In the absence of the evidence, which would alone qualify the reader to take a judicial view of the Squire’s requirements, it may be assumed that they comprised some stipulation which, having reference to his son’s religious and political sentiments, and going further than the former request for mere abstinence from public controversy, demanded some action which Percy could regard as public recantation of his published opinions. Possibly the unreasonable requirement was that, recalling to his hands every recoverable copy of Queen Mab, he should destroy all copies of the book within his reach, and promise never again to put the work, or any similar work, in circulation. Shelley would not have failed to regard any such condition, as a demand for his ‘sudden renunciation of sentiments seriously taken up.’ The Shelleyan enthusiasts of course take the expressions of the epistle literally, and argue from them that the proposals he declined with so much spirit and generous resoluteness involved some extravagant and humiliating concession, which should not have been demanded of him. One of the strongest reasons for thinking the zealots err on this point, is the certainty that no such extreme and insolent demand would have been sanctioned by the Duke of Norfolk, whose ‘exalted mind’ determined the course taken by Mr. Timothy Shelley in the business. I am prepared for evidence that the terms, so warmly rejected by Shelley, were hard terms. But should sufficient evidence ever appear that, in his growing irritation with a singularly exasperating son, the Squire insisted on terms, that besides being hard were cruel and unreasonable, it would still remain for readers to smile contemptuously at the Pecksniffian style in which Shelley (the writer of wheedling letters, who did not blush to declare to his familiar friend his deliberate intention of having recourse to deception) wrote of himself in this particular epistle, as though he were incapable of deviating by a hair’s breadth from the straight path of truth.
Another point to be noticed in this curious epistle is Shelley’s statement, that the futile negotiation, was a ‘negociation, in which private communications from his father first induced him to engage.’ As Shelley knew it to be within the Duke’s knowledge, whether the overtures for the fruitless negotiation came from him to his father, or from his father to him, he may be assumed to have written accurately respecting the preliminary ‘private communications.’ It may therefore be taken for certain that the Squire (acting doubtless at the Duke of Norfolk’s instance) made the overtures to his son for a friendly settlement of their differences;—a fact indicative of a disposition, rather than of an indisposition, on the Squire’s part, to come to friendly terms with his son. None the less certain, however, is it that Shelley himself (acting on Hogg’s advice) was the person, who for purely selfish ends (to get money) wrote the wheedling letter and made the insincere professions, which moved the Duke of Norfolk to advise the Squire to approach his boy with conciliatory overtures.
Three weeks after the fruitless negotiation, dating from Cooke’s Hotel (though I have but little doubt that he and Harriett were living in Pimlico, within a stone’s-throw of Maimuna’s drawing-room windows), Shelley, in mid-June, asked Mr. Medwin to be his legal adviser, in respect to the difficulties he would encounter on coming of age. ‘I know,’ he wrote to the Horsham Lawyer, ‘that I am heir to large property. Now, are the papers to be seen? Have you the least doubt that I am the sole heir to a large landed property? Have you any certain knowledge on the subject?’
In spite of the decisiveness of the words, ‘I know that I am the heir to large property,’ it is obvious, from the ensuing words, that, as his twenty-first year neared its end, the poet realized vividly how small his knowledge was of the nature and magnitude of the patrimony, about which he had written and spoken so much, with equal looseness and boastfulness. He begs his lawyer to say whether he has any doubt that he is the heir to a large landed property. ‘Have you,’ he asks of the man of business, who was his relative, and had formerly been in some degree cognizant of the affairs of the Shelleys, though he may never have been greatly in the confidence of either Sir Bysshe or Sir Bysshe’s son, ‘Have you any certain knowledge on the subject?’ He would not have asked in this nervous style for his attorney’s ‘certain knowledge on the subject,’ had he not been himself painfully in want of such knowledge. Seventeen months since, he had written confidently to William Godwin, ‘I am heir by entail to an estate of 6000l. per annum;’ and now in mid-June, 1813, he is writing almost with the excitement of panic to the Horsham lawyer, ‘Have you any certain knowledge on the subject?’ It seems as though the nervous creature were possessed by a fear that he might, after all his fine talk, find himself heir to nothing,—the fool of a fool’s paradise,—the dupe of a long, delightful, golden dream, passing away quickly in the chilling dawn of penury. Of course, any such state of alarm was transient. He had sufficient grounds for believing himself the heir (somehow or other) to considerable property. At the same time, he was painfully alive to his need of precise information respecting the property.
Four or five days later (21st June, 1813), after receiving a letter of reassuring information from Mr. Medwin, he wrote to the lawyer, ‘Depend upon it, that no artifice of my father’s shall induce me to take a life-interest in the estate;’—words, seeming to indicate that the lawyer (who had lent him money, and was otherwise interested in encouraging him to surrender nothing of his estate) had already been instructing him to disappoint his grandfather’s and father’s design to compass the re-entailment of the property. ‘I feel with sufficient force,’ the writer continues, in respect to the proposal that he should take a life-interest in the estate, ‘that I should not by such conduct be guilty alone of injustice to myself, but to those who have assisted me by kind offices and advice during my adversity:’—i.e. those who had lent him money during his minority.
