Shelley and Elizabeth Hitchener.
Lovers of literature have once more to thank Mr Dobell for discharging one of those patient and humble services which only true devotion will take the pains to perform. Shelley’s letters to Miss Hitchener have already been printed, indeed, but privately; and now we have them issued in a delightful shape, enriched with an introduction and with notes by Mr Dobell himself, so that one more chapter in the life of Shelley becomes plainer and more substantial. Nor can it be objected that the piety in this instance is excessive, for although the letters are chiefly remarkable because they illustrate the nature of a boy who was, five or six years later, to write consummate poetry, still Shelley’s character is always amazing. And in spite of the verbosity and the pale platitudes of his style in 1811, it is impossible to read the letters without an exquisite sense of faded scenes come to life again, and dull people set talking, and all the country houses and respectable Sussex vicarages once more alive with ladies and gentlemen who exclaim, ‘What! a Shelley an Atheist!’ and add their weight to the intense comedy and tragedy of his life.
Elizabeth Hitchener was a schoolmistress at Hurstpierpoint, and Shelley first knew her in 1811 when he was nineteen and she was twenty-eight. She was the daughter of a man who kept a public house and was, or had been, a smuggler; and all her education was due to a Mrs Adams, who is called, in the language of the letters, ‘the mother of my soul’. Miss Hitchener was thin, tall, and dark, an austere intellectual woman with a desire for better things than the society of a country village could afford her, although she was not, as Shelley was eager to assure her, a Deist and a Republican. But she was probably the first clever women he had met; she was oppressed, lonely, misunderstood, and in need of someone with whom she could discuss the pleasant agitations of her soul. Shelley rushed into the correspondence with enthusiasm; and she, no doubt, though a little mystified and awkward in her flight, was touched and anxious to prove herself as passionate, as philanthropic, and almost as revolutionary as he was. Shelley’s first letter indicates the nature of the friendship; he speaks of certain books which, in the manner of ardent young men, he had thrust upon her - Locke, The Curse of Kehama’, and Ensor’s ‘National Education’. He goes on to attack her Christianity, exclaims that ‘Truth is my God,’ and ends up, ‘But see Ensor on the subject of poetry.’ It would be delightful if we could have Miss Hitchener’s letters also, for some allusions in Shelley’s answers show the way in which, on occasion, she would try to cap his speculations. ‘All nature,’ she wrote, ‘but that of horses is harmonical; and he is born to misery because he is a horse.’ An Ode on the Rights of Women began,
All, all are men - women and all!
But it is clear enough, without her replies, that Shelley was not anxiously concerned with the state of her mind. He assumed easily that she was of a more exalted temper than he was; so that it was not necessary to investigate details, but he might pour forth to her, as to some impersonal deity, the surprising discoveries and ardent convictions which come, with such bewildering rapidity, when for the first time the world asks a definite question and literature supplies a variety of answers. The poor schoolmistress, we can gather, took vague alarm when she found to what a mate she had attached herself, to what speculations she was driven, what opinions she must embrace; and yet there was a strange and not laughable exhilaration in it, which urged her on. The relationship, moreover, was soon justified by Shelley’s marriage with Harriet Westbrook, and her approval of the correspondence. It was to be a spiritual companionship, in no way inspired by carnal love of that ‘lump of organized matter which enshrines thy soul’; and, further, there was the insidious bait which Shelley offered, with his curious lack of humanity, in the letter which explains why he married Harriet. He begged the ‘sister of his soul’ to help him in educating his wife. ‘Blame me [for the marriage] if thou wilt, dearest friend, for still thou art dearest to me; yet pity even this error, if thou blamest me.’ Miss Hitchener, it is clear, was keenly susceptible” to praise of her mind which so subtly implied a closer tie; her letters became voluminous, and showed, so Shelley declared, ‘the embryon of a mighty intellect’. But the prophetess kept one shrewd and sensible and, it must be added, honourable eye upon the earth; she was well aware that Harriet might become jealous, nor could she disregard the mischievous chatter of Cuckfield gossips and attend only, as Shelley bade her, to the majestic approval of her conscience. Tragedy, of a sordid and substantial kind, was bound sooner or later to dissolve this incongruous alliance between the rushing poet, whose wings grew stronger every day, and the painstaking but closely tethered woman. The illusion was only sustained because for so long Shelley was in Wales or Cumberland or Ireland, and the lady remained at Hurstpierpoint, earning her living, which was noble in itself, and teaching small children, which was yet nobler; for to teach is ‘to propagate intellect... every error conquered, every mind enlightened, is so much added to the progression of human perfectibility”. Then the first of the poet’s illusions was terribly destroyed; Hogg’s treachery was discovered; and poor Shelley, more in need than ever of understanding, turned wholly to his ‘almost only friend’, as he calls her in the letter which tells her of the blow.
