CHAPTER XVI.

CLOSING SCENES.

Shelley’s Attachment to Jane Williams--Her Womanly Goodness--Her Devotion to her Husband--_The Serpent is shut out from Paradise_--_Essay on the Devil_--Shelley’s Happiness and Discord with Mary--Her Remorseful Verses--Trials of her Married Life--_Essay on Christianity_--San Terenzo and Lerici--The Casa Magni--Mary’s Illness and Melancholy at San Terenzo--Arrival of the ‘Don Juan’--Mutual Affection of Mrs. Shelley and Mrs. Williams--Shelley’s latest Visions and Hallucinations--Leigh Hunt’s Arrival in Italy--Shelley sails for Leghorn--Meeting of Shelley and Hunt--Improvement in Shelley’s Health--His Mediation between Hunt and Byron--The Hunts in the Palazzo Lanfranchi--Lady Shelley’s Account of the Difficulties between Byron and Shelley--Shelley’s Contentment with his Arrangements for the Hunts--He sets Sail for Lerici--The Fatal Storm--Cremation on the Sea-shore--Grave at Rome.

The time has come for a few more words about Shelley’s attachment to Jane Williams,--the last of the series of fair women who successively inspired him with feelings of adorative fondness, that, differing widely from such love as animated Byron towards his several mistresses, differed no less widely from the placid preferences of passionless friendship. No sympathetic student of the poet’s character and story can entertain even a momentary suspicion of the refinement and purity of Shelley’s regard for the gentle and fine-natured woman, to whom he addressed the saddest and sweetest poetry of his life’s closing term. To say this of the feelings that swayed his soul in all its successive services of homage towards his friend’s wife, is indeed to say no more than I would declare of each and all of the so-called platonic attachments that preceded his worship of Jane Williams.

I have no shadow of a doubt that the always abundant and sometimes glowing fervour of these attachments was never touched for a single instant by desire. On this point my confidence proceeds no less from my clear apprehension of the peculiarity which I venture to designate Shelley’s prime physical defect, than from an equally precise perception of his sentimental idiosyncrasy. But in respect to some of these so-called platonic attachments, this conviction is raised to still higher certainty by the conditions, under which Shelley approached the objects of his sentimental preference, or by the characteristics of the women he distinguished so highly. Though it would be absurd to infer anything from the moral rectitude or the delicacy of the young lady, who asked money of her poetical worshiper, and passed from her convent into wedlock only to be separated from her husband, after leading him (to use Mrs. Shelley’s expression) ‘a devil of a life’ for a very brief while, the conditions, under which Shelley was permitted to have personal intercourse with Emilia Viviani, put it beyond question that, in their curious intimacy, he never strayed beyond the lines of social decorum and conventional propriety. In the case of Emilia’s successor, confidence in the purity of Shelley’s passion, and in the delicacy of his addresses, is raised even higher,--is raised, indeed, to absolute certainty,--by the moral excellences of the lady, and all her domestic circumstances, as well as by all the other conditions and features of a friendship that, even in the tenderest and warmest of its emotional developments, could not have been more innocent had Shelley been a woman.

In some particulars the last of Shelley’s spiritual passions resembled his wilder and more tumultuous idolatry of Emilia Viviani. Just as he worshipt Emilia because fancy tricked him into thinking her a realization of his long-cherished ideal of all that was or could be admirable in womankind, he idolized Jane Williams as an example of the particular type of feminine loveliness that swayed his imagination whilst he was composing _The Sensitive Plant_. Whilst he worshipt Jane as the veritable realization of a pure anticipatory cognition, even as he had worshipt Emilia a year earlier for her imaginary correspondence to a more comprehensive conception of feminine excellence, Shelley rendered the homage of his spiritual devotion to Mrs. Williams in a way that reminds one of his manner of wooing Emilia. Associating his wife with himself in his addresses to Emilia, he made Jane’s husband a sympathetic co-operator in his addresses to Mrs. Williams, by selecting him for the fittest possible confidant of his affectionate regard for the lady, and even inducing him to act as the medium through which she received his friend’s adoration. There were indeed occasions when Williams and his wife were in this manner rendered the joint-recipients of the homage which she alone evoked, Mary being, at the same time, imperfectly cognizant of the course of the platonic suit to which Jane’s husband consented. In a former page I spoke of the affair with Emilia Viviani as a kind of three-cornered flirtation. The same term is applicable to the affair in which Edward Williams was scarcely less a principal than his wife and Shelley. The two three-cornered flirtations differed, however, in the fact that the later of them had a deeply interested, though by no means equally gratified, spectator of something of the proceedings. This spectator was Mary, who, whilst cognizant of the general progress of what she cannot be supposed to have approved, was kept wholly in the dark as to some of its incidents. Whilst Williams consented sympathetically to an affair of which he knew every particular, Mrs. Shelley consented submissively (though, of course, by no means cheerfully) to an affair respecting which she was far from fully informed.

On 26th January, 1822, when no breath of discord had yet ruffled his relations with Byron, Shelley, from his own apartment in the same house in which the Williamses had a set of rooms (a house on the Lung’Arno, but divided by the river from Byron’s palazzo), sent Williams _The Serpent is shut out from Paradise_, together with the characteristic note, which instructed Williams, that he might read to ‘Jane, but to no one else,’ the poem, containing the confession:

‘Therefore, if now I see you seldomer, Dear friends, dear _friend_! know that I only fly Your looks, because they stir Grief that should sleep, and hopes that cannot die: The very comfort that they minister I scarce can bear, yet I, So deeply is the arrow gone, Should quickly perish if it were withdrawn.

When I return to my cold home, you ask Why I am not as I have ever been. _You_ spoil me for the task Of acting a forced part in life’s dull scene,-- Of wearing on my brow the idle mask Of author, great or mean, In the world’s carnival. I sought Peace thus, and, but in you, I found it not.’

The little effort of literary mystification, to be observed in the note which accompanied these verses to Edward Williams, affords another point of resemblance between the Emilia-Viviani affair and the affair with Jane Williams. Just as the _Epipsychidion_ was offered to the public with a preface which attributed the composition to the real author’s ‘unfortunate friend’ who ‘died at Florence, as he was preparing for a voyage to one of the wildest of the Sporades,’ the verses are offered to Edward Williams as poetry taken from the portfolio in which the poet’s friend used ‘to keep his verses,’--the object of this misrepresentation to Williams and Jane, who were in the real author’s confidence, being less than obvious. Given, of course, for a reason no less sufficient than manifest, the direction that the verses should be shown to _no one but Jane_ was, no doubt, duly observed by the receivers of the poem. Williams, in his diary, may well have styled the verses ‘beautiful, but too melancholy lines.’ One can imagine how commiseratingly the happy husband and wife (to whom the verses were sent, or rather the husband _through_ whom the verses were transmitted, and the wife _to_ whom they were addressed) spoke of the wretchedness of their friend who, in his inability to find contentment, such as their own mutual happiness, in the society of his Mary, spoke of his chambers in the same house (the Tre Palazzi) as his ‘cold home.’ It is certainly less surprising that Shelley desired the verses to be withheld from Mary, than that he was so communicative respecting the cheerlessness of the apartment, of which she was the mistress.

