‘I have not,’ he remarked in a subsequent letter from Ravenna to his wife, ‘recopied your letter—such a measure would destroy its authenticity, but have given it to Lord Byron, who has engaged to send it with his own comments to the Hoppners. People do not hesitate, it seems, to make themselves panders and accomplices to slander, for the Hoppners had exacted from Lord Byron that these accusations should be concealed from me. Lord Byron is not a man to keep a secret, good or bad, but in openly confessing that he has not done so, he must observe a certain delicacy, and therefore he wished to send the letter himself, and indeed this adds weight to your representations.’
It is inconceivable that Shelley really thought what he pretended to think, viz., that his wife wished him to make a fair copy of her letter, for Mrs. Hoppner’s perusal. He knew right well why Mary told him to copy the letter. He misconstrued her words wilfully, because he did not wish her to have a copy of the letter at her hand,—to remind her of the circumstances that had caused her to write it. Paying proper regard to her repeated injunction, he would have copied not only her written words, but also that part of his own letter of the 7th instant, which she had made a substantive part of her own epistle. This she asked him to do. Instead of doing what she told him, he pretended to have misunderstood her request, and at the same time informed her that her vindicatory letter had been given to Byron, for transmission to Mrs. Hoppner.
This vindicatory letter was not transmitted by Byron to Mrs. Hoppner. On the contrary, after Byron’s death, it was found amongst his papers, and at some later time passed to the hands of the present Sir Percy Shelley. With law and logic resembling his knowledge of the simplest rules of evidence, Mr. Froude wrote of this letter in his notorious Nineteenth-Century article, ‘It was not addressed to Byron; it therefore never belonged to Byron; and a property which was not his own could not descend to his representatives.’ What egregious nonsense! What should be thought of the readers of the Nineteenth Century, who accept such foolishness as sound literature? What living writer but Mr. Froude could venture to declare it impossible for a man to acquire property in a letter, not addressed to him? Were the dictum good law, the trustees of the British Museum would have no property in any one of their several thousands of ancient letters. Mr. Alfred Morrison would not have property in any of his thousands of epistles, not addressed to himself. On coming to Shelley’s hands at Ravenna, Mrs. Shelley’s vindicatory letter was as much his property as any ring on his finger. Written by his own wife (who had no property of her own) on paper bought with his money, the epistle belonged to Shelley. The legal property of the document was in him and no one else. He had as perfect legal power to give the epistle to Byron, as to give any other of his lawful possessions to Byron. There are grounds for the strongest opinion that Shelley did give the letter to Byron—not to transmit to Mrs. Hoppner, but to do what he liked with it; and that, therefore, the letter at his death passed to his representatives.
Shelley himself admits that he gave the letter. ‘I have,’ he writes to his wife, ‘given it to Lord Byron,’ adding that Byron ‘has engaged to send it with his own comments, to the Hoppners.’ Apart from these words, there is no evidence whatever that Byron promised to transmit the letter to the Hoppners;—words written by a man of such singular mental inexactness, that his most intimate friends held him absolutely incapable of giving an accurate account of any matter of his personal affairs;—a man, who wrote wheedling letters, and deliberately deceitful letters, whenever he was tempted to do so;—a man, who only the other day had written his wife a flagrantly inaccurate account of what Byron had told him of the Claire scandal. Is the bare statement of so inexact a letter-writer to be held good evidence, that Byron withheld a letter he was bound in honour to pass on to Mrs. Hoppner? Is it probable that Shelley had authority for writing to his wife, that Byron had promised to transmit the letter and enclosure? If he was inaccurate in this statement, Shelley was merely guilty of an inaccuracy, comparable with scores of similar inaccuracies to be found in his private epistles. Is it conceivable that Byron promised to transmit to the Hoppners an epistle, which represented him as having said of them divers things which he certainly had not said of them?
