The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 06, No. 33, July, 1860

After a considerable interval, some notices of Shelley have appeared, without, however, throwing much additional light on the wayward heart and pilgrimage of the poet. Mr. C.S. Middleton has published a book upon Shelley and his writings; Mr. T.J. Hogg has given a sketch of his life; and E.J. Trelawny some recollections of him, as well as of Byron. None of these pretends to explain that eccentric nature, or harmonize in any way his acts and his feelings; though a few things may be gathered that tend to make the biography somewhat more distinct than before, in some particulars. On the subject of his first unfortunate marriage, we are made aware that his wife was a self-willed, ill-taught young woman, who set her own father at defiance, and threw herself on the protection of such a wandering oddity as Percy Shelley. She was strong- minded, and brought with her into her husband's house her elder sister, also strong-minded, a ridiculous and insufferable duenna, whom Shelley hated with all his heart and soul, and wished dead and buried out of his sight,–finding, no doubt, his unsteady disposition controlled and thwarted by the voice and authority of his sister-in-law, who, knowing that her father furnished the young couple with their chief means of livelihood, would be all the more resolute in advising them or domineering over the migratory household. At last, these women grew tired of the moping and ineffectual youth who still remained poor and unsettled, with a father desperately healthy and inexorable, and all hope of the baronetcy very far off indeed; they grew tired of him and went away,–the wife, like Lady Byron, refusing to go back to such an aimless, rhapsodizing vagabond. With her natural decision of mind, aided and encouraged, very likely, by her astute relatives, she thought she saw good reasons for breaking and setting aside the contract which had united them; and no doubt the poor woman must have felt the hardship of living with such a melancholy outlaw. Having nothing in common with the devoted Emma, drawn in the ballad of "The Nut-brown Maid," she must have hated that wandering about from, place to place, living in lonely country-houses, under perpetual terror of robbers in the night, and subsisting for the most part on potatoes and Platonism; and she must have especially hated the Latin Grammar. She naturally thought, that, when she was married, she should have nothing more to say to exercises and lessons; but she found a pedagogue in Shelley, and the honeymoon saw her "attacking Latin" for the purpose of construing the poet Horace. How she must have hated all poets! She had other ideas,–ideas of ease, respectability, baronetcy; and her disappointment was greater than she could bear. Mr. Hogg says, she had a propensity to strong courses, and would talk of suicide in a speculative way. It is not difficult to discover the truth of that unfortunate union and disunion. Shelley, betrayed by the impulses of his enthusiast nature and the ignorant and deplorable credulity of a bookworm, allowed himself to be imposed upon by a designing boarding-school girl and her relatives, and everything followed as a matter of course. The unhappy wife recklessly broke the bond which she had as recklessly formed, and which the poet would have honorably and truly respected all his life; and then her passionate regret reacted fatally on herself,–and on him also, by a Nemesis not so very strange or unnatural, as the world goes.4

The subject of Shelley's character is a delicate and a difficult one, and Mr. Hogg and Mr. Trelawny, especially, show their inability to understand it, by the way in which they put forward and dwell upon the poet's peculiarities. Trelawny, a hard-minded, thorough-paced man of the world, publishing garrulously in his old age what he was silent about in his better period, talks of the poet's oddity, awkwardness, and want of punctuality,–as if Percy were some clerkly man on 'Change; and Hogg, hilariously clever, says Shelley was so erratic, fragmentary, and unequal, that his character cannot be shown in any way but as the figures of a magic-lantern are shown on a wall,–Mr. Hogg's own style of description being the wall,–"O wall, O wall, O sweet and lovely wall!" He also tells us, to instance the poet's familiarity with the sex, a story of Shelley sitting with one of his lady friends and being plied with cups of tea by that fair sympathizer,–the poet talking and letting his saucer fall, and the lady wiping his perspiring face with a pocket-handkerchief. Such scraps of silly gossip are not biography; they may do for tea-table chit-chat, but show very feebly in the place where one looks for something like a philosophical criticism on the mind of so extraordinary a man as Shelley.

