Shelley: The Pursuit (77 page)

Sixty years later, Claire was to write acidly of those who had tried to defend Shelley’s actions as if he could do no wrong. ‘[Harriet] did not form after S.’s leaving her, a connexion with some low man, as Mr Rossetti in his desire of making S. a model of moral perfection hints and more than hints. Her lover was a Captain in the Indian or Wellington Army I forget which, and he was ordered abroad. His letters did not reach her — with her sister’s concurrence, she retired for her accouchement to live with a decent couple in a Mews near Chapel Street . . . . The parents were told that H. — was gone on a visit of some weeks to a friend in the country — it was of consequence in Miss W.’s opinion to conceal the affair from Shelley.’ Claire went on to describe Harriet’s increasing loneliness and depressions, the suicide itself and the burial in a small cemetery off the Bayswater Road. Perhaps she recalled how Shelley’s own role
vis-à-vis
the concealment of her pregnancy from the Godwins mirrored that of Eliza’s concealment of Harriet’s pregnancy from the Westbrooks. If Shelley himself was aware of this, he did not say so. Claire concluded: ‘To me it appears that Mr Rossetti has written his memoir to suit Lady [Jane] Shelley’s predilections — and she is a warm partisan of Shelley and Mary, and like all warm partisans does not care much about Truth. Miss [Eliza] Westbrook related all the above particulars to my Mother. Harriet’s suicide had a beneficial effect on Shelley — he became much less confident in himself and not so wild as he had been before.’
¹⁵
For Claire, it was Shelley’s recognition of his own degree of responsibility — a slow and painful recognition — which matured him. But with the advantage of hindsight Claire did not include his marriage to Mary as one of the ‘benefits’.

Back at Bath, Shelley tried to concentrate on practical matters: Claire’s baby, a little girl, was born safely on 12 January 1817. At first they called her Alba, and later at Byron’s request, Allegra. His ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ was published by Hunt in the
Examiner
of the 19th, and consolidated his
entrée
into London literary life. On the 24th the Chancery case for custody of the two children, Ianthe and Charles, began under Lord Eldon, and Shelley spent many afternoons consulting in London with his counsel Basil Montagu, and Lord Brougham. Both Hunt and Godwin were at their most solicitous, but Shelley and his friends badly underestimated the determination and the sense of justice of the Westbrooks. Old John Westbrook, ill as he was, but ably advised by his solicitor Deesse and supported by Eliza, assembled a powerful case for custody of the children. First, he settled £2,000-worth of four-per-cent annuities on both children, irrespective of the outcome of the case. Secondly, he drew up a dossier of letters which Shelley had sent to Harriet during the time of their separation in autumn 1814. These reflected badly on the irregularity of his conduct and
compounded Shelley’s complete failure to visit the children. Thirdly, he began to assemble, with Eliza’s critical advice, several of Shelley’s ideological writings — notably
Queen Mab
— which showed his political and religious views at their most heretical. It was characteristic of Shelley that he failed to see the social and legal force of the first two aspects of the case, and concentrated entirely on the third. It was of course over the matter of heresy that he felt most justified, and most righteous. Writing to Byron on 17 January to inform him of the birth of Claire’s child, most of the letter was spent defending this position. Again, he reverted to the accusation that Eliza, ‘a libidinous and vindictive woman’
[3]
had ‘not in law, yet in fact’ murdered Harriet. Shelley continued:

The sister has now instituted a Chancery process against me, the intended effect of which is to deprive me of my unfortunate children, now more than ever dear to me; of my inheritance, and to throw me into prison, and expose me in the pillory, on the ground of my being a REVOLUTIONIST, and an
Atheist
. It seems while she lived in my house she possessed herself of such papers as go to establish these allegations. The opinion of Council is, that she will certainly exceed to a considerable extent, but that I may probably escape entire ruin, in the worldly sense of it. So I am here, dragged before the tribunals of tyranny and superstition, to answer with my children, my property, my liberty, and my fame, for having exposed their frauds, and scorned the influence of their power. Yet I will not fail; though I have been given to understand that I could purchase victory by recantation. Indeed, I have too much pride in the selection of their victim.
¹⁶

