Finally, these letters yield much information to the student of Shelley’s poetry. Even among the most subjective English poets it may be doubted whether there are any, save Wordsworth, whose verse so habitually reflects their daily life — of which letters are the record. And both the manner and the matter of Shelley’s poetry find representation here. For the former, there are no better instances than two passages in the letter of March 23, 1819 — the period of the second act of the Prometheus. Speaking of the arch of Constantine, he describes the supporters of the keystones: ‘two winged figures of Victory, whose hair floats on the wind of their own speed’: and later ‘their lips are parted: a delicate mode of indicating the fervour of their desire to arrive at the destined resting-place, and to express the eager respiration of their speed’. The three main ideas of these sentences all find a place within five lines of the Prometheus (II. iv. 135-9):
Others, with burning eyes, lean forth, and drink With eager lips the wind of their own speed, As if the thing they loved fled on before, And now, even now, they clasped it. Their bright locks Stream like a comet’s flashing hair.
It is a fine example of the truth of Browning’s admirable remark, that in Shelley’s letters ‘the musician speaks on the note he sings with; there is no change in the scale, as he diminishes the volume into familiar intercourse’: and that ‘we find even his carnal speech to agree faithfully, at faintest as at strongest, with the tone and rhythm of his most oracular utterances.’
And for an instance of a sketch attempted before the subject is finally chosen to grace a poem, there is the picture of the forest pool given with so much detail in the ninth letter, with its water ‘as transparent as the air, so that the stones and sand at the bottom seem, as it were, trembling in the light of noonday.’ Surely this pool must have been in the mind of Shelley — who had as keen a zest for the brilliance of unbroken light as Milton had for the play of light and shade — when he wrote the lines in the Prometheus (IV. 503):
I rise as from a bath of sparkling water,
A bath of azure light, among dark rocks,
Out of the stream of sound, and surely there is no doubt that just as the paper boats which Shelley and Peacock launched, and the wherries in which they skimmed the Thames, sail for ever as magic barques on the rivers of Alastor and Ahrimanes, so the memory of this pool which the poet loved lives here for a brief moment on Panthea’s lips.
H. F. B. BRETT-SMITH.
OXFORD, September, 1909.
MEMOIRS OF PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
‘ROUSSEAU, NE RECEVANT aucun auteur, remercie Madame —— de ses bontés, et la prie de ne plus venir chez lui.’
ROUSSEAU had a great aversion to visitors of all classes, but especially to literary visitors, feeling sure that they would print something about him. A lady who had long persisted in calling on him, one day published a brochure, and sent him a copy. He rejoiced in the opportunity which brought her under his rule of exclusion, and terminated their intercourse by the above billet-doux.
Rousseau’s rule bids fair to become general with all who wish to keep in the secretum iter et fallentis semita vitae, and not to become materials for general gossip. For not only is a departed author of any note considered a fair subject to be dissected at the tea-table of the reading public, but all his friends and connexions, however quiet and retiring and unobtrusive may have been the general tenor of their lives, must be served up with him. It is the old village scandal on a larger scale; and as in these days of universal locomotion people know nothing of their neighbours, they prefer tittle-tattle about notorieties to the retailing of whispers about the Jenkinses and Tomkinses of the vicinity.
This appetite for gossip about notorieties being once created in the ‘reading public’, there will be always found, persons to minister to it; and among the volunteers of this service, those who are best informed and who most valued the departed will probably not be the foremost. Then come biographies abounding with errors; and then, as matter of defence perhaps, comes on the part of friends a tardy and more authentic narrative. This is at best, as Mr. Hogg describes it, a ‘difficult and delicate task’. But it is always a matter of choice and discretion. No man is bound to write the life of another. No man who does so is bound to tell the public all he knows. On the contrary, he is bound to keep to himself whatever may injure the interests or hurt the feelings of the living, especially when the latter have in no way injured or calumniated the dead, and are not necessarily brought before the tribunal of public opinion in the character of either plaintiffs or defendants. Neither if there be in the life of the subject of the biography any event which he himself would willingly have blotted from the tablet of his own memory, can it possibly be the duty of a survivor to drag it into daylight. If such an event be the cardinal point of a life; if to conceal it or to misrepresent it would be to render the whole narrative incomplete, incoherent, unsatisfactory alike to the honour of the dead and the feelings of the living; then, as there is no moral compulsion to speak of the matter at all, it is better to let the whole story slumber in silence.