His desire, reiterated with the utmost emphasis, was that Elizabeth should join his wandering household directly; and Harriet, in some of the most interesting letters in the volume, was made to add her entreaty to his, in a tone that tried, with some pathos, to imitate his enthusiasm and generosity, but would lapse easily, it is clear, into plaintive common-sense when he was out of hearing. Miss Hitchener for a long while declined, for a variety of reasons; she would have to give up her school, her only support, depend entirely on Shelley, defy her father, and, besides, people would talk. But these arguments, coming on the top of so much impassioned rhetoric, were inadmissible; ‘the hatred of the world’, Shelley declared, ‘is despicable to you. Come, come, and share with us the noblest success, or the most glorious martyrdom. Assert your freedom... Your pen... ought to trace characters for a nation’s perusal’. Whatever the reason, she yielded at length, and set off in July 1812, on her disastrous expedition to Devonshire. For a time all acted up to their high missions; Portia (for ‘Elizabeth’ was already sacred to Harriet’s sister), discussed ‘innate passions, God, Christianity, &c.’, with Shelley, walked with him, and condescended so far as to exchange the name Portia, which Harriet did not like - ‘I had thought it would have been one more common and pleasing to the ear” - for Bessy. Professor Dowden gives us a singular picture of the time; Shelley and the tall dark woman, who is taken by some for a maidservant, wander on the shore together, and set bottles and chests stuffed with revolutionary pamphlets floating out to sea, uttering words of ecstatic prophecy over them. Within doors she wrote from his dictation and read as he directed. But the decline of this artificial virtue was inevitable; the women were the first to discover that the others were impostors; and soon Shelley himself veered round with childlike passion. The spiritual sister and prophetess became simply The Brown Demon’, ‘a woman of desperate views and dreadful passions’, who must be got rid of even at the cost of a yearly allowance of a hundred pounds. It is not known whether she ever received it; but there is a very credible tradition that she recovered her senses, after her startling downfall, and lived a respectable and laborious life at Edmonton, sweetened by the reading of the poets, and the memory of her romantic indiscretions with the truest of them all.
Literary Geography.
These two books belong to what is called the ‘Pilgrimage’ series, and before undertaking the journey it is worth considering in what spirit we do so. We are either pilgrims from sentiment, who find something stimulating to the imagination in the fact that Thackeray rang this very door bell or that Dickens shaved behind that identical window, or we are scientific in our pilgrimage and visit the country where a great novelist lived in order to see to what extent he was influenced by his surroundings. Both motives are often combined and can be legiti
mately satisfied; as, for instance, in the case of Scott or the Brontës, George Meredith or Thomas Hardy. Each of these novelists may be said to possess a spiritual sovereignty which no one else can dispute. They have made the country theirs because they have so interpreted it as to have given it an ineffaceable shape in our minds, so that we know certain parts of Scotland, of Yorkshire, of Surrey, and of Dorset as intimately as we know the men and women who have their dwelling there. Novelists who are thus sensitive to the inspiration of the land are alone able to describe the natives who are in some sense the creatures of the land. Scott’s men and women are Scotch; Miss Brontë loves her moors so well that she can draw as no one else can the curious type of human being that they produce; and so we may say not only that novelists own a country, but that all who dwell in it are their subjects. It seems a little incongruous to talk of the Thackeray ‘country’ or the Dickens ‘country’ in this sense; for the word calls up a vision of woods and fields, and you may read through a great number of these masters’ works without finding any reason to believe that the whole world is not paved with cobble stones. Both Thackeray and Dickens were Londoners; the country itself comes very seldom into their books, and the country man or woman - the characteristic product of the country - hardly at all. But to say that, a man is a Londoner implies only that he is not one of the far more definite class of countrymen; it does not stamp him as belonging to any recognized type.
