Of the droll things written of the poet by his enthusiastic worshipers, few are droller than the pages in which this exercise of childish fancy is dealt with, as an early exhibition of the peculiar genius that placed him eventually in the highest rank of imaginative artists. Had they not been too engrossed with the affairs of their own home to take nice cognizance of their neighbours’ children, the elders of Field Place, whilst rightly regarding the fib as no flagrant offence, would not have ‘mentioned it as a singular fact.’ To those who are familiar with the ways and humours of children, it is needless to say, that little Bysshe’s ‘invention’ is an example of the commonest kind of the harmless fibs, that come from the proverbially truthful mouths of babes and sucklings. Poets would be unendurably abundant, if all the little boys and girls, who ‘romance’ in this innocent fashion, were destined for the service of the Muses.
In Shelley’s case, however, the story has an exceptional interest, because he never survived the disposition, which thus early in his career caused him to proclaim himself the recipient of civilities that had not been offered to him,—the graceful actor in a domestic drama that had not been performed. All through life, Shelley had a practice of uttering for the truth statements that were not true. All through life, his familiar friends received his communications, with reference to this propensity. Out of their affection for the man, they palliated the weakness with more or less sincere excuses, that relieved the infirmity of the odium of deceitfulness. Some of his friends called attention to the poetical verity, underlying the least veracious statements; others persuaded themselves that the speaker of untruths was the victim of an inordinately powerful imagination. Others, unable to shut their eyes to the sure indications that he was not altogether unaware of the fictitious nature of his statements, maintained that the fables were due partly to hallucination, and only in some degree to wilful inventiveness. Whilst Hogg talked of the poetic verity of the egregious fictions, and of their utterer’s inordinately powerful imagination, Peacock originated the theory of ‘semi-delusion.’
From the few glimpses to be had of him in Miss Hellen Shelley’s letters, and Medwin’s reminiscences, and from bits of testimony which, though found in records of his later boyhood, are evidential to certain particulars of his earlier infancy, the cautious historian can produce the principal characteristics of the little fellow, who used to play with his sisters in the Field Place gardens, and ride on his pony about the Warnham lanes, in years anterior to his first departure from home for boarding-school. It is manifest that the child, who from his seventh to his eleventh year went daily to the Warnham Vicar for instruction in Latin, and received his other lessons in his sisters’ schoolroom, may be thought of as a shy, nervous, timid, small-headed urchin; tall for his years, but delicately fashioned. Narrow-chested and slightly round-shouldered, he had the look of a little fellow, scarcely strong enough to enjoy the sports of robust children. A slight slip of a lad, more given to loitering than running about the Field Place gardens; more often seen sitting by the fire, than dancing on the carpet of his sisters’ play-room; he was gentle in his happier moods with a girlish gentleness, and sometimes fretful with a girlish fretfulness. Deficient in boyishness, the boy had a face, chiefly remarkable for the fawn-like prominence of its deep blue eyes, the delicate, though imperfect, shapeliness of its mouth, the rather comical meanness of its little tip-tilted nose, and the red-and-white of its singularly bright complexion; the general girlishness of his appearance being heightened by the profusion of the silky hair, falling and flowing in blond-brown ringlets about his long neck and weedy shoulders.
Years later, musing on his conception of his former self, when he preferred the society of his little sister to the company of the rough boys of the Vicar’s schoolroom, Shelley wrote in Rosalind and Helen, of Helen’s docile child:—
‘He was a gentle boy,
And in all gentle sports took joy;
Oft in a dry leaf for a boat,
With a small feather for a sail,
His fancy on that spring would float,
If some invisible breeze would stir
Its marble calm.’
In like manner, ‘Abdallah’ and ‘Maimuna’ (the little Bysshe and Bessie of The Assassins) used to float their toy-boats upon the water of their smiling creek. Shelley’s delight in toy-flotillas may have arisen for the first time (as some of his biographers aver) long after his childhood. Possibly he was the fool of his own fancy in thinking he cared to play with toy-boats in his infancy. It is, however, certain, that gentleness characterized the child, who, on attaining manhood, meditated complacently on the delight he took in gentle sports when he was a gentle boy.
