Shelley: The Pursuit (56 page)

In his first letter, written on the afternoon they took lodgings at Margaret Street, he wrote: ‘Indeed my dear friend I cannot write to you in confidence unless my letters are sacredly confined to yourself. . . . I know not what is the nature and extent of the intercourse which is hereafter to take place between us. Whatever it be let it not be contaminated by the comments and interference of others. Suffice to your own self, and despise the miserable compassion of those who cannot esteem or love — Forgive this frankness Harriet. Let us understand each other and ourselves. I deem myself far worthier and better than any of your nominal friends. . . . We must agree on certain points, or our intimacy will be the mere gibe and mockery of affection. — Are you above the world & to what extent? — My attachment to Mary neither could nor ought to have been overcome: our spirits and our bodies
[1]
are united. We met with passion, she has resigned all for me. But I shall probably see you tomorrow. I wish you to answer this letter.’
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What answer could Harriet make to this? Shelley did meet her the next day, and it gradually became clear to both parties what was at issue, and how far ‘above the world’ Harriet was required to be. Shelley, on his side, still wanted Harriet to join him and live under his protection with Mary and Jane as ‘a sister’. He also wished for a private and informal settlement over the terms of Harriet’s support. How Mary would have taken to this we can only guess; her sole comment in her journal had so far been that Harriet was ‘certainly a very odd creature’. Yet without her positive enthusiasm the plan was a hopeless one, necessarily fated to founder on every sort of jealousy and insecurity, between her and Harriet. Harriet, on her side, was at first prepared to appear interested in anything Shelley might suggest. But what she hoped was to draw Shelley’s interest away from the younger girl, supposing that he would still come to his senses. She hoped above all to press Shelley into making some formal arrangement over money, which would provide the necessary independence for herself and her children, and have the effect of still acknowledging her as the true Mrs Shelley. But in this she completely misunderstood the precariousness of Shelley’s financial state, and her actions to secure a legal settlement had the opposite effect from that which she had intended. She inadvertently disorganized all Shelley’s arrangements for securing an immediate loan, which only infuriated him and drove him even more firmly into the arms of Mary, where solidarity was
confirmed by adversity. Harriet also lost the moral advantage of her pregnancy, for in October Mary announced that she was expecting a child as well.

Until about 20 September the situation was still evenly balanced. Shelley was attempting to secure money through his lawyer Amory, who seems to have agreed to try and sell the reversion of part of the inheritance which was ultimately due, without being fully informed of Shelley’s and Harriet’s situation. Shelley was still writing in a conciliatory tone to Harriet, begging her secrecy, promising his aid and urging her to reconsider her position: ‘I am anxious for an answer to my letter — Collect your maturest judgement & acquit yourself with justice towards me and Mary. United as we are we cannot be considered separately. Consider how far you would desire your future life to be placed within the influence of my superintending mind, whether you still confide sufficiently in my tried and unalterable integrity to submit to the laws which any friendship would create between us: whether we are to meet in entire and unreserved faith or allow our intimacy to subside.’
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But Harriet, who had been finding the high-minded and condescending tone increasingly insufferable, finally doubted the genuineness of Shelley’s intentions, and despite his requests, she went direct to the lawyer, overwhelmed by misery and bitterness and uncertainty. She proceeded to explain the full nature of Shelley’s position, and demanded that he be forced to come to a formal legal settlement. She then closed all communication with Margaret Street, and appears to have left London for several days. When Shelley called at Chapel Street on the 22nd, he found Harriet was ‘out of town’. No doubt her father and Eliza were strongly influential in this determined action on her part, and there was talk that Eliza had told Hookham that a legal action against Shelley was about to be put in motion by Mr Westbrook. The results were fatal for any reconciliation. In Shelley’s mind she had reverted to her original status, a puppet of the Westbrooks.

Four days later, Shelley wrote her a stinging, furious letter, which showed that at last she too, the beautiful Harriet, had joined the ranks of those who had finally and irrevocably fallen from grace. He began with pointed coolness. ‘In the first place I find that you have detailed the circumstances of our separation to Amory in opposition to your own agreement with me, in contradiction to your own sense of right, & with the most perfect contempt for my safety or comfort. He, as you foresaw, has determined to resign the affairs of mine that were on the point of completion.’

