SOURCE: “Life and Letters (1822-1847)” in The Friend of Shelley: A Memoir of Edward John Trelawny, Cobden-Sanderson, 1930, pp. 221-88.

[In the following excerpt, Massingham characterizes Trelawny's letters as deeply inscribed by his short friendship with Shelley, although most of the letters date from the sixty-year period of Trelawny's life after Shelley's death in 1822.]

Trelawny's inner life pivots upon Shelley as integrally as the ocean tides take their motions from the moon. There is no doubt that he saw in Shelley the perfect man he wished to have been himself, had he not had poured into his composition something of the foreign matter of Byron the sensationalist, Byron of the dual part, at civil war with himself until he tried to make peace in a country equally divided against itself. Trelawny hated Byron because he saw the face-value of what he wished to appear before the world, though he failed to see it as an expression of that unresting dualism which paralysed Byron's every enterprise, gave him a posturing unreality, and was reflected in part of his own self. He loved Shelley because he saw in him that unity between instinct, thought and action which his own nature intuitively sought, and, after Shelley's death, practically failed to achieve. He perceived in Shelley what every pondering man must see in whomsoever is greatly beloved of him—an idea embodied which represents for him his union with the spiritual world. And when Shelley died in what must have seemed to him a lusus Naturae so contradictorily cruel, by the mocking ingratitude of their own loved element, a portion of night fell across his life from which he never emerged and that lies murkily upon most of his letters. He could not lose his friend without forfeiting something of his own romantic vision, drawn consciously from Shelley and unconsciously from the springs of his own nature.

For what must surprise the reader who plucks out stray biographical and abundant psychological material from the letters between 1822 and 1880 is how poor a harvest a man of such prolific parts, vehement practice and dynamic impulse gathered of his many years. The Greek crusade, the writing of the Adventures of a Younger Son and the Recollections, the marriage with Lady Goring, the somewhat meaningless vagabondage of the American tour during which he swam Niagara Falls¹—these are the only discoverable “point-events” in a further lifetime of nearly sixty years. Whether we regard Trelawny as man of letters or man of action, united in him as they were in his master Shelley, we cannot subscribe them with Blake's “Exuberance is beauty”. It is true that Trelawny is to be remembered much more as a personality than as a man of achievements; his poetry was in his individual self as Shelley's was in the union he made between life and imagination. Trelawny's contribution to the Romantic Revival is Trelawny. But he was most distinctively and completely himself when he was in living contact with Shelley, and when that contact was broken, he was divided up again with periods of almost febrile activity interspersed with blanks.

We find a corresponding lack of fullness of response to life in the Letters. They are acutely retrospective, for his deepest heart was left behind at Pisa and Lerici. They are full of thoroughly Elizabethan reflections upon the transitoriness and vanity of the shows of things and these words from a letter to Mary written from Cornwall in September, 1828, reflect a persistent mood:

Death and Time have made sad havoc amongst my old friends here; they are never idle, and yet they go on as if they concerned us not, and thus [we] dream our lives away till we wake no more, and then our bodies are thrown into a hole in the earth, like a dead dog's, that infects the atmosphere, and the void is filled up, and we are forgotten. Can such things be, and overcome us like a summer cloud, without our special wonder?

“I never clung to life and would not live any part of it over again”, he wrote in an unpublished letter to Augusta White, “—we play our little useless game and the bubble bursts and there's an end.” The melancholy of isolation, of frustration, distraction and restlessness, the inconsequences of a powerful but derelict spirit are the dominant note of these letters.

They are extremely good letters, all the same, and not the least of their virtues is that they are all unconscious of any eyes but their receivers. The bulk of them, published in Buxton Forman's volume in 1910—many of them obtained from the Clairmont collection of Shelley documents and relics, while others were secured from Miss Paola Clairmont through a pilgrimage of this sterling editor to Vienna—were written to Claire Clairmont, Mary Shelley and William Rossetti in the order named according to quantity. A few odd ones to Jane Williams, Captain Roberts, the Hunt brothers, Colonel Stanhope, Joseph Severn, Moxon the publisher and others complete the list, while a further (unpublished) packet in my temporary possession were inscribed to Mrs Draper (Miss Augusta White).

