Percy Bysshe Shelley

With Byron in Switzerland.

In May 1816 the Shelleys left England for Switzerland, together with Claire Clairmont, and their own infant son William. They went straight to Secheron, near Geneva; Byron, whose separation from his wife had just then taken place, arrived there immediately afterwards. A great deal of controversy has arisen as to the motives and incidents of this foreign sojourn. The clear fact is that Claire Clairmont, who had a fine voice and some inclination for the stage, had seen Byron, as connected with the management of Drury Lane theatre, early in the year, and an intrigue had begun between them in London. Prima facie it seems quite reasonable to suppose that she had explained the facts to Shelley or to Mary, or to both, and had induced them to convoy her to the society of Byron abroad; were this finally established as the fact, it would show no incon sistency of conduct, or breach of his own code, on Shelley's part. But documentary evidence shows that Mary was totally ignorant of the amour shortly before they went abroad. Whether or not they knew of it while they and Claire were in daily intercourse with Byron, and housed close by him on the shore of the Lake of Geneva, may be left unargued. The three returned to London in September 1816, Byron remaining abroad; and in January 1817 Claire gave birth to his daughter named Allegra.

The return of the Shelleys was closely followed by two suicides —first that of Fanny Wollstonecraft (already referred to), and second that of Harriet Shelley, who on Nov. 9 drowned herself in the Serpentine. The body was not found until Dec. 1o. The latest stages of the lovely and ill-starred Harriet's career have never been very explicitly recorded. It seems that she formed a connexion with some man from whom circumstances or desertion separated her, and that she was treated with harshness by her sister during an illness of their father. She had always had a propensity to the idea of suicide, and she now carried it out in act. Shelley, then at Bath, hurried up to London when he heard of Harriet's death, giving manifest signs of the shock which so ter rible a catastrophe had produced on him. So far from Shelley dismissing the subject from his mind it is more than probable that the memory of this tragedy was ever present to him, and especially so during his last days.

This was the time when Shelley began to see a great deal of Leigh Hunt, the poet and essayist, editor of the Examiner; they were close friends, and Hunt did something to uphold the reputa tion of Shelley as a poet—which, we may here say once for all, scarcely obtained any public acceptance or solidity during his brief lifetime. The death of Harriet having removed the only obstacle to a marriage with Mary Godwin, the wedding ensued on Dec. 3o, 1816, and the married couple settled down at Great Marlow in Buckinghamshire. Their tranquillity was shortly disturbed by a Chancery suit set in motion by Mr. Westbrook, who asked for the custody of his two grandchildren, on the ground that Shelley had deserted his wife and intended to bring up his offspring in his own atheistic and anti-social opinions. Lord Chancellor Eldon

delivered judgment on March 27,1817. He held that Shelley, hav ing avowed condemnable principles of conduct, and having fash ioned his own conduct to correspond, and being likely to inculcate the same principles upon his children, was unfit to have the charge of them. He appointed as their curator Dr. Hume, an orthodox army-physician, who was Shelley's own nominee. The poet had to pay for the maintenance of the children a sum which stood eventu ally at 1120 per annum ; if it was at first (as generally stated) £200, that was no more than what he had previously allowed to Harriet. This is the last incident of marked importance in the per turbed career of Shelley; the rest relates to the history of his mind, the poems which he produced and published, and his changes of locality in travelling. The first ensuing poem was The Revolt of Islam, referred to near the close of this article.

Removal to Italy.

In March 1818, after an illness which he regarded (rightly or wrongly) as a dangerous pulmonary attack, Shelley, with his wife, their two infants William and Clara, and Claire Clairmont and her baby Allegra, went off to Italy, where the short remainder of his life was passed. Allegra was soon sent on to Venice, to her father, who, ever since parting from Claire in Switzerland, showed a callous and unfeeling determination to see and know no more about her. In 1818 the Shelleys—always nearly with Claire in their company—were in Milan, Leghorn, the Bagni di Lucca, Venice and its neighbourhood, Rome and Naples; in 1819 in Rome, the vicinity of Leghorn and Florence (both their infants were now dead, but a third was born late in 1819, Percy Florence Shelley, who in 1844 inherited the baronetcy and died in 1889) ; in 182o in Pisa the Bagni di Pisa (or di San Giuliano), and Leghorn; in 1821 in Pisa and with Byron in Ra venna ; in 1822 in Pisa and on the Bay of Spezia, between Lerici and San Terenzio.

The incidents of this period are but few, and of no great im portance apart from their bearing upon the poet's writings. In Leghorn he knew Mr. and Mrs. Gisborne, the latter a once inti mate friend of Godwin; she taught Shelley Spanish, and he was eager to promote a project for a steamer to be built by her son by a former marriage, the engineer Henry Reveley ; it would have been the first steamer to navigate the Gulf of Lyons. In Pisa he formed an intimacy with the Contessina Emilia Viviani, a girl who was pining in a convent pending her father's choice of a hus band for her; this impassioned but vague and fanciful attachment —which soon came to an end, as Emilia's character developed less favourably in the eyes of her Platonic adorer—produced the transcendental love-poem of Epipsychidion in 1821. In Ravenna the scheme of the quarterly magazine the Liberal was concerted by Byron and Shelley, the latter being principally interested in it with a view to benefiting Leigh Hunt by such an association with Byron.