This, as Shelley implied, cut Harriet’s throat as effectively as it cut his own. Certainly it was true that from this time onwards Shelley had to abandon ordinary legal channels, and engage in a desperate game of dodging bailiffs and warrants of arrest for debt. His negotiations were forced to descend into the seedy
world of money-lenders and property speculators. Realizing this, he now turned on Harriet the full force of his anger. ‘I was an idiot to expect greatness or generosity from you, that when an occasion of the sublimest virtue occurred, you would fail to play a part of mean and despicable selfishness. The pure & liberal principles of which you used to boast that you were a disciple, served only for display. In your heart it seems you were always enslaved to the vilest superstitions, or ready to accept their support for your own narrow & worldly views. You are plainly lost to me forever. I foresee no probability of change.’
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This was, among many unwise and unfortunate outbursts, perhaps the unkindest and most arrogant in his life. Perhaps some of his bitterness was called forth by what he called the ‘wanton cruelty & injustice’ of Harriet circulating to various persons false reports about Godwin favouring Shelley’s passion for Mary. But one can understand how it must have looked to Harriet. Shelley concluded his letter with the observation that ‘the subject of money alone remains’, and signed himself with pointed brevity ‘PB Shelley’.

Harriet apparently
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replied to this letter, attempting to ‘vindicate’ herself as Shelley put it, the same day; yet he wrote again on the 27th, in much the same tone. ‘You have applied to an attorney the consequence is obvious — you are plainly lost to me, lost to the principles which are the guide and hope of my life.’ As to her remarks about Mary, and her ‘appeal to the vilest superstitions’, he considered it ‘an insult that you address such Cant to me’. His own sense of moral superiority remained unshaken, and, if anything, further enhanced. ‘If you feel yet any ambition to be ranked among the wise and good, write to me. I am hardly anxious however to hear from you, as I despair of any generosity or virtue on your part. . . . PB Shelley.’
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Shelley was preparing to move to St Pancras that afternoon at 5 o’clock, but deliberately omitted to give Harriet the new address, advising her instead to communicate through Hookham. In retrospect this really marked the decisive collapse of the relationship. There was a break of some six days in the correspondence, and thereafter Shelley’s letters, though never again so bitter, remained frigidly aloof. Yet Harriet still had hopes.

The new lodgings were on two floors at No. 5 Church Terrace, St Pancras, beyond what is now the Euston Road, a shabby-genteel district bordered by open fields, to which Godwin himself was to retire much later in old age. Peacock began to call regularly, and he helped Shelley with the early stages of his negotiations with a money-lender called Ballechy, while discussing his own amatory complications in the shape of an enthusiastic heiress, and his old friend Marianne St Croix. Shelley accepted Peacock’s new position as an intermediary,
and was now glad of his friendship in a London that had suddenly become hostile. He reacted curiously to the break with Harriet, and plunged into a volatile mood of mischievous scheming. Shelley and the two girls and Peacock walked over Hampstead Heath and Primrose Hill, launched fleet after fleet of paper fireboats, read aloud from
Political Justice
, set off fireworks in the fields, discussed a renewed Irish expedition and concocted an extraordinary plan to kidnap his two younger sisters, Hellen and Elizabeth, from their boarding school at Mrs Hugford’s in Hackney. Jane and Mary were even sent to the school anonymously to reconnoitre.
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On 3 October, Shelley wrote a long retrospective letter to Harriet. Although he told her that he would have liked to have ‘superintended’ the progress of her mind, and have assisted her in ‘cultivating an elevated philosophy’, he was now broadly dismissive. ‘I am united to another; you are no longer my wife. Perhaps I have done you injury, but surely most innocently & unintentionally in having commenced any connection with you. — That injury whatever be its amount was not to be avoided. If ever in any degree there was sympathy in our feelings & opinions wherefore deprive ourselves in future of the satisfaction which may result, by this contemptible cavil — these unworthy bickerings. Unless a sincere confidence be accorded by you to my undesigning truth, our intercourse for the present must be discontinued.’ He cancelled an arrangement for them to meet the following afternoon, apparently to settle mutual debts, since he had heard rumours of bailiffs.

