Mr. Ingpen has really written a new biography of Shelley rather than a compilation of new material.  The new documents incorporated in the book were discovered by the successors to Mr. William Whitton, the Shelleys’ family solicitor, but they can hardly be said to add much to our knowledge of the facts about Shelley.  They prove, however, that his marriage to Harriet Westbrook took place in a Presbyterian church in Edinburgh, and that, at a later period, he was twice arrested for debt.  Mr. Ingpen holds that they also prove that Shelley “appeared on the boards of the Windsor Theatre as an actor in Shakespearean drama.”  But we have only William Whitton, the solicitor’s words for this, and it is clear that he had been at no pains to investigate the matter.  “It was mentioned to me yesterday,” he wrote to Shelley’s father in November, 1815, “that Mr. P.B.  Shelley was exhibiting himself on the Windsor stage in the character of Shakespeare’s plays, under the figured name of Cooks.”  “The character of Shakespeare’s plays” sounds oddly, as though Whitton did not know what he was talking about, unless he was referring to allegorical “tableaux vivants” of some sort.  Certainly, so vague a rumour as this—­the sort of rumour that would naturally arise in regard to a young man who was supposed to have gone to the bad—­is no trustworthy evidence that Shelley was ever “an actor in Shakespearean drama.”  At the same time, Mr. Ingpen deserves enthusiastic praise for the untiring pursuit of facts which has enabled him to add an indispensable book to the Shelley library.  I wish that, as he has to some extent followed the events of Shelley’s life until the end, he had filled in the details of the life abroad as well as the life in England.  His book is an absorbing biography, but it remains of set purpose a biography with gaps.  He writes, it should be added, in the spirit of a collector of facts rather than of a psychologist.  One has to create one’s own portrait of Shelley out of the facts he has brought together.

One is surprised, by the way, to find so devoted a student of Shelley—­a student to whom every lover of literature is indebted for his edition of Shelley’s letters as well as for the biography—­referring to Shelley again and again as “Bysshe.”  Shelley’s family, it may be admitted, called him “Bysshe.”  But never was a more inappropriate name given to a poet who brought down music from heaven.  At the same time, as we read his biography over again, we feel that it is possible that the two names do somehow express two incongruous aspects of the man.  In his life he was, to a great extent, Bysshe; in his poetry he was Shelley.  Shelley wrote The Skylark and Pan and The West Wind.  It was Bysshe who imagined that a fat old woman in a train had infected him with incurable elephantiasis.  Mr. Ingpen quotes Peacock’s account of this characteristic illusion: