Lives of the Great Romantics, Part I, Volume 1

John Mullan, Chris Hart, Peter Swaab

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000748222
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The memoirs in this collection are written by those who had personal knowledge of Shelley, Byron and Wordsworth, or who claimed to be recording the accounts of those who had such knowledge. Each volume in this set contains facsimilies of the original memoirs.

William Hazlitt, ‘On Paradox and Common-place’, in Table-Talk; or, Original Essays, 2 vols (London, 1821)

Hazlitt’s description of Shelley is unusual in having been published during the poet’s lifetime. Other accounts based on personal knowledge of Shelley were posthumous: attempts either to form or to exploit his reputation. Written by friends and followers, these memoirs presented themselves as sympathetic, even if sympathy was characterized by the effort to exculpate Shelley from the misconduct or intellectual folly of which his opponents accused him. Hazlitt’s portrait is written by a member of the liberal, literary circles in which Shelley moved for a time, but is satirical rather than admiring. He was often enough mocked by those who did not know him and were his natural ideological foes; this text is interesting (and unique) because its satire comes from a writer who did know him, and who might have been expected to have shared his political discontent.

Hazlitt became acquainted with Shelley shortly after Harriet Shelley’s suicide and his marriage to Mary. In February 1817, he and Mary were staying with Leigh Hunt and his family in Hampstead. During their stay, they met many of Hunt’s literary acquaintances, including Keats, Charles Lamb, and Charles Oilier, who was to become Shelley’s publisher (Holmes, p. 359). Mary Shelley’s Journal records meeting Hazlitt twice. On the first occasion, there was clearly animated discussion: ‘Sunday 9th… Several of Hunt’s acquaintances come in the evening – Music – after Supper a discussion untill 3 in the morning with Hazlitt concerning monarchy & republicanism’ (Feldman and Scott-Kilvert, I, p. 163). At this time the Shelleys also frequently visited Godwin, in whose company they almost certainly met Hazlitt again. Indeed, in a letter to them in July 1821, Leigh Hunt implies as much when he tries to explain Hazlitt’s motivation for penning the portrait given here: ‘Did Shelley ever cut him up at Godwin’s table? Somebody says so, and that this is the reason of Hazlitt’s attack’ (Jones, Letters, II, p. 383). Hunt clearly saw the essay as an act of betrayal, and says in the same letter, ‘I wrote him an angry letter about Shelley – the first one I ever did; and I believe he is very sorry: but this is his way. Next week, perhaps, he will write a panegyric upon him. He says that Shelley provokes him by his going to a pernicious extreme on the liberal side, and so hurting it’.

At the time that he met Shelley, Hazlitt was almost forty, and was at a peak of productivity as a writer of essays and reviews for periodicals. It is difficult not to hear in his description of the ‘shrill-voiced’ intellectual enthusiast that he encountered at the Hunts’ the resentment of the jobbing writer for the aristocratic dilettante. Yet we should not forget that, for all the immediacy of Hazlitt’s characteristic present tense, the essay dates from four years after the meetings on which it was based. Hazlitt’s resentment is likely to have become greater in the interim. By the time that he wrote ‘On Paradox and Common-place’, the living that he was attempting to earn from periodical journalism and from giving lectures on literary topics had become more precarious than ever (see Jones, Hazlitt, pp. 304-6). The Shelleys were now in Italy, and Hazlitt was absorbed by the unrequited passion for his landlady’s daughter (and the arrangement of his separation from his wife) that he turned into his strangely confessional Liber Amoris (1823). In fact, he wrote most of Table-Talk at an inn outside Edinburgh, having travelled North seeking a Scottish divorce. It was, we might say, a difficult time.

