[kdgak] SHELLEY'S DEBT TO XVIIL CENTURY THOUGHT 189 



problem to be discussed, and my object will be gained if I can reach 

 even an approximate solution. 



We have abundant testimony to the inherent beauty of Shelley's 

 character. Gentle, sympathetic and generous to a fault, his worldly 

 interests and his personal advantage he held as naught wherever there 

 was a wrong to be righted, or some glaring injustice to be laid low. 

 Quixotically chivalrous, he was upon occasion ingenuously cruel. He 

 deserts Harriet "Westbrook, yet apparently cherishes the most friendly 

 feeling towards her. Travelling with Mary Godwin in France 'on his 

 way to Switzerland, he writes to her in the most affectionate terms: 



My dearest Harriet, — 



I write to you from this detestable town : I write to show that I 

 do not forget you: I write to urge you to come to Switzerland, where 

 you will at last find one firm and constant friend, to whom your in- 

 terests will be always dear — by whom your feelings will never wilfully 

 be injured. From none can you expect this but me — all else are either 

 unfeeling or selfish, or have beloved friends of their own.^' 



The rest of the letter is filled with little details (most interesting 

 surely to Harriet !), as to what he and Mary were doing. And in the 

 later Italian days Shelley, pouring out his soul to Emilia Viviani in 

 surely the most ardent love poem of the English language, includes Mary 

 with Emilia in an ideal community of three. Can naïveté farther go? 



Is this problem then susceptible of solution — that a man who from 

 his early youth is at- war with his family and with society should still 

 be benevolent, gentle, and disinterested; and that a man who abandons 

 his wife to elope with a woman more capable of satisfying his intel- 

 lectual sympathies, and afterwards worships, though in Platonic wise, 

 at other shrines should be credited with being moved by virtuous in- 

 clinations ? 



I have dwelt thus particularly upon certain events which stand out 

 boldly in Shelley's life, because in his case it is impossible to dissociate 

 opinion and conduct. With Shelley to think was to act; and impulsive 

 though his nature was, it is impossible to point to a single action of his 

 life which had not the approval at once of his reason and his con- 

 science. It is incumbent upon us therefore to investigate the genetic 

 source of these opinions wliich swayed him so powerfully throughout 



his life. 



Professor Dowden is not far from the truth in shouldering upon 



William Godwin the responsiliility for all those acts in which Shelley 



contemptuously ignored the conventional standards of morality and 



