BOOKS.

THE LIFE OF MARY SHELLEY.*

TILEEE years ago, Professor Dowden, at the request of Sir Percy and Lady Shelley, published what may be called an official Life of the poet. He had access to all the Shelley papers, with permission to make use of them "without • The Life and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. By Mrs. Julian Marshall. 2 vols. London: Bentley and Son.

reserve;" and the result was the fullest and most interesting biography of Shelley which we possess.

It is impossible to read Mrs. Marshall's elaborate biography of Mary Shelley without recalling the more important work of Professor Dowden. Almost in that writer's words, Mrs. Marshall announces in her preface that the biography was undertaken at the request of Sir Percy and Lady Shelley, and has been compiled from the manuscript journals and letters in their possession, which were entrusted to her " without re-

serve for this purpose." The task was not an easy one, and we may say at once that, granting so copious a narrative to be

necessary, Mrs. Marshall has performed it well. All that we are likely to know of Shelley, will therefore be found in these biographies of the poet and of his second wife ; and as the public were informed several years ago that the Shelley family possess documents which "will completely vindicate the poet's conduct " in parting with Harriet, the reader is not un..

reasonable if, after looking in vain for this vindication in Professor Dowden's volumes, he now turns for the same purpose to Mrs. Marshall's narrative. Once more, however, he will be doomed to disappointment.

" Those who hope," Mrs. Marshall writes, " to find in these pages much new circumstantial evidence on the vexed subject of Shelley's separation from his first wife will be disappointed. No contemporary document now exists which puts the case beyond the reach of argument. Collateral evidence is not wanting ; but even were this not beyond the scope of the present work, it would be wrong on the strength of it to assert more than that Shelley himself felt certain of his wife's un- faithfulness." Of this we had been assured before by Pro- fessor Dowden, who also admitted that " no one who was not a rash partisan could assert that Harriet was not innocent."

Shelley, as every one knows, could always convince himself of what he wished to believe; and if he became convinced of Harriet's infidelity, as Mrs. Marshall states, in June, 1814 (in May he had called her " only virtuous, gentle, kind "), it will be remembered how in that very month be was making love to Mary Godwin. No fresh evidence against Harriet's con- duct as a wife has been produced by Mrs. Marshall, and the letters addressed to her friend Mrs. Nesbit, and published last summer in a New York journal, so far as they prove any- thing, are distinctly in her favour. The rumour of her infidelity reported by Godwin is as valueless as Shelley's conviction, or as Mary's own testimony ; and, on the other side, there is the direct assertion of Peacock, who stated it as his belief that Harriet's "conduct as a wife was as pure, as true, as abso- lutely faultless as that of any who for such conduct are held most in honour."

If it be true that the young wife, who was enceinte and still in her teens when Shelley deserted her, went wrong after- wards, the evil may be fairly attributed to his conduct and to

his teaching ; but did she go astray? Mr. Dowden says, " There is no doubt that she wandered from the ways of upright living ;" and on the next page he writes that "we have no means of verifying or disproving" the report to this effect which is said to have reached Shelley. Mrs. Marshall, with contemptuous pity. writes :—

" Life and its complications had proved too much for the poor, silly woman, and she took the only means of escape she saw open to her. Her piteous story was sufficiently told by the fact that when she drowned herself she was not far from her confinement. But it would seem from subsequent evidence that harsh treatment on the part of her relatives was what finally drove her to despair. She had lived a fast life, but had been, nominally at any rate, under her father's protection until a comparatively short time before her disappearance, when some act or occurrence caused her to be driven from his house. From that moment she sank lower and lower, until at last, deserted by one—said to be a groom —to whom she had looked for protection, she killed herself."

There are definite assertions here which Mr. Dowden does

not venture to make. They are made, so far as the reader is informed, without any addition to the evidence which he possessed.

Mary Godwin was only sixteen when she eloped with

Shelley ; she had been brought up in the worst of schools, and did but follow with the ardour of an enthusiastic girl the theories of her parents. Perhaps her painful story is one of

the most remarkable examples in our literary history of the Nemesis that awaits those who prefer the guidance of their feelings to the divine and human laws that knit society together. With a nature that had much nobility in it, Mary was brought into collision with the most untoward influences, and with selfishness under some of its meanest aspects. Her father, whom she warmly loved, in spite of his despicable fail- ings, had, to quote Mrs. Marshall's description, " got to regard those who in the thirsty search for truth and knowledge had attached themselves to him, in the secondary light of possible sources of income." To receive money constantly from Shelley, when from virtuous indignation he declined to see him, was no shame to the philosopher ; and when Shelley died, he was equally willing to be supported by Mary. "It is contrary to the course of nature," he wrote, " that a father should look for supplies to his daughter," —but he did look notwithstanding. " Let us help each other," he said, and was satisfied with saying so.

