The Radicalism of Shelley and Its Sources Part 2

Caleb Williams turned all these particulars over and over in his mind and began to suspect that Falkland was the real murderer of Tyrrel. His curiosity became an overpowering pa.s.sion which was ultimately the cause of all his misfortunes. Falkland realizes that his secretary is convinced of his guilt, so he determines to silence him forever. He calls Williams into his room and confesses his guilt to him. Falkland said that he allowed the innocent Hawkinses to die because he could not sacrifice his fame. He would leave behind him a spotless and ill.u.s.trious name even should it be at the expense of the death and misery of others. He then told Caleb that if ever an unguarded word escaped from his lips he would pay for it by his death or worse. This secret was a constant source of torment to Williams.

Every trifling incident made Falkland suspicious and consequently increased the misery of his secretary. At length Caleb flees, but is taken back, falsely accused of theft, and cast into prison. In all this Falkland contrives to manage things so as to increase his reputation for benevolence. Williams is made to appear an ungrateful wretch. The impotence of the law to secure justice to the weak is only equalled by the wretchedness of the prisons to which they are condemned. "Thank G.o.d,"

exclaims the Englishman, "we have no Bastile! Thank G.o.d with us no man can be punished without a crime!" "Unthinking wretch!" writes G.o.dwin, "Is that a country of liberty, where thousands languish in dungeons and fetters? Go, go, ignorant fool! and visit the scenes of our prisons.

Witness their unwholesomeness, their filth, the tyranny of their governors, the misery of their inmates! After that show me the man shameless enough to triumph, and say 'England has no Bastile!' Is there any charge so frivolous, upon which men are not consigned to those detested abodes? Is there any villainy that is not practiced by justices and prosecutors, etc.?"

Williams tries to escape from prison and is caught in the attempt. He was then treated more cruelly than ever. He made another attempt to escape and was successful. The rest of the novel is taken up with an account of all that Williams suffered in his endeavors to keep out of the reach of the law. He falls in with a band of outlaws whose rude natural virtues are contrasted with the meanness and corruption of the officers of the law. He is at last caught, but Falkland, to make himself appear magnanimous, does not press the charge against Williams. Instead he persecutes Caleb by poisoning people's minds against him. Everywhere Caleb goes he is followed by an emissary of Falkland who contrives to convince people that Williams is an ungrateful scoundrel. He can stand the persecution no longer and so determines to accuse Falkland of the murder of Tyrrel. Williams does this in a way to carry conviction to his hearers. Falkland finally breaks down, throws himself into Williams' arms, saying, "All my prospects are concluded. All that I most ardently desired is forever frustrated. I have spent a life of the basest cruelty to cover one act of momentary vice, and to protect myself against the prejudice of my species.... And now (turning to the magistrates) do with me as you please. If, however, you wish to punish me, you must be speedy in your justice; for, as reputation was the blood that warmed my heart, so I feel that death and infamy must seize me together." He survived this event but three days. "A n.o.bler spirit than Falkland's," G.o.dwin writes, "lived not among the sons of men. Thy intellectual powers were truly sublime, and thy bosom burned with a G.o.dlike ambition. But of what use are talents and sentiments in the corrupt wilderness of human society? It is a rank and rotten soil, from which every finer shrub draws poison as it grows. Falkland! thou enteredst upon thy career with the purest and most laudable intentions. But thou imbibest the poison of chivalry with thy earliest youth; and the base and low-minded envy that met thee on thy return to thy native seats, operated with this poison to hurry thee into madness...." All these evils flow from Falkland's standard of morals--and his is the aristocratic, traditional one. He is the victim of the false ideal of chivalry. The errors of Falkland, Sh.e.l.ley writes, "sprang from a high though perverted conception of human nature, from a powerful sympathy with his species and from a temper, which led him to believe that the very reputation of excellence should walk among mankind unquestioned and una.s.sailed."

Protests against this condition of affairs were not wanting, it is true, but they did not influence men to any great extent. Cowper, for example, criticizes most severely the luxury and vices of his age.

Rank abundance breeds In gross and pampered cities, sloth and l.u.s.t And wantonness and gluttonous excess.

