Shelley Part 3

SECOND RESIDENCE IN LONDON, AND SEPARATION FROM HARRIET.

Early in April the Sh.e.l.leys arrived in London, where they were soon joined by Eliza, from whose increasingly irksome companions.h.i.+p the poet had recently enjoyed a few weeks' respite. After living for a short while in hotels, they took lodgings in Half Moon Street. The house had a projecting window, where the poet loved to sit with book in hand, and catch, according to his custom, the maximum of sunlight granted by a chary English summer. "He wanted," said one of his female admirers, "only a pan of clear water and a fresh turf to look like some young lady's lark, hanging outside for air and song." According to Hogg, this period of London life was a pleasant and tranquil episode in Sh.e.l.ley's troubled career. His room was full of books, among which works of German metaphysics occupied a prominent place, though they were not deeply studied. He was now learning Italian, and made his first acquaintance with Ta.s.so, Ariosto, and Petrarch.

The habits of the household were, to say the least, irregular; for Sh.e.l.ley took no thought of sublunary matters, and Harriet was an indifferent housekeeper. Dinner seems to have come to them less by forethought than by the operation of divine chance; and when there was no meat provided for the entertainment of casual guests, the table was supplied with buns, procured by Sh.e.l.ley from the nearest pastry-cook. He had already abjured animal food and alcohol; and his favourite diet consisted of pulse or bread, which he ate dry with water, or made into panada. Hogg relates how, when he was walking in the streets and felt hungry, he would dive into a baker's shop and emerge with a loaf tucked under his arm. This he consumed as he went along, very often reading at the same time, and dodging the foot-pa.s.sengers with the rapidity of movement which distinguished him. He could not comprehend how any man should want more than bread. "I have dropped a word, a hint," says Hogg, "about a pudding; a pudding, Bysshe said dogmatically, is a prejudice." This indifference to diet was highly characteristic of Sh.e.l.ley. During the last years of his life, even when he was suffering from the frequent attacks of a painful disorder, he took no heed of food; and his friend, Trelawny, attributes the derangement of his health, in a great measure, to this carelessness. Mrs. Sh.e.l.ley used to send him something to eat into the room where he habitually studied; but the plate frequently remained untouched for hours upon a bookshelf, and at the end of the day he might be heard asking, "Mary, have I dined?" His dress was no less simple than his diet. Hogg says that he never saw him in a great coat, and that his collar was unb.u.t.toned to let the air play freely on his throat. "In the street or road he reluctantly wore a hat; but in fields and gardens, his little round head had no other covering than his long, wild, ragged locks." Sh.e.l.ley's head, as is well known, was remarkably small and round; he used to plunge it several times a day in cold water, and expose it recklessly to the intensest heat of fire or sun. Mrs. Sh.e.l.ley relates that a great part of the _Cenci_ was written on their house-roof near Leghorn, where Sh.e.l.ley lay exposed to the unmitigated ardour of Italian summer heat; and Hogg describes him reading Homer by a blazing fire-light, or roasting his skull upon the hearth-rug by the hour.

These personal details cannot be omitted by the biographer of such a man as Sh.e.l.ley. He was an elemental and primeval creature, as little subject to the laws of custom in his habits as in his modes of thought, living literally as the spirit moved him, with a natural nonchalance that has perhaps been never surpa.s.sed. To time and place he was equally indifferent, and could not be got to remember his engagements. "He took strange caprices, unfounded frights and dislikes, vain apprehensions and panic terrors, and therefore he absented himself from formal and sacred engagements. He was unconscious and oblivious of times, places, persons, and seasons; and falling into some poetic vision, some day-dream, he quickly and completely forgot all that he had repeatedly and solemnly promised; or he ran away after some object of imaginary urgency and importance, which suddenly came into his head, setting off in vain pursuit of it, he knew not whither. When he was caught, brought up in custody, and turned over to the ladies, with, Behold, your King! to be caressed, courted, admired, and flattered, the king of beauty and fancy would too commonly bolt; slip away, steal out, creep off; un.o.bserved and almost magically he vanished; thus mysteriously depriving his fair subjects of his much-coveted, long looked-for company." If he had been fairly caged and found himself in congenial company, he let time pa.s.s unheeded, sitting up all night to talk, and chaining his audience by the spell of his unrivalled eloquence; for wonderful as was his poetry, those who enjoyed the privilege of converse with him, judged it even more attractive. "He was commonly most communicative, unreserved, and eloquent, and enthusiastic, when those around him were inclining to yield to the influence of sleep, or rather at the hour when they would have been disposed to seek their chambers, but for the bewitching charms of his discourse."

From Half Moon Street the Sh.e.l.leys moved into a house in Pimlico; and it was here, according to Hogg, whose narrative can probably be relied on in this matter, that Sh.e.l.ley's first child, Ianthe Eliza, was born about the end of June, 1813. Harriet did not take much to her little girl, and gave her over to a wet-nurse, for whom Sh.e.l.ley conceived a great dislike. That a mother should not nurse her own baby was no doubt contrary to his principles; and the double presence of the servant and Eliza, whom he now most cordially detested, made his home uncomfortable. We have it on excellent authority, that of Mr. Peac.o.c.k, that he "was extremely fond of it (the child), and would walk up and down a room with it in his arms for a long time together, singing to it a song of his own making, which ran on the repet.i.tion of a word of his own coining. His song was Yahmani, Yahmani, Yahmani, Yahmani." To the want of sympathy between the father and the mother in this matter of Ianthe, Mr. Peac.o.c.k is inclined to attribute the beginning of troubles in the Sh.e.l.ley household. There is, indeed, no doubt that the revelation of Harriet's maternal coldness must have been extremely painful to her husband; and how far she carried her insensibility, may be gathered from a story told by Hogg about her conduct during an operation performed upon the child.

