Ariel: A Shelley Romance

by André Maurois

PART I

So I turned to the Garden of Love

That so many sweet flowers bore;

And I saw it was filled with graves.

William Blake

CHAPTER I
KEATE’S WAY

In the year 1809 George III appointed as Headmaster of Eton, Dr. Keate, a terrible little man who considered the flogging-block a necessary station on the road to perfection, and who ended a sermon on the Sixth Beatitude by saying, “Now, boys, be pure in heart! For if not, I’ll flog you until you are!”

The county gentlemen and merchant princes who put their sons under his care were not displeased by such a specimen of pious ferocity, nor could they think lightly of the man who had birched half the ministers, bishops, generals, and dukes in the kingdom.

In those days the severest discipline found favour with the best people. The recent French Revolution had proved the dangers of liberalism when it affects the governing classes. Official England, which was the soul of the Holy Alliance, believed that in combating Napoleon she was combating liberalism in the purple. She required from her public schools a generation of smooth-tongued hypocrites.

In order to crush out any possible republican ardour in the young aristocrats of Eton, their studies were organized on conventional and frivolous lines. At the end of five years the pupil had read Homer twice through, almost all Virgil, and an expurgated Horace; he could turn out passable Latin epigrams on Wellington and Nelson. The taste for Latin quotations was then so pronounced, that Pitt in the House of Commons being interrupted in a quotation from the Æneid, the whole House, Whigs and Tories alike, rose as one man to supply the end. Certainly a fine example of homogeneous culture.

The study of science, being optional, was naturally neglected, but dancing was obligatory. On the subject of religion Keate held doubt to be a crime, but that otherwise it wasn’t worth talking about. He feared mysticism more than indifference, permitted laughing in chapel and wasn’t strict about keeping the Sabbath.

Here, in order to make the reader understand the—perhaps unconscious—Machiavellism of this celebrated trainer of youth, we may note that he did not mind being told a few lies: “A sign of respect,” he would say.

Barbarous customs reigned amongst the boys themselves. The little boys were the slaves or “fags” of the big boys. The fag made his master’s bed, fetched from the pump outside and carried up his water in the morning, brushed his clothes, and cleaned his shoes. Disobedience was punished by torments to fit the crime. A boy writing home, not to complain, but to describe his life, says: “Rolls, whose fag I am, put on spurs to force me to jump a ditch which was too wide for me. Each time I funked it he dug them into me, and of course my legs are bleeding, my ‘Greek Poets’ reduced to pulp, and my new clothes torn to tatters.”

The glorious “art of self-defence” was in high honour. At the conclusion of one strenuous bout, a boy was left dead upon the floor. Keate, coming to look at the corpse, said simply: “This is regrettable, of course, but I desire above all things that an Eton boy should be ready to return a blow for a blow.”

The real, but hidden, aim of the system was to form “hard-faced men,” all run in the same mould. In action you might be independent, but any originality of thought, of dress, or of language, was the most heinous of crimes. To betray the smallest interest in ideas or books was a bit of disgusting affectation to be forcibly pulled up by the roots.

Such a life as this seemed to the majority of English boys quite right. The pride they felt in carrying on the traditions of a school like Eton founded by a king, and under the protection of and near neighbour to all the succeeding kings, was balm of Gilead to their woes.

Only a few sensitive souls suffered terribly and suffered long.

One of these, for example, the young Percy Bysshe Shelley, son of a rich Sussex landowner, and grandson to Sir Bysshe Shelley, Bart., did not seem able to acclimatize himself at all.

This boy, who was exceptionally beautiful, with brilliant blue eyes, dark curling hair, and a delicate complexion, displayed a sensitiveness of conscience most unusual in one of his class, as well as an incredible tendency to question the Rules of the Game.

When first he appeared in the school, the Sixth Form captains, seeing his slender build and girlish air, imagined they would have little need to enforce their authority over him. But they soon discovered that the smallest threat threw him into a passion of resistance. An unbreakable will, with a lack of the necessary physical strength to carry out its decrees, forefated him to rebellion. His eyes, dreamy when at peace, acquired, under the influence of enthusiasm or indignation, a light that was almost wild; his voice, usually soft and low, became agonized and shrill.

His love of books, his contempt for games, his long hair floating in the wind, his collar opened on a girlish throat, everything about him scandalized those self-charged to maintain in the little world of Eton the brutal spirit of which it was so proud.

But Shelley, from his first day there, having decided that fagging was an outrage to human dignity, had refused obedience to the orders of his fag-master, and in consequence was proclaimed an outlaw.

He was called “Mad Shelley.” The strongest of his tormentors undertook to save his soul as by fire, although they gave up attacking him in single combat, when they found he would stop at nothing. Scratching and slapping, he fought with open hands like a girl.

An organized “Shelley-bait” became one of the favourite amusements. Some scout would discover the strange lad reading poetry by the riverside, and at once give the “view hallo!” Shelley, with his hair streaming on the wind, would take flight across the meadows, through the college cloisters, the Eton streets. Finally, surrounded like a stag at bay, he would utter a prolonged and piercing shriek, while his tormentors would “nail” him to the wall with balls slimy with mud.

A voice would cry “Shelley!” And “Shelley!” another voice would take it up. The old walls would re-echo to yells of “Shelley!” in every key. A lickspittle fag would pluck at the victim’s jacket; another would pinch him; a third would kick away the books he squeezed convulsively under his arm. Then, every finger would be pointed towards him, while fresh cries of “Shelley!” “Shelley!” “Shelley!” finally shattered his nerves.

The crisis was reached for which his tormentors waited—an outburst of mad rage, in which the boy’s eyes flashed fire, his cheeks grew white, his whole body trembled and shook.

Tired at length of a spectacle that was always the same, the school went back to its games.

Shelley picked up his mud-stained books and lost in thought wandered away through the meadows that border the Thames and, flinging himself down on the sun-flecked grass, watched the river glide past him. Running water, like music, has the power to change misery into melancholy. Both, through their smooth, unceasing flow, pour over the soul the anodyne of forgetfulness and peace. The massive towers of Windsor and Eton, typified to the young rebel a hostile and unchanging world, but the reflection of the willow-trees trembling in the water soothed him by its tenuous fragility.

He returned to his books, to Diderot, to Voltaire, to the system of M. d’Holbach. To love these Frenchmen, so hated by his masters, seemed an act of defiance worthy of his courage. An English work condensed them all. Godwin’s Political Justice. It was his favourite reading.

Godwin made all things seem simple. Had men studied him the world would have attained to a state of idyllic happiness. Had they listened to the voice of reason, that is of Godwin, two hours’ work a day would have been sufficient for all their needs. Free love would have replaced the stupid conventions of marriage, and philosophy have banished the terrors of superstition.

Unfortunately, “prejudices” still shut men’s minds to truth.

Shelley closed his book, stretched himself out upon the sunny, flower-starred grass, and meditated on the misery of man. From the school buildings behind him a confused murmur of stupid voices floated out over the exquisite landscape of wood and stream, but here at least no mocking eye could spy upon him. The boy’s tears ran down, and pressing his hands together, he made this vow: “I swear, to be just and wise and free, if such power in me lies. I swear never to become an accomplice, even by my silence, of the selfish and the powerful. I swear to dedicate my whole life to the worship of beauty.”

Had Dr. Keate been witness to the above outburst of religious ardour, so deplorable in any well-regulated school, he would certainly have treated the case in his favourite way.

CHAPTER II
THE HOME

In the holidays the refractory slave became the hereditary prince. Mr. Timothy Shelley, his father, owned the manor of Field Place in Sussex, a well-built, low, white house surrounded by a park, and extensive woods. There Shelley found his four pretty sisters, a little brother three years old, whom he had taught to say “The devil!” so as to shock the pious, and his beautiful cousin Harriet Grove, who people said resembled him.

The head of the family, Sir Bysshe Shelley, lived in the market-town of Horsham. He was a gentleman of the old school who boasted of being as rich as a duke and of living like a poacher. Six feet high, of commanding presence and a handsome face, Sir Bysshe was of cynical mind and energetic temperament. Unlike the rest of the Shelleys, who all had bright blue eyes, Sir Bysshe’s eyes were brown, inherited presumably from his New Jersey mother, the wealthy widow Plum.

He had sunk eighty thousand pounds in building Castle Goring, but could not finish it because of the expense. So he lived in a cottage close to the Horsham Town Hall, with one man-servant as eccentric as himself. He dressed like a peasant and spent his days in the tap-room of the Swan Inn, talking politics with all and sundry. He had a rough sort of humour that frightened the slow-witted country-folk. He had made his two daughters so unhappy at home that they had run away, which afforded him an excellent pretext for not giving them any dowry.

His one desire was to round off an immense estate and to transmit it intact to innumerable generations of Shelleys. With this in view he had entailed the greater part of it on Percy, to the total exclusion of his other children. Considering his grandson as the necessary upholder of his posthumous ambition, he had a certain affection for him. But for his son, Timothy, who dealt in stilted phrases, he had nothing but contempt.

Timothy Shelley was member of Parliament for the pocket borough of New Shoreham. Like his father, he was tall and well made, fair, handsome and imposing. He had a better heart than Sir Bysshe but less will-power. Sir Bysshe was rather attractive, as avowed egoists and cynics often are. Timothy had good intentions and was insupportable. He admired intellect with the irritating want of tact of the illiterate. He affected a fashionable respect for religion, an aggressive tolerance for new ideas, a pompous philosophy. He liked to call himself liberal in his political and religious opinions, but was careful not to scandalize the people of his set. A friend of the Duke of Norfolk, he spoke with complacency of the emancipation of the Irish Catholics. He was proud of his own boldness and not a little scared by it. He had tears at command, but became ferocious if his vanity was touched. In private life he plumed himself on his urbanity, but tried to combine the mailed fist with the velvet glove. Diplomatic in small things he was boorish in big ones; inoffensive yet exasperating, he was well fitted to try the temper of any young critic; and it was the vexation caused by the silly bibble-babble of his father which had done much to throw Shelley into intellectual isolation. As to Mrs. Shelley, she had been the prettiest girl in the county, she liked a man to be a fighter and a gentleman, and she would watch with disgust her eldest son go off into the woods carrying a book under his arm instead of a gun.

In the eyes of his sisters, however, Shelley was a Superman. The moment he arrived from Eton the house was filled with fantastic guests, the park was alive with confused murmurs as in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” The little girls lived in a continual but agreeable terror. Percy delighted in clothing with mystery the everyday objects of life. There was no hole in the old walls into which he did not thrust a stick in the search for secret passages. In the attics he had discovered a locked room. Here, said he, lived an old alchemist with a long beard, the terrible Cornelius Agrippa. When a noise was heard in the attics, it was Cornelius upsetting his lamp. During a whole week the Shelley family worked in the garden, digging out a summer shelter for Cornelius.

Other monsters woke again with the boy’s arrival. There was the great tortoise which lived in the pond, and the great old snake, a formidable reptile, that once had really frequented the underwood, and which one of the Squire’s gardeners had killed with a scythe. “This gardener, little girls, this gardener who had the look of a human being like you and me, was in reality Father Time himself who causes all legendary monsters to perish.”

What rendered these inventions so fascinating was that the teller himself was not too sure he was inventing them. Stories of witches and ghosts had troubled his sensitive childhood. But the more he feared ghostly apparitions the more he forced himself to brave them. At Eton, having drawn a circle on the ground, and set fire to some alcohol in a saucer, which enveloped him in its bluish flame, he began his incantation: “Demons of the air, and of fire. . . .” “What on earth are you doing, Shelley?” said his Master, the solemn and magnificent Bethel, interrupting him one day: “Please, sir, I’m raising the devil. . . .” In the country likewise the Lord of Darkness was often called up by a shrill young voice, and sometimes to their great joy the children received an order from the sovereign brother to dress up as ghosts or demons.

The discipline of science was quite alien to Shelley’s nature, but he liked its romantic side. Armed with a machine which had just been invented, he gave electric shocks to the admiring bevy of little girls. But whenever little Hellen, the youngest, saw him coming with a bottle and a bit of wire she began to cry.

His dearest and most faithful disciples were Elizabeth his eldest sister, and his lovely cousin, Harriet Grove. These three children were drawn together by their dawning senses and their impassioned love of Truth. The first awakening of instinct always sheds over ideas an extraordinary charm. Shelley led his fair pupils to the churchyard to which the mysterious presence of the dead lent, in his eyes, a poetic fascination, and safe from the pursuit of his father, seated between them on some rustic tomb in the shadow of the old church, arms round swaying waists, he discoursed eloquently on all things in heaven and earth while lovely eyes drank up his every word.

The picture he drew of the world was a simple one. On the one side Vice: kings, priests, and the rich. On the other Virtue: philosophers, the wretched, and the poor. Here, religion in the service of tyranny: there, Godwin and his Political Justice. But more often he spoke to the girls of Love.

“Men’s laws pretend to regulate our natural sentiments. How absurd! When the eye perceives a lovely being the heart takes fire. How is it under man’s control to love or not to love? But the essence of love is liberty and it withers in an atmosphere of constraint. It is incompatible with obedience, jealousy, or fear. It requires perfect confidence and absolute freedom. Marriage is a prison. . . .”

Scepticism extended to marriage is a form of wit which unmarried ladies do not much appreciate. Metaphysical heresy may sometimes amuse them, matrimonial heresy smells of the faggot.

“Bonds?” repeated Harriet. “No doubt. . . . But what matter if the bonds are light ones?”

“If they are light they are useless. Does one shackle a voluntary prisoner?”

“But religion . . .”

Shelley called Holbach to the aid of Godwin. “If God is just, how can we believe that he will punish creatures whom he himself has created weak? If he is All-Powerful, how is it possible either to offend him or resist him? If he is reasonable, why is he angry with the hapless beings to whom he has left the liberty to be unreasonable?”

“Custom . . .”

“What can custom matter to us in this short moment of eternity which we call the nineteenth century?”

Elizabeth took her brother’s side, and it was impossible for Harriet to oppose a demi-god with flashing eyes, a shirt-collar open on a delicate throat, and hair as fine as spun-silk.

She sighed; then to change the conversation, “Let us go on with Zastrozzi?” she proposed.

This was a novel which the three were writing together. It dealt with a robber chief, a haughty tyrant, and an “elegantly proportioned heroine all tenderness and purity.”

The hours passed pleasantly in Zastrozzi’s company; the evening closed in. Elizabeth left the guileless lovers alone in the darkness.

Shelley and Harriet, their arms interlocked, wandered back to the house through the white mist rising from the meadows. The breeze waved the topmost leaves of the trees across the face of the moon. The anemones shut their pale cups and drooped their heads. The sadness of twilight reminded Shelley of his approaching return to the sombre cloisters of Eton. But conscious of the warm loveliness of his cousin, who trembled and vibrated beneath his touch, he felt himself filled with new courage for a life of apostleship and combat.

CHAPTER III
THE CONFIDANT

In October, 1810, Timothy Shelley took his son up to Oxford. The member for New Shoreham was in the best of tempers.

Objecting to hotels, he put up at his old lodgings in the High—“the leaden horse”—appropriate house-sign of John Slatter, Plumber and Glazier. This Slatter was a son of Mr. Shelley’s former landlord, whom he had succeeded in the lodging-house and plumbing businesses. Another son, with whom to his chagrin he was to have much to do, had gone into partnership with Munday, bookseller at Carfax.

Mr. Shelley had come to enter a future baronet in the books of University College; through which he himself had passed many years earlier, without distinction. Such ceremonies are always agreeable to an Englishman, and would be particularly so to a man of the consequential turn of mind of Timothy Shelley. So soon as the rite was satisfactorily accomplished, he went down with Bysshe to the bookseller, and there opened for him an unlimited credit in books and paper.

“My son here,” he said, pointing good-humouredly to the wild-haired youth with luminous eyes who stood by, “has a literary turn, Mr. Slatter. He is already the author of a romance”—it was the famous Zastrozzi—“and if he wishes to publish again, do pray indulge him in his printing freaks.”

Shelley was delighted with college. To have rooms of his own, where he could sport his oak; to be free to attend lectures or shirk them; to follow the studies of his choice; to read, write, or go walking as he pleased; this was to combine the charm of the monastic life with the freedom of thought of the philosopher. It was thus he had dreamed of passing his life “for ever.”

