CHAPTER XV.

‘TheEpipsychidionI cannot look at; the person whom it celebrates was a cloud instead of a Juno, and poor Ixion starts from the centaur that was the offspring of his own embrace.’

Whilst penning these lines, Shelley was still moving along the comparatively tranquil stream of his melancholy attachment to Jane Williams, the last of his spiritual brides, to whose singing and guitar he listened on the evening after writing the letter, as he paced to and fro on the Casa Magni terrace, whilst Mary lay a-bed faint and exhausted by her recent miscarriage.

Before he passes to the concluding term of Shelley’s residence at Pisa, the reader should be informed of another of those imaginary incidents, which would have had prominence in the record, had Shelley lived to be his own biographer. In the summer of 1820, whilst Mr. Tighe (son of the still famous Mrs. Tighe) was staying at Pisa, Shelley came in high excitement to that gentleman (or at least told Medwin he had gone to Mr. Tighe) with this strange story. He (Shelley, the narrator of the affair to Medwin, if not to Tighe) had gone to the Post Office of Pisa for letters, and had barely uttered his name to the clerk of the Poste-restante bureau, when a stranger, with a military cloak hanging from his shoulders, exclaimed, ‘What, are you that d——d atheist, Shelley?’ and forthwith felled him to the ground with a stunning fist-blow,—a blow rendering the poet unconscious, whilst the doer of the violent deed went off, cloak and all. According to the story, given to Medwin some three months or so after the alleged occurrence, Shelley and Tighe tracked the ruffianly assailant to the Tre Donzelle of Pisa, and on learning he had started for Genoa, hastened thither in the hope of overtaking and punishing him. Mr. Rossetti suggests that, in respect to this alleged assault, Medwin, the original historian of the affair, may have given a loose account of some adventure that is said to have taken place at Rome. But I see no reason to accept this suggestion. Though comically inaccurate in his reminiscences, Medwin was an honest gentleman and a precise note-taker. On coming to Pisa to stay with Shelley in the late autumn of 1820, he was a diarist who took pains to record exactly the things seen by him, and the things (true or false) told to him by other people. Without giving Shelley as his authority for the narrative, he tells the story of the assault as one of the matters which came to his knowledge soon after his arrival at Pisa, during his familiarintercourse with his cousin. Whilst fully cognizant of the gentleman’s literary defects, I do not question that he had the story of the assault from Shelley’s lips, and passed it on through one of his note-books with substantial accuracy. It is certain no such attack was made on Shelley at Pisa. The marvellous story must be regarded as an affair of delusion, semi-delusion, or sheer untruth.

PISAN ACQUAINTANCES.

The Williamses—Shelley at Ravenna—The Shelley-Claire Scandal—Shelley’s startling Letter to Mrs. Shelley—Examination of the Letter—Its wild Inaccuracies—Mrs. Shelley’s vindicatory Letter to Mrs. Hoppner—Demonstration that Byron was authorized by Shelley to withhold the Letter—Explanation of the Shelley-Claire Scandal—Shelley’s Visit to Allegra at Bagna-Cavallo—Project for starting theLiberal—Leigh Hunt invited to edit theLiberal—Shelley’s Change of Plans—His Pretexts and Reasons for changing them—Leigh Hunt’s Way of dealing with his Friends—His Concealment of his financial Position—Byron at Pisa—Hunt’s Misadventures on his Outward Voyage—Byron’s Discouragement in respect to theLiberal—Differences between Byron and Shelley—Shelley’s Position between Byron and Hunt—The Byron-Shelley ‘Set’ at Pisa—Shelley and Hunt in secret League against Byron—Shelley’s Change of Feeling towards Byron—Was Byron aware of the Change?

Though leading a life of seclusion and studious industry, Shelley escaped at Pisa from the social estrangement, almost amounting to social isolation, which had alternately irritated and depressed him during the earlier stages of his residence in Italy, and would have affected him still more painfully, had it not been for Claire’s exhilarating vivaciousness. If he made no friends in the Tuscan city, Pisa at least afforded him acquaintances,—Vacca the physician (who wisely treating the poet as amalade imaginairetold him to confide in nature for the proper treatment of his maladies); Sgricci the improvisatore, whose peculiar faculty stirred the poet’s curiosity and admiration; and the dissolute Professor who introduced him to Emilia Viviani. Receiving his cousin Tom Medwin in the late autumn of 1820 for a long visit, he made the acquaintance of Medwin’s especial friends, the Williamses, early in the following year,—Edward Williams, whilom lieutenant in the 8th Dragoons, and in still earlier time a midshipman of the Navy, who, boasting a lineal descent from Oliver Cromwell, and displaying at least an amateur’s aptitude for literature and the fine arts, possessed various mental and moral qualities, to render him no less acceptable toMary than her husband; and Jane Williams, the last of the several women, fair or otherwise, to move Shelley to platonic affection. From time to time, also, at Pisa, Shelley saw something of Lady Mountcashel, whose acquaintance he had made at Florence,—the gentlewoman of letters, who, whilst corresponding regularly with her old friend, Claire’s mother, had her reasons for living abroad under the name and style of Mrs. Mason, together with her cold and capricious daughter, who ranged herself for a while with Claire’s admirers. But of all Shelley’s Pisan associates, in the time preceding Byron’s tenure of the Palazzo Lanfranchi, none is more deserving of commemoration than the Prince Mavrocordatos, with whom Shelley played chess and lived for awhile on terms of domestic intimacy, before dedicatingHellasto him, as ‘an imperfect token’ of the author’s ‘admiration, sympathy, and friendship.’ That Shelley had some other and less creditable associates at the Tuscan city and the adjacent Baths, may be inferred from the contemptuous and even disgustful severity with which Mrs. Shelley spoke of their Pisan acquaintances as a ‘dirty enough’ lot of people.

