Home Life of Great Authors Part 7

"But in all, the recollections of bitterness, and more especially of recent and more home desolation, which must accompany one through life, have preyed upon me here; and neither the music of the shepherd, the crashing of the avalanche, or the torrent, the mountain, the glacier, the forest, or the cloud, have for one moment lightened the weight upon my heart, or enabled me to lose my own wretched ident.i.ty in the majesty, and the power, and the glory around, above, and beneath me."

The close of Byron's life, in Greece, seems to have been one of peculiar desolation. There is something really tragic in the utter loneliness of such a death-bed. Years before, he had written concerning his death:--

"When time or soon or late shall bring The dreamless sleep that lulls the dead, Oblivion! may thy languid wing Wave gently o'er my dying bed.

"No band of friends or heirs be there To weep, or wish the coming blow; No maiden with dishevelled hair To feel, or feign, decorous woe.

"But silent let me sink to earth, With no officious mourners near; I would not mar one hour of rest Or startle friendship with a tear."

Never was wish more literally fulfilled than this. There were none but servants about him in his last hours:--

"In all these attendants," says Parry, "there was an over-officiousness of zeal; but as they could not understand each other's language their zeal only added to the confusion. This circ.u.mstance, and the want of common necessaries, made Byron's apartment such a picture at distress and even anguish during the last two or three days of his life as never before beheld, and have no wish to witness again."

His remains were taken to England and interred in the family vault in the Church of Hucknall. His poems are his imperishable monument.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Sh.e.l.lEY.

The beautiful face of Sh.e.l.ley is one that is familiar to all students of literary biography, and contends with that of Byron for the distinction of being the handsomest among the men of letters of his day. Burns was also a picture of manly beauty, whose features have long been familiar in engravings; but Byron and Sh.e.l.ley look the ideal poet far more than their st.u.r.dier Scottish brother. The face of Schiller was also one of great charm, and Tennyson and Longfellow in their youth were also beautiful; but the world is more familiar with the representations of their later years, and has almost forgotten the alluring eyes and the flowing locks of the youthful bards.

Sh.e.l.ley always had a girlish look, caused perhaps by a feeble const.i.tution, and he suffered much from poor health, which added to the delicacy of his face. But there was a wonderful charm about his countenance even in childhood, and his eyes seemed like wells into which one might fall. There was rare sweetness in his smile, too. He was a tall man and very slender, with a certain squareness of shoulder, and great bodily litheness and activity. He had an oval face and delicate features. His forehead was high. His fine dark-brown hair disposed itself in beautiful curls over his brow and around the back of his neck.

The eyes were brown, and the coloring of his face as soft as that of a girl's, in youth, though he bronzed somewhat during his life in Italy.

His countenance changed with every pa.s.sing emotion; his usual look was earnest, but when joyful he was very bright and animated in expression.

When sad there was something peculiarly touching in his face, and there was sometimes expressed in his look a mournful weariness of everything.

But there was something n.o.ble and commanding in his aspect through all changes, something hinting of his high and n.o.ble birth, as well as of his genius. He had a peculiar voice, not powerful, but musical and expressive, and fine agreeable manners when once the shyness of youth had worn off.

That youth was a period of great unhappiness in many ways. He was irritable and sensitive, and much given to reading and brooding, at which the other children--or, as he called them "the little fiends--scoffed incessantly." He had thoughts beyond his years, and found in these his greatest happiness. He was impatient and full of impulse, with a strong dash of egotism, like most men of genius.

That he was eccentric beyond the usual eccentricities of genius is known to all the world. That he set out fully determined to live the ideal life and to reform the world, is as well known; also, that he failed in both these attempts,--partly through the limitations of his own nature, and partly that the contract was too large, even for a man of his undoubted genius.

Sh.e.l.ley was born in the County of Suss.e.x, on the 4th of August, 1792.

His most characteristic childish amus.e.m.e.nt seems to have been the making of chemical experiments; and his brothers and sisters were often terrified at the experiments in electricity which he tried upon them. He was also fond of making the children personate spirits or fiends, while he burned some inflammable liquid.

He was full of cheerful fun, and had all the comic vein so agreeable in a household. His benevolent impulses displayed themselves in his earliest childhood in his wish to educate some child; and he talked seriously of purchasing a little girl for that purpose, and actually entered into negotiations to that effect with a tumbler who came to the back door. His hatred of tyranny also showed itself at the earliest age, in rebellion against the rule of the old schoolmistress who educated his sisters.

