An eminent contemporary writer, speaking of Trelawny’s writings, has remarked: “So long as he dwells on Shelley, he is, like the visitants to the Witch of Atlas, ‘imparadised.’” This was true, in fact not as to the writings, but the natures, of all who had friendly or intimate relations with Shelley. His personality was like a clear, deep lake, wherein the sky and the surrounding objects were reflected. Now and again a breeze, or even a storm, might sweep across the “watery glass,” playing strange, grotesque pranks with the distorted reflections. But in general those who surrounded it saw themselves, and saw each other, not as they were, but as they appeared,—transfigured, idealised, glorified, by the impalpable, fluid, medium. And like a tree that overhangs the water’s edge, whose branches dip and play in the clear ripples, nodding and beckoning to their own living likeness there, so Mary had grown up by the side of this, her own image in him,—herself indeed, but “imparadised” in the immortal unreality of the magic mirror.
Now the eternal frost had fallen: black ice and dreary snow had extinguished that reflection for ever, and the solitary tree was left to weather all storms in a wintry world, where no magic mirror was to be hers any more.
Mary Shelley’s diary, now she was alone, altered its character. In her husband’s lifetime it had been a record of the passing facts of every day; almost as concise in statement as that of her father. Now and then, in travelling, she would stereotype an impression of beautiful scenery by an elaborate description; sometimes, but very rarely, she had indulged (as at Pisa) on reflections on people or things in general.
The case was now exactly reversed. Alone with her child, with no one else to live for; having no companion-mind with which to exchange ideas, and having never known what it was to be without one before, her diary became her familiar,—or rather her shadow, for it took its sombre colouring from her and could give nothing back. The thoughts too monotonously sad, too harrowing in their eloquent self-pity to be communicated to other people, but which filled her heart, the more that heart was thrown back on itself, found here an outlet, inadequate enough, but still the only one they had. In thus recording her emotions for her own benefit, she had little idea that these melancholy self-communings would ever be gathered up and published for the satisfaction of the “reading world”; a world that loves nothing so well as personal details, and would rather have the object of its interest misrepresented than not represented at all. Outwardly uneventful as Mrs. Shelley’s subsequent life was, its few occurrences are, as a rule, not even alluded to in her journal. Such things for the most part lost their intrinsic importance to her when Shelley disappeared; it was only in the world of abstractions that she felt or could imagine his companionship. Her journal, in reality, records her first essay in living alone. It was, to an almost incredible degree, a beginning.
Her existence, from its outset, had been offered up at the shrine of one man. To animate his solitude, to foster his genius, to help—as far as possible—his labours, to companion him in a world that did not understand him,—this had been her life-work, which lay now as a dream behind her, while she awakened to find herself alone with the solitude, the work, the cold unfriendly world, and without Shelley.
Could any woman be as lonely? All who share an abnormal lot must needs be isolated when cut adrift from the other life which has been their raison d’être; and Mary had begun so early, that she had grown, as it were, to this state of double solitude. She had not been unconscious of the slight hold they had on actualities.
“Mary,” observed Shelley one day at Pisa, when Trelawny was present, “Trelawny has found out Byron already. How stupid we were; how long it took us!”
“That,” she observed, “is because he lives with the living and we with the dead.”
And as a fact, Shelley lived with the immortals; finite things were outside his world; in his contemporaries it was what he would have considered their immortal side that he cared for. There are conjurors who can be tied by no knot from which they cannot escape, and so the limitations of practical convention, those “ideas and feelings which are but for a day,” had no power to hold Shelley.
And Mary knew no world but his. Now, young,—only twenty-five,—yet with the past experience of eight years of chequered married life, and of a simultaneous intellectual development almost perilously rapid, she stood, an utter novice, on the threshold of ordinary existence.