Shelley’s Refusal to join in the Resettlement of A and B—His Places of Residence in Two Years and Eight Months—A Refutation of Deism—Mr. Kegan Paul’s Inaccuracies—Discord between Shelley and Harriett—Their Remarriage—Miss Westbrook’s Withdrawal—Shelley’s Desertion of Harriett—The Desertion closes in Separation by mutual Agreement—‘Do what other women do!’—Causes of the Separation—How Shelley’s Evidence touching them should be regarded—Peacock’s Testimony for Harriett—Shelley in Skinner Street—‘The Mask of Scorn’—Mary Godwinnotbred up to mate in Free Contract—Old St. Pancras Church—At Mary Wollstonecraft’s Grave—Claire’s Part in the Wooing—Excuses for Mary Godwin—The Elopement from Skinner Street—From London to Dover—From Dover to Calais—A ‘Scene’ at Calais—The Joint Journal—Mrs. Shelley convicted of Tampering with Evidence—The Six Weeks’ Tour—Shelley begs Harriett to come to him in Switzerland—Byron’s Hunger for Evil Fame—Shelley’s Self-Approbation and Self-Righteousness—Godwin’s Wrath with Shelley—Their subsequent Relations—Shelley’s Renewal of Intercourse with Harriett—Tiffs and Disagreements between Claire and Mary—Claire’s Incapacity for Friendship—She wants more than Friendship from Shelley.
Shelley’s Refusal to join in the Resettlement of A and B—His Places of Residence in Two Years and Eight Months—A Refutation of Deism—Mr. Kegan Paul’s Inaccuracies—Discord between Shelley and Harriett—Their Remarriage—Miss Westbrook’s Withdrawal—Shelley’s Desertion of Harriett—The Desertion closes in Separation by mutual Agreement—‘Do what other women do!’—Causes of the Separation—How Shelley’s Evidence touching them should be regarded—Peacock’s Testimony for Harriett—Shelley in Skinner Street—‘The Mask of Scorn’—Mary Godwinnotbred up to mate in Free Contract—Old St. Pancras Church—At Mary Wollstonecraft’s Grave—Claire’s Part in the Wooing—Excuses for Mary Godwin—The Elopement from Skinner Street—From London to Dover—From Dover to Calais—A ‘Scene’ at Calais—The Joint Journal—Mrs. Shelley convicted of Tampering with Evidence—The Six Weeks’ Tour—Shelley begs Harriett to come to him in Switzerland—Byron’s Hunger for Evil Fame—Shelley’s Self-Approbation and Self-Righteousness—Godwin’s Wrath with Shelley—Their subsequent Relations—Shelley’s Renewal of Intercourse with Harriett—Tiffs and Disagreements between Claire and Mary—Claire’s Incapacity for Friendship—She wants more than Friendship from Shelley.
On coming of age, Shelley was pressed to join in the resettlement of the estates A and B, in accordance with the directions of his grandfather’s will and codicil. Instead of yielding to this pressure, he firmly refused to join in the arrangement on which his father and grandfather were set; and by so refusing he forfeited for himself and issue all the interest assigned to him and them, in the far larger property, by the will. The choice was given to him to elect between surrendering the estate secured to him by existing settlements, and taking in lieu thereof the position and interest appointed to him by his grandfather’s will in the greater estate, or retaining his interest in A and B, and foregoing participation alike for himself and issue in C. Shelley deliberately elected to hold what was already secured to him, and to forego all interest under his grandfather’s will. On 21st June, 1813, he wrote to Mr. Medwin, Senr., in his own perverse way about what was hisgrandfather’sarrangement: ‘Dependupon it, that no artifice of myfather’sshall induce me to take a life-interest in the estate;’ and he held to this resolution. By being as good as his word on this matter, he may be said to have disinherited himself and his issue out of the very large entailed estate, created by his grandfather’s wealth. Religious sentiment and political opinion had nothing whatever to do with the arrangement in which he refused to concur. There must be an end to the romantic notion that the poet was disinherited, or in some way extruded from his boyhood’s home and proper place in his family, by the merciless elders of his house, at the instigation of religious bigotry and political resentment.
Shelley’s refusal to concur in the arrangement could be more easily accounted for, if there were evidence before the world that his grandfather and father required him to take a mere life-interest in lieu of his larger interest in A and B, and during their lives to rely wholly on their generosity for an income, sufficient for his necessities and the payment of the considerable debts contracted by him during his minority,—debts for which he was responsible in honour, though not in law. But whilst there is no evidence before the world that the sire and grandsire made any such requirement, there exists considerable (though by no means conclusive) evidence that by acceding to the wishes of his domestic elders in respect to the resettlement of A and B, he would have a large assured income during their lives:—even (according to one account) so large an income as 2000l.a-year, which would certainly have been sufficient for his current necessities and the payment of his creditors. One would like to know more of the negotiations between the young man and his elders, that resulted in his final refusal to re-settle A and B, notwithstanding the purport of the momentous codicil. Field Place, doubtless, could impart the desired knowledge; but Field Place is not likely to throw fuller light on the romantic inaccuracies of Lady Shelley’sShelley Memorials.
