Of individuals as of nations, it may be true that those are happiest who have no history. The later years of Mrs. Shelley, which offer no event of public interest, were tranquil and comparatively happy. She brought out no new work after 1844.[22] It had been her intention, now that the prohibition which constituted the chief obstacle was removed, to undertake the long-projected Life of Shelley. It seemed the more desirable as there was no lack of attempts at biography. Chief among these was the series of articles entitled “Shelley Papers,” contributed by Mr. Hogg to the New Monthly magazine during 1832. They were afterwards incorporated with that so-called Life of Shelley which deals only with Shelley’s first youth, and which, though it consists of one halfpennyworth of Shelley to an intolerable deal of Hogg, is yet a classic, and one of the most amusing classics in the world; so amusing, indeed, that, for its sake, we might address the author somewhat as Sterne is said to have apostrophised Mrs. Cibber, after hearing her sing a pathetic air of Handel, “Man, for this be all thy sins forgiven thee!” The second chapter of the book includes some fragments of biography by Mary, a facsimile of one of which, in her handwriting, is given here.

Medwin’s Life of Shelley, inaccurate and false in facts, distasteful in style and manner, had caused Mrs. Shelley serious annoyance. The author, who wrote for money chiefly, actually offered to suppress the book for a consideration; a proposal which Mrs. Shelley treated with the silent contempt it deserved. These were, however, strong arguments in favour of her undertaking the book herself. She summoned up her resolution and began to collect her materials.

But it was not to be. Her powers and her health were unequal to the task. The parallel between her and the Princess of the nettle-shirts was to be carried out to the bitter end, for the last nettle-shirt lacked a sleeve, and the youngest brother always retained one swan’s wing instead of an arm. The last service Mary could have rendered to Shelley was never to be completed, and so the exact details of certain passages of Shelley’s life must remain for ever, to some extent, matters of speculation. No one but Mary could have supplied the true history and, as she herself had said, in the introductory note to her edition of his poems, it was not yet time to do that. Too many were living who might have been wounded or injured; nay, there still are too many to admit of a biographer’s speaking with perfect frankness. But, although she might have furnished to some circumstances a key which is now for ever lost, it is equally true that there was much to be said, which hardly could, and most certainly never would have been told by her. Of his earliest youth and his life with Harriet she could, herself, know nothing but by hearsay. But the chief difficulty lay in the fact that too much of her own history was interwoven with his. How could she, now, or at any time, have placed herself, as an observer, so far outside the subject of her story as to speak of her married life with Shelley, of its influence on the development of his character and genius, of the effect of that development, and of her constant association with it on herself? Yet any life of him which left this out of account would have been most incomplete. More than that, no biography of such a man as Shelley can be completely successful which is written under great restrictions and difficulties. To paint a life-like picture of a nature like his requires a genius akin to his, aglow with the fervour of confident enthusiasm.

It was, then, as well that Mary never wrote the book. The invaluable notes which she did write to Shelley’s poems have done for him all that it was in her power to accomplish, and all that is necessary. They put the reader in possession of the knowledge it concerns him to have; that of the scenes or the circumstances which inspired or suggested the poems themselves.In 1847 she became acquainted with the lady to whom her son was afterwards married, and who was to be to Mrs. Shelley a kind of daughter and sister in one. No one, except her son, is living who knew Mary so well and loved her so enthusiastically. A mutual friend had urged them to become acquainted, assuring them both “they ought to know each other, they would suit so perfectly.” Some people think that this course is one which tends oftener to postpone than to promote the desired intimacy. In the present case it was justified by the result. Mrs. Shelley called. Her future daughter-in-law, on entering the room, beheld something utterly unlike what she had imagined or expected in the famous Mrs. Shelley,—a fair, lovely, almost girlish-looking being, “as slight as a reed,” with beautiful clear eyes, who put out her hand as she rose, saying half timidly, “I’m Mary Shelley.” From that moment—we have her word for it—the future wife of Sir Percy had lost her heart to his mother! Their intercourse was frequent, and soon became necessary to both. The younger lady had had much experience of sorrow, and this drew the bond all the closer.

Not for some time after this meeting did Sir Percy appear on the scene. His engagement followed at no distant date, and after his marriage he, with his wife and his mother, who never during her life was to be parted from them, again went abroad.

The cup of such happiness as in this world was possible to Mary Shelley seemed now to be full, but the time was to be short during which she could taste it. She only lived three years longer, years chequered by very great anxiety (on account of illness), yet to those who now look back on them they seem as if lived under a charm. To live with Mary Shelley was indeed like entertaining an angel. Perfect unselfishness, selflessness indeed, characterised her at all times.

One illustration of this is afforded by her repression of the terror she felt when she saw Shelley’s passion for the sea asserting itself in his son. Her own nerves had been shaken and her life darkened by a catastrophe, but not for this would she let it overshadow the lives of others. Not even when her son, with a friend, went off to Norway in a little yacht, and she was dependent for news of them on a three weeks’ post, would she ever let him know the mortal anxiety she endured, but after his marriage she told it to her daughter-in-law, saying, “Now he will never wish to go to sea.”

But of herself she never seemed to think at all; she lived in and for others. Her gifts and attainments, far from being obtruded, were kept out of sight; modest almost to excess as she was, she yet knew the secret of putting others at their ease. She was ready with sympathy and help and gentle counsel for all who needed them, and to the friends of her son she was such a friend as they will never forget.

The thought of Shelley, the idea of his presence, never seemed to leave her mind for a moment. She would constantly refer to what he might think, or do, or approve of, almost as if he had been in the next room. Of his history, or her own, she never spoke, nor did she ever refer to other people connected with their early life, unless there was something good to be said of them. Of those who had behaved ill to her, no word—on the subject of their behaviour—passed her lips. Her daughter-in-law had so little idea of what her associations were with Clare, that on one occasion when Miss Clairmont was coming to stay at Field Place, and Lady Shelley, who did not like her, expressed a half-formed intention of being absent during her visit and leaving Mrs. Shelley to entertain her, she was completely taken aback by the exclamation which escaped Mary’s lips, “Don’t go, dear! don’t leave me alone with her! she has been the bane of my life ever since I was three years old!”

No more was ever said, but this was enough, even to those who did not know all, to reveal a long history of endurance.Clare came, and more than once, to stay at Field Place, but her excitability and eccentricity had so much increased as, at times, to be little if at all under her own control, and after one unmistakable proof of this, it was deemed (by those who cared for Mrs. Shelley) desirable that she should go and return no more.

She died at Florence in 1878.

Mary Shelley’s strength was ebbing, her nervous ailments increased, and the result was a loss of power in one side. Life at Field Place had had to be abandoned on grounds of health (not her own), and Sir Percy Shelley had purchased Boscombe Manor for their country home, anticipating great pleasure from his mother’s enjoyment of the beautiful spot and fine climate. But she became worse, and never could be moved from her house in Chester Square till she was taken to her last resting-place. She died on the 21st of February 1851.

She died, “and her place among those who knew her intimately has never been filled up. She walked beside them, like a spirit of good, to comfort and benefit, to lighten the darkness of life, to cheer it with her sympathy and love.”

These, her own words about Shelley, may with equal fitness be applied to her.

Her grave is in Bournemouth Churchyard, where, some time after, her father and mother were laid by her side.

As an author Mary Shelley did not accomplish all that was expected of her. Her letters from abroad, both during her earlier and later tours, the descriptive fragments intended for her father’s biography, and above all her notes on Shelley’s works, are indeed valuable and enduring contributions to literature. But it was in imaginative work that she had aspired to excel, and in which both Shelley and Godwin had urged her to persevere, confident that she could achieve a brilliant success. None of her novels, however, except Frankenstein, can be said to have survived the generation for which they were written. Only in that work has she left an abiding mark on literature. Yet her powers were very great, her culture very extensive, her ambition very high.

The friend whose description of her has been quoted in an earlier chapter tries to account for this. She says—

But the true cause lay deeper still, and may afford a clue to more puzzles than this one. What Mary Godwin might have become had she remained Mary Godwin for six or eight years longer it is impossible now to do more than guess at. But the free growth of her own original nature was checked and a new bent given to it by her early union with Shelley. Two original geniuses can rarely develop side by side, certainly not in marriage, least of all in a happy marriage. Two minds may, indeed, work consentaneously, but one, however unconsciously, will take the lead; should the other preserve its complete independence, angles must of necessity develop, and the first fitness of things disappear. And in a marriage of enthusiastic devotion and mutual admiration, the younger or the weaker mind, however candid, will shirk or stop short of conclusions which, it instinctively feels, may lead to collision. On the other hand, strong and pronounced views or peculiarities on the part of one may tend to elicit their exact opposite on the part of the other; both results being equally remote from real independence of thought. However it may be, either in marriage or in any intellectual partnership, it is a general truth that from the moment one mind is penetrated by the influence of another, its own native power over other minds has gone, and for ever. And Mary parted with this power at sixteen, before she knew what it was to have it. When she left her father’s house with Shelley she was but a child, a thing of promise, everything about her yet to be decided. Shelley himself was a half-formed creature, but of infinite possibilities and extraordinary powers, and Mary’s development had not only to keep pace with his, but to keep in time and tune with his. Sterne said of Lady Elizabeth Hastings that “to have loved her was a liberal education.” To love Shelley adequately and worthily was that and more—it was a vocation, a career,—enough for a life-time and an exceptional one.

Every reader of the present biography must see too that in Mary Shelley’s case physical causes had much to do with the limit of her intellectual achievements. Between seventeen and twenty-five she had drawn too largely on the reserve funds of life. Weak health and illness, a roving unsettled life, the birth and rearing, and then the loss, of children; great joys and great griefs, all crowded into a few young years, and coinciding with study and brain-work and the constant call on her nervous energy necessitated by companionship with Shelley, these exhausted her; and when he who was the beginning and end of her existence disappeared, “and the light of her life as if gone out,”[23] she was left,—left what those eight years had made her, to begin again from the beginning all alone. And nobly she began, manfully she struggled, and wonderfully, considering all things, did she succeed. No one, however, has more than a certain, limited, amount of vitality to express in his or her life; the vital force may take one form or another, but cannot be used twice over. The best of Mary’s power spent itself in active life, in ministering to another being, during those eight years with Shelley. What she gained from him, and it was much, was paid back to him a hundredfold. When he was gone, and those calls for outward activity were over, there lay before her the life of literary labour and thought for which nature and training had pre-eminently fitted her. But she could not call back the freshness of her powers nor the wholeness of her heart. She did not fully know, or realise, then, the amount of life-capital she had run through. She did realise it at a later time, and the very interesting entry in her journal, dated October 21, 1838, is a kind of profession of faith; a summary of her views of life; the result of her reflections and of her experience—

The true success of Mary Shelley’s life was not, therefore, the intellectual triumph of which, during her youth, she had loved to dream, and which at one time seemed to be actually within her grasp, but the moral success of beauty of character. To those people—a daily increasing number in this tired world—who erect the natural grace of animal spirits to the rank of the highest virtue, this success may appear hardly worth the name. Yet it was a very real victory. Her nature was not without faults or tendencies which, if undisciplined, might have developed into faults, but every year she lived seemed to mellow and ripen her finer qualities, while blemishes or weaknesses were suppressed or overcome, and finally disappeared altogether.

As to her theological views, about which the most contradictory opinions have been expressed, it can but be said that nothing in Mrs. Shelley’s writings gives other people the right to formulate for her any dogmatic opinions at all. Brought up in a purely rationalistic creed, her education had of course, no tinge of what is known as “personal religion,” and it must be repeated here that none of her acts and views were founded, or should be judged as if they were founded on Biblical commands or prohibitions. That the temper of her mind, so to speak, was eminently religious there can be no doubt; that she believed in God and a future state there are many allusions to show.[24] Perhaps no one, having lived with the so-called atheist, Shelley, could have accepted the idea of the limitation, or the extinction of intelligence and goodness. Her liberality of mind, however, was rewarded by abuse from some of her acquaintance, because her toleration was extended even to the orthodox.

Her moral opinions, had they ever been formulated, which they never were, would have approximated closely to those of Mary Wollstonecraft, limited, however, by an inability, like her father’s, not to see both sides of a question, and also by the severest and most elevated standard of moral purity, of personal faith and loyalty. To be judged by such a standard she would have regarded as a woman’s highest privilege. To claim as a “woman’s right” any licence, any lowering of the standard of duty in these matters, would have been to her incomprehensible and impossible. But, with all this, she discriminated. Her standard was not that of the conventional world.

At every risk, as she says, she befriended those whom she considered “victims to the social system.” It was a difficult course; for, while her acquaintance of the “advanced” type accused her of cowardice and worldliness for not asserting herself as a champion of universal liberty, there were more who were ready to decry her for her friendly relations with Countess Guiccioli, Lady Mountcashel, and others not named here; to say nothing of Clare, to whom much of her happiness had been sacrificed. She refrained from pronouncing judgment, but reserved her liberty of action, and in all doubtful cases gave others the benefit of the doubt, and this without respect of persons. She would not excommunicate a humble individual for what was passed over in a man or woman of genius; nor condemn a woman for what, in a man, might be excused, or might even add to his social reputation. Least of all would she secure her own position by shunning those whose case had once been hers, and who in their after life had been less fortunate than she. Pure herself, she could be charitable, and she could be just.

The influence of such a wife on Shelley’s more vehement, visionary temperament can hardly be over-estimated. Their moods did not always suit or coincide; each, at times, made the other suffer. It could not be otherwise with two natures so young, so strong, and so individual. But, if forbearance may have been sometimes called for on the one hand, and on the other a charity which is kind and thinks no evil, it was only a part of that discipline from which the married life of geniuses is not exempt, and which tests the temper and quality of the metal it tries; an ordeal from which two noble natures come forth the purer and the stronger.

The indirect, unconscious power of elevation of character is great, and not even a Shelley but must be the better for association with it, not even he but must be the nobler, “yea, three times less unworthy” through the love of such a woman as Mary. He would not have been all he was without her sustaining and refining influence; without the constant sense that in loving him she loved his ideals also. We owe him, in part, to her.

Love—the love of Love—was Shelley’s life and creed. This, in Mary’s creed, was interpreted as love of Shelley. By all the rest she strove to do her duty, but, when the end came, that survived as the one great fact of her life—a fact she might have uttered in words like his—

And where is Truth? On tombs; for such to thee
Has been my heart; and thy dead memory
Has lain from (girlhood), many a changeful year,
Unchangingly preserved, and buried there.

F. D. & Co.

Printed by R. & R. Clark, Edinburgh.