Chapter IX: Bishopgate (1)

Pecuniary Difficulties and Resources--Choice of a Profession--Shelley
walking a Hospital--Dropt by Acquaintances--Birth of Mary Godwin’s
first Child--Sir Bysshe Shelley’s Death--Differences and Tiffs between
Mary and Claire--Characteristics of the Sisters--Trip to South
Devon--At Work on _Alastor_--Publication of the Poem--_Essay on
Christianity_--Life at Bishopgate--Shelley’s Idolatry of Byron--Birth
of Mary Godwin’s first-born Son--Claire and Byron--Second Trip to
Switzerland--Shelley’s Pretext for leaving England--Strange Scene
between Shelley and Peacock--Semi-Delusions--Another Hallucination.

So much fantastic stuff has been written about Shelley’s poverty at manhood’s threshold, and the sufferings which came to him from his father’s cruel parsimony, that it is well to observe he never made a close and enduring acquaintance with the penury, which has nursed so many rhymesters into poets of deathless song. Poverty is of course a comparative term. In the story of Shelley’s career it must be construed as little more than a figure of speech. In Poland Street he was supplied bountifully with money by relatives and other friends. From the date of the arrangement, to which the Squire was a party not long after his boy’s expulsion from Oxford, he enjoyed a sufficient and even liberal allowance, till he ran off to Scotland with Harriett; and from the day of the elopement till the moment of his withdrawal from his first wife he had an adequate income, and the means of living far beyond it. Between 28th July and 13th September, 1814, he spent (in ready money) 98_l._, besides the money with which he journeyed from London to Calais and posted from Calais to Paris. The young man who spent money at this rate, like most other outrunners of the constable, was often without money in hand for the requirements of his wasteful career,--often without a guinea in his pocket. But it is absurd to assign to poverty the immediate results of habitual prodigality. If he ever suffered from what can be fairly styled poverty, the brief experience belonged to the period between his return from the Continent in September, 1814, and the early month of the ensuing year, when by accepting the easy terms offered to him by his father with the Duke of Norfolk’s approval, he stept into a clear revenue of 1000_l._ a-year. In compliance with the arrangement which afforded him this assured allowance during his father’s life, the poet surrendered only a small portion of his interest in the settled estates, A and B.

At divers times between September, 1814, and the arrangement which afforded him a thousand a-year, Shelley doubtless endured numerous annoyances and humiliations from want of money. Once and again he was tracked by bailiffs; and as often he was constrained to keep away from his lodgings and conceal himself from the emissaries of the law. There were days together during which he and Mary could safely meet one another only by appointment at places away from her abode. But even at these hard times he could raise money for his immediate necessities, albeit at heavy rates of interest. The poet, who in the time of his most urgent need of money could give Mary Godwin 90_l._ for the mitigation of her father’s pecuniary distress, knew nothing of biting penury, little of vexatious poverty, even when his difficulties were at their worst. Still it cannot be questioned that in the winter of 1814-15, Shelley was so sensibly touched by pecuniary trouble as to awake from the golden dreams which had so long given him a delusive view of his financial position, and to think he should in common prudence qualify himself to earn his living in one of the liberal professions.

By this time his debts were no less considerable than harassing; and he had discovered that no sum he could raise in the money-market on his expectations would satisfy the demands of his numerous creditors, and afford a surplus sufficient for his maintenance in scholarly idleness. In the previous spring a lawyer, whom he had consulted on the state of his affairs, described him in a professional letter as having ‘used the utmost of his endeavours to raise money for the payment of his debts, _without success_.’ Having vainly tried to raise enough money for the mere payment of his debts, he may well have despaired to raise enough for the satisfaction of his creditors, and his own subsistence to the end of his days. Under these circumstances, it was natural for him to think of choosing a profession. Which of the professions should he enter? The Church? the Bar? or Medicine? The notion of taking holy orders and seeking the needful morsel of bread in a parsonage, covered with corchorus in full flower, was only a passing fancy. For the law, of which he knew nothing, he had a poet’s natural aversion. The army was out of the question to the sentimentalist, who regarded war with abhorrence, and rated soldiers with murderers. Not because he had any natural aptitude or inclination for the calling, but chiefly because it was less distasteful to him than any other vocation by which he could win his daily bread without disgrace, and in a slight degree because some of his forefathers, and several of his near kindred, had followed, or were following it, Shelley thought of qualifying himself for service in the vocation, by which his great-grandfather had prospered in America before marrying the widow Plum. In this selection of a calling he may also have been influenced by his cousins, the Groves, a family of doctors.

To guard him from a suspicion of being actuated in this matter by purely selfish motives, and to account in an elegant manner for his choice of a profession, which, though sufficiently honourable for persons of undistinguished lineage, is seldom followed by gentlemen of high ancestral dignity, successive biographers have represented that, in deciding to become an apothecary and surgeon, he was moved chiefly by concern for the interests of the poor. Indeed, Lady Shelley insists that her husband’s father was governed wholly in this matter by benevolent considerations. ‘In the winter months at the commencement of this year,’ she says, ‘Shelley walked a hospital for the purpose of acquiring some slight knowledge of surgery, which might enable him to alleviate the sufferings of the poor.’ It makes, however, against this elegant apology for the poet’s condescension to medicine, that on coming into an assured income of 1000_l._ a-year he ceased to walk his hospital.[3]