He deplores the corruption in church and state, and pleads for a return to religion. In the _Progress of Error_ he pictures Occidius as

A ca.s.sock'd huntsman and a fiddling priest.

Himself a wanderer from the narrow way, His silly sheep, what wonder if they stray.

Although he lashes the follies of his time in _The Task_, _Table Talk_, and _Expostulation_, still he does not attack the inst.i.tutions of his country with the vehemence characteristic of later writers. His poems are a mild expression of the revolutionary spirit that was then gathering strength.

At a very early age Sh.e.l.ley showed signs of hatred for existing inst.i.tutions. These became more p.r.o.nounced as he grew older, until they finally blazed forth in _Queen Mab_ in 1813. This poem is considered by some to be merely a declamatory pamphlet in verse. Sh.e.l.ley himself described it at one time as "villainous trash." Like a true radical he gathers up all the evils of society, its crimes, misery, and oppression, and feels them so keenly that he makes them part of his own being. This collected lightning he discharged in one awful flash in _Queen Mab_.

The first two parts of this poem bear a striking resemblance to Volney's _Les Ruines_.[25] In _Queen Mab_ a fairy descends and takes up Ianthe's soul to heaven that she may see how to accomplish the great end for which she lives, and that she may taste that peace which in the end all life will share. Ianthe merited this boon because she vanquished earth's pride and meanness and burst "the icy chains of custom." Volney's traveler is likewise disengaged from his body and conveyed to the upper regions by a Genius. Many consolations await him there as a reward for his unselfishness and desires for the happiness of mankind. The earth is plainly visible to both Volney's traveler and Sh.e.l.ley's spirit, Ianthe, and its thronging thousands seem like an ant-hill's citizens. Volney's traveler sees but a few remains of the hundred cities which once flourished in Syria. All this destruction was caused by cupidity. In the same way the Spirit of Ianthe finds that from England's fertile fields to the burning plains where Libyan monsters dwell--

Thou canst not find one spot Whereon no city stood.--_Canto II._

Ianthe thanks the fairy for this vision of the past and says that from it she will glean a warning for the future

So that man May profit by his errors and derive Experience from his folly.

Volney's traveler wonders that past experience has not taught mankind a lesson, and that destruction is not a thing of the past. The Spirit, in _Queen Mab_, is shown the miserable life that kings live. They have no peace of mind; even their "slumbers are but varied agonies." They are heartless wretches whose ears are deaf to the shrieks of penury. The fairy says that kings and parasites arose--

From vice, black loathsome vice: From rapine, madness, treachery, and wrong.

This is somewhat stronger than Volney's dictum that paternal tyranny laid the foundations of political despotism. Canto IV of _Queen Mab_ contains a description of the horrors of war. In _Les Ruines_ there is an account of the war between Russia and Turkey. Both attribute this horrible evil to cupidity, "the daughter and companion of ignorance." Volney's traveler is then vouchsafed a glimpse of the "new age" when Equality, Liberty, and Justice will reign supreme. The final chapters of _Les Ruines_ describe a disputation between the doctors of different religions, which ends in convincing the people that all religions are false. The ministers of the various sects contradict and refute one another, opposing revelations to revelations and miracles to miracles, until they render it evident that they are all deceived or deceivers. Man himself is to blame for having been duped. Religion exists because man is superst.i.tious and tolerates the imposition of priests. "Thus, agitated by their own pa.s.sions, men, whether in their individual capacity, or as collective bodies, always rapacious and improvident pa.s.sing from tyranny to slavery, from pride to abjectness, from presumption to despair, have been themselves the eternal instruments of their misfortunes."[26] In the notes to _Queen Mab_, Sh.e.l.ley says that as ignorance of nature gave birth to G.o.ds the knowledge of nature is calculated to destroy them.

But now contempt is mocking thy gray hairs; Thou art descending to the darksome grave Unhonored and unpitied, but by those Whose pride is pa.s.sing by like thine.

And sheds like thine a glare that fades before the sun Of Truth, and shines but in the dreadful night That long has lowered above the ruined world.[27]

The third part of _Queen Mab_ contains a glowing picture of the Golden Age--of the world as it will be, when reason will be the sole guide of men. For this Sh.e.l.ley is indebted mainly to G.o.dwin's _Political Justice_.