They are so amazingly unstudied not only in the special aroma of privacy breathed from them but in grammar, spelling, punctuation and even sense that they are unique of their kind. “I have never”, justly wrote Buxton Forman, “seen a letter or note of Trelawny's which was expressed just as any other man would have expressed it”. They are dressing-gown letters, unshaven letters, positively illiterate letters to such an extent that those of Keats, Shelley and Byron seem essays in comparison and Chesterfield's letters might have been printed on handmade paper, Cowper's sent hot-foot to the Press. Had a born babble-wren like Leigh Hunt written them, they would have been intolerable, but, as it is, they are a perfect vehicle for a direct and indomitable character who really was as innocent of the conventions as the infant Hercules, strangling serpents in his cradle. Their hurly-burly of words treading on each others' toes, their tempestuous syntax and unpolished phrasing are adapted to the warmth and often truculence of their contents. And of the former there is abundance, for Trelawny was true to himself when he wrote:

I have ever found that those who have the least heart have the most reason—remember I speak of reason not as that divine and glorious property which distinguishes human beings from brutes—but to the cruel and absurd practice of profaning it down to the everyday concerns of life, thereby stifling all the tender and generous feelings of our nature—which impel us spontaneously to all sorts of kindnesses and fill our hearts with love—it leaves indistinguishable the gelid and heartless from the warm and true-hearted.

You are always certain with Trelawny's letters, as Buxton Forman says, that he never wrote one set of opinions for publication and another for home consumption. The whole feeling man went into them with a cataractic swoop, and the pauses between sentences and parts of sentences, the very orthography of words, dictated by common use and convenience, had to look after themselves. The dams sometimes held, and sometimes they did not, for his thoughts fell upon the page like a storm of rain.

The following extract from a letter to Claire, written at Genoa, on December 4th, 1822, consists of one sentence:

Yes, much as indurance has hardened me, I must give you the consolation of knowing—that you have inflicted on me indiscribable tortures—that your letter has inflicted an incurable wound which is festering and inflaming my blood—and my pride and passion, warring against my ungovernable love, has in vain essayed to hide my wounded feelings—by silently submitting to my evil destiny—my intercourse with you has been that of the heart—I have used no false colours, no hypocrisy—no art, enacted no part—I resigned myself to the pure and untainted emotions which you awoke—and when in absence I was obliged to reflect on that, which overwhelmed all other thoughts (my Love for you)—finding that all my hopes of peace (of happiness I had none, believing it to be an ideal shadow) were centered in you—I wished to wipe from you every stain whether real, or imaginary—which the jealous and Lynx eyes of a Lover disquiet themselves with—I fearlessly opened my heart, confessed my weaknesses, poured out all my disjointed thoughts—intreated your counsel, aid, judgment, looked to you as my destiny—considered you bound to me by ties nothing could tear asunder—would have broken through all others to do you service—I tell you, Clare, and my word is sufficient at this era—that whether you shake me from you or not—that you—that you use me most unjustly!—that I have, and do love you with the warmest and most fervent and unalterable affection, that every sentiment and sensation that the purest Love has awakened in my heart are all exclusively concentrated in you.

As Claire, according to her outraged lover, was about this time accusing him of being a proud, peevish, sullen, domineering, self-willed, revengeful, unrelenting, ascetic, hypocritical, deceitful, base, cowardly, ungenerous, cold-blooded, selfish, heartless villain, Trelawny apparently had some grounds for pouring into her this barrage of indignation. Of course, as literature, it is a thoroughly bad letter, and I feel some compunction in selecting it for quotation among so many others that are of more robust a stamp or more loveable a likeness. But when one loves one is so often long-winded, yet scant of breath into the bargain, and the suffering in this letter is not faked like Mary's in her Journal, however tempestuously futile the stricken one's expression of it.

It is a little difficult to take Trelawny's loves seriously, because there were so many of them. In an unpublished letter to Augusta White, with whom he was probably at one time in love, he wrote:

My motto is,

“He who loves but once alone
Love's full power hath never known,
Only he true bliss can tell
Who often loves, and always well.”