Instead of coming to him from poverty, Shelley’s keenest annoyances in the winter of 1814-15 came to him from the coldness of persons who, after courting him in the summer and autumn of 1813, made it clear they no longer wished for his acquaintance. ‘Some of his few friends,’ says Peacock, ‘of the preceding year had certainly at that time fallen off from him.’ Ladies, who had compared him to a rose drenched with rain, and a bird rejoicing in the sunshine, now thought less favourably of him. Instead of running after him for sweet converse touching the perfectibility of the species, they spoke of him as a very bad young man, who had treated his charming little wife most cruelly and shamefully, and in other ways proved himself a monster. Because it amuses gentlewomen to listen in a drawing-room to a young poet’s eloquent exhibitions of his daring and delightful and original views about society, and the affections, and ‘all that sort of thing,’ it does not follow that they will care to flutter about him and smile upon him, when he has acted on his startling and charming theories. Talk that is piquant and innocent, from the lips of a young gentleman who is living virtuously with a charming little wife, strikes gentle listeners as superlatively shocking and offensive, from a young man who is known to have transferred his affections from the charming little wife to a young lady who isn’t his wife. However much he was pained and astonished by her altered demeanour, Maimuna may be pardoned for declining to call on Miss Mary Godwin. Had she not a daughter and grandchildren (to say nothing of her character in Pimlico) to think for? So Shelley was dropt by the Boinvilles and Newtons, and other no less charming and exemplary people, whilst he lived with Mary and Claire in lodgings, where the trio--shut out from the Skinner-Street house, and avoided by all the members of William Godwin’s ‘set’--seldom had a call from any one but Peacock and Hogg.

One of the incidents of this troublous and vexatious period was the birth of Mary Godwin’s first child,--a seven months’ girl, who drawing her first breath on 20th February, 1815, breathed her last a few days later. The infant’s premature appearance was of course fruitful of scandalous gossip, which in the total absence of justificatory evidence may be dismissed as mere gossip. Mary’s earliest issue was, no doubt, a seven months’ child.

Enough has been said of the will, with its momentous codicil, of Sir Bysshe Shelley, Bart., who died on 6th January, 1815, in his eighty-fourth year. Enough also has been said of the way in which the poet disinherited himself and his issue out of the large entailed estate created by that will. Henceforth, in regarding the poet’s financial position, readers must think of him as a man with an assured income of 1000_l._ during his father’s life, and a vested interest in the fee-simple of estates A and B on the extinction of his father’s life-interest in them, _minus_ the portion of his interest in the same estates, which he surrendered to his father in consideration of the 1000_l._ a-year assured to him during his father’s life.

It is not to be supposed that after taking Claire and Mary through Miss Wollstonecraft’s _Letters to Imlay_, and Sir James Lawrence’s _Empire of the Nairs_, and showing them why chastity was a mere monkish superstition and conjugal constancy a mere matter of expedience, which on ceasing to be expedient became actually vicious, Shelley was so greatly scandalized, as Mr. Froude imagines, by Claire’s sprightly talk about ‘community of women.’ Nor is it to be imagined that Mary was so profoundly shocked and deeply disgusted as the same historian fancies by her fellow-pupil’s misconceptions respecting a state of human society, that necessarily came under their consideration in the course of study and discussion through which Percy was taking them. In October, 1814, Mary had for several months been undergoing an education, that saved her from all acutely painful emotions of horror and repugnance at her class-mate’s equally erroneous and ridiculous conclusions. Possibly Mary’s diary contains some edifying memoranda, capable of being used as evidence that she regarded Claire as wild, even to wickedness, on one or two subjects that rarely come under the cognizance of English girls or even of English matrons; but such entries of the joint-journal should be read and construed with reference to Mary’s familiarity with such topics, and also with reference to the multifarious incidents and circumstances that had resulted in her enlightenment on matters, about which both girls should have been kept in darkness.

None the less certain, however, is it that on coming in October, 1814, to differences of sentiment on a decidedly unsavoury question, Claire and Mary had a cause of disagreement which, passionately as they had loved one another in former time (transient tiffs notwithstanding), could scarcely fail to engender the friction and heat of lively discord between them. Differing greatly in personal appearance, these sisters of about the same age and the same training, were alike remarkable for intellectual and moral characteristics that, under any circumstances, would have caused them to clash and quarrel at times, even whilst strongly attached to one another in their hearts. In some particulars of outward show, each of these charming and sadly misguided girls had the advantage of the other. Together with an intellectuality of expression, differing from, but in no degree inferior to, the mental expressiveness of Claire’s countenance, Mary the Blonde (albeit with eyes more brown than blue) had a singularly lovely profile, and finely moulded features, that gave her, in respect to facial contour and shapeliness, manifest and unquestionable superiority over her sister-by-affinity. Though not absolutely defective in stature (indeed one of Godwin’s letters describes her as though she were tall), Mary lacked the full height requisite for personal impressiveness; but her figure, good even in girlhood, developed in her maturity into the exuberant loveliness of antique sculpture. On the other hand, Claire the Brown had a tall, lissom figure of matchless elegance; a figure which, though striking beholders at first sight as chiefly remarkable for delicacy and slightness, was seen at a second glance to be in no degree wanting in the developments that are requisite for female attractiveness. Small at the waist and long-necked, Claire had perfectly fashioned shoulders and arms, tiny hands, and feet minute and nimble enough to have won Sir John Suckling’s approval. The worst feature of her face was a nose that resembled Shelley’s in being tip-tilted; but she had the shapely mouth that is never seen apart from cleverness, pink lips, white teeth, and dark eyes that shone soft as sunshine through their long lashes when she was in a good temper, but flashed with a terrifying vehemence when she was whipt to fury by a cruel tongue. Whilst the colour of Mary’s hair accorded with her complexion, Claire had a wealth of darksome tresses. In aspect and air Mary was piquant, lovely, and good; Claire, brilliant, distinguished, and dangerous.