In July, 1821, the Shelleys designed to spend the next winter in Florence with Mr. and Mrs. Horace Smith, whom they had promised to introduce to the glories of the Uffizi and Pitti galleries; and in accordance with this purpose Shelley went to Florence at the end of July to choose a suitable residence. But this scheme for the winter fell through; Mrs. Smith’s ill health determining Horace Smith to postpone their Italian trip,—an opportune change of purpose, that liberated the Shelleys from their engagement to winter at Florence, just as they were wishing for a decent pretext for throwing the Smiths over, and wintering again at Pisa, where they would be members of the great Byron’s especial circle.

Five days after writing from Florence to his wife at Bagni di Pisa, Shelley was writing (6th August, 1821) to her from Bologna, as he was on the point of starting for Ravenna, to visit Byron at the Palazzo Guiccioli, which he entered at 10 p.m. of the same date. Crossing at this late hour his entertainer’s threshold, Shelley was not permitted to retire to rest, by daylight, until he had heard a piece of scandal that cannot have disposed him for slumber. The promptitude, with which Byron poured this piece of tattle into his guest’s ear, will remind readers how at Diodati he seized the earliest moment to chatter to anotherfriend about the revolting Genevese scandal. Before Shelley went to bed for the first time, at five o’clock a.m. at the Palazzo Guiccioli, he had heard that rumour charged him with being the father by Claire of a child, whom she had put into a Foundling Hospital. It was of course the easier for Byron to speak to Shelley of so indelicate a matter, because they had spoken freely together just five years since on the details of the Genevese scandal. Going to bed at five or six a.m. it was Byron’s practice to rise in the afternoon; and the poet, who thus turned night into day, was still only in his second sleep, when Shelley, at 11 a.m. on the 7th August, 1821, was writing to his wife in these terms,—

‘Lord Byron has told me of a circumstance that shocked me exceedingly, because it exhibits a degree of desperate and wicked malice, for which I am at a loss to account. When I hear such things my patience and philosophy are put to a severe proof, whilst I refrain from seeking out some obscure hiding-place where the countenance of man may never meet me more.... It seems that Elise, actuated either by some inconceivable malice for our dismissing her, or bribed by my enemies, or making common cause with her husband, has persuaded the Hoppners of a story, so monstrous and incredible, that they must have been prone to believe any evil to have believed such assertions upon such evidence. Mr. Hoppner wrote to Lord Byron, to state this story as a reason why he declined any further communication with us, and why he advised him to do the same. Elise says that Claire was my mistress; that she was brought to bed; that I immediately tore the child from her and sent it to the Foundling Hospital. I quote Mr. Hoppner’s words—and this is stated to have taken place in the winter after we left Este (1819-20).—[sic, in the proverbially inaccurate Mr. Froude’s transcript. The winter of the stay at Naples was the winter of 1818-19.] In addition she says that both I and Claire treated you in the most shameful manner; that I neglected and beat you, and that Claire never let a day pass without offering you insults of the most violent kind, in which she was abetted by me.—As to what reviews and the world say I do not care a jot; but when persons who have known me are capable of conceiving of me,not that I have fallen into a great error—as would have been the living with Claire as my mistress—but that I have committed such unutterable crimesas destroyingor abandoning a child, and that my own! Imagine my despair of good! Imagine how it is possible that one of so weak and sensitive a nature as mine can run the gauntlet further, through this hellish society of men.Youshould write to the Hoppners a letter refuting the charge, in case you believe, and know, and can prove it to be false; stating the grounds and proof of your belief.... If you will send the letter to me here, I willforward it to the Hoppners. Lord Byron is not up, I do not know the Hoppners’ address, and I am anxious not to lose a post.’

For the italics of the foregoing extract the present transcriber is responsible.

It is in the memory of some readers of this book, that the afore-given passage, from Shelley’s letter of 7th August, was a chief feature of the article, which Mr. Froude wrote for the August-1883Nineteenth Century, to the discredit of myReal Lord Byron, and for Byron’s defamation. It is therefore in some degree for the defence of my own reputation (a matter of importance to at least one person), though chiefly for the vindication of Byron’s honour from the latest of his defamers’ countless calumnies, and for the fuller exhibition of certain aspects of Shelley’s character, that I proceed to examine the passage of Shelley’s 7th August-1821 letter to his wife, certain parts of her reply to it, and the use made by Mr. Froude of the poet’s letter and Mrs. Shelley’s vindicatory answer.

The shameful conduct, charged against Shelley and Claire, was (according to Shelley’s letter) alleged to have taken place in the winter of 1818-19,i.e.when they were at Naples. The indictment (according to the same letter) comprised several counts:—(1) That Shelley had taken Claire for his mistress under his wife’s roof; (2) That he and Claire had joined in treating his wife cruelly in other ways; (3) That he had beaten his wife and neglected her; (4) That he tore from Claire the child to which she had given birth; (5) That he had sent the child into a Foundling Hospital; (6) That he had destroyed or abandoned the child,—i.e.that, if he had not put the child into a Foundling Hospital, he had destroyed it. According to the letter Elise had made these charges, and the Hoppners believed them,—i.e.deemed him guilty of the first five charges, and further guilty of abandoning or murdering his own offspring. I say,according to Shelley’s letter; for this excited epistle by a man, who in the opinion of his most intimate friends was absolutely incapable of writing a precisely accurate account of any agitating passage of his own quite recent affairs, is our only account of the substance and particulars of Byron’s speech at or after midnight to the greatly excited and indignant Shelley. Is it likely that this account is precisely or substantially accurate?