And my enemies must allow I've ever fulfilled the motto. There were Tersitza and Claire and Augusta White and Lady Goring and the chit who supplanted her and the Zela of the Younger Son and perhaps others not a few, though certainly not so many as Mary in a demure, subacid fashion, rallied him with. Claire prudently denied herself to him; she was not anxious to repeat her experience as a discarded mistress.

Trelawny's emotional variabilities as a lover contrast very remarkably with his extraordinary tenacity of feeling as a man. I have already quoted extracts from the Letters to show that his love of Shelley not merely endured into advanced old age but retained all its primal freshness to a degree that baffles the conception of time as a travelling from a given point to a further one. It burned as brightly at eighty as at thirty. It was more than an evergreen devotion because its foliage was of that virile and burnished novelty which is the pride of the oak in spring. Critics have made much of his rupture with Mary as an infidelity of friendship, but I have tried to show that the remarkable feature of that friendship was not its natural decease but its artificial prolongation. “Trust me”, he wrote to Claire, when he was in Rome, gardening the grave of Shelley, “I am better than the superficially judging world thinks me—my heart and soul is rich in love and tender affection—but they are hid in a rough and forbidding exterior”, and to Augusta White, “My mind is rough and prickly but I am milky and soft within”, and again, four years before he met Shelley, “My study through life has been to hide under the mask of affected roughness the tenderest, warmest and most affectionate sensibility”. No doubt, Trelawny liked so to think of himself, but, unlike Byron, he could not act a part very different from his innate self. He had not a great deal of sensibility, but the warmth of heart was not the less genuine because he thus paraded it.

Such warmth is the true reading of his relations with Mary, and the true reason why it took him fifty years² before he wrote of Mary in these terms:

As to Mary Shelley, you are welcome to her: she was nothing but the weakest of her sex—she was the Poet's wife and as bad a one as he could have found—her aim and object was fashionable society; she was conventional in everything and tormented him by jealousy and would have made him like Tom Moore if she could,

and, a year later (1872):

she would have been better matched with a conventional commonplace man of the world—that went to church and parties: as she grew older and saw something of the world and its absurdities, she saw her folly and looked back with bitter remorse at her past life.

In the same way, his amorous fondness for Augusta White, alive in 1819, and more tender than his love for Claire, cherished the glowing image of itself as late as 1873, when he was still writing to her. Though his tormented love for Claire subsided into a more equable flow, and though their meetings were but drops fetched out of an ocean of separation, both in time and distance, yet his correspondence with her continued for fifty-three years, from the end of 1822 to the end of 1875. Such pertinacity in feeling is the more striking from the evidence on record as to her real attitude towards him. In the same month (March, 1830) as Trelawny wrote a letter to Claire, opening “Dearest Clare” and concluding, “Adieu, dearest Clare—and if fortune is not altogether evil—she will in pity conduct this to you. Adieu, dearest”, Claire wrote to Mary from Dresden:

Of Trelawny I know little. He wrote to me, describing where he was living and what kind of life he was leading. I have not yet answered him, although I make a sacred promise every day not to let it go over my head without so doing. But there is a certain want of sympathy between us which makes writing to him extremely disagreeable to me. I admire, esteem and love him; some excellent qualities he possesses in a degree that is unsurpassed, but then it is in exactly another direction from my centre and my impetus. He likes a turbid and troubled life, I a quiet one; he is full of fine feelings and has no principles, I am full of fine principles but never had a feeling; he receives all his impressions through his heart, I through my head. Que voulez-vous? Le Moyen de se recontrer (sic) when one is bound for the North Pole and the other for the South.

That is an unusually frank piece of self-revelation for so nimble a spirit as Claire, whose elusiveness so disquieted Trelawny until he accepted it as part of the incorrigible flux of life. It also explains why in an access of rage he once wrote to Claire (January 1st, 1829): “I consider you very fish-like—bloodless—and insensible—you are the counterpart of Werter—a sort of bread butter and worsted stockings—like Charlotte fit for ‘suckling fools and chronicling small beer’. Adieu old Aunt”.

