Shelley

at have something to do with their art. With Shelley it is different. During his life he aroused fears and hatreds, loves and adorations, that were quite irrelevant to lit

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espected by contemporaries of tastes very different from his own, who were good judges and intolerant of bores-by Byron, who was apt to care little for any one, least of all for poets, except himself; by Peacock, who poured laughter on all enthusiasms; and by Hogg, who, though slightly eccentric, was a Tory eccentric. The fact is that, with all his defects, he had two qualities which, combined, are so attractive that there is scarcely anything they will not redeem-perfect sincerity without a thought of self, and vivid emotional force. All his faults as well as his virtues were, moreover, derived from a certain strong feeling, coloured in a peculiar way wh

ife-like, but a more and more intimate echo or emanation of his own spirit. In studying his writings we shall see how they flow from his dominating emotion of love for his fellow-men; and the drama of his life, displayed against the background of the time, will in turn throw light on that emotion. His benevolence took many forms-none perfect, some admirable, some ridiculous. It was too universal. He n

and traders into a nation of manufacturers, had begun; but its chief fruits as yet were increased materialism and greed, and politically the period was one of blackest reaction. Alone of European peoples we had been untouched by the tide of Napoleon's conquests, which, when it receded from the Continent, at least left behind a framework of enlightened institutions, while our success in the Napoleonic wars only confirmed the ruling aristo

bliss to be alive" in that dawn; Southey and Coleridge had even planned to found a communistic society in the New World. Now all three were rallied to the defence of order and property, to Church and Throne and Constitution. From their seclusion in the Lakes, Southey and Wordsworth praised the royal family and celebrated England as the home of freedom; while Thomson wrote "Rule, Britannia," as if Britons, though they never, never would be slaves to a foreigner, were to a home-grown tyranny more blighting, because more stupid, than that of Napoleon. England had stamped out the Irish rebellion of 1798 in blood, had forced Ireland by fraud into the Union of 1800, and was strangling her industry and commerce. Catholics could neither vote nor hold office. At a time when the population of the United Kingdom was some thirty millions, the Parliamentary franchise was possessed by no more than a million persons, and most of the seats in the House of Commons were the private property of rich men. Representative government did not exist; whoever agitated for some measure of it was deporte

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as nineteen years old, with the object of procuring Catholic emancipation and the repeal of the Union Act-subjects on which he was quite ignorant. He addressed meetings, wasted money, and distributed two pamphlets "consisting of the benevolent and tolerant deductions of philosophy reduced into the simplest language." Later on, when he

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divorce case which followed was like a gangrenous eruption symptomatic of the distempers of the age. Shelley felt that sort of disgust which makes a man rave and curse under the attacks of some loathsome disease; if he laughs, it is the laugh of frenzy. In the slight Aristophanic drama of 'Swellfoot', which was sent home, published, and at once suppressed, he represents the men of England as starving pigs content to lap up such diluted hog's-wash as their tyrant, the priests, and the soldiers will allow them. At the end, when

two odes-the 'Ode to Liberty' and the 'Ode to Naples'-the most splendid of those cries of hope and prophecy with which a long line of English poets has encouraged the insurrection of the nations. Such cries, however, have no visible effect on the course of events. Byron's jingles could change the face of the world, while all Shelley's pure and lofty aspirations left no mark on history. And so it was, not with his republican ardours alone, but with all he und

his son being out of the room, he expresses his surprise to Hogg at finding him such a sensible fellow, and asks him what is to be done with the scapegoat. "Let him be married to a girl who will sober him." The wine moves briskly round, and Mr. Shelley becomes maudlin and tearful again. He is a model magistrate, the terror and the idol of poachers; he is highly respected in the House of Commons, and the Speaker could not get through the session without him. Then he drifts to religion. God exists, no one can deny it; in fact, he has the proof in his pocket. Out comes a piece of paper, and arguments are read aloud, which his son recognises as Palley's. "Yes, they are Palley's arguments, but he had them from me; almost everything in Palley's book he had taken from me." The boy of nineteen, who listens fuming to this folly, takes it all with fatal seriousness. In appearance he is no ordinary being. A shock of