During this period of his sojourn in London, Sh.e.l.ley was again in some pecuniary difficulties. Yet he indulged Harriet's vanity by setting up a carriage, in which they afterwards took a hurried journey to Edinburgh and back. He narrowly escaped a debtor's prison through this act of extravagance, and by a somewhat ludicrous mistake Hogg was arrested for the debt due to the coachmaker. His acquaintances were few and scattered, and he saw nothing of his family. Gradually, however, he seems to have become a kind of prophet in a coterie of learned ladies. The views he had propounded in _Queen Mab_, his pa.s.sionate belief in the perfectibility of man, his vegetarian doctrines, and his readiness to adopt any new nostrum for the amelioration of the race, endeared him to all manners of strange people; nor was he deterred by aristocratic prejudices from frequenting society which proved extremely uncongenial to Hogg, and of which we have accordingly some caustic sketches from his pen. His chief friends were a Mrs. Boinville, for whom he conceived an enthusiastic admiration, her sister Mrs. Newton, and her daughter Cornelia, Mrs. Turner. In order to be near them he had moved to Pimlico; and his next move, from London to a cottage named High Elms, at Bracknell, in Berks.h.i.+re, had the same object.

With G.o.dwin and his family he was also on terms of familiar intercourse.

Under the philosopher's roof in Skinner Street there was now gathered a group of miscellaneous inmates--f.a.n.n.y Imlay, the daughter of his first wife, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary, his own daughter by the same marriage; his second wife, and her two children, Claire and Charles Clairmont, the offspring of a previous union. From this connexion with the G.o.dwin household events of the most serious import in the future were destined to arise, and already it appears that f.a.n.n.y Imlay had begun to look with perilous approval on the fascinating poet. Hogg and Mr. Peac.o.c.k, the well-known novelist, described by Mrs. Newton as "a cold scholar, who, I think, has neither taste nor feeling," were his only other intimates.

Mrs. Newton's unfair judgment of Mr. Peac.o.c.k marks a discord between the two main elements of Sh.e.l.ley's present society; and indeed it will appear to a careful student of his biography that Hogg, Peac.o.c.k, and Harriet, now stood somewhat by themselves and aloof from the inner sphere of his a.s.sociates. If we regard the Sh.e.l.leys as the centre of an extended line, we shall find the Westbrook family at one end, the Boinville family at the other, with Hogg and Peac.o.c.k somewhere in the middle. Harriet was naturally drawn to the Westbrook extremity, and Sh.e.l.ley to the Boinville.

Peac.o.c.k had no affinity for either, but a sincere regard for Harriet as well as for her husband; while Hogg was in much the same position, except that he had made friends with Mrs. Newton. The G.o.dwins, of great importance to Sh.e.l.ley himself, exercised their influence at a distance from the rest. Frequent changes from Bracknell to London and back again, varied by the flying journey to Edinburgh, and a last visit paid in strictest secrecy to his mother and sisters, at Field Place, of which a very interesting record is left in the narrative of Mr. Kennedy, occupied the interval between July, 1813, and March, 1814. The period was not productive of literary masterpieces. We only hear of a _Refutation of Deism_, a dialogue between Eusebes and Theosophus, which attacked all forms of Theistic belief.

Since we are now approaching the gravest crisis Sh.e.l.ley's life, it behoves us to be more than usually careful in considering his circ.u.mstances at this epoch. His home had become cold and dull. Harriet had lost her interest in his studies. She became more and more an ordinary woman of the world. Eliza was a source of continual irritation, and the Westbrook family did its best, by interference and suggestion, to refrigerate the poet's feelings for his wife. On the other hand he found among the Boinville set exactly that high-flown, enthusiastic, sentimental atmosphere which suited his idealizing temper. Two extracts from a letter written to Hogg upon the 16th of March, 1814, speak more eloquently than any a.n.a.lysis, and will place before the reader the antagonism which had sprung up in Sh.e.l.ley's mind between his own home and the circle of his new friends:--"I have been staying with Mrs. B---- for the last month; I have escaped, in the society of all that philosophy and friends.h.i.+p combine, from the dismaying solitude of myself. They have revived in my heart the expiring flame of life. I have felt myself translated to a paradise, which has nothing of mortality but its transitoriness; my heart sickens at the view of that necessity, which will quickly divide me from the delightful tranquillity of this happy home,--for it has become my home. The trees, the bridge, the minutest objects, have already a place in my affections."

