SHELLEY MEMORIALS..
THE Editor of the "Shelley Memorials " warns the public to re- ceive with the utmost caution all letters purporting to be by the poet which have not some indisputable warrant, and to put little trust in any biographies of Shelley which have yet appeared. Captain Medwin'a is full of errors; others have been written by those who had no means of knowing the truth ; and Mr. Hogg appears to be, in Lady Shelley's opinion, the worst of all. He was Shelley's early and intimate friend, and was chosen by the poet's surviving representatives as the fittest person to edit the documents in their possession, but the use he has made of them has "astonished and shocked" those who placed them in his hands. It was " with the most painful feelings of dismay " they perused the " fantastic caricature," he had penned, and they felt bound to take upon themselves the task of editing the materials which Mr. Hogg had so strangely misused. In doing this they have connected them " only by as slight a thread of narrative. as would suffice to make them intelligible to the reader." The documents consist of letters, not numerous, written by Shelley between the years 1812 and 1821, both inclusive ; of about as many by Mrs. Shelley, Godwin, and others ; extracts from Mrs. Shelley's journal, and an unfinished Essay on Christianity—a paper profoundly interesting, as a record of Shelley's matured opinions on the highest subjects that can engage the mind of man. The details of Shelley's early life are rapidly passed over, the editor being unwilling to repeat what has already appeared in print ; but the work grows fuller from the period when the poet became acquainted with Godwin. We soon come upon the strange story of the alleged attempt on Shelley's life, when he was residing at Tanyralt in Caernarvonshire. His daughter-in-law admits that there is a something of a nightmare character" in the incidents of the scene, but cannot believe it was the creation of an over-excited and morbidly sensitive brain, for the testimony of Mrs. Shelley and her sister, who were in the house at the time—but not eye-witnesses—appears to her to give the stamp of reality to the affair. We doubt that such testimony would have been much regarded by an acute Bow Street officer ; and it seems to us quite admissible as a supposition that in a fit of temporary insanity Shelley hiniself fired the shots, one of which is said to have passed through his night-gown. The wonder is not that a mind so ex- quisitely sensitive as his, and so cruelly tortured, should some- times have been deranged, but that it did not topple over the verge to which it constantly approached, and become permanently insane. Proofs of this morbid tendency are numerous enough, and in the volume before us we find symptoms recorded which a wise physician would certainly have regarded as premonitory of mania. Of this kind is the intense irritability of the nervous system de- scribed in the following extract of a letter to Godwin, written by Shelley in December 1817. " My health has been materially worse. My feelings at intervals are of a deadly and torpid kind, or awakened to a state of such unnatural and keen excitement, that, only to instance the organ of sight, I find the very blades of grass and the boughs of distant trees present themselves to me with microscopical distinctness. Towards evening, I sink into a state of lethargy, and inanimation, and often remain for hours on the sofa, between sleep and waking, a prey to the most painful irritability of thought. Such, with little intermission, is my condition. The hours devoted to study are selected with vigilant caution from among these periods of endurance. It is not for this that I think of travelling to Italy, even if I knew that Italy would relieve me. But I have experienced a decisive pulmonary. attack ; and, although at present it has passed away without any very considerable vestige of its existence, yet this symptom sufficiently shows the true nature of my disease to be consumption. It is to my advantage that this malady is in its nature slow, and, if one is sufficiently alive to its advances, is susceptible of cure from a warm climate. In the event of its assuming any decided shape, it would be my duty to go to Italy without delay ; and it is only when that measure becomes an indispensable duty that, contrary to both Mary's feelings and to mine, as they regard you, I shall go to Italy. I need not remind you (besides the mere pain endured by the survivors) of the train of evil consequences which my death would cause to ensue. I am thus circumstantial and explicit, because you seem to have misunderstood me. It is not health, but life, that ! should seek in Italy ; and that, not for my own sake—I feel that I am capable of trampling on all such weakness—but for the sake of those to whom my life may be a source of happiness, utility, security, and honour, and to some of whom my death might be all that is the reverse."
Hallucination is incipient madness, and Shelley was subject to this condition, even to the extent, as appears in the third of the instances we are about to quote, of believing in the reality of his visions. During his residence in Switzerland-
" One evening, the recital by Lord Byron of the commencement of Cole- ridge's spectral poem, Christabel, conjured up in Shelley's mind, by an association of ideas, a vision of a beautiful woman with four eyes, two of which were glancing at him from out of her breast ; and he rushed from the room in an agony of horror."
The last instances mentioned by Lady Shelley occurred in the fatal year of 1822 on the shores of the Bay of Spezia.
