One may well smile at such egregious ignorance of law and affairs in the self-confident youth, who was preparing to visit Ireland in order to Emancipate the Catholics, Repeal the Union, and instruct the whole Irish people in political science. It is, however, no matter for smiling that this young scatterbrain, whom his adulators compare with the Saviour of the World, penned these egregious inventions to his father’s discredit in a letter to a person, with whom he had no domestic connexion,—to a stranger, of whom he knew nothing, save that he was a writer of entertaining and clever books.
Readers must settle for themselves whether the untruthful statements were sheer and wilful untruths, or the fruits of misconception scarcely compatible with mental sanity, or products of a state of mind that would justify the critic in adopting Peacock’s term, and speaking of them as results of ‘semi-delusion.’ On these points there may be room for differences of opinion; but it must be obvious to all judicious readers that in putting the erroneous statements on paper, the generous and chivalric Shelley was actuated by a desire to exhibit his father as an unnatural and treacherous parent to the man of letters, to whom the epistle was addressed. Had the Squire of Field Place been the bad father Shelley declared him, it was not for Shelley to say so in a letter to a stranger. Even to his nearest and dearest friend—even to so familiar a comrade as Hogg, in the time of their most affectionate intimacy—Shelley would have been silent on so painful and shameful a subject, had he been the loyal and chivalrous being his idolaters would have us think him.
Readers may also reflect on the different strain in which Shelley, only a few weeks earlier, wrote of his father to the Duke of Norfolk. Godwin, the stranger, is informed by Shelley that his father regards him as a blot and defilement; that his father had striven to force him out of the country into distant military service; that his father had designed to institute legal proceedings against him for writing The Necessity of Atheism; that his father had desired to despoil him of his birthright, and place his younger brother next in succession to the family estate. These statements are made to the stranger, who is not likely to know the real causes of his correspondent’s estrangement from his father. But in Shelley’s letter to the Duke of Norfolk, who knows all about the domestic question and the Squire’s treatment of his son, it is not suggested by Shelley that ‘the pamphlet’ had anything to do with his father’s anger. On the contrary, his father’s extreme displeasure with him is attributed to the real cause—his marriage, and the circumstances of the mésalliance. Why this difference? To those who answer that, whereas Shelley was in his right mind when writing to the Duke of Norfolk, and labouring under delusions when writing to William Godwin, it must appear curiously significant and suggestive of another conclusion—that he wrote truthfully of his affairs to the correspondent who (to his knowledge) knew the truth of them, and altogether untruthfully about his affairs to the person whom he had reason to think ignorant of them.
Godwin’s answer to the letter containing these inaccurate statements is not extant; but it is on the evidences that the philosopher’s reply indicated surprise at, and disapproval of, the terms in which his youthful correspondent had spoken of his father. Finding he had exhibited himself in an unfavourable light to the author of Political Justice, Shelley hastened to retrieve the false step, and recover his correspondent’s good opinion by writing (14th January, 1812), in his third letter from Keswick to Skinner Street:—
‘You mistake me if you think that I am angry with my father. I have ever been desirous of a reconciliation with him, but the price which he demands for it is a renunciation of my opinions, or, at least a subjection to conditions which should bind me to act in opposition to their very spirit. It is probable that my father has acted for my welfare....’
Neither misconception nor semi-delusion can be pleaded for Shelley’s statement that he was not angry with his father. It was not true that he had ‘ever been desirous of a reconciliation with his father.’ The two statements were untruths, told by Shelley in order to set himself right with his correspondent. For the same purpose he now admits that his father (charged in the previous letter with an execrable design for depriving him of his birthright) may have acted for his welfare. Other words of the extract should have the reader’s thoughtful consideration. One of the charges against the Squire of Field Place being that, after banishing his son from his boyhood’s home at the instigation of religious intolerance, he required his son’s renunciation of his sincere opinions as the condition for their reconcilement, it is well for readers of the poet’s story to take especial notice of his admission that, instead of being required to renounce his opinions, he was only required to ‘submit to conditions which should bind him to act in opposition to their very spirit,’ words of qualification which, coming from Shelley, are sufficient evidence to the moderation and reasonableness of the conditions. There is a wide difference between a demand for the renunciation of opinions and a demand for abstinence from noisy and aggressive assertion of them; and the father who requires a youngster in his nonage to hold his pen and tongue on certain subjects of difficult and perilous controversy is guilty of no despotic excess of paternal authority. The forbearance which Mr. Timothy Shelley had required of his son was in truth nothing more than the forbearance which William Godwin was already urging the youngster to exercise for his own advantage. ‘I will not again,’ Shelley writes to his newly selected Mentor, ‘crudely obtrude my peculiar opinions or my doubts on the world;’ a promise which he, of course, had no intention of keeping; a promise he was, even at the moment of making it, on the point of breaking in the imbecile Address to the Irish People. Had he made the same promise to his father and kept it, there would have been peace between them,—at least on mere matters of opinion.
