CHAPTER VIII.

FROM THE OLD TO THE NEW LOVE.

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 Godwin _not_ bred 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 his _grandfather’s_ arrangement: ‘Depend upon it, that no artifice of my _father’s_ shall 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 2000_l._ 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’s _Shelley 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 also of 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 B _as_ C, 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 season in (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.’

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 the evidences 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 of _The Necessity of Atheism_ and the Atheistical Note to _Queen Mab_.

It has been observed how Shelley reproduced in the _Letter_ to _Lord Ellenborough_ one of the prime doctrines of _The Necessity of Atheism_,--viz., that belief is independent, and beyond the control of volition. Hence, Shelley reproduced the reasoning of _The Necessity of Atheism_ in three successive publications, (1) the _Letter to Lord Ellenborough_, (2) _Queen Mab_, (3) the _Refutation of Deism_. Yet Mr. Garnett requires us to believe that in writing _The 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’s _William Godwin; his Friends and Contemporaries_, wherein it is written,--

‘In 1813 Shelley was again in London for _a 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 child _whom he had scarcely noticed two years_ before 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 be _a 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 London _only_ for 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 evidence that 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 visit _at the end_ of 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, _when_ he 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 seven months. 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 of the 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 hanging about his infant. The letter of despair was dated from Bracknell, on 16th March, 1814. Eight days later,--_only_ eight 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 see grounds for differing from him. Shelley can scarcely have felt any need for the precaution. The _Edinburgh 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 was to 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, _with_ a 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, and _assented_, 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 by corresponding 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 the whole 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 said of 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, and replace 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 of _primâ facie_ and _ex parte_ evidence 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 information _from 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 on _his_ authority, 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 mere _ex parte_ statements. They are of less weight than most _ex parte_ statements, 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 statements to 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 the wife, 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.’ He _was_ so 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 Skinner Street, 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 appear Aught but thyself, or turn thine heart Away from me, _or stoop to wear The mask of scorn, although it be To 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 a perfectly 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 was _not_ educated 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 were _not_ educated 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 conjugally during 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:--

‘The theories,’ says Lady Shelley, ‘in which the daughter of the authors of _Political Justice_ and of the _Rights of Woman_ had been educated, spared her from any conflict between her duty and her affection; for she was the child of parents whose writings had had for their object to prove that marriage was one among the many institutions which a new era in the history of mankind was about to sweep away. By her father, whom she loved--by the writings of her mother, whom she had been taught to venerate--these doctrines had been rendered familiar to her mind.’

This whole passage is made up of statements that, so far as Mary Godwin is concerned, are absolutely the reverse of historic truth. What? Mary’s education in Free Contract principles ‘spared her from any conflict between her duty and her affection?’ Why at one moment she is declaring she can’t be Shelley’s mistress, but will never marry any other man; a few days later she sacrifices her principles and does become his mistress; and yet there was no conflict of duty and affection!

It is in the highest degree improbable that, till Shelley spoke to her of her mother’s views and story, using them as arguments why she should not shrink from becoming his mistress, Mary Godwin had ever heard aught of Mary Wollstonecraft’s dangerous opinions and discreditable career. William Godwin’s daughter was only a few days old when her mother died. Only three years and four months Mary’s senior, Fanny Imlay was too young at her mother’s death to have, in later time, any recollections to impart to Mary about their common parent. Who was at all likely to be at pains to acquaint Mary in her early childhood with her mother’s story? It is not usual for a man, after taking a second wife and having issue by her, to be loquacious about his first wife to her children in their tender age. The cold, unsentimental, unemotional Godwin was not likely to talk of Mary Wollstonecraft to either of her children. Is it conceivable that whilst they were of tender age, or in later years, when they had become inquisitive girls, he revealed to them the particulars of their mother’s story,--told Fanny that she was of shameful birth; told Mary that her sister was a bastard; unfolded to their inquiring minds the doctrines of Free Contract; informed them that their mother held opinions about marriage which he had himself abandoned as dangerous and pernicious; instructed them out of pious regard to her memory that they should on coming to womanly age think of the matrimonial rite as an idle form? Is it imaginable that the second Mrs. Godwin, intent on holding her curiously constituted family within the lines of conventional respectability, enlightened Fanny, and Claire, and Mary, on the very matters she was especially desirous of keeping from their knowledge?

It is, however, certain that Mary Godwin heard much about her mother from Shelley’s lips in 1814. The subject, in respect to which Godwin had been wisely reticent to his child, Shelley did not hesitate to use for the accomplishment of his purpose. No one knew better than Shelley, that his familiar friend and benefactor had long since ceased to approve the Free Contract. No one knew better than Shelley, how careful his familiar friend had been to withhold from his only daughter those particulars of her mother’s career that, on being communicated to her, might dispose the imaginative, generous, fearless, too self-dependent child to adopt her mother’s earlier views about marriage. At the same time Shelley saw that, to break down the girl’s reverence for marriage and thereby remove the grand obstacle to his designs upon her, his best course was to enlighten the sixteen-years-old girl on those points of her domestic story, which her father was especially desirous to keep from her knowledge. It is needless to say that the young man, who had illuminated, or tried to illuminate, so many girls of tender age out of the views in which they had been educated, was not withheld from illuminating Mary out of her superstitious reverence for marriage by any weak sentiment of loyalty to his familiar friend,--the friend whom he was in the habit of styling his greatest benefactor.

As the Skinner-Street house, notwithstanding the hospitable freedom accorded to him within its walls, was no place where he could urge his suit to Mary and teach her to approve the Free Contract, it appeared well to Shelley, in his strength, to make appointments for private interviews with Mary at her mother’s grave in Old St. Pancras churchyard, and well to the sixteen-years-old Mary, in her weakness and romantic silliness, to meet him there. Old St. Pancras churchyard was a comparatively secluded place, and Mr. Kegan Paul is careful to record that ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’s grave was shaded by a fine weeping willow.’ I cannot see that the character and magnitude of the tree over Mary Wollstonecraft’s grave ought to affect the reader’s judgment of what took place under it in the warm days of June and July, 1814. But Mr. Kegan Paul seems to think otherwise; and as I wish to handle this matter with a liberal regard for all extenuating circumstances, I beg my readers to bear in mind that Mary Wollstonecraft’s grave was shaded by a fine weeping willow.

Whilst gentle breezes made music in the long leaves of this trysting-tree, Shelley,--with _Queen Mab and_ its notes in his hand, and the writings of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft in his memory,--explained to Mary Godwin why ‘chastity was a monkish and evangelical superstition;’ why her mother had very properly come to the conclusion that she might live conjugally with Gilbert Imlay in Paris, without being married to him; why a few years later her mother had no less virtuously determined to live in Free Contract with William Godwin; and why she, Mary Godwin (the daughter of so exemplary and altogether phenomenal a woman as Mary Wollstonecraft), might with honour and virtue become his wife in the highest sense, although inhuman laws and tyrannic custom precluded him from making her his wife in another and altogether trivial sense. Readers may not forget that Shelley was within a few days of being Mary’s senior by five years; that he was so greatly Mary’s social superior as to figure in her esteem as a sort of young prince; that he was a young man of a singularly pleasant appearance and charming address; that she was only sixteen years old, and living under the dominion of a stern stepmother, who, besides insisting that Mary should darn her stockings, was so unreasonable as to think a girl of her age and social degree should know how to make a beef-steak pudding.