"Eliza is still with us,--not here!--but will be with me when the infinite malice of destiny forces me to depart. I am now but little inclined to contest this point. I certainly hate her with all my heart and soul. It is a sight which awakens an inexpressible sensation of disgust and horror, to see her caress my poor little Ianthe, in whom I may hereafter find the consolation of sympathy. I sometimes feel faint with the fatigue of checking the overflowings of my unbounded abhorrence for this miserable wretch. But she is no more than a blind and loathsome worm, that cannot see to sting."[11]

[While divided in this way between a home which had become distasteful to him, and a house where he found scope for his most romantic outpourings of sensibility. Sh.e.l.ley fell suddenly and pa.s.sionately in love with G.o.dwin's daughter, Mary. Peac.o.c.k, who lived in close intimacy with him at this period, must deliver his testimony as to the overwhelming nature of the new attachment:--"Nothing that I ever read in tale or history could present a more striking image of a sudden, violent, irresistible, uncontrollable pa.s.sion, than that under which I found him labouring when, at his request, I went up from the country to call on him in London.

Between his old feelings towards Harriet, _from whom he was not then separated_, and his new pa.s.sion for Mary, he 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.' His eyes were bloodshot, his hair and dress disordered. He caught up a bottle of laudanum, and said, 'I never part from this.'"

We may therefore affirm, I think, with confidence that in the winter and spring of 1814, Sh.e.l.ley had been becoming gradually more and more estranged from Harriet, whose commonplace nature was no mate for his, and whom he had never loved with all the depth of his affection; that his intimacy with the Boinville family had brought into painful prominence whatever was jarring and repugnant to him in his home; and that in this crisis of his fate he had fallen in love for the first time seriously with Mary G.o.dwin. She was then a girl of sixteen, "fair and fair-haired, pale indeed, and with a piercing look," to quote Hogg's description of her, as she first appeared before him on the 8th or 9th of June, 1814. With her freedom from prejudice, her tense and high-wrought sensibility, her acute intellect, enthusiasm for ideas, and vivid imagination, Mary G.o.dwin was naturally a fitter companion for Sh.e.l.ley than the good Harriet, however beautiful.

That Sh.e.l.ley early in 1814 had no intention of leaving his wife, is probable; for he was re-married to her on the 24th of March, eight days after his impa.s.sioned letter to Hogg, in St. George's, Hanover Square.

Harriet was pregnant, and this ratification of the Scotch marriage was no doubt intended to place the legitimacy of a possible heir beyond all question. Yet it seems, if we may found conjecture on "Stanzas, April, 1814," that in the very month after this new ceremony Sh.e.l.ley found the difficulties of his wedded life insuperable, and that he was already making up his mind to part from Harriet. About the middle of June the separation actually occurred--not by mutual consent, so far as any published doc.u.ments throw light upon the matter, but rather by Sh.e.l.ley's sudden abandonment of his wife and child.[12] For a short while Harriet was left in ignorance of his abode, and with a very insufficient sum of money at her disposal. She placed herself under the protection of her father, retired to Bath, and about the beginning of July received a letter from Sh.e.l.ley, who was thenceforth solicitous for her welfare, keeping up a correspondence with her, supplying her with funds, and by no means shrinking from personal communications.

That Sh.e.l.ley must bear the responsibility of this separation seems to me quite clear. His justification is to be found in his avowed opinions on the subject of love and marriage--opinions which Harriet knew well and professed to share, and of which he had recently made ample confession in the notes to _Queen Mab_. The world will still agree with Lord Eldon in regarding those opinions as dangerous to society, and a blot upon the poet's character; but it would be unfair, while condemning them as frankly as he professed them, to blame him also because he did not conform to the opposite code of morals, for which he frequently expressed extreme abhorrence, and which he stigmatized, however wrongly, as the source of the worst social vices. It must be added that the Sh.e.l.ley family in their memorials of the poet, and through their friend, Mr. Richard Garnett, inform us, without casting any slur on Harriet, that doc.u.ments are extant which will completely vindicate the poet's conduct in this matter. It is therefore but just to await their publication before p.r.o.nouncing a decided judgment. Meanwhile there remains no doubt about the fact that forty days after leaving Harriet, Sh.e.l.ley departed from London with Mary G.o.dwin, who had consented to share his fortunes. How he plighted his new troth, and won the hand of her who was destined to be his companion for life, may best be told in Lady Sh.e.l.ley's words:--

"His anguish, his isolation, his difference from other men, his gifts of genius and eloquent enthusiasm, made a deep impression on G.o.dwin's daughter Mary, now a girl of sixteen, who had been accustomed to hear Sh.e.l.ley spoken of as something rare and strange. To her, as they met one eventful day in St. Pancras Churchyard, by her mother's grave, Bysshe, in burning words, poured forth the tale of his wild past--how he had suffered, how he had been misled, and how, if supported by her love, he hoped in future years to enrol his name with the wise and good who had done battle for their fellow-men, and been true through all adverse storms to the cause of humanity. Unhesitatingly, she placed her hand in his, and linked her fortune with his own; and most truthfully, as the remaining portions of these Memorials will prove, was the pledge of both redeemed.

The theories in which the daughter of the authors of _Political Justice_, and of the _Rights of Woman_, had been educated, spared her from any conflict between her duty and her affection. For she was the child of parents whose writings had had for their object to prove that marriage was one among the many inst.i.tutions which a new era in the history of mankind was about to sweep away. By her father, whom she loved--by the writings of her mother, whom she had been taught to venerate--these doctrines had been rendered familiar to her mind. It was therefore natural that she should listen to the dictates of her own heart, and willingly unite her fate with one who was so worthy of her love."

