Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 by Various

V >> Various >> Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19

The autobiographies are the best biographies. No doubt, self-love and
some cowardly sensitiveness will operate on a man in speaking of his
own doings; but all such drawbacks will still leave his narrative far
more trustworthy, as regards the truth of character, than that of any
other man: and this is more emphatically the case in proportion to
the genius of the writer; for genius is naturally bold and true, the
antipodes of anything like hypocrisy, and prone to speak out,--if it
were but in defiance of hatred or misrepresentation, even though the
better and more philosophic spirit were wanting. We should have
better and more instructive autobiographies, if distinguished men
were not deterred by the self-denying ordinance so generally
accepted, that it is not becoming in any one to speak frankly of
himself or his own convictions. We have no longer any of the strong,
wayward egotists,--the St. Augustines, the Montaignes, the Rousseaus,
the Mirabeaus, the Byrons; even the Cobbetts have died out. But the
Carlyles and the Emersons preserve amongst us still the evidences of
a stronger time.

There are two sorts of biographies, which may be described, in a
rough way, as biographies of thought and biographies of action. It
may not be a very difficult thing, perhaps, to write the life of a
politician or a general, or even of a statesman or a great soldier.
At any rate, the history of such a one is an easy matter, compared
with that of a mere man of thought, of a man of genius. In the former
case, we have the marked events, which are, as it were, the
stepping-stones of biography,--events belonging to the narrative of the
time,--and the individual receives a reflected light from many men
and things. Dates and facts make the task of statement or commentary
more easy to the writer, and his work more interesting to the general
reader. But the case of the mere thinker, the man of inaction, whose
sphere of achievement is for the most part a little room, and who
produces his effects in a great measure in silence or solitude, is a
very different one. The names of his publications, the dates of them,
the number of them, the publisher's price for them, the critic's
opinion of them, are meagre facts for the biographer; and if the man
of genius be a man of quiet, sequestered life, the record of it will
be only the more uninteresting to the reader. It is only when
something painful has been suffered, something eccentric done and
misunderstood and denounced or derided, that the biography rouses the
languid interest of the public. Indeed, so imperfect and false are
the plan and style of the literary biographies, that such opprobria
are, as it were, necessary to them,--necessary stimulants of
attention, and necessary shades of what would otherwise be a
monotonous and ineffective picture; and thus the unlucky men of
letters suffer posthumously for the stupidity of others as well as
their faults or divergencies. When biographers have not facts, they
are not unwilling to make use of fallacies: they set down "elephants
for want of towns." Dean Swift is a case in point. Society has
avenged itself by calumniating the man who spat upon its hypocrisies
and rascalities; and to appease the wounded feelings of the world, he
is attractively set down as a savage and a tyrant. Mr. Thackeray and
others find such a verdict artistically suitable to their criticisms
or their narratives, (a French author has written a romantic book
about the Dean and Stella,) and so the man is still depicted and
explained as the slayer of two poor innocent women, a sort of
clerical Bluebeard, and the horrid ogre who proposed to kill and eat
the fat Irish babies. Thackeray's plan of dissertation, indeed, was
inconsistent with any displacing or disturbing of the preconceived
notions; the success of it was, on the contrary, to be built upon the
customary old impressions of the subject. Everybody is pleased to
find his own idea in Thackeray, liking it all the better for the
graphic way in which it is set forth and illustrated; and the result
shows the shrewd artistic judgment of the critic, who apparently
(especially in the Dean's case) understands his readers rather better
than his theme. As for Swift,--though a fair knowledge of the man may
be gleaned from the several biographies of him that we have, his life
has not yet been fairly written and interpreted; and we believe the
same may be said of most literary men of genius.