Having lived some years in very familiar intimacy with the subject of these memoirs; having had as good opportunities as any, and better than most persons now living, to observe and appreciate his great genius, extensive acquirements, cordial friendships, disinterested devotion to the well-being of the few with whom he lived in domestic intercourse, and ardent endeavours by private charity and public advocacy to ameliorate the condition of the many who pass their days in unremunerating toil; having been named his executor conjointly with Lord Byron, whose death, occurring before that of Shelley’s father, when the son’s will came into effect, left me alone in that capacity; having lived after his death in the same cordial intimacy with his widow, her family, and one or two at least of his surviving friends, I have been considered to have some peculiar advantages for writing his life, and have often been requested to do so; but for the reasons above given I have always refused.
Wordsworth says to the Cuckoo: —
O blithe new-corner! I have heard,
I hear thee, and rejoice.
O Cuckoo! shall I call thee Bird,
Or but a wandering Voice?
Thrice welcome, darling of the Spring!
Even yet thou art to me
No bird, but an invisible thing,
A voice, a mystery.
Shelley was fond of repeating these verses, and perhaps they were not forgotten in his poem ‘To a Skylark
Hail to thee, blithe spirit!
Bird thou never wert,
That from heaven, or near it,
Pourest thy full heart, In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.
The pale purple even Melts around thy flight:
Like a star of heaven,
In the broad daylight,
Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight.
Now, I could have wished that, like Wordsworth’s Cuckoo, he had been allowed to remain a voice and a mystery: that, like his own Skylark, he had been left unseen in his congenial region,
Above the smoke and stir of this dim spot
Which men call earth,’
and that he had been only heard in the splendour of his song. But since it is not to be so, since so much has been, and so much more will probably be, written about him, the motives which deterred me from originating a substantive work on the subject, do not restrict me from commenting on what has been published by others, and from correcting errors, if such should appear to me to occur, in the narratives which I may pass under review.
I have placed the works at the head of this article in the order in which they were published. I have no acquaintance with Mr. Middleton. Mr. Trelawny and Mr. Hogg I may call my friends.
Mr. Middleton’s work is chiefly a compilation from previous publications, with some very little original matter, curiously obtained.
Mr. Trelawny’s work relates only to the later days of Mr. Shelley’s life in Italy.
Mr. Hogg�
��s work is the result of his own personal knowledge, and of some inedited letters and other documents, either addressed to himself or placed at his disposal by Sir Percy Shelley and his lady. It is to consist of four volumes, of which the two just published bring down the narrative to the period immediately preceding Shelley’s separation from his first wife. At that point I shall terminate this first part of my proposed review.
I shall not anticipate opinions, but shall go over all that is important in the story as briefly as I can, interspersing such observations as may suggest themselves in its progress.
Percy Bysshe Shelley was born at his father’s seat, Field Place, in Sussex, on the 4th of August 1792 His grandfather, Sir Bysshe Shelley, was then living, and his father, Timothy Shelley, Esquire, was then or subsequently a Member of Parliament. The family was of great antiquity; but Percy conferred more honour on it than he derived from it.
He had four sisters and a brother, the youngest of the family, and the days of his childhood appear to have passed affectionately in his domestic society.
To the first ten years of his life we have no direct testimony but that of his sister Hellen, in a series of letters to Lady Shelley, published in the beginning of Mr. Hogg’s work. In the first of these she says: —
A child who at six years old was sent daily to learn Latin at a clergyman’s house, and as soon as it was expedient removed to Dr. Greenland’s, from thence to Eton, and subsequently to college, could scarcely have been the uneducated son that some writers would endeavour to persuade those who read their books to believe he ought to have been, if his parents despised education.’