The essay from which the passage below is taken sets out to distinguish between ‘originality’ (which is admirable) and its pale mimic, ‘singularity’ (which is merely the capacity to manufacture paradoxes). The unthinking prejudices of those who rely entirely on ‘custom and authority’ are but mirrored by the ‘paradoxes’ of those who, ‘under the influence of novelty and restless vanity’, try to think or say what is ‘singular’ (I, p. 350). This comparison structures the whole essay: ‘With one party, whatever is, is right: with their antagonists, whatever is, is wrong. These swallow every antiquated absurdity: those catch at every new, unfledged project – and are alike enchanted with the velocipedes or the French Revolution’ (p. 352). Shelley is taken as a prime specimen of the latter sort.

The author of the Prometheus Unbound (to take an individual instance of the last character) has a fire in his eye, a fever in his blood, a maggot in his brain, a hectic flutter in his speech, which mark out the philosophic fanatic. He is sanguine-complexioned, and shrill-voiced. As is often observable in the case of religious enthusiasts, there is a slenderness of constitutional stamina, which renders the flesh no match for the spirit. His bending, flexible form appears to take no strong hold of things, does not grapple with the world about him, but slides from it like a river—

“And In its liquid texture mortal wound

Receives no more than can the fluid air.”

The shock of accident, the weight of authority make no impression on his opinions, which retire like a feather, or rise from the encounter unhurt, through their own buoyancy. He is clogged by no dull system of realities, no earth-bound feelings, no rooted prejudices, by nothing that belongs to the mighty trunk and hard husk of nature and habit, but is drawn up by irresistible levity to the regions of mere speculation and fancy, to the sphere of air and fire, where his delighted spirit floats in “seas of pearl and clouds of amber.” There is no caput mortuum of worn-out, thread-bare experience to serve as ballast to his mind; it is all volatile intellectual salt of tartar, that refuses to combine its evanescent, inflammable essence with any thing solid or any thing lasting. Bubbles arc to him the only realities:—touch them, and they vanish. Curiosity is the only proper category of his mind, and though a man in knowledge, he is a child in feeling. Hence he puts every thing into a metaphysical crucible to judge of it himself and exhibit it to others as a subject of interesting experiment, without first making it over to the ordeal of his common sense or trying it on his heart. This faculty of speculating at random on all questions may in its overgrown and uninformed state do much mischief without intending it, like an overgrown child with the power of a man. Mr. Shelley has been accused of vanity—I think he is chargeable with extreme levity; but this levity is so great, that I do not believe he is sensible of its consequences. He strives to overturn all established creeds and systems: but this is in him an effect of constitution. He runs before the most extravagant opinions, but this is because he is held back by none of the merely mechanical checks of sympathy and habit. He tampers with all sorts of obnoxious subjects, but it is less because he is gratified with the rankness of the taint, than captivated with the intellectual phosphoric light they emit. It would seem that he wished not so much to convince or inform as to shock the public by the tenor of his productions, but I suspect he is more intent upon startling himself with his electrical experiments in morals and philosophy; and though they may scorch other people, they are to him harmless amusements, the coruscations of an Aurora Borealis, that “play round the head, but do not reach the heart.” Still I could wish that he would put a stop to the incessant, alarming whirl of his Voltaic battery. With his zeal, his talent, and his fancy, he would do more good and less harm, if he were to give up his wilder theories, and if he took less pleasure in feeling his heart flutter in unison with the panic-struck apprehensions of his readers. Persons of this class, instead of consolidating useful and acknowledged truths, and thus advancing the cause of science and virtue, are never easy but in raising doubtful and disagreeable questions, which bring the former into disgrace and discredit. They are not contented to lead the minds of men to an eminence overlooking the prospect of social amelioration, unless, by forcing them up slippery paths and to the utmost verge of possibility, they can dash them down the precipice the instant they reach the promised Pisgah. They think it nothing to hang up a beacon to guide or warn, if they do not at the same time frighten the community like a comet. They do not mind making their principles odious, provided they can make themselves notorious. To win over the public opinion by fair means is to them an insipid, common-place mode of popularity: they would either force it by harsh methods, or seduce it by intoxicating potions. Egotism, petulance, licentiousness, levity of principle (whatever be the source) is a bad thing in any one, and most of all, in a philosophical reformer. Their humanity, their wisdom is always “at the horizon.” Any thing new, any thing remote, any thing questionable, comes to them in a shape that is sure of a cordial welcome—a welcome cordial in proportion as the object is new, as it is apparently impracticable, as it is a doubt whether it is at all desirable. Just after the final failure, the completion of the last act of the French Revolution, when the legitimate wits were crying out, “The farce is over, now let us go to supper,” these provoking reasoners got up a lively hypothesis about introducing the domestic government of the Nayrs into this country as a feasible set-off against the success of the Boroughmongers. The practical is with them always the antipodes of the ideal; and like other visionaries of a different stamp, they date the Millennium or New Order of Things from the Restoration of the Bourbons. Fine words butter no parsnips, says the proverb. “While you are talking of marrying, I am thinking of hanging,” says Captain Macheath. Of all people the most tormenting are those who bid you hope in the midst of despair, who, by never caring about any thing but their own sanguine, hair-brained Utopian schemes, have at no time any particular cause for embarrassment and despondency because they have never the least chance of success, and who by including whatever does not hit their idle fancy, kings, priests, religion, government, public abuses or private morals, in the same sweeping clause of ban and anathema, do all they can to combine all parties in a common cause against them, and to prevent every one else from advancing one step farther in the career of practical improvement than they do in that of imaginary and unattainable perfection.