It must certainly be said of Shelley,--and this brings us to the
beginning of our remarks. Not one man in ten thousand would be
capable of writing the life of that poet as it should be
written,--even supposing the biographer were one of his intimate friends.
Shelley went entirely away from the ranks of society,--farther away
than Byron, and was a man harder to be understood by the generality
of men. An autobiography of such a man was more needed than that of
any other; but we could not expect an autobiography from Shelley. He
felt nothing but pain and sorrow in the retrospect of his life, and,
like Byron, shrank from the task of explaining the mixture of self-will,
injustice, falsehood, and impetuous defiance that made up the
greater part of his history; and when he died, he left everything at
sixes and sevens, as regarded his place and acts in the world.
Accordingly, until lately, no one ventured forward with a biography
of the departed poet, who has been for more than a generation looked
on, as it were, through the medium of two lights: one, that of his
poetry, which represents him as the loftiest and gentlest of minds;
and the other, the imperfect notices of his life, which show him
forth a cruel, headstrong, and reckless outlaw,--hooted at,
anathematized, (and by his own father first,) driven out, like a
leper in the Middle Ages, and deprived of the care of his children.
In his case, however, the tendency to dwell upon and bring out the
darker traits of biography does not exhibit itself in any remarkable
way; and, on the whole, Shelley's character wears a mild and retiring
rather than a defiant or fiendish aspect. The world is inclined to
make allowances for him, on account of his beautiful poetry; and this
is something of the justice which, on other grounds also, is probably
due to him. Still, nobody has come forward to write his biography as
it should be written; and we are yet to seek for the illustrated
moral of a sensitive, unaccommodating, and impulsive being, rebelling
against the rules of life and the general philosophy of his
fellow-creatures, and shrinking with a shy, uncomprehended pride from the
companionship of society. Shelley's disposition was a marked and rare
one, but there is nothing of the riddle in it; for thousands, of his
temperament, may always be found going strangely through the world,
here and there, and the interpretation of such a character could be
made extremely interesting, and even instructive, by any one capable
of comprehending it.

After a considerable interval, some notices of Shelley have appeared,
without, however, throwing much additional light on the wayward heart
and pilgrimage of the poet. Mr. C.S. Middleton has published a book
upon Shelley and his writings; Mr. T.J. Hogg has given a sketch of
his life; and E.J. Trelawny some recollections of him, as well as of
Byron. None of these pretends to explain that eccentric nature, or
harmonize in any way his acts and his feelings; though a few things
may be gathered that tend to make the biography somewhat more
distinct than before, in some particulars. On the subject of his
first unfortunate marriage, we are made aware that his wife was a
self-willed, ill-taught young woman, who set her own father at
defiance, and threw herself on the protection of such a wandering
oddity as Percy Shelley. She was strong-minded, and brought with her
into her husband's house her elder sister, also strong-minded, a
ridiculous and insufferable duenna, whom Shelley hated with all
his heart and soul, and wished dead and buried out of his
sight,--finding, no doubt, his unsteady disposition controlled and
thwarted by the voice and authority of his sister-in-law, who, knowing
that her father furnished the young couple with their chief means of
livelihood, would be all the more resolute in advising them or
domineering over the migratory household. At last, these women grew
tired of the moping and ineffectual youth who still remained poor and
unsettled, with a father desperately healthy and inexorable, and all
hope of the baronetcy very far off indeed; they grew tired of him and
went away,--the wife, like Lady Byron, refusing to go back to such an
aimless, rhapsodizing vagabond. With her natural decision of mind,
aided and encouraged, very likely, by her astute relatives, she
thought she saw good reasons for breaking and setting aside the
contract which had united them; and no doubt the poor woman must have
felt the hardship of living with such a melancholy outlaw. Having
nothing in common with the devoted Emma, drawn in the ballad of "The
Nut-brown Maid," she must have hated that wandering about from, place
to place, living in lonely country-houses, under perpetual terror of
robbers in the night, and subsisting for the most part on potatoes
and Platonism; and she must have especially hated the Latin Grammar.
She naturally thought, that, when she was married, she should have
nothing more to say to exercises and lessons; but she found a
pedagogue in Shelley, and the honeymoon saw her "attacking Latin" for
the purpose of construing the poet Horace. How she must have hated
all poets! She had other ideas,--ideas of ease, respectability,
baronetcy; and her disappointment was greater than she could bear.
Mr. Hogg says, she had a propensity to strong courses, and would talk
of suicide in a speculative way. It is not difficult to discover the
truth of that unfortunate union and disunion. Shelley, betrayed by
the impulses of his enthusiast nature and the ignorant and deplorable
credulity of a bookworm, allowed himself to be imposed upon by a
designing boarding-school girl and her relatives, and everything
followed as a matter of course. The unhappy wife recklessly broke the
bond which she had as recklessly formed, and which the poet would
have honorably and truly respected all his life; and then her
passionate regret reacted fatally on herself,--and on him also, by a
Nemesis not so very strange or unnatural, as the world goes.[1]

[Footnote 1: Since this article was written, Mr. Peacock, an early
friend of Shelley, has published a very different estimate of the
character of Harriet Shelley. See _Fraser's Magazine_ for March,
1860.]