From Byron’s March-1821 note to Hoppner weknow whatill things they charged against Shelley and Claire. Weknowthey believed that Claire was Shelley’s mistress, that Claire had given birth to a child, and thatshe(notShelley) had put this child into a Foundling. Byron’s words to Hoppner are precise. ‘The moral part of this letter,’ he wrote to Hoppner in March, 1821, about Claire’s epistle, ‘upon the Italians, &c., comes with an excellent grace from the writer now living with amanand hiswife, and having planted a child in the Foundling.’—They did not imagine that Shelley had torn the child from Claire’s breast, and sent it to a Foundling against her will. On the contrary they believed the child to have been put into the Foundling by Claire. At the worst they believed Shelley guilty, on this point, of mere acquiescence inherarrangement for getting rid of the child. They thought that the child was sent to a Foundling. It never occurred to them to suspect Shelley of having destroyed the child. One difficulty of the matter is that Byron, to say the least of it, was not quite, but almost, as untruthful as Shelley. But it was not in the way of his peculiar untruthfulness, to say in cold blood that Hoppner believed Shelley to have torn the child from Claire’s breast, and sent it to a Foundling against her will,orperhaps destroyed it, when he knew Hoppner thought nothing of the kind. In his hatred of Claire, Byron hugged the notion thatshehad planted her child in a Foundling; and his hatred of her would alone have prevented him from telling a lie, that would have represented her as innocent of that offence, at least in Hoppner’s opinion. Yet Shelley (so prone to write with wild inaccuracy about his personal affairs) wrote to his wife that Byron had told him certain things (over and above the real communications) which it is inconceivable Byron told him.

Another remarkable feature of Shelley’s letter is the way in which he refers to the first count of the indictment. Writing tohis own wife, Shelley (the poet, who according to his idolaters might have been the Saviour of the World) positively tellsher, that, if he had lived in adultery with her sister-by-affinity under her own roof, he would have been guilty of nothing worse than ‘a great error!’ He would not have committed prodigious immorality, and a revolting outrage of social decency. He would not have been guilty of loathsome domestic uncleanness. He would only have fallen into ‘a great error.’ He wrote this ofhimselfto hisown wife! This fact should be pondered by those, who not long since were so indignant with Byron for imaginingShelley could have sinned with Claire in his wife’s house. Here is Shelley, instructing his own wife that the enormity would have been nothing more heinous than a big blunder.

Moved by Shelley to write a vehement denial of the slanders, Mrs. Shelley (best of letter-writers) seized her pen, and produced an epistle that cannot be commended too highly as an exhibition of womanly feeling. On some subordinate points it is not free from confusion and inconsistency, and in one or two passages the writerseemsguilty of several material inaccuracies; but this appearance may be wholly due to the carelessness of transcribers of the printed copies of Shelley’s letter to her. For instance, whilst Shelley in the printed passages of his letter merely says, ‘Elise ... has persuaded the Hoppners,’ and ‘Elise says,’ Mrs. Shelley in her vindicatory epistle says of her husband’s letter, ‘It tells me that Elisewrote to you’ (i.e.to Mrs. Hoppner) ‘relating the most hideous stories against him,’—words certainly not justified by the published passages of Shelley’s letter. Dealing thus, in the opening of her letter, with Elise, as though she were the actual slanderer, Mrs. Shelley in a later passage seems to hold Paolo altogether accountable for the calumnies, and to acquit Elise of complicity in his wickedness. Yet, towards the close of the epistle (addressed to Mrs. Hoppner), reflecting bitterly on her former nurse, Mrs. Shelley bids Mrs. Hoppner withdraw her confidence from ‘one so vile as Elise.’ Both in her letter to Mrs. Hoppner and in the accompanying note to her own husband, Mrs. Shelley refers to Byron’s disbelief of the slanders; whereas the published passages of Shelley’s letter afford no grounds for these references to Byron’s incredulity, and even justify a suspicion that the generous disbelief for which Mrs. Shelley was so grateful, was merely her presumption. Possibly the production of the original documents would dispel these apparent inconsistencies and inaccuracies. As they stand before the world, however, the published passages of Mrs. Shelley’s letter comprise several perplexing sentences. On the main points of the slanders, however, Mrs. Shelley is direct, and admirably strenuous. Nothing of its kind can well be stronger than this:—

‘But now I come to the accusations, and I must summon all my courage while I transcribe them, for tears will force their way, and how can it be otherwise? You knew Shelley. You saw his face, and could you believe them?—believe them only on the testimony of a girl whomyou despised? I had hoped that such a thing was impossible, and that, although strangers might believe the calumnies that this man propagated, none who had ever seen my husband could for a moment credit them. He says Claire was Shelley’s mistress—that—upon my word I solemnly assure you that I cannot write the words. I send you a part of Shelley’s letter, that you may see what I am now about to refute; but I had rather die than copy anything so vilely, so wickedly false, so beyond imagination fiendish.—But that you should believe it! That my beloved Shelley should stand thus slandered in your minds—he, the gentlest, the most humane of creatures—is more painful to me—oh far more painful—than words can express. Need I say that the union between my husband and myself has never been disturbed? Love caused our first imprudence; love which improved by esteem, a perfect trust one in the other, a confidence and affection which, visited as we have been by severe calamities (have we not losttwo(sic) children?), has increased daily, and knows no bounds. I will add that Claire has been separated from us for about a year.... You ought to have paused before you tried to convince the father of her child of such unheard-of atrocities on her part. If his generosity and knowledge of the world had not made him reject the slander with the ridicule it deserved, what irretrievable mischief you would have occasioned her! Those who know me will believe my simple word. It is not long ago that my father said, in a letter to me, that he had never known me utter a falsehood; but you—easy as you have been to credit evil, you may be more deaf to truth—to you I swear by all that I hold sacred in Heaven and Earth, by a vow which I should die to write if I affirmed a falsehood,—I swear by the life of my child—my blessed, beloved child—that I know the accusation to be false.’