My impression is that Mr. Medwin, the elder, was mainly accountable for the action by which Shelley put himself outside his original domestic circle, and closed the doors of his ‘boyhood’s home’ against himself for ever. The solicitor, who undertook in the summer of 1813 to see his young friend ‘through his difficulties,’ had reasons of self-interest, and alsoof resentment, for drawing him into deeper difficulty. He had lent him money, and saw it would be more to his advantage to have for his client the tenant in tail male of A and B in remainder expectant, than to have for his client a young man with nothing but a contingent life-interest in an estate to which he might never succeed. At the same time, the Horsham solicitor participated in his youthful client’s animosity against the Squire of Field Place, who had on a recent occasion treated him with insolence, if not with personal violence. The evidence is clear that the lawyer encouraged his youthful client to oppose his father and grandfather; and like most wilful men, Shelley was ever easily managed by the person to whom he gave his confidence for the moment. The lawyer’s influence and his youthful client’s antagonism to the elders of his House are sufficient to account for Shelley’s firmness in ‘holding his own’ at a great sacrifice; but the evidences are still wanting for a perfect account of the motives which made him disinherit himself and his issue out of the bulk of the family property. After taking a course attended with painful consequences, it was like Shelley to call it the course of duty and self-sacrifice. Readers may dismiss with a smile the notion that he declined to resettle A and BasC, because his conscience would not permit him to join in an immoral arrangement which, whilst diminishing his own capacity for beneficent action, might put vast power in the hands of a fool or scoundrel. Religious sentiment and political morality had no more to do with Shelley’s refusal than with Sir Bysshe’s codicil.
Returning from Scotland to London shortly before Christmas, 1813, Shelley, after a brief stay in town, took a furnished house for two or three months at Windsor, whence he migrated in the early spring to Binfield, where he still nominally resided at the time of his withdrawal from his wife. Thus during the two years and nine months of their association in wedlock, Shelley and Harriett stayed for six weeks in (1) Edinburgh, sojourned for awhile at (2) York, tarried for three months at (3) Keswick, lived nine weeks at (4) Dublin, tarried for something over two months at (5) Nantgwillt, spent something more than nine weeks at (6) Lynton, lived for a fortnight or so at (7) Tanyrallt, came for six weeks to (8) London, returned for something like fourteen weeks to (9) Tanyrallt, made a second trip to (10) Dublin, flew off to (11) Killarney, passed a seasonin (12) London, tenanted a cottage in (13) Bracknell, revisited (14) the Cumberland lakes and (15) Edinburgh, inhabited a house at (16) Windsor, and dwelt in a cottage at (17) Binfield. To realize their restlessness, the reader must remember that they had two and even three successive places of abode in some of the parishes they visited. Besides hotels which they entered for bed and board in the course of their wanderings, they inhabited some nineteen different houses or sets of lodgings in thirty-three months. What a life of vagabondage! How little calculated was such a way of living to dispose the ramblers to seek enjoyment in simple domestic interests! Hogg laughs at Harriett’s ignorance of housewifely arts, and her inability even to order the wretched dinners served in her successive lodgings. No wonder that the poor child, who never had a house of her own to keep, was a simpleton at house-keeping!
In 1814 (according to Hogg, at the beginning of the year) Shelley published (in the legal, if not in the commercial sense of the term)A Refutation of Deism: In a Dialogue.
Had it been Shelley’s purpose to give a suitable title to the performance, which in style contrasts so favourably with his earlier prose writings, he would have named it ‘A Dialogue for the Fuller Demonstration of the Necessity of Atheism.’ But it was his design to give the pamphlet a title, that should throw dust in the eyes of his orthodox enemies, and cause persons to buy the book, who would not wilfully open an atheistical treatise. With the same deceptive purpose he concocted the preface, which opens with these words:—
‘The object of the following dialogue is to prove that the system of Deism is untenable. It is attempted to show that there is no alternative between Atheism and Christianity; that the evidences of the Being of a God are to be deduced from no other principles than those of Divine Revelation. The author endeavours to show how much the cause of natural and revealed religion has suffered from the mode of defence adopted by Theosophistical Christians. How far he will accomplish what he proposed to himself, in the composition of this dialogue, the world will finally determine.’
‘The object of the following dialogue is to prove that the system of Deism is untenable. It is attempted to show that there is no alternative between Atheism and Christianity; that the evidences of the Being of a God are to be deduced from no other principles than those of Divine Revelation. The author endeavours to show how much the cause of natural and revealed religion has suffered from the mode of defence adopted by Theosophistical Christians. How far he will accomplish what he proposed to himself, in the composition of this dialogue, the world will finally determine.’
In the whole range of English literature, it would be difficult to point to a preface, containing a larger number of misstatements and false suggestions in so few words. The object of the dialogue is to prove that Christianity and Deism are alike untenable. Shelley’s aim in the dialogue is to prove that theevidences of the Being of God can be deduced neither from the principles of Deism, nor from those of the so-styled Christian Revelation, and that, after reviewing the arguments for Christianity and the arguments for Atheism, the logical reader will not hesitate to embrace the latter.
Were it not for his want of a quality so conspicuous in Byron, one would suspect Shelley of grim humour in making the arguments for Atheism proceed from a Christian’s mouth. But Eusebes, the Christian of the dialogue, is not so much a Christian as an Atheist disguised as a Christian,—the disguise being one of the mystifications employed by the author to veil his insidious purpose. Whilst the Christian of the dialogue may be described as an Atheist in disguise, Theosophus is less a Deist than a mere derider of Christianity. He urges little in favour of Deism, and that little he utters faintly, in comparison with his arguments against Christianity. For every page of the Deist’s arguments in support of Deism, the dialogue affords nearly eight pages to the direct discredit of Christianity. The mystification, that results from the author’s adroit handling of his two argumentative puppets, is even more effective than the mystification resulting from the title-page and preface. What the author, with all his boldness, would have hesitated to say in his own person, to the dishonour of the national faith, he felt he could utter with comparative safety through the lips of a Deist, who is thoroughly beaten on the deistical questions by a Christian. On the other hand, the atheistical arguments that could scarcely fail to expose him to prosecution for blasphemy, Shelley thought he could utter with impunity, or at least with smaller risk of legal chastisement, if he uttered them through the mouth of a Christian, who should be represented as offering them to his companion, merely for the sake of purging his mind of deistical trash, and driving him to embrace Christianity.
Theosophus (the derider of Christianity who affects to be a Deist) having done his best to demolish Christianity, Eusebes (the Atheist who affects to be a Christian) directs the fire of his polemical guns against the belief in a supreme Deity; and it is in this later portion of the dialogue that the reader comes upon the most important of the arguments, that are mere developments of the reasonings ofThe Necessity of Atheismand the Atheistical Note toQueen Mab.
