The best letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley

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LIBRARY OF ^CONGR ESS.

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Preface

THE year 1892 marks the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of the poet Shelley, and the English literary world has celebrated it in fitting manner. A splendid marble memorial has been erected to perpetuate his name within the precincts of the ancient seat of learning that once spurned him from her walls, and the Shelley Society has made the year the most memorable in its annals by its tributes to his genius. Bound as she is by all the ties of blood, of speech, and of tradition to the mother country, America holds the literature of England as somewhat of her own, and will not permit this occasion to pass unnoticed. Not that this little /volume for a moment claims the distinction of being a memorial one, but it has occurred to the editor that no more appropriate time than the present could be chosen at which to make an effort to arouse among American readers generally an interest in the prose writings of one who is chiefly known in the field of poetry.

In the preparation of this collection chief regard has been had to the literary excellence of the letters, without neglecting, however, their biographical value. All giving pictures of his time, and especially those

VI PREFACE.

which admit us into the inner circle of that distinguished coterie of English exiles with which Shelley was associated in Italy, are carefully retained. The object has been to give the "Best Letters" of the poet, and at the same time to make the volume a complete and ready work of reference for those who might desire to consult Shelley's records of his own life, and the lives of his poet-friends. Shelley was not a voluminous letter writer, and the present edition contains very nearly all that he left with the exception of the letters of his younger and more immature years. The editor is indebted to Professor Dowden's Life of Shelley for a number of letters which have never before appeared in any collection.

Some of the notes contributed to early editions by Mrs. Shelley, Lady Shelley, and Peacock have been retained, and are designated by their initials, — M. S., L. S., and T. L. P., respectively. For the other notes the present editor is responsible.

September, 1892.

Contents

PAGE

INTRODUCTION n

LETTER

Introduction

THE year before his death Shelley wrote in his noble "Defense of Poetry": " The jury which sits in judgment upon a poet, belonging as he does to all time, must be composed of his peers ; it must be empanelled by Time from the selectest of the wise of many generations." To those who know the life and character of this remarkable genius, these words have a strange personal ring. He could not have applied them to his contemporaries save in a_ few instances. Byron, Scott, Southey, Wordsworth, Coleridge, his most famous coworkers in the realm of the Muses, heard the trump of fame while they were yet in the vigor of their intellectual youth. Shelley, on the other hand, was neglected by one half the world, and hated by the other half. Full of high hopes of elevating mankind, and believing poetry to be the loftiest mode of expression of the highest things, he sought to lure the world to nobler achievement by his sweetest strains. But the world turned a deaf ear to him, or denounced his music as the inspiration of an evil genius. Despite, however, the scorn of society, he felt that he might yet do something to raise his fellow-man, and, hoping against hope, he went forth as what Heine might have called " A brave soldier in the Liberation War of humanity." And he has been tried by the jury of which he spoke. " The selectest of the wise " of these latter days have rendered their verdict, and his genius has been vindicated. Probably no man so neglected by his own generation has been accorded so much praise and honor in after times, and it has been all in spite of Shelley himself. Death released his genius from its strange and unnatural surroundings, and when considered alone, apart from the man, there could be no doubt as to the position it should be accorded.

Just one hundred years ago Percy Bysshe Shelley was born in Sussex, England, and, as an eldest son, he was the heir presumptive to one of the richest baronetcies in that part of the kingdom. He was born in " the purple of the English Squirearchy," but his inherited honors received but little consideration at his hands. Gifted with a most untamable spirit of liberty, he had not attained his majority before he came to hate, with a hatred that lasted until the end, the empty show and paraphernalia of nobility. Filled with a sense of the equality of man, he despised the sentiment which arbitrarily placed one class above another, and which made one man better than his fellow by accident of birth. Living as he did in an age that boasted but little liberality of thought, it is not surprising that he met with scant sympathy. The terrors of the French Revolution were still fresh in the minds of men, and the world had not yet recovered from its first paroxysm of horror at the terrible school of free thought that was born of that period. But Shelley did not share this feeling of horror. He himself was of that French school, and he was ready to receive on their supposed merits any new ideas that might be presented. Holding such views, born in a period of anarchy and blood, and nurtured under skies red with the glare of Europe T s blazing thrones, it is not surprising that he, the " Child of the Revolution," should have become an apostle of the new school, a high priest of iconoclasm.

