The Real Shelley. New Views of the Poet's Life. Vol. 2 (of 2)

by John Cordy Jeaffreson

Five days after writing from Florence to his wife at Bagni di Pisa, Shelley was writing (6th August, 1821) to her from Bologna, as he was on the point of starting for Ravenna, to visit Byron at the Palazzo Guiccioli, which he entered at 10 p.m. of the same date. Crossing at this late hour his entertainer’s threshold, Shelley was not permitted to retire to rest, by daylight, until he had heard a piece of scandal that cannot have disposed him for slumber. The promptitude, with which Byron poured this piece of tattle into his guest’s ear, will remind readers how at Diodati he seized the earliest moment to chatter to another friend about the revolting Genevese scandal. Before Shelley went to bed for the first time, at five o’clock a.m. at the Palazzo Guiccioli, he had heard that rumour charged him with being the father by Claire of a child, whom she had put into a Foundling Hospital. It was of course the easier for Byron to speak to Shelley of so indelicate a matter, because they had spoken freely together just five years since on the details of the Genevese scandal. Going to bed at five or six a.m. it was Byron’s practice to rise in the afternoon; and the poet, who thus turned night into day, was still only in his second sleep, when Shelley, at 11 a.m. on the 7th August, 1821, was writing to his wife in these terms,—

‘Lord Byron has told me of a circumstance that shocked me exceedingly, because it exhibits a degree of desperate and wicked malice, for which I am at a loss to account. When I hear such things my patience and philosophy are put to a severe proof, whilst I refrain from seeking out some obscure hiding-place where the countenance of man may never meet me more.... It seems that Elise, actuated either by some inconceivable malice for our dismissing her, or bribed by my enemies, or making common cause with her husband, has persuaded the Hoppners of a story, so monstrous and incredible, that they must have been prone to believe any evil to have believed such assertions upon such evidence. Mr. Hoppner wrote to Lord Byron, to state this story as a reason why he declined any further communication with us, and why he advised him to do the same. Elise says that Claire was my mistress; that she was brought to bed; that I immediately tore the child from her and sent it to the Foundling Hospital. I quote Mr. Hoppner’s words—and this is stated to have taken place in the winter after we left Este (1819-20).—[sic, in the proverbially inaccurate Mr. Froude’s transcript. The winter of the stay at Naples was the winter of 1818-19.] In addition she says that both I and Claire treated you in the most shameful manner; that I neglected and beat you, and that Claire never let a day pass without offering you insults of the most violent kind, in which she was abetted by me.—As to what reviews and the world say I do not care a jot; but when persons who have known me are capable of conceiving of me, not that I have fallen into a great error—as would have been the living with Claire as my mistress—but that I have committed such unutterable crimes as destroying or abandoning a child, and that my own! Imagine my despair of good! Imagine how it is possible that one of so weak and sensitive a nature as mine can run the gauntlet further, through this hellish society of men. You should write to the Hoppners a letter refuting the charge, in case you believe, and know, and can prove it to be false; stating the grounds and proof of your belief.... If you will send the letter to me here, I will forward it to the Hoppners. Lord Byron is not up, I do not know the Hoppners’ address, and I am anxious not to lose a post.’

For the italics of the foregoing extract the present transcriber is responsible.

It is in the memory of some readers of this book, that the afore-given passage, from Shelley’s letter of 7th August, was a chief feature of the article, which Mr. Froude wrote for the August-1883 Nineteenth Century, to the discredit of my Real Lord Byron, and for Byron’s defamation. It is therefore in some degree for the defence of my own reputation (a matter of importance to at least one person), though chiefly for the vindication of Byron’s honour from the latest of his defamers’ countless calumnies, and for the fuller exhibition of certain aspects of Shelley’s character, that I proceed to examine the passage of Shelley’s 7th August-1821 letter to his wife, certain parts of her reply to it, and the use made by Mr. Froude of the poet’s letter and Mrs. Shelley’s vindicatory answer.

