CHAPTER XV

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MOTIVE AND INFLUENCES.

The fatal Marriage--Was Shelley trapt into it?--Mr. Garnett's Assurances--The Fiction about Claire--Lady Shelley's Use of Hogg's Evidences--The Prenuptial Intercourse--Was it slight?--Shelley's Opportunities for knowing all about Harriett--His Use and Abuse of those Opportunities--Mr. Westbrook's Action towards Shelley--His endeavour to preserve Harriett from Shelley--Eliza Westbrook's part in making up the Match--The Tool's Reward--The Etonian Free Lover--The Social Condition of the Westbrooks and Godwins--Harriett Westbrook's Beauty--Her Education--Her Knowledge of French--Her quick Progress in Latin--What Wonder that Shelley fell in love with her?

Thus it was that Shelley carried off Mr. Westbrook's sixteen-years-old child, and made her his wife, instead of acting on 'the hasty decision,' from which Hogg dissuaded him. Did he take this momentous step inconsiderately? On a slight acquaintance with the young lady? Under circumstances that denied him fair opportunities for observing the temper and studying the character of the girl whose singular beauty had fascinated him? Was he lured, drawn, inveigled, into the marriage by influences, stronger than those that are usually employed by a girl's nearest relatives for compassing what they think a good match for her? The enthusiasts, who draw their inspiration on Shelleyan questions from Field Place, do not hesitate to answer all these questions in the affirmative.

Mr. Garnett (_vide_ his _Shelley in Pall Mall_) assures us that whenever certain documents, hitherto withheld from the world, shall be made public, _i.e._ when Field Place shall issue its authoritative biography for the ending of all controversies on Shelleyan matters, 'it will for the first time be clearly understood how slight was the acquaintance of Shelley with Harriet, previous to their marriage; what advantage was taken of his chivalry of sentiment, and her compliant disposition, and the inexperience of both; and how little entitled or disposed she felt herself to complain of his behaviour.' It is certain that before submitting to what she could not prevent, Harriett complained with passionate vehemence of her husband's behaviour to her. Let that matter, however, pass for the present. What are the grounds for saying that unfair advantage was taken of Shelley's inexperience, and that Shelley, by reason of the slightness of his acquaintance with her, when he stole her from her father, knew much less of Harriett than young men usually know of girls they are on the point of marrying?

Strange things may of course be looked for from the people, who have recently required the world to believe that, instead of taking Claire from London to Byron at Geneva, Shelley and Mary Godwin were taken (like two little children) _by_ Claire to Switzerland,--and so taken there _by_ her, although they (as the Field Place story goes) disliked her exceedingly, even to the point of disgustful aversion. But even the authorities of Field Place will scarcely declare the documents published in Hogg's _Life_ to be spurious documents. They will scarcely declare that Hogg (the writer with a peculiar style from which he could not liberate himself for an instant) forged the multitude of letters, published in his book as letters written to him by Shelley,--the epistles, some of which Lady Shelley herself used for evidential purposes in writing her _Shelley Memorials_,--the epistles which are so Shelleyan in thought and diction, feeling and language, form and style, that no other human being but Shelley could have written them. Field Place has dared to do strange things, but its daring will stop short of this extravagance. To produce documents, drawn by Shelley's hand or at his dictation, in contradiction of these letters, would not be to discredit the letters, but only to produce fresh illustration of one of Shelley's most perplexing infirmities,--fresh evidence that he often made statements contrary to the truth.

