Operations Management Stevenson 12th Edition Test Bank
Operations Management Stevenson 12th Edition Test Bank
Operations Management Stevenson 12th Edition Test Bank
Operations Management Stevenson 12th Edition Test Bank
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21. Claire, exiled to the country, enjoyed after such storm and stress
her first days of profound peace. But she was not the girl to put up
for long with rural solitude. She must have a reason for living—and
she did not fail to find one.
When people are in love they always imagine, quite wrongly, that
it is because they have come across an exceptional being who has
inspired them with the passion. The truth is that love, existing
already in the soul, seeks out a suitable object, and if it does not
find one, then creates it. But if, in an ordinary girl, this love-seeking
is unconscious, it was otherwise with the brilliant and hot-blooded
Claire. Realizing the impossibility of taking Shelley from her sister, or
even of sharing him with her, she deliberately looked round for some
other hero on whom to expend her unemployed affection. Some
women in such case send letters to great writers, or soldiers, or
actors. But Claire, who was poetical, desired a poet.
She found none more worthy of her than George Gordon, Lord
Byron, the man the most worshipped and the most hated in the
whole of England. She knew his poems by heart, Shelley had so
often read them to her with enthusiasm. She knew the stories of
vice and wit, of diabolical charm and infernal cruelty which were
woven round his name.
His extraordinary beauty, his title, his genius as a writer, the
boldness of his ideas, the scandals of his love affairs, all contributed
to make of him the perfect hero. He had had mistresses among the
highest in the land, the Countess of Oxford, Lady Frances Webster,
and the unfortunate Lady Caroline Lamb, who the first day that she
met him wrote in her journal: “Mad, bad and dangerous to know”:
and then underneath, “But this pale handsome face holds my
destiny.”
He had married, and all London repeated the tale that, when he
got into the carriage after the ceremony, he said to Lady Byron: “You
are now my wife, and that is enough for me to hate you. Were you
some one else’s wife, I might perhaps care about you.” He had
treated her with such contempt that she had been driven to ask for
a separation from him at the end of the first year.
22. Claire, who sought only for difficult adventures, and had supreme
confidence in herself, found out Byron’s address and decided to
chance her luck.
Claire to Byron.
“An utter stranger takes the liberty to addressing
you. . . . It is not charity I demand for of that I stand in no
need. . . . I tremble with fear at the fate of this letter. I
cannot blame if it shall be received by you as an impudent
imposture. It may seem a strange assertion, but it is not
the less true that I place my happiness in your hands. . . .
If a woman, whose reputation has yet remained unstained,
if without either guardian or husband to control, she should
throw herself on your mercy, if with a beating heart she
should confess the love she has borne you many years, if
she should return your kindness with fond affection and
unbounded devotion, could you betray her, or would you be
silent as the grave? . . . I must entreat your answer without
delay. Address me as E. Trefusis, 21 Noley Place, Mary Le
Bonne.”
Don Juan made no reply. This unknown writer of ornate style was
small game for him. But there is no one more tenacious than a
woman tired of her virtue. Claire returned to the attack a second
time. “Sunday Morning. Lord Byron is requested to state whether
seven o’clock this evening will be convenient to him to receive a lady
to communicate with him on business of peculiar importance. She
desires to be admitted alone and with the utmost privacy.”
Lord Byron sent out word by the servant that he had left town.
Then Claire wrote in her own name that, wanting to go on the
stage, and knowing that Lord Byron was interested in Drury Lane
Theatre, she would like to ask his advice. Byron’s reply was to
recommend her to call on the stage manager. Undeterred, she
made, at once, a skilful change of front. It was not a theatrical
career but the literary life which she now desired. She had written
23. half a novel and would so very much like to submit it to Byron’s
judgment. As he continued to keep silence, or to send evasive
replies, she risked offering him the only thing which a man with any
self-respect seldom refuses.
“I may appear to you imprudent, vicious, but one thing at least
time shall show you, that I love gently and with affection, that I am
incapable of anything approaching to the feeling of revenge or
malice. I do assure you your future shall be mine.
“Have you any objection to the following plan? On Thursday
evening we may go out of town together by some stage or mail
about the distance of ten or twelve miles. There we shall be free and
unknown; we can return early the following morning. I have
arranged everything here so that the slightest suspicion may not be
excited. Pray do so with your people.
“Will you admit me for two moments to settle with you where?
