To complete the view of the future poet’s relations with the principal members of his familiar circle, one must glance at the way in which he was treated by his Uncle Pilfold, and the characteristic way in which he repaid the cheery sailor for his good services. Instead of eyeing him askance, regarding him coldly, holding aloof from him, denouncing him as an incorrigible young reprobate, this kindly uncle grasped his nephew by the hand, as though it were a greater honour to be expelled from Oxford than to win ‘the Newdigate.’ Welcoming the boy to his house, the old sailor opened at the same moment his heart and his purse to the youngster in disgrace. When Mr. Timothy Shelley’s wrath at his boy’s rebellion had in ten days or a fortnight scolded off its fiercest heat, Uncle Pilfold became a mediator between the father and son, inducing the former to let the boy have intercourse with his sister, and at the same time making the latter see that he must concede something to his father who, though he had gone a deuced deal too far in stopping the supplies, was not without grounds for displeasure. ‘I am now with my uncle,’ the future poet wrote from Cuckfield to Hogg, on Sunday, 19th May, 1811; ‘he is a very hearty fellow, and has behaved very nobly to me, in return for which I illuminated him. A physician, named Dr. J——, dined with us last night, who is a red-hot saint; the Captain attacked him, warm from The Necessity, and the Doctor went away very much shocked.’ Grateful for his uncle’s kindness, Mr. Percy Bysshe Shelley rewarded him with characteristic munificence,—by illuminating him out of Christianity.
What reason had Shelley to complain of the way in which he was treated by his kindred in the season of his heavy disgrace? Expelled from Oxford for the gravest offence of which an undergraduate could be guilty, he was enjoined by his father to go home before being placed under a sufficient tutor. Having refused to obey his father’s orders, he was angrily told to keep away from the home he had declined to visit, when ordered to do so. Consenting for a few weeks to this barbarous exclusion from his boyhood’s home,—an exclusion which he knew he could terminate at any moment by simply walking into the house, and which he did terminate by that simple process,—the exile passed a few weeks very agreeably in London. During this so-called exclusion and banishment he was in affectionate communication with his mother, his sisters, his Uncle Pilfold, and his cousins Grove. On returning to his ‘boyhood’s home,’ within a month or five weeks of the sentence of exclusion, he was received with a measure of affectionate indulgence and consideration by his mother, that may well have surprised him. He was also treated affectionately by his sister Elizabeth, though she kept away from his study, and instead of assenting to his sceptical opinions, met them with much exasperating ‘cant and twaddle,’ and made him despair of illuminating her into a fit mate for his incomparable Hogg. At the same time he was treated with substantial kindness by his father (who, in return for a liberal allowance, only required him to desist for awhile from personal intercourse with Hogg), and with a flattering show of sympathetic concern by his father’s patron,—the Duke of Norfolk. Unless Shelley’s cousin, Charles Henry Grove, is in error as to the year, his Grace of Norfolk and the Squire of Field Place talked (in the spring of 1811) over a plan for bringing the youngster into Parliament, on the earliest opportunity, as Member for Horsham. It was thus that the future poet was persecuted by his kindred, and thus that he endured persecution at their hands in the months ensuing immediately on his expulsion. There must be an end of the wild nonsense about the poet’s sufferings for truth and conscience at this stage of his career. Perhaps no youngster was ever treated more tenderly by his nearest kindred, so soon after earning signal disgrace by extravagant misbehaviour.