From documentary evidences of unimpeachable genuineness and irresistible cogency, it is certain that Shelley made Harriett Westbrook's acquaintance in January, 1811, eight lunar months before his elopement with her; that he corresponded with her between the day on which he made her acquaintance and the date of his expulsion from Oxford; that in the spring of 1811 he saw her repeatedly at her home and elsewhere,--receiving her at least on one occasion at his lodgings in Poland Street, attending her from her father's house to her school on Clapham Common, walking about with her on Clapham Common, and sitting up with her (at least on one occasion) till past midnight, at Chapel Street, Grosvenor Square, in the absence of a third person; that he corresponded with her from March to September; that the wooing, which began at Oxford by letter, if not on the occasion of their first meeting, was strenuously prosecuted by Shelley to the day of the elopement; that he had opportunities for seeing and influencing her, which enabled him to illuminate her out of Christianity and (to use Mr. Rossetti's expression) to 'philosophise her out of the ordinary standard of propriety'; that he had opportunities, and used them, for making her think lightly of the matrimonial rite; that he had opportunities, and used them, for encouraging her in rebellion against her own father; that instead of being kept in the dark as to the chief, and indeed the only important defect of her temper--a constitutional proneness to discontent--he was peculiarly interested in her manifestations of this significant quality, and sympathized cordially with her groundless grievances and imaginary sorrows. Though he was uncertain as to the day on which Shelley determined to win Harriett Westbrook's affections, Hogg had no doubt his friend had begun to woo the girl before he left Oxford. 'Shelley's epistles show the progress of his courtship,' he says, 'and that his marriage was not quite so hasty an affair as it is commonly represented to have been. The wooing continued for half-a-year at least, and this is a long time in the life,--in the life of love, of such young persons.' The interval, between Shelley's withdrawal from Oxford and his marriage at Edinburgh, wanted at least three weeks of an entire half-year. Yet, Field Place requires us to believe slightness was a principal characteristic of the prenuptial intercourse of these young people!

How about the charge of inveiglement? No one has ever suggested that Mr. Westbrook was an accomplice in measures for luring the heir of the heir to a wealthy Sussex baronetcy into wedlock with his younger daughter. On the contrary there were reasons why he should regard any such project with disfavour. If he was not a gentleman, Mr. Westbrook was a man of the world, who came in contact with gentlemen, and knew something of the ways of the higher world and fashionable society, from the gossip of the gentlemen who used his public-house. The west-end taverner, who had risen to comfortable circumstances by attention to his affairs, was not the man to be keenly desirous of having for his son-in-law the scatterbrain youngster who only the other day was expelled from Oxford. He had seen too many youngsters of quality drop to grief and ruin, not to know that a young gentleman of Shelley's parentage and expectations and story might prove a very poor match for a prosperous tradesman's daughter. He knew the value of his money too well, not to be aware that his pretty daughter, to whom he could make a good allowance during his life and perhaps leave ten thousand pounds at his death, might do much better for herself than marry the harum-scarum son of the Member for New Shoreham. Mr. Westbrook did not need to be told that, so married, his pretty daughter and her children might drain his pocket to his last hour. Like a prudent man, he did nothing to hurry his daughter into the unfortunate marriage.

When Shelley came to Chapel Street with his sister's present and letter of introduction in his hand, he was received with courtesy at the taverner's private house. Mr. Westbrook received the youngster with civility in the ensuing spring: a civility that would have seemed less 'strange' to Shelley (_vide_ Letter to Hogg, of 28th April, 1811), had he not been conscious how little he deserved it. Though he writes disdainfully of the tradesman, whom he calls alternately a coffeehouse-keeper and ex-coffeehouse-keeper, and charges him with pitiful stinginess to his daughter, whose disobedience raised her so considerably in the scale of social dignity, Hogg forbears to accuse Mr. Westbrook of imposing his younger daughter on the youth of quality, who made her so poor a husband. According to Hogg, Miss Elizabeth Westbrook made up the match, her father being guilty of nothing worse than prudent and hypocritical anger at the event on which he secretly congratulated himself. Perhaps Mr. Westbrook, after the elopement, made the most of Harriett's unfilial disobedience, and feigned more displeasure than he felt at her misbehaviour, in order to have and preserve a good pretext for tightening the string of his purse. But no one can suspect him of busying himself to bring about the match. Compelling Harriett to return to her prison on Clapham Common after the Easter holidays, he did nothing to facilitate their intercourse, before Shelley, in the middle of May, went from town to Sussex. At the beginning of August, on finding how matters had been going on with the lovers, without his consent or suspicion, Mr. Westbrook determined to send Harriett again to school, returned with his wife and daughters to Chapel Street, and on Shelley's reappearance in the neighbourhood of Grosvenor Square, shut his door against him.