In his desire to subvert the old order of things, his boundless enthusiasm spared nothing. Whatever merits an institution might have in itself, the fact that it was a part of the ancient economy of social or political life was sufficient for him to condemn it, and denounce it as a pernicious obstacle to the advancement of mankind. He knew nothing of discrimination, and just here lay the mistake which rendered his efforts of no avail, or, as it has been touchingly expressed, made him " a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain." *

Shelley's youth was no less turbulent than his latter years. It seemed, indeed, that from his very infancy some strange destiny hung over him, forcing him into bitter opposition to everything with which he should have been identified. A brief and unhappy course at Eton was followed by a still briefer and more unfortunate residence at Oxford. As a student, he rebelled against the arbitrary curriculum of studies, and sought sources of knowledge which at that day were unknown to the ordinary undergraduate at Oxford, and known to the learned authorities only to be condemned in a manner more than characteristic of the bigoted age. Shelley, even as a boy, was a thinker, and his study of the French philosophical writers soon bore fruit. He had not been a member of the University six months before the ancient and orthodox seat of learning was startled by an anonymous publication — a mere leaflet — entitled " The Necessity of Atheism," which was scattered through the colleges. Shelley made no secret of the fact that he was the author of the remarkable work, and on Lady Day, 181 1, he was summoned before the authorities and required to answer to certain peremptory

1 Matthew Arnold concludes his essay on Shelley with this paraphrase of Joubert's comment on Plato.

questions regarding his connection with it. The spirit of rebellion against anything like coercion was fired in a moment, and he defiantly refused to answer. Without any further formality, he was served with a notice of expulsion, which had been previously drawn up in anticipation of his refusal to submit to a formal examination regarding his act.

Driven from Oxford, Shelley sought a residence in London, and from there proceeded to open negotiations with his father, with whom he had never been on good terms, but in this business he had to deal with a Philistine of a school as ancient as Goliath himself. Mr. Timothy Shelley heard of his son's performance with a horror that was indeed to be expected ; but what does surprise us is that never once did the stiff-necked old English gentleman seek to win his erring son from his error by the influence of that love which must have come off victor in every case where he was concerned. But he was a stern parent of the most pronounced eighteenth century type, and his only thought was to whip the rebellious boy back into the right path. Tactless almost to a degree of brutality, and bound hand and foot by conventions which even the conservative people of that day were beginning to disregard, it is not surprising that his negotiations with his son ended in a breach which was never healed, and that Shelley, at the age of nineteen, found himself thrown on the world, and in a position where he could with some color of justice consider himself a persecuted man.

To Shelley's residence in London the keenest interest attaches, as it was now that he met with one whose sad career was to bring a strange tragedy into his life. His sudden marriage with Harriet Westbrook, their brief and checkered life together, their estrangement and separation, are questions too lengthy and vexed to be discussed in the narrow compass of this essay. The immediate causes of their separation have never been accurately known, and probably never will be. The Shelley family promised them to the world, but Professor Dowden's Life of Shelley — two great volumes prepared under family auspices — have appeared, and the world is no wiser than before.

During the spring of 1813, while Shelley was yet living happily with Harriet, he became one of a little coterie of free-thinkers who attached themselves to William Godwin, the author of the famous work on " Political Justice." Some time previous Shelley had become acquainted with Godwin through a correspondence in which he invited the old philosopher of Skinner Street to become his guide in the devious paths of political and social philosophy. From this their mutual interest increased until now the young poet had become one of the most constant attendants on the frequent seances to which only the favored few were admitted. From this period date many of those friendships which exerted so much influence on Shelley's after life. It was here that he met Peacock, to whom his finest letters were addressed, and it was here, too, that he met Mary Godwin, the Mary who in after years filled so great a part of his life, — that daughter of illustrious parentage, who, while she brought Shelley the first and only hap piness he knew, brought also into his life a dark tragedy, the only blot that has ever stained his fame.

Early in 1814 came the final break with Harriet, and a few weeks later he fled to the Continent with Mary, to escape the wrath of Godwin, who, although he was an opponent of marriage, was too weak to advance his theories into practice in the case of his daughter. With the birth of her second child, Harriet hoped for a reconciliation, but it was too late. Shelley saw her but once again, and they then parted forever. He went out into life, his heart filled with high hopes and aspiring ambitions; Harriet went back to her old friends, to drag out a heart-broken existence, until, on a dark November night two years later, the waters of the Serpentine closed over her, shutting out from life one whose career we must contemplate with infinite pity.

The following month Shelley was married to Mary Godwin, and immediately set about to recover his children by a suit in Chancery, The notes to " Queen Mab " were entered as evidence to prove that he was riot a proper person to rear his own offspring, and Lord Eldon rendered a decision to that effect. The children were placed in charge of a guardian, and the severest restrictions placed on their father's visits to them.

