PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY AND MARY GODWIN
A great deal has been said and written in favor of early marriage; and,in a general way, early marriage may be an admirable thing. Young menand young women who have no special gift of imagination, and who havepractically reached their full mental development at twenty-one ortwenty-two--or earlier, even in their teens--may marry safely; becausethey are already what they will be. They are not going to experience anygrowth upward and outward. Passing years simply bring them more closelytogether, until they have settled down into a sort of domestic unity,by which they think alike, act alike, and even gradually come to lookalike.
But early wedlock spells tragedy to the man or the woman of genius. Intheir teens they have only begun to grow. What they will be ten yearshence, no one can prophesy. Therefore, to mate so early in life isto insure almost certain storm and stress, and, in the end, domesticwreckage.
As a rule, it is the man, and not the woman, who makes the false step;because it is the man who elects to marry when he is still very young.If he choose some ill-fitting, commonplace, and unresponsive nature tomatch his own, it is he who is bound in the course of time to learn hisgreat mistake. When the splendid eagle shall have got his growth,and shall begin to soar up into the vault of heaven, the poor littlebarn-yard fowl that he once believed to be his equal seems very far awayin everything. He discovers that she is quite unable to follow him inhis towering flights.
The story of Percy Bysshe Shelley is a singular one. The circumstancesof his early marriage were strange. The breaking of his marriage-bondwas also strange. Shelley himself was an extraordinary creature. He wasblamed a great deal in his lifetime for what he did, and since then somehave echoed the reproach. Yet it would seem as if, at the very beginningof his life, he was put into a false position against his will. Becauseof this he was misunderstood until the end of his brief and brilliantand erratic career.
SHELLEY AND MARY GODWIN
In 1792 the French Revolution burst into flame, the mob of Paris stormedthe Tuileries, the King of France was cast into a dungeon to await hisexecution, and the wild sons of anarchy flung their gauntlet of defianceinto the face of Europe. In this tremendous year was born young Shelley;and perhaps his nature represented the spirit of the time.
Certainly, neither from his father nor from his mother did he derivethat perpetual unrest and that frantic fondness for revolt whichblazed out in the poet when he was still a boy. His father, Mr. TimothyShelley, was a very usual, thick-headed, unromantic English squire. Hismother--a woman of much beauty, but of no exceptional traits--was thedaughter of another squire, and at the time of her marriage was simplyone of ten thousand fresh-faced, pleasant-spoken English country girls.If we look for a strain of the romantic in Shelley's ancestry, weshall have to find it in the person of his grandfather, who was a veryremarkable and powerful character.
This person, Bysshe Shelley by name, had in his youth been associatedwith some mystery. He was not born in England, but in America--andin those days the name "America" meant almost anything indefinite andpeculiar. However this might be, Bysshe Shelley, though a scion ofa good old English family, had wandered in strange lands, and it waswhispered that he had seen strange sights and done strange things.According to one legend, he had been married in America, though no oneknew whether his wife was white or black, or how he had got rid of her.
He might have remained in America all his life, had not a smallinheritance fallen to his share. This brought him back to England, andhe soon found that England was in reality the place to make his fortune.He was a man of magnificent physique. His rovings had given him easeand grace, and the power which comes from a wide experience of life. Hecould be extremely pleasing when he chose; and he soon won his way intothe good graces of a rich heiress, whom he married.
With her wealth he became an important personage, and consorted withgentlemen and statesmen of influence, attaching himself particularly tothe Duke of Northumberland, by whose influence he was made a baronet.When his rich wife died, Shelley married a still richer bride; and sothis man, who started out as a mere adventurer without a shilling to hisname, died in 1813, leaving more than a million dollars in cash, withlands whose rent-roll yielded a hundred thousand dollars every year.
If any touch of the romantic which we find in Shelley is a matterof heredity, we must trace it to this able, daring, restless, andmagnificent old grandfather, who was the beau ideal of an Englishsquire--the sort of squire who had added foreign graces to nativesturdiness. But young Shelley, the future poet, seemed scarcely to beEnglish at all. As a young boy he cared nothing for athletic sports.He was given to much reading. He thought a good deal about abstractionswith which most schoolboys never concern themselves at all.