Indeed, I will not stay an instant after you tell me to go. . . . Do
what you will or go where you will, refuse to see me and behave
unkindly, I shall ever remember the gentleness of your manners and
the wild originality of your countenance.”
It was then that Don Juan, trapped and tired by the long pursuit,
decided to accept his defeat. He had already decided to leave
England and fix himself in Switzerland or Italy, and the prospect of a
speedy departure set welcome limits to this unwelcome amour.
24. CHAPTER XXIII
ARIEL AND DON JUAN
Don Juan counted, however, without the energy of Elvira. Claire
had made up her mind to follow him to Switzerland, and this dark-
eyed girl was a flame and a force. She arranged that the Shelleys
should chaperon her, knowing that they, too, would welcome the
idea of a change.
Since she left them, they had been living at Bishopsgate, on the
border of Windsor Forest, and beneath the oak-shades of the Great
Park Shelley had composed his first long poem since Queen Mab.
This was Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude, an imaginative
interpretation of his spiritual experiences, and a record of the
exquisite mountain, river, and woodland scenery of the past year.
The tone differs from that of his previous works. Melancholy and
resignation soften down the confident assertions of earlier years,
and religious and moral theories, if still serving as a peg, get
somewhat pushed into the background.
In the preface he shows the Poet thirsting for love and dying
because he cannot find it. But, says Shelley, it is better to die than to
live as do the comfortable worldlings, “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 in human joy, nor mourning with human
grief; these and such as they have their appointed curse. . . . They
are morally dead. They are neither friends, nor lovers, nor fathers,
nor citizens of the world, nor benefactors of their country . . . they
live unfruitful lives, and prepare for their old age a miserable grave.”
While Shelley had no regrets for his actions, all the same, life in
England had become odious to him. Mary, as an unmarried wife,
suffered from her social ostracism, and thought that if they went
25. abroad, where their story would be unknown, she would have more
chance of making friends.
She had given birth to a second child in January, 1816, a fine
little boy whom she had named William, after Godwin. The expenses
of the household, with the addition of a nurse, were heavy, the
income small. Life in Switzerland was said to be cheap; Claire, at
least, had little difficulty in persuading her that it was so.
As in the time of their first flight from London the extraordinary
trio crossed France, Burgundy, the Jura, and, reaching Geneva,
settled down at Sécheron, one of its suburbs, in the Hôtel
d’Angleterre. The house was on the edge of the lake, from its
windows they saw the sun sparkling on every wave-crest of the blue
water, and in the distance the black mountain-ridges that seemed to
quiver in the sunny atmosphere. Farther away still, a brilliant and
solid-looking white cloud spoke of the snow peaks of the Alps. The
change to this golden climate after English greyness and London
gloom was delicious. They hired a boat, and passed long days upon
the water, reading and sleeping.
⁂
While they lived thus, a band of happy children, with the blue sky
above them, and the blue lake beneath, Childe Harold in the most
sumptuous of travelling carriages was crossing Flanders on his way
to join them. England, in one of those crazy fits of virtue which
alternate with periods of the most amazing licence, had just
hounded Byron from her shores. When he entered a ball-room every
woman would leave it, as though he were the devil in person. He
determined to shake for ever from his shoes the dust of so
hypocritical a land.
His departure was accompanied by the most frenzied curiosity.
Society, which punishes cruelly any revolt of the elemental instincts,
nevertheless, in her heart of hearts, admires the rebel and envies
him. At Dover, where the Pilgrim embarked, a double line of
spectators stood on either side of the gangway. Great ladies
26. borrowed the clothes of their chamber-maids, so as to mix
unobserved with the crowd. People pointed out to one another the
enormous packing-cases containing his sofa, his books, his services
of china and glass.
The sea was rough, and Byron reminded his travelling
companions that his grandfather Admiral Byron was nicknamed
“Foul-weather Jack” because he never put to sea without a squall
blowing up. He took a certain pleasure in painting his own portrait
against this traditional stormy background. Unfortunately, he would
have his misfortunes transcendent.
⁂
A few days later there was great commotion at the Hôtel
d’Angleterre. Every one was on edge expecting the arrival of the
noble lord. Claire was tremulous in spite of her audacity, Shelley, in
the happiest spirits, was impatient. He was not shocked by the affair
between Byron and Claire. On the contrary he hoped to see the
same ties formed between Byron and his sister-in-law as existed
between himself and Mary.