Six days after the date of this last-mentioned letter, Harriett gave birth to her first-born child, who was named Ianthe Eliza, the second of the two names indicating that Miss Westbrook continued to hold her sister’s affection, and to have an influence in her brother-in-law’s home, after he had come to regard her with a dislike, that developed rapidly into unqualified aversion. That Hogg was right in thinking the child was born in Pimlico, instead of Dover Street, I have little doubt, though immediately before and after the birth Shelley was dating letters from Cooke’s Hotel.
The question has been raised whether Shelley ever felt any strong affection for Harriett’s daughter, though he spoke and wrote passionately of the barbarous decree of the Court of Chancery, that declared him unfit to have any part in the child’s education. It has also been questioned whether Harriett ever delighted in the little girl, who suffered from a congenital defect of one of her eyes, that was at least in some degree removed by the surgical operation, which afforded Mrs. Shelley an opportunity of displaying her self-control or insensibility, less to the admiration than to the astonishment of the surgeon who, after vainly endeavouring to persuade her to be absent whilst the patient was under the knife, was surprised at the apparent indifference with which she heard the cries and regarded the sufferings of the infant. It would, however, be unjust to draw conclusions unfavourable to Harriett from her demeanour on this occasion; for she may have been moved by maternal solicitude to remain in the room during the operation, and having decided to remain there, she was bound by care for her child’s welfare and the surgeon’s convenience, to keep her feelings under command. Nor should any positive inference to Harriett’s disadvantage be drawn from the fact, that, instead of being suckled by her mother, little Ianthe took her first nourishment from a wet-nurse; for though her accouchement was an easy affair, from which she recovered quickly, Harriett may have been compelled to employ a nurse to discharge a duty, which she would have been only too glad to perform personally. Again, though Hogg attributed the weakness to her shame at knowing ‘that one so nearly connected with herself was not perfectly beautiful,’ Harriett’s sensitiveness in respect to her infant’s slight facial deformity,—a sensitiveness that caused her to shrink from showing the child even to so intimate a friend as her husband’s future biographer, may have originated in maternal tenderness, quite as much as in wounded maternal vanity. Still, though no one of them would warrant an unhesitating inference to her disadvantage, and all of them are susceptible of explanation that would relieve her maternal character of the imputation resulting from them, it must be admitted that the morbid sensitiveness, the employment of the wet-nurse, and the extraordinary self-possession or apathy during the operation, are three facts, to justify a suspicion that the young mother was deficient in parental tenderness.
But to prove that her nature was defective in this respect, would raise no presumption that she was characterized by similar coldness towards her husband. The presumption would, indeed, be in the contrary direction; for instances are afforded at every turn to the social observer, of women who, whilst cold to their offspring, are passionately devoted to their husbands. There is no evidence that Harriett ever evinced any extraordinary devotion to her husband, or any love of him surpassing a girl’s ordinary liking for a youthful husband. Having regard to all the circumstances of her married life,—circumstances peculiarly unfavourable to the development of the domestic affections,—most readers of this page will concur with me in holding, that it would have been very strange, had Harriett loved her husband in the highest conceivable degree, or indeed with any fervour surpassing the warmth of ordinary conjugal attachment. Still, in justice to her, it should be borne in mind that a young woman may be at the same time a coldly amiable mother and a passionately loving wife.
It would be more important to ascertain, in what degree Shelley was animated by parental affectionateness. On this point the authorities are in conflict. Whilst Hogg thought his friend singularly wanting in parental tenderness and emotionality, so far as Ianthe was concerned, Peacock declares Shelley to have been ‘extremely fond’ of Ianthe when she was an infant-in-arms. To put implicit confidence in Hogg is to believe that Ianthe’s arrival neither ‘afforded’ her father ‘any gratification,’ nor ‘created an interest’ in him. Never speaking to Hogg of the infant, Shelley never wrote to him about her, except in the single letter, dated from Bracknell on 16th March, 1814, where he rails against his sister-in-law as ‘a blind and loathsome worm,’ even as he had formerly in an epistle to the same correspondent railed against the Brown Demon, who, after being worshipt by him for her angelic excellencies, became in a few months ‘the hermaphroditical beast of a woman.’
On the other hand, in support of his opinion that Shelley was ‘extremely fond’ of Ianthe, Peacock tells how the father ‘would walk up and down a room with it in his arms for a long time together, singing to it a monotonous melody of his own making.’ Peacock says further, ‘His song was, Yáhmani, Yáhmani, Yáhmani, Yáhmani! It did not please me; but, what was more important, it pleased the child, and lulled it when it was fretful. Shelley was extremely fond of his children. He was pre-eminently an affectionate father.’ To most readers Peacock’s example of the poet’s parental tenderness will fail to prove the large allegation that he ‘was pre-eminently an affectionate father.’ Ordinary humanity and selfishness will account for the pains he took to lull the child, as he could not fly to Maimuna’s drawing-room whenever it raised its sharp, wailing cry. To do what Shelley did, is only to do what is done by almost every young father who, with a babe in his home, has not a good nursery at a convenient distance from the room he inhabits, but must perforce endure its screams or make it leave off screaming.