It has been observed how Shelley reproduced in theLettertoLord Ellenboroughone of the prime doctrines ofThe Necessity of Atheism,—viz., that belief is independent, and beyond the control of volition. Hence, Shelley reproduced the reasoning ofThe Necessity of Atheismin three successive publications, (1) theLetter to Lord Ellenborough, (2)Queen Mab, (3) theRefutation of Deism. Yet Mr. Garnett requires us to believe that in writingThe Necessity of Atheism, Shelley was merely throwing off a squib, that did not express his serious convictions.
It is needful for the present biographer to call attention to another cluster of inaccuracies in Mr. Kegan Paul’sWilliam Godwin; his Friends and Contemporaries, wherein it is written,—
‘In 1813 Shelley was again in London fora short time during the summer, but Mary was absent in Scotland. She was not strong, and as a growing girl needed purer air than Skinner Street could offer; she had therefore gone to Dundee with her father’s friends, Mr. Baxter and his daughter; and remained with them for six months. It was not until the summer of 1814 that Shelley and Mary Godwin became really acquainted, when he found the childwhom he had scarcely noticed two yearsbefore had grown into the woman of nearly seventeen summers....Shelley came to London on May 18th, leaving his wife at Binfield, certainly without the least idea that it was to bea final separation from him, though the relations between husband and wife had for some time been increasingly unhappy.He was of course received in Godwin’s house on the old footing of close intimacy, and rapidly fell in love with Mary.Fanny Godwin was away from home visiting some of the Wollstonecrafts, or she, three years older than Mary, might have discouraged the romantic attachment which sprang up between her sister and their friend.Jane Clairmont’s influence was neither then, nor at any other time, used, or likely to be used, judiciously.’
‘In 1813 Shelley was again in London fora short time during the summer, but Mary was absent in Scotland. She was not strong, and as a growing girl needed purer air than Skinner Street could offer; she had therefore gone to Dundee with her father’s friends, Mr. Baxter and his daughter; and remained with them for six months. It was not until the summer of 1814 that Shelley and Mary Godwin became really acquainted, when he found the childwhom he had scarcely noticed two yearsbefore had grown into the woman of nearly seventeen summers....Shelley came to London on May 18th, leaving his wife at Binfield, certainly without the least idea that it was to bea final separation from him, though the relations between husband and wife had for some time been increasingly unhappy.He was of course received in Godwin’s house on the old footing of close intimacy, and rapidly fell in love with Mary.Fanny Godwin was away from home visiting some of the Wollstonecrafts, or she, three years older than Mary, might have discouraged the romantic attachment which sprang up between her sister and their friend.Jane Clairmont’s influence was neither then, nor at any other time, used, or likely to be used, judiciously.’
I have ventured to print certain words of the above extract in italics.
(1) As Mr. Kegan Paul ought to have known that Shelley was in London from an early time of April till after the middle of July, 1813, he should not have written, ‘In 1813 Shelley was again in London for a short time during the summer;’—words implying that the poet was in Londononlyfor a short time.
(2) Nor should Mr. Kegan Paul have written in continuation of the same sentence, ‘but Mary was absent in Scotland;’—words implying that she was in Scotland during the whole time Shelley was in London,i.e.from about the end of the first week of April, 1813, till after the middle of July, 1813.
(3) Can Mr. Kegan Paul produce any sufficient evidencethat Mary Godwin was in Scotland for a single day of that period? On the 8th June, 1814, the day when Hogg saw her for the first time, in the parlour over her father’s shop in Skinner Street, Mary Godwin had recently returned from her sojourn in Scotland, and was wearing ‘a frock of tartan, an unusual dress in London at that time.’ We have Mr. Kegan Paul’s assurance, made on the evidence of the Field Place papers, that Mary Godwin’s stay in Scotland was for six months; and there is other evidence that she stayed there for about that time. Mary Godwin was certainly back in London on the 8th June, 1814. Mr. Kegan Paul’s words imply that she had returned very much before the 18th May, 1814; but there are grounds for thinking that she did not return much earlier. Let us suppose she returned at the beginning of the month. In that case she went to Scotland, for her six months’ visit, at the end of October or the beginning of November 1813, when Shelley was either at or approaching Edinburgh,—more than three months after Shelley’s stay in London (from the first week of April to the middle of July, 1813) came to an end.
(4) Shelley returned from Scotland to London shortly before Christmas 1813, and made a brief stay in town. But it will not clear Mr. Kegan Paul from this charge of serious inaccuracy for him to say his printed words refer to this brief visitat the endof the year. Mr. Kegan Paul speaks of Shelley’s stay in London in the summer of 1813.
(5) As Mary Godwin was in London during the time Shelley lived in Half-Moon Street and Pimlico, and as Shelley saw her during that time,i.e.between the end of the first week of April and the middle of July, 1813, Mr. Kegan Paul should not have written, ‘It was not until the summer of 1814 that Shelley and Mary Godwin became really acquainted,whenhe found the child whom he had scarcely noticed two years before had grown into the woman of nearly seventeen summers;’—words implying that on seeing Mary Godwin in May, 1814, he had not seen her for two years.
(6) Mr. Kegan Paul should not have written that, two years before seeing her in May, 1814, Shelley had seen Mary Godwin and scarcely noticed the child, for in May, 1812,Shelley had never set eyes on the child. At the beginning of May, 1812, five months had still to elapse before Shelley saw Mary for the first time. In May, 1814, he had known her for only one year and sevenmonths. He cannot from personal observation have regarded Mary as a child, five months before he ever saw her.
(7) Mr. Kegan Paul should not have suggested that, after returning from London to Tanyrallt in November 1812, Shelley had no opportunity of holding personal intercourse with Mary Godwin, till the 18th May, in 1814, when he ought to have known that, during the season of 1813, Shelley was a frequent visitor at the Skinner-Street house.