That evening in hall he found himself seated by the side of a young man, a freshman like himself, who after introducing himself as “Jefferson Hogg,” relapsed into the high-bred reserve which Oxford manners require. However, towards the middle of the meal the two young men, incapable of maintaining silence any longer, began to talk of their reading.

“The best poetical literature of these days,” said Shelley, “is German literature.”

Hogg, with a smile, asserted the German’s want of nature. So much romanticism made him tired. . . .

“What modern literature can you compare with theirs?”

Hogg named the Italian.

This roused all Shelley’s impetuosity, and started such an endless discussion that the servants were able to clear the tables before the two perceived they were alone.

“Will you come up to my rooms?” said Hogg. “We can go on talking there.”

Shelley eagerly accepted, but he lost the thread of his discourse on the way and the whole of his enthusiasm in the cause of Germany. While Hogg was lighting the candles, his guest said calmly that he was not qualified to maintain such a discussion, being as ignorant of Italian as he was of German, and that he had only talked for talking’s sake.

Hogg replied smiling that his own indifference and ignorance were profound, and proceeded to set out on the table a bottle, glasses, and biscuits.

“Besides,” declared Shelley, “all literature is vain trifling. What is the study of ancient or modern tongues but merely a study of words and phrases, of the names of things? How much wiser it were to investigate the things themselves!”

How was this to be done, Hogg wanted to know.

“Through the physical sciences, and especially through chemistry,” said Shelley, and raising his voice he discoursed with a degree of animation that far outshone his zeal in defence of the Germans, on chemical analysis, on the recent discoveries in physics, and on electricity.

Feeling no interest in these subjects Hogg had leisure to examine the appearance of his new friend. His clothes were expensive, and made according to the most approved mode of the day, but they were tumbled, rumpled, unbrushed. His figure was slight and fragile, he was tall, but appeared less tall than he really was, being round-shouldered, through an habitual eagerness of mood which always made him thrust his face forward. His gestures were both graceful and abrupt, his complexion red and white like a girl’s; his hair dark-brown, long and bushy. His features breathed an animation, a fire, a vivid and preternatural intelligence. Nor was the moral expression less beautiful than the intellectual, for there was a softness, a delicacy, a gentleness about it, and that air of profound religious veneration which characterizes the frescoed saints of the great masters of Florence.

Shelley was still talking when some clock chimed—he uttered a cry. “My mineralogy class!” and fled downstairs.

⁂

Hogg had promised to call on him next morning. He found him in a violent dispute with the scout who wanted to tidy up his rooms.

Books, boots, papers, pistols, linen, ammunition, phials, and crucibles were scattered on the floor and on every chair and table. An electrical machine, an air pump, and a solar microscope were conspicuous amidst the mass of matter. Shelley turned the handle of the machine so that the fierce crackling sparks flew out, and presently getting upon the stool with glass feet, his long wild locks bristled and stood on end. Hogg, with a look of amusement, followed his movements with anxiety, watching in particular over the glasses and tea-cups. Just as his host was going to pour out tea, the guest removed in haste from the bottom of his cup a small gold seven-shilling piece partly dissolved by the nitromuriatic acid in which it was immersed.

The young men became inseparable. Every morning they went for a long walk, during which Shelley behaved like a child, climbing all the banks, jumping all the ditches.

When he came to any water he launched paper boats, and sent little argosies trembling down the Isis. He followed them until they sank, while Hogg, compliant but exasperated, waited for him at the starting point by the water’s edge.

After the walk they went up to Shelley’s rooms where, worn out by his continual expenditure of energy, he would be overcome by extreme drowsiness. He would lie stretched out upon the rug before a large fire and, curled round upon himself like a cat, would sleep thus from six to ten. At ten he would suddenly start up, and rubbing his eyes with great violence and passing his fingers swiftly through his long hair, he would enter at once into a vehement argument, or begin to recite verses with an energy which was almost painful.

At eleven he supped, but his meals were very simple. Eating no meat on principle, he liked bread, and his pockets were always full of it. He would walk reading and nibbling as he went, and his path was marked by a long line of crumbs. Next to bread he liked pudding raisins and dried prunes bought at the grocer’s. A regular sit-down meal was intolerably boring to him, and he hardly ever remained to the end.

After supper his mind was clear and his conversation brilliant. He spoke to Hogg about his cousin Harriet, to whom he wrote long letters in which outbursts of love alternated with Godwin’s philosophy; about his sister Elizabeth, a valiant enemy of convention. Or he read the last solemn letter from his father with shrieks of laughter. Or he took up one of his favourite books, Locke, Hume or Voltaire, and commented on it with enthusiasm.

Hogg often asked himself why these writers exercised so great a fascination over the religious and mystical nature of his friend. It seemed as though in suddenly discovering in the by-ways of his extensive reading the immense variety of systems, resembling an entanglement of deep valleys and rocky precipices, that a sort of vertigo must have seized Shelley and only a clear and simple doctrine such as Godwin’s could relieve his metaphysical giddiness. He amused himself by substituting for the titanic and confused accumulations of History, an aëry edifice of crystalline theories, and he preferred to the real world, the incoherence of which terrified him, the more agreeable vision which the soul gains by looking at facts through the vaporous meshes of clouds.

Then the college clock struck two. Hogg got up, and in spite of the protestations of his friend went off to bed.

“What an extraordinary creature!” thought he as he went up to his room . . . “the grace of a young girl, the purity of a maiden who has never left her mother’s side . . . and nevertheless an indomitable force . . . the soul of a Benedictine monk, with the ideas of a Jacobin.”

It was certainly a strange mixture, well worth thinking over. But Master Jefferson Hogg didn’t care about tiring his brain, and his dear friend Shelley always gave him an overwhelming desire to sleep.

CHAPTER IV
THE NEIGHBOURING PINE

A few days before Christmas Mr. Shelley found in his letter-bag a communication from a London publisher, a certain Mr. Stockdale, who called his attention to the extraordinary productions which young Mr. Percy Shelley desired to have published. Stockdale had received the MS. of a novel, St. Irvyne, or the Rosicrucian, filled with the most subversive ideas, and the worthy tradesman could not see without misgiving the son of so estimable a gentleman as Mr. Shelley treading this dangerous path. He considered it to be his duty to warn the young man’s father; and above all to call his attention to the young man’s evil genius, his comrade Mr. Jefferson Hogg, son of a good old Tory family in the north of England, but thoroughly false and dangerous in character.

Mr. Shelley replied by informing Stockdale that he refused to pay one penny of the printing bill, which greatly increased the metaphysical and doctrinal anxieties of the publisher. Then, while awaiting the arrival of his son, who was to spend the first week of the Christmas holidays at Field Place, he prepared one of his incoherent, affectionate, and blustering sermons, in the bombastic style of which he was past master.

Arguments have never convinced anybody yet. But to imagine that the arguments of a father can change the ideas of a son is the height of argumentative madness. At the close of the conversation Shelley went away sickened by the stupidity of his family, filled with a righteous fury at the behaviour of Stockdale so unworthy of a gentleman, and more than ever attached to Jefferson Hogg, his only friend. That very evening he sat down and confided every thing to him in a long letter:

“Everybody attacks me for my detestable principles; I am reckoned an outcast; there lowers a terrific tempest, but I stand as it were on a pharos, and smile exultingly at the vain beating of the billows below. I attempted to enlighten my father. Mirabile dictu! He, for a time, listened to my arguments; he allowed the impossibility of any direct intervention of Providence. He allowed the utter incredibility of witches, ghosts, legendary miracles. But when I came to apply the truths on which we had agreed so harmoniously, he started . . . and silenced me with an equine argument ‘I believe because I believe.’

“My mother believes me to be in the high-road to Pandemonium. She fancies I want to make a deistical coterie of all my little sisters. How laughable!”

Field Place, usually so gay during the holidays, was overshadowed by these happenings. Mrs. Shelley advised her daughters not to speak too much with Percy, and the little girls became shy and silent. They continued their Christmas preparations through force of habit, but no one took any further interest in them; the little amusements and surprises were arranged as usual, but without the laughter and fun which makes Christmas Day so delightful in happy families.

Only Elizabeth remained faithful to Shelley in secret. But she saw that her admiration was no longer shared by her cousin Harriet, who grew colder and more evasive every day.

The letters which Harriet had received from Oxford, filled with enthusiastic dissertations extremely difficult to follow, had troubled and annoyed her. The quotations from Godwin bored her to tears, and her terror was even greater than her boredom. It is rare that pretty women show a taste for dangerous ideas. Beauty, the natural expression of law and order, is conservative by essence; it upholds all established religions of which it adorns the ceremonies; Venus was always the right hand of Jupiter.

Harriet showed Shelley’s letters to her mother, who advised her to pass them on to her father. This gentleman pronounced Shelley’s doctrines to be abominable. Both parents took gloomy views as to the young man’s future. Ought Harriet to unite herself with an eccentric creature whose follies alienated everybody? She loved elegance, county balls, and admiration. What sort of a life would she lead with this mad boy who respected nothing, not even marriage? Yet, after all, religion has claims. . . .

Before Shelley’s arrival the two young girls had some violent discussions. Elizabeth pleaded his cause. How could Harriet weigh a few poor worldly successes against the happiness of passing her life with the most marvellous of men?

“You make your brother out to be an extraordinary person, but how can I be sure he really is as you represent him? We have always lived in the country, we know nothing of life. Our parents, your own father even, who is in Parliament, disapprove of Bysshe’s ideas. However, let us admit that he is a genius. What right have I to enter into an intimacy with him which must end in disappointment when he discovers how really inferior I am to the being his imagination has pictured? I am just an ordinary young girl like all the rest. He has idealized me and he would be very much surprised if he knew me as I am.”

So much modesty gives one to think: Love does not reason like this.

When Shelley arrived Elizabeth explained the situation to him. Instantly he sought Harriet out. He found her cold and distant, exactly as Elizabeth had described her. She did not ask Shelley to justify himself: all she asked was that he should leave her alone. She reproached him with his universal scepticism.

“But really, Harriet,” Shelley protested, “it is monstrous that I should not be allowed to express opinions which I have reached by the most logical of arguments. And how can my theological opinions disqualify me as brother, friend, or lover?”

“You may think what you please,” replied Harriet, “I do not care in the least what you think, but don’t ask me to unite my lot with yours.”

It was the first time Shelley had come in contact with a woman’s indifference, which she can spring upon a man with the suddenness of night falling in the centre of Africa.

He went away mad with grief. Through the naked, frozen woods, he wandered back towards Field Place; unconscious of the drifting snow, he paced for hours the village graveyard, which had been the background for love’s young dream.

He got home at two o’clock in the morning, and went to bed after placing a loaded pistol, and various poisons taken from his chemical arsenal, by his side. But the thought of Elizabeth’s grief on finding his corpse prevented him from killing himself.

Next day he wrote to Hogg. Against Harriet herself he expressed no resentment, none against his father nor Mr. Grove. The Spirit of Intolerance alone was responsible for the tragedy:

“Here I swear—and as I break my oaths, may Infinity, Eternity blast me—I swear that I will never forgive Intolerance! It is the only point on which I allow myself to encourage revenge; every moment I can spare shall be devoted to my object. Intolerance is of the greatest disservice to Society; it encourages prejudices which strike at the root of the dearest, the tenderest of its ties. Oh how I wish I were the avenger!—that it were mine to crush the demon; to hurl him to his native hell, never to rise again and thus to establish for ever perfect and universal toleration.

“I expect to gratify some of this insatiable feeling in poetry. You shall see, you shall hear, how it has injured me. She is no longer mine! She abhors me as a sceptic, as what she was before! O bigotry! When I pardon this last, this severest of thy persecutions, may Heaven—if there be wrath in Heaven—blast me!

“Forgive me, I have done. I am afraid there is selfishness in the passion of love, for I cannot avoid feeling every instant as if my soul were bursting. But I will feel no more. It is selfish. I would feel for others, but for myself—oh how much rather would I expire in the struggle! Yes, that were a relief! Is suicide wrong? I slept with a loaded pistol and some poison last night, but did not die. Had it not been for my sister, for you, I should have bidden you a final farewell.”

There still remained a fortnight of the holidays to be passed at Field Place, an unhappy fortnight owing to the displeasure of his father and mother, and the embarrassment of his sisters.

In spite of Elizabeth’s invitations Harriet refused to come over and see them while he was there.

People began to whisper, under the seal of secrecy, that she was engaged to someone else.

Seeking to appease his spirit in the endeavour to make others happy, Shelley had resolved that Hogg should fall in love with Elizabeth, whom he had never seen. He sent Hogg some verses written by her, which were filled with good intentions, hatred of tyranny, and faults of prosody.

“All are brethren,” sang Elizabeth like the good pupil she was, “even the African bending to the stroke of the hard-hearted Englishman’s rod” . . . and more in the same strain.

In return, Shelley gave his sister Hogg’s poems which he declared to be “extremely beautiful” and in which he himself was compared to a young oak, and Harriet Grove to the ivy which stifles the tree by its embraces.

“You have not said,” wrote Shelley, “that the ivy after it had destroyed the oak, as if to mock the miseries which it had caused, twined around a pine which stood near.”

The neighbouring pine was Mr. Heylar, a wealthy landowner, and a man of sound doctrines, who had been expressly created by Providence to escort his wife to county balls.

“She is lost to me for ever! She is married! Married to a clod of earth! She will become as insensible herself. All those fine capabilities will moulder. Let us speak no more on the subject.”

He would have liked to invite Hogg to Field Place, so that Elizabeth might judge for herself of his admirable qualities. But the squire, remembering Stockdale’s warnings concerning a certain Evil Genius, forbade the invitation.

CHAPTER V
QUOD ERAT DEMONSTRANDUM

About a month after these unfortunate holidays, Messrs. Munday & Slatter, the Oxford booksellers to whom Timothy Shelley had recommended the literary freaks of his son, saw that young man burst into their shop, his hair flying, his shirt-collar wide open, and a fat parcel of pamphlets under his arm. He wished these to be sold at sixpence each, and to be displayed conspicuously in the shop-window. To be sure of this being well done, he set about doing it himself.

The booksellers watched him at work with the amused and fatherly benevolence which Oxford tradesmen show to Oxford freshmen who have plenty of money. Had they looked closer they would have been horrified at the explosive matter with which their young customer strewed their counters and windows.

The title of the pamphlet, The Necessity of Atheism, was the most scandalous imaginable in a mealy-mouthed, theological city like Oxford. It was signed by the unknown name of “Jeremiah Stukeley,” and had Messrs. Munday & Slatter turned over its pages they would have been more horrified still by the insolent logic of the imaginary Stukeley.

“A close examination of the validity of the proofs adduced to support any proposition, has ever been allowed to be the only sure way of attaining truth, upon the advantages of which it is unnecessary to descant.”

It was with this bold axiom that the pamphlet began, and written in the form of a geometrical theorem it proceeded to prove the impossibility of the existence of God. It ended triumphantly with the three letters Q.E.D., quod erat demonstrandum.

To Shelley who knew nothing of mathematics, this formula had always seemed like a magician’s spell for the evocation of Truth. Although he had an ardent belief in a Spirit of universal Goodness, the creator and director of all things; although he professed the personal theology of an anglican “Vicaire Savoyard”; the word “Atheist” pleased him because of its vigour. He loved to fling it in the face of Bigotry. He picked up the epithet with which he had already been pelted at Eton, as a Knight Errant picks up a glove. To the physical and moral courage of his race, he added intellectual courage, thus affronting great dangers and an inevitable scandal.

The Necessity of Atheism had been published just twenty minutes, when the Rev. John Walker, a Fellow of New College, a man of a sinister and inquisitorial turn of mind, passed the shop-window and looked in.

The Necessity of Atheism! . . . Astounded and outraged, the Rev. John strode into the shop, calling out in stentorian tones, “Mr. Munday! Mr. Slatter! What is the meaning of this?”

“Really, sir, we know nothing about it. We have not personally examined the pamphlet. . . .”

“The Necessity of Atheism! . . . But the title in itself is sufficient to inform you.”

“Quite so, sir. Quite so. And now that our attention has been called to it . . .”

“Now that your attention, gentlemen, has been called to it, you will have the goodness to withdraw immediately every copy from your window, and to carry them, as well as any other copies you may possess, into your kitchen and throw them all into the fire.”

Mr. Walker had not, of course, the smallest right to give any such order, but the booksellers knew that he had only to complain to the University authorities, and they would see their shop put out of bounds. So they obeyed with obsequious smiles, and sent one of their clerks to beg young Mr. Shelley to step round for a few minutes’ conversation with them.