For his denunciation of the professions Sh.e.l.ley is indebted to the Essay on "Trades and Professions" in G.o.dwin's _Enquirer_. With regard to commerce, G.o.dwin says that the introduction of barter and sale into society was followed by vice and misery. "Barter and sale being once introduced, the invention of a circulating medium in the precious metals gave solidity to the evil, and afforded a field upon which for the rapacity and selfishness of man to develop all their refinements."[28]

Sh.e.l.ley says:

Commerce has set the mark of selfishness The signet of its all-enslaving power Upon a shining ore, and called it gold.[29]

G.o.dwin expresses his opinion of merchants as follows: "There is no being on the face of the earth with a heart more thoroughly purged from every remnant of the weakness of benevolence and sympathy."[30]

And Sh.e.l.ley writes:

Commerce! beneath whose poison-breathing shade No solitary virtue dares to spring.

Sh.e.l.ley says that soldiers--

... are the hired bravos who defend The tyrant's throne--the bullies of his fear: These are the sinks and channels of worst vice, The refuse of society, the dregs Of all that is most vile, etc.

His note on this pa.s.sage was taken bodily from Essay V of G.o.dwin's _Enquirer_. With regard to clergymen, Sh.e.l.ley expresses his opinion thus:

Then grave and h.o.a.ry-headed hypocrites Without a hope, a pa.s.sion, or a love Who, through a life of luxury and lies Have crept by flattery to the seats of power Support the system whence their honors flow

G.o.dwin's verdict is not so severe. "Clergymen," he says, "are timid in enquiry, prejudiced in opinion, cold, formal, the slave of what other men may think of them, rude, dictatorial, impatient of contradiction, harsh in their censures, and illiberal in their judgments."

_Queen Mab_ then is a fierce diatribe against existing inst.i.tutions. It contains very little constructive philosophy. What value has it for mankind? Does it serve any purpose apart from giving pleasure to the aesthetic faculties? It a.s.suredly does. It awakens the social conscience.

The first step for the sinner on the road to conversion is to try to realize the sinful state of his soul. The same is true of a nation in need of reform. Unless its shortcomings are vividly brought home to it, reformation will never take place. To do this was and still is the work of _Queen Mab_. It laid bare the weaknesses of State and Church; it engendered the spirit of compa.s.sion and thus paved the way for reform.

CHAPTER II

VIEWS ON MARRIAGE AND LOVE

In September, 1813, Sh.e.l.ley wrote a sonnet, already quoted, to Ianthe, his first child, in which he says that the babe was dear to him not only for its own sweet sake, but for the mother's, and that the mother had grown dearer to him for the babe's. Hogg informs us, however, that about this time the ardor of Sh.e.l.ley's affection for his wife was beginning to cool.

It is scarcely correct to speak of the ardor of his affection, for it may be doubted that he ever loved Harriet very ardently. If he had been seriously in love with his wife, he would not have written Miss. .h.i.tchener two months after his marriage that he loved her "more than any relation,"

and that she was the sister of his soul.[31] However this may be, it is certain that in 1814 Sh.e.l.ley and his wife did not get along well together.

Harriet was beautiful and amiable, and adopted in a somewhat parrot-like manner the views of her husband. As she grew older she no doubt developed tastes more in keeping with the conventions of that society which Sh.e.l.ley detested. Professor Dowden suggests that motherhood produced in her character a change that did not harmonize with her husband's idealism. She was no longer an ardent schoolgirl, but a woman who has found out that one must grapple with the realities of life in some way more practical than the one hitherto followed. Her sister urged her to look for the style and elegance suitable to the wife of a prospective baronet. This was repugnant to Sh.e.l.ley's republican simplicity. "I have often thought," Peac.o.c.k writes, "that, if Harriet had nursed her own child, and if the sister had not lived with them, the link of their married life would not have been so readily broken." Harriet sympathized less and less with her husband's aspirations, and as a consequence Sh.e.l.ley turned to other women for the encouragement and inspiration which he once got from his wife. He spent too much of his time in the company of the Newtons, Boinvilles, and Turners to render possible the retention of his wife's affections. On March 16, 1814, Sh.e.l.ley wrote a letter to Hogg, which plainly shows that he found no happiness in his home. "I have been staying with Mrs.

Boinville for the last month; I have escaped, in the society of all that friendship and philosophy combine, from the dismaying solitude of myself.... I have sunk into a premature old age of exhaustion.... Eliza is still with us--not here!--but (with his wife) ... I certainly hate her with all my heart and soul." Sh.e.l.ley's second marriage in St. George's Church, on March 22, does not throw any light on the relations that existed between himself and his wife. They celebrated this second ceremony simply to dispel all doubts concerning the validity of the first one in Edinburgh. On April 18, Mrs. Boinville wrote to Hogg that Sh.e.l.ley was at her house, that Harriet had gone to town (presumably to her father's), and that Eliza was living at Southampton. J. C. Jeafferson says that it was Sh.e.l.ley who deserted Harriet and not Harriet, Sh.e.l.ley. According to this biographer, Sh.e.l.ley left her at Binfield on May 18, 1814.[32] Sh.e.l.ley still hoped to regain his wife's love, and in some verses inscribed, "To Harriet, 1814," he appeals pathetically for her affection. Harriet had become cold and proud, and refused to meet his advances toward a reconciliation. Her pride, Sh.e.l.ley believed, was incompatible with virtue.

When he found that he had "clasped a shadow," his anguish, owing to his great sensitiveness, was extreme. Other men put up with their wives'

imperfections, and why could not Sh.e.l.ley have done the same? It must be remembered, though, that these men have other interests to occupy their thoughts, and other friends to give them the sympathy and love denied them at home. This was not the case with Sh.e.l.ley. He had few friends and many enemies. It should not surprise us then to find him s.n.a.t.c.hing at the first vision "which promised him the longed-for boon of human love." This vision appeared to him in the person of Mary G.o.dwin.

A letter from Harriet to Hookham, dated July 7, shows that she was anxious to be with her husband again. But the time for reconciliation had pa.s.sed.

Whenever Sh.e.l.ley hated or loved anybody, he did so intensely. Everybody was either an angel or a devil; and Harriet had ceased to be an angel.

"Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds." Dowden says Sh.e.l.ley persuaded himself that Harriet was false to him and had given her heart to a Mr. Ryan. There is no ground for the charge of unfaithfulness, as Peac.o.c.k, Thornton Hunt, and Trelawny bear testimony concerning her innocence.

Sh.e.l.ley believed that Harriet had ceased to love him, and that he was consequently free to contract a union with another. He puts forth this doctrine in the notes to _Queen Mab_. "A husband and wife ought to continue so long united as they love each other.... There is nothing immoral in this separation.... The conviction that wedlock is indissoluble holds out the strongest of all temptations to the perverse....

Prost.i.tution is the legitimate offspring of marriage." He considered marriage a useless inst.i.tution, and expressed this view in _St. Irvyne_.

"Say, Eloise, do not you think it an insult to two souls, united to each other in the irrefragable covenants of love and congeniality, to promise in the sight of a Being whom they know not, that fidelity which is certain otherwise." He does not think that promiscuous intercourse will follow the abolition of marriage. Love, and not money, honors, or convenience will be the bond of these unions when marriage is abolished, and this will result in more faithfulness than obtains at present. "The parties having acted upon selection are not likely to forget this selection when the interview is over."[33] In his review of Hogg's _Memoirs of Prince Alexy Haimatoff_, Sh.e.l.ley regards with horror the recommendation of the tutor to Alexy to indulge in promiscuous intercourse. "It is our duty to protest against so pernicious and disgusting an opinion." In a letter to Hogg, written after the latter's attempt to seduce Harriet, we find the following: "But do not love one (Harriet) who can not return it, who if she could, ought to stiffle her desire to do so. Love is not a whirlwind that is unvanquishable."

Sh.e.l.ley's views on marriage agree with those of G.o.dwin. They both looked on marriage as a human inst.i.tution, and consequently thought it might be modified or abolished entirely. They considered happiness man's highest good, and unhappiness man's only evil. Vows and promises are immoral because the thing promised may prove at any time detrimental to one's happiness. For this reason husband and wife should not bind themselves to live always together. This doctrine appealed to Sh.e.l.ley because it agreed with his views on freedom and his pa.s.sion for opposing the traditions of society.

