NEW FACTS ABOUT SHELLEY.* Mn. INcrre's careful exposition of the
new material which became available a few years ago for the study of the life of Shelley does not solve the central problem of Shelley's"character, but it puts us in posses- sion of several new facts. For this all students of Shelley will be grateful. No reasoning person ever expected that the poet's wayward haraeter could be reduced to anything like logic or sequence. Shelley was to near the border-line where genius passes into extreme irration- ality and delusion for his character to be either classified or justified. Readers of Professor Dowden's Life of Shelley, and of all the other Lives, Must have felt as much, and they will feel it still more when they turn the last page of Mr. Ingpen's largo volume. The new material of which Mr. Ingpen makes a very workmanlike use, was discovered by the lawyers who succeeded to the business of Whitton, the solicitor of Timothy Shelley, the poet's father. Their legal archives yielded twenty-nine letters written by Shelley to his father and to Whitton. Among the other letters are some from Timothy Shelley, Sir Bysshe Shelley (Shelley's grandfather), Thomas Love Peacock, and Byron (two letters). One of Byron's letters is a very handsome appeal to Sir Timothy Shelley for help for Mary Shelley, the poet's widow, as well as a tribute to Shelley. Mr. Ingpen says :—
" The new letters of the poet throw some light on his relations with his father in regard to his life at Oxford, his expulsion from the Uni- versity, his elopement and marriage with Harriet Westbrook. The fact that Shelley was actually married in Edinburgh is now revealed for the first time, with the date of the ceremony and the name of the officiating minister. That Shelley was arrested on two separate *cm, sions for debt and that he appeared on the boards of the Windsor theatre as an actor in Shakespearian drama, are incidents in his life that hitherto-have not been disclosed. The discovery by' Mr. Charles Withall, while this book was in the press, of the Coroner s documents relating to the inquest on Harriet Shelley's body, has cleared -up certain doubtful points in regard to her death. I have been able to tell some thing about the fate of Harriet's two children, as also about the life of Sir Percy Shelley, the poet's son by his second wife, and to give some patticulars concerning Mary Shelley after the- death. of her -husband. The manuscript note-book of the poet, of which many pages are repro- duced in reduced facsimile at the end of this-volume, appears to have been found, after she was salvaged, in the Arid, the ill-fated boat from which Shelley was drowned."
If tho relations of Timothy Shelley and his son and lawyer were not tinged with so much that is of the substance of human tragedy, it might be pronounced a most alluring comedy. You see the very borne country squire anxious to do tho right thing, but puzzled and worried to distraction by the intellectual vagaries-of the boy -who was to bring immortality to the name of Shelley. You see the intellectual arrogance, and indeed the insolence, of the boy, who would not tolerate that old Timothy should " come the heavy 'father " over him. You see the lawyer called in to mediate, and drivingethe boy into transports of rage at the stern and improving letters from the of at Camberwell, We imagine that nothing much could really be done with Shelley. It was impossible to school him, and therefore a fortiori impossible to dragoon- him. His tantrums went beyond mere occasional outbursts of impulse. His more serious delusions were a key to much that was not in itself serious. He believed at one time that he had caught elephantiasis through having sat near a woman who was afflicted by it ; and while the delusion was gradually spending itself, he would continually pinch, not only his own skin'to see if there were any-signs of a tell-tale thickening, but even the skins of people whom he casually met, in order to form a comparison with his own condition. There is one letter- from him to his mother in which he brings a horrible accusation against her without a scintilla of proof. When be eloped with Harriet Westbrook he set up, as was already well known, an ill-considered domestic system which included his friend and bio- grapher Hogg. When he was foolish enough to leave Hogg and Harriet alone together for days, the almost inevitable happened, and Hogg made love to the young wife. As though that failure were not lesson enough, he afterwards consented to let his sister-in-law, Eliza 'Westbrook, lire in his house, although he hated her so much that he could hardly bear to look at her. This arrangement was probably the main cause of his leaving Harriet, though Harriet, to be sure, was by that time inclined to ,live her own life, and can scarcely be represented as being inoonsolable at being, abandoned. Again; he imagined his friend Elizabeth Hitchener to be an angel of good counsel till he persuaded her to join his household, and then conceived such an intense' dislike • Shelley in England : New Parts and Letters from the Shelley-Whitton Papers. By Rimer mean. WIttillltsttations and FacilinUes. London : Kegan Paul, Trench, and co. [155. tieLl for her that he had to pay her to go away. This,-idea that a married couple and a-third person could live permanently together on a satis- factory plan was in itself almost a delusion. And then his notion that he could abandon Harriet,- go off to Switzerland with Mary Godwin and her sister, and gravely expect Harriet to go out to Switzerland and become one of the -party was- perhaps-the most curious mental contortion of all. Yet he wrote to Harriet proposing this without a suggestion of malice or conscious effrontery. In his letter to her he serenely described the country through which he haelpassed, as though there were nothing disruptive in the letter ! Such incidents as these prove that Shelley was beyond all the ordinary methods of domestic or paternal controL Yet the new letters reveal occasions when kindness and a sort of dim yearning welled up between father and son, and one thinks that an understanding might have been reached if the father had tried less strenuously to bind the son down to a formula, and above all if he had not insisted on believing that human crotchets could be disposed of most easily by legal mediation. When the relations of father and son were most strained the boy's letters were regularly sent unopened to Whitton for examination.
