‘household virtue, most uncommon, Of constancy to a bad, ugly woman,’
Byron placed conjugal constancy amongst the domestic virtues. Shelley took another view of the quality, which, appearing to him (at its best) as nothing better than a particular kind of selfish prudence, ‘partook of the temporizing spirit of vice in proportion as it endured tamely moral defects of magnitude in the objects of its indiscreet choice.’
(14) It must be remembered that Shelley did not propound these views as mere theories for discussion amongst philosophers, without any serious desire that they should become rules of personal conduct under existing social circumstances, but as principles of social science and morals, on which men would do well to act. Unlike William Godwin, who backed out of his own more fantastic theories as soon as the accidents of life afforded him a good opportunity for putting them in practice, Shelley was ‘thorough’ at this period of his life, and ready at any moment to do any wild thing which, with boyish impetuosity and self-sufficiency, he had talked himself into thinking a thing that ought to be done. Holding these views in the spring of 1813, he acted upon them in the summer of 1814.
(15) To this extreme point had he gone in the social philosophy of the Free Lovers, the more moderate of whom discovered much to question, and no little to dissent from, in his manifesto on matters touching the intercourse of the sexes. But far as he had gone in Free Love, Shelley was appointed to go much further, and in the same department of social inquiry to arrive some three or four years later at a conclusion, far stronger and more startling than anything to be found in _Queen Mab’s_ Anti-matrimonial Note.
There is no little of direct discrepancy and general confusedness in the many things told us by the authorities respecting Shelley’s several places of residence in London during the season of 1813. To believe all the authorities tell us is to believe that, after resting for a night or two in Chapel Street, he and Harriett lived for several weeks (and even months) in different London hotels, then for several months in lodgings in Half-Moon Street, and then for several weeks in lodgings at Pimlico, and also to believe that they lived some time in Cooke’s Hotel, Dover Street, and in the Half-Moon-Street lodging-house simultaneously, before they settled at Bracknell, in the third week of July, 1813;--which clearly is more than could have been accomplished, even by such singular persons as the Shelleys, between the 7th or 8th of April and the 20th or 21st of the following July.