CHAPTER XVII

COMPARISONS

The child was a girl, fair, with blue eyes. Her father named her Ianthe. Her mother added Elizabeth. Thus Ovid and Miss Westbrook clasped hands over the cradle. Shelley walked about with the baby in his arms singing to it a monotonous tune of his own making. The idea of bringing up a new being that he might save from prejudices was delightful to him. As an admirer of Rousseau he expected Harriet to suckle the child herself and he was eager to give the tenderest care to both. In the excitement of his new rôle, the odious Eliza was forgotten.

But Harriet, egged on by her sister, refused to nurse the child. She engaged a wet nurse, “a hireling” as Shelley declared resentfully. But on this point Harriet was gently but firmly obstinate.

A curious change came over her after Ianthe’s birth. It seemed as though she wished to make up for nine months’ inactivity. Her Latin lessons were not resumed. She wanted nothing now but to be out of doors looking into the bonnet-shops and jewellers’ windows. To find pleasure in such idle trifling seemed to Shelley monstrous and unintelligible. He was willing to pay for any of Harriet’s “reasonable” fancies, even at the price of loans and endless annoyances, but to spend the money so necessary to “persecuted writers” and other just causes, on mere “glad rags,” appeared to him scandalous, and he made his wife and sister-in-law feel it.

Eliza was careful to show up Shelley’s failings.

“Percy finds money enough to pay the debts of his dear Godwin, who plucks him and whose wife is rude to us. He finds money to pay the fines for a set of miserable scribblers, but he can’t afford to dress his own wife decently! He’s a fool if he thinks it odd that a young and pretty woman should like bonnets. If you don’t dress now at eighteen, when _can_ you do so?”

Miss Westbrook encouraged at the house the visits of an army man, a certain Major Ryan, whom they had first met in Ireland, and now found again in London. He, too, was of opinion that so charming a young woman as Harriet ought to lead a more normal life. Harriet was inclined to agree with him. Latin and philosophy had really been a great strain on her. She had borne it without complaint because of her love and admiration for Percy. But shopping and gay chatter were just as much to her taste as were the Newtons to Shelley’s, and the pleasure she found in these frivolities contrasted with the rather painful attention she had given to her “lessons.”

Shelley thought that town life and its temptations was the cause of the trouble, and he had the very natural idea of all lovers who feel a shadow falling between them, to go back to these scenes where their love had been unclouded. Harriet’s famous carriage was got ready. Shelley raised £500 by a post-obit bond for £2,000, and, accompanied by the inevitable Eliza, went on pilgrimage to Keswick and Edinburgh.

The constant change of scene on the journey made them forget their worries, and they returned to London in much better spirits, but they had hardly settled down again when the old disagreements were renewed. Harriet and Eliza pined for a fine house, fashionable life, gowns, and a social circle. Shelley detested all these things but detested still more the idea that his wife wanted them. He still loved her, but he began to feel a touch of contempt.

Hogg came to see them. He found Harriet quite recovered, prettier and more blooming than ever. But she no longer offered to read to him the wise counsels of Idomeneus. She asked him instead to go with her to her milliner’s. She vanished into the shop, leaving him waiting on the pavement. She began to bore him, and as a man has little indulgence towards the woman who has rejected his advances he let Shelley see it. Shelley, too, could no longer hide his impatience. The Shelleys had reached the dangerous moment of confidences with a third person.

* * *

When Madame de Boinville invited Shelley and Hogg to pass a few days with her in the country, they accepted with joy. They found there her daughter Cornelia, who was cultured, pensive and pretty, and her sister Mrs. Newton. Shelley again knew the delightful sensations of former evenings passed with them in town. He called Madame de Boinville, Maimouna, because she reminded him of the heroine of _Thalaba_ whose

“. . . face was as a damsel’s face And yet her hair was grey.”

The attractive Cornelia gave the two young men lessons in Italian, and Madame de Boinville expounded in her delicious voice the indulgent teaching of the French philosophers. “To enjoy life, and help others to enjoy it, without harming anyone, herein lies the whole of morality.” This dictum of Chamfort’s, which was a great favourite of Madame de Boinville, ought by rights to have roused Shelley’s wrath. Poor Harriet had never said anything so flatly opposed to virtue. . . . But then she would have said it much less well.

At Bracknell even fooling seemed pleasant to Shelley, because there the simplest games were imbued with the cast of thought. Cornelia had the habit, when she first woke up, of reading over and often learning by heart, one of Petrarch’s sonnets. This sonnet she thought over and fed upon all day long. When they said good morning to her, Shelley and Hogg would inquire which the day’s sonnet might be. Sometimes the poem was so moving she did not trust herself to recite it, but opened the little pocket Petrarch always carried with her, and pointed out the passage.

Walking between the two young men in the garden, she would comment the love text with eloquence and simplicity.

“It is so good to begin the day,” she said, “with a draught of tenderness which sweetens all our thoughts, words and deeds until the night.”

These walks, these talks, seemed to Shelley the only things of any real importance. The house, fine yet simple, charmed him by its perfection and the absence of the luxury which disgusted him so much. It was for him a place of repose and of freedom from care. Harriet was invited to join them. Madame de Boinville received her with kindness. “She’s a very pretty little creature,” she told Hogg. “But she seems to me a rather frivolous companion for our dear, delightful Stoic. However, she’s not yet eighteen, I think?”

