The Life and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Volume I Part 15

On 22d March (G.o.dwin has been begging again, but this time in behalf of his old a.s.sistant and amanuensis, Marshall)--

Marshall's proposal is one in which, however reluctantly, I must refuse to engage. It is that I should grant bills to the amount of his debts, which are to expire in thirty months.

On 15th April G.o.dwin writes on his own behalf--

The fact is I owe 400 on a similar score, beyond the 100 that I owed in the middle of 1815; and without clearing this, my mind will never be perfectly free for intellectual occupations. If this were done, I am in hopes that the produce of _Mandeville_, and the sensible improvement in the commercial transactions of Skinner Street would make me a free man, perhaps, for the rest of my life....

My life wears away in lingering sorrow at the endless delays that attend on this affair.... Once every two or three months I throw myself prostrate beneath the feet of Taylor of Norwich, and my other discounting friends, protesting that this is absolutely for the last time. Shall this ever have an end? Shall I ever be my own man again?

One can imagine how such a letter would work on his daughter's feelings.

Nor was Charles Clairmont backward about putting in his claims, although his modest little requests require, like gems, to be extracted carefully from the discursive raptures, the eloquent flights of fancy and poetic description in which they are embedded. In January he had written from Bagneres de Bigorre, where he was "acquiring the language"--

Sometimes I hardly dare believe, situated as I am, that I ought for a moment to nourish the feelings of which I am now going to talk to you; at other times I am so thoroughly convinced of their infinite utility with regard to the moral existence of a being with strong sensations, or at all events with regard to mine, that I fly to this subject as to a tranquillising medicine, which has the power of so arranging and calming every violent and illicit sensation of the soul as to spread over the frame a deep and delightful contentment, for such is the effect produced upon me by a contemplation of the perfect state of existence, the perfect state of social domestic happiness which I propose to myself. My life has. .h.i.therto been a tissue of irregularity, which I a.s.sure you I am little content to reflect upon.... I have been always neglectful of one of the most precious possessions which a young man can hold--of my character.... You will now see the object of this letter.... I desire strongly to marry, and to devote myself to the temperate, rational duties of human life.... I see, I confess, some objections to this step.... I am not forgetful of what I owe to G.o.dwin and my Mother, but we are in a manner entirely separated.... It is true my feelings towards my Mother are cold and inactive, but my attachment and respect for G.o.dwin are unalterable, and will remain so to the last moment of my existence.... The news of his death would be to me a stroke of the severest affliction; that of my own Mother would be no more than the sorrow occasioned by the loss of a common acquaintance.

... Unless every obstacle on the part of the object of my affection were laid aside, you may suppose I should not speak so decisively. She is perfectly acquainted with every circ.u.mstance respecting me, and we feel that we love and are suited to each other; we feel that we should be exquisitely happy in being devoted to each other.

... I feel that I could not offer myself to the family without a.s.suring them of my capability of commanding an annual sufficiency to support a little _menage_--that is to say, as near as I can obtain information, 2000 francs, or about 80.... Do I dream, my dear Sh.e.l.ley, when a gleam of gay hope gives me reason to doubt of the possibility of my scheme?... Pray lose no time in writing to me, and be as explicit as possible.

The following extract is from a letter to Mary, written in August (the matrimonial scheme is now quite forgotten)--

I will begin by telling you that I received 10 some days ago, minus the expenses.... I also received your letter, but not till after the money.... I am most extremely vexed that Sh.e.l.ley will not oblige me with a single word. It is now nearly six months that I have expected from him a letter about my future plans.

Do, my dear Mary, persuade him to talk with you about them; and if he always persists in remaining silent, I beg you will write for him, and ask him what he would be inclined to approve.... Had I a little fortune of 200 or 300 a year, nothing should ever tempt me to make an effort to increase this golden sufficiency....

Respecting money matters.... I still owe (on the score of my _pension_) nearly 15, this is all my debt here. Another month will acc.u.mulate before I can receive your answer, and you will judge of what will be necessary to me on the road, to whatever place I may be destined. I cannot spend less than 3s. 6d. per day.

If Papa's novel is finished before you write, I wish to G.o.d you would send it. I am now absolutely without money, but I have no occasion for any, except for washing and postage, and for such little necessaries I find no difficulty in borrowing a small sum.

If I knew Mamma's address, I should certainly write to her in France.

I have no heart to write to Skinner Street, for they will not answer my letters. Perhaps, now that this haughty woman is absent, I should obtain a letter. I think I shall make an effort with f.a.n.n.y. As for Clare, she has entirely forgotten that she has a brother in the world.... Tell me if G.o.dwin has been to visit you at Marlow; if you see f.a.n.n.y often; and all about the two Williams. What is Sh.e.l.ley writing?

Sh.e.l.ley, when this letter arrived, was writing _The Revolt of Islam_. To this poem, in spite of duns, sponges, and law's delays, his thoughts and time were consecrated during his first six months at Marlow; in spite, too, of his constant succession of guests; but society with him was not always a hindrance to poetic creation or intellectual work. Indeed, a congenial presence afforded him a kind of relief, a half-unconscious stimulus which yet was no serious interruption to thought, for it was powerless to recall him from his abstraction.

