SHELLEY'S EARLY LIFE.*
MR. MAcCarrrny has produced a volume which is likely to be of service to the future biographer of Shelley. The writer has made some discoveries—of less value perhaps than he appears to consider them ; he has also pointed out a great number of blunders on the part of Shelley's former biographers, and many, if not all of his-statemente, are important enough to deserve atteution. The book, we may remark at once, is not calculated to attract the general reader. The subject is one of the most painful interest, but the manner in which Mr. MacCarthy deals with it is that of a dry sifter of evidence, and hardly that of a man of letters. We do not complain of this manner as a defect, for it appears to be the writer's object rather to examine previous statements and to expose blunders, than to write the early life of a great poet ; but it is obvious that an investigation of this kind will be of principal service to the student who may desire an accurate knowledge of certain details in the biography of the poet. In his survey, Mr. Mac- Carthy spares nobody. He allows some credit to Mr. Rossetti, as the most accurate of Shelley's biographers, yet he points out again and again what he deems his erroneous statements ; Captain Medwin is also called to account for blunders ; the popular belief as to Leigh Hunt's early knowledge and appreciation of Shelley's genius is said to be a fallacy ; and the author does not scruple to say of Hogg, whose book is at least extremely amusing and readable, that it is doubtful if he has told one single fact truly.
Shelley's Early Life is said to be founded almost entirely on original research, and in the course of his labours the writer has found out that Shelley, just before his expulsion from Oxford, wrote and published a volume of poetry in aid of an Irish patriot, and that the book produced a profit of nearly £100. This is certainly a strange discovery. Shelley, it is well known, wrote much both in prose and verse when a mere boy, and it is also well known that what he published in those days was of trifling value and fell dead from the press. Poetry is rarely a very marketable commodity, and that an unknown youth of nineteen should have made a venture producing such tangible results seems well nigh incredible. But the fact of his having done so, and of the poem escaping the sight of all Shelley's admirers and critics, appears to be still more difficult of credence. Some hundreds of copies must have been circulated before a profit could be realised, yet even Mr. MacCarthy's research has failed in the attempt to dis- cover one of them. The Dublin Weekly Messenger of March 7, 1812, which has been disinterred by Mr. MacCarthy, has the following state- ment, "the only allusion to the poem in existence." "Mr. Shelley, commiserating the sufferings of our distinguished countryman, Mr. Finnerty, whose exertions in the cause.of political freedom he much admired, wrote a verybeautif ul poem, the profits of the sale of which, we understand from undoubted authority, Mr. Shelley remitted to Mr. Finnerty. We have heard they amounted to nearly a hundred pounds. This fact speaks a volume in favour of our new friend." Nor is this all. Finnerty, for whose benefit the poem was
* Shelley's Early Life. From Original Sources, with Curious Incidents, Letters, and Writings now first published or collected. By Denis Florence MacCarthy, MILLS.. London: gotten.
published, must have been well known to Leigh Hunt, whom he succeeded as the editor of the Statesman newspaper ; moreover, he lived to see Shelley take rank among the chief poets of a highly poetical age, and died in 1822, the year in which Shelley perished. Yet it would seem from Mr. MacCarthy that the honour and the service rendered to him by the poet was never afterwards alluded to, and that the poem, notwithstanding Hunt's acquaintance with. Finnerty and close intimacy with Shelley, was wholly unknown to. him. When Finnerty was in prison, a subscription was set on foot for his support, which amounted in one year to about £1,000. Mr. MacCarthy has taken the trouble to examine all the lists in refer- ence to this fund which appeared in the newspapers of the period,. yet he has been unable "to meet with any acknowledgment of so. handsome a contribution as one hundred pounds," the profits,. according to the Dublin paper, of the poem Shelley published for the benefit of Finnerty. The biographer has, however, no doubt that the statement is a true one. "Nothing published in the Weekly Messenger could possibly have escaped his notice. It is incredible that he would not have contradicted this statement of the presentation to him of the profits of a poem, if it were not true.. This statement, too, it should be remembered, is authenticated by Shelley himself, for he sends the paper containing it to Godwin., and pointedly refers to the article in which it is given." To this, however, it may be objected that we know nothing of Finnerty's character, and that if he at all resembled Shelley in his looseness and inconsiderateness about money matters, such an omission is by no means extraordinary. Shelley, who forgot to pay his debts, a weakness for which Mr. Rossetti asks a charitable smile, may also have forgotten or may not have cared to tax his memory as to the result of a generous action.
