Mr. Froude is of opinion that Shelley should be judged leniently for taking to himself this girl because he was young and enthusiastic. Mr. Froude is also of opinion that Mary Godwin should be judged leniently because she was young and enthusiastic. I concur with Mr. Froude in thinking that Mary should not be severely judged. To her my compassion goes as freely as Mr. Froude requires. She was a naughty girl. But who can forbear to make charitable allowance for so young and inexperienced a girl? She was (as Mr. Froude urges) enthusiastic; she was also young, very young,—only sixteen years old.
There are other reasons for being lenient and pitiful to this poor child, reared though she was in honest principles and absolute ignorance of her mother’s perverse views. Who seduced her? She was not led astray by an ordinary tempter, but by a young man of singular comeliness, a poet who clothed his prayers with the images of speech most likely to render them irresistible. She had done nothing in the hope of winning his love, said nothing by lip or look to lure him from loyalty to Harriett, when he came quickly upon her and said ‘You shall be mine!’ She was wooed and won by Shelley! Remember how (though he was Shelley) she contended with him, fought him, prayed to him for mercy; how passionately she declared to him, in spoken words and written words, that, though she loved him wholly, and would never give herself to any other man, she would not, could not, dared not, give herself to him till he could marry her.
Could nothing be urged in palliation of her misconduct, but that she was young and enthusiastic, I should plead less earnestly in her behalf. I cannot concur with Mr. Froude in holding that youth and enthusiasm should of themselves be pronounced considerable extenuations of wrongful action, of which the young and enthusiastic are more likely than other persons to be guilty. On the contrary, Mr. Froude must pardon a white-headed writer for telling him frankly, it is ill for a man of his still greater age to teach (however lightly and elegantly) in a popular magazine, that to act as Shelley and Mary acted in their elopement, is sometimes to be guilty of nothing worse than ‘the sin of acting on emotional theories of liberty.’ Moreover, I decline to regard Shelley’s youth in 1814 as a matter to be urged strongly in mitigation of the sentence to be passed upon him. His youth unquestionably may be pleaded in misericordiam when he is under trial for running away with John Westbrook’s daughter. But the offence he committed in 1814 was no mere elopement, and he had long since ceased to be a child. When he posted seaward along the Dover Road, with Mary Godwin by his side, he was within a week of his twenty-third year. Age by the calendar is not the only thing to be considered in estimating a man’s moral responsibility. Regard should also be had to the discipline of circumstances. It wanted now only a month of three years since Shelley ran off with John Westbrook’s lovely child. A man who is a father, and has been a husband for nearly three years, is not to be judged as a mere stripling. He was five years older than Mary. Those five years spent in the world gave him greatly the advantage over Mary, and he had used the advantage mercilessly against her. On the threshold of his twenty-third year a young man has lived quite long enough to know that he should not seduce his intimate friend’s sixteen-years-old daughter.
Should Mr. Froude write on this question again, he will do well to drop the plea of youth. Moreover, Mr. Froude, at any sacrifice of feeling, must throw overboard that elegant euphuism about ‘the sin of acting on emotional theories of liberty.’ That Shelley was under the influence of emotion throughout his suit to Mary is certain. It is not unusual for people to be under the influence of emotion when they are in love. But there was nothing emotional in Shelley’s theories respecting the Freedom of Lovers to be off with an old and on with a new love at pleasure. I have wasted much pains in exhibiting the origin of those theories, and tracing their growth through his boyish novels and his letters to Hogg and Godwin, to their development in the anti-matrimonial note to Queen Mab, if it is necessary to remind my readers that Shelley’s views about wedlock—views in which he persisted to the last hour of his life—were embraced in his boyhood long before he formulated them in the Queen Mab note. Never were theories formed with greater deliberation, brooded over more calmly, acted upon more resolutely by a social innovator. Holding them tenaciously long before he promulgated them in the famous note, he did not act upon them till Queen Mab had been in secret circulation for considerably more than a year. In speaking of them as emotional theories, Mr. Froude shows how absolutely ignorant he was of the matters about which he wrote so rashly.
A note in one of William Godwin’s diaries indicates that he regarded the fugitives as having left his house at five o’clock of the early morning. But there are grounds for thinking the flight began an hour earlier. Anyhow, long before London was awake and stirring, Shelley and the two girls were clear of the town and clattering towards the sea. Towards noon the sun bore down upon them with scorching vehemence, and the remainder of the journey on wheels was made in heat so intense and overpowering, that Mary Godwin nearly fainted under it. The journey closed with a serious disappointment to the travellers. On alighting at Dover at about 4 p.m., they found themselves too late for the Calais packet, and no other public boat would start for the French port till the following day. To all three it was of the highest moment that they should cross the Channel as quickly as possible. Mary and Claire were too well acquainted with their mother’s energy to have any doubt, that on discovering their flight she would soon be following them. Had Mary been less than sixteen years of age, Shelley, in case of his arrest on English ground, would have been liable, under the circumstances, to imprisonment for two years; and under a certain contingency, even to five years’ incarceration. But though Mary’s age exempted him from the heavy punishment to which he would have been liable had she been a year younger, he was aware that, if he were overtaken by Mrs. Godwin on this side the Channel, the Mayor of Dover would aid her effectually in regaining possession of her daughter and step-daughter. To secure his prize it was needful that he should cross the water without passing another night on English soil.
