BOOKS OF THE DAY

. . Mary Shelley (Edmund Blunden). 94 Co-operation or Coercion (Sir Alfred Zimmern) .. 95 Fils du Peuple (T. G. Barman) .. .. .. 95 The Letters of Mrs. Henry Adams, 1855-1883 (D. W.

Brogan) .. .... .. .. 96 More Spanish Primers (John Marks) .... 96 Literature and Society (Bonamy Dobree)

4nglesex. (Edmund Vale) .. . • • • e London Miscellany (A. Desmond Hawkins) The Voice. of Under Thirty

Fiction (Forrest Reid) .

Current Literature ..

98 I00 102 102 104 rO6

MARY SHELLEY AND OTHERS

By EDMUND BLUNDEN How Mrs. Julian Marshall came to be chosen as the official biographer of Mary Shelley is one of the small questions left unanswered by the present work, which, notwithstanding its title, extends over the lives of Mary's son and his wife and the happy years at Boscombe Manor. At any rate, Mrs. Marshall's two volumes, though necessarily subjected to omissions and v guenesses, still justify the Shelleys in their choice; they present a great store of family papers ; and to say that Miss Grylls's book wins a place beside them is no little praise. Her book, moreover, has an index. It is not free from confusing arrange- ment and error of detail, but for those with some feeling for the subject it provides unusual and sustained interest, and not .merely where Miss Grylls succeeds in revealing new facts.

The personalities of Shelley and most of the people connected with his life, the onrush of chequered experiences which made him say himself in his thirtieth year that he had lived ninety, the light of genius and originality flashing about him and his friends, the wealth and variety of written and other memorials of all this, the widely divergent interpretations already given— these things continue to attract fresh exponents. Their task is as severe as it is attractive. Encountering so many problem- atical people as part of the theme, Miss Grylls has naturally treated some of them in brief ; Sir Timothy, Harriet, Peacock, Hunt, Hogg, even Trelawny and Byron pass by in a certain shadow. Her central purpose is announced in an introduction, culminating in the oneness of Shelley and Mary—a kind of Phoenix and Turtle vision ; dividing human relationships " into the Noumenal and the Phenomenal," the profound and the superficial, she holds that their love " was of the Noumenal." This conception underlies her treatment of the Shelley litera- ture, broadly unifies her records of Mary, and (sometimes too -drastically) relegates others to unimportant divisions.

Writing about the Shelleys has an immediate advantage, but it has its own dangers. Ten years ago Sir Edmund Gosse took occasion to reprove the present reviewer for a misguided article on Shelley's life. He said, " You must be careful. This Shelley business is immensely difficult, takes years of expe- rience ; I know, for I've been at it." It is scarcely possible to venture into this zone without falling into some trap. From one slough into which many Shelley pilgrims have hurried in the best of spirits, Miss Grylls is safe enough. The entertaining pages of T. J. Hogg are now known to disdain, as it were, the dullness of truth, and to offer the gay fruits of a long cultivation of scurrility. The old impostor is almost pardoned when we find him, at the period of his main concoction, writing to trustful Lady Shelley, " To falsify documents would be to injure the faith of history and to destroy the credit of our book," and, " where matters are conducted in an underhand way, we are powerless." However, Hogg cannot impose on Miss Grylls.

But she has been a little imprudent in transcribing and relying on the letter purporting to have been writen by Shelley to Mary on the occasion of Harriet's suicide. This document, in the Ashley Library, turned up in 1858, bearing forged post- marks (as Mr. Graham Pollard has demonstrated) to support a story that it had been repcsted after 42 years of mystery. The problem has been many times discussed in print, and I will not go further into it now, but simply comment that if Miss Grylls had to include this composition entire she should in fairness to Shelley have added his undeniable letter of almost the same date to Eliza Westbrook—one of Mr. Hotson'S finds.

Among the illustrations, which are otherwise genuine and delightful discoveries, there appears " Shelley in 1822," from a sketch " by West . . recently acquired " by Sir John Shelley-Rolls. In spite of the legend scrawled anonymously

Mary Shelley. A Biography. By R. Glynn Grylls. (Oxford University Press. 18s.) on this sketch, it is a picture of Leigh Hunt. It looks like a copy of, not a sketch for, the- portrait reproduced as of Shelley in the Century Magazine, October, 19o5. In one sense Miss Grylls 'was not well advised to include a full facsimile of Keats's splendid; quietly cOmbatant letter to Shelley in 182o. She has printed opposite it the- text hitherto available with some corrective footnotes. Taken together these still fail to register what Keats *rote : the day of the month is missed, three words omitted, two are erroneous (not to mention that where Keats has " metapc" "—meta- physics?—the printed text gives " metal)! "). The expressive punctuation of the original is handled very loosely, as though it did not signify. Such discrepancies make me momentarily uncertain of the transcribings elsewhere ; but of course there is generally -nothing much in these small points, and the said facsimile has its own charm and value.

Comments like these, which might 'be continued; are due to a work which commands attention as an exact literary Study ; but the number of exact: literary studies which command attention on no other account is astronomical, and I return with pleasure to the more grateful aspects of Miss Grylls's pictures of the past. The temptation (and she is largely responsible) is to escape even from her Mary Shelley into the good company of Sir Percy Florenee Shelley, Bart. This noted yachtsman and tricycle pioneer, from whose diary Miss Grylls has been enabled to quote, has been too little known. He would say, too much: It is to be suspected that, though he revered the memory of his father, he found the old gang an infernal nuisance. There was Peacock ; he always addressed Mary Shelley as his " very dear friend," and yet P. F. S. heard him proclaim that he hated 'Mary. There was Hogg, entrusted with the poet's biography—and he had to be stopped by resort to the law in the middle of his- machinations. Besides, .there was the flock of poet-lorists. Sir Percy's preferences were rather for luncheon at the Garrick Club, comic opera, light fiction from France, F: C. Burnand in Punch, and Mediterranean cruises.

Had he cared to exert himself, the poet's son had abilities enough. Miss Grylls illustrates the fact, apart from his talents for the theatre, music and painting ; when he is ,found commenting on matters, he is terse and perceptive.' The presence of Lady Shelley too in the later chapters is exceedingly attractive, and 'all the more Welcome because she has been so often disposed of as a sentimental nonentity. Revealed through the descriptions of those who knew her, she is quite the opposite ; and one of the finest of the new letters is from her to Trelawny upon a few of his self-contradictions. With that should be mentioned Sir Percy's photograph of his wife with Shelley's sisters—after seeing that, one may reasonably see Shelley himself. The frontispiece is • a tinted miniature of Mary Shelley aged nineteen—but it was done at Geneva, apparently by one of those seedy geniuses who catch -British tourists. In it Mary has blue eyes, but Miss Grylls say, they had been hazel when she was seventeen.

Mary Shelley's character is not at all easy to draw. Her enthusiasm for secret sorrow contrasted with' her love of the social round has irritated some ; some have construed her frequent admiration—Miss Grylls does not emphasise then! —into a want of true devotion. The unconventional Lord Dillon met her, and then wrote : " You have puzzled me very much. I should have thought of yow—if I had only read you —that you were a sort of Sybil, outpouringly enthusiastic, rather indiscreet, and even extravagant ; but you are cool, quiet, and feminine to the last degree. . . . Explain this to me." With the selectiveness of one traversing a well-known field, Miss Grylls on the whole succeeds, through man: strange episodes, in explaining Shelley's second .wife,