C. Kegan Paul: William Godwin: his Friends and Contemporaries

The intimacy with Shelley, which also was not of Godwin’s seeking, was destined to have a far more abiding influence on the lives of both. The first notice of Shelley in the Godwin Diaries is under date Jan. 6, 1811. “Write to Shelly.” It is the only time his name is so spelt, his letter was in answer to Shelley’s first letter, in which he introduced himself, and was written at once, when he was not quite clear about the name of his correspondent.

Shelley was at this time living at Keswick, in the earlier and happier days of his marriage with Harriet Westbrook, and his eager and restless spirit prompted him to form the acquaintance, by letter, with others whom he believed to be like himself enthusiasts in the cause of humanity, of liberty, and progress. He had already, in this manner, made the acquaintance of Leigh Hunt, when, in January 1811, he wrote thus to Godwin:—

The answer to this is lost, but it appears from the diary that the correspondence was frequent. From Keswick Shelley went to Dublin, and devoted himself to the cause of Irish Patriotism, with his usual chivalry, and perhaps even less than his usual discretion. Godwin did all that he could, not by any means to change Shelley’s principles, but to inculcate prudence and discretion in the mode of carrying them out. The following letters serve well to show their writer’s political standpoint, though it may be doubted if they had much effect on the vehement young dreamer to whom they were addressed. In fact, very shortly after the last was written, Shelley had made Ireland too hot to hold him, for venturing to suggest that even Protestants were entitled to toleration. The police warned him that he had better quit the country, and after a while he settled for a time his wandering household at Lynmouth, in North Devon.

When arranging his usual short summer excursion in 1812, Godwin determined to combine this with a visit to the Shelleys. They had asked him to visit them, but no time had been fixed for his arrival; indeed the invitation had not been pressed when Godwin first thought of making his tour westward, for the Shelleys feared they could scarcely make him quite comfortable in the limited accommodation they could offer him. But on his arrival at Lynmouth, the Shelleys were gone, and had taken up their abode at Tanyr-alt in North Wales. The diary illustrates the difficulties of a pleasure tour sixty years since, and the perseverance of the tourist in spite of ill-health.

The Shelleys arrived in London after their stay at Tanry-alt on October 4th, and dined with Godwin. They remained in London just six weeks, during which time

MARY GODWIN.

213

Shelley and Godwin met almost daily, and he with his wife and her sister, Miss Westbrook, were frequent visitors in Skinner Street. Of the two persons who were most to influence Shelley’s life in after years, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and Jane Clairmont, who made her home with him and his second wife, he saw but little. Mary Godwin was just fifteen, was still a child, and considered as such in her family. Her half sister Fanny was Miss Godwin, and was, after this visit, Shelley’s friend and occasional correspondent. Jane Clairmont was only at home for two nights during the six weeks Shelley spent in London. She was several years older than Fanny, and even then led a somewhat independent life apart from her mother and step-father, presumably as a governess, since that was the occupation she afterwards followed in Italy, during the intervals of her residence with the Shelleys. In those later days, however, it seemed more poetical to an imaginative mind to call herself ‘Clare’ instead of Jane, by which self-chosen name she appears in the Shelley diaries. Godwin, however, preferring blunt reality, sticks to her true name.

When Mary Godwin was fifteen her father received a letter from an unknown correspondent, who took a deep interest in the theories of education which had been held by Mary Wollstonecraft, and who was anxious to know how far these were carried out in regard to the children she had left. An extract from Godwin’s reply paints his daughter as she was at that period:—

“Your enquiries relate principally to the two daughters of Mary Wollstonecraft. They are neither of them brought up with an exclusive attention to the system and ideas of their mother. I lost her in 1797, and in 1801 I married a second time. One among the motives which led me to chuse this was the feeling I had in myself of an incompetence for the education of daughters. The

214

WILLIAM GODWIN

present Mrs Godwin has great strength and activity of mind, but is not exclusively a follower of the notions of their mother; and indeed, having formed a family establishment without having a previous provision for the support of a family, neither Mrs Godwin nor I have leisure enough for reducing novel theories of education to practice, while we both of us honestly endeavour, as far as our opportunities will permit, to improve the mind and characters of the younger branches of our family.

“Of the two persons to whom your enquiries relate, my own daughter is considerably superior in capacity to the one her mother had before. Fanny, the eldest, is of a quiet, modest, unshowy disposition, somewhat given to indolence, which is her greatest fault, but sober, observing, peculiarly clear and distinct in the faculty of memory, and disposed to exercise her own thoughts and follow her own judgment. Mary, my daughter, is the reverse of her in many particulars. She is singularly bold, somewhat imperious, and active of mind. Her desire of knowledge is great, and her perseverance in everything she undertakes almost invincible. My own daughter is, I believe, very pretty; Fanny is by no means handsome, but in general prepossessing.”