Mary's life at Marlow was very different from what it had been at Bishopsgate and Bath. Her duties as house-mistress and hostess as well as Sh.e.l.ley's companion and helpmeet left her not much time for reverie. But her regular habits of study and writing stood her in good stead.

_Frankenstein_ was completed and corrected before the end of May. It was offered to Murray, who, however, declined it, and was eventually published by Lackington.

The negotiations with publishers calling her up to town, she paid a visit to Skinner Street. Sh.e.l.ley accompanied her, but was obliged to return to Marlow almost immediately, and as Mrs. G.o.dwin also appears to have been absent, Mary stayed alone with her father in her old home. To him this was a pleasure.

"Such a visit," he had written to Sh.e.l.ley, "will tend to bring back years that are pa.s.sed, and make me young again. It will also operate to render us more familiar and intimate, meeting in this snug and quiet house, for such it appears to me, though I daresay you will lift up your hands, and wonder I can give it that appellation."

To Mary every room in the house must have been fraught with unspeakable a.s.sociations. Alone with the memories of those who were gone, of others who were alienated; conscious of the complete change in herself and transference of her sphere of sympathy, she must have felt, when Sh.e.l.ley left her, like a solitary wanderer in a land of shadows.

"I am very well here," she wrote, "but so intolerably restless that it is painful to sit still for five minutes. Pray write. I hear so little from Marlow that I can hardly believe that you and Willman live there."

Another train of mingled recollections was awakened by the fact of her chancing, one evening, to read through that third canto of _Childe Harold_ which Byron had written during their summer in Switzerland together.

Do you remember, Sh.e.l.ley, when you first read it to me one evening after returning from Diodati. The lake was before us, and the mighty Jura. That time is past, and this will also pa.s.s, when I may weep to read these words.... Death will at length come, and in the last moment all will be a dream.

What Mary felt was crystallised into expression by Sh.e.l.ley, not many months later--

The stream we gazed on then, rolled by, Its waves are unreturning; But we yet stand In a lone land, Like tombs to mark the memory Of hopes and fears, which fade and flee In the light of life's dim morning.

On the last day of May, Mary returned to Marlow, where the Hunts were making a long stay. Externally life went quietly on. The summer was hot and beautiful, and they pa.s.sed whole days in their boat or their garden, or in the woods. Their studies, as usual, were unremitting. Mary applied herself to the works of Tacitus, Buffon, Rousseau, and Gibbon. Sh.e.l.ley's reading at this time was princ.i.p.ally Greek: Homer, aeschylus, and Plato.

His poem was approaching completion. Mary, now that _Frankenstein_ was off her hands, busied herself in writing out the journal of their first travels. It was published, in December, as _Journal of a Six Weeks' Tour_, together with the descriptive letters from Geneva of 1816.

But her peace and Sh.e.l.ley's was threatened by an undercurrent of ominous disturbance which gained force every day.

Byron remained abroad. But Clare and Clare's baby remained with the Sh.e.l.leys. At Bath she had pa.s.sed as "Mrs." Clairmont, but now resumed her former style, while Alba was said to be the daughter of a friend in London, sent for her health into the country. As time, however, went by, and the infant still formed one of the Marlow household, curiosity, never long dormant, became aroused. Whose was this child? And if, as officious gossip was not slow to suggest, it was Clare's, then who was its father?

As month after month pa.s.sed without bringing any solution of this problem, the vilest reports arose concerning the supposed relations of the inhabitants of Albion House--false rumours that embittered the lives of Alba's generous protectors, but to which Sh.e.l.ley's unconventionality and unorthodox opinions, and the stigma attached to his name by the Chancery decree, gave a certain colour of probability, and which in part, though indirectly, conduced to his leaving England again,--as it proved, for ever.

Again and again did he write to Byron, pointing out with great gentleness and delicacy, but still in the plainest terms, the false situation in which they were placed with regard to friends and even to servants by their effort to keep Clare's secret; suggesting, almost entreating, that, if no permanent decision could be arrived at, some temporary arrangement should at least be made for Alba's boarding elsewhere. Byron, at this time plunged in dissipation at Venice, shelved or avoided the subject as long as he could. Clare was friendless and penniless, and her chances of ever earning an honest living depended on her power of keeping up appearances and preserving her character before the world. But the child was a remarkably beautiful, intelligent, and engaging creature, and its mother, impulsive, uncontrolled, and reckless, was at no trouble to conceal her devotion to it, regardless of consequences, and of the fact that these consequences had to be endured by others.

Those who had forfeited the world's kindness seemed, as such, to be the natural _proteges_ of Sh.e.l.ley; and even Mary, who, not long before, had summed up all her earthly wishes in two items,--"a garden, _et absentia Claire_,"--stood by her now in spite of all. But their letters make it perfectly evident that they were fully alive to the danger that threatened them, and that, though they willingly harboured the child until some safe and fitting asylum should be found for it, they had never contemplated its residing permanently with them.

