The Real Shelley. New Views of the Poet's Life. Vol. 1 (of 2)
by John Cordy Jeaffreson · English · Gutenberg #41747 · 1,118,259 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Real Shelley. New Views of the Poet's Life. Vol. 1 (of 2)
Author: John Cordy Jeaffreson
Release date: December 31, 2012 [eBook #41747]
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Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE REAL SHELLEY. NEW VIEWS OF THE POET'S LIFE. VOL. 1 (OF 2) ***
THE REAL SHELLEY.
VOL. I.
THE REAL SHELLEY.
NEW VIEWS OF THE POET'S LIFE.
BY JOHN CORDY JEAFFRESON,
AUTHOR OF 'THE REAL LORD BYRON,'
'A BOOK ABOUT DOCTORS,'
'A BOOK ABOUT LAWYERS,' &c. &c.
IN TWO VOLUMES.
VOL. I.
LONDON:
HURST AND BLACKETT, PUBLISHERS,
13 GREAT MARLBOROUGH STREET.
1885.
_All Rights reserved._
LONDON:
PRINTED BY STRANGEWAYS AND SONS,
Tower Street, Upper St. Martin's Lane.
CONTENTS OF THE FIRST VOLUME.
PAGE
CHAPTER I.
THE SHELLEY OF ROMANTIC BIOGRAPHY 1
Creators of The Romantic Shelley--Clint's Fanciful
Composition--The Poet's Personal Appearance--His Little
Turn-up Nose--His Ancestral Quality--Sussexisms of his Speech
and Poetry--His Phenomenal Untruthfulness--His Temperance and
Intemperance--A Victim of Domestic Persecution--Was _The
Necessity of Atheism_ a mere Squib?--Lord Eldon's Decree--The
Slaughter of Reputations--The Poet's Character--His Treatment
of his familiar Friend--Biographic Fictions--Extravagances of
Shelleyan Enthusiasm.
CHAPTER II. THE SHELLEYS OF SUSSEX 13
Medwin's Blunders--Lady Shelley's Statement of the Case--The
Michelgrove Shelleys--Sir William Shelley, Justice of The
Common Pleas--The Castle Goring Shelleys--Their Pedigree at
the Heralds' College--Evidences of the Connexion of the Two
Families--John Shelley, 'Esquire and Lunatic'--Timothy
Shelley, the Yankee Apothecary--Bysshe Shelley's Career--His
Runaway Match with Catherine Michell--His Marriage with the
Heiress of Penshurst--His Great Wealth--The Poet's Alleged
Pride in his Connexion with the Sidneys--His Gentle, but not
Aristocratic, Lineage.
CHAPTER III. SHELLEY'S CHILDHOOD 27
The Poet's Father--Shelley's Birth and Birth-Chamber--Miss
Hellen Shelley's Recollections--The Child-Shelley's Pleasant
Fiction--His Aspect at Tender Age--His Description of his
own Nose--The Indian-Ink Sketch--Miss Curran's 'Daub'--
Williams's Water-Colour Drawing--Clint's Composition--
Engravings of 'The Daub' and 'The Composition'--The Poet's
Likeness in Marble--Shelley and Byron--Peacock and Hogg on
Shelley's Facial Beauty--The Colnaghi Engraving.
CHAPTER IV. THE BRENTFORD SCHOOLBOY 43
Dr. Greenlaw's Character--Quality of his School--Medwin's
Anecdotes to the Doctor's Discredit--Mr. Gellibrand's
Recollections of the Brentford Shelley--The Bullies of the
Brentford Playground--Shelley's Character at the School--His
Disposition to Somnambulism--His Delight in Novels--His
Wretchedness at School--Shelleyan Egotism--Byronic
Egotism--Byron's Influence on Shelley--Enduring Influence of
Novels on Shelley's Mind--Stories of Boating--Easter Holidays
in Wiltshire--'Essay on Friendship'--Its Biographical Value.
CHAPTER V. THE ETON SCHOOLBOY 69
First year at Eton--Creation of the Castle-Goring Baronetcy--
Sir Bysshe Shelley's Last Will--Timothy Shelley's Children--
Miss Hellen Shelley's Recollections--The Etonian at Home--
The Big Tortoise--The Great Snake--Dr. Keate--Mr. Packe at
fault--Walter Halliday--Mr. Hexter--Mr. Bethell--Fagging--Mad
Shelley--'Old Walker'--Enthusiasm for Natural Science--The
Rebel of the School--Lord High Atheist--Dr. Lind's Pernicious
Influence on Shelley--Poetical Fictions about Dr. Lind--
Shelley's Illness at Field Place--His Monstrous Hallucination
touching his Father--John Shelley the Lunatic--_Zastrozzi_--
Premature Withdrawal from Eton.
CHAPTER VI. ZASTROZZI; A ROMANCE. BY P. B. S. 110
Literary Ambition--Biographical Value of _Zastrozzi_--The
Etonian Shelley's Disesteem of Marriage--Review of the
Romance--Julia and Matilda--Conceits of the Romance
reproduced in _Laon and Cythna_--Egotisms of the Prose Tale
and the Poem--The Original of Count Verezzi and Laon.
CHAPTER VII. BETWEEN ETON AND OXFORD 123
Literary Interests and Enterprise--A.M. Oxon. Letter--
Shelley's Hunger for Publisher's Money--Winter 1809-10--
Nightmare--_The Wandering Jew_--Medwin in Lincoln's Inn
Fields--The Fragment of Ahasuerus--Its Influence on Byron and
Shelley--Matriculation at Oxford--Shelley at the Bodleian--
John Ballantyne and Co.--Shelley in Pall Mall--Stockdale's
Scandalous _Budget_--_Victor and Cazire_--Their Original
Poetry--Who was Cazire?--Felicia Dorothea Browne--
Illumination of Young Ladies--Harriett Grove--The Groves and
Shelleys in London--Shelley's Interest in Harriett Grove.
CHAPTER VIII. ST. IRVYNE; OR, THE ROSICRUCIAN: A ROMANCE. BY A
GENTLEMAN OF THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD 153
Venal Villains--'Jock' instructed to 'Pouch' them--At Work on
another Novel--The Dog of a Publisher--Devil of a Price--_St.
Irvyne_--Irving's Hill--Review of _St. Irvyne_--Wolfstein the
Magnanimous--Megalena de Metastasio--Olympia della Anzasca--
Eloise St. Irvyne--The Virtuous Fitzeustace--Ginotti's Doom--
The Oxonian Shelley's Repugnance to Marriage--His
Commendation of Free Love--Parallel Passages of _Zastrozzi_
and _St. Irvyne_--The Verses of _St. Irvyne_.
CHAPTER IX. MR. DENIS FLORENCE MACCARTHY _v._ THOMAS JEFFERSON
HOGG 168
Shelley's Matriculation at Oxford--Hogg's Matriculation at
Oxford--Hogg's First Arrival at Oxford--Lord Grenville's
Election--Mr. Denis Florence MacCarthy's Blunders--Hogg's
'New Monthly' Papers on Shelley at Oxford--Mrs. Shelley's
Reason for not Writing her Husband's 'Life'--Peacock's Reason
for not Writing it--Leigh Hunt's Reason for not Writing
it--Hogg undertakes the Task--Hogg's Two Volumes--Their
Merits and Faults--Hogg dismissed by Field Place--His
Mistakes and Misrepresentations--Some of his
Misrepresentations adopted by Field Place.
CHAPTER X. AT OXFORD: MICHAELMAS TERM, 1810 179
Hogg's Toryism--Shelley's Liberalism--In Hogg's Rooms--
Shelley's Looks and Voice--Patron and Idolater--The Ways of
Passing Time--Hogg's Reminiscences--Nocturnal Readings and
Conversations--Country about Oxford--Pistol Practice--Playing
with Paper Boats--Windmill and Plashy Meadow--The Horror of
it--Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson--University
Tattle and Laughter--Eccentric Inseparables--Pond under
Shotover Hill--Pacing 'The High'--Dons' Civility to Shelley--
His Incivility to Dons--Uninteresting Stones and Dull
People--'Partly True and Partly False'--The Fiery Hun!--'My
Dear Boy'--Shelley offers his Sister to Hogg in
Marriage--Hogg entertains the Proposal--End of Term.
CHAPTER XI. THE CHRISTMAS VACATION OF 1810-11 210
Presentation copies of _St. Irvyne_--Shelley resorts to
Deception--Shelley in Disgrace at Field Place--Harriett
Grove's Dismissal of her Suitor--The Squire's Anger--Mrs.
Shelley's Alarm for her Girls--Shelley's Troubles--His Rage
against Intolerance--His Wild Letters to Hogg--'Married to a
Clod'--Stockdale's Design--His Intercourse with Shelley's
Father--More Negotiations with the Pall-Mall Publisher--
Shelley a Deist--Controversial Correspondence--Shelley's
Attempt to enlighten his Father--His Passage from Deism to
Atheism--The Squire relents to his Son--Hogg invited to Field
Place--Stockdale's Disappointment--Stockdale's Character--His
Scandalous _Budget_.
CHAPTER XII. MR. MACCARTHY'S DISCOVERIES TOUCHING THE OXONIAN
SHELLEY 234
_A Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things_--Evidence
that the Poem was Published--Reasons for Thinking it may
never have been Published--Reasons for Thinking that, if the
Poem was Published, it was promptly Suppressed--Did Shelley
contribute Prose and Poetry to the _Oxford Herald_?--Spurious
Letter to the Editor of the _Statesman_--Shelley's First
Letter to Leigh Hunt--His way of Introducing himself to
Strangers--Did he at the Same Moment Think Well and Ill of
his Father?--Miss Janetta Phillips's Poems--E. & W. Phillips,
the Worthing Printers.
CHAPTER XIII. SHELLEY'S SECOND RESIDENCE-TERM AT OXFORD 251
Harriett Westbrook--Her Character and Beauty--How Shelley
came to care for her--Her Subscription for Janetta Phillips's
Poems--Shelley's first Visit to Harriett's Home--His
Intention to compete for 'the Newdigate'--Thornton Hunt's
scandalous Suggestion--Obligations of the Oxford
Undergraduate--Mary Wollstonecraft on the Guinea Forfeit--
Shelley's False Declaration--His numerous Untruths--_The
Necessity of Atheism_--Was it a Squib?--Lady Shelley's
Inaccuracies--Mr. Garnett's Misdescription of the Tract--His
Misrepresentation of Hogg--The _Little Syllabus_ printed at
Worthing--More Untruths by Shelley--The Tract offered for
Sale in Oxford--Shelley called before 'the Dons'--His
Expulsion from University College--Hogg's Impudence and
Craft--His Misrepresentations--Shelley and Hogg leave Oxford.
CHAPTER XIV. THE SPRING AND SUMMER OF 1811 292
Arrival in Town--The Poland-Street Exiles--The Squire's
Correspondence with Hogg's Father--His gentle Treatment of
Shelley--Dinner at Miller's Hotel--Hogg's Testimony to the
Squire's Worth--Shelley's Nicknames for his Father--Shelley
rejects his Father's Terms--Shelley offers Terms to his
Father--The Squire's Indignation--He Relents--He makes
Shelley a Liberal Allowance--Lady Shelley's
Misrepresentations--The Exiles about Town--The Separation of
'The Inseparables'--Shelley's Intimacy with the Westbrooks
Shelley's Intimacy with the Westbrooks--John Westbrook's
Calling and Character--Taking the Sacrament--Harriett
Westbrook's Conversion to Atheism--Her Disgrace at School--
Shelley's Measures for illuminating his Sister Hellen--
Tourists in Wales--The Change in Elizabeth Shelley--
Arrangements for a Clandestine Meeting--Mrs. Shelley's
Treatment of her Son--Captain Pilford's Kindness to his
Nephew--Harriett Westbrook's Appeal to Shelley--Her Decision
and Indecision--From Wales to London--Hogg's Influence--The
Elopement to Scotland--Hogg starts for Edinburgh.
CHAPTER XV. MOTIVE AND INFLUENCES 330
The fatal Marriage--Was Shelley trapt into it?--Mr. Garnett's
Assurances--The Fiction about Claire--Lady Shelley's Use of
Hogg's Evidences--The Prenuptial Intercourse--Was it
slight?--Shelley's Opportunities for knowing all about
Harriett--His Use and Abuse of those Opportunities--Mr.
Westbrook's Action towards Shelley--His Endeavour to preserve
Harriett from Shelley--Eliza Westbrook's part in making up
the Match--The Tool's Reward--The Etonian Free Lover--The
Social Condition of the Westbrooks and Godwins--Harriett
Westbrook's Beauty--Her Education--Her Knowledge of French--
Her quick Progress in Latin--What Wonder that Shelley fell in
love with her?
CHAPTER XVI. EDINBURGH, YORK, AND KESWICK 338
The Scotch Marriage--The Trio at Edinburgh--'Wha's the
Deil?'--Posting from Edinburgh to York--Dingy Lodgings and
Dingy Milliners--Shelley's run South--Did Harriett accompany
him?--The Squire stops the Supplies--The Earl's Description
of Harriett Westbrook--The Squire's Anger at the
_Mésalliance_--The Course Shelley could not take--Eliza
Westbrook in Possession--The Ouse at full Flood--One too
many--Designs on Greystoke Castle--Shelley's Appeal to the
Duke of Norfolk--The Codicil to Sir Bysshe's Will--The Flight
to Richmond--Miss Westbrook strikes her Enemy--The Trio at
Keswick--Shelley's affectionate Letters from Keswick to Hogg
at York--John Westbrook's Daughters at Greystoke Castle--
Ducal Benignity and Policy--The Calverts of Greta Bank--
Shelley's Means during his first Marriage--How to live on
Three Hundred a-year--How not to live on Four Hundred a-year.
CHAPTER XVII. GRETA BANK 380
Shelley wishes for a Sussex Cottage--His Friends at Keswick--
Southey at Home--Poet and Schoolmaster--Southey's Way of
handling Shelley--Shelley caught Napping--Mrs. Southey's
Tea-cakes--Eggs and Bacon on Hounslow Heath--At Home with the
Calverts--Shelley's remarkable Communications to Southey--His
Story of Harriett's Expulsion from School--The Story to
Hogg's Infamy--Mr. MacCarthy on the _Posthumous Fragments_--
Miss Westbrook's transient Contentment--Shelley's _For Ever_
and _Never_--His Interest in Ireland--Burning Questions--
Southey and Shelley at War--The _Address to the Irish
People_--Letters to Skinner Street--Godwin tickled by them--
Shelleyan Conceptions and Misconceptions--Shelley forgets all
about Dr. Lind--Preparations for the Irish Campaign--Letter
of Introduction to Curran--Project for a happy Meeting in
Wales--Miss Eliza Hitchener--Bright Angel and Brown Demon--
Shelley's Delight in her--His Abhorrence of her.
CHAPTER XVIII. SHELLEY'S QUARREL WITH HOGG 407
Shelley's Suspicion of Hogg--His Conviction of Hogg's Guilt--
Did Hogg make the Attempt?--The Manipulated Letter--Hogg's
Object in publishing it--His Purpose in altering it--The
Great Discovery--Evidence of Hogg's Guilt--Sources of the
Evidence--Shelley's Correspondence with Miss Hitchener--His
Letters from Keswick to Hogg--Their vehement
Affectionateness--Eliza Westbrook in Office--Shelley under
Training--Sisters in Council--Shelley's Conferences with
Harriett--Proofs of Hogg's Innocence--_Primâ Facie_
Improbability--Why Hogg was not charged at York--His
Arraignment at Keswick--Condemned in his Absence--The
Reconciliation--Divine Forgiveness--Hogg's Restoration to
Intimacy with Harriett--Shelley's subsequent Intimacy with
Hogg--Hogg's Intimacy with Mary Godwin--Shelley's
Acknowledgment of Delusion--He begs Pardon of Hogg--Hogg's
Denials of the Charge--Hypothetical Letters--Concluding
Estimate of Harriett's Evidence--If Hogg should be proved
Guilty--Consequences to Shelley's Reputation.
THE REAL SHELLEY.
CHAPTER I.
THE SHELLEY OF ROMANTIC BIOGRAPHY.
Creators of The Romantic Shelley--Clint's Fanciful Composition--The
Poet's Personal Appearance--His Little Turn-up Nose--His Ancestral
Quality--Sussexisms of his Speech and Poetry--His Phenomenal
Untruthfulness--His Temperance and Intemperance--A Victim of Domestic
Persecution--Was _The Necessity of Atheism_ a mere Squib?--Lord
Eldon's Decree--The Slaughter of Reputations--The Poet's
Character--His Treatment of his familiar Friend--Biographic
Fictions--Extravagances of Shelleyan Enthusiasm.
From a time considerably anterior to the day on which Hogg undertook to
write the _Life_ of his college friend, three separate forces,
(_a_) Field Place,
(_b_) The Shelleyan Enthusiasts,
(_c_) The Shelleyan Socialists,
have been steadily working to withdraw the Real Shelley from the world's
view, and to replace him with a Shelley, altogether unlike the poet, who
carried Mary Godwin off to the Continent, and wrote _Laon and Cythna_.
By 'Field Place,' I mean those members of the poet's family (living or
dead), who in their pious devotion to his memory, and laudable concern for
the honour of their house, have busied themselves in creating this
fanciful and romantic Shelley, and substituting him for the Real Shelley.
By designating these members of the Shelley family by the name of the
house that is Shelley's shrine, even as the Stratford birthplace is
Shakespeare's shrine, and Newstead Abbey is Byron's shrine, I shall be
able to refer with the least possible offensiveness to excellent
individuals, from whom I am constrained to differ on a large number of
Shelleyan questions.
By 'The Shelleyan Enthusiasts,' I mean vehement admirers of Shelley's
poetry, who, without ever thinking about his social views, delight in
imagining that the poet's character and career resembled his genius in its
grandeur, and his song in its loftiness and beauty.
By 'The Shelleyan Socialists' I mean those conscientious though misguided
persons, who, valuing Shelley for his mischievous social philosophy, and
thinking of Marriage somewhat as the pious John Milton thought of it in
the seventeenth century, and somewhat as the devout Martin Bucer thought
of it in the sixteenth century, regard with various degrees of approval or
tolerance Shelley's daring, though by no means original, proposal for
abolishing lawful marriage, and replacing it with the Free Contract, from
which each of the contracting parties is free to retire on the death of
their mutual affection, and who, in accordance with their various degrees
of approval or tolerance of the proposal, have contributed or are
contributing, by written words or by spoken words, either to the opinion
that society should adopt the proposal, or to the opinion that, without
abolishing lawful marriage, society should recognize the Free Contract as
a kind of marriage, to the extent of holding persons who live under it
conscientiously, as blameless or not greatly blameworthy for doing so.
The work of creating the romantic Shelley, and endowing him with personal
and moral graces, never conspicuous in the real Shelley, was begun not
long after the poet's death, when Mrs. Shelley and Mrs. Williams induced
Clint to compose the fancy picture, to which the world is, through the
engraver's art, indebted for its very erroneous conception of Shelley's
personal aspect. Who has not, through the engraver's art, gazed on the
face of that charming portraiture: a face so remarkable for gentle
delicacy and symmetrical loveliness? Gazing on the beauteous face, who has
not observed the rather large, straight, delicately-modelled,
finely-pointed nose?--The original of the lovely picture had a notably
unsymmetrical face, and a little turn-up nose.
Having replaced his unsymmetrical visage with a face of exquisite
symmetry, the cunning idolaters have introduced the poet as a gentleman of
high ancestral dignity, to a world ever too quick to honour men of ancient
gentility. His remote forefathers have been proclaimed persons of knightly
rank and virtue. His house (founded though it was by a comparatively
self-made man, who won his baronetcy years after the poet's birth) has
been declared a branch of the Michelgrove Shelleys. Cynics and humourists
may well smile to recall all that has been written of the poet's mediæval
ancestors and his shield of twenty-one quarterings, whilst they remember
at the same time that his grandfather was the younger son of a Yankee
apothecary, that his earlier people of the eighteenth and seventeenth
centuries were undistinguished though gentle persons, the squireens and
farmers, of whose claim to be rated with the great families of Sussex more
will be said in a subsequent chapter.
Endowing him with aristocratic descent, the Shelleyan idolaters have
discovered indications of nobility in the Sussex provincialisms that
qualified the utterances of the poet's singularly disagreeable voice, and
may be now and then detected in his outpourings of song: provincialisms to
remind the reader of Byron's scarcely perceptible Scotch accent, and the
Scotticisms of expression that are occasionally discoverable in his poems.
The Sussex peasantry seldom sound the final _g_ of words ending with that
letter, and Sussex gentlemen are sometimes heard to say 'Good mornin' to
one another.' Shelley was sometimes guilty of this provincialism. For
instance, in _Laon and Cythna_ (1817), and again in _Arethusa_ (1820), he
makes _ruin_ rhyme to _pursuing_. Mr. Buxton Forman regards the
provincialism as an indication of the poet's aristocratic quality. 'I need
not,' says the enthusiastic editor, 'tell the reader that, to this day, it
is an affectation current among persons who are, or pretend to be, of the
aristocratic caste, not only to drop the final _g_ in these cases
themselves, but to stigmatize its pronunciation by other people as
"pedantic."'