Harriet had perhaps counted on one last appeal: the forthcoming birth of their second child. But underneath the signature, ‘Affectionately yours, PB Shelley’, she read a coldly courteous P.S. ‘I do not apprehend the slightest danger from your approaching labour: I think you may safely repose confidence in [Dr] Sim’s skill. Your last labour was painful, but auspicious. I understand that cases of difficulty after that are very rare.’ He closed by asking her to send on to Hookham ‘stockings, hanks & Mrs Wollstonecraft’s posthumous works’.
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Two days later it was the same thing: he hoped she would find another lover, ‘capable of being to you as the brother of your soul’, meanwhile he remained her true friend, and ‘enough your friend to make the employment of a lawyer quite unnecessary’. He still refused to see her, refused to meet a lawyer or to give his address. He felt he could be rational about Ianthe too. ‘I know that by the law of nature she is yours, & not mine — that your feelings towards her depend on physical sympathy, whilst mine are the result of habit & self-persuasion.’ Now at last Harriet began to see how hopeless it was.
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Shelley’s letters to Harriet over this period had totally lacked understanding or sympathy towards his wife’s feelings. Her own point of view was merely
‘superstition’, and her own need for support and advice merely weakness and treachery. Compared with his letters to Hogg of 1811, or his letters to Miss Hitchener of 1812, they were chill, high-minded and emotionally empty. It is difficult to believe that anyone could really have taken seriously those beneficent plans for Harriet’s future life and welfare. The Westbrooks and Amory certainly did not. Did Mary? Did Peacock?

In striking contrast, when writing to Hogg in Norton on 3 and 4 October, Shelley revealed his feelings freely, and surveyed the whole pattern of his life as it had shifted in the last year from Harriet to Mary Godwin. He wrote that Harriet had diverted the true and natural course of his career and task in life. There is no talk of beneficence. ‘You will rejoice that after struggles and privations which almost withered me to idiotism…I am restored to energy and enterprise, that I have become again what I once promised to become. . . . I suddenly perceived that the entire devotion with which I had resigned all prospects of utility or happiness to the single purpose of cultivating Harriet was a gross & despicable superstition.’ By contrast, his union with Mary had given him an overwhelming sense of both intellectual and sexual liberation and fulfilment, amounting to a revelation. ‘How wonderfully I am changed! Not a dis-embodied spirit can have undergone a stranger revolution! I never knew until now that contentment was anything but a word denoting an unmeaning abstraction. I never before felt the integrity of my nature, its various dependencies, & learned to consider myself as a whole accurately united rather than an assemblage of inconsistent and discordant portions.’ Most important of all, the liberation that his love for Mary had brought freed him to continue with his life’s work. ‘I am deeply persuaded that thus ennobled, I shall become a more true and constant friend, a more useful lover of mankind, a more ardent asserter of truth and virtue — above all, more consistent, more intelligible more true.’

The nature and intensity of his passion for Mary were well expressed in the way he recalled his first impressions of her at Skinner Street, though remembering that Hogg had never seen the girl whom Shelley was now presenting as his lover, it had a curious physical disembodiment. ‘The originality & loveliness of Mary’s character was apparent to me from her very motions and tones of voice. The irresistible wildness and sublimity of her feelings shewed itself in her gestures and her looks. — Her smile, how persuasive it was, and how pathetic! She is gentle, to be convinced and tender; yet not incapable of ardent indignation and hatred. . . . I speedily conceived an ardent passion to possess this inestimable treasure.
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In my own mind this feeling assumed a variety of shapes. I disguised from myself the true nature of affection. I endeavoured also to
conceal it from Mary: but without success. . . . No expressions can convey the remotest conception of the
manner
in which she dispelled my delusions.’