It was at Nant Gwillt, in Radnorshire, in the spring of 1812, that Shelley and Harriet made his acquaintance. But their movements about this time were rapid and uncertain; they passed successively from Nant Gwillt to Lynmouth, Tanyrallt, Dublin and Killarney; and although they returned to London in May, 1813, they saw little of their new friend till he visited them, some months later, in their temporary house at Bracknell.
Shelley had gone there in order to be near the de Boinvilles, who were the centre of a little literary clique of which Peacock gives an amusing account. Hogg, who had also been there, and had gone away in disgust, is much more brutal.
‘I generally found there,’ he says, two or three sentimental young butchers, an eminently philosophical tinker, and several very unsophisticated medical practitioners or medical students, all of low origin and vulgar and offensive manners. They sighed, turned up their eyes, retailed philosophy, such as it was, and swore by William Godwin and Political Justice, acting, moreover, and very clumsily, the parts of Petrarchs, Werthers, St. Leons, and Fleet- woods.’
Peacock was more tolerant; and though he joined Harriet in laughing at their misdirected energies, he was evidently a congenial companion, for in October he occupied a seat in the Shelleys’ carriage on their second journey to Edinburgh. Unfortunately he says little of this visit, or some light might be thrown on the unsupported statement of the ‘informant, exceedingly unlikely to be mistaken’, who told Rossetti that when Shelley came of age, his ‘first act was to marry Harriet over again in an Episcopal Chapel in Edinburgh’. Had this been so, Peacock would hardly have ignored a piece of evidence which lent such strong support to his argument on the separation.
The Shelleys returned to London at the end of 1813, and there, in March of the following year, they were formally remarried. Peacock speaks of this ceremony as witness to the absence of any estrangement, but the claim is not conclusive, for Shelley’s object was merely to place beyond all doubt the legitimacy of his expected heir, and in another four months he had deserted Harriet.
This incident, the most painful in Shelley’s life, demands detailed notice both from the space devoted to it in the Memoirs, and because it has stumbled so many of Shelley’s biographers. Rossetti and Symonds were hampered by the want of documents which were not made public until the appearance, in 1886, of Professor Dowden’s weighty Life; and Professor Dowden’s unconscious bias in Shelley’s favour has grievously obscured his account of the separation. The main contention of Peacock — that it did not take place by mutual consent — stands confirmed, in spite of Garnett’s attack; but in various minor matters his account requires correction. That there was ‘no shadow of a thought of separation’ before Shelley met Mary Godwin is likely enough, but that there was ‘no estrangement’ is not so probable: Harriet’s intellectual development had not kept pace with her husband’s, and his letter to Hogg (March 16, 1814) shows clearly enough that even before the meeting with Mary, the attractions of Mrs de Boinville’s daughter Cornelia had seriously engaged his highly susceptible heart. Its ultimate conquest by some one other than Harriet was humanly certain.
Peacock’s reply, in his Supplementary Notice, to Garnett’s criticism in Macmillan’s Magazine, provoked a rejoinder in the same year. In this article, printed at the end of his Relics of Shelley, and distinguished by peculiar acrimony and lack of taste, Garnett showed the probability of an earlier estrangement, and the reason of the second marriage, and proved Peacock to have misquoted Harriet’s letter of July 7 (p. 86), and also the interview with Southey (p. 50). In the latter case Shelley is as likely to have been at fault as Peacock, who admits his uncertainty of the facts; and the letter must have been quoted from memory or hearsay. But Garnett still relied on the unpublished documents for his main point, that the separation was ‘an amicable agreement effected in virtue of a mutual understanding’, and their publication has shown that Peacock was right.