(8) Mr. Kegan Paul would not have written of Mary Godwin as a ‘woman of nearly seventeen summers’ in May 1814 when on the 1st morning of that month she was only sixteen years and eight months of age, had he not wished to make her seem as old as possible.
(9) As Mr. Kegan Paul’s book affords evidence that Mary and Claire were of about the same age he should not have suggested (what elsewhere in his book he says outright) that Jane Clairmont was considerably Mary’s senior, and should therefore be held accountable for her sister’s misconduct.
It is needless to say that Shelley’s reputation gains nothing from such misrepresentations, which are calculated to make readers suspect that the poet’s intercourse with Mary in the spring and summer of 1813 was attended with incidents, creditable to neither of them.
Differences, each of which was fruitful of estrangement, having arisen between them in the later months of 1813, it was not to be expected that Shelley and Harriett would return to their former harmony. Like other husbands and wives who take to bickering, they contended about little things which they magnified into great ones. To Shelley, who had argued himself into believing that all the evils of human nature and society were referable to the diet denounced by vegetarians, it was a serious grievance that his wife enjoyed a mutton-chop and a glass of ale; that instead of being ‘slightly animal,’ as she was at Tanyrallt, she ridiculed the Newtons and their crotchets, and insisted on eating and drinking like most other young women. It has been suggested that before Shelley ceased to live with her, she sometimes took too much wine, and in other ways displayed a disposition, which a year or two later developed into intemperance. But though her subsequent career accorded with the imputation, readers of this page will decline to attach much weight to a charge, resting wholly on the evidence ofthe poet, who, while drinking laudanum with an easy conscience, remembered with remorseful shame that at Oxford he had enjoyed a tumbler of stiff white-wine negus. Differing on questions of diet, Percy and Harriett bickered on other matters. Whilst she resented his devotion to Maimuna, he resented her jealousy of the lady, whom he worshipt for the subtlety and delicacy of her understanding and affections. Ceasing to delight in Harriett’s beauty, though he could still speak of her as ‘a noble animal,’ Shelley ceased to direct the studies of the young woman, who could ‘neither feel poetry nor understand philosophy.’ On the other hand, there were signs of deterioration of the girlish wife who, desisting from the studies Percy no longer cared to direct, withdrew her attention from books and turned it to bonnets. Turning from authors she could not understand, Harriett gave her mind to millinery. No marvel, that the disagreements grew in number and bitterness; that Miss Westbrook, ever of course on her sister’s side, grew hourly more hateful to her brother-in-law; that to escape from the child-wife who irked him, and from the sister-in-law who exasperated him, Shelley withdrew from the furnished house at Richmond, and flying to Maimuna for counsel and consolation, remained under her roof at Bracknell from about the middle of February, 1814, to a day something later than the middle of March,without his wife. If Shelley found solace, he missed contentment in the society of the white-haired lady, whose influence over him at this point of his career was no less mischievous than powerful. From Bracknell he wrote to Hogg a letter of despair on 16th March, 1814, having a few days earlier addressed Maimuna in the melancholy verses, ‘Thy dewy looks sink in my breast.’
What poison had Maimuna’s gentle words stirred in his breast, how had her dewy looks troubled him, that he had lost the repose of despair, and was crushed by the thought of persisting in the path of duty? Readers should reperuse the verses and letter, in order to get a view of the miserable position of the youthful sentimentalist, whose expiring flame of life had been revived by Maimuna and friends;—the young man who, having found a happy home at a distance from his wife’s dwelling, could not endure the thought of returning to Harriett and her child, because he could not return to them without encountering the ‘blind loathsome worm’ that was ever hangingabout his infant. The letter of despair was dated from Bracknell, on 16th March, 1814. Eight days later,—onlyeight days later; on 24th March, 1814, Shelley re-married Harriett Westbrook in the church of the parish of St. George, Hanover Square. This re-marriage was done by license; the officiating clergyman being Mr. Edward Williams, curate, and the two witnesses being John Westbrook and John Stanley. In the registration of the marriage it is recorded that the parties had been ‘already married to each other according to Rites and Ceremonies of the Church of Scotland,’ and that the marriage was solemnized on the present occasion, ‘in order to obviate all doubts that have arisen, or shall or may arise, touching or concerning the validity of the aforesaid marriage.’
Two different views are taken of this marriage by Shelleyan writers. Whilst Peacock, and the writers who follow him, declare it a sufficient evidence that Shelley was living in harmony with his wife, and can have had no disposition to separate from her so late as 24th March, 1814, it is maintained by other writers, that Shelley’s only motive in the marriage was to put the legitimacy of his next child beyond question. Whilst I am certain that error lies with the former set of writers, I cannot concur with the latter. There is no need for the threatened publication of unsavoury particulars about Harriett, to bring readers to the conclusion that Shelley and his wife had ceased to live happily together before the date of their re-marriage. People who, after perusing the evidence of the foregoing pages, can believe that Shelley and Harriett were living harmoniously in February and March, 1814, would continue in that belief, even though it were proved that he ran off from his own home to Maimuna’s house, because he caught her with her arm round another man’s waist. The evidence of their estrangement in those and earlier months, is not discredited by what Mr. Peacock says of their concord at the time of their re-marriage.
On the other, I cannot refer the re-marriage to any wish on Shelley’s part to put the legitimacy of his next child beyond question. Mr. Rossetti is of opinion that Shelley re-married Harriett because he knew her to be in the way to give him a second child, and therefore thought it prudent to put the infant’s legitimacy beyond question. Whatever is urged by Mr. Rossetti deserves consideration; but on these points I seegrounds for differing from him. Shelley can scarcely have felt any need for the precaution. TheEdinburgh Reviewer(October, 1882) speaks of the ‘doubtful validity of the previous Scotch marriage,’ but the doubt can scarcely have troubled Shelley, though he may have ascribed his action to the uncertainty. Soon after the Scotch marriage, Shelley had declared his intention to be re-married in England. That he did not act on this intention was, doubtless, due to sufficient legal assurance that the marriage was valid. Whilst Harriett was in her previous progress to maternity, it had never occurred to him that he ought to re-marry his wife in order to place the legitimacy of her issue beyond question. Why then should he entertain the doubt in 1814? With a legal adviser in the elder Mr. Medwin, a legal friend in Hogg, he cannot have feared his wife’s possible heir might be declared illegitimate, unless he re-married Harriett by the Anglican form. Mr. Westbrook, however, may have been uneasy about the legal question, or have desired the re-marriage for his social credit’s sake.
The re-marriage having been accomplished, Shelley returned to Maimuna, to consult her on his future movements. The enchantress, with snow-white tresses and ‘dewy looks,’ was, of course, the influence that caused the poet to settle for a while at Binfield. On 18th April, 1814, Shelley was again at a distance from his wife, who had gone with Miss Westbrook up to London, whence it was understood the elder sister would soon journey to Southampton, for the purpose of living there. Thus it was, that ‘the blind and loathsome worm’ passed, all too late, from her brother-in-law’s domestic life. Peacock may have been right in assuming that Shelley and Harriett were staying together in Mrs. Boinville’s house in April; but instead of being the lady’s guests at Bracknell, the husband and wife may have been only her neighbours at Binfield. Anyhow, they were living at Binfield a month later, when Shelley went up to town and gave his heart to Mary Godwin, looking more than usually bright and charming in her ‘frock of tartan.’ Coming up to London on the 18th of May, Shelley left Harriett at Binfield, little imagining (it is said) that he would never again live as a husband with the woman he had so lately re-married. ‘Shelley,’ says Mr. Kegan Paul, writing from Field Place evidences, ‘came to London on May 18th, leaving his wife at Binfield, certainly without the least idea that it wasto be a final separation from him.’ A momentous date and admission by a writer drawing his facts from Field Place archives. In admitting that, when Shelley left his wife, she had no conception that their conjugal intercourse would not be renewed, Mr. Kegan Paul admits that Shelley deserted her—the charge against the poet, which has been so often and indignantly denied by some of his admirers.
Mr. Kegan Paul forbears to say that Shelley left Binfield on 18th May, 1814,witha secret resolve never to return to conjugal association with Harriett. All that can be gathered from Mr. Paul’s words on this point is that, if Shelley formed the resolve before leaving Binfield, he forbore to impart it to her. In judging his conduct, it matters little whether he left Binfield with the resolve or without it. If the resolution was not formed before he left Berkshire, it was formed soon after his arrival in London, and for some considerable time before he communicated his purpose to her. In either case he deserted her. After determining to remain away from Harriett, Shelley omitted to give her timely notice of his purpose to keep away from her. He neither told her of his intention, nor sent her his address in London, so that she might be able to communicate with him. Besides withdrawing from her, he concealed himself from her. A husband who, withdrawing from his wife, neither advertises her of his purpose to keep away from her, nor sends her his address so that she may communicate with him, is guilty of deserting his wife in an especially unfeeling and cruel manner. For grave reasons a chivalric man may withdraw from his wife. On doing so, a chivalric man is careful to inform her of his purpose and reasons. He forbears to sharpen the pain and humiliation he deems himself constrained to inflict, by an insolent or inconsiderate silence, that exposes the object of his displeasure to the tortures of uncertainty and suspense. He does not leave her and her child-in-arms without any care whether or no she has money for her immediate necessities. Shelley did thus leave and keep away from his wife for a considerable period. On being thus deserted by her husband, Harriett is said to have had only fourteen shillings in her pocket. Had Shelley been the essentially chivalric creature his eulogists declare him, he could not have left his wife in this way, even though her offences had been far more repulsive than her sternest censors declare them.
It is true that the abandonment was of no long duration; but the period during which Shelley forbore to communicate with his wife was so long, that his silence may be fairly described as persistent cruelty to a woman who, whatever her misconduct may have been, had far stronger claims to his consideration than greatly offending wives usually have to the consideration of their offended husbands. Mr. Rossetti speaks of a letter, written by Harriett ‘on or about the 5th of July,’ which shows her to have heard from Shelley ‘about the 1st of the same month.’ If she heard so soon from Shelley, the epistle seems to have afforded her information neither of his place of residence nor of his intention never to return to her; for Peacock declares that, on 7th July, 1814, she wrote to one of his friends a letter in which ‘she expressed a confident belief that he must know where Shelley was, and entreated his assistance to induce him to return home.’ Peacock adds, ‘She was not even then aware that Shelley had finally left her.’ Still, let us suppose that Shelley’s silence to Harriett ceased on the earlier date, and ceased in such a way as to make her feel she was an object of his affection and that he would return to her ere long. Even in that case, the period of abandonment, in its most cruel form,—of abandonment attended with silence and concealment—covered full six weeks: a long period for a woman to be held in sharp anxiety.
