Lamb and most other people
found so unpleasant. Medwin gives us nothing in the nature of a portrait
of Shelley in these heavy and incoherent pages; but he gives us invaluable
materials for such a portrait--in descriptions, for instance, of how he
used to go on with his reading, even when he was out walking, and would
get so absorbed in his studies that he sometimes asked, "Mary, have I
dined?" More important, as revealing his too exquisite sensitiveness, is
the account of how Medwin saw him, "after threading the carnival crowd in
the Lung' Arno Corsos, throw himself, half-fainting, into a chair,
overpowered by the atmosphere of evil passions, as he used to say, in that
sensual and unintellectual crowd." Some people, on reading a passage like
this, will rush to the conclusion that Shelley was a prig. But the prig is
a man easily wounded by blows to his self-esteem, not by the miseries and
imperfections of humanity. Shelley, no doubt, was more convinced of his
own rightness than any other man of the same fine genius in English
history. He did not indulge in repentance, like Burns and Byron. On the
other hand, he was not in the smallest degree an egolator. He had not even
such an innocent egoism as Thoreau's. He was always longing to give
himself to the world. In the Italian days we find him planning an
expedition with Byron to rescue, by main force, a man who was in danger of
being burnt alive for sacrilege. He has often been denounced for his
heartless treatment of Harriet Westbrook, and, though we may not judge
him, it is possible that a better man would have behaved differently. But
it was a mark of his unselfishness, at least, that he went through the
marriage service with both his wives, in spite of his principles, that he
so long endured Harriet's sister as the tyrant of his house, and that he
neglected none of his responsibilities to her, in so far as they were
consistent with his deserting her for another woman. This may seem a
_bizarre_ defence, but I merely wish to emphasize the fact that Shelley
behaved far better than ninety-nine men out of a hundred would have done,
given the same principles and the same circumstances. He was a man who
never followed the line of least resistance or of self-indulgence, as most
men do in their love affairs. He fought a difficult fight all his life in
a world that ignored him, except when it was denouncing him as a polluter
of Society. Whatever mistakes we may consider him to have