Soon after her withdrawal to Bath, Harriet gave birth to Sh.e.l.ley's second child, Charles Bysshe, who died in 1826. She subsequently formed another connexion which proved unhappy; and on the 10th of November, 1816, she committed suicide by drowning herself in the Serpentine. The distance of time between June, 1814, and November, 1816, and the new ties formed by Harriet in this interval, prove that there was no immediate connexion between Sh.e.l.ley's abandonment of his wife and her suicide. She had always entertained the thought of self-destruction, as Hogg, who is no adverse witness in her case, has amply recorded; and it may be permitted us to suppose that finding herself for the second time unhappy in her love, she reverted to a long-since cherished scheme, and cut the knot of life and all its troubles.

So far as this is possible, I have attempted to narrate the most painful episode in Sh.e.l.ley's life as it occurred, without extenuation and without condemnation. Until the papers, mentioned with such insistence by Lady Sh.e.l.ley and Mr. Garnett, are given to the world, it is impossible that the poet should not bear the reproach of heartlessness and inconstancy in this the gravest of all human relations. Such, however, is my belief in the essential goodness of his character, after allowing, as we must do, for the operation of his peculiar principles upon his conduct, that I for my own part am willing to suspend my judgment till the time arrives for his vindication. The language used by Lady Sh.e.l.ley and Mr. Garnett justify us in expecting that that vindication will be as startling as complete. If it is not, they, as pleading for him, will have overshot the mark of prudence.]

On the 28th of July, 1814, Sh.e.l.ley left London with Mary G.o.dwin, who up to this date had remained beneath her father's roof. There was some secrecy in their departure, because they were accompanied by Miss Clairmont, whose mother disapproved of her forming a third in the party. Having made their way to Dover, they crossed the Channel in an open boat, and went at once to Paris. Here they hired a donkey for their luggage, intending to perform the journey across France on foot. Sh.e.l.ley, however, sprained his ancle, and a mule-carriage was provided for the party. In this conveyance they reached the Jura, and entered Switzerland at Neufchatel. Brunnen, on the Lake of Lucerne, was chosen for their residence; and here Sh.e.l.ley began his romantic tale of _The a.s.sa.s.sins_, a portion of which is printed in his prose works. Want of money compelled them, after two days in Uri, to turn their steps homeward; and the back journey was performed upon the Reuss and Rhine. They reached Gravesend, after a bad pa.s.sage, on the 13th of September. Mrs. Sh.e.l.ley's _History of a Six Weeks' Tour_ relates the details of this trip, which was of great importance in forming Sh.e.l.ley's taste and in supplying him with the scenery of river, rock, and mountain, so splendidly utilized in _Alastor_.

The autumn was a period of more than usual money difficulty; but on the 6th of January, 1815, Sir Bysshe died, Percy became the next heir to the baronetcy and the family estates, and an arrangement was made with his father by right of which he received an allowance of 1000_l._ a year. A portion of his income was immediately set apart for Harriet. The winter was pa.s.sed in London, where Sh.e.l.ley walked a hospital, in order, it is said, to acquire some medical knowledge that might be of service to the poor he visited. His own health at this period was very bad. A physician whom he consulted, p.r.o.nounced that he was rapidly sinking under pulmonary disease, and he suffered frequent attacks of acute pain. The consumptive symptoms seem to have been so marked that for the next three years he had no doubt that he was destined to an early death. In 1818, however, all danger of phthisis pa.s.sed away; and during the rest of his short life he only suffered from spasms and violent pains in the side, which baffled the physicians, but, though they caused him extreme annoyance, did not menace any vital organ. To the subject of his health it will be necessary to return at a later period of his biography. For the present it is enough to remember that his physical condition was such as to justify his own expectation of death at no distant time.[13]

Fond as ever of wandering, Sh.e.l.ley set out in the early summer for a tour with Mary. They visited Devons.h.i.+re and Clifton, and then settled in a house on Bishopsgate Heath, near Windsor Forest. The summer was further broken by a water excursion up the Thames to its source, in the company of Mr. Peac.o.c.k and Charles Clairmont. Peac.o.c.k traces the poet's taste for boating, which afterwards became a pa.s.sion with him, to this excursion.

About this there is, however, some doubt. Medwin tells us that Sh.e.l.ley while a boy delighted in being on the water, and that he enjoyed the pastime at Eton. On the other hand, Mr. W. S. Halliday, a far better authority than Medwin, a.s.serts positively that he never saw Sh.e.l.ley on the river at Eton, and Hogg relates nothing to prove that he practised rowing at Oxford. It is certain that, though inordinately fond of boats and every kind of water--river, sea, lake, or ca.n.a.l--he never learned to swim.

Peac.o.c.k also notices his habit of floating paper boats, and gives an amusing description of the boredom suffered by Hogg on occasions when Sh.e.l.ley would stop by the side of pond or mere to float a mimic navy. The not altogether apocryphal story of his having once constructed a boat out of a bank-post-bill, and launched it on the lake in Kensington Gardens, deserves to be alluded to in this connexion.

