CHAPTER II

VIEWS ON MARRIAGE AND LOVE

In September, 1813, Shelley wrote a sonnet, already quoted, to Ianthe, his first child, in which he says that the babe was dear to him not only for its own sweet sake, but for the mother’s, and that the mother had grown dearer to him for the babe’s. Hogg informs us, however, that about this time the ardor of Shelley’s affection for his wife was beginning to cool. It is scarcely correct to speak of the ardor of his affection, for it may be doubted that he ever loved Harriet very ardently. If he had been seriously in love with his wife, he would not have written Miss Hitchener two months after his marriage that he loved her “more than any relation,” and that she was the sister of his soul.[31] However this may be, it is certain that in 1814 Shelley and his wife did not get along well together. Harriet was beautiful and amiable, and adopted in a somewhat parrot-like manner the views of her husband. As she grew older she no doubt developed tastes more in keeping with the conventions of that society which Shelley detested. Professor Dowden suggests that motherhood produced in her character a change that did not harmonize with her husband’s idealism. She was no longer an ardent schoolgirl, but a woman who has found out that one must grapple with the realities of life in some way more practical than the one hitherto followed. Her sister urged her to look for the style and elegance suitable to the wife of a prospective baronet. This was repugnant to Shelley’s republican simplicity. “I have often thought,” Peacock writes, “that, if Harriet had nursed her own child, and if the sister had not lived with them, the link of their married life would not have been so readily broken.” Harriet sympathized less and less with her husband’s aspirations, and as a consequence Shelley turned to other women for the encouragement and inspiration which he once got from his wife. He spent too much of his time in the company of the Newtons, Boinvilles, and Turners to render possible the retention of his wife’s affections. On March 16, 1814, Shelley wrote a letter to Hogg, which plainly shows that he found no happiness in his home. “I have been staying with Mrs. Boinville for the last month; I have escaped, in the society of all that friendship and philosophy combine, from the dismaying solitude of myself.... I have sunk into a premature old age of exhaustion.... Eliza is still with us—not here!—but (with his wife) ... I certainly hate her with all my heart and soul.” Shelley’s second marriage in St. George’s Church, on March 22, does not throw any light on the relations that existed between himself and his wife. They celebrated this second ceremony simply to dispel all doubts concerning the validity of the first one in Edinburgh. On April 18, Mrs. Boinville wrote to Hogg that Shelley was at her house, that Harriet had gone to town (presumably to her father’s), and that Eliza was living at Southampton. J. C. Jeafferson says that it was Shelley who deserted Harriet and not Harriet, Shelley. According to this biographer, Shelley left her at Binfield on May 18, 1814.[32] Shelley still hoped to regain his wife’s love, and in some verses inscribed, “To Harriet, 1814,” he appeals pathetically for her affection. Harriet had become cold and proud, and refused to meet his advances toward a reconciliation. Her pride, Shelley believed, was incompatible with virtue. When he found that he had “clasped a shadow,” his anguish, owing to his great sensitiveness, was extreme. Other men put up with their wives’ imperfections, and why could not Shelley have done the same? It must be remembered, though, that these men have other interests to occupy their thoughts, and other friends to give them the sympathy and love denied them at home. This was not the case with Shelley. He had few friends and many enemies. It should not surprise us then to find him snatching at the first vision “which promised him the longed-for boon of human love.” This vision appeared to him in the person of Mary Godwin.

A letter from Harriet to Hookham, dated July 7, shows that she was anxious to be with her husband again. But the time for reconciliation had passed. Whenever Shelley hated or loved anybody, he did so intensely. Everybody was either an angel or a devil; and Harriet had ceased to be an angel. “Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.” Dowden says Shelley persuaded himself that Harriet was false to him and had given her heart to a Mr. Ryan. There is no ground for the charge of unfaithfulness, as Peacock, Thornton Hunt, and Trelawny bear testimony concerning her innocence.

Shelley believed that Harriet had ceased to love him, and that he was consequently free to contract a union with another. He puts forth this doctrine in the notes to Queen Mab. “A husband and wife ought to continue so long united as they love each other.... There is nothing immoral in this separation.... The conviction that wedlock is indissoluble holds out the strongest of all temptations to the perverse.... Prostitution is the legitimate offspring of marriage.” He considered marriage a useless institution, and expressed this view in St. Irvyne. “Say, Eloise, do not you think it an insult to two souls, united to each other in the irrefragable covenants of love and congeniality, to promise in the sight of a Being whom they know not, that fidelity which is certain otherwise.” He does not think that promiscuous intercourse will follow the abolition of marriage. Love, and not money, honors, or convenience will be the bond of these unions when marriage is abolished, and this will result in more faithfulness than obtains at present. “The parties having acted upon selection are not likely to forget this selection when the interview is over.”[33] In his review of Hogg’s Memoirs of Prince Alexy Haimatoff, Shelley regards with horror the recommendation of the tutor to Alexy to indulge in promiscuous intercourse. “It is our duty to protest against so pernicious and disgusting an opinion.” In a letter to Hogg, written after the latter’s attempt to seduce Harriet, we find the following: “But do not love one (Harriet) who can not return it, who if she could, ought to stiffle her desire to do so. Love is not a whirlwind that is unvanquishable.”