It was not without reason, then, that Trelawny insisted, as he does in his letters to Augusta White, upon his unchangeableness of heart, a too capacious heart, but not one whose impressions were volatile. Claire herself had no doubt of that when she wrote to Mary from Moscow in the October of 1825: “I am not afraid of his friendship growing cold for me, for I am sure he is unchangeable on that point, but I am afraid [Trelawny was then in the Cave of Odysseus on Mt Parnassus] for his happiness and safety”.

Even more salient than his continuities of affection was his inflexibility of faith in the vision of life he had—in its cruder form—derived from Shelley, a vision which his own wild-natured being, confirmed no doubt in its tendencies by the cruelty of his father and his early estrangement from polite society, had eagerly absorbed. Trelawny, writes Buxton Forman, was less tainted by the commercialism and snobbery of the last century than any other figure. I should be inclined to put it more strongly than that. Trelawny strode through the most injurious revolution in values of our history—that of the Victorian period, at once so savage in its philosophy and naked industrialism and so creamy in its sentiment—without turning a hair. Neither the Little Bo-Peep of the drawing-room cult of the age was able to seduce him nor the brazen Moloch of material progress to dismay him from his allegiance to the dead Romantics of his prime. Of the lost race of Prometheus and Hyperion, of whom even Tennyson admitted that “however mistaken they may be, they did yet give the world another heart and new pulses”, he was the sole survivor. He escaped the bondage of this new world, because he hardly so much as noticed it. “I have been a dreamer all my life”, he wrote to Augusta White in 1833, “and patience herself has given over all hope of my reformation.”

His dreams were retrospective of the Arno and the Bay of Spezia where had lived one who would have regenerated the world. The gimcrack romanticism of the mid-Victorian period, quite different from the fabulous knight-errantry which he dramatised in himself, or the beau sabreur affectations of his Byronic side, held no appeal for him, while his disillusionment was more in character with that of our own age than with the hard optimism of the Victorians. The man who wrote incoherently to Claire in 1836:

The Great Captain that commands this planet of ours—is a great arithmetician—and has lines and figures for his ministers—the wildest freaks of comets above us, or earthquakes beneath us—or hurricanes—are but as the lesser convulsions of us things—that play our melodramatic absurdities—“on this our dingy earth” of war and revolution—the greater as the lesser effects no real changes—on the contrary they restore the equilibrium—thus everything ends as it began, immovable, unalterable, immutable—I that once thought I could put a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes—now feel that I have but existed—as a frog in a swamp; the snail-paced and slug-blooded—that pass vegetable lives—or I that flutter in this our elementary cage and think I am flying over boundless space—lead the same lives—it's all the same—we are in reality but animated stocks and stones.—

had, however materialist the passage, less in common with his contemporaries at that period than with his forefathers of three centuries before. So little touched was this Ishmael by the convulsions of the new epoch, mechanically so headlong in pace, institutionally so intricate and expansive, and humanly so retrogressive, that his loyalty to the lost romantic ideal might be called an obdurate conservatism, an individualistic Banburyism, were it not so innocently true to his nature. He was without exception the only one of the great Victorians who wasn't a Victorian, for every one of them, however strenuous his revolt, was branded by his age.

In the abortive revolutionary period of the early thirties, he sang his saga of liberty in the full-throated fashion of an age which had become far more antiquated to that generation than the Roman which it had begun to mimic.

“The changes in the opinions of all mankind”, he wrote to Mary of all people, “and other topics are favourable to such writers as I and the Poets of Liberty whom I have selected. We shall no longer be hooted at; it is our turn to triumph now. Would those glorious spirits, to whose genius the present age owes so much [the age of course had totally forgotten them] could witness the triumphant success of these opinions. I think I see Shelley's fine eyes glisten, and faded cheeks glow with fire unearthly. England, France and Belgium free, the rest of Europe must follow; the theories of tyrants all over the world are shaken as by an earthquake; they may be propped up for a time, but their fall is inevitable.”