He was exceedingly precocious, and was thus sent to Eton at an age much younger than other boys. He was perhaps a little proud of his birth and breeding; but it was probably more from his inborn hatred of tyranny than from the former reason, that he utterly refused to "f.a.g" for the older boys, and in this way got himself at once into trouble in the school. Neither the cruel vituperation of his fellows nor menaces of punishment upon the part of his superiors could bend his will to an obedience which could only be yielded at the expense of self-respect. He was soon withdrawn from Eton, and was afterwards sent to Oxford. Here his first great enthusiasm was for chemistry; and the appearance of his room is thus described by a fellow-student:--

"Books, boots, papers, shoes, philosophical instruments, clothes, pistols, linen, crockery, ammunition, and phials innumerable, with money, stockings, paints, crucibles, bags, and boxes, were scattered on the floor and in every place; as if the young chemist, in order to a.n.a.lyze the mystery of creation, had endeavored first to reconstruct the primeval chaos. The tables, and especially the carpet, were already stained with large spots of various hues, which frequently proclaimed the agency of fire. An electrical machine, an air-pump, the galvanic trough, a solar microscope, and large gla.s.s jars were conspicuous amidst the ma.s.s of matter. More than one hole in the carpet could elucidate the ultimate phenomena of combustion,--especially a formidable aperture in the middle of the room, where the floor had also been burned by spontaneous combustion; and the horrible wound was speedily enlarged by rents,--for the philosopher as he hastily crossed the room in pursuit of truth, was frequently caught in it by the foot."

No student ever read more a.s.siduously than he; and one of his chums said to him, after he had literally read all day:--

"If I read as long as you read, Sh.e.l.ley, my hair and my teeth would be strewed about on the floor, and my eyes would slip down into my waistcoat pockets."

It was only by attracting his attention by some extravagance that he could be drawn away from his books. He seldom stopped to take a regular meal, but would have his pockets stuffed with bread, from which he ate from time to time, anywhere he chanced to be. When he was walking in London he would suddenly run into a baker's shop, purchase a supply, and breaking a loaf, offer half of it to his companion; if it was refused he would wonder that his friend did not like bread, and could scarcely appreciate the joke when they laughed at him for devouring two or three pounds of dry bread in the streets.

Very early in life he began to have decided opinions upon religious topics; and for some of his so-called atheistic tendencies, embodied in his writings, he was expelled from Oxford at the age of seventeen, without a word of friendly remonstrance upon the part of the authorities, or any attempt whatever to counteract the errors which he had imbibed from the reading of French philosophy. We can scarcely believe it at this day, but it was true.

"At seventeen," says Mrs. Sh.e.l.ley, "fragile in health and frame, of the purest habits in morals, full of devoted generosity and universal kindness, glowing with ardor to attain wisdom, resolved at every personal sacrifice to do right, burning with a desire for affection and sympathy, he was treated as a reprobate, cast forth as a criminal."

Even his father cast him off on account of his impious opinions, and added his curse; and had he been in the way of procuring a _lettre de cachet_, like Mirabeau's father, he would certainly have sent him to Newgate and kept him there. As it was, all his friends deserted him, and he lived in lodgings in London, in a very irregular manner, for some time. Even his cousin Harriet Grove, with whom he had been in love in his boyish way for a long time, gave him up, and soon after married another. The affair was not a serious one upon the part of either; but it cost Sh.e.l.ley some tears at the time. He soon consoled himself, however, with a schoolmate of his sisters whom he sometimes met when he went to visit them. Harriet Westbrook was empowered by his sisters to convey to Percy such sums of money as they could gather for him; for his father had refused to a.s.sist him, and he was in absolute want at this time. She appeared to Sh.e.l.ley in the guise of a ministering angel, and his imagination at once took fire. She was a comely, pleasing, amiable, ordinary girl, who felt herself oppressed because obliged to go to school, and excited Sh.e.l.ley's sympathy by appearing unhappy. He soon became entangled with her and her sister, who was older, and who is accused of furthering the intrigue out of ambition, thinking that the son of a baronet must be a great match. He writes to a friend in May, 1811:--

"You will perhaps see me before you can answer this; perhaps not; Heaven knows. I shall certainly come to York, but Harriet Westbrook will decide whether now or in three weeks. Her father has persecuted her in a most horrible way by endeavoring to compel her to go to school. She asked my advice; resistance was the answer,--at the same time that I essayed to mollify Mr. W. in vain.

And in consequence of my advice, _she_ has thrown herself upon _my_ protection."

The whole history of Sh.e.l.ley's courtship of Harriet--or of her courtship of him, as many of his friends put it--will probably never be written.

It seems to have been promoted by others quite as much as by themselves.

That her father was not averse to her marriage with the eldest son of a baronet may be taken for granted, and Sh.e.l.ley was the very man to be duped by designing parties; of this there can be no doubt. He was but nineteen years old, and she but sixteen, when they eloped,--of which proceeding there does not seem to have been any especial need,--and proceeded to Edinburgh, where they were married. By the time they reached Edinburgh their money was gone, and Sh.e.l.ley laid the case before his landlord, and asked him to advance money enough so that they might be married. To this the landlord consented, and the ceremony was performed. But the landlord, it appears, presumed somewhat upon the aid he had rendered, and in the evening, when Sh.e.l.ley and his bride were alone together, he knocked at the door and told them it was customary there for the guests to come in, in the middle of the night, and wash the bride with whiskey.