Shelley’s views on marriage agree with those of Godwin. They both looked on marriage as a human institution, and consequently thought it might be modified or abolished entirely. They considered happiness man’s highest good, and unhappiness man’s only evil. Vows and promises are immoral because the thing promised may prove at any time detrimental to one’s happiness. For this reason husband and wife should not bind themselves to live always together. This doctrine appealed to Shelley because it agreed with his views on freedom and his passion for opposing the traditions of society.

Heretofore it has been found convenient to lay the blame for all the radical views of Shelley at the door of Godwin. In the case of those on marriage a good deal of the blame must be borne by Sir James Lawrence.

In a letter to Lawrence, dated August 17, 1812, Shelley writes: “Your Empire of the Naires, which I read this spring, succeeded in making me a perfect convert to its doctrines. I then retained no doubts of the evils of marriage—Mrs. Wollstonecraft reasons too well for that—but I had been dull enough not to perceive the greatest argument against it, until developed in the Naires, prostitution both legal and illegal.” Hogg says that Shelley and his young friends read Lawrence’s tale with delight.[34] This work, intended to vindicate the rights of women, is a plea for free love. It pictures the Kingdom of the Naires as a Paradise of Love, where neither jealousy nor envy, quarreling nor hatred, have any place. Infanticide and the sufferings that follow in the wake of illicit intercourse are there unknown. “It would be unjust to conclude,” Lawrence writes, “that every voluntary union would be short-lived.” He claims that, although constancy is no merit in itself, still it obtains in the Kingdom of the Naires to a greater extent than in Europe. “Know ye not that though constancy is no merit it is a source of happiness; and that though inconstancy is no crime, it is no blessing much less a boast.”[35] There is some resemblance between this and the following from Shelley’s Notes to Queen Mab: “Constancy has nothing virtuous in itself independently of the pleasure it confers, and partakes of the temporizing spirit of vice in proportion as it endures tamely moral defects of magnitude in the object of its indiscreet choice.” In another place Lawrence writes: “Two hearts whom love with its loadstone has touched, will stick together, nought will tear asunder. But soon as the magnetic power has ceased, say, why should wedlock link in iron fetters, superfluous even when they are not vexatious, those bodies which the soul of love has left?”[36] In the notes to Queen Mab we read—“A husband and wife ought to continue so long united as they love each other; any law which should bind them to cohabitation for one moment after the decay of their affection would be a most intolerable tyranny, and the most unworthy of toleration.”[37] “Among the Naires there are neither courtesans nor virgins, for the two extremes are equally unnatural and equally detrimental to the state. Love there shuns not the light of the sun, nor is it, as in Europe, degraded as a vice, nor allied to infamy and guilt.”

Shelley lived at a time when the marriage ideal was not held in high repute. Lawrence describes many kinds of abominable travesties of marriage. In Persia, to silence the scruples of the lustful, “they have contrived contracts of enjoyment (for it would be wicked to call them contracts of marriage) for very short periods of time; these are formally signed and countersigned, and many priests gain their livelihood by giving their benediction to this orthodox prostitution.”[38] Marriage was a mere formality for a great many. In France, Montesquieu writes, “a husband, who would wish to keep his wife to himself, would be considered a disturber of the public happiness, and as a madman who would monopolise the light of the sun. He who loves his own wife, is one who is not agreeable enough to gain the affections of any other man’s wife, who takes advantage of a law to make amends for his own want of amiability; and who contributes, as far as lies in his power, to overturn a tacit convention, that is conducive to the happiness of both sexes.”[39] In England conditions were no better. A husband might consort with as many women as he chose and his wife could get no redress. In Italy and Spain, the inhabitants, “too fond of liberty to respect the duties of marriage and too attached to their names to suffer their extinction, require only representatives, and not sons as their heirs. It is a pity that the Naire system is not known to them; but cicesbeism is a palliative to marriage and an ingenious compromise between family pride and natural independence, and it is better to be inconsistent and happy than unhappy and rational.”[40]