The Shelleys were not disappointed by Byron’s first appearance.
His beauty was extraordinary. To begin with, you were struck by his
air of pride and intellect; next, you noticed the moonlight paleness
of his skin, his splendid dark blue eyes, his black and slightly curling
hair, the perfect line of his eyebrows. The nose and chin were firm
and well-drawn, the mouth full and voluptuous. His only defect
appeared in his walk. “Club-footed” was said of him. “Cloven-footed”
he insinuated of himself, for he preferred to be considered diabolic
rather than infirm. Mary saw that his lameness embarrassed him, for
whenever he had to take a few steps before spectators he made
some satanic jest. In the register-book of the hotel, against the word
“age” he wrote “a hundred.”
Byron and Shelley got on well together. Byron was glad to find
him a man of his own class, who in spite of hardships had retained
the charming ease of manner peculiar to the young aristocrat. His
27. cultivation was astounding. Byron, too, had read enormously, but
without Shelley’s serious application. Shelley had read to know,
Byron had read to dazzle, and Byron was perfectly well aware of the
difference. He felt, too, the instant conviction that Shelley’s will was
a force, a bent bow, while his own floated loose on the current at
the mercy of his passions and of his mistresses.
Shelley, the least vain of men, did not observe this admiration for
him, which Byron took care to hide. While listening to the third canto
of Childe Harold he was moved to enthusiasm and discouragement.
In the superb energy of the poem, which rose and swelled,
irresistibly like a flood, he recognized genius and despaired of ever
equalling it.
But if the poet filled him with admiration, the man filled him with
astonishment. He had expected a Titan in revolt, and he found a
wounded aristocrat fully alive to the pleasures and pains of vanity,
which seemed to Shelley so puerile. Byron had outraged convention,
but, all the same, he believed in it. It had stood in the path of his
desires, and he had flung it aside, but with regret. That which
Shelley had done ingenuously, he had done consciously. Banished
from society, he valued nothing so much as social success. A bad
husband, it was only to legitimate love that he paid respect. His
mouth overflowed with cynicism, but it was by way of reprisals, not
from conviction. Between marriage and depravity he recognized no
middle path. He had sought to terrify his compatriots by acting an
audacious part, but only because he had despaired of conquering
them by acting a traditional one.
Shelley looked to women as a source of exaltation, Byron as a
pretext for idling. Shelley angelic, too angelic, venerated them.
Byron human, too human, desired them and talked of them in the
most contemptuous fashion. “It is the plague of these women,” said
he, “that you cannot live with them or without them. . . . I cannot
make up my mind whether or not women have souls. My beau-ideal
would be a woman with talent enough to understand and value
mine, but not sufficient to be able to shine herself.”
The upshot of certain of their conversations was surprising.
Shelley, mystical without knowing it, managed to scandalize Byron, a
28. Don Juan in spite of himself.
This did not prevent them from being excellent company one for
the other. When Shelley, always a great fisher of souls, tried to win
over his friend to a less futile conception of life, Byron defended his
point of view by brilliant paradoxes which delighted Shelley the
artist, as much as they pained Shelley the moralist. Both were
passionately fond of the water. They bought a boat, keeled and
clinker-built, in which they went on the lake every evening with
Mary, Claire, and Byron’s medical attendant, the handsome young
Italian, Polidori. Byron and Shelley, sitting silent, would ship their
oars to follow with their gaze fleeting shapes amidst the moon-lit
clouds; Claire would sing, and her warm, delicious voice carried their
thoughts with it over the starry waters in a voluptuous flight.
One night of strong wind Byron, defying the storm, said he would
sing them an Albanian song. “Now be sentimental and give me all
your attention.” It was a strange wild howl that he gave forth,
laughing the while at their disappointment, who had expected a wild
Eastern melody. From that day onward Mary and Claire named him
“the Albaneser,” and “Albé” for short.
The two poets made a literary pilgrimage round the lake. They
visited the spot where Rousseau has placed his Nouvelle Héloïse,
“Clarens, sweet Clarens, birthplace of deep Love”; and Lausanne and
Ferney, full of memories of Gibbon and Voltaire.