On their return from this river journey, Sh.e.l.ley began the poem of _Alastor_, haunting the woodland glades and oak groves of Windsor Forest, and drawing from that n.o.ble scenery his inspiration. It was printed with a few other poems in one volume the next year. Not only was _Alastor_ the first serious poem published by Sh.e.l.ley; but it was also the first of his compositions which revealed the greatness of his genius. Rarely has blank verse been written with more majesty and music: and while the influence of Milton and Wordsworth may be traced in certain pa.s.sages, the versification, tremulous with lyrical vibrations, is such as only Sh.e.l.ley could have produced.

"Alastor" is the Greek name for a vengeful daemon, driving its victim into desert places; and Sh.e.l.ley, prompted by Peac.o.c.k, chose it for the t.i.tle of a poem which describes the Nemesis of solitary souls. Apart from its intrinsic merit as a work of art, _Alastor_ has great autobiographical value. Mrs. Sh.e.l.ley affirms that it was written under the expectation of speedy death, and under the sense of disappointment, consequent upon the misfortunes of his early life. This accounts for the somewhat unhealthy vein of sentiment which threads the wilderness of its sublime descriptions. All that Sh.e.l.ley had observed of natural beauty--in Wales, at Lynton, in Switzerland, upon the eddies of the Reuss, beneath the oak shades of the forest--is presented to us in a series of pictures penetrated with profound emotion. But the deeper meaning of _Alastor_ is to be found, not in the thought of death nor in the poet's recent communings with nature, but in the motto from St. Augustine placed upon its t.i.tle-page, and in the _Hymn to Intellectual Beauty_, composed about a year later. Enamoured of ideal loveliness, the poet pursues his vision through the universe, vainly hoping to a.s.suage the thirst which has been stimulated in his spirit, and vainly longing for some mortal realization of his love. _Alastor_, like _Epipsychidion_, reveals the mistake which Sh.e.l.ley made in thinking that the idea of beauty could become incarnate for him in any earthly form: while the _Hymn to Intellectual Beauty_ recognizes the truth that such realization of the ideal is impossible. The very last letter written by Sh.e.l.ley sets the misconception in its proper light: "I think one is always in love with something or other; the error, and I confess it is not easy for spirits cased in flesh and blood to avoid it, consists in seeking in a mortal image the likeness of what is, perhaps, eternal." But this Sh.e.l.ley discovered only with "the years that bring the philosophic mind," and when he was upon the very verge of his untimely death.

The following quotation is a fair specimen of the blank verse of _Alastor_. It expresses that longing for perfect sympathy in an ideal love, which the sense of divine beauty had stirred in the poet's heart:--

At length upon the lone Chorasmian sh.o.r.e He paused, a wide and melancholy waste Of putrid marshes. A strong impulse urged His steps to the sea-sh.o.r.e. A swan was there, Beside a sluggish stream among the reeds.

It rose as he approached, and, with strong wings Scaling the upward sky, bent its bright course High over the immeasurable main.

His eyes pursued its flight:--"Thou hast a home, Beautiful bird! thou voyagest to thine home, Where thy sweet mate will twine her downy neck With thine, and welcome thy return with eyes Bright in the l.u.s.tre of their own fond joy.

And what am I that I should linger here, With voice far sweeter than thy dying notes, Spirit more vast than thine, frame more attuned To beauty, wasting these surpa.s.sing powers In the deaf air, to the blind earth, and heaven That echoes not my thoughts?" A gloomy smile Of desperate hope wrinkled his quivering lips.

For Sleep, he knew, kept most relentlessly Its precious charge, and silent Death exposed, Faithless perhaps as Sleep, a shadowy lure, With doubtful smile mocking its own strange charms.

William, the eldest son of Sh.e.l.ley and Mary G.o.dwin, was born on the 24th of Jan., 1816. In the spring of that year they went together, accompanied by Miss Clairmont, for a second time to Switzerland. They reached Geneva about the 15th of May, and were soon after joined by Lord Byron and his travelling physician, Dr. Polidori. Sh.e.l.ley had not yet made Byron's acquaintance, though he had sent him a copy of _Queen Mab_, with a letter, which miscarried in the post. They were now thrown into daily intercourse, occupying the villas Diodati and Mont Alegre at no great distance from each other, pa.s.sing their days upon the lake in a boat which they purchased, and spending the nights in conversation. Miss Clairmont had known Byron in London, and their acquaintance now ripened into an intimacy, the fruit of which was the child Allegra. This fact has to be mentioned by Sh.e.l.ley's biographer, because Allegra afterwards became an inmate of his home; and though he and Mary were ignorant of what was pa.s.sing at Geneva, they did not withdraw their sympathy from the mother of Lord Byron's daughter. The lives of Byron and Sh.e.l.ley during the next six years were destined to be curiously blent. Both were to seek in Italy an exile-home; while their friends.h.i.+p was to become one of the most interesting facts of English literary history. The influence of Byron upon Sh.e.l.ley, as he more than once acknowledged, and as his wife plainly perceived, was, to a large extent, depressing. For Byron's genius and its fruits in poetry he entertained the highest possible opinion. He could not help comparing his own achievement and his fame with Byron's; and the result was that in the presence of one whom he erroneously believed to be the greater poet, he became inactive. Sh.e.l.ley, on the contrary, stimulated Byron's productive faculty to n.o.bler efforts, raised his moral tone, and infused into his less subtle intellect something of his own philosophical depth and earnestness. Much as he enjoyed Byron's society and admired his writing, Sh.e.l.ley was not blind to the imperfections of his nature. The sketch which he has left us of Count Maddalo, the letters written to his wife from Venice and Ravenna, and his correspondence on the subject of Leigh Hunt's visit to Italy, supply the most discriminating criticism which has yet been pa.s.sed upon his brother poet's character. It is clear that he never found in Byron a perfect friend, and that he had not accepted him as one with whom he sympathized upon the deeper questions of feeling and conduct. Byron, for his part, recognized in Sh.e.l.ley the purest nature he had ever known. "He was the most gentle, the most amiable, and least worldly-minded person I ever met; full of delicacy, disinterested beyond all other men, and possessing a degree of genius joined to simplicity as rare as it is admirable. He had formed to himself a _beau ideal_ of all that is fine, high-minded, and n.o.ble, and he acted up to this ideal even to the very letter."