It is unnecessary and it would be uninteresting to follow Mr._ MacCarthy in his exposure of the various blunders of preceding biographers, but there are some facts respecting Shelley's early life, and some discoveries due to the author's research, which are- too significant or too curious to be wholly passed by without com- ment. The story of the poet's visit to Dublin, for instance, is told afresh, and contradicts the careless narrative of Hogg, as well as several statements, trifling for the most part, made by Mr_ Rossetti. A letter, hitherto unpublished, shows the date of. Shelley's arrival in the Irish metropolis, and two days later the- young enthusiast writes to Miss Hitchener, of Hurstpierpoint, the- deist and republican, in the following strain :—" We will meet you in Wales, and never part again. You shall not cross the- Channel alone. It will not do. In compliance with Harriet's earnest solicitations, I entreated you instantly to come and joiu. our circle, resign your school, all, everything for us and the Irisk.
cause. This could not be done But summer will come: The ocean rolls between us,"--and he continues, boy-like, with an, apostrophe to the ocean, of which only two or three lines are printed by Mr. MacCarthy. In another letter, now first pub- lished, Miss Hitchener is his "dearest friend," his friend "com- pletely and unalterably." It will be remembered that when the lady, like a fool, afterwards gave up her position in Sussex to joia. Shelley in North Devon, the poet's absurd admiration gays way to unmitigated disgust, and the "Brown Demon," as he called her, was dismissed from the circle she had bee& implored to enter, and politely termed by her quondam.. admirer "an artful, superficial, ugly, hermaphroditical beast of a- woman." The lady's father, it appears, from one among several. official letters, discovered by Mr. MacCarthy, was originally a.- smuggler, and afterwards kept a public-house ; but it appears also. that his daughter was "well-spoken off," and Shelley's offensive- expressions are less injurious to her reputation than to his. With regard to Miss Hitchener, Mr. MacCarthy has a theory which. may be worth stating. Shelley writes that having deprived " the Brown Demon, as we may call our Jate tormentor and schoolmis- tress," of a comfortable situation by his misjudging haste, she "muse receive her stipend," adding, "I pay it with a heavy heart and' an unwilling hand." Mr. MacCarthy thinks that this is only a promise to pay, that we have no evidence the stipend ever was- paid, and that the strange nocturnal attack at Tanyrallt which has puzzled all Shelley's biographers might have been devised in. revenge by Miss Hitchener's father. " The wrongs of Miss Hitchener, we can have little doubt, were discussed around the - paternal bar at Hurstpierpoint. The ' stipend ' may not have- been paid. Who knows but that it was after an ineffectual, demand, by an agent either of the father or the daughter, for the first quarter's instalment—which was due a few days before the memorable 26th of February, and the threats which may have followed the disappointment, that Shelley may have thought expedient to load his pistols, 'expecting to have occasion
them ' ? This may not be the solution of the mystery, but it is the most reasonable that has been yet suggested."
To return to the Dublin episode, which is slightly dealt with by Mr. Rossetti, and described at considerable length by Mr. MacCarthy. Among other instances of painstaking in pursuit of his object, the writer mentions that having examined all the State papers of the Irish Government referring to this period, he finds in them no reference to Shelley's pamphlets, and that while one of the Government reporters of a Dublin meeting at which the poet spoke for more than an hour merely describes him as "Mr. Shelly, who stated himself to be a native of England," the other does not mention him at all. Mr. Rossetti thinks it probable that in this instance Shelley did not shine as a speaker, but Mr. MacCarthy gives various extracts from Dublin papers to show that his speech was well received, and a letter in which an Englishman present on the occasion writes in disgust of the transports with which Shelley's invectives against his native country "were hailed by the assemblage addressed." Instead of the "savage yells" of which Hogg writes, this letter states that "joy beamed in every countenance and rapture glistened in every eye."
A letter from Harriet Shelley to the Brown Demon has been discovered by Mr. MacCarthy in the Record Office, and he also gives other letters or paragraphs of letters written by the poor girl which are of painful interest. Shelley cast off his young wife because he fell in love with another woman, and discovered that Harriet was only "a noble animal," who could neither "feel poetry nor understand philosophy." It was a despicable deed, and the blackness of it is scarcely diminished by the fact on which Mr. Rossetti lays so much stress, that it Was strictly in accordance with Shelley's views of right. Not a word had the poet to say against the character of the woman he repudiated, but it was enough that he discovered a "mutual incompatibility ;" and if we are to credit Dr. Polidori, "a friend of his liking his wife, he tried all he could to induce her to love him in return." Mr. MacCarthy has not much to say about this unhappy separation, and what he does say is hardly to the point, for he gives a brief extract from the Examiner, in which Shelley is announced to be a very striking and original thinker, observes that Harriet Shelley's suicide must, in all proba- bility, have occurred a day or two " after the appearance of this first public recognition (in England) of her husband," has no doubt that she read the passage, and adds, "It is no mere fancy to read in the paragraphs of the Examiner the death-warrant of Harriet Shelley,"—a conclusion which strikes us as strangely irrelevant. That Harriet and Shelley should both have been drowned, that Fanny Imlay (who was not Godwin's child, as Mr. Rossetti states, but the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and Gilbert Imlay) committed suicide by drowning, and that her mother attempted the same fate, form, Mr. MacCarthy thinks, "a series of coinci- dents that is exceedingly painful, if not awful, to reflect on;" but, indeed, there is little that is not sad in the short and troubled life of this wonderful poet.
It will be seen from what we have said that Mr. MacCarthy has succeeded in bringing together a number of useful materials for the service of some future biographer. That the volume is marked occasionally by inconclusive reasoning, and that there is frequently a clumsy repetition of statements, is not of much consequence. The value of the book consists in its facts, and not in its literary form. Mr. MacCarthy might readily have displayed more art in the management of his materials, but he could scarcely have given more labour to the investigation of his subject.
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