“We are very sorry, Mr. Shelley, very sorry indeed, but really we couldn’t help ourselves. Mr. Walker insisted on it, and in your own interest . . .”

But his “own interest” was the last thing Shelley ever thought of. In his piercing, urgent voice, he asserted to the much-worried booksellers his right to think as he pleased, and to communicate his thoughts to the world.

“And,” he told them triumphantly, “I have done worse than spread my net in the sight of callow Oxford birds. I have sent a copy of The Necessity of Atheism to every bishop on the Bench, to the Chancellor of the University, and to every college Master, Warden, and Dean, with the compliments of ‘Jeremiah Stukeley’ in my own handwriting!”

⁂

A few days later a porter appeared in Hogg’s rooms with the Dean’s compliments to Mr. Shelley, and would he go down to him immediately. He went down to the Common Room where he found the Master and several of the Fellows; a little group of learned puritans, all classical and muscular Christians who had always abhorred Shelley because of his long hair, his eccentricities of dress, and his really low taste for experimental science.

The Dean showed him a copy of The Necessity of Atheism, and asked him if he were the author. As he spoke in a rude, abrupt, and insolent voice, Shelley did not reply.

“Are you, yes or no, the author of this pamphlet?”

“If you can prove that it is by me, produce your evidence. It is neither just nor lawful to interrogate me in this fashion. Such proceedings would become a court of inquisitors, but not free men in a free country.”

“Do you choose to deny that this is your composition?”

“I refuse to reply.”

“Then you are expelled, and I desire that you will quit the college to-morrow morning at the very latest.”

An envelope sealed with the college seal was immediately handed to him by one of the Fellows. It contained the sentence of expulsion.

Shelley dashed back to Hogg’s rooms, flung himself down on the sofa, and trembling with rage repeated “Expelled! . . . Expelled!”

The punishment was terrible. It put a stop to his studies; made it impossible for him to enter any other university; deprived him of the peaceful life he so much enjoyed; and drew down on his head his father’s grotesque and inextinguishable anger.

Hogg was as indignant as his friend, and carried away by a youthful generosity, instantly addressed a note to the Master and Fellows, expressing his grief and astonishment that such treatment could have been meted out to such a man as Shelley. He trusted that the sentence was not final.

The note was dispatched. The Conclave was still sitting. In a moment the porter returned with “the Dean’s compliments to Mr. Hogg and would he go down at once.”

The audience was brief.

“Did you write this?”

It was the letter he had just written and he acknowledged it.

“And this?” putting into Hogg’s hand the pamphlet on Atheism.

With a wealth of arguments and the subtleties of a K.C., Hogg pointed out the absurdity of the question, and the injustice of punishing Shelley for having refused to answer it, the obligation lying on every man conscious of his rights. . . .

“That’s enough!” shouted the Master in a furious voice. “You’re expelled too!” . . . He seemed in a mood to have expelled every man in the college. Hogg was handed the sealed envelope in his turn.

In the course of the day a large official paper was affixed to the door of hall. It was signed by the Master and Dean, bore the college seal, and declared that Thomas Jefferson Hogg and Percy Bysshe Shelley were publicly expelled for refusing to answer certain questions put to them.

CHAPTER VI
TIMOTHY SHELLEY’S VIGOROUS DIALECTICS

The exiles set off bag and baggage in the Oxford coach. Shelley had borrowed £20 from his booksellers, in order to pay his way in London while waiting news from his father.

Every lodging which he visited with Hogg appeared to him impossible, either the street was too noisy, the district too dirty, the maid-servant too plain. Finally, the name of Poland Street reminded him of Warsaw . . . of Freedom . . . he was certain that in Poland Street any one of the rooms must be worthy of a free man’s choice, and the very first which he visited, where there was a trellised paper, vine leaves, and huge bunches of green and purple grapes, seemed to him the most beautiful room in the world.

“Here we will settle down,” said he, “and begin our Oxford days over again, our readings by the fireside, our rambles, our delightful experiences. Here we will live for ever.”

Nothing was wanting to his programme but the consent of the two fathers, Mr. Shelley and Mr. Hogg.

⁂

When Timothy Shelley heard of the events at Oxford, he was enraged beyond measure. Evidently, for a wealthy landowner, a Member of Parliament, and a J.P. for his county, it was a most disagreeable occurrence. The accusation of atheism annoyed him most, because he himself was known as a Liberal, and such advanced thought in politics required to balance it orthodoxy in religion.

He sat down and wrote a solemn letter to Mr. Hogg senior, deploring “the unfortunate affair that has happened to my son and yours at Oxford,” and urging him to get his “young man home” as soon as possible. “As for me,” he added, “I shall recommend mine to read Paley’s Natural Theology: it is extremely applicable. I shall read it with him.”

Then he wrote a second letter to his own “young man,” very strongly worded: “Though I have felt as a father and sympathized in the misfortune which your criminal opinions and improper acts have begot: yet you must know that I have a duty to perform to my own character, as well as to your young brother and sisters. Above all my feelings as a Christian require from me a firm and decided conduct toward you.

“If you shall require aid or assistance from me—or any protection—you must please yourself to me:

“1st. To go immediately to Field Place, and to abstain from all communication with Mr. Hogg for some considerable time.

“2nd. That you shall place yourself under the care and society of such gentleman as I shall appoint and attend to his instructions and directions he shall give.”

If these conditions were not accepted Timothy Shelley would abandon his son to all the misery which such wicked and diabolical opinions justly entail.

Shelley’s reply was brief:

“My dear Father,

“As you do me the honour of requesting to hear the determination of my mind as the basis of your future actions I feel it my duty, although it gives me pain to wound ‘the sense of duty to your own character, to that of your family and your feelings as a Christian,’ decidedly to refuse my assent to both the proposals in your letter and to affirm that similar refusals will always be the fate of similar requests. With many thanks for your great kindness,

“I remain your affectionate, dutiful son,

“Percy B. Shelley.”

⁂

The chief obstacle in the diplomatic relations between father and son is that the former desires above all things to avoid a rupture, which renders disciplinary measures difficult. His “conditions” having been succinctly refused, Timothy Shelley found himself at a loss what to do.

Not a bad man at bottom, he believed in the powerful persuasion of a bottle of old port. He resolved to go up to town and invite the delinquents to dinner at Miller’s Hotel, where the wine was good.

“After all,” he said to himself, while waiting for the two young men, “one must treat young people with good humour, and even go so far, ridiculous as it may seem, as to discuss things with them. . . . A ripened and thoughtful mind should get the better, without any difficulty, of a philosopher of eighteen, and serious misfortune may be avoided, by a word of wisdom in the nick of time. . . . I mustn’t forget that Percy is my heir and that he will succeed to the title: he must be led back into the fold.”

And the excellent man, while marshalling into order Paley’s chief arguments, rubbed his hands with satisfaction.

Meanwhile, the friends, going on foot from Poland Street to Southwark, read aloud to each other passages from Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary which Shelley had picked up on a stall. They found it extremely amusing and laughed immoderately at the old Frenchman’s ridicule of the Jewish people, the intolerance with which the Bible is packed, and Jehovah’s sickening and useless cruelties.

When they reached the hotel, a certain Mr. Graham, the factotum of Timothy Shelley, was already there with his friend and patron. Mr. Shelley received Hogg with a wheedling benevolence, then turning to his son, began to talk in an odd, unconnected manner, punctuating his discourse with dramatic gestures, which appeared highly ridiculous to the two young men.

“What do you think of my father?” Shelley whispered to Hogg.

“Oh, it is not your father. It is the God of the Jews, the Jehovah you have been reading about.”

Percy gave a wild demoniacal burst of laughter, slipped from his seat and fell on his back at full length on the floor.

“What’s the matter, Bysshe? Are you ill? Are you mad? Why do you laugh?” asked his father, scandalized.

Fortunately, at the same moment, dinner was announced, and proving excellent, the conversation became almost cordial. When the dessert was put on the table, the squire sent his son off to order the post-horses for the next morning, while he undertook the conquest of Hogg.

“You are a very different person, sir, from what I expected to find; you are a nice, moderate, reasonable, pleasant gentleman. Tell me what you think I ought to do with my poor boy? He is rather wild, is he not?”

“Yes, rather.”

“Then what am I to do?”

“If he had married his cousin he would perhaps have been less so. . . . He wants somebody to take care of him; a good wife. What if he were married?”

“But how can I do that? It is impossible. If I were to tell Bysshe to marry a girl he would refuse immediately. I know him so well.”

“I have no doubt he would refuse if you were to order him to marry, and I should not blame him. But if you were to bring him in contact with some young lady who you believed would make him a suitable wife, without saying anything about marriage, perhaps he would take a fancy to her, and if he did not like her you could try another.”

Mr. Graham, interposing, said it was an excellent plan, and the two men talking in low voices were going over a list of the young women of their acquaintance, when Shelley returned. His father ordered a bottle of a still older port than any they had yet had, and began to speak in praise of himself. He was so highly respected in the House of Commons: he was respected by the whole House and by the Speaker in particular, who said to him, “Mr. Shelley, I do not know what we should do without you.” He was greatly beloved in the county; he was an admirable Justice of the Peace; he told a very long story of how he had lately committed two poachers: “You know the fellows, Graham. You know what they are?” Graham assented. “Well, when they got out of prison one of them came and thanked me.”

Why the poacher was so grateful for a pitiless sentence Hogg never knew, for the worthy magistrate, believing the wine to have by now produced its effect, attacked the principal subject of his thoughts.

“There is certainly a God,” said he. “There can be no doubt of the existence of a Deity; none whatever.”

Nobody present expressed any doubt.

“You, sir,” said he, addressing himself to Hogg, “you have no doubt on the subject, have you?”

“None whatever.”

“If you have, I can prove it to you in a moment.”

“But I have no doubt.”

“Ah . . . still you might perhaps like to hear my argument?”

“Very much.”

“I will read it to you then.”

He searched in all his pockets, pulling out various bills and letters, producing finally a half-sheet of note-paper, which he began to read. Bysshe, leaning forward, listened with profound attention.

“I have heard this argument before,” said he, at the end of a few minutes, and turning to Hogg, “Where have I heard that?”

“They are Paley’s arguments.”

“Yes,” the reader observed with much complacency. “They are Paley’s arguments. I copied them out of Paley’s book this morning, but Paley had them originally from me; everything in Paley’s book he had from me.”

On this he folded up the paper, and returned it to his pocket. His son watched him with more disdain than ever, and the dinner terminated without having brought about a reconciliation. Shelley refused to go with his father. His father refused to give him a penny. The only two who seemed satisfied with one another were Hogg and his host. Timothy Shelley had found his son’s friend to be far more human than his son. He was not like Percy, always with bristling quills, always on the strain, always dug in behind principles which one could not attack without wounding his infernal pride. Young as he was, Hogg understood life. His notions on marriage were sensible. Hogg, on his side, declared that though the oratorical eloquence of the member for New Shoreham was certainly a bit foggy, nevertheless he was very hospitable and a good sort.

A few days later he gave another proof that he understood life by making up his quarrel with his own father, who, head of a True Blue Tory family, well known for its orthodoxy, had no need to display the same horror at the actions of his “young man” as had the Whig owner of Field Place.

Hogg senior advised his son to read for the Bar and got him into a conveyancer’s chambers at York. Hogg was, therefore, obliged to abandon Shelley in the Poland Street lodgings, a wistful, bright-eyed fox in the midst of the green and purple bunches of grapes.

CHAPTER VII
AN ACADEMY FOR YOUNG LADIES

Alone in London, without friends, work, or money, Shelley fell into despair. He passed his time in writing melancholy poems, or letters to Hogg. Not knowing what to do with his evenings he went to bed at eight o’clock. Sleep alone stopped him from going over and over the story of his woes. The moment he let himself think, the image of his beautiful and shallow-hearted cousin rose to torture him. He tried to steel his heart against the painful vision by syllogisms.

“I loved a being,” he told himself. “The being whom I loved is not what she was: consequently, as love appertains to mind and not to body, she exists no longer. . . . I might as well court the worms, which the soulless body of a beloved being generates in the damp unintelligent vaults of a charnel-house.”

This appeared to him such excellent logic that he was astounded it brought him no consolation.

The money question grew serious. His father gave no sign of life. Shelley meeting him one day by chance, politely hoped he was well? All he got was a look black as a thunder cloud and a majestic “Your most humble servant, sir!”

Fortunately, his sisters did not forget him and sent him their pocket-money. It was all he had to live on. Elizabeth at Field Place was too well watched to do anything, but the younger girls were now at Mrs. Fenning’s Academy for Young Ladies on Clapham Common, and very soon Mrs. Fenning’s pupils made acquaintance with the fine eyes, the open shirt-collar and tossed curls of Hellen Shelley’s wonderful brother.

He would arrive, his pockets bulging with biscuits and raisins, and begin to discourse on ultimate themes to an adoring circle of little girls. He had undertaken to “illuminate” the prettiest amongst them. He could not endure the idea that so much loveliness should be abandoned to “prejudices.”

He admired most of all his sisters’ greatest friend, Harriet Westbrook, a lovely child of sixteen, with light brown hair and a complexion of milk and roses. She was small, slightly and delicately formed, and had an air of youthful gaiety, of delicious freshness. She came to the rescue when Mrs. Fenning, acting on the orders of Timothy Shelley, requested Percy to visit his sisters less often. Harriet, whose family lived in Chapel Street, Mayfair, often went home: the little sisters, therefore, entrusted her with the cakes and the money intended for Percy, and she taking these to the hermit of Poland Street, the two young people became naturally the greatest friends.

Harriet Westbrook’s father was a retired publican; he had made money, and desired to give his youngest daughter a genteel education. Her mother was dead, and she had been brought up by Eliza, a much older sister. One can easily imagine the interest which the Westbrook family took in the grandson of a baronet, the heir to an immense fortune, who was beautiful as a young god, lived in lodgings on bread and pudding raisins, and to whom the youngest of the Westbrook girls carried his sisters’ pocket-money to prevent him from starving to death.

Eliza being keen to see the hero, Harriet took her with her on the next visit. Shelley was somewhat intimidated by the elder Miss Westbrook, a mature virgin, dried-up and bony, with a dead-white skin seamed with scars, and fish-like eyes that stared without intelligence, the whole crowned with an immense crop of black hair. Eliza was particularly proud of her hair. Her affected manners were in striking contrast with Harriet’s spontaneous gaiety. But Bysshe soon forgot she was plain when he saw that her intentions were friendly. Not only she made no objection, as might have been feared, to Harriet’s visits to Poland Street, but she offered to bring her there, and on several occasions invited Shelley to come and dine with them when Mr. Westbrook was away.

She completely won the heart of the young philosopher by asking to share with Harriet in his teaching, and undertook to read the Philosophical Dictionary under his guidance.

Harriet’s walks with Shelley soon became the talk of the Young Ladies’ Academy. One of the mistresses thought fit to warn her: “Young Mr. Shelley is notorious for his advanced opinions, and it is probable that his morals are no better than his ideas.” Harriet had to give up a letter from him, filled with the most pernicious arguments, and for corresponding with an “atheist,” she was threatened with expulsion. The county gentlemen’s daughters gave the cold shoulder to the publican’s daughter, and life in the school was made exceeding bitter to her.

One night as Shelley sat alone, reading by his fireside, a message was brought him from Eliza to say that Harriet was sick, and would he come and keep her company. He found her in bed, very pale, but lovelier than ever, with all her chestnut hair spread about her.

Old Westbrook came upstairs to say “How-d’ye-do,” and Shelley was rather embarrassed on seeing him, for however free he was from convention, he could not help feeling that his presence at that late hour in a young girl’s bedroom was hardly discreet.

Westbrook, however, showed himself all geniality. “Sorry I can’t stop with you but I’ve got friends downstairs. Perhaps you’ll join us presently?”

Shelley thanked him and declined. The friends of Westbrook had no attraction for him. He sat beside Harriet’s bed, with Eliza near by. She was in eloquent vein, speaking at great length on the enthralling subject of Love. Harriet complained of a headache; she could not stand the noise of conversation.

“Very well then,” said Eliza, “I’ll go away.”

The two young things were left alone until long after midnight, while Westbrook’s friends drank and roared below.

Next day Harriet was quite well.