Shelley’s enthusiasm gained Byron, who wrote under its influence
some of his finest lines. Near Meillerie one of the sudden lake-storms
nearly upset the boat. Byron began to strip. Shelley, who could not
swim, sat still with folded arms. His calmness increased Byron’s
admiration for him, although he hid it more carefully than ever. Long
afterwards Shelley, speaking of this storm, said, “I knew that my
companion would try to save me, and it was a humiliating idea.”
Sick of hotel life and the impertinent curiosity of their fellow-
boarders, the Shelleys hired a cottage at Coligny on the edge of the
lake. Byron settled himself at the Villa Diodati, a short distance away.
The two houses were only separated by a vineyard. Here, some
vine-dressers at work in the early morning saw Claire come out of
Byron’s villa and run across to Shelley’s. She lost a slipper on the
29. way, but ashamed of being seen did not stop to pick it up. The
honest Swiss peasants, chuckling hugely, made haste to carry the
slipper of the English “Miss” to the mayor of the village.
Her love affair did not prosper. She was with child, and Byron
was utterly tired of her. He let her see it. For a moment perhaps he
had admired her voice, and her vivacity, but very soon she bored
him. Nor did he feel himself in any way bound to this young woman
who had thrust herself upon him with such pertinacity. . . .
“ ‘Carry off’ quotha! and ‘girl.’ I should like to know who has been
carried off except poor dear me. I have been more ravished myself
than anybody since the Trojan War. I am accused of being hard on
women. It may be so, but I have been their martyr. My whole life
has been sacrificed to them and by them.”
Shelley went to talk with him of Claire’s future, and of the child’s.
As to Claire’s, Byron was perfectly indifferent. All he wanted was to
get rid of her as soon as possible and never to see her again. Shelley
had nothing to say on this point, but he defended the rights of the
unborn child.
At first Byron had the idea of confiding it to his sister Augusta.
Claire refusing her consent, he then undertook to look after the child
himself as soon as it was a year old, on condition that he should be
absolutely master of it.
It became difficult for the Shelleys to remain in his
neighbourhood. Not that there was any coldness between the two
men, for while Shelley had found the negotiations for Claire painful,
they had seemed to him perfectly natural. But Claire herself
suffered, and Mary was often indignant at Byron’s cynical talk. When
he declared that women had no right to eat at the same table with
men, that their proper place was in the harem or gynæceum, the
daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft trembled with anger. Once more
she was homesick for English scenes. A house beside some English
river now appeared to her, at this distance away, a haven of peace.
Shelley wrote to his friends, Peacock and Hogg, to find something
for them, and the journey home began.
30. ⁂
After they had gone, Byron wrote to his sister:
“Now don’t scold; but what could I do? A foolish girl, in
spite of all I could say or do, would come after me, or
rather went before—for I found her here—and I had all the
plague possible to persuade her to go back again, but at
last she went. Now, dearest, I do most truly tell thee that I
could not help this, that I did all I could to prevent it. I was
not in love nor have any love left for any; but I could not
exactly play the Stoic with a woman, who had scrambled
eight hundred miles to unphilosophize me. . . . And now
you know all that I know of the matter, and it’s over.”
Shelley remained in correspondence with Byron and did not give
up hopes of “saving” him. Mingled with an immense deference for
the great poet, Shelley’s letters show a trace of haughty disapproval
of the character of the man. He opposed to Byron’s constant anxiety
concerning his reputation, his success, and what was said of him in
London, a picture of true glory.
“Is it nothing to create greatness and goodness,
destined perhaps to infinite extensions? Is it nothing to
become a source whence the minds of other men will draw
strength and beauty? . . . What would Humanity be if
Homer and Shakespeare had never written? . . . Not that I
advise you to aspire to Fame. Your work should spring from
a purer, simpler source. You should desire nothing more
than to express your own thoughts, and to address yourself
to the sympathy of those who are capable of thinking as
you do. Fame follows those whom she is unworthy to
guide.”
Lord Byron, who was then on his way to Venice, read these lofty
counsels with a weary indifference. Exacting veneration bored him.
32. CHAPTER XXIV
GRAVES IN THE GARDEN OF LOVE
Of the three young girls who had given life and gaiety to the
house in Skinner Street, one only, Fanny Imlay, was left. She alone,
who was neither Godwin’s child, nor yet Mrs. Godwin’s, lived at
home with them and called them “papa” and “mamma.” She alone,
so gentle and so loving, had found neither lover nor husband.