Instead of suffering from no conflict of duty and affection (as Lady Shelley avers), it is certain that poor sixteen-years-old Mary was distracted and cruelly tortured by the conflict of her desire to be good, with her inclination to be very naughty. She was troubled by thoughts of Percy’s wife, her own friend; and by thoughts of the shame and sorrow that would come to her old father, if she did as Percy asked her. She was stung by a feeling that, as Percy was her father’s young friend, and moreover a young friend to whom her father had been very good and kind, he should not ask of her what he was asking. Tears sprung to her eyes as she thought of the disgrace she would bring on her home and people if she yielded. There were moments when she could not see why she could be right in doing what was wrong in her eyes, because her mother was not wrong in doing what seemed right to her. She implored Percy not to ask so much of her. Promising to love him for ever, promising that no other man should ever find a place in her heart, acknowledging that she loved him unutterably, she entreated Percy, as he was good and clever, so bright a poet, and so sweet to her soul, to be satisfied with her confession and vows of perpetual fidelity. But this was not enough for the young gentleman who ‘might have been the Saviour of the World.’ He wanted something more, and was determined to have all he wanted, although Mary was the only daughter of his friend and benefactor. Why are readers indignant against this young man, who was so young and enthusiastic, and only (as Mr. Froude says) acting on emotional theories of liberty?

Whilst he was having stolen interviews with his familiar friend’s sixteen-years-old daughter under the willow-tree, he had a remarkable conference with his friend Peacock, who, on coming from the country to London for the meeting, found the author of _Queen Mab_ in a state of extreme excitement. His eyes were bloodshot, his hair disheveled, his dress disordered; and whilst talking with extravagant energy he caught up a bottle of laudanum, saying vehemently as he clutched the vessel of poisonous drink, ‘I never part with this. I am always repeating to myself your lines from Sophocles:--

‘Man’s happiest lot is not to be: And when we tread life’s thorny steep, Most blest are they, who earliest free Descend to death’s eternal sleep.’

In the ensuing conversation (_vide_ Peacock’s collected _Works_) Shelley did not even suggest that Harriett’s behaviour had afforded him any serious cause of dissatisfaction. On the contrary, whilst reflecting on her mental unfitness for the position to which he had so imprudently exalted her, he admitted that she was a noble animal.

‘Every one, who knows me,’ he said, ‘must know that the partner of my life should be one who can feel poetry and understand philosophy. Harriett is a noble animal, but she can do neither.’

‘It always appeared to me,’ replied Peacock, ‘that you were very fond of Harriett.’

‘But you did not know how I hated her sister,’ rejoined Shelley; forbearing to say aught in dissent from, or assent to, Peacock’s remark on his former show of fondness for his wife.

To another of his friends Shelley commended Harriett for being ‘a noble animal,’ adding words which seemed to imply that, in her nobleness, she would acquiesce in the transference of his affections from herself to William Godwin’s daughter.

But because he spoke thus fairly of Harriett to persons, who knew she had given him no grave cause of offence, it does not follow that he was not at the same time charging her with serious misconduct to those, who were not so well qualified to judge between her and him. To those who remember in what different strains he wrote of his father to the Duke of Norfolk and William Godwin, it is needless to say that he was capable of speaking justly of a person, with whom he was displeased, to individuals cognizant of the real causes of his displeasure, and no less unjustly to persons of inferior or no information touching the nature of the quarrel.

Whilst Mary Godwin was being illuminated into Free Contract in Old St. Pancras churchyard, and educated in deceit in Skinner Street, the pupil and her teacher had a sympathetic confidante in Claire,--the maiden of bright eyes, olive complexion, Italian features, and southern fervour. It is needless to remind readers that Claire was not older than Mary by so much as Mr. Kegan Paul repeatedly asserts in the very book, which affords evidence that they were nearly of the same age. Elsewhere it has been told how (though they bickered and quarreled smartly once and again in Shelley’s life, and came after his death to hate one another cordially) these daughters of one home, who called the same man ‘papa’ and the same woman ‘mamma,’ were living together in 1814 in the fullest mutual confidence, and in affection glowing with the impetuosity of girlish romance. Cognizant of their meetings under the weeping willow, Claire knew why Shelley and her sister-by-affinity met so often at the trysting-tree. In Skinner Street, when Mary, the piquant brown-eyed blonde, wore her disguise, she did not assume ‘the mask of scorn’ to hide her love of Shelley from her sister-by-affinity. Delighting in the sentimental affair, as though it were a mere game played for her amusement in the midsummer holidays, Claire, the impetuous and saucy, was ever at hand to divert the attention of the elders from the proceedings of her two playmates. Had Fanny been at home the game might not have been carried to its calamitous _dénoument_, for besides being orderly and dutiful, and ever on the side of authority, the eldest of the three sisters had an influence over Shelley which would certainly have been exercised for good, had she detected his evil purpose. It was unfortunate for the two younger girls that Fanny was away from home. It was unfortunate for Mary, that Claire was at hand to aid and encourage her and Shelley. Without Claire’s help Shelley would most likely have failed to accomplish his purpose. But for her sister’s sympathy and assistance, it is scarcely conceivable that Mary (remarkable though she was for self-dependence and resoluteness) would have left her home. It was in no small degree due to Claire’s cleverness, in covering the actions of the lovers, that the first week of July was over before their proceedings caused Godwin uneasiness. What, on so late a day, caused the philosopher to think his young friend too attentive to Mary, does not appear. Possibly neighbours had told him of the meetings under the trysting-tree. Possibly Mrs. Godwin had detected something suspicious in Mary’s countenance, at a moment when she forgot to wear the mask of scorn. Anyhow, on the 8th of July, Godwin spoke to his daughter respecting her demeanour to Shelley, and on the same day wrote Shelley a letter, which was answered in a way that abated the philosopher’s apprehensions without altogether putting an end to his disquiet. Speaking of Shelley’s reply to his benefactor’s epistle, Mr. Kegan Paul says, ‘The explanation was satisfactory.’ The explanation must, therefore, have been disingenuous, for no honest reply could have been otherwise than most unsatisfactory. The consequence of the explanation was that the two familiar friends continued to meet daily, though the veteran decided that for a brief while Shelley should not dine at Skinner Street. Probably it was due to Godwin that Mrs. Shelley was at length informed of her husband’s place of abode. Anyhow, Harriett came up to town and saw both Godwin and Shelley, the former of whom did his utmost to reconcile the husband and wife, whilst the latter held to his purpose of making Mary his mistress. Almost to the last moment it was uncertain what would be the issue of the fierce conflict between passion and duty in her breast. It is not surprising that eventually she yielded to his entreaties, and his pathetic account of the wrongs he had endured in boyhood from the barbarous father, who would have consigned him for life to a lunatic asylum, had it not been for Dr. Lind’s timely intervention. How was the inexperienced and romantic girl to suspect that the thrilling tale was a tissue of romantic fancies and delusive inventions? Small blame to her for yielding, in comparison with the blame due to the man, who subdued her to his will.

On the evening of 27th July, 1814, William Godwin’s household retired to rest under circumstances which rendered the man of letters, his wife, and his stepson (Charles Clairmont) wholly unsuspicious of the purpose and pre-arrangements of the two girls. On the morrow, Mr. and Mrs. Godwin awoke to learn that Claire and Mary had left the house at daybreak. An examination of their sleeping apartment discovered that the two girls had not quitted their home without making preparations for an absence of some duration, for they had taken enough of their clothing to show that a speedy return was no part of their plan. Thus it was that they left their homes at four o’clock a.m., and hastened to the spot where Shelley awaited them in a carriage. Not content with carrying off his familiar friend’s sixteen-years-old daughter, Shelley repaid Mrs. Godwin’s hospitality by carrying off _her_ sixteen-years-old (or, perhaps, seventeen-years-old) daughter, in order that he and Mary should have an agreeable travelling companion.