⁂

Shelley’s exile was less hard to bear from the moment he could receive the visits of a young girl and “illuminate” her soul. Nevertheless, he suffered from being separated from his sister Elizabeth. She no longer even answered his letters. Could she be shut up in her room? He determined at all costs to make a secret visit to Field Place so as to see her. At times he thought of a pacific invasion. What could happen to him, after all, if one evening he turned up there without notice, and opposed a Quaker-like silence to the cursings of his father? But the adventure was simplified when Captain Pilfold, a brother of Mrs. Shelley, offered his nephew most opportunely a jumping-off place for his attack on Field Place.

Pilfold was a hearty and jovial old sea-dog who, under Nelson, had commanded a frigate at Trafalgar. He infinitely preferred his fantastic nephew to his solemn brother-in-law. That Percy were an atheist or not, the Captain did not care a hang. The boy had energy, and that was the important thing. He invited him to run down to Cuckfield, ten miles from Field Place, and received him with open arms.

Shelley, out of gratitude, offered to “illuminate” his host, and the Captain proved such an apt scholar that at the end of ten days he staggered the Rector and the Doctor by his fiery syllogisms.

At Cuckfield, Shelley made acquaintance with Miss Kitchener, a school-teacher, from the neighbouring town of Hurstpierpoint. She was rather good-looking, had a Roman nose, and was in her twenty-ninth year. She was a republican in politics, and enjoyed the reputation of being sentimental and conceited. She, on her side, lamented that there was not one who understood her. Shelley having admired as was natural to him the nobility of her attitude, perceived with regret that she was still a deist. He proposed “a polemical correspondence,” in the course of which he undertook to cure her of this infirmity. She agreed.

Captain Pilfold, meanwhile, set off courageously to grapple and board Timothy Shelley. He had the bright idea of enrolling in the cause the Duke of Norfolk, chief of the Whig party. Snobbism triumphed over paternal tyranny. Shelley walked back into Field Place with all the honours of war. He was given £200 a year unconditionally.

⁂

He could now again see Elizabeth, but he was overwhelmed by the change he found in her. She was livelier, and gayer, than formerly, but had become incredibly frivolous. He remembered her serious, enthusiastic; he found her apathetic to everything but dancing, trivial amusements, and silly chatter. She lived now for nothing but society.

He wished to read to her Hogg’s letters as he had been used to do.

“Oh, you and your ridiculous friend! Every one I know thinks you are both mad.”

On this she spoke of matrimony: she thought of little else, and nothing disgusted Shelley more. She seemed to have forgotten all they had read together on the subject, and all Godwin’s elevated ideas.

“Marriage is odious and hateful,” he told her. “I am sickened when I think of this despotic chain, the heaviest forged by man to shackle fiery souls. Scepticism and free love are as necessarily associated together as religion and marriage. Honourable men have no need of laws. For heaven’s sake, Elizabeth, read over the Marriage Service and ask yourself if any decent man could wish the girl he loved to submit to such degradation.”

“Yet you want me to marry your friend Hogg?”

“Yes, but not by a clergyman nor according to man’s laws, but freely and with Love only as high priest.”

“This then is the honourable advice of a brother?” said Elizabeth with disdain.

It was useless to hope to make any impression on a character become futile beyond any possible cure. “Why should I deceive myself? She is lost, lost to everything. She talks nothing but cant and twaddle. What she wants of me is that, like a fashionable brother, I should act as a jackal for husbands, well, I refuse! I refuse emphatically.”

He had returned to Field Place merely to see Elizabeth. There was no good in remaining. Invitations elsewhere were not wanting. Captain Pilfold would have been glad to have him again at Cuckfield. Westbrook was going to pass the summer in Wales, and his daughters pressed Shelley to join them. Hogg wanted him to come for a month to York; it was this last idea which tempted him most. But his father, who doubtless saw a symbolic value in the separation of the two Oxford criminals, would not have tolerated it, and as the first quarter’s allowance was due on the first of September it was better to be patient. Hogg wrote jestingly that it was easy to see the lovely Harriet took precedence over old friends.

“Your jokes amuse me,” Shelley answered.

“If I know anything about love I am not in love. But I have heard from the Westbrooks, both of whom I highly esteem.”

While he still hesitated where to go, Thomas Grove, a cousin of his mother’s, invited him to Cwm Elan, a wild corner of Radnorshire. Here he could economize while awaiting his allowance. He accepted the Groves’ invitation.

On his way through London he would have liked to have seen Miss Kitchener and have taken her to lunch. But the school-teacher with the Roman nose feared this would not be quite a proper thing to do, there was such an immense social difference between her and Mr. Shelley. Indignant at the mere idea, Shelley wrote her a long letter on equality, in which he addressed her as “his soul’s sister.” Miss Kitchener began to think that Lady Shelley was a fine name and to study her reflection in the looking-glass.

CHAPTER VIII
THIS DESPOTIC CHAIN . . .

Now for the first time Shelley was among mountain solitudes, and heard the voices of mountain torrents, but the power of hills was not upon him. “This is most divine scenery,” he wrote to Hogg, “but all very dull, stale, flat, and unprofitable; indeed, the place is a very great bore.” Sitting near some tree-shaded waterfall he passed his time in reading and re-reading the letters he received from his friends. He was the director of innumerable “souls”: Miss Kitchener, the faithful Hogg, Captain Pilfold, the terror of the pious, Eliza and Harriet Westbrook, without counting many whose names are unknown.

The Westbrooks had just gone back to London when he received from Harriet a most disturbing letter. Her father insisted on her returning to Mrs. Fenning’s school where she had been so miserable, where her schoolfellows had sent her to Coventry, and called her “an abandoned wretch.” Rather than exist in such a prison she would kill herself. “Why live? No one loves me, and I have no one to love. Is suicide a crime in one who is useless to others and insupportable to herself? Since there is no law of God, has the law of man any right to forbid so natural an action?”

A sort of terror seized Shelley. This schoolgirl logic appeared irrefutable, and it was he who had formed her mind. How then could he answer her with calculated coldness and abandon her to death? He wrote advising firmness; before despairing she should resist, she should refuse to return to school, and he himself wrote Mr. Westbrook a letter of expostulation.

The old publican was outraged. What right had this young sprig of nobility to interfere? He had been dangling after the Westbrook girls for six months or more, and Eliza imagined he would marry Harriet, but when had a future baronet ever married the daughter of a tavern-keeper? The young fellow wanted, evidently, something very different.

Westbrook had sized him up the evening he had first met him in Harriet’s bedroom. He had invited him to come down and take a glass in the parlour, and Mr. Shelley had refused with disdain.

How could the grandson of Sir Bysshe Shelley, the wealthy baronet, be a Friend of the People, or a believer in Equality? Bah! the Upper Ten were all exactly the same.

Harriet was ordered to get ready for Clapham. She wrote to Shelley again a letter in which a somewhat less lugubrious plan replaced that of suicide. She was too miserable at home, too cruelly persecuted, but she was ready to elope with him if he would consent.

He instantly took the coach for London in indescribable agitation of mind.

That he was partly responsible for Harriet he could not doubt. He had formed her, he had inspired her with exalted courage, and the horror of injustice. It was a letter from him which had brought about her first disgrace.

But if he eloped with her how should they live? He had no profession, no prospects—and did he really love her? Could he love anyone again after the blighting of his young hopes by his cousin?

Still, Harriet was charming, and there was something intoxicating in the idea of a journey in the company of the lovely creature he had seen one night in bed, with unbound auburn hair.

It was difficult to repel even warmer ideas.

When he saw her again her face was pale, wasted, tragic.

“They have made you suffer?”

“No, no. . . .” She hesitated to say, “I suffer because I am in love with you,” but her eyes, lifted to his, confessed the truth. She was madly in love with him. He had completely transformed her. Before meeting him she had had all the normal tastes of the British schoolgirl. She had adored the red coats of the military, and when she wove day-dreams the hero was always an officer. But when she dreamed of marriage the hero became a black-coated clergyman.

Shelley had overthrown all such reasonable ideals. The first time she had heard him declaim on religion or politics, she had been frightened, and made up her mind to convert him. But at the outset his logic had crushed her, and conquered by an antagonist so greatly her superior, she found nothing but pleasure in her defeat.

When he had decided not to join them in Wales, she was afraid she had lost him, and in writing to him had exaggerated her hardships in order to bring her hero back.

Shelley had little admiration for Knight Errantry, which struck him as senseless. A man has no right to devote to Woman a life which should be consecrated to the service of Humanity. But looking on Harriet’s exquisite face, which a single word from him could suffuse with happiness, he gave his principles the go-by. He took her hand in his, and declared himself hers heart and soul.

A last rag of prudence made him decide against an immediate elopement. It was dangerous and needless to force events. If they tried to coerce her, she had but to make a sign to him, he would fly to her from the ends of the earth and carry her off.

Once more her face glowed with the rosy happiness of the young girl who knows she is beloved.

⁂

But the moment he had left her, he sighed deeply and fell into embarrassment and melancholy. He wrote to describe the situation to Hogg, and Hogg replied strongly urging his friend not to elope with Harriet without marrying her first. He knew all Shelley’s hostility to marriage, but he used powerful arguments. “If you don’t marry her, which will suffer? You or she? Evidently she alone. It is she whom the world will scorn. It is she who must make the sacrifice of her reputation and her security. Have you the right to ask this of her?” The appeal was cleverly turned, as selfishness was of all vices the one which Shelley most despised. But he felt too that marriage was a shameful and immoral action. The chapters in Political Justice against matrimonial chains stuck in his mind. It was now that some one reassured him by telling him that the great Godwin himself had been married twice.

“It is evidently useless,” he wrote to Hogg, “to seek by an individual example to rejuvenate the forms of society until such time as reason shall have brought about so great a change, that the reformer be no longer exposed to stoning.”

At the same time he was in no hurry to apply his new tenets. Captain Pilfold invited him to Cuckfield; he knew he would see there his “soul’s sister,” the handsome school-teacher with the Roman nose. He desired to complete her initiation in the Truth. So, again promising Harriet to return at the first sign she should make him, he left London.

One would need to be nineteen years old to have the smallest doubt as to what must happen. A young girl very much in love and armed with such a promise, does not long resist her heart’s desire. Before a week was out an ardent message recalled Shelley to town. The tyrants insisted on delivering up Andromeda to the Scholastic Dragon!

Shelley realized that there was no help for it but to elope with Harriet, and marry her afterwards—as soon as possible.

Next day the Edinburgh Mail Coach carried northwards these two young things whose united ages did not exceed thirty-five.

“An act of will, not an act of passion,” the young Knight told himself, as he sat facing his exquisite little sweetheart, while the stage jolted and rumbled on its way.

CHAPTER IX
A VERY YOUNG COUPLE

A pair of young lovers, persecuted and charming, exercises a fascination which is almost irresistible. The citizens of Edinburgh, difficult to get at where their purse is concerned, could not prevent themselves from giving an amused and indulgent welcome to the very young couple who arrived at their gates in such brilliant penury.

Before leaving London Shelley had borrowed a few pounds from a friend. When he got to Edinburgh he hadn’t a penny left. It was useless to hope for help from his father, whom the news of his elopement must have thrown into paroxysms of rage.

However, he found a good-humoured landlord to whom he told his story; this, with Harriet’s beauty and a promise of speedy payment, induced him to give the travellers an excellent ground-floor flat in his house.

Better still, he advanced them the money they needed to pay their way during the first few days, and to arrange the wedding, according to the simple rites of the Scottish Church. His only condition was that Shelley should treat him and his friends to a supper on the wedding night.

So it was in the midst of Edinburgh tradesmen that the grandson of Sir Bysshe ate his wedding-feast. The fumes of the wines and the spectacle of the young people going to the heads of the guests, these honest Puritans became a trifle too wanton for Shelley’s taste. The jests grew ribald. The modest Harriet blushed crimson, and Shelley rising announced that he and his wife would say good night.

A roar of laughter was the reply.

A little later there came a knock at their door. Shelley opened it to find his landlord, followed by all his friends. He spoke tipsily: “It’s the custom here when there’s a wedding, to come up in the middle of the night and wash the bride with whisky. . . .”

“Take another step into the room, and I blow your brains out!” cried Shelley, seizing a pistol in each hand.

Perceiving that there was something dangerous in this young man who looked so like a girl, the intruders wished him a respectful good night, and tumbled precipitately downstairs.

Thus Shelley and Harriet found themselves husband and wife, free and alone in a big unknown city. They looked at each other in rapture.

A few days had sufficed to render the young husband, who in the stage had reflected with melancholy, “An act of will and not of passion,” over head and ears in love.

Harriet was really delightful to look upon: always pretty, always bright, always blooming, her head well dressed, not a hair out of its place; smart, usually plain in her neatness, without a wrinkle, without a spot, she resembled some pink-and-white flower.

Without being really cultivated she was remarkably well-informed. She had read a prodigious number of books, she still read all day long, and works of a high ethical tone for choice.

Her master, who was her lover, had given her his own veneration for Virtue, and Fénelon’s Télémaque was his favourite hero. She practised saying over the magic words “Intolerance,” “Equality,” “Justice,” and her child-lips uttered maxims which would have staggered the Lord Chancellor. As to the Anglican religion she ignored it as completely as did Calypso and Nausicaa.

Children are delightful, but their society is fatiguing. Fully alive to the charm, sweet temper, and unselfishness of Harriet, nevertheless Shelley now and again sighed for Hogg’s caustic talk, or Miss Hitchener’s ardent enthusiasm. He asked himself uneasily what the latter would think of his marriage.

“My dearest Friend,” he wrote to her, “if I may still address you so? Or have I lost, through my equivocal conduct, the esteem of the virtuous and the wise? . . . How in one week all my plans have changed, and to what an extent are we the slaves of circumstance! You will ask how I, an atheist, could submit myself to the marriage ceremony, how my conscience could ever consent to it? This is what I want to explain to you. . . .”

Thereupon, treading in Hogg’s footsteps, he proved that one has not the right to deprive a beloved being of all the advantages which are bound up with a good reputation.

“Blame if thou wilt, dearest friend, for still thou art dearest to me, yet pity even this error if thou blamest me. If Harriet be not at sixteen all you are at a more advanced age, assist me to mould a really noble soul into all that can make its nobleness useful and lovely. . . . Charming she is already unless I am the weakest of error’s slaves.”

The letter finished with an invitation that the lady should join them at Edinburgh, where Harriet’s presence would prevent any thought of impropriety. Miss Kitchener did not accept. Evidently the poetic “thee’s” and “thou’s” were not sufficient to buy pardon for the somewhat unfortunate reference to Harriet’s and Miss Hitchener’s respective ages.

But though the virgin of Cuckfield declined to come and help in the moulding of Harriet’s soul, one sunny morning Shelley heard a knock at the door of his flat, and looking out of the window was overjoyed to see Hogg standing in the street, bag in hand.

Having just given himself a few weeks’ holiday, he came to pass them in Edinburgh. He received a triumphal reception.

“We have met at last once more!” cried Shelley. “And we will never part again! You must have a bed in the house!”

Harriet came in. Hogg was charmed with her. He had never seen such blooming, radiant youth and beauty. The landlord was summoned.

“We want another bedroom, instantly, urgently, indispensably!” When the poor man was permitted to answer, he offered them a room at the top of the house.

The three friends had a thousand things to tell and to ask. They all talked at once, while a dirty little nymph, the servant of the house, brought in tea, with many discordant ejaculations.

So soon as the excitement had somewhat subsided Shelley proposed a walk, and they went to visit the palace of Mary Stuart.

Harriet, as an excellent pupil of the Academy for Young Ladies and a tireless reader of historical romances, explained the history of the unhappy Queen. On leaving Holyrood House Shelley declared he must go home and write letters, but he wished Hogg and Harriet to climb to Arthur’s Seat, whence they would get a view of the whole city.

Hogg having admired the scene, they sat there a long time together, and probably in such delightful company he would have found any view admirable.

As they came down, the wind having begun to blow, displayed Harriet’s ankles, which Hogg by a side glance examined with interest.

This made Harriet sit down again upon a rock and declare she would remain there “for ever”!

Hogg who was desperately hungry, protested in vain. So he left her . . . and presently she came running down after him.

Thus began for the three young people some delightful weeks.

The money question remained an anxious one, but jolly Uncle Pilfold sent frequent presents. “To be confoundedly angry with his son is all very well, but to stop the supplies is a great deal too bad.” Hogg also had some spare cash, although Timothy Shelley had taken the trouble to write to Hogg senior: “I think it my duty to warn you that my young man has just set off for Scotland with a young female, and that your young man has joined them.”