Toward the end of June the two poets made the tour of Lake Geneva in their boat, and were very nearly wrecked off the rocks of Meillerie. On this occasion Sh.e.l.ley was in imminent danger of death from drowning. His one anxiety, however, as he wrote to Peac.o.c.k, was lest Byron should attempt to save him at the risk of his own life. Byron described him as "bold as a lion;" and indeed it may here be said, once and for all, that Sh.e.l.ley's physical courage was only equalled by his moral fearlessness. He carried both without bravado to the verge of temerity, and may justly be said to have never known what terror was. Another summer excursion was a visit to Chamouni, of which he has left memorable descriptions in his letters to Peac.o.c.k, and in the somewhat Coleridgian verses on Mont Blanc. The preface to _Laon and Cythna_ shows what a powerful impression had been made upon him by the glaciers, and how he delighted in the element of peril. There is a tone of exultation in the words which record the experiences of his two journeys in Switzerland and France:--"I have been familiar from boyhood with mountains and lakes and the sea, and the solitude of forests.

Danger, which sports upon the brink of precipices, has been my playmate. I have trodden the glaciers of the Alps, and lived under the eye of Mont Blanc. I have been a wanderer among distant fields. I have sailed down mighty rivers, and seen the sun rise and set, and the stars come forth, whilst I have sailed night and day down a rapid stream among mountains. I have seen populous cities, and have watched the pa.s.sions which rise and spread, and sink and change amongst a.s.sembled mult.i.tudes of men. I have seen the theatre of the more visible ravages of tyranny and war, cities and villages reduced to scattered groups of black and roofless houses, and the naked inhabitants sitting famished upon their desolated thresholds."

On their return to the lake, the Sh.e.l.leys found M. G. Lewis established with Byron. This addition to the circle introduced much conversation about apparitions, and each member of the party undertook to produce a ghost story. Polidori's _Vampyre_ and Mrs. Sh.e.l.ley's _Frankenstein_ were the only durable results of their determination. But an incident occurred which is of some importance in the history of Sh.e.l.ley's psychological condition. Toward midnight on the 18th of July, Byron recited the lines in _Christabel_ about the lady's breast; when Sh.e.l.ley suddenly started up, shrieked, and fled from the room. He had seen a vision of a woman with eyes instead of nipples. At this time he was writing notes upon the phenomena of sleep to be inserted in his _Speculations on Metaphysics_, and Mrs. Sh.e.l.ley informs us that the mere effort to remember dreams of thrilling or mysterious import so disturbed his nervous system that he had to relinquish the task. At no period of his life was he wholly free from visions which had the reality of facts. Sometimes they occurred in sleep and were prolonged with painful vividness into his waking moments.

Sometimes they seemed to grow out of his intense meditation, or to present themselves before his eyes as the projection of a powerful inner impression. All his sensations were abnormally acute, and his ever-active imagination confused the border-lands of the actual and the visionary.

Such a nature as Sh.e.l.ley's, through its far greater susceptibility than is common even with artistic temperaments, was debarred in moments of high-strung emotion from observing the ordinary distinctions of subject and object; and this peculiar quality must never be forgotten when we seek to estimate the proper proportions of _Dichtung und Wahrheit_ in certain episodes of his biography. The strange story, for example, told by Peac.o.c.k about a supposed warning he had received in the spring of this year from Mr. Williams of Tremadoc, may possibly be explained on the hypothesis that his brooding thoughts had taken form before him, both ear and eye having been unconsciously pressed into the service of a subjective energy.[14]

On their return to England in September, Sh.e.l.ley took a cottage at Great Marlow on the Thames, in order to be near his friend Peac.o.c.k. While it was being prepared for the reception of his family, he stayed at Bath, and there heard of Harriet's suicide. The life that once was dearest to him, had ended thus in misery, desertion, want. The mother of his two children, abandoned by both her husband and her lover, and driven from her father's home, had drowned herself after a brief struggle with circ.u.mstance.

