Shelley left behind him fragments of two other poems, addressed to Claire under the name of Constantia. But why Constantia? Always sagacious in his suggestions respecting the poet, whose story he told with such admirable tenderness and fairness, Mr. Rossetti suggests that Constantia was a fancy-name, taken from Constantia Dudley, the heroine of Brockden Brown’s Ormond,—one of the several novels by a forgotten writer, which Shelley admired so greatly. None the less certain, however, is it, that the heroine of the poem was the Claire in whose singing Shelley delighted in later time, no less than in 1817, and for whose progress in the most effective of her several accomplishments he was thoughtful during their stay at Marlow. Of course, Claire was vastly delighted by her brother-in-law’s approval of her singing, and by the great compliment he rendered her, in giving poetical expression to the approval. The second Mrs. William Godwin’s daughter took strange liberties with her name. Christened Mary Jane (a homely name enough), she usually signed her letters ‘Claire,’ after inventing that agreeable designation for her bright and fascinating individuality; and she also caused herself sometimes to be described, as Clara Mary Constantia Jane Clairmont;—‘Constantia,’ in commemoration of her association with Shelley’s poetical achievements; and ‘Clara’ in commemoration of the fact, that Shelley’s daughter (born at Marlow on 3rd September, 1817) was named after her mother’s sister-by-affinity,—even as Byron’s Ada was in her other Christian name styled after her father’s half-sister. Described as Clara Mary Constantia Jane in a legal instrument, dated long after Shelley’s death, Claire figures as Mary Jane Clairmont in Shelley’s last will and testament.
Covering passages of wretchedness, that came to him from grief for his first wife’s fate, and from his rage against the Lord Chancellor, Shelley’s time at Marlow covered, also, some of the happiest weeks and months of his existence,—weeks and months of exciting literary labour; days spent agreeably with his wife’s father; and days passed, with livelier contentment, in the society of Peacock, Hogg, and the Hunts. Now on the water, and now on foot, he took much exercise in the open air. Sometimes by himself and sometimes with his younger friends, he walked to and fro between Marlow and London. In their pedestrian excursions to London (thirty-two miles distant from the Buckinghamshire village), it was usual for Peacock and Shelley to march to town in the day, stay two nights in the capital, and march back on the third day.
Holding little intercourse with his immediate neighbours of his own degree (who, no doubt, gossiped much, and pumped Mr. Furnivall, the surgeon, with small result, about the ladies and babies of the poetical household), he received visitors from a distance, together with two or three of the Marlow residents, and altogether led a more sociable life than at Bishopgate. His time at Marlow was also a time of great literary productiveness. In it he threw off the Marlow Pamphlets, (a) A Proposal for putting Reform to the Vote throughout the Kingdom, and (b) An Address to the People on the Death of the Princess Charlotte, and published the History of a Six Weeks’ Tour—the book that gave Claire her place in the record of English literature as Shelley’s and Mrs. Shelley’s sister. It was also the period in which he wrote Laon and Cythna, or the Revolution of the Golden City: A Vision of the Nineteenth Century. In the Stanza of Spenser; wrote the fragmentary Prince Athanase, and began Rosalind and Helen, the modern eclogue, which he finished in the summer of the following year (1818) at the baths of Lucca,—the three poems which, telling us so much of the poet’s romantic view of his own character and career, are so rich in the poetical egotisms, which have been so often handled as though they were reliable passages of unimaginative biography.
In studying the last-named of these poems, the reader will not fail to detect Shelley in Lionel (the name under which the poet figures in The Boat on the Serchio), Claire in Rosalind, and Mrs. Shelley in Helen, who says of her lost Lionel,—
‘To Lionel,
Though of great wealth and lineage high,
Yet through those dungeon walls there came
Thy thrilling light, O liberty!
And as the meteor’s midnight flame
Startles the dreamer, sun-like truth
Flashed on his visionary youth,
And filled him, not with love, but faith,
And hope, and courage mute in death;
For love and life in him were twins,
Born at one birth.’
It is thus that Shelley, the scion of a middle-class family, the great-grandson of a Yankee apothecary, boasted of his ‘lineage high,’ to the admiration of eulogists, who speak disdainfully of Byron’s pride in his Norman descent. Of her conjugal union to Lionel—a union effected in accordance with the ways and principles of Free Lovers—Helen says, in terms descriptive of Mary’s bondless marriage with her father’s familiar friend,—
‘And so we loved, and did unite
All that in us was yet divided:
For when he said, that many a rite,
By men to bind but once provided,
Could not be shared by him and me,
Or they would kill him in their glee,
I shuddered, and then laughing said—
“We will have rites our faith to bind,
But our church shall be the starry night,
Our altar the grassy earth outspread,
And our priest the muttering wind.”’
A very delightful way of being married, no doubt; but in real life, marriages done thus lightly and elegantly, without church or chapel, priest or minister, officer or registrar, sometimes have inconvenient consequences.
Another thing to render Rosalind and Helen interesting to students of Shelley’s story, is its evidence that Shelley wrote the poem with a hope, that it would tend to draw Mary and Claire still closer together, and weld their hearts into an indissoluble union by the strongest mutual affection. That it was Mary who induced Shelley, at the baths of Lucca in the summer of 1818, to finish the poem which had this obvious purpose, is a part of the evidence that she was then animated by affection for the sister-by-affinity, whom she had so recently styled her ‘sister’ in a published book. Yet we are assured by Mr. Kegan Paul that, in 1818, Mrs. Shelley ‘felt as strongly as Byron that Allegra’s mother was the worst person possible to train the child.’ Had I not on certain occasions caught Mr. Kegan Paul, passing from clear evidences to strangely erroneous conclusions, I should take it for granted that he had sufficient documentary evidence for so strong and startling a statement. But I am slow to believe that Mrs. Shelley thought so ill of Claire, either at Marlow (where she styled Claire her ‘sister’ in a published book), or in any term of 1818, prior to the time when she encouraged Shelley to resume work on Rosalind and Helen. Under the circumstances, I can conceive that Mr. Kegan Paul has inferred too much from some words, penned by Mrs. Shelley, in order to induce Byron to take personal charge of Allegra. In 1817 and 1818, the Shelleys put strong pressure on Byron, to rear Allegra under his own roof and eye, and in doing so declared the strongest opinion that he was the fittest person to have charge of the child. But to argue from any expressions of this opinion, that Mrs. Shelley regarded her ‘sister’ as a person from whose deleterious influence the child should be preserved, would be alike unjust to the Shelleys and to Claire; it being certain that Shelley wished Byron to receive both the mother and the child; that he did his utmost to bring about an arrangement for Claire to have charge of her offspring under Byron’s roof; and that he strove and hoped to bring about this arrangement, even after Allegra’s transference to her father’s house.
I do not say that Mr. Kegan Paul cannot produce evidence to sustain his staggering statement. On the contrary, I have a feeling that he may be able to do so. But I do not hesitate in saying, that to produce any sufficient documentary evidence of Mrs. Shelley’s having written, or thought so ill of Claire in 1817 or 1818, would be to show how little William Godwin knew of his daughter’s real character, and to prove that she was the falsest little minx that ever wore petticoats. If, whilst she was bearing herself to the world with every show of sisterly affection for, and confidence in, her sister (her ‘sister’ of the published Six Weeks’ Tour), Mrs. Shelley ever gave anyone to understand that Claire was unfit to discharge the maternal duties to her own child, she was a woman with two faces and a double tongue.