Nothing connected with this miserable business is more strange than that it has been treated by successive writers as though it were a wholesome and delightful love-story, redounding, on the whole, to the credit of both principals. The affair has been handled by these writers so effectually that many a reader will have to liberate himself from their influence by a strenuous effort before seeing that, in thus carrying off his friend’s sixteen-years-old daughter, Shelley was guilty of the crime which he professed to hold in the highest repugnance. In carrying off John Westbrook’s sixteen-years-old daughter when he was in a position to marry her, Shelley committed nothing more than an act of elopement. But in carrying off his familiar friend’s child when he could not marry her, and had no prospect of ever being able to marry her, he was guilty of an act of seduction. If regard is had to his intimacy with her father, the deception he practised towards him, and the means he employed to overcome her sense of duty, it cannot be questioned that Shelley’s triumph over his familiar friend’s daughter was a very bad case of domestic treason. That an unlooked-for incident enabled him, something more than two years later, to marry her, and that on the occurrence of this incident he lost no time in making her his wife, are facts in no way affecting the quality of his action towards his friend’s sixteen-years-old daughter in 1814. That he married her as soon as he could is a fact to be remembered to the poet’s credit in the general estimate of his character, and more especially of his affection for the girl. But what he did at the end of 1816 could not affect the legal and moral quality of what he did in the summer of 1814. There must be no misunderstanding on this point. Till the English people shall modify and rearrange the English language into accordance with the crotchets and sensibilities of our favourers of the Free Contract, the man who shall lure a sixteen-years-old girl from her home and parents, and induce her to live with him as a mistress, must be declared guilty of an offence which is deemed odious even by libertines.

Mr. Froude is of opinion that Shelley should be judged leniently for taking to himself this girl because he was young and enthusiastic. Mr. Froude is also of opinion that Mary Godwin should be judged leniently because she was young and enthusiastic. I concur with Mr. Froude in thinking that Mary should not be severely judged. To her my compassion goes as freely as Mr. Froude requires. She was a naughty girl. But who can forbear to make charitable allowance for so young and inexperienced a girl? She was (as Mr. Froude urges) enthusiastic; she was also young, very young,--only sixteen years old.

There are other reasons for being lenient and pitiful to this poor child, reared though she was in honest principles and absolute ignorance of her mother’s perverse views. Who seduced her? She was not led astray by an ordinary tempter, but by a young man of singular comeliness, a poet who clothed his prayers with the images of speech most likely to render them irresistible. She had done nothing in the hope of winning his love, said nothing by lip or look to lure him from loyalty to Harriett, when he came quickly upon her and said ‘You shall be mine!’ She was wooed and won by Shelley! Remember how (_though_ he was Shelley) she contended with him, fought him, prayed to him for mercy; how passionately she declared to him, in spoken words and written words, that, though she loved him wholly, and would never give herself to any other man, she would not, could not, dared not, give herself to him till he could marry her.

Could nothing be urged in palliation of her misconduct, but that she was young and enthusiastic, I should plead less earnestly in her behalf. I cannot concur with Mr. Froude in holding that youth and enthusiasm should of themselves be pronounced considerable extenuations of wrongful action, of which the young and enthusiastic are more likely than other persons to be guilty. On the contrary, Mr. Froude must pardon a white-headed writer for telling him frankly, it is ill for a man of his still greater age to teach (however lightly and elegantly) in a popular magazine, that to act as Shelley and Mary acted in their elopement, is sometimes to be guilty of nothing worse than ‘the sin of acting on emotional theories of liberty.’ Moreover, I decline to regard Shelley’s youth in 1814 as a matter to be urged strongly in mitigation of the sentence to be passed upon him. His youth unquestionably may be pleaded _in misericordiam_ when he is under trial for running away with John Westbrook’s daughter. But the offence he committed in 1814 was no mere elopement, and he had long since ceased to be a child. When he posted seaward along the Dover Road, with Mary Godwin by his side, he was within a week of his twenty-third year. Age by the calendar is not the only thing to be considered in estimating a man’s moral responsibility. Regard should also be had to the discipline of circumstances. It wanted now only a month of three years since Shelley ran off with John Westbrook’s lovely child. A man who is a father, and has been a husband for nearly three years, is not to be judged as a mere stripling. He was five years older than Mary. Those five years spent in the world gave him greatly the advantage over Mary, and he had used the advantage mercilessly against her. On the threshold of his twenty-third year a young man has lived quite long enough to know that he should not seduce his intimate friend’s sixteen-years-old daughter.

Should Mr. Froude write on this question again, he will do well to drop the plea of youth. Moreover, Mr. Froude, at any sacrifice of feeling, must throw overboard that elegant euphuism about ‘the sin of acting on emotional theories of liberty.’ That Shelley was under the influence of emotion throughout his suit to Mary is certain. It is not unusual for people to be under the influence of emotion when they are in love. But there was nothing emotional in Shelley’s theories respecting the Freedom of Lovers to be off with an old and on with a new love at pleasure. I have wasted much pains in exhibiting the origin of those theories, and tracing their growth through his boyish novels and his letters to Hogg and Godwin, to their development in the anti-matrimonial note to _Queen Mab_, if it is necessary to remind my readers that Shelley’s views about wedlock--views in which he persisted to the last hour of his life--were embraced in his boyhood long before he formulated them in the _Queen Mab_ note. Never were theories formed with greater deliberation, brooded over more calmly, acted upon more resolutely by a social innovator. Holding them tenaciously long before he promulgated them in the famous note, he did not act upon them till _Queen Mab_ had been in secret circulation for considerably more than a year. In speaking of them as emotional theories, Mr. Froude shows how absolutely ignorant he was of the matters about which he wrote so rashly.

A note in one of William Godwin’s diaries indicates that he regarded the fugitives as having left his house at five o’clock of the early morning. But there are grounds for thinking the flight began an hour earlier. Anyhow, long before London was awake and stirring, Shelley and the two girls were clear of the town and clattering towards the sea. Towards noon the sun bore down upon them with scorching vehemence, and the remainder of the journey on wheels was made in heat so intense and overpowering, that Mary Godwin nearly fainted under it. The journey closed with a serious disappointment to the travellers. On alighting at Dover at about 4 p.m., they found themselves too late for the Calais packet, and no other public boat would start for the French port till the following day. To all three it was of the highest moment that they should cross the Channel as quickly as possible. Mary and Claire were too well acquainted with their mother’s energy to have any doubt, that on discovering their flight she would soon be following them. Had Mary been less than sixteen years of age, Shelley, in case of his arrest on English ground, would have been liable, under the circumstances, to imprisonment for two years; and under a certain contingency, even to five years’ incarceration. But though Mary’s age exempted him from the heavy punishment to which he would have been liable had she been a year younger, he was aware that, if he were overtaken by Mrs. Godwin on this side the Channel, the Mayor of Dover would aid her effectually in regaining possession of her daughter and step-daughter. To secure his prize it was needful that he should cross the water without passing another night on English soil.

As the lovely evening promised a quick and agreeable passage, Shelley hired some seamen to carry him and the two girls (without their boxes) to Calais in an open boat; and as soon as Mary had revived herself with a sea-bath, the trio went on board the frail vessel, hoping to touch the French sands within two hours. But the weather failed to keep its promise. At first their progress was slow from lack of wind; but as the moon rose and night came on, the faint breeze freshened into a gale, attended with signs of a coming storm. Besides being violent the wind soon became contrary; and after working well out to sea the sailors began to despair of reaching Calais, and talked of making for Boulogne. Some hours later, a squall striking the sail nearly capsized the boat, that seemed likely to perish in the thunder-storm, which made the mariners fearful. Fortunately the gale abated, and the wind, changing its course, carried the craft straight for Calais, where the fugitives,--weary, cold, and drenched to the skin,--arrived at sunrise; their plight being the more pitiable, because they had left their boxes at the Dover custom-house, to follow by the next day’s packet.