The flaws in Professor Dowden’s treatment of the question have been brilliantly exposed in Matthew Arnold’s Essay. Both Professor Dowden and Dr. Garnett have hinted that Shelley was unlikely to make Peacock his confidant over the separation, and this is highly probable. Shelley could always persuade himself, quite genuinely, of anything which he wished to believe; he had probably persuaded himself that Harriet no longer loved him; and instinct would warn him not to expose the desired illusion to the searchlight of Peacock’s logic, which had been proved too strong for so many former hallucinations. He was evidently much annoyed by Peacock’s attitude of tacit disapproval, and his irritation is clearly shown by a sentence in the almost ludicrously tactless letter to Harriet from Troyes:
I have written to Peacock to superintend money affairs; he is expensive, inconsiderate, and cold, but surely not utterly perfidious and unfriendly and unmindful of our kindness to him; besides, interest will secure his attention to these things.
The last sentence probably refers to the annual sum of £100 which Shelley allowed Peacock for some time prior to his India House appointment.
Shelley left London for Switzerland, with Mary Godwin and Claire Claremont, on July 28, 1814, and did not return until the following September. By a clerical error, Peacock mentions the letters he received during the second tour in Switzerland, two years later, as belonging to this period: if any reached him in 1814, all trace of them is now lost. After their return Shelley and Mary took rooms in London for the winter, and Peacock several times gave the poet a night’s lodging, lest he should be arrested for debt at his own door. But early in the following year the death of Sir Bysshe Shelley placed his grandson’s affairs on a better footing; a house was taken at Bishopgate, and in the summer Peacock, who had been a frequent visitor there, accompanied the Shelleys and Charles Clairmont on a river expedition up the Thames.
To this holiday belongs one of the many amusing incidents of the Memoirs. Shelley had published the treatise, A Vindication of Natural Diet, in 1813, but the practice of his vegetarian principles brought frequent trouble, and on their river trip Peacock’s simple prescription— ‘Three mutton chops, well peppered’ — was immediately successful. ‘While he was living from inn to inn,’ says an earlier passage, ‘he was obliged to live, as he said, “on what he could get”; that is to say, like other people. When he got well under this process he gave all the credit to locomotion, and held himself to have thus benefited, not in consequence of his change of regimen, but in spite of it.’ There is curious confirmation of this statement in a letter to Hogg written in September, 1815, ‘on my return from a water excursion on the Thames,’ in which Shelley remarks that ‘the exercise and dissipation of mind attached to such an expedition have produced so favourable an effect on my health, that my habitual dejection and irritability have almost deserted me.’ Not a word here of the change of diet from tea and bread and butter to a liberal allowance of mutton!
From this time until Shelley’s final departure from England, his intercourse with Peacock was broken only by the second Swiss tour of 1816, and both Alastor and the Revolt of Islam had the advantage of his friend’s criticism.
In 1819, twelve months after the Shelleys went to Italy, Peacock became a clerk in the service of the East India Company, and the next twenty years changed the idle littérateur into a busy and able official. But before this he had published his third novel, Nightmare Abbey, which takes rank, in its bearing on Shelley, with the Memoirs and the Four Ages of Poetry. The character of Scythrop, in this novel, is a lively portrait of the poet as he was when Peacock first met him, and their adventures in love have a distinct resemblance. Scythrop’s early and transient affection for his cousin Emily is a repetition of Shelley’s for his cousin Harriet Grove; and his hesitation between the two heroines, Marionetta and Stella, recalls the doubtful supremacy of Harriet Shelley and Mary Godwin. The similarity of situation required careful handling, but by making his hero lose both the ladies, Peacock secured the tale from any infringement of good taste: and his treatment of Scythrop is delightful. Scythrop is a
brilliant realization of the undeveloped Shelley of 1812: he devours tragedies and German romances, is troubled with the ‘passion for reforming the world’ which his original never lost, and publishes a treatise entitled Philosophical Gas; or, a Project for a General Illumination of the Human Mind. ‘He slept with Horrid Mysteries under his pillow, and dreamed of venerable eleutherarchs and ghastly confederates holding midnight conventions in subterranean caves.’ And his soliloquies echo the views of ‘the sublime Kant, who delivers his oracles in language which none but the initiated can comprehend’.