Both girls were hot-tempered, peevish, and resentful, as well as vehemently affectionate; Mary animated with the fervour and captiousness of her mother’s stock, whilst Claire was as impetuous and unruly as any girl of southern blood ripened by southern suns. Both girls were quick-witted, imaginative, and ambitious. Reared during their earlier childhood in Somers Town, discovered by Shelley in the rooms over the Skinner-Street shop, they were both fashioned to make a figure in the world; and even in the nursery, where Shelley may be said to have found them, they conceived the design of making themselves personages of celebrity. Slovens so long as they were poor, they developed a taste for dress and personal display as soon as they were rich enough to wear silk and velvet. Under favourable circumstances (never granted to either of them) Mary would have developed into a good and greatly useful woman; Claire into a generous and powerful, though possibly mischievous, woman. Under such circumstances, Mary would have been precisely conscientious and as truthful as sunshine (which she certainly was not in her later time), but Claire would all the same have been something of a schemer and an _intriguante_, and have valued propitious fortune chiefly on account of the greater power it afforded her for playing with men and women, as though they were mere cards and counters. Each of these girls, predestined to embittering disappointment by the malicious fate that for a brief hour stirred them both with a sense of dazzling success, numbered amongst their social endowments a degree of colloquial piquancy and conversational address that, in the absence of all her other natural excellencies, would have given her the advantage over ordinary women. Whilst Mary’s sparkling gossip sometimes smiled with humour (according to Thackeray a rare faculty in woman), Claire’s higher raillery smacked of the satire that, under the spur of anger, rolled in torrents of scornful irony from her writhing lips. The time was coming when Byron whitened and trembled under her scathing sarcasm. But Claire’s voice was made for better work than cruel speech. Music was her chief accomplishment; and whilst figuring creditably amongst professional performers as an instrumentalist, she only just missed the vocal excellence that would have enabled her to achieve her ambition to be an operatic singer. That she became so bright and vivid a force in Florentine drawing-rooms during Shelley’s later years, and after his death, was in no small degree owing to his admiration of her noble voice, and the care he took to provide her with good musical instruction whilst she lived with him and Mary at Marlow and in Italy.

It is not surprising that after living together for seven months, Claire and Mary determined to dwell apart. In truth the reasons why they should not cohabit (to use one of Godwin’s favourite words) were so numerous and weighty that nothing but the strength of the mutual affection, underlying their mutual jealousies and emotional discrepancies of sentiment, will account for the long postponement of the outbreak of temper on either side that, in the spring of 1815, severed them for awhile. A young married woman usually likes to have her home to herself and her husband, and though she was not Shelley’s wife it was natural for Mary to rate herself as his wife, and all the more for the peculiarity of her alliance with him to wish for the full measure of the domestic privacy, to which a wife is entitled. Mary was too well acquainted with the troubles arising from Miss Westbrook’s permanent residence with Percy and Harriett, not to fear that similar troubles might ensue to him and herself should Claire be always with them. She was the more desirous for Claire to leave them to themselves, because, though she had no doubt of the strength and completeness of Shelley’s attachment to herself, she could not blind herself to his admiration of and liking for Claire,--an admiration and liking that influenced him to the day of his death, although his affection for her was sometimes sorely tried by Claire’s waywardness and freakish impetuosity. At the same time, though the witty and vivacious girl amused and delighted him even when she was most perverse and unmanageable, Shelley had in former times suffered too much from a sister-in-law’s influence and continual presence at his hearth, not to shrink from the thought of having another sister-in-law incessantly on his hands. Hence it came to pass that, on 11th March, 1815, Mary wrote in her diary,--

‘March 11th, 1815.--Talk about Claire’s going away. Nothing settled. I
fear it is hopeless; she will not go to Skinner Street. Thus our
house, I see plainly, is the only remaining place--what is to be
done?’

Two months later, after numerous tiffs and interchanges of sarcastic speech, the two hot-tempered sisters parted for awhile, not more to the relief and contentment of the one than of the other, Claire taking up her abode in a solitary cottage (presumably on an allowance made by Shelley), whilst her sister and the poet entered on the enjoyment of the furnished house at Bishopgate (the eastern entrance of Windsor Park) that was their usual place of abode from the summer of 1815 to the early summer (or, to speak more precisely, the late spring) of 1816. That Mary and Claire separated none too soon appears from the letter in which the latter wrote on 15th May, 1815, to Fanny Imlay (_alias_ Wollstonecraft, _alias_ Godwin),--

‘I am perfectly happy. After so much discontent, such violent scenes,
such a turmoil of passion and hatred, you will hardly believe how
enraptured I am with this dear, quiet little spot. I am as happy when
I go to bed as when I rise. I am never disappointed, for I know the
extent of my pleasures.’

Clearly the sisters-by-affinity had spoken smartly to one another before parting ‘for ever,’--a ‘for ever’ that fell considerably short of twelve months. At sweet seventeen the mutual resentments of two quick-tempered sisters blow over and leave no heart-burnings behind them. It would be ill for our homes were it otherwise. What would become of us were English girls so incapable, as Mr. Froude imagines them to be, of ‘making it up’ and ‘beginning again’ when they have had a smart tiff? It was all in the ordinary course of human nature that in the ensuing spring Claire and Mary were animated by ‘mutual affection, glowing with the impetuosity of girlish romance.’