Regaining their energy and cheerfulness, whilst waiting for their luggage, the trio (‘three’ was Shelley’s favourite number for a trip) remained at their Calais hotel till Saturday afternoon (July the 30th), when they started for Paris in a cabriolet, drawn by three horses abreast, under the control of the queer little postillion, who wore a long pig-tail and _craquéed_ his whip in a style that delighted the girls. But though they made no long stay at the French port, they tarried there long enough to have cause for congratulating themselves on having crossed the Channel so promptly. The sisters had not overrated their mother’s spirit and alertness. Catching the boat which brought the fugitives their luggage, Mrs. Godwin surprised them with a visit on Saturday morning; her arrival at the hotel being announced to them by the landlord, who hastened to their room with intelligence that a fat English Madame had come to the house, and was bent on seeing her daughters, with whom (according to Madame’s account) Monsieur had run away. How Mrs. Godwin was received by the trio may be imagined. Mary laughed saucily at the step-mother, from whose authority she had escaped. Claire answered her mother’s sharp speech by declaring she should not return to London till she had seen something of the world. If Shelley was not wanting in outward civility to the lady, of whose bread and salt he had partaken so freely, he was at pains to record in the journal which he and Mary had already begun to keep, how disdainfully his friend’s wife had been described by the Calais taverner. In the memoranda of the second day’s entry it is told how the landlord announced that ‘a fat lady had arrived who said that I had run away with her daughter,’ the personal pronoun and whole structure of the phrase showing that the words were a portion of Shelley’s contribution to the entry. For this scrap from Shelley’s diary we are indebted to Mr. Kegan Paul, who wishes the readers of _William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries_, to chuckle over the evidence that Mrs. Godwin was fat, that a French innkeeper derided her for being fat, and that Shelley was tickled by what the innkeeper said of the gentlewoman. Had one of Byron’s numerous diaries contained these same words in ridicule of a lady whose hospitality he had abused, what a rout the Shelleyan enthusiasts would have made about the diarist’s ingrained vulgarity!

A few words may here be said of the journal which Shelley and Mary began to keep at this point of their joint-story, and kept conjointly for a considerable period. It has been averred by Shelleyan enthusiasts that this journal was thus kept by the poet and Mary without a single day’s break up to the date of Shelley’s death. This journal has been declared a source of information by which every day, every hour of the poet’s life from the very first day of his association with Mary Godwin, can be accounted for. The journal has been held out by the Field Place scribes _in terrorem_ against all persons, presuming to question anything uttered by a small ‘ring’ of Shelleyan specialists, as a source of evidence that may at any moment be used to cover such presumptuous persons with discredit. It is therefore well that in a book written by one of the presumptuous personages, prominence should be given to the reasons for questioning whether this joint-journal was kept for so long a period, and in so unbroken a manner as certain writers have declared; and also to the far stronger reasons for thinking the journal may have been altered and ‘doctored’ by Mary Godwin after her husband’s death.

On 26th January, 1819, Shelley wrote from Naples (where he was then staying _with_ his wife) these words, ‘In my accounts of pictures and things I am more pleased to interest you than the many; ... Besides, I keep no journal, and the only records of my voyage will be the letters I send you.’

Observe how Shelley in a confidential letter to one of his closest friends declares that he is not keeping a journal, and that the letters he is sending his friend will be the only record of the part of his career to which the letters refer. If Shelley’s statements about his personal affairs could be relied upon, the words would be sufficient evidence that he was not then keeping a journal, that his letters to Peacock were the only authoritative record of his doings at this particular point of his career, and that, therefore, to the best of his knowledge and belief, his wife was not then keeping a record of his doings. If he was at that time keeping a journal, he wrote to Peacock what was untrue. Unless he had reason for thinking that no record of his life was being kept at that time either by his wife or any other person, he was less than truthful. If Mr. Garnett was right in saying Shelley began a diary in 1814, which accounts for every day of his life, Shelley was wrong in saying he was keeping no record of his life in January, 1819. Mr. Rossetti suggests that the inconsistency between Shelley’s words and Mr. Garnett’s words may be only apparent, as Shelley may ‘sometimes have intermitted his journalizing, and then his wife kept it up.’ But this reasonable suggestion does not dispose of the difficulty. If the suggestion is correct, Mrs. Shelley must have filled in and kept up the journal with her husband’s knowledge, or without it. If she kept the diary with his knowledge and sanction, the journal remained a thing for which he was so far responsible, that it should have precluded him from saying he kept no journal. If he knew Mrs. Shelley was keeping a daily record of his doings, he was untruthful in saying the letters would be the only record of those doings. On the other hand, if Mrs. Shelley kept the journal without his knowledge, the diary during the times of its being so kept was not his journal, but simply Mrs. Shelley’s journal, and Mr. Garnett erred in writing of it as a record for which Shelley was responsible from first to last.

Let me now pass to the reasons why the statements of this journal should be received with caution. The journal was in Mrs. Shelley’s keeping after her husband’s death, some portions of it having been published during his life, whilst other portions are even yet withheld from critical scrutiny. It will be admitted that _primâ facie_ the poet’s widow was far less likely to alter the printed and published portions of the record than to alter the MS. and undivulged entries; since in tampering with the published portions she would be more or less liable to exposure, whereas in altering the unpublished portion she would feel secure from detection. It will also be admitted that to show Mrs. Shelley did, after her husband’s death, tamper with and alter the published portions, for the express purpose of removing an important matter of evidence from them, is to prove her quite capable of tampering with, and altering the unpublished portions, should she be tempted strongly to do so. I charge Mrs. Shelley with having thus tampered with the published portions of the record.

In 1814 Mary and Claire were sisters, ever thinking and speaking of one another as sisters. In 1814 years had still to pass (albeit they often had smart tiffs and differences) before they ceased to think and speak of one another with sisterly love and in sisterly fashion. Hence, at Paris in August, 1814, it was natural for Mary Godwin to write in her journal:--

‘We resolved to walk through France; but as I was too weak for any considerable distance, and _my sister_ could not be supposed to walk as far as S*** each day, we determined to purchase an ass to carry our portmanteau and one of us by turns.’

To call attention to ‘my sister’ I have printed the two words in italics. In December, 1817, when Claire had been for some time Byron’s mistress, and after being discarded by him had given birth to Allegra, Shelley and Mary published the journal (in which these words occur), together with certain well-known letters and the poem on _Mont Blanc_, under the title of _History of a Six Weeks’ Tour through a part of France, Switzerland, Germany, and Holland: With letters descriptive of a sail round the Lake of Geneva and of the Glaciers of Chamouni_: the book being provided with a preface written by Shelley himself, which contains these words:--

‘Those whose youth has been past as their’s (with what success it imports not) in pursuing, like the swallow, the inconstant summer of delight and beauty which invests the visible world, will perhaps find some entertainment in following the author, _with her husband and sister_, on foot, through part of France and Switzerland, and in sailing with her down the castled Rhine, through scenes beautiful in themselves, but which, since she visited them, a great poet has clothed with the freshness of a diviner nature.’

