John Cordy Jeaffreson

“ To Claire he had said, ‘Our felicity having perished, in obedience to the forces that cause human beings to love and cease from loving one another, you go your way, whilst I go mine. Leaving me to select another object of affection, do you give your heart to some one who wishes for it. We have been happy together; the time has come for us to seek happiness apart from one another,’ At the same time, still speaking like an honourable Lawless Lover, Byron said, ‘But I cannot allow you to suffer in your purse for your goodness to me. ”

“ In his doubt and curiosity he may also be conceived to have hoped that, should death prove the gateway to another life for him, it would be a life, in which the ways of duty and righteousness are more clearly marked and more easily discovered, than the ways of righteousness and duty in this darksome, and troublous, and perplexing existence. Thus, as he sate a-thinking in the foundering boat, Shelley sunk beneath the turbulent and cruel waves, so remorseless for the woe they work, so heedless of the lives they devour. ”

“ Seventeen months since, he had written confidently to William Godwin, ‘I am heir by entail to an estate of 6000l. per annum;’ and now in mid-June, 1813, he is writing almost with the excitement of panic to the Horsham lawyer, ‘Have you any certain knowledge on the subject?’ It seems as though the nervous creature were possessed by a fear that he might, after all his fine talk, find himself heir to nothing,—the fool of a fool’s paradise,—the dupe of a long, delightful, golden dream, passing away quickly in the chilling dawn of penury. ”

“ Instead of running after him for sweet converse touching the perfectibility of the species, they spoke of him as a very bad young man, who had treated his charming little wife most cruelly and shamefully, and in other ways proved himself a monster. Because it amuses gentlewomen to listen in a drawing-room to a young poet’s eloquent exhibitions of his daring and delightful and original views about society, and the affections, and ‘all that sort of thing,’ it does not follow that they will care to flutter about him and smile upon him, when he has acted on his startling and charming theories. ”

“ Foolish people, and by no means altogether foolish people, when they sink into sorrow, are apt to drink for the sake of drowning care, and Heaven knows that poor Harriett (only twenty-one years old) had care enough to excuse her for trying to drown it—even in so futile and disgusting a manner. If Harriett drowned her pain of body and mind with wine and brandy, Shelley drowned his pain of body and mind with laudanum. ”

“ No one knew better than Shelley, that his familiar friend and benefactor had long since ceased to approve the Free Contract. No one knew better than Shelley, how careful his familiar friend had been to withhold from his only daughter those particulars of her mother’s career that, on being communicated to her, might dispose the imaginative, generous, fearless, too self-dependent child to adopt her mother’s earlier views about marriage. ”

“ But it is rare, and because rare it is amusing and piquant, to find a man chiefly desirous of persuading his neighbours that he is a very much worse man than he really is. England will hold her own amongst the nations of the earth for several centuries, without producing another great poet so enamoured and ambitious as Byron was of evil fame; but every generation of her past or future story has produced, or will produce, a poet with Shelley’s disposition to think and speak too well of himself. ”

“ Active in the kitchen and busy with the needle, she was at the same time her step-father’s cheery ‘right-hand’ and ministrant,—ever ready to ply her pen in his service, and ever quick at his call, with bonnet on her head and smiles on her face, to accompany him in his walks. At last the brave heart broke, and the grave covered her. Is the world too virtuous to be incapable of generous compassion for the doer of her own death?
In a former page I have declared my inability to offer an opinion whether love of Shelley was in any degree accountable for poor Fanny’s fatal desperation. ”

“ It is not surprising that for some time he refused to speak with Shelley, or to correspond with him, except through a solicitor. The worm turns when it is trodden upon. Even a philosopher may be excused for showing he participates in the infirmities of ‘the slavish multitude,’ when the young man he has cherished affectionately repays his kindness by bringing his only daughter to shame. It is not surprising that, to the hour of the poet’s death, Godwin thought of him bitterly and resentfully as an evil man. ”

“ If it was wrong on the one hand to allow husbands and wives the liberty of separating on frivolous pretexts, and to provide the fortress of marriage with numerous gates of egress, whose double locks obeyed the pass-keys of perjury and corruption; it was on the other hand no less hurtful to society and impious to God, to constrain a pair of human creatures, in the name of religion, to persevere in an association, that could not accomplish the highest purposes of matrimony, and debarred the ill-assorted couple from the serene and wholesome pleasures of Christian life. ”

“ In her later time the woman, who in girlhood had been strangely lawless and defiant of the world’s opinion, was chiefly desirous of clothing herself with respectability, of toning and colouring her story into accordance with the social condition of the family into which she had married. The woman who would fain have justified her husband’s life to the world, was only a few degrees less desirous of rendering her own story the same service. What more natural than for such a woman to wish to cover up the ugly fact, that she was born only five calendar months after her mother’s marriage? ”