Much as they delighted in their new home, Shelley and Miss Godwin needed the diversion of visiting scenes, even more alluring to lovers of nature than the glades of Windsor and the rich landscapes of the surrounding country. Besides making a tour along the coast of south Devon, and staying at Clifton during the summer, they went, at the end of August, with Peacock and Charles Clairmont, by the Thames to Lechlade in Gloucestershire, the river-trip mentioned in a previous chapter. Returning in September, 1815, to Bishopgate for the enjoyment of the autumnal colouring of the forest, Shelley may be supposed to have spent the happiest hours of his existence whilst meditating _Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude_, under the oaks of the Great Park,--the poem that was almost as great an advance from _Queen Mab_ as the _Queen_ was in advance of his previous poetry. The first of his supremely great works--a poem that, had he lived to produce nothing greater, would, by itself, have given him a place amongst the poets who never die--_Alastor_, was published in an early (if not the earliest) month of 1816, together with the stanzas to Coleridge, the April-1814 stanzas (from which so many futile efforts have been made to extort evidence touching the causes of his defection from Harriett); the verses on Mutability, the lines on the verse from Ecclesiastes, the Lechlade verses, the sonnet to Wordsworth, the sonnet on the Fall of Bonaparte, the lines taken from _Queen Mab_ on Religion (styled _Superstition_ in the reprint, for security’s sake), the sonnet from Dante’s Italian, the revised fragments of _Queen Mab_, styled _The Demon of the World_, and the translation from Moschus,--the last-mentioned item of the miscellany being one of the reasons why successive Shelleyan biographers and editors have ante-dated the unfinished _Essay on Christianity_ by five or six years.

Had it not been for this trifle from Moschus in the _Alastor_ volume, and the passage in Shelley’s letter (dated to Hogg from ‘Bishopgate, September, 1815’), where he says, ‘I have been engaged lately in the commencement of several literary plans which, if my present temper of mind endures, I shall probably complete in the winter,’ it would probably never have occurred to any editor of Shelleyan MSS. that Shelley produced, in 1815, a composition so foreign to his way of dealing with religious questions at any time, between the publication of _The Necessity of Atheism_ and the production of _Laon and Cythna_, as the fragmentary treatise on the character and teaching of the Saviour of the World. It is not far to seek how the editorial mind came to commit so strange a mistake. On the discovery amongst Leigh Hunt’s MSS. of the beginning of a translation of Moschus’s third idyll (the elegy on Bion), written by Shelley on the same paper as a missing piece of the _Essay on Christianity_, it became obvious that the _Essay_ was written at a time when he was interested in the writings of Moschus. This being manifest the first of the misleading editors argued thus: The _Essay on Christianity_ was written near the time when Shelley was working at Moschus; the _Alastor_ volume which passed through the press soon after the composition of the poem in the autumn and winter of 1815, contains a translation from the Greek of Moschus, showing that somewhere about that time the poet was interested in the Moschian idylls; moreover we have Shelley’s assurance that in September, 1815, he was engaged on several literary enterprises which he hoped to complete in the course of the ensuing winter. Therefore one may safely assign the fragmentary _Essay on Christianity_ to the year 1815.

It is obvious that to show the _Essay_ is wholly out of accord with Shelley’s temper and views on matters of religion in 1815, and on the other hand to show he was more strongly interested in the Moschian verse at a later period of his career, when his temper and views were in accordance with those of the _Essay_, is to sweep away the whole of the editorial argument. It is not too much to say that in 1815 Shelley could no more have written the _Essay_, than he could have composed the music of a great opera. On the other hand, the _Adonais_ affords conclusive evidence that the poet was influenced by both Bion and Moschus during the composition of the noble elegy. Besides the translated fragment of the Elegy on the Death of Bion, by Moschus (written on the same paper as the portion of the _Essay on Christianity_), Shelley left a translation of Bion’s _Elegy on the Death of Adonis_, both manuscripts being in the style of the poet’s later penmanship. Yet further, the Shelleyan manuscript of the translated fragment of Bion’s _Elegy on the Death of Adonis_ exhibits on its back a draft of _Pan, Echo, and the Satyr_, translated from the Greek of Moschus. Thus, whilst the last-named manuscript shows that Shelley was working about the same time on translations from both Greek poets, and the _Adonais_ affords conclusive evidence that its author was influenced in its composition by the same two poets, the manuscript of the translated fragment of the _Elegy on the Death of Bion_ shows it to have been produced by Shelley’s pen in the same period as the _Essay on Christianity_. It follows, therefore, that the _Essay on Christianity_ was produced at least in the same period as the _Elegy on John Keats_. This abundant evidence that the _Essay on Christianity_ should be assigned to the _Adonais_ period of Shelley’s literary career is further confirmed by these two important facts: (1) That the temper and reasoning of the _Essay_ are in harmony with Shelley’s views and feeling on religious matters towards the close of his life; and (2) That in conversation with Trelawny, who knew the poet only at the close of his career, Shelley ‘said he had wished to write a _Life of Christ_, revoking the hasty afterthought’ (expressed in a note to _Queen Mab_) ‘that Jesus was an ambitious man who aspired to the throne of Judea,’ at the same time adding ‘that he found the materials too deficient for reconstructing a _Life_ having some solidity and authority,’--words indicating that at a time no long while anterior to his brief association with Trelawny, the poet had been reconsidering and reshaping his views of the Saviour’s career. Mr. Rossetti justly remarks that the _Essay on Christianity_ may have been the out-come of this project. Most readers will also think the out-come, instead of being ascribed to a period prior to the composition of _Laon and Cythna_, should be assigned to the _Adonais_ term of the poet’s story. In truth the discovery of a Shelleyan copy of the _Essay_, dated 1820 or 1821, would not materially strengthen the evidence that Shelley wrote it in his life’s concluding term.