From what has been said of the facial show of the little fellow, who used to play in the Field Place gardens, and ride his Shetland pony about the Warnham lanes, in the closing years of the last, and the opening summers of the present century, it follows that the picture published by Mr. Colnaghi, in 1879, as a veritable portraiture of Shelley in his childhood, is an unauthentic and delusive performance. An exquisite example of childish beauty, the little boy of Mr. Colnaghi’s engraving has a straight, finely-pointed nose, and a face of faultless symmetry; a nose that could not have developed into the distinctly tip-tilted nose of the poet’s later visage; a face, that could not have departed so far from its normal mould, as in later time to bear any resemblance to the poet’s countenance, which is represented by all the several persons of his familiar acquaintance, who wrote about it, as having been no less wanting in symmetry than fortunate in the charms of expressiveness. Whilst declaring the singular comeliness of the poet’s face in its happier moments, Hogg records that its ‘features were not symmetrical.’ Medwin, ever quick to glorify his cousin, admits that his features were ‘not regularly handsome.’ Though she busied herself to impose upon the world the picture of a beautifully symmetrical face as Shelley’s veritable semblance, and was even more accountable than Mrs. Shelley for the prevailing misconceptions respecting his facial aspect, Mrs. Hogg (the Mrs. Williams of Shelleyan annals) admitted to Mr. Rossetti, in Trelawny’s presence, on March 13, 1872, that the poet ‘could not be called handsome or beautiful, though the character of his face was so remarkable for ideality and expression;’ the lady, at the same time, confirming what Hogg and Peacock tell us of the unmusical character of the poet’s voice. In the opinion of the lady, whose singing was unutterably sweet to her spiritual worshiper, Shelley’s ‘voice was decidedly disagreeable.’ On seeing the familiar pictures of Shelley, that serve as the frontispieces in Hogg’s Life, and Trelawny’s Recollections, Peacock declined to regard them as likenesses of his former friend; putting them aside not merely as ineffective and unsatisfactory likenesses, but as no likenesses whatever of the individual they professed to represent. ‘The portraits,’ he remarked in Fraser, ‘do not impress themselves on me as likenesses; they seem to me to want the true outline of Shelley’s features, above all, to want their true expression.’ How could he honestly speak otherwise of the spurious and delusive portraits, ‘in which’ (to repeat his own words) ‘the nose has no turn-up?’ That Shelley had a small and distinctly tip-tilted nose, instead of the straight and rather large (though delicately moulded) nose of the lying pictures, appears from words penned by himself to Peacock, from Leghorn, in August, 1819. After speaking derisively of John Gisborne’s quite Slawkenbergian nose as a thing that, weighing upon the beholder’s imagination, and transforming all its owner’s g’s into k’s, was a feature scarcely to be forgiven by Christian charity, Shelley observed, ‘I, you know, have a little turn-up nose; Hogg has a large hook one; but add them together, square them, cube them, you would have but a faint notion of the nose to which I refer.’ Shelley having written in this way of the defective shape and size of a principal feature of his face, it is not surprising that, whilst avoiding such words as ‘unsymmetrical’ and ‘irregular,’ Lady Shelley admitted reluctantly in her Shelley Memorials, that the poet’s ‘features were not positively handsome.’ The wonder is that, after making this admission in the text, the lady told a different story in the frontispiece of her book. The evidence is superabundant that, instead of being positively handsome, Shelley’s little nose was positively tip-tilted, and his face positively unsymmetrical.
To see the real Shelley, as he appeared during life to persons who regarded him through no such disturbing medium as romantic glamour, it is needful to get the better of misconceptions, arising from the delusive portraitures of him, to be found in familiar biographies—the fanciful pictures, which are the more intolerable for being fruitful of misapprehensions respecting the poet’s moral endowments.
The epithet applied to the delusive portraitures, was chosen with deliberation. ‘Fanciful’ in effect, they had their origin in fancy, and may be fairly described as the offspring of fancy working upon fancy, at different times and under various conditions. Shelley never sate to a professional painter. From the year that produced the Indian-ink sketch of a young gentleman, wearing the scant gown and leading bands of an Oxford undergraduate, to the year of his death, Shelley never gave a competent painter an opportunity for producing a work, that would have prevented the fanciful misrepresentations from gaining any credit—possibly would even have prevented them from coming into existence.
It would have been better for his readers, and certainly no worse for his fame, had he never consented to sit to an amateur. But it was fated that the man, who suffered so much in more important matters from sterner adversaries, should suffer considerably from two dabblers in the fine arts. At Rome (Lady Shelley says in 1818, Trelawny says in 1819) Miss Curran began the portrait in oil, which she never finished, of the poet in his twenty-eighth year—the sketch which, dropped and relinquished by the fair limner, possibly because she felt she had made ‘a bad beginning,’ was destined to be the chief source of all the artistic falsities, that have been manufactured to his injury since his death. Trelawny says this failure was ‘left in an altogether flat and inanimate state’—a description to be kept in mind.