NOTE

p. 3, ll. 14-15: ‘And in its liquid texture …’, Paradise Lost, VI, ll. 348-9, slightly adapted.

Mary Shelley, Preface to Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley (London, 1824)

On 22 August 1824, two years after Shelley’s death, Mary Shelley wrote from London to Leigh Hunt who was still in Italy with his family (thinking of the distance between the two countries, she commented, ‘… it seems to me as if I wrote to Paradise from Purgatory’). As in many of her letters from the years immediately after Shelley’s death, financial concerns are uppermost. With Peacock’s help, she has, she says, begun a ‘Negociation’ with her father-in-law, Sir Timothy Shelley. In return for ‘sacrificing a small part of my future expectations on the will’ (by which she means the money that will come to her on his death) ‘I shall ensure myself a sufficiency, for the present’ (Bennett, Letters, I, 444). There is, however, a condition – a condition with which she has no choice but to comply. ‘I have been obliged however as an indispensable preliminary, to suppress the Post. Poems – More than 300 copies had been sold so this is the less provoking, and I have been obliged to promise not to bring dear S’s name before the public again during Sir. T—’s life. There is no great harm in this, since he is above 70, & from choice I should not think of writing memoirs now’. She adds that, by the account that she has had from Sir Timothy’s lawyer, ‘Sir T. writhes under the fame of his incomparable son as if it were a most grievous injury done to him’.

In some ways, Mary’s position was to become unexpectedly more secure two years later when Charles, Shelley’s son by Harriet, died of consumption, aged eleven. Now her son Percy was the Shelley heir, and she could not easily be disowned by the family. Yet her efforts as a writer of novels, tales, and essays brought little financial reward. She and her son remained financially dependent upon her father-in-law for the next twenty years: he lived into his nineties, dying in 1844. Until she was permitted to produce an edition of Shelley’s Poetical Works in 1839, the Posthumous Poems volume was her most significant attempt to shape her husband’s reputation and the signed preface to the collection was her only published statement about him. Yet even in her enforced silence she was not inactive. She privately confessed that her novel The Last Man, published in 1826 as ‘by the Author of Frankenstein’, contained, in the character of Adrian, a portrait of ‘my lost Shelley’: ‘I have endeavoured, but how inadequately to give some idea of him… the sketch has pleased some of those who best loved him’ (letter to John Bowring, in Bennett, Letters, I, 512). She secredy encouraged the Paris publishers of the Galignani edition of the works of Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley, which appeared in 1829 (see her correspondence with Cyrus Redding and William Galignani in Bennett, Letters, II). This collection contained a biographical sketch of Shelley that borrowed largely from her own preface to Posthumous Poems, and Leigh Hunt’s Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries (see the extracts in this volume). Perhaps most influentially, she promoted the romantic tale of the circumstances in which Frankenstein was produced in a Preface to a new edition of that novel, published in 1831. In doing so, she managed to imply that she and Shelley had been married when they went to Switzerland in 1816 (see St Clair, 485).