Thus in the journal, which has been dealt with by the Shelleyan specialists as the joint-production of Shelley and Mary, and in the Preface of which Shelley was the sole author, Claire is styled Mary’s _sister_. This is conclusive evidence of the regard in which Claire was held by Shelley and Mary from 1814 to the end of 1817. Jointly they style her ‘sister.’ Shelley by himself styles Claire his wife’s sister. What does Mrs. Shelley do in 1840, when she has ceased to love Claire, and lived to think of her as a vexatious and discreditable connexion? In the last named year, on producing a new edition of the _Six Weeks’ Tour_, she does her utmost to obliterate the evidence of her relationship to her old playmate and travelling companion, by substituting the word ‘friend,’ for the word ‘sister,’ in each of the above-given passages. She thus tampers with the text of the journal of which her husband was joint-author, and the text of the Preface, written altogether by her husband, in order to withdraw evidence which he put before the world. Am I wrong in saying that the widow, who dealt thus with her husband’s printed words, was capable of altering the unpublished entries of diaries kept by herself and her husband?

Posting to Paris, where they stayed for a week, the trio entered the French capital with so little money that Shelley was compelled to sell his watch and chain for eight Napoleons and five francs, a part of which sum he is said to have remitted to Harriett. On the arrival of a remittance from England of 60_l._, which is noticed in the diary as setting them ‘free’ from a kind of imprisonment which they found very irksome, the travellers made a curious plan for enjoying their financial liberty and acted upon it promptly; in spite of the dissuasive eloquence of their landlady, who assured Mary and Claire, that in traversing a country populous with recently disbanded soldiers, they would expose themselves to insult and to outrage far worse than mere insolence. Mainly from considerations of economy, though in some degree, perhaps, from appetite for novel adventure, they determined to walk through France.

With clothing that could be packed in a single portmanteau and a dear little donkey that, besides carrying the portmanteau, would carry them by turns, Mary and Claire were certain they could journey to Switzerland with keen enjoyment and no excessive fatigue; whilst Shelley (an excellent walker) could, of course, trudge the whole way on foot, bearing a small basket of provisions for their frugal meals. The scheme looked well on paper; and had circumstances been as compliant as the adventurers were imaginative the plan would have worked admirably. The portmanteau would have been none too heavy and the donkey none too weak; every village in which they desired to rest would have afforded them clean beds and sufficient cookery; the weather would never have been too hot, the roads never too stony. But the circumstances were too rigorous and unyielding. It was to their misfortune that, instead of buying a competent ass in the Parisian ass-market, Claire and Shelley selected a diminutive animal, that in less than twenty-four hours proved insufficient for the place. Still it was all merriment at the outset to the girls, who prattled merrily on the way from Paris (which they left at four p.m.) to Charenton, which they entered some six hours later. Dressed in black silk, the sisters (on leaving coach and taking the donkey at the barrier) congratulated themselves on their choice of a costume, the lightness of their portmanteau, the mild intelligence of their dear little donkey. At the first view of Charenton in the valley watered by the Seine, Claire (in sly raillery at Shelley) ejaculated, ‘Oh! this is beautiful enough: let us live here.’ In the morning, when, on recognizing the donkey’s incompetence they replaced it with a mule (bought for ten Napoleons), the girls may have been troubled with doubts whether ‘black’ was the best ‘colour for standing white dust.’ Soon the temper of the tourists was tested by trials more grievous than fatigue and the dust of hot highways. The fare of the _cabarets_ was coarse, the company in them not chiefly remarkable for refinement, the bedding neither comfortable nor clean. The peasants might have been something less morose to gentle strangers, in no degree responsible for the excesses of the brutal Cossacks. On nearing Trois Maisons, Shelley sprained his ankle so badly that the girls were compelled to walk an entire day’s journey and let him ride on their mule. At Troyes he could scarcely put his lame foot to the ground; Mary was ‘dead-beat’ with fatigue; Claire could no longer cry out gleefully, ‘I am glad we did not stay at Charenton, but let us live here.’ The bright girl’s cheeriest cry just then may well have been ‘Beds,--and let’s sleep here for ever.’

On the morrow, 13th August, 1814 (and maybe in the absence of Mary and Claire, capable of strolling through the town), Shelley, whose lameness kept him a prisoner to the hotel, took pen in hand and wrote his wife a remarkable epistle. Opening with an assurance that it is written, in order that she may realize how he holds her in remembrance, this epistle from Shelley to the wife he has left in England begins with ‘My dearest Harriett,’ and closes with a declaration of enduring affection for her:--a declaration preceded by a message of love to their sweet little Ianthe. ‘I write,’ he says, ‘to urge you to come to Switzerland, where you will, at least, find one firm and constant friend, to whom your interests will be always dear,--by whom your feelings will never be wilfully injured.’ It is scarcely conceivable that in his heart Shelley believed Harriett guilty of any heinous offence against his honour, when he thus begged her to join him in Switzerland. After chatting to her about the scenes and circumstances and incidents of her journey from Paris to the town where he is staying, Shelley enjoins Harriett ‘not to part with any of her money’ (words implying that he knows her to be in possession of a considerable sum), and bids her bring with her to Switzerland the two deeds which Tahourdin has been instructed to prepare for her. The settlement may have been a deed for her pecuniary benefit. The other two deeds may have been duplicates of an instrument, defining the terms of their separation, to which (I think) she may be regarded as having assented (in a legal sense) before Shelley left England. Thus Shelley wrote from Troyes to his wife, whom he hoped soon to have the pleasure of welcoming to some sweet retreat in the Swiss mountains.

By the writer of the well-known _Edinburgh_ ‘Shelley and Mary’ article, it is remarked of this letter,--

‘It is difficult to conceive anything more wild and impracticable--the more so as Shelley himself, travelling with another woman who was not his wife, invites his wife in terms of endearment to join him in Switzerland, which he had not reached, and where he was not going to stay. It is the scheme of a reckless child.’

Because this curious, scrambling tour, covered only forty-seven days, is it so certain that Shelley left England without any intention of remaining abroad for a longer period? Because he spent only ten days in Switzerland, does it follow that on the 13th of August he was going there _for_ no longer time? I venture to differ from the _Edinburgh_ writer. Taken by itself the letter is evidence, that on the 13th of August, Shelley hoped to make a sojourn of several months in Switzerland. Had he at that time intended to scamper into and out of the little Republic, after spending ten days within its bounds, he would scarcely (harum-scarum creature though he was) have entreated Harriett to come out to him. But there is other evidence that he hoped to be away from England for a longer time. The _History of a Six Weeks’ Tour_ abounds with indications that at the outset the tour was meant to cover several months instead of a few weeks. Leaving England with only a little money in his pocket, even Shelley would not have spent it so lavishly in posting from Calais, had he not hoped to find an abundant remittance for him at Paris. Instead of awaiting his arrival at the capital, the remittance did not come till he had waited for it several days, ‘in a kind of imprisonment.’ When it came the trio were disappointed by its smallness. Indicated by the epithet applied to the sum in the diary, this disappointment is revealed yet more fully by the fact that the smallness of the sum caused the trio immediately to alter their plans, and on the spur of the moment devise a scheme for a cheap walking-tour. Had they expected no more than 60_l._ they would have laid their plans for the cheap expedition on foot, whilst enduring the ‘kind of imprisonment.’ Between Troyes and Uri they were compelled to spend money much faster than they intended to spend it; a series of small and unforeseen misadventures diminishing the resources, which would otherwise have enabled them to stay longer in the country, where they hoped to make a temporary home. It is clear from the diary, that on the road from Troyes to Switzerland, they looked forward to Neufchatel as a place, where they would possibly find another remittance. Even on the 20th of August, after getting the 38_l._ in silver from the Neufchatel banker who afforded them relief, so far were they from thinking of a speedy return to England, that they ‘resolved to journey towards the lake of Uri, and seek in that romantic and interesting country some cottage where they might dwell in peace and solitude.’ In their account of the circumstances which compelled them to relinquish this delightful scheme, the diarists say, ‘Such were our dreams, which we should probably have realised, had it not been for the deficiency of that indispensable article--money, which obliged us to return to England.’ Even on the 26th of August, when they determine to run home as quickly and cheaply as possible on their remaining 28_l._, they are clinging to a hope of money from some uncertain source. ‘The 28_l._ which we possessed,’ they say, ‘was all the money that we could count upon _with any certainty_ until the following December.’ Hence there is less reason for astonishment, than the _Edinburgh_ Reviewer imagined, in the poet’s sufficiently staggering proposal to the ‘noble animal,’ who could neither ‘feel poetry’ nor ‘understand philosophy.’