In the case of Thackeray any such definition is more than usually absurd; he was, as Mr Melville remarks, a cosmopolitan; with London for a basis he travelled everywhere; and it follows that the characters in his books are equally citizens of the world. ‘Man and not scenery’, says Mr Melville, ‘was what he strove to portray’; and it is because he took so vast and various a subject that the only possible scene for a pilgrim in Thackeray’s footsteps is the great world of London. And even in London, the scene of ‘Vanity Fair’, of ‘Pendennis’, of ‘The Newcomes’, it is not easy to decide upon the exact shrine at which we are to offer incense. Thackeray did not consider the feelings of these devout worshippers, and left many of his localities vague. Whole districts rather than individual streets and houses seem to be his; and though we are told that he knew exactly where Becky and Colonel Newcome and Pendennis lived, the photographs of the authentic houses somehow leave one’s imagination cold. To imprison these immortals between brick walls strikes one as an unnecessary act of violence; they have always tenanted their own houses in our brains, and we refuse to let them go elsewhere. But there can be no such risk in following Thackeray himself from one house to another; and we may perhaps find that it adds to our knowledge of him and of his books to see where he lived when he was writing them and what surroundings met his eye. But here again we must select. Charterhouse and the Temple, Jermyn-street, and Young-street, Kensington, are the genuine Thackeray country, which seems to echo not only his presence but his spirit; these are the places that he has interpreted as well as pictured. But it needs either a boundless imagination or a mind that holds sacred the boots and umbrellas of the great to follow Thackeray with unflagging interest in his journeyings to Ireland, to America, and to all parts of the Continent; and at No. 36 Onslow-square, Brompton, the most devoted pilgrim might find it difficult to bend the knee.
We do less violence to the truth if, in our love of classification, we describe Dickens as a cockney. We might draw a very distinct line round London - even round certain districts of London - if we wished to circumscribe his kingdom. It is true that the late Mr Kitton, who brought what we must consider a superfluous zeal and a too minute knowledge to the task, begins his book with two or three pictures of Portsmouth and Chatham. We are asked to imagine the child Dickens as he looked at the stars from the upper window of No. 18 St Mary’s-place, and we are assured that he enjoyed many a ramble with his sister and nurse in the fields near Chatham. The imagination oppressed with these details has to bear an altogether insupportable load before it has followed Dickens to his last resting place. Mr Melville was wise enough to ignore the ‘hundred and one places of minor importance’ in writing of Thackeray and select only those that seemed to him of primary interest - from which the reader will probably make a further selection. But Mr Kitton, whose mind was a unique storehouse of facts about Dickens, lets us have the full benefit of his curiously minute scholarship. He knows not only every house where Dickens lived, but every lodging that he took for a month or two in the summer; he tells us how Dickens seemed to prefer “houses having semi-circular frontages’ and describes the inns where Dickens lodged and the mugs from which he is said to have drunk and the ‘stiff wooden chair’ in which he sat. A pilgrimage, if one followed this guide, would be a very serious undertaking; and we doubt whether the pilgrim at the end would know very much more about Dickens and his writings than he did at the beginning. The most vivid and valuable part of the book is that which describes the various dwelling places of Dickens as a young man before he was famous and could afford a ‘frightfully first-class family mansion’, as he calls it. It was while he lived in these dreary and dingy back streets in Camden-town and the neighbourhood of the Debtors’ Prison that Dickens absorbed the view of life which he was afterwards to reproduce so brilliantly. These early experiences, indeed, read like the first sketch for David Copperfield. No one probably has ever known his London so intimately as Dickens did, or has painted the life of the streets with such first-hand knowledge. He was not really happy when he was alone. He made one or two conscientious expeditions into the country in search of local colour, but when it had yielded the words he wanted he had no further use for it. He spent his summer holidays at various seaside resorts, and in London he lived in a variety of houses which leave no single impression upon the mind. Indeed, the book is such an accumulation of detail that it is, after all, from his own writings that one must draw one’s impression of the Dickens country.