Every morning Shelley would go out to fetch his letters, the number of which remained prodigious. After breakfast he worked at a translation of Buffon which he had undertaken, while Hogg and Harriet went for a walk. If the weather were bad she read aloud to Hogg. She was fond of reading aloud and she read remarkably well, with a very distinct enunciation and an agreeable voice.

Hogg listened to the greater part of Télémaque and never complained. The virtuous Idomeneus giving wise laws to Crete was horribly boring, but the reader was so lovely to look upon that he would have listened without complaining the whole day through.

Shelley, less polite, would sometimes drop off to sleep, and his innocent slumbers gave serious offence. His friend would support his wife in stigmatizing him as an inattentive wretch, Hogg taking an unconscious pleasure in making common cause with Harriet.

It was the year of the famous comet and of the still more famous vintage 1811. The nights were clear and bright.

CHAPTER X
HOGG

At the end of six weeks it was necessary that Hogg should return to York. As Shelley and Harriet had nothing to retain them in Edinburgh, nor indeed anywhere else in the world, they decided to go with him. They would remain with him in York during the year which he must still spend in that city, and then all three would remove to London where they would live “for ever,” writing, reading, and being read to.

Not to overtire Harriet they hired a post-chaise. On either side of the road fields of turnips alternated monotonously with fields of barley.

“But which are the turnips and which is the barley?” Harriet asked.

“Why, you little Cockney!” Shelley, the heir to broad lands, exclaimed with indignation.

Silent in his corner, Hogg, the scoffer, asked himself how it came about that the virtuous Idomeneus had taught his disciple so little.

To while away the time, Harriet read aloud in the chaise Holcroft’s novels. The rigid, spartan, iron tone of that stern author was not encouraging. Bysshe sometimes sighed deeply.

“Is it necessary to read all that, Harriet dear?”

“Yes, absolutely.”

“Cannot you skip some part?”

“No, it is impossible.”

At the first relay, Shelley vanished. He had always possessed the astonishing power of vanishing like an Elf. He was recaptured by Hogg, who found him standing on the seashore—it was at Berwick—gazing mournfully at the setting sun.

He took a violent dislike to York. The theological and civic pre-eminence of the old city had no charm for him, and the only lodgings they could find were dingy rooms kept by a couple of dingy milliners in a dingy street. “It’s impossible to stay here,” Bysshe declared. But to move elsewhere money was needed. He decided to go and see Captain Pilfold, protector of the good and free; there, too, at Cuckfield, he would again meet Miss Kitchener; perhaps he could persuade her to go back with him to York, and on their way through London they could pick up Eliza Westbrook, whose company was much desired by Harriet. And thus, for the first time, all Shelley’s spiritual sisters would find themselves together.

He therefore took the coach, and Harriet and Hogg were left by themselves, a strange and delicious situation. In this city, where they had no acquaintances, they were as free as on some desert island, and Harriet found a childish pleasure in playing at “housekeeping” with her young and witty companion. Hogg’s sarcastic tongue amused her greatly, and was a relief to Shelley’s burning seriousness which she admired so much. Hogg was always paying her compliments, both in Edinburgh and on the journey to York, and she saw no harm in it. Percy was always a little bit of “the school-master.” He had taught her all she knew. He gravely corrected her mistakes. He was conscious of her limitations. Hogg, on the contrary, admired everything she did, noticed her frocks, and the way she did her hair. He listened to Télémaque, and praised the voice of the reader. He was always gay. It was really very pleasant.

Hogg’s own sentiments were quite other and less commendable. Living continually in the company of this charming girl, he began to desire her with passion. At first he told himself that this was a terrible desire and that the wife of his best friend could never be an object of his pursuit. But when one is intelligent, one knows how to put intelligence at the service of one’s desires.

“Am I to blame,” said he, “if Bysshe throws her in my arms? What a mad notion of his to sit and write long letters on Virtue when he possesses an adorable creature like Harriet! For she is ravishingly pretty. When she walks in the street the most Puritanical run to the windows to look at her. . . . Does Bysshe really love her? He shows her a rather contemptuous sort of affection, and has some excuse for it. For Harriet is . . . what? The daughter of a publican. . . . She can’t be very stand-off. . . .”

Ever since he first knew Shelley, two contradictory sentiments had divided his soul. He admired his friend’s moral courage, frankness, and ardent loyalty. He knew him to be unique, a diamond of the purest water. Yet, at the same time, his sense of humour was tickled by Percy’s declamatory vehemence, by his feverish energy that yet accomplished nothing.

At Oxford Hogg had acted the cultured Sancho Panza to this fair-skinned Don Quixote, and had taken his share of the punishment meted out by the terrible windmills. His admiration in the beginning had triumphed over his irony, which simply served to lend the former a more tender hue. Now, stirred up by a guilty passion, his irony visibly increased.

On the first day of Shelley’s absence, when Hogg left his chambers he took Harriet for a walk by the river. He gazed in her eyes with delight, and murmured a thousand foolish things. She talked of her husband whose return she longed for, partly for his own sake but chiefly because he was to bring with him her dearest Eliza. “Eliza is very beautiful as you will see, she has splendid hair, jet black, glossy . . . she is awfully clever . . . it is she who has always guided me in the important affairs of my life.”

“The child has had important affairs in its life?”

Harriet spoke of her martyrdom at school . . . of the obstacles to her marriage . . . she remained pensive a moment plunged in the past . . . then, “What is your opinion of suicide? Did you never think of destroying yourself?”

“Never! Nor you either, I should hope?”

“Oh yes, very often. Even at school I used to get up in the night with the fixed intention of killing myself. I would look out of the window, and say good-bye to the moon and the stars, to the sleeping girls . . . and then I would go back to bed again and fall asleep.”

The walk continued, so did their intimate talk. Then they went home to make the tea, a ceremony during which Hogg was always extremely funny. After tea Harriet offered to read to him, but of what she read to him that evening he retained no notion. When she said “good night” and left him, he asked himself, “Is she really good?”

When he saw her next day he told her he was madly in love with her.

Harriet was upset and indignant. For a child of sixteen, she defended herself fairly well. She spoke of Shelley and of Virtue. “Don’t you see how odious your behaviour is? Percy gave me into your care and you betray his confidence. . . . But I’m sure you are cured already. . . . Please don’t say another word about it. . . . And I will say nothing to Percy so as not to grieve him.”

She spoke with vivacity. Love scenes are a pretty woman’s battlefields and soldiers enjoy fighting. Harriet’s courage was victorious, and Hogg promised to be good.

That evening, when he returned from work, he saw sitting by Harriet’s side on the sofa a big woman, with raven-black hair, a face of a dead white, and a horse-like profile. “Hogg, this is Eliza, she is come, isn’t it kind of her? Eliza, this is Hogg, our greatest friend, of whom Percy has so often spoken to you.”

Eliza shadowed him a bow from the nape of her neck.

“I thought Bysshe was to have brought you with him?”

“Oh dear no!” said Eliza, and she went on talking to Harriet and paid him no further attention.

Hogg was not used to such treatment in the Shelleys’ house.

“So this is Eliza?” he thought. “She is hideous and common-looking. Here’s an end to my flirtation with Harriet—though perhaps that’s just as well. . . .”

“Harriet, dearest,” he said aloud, “aren’t we going to have any tea to-day? You don’t take tea, Miss Westbrook?” he inquired, turning to her politely.

“Oh dear no!” replied that lady.

“And you, Harriet?”

“No, I won’t either.”

Hogg resigned himself to making his own tea, and to drinking it in silence.

From this day forth the house became insupportable. Eliza took over, or rather resumed, the management of everything. She had managed Harriet her whole life through, and though she had been obliged to relinquish her post to Shelley during the first few weeks of marriage, she now again took her place on the bridge like a captain on his ship, who runs his flag up to the mast-head, and tolerates no other authority on board.

She began by criticizing severely Shelley’s conduct. “So if I hadn’t come you would have been left alone with this young man? It’s unbelievable! And he calls you ‘dearest’? And you permit him to do so! Good heavens! What would Miss Warne say!”

When Hogg proposed a walk, “What are you thinking of?” said Eliza. “Harriet is very tired, not well at all. . . .”

Hogg was astounded. “Harriet?” he repeated. “What on earth’s the matter with her?”

“It’s her poor nerves, you must be blind not to see it.”

When Harriet wanted to read aloud to Hogg the virtuous counsels of Idomeneus, of which he stood so much in need: “Read aloud, Harriet? Whatever will become of your poor nerves? What would Miss Warne say?”

“Who the deuce is Miss Warne?” Hogg asked Harriet so soon as Eliza had gone to her room.

“She is Eliza’s greatest friend, and we have the highest opinion of her.”

“Why? Is she anything extraordinary by birth and education?”

“Oh dear no, her father keeps a public-house like ours.”

Hogg heaved a sigh and lifted his eyebrows.

“What does that dear Eliza do in her bedroom? Does she read?”

“No.”

Harriet leaned over him to say in tones of mystery: “She brushes her hair.”

“Let’s go out, Harriet. . . .”

At first Harriet refused, but as the hair-brushing was prolonged she agreed to accompany Hogg for a few minutes.

Since his first attempt on her virtue he had kept his promise “to be good.” She was pleased—but disappointed. Quite sure of herself, she would have enjoyed temptation.

They stood on the high centre of the old Roman bridge, there was a mighty flood. The Ouse had overflowed his banks, carrying away with him timber and what not.

“Harriet dearest, think how nicely Eliza would spin down the river! How sweetly she would turn round and round like that log of wood. . . . And gracious heavens! What would Miss Warne say?”

Harriet turned away her head to hide her laughter. Hogg said dreadful things, but really he was too funny.

“You have such a delightful laugh, Harriet! . . . so musical, so gay!”

Harriet, full of courage, felt the battle was close at hand.

CHAPTER XI
HOGG (continued)

Shelley returned next day, sooner than was expected. He had had no success. His father had refused to see him. From very different motives to Shelley’s he too considered his son’s marriage the unforgivable crime.

“I’d have willingly supported any amount of illegitimate children,” he told Captain Pilfold. “But that he should have married her . . . never speak to me of him again!”

Miss Hitchener, afraid for her reputation, had refused to make the journey with Shelley. In London he learned that Eliza had not waited for him. He reached York, tired and out of spirits, hoping to find consolation in the society of his wife and his friend. What he found was an atmosphere of embarrassment and constraint.

Eliza, shut up in her room, brushed her hair all day long. Harriet and Hogg, instead of their former gay nonsense round the tea-tray, treated each other with studied coldness. When Hogg spoke to her, she replied very shortly. There was something mysterious in the air.

The moment Harriet and Shelley were alone, “Dear,” he began, “I don’t like this haughty attitude you take with Hogg. He is my best friend. He has looked after you in my absence. That you now have your sister with you is no reason for giving the cold shoulder to Hogg, whom I look on as a brother.”

Harriet sighed. “He’s a nice sort of friend!” said she, in a tone heavy with insinuations.

Shelley, astonished, urged her to explain.

She told the story. “He has made love to me . . . twice. The first time he told me he was passionately in love with me. . . . I pretended it was a joke. . . . I made him be quiet. I imagined it was all over, and I even had no intention of speaking to you about it. But yesterday he began again. He declared he couldn’t live without me, and that he will kill himself if I don’t consent.”

Shelley felt his blood freeze. His heart seemed to stand still.

“Hogg? Hogg did this? But did you not point out to him . . .?”

“Oh, I said everything I could say . . . that he was a false friend, that he was betraying your confidence. . . . ‘What does all that matter when one is in love?’ he replied. ‘It’s all right for Percy, who is a cold and pure spirit, to talk of virtue . . . but I’m in love with you, and the rest doesn’t count. . . . Besides, what harm should we do Shelley? He need never know. Why not give me your love, and give him your affection? Does he think so much about you?’ ”

“He said that?”

“Yes, and lots of other things as well. He said you mix logic with things where it has no business, that you are a flame for ideas, and ice for the sentiments which alone count in life. . . . I answered him as well as I was able. . . .”

Shelley let himself fall upon the sofa. Suddenly the world seemed eclipsed behind a veil of grey. He was seized with giddiness, his head swam, he shivered with cold.

“That Hogg should have tried to seduce my wife, taking advantage of the moment that I had confided her to his protection . . . Hogg, on whose countenance I have sometimes gazed till I fancied the world could be reformed by gazing too. . . . Never was there a more shameful attempt. . . . And yet when I think of Oxford, of his nobility and disinterestedness. . . . I must talk with him, I must make him see reason. . . .”

He kissed Harriet tenderly, and begged Hogg to walk with him to the fields beyond York. Hogg knew there must be a scene. He was prepared for it. He denied nothing.

“Yes, it’s true. I’ve been in love with Harriet since the first day I saw her in Edinburgh. Is it my fault? I can’t resist beauty in women, and Harriet is admirably beautiful. I repeat I fell in love with her at once.”

“It is not love but lust. A low animal instinct. Not the exalted passion which differentiates Man from the brute. Love? Think a little, Hogg. Love supposes self-forgetfulness, and the desire for the happiness of the beloved object. You could only bring about Harriet’s misery. Therefore, your feelings are not those of love, but of egotism. . . .”

“Call it what you like. . . . What do words signify? It is, anyhow, a terrible passion, which I should have fought against had I not felt it was invincible.”

“No passion is invincible. Our will can always be victorious. Had you thought of me . . . This revelation has aged and broken me more than twenty years of misery could have done. . . . my heart seems seared . . . and then there is Harriet, do you not suppose that all this has been very painful for her?”

Hogg was pale, cast-down. He looked ashamed and unhappy, and he felt so. For he too loved Shelley and he blamed his own conduct severely. “No woman in the world,” he thought, “is worth the sacrifice of such a friend.” Then aloud, “I’m awfully sorry, Bysshe, for what has happened. I’ll try to forget, and do you and Harriet try to forgive me. Let us begin life anew as it was before. Don’t be angry with me any longer. . . .”

“I’m not angry with you, I hate your crime, but not yourself. I hope that one day you will regard this horrible error with as much disgust as I do. When that day comes, you will no longer be responsible for it. The man who feels remorse is no longer the man who was guilty. It is certainly not I who would ever reproach you, for I value a human being not for what it has been, but for what it is.”

Shelley felt such satisfaction at having trodden down his anger and his jealousy, at having discovered for Hogg the way of salvation, that the offence was almost forgotten.

But women are much less indulgent. When Shelley on going home announced that he had forgiven the criminal: “What!” cried Eliza, “you mean to go on living with that fellow? Good heavens! What will become of Harriet’s poor nerves?”

Hogg, coming in from his chambers next day, found an empty house.

CHAPTER XII
FIRST ENCOUNTER WITH MIDDLE AGE

Shelley and the two girls, in their flight from the deplorable Hogg, had decided to go to the Lakes. There was a sentimental reason for this, very like his choice of Poland Street. Two great poets, both Liberals, Southey and Coleridge, had long lived in the Lake District and by some happy chance it might be that Shelley would make their acquaintance. Nothing could have delighted him more than to meet some of the rare great minds that shared his ideas.

The Shelleys found at Keswick a small furnished cottage set in flowers. They had no right to the garden, but the landlord, who looked upon Shelley and Harriet as little better than a pair of strayed children, allowed them to run about in it.

The postman soon came to know the weight of Shelley’s letter-bag. First, there was the correspondence with Hogg, which was very discouraging. He wrote long letters to Harriet in which he swore to respect her, and at the same time, to adore her during time and eternity. Such unasked-for constancy wearied her, yet her pride fed on it. When Shelley said, “Time and distance will make him forget you,” she shook her head with an air of scepticism. Really sorry for the unhappiness of her admirer, she would perhaps have been more sorry to believe it could be cured: “Distance,” said she, “may ease trifling griefs, but only increases great ones.” When Hogg wrote, “Either Harriet must forgive me or I’ll blow out my brains at her feet,” she triumphed and was sad. But when no pistol-shot came to shatter their flowery solitude, she was reassured—and disappointed.

Then, there were the letters of Miss Hitchener who, since the fall of Hogg, had become Shelley’s only confidante. Nearly every day he sent her a few urgent and exemplary pages. Harriet would often add to her husband’s eloquent dissertations a warm invitation to come and join them.