Addressed to Mrs. Hoppner, this letter was sent to Shelley at Ravenna, for him to forward it to the lady at Venice; the note which accompanied it to Shelley’s hands, contained the writer’s earnest request to him, to copy the epistle, before sending it on. ‘Pray,’ said Mrs. Shelley, ‘get my letter to Mrs. H. copied, for a thousand reasons,’—meaning, of course, to keep the copy in evidence of what she had written in the original, that would go to Mrs. Hoppner. She had previously said in the same letter, ‘If the task be not too dreadful, pray copy it for me.’ Shelley’s way of dealing with this natural request is equally curious and significant:—

‘I have not,’ he remarked in a subsequent letter from Ravenna to his wife, ‘recopied your letter—such a measure would destroy its authenticity, but have given it to Lord Byron, who has engaged to send it with his own comments to the Hoppners. People do not hesitate, it seems, to make themselves panders and accomplices to slander, for theHoppners had exacted from Lord Byron that these accusations should be concealed fromme. Lord Byron is not a man to keep a secret, good or bad, but in openly confessing that he has not done so, he must observe a certain delicacy, and therefore he wished to send the letter himself, and indeed this adds weight to your representations.’

It is inconceivable that Shelley really thought what he pretended to think, viz., that his wife wished him to make a fair copy of her letter, for Mrs. Hoppner’s perusal. He knew right wellwhyMary told him to copy the letter. He misconstrued her words wilfully, because he did not wish her to have a copy of the letter at her hand,—to remind her of the circumstances that had caused her to write it. Paying proper regard to her repeated injunction, he would have copied not only her written words, but also that part of his own letter of the 7th instant, which she had made a substantive part of her own epistle. This she asked him to do. Instead of doing what she told him, he pretended to have misunderstood her request, and at the same time informed her that her vindicatory letter had been given to Byron, for transmission to Mrs. Hoppner.

This vindicatory letter wasnottransmitted by Byron to Mrs. Hoppner. On the contrary, after Byron’s death, it was found amongst his papers, and at some later time passed to the hands of the present Sir Percy Shelley. With law and logic resembling his knowledge of the simplest rules of evidence, Mr. Froude wrote of this letter in his notoriousNineteenth-Centuryarticle, ‘It was not addressed to Byron; it therefore never belonged to Byron; and a property which was not his own could not descend to his representatives.’ What egregious nonsense! What should be thought of the readers of theNineteenth Century, who accept such foolishness as sound literature? What living writer but Mr. Froude could venture to declare it impossible for a man to acquire property in a letter,notaddressed to him? Were thedictumgood law, the trustees of the British Museum would have no property in any one of their several thousands of ancient letters. Mr. Alfred Morrison would not have property in any of his thousands of epistles,notaddressed to himself. On coming to Shelley’s hands at Ravenna, Mrs. Shelley’s vindicatory letter was as much his property as any ring on his finger. Written by his own wife (who had no property of her own) on paper bought with his money, the epistle belonged to Shelley. The legal property of the documentwas in him and no one else. He had as perfect legal power to give the epistle to Byron, as to give any other of his lawful possessions to Byron. There are grounds for the strongest opinion that Shelley did give the letter to Byron—notto transmit to Mrs. Hoppner,butto do what he liked with it; and that, therefore, the letter at his death passed to his representatives.

Shelley himself admits that he gave the letter. ‘I have,’ he writes to his wife, ‘given it to Lord Byron,’ adding that Byron ‘has engaged to send it with his own comments, to the Hoppners.’ Apart from these words, there is no evidence whatever that Byron promised to transmit the letter to the Hoppners;—words written by a man of such singular mental inexactness, that his most intimate friends held him absolutely incapable of giving an accurate account of any matter of his personal affairs;—a man, who wrote wheedling letters, and deliberately deceitful letters, whenever he was tempted to do so;—a man, who only the other day had written his wife a flagrantly inaccurate account of what Byron had told him of the Claire scandal. Is the bare statement of so inexact a letter-writer to be held good evidence, that Byron withheld a letter he was bound in honour to pass on to Mrs. Hoppner? Is it probable that Shelley had authority for writing to his wife, that Byron had promised to transmit the letter and enclosure? If he was inaccurate in this statement, Shelley was merely guilty of an inaccuracy, comparable with scores of similar inaccuracies to be found in his private epistles. Is it conceivable that Byron promised to transmit to the Hoppners an epistle, which represented him as having said of them divers things which he certainly had not said of them?

