I’m sure you would laugh were you to see us give the pamphlets. We throw them out of the window, and give them to men that we pass in the streets. For myself, I am ready to die of laughter when it is done, and Percy looks so grave. Yesterday he put one into a woman’s hood and cloak. She knew nothing of it, and we passed her. I could hardly get on: my muscles were so irritated.
Shelley, none the less, was in regard to Ireland a wiser politician than the politicians, and he was indulging in no turgid or fanciful prose in his Address when he described the Act of Union as “the most successful engine that England ever wielded over the misery of fallen Ireland.” Godwin, with whom Shelley had been corresponding for some time, now became alarmed at his disciple’s reckless daring. “Shelley, you are preparing a scene of blood!” he wrote to him in his anxiety. It is evidence of the extent of Godwin’s influence over Shelley that the latter withdrew his Irish publications and returned to England, having spent about six weeks on his mission to the Irish people.
Mr. Ingpen has really written a new biography of Shelley rather than a compilation of new material. The new documents incorporated in the book were discovered by the successors to Mr. William Whitton, the Shelleys’ family solicitor, but they can hardly be said to add much to our knowledge of the facts about Shelley. They prove, however, that his marriage to Harriet Westbrook took place in a Presbyterian church in Edinburgh, and that, at a later period, he was twice arrested for debt. Mr. Ingpen holds that they also prove that Shelley “appeared on the boards of the Windsor Theatre as an actor in Shakespearean drama.” But we have only William Whitton, the solicitor’s words for this, and it is clear that he had been at no pains to investigate the matter. “It was mentioned to me yesterday,” he wrote to Shelley’s father in November, 1815, “that Mr. P.B. Shelley was exhibiting himself on the Windsor stage in the character of Shakespeare’s plays, under the figured name of Cooks.” “The character of Shakespeare’s plays” sounds oddly, as though Whitton did not know what he was talking about, unless he was referring to allegorical “tableaux vivants” of some sort. Certainly, so vague a rumour as this—the sort of rumour that would naturally arise in regard to a young man who was supposed to have gone to the bad—is no trustworthy evidence that Shelley was ever “an actor in Shakespearean drama.” At the same time, Mr. Ingpen deserves enthusiastic praise for the untiring pursuit of facts which has enabled him to add an indispensable book to the Shelley library. I wish that, as he has to some extent followed the events of Shelley’s life until the end, he had filled in the details of the life abroad as well as the life in England. His book is an absorbing biography, but it remains of set purpose a biography with gaps. He writes, it should be added, in the spirit of a collector of facts rather than of a psychologist. One has to create one’s own portrait of Shelley out of the facts he has brought together.
One is surprised, by the way, to find so devoted a student of Shelley—a student to whom every lover of literature is indebted for his edition of Shelley’s letters as well as for the biography—referring to Shelley again and again as “Bysshe.” Shelley’s family, it may be admitted, called him “Bysshe.” But never was a more inappropriate name given to a poet who brought down music from heaven. At the same time, as we read his biography over again, we feel that it is possible that the two names do somehow express two incongruous aspects of the man. In his life he was, to a great extent, Bysshe; in his poetry he was Shelley. Shelley wrote The Skylark and Pan and The West Wind. It was Bysshe who imagined that a fat old woman in a train had infected him with incurable elephantiasis. Mr. Ingpen quotes Peacock’s account of this characteristic illusion:
He was continually on the watch for its symptoms; his legs were to swell to the size of an elephant’s, and his skin was to be crumpled over like goose-skin. He would draw the skin of his own hands arms, and neck, very tight, and, if he discovered any deviation from smoothness, he would seize the person next to him and endeavour, by a corresponding pressure, to see if any corresponding deviation existed. He often startled young ladies in an evening party by this singular process, which was as instantaneous as a flash of lightning.
Mr. Ingpen has wisely omitted nothing about Bysshe, however ludicrous. After reading a biography so unsparing in tragi-comic narrative, however, one has to read Prometheus again in order to recall that divine song of a freed spirit, the incarnation of which we call Shelley.
[(2) The Experimentalist]
Mr. Buxton Forman has an original way of recommending books to our notice. In an introduction to Medwin’s Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley he begins by frankly telling us that it is a bad book, and that the only point of controversy in regard to it is as to the kind of bad book it is. “Last century,” he declares, “produced a plethora of bad books that were valuable, and of fairly good books with no lasting value. Medwin’s distinction is that he left two bad books which were and still are valuable, but whether the Byron Conversations and the Life of Shelley should be called the two most valuable bad books of the century or the two worst valuable books of the century is a hard point in casuistry.” Medwin, we may admit, even if he was not the “perfect idiot” he has been called, would have been a dull fellow enough if he had never met Shelley or Byron. But he did meet them, and as a result he will live to all eternity, or near it, a little gilded by their rays. He was not, Mr. Forman contends, the original of the man who “saw Shelley plain” in Browning’s lyric. None the less, he is precisely that man in the imaginations of most of us. A relative of Shelley, a school friend, an intimate of the last years in Italy, even though we know him to have been one of those men who cannot help lying because they are so stupid, he still fascinates us as a treasury of sidelights on one of the loveliest and most flashing lives in the history of English literature.
Shelley is often presented to us as a kind of creature from fairyland, continually wounded in a struggle with the despotic realities of earth. Here and in his poetry, however, we see him rather as the herald of the age of science: he was a born experimentalist; he experimented, not only in chemistry, but in life and in politics. At school, he and his solar microscope were inseparable. Ardently interested in chemistry, he once, we are told, borrowed a book on the subject from Medwin’s father, but his own father sent it back with a note saying: “I have returned the book on chemistry, as it is a forbidden thing at Eton.” During his life at University College, Oxford, his delight in chemical experiments continued.