However Sh.e.l.ley may have felt that his conscience was free from blame, however small an element of self-reproach may have mingled with his grief and horror, there is no doubt that he suffered most acutely. His deepest ground for remorse seems to have been the conviction that he had drawn Harriet into a sphere of thought and feeling for which she was not qualified, and that had it not been for him and his opinions, she might have lived a happy woman in some common walk of life. One of his biographers a.s.serts that "he continued to be haunted by certain recollections, partly real and partly imaginative, which pursued him like an Orestes," and even Trelawny, who knew him only in the last months of his life, said that the impression of that dreadful moment was still vivid. We may trace the echo of his feelings in some painfully pathetic verses written in 1817;[15] and though he did not often speak of Harriet, Peac.o.c.k has recorded one memorable occasion on which he disclosed the anguish of his spirit to a friend.[16]

Sh.e.l.ley hurried at once to London, and found some consolation in the society of Leigh Hunt. The friends.h.i.+p extended to him by that excellent man at this season of his trouble may perhaps count for something with those who are inclined to judge him harshly. Two important events followed immediately upon the tragedy. The first was Sh.e.l.ley's marriage with Mary G.o.dwin on the 30th of December, 1816. [Whether Sh.e.l.ley would have taken this step except under strong pressure from without, appears to me very doubtful. Of all men who ever lived, he was the most resolutely bent on confirming his theories by his practice; and in this instance there was no valid reason why he should not act up to principles professed in common by himself and the partner of his fortunes, no less than by her father and her mother. It is, therefore, reasonable to suppose that he yielded to arguments; and these arguments must have been urged by G.o.dwin, who had never treated him with cordiality since he left England in 1816. G.o.dwin, though overrated in his generation and almost ludicrously idealized by Sh.e.l.ley, was a man whose talents verged on genius. But he was by no means consistent. His conduct in money-matters shows that he could not live the life of a self-sufficing philosopher; while the irritation he expressed when Sh.e.l.ley omitted to address him as Esquire, stood in comic contradiction with his published doctrines. We are therefore perhaps justified in concluding that he worried Sh.e.l.ley, the one enthusiastic and thoroughgoing follower he had, into marrying his daughter in spite of his disciple's protestations; nor shall we be far wrong if we surmise that G.o.dwin congratulated himself on Mary's having won the right to bear the name of a future baronet.]

The second event was the refusal of Mr. Westbrook to deliver up the custody of his grandchildren. A chancery suit was inst.i.tuted; at the conclusion of which, in March, 1817, Lord Eldon deprived Sh.e.l.ley of his son and daughter on the double ground of his opinions expressed in _Queen Mab_, and of his conduct toward his first wife. The children were placed in the hands of a Dr. Hume, to be educated in accordance with principles diametrically opposed to their parent's, while Sh.e.l.ley's income was mulcted in a sum of 200_l._ for their maintenance. Thus sternly did the father learn the value of that ancient aeschylean maxim, t? d??sa?t?

pa?e??, the doer of the deed must suffer. His own impulsiveness, his reckless a.s.sumption of the heaviest responsibilities, his overweening confidence in his own strength to move the weight of the world's opinions, had brought him to this tragic pa.s.s--to the suicide of the woman who had loved him, and to the sequestration of the offspring whom he loved.

Sh.e.l.ley ought not to be made the text for any sermon; and yet we may learn from him as from a hero of Hebrew or h.e.l.lenic story. His life was a tragedy; and like some protagonist of Greek drama, he was capable of erring and of suffering greatly. He had kicked against the altar of justice as established in the daily sanct.i.ties of human life; and now he had to bear the penalty. The conventions he despised and treated like the dust beneath his feet, were found in this most cruel crisis to be a rock on which his very heart was broken. From this rude trial of his moral nature he arose a stronger being; and if longer life had been granted him, he would undoubtedly have presented the enn.o.bling spectacle of one who had been lessoned by his own audacity, and by its bitter fruits, into harmony with the immutable laws which he was ever seeking to obey. It is just this conflict between the innate rect.i.tude of Sh.e.l.ley's over-daring nature and the circ.u.mstances of ordinary existence, which makes his history so tragic: and we may justly wonder whether, when he read the Sophoclean tragedies of dipus, he did not apply their doctrine of self-will and Nemesis to his own fortunes.

CHAPTER V.

LIFE AT MARLOW, AND JOURNEY TO ITALY.

Amid the torturing distractions of the Chancery suit about his children, and the still more poignant anguish of his own heart, and with the cloud of what he thought swift-coming death above his head, Sh.e.l.ley worked steadily, during the summer of 1817, upon his poem of _Laon and Cythna_.

Six months were spent in this task. "The poem," to borrow Mrs. Sh.e.l.ley's words, "was written in his boat, as it floated under the beech-groves of Bisham, or during wanderings in the neighbouring country, which is distinguished for peculiar beauty." Whenever Sh.e.l.ley could, he composed in the open air. The terraces of the Villa Cappuccini at Este, and the Baths of Caracalla were the birthplace of _Prometheus_. _The Cenci_ was written on the roof of the Villa Valsovano at Leghorn. The Cascine of Florence, the pine-woods near Pisa, the lawns above San Giuliano, and the summits of the Euganean Hills, witnessed the creation of his loveliest lyrics; and his last great poem, the _Triumph of Life_, was transferred to paper in his boat upon the Bay of Spezia.