eloping with an heiress. Already at Eton Shelley was a rebel and a pariah. Contemptuous of authority, he had gone his own way, spending pocket-money on revolutionary literature, trying to raise ghosts, and dabbling in chemical experiments. As often happens to queer boys, his school-fellows herded against him, pursuing him with blows and cries of "Mad Shelley." But the holidays were happy. There must have been plenty of fun at Field Place when he told his sisters stories about the alchemist in the attic or "the Gr

try will turn deserts into cornfields, and even the air and water will year fire and food; how Africa will be explored by balloons, of which the shadows, passing over the jungles, will emancipate the slaves. In the midst he would rush out to a lecture on mineralogy, and come back sighing that it was all about "stones, stones, stones"! The friends read Plato together, and held endless talk of metaphysics, pre-existence, and the sceptical philosophy, on winter walks across country, and all night beside the fire, until Shelley would curl up on the hearthrug and

dialectical scores, he printed a pamphlet on 'The Necessity of Atheism', a single foolscap sheet concisely proving that no reason for the existence of God can be valid, and sent it to various personages, including bishops, asking for a refuta

agedy. His sisters were at a school at Clapham, where among the girls was one Harriet Westbrook, the sixteen-year-old daughter of a coffee-house keeper. Shelley became intimate with the Westbrooks, and set about saving the soul of Harriet, who had a pretty rosy face, a neat figure, and a glib school-girl mind quick to catch up and reproduce his doctrines. The child seems to have been innocent enough, but her elder sister, Eliza, a vulgar woman of thirty, used her as a bait to entangle the future baronet; she played on Shelley's feelings by encouraging Harriet to believe herself the victim of tyranny at school. Still, it was six months before he took the final step. How he could save Harr

dence with William Godwin, the philosopher and author of 'Political Justice'. His energy in entering upon ecstatic personal relations was as great as that which he threw into philanthropic schemes; but the relations, like the schemes, were formed with no notion of adapting means to ends, and were often dropped as hurriedly. Eliza Westbrook, at first a woman of estimable qualities, quickly became "a blind and loathsome worm that cannot see to sting", Miss Hitchener, who had been induced to give up her school and come to live with them "for ever," was discovered to be a "brown demon," and had to be pensioned off. He loved his wife for a time, but they drifted apart, and he found consolation in a sentimental attachment to a Mrs. Boinville and her daughter, Cornelia Turner, ladies who read Italian poetry with him and sang to guitars. Harriet had borne him a daughter, Ianthe, but she herself was a child, who soon wearied of philosophy and of being taught Latin; natura

ambling poverty by the energy of the second Mrs. Godwin, who carried on a business of publishing children's books. In letters of the time we see Mrs. Godwin as a fat little woman in a black velvet dress, bad-tempered and untruthful. "She is a very disgusting woman, and wears green spectacles," said Charles Lamb. Besides a small son of the Godwins, the family contained four o

at she should be interested in this bright creature, fallen as from another world into their dingy, squabbling family. If it was inevitable that her interest, touched with pity (for he was in despair over the collapse of his life with Harriet), should quickly warm to love, we must insist that the rapture with which he leaped to meet her had some foundation in reality. That she was gifted is manifest in her writings-chiefly, no doubt, in 'Frankenstein', composed when she had Shelley to fire her imagination; but her other novels are competent, and her letters are the work of a vigorous intellect. She had her limitations. She was not quite so fre

eks. Their difficulties began in Paris, where only an accident enabled Shelley to raise funds. Then they moved slowly across war-wasted France, Mary and Claire, in black silk dresses, riding by turns on a mule, and Shelley walking. Childish happiness glows in their journals. From Troyes Shelley wrote to the abandoned Harriet, in perfect good faith, pressing her to join them in Switzerland. There were sprained ankles, dirty inns, perfidious and disobliging drivers-the ordinary misadventures of the road, magnified a thousand times by their helplessness, and all transfigured in the purple light of youth and the intoxication of literature. At last they re

ievance, only provided it were wild enough. Godwin especially was a running sore both now and later on; the philosopher was at the beginning of that shabby 'degringolade' which was to end in the ruin of his self-respect. In spite of his anti-matrimonial principles, he was indignant at his disciple's elopement with his daughter, and, in spite of his philosophy, he was not above

