Of course, these less discerning critics had better have imitated the more temperate and discreet men of letters, and held their peace. But critics are human; and when men speak under the influence of strong resentment, they are apt to say wild things. To point to the angry things written to Shelley’s discredit, when the passions he had stirred were at their fiercest rage, as evidence of a singular and unaccountable blindness to the excellences of fine poetry, is to misread the signs of a former time. Like Byron, the author of Laon and Cythna provoked a storm he was not permitted to survive; though he would have survived it, had he lived to middle age and continued to write in the vein of Prometheus Unbound and Adonais. It is not wonderful that violent things were said of the man, who had done violence to society’s finest sensibilities. What occurred to his annoyance more than sixty years since would occur now-a-days to a similar offender,—say, to a novelist of high culture and singular aptitude for his department of literary art, guilty of producing a novel whose hero and heroine, born of the same parents, and reared in the same home, should live and love like Laon and Cythna; the whole romance being cunningly devised and skilfully worked out, for the purpose of luring readers to the opinion that brothers and sisters ought to be allowed to marry one another. After all that has been done during the last fifty years to make people tolerant of the Free Contract, what would happen if such a story came to us one fine day from the pen of a young and remarkably able writer (ætat. 25), together with his assurance that the work was ‘an experiment on the temper of the public mind,’ and an attempt to bring about ‘happier conditions of moral and political society?’ Would critics be mealy-mouthed and weigh their words precisely in declaring the experiment an outrage, and the attempt a monstrous scandal? Would they be less outspoken on discovering that the young writer, at so early a stage of his existence, had put away his first wife, seduced his intimate friend’s sixteen-years-old daughter, written strongly on previous occasions against chastity and conjugal constancy, and been declared by the Lord Chancellor a person whose conduct proved him unfit to have the charge of his children?
One is often asked to explain what is meant by ‘the irony of fate.’ It is easier to explain a term by an example than by words. It was fate’s irony that, whilst the poet, who exhibited a brother’s incestuous intercourse with his sister as sinless and beautiful, escaped the imputation he may be said to have invited by the personal note at the end of the Preface, the world was induced to charge the crime passionately on another poet, who had only written of such incest vaguely as an enormity of wickedness, or mockingly as the familiar arrangement of a remote period. Another example of fate’s irony is found in the fact that, when Byron was suffering in posthumous fame from the Beecher-Stowe calumny, the more fervid of the Shelleyan enthusiasts and the more fervid of the Shelleyan socialists combined to decry him as a prodigy of wickedness for practising the form of Lawless Love, which Shelley had declared compatible with virtue. Fate also was set upon another exploit in irony, when she determined that the poem, which a committee of men of the world declared unfit for circulation during the profligate Regency, should be produced verbatim for the moral edification of the men, and women, and young people of Victorian England.
CHAPTER XIV.
FROM MARLOW TO ITALY.
The Hunts and the Shelleys—Their Intimacy—Pecuniary Difficulties—Dealings with Money-lenders—Leigh Hunt relieves Shelley of £1400—His Testimony to Shelley’s virtuous Manners—Shelley’s Benevolence at Marlow—At the Opera—Departure for Italy—The fated Children—Shelley’s literary Work and studious Life in Italy—Milan—Allegra sent to her Father—Elise the Swiss Nurse—Her Knowledge and Suspicions—Claire and her ‘Sister’—Their Affectionate Intercourse and Occasional Quarrels—Shelley’s Affection for Claire—Vagrants in Italy—Pisa—Leghorn—Maria Gisborne—Her Husband and Son—Claire and Shelley at Venice—Trick played on Byron—His Civilities to the Shelleys—Little Clara’s Death—Paolo the Knave—He falls in Love with Elise—Their Marriage—Paolo’s Wrath and Vengeance—Emilia Viviani—Shelley’s Adoration of Her—The three-cornered Flirtation—Mrs. Shelley’s Attitude and Action—Shelley’s Fault in the Affair—His subsequent Shame at the Business—The imaginary Assault at the Pisan Post Office.