Heretofore it has been found convenient to lay the blame for all the radical views of Sh.e.l.ley at the door of G.o.dwin. In the case of those on marriage a good deal of the blame must be borne by Sir James Lawrence.

In a letter to Lawrence, dated August 17, 1812, Sh.e.l.ley writes: "Your _Empire of the Naires_, which I read this spring, succeeded in making me a perfect convert to its doctrines. I then retained no doubts of the evils of marriage--Mrs. Wollstonecraft reasons too well for that--but I had been dull enough not to perceive the greatest argument against it, until developed in the Naires, prost.i.tution both legal and illegal." Hogg says that Sh.e.l.ley and his young friends read Lawrence's tale with delight.[34]

This work, intended to vindicate the rights of women, is a plea for free love. It pictures the Kingdom of the Naires as a Paradise of Love, where neither jealousy nor envy, quarreling nor hatred, have any place.

Infanticide and the sufferings that follow in the wake of illicit intercourse are there unknown. "It would be unjust to conclude," Lawrence writes, "that every voluntary union would be short-lived." He claims that, although constancy is no merit in itself, still it obtains in the Kingdom of the Naires to a greater extent than in Europe. "Know ye not that though constancy is no merit it is a source of happiness; and that though inconstancy is no crime, it is no blessing much less a boast."[35] There is some resemblance between this and the following from Sh.e.l.ley's _Notes to Queen Mab_: "Constancy has nothing virtuous in itself independently of the pleasure it confers, and partakes of the temporizing spirit of vice in proportion as it endures tamely moral defects of magnitude in the object of its indiscreet choice." In another place Lawrence writes: "Two hearts whom love with its loadstone has touched, will stick together, nought will tear asunder. But soon as the magnetic power has ceased, say, why should wedlock link in iron fetters, superfluous even when they are not vexatious, those bodies which the soul of love has left?"[36] In the notes to _Queen Mab_ we read--"A husband and wife ought to continue so long united as they love each other; any law which should bind them to cohabitation for one moment after the decay of their affection would be a most intolerable tyranny, and the most unworthy of toleration."[37] "Among the Naires there are neither courtesans nor virgins, for the two extremes are equally unnatural and equally detrimental to the state. Love there shuns not the light of the sun, nor is it, as in Europe, degraded as a vice, nor allied to infamy and guilt."

Sh.e.l.ley lived at a time when the marriage ideal was not held in high repute. Lawrence describes many kinds of abominable travesties of marriage. In Persia, to silence the scruples of the l.u.s.tful, "they have contrived contracts of enjoyment (for it would be wicked to call them contracts of marriage) for very short periods of time; these are formally signed and countersigned, and many priests gain their livelihood by giving their benediction to this orthodox prost.i.tution."[38] Marriage was a mere formality for a great many. In France, Montesquieu writes, "a husband, who would wish to keep his wife to himself, would be considered a disturber of the public happiness, and as a madman who would monopolise the light of the sun. He who loves his own wife, is one who is not agreeable enough to gain the affections of any other man's wife, who takes advantage of a law to make amends for his own want of amiability; and who contributes, as far as lies in his power, to overturn a tacit convention, that is conducive to the happiness of both s.e.xes."[39] In England conditions were no better. A husband might consort with as many women as he chose and his wife could get no redress. In Italy and Spain, the inhabitants, "too fond of liberty to respect the duties of marriage and too attached to their names to suffer their extinction, require only representatives, and not sons as their heirs. It is a pity that the Naire system is not known to them; but cicesbeism is a palliative to marriage and an ingenious compromise between family pride and natural independence, and it is better to be inconsistent and happy than unhappy and rational."[40]

In no country of Europe is the marriage vow kept. Why not then, argued Sh.e.l.ley, abolish this inst.i.tution which makes hypocrites of men? "Marriage is the tomb of love.... Two lovers only meet when in good humor, or when resolved to be so; a married couple think themselves ent.i.tled to torment each other with their ill-humors. When a lover presents a trifle to his beloved, she receives it with smiles; when a husband makes a present to his wife, which indeed happens seldom enough, he runs the risk of being told that he has no taste, or that she could have bought it cheaper."[41]