Englishmen like people to be truthful, and in the long-run never fail to
honour the man, who, having the courage of his opinions, proclaims them
fearlessly, even though they may quarrel with him for a season, because he
tells the truth too pugnaciously, or persists in telling them truths they
don't wish to think about. To commend him to lovers of truth, the
Shelleyan idolaters declare the poet to have been, from his boyhood till
his death, daringly, unfalteringly, unwaveringly, invariably truthful.
Lady Shelley insists that at Eton he was more truth-loving than other
boys,--was, indeed, chiefly remarkable for unswerving and audacious
veracity. In half-a-dozen different biographies he is extolled for his
intolerance of falsehood. Most of the misfortunes that befel him are
attributed to his habit of telling the truth in season and out of season.
It is, indeed, admitted even by some of his panegyrists that he now and
then made statements at variance with fact. But on these occasions he is
declared to have spoken erroneously through the delusive influence of a
too powerful imagination. The inordinately vigorous fancy, that enabled
him to write _Queen Mab_, caused him sometimes to imagine things to have
taken place, when they had not taken place. His mis-statements resulted
altogether from misconception, and should not be regarded as in any way
affecting the overwhelming evidence that he loved truth more than life;
that he made great sacrifices for the truth's sake, that he was, in fact,
a martyr for the truth. It is, however, all too certain that he uttered
mis-statements, for which the force of his imagination cannot in any
degree whatever have been accountable; and that, instead of being more
truth-loving than most men, he was phenomenally untruthful. Telling fibs
in order to escape momentary annoyance or gain a trivial advantage, he
could instruct other persons to tell fibs in his interest. He was singular
amongst men of his degree for being able to declare his intention of
practising deceit, and forthwith being as bad as his word. Instances of
this candour in falsehood are given in the ensuing pages. When he tells a
fib, a gentleman is usually too much ashamed of the matter to take any one
into his confidence on the subject. There were times, when no such sense
of shame troubled Shelley.
Much has been written to Shelley's honour about his habitual temperance
and general disregard for the pleasures of the table. It has been
accounted to him for righteousness that he seldom drank wine, and for
months together ate nothing but vegetable food. As Shelley at one period
of his career found, or fancied, that his health was better, his mind
lighter and more vigorous, his whole soul in higher contentment, when he
lived wholly on vegetable food, than when he ate flesh, I cannot see why
it was eminently virtuous in him to take the food that seemed to suit him
best. As he drank fresh water and strong tea, because he liked them better
than mild ale and stiff toddy, it remains to be shown why he should be so
much commended for drinking what he liked best. Still temperance in diet
is one of the minor virtues. But was Shelley a temperate man in his
drinks? If he never drank wine immoderately, and in some periods of his
career was a total abstainer from all the usual alcoholic drinks, it is
certain that he was at times a heavy laudanum-drinker; and it is not
obvious why it is less intemperate to be sottish with spirits of wine, in
which opium has been macerated; than to be sottish with gin, in which
gentian has been macerated.
Misrepresenting the poet's story in the smaller matters, the Shelleyan
apologists have misrepresented it even more daringly in the larger
matters. Endeavouring to explain away his gravest academic offence, they
maintain that _The Necessity of Atheism_ was a trivial essay, a little
argumentative syllabus, a humorous _brochure_, that did not exhibit his
real opinions on matters pertaining to religion; that it was printed only
for private circulation amongst the learned; that it was never offered for
sale to the general public. Yet it is certain that he reproduced some of
its argument in the _Letter to Lord Ellenborough_; that more than two
years after its first publication, he revised, amended, and reprinted it
in the notes to _Queen Mab_; that later still he reproduced some of its
reasoning in the _Refutation of Deism_, and that it was offered for sale
to anyone who cared to buy it at Oxford. Mr. Garnett declares the essay to
have been nothing more than 'a squib,' and gives Hogg as his authority for
the staggering statement. Yet it is certain that Hogg makes no such
statement; but is, on the contrary, most careful and precise in declaring
how completely earnest and sincere Shelley was in the matter. Declaring
that the essay was no expression of the author's genuine opinions, the
Shelleyan apologists almost in the same breath declare it to have been an
utterance of his real convictions, and applaud him for his courage in
putting forth clearly what he believed to be true.
One of the prime biographic fictions about Shelley is, that he endured
persecution for publishing this equally sincere and insincere profession
of no faith, not only at Oxford but in his domestic circle. It is asserted
that he was treated cruelly by his father, excluded from Field Place,
driven from his boyhood's home, and even disinherited, for this and other
bold declarations of what he believed to be true. Sympathy and admiration
are demanded for him as a martyr for the truth's sake. 'On the sensitively
affectionate feelings of the young controversialist and poet,' Lady
Shelley says, 'this sentence of exclusion from his boyhood's home
inflicted a bitter pang, yet he was determined to bear it for the sake of
what he believed to be right and true.' With the perplexing perversity
that characterised so many of his utterences about his private affairs,
Shelley himself, after surrendering by his own act, and of his own will,
the position assigned to him in respect to his grandfather's property by
his grandfather's will, used to speak of himself as having made great
sacrifices of his material interests for the truth, and to offer himself
to the sympathy and admiration of his friends as a martyr for conscience's
sake. Yet it is certain that he was treated kindly by his father in
respect to the causes and immediate consequences of his academic disgrace;
that he was excluded from Field Place in the first instance, not on
account of his religious opinions, but on account of his outrageous
disregard for his father's wishes in respect to other matters; that he was
excluded from Field Place in 1811 only for a few weeks, during which time
so far from 'being determined to bear it for the sake of what he believed
to be right and true,' he never for a moment designed to respect the
sentence of banishment, but intended to return to his boyhood's home as
soon as it should please him to do so; and that, the few weeks of discord
having passed, he was received at Field Place by his father and endowed
with a handsome yearly allowance of pocket-money. No less certain is it
that he was never driven from his boyhood's home; that on eventually
withdrawing from the old domestic circle, he left it of his own accord, to
make a runaway match with a licensed victualler's daughter; and that,
instead of resulting from differences of opinion on questions of religion
and politics (differences which at most only aggravated and embittered a
quarrel due to other causes), his estrangement from and rupture with his
family resulted from (1) their reasonable displeasure at his
_mésalliance_, and (2) the reasonable displeasure of his grandfather, and
father, at his refusal to concur with them in effecting a particular
settlement of certain real estate.
To give yet another example of the audacious way in which Shelley's story
has been mistold in respect to its principal incidents. Every one has
heard how Shelley was deprived of the custody of his children by Lord
Eldon; how, on account of his religious opinions, and for no other cause,
he was robbed of his dear babes by the cruel and fanatical Lord
Chancellor. Lady Shelley speaks furiously of 'the monstrous injustice of
this decree.' In an article, written to the lively gratification of the
Shelleyan Enthusiasts and the Shelleyan Socialists, the _Edinburgh Review_
not long since (October, 1882) declared that the judgment was formed and
the decree delivered, 'on the ground, not of Shelley's misconduct to his
wife, but of the opinions expressed in his writings.' The words of the
Edinburgh Reviewer are absolutely erroneous. The judgment was formed in
steady consideration of the poet's misconduct to his first wife; and in
its delivery the Chancellor was careful to say, not once, but repeatedly,
that he decreed against the poet's petition, _not_ on account of any
opinions expressed in his writings (considered apart from conduct), _but_
on account of his _conduct_ (the word conduct, conduct, conduct, being
reiterated by the Chancellor, till the reader of the decree grows weary of
it)--on account of his _conduct_ in respect to his wife; _conduct_ showing
his resolve to act on the Free Contract principles, set forth in the
anti-matrimonial note to _Queen Mab_; _conduct_ justifying the opinion
that if Harriett Westbrook's children were delivered to him, he would rear
them to hold his own anti-matrimonial views. That so respectable an organ
of public opinion should make this statement is significant. It indicates
how great is the force with which I venture to contend, not without hope
that my weak hands may be strengthened by all who reverence marriage.
A matter to be noticed, in connection with the efforts to substitute the
romantic for the Real Shelley, is that their success will involve the
discredit, if not the absolute infamy, of nearly all the principal
persons, whom the poet encountered in friendship or enmity, on his way
from birth to death. To accept the extravagant stories told by Shelley or
his idolaters is to believe, that the poet's father was a prodigy of
parental wickedness; that his mother was hatefully deficient in maternal
affection; that Dr. Greenlaw was a malicious, base-natured pedagogue; that
the Eton masters (from Dr. Keate to Mr. Bethell) delighted in persecuting
their famous pupil; that the Master and Fellows of University College were
actuated by the basest motives (including sycophancy to a powerful
minister) in requiring the poet to leave Oxford; that Hogg was a nauseous
villain, who attempted to seduce his friend's wife within a few weeks of
her wedding-day; that the first Mrs. Shelley broke her marriage-vow; that
William Godwin, instead of feeling like the honest man he affected to be
at his daughter's flight, chuckled in his sleeve at his girl's good
fortune in winning a rich baronet's son for her paramour and eventual
husband; that Lord Chancellor Eldon was an unjust judge, who delivered a
monstrous decree at the instigation of religious bigotry and political
resentment; that Peacock was either a simpleton or traitor in bearing
testimony to the first Mrs. Shelley's conjugal goodness; that William
Jerdan was a virulent slanderer; that Sir John Taylor Coleridge was a
malignant calumniator; that Byron, whom Shelley throughout successive
years honoured as a supremely great man, and for a while worshipt as a
god, was the meanest, paltriest, dirtiest knave that ever broke a sacred
trust, and stole a letter. It is thus that the creators of the romantic
Shelley deal with the persons most influential on the poet's career and
reputation. It is true they have good words for the hard-swearing Windsor
apothecary, who gave the Etonian Shelley lessons in commination and
chemistry; and for Leigh Hunt, the equally insatiable and charming
parasite, who took all he could get from his young friend's pocket. The
Squire of Field Place, Dr. Greenlaw, Dr. Keate, Mr. Bethell, the Master
and Tutors of University College, Hogg, William Godwin, Lord Eldon,
Peacock, William Jerdan, Sir John Taylor Coleridge, Byron, were all odious
in different ways. The only good and true men, of all the many notable
men, Shelley encountered on his way through life, were Dr. Lind and Leigh
Hunt. Surely there must be something wrong in the story, that slays so
many reputations, whilst it selects Dr. Lind and Leigh Hunt for approval.
Were there not another and very different side to the story, this book
would not have been written. Unless I read it amiss (and I am sure I read
it aright, for I have studied it carefully, and in doing so have found it
to have been perused only in parts, and in some parts with strange
carelessness, by all previous biographers), it stands out clear upon the
record, that from his boyhood Shelley was disposed to rise in rebellion
against all persons placed in authority over him; that instead of having
the gentle nature attributed to him by fanciful historians, he was
quick-tempered and resentful; that without being desperately wicked, his
heart was strangely deceitful towards himself; that he was a bad and
disloyal son to a kind-hearted and well-intentioned father, and by no
means a good son to a gentle-natured and conscientious mother; that he was
a bad husband to his first wife, and far from a faultless husband to his
second wife; that, together with several agreeable characteristics, he
possessed several dangerous qualities; and that he was, at least towards
one person, a bad friend.
So strangely has Shelley's story been mistold, that this last assertion is
likely to make readers start with surprise and revolt against the author.
Let it, therefore, be justified at once. The poet had a familiar friend,
from whom he had received much kindness, for whom he professed cordial
veneration, and with whom he lived in close intimacy. This friend had an
only daughter, a bright, lively, romantic, lovely girl, still only sixteen
years old. Reared within the lines of religious orthodoxy, this young girl
had been educated to think of marriage just as other young English girls
are usually taught to think of it. Though he had in former time been an
advocate of the Free Contract, her father had changed his views about
marriage before her birth, and had abandoned his Free Contract views when
she was still a nursling. Soon after making this girl's acquaintance,
Shelley passed into discord with his wife; and soon after ceasing to love
his wife, he fixed his affections on his friend's daughter. Without
speaking to his friend on the subject, or giving him occasion to suspect
what he was about, Shelley paid his addresses to this child, and had won
her heart, ere ever it occurred to her father that they might be living
too intimately and affectionately with one another. It was with great
difficulty Shelley overcame the child's notions of right in which she had
been educated; but, eventually, he accomplished his purpose. A few days
later, leaving his wife in England, Shelley stole this young child from
her home, and, carrying her off to the Continent, lived with her as though
she were his wife. He did this, though she was his most intimate friend's
only daughter, though she was only sixteen years old, and though he had no
prospect of ever being able to marry her. The creators of the romantic
Shelley deal with this episode of Shelley's story as though it were a
pleasant and unusually interesting love-passage. Some of them are unable
to see that Shelley was at all to blame in the business. Those of them,
who admit it was not altogether right of him to act thus towards so young
a girl, maintain that the author of such superlatively fine poetry as
_Adonais_ and _The Cenci_ cannot have been very wrong in the affair, and
should not be judged in respect to the matter, as though he were a young
man incapable of writing fine poetry. No one of them has a word of
compassion for the girl's father. Mr. Froude is of opinion that in this
matter Shelley was guilty of nothing worse than 'the sin of acting on
emotional theories of liberty,' and should be judged tenderly, because he
was young and enthusiastic! Differing from Mr. Froude, I venture to say
that, in acting thus ill towards the girl, Shelley was guilty of very
hateful treason towards his friend. I ask English fathers with young
children about them, and English brothers with young sisters for
playmates, to judge between me and my adversary.
Since it dismissed Hogg with scant courtesy for being too realistic and
communicative, Field Place has done much to gratify the Shelleyan
enthusiasts and socialists. Soon after publishing the uniformly erroneous
_Shelley Memorials_, Field Place promised to produce, in due season,
evidence that Shelley was not seriously to blame in his treatment of his
first wife. For years Field Place has gathered evidences for the poet's
vindication. Field Place aided Mr. Buxton Forman in producing his stately
and careful edition of the poet's works. In comparatively recent time the
Field Place muniments have enabled a well-known writer to produce the
memoir of the poet's father-in-law (William Godwin), and a memoir of Mary
Wollstonecraft, in which she is styled Gilbert Imlay's wife, and is said
to have thought herself his wife before God and man, though they were
never married. And now Field Place is enabling another writer to produce
another authoritative history of Shelley and Mary, that shall raise Mary
Godwin yet nearer to the angels, and bring her husband's story into more
perfect harmony with the straight nose and symmetrical lineaments of
Clint's composition.
It is not surprising that Field Place should wish to produce some more
adequate memoir of its poet than Lady Shelley's _Shelley Memorials; from
Authentic Sources_. But however cleverly it may be executed, only the most
hopeful can hope that the promised biography will afford satisfaction to
the general public. It is simply impossible for it to satisfy those who
want the truth about Shelley, and at the same time to satisfy the
enthusiasts who would be pained by the truth, and the Shelleyan
Socialists who are chiefly desirous that the truth should not be told. To
satisfy those who want the truth and the whole of it: to produce a memoir
that shall be worth the paper on which it is printed, it will be necessary
for the official biographer to show that Lady Shelley's work is from first
to last a book of mistakes--that it is wrong in every page; wrong in its
views of the poet's character; wrong in its general outline of his career;
wrong in its incidents; wrong in its names and dates; wrong, even in its
particulars of domestic affairs, legal matters, and pecuniary
arrangements--particulars in respect to which a biographer, with access to
authentic sources of information, has no excuse for blundering. Can such
candour be looked for from the source which gave us the _Shelley
Memorials_? Is it conceivable that the new official scribe will be
permitted to deal thus honestly with Lady Shelley's book from authentic
sources? If he is required to make his book agree with this thing from
authentic sources, he must dismiss the hope of pleasing the general
public.
On the other hand, to please the enthusiasts and the more fervid Shelleyan
Socialists he must tell that Shelley was sinless, stainless, divine; that
Mary Wollstonecraft was married, in the sight of God and man, to the
American adventurer, who never married her; and that Mary Godwin showed a
justifiable disregard of social prejudices, when she went off to
Switzerland with another woman's husband. He must produce a work more or
less calculated to illuminate the English people out of their reverence
for marriage, and educate them into a philosophical tolerance of the Free
Contract. Nothing less thorough will appear to the more fervid of the
Shelleyan Socialists a sufficient vindication of the poet's superhuman
excellence.
For in these days, to please both sets of zealots, it is not enough for a
biographer to delight in Shelley's verse; to render homage to his genius;
to think him--as all men of culture and poetical sensibility concur in
thinking him--the brightest, most strenuous, and most musical of lyric
poets; and at the same time, taking a charitable view of his failings and
indiscretions, to palliate them in all honest ways, or look away from
them, when they admit of no honest palliation. This is not enough for the
enthusiasts, who insist that the poet's character and career were
altogether in harmony with his art. It only exasperates the most
strenuous of the social innovators, who honouring him for his social
philosophy even more than for his poetry, have no word of cordial censure,
and scarcely a word of regret, for the way in which he acted on 'his
emotional theories of liberty.' Readers must not blink the fact, that the
more able and resolute of the Shelleyan enthusiasts recognize in Shelley a
great social teacher and regenerator, as well as a great poet. To Mr.
Buxton Forman, the author of _Laon and Cyntha_ is 'that Shelley who, in
some circumstances, might have been the Saviour of the World.' It is
needless for me to express my opinion of the comparison instituted by
these words. It is enough for me to say that the words are Mr. Buxton
Forman's words, and that he represents favourably the learning and
sentiment of a body of gentlemen, whose generous fervour appears to me
more commendable than their discretion.
When it is possible for such words to be written by an eminent Shelleyan
specialist, and to be read with approval by men of high culture, it must
surely be admitted that Shelleyan enthusiasm has gone quite far enough;
and that it is well for a writer to produce a truthful account of the
poet, who is thus offered to universal homage.
I have not discovered the Real Shelley. The poet of these volumes is the
same Real Shelley, who appears in his most agreeable aspects in Hogg's
biography, the delightful book that was stopped midway, because its
realism offended the Hunts and Field Place. I mean to show that Shelley
was judged fairly, though severely, by those of his contemporaries who,
whilst recognizing his genius, condemned his principles, conduct, and
social theories. In respect to the Real Shelley, I shall merely bring to
light what has been hurtfully withdrawn, or hurtfully withheld from view.
As for the fictitious Shelley, with which the Real Shelley has been
replaced, I mean to demolish it. In destroying it, I shall be animated by
a desire to do something before I go away, to counteract the strong stream
of literature--a literature of books, pamphlets, magazine-articles, and
articles in powerful journals--which for more than a quarter of a century
has been educating people to approve or tolerate the pernicious social
philosophy, that requires sound-hearted England to abolish marriage and
replace it with the Free Contract.
CHAPTER II.
THE SHELLEYS OF SUSSEX.
Medwin's Blunders--Lady Shelley's Statement of The Case--The
Michelgrove Shelleys--Sir William Shelley, Justice of The Common
Pleas--The Castle Goring Shelleys--Their Pedigree at the Heralds'
College--Evidences of the Connexion of the Two Families--John Shelley,
'Esquire and Lunatic'--Timothy Shelley, the Yankee Apothecary--Bysshe
Shelley's Career--His Runaway Match with Catherine Michell--His
Marriage with the Heiress of Penshurst--His Great Wealth--The Poet's
Alleged Pride in his Connexion with the Sidneys--His Gentle, but not
Aristocratic, Lineage.
So much has been written in the ways of sycophancy or vaingloriousness
about Shelley's Norman descent and aristocratic quality, it is necessary
to glance at some of the facts of his ancestral story.
The poet's friend, from the time when they were schoolfellows at
Brentford, Thomas Medwin the Younger, was also the poet's kinsman--his
third cousin, through Sir Bysshe Shelley's marriage with Mary Catherine
Michell, and his second cousin, through Sir Timothy Shelley's marriage
with Elizabeth Pilford. It might have been supposed that a biographer,
thus related to Shelley by blood and friendship, would know the prime
facts of his friend's pedigree, and state them without egregious error.
But poor Tom Medwin was not remarkable for accuracy.
To rely in this affair on the whilom _littérateur_ and cavalry officer, is
to believe that the poet was a lineal descendant of Sir John Shelley of
Maresfield Park, who was created a baronet in 1611; to believe that this
Sir John Shelley's son (William) was a Justice of the Common Pleas; and to
believe that the poet's great-grandfather (Timothy Shelley, of Fen Place,
Co. Sussex) was a lineal descendant, in the ninth descent, of the
aforesaid baronet of James the First's time. 'I will only say,' Medwin
remarks lightly, 'that Sir John Shelley, of Maresfield Park, who dated his
Baronetage from the earliest creation of that title in 1611, had besides
other issue, two sons, Sir William, a Judge of the Common Pleas, and
Edward; from the latter of whom, in the seventh descent, sprung Timothy,
who also had two sons, and settled--having married an American lady--at
Christ's Church, Newark, in North America.'
Medwin is wrong in all the really important allegations of the brief
statement. Sir John Shelley of Michelgrove (the baronet referred to) had
two sons; but neither of them was named Edward; neither of them became a
Justice of the Common Pleas; neither of them was in any way or degree
accountable for Percy Bysshe Shelley's appearance on the earth's surface.
The poet was no more descended from Sir John Shelley, the first of the
Michelgrove baronets, than he was descended from the man in the moon. How
could the poet's great-grandfather (Timothy, born in 1700 A.D.) be the
eighth in descent from the first Michelgrove baronet, the seventh in
descent from either of the baronet's sons? Human generations do not come
and go at the rate of seven to a century.