Shelley’s letter of the 7th instant to his wife was posted to her before Byron had risen from bed. Dates and the lady’s words show that Mrs. Shelley answered it immediately,—that her indignant reply was dashed offcurrente calamo, when she, too, was in a state of excitement incompatible with mental exactness. Thus written, her epistle was despatched immediately, so that no time might be lost. In due course the vindicatory letter, together with the piece of Shelley’s own writing which had been constituted a part of the vindicatory epistle, came under Byron’s observation at Ravenna. What ensued forthwith, between the two poets, can be readily imagined.After perusing the two documents of the reply, Byron, of course, spoke to Shelley to this effect: ‘My dear Shelley, in your excitement you gave Mrs. Shelley a strangely inaccurate account of what passed between us on the night of your arrival. What I told you was, that the Hoppners had been induced to regard Claire as your mistress, to thinkshehad given you a child, and to thinkshehad sent the child to a Foundling. This was what I told you. But you have told your wife a very different story. The Hoppners never spoke of you as tearing the child from Claire’s breast; they never accused you of sending the child to a Foundling against her will; they never hinted to me that, instead of sending the child to a Foundling, you might have destroyed it. Such thoughts of you never entered their heads. How came you to conceive they had such suspicions? They never wronged you in the way you have represented to Mrs. Shelley. They told me you had made a domestic arrangement with Claire, which (as you remark to Mrs. Shelley) would have been no heinous crime, but only “a great error,” had you and she entered into the arrangement. They told me Claire had given you a child, even as she gave me one a few years since,—i.e.they believed that the arrangement, which in your opinion would have been no worse than “a great error,” had been attended with a natural result. Further, they told me that they believed the offspring of the arrangement had been dealt with as illegitimate children are often dealt with in this country. To think this of you is not to believe you tore the child from Claire’s breast, disposed of it violently and without her consent, abandoned itorperhaps destroyed it. This letter and enclosure may not be sent to Mrs. Hoppner; for they imply that I have told you prodigious untruths. As the epistle touches my honour so acutely, leave it in my hands, and trust to me to communicate with the Hoppners, so as to disabuse their minds completely of their erroneous impressions about you. But do let me retain possession of those sheets of paper, which so strangely misrepresent my confidential speech to you.’

Byron must necessarily have put the case in this way to Shelley. After speaking in this way, it is inconceivable that he promised to send the letter and enclosure to Venice. After being so spoken to by Byron, it is inconceivable that Shelley wished the documents to be sent to Mrs. Hoppner, or was otherwise than well pleased to know Byron could be trusted to keepthem from her eyes. It must have been a great relief to him to think that, instead of sending to Venice the writings which, on coming to the Hoppners, would have been fruitful of mischief, he had shown them to Byron. Of course he made no copy of Mary’s letter and enclosure, to remain in evidence how egregiously he had exaggerated the scandalous report, and misrepresented a confidential conversation. But it was necessary for him to acknowledge to Mary his receipt of the documents; to acknowledge them, moreover, in such a way, that she would not be looking to every post for a letter from Mrs. Hoppner; that she should feel assured proper measures were being taken to kill the scandal; that she should not be angry with him for neglecting to copy the papers; and that she should not lose all power of ever again relying on his statements of fact. The author ofLaon and Cythnawas in a very embarrassing and rather humiliating position. His way of accounting for his neglect to copy the documents is sufficiently significant of disingenuousness. It was necessary for him to conceal from his wife that her epistle, so eloquent of fine and womanly feeling, would not be sent on to Mrs. Hoppner; it was necessary for him to allay her impatience for a letter from Mrs. Hoppner, by giving her to understand that she must not expect the lady’s reply to come quickly; it was necessary for him to provide against further importunity on her part for copies of the documents. In submission to these necessities he had recourse to misrepresentation. Affecting to have mistaken her purpose in requesting him to take copies of the writings, he informed her he had given her epistle, with the piece of his own epistle, to Byron,—an announcement calculated to make her feel she could scarcely repeat her request for copies without implying distrust of Lord Byron’s discretion and zeal. At the same time, he assured her that Byron ‘had engaged to send the letter with his own comments to the Hoppners,’ whilst knowing that Byron had only engaged to give the substance of certain passages of the letter, together with his comments on the case.

Whilst this explanation of Byron’s retention of a letter (which on reflection Shelley can have been no less desirous than Byron to keep from the Hoppners), acquits him of the egregious villainy of withholding an epistle he had pledged his honour to forward to Mrs. Hoppner, it only requires the readers of this work, so far as Shelley is concerned, to believe that, under thepressure of a rather comical embarrassment, he practised on his wife the kind of deceit he so often employed in his dealings with other people. Acquitting Byron of the villainy imputed to him by Mr. Froude, a villainy very different from the immoralities with which he is justly chargeable, it merely imputes to Shelley the particular kind of underhandedness and inaccuracy, of which so many examples may be found in his dealings with various people. Had Byron sent the letter to Mrs. Hoppner, it would of course have been accompanied with explanations, showing that he was not accountable for the exaggerations and staggering misstatements of Shelley’s letter (of 7th August) to his wife. Knowing this, Shelley had even a stronger motive than Byron for stopping the letter. Under these circumstances, it is absurd to argue from the mere retention of the letter, that it was retained dishonestly by the elder poet, in breach of a solemn promise.

There is no reason to suppose Byron was wanting in fidelity to Shelley in any stage of this business. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, he must be assumed to have kept his promise, to do his utmost to convince the Hoppners of the untruth of the scandalous story, so far as it affected the Shelleys. There is at present no evidence that he either failed to keep this promise, or failed to satisfy the Hoppners of Shelley’s innocence. Under existing circumstances, the only fair assumption is that he wrote to the Hoppners on the matter, and made it clear to them that Shelley neither was nor ever had been the father of a child by Claire. It makes nothing against the reasonableness of this assumption, that Mrs. Shelley received no letter from Mrs. Hoppner on the subject, and that the Hoppners never again had any intercourse with her. Having received no letter from Mrs. Shelley on the matter, Mrs. Hoppner was under no obligation to write to her about it. Indeed, under the circumstances, it would have been something worse than an insulting impertinence, had the Consul-General’s wife written to Mrs. Shelley on so unsavoury a business. To set the ugly matter right, it was not necessary for Byron to let Mrs. Hoppner know her name had been mentioned to the Shelleys in connexion with the scandal; and the reasons why he should be silent on that point are obvious. That the Hoppners never again communicated with Mrs. Shelley is no evidence that they continued to think ill of her. Mrs. Shelley and Mrs. Hoppnerhad never corresponded with one another for any considerable time. Mrs. Shelley’s intercepted letter (of 10th August, 1821) opens with these words: ‘My dear Mrs. Hoppner, after silence ofnearly two years, I address you again,’—words showing conclusively the shortness of the period, during which the two ladies (who met for the first time no earlier than the autumn of 1818) were in the habit of writing to one another. Correspondents only for a single year, they had, in August, 1821, ceased to correspond for nearly two years. In truth, though the Shelleys, during their 1818 visits to and sojourn near Venice, received great kindness from the Hoppners (especially at the moment of little Clara’s death), the two ladies were casual acquaintances,—slight acquaintances, notwithstanding their intimacy for a brief period. How common is it for people to live sociably with persons for a few months, and then see no more of them! Had Mrs. Shelley in her later time met the Hoppners, she would probably have been greeted by them in a way to satisfy her, that they had no wish to avoid her as a discreditable person. But never meeting them after 1818, she went from 1821 to her grave, imagining they persisted in thinking evil of her.

