‘I fully anticipated the probable vexation of the juvenile maiden-author, when I communicated my discovery to Mr. P. B. Shelley. With all the ardour, incidental to his character, which embraces youthful honour in all its brilliancy, he expressed the warmest resentment at the imposition, practised upon him, by his coadjutor, and intreated me to destroy all the copies.’
Of Stockdale’s motives of self-interest and vindictiveness, in writing of Shelley in a laudatory style, something will be said by-and-by. For the present it is enough to remind the reader that the concoctor of the scandalous Budget (1827) was writing from memory, more than sixteen years after the incidents to which he refers. That Shelley’s coadjutor was spurred into wrongful action by ‘the poet’s impetuous solicitations for more verses,’ is a touch of fiction for which we are indebted to Mr. Garnett’s imagination.
As no copy of the suppressed edition is known to be in existence, and all our certain knowledge of the contents of the volume comes from Stockdale’s meagre and mendacious narrative, it is useless to inquire what will probably never be known—what proportion the purloined matter bore to the original writing of the book, and how far the purloined matter was manipulated and re-dressed by the pilferer or pilferers? It is scarcely conceivable that the stolen stuff was lifted from one book to the other without any verbal alteration. Should a copy of the Original Poetry be recovered, I should expect to find the least original of its pieces to be specimens of bold, free, manifest plagiarisms—not verbatim transcripts. That Shelley was a partner to such plagiarisms in 1810 we know from Medwin’s candid account of the way in which they made up the cantos of The Wandering Jew. That Shelley used to perpetrate such plagiarisms single-handed, and for his own sole use, in 1810, we know from the plagiarism from Byron’s Lachin-y-Gair (Hours of Idleness) to be found in St. Irvyne. Lewis’s Monk was boldly pilfered for the benefit of the third canto of The Wandering Jew, a canto altered and added to by Shelley after Medwin had rough-written it. Monk Lewis’s writings were so much admired by Shelley, and so familiar to him, that whilst he (with a strong taste for literary imitation) may be assumed, almost as a matter of course, to have plagiarized some parts of them at some time or other, he was not likely to have overlooked the quality of any plagiarism from Monk Lewis in the verses given him by his sister for their joint enterprise.
It follows that, whilst there is no sufficient evidence in support of Mr. Garnett’s account of the affair, several facts point to the probability that, instead of being perpetrated by Miss Shelley, the plagiarisms, which made it needful to withdraw and suppress the ‘original poetry,’ were done by her brother’s own hand. Yet Mr. Garnett declares it not merely clear, but ‘too clear,’ that Shelley was nothing more than the simple and unsuspicious victim of an unworthy coadjutor. At the same time to minimize the discredit, accruing to Shelley from her misconduct, it is observed lightly that, instead of stealing, she only ‘appropriated whatever first came to hand, with slight respect for pedantic considerations of meum and tuum.’ It is thus that disagreeable matters are glossed for the benefit of the poet, who might have been the Saviour of the World.
Mr. Rossetti, by far the most discreet and able of Shelley’s apologists, would win a favourable verdict for the poet in respect to this Victor and Cazire business, on the plea that so youthful and unworldly a writer is not to be supposed to have studied the law of copyright.
‘One can but speculate on the question whether Shelley was himself in fault in this matter, or whether he had been duped by his coadjutor. There was certainly some tendency to secretiveness in his early literary attempts; and it may be doubted whether the Etonian scatterbrain would have seen much harm in appropriating stanzas or whole compositions from Lewis if they fell in with his notions,—or, indeed, whether he had ever perceived or pondered the meaning of the word copyright. Stockdale, at any rate, does not seem to have considered himself aggrieved by Shelley, as he soon after undertook the publishing of St. Irvyne; in fact, after some serious rows during their business connexion, he continued enthusiastic as to the young author’s character and honour.’
By all means let Shelley have the benefit of the lenient judgment of a publisher, who came to ruin through his own dishonourable conduct. The publisher, who gave English literature The Memoirs of Harriet Wilson, is scarcely the person on whose evidence a proud man would care to rely for the vindication of his own or his friend’s honour. The plea that Shelley probably knew nothing of the law of copyright, reminds one of the similar plea, which caused Lord Justice Knight Bruce to declare in his proper court, that ‘to be honest it was not necessary to be an attorney.’ In truth, the question is wholly beside Shelley’s knowledge or ignorance of that law. Every Eton boy knows whether he has done a set of Latin verses for himself, or copied them from another boy’s paper; knows also that he is telling an untruth when he expressly declares himself the maker of the verses which another boy has composed for him. If Shelley knew the book contained poetry, that was written by neither of the individuals indicated in the title-page,—contained poetry that was not original in the sense of the title,—he was guilty of an untruth. For reasons already stated, I cannot question he had this knowledge, and was guilty of an untruth, which he would not have uttered to the publisher and the world, had he been (as Lady Shelley declares him to have been) more outspoken and truthful than other boys; or (as Mr. Walter S. Halliday declares him to have been) remarkable for ‘great moral courage’ and dislike of everything that was ‘false.’ Were it a solitary instance of departure from truth in the poet’s career, his present biographer would be at less pains to call attention to this matter, as an affair that should not be without effect on our final estimate of an equally interesting and puzzling character.
After placing the 1480 copies of the Original Poetry in Mr. Stockdale’s hands, Shelley naturally wished the same publisher of light literature to produce St. Irvyne; or, the Rosicrucian,—a novel of which so much will be said in the next chapter of this volume, that it is enough in the present page to say the young author was at work upon it in the summer and autumn of 1810, and probably began to work upon it soon after sending the copy of The Wandering Jew to John Ballantyne and Co.
Enough has been said of the verses that, written by Shelley in 1809-10 (probably in the earlier half of 1810), may have been the first sketches and studies for Queen Mab. It is, however, well to refer again to the metrical performances that, engaging Shelley’s attention in the autumn of 1810, were published by the Oxford printer and bookseller, J. Munday, in the middle of the November of that year, under the title of Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson. In a contemptuous notice of the Victor and Cazire poems, the British Critic (1811) spoke of the volumes as ‘sentimental nonsense and very absurd tales of horror’ in terms, that seem to dispose of Mr. D. F. MacCarthy’s suggestion that the Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson may be a mere reproduction of the Victor and Cazire poems, minus the verses that might have brought the publisher into the Court of Chancery. In comparing Byron’s story with Shelley’s story, one is struck by the numerous resemblances and coincidences of the two careers. Even as Byron employed a country printer to produce his first volume of boyish verse, Shelley employed a country printer for the production of his first book of jingle. Even as the indiscretions of Byron’s first book constrained him to suppress it, Shelley was forced to suppress his first thing of rhymes by fear of consequences.
What was the year of Shelley’s correspondence with Miss Felicia Dorothea Browne (afterwards Mrs. Hemans), the correspondence, in which he impregnated her mind with sceptical thought, and so far disturbed her religious life that Mrs. Browne (Felicia’s mother) wrote to Mr. Medwin the elder, begging him to use his influence with Shelley, so that he should desist from writing to the girl he had never seen? In the absence of dated documents, I answer this question with some hesitation by assigning the interchange of letters to 1810. There are reasons for giving a somewhat earlier date to the correspondence, and reasons for thinking the boy and girl were writing to one another even so late as the spring of 1811. But, speaking doubtfully, I regard the interchange of epistles as an affair of the spring and summer of 1810.