Relinquishing his design to go to York before going to Radnorshire, when he saw the breach of promise and act of disobedience would be fruitful of pecuniary inconvenience, Shelley went (as we have seen) direct to Cwm Elan, Rhayader, in the middle of July, 1811, with the intention of staying there till the Westbrooks should have arrived at Aberystwith, when it was his purpose to run over to them, and enjoy the society of the young lady, with whom he was not at all in love. Had the Westbrooks’ movements accorded with Mr. Bysshe Shelley’s anticipations and wishes, there is reason to think he would have eloped with the sixteen-years-old school girl from Aberystwith, instead of eloping with her from London. Possibly on leaving town he had not fully made up his mind to do so. Possibly he took coach for Radnorshire, with no more definite programme of proceedings than that in the course of three weeks he should be with the Westbrooks at Aberystwith; after which event he would, somehow or other, be happy with Harriett for ever. It is, however, sufficiently manifest from the records, that he accepted his cousin’s invitation to Cwm Elan, because it afforded him a pretext for going to Wales, which would cover the real purpose of the journey from his father, and because the neighbourhood of Rhayader would be a convenient resting-place, whence he could slip away to Aberystwith, some thirty miles distant. Moreover, it is clear in the superlative degree that Shelley and Harriett had both set their hearts on meeting one another at Aberystwith; and that it was an occasion of the sharpest disappointment to both of them, when, after proceeding towards Aberystwith, as far as the place, called Condowell in one of Shelley’s letters, Mr. Westbrook suddenly faced about, and returned to London, with the intention of sending his younger daughter again to boarding-school, when she imagined herself to have ‘left school for good.’
What caused this sudden relinquishment of Mr. Westbrook’s plans for his summer holidays is matter for conjecture. But from matters of indisputable record, it may be safely inferred that the worthy taverner returned to town because he thought it better Mr. Bysshe Shelley and his younger daughter should not come together at Aberystwith; and that he was bent on sending her again to school, because he thought a regular and professional schoolmistress better qualified than Miss Elizabeth Westbrook to take good care of the giddy girl. Possibly Mr. Westbrook had peeped into one of the several letters which Shelley sent the sisters from Rhayader, and learnt from it enough to convince him he had better return abruptly with his daughters to London. Anyhow he decided to do so, alike to Shelley’s annoyance and Miss Harriett’s chagrin.
Like Byron, Shelley never brooked aught that thwarted his will, or in any way threatened to withhold from him a pleasure, on which he had set his heart. On being told she must go back to London and to school, instead of onwards to Aberystwith, Miss Harriett Westbrook wrote to Shelley for advice. On receiving Harriett’s shocking intelligence, Shelley overflowed with indignation at the monstrous cruelty of the father, who could think of sending his sixteen-years-old daughter to school for another half-year. Should she, Harriett asked in her letter, submit to her father’s tyranny or resist it? Shelley, of course, answered, ‘Resist it.’ At the same time he wrote to Mr. Westbrook a letter which, though it was intended to mollify the stern and inhuman parent, only confirmed him in his hideous and revolting purpose. Powerless to subdue by tears and tragic threats the father, who only fumed and sneered at Percy’s mollifying epistle, Harriett wrote to Shelley that she threw herself on his protection, and would fly with him anywhere. Shelley was delighted. For weeks and months he had been nursing the hope that his darling Harriett would rise so far superior to the dwarfing prejudices, which disposed ordinary women to prefer wedlock to Free Love, as to commit herself to his custody without regard to the laws of Priests and the requirements of tyrannic custom. For weeks and months he had been educating her to see in Love a sufficient sanction of the union requisite for fulfilment of its desire. And here was the fruit of his instruction. Snapping the ties of parental tyranny and filial thraldom, Harriett had thrown herself on him for protection, and would fly with him anywhere,—to be happy with him for ever. Had he not reason, in the first and liveliest exultations of his triumph, to write to Hogg, ‘Gratitude and admiration, all demand, that I should love her for ever?’ How could he be sufficiently grateful to the girl who had thus surrendered herself to his honour, in her absolute confidence in his goodness? How could he sufficiently admire the girl, whose magnanimity had enabled her to say to him, ‘Do your will with me; take me on your own terms, so long as you are good enough to make me yours?’ If Shelley went to Wales, without a project for elopement with Harriett Westbrook, he certainly returned from Radnorshire to London, with the intention of taking her from her father at the earliest opportunity.