Genius alone can do justice to genius; and kindred genius alone will do it. There have been, no doubt, a great many writers of biography who had no objection to compensate their feelings for bygone slights or discourtesies, suffered from some wayward or inattentive superiority, some stroke of ridicule or malice. Literary antipathies do not die with the dead. The posthumous impression of Margaret Fuller Ossoli has been colored by some who sneer at her ways and pretensions, because there was probably something in her manner which displeased them in a personal way. She had certainly a very awkward fashion of blinking her eyes, and also "a mountainous me." It is very probable poor Edgar Poe has had his faults exaggerated by those who suffered from the critical superiority of his intellect; since some of those notices of him which tend most to fix his character as a reprobate, and appear in a laggard way in the English periodicals, were probably written by some of his own countrymen. It was a painful consciousness of this literary revenge that made H.W. Herbert, in his last agony, call on his brother-penmen for mercy on his remains, and that induces many of our public men to bring out their own memoirs or encourage others to do so. It looks like vainglory, but it is not such. The memoirs show a mortal dread of calumny or misrepresentation. Mr. Barnum, for instance, was more just to himself than anybody else would be. He showed that his doings were only of a piece with those of thousands around him in society; and this not unreasonable extenuation is one that few of his critics are apt to make use of in commenting on him and his dexterities of living. As for Shelley, he might have shunned or slighted or overlooked Mr. Trelawny in some painful or preoccupied moment, or offended the robust man of the world by the mere delicate shyness of his look; he might also have puzzled and bewildered Mr. Hogg, being, perhaps, puzzled and bewildered himself, by some subtile mental speculation,– unconscious that for these things he was yet to be brought to judgment and turned into ridicule, for the coming generation, by these familiar men,–these drilled and pipe-clayed familiar men. He might have tossed up a paradox or two to keep the muscles of his mind in exercise on a cold day, and his rapid intellect may have run away from his hearer, trampling on the conventions and platitudes in its course; but Mr. Hogg does not think he had fixed notions concerning anything. The poet did not nail his colors with a cheer to the mast of any of the great questions of the day, ethical or social, and therefore suffered the disparagements of those intelligent friends of his who have been taught to consider a well-defined rigidity of conviction and maintenance, in the midst of all these phenomena of our universe, telluric and uranological, as the test of everything valuable in human character and morals. And thus it has come about, that genius, with its native instincts of reason, truth, and common sense, is doomed to pay the penalty of its preëminence and its divergencies, and suffer at the hands of friends and enemies alike, from the show of those false appearances, insincerities, equivocations, which are its natural and proper antipathies.

Since the foregoing observations were written, the writer has seen a certain corroboration of them in the interesting "Memorials of Shelley," recently edited by Lady Shelley, and published by Ticknor and Fields. For, in the preface of this book, she takes occasion to speak of the misstatements of all those who have hitherto written on the subject of the poet, instancing the fallacies of Captain Medwin's book, and also, in an especial manner, though vaguely enough, the incorrectness, amounting to caricature, put forth by a later biographer, one of Shelley's oldest friends,–by which she evidently means to indicate Mr. Hogg. At the same time, the nature of her Ladyship's book is, involuntarily, an additional evidence of the difficulty that seems fated to attend all attempts to set forth or set right the character of Shelley. Indeed, she appears to be in some degree conscious of this; for she says, apologetically, that she has published the "Memorials" for the special purpose of neutralizing the misstatements and spirit of Mr. Hogg's work, and also lets us know that the time is not yet come for the publication of other and more important matter calculated to do justice to the character of Percy Bysshe Shelley.

It is only natural to think that Lady Shelley is not the person to write the biography of the poet, whose relationship to her is such a close one. She would far more willingly leave the events of his troubled life forever unremembered. Indeed, when we find, that, in her long widowhood of thirty years, Mrs. Shelley shrank from the task of writing the life of her husband, we can the more easily understand why any member of his family, especially a lady, should be the most unfit to undertake the task. Nobody could expect Lady Shelley to enter into those painful explanations necessary to it. Accordingly, in the work before us, we do not find any light thrown on those places where a person would be most anxious to see it. Lady Shelley slurs over the undutiful boyhood of the poet and the terrible sternness of his Mirabeau-father. She merely glances across the first foolish marriage and the catastrophe that closed it, as a bird flies over an abyss. On such subjects she cannot set about contradicting anybody.