The last part of this letter, in its melodramatic posturing, might have been written while Shelley was still at Oxford. There was no real sense in which he could have ‘purchased victory by recantation’: the essence of the Westbrook case lay not in what he had done as a writer but in what he had omitted to do as a father. In the event the case dragged on for many weeks: judgement against Shelley was given on 17 March, but the actual custody of the children was not finally awarded until the autumn. The Westbrooks did not get them either, but they were farmed out to respectable foster parents, a certain Dr and Mrs Thomas Hume, who lived in the Home Counties. Strictly limited visiting rights were granted to Shelley, and slightly more flexible ones to the Westbrooks. There is no evidence that Shelley ever made use of this right. It was, in the end, probably the least satisfactory solution for the children themselves, and a far cry from Harriet’s last request.

Peacock, whom Shelley visited frequently at Marlow during this time, observed that he was ‘calm and self-possessed’, except for one curious incident
when he flew at a gardener who had topped off a holly bush to sell as Christmas decorations. This was in the grounds of the new house which Shelley intended to take. ‘As soon as Shelley saw it, he asked the gardener, “What had possessed him to ruin that beautiful tree?” The gardener said, he thought he had improved its appearance. Shelley said: “It is impossible that you can be such a fool.” The culprit stood twiddling his thumbs along the seams of his trousers, receiving a fulminating denunciation, which ended in his peremptory dismissal . . . . Nothing disturbed his serenity but the unfortunate holly. Subsequently, the feeling for Harriet’s death grew into a deep and abiding sorrow: but it was not in the beginning that it was felt most strongly.’
¹⁷

Writing four years later in
Epipsychidion
, Shelley faced much of that which he had hidden from Peacock, from Byron and from Mary. Most of all he faced the appalling effect that ‘abiding sorrow’ had on his own feelings, and on his relationship with Mary. Guilt for Harriet’s suicide itself he never accepted, and perhaps he was right not to do so and true to himself. He wrote of Mary as the Moon; Ianthe and Charles the ‘twin babes’, and Harriet ‘the planet of that hour’. He described the deadening of his emotions, as if part of his mind had iced over.

And there I lay, within a chaste cold bed:

Alas, I then was nor alive nor dead: —

For at her silver voice came Death and Life,

Unmindful each of their accustomed strife,

Masked like twin babes, a sister and a brother,

The wandering hopes of one abandoned mother,

And through the cavern without wings they flew,

And cried ‘Away, he is not of our crew.’

I wept, and though it be a dream, I weep.

What storms then shook the ocean of my sleep,

Blotting that Moon, whose pale and waning lips

Then shrank as in the sickness of eclipse; —

And how my soul was as a lampless sea,

And who was then its Tempest; and when She,

The Planet of that hour, was quenched, what frost

Crept o’er those waters, till from coast to coast,

The moving billows of my being fell

Into a death of ice, immovable; —

And then — what earthquakes made it gape and split,

The white Moon smiling all the while on it,

These words conceal: — If not, each word would be

The key of staunchless tears. Weep not for me!
¹⁸

In
later letters to Byron, Shelley wrote that Harriet’s death communicated a shock ‘which I know not how I have survived’.

But Shelley’s powers of survival were, as he had shown many times before, very great. He threw himself with enthusiasm into the new circle of writers, journalists and poets which Hunt’s friendship had brought him. From the end of January 1817, while seeing the case through Chancery, Shelley and Mary came to stay for four weeks at the Vale of Health. On the 26th, Hunt invited the critic William Hazlitt and the editor Walter Coulson up to dine with the Shelleys, reinforced by Hogg. On 5 February Hunt organized a special dinner for the three members of his ‘Young Poets’ article, and Shelley again met Reynolds and John Keats. Four days later Shelley, Hazlitt and Hunt were up to 3 in the morning arguing about Monarchy and Republicanism. Hunt was determined to keep his new friend well occupied.