To pass for a moment from Tom Medwin (of whose egregious mis-statements
something more must be said) to the present Lady Shelley, the poet's
daughter-in-law. 'At the close of the last century,' says this lady in her
_Shelley Memorials: from Authentic Sources_, 'the family of the Shelleys
had long held a high position among the large landholders of Sussex.
Fortunate marriages in two generations preceding the birth of the poet
considerably increased the wealth and influence of the house, the head of
which was a staunch Whig.' Lady Shelley's book from authentic sources
contains several statements of no authenticity. For each of the principal
statements of the above-quoted words, she had, however, good authority.
But instead of coming to her from a single authentic source, the facts
embodied in the quotation were drawn from two different authentic sources,
the archives of the Michelgrove Shelleys, and the archives of the Castle
Goring Shelleys; and by cleverly combining the two sets of facts, Lady
Shelley conveys to her readers a very erroneous impression respecting the
condition of the poet's seventeenth-century ancestors. Unquestionably, the
Sussex Shelleys, at the close of the eighteenth century, had long held a
high position among the large landowners of the county. But these
fortunate Shelleys were not the family of which the poet was the brightest
ornament. They were the Michelgrove Shelleys; whereas the poet came of
people, differing greatly from the Michelgrove people in social quality.
He was of the Castle Goring Shelleys--a family that, instead of being
merely enriched, was created and established by the fortunate marriages to
which Lady Shelley refers. Before the first of those marriages, wedlock
had done much for the advantage of these inferior Shelleys. For instance,
the marriage, in 1692, of John Shelley, of Fen Place, _jure uxoris_, with
Helen, co-heir of Roger Bysshe, of Fen Place, Co. Sussex, had reclaimed
the poet's direct male ancestors from a state of territorial vagrancy, and
given them a permanent, though modest, abiding-place. But for a
considerable period after that marriage, the direct ancestral precursors
of the Castle Goring Shelleys were no such house as the readers of Lady
Shelley's book are likely to imagine. The Michelgrove Shelleys were one
'house,' the Castle Goring Shelleys were quite another house; though it
has for some time been the fashion of biographers to mix the two houses,
and speak of them by turns as one house, or as branches of the same house.
The Michelgrove Shelleys were an ancient house. The Castle Goring Shelleys
were a mushroom family, disdainfully regarded by the Michelgrove people,
at the opening of the nineteenth century.
Something more must be said of the older of these houses. The Michelgrove
Shelleys are said, for reasons no longer discoverable, to have entered the
country with the Conqueror. They may have done so. There is better
evidence that they had lands in Kent in the times of Edward I. and Edward
II., before they established themselves in Sussex; and still better
testimony, that one of the clan (John Shelley) was Member of Parliament
for Rye from 1415 to 1428. With this parliamentary personage, the house,
or rather the family from which the house proceeded, comes into the clear
light of history. Two long generations later (generations so lengthy that
one has reason to suspect a failure of the record) the house acquired a
dignity, which gave it an enduring place amongst the historic families of
the realm.
Bred to the law, William Shelley (the grandson, or maybe the
great-grandson, of the afore-mentioned Member for Rye) became Reader of
the Inner Temple in 1517, and after holding successively the office of a
Judge of the Sheriff's Court and the office of Recorder of the City of
London, rose to be a Judge of the Common Pleas somewhere about the
beginning of 1527. Before mounting to this eminence he had represented the
City in Parliament, and practised for six years as a Serjeant-at-law in
Westminster Hall. Those who know Cavendish's _Wolsey_ do not need to be
reminded of the part taken by this fortunate lawyer in the negotiations
that closed with the Cardinal's surrender of York House to Henry the
Eighth. 'Tell his Highness,' said the fallen Cardinal to the Judge of the
Common Pleas, 'that I am his most faithful subject and obedient beadsman,
whose command I will in no wise disobey; but will in all things fulfil his
pleasure, as you the father of the law say I may. I therefore charge your
conscience to discharge me, and show His Highness from me that I must
desire His Majesty to remember there is both heaven and hell;' a message
which the judge probably forgot to deliver, as he lived to entertain the
King at Michelgrove, and was continued in his office till Henry's death.
Surviving the sovereign, whom he served on the bench of the Common Pleas
for twenty years, Sir William Shelley served Edward the Sixth in the same
capacity, to the day of his own death, which occurred between November 3,
1548 (the date of his last fine), and May 10, 1549, the date of his
successor's appointment.
Fortunate in his professional career, Sir William Shelley was no less
fortunate in his domestic affairs. Marrying an heiress, he had, with other
children, John, the grandfather of the first Michelgrove baronet, and Sir
Richard Shelley, the last English Prior of St. John of Jerusalem.
Not much less than a century wrong in assigning the legal eminence of
Henry the Eighth's judge to the eldest son of James the First's baronet,
Medwin wrote under a general impression that the Shelleys to whom he was
related, had somehow or other descended from the Michelgrove house, an
impression which the poet seems also to have cherished, and imparted to
his college-friend and biographer, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, who writes in
serio-comic vein of Sir Guyon de Shelley and Sir Richard Shelley (the
Knight of Malta), as though the Grand Prior of the sixteenth century and
the Paladin with the three conchs were veritable forefathers of the Castle
Goring Shelleys.
That these Shelleys of the junior house were no family of singular
antiquity or overpowering dignity, is shown by the pedigree of Percy
Bysshe Shelley, published in the first volume of Mr. Forman's edition of
the poet's prose works. A pedigree of only nine generations, beginning
with mention of Henry Shelley, of Worminghurst, Co. Sussex, who died in
1623, this evidential writing puts it beyond question that the poet, of
whose ancestral grandeur so much has been written, was no man of noble or
otherwise splendid lineage; puts it beyond question, that whether regard
be had to the number of its generations, the antiquity of the earliest
dates, or the importance of the persons commemorated in its entries, it is
(from the date of Henry Shelley's death _temp._ James I. to Percy Bysshe
Shelley's birth in 1792) nothing more than such a pedigree as could be
displayed by the majority of the gentle families of the middle way of
English life, who never for a moment think of rating themselves as
families of patrician worth.
One or two rather awkward matters excepted, this pedigree is a fair and
honest record of the births, marriages, and deaths, of nine successive
generations of gentle people; but as an exhibition of familiar grandeur,
it is no more impressive than any pedigree one would regard as a matter of
course in the muniment room of a country gentleman, tracing his descent
from a gentle yeoman of the Elizabethan period. It mentions eight of the
poet's forefathers in the direct right line. Describing some of these
eight individuals as 'esquires,' and some of them as 'gentlemen,' the
record shows that no one of them bore any hereditary honour, or even the
dignity of knighthood before the poet's birth. It shows that no one of
them married a woman of higher quality than the degree of a simple
gentlewoman. Doubtless they were (with a single exception) gentlewomen in
the heraldic sense of the term,--daughters of gentlemen bearing arms,--but
to use an old-world phrase, no one of them was 'a woman of quality.' The
record shows, that at the time of the poet's birth, no one of his eight
male ancestors in the direct right line had served the State with
distinction, won a foremost place in one of the learned professions, or
attained to any social eminence higher than a place in a Commission of the
Peace.
Such is the evidence of the document of which Mr. Forman justly remarks,
'the pedigree speaks for itself to any careful reader.' And this evidence
is the more impressive, because the carefully elaborated record is the
pedigree deposited at the Heralds' College on 6th March, 1816, by Mr. John
Shelley Sidney (the poet's uncle by the half-blood), at a moment when he
was especially desirous of figuring to the best possible advantage in the
esteem of heralds and their employers. Regard being had to this
gentleman's character and social ambition, and his pride in his descent
from the Sidneys, it cannot be questioned that he made his genealogical
record showy and impressive to the utmost of his ability,--that he would
fain have driven it back another generation,--that could he have
demonstrated a connection between the Castle Goring and Michelgrove
Shelleys, he would not have omitted to prove them two branches of the same
tree.
Mr. John Shelley Sidney's forbearance from pushing the genealogical record
a single stage backwards beyond the certain evidences, is the more
noteworthy and creditable, because he can scarcely have been ignorant of
the inconclusive, though by no means inconsiderable, testimony that the
Henry Shelley, who died at Worminghurst in 1623, was the grandson of
Edward Shelley of the said parish, and that this Edward Shelley was the
younger brother of the Judge of the Common Pleas, who was the actual
founder of the Michelgrove family.
What are the inconclusive, though considerable, evidences of this descent
of the Castle Goring Shelleys and the Michelgrove Shelleys from a common
ancestor, John Shelley, the judge's father? A manuscript, in the
possession of the present Sir Percy Shelley, bears witness that the Henry
Shelley, of Worminghurst, mentioned in the first entry of the pedigree
(deposited by Mr., afterwards Sir John Shelley Sidney in the Heralds'
College), was the son of Henry Shelley of the same parish. Consequently,
if reliance may be placed on this manuscript, the most ancient of the male
ancestors in the right line, from whom Mr. John Shelley Sidney traced his
descent, was preceded by his father at Worminghurst, a fact carrying the
poet's lineage another generation backwards, into the closing term of the
Tudor period. There is, moreover, in the chancel of Worminghurst Church, a
brass, of sixteenth century workmanship, to the memory of Edward Shelley,
Esq., one of the four masters of the royal household, in the successive
reigns of Henry the Eighth, Edward the Sixth, and Mary Tudor. There are
grounds for believing that this Edward Shelley was a son of John Shelley,
of Michelgrove, and younger brother of Sir William Shelley, Justice of the
Common Pleas. The archives of the Michelgrove Shelleys certify that Sir
William Shelley, the judge of the Common Pleas, had a younger brother
named Edward. That the poet's certain male ancestors in the right line
bore the same arms as the Michelgrove Shelleys in the seventeenth century,
that vigilant heralds permitted them to bear those arms, and that no
baronet of the Michelgrove Shelleys ever questioned their right to bear
those arms, are noteworthy pieces of testimony that the two families came
from the same source. In the absence of positive evidence of the fact, it
cannot be denied that Sir Bernard Burke had sufficient presumptive
testimony, to warrant him in recording that the poet was a lineal
descendant of Edward Shelley, the judge's younger brother. There is also
fair presumptive testimony that the judge's younger brother Edward was the
Edward Shelley, who held office as one of the Masters of Henry the
Eighth's household, and found his grave in Worminghurst. Such evidence
would not be sufficient to establish a claim to a dormant peerage, or to
the reversion of a great estate; but it is sufficient for the purpose of
Shelley's personal historian.
'The house,' which Lady Shelley regards as having been merely enriched by
the fortunate marriages that created it, was a curiously vagrant family
for a house 'holding a high position among the large landholders of
Sussex.' Leaving Worminghurst, Co. Sussex, on the demise of Henry Shelley
('esq.,' as he is described in the official pedigree), who died there in
1623, the house moved to Ichingfield, in the time of Richard Shelley
('gent.,' as he is modestly defined in the same genealogical chart). Under
the government of John Shelley, 'esq.,' who died in 1673, the house rested
at Thakeham, whence it migrated to Fen Place, in the parish of Worth, Co.
Sussex, on the marriage, in 1692, of John Shelley (of Fen Place, _jure
uxoris_, Co. Sussex, esq.), with Hellen, younger of the two daughters and
co-heirs of Roger Bysshe, of Fen Place, aforesaid. Of the eight children
of this marriage, the reader of the present work is invited to take notice
of no more than two, John Shelley, the second, and Timothy Shelley, the
third son. Born at Worth in 1696, this last-named John Shelley, who died
in 1772 at Uckfield, is handed down to all future time by the pedigree as
'an esquire and lunatic.' That there was a strain of insanity in the
Castle-Goring Shelleys is a matter to be borne in mind by those who are
interested in the poet and his nearest kindred. Percy Bysshe was
great-great-nephew of this lunatic, and great-grandson of the lunatic's
brother, Timothy, of whom further mention must be made.
Born at Worth, in April 1700, the third son, and fifth child, of a petty
squireen, who lived to have nine children to set going in the world,
Timothy, on coming to man's estate, emigrated to the American plantations,
with a slender purse and an abundant store of physical energy. It is
probable that he also carried across the Atlantic some knowledge of
medicine and surgery, acquired during an apprenticeship to a country
apothecary. As there is no evidence that he passed, or tried to pass, an
examination at the Apothecaries' Hall, or Surgeons' Hall, nor any evidence
that the adventurer underwent any medical training before he crossed the
Atlantic, Medwin may have been right in believing that he fought life's
battle in the New World as 'a quack doctor.' It should, however, be borne
in mind that, if he had served an apprenticeship to a Sussex apothecary,
this Timothy would have possessed all the legal qualification to kill and
cure, that was required of provincial apothecaries in the mother country
prior to the Medical Act of 1814. Anyhow, with or without qualification,
the adventurer established himself as a medicine man, and with quackery,
or without it, throve in his adopted calling. Practising at Christ's
Church, Newark, he married a widow with money. In this last particular he
held firmly to the main article of Shelleyan worldly wisdom. The poet's
ancestors may have married for love, but they usually required a
substantial compensation for the loss of celibatic freedom. The widow to
whom Timothy surrendered himself was the widow of a New York miller, named
Plum; and it is believed that her purse satisfied the hopes planted in her
admirer's breast by so suggestive a name. Marrying thus prudently, Timothy
Shelley, of Newark, became the father of his first-born son, John Shelley,
on the 10th of December, 1729, and of his second son, Bysshe Shelley (the
first of the Castle Goring baronets), on the 21st of June, 1731.
It is doubtful when Timothy of Newark returned to England, where his
father died in 1739, after surviving his eldest and issueless son by some
six years. He may have sailed 'for home,' on news coming to him in Newark
of his father's death. That he became the actual chief of the family on
his father's demise may be inferred from the fact that he is styled in
the pedigree his father's 'heir.' After setting his English affairs in
order, he may have returned to America for awhile. It is more probable,
however, that, returning to England with his two boys, when the elder of
them was some _ten_, and the younger some _eight_ years old, he was
content to play the part of a modest Sussex squireen to the day of his
death. Anyhow it is certain the equally adventurous and fortunate
apothecary (or 'quack doctor,' if any reader prefers Tom Medwin's word)
was the squire of Fen Place for a considerable term of years, before he
was coffined, and put under the floor of Warnham Church, in 1770, some two
years and six months before the death of his elder and lunatic brother.
What became of this fortunate apothecary's two sons, John (the elder) and
Bysshe (the younger)? Becoming the head of 'the House' on his father's
demise in 1770, the apothecary's elder son married the daughter of a
Sussex gentleman, led a comparatively uneventful life at Field Place, near
Horsham, and dying childless in 1790, was buried in Warnham Church; being
succeeded by his younger brother, a man far superior to him in address and
energy, if not in benevolence and piety. Planted by the petty squireen,
who took possession of Roger Bysshe's daughter and home, and watered by
the apothecary who had followed fortune, and found money in America, the
family that gave England her brightest, and sweetest, and most passionate
lyric poet, was raised to the dignity of a house, by the craft, greed, and
penuriousness of Bysshe Shelley, the first baronet of Castle Goring.
The several excellent writers, who have been misled on the matter by
Medwin, the Misleader, may take the present writer's assurance that the
gentleman, who won a baronetcy in his old age, never 'exercised the
profession of a quack doctor' in America. There is, however, sufficient
evidence that the Newark apothecary's younger son was designed to follow
his father's calling. In his sordid and eccentric old age, when the lord
of Castle Goring inhabited a small house hard by his favourite tap-room in
Horsham, it was generally believed that he had at one time practised
medicine in London. It may also be put upon the present record, that he
was believed to have been a partner in the professional activities of Dr.
James Graham, the notorious mesmeric charlatan, in whose Temple of Health
the fair and frail Emma Harte officiated as the Goddess Hygeia, before
she became Sir William Hamilton's wife and Nelson's mistress. Percy
Bysshe, the poet, told Hogg, that his grandfather supplied the money which
enabled Graham to set up his preposterous purple chariot. Percy's
statements, however, should be regarded suspiciously, when they tend to
the discredit of his sire and grandsire.
Whatever the means he used for making money, it is certain that the man,
who in his old age was remarkable for the stateliness of his presence, and
in his milder moods for the courtesy of manner, possessed in his youth no
ordinary charms of appearance and address. Tall, even as his famous
grandson, and qualified by his blue eyes and brown curls to captivate
heedless womankind, he had not crossed the threshold of manly estate, when
he found favour in the eyes of Miss Mary Catherine Michell, only child and
heir of the late Reverend Theobald Michell, clk., formerly of Horsham. The
young lady (only eighteen years old) having considerable possessions, it
is probable that her guardians thought she could do better for herself
than marry the boyish medical student, who was only the younger son of the
squire and whilom apothecary of Fen Place. Possibly they only expressed a
strong opinion, that the young man should wait awhile, and thereby avoid
the evils of precipitate wedlock. Possibly they had no opportunity of
expressing an opinion on the matter, until remonstrance would have been
out of time. To the young people it appeared a case for elopement and
irregular marriage; and, acting on this romantic view of their position,
they hastened to town and were married in 1752, at Keith's Chapel, Mayfair
(the fashionable place for Fleet marriages done in the west end of the
town). From Keith's Chapel they hastened to Paris, where the bride fell
ill of small-pox, and narrowly escaped the death that would have made Tom
Medwin's mother the heir of the late Rev. Theobald Michell's estate. Eight
years later, the lady died after giving birth to three children, and Mr.
Bysshe Shelley was at liberty to look out for a second heiress willing to
become his wife. The only son of this marriage was Timothy Shelley, the
poet's father, who became M.P. for New Shoreham, Co. Sussex.
Nine years after his first wife's death, Mr. Bysshe Shelley fixed his
affections on another heiress--the heiress of an historic line and an
historic estate--Miss Elizabeth Jane Sidney Perry, only daughter and heir
of William Perry, Esq., of Turvill Park, Bucks, Wormington, Co.
Gloucester, and Penshurst Place, Co. Kent. It is remarkable that an
heiress of so bright a lineage and so noble an estate--an heiress who, in
descent and fortune, was a fit match for an earl--an heiress lineally
descended from the Sidneys, Earls of Leicester--should have lived in
singleness to her twenty-ninth year. Perhaps this remarkable fact gave the
younger son of the Newark apothecary the requisite courage for a daring
exploit.
Thirty-eight years old, he was no longer young when he first conceived the
purpose of winning so notable an heiress. But though well on in middle
age, he had the figure, and face, and audacity, of a youngster. Taking up
a position, suitable for his purpose, in a little inn near the Park,
celebrated by Jonson's verse, and glorified by the loves of Waller and
Saccharissa, he crossed the lady's path in her walks, regarded her
worshipfully when she attended the services of Penshurst Church, knelt to
her beneath the spreading branches of 'the Lady's Oak.' Is it marvellous
that a suitor, so eager and vigilant, so comely and daring, achieved his
purpose, notwithstanding the disadvantages of inferior station and growing
years? Is it wonderful that the gentlewoman eloped with the suitor, who
valued her far more for her broad acres than her descent from the Sidneys?
Whatever the motives to the suit, Mr. Bysshe Shelley won, in gallant
fashion, the lady by whom he had his second lot of children,--five sons
and two daughters.
In the year following this marriage, the Newark apothecary was entombed in
Warnham Church; and eleven years later (May 1781) Mr. Bysshe Shelley again
found himself a widower when he was still in his fiftieth year. Henceforth
he devoted himself chiefly to the pursuit of money,--a pursuit in which he
was favoured by the death of his childless brother in 1790, when he
succeeded to the Fen Place and Field Place estates.
The family having come to his hands, he made 'a House' of it. In
1806,--when his little grandson, the future poet, was on the point of
going to Eton,--Mr. Bysshe Shelley became Sir Bysshe Shelley, baronet, of
Castle Goring; the dignity being the price, with which the Duke of Norfolk
rewarded him for former electioneering service, and prepaid him for
similar service to be rendered to the Howards and the Whig party to the
end of his days. At the date of this social promotion, Sir Bysshe Shelley
had already begun to build the egregious Castle which he never finished,
though he is said, by the unreliable Medwin, to have spent 80,000_l._ upon
it.
If he ever hoped for happiness in his later time, the hope was
disappointed. After he had married his daughters, and sent his sons into
life, the passion for money, which had long overpowered the other forces
of his nature, developed even to miserly madness. In other respects the
strain of insanity, that had given him a lunatic for an uncle, displayed
itself in his manifold eccentricities. Living at Horsham, in a little
house, and finding his most congenial associates in the tap-rooms of the
Horsham taverns, whilst his grandson went to school at Brentford and Eton,
the founder of the Castle Goring Shelleys disliked his son so cordially,
that he is said to have seldom greeted him without an outbreak of
passionate malevolence. Percy, the future poet, used to entertain his
comrades at Eton by cursing his absent sire; and at Oxford, he assured
Hogg, that he had acquired this singular taste for cursing his father
behind his back, from hearing old Sir Bysshe curse him to his face. It was
thus that this chief of the Castle Goring Shelleys lived from the creation
of his baronetcy in 1806 to his death in 1815, when he left vast wealth in
money and lands, _In Trust_, for the creation of the big entailed estate,
that should perpetuate the grandeur of 'the House' he had laboured so
resolutely to found. Medwin (no safe authority on details) says the old
man left to his descendants 300,000_l._ in the English funds, and landed
estates yielding a yearly revenue of 20,000_l._, besides the banknotes to
the amount of 10,000_l._ that were hidden in the books and other furniture
of the room, where he drew and yielded his last breath.
