Complete Works of Thomas Love Peacock

by Thomas Love Peacock

  He was especially fond of the novels of Brown — Charles Brockden Brown, the American, who died at the age of thirty-nine.

  The first of these novels was Wieland. Wieland’s father passed much of his time alone in a summerhouse, where he died of spontaneous combustion.

  This summer-house made a great impression on Shelley, and in looking for a country house he always examined if he could find such a summerhouse, or a place to erect one.

  The second was Ormond. The heroine of this novel, Constantia Dudley, held one of the highest places, if not the very highest place, in Shelley’s idealities of female character.

  The third was Edgar Huntley; or, the Sleepwalker, In this his imagination was strangely captivated by the picture of Clitheroe in his sleep digging a grave under a tree.

  The fourth was Arthur Mervyn: chiefly remarkable for the powerful description of the yellow fever in Philadelphia and the adjacent country, a subject previously treated in Ormond. No descriptions of pestilence surpass these of Brown. The transfer of the hero’s affections from a simple peasant-girl to a rich Jewess, displeased Shelley extremely, and he could only account for it on the ground that it was the only way in which Brown could bring his story to an uncomfortable conclusion. The three preceding tales had ended tragically.

  These four tales were unquestionably works of great genius, and were remarkable for the way in which natural causes were made to produce the semblance of supernatural effects. The superstitious terror of romance could scarcely be more strongly excited than by the perusal of Wieland.

  Brown wrote two other novels, Jane Talbot and Philip Stanley, in which he abandoned this system, and confined himself to the common business of life. They had little comparative success.

  Brown’s four novels, Schiller’s Robbers, and Goethe’s Faust, were, of all the works with which he was familiar, those which took the deepest root in his mind, and had the strongest influence in the formation of his character. He was an assiduous student of the great classical poets, and among these his favourite heroines were Nausicaa and Antigone. I do not remember that he greatly admired any of our old English poets, excepting Shakespeare and Milton. He devotedly admired Wordsworth and Coleridge, and in a minor degree Southey: these had great influence on his style, and Coleridge especially on his imagination; but admiration is one thing and assimilation is another; and nothing so blended itself with the structure of his interior mind as the creations of Brown. Nothing stood so clearly before his thoughts as a perfect combination of the purely ideal and possibly real, as Constantia Dudley.

  He was particularly pleased with Wordsworth’s Stanzas written in a pocket copy of Thomson’s Castle of Indolence. He said the fifth of these stanzas always reminded him of me. I told him the four first stanzas were in many respects applicable to him.’ He said: ‘It was a remarkable instance of Wordsworth’s insight into nature, that he should have made intimate friends of two imaginary characters so essentially dissimilar, and yet severally so true to the actual characters of two friends, in a poem written long before they were known to each other, and while they were both boys, and totally unknown to him.’ — .

  The delight of Wordsworth’s first personage in the gardens of the happy castle, the restless spirit that drove him to wander, the exhaustion with which he returned and abandoned himself to repose, might all in these stanzas have been sketched to the life from Shelley. The end of the fourth stanza is especially apposite: —

  Great wonder to our gentle tribe it was

  Whenever from our valley he withdrew;

  For happier soul no living creature has

  Than he had, being here the long day through.

  Some thought he was a lover, and did WOO:

  Some thought far worse of him, and judged him wrong:

  Bid verse was what he had been wedded to;

  And his own mind did like a tempest strong

  Come to him thus, and drive the weary wight along.’

  He often repeated to me, as applicable to himself, a somewhat similar passage from Childe Harold: —

  — On the sea

  The boldest steer but where their ports invite:

  But there are wanderers o’er Eternity,

  Whose bark drives on and on, and anchor’d ne’er shall be.

  His vegetable diet entered for something into his restlessness. When he was fixed in a place he adhered to this diet consistently and conscientiously, but it certainly did not agree with him; it made him weak and nervous, and exaggerated the sensitiveness of his imagination. Then arose those thickcoming fancies which almost invariably preceded his change of place. While he was living from inn to inn he was obliged to live, as he said, ‘on what he could get’; that is to say, like other people. When he got well under this process he gave all the credit to locomotion, and held himself to have thus benefited, not in consequence of his change of regimen, but in spite of it. Once, when I was living in the country, I received a note from him wishing me to call on him in London. I did so, and found him ill in bed. He said, ‘You are looking well. I suppose you go on in your old way, living on animal food and fermented liquor?’ I answered in the affirmative. ‘And here,’ he said, ‘you see a vegetable feeder overcome by disease.’ I said, ‘Perhaps the diet is the cause.’ This he would by no means allow; but it was not long before he was again posting through some yet unvisited wilds, and recovering his health as usual, by living ‘on what he could get’.

  He had a prejudice against theatres which I took some pains to overcome. I induced him one evening to accompany me to a representation of the School for Scandal. When, after the scenes which exhibited Charles Surface in his jollity, the scene returned, in the fourth act, to Joseph’s library, Shelley said to me—’ I see the purpose of this comedy. It is to associate virtue with bottles and glasses, and villainy with books.’ I had great difficulty to make him stay to the end. He often talked of ‘the withering and perverting spirit of comedy’. I do not think he ever went to another. But I remember his absorbed attention to Miss O’Neill’s performance of Bianca in Fazio,’ and it is evident to me that she was always in his thoughts when he drew the character of Beatrice in the Cenci.

  In the season of 1817, I persuaded him to accompany me to the opera. The performance was Don Giovanni. Before it commenced he asked me if the opera was comic or tragic. I said it was composite, — more comedy than tragedy. After the killing of the Commendatore, he said, ‘Do you call this comedy?’ By degrees he became absorbed in the music and action. I asked him what he thought of Ambrogetti? He said, ‘He seems to be the very wretch he personates.’ The opera was followed by a ballet, in which Mdlle. Milanie was the principal danseuse. He was enchanted with this lady; said he had never imagined such grace of motion; and the impression was permanent, for in a letter he afterwards wrote to me from Milan he said, ‘They have no Mdlle. Milanie here.’

  From this time till he finally left England he was an assiduous frequenter of the Italian Opera. He delighted in the music of Mozart, and especially in the Nozze di Figaro, which was performed several times in the early part of 1818.

  With the exception of Fazio, I do not remember his having been pleased with any performance at an English theatre. Indeed I do not remember his having been present at any but the two above mentioned. I tried in vain to reconcile him to comedy. I repeated to him one day, as an admirable specimen of diction and imagery, Michael Perez’s soliloquy in his miserable lodgings, from Rule a Wife and Have a Wife. When I came to the passage:

  There’s an old woman that’s now grown to marble,

  Dried in this brick-kiln: and she sits i’ the chimney

  (Which is but three tiles, raised like a house of cards),

  The true proportion of an old smoked Sibyl.

  There is a young thing, too, that Nature meant

  For a maid-servant, but ’tis now a monster:

  She has a husk about her like a chestnut,

  With laziness, and living under the line here:

  An
d these two make a hollow sound together,

  Like frogs, or winds between two doors that murmur — he said, ‘There is comedy in its perfection, Society grinds down poor wretches into the dust of abject poverty, till they are scarcely recognizable as human beings; and then, instead of being treated as what they really are, subjects of the deepest pity, they are brought forward as grotesque monstrosities to be laughed at.’ I said, ‘You must admit the fineness of the expression.’ ‘It is true,’ he answered; ‘but the finer it is the worse it is, with such a perversion of sentiment.’

  I postpone, as I have intimated, till after the appearance of Mr. Hogg’s third and fourth volumes, the details of the circumstances which preceded Shelley’s separation from his first wife, and those of the separation itself.

  There never was a case which more strongly illustrated the truth of Payne Knight’s observation, that ‘the same kind of marriage, which usually ends a comedy, as usually begins a tragedy’.

  MEMOIRS OF PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY. PART II

  Y GWÎR YN erbyn y Byd.

  The Truth against the World.

  Bardic Maxim.

  MR. HOGG’S third and fourth volumes not having appeared, and the materials with which Sir Percy and Lady Shelley had supplied him having been resumed by them, and so much of them as it was thought desirable to publish having been edited by Lady Shelley,’ with a connecting thread of narrative, I shall assume that I am now in possession of all the external information likely to be available towards the completion of my memoir; and I shall proceed to complete it accordingly, subject to the contingent addition of a postscript, if any subsequent publication should render it necessary.

  Lady Shelley says in her preface:

  We saw the book (Mr. Hogg’s) for the first time when it was given to the world. It was impossible to imagine beforehand that from such materials a book could have been produced which has astonished and shocked those who have the greatest right to form an opinion on the character of Shelley; and it was with the most painful feelings of dismay that we perused what we could only look upon as a fantastic caricature, going forth to the public with my apparent sanction, — for it was dedicated to myself.

  Our feelings of duty to the memory of Shelley left us no other alternative than to withdraw the materials which we had originally entrusted to his early friend, and which we could not but consider had been strangely misused; and to take upon ourselves the task of laying them before the public, connected only by as slight a thread of narrative as would suffice to make them intelligible to the reader.

  I am very sorry, in the outset of this notice, to be under the necessity of dissenting from Lady Shelley respecting the facts of the separation of Shelley and Harriet.

  Captain Medwin represented this separation to have taken place by mutual consent. Mr. Leigh Hunt and Mr. Middleton adopted this statement; and in every notice I have seen of it in print it has been received as an established truth.

  Lady Shelley says —

  Towards the close of 1813 estrangements, which for some time had been slowly growing between Mr and Mrs. Shelley, came to a crisis. Separation ensued, and Mrs. Shelley returned to her father’s house. Here she gave birth to her second child — a son, who died in 1826.

  The occurrences of this painful epoch in Shelley’s life, and of the causes which led to them, I am spared from relating. In Mary Shelley’s own words — f 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.’

  Of those remaining who were intimate with Shelley at this time, each has given us a different version of this sad event, coloured by his own views or personal feelings. Evidently Shelley confided to none of these friends. We, who bear his name, and are of his family, have in our possession papers written by his own hand, which in after years may make the story of his life complete; and which few now living, except Shelley’s own children, have ever perused.

  One mistake, which has gone forth to the world, we feel ourselves called upon positively to contradict.

  Harriet’s death has sometimes been ascribed to Shelley. This is entirely false. There was no immediate connexion whatever between her tragic end and any conduct on the part of her husband. It is true, however, that it was a permanent source of the deepest sorrow to him; for never during all his after-life did the dark shade depart which had fallen on his gentle and sensitive nature from the selfsought grave of the companion of his early youth.

  This passage ends the sixth chapter. The seventh begins thus —

  To the family of Godwin, Shelley had, from the period of his self-introduction at Keswick, been an object of interest; and the acquaintanceship which had sprung up between them during the poet’s occasional visits to London had grown into a cordial friendship. It was in the society and sympathy of the Godwins that Shelley sought and found some relief in his present sorrow. He was still extremely young. His anguish, his isolation, his difference from other men, his gifts of genius and eloquent enthusiasm, made a deep impression on Godwin’s daughter Mary, now a girl of sixteen, who had been accustomed to hear Shelley spoken of as something rare and strange. To her, as they met one eventful day in St. Pancras’ churchyard, by her mother’s grave, Bysshe, in burning words, poured forth the tale of his wild past — how he had suffered, how he had been misled; and how, if supported by her love, he hoped in future years to enrol his name with the wise and good who had done battle for their fellow-men, and been true through all adverse storms to the cause of humanity.

  Unhesitatingly she placed her hand in his, and linked her fortune with his own; and most truthfully, as the remaining portion of these Memorials will prove, was the pledge of both redeemed.

  I ascribe it to inexperience of authorship, that the sequence of words does not, in these passages, coincide with the sequence of facts: for in the order of words, the present sorrow would appear to be the death of Harriet. This however occurred two years and a half after the separation, and the union of his fate with Mary Godwin was simultaneous with it. Respecting this separation, whatever degree of confidence Shelley may have placed in his several friends, there are some facts which speak for themselves and admit of no misunderstanding.

  The Scotch marriage had taken place in August, 1811. In a letter which he wrote to a female friend sixteen months later (Dec. 10, 1812), he had said —

  How is Harriet a fine lady? You indirectly accuse her in your letter of this offence — to me the most unpardonable of all. The ease and simplicity of her habits, the unassuming plainness of her address, the uncalculated connexion of her thought and speech, have ever formed in my eyes her greatest charms: and none of these are compatible with fashionable life, or the attempted assumption of its vulgar and noisy éclat. You have a prejudice to contend with in making me a convert to this last opinion of yours, which, so long as I have a living and daily witness to its futility before me, I fear will be insurmountable. — Memorials, p. 44.

  Thus there had been no estrangement to the end of 1812. My own memory sufficiently attests that there was none in 1813.

  From Bracknell, in the autumn of 1813, Shelley went to the Cumberland lakes; then to Edinburgh. In Edinburgh he became acquainted with a young Brazilian named Baptista, who had gone there to study medicine by his father’s desire, and not from any vocation to the science, which he cordially abominated, as being all hypothesis, without the fraction of a basis of certainty to rest on. They corresponded after Shelley left Edinburgh, and subsequently renewed their intimacy in London. He was a frank, warm-hearted, very gentlemanly young man. He was a great enthusiast,
and sympathized earnestly in all Shelley’s views, even to the adoption of vegetable diet. He made some progress in a translation of Queen Mob into Portuguese. He showed me a sonnet, which he intended to prefix to his translation. It began —

  Sublime Shelley, cantor di verdade!

  and ended —

  Surja Queen Mab a restaurar o mundo.