Let us give instances of both the rage and -the yearnings of the poet. He writes, for instance, to Whitton when Whitton has sent him quite a wholesome but arid lecture :-
" SrR, I am not a likely person to submit to the imperious manner of address, of which this e'vening's letter is a specimen ; nor am I inclined to withdraw, nor ever will I be inclined to withdraw the proposal which I sent your As therefore you seem to have much to do in this business on the part of my father, it is your duty either to go through with it, or to give it up. I never" withdraw that proposal: It is for nay father's or rather my family's interests which ought to be the same that I make it. Here is no appeal to mercy, leniency, or favor. I have not found nor do I care to find either : but an appeal to justice, reason, humanity if you, if he, were deaf to that—nothing can be done. —I will not listen to the suggestions of family pride, to interest to fortune I am indifferent and 1 desire that when I am addressed again. a less authoritative manner be used, or subsequent letters are returned
unopened.—Yr. humbl. Bert. P. B. annuals."
Then the letter to his sister Hellen Shelley :- " You remember that you once told me that you loved me. . . . If you really love me, show this letter to no one, but answer it as you can. Remember this is the only proof I can now have that you do love me. We are now at a great distance from each other, or at least we shall be : but that is no reason that I should forget that I ant your brother, or you should format that you are my sister. Everybody near you says that I have behaved very ill, and that I can lose no ono. But how do you know that everything that ie told you is true ? A , great many people tell a great many lies, and believe them, but that is no reason that you are to believe them. Because everybody else hates me, that is no reason that you should."
Mr. Ingpen apparently believes that Shelley joined a theatrical company and acted in some Shakespearean play, bet the belief rests only on the vague language of Whitton. The lawyer, very precise in his profession; was lamentably vague on this subject. We should very much like to know more. By comparison with the possibility of knowing how Shelley played a Shakespearean part, it is a matter of no concern to us to know that the- poet was twice arrested for debt. Whitton writes to Sir Timothy :- " It was mentioned to me yesterday that Mr. P. B. Shelley was exhibiting himself on the Windsor Stage in'the-Character of Shakespeare's plays under the figure name of Cooks. I believe that fact is so, and I know- of -no-way correcting such a purpose and bringing himself and his conduct" in life and principles before the publick than measures of communication with the principal of the Company,whoso name, I believe. is Penley, and whom I know a little of from his visiting Camberwell parish annually with his company. Can I do anything for you about this ? "
Even if Shelley had sprited about the 'stage as Ariel; the lawyer, we may be sure, would have seen nothing appropriate to the airiness of the poet. To sum up, we may say that Shelley remains unintelligible in his conduct because his mental' constitution was naturally anarchical. That fact makes the search for explanations futile. In spite of Shelley's bear- baiting spitefulness towards his dull and baffled father, he radiated flashes of utter unworldliness,which sometimes approached nobility. If there had been-any response to these, the life. of Field-Place' might have been lived with fewerjars. But there was no response. There could not be with men of the temper and limitations of Timothy Shelley
and Whitton. -
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