Miss Hellen gives an illustration of Shelley’s boyish traits of imagination: —
On one occasion he gave the most minute details of a visit he had paid to some ladies with whom he was acquainted at our village. He described their reception of him, their occupations, and the wandering in their pretty garden, where there was a well-remembered filbert-walk and an undulating turf-bank, the delight of our morning visit. There must have been something peculiar in this little event; for I have often heard it mentioned as a singular fact, and it was ascertained almost immediately, that the boy had never been to the house. It was not considered as a falsehood to be punished; but I imagine his conduct altogether must have been so little understood and unlike that of the generality of children, that these tales were left unnoticed.’
Mr. Hogg says at a later date: —
He was altogether incapable of rendering an account of any transaction whatsoever, according to the strict and precise truth, and the bare naked realities of actual life; not through an addiction to falsehood, which he cordially detested, but because he was the creature, the unsuspecting and unresisting victim, of his irresistible imagination.
Had he 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 the day, as the latter would contradict the tale of yesterday.’
Several instances will be given of the habit, thus early developed in Shelley, of narrating, as real, events which had never occurred; and his friends and relations have thought it necessary to give prominence to this habit as a characteristic of his strong imaginativeness predominating over reality. Coleridge has written much and learnedly on this subject of ideas with the force of sensations, of which he found many examples in himself.
At the age of ten, Shelley was sent to Sion House Academy, near Brentford. ‘Our master,’ says his schoolfellow, Captain Medwin, ‘a Scotch Doctor of Law, and a divine, was a choleric man, of a sanguinary complexion, in a green old age, not wanting in good qualities, but very capricious in his temper, which, good or bad, was influenced by the daily occurrences of a domestic life not the most harmonious, and of which his face was the barometer and his hand the index.’ This worthy was in the habit of cracking unbecoming jokes, at which most of the boys laughed; but Shelley, who could not endure this sort of pleasantry, received them with signs of aversion. A day or two after one of these exhibitions, when Shelley’s manifestation of dislike to the matter had attracted the preceptor’s notice, Shelley had a theme set him for two Latin lines on the subject of Tempest as.
He came to me (says Medwin) to assist him in the task. I had a cribbing book, of which I made great use, Ovid’s Tristibus. I knew that the only work of Ovid with which the Doctor was acquainted was the Metamorphoses, and by what I thought good luck, I happened to stumble on two lines exactly applicable to the purpose. The hexameter I forget, but the pentameter ran thus:
Jam, jam tacturos sidéra celsa putes.
So far the story is not very classically told. The title of the book should have been given as Tristia, or De Tristibus; and the reading is tacturas, not tacturos; summa, not celsa: the latter term is inapplicable to the stars. The distich is this:
Me miserum! quanti montes volvuntur aquarum!
Jam, jam tacturas sidera summa putes.
Something was probably substituted for Me miserum! But be this as it may, Shelley was grievously beaten for what the schoolmaster thought bad Latin. The Doctor’s judgement was of a piece with that of the Edinburgh Reviewers, when taking a line of Pindar, which Payne Knight had borrowed in a Greek translation of a passage in Gray’s Bard, to have been Payne Knight’s own, they pronounced it to be nonsense.
The name of the Brentford Doctor according to Miss Hellen Shelley was Greenland, and according to Mr. Hogg it was Greenlaw. Captain Medwin does not mention the name, but says, ‘So much did we mutually hate Sion House, that we never alluded to it in after-life.’ Mr. Hogg says, ‘In walking with Shelley to Bishopsgate from London, he pointed out to me more than once a gloomy brick house as being this school. He spoke of the master, Doctor Greenlaw, not without respect, saying, “he was a hard-headed Scotchman, and a man of rather liberal opinions.”’Of this period of his life he never gave me an account, nor have I heard or read any details which appeared to bear the impress of truth. Between these two accounts the Doctor and his character seem reduced to a myth. I myself know nothing of the matter. I do not remember Shelley ever mentioning the Doctor to me. But we shall find as we proceed, that whenever there are two evidences to one transaction, many of the recorded events of Shelley’s life will resolve themselves into the same mythical character.