Another thing to be noticed in the evidences of this family is the
testimony to the newness of its grandeur, that may be gathered from the
records of its territorial possessions. Fen Place came to these Shelleys,
through the wedding-ring, so recently as the last decade of the
seventeenth century. They acquired Field Place by purchase in the earlier
half of the following (the eighteenth) century. For their place 'among the
large landholders of Sussex,' they are mainly indebted to the Newark
apothecary's younger son, who flourished in George the Third's time, and
died only a few months before the battle of Waterloo.
To take a true view of the poet's lineage and ancestral quality, the
reader must bear in mind the distinctness of the Michelgrove Shelleys and
the Castle Goring Shelleys,--a distinctness that would not be affected by
the production of positive and indisputable evidence, that the two
families had for their common progenitor, a gentle yeoman of Henry the
Eighth's time. Should this remote connexion of the two families ever be
put beyond question, it would be none the less true that, instead of being
of aristocratic descent, as so many biographers have asserted, the poet
came of a line of forefathers who were nothing more than 'gentle yeomen'
till the later time of George III. The poet was no lineal descendant of
the Justice of the Common Pleas, who may be fairly styled the founder of
the Michelgrove House. From the date of that slightly historic personage,
the Michelgrove family was a knightly house. Baronets from the creation of
the order, they intermarried with knightly and noble houses before and
after 1611, drawing to their veins the blood of the Belknaps,
FitzWilliamses, Sackvilles, Lovells, Reresbys, Vantelets, and Nevills. On
the other hand, from the earliest date of his genealogical record, the
poet's ancestors were mere gentle yeomen, intermarrying with families of
no higher gentility, till the poet's grandfather carried off the heiress
of the Penshurst Sidneys.
As no drop of Sidney blood came to his veins from his grandfather's second
marriage, and as his kindred of the half-blood at Penshurst were not
over-fond of their half-cousins at Field Place, it is scarcely conceivable
the poet was so proud of his connexion with the Sidneys as Medwin
represents. It may, however, have been so. For with all his vaunted
superiority to aristocratic prejudice, and all his sincere hostility to
aristocratic privilege, Shelley was by no means exempt from the weakness,
which disposed Byron in his vainer moods to think too much of his
nobility. The advocate of republican ideas, the apostle of freedom and
equality, he was sometimes curiously careful to remind his admirers that
he was no demagogue of vulgar origin, but resembled the Lionel of
_Rosalind and Helen_, in being the heir to 'great wealth and lineage
high.' When this humour prevailed within him, it is possible that he
sometimes looked away from the father whom he hated, the grandsire he
despised, the obscure yeomen whom he distasted, and could persuade
himself that, like his half-cousins at Penshurst, he, too, had somehow or
other descended from the Sidneys. But no such innocent exercise of fancy
would touch the facts or qualify the complexion of his genealogy. It is
nothing to the poet's dishonour to say that, though better born than
Shakespeare, he was no more fortunate in his ancestral story than the
majority--or, at least, a large minority of English gentlemen, moving in
the middle ways of gentle life.
CHAPTER III.
SHELLEY'S CHILDHOOD.
The Poet's Father--Shelley's Birth and Birth-Chamber--Miss Hellen
Shelley's Recollections--The Child-Shelley's Pleasant Fiction--His
Aspect at Tender Age--His Description of his own Nose--The Indian-Ink
Sketch--Miss Curran's 'Daub'--Williams's Water-Colour Drawing--Clint's
Composition--Engravings of 'The Daub' and 'The Composition'--The
Poet's Likeness in Marble--Shelley and Byron--Peacock and Hogg on
Shelley's Facial Beauty--The Colnaghi Engraving.
Whatever the failings of the Newark apothecary's younger son, it must be
recorded to his credit that he gave his son an education befitting the
chief of a territorial family. Inferior though he was in tact and
politeness to the great Chesterfield, whose precepts and example are said
to have been largely accountable for his manners and morality, Mr. Timothy
Shelley (Sir Bysshe's son and heir by Mary Catherine Michell) received the
training, and, notwithstanding the eccentricities that provoked the smiles
of London drawing-rooms, had the port and temper of an English gentleman.
It has been the fashion of biographers to decry this gentleman. Readers,
however, should decline to accept the poet's estimate of the second
baronet of Castle Goring, though the much-maligned gentleman wrote
comically ungrammatical letters, thought too highly of himself, talked
boastfully over his second bottle, swore well up to the mark of Georgian
good breeding, and believed himself the originator of every strenuous
argument in Paley's _Evidences_. The good landlord and kindly patron of
aged servants, the squire whose virtues blossomed in the dust, the amiable
father whose parental excellences were gratefully remembered by all his
surviving children, was neither the fool nor the barbarian his eldest son
thought him.
The Shelleyan enthusiasts have little charity for the poet's sire, even
the most discreet of them regarding him as a deplorably inconvenient
father for so marvellous a son. It is not clear what kind of father would
have won Percy's filial loyalty. In fairness to this sire, it should be
remembered that, if he was not the right kind of father for the poet, he
proved an excellent father to all his other children; and that, if the
poet should have had a more congenial father, Squire Timothy could not
well have had a more trying son than the boy of latent genius, who lived
to cover his house with glory.
After keeping his terms at the same Oxford College, from which his son was
expelled in the following century, Mr. Timothy Shelley made 'the grand
tour,' returning in due course with a smattering of French, an extremely
bad picture of the Eruption of Vesuvius, and 'a certain air' (if Medwin
may be trusted) of having seen the world. Having surveyed mankind in
European capitals, and entered middle age, he married Miss Elizabeth
Pilfold, a gentlewoman of good family and great beauty, who is lightly
regarded by the Shelleyan enthusiasts, because, in the conflict of her
husband and her son, she held loyally to the former, and declined to be
the partisan of the latter. It has even been urged to this lady's
discredit that, when her wilful boy would fain have shaken his sister's
confidence in the doctrines of the Church of England, she, in her mental
narrowness, was alarmed for the spiritual safety of her girls, and thought
it well that at least for a time they should be guarded from his
influence.
Had these parents foreseen the trouble that would come to them from their
first-born child, they would have welcomed him coldly on his arrival in
the room (at Field Place), one of whose walls has in recent time been
illustrated with this inscription:--
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
WAS BORN IN THIS CHAMBER
AUGUST 4TH, 1792.
SHRINE OF THE DAWNING SPEECH AND THOUGHT
OF SHELLEY SACRED BE
TO ALL WHO BOW WHERE TIME HAS BROUGHT
GIFTS TO ETERNITY.
Of Shelley, the little fellow of Dr. Greenlaw's school at Brentford, we
know much from Tom Medwin's occasionally accurate pages, and from other
sources of information, which enable us to check the statements of that
more entertaining than reliable biographer. Respecting Shelley at Eton,
there is almost a redundance of evidence. Of the Etonian's ways of amusing
himself at Field Place during his holidays, there is no lack of
information;--thanks to Miss Hellen Shelley's goodness in committing all
she could remember of her brother to paper, for the assistance of his
biographer and fellow-collegian, Hogg, the cynical humourist and clever
lawyer. But of Shelley, the nursling of the Field Place nursery, and child
of the Field Place schoolroom, few facts are on the record;--scarcely
anything besides the three or four matters, which Miss Hellen placed
amongst her personal recollections, as matters of domestic tradition,
coming to her from times before she was of an age to take clear and
enduring cognizance of her brother's doings.
Seven years his junior, the lady, plying her pen in 1856 (four-and-thirty
years after his death), can scarcely have retained any clear memories of
him, from a time previous to the opening of her ninth year. Barely seven
years old, when her brother went for the first time to Eton, she had in
1856 a memory of uncommon retentiveness, if it afforded her a clear
picture of him, as he appeared during the first of his Eton holidays.
Fortunately, however, she touches on affairs and incidents of an earlier
date; such, for instance, as his visits to the Warnham Vicar, who taught
him the rudiments of Latin, visits that began when he was only six years
old, and she was still unborn. To this gentle and delightful chronicler,
speaking for the moment from memory of her mother's gossip, we are
indebted for our knowledge of the astonishment little Bysshe (whilst a
Latin scholar at the Vicar's school) caused the elders of Field Place, by
repeating aloud, word for word, and without an error, Gray's lines on the
Cat and the Gold Fish, after a single reading of the composition.
Without precisely declaring herself indebted to hearsay for the story,
Miss Hellen seems to be speaking of a matter anterior to the earliest of
her personal observations, when she gives us the particulars of the
marvellous 'invention' with which Percy in his tender childhood
entertained and perplexed the people of his home. The essay in romantic
fiction was this: Assuring his sisters (Hellen's elder sisters) that he
had just returned from paying a visit to certain ladies of their village,
he recounted to them, minutely, how the ladies received him, how they
occupied themselves during his visit, and more particularly how he and
they wandered through a delightful garden, well known to the boy's
auditors for its filbert bank and undulating turf bank. On inquiry, it was
found that the imaginative urchin had not been to the ladies, their house,
or their garden. The whole statement was made up of fibs; 'but' (says the
recorder of the characteristic incident) 'it was not considered as a
falsehood to be punished.' Perhaps it would have been better in the long
run for little Bysshe, had a less lenient view been taken of the affair
that, if not the first, was one of the earliest of those countless
deviations from strict historical veracity, which have occasioned so much
controversy between his extravagant idolaters and his temperate admirers.
Of the droll things written of the poet by his enthusiastic worshipers,
few are droller than the pages in which this exercise of childish fancy is
dealt with, as an early exhibition of the peculiar genius that placed him
eventually in the highest rank of imaginative artists. Had they not been
too engrossed with the affairs of their own home to take nice cognizance
of their neighbours' children, the elders of Field Place, whilst rightly
regarding the fib as no flagrant offence, would not have 'mentioned it as
a singular fact.' To those who are familiar with the ways and humours of
children, it is needless to say, that little Bysshe's 'invention' is an
example of the commonest kind of the harmless fibs, that come from the
proverbially truthful mouths of babes and sucklings. Poets would be
unendurably abundant, if all the little boys and girls, who 'romance' in
this innocent fashion, were destined for the service of the Muses.
In Shelley's case, however, the story has an exceptional interest, because
he never survived the disposition, which thus early in his career caused
him to proclaim himself the recipient of civilities that had not been
offered to him,--the graceful actor in a domestic drama that had not been
performed. All through life, Shelley had a practice of uttering for the
truth statements that were not true. All through life, his familiar
friends received his communications, with reference to this propensity.
Out of their affection for the man, they palliated the weakness with more
or less sincere excuses, that relieved the infirmity of the odium of
deceitfulness. Some of his friends called attention to the poetical
verity, underlying the least veracious statements; others persuaded
themselves that the speaker of untruths was the victim of an inordinately
powerful imagination. Others, unable to shut their eyes to the sure
indications that he was not altogether unaware of the fictitious nature of
his statements, maintained that the fables were due partly to
hallucination, and only in some degree to wilful inventiveness. Whilst
Hogg talked of the poetic verity of the egregious fictions, and of their
utterer's inordinately powerful imagination, Peacock originated the theory
of 'semi-delusion.'
From the few glimpses to be had of him in Miss Hellen Shelley's letters,
and Medwin's reminiscences, and from bits of testimony which, though found
in records of his later boyhood, are evidential to certain particulars of
his earlier infancy, the cautious historian can produce the principal
characteristics of the little fellow, who used to play with his sisters in
the Field Place gardens, and ride on his pony about the Warnham lanes, in
years anterior to his first departure from home for boarding-school. It is
manifest that the child, who from his seventh to his eleventh year went
daily to the Warnham Vicar for instruction in Latin, and received his
other lessons in his sisters' schoolroom, may be thought of as a shy,
nervous, timid, small-headed urchin; tall for his years, but delicately
fashioned. Narrow-chested and slightly round-shouldered, he had the look
of a little fellow, scarcely strong enough to enjoy the sports of robust
children. A slight slip of a lad, more given to loitering than running
about the Field Place gardens; more often seen sitting by the fire, than
dancing on the carpet of his sisters' play-room; he was gentle in his
happier moods with a girlish gentleness, and sometimes fretful with a
girlish fretfulness. Deficient in boyishness, the boy had a face, chiefly
remarkable for the fawn-like prominence of its deep blue eyes, the
delicate, though imperfect, shapeliness of its mouth, the rather comical
meanness of its little tip-tilted nose, and the red-and-white of its
singularly bright complexion; the general girlishness of his appearance
being heightened by the profusion of the silky hair, falling and flowing
in blond-brown ringlets about his long neck and weedy shoulders.
Years later, musing on his conception of his former self, when he
preferred the society of his little sister to the company of the rough
boys of the Vicar's schoolroom, Shelley wrote in _Rosalind and Helen_, of
Helen's docile child:--
'He was a gentle boy,
And in all gentle sports took joy;
Oft in a dry leaf for a boat,
With a small feather for a sail,
His fancy on that spring would float,
If some invisible breeze would stir
Its marble calm.'
In like manner, 'Abdallah' and 'Maimuna' (the little Bysshe and Bessie of
_The Assassins_) used to float their toy-boats upon the water of their
smiling creek. Shelley's delight in toy-flotillas may have arisen for the
first time (as some of his biographers aver) long after his childhood.
Possibly he was the fool of his own fancy in thinking he cared to play
with toy-boats in his infancy. It is, however, certain, that gentleness
characterized the child, who, on attaining manhood, meditated complacently
on the delight he took in gentle sports when he was a gentle boy.
From what has been said of the facial show of the little fellow, who used
to play in the Field Place gardens, and ride his Shetland pony about the
Warnham lanes, in the closing years of the last, and the opening summers
of the present century, it follows that the picture published by Mr.
Colnaghi, in 1879, as a veritable portraiture of Shelley in his childhood,
is an unauthentic and delusive performance. An exquisite example of
childish beauty, the little boy of Mr. Colnaghi's engraving has a
straight, finely-pointed nose, and a face of faultless symmetry; a nose
that could not have developed into the distinctly tip-tilted nose of the
poet's later visage; a face, that could not have departed so far from its
normal mould, as in later time to bear any resemblance to the poet's
countenance, which is represented by all the several persons of his
familiar acquaintance, who wrote about it, as having been no less wanting
in symmetry than fortunate in the charms of expressiveness. Whilst
declaring the singular comeliness of the poet's face in its happier
moments, Hogg records that its 'features were not symmetrical.' Medwin,
ever quick to glorify his cousin, admits that his features were 'not
_regularly_ handsome.' Though she busied herself to impose upon the world
the picture of a beautifully symmetrical face as Shelley's veritable
semblance, and was even more accountable than Mrs. Shelley for the
prevailing misconceptions respecting his facial aspect, Mrs. Hogg (the
Mrs. Williams of Shelleyan annals) admitted to Mr. Rossetti, in Trelawny's
presence, on March 13, 1872, that the poet 'could not be called handsome
or beautiful, though the character of his face was so remarkable for
ideality and expression;' the lady, at the same time, confirming what Hogg
and Peacock tell us of the unmusical character of the poet's voice. In the
opinion of the lady, whose singing was unutterably sweet to her spiritual
worshiper, Shelley's 'voice was decidedly disagreeable.' On seeing the
familiar pictures of Shelley, that serve as the frontispieces in Hogg's
_Life_, and Trelawny's _Recollections_, Peacock declined to regard them as
likenesses of his former friend; putting them aside not merely as
ineffective and unsatisfactory likenesses, but as no likenesses whatever
of the individual they professed to represent. 'The portraits,' he
remarked in _Fraser_, 'do not impress themselves on me as likenesses; they
seem to me to want the true outline of Shelley's features, above all, to
want their true expression.' How could he honestly speak otherwise of the
spurious and delusive portraits, 'in which' (to repeat his own words) 'the
nose has no turn-up?' That Shelley had a small and distinctly tip-tilted
nose, instead of the straight and rather large (though delicately moulded)
nose of the lying pictures, appears from words penned by himself to
Peacock, from Leghorn, in August, 1819. After speaking derisively of John
Gisborne's quite Slawkenbergian nose as a thing that, weighing upon the
beholder's imagination, and transforming all its owner's g's into k's, was
a feature scarcely to be forgiven by Christian charity, Shelley observed,
'_I, you know, have a little turn-up nose_; Hogg has a large hook one; but
add them together, square them, cube them, you would have but a faint
notion of the nose to which I refer.' Shelley having written in this way
of the defective shape and size of a principal feature of his face, it is
not surprising that, whilst avoiding such words as 'unsymmetrical' and
'irregular,' Lady Shelley admitted reluctantly in her _Shelley Memorials_,
that the poet's 'features were not _positively_ handsome.' The wonder is
that, after making this admission in the text, the lady told a different
story in the frontispiece of her book. The evidence is superabundant that,
instead of being positively handsome, Shelley's little nose was positively
tip-tilted, and his face positively unsymmetrical.
To see the real Shelley, as he appeared during life to persons who
regarded him through no such disturbing medium as romantic glamour, it is
needful to get the better of misconceptions, arising from the delusive
portraitures of him, to be found in familiar biographies--the fanciful
pictures, which are the more intolerable for being fruitful of
misapprehensions respecting the poet's moral endowments.
The epithet applied to the delusive portraitures, was chosen with
deliberation. 'Fanciful' in effect, they had their origin in fancy, and
may be fairly described as the offspring of fancy working upon fancy, at
different times and under various conditions. Shelley never sate to a
professional painter. From the year that produced the Indian-ink sketch of
a young gentleman, wearing the scant gown and leading bands of an Oxford
undergraduate, to the year of his death, Shelley never gave a competent
painter an opportunity for producing a work, that would have prevented the
fanciful misrepresentations from gaining any credit--possibly would even
have prevented them from coming into existence.
It would have been better for his readers, and certainly no worse for his
fame, had he never consented to sit to an amateur. But it was fated that
the man, who suffered so much in more important matters from sterner
adversaries, should suffer considerably from two dabblers in the fine
arts. At Rome (Lady Shelley says in 1818, Trelawny says in 1819) Miss
Curran began the portrait in oil, which she never finished, of the poet in
his twenty-eighth year--the sketch which, dropped and relinquished by the
fair limner, possibly because she felt she had made 'a bad beginning,' was
destined to be the chief source of all the artistic falsities, that have
been manufactured to his injury since his death. Trelawny says this
failure was 'left in an altogether flat and inanimate state'--a
description to be kept in mind.
An amateur in oil (of the gentler sex) having thus attempted and failed to
paint the poet when he was at Rome, two or three years later (1821 or
1822) Shelley surrendered himself to a masculine dabbler in
water-colours--to Williams, the companion of his voyage to death.
Possibly, this sketch (which differed from Miss Curran's effort, in being
finished) would have been preserved, had it accorded with the spurious
portraitures, given so profusely in later time to a credulous and
undiscerning public. But it has disappeared; and at the present date no
one can say how far it merited the praise given to it by Trelawny, whose
favourable opinion of the 'spirited water-colour drawing' would deserve
more consideration, had he known half as much about the fine arts as he
knew about horses and yachts. The Indian-ink sketch of a boy in the
academicals of an Oxford undergraduate, the unfinished daub in oil, and
the 'spirited water-colour drawing,' are the only portraits of the poet,
known to have been produced by artists of any qualification or incapacity
during his life.
Possibly, the Indian-ink sketch, which De Quincey saw somewhere in London,
was the best of the three performances. It cannot have been much more
absurd than Miss Curran's absurdity, though from De Quincey's words it
seems to have been a sufficiently ludicrous production. 'The sketch,' says
the Opium-Eater, 'tallied pretty well with a verbal description which I
had heard of him in some company, viz.: that he was tall, slender, and
presenting the air of an elegant flower, whose head drooped from being
surcharged with rain'--a description censured by the essayist for giving
the equally false and disagreeable impression that the youthful
_littérateur_ 'was tainted, even in his external deportment, by some
excess of sickly sentimentalism, from which, however, in all stages of his
life, he was remarkably free.' Though, possibly, more like the man than
Miss Curran's fanciful oil-daub and Mr. Williams's 'spirited' achievement
in water-colour, this performance in Indian-ink, which made a young
Englishman look like a dripping lily or a rose well wetted at a pump, was
certainly a libel on the scandalous undergraduate.
Perhaps it would have been well had the spirited water-colour disappeared
sooner. It would have been better than well had Miss Curran's 'failure'
been tossed into the Tiber as soon as she despaired of making a decent
picture of it. Unfortunately, the thing that was only begun by a woman,
and the thing that was finished to the last touch by man, survived the
poet; so that Mrs. Shelley (through Mrs. Williams) was able to put them
into the hands of Mr. Clint, with a request that out of such sorry
materials, her own reminiscences--the recollections of a widow who liked
to speak of herself as 'the chosen mate of a celestial spirit'--and his
sense of the fitness of things, he would compose a picture, worthy of
being handed down to posterity, as the veritable and unquestionably
historic likeness of the greatest lyrical poet of the nineteenth century.