The Duke of Norfolk lived in the neighbourhood. He had already brought about one reconciliation between Shelley and his father, and as the money question became more and more serious they decided to write to him again. The Duke replied by inviting Shelley, his wife, and his sister-in-law to spend the week-end at Greystoke. He took an interest in the young man possibly through natural benevolence, possibly because it was his duty, as head of a great political party, to win the friendship of one, destined it would seem when he came of age, to go into Parliament, and to inherit £6,000 a year.

Harriet, at Greystoke, bore herself with grace. The Duchess, who had been told the story of Shelley’s extraordinary marriage, was agreeably surprised by the beauty and good manners of his wife. Even Eliza was considered “quite charming,” at least according to Harriet. The visit was successful. When Mr. Westbrook knew that his daughters had stayed with a duke, and that his son-in-law had arrived at the castle with only a guinea in his pocket, he felt the sudden need to show himself generous, and he offered the young couple an allowance of £200 a year.

Mr. Shelley could not be less open-handed, above all when his suzerain and chief asked him to be clement. He agreed once more to allow his son £200 a year: and thus all danger of poverty came to an end.

But in Percy’s eyes the chief satisfaction lay in having obtained these important results without any concessions on his part: “I think it my duty to say that however great advantages might result from such concessions I can make no promise of concealing my opinions in political or religious matters. . . . Such methods as these would be unworthy of us both.” His father answered: “If I make you an allowance it is simply to prevent you from swindling strangers.” So incapable was he of rising to the height of Shelley’s ideas.

⁂

At Greystoke Shelley made acquaintance with William Calvert, a friend of Southey’s, who offered to take him to call on the poet. Thus, for the first time, he was to see in the flesh one of the writers he most admired. But when he actually met Southey he was intensely surprised, for he had always associated the idea of a poet with the most entrancing and aerial of beings.

What he found, in a well-furnished and well-warmed house, was a Mrs. Southey resembling far more a cook-housekeeper than a Muse. She had been in point of fact a dressmaker, and she bound her husband’s books with remnants of the gowns she had made. Her linen-closets were the sanctuaries in which she exercised her talents, and her conversation was of money, cooking, and servants, like the most boring of housewives. The poet seemed insensible to the ignominy of it all. He was an honest creature, but with no reasoning powers. He admitted the social system needed changing, but declared that change could only come very slowly. He made use of the odious formula, “Neither you nor I will live to see it.” He was opposed to Catholic Emancipation and Parliamentary reform. Worst of all, he called himself a Christian! Grieved to the heart, Shelley left him.

Southey, worthy man, was far from imagining the impression he had made. “An extraordinary boy!” thought he, after his visitor had gone. “His chief sorrow seems to be that he is heir to an immense property, and he is as much worried by the notion that he will have £6,000 a year, as I used to be at his age by the knowledge that I hadn’t a penny. Apart from this, he acts upon me as my own ghost would do. He is just what I was in 1794. He thinks himself an Atheist but is really a Pantheist: a childish ailment through which we have all passed. It is lucky he has fallen on me. He could not have a better doctor. I have prescribed Berkeley and before the week is out he will be a Berkeleian. It has surprised him a good deal to meet for the first time in his life with a man who perfectly understands him and does him full justice. . . . God help us! The world wants mending, though he does not set about it exactly in the right way. Yet I do not despair of convincing him that he may do a great deal of good with £6,000 a year.”

Thus did Youth and Middle Age meet upon their way, and the former looked at the latter with respect, but with impatience. But the Middle Age looked at Youth with a kindly irony, and promised himself to dominate it by the strength of a more cultivated mind.

Middle Age forgot that the minds of different generations are as impenetrable one by the other as are the monads of Leibniz.

Southey and his wife did all in their power to be of service to the young couple. He persuaded Shelley’s landlord to reduce the weekly rent of Chestnut Cottage. Mrs. Southey gave poor Harriet, who knew nothing of housekeeping, excellent advice on cookery and laundry work. She even lent her bed-and-table-linen, which was the high-water mark of favour. But a discovery which Shelley now made rendered useless every advance on the part of Middle Age.

He read by chance in a review an article by Southey in which he spoke of George III as “the best King who had ever sat upon a throne.” A blatant piece of flattery, of course, but Southey aspired to be Poet Laureate, and the road to official honours is steep to climb. Shelley never pardoned baseness of this sort. He wrote to him that henceforward he should look upon him as a wage-earning slave, an upholder of crime, and he would see him no more.

And at this precise moment he troubled himself very little about Southey, for he had just discovered Godwin, the great Godwin, the author of Political Justice, the destroyer of marriage, the enemy of the divinity, the atheist, republican and revolutionary. Godwin was still alive, he lived in London, he had a postal address like everybody else, one could send letters on Virtue to Virtue’s own high prophet!

“You will be surprised,” he wrote, “to receive a letter from a stranger. No introduction has authorized that which ordinary men would describe as a liberty. But it is a liberty, which if not sanctioned by custom, is far from being blamable by reason. The dearest interests of humanity demand that fashionable etiquette should not divide man from man.

“The name of Godwin has been used to excite in me feelings of reverence and admiration. I have been accustomed to consider him a luminary too dazzling for the darkness which surrounds him. . . . You will not, therefore, be surprised at the inconceivable emotions with which I learnt your existence and your dwelling. I had enrolled your name in the list of the honourable dead. It is not so. You still live, and I firmly believe are still planning the welfare of human kind.

“I have but just entered on the scene of human operations, yet my feelings and my reasonings correspond with what yours were. My course has been short, but eventful. . . . The ill-treatment I have met with has more than ever impressed the truth of my principles on my judgment.”

When Godwin received this letter he was well pleased. Much talked of at the moment that Political Justice appeared, he had fallen back since into comparative neglect. He, too, though with less reason than his young disciple, could talk of an “eventful life.” He began his career as a clergyman, and at the age of thirty was an avowed atheist and republican.

In 1793 he had published his famous book. Pitt was in half a mind to have him prosecuted for it, but the high price of the work—it was sold at six guineas—had seemed to the Prime Minister a sufficient protection against its dangerous teaching.

Four years later Godwin had married Mary Wollstonecraft, a woman writer of genius, with whom he had been living. She had died in giving birth to a daughter, and the inveterate enemy of marriage at once married a second time, a certain Mrs. Clairmont. This lady, who was a widow, lived in the next house to his, and had made his acquaintance by addressing gross flattery to him from her balcony.

The couple led a thorny life. There were five children, the offspring of complicated crossings. First, the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and Godwin, by Genius out of Genius; she was named Mary. Then two children from Mrs. Clairmont’s first marriage, Jane and Charles. Thirdly, a little boy, son of Godwin and Mrs. Clairmont. Finally, the eldest in age, was a young girl who no longer belonged to anyone in the house, the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and her American lover, Captain Gilbert Imlay. This was the gentle and attractive Fanny Imlay, the Cinderella of the household.

The second Mrs. Godwin, “a disgusting woman who wore green spectacles,” had a mendacious tongue and a nasty temper. She treated Fanny and Mary with harshness, and managed the Juvenile Library in Skinner Street, which Godwin had started in order to earn the living of his own juveniles. The poor Philosopher led a sorrowful and difficult existence, entirely weaned from any sops to his vanity. On this account, a disciple writing him an enthusiastic letter from Keswick was extremely welcome. For a publisher of Children’s Books snowed under by Bills of Exchange, nothing could be more opportune than the acquaintance of a man who considered him as a luminary too dazzling for close inspection.

He answered Shelley’s letter by saying he should be glad to have a few personal details concerning his unknown correspondent. By return of post he received an autobiography, in which Timothy Shelley and the Dean of Oxford played ignoble parts. He was informed that his correspondent would inherit £6,000 a year, that he was married to a woman who shared all his ideas, and that he had already published two novels and a pamphlet, all of which he was sending to “the regulator and former” of his mind.

This enthusiastic epistle was read with great excitement by the young girls of the Godwin-Clairmont household, but the author of Political Justice was somewhat dubious about it. Since becoming himself the father of a family, he valued paternal authority more highly than heretofore. Possibly, Mr. Timothy Shelley had only acted in his son’s interests? One ought not to criticize the powers that be when one is young, above all one ought not to publish such criticisms. While yet a scholar, one ought to have no intolerable itch to become a teacher.

Had anyone but the “venerated” Godwin written this he would have been relegated at once to the class of stipended upholders of Intolerance. But Authority and Hierarchies are so essential to Youth, even to rebellious Youth, that it humbles itself with delight before the chosen director of its conscience.

The mystic side of Shelley’s nature had more need than another’s of some shrine at which to worship. “I am willing to become a scholar; nay a pupil,” he replied. “My humility and confidence is unfeigned and complete, where I am conscious that I am not imposed upon, and where I perceive talents and powers so undoubtedly superior.”

In his delight at having discovered Godwin, he mapped out the vastest schemes. To completely change the lives of others, to join their destiny to his own, appeared to him child’s play. Hadn’t he succeeded perfectly in the case of Harriet and of Eliza? What could be simpler than to hire a big house in Wales and there have Miss Kitchener, Godwin, his “venerated” friend, and the whole of Godwin’s charming family to live with him.

But first, being slightly stung by Godwin’s scepticism, he wished to prove in a striking manner that despite his youth he knew how to act. Before settling down “for ever” in the Welsh “Home of Meditation,” he would go to Ireland with Harriet and Eliza, and there spend three months working for Catholic Emancipation in particular, and the improvement of the distressful country in general.

How were the fair Harriet and Eliza of the much-brushed hair going to emancipate the Irish Catholics? The question was left unanswered, but Shelley took with him “An Address to the Irish,” so full of philosophy, wise counsels, and love of humanity, that it seemed impossible the mere reading of it would not touch every heart.

Thus did the young Knight Errant of the luminous eyes take ship to conquer the Green Island. In place of a lance he carried a manuscript, the Beauteous Harriet was his lady and the Black Eliza his squire; the latter being in charge of the money, the housekeeping, and all the dirty jobs.

CHAPTER XIII
SOAP BUBBLES

The Knight of the Rueful Countenance got stoned by the galley-slaves whom he wished to free. Shelley was greeted with cat-calls when, at a meeting of the friends of Catholic Emancipation, he affirmed that it was harmful to refuse public employment to the Irish because of their religion, since one religion is as good as another. His audience much preferred the fanaticism of its persecutors to the scepticism of its defender.

The famous Address was on the same subject. It showed that Catholic Emancipation is a step on the road to total emancipation, and that morality and not expediency should be the principle of politics. Instead of expecting their freedom from the British, the Irish should free themselves by becoming sober, just, and charitable. Shelley imagined that his teaching would go straight to the heart of the poor Dubliners, and he held himself ready for martyrdom in the cause.

Harriet was not less enthusiastic, and her reforming ardour was a joy to behold. With pockets stuffed with pamphlets, the young couple walked up and down Sackville Street, and when they met anyone with a “likely air” they slipped a soul-saving paper into his hand; or from the balcony of their lodgings they spread sound doctrine by dropping Addresses on the heads of the passers-by. When Shelley put one adroitly into the hood of an old woman’s cloak, Harriet, ready to die of laughter, was obliged to rush away. The conversion of the Irish was assuredly the most amusing of games. Godwin and Miss Kitchener expected every day to hear of Shelley’s arrest. The school-teacher even considered the possibility of a political assassination. But Dublin Castle learned with composure that a young Englishman, nineteen years of age, had just made a speech on Virtue.

The police sent a copy of the Address to the Secretary of State, and Shelley’s advice to the Irish on sobriety and toleration struck the official mind as a screaming joke.

Such impunity was very discouraging, nor were the ways of the Irish themselves any less so. “The reason they drink so much whisky,” said kind-hearted Harriet, “is because meat is so dear.” When Shelley tried to save some wretched creature run in for theft or brawling, the policeman, with a smile of pity, would prove to him the man was drunk.

On St. Patrick’s Night everybody was drunk, and there was a ball at the Castle. Percy and Harriet watched the starving people crowd round the State carriages to admire the finery. Such a want of dignity reduced Percy to despair.

That they themselves might set an example of plain living, all three became vegetarians, and Shelley thus freed himself from the remorse he felt when thinking of the “horrors of the slaughterhouse” and the “massacre of the bird-innocents.” They only broke the rule when Mrs. Nugent came to dinner. She was their sole acquaintance in Dublin, a dressmaker by trade. It was just one of the difficulties of their position that they knew nobody amongst these Irish whom they loved so much. “I suppose,” said Harriet, “that the moment Percy becomes famous we shall know everybody all at once.”

But Shelley himself hadn’t much hope. In the land of baseless and visionary fabrics where he usually wandered down-trodden Ireland figured as a proud and beautiful female, Shelley as a knight-errant and apostle, ready to fight for her and die if need be: crowds of tatterdemalions followed them in the streets: barbarous British soldiers stopped him and cudgelled him: but the heroic sweetness of his gospel tamed the brutes themselves, and philosophy worked the miracle of reconciling hostile races.

Little by little this brilliant fantasy melted away, the last shred of rainbow-tinted mist floated over dirt-blackened houses, and the real Ireland loomed up, a huge solid mass of towns, farms, forests, an incalculable number of obscure and dissimilar men, a heap of immemorial traditions and laws; the land of gambling, hunting, and blood-feuds; seat of the magistrature, garrison for the soldiery, centre for the police; Ireland wretched but jeering, suffering but garrulous, discontented, and rejoicing in her discontent. The Enigmatical Island . . . the Absurd Island. . . . Gazing at the terrifying Reality, what could he do? What could he hope for? He was crushed and tired out.

With growing insistence Godwin urged his disciple to give up the game. Ever since Shelley had hailed him as a spiritual father he had adopted the paternal tone, a grumbling and hostile one.

“Believe me, Shelley,” he prophesied, “you are preparing a bath of blood!”

Could he have seen his spiritual son drawing up an inoffensive “Proposal for an Association for the Good of Mankind,” with Eliza on one side sewing at a crimson cloak, and Harriet, preparing a meal of bread and honey on the other, he might have felt more tranquil.

However, his exhortations were so far useful that they gave Shelley a decent excuse to give up rescuing the oppressed who didn’t want to be rescued.

Minus a few poor creatures who knew how to sponge on him successfully, no one in Dublin took him seriously. For if in the eyes of an Irishman there is any one being more ridiculous than an Englishman, it is an Englishman who loves Ireland, and if in the whole world there is any one spectacle which an old Eton boy and Oxford man cannot endure, it is Irish disorder and dirt.

Having seen close at hand the folly and the misery of the people, his thoughts turned with longing to the beauty and peace of the English country-side.

“I give in,” he wrote to his “venerated” friend. “Never again will I address myself to the ignorant. . . . I will content myself with being the cause of an effect which will manifest itself years after I myself am dust.”

Harriet packed up all the remaining pamphlets and forwarded them to Miss Kitchener, who could have very well done without this “inflammable matter.”

Eliza folded up the crimson cloak, and the three apostles took the boat back to England.

⁂

The second part of their programme was now to be carried out, the house in Wales, where the “spiritual flock” could be brought together, and all problems solved. They thought they had found just the very thing, in the district where Shelley had stayed before his marriage. The wildness and beauty of the country attracted him. Near the house a mountain torrent brawled over the stones, and formed pools on which he had floated a little boat a foot long. His sail had been a £5 note: a terrified cat his passenger. He hoped that Miss Hitchener would persuade her father to come and farm the property of one hundred and thirty acres.

But the affair hung fire. The house was too dear. Mr. Hitchener, indignant at the Cuckfield slanders concerning Shelley and his daughter, refused to let her go to Nantgwillt. The school-teacher, proud of the invitation she had received, had very imprudently boasted of it to every one, and every one, led by Aunt Pilford, construed it in the worst possible way.

Once again was Shelley astounded by the world’s malignancy. He, who had run away with his wife, and made a Scotch love-marriage, how could anyone suppose he would be unfaithful to Harriet! The idea caused him such an overwhelming surprise that a less virtuous woman than Miss Hitchener might have been offended by it.

As for Mr. Hitchener, he got the treatment he merited. He, too, was a retired public-house keeper, for the gods seemed to delight in putting the crystalline Shelley in connection with “the trade.” “Sir,” he wrote to the lady’s father, “I have some difficulty in repressing my indignant astonishment on hearing that you refuse my invitation to your daughter. By what right? Who made you her master? . . . Neither the laws of Nature nor yet those of England have put children on the footing of personal property. . . . Adieu. When next I hear from you I hope that time will have liberalized your sentiments.”