Shelley having turned lame, Mary having failed from weakness, and Claire having had enough of trudging along hot roads, the remainder of the ‘Six Weeks’ Tour’ was made on wheels or by water. Selling their mule and saddle (at a sacrifice of several Napoleons) at Troyes, where they bought a four-wheeled vehicle for five Napoleons, and making a bad bargain with the impudent peasant, who agreed to convey them and their carriage with his own mule to Neufchatel, they pushed onwards to Switzerland, where they arrived, after a series of exasperating misadventures, to discover that enthusiasts for liberty may be exceedingly uncomfortable, though living within view of William Tell’s Chapel, and to discover at the end of ten days that, to escape absolute want, they had better hasten back to England. Taking the _diligence par eau_ at Lucerne, they made their way in uncongenial company along the Reuss to Loffenberg, pushed onwards in a leaky canoe to Mumph, and passed through divers discomforts _en route_ from Mumph to Basle. Leaving the Rhine at Bonn, they posted to Cologne, travelled by diligence to Cleves, and posted to Rotterdam. Detained by contrary winds for nearly two days at Marsluys, they had ample time for spending their last guinea at that scarcely genial place, whilst

‘reflecting with wonder that they had travelled eight hundred miles for less than thirty pounds, passing through lovely scenes, and enjoying the beauteous Rhine, and all the brilliant shows of earth and sky, perhaps more, travelling as they did, in an open boat, than if they had been shut up in a carriage, and passed on the road under the hills.’

On the third day after clearing away from Marsluys, they landed at Gravesend on the morning of the 13th of September, cold and miserably exhausted by an unusually rough passage.

Cheap touring now-a-days is more rough than nice. Seventy years since it was unutterably nasty. To realize what Shelley and the girls endured in their cheap and nasty tour, is to see our grandfathers and grandmothers did well to stay at home, when they could not afford to travel luxuriously. Journeying in the easiest carriages, sailing in the least crowded boats, resting at the best hotels, wealthy tourists had to endure no little rough usage and discomfort. But it makes the flesh creep to think how the poet, and Mary, and Claire, fared during the most disagreeable passages of their first Swiss trip. Eating coarse food they were often compelled to eat it in the company of quarrelsome peasants, heavy with drink and stinking of garlic. Even when they were not verminous, the beds offered to their weary limbs were comfortless and unalluring. More than once they remained all night in the open air rather than repose on the squalid couches of their inn’s worst room. At least on one occasion the hostess of a rural tavern told them that if they would go to bed, they must be content to do so in the same chamber as their coachman. At Brunen, on the lake of Lucerne, where they made a brief and feeble effort to settle, the best quarters they could get consisted of two unfurnished rooms in an old, ugly, and dilapidated chateau. The season was cold and rainy; and when they lit a fire in their living room, the big stove emitted so unwholesome and stifling a warmth, they were forced to throw open the windows to the bleak and penetrating wind.

In compensation for serious and sometimes disgusting discomforts, they experienced those excitements that are enjoyed in the highest degree only by young, hopeful, and imaginative tourists, moving through new scenes of surpassing loveliness. From the Alps and the German vineyards, the Swiss lakes and the glorious Rhine, Shelley returned to England with memories, to which we are indebted for much of the finest poetry of _Alastor_. Ever and again, too, in the pages of the _Six Weeks’ Tour_, the tourists are seen in the enjoyment of pleasures that, instead of being derived from the surrounding scenery, were only heightened by the influence of its beauties. On their passage, in a boat laden with merchandise, from Basle to Mayence, whilst the sun shone pleasantly, Shelley read Mary Wollstonecraft’s _Letters from Norway_ to the girls, who listened with delight to a book that was new literature to them.

Landing at Gravesend without three halfpence in their pockets, and leaving Gravesend in debt to the captain of the vessel that had brought them from Holland, the trio made their way back to London. It was a doleful return for the two girls, neither of whom had courage or inclination to go to the home, from which they had fled so shamefully less than seven weeks since. As though it were a matter about which his readers might be doubtful, Mr. Kegan Paul is at pains to record, that, ‘Godwin’s irritation and displeasure at the step his daughter had taken were extreme.’ ‘Irritation’ and ‘displeasure’ are no terms to describe the veteran’s indignation at the young man who, after eating his bread and salt, and affecting for successive years to sit meekly at his feet, in the character of an idolizing and grateful disciple, had seduced his only daughter. Let there be an end of the dishonest endeavours to gloss the blackest business of Shelley’s life into a venial indiscretion, to colour and tone it into a pretty piece of domestic romance. Truth and morality require that this spade should be called by no other name.

It is noteworthy that the persons who have displayed the most zeal and ingenuity in glossing and colouring Shelley’s seduction of Mary Godwin into a romantic and innocent love-passage, are the very persons who have been most ostentatious of their righteous indignation and disgust at Byron’s profligacy. In my _Real Lord Byron_ I gave due prominence (some of my critics thought me guilty of giving excessive prominence) to his successive acts of libertinism. But I know of nothing in the whole record of Byron’s profligacies, that is comparable for deceit and treachery with Shelley’s course of action to his familiar friend’s daughter. Had Byron acted towards the daughter of any one of his intimate friends precisely as Shelley acted to Mary Godwin, what a noise the Shelleyan enthusiasts would have made about his treacherous profligacy!

In dealing with Shelley’s conduct to his familiar friend’s sixteen-years-old daughter, the Shelleyan Socialists will not touch the questions at issue, by urging that he was unhappy with his wife; by showing that he had good (_even the gravest_) reasons for dissatisfaction with her; or by arguing that good and wise men have distinguished themselves by benevolence to their species, and laboured with eminent advantage to their fellow-creatures, whilst associating conjugally with women who were not their wives. Every one knows that men of exemplary beneficence, whose services to their species are commemorated in the brightest pages of its history, have lived amiably and usefully in the closest domestic union with women to whom they were not lawfully wedded. The question is not whether or no, after discovering real cause for quarrel with his wife, and finding himself unable to live happily with her, he would, after a considerable lapse of time, have been justified in going to a woman (already in the maturity of intellect and of years) and saying to her, ‘I made, in my boyhood, a miserable marriage, from which I cannot get legal release. You know every particular of my story; nothing of it has been withheld from you. Your age and your experience qualify you to estimate the nature, and magnitude, and consequences of the sacrifice I ask of you. As far as any woman can be in such a position, you are in a position to justify you in ministering to my happiness, in contravention of human laws and social sentiment. My prayer is that you may love me as I love you, and will grant me all that my love requires of you. But in consideration of the enormity of the sacrifice you will make of your interests in yielding to my prayer, I cannot allow you to consent impulsively, but beg you to ponder my proposal with all possible calmness before you answer.’ The question is not raised whether or no Shelley, some ten or twenty years after his complete separation from Harriett, might have spoken in this way to a woman some thirty years of age.