At Bishopgate, Shelley saw little of his neighbours; the few of them who called upon him being so little to his mind that they were not encouraged to call again. Indeed, the only gentleman of the neighbourhood who seems to have approached the new settler on the verge of Windsor Park, without impressing him unfavourably, was Dr. Pope, the Quaker doctor of Staines, who, visiting the poet in the way of professional service, visited him also for the friendly discussion of religious questions. ‘I like to hear thee talk, friend Shelley: I see thee art very deep,’ the doctor remarked on one occasion to the author of _Queen Mab_. With the exception of this new acquaintance, who was only an occasional caller, and the two familiar comrades who had held to him staunchly in the previous winter of harassment and neglect, Shelley seems to have received no one at Bishopgate on a footing of sociability, from the middle of September, 1815, to the opening of the next spring. But the time of seclusion passed pleasantly in literary effort and the society of the two friends, with whom he read Greek authors;--Peacock strolling over to him twice or thrice a-week from Marlow, whilst Hogg (though a less frequent visitor at the cottage) seldom let a fortnight pass without walking down from London. Whilst reading Greek literature with the two scholars, Shelley found time to bring Mary forward in Latin. ‘Mary,’ he wrote to Hogg in September, 1815, ‘has finished the fifth book of the _Æneid_, and her progress in Latin is such as to satisfy my best expectations,’--words reminding one pathetically how, three years earlier, he took a similar interest in Harriett’s Latin studies, and wrote about them with the same satisfaction to the same correspondent.

As the time is nearing for Shelley to achieve his ambition of winning Byron’s friendship, the occasion has arrived for glancing at the regard in which the more famous poet was held by the author of _Alastor_, and also for glancing at the efforts made by certain of the Shelleyan enthusiasts to minimize the idolater’s admiration of the poet they abhor, by insisting that the admiration was qualified with disapproval, and strictly limited to certain of Byron’s more creditable literary productions. Let us see, by Shelley’s own words and acts, how he thought of Byron from 1816, when they made the personal acquaintance of one another, to the opening of the year memorable for the fatal boat accident in the Bay of Spezia.

(1)--Of Shelley’s regard for Byron in that year (1816), it is enough, for the present, to say that, after making Byron’s acquaintance under remarkable circumstances, and spending some weeks in close intimacy with him in Switzerland, Shelley was at much pains from that time till the opening of 1822, to cultivate and preserve his friendship:--a fact which may, at least, be regarded as conclusive evidence that their intercourse on the marge of Lake Leman was not fruitful of disappointment in the younger poet. Admiring the author of _Childe Harold_, whilst he was living in Free Love with Mary’s sister-by-affinity, Shelley admired him none the less for dismissing Claire, and in later times worshipt him with a sentiment of idolatry that will ever remain one of the most remarkable examples of hero-worship in literary annals.

(2)--It is no slight indication of Shelley’s esteem for Byron in 1817,--when, according to Mr. Froude, he must have regarded the author of _Childe Harold_ with repugnance, as Claire’s seducer,--that he left Byron a legacy of 2000_l._ by his will (dated 18th Feb., 1817), and also appointed him to be an executor of the will, and a trustee for the performance of its trusts.

In the same year, 1817, when the discarded mistress had given birth to Allegra, Shelley wrote in the preface to the _Six Weeks’ Tour_ 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 this 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_. They will be
interested to hear of one who has visited Meillerie, and Clarens, and
Chillon, and Vevai,--classic ground, peopled _with tender and
glorious imaginations of the present and the past_.’

Thus at a time when, according to Mr. Froude, he secretly revolted from Byron as a libertine and seducer, Shelley extolled him for clothing the beauties of the Rhineland with ‘the freshness of a diviner nature,’ and appointed him an executor and trustee of his will.

(3)--In 1818, in the prefatory note to _Julian and Maddalo_, Shelley wrote thus of Byron, the original of Count Maddalo:--

‘Count Maddalo is a Venetian nobleman of antient family and of great
fortune, who, without mixing much in the society of his countrymen,
resides chiefly at his magnificent palace in that city. He is a person
of the most consummate genius, and capable, if he would direct his
energies to such an end, of becoming the redeemer of his degraded
country. But it is his weakness to be proud: he derives, from a
comparison of his own extraordinary mind with the dwarfish intellects
that surround him, an intense apprehension of the nothingness of human
life. His passions and his powers are incomparably greater than those
of other men; and, instead of the latter having been employed in
curbing the former, they have mutually lent each other strength. His
ambition preys upon itself, for want of objects which it can consider
worthy of exertion. I say that Maddalo is proud, because I can find no
other word to express the concentered and impatient feelings which
consume him; but it is on his own hopes and affections only that he
seems to trample, for in social life no human being can be more
gentle, patient, and unassuming than Maddalo. He is cheerful, frank,
and witty. His more serious conversation is a sort of intoxication;
men are held by it as by a spell. He has travelled much; and there is
an inexpressible charm in his relation of his adventures in different
countries.’

In this strain of adulation Shelley wrote of Byron in 1818. Having put the flattery in clear type and on fine paper, Shelley approached Byron with it in his hand, and, kneeling, laid it at his idol’s feet.

On 23rd August, 1818, Shelley wrote to his wife from Venice with grateful fervour, of Byron’s sympathy with his troubles and friendly concern for his interests:--

‘When we disembarked, we found his horses waiting for us, and we rode
along the sands of the sea, talking. Our conversation consisted in
histories of his wounded feelings, and questions as to my affairs, and
great professions of friendship and regard for me. He said, that if he
had been in England at the time of the Chancery affair, he would have
moved heaven and earth to have prevented such a decision.’