The period of abandonment, in its most cruel form, certainly ended before the middle of July, 1814. On the 14th of that month Harriett arrived in London; on the two following days she was in personal communication with Shelley and William Godwin. By this time, though still ignorant of her husband’s purpose to fly with Mary Godwin, Harriett was assured of his purpose to keep away from her. In vain Godwin strove to bring about the reconcilement of the youthful husband and wife. Finding that Shelley was bent on separation, insisted on separation would for the moment be satisfied with nothing less than separation, Harriett yielded to the fate she could not resist, accepted the position she could not avoid, andassented, by acts as well as by tacit submission, to the arrangement that was forced upon her. She assented, by forbearing to resist her husband’s will; she assented, by holding sullen, but in some degree friendly, communication with him, whilst he lived with Mary Godwin; she assented to the arrangement bycorresponding with him, receiving his visits, taking money from him, as gifts coming from his bounty—not as payment exacted by process of law, whilst Mary Godwin was living under his protection. This is a series of facts provable by superabundant evidence, that may be fairly said to justify the most precise and scrupulous writer in saying that the separation became, after some brief while, ‘a separation by mutual consent,’ and passed from an affair of conjugal abandonment into ‘an amicable agreement effected in virtue of a mutual understanding.’ The impression prevails that there exists some piece of legal draughting, some ‘regular agreement’ (as the phrase goes, duly signed and sealed, in evidence of this agreement), and that Lady Shelley and Mr. Garnett have, in some way, pledged themselves to produce this document for the satisfaction of the world. I cannot take this view of the case. Whilst Lady Shelley has not (to my knowledge) published separately and in her own name a single line, to account for this impression, Mr. Garnett, in his studiously guarded words, appears to abstain with nice and nervous caution from stating that any such legal instrument either exists or ever was executed. All he promises is ‘the publication of documents hitherto withheld,’ which will prove that the separation resulted from ‘long-continued unhappiness,’ and was ‘an amicable agreement effected in virtue of a mutual understanding,’—statements of whose truth there is abundant evidence. That Harriett eventually consented to what she could not help is certain. Moreover, it may be fairly argued that Harriett’s successive acts of consent to the arrangement, thus forced upon her, partook of the nature of condonation of the abandonment, so far as to qualify the sheer cruel desertion into an incident of the series of mere disagreements. There may, for all I know, be amongst the Field Place MSS. a regular signed and sealed agreement of separation, with stipulations touching the moneys to be paid by Shelley and received by Harriett,—an agreement comprising all the usual common-form assertions of free-will and qualified goodwill on the part of each of the parties. But to produce any such agreement would not be to disprove, or otherwise affect, what has been said of the desertion, which was the first stage of the separation.
None the less natural and reasonable for these acts of assent and condonation was it for Harriett, when her husband had departed for the Continent with Claire and Mary, to speak of thewhole affair as something that had been done wholly against her will and without her sanction,—to speak of it in terms that were calculated to make Peacock, in later time, confident she had never spoken of the separation (soon after its occurrence) as a matter to which she had consented. An honest and otherwise reliable witness, Peacock declares that, when she spoke of the separation to him at her father’s house, soon after Shelley’s flight across the water, Harriett spoke of it in terms, that ‘decidedly contradicted the supposition of anything like separation by mutual consent.’ About the same time she spoke to William Jerdan of the separation as a state of things forced upon her, in spite of her vehement protests. Recounting to Jerdan what passed between her and Shelley, when he told her their conjugal association was at an end, she said that, on hearing her doom, she exclaimed imploringly, ‘Good God, Percy! what am I to do?’ In answer to this pathetic question Shelley, extending his right hand to her in vehement gesticulation (and screeching, even as Byron used to screech under the agitations of overpowering rage), replied in the highest and most discordant pitch of his voice, ‘Do? Do?—Do what other women do. They know what to do. Do as they do.’
The words unquestionably admit of the construction[2]Jerdan put upon them. At the same time, coming from an angry man, such words may merely signify that he is beside himself with rage; and it would be unjust to judge any man, young or old, by words he utters under a sudden and overpowering gust of fury. It must, moreover, be remembered that we have only Harriett’s hearsay word that he made the violent speech. Still the alleged utterance was just such a one as might have come from the raging Shelley, who, in spite of all that is saidof his gentleness, is known, from Mr. Kegan Paul’s book about ‘Godwin,’ to have been a man of violent temper.
Apart from the influences to which the reader’s attention has been called in previous pages, was there aught in the circumstances and conditions of Shelley’s life, that can be held accountable for his determination to withdraw from Harriett and replace her by Mary Godwin? To show that he had been strongly interested in Mary Godwin, when he was lodging successively in Half-Moon Street and Pimlico, would be to suggest that the interest had, in the ensuing autumn and winter, matured into a romantic passion for her, or at least had predisposed him to fall violently in love with her in the following June. But though he saw her in the spring and summer of 1813, and must have observed that the bright and charming child gave promise of developing into a lovely woman, there are no sufficient grounds for thinking he either took much notice of her, or felt any especial concern in her at that time. Indeed, apart from the suspicious pains taken by Mr. Kegan Paul to make it seem that he never saw her for a single interview in 1813, I am not aware of any reason for conceiving it possible, that the passion which dominated him in the summer of 1814 may have proceeded from a sentiment of earlier date. And in respect to this cause for suspicion, I do not question that both Shelley and Mary may be said to suffer from the indiscretion of a single biographer. From an early day of his long sojourn in western quarters of the town, Shelley was too completely under Maimuna’s influence to have much tender care for the mere school-girl. Moreover, in the summer of 1814, Shelley’s friends were unanimous in thinking his passion for Mary a sentiment of quite recent birth. Whilst Hogg had no suspicion of its existence before the 8th of June, 1814, Peacock was confident that the passion was no less sudden than violent. ‘Nothing,’ says Peacock, ‘that I ever read in tale or history could present a more striking image of a sudden, violent, irresistible, uncontrollable passion, than that under which I found him labouring when, at his request, I went up from the country to call upon him in London.’
In addition to the already indicated causes of estrangement, had Shelley, before going up to town on 18th May, 1814, discovered in Harriett’s conduct any serious cause for dissatisfaction, likely to extinguish his fondness for her in a moment, andreplace it with a feeling of lively repugnance? For a long time it has been an open secret in Shelleyan coteries that documents are in existence which, if reliance could be placed on Shelley’s statements about his own affairs, would constitute a strong body ofprimâ facieandex parteevidence that, before he withdrew from her in May, 1814, he had found Harriett guilty of misconduct, that would have entitled him to divorce from her, had he sought it in the usual legal way.
