The Real Shelley : New Views of the Poet's Life.
By John Cordy Jeaffreson. 2 vols. (Hurst and Blackett.)—We willingly give Mr.
Jeaffreson credit for a good purpose in this attack upon Shelley and his biographers; but we cannot praise his method. Nearly one thousand closely printed pages of criticism and vituperation are enough to try the temper of the most patient reader, especially when he discovers that much of the matter is irrelevant, and is the work of a book-maker rather than of a critic. The writer's style is often grating, he says disagreeable things in a blunt, coarse way ; bat it cannot be denied that there is some ground for his strong asser- tions and indignant protests. Because Shelley is an exquisite lyric poet, whose voice of song for sweetness and compass is well-nigh unrivalled, because he had passionate aspirations for what he deemed the progress of the race, and possessed many noble qualities of head and heart, he has been praised so irrationally by his admirers, that
Mr. Jeaffreson is justified in reminding us that there is another side to the picture. When the poet's latest and most exhaustive editor is bold enough to declare that Shelley, "in some circumstances, might have been the Saviour of the world "—an assertion more irreverent, but not much more extravagant, than the usual utterances of his worshippers— it is natural that persons who loathe such extravagance should demand the grounds for an assertion so monstrous. Mr. Jeaffreson is an iconoclast. He regards Shelley as an idol,—from the moral standing. point as a very ugly idol,—and he essays to strike him off his pedestal with a sledge-hammer. He undertakes to show that "from his boyhood Shelley was disposed to rise in rebellion against all persons placed in authority over him ; that instead of having the gentle nature attributed to him by fanciful historians, he was quick-tempered and resentful ; that without being desperately wicked, his heart was strangely deceitful towards himself ; that he was a bad and disloyal son to a kind-hearted and well-intentioned father, and by no means a good son to a gentle-natured and conscientious mother ; that he was a bad husband to his first wife, and far from a faultless husband to his second wife ; that together with several agreeable characteristics, he possessed several dangerous qualities, and that he was, at least towards one person, a bad friend." The "one person" was Godwin, whose daughter, a lovely girl of sixteen, was, it is said, stolen from her home by Shelley and carried off to the Continent. "Soon after making this girl's acquaintance, Shelley passed into discord with his wife, and soon after ceasing to love his wife he fixed his affections on his friend's daughter." When Harriett Westbrook was sixteen, so runs Mr. Jeaffreson's charge, Shelley lured her from Christianity to Atheism, set her in rebellion against her father, and having made her an undutiful daughter and an Atheist, married her "only because Hogg made him see that he was bound to do so." Three years later, one child having been born and another being expected, Shelley having discovered that Harriett was "a noble animal," who could neither feel poetry nor understand philosophy, deserted her for Mary, who in company with Claire, her sister-by-affinity, escaped with him to the Continent. In carrying off Harriett and marrying her, Shelley, we are told, committed nothing more than an act of elopement. But, "in carrying off his familiar friend's child, when he could not marry her and had no prospect of ever being able to marry her, he was guilty of an act of seduction." It is to the poet's credit, Mr. Jeaffreson observes, that he married Mary after Harriett's suicide ; "bat what he did at the end of 1816 could not affect the legal and moral quality of what he did in 1814." No doubt, if Shelley had been a small poetaster instead of a great poet, such conduot would have received the blame it deserves; yet, as Mr. Jeaffreson points out, "this miserable business has been treated by successive writers as though it were a wholesome and delightful love-story." We do not purpose noticing, however briefly, all Mr. Jeaffreson's octants against Shelley. He regards him as utterly unveracions, he severely criticises his conduct in relation to Miss Clairmont and Lord Byron, he denounces his purpose in writing "Leon and Cythna," and, to sum up all in a sentence, he shows from the first page to the last, that, while admiring Shelley as a poet, he holds his conduct in abhorrence. And while following with measured steps and with a pertinacity that is almost creel the events of Shelley's troubled life,. Mr. Jeaffreson strikes right and left at nearly every biographer of the poet. One of the most prominent has produced a book of blunders ; a second, has committed the same offence ; a third has written "a book of mistakes, that is wrong in every page "; a fourth is given to gashing, and is " wildly and inexplicably inaccurate." These romance-writers, it appears, do not even know that Shelley's nose turned up ; is it then likely that they will be accurate about more compromising matters ? Mr. Jeaffreson's big volumes are written apparently with a twofold object,—one of them being to neutralise the effects of a biography, shortly, we believe, to appear under the auspices of the Shelley family, and the other to protest against Shelley's advocacy of free contract between the sexes in preference to marriage. By a carious but honourable inconsistency, Shelley married his first wife both in Scotland and according to the rites of the English Church ; and when Harriett committed suicide, he married Mary Godwin ; but he believed in free contract notwithstanding, for he offered his sister to Hogg on those terms. What are we to think of a man who, after leaving his wife for a mistress, writes to the wife requesting her to join them ? The Real Shelley is not a pleasant book ; but it will not be useless if it lowers, as it can scarcely fail to do, the fever-heat of the Shelley worshippers. It is not necessary that our admiration of an exquisite poet should be extended to his social theories or to his wayward conduct. The best excuse for Shelley is not that he was a man of genius, for genius does not lessen responsibility, but that he was a man of vehement impulses who died young, before he had time to weigh and atone for his own great sins.
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