Modest and unselfish, these are virtues which men praise—and pass
by. For a moment she had wondered whether Percy would not think
of her, and with a beating heart had begun a correspondence with
him. But Mary’s hazel eyes had quenched the hopes to which the
timid Fanny had never given definite form.
In this silent home, saddened by money-worries, it was on Fanny
that Mrs. Godwin wreaked her ill-humour, while Godwin let her
understand that he could not continue to keep her, and that she
ought to see about earning her own living. She asked nothing better,
and would have liked to become a teacher, but the flight of Mary and
Jane had thrown a mantle of disrepute over the household, and the
heads of schools distrusted the way in which the Godwin girls had
been brought up.
Sick at heart and with a touch of envy, Fanny admired from afar
her sisters’ life of wild adventure, a life which was sometimes
dangerous, but always amusing. How she, too, would have loved to
be over there at Lake Leman, in the company of the famous Lord
Byron, of whom all London was talking!
“Is his face as fine as in your portrait of him? . . . Tell
me also if he has a pleasing voice, for that has a great
charm with me. Does he come into your house in a
careless, friendly, dropping-in manner? I wish to know,
though not from idle curiosity, whether he was capable of
acting in the manner that London scandal-mongers say he
33. did. I cannot think from his writings that he can be such a
detestable being. Do answer me these questions, for where
I love the poet, I should like to respect the man.
“Shelley’s boat excursion with him must have been very
delightful. . . . I long very much to read the poems the
‘Poet’ has written on the spot where Julie was drowned.
When will they be published in England? May I see them in
manuscript? Say you have a friend who has few pleasures,
and is very impatient to read them. . . . It is impossible to
tell the good that Poets do their fellow creatures, at least
those that can feel. Whilst I read I am a poet. I am inspired
with good feelings—feelings that create perhaps a more
permanent good in me than all the everyday preachments
in the world; it counteracts the dross which one gives on
the everyday concerns of life and tells us there is
something yet in the world to aspire to—something by
which succeeding ages may be made happy and perhaps
better.”
Mary and Claire would read these charming letters with a
condescending pity. Poor Fanny! How Skinner Street! Always thinking
that Godwin’s novels, Godwin’s debts, and Mrs. Godwin’s bad
tempers were the most important things in the world! Fanny’s
slavery gave the two others a more vivid appreciation of their own
freedom. Her loneliness enhanced for them the value of their lovers’
society, and, in their compassion for her, Mary got Shelley to buy her
a watch before leaving Geneva.
When the Shelleys and Claire came back to England, to settle
down at Bath, they saw Fanny as they passed through London. She
was depressed, and spoke of nothing but her loneliness and her
uselessness; no one wanted her. In saying good-bye to Shelley, her
voice quivered. Yet she wrote to him at Bath with the same
affectionate frankness as before, although her letters now had that
indefinable note of reproach which those who lead a death-in-life
feel towards those whose life is filled with living. Godwin, his literary
work broken into by fresh money troubles, became more and more
34. grumpy; an aunt, Everina Wollstonecraft, who had promised to take
Fanny as governess in her school, wrote to say that a sister of Mary
and Claire would certainly be too terrifying a teacher for the narrow-
minded middle-class parents.
One morning the Shelleys received from Bristol a curious letter, in
which Fanny bade them farewell in mysterious sentences: “I am
going to a place whence I hope never to return.”
Mary implored Shelley to go to Bristol at once. He came home
during the night without any news. Next morning he went again,
and this time brought Mary lamentable tidings. Fanny had left Bristol
for Swansea by the Cambrian Coach, and had put up at the
Mackworth Arms Inn. She had gone at once to her room telling the
chamber-maid that she was tired. When she did not come down
next morning, her door was forced, and she was found lying dead,
her long brown hair spread about her. By her was the little Genevan
watch given her by Mary and Shelley. On the table was a bottle of
laudanum and the beginning of a letter:
“I have long determined that the best thing I could do
was to put an end to the existence of a being whose birth
was unfortunate, and whose life has only been a series of
pain to those persons who have hurt their health in
endeavouring to promote her welfare. Perhaps to hear of
my death will give you pain, but you will soon have the
blessing of forgetting that such a creature ever existed as
. . .”
Godwin had taught in Political Justice that suicide is not a crime;
the only difficulty being to decide in each individual case whether
the social advantage of thirty supplementary years of life forbids
recourse to a voluntary death. After the tragedy he wrote to Mary
for the first time since her flight. It was to implore the three outcasts
to avoid anything leading to publicity, “which to a mind in anguish is
one of the severest of all trials.”