Shelley’s instant and joyful recognition of the identity of Scythrop, and his keen appreciation of a novel which presented him in a somewhat ludicrous light, have usually been regarded with surprise. Probably he was flattered by the implied compliment; in any case he must have recognized the good feeling of the picture and the brilliance of its setting; but the real secret of his pleasure lay, no doubt, in the retrospective aspect of Nightmare Abbey — all the events shown there, and most of the foibles displayed, were things of the past, and he could afford to join Peacock in the laugh against his old self. Perhaps his friend’s comprehension of the nature of Shelley’s early heroics appears as well as anywhere at the close of the novel, where Scythrop, seated over a pistol and a pint of port, and faced with an unfortunate decision to take his own life at twenty-five minutes past seven, uses the pistol for the more reasonable purpose of persuading his butler vi et armis that the clock is fast. Yet Peacock could hardly have seen the letter to Hogg, written seven years earlier, in which Shelley naïvely wrote: ‘Is suicide wrong? I slept with a loaded pistol and some poison last night, but did not die.’
Only one of Peacock’s remaining prose works has much interest in regard to Shelley, although there are distinct traces of his opinions to be found in both the earlier novels, Headlong Hall and Melincourt. This is the essay entitled The Four Ages of Poetry, published by Ollier in 1820: a humorous and very characteristic attack, to which Shelley’s Defence of Poetry was a direct reply. The utter difference in the point of view, and the omission by John Hunt of the polemic passages of the Defence, have altogether obscured its controversial origin: in fact, few processes bring out the essential dissimilarity between the minds of the two friends so clearly as a comparison of these essays. Peacock, who loved poetry as well as any man, could no more help laughing at some of its aspects than he could help laughing at some of Shelley’s; he traces its history from Orpheus and Amphion, ‘building cities with a song, and leading brutes with a symphony; which are only metaphors for the faculty of leading multitudes by the nose,’ down to the dark ages, ‘in which the light of the Gospel began to spread over Europe, and in which, by a mysterious and inscrutable dispensation, the darkness thickened with the progress of the light.’ As Shelley said in the Letter to Maria Gisborne:
His fine wit
Makes such a wound, the knife is lost in it.
But his real quarrel is with the moderns, and especially the Lake Poets in their mountain retirement, passing the whole day in the innocent and amiable occupation of going up and down hill, receiving poetical impressions, and communicating them in immortal verse to admiring generations.’
Shelley had neither the wish nor the power to tackle his opponent on his own ground, but his incomplete Defence is a serious effort to obtain light, and all Peacock’s wit pales before the glow of the great definition ‘A poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth’. Shelley believed in the future, and blundered after better things: Peacock in the past, and saw the weak points of reformers: the outlook of the two essays is characteristic of the men.
Yet the clear comprehension of Shelley’s foibles never biased the author of the Memoirs; he painted the man as he was, and did not strive after telling points with Hogg’s satiric licence. ‘Nothing,’ said Robert Buchanan, who knew him in his old age, ‘can be more gentle, more guarded, than Peacock’s printed account of Shelley. His private conversation on the subject was, of course, very different. Two subjects he did not refer to in his articles may safely be mentioned now — Shelley’s violent fits of passion, and the difficulty Peacock found in keeping on friendly terms with Mary Godwin.’ There is no hint of either here, although the instance of petulance which Buchanan gives would have made a good story in the manner of Hogg.
On the very difficult question of Shelley’s hallucinations— ‘the degree in which his imagination coloured events’ — the Memoirs are peculiarly rich. They include the imaginary visit in his childhood, the Eton incident, the madhouse scare, the affray at Tanyrallt, the dread of elephantiasis, Williams’s warning, and the cloaked man at Florence. The list might be doubled from other sources; the Keswick robbery and Medwin’s veiled lady occur at once, with the mysterious cry of ‘Cenci, Cenci’, which thrilled the poet in the streets of Rome — and proved to be the request for ‘old rags’! Adventures of this kind, as Symonds observed, blend fact and fancy in a now inextricable tangle, but there is no better explanation of them than that which Peacock suggests: that on some basis — usually the idea that his father and uncle had designs on his liberty—’ his imagination built a fabric of romance, and when he presented it as substantive fact, and it was found to contain more or less of inconsistency, he felt his self-esteem interested in maintaining it by accumulated circumstances, which severally vanished under the touch of investigation.’ The remarkable blend of fact and fiction in Shelley’s second letter to Godwin shows that this habit of romance must have been very deeply rooted.