Consequently, both in private schools and afterward at Eton, he becamea sort of rebel against authority. He resisted the fagging-system. Hespoke contemptuously of physical prowess. He disliked anything that hewas obliged to do, and he rushed eagerly into whatever was forbidden.
Finally, when he was sent to University College, Oxford, he brokeall bounds. At a time when Tory England was aghast over the FrenchRevolution and its results, Shelley talked of liberty and equality onall occasions. He made friends with an uncouth but able fellow student,who bore the remarkable name of Thomas Jefferson Hogg--a name that seemsrampant with republicanism--and very soon he got himself expelled fromthe university for publishing a little tract of an infidel charactercalled "A Defense of Atheism."
His expulsion for such a cause naturally shocked his father. It probablydisturbed Shelley himself; but, after all, it gave him some satisfactionto be a martyr for the cause of free speech. He went to London with hisfriend Hogg, and took lodgings there. He read omnivorously--Hogg saysas much as sixteen hours a day. He would walk through the most crowdedstreets poring over a volume, while holding another under one arm.
His mind was full of fancies. He had begun what was afterward called"his passion for reforming everything." He despised most of the laws ofEngland. He thought its Parliament ridiculous. He hated its religion. Hewas particularly opposed to marriage. This last fact gives some point tothe circumstances which almost immediately confronted him.
Shelley was now about nineteen years old--an age at which most Englishboys are emerging from the public schools, and are still in thehobbledehoy stage of their formation. In a way, he was quite far fromboyish; yet in his knowledge of life he was little more than a merechild. He knew nothing thoroughly--much less the ways of men and women.He had no visible means of existence except a small allowance fromhis father. His four sisters, who were at a boarding-school on ClaphamCommon, used to save their pin-money and send it to their gifted brotherso that he might not actually starve. These sisters he used to callupon from time to time, and through them he made the acquaintance of asixteen-year-old girl named Harriet Westbrook.
Harriet Westbrook was the daughter of a black-visaged keeper of acoffee-house in Mount Street, called "Jew Westbrook," partly because ofhis complexion, and partly because of his ability to retain what hehad made. He was, indeed, fairly well off, and had sent his youngerdaughter, Harriet, to the school where Shelley's sisters studied.
Harriet Westbrook seems to have been a most precocious person. Any girlof sixteen is, of course, a great deal older and more mature than ayouth of nineteen. In the present instance Harriet might have beenShelley's senior by five years. There is no doubt that she fell in lovewith him; but, having done so, she by no means acted in the shy andtimid way that would have been most natural to a very young girl in herfirst love-affair. Having decided that she wanted him, she made up hermind to get Mm at any cost, and her audacity was equaled only by hissimplicity. She was rather attractive in appearance, with abundant hair,a plump figure, and a pink-and-white complexion. This description makesof her a rather doll-like girl; but doll-like girls are just the sort toattract an inexperienced young man who has yet to learn that beauty andcharm are quite distinct from prettiness, and infinitely superior to it.
In addition to her prettiness, Harriet Westbrook had a vivacious mannerand talked quite pleasingly. She was likewise not a bad listener;and she would listen by the hour to Shelley in his rhapsodies aboutchemistry, poetry, the failure of Christianity, the national debt, andhuman liberty, all of which he jumbled up without much knowledge, but ina lyric strain of impassioned eagerness which would probably have madethe multiplication-table thrilling.
For Shelley himself was a creature of extraordinary fascination, boththen and afterward. There are no likenesses of him that do him justice,because they cannot convey that singular appeal which the man himselfmade to almost every one who met him.
The eminent painter, Mulready, once said that Shelley was too beautifulfor portraiture; and yet the descriptions of him hardly seem to bearthis out. He was quite tall and slender, but he stooped so much asto make him appear undersized. His head was very small-quitedisproportionately so; but this was counteracted to the eye by hislong and tumbled hair which, when excited, he would rub and twist in athousand different directions until it was actually bushy. His eyes andmouth were his best features. The former were of a deep violet blue, andwhen Shelley felt deeply moved they seemed luminous with a wonderfuland almost unearthly light. His mouth was finely chiseled, and might beregarded as representing perfection.
One great defect he had, and this might well have overbalanced hisattractive face. The defect in question was his voice. One would haveexpected to hear from him melodious sounds, and vocal tones both richand penetrating; but, as a matter of fact, his voice was shrill at thevery best, and became actually discordant and peacock-like in moments ofemotion.
