Shelley

by John Addington Symonds

Whatever opinion the student of Shelley’s history may form regarding his previous and his subsequent conduct, due weight must always be given to the accent of sincerity, of pleading sorrow, of ingenuous self-humiliation, in these touching lines. It must also be remembered that Harriet, although she treasured them and copied them in her own handwriting, apparently turned a deaf ear to their appeal, and that it was not until several weeks of solitude and misery had passed that Shelley finally sought the “fatal cure” of separation by flinging himself into the arms of Mary Godwin.

We may now affirm with confidence that in the winter and spring of 1814 an estrangement had gradually been growing up between Shelley and Harriet. Her more commonplace nature, subsiding into worldliness, began to weary of his enthusiasms, which at the same epoch expanded somewhat unhealthily under the influences of the Boinville family. That intimacy brought into painful prominence whatever was jarring and repugnant to him in his home. While divided in this way between domesticity which had become distasteful, and the society of friends with whom he found scope for his most romantic outpourings of sensibility, Shelley fell suddenly and passionately in love with Godwin’s daughter, Mary. He made her acquaintance first perhaps in May or at the beginning of June. Peacock, who lived on terms of the closest familiarity with him at this period, must deliver his testimony as to the overwhelming nature of the new attachment:—“Nothing that I ever read in tale or history could present a more striking image of a sudden, violent, irresistible, uncontrollable passion, than that under which I found him labouring when, at his request, I went up from the country to call on him in London. Between his old feelings towards Harriet, from whom he was not then separated, and his new passion for Mary, he showed in his looks, in his gestures, in his speech, the state of a mind ‘suffering, like a little kingdom, the nature of an insurrection.’ His eyes were bloodshot, his hair and dress disordered. He caught up a bottle of laudanum, and said, ‘I never part from this.’”

Mary Godwin was then a girl of sixteen, “fair and fair-haired, pale indeed, and with a piercing look,” to quote Hogg’s description of her, as she first appeared before him on the 8th or 9th of June, 1814. With her freedom from prejudice, her tense and high-wrought sensibility, her acute intellect, enthusiasm for ideas, and vivid imagination, Mary Godwin was naturally a fitter companion for Shelley than the good Harriet, however beautiful. How he plighted his new troth, and won the hand of her who was destined to be his companion for life, may best be told in Lady Shelley’s words:—

“His anguish, his isolation, his difference from other men, his gifts of genius and eloquent enthusiasm, made a deep impression on Godwin’s daughter Mary, now a girl of sixteen, who had been accustomed to hear Shelley spoken of as something rare and strange. To her, as they met one eventful day in St. Pancras Churchyard, by her mother’s grave, Bysshe, in burning words, poured forth the tale of his wild past—how he had suffered, how he had been misled, and how, if supported by her love, he hoped in future years to enrol his name with the wise and good who had done battle for their fellow-men, and been true through all adverse storms to the cause of humanity. Unhesitatingly, she placed her hand in his, and linked her fortune with his own; and most truthfully, as the remaining portions of these Memorials will prove, was the pledge of both redeemed. The theories in which the daughter of the authors of Political Justice, and of the Rights of Woman, had been educated, spared her from any conflict between her duty and her affection. For she was the child of parents whose writings had had for their object to prove that marriage was one among the many institutions which a new era in the history of mankind was about to sweep away. By her father, whom she loved—by the writings of her mother, whom she had been taught to venerate—these doctrines had been rendered familiar to her mind. It was therefore natural that she should listen to the dictates of her own heart, and willingly unite her fate with one who was so worthy of her love.”

The separation from Harriet, which actually took place about the middle of July, was not arranged by mutual consent, as some authorities assert, so much as by Shelley’s deliberate repudiation of his partner. Yet she must be held to some degree responsible for bringing about the catastrophe by her own imprudent behaviour. At an uncertain date in the summer she went to Bath, leaving her husband in London or its neighbourhood. Although he was now becoming convinced that their union could not be prolonged, he continued to correspond with her regularly until early in July. A silence of four days then alarmed her so much that she wrote upon the 6th in great anxiety to Mr. Hookham, begging to be informed of Shelley’s doings. On the 14th they met again at his request in London. What passed on this occasion is not known; but it seems tolerably certain that he informed her of his firm resolve to part from her. On the 28th of that month he departed secretly for the Continent with Mary Godwin, who had consented to share his fortunes. It must be added that he passed through a crisis of intense suffering and excitement, bordering on madness, before he finally determined to exchange the refrigerated and uncongenial Harriet for the impassioned and sympathetic Mary.