Shelley’s letter of the 7th instant to his wife was posted to her before Byron had risen from bed. Dates and the lady’s words show that Mrs. Shelley answered it immediately,—that her indignant reply was dashed off currente calamo, when she, too, was in a state of excitement incompatible with mental exactness. Thus written, her epistle was despatched immediately, so that no time might be lost. In due course the vindicatory letter, together with the piece of Shelley’s own writing which had been constituted a part of the vindicatory epistle, came under Byron’s observation at Ravenna. What ensued forthwith, between the two poets, can be readily imagined. After perusing the two documents of the reply, Byron, of course, spoke to Shelley to this effect: ‘My dear Shelley, in your excitement you gave Mrs. Shelley a strangely inaccurate account of what passed between us on the night of your arrival. What I told you was, that the Hoppners had been induced to regard Claire as your mistress, to think she had given you a child, and to think she had sent the child to a Foundling. This was what I told you. But you have told your wife a very different story. The Hoppners never spoke of you as tearing the child from Claire’s breast; they never accused you of sending the child to a Foundling against her will; they never hinted to me that, instead of sending the child to a Foundling, you might have destroyed it. Such thoughts of you never entered their heads. How came you to conceive they had such suspicions? They never wronged you in the way you have represented to Mrs. Shelley. They told me you had made a domestic arrangement with Claire, which (as you remark to Mrs. Shelley) would have been no heinous crime, but only “a great error,” had you and she entered into the arrangement. They told me Claire had given you a child, even as she gave me one a few years since,—i.e. they believed that the arrangement, which in your opinion would have been no worse than “a great error,” had been attended with a natural result. Further, they told me that they believed the offspring of the arrangement had been dealt with as illegitimate children are often dealt with in this country. To think this of you is not to believe you tore the child from Claire’s breast, disposed of it violently and without her consent, abandoned it or perhaps destroyed it. This letter and enclosure may not be sent to Mrs. Hoppner; for they imply that I have told you prodigious untruths. As the epistle touches my honour so acutely, leave it in my hands, and trust to me to communicate with the Hoppners, so as to disabuse their minds completely of their erroneous impressions about you. But do let me retain possession of those sheets of paper, which so strangely misrepresent my confidential speech to you.’
Byron must necessarily have put the case in this way to Shelley. After speaking in this way, it is inconceivable that he promised to send the letter and enclosure to Venice. After being so spoken to by Byron, it is inconceivable that Shelley wished the documents to be sent to Mrs. Hoppner, or was otherwise than well pleased to know Byron could be trusted to keep them from her eyes. It must have been a great relief to him to think that, instead of sending to Venice the writings which, on coming to the Hoppners, would have been fruitful of mischief, he had shown them to Byron. Of course he made no copy of Mary’s letter and enclosure, to remain in evidence how egregiously he had exaggerated the scandalous report, and misrepresented a confidential conversation. But it was necessary for him to acknowledge to Mary his receipt of the documents; to acknowledge them, moreover, in such a way, that she would not be looking to every post for a letter from Mrs. Hoppner; that she should feel assured proper measures were being taken to kill the scandal; that she should not be angry with him for neglecting to copy the papers; and that she should not lose all power of ever again relying on his statements of fact. The author of Laon and Cythna was in a very embarrassing and rather humiliating position. His way of accounting for his neglect to copy the documents is sufficiently significant of disingenuousness. It was necessary for him to conceal from his wife that her epistle, so eloquent of fine and womanly feeling, would not be sent on to Mrs. Hoppner; it was necessary for him to allay her impatience for a letter from Mrs. Hoppner, by giving her to understand that she must not expect the lady’s reply to come quickly; it was necessary for him to provide against further importunity on her part for copies of the documents. In submission to these necessities he had recourse to misrepresentation. Affecting to have mistaken her purpose in requesting him to take copies of the writings, he informed her he had given her epistle, with the piece of his own epistle, to Byron,—an announcement calculated to make her feel she could scarcely repeat her request for copies without implying distrust of Lord Byron’s discretion and zeal. At the same time, he assured her that Byron ‘had engaged to send the letter with his own comments to the Hoppners,’ whilst knowing that Byron had only engaged to give the substance of certain passages of the letter, together with his comments on the case.
Whilst this explanation of Byron’s retention of a letter (which on reflection Shelley can have been no less desirous than Byron to keep from the Hoppners), acquits him of the egregious villainy of withholding an epistle he had pledged his honour to forward to Mrs. Hoppner, it only requires the readers of this work, so far as Shelley is concerned, to believe that, under the pressure of a rather comical embarrassment, he practised on his wife the kind of deceit he so often employed in his dealings with other people. Acquitting Byron of the villainy imputed to him by Mr. Froude, a villainy very different from the immoralities with which he is justly chargeable, it merely imputes to Shelley the particular kind of underhandedness and inaccuracy, of which so many examples may be found in his dealings with various people. Had Byron sent the letter to Mrs. Hoppner, it would of course have been accompanied with explanations, showing that he was not accountable for the exaggerations and staggering misstatements of Shelley’s letter (of 7th August) to his wife. Knowing this, Shelley had even a stronger motive than Byron for stopping the letter. Under these circumstances, it is absurd to argue from the mere retention of the letter, that it was retained dishonestly by the elder poet, in breach of a solemn promise.