To Mary Sh.e.l.ley this state of things brought one bitter personal grief and disappointment in the loss of her earliest friend, Isabel or Isobel Baxter, now married to Mr. David Booth, late brewer and subsequently schoolmaster at Newburgh-on-Tay, a man of shrewd and keen intellect, an immense local reputation for learning, and an estimation of his own gifts second to that of none of his admirers.

The Baxters, as has already been said, were people of independent mind, of broad and liberal views; full of reverence and admiration for the philosophical writings of G.o.dwin. Mary, in her extreme youth and inexperience, had quite expected that Isabel would have upheld her action when she first left her father's house with Sh.e.l.ley. In that she was disappointed, as was, after all, not surprising.

Now, however, her friend, whose heart must have been with her all along, would surely feel justified in following that heart's dictates, and would return to the familiar, affectionate friendship which survives so many differences of opinion. And her hope received an encouragement when, in August, Mr. Baxter, Isabel's father, accepted an invitation to stay at Marlow. He arrived on the 1st of September, full of doubts as to what sort of place he was coming to,--apprehensions which, after a very short intercourse with Sh.e.l.ley, were changed into surprise and delight.

But his visit was cut short by the birth, on the very next day, of Mary's little girl, Clara. He found it expedient to depart for a time, but returned later in the month for a longer stay.

This second visit more than confirmed his first impression, and he wrote to his daughter in warm, nay, enthusiastic praise of Sh.e.l.ley, against whom Isabel was, not unnaturally, much prejudiced, so much so, it seems, as to blind her even to the merits of his writings.

After a warm panegyric of Sh.e.l.ley as

A being of rare genius and talent, of truly republican frugality and plainness of manners, and of a soundness of principle and delicacy of moral tact that might put to shame (if shame they had) many of his detractors,--and withal so amiable that you have only to be half an hour in his company to convince you that there is not an atom of malevolence in his whole composition.

Mr. Baxter proceeds--

Is there any wonder that I should become attached to such a man, holding out the hand of kindness and friendship towards me? Certainly not. Your praise of his book[25] put me in mind of what Pope says of Addison--

d.a.m.n with faint praise; a.s.sent with civil leer, And, without sneering, others teach to sneer.

[You say] "some parts appear to be well written, but the arguments appear to me to be neither new nor very well managed." After Hume such a publication is quite puerile! As to the arguments not being new, it would be a wonder indeed if any new arguments could be adduced in a controversy which has been carried on almost since ever letters were known. As to their not being well managed, I should be happy if you would condescend on the particular instances of their being ill managed; it was the first of Sh.e.l.ley's works I had read. I read it with the notion that it _could_ only contain silly, crude, undigested and puerile remarks on a worn-out subject; and yet I was unable to discover any of that want of management which you complain of; but, G.o.d help me, I thought I saw in it everything that was opposite. As to its being puerile to write on such a subject after David Hume, I by no means think that he has exhausted the subject. I think rather that he has only proposed it--thrown it out, as it were, for a matter of discussion to others who might come after him, and write in a less bigoted, more liberal, and more enlightened age than the one he lived in. Think only how many great men's labours we should decree to be puerile if we were to hold everything puerile that has been written on this subject since the days of Hume! Indeed, my dear, the remark altogether savours more of the envy and illiberality of one jealous of his talents than the frankness and candour characteristic of my Isobel. Think, my dear, think for a moment what you would have said of this work had it come from Robert,[26] who is as old as Sh.e.l.ley was when he wrote it, or had it come from me, or even from----O! I must not say David:[27] he, to be sure, is far above any such puerility.

Her father's letter made Isabel waver, but in vain. It had no effect on Mr. Booth, who had been at the trouble of collecting and believing all the scandals about Alba, or "Miss Auburn," as she seems to have been called.

He was not one to be bia.s.sed by personal feelings or beguiled by fair appearances, in the face of stubborn, unaccountable facts. He preferred to take the facts and draw his own inference--an inference which apparently seemed to him no improbable one.

For a long time nothing decisive was said or done, but while the fate of her early friendship hung in the balances, Mary's anxiety for some settlement about Alba became almost intolerable to her, weighing on her spirits, and helping, with other depressing causes, to r.e.t.a.r.d her restoration to health.

On the 19th of September she summed up in her journal the heads of the seventeen days after Clara's birth during which she had written nothing.

I am confined Tuesday, 2d. Read _Rhoda_, Pastor's _Fireside_, _Missionary_, _Wild Irish Girl_, _The Anaconda_, _Glenarvon_, first volume of Percy's _Northern Antiquities_. Bargain with Lackington concerning _Frankenstein_.

Letter from Albe (Byron). An unamiable letter from G.o.dwin about Mrs.

G.o.dwin's visits. Mr. Baxter returns to town. Thursday, 4th, Sh.e.l.ley writes his poem; his health declines. Friday, 19th, Hunts arrive.