‘Her face was as a damsel’s face,
And yet her hair was grey.’
Doting on her in 1813, for the perfection of her manners and character, Shelley some five years later remembered Maimuna as a person ‘whose extreme subtlety and delicacy of understanding’ were incompatible with perfect guilelessness and constancy. And coming to think less favourably of his whilom spiritual mate, it was natural for the poet to tell others of her insincerity and fickleness.
Admiring her from the first hour of their brief association for an appearance, that combined in so peculiar and piquant a manner the loveliness of youth and age, he delighted in the winning sweetness of her voice, and discovered in her conversation and mien the charms of intellectual subtlety and moral elevation. Concurring with him on the several religious and social questions, that were holding his attention, she exulted in his song no less frankly than he exulted in her beauty. It is no exaggeration to say that the stripling, who still wanted several months of his majority, was platonically enamoured of the woman with snow-white hair and girlish face, whose years cannot have been much under fifty. Pouring into her sympathetic ear the long and stirring tale of his multifarious domestic distresses, he consulted her on nice questions of poetry and metaphysical science, and never conferred with her on such matters without discovering new reasons for admiring the subtlety and self-dependence of her intellect; though it is conceivable that, when he was most deeply impressed by her mental acuteness and originality, she was only returning to him the thoughts that had come to her from his lips on the previous evening.
Nor was Maimuna the only influence that rendered her house far more agreeable to the youthful poet than his comfortless lodgings in Half-Moon Street, where Eliza became more and more distasteful to her brother-in-law, and Harriett less shapely and beautiful. For the charming and highly sentimental Mrs. Boinville had a scarcely less charming and sentimental sister, as well as a daughter who, without possessing all her mother’s excellencies, was not unworthy of so fascinating a parent. In adorative tenderness for Percy, the youngest of these three ladies seems to have surpassed her aunt and equalled Mrs. Boinville. It was she who discovered that, seen from the pavement below, whilst sitting book-in-hand at the little projecting window of the Half-Moon Street drawing-room, Percy would have looked ‘like some young lady’s lark, hanging outside for air and song,’ had he only been provided with ‘a pan of clear water and a fresh turf.’ Surely the lady who discovered this resemblance must have been the author of the happy thought, that Shelley had the appearance of a moss-rose still drenched by the tears of heaven.
The Pimlico drawing-room would have been a bower of delight to the young poet, had he found no other worshipers there; but it was the favourite gathering place of a coterie of sentimentalists and free-thinkers of both sexes, who rendered the salon even more agreeable to the author of Queen Mab, by being at much pains to make him see that he was superlatively acceptable to them. Mr. Hogg may, perhaps, have been justified in thinking meanly of Mrs. Boinville’s circle, and in suggesting that before the end of the season Shelley was secretly ashamed of himself for spending so much of his time in it. But the poet, who had long yearned for social recognition, may be pardoned for not being nicely fastidious respecting the quality of the first coterie to welcome and worship him as a man of genius. Moreover, though it may have comprised several arrant charlatans, together with a considerable percentage of individuals to be fairly rated by a humorous annalist as so many sentimental medical students and revolutionary tinkers, the crowd, that thronged Mrs. Boinville’s staircase on her evenings of reception, doubtless held a far larger proportion of well-mannered gentle people, who were all the better company because their social crotchets declared them likely to die in a lunatic asylum. Certainly it contained a fair proportion of clever and lovely girls, whose mental and personal endowments may well have caused the principal poet of the assemblies to recall with a sense of shame, how recently he had hung upon the words of the Hurstpierpoint prophetess. It was at Mrs. Boinville’s house that Shelley met the chosen and especially favoured young ladies, with whom (after the departure of the other visitors) he used to drink strong tea and converse on lofty themes from midnight to early dawn, and sometimes from early dawn to broad daylight. On crossing Piccadilly an hour or so after daybreak, as the market-carts rolled slowly towards Covent Garden, it was natural for Shelley to wish his lodgings were something nearer the house he visited at least once in every twenty-four hours; and so wishing, it was natural for him to think it would be well for his dear Harriett’s sake, that he should take lodgings in Pimlico, so as to be able to drop in at any moment on the dear Boinvilles for a short call, without leaving her for hours together during the illness that would soon be upon her.
Though I cannot speak positively on the point, I have little doubt that Mrs. Boinville’s was the house where Shelley, during this same London season of 1813, caused much commotion by passing down a line of charming young ladies (who were ranged on one side of the drawing-room for the country dance), and closely examining the skin of each of the astonished but unresisting damsels. It was not enough for Shelley to put his eyes within a few inches of each young lady’s unconcealed developments, so as to get the closest and clearest view of her neck, shoulders, and bosom. To effect his purpose it was requisite to examine the parts, in which he was greatly interested, by touch as well as by sight. It was not till, with the look and air of a concern no less reverential than pitiful, he had pressed and otherwise felt the skin of several necks, bosoms, and pairs of shoulders, that the hostess, on seeing what he was about, caused him to desist from his too intrusive observations, by assuring him with proper earnestness and gravity, that no one of the lovely damsels standing before him was suffering from elephantiasis.
For some days Shelley had been afflicted by a fancy that he had caught that rare and terrible disease from an old woman, whom he had met in a stage-coach, and for the preposterous magnitude of whose ankles he could account only by assuming that she was afflicted with elephantiasis in the legs. In vain was he assured by the doctors, whom he consulted on the subject, that he had not caught elephantiasis, and that, had the old woman been a sufferer from the disease in the degree he imagined, she could not have endured the motion of the stage-coach. No doctor, no number of conspiring doctors, could persuade him he had not caught elephantiasis, or make him believe the signs of disease, so easily caught, could not be detected in the skin of persons unaware of their deplorable condition. To prove himself right on the first point, he was ever and again scrutinizing his own skin. To show he was right on the second point, he seized every opportunity of examining the skin of other people. Hence the extraordinary examination of the young ladies, who, in their confidence in the rectitude and innocency of his purpose, were willing to allow him any license requisite for the completion of his inquiries.
Apocryphal biography requires us to believe that Shelley met another disagreeable old woman in a stage-coach,—the old lady whom he at the same time drove out of the carriage and her wits, by seating himself on the floor of the vehicle, and ejaculating with passionate pathos—
‘For heaven’s sake, let us sit upon the ground,
And tell sad stories of the death of kings!
How some have been deposed, some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed,
Some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping killed;
All murdered.’
The story (known to every one) proceeds to tell how in her alarm at the words, the thrilling accents in which they were delivered, and the dolefully maniacal visage of their utterer, the poor old woman screamed to the guard to open the door and allow her to escape from the company of the raving lunatic, who wanted her to join with him in talking about kings and their deaths in so disloyal a fashion; and how, on the door being opened, she cleared herself out of the coach, with her basket of mellow apples and her other basket of onions. There are several versions of this equally piquant and doubtful story. To believe everything in Leigh Hunt’s Autobiography, is to believe that the farce was originally enacted, to the poor woman’s terror, in his presence in ‘the Hampstead stage,’ as he and Shelley were travelling by that vehicle into town. But even if it could be proved that he had no part in the conception of the story, or in the incidents out of which it grew, the fiction would be fitly given as an example of the kind of humour that was acceptable to, perhaps, the least humorous of our supremely great poets; for Shelley told the story so often of himself, that he eventually believed it as thoroughly as any of his numerous fictions about himself.