The fancy picture, that was 'composed' under these less unusual than
laughable circumstances, may not be more untruthful, but certainly is not
more veracious, than the majority of fancy portraits. 'Of these
materials,' Trelawny wrote in 1858, 'Mrs. Williams, on her return to
England after the death of Shelley, got Clint to compose a portrait,
which the few who knew Shelley in the last year of his life thought very
like him. The water-colour drawing has been lost, so that the portrait
done by Clint is the only one of any value.' What evidential value can
attach to a portrait 'composed' and 'done' under such circumstances? Apart
from his weakness (one might, perhaps, say his dishonesty) in consenting
to the prayer of the poet's widow and her friend (Mrs. Williams), no blame
belongs to Clint. Doing as portrait-painters are wont to do, when they
agree to manufacture posthumous likenesses of people they have never seen,
Clint worked up a fancy picture out of the two performances by amateurs;
assuming that he might rely on those performances for correct information
as to the principal features and general effect of the poet's countenance.
On points where the two performances gave incongruent evidence, he relied
on the widows (Mrs. Williams and Mrs. Shelley) to instruct him as to which
of the two performances was the more trustworthy. The portrait having been
'composed' and 'done' in this way, the final touches were added in
accordance with further information from Mrs. Williams and further
suggestions by 'the chosen mate of a celestial spirit.'
The falseness and absurdity of the composition are mainly referable to the
romantic view Miss Curran took of the poet's appearance, and to her
romantic desire to give him the beauty which she deemed appropriate to the
author of incomparably beautiful poems. Rating him with the angels, the
lady was determined he should look like an angel--on her canvas. Beginning
with this ambition, it is no matter for surprise that she made only 'a
beginning.' If he was instructed to rely on the daub in oil, rather than
on the spirited water-colour, it is not wonderful Clint went wrong. In her
resolve to make Shelley look like an angel, Miss Curran decided to make
the principal feature of his portrait altogether unlike the most prominent
feature of his face. In the face, this feature wanted the size and contour
needful for the romantic beauty, with which the lady would fain have
endowed her bard. In the picture, this particular feature has every
quality required in a feature of its kind by connoisseurs of romantic
beauty--connoisseurs, that is to say, of the conventional school to which
the lady and her friends (Mrs. Williams and Mrs. Shelley) belonged.
The artist was not more interested than either of the other ladies in
misrepresenting the poet in this particular feature. Mrs. Williams was
animated with sentimental tenderness for the poet, who wrote her so much
beautiful poetry. It was natural for this romantic mourner to wish that in
his historic portrait, her Platonic lover should be relieved of a facial
defect, that in her opinion amounted to disfigurement. Whilst mourning
sincerely for her husband, Mrs. Williams mourned romantically for the poet
who had perished with her husband in the same wild storm. In like manner,
Mrs. Shelley (whose notions of the beautiful were purely conventional) was
desirous that this particular feature should be dealt with tenderly,
delicately, lovingly, in the portrait that would represent her husband's
facial show to future ages. Hence it was, that whilst he was composing the
great historic portrait chiefly out of Miss Curran's artistic falsehood,
neither of the ladies, on whose guidance he relied, was in a mood to tell
Mr. Clint in what respect the oil-daub was especially misleading, or even
to hint it was likely to mislead him in any way. Sixty years since, a
little turn-up nose was universally regarded as a nose wholly unbefitting
a poet. In their measures for rendering their poet altogether admirable
and lovely to unborn ages, both ladies were especially desirous that on
the historic canvas he should be endowed with a nose wholly unlike the one
that had been, in their eyes, the great blemish of his earthly tabernacle.
If Trelawny's evidence may be accepted, Clint did his work to the
satisfaction of 'the few who knew Shelley in the last year of his life.'
As Trelawny was one of those few, the 'composition' may be assumed to have
had his approval. But Trelawny knew nothing of pictures, and little of the
poet with whose story he will be associated to the end of time. The whole
term of their friendly intercourse exceeded six months by no more than two
or three days. And throughout that term the Cornish gentleman, with his
simple reverence for literature and men of letters, regarded the poet
through the glamour that makes things seem other than they are. On being
shown the portrait for the first time, with an assurance that people
approved it, Trelawny was not the man to discover anything wrong in it.
When he saw it for the first time, a considerable number of long years had
elapsed since the death of his acquaintance for six short months. Under
these circumstances, Trelawny's good word goes for nothing in the
estimate of the spurious performance. That Hogg resembled Peacock in
rating the picture at its proper worthlessness is matter of certainty; for
though an engraving of the artistic imposture faces the title-page of his
first volume, the biographer shows himself fully alive to the fictitious
nature of the composition, by his vivid and minute verbal portraitures of
the poet at Oxford and in later stages of his career.
Since Trelawny published Vinter's lithograph of the picture as a
frontispiece to the _Recollections_ (1858), numerous engravings have
appeared on wood, stone, or metal, of the posthumous 'composition' which
the Cornish gentleman, at the time of his book's appearance, regarded as
the only reliable painting of the poet. 'The water-colour drawing has been
lost,' Trelawny wrote in 1858, 'so the portrait done by Clint is the only
one of any value.' At that time he was far from imagining that the
oil-sketch, which Miss Curran 'never finished, and left in an altogether
flat and inanimate state,' would ever compete in public confidence with
the posthumous 'composition.' To the present writer it has not seemed
worth the while to inquire what (if anything) was done to Miss Curran's
'failure,' to bring it out of the 'altogether flat and inanimate state,'
and put it into a condition to be regarded (_on the authority_ of words
spoken by Sir Percy Shelley, _on the authority_ of his mother) as the
'best portrait extant' of the poet. It is enough for the present writer
and his readers to know that Miss Curran's beginning of a portrait has
risen to this place in Sir Percy's esteem--to know that it rose eventually
to an equally high place in Mary Godwin Shelley's esteem--to know from
Lady Shelley's assurance that the frontispiece of the third edition of her
_Shelley Memorials: From Authentic Sources_, is an engraving from (to use
her ladyship's words) 'the original picture by Miss Curran, painted at
Rome in 1818, now in Sir Percy Shelley's possession'--to know, from Mr.
Buxton Forman's authoritative assurance, that the frontispiece to the
first volume of his edition of _The Poetical Works_ is an engraving from
the same 'best portrait extant,' and not an engraving of Clint's
posthumous 'composition'--to know that engravings from this 'best portrait
extant' have, like the engravings at first hand of the 'composition,' been
repeatedly re-engraved (with or without variations to suit the
requirements of editorial taste),--and, _lastly_, to know that all the
engravings and re-engravings of the two delusive originals are flagrant
and altogether-to-be-repudiated misrepresentations of the poet's actual
appearance.
After what has been said of Miss Curran's unfinished oil-sketch, and
Clint's posthumous 'composition,' which was mainly made up from the lady's
derelict absurdity, it is needless to say that all the engravings and
re-engravings of the abandoned fib and the elaborate falsehood bear a
close resemblance to one another. Resembling one another in the contour of
the features, the arrangement of the hair (even to the tips of the curls),
the items of costume (even to the shape of the rumpled Byronic collars),
these engravings and re-engravings might be mistaken for reproductions of
the same original picture--allowance being made for the taste and whims of
engravers, the fancies and requirements of editors. The only difference
between the avowed engravings from Miss Curran's daub and the engravings
of Mr. Clint's composition is that the former are something more unnatural
and unsatisfactory than the latter. The poet of the former lot of
engravings is a somnambulant girl--a sleepwalker from dyspepsia, who, on
leaving her bed somehow or other, contrived to put on her brother's
walking-coat instead of her own bodice. The poet of the latter set of
engravings is a very pretty girl, exhibiting no sign of disease, apart
from the indications of a desire to look something wiser and prettier than
she really is. Like the somnambulant girl of the more disagreeable
picture, the young lady of these less disagreeable engravings has put on
her brother's coat, wears Byronic shirt-collars, has a quill pen in her
lily-white hand, and is so posed that her right fore-arm is resting on an
open manuscript. Of the dozen or more engravings of this young lady now
lying open before the present writer's desk, the one to which he would
direct his readers' attention--in consideration of its being the most
agreeable, typical, and artistic of them all--is the engraving by that
fine engraver, Francis Holl, which does duty as frontispiece to the first
volume of Hogg's (unfinished) _Life_.
What is offered to the eye by this frontispiece? It is the picture of a
man, to judge of it from the coat, the folds of the Byronic shirt-collar,
and the absence of the developments of the breast that are such powerful
elements of feminine loveliness. It is the picture of a beautiful girl, to
judge of it by the girlish face and hair, the girlishness of the long,
slender neck. The first thing to strike the beholder of this girl's face
is the symmetrical character of its delicate beauty. The symmetry is
perfect--too perfect, even for a girl of seventeen. The fine pencillings
of the eye-brows, the curves immediately beneath the eyes, the superior
contours of the cheeks, the line and shadow-line of the long, straight
nose, the outlines of the lower parts of the countenance, the curlings of
the small kissable lips and dainty chin, are all finely, unsurpassably
symmetrical. If the word may be applied to things so lovely and delicate,
symmetry is carried even to caricature in the details of this girlish
face. Of course the face, so delicately girlish, is deficient in the
strength, the indications of force, active or latent, always to be looked
for and, in some degree, invariably discernible in the countenance of a
man of mark.
Though he never sate to professional painter, Shelley sate to a sculptor
of sufficient ability, whose chisel produced a work of art that,
indicating with sufficient clearness the two chief defects of the poet's
least comely feature, fortunately, still exists, to give the lie to the
foolish pictures, and to protest with mute eloquence against the policy of
misrepresentation, which pursues its ends with insolent disregard for the
rights of the many thousands of persons, who are interested in knowing the
truth and the whole truth, and in believing nothing but the truth, about
one of the most remarkable Englishmen of the present century.
But though it offered violence to romantic and conventional notions of
poetical beauty, and gave his countenance a contour very different from
the profile of the delusive portraits, it may not be imagined that the
'little turn-up nose' caused Shelley to be otherwise than a man of a
singularly striking and charming appearance. Tall for his years, from his
childhood till he attained the fullness of his stature, Shelley had a
slender figure that would not have wanted elegance, had it not been for
the slight drooping and roundness of his shoulders, the narrowness of his
chest, and the forward inclination of his long neck and minute
head--peculiarities scarcely reconcilable with all that has been written
about his personal stateliness. To imagine that the young man who paced
the streets of Oxford and London 'with bent knees and outstretched neck'
(in the manner described by Hogg), was remarkable for the grace and
dignity of his carriage, is to surrender one's judgment to the sway of
romantic biographers. None the less certain, however, is it that there
were moments when Shelley's countenance might be commended for loveliness.
Remarkable for a complexion, in which carmine-red and delicate white,
instead of being blended, were separately conspicuous, even when it was
most freckled by exposure to the sun, the face surmounting his long and
slender frame was singularly expressive of intelligence, sympathy, nervous
alertness, enthusiasm, and sincerity. Dull in moments of contemplation,
the prominent deep-blue eyes of Trelawny's stag-eyed Shelley were
comparable with Byron's grey-blue eyes, for overpowering vehemence under
the impulses of strong and sudden emotion. Though inferior to Byron's
feminine mouth in beauty, and even more deficient than Byron's mouth in
power, Shelley's mouth--the one symmetrical part of his unsymmetrical
countenance--was notable for shapeliness, and alike expressive of
sensibility and refinement.
In other particulars, Shelley's head and face were comparable with Byron's
head and face. Like Byron, the author of _Laon and Cythna_ had a head of
striking smallness. It is a matter to be pondered by the physiologists,
who maintain no man can be mentally powerful unless he has a big bulk of
brain and a big pan to hold it, that the two greatest poets of the
nineteenth century were, perhaps, the _two_ smallest-headed Englishmen of
their time. Though it wanted the auburn under-glow, the feathery softness,
and careful keeping of the Byronic tresses, Shelley's brown shock--blonde
brown in childhood, deep brown ere it began prematurely to turn
grey--resembled the locks of his familiar friend and fellow-poet in
curling naturally. The most prominent feature of either poet's face was
the one in which he differed most conspicuously from the other. In that
feature Byron had greatly the advantage. Had he not grudged the poet whom
he hated this personal advantage over the poet whom he loved, Leigh Hunt
would not have been at so much pains to describe the faults of Byron's
nose--its excessive massiveness, and its appearance of having been put
upon the face, rather than of growing out of it. But whilst inferior to
Byron's face in that important feature, Shelley's face, in its naturalness
and seraphic gentleness, its candour and high simplicity, was possessed of
charms no one would venture to attribute to Byron's more earthly
loveliness. In spite of its grand defect, Shelley's was a face that
reminded his two closest friends of works of Italian art. Whilst Peacock
speaks of his vanished friend's resemblance to the portrait of Antonio
Leisman in the Florentine Gallery, Hogg likens the sweetest and loftiest
element of the poet's facial beauty to the air of profound religious
veneration that may be observed in the best frescoes of the greatest
masters of Florence and Rome.
There is no need to inquire how the lovely face of Mr. Colnaghi's
engraving came to be regarded as a portrait of Shelley in his childhood.
Still less is there any need to inquire whether the original picture was
the work of the exiled French prince to whom it has been attributed. The
present writer has no wish to deal disrespectfully with any part of the
picture's story that does not touch the poet's record. For this work's
purpose it is enough to say authoritatively that the child, whose delicate
and exquisitely symmetrical lineaments are exhibited in the Colnaghi
engraving, cannot have been the infantile Shelley, because it is not in
the nature of things that the poet of unsymmetrical visage and 'little
turn-up nose' was the development of the child, whose facial loveliness
was so perfect an example of facial symmetry, and whose nose could not by
any possibility have changed into the tip-tilted feature, described so
precisely by the poet himself. Portraits are often strangely mis-assigned;
but it is seldom for a portrait to be so egregiously mis-assigned as this
so-called picture of the child Shelley. Had not Mrs. Shelley and Mrs.
Williams succeeded in palming off on romantic credulity their symmetrical
and straight-nosed 'composition' as a veritable picture of 'The Real
Shelley,' it would never have occurred to any one to suggest that the
original of the Colnaghi engraving was the poet Shelley at a tender age.
CHAPTER IV.
THE BRENTFORD SCHOOLBOY.
Dr. Greenlaw's Character--Quality of his School--Medwin's Anecdotes to
the Doctor's Discredit--Mr. Gellibrand's Recollections of the
Brentford Shelley--The Bullies of the Brentford Playground--Shelley's
Character at the School--His Disposition to Somnambulism--His Delight
in Novels--His Wretchedness at School--Shelleyan Egotism--Byronic
Egotism--Byron's Influence on Shelley--Enduring Influence of Novels on
Shelley's Mind--Stories of Boating--Easter Holidays in
Wiltshire--'Essay on Friendship'--Its Biographical Value.
The slight slip of a boy, who under the name of Percy Bysshe Shelley,
appeared for the first time in his eleventh year (the third year of the
present century) amongst the boys of Dr. Greenlaw's school at Sion House,
Brentford, was no child to prefer the society of overbearing boys to the
society of his little sisters, whose playmate he had hitherto been.
Dr. Greenlaw's home for young gentlemen was a house of forbidding aspect.
More than once as they walked from London to Bishopgate (familiar to those
who are in the habit of entering Windsor Park from Englefield Green),
Shelley directed Hogg's attention to the gloomy walls of his first
boarding-school. The house was unalluring, the master not incapable of
outbreaks of anger, the boys by no means innocent of puerile rudeness and
inhumanity. But the present writer, who in former time knew some of Dr.
Greenlaw's scholarly descendants, has reason to believe the doctor was a
kindlier gentleman, and his school a much less defective establishment,
than Mr. Medwin made the world imagine.
Taking much credit to himself for having been at Brentford a sympathetic
and condescending senior schoolmate to his little far-away cousin, Tom
Medwin speaks with ungenerous resentment of the seminary where they sipt
the Pierian spring. All that his bitter words amount to is that Dr.
Greenlaw was a pedagogue, and Sion House a seminary, 'of an old school.'
If the bread served to the boys at breakfast and supper was parsimoniously
dressed with butter, the fare was neither better nor worse than the bread
and butter usually provided for schoolboys eighty years since. If the
Saturday's pie was a scrap-pie, and a poor specimen of its inferior kind
of pie, it was only such a thing as schoolboys of the period were expected
to eat with thankfulness. A schoolboy's toilet, in the days of our
grandfathers, was always a short and simple business. As the boys seldom
saw the lady, who never harassed or troubled them in any way, Mr. Medwin
might as well have forborne to sneer at Mrs. Greenlaw for priding herself
less on her husband's calling, than on being distantly related to the Duke
of Argyll. Mr. Medwin was not a little proud of his slight relationship to
the Castle Goring Shelleys, though they were not (to put the case mildly)
the best of the Sussex families. He might, therefore, have spoken
leniently of Mrs. Greenlaw's sense of the dignity of her people, or been
silent about the matter. Himself the son of a country attorney, Mr. Medwin
should have written a little less disdainfully of his old schoolfellows,
for being 'mostly the sons of London shopkeepers.' Nor is the Rev. Dr.
Greenlaw (he was in holy orders and had a Scotch degree) to be severely
judged if, when pupils were few, he was something less inquisitive than he
might have been about the quality of parents. To live, schoolmasters must
fill up their beds; and to be placed at school in the same dormitory with
a cheesemonger's son is an indignity, to be forgiven (after forty years)
even by the son of a solicitor of the High Court of Judicature.
It may, however, be conceded that Sion House was no more a fit school for
the heir of a great county family, than the Clapham school, where the
poet's sisters received their higher education, was a suitable seminary
for the daughters of an aristocratic house. Whilst little Bysshe was still
making Latin verses in the company of tradesmen's sons, the elder of his
sisters went to the Clapham school, where Harriett Westbrook (the daughter
of a licensed victualler) in later time learnt something of French and the
answers to Mangnall's Questions. It may not, however, be inferred that Mr.
and Mrs. Shelley, of Field Place, were deficient in proper care for their
own dignity, or in proper concern for the welfare of their offspring.
Though no place of education for the sons of the English aristocracy, Sion
House was greatly superior to the 'commercial schools' where tradesmen
sent their boys to be trained for the counter and the counting-house. It
was a 'classical school' for the sons of ordinary professional men (boys
like Tom Medwin), and the sons of well-to-do and ambitious tradesmen,
bent on putting their boys into the liberal professions. The Clapham
school for girls was a school of corresponding quality,--a place of
education for the daughters of people moving in the middle way of life.
That he sent his children to such schools merely shows that the Squire of
Field Place was not possessed by the spirit of exclusiveness, that is a
characteristic of aristocratic personages; that he was still far from
rating himself with the aristocracy of his county, though he had taken a
degree at Oxford, made the grand tour, and risen to represent New Shoreham
in the House of Commons. That the children were sent to such schools shows
how far the head of the family (old Mr. Bysshe Shelley, the son of the
Newark apothecary and the friend of Graham, the quack) was from
over-estimating his social position; how far he was from deeming himself
one of the dignitaries of his shire, though he had married the heiress of
Penshurst, and adding acre to acre, was rich enough to spend tens of
thousands on the big castle, which he never finished or inhabited.
Instead of enjoying the status, which delusive biographers declare them to
have enjoyed for successive centuries, the poet's people were in his
childhood only emerging from the middle class of society. Planted though
they had been for some time within the outer breastworks of provincial
gentility, they were still regarded by their patrician neighbours as
people of ambiguous quality,--too wealthy to be rated with mere 'gentle
populace,' and at the same time, too wanting in local influence and
ancestral dignity to be rated with the _élite_ of 'the county.' Fortunate
though it had been, old Mr. Bysshe Shelley's career was more calculated to
provoke scandal than conciliate social sentiment. Though it had done much
for his enrichment, his second marriage had also caused leading families
of Sussex and Kent to regard him with animosity, and speak of him with
disapproval. Strange stories were told of the ways in which the old man
had made money,--was still making money. The sordid tastes and habits,
that rendered him equally despicable and pitiable in his senility, were
already revealing themselves, and confirming people of honest pride and
good principle in their resolve to hold aloof from him. To personages of
the county, who had long looked down upon them as obtrusive upstarts, the
father and son grew more distasteful in proportion as they grew richer.
Instead of being diminished, this disfavour was for a time quickened by
the civilities, which for political reasons the Duke of Norfolk thought
fit to offer to the Horsham capitalist and the Member for New Shoreham.
Both within and without the lines of the Liberal party, dislike of these
'new men' was stimulated by the growing opinion that, if the younger kept
his seat for the Sussex borough, and voted steadily in accordance with the
Duke's pleasure, the elder of them would in a few years be raised to the
dignity for which he had long hungered.
Thus regarded in Sussex, it is not surprising that the poet's father and
grandfather lived more within the lines of their proper middle-class
connexion, than with the higher gentry of their neighbourhood, and that,
in selecting schools for his children, Mr. Timothy Shelley acted in
harmony with the views of his middle-class friends and relations. It is
not surprising that little Bysshe was sent to the school that was good
enough for the boys of people like the Medwins, and none too good for the
tradesmen's sons who came between the wind and Tom Medwin's nobility. Nor
is it surprising that in later time little Bysshe's sisters were sent to
the suburban academy, where the youngest of them became intimate with
Harriett Westbrook,--the lovely child of 'Jew Westbrook,' the licensed
victualler. Had he in 1802 felt more certain of getting the baronetcy for
which he was playing (and won only four years later--1806), it is probable
that the Horsham money-maker would have loosened his purse-string, and
told his son (the M.P.) that Sion House was not good enough school for the
heir of the Castle Goring Shelleys. Had the father and son foreseen what
embarrassment and scandal would come to the Castle Goring Shelleys from
friendships made at the Clapham girls'-school, it is probable that the
poet's sisters would have been sent to a more select seminary, or have
been educated, even to the finishing touches of their education, at Field
Place.
