CHAPTER XIII.
SHELLEY’S SECOND RESIDENCE-TERM AT OXFORD.
Harriett Westbrook—Her Character and Beauty—How Shelley came to care for her—Her Subscription for Janetta Phillips’s Poems—Shelley’s first Visit to Harriett’s Home—His Intention to compete for ‘the Newdigate’—Thornton Hunt’s scandalous Suggestion—Obligations of the Oxford Undergraduate—Mary Wollstonecraft on the Guinea Forfeit—Shelley’s False Declaration—His numerous Untruths—The Necessity of Atheism—Was it a Squib?—Lady Shelley’s Inaccuracies—Mr. Garnett’s Misdescription of the Tract—His Misrepresentation of Hogg—The Little Syllabus printed at Worthing—More Untruths by Shelley—The Tract offered for Sale in Oxford—Shelley called before ‘the Dons’—His Expulsion from University College—Hogg’s Impudence and Craft—His Misrepresentations—Shelley and Hogg leave Oxford.
Though he had not yet seen the child who, in the following September, became his first wife, Shelley was enough interested in her on 11th January, 1811, to write to his publisher, Stockdale:—‘I would thank you to send a copy of St. Irvyne to Miss Harriet Westbrook, 10, Chapel Street, Grosvenor Square;’ an order he would scarcely have given, had not circumstances already caused him to think of her with peculiar friendliness. At their boarding-school on the north side of Clapham Common, near the ‘Old Town,’ Miss Mary Shelley (ætat. 13) and Miss Hellen Shelley (ætat. 11) had several schoolmates, of whose looks and doings they would naturally prattle to their elder brother during the Christmas holidays, as they sat about the Christmas fire. How was it that, of all the girls about whom his sisters may be assumed to have spoken in his hearing, Harriett Westbrook was the one he selected for a compliment that must have greatly pleased her? Mary and Hellen were the only persons (with the exception of their elder sister—possibly one of Harriett’s school friends in earlier time) who can be conceived to have gossiped with him about the loveliest of Mrs. Fenning’s pupils, in a way to inspire him with interest in her. The fair inference from the reasonable assumptions is that of all the school-girls, of whom his sisters spoke, Harriett Westbrook seemed the fairest and most fascinating to him and them.
Let it be assumed that, of all their friends at the Clapham boarding-school, Harriett was the only girl of whom the sisters spoke to their brother. In that case, the question arises, why the sisters, so uncommunicative about the others, were eloquent about the girl who soon became their brother’s wife?—eloquent about her in a way to make him desirous of knowing her? The question must be answered in a way more or less favourable to the notion that Harriett stood well in the opinion of the sisters.
There is another reason for thinking Harriett Westbrook was at this point of her career peculiarly acceptable to the young ladies of Field Place. Older than Miss Mary Shelley by two years at least, more than three years older than Miss Hellen Shelley, Harriett Westbrook, besides being one of the older girls of Mrs. Fenning’s seminary, was the acknowledged ‘beauty’ of the school; and beauty in a senior school-girl always disposes the juniors of the school to regard her favourably, when it is not associated with any irritating moral defect. Harriett’s temper was by no means faultless, but as she was the only serious sufferer from her propensity to imagine herself an ill-used damsel, it did not lessen the natural influence of her personal attractiveness.
Fretful towards herself, she was never peevish or wilfully unkind to others. Her prevailing mood was tranquil melancholy; and there were times when she played the rebel with a serene sullenness that made worthy Mrs. Fenning wonder what would be the end of so perplexing a young lady. When she was more than usually miserable about nothing at Clapham, this young lady (who eventually committed suicide) used to think she might as well destroy herself, would even tell the governesses she rather thought she should destroy herself. But the announcements of suicidal purpose were made in so placid and passionless a manner, that they caused little or no alarm. Even in her naughtiest humours she was gentle in speech and bearing to her classmates, and not devoid of frigid decorum to those who were in authority over her. In her brighter seasons she was childishly charming,—so winning and cooingly docile, that Mrs. Fenning and the subordinate teachers quickly relented to her smiles, and forgiving her in five minutes for all the trouble she had given throughout twice as many weeks, fell to kissing and petting her, as though she were the veriest darling. How could this darling, so irresistible to the governesses she harassed, be otherwise than popular with the girls whose tempers she never tried?
One of those beauties, who are seen oftener on the walls than the floors of drawing-rooms, less a thing of real life than a picture, this girl of curious and memorable loveliness lived in the recollections of her Clapham schoolmates, when forty years and more had passed over her grave. Rather below the average stature of womankind, shapely as a sculptured Venus, graceful in her movements, she would have possessed all the finer elements of womanly loveliness, had she not lacked the air and style of mental force and moral dignity. In 1856 Miss Hellen Shelley recalled Harriett[6] Westbrook, whom she saw for the last time in 1811, as ‘a very handsome girl, with a complexion quite unknown in these days—brilliant pink and white,—with hair quite like a poet’s dream, and Bysshe’s peculiar admiration.’ It lived also in Miss Hellen’s recollection that Mrs. Fenning, and her assistant-governesses, used to talk about Harriett’s beauty, and even spoke of her as qualified to ‘enact Venus’ at a fête champêtre. In colour her eyes resembled Shelley’s prominent blue eyes, and the profusion of hair, that was his ‘peculiar admiration,’ was light brown.
When she committed to paper (in her fifty-seventh year, or thereabouts) whatever she could remember of the beautiful girl, whom she never beheld after they became sisters-in-law, it lived in Miss Hellen Shelley’s recollection that her brother was said to have married her because her name was Harriett. It is in the way of lovers to delight in the names of those they idolize, even when their devotion is rewarded with coldness. To the last, Byron’s ear discovered music in ‘Mary,’ the name of the wee Scotch lassie whom he loved in his tenth year. One can readily imagine that the charm of her name was the first influence to make Shelley an attentive listener to his sisters’ gossip about ‘the beauty’ of their college friend. It is conceivable that their talk about this lovely Harriett of the Clapham boarding-school was accountable for the frame of mind in which Miss Harriett Grove’s discarded suitor wrote from Field Place to Hogg on 28th December, 1810: ‘At present, a thousand barriers oppose any more intimate connexion, any union with another;’ words that would scarcely have fallen from his pen within a fortnight of his final rejection by the Wiltshire ‘belle,’ had he not already recovered from the first and keenest misery of the misadventure, so far as to be capable of looking forward to a future time when his ‘union with another’ Harriett would be possible.
Is it not conceivable, also, that in their sympathy with his distress for the loss of Harriett Grove, and in their affectionate desire to restore him to his usual cheerfulness, the sisters at Field Place conspired to remind him that their cousin Harriett was not the only beautiful Harriett in the universe, and to lure him into consoling himself for Harriett Grove’s disdain with Harriett Westbrook’s devotion? No doubt Miss Hellen Shelley and Miss Mary Shelley were full young for match-makers. But girls sometimes take to match-making, no less than to flirtation, before their teens. Little Hellen (ætat. 11) may not have been taken fully, or even at all, into the confidence of her elder sisters on the romantic project. They may have encouraged her to prattle about Harriett Westbrook without letting her suspect their purpose.