And again to Mary, he suggests the insertion of a “diatribe” into the MS. of the Younger Son, part of which runs:

I went forth, too, my hand ever against them (“the cursed dynasty of the Bourbons”), and when tyranny had triumphed, I wandered an exile in the world and leagued myself with men worthy to be called so, for they, inspired by wisdom, uncoiled the frauds contained in lying legends, which had so long fatally deluded the majority of mankind. Alas! those apostles have not lived to see the tree they planted fructify; would they had tarried a little while to behold this new era of 1830-31, how they would have rejoiced to behold the leagued conspiracy of kings broken, and their bloodhound priests and nobles muzzled, their impious confederacy to enslave and rob the people paralysed by a blow that has shaken their usurpation to the base, and must inevitably be followed by their final overthrow.

A raw and dateable “diatribe” it is, a parody of the Shelley of Queen Mab, and distasteful to us who for four years heard the most barbarous slaughter in history magniloquently lauded in not dissimilar terms. No wonder Byron so mercilessly guyed him! Trelawny, “worldwide liberty's lifelong lover”, as Swinburne somewhat thickly sang of him, had shaped no metaphysic out of the contact of his mind with experience, and so apostrophised the spirit of liberty with the gesticulations of a Peter Pan. But he was not bombinating in vacuo—he lived what he felt, if by an onset of fugitive storms rather than in a steady trade-wind. And as Edward Garnett truly points out, Trelawny was as far in advance of his age in the assimilation of liberal ideas as were Shelley and Byron in the creation of them. He not only deranged his hair (which was how Mary saw him) but “the collection of petrified codes and fossil theories of the day”. And are we, he adds, to criticise the men who vigorously attacked and demolished the social and religious bigotry of the early nineteenth century?

Mr Brailsford says truly of him that he would have said with Tom Paine, “Where liberty is not, there is my country”, for he was a rebel against all forms of authority, the enemy of every Empire and the iconoclast of all sterile conventions. His ties were with men fighting against despotism, no matter what the cut of their clothes and the colour of their skins. It was as natural for him to serve under the French flag as for Paine to join Washington's army. One of his favourite books was Volney's Ruins of Empires, that “grammar of revolution” which he hauls into the pages of the Younger Son. A Liberal of the 1820 school, he was consistent to his principles of liberty for nations and the individual throughout his whole life, and though he saw Italy accept the Austrian, Greece the Turk and England Peterloo, an Ajax he remained. “My early convictions”, he wrote to Augusta White from 7 Pelham Crescent, Brompton, in April, 1873, “have hardened with my bones. I am a thorough Republican and free thinker … the people are getting stronger everywhere.” Not that this declamatory faith was left uninfused with the strong waters of his buccaneering apprenticeship. “As we are poor,” wrote Robin Hood naughtily to his nice Mary, “the rich are our inheritance, and we are justified on all and every occasion to rob and use them.”

He told Mary at the end of June, 1831, that if he could get a seat in a reformed House of Commons, “or if there was a probability of revolution” he would return to England from Florence, and as he actually returned in 1832, it is quite possible that the Reform Bill was the magnet. But England sadly disappointed him and in 1833 he went off to America, where he remained until June, 1835. But that he was interested in the problems of Parliamentary government appears from an unpublished and rather incoherent letter written to Seymour Kirkup in Italy just before he left England for America:

The blackguards have again conspiered (sic)—you see they are throwing back Bills to Parliment (sic) and preparing to turn out and show fight for loaves & fishes. The Wigs (sic) are exasperated—a deadly hatred—is hearted (sic) amongst the aristocracy—and out of that the people will work their salvation—our latest news is that Parliment will be soon proroged (sic)—and after the lapse of two months possibly dissolved—& a new one summoned—others think a Peel ministry will prefer trying their strength with the present Parliment which I think is the most probable as this is a Tory elected parlement (sic) (I mean when they were in power) when the Municipal Corporation Bill is passed the English may say they have a representative goverment (sic)—these corporations are the last strongholds of the aristocracy when we drive them out of these we may demolish them according to Law and then—I ought now that I am speaking of reform to tell you about my sojourn with the republicans on the other side the water—but I have neither time nor space. We will discuss these things by the Arno.