It being probable that these documents, or their substance, will at no distant time be offered to the world as so much certain and indisputable evidence, that Shelley had good moral ground for breaking from his wife, it will be well for readers to anticipate the publication by settling in their minds what effect any such evidence—whether coming from Shelley’s pen, or from the pens of writers deriving their informationfrom him—should have on discreet and logical persons. Enough has been said of Shelley’s veracity to show that it was not unimpeachable. The man, who had recourse to deception, when his convenience required him to use it; the man who, in 1811, made a statement about his mother and sisters, which his neighbours at Horsham did not hesitate to call an untrue statement; the man who wrote the wheedling letter to the Duke of Norfolk, in order to get money out of his father’s pocket, cannot (to put the case mildly) be regarded as a strictly truthful person. It has also been shown that he was liable to delusions incompatible with perfect sanity. It will be shown in ensuing pages that thus untruthful and liable to insane delusions, in his earlier time, Shelley was no less untruthful and subject to delusions and (to use Peacock’s term) semi-delusions, after leaving his wife. Bearing all this in mind, how should judicious persons regard any statements made by Shelley (or made by individuals speaking directly or indirectly onhisauthority, or in obedience to his influence), that before leaving Harriett he found her guilty of flagrant misconduct?
Surely, judicious persons will say of such evidence, ‘These are mereex partestatements. They are of less weight than mostex partestatements, because they proceed from a witness, who was on some occasions untruthful, and on several occasions the victim of extravagant and insane hallucinations. Coming from the chief actor in the Tanyrallt affair, from the man who for a time thought similar evil of his dearest male friend, these statementsto the dishonour of the wife he deserted must be considered with reference to one of his chief moral infirmities, and with reference to his mental peculiarities. These statements are not so much evidence of guilt in Harriett, as of delusion in her husband.’
The incredibility of such statements would, of course, be affected by the production of a clear confession by Harriett, that, before he left her, she had been conjugally faithless to him; or by the production of reasonable evidence that she did admit so much to her shame. But even such an admission would have to be considered with jealous regard to the influences and circumstances under which it was made, and also with reference to the curious fact that she had been in former time brought to believe, or to act as though she believed, that Hogg had made an attempt on her honour, which he did not make upon it.
There are other reasons for an opinion that Harriett cannot have been guilty of the offence which has been so long charged against her in the Shelleyan coteries. Peacock (Shelley’s most intimate friend and executor), who knew Harriett intimately in the later months of 1813, and the earlier half of 1814, was confident she had been a true wife. ‘I feel it,’ he writes, ‘due to the memory of Harriet to state my most decided conviction that her conduct as a wife was as pure, as true, as absolutely faultless as that of any who for such conduct are held most in honour.’ This evidence to character should have more weight with judicial minds than any unsupported evidence to the contrary by her husband, who, in the middle of August, 1814, wrote to her from Troyes, begging her to join him and Claire, and Mary in Switzerland, and be happy in their society; and who, after his return to England, was desirous that she should live under the same roof with him and Mary Godwin. One hesitates to say where a man, holding Shelley’s unusual views respecting the intercourse of the sexes, would draw the line between venial indiscretion and unpardonable depravity in feminine demeanour. Whatever her misconduct, Harriett was certainly entitled to a large measure of charitable consideration from the husband, who had taught her to think ‘chastity ... a monkish and evangelical superstition, a greater foe to natural temperance even than unintellectual sensuality.’ But it is scarcely conceivable that even Shelley would have invited thewife, on whose finger he had put a wedding-ring, to come to him and his ringless bride in Switzerland, had she to his knowledge, only a few months earlier, been guilty of the offences that have long been whispered against her.
Coming up to town on 18th May, 1814, Shelley (says Mr. Kegan Paul, in his light and happy style) ‘was, of course, received in Godwin’s house on the old footing of close intimacy, and rapidly fell in love with Mary.’ Hewasso received with cordial greeting and hospitable confidence by Mr. Godwin and Mrs. Godwin. The girls (Mary and Claire being at home, during Fanny’s absence to some one or another of her maternal relatives) also welcomed the youthful poet heartily. To most readers it may appear that, because ‘he was,of course, received in Godwin’s house on the old footing of close intimacy,’ he was under stringent obligations to respect the confidence thus reposed in him;—obligations so sacred as well as stringent, that his action to his host and his host’s only daughter, to his hostess and her only daughter, must be declared one of the most shocking examples of domestic treason recorded in literary annals.
In three successive years—1812, 1813, 1814—Shelley had been received in Godwin’s house on a ‘footing of close intimacy.’ The house was open to him whenever he cared to visit it. The master of the house, whom Shelley persisted in styling his teacher, friend, benefactor, was ever ready with counsel and sympathy for the young man. Had he been unmarried, the Godwins would have been slow to suspect evil in the young man of pleasant aspect and winning address. As he was married to a lovely girl, with whom they had every reason to think him living in mutual love, it never occurred to William Godwin and his wife that they should watch his behaviour to their children, as they would have observed it, had he been in a position to make one of them an offer. The confidence reposed in his honour was without limit or qualification. How did he respect this confidence, repay this trustful hospitality? Mr. Kegan Paul answers the question in seven words, ‘He ... rapidly fell in love with Mary.’