Such, then, was Shelley, star-eyed, with the delicate complexion of agirl, wonderfully mobile in his features, yet speaking in a voice highpitched and almost raucous. For the rest, he arrayed himself with careand in expensive clothing, even though he took no thought of neatness,so that his garments were almost always rumpled and wrinkled from hisfrequent writhings on couches and on the floor. Shelley had a strangeand almost primitive habit of rolling on the earth, and another ofthrusting his tousled head close up to the hottest fire in the house,or of lying in the glaring sun when out of doors. It is related that hecomposed one of his finest poems--"The Cenci"--in Italy, while stretchedout with face upturned to an almost tropical sun.
But such as he was, and though he was not yet famous, Harriet Westbrook,the rosy-faced schoolgirl, fell in love with him, and rather plainlylet him know that she had done so. There are a thousand ways in whicha woman can convey this information without doing anything un-maidenly;and of all these little arts Miss Westbrook was instinctively amistress.
She played upon Shelley's feelings by telling him that her father wascruel to her, and that he contemplated actions still more cruel. Thereis something absurdly comical about the grievance which she brought toShelley; but it is much more comical to note the tremendous seriousnesswith which he took it. He wrote to his friend Hogg:
Her father has persecuted her in a most horrible way, by endeavoringto compel her to go to school. She asked my advice; resistance was theanswer. At the same time I essayed to mollify Mr. Westbrook, in vain! Iadvised her to resist. She wrote to say that resistance was useless, butthat she would fly with me and throw herself on my protection.
Some letters that have recently come to light show that there was adramatic scene between Harriet Westbrook and Shelley--a scene in thecourse of which she threw her arms about his neck and wept upon hisshoulder. Here was a curious situation. Shelley was not at all in lovewith her. He had explicitly declared this only a short time before. Yethere was a pretty girl about to suffer the "horrible persecution" ofbeing sent to school, and finding no alternative save to "throw herselfon his protection"--in other words, to let him treat her as he would,and to become his mistress.
The absurdity of the situation makes one smile. Common sense should haveled some one to box Harriet's ears and send her off to school without amoment's hesitation while as for Shelley, he should have been told howludicrous was the whole affair. But he was only nineteen, and she wasonly sixteen, and the crisis seemed portentous. Nothing could be moreflattering to a young man's vanity than to have this girl cast herselfupon him for protection. It did not really matter that he had notloved her hitherto, and that he was already half engaged to anotherHarriet--his cousin, Miss Grove. He could not stop and reason withhimself. He must like a true knight rescue lovely girlhood from thehorrors of a school!
It is not unlikely that this whole affair was partly managed ormanipulated by the girl's father. Jew Westbrook knew that Shelley wasrelated to rich and titled people, and that he was certain, if he lived,to become Sir Percy, and to be the heir of his grandfather's estates.Hence it may be that Harriet's queer conduct was not wholly of her ownprompting.
In any case, however, it proved to be successful. Shelley's ardent andimpulsive nature could not bear to see a girl in tears and appealingfor his help. Hence, though in his heart she was very little to him, hisromantic nature gave up for her sake the affection that he had felt forhis cousin, his own disbelief in marriage, and finally the common sensewhich ought to have told him not to marry any one on two hundred poundsa year.
So the pair set off for Edinburgh by stagecoach. It was a weary and mostuncomfortable journey. When they reached the Scottish capital, theywere married by the Scottish law. Their money was all gone; but theirlandlord, with a jovial sympathy for romance, let them have a room, andtreated them to a rather promiscuous wedding-banquet, in which every onein the house participated.
Such is the story of Shelley's marriage, contracted at nineteen with agirl of sixteen who most certainly lured him on against his own betterjudgment and in the absence of any actual love.
The girl whom he had taken to himself was a well-meaning little thing.She tried for a time to meet her husband's moods and to be a realcompanion to him. But what could one expect from such a union? Shelley'sfather withdrew the income which he had previously given. Jew Westbrookrefused to contribute anything, hoping, probably, that this course wouldbring the Shelleys to the rescue. But as it was, the young pair driftedabout from place to place, getting very precarious supplies, runningdeeper into debt each day, and finding less and less to admire in eachother.
