What evidence that a youngster—living in the times of Moore, and Maturin, and Sydney Morgan; in times when the popularity of the ‘Irish Melodies’ had called into existence a score imitators of their author; in times when romantic Irish ballads and patriotic Irish ballads lay on every drawing-room table; in times when to humour the prevailing taste for fiction about Ireland, and to profit by the demand for Irish tales at circulating libraries, Lady Morgan christened one of her stories The Wild Irish Girl, though no such girl played a part in the narrative,—was a serious student of Irish history and legends, and had entered on a course of inquiry and thought, that naturally resulted in a resolve to visit Ireland, for the purpose of striking the manacles from the bruised and bleeding limbs of Fair Erin! Thus is it that Shelley’s story has been told by his fanciful idolaters.
The instruction given (November 26th, 1811) to Mr. Medwin, the Horsham lawyer, to find a Sussex cottage for the poet’s habitation, is a sufficient proof that Shelley at that time designed to settle ere long in his native county. When a man speaks to his lawyer on such a matter, he may be assumed to mean what he says. Shelley’s written words to the man of business were: ‘We do not intend to take up our abode here for a perpetuity, but should wish to have a house in Sussex. Let it be in some picturesque, retired place—St. Leonard’s Forest, for instance. Let it not be nearer to London than Horsham, nor near any populous manufacturing town. We do not covet either a propinquity to barracks.’ The young man who wrote with this amplitude and precision must have meant what he said. He could not afford to hire a house and let it stand empty. With no purpose of staying a long time at Keswick, he wished for a house in Sussex to retire to, in the company of his wife and sister-in-law, when he should withdraw from the lakes. This was his plan when he entered Keswick; and when he had been there some weeks.
What made him relinquish this scheme for a home? Probably he relinquished it at the advice and with the approval of his wife and her sister, and also in accordance with his own judgment, immediately after the visit to Greystoke Castle, and Mr. Calvert’s offer to take them into his house. When they had been received at the Castle—not for a mere formal dinner, not for a brief three nights’ stay, but for a visit of several (eight or nine) days—the prospect of living for a considerable time at Keswick must have been acceptable to both the sisters; to the gentle and lovable Harriett, who had several reasons for thinking such a residence would be for her husband’s advantage,—and to the scheming and ambitious Eliza, who, in some degree sincerely desirous for Harriett’s and Percy’s welfare, was chiefly ambitious of taking rank with gentlewomen. Exulting in her reception at Greystoke Castle,—a reception that qualified her to speak of the Duchess of Norfolk as her friend, and gave her the castle-mark of gentility in the eyes of the ‘highest quality’ of and near Keswick—Miss Westbrook, we may be sure, was in no hurry to withdraw from the neighbourhood, that was the scene of her sweetest social triumph; from the town that necessarily rated her one of the Greystoke circle. It was manifest to the prudent and ambitious Miss Westbrook, that nothing could be more favourable to her own hopes, and aims, and interest, than such a residence at Keswick as would plant her amongst the local ‘quality,’ and result in future invitations to the Castle,—nothing more certain to please her money-grubbing and upward-looking father; nothing more likely to conciliate Percy’s wrathful father; no course more likely to end in her own admission to Field Place during the life of Percy’s mother.
At the same time it was no less manifest to Miss Westbrook that a better place of residence than Keswick could not be found for her youthful and erratic brother-in-law during the next two or three years. Living in Sussex he would be a perpetual irritant to his irritable father. Living in Cumberland he would be out of his father’s way, and under the fewest temptations to exasperate him to fiercer anger. Not only would he be out of his father’s way in Cumberland, but living there, in a certain sense, under the Duke of Norfolk’s patronage, he would be passing his time under conditions most likely to confirm the Duke in his friendly disposition towards him, and therefore most likely to result in the reconciliation of the father and son. At Keswick her brother-in-law would have literary society, form literary friendships, and have access to the libraries of his literary friends. On hearing her brother-in-law enjoyed the Duke of Norfolk’s favour, and meant to remain for a considerable time at Greta Bank, Miss Westbrook was hopeful that Mr. De Quincey would soon call upon him. On their return to the lakes, Mr. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Mr. John Wilson would make his acquaintance. Mr. Wordsworth might hold aloof from the new-comers for a time, but in some way or other he would extend the hand of good-fellowship to them, soon after Coleridge’s reappearance in his favourite haunts. Living with such friends, Percy would read many books, and write a wonderful poem, that, raising him yet higher in the omnipotent Duke’s good opinion, would restore him to his father’s favour, and open the doors of Field Place to his wife and her sister. These were Miss Westbrook’s views of the position and prospect. No one can say they were unreasonable views. Had they been so, Harriett would have accepted them out of her usual submissiveness to so incomparable a sister. But there was no need for Miss Westbrook to force her views of these matters on her sister, who, without guidance or instruction of any kind, had come to the same conclusions. Harriett and Eliza had seldom been of different opinions on anything up to this point of their story. At least for once, the concurrence of their sentiments was in no degree due to the elder sister’s authority.