It has been already noticed how the Shelleyan apologists deal with the evidence that, in December, 1816, when Harriett’s suicide held the attention of the literary coteries, Shelley’s conduct towards her had the approval of his friend Leigh Hunt and two other unbiased judges,—his bookseller and his attorney (the same attorney who treated the poet so scurvily in the spring of 1821). Whilst using Leigh Hunt as a witness to the excellence of Shelley’s conduct to his wife, the Shelleyan apologists imply that, in the December of 1816, the two poets had long been intimate friends. It is, however, certain that, till the end of the autumn of 1816, the two ‘friends’ knew so little of one another that they were nothing more than slight acquaintances. How little Hunt cared about the author of Alastor at any time prior to Harriett’s suicide, appears from his confession that, on receiving certain sets of verses from the still youthful literary aspirant, he neither printed them in the Examiner nor returned them to their author, but after ‘unfortunately mislaying them,’ forgot all about them,—i.e. tossed them disdainfully to the waste-paper basket. Something (weeks or months) later, on seeing reason to render the amende honorable to the young author whom he had treated so contemptuously, Hunt put in the Examiner (December, 1816) an article that, referring to Shelley as one of ‘three young writers, who appeared to promise a considerable addition of strength to the new school,’ and also spoke of him as ‘the author of a poetical work entitled Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude;’ no line of which poem had been seen by the poetical editor, when he alluded to it thus cautiously in the apologetic note. ‘We shall,’ Hunt says of the poet, of whose writings he had seen nothing but the ‘one or two specimens,’ so lightly pitched into the wicker-basket, after a hasty glance at their contents, ‘procure what he has published, and if the rest answer to what we have seen, we shall have no hesitation in announcing him for a very striking and original thinker.’ That these words of Hunt’s pen appeared in the Examiner, so late as 1st December, 1816, is conclusive evidence of how little he cared for, and knew of, Shelley up to the very moment of Harriett’s death. Yet in these latest years of grace, we have been required to believe there can have been nothing very reprehensible in Shelley’s conduct to his wife, since it had the approval of so precise a moralist as Leigh Hunt, who, by reason of his long-standing intimacy with Shelley, must have known all about it.[4]
But if Hunt was tardy in responding to Shelley’s repeated overtures for friendship, he atoned for previous negligence by his subsequent pains to plant himself in the affection of the young man, whom he had treated with scant courtesy. The editor of the Examiner was too sincere a man to admire aught till he had found it admirable. But on seeing Shelley’s titles to his homage, he promptly acknowledged them, and on discovering his virtues, declared his generous admiration of them in no uncertain voice. The Hermit of Marlow and the poet of Hampstead’s ‘Vale of Health’ became close friends. Whilst Marianne (Mrs. Hunt) discovered her dearest and ever-loving familiar in Mrs. Shelley, their husbands had all thoughts and things (money not excluded) in common. Admiring one another’s writings, the poets backed each other’s bills. Circumstances constraining him to fly from Lisson Grove, or the ‘Vale of Health,’ and seek a place of retirement from creditors, Hunt found the needful seclusion at Marlow, where he stayed, on one occasion, for nearly three months. On the other hand, towards the close of 1817, when tradesmen were troubling him sorely to pay certain bills for necessaries, supplied to the late Mrs. Shelley, the author of Alastor made quick march from Bisham Wood to Hampstead Heath, and found hospitality with concealment in the ‘Vale of Health,’ where he delighted his host’s children by playing with them in an equally amiable and frolicsome manner.
It was during this sojourn with the Hunts that Shelley came, one winterly afternoon, on the poor woman, lying in a fit upon the heath, with a little boy by her side, and was so greatly incensed by the reluctance of the nearest householders to open their doors and arms to her. Why Shelley, who eventually carried the sufferer to Hunt’s quarters (which were near at hand), did not carry her there in the first instance, does not appear. It is, however, on the record that, he deferred taking so obvious and reasonable a course till he had vainly tried to get her admitted to nearer houses, whose occupants declined to act charitably in the matter,—possibly, because they thought he might as well take his protégée to the place where he was himself staying. One of the individuals, to whose benevolence he vainly appealed in this emergency, being a gentleman who was stepping out of his carriage at the door of his own goodly mansion, the indignant poet is said to have told the selfish householder roundly, that he might expect to have his house burnt over his head in the quickly-coming revolution, when the poor would settle accounts summarily with the rich. As it is told, the story redounds to Shelley’s honour and the rich householder’s shame. But as some of the story’s truth may be on its unrecorded side, judicious readers will decline to condemn the householder. It is, however, to the poet’s credit that, seeing a poor woman in need of help, he eventually helped her in the best way, by taking her to his own place of abode, and sending for the nearest doctor.