Nor will the Shelleyan apologists touch the main question by repeating one of their favourite pleas in Shelley’s behalf, viz., that, if he was wrong in stealthily carrying off his friend’s child, he believed himself quite right in doing so. It is curious that the lady, who in her girlhood was thus dealt with by her future husband, should have been the originator of the extraordinary plea. In her note to _Alastor_, Mrs. Shelley remarks of her husband, that ‘in all he did, he, at the time of doing it, believed himself justified to his own conscience.’ What makes this curious plea especially deserving of notice is its truth. As soon as Shelley wished to do a thing, it was manifest to him that he had a right to do it; and having done the thing (however wrong it might be), he could commend himself for virtue in having done it. Peacock tells a curious story, that may be repeated in illustration of Shelley’s readiness to discover a good motive, to justify anything he had a humour to do. One fine day in the early summer (probably of 1815), the two friends were walking through a village where there was a good vicarage-house, whose front wall was covered with corchorus in full bloom. In his delight at the pleasant house and garden, and the picturesque church near at hand, Shelley remarked seriously, ‘I feel strongly inclined to enter the church.’

‘What,’ said Peacock, ‘to become a clergyman, with your ideas of the faith?’

Instead of admitting that a man of his views would be a miserable impostor to take orders for the sake of a good benefice, Shelley answered, ‘Assent to the supernatural part of it is merely technical. Of the moral doctrines of Christianity I am a more decided example than many of its more ostentatious professors. And consider for a moment how much good a good clergyman can do.... It is an admirable institution that admits the possibility of diffusing such men over the surface of the land. And am I to deprive myself of the advantages of this admirable institution, because there are certain technicalities to which I cannot give my adhesion, but I need not bring prominently forward?’

This notion of entering the church was nothing more than a passing fancy; but with Shelley to entertain the notion was to discover virtuous reasons for acting on the immoral fancy. All through life Shelley thought of himself and his doings in this self-justificatory fashion. Whatever he said or did was right to be said and done. In a former chapter it has been remarked how Shelley resembled Byron in being a sentimental egotist; and how the egotism of the one poet differed from the egotism of the other. Whilst it delighted Byron to figure as the man of sin, Shelley sided with angels and asked the world to worship him for his celestial qualities. Whilst Byron delighted in painting himself blacker than he was, Shelley never wearied of proclaiming himself a creature of angelic purity and whiteness. Both were actors desirous of being mistaken for the characters they assumed; each of them having selected his part in obedience to his natural disposition; Byron wishing to be thought romantically wicked, because wickedness had a fascination for him, whilst Shelley wished to be thought romantically virtuous, because he had a genuine preference for goodness.

Insincere on the surface, the affectation of either poet had its source in sincerity. In some respects Byron’s affectation was the more piquant, from being so much more unusual than Shelley’s affectation. Whilst Shelley’s affectation was commonplace hypocrisy, expressing itself in the finest figures of poetry, Byron’s hypocrisy was so much out of the ordinary course of things as to be almost unique. Harness designated it ‘hypocrisy reversed.’ It was hypocrisy turned inside out. And anything, from a philosopher’s argument to a fop’s dress suit, on being turned inside out, is for a while more attractive and entertaining than when it is displayed in the usual and proper way. To hear a man credit himself with virtues he does not possess, one has only to stand with open ears at the corner of any market, where people are noisily employed in over-reaching one another. But it is rare, and because rare it is amusing and piquant, to find a man chiefly desirous of persuading his neighbours that he is a very much worse man than he really is. England will hold her own amongst the nations of the earth for several centuries, without producing another great poet so enamoured and ambitious as Byron was of evil fame; but every generation of her past or future story has produced, or will produce, a poet with Shelley’s disposition to think and speak too well of himself. It may, however, be questioned whether England will, in the coming time, ever produce a poet so supremely great in his art, and at the time so supremely self-righteous as the author of _Laon and Cythna_.

It is not surprising that William Godwin could not recognize a possible Saviour of the World in his daughter’s captor. It is not surprising that for some time he refused to speak with Shelley, or to correspond with him, except through a solicitor. The worm turns when it is trodden upon. Even a philosopher may be excused for showing he participates in the infirmities of ‘the slavish multitude,’ when the young man he has cherished affectionately repays his kindness by bringing his only daughter to shame. It is not surprising that, to the hour of the poet’s death, Godwin thought of him bitterly and resentfully as an evil man. Even to his daughter, after he had taken her back to his heart, the poor author and struggling bookseller never disguised from her his low opinion of the man who in undue course became his son-in-law. Writing to her on 9th September, 1819, he said, ‘What is it you want that you have not? You have the husband of your choice, to whom you are unalterably attached, a man of high intellectual attainments, _whatever I, and some other persons_, may think of his morality, and the defects under this last head, if they be not (as you seem to think) imaginary, at least do not operate as towards you.’ From these words, written to his child about her husband, it may be inferred what Godwin thought of his son-in-law’s morals, and said of them to people less sensitive than Mary for the poet’s honour, and less entitled to the old man’s consideration. So much has been written gushingly about the sweetness of Shelley’s temper, it is well to observe that Godwin (who may be supposed to have known it better than any of the poet’s eulogists) wrote to his wife on 14th May, 1817, ‘I knew that Shelley’s temper was occasionally fiery, resentful and indignant!’

No doubt, Shelley in later time helped Godwin on several occasions with money. It even appears that in the winter of 1814-15, whilst Godwin was holding to his purpose of having no renewal of friendly intercourse with him, Shelley, in the midst of urgent embarrassments, managed to borrow 90_l._, which was sent to the relief of the old man, who was in financial distress. As the moneys with which he at divers times saved Mary’s father from bankruptcy, were for the most part, if not altogether, obtained from money-lenders on post-obits or on loans at heavy interest, charged on the estates A and B, the amount for which Shelley rendered himself liable for Godwin’s advantage greatly exceeded the sum that came to the veteran from his son-in-law. The smaller of the two sums was, however, a large one. One could wish, for his credit’s sake, that Godwin had never yielded to necessity so far as to take a single guinea from his daughter’s husband. It would be easier to respect the veteran had he surrendered his stock to his creditors, and lived again at the point of pen, rather than take money from the man who led Mary from the way of womanly duty. But Godwin was now growing old; his powers and spirit were failing; and there is nothing so likely as financial distress to deaden a man’s sense of honour. Under that demoralizing distress, poor Godwin deteriorated lamentably. Several considerations may, however, be urged in palliation of the incidents that exposed him to the charge of receiving pecuniary compensation for loss of honour. He had a wife and a young son still upon his hands; the character of his business encouraged him to hope that even yet it would prove more remunerative; and the money he should not have accepted, may well have seemed to him to come not so much from his son-in-law as from his prosperous daughter. He may well have felt that in refusing to be helped by her, he should be reminding her ungenerously of what was shameful in her ability to help him. In considering these pecuniary transactions, readers should make an effort to dismiss Shelley from their minds, and as far as possible think only of the father and daughter.