Harriet, unfortunately, saw quite well that she was not treated on a footing of equality. She saw that Percy took far more pleasure in reading Petrarch with Cornelia than in discussing with his wife how to improve their style of living; and by a reaction against an environment which she dimly felt to be hostile to her in spite of an appearance of cordiality, she put on cold and ironical airs.

When the rest of the party were solemnly debating on Virtue, or the Reform Bill, Shelley saw her exchange mocking smiles with Hogg and Peacock, a new and very sceptical friend they had just discovered.

He could forgive Hogg’s irony. His wife’s irritated him. Hogg’s mind was an entirely different world from his, and he permitted the difference. But Harriet’s mind was his very own handiwork. He had formed it, trained it, cultivated it. He was accustomed to think of it as his echo. On suddenly discovering that this other self had detached itself from him, and could sometimes even make fun of what he said, he was surprised and profoundly hurt.

There is nothing which makes a woman appear stupider than secret jealousy. Instead of attacking the foe openly, which would be natural and pathetic, she criticizes with spite innocent words and inoffensive actions, and showing a terrible want of tact gives an air of meanness to a sentiment which is perfectly justifiable. Harriet found fault with everything at Bracknell because she had good cause to be jealous of Cornelia Turner. But Shelley, who put down her scornful looks and her mocking remarks to an incredible childishness, treated her with cool contempt.

At this her pride was up in arms, and her behaviour became worse. “Eliza is right,” she thought, “Percy is absolutely selfish, and thinks everything he does is perfect. Because he likes this dull life, these silly discussions, and this Italian poetry, he wants to force me to like them too. But what right has he to prevent me from living _my_ life? How is Cornelia Turner reading Petrarch so superior to me? These women whom he admires are neither so young nor so good-looking as I. He would very soon want me back.”

With this idea in her head she announced her intention of returning to London to join Eliza. Her hostesses did nothing to dissuade her, beyond the few words of regret which politeness requires. “Poor Shelley,” these ladies remarked, just as the Godwin girls had done, “he has not got the wife he ought to have.”

Harriet fell into the way of going up to stay with Eliza for weeks at a time, leaving her husband alone at Bracknell. Soon the usual “kind friend” let Shelley know that his wife was going about with Major Ryan. For the first time since his marriage the idea of a possible infidelity occurred to him. It was a question which in the abstract he had always treated with the greatest contempt. Suddenly brought up against it with Harriet and himself as possible actors, he was overwhelmed with the most violent grief he had yet known.

Reason told him he ought to consider himself lucky if he were freed from a very ordinary woman. If at that moment he loved at all, was it not rather the heavenly Cornelia than Harriet whose miserable spite had recently annoyed him so much? And, if he no longer loved her, to break with her would be best. He had always taught that when passion’s trance is over-past each should be free again. But it was in vain that he reasoned thus with himself. He discovered with stupefaction that Percy Shelley and Harriet Westbrook were no longer two separate and free beings. The sum of past memories, caresses, joys, and sufferings enmeshed them both in a web from which there was no escape.

He rushed up to town, determined either to offer Harriet his excuses or to confess his faults. But she received him with harshness and irony. Any heart-to-heart talk was out of the question.

His child-wife, so gentle and submissive only three months ago, now showed herself cold and haughty. How had such a change come about? There were instants when Shelley thought he detected, beneath pride’s hard surface, a fleeting image of the other Harriet, but when he sought to hold it by a loving word, it was gone. Against the steely armour of her heart he knocked in vain.

Wandering about the streets without any object, he thought: “What a fool I have been! Here I am tied for ever to a woman who does not love me, who has never loved me. Evidently she only married me for the money and title. . . . Now that she sees her hopes upset, she punishes me for her mistake. . . .” And he repeated with disgust: “A heart of ice . . . a lump of ice!”

Perhaps had he ever seen her alone he would have succeeded in thawing it, but Eliza, prim, hostile, formidable, stood always between them, and the gallant Major Ryan was in the wings, ready to commiserate the cruelties of a doctrinaire husband.

After struggling for a few days, Shelley’s ardour was suddenly quenched. Capable by fits and starts of an energy when nothing was impossible to him, he fell as formerly after his long tramps at Oxford into an insurmountable torpor, and his will-power like a dying candle-flame threw up a final blaze of light before it expired.

When he saw that Harriet was obdurate, he gave up all hope of saving the remnants of his married happiness, and he wrote to Bracknell to announce he was coming on a month’s visit, and coming alone. He knew well that after a month’s interval he would find Harriet completely ruined by her hateful surroundings, he knew that a catastrophe would be the result of the Bracknell interlude, but he was too tired to carry on the fight.

“What more am I now but an insect warming itself in a ray of sunshine? The next cloud that passes will plunge me into the frozen darkness of death.” And, in melancholy mood, he recited the lines from Burns:

“But pleasures are like poppies spread, You seize the flow’r, its bloom is shed; Or like the snow-fall in the river, A moment white, then melts for ever.”

It seemed to him that into the translucent domes of crystal wherein his fancy dwelt, Harriet, Ianthe and Elizabeth had been suddenly flung like so many blocks of living and rebellious matter. In vain did he try with all the forces of logic to drag them out. His feeble weapons were crushed beneath the ponderous reality.