The subject of Shelley's character is a delicate and a difficult one,
and Mr. Hogg and Mr. Trelawny, especially, show their inability to
understand it, by the way in which they put forward and dwell upon
the poet's peculiarities. Trelawny, a hard-minded, thorough-paced man
of the world, publishing garrulously in his old age what he was
silent about in his better period, talks of the poet's oddity,
awkwardness, and want of punctuality,--as if Percy were some clerkly
man on 'Change; and Hogg, hilariously clever, says Shelley was so
erratic, fragmentary, and unequal, that his character cannot be shown
in any way but as the figures of a magic-lantern are shown on a
wall,--Mr. Hogg's own style of description being the wall,--"O wall,
O wall, O sweet and lovely wall!" He also tells us, to instance the
poet's familiarity with the sex, a story of Shelley sitting with one
of his lady friends and being plied with cups of tea by that fair
sympathizer,--the poet talking and letting his saucer fall, and the
lady wiping his perspiring face with a pocket-handkerchief. Such
scraps of silly gossip are not biography; they may do for tea-table
chit-chat, but show very feebly in the place where one looks for
something like a philosophical criticism on the mind of so
extraordinary a man as Shelley.

Genius alone can do justice to genius; and kindred genius alone will
do it. There have been, no doubt, a great many writers of biography
who had no objection to compensate their feelings for bygone slights
or discourtesies, suffered from some wayward or inattentive
superiority, some stroke of ridicule or malice. Literary antipathies
do not die with the dead. The posthumous impression of Margaret
Fuller Ossoli has been colored by some who sneer at her ways and
pretensions, because there was probably something in her manner which
displeased them in a personal way. She had certainly a very awkward
fashion of blinking her eyes, and also "a mountainous _me_." It is
very probable poor Edgar Poe has had his faults exaggerated by those
who suffered from the critical superiority of his intellect; since
some of those notices of him which tend most to fix his character as
a reprobate, and appear in a laggard way in the English periodicals,
were probably written by some of his own countrymen. It was a painful
consciousness of this literary revenge that made H.W. Herbert, in his
last agony, call on his brother-penmen for mercy on his remains, and
that induces many of our public men to bring out their own memoirs or
encourage others to do so. It looks like vainglory, but it is
not such. The memoirs show a mortal dread of calumny or
misrepresentation. Mr. Barnum, for instance, was more just to himself
than anybody else would be. He showed that his doings were only of a
piece with those of thousands around him in society; and this not
unreasonable extenuation is one that few of his critics are apt to
make use of in commenting on him and his dexterities of living. As
for Shelley, he might have shunned or slighted or overlooked Mr.
Trelawny in some painful or preoccupied moment, or offended the
robust man of the world by the mere delicate shyness of his look; he
might also have puzzled and bewildered Mr. Hogg, being, perhaps,
puzzled and bewildered himself, by some subtile mental
speculation,--unconscious that for these things he was yet to be brought
to judgment and turned into ridicule, for the coming generation, by
these familiar men,--these drilled and pipe-clayed familiar men. He
might have tossed up a paradox or two to keep the muscles of his mind
in exercise on a cold day, and his rapid intellect may have run away
from his hearer, trampling on the conventions and platitudes in its
course; but Mr. Hogg does not think he had fixed notions concerning
anything. The poet did not nail his colors with a cheer to the mast
of any of the great questions of the day, ethical or social, and
therefore suffered the disparagements of those intelligent friends of
his who have been taught to consider a well-defined rigidity of
conviction and maintenance, in the midst of all these phenomena of
our universe, telluric and uranological, as the test of everything
valuable in human character and morals. And thus it has come about,
that genius, with its native instincts of reason, truth, and common
sense, is doomed to pay the penalty of its preeminence and its
divergencies, and suffer at the hands of friends and enemies alike,
from the show of those false appearances, insincerities,
equivocations, which are its natural and proper antipathies.

