CHAPTER XXV
THE RULES OF THE GAME
In what way does a marriage ceremony, religious or civil, add to the happiness of a pair of lovers, deeply smitten and full of confidence in one another? The event proved that it can at least make joy blossom on the countenance of a pedant. Godwin’s exhibited an incredible satisfaction on learning that “the seducer” was going to make “an honest woman” of his daughter, and that, eventually, she would become Lady Shelley. He thus inspired in his ex-disciple a contempt for his character, full measure, pressed down, and running over.
At first there had been some hesitation as to whether it were decent to celebrate the marriage so soon after Harriet’s death, but the authorities on social etiquette declared that it would not do to wait any longer for the Church’s blessing on a union which Nature had already blessed twice over.
Just a fortnight after the body of the first Mrs. Shelley had been taken out of the Serpentine, Mary and Percy were married by a clergyman in the church of St. Mildred, Bread Street. Godwin, beaming all over his face, and Mrs. Godwin, simpering and pretentious, signed as witnesses. That evening, for the first time since they ran away, the Shelleys dined in Skinner Street.
The family feast was a lugubrious one. There, in the little dining-room, Fanny had moved to and fro; there, Harriet had sat in her happy early wedded days; their ghosts, suffering and unsatisfied, continued to haunt the room and torture the living. It is true that Godwin’s ill-temper had been changed by the morning’s ceremony into an excess of urbanity, but too many memories troubled the guests to make any real cordiality possible.
That night Mary wrote in her journal: “Go to London. A marriage takes place. Draw. Read Lord Chesterfield and Locke.” Mary had good nerves. Poor drowned Harriet was never a patch on her.
* * *
Nevertheless, it was but right that the news of so splendid a marriage should be sent to every Godwin in the land. The Philosopher wrote to Hull Godwin:
“DEAR BROTHER,
“Were it not that you have a family of your own, and can see by them how little shrubs grow into tall trees, you would hardly imagine that my boy, born the other day, is now fourteen, and that my daughter is between nineteen and twenty. The piece of news I have to tell, however, is that I went to church with this tall girl some little time ago to be married. Her husband is the eldest son of Sir Timothy Shelley, of Field Place, in the county of Sussex, Baronet. So that according to the vulgar ideas of the world she is well married, and I have great hopes that the young man will make her a good husband. You will wonder, I daresay, how a girl without a penny of fortune should make so good a match. But such are the ups and downs of the world. For my part, I care but little comparatively about wealth, so that it should be her destiny in life to be respectable, virtuous, and contented.”
The letter closes with a word of cool thanks for a ham and a turkey sent to the Skinner Street household at Christmas.
But the formal marriage brought about one real advantage. The “concubinage” argument, advanced by those who wished to deprive Shelley of his children, fell to the ground. The Westbrooks, however, did not give in. By the voice of the retired publican, the young Ianthe aged three, and Charles aged two, addressed a petition to the Lord Chancellor in which they said: “Our father avows himself to be an Atheist, and has written and published a certain work called _Queen Mab_ with notes, and other works, wherein he blasphemously denies the existence of God as the Creator of the Universe, the sanctity of marriage, and all the most sacred principles of morality.” For which reasons these precocious and virtuous infants prayed that their persons and fortunes might not be placed in the power of an unworthy father, but under the protection of persons of the highest morality, such as their maternal grandfather and their kind Aunt Eliza.
Shelley’s counsel took care to say nothing in defence of _Queen Mab_: there was nothing to be said at that time, and in that place, the Court of Chancery. He confined himself to denying the importance of a work written by a boy of nineteen.
“Notwithstanding Mr. Shelley’s violent philippics against marriage, Mr. Shelley marries twice before he is twenty-five! He is no sooner liberated from the despotic chains which he speaks of with so much horror and contempt, than he forges a new set, and becomes again a willing victim of this horrid despotism! It is hoped that a consideration of this marked difference between his opinions and his actions will induce the Lord Chancellor not to think very seriously of this boyish and silly publication.” As to the proposal of placing the children with their mother’s family: “We think it right to say that Mr. Westbrook formerly kept a coffee-house, and is certainly in no respect qualified to be the guardian of Mr. Shelley’s children. To Miss Westbrook there are more decided objections: she is illiterate and vulgar, and it was by her advice, with her active concurrence, and it may be said by her _management_, that Mr. Shelley, when of the age of nineteen, ran away with Miss Harriet Westbrook, then of the age of seventeen, and married her in Scotland. Miss Westbrook, the proposed guardian, was then nearly thirty, and, if she had acted as she ought to have done as the guardian and friend of her younger sister, all this misery and disgrace to both families would have been avoided.”