The great value of the Memoirs lies in their standpoint: they attain the just blend of sympathy and discernment which the nature of their subject makes so difficult. When Shelley settled himself to the poetical contemplation of life, he found it a thing
Of error, ignorance, and strife,
Where nothing is, but all things seem,
And we the shadows of the dream,
and this aspect of unreality appealed to him very strongly: he even found that
Death is the veil which those who live call life:
They sleep, and it is lifted.
But in his actual passage through the world, the smugness of everyday existence oppressed him with all the pompous absurdity of a well-regulated public meeting; and like all highly-strung persons, he felt an irresistible desire to shriek — to put the dull orator, Custom, into a false gallop. This might be done either willingly or accidentally; by hooting, or hysterics. Sometimes he hooted: flicked bread-pellets into the faces of the Sir Oracles who passed him in the street, or startled staid old ladies in public vehicles with the suggestion:
For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground And tell sad stories of the death of kings!
— ‘not eccentricity so much as painful discourtesy’, wrote de Quincey, who did not know the man. Sometimes he became hysterical, and the reviewers received a shock. But always he needed an understanding observer more than most objects of criticism; and it is intelligent sympathy, neither idealizing nor vilifying, in which Peacock’s Memoirs excel.
Probably few modern readers will agree with John Addington Symonds in the opinion that Shelley’s Italian letters to Peacock, ‘taken altogether, are the most perfect specimens of descriptive prose in the English language.’ The writer’s brain is too often, as he admits, ‘like a portfolio of an architect, or a print-shop, or a commonplace-book,’ and the poetry of his continual word-painting occasionally cloys. ‘The tourists tell you all about these things,’ he says, ‘and I am afraid of stumbling on their language when I enumerate what is so well known.’ There was little need for the apprehension, though we see that Shelley could be tourist enough at times, and could misquote Lycidas and hack pieces off dungeon doors with the worst. But the magnificence and variety of the ancient and modern art of Rome oppressed him; he laboured to convey his sensations, and we can see the effort in the presence of one small but significant phrase — the ‘as it were’ of his descriptions.
There is nothing of the tourist, however, in his v
iews on art; without pretending to taste, he had his own opinions and the courage of them. Occasionally there is an excusable blunder — he thought, for example, that the painted dome of Milan Cathedral was carved in marble fretwork. But he disliked Michael Angelo, and had the rare courage to say so. And in general, his instinct for painting is less true than for sculpture; but he is at his best under the open sky, in the Baths of Caracalla, or meditating on Greek life among the ruins of Pompeii. This is not to say that he did not appreciate painting, but he had a standard of his own for it, as he had for music and the drama, and in neither art was it a normal one. Though in the case of the stage, his failure to enjoy comedy must have been due not only to his hatred of any injustice, but to that inability to perceive the essential humour of incongruity which allowed him to write ‘Single sheet, by God!’ on the cover of a letter to Miss Hitchener, by way of ‘a strong, though vulgar appeal to the feelings of the postmaster’.
Michael Angelo is not the only sufferer in the letters. It is startling, after reading Peacock’s statement that Shelley devotedly admired Wordsworth and Coleridge, to come upon the exclamation: ‘What a beastly and pitiful wretch that Wordsworth!’ But it is not the poet, but the political pervert, who suffers this denunciation: the Two Addresses to the Freeholders of Westmorland had just been published, and Shelley’s boundless indignation showed itself with little less strength in his sonnet to Wordsworth, and in Peter Bell the Third. Yet although he admired Wordsworth as a poet, his reference to the forest pool as ‘sixteen feet long and ten feet wide, to venture an unrythmical paraphrase’, shows that he was no more blind than Peacock to the dangers of the extreme simplicity of The Thorn.
Complete Works of Thomas Love Peacock Page 149