And perhaps, when everything is said, this is always bound to be the case. A writer’s country is a territory within his own brain; and we run the risk of disillusionment if we try to turn such phantom cities into tangible brick and mortar. We know our way there without signposts or policemen, and we can greet the passers by without need of introduction. No city indeed is so real as this that we make for ourselves and people to our liking; and to insist that it has any counterpart in the cities of the earth is to rob it of half its charm. In the same way too the great dead come to each of us in their own guise, and their image is more palpable and enduring than any shapes of flesh and blood. Of all books therefore the books that try to impress upon the mind the fact that great men were once alive because they lived in this house or in that are those that seem to have least reason for their being, for Thackeray and Dickens, having done with earthly houses, live most certainly in our brains.
Flumina Amem Silvasque.
It is a proof of the snobbishness which, no doubt, veins us through that the mere thought of a literary pilgrim makes us imagine a man in an ulster looking up earnestly at a house front decorated with a tablet, and bidding his anaemic and docile brain conjure up the figure of Dr Johnson.- But we must confess that we have done the same thing dozens of times, rather stealthily perhaps, and choosing a darkish day lest the ghosts of the dead should discover us, yet getting some true pleasure and profit nevertheless. We cannot get past a great writer’s house without pausing to give an extra look into it and furnishing it as far as we are able with his cat and his dog, his books and his writing table. We may justify the instinct by the fact that the dominion which writers have over us is immensely personal; it is their actual voice that we hear in the rise and fall of the sentence; their shape and colour that we see in the page, so that even their old shoes have a way of being worn on this side rather than on that, which seems not gossip but revelation. We speak of writers; the military or medical or legal pilgrim may exist, but we fancy that the present of his heroes’ old boots would show him nothing but leather.
Edward Thomas was as far removed from o
ur imaginary pilgrim as well may be. He had a passion for English country and a passion for English literature; and he had stored enough knowledge of the lives of his heroes to make it natural for him to think of them when walking through their country and to speculate whether the influence of it could be traced in their writing. The objection that most writers have no particular country he met in a variety of ways, which are all excellent, and many of them illuminating, because they sprang from the prejudices and preferences of a well-stocked mind. There is no need to take alarm, as we confess to have done, at finding that the counties are distributed among the poets; there is no trace whatever of the ‘one can imagine’ and ‘no doubt’ style of writing.
On the contrary the poets and the counties are connected on the most elastic and human principle; and if in the end it turns out that the poet was not born there, did not live there, or quite probably had no place at all in his mind when he wrote, his neglect is shown to be quite as characteristic as his sensibility. Blake, for instance, comes under London and the Home Counties; and it is true that, as it is necessary to live somewhere, he lived both in London and at Felpham, near Bognor. But there is no reason to think that the tree that was filled with angels was peculiar to Peckham Rye, or that the bulls that ‘each morning drag the sulphur Sun out of the Deep’ were to be seen in the fields of Sussex. ‘Natural objects always did and do weaken, deaden, and obliterate imagination in me!’ he wrote, and the statement, which might have annoyed a specialist determined to pin a poet down, starts Mr Thomas off upon a most interesting discussion of the state of mind thus revealed. After all, considering that we must live either in the country or in the town, the person who does not notice one or the other is more eccentric than the person who does. It is a fine opening into the mind of Blake.
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf Page 512