He was a long, earnest man, and though born on an icy coast, seemed well adapted to endure hot latitudes, his flesh being hard as twice-baked biscuit. Transported to the Indies, his live blood would not boil like bottled ale. … Only some thirty arid summers had he seen; those summers had dried up all his physical superfluousness. But this, his thinness, so to speak, seemed no more the token of wasting anxieties and cares, than it seemed the indication of any bodily blight. It was merely the condensation of the man. He was by no means ill-looking; quite the contrary. His pure tight skin was an excellent fit; and closely wrapped up in it, and embalmed with inner health and strength, like a revivified Egyptian, he seemed prepared to endure for long ages to come, and to endure always, as now; for be it Polar snow or torrid sun, like a patent chronometer, his interior vitality was warranted to do well in all climates. Looking into his eyes, you seemed to see there the yet lingering images of those thousand-fold perils he had calmly confronted through life.

That is Melville's description of Starbuck, in Moby Dick; it is also Edward Trelawny to the life, as he is revealed to us by innumerable hints illuminating as sketches scribbled on the backs of used envelopes (one of them, by Fanny Kemble, considerably more finished than the others), and even as he appears, old and hard-bitten, in the famous picture by Millais. Hard-bitten he was, from a very early age: we should gather that much, even without the Adventures of a Younger Son; for Trelawny was possessed—and it is one of his two great claims on our sympathy—by the savage resolution that seizes very vital people who have suffered in childhood from a lack of love. This is a crucial point, for everything that is unsatisfactory about Trelawny's character can be traced back to it. Miss R. Glynn-Grylls¹ is not an impartial witness; but even Trelawny's bitterest enemies, such as Mr. Harold Nicolson, would scarcely deny that his father must have been enough to turn any child sour. It is one of the more noticeable tragedies of life that those who have reason to hate their parents end by resembling them. Trelawny certainly became morose, and was at all times conspicuous for a number of startling and absurd prejudices; but, unlike his father, he was never either mean or a bully. A fundamental magnanimity redeems this self-conscious and pathetically theatrical man. A too early loss of innocence did not turn him—as it turns many people—into a devil. For Trelawny was gifted with imagination, not merely the kind which dramatises the self (though he had this too), but the kind which induces disinterested love for what is different from the self. On rare occasions Trelawny was as callous as he habitually pretended to be, but his excessive temperament, where it bore on moral questions, inclined him to hate injustice worse than cruelty. Since he was prodigiously strong and tough, physical violence was to him merely a fact of life, amusing rather than horrible: he saw it as an inevitable part of action, not as the expression of spiritual evil.

Whether we find him a sympathetic or an exasperating and disreputable figure, Trelawny is a puzzling character—and remains one, I'm afraid, after we have read Miss Glynn-Grylls's painstaking book. She assembles all the facts (many of them new) and recounts them well enough; but she refrains from weighing them against each other in such a manner as to produce a conclusive picture of the man's personality. We can hardly complain of her obvious bias in Trelawny's favour: too few writers have even tried to be fair to him; but her advocacy needed more strengthening than can be conferred by the constant use of a vague word like “Celtic,” which covers a multitude of sins. And I cannot help thinking that she would have been better advised not to gloss over Trelawny's treatment of his Greek wife, Tersitza, in quite so glib a manner.

Miss Glynn-Grylls's comparative failure to give a clear account in depth of so complex a character is the more vexing because there are passages in her book which show that she is capable of a definite analysis. She does not, for instance, miss the importance of Trelawny's encounter with Byron.

Byron and Trelawny saw in one another the things of which each was secretly ashamed—the swashbuckling heroes in which Byron had only half-believed when he drew them had come to mock their Frankenstein; and Trelawny was impatient with Byron's central lack of direction because it was the weakness to which he himself was prone. … Except for courage, which each granted the other, they preferred to disown what they had in common.

There is an important clue here—a clue which connects Trelawny with three later Englishmen, all spiritually akin to him in their adoption of a similar exotic persona: Sir Richard Burton, Wilfrid Blunt, and Lawrence of Arabia. These four extraordinary and highly gifted men failed (in so far as they did fail) for the same reason: in all of them an artist of powerful imagination was at war with a bigoted man of action. Their attitude to art was, therefore, highly ambivalent: they flirted with it, loving and despising it, as, in their different ways, they loved and despised the female sex. Possessed by pride, they could not give themselves wholly to anything. Mary Shelley expressed part of the truth about these extreme creations of the romantic spirit when she complained that Trelawny was “destroyed by being nothing”; but I agree with Miss Glynn-Grylls that this is really a misconception. Trelawny attained to being in his whole-hearted love and comprehension of Shelley and Shelley's poetry. This pure and selfless passion justifies an otherwise futile life; it enabled Trelawny to execute one most vivid and truthful book—the best of all contemporary accounts of the subject—the Recollections of Shelley and Byron.

