words of melancholy meaning from the poet, who in the same year confided to the Williamses how wretched he was in his own home. Trelawny, whose acquaintance with Shelley was brief and not of a kind to render him the confidant of the poet’s most delicate secrets, saw enough of Mary’s relations with her husband to make him regard them as something less than altogether happy in their union. That the woman, who in her girlhood had sharp tiffs and lively altercations with her sister Claire, had similar differences with her husband—differences that of course arise frequently between husband and wife without extinguishing their mutual affection, but still differences that do not arise between altogether congenial and happily mated couples—we know from Mrs. Shelley’s regretful and penitential verse. How did the sorrowing widow address the spirit of the husband whom she often worried with her perversities?—
‘Oh, gentle Spirit! * * *
* * ** * *
Now fierce remorse and unreplying death
Waken a chord within my heart, whose breath,
Thrilling and keen, in accents audible
A tale of unrequited love doth tell.
It was not anger,—while thy earthly dress
Encompassed still thy soul’s rare loveliness,
All anger was atoned by many a kind
Caress or tear, that spoke the softened mind.—
It speaks of cold neglect, averted eyes,
That blindly crushed thy soul’s fond sacrifice;—
My heart was all thine own,—but yet a shell
Closed in it’s core, which seemed impenetrable,
Till sharp-toothed misery tore the husk in twain,
Which gaping lies, nor may unite again.
Forgive me!’
(Vide Mrs. Shelley’s The Choice, a poem of 159 verses, printed in Volume I of Mr. Buxton Forman’s edition of Shelley’s Works.)
Penitential utterances, such as this pathetic plaint, should of course be construed generously; but Mr. Buxton Forman goes much too far beyond the line, that divides generous construction from sentimental misconstruction, when he says,—
‘I cannot regard this passage as indicating anything more than a natural feeling of remorse in the noble heart of a woman who has suddenly lost an idolized husband, and fancies all kinds of deficiencies in her conduct to him.’
An example of the kind of remorseful confession, to which Mr. Forman’s words would be fairly applicable, appears in the prose, employed by Mrs. Shelley on another occasion to exhibit her bitter sense of her own wifely remissness. Speaking of the melancholy that visited her husband at Naples, Mrs. Shelley says:—
‘... then he escaped to solitude, and in verses, which he hid from fear of wounding me, poured forth morbid but too natural bursts of discontent and sadness. One looks back with unspeakable regret and gnawing remorse to such periods; fancying that, had one been more alive to the nature of his feelings, and more attentive to soothe them, such would not have existed.’
A general confession of a remorseful sense of not having been all that she should have been to her husband, of regret that she had not been more studious of and considerate for his feelings, the prose statement is at the most an utterance of sorrowful compunction for shortcomings, that might have been altogether imaginary. Far otherwise is it with the verses of The Choice, comprising several distinct statements of fact, which the biographer is bound to consider, without regard to the poetical form, in which they are submitted to his consideration. In them it is asserted by Shelley’s wife, that she was often angry with him, that she made him fully aware of her anger, that she used to atone for her ebullitions of temper by approaching him with tears and appeasing him with caresses, that she persecuted him with sullenness, that even to the last—when anguish at losing him stirred her to sincerity, and swept away the delusions of her vain self-conceit—she was set on making him imagine, and even on persuading herself, that he was something less than lord and master of her whole heart. Are we to suppose that, in respect to each of these positive assertions, Mrs. Shelley was the dupe of her imagination;—that she was never angry with her husband, never made him sensible of her anger, never kissed him into forgiving her exhibitions of petulance, never punished him with sullen and averted eyes, never pretended that her heart was not wholly in his possession? The Shelleyan vindicators, who never hesitate to take the poet’s words au pied de la lettre, whenever the severest and most literal way of construing his poetical egotisms favours their belief in his superhuman goodness, are the last persons who should reduce Mrs. Shelley’s series of positive assertions into a mere show of natural regret, that she was not so good a wife as she might have been. To me and most readers of this page, her statements must remain evidence, on her own confession, that her life with Shelley was fruitful of the bickerings and contentions, the petty pettishnesses and paltry petulances, the divergences of sentiment and conflicts of feeling, that so often qualify the contentment, and only too often end in extinguishing the mutual affection, of mated couples.
And small the blame to William Godwin’s daughter, that she was guilty of all the positive offences with which she charged herself in the criminatory and penitential verses! Had she erred far more grievously, a generous sympathy would stir every large-hearted and impartial judge of her case, to become her advocate at least to the extent of pleading, that she received from the husband, whom she loved, precisely the slights, so sensitive and proud and quick-tempered a woman would necessarily find exasperating and intolerable in the highest degree. In saying that Shelley’s affection for Mrs. Williams was a sentiment, so refined and delicate, so absolutely pure of love’s grosser appetency, that her husband’s ‘genuinely attached friend could without blame both entertain and avow it,’ Mr. Rossetti says no more than the truth. But we cannot concur with him in thinking that Shelley could entertain and avow the sentiment without disloyalty to his own wife. It was not in his power to entertain the sentiment for two women at the same time. The sentiment was the ethereal, finer, higher element of the passion he had formerly felt for Mary; of the love he offered her in 1814, in return for the devotion and sacrifices he required from her; of the love, whose vehement avowal had determined her to commit herself to his keeping, in defiance of social rule and censure. Before he could bestow it on Jane Williams, Shelley had to take from Mary the sentimental regard which, to a woman of her sensibility, pride, imaginativeness and sentimentalism, was so far the larger part of the consideration, as almost to amount to the whole of the consideration, by which he had acquired possession of her. Endowed with youth, beauty, intellectual address, wit, imagination, taste, tact, the liveliest sensibilities, and literary aptitude bordering on genius, Mrs. Shelley was required to descend from the throne of her husband’s heart, in order that it should be occupied, now by such an ignoble though lovely animal as Emilia Viviani, and now by a lady, whose mental powers and personal attractions were greatly inferior to her own,—a lady whose want of literary culture he lamented; whose highest accomplishment was a faculty of singing simple airs to her guitar. To suggest that Mary loved the Italian girl whom she styled her ‘cara sorella,’ or in the secret chambers of her fervid and sensitive heart, deemed herself aught else than grievously wronged by her husband’s devotion to the lady with the guitar, is to display a startling ignorance of the sentimental forces that animate and control high-hearted and finely sympathetic women.
Though the passionate ferocity which distinguished Shelley’s earlier writings against priests and creeds, and the tyrannies of custom, waned almost to extinction, under the softening and mellowing influences of time, and of his steadily increasing knowledge of human nature, letters, dated by his hand in the closing months of his existence, show how tenacious he was to the last of his principal conclusions on questions of social philosophy; how even to his final hour he declared against all existing governments as iniquitous and cruel, against marriage as a depraving institution, against Christianity as a pernicious delusion. Though he lived to take larger and sympathetic views of Christ’s character and career, the author of the Essay on Christianity was no less hostile than the poet of Queen Mab and Laon and Cythna, to the Christianity of the churches.