Since the foregoing observations were written, the writer has seen a
certain corroboration of them in the interesting "Memorials of
Shelley," recently edited by Lady Shelley, and published by Ticknor
and Fields. For, in the preface of this book, she takes occasion to
speak of the misstatements of all those who have hitherto written on
the subject of the poet, instancing the fallacies of Captain Medwin's
book, and also, in an especial manner, though vaguely enough, the
incorrectness, amounting to caricature, put forth by a later
biographer, one of Shelley's oldest friends,--by which she evidently
means to indicate Mr. Hogg. At the same time, the nature of her
Ladyship's book is, involuntarily, an additional evidence of the
difficulty that seems fated to attend all attempts to set forth or
set right the character of Shelley. Indeed, she appears to be in some
degree conscious of this; for she says, apologetically, that she has
published the "Memorials" for the special purpose of neutralizing the
misstatements and spirit of Mr. Hogg's work, and also lets us know
that the time is not yet come for the publication of other and more
important matter calculated to do justice to the character of Percy
Bysshe Shelley.

It is only natural to think that Lady Shelley is not the person to
write the biography of the poet, whose relationship to her is such a
close one. She would far more willingly leave the events of his
troubled life forever unremembered. Indeed, when we find, that, in
her long widowhood of thirty years, Mrs. Shelley shrank from the task
of writing the life of her husband, we can the more easily understand
why any member of his family, especially a lady, should be the most
unfit to undertake the task. Nobody could expect Lady Shelley to
enter into those painful explanations necessary to it. Accordingly,
in the work before us, we do not find any light thrown on those
places where a person would be most anxious to see it. Lady Shelley
slurs over the undutiful boyhood of the poet and the terrible
sternness of his Mirabeau-father. She merely glances across the first
foolish marriage and the catastrophe that closed it, as a bird flies
over an abyss. On such subjects she cannot set about contradicting
anybody.

But it is an ungrateful task to go on speaking of short-comings in a
case like this, where the hardest critic in the world must sympathize
with the feelings of the author, whatever becomes of the book. And
yet the book will be very welcome to every one who regards it as a
feminine offering of tender admiration and grief laid upon the grave
of departed genius. Though not exactly the sort of personal history
one would wish for from another hand, it is still valuable, as
furnishing very interesting matter for a future biography. We have in
it several new letters of Shelley's, some letters of Godwin's, and
others of Mrs. Shelley's, together with a number of touching extracts
from the diary of the latter. There are also two papers from the
poet's pen: one an "Address to Lord Ellenborough" in defence of a man
punished for having published Paine's "Age of Reason," and another an
"Essay on Christianity." In the first, with all a boy's enthusiasm,
he opposes the high abstract logic of truth and toleration to the
hard government policy which tries to keep a reckless kind of
semi-civilization in order, and cannot bring itself to believe, that, as
yet, the broad principle of license is the one that can serve the
cosmogony best. In the next he rather surprises the reader by
exhibiting himself as the eulogist and expounder of Jesus
Christ,--but not after the manner of Saint Paul. No doubt, the secular
and semi-pagan tone of this dissertation will jar against the orthodoxy
of a great many readers,--to whom, however, it will be interesting as
a literary curiosity. But it is meant to show the character of
Shelley in a more amiable light than that in which it is contemplated
by the generality of people.

To explain Percy Bysshe Shelley, by telling us he was inconsequent,
absurd, and odd in his manners, is as futile as to explain him by
saying he was a strange, wonderful genius, of the Platonic or
Pythagorean order, always soaring above the atmosphere of common men.
To call a man of genius an inspired idiot or an inspired oddity is an
easy, but false way of interpreting him. The truth of Shelley's
character may be found by a more matter-of-fact investigation. He was
naturally of a feeble constitution from childhood, and not addicted
to the amusements of stronger boys; hence he became shy, and, when
bullied or flouted by the others, sensitive and irritable, and given
to secret reading and study, instead of play with those "little
fiends that scoffed incessantly." These habits gave him the name of
an oddity, and what is called a "Miss Molly," and the persecution
that followed only made him more recluse and speculative, and
disgusted with the ways and feelings of others. He began to have
thoughts beyond his years, and was happy to think he had, in these, a
compensation for what he suffered from his schoolfellows. With his
hermit habits grew naturally a strong egotistical vanity, which he
could as little repress as the other youths could repress their
muscular propensities to exercise; and hence his eagerness to set
forth the threadbare heretical theories he had found among his books.
For supporting these with an insolent show of importunity, he was
turned away from college, and soon left his father's home, with his
father's curse to bear him company. Had the baronet been in the way
of a _lettre de cachet_, like Mirabeau's father, he would certainly
have had Percy put into Newgate and kept there.

