To the end of their lives, tried as they were to be by every kind of trouble, neither one nor the other ever repented the step they now took, nor modified their opinion of the grounds on which they took it. How Shelley regarded it in after years we have already seen. Mary, writing during her married life, when her judgment had been matured and her youthful buoyancy of spirit only too well sobered by stern and bitter experience, can find no harder name for it than “an imprudence.” Many years after, in 1825, alluding to Shelley’s separation from Harriet, she remarks, “His justification is, to me, obvious.” And at a later date still, when she had been seventeen years a widow, she wrote in the preface to her edition of Shelley’s Poems—
I abstain from any remark on the occurrences of his private life, except inasmuch as the passions they engendered inspired his poetry. This is not the time to relate the truth, and I should reject any colouring of the truth. No account of these events has ever been given at all approaching reality in their details, either as regards himself or others; nor shall I further allude to them than to remark that the errors of action committed by a man as noble and generous as Shelley, may, as far as he only is concerned, be fearlessly avowed by those who loved him, in the firm conviction that, were they judged impartially, his character would stand in fairer and brighter light than that of any contemporary.
But they never “made the public their familiar confidant.” They screened the erring as far as it was in their power to do so, although their reticence cost them dear, for it lent a colouring of probability to the slanders and misconstruction of all kinds which it was their constant fate to endure for others’ sake, which pursued them to their lives’ end, and beyond it.
Life, which is to no one what he expects, had many clouds for them. Mary’s life reached its zenith too suddenly, and with happiness came care in undue proportion. The future of intellectual expansion and creation which might have been hers was not to be fully realised, but perfections of character she might never have attained developed themselves as her nature was mellowed and moulded by time and by suffering.
Shelley’s rupture with his first wife marks the end of his boyhood. Up to that time, thanks to his poetic temperament, his were the strong and simple, but passing impulses and feelings of a child. “A being of large discourse” he assuredly was, but not as yet “looking before and after.” Now he was to acquire the doubtful blessing of that faculty. Like Undine when she became endued with a soul, he gained an immeasurable good, while he lost a something that never returned.
Early in the morning of 28th July 1814 Mary Godwin secretly left her father’s house, accompanied by Jane Clairmont, and they started with Shelley in a post-chaise for Dover.
CHAPTER VI
August 1814-January 1816