Though Byron’s March-1821 note to Hoppner defines the main facts of the scandalous story, it gives none of the minor details of the slander, that seems to have originated in Elise’s general knowledge of the Genevese scandal and her subsequent misconceptions respecting Allegra’s paternity. Had that note been as ample as it was precise, it would have enabled us to see how far the slander (credited by Byron and Hoppner) was the pure outgrowth of Elise’s misconceptions, and in what degree it resulted from Paolo’s malicious inventiveness,—and also to gauge more precisely the element of inaccuracy in Shelley’s letter of exaggerations. There is, of course, a great difference in detail between the story Elise may be conceived to have told Paolo about Allegra’s birth in England in January, 1817, and the slanderous statement about a second child, alleged to have been born at Naples in the winter of 1818-1819. But it is in the nature of scandal to change in its details and colour, no less than in its magnitude, as it passes from mouth to mouth; and before it reached Mrs. Shelley at Bagni di Pisa, the scandalous story about Claire had passed through several hands. Originating with Elise, it had passed from her to Paolo; throughPaolo to Hoppner; through Hoppner to Mrs. Hoppner; from the Hoppners to Byron; from Byron’s cynical lips to Shelley’s heated brain; through Shelley’s inaccurate pen to Mrs. Shelley. Elise, Paolo (a liar of great ability), Hoppner, Mrs. Hoppner, Byron (not remarkable for accuracy of statement), and Shelley (a prodigy of historical inventiveness):—all and each of these six persons had worked in some way or other on the scandal, before it came to Mary at Bagni di Pisa! No wonder the story was a marvellous and extremely exciting story on coming to poor Mrs. Shelley.

The liar in the business was, of course, Paolo, the clever, vindictive, unscrupulous knave, set on avenging himself on the master, who had declined to be cheated beyond a hundred per cent. Certainly guilty of the venial offence of indiscreet and disloyal loquacity, Elise was probably also guilty of encouraging her husband in his purpose to extort more money from her bountiful employers. Her passionate assertion that she had said nothing against the Shelleysto Mrs.Hoppner (‘Je vous assure, ma chère Madame Shelley,’ she wrote in reply to a letter from her former mistress, ‘que je n’ai jamais rien dit à Madame Hoppner ni contre vous, ni contre Mademoiselle, ni contre Monsieur, et de quelque part que cela vienne c’est un mensonge contre moi’) does not acquit her of talking freely to her husband against them. It tells much and suggests more against the smart Elise that, for months after her husband had put himself (with his wife’s cognizance) in communication with the Hoppners, she was writing to Mrs. Shelley for money;—a kind of demand the woman would, of course, have never made on her former mistress, had she not felt she had a most unusual claim on her. Only a day or two before Mrs. Shelley perused her husband’s staggering letter from Ravenna, Mrs. Shelley had received a letter from Elise, asking for more money. ‘The other day,’ Mrs. Shelley wrote in her intercepted letter to Mrs. Hoppner, ‘I received a letter from Elise, entreating, with great professions of love, that I would send her money’!!! More than two and a half years had passed since she quitted the Shelleys’ service, and yet Elise was writing for money to her former mistress. Elise had never said anythingto Mrs. Hoppneragainst either Mrs. Shelley or Mademoiselle Claire or Shelley; but she had said things against all threeto Paolo, who had carried them toMr.Hoppner.

In declaring so indignantly that she had never spoken disparagingly of her former employersto Mrs.Hoppner, Elise was alike true in the letter and false in the spirit of her words. The personto whomshe had spoken was Paolo, who, carrying her communications to Mr. Hoppner, had modified them, amended them, expanded them, as he saw the need of doing so, from the Consul-General’s countenance. On seeing that Monsieur Hoppner made light of the partly true story about the baby born in England, Paolo was quick to enlarge his narrative with a story of another baby born in Italy;—the story, told so cleverly, that the Consul-General and Mrs. Hoppner and Byron all believed it. This is the reasonable explanation of the monstrous fiction that Claire had a child by Shelley in Italy.

Before his stay at Ravenna came to an end Shelley rode over to Bagna Cavallo (renderedBagrea Cavaby Mr. Froude, andBazin-carelloby theEdinburghReviewer) to see Allegra at the convent, where the greedy and by no means exemplary little damsel had been under discipline for some months; affectionate concern for Claire being his chief motive for riding so far (25 miles) in the saddle, to visit the little school-miss, of whose beauty and costume he wrote so pleasantly to his wife on his return to Ravenna;—a letter written less for the gratification of Mary, to whom it was addressed, than for the gratification of Mary’s sister.

