(12) It is obvious that the Free Love, which Shelley recommended as a wholesome substitute for antiquated wedlock, would permit the ordinary seducer to pursue his favourite diversion with absolute impunity; and that Shelley, with all his avowed abhorrence of seducers, would at least have regarded leniently several practices, that in the opinion of most men amount to seduction. In ordinary parlance, the man who takes a hitherto virtuous girl under his protection, and uses her as his mistress, is termed her seducer, and the proceeding by which the girl is brought to so discreditable a position is called her seduction. For instance, though he would have indignantly denied the charge, Byron’s intercourse with Claire would by most persons be regarded as a sufficient reason for holding him guilty of an offence of which even libertines do not like to be thought capable. Shelley certainly cannot have used the word in this sense when he wrote to the Chevalier de Lawrence that seduction was ‘an enormous and desolating crime, of which he should shudder to be accused;’ for after showing positive sympathy with Byron’s tenderness for Claire in the earlier stages of the fleeting passion, he exerted himself to bring about a renewal of their association, just as though he were a brother set on arranging some discord between his sister and her husband. It is not easy to see in what sense he used the word when he wrote to the Chevalier that ‘seduction ... could have no meaning in a rational state of society.’ Questioned on the point, he would probably have said that to pursue a woman for purely sensual ends, with false assurances of sentimental preference and affectionate devotion, was ‘the enormous and desolating crime.’
(13) In obedience to sincere and vehement passion for a woman, whether she were maid or wife, every man was by the Shelleyan doctrine at liberty to solicit her for corresponding affection, and to his utmost, in all truthful ways, to render himself no less loveable in her eyes than she seemed loveable to him. Whilst thinking that in the majority of cases such a passion would prove of considerable duration, he saw also that in a minority of cases it would speedily wane and perish, either through the discovery of previously existing, though unobserved, defects in its object, or through the mental, moral, or physical deterioration of the idolized person, or through the attachment’s extinction by a more powerful passion for a more perfect and loveable being. On the occurrence of any such contingency, Shelley was of opinion that, on seeing it would be more conducive to his own enjoyment of life to withdraw from a no longer congenial mate, a man should act promptly in doing so, and not be restrained from pursuing his own happiness by any pitiful notion that honour and morality required him to remain in discontent, out of regard to the feelings and interests of his conjugal partner. ‘Constancy,’ in his opinion, ‘had nothing virtuous in itself, independently of the pleasure it conferred’ on the persisting person. In ridiculing George the Third’s
‘household virtue, most uncommon,
Of constancy to a bad, ugly woman,’
Byron placed conjugal constancy amongst the domestic virtues. Shelley took another view of the quality, which, appearing to him (at its best) as nothing better than a particular kind of selfish prudence, ‘partook of the temporizing spirit of vice in proportion as it endured tamely moral defects of magnitude in the objects of its indiscreet choice.’
(14) It must be remembered that Shelley did not propound these views as mere theories for discussion amongst philosophers, without any serious desire that they should become rules of personal conduct under existing social circumstances, but as principles of social science and morals, on which men would do well to act. Unlike William Godwin, who backed out of his own more fantastic theories as soon as the accidents of life afforded him a good opportunity for putting them in practice, Shelley was ‘thorough’ at this period of his life, and ready at any moment to do any wild thing which, with boyish impetuosity and self-sufficiency, he had talked himself into thinking a thing that ought to be done. Holding these views in the spring of 1813, he acted upon them in the summer of 1814.
(15) To this extreme point had he gone in the social philosophy of the Free Lovers, the more moderate of whom discovered much to question, and no little to dissent from, in his manifesto on matters touching the intercourse of the sexes. But far as he had gone in Free Love, Shelley was appointed to go much further, and in the same department of social inquiry to arrive some three or four years later at a conclusion, far stronger and more startling than anything to be found in Queen Mab’s Anti-matrimonial Note.
There is no little of direct discrepancy and general confusedness in the many things told us by the authorities respecting Shelley’s several places of residence in London during the season of 1813. To believe all the authorities tell us is to believe that, after resting for a night or two in Chapel Street, he and Harriett lived for several weeks (and even months) in different London hotels, then for several months in lodgings in Half-Moon Street, and then for several weeks in lodgings at Pimlico, and also to believe that they lived some time in Cooke’s Hotel, Dover Street, and in the Half-Moon-Street lodging-house simultaneously, before they settled at Bracknell, in the third week of July, 1813;—which clearly is more than could have been accomplished, even by such singular persons as the Shelleys, between the 7th or 8th of April and the 20th or 21st of the following July.
The conflict of the authorities respecting Shelley’s several homes during these fifteen weeks is in a large measure due to the indiscretion of writers, who infer from the dates of letters that he was residing at the hotel where the epistles were written. For instance, from the dates or post-marks of letters written by the poet in May, 1813, to his father and the Duke of Norfolk, and to Mr. Medwin of Horsham on 16th June, 21st June, 28th June, and 6th July, of the same year, it has been inferred that he was living in Cooke’s Hotel, Dover Street, instead of merely frequenting the hotel, in those months,—an inference that will be declined by readers who remember how hotels were used by their mere frequenters in the early days of the present century. To those who remember that between the middle of April and the middle of July, Shelley lodged successively in Half-Moon Street and Pimlico, and occupied each set of rooms for several weeks, the dates of the aforementioned letters are mere evidence that, whilst sleeping in Half-Moon Street and Pimlico, he was a frequenter of the hotel, in which he had previously occupied a bedroom, and that he continued to use the hotel as a place of address for some of his correspondents, also as a place for interview with those of his acquaintances, whom he did not care to receive at his lodgings.
It follows that I question whether the accouchement, resulting in the birth of Shelley’s first-born child, took place at the hotel in Dover Street on 27th June, 1813, though he wrote on the following day from the hotel:—
‘My Dear Sir,—I am happy to inform you that Mrs. Shelley has been safely delivered of a little girl, and is now rapidly recovering. I would not leave her in her present state, and therefore still consider your proposal of fixing the interview in London as the most eligible.’