35. ⁂
Shelley’s nerves were badly shaken by Fanny’s terrible death, and
Mrs. Godwin in her amiable way insinuated she had killed herself for
love of him. He then remembered certain signs of emotion he had
seen in her, and reproached himself for having always considered
her as of a slightly lower status. Perhaps he had, though quite
unwittingly, awakened her love at the moment when, deserted by
Harriet, he sought a shelter in any feminine tenderness. Perhaps she
had weighed and counted and analysed with care, words and
glances, into which he had meant to put mere friendliness. “How
difficult it is to understand the soul of another; How much suffering
one may cause without wishing it, or knowing it; How one may live
in presence of the most profound, sometimes of the most despairful
feelings without even suspecting their existence!” It does not suffice
therefore to be sincere, nor to have good intentions. You can do just
as much harm through not understanding as through unkindness.
He was plunged into a blank despondency.
To shake it off, he went to spend a few days alone with a young
literary critic, Leigh Hunt, who had praised his poetry with
intelligence and enthusiasm. Hunt lived on Hampstead Heath in the
Vale of Health, a spot as tree-embowered and almost as charming
to-day as it was then. His wife Marianne was homely and hospitable.
He had a whole brood of jolly children with whom Shelley could walk
and play. There, he could forget for a time poor Fanny and Godwin.
The visit was short but delicious, and he came home much cheered.
On his return, he found awaiting him a letter from Hookham,
which he opened eagerly, for he had asked Hookham to find out for
him what Harriet was doing. He had had no news of her for two
months. She had drawn her allowance in March and in September,
being then in her father’s house. But since October nothing was
known of her.
“My dear Sir,” Hookham wrote, “It is nearly a month
since I had the pleasure of receiving a letter from you, and
36. you have no doubt felt surprised that I did not reply to it
sooner. It was my intention to do so; but on enquiring, I
found the utmost difficulty in obtaining the information you
desire relative to Mrs. Shelley and your children.
“While I was yet endeavouring to discover Mrs. Shelley’s
address, information was brought me that she was dead—
that she had destroyed herself. You will believe that I did
not credit the report. I called at the house of a friend of Mr.
Westbrook; my doubt led to conviction. I was informed that
she was taken from the Serpentine river on Tuesday
last. . . . Little or no information was laid before the jury
which sat on the body. . . . The verdict was found drowned.
Your children are well and are both, I believe, in London.”
Shelley went up to town in an agonizing condition of mind. With
horror he saw in imagination the blonde and childlike head, which he
had so loved, befouled by the mud of the river-bed, green and
swollen through its sojourn in the water. He asked himself how was
it possible she could have abandoned her children and chosen so
dreadful a death.
The Hunts and Hookham showed him every kindness, and told
him all they knew. A paragraph in The Times stated: “On Thursday a
respectable female far advanced in pregnancy was taken out of the
Serpentine river, and brought home to her residence in Queen
Street, Brompton, having been missed for nearly six weeks. She had
a valuable ring on her finger. A want of honour in her own conduct is
supposed to have led to this fatal catastrophe, her husband being
abroad.”
The gossips of Queen Street repeated the little they had gleaned:
Harriet no longer received letters from her husband, because her
former landlady had failed to forward them, and she had given up all
hope of his ever coming back to her. She had fallen, from despair.
Living first with an army officer, he had been obliged to leave her on
his regiment being ordered to India. Then, unable to endure the
loneliness of life, she found a protector of humble grade, said to be
a groom, and that he deserted her. The Westbrooks had deprived
37. her of her children, and refused to receive her back. She was said to
be in the family way, absolutely alone, and terrified at the
approaching scandal. Then, came the body in the river.
Shelley passed an appalling night. . . . “Far advanced in
pregnancy. . . .” What an end to her life . . . what madness. . . .
Detailed and intimate memories of poor Harriet crowded back into
his mind against his will, and he saw in imagination with terrible
vividness the last scenes. . . . Harriet in love, Harriet in terror, Harriet
in despair . . . every expression he knew too well. Ah, this name
which during a few years had meant the whole world to him, for the
future he must associate with all that is basest and most vile!
“Harriet, my wife, a prostitute! Harriet, my wife, a suicide!”