In South Carolina in the December of that same year, he wrote to Claire:

The wealthier classes in America attempt to imitate the English in their social institutions—and that is an absurdity—but they are a small sect—with small means and little influence—Democratic institutions are using up to the stump their goose quills—the Sovereign people are bearing down all opposition—they are working out triumphantly their grand experiment—that all men are born free and equal!—the only blot on their charter, slavery, will gradually disappear—it must be spunged out—or cut out soon.

Rousseau—Shelley—Trelawny, that is the genealogy of this passage. It was in the Southern States that Trelawny bought the freedom of a man slave. Doubts have been cast upon the authenticity of this report. Through the courtesy of Mrs Call (his daughter, Letitia), I am able to give the actual Deed of Conveyance:

I, Emma Maria, for and in consideration of the sum of one thousand Dollars do bargain, sell and deliver to the said Edward Trelawny my black slave John—to have and to hold the said black boy John for his use at his new settlement in Virginia or elsewhere—Dated at Charlestown on the 11th of January, 1834.

It was one of those unobtrusive acts of generosity—like pardoning Whitcombe his attempt upon his life on Mt Parnassus and sharing his purse with Mary—which were unknown until his death.

These political views—garishly expressed as they are—Trelawny not only maintained as zealously, if without his former self-advertisement, in his cottage at Sompting when he was eighty, as he did at the Casa Magni when he was thirty, but brought them into relation with their human and natural counterparts. He loved America, just as W. H. Hudson and Paul Fountain loved it, for its “boundless horizons unbroken by the trumpery works of man”, and, like them, a wanderer in incult places, shared their hatred of urban life.

Virginia is twice as large [as England]—with no more than half a million population—this is delightful—after being almost suffocated in Europe, [what would he have said to the Underground at 6.0 p.m. on a wet night?], crammed together like the audience in a theatre. … In the wilderness—encompassed by the works of nature— … I feel so elated that life is of itself a pleasure—when I enter a town it is a pain—the only place I could find peace in would be where village bell—did never knoll to church.

Though for a short time he allowed himself to be petted by London society, a lion with a ribbon round his neck, he radically abhorred the social world for its formal finesse, duplicity and artifice as much as for its inequitable privileges in the distribution of wealth.

“All my friends and acquaintances”, he wrote to Claire, “are picked up clandestinely; the only people worth knowing is where there is a demonstration of its being the mutual wish of two people—and the ceremony can be evaded—such is my habit—the forcing myself through the medium of a third person I abhor.”

He watched the same struggle in individual human beings that he saw on the political stage.

“Is there not something very attractive in Jane Boccella?” he wrote to Claire, “so frank, so honest, so generous—so warm and single-hearted—so bold and yet so sentative (sic)—so brave and yet so weak—so vain and yet so loving—impelled by instinct to act nobly—and by education to be [the] veriest trifler—the emotions of a generous soul—struggling to free itself—‘A chain of lead around a soul of fire'.”³

In all this, Hudson and Fountain, elementals like himself, would have found a brother. But they certainly would not have acceded to his revolutionary sympathies no matter how modernised. That is where Trelawny expressed his synthesis, partly natural and partly acquired from Shelley. He had in him the noble possibility of that completeness and single-hearted acceptance of life whose ideal, as formulated by Mr Fausset. … It was a unity of length because he never swerved from it, and of breadth because it inspired all his activities, though even Shelley could not give him depth.

But, as I turn over the pages of the letters, his failure to realise that possibility is not to be denied, while his succession of aimless love-affairs seems out of harmony with that remarkable consistency of mind that bore him from Pisa to the grave, a very old man, without, for all his errantry, his ever leaving, metaphorically speaking, the Shelley's house. Are not these two factors, his loving so often and accomplishing so little susceptible of the same explanation? There is a link between them, for the waywardness of his loves is paralleled by the restlessness of his wanderings, interleaved with periods of stagnation. Only one great emotion informed Trelawny's life after Shelley's death and no great action outside the writing of his two books, both inspired by Shelley, provided a channel for his inordinate vitality, his superb health, his tireless zeal for liberty and his unique personality. There is surely something missing here. The only relevant comment on his many loves is that he frittered himself away on them; on his spasmodic travels and odd quiescences that they reveal some central dislocation. In July, 1827, he wrote to Augusta White from Duke Street, St James's: “I am a boat hauled up on the beach—out of the reach of the tide rotting in idleness”.⁴ He was conscious that he was not fulfilling himself and stung by the knowledge off he would go, somewhere, anywhere. Wandering, he told her, “is my chief delight and solace from retrospection” and “my memory is constantly reverting to the past”. As early as 1833 he who was to live for nearly another fifty years with barely a day's illness, wrote her from Niagara (see Appendix v): “I am old—very old if you consider what my life has been—a horse that is early used is prematurely worn out. I am worn out and not worth a damn”. This from the man who had just swum Niagara!