His counsel’s ingenious notion of winning his client’s case by renouncing in that client’s name the opinions of his youth, seemed to Shelley a piece of disgusting hypocrisy. He, therefore, drew up for the Lord Chancellor a statement in which he set forth that his ideas on marriage had not changed, and that if he had made his conduct conform to the customs of society, he in no way had renounced the liberty to criticize those customs.
The Lord Chancellor in his judgment remarks: “This is a case in which a father has demonstrated that he must and does deem it to be a matter of duty to recommend to those whose opinions and habits he may take upon himself to form conduct as moral and virtuous, which the law calls upon me to consider as immoral and vicious. . . . I cannot, therefore, in these conditions, entrust him with the guardianship of these children.”
But the Lord Chancellor refused to confide them to the odious Westbrooks. He put them under the care of an Army doctor, named Hume, of Brent End Lodge, Hanwell, who would place the boy, when seven years old, at a good private school under the superintendence of an orthodox clergyman. As to the little Ianthe, she would be brought up at home by Mrs. Hume, who would see that she said her morning prayers, and asked a blessing on her food. Mrs. Hume would also put into her hands improving books, and, to a certain extent would encourage the reading of poetry, Shakespeare for instance, if carefully Bowdlerized. The whole cost, one hundred a year for each child. Mr. Shelley might visit them twelve times a year, but in the presence of Dr. and Mrs. Hume. Mr. John Westbrook might see them the same number of times, but, if he wished it, he might see them without the Humes being present.
This sentence was very bitter to Shelley. It sanctioned officially so to say, and in reasonable and moderate formulas, his exile from the community of civilized men. It was like a brevet of incurable folly.
* * *
While the case was being fought out, he had bought a house in the pleasant little country town of Great Marlow. Ariel at last consented to have a home like other people. One room, big enough for a village ball-room, was fitted up as a library, and decorated with casts of Venus and Apollo. There was a very big garden: in this during the spring and summer of 1817 might be seen two babies, William and Clara Shelley, and a third child of unusual beauty, Alba, daughter of Lord Byron and Claire. Her father was said to be leading a wild life at Venice. Claire received no news from him.
Shelley’s recent trials had left their traces on his countenance. He was thinner, more hectic, and stooped more than ever. A violent pain in his side prevented him from sleeping, and the doctors, unable to cure it, said it was “a nervous disorder.”
His state of mind was despondent. Life had brought him so much suffering, his good intentions had been repaid by such evil results, that he had taken a horror of every sort of action. He felt an intense but undefined desire to withdraw from the perilous throngs of men, men whose reactions cannot be predicted, and who are swayed by such terrible gusts of passion. The regeneration of the real world now appeared to him so unrealizable that he no longer sought satisfaction therein for his loves and hatreds, but looked for it in the more docile and malleable world of the imagination. Subjects for poems, vague and shadow-like, floated round him, which feeding on his sorrowful thoughts, gradually took form at the expense of his powers of action.
The aërial edifices, the crystalline palaces, which with their filmy vapours had so long hidden from him the actual world, seemed to detach themselves from earth and to float up as though drawn by an invisible force. They did not melt away, but swaying with a gentle movement rose in all their translucent glory to the high realms of pure Poetry. In the place which they had occupied, Shelley now saw the world as it is, the brown earth arduous to cultivate, the harsh faces of men, women full of nerves and hysteria, the cruel and obstructive society from which he longed to escape.
The poem which occupied his thoughts the oftenest was the story of an ideal Revolution. He did not want the scenes of bloodshed which ruined for him the otherwise inspiring story of the French Revolution. He wanted his Revolution to be the work of a pair of lovers. His personal experience had taught him that only the love of a woman can inspire a sublime courage.
Laon and Cythna, two ideal anarchists, were to be the transfigured portraits of himself and Mary. He would make them die at the stake, for their ideas, as he would have liked to die himself, exchanging a last kiss in the midst of the flames, a kiss so delicious that the agony would become a sort of voluptuous refinement of ecstasy. For him love did not attain its maximum unless he could associate it with thoughts and sufferings shared in common. Now that he and Mary, married and fairly well off, seemed about to begin an easier life, he desired to escape from this somewhat commonplace happiness, and to live in imagination the magnificent and perilous destiny which might have been his in other lands and other ages.