In 1813 Shelley was again in London for a short time during the summer, but Mary was absent in Scotland. She was not strong, and as a growing girl needed purer air than Skinner Street could offer; she had therefore gone to Dundee with her father’s friends, Mr Baxter and his daughter; and remained with them six months. It was not until the summer of 1814 that Shelley and Mary Godwin became really acquainted, when he found the child whom he had scarcely noticed two years before had grown into the woman of nearly seventeen summers.

It is quite certain that Godwin used all his influence to restore the old relations between husband and wife; and on the 22d “Talk with Jane, letter fr. do. Write to H. S.,” evidently refer to his dislike of the attention which Shelley now paid his daughter. But it was too late; for on July 28th, early in the morning, Mary Godwin left her father’s house, accompanied by Jane Clairmont. They joined Shelley, posted to Dover, and crossed in an open boat to Calais during a violent storm, during which they were in considerable danger. As soon as the elopement was discovered Mrs Godwin pursued the party.

Charles Clairmont wrote to break the news to Fanny, and devoted himself to his step-father during the three days of uncertainty, till Mrs Godwin returned from Calais on July 31st.

Godwin’s sources of trouble were considerable at the time of Mary’s leaving her home. He was not a tender father in outward show, but he was sincerely attached to his children, and Mary was bound up with the happiest and the saddest days of the past. William also began to give his father a good deal of uneasiness, and the week after Mrs Godwin returned from her bootless mission to Calais, the boy ran away from home—the first, but by no means the last, escapade of the kind—and could not be found till after two nights’ search and anxiety. And the day after his disappearance was that on which Godwin heard of Patrickson’s suicide.

“Mar. 26, 1811.

“Dear Godwin,—Mr Grattan did me the honour of calling on me and leaving his card on Sunday afternoon, unfortunately a few minutes after I had gone out, and I am so unwell that I am afraid I shall not be able to return the call to-day, as I had intended, though it is a grief even for a brace of days to appear
LETTER FROM COLERIDGE. 223
insensible of so much kindness and condescension. But what need has Grattan of pride?
“‘Ha d’ uopo solo
Mendicar dall’ orgoglio, onore e stima
Chi senza lui di vilipendio è degno.’
(Chiabrera.)

“I half caught from Lamb that you had written to Wordsworth with a wish that he should versify some tale or other, and that he had declined it. I told dear Miss Lamb that I had formed a complete plan of a poem, with little plates for children, the first thought, but that alone, taken from Gesner’s ‘First Mariner;’ and this thought I have reason to believe was not an invention of Gesner’s. It is this: that in early time, in some island or part of the continent, the ocean had rushed in, overflowing a vast plain of twenty or thirty miles, and thereby insulating one small promontory or cape of high land, on which was a cottage, containing a man and his wife and an infant daughter. This is the one thought. All that Gesner has made out of it (for I once translated into blank verse about half of the poem, but gave it up under the influence of a double disgust, moral and poetical), I have rejected, and, strictly speaking, the tale in all its parts, that one idea excepted, would be original. The tale will contain the cause, the occasions, the process, with all its failures and ultimate success, of the construction of the first boat, and of the undertaking of the first naval expedition. Now, supposing you liked the idea—I address you and Mrs Godwin as commerciants, not you as the philosopher who gave us the first system in England that ever dared reveal at full that most important of all important truths, that morality might be built up on its own foundation like a castle built from the rock, and on the rock, with religion for the ornaments and completion of its roof and upper storeys—nor as the critic who in the life of Chaucer has given us, if not principles of aesthetic, or taste, yet more and better data for principles than had hitherto existed in our language. If we, pulling like two friendly tradesmen together (for you and your wife must be one flesh, and I trust are one heart), you approve of the plan, the next
224 WILLIAM GODWIN
question is whether it should be written in prose or verse, or if the latter, in what metre—stanzas or eight-syllabled iambics with rhymes (for in rhyme it must be) now in couplets and now in quatrains, in the manner of Cooper’s admirable translation of the ‘Lament of Gresset.’ (NB.—Not the Cowper.)

“Another thought has struck me of a school-book in two octavo volumes of ‘Lives’ in the manner of Plutarch’s, but instead of comparing and coupling Greek with Roman, Dion with Brutus, and Cato with Aristides, of placing ancient and modern together, Hume with Alfred, Cicero with Bacon, Hannibal with Gustavus Adolphus, and Julius Cæsar with Buonaparte. Or, which perhaps might be at once more interesting and more instructive, a series of ‘Lives,’ from Moses to Buonaparte, of all those great men who in states, or in the mind of man, had produced great revolutions, the effects of which still remain, and are more or less distant causes of the present state of the world. . . .”

