Though he never sate to professional painter, Shelley sate to a sculptor of sufficient ability, whose chisel produced a work of art that, indicating with sufficient clearness the two chief defects of the poet’s least comely feature, fortunately, still exists, to give the lie to the foolish pictures, and to protest with mute eloquence against the policy of misrepresentation, which pursues its ends with insolent disregard for the rights of the many thousands of persons, who are interested in knowing the truth and the whole truth, and in believing nothing but the truth, about one of the most remarkable Englishmen of the present century.
But though it offered violence to romantic and conventional notions of poetical beauty, and gave his countenance a contour very different from the profile of the delusive portraits, it may not be imagined that the ‘little turn-up nose’ caused Shelley to be otherwise than a man of a singularly striking and charming appearance. Tall for his years, from his childhood till he attained the fullness of his stature, Shelley had a slender figure that would not have wanted elegance, had it not been for the slight drooping and roundness of his shoulders, the narrowness of his chest, and the forward inclination of his long neck and minute head—peculiarities scarcely reconcilable with all that has been written about his personal stateliness. To imagine that the young man who paced the streets of Oxford and London ‘with bent knees and outstretched neck’ (in the manner described by Hogg), was remarkable for the grace and dignity of his carriage, is to surrender one’s judgment to the sway of romantic biographers. None the less certain, however, is it that there were moments when Shelley’s countenance might be commended for loveliness. Remarkable for a complexion, in which carmine-red and delicate white, instead of being blended, were separately conspicuous, even when it was most freckled by exposure to the sun, the face surmounting his long and slender frame was singularly expressive of intelligence, sympathy, nervous alertness, enthusiasm, and sincerity. Dull in moments of contemplation, the prominent deep-blue eyes of Trelawny’s stag-eyed Shelley were comparable with Byron’s grey-blue eyes, for overpowering vehemence under the impulses of strong and sudden emotion. Though inferior to Byron’s feminine mouth in beauty, and even more deficient than Byron’s mouth in power, Shelley’s mouth—the one symmetrical part of his unsymmetrical countenance—was notable for shapeliness, and alike expressive of sensibility and refinement.
In other particulars, Shelley’s head and face were comparable with Byron’s head and face. Like Byron, the author of Laon and Cythna had a head of striking smallness. It is a matter to be pondered by the physiologists, who maintain no man can be mentally powerful unless he has a big bulk of brain and a big pan to hold it, that the two greatest poets of the nineteenth century were, perhaps, the two smallest-headed Englishmen of their time. Though it wanted the auburn under-glow, the feathery softness, and careful keeping of the Byronic tresses, Shelley’s brown shock—blonde brown in childhood, deep brown ere it began prematurely to turn grey—resembled the locks of his familiar friend and fellow-poet in curling naturally. The most prominent feature of either poet’s face was the one in which he differed most conspicuously from the other. In that feature Byron had greatly the advantage. Had he not grudged the poet whom he hated this personal advantage over the poet whom he loved, Leigh Hunt would not have been at so much pains to describe the faults of Byron’s nose—its excessive massiveness, and its appearance of having been put upon the face, rather than of growing out of it. But whilst inferior to Byron’s face in that important feature, Shelley’s face, in its naturalness and seraphic gentleness, its candour and high simplicity, was possessed of charms no one would venture to attribute to Byron’s more earthly loveliness. In spite of its grand defect, Shelley’s was a face that reminded his two closest friends of works of Italian art. Whilst Peacock speaks of his vanished friend’s resemblance to the portrait of Antonio Leisman in the Florentine Gallery, Hogg likens the sweetest and loftiest element of the poet’s facial beauty to the air of profound religious veneration that may be observed in the best frescoes of the greatest masters of Florence and Rome.
There is no need to inquire how the lovely face of Mr. Colnaghi’s engraving came to be regarded as a portrait of Shelley in his childhood. Still less is there any need to inquire whether the original picture was the work of the exiled French prince to whom it has been attributed. The present writer has no wish to deal disrespectfully with any part of the picture’s story that does not touch the poet’s record. For this work’s purpose it is enough to say authoritatively that the child, whose delicate and exquisitely symmetrical lineaments are exhibited in the Colnaghi engraving, cannot have been the infantile Shelley, because it is not in the nature of things that the poet of unsymmetrical visage and ‘little turn-up nose’ was the development of the child, whose facial loveliness was so perfect an example of facial symmetry, and whose nose could not by any possibility have changed into the tip-tilted feature, described so precisely by the poet himself. Portraits are often strangely mis-assigned; but it is seldom for a portrait to be so egregiously mis-assigned as this so-called picture of the child Shelley. Had not Mrs. Shelley and Mrs. Williams succeeded in palming off on romantic credulity their symmetrical and straight-nosed ‘composition’ as a veritable picture of ‘The Real Shelley,’ it would never have occurred to any one to suggest that the original of the Colnaghi engraving was the poet Shelley at a tender age.
CHAPTER IV.
THE BRENTFORD SCHOOLBOY.
Dr. Greenlaw’s Character—Quality of his School—Medwin’s Anecdotes to the Doctor’s Discredit—Mr. Gellibrand’s Recollections of the Brentford Shelley—The Bullies of the Brentford Playground—Shelley’s Character at the School—His Disposition to Somnambulism—His Delight in Novels—His Wretchedness at School—Shelleyan Egotism—Byronic Egotism—Byron’s Influence on Shelley—Enduring Influence of Novels on Shelley’s Mind—Stories of Boating—Easter Holidays in Wiltshire—‘Essay on Friendship’—Its Biographical Value.
The slight slip of a boy, who under the name of Percy Bysshe Shelley, appeared for the first time in his eleventh year (the third year of the present century) amongst the boys of Dr. Greenlaw’s school at Sion House, Brentford, was no child to prefer the society of overbearing boys to the society of his little sisters, whose playmate he had hitherto been.