A brief note on the poem’s first line (‘The serpent is shut out from Paradise’), written at a time when it was Byron’s humour to call Shelley ‘the serpent’ or ‘the snake.’ Accepting the title in good part, and indeed as a compliment, Shelley, only a few weeks before sending the verses to the Williamses, had written to Byron about the culprit, who was _not_ burned at Lucca for scattering the eucharistic wafers from the altar, ‘I hear this morning that the design, which certainly had been in contemplation, of _burning my fellow serpent_, has been abandoned, and that he has been condemned to the galleys.’ Knowing how Shelley regarded the serpent as typical of the wisdom, that is especially hateful to bigots, and delighted in regarding himself as akin to the serpent in being largely endowed with the same wisdom, Byron had of course more reasons for calling him ‘the snake’ than he troubled himself to declare, when he observed ‘_Goethe’s Mephistofilus_ calls the serpent who tempted Eve “my aunt the renowned snake”; and I always insist that Shelley is nothing but one of her nephews, _walking about on the tip of his tail_’; a peculiarly Byronic flippancy that appears in the concluding paragraph of Shelley’s _Essay on the Devil_--‘... before this misconduct it hopped along upon its tail; a mode of progression which, if I was a serpent, I should think the severer punishment of the two.’

Few readers will question that this remarkable coincidence of humour and verbal form in the Byronic utterance and the Shelleyan essay (an essay withheld from the public eye long after the death of both poets) should be deemed a clear indication, that Byron either perused the essay or was the originator of at least one of its humorous sallies. If Byron did not take the thought and words from the essay, Shelley must be assumed to have taken them from him. To the present writer the coincidence is part of the superabundant evidence that, Byron was accountable for the piquancy, incisiveness, and Don-Juanesque levity that distinguish the _Essay on the Devil_ from all Shelley’s other prose productions. For the purpose of exalting the younger at the expense of the elder poet, many extravagant things have been written about Shelley’s influence on Byron. That Shelley influenced Byron greatly is unquestionable, but it is not to be supposed the influences arising from the close, and for a while harmonious, intercourse of the two poets, were altogether one-sided,--that whilst receiving much from his familiar companion, Byron gave him nothing. The _Essay on Christianity_ and the _Essay on the Devil_ are distinctly assignable to the same period of Shelley’s literary productiveness; and to turn from the one to the other, is to pass from the society of the Real Shelley, to the society of Shelley speaking under the inspiration of Byronic mockery.

At this late point of their brief association, when he is under the sway of a spiritual attachment that endured till his death, and she is regarding his services of homage to her familiar friend, the occasion rises for inquiring, whether Mary has experienced an average share of felicity since she eloped from the old home in Skinner Street? whether Shelley has been to her all she hoped of him, when she took the momentous step of July, 1814? whether, in addition to trouble, for which he is in no degree to be held responsible, she has endured trouble he either caused her, or might have preserved her from? whether her anticipations of felicity from their association have been realized? whether, in brief, their marriage has been a happy one?

Much has been written of the perfect happiness that came to both Shelley and Mary from their association. It has been proclaimed by romantic biography that the soul of each found its perfect complement in the other’s soul, that their conjugal intimacy was singularly felicitous, and that, whilst they dwelt together in harmony seldom accorded to spouses, neither was ever for a single moment disappointed in the other. The present writer ventures to declare no less confidently that their marriage was by no means remarkable for happiness,--that they were not a well-mated couple.

In respect to intellectual endowments and sympathy, it cannot be questioned for a moment that Shelley was more fitly matched with Mary Godwin than with Harriett Westbrook; but mental unison is not sufficient for perfect conjugal concord. I do not suggest that during the eight years’ interval between their elopement and Shelley’s death they ceased to care for one another. On the contrary, I have no doubt that, loving him with girlish vehemence in the summer of 1814, Mary loved Shelley at the bottom of her heart till the summer of 1822, though (we have her word for it) she sometimes behaved to him so as to imply that his felicity was by no means her chief concern. I have also no doubt, that Shelley never survived his affectionate concern for Mary, though he cannot have delighted in her greatly when he sighed to Emilia, and instructed the Williamses not to let his wife suspect how much happier he was in their rooms of the Tre Palazzi than in his own apartment. It is possible for a married couple to be held strongly by a deep-seated sentiment of mutual dependence, and yet to live on uneasy, and even exasperating, terms, with one another. It was so, at times, with Shelley and Mary. Knowledge comes to the student of human nature from observing how deep-seated attachment sometimes survives superficial sympathy in mated couples. Superficial sympathy must have perished from the mutual regard of Mary and Shelley, when he looked to other women for the higher felicity she was powerless to afford him. Yet they persisted in loving one another at the bottom of their hearts.