There were many other acquaintances who came to Hunt’s fireside, to drink tea, or eat supper, or pass musical evenings surrounded by the literary busts by Shout, the pots of trailing flowers, the elegant engravings, the piles of books and galley proofs, the comfortably battered chairs and settees, and the charming suite of female cousins. Among them were Charles and Mary Lamb, the painter Benjamin Haydon and the two literary lawyers who were recognized as sympathetic satellites of the Hampstead set, Basil Montagu and Horace Smith. Shelley also met the man who was to take Hookham’s place as his future publisher, Charles Ollier. The circumstances of Shelley’s Chancery case were generally known and he was treated with kindness and understanding. Besides, Shelley at once felt perfectly at ease in the liberal-radical atmosphere of the group, and the genteel quality of Hunt’s tea-drinking, ‘neat disorder’ and eternal literary puns did not jar him as it tended to jar Hazlitt and Keats. Shelley found it kindly and comfortable and slightly quaint, and he responded to the faint shade of sychophancy in Hunt’s warm personality. In contrast, Hazlitt felt at bottom that Hunt was only playing at radicalism; and Keats was slowly coming to distrust the poetaster element in Hunt’s make up. Shelley, after his initial shyness had worn off, entered loudly and vigorously into both political and literary discussions which filled the evenings throughout February. He seemed to be unaware that both Keats and Hazlitt found him, in their different ways, rather overbearing. Keats was sensitive to his tendency to insist on a point with a hint of aristocratic superiority; and Hazlitt distrusted his political fervour.

It is remarkable that on the whole the reminiscences of Shelley left by the Hampstead set — by Keats, Hazlitt and Haydon especially — were sharply unfavourable. This contrasts with the idealizing that Hunt always indulged in towards Shelley, but most notably after his death.

Perhaps the most kindly was that of Horace Smith, the literary lawyer, who
afterwards looked after Shelley’s financial affairs in England with great efficiency. Meeting him for the first time at Hunt’s in January, his immediate impression was of the curious combination of fashionable clothes worn carelessly with ‘no thought for modish adjustment’, yet ‘it was impossible to doubt, even for a moment, that you were gazing upon a gentleman’. Smith noticed that Shelley smiled but took no part in the ‘playful and bantering’ antics of Hunt. The weather was fine, and they all walked out on Hampstead Heath; Smith attached himself to Shelley, and gradually drew him into conversation. He was surprised at once by the extent of his reading, and the force and fearless disregard with which he asserted his opinions. ‘My companion, who, as he became interested in his subjects, talked much and eagerly, seemed to me a psychological curiosity, infinitely more curious than Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, to which strange vision he made reference. His principle discourse was, however, of Plato . . . .’
¹⁹

The painter, Benjamin Robert Haydon, erratic friend of both Hunt and Keats, met Shelley at a memorable dinner at Hampstead on 20 January 1817, when he found himself set upon and severely baited for his Christian belief. His memories of Shelley, who took an active part in this baiting, recorded in his diary were not pleasant. First of all, he found Shelley to be hypocritical: ‘Shelley said he could not bear the inhumanity of Wordsworth in talking about the beauty of the shining trout as they lay after being caught, that he had such a horror of torturing animals it was impossible to express it.’
²⁰
Haydon felt this compared badly with the pain Shelley had caused in his own domestic life. Shelley later returned to this criticism of Wordsworth in 1819.
²¹
Haydon felt that all Shelley’s attitudes and actions were perverse in this way, and he was one among many who were appalled by the story of ‘his writing
αθεoς
on Mont Blanc’.
²²
‘He would lie with his sister & sophisticate himself into a conviction of its innocence, and then sell his coat for his Friend, if the produce would relieve his Friend’s necessities! He would kill his wife by infidelity, or himself by continence, whichever would make him most singular by appearing to suffer on principles not vulgarly acknowledged; pride was the foundation of his heart, I suspect, though I certainly [saw] little of him.’