During all this time Shelley had not thought of Italy as a permanent residence. Although he hated the existing institutions of his country with all the strength of his moral nature, still for England itself he had a love which reminds us of the great love the exiled Heine bore his down-trodden Fatherland, and it was not until after the chancery suit that he thought of seeking freedom and peace in that " paradise of exiles." At this time he was living at Great Marlowe on the Thames. There he had the quiet of home, and the communion of faithful and devoted friends. Leigh Hunt, Peacock, and Horace Smith were his constant companions ; there he met Keats, his "Adonais " ; and there he formed those lasting friendships which infused so much of happiness into his life. There, too, Shelley wrote. With his ardent devotion to nature, most of his work was done out of doors, under the spreading trees, in the fields with only the blue English summer sky over him, or while floating in some frail boat in the shadow of the willows which bordered the picturesque Thames.

But these delightful, almost idyllic surroundings, could not and did not bring happiness to Shelley. " The Chancellor had said some words," wrote Mrs. Shelley,

INTRO D UCTION. I J

" that seemed to intimate that Shelley would not be permitted the care of any of his children, and for a moment he feared that our infant son would be torn from us." This fear so haunted him that it soon became evident that he could have no happiness in England, and by the spring of 1818 he had fully determined to seek a home in Italy. April found him with his family at Milan, and from there he went from point to point, which inclination or his search after health prompted him to visit. For four years — " years," says Symonds, " filled with music that will sound as long as English lasts " — Shelley and Mary followed a series of delightful and uncertain wanderings through Italy. They had no settled abiding-place. All Italy was their home. Shelley wished for no roof save "the vault of blue Italian day"; the purple-peaked Apennines were the only walls and towers he cared to have above him; the Muses were his Lares and Penates, and their shrines he found everywhere, — in the flowered valleys, up the snowy mountain slopes, and on the bosom of the deep sea he loved so much. Wherever beauty was, there was his home. Like the ancient poets he found inspiration in all things ; for him every fountain had its Nereid, every wood its nymph, and every mountain side its musical Pan. The riotous melody of Satyrs he heard in every wind, and the great forests were like vast ^Eolian harps upon which the powers of the air played the divinest music of nature. All the universe was filled with associations as dear to him as any that ever clustered around an humble hearthstone, or an ancestral hall.

But we will not linger over these Italian years. The only true account of them — and the most beautiful account that could ever be written — is found in his letters. So we will leave him to tell the story of his own life until we reach the last days. There we will pause.

It was July, 1822. Lured by the sea whose music ever had so subtle an influence on his spirit, Shelley had found his way to Casa Magni, a little white stone cottage on the Bay of Spezia, so near the water that in times of storm, wrote Mrs. Shelley, " we almost fancied ourselves on board ship." Here, with Mary, Trelawny, Byron, Edward Williams, and Williams's wife — the " Jane " of so many of his short poems — Shelley passed some Elysian days. The water he loved so much was at his feet, the breath of the warm south was pulsing over the Mediterranean ; on the east, across the blue gulf, lay the picturesque town of Lerici, and far away to the west shone the white villas of Porto Venere. It was summer in Italy, glorious season in a glorious land. Late in June he wrote Horace Smith : " I still inhabit this divine bay, reading Spanish dramas, and sailing, and listening to the most enchanting music. We have some friends on a visit to us, and my only regret is that the summer must ever pass."

One friend, however, was wanting to complete their circle. All through the years repeated invitations had been sent to Leigh Hunt to visit them in Italy, and now in this eventful summer he was on his way south. During the early days of July at Leghorn the friends clasped hands for the first time since Shelley had parted from English shores. The meeting was characterized by that affection which in strong men is as touching as it is beautiful. "I will not dwell upon the moment," wrote Hunt, with inexpressible tenderness, in his Autobiography.

Hunt was established in Byron's palace at Pisa, and, after a few days of delightful intercourse, Shelley started on his return to Casa Magni, where Hunt was to follow him in a few days. On July 8, with Williams and one seaman, he sailed from Leghorn in a small yacht. With a heart full of gladness at the anticipation of his friend's companionship, there was no cloud on Shelley's sky that day; but waiting in the storm which crouched beneath the horizon was his fate. The afternoon was hot and sultry. There was a stillness in the atmosphere that boded no good to the sea-going mariner. "The Devil is brewing mischief," remarked the Genoese mate of Byron's yacht, as Shelley's little vessel beat slowly out to sea. A little later a fog shut out the sea view, and the storm broke. It did not last a short half-hour, but that brief space held woe enough for those who loved Shelley to tinge all after life with the sombre hues of an ineffaceable grief.