Apart from her reasonable grounds of complaint against her husband, Mrs. Shelley was a woman whose lot was fruitful of trouble and trial. Her health was far from good, and during the eight years of her connection with Shelley she endured five (including her miscarriage at San Terenzo) of those illnesses, which, though desired by wives who have never had experience of them, are by no means conducive to physical vigour. She gave birth to four children, and wept over the graves of three of them, losing two of them when they had lived long enough to gain firm hold of her heart. Her grief at the last of these bereavements was excessive. An ardent and strongly affectionate creature (how could Mary Wollstonecraft’s daughter be otherwise?), she had in girlhood loved her father and her sisters vehemently. Her half-sister had perished dismally. Through Claire’s too fervid temper, and the successive ill-consequences of her luckless alliance with Byron, Mary had (to put the case mildly) derived more vexation than contentment from her close intercourse with her sister-by-affinity. Loving her old father and wishing him well, she was continually receiving doleful intelligence from England that, instead of mending, his affairs grew steadily more desperate. Pining for the diversions of society, she had often fretted at being excluded from it in foreign capitals, no less than in her native country. It was also against the contentment of this unwilling exile from England, that during her successive illnesses and her trials with her children, she never had the consolations of a home, worthy to be called a home. To render existence fairly comfortable in any transient abiding-place, more especially when the abiding-place is a single set of rooms, it is needful for a woman to be an adept in housewifely arts and the smaller domestic economies. But the woman who in her girlhood shirked the matters of the house, to which her step-mother wished her to give attention, was as shiftless and helpless a home-keeper as John Westbrook’s daughter. From this lack of housewifely knowingness and capacity, she suffered much and Shelley not a little. One would fain forget that the poet, who has done so much for the happiness of English firesides, never knew the comforts of a home, after passing from Field Place, and that he suffered in this respect chiefly through the incompetence of his wives, both of whom he took from a social grade in which to keep house cleverly is woman’s first duty. Due in no small measure to nervous fancies, Shelley’s bodily ailments were due in a larger degree to comfortless feeding. At the same time he suffered from causes, in respect to which his wife was blameless. His temperament would under any circumstances have exposed him to sudden visitations of melancholy; and in the memories that haunted him--memories of the kindred from whom he had estranged himself, and the poor girl who drowned herself in the Serpentine--he had constant sources of sadness.

Even if they had been altogether fitted to one another, Shelley and Mary would in their Italian life have missed the average of connubial enjoyment. But they were not precisely adapted to one another. Whilst his taste was for studious or meditative seclusion, she had been designed by nature for a career of action and gaiety. ‘She,’ Shelley once said to Trelawny, ‘can’t bear solitude, nor I society--the quick coupled with the dead,’ When he was pining for green fields or sea-breezes, she thought of ball-rooms and assemblies. Under the most auspicious influences their contrarieties of temper would have brought them into conflict. Habitual melancholy is perhaps the most trying temper in a husband, for a wife to endure with patient cheerfulness; and though it was relieved by occasional moods of blithesomeness and jubilant elation, despondency was Shelley’s normal condition in his later years. Whilst he harassed Mary with unseasonable and bootless moanings, she worried him with the perversities of her Wollstonecraft vehemence and captiousness,--with the temper that disposed all the Wollstonecrafts to discover egregious insults in trivial slights, and imagine themselves the victims of human malignity whenever the wind blew from the wrong point of the compass.