If _Alastor_ had expressed one side of Sh.e.l.ley's nature, his devotion to Ideal Beauty, _Laon and Cythna_ was in a far profounder sense representative of its author. All his previous experiences and all his aspirations--his pa.s.sionate belief in friends.h.i.+p, his principle of the equality of women with men, his demand for bloodless revolution, his confidence in eloquence and reason to move nations, his doctrine of free love, his vegetarianism, his hatred of religious intolerance and tyranny--are blent together and concentrated in the glowing cantos of this wonderful romance. The hero, Laon, is himself idealized, the self which he imagined when he undertook his Irish campaign. The heroine, Cythna, is the helpmate he had always dreamed, the woman exquisitely feminine, yet capable of being fired with male enthusiasms, and of grappling the real problems of our nature with a man's firm grasp. In the first edition of the poem he made Laon and Cythna brother and sister, not because he believed in the desirability of incest, but because he wished to throw a glove down to society, and to attack the intolerance of custom in its stronghold. In the preface, he tells us that it was his purpose to kindle in the bosoms of his readers "a virtuous enthusiasm for those doctrines of liberty and justice, that faith and hope in something good, which neither violence, nor misrepresentation, nor prejudice, can ever wholly extinguish among mankind;" to ill.u.s.trate "the growth and progress of individual mind aspiring after excellence, and devoted to the love of mankind;" and to celebrate Love "as the sole law which should govern the moral world." The wild romantic treatment of this didactic motive makes the poem highly characteristic of its author. It is written in Spenserian stanzas, with a rapidity of movement and a dazzling brilliance that are Sh.e.l.ley's own. The story relates the kindling of a nation to freedom at the cry of a young poet-prophet, the temporary triumph of the good cause, the final victory of despotic force, and the martyrdom of the hero, together with whom the heroine falls a willing victim. It is full of thrilling incidents and lovely pictures; yet the tale is the least part of the poem; and few readers have probably been able either to sympathize with its visionary characters, or to follow the narrative without weariness. As in the case of other poems by Sh.e.l.ley--especially those in which he attempted to tell a story, for which kind of art his genius was not well suited--the central motive of _Laon and Cythna_ is surrounded by so radiant a photosphere of imagery and eloquence that it is difficult to fix our gaze upon it, blinded as we are by the excess of splendour. Yet no one now can read the terrible tenth canto, or the lovely fifth, without feeling that a young eagle of poetry had here tried the full strength of his pinions in their flight. This truth was by no means recognized when _Laon and Cythna_ first appeared before the public. Hooted down, derided, stigmatized, and howled at, it only served to intensify the prejudice with which the author of _Queen Mab_ had come to be regarded.

I have spoken of this poem under its first name of _Laon and Cythna_. A certain number of copies were issued with this t.i.tle;[17] but the publisher, Ollier, not without reason dreaded the effect the book would make; he therefore induced Sh.e.l.ley to alter the relations.h.i.+p between the hero and his bride, and issued the old sheets with certain cancelled pages under the t.i.tle of _Revolt of Islam_. It was published in January, 1818.

While still resident at Marlow, Sh.e.l.ley began two autobiographical poems--the one _Prince Athanase_, which he abandoned as too introspective and morbidly self-a.n.a.lytical, the other _Rosalind and Helen_, which he finished afterwards in Italy. Of the second of these compositions he entertained a poor opinion; nor will it bear comparison with his best work. To his biographer its chief interest consists in the character of Lionel, drawn less perhaps exactly from himself than as an ideal of the man he would have wished to be. The poet in _Alastor_, Laon in the _Revolt of Islam_, Lionel in _Rosalind and Helen_, and Prince Athanase, are in fact a remarkable row of self-portraits, varying in the tone and scale of idealistic treatment bestowed upon them. Later on in life, Sh.e.l.ley outgrew this preoccupation with his idealized self, and directed his genius to more objective themes. Yet the autobiographic tendency, as befitted a poet of the highest lyric type, remained to the end a powerful characteristic.

Before quitting the first period of Sh.e.l.ley's development, it may be well to set before the reader a specimen of that self-delineative poetry which characterized it; and since it is difficult to detach a single pa.s.sage from the continuous stanzas of _Laon and Cythna_, I have chosen the lines in _Rosalind and Helen_ which describe young Lionel:

To Lionel, Though of great wealth and lineage high, Yet through those dungeon walls there came Thy thrilling light, O Liberty!

And as the meteor's midnight flame Startles the dreamer, sun-like truth Flashed on his visionary youth, And filled him, not with love, but faith, And hope, and courage mute in death; For love and life in him were twins, Born at one birth: in every other First life, then love its course begins, Though they be children of one mother; And so through this dark world they fleet Divided, till in death they meet: But he loved all things ever. Then He past amid the strife of men, And stood at the throne of armed power Pleading for a world of woe: Secure as one on a rock-built tower O'er the wrecks which the surge trails to and fro, 'Mid the pa.s.sions wild of human kind He stood, like a spirit calming them; For, it was said, his words could find Like music the lulled crowd, and stem That torrent of unquiet dream, Which mortals truth and reason deem, But is revenge and fear and pride.

Joyous he was; and hope and peace On all who heard him did abide, Raining like dew from his sweet talk, As where the evening star may walk Along the brink of the gloomy seas, Liquid mists of splendour quiver.