Whilst Harriett and Miss Westbrook both liked the notion of living at Keswick for a considerable period, Shelley also favoured it. One consequence of Shelley’s enthusiasm and nervous vehemence was that, whilst he was the most changeable of mortals in some matters, he seldom did a thing once without at the same time intending to do it ‘for ever.’ A restless vagrant from his manhood’s threshold to his death, he seldom entered a picturesque place without declaring he would live in it ‘for ever.’ He was perpetually doing things ‘for ever,’ and undoing them a few days or weeks later. He never made a friendship with man or woman without vowing the league should be perpetual. He went to York with the intention of living there ‘for ever.’ He declared he would love Hogg ‘for ever.’ He vowed he would live ‘for ever’ in friendship with Miss Hitchener, of Hurstpierpoint, and no long time afterwards vowed just as passionately and sincerely to hate her ‘for ever.’ It mattered not to him in periods of passionate excitement, that in his opinion love and all other sentimental preferences were mere consequences of perception and wholly independent of volition. It mattered not that ‘Love was free,’ and that in his judgment ‘To promise for ever to love the same woman was not less absurd than to promise to believe the same creed,’ because such a vow excluded its maker from inquiries he might be constrained to make, and from new judgments he might be compelled to form, and was therefore by the nature of things powerless to bind its utterer when the mental perceptions required him to disregard it. All the same, he never desired human affection without praying for it, in order that he might enjoy it ‘for ever,’—never wished vehemently for anything without hoping, in his emotional intensity, to get happiness from it ‘for ever.’ He promised to love Harriett Westbrook ‘for ever,’ whilst believing himself to be so constituted that at no distant time he might be powerless to love her at all. In the same spirit, with the same fervour, and the same perception of love’s fickleness and instability, he carried off Mary Godwin with avowals that he would love her ‘for ever.’ When Claire, in the ‘Six weeks’ tour,’ exclaimed with delight at each new scene of loveliness, ‘Let us live here,’ the lively and humorous girl was laughing in her sleeve at Shelley’s practice of declaring he would ‘live for ever’ in any place, that pleased him greatly at first sight. Allowance must be made for Shelley’s vehement emotionality and extravagance of diction by readers who would not be misled by his use of ‘ever’ and ‘never’ in matters of his own personal story.
In the absence of positive evidence to the point, I have little doubt that Shelley entered the rooms assigned to him in Mr. Calvert’s house with a declaration that he would inhabit them ‘for ever,’ and that the sisters who had him in their keeping entered the same rooms with a strong opinion that he would do well to inhabit them for a considerable time. He would scarcely have remained in them for seven weeks had he not taken possession of them with the intention of occupying them for as many years. How was it then that he withdrew so soon from so eligible an abode? Certainly the cause was neither a sudden dislike of Keswick, nor a diminution of his affectionate regard for Mr. and Mrs. Calvert. There exists testimony in his own handwriting that he left Keswick with regret, and the Calverts with a hope to see more of them. ‘I hope,’ he wrote to a friend from Whitehaven on 3rd February, 1812, as he was on the point of sailing for Ireland, ‘some day to show you Mrs. Calvert; I shall not forget her, but will preserve her memory as another flower to compose a garland which I intend to present to you.’ How came he then to tear himself away at the beginning of February, 1812, from a place he liked, and from friends in whom he delighted? How was it that, on tearing himself from this place and these friends, he went off to Ireland,—an expedition he certainly cannot have thought of making when, on 26th November, 1811, he wrote to Mr. Medwin, of Horsham, about a house in Sussex? How are we to account for the change of purpose that sent him on a mission to Ireland for the Repeal of the Union and the Emancipation of the Catholics? Successive writers have either declared their inability to answer this question, or have answered it in the wrong way.