There is something inexpressibly ludicrous in the notion of Byron ‘moving heaven and earth’ to stop Lord Eldon’s mouth. The ‘Childe’ must surely have been laughing in his sleeve when he talked in this style, if, indeed, he said aught so superlatively farcical.

(4)--To the year 1818 or 1819 may be assigned Shelley’s _Address to Byron_, the worshipful tone of which composition may be inferred from the only three lines preserved to us:--

‘O mighty mind, in whose deep stream this age
Shakes like a reed in the unheeding storm,
Why dost thou curb not thine own sacred rage?’

(5)--To the year 1821 may be assigned the Sonnet to Byron, headed with the words, ‘I am afraid these verses will not please you, but,’--

‘If I esteemed you less, Envy would kill
Pleasure, and leave to Wonder and Despair
The ministration of the thoughts that fill
The mind which, like a worm whose life may share
A portion of the unapproachable,
Marks your creations rise as fast and fair
As perfect worlds at the Creator’s will.
But such is my regard that nor your power
To soar above the heights where others climb,
Nor fame, that shadow of the unborn hour
Cast from the envious future on the time,
Move one regret for his unhonoured name
Who dares these words;--the worm beneath the sod
May lift itself in homage of the God.’

Can passionate idolatry of a fellow-creature go further in the direction of abject servility without being lost in it? It is appalling to reflect that Shelley, a man of high intellect and culture, of gentle breeding and imperishable achievement in art, thought of Byron in a way to render it possible for him to utter forth such slavish song. It is asserted by Medwin (no sure authority on such a point), that this outpouring of adulation was never actually offered to the hand and eye of the poet, who could not have contemplated such a tribute of adorative homage without turning in cordial (though undeclared) scorn from its producer. The sonnet is said never to have been seen by Byron. But it remains that Shelley wrote it in Byron’s honour; that he wrote it out (with amendments) on several slips of paper, and, at least, thought of offering it to the man, whose contempt of his kind needed no such stimulant.

(6)--Written in June, 1821, _Adonais_ calls on the world to honour Byron as ‘the Pythian of the age,’ and ‘the Pilgrim of Eternity:’--

‘The herded wolves, bold only to pursue;
The obscene ravens, clamorous o’er the dead;
The vultures, to the conqueror’s banner true,
Who feed where Desolation first has fed,
And whose wings rain contagion;--how they fled,
When, like Apollo, from his golden bow,
The Pythian of the age one arrow sped
And smiled!--The spoilers tempt no second blow,
They fawn on the proud feet that spurn them lying low.

* * * * *

Thus ceased she; and the mountain shepherds came,
Their garlands sere, their magic mantles rent;
The Pilgrim of Eternity, whose fame
Over his living head like Heaven is bent,
An early but enduring monument,
Came, veiling all the lightnings of his song
In sorrow.’

(7)--In August, 1821, Shelley was so delighted at Byron’s way of living with another man’s wife, and his consequent progress to moral excellence, that he wrote to his own wife (the faultless, stainless, high-souled Mary) from Ravenna, where he was resting as Byron’s guest in the Palazzo Guiccioli:--

‘L[ord] B[yron] is greatly improved in every respect; in genius, in
temper, in moral views, in health, in happiness. The connexion with la
Guiccioli has been an inestimable benefit to him. He lives in
considerable splendour, but within his income, which is now about
4000_l._ a-year, 100_l._ of which he devotes to purposes of charity.
He has had mischievous passions, but these he seems to have subdued;
and he is becoming, what he should be, a virtuous man.’

When Mr. Froude wrote so gushingly, almost in the same paragraph, of Shelley’s speckless purity of thought and manners, and Byron’s revolting dissoluteness in living with another man’s wife, he had still to learn that this guileless and angelic Shelley rated Byron’s _liaison_ with the Contessa Guiccioli as an eminently virtuous and salutary arrangement.

In the same letter to Mary (mind, Mr. Froude, the letter is written to Mary _née_ Godwin, the writer’s own exemplary wife), Shelley says:--

‘He’ (Byron) ‘has read to me one of the unpublished cantos of _Don
Juan_, which is astonishingly fine. It sets him not only above, but
far above, all the poets of the day,--every word has the stamp of
immortality. I despair of rivalling Lord Byron, as well I may, and
there is no other with whom it is worth contending. This canto is in
the style, but totally, and sustained with incredible ease and power,
like the end of the second canto. _There is not a word which the most
rigid assertor of the dignity of human nature could desire to be
cancelled._ It fulfils, in a certain degree, what I have long preached
of producing,--something wholly new and relative to the age, _and yet
surpassingly beautiful_.’

On, or about, the same day, Shelley wrote from Ravenna about this same Canto of _Don Juan_, which he commended so highly to Mary, for its unqualified purity and surpassing beauty, to his friend Peacock:--

‘Lord Byron is in excellent cue both of health and spirits. He has got
rid of all those melancholy and degrading habits which he indulged at
Venice. He lives with one woman, a lady of rank here, to whom he is
attached, and who is attached to him, and is in every respect an
altered man. He has written three more cantos of _Don Juan_. I have
yet only heard the fifth, and I think that every word of it is
pregnant with immortality. I have not seen his late plays except
_Marino Faliero_, which is very well, but not so _transcendently fine_
as the _Don Juan_.’

