, and on the top of it an open tower in which a bell swung in black relief against the crimson sky. With the splash of the oars seemed to mingle distant, stifled cries for help.

“That,” Byron said, “is the madhouse. Every evening when I cross the water at this hour, I hear the bell clanging the maniacs to vespers.”

“No doubt that they may thank the Creator for his mercy towards them?”

“Always the same Shelley!” laughed Byron. “Infidel and blasphemer! You who can’t swim, beware of providence! But you spoke just now of vanquishing our instincts. Does it not seem to you that this spectacle rather is an image of our life? Conscience is the bell that calls us to virtue. We obey it like the madmen without knowing why. Then the sun sets, the bell stops, it is the night of death.”

He looked towards Venice, which, huddled in the twilight, had become a rose-tinged grey.

“We Byrons,” said he, “die young . . . on my father’s side, and on my mother’s as well. . . . It’s all the same to me, but I intend first to enjoy my youth.”

⁂

The next day Shelley, who had come to Byron filled with forebodings, was agreeably surprised to find him quite reasonable. He offered to lend Shelley and Claire for two months a villa he owned at Este, and to allow Allegra to go and stay there with her mother. Shelley joyfully accepted this generous offer, and he wrote to Mary to come at once and join them: