Complete Works of Thomas Love Peacock

by Thomas Love Peacock

  I must add that, in the expression of these differences, there was not a shadow of anger. They were discussed with freedom and calmness; with the good temper and good feeling which never forsook him in conversations with his friends. There was an evident anxiety for acquiescence, but a quiet and gentle toleration of dissent. A personal discussion, however interesting to himself, was carried on with the same calmness as if it related to the most abstract question in metaphysics.

  Indeed, one of the great charms of intercourse with him was the perfect good humour and openness to conviction with which he responded to opinions opposed to his own. I have known eminent men, who were no doubt very instructive as lecturers to people who like being lectured; which I never did; but with whom conversation was impossible. To oppose their dogmas, even to question them, was to throw their temper off its balance. When once this infirmity showed itself in any of my friends, I was always careful not to provoke a second ebullition. I submitted to the preachment, and was glad when it was over.

  The result was a second trip to Switzerland. During his absence he wrote me several letters, some of which were subsequently published by Mrs. Shelley; others are still in my possession. Copies of two of these were obtained by Mr. Middleton, who has printed a portion of them. Mrs. Shelley was at that time in the habit of copying Shelley’s letters, and these were among some papers accidentally left at Marlow, where they fell into unscrupulous hands. Mr. Middleton must have been aware that he had no right to print them without my consent. I might have stopped his publication by an injunction, but I did not think it worth while, more especially as the book, though abounding with errors adopted from Captain Medwin and others, is written with good feeling towards the memory of Shelley.

  During his stay in Switzerland he became acquainted with Lord Byron. They made together an excursion round the lake of Geneva, of which he sent me the detail in a diary. This diary was published by Mrs. Shelley, but without introducing the name of Lord Byron, who is throughout called ‘my companion’. The diary was first published during Lord Byron’s life; but why his name was concealed I do not know. Though the changes are not many, yet the association of the two names gives it great additional interest.

  At the end of August 1816 they returned to England, and Shelley passed the first fortnight of September with me at Marlow. July and August 1816 had been months of perpetual rain. The first fortnight of September was a period of unbroken sunshine. The neighbourhood of Marlow abounds with beautiful walks; the river scenery is also fine. We took every day a long excursion, either on foot or on the water. He took a house there, partly, perhaps principally, for the sake of being near me. While it was being fitted and furnished he resided at Bath.

  In December 1816 Harriet drowned herself in the Serpentine river, not, as Captain Medwin says, in a pond at the bottom of her father’s garden at Bath. Her father had not then left his house in Chapel Street, and to that house his daughter’s body was carried.

  On 30th December 1816 Shelley married his second wife; and early in the ensuing year they took possession of their house at Marlow. It was a house with many large rooms and extensive gardens. He took it on a lease for twenty-one years, furnished it handsomely, fitted up a library in a room large enough for a ballroom, and settled himself down, as he supposed, for life. This was an agreeable year to all of us. Mr, Hogg was a frequent visitor. We had a good deal of rowing and sailing, and we took long walks in all directions. He had other visitors from time to time. Amongst them were Mr. Godwin and Mr and Mrs. Leigh Hunt. He led a much more social life than he had done at Bishopgate; but he held no intercourse with his immediate neighbours. He said to me more than once: ‘I am not wretch enough to tolerate an acquaintance’.

  In the summer of 1817 he wrote The Revolt of Islam, chiefly on a seat on a high prominence in Bisham Wood, where he passed whole mornings with a blank book and a pencil. This work, when completed, was printed under the title of Laon and Cythna. In this poem he had carried the expression of his opinions, moral, political, and theological, beyond the bounds of discretion. The terror which, in those days of persecution of the press, the perusal of the book inspired in Mr. Ollier, the publisher, induced him to solicit the alteration of many passages which he had marked. Shelley was for some time inflexible; but Mr. Ollier’s refusal to publish the poem as it was, backed by the advice of all his friends, induced him to submit to the required changes. Many leaves were cancelled, and it was finally published as The Revolt of Islam. Of Laon and Cythna only three copies had gone forth. One of these had found its way to the Quarterly Review, and the opportunity was readily seized of pouring out on it one of the most malignant effusions of the odium theologicum that ever appeared even in those days, and in that periodical.

  During his residence at Marlow we often walked to London, frequently in company with Mr. Hogg. It was our usual way of going there, when not pressed by time. We went by a very pleasant route over fields, lanes, woods, and heaths to Uxbridge, and by the main road from Uxbridge to London. The total distance was thirty-two miles to Tyburn turnpike. We usually stayed two nights, and walked back on the third day. I never saw Shelley tired with these walks. Delicate and fragile as he appeared, he had great muscular strength. We took many walks in all directions from Marlow, and saw everything worth seeing within a radius of sixteen miles. This comprehended, among other notable places, Windsor Castle and Forest, Virginia Water, and the spots which were consecrated by the memories of Cromwell, Hampden, and Milton, in the Chiltem district of Buckinghamshire. We had also many pleasant excursions, rowing and sailing on the river, between Henley and Maidenhead.

  Shelley, it has been seen, had two children by his first wife. These children he claimed after Harriet’s death, but her family 346 refused to give them up. They resisted the claim in Chancery, and the decree of Lord Eldon was given against him.

  The grounds of Lord Eldon’s decision have been misrepresented. The petition had adduced Queen Mab, and other instances of Shelley’s opinions on religion, as one of the elements of the charges against him; but the judgment ignores this element, and rests entirely upon moral conduct. It was distinctly laid down that the principles which Shelley had professed in regard to some of the most important relations of life, had been carried by him into practice; and that the practical development of those principles, not the principles themselves, had determined the judgment of the Court.

  Lord Eldon intimated that his judgment was not final; but nothing would have been gained by an appeal to the House of Peers. Liberal law lords were then unknown; neither could Shelley have hoped to enlist public opinion in his favour. A Scotch marriage, contracted so early in life, might not have been esteemed a very binding tie: but the separation which so closely followed on a marriage in the Church of England, contracted two years and a half later, presented itself as the breach of a much more solemn and deliberate obligation.

  It is not surprising that so many persons at the time should have supposed that the judgment had been founded, at least partly, on religious grounds. Shelley himself told me, that Lord Eldon had expressly stated that such grounds were excluded, and the judgment itself showed it. But few read the judgment. It did not appear in the newspapers, and all report of the proceedings was interdicted. Mr. Leigh Hunt accompanied Shelley to the Court of Chancery. Lord Eldon was extremely courteous; but he said blandly, and at the same time determinedly, that a report of the proceedings would be punished as a contempt of Court. The only explanation I have ever been able to give to myself of his motive for this prohibition was, that he was willing to leave the large body of fanatics among his political supporters under delusion as to the grounds of his judgment; and that it was more for his political interest to be stigmatized by Liberals as an inquisitor, than to incur in any degree the imputation of theological liberality from his own persecuting party.

  Since writing the above passages I have seen, in the Morning Post of November 22nd, the report of a meeting of the Juridical Society, under the presidency of t
he present Lord Chancellor, in which a learned brother read a paper, proposing to revive the system of persecution against ‘blasphemous libel’; and in the course of his lecture he said: ‘The Court of Chancery, on the doctrine Parens patriae, deprived the parent of the guardianship of his children when his principles were in antagonism to religion, as in the case of the poet Shelley’. The Attorney-General observed on this: ‘With respect to the interference of the Court of Chancery in the case of Shelley’s children, there was a great deal of misunderstanding. It was not because their father was an unbeliever in Christianity, but because he violated and refused to acknowledge the ordinary usages of morality’. The last words are rather vague and twaddling, and I suppose are not the ipsissima vert a of the Attorney-General. The essence and quintessence of Lord Eldon’s judgment was this: ‘Mr. Shelley long ago published and maintained the doctrine that marriage is a contract binding only during mutual pleasure. He has carried out that doctrine in his own practice; he has done nothing to show that he does not still maintain it; and I consider such practice injurious to the best interests of society’. I am not apologizing for Lord Eldon, nor vindicating his judgment. I am merely explaining it, simply under the wish that those who talk about it should know what it really was.

  Some of Shelley’s friends have spoken and written of Harriet as if to vindicate him it were necessary to disparage her. They might, I think, be content to rest the explanation of his conduct on the ground on which he rested it himself — that he had found in another the intellectual qualities which constituted his ideality of the partner of his life. But Harriet’s untimely fate occasioned him deep agony of mind, which he felt the more because for a long time he kept the feeling to himself. I became acquainted with it in a somewhat singular manner.

  I was walking with him one evening in Bisham Wood, and we had been talking, in the usual way, of our ordinary subjects, when he suddenly fell into a gloomy reverie. I tried to rouse him out of it, and made some remarks which I thought might make him laugh at his own abstraction. Suddenly he said to me, still with the same gloomy expression: ‘There is one thing to which I have decidedly made up my mind. I will take a great glass of ale every night’. I said, laughingly: ‘ A very good resolution, as the result of a melancholy musing’. ‘Yes,’ he said; ‘ but you do not know why I take it. I shall do it to deaden my feelings: for I see that those who drink ale have none.’ The next day he said to me: ‘You must have thought me very unreasonable yesterday evening?’ I said: ‘I did, certainly’.

  ‘Then’, he said, ‘ I will tell you what I would not tell any one else. I was thinking of Harriet.’ I told him: Ί had no idea of such a thing: it was so long since he had named her. I had thought he was under the influence of some baseless morbid feeling; but if ever I should see him again in such a state of mind, I would not attempt to disturb it’.

  There was not much comedy in Shelley’s life; but his antipathy to Acquaintance’ led to incidents of some drollery. Amongst the persons who called on him at Bishopgate, was one whom he tried hard to get rid of, but who forced himself on him in every possible manner. He saw him at a distance one day, as he was walking down Egham Hill, and instantly jumped through a hedge, ran across a field, and laid himself down in a dry ditch. Some men and women, who were haymaking in the field, ran up to see what was the matter, when he said to them: ‘Go away, go away: don’t you see it’s a bailiff?’ On which they left him, and he escaped discovery.

  After he had settled himself at Marlow, he was in want of a music-master to attend a lady staying in his house, and I inquired for one at Maidenhead. Having found one, I requested that he would call on Mr. Shelley. One morning Shelley rushed into my house in great trepidation, saying: ‘Barricade the doors; give orders that you are not at home. Here is — in the town’.

  He passed the whole day with me, and we sat in expectation that the knocker or the bell would announce the unwelcome visitor; but the evening fell on the unfulfilled fear. He then ventured home. It turned out that the name of the music-master very nearly resembled in sound the name of the obnoxious gentleman; and when Shelley’s man opened the library door and said:

  ‘Mr. , sir’, Shelley, who caught the name as that of his Monsieur Tonson, exclaimed: ‘I would just as soon see the devil!’ sprang up from his chair, jumped out of the window, ran across the lawn, climbed over the garden-fence, and came round to me by a back-path: when we entrenched ourselves for a day’s siege. We often laughed afterwards at the thought of what must have been his man’s astonishment at seeing his master, on the announcement of the musician, disappear so instantaneously through the window, with the exclamation: Ί would just as soon see the devil!’ and in what way he could explain to the musician that his master was so suddenly ‘not at home’.

  Shelley, when he did laugh, laughed heartily, the more so as what he considered the perversions of comedy excited not his laughter but his indignation, although such disgusting outrages on taste and feeling as the burlesques by which the stage is now disgraced had not then been perpetrated. The ludicrous, when it neither offended good feeling, nor perverted moral judgment, necessarily presented itself to him with greater force.

  Though his published writings are all serious, yet his letters are not without occasional touches of humour. In one which he wrote to me from Italy, he gave an account of a new acquaintance who had a prodigious nose. ‘His nose is something quite Slawkenbergian. It weighs on the imagination to look at it. It is that sort of nose that transforms all the g’s its wearer utters into k’s. It is a nose once seen never to be forgotten, and which requires the utmost stretch of Christian charity to forgive. I, you know, have a little turn-up nose, H — has a large hook one; but add them together, square them, cube them, you would have but a faint notion of the nose to which I refer.’

  I may observe incidentally, that his account of his own nose corroborates the opinion I have previously expressed of the inadequate likeness of the published portraits of him, in which the nose has no turn-up. It had, in fact, very little; just as much as may be seen in the portrait to which I have referred, in the Florentine Gallery.

  The principal employment of the female population in Marlow was lace-making, miserably remunerated. He went continually amongst this unfortunate population, and to the extent of his ability relieved the most pressing cases of distress. He had a list of pensioners, to whom he made a weekly allowance.

  Early in 1818 the spirit of restlessness again came over him. He left Marlow and, after a short stay in London, left England in March of that year, never to return.

  I saw him for the last time on Tuesday the 10th of March. The evening was a remarkable one, as being that of the first performance of an opera of Rossini in England, and of the first appearance here of Malibran’s father, Garcia. He performed Count Almaviva in the Barbiere di Simglia. Fodor was Rosina; Naldi, Figaro; Ambrogetti, Bartolo; and Angrisani, Basilio. I supped with Shelley and his travelling companions after the opera. They departed early the next morning.

  Thus two very dissimilar events form one epoch in my memory. In looking back to that long-past time, I call to mind how many friends, Shelley himself included, I saw around me in the old Italian Theatre, who have now all disappeared from the scene. I hope I am not unduly given to be laudator temporis acti, yet I cannot but think that the whole arrangement of the opera in England has changed for the worse. Two acts of opera, a divertissement, and a ballet, seem very ill replaced by four or five acts of opera, with little or no dancing. These, to me, verify the old saying, that ‘Too much of one thing is good for nothing’; and the quiet and decorous audiences, of whom Shelley used to say: ‘It is delightful to see human beings so civilized’, are not agreeably succeeded by the vociferous assemblies, calling and recalling performers to the footlights, and showering down bouquets to the accompaniment of their noisy approbation.

  At the time of his going abroad, he had two children by his second wife — William and Clara; and it has been said that the fear of having th
ese taken from him by a decree of the chancellor had some influence on his determination to leave England; but there was no ground for such a fear. No one could be interested in taking them from him; no reason could be alleged for taking them from their mother; the chancellor would not have entertained the question, unless a provision had been secured for the children; and who was to do this? Restlessness and embarrassment were the causes of his determination; and according to the Newtonian doctrine, it is needless to look for more causes than are necessary to explain the phenomena.

  These children both died in Italy; Clara, the youngest, in 1818; William, in the following year. The last event he communicated to me in a few lines, dated Rome, June 8th, 1819:

  Yesterday, after an illness of only a few days, my little William died. There was no hope from the moment of the attack. You will be kind enough to tell all my friends, so that I need not write to them. It is a great exertion to me to write this, and it seems to me as if, hunted by calamity as I have been, that I should never recover any cheerfulness again.

  A little later in the same month he wrote to me again from Livorno:

  Our melancholy journey finishes at this town; but we retrace our steps to Florence, where, as I imagine, we shall remain some months.