Let it be observed that, in the letter to his wife, Shelley alludes to the second Canto of _Don Juan_, and more especially to the end of it, as a piece of literature with which she is familiar. To demonstrate the excellence of the unpublished Canto he has just read in manuscript, Shelley assures Mary that, in its style, and the powerful ease with which it is sustained, it resembles the end of the second Canto,--_i.e._ the part of the poem which describes, with delicate and insidious suggestiveness, the mutual passion of Don Juan and Haidee in the cave. Is it to ‘insult the Shelleys’ (Mr. Froude’s pleasant phrase) to say that Shelley could not have thus referred to some of the sweetest and most voluptuous passages of the amorous poem, without knowing that Mary had perused them with enjoyment and approval? And what is the theme of the unpublished fifth Canto, which Shelley extols to his wife for bearing, in every word, ‘the stamp of immortality,’ and for containing ‘not a word which the most rigid assertor of the dignity of human nature could desire to be cancelled?’ One of the wittiest and wickedest of the sixteen Cantos, this highly commended Canto contains the harem scene where Gulbeyaz vainly solicits Don Juan to minister to her lust. I do not wish to ‘insult the Shelleys,’ but I cannot conceive that Shelley would have written so approvingly of the Canto, had he not wished Mary to peruse this vicious and vitiating piece of Byronic devilry, and felt that it would please her to read how, in her desperate effort to conquer Don Juan’s coldness, Gulbeyaz, in an imperial way

‘laid
Her hand on his, and bending on him eyes,
Which needed not an empire to persuade,
Look’d into his for love....
... and pausing one chaste moment, threw
Herself upon his breast, and there she grew.’

On 14th September, 1821, Shelley wrote from Pisa to Horatio Smith, of Byron’s determination to write a series of dramas:--

‘This seems to me the wrong road; but genius like his is destined to
lead and not to follow. He will shake off his shackles as he finds
they cramp him. I believe he will produce something very great; and
that familiarity with the dramatic forms of human nature, will soon
enable him to soften down the severe and unharmonizing tints of his
_Marino Faliero_.’

On 4th November, 1821, Shelley said to Edward Williams of Lord Byron’s _Cain_, ‘His _Cain_ is second to nothing of the kind.’

(8)--From Pisa, Shelley wrote, in January, 1822, to John Gisborne of the poet, whom he idolized:--

‘What think you of Lord Byron now? Space wondered less at the swift
and fair creations of God, when he grew weary of vacancy, than I at
this spirit of an angel in the mortal paradise of a decaying body. So
I think, let the world envy while it admires, as it may.’

(9)--On 10th April, 1822, when his relations with the great poet had been shaken and ruffled by gusts of discord, Shelley wrote to John Gisborne, ‘What think you of Lord Byron’s last volume? In my opinion it contains finer poetry than has appeared in England since the publication of _Paradise Regained_. _Cain_ is apocalyptic,--it is a revelation not before communicated to man.’

Of course, Shelley’s idolatry of his hero was not always maintained at this pitch of enthusiasm. There were moments when the worm turned against his God, and wrote disparagingly of him. But the foregoing passages from Shelley’s letters and works exhibit his prevailing view of Byron the poet, and his worshipful disposition towards the man Byron. Nor may it be imagined that the worshiper was enabled to think thus reverentially of the idol, because he was unaware of what was most repulsive in the darker stages of Byron’s career. For Shelley is the most strenuous and precise of all the many givers of testimony respecting the Venetian excesses. Writing to Peacock of Byron’s Venetian life, Shelley says, on 22nd December, 1818:--

‘The fact is, that first, the Italian women with whom he associates
are perhaps the most contemptible of all who exist under the moon--the
most ignorant, the most disgusting, the most bigoted; countesses [who]
smell so strongly of garlic, that an ordinary Englishman cannot
approach them. Well, L[ord] B[yron] is familiar with the lowest sort
of these women, the people his gondolieri pick up in the streets. He
associates with wretches who seem almost to have lost the gait and
physiognomy of man, and who do not scruple to avow practices, which
are not only not named, but I believe seldom even conceived in
England.’

None the less able, however, was Shelley to admire the same Byron (of whom Mr. Froude writes disgustfully, for ‘living with another man’s wife’) as a being to be worshipt for his divine excellences and beneficent achievements. None the less could he regard Byron with reverence and delight, as ‘the spirit of an angel in the mortal paradise of a decaying body.’

The winter (styled by Hogg ‘a mere Atticism’) had for its chief domestic incident the birth of Mary’s eldest son, the ‘William’ of his father’s song, and of the early grave at Rome, who was born on 24th January, 1816, on the ninth day after Lady Byron’s withdrawal from Piccadilly Terrace to Kirkby Mallory. Byron’s Ada was only in the seventh week of her life, when Shelley’s boy entered upon his brief existence. Born within six weeks and three days of one another, these infants are curiously associated in literary annals; for whilst Byron gushed for the world’s edification over his Ada in verse, that set the sentimental mothers weeping throughout the country, Shelley’s parental devotion to his ‘delightful child’ broke forth into song that was no less insincere.

Mary Godwin had not risen from her bed, before all England was ringing with strange stories of Byron’s domestic troubles. That Shelley, who had created much scandal in a small world of comparatively obscure people by quarrelling with his wife, some eighteen or twenty months since, was more cheered than shocked by Byron’s rupture with his spouse, is probable. That Byron in his domestic trials and social discredit had a sympathizer and apologist in the younger poet, is certain. To Byron’s idolater, Lady Byron’s inability to live happily with her superb husband was a sufficient proof that she was a faulty woman. That on falling out with his wife, so sublime a creature as Byron could not take another lawful bride, was in Shelley’s view a signal example of the depraving tyranny of matrimonial law,--another argument why Wedlock should be replaced by Free Love.

