June-August 1814

Perhaps of all the objects of Shelley’s devotion up to this time, Harriet, his wife, was the only one with whom he had never, in the ideal sense, been in love. Possibly this was one reason that against her alone he never had the violent revulsion, almost amounting to loathing, which was the usual reaction after his other passionate illusions. He had eloped with her when they were but boy and girl because he found her ready to elope with him, and because he was persuaded that she was a victim of tyranny and oppression, which, to this modern knight-errant, was tantamount to an obligation laid on him to rescue her. Having eloped with her, he had married her, for her sake, and from a sense of chivalry, only with a quaint sort of apology to his friend Hogg for this early departure from his own principles and those of the philosophic writers who had helped to mould his views. His affection for his wife had steadily increased after their marriage; she was fond of him and satisfied with her lot, and had made things very easy for him. She could not give him anything very deep in the way of love, but in return she was not very exacting; accommodating herself with good humour to all his vagaries, his changes of mood and plan, and his romantic friendships. Even the presence of her elder sister Eliza, who at an early period established herself as a member of their household, did not destroy although it did not add to their peace. It was during their stay in Scotland, in 1813, that the first shadow arose between them, and from this time Harriet seems to have changed. She became cold and indifferent. During the next winter, when they lived at Bracknell, she grew frivolous and extravagant, even yielding to habits of self-indulgence most repugnant to one so abstemious as Shelley. He, on his part, was more and more drawn away from the home which had become uncongenial by the fascinating society of his brilliant, speculative friend, Mrs. Boinville (the white-haired “Maimuna”), her daughter and sister. They were kind and encouraging to him, and their whole circle was cheerful, genial, and intellectual. This intimacy tended to widen the breach between husband and wife, while supplying none of the moral help which might have braced Shelley to meet his difficulty. His letters and the stanza addressed to Mrs. Boinville[5] show the profound depression under which he laboured in April and May. His pathetic poem to Harriet, written in May, expresses only too plainly what he suffered from her alienation, and also his keen consciousness of the moral dangers that threatened him from the loosening of old ties, if left to himself unsupported by sympathy at home. But such feeling as Harriet had was at this time quite blunted. She had treated his unsettled depression and gloomy abstraction as coldness and sullen discontent, and met them with careless unconcern. Always a puppet in the hands of some one stronger than herself, she was encouraged by her elder sister, “the ever-present Eliza,” the object of Shelley’s abhorrence, to meet any want of attention on his part by this attitude of indifference; presumably on the assumption that men do not care for what they can have cheaply, and that the best way for a wife to keep a husband’s affection is to show herself independent of it. Good-humoured and shallow, easy-going and fond of amusement, she probably yielded to these counsels without difficulty. She was much admired by other men, and accepted their admiration willingly. From evidence which came to light not many years later, it appears Shelley thought he had reason to believe she had been misled by one of these admirers, and that he became aware of this in June 1814. No word of it was breathed by him at the time, and the painful story might never have been divulged but for subsequent events which dragged into publicity circumstances which he intended should be buried in oblivion. This is not a life of Shelley, and the evidence of all this matter,—such evidence, that is, as has escaped destruction,—must be looked for elsewhere. In the lawsuit which he undertook after Harriet’s death to obtain possession of his children by her, he was content to state, “I was united to a woman of whom delicacy forbids me to say more than that we were disunited by incurable dissensions.”

That time only confirmed his conviction of 1814 is clearly proved by his letter, written six years afterwards, to Southey, who had accused him of guilt towards both his first and second wives.

I take God to witness, if such a Being is now regarding both you and me, and I pledge myself if we meet, as perhaps you expect, before Him after death, to repeat the same in His presence, that you accuse me wrongfully. I am innocent of ill, either done or intended, the consequences you allude to flowed in no respect from me. If you were my friend, I could tell you a history that would make you open your eyes, but I shall certainly never make the public my familiar confidant.

It is quite certain that in June 1814 Shelley, who had for months found his wife heartless, became convinced that she had also been faithless. A breach of the marriage vow was not, now or at any other time, regarded by him in the light of a heinous or unpardonable sin. Like his master Godwin, who held that right and wrong in these matters could only be decided by the circumstances of each individual case, he considered the vow itself to be the mistake, superfluous where it was based on mutual affection, tyrannic or false where it was not. Nor did he recognise two different laws, for men and for women, in these respects. His subsequent relations with Harriet show that, deeply as she had wounded him, he did not consider her criminally in fault. Could she indeed be blamed for applying in her own way the dangerous principles of which she had heard so much? But she had ceased to care for him, and the death of mutual love argued, to his mind, the loosening of the tie. He had been faithful to her; her faithlessness cut away the ground from under his feet and left him defenceless against a new affection.

No wonder that when his friend Peacock went, by his request, to call on him in London, he

Harriet had been absent for some time at Bath, but now, growing anxious at the rarity of news from her husband, she wrote up to Hookham, his publisher, entreating to know what had become of him, and where he was.

Godwin, who called at Hookham’s the next day, heard of this letter, and began at last to awaken to the consciousness that something he did not understand was going on between Shelley and his daughter. It is strange that Mrs. Godwin, a shrewd and suspicious woman, should not before now have called his attention to the fact. His diary for 8th July records a “Talk with Mary.” What passed has not transpired. Probably Godwin “restricted himself to uttering his censures with seriousness and emphasis,”[6] probably Mary said little of any sort.

On the 14th of July Harriet Shelley came up to town, summoned thither by a letter from her husband. He informed her of his determination to separate, and of his intention to take immediate measures securing her a sufficient income for her support. He fully expected that Harriet would willingly concur in this arrangement, but she did no such thing; perhaps she did not believe he would carry it out. She never at any time took life seriously; she looked on the rupture between herself and Shelley as trivial and temporary, and had no wish to make it otherwise. Godwin called on her two or three times; he was aware of the estrangement, and probably hoped by argument and discussion to restore matters to their old footing and bring peace and equanimity to his own household. But although Harriet was quite aware of Shelley’s love for Godwin’s daughter, and knew, too, that deeds were being prepared to assure her own separate maintenance, she said nothing to Godwin, nor did her family give him any hint. The impending elopement, with all its consequences to Godwin, were within her power to prevent, but she allowed matters to take their course. Godwin, evidently very uncomfortable, chronicles a “Talk with P. B. S.,” and, on 22d July, a “Talk with Jane.” But circumstances moved faster than he expected, and these many talks and discussions and complicated moves and counter-moves only made the position intolerable, and precipitated the final crisis. Towards the close of that month Shelley’s confession was wrung from him: he told Mary the whole truth, and how, though legally bound, he held himself morally free to offer himself to her if she would be his.

To her, passionately devoted to the one man who was and was ever to remain the sun and centre of her existence, the thought of a wife indifferent to him, hard to him, false to him, was sacrilege; it was torture. She had not been brought up to look on marriage as a divine institution; she had probably never even heard it discussed but on grounds of expediency. Harriet was his legal wife, so he could not marry Mary, but what of that, after all? if there was a sacrifice in her power to make for him, was not that the greatest joy, the greatest honour that life could have in store for her?

That her father would openly condemn her she knew, for she must have known that Godwin’s practice did not move on the same lofty plane as his principles. Was he not at that moment making himself debtor to a man whose integrity he doubted? Had he not, in twice marrying, taken care to proclaim, both to his friends and the public, that he did so in spite of his opinions, which remained unchanged and unretracted, until some inconvenient application of them forced from him an expression of disapproval?

Her mother too, had she not held that ties which were dead should be buried? and though not, like Godwin, condemning marriage as an institution, had she not been twice induced to form a connection which in one instance never was, in the other was not for some time consecrated by law? Who was Mary herself, that she should withstand one whom she felt to be the best as well as the cleverest man she had ever known? To talent she had been accustomed all her life, but here she saw something different, and what of all things calls forth most ardent response from a young and pure-minded girl, a genius for goodness; an aspiration and devotion such as she had dreamed of but never known, with powers which seemed to her absolutely inspired. She loved him, and she appreciated him,—as time abundantly showed,—rightly. She conceived that she wronged by her action no one but herself, and she did not hesitate. She pledged her heart and hand to Shelley for life, and she did not disappoint him, nor he her.

To the end of their lives, tried as they were to be by every kind of trouble, neither one nor the other ever repented the step they now took, nor modified their opinion of the grounds on which they took it. How Shelley regarded it in after years we have already seen. Mary, writing during her married life, when her judgment had been matured and her youthful buoyancy of spirit only too well sobered by stern and bitter experience, can find no harder name for it than “an imprudence.” Many years after, in 1825, alluding to Shelley’s separation from Harriet, she remarks, “His justification is, to me, obvious.” And at a later date still, when she had been seventeen years a widow, she wrote in the preface to her edition of Shelley’s Poems—

I abstain from any remark on the occurrences of his private life, except inasmuch as the passions they engendered inspired his poetry. This is not the time to relate the truth, and I should reject any colouring of the truth. No account of these events has ever been given at all approaching reality in their details, either as regards himself or others; nor shall I further allude to them than to remark that the errors of action committed by a man as noble and generous as Shelley, may, as far as he only is concerned, be fearlessly avowed by those who loved him, in the firm conviction that, were they judged impartially, his character would stand in fairer and brighter light than that of any contemporary.

But they never “made the public their familiar confidant.” They screened the erring as far as it was in their power to do so, although their reticence cost them dear, for it lent a colouring of probability to the slanders and misconstruction of all kinds which it was their constant fate to endure for others’ sake, which pursued them to their lives’ end, and beyond it.

Life, which is to no one what he expects, had many clouds for them. Mary’s life reached its zenith too suddenly, and with happiness came care in undue proportion. The future of intellectual expansion and creation which might have been hers was not to be fully realised, but perfections of character she might never have attained developed themselves as her nature was mellowed and moulded by time and by suffering.

Shelley’s rupture with his first wife marks the end of his boyhood. Up to that time, thanks to his poetic temperament, his were the strong and simple, but passing impulses and feelings of a child. “A being of large discourse” he assuredly was, but not as yet “looking before and after.” Now he was to acquire the doubtful blessing of that faculty. Like Undine when she became endued with a soul, he gained an immeasurable good, while he lost a something that never returned.

Early in the morning of 28th July 1814 Mary Godwin secretly left her father’s house, accompanied by Jane Clairmont, and they started with Shelley in a post-chaise for Dover.