Trelawny had watched the storm from Byron's yacht, and when the skies cleared no sail was seen against the smiling horizon. Something told him that the worst had come. Summoning Byron and Hunt, the friends patrolled the beach for many miles, and not until ten days later was Shelley's body found washed on the sands near Via Reggio.

The quarantine regulations required that the remains be burned, and loving hands prepared them for the final rites. The body was placed in an iron receiver ; over it was poured a vast quantity of oil and wine, and on the sea-shore, on August 8, it was consigned to the purifying flame. Only the heart refused to be consumed. It was rescued by Trelawny, and given to Mrs. Shelley, while the ashes were interred in the English cemetery at Rome, beside the grave of his son William, and near that of Keats.

Thus lived and died one of the strangest geniuses of the century ; one who left behind him a deathless fame, but a fame that we scarcely know how to estimate. As a poet, as a man of intellectual power, as a man of almost transcendent genius, his position is not to be questioned. But he was more than this; he was the champion of those principles which were waging the bitterest warfare against the shams of the world, against that old idolatry which still remained from the Dark Ages; he was "the poetical representative of those whose hopes and aspirations and affections rush forward to embrace the great hereafter, and dwell in rapturous anticipation on the coming of the golden year, the reign of universal freedom, and the establishment of universal brotherhood."

His creed was that the truly good and the truly beautiful were one and the same, and in this he was much nearer to the highest truth than he realized. Holding to this belief, had he entered the right path at the beginning of his life, we cannot conceive of a career that would have been above his reach. With his intellectual power, combined with his intense earnestness and enthusiasm, his absolute fearlessness, and his limitless capacity for appreciating the lofty poetry which is interwoven like a thread of fine-spun gold through all the fabric of Christianity, he would have proved a splendid ornament to that religion, a blazing beacon whose rays would have shone down through future centuries guiding men to truth and light.

What we must admire most of all in Shelley is the great love he bore his fellow-man. However mistaken they were, his life was one continuous sacrifice to those principles which he conscientiously believed would elevate mankind, if carried out. He found man out of harmony with truth, with beauty. He recognized that the chords of his nature had not been torn asunder by the fall; they were only out of tune. He looked on humanity as some vast harp 1 from which could be drawn symphonies which could charm sin and depravity out of the world, but whose music was a jangling discord because the strings were not attuned one to another ;

1 See the " Defence of Poetry."

and he believed that it was his mission to find that key by which discord could be changed into music of a divine strain, and the harsh tones blended into an eternal harmony. This was his aim, and to it he sacrificed everything. But little did he realize the hopelessness of his task. In his enthusiasm, in his fearless warfare against every obstacle, he forgot that through a hundred centuries poets and prophets, priests and seers, had striven to bring about the same end, and that even in the face of divinely inspired effort the discord had swelled until human life had become a horrid Pandemonium. He did not know that the cause of the discord was human nature itself, and that the fingers of a god would have to sweep those strings before the music of which he dreamed could be brought forth.

Shelley's attitude toward his fellow-man he sums up in one of the grandest of his prose passages, in his eloquent note to that strange autobiographical poem, "Alastor." He says :—

" They who, deluded by no generous error, instigated by no sacred thirst of doubtful knowledge, duped by no illustrious superstition, loving nothing on this earth, and cherishing no hopes beyond, yet keep aloof from sympathies with their kind, rejoicing neither with human joy, nor mourning With human grief, these, and such as they, have their apportioned curse. They languish because none feel with them their common nature. They are morally dead. They are neither friends, nor lovers, nor fathers, nor citizens of the world, nor benefactors of their country. Among those who attempt to exist without human sympathy, the pure and tender-hearted perish through the intensity and passion of their search after its communities when the vacancy of their spirit suddenly makes itself felt. All else, selfish, blind, and torpid, are those unforeseeing multitudes who constitute, together with their own, the lasting misery and loneliness of the world. Those who love not their fellow-beings live unfruitful lives, and prepare for their old age a miserable grave."

The value of this declaration as an index to Shelley's position is enhanced by the fact that it was written at that early period when his opinions were but little modified, and when he gloried in the self- applied epithet of Atheist, "to express," as he said, "his abhorrence of superstition."