• Shelley Memorials: from Authentic Sources. Edited by Lady Shelley. To which is added An Essay on Christianity, by Percy Bysshe Shelley: now first printed. Published by Smith, Elder, and Co. " The wildness of the objects by which he was constantly surrounded— the solemnity of the solitude in which he had voluntarily placed himself, broken occasionally by the uproar of the half-civilized men and women from the adjacent districts—the abrupt transitions of his life from sea to land, and from land to sea—the frequent recurrence of appalling storms, and the lofty, but weird, abstractions of the poem he was composing [the Triumph of Life] —contributed to plunge the mind of Shelley into a state of morbid ex- oitement, the result of which was a tendency to see visions. One night, loud eries were heard issuing from the saloon. The Williamses rushed out of their room in alarm ; Mrs. Shelley also endeavoured to reach the spot, but fainted at the door. Entering the saloon, the Williamses found Shelley staring horribly into the air, and evidently in a trance. They waked him, and he related that a figure wrapped in a mantle came to his bedside, and beckoned him. He must then have risen in his sleep ; for he followed the imaginary figure into the saloon, when it lifted the hood of its mantle, 4aculated, Siete sodisfatto ? ' ['Are you satisfied ? 9 and vanished. The dream is said to have been suggested by an incident occurring in a drama attributed to Calderon.
"Another vision appeared to Shelley on the evening of May 6th, when he and Williams were walking together on the terrace. The story is thus re- corded by the latter in his diary :—‘ Fine. Some heavy drops of rain fell without a cloud being risible. After tea, while walking with S. on the ter- race, and observing the effect of moonshine on the waters, he complained of being unusually nervous, and stopping short, he grasped me violently by the arm, and stared steadfastly on the white surf that broke upon the beach ender our feet. Observing him sensibly affected, I demanded of him if he was in pain ; but he only answered by saying, There it is again! there!' He recovered after some time, and declared that he saw, as plainly as he then saw me, a naked child [Allegra, who had recently died] nee from the sea, and clasp its hands as if in joy, smiling at him. This was a trance that it required some reasoning and philosophy entirely to wake him from, so forcibly had the vision operated on his mind. Our conversation, which bad been at first rather melancholy, led to this; and my confirming his sen- sation' by confessing that I had felt the same, gave greater activity to his ever-wandering and lively imagination.' " The resent volume adds little to what was already known of Shelley's life, nor has the editor copied into it all the documents in her possession, on the contents of which she relies for a full vindication of the poet's memory. For instance, the time, she says, has not yet arrived for the publication of Shelley's auto- graph papers relating to the sad story of his first marriage. These have been seen by few now living except his children, and they contain the only authentic record of events of which Mary Shelley has said, that " no account has ever been given at all approach- ing reality in their details."
A letter from Charles Lamb, never before published, turns up unexpectedly in Lady Shelley's volume. Here it is-
" Enfield, 29th July 1827.
" Dear Mrs. Shelley—At the risk of throwing away some fine thoughts, I mint write to say how pleased we were with your very kind remembering of us (who have unkindly run away from all our friends) before you go. Perhaps you are gone, and then my tropes are wasted. If any piece of better fortune has lighted upon you than you expected, but less than we wish you, we are rejoiced. We are here trying to like solitude, but have sauce enough to justify the experiment. Vire get some, however. The six days are our Sabbath ; the seventh—why, cockneys will come for a little fresh air ; and ao-
" But by your month, or October at furthest, we hope to see Islington; I, like a giant refreshed with the leaving off of wine ; and Mary pining for Mr. Moron's books and Mr. Meson's society. Then we shall meet. " I am busy with a farce in two acts, the incidents tragi-comic. I can do the dialogue, eommey for; but the .damned plot—I believe I must omit it altogether. The scenes come after one another like geese, not mar- Shelling like cranes, or a Hyde Park review. The story is as simple as GE. D., and the language plain as his spouse. The characters are three women to one man; which is one more than laid hold on him in the Evangely. I think that prophecy squinted towards my drama. " I want some Howard Paine to sketch a skeleton of artfully succeeding scenes through a whole play ; as the courses are arranged in a cookery- book. I to find wit, passion, sentiment, character, and the like trifles. To Lay in the dead colours; I'd Titianesque 'em up. To mark the channel in a cheek (smooth or furrowed, yours or mine) ; and, where tears should course, I'd draw the waters down. To say where a joke should come in, or a pun be left out. To bring my persona on and off like a Beau Nash ; and Vet Frankenstein them there. To bring three together on the stage at once ; they are so shy with me, that I can get no more than two, and there they stand, till it is the time, 4ithout being the season, to withdraw them.
" I am teaching Emma Latin, to qualify her for a superior governess- ship, which we see no prospect of her getting. 'Tis like feeding a child with chopped hay from a spoon. Sisyphus his labours were as nothing to it.
" Actives and passives jostle in her nonsense, till a deponent enters, like Chaos, more to embroil the fray. Her prepositions are suppositions • her conjunctions copulative have no connexion in them ; her concords disagree ; her interjections are purely English, Ah ! ' and 4 Oh !' with a yawn and a gape in the same tongue ; and she herself is a lazy, blockheadly supine. As I say to her, are in pnesenti rarely makes a wise man in future.
" But I dare say it was so with you when you began Latin—and a good while after.
" Good-bye ! Mary's love.
Previous page
