Another episode of Byron’s Swiss life was his encounter there, for the first time, with the poet Shelley.[67] He, too, was under ban, for reasons that I must briefly make known. Like his brother poet, Shelley was born to a prospective inheritance of title and of wealth. His father was a baronet, shrewd and calculating, and living by the harshest and baldest of old conventionalisms; this father had given a warm, brooding care to the estate left him by Sir Bysshe Shelley (the grandfather of the poet), who had an American bringing up—if not an American birth—in the town of Newark,[68] N. J. The boy poet had the advantages of a place at Eton[69]—not altogether a favorite there, it would seem; “passionate in his resistance to an injury, passionate in his love.” He carried thence to Oxford a figure and a beauty of countenance that were almost effeminate; and yet he had a capacity for doubts and negations that was wondrously masculine. His scholarship was keen, but not tractable; he takes a wide range outside the established order of studies; he is a great and unstinted admirer of the French philosophers, and makes such audacious free-thinking challenge to the church dignitaries of Oxford that he is expelled—like something venomous. His father, too, gives him the cold shoulder at this crisis, and he drifts to London. There he contrives interviews with his sisters, who are in school at Clapham; and is decoyed into a marriage—before he is twenty—with a somewhat pretty and over-bold daughter of a coffee-house keeper, who has acted as a go-between in communications with his sisters. The prudent, conventional father is now down upon him with a vengeance.
But the boy has pluck under that handsome face of his. He sets out, with his wife—after sundry wanderings—to redeem Ireland; but they who are used to blunderbusses, undervalue Shelley’s fine periods, and his fine face. He is some time in Wales, too (the mountains there fastening on his thought and cropping out in after poems); he is in Edinboro’, in York, in Keswick—making his obeisance to the great Southey (but coming to over-hate of him in after years). Meantime he has children. Sometimes money comes from the yielding father—sometimes none; he is abstemious; bread and water mostly his diet; his home is without order or thrift or invitingness—the lapses of the hoydenish girl-wife stinging him over and over and through and through.
But Shelley has read Godwin’s Political Justice—one of those many fine schemes for the world’s renovation, by tearing out and burning up most of the old furniture, which make their appearance periodically—and in virtue of his admiration of Godwin, Shelley counts him among the demi-gods of the heaven which he has conjured up. In reality Godwin[70] was an oldish, rather clumsy, but astute and clever dissenting minister, who had left preaching, and had not only written Political Justice, but novels—among them one called Caleb Williams; by which you will know him better—if you know him at all. This gave him great reputation in its time. There were critics who ranked him with, or above, Scott—even in fiction. This may tempt you to read Caleb Williams;[71] and if you read it—you will not forget it. It pinches the memory like a vice; much reading of it might, I should think, engender, in one of vivid imagination, such nightmare stories as “Called Back” or “A Dark Day.”
But Mr. Godwin had a daughter, Mary (whose mother was that Mary Wollstonecraft, promoted now to a place amongst famous women), and our Shelley going to see Godwin, saw also the daughter Mary—many times over; and these two—having misty and mystic visions of a new order of ethics—ran away together.
It must be said, however, to the credit of Shelley (if credit be the word to use), that when this first wife killed herself—as she did some eighteen months afterward[72] (whether from grief or other cause is doubtful)—he married Miss Godwin; and it was during the summer preceding this second marriage that Byron (1816) encountered Shelley on the shores of Lake Leman. Shelley had already written that wild screed of Queen Mab (privately printed, 1813), giving poetic emphasis to the scepticism of his Oxford days. He had published that dreamy poem of Alastor—himself its poet hero, as indeed he was in a large sense of every considerable poem he wrote. I cite a fragment of it, that you may see what waking and beguiling voice belonged to the young bard, who posed there on the Geneva lake beside the more masculine Byron. He has taken us into forest depths:
“One vast mass
Of mingling shade, whose brown magnificence
A narrow vale embosoms.
The pyramids
Of the tall cedar, overarching, frame