The shameful conduct, charged against Shelley and Claire, was (according to Shelley’s letter) alleged to have taken place in the winter of 1818-19, i.e. when they were at Naples. The indictment (according to the same letter) comprised several counts:—(1) That Shelley had taken Claire for his mistress under his wife’s roof; (2) That he and Claire had joined in treating his wife cruelly in other ways; (3) That he had beaten his wife and neglected her; (4) That he tore from Claire the child to which she had given birth; (5) That he had sent the child into a Foundling Hospital; (6) That he had destroyed or abandoned the child,—i.e. that, if he had not put the child into a Foundling Hospital, he had destroyed it. According to the letter Elise had made these charges, and the Hoppners believed them,—i.e. deemed him guilty of the first five charges, and further guilty of abandoning or murdering his own offspring. I say, according to Shelley’s letter; for this excited epistle by a man, who in the opinion of his most intimate friends was absolutely incapable of writing a precisely accurate account of any agitating passage of his own quite recent affairs, is our only account of the substance and particulars of Byron’s speech at or after midnight to the greatly excited and indignant Shelley. Is it likely that this account is precisely or substantially accurate?

From Byron’s March-1821 note to Hoppner we know what ill things they charged against Shelley and Claire. We know they believed that Claire was Shelley’s mistress, that Claire had given birth to a child, and that she (not Shelley) had put this child into a Foundling. Byron’s words to Hoppner are precise. ‘The moral part of this letter,’ he wrote to Hoppner in March, 1821, about Claire’s epistle, ‘upon the Italians, &c., comes with an excellent grace from the writer now living with a man and his wife, and having planted a child in the Foundling.’—They did not imagine that Shelley had torn the child from Claire’s breast, and sent it to a Foundling against her will. On the contrary they believed the child to have been put into the Foundling by Claire. At the worst they believed Shelley guilty, on this point, of mere acquiescence in her arrangement for getting rid of the child. They thought that the child was sent to a Foundling. It never occurred to them to suspect Shelley of having destroyed the child. One difficulty of the matter is that Byron, to say the least of it, was not quite, but almost, as untruthful as Shelley. But it was not in the way of his peculiar untruthfulness, to say in cold blood that Hoppner believed Shelley to have torn the child from Claire’s breast, and sent it to a Foundling against her will, or perhaps destroyed it, when he knew Hoppner thought nothing of the kind. In his hatred of Claire, Byron hugged the notion that she had planted her child in a Foundling; and his hatred of her would alone have prevented him from telling a lie, that would have represented her as innocent of that offence, at least in Hoppner’s opinion. Yet Shelley (so prone to write with wild inaccuracy about his personal affairs) wrote to his wife that Byron had told him certain things (over and above the real communications) which it is inconceivable Byron told him.

Another remarkable feature of Shelley’s letter is the way in which he refers to the first count of the indictment. Writing to his own wife, Shelley (the poet, who according to his idolaters might have been the Saviour of the World) positively tells her, that, if he had lived in adultery with her sister-by-affinity under her own roof, he would have been guilty of nothing worse than ‘a great error!’ He would not have committed prodigious immorality, and a revolting outrage of social decency. He would not have been guilty of loathsome domestic uncleanness. He would only have fallen into ‘a great error.’ He wrote this of himself to his own wife! This fact should be pondered by those, who not long since were so indignant with Byron for imagining Shelley could have sinned with Claire in his wife’s house. Here is Shelley, instructing his own wife that the enormity would have been nothing more heinous than a big blunder.