d lacerated by chagrin, was beginning to bear through Europe that "pageant of his bleeding heart" of which the first steps are celebrated in 'Childe Harold'. Unknown to Shelley and Mary, there was already a link between them and the luxurious "pilgrim of eternity" rolling towards Geneva in his travelling-carriage, with physician and suite: Claire had visited Byron in the hope that he might help her to employment at Drury Lane Theatre, and, instead of going on the stage, had become his

ough it is hard to know precisely how bad. He was liable to hallucinations of all kinds; the line between imagination and reality, which ordinary people draw quite definitely, seems scarcely to have existed for him. There are many stories as to which it is disputed how far, if at all, reality is mixed with dream, as in the case of the murderous assault he believed to have been made on him one night of wind and rain in Wales; of the veiled lady who offered to join her life to his; of the Englishman who, hearing him ask for letters in the post-office at Pisa or Florence, exclaimed, "What, are you that damned atheist Shelley?" and felled him to the ground. Often he would go half frantic with delusions-as that his father and uncle were plotting to shut him up in a

their wanderings were at last over. At Marlow he busied himself with politics and philanthropy, and wrote 'The Revolt of Islam'. But, partly because the climate was unsuitable, partly from overwork in visiting and helping the poor, his hea

ordinary provision against ailments-which seems to have caused the death of these beloved little beings. The birth in 1819 of another son, Percy (who survived to become Sir Percy Shelley), brought some comfort. Claire's troubles, again, were a constant anxiety. Shelley worked hard to persuade Byron either to let her have Allegra or to look after his daughter properly himself; but he was obdurate, and the child died in a convent near Venice in 1822. Shelley's association with Byron, of whom, in 'Julian and Maddalo' (1818), he has drawn a picture with the darker features left out, brought as much pain as pleasure to all concerned. No doubt

-hearted and the most lovable of all Shelley's friends. Edward John Trelawny, a cadet of a Cornish family, "with his knight-errant aspect, dark, handsome, and moustachioed," was the true buccaneer of romance, but of honest English grain, and without a trace of pose. The devotion with which, though he only knew Shelley for a few months, he fed in memory on their friendship to the last day of his life, brings home to us, as nothing else can, the force of Shelley's personal attraction; for this man lived until 1881, an almost solitary survivor from the Byronic age, and his life contained matter enough to swamp recollection of half-a-dozen poets. It seems that, after serving in the navy and deserting from an East Indiaman at Bombay, he passed, in the Eastern Archipelago, through the incredible experiences narrated in his 'Adventures of a Younger Son'; and all this before he was twenty-one, for in 1813 he was in England and married. The

saw visions, and Mary disliked the place at first sight. Still, there was the sea washing their terrace, and Shelley loved the sea (there is scarcely one of his poems in which a boat does not figure, though it is usually made of moonstone); and, while Williams fancied himself as a navigator, Trelawny was really at home on the water. A certain Captain Roberts was commissioned to get a boat built at Genoa, where Byron also was fitting out a yacht, the 'Bolivar'. When the 'Ariel'-for so they

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glish sailor-boy. Trelawny wanted to convoy them in Byron's yacht, but was turned back by the authorities because he had no port-clearance. The air was sultry and still, with a storm brewing, and he went down to his cabin and slept. When he awoke, it was to see fishing-boats running into harbour under bare poles amid the hubbub of a thunder-squall. In that squall the 'Ariel' disappeared. It is doubtful whether the unseaworthy craft was merely swamped, or whether, as there is some reas

charged himself with the business of burning the bodies. This required some organisation. There were official formalities to fulfil, and the materials had to be assembled-the fuel, the improvised furnace, the iron bars, salt and wine and oil to pour upon the pyre. In his artless 'Records' he describes the last scene on the seashore. Shelley's body w

ent than its predecessors; yet, when we consider the nature of his talent, the fact is perhaps significant. His song was entirely an affair of uncontrolled afflatus, and this is a force which dwindles in middle life, leaving stranded the poet who has no other resource. Some men suffer spiritual upheavals and eclipses, in which they lose their old selves and emerge with new and different powers; but we may be fairly sure that this would