That the Reverend Dr. Greenlaw was a fairly sufficient pedagogue may be
inferred even from the reluctant admissions of the writer, who is our
chief source of information respecting little Bysshe's life at Sion House.
Whilst telling apocryphal stories to the discredit of his scholarship,
Medwin concedes that the Doctor was 'a tolerable Greek and Latin scholar,'
drilled his pupils assiduously in Homer, and carried them 'in his own way'
through some of the plays of Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Mr.
Medwin was not so precisely accurate a writer that we must accept all his
statements to the schoolmaster's disadvantage. Possibly, in recalling the
teacher's way of 'driving straightforwards in defiance of obstacles,' the
biographer only remembered his own way of dealing with choruses and other
perplexing passages of the Greek dramatists. The historian who misquoted
the Ovidian verses, in his worst and most damaging story against the
Doctor, may also have misquoted the sorry verses inscribed on the Scotch
mull which Charles Mackintosh (a former pupil at Sion House) gave his
preceptor. If the verses of the mull were as bad as the biographer
represents, and were (as the same authority alleges) the production of the
Doctor's own head and hand, their extreme badness disproves the assertion
that the Doctor 'was a tolerable Greek and Latin Scholar.' However much
misquoted in Medwin's _Life of Shelley_, the verses must have been bad;
but it is more probable that 'Carolus Mackintosh ... _alumnus_' composed
the lame lines inscribed upon his gift, than that they were put together
by 'the tolerable Greek and Latin scholar,' who had grown grey in teaching
boys to make Latin verses. Recollections after a lapse of forty years,
touching the infirmities of former schoolmasters, should be regarded with
suspicion, even when they proceed from habitually careful narrators. But
when a gentleman of almost proverbial inaccuracy entertains the world with
irreconcilable reminiscences of the same individual, he may be regarded as
labouring for a moment under the besetting infirmity, that always weakens
Mr. Medwin's testimony, and sometimes deprives it of all value.
That the successful schoolmaster (bound alike by his interest and the
obligations of his office to be mindful of the proprieties) disgusted
little Bysshe, and delighted the rest of the class with obscene jocosity
in reference to a familiar passage of the _Æneid_, is less probable than
that Tom Medwin's memory betrayed him. It is easier to believe that in a
mood of unusual irritability and dullness Dr. Greenlaw discovered
execrable Latinity in the Ovidian lines:
'Me miserum! quanti montes volvuntur aquarum!
Jam, jam tacturas sidera summa putes,'--
which little Bysshe 'gave in' as verses of his own manufacture. '_Jam,
jam!_' the Doctor is said to have exclaimed during the course of
animadversions that were emphasized with slaps administered to the child's
small cheeks and ears. '_Jam, jam!_ Pooh, pooh, boy! raspberry jam! Do you
think you are at your mother's? Don't you know that I have a sovereign
objection to those two monosyllables, with which schoolboys cram their
verses? haven't I told you so a hundred times already? "_Tacturas sidera
summa putes_,"--what, do the waves on the coast of Sussex strike the
stars, eh?--"_summa sidera_,"--who does not know that the stars are high?
Where did you find that epithet?--in your _Gradus ad Parnassum_, I
suppose. You will never mount so high. "_Putes!_" you may think this very
fine, but to me it is all balderdash, hyperbolical stuff. There' (with a
final box on the little fellow's nearest ear), 'go now, sir, and see if
you can't write something better!'
It is consolatory to reflect that, though he should not have been cuffed
and exposed to the riotous ridicule of his school-fellows for writing
Latin verses as badly as Ovid wrote them, the culprit merited some kind of
punishment for 'giving in' as his own the verses that were not his
own,--an act of deception common enough with schoolboys, but scarcely
reconcilable with the severe truthfulness, which is said (by the Shelleyan
enthusiasts) to have distinguished him from his childhood to his last
hour. 'He was,' says Lady Shelley in her _Shelley Memorials: From
Authentic Sources_, 'more outspoken and truth-loving than other boys.'
With this anecdote of Latin verses, given in to the Doctor of the
Brentford school, may be coupled a story, which the late Mr. Gellibrand
used to tell, somewhat to the discredit of little Bysshe. Just about
Shelley's age, though placed in a lower form of the school than Shelley's,
Gellibrand was trying to put together a nonsense Latin verse in the way of
scholastic duty, when Bysshe said, 'Give me your slate, and I will do it
for you and you can go.' Trusting his friend, Gellibrand surrendered his
slate and went off to play. The verses Shelley wrote on the slate ran,--
'Hos ego versiculos scripsi,
Sed non ego feci.'
On being 'given in,' by a boy who could not make a nonsense 'line' without
racking his brain, these verses may well have attracted the master's
attention. To the question, 'Did you write this?' Gellibrand of course
answered 'Yes.' Of course, also, the matter was inquired into further; the
result being that Gellibrand received a whipping, for which he paid
Shelley out with a 'pummelling.'
Though heavy, the blows he received for the Jam-jam verses were by no
means the sharpest and most penetrating that came from time to time to
little Bysshe Shelley from the same hand. Eighty years since our boys were
taken from the nursery and confided to the schoolmaster, in the same way
that pups of choicest breed were given over to the very slender mercy of
the under-gamekeeper. In either case it was known what was in store for
the young and helpless creatures. It was needful for these young things to
be licked into shape and form and good behaviour,--for the small boys to
be whipt into bigger boys, and then into serviceable men; and for the
young dogs to be whipt into good sporting dogs. Relying on the wisdom of
his ancestors, the English gentleman believed in the Coptic proverb, which
declares that 'the stick came down from heaven,' To train boys and dogs
the stick was needful. Whilst the tender-hearted father hoped silently
that much of the stick would not be needed, the father of no more than
average humanity was jubilant about the stick, confident that youngsters
needed it, jocular about its power to do them good. Like George the Third,
who told his sons' tutors to whip them when they wanted it (but for this
order, how badly George the Fourth might have turned out!). Mr. Timothy
Shelley, M.P. for New Shoreham, sent little Bysshe to Sion House, with the
understanding that he would be whipt, and well whipt too, when he wanted
it. Mrs. Shelley knew what was in store for the little fellow, when she
put the plum-cake into his box and hoped he would enjoy it. The
foreknowledge did not make the lady sorrowful. Was it not written, that to
spare the rod was to spoil the child? It is hard on schoolmasters that
they should be required to bear the odium of an educational method, so
universally approved two generations since, and sanctioned by the highest
authority.
Elderly (not to say old) gentlemen of 'the old school' still talk and
write cheerily of the good old birch. In his later novels the late Lord
Lytton uttered several pleasantries about the antique instrument of
domestic torture. But he probably took another view of the matter, when he
was under it. Though the great Thackeray wrote with characteristic
sprightliness and piquancy of interviews with 'the Doctor' in his
study,--interviews attended with swishing sounds and shrill cries of
puerile protest, audible through the strong doors of the same awful
room,--he was alive to the tragic side of the comic business. Only a few
years before his death, he spoke to an attentive mahogany-tree of one of
these 'interviews with the Doctor,' in which he had figured as passive
principal at a preparatory school, where he acquired some of the rudiments
of human knowledge, before going to Charterhouse. 'And can you still
remember what it felt like?' inquired one of the listeners. 'Remember it!
It was like ----!' screamed the witness to his own early grief, raising
his voice and eyebrows till they were comically eloquent of pain and
affright, as he named a place whither so excellent a novelist cannot be
supposed to have gone. Like little Makepeace, little Bysshe had interviews
with the Doctor between the four walls of the Doctor's study,--interviews
from which the nervous boy retired, with fury and horror in his face and
at his heart, to the schoolroom full of heartless boys, whose only
expression of concern at his misadventure was to ask him 'how he liked
it.' All this is so much a matter of course that nothing would be said of
it in these pages, were it not for the general opinion that this medicine
of childhood (as an old writer pleasantly designates the discipline of the
rod) not only caused the future poet the usual amount of transient
physical annoyance, but had also an enduring and by no means beneficial
effect on his temper and his disposition towards every kind of human
government. It has been urged by successive biographers that this bitter
physic, instead of curing his infantile ill-humours, aggravated them
seriously, and was one of the several influences that set him at war with
society from the outset of his career. Mrs. Shelley and Lady Shelley (the
poet's second wife and his daughter-in-law) both take this view of the
discipline that vexed him both at Brentford and Eton. And though he does
not hold the birch largely accountable for _Queen Mab_, the present writer
is by no means certain that the two ladies are so entirely wrong on this
matter, as they are on other matters of the poet's character and story.
Notwithstanding the incidents, which may have disposed him to rate his
Brentford preceptor as one of his earlier tyrants, there is evidence that,
after coming to manhood, Shelley remembered Dr. Greenlaw with qualified
approval, if not with affection. As they walked past the gloomy brick
house to which he had just called his companion's attention, Shelley
'spoke of the master, Doctor Greenlaw, not without respect, saying, "he
was a hard-headed Scotchman, and man of rather liberal opinions."' To be
tinctured with liberality of sentiment was, in Shelley's opinion, to have
a quality of goodness.
If Medwin was justified in saying that 'Sion House was a perfect hell' to
Shelley, it is probable that the bullies of the playground were more
accountable than the discipline of the schoolroom for the boy's hatred of
the place. Numbering about sixty scholars, some of whom were seventeen or
eighteen years old, the school--governed out of school-hours by bullies,
who might bully any one weak enough to be bullied, instead of by 'masters'
entitled to bully only their own fags--was just the place to be fruitful
of misery for a shy, nervous, mammy-sick lad; lacking the muscle and pluck
to hold his own with boys of his own age. On appearing for the first time
in the playground--fenced with four high walls, and adorned with the
solitary tree, to which the school-bell was hung--the child from Field
Place found himself surrounded by a mob of inquisitive urchins, who at a
glance saw he had neither the strength nor the courage to answer a rough
word with a ready blow. Could he play at pegtop? at marbles? at hopscotch?
at cricket? As each of these questions was answered in the negative, a cry
of derision went up from his inquisitors. His girlish looks and long hair,
his red-and-white complexion and the slightness of his long (not oval)
face provoked uncomplimentary criticism. Then came questions about his
home. Had he any sisters? What were their names? Where did they live? Had
he a mother? What was his father? What was he 'blubbing' about? On hearing
that his father was a Member of Parliament, some of the boys (possibly the
tradesmen's sons) intimated that he had better not give himself airs.
Resembling Byron in divers matters already submitted to the reader's
consideration, and in other matters to be noticed in later pages of this
work, Shelley resembled him also, from childhood to his latest hour, in
being a singular combination of feminine weakness and masculine strength.
Remarkable for boyish resoluteness and energy, the Byron of Aberdeen,
Harrow, and Cambridge, was no less remarkable for girlish sensibility and
softness. Feminine in the emotional forces of his nature, the Byron of
'the Pilgrimage,' the London drawing-rooms, the Italian exile, and the
expedition to Greece, was rich also in manly daring and combativeness. A
similar account may be given of Shelley's constitution and temper. In his
earlier time a boy on one side of his nature, he was a girl on the other.
If 'his port' (to use Hogg's words) 'had the meekness of a maiden' in his
later time, it possessed also the dignity of manliness. In moments of
sudden peril it was discovered that fear had no chamber in the heart, of
which Hogg wrote 'the heart of the young virgin, who had never crossed her
father's threshold to encounter the rude world, could not be more
susceptible of all the sweet charities than his.' It is remarkable how
these two inseparable poets (inseparable for ever! notwithstanding all the
efforts of the Shelleyan enthusiasts to disassociate them) impressed their
closest friends alternately by their manliness and their womanliness. The
biographer, who is eloquent about the manliness of Shelley's carriage,
could not recall this friend of his heart and holder of his admiration,
without remembering his meek and maidenly bearing and virginal
sensibility. Even when he was bearing testimony to Byron's manly
endowments, Hobhouse could not refrain from glancing at those of the
poet's weaknesses, that, resembling 'a portion of his virtues, were of a
feminine character--so that the affection felt for him was as that for a
favourite and sometimes froward sister.'
At Brentford the girlish elements of Bysshe's nature were in the
ascendant, the masculine elements altogether in abeyance. Possibly the
latter elements had never manifested themselves at Field Place, where the
little fellow, with younger sisters for his playmates, had lived at the
end of his mother's apron-string something too long. If they had shown
themselves in his earlier childhood, they seem to have retired from view
during his stay at Dr. Greenlaw's school. Bearing a stronger likeness to
the Geordie Byron, of Aberdeen High School, who fell a-weeping before his
classmates, on being required for the first time to answer to the proud
title of 'Dominus,' than to the Geordie Byron of the same school, who,
notwithstanding his lameness, used to spring (in his hopping way) with
clenched fists and flashing eyes at boys of superior size and strength,
little Bysshe seems throughout his time at Sion House to have justified
the disdain in which he was held, alike by the big and the small bullies
of the dismal playground, as a chicken-heart and a milk-sop. His old
schoolfellow, Gellibrand, who died something over twelve months in his
ninety-third year, used to describe the Shelley of Dr. Greenlaw's
seminary as a 'girl in boy's clothes, fighting with open hands and rolling
on the floor when flogged, not from the pain, but "from a sense of
indignity."' (_Vide_ Mr. Augustine Birrell's letter to the _Athenæum_ of
3rd May, 1884.)
Scared and cowed by the first greetings of the playground, he seems never
to have gained heart to learn the games, of which he had been compelled to
confess a shameful ignorance, or to repay with boyish energy and in proper
style the snubs and blows of boys as small as himself. Every boy's hand
was raised against him; and when he raised his own in retaliation, it was
to slap with open palm. What the big bullies bade him do, he did meekly
and often to his cost. When they ordered him to run after their balls, he
obeyed till he was ready to drop with fatigue. When they ordered him to
fetch books from the circulating library, to 'truck' Latin dictionaries
and other scholastic volumes (appraised by avoirdupois weight) with the
grocer for lumps of cheese or sweetstuff, he broke bounds and did their
commands, earning once and again a smart punishment 'from the Doctor,' by
his submissiveness to lawless orders. But he never joined of his own will
in the pastimes of his schoolfellows, great or small. Moping in corners by
himself, when the other boys were playing clamorously at prisoners' bars
or leap-frog, with their marbles or their tops, he counted the days till
next breaking-up day, recalled the pleasures of the garden where his
little sisters had been his sturdiest playmates, or conned the pages of
stories, borrowed from the circulating library. Sometimes on half-holidays
he loitered for the hour together under the southern wall of the
playground, as far as possible out of the way of his uncongenial
companions. Sometimes out of pity for the child's solitariness and misery,
Medwin left the sports of the yard, and walked with his little cousin to
and fro under the high wall. It pleased the senior cousin long after the
younger cousin's death to imagine, that Shelley was mindful of these walks
and the kindness thus shown him when, in the description of an antique
group, he wrote, 'Look, the figures are walking with a sauntering and idle
pace, and talking to each other as they walk, as you may have seen a
younger and an elder boy at school, walking in some grassy spot of the
playground, with that tender friendship for each other which the age
inspires.'
In this stage of his existence, little Bysshe resembled Geordie Byron at a
somewhat earlier age, in having the nervous diathesis that often disposes
children to walk in their sleep, when suffering from derangement of the
stomach. At least, on one occasion, Geordie Byron was a somnambulist at
Aberdeen. At least, on one occasion, Bysshe Shelley was a somnambulist
during the time he passed under Dr. Greenlaw's government. More than forty
years later, Medwin remembered how the boy looked, when after leaving his
proper bedroom he advanced with slow steps, one summer night, to the open
window of the dormitory he had no right to enter. Seeing that he was
asleep, and unaware that sleep-walkers should be awakened gradually,
Medwin jumped from bed and, seizing him quickly, roused the somnambulist
with a suddenness that gave him a painful shock, attended with severe
nervous erethism. In the morning Shelley paid another penalty for the
misbehaviour of his nerves. Boys taken at night in a wrong bed-room were
offenders against a wholesome domestic rule, to be punished even though
the offence was unintentional. 'I remember,' says Medwin, 'that he was
severely punished for this involuntary transgression.' It does not appear
how he was punished, or whether it was known to the punisher that the
breach of law had been committed during sleep.
Though he was not guilty of another walk in his sleep, the nervous and
delicate boy was still visited by 'waking dreams, a sort of lethargy and
abstraction that became habitual to him.' Whilst he was under the
influence of these day-dreams, his prominent blue eyes were glazed with a
peculiar dullness, and were equally inexpressive and insensible of
external objects. As soon as the visitations were over, his eyes flashed,
his lips quivered, and he spoke with a tremulous voice that was strangely
and painfully indicative of nervous agitation and distress. 'A sort of
ecstasy,' says Medwin, 'came over him, and he talked more like a spirit or
an angel than a human being.' As the words convey the intended impression,
there is no need to inquire in what respect the speech of a human creature
differs from the speech of a spirit, or to imagine the circumstances under
which Mr. Medwin may have been permitted to overhear the talk of angels.
Under the manifold vexations and sorrows that preyed upon his feelings at
Sion House, Shelley found solace and intermissions of grief in the
perusal of blue books,--no folios of parliamentary manufacture and
information; but the little blue-covered volumes of extremely exciting and
unwholesome prose-fiction, that were to be bought at sixpence a-piece of
ordinary booksellers in the earlier decades of the present century. He was
also a greedy devourer of tales (touching haunted castles, magicians,
picturesque brigands, and mysterious murderers) that proceeded from
writers, who did not condescend to offer their productions to the public
eye, in the vulgar little 'blue books,' or in any form less acceptable to
connoisseurs of elegant literature than board-bound volumes. It is
something to the honour of prose-fiction that the two greatest poets of
the nineteenth century may be said to have been mentally suckled and
reared on novels from infancy to adult age,--taught by novels how to think
and feel, and how to make others think and feel. It is alike true of Byron
and Shelley, that the germs of much that is most delightful and admirable
in their finest poems must be sought in old novels. John Moore's _Zeluco_
was not more influential in the production of _Childe Harold_, than
_Zofloya or the Moor_ was influential in the production of _Zastrozzi_ and
_St. Irvyne_, those crude and unutterably ridiculous achievements of
Shelley's youthful pen, which, offering to their amused perusers the
feeble fancies and puerile conceits that, appearing and reappearing in
successive volumes, developed eventually into vigorous creations and
exquisite examples of poetic imagery,--exhibit also the rude notions and
embryonic reasonings, that in the course of a few years grew and shaped
themselves in the fundamental principles and main features of his
philosophy on matters pertaining to politics, social economy, and
religion.
It is a question whether the recollections of misery endured at school,
which occupy three of the familiar stanzas to 'Mary,' should be regarded
as reminiscences of trials the poet underwent at Sion House, or of sorrows
that moved him to tears at Eton. Mrs. Shelley had no doubt the stanzas
referred to the public school; and Lady Shelley is no less confident that
her father-in-law was thinking of the Eton playing-grounds, when he wrote
in the dedicatory prelude to _Laon and Cythna_:
'Thoughts of great deeds were mine, dear Friend, when first
The clouds which wrap this world from youth did pass;
I do remember well the hour which burst
My spirit's sleep: a fresh May-dawn it was,
When I walked forth upon the glittering grass,
And wept, I knew not why; until there rose
From the near schoolroom, voices, that, alas!
Were but one echo from a world of woes--
The harsh and grating strife of tyrants and of foes.
'And then I clasped my hands and looked around,
But none was near to mock my streaming eyes,
Which poured their warm drops on the sunny ground--
So without shame, I spake:--"I will be wise,
And just, and free, and mild, if in me lies
Such power, for I grow weary to behold
The selfish and the strong still tyrannise,
Without reproach or check." I then controuled
My tears; my heart grew calm, and I was meek and bold.
'And from that hour did I with earnest thought
Heap knowledge from forbidden mines of lore;
Yet nothing that my tyrants knew or taught
I cared to learn, but from that secret store
Wrought linked-armour for my soul, before
It might walk forth to war upon mankind;
Thus power and hope were strengthened more and more
Within me, till there came upon my mind
A sense of loneliness, a thirst with which I pined.'
It has been usual with Shelley's biographers to deal with these verses as
though, besides referring to Eton, they afford a substantially accurate
account of trouble undergone, resolutions formed, and action taken by the
poet whilst he was at Eton. To the Shelleyan enthusiasts, it is heresy to
question the strict and severe historic veracity of any particular
statement of this piece of melodious egotism. To them it is an affair of
certainty that the grass glittered, the boy wept, the voices came from the
school-house, the weeping youth made virtuous resolves, precisely as, and
when, the poetry represents. The verses are given in evidence that Shelley
neglected Latin and Greek in order that he might devote all his best
energies to chemistry, astronomy, electricity, pneumatics,--in brief, to
those 'scientific pursuits,' about which so much fantastic nonsense has
been printed by the more fervid and less discreet of his eulogists. To
this way of reading and handling these verses, is mainly referable the
equally general and false notion that Shelley's principal employment at
Eton was to make 'linked armour for his soul' out of materials prohibited
to ingenuous youth by the teachers of his despotic school,--and that his
one purpose in forging this linked armour for his soul, was that he might
equip himself for 'walking forth to war among mankind,' _i.e._ for playing
the part of a political revolutionist and social reformer, as soon as he
should be his own master.