The sense of dissatisfaction is omnipresent in Trelawny's letters and I am convinced that it was this disappointment with life that drove him to his many love-affairs rather than their failures which bred his disappointment. True, they were dispiriting enough. His high-hearted Zela perishing in the all-Danaë flower of her warmth and vividness: Julia Addison, his second wife, “bankrupted me in fortune as well as happiness”; Tersitza, the barbaric child with her passion for Parisian dresses. And Claire, what anchorage could any man find in that siren Lamia? Even the brave and high-spirited Lady Goring so ate him up with her glittering extravagances that when she returned from a visit to his London house, she found everything in the house sold up except a couple of kitchen chairs, two beds and a deal table, and he silently handed her the receipts. But Trelawny took them, one after the other, all in the day's journey, and it is plain that none of their or his inconstancies injected a lasting toxin into his blood.⁵ He delighted in the society of women and possessed that intuitive understanding of the feminine quality which women value in men above all things, but owing to the crudities of our male educational system, so rarely enjoy. No man who had been severely mauled by a woman or had himself treated them as a bird-catcher could have written to Claire as late as 1870: “You say he [Shelley] was womanly in some things—so he was, and we men should all be much better if we had a touch of their feeling, sentiment, earnestness and constancy”.

Had Trelawny been a man of sickly constitution or infected with the soul-malady of the incomplete French Romantics, or, like poor Cowper, arbitrarily cut off from his intuitions and love of nature, or enslaved by family inhibitions like Ruskin, or much persecuted by the world, or reduced to continuous poverty or a neglected writer or a friendless solitary, we could have better understood the bitter despondency of so many of his letters, which, as he often said, “requires all my resolution to fight against its ascendancy”. But in a man of such metal and unquenchable fires, afflicted with none of these diseases, virile above the common lot of men, what explains it? When he writes to Claire in 1828:

Whilst the most worthless are the most powerful—rascals and villains reign triumphant thro' the world—and their cause is sanctified and made holy by success—we who are of the weakest side must be content to pine in sorrow and solitude—to grieve o'er grievances we cannot redress—we know our efforts are vain, and yet it deters not the just and noble from shedding their blood freely and fearlessly.—

the pessimism appears more personal than the cause for it warrants.

Trelawny had periods of poverty but hardly serious and prolonged enough to cause him to write to Claire from Florence four years later:

I am now fiercely struggling to enable myself to indulge in my love of locomotion—I cannot indure location—my existence is burthensome whilst I am fixed by anything like ties—and nothing but my poverty has detained me here thus long. … You are happier than I am—for in despite of the past you can yet hope for the future—whilst I utterly despair.

Again he writes in the same year:

You deceive yourself, Clare, in thinking there are none so wretched as yourself! All who are unfortunate make the same assertion. I have known those who were out of all comparison more wretched;—that mentally and bodily have suffered such tortures, that I would suffer all you have suffered during your life—than what they endured hourly.—I have not only seen a considerable portion of the world—and played a part—but I have looked into it with an experienced and thinking eye—it is full of misery—I have sometimes thought that the planet we are dwelling in is Hell—and that we are suffering the penalty for sins we have committed in some anterior state of existence in some other planet; do we not all suffer here? … pain and pleasure seem scattered promiscuously into the crowd of the world—the foremost and most grasping and impudent and worthless of the rabble thrust themselves foremost in seizing the good—whilst the evils of life fall to the share of the weak, the worthy, and the unobtrusive.