Yet the salient impression made on us by the story of Trelawny is one of aimlessness. This is what Mary Shelley perceived, though she expressed it wrongly. It is the tragedy of a talented man whose background meant nothing to him—or worse than nothing, because it had driven him away at an age when roots must be struck through affection or not at all. If his Arabian wife, Zella, had lived—if Shelley had lived—Trelawny's life might have acquired shape and direction. That he himself was aware of this is clear from some heart-broken phrases in a letter to Mary of 1828: “ … torn away one after another.—I have sought and loved the noble—the gentle and beautiful—and when I find them I link myself to them and rivet them to my heart. …” “It was not,” adds Miss Glynn-Grylls, “the way to escape being hurt.” Those who would have defended his character died and left him to grow old and crusty, despised as a ruffian and a liar to boot.

As regards the first of these epithets, I think it must be admitted that mid-Victorian England had some reason to look askance at Trelawny. He was gruff; he could be violently rude; he was dirty. Byron had complained, in a famous sneer, that Trelawny neglected to wash his hands. On her last visit to him, when he was a very old man, his faithful friend, Augusta White, was shocked by his refusal to wear socks. It seems beside the point to accuse such a man of eccentricity; but would it have been possible not to be astonished when he was seen spending a whole afternoon standing in a lake in somebody's park, up to his neck in water, reading a book? And as for his sexual goings-on—his inability to do either with or without women—the contemporary view is perhaps best summed up in the dry words of Robert Browning, writing to Isa Blagden in 1869: “The Trelawnys are problematical to me. He has so many wives and daughters—the last he married I fancied had been the Baronet's wife whose divorce he caused. He lives with a niece, I suppose she is that, but won't swear.”

We have no difficulty in believing Miss Glynn-Grylls's assertion that children loved the old man. We may also have more than a suspicion that the adults with whom he consented to be on friendly terms sometimes found him a bit of a bore—especially when one of his prejudices was aroused and he embarked on the iniquity of the Catholic church or of the medical profession, or on the futility of toothbrushes.

So much for “ruffian.” As for “liar,” the accusation is founded chiefly on that amazing book, the Adventures; and here again it must be admitted that Trelawny's obvious scorn for accuracy of detail, and the bizarre combination of forthright narrative style with slovenly syntax and conventional melodrama, is indeed disconcerting to those (like Miss Glynn-Grylls) who are disposed to credit the book with being substantially true. Yet the brilliant sense of character, which makes the Recollections convincing as well as vivid, in the Adventures keeps shining through the scudding cloud-wrack of Prep-school romanticism. The candid Aston the pirate De Ruyter, and above all the sadistic Dutch surgeon, Van Scolpvelt, are picturesquely seen, but scarcely too good to be true.

[Van Scolpvelt] was in animated discussion with De Ruyter as they returned to where I stood, with his hand extended, of which he was somewhat vain. It was long and narrow, like the claw of a bird of prey, so utterly devoid of flesh, that on meeting him at night with a candle shaded between his palms, the light shone so clearly through them that I asked him to let me have the loan of the signal lanthorn he was carrying. “For,” as he said, “where a ball goes there I can follow it,” stretching out a long ghastly finger, adorned with the only ornament he wore, a huge silver-mounted, antique, carbuncle ring, embossed with cabalistic characters.

On other occasions, when Trelawny has not bothered to “heighten” his narrative, the single indubitable detail puts us in possession of a memory almost painfully accurate.

Cups, saucerless and chipped, a handleless tea-pot, a piece of salt butter wrapped in brown paper, sugar on a broken plate, and soddened buttered toast, half eaten, and tooth-marked, were scattered about, with fat of ham and sausage.

The early chapters of the Adventures, from which that last sentence is taken, have a touching poignancy, for in them Trelawny recaptures the tension, the dismay, the confusion of feeling, and the absolute courage, which had driven the boy of thirteen to take his life into his own hands. At the same time, I think, those chapters adumbrate the writer Trelawny might have become, if his restless nature (call it weakness of character, if you will) had not flung him hither and thither until life was over before he had had time to realise what it was all about. As it was, the books he did write were but improvisations, careless and desperately commital. But the signs are there: only the eye of a born artist would have noticed the brown paper and the bitten-into pieces of toast.

Notes

1. Trelawny. By R. Glynn-Grylls. Constable. 218.