Writing to William Godwin, on 16th January, 1812, a letter that affords some curious examples of the obsequious adulation with which he approached the man of letters, whose friendship he was desirous of winning, Shelley remarked:—
‘I have known no tutor or adviser (not excepting my father) from whose lessons and suggestions I have not recoiled with disgust. The knowledge which I have, whatever it may be (putting out of the question the age of grammar and the horn-book), has been acquired by my unassisted efforts. I have before given you a slight sketch of my earlier habits and feelings—my present are, in my opinion, infinitely superior—they are elevated and disinterested; such as they are, you have principally produced them.’
‘I have known no tutor or adviser (not excepting my father) from whose lessons and suggestions I have not recoiled with disgust.’ This language is no less comprehensive than precise. Including all his schoolmasters and other official teachers, it includes all his advisers and social monitors—includes even his own father. How about Dr. Lind?—the wise, the humane, the gentle and large-minded Dr. Lind? the physician who trained him in science and philosophy, and carried him through brain-fever at Field Place? the benign hermit of Laon and Cythna, the persuasive teacher of Prince Athanase? Readers cannot need to be reminded of all Shelley told Hogg and his second wife about the wise physician’s influence on his mental and moral development; of the poetic egotisms of Laon and Cythna and Prince Athanase, that glorified the doctor for having been the beneficent illuminator of his pupil’s young mind; the poetic egotisms which Mrs. Shelley accepted, and the present Lady Shelley regards, as severely accurate autobiographic evidence. Taking them au pied de la lettre Lady Shelley argues from these scraps of egotistic verse as though they were historic data of unimpeachable authority. Lady Shelley is confident that Dr. Lind (‘the erudite scholar and amiable old man,’ as she styles him) was one of Shelley’s Eton tutors,—a tutor in whom he delighted at school, and remembered in after-life with love and veneration. Yet Shelley assures us that up to January, 1812, he never had tutor or adviser of any kind from whose lessons and suggestions he had not recoiled with disgust. Did Shelley really recoil with disgust from the hard-swearing doctor who taught him to curse his father?—from the enlightened physician who guided his ‘scientific studies?’ Or had he clean forgotten the doctor and all his virtuous ways when he was writing from Keswick to William Godwin? To those who answer this last question in the affirmative, it must seem strange that Dr. Lind, with all his virtue and wisdom, was so completely forgotten by the young gentleman, whom he had influenced so strongly and agreeably so few years since. If Dr. Lind was so great a power in the poet’s education as trustful readers of his poetry imagine, it is passing strange that Shelley never remembered him when he was recalling his teachers and their services in the first month of 1812. By those who attribute the frequent inaccuracies of his personal statements to a fertile fancy, an innocent and unconscious inventiveness, it must be considered that Shelley’s unruly and too vigorous imagination was suspiciously associated with an unreliable (though often strongly retentive) memory,—that whilst curiously apt to imagine things had taken place which had never occurred, he was also at times strangely forgetful of matters that he might well have been thought certain to remember.
On learning from this same Keswick letter of 16th January, 1812, that Shelley had made up his mind to go shortly to Dublin, with his wife and sister-in-law, for the purpose of furthering, to the utmost of their joint powers, the cause of Catholic Emancipation, Godwin (who seems to have been vastly delighted with the letters from Keswick, whilst seeing much to disapprove in them) sent his youthful and enthusiastic correspondent a letter of introduction to Curran, the Irish Master of the Rolls. In the letter which acknowledged the note of introduction as ‘a great and essential service,’ Shelley (28th January, 1812) referred apologetically to the lawfulness of his union with Harriett Westbrook, as a concession he made to despotic usage from ‘considerations of the unequally weighty burden of disgrace and hatred, which a resistance to this system’ (i.e. of lawful wedlock) ‘would entail upon his companion’ in connubial felicity. Yet further in defence of his politic ‘submission to the ceremonies of the Church,’ and in reference to the uneven consequences of the other and in some respects better course, he remarked, ‘a man in such a case, is a man of gallantry and spirit—a woman loses all claim to respect and politeness. She has lost modesty, which is the female criterion of virtue, and those, whose virtues extend no further than modesty, regard her with hatred and contempt.’