On this exciting subject, Shelley and Mary were in perfect accord, when Claire ran in upon them, beaming with beauty, radiant with joy, brimming over with affection and happiness. She had rare news for them. Bent on going to Switzerland, she implored them to take her there. Switzerland? Geneva? Why was she so desirous of going thither? Mary had a babe at her breast, and was still only recovering from her accouchement; Shelley was busy at home with his books and writing. What reasons could Claire show why he should leave his study and Mary her home, to escort her to Geneva? Answering their questions, and disposing of any objections they made to her astounding proposal, Claire induced them to take her out viâ Paris to the Sécheron Hotel near Geneva.

There were no steamboats and railways in 1816. No mere jaunt for idlers and invalids, as it is now-a-days; the journey from London to Switzerland (as Shelley, Mary, and Claire knew from experience) was a painful and costly business in 1816. Mary Godwin’s son was still in his third month, when the vivacious and irrepressible Claire came in upon her with these words, ‘I am dying to go to Switzerland; the one desire of my heart is to go to Geneva; and you and Shelley must take me there,--not in August, or July, or June; but at the turn of April. You must pack at once and take me out to Switzerland!’ Is it conceivable that Shelley and Mary yielded to Claire’s vehement entreaty without asking her, _why_ she was so eager to be off to Geneva; without satisfying themselves that Claire had an object in view which justified her in asking so much of them, and in putting them to so much trouble and expense? Is it conceivable that Claire would have carried her point with her sister and Shelley, had they not regarded her again with affection, and been of opinion that she had a claim to so large a measure of their sympathy and assistance? Is it conceivable that in the month, whose lap is chilled by lingering winter, Mary Godwin with her babe in her arms would have crossed the Channel, and traversing France made the long and toilsome journey to Geneva, only to gratify the mere whim of a girl she disliked?

All these questions are answered in the affirmative by Mr. Froude, and the other Shelleyan enthusiasts, who require us to believe that Shelley and Mary Godwin accompanied Claire, _viâ_ Paris, to Geneva, without any knowledge or suspicion--that Byron was journeying thither with his young doctor (Polidori) by the Rhine route; that Claire and Byron had arranged to meet at the Hotel Sécheron; that Claire had for some weeks before leaving England been Byron’s mistress; that her object in getting out to Geneva was to throw herself into Byron’s arms. Successive biographers have represented that the meeting of the two sets of tourists at the Sécheron was accidental. Till I exhibited in _The Real Lord Byron_ the reasons for thinking otherwise of this meeting, no biographer had ventured even to hint that the juncture of the two parties might have resulted from pre-arrangement. It is now admitted, even by Mr. Froude, that I was right on this point.

But whilst admitting that the meeting resulted from pre-arrangement, Mr. Froude now insists that Byron and Claire were the only parties to the pre-arrangement, which (according to Field Place) was withheld by Claire from her travelling companions. Further, Mr. Froude maintains that, instead of being taken to Geneva by Shelley and her sister, Claire took them thither on her lap. Yet more:--Mr. Froude and his fellow-workers require us to believe that, when they accompanied her to Switzerland, without knowing or suspecting _why_ she wished to go there, Shelley and Mary Godwin disliked Claire extremely,--disliking her for being a malicious, spiteful, and altogether intolerable girl; regarding her disgustfully on account of her vicious notions respecting the intercourse of the sexes. Touring in pre-railway times with an odious companion was even more vexatious than touring with such a companion now-a-days. Yet Mr. Froude insists that Shelley and Mary Godwin associated themselves for several months of foreign touring, with a girl they disliked extremely, for the pure pleasure of her society. More still:--Mr. Froude wishes us to believe that, almost to the last day of their sojourn with Claire and Byron in Switzerland, neither Shelley nor Mary Godwin had the faintest suspicion that Claire was Byron’s mistress; and that though Byron was at pains to have his mistress brought out to him, under cover of her travelling companions, he never saw her at Geneva, except in the presence of some witness to the propriety of their demeanour to one another. Admitting that Byron talked to Claire on the most delicate subjects--such as the arrangements for her accouchement, and plans for the disposal of her child when it should be born--Mr. Froude insists that, throughout her stay in Switzerland, she could not easily have been alone with Byron, even for the shortest interview. Mr. Froude makes this statement, though it is a matter of sure personal history that, whilst Byron lived in the Villa Diodati, and Shelley (with Mary and Claire) in a cottage at the villa’s foot, the trio of the cottage often slept in Byron’s house after sitting up with him till dawn.

On what grounds does Mr. Froude ask us to believe things, so incredible that it is difficult to imagine any evidence that would justify us in believing them? Mr. Froude has nothing whatever _to show_; nothing whatever to urge, in support of his extravagant assertions, except talk about a letter, which he may not show, because Sir Percy Shelley thinks it better not to show it. We are not told when this letter was written, under what circumstances it was written, for what purpose it was written. Mr. Froude says the letter was written by Claire. Any statement told by Claire, to the discredit of their curious views of Shelley and his career, is unhesitatingly rejected as a falsehood by the Shelleyan enthusiasts. They do not falter in charging Claire with falsehood in telling the certain truth, that she was the Constantia of Shelley’s verse. They do not falter in charging her with falsehood, in saying that Fanny Imlay, _alias_ Wollstonecraft _alias_ Godwin, killed herself for love of Shelley. According to the Shelleyan enthusiasts Claire went through life, telling fibs whenever fibs would serve her purpose; and yet a letter, said to have been written by her (a letter withheld from public scrutiny), is enough to satisfy them, that Byron, after causing her (his already _enceinte_ mistress) to come out to him in Switzerland, never saw her there except in the presence of a third party. To believe this is to believe the incredible.