Mrs. Shelley, in passing judgment upon Shelley's prose writings, has said that he "commanded language splendid and melodious as Plato," and while we are not prepared to indorse to the fullest extent her naturally biased opinion, it is none the less true that the verdict of more than one eminent scholar has been that in splendor of expression and power of thought his prose more nearly resembles that of the ancient master than that of any of his contemporaries. Every true poet, as Wordsworth has declared, must be a writer of good prose. The genius possessed by the real poet includes in its scope the prose writer, and few men have ever attained a high plane in the realm of the Muses whose pens could not be used with singular force and effect in the more serious field of prose. But Shelley's power in this respect was not to be compared with the average of his fellow-singers. There was in all he wrote a melody, a subtle rhythm, which made his prose close akin to poetry. There was a depth to the current of his words as well as to the current of his thought, and his splendid imagery, and his wealth of metaphor, drawn from all that represented sweetness, light, love, beauty, and sublimity, in both physical and spiritual nature, has given to his writings so much of literary value that so distinguished a critic as Matthew Arnold has doubted whether Shelley's "delightful letters and essays, which deserve to be far more read than they now are, will not resist the wear and tear of time better, and finally come to stand higher, than his poetry."

In his prose writings Shelley covered a wide range.

When he entered Oxford, a stripling of eighteen years, he had already found a publisher for more than one novel of a distinct "blue-fire " type, and in 1812 he considered them serious enough to submit to Godwin for perusal. At an early age he began to put forth political tracts, which showed marked clearness of thought and directness of logic, and, what was most singular of all, considering the nature of the author, were models of tolerance and calm, dispassionate argument. Although the "Defence of Poetry" stands as Shelley's prose masterpiece, he rose to some of his most magnificent flights in the prefaces and notes to his poems. The extract already given from the note to "Alastor " is a striking instance of prose composed while the divine impulse was still upon the poet, while the fire of poetic enthusiasm was still aglow. The "Defense of Poetry " is an exquisite essay written as " an antidote " to Peacock's " Four Ages of Poetry." 1 This work is on the same lines as Sir Philip Sidney's famous "Apology," but contains much splendid and original thought, while the style and treatment are such as to secure for it a position as an English classic. Shelley intended to prepare the essay in three parts, but only the first was ever completed. When one attempts to discuss Shelley's letters in any circumscribed space, he feels as hopeless as did the man in the Eastern fable who sought to imprison the giant in the flower. Nearly all of us at certain periods of our lives have conceived a passion for Shelley's poetry, which, in many cases, has been in a measure outgrown : but to outgrow a keen appreciation of Shelley's letters would be to lose a taste for some of the finest prose in the English tongue. In discussing them the temptation to discuss his poetry is wellnigh irresistible, for the reason that the two in so many instances are insep-

1 See Letter LXXXVII.

arable. The letters often are the groundwork of his poems, and one famous letter has long since been included in every volume of his poetry that pretends to be either complete, or to be a selection of his best work. Shelley had a keen conception of the beautiful, and whenever he seized upon a beautiful idea he cherished it, and clung to it, and it imparted to him an inspiration which did not pass with the moment. First he would give expression to it in some letter of tender friendship to Peacock, or Hunt, or perhaps to the Gisbornes, and next we find it interwoven with other beautiful conceptions through the musical stanzas of some incomparable poem. This it is that so enhances the value of these letters. They cannot be divorced from his immortal works; each is the complement of the other. Reading them together, we find that he idealized and clothed in flaming verse the experiences and observations of his every-day life ; that by the alchemy of his splendid genius he transmuted his restless, stormy life into a poem. There are few of his poetical productions that do not contain striking autobiographical passages, and by means of the letters we trace them with delightful accuracy. Idealist that he was, he knew no distinction between the common realities of his life and the higher things that were a part of his poet nature. To him poetry and all things beautiful were realities, and the sternest realities themselves he elevated and spiritualized.

Thus dwelling in an atmosphere of poetry, ever on the wing, Shelley transfused all life with a beauty that shines through everything he wrote, and most especially through the letters of certain periods. In those written to Peacock from Switzerland and Italy, more particularly, does he lose himself in the contemplation of the beautiful around him ; and often does he pour forth periods as fresh and beautiful as the most unpremeditated song.

The descriptions he sends his friends of the paintings and statuary in the Italian galleries are no less artistic and inspiring, and the impressions he imparts regarding the ruins of u the capital of the vanished world," are in a style not inferior to any prose ever written. We have not space for long extracts, although the temptation to quote indefinitely is difficult to withstand. Take, for instance, a few lines from his description of the ruins of the Thermae of Caracalla.