Shelley took to laudanum. Harriet dropped her abstruse studies, whichshe had taken up to please her husband, but which could only puzzle hersmall brain. She soon developed some of the unpleasant traits of theclass to which she belonged. In this her sister Eliza--a hard andgrasping middle-aged woman--had her share. She set Harriet against herhusband, and made life less endurable for both. She was so much olderthan the pair that she came in and ruled their household like a typicalstepmother.
A child was born, and Shelley very generously went through a secondform of marriage, so as to comply with the English law; but by thistime there was little hope of righting things again. Shelley was muchoffended because Harriet would not nurse the child. He believed her hardbecause she saw without emotion an operation performed upon the infant.
Finally, when Shelley at last came into a considerable sum of money,Harriet and Eliza made no pretense of caring for anything except thespending of it in "bonnet-shops" and on carriages and display. Intime--that is to say, in three years after their marriage--Harrietleft her husband and went to London and to Bath, prompted by her eldersister.
This proved to be the end of an unfortunate marriage. Word was broughtto Shelley that his wife was no longer faithful to him. He, on hisside, had carried on a semi-sentimental platonic correspondence with aschoolmistress, one Miss Hitchener. But until now his life had beenone great mistake--a life of restlessness, of unsatisfied longing, of adesire that had no name. Then came the perhaps inevitable meeting withthe one whom he should have met before.
Shelley had taken a great interest in William Godwin, the writer andradical philosopher. Godwin's household was a strange one. There wasFanny Imlay, a child born out of wedlock, the offspring of GilbertImlay, an American merchant, and of Ma
ry Wollstonecraft, whom Godwin hadsubsequently married. There was also a singularly striking girl whothen styled herself Mary Jane Clairmont, and who was afterward knownas Claire Clairmont, she and her brother being the early children ofGodwin's second wife.
One day in 1814, Shelley called on Godwin, and found there a beautifulyoung girl in her seventeenth year, "with shapely golden head, aface very pale and pure, a great forehead, earnest hazel eyes, and anexpression at once of sensibility and firmness about her delicatelycurved lips." This was Mary Godwin--one who had inherited her mother'spower of mind and likewise her grace and sweetness.
From the very moment of their meeting Shelley and this girl were fatedto be joined together, and both of them were well aware of it. Each feltthe other's presence exert a magnetic thrill. Each listened eagerlyto what the other said. Each thought of nothing, and each cared fornothing, in the other's absence. It was a great compelling elementalforce which drove the two together and bound them fast. Beside thismarvelous experience, how pale and pitiful and paltry seemed theaffectations of Harriet Westbrook!
In little more than a month from the time of their first meeting,Shelley and Mary Godwin and Miss Clairmont left Godwin's house at fouro 'clock in the morning, and hurried across the Channel to Calais. Theywandered almost like vagabonds across France, eating black bread andthe coarsest fare, walking on the highways when they could not afford toride, and putting up with every possible inconvenience. Yet it is worthnoting that neither then nor at any other time did either Shelley orMary regret what they had done. To the very end of the poet's briefcareer they were inseparable.
Later he was able to pension Harriet, who, being of a morbiddisposition, ended her life by drowning--not, it may be said, becauseof grief for Shelley. It has been told that Fanny Imlay, Mary's sister,likewise committed suicide because Shelley did not care for her, butthis has also been disproved. There was really nothing to mar the innerhappiness of the poet and the woman who, at the very end, became hiswife. Living, as they did, in Italy and Switzerland, they saw much oftheir own countrymen, such as Landor and Leigh Hunt and Byron, to whosefascinations poor Miss Clairmont yielded, and became the mother of thelittle girl Allegra.
But there could have been no truer union than this of Shelley's withthe woman whom nature had intended for him. It was in his love-life, farmore than in his poetry, that he attained completeness. When he diedby drowning, in 1822, and his body was burned in the presence of LordByron, he was truly mourned by the one whom he had only lately made hiswife. As a poet he never reached the same perfection for his genius wasfitful and uncertain, rare in its flights, and mingled always with thatwhich disappoints.
As the lover and husband of Mary Godwin, there was nothing left to wish.In his verse, however, the truest word concerning him will always bethat exquisite sentence of Matthew Arnold:
"A beautiful and ineffectual angel beating his luminous wings againstthe void in vain."