The malediction of the old man seems to have clung to Shelley's mind
to the end, and made him rebellious against everything bearing the
paternal name. He assailed the Father of the Hebrew theocracy with
amazing bitterness, and joined Prometheus in cursing and dethroning
Zeus, the Olympian usurper. With him, tyrant and father were
synonymous, and he has drawn the old Cenci, in the play of that name,
with the same fierce, unfilial pencil, dipped in blood and wormwood.
Shelley was by nature, self-instruction, and inexperience of life,
impatient and full of impulse; and the sharp and violent measures by
which they attempted to reclaim him only exasperated him the more
against everything respected by his opponents and persecutors. Genius
is by nature aggressive or retaliatory; and the young poet, writhing
and laughing hysterically, like Demogorgon, returned the scorn of
society with a scorn, the deeper and loftier in the end, that it grew
calm and became the abiding principle of a philosophic life. It was
the act of his father which drove Shelley into such open rebellion
against gods and men. Very probably, though he might have lived an
infidel in religious matters, like tens of thousands of his fellows,
he would not have written, or, at least, published, such shocking
things, if his father had been more patient with a youth so
organized. But parents have a right to show a terrible anger when
thwarted by their children, and in this case the father too much
resembled the son in wilful impetuosity of temper. Turned out of his
first home, Shelley went wandering forth by land and sea,--a reed
shaken by the wind, a restless outcast yearning for repose and human
sympathy, and in this way encountering the questionable accidents of
his troubled, unguarded life, and gathering all the feverish
inspiration of his melancholy and unfamiliar poetry.

With a sense of physical infirmity or defect which shaped the
sequestered philosophy of the Cowpers, the Berangers, and others, the
manlier minds of literature, including Byron himself, in some
measure, Shelley felt he was not fit for the shock and hum of men and
the greater or lesser legerdemain of life, and so turned shyly away
to live and follow his plans and reveries apart, after the law of his
being, violating in this way what may be called the common law of
society, and meeting the fate of all nonconformists. He was slighted
and ridiculed, and even suspected; for people in general, when they
see a man go aside from the highway, maundering and talking to
himself, think there must be a reason for it; they suppose him
insane, or scornful, or meditating a murder,--in any case, one to be
visited with hard thoughts; and thus baffled curiosity will grow
uneasily into disgust, and into calumny, if not into some species of
outrage,--and very naturally, after all; for man is, on the whole,
made for society, and society has a sovereign right to take
cognizance of him, his ways and his movements, as a matter of
necessary _surveillance_.

The world will class men "in its coarse blacks and whites." Some mark
Shelley with charcoal, others with chalk,--the former considering him
a reprobate, the latter admiring him as a high-souled lover of human
happiness and human liberty. But he was something of both
together,--and would have been nothing without that worst part of him.
He ran perversely counter to the lessons of his teachers, and acted in
defiance of the regular opinions and habits of the world. He was too
out-spoken, like all genius; whereas the world inculcates the high
practical wisdom of a shut mouth and a secretive mind. Fontenelle,
speaking according to the philosophy of the crowd, says, "A wise man,
with his fist full of truths, would open only his little finger."
Shelley opened his whole hand, in a fearless, unhappy manner; and was
accordingly punished for ideas which multitudes entertain in a quiet
way, saying nothing, and living in the odor of respectable opinion.
With a mind that recoiled from anything like falsehood and injustice,
he wanted prudence. And as, in the belief of the matter-of-fact
Romans, no divinity is absent, if _Prudentia_ be present, so it still
seems that everything is wanting to a man, if he wants that. Shelley
denied the commonly received Divinity, as all the world knows,--an
Atheist of the most unpardonable stamp,--and has suffered in
consequence; his life being considered a life of folly and vagary,
and his punishment still enduring, as we may perceive from the tone
and philosophy of his biographers, or rather his critics, who, not
being able to comprehend such a simple savage, present his character
as an oddity and a wonder,--an _extravaganza_ that cannot be
understood without some wall of the world's pattern and plastering to
show it up against.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19