Miss Elizabeth Westbrook no doubt had a hand in making up the match. But what of that? To make matches is the privilege and convenient diversion of mature woman-kind, and a successful taverner's daughter is not to be denied the rights and privileges of her sex, because her father is a licensed victualler. In doing what she did to oblige Shelley in the matter, she was moved partly by affection for her sister, and partly by a desire to become, sooner or later, the sister-in-law of a wealthy baronet, the sister of a lady of quality. Actuated by ambition and sisterly affection, Miss Elizabeth Westbrook obeyed precisely the same motives that determine any gentlewoman of high condition to make the heir of a peerage, or any other highly eligible _parti_, duly sensible of her eldest daughter's manifold graces and virtues. Standing to Harriett in the relation of a mother rather than a sister, Miss Elizabeth Westbrook merely did for her younger sister's advantage and her own gratification, what a mother bent on marrying her daughter advantageously is permitted to do for the achievement of her purpose. Shelley besought Miss Westbrook for opportunities of seeing Harriett, as he was disposed to love her, and Miss Westbrook gave him what he wanted.

If this is to lure and inveigle a young man into wedlock, the elder Miss Westbrook was guilty of that offence. But I cannot think her action should be described by such offensive words. She did not seek Shelley; it was he who in a very remarkable way sought her and her people out. He was not the mild and compliant youth to be led into wedlock against his will, because a rather mature maiden told him it would be good for him. Miss Elizabeth Westbrook of all women was the least qualified to exercise such control over him. She was not beautiful, and at the outset of their acquaintance she was by no means acceptable to Shelley. He thought her affected, and suspected her of unamiability. He felt for her a dislike that almost amounted to repulsion, and would soon have quickened into aversion, had she irritated him by opposing his scheme. Till he had made her clearly understand he did not visit Chapel Street to talk of love with her, but to talk of it with her sister, and she had consented to his design, Shelley saw nothing to approve and much to disapprove in the elder Miss Westbrook. On changing his mind about her, he found the lady amiable merely because she acquiesced in his scheme. When a person consents to be the tool of another, the tool usually has a reward. Sometimes in addition to the reward agreed upon by both parties, the tool has in view an end unimagined by the person using the tool. Sometimes also it happens that, turning the tables, the tool becomes the tyrant of its former employer. It was so in the present instance. After Shelley's marriage, Miss Elizabeth Westbrook insisted on the reward of former services, and for a while exacted heavier payment for them than Shelley was willing to pay. Amiable in his eyes, whilst she was only his tool, Miss Westbrook soon grew hateful to him when she had become his tyrant.

Why should we assume, why was it ever assumed, that Shelley was inveigled and drawn into the association, which was so completely an affair of his own desire and contrivance? The notion that he _was made_ to do the thing which he did of his own accord, and in spite of numerous obstacles, probably originated from regard for the disparity of the Westbrooks and Shelleys in respect to social station. The disparity, no doubt, was considerable. Though he was not of aristocratic ancestry as biographers have so stubbornly declared, the young man who, besides being the son of a Member of Parliament, stood in the direct line of succession to a good estate and a hereditary dignity, married greatly beneath him when he took a licensed victualler's daughter for his wife; and in the majority of the cases, where a young man marries a girl so greatly his inferior in social quality, the marriage is found on inquiry to have been brought about by the artifice and influence of a third person. Shelley's marriage, however, was one of those unequal marriages that are distinctly referable to other causes. Having in his boyhood a sentimental repugnance to lawful matrimony, that had steadily grown in power from the time when he wrote _Zastrozzi_, the Oxonian Shelley had no sooner been discarded by Harriett Grove, than he desired a conjugal partner, whom he could attach to himself by a tie less enduring than the bond of marriage,--a girl, in fact, with whom he could live in Free Love. He could not hope to find such a partner in his own social grade. The prejudices against Free Love were stronger in Shelley's time, even as they are at the present time, in the higher than in the lower grades of English society. In descending from his own social grade, to the grade of the prosperous London _bourgeoisie_, he descended no lower than the highest social grade, in which he could conceive it possible for him to find a girl of beauty, culture, refinement, and delicacy, whom he would be allowed to 'philosophise out of the ordinary standard of propriety,' till she should 'throw herself upon him for protection.' To win Harriett Westbrook, he descended (at least in the eyes of fashionable society) no lower, than he descended to win Mary Godwin. Of course, in being a very considerable man of letters, Godwin (in the opinion of the present writer) was greatly Mr. Westbrook's superior; but this superiority was in Shelley's time more obvious to persons of education moving in the middle way of life, than to people of fashion and patrician quality. Moreover, Godwin's superiority to Mr. Westbrook in this

