lutely contemned and loathed. Her price was food, lodging, and respectability for herself and her mother. Her mother soon died; her husband, from his "putrid shroud" as Shelley says, lyingly denied her respectability; and when his death had shaken her free from what she described as "those abhorred embraces," she underwent the frightful experience of reading in her involuntary and irrepressible joy at his death, the condemnation of her own dutifully ordered life. Rosalind's story is indeed far from a pleasant or even an interesting one; and it is in Helen's that we find the agreeable side of the poem. Devoted to the memory of Lionel, she gives her friend an enthusiastic account of his genius and amiable qualities; and that account is, as I have said, full of the personality of Shelley and his views upon reform. It tells of the time "When liberty's dear pæan fell 'Mid murderous howls. To Lionel, Though of great wealth and lineage high, And as the meteor's midnight flame Startles the dreamer, sun-like truth Flashed on his visionary youth, And filled him, not with love, but faith, And hope, and courage. The restless and reckless propagandism of Lionel is clearly Shelley's own experience but slightly idealized, and the account of the wonder it inspired in commonplace minds might have been translated from the prose of some commentators on Shelley's doings as a reform agitator: "Men wondered, and some sneered to see INTRODUCTION. He casts away, like a vile weed Which the sea casts unreturningly. That poor and hungry men should break We know is rich and nobly born." xxi Then the account of the "wild and queer" verses about "devils and saints and all such gear," which he aimed against the priests and so incurred their hatred, is very suggestive of foundation in fact; and, if the following passage had occurred in a poem headed "England in 1817-18," who would have wondered?— "Grey Power was seated Safely on her ancestral throne; And Faith, the Python, undefeated, Even to its blood-stained steps dragged on Were trampled and deceived again, And words and shews again could bind If we had met the next few lines in prose in Mary's journal for 1814, we should scarcely have been surprised : : "Then he would bid me not to weep, And a page or two further on we emerge with certainty into the region of the actual in a curious way enough; for when Lionel has been taken for sedition and blasphemy, as Shelley was quite prepared to be, he F cries to Helen as she is driven forth from the prison she would fain share with him : "Fear not the tyrants shall rule for ever, They stand on the brink of that mighty river, This stanza is really one of six addressed by Shelley to his infant son William, between the time of the Lord Chancellor's decree depriving him of the custody of Harriett's children and the time of the final departure for Italy-I should say in March 1818; for there are allusions to the sea and the boat in other stanzas which make it probable the poem was composed on the rough passage in the boat Lady Castlereagh that carried Shelley and his family from Dover to Calais, and written down perhaps at the end of that stormy voyage. When Mrs. Shelley printed the verses to William in 1839, she gave the second line with the epithet evil instead of bloodya change which leaves the verse, if more polite, still less forcible and characteristic; but the words are for the rest practically identical. It would be interesting to know whether, when Shelley addressed his son on the subject of their flight from England, he repeated the eight lines from a part of his eclogue already completed, or whether, when he revised the eclogue in Italy, he was tempted to insert in it this very appropriate stanza of his little poem. I lean to the latter supposition; but know of no external evidence on the subject. It is not necessary to elaborate the evidence of what few will be disposed to dispute, to wit, the position that the motives of this poem of Rosalind and Helen are before all things personal and homiletic; nor need I enter on a long analysis of the faults of execution which show how feeble a hold the story, as a story, had on Shelley's imagination. The principal flaws are inconsistencies in the narrative of Rosalind, which is precisely where we should expect the interest of Shelley in his own creation INTRODUCTION. xxiii to relax, seeing that her character was just such as he would be most likely to contemn. Hence it is no great marvel that Rosalind, the mother of three children, who at one point speaks of her two wild boys as cowering fearfully near her knee while the babe at her bosom was hushed with fear at its father's approach, thus making the girl the youngest, should so far forget herself in the sequel as to mention her daughter as the first-born. Similarly we do not think much of her inconsistency when, after promising Helen to tell her the truth, she first says she watched her husband's unlamented tomb morning and evening, and would not depart from it, while her children "laughed aloud in frantic glee," and afterwards affirms that she went away from the place immediately after the reading of the will without even noticing her children. But if Rosalind and her story had had for Shelley an interest other than didactic these things would probably have been obvious to him. These flaws, such as they are, are left upon the poem for all time, for it was Shelley's will not to bring his work to perfection. To the few errors in the sense which Peacock's unsympathetic revision of the proofs failed to detect, and which gave Shelley some small concern, we may yet hope to see justice done in time; for it would be strange if the original manuscript and Mrs. Shelley's copy had both disappeared for ever: meanwhile rather than bewail our ignorance as to the particular passages which were thus corrupted, let us congratulate ourselves that the noble close of the poem is free from corruption, and that most of the many flashes of self-revelation which Shelley vouchsafed us in the portraiture of Lionel are unimpaired by their passage through the press.1 1 The bare text here reprinted requires for pleasurable reading the following corrections and suggestions :— Page 6 line II. For thee read there. Page 18, line 9. Omit the turned commas. Pages 23-4. This passage is probably corrupt. It is possible that Which in the last line but one of page 23 is a misprint for While, and and in line 2 of page 24 a misprint for had. Page 33, line 2. The words nursling child may be right, but are suspicious. They form something very like a pleonasm; whereas nursing child is a familiar equivalent for a child at nurse. Page 40, line 8. For striken read stricken. It has often pleased me to connect in my mind with the name of Shelley that memorable stanza of the Poet Laureate's "The poet in a golden clime was born, With golden stars above; Dower'd with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, The love of love." Indeed, apart from the golden clime, I know of no one to whom that stanza applies so perfectly; and of all the fictitious characters in Shelley's poetry that serve to bring his own personality before us in various phases and modifications,—Laon, Athanase, the poet in Alastor, Lionel, I think the one that renders most of the essential spirit of Shelley is Lionel. It would not be far from the truth if we applied to Shelley the words of Helen concerning Lionel "love and life in him were twins, But he loved all things ever." H. BUXTON FORMAN. 46 MARLBOROUGH HILL, ST. JOHN'S WOOD, October 1888. Page 60, lines 11-14. Whether lax, licentious, or eccentric in its construction or diction, I do not doubt this passage is what Shelley wrote. Page 61, lines 9-11. To bring out the sense of these lines the punctuation should be that adopted by Mr. Rossetti : "O that I were now dead! but such (Did they not, love, demand too much, : "But such he forbade" means, of course, "but he forbade me to put myself to death. Page 62, line 12. Page 77, line 9. a misprint for sons. For rescued read rescue. The final comma is probably a misprint. The word songs seems to me suspiciously like Page 89, lines 5 and 6 from foot. For lover's read lovers'; and for are read art. Page 91, line 1. For loves read love's. |