“ Godwin was by no means so violent and outrageous in wrath as Mary Wollstonecraft. In other respects Mary Jane had the advantage of Mary Wollstonecraft. In social reputation she was far superior to Mary Godwin’s mother. Having never produced so scandalous a book as the Rights of Women, she had not lived in Free Love with two men or any man; she had never given birth to an illegitimate child; her name had never been discreditably associated with another woman’s husband; nor had she ever thrown herself in a fit of white rage off Putney Bridge. ”

“ Honest Jack Lawless to Shelley’s womankind, and to welcome the trio to his hearth, where he entertained them with the best fruit and vegetables of the Dublin market, and would have fed them on richer fare, had they not recently joined the Nineteenth Century Pythagoreans, and as Pythagoreans bound themselves to abstain from flesh and fermented liquors.
It is not to be imagined that honest Jack showered these civilities on the Shelleys without a thought for civilities, to be rendered by the Shelleys in return. One may need money without being an Irishman. ”

“ Had Field Place merely garnished the poet’s pedigree, and varnished his portraits, and dressed the main incidents of his career into a pretty memoir, I should have been silent about the genealogical record and personal narrative, and held my peace about the falsity of the pictures. But Field Place has exceeded its reasonable powers and privileges, in dealing with the story of a remarkable man, whose fame is less the property of his nearest kindred than of the nation, to whose literature his genius gave new lustre. ”

“ Whilst his taste was for studious or meditative seclusion, she had been designed by nature for a career of action and gaiety. ‘She,’ Shelley once said to Trelawny, ‘can’t bear solitude, nor I society—the quick coupled with the dead,’ When he was pining for green fields or sea-breezes, she thought of ball-rooms and assemblies. Under the most auspicious influences their contrarieties of temper would have brought them into conflict. Habitual melancholy is perhaps the most trying temper in a husband, for a wife to endure with patient cheerfulness ”

“ From the August of 1817, even to this year of grace, Lord Eldon has been written of bitterly for depriving so bright a genius and so virtuous a citizen as Shelley of the care of his own offspring; and so long as organs of social opinion, so powerful as the Edinburgh Review, continue to misstate the grounds of the Lord Chancellor’s decree, he will continue to be denounced as a prodigy of intolerance. ”

“ What, thought Shelley, could be more agreeable to him than to turn farmer? With a bailiff at his elbow to look after matters of vulgar business, he could farm to a profit. The holding comprised a hundred and thirty acres of land under cultivation, and seventy acres of wood, scrub, briery, and mountain; woods in which he and Harriett and Eliza could saunter with their friends, when the summer’s sun should be oppressive; hills they could climb in the colder seasons for the enjoyment of the invigorating breeze. ”

“ His ambition preys upon itself, for want of objects which it can consider worthy of exertion. I say that Maddalo is proud, because I can find no other word to express the concentered and impatient feelings which consume him; but it is on his own hopes and affections only that he seems to trample, for in social life no human being can be more gentle, patient, and unassuming than Maddalo. He is cheerful, frank, and witty. His more serious conversation is a sort of intoxication; men are held by it as by a spell. ”

“ Kegan Paul says that she believed Gilbert Imlay’s love would endure. What a strange belief for a woman who thought no man’s love capable of endurance; who wrote in the Rights of Woman that ‘love, from its nature, must be transitory,’ and was ‘perhaps the most evanescent of all passions;’ who had taught in the same book that every woman should anticipate the inevitable death of her husband’s love for her! ”

“ Much has been written of the perfect happiness that came to both Shelley and Mary from their association. It has been proclaimed by romantic biography that the soul of each found its perfect complement in the other’s soul, that their conjugal intimacy was singularly felicitous, and that, whilst they dwelt together in harmony seldom accorded to spouses, neither was ever for a single moment disappointed in the other. ”

“ Rossetti’s opinion, that Shelley did not intend the reference to his love-less lot to reflect on his wife, I venture to say that, had he been sensible of owing much to her devotion, had she been to him the perpetual spring of gladness that a loving wife ever is to the man who loves her thoroughly, had their union been as felicitous as they hoped it to prove, he could not have thus spoken of himself as alike fameless, powerless, and love-less. ”

“ It was hard for him, that Mary could not keep her ailments and discontent to herself. Knowing how he had been counting on the felicity of living near Lerici, how he and Williams had for months been looking forward to the delight of sailing about the bay, and running to and fro between Leghorn and Lerici in the lovely boat, that was being built for them at Genoa, it was Mary’s manifest duty to enjoy what he enjoyed, or at least to pretend that she enjoyed it. No doubt she was in a delicate state of health. But what of that? It is usual for young wives to be so at times. ”

“ To think that such a lot might have befallen her, could have scarcely failed to befall her, had she answered the fatal question in another way, is to feel resentfully against the man who, at the instigation of mere masculine selfishness, attached himself to her, and in doing so bemuddled her existence, and shut her out from so many of life’s sweetest joys. Had he acted the part of a gentleman in the matter, she would, at the dawn of her celebrity, have married happily, for she was a woman to inspire love. ”