There is the less need to trouble oneself seriously with the question
whether the verses refer to Sion House or Eton, because it is certain they
do not correspond, in all their chief particulars, to his life at either
school. Whilst it is certain that his studies at the private school were
the studies prescribed by Dr. Greenlaw (unless the not-actually-prohibited
perusal of novels is to be rated as 'study'), it is no less certain that
he never grossly neglected the studies of either school. Far from
neglecting the ordinary scholastic exercises of an Eton boy in the degree
implied by the words,
'Yet nothing that my tyrants knew or taught
I cared to learn,'
it is certain that, without holding steadily a high place in any of the
higher forms, he acquired something more than a fair amount of the only
learning imparted to boys at Eton eighty years since, and displayed
remarkable aptitude and skill in making Latin verses,--an important part
of what his tyrants knew and taught. The evidence is conclusive that, at
Eton he was a facile and clever maker of Latin verses. Medwin speaks to
'his capacity for writing Latin verses,' and gives some examples of the
capacity, that may, at least, be styled creditable performances for a
public school-boy. Long after his abrupt withdrawal from the school, the
excellence of Shelley's Latin verses was remembered by old Etonians.
Whilst his readiness in the verse-maker's art was described as 'wonderful'
by Mr. Packe, another of his former schoolmates at Eton (Mr. Walter S.
Halliday) wrote of the same faculty to Lady Shelley, 'his power of Latin
versification' was 'marvellous.' Hogg certifies that, though more than a
year elapsed between his retirement from Eton and his going into residence
at University College--a period during which he certainly omitted to
enlarge his classical attainments--Shelley came up to Oxford an expert and
singularly quick Latin verse-maker, and a ready writer of Latin prose. So
much for the poet's vaunt that he did not care to learn what the Eton
masters could teach him.
On the other hand, it is certain that, whilst carrying away from Eton
something more than a creditable amount of the learning to be acquired in
the classes, Shelley learnt nothing at the school by irregular and
unrecognized study to justify the assertion that, whilst a schoolboy, he
gathered 'knowledge from forbidden mines of lore,' and armed himself for
the battle of life with weapons his official teachers would fain have kept
from his hands. His scientific studies were the mere sports of a
schoolboy, playing idly with an air-pump, an electrical battery, and a few
acids and alkalies. Instead of spending his leisure at Eton in the serious
pursuits of natural science, he employed it chiefly in literary essays,
that show him to have been possessed by an ambition scarcely compatible
with an enthusiasm for scientific investigation and a yearning for
scientific celebrity.
That both Mrs. Shelley and Lady Shelley had considerable, though
insufficient, grounds for regarding the dedicatory stanzas as a record of
the poet's experiences at Eton, is unquestionable. Mrs. Shelley could,
doubtless, have defended her view of the verses with words spoken by her
husband, who entertained her with several equally strange and delusive
stories of his life at the public school. Besides the poet's authority,
Lady Shelley could, perhaps, produce other evidence to justify her
concurrence with Mrs. Shelley's opinion. Whilst he deems it possible that
Shelley was thinking more of Eton than Brentford, when he committed the
verses to paper, the present writer has no doubt whatever that the poet,
soon after their composition and ever afterwards, regarded the three
stanzas as veracious autobiography--as a faithful poetical record of what
he had suffered, resolved, and done, when he was under Dr. Keate's
rigorous government. But the poet's words may not be produced as sure
evidence respecting the tenor and chief incidents of his career. From
manhood's threshold to his last hour, he was subject to strange delusions
about his own story; some of the marvellous misconceptions having
reference to matters of quite recent occurrence. 'Had he,' says Hogg,
'written to ten different individuals the history of some proceeding in
which he was himself a party and an eye-witness, each of his ten reports
would have varied from the rest in essential and important circumstances.
The relation given on the morrow would be unlike that of to-day, as the
latter would contradict the tale of yesterday.' Peacock, who also knew
and loved him well, bears similar testimony to the looseness and
inaccuracy of the poet's statements about his own affairs, even about
those of his affairs, respecting which (had he been a man of ordinary
exactness and fidelity to facts) he would be naturally regarded as the
best source of information. To escape the disagreeable necessity of
thinking him deliberately untruthful, Thomas Love Peacock had recourse to
the notion that his friend was the victim of 'semi-delusions.' With all
his desire to palliate his friend's besetting frailty, so as to relieve it
of the odium of sheer untruthfulness, Peacock, in his inability to rate
the delusive fancies as sincere and perfect delusions, came to the
conclusion that they were only 'semi-delusions;' that the mis-statements
of the poet's mouth and pen were referable in equal proportions to
delusive fancy and influences distinct from delusion. Whatever their show
of autobiographic purport and sincerity, it is obvious that the verses of
a poet, suffering from so perplexing an infirmity, differ widely in
evidential value from the autobiographic statements of an ordinary
individual.
How far the Byronic poems should be held accountable for Shelley's Byronic
way of dealing with his personal story in poems offered to the world, is a
question deserving more consideration than can be given to it in this
chapter. At this early point of an attempt to exhibit 'the Real Shelley,'
it is, however, well to indicate why criticism should deal with the
egotisms of the Shelleyan poems precisely as criticism has long dealt with
the egotisms of the Byronic poems.
However people may differ about the respective merits of the two poets,
all persons must allow that Byron and Shelley were both egotists in the
superlative degree,--and that differing from other poets in more unusual
and admirable qualities, they differ from them also in surcharging their
magnificent poetry with more or less misleading references to their
private concerns, and with emotion and sentiment arising from their purely
personal interests,--often from their purely personal discontents. In this
respect, both poets strayed from the high poetic path; sacrificing art to
egotism, fame to foible, greatness to vanity. If _Childe Harold_ was the
wail of a single romantic sufferer for his own sake, _Laon and Cythna_ was
the cry of a single romantic sufferer for his own as well as the world's
sake. The poet's personality is forced upon the reader's notice no less
resolutely in Shelley's than in Byron's poem. If it was Byron's vanity to
demand human sympathy as the victim of fate, it was Shelley's vanity to
solicit it as the victim of persecution.
Whilst the man of sin and mystery invited the world to admire his proud
endurance of the doom that distinguished him from all other mortals, the
angel of goodness and light invited mankind to worship him, for his
unselfishness, his impatience of evil, his abhorrence of oppression, his
ineffable benevolence, his heroic readiness to perish for the good of his
species. Both actors were equals in sincerity and in dishonesty. The man
who has still to discover that sincerity underlies almost every display of
human affectation, is a man who has failed in justice to a considerable
proportion of his species. The pretender ever plays the character he
desires in the most secret chamber of his heart to be mistaken for. Byron
and Shelley were alike actors and alike sincere, each taking a part
accordant with his conceptions of the sublime and admirable in human
nature. In assuming the character of a libertine,
'A shameless wight,
Sore given to revel and ungodly glee,'
Byron assumed the character that interested and fascinated him. In
assuming the character of the social martyr, Shelley, true to his own
nature, selected the character that appeared to him the most admirable.
Both characters were taken from the marvellous creations of the romantic
literature on which the two poets fed from childhood to years of
discretion. It was a literature that may be styled the romantic literature
of the good principle and the evil principle. In taking a representative
of the evil principle for his model, Byron displayed his genuine
disposition which, in spite of his engaging qualities and several generous
endowments, was a disposition towards evil. In determining to be a
representative of the good principle of human existence, as that existence
was exhibited in the 'blue books,' and other literature of the circulating
libraries, Shelley made a choice no less true to his own more gentle and
earnest nature. Mere boys when they forced themselves into notoriety,
neither of them could readily relinquish the part,--chosen so easily and
naturally. Shelley determined to be on the side of the angels, because his
disposition was in the main towards goodness; Byron went with the devils,
because he found them upon the whole better and more congenial company
than the angels of light.
In other respects, their resemblance was striking. Endowed with a memory
that equalled Byron's memory in retentiveness, though more liable to
illusions, an imagination even more powerful than Byron's imagination, and
a sensibility no less acute than Byron's sensibility, Shelley resembled
Byron also in his habit of brooding over old sorrows, intensifying them by
the exercise of fancy, and using them as instruments of self-torture.
Certainly in some degree, probably in a high degree, this habit is
referable to the influence of Byron's genius,--to the influence of the
Byronic poems, and also of their popularity. Whilst success never fails to
produce imitators, the affectations of the successful are curiously
infectious. This was notably the case with Byron's success, that putting
the younger poets and poetasters into turn-down collars, caused them to
train their voices to notes of what they deemed Byronic melancholy, and to
set their features into what they deemed expressions of Byronic
bitterness, and melancholy. It is not suggested that Shelley was for a
single minute one of the Byro-maniacal apes. It is not hinted that he ever
imitated Byron, except in the way in which a loyal, enthusiastic, and
altogether honest disciple may be seen to imitate a great master.
From his boyhood to his last year, Shelley regarded Byron with a generous
admiration, that once and again expressed itself in almost idolatrous
language. Unlike the Shelleyan fanatics, who seek to exalt their favourite
by decrying the only modern English poet likely to be rated as his
superior, Shelley ever regarded Byron as the greatest living master of
their art. Scott, Wordsworth, Southey, Coleridge, Keats, Tom Moore, Leigh
Hunt, to say nothing of minor minstrels, all had a share of Shelley's
never-stinted homage, but he never for any long time thought of putting
the best and strongest of them on equality with the incomparable Byron. To
remember the terms in which he wrote and spoke of Byron, is to think with
a smile of all that has been written in these later years by poetasters
and critics to Byron's discredit.
The enthusiasts, who have so clear a perception of the signs of Shelley's
influence over Byron in the Third Canto of _Childe Harold_, are curiously
blind to the far more important and conspicuous indications of Byron's
influence on Shelley in _Laon and Cythna_. When the most has been said of
the manifestations of Shelleyan thought in Byron's poem, it cannot be
questioned that had the younger of the two poets never lived, the four
Cantos of _Childe Harold_ would have been substantially the same poem they
now are. On the other hand, it is impossible for any one but a Shelleyan
enthusiast to believe that _Laon and Cythna_ would have been the same poem
it now is, had Byron never come into existence. Written in the summer of
1817, when the poet had been for five years, like all the younger poets of
his time, living under the domination of Byron's intellect, and had been
for a still longer period an enthusiastic admirer of Byron's writings;
written in the summer following the one in which the still youthful
aspirant to poetical renown had come under the personal influence of the
great poet, whom he had so long desired to know personally, and had made
at least one futile attempt to approach, _Laon and Cythna_ bears the most
distinct marks of Byron's influence in Shelley's selection of the
Spenserian measure, in the poem's Byronic egotisms, and in the pains taken
by the poet to identify himself with the hero of the narrative. In all
these particulars (to say nothing of other particulars which the reader of
these pages can discover for himself), _Laon and Cythna_ resembles _Childe
Harold_, just as the painting by a young artist, abounding in originality
and natural vigour, is often seen to resemble the painting of an older
artist, whose notions and treatment of colour, and whose manipulatory
address, have been a manifest force in the aspirant's education. Just as
the painting of the younger artist in form and colour, without being
either 'a copy,' or even 'an imitation,' in any dishonourable sense of the
term, bears to the painting of the master a certain resemblance (of tone
and treatment) that causes both works to be regarded in later times as
'works of the same school,' Shelley's great poem resembles Byron's great
poem.
Byron was in no degree accountable either for the 'story' of Shelley's
poem, or for its incidents and conceptions of character. The same may be
said of the prevailing sentiments, subordinate aims, and main purpose of
the poem. Whilst the prevailing sentiments of the poem are altogether
foreign to Byron's views on the religious, political, and social questions
dealt with in _Laon and Cythna_, his writings are in evidence that he must
have regarded Shelley's approval of 'Laon's' incest with his own sister
as revolting in the highest degree. But though the substance of this
extraordinary poem could not have proceeded from Byron's brain and pen,
the form of the work is distinctly Byronic. Shelley cannot have been
unconscious of this resemblance of his poem to what was at that time
Byron's greatest achievement in song. _Qui s'excuse s'accuse._ The very
words of the Preface, in which he anticipates a charge of 'presuming to
enter into competition with our greatest contemporary poets,' and, whilst
disclaiming the presumption, declares his 'unwillingness to tread in the
footsteps of any who preceded him,' are words of evidence that he was
fully and uneasily alive to the resemblance. His curious way of accounting
for his choice of the measure which Byron's poem had rendered more popular
for the moment than any other measure, is only the poet's attempt to shut
his eyes to the fact, that he selected the measure because _Childe Harold_
had rendered it more agreeable to his own ear than any other, and had also
made it the measure most likely to commend his poem to the public taste.
'I have,' he says, 'adopted the stanza of Spenser (a measure inexpressibly
beautiful), not because I consider it a finer model of poetical harmony
than the blank verse of Shakespeare and Milton, but because in the latter,
there is no shelter for mediocrity; you must either succeed or fail.'
Though Byron doubtless smiled at this reason for the adoption of the
measure, which he had in a certain sense made his own, he must have been
gratified by the delicate compliment to the poet who had adopted it with
success.
Using the Byronic measure (for the Spenserian measure had become for the
moment Byron's property), Shelley made a Byronic use of matter taken from
romances devoured in his childhood. 'Treading in the footsteps' of his
master, notwithstanding his assertions to the contrary, Shelley followed
the Byronic example in attaching his own personality to the hero of his
poem. Not content with hinting poetically in the Dedicatory Stanzas to
Mary that he and Laon are one, the author of _Laon and Cythna_ is at pains
to declare more fully and precisely in the prose of his Preface that
Laon's views on matters of religion and politics, on questions of
government and misgovernment, on the vices of ecclesiasticism and the
merits of vegetarianism, on the relations of the sexes and the æsthetics
of love, are the views of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Esq., who has studied
human nature in Switzerland as well as England, and who, in consideration
of his 'having trodden the glaciers of the Alps, and lived under the eye
of Mont Blanc,' should be regarded as a gentleman especially educated and
peculiarly qualified to dogmatize on such matters to English persons who
have never crossed the Channel. Both in the poem and dedicatory prelude he
seizes every opportunity to impress on the reader that Percy Bysshe
Shelley is Laon, the apostle of 'Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality,' and
that this Preacher of the 'New Evangel,' who at the close of the poem
sails into Paradise with his sister and the offspring of their incestuous
intercourse in a boat made of
'one curved shell of hollow pearl,
Almost translucent with the light divine
Of her within,'
is no other than Percy Bysshe Shelley, Esq., eldest son of the Member of
Parliament for New Shoreham, and heir-apparent to a Sussex baronetcy. In
these Shelleyan egotisms the critical reader of the marvellous poem
recognizes the very touch and trick of Byron's way of dressing up details
of his domestic woes and personal story for the delight and mystification
of his readers. One of the most pathetic and effective of the egotisms is
the poet's account of the misery he endured from hard-hearted masters and
malicious boys whilst he was at school.
Just as Byron seasoned the introductory stanzas of _Childe Harold's_ first
canto with more or less imaginary particulars of his misspent youth, when
'Few earthly things found favour in his sight,
Save concubines and carnal companie,
And flaunting wassailers of high and low degree,'
Shelley seasoned the dedicatory verses of _Laon and Cythna_ with
references to the wretchedness that preyed upon him when, walking forth
upon the glittering grass, he wept and
'knew not why; until there rose
From the near schoolroom, voices, that, alas!
Were but one echo from a world of woes--
The harsh and grating strife of tyrants and of foes.'
Both descriptions were equally truthful and untruthful. The basis of truth
in Byron's poetical narrative of his misspent youth is that he kept the
girl at Brompton who used to ride and walk about London in boy's clothes,
and that when he entertained three or four old college friends at
Newstead, they talked a good deal of nonsense and drank rather more
champagne than was good for them. The basis of truth in Shelley's
narrative of his wretched boyhood is that he was often unhappy at school
(_very_ unhappy at Brentford), and that being of a soft and girlish
temperament when he was at Sion House, he sometimes fell a-weeping because
the 'boys were so unkind to him.' The Shelleyan narrative is not
historically exact to his doings and experiences in either of his two
schools. At Brentford he was not remarkably insubordinate (as he was at
Eton), and did nothing to give the faintest justificatory colour to his
vaunt of having devoted himself to studies prohibited or discountenanced
by the masters of the establishment. At Eton (where, though often unhappy,
he was less given to crying than in his Brentford days), instead of
neglecting the studies of the college, he attained to considerable
excellence in them. Upon the whole, the weeping boy 'upon the glittering
grass' bears more resemblance to the chicken-heart and milksop of Dr.
Greenlaw's playground than to the unruly, fitfully riotous, and
inordinately blasphemous young rascal, who was eliminated from Eton with
the least possible disgrace, even as in later time he was expelled in an
irregular way, and with no needless humiliation, from Oxford. And in
consideration of this greater resemblance, the present writer has thought
right to deal, in this chapter about the Brentford schoolboy, with the
verses that, in Mrs. Shelley's opinion and Lady Shelley's opinion, are a
faithful picture of the lad at Eton.
It is certain that the little Bysshe was an unhappy child at Sion House,
even to the time of his withdrawal from the school, when he had grown
almost too tall, though certainly not too robust, to be called 'little.'
But miserable children are curiously, pathetically clever in escaping from
their misery. The smart of them over, Bysshe soon dismissed from his mind
those disagreeable visits to the Doctor's study. In the pages of his
ghost-stories and banditti-stories, his tales of satanic malice and
knightly heroism, he forgot all about those very unkind boys. Most of
those delightful books he borrowed from the circulating library, but
doubtless he had in his schoolroom 'locker' his own copies of his
favourite novels. It cannot be questioned he had a peculiar and
inalienable copy of _Zofloya, or The Moor_, which, yielding flowers of
romance to be found in the ineffably absurd novels which he published in
the opening term of his literary career, gave him also fine pieces of
descriptive writing that, after doing service in _Zastrozzi_ and _St.
Irvyne_, were worked with skilful art into the lofty song of _Laon and
Cythna_.
The urchin enjoyed his frequent walks under the playground's southern wall
with his cousin Tom Medwin, till the latter left Dr. Greenlaw's sadly
plebeian school, and went off to the public school which prepared him for
Oxford. Though he cannot rely so confidently as he could wish on Tom
Medwin's assurance, the present writer likes to imagine Mr. Medwin had
better ground than his treacherous memory for saying that, when they were
schoolfellows at Sion House, he and his young cousin more than once played
the truant; and rowing on the river more than once to Kew, went on one
occasion by water to Richmond, where they visited the theatre and saw Mrs.
Jordan in the 'Country Girl.' One would fain believe this of the little
boy who, on growing to be a man, disliked the theatre almost as cordially
as he had in former time hated Professor Sala's dancing academy.
But one hesitates to trust in this matter to the biographer who seems to
have erred in recording that Shelley acquired a taste for boating, even at
a time considerably prior to the period in which this secret and lawless
trip to the Richmond Theatre is said to have been made. Peacock, who can
scarcely have been mistaken, was certain the poet's 'affection for boating
began at a much later date' than his time at Eton. Walter S. Halliday
(Shelley's friend at the public school) was no less certain, in February,
1857, that at Eton Shelley 'never joined in the usual sports of the boys,
and, what is remarkable, never went out in a boat on the river.' Had
Shelley enjoyed boating at Sion House, it is inconceivable that he (so
passionately fond of the water in later time) would have avoided the
river, or could have been kept from it at Eton. As Halliday was no such
reliable authority as successive writers have thought, I should have
hesitated to prefer his evidence to Medwin's testimony on this point, had
not the Etonian witness been so emphatically sustained by Love Peacock. In
regard to what he says of Shelley's boating at Brentford, Mr. Medwin
professes to speak from his own knowledge. On the other hand, he
acknowledges that, with respect to the poet's alleged love of boating at
Eton, he speaks on the worst possible authority--the poet's own equally
delusive and retentive memory. 'He told me,' says Medwin, _vide_ _The
Life_, v. I., p. 52, 'the greatest delight he experienced at Eton was from
boating, for which he had, as I have already mentioned, early acquired a
taste.' Such unsupported evidence from Shelley is scarcely anything better
than no evidence at all, on being opposed by such witnesses as Halliday
and Peacock.
From this chapter on Shelley's school-days at Brentford, one should not
omit a pleasant glimpse that is afforded of the boy (in the company of his
cousins, the Groves, sons of Thomas Grove, of Fern House, Wiltshire, who
married Charlotte Pilford, sister of the poet's mother) by a letter, dated
to Hogg, February 16th, 1857, by Charles Henry Grove. At that date it was
in the memory of Charles Henry Grove how, when a tender Harrovian, _ætat._
nine, he saw his cousin Bysshe for the first time. On this occasion the
nine-year old Harrovian, attended by his brother George, _ætat._ ten, and
protected by a sufficient body-servant, picked Bysshe up at Brentford and
carried him off, on the roof of the stage-coach to Wiltshire, for the
Easter holidays. It lived in Charles Grove's memory, how, during these
holidays he and his brother joined Shelley in a feat of mischief that no
doubt made the Squire of Fern wish them back at school. Acting on Bysshe's
suggestion, the three took the carpenter's axes, and set to work cutting
down some of the young fir-trees of Fern Park. As Charles Grove, _ætat._
nine at the time of this occurrence, was born in 1794 (_vide_ Burke's
_Landed Gentry_), and Shelley was born in August, 1792, this pretty 'piece
of boys' mischief' may be assigned to the Easter holidays of Bysshe's
twelfth year,--_i.e._ Easter, 1804; about the middle of his whole time at
Sion House.