Confessing his inability to answer the question, Hogg conjectures that some Irish frequenter of the Mount Street coffee-house, or some Hibernian Hampden, encountered by Shelley on the hills of Cumberland, may have inspired Shelley with an ambition to settle all the Irish questions, and put a period to all the Irish grievances, by making the voyage to Dublin, and speaking words of wisdom to its inhabitants. Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy is certain that this new project for the pacification of Ireland was the natural result of Shelley’s Oxonian study of Irish history and legends; that the poet went to Ireland of his own mere motion, after coming slowly and dispassionately to a strong and reasonable opinion that he would do Ireland good service, by visiting her capital, and in the course of a few weeks converting her children to moderation, temperance, industry, orderliness, and universal political amenity. The present writer is no less certain that Shelley’s Oxonian concern for Irish literature had nothing to do with his marvellous scheme for settling Irish difficulties; that his premature departure from Keswick was mainly due to his dislike of Southey; and that his Irish mission was the outcome of sentiments arising from his acrimonious disputations with the same poet on questions of Irish politics.
It is not surprising that the man of letters and his young friend exchanged their views on questions that engaged the attention of all persons interested in the politics of the United Kingdom. It would have been strange had the Quarterly Reviewer and the literary aspirant—the mature Tory, who spoke disdainfully of his former republicanism as mere boyish effervescence, and the youthful enthusiast of the revolutionary school—differed amicably on matters, so calculated to stir the temper of either disputant. Whilst they were alike fervid and intolerant, each had a manner peculiarly irritating to the other, as soon as their pulses quickened under verbal contention. Overbearing and contemptuous, even to those who agreed with him, Southey soon grew insufferably dogmatic and disdainful to the boy who had the presumption to contradict him. Never remarkable for a reverential and conciliatory demeanour to those of his elders who ventured to teach him what he did not wish to be taught, Shelley soon ceased to show his opponent the respect due from him to a man, so greatly his superior by age, experience, and achievement. Southey’s attempts to snub his young friend into submissiveness, and lecture him into sensible views, only stirred and stung Shelley to declare in shriller notes his repugnance to the views that were forced upon him in so dictatorial a manner. On finding that in Southey’s study and presence he was expected to hold silence and take instruction, the young gentleman (ætat. 19), who deemed himself qualified ‘to hold the argument everywhere,’ became furious. Of course, everything Southey said in this insolent style, against the Irish, only made Shelley think, or confirmed him in thinking, the reverse. The more insultingly he was told that all Ireland needed was firm government and the steady maintenance of existing laws, the more clear was it to Shelley that Ireland’s chief need was the gentle rule of new and humane laws. Southey’s assertions that reasoning was wasted on the Irish, for whose government the bayonet was the best instrument, only made Shelley more positive that the Irish were a gentle, generous, and reasonable people, who could be reasoned into virtuous behaviour, and be cured by sympathetic and persuasive speech of their faults and failings,—faults and failings chiefly, if not altogether, due to the tyranny under which they had groaned so long.
To show that he was altogether right, and the exasperating Southey altogether wrong, about Ireland and the Irish, Shelley set to work with his pen on the production of An Address to the Irish People, that, written at Keswick in the last month of 1811 and the first month of 1812, was printed and published at Dublin in February, 1812. As the words of this curious and delightfully boyish composition fell to the paper, it struck the author that it would be well for him to visit Ireland, and enforce with his persuasive tongue the wholesome admonitions of his pen,—and very pleasant for him, and Harriett, and Eliza, to observe in the streets of Dublin the first signs of that conversion of the Irish people to thrift, industry, temperance, and tolerance, which could not fail to be the immediate consequence of the publication of so excellent an essay. This notion of going to Ireland, for the purpose of contributing to, and witnessing the success of, his pamphlet, was the more agreeable to Shelley because he was eager to get away from the odious Southey, and because, in going to Ireland (of all places of the earth’s surface) to get out of the renegade’s way, he would exhibit, in a singularly telling and emphatic manner, his contempt for all that had been urged to the discredit of the dear Irish people by the malignant apostate from pantisocratic and other republican principles. Under these circumstances, is it wonderful that the later slips of the Address were written in the midst of arrangements for the author’s expedition to the land, that would be so speedily recovered from rancour and wretchedness to contentment and prosperity?
Whilst writing the Address to the Irish People at Greta Bank, Shelley found other employment for his pen, in producing verses to Robert Emmett’s glorification, with other additions to the collection of poems which he designed to publish in Dublin; and in throwing off letters to Miss Eliza Hitchener, of Hurstpierpoint, near Brighton, and to a certain famous author and struggling bookseller, who must have experienced emotions of amusement and self-complacence on perusing the first of the letters, in which the author of the Necessity of Atheism, approached William Godwin with expressions of profoundest reverence, several months before he was permitted to gaze on the altogether human lineaments of the divine philosopher.