With the judicial fairness and critical moderation, that are not the only qualities to distinguish him from the poet’s other worshipful biographers, Mr. Rossetti hesitates in inferring from Shelley’s words (‘she ... threw herself upon my protection’) that, whilst writing to Shelley at Cwm Elan, Harriett Westbrook was ready to be his mistress. Reminding his readers that, instead of being the girl’s own words, the phrase is at the utmost nothing more than Shelley’s ‘summing up’ of her expressions,—Shelley’s way of packing into half-a-dozen words the most momentous of her passionate communications,—Mr. Rossetti also bids his readers qualify their censure of her indelicacy with considerations, arising from the reflection that ‘the school-girl of sixteen, hardly more than a child,’ had been ‘lately philosophised out of the ordinary standard of propriety’ by Shelley himself.
The biographer who writes with so much conscientious circumspection cannot be charged with straining words to Harriett’s disadvantage. Still I am disposed to think he goes something too far. More doubtful even than Mr. Rossetti, I hesitate to accept or reject his inference from the words which, instead of being the school-girl’s own words, are nothing more than Shelley’s summary of them. The inexact Shelley’s mere summary of the written words is no evidence to be accepted with unqualified confidence in its accuracy. Moreover, could it be shown that the summary was a fair representation of the purport of her written words, it would still be conceivable that in her haste and excitement the angry girl put them on paper without seeing their full force and realizing to what they committed her. Yet, further, it may be urged in palliation of the child’s want of maidenly decorum that, if she was ready for flight without marriage at the moment of penning the letter, she changed her mind on coming out of her anger against her father, and subsiding to a temper that permitted her to reflect with comparative calmness on all that had passed between herself and her lover. Instead of finding her ready to fly with him on any terms, when he saw her in London after his return from Wales, Shelley found her in a state of indecision. ‘My unfortunate friend, Harriett,’ he wrote from London to Hogg at York, on 15th August, 1811, ‘is yet undecided, not with respect to me, but herself.’
But though I am far from confident that Harriett ever threw herself on Shelley’s protection in the sense imagined by Mr. Rossetti, or even gave Shelley sufficient grounds for saying she had done so, I am in no degree disposed to suspect Shelley of wilfully misrepresenting the nature of her confidence in, and appeal to, him. On the contrary, I have no doubt that Shelley meant to make his friend at York understand the girl was ready to become his mistress, and that he felt himself justified by the words of her letter in crediting her with this readiness. I have no doubt that the future poet wrote to Hogg in perfect good faith, and for the mere purpose of letting his correspondent see the exact state of the case. The evidences leave no room for doubt that, after spending weeks and months in training and educating his sister’s schoolmate to take a philosophic view of marriage, he accepted with equal sincerity and delight the expressions of her tempestuous letter as a declaration that she was willing to be his mistress, or (in the language of the Free Lovers) to become his wife without the intervention of the priest and the sanction of legal matrimony. Under this impression he wrote to Hogg from Rhayader with jubilant boyishness,—‘We shall have 200l. a-year; when we find it run short, we must live, I suppose, upon love!... We shall see you at York.... I can get lodgings at York, I suppose.’ Under the same exhilarating impression he journeyed from Wales to London, thinking how he and Harriett would be journeying northwards a week or ten days later, how happy they would be for ever in lodgings at York, and how furious his tyrannical father would be on hearing he had carried Harriett away from her tyrannical father and taken her to the city he was forbidden to enter,—to the dear, delightful, incomparable Hogg, with whom he was forbidden to have personal intercourse. But on arriving in town he found Harriett in no humour for immediate elopement. She was undecided, not in respect to her choice of a lover, but in respect to the time at which, and the terms on which, she should commit herself to his custody.
It is, therefore, by no means so manifest to me as it is to Mr. Rossetti, that had he cared to take advantage of her simplicity and romantic trustfulness, Shelley could easily have seduced his sister’s schoolfellow, or, rather (I beg pardon of the Free Lovers), could have made her his wife without marrying her.
‘If the calculating habit is still strong upon us,’ says Mr. Rossetti, ‘we may compute what percentage of faultlessly Christian young heirs of opulent baronets would have acted like the atheist Shelley, and married a retired hotel-keeper’s daughter offering herself as a mistress. To deny that the act was foolish would be absurd under any circumstances, and doubly so when we reflect upon the ultimate issue of it to Shelley and Harriett themselves; let us then distinctly recognize that it was foolish, and no less distinctly that it was noble.’