“March 29, 1811.

“Dear Godwin,—My chief motive in undertaking ‘the first mariner’ is merely to weave a few tendrils around your destined walking stick, which, like those of the wood-bine (that, serpent-like climbing up, and with tight spires embossing the straight hazel, rewards the lucky school-boy’s search in the hazel-copse), may remain on it when the wood-bine, root and branch, lies trampled in the earth. I shall consider the work as a small plot of ground given up to you to be sown at your own hazard with your own seed (gold grains would have been but a bad pun, and besides have spoiled the metaphor). If the increase should more than repay your risk and labour, why then let me be one of your guests at Harvest Home.

“Your last letter impressed and affected me strongly. Ere I had yet read or seen your works, I, at Southey’s recommendation, wrote a sonnet in praise of the author. When I had read them, religious bigotry, the but half-understanding of your principles, and the not half-understanding my own, combined to render me a warm
COLERIDGE ON GODWIN. 225
and boisterous anti-Godwinist. But my warfare was open; my unfelt and harmless blows aimed at an abstraction I had christened with your name; and you at that time, if not in the world’s favour, were among the captains and chief men in its admiration. I became your acquaintance when more years had brought somewhat more temper and tolerance; but I distinctly remember that the first turn in my mind towards you, the first movements of a juster appreciation of your merits, was occasioned by my disgust at the altered tone and language of many whom I had long known as your admirers and disciples. Some of them, too, were men who had made themselves a sort of reputation in minor circles as your acquaintance, and were therefore your echoes by authority, themselves aided in attaching an unmerited ridicule to you and your opinions by their own ignorance, which led them to think the best settled thoughts, and indeed everything in your ‘Political Justice,’ whether ground, or deduction, or conjecture, to have been new thoughts, downright creations. Their own vanity enabled them to forget that everything must be new to him that knows nothing. Others again, who though gifted with high talents had yet been indebted to you, and the discussions occasioned by your wish for much of their development, who had often and often styled you the Great Master, written verses in your honour, and, worse than all, had brought your opinions with many good and worthy men into as unmerited an odium as the former class had into contempt by the attempt, equally unfeeling and unwise to realise them in private life, to the disturbance of domestic peace. And lastly, a third class; but the name of —— spares me the necessity of describing it. In all these there was such a want of common sensibility, such a want of that gratitude to an intellectual benefactor which even an honest reverence for their great selves should have secured, as did then, still does, and ever will disgust me.

“As for ——, I cannot justify him; but he stands in no one of the former classes. When he was young he just looked enough into your books to believe you taught republicanism and stoicism; ergo, that he was of your opinion and you of his, and that was all.
226 WILLIAM GODWIN
Systems of philosophy were never his taste or forte. And I verily believe that his conduct originated wholly and solely in the effects which the trade of reviewing never fails to produce at certain times on the best minds,—presumption, petulance, callousness to personal feelings, and a disposition to treat the reputations of their contemporaries as playthings placed at their own disposal. Most certainly I cannot approve of such things; but yet I have learned how difficult it is for a man who has from earliest childhood preserved himself immaculate from all the common faults and weaknesses of human nature, and who, never creating any small disquietudes, has lived in general esteem and honour, to feel remorse, or to admit that he has done wrong. Believe me, there is a bluntness of conscience superinduced by a very unusual infrequency, as well as by a habit of frequency of wrong actions. ‘Sunt, quibus cecidisse prodesset,’ says Augustine. To this add that business of review-writing, carried on for fifteen years together, and which I have never hesitated to pronounce an immoral employment, unjust to the author of the books reviewed, injurious in its effects on the public taste and morality, and still more injurious in its influences on the head and heart of the reviewer himself. The pragustatores among the luxurious Romans soon lost their taste; and the verdicts of an old praigustator were sure to mislead, unless when, like dreams, they were interpreted into contraries. Our Reviewers are the genuine descendants of these palate-scared taste dictators.

“I am still confined by indisposition, but intend to step out to Hazlitt’s, almost my next door neighbour, at his particular request. It is possible that I may find you there.

“Yours, dear Godwin, affectionately,

S. T. Coleridge.”

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INFORMATION FROM TEI HEADER

Source Description:

Author: C. Kegan Paul

Title: William Godwin: his Friends and Contemporaries (London: Henry S. King & Co., 1876).

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Series: Lord Byron and his Times: http://lordbyron.org

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Publisher: Center for Applied Technologies in the Humanities, Virginia Tech

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