"Mary Shelley's jealousy must have sorely vexed Shelley—indeed she was not a suitable companion for the poet—his first wife Harriett must have been more suitable—Mary was the most conventional slave I ever met—she even affected the pious dodge, such was her yearning for society—she was devoid of imagination and Poetry—she felt compunction when she had lost him—she did not understand or appreciate him."
There are two big gaps in the correspondence with Claire: one from 1838 to 1857, the other from 1857 to 1869. At the age of seventy-seven we find Trelawny still unchanged: "All my early convictions and feelings harden with my bones—age has not tamed or altered me." He had lived through the wildest adventures: in a cave on Mount Parnassus he had been shot through the body and had pardoned one of his assailants; he had swum the rapids below Niagara; he had played the pirate in the South Seas and flirted with Mrs. Norton in Downing Street; and now, a veteran and something of a lion, he astonished London parties with his gasconade and the Sussex fisher-folk with his bathing exploits. We can believe that his conversation was "brilliant," but "most censorious"; his letters to Claire give some idea of it: "Women have taken to gin—men have always done so, now it's women's turn"; "—— is as gross and fat as —— and from the same cause—gluttony and sotting—it's all the fashion."
And here we would interpose a query—Was it really necessary to suppress the names? This elaborate and unscholarly tenderness for the feelings of the friends and relations of the dead, and for those of their descendants even, is becoming, in our judgment, a nuisance. Had people been so fussy and timid always we should have no history worth reading. After all, men, and women too for that matter, have got to stand on their own feet. We are not our grandmothers' keepers. No one will think at all the worse of Mr. Smith because some lively diarist has hinted that his great maiden aunt was no such thing: neither will any one think much the worse of the old lady. Besides, it is easy for Mr. Smith to say that the diarist was a liar who couldn't possibly have known anything about it. The past belongs to the present, and the dead are in some sort public property. It is not well, we think, that history should be impoverished, and an instrument of culture blunted, out of regard for the feelings of stray nephews and nieces, and we commend to editors and biographers the saying of that undergraduate who to his friend's complaint—"Hi, Johnnie, you've shot my father," replied, with a truly British sense of give and take—"Never mind, have a shot at mine."
Poor Claire became devout in old age and provoked a comprehensive growl from Shelley's untamed friend: "I am not one of that great sect whose vanity, credulity, and superstition makes them believe in God—the devil—souls and immortality." Yet with what cheerful wisdom he laughs away the fancy, which threatened to become an obsession, that Allegra was still alive in 1869: "My dear Clare, you may be well in body; but you have a bee in your bonnet." He suggests raking up "some plausible cranky old dried-up hanger-on" of fifty-two or so, who "should follow you about like a feminine Frankenstein," as he carelessly puts it. He tried to mitigate the crazy malevolence she cherished for her earliest lover: "Your relentless vindictiveness against Byron is not tolerated by any religion that I know of"; while through the rack of jibes, malisons, and ebullitions of wilfulness shines steadily his veneration for the great poet he loved:
"You say he [Shelley] was womanly in some things—so he was, and we men should all be much better if we had a touch of their feeling, sentiment, earnestness, and constancy; but in all the best qualities of man he excelled."
Through these letters—through all Trelawny's writings—runs a wonderful sense of power. He was not one to seek out the right word or prune a sentence; his strength is manifest in his laxities. He believed that no task, intellectual or physical, was beyond him; so he wrote as he swam, taking his ease, glorying in his vitality, secure in a reserve of strength equal to anything. A sense of power and a disregard for syntax—these are his literary characteristics. He read Shakespeare and Shelley, and it is not clear that he cared greatly for much besides; he liked Swinburne, and was profoundly interested in Darwin. Late in life he discovered Blake and was fascinated. What Trelawny cared for in literature was Imagination, the more sublime the better, while in life he had a taste for Truth and Freedom. He was always something of an oddity. He loathed superstition, cant and snobbery and said so in a way that gave much pain to the nicest people. He was of that disconcerting sort which, excelling in all that ordinary people admire, admires, for its part, what they hate—the abnormal and distinguished. He was a man of action who mistrusted common sense, a good fellow on the side of cranks: the race has never been common and is now almost extinct.
FOOTNOTE:
[13] "Letters of Edward John Trelawny." Edited, with a brief Introduction and Notes, by H. Buxton Forman. (Frowde.)