That Shelley has to bear the burden of this act of separation from his first wife seems quite clear; nor can I discover anything to justify his conduct, according to the commonly received opinions of the world, except incompatibility of aims and interests in 1814 between him and the woman he so recklessly married in 1811. His own peculiar justification is to be found in his avowed opinions on the subject of marriage—opinions which Harriet knew well and professed to share, and of which he had recently made ample confession in the notes to Queen Mab. Men and women in general, those whom Shelley was wont to style “the vulgar,” will still agree with Lord Eldon in regarding those opinions as dangerous to society. But it would be unfair, while condemning them as frankly as Shelley professed them, to blame him also because he did not conform to the opposite code of morals, for which he frequently expressed extreme abhorrence, and which he stigmatized, however wrongly, as the source of the worst social vices.

What is left of Harriet’s history may be briefly told. She remained in correspondence with her husband, who showed himself always anxious for her material and moral welfare. At Bath, upon the 30th of November, 1814, she gave birth to Shelley’s second child, Charles Bysshe, who eventually died in 1826. She seems to have formed other connexions at a later date, which proved unfortunate; and on the 9th of November (?) 1816, she committed suicide by drowning in the Serpentine. It should be added that, until just before the end, she continued to live under her father’s protection. The distance of time between July, 1814, and November, 1816, and the new ties formed by Harriet in the interval, prove that there was no immediate relation between Shelley’s abandonment of his wife and her suicide. She had always entertained the thought of self-destruction, as Hogg, who is no adverse witness in her case, has amply recorded. It may, indeed, be permitted us to suppose that, finding herself for the second time unhappy in her love, she reverted to a long-since cherished scheme, and cut the knot of life and all its troubles.

So far as this is possible, I have attempted to narrate the most painful episode in Shelley’s life as I conceive it to have occurred, without extenuation and without condemnation. But one important point connected with the chief incident still remains to be examined in detail.

Mr. Dowden says: “From an assurance that she (Harriet) had ceased to love him, Shelley had passed to a conviction that she had given her heart to another, and had linked her life to his.”[36] This statement he repeats without qualification: “He had left her, believing she was unfaithful to him.”[37] The documents which Mr. Dowden quotes to establish Shelley’s belief in Harriet’s unfaithfulness before the separation are three in number.[38] First, a letter from Shelley to his second wife, dated January 11, 1817. Secondly, a letter from Godwin to Mr. W. T. Baxter, dated May 12, 1817. Thirdly, a note appended by Miss Clairmont to transcripts from her mother’s letters, made some time after 1832. I have enumerated these in chronological order, because their greater or less remoteness from the year 1814 considerably affects their value as evidence regarding Shelley’s belief at that period.

It must be borne in mind that Harriet committed suicide in November, 1816, and very soon after this event the Westbrook family began a suit in Chancery with the object of depriving Shelley of the custody of his two children by her. On the 11th of January, 1817, then, Shelley wrote to Mary: “I learn just now from Godwin that he has evidence that Harriet was unfaithful to me four months before I left England with you. If we can succeed in establishing this, our connexion will receive an additional sanction, and plea be overborne.”[39] As a matter of fact, when the pleadings began, he did not establish this, nor did he allude to the matter in the memorandum he drew up of his case.[40] Godwin writes upon the 12th of May: “The late Mrs. Shelley has turned out to be a woman of great levity. I know from unquestionable authority, wholly unconnected with Shelley (though I cannot with propriety be quoted for this), that she had proved herself unfaithful to her husband before their separation.” On the strength of these two passages, the pith and kernel of which is that Godwin, some months after Harriet’s death, credited a tale told him by an unknown person, which he repeated to Shelley, we are asked to suppose that Shelley in July, 1814, two and a half years earlier, was convinced of Harriet’s infidelity. But Miss Clairmont has still to be heard. She, writing at some uncertain date subsequently to 1832, and therefore at least eighteen years after the separation, recorded that: “He (Shelley) succeeded in persuading her (Mary) by declaring that Harriet did not really care for him; that she was in love with a Major Ryan; and the child she would have was certainly not his. This Mary told me herself, adding that this justified his having another attachment.” When we come to examine Miss Clairmont’s reminiscences, we find them untrustworthy in so many instances that her evidence carries no weight.[41] In the second place it is unquestioned and unquestionable that Shelley firmly believed the second child he had by Harriet to be his own. He announced the boy’s birth to his friends, had him named Charles Bysshe, used him in his efforts to raise money, and passionately claimed him when Harriet’s relatives refused to give him up. Yet we are invited to accept the memorandum of an inaccurate woman, penned at least eighteen years after the event, and including one palpable and serious misstatement, as proof that Shelley judged his first wife unfaithful before he eloped with Mary.