In other respects Shelley was a trying husband, in whom Mary had reason to be disappointed. At an early stage of their association she discovered how little reliance could be placed on the accuracy of his statements; a cruel mortification for the girl, who had sacrificed so much for him in her romantic belief of all he told her. Natural annoyance at this discovery can have been only mitigated by her ability to refer all his inaccuracies of statement to poetic imaginativeness. Throughout his time with her, Shelley was seeing visions which he mistook for real occurrences, and telling her stories at manifest discord with historic veracity.

Throughout this biography I have exercised a jealous caution in assigning biographical value to the egotisms of the Shelleyan verse, and have repeatedly cautioned readers against dealing with the poet’s references to his former experiences, as good evidence in respect to matters of fact. On the other hand I have not hesitated to regard his poetry as evidential of his temper and sentiment at the moment of its composition. It cannot be questioned that the _Stanzas, written in Dejection, near Naples_, were the result of sincere emotion, and could have been composed only in a mood of the profoundest melancholy. Nor can it be doubted that, whilst displaying the general state of feeling, the _Stanzas_ reflect no less faithfully the writer’s particular sentiments, during the sorrowful mood. How does Shelley write of himself in these memorable lines, when he had been connubially linked to William Godwin’s daughter for something less than three and a half years?

‘Alas! I have nor hope nor health, Nor peace within nor calm around, Nor that content surpassing wealth The sage in meditation found, And walked with inward glory crowned-- Nor fame, nor power, _nor love_, nor leisure; Others I see whom these surround-- Smiling they live, and call life pleasure:-- To me that cup has been dealt in another measure.’

Without declining to concur in Mr. Rossetti’s opinion, that Shelley did not _intend_ the reference to his love-less lot to reflect on his wife, I venture to say that, had he been sensible of owing much to her devotion, had she been to him the perpetual spring of gladness that a loving wife ever is to the man who loves her thoroughly, had their union been as felicitous as they hoped it to prove, he could not have thus spoken of himself as alike fameless, powerless, and _love-less_. I even go further, and say that, had their marriage been a happy one, Shelley in his miserable mood would have paused in the enumeration of divers woes, to render grateful acknowledgment of the solace he derived, in the midst of manifold sufferings, from the knowledge that he was _not_ unbeloved. It is also a matter of biographical significance that in 1821--the year in which his passion for Emilia Viviani was succeeded by his milder devotion to Jane Williams--Shelley wrote in _Ginevra_ of marriage as

‘life’s great cheat; a thing Bitter to taste, sweet in imagining,’--

words of melancholy meaning from the poet, who in the same year confided to the Williamses how wretched he was in his own home. Trelawny, whose acquaintance with Shelley was brief and not of a kind to render him the confidant of the poet’s most delicate secrets, saw enough of Mary’s relations with her husband to make him regard them as something less than altogether happy in their union. That the woman, who in her girlhood had sharp tiffs and lively altercations with her sister Claire, had similar differences with her husband--differences that of course arise frequently between husband and wife without extinguishing their mutual affection, but still differences that _do not_ arise between altogether congenial and happily mated couples--we know from Mrs. Shelley’s regretful and penitential verse. How did the sorrowing widow address the spirit of the husband whom she often worried with her perversities?--

‘Oh, gentle Spirit! * * * * * * * * * Now fierce remorse and unreplying death Waken a chord within my heart, whose breath, Thrilling and keen, in accents audible A tale of unrequited love doth tell. It was not anger,--while thy earthly dress Encompassed still thy soul’s rare loveliness, All anger was atoned by many a kind Caress or tear, that spoke the softened mind.-- It speaks of cold neglect, averted eyes, That blindly crushed thy soul’s fond sacrifice;-- My heart was all thine own,--but yet a shell Closed in it’s core, which seemed impenetrable, Till sharp-toothed misery tore the husk in twain, Which gaping lies, nor may unite again. Forgive me!’

(_Vide_ Mrs. Shelley’s _The Choice_, a poem of 159 verses, printed in