On returning to London from the six weeks’ tour, Shelley lost no time in calling on his wife, who, by receiving his visit, may be said to have justified Mary Godwin in remarking in her diary, that Harriett was ‘certainly a very odd creature.’ This visit to Harriett is said to have been paid by Shelley on the day following his arrival at Gravesend; and as Harriett was at that time living under her father’s roof in Chapel Street, the fair presumption (in the absence of direct evidence to the contrary) is that the husband and wife saw one another at her father’s house. It is also certain that in several ensuing months Shelley not only displayed a desire to live on a friendly footing with Harriett, but that she consented to his desire so far as to allow him to call upon her, and in divers ways to make arrangements for her comfort. Whether Mary Godwin called on Harriett does not appear; but from an entry of her diary, it is obvious she was disposed to do so. It is scarcely conceivable (though strange things are conceivable of the Shelleys) that the project for calling on her would have been seriously entertained until Harriett’s feelings had been, at least, sounded by Shelley, in order to discover whether it would be agreeable to his wife to receive a call from his mistress. If the visit was paid, and, moreover, paid to, and received by, Harriett under her father’s roof, the affair involved a curious position, and showed that the Westbrooks resembled the poet in disregard of conventional propriety. That the intercourse, which certainly took place at this period between Shelley and Harriett, was fruitful of much enjoyment to either of them is not to be imagined. Some of their interviews were by no means agreeable to the sensibilities of the young husband, who on returning from one of them (an interview that _is said_ to have taken place on the day following that of the birth of Harriett’s son), complained bitterly to Mary of Harriett’s demeanour to him. Possibly the mother of Shelley’s heir was not without materials for a countercharge of the same nature against the young poet, whom she had just presented with an heir to the Castle Goring baronetcy. Anyhow, excuses may be made for the young wife and mother (still only nineteen years of age), should she be proved to have spoken tartly to the young husband, who had come straight from his mistress’s lodgings to congratulate her on so interesting an occasion. The matter of chief importance about these interviews is, that they were made: that Shelley paid and Harriett received the visits,--a fact fully justifying certain of Shelley’s biographers in averring that she assented to his withdrawal from her bed, and that the separation was an affair of mutual consent. Under these circumstances, as I have already remarked, to produce a regular deed of separation would not be to give a new colour to the arrangement.

There is some uncertainty as to the precise date of Charles Bysshe Shelley’s birth. As the matter is of slight or no importance, I have not been at much pains to ascertain the very day on which Shelley’s son by Harriett was born. Writing from the Field Place MSS., the writer of the _Edinburgh_, ‘Shelley and Mary’ article, says that the poet’s first-born son was born ‘about December 1st,’--a statement following immediately upon the writer’s testimony that, according to Mary Godwin’s diary, Harriett left her father’s house on the 20th of October preceding her accouchement; and that, on so leaving her father’s house, she went to some place alike unknown to both keepers of the joint-diary. Anyhow, there is small reason for doubt that the boy was born in his maternal grandfather’s house in Chapel Street. To this point, Miss Westbrook (in her second affidavit in the memorable proceedings in Chancery, dated 13th January, 1817) speaks precisely. Affidavits are sometimes loosely drawn; but it is in the highest degree improbable that Miss Westbrook would have signed under oath a statement that her nephew was born in her father’s house, and her own home, unless she remembered him to have been born there. It is no less improbable that Miss Westbrook’s memory could have betrayed her on such a point. Consequently, _if_ Harriett’s boy by Shelley was born about 1st December, 1814 (as the Field Place evidences are said to show), and _if_ (as the same evidences are said to show) Harriett left her father’s house on the previous 20th October, 1814, she must have returned to her old home in Chapel Street on some day before the birth of her son.

Whilst he was rendering scarcely acceptable civilities to his wife, Shelley was not without sentimental embarrassments in the lodgings where he was living with Mary and Claire,--embarrassments arising chiefly from Claire’s inability to concur with him respecting the proper limits of his affectionateness for her. The bright, witty, vivacious girl, who had favoured and furthered his suit to Mary, and, deserting her mother, had decided to share the fortunes of the two Free Lovers, saw much to disapprove, and something to resent, in Shelley’s purpose to treat her merely as a friend who had rendered him sisterly service. It does not appear from the record in what particulars Claire felt herself aggrieved; and in the absence of definite information, readers must be left to imagine her grounds for discontent with Percy’s treatment of her. The lady so recently initiated into the principles of Free Love, may possibly have conceived that its freedom should be limitless. If she was guilty of so great a mistake, it may be pleaded in her excuse that she had been carried somewhat too quickly through a course of reading, not unlikely to fill her young mind with wild and preposterous imaginations. In justice to this girl of seventeen summers, it should be remembered that in the autumn of 1814 she had been for some months drinking deeply and incessantly of a new and perilous philosophy. The sharer of her sister’s training for the higher life, Claire had studied _Queen Mab_ with its Notes, perused Mary Wollstonecraft’s delightful letters to Gilbert Imlay, pondered William Godwin’s arguments against marriage, and enlarged her views of life by earnest application to the Chevalier Lawrence’s elegant work on _The Empire of the Nairs_. Sure evidence exists that, in the summer and early autumn, all this stimulating and wildly delusive literature was offered to the consideration of the two sisters; and it cannot be doubted that, whenever they needed larger enlightenment and more exact guidance on questions rising from the texts of the various authors, the girls carried their difficulties to a tutor who was only too happy to give them more precise instruction. There is no lack of evidence that Shelley and the girls went together through this disturbing literature. In a few months the girls had learnt why chastity should be deemed a monkish superstition; why conjugal constancy ceases to be virtuous when it ceases to be agreeable; why love should be lawless. Is it strange that the instruction afforded to Claire during her passage through such literature, not only by the books themselves, but also by the more exciting than wholesome conversations arising from them, was fruitful of misconceptions and wild fancies in her ardent brain? Mr. Froude is of opinion that by thus declaring her approval of ‘community of women,’ Claire ‘scandalized even Shelley himself,’ and proved herself a phenomenally impure and vicious girl. To me, on the contrary, the declaration of so repulsive a sentiment only shows how greatly Claire was mentally disturbed and morally injured, at least for the moment, by the literature and vein of thought to which Shelley had introduced her.

Was a young man ever in a stranger complication of sentimental embarrassments than Shelley, living in lodgings with a mistress to whom he was passionately attached, and her sister so incapable of mere friendship, whilst he was paying visits of affectionate courtesy to his young wife on the point of giving birth to his first-born son, or already dandling the little one in her arms? Whatever the uncertainty respecting his feelings for Harriett, the position of affairs at his lodgings is clearly defined. Whilst he would fain cherish Claire with tender and affectionate friendship, she requires more than friendship of him. On finding that Claire requires more of his consideration and sympathy than fidelity to the girl who has sacrificed her honour for his happiness will allow him to give her, he retires into his sentimental shell, in respect to the girl of southern complexion and Italian fervour, resolving for the future to bear himself towards her with circumspection, reserve, and even coldness. Aware of Claire’s extravagant desire and pretensions, Mary is of course on Shelley’s side and encourages him to persist in the attitude, which, of course, appears to her most favourable to domestic virtue. Being in possession of his heart, she, of course, has no wish to share it with Claire, and resents Claire’s claim for a part of it as unendurable presumption.

Had Mary been in Claire’s place, and Claire in her sister’s position, it is possible Mary would have been guilty of Claire’s egregious misconceptions, and Claire would have been on the side of domestic virtue. But having all she wanted Mary was preserved from the erroneous conclusions, to which new and exciting literature had reduced her sister-by-affinity. Possessing Percy’s undivided love Mary was saved from Claire’s painful misconceptions by a natural selfishness,--the vice that so often renders virtue efficient service. This was the position at Percy’s lodgings,--a position that, promising much sentimental disturbance and successive outbreaks of emotional energy, in due course fulfilled the promise.