There were moments when he asked himself if he were not
responsible, but he pushed this idea from him with all his strength.
“I did my duty. Always on every occasion in life, I have done what
seemed to me the loyal and disinterested thing to do. When I left
her, I no longer loved her. I assured her existence to the utmost of
my means, and even beyond them. Never have I treated her with
unkindness . . . it is those odious Westbrooks alone. . . . Ought I to
have sacrificed my sanity and my life, to one who was unfaithful to
me, and second-rate?”
His reason told him “No.” Hogg and Peacock, who surrounded
him with affectionate attentions, told him “No.” He besought them to
repeat it to him, for at instants he seemed to glimpse some
mysterious and super-human duty towards Harriet, in which he had
failed. “In breaking traditional ties one sets free in man unknown
forces, the consequences of which one cannot foresee. . . . Freedom
is only good for the strong . . . for those who are worthy of it. . . .
Harriet’s soul was weak. . . .” Ah, little head, blonde and childlike, of
drowned Harriet. . . .
Next day he wrote a tender letter to Mary, eager to dwell by
contrast on her gentle serenity. He asked her to become a mother to
his “poor babes, Ianthe and Charles.” His counsel had just informed
him that the Westbrooks would take action to contest his
guardianship of the children, on the pretext that his irreligious
38. opinions, and his living in concubinage with Miss Godwin, rendered
him unfit to bring them up.
39. CHAPTER XXV
THE RULES OF THE GAME
In what way does a marriage ceremony, religious or civil, add to
the happiness of a pair of lovers, deeply smitten and full of
confidence in one another? The event proved that it can at least
make joy blossom on the countenance of a pedant. Godwin’s
exhibited an incredible satisfaction on learning that “the seducer”
was going to make “an honest woman” of his daughter, and that,
eventually, she would become Lady Shelley. He thus inspired in his
ex-disciple a contempt for his character, full measure, pressed down,
and running over.
At first there had been some hesitation as to whether it were
decent to celebrate the marriage so soon after Harriet’s death, but
the authorities on social etiquette declared that it would not do to
wait any longer for the Church’s blessing on a union which Nature
had already blessed twice over.
Just a fortnight after the body of the first Mrs. Shelley had been
taken out of the Serpentine, Mary and Percy were married by a
clergyman in the church of St. Mildred, Bread Street. Godwin,
beaming all over his face, and Mrs. Godwin, simpering and
pretentious, signed as witnesses. That evening, for the first time
since they ran away, the Shelleys dined in Skinner Street.
The family feast was a lugubrious one. There, in the little dining-
room, Fanny had moved to and fro; there, Harriet had sat in her
happy early wedded days; their ghosts, suffering and unsatisfied,
continued to haunt the room and torture the living. It is true that
Godwin’s ill-temper had been changed by the morning’s ceremony
into an excess of urbanity, but too many memories troubled the
guests to make any real cordiality possible.
That night Mary wrote in her journal: “Go to London. A marriage
takes place. Draw. Read Lord Chesterfield and Locke.” Mary had
40. good nerves. Poor drowned Harriet was never a patch on her.
⁂
Nevertheless, it was but right that the news of so splendid a
marriage should be sent to every Godwin in the land. The
Philosopher wrote to Hull Godwin:
41. “Dear Brother,
“Were it not that you have a family of your own, and
can see by them how little shrubs grow into tall trees, you
would hardly imagine that my boy, born the other day, is
now fourteen, and that my daughter is between nineteen
and twenty. The piece of news I have to tell, however, is
that I went to church with this tall girl some little time ago
to be married. Her husband is the eldest son of Sir Timothy
Shelley, of Field Place, in the county of Sussex, Baronet. So
that according to the vulgar ideas of the world she is well
married, and I have great hopes that the young man will
make her a good husband. You will wonder, I daresay, how
a girl without a penny of fortune should make so good a
match. But such are the ups and downs of the world. For
my part, I care but little comparatively about wealth, so
that it should be her destiny in life to be respectable,
virtuous, and contented.”
The letter closes with a word of cool thanks for a ham and a
turkey sent to the Skinner Street household at Christmas.
