Part 3 (1/2)

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:--