(29) In 1820, Shelley told Medwin that, in the summer of the same year, he had been felled to the ground in the Post Office of Pisa by a man who preluded the ruffianly blow by exclaiming, ‘What, are you that d——d atheist, Shelley?’ that, on recovering from the stunning effect of the blow, he hastened to tell Mr. Tighe of the assault; and that, after tracking the ruffian to the Tre Donzelle at Pisa, he and Mr. Tighe went to Genoa in futile pursuit of the assailant. Whether, in the summer of 1820, Shelley really imagined himself a sufferer from this imaginary assault, whether he went to Genoa in pursuit of the imaginary assailant, whether he ever spoke to Mr. Tighe about the assault, are matters respecting which there is no sufficient testimony; but the evidence is sufficient that he told Medwin about this assault that was never made upon him. Shelley’s statement about this affair must be referred to falsehood, delusion, or semi-delusion.
(30) In 1821-2 Shelley spoke to Byron and Medwin of the enamoured gentlewoman who, according to his account, followed him, in 1816, from England to Geneva, and, in 1818, from England to Naples; the whole of his narrative of the lady, who worshipt him and died of love for him, being a fiction, referable to falsehood, delusion, or semi-delusion.
(31) In the same year (1821) Shelley wrote from Ravenna to his wife the letter, crammed and crowded with misrepresentations of what had passed in conversation between him and Byron, respecting the scandalous account of his (Shelley’s) intercourse with Claire.
To the careful reader of these volumes it is, of course, apparent that this schedule of significant matters might be greatly extended and expanded. But the list is sufficiently comprehensive to justify the verdict that, from his boyhood to his death, Shelley was apt to utter for truth things contrary to fact; that he sometimes did things which no precisely honest man could do; that his word was not a word to be relied on. To account for his frequent departures from truth, friendly historians of his career have declared him, in respect to his misstatements, not so much an untruthful man as a deluded man. Following in the track of these historians, every reader of this book is left to decide for himself, in respect to each of the poet’s numerous misstatements, whether its inaccuracy should be referred to purely deceptive purpose, sheer misconception, or semi-delusion. In reviewing the many deviations from truth, it is, however, well for readers to bear in mind that delusion is one of three distinctive forms of insanity. To be insane is to suffer from a state of mental disease, attended with incoherence, fatuity, or delusion. The mind that suffers from any one of these kinds of disorder is a deranged and insane mind. However eccentric, or feeble, or otherwise unhealthy, it may be, the mind which displays no one of these three symptoms of derangement is a sane mind. Hallucination differs in magnitude, intensity, and persistence. If Shelley was wholly under hallucination in respect to his father’s purpose of confining him in a madhouse, and if he was (as Peacock says) haunted by this notion throughout life, he was the victim of an extremely revolting and very persistent delusion. There is a certain amount of truth in another poet’s dictum, that great wits to madness sure are near allied. But if Shelley’s alert and subtle mind was so steadily, and for so long a period, held by the notion that his father wished to put him in a madhouse, he was mad in a degree, that to many readers may well appear incompatible with the vigour and grandeur of his faculties. In the estimate of his mental and moral peculiarities to minimize the degree in which he suffered from hallucination, is to maximize the degree in which he was untruthful. In proportion as the final verdict shall acquit him of untruthfulness it must declare him to have suffered from insanity. If he was not contemptibly untruthful, he was (for all his mental force and poetic sensibility) pitiably insane,—far more insane than I can think it possible for a man of his mental power to be. In reviewing his long series of misstatements, careful psychologists must come to the conclusion that when uttering them he was either wilfully untruthful, suffering from delusion, or suffering from what Peacock termed ‘semi-delusion’—the state of mind in which untruthfulness and morbid imaginativeness joined hands.
But whether they proceeded from hallucination or deceptive purpose, or from the co-operation of falsehood with ungovernable fancy, the misstatements had the effect of wilful untruths; and the utterer was a speaker of words not to be relied on. To be kept steadily in mind by the students of Shelley’s story, this fact is to be held especially in view at moments, when the student is considering the evidential value of statements uttered by the poet to the discredit of individuals.