At the best, Sion House Academy must have been a bad beginning of scholastic education for a sensitive and imaginative boy.
After leaving this academy, he was sent, in his fifteenth year, to Eton. The head master was Doctor Keate, a less mythical personage than the Brentford Orbilius, but a variety of the same genus. Mr. Hogg says: —
Dr. Keate was a short, short-necked, short-legged, man — thick-set, powerful, and very active. His countenance resembled that of a bull-dog; the expression was not less sweet and bewitching: his eyes, his nose, and especially his mouth, were exactly like that comely and engaging animal, and so were his short crooked legs. It was said in the school that old Keate could pin and hold a bull with his teeth. His iron sway was the more unpleasant and shocking after the long mild Saturnian reign of Dr. Goodall, whose temper, character, and conduct corresponded precisely with his name, and under whom Keate had been master of the lower school. Discipline, wholesome and necessary in moderation, was carried by him to an excess. It is reported that on one morning he flogged eighty boys. Although he was rigid, coarse, and despotical, some affirm that on the whole he was not unjust, nor altogether devoid of kindness. His behaviour was accounted vulgar and ungentlemanlike, and therefore he was particularly odious to the gentlemen of the school, especially to the refined and aristocratical Shelley.
But Shelley suffered even more from his schoolfellows than he did from his master. It had been so at Brentford, and it was still more so at Eton, from the more organized system of fagging, to which no ill-usage would induce him to submit. But among his equals in age h
e had several attached friends, and one of these, in a letter dated February 27th, 1857, gives the following reminiscences of their Eton days: — (Hogg i. 43.)
My DEAR MADAM, — Your letter has taken me back to the sunny time of boyhood, ‘when thought is speech and speech is truth,’ when I was the friend and companion of Shelley at Eton. What brought us together in that small world was, I suppose, kindred feelings, and the predominance of fancy and imagination. Many a long and happy walk have I had with him in the beautiful neighbourhood of dear old Eton. We used to wander for hours about Clewer, Frogmore, the park at Windsor, the Terrace; and I was a delighted and willing listener to his marvellous stories of fairyland, and apparitions, and spirits, and haunted ground; and his speculations were then (for his mind was far more developed than mine) of the world beyond the grave. Another of his favourite rambles was Stoke Park, and the picturesque churchyard where Gray is said to have written his ‘Elegy’, of which he was very fond.
I was myself far too young to form any estimate of character, but I loved Shelley for his kindliness and affectionate ways. He was not made to endure the rough and boisterous pastime at Eton, and his shy and gentle nature was glad to escape far away, to muse over strange fancies, for his mind was reflective and teeming with deep thought. His lessons were child’s play to him, and his power of Latin versification marvellous. I think I remember some long work he had even then commenced, but I never saw it. His love of nature was intense, and the sparkling poetry of his mind shone out of his speaking eye when he was dwelling on anything good or great. He certainly was not happy at Eton, for his was a disposition that needed especial personal superintendence to watch and cherish and direct all his noble aspirations and the remarkable tenderness of his heart. He had great moral courage, and feared nothing but what was base, and false, and low. He never joined in the usual sports of the boys, and what is remarkable, never went out in a boat on the river. What I have here set down will be of little use to you, but will please you as a sincere and truthful and humble tribute to one whose good name was sadly whispered away. Shelley said to me when leaving Oxford under a cloud, ‘Halliday, I am come to say good-bye to you, if you are not afraid to be seen with me!’ I saw him once again in the autumn of 1814,’ when he was glad to introduce me to his wife. I think he said he was just come from Ireland. You have done quite right in applying to me direct, and I am only sorry that I have no anecdotes or letters of that period to furnish.
Complete Works of Thomas Love Peacock Page 150