On 8th June, 1814, when exactly three weeks had passed since his arrival in town, Shelley ran upon Hogg in Cheapside, as the latter was returning from the scene of Lord Cochrane’s trial to Gray’s Inn. Bound for different places in the same direction, the friends walked together from Cheapside to SkinnerStreet, when, on coming to the door of Godwin’s shop, Shelley said to his companion, ‘I must speak with Godwin; come in; I will not detain you long.’ Passing through the shop, which was the only way of passage to the living-rooms of the house, the young men went straight upstairs to the quadrant-shaped parlour on the first floor, where Shelley expected to find his familiar friend and benefactor. That Shelley went upstairs in this fashion, without rapping or ringing, or sending any one from the shop to announce his arrival, indicates his close intimacy with Godwin and Mrs. Godwin,—shows how they allowed him the free run of the house, permitting him to come and go at his pleasure, as though the place were his own home. To Shelley’s disappointment and discomposure Godwin was away from home. ‘Where is Godwin?’ he asked several times of Hogg, as though the latter were in Godwin’s confidence and somehow accountable for his absence. Shelley was still fussing about in this way; when the door of the room was opened by a young girl, who exclaimed in a thrilling voice, ‘Shelley!’ Answering the ejaculation with one word, Shelley hastened from the room, leaving Hogg to meditate in solitude, and marvel at the momentary apparition of the ‘very young female, fair and fair-haired, pale indeed, and with a piercing look, wearing a frock of tartan, an unusual dress in London at that time,’ who had appeared for an instant, like a quick gleam of sunlight, only to disappear with her lover. Hogg saw no more of William Godwin’s lovely child on that occasion. In a minute or two Shelley re-entered the room, saying ‘Godwin is out; there is no use in waiting.’ Godwin’s absence had defeated the poet’s plan for getting a long ‘lover’s interview’ with his heart’s idol, whilst Godwin should be talking with Hogg. Had the poet passed Hogg with a nod in Cheapside, he would have had the desired interview with Mary in her father’s absence. As it was, he had allowed Hogg to discover an interesting secret. Under the circumstances, Shelley saw that his only chance of keeping the truth from the vigilant and humorous Hogg required him to continue the walk towards Gray’s Inn, as though he had dropt in at the Juvenile Library, solely for the purpose of seeing Mary’s father.
‘Who is she?—a daughter?’ Hogg inquired of Shelley, as they walked to the West.
‘Yes.’
‘A daughter of William Godwin?’
‘The daughter,’ replied Shelley, ‘of Godwin and Mary.’
The brief answer was enough for Hogg. The whole position had been revealed to Hogg, who, on his westward way at his friend’s side, may be presumed to have debated, in a breast by no means devoid of trouble, how much and how little Harriett knew or suspected of what was going on in Skinner Street.
On some day of June, possibly preceding, but more probably following at a brief interval the day of Hogg’s first brief glimpse of Mary Godwin’s beauty, Shelley gave the girl the well-known verses, ‘Mine eyes were dim with tears unshed;’ the verses with the concluding stanza:—
‘Gentle and good and mild thou art,Nor can I live if thou appearAught but thyself, or turn thine heartAway from me,or stoop to wearThe mask of scorn, although it beTo hide the love thou feel’st for me.’
Though an attempt has been made to force another meaning on the lines here printed in italics, few readers will decline to regard them as pointing to the deception which Mary Godwin was practising at this time, in order to conceal from her family that Shelley regarded her with passion to which she responded. The blame provoked by the deceitfulness of the girl, who veiled her affection for the poet from observers in Skinner Street with an air and tone of scorn, should, of course, be given to the man who had won her heart, rather than to the child, who had recourse to artifice in his interest and her own. In other respects, also, the blame of a miserable business should be awarded to the married man, rather than the girl who was just five years his junior. She may be wholly acquitted, she is not to be suspected, of deliberately luring Shelley from his wife, and supplanting her in his affections. It should not be questioned that he made all the overtures and advances to Mary; and that he found it very difficult to persuade her to fly with him. It would have been strange had he found her an easy conquest; for (notwithstanding all that has been urged to the contrary) it is certain that she had been reared within the lines of conventional decorum and orthodoxy.
When he wrote that, though Mary Godwin ‘had been bred up to regard love as the essential part of marriage, she was aperfectly pure and innocent woman,’ (meaning, of course, that she was trained in childhood to hold certain of her parents’ earlier and notorious views respecting marriage,i.e.that love was a sufficient sanction of conjugal union, and that where such love existed it was better for spouses to live together in Free Love than in the bondage of Lawful Wedlock), Mr. Froude only showed his absolute ignorance of the matters on which he wrote so rashly, under the insufficient instructions of the person or persons who should have instructed him better. It is certain that, during their brief association, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft modified those views of marriage so far as to be lawfully married to one another; that soon after Mary Wollstonecraft’s death, if not during her life, Godwin abandoned them altogether; and that his daughter by her wasnoteducated to regard the matrimonial rite as an idle form.
In a former chapter of this work evidence has been given, under Godwin’s own hand, that Mary Wollstonecraft’s children werenoteducated in accordance with their mother’s peculiar views; that he deemed so clever a boy as Charles Clairmont was in his seventeenth year far too young for initiation in Free Thought; that on sending the boy Anthony Collins’s sober and moderate book, he was urgent that Mary should not be allowed to see a line of it. Never touched with Free Contract sentiment, the second Mrs. Godwin held the Free Contract people in aversion, and their doctrines in contemptuous detestation. Had it been otherwise, she would have been spoken of less harshly by some of her husband’s friends.
Mary was educated by her father and his second wife, and by governesses of their selection. Is it conceivable that she was educated by her father and stepmother in principles which the former of the two abandoned in her infancy, and the latter had never tolerated? If Mary Godwin left behind her any writing in evidence that she was educated to mate in Free Contract, she left behind her a piece of false testimony. To show how far she was from favouring the Free Contract, how absolutely free from Free Contract sentiment, she was before she came under Shelley’s influence, it is enough to say that, even so late as July, 1814, after surrendering her heart so completely to him as to conceive herself incapable of loving any one else, she declared it impossible for her to live with him conjugallyduring his wife’s existence. At the same time, in the fervour of her passion for him she declared she would never marry any other man. In her respect for the matrimonial rite, even at the very moment of avowing herself incapable of giving herself to any other man, she deemed it absolutely impossible for her to live with Shelley till death shall have put him in a position to make her his lawful wife. Mr. Froude admits that this was so. Yet he insists that she was educated to regard the Free Contract with tolerance.
Lady Shelley speaks even more precisely on this point than Mr. Froude:—