He passed his time among the little islands of the Thames where the swans build their nests. Lying at the bottom of his boat completely hidden by the high grasses, he sought his inspiration in gazing up at the changing skies. The study of fleeting, interweaving colour and form had always given him immense pleasure, and every day he felt more strongly that his real mission in life was to seize the most transitory shades of beauty, and to fix them for ever in words buoyant and beautiful as themselves.
The entire summer was given to this entrancing work. Then he was obliged to go up to London. Money was getting scarce; he had so many mouths to feed. Besides Mary and the children, Claire and Allegra were dependent on him, and very often the entire Godwin household. His new friend, Leigh Hunt, with a wife and five children, needed help. He had promised Peacock a hundred a year so that he might go on writing his fine novels. Charles Clairmont, who was nothing to him, had fallen in love when in France with an ugly woman several years older than himself and of course penniless; it was Shelley who provided the means for marriage. Just as formerly, he had to go to the money-lenders in order to satisfy these endless claims. “You’re a thoroughbred,” Godwin once told him, “whom the horse-flies prevent from taking your spring.”
Happily for him, Mary managed to bring him back to earth, and he forgave her, seeing her now only as the Cythna of his poem. But she, an over-anxious hostess, did not care for their too assiduous visitors, such as Peacock, who dropped in every evening “without being asked,” and drank up a whole bottle of wine. She wanted Shelley to find a purchaser for the Marlow House which they had bought too hastily. She saw he suffered from cold, and wished to take him away to a warmer climate, perhaps to Italy.
“Dearest love,” she wrote to him in London. . . . “Pray in your letters do be more explicit! You have advertised the house, but have you given Madocks any orders about how to answer applicants? And have you settled yet for Italy or the sea? And do you know how to get money to convey us there, and to buy the things that will be absolutely necessary before our departure? And can you do anything for my father before you go? Or, after all, would it not be as well to inhabit a small house by the seashore where our expenses would be much less than they are at present? You have not yet mentioned to Godwin your thoughts of Italy; but if you determine soon, I would have you do it, as those things are always better to be talked of some days before they take place.
“I took my first walk to-day! What a dreadfully cold place this house is! I was shivering over a fire and the garden looked cold and dismal, but so soon as I got into the road I found to my infinite surprise that the sun was shining and the air warm and delightful.
“I wish Willy to be my companion in my future walks; to further which plan will you send down if possible by Monday’s coach, a sealskin fur hat for him? It must be a fashionable round shape, _for a boy_ mention particularly, and have a narrow gold ribbon round it, that it may be taken in if too large. . . . I am just now surrounded by babes. Alba is scratching and crowing, William amusing himself with wrapping a shawl round him, and Miss Clara staring at the fire. . . . Adieu, dearest love! I want to say again that you may fully answer me, how very, very anxious I am to know the whole extent of your present difficulties and pursuits.”
One source of annoyance to Mary was the presence of Alba in the house. The neighbours had been told that she was the child of a lady in London and had been sent to the country for her health, but anyone could see from Claire’s behaviour that the child was hers. The pure-minded jumped at once to the conclusion that Shelley was the father. The old accusations of promiscuity again reared their heads, and Mary’s prudishness suffered from it. One of the reasons for which she wished to go to Italy was that the journey would enable them to take the little girl out to Lord Byron.
Shelley’s one wish also was to depart. The ties of family, of friendship, of business, had raised round him intangible walls behind which he was stifling. His will was rock-like, but life’s little waves, perfidious and unconcerned, ate away at it ceaselessly. In England where the highest legal dignity had taken from him his civic rights, he had the sensation of standing always in the pillory. It seemed to him that in flying from England, he would become again a free and aërial spirit, that in a new country his life would be like a sheet of white paper on which he could compose a new existence in the same way that he could compose a poem.
When their departure was fixed, Mary asked to have the children baptized. She thought it was better for them to start in life by observing the Rules of the Game. Shelley agreed, and at the same time that William Shelley and Clara Everina Shelley were christened, Byron’s daughter was christened too under the names of Clara Allegra.