When Mary eloped with Shelley, Jane, or (as she preferred to be called) Clare Clairmont, Godwin's step-daughter, accom- panied them. An ardent, impulsive, undisciplined girl, with warm affections and weak principles, she was destined to be a thorn in the side of Mary during the best part of her married life. Clare, it is well known, had an intrigue with Lord Byron, who afterwards treated her brutally, and seems even to have spread the vile reports which made her residence under Percy's roof intolerable to his wife. Shelley liked her, and found her vivacity amusing; but, as Mrs. Marshall truly observes, "to impose her presence on Mary in such circum- stances was in fact as great a piece of tyranny as he had suffered from" when Harriet's sister was imposed on him. Sometimes Mrs. Shelley expressed much kindness for Chive, but her most deeply fixed feeling was uttered to her daughter- in-law not long before she died. " Don't go, dear," she said ; " don't leave me alone with her ! she has been the bane of my life ever since I was three years old!" She was not the only woman who was a bane to Mary in her troubled life. The least exacting of wives could not have witnessed Shelley's passionate admiration of Emilia Viviani with indifference, and the young wife of two-and-twenty did not pretend to do so. All the passion and fervour of Shelley's nature is poured forth in " Epipsychidion," and perhaps no poem that he has written is more characteristic of his genius :-

"Rightly kalanced," says Mrs. Marshall, " the whole sum of Emilia's gifts and graces would have weighed little against Mary's nobleness of heart and unselfish devotion ; her talents might not even have borne serious comparison with Clare's vivacious in- tellect. But to Shelley, haunted by a vision of perfection, and ever apt to recognise in a mortal image 'the likeness of that which is perhaps eternal,' she seemed a revelation, and like all revela- tions, supreme, unique, superseding for the time every other possibility.. . . . . That Mary should be his most sympathetic confidant at this juncture was not in the nature of things. She too had begun by idealising Emilia, but her affection and enthu- siastic admiration were soon outdone, and might well have been quenched by Shelley's rapt devotion. She did not misunderstand him ; she knew him too well for that but the better she under- stood him, the less it was possible for her to feel with him ; nor could it have been otherwise, unless she had been really as cold as she sometimes appeared."

And the writer adds that ""later allusions are not wanting to show that this time was felt by her to be one of annoyance and bitterness." After the awful calamity that swept away all Mary Shelley's hopes, she naturally turned for solace to Jane Williams, the partner of her sorrow. " Their affection for each other, warm in happier times, had developed by force of circumstances into a mutual need; so much nearer in their sorrow were they to each other than either could be to any one else." Within five years, Jane Williams found a second husband in Hogg, " a man of honour " in Mary's judgment, but who, it will be remembered, had at one time attempted to seduce Shelley's first wife. And now Mary discovered that Jane, whom she loved " better than any other human being," was a false friend, who amused herself with talking of Shelley's devotion to her, and of Mary's jealousy in consequence. " Mary had had many and bitter troubles and losses, but nothing entered into her soul so deeply as the defection of her friend. Alienation is worse than bereavement." Yet, strange to say, intercourse did not cease between the two women ; and in a letter addressed to Mrs. Gisborne in 1835, Mrs. Shelley writes : " I can never forget nor cease to be grateful to Jane for her excessive kindness to me when I needed it most, con- fined as I was to my sofa, unable to move."

Mrs. Marshall was, we think, ill-advised in the publication of copious extracts from Mrs. Shelley's journals written after the poet's death. The extravagance of grief is not unnatural, and can be understood ; but it should be kept sacred. When such passionate utterances as fell from Mary Shelley's pen in her early widowhood appear in print, there is a danger lest a reader's sense of the ludicrous should be stronger than his pity. As the years went on, she became calmer, and wrote without invoking the stars, or the shade of Shelley, or pouring the vials of her hatred upon England, as in the following entry :—

" Tears fill my eyes ; well may I weep, solitary girl! The dead know you not; the living heed you not. You sit in your lone room, and the howling wind, gloomy prognostic of winter, gives not forth so despairing a tone as the unheard sighs your ill-fated heart breathes. I was loved once ! still let me cling to the memory ; but to live for oneself alone, to read and to communicate your reflections to none ; to write and be cheered by none ; to weep and in no bosom ; no more on thy bosom, my Shelley, to spend my tears,—this is- misery I have been a year in England, and, ungentle- England, for what have I to thank you? For disappointment, melancholy, and tears ; for unkindness, a bleeding heart, and despairing thoughts. I wish, England, to associate but one idea, with thee,—immeasurable distance and insurmountable barriers, so that I never, never, might breathe thine air more. Beloved. Italy ! you are my country, my hope, my heaven !"

But though Mary Shelley began to live early, life was not

exhausted at twenty-seven. Her path was obstructed by three great evils,—a small income, weak health, and her father's fate, which pressed her to the earth; but she had a mother's pride in her son, and she owned some friends at least whose quality appeared sterling. Among these was Trelawny, who touched Mary Shelley's heart by his considerate conduct on the death of her husband. Some of the liveliest letters in these volumes are from Trelawny's pen, who appears at one- time to have made her an offer of marriage, for she writes :—

" My name will never be Trelawny. I am not so young as I was when you first knew me, but I am as proud. I must have the entire affection, devotion, and above all the solicitous protection of any- one who would win me. You belong to womankind in general,. and Mary Shelley will never be yours."

Strange to say, .a quarter of a century after the death of the- woman whom he had loved, teased, and praised, and who had- borne with his humours for friendship's sake, Trelawny

could write of her as " conventional and commonplace, un-

sympathetic and jealous, narrow, orthodox, and worldly." Mrs. Shelley says in one of her letters that she had been " barbarously handled by fortune and her fellow-creatures r but she could not have anticipated a time when Trelawny,

who now lies by the side of Shelley, would have written un- generously of his wife.

Mrs. Marshall's picture of Mary Shelley is drawn with care, but it is far too elaborate. Apart from the poet with whom her name is inseparably linked, she has no strong claim to

distinction. Frankenstein is indeed, as Moore called it, a powerful romance, and as the conception of a mere girl, will excite the reader's wonder ; but her other romances have been

long ago forgotten. It is pleasant to read that Mrs. Shelley's last years were the happiest, and that in her son's wife she had " a kind of daughter and sister in one."