Even if Posthumous Poems was quickly suppressed in the face of Sir Timothy’s displeasure, Mary Shelley still remembered it, fifteen years later, as a labour of love. In December 1838, when she wrote to Edward Moxon to accept his terms for the publication of the Poetical Works, she described how she had composed the earlier collection from ‘fragments of paper which in the hands of an indifferent person would never have been decyphered – the labour of putting it together was immense’ (Bennett, Letters, II, 300). By the time that she recalled this, she had obtained permission from Sir Timothy to produce an edition of Shelley’s writing, provided that no memoir were attached. Famously, in the Poetical Works of 1839 she kept to his stipulation by turning her knowledge and opinions to the ‘Notes’ that framed Shelley’s poems. These have been preserved in many subsequent editions, even where the texts of the poems themselves have been amended. Most importantly, they have been reprinted in the Oxford Standard Authors collection, which has been the standard edition of Shelley’s poetry for much of this century. (For a short history of editions, see the Introduction to The Poems of Shelley. Volume I 1804–1817, eds Geoffrey Matthews and Kelvin Everest.) For this reason, they have not been reprinted in this volume.

When she produced Posthumous Poems, Mary Shelley still imagined that there would eventually be an authorised biography of Shelley – either written by herself, or by someone, probably Leigh Hunt, whom she could trust and prompt. The Notes and Preface to her 1839 edition of Shelley’s Poetical Works indicate, however, that, fifteen years later, she was not unhappy to leave this biography unwritten, and that Sir Timothy’s edict was therefore not so unwelcome.

I abstain from any remark on the occurences of his private life, except inasmuch as the passions which they engendered inspired his poetry. This is not the time to relate the truth; and I should reject any colouring of the truth. No account of these events has ever been given at all approaching reality in their details, either as regards himself or others; nor shall I further allude to them than to remark that the errors of action committed by a man as noble and generous as Shelley, may, as far as he only is concerned, be fearlessly avowed by those who loved him, in the firm conviction that, were they judged impartially, his character would stand in fairer and brighter light than that of any contemporary (Hutchinson, p. xxi).

So she wrote in her 1839 Preface. The defensiveness here (so quick to mention those ‘errors’) concedes that the poet’s life has been a matter of controversy, but in order to imply that only small minds will fail to see beyond this. None of the accounts of the life that have been given are to be trusted, but, turning a necessity into a source of pride, Shelley’s widow declares that she is not going to enter the biographical fray. She will spe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Bibliography
• Chronology
• Copy Texts
• 1. Hazlitt, William, ‘On Paradox and Common-place’
• 2. Shelley, Mary, Preface to Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley
• 3. Medwin, Thomas, Journal of the Conversations of Lord Byron
• 4. Hunt, Leigh, Lord Byron and Some of his Contemporaries
• 5. Hogg, Thomas Jefferson, ‘Shelley at Oxford’
• 6. Medwin, Thomas, The Shelley Papers
• 7. Shelley, Mary, Preface and notes to Essays, Letters from Abroard
• 8. Dix, John, Pen and Ink Sketches of Poets
• 9. Medwin, Thomas, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley
• 10. Hunt, Leigh, The Autobiography
• 11. Hogg, Thomas Jefferson, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley
• 12. Trelawny, Edward, Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron
• 13. Peacock, Thomas Love, ‘Memoirs of Shelley’, 1858
• 14. Shelley, Lady Jane, Shelley Memorials
• 15. Peacock, Thomas Love, ‘Memoirs of Shelley’, 1860/1862
• 16. Hunt, Thornton, ‘Shelley. By One Who Knew Him’
• 17. Trelawny, Edward, Records of Shelley, Byron and the Author
• 18. Polidori, John William, Diary, 1816