⁂

As the Shelleys were going to leave Wales, Godwin mentioned to them a most desirable cottage which one of his friends wanted to let. His advice was always respected. Shelley and Harriet went to see the cottage and found it hopeless. The house was commonplace, scarcely finished and far too small for them. But, on their way back from this useless journey, they discovered a very picturesque village. Thirty cottages with thatched roofs covered with climbing roses and myrtles, formed the delightful hamlet of Lynmouth. By a miracle, one of the cottages was to let. It was the best situated, above a wooded gorge. From the windows you looked down upon the sea, three hundred feet below. They instantly decided to settle there “for ever.”

The “venerated friend,” on news of this, wrote a stiff letter. He said, harshly, that the tastes of the Shelleys were too luxurious, and that a small house, modest as it might be, ought to suffice for one who called himself Godwin’s disciple. Had Timothy Shelley written such a letter the most violent epithets would have been hurled at his head, but one naturally accepts from a stranger what one would never put up with from one’s own father.

Shelley did not think of complaining, but of justifying himself. If he had said that the house recommended by his guide, philosopher, and friend was too small, this was not from a wish for luxury, or even for comfort. But the number of rooms was too few, and it seemed to him hardly the thing for two persons of opposite sex and unmarried to share the same bedroom. He knew that in a regenerated society this prejudice would disappear, but in the present state of things, promiscuity appeared to him imprudent. However, he advanced this opinion—which he feared was rather reactionary—with precaution. The Master was good enough to forget it.

The adorable cottage at Lynmouth was soon the scene of a great event, the arrival of Miss Hitchener. Shelley promised himself that she would add to his life the element of intellectual collaboration, so far rather wanting to it. Nor would Harriet lose anything by the arrangement, for her “spiritual sister” would help him to form her, both young women being, he thought, sufficiently high-minded to accept these parts.

With surprise the Lynmouth villagers now saw him set off of a morning on long expeditions with this gaunt, bony stranger. And henceforth it was with her that he discussed all plans for the propagation of his ideas. The diffusion of Virtue was growing difficult. A London printer had just been sentenced to the pillory. The fate of Galileo did not frighten Shelley for himself, but he would not thrust an innocent printer into danger.

Luckily, the Magician had at his disposal ways and means which defied the police of Lord Castlereagh. When he had written some fine incendiary pamphlet, he would put it in a little box, well resined and waxed, with a lead below and a tiny mast and sail above, and launch it on the ocean, or he would make small fire-balloons, and having loaded them with Wisdom set them sailing up into the summer sky. Or he would watch entranced a flotilla of dark-green bottles tightly corked, and each containing a divine remedy, rise and sink as the emerald waves swayed them seaward.

After he had “worked” hard in this manner, his favourite relaxation was blowing soap-bubbles. Seated before the door, churchwarden in hand, he blew glassy spheres that reflected all the forms and colours of heaven and earth upon their tenuous surfaces. He watched them float away until they broke and vanished.

Then quitting for a short time the aërial, translucent palaces of Logic, he experienced the need of fixing in verse, the intangible beauty of these shimmering violets, greens, and golds.

CHAPTER XIV
THE VENERATED FRIEND

The roses of Lynmouth were fading, and autumn winds swept the loose clouds like dead leaves across the sky. Miss Hitchener’s star was about to set. The constant presence of a stranger wearied Harriet. Shelley himself saw the dream dissolve, revealing grosser forms, and was surprised to find installed at his side a mediocre and twaddling woman. He sought his heroine in vain, and repented of his folly.

After having insisted so strenuously in dragging her from her school it was difficult to send her back there. Yet to go on living with her in an autumnal solitude was becoming unbearable. Perhaps in a big city other friends and other distractions might help him to forget the obsession of her company. At the same time, Godwin urged the Shelleys to come back to London. They resolved to go and make a long stay.

⁂

It was with great excitement that one day in October 1812, they left their hotel in St. James’s Street to pay their first visit to Godwin and his family. Harriet, tiny, fair, and rosy, tripped by the side of her tall and round-shouldered boy-husband. They wondered what sort of welcome the Great Man was going to give them? Miss Hitchener, who had called in Skinner Street on her way through London, had met with a cold welcome. But maybe that proved nothing but the perspicacity of Godwin.

They found the whole family gathered together in the dwelling-house above the Juvenile Library, for the Godwins, on their side, were devoured with curiosity to see the Shelleys. There was the Philosopher himself, short, fat, bald, intellectual-looking, with the appearance of a Methodist parson, like almost all the theorists of Revolution.

The second Mrs. Godwin had put on her best black silk, and only wore the green-glasses just for the time needed to take stock of the Baronet’s grandson and his pretty wife. The Shelleys had been warned that she was a back-biter, but on this occasion she showed herself amiable.

Fanny Imlay was there too, gentle and pensive; and Jane Clairmont, a beautiful and vivacious brunette of the Italian type.

“The only one absent,” said Godwin, “is my daughter Mary now in Scotland. She is very like her mother whose portrait I will show you.”

He took the young couple into his study, and Shelley, much moved, looked long at the portrait of the fascinating Mary Wollstonecraft. Then every one sat down and Godwin and Percy talked of the relativity of matter to spirit, of the position of the clergy, and of German literature. The women listened in mute admiration. Harriet thought that Godwin resembled Socrates; he had the same bulgy forehead; and that Percy sitting beside him was like one of the handsome Greek youths whose ardent impatience was tempered with respect.

⁂

A close intimacy began between the Shelleys and the Godwins. Godwin often came round to the hotel to take Shelley for a walk, or Mrs. Godwin invited Harriet and Percy to dinner. She even invited Eliza and Miss Hitchener, but the last very unwillingly. Sometimes Harriet ventured to give a dinner herself.

On the 5th November, Guy Fawkes’ Day, the Shelleys dined with the Godwins. After dinner little William Godwin, aged nine, said he was going round to let off fireworks with his friend and neighbour, young Newton. Shelley at this moment was discussing some profound question or other with his venerated friend. But the word “fireworks” instantly brought to life the alchemist of Field Place. He hesitated just a second between Godwin and his discourse, and the joy of rockets and catherine wheels lighting up with their many-coloured fires the old London streets.

Then, “I’ll go with you,” he said to the little boy, and off they went.

When the fireworks were over, young Newton, enchanted by this grown-up friend who played like a boy and could tell such wonderful stories, took him home to introduce him to his parents. Shelley made no resistance, and never had to regret it. He found the Newtons adorable. They fell at once into free, cultured and agreeable talk.

Newton was just the man to please Shelley. He had endless theories which he put into practice. One of his favourite ideas was that when Man migrated from the equatorial regions and pushed northwards, he adopted unnatural habits and that from these sprang all his woes. One of such bad habits was the wearing of clothes: Newton’s children ran about the house entirely naked. Another bad habit was the eating of flesh food; the whole Newton family was vegetarian. Nothing could arouse more surely Shelley’s enthusiasm, and Mr. Newton supplied him with new arguments.

“Man has no similarity with any carnivorous animal; he is without claws to hold his prey; the formation of his teeth points out that his food should be vegetables and fruit. He first knew sickness after taking to flesh-eating which, for him, is poison. Here you have the meaning of the story of Prometheus which is evidently a vegetarian myth. Prometheus, that is to say Man, discovered fire and invented cooking; immediately a vulture began to gnaw at his liver. The vulture is hepatitis, that’s quite clear.”

Since the Newtons had taken to vegetarianism they had never needed any doctors nor any drugs. The children were the healthiest in the world, and Shelley, who had many opportunities of seeing the little girls, found them beautiful as sculptor’s models.

He became a constant visitor, and the moment his voice was heard in the hall the five children rushed downstairs to meet him, and take him up with them to the nursery. Mrs. Newton and her sister Madame de Boinville were just as infatuated with him as were the children.

At Godwin’s Fanny and Jane passed whole evenings in listening to him with ecstasy. They raved of his beauty, and his arguments appeared to them unassailable. Even in a family of republicans this young aristocrat, heir to an immense fortune and so disdainful of money, shone with a romantic light.

As for him, between the two young girls, Fanny, gentle and reserved, Jane, hot-blooded and vehement, he seemed to be back again in those happy days of youthful fervour and high enthusiasm, when a bevy of adoring sisters and cousins clipt him round.

Harriet pleased the Godwin girls less. They noticed that she never thought for herself but simply repeated her husband’s favourite phrases and that her grammar was faulty.

“Poor dear Shelley!” said they, as soon as the couple had left them. “He certainly has not got the wife he ought to have.”

This is an impression very general amongst young women who see the man they would have liked themselves in the possession of another. They even ventured to attack Harriet, in her absence, with tiny pin-pricks; they guessed intuitively those criticisms to which her doctrinaire husband would be most sensitive.

“Harriet frightens me,” wrote Fanny, “she is such a fine lady.” Shelley was indignant.

“Harriet a ‘fine lady’? And it is you who accuse her of this crime, in my eyes, the most unforgivable of any. The ease and simplicity of her manners have always been her greatest charm, and are incompatible with the vulgar brilliancy of fashionable life. You will not convert me to your opinion, so long as I have before my eyes the living witness of its falsity.”

Later on, this letter of Fanny’s came back to Shelley’s mind.

CHAPTER XV
MISS HITCHENER

Hogg, now fully reconciled with his family, returned to London after a year’s exile at York to finish his law studies.

One evening as he sat reading in a comfortable arm-chair wrapped in a warm dressing-gown, a pot of hot tea by his side, he heard a tremendous knocking at the outer door of the house. Then this door was flung violently back against the wall, so that the whole building shook; Hogg recalled a pair of luminous eyes, a tall and stooping figure. . . .

“If Shelley were still friends with me, I should imagine . . .”

Some one rushing upstairs recalled rapid footsteps heard long ago on an Oxford staircase.

“No one but Shelley ever ran upstairs like that!”

The room-door opened, and there Shelley stood, hatless, with shirt-collar wide open, wild-looking, intellectual, always the image of some heavenly spirit come down to earth by mistake.

“I got your address from your ‘special pleader’ fellow, and not without trouble! He took me for a swindler of some kind and didn’t want to give it to me. What has become of you all this last year? . . . I’ve just got back from Ireland. . . . I went to preach humanity to the Irish Catholics. . . . Then we returned to Wales, a lovely country. . . . Harriet’s all right . . . she expects a child. . . . Have you read Berkeley? . . . At this moment I’m reading Helvetius . . . very clever, but dry stuff. . . .”

Hogg looked at him with the admiration, affection, and irony, of former days. Who but Shelley would start off to discuss Helvetius with a friend from whom he had parted on such bad terms a year back?

Shelley, full of animation and joy, walked about the room, opened books, put questions to which he never waited the answers, and seemed to have forgotten completely that Hogg had ever offended him.

He talked far into the night, and the men in the chambers next to Hogg knocked furiously on the walls to warn him that the high and piercing voice of his visitor prevented them from sleeping.

Hogg, alarmed for his good name, suggested Shelley should go. Shelley continued to talk. He explained that he had just opened a subscription list to finish a dyke which would enable the Welsh at Tremadoc to regain 5,000 acres of land from the sea. He had headed the list with £100 and he was devoting his life, his strength, and his fortune to the enterprise. . . . Hogg taking him gently by the arm led him to the door, but he resisted.

“Your neighbours bore me! They are brutes who don’t understand that it is only during the night that the soul feels really free.”

Hogg had managed to get him out upon the landing.

“I’ll go, but on one condition, and that is that you come and dine with us to-morrow. Harriet will be delighted to see you. I apologize for having a horrible creature with us, Miss Hitchener . . . but she will be leaving in a day or two.”

“Miss Hitchener? The sister of your soul?”

“She, the sister of my soul?” cried Shelley. “She’s a crawling and contemptible worm. . . . We call her the Brown Demon.”

But they had now reached the street. Hogg gently pushed his friend out of the house and closed the door behind him.

⁂

Next day at six o’clock, Hogg sent in his name to Harriet. She received him with enthusiasm. She looked younger, more blooming, and lovelier than ever.

“What a separation this has been!” she said. “But it will not happen again. We are now going to live in London for ever!”

Eliza sat apart in haughty silence. She gave Hogg a limp hand, without condescending to speak to him.

“You’re looking delightfully well, Harriet.”

“She? Oh, no, poor dear thing!” said Eliza in a lackadaisical voice. “Her nerves are in a fearful state. Most dreadfully shattered!”

Hogg thought, “Nothing is changed in this house, one must take care what one says.”

Shelley at this moment burst into the room like a cannon ball, and dinner was brought up.

After dinner there were mysterious whisperings from Eliza into Harriet’s ear, who came obediently to bid Hogg good night, and to invite him to come again on Sunday morning.

“It’s the day the Brown Demon is going, conversation will be so difficult. But you are always such good fun, you would be the greatest help to us. . . . Percy has told you about our Tormentor?”

At the mention of Miss Hitchener’s name Eliza exhibited a deep but silent disgust.

“She’s a horrible woman,” Harriet went on. “She tried to make Percy fall in love with her. She pretended that he did really love her, and that I was only good for the housekeeping. Percy has promised her £100 a year if only she will go.”

Shelley confirmed this. He saw the imprudence of thus sacrificing a quarter of his income, but it was necessary. The young woman had lost her situation through him, and her reputation and health into the bargain, she added, thanks to their barbarous conduct.

“She is really a horrible creature!” he said shuddering. “A superficial, ugly, hermaphroditical beast of a woman. I’ve never been so astonished at my bad taste as after spending four months with her. . . . How would Hell be, if such a woman were in Heaven? And she writes poetry! She has written an Elegy on the Rights of Woman, which begins:

“All, all are men, the woman like the rest. . . .”

He burst into one of his wild shouts of laughter.

Next day Hogg did not fail to turn up. The Heroine of the day appeared to him boring but inoffensive. She was a big, bony, masculine woman, dark-skinned, and with traces of a beard.

Shelley presently declared he must go out, Harriet had a bad headache and needed quiet; Hogg’s fate was to take the two Eliza’s for a walk.

With the Brown Demon on his right arm, and the Black Diamond, as he nicknamed Eliza Westbrook, on his left, he directed their steps towards St. James’s Park. “I could say, like Cornelia: ‘These are my jewels!’ ” he thought.

The two fair rivals attacked each other across him in phrases of haughty contempt. The languishing Eliza woke up to deal formidable blows with a calm soft acrimony. Miss Hitchener made a show of speaking only to Hogg. She discoursed on the Rights of Woman. Eliza who could not talk on this subject, nor on any other, found herself reduced to ignominious silence.

When they got home she penned Hogg into a corner of the hall.

“How could you talk to that nasty creature so much? How could you permit her to prate so long to you? Harriet will be seriously displeased with you, I assure you! She will be very angry.”

But Harriet merely smiled up at him and asked, “Were you not tired of the Brown Demon?”

When luncheon was over he wickedly led the conversation back to Woman’s Rights, and the Goddess of Reason was at once let loose. Shelley rose from his chair, came and stood before her and fell into animated discussion. The sisters Westbrook looked at him with sorrowful dismay as at one guilty of communication with the enemy.

Eliza whispered to Hogg, “If you only knew how dirty she is you wouldn’t go near her!”

But the moment of release came when the exile’s bags and boxes were piled into a hackney-coach, and the women of Shelley’s household were left dancing and singing for joy.

CHAPTER XVI
HARRIET

The few months which followed the departure of Miss Hitchener were happy months. The Shelleys were still penniless wanderers, but an immense interior satisfaction replaced for them money and home. He had begun a long poem, “Queen Mab,” and to work at it made life worth living. Harriet, who was with child, was sunk in an agreeable torpor, reserving all her strength for creative purposes, and so amused by and interested in her own sensations and hopes, as to be quite insensible to boredom.

During this period they made short visits to Wales, and returned a second time to Ireland, but no longer dabbled in politics. To please Percy, Harriet began to learn Latin. He taught her on a method of his own. Discarding grammars he plunged her straight into Horace and Virgil.

While she studied, he went on with his poem or read history. Godwin had assured him that his ignorance of history was one great cause of his errors of judgment, and though he loathed the subject he set at it courageously. In the evening, Harriet sang old Irish songs, “Robin Adair,” and “Kate of Kearney,” or they read the newspapers together, which at that time were filled with accounts of the prosecutions of Liberal writers.

Often to these unknown comrades, condemned for their opinions, Shelley would write offering to pay the fine, but never having ten pounds in hand, he was obliged to borrow at 400 per cent, in order to do so.