Shelley had for some time been exercising his mind to discover some way of arranging for the child’s nurture, less displeasing to her mother than this conventual education. Acknowledging that, while Italy was stirred with revolutionary excitement and the Romagna plotting for a general insurrection, Byron did well in sending the child to the convent, Shelley wished her now to be placed at some place where her mind would be less subject to clerical influence, and her mother could visit her occasionally, without inconvenience to herself or annoyance to Byron. One of his notions for Allegra’s advantage was that Mrs. Mason (Lady Mountcashel, who had written educational books for children, and affected to be wise about the training of girls) should be moved to take charge of Claire’s little one. For a moment he thought of the Pisan Convent of St. Anna (Emilia Viviani’s convent), but only to decide that it was precisely the place to which Allegra oughtnotto be sent. Now that the Gambas and Teresa Guiccioli, banished from thePapal territory, were waiting at Florence for marching orders from Byron, whose sojourn at Ravenna had for some time been prolonged only by indecision as to his future movements, Shelley was urgent that Byron should withdraw the child from the nuns, to whose custody she had been committed, only till some more eligible home could be found for her.

It cannot be said that Shelley’s intercourse with Byron at Ravenna was fruitful of wise decisions. Concluding that the question of Allegra’s future education might stand over (a conclusion for which the elder poet’s mental unsteadiness and Shelley’s inability to propose a better plan for her nurture were equally accountable), Byron, on withdrawing from Ravenna, at the end of October, 1821, left the child at Bagna Cavallo, to die there of fever in the ensuing spring,—the last of the three fated children to perish from the ways of man. In determining to take a Palazzo at Pisa, at Shelley’s instance, though not altogether out of deference to his judgment and counsel, Byron decided on a step that in no long time could not be favourable to the cordial and even idolatrous sentiment, with which the younger poet regarded him. On its death such enthusiastic and extravagant hero-worship would necessarily be followed by feeling of an opposite kind; and for the preservation of the sentiment of condescending respect on the one side, and the sentiment of affectionate idolatry on the other side, it was especially needful that the two poets should not be daily associates for any considerable period. Had they continued to live on different sides of Italy, Shelley might have idolized Byron to his last hour, and Byron would never have been irritated by Shelley. In deciding to become neighbours and almost daily companions at Pisa they resolved on a course which, even without the annoyances coming to each of the poets from what may be called the Leigh-Hunt complications, was certain to result in a diminution of their friendliness for one another. It was also in the highest degree inauspicious for their mutual good feeling that the two friends in council agreed in thinking Leigh Hunt the very man who should be invited to the editorial position which Tom Moore had prudently declined to accept.

It devolved on Shelley to write the letter, which invited Leigh Hunt to come out from England and join his correspondent and ‘noble friend’ Lord Byron, in establishingTheLiberal; and in his elation at the prospect of again embracing his equally extortionate and delightful admirer, and at finding himself in a position to render his charming friend a substantial service, Shelley (writing to Hunt from Pisa on 26th August, 1821,) invested the project with the roseate colouring most likely to heighten its attractiveness to Hunt. He even went so far as to assure Hunt that he would be Byron’s partner on equal footing and equal terms; that, whilst taking one-half of the revenue from the magazine, he would contribute, though in a different manner, no less than Byron to the success of their joint enterprise. How far was Shelley sincere in such extravagance? There is, no doubt, such a thing as honest adulation; and it is possible that for the moment Byron and Leigh Hunt were equals in fame and achievement to the poet, who, a short while earlier or later, declared himself a mere earthworm in comparison with the godlike author ofCain,—

‘the worm beneath the sodMay lift itself in homage of the God.’

Declaring he would participate neither in the profits nor the borrowed splendour of such a partnership, as should give the world a successfulLiberal, Shelley was ready to act as the connecting link between the two poets, who were in the same degree superior to him in literary eminence and power. With all his vanity and intellectual arrogance, Hunt had, of course, enough worldly knowledge and mental sobriety to be aware that he and Byron were other than equals; but all the same it tickled his self-complacence to be told that the author ofRiminiwas no less considerable a personage than the author ofChilde Harold. Moreover, the excessive praise was an agreeable indication to Hunt that, in the distress and confusion of his affairs, he might look confidently for further assistance to the young enthusiast (‘Mr. Shelley,’ as Hunt always called him in a deferential tone), whose pocket he had a few years since lightened of 1400l.in a single sum, to say nothing of smaller sums. At the same time, whilst accounting for his inability to send him a remittance for travelling expenses from Byron’s purse, Shelley intimated that he would obtain from another source the funds needful for his dearest Hunt’s journey, with his wife and babes to Leghorn.

Since he found shelter from bailiffs at Marlow, and in return afforded the author ofAlastorsimilar protection from clamorous creditors, things had gone with Hunt from bad to worse, and from worse to a state of affairs differing in little but name from actual bankruptcy. Drowning men catch at straws, and the sinking Hunt was glad to clutch at so substantial a plank as the proposal from Italy, which, under the smiles of fortune, might prove a seaworthy craft. Knowing well that the proposal was made not so much to Leigh Hunt the poet, as to Leigh Hunt the journalist, who was supposed to be still editor and joint-proprietor of theExaminer, and that the proposal was made to him in consideration, or at least not without consideration, of his editorial power to commend the new periodical to public favour, it was of course Hunt’s duty, before he closed with the offer, to let both projectors know they might no longer count upon theExamineras an influence for compassing the success of theLiberal. Had he been actuated by any sentiment of honour, or by bare commercial honesty, he would not have arranged to leave England without first writing to both Byron and Shelley, ‘Your offer having been made under, if not from, a misapprehension respecting my circumstances, I cannot accept it unless you renew it after learning I have ceased to be editor of theExaminer.’ Instead of treating Byron and Shelley with the candour, which is a chief element in fair dealing between friends, he started for Italy without a shilling of his own money in his pocket, without an income of any kind from any source whatever, and without letting either of them know he had determined his editorial connexion with the powerful newspaper. It was a surprise alike to Shelley and Byron to learn from Hunt, after his arrival at Leghorn, that he was no longer editor of theExaminer. There is no escape from the ugly truth that the brilliant, scholarly, irresistibly charming Leigh Hunt went to Italy with the purpose of fixing himself, his wife and children on a nobleman, with whom he had only the slightest acquaintance, and on a far from prosperous friend whose purse he had repeatedly laid under heavy requisitions, and with a clear intention of making them wholly responsible for the maintenance of himself and family for a considerable period. It is also certain that he thus went out to Italy without giving Byronand Shelley any intimation of his purpose, or any grounds for suspecting it.