It seems to have been towards the end of his time at Brentford, that
Shelley experienced the delights of his tender attachment to the gentle
schoolmate of his own age, with whom he used to hold romantic converse in
the playground, and exchange 'good-night kisses' at the time for going to
bed--the childish attachment so sweetly commemorated in the _Essay on
Friendship_. What is the biographical value of that charming story, which
one could believe no less readily than gladly, were it not told _of_
Shelley _by_ Shelley?
Had it proceeded from a man far less imaginative than Shelley, and far
less prone to mistake the creations of his fancy for sincere
recollections, no cautious reader would regard this pleasant record of
infantile affection as faithful in every particular to the actual
circumstances of the childish attachment. On the other hand, the coldest
and most suspicious peruser will be disposed to think the story
substantially truthful, due allowance being made for the force of
imagination, the deceitfulness of the equally retentive and fallacious
memory, and the peculiar infirmity of the man who could not be trusted to
give twelve fairly consistent accounts of any matter, however much he
might desire to be precisely accurate. It is in favour of this estimate of
the story that the essayist's portraiture of his former self harmonizes
with the several other accounts he has given elsewhere of his character in
childhood. In his later time Shelley always thought of the child, from
which he had developed, as a mild-mannered, tractable, gentle child. The
attachment being remembered, as an affair of his twelfth or thirteenth
year, it may be presumed to have stirred and held his heart towards the
close of his time at Brentford,--probably after Tom Medwin (who says
nothing of the matter) left Sion House. To see the Brentford schoolboy's
prominent blue eyes overflowing with tears of delight, under the music of
his friend's voice, to watch the two urchins exchanging kisses, is to
remember the girlishness of Byron's early attachments, as well as the
girlishness of his affectionate care for his Harrow 'favourites.' From his
first to his last hour at Sion House the masculine forces of Bysshe's
two-sided nature were in abeyance. He was a gentle English girl rather
than a gentle English boy.
CHAPTER V.
THE ETON SCHOOLBOY.
First year at Eton--Creation of the Castle-Goring Baronetcy--Sir
Bysshe Shelley's Last Will--Timothy Shelley's Children--Miss Hellen
Shelley's Recollections--The Etonian at Home--The Big Tortoise--The
Great Snake--Dr. Keate--Mr. Packe at fault--Walter Halliday--Mr.
Hexter--Mr. Bethell--Fagging--Mad Shelley--'Old Walker'--Enthusiasm
for Natural Science--The Rebel of the School--Lord High Atheist--Dr.
Lind's Pernicious Influence on Shelley--Poetical Fictions about Dr.
Lind--Shelley's Illness at Field Place--His Monstrous Hallucination
touching his Father--John Shelley the Lunatic--_Zastrozzi_--Premature
Withdrawal from Eton.
Respecting the year of Shelley's first term at Eton, the authorities
differ: one set of writers averring that he entered the school in his
fourteenth year (1806), whilst other biographers record that he entered it
in his fifteenth year (1807). Lady Shelley says, 'At the age of _thirteen_
Shelley went to Eton.' On the other hand, the usually exact Thomas Love
Peacock says, 'On leaving this academy' (_i.e._ Sion House) 'he was sent
in his fifteenth year to Eton,' and Mr. William Rossetti says, 'He passed
to Eton in his fifteenth year.' Though no prudent writer ventures to set
aside lightly a date given by so careful and conscientious a biographer as
the author of the _Memoir of Shelley_, I venture to think that Mr.
Rossetti is at fault in this particular, having perhaps erred through
reasonable reliance on the accuracy of Mr. Peacock, who seems, in taking a
date from one of the books he was reviewing for _Fraser's Magazine_ (June,
1858), to have gone a barley-corn beyond Mr. Middleton's words. Instead of
saying that Shelley _went_ to Eton in his fifteenth year for the first
time, Mr. Middleton (in his _Shelley and his Writings_, 1858) keeps to
historic truth in merely stating, 'In 1807, when Shelley was in his
fifteenth year, we find him at Eton.' He neither says nor implies that the
future poet could not have been found there in the previous year. On the
contrary, his words indicate uncertainty as to the precise date of the
poet's first appearance at the school. Gaining his knowledge of the poet's
career at Eton from old Etonians who were schoolmates there, Mr.
Middleton was probably instructed in this matter by an old Etonian who,
whilst certain Shelley was at the school in 1807, could not speak
positively to his being there in an earlier year.
Though the author of the _Shelley Memorials_ is curiously deficient in the
communicativeness and accuracy to be looked for in a biographer professing
to gather her materials 'from Authentic Sources,' it may be assumed that
Lady Shelley is right on a matter from which the schoolboy's preserved
letters and his father's domestic memoranda of the year 1806 would save
her from going wrong. It favours this view of Lady Shelley's statement,
that old Mr. Bysshe Shelley was created a baronet by the Duke of Norfolk's
influence on the 3rd of March, 1806, when he was in his seventy-fifth
year. At length the Castle-Goring Shelleys had risen from the status of
prosperous middle-class folk to the honour of the baronetage. Having
become a dignified commoner, with a dignity transmissible to his
descendants, the Horsham miser (who had sent his son to Oxford) naturally
felt that, instead of associating any longer with tradesmen's sons at Sion
House, his grandson (the heir of the heir to the Castle-Goring baronetcy)
should make the acquaintance of the sons of the nobility and other
territorial gentry. Much though he grudged the fees for his baronetcy, and
dreaded the school-bills, Sir Bysshe determined that his grandson should
be educated up to his rank, and sent forthwith to Eton.
The future poet was still under Dr. Greenlaw's government, and his
grandsire was counting the days still to elapse before he should clutch
the long-coveted honour of the bloody hand, when the veteran took an
important step (on 28th November, 1805) for the achievement of the grand
ambition of his riper age and failing years. This ambition was to make the
Shelleys of his loins into the House of the Castle-Goring Shelleys, and to
endow the new house with a large and strictly entailed estate in land,
that should place it securely amongst the great territorial families of
Sussex; a common-place ambition, that was the natural and matter-of-course
ambition for a man of old Bysshe Shelley's character, career, and age. As
he was his father's eldest son, Mr. Timothy Shelley (the poet's father)
naturally approved this design for making a big entailed estate, to which
he would succeed on his sire's death. Though they squabbled and wrangled
with one another on minor pecuniary questions, the veteran and his son
were of one mind on this point. Whilst the old man was set on making a big
entailed estate, his son was of opinion that the estate ought to be made.
The materials of which it was proposed to construct this big estate
were,--
(A) Certain real estate, settled by deed of appointment (dated 20th
August, 1791) on Mr. Bysshe Shelley for life, and then on his son Timothy
for life, with, &c.
(B) Certain other real estate, settled, by certain indentures of Lease and
Release (dated respectively 29th and 30th April, 1782) on the same Bysshe
Shelley for life, and then on his same son Timothy for life, with, &c.,
and
(C) Certain unsettled lands, the property and disposal of which were
wholly in the same Bysshe Shelley: and one half of the same Bysshe
Shelley's personal estate.
After what has been said of old Bysshe Shelley's success in making money,
it is needless to inform readers that C was by far the most important of
these three several lots of estate:--that, though of considerable value, A
and B were insignificant in comparison with C.
What was the precise yearly revenue of A and B does not appear. At a time
when he had no clear knowledge of the matter, the poet used to speak of
the revenue as 6000_l._ per annum. But whilst he certainly did not
understate the income, there is reason for thinking he greatly exaggerated
it. The rental may (for all I know positively to the contrary) have been
6000_l._ a-year; but in estimating the poet's financial position, readers
had better assume that the yearly income from A and B did not exceed, and
may have been considerably less than, 4000_l._ a-year. If the two lots of
estate yielded a clear income of 4000_l._ they were worth about 80,000_l._
If they yielded as much as 6000_l._, they were worth about 120,000_l._
Under the settlements, to which reference has been made, Percy Bysshe
Shelley (the poet) was, in the language of lawyers, tenant in tail male of
A and B in remainder expectant on the deaths of his father and
grandfather. That is to say, the fee simple of A and B would devolve on
him absolutely after the deaths of his sire and grandsire. For the more
clear information of non-legal readers, let it also be observed that,
having this estate in A and B under existing settlements, Percy had in A
and B an interest that would vest in him at the attainment of his
majority,--an estate which, on his coming of age, he would be able to
charge, aliene, or will away from his kindred; an estate on which he would
be able to borrow money, and could sell, or dispose of by testament,
during the lives of his father and grandfather, or the life of either of
them, no less than when on the deaths of both of them he should come in
actual possession of the land.
This being so, old Bysshe Shelley (son of the Yankee apothecary) made a
will on 28th November, 1805, whereby he devised his unsettled lands (of C)
to trustees, In Trust to settle the same, in what lawyers designate
'strict settlement,' on his son Timothy Shelley for life, Percy Bysshe
Shelley for life, and Percy Bysshe Shelley's sons successively, according
to their seniorities in tail male, and then in default, &c., on other sons
of Timothy Shelley aforesaid born in the testator's lifetime and their
sons successively in tail male, and then in default, &c., on other sons of
the same Timothy, born after the testator's death, successively according
to their seniorities in tail male; with similar limitations in default,
&c., in favour of John Shelley Sidney, and Robert Shelley (Timothy's
younger brothers by half-blood), and their respective issue male. By his
will the testator further bequeathed his personal estate to trustees, and
directed half of it to be invested in land, to be settled in the same way
as the already-mentioned lands. It is further directed by the will that
all persons entitled to A shall concur in settling A as C, or forfeit for
themselves and issue all the interest pertaining to them under the will in
C. By the will, therefore, Percy Bysshe Shelley stood to succeed on his
father's death as tenant for life to the whole entailed estate, provided
he concurred in arrangements whereby the real estate A (of which he was
tenant in tail male in remainder expectant on the deaths, &c., &c.) would
become part of the entailed estate. To take his place in succession to the
very large estate, to be created by his grandsire's will, he was only
required, on coming of age, to surrender his eventual absolute interest in
a comparatively small estate, and take in lieu thereof a life-interest.
Nothing was required of him that is not often required of heirs under
similar circumstances. Nothing was required of him that (in case of his
death in his nonage) would not have been required of his younger brother,
or any other person similarly interested in A. Such was the will of old
Bysshe Shelley made in 1805 in abundant grand-paternal affection for the
poet, long before any differences touching religion and politics had risen
between the youngster and his father. This same will was in due course
proved as the last testament of Sir Bysshe Shelley, Bart., in Doctors'
Commons, in 1815.
At the moment of the future poet's departure for Eton, it is well to
remind the readers of his story, that he was the eldest child of his
parents,--being senior to his eldest sister by a year and nine months.
Mistakes having been made about the poet in his earlier years, which would
not have been made by his biographers, had they been aware of this fact,
it is necessary to warn readers not to mistrust their present guide
because he differs on this matter from several previous authorities. Here
is the list of the offspring of Mr. and Mrs. Timothy Shelley, of Field
Place, with some particulars of the children, taken from the pedigree,
mentioned in a previous chapter:--
1. Percy Bysshe Shelley, eldest son and heir-apparent, born at Field
Place 4th August, 1792, baptized at Warnham 7th September following.
2. Elizabeth Shelley, eldest daughter, born 10th May, 1794, baptized
at Warnham 2nd July following.
3. Hellen Shelley, 2nd daughter, born 29th January, 1796, baptized
27th February following; died an infant, buried at Warnham 25th May,
1796.
4. Mary Shelley, 3rd daughter, born 9th June, 1797, baptized at
Warnham 17th of July following.
5. Hellen Shelley, 4th daughter, born 26th September, 1799, baptized
at Warnham 6th October following.
6. Margaret Shelley, 5th daughter, born 20th of January, 1801,
baptized at Warnham 12th March following.
7. John Shelley, 2nd son, born 15th of March, 1806, baptized at
Warnham 14th of August following.
A child of six years, when her brother went to Eton for the first time,
Miss Hellen Shelley (who lived to be in her later middle age the chief
source of information respecting his boyhood) may have still been in her
seventh year, cannot have exceeded her seventh year by three full months,
when he returned from Eton to Field Place for his first Etonian holidays.
It follows that, instead of pertaining to an earlier period of his
boyhood, Miss Hellen Shelley's recollections of her brother relate to the
Eton schoolboy; to the youth between the date of his gentle extrusion from
Eton and entrance into Oxford, to the University undergraduate, and to the
youthful lodger in Poland Street, immediately after his by no means
undeserved expulsion from his Oxford college. It is not in the nature of
things that his sister Hellen (his junior by seven years and something
more than seven weeks) should have remembered aught of her brother
previous to his Eton time, so clearly as she remembered the things
narrated of him, by virtue of her own memory, in the letters of her pen
published in Hogg's first volume. It follows, therefore, that for a
biographer to make the Shelley of the Warnham day-school, and the
Brentford boarding-school, out of these reminiscences, is to produce a
precocious infant very much unlike what the schoolboy can have been in his
earlier childhood; in fact, to set the reader wrong at the story's outset
with a false Shelley, instead of the real Shelley.
If Miss Hellen Shelley may be trusted (and there is no reason to question
the general fidelity of the lady's reminiscences), the Etonian, at home
for the holidays, taught his little sisters to personate angels of light
and angels of darkness, spirits of the air and spirits of the fiery
depths, with such eccentric and fantastic articles of clothing or other
drapery as the children of big country-houses can usually discover in
out-of-the-way wardrobes and closets when they have mind to 'play at
dressing up' in the Christmas holidays. He used also to play under their
curious eyes, and to their alternate delight and terror, with his chemical
toys and electrical apparatus. Good cause had little Hellen to hold her
breath with alarm, and wonder what would come of the magical performance,
when the mysteriously clever and daring Bysshe was seen running through a
principal passage of the old home towards the kitchen, whilst bearing in
his outstretched hands a dish, that sent blue flames upwards even to the
ceiling. Better reason still had the small damsel to cry aloud, in strains
that brought the elders of the family to her rescue, when the scientific
experimentalist (who had on previous occasions inspired her with a
reasonable aversion to his electrical jar) declared his humane purpose of
curing her chilblains with a series of small shocks.
Himself a glutton of horrible tales, the Etonian-at-home was ever ready
with a harrowing narrative of tragic crime and ghastly consequences, when
the girls begged him to tell them something terrible, by the flickering
light of their play-room fire. He overflowed, also, with stories about the
alchemist, Cornelius Agrippa, who was represented as living up aloft in a
spacious garret, under the roof of Field Place, directly over the heads of
the excited children, grouped about this playroom's only source of light.
To their frequent entreaties for a personal introduction to the mysterious
and benevolent Cornelius, Percy used to assure his sisters that in due
course they should see the philosopher, his books, his lamp, his venerable
beard, when he should migrate from the garret to the cave, soon to be dug
for him in the orchard, and furnished with all the apparatus needful for
his investigations and experiments.
At other times Percy entertained his sisters with anecdotes of the Great
Tortoise, that had lived for centuries and grown to enormous magnitude in
and near Warnham Pond. What he told them of the fabulous tortoise does not
appear. It is so difficult to get anything but turtle-soup and hair-combs
out of a tortoise of any kind, one would like to know how the boy
contrived to inspire his auditors with a vivid interest in this creature
of his imagination. To do so he may be presumed to have talked freely and
with wild disregard for the teaching of the best authorities on natural
history.
Towards the close of his Eton time (or possibly somewhat later, between
his withdrawal from Eton and departure for Oxford) Percy Bysshe discarded
the Big Tortoise and replaced it with the Great Snake, that was supposed
to have lived for three hundred years in the Field Place gardens, before
it was killed by the scythe of the careless or ruthless gardener, during
the childhood of its imaginative historian. Biographers, who smile at the
Shelleyan girls for putting faith in their brother's taradiddles about the
Big Tortoise, are firm believers in his taradiddles about the monstrous
and Venerable Serpent. Indeed, they are apt to be indignant with flippant
sceptics, who declare themselves as ready to believe in the Warnham
Tortoise as in the Field Place Snake. How the snake had amused itself for
three hundred years in the grass and flower-beds of the garden is not on
the record. Nor does it appear how the young historian came upon the
evidence of its longevity.
At Oxford, Hogg heard strange tales of the Field Place Snake; and
listening to them, as they came from his young friend's lips, the
hard-headed north-countryman may well have wondered why his young friend
told so many more lies than were necessary. But if Hogg dismissed the
Great Snake legends from his mind, as mere levities undeserving of
remembrance, some of the poet's historians would have them treated more
respectfully. Believing in the Great Snake, and gushing over it in a style
that appears slightly comical to unbelievers, Mr. Buxton Forman
ejaculates, 'We think of these things, and remember the anecdote of the
"great old snake" of Field Place, beloved of the little Percy, and killed
by the scythe of the gardener, and almost wonder what inarticulate dirge
the little boy uttered over his mutilated favourite'!!! It still remains
for a Royal Academician to put on canvas this pathetic scene:--The Child
Shelley uttering an inarticulate dirge over the corse of his mutilated
favourite, whilst the remorseless and all unfeeling gardener pursues his
daily wages with the fatal knife.
Other facts touching the Etonian may be gleaned from Miss Hellen Shelley's
letters, or the pages of less delightful writers. Sometimes he is seen
taking his sisters for country walks. At other times he is seen on his
pony, riding, perhaps, to 'the meet' of his grandsire's hounds; for much
as he loved money, and much as he may have grudged the cost of his kennel,
old Sir Bysshe kept hounds, and a huntsman and 'whips' almost to the last.
There were times when he walked forth shooting, with a gun in his hand and
a dog at his heels. On one occasion the humour seized him to don the garb
of a farmer's hind, and bearing a truss of hay on his back walk across the
Field Place lawn, and under the very windows through which his sisters
were looking. It was, doubtless, some two years or more before this bit of
rural masquerading, that he used to walk out in the evening, to look at
the moon and stars, moving to and fro in the park, and in the Warnham
lanes, with the butler at his heels, to watch over him and take care of
him. There was also a day, when this--in his sisters' eyes, so
marvellous--Etonian spoke to them seriously of his intention to buy a
little gipsy-girl, and train her to love him and depend upon him. But
nothing in all Miss Hellen Shelley's reminiscences is more eloquent of the
pride she took in her marvellous brother, than her recollection of the
pleasure she took in admiring 'the beautifully fitting silk pantaloons,'
and other sumptuous raiment he was allowed to order 'according to his own
fancy at Eton.' Little Hellen's delight was perfect when she saw this
exemplary Etonian standing, after the fashion of men and boys, with his
back to the fire, posturing, and playing with his coat-tails, so as to
display his slight figure and exquisite nether-garments to the best
advantage. What though this superb brother now and then stained his little
sister's pinafores and frocks with lunar-caustic, and otherwise injured
them with the chemicals he used in his scientific experiments?
Going to Eton in 1806 (probably in the early autumn) Shelley left the
school in disgrace, some time towards the close of 1809. The exact date of
his withdrawal from the college has never been revealed by the authorities
of Field Place, who have been no less reticent respecting the
circumstances that resulted in his premature removal from the seminary,
where he failed to win the approval of the masters, though he succeeded
eventually in making himself acceptable to the boys. Why Lady Shelley,
writing 'from authentic sources,' was thus silent on particulars of no
slight moment, the present writer makes no suggestion. All he can say
positively on these points is that Shelley left the school in disgrace,
which there is reason for thinking he richly merited, and left it at the
time already stated. His Eton career, therefore, cannot have exceeded
three years by very many weeks. In so short a time, however, he endured
more suffering than falls to the lot of an ordinary schoolboy, and at the
same time achieved a reputation that long survived his departure from the
school, and would have lived for several years in its traditions, even if
his subsequent career had not given his former comrades at the famous seat
of learning, other and stronger reasons for holding him in remembrance.
On the girlish side of his nature, Bysshe was no boy to conciliate the
riotous, overbearing urchins of the public school. When the masculine
elements of his constitution came to be in the ascendant, he made enemies
of the masters; and at Eton, in 'old Keate's time,' to have a bad
character with the masters was to come under the lash of a gentleman who
surpassed Mulcaster and Busby as a severe disciplinarian. If any kind of
posthumous renown is better than none, this gentleman may be numbered
amongst the fortunate members of his profession; for his fame will not
perish so long as Orbilius is remembered. Shelley soon learnt that Dr.
Greenlaw's hand was light in comparison with the hand of the Etonian
master-in-chief; that his rods were feathers in comparison with the
implements of torture wielded by Dr. Keate. Succeeding a head-master, the
mildness of whose rigour had rendered him the scorn of pedagogues and the
jest of schoolboys, Dr. Keate ascended his throne with a purpose of
restoring the discipline of the school to the ancient standard of Etonian
severity. Just the man to accomplish this ambition, he failed only by
raising
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