Presently, it was necessary to go back to London as Harriet’s time was near. Shelley was also approaching his twenty-first birthday, an important date for him, for it seemed possible he might then come to terms with his father.

They took rooms at Cooke’s Hotel in Albemarle Street. Eliza, who was with them, looked after Harriet with exaggerated care. Her fussiness annoyed Shelley always in favour of letting Nature have her way. When he was absent Eliza would prime her sister in matrimonial strategy.

“It’s most extraordinary that at twenty-one years of age Percy can’t find a way of making up with his father, so that you could be received by the family, and lead the proper sort of life for a future baronet’s wife! If you were a little more skilful and persuasive with him, things would be very different, I’m sure! You ought to have a town house of your own, your own silver, your own carriage; and all that could easily be had if Percy chose.”

Harriet was of the same mind. She was a pretty woman and she knew it, and for a pretty woman a life without luxury is as hard to bear as a subordinate position for a clever man. The street admiration she meets with tells her of her power, and she knows too that youth’s a stuff that won’t endure. Just as a strongly armed nation desires to ensure her place in the sun, before demobilizing, Woman wishes to exact good terms from her enemy Man, before resigning herself to the pacifism of old age.

Besides which Eliza was continually pitying Harriet, and self-pity comes so naturally to all of us that the most solid happiness can be shaken by the compassion of a fool.

Moved thereunto by Harriet at the instigation of Eliza, and also by renewed counsel from the Duke of Norfolk, Shelley decided to write again to his father. He would not have taken this step had he not judged it to be both honourable and necessary. He desired earnestly to see his mother, and even the Squire seen from a distance of time and place appeared to him a pathetic and inoffensive figure.

“My dear Father,

“I once more presume to address you to state to you my sincere desire of being considered as worthy of a restoration to the intercourse with yourself and my family which I have forfeited by my follies. . . . I hope the time is approaching when we shall consider each other as father and son with more confidence than ever, and that I shall no longer be a cause of disunion to the happiness of my family. I was happy to hear from John Grove who dined with us yesterday, that you continue in good health. My wife unites with me in respectful regards.”

Unfortunately, Timothy Shelley, with characteristic wrong-headedness, chose a test of Bysshe’s obedience to which it was impossible for him to submit; he could not write to the authorities of University College that he was now a sincere and dutiful son of the Church. And, failing this, his father declined all further communication with him.

“I am not so degraded and miserable a slave,” wrote Shelley to the Duke of Norfolk, “as publicly to disavow an opinion which I believe to be true. Every man of common sense must plainly see that a sudden renunciation of sentiments seriously taken up is as unfortunate a test of intellectual uprightness as can possibly be devised. . . . I am willing to concede everything that is reasonable, anything that does not involve a compromise of that self-esteem without which life would be a burden and a disgrace.”

Eliza considered such obduracy absurd. “Thus Harriet, so soon to be brought to bed, will not even have a carriage to save her running about the streets on foot!” Shelley, exasperated, bought a carriage on credit, and refused to use it. He hated being shut up in a closed carriage, and much preferred long tramps with Hogg on foot.

Though sick to death of Eliza at home, there were plenty of pleasant houses where he could take refuge. There was the Godwins’ in Skinner Street, where Fanny and Jane Clairmont always received him with open arms. There was the Newtons’ in Chester Square, where he found affection, intelligence, and old-world courtesy. Mrs. Newton, a first-rate musician, the favourite pupil of Dussek, would sit down to the piano, while Shelley seated on the rug amidst the children would tell them tales of ghosts and phantoms in a low voice.

Very often Madame de Boinville was on a visit to her sister. These two ladies, daughters of a wealthy St. Vincent planter, had received a mixed Anglo-French education that Shelley, tremendous admirer of the French philosophers, much appreciated. Madame de Boinville, in particular, charmed him. Her romantic marriage with a ruined émigré, a friend of André Chénier and of La Fayette, invested her with a poetic fascination. She was a woman with white hair, but with so childlike a face, such speaking eyes, a mind so lively and up-to-date, that one had more pleasure in talking with her than with many a younger woman. For the first time in his life Shelley found, in her and her sister, women whose intellectuality was on a par with his own.

The conversation of Eliza and Miss Hitchener now appeared to him thoroughly despicable.

From living with Harriet, he had fallen into the habit of looking on women as children, for whom an abstract idea must be reduced to its simplest expression. With Madame de Boinville he was astonished to find that he could not only tell her all his ideas, but that by the charm and precision of her language she gave them a new attraction. For her and her sister, as for Shelley himself, the play of thought was the finest of pastimes. Learning is nothing without cultivated manners, but when the two are combined in a woman you have one of the most exquisite products of civilization.

With a secret joy and a delicious feeling of attained perfection, Shelley realized that he had at last found surroundings propitious to his happiness, and that everything he had previously known was grotesquely unworthy of him.

The ladies, on their side, were enchanted by their discovery of Shelley, for this very good-looking and well-born young man loved ideas as they did and expressed them with warmth. He had got rid of the rather intolerant dogmatism of his sixteen years, and now in discussion showed modesty and forbearance. Never had they met a man so selfless, so generous, so free from materialism as he. Generally serious, he yet was capable of fun, and he had the ease of manner, the contempt for ceremony, and the perfect politeness, which is the hall-mark of the young aristocrat. “What more charming,” they asked themselves, “than a saint who is at the same time a man of the world?”

With a tinge of jealousy, but also with affectionate interest, Hogg watched the manœuvrings of all these pretty women round his ingenuous friend. At the Godwins’ the girls called Shelley the Elf-King or the King of Faery; at the Newtons’ he was known as Ariel and Oberon. The moment he appeared the women gathered about him. But he was a Spirit difficult to call up at any fixed hour. He was subject to strange caprices, sudden frights, panic terrors. Sometimes falling into a poetic vision, he forgot that he was expected to a tea-party. At other times, when he was actually caught and supposedly held fast, all at once some imaginary duty called him one knew not where.

“In certain countries,” Hogg told him, “it is believed that goats, which are children of the devil, pass one hour out of every twenty-four in hell. I think you’re like the goats, Shelley.”

On the other hand, when engaged with a woman after his own heart in one of the serious and animated talks which he so much enjoyed, he forgot both time and place. The night waned, and Adonis still led his rather breathless priestesses conversationally onwards. Dawn broke; he was talking still. Then, as it was too late to go to bed, a walk in the delicious morning air rounded things off.

“What the devil were you talking about all night to your circle of beauties?” the puzzled Hogg would inquire.

“I’m sure I don’t know.”

Harriet also wondered what her husband could have to say to all these women. She was now near her term, and seldom went out of doors. Shelley often left her alone. In the houses where he was a favourite, she felt that she was unwelcome. At the Godwins’ she could not get on with Mrs. Godwin. At the Boinville’s she had been thought at first charming because she was so pretty and the wife of a poet, but she was soon set down as a very ordinary woman.

CHAPTER XVII
COMPARISONS

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

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

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

Eliza was careful to show up Shelley’s failings.

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

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

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

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

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

⁂

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

“. . . face was as a damsel’s face

And yet her hair was grey.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But pleasures are like poppies spread,

You seize the flow’r, its bloom is shed;

Or like the snow-fall in the river,

A moment white, then melts for ever.”

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

CHAPTER XVIII
SECOND INCARNATION OF THE GODDESS

There were days when Shelley, recalling the sweet and childlike face of his eighteen-year-old wife, thought it might still be possible to forget and make up. In a pathetic poem he tried to tell her how miserable it was for one who had lived in the warm sunshine of her eyes to die beneath her scorn. Did the lines move her? He never knew. She shut herself up more and more in feelings of pride and revenge. He had left her on several occasions. No doubt it was as a reprisal that the moment he came back to London she set off with Ianthe for Bath.

Shelley was obliged to remain in town. He had come of age, yet his affairs were no further advanced thereby. His solicitor gave him to understand there might be a family law-suit to deprive him of his rights. Although crippled with debts himself, he persisted in trying to free others from theirs. The Juvenile Library founded by Godwin had been a failure, and the sight of this old fighter for justice, impoverished and saddened by money troubles, was inexpressibly painful to his young disciple and friend.

But three thousand pounds were needed to save Godwin, a big sum. Yet from the moment he knew of Shelley’s wish to save him, he again exhibited great friendliness, and as Shelley was now a “bachelor” in London, his “beauteous half” being in the country for an indefinite period, he was invited to dine in Skinner Street every night.

He accepted all the more readily that he wished to see the girls again, and Godwin had informed him he would find an extra one, Mary, who had at length come home from Scotland. He gave an attractive portrait of her; seventeen years old, quick and lively, a great wish to learn, and immense perseverance. Already Fanny and Jane had described her to Shelley as being as intelligent as she was beautiful. For her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, Shelley had the warmest admiration. He was greatly moved at the thought he was about to meet her unknown daughter.

He needed for his happiness to embody in the form of a beautiful woman the mysterious and benevolent Forces which he imagined as scattered throughout the Universe. Love was, for him, an impassioned admiration, an integral act of faith, an exquisite and perfect mixture of the sensuous and the intellectual.

Had Mary not appeared at that juncture, or had she proved a disappointment, the sentiment which hovered and hesitated in his wounded heart, would have dedicated itself to Fanny or to Jane, but Mary came, and his fate was settled.

Her face was very pale and pure, her golden hair arranged in smooth bands on either side of a shapely head, she had a great slab of a forehead, and earnest hazel eyes. An air of sensibility and mournful courage instantly inspired in Shelley the same enthusiasm that he found in reading Homer or Plutarch. He saw something heroic in this delicate young girl, and the mixture of the heroic and the feminine was ever that which most appealed to him.

“What seriousness and what feeling!” thought he, listening with ecstasy to her young fresh voice. A maiden standing where brook and river meet, having the grace of the woman and the intellectual eagerness of the youth, had always seemed to him one of the most exquisite works of art. He longed to put a brotherly arm round those slender shoulders, and to make those questioning eyes sparkle, as he bore her away on some astonishing gallop through the realms of aërial metaphysics.

Harriet Westbrook had only imperfectly realized his ideal. For a moment he had hoped to find in her the delightful blend of beauty and intelligence that he would so greatly have loved, but poor Harriet had not withstood the difficult test of time. She was wanting in any real brain-power; even when she had the air of being interested in ideas, her indifference was proved by the blankness of her gaze. Worst of all, she was coquettish, frivolous, versed in the tricks and wiles of woman, and this alone was sufficient to chill him to the marrow.

But Mary, of the nut-brown eyes, was slim and true as a Toledo blade. Brought up by the author of Political Justice, her mind appeared free from all feminine superstition; and the clear if rather piercing tones of her voice emphasized delightfully its cultivated precision. Dining every evening in the little house in Skinner Street, Shelley passed the time in looking at Mary, while he seemed to listen to Godwin, who explained the regrettable state of his own affairs, and discussed the Budget, or the laws of the Press.

Mary, on her side, was quite ready to fall in love with Shelley. The romance had been prepared by the sisters, who for a month previously had talked of nothing in their letters but the handsome poet. Yet no description of Shelley ever came up to the reality.

Mary saw, at once, how much she interested him. Although he had made no complaint of life—he never did—she realized he was unhappy, and so one evening when they found themselves alone in the room where her mother’s portrait hung she spoke to him of her own troubles. She adored her father, but detested Mrs. Godwin on whose account the home in Skinner Street was become odious to her. The only place in the world where she felt herself at peace was by her mother’s tomb in the churchyard of old St. Pancras. She went there book in hand every fine day to read and meditate. Shelley, thrilled, asked if he might go with her.

⁂

Thus, after an interval of five years, he found himself sitting again at a young girl’s side in a graveyard, but this time his companion was of a serious and impassioned soul. For the second time the Word was made Woman. But, alas, Shelley was no longer free. He felt himself drawn to Mary by an irresistible force. He longed to take her hand, to press his lips to her delicately curved ones, he knew that she desired him, as he did her, and they dared not let their eyes meet. What could he offer her? He was a married man. It is true that marriage is only a convention. When one loves no longer, one is free. He had never promised Harriet more than this; besides, believing her to be the mistress of Major Ryan, he felt no scruples on her account. But his marriage was legally indissoluble. He had nothing to offer Mary but that reprobate existence which he had not dared to impose on his first love, Harriet Grove.

Nevertheless, a love shared, even though hopeless, is better than uncertainty and moral isolation. He determined to tell Mary the whole truth about his wife. Married love, even as it dies, long holds out behind a mask of silence against the world’s assaults, but there comes a moment when a man finds a bitter joy in laying bare his wounds.

Shelley drew a picture of Harriet as he now saw her, and by an unconscious change of values lent, to his very human deception, motives of a spiritual order. He had needed a companion who could appreciate poetry and understand philosophy. Harriet was incapable of either. He took a painful pleasure, also very human, in depreciating the grapes which he had lost.

He gave Mary a copy of Queen Mab. Under the printed dedication of that poem to Harriet, he wrote the words, “Count Slobendorf was about to marry a woman who, attracted solely by his fortune, proved her selfishness by deserting him in prison.” Back in her own room, Mary added, “This book is sacred to me, and as no other creature shall ever look into it, I may write in it what I please—yet what shall I write—that I love the author beyond all powers of expression and that I am parted from him, dearest and only love—by that love we have promised to each other although I may not be yours, I can never be another’s. But I am thine, exclusively thine.

‘By the kiss of love, the glance none saw beside,

The smile none else might understand,

The whispered thought of hearts allied,

The pressure of the thrilling hand.’

“I have pledged myself to thee and sacred is the gift.”

Meanwhile, these glances and smiles that none might see nor understand, had been seen and perfectly understood by Godwin. The intrigue of his daughter with a married man troubled him. He pointed out the danger to her, and wrote to Shelley in the same strain. He advised him to make things up with his wife: and he begged him to discontinue, for the present, his visits to Skinner Street.

The prohibition, kindly as it was, simply hastened on events, which, without it, might have tarried. Shelley, passionately in love with Mary and deprived of her society, determined to take a decisive step. He felt no remorse on Harriet’s account, for he persisted in thinking her guilty, in spite of the assertions of Peacock and Hogg, both impartial witnesses. “There’s just one thing only she cares about,” he thought, “and that is money. I’ll provide for her future, and then she’ll be glad to be free.” Accordingly he wrote to her begging her to come to London. She came; she was four months gone with child, and very unwell. When, calmly and kindly, Percy told her he was going to live without her and elope with some one else, but that he would always remain her best friend, the shock brought on an alarming illness.

Shelley nursed her with devotion, which made her more unhappy still, and the moment she was better he resumed his inflexible arguments. “The union of the sexes is sacred only so long as it contributes to the happiness of husband and wife, and it is dissolved automatically from the moment that its evils exceed its benefits. Constancy has nothing virtuous in itself, on the contrary it is often vicious, leading one to condone the gravest faults in the object of one’s choice.”

When he wove round her these diaphanous but insuperable webs, Harriet knew she was lost, just as formerly when she had tried to defend her religious beliefs against him she had seen herself overwhelmed on every side. She knew that some answer must exist; that so much anguish and sorrow and horror should find some expression, and might have found it had her mind been clearer; as it was she never knew what she ought to say. She dreamed she was struggling to free herself from invisible bonds. Her one relief was in terrible outbursts of rage against Mary. It was she who was the cause of all, she who had separated Percy from his wife, taking advantage of his romantic tendencies to entice him to meet her at a grave-side, which was just the kind of thing that would appeal to him. She had made a shameful use of her mother’s memory.

Mary, on her side, had not the slightest pity for Harriet. She had formed an odious conception of her. A woman who, having had the felicity of marrying Shelley, had yet been incapable of making him happy could only be selfish, futile, second-rate. She knew that he would treat Harriet with generosity, that he was going to give an order to his banker to pay over to her the greater part of his allowance, and this knowledge quieted her conscience. “She’ll have the money, and that’s all she cares about,” Mary said with disdain.

Shelley was in a condition of extreme nervous agitation. All sorts of contrary sentiments warred in his soul. When he saw Harriet fall into heartbreaking fits of despair, he could not forget the delicious moments passed with her long ago, but he had only to be again in Mary’s presence to consecrate himself anew to her tranquil charm.

To calm his mind he began to take laudanum as he had formerly done at Berwick, but now in stronger doses. He showed the bottle to Peacock, and said: “I never part from this.” He added, “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.’ ”