THE DUTY OF FeR,GETTING. TIME hath, my lord, a wallet
at his back, Wherein he puts alms for oblivion," is the one saying of Shake- speare which is too little remembered. We are in danger of remembering and recording a great deal too much. It is for- gotten that we have only finite memories, and that if we fill these memories with all the rubbish-heaps of each generation, we shall have no room left for what is really valuable and impressive. Our " interviewers " and our cheap Press are great dangers, as well as occasionally great helps. They I prevent that wholesome oblivion by which the world is re- lieved of its dust-heaps and its superfluous scandal. Here, for instance, is Mr. William Graham preserving for us in the new Nineteenth Century what it seems to us that he might much better forget,—what only disfigures that which we would not willingly have disfigured, our associations with Shelley, one of the greatest of English poets, but one who, as well as being a great poet, was, in many respects, a weak and frail man.
i Mr. William Graham, as a worshipper of Shelley, has just published a reminiscence of Jane Clermont, the step-sister of the second Mrs. Shelley, in her old age at Florence, of which we 0 must say that he would have done far better if he had allowed his reminiscence to perish with him, and had not preserved for us this titter of the past. However true his love for Shelley may be, and he professes much, Jane Clermont was not the woman to whom he should have applied to brighten our im- pressions of Shelley. Mrs. Shelley, in her widowhood, was only too anxious not to be left alone with Jane Clermont. "Don't leave me alone with her," she said to her daughter-in-law, " she has been the bane of my life ever since she was three years old." And certainly Mr. William Graham's record of Jane Clermont's reminiscences go to justify Mrs. Shelley's language. The only pretty clear upshot of these reminiscences is that, after Miss , Clermont's intrigue with Byron, she was desperately in love with Shelley, and that Shelley was, in some of his various , moods, desperately in love with her, as his lines to " Constantia singing" show beyond all doubt. Professor Dowden's memoir sufficiently testifies how much Mrs. Shelley suffered from the s presence of her step-sister, and from Shelley's passionate t interest in her fate; and we did not need any further light on that disagreeable episode in his history,—one of a con- , siderable number of like episodes. Shelley tells us himself in " Epipsychidion " that he "never was attached to that great , sect " which objects to a multiplicity of loves :— " True love in this differs from gold and clay, That to divide is not to take away."
And he acted liberally on his own theory. We could have spared more illustrations of his practice. And especially we could have spared this record by Mr. William Graham of , Miss Clermont's manners and feelings at eighty-three. Neither its style nor its substance is good. Its style is the sickly- tender style. Miss Clermont told him, that though she might , then say without vanity that she was once a beautiful woman, he would only be disappointed at finding " a wretched, worn-out old creature on the threshold of the unknown ; " whereupon Mr. Graham replied,—" Madame, you are beautiful now as ever, and there is no age for those who have known Shelley and whom he loved. I am young now, but never, if I live to a century, shall I have a greater privilege than this, to see the Constantia of Shelley, whose voice was as sweet as ' the poet's song." When he takes leave of her finally, the old lady says,—" Come, kiss me, and say good-bye, like a man ; no, not good-bye, au revoir I Au revoir, dear, in this world or the next ; I am sure it is only au revoir. Meantime, you ' must forget all about me."—" I shall never forget, Madame," I replied, with a choking in the throat, as I kissed those lips z4 which had been kissed by Byron and by Shelley. And I never shall. But that spring-time " [when he was to visit her again] , " never came, and I am waiting for the after-world ; for soon after, that dear lady passed to where beyond these voices there is peace.' " That is the nauseous style; and the substance ,,of the various interviews is no better than the style. We learn 4only that Miss Clermont was never in love with Byron, though she lived with him ; that she was deeply devoted to Shelley, and used." to box his ears and teaze his life out; ' and that she toyed with her professed Catholicism just as Mr. Graham himself did when he obtained his interview with her by professing to a Catholic priest that he was on the verge of conversion to Catholicism, and that an interview with Miss Clermont might turn the scales. Surely all this dis- agreeable and silly stuff, all Mr. Graham's elaborate gallantries to the old lady, and all the old lady's ecstasies concerning Shelley, whose wife's peace she bad so much disturbed, and her light raillery and caressing of her young admirer, together with her unwholesome talk of her need of a religion in which she had apparently no belief, but at most a feeble wish to believe, would have been much better consigned to that oblivion for which it was so admirably fitted. We know quite enough of Shelley's passion for falling in love, and of the misery it too. often caused ; and we do not wish to have his poetry further spoiled for us by the revival of details ranch better forgotten. And certainly Miss Clermont's aged flirtation with her youth- ful flatterer is not in itself a valuable inheritance for the ages to come.
Wordsworth, in one of his most exquisite poems, declares that he mourns much less for that which " age takes away" than for " what it leaves behind " :— " My eyes are dim with childish tears, My heart is idly stirred,
For the same sound is in my ears Which once before I heard.
So fares it still in our decay ; And yet the wiser mind
Mourns less for what age takes away,
Than what it leaves behind."
That is often true of the individual memory, and is still more true of the memory of the race which no doubt preserves carefully thousands of useless fragments of gossip which are either purely worthless, or, still worse, mischievous in their effects on the senses and the imagination. What Clough says of Rome is quite as true of the literatures of all nations :— "Rome disappoints me much ; I hardly can yet understand, but Rubbish/ seems the word which most exactly would suit it. All the foolish destructions, and all the sillier savings, All the incongruous things of past incompatible ages, Seem to be treasured up here to make fools of present and future. Would to Heaven the old Goths had made a cleaner sweep of it 1" That may be going rather too far as regards the monuments of a confused past, for it is well to have physical registers of the greater confusions through which the world has passed. Bat it is certainly true of the literature of the present day, that it carefully sweeps up for preservation much that it should sweep straight into oblivion, till, with every generation that succeeds, there is more and more difficulty in choosing pro- perly between what is worth remembering and what it is almost a duty to forget. As a select memory is one of the greatest of human treasures, so an unsifted memory which retains more scandal and folly than either humour or wisdom, is one of the most embarrassing of possessions. Yet every year that passes, the accumulation of worthless memoranda renders it more and more difficult to have a well-assorted memory, and more and more easy to have in its place a mere lumber-room of worthless scraps and patches. If our literature could but be weeded of what is worthless or worse than worthless, how infinitely more valuable and more impressive the rest of it would be! Not, of course, that we would have only the larger life of the world mirrored in it. It is most necessary to have a suffi- cient set-off of petty and average life to bring out the full meaning of that larger life. But then, even the petty and average life should be painted by genius, and not by those who cannot discriminate what is characteristic from what is of no signifi- cance; and, unfortunately, sensational writers who fancy that because they are sensational and excite the curiosity of the reader, they are men of genius, often usurp the place of those who see life truly and describe it effectively. There is no greater difficulty in an age of cheap literature than to know what it is best to forget. But it would be clearly well to forget all the mere redundancies of scandal and gossip about the great which tell us nothing but what we knew before, and in a form net nearly so good as that in which we knew it before. Mr. Graham's mannered and sickly description of Miss Clermont's unvenerable old age, appears to us to be rubbish of the latter kind which should have been included in Shakespeare's "alms for oblivion."
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