But the formal marriage brought about one real advantage. The
“concubinage” argument, advanced by those who wished to deprive
Shelley of his children, fell to the ground. The Westbrooks, however,
did not give in. By the voice of the retired publican, the young
Ianthe aged three, and Charles aged two, addressed a petition to
the Lord Chancellor in which they said: “Our father avows himself to
be an Atheist, and has written and published a certain work called
Queen Mab with notes, and other works, wherein he blasphemously
denies the existence of God as the Creator of the Universe, the
sanctity of marriage, and all the most sacred principles of morality.”
For which reasons these precocious and virtuous infants prayed that
their persons and fortunes might not be placed in the power of an
unworthy father, but under the protection of persons of the highest
morality, such as their maternal grandfather and their kind Aunt
Eliza.
42. Shelley’s counsel took care to say nothing in defence of Queen
Mab: there was nothing to be said at that time, and in that place,
the Court of Chancery. He confined himself to denying the
importance of a work written by a boy of nineteen.
“Notwithstanding Mr. Shelley’s violent philippics against marriage,
Mr. Shelley marries twice before he is twenty-five! He is no sooner
liberated from the despotic chains which he speaks of with so much
horror and contempt, than he forges a new set, and becomes again
a willing victim of this horrid despotism! It is hoped that a
consideration of this marked difference between his opinions and his
actions will induce the Lord Chancellor not to think very seriously of
this boyish and silly publication.” As to the proposal of placing the
children with their mother’s family: “We think it right to say that Mr.
Westbrook formerly kept a coffee-house, and is certainly in no
respect qualified to be the guardian of Mr. Shelley’s children. To Miss
Westbrook there are more decided objections: she is illiterate and
vulgar, and it was by her advice, with her active concurrence, and it
may be said by her management, that Mr. Shelley, when of the age
of nineteen, ran away with Miss Harriet Westbrook, then of the age
of seventeen, and married her in Scotland. Miss Westbrook, the
proposed guardian, was then nearly thirty, and, if she had acted as
she ought to have done as the guardian and friend of her younger
sister, all this misery and disgrace to both families would have been
avoided.”
His counsel’s ingenious notion of winning his client’s case by
renouncing in that client’s name the opinions of his youth, seemed
to Shelley a piece of disgusting hypocrisy. He, therefore, drew up for
the Lord Chancellor a statement in which he set forth that his ideas
on marriage had not changed, and that if he had made his conduct
conform to the customs of society, he in no way had renounced the
liberty to criticize those customs.
The Lord Chancellor in his judgment remarks: “This is a case in
which a father has demonstrated that he must and does deem it to
be a matter of duty to recommend to those whose opinions and
habits he may take upon himself to form conduct as moral and
virtuous, which the law calls upon me to consider as immoral and
43. vicious. . . . I cannot, therefore, in these conditions, entrust him with
the guardianship of these children.”
But the Lord Chancellor refused to confide them to the odious
Westbrooks. He put them under the care of an Army doctor, named
Hume, of Brent End Lodge, Hanwell, who would place the boy, when
seven years old, at a good private school under the superintendence
of an orthodox clergyman. As to the little Ianthe, she would be
brought up at home by Mrs. Hume, who would see that she said her
morning prayers, and asked a blessing on her food. Mrs. Hume
would also put into her hands improving books, and, to a certain
extent would encourage the reading of poetry, Shakespeare for
instance, if carefully Bowdlerized. The whole cost, one hundred a
year for each child. Mr. Shelley might visit them twelve times a year,
but in the presence of Dr. and Mrs. Hume. Mr. John Westbrook might
see them the same number of times, but, if he wished it, he might
see them without the Humes being present.
This sentence was very bitter to Shelley. It sanctioned officially so
to say, and in reasonable and moderate formulas, his exile from the
community of civilized men. It was like a brevet of incurable folly.
⁂
While the case was being fought out, he had bought a house in
the pleasant little country town of Great Marlow. Ariel at last
consented to have a home like other people. One room, big enough
for a village ball-room, was fitted up as a library, and decorated with
casts of Venus and Apollo. There was a very big garden: in this
during the spring and summer of 1817 might be seen two babies,
William and Clara Shelley, and a third child of unusual beauty, Alba,
daughter of Lord Byron and Claire. Her father was said to be leading
a wild life at Venice. Claire received no news from him.
Shelley’s recent trials had left their traces on his countenance. He
was thinner, more hectic, and stooped more than ever. A violent pain
in his side prevented him from sleeping, and the doctors, unable to
cure it, said it was “a nervous disorder.”
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