No. XV. A HOED OH TWO EFEYECYLEG THE "SHELLEY MMIORIALIL"
Shelley not a man to be judged by ordinary rules. Question of the attempted assassination in Wales; of morbid visions; end of Ms character for veracity. Caution against forged lettere. A complete biography of Shelley not to be looked for at present.
As I am only an occasional contributor to this journal, and have been hand- somely permitted by its authorities to say that I differ with it on one or two points of consequence, political and polemical, I shall not be considered, I trust, taking a liberty beyond the pale of its indulgence, when I ex- press a wish, on the strength of my intimacy with Shelley, that I could have had some talk respecting him with the gentleman who wrote the notice of these " Memorials," in last week's Spectator, before it was given to the press. What I should have had to say might possibly have altered some of his conclusions, or conjectures, respecting my friend.
I shall be very brief in alluding to what I mean, because I am waiting to see, whether it will be necessary for me to break a silence with diffi- culty maintained, and say all which I think and feel respecting a heap of the most extraordinary mistakes and misrepresentations made respecting Shelley and others in a very different quarter; or whether the very extravagance of them, itself now holding its tongue, will not warrant a continuance of the charitable treatment which it has met with, for reasons cognizable by all the rational part of mankind.
Shelley was not a man to be judged by ordinary rules of any kind ; much less by men qualified only to abide by those rules outwardly ; and to see and cherish nothing better in their own innermost natures than the grossest selfishness and materialism. He was one of those great and rare spirits, who, by a combination of the extremes of intellectual per- ceptiveness and nervous sensibility, may be said, instead of being the madmen that ordinary judgments would pronounce them, to possess reason itself in excess; and by discerning, through their sympathy with the needs of all the world, what all the world ought reasonably to be, are qualified to give rules to their fellow-creatures, and be the founders of new faiths, or improvers on the old. Inasmuch as they are human in the ordinary sense, they may err ; but, inasmuch as they carry humanity to its highest and widest extent, they approach divinity ; for, next to the great mystery which took, and which takes, so much interest in its crea- tures as to have caused them at all, and still to continue them, what can be held diviner than the spirit which makes the welfare of those crea- tures paramount to every other consideration ?
As to the question of the attempted assassination in Wales, with what reasonableness can such a circumstance be counted incredible, as long as such things as fanatical hatreds exist, or the jealousies that we see murdering every day, or the commonest inclinations to murder for money? Mr. Shelley was a man likely to be marked for destruction by any one of these villainies. He was thought at the time to be the enemy of all that was held by fanaticism to warrant them : he appears to have been the unsuspecting cause of jealousies the most intense and extraordinary as long as he lived ; his very memory causes them : and in regard to money, his hand being ever open was seen to lavish it ; and what so tempting to the clown or the midnight drunkard, as his purse ? The " halluci- nations," as they are termed, with respect to appearances of things non- existing, are known, it is true, to take place in many over-taxed con- ditions of the brain or the nerves, though not as necessary forerunners of " madness." Grown and intelligent patients who see them, know them to be illusions; and remain as reasonable as other men, to all intents and purposes. They are only the sights we see in imagination carried further; projected from the brain on the retina by some process no more unaccountable than the imagination itself. Thousands of persons not at all lunatic, or likely to become so, often see faces pass in succession be- fore their shut eyes, while going to sleep. They open their eyes, and the faces are gone. Were they to continue, and perhaps in some cases they do, it would be the " hallucination " in question. They generally dis- appear at the beholder's will. Doubtless he is not so well in health as he ought to be. It is one of kind nature's intimations to him to become better. Perhaps the faces are the nerves of his own face, needing repose. But a solid assassin with a pistol is not apt to be a vision of this kind.
In answer to similar and other insinuations of Shelley's want of veracity, made apparently in a very spirit of fondness by those who would willingly find him as truthless as themselves, I have this to say :-that during all the years in which I knew him, I never once observed in his conversation the smallest departure from matter of fact. I was so much impressed with the reverse, that any such inconsistency would have struck and surprised me. He would, it is true, sometimes give persons of doubtful merit more credit than they deserved, in the avowed hope of encouraging them to deserve : and he would take a politic step or so in more doubtful quarters to compass some object for other people's ad- vantage. How far these expediences accorded with the principle of being "wise as serpents and harmless as doves," I leave the reader to deter- mine. But that he was capable of inventing a story for the purpose of its being believed, or of misstating any circumstance whatsoever, or ex- aggerating it, or giving it a false colour, never occurred to me as a thing possible.
Look at all the reverential things said of him by his widow, at the affection for him inherited by his son, and the zeal for his memory with which they, and his writings, have inspired his son's wife, and add them to the impression which those writings have produced on the world. Is such a memory again to be made responsible for the mistakes of those who are incompetent to do it justice ? Lady Shelley's book, though it does not profess to add much to the information respecting him, yet doubtless for that honest reason, as well as for what it does add, and for what it rescues from misrepresentation, will be read by every admirer of the beautiful poet and great-hearted philanthropist. Genuine portions of information like these are all that can be expected of his biography for a good many years to come, especially after what has been seen of documents garbled, and of a whole volume of letters forged. A caution against belief in any letters not countenanced by indisputable authority, and explaining whence they came and through whose hands (for spurious ones, ever since his death, have been sold in all directions, and often greedily accepted), has justly been added to other warnings in his behalf. It was a mistake on the part of his admirers to suppose that any work finally complete respecting him could at present be looked for. From the time of my return from Italy up to a year or two back, I, for one, have been repeatedly applied to from various quarters to write a Life of Shelley. But I always said I never could do it, because I could not ex- pect to live long enough to survive a number of persons, whose names it would be necessary to bring forward, and to whom, from considerations of family and other delicacies, right or wrong, and even from honest dif- ferences of opinion with him on points civil and religious, it would be unwarrantably distressing to do so.
Great men of advanced and unworldly natures need the growth of time to do them a justice equal to their greatness. It is sufficient mean- while (and they think so), if credit for good intentions be given them by good hearts.
[In the notice above referred to by Mr. Leigh Hunt the story of the at- tempted assassination in Wales was not "counted incredible ;" it was regarded as questionable ; hallucinations were spoken of as premonitory symptoms of insanity, but not as its " necessary forerunners ;" and the - writer of the notice has not found in it on reperusal a single word in- consistent with his belief in the crystal purity of Shelley's moral cha- racter. The notice did not impute want of veracity to Shelley; but it suggested an hypothesis subversive of a charge of wilful falsehood which had been more than insinuated against him. Surely Mr. Leigh Hunt is of all men the last who would intentionally sanction the cruel doctrine, not yet wholly eradicated, that madness Is wickedness. Mr. Hunt's zeal for the memory of his friend is worthy of the sincerest respect ; the more therefore is it to be regretted that he should have allowed so ex- cellent a motive to hurry him beyond the bounds of discretion and fair dealing. With respect to the imputations which form the gist of the first sentence in Mr. Hunt's fifth paragraph, it is impossible to be- lieve that Mr. Leigh Hunt deliberately intended to apply them to
THE WRITER OF THE NOTICE OF THE "SHELLEY MEMORIALS"
in last week's Spectator.]
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