There is no reason to suppose Byron was wanting in fidelity to Shelley in any stage of this business. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, he must be assumed to have kept his promise, to do his utmost to convince the Hoppners of the untruth of the scandalous story, so far as it affected the Shelleys. There is at present no evidence that he either failed to keep this promise, or failed to satisfy the Hoppners of Shelley’s innocence. Under existing circumstances, the only fair assumption is that he wrote to the Hoppners on the matter, and made it clear to them that Shelley neither was nor ever had been the father of a child by Claire. It makes nothing against the reasonableness of this assumption, that Mrs. Shelley received no letter from Mrs. Hoppner on the subject, and that the Hoppners never again had any intercourse with her. Having received no letter from Mrs. Shelley on the matter, Mrs. Hoppner was under no obligation to write to her about it. Indeed, under the circumstances, it would have been something worse than an insulting impertinence, had the Consul-General’s wife written to Mrs. Shelley on so unsavoury a business. To set the ugly matter right, it was not necessary for Byron to let Mrs. Hoppner know her name had been mentioned to the Shelleys in connexion with the scandal; and the reasons why he should be silent on that point are obvious. That the Hoppners never again communicated with Mrs. Shelley is no evidence that they continued to think ill of her. Mrs. Shelley and Mrs. Hoppner had never corresponded with one another for any considerable time. Mrs. Shelley’s intercepted letter (of 10th August, 1821) opens with these words: ‘My dear Mrs. Hoppner, after silence of nearly two years, I address you again,’—words showing conclusively the shortness of the period, during which the two ladies (who met for the first time no earlier than the autumn of 1818) were in the habit of writing to one another. Correspondents only for a single year, they had, in August, 1821, ceased to correspond for nearly two years. In truth, though the Shelleys, during their 1818 visits to and sojourn near Venice, received great kindness from the Hoppners (especially at the moment of little Clara’s death), the two ladies were casual acquaintances,—slight acquaintances, notwithstanding their intimacy for a brief period. How common is it for people to live sociably with persons for a few months, and then see no more of them! Had Mrs. Shelley in her later time met the Hoppners, she would probably have been greeted by them in a way to satisfy her, that they had no wish to avoid her as a discreditable person. But never meeting them after 1818, she went from 1821 to her grave, imagining they persisted in thinking evil of her.
Though Byron’s March-1821 note to Hoppner defines the main facts of the scandalous story, it gives none of the minor details of the slander, that seems to have originated in Elise’s general knowledge of the Genevese scandal and her subsequent misconceptions respecting Allegra’s paternity. Had that note been as ample as it was precise, it would have enabled us to see how far the slander (credited by Byron and Hoppner) was the pure outgrowth of Elise’s misconceptions, and in what degree it resulted from Paolo’s malicious inventiveness,—and also to gauge more precisely the element of inaccuracy in Shelley’s letter of exaggerations. There is, of course, a great difference in detail between the story Elise may be conceived to have told Paolo about Allegra’s birth in England in January, 1817, and the slanderous statement about a second child, alleged to have been born at Naples in the winter of 1818-1819. But it is in the nature of scandal to change in its details and colour, no less than in its magnitude, as it passes from mouth to mouth; and before it reached Mrs. Shelley at Bagni di Pisa, the scandalous story about Claire had passed through several hands. Originating with Elise, it had passed from her to Paolo; through Paolo to Hoppner; through Hoppner to Mrs. Hoppner; from the Hoppners to Byron; from Byron’s cynical lips to Shelley’s heated brain; through Shelley’s inaccurate pen to Mrs. Shelley. Elise, Paolo (a liar of great ability), Hoppner, Mrs. Hoppner, Byron (not remarkable for accuracy of statement), and Shelley (a prodigy of historical inventiveness):—all and each of these six persons had worked in some way or other on the scandal, before it came to Mary at Bagni di Pisa! No wonder the story was a marvellous and extremely exciting story on coming to poor Mrs. Shelley.
The liar in the business was, of course, Paolo, the clever, vindictive, unscrupulous knave, set on avenging himself on the master, who had declined to be cheated beyond a hundred per cent. Certainly guilty of the venial offence of indiscreet and disloyal loquacity, Elise was probably also guilty of encouraging her husband in his purpose to extort more money from her bountiful employers. Her passionate assertion that she had said nothing against the Shelleys to Mrs. Hoppner (‘Je vous assure, ma chère Madame Shelley,’ she wrote in reply to a letter from her former mistress, ‘que je n’ai jamais rien dit à Madame Hoppner ni contre vous, ni contre Mademoiselle, ni contre Monsieur, et de quelque part que cela vienne c’est un mensonge contre moi’) does not acquit her of talking freely to her husband against them. It tells much and suggests more against the smart Elise that, for months after her husband had put himself (with his wife’s cognizance) in communication with the Hoppners, she was writing to Mrs. Shelley for money;—a kind of demand the woman would, of course, have never made on her former mistress, had she not felt she had a most unusual claim on her. Only a day or two before Mrs. Shelley perused her husband’s staggering letter from Ravenna, Mrs. Shelley had received a letter from Elise, asking for more money. ‘The other day,’ Mrs. Shelley wrote in her intercepted letter to Mrs. Hoppner, ‘I received a letter from Elise, entreating, with great professions of love, that I would send her money’!!! More than two and a half years had passed since she quitted the Shelleys’ service, and yet Elise was writing for money to her former mistress. Elise had never said anything to Mrs. Hoppner against either Mrs. Shelley or Mademoiselle Claire or Shelley; but she had said things against all three to Paolo, who had carried them to Mr. Hoppner.