The Misleading Tablet—House and Garden—Claire at Marlow—Shelley’s Delight in Claire’s Voice—To Constantia Singing—Source of the Name—Trips to London—The Marlow Pamphlets—Rosalind and Helen—Other Literary Work at Marlow—Mary’s Treatment and Opinion of Claire—Shelley makes his Will—Date of Probate—The Will’s various Legacies—Significant Legacies to Claire—Object of the Second Legacy of £6000—Did Shelley mean to leave Claire so much as £12,000?—Mr. Froude’s Indiscretion—His Ignorance of the Will.
Over the wall (towards the high road) of the house, inhabited for about a year by Shelley at Great Marlow, may be seen a tablet bearing this inscription, chiselled at the cost of a gentleman, whose intention to honour the poet was more creditable than his knowledge of the poet’s story:—
This Tablet was Placed A.D. 1867,
At the Instance of
Sir William Robert Clayton, Bart.,
To Perpetuate the Record that
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Lived and Worked in this House
And was Here Visited by
Lord Byron.
‘He is Gone where all Things Wise and fair
Descend. Oh, Dream not the Amorous Deep
Will yet Restore him to the Vital air,
Death Feeds on His Mute Voice, and Laughs at Our Despair.’
Adonais.
Byron having left England for ever long before Shelley entered the house, it is needless to say that the poets never exchanged words under its roof.
Regarded from the road, this house is, at the present time, a dingy and mean dwelling; but on entering it, the visitor is agreeably surprised by the magnitude of the rooms (one of them, i.e. Shelley’s library, being, in Peacock’s opinion, not in mine, large enough for a ball-room); and the rectangular garden in the rear of the building (a garden, at this present time, divided into four several plots of ground) is twenty-one yards wide and two hundred and twenty-five yards long. Readers may rely on the exactness of these particulars of the garden’s size, which were given to me for this work by my friend Mr. William Ford Langworthy.
The knavish gardener having lopt the fine holly to a bare pole, Shelley was at considerable cost in planting this garden with shrubs. About the same time the house (taken on lease for twenty-one years) was re-decorated and furnished at no small expense; the library (big enough for a ball-room) being fitted with shelves and books on terms, that were not otherwise than advantageous to the ‘unbiased’ Mr. Hookham, of Bond Street. Without meaning to live in this pleasant house ‘for ever,’ Shelley, no doubt, intended to make it his home, till he should succeed to estates A and B. Mrs. Shelley hoped the place would be her home till she should become Lady Shelley. But human creatures are less the rulers than the sport of circumstances. Little more than a year had passed since their settlement at Marlow when, yielding reluctantly to her husband’s solicitations, Mrs. Shelley went with him to Italy for the remainder of his days.
It has been the fashion of the Shelleyan partisans to speak of the Shelleys’ kindness to Claire as though she were a kind of fallen woman, whom they magnanimously sheltered from social opprobrium. That they were very kind to her when she needed their sympathy and care, is unquestionable; but in estimating their conduct towards Claire, the reader must remember, not only their familiar relationship to her, but also that, in her intimacy with Byron, Claire had done nothing to forfeit their respect. So soon after her marriage with the poet, under whose ‘protection’ she had been living for two years and a half, Mrs. Shelley could scarcely assume an attitude of virtuous superiority and condescension to her sister, who had lived in the same way with another poet for a shorter time. That Mrs. Shelley was altogether pleased to have Claire on her hands, in 1817 and afterwards, is not to be supposed. On the contrary, a letter of her writing shows that, some time elapsed after her return from Switzerland, in September, 1816, before she consented to receive Claire as a permanent inmate of her home. But circumstances constrained her to consent.
It would have been inhuman in the Shelleys to decline to shelter Claire during her accouchement. It is not wonderful that they gave her and her child a home at Marlow. It was necessary that Claire’s babe should be born under circumstances most likely to keep the affair from her mother and step-father, who had no knowledge or suspicion of their child’s liaison with Byron. In providing Claire with the retreat, in which she gave birth to Allegra with the utmost secresy, and in afterwards providing her with a home, in which to cherish her infant with similar privacy, the Shelleys were actuated by care for themselves, as well as by affection for her. Mrs. Shelley had suffered too severely from her father’s displeasure, not to be very desirous of withholding from him matters which would, on coming to his and Mrs. Godwin’s knowledge, be sure to occasion its renewal. Now that the sisters had been pardoned by Skinner Street, and general harmony been re-established in the family circle, it was obvious that Claire must live for a while either at Marlow or under Godwin’s roof. On leaving her sister’s side, she could not keep away from her mother’s house without giving offence or provoking suspicion. Her return to Skinner Street would be followed quickly by disclosures, certain to result in a fresh outbreak of family dissension. On the other hand, so long as they knew her to be living with the Shelleys at Marlow, Mr. and Mrs. Godwin would not be uneasy or inconveniently curious about her. Out of her mother’s observation, she could nurse her child at Marlow in greater security from detection than anywhere else.
That Shelley found the dark-eyed and charming, though sometimes exasperatingly freakish, girl, upon the whole an agreeable inmate, and was, in some degree, rewarded for his hospitality by the delight coming to him from her faculty of song, may be inferred from Shelley’s poem ‘To Constantia Singing’ (1817), opening with the stanza,—
‘TO CONSTANTIA SINGING.
Thus to be lost and thus to sink and die,
Perchance were death indeed!—Constantia, turn!
In thy dark eyes a power like light doth lie,
Even though the sounds which were thy voice, which burn
Between thy lips, are laid to sleep;
Within thy breath, and on thy hair, like odour it is yet,
And from thy touch like fire doth leap.
Even while I write, my burning cheeks are wet;
Alas, that the torn heart can bleed, but not forget!’