“Time”, he wrote to Claire in the same strain nearly forty years later, “will put me in his wallet as alms for oblivion—life is very long considering how little we do with it that's worth doing—our distinguishing faculty from the other animals is vanity and folly.—We have the worst of all the animals and the best of none.”

Such backward-looking, such restlessness as of a horse tormented by flies, such preoccupation alike with the follies of the painted scene and his own sterility in it, such a cry, repeated again and again—the world is out of joint and with it I—show that the lack of correspondence in that world between inward truth and outward seeming had stolen into Trelawny himself. He had breathed the contagion of the world's slow stain and vainly mutinied, he the freeman and freebooter, against the paralysis. He had lost touch with that creative unity which was potential in his own nature and into which Shelley, by his personality, his magnetism, and a redeeming conception of life, manifested in his own person, and enchanted in his art, had given him an undying glimpse. It is clear that Trelawny did not know what was the matter with himself, but we are enlightened who can weigh the tremendous impact upon him both of Shelley the man and of Shelley the possessed of a divine vision. The loss of Shelley was, in no straining of sense, the loss of himself. He did not consciously formulate to his own mind the philosophic implications of that ideal harmony that had fired him, but the curious mixture in his later life of a ferment of meaningless activity and the bewilderments of a delusive inertia from which he hurled his savage scorn upon the world, was the effect upon a man who had once seen Shelley plain and except in dream saw him no more. Add to that the loss of confidence in himself for which both Byron and his giddy life in Greece were responsible—and the Letters are truly revealing.

How crowded year after year the letters are with references to anything and everything to do with Shelley! Pages in the earlier ones about the tomb in Rome; more pages in the later ones to Claire about her possession of Shelley documents. His letters to William Rossetti are about little else than Shelley, constantly pouring out new versions of or new marginalia upon the old stories. He was as much up in arms about the isolation of “the lorn and outraged Poet”, the omission of the Queen Mab notes and other matters relating to Shelley three years before his death in 1881, as he was intoxicated with Shelley himself at Pisa and Lerici. His last letters were concerned with his burial by Shelley's side in the true spirit of the only good line in Swinburne's poem—“Shelley, Trelawny rejoins thee here”. He took the most eager interest in every edition or life of Shelley and was delighted with Rossetti's “work of love”:

Peacock had fancy and learning, Hogg the same; Leigh Hunt did not understand Shelley's poetry; Medwin, superficial; Mrs Shelley, fear of running counter to the cant of society restrained her. You alone have the qualities essential to the task, and have done it admirably.

To Buxton Forman, a year before his death, he handed over the Clint portrait and the collection of Shelley letters in the Records, describing to him how he had bought Shelley's poems in a small bookshop in London, fifty-eight years before. These acorns, he remarked of the materials he gave to Forman, incorporated into the edition of the Prose Works, “have grown into lofty oaks. The poet was one of the few Authors who could bear, without loss, every act of his life, from youth to maturity, to be made prospect to all the world”.

But for Shelley he would never have written the record of his wild adventures in youth, for their emotional landscape is wholly coloured by what he received from a tutelage of six months in the Poet's company. Thus those six months not merely informed his whole subsequent life of nearly sixty years, but actually gave the world the immortal record of the flamboyant career which preceded them. It was a period long enough to inspire him with an unparalleled constancy of devotion, but it was too short and too abruptly ended for him to resolve his discords and make his peace with life. For as Shelley had mirrored for Trelawny the image of the “good life”, in his own transparent self, so was it shattered when his master was taken back into the elements from which, transfused into his imagination, he had fashioned a new heaven upon earth. …

Notes

1. See Appendix v.

2. Though it is true he did write in 1838: “Mary is the blab of blabs—she lives on hogs' wash—what utter failures most people are”.

3. This line is a misquotation from Epipsychidion.

4. Cf. also to Claire, four years later, from Florence: “I am like a bark stranded on the shore—by some extraordinary influx of the sea—kept high and dry without the hope of the tide ever rising high enough to float me again”.

5. “Dear Mary,” he wrote in 1831, “I love women and you know it, but my life is not dedicated to them.”