The New Life of Shelley THE devout company of Shelley

worshippers has been awaiting this book for some time, for its advent has been long adver-

tised. Mr. Peck is still another of those American scholars who exhibit in research a humility and patience that have no equal here. We English are not so inclined to this almost un- humorous hero-worship ; and while in our better moments we are willing to make copious commentary on the work of a great compatriot, we feel it is beneath our dignity as potential creators in kind to go about collecting the master's returned cheques, washing bills, and other flotsam and jetsam of his little days of frail mortality."- Many restless people, including a few critics, have begun to kick against this vast mechanical—one might almost say bureaucratic—process which nowadays is set in motion to surround everybody with any claim to immortality. The poor soul is wire-meshed and concreted into that immortality,

after having been submitted to a sort of literary and domestic autopsis that throws a merciless limelight on the few articu-. lations of his life.

Mr. Peck has been guilty of all these terrible cruelties and sacrileges. He has not left a bone of Shelley unturned. The search has been exhaustive and complete. One feels, indeed, that actually Mr. Peck must have employed a detective agency and several State Departments, in order to have learned so much and to have co-ordinated this incredible mass of detailed knowledge. At the end of these two huge volumes there comes a retinue of appendices covering a hun- dred and fifty pages. One of them gives us twelve pages of bills, shopping memoranda, promissory notes, and other such stuff. It is all very awe-inspiring, especially when we turn to

Mr. Peck's examination of Shelley's work and find that the

biographer's zeal has not waned even here. Poems arc analysed and compared ; sources, analogies, and probable allusions traced and connected, until the reader feels that not another word can ever possibly be said on the subject of Shelley and his circle. American readers will appreciate this amazing efficiency, as well as the large number of miscel- laneous pictures which accompany the text. There is a full- page portrait, for instance, of William Paley, with the inscrip-

tion, " Whose Natural Theology Timothy Shelley read to Bysshe." There is a photograph of The Valley of Rocks, Lynton, " where Godwin sought solace in nature for his dis- appointment at not finding the Shelleys at Lynmouth."

Having got over these superficial jocularities, we can now approach the book more soberly and realize how valuable it is. It is really a portfolio of all the research into Shelley's life and work that has ever been made. If it is not presented with the grace of Mr. Ingpen's Shelley in England, or the literary distinction of Dowden's Life, it is, apart from the author's naiveté in expressing himself, very clearly organized, and the copiously annotated text hangs well together under the enormous burden of material which it has to carry.

What more does the new Life tell us about Shelley ? Little, I think, that the impassioned reader and lover has not been able to discover in the work of the poet, and in the details of his life already brought to light by Mr. Ingpen and others. The book serves rather to bring details to fill out and confirm our general convictions about the character of this curiously complicated genius. Mr. Peck sides with Shelley's friends, Hogg and Peacock, in their partisanship for Shelley's first wife, Harriett. He blames the poet for deserting her, and ignores the point of view which considers that Harriett, by her wilful and

prolonged absence at Bath, virtually deserted the poet at a time when he was in financial difficulties incurred as much by

her snobbish extravagance as by his impracticable philan- thropy. Mr. Peck reprints that last letter which she wrote to her sister before committing suicide. It is such a master- piece of agonizing simplicity and girlish lovingness that we are disarmed every time we re-read it, until we recollect how all her charm, beauty, and candour could be curdled by prejudice

into an obstinate stupidity that must have driven the sensitive poet nearly crazy.

A passage has lately been restored by Mr. T. J. Wise to a

letter which Shelley wrote to Mary after the event. It runs as follows :

" It seems that this poor woman—the most innocent of her abhorred and unnatural family—was driven from her father's house, and descended the steps of prostitution until she lived with a groom of the name of Smith, who deserting her, she killed herself. There can be no question that the beastly viper, her sister, unable to gain profit from her connection with her, has secured to herself the fortune of the old man—who is now dying —by the murder of this poor creature."

Such words, written to Mary, make one feel that the philis- tines are justified in their accusations that Shelley was out of touch with the normal things of life. Mr. Peck in proving how concise Shelley was in dealing with bankers and money-lenders, does not clear Shelley of that charge, for a man may have a profound stock of common sense, yet be a baby in money matters. This fragment of a letter indeed exposes the greatest weakness of the poet, and justifies (if we can forget his achieve- ment and his potentiality) the judgment of such people as Matthew Arnold and his frock-coated regiments of the worldly- wise.

Shelley's intellectual enthusiasms made him a fool in his

relations with his fellow mortals. If people were unwilling or unable to be proselytised to his metaphysical and political theories, or to his practice of ethics, he could hate them with all the false compassion which we find in the worst religious crank. Elizabeth Westbrook genuinely loved and was loved by her sister Harriett. She was ambitious that the young girl should have every opportunity in life, and the young aristocrat Shelley was accordingly welcomed and trapped. It is a natural thing for an ambitious woman to have done on behalf of the girl whom she mothered. It was Shelley's own fault—or the fault of-his youth—that he was not alive to the dangers of his complaisance in being so easily inveigled. Had he realized, after his marriage, that intellectual convic- tions are after all mere theories of existence, changing as fate knocks us with the cruel reminders of reality, he would have seen that this " beastly viper " was really a good-natured, conscientious and strong-minded woman, determined to do as well as possible for herself and those around her. Even after the sequence of miseries which ended in the terrible disaster of the Serpentine, she devoted herself lovingly to Shelley's children, and one feels that it might have been to their advan- tage had they been left under the shelter of her crinoline. But the discussion about Shelley's character is likely to lead us on for ever, for it is a world in itself, within which we small

figures may explore and lose ourselves. RICHARD CHURCH.