Under no conceivable circumstances could the three poets have worked together harmoniously for as many years. They might, however, under conceivable conditions, have accomplished the immediate purpose of their partnership and avoided quarrelling, for eighteen months or even a couple of years, had Hunt been able to get out to Pisa before the end of the autumn, or at the latest by the end of December. But the winds and waves combined with Moore and Murray to defeat the enterprise, to which Hunt looked for preservation from utter financial ruin. It was not his fault that it was near the end of June, 1822, before he entered Leghorn harbour. Showing abundant alacrity in his preparations for leaving England, he would have started for the sunny South at the end of September, had not the vessel, in which he took berths for himself and his numerous family, been detained in England till the 16th of November. From that day till the end of June, his course was a series of vexatious misadventures. Detained for three weeks by bad weather at Ramsgate, he was beaten up and down Channel till the 22nd of December, when his ship put in at Dartmouth. Mrs. Hunt being by that time too ill to proceed, the Hunts migrated to Stonehouse (Plymouth), where they tarried till 22nd May, 1822, on which day they set forth again for Leghorn, in another vessel, that was so fortunate as to reach its destination at the close of June; when nine months had elapsed since the berths were taken on the first vessel.

In the meantime, persons, who disapproved of Byron’s alliance with Shelley and Hunt, had been at work to detach him from such dangerous associates, and put him out of conceit with his new literary project. Entreated for his reputation’s sake to be less intimate with Shelley, and warned of the risks he ran in calling Hunt to his confidence, Byron was assured by Hobhouse and Moore that even his genius and influence could not preserve from ignominious failure an enterprise, in which he would be discredited by his coadjutors. Time was in this affair even more prejudicial to Hunt’s interests than the mischief-makers, who, having Byron’s ear, knew well how to play on his least generous qualities. Before Hunt made hissecond start for Italy, the friendship of the two Pisan exiles had been rudely shaken by differences.

It is impossible to refrain from smiling at the recollection of the letter, in which Shelley (who declined Polidori’s challenge at Geneva on conscientious grounds, and at all stages of his career regarded duelling with reasonable repugnance) averred that, were it not for considerations moving him to do nothing of the kind, he would leave Italy forthwith, and never enter a country inhabited by Byron, unless it were to arrange their difficulties without words. To write in this vapouring vein to a sympathetic correspondent is, of course, a very different thing from sending a message of war at ten paces to so good a shot as the author ofDon Juan. Enough also is known of Shelley’s letters to render it probable that (his brave words to the contrary notwithstanding) he never for sixty consecutive moments seriously thought of ‘calling Byron out.’ There is no reason to think Shelley an exception to the general rule, that men who mean fighting keep their purpose to themselves till they act upon it. But none the less does the laughably valorous epistle point to a state of discord between the recently harmonious poets, that cannot have tended to quicken or strengthen Byron’s friendliness for Hunt, whom he had valued chiefly for being Shelley’sprotégé, and had selected for his literary coadjutor at Shelley’s request.

Whilst Hunt necessarily suffered in Byron’s regard from the mere decline of the last-named poet’s friendliness for Shelley, he suffered in the same respect also from a singular indiscretion into which Shelley was betrayed by his desire to serve the author ofRimini. Driven to Plymouth by stress of weather and the state of his wife’s health, Hunt, who had made the false start for Italy with an insufficiently furnished pocket, soon found himself under the necessity of begging Shelley to send him money from Pisa. To the weather-bound adventurer it, of course, appeared that, as he was bound for Italy at Byron’s invitation to co-operate with him in an important enterprise, he had a moral right to look to him for a remittance; and had he, in regard to his financial position, dealt frankly with the famous and affluent poet, few readers would decline to recognize Hunt’s title to needful assistance. It was under these circumstances that, instead of writing straight to Byron on the subject (which would have been the manlier course), Hunt wrote fromEngland not once, but repeatedly, to Shelley, to do for his benefit what he should have done for himself, in a letter addressed to Byron. Explaining the causes of his urgent need of money, Hunt moved Shelley to ask Byron for it. As it would doubtless have been less disagreeable to him to increase his more considerable than burdensome debt to Shelley, than to open his business relations with Byron by asking for a not trifling loan, it is probable that the request to Shelley to get the money from Byron was only Hunt’s way of asking Shelley to supply it from his own pocket. Anyhow, the request caused Shelley to empty his pocket into Hunt’s hands, rather than apply for money to Byron (with whom he was still on uneasy terms, though they had recently arranged their differences) and send Hunt 150l.—a gift that reduced to less than 40l.the donor’s reserve of money for his own current expenses.

In addition to the 150l.sent to Hunt, Shelley was ready to give him any sum for whichCharles the Firstcould be sold. In brief, Shelley was ready to do anything for the relief of hisprotégé, with the exception of going either to Lord Byron or to the Jews. But all he could do, without taking either of these steps, was insufficient for Hunt, who, pocketing the remitted money, wrote back to Pisa that Byron must be pressed for more. Thus driven, Shelley committed the indiscretion (to which reference has been made) in writing Byron this remarkable letter:—

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