At this late point of their brief association, when he is under the sway of a spiritual attachment that endured till his death, and she is regarding his services of homage to her familiar friend, the occasion rises for inquiring, whether Mary has experienced an average share of felicity since she eloped from the old home in Skinner Street? whether Shelley has been to her all she hoped of him, when she took the momentous step of July, 1814? whether, in addition to trouble, for which he is in no degree to be held responsible, she has endured trouble he either caused her, or might have preserved her from? whether her anticipations of felicity from their association have been realized? whether, in brief, their marriage has been a happy one?
Much has been written of the perfect happiness that came to both Shelley and Mary from their association. It has been proclaimed by romantic biography that the soul of each found its perfect complement in the other’s soul, that their conjugal intimacy was singularly felicitous, and that, whilst they dwelt together in harmony seldom accorded to spouses, neither was ever for a single moment disappointed in the other. The present writer ventures to declare no less confidently that their marriage was by no means remarkable for happiness,—that they were not a well-mated couple.
In respect to intellectual endowments and sympathy, it cannot be questioned for a moment that Shelley was more fitly matched with Mary Godwin than with Harriett Westbrook; but mental unison is not sufficient for perfect conjugal concord. I do not suggest that during the eight years’ interval between their elopement and Shelley’s death they ceased to care for one another. On the contrary, I have no doubt that, loving him with girlish vehemence in the summer of 1814, Mary loved Shelley at the bottom of her heart till the summer of 1822, though (we have her word for it) she sometimes behaved to him so as to imply that his felicity was by no means her chief concern. I have also no doubt, that Shelley never survived his affectionate concern for Mary, though he cannot have delighted in her greatly when he sighed to Emilia, and instructed the Williamses not to let his wife suspect how much happier he was in their rooms of the Tre Palazzi than in his own apartment. It is possible for a married couple to be held strongly by a deep-seated sentiment of mutual dependence, and yet to live on uneasy, and even exasperating, terms, with one another. It was so, at times, with Shelley and Mary. Knowledge comes to the student of human nature from observing how deep-seated attachment sometimes survives superficial sympathy in mated couples. Superficial sympathy must have perished from the mutual regard of Mary and Shelley, when he looked to other women for the higher felicity she was powerless to afford him. Yet they persisted in loving one another at the bottom of their hearts.
Apart from her reasonable grounds of complaint against her husband, Mrs. Shelley was a woman whose lot was fruitful of trouble and trial. Her health was far from good, and during the eight years of her connection with Shelley she endured five (including her miscarriage at San Terenzo) of those illnesses, which, though desired by wives who have never had experience of them, are by no means conducive to physical vigour. She gave birth to four children, and wept over the graves of three of them, losing two of them when they had lived long enough to gain firm hold of her heart. Her grief at the last of these bereavements was excessive. An ardent and strongly affectionate creature (how could Mary Wollstonecraft’s daughter be otherwise?), she had in girlhood loved her father and her sisters vehemently. Her half-sister had perished dismally. Through Claire’s too fervid temper, and the successive ill-consequences of her luckless alliance with Byron, Mary had (to put the case mildly) derived more vexation than contentment from her close intercourse with her sister-by-affinity. Loving her old father and wishing him well, she was continually receiving doleful intelligence from England that, instead of mending, his affairs grew steadily more desperate. Pining for the diversions of society, she had often fretted at being excluded from it in foreign capitals, no less than in her native country. It was also against the contentment of this unwilling exile from England, that during her successive illnesses and her trials with her children, she never had the consolations of a home, worthy to be called a home. To render existence fairly comfortable in any transient abiding-place, more especially when the abiding-place is a single set of rooms, it is needful for a woman to be an adept in housewifely arts and the smaller domestic economies. But the woman who in her girlhood shirked the matters of the house, to which her step-mother wished her to give attention, was as shiftless and helpless a home-keeper as John Westbrook’s daughter. From this lack of housewifely knowingness and capacity, she suffered much and Shelley not a little. One would fain forget that the poet, who has done so much for the happiness of English firesides, never knew the comforts of a home, after passing from Field Place, and that he suffered in this respect chiefly through the incompetence of his wives, both of whom he took from a social grade in which to keep house cleverly is woman’s first duty. Due in no small measure to nervous fancies, Shelley’s bodily ailments were due in a larger degree to comfortless feeding. At the same time he suffered from causes, in respect to which his wife was blameless. His temperament would under any circumstances have exposed him to sudden visitations of melancholy; and in the memories that haunted him—memories of the kindred from whom he had estranged himself, and the poor girl who drowned herself in the Serpentine—he had constant sources of sadness.