As the lovely evening promised a quick and agreeable passage, Shelley hired some seamen to carry him and the two girls (without their boxes) to Calais in an open boat; and as soon as Mary had revived herself with a sea-bath, the trio went on board the frail vessel, hoping to touch the French sands within two hours. But the weather failed to keep its promise. At first their progress was slow from lack of wind; but as the moon rose and night came on, the faint breeze freshened into a gale, attended with signs of a coming storm. Besides being violent the wind soon became contrary; and after working well out to sea the sailors began to despair of reaching Calais, and talked of making for Boulogne. Some hours later, a squall striking the sail nearly capsized the boat, that seemed likely to perish in the thunder-storm, which made the mariners fearful. Fortunately the gale abated, and the wind, changing its course, carried the craft straight for Calais, where the fugitives,—weary, cold, and drenched to the skin,—arrived at sunrise; their plight being the more pitiable, because they had left their boxes at the Dover custom-house, to follow by the next day’s packet.
Regaining their energy and cheerfulness, whilst waiting for their luggage, the trio (‘three’ was Shelley’s favourite number for a trip) remained at their Calais hotel till Saturday afternoon (July the 30th), when they started for Paris in a cabriolet, drawn by three horses abreast, under the control of the queer little postillion, who wore a long pig-tail and craquéed his whip in a style that delighted the girls. But though they made no long stay at the French port, they tarried there long enough to have cause for congratulating themselves on having crossed the Channel so promptly. The sisters had not overrated their mother’s spirit and alertness. Catching the boat which brought the fugitives their luggage, Mrs. Godwin surprised them with a visit on Saturday morning; her arrival at the hotel being announced to them by the landlord, who hastened to their room with intelligence that a fat English Madame had come to the house, and was bent on seeing her daughters, with whom (according to Madame’s account) Monsieur had run away. How Mrs. Godwin was received by the trio may be imagined. Mary laughed saucily at the step-mother, from whose authority she had escaped. Claire answered her mother’s sharp speech by declaring she should not return to London till she had seen something of the world. If Shelley was not wanting in outward civility to the lady, of whose bread and salt he had partaken so freely, he was at pains to record in the journal which he and Mary had already begun to keep, how disdainfully his friend’s wife had been described by the Calais taverner. In the memoranda of the second day’s entry it is told how the landlord announced that ‘a fat lady had arrived who said that I had run away with her daughter,’ the personal pronoun and whole structure of the phrase showing that the words were a portion of Shelley’s contribution to the entry. For this scrap from Shelley’s diary we are indebted to Mr. Kegan Paul, who wishes the readers of William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries, to chuckle over the evidence that Mrs. Godwin was fat, that a French innkeeper derided her for being fat, and that Shelley was tickled by what the innkeeper said of the gentlewoman. Had one of Byron’s numerous diaries contained these same words in ridicule of a lady whose hospitality he had abused, what a rout the Shelleyan enthusiasts would have made about the diarist’s ingrained vulgarity!
A few words may here be said of the journal which Shelley and Mary began to keep at this point of their joint-story, and kept conjointly for a considerable period. It has been averred by Shelleyan enthusiasts that this journal was thus kept by the poet and Mary without a single day’s break up to the date of Shelley’s death. This journal has been declared a source of information by which every day, every hour of the poet’s life from the very first day of his association with Mary Godwin, can be accounted for. The journal has been held out by the Field Place scribes in terrorem against all persons, presuming to question anything uttered by a small ‘ring’ of Shelleyan specialists, as a source of evidence that may at any moment be used to cover such presumptuous persons with discredit. It is therefore well that in a book written by one of the presumptuous personages, prominence should be given to the reasons for questioning whether this joint-journal was kept for so long a period, and in so unbroken a manner as certain writers have declared; and also to the far stronger reasons for thinking the journal may have been altered and ‘doctored’ by Mary Godwin after her husband’s death.
On 26th January, 1819, Shelley wrote from Naples (where he was then staying with his wife) these words, ‘In my accounts of pictures and things I am more pleased to interest you than the many; ... Besides, I keep no journal, and the only records of my voyage will be the letters I send you.’
Observe how Shelley in a confidential letter to one of his closest friends declares that he is not keeping a journal, and that the letters he is sending his friend will be the only record of the part of his career to which the letters refer. If Shelley’s statements about his personal affairs could be relied upon, the words would be sufficient evidence that he was not then keeping a journal, that his letters to Peacock were the only authoritative record of his doings at this particular point of his career, and that, therefore, to the best of his knowledge and belief, his wife was not then keeping a record of his doings. If he was at that time keeping a journal, he wrote to Peacock what was untrue. Unless he had reason for thinking that no record of his life was being kept at that time either by his wife or any other person, he was less than truthful. If Mr. Garnett was right in saying Shelley began a diary in 1814, which accounts for every day of his life, Shelley was wrong in saying he was keeping no record of his life in January, 1819. Mr. Rossetti suggests that the inconsistency between Shelley’s words and Mr. Garnett’s words may be only apparent, as Shelley may ‘sometimes have intermitted his journalizing, and then his wife kept it up.’ But this reasonable suggestion does not dispose of the difficulty. If the suggestion is correct, Mrs. Shelley must have filled in and kept up the journal with her husband’s knowledge, or without it. If she kept the diary with his knowledge and sanction, the journal remained a thing for which he was so far responsible, that it should have precluded him from saying he kept no journal. If he knew Mrs. Shelley was keeping a daily record of his doings, he was untruthful in saying the letters would be the only record of those doings. On the other hand, if Mrs. Shelley kept the journal without his knowledge, the diary during the times of its being so kept was not his journal, but simply Mrs. Shelley’s journal, and Mr. Garnett erred in writing of it as a record for which Shelley was responsible from first to last.