Apart from grounds of which I refrain from speaking fully, there are grounds for believing that Shelley accounted for his rupture with Harriett Westbrook by representations which, had he been constituted like ordinary English gentlemen, would at least be primâ facie evidence that he had other and stronger reasons for withdrawing from her than any reasons he gave to Peacock. It is not probable that he would have succeeded in withdrawing Mary Godwin from her father’s care, had he not made her believe he had graver causes for dissatisfaction with the ‘noble animal,’ than her inability to feel poetry and understand philosophy. Reared as she had been within the lines of religious orthodoxy, and trained to reverence marriage, it is scarcely conceivable that Mary Godwin fled with her lover to the Continent, without having been made to believe that her friend, Harriett Shelley, had by flagrant misconduct forfeited her title to her husband’s consideration. Though Field Place has not shown much discretion in its treatment of Shelleyan questions, it would scarcely have smiled at Peacock for not being in Shelley’s confidence on the subject, had it not been really possessed by the notion, that it knew more than the rest of the world about the poet’s real cause of displeasure with Harriett. Without having a strange story in reserve for the fulfilment of the promise, Field Place would scarcely have promised to produce in due season a statement, certain to change greatly the world’s misguided view of the poet’s treatment of his first wife. I have small doubt that Southey quite misconstrued the words to which he referred, when in his scathing August-1820 letter to Shelley, he wrote:—
‘You might have regulated your domestic arrangements, as you say, quite as conveniently to yourself, if you had descended to the base thoughts of the vulgar. I suppose this means that you might have annulled your marriage as having been contracted during your minority.’—(Southey’s Correspondence with Caroline Bowles, 1881.)
Southey’s conjecture was wide of the mark. Shelley knew too much of the Scotch marriage law to imagine he could have set aside his marriage on that ground. What he meant to imply must have been, that if he could have descended to the base practice of vulgar folk, wishing for divorce, and rich enough to pay for it in the usual way, he could have obtained a legal separation from his wife, on account of her misconduct. And that he ventured to hint so much to his disdainful correspondent is a sufficiently clear sign that he felt he really had a story (true or fanciful) which, had he condescended to divulge it, would have made Southey open his eyes with astonishment at the sufficiency of the grounds on which the author of Queen Mab retired from John Westbrook’s daughter. It may therefore be assumed, or at least imagined, that sooner or later the world will be told in a new way, why Shelley left the girl who had tried his temper not a little for some months. Possibly the story will be that the author of the anti-matrimonial note to Queen Mab caught poor Harriett in the act of lavishing on some man of mean condition attentions she should have rendered to no one but her husband.
At this date, when poor Harriett’s friends have passed from the scene, it may appear to Shelley’s idolaters alike easy to get credit for such a tale, and difficult to discredit it. But critical persons will be less readily satisfied of the truth of any such story than the Shelleyan enthusiasts imagine. To offer such a tale to critical persons on Shelley’s bare and unsupported assertion will be bootless. They will be sure to say, ‘What more natural than for the man, who (under delusion) slandered his father and Hogg, to put (under delusion) monstrous things on record against his wife, after quarrelling with her?’ At the moment of breaking with his wife, Shelley was very anxious for Peacock’s approval of his action;—so anxious for it as to call him up to London from the country for a conference on the business. Moreover (though Mr. Froude, out of his great knowledge of Shelleyan questions, says the reverse), Shelley all through life was quick to defend himself at the expense of other people. The critical people will say: ‘Why, if this story is true, and not a Shelleyan invention, did not Shelley confide it to Peacock? One can see why the poet (capable of giving two different accounts of the same affair to the well-informed Duke of Norfolk and the uninformed William Godwin) would withhold an untrue story from the well-informed Peacock. But why, if the story were true, did he keep it from Peacock? It can scarcely be suggested that he shrunk from lowering Harriett in Peacock’s esteem.’
At the time of the Chancery Suit, Shelley did his utmost to regain the custody of his children. He knew that, if the decree should be given against him, the decision would be grounded on considerations of his conduct to his first wife. Harriett was no longer in the world to suffer from any evidence to her discredit. The other Westbrooks were so hateful to him, he would gladly have caused them pain by evidence to her discredit. To prove he had left Harriett for a good and sufficient cause, would have been to strengthen his case greatly. Yet he did not venture to embody the facts in an affidavit for the Chancellor’s consideration. Moreover, Field Place bears witness that he never confided the real cause of his withdrawal from Harriett to any of the few men, who were his familiar friends in 1814. Surely the critical people will ask, ‘Why did he not confide this story to his familiar male friends in 1814? Why did he not venture to produce this story in the Court of Chancery, and swear to its truth in 1817?’ Surely, also, the critical people will answer both these questions in ways, adverse to the credibility of the story. Should it appear that he told the story to Mary shortly before she yielded to his suit, the critical people will say with a significant smile: ‘No doubt; and also to move her to regard him compassionately, he at the same time told her how his cruel father would have locked him up in a madhouse, had it not been for the virtuous Dr. Lind’s intervention,’ It will be asked by critical readers why the statement, which if true should have been given to the world long since, has been withheld so long? Why it was not put forth during the life of Thomas Love Peacock (Harriett’s vindicator, Shelley’s close friend and executor), who, knowing both Shelley and his first wife intimately, maintained stoutly to the last that she was a virtuous and loyal wife? These questions will also be answered in ways unfavourable to the statement.