## particular was attended with circumstances that would render 'society'

more than usually indifferent to it. By birth and familiar associations, William Godwin and Mr. Westbrook were of the same social degree. They were also of the same social degree in respect to the avocations, by which the one had acquired sufficient affluence, and the other maintained his family in Skinner Street. Whilst the prosperous man of business lived with the port and bearing of a gentleman in Chapel Street, Grosvenor Square, the man of letters was a struggling and needy bookseller in the city. In eloping with Mary Godwin in 1814, the poet associated himself with a family no less distinctly beneath people of quality than the family from which he took his first wife. Yet it has never been suggested that he was lured and inveigled into his alliance with the Skinner Street family.

The notion that Shelley was 'caught' and 'trapt,' inveigled and drawn against his will into his first marriage, becomes still more ludicrous, when regard is had to the personal charms of Harriett Westbrook,--charms that, had she been of far lowlier origin, would account for the young man's action in making her his wife. Shapely in figure and graceful in her movements, she possessed a face of singular loveliness, and the air of high breeding that is so often wanting in damsels of high birth. It is no exaggeration to say that she was a rare and faultless example of the girlish beauty, which was most delightful and charming to Shelley. Her features were delicate and regular; her light-brown hair was of a colour peculiarly acceptable to her admirer; no girl ever had a more transparent complexion, or alluring lips; and in her sunnier moods, her countenance brightened with looks curiously expressive of intellectual alertness and childish _naïveté_. At the same time in a laugh, equally spontaneous and joyous, and a voice so musical, that people delighted in hearing her read unentertaining books for the hour together, she possessed two natural endowments that have been known to inspire passion, when they have been associated with features plain even to ugliness. The air and style of this lovely girl were such, that fifteen months after their wedding, Shelley wrote of her and them, 'The ease and simplicity of her habits, the unassuming plainness of her address, the uncalculated connexion of her thought and speech, have ever formed, in my eyes, her greatest charms.' Speaking of the pleasure he experienced in hearing her read aloud, Hogg says, 'If it was agreeable to listen to her, it was not less agreeable to look at her; she was always pretty, always bright, always blooming; without a spot, without a wrinkle, not a hair out of its place.' Peacock admired the taste and simplicity with which she arranged her light-brown tresses, and the simple elegance of her costume. Be it also remarked that for a girl of her period (more than seventy years since) Harriett was well educated,--writing excellent letters of gracefully fluent penmanship: so familiar with French, that during her six weeks' stay at Edinburgh, she found a congenial occupation in translating one of Madame Cottin's novels into English; fond of reading sound literature by herself, no less than to attentive auditors; and possessing so much taste and aptitude for study that Shelley delighted in teaching her Latin, and brought her so quickly forward in it, that before the end of 1812, she was reading the Horatian Odes with interest, if not without difficulty.

Such was the Harriett Westbrook of 1811 and 1812. And yet Field Place cannot account for Shelley's weakness in wedding so lovely and winsome a creature, without assuming that he was 'caught' and inveigled into the match by a designing third person,--the artful and scheming Elizabeth Westbrook.

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