Moved by Shelley to write a vehement denial of the slanders, Mrs. Shelley (best of letter-writers) seized her pen, and produced an epistle that cannot be commended too highly as an exhibition of womanly feeling. On some subordinate points it is not free from confusion and inconsistency, and in one or two passages the writer seems guilty of several material inaccuracies; but this appearance may be wholly due to the carelessness of transcribers of the printed copies of Shelley’s letter to her. For instance, whilst Shelley in the printed passages of his letter merely says, ‘Elise ... has persuaded the Hoppners,’ and ‘Elise says,’ Mrs. Shelley in her vindicatory epistle says of her husband’s letter, ‘It tells me that Elise wrote to you’ (i.e. to Mrs. Hoppner) ‘relating the most hideous stories against him,’—words certainly not justified by the published passages of Shelley’s letter. Dealing thus, in the opening of her letter, with Elise, as though she were the actual slanderer, Mrs. Shelley in a later passage seems to hold Paolo altogether accountable for the calumnies, and to acquit Elise of complicity in his wickedness. Yet, towards the close of the epistle (addressed to Mrs. Hoppner), reflecting bitterly on her former nurse, Mrs. Shelley bids Mrs. Hoppner withdraw her confidence from ‘one so vile as Elise.’ Both in her letter to Mrs. Hoppner and in the accompanying note to her own husband, Mrs. Shelley refers to Byron’s disbelief of the slanders; whereas the published passages of Shelley’s letter afford no grounds for these references to Byron’s incredulity, and even justify a suspicion that the generous disbelief for which Mrs. Shelley was so grateful, was merely her presumption. Possibly the production of the original documents would dispel these apparent inconsistencies and inaccuracies. As they stand before the world, however, the published passages of Mrs. Shelley’s letter comprise several perplexing sentences. On the main points of the slanders, however, Mrs. Shelley is direct, and admirably strenuous. Nothing of its kind can well be stronger than this:—

‘But now I come to the accusations, and I must summon all my courage while I transcribe them, for tears will force their way, and how can it be otherwise? You knew Shelley. You saw his face, and could you believe them?—believe them only on the testimony of a girl whom you despised? I had hoped that such a thing was impossible, and that, although strangers might believe the calumnies that this man propagated, none who had ever seen my husband could for a moment credit them. He says Claire was Shelley’s mistress—that—upon my word I solemnly assure you that I cannot write the words. I send you a part of Shelley’s letter, that you may see what I am now about to refute; but I had rather die than copy anything so vilely, so wickedly false, so beyond imagination fiendish.—But that you should believe it! That my beloved Shelley should stand thus slandered in your minds—he, the gentlest, the most humane of creatures—is more painful to me—oh far more painful—than words can express. Need I say that the union between my husband and myself has never been disturbed? Love caused our first imprudence; love which improved by esteem, a perfect trust one in the other, a confidence and affection which, visited as we have been by severe calamities (have we not lost two (sic) children?), has increased daily, and knows no bounds. I will add that Claire has been separated from us for about a year.... You ought to have paused before you tried to convince the father of her child of such unheard-of atrocities on her part. If his generosity and knowledge of the world had not made him reject the slander with the ridicule it deserved, what irretrievable mischief you would have occasioned her! Those who know me will believe my simple word. It is not long ago that my father said, in a letter to me, that he had never known me utter a falsehood; but you—easy as you have been to credit evil, you may be more deaf to truth—to you I swear by all that I hold sacred in Heaven and Earth, by a vow which I should die to write if I affirmed a falsehood,—I swear by the life of my child—my blessed, beloved child—that I know the accusation to be false.’

Addressed to Mrs. Hoppner, this letter was sent to Shelley at Ravenna, for him to forward it to the lady at Venice; the note which accompanied it to Shelley’s hands, contained the writer’s earnest request to him, to copy the epistle, before sending it on. ‘Pray,’ said Mrs. Shelley, ‘get my letter to Mrs. H. copied, for a thousand reasons,’—meaning, of course, to keep the copy in evidence of what she had written in the original, that would go to Mrs. Hoppner. She had previously said in the same letter, ‘If the task be not too dreadful, pray copy it for me.’ Shelley’s way of dealing with this natural request is equally curious and significant:—