Even if they had been altogether fitted to one another, Shelley and Mary would in their Italian life have missed the average of connubial enjoyment. But they were not precisely adapted to one another. Whilst his taste was for studious or meditative seclusion, she had been designed by nature for a career of action and gaiety. ‘She,’ Shelley once said to Trelawny, ‘can’t bear solitude, nor I society—the quick coupled with the dead,’ When he was pining for green fields or sea-breezes, she thought of ball-rooms and assemblies. Under the most auspicious influences their contrarieties of temper would have brought them into conflict. Habitual melancholy is perhaps the most trying temper in a husband, for a wife to endure with patient cheerfulness; and though it was relieved by occasional moods of blithesomeness and jubilant elation, despondency was Shelley’s normal condition in his later years. Whilst he harassed Mary with unseasonable and bootless moanings, she worried him with the perversities of her Wollstonecraft vehemence and captiousness,—with the temper that disposed all the Wollstonecrafts to discover egregious insults in trivial slights, and imagine themselves the victims of human malignity whenever the wind blew from the wrong point of the compass.
In other respects Shelley was a trying husband, in whom Mary had reason to be disappointed. At an early stage of their association she discovered how little reliance could be placed on the accuracy of his statements; a cruel mortification for the girl, who had sacrificed so much for him in her romantic belief of all he told her. Natural annoyance at this discovery can have been only mitigated by her ability to refer all his inaccuracies of statement to poetic imaginativeness. Throughout his time with her, Shelley was seeing visions which he mistook for real occurrences, and telling her stories at manifest discord with historic veracity.
Throughout this biography I have exercised a jealous caution in assigning biographical value to the egotisms of the Shelleyan verse, and have repeatedly cautioned readers against dealing with the poet’s references to his former experiences, as good evidence in respect to matters of fact. On the other hand I have not hesitated to regard his poetry as evidential of his temper and sentiment at the moment of its composition. It cannot be questioned that the Stanzas, written in Dejection, near Naples, were the result of sincere emotion, and could have been composed only in a mood of the profoundest melancholy. Nor can it be doubted that, whilst displaying the general state of feeling, the Stanzas reflect no less faithfully the writer’s particular sentiments, during the sorrowful mood. How does Shelley write of himself in these memorable lines, when he had been connubially linked to William Godwin’s daughter for something less than three and a half years?
‘Alas! I have nor hope nor health,
Nor peace within nor calm around,
Nor that content surpassing wealth
The sage in meditation found,
And walked with inward glory crowned—
Nor fame, nor power, nor love, nor leisure;
Others I see whom these surround—
Smiling they live, and call life pleasure:—
To me that cup has been dealt in another measure.’
Without declining to concur in Mr. Rossetti’s opinion, that Shelley did not intend the reference to his love-less lot to reflect on his wife, I venture to say that, had he been sensible of owing much to her devotion, had she been to him the perpetual spring of gladness that a loving wife ever is to the man who loves her thoroughly, had their union been as felicitous as they hoped it to prove, he could not have thus spoken of himself as alike fameless, powerless, and love-less. I even go further, and say that, had their marriage been a happy one, Shelley in his miserable mood would have paused in the enumeration of divers woes, to render grateful acknowledgment of the solace he derived, in the midst of manifold sufferings, from the knowledge that he was not unbeloved. It is also a matter of biographical significance that in 1821—the year in which his passion for Emilia Viviani was succeeded by his milder devotion to Jane Williams—Shelley wrote in Ginevra of marriage as
‘life’s great cheat; a thing
Bitter to taste, sweet in imagining,’—