What to the evil world is due
And therefore sternly did refuse
to link themselves with the infamy of ones so lost as their sinning sisters. In both cases common misery reunites them and their friends again.
In May or June, 1814, Shelley became acquainted with Mary Godwin. Her father described her as being “singularly bold, somewhat imperious, and active in mind; her desire of knowledge is great, and her perseverance in everything she undertakes almost invincible.” She was brought up in an atmosphere of free thought, having spent most of her girlhood with Mr. Baxter, a faithful disciple of Godwin. Shelley and Mary had many sympathies in common, and it is not surprising to find them soon falling in love with each other.
Peacock tells us that Shelley at this time was in agony. On the one hand he was tormented by his desire to treat Harriet rightly, and on the other by his passion for Mary. Passion won the day, and on July 28 Shelley eloped with Mary to the Continent. He tried to ease his conscience by offering Harriet his friendship and protection. He wrote her from the Continent and urged her to join himself and Mary in Switzerland. He assured her that she would find in him a firm, constant friend to whom her interests would be always dear.
While passing judgment on Shelley one should not forget that he simply put into practice those doctrines which he believed to be true. Neither Shelley nor Mary thought they were inflicting any wrong on Harriet as long as they offered her their friendship and protection.
In September, 1814, Shelley, Mary and Jane Clairmont, Mary’s half-sister, settled in London. About this time he was troubled a great deal with money embarrassments and was in continual hiding from the bailiffs. Toward the end of the year he read “the tale of Godwin’s American disciple in romance, Charles Brockden Brown.”[45] “Brown’s four novels,” says Peacock, “Schiller’s Robbers, and Goethe’s Faust, were of all the works with which he was familiar those which took the deepest root in Shelley’s mind and had the strongest influence in the formation of his character.”
Brown’s most important novel, Wieland, is a gruesome tale in which the horrors portrayed owe their existence to the errors of the sufferers. Wieland, a very religious man, is deceived by an unscrupulous ventriloquist who persuades him that a voice from heaven bids him sacrifice the life of his wife and four children. “If Wieland had framed juster notions of moral duty, and of the divine attributes; or if he had been gifted with ordinary equanimity or foresight, the double tongued deceiver would have been baffled and repelled.” This is the doctrine of Shelley; he believed that the evils of society were man’s own creation.
Ye princes of the earth, ye sit aghast
Amid the ruin which yourselves have made.
Yes, Desolation heard your trumpet’s blast,
And sprang from sleep.[46]
Brown’s views on love are almost as radical as those of Godwin. Wieland’s sister is in love with Pleyel, and is anxious to act in such a way as to give him hope and at the same time not to appear too forward. “Time was,” she says, “when these emotions would be hidden with immeasurable solicitude from every human eye. Alas! these airy and fleeting impulses of shame are gone. My scruples were preposterous and criminal. They are bred in all hearts, by a perverse and vicious education, and they would have maintained their place in my heart had not my portion been set in misery. My errors have taught me thus much wisdom; that those sentiments which we ought not to disclose it is criminal to harbor.”[47] Shelley’s ideal woman would hold the same views. He writes:
And women too, frank, beautiful and kind ...
... From custom’s evil taint exempt and pure
Speaking the wisdom once they could not think,
Looking emotions once they feared to feel.
And changed to all which once they dared not be
Yet, being now, made earth like heaven.