"I immediately," says Sh.e.l.ley, "caught up my brace of pistols, and pointing them both at him, said to him, 'I have had enough of your impertinence; if you give me any more of it I will blow your brains out;' on which he ran or rather tumbled downstairs, and I bolted the doors."

Even before the honeymoon was over, Harriet's sister Eliza, the evil genius of the pair, appeared upon the scene. The friend who was with them at the time thus describes her advent:--

"The house lay, as it were, under an interdict; all our accustomed occupations were suspended; study was forbidden; reading was injurious; to read aloud might terminate fatally. To go abroad was death; to stay at home the grave. Bysshe became nothing; I of course much less than nothing,--a negative quant.i.ty of a very high figure."

That Harriet already had peculiar notions of her own was soon evident.

The same friend writes:--

"'What do you think of suicide?' said Harriet one day. 'Did you ever think of destroying yourself?' It was a puzzling question, for indeed the thought had never entered my head. 'What do you think of matricide, of high treason, of rick-burning? Did you ever think of killing any one? of murdering your mother? or setting rick-yards on fire?' I replied."

But Harriet often discoursed at great length, in a calm, resolute manner, of her purpose of killing herself some day or other. Of their after-housekeeping in London lodgings Hogg writes:--

"Our dinners therefore were constructive, a dumb show, a mere empty idle ceremony; our only resource against absolute starvation was tea. Penny-buns were our a.s.sured resource. The survivors of those days of peril and hardship are indebted for their existence to the humane interposition and succor of penny-buns. A shilling's worth of penny-buns for tea. If the purchase was intrusted to the maid, she got such buns as none could believe to have been made on earth, proving thereby incontestably that the girl had some direct communication with the infernal regions, where they alone could have been procured."

The married life was on the whole, when not a roaring farce, almost a tragedy. Harriet's sister was, like the poor, always with them. Sh.e.l.ley grew to hate her, and tried in every way to be delivered from her presence, but in vain. Harriet would not live without her, and paid little attention to anybody else when she was present. Two children were born to them, but even the children Sh.e.l.ley was not permitted to enjoy without the constant supervision of Eliza. He became nearly frantic from the constant annoyance, and finally a separation came about between the ill-mated pair. The women themselves became tired of the moping and inefficient youth, who still remained poor and unsettled, with a father desperately healthy and inexorable. They grew tired and went away,--the wife, like Lady Byron, refusing to go back to such an aimless, rhapsodizing husband. And in truth, the hardship of living with such a man as Sh.e.l.ley, for a woman like Harriet, must have been very great. It is easy to understand how a limited nature like hers should be worn out by the exaction and impracticability of one like Sh.e.l.ley; for to her, most impracticable would seem his lofty and ideal requirements. The parting was not unfriendly, and Sh.e.l.ley always spoke of her with deep kindness and pity, and she continued to write to him for some time after he had formed his connection with Mary G.o.dwin, of which she did not seem to disapprove. He had found a sort of comfort in his intercourse with Mary from his first acquaintance with her, and she was probably the first woman he had ever known who in any way understood or appreciated him. Some lines have been given in the "Relics," written to her at this time, which run thus:--

"Upon my heart thy accents sweet Of peace and pity fell like dew On flowers half-dead. . . .

"We are not happy, sweet! our state Is strange and full of doubt and fear; More need of words that ills abate;-- Reserve or censure come not near Our sacred friendship, lest there be No solace left for thee or me."

Sh.e.l.ley and Mary seem to have been very happy with each other from the first, although they felt the keenest sorrow at his being deprived by the Court of Chancery of the guardianship of his children, on the alleged grounds of his atheism, and although they were inexpressibly pained and shocked at the suicide of Harriet, which occurred about two years after the separation.

Her death seems to have had no immediate connection with any act of Sh.e.l.ley's, but he mourned over it with great bitterness to the end of his life. He married Mary in a legal manner soon after Harriet's death, and of course a most violent storm of detraction and denunciation burst upon his head. He soon retired to Italy, where he first met Byron, and he pa.s.sed nearly all the rest of his life there. Poor Harriet was only twenty-two at the time of her tragic death. Whatever may have been the errors of her life, she had suffered much in their expiation. After her return to her father's house it appears that she was treated with unkindness, and fell into some irregularities of life,--how great, remains still a disputed point. But no one charges anything against her up to the time of her separation from Sh.e.l.ley, except that she was almost as foolish and impracticable as himself.

Sh.e.l.ley's fancy for her was that of a mere boy, and his friend Mr.

Peac.o.c.k thus describes the conflict of his feelings after meeting Mary G.o.dwin:--

"Between his old feelings towards Harriet, from whom he was not then separated, and his new pa.s.sion for Mary, he showed in his looks, in his gestures, in his speech, the state of a mind suffering, like a little kingdom, the nature of an insurrection.

His eyes were bloodshot, his hair and dress disordered. He frequently repeated the lines from Sophocles,--

'Man's happiest lot is not to be; And when we tread life's th.o.r.n.y steep, Most blest are they who, earliest free, Descend to death's eternal sleep.'"