But it is an ungrateful task to go on speaking of short-comings in a case like this, where the hardest critic in the world must sympathize with the feelings of the author, whatever becomes of the book. And yet the book will be very welcome to every one who regards it as a feminine offering of tender admiration and grief laid upon the grave of departed genius. Though not exactly the sort of personal history one would wish for from another hand, it is still valuable, as furnishing very interesting matter for a future biography. We have in it several new letters of Shelley's, some letters of Godwin's, and others of Mrs. Shelley's, together with a number of touching extracts from the diary of the latter. There are also two papers from the poet's pen: one an "Address to Lord Ellenborough" in defence of a man punished for having published Paine's "Age of Reason," and another an "Essay on Christianity." In the first, with all a boy's enthusiasm, he opposes the high abstract logic of truth and toleration to the hard government policy which tries to keep a reckless kind of semi- civilization in order, and cannot bring itself to believe, that, as yet, the broad principle of license is the one that can serve the cosmogony best. In the next he rather surprises the reader by exhibiting himself as the eulogist and expounder of Jesus Christ,–but not after the manner of Saint Paul. No doubt, the secular and semi-pagan tone of this dissertation will jar against the orthodoxy of a great many readers,–to whom, however, it will be interesting as a literary curiosity. But it is meant to show the character of Shelley in a more amiable light than that in which it is contemplated by the generality of people.

To explain Percy Bysshe Shelley, by telling us he was inconsequent, absurd, and odd in his manners, is as futile as to explain him by saying he was a strange, wonderful genius, of the Platonic or Pythagorean order, always soaring above the atmosphere of common men. To call a man of genius an inspired idiot or an inspired oddity is an easy, but false way of interpreting him. The truth of Shelley's character may be found by a more matter-of-fact investigation. He was naturally of a feeble constitution from childhood, and not addicted to the amusements of stronger boys; hence he became shy, and, when bullied or flouted by the others, sensitive and irritable, and given to secret reading and study, instead of play with those "little fiends that scoffed incessantly." These habits gave him the name of an oddity, and what is called a "Miss Molly," and the persecution that followed only made him more recluse and speculative, and disgusted with the ways and feelings of others. He began to have thoughts beyond his years, and was happy to think he had, in these, a compensation for what he suffered from his schoolfellows. With his hermit habits grew naturally a strong egotistical vanity, which he could as little repress as the other youths could repress their muscular propensities to exercise; and hence his eagerness to set forth the threadbare heretical theories he had found among his books. For supporting these with an insolent show of importunity, he was turned away from college, and soon left his father's home, with his father's curse to bear him company. Had the baronet been in the way of a lettre de cachet, like Mirabeau's father, he would certainly have had Percy put into Newgate and kept there.

The malediction of the old man seems to have clung to Shelley's mind to the end, and made him rebellious against everything bearing the paternal name. He assailed the Father of the Hebrew theocracy with amazing bitterness, and joined Prometheus in cursing and dethroning Zeus, the Olympian usurper. With him, tyrant and father were synonymous, and he has drawn the old Cenci, in the play of that name, with the same fierce, unfilial pencil, dipped in blood and wormwood. Shelley was by nature, self-instruction, and inexperience of life, impatient and full of impulse; and the sharp and violent measures by which they attempted to reclaim him only exasperated him the more against everything respected by his opponents and persecutors. Genius is by nature aggressive or retaliatory; and the young poet, writhing and laughing hysterically, like Demogorgon, returned the scorn of society with a scorn, the deeper and loftier in the end, that it grew calm and became the abiding principle of a philosophic life. It was the act of his father which drove Shelley into such open rebellion against gods and men. Very probably, though he might have lived an infidel in religious matters, like tens of thousands of his fellows, he would not have written, or, at least, published, such shocking things, if his father had been more patient with a youth so organized. But parents have a right to show a terrible anger when thwarted by their children, and in this case the father too much resembled the son in wilful impetuosity of temper. Turned out of his first home, Shelley went wandering forth by land and sea,–a reed shaken by the wind, a restless outcast yearning for repose and human sympathy, and in this way encountering the questionable accidents of his troubled, unguarded life, and gathering all the feverish inspiration of his melancholy and unfamiliar poetry.

With a sense of physical infirmity or defect which shaped the sequestered philosophy of the Cowpers, the Bérangers, and others, the manlier minds of literature, including Byron himself, in some measure, Shelley felt he was not fit for the shock and hum of men and the greater or lesser legerdemain of life, and so turned shyly away to live and follow his plans and reveries apart, after the law of his being, violating in this way what may be called the common law of society, and meeting the fate of all nonconformists. He was slighted and ridiculed, and even suspected; for people in general, when they see a man go aside from the highway, maundering and talking to himself, think there must be a reason for it; they suppose him insane, or scornful, or meditating a murder,–in any case, one to be visited with hard thoughts; and thus baffled curiosity will grow uneasily into disgust, and into calumny, if not into some species of outrage,–and very naturally, after all; for man is, on the whole, made for society, and society has a sovereign right to take cognizance of him, his ways and his movements, as a matter of necessary surveillance.

The world will class men "in its coarse blacks and whites." Some mark Shelley with charcoal, others with chalk,–the former considering him a reprobate, the latter admiring him as a high-souled lover of human happiness and human liberty. But he was something of both together,–and would have been nothing without that worst part of him. He ran perversely counter to the lessons of his teachers, and acted in defiance of the regular opinions and habits of the world. He was too out-spoken, like all genius; whereas the world inculcates the high practical wisdom of a shut mouth and a secretive mind. Fontenelle, speaking according to the philosophy of the crowd, says, "A wise man, with his fist full of truths, would open only his little finger." Shelley opened his whole hand, in a fearless, unhappy manner; and was accordingly punished for ideas which multitudes entertain in a quiet way, saying nothing, and living in the odor of respectable opinion. With a mind that recoiled from anything like falsehood and injustice, he wanted prudence. And as, in the belief of the matter-of-fact Romans, no divinity is absent, if Prudentia be present, so it still seems that everything is wanting to a man, if he wants that. Shelley denied the commonly received Divinity, as all the world knows,–an Atheist of the most unpardonable stamp,–and has suffered in consequence; his life being considered a life of folly and vagary, and his punishment still enduring, as we may perceive from the tone and philosophy of his biographers, or rather his critics, who, not being able to comprehend such a simple savage, present his character as an oddity and a wonder,–an extravaganza that cannot be understood without some wall of the world's pattern and plastering to show it up against.

It is, to be sure, much easier and safer to regard Shelley's career in this way than to justify it, since the customs and opinions of the great majority must, after all, be the law and rule of the world. Shelley's apologist would be a bold man. Whether he shall ever have one is a question. At all events, he has not had a biographer as yet. His widow shrank from the task. Of those familiar friends of his, we can say that "no man's thought keeps the roadway better than theirs," and all to show how futile is the attempt to measure such a man with the footrule of the conventions. Shelley was a mutineer on board ship, and a deserter from the ranks; and he must, therefore, wait for a biographer, as other denounced and daring geniuses have waited for their audience or their epitaph.

CLARIAN'S PICTURE

A LEGEND OF NASSAU HALL

"Turbine raptus ingenii."–Scaliger[concluded.]

The next morning there was queer talk about Clarian. Mac and I stared at each other when we heard it at breakfast, but still kept our own counsel in silence. Some late walkers had met him in the moonlight, crossing the campus at full speed, hatless, dripping wet, and flying like a ghost.

"I tell you," said our informant, a good enough fellow, and one not prone to be violently startled, "he scared me, as he flitted past. His eyes were like saucers, his hair wet and streaming behind him, his face white as a chalk-mark on Professor Cosine's blackboard. Depend on it, that boy's either going mad or has got into some desperate scrape."

"Pshaw!" growled Mac, "you were drunk,–couldn't see straight."

"Mr. Innocence was returning from some assignation, I suspect", remarked Zoile.

"If he had been, you'd have encountered him, Mr. Zoile," said Mac, curtly.

But I noticed my chum did not like this new feature in the case.

After this, until the time of my receiving the lad's invitation, I neither saw nor had communication with Clarian, nor did any others of us. If he left his room, it was solely at night; he had his meals sent to him, under pretence of illness, and admitted no one, except his own servant. This fellow, Dennis, spoke of him as looking exceedingly feeble and ill; and also remarked that he had apparently not been to bed for some days, but was mixing colors, or painting, the whole time. I went to his door several times; but was invariably refused admittance, and told, kindly, but firmly, that he would not be interrupted. Mac also tried to see him, but in vain.

"I caught a glimpse of that boy's face at his window just now," said he, one day, coming in after recitation. "You may depend upon it, there's something terribly wrong. My God, I was horrified, Ned! Did you ever see any one drown? No? Well, I did once,–a woman. She fell overboard from a Chesapeake steamboat in which I was coming up the Bay, and sank just before they reached her. I shall never forget her looks as she came up the last time, turned her white, despairing, death-stricken face towards us, screamed a wild nightmare scream, and went down. Clarian's face was just like hers. Depend upon it, there's something wrong. What can we do?"

Nothing, indeed, save what we did,–wait, until that pleasant morning came round and brought me Clarian's note. I could scarcely brook the slow laziness with which the day dragged by, as if it knew its own beauty, and lingered to enjoy it. At last, however, the night came, the hour also, and punctually with it came Dr. Thorne, a kindly young physician, and a man of much promise, well- read, prompt, clear-headed, resourceful, and enthusiastically attached to his profession Mac tucked a volume of Shakspeare under his arm, and we made our way to Clarian's room forthwith. Here we found about a dozen students, all known to us intimately. They were seated close to one another, conversing in low tones, and betraying upon their faces quite an anxiety of expectation. The door of the bedroom was closed, the curtain was lowered, and the only light in the room came from a shaded lamp, which was placed upon a small table in the recess to the right of the picture.

"What is this for?" inquired Dr. Thorne, pointing to a sort of salver resting upon a low tripod directly in front of the picture.

"Where is Clarian?" asked I.

"He looks awful," someone began in a whisper, when the lad's feeble voice called out from the bedroom,–

"Is it Ned and Mac?"

The door was pulled open, and Clarian came towards us.

"I am glad to see you, my friends. Dr. Thorne, you are truly welcome. Pray, be seated. Mac, here is your place, you and your Shakspeare," said he, indicating the chair and table in the recess.

I had held out my hand to the lad, but he turned away without taking it, and began to adjust the cords that moved the curtain.

"The tripod, Dr. Thorne," said he, with a sickly smile, "is a–a mere fancy of mine,–childish,–but in the salver I shall burn some pyrotechnic preparations, while the picture is being exhibited, by way of substitute for daylight. Excuse me a moment," added he, as he went into the bedroom again.

"Blount," said Dr. Thorne, in my ear, "why have you permitted this? What ails that boy? If he is not cared for soon, he will go crazy. Hush!–here he comes,– keep your eye on him."

Then, as Clarian came out, and stood in the bedroom doorway, quite near me, I remarked the terrible change since I had last seen him. He leaned against the door-frame, as if too weak to support himself erect; and I saw that his knees shook, his hands jerked, and his mouth twitched in a continual nervous unrest. He had on a handsome robe de chambre of maroon velvet, which he seldom wore about college, though it was very becoming to him, its long skirts falling nearly to his feet, while its ample folds were gathered about his waist, and secured with cord and tassel. His feet were thrust into neat slippers, and his collar rolled over a flowing black cravat à la Corsaire. His long hair, which was just now longer than usual, was evenly parted in the middle, like a girl's, and, combed out straight, fell down to his shoulders on either side. All this care and neatness of dress made the contrast of his face stand out the more strikingly. Its pallor was ghastly: no other word conveys the idea of it. His lips kept asunder, as we see them sometimes in persons prostrated by long illness, and the nether one quivered incessantly, as did the smaller facial muscles near the mouth. His eyes were sunken and surrounded by livid circles, but they themselves seemed consuming with the dry and thirsty fire of fever: hot, red, staring, they glided ever to and fro with a snake-like motion, as uncertain, wild, and painful, in their unresting search, as those of a wounded and captive hawk. The same restlessness, approaching in violence the ceaseless spasmodic habit of a confirmed Chorea, betrayed itself in all his movements, particularly in a way he had of glancing over his shoulder with a stealthy look of apprehension, and the frequent starts and shivers that interrupted him when talking. His voice also was changed, and in every way he gave evidence not only of disease of mind and body, but of a nervous system shattered almost beyond hope of reaction and recovery. Trembling for him, I rose and attempted to speak with him aside, but he waived me off, saying, with that sickly smile which I had never before seen him wear,–