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FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS*Ver.12.12.00*END* + + + + + +This etext was produced by David Widger <widger@cecomet.net> + + + + + +In Defence of Harriet Shelley + +by Mark Twain + + + + +I + +I have committed sins, of course; but I have not committed enough of them +to entitle me to the punishment of reduction to the bread and water of +ordinary literature during six years when I might have been living on the +fat diet spread for the righteous in Professor Dowden's Life of Shelley, +if I had been justly dealt with. + +During these six years I have been living a life of peaceful ignorance. +I was not aware that Shelley's first wife was unfaithful to him, and that +that was why he deserted her and wiped the stain from his sensitive honor +by entering into soiled relations with Godwin's young daughter. This was +all new to me when I heard it lately, and was told that the proofs of it +were in this book, and that this book's verdict is accepted in the girls' +colleges of America and its view taught in their literary classes. + +In each of these six years multitudes of young people in our country have +arrived at the Shelley-reading age. Are these six multitudes +unacquainted with this life of Shelley? Perhaps they are; indeed, one +may feel pretty sure that the great bulk of them are. To these, then, I +address myself, in the hope that some account of this romantic historical +fable and the fabulist's manner of constructing and adorning it may +interest them. + +First, as to its literary style. Our negroes in America have several +ways of entertaining themselves which are not found among the whites +anywhere. Among these inventions of theirs is one which is particularly +popular with them. It is a competition in elegant deportment. They hire +a hall and bank the spectators' seats in rising tiers along the two +sides, leaving all the middle stretch of the floor free. A cake is +provided as a prize for the winner in the competition, and a bench of +experts in deportment is appointed to award it. Sometimes there are as +many as fifty contestants, male and female, and five hundred spectators. +One at a time the contestants enter, clothed regardless of expense in +what each considers the perfection of style and taste, and walk down the +vacant central space and back again with that multitude of critical eyes +on them. All that the competitor knows of fine airs and graces he throws +into his carriage, all that he knows of seductive expression he throws +into his countenance. He may use all the helps he can devise: watch- +chain to twirl with his fingers, cane to do graceful things with, snowy +handkerchief to flourish and get artful effects out of, shiny new +stovepipe hat to assist in his courtly bows; and the colored lady may +have a fan to work up her effects with, and smile over and blush behind, +and she may add other helps, according to her judgment. When the review +by individual detail is over, a grand review of all the contestants in +procession follows, with all the airs and graces and all the bowings and +smirkings on exhibition at once, and this enables the bench of experts to +make the necessary comparisons and arrive at a verdict. The successful +competitor gets the prize which I have before mentioned, and an abundance +of applause and envy along with it. The negroes have a name for this +grave deportment-tournament; a name taken from the prize contended for. +They call it a Cakewalk. + +This Shelley biography is a literary cake-walk. The ordinary forms of +speech are absent from it. All the pages, all the paragraphs, walk by +sedately, elegantly, not to say mincingly, in their Sunday-best, shiny +and sleek, perfumed, and with boutonnieres in their button-holes; it is +rare to find even a chance sentence that has forgotten to dress. If the +book wishes to tell us that Mary Godwin, child of sixteen, had known +afflictions, the fact saunters forth in this nobby outfit: "Mary was +herself not unlearned in the lore of pain"--meaning by that that she had +not always traveled on asphalt; or, as some authorities would frame it, +that she had "been there herself," a form which, while preferable to the +book's form, is still not to be recommended. If the book wishes to tell +us that Harriet Shelley hired a wet-nurse, that commonplace fact gets +turned into a dancing-master, who does his professional bow before us in +pumps and knee-breeches, with his fiddle under one arm and his crush-hat +under the other, thus: "The beauty of Harriet's motherly relation to her +babe was marred in Shelley's eyes by the introduction into his house of a +hireling nurse to whom was delegated the mother's tenderest office." + +This is perhaps the strangest book that has seen the light since +Frankenstein. Indeed, it is a Frankenstein itself; a Frankenstein with +the original infirmity supplemented by a new one; a Frankenstein with the +reasoning faculty wanting. Yet it believes it can reason, and is always +trying. It is not content to leave a mountain of fact standing in the +clear sunshine, where the simplest reader can perceive its form, its +details, and its relation to the rest of the landscape, but thinks it +must help him examine it and understand it; so its drifting mind settles +upon it with that intent, but always with one and the same result: there +is a change of temperature and the mountain is hid in a fog. Every time +it sets up a premise and starts to reason from it, there is a surprise in +store for the reader. It is strangely nearsighted, cross-eyed, and +purblind. Sometimes when a mastodon walks across the field of its vision +it takes it for a rat; at other times it does not see it at all. + +The materials of this biographical fable are facts, rumors, and poetry. +They are connected together and harmonized by the help of suggestion, +conjecture, innuendo, perversion, and semi-suppression. + +The fable has a distinct object in view, but this object is not +acknowledged in set words. Percy Bysshe Shelley has done something which +in the case of other men is called a grave crime; it must be shown that +in his case it is not that, because he does not think as other men do +about these things. + +Ought not that to be enough, if the fabulist is serious? Having proved +that a crime is not a crime, was it worth while to go on and fasten the +responsibility of a crime which was not a crime upon somebody else? What +is the use of hunting down and holding to bitter account people who are +responsible for other people's innocent acts? + +Still, the fabulist thinks it a good idea to do that. In his view +Shelley's first wife, Harriet, free of all offense as far as we have +historical facts for guidance, must be held unforgivably responsible for +her husband's innocent act in deserting her and taking up with another +woman. + +Any one will suspect that this task has its difficulties. Any one will +divine that nice work is necessary here, cautious work, wily work, and +that there is entertainment to be had in watching the magician do it. +There is indeed entertainment in watching him. He arranges his facts, +his rumors, and his poems on his table in full view of the house, and +shows you that everything is there--no deception, everything fair and +above board. And this is apparently true, yet there is a defect, for +some of his best stock is hid in an appendix-basket behind the door, and +you do not come upon it until the exhibition is over and the enchantment +of your mind accomplished--as the magician thinks. + +There is an insistent atmosphere of candor and fairness about this book +which is engaging at first, then a little burdensome, then a trifle +fatiguing, then progressively suspicious, annoying, irritating, and +oppressive. It takes one some little time to find out that phrases which +seem intended to guide the reader aright are there to mislead him; that +phrases which seem intended to throw light are there to throw darkness; +that phrases which seem intended to interpret a fact are there to +misinterpret it; that phrases which seem intended to forestall prejudice +are there to create it; that phrases which seem antidotes are poisons in +disguise. The naked facts arrayed in the book establish Shelley's guilt +in that one episode which disfigures his otherwise superlatively lofty +and beautiful life; but the historian's careful and methodical +misinterpretation of them transfers the responsibility to the wife's +shoulders as he persuades himself. The few meagre facts of Harriet +Shelley's life, as furnished by the book, acquit her of offense; but by +calling in the forbidden helps of rumor, gossip, conjecture, insinuation, +and innuendo he destroys her character and rehabilitates Shelley's--as he +believes. And in truth his unheroic work has not been barren of the +results he aimed at; as witness the assertion made to me that girls in +the colleges of America are taught that Harriet Shelley put a stain upon +her husband's honor, and that that was what stung him into repurifying +himself by deserting her and his child and entering into scandalous +relations with a school-girl acquaintance of his. + +If that assertion is true, they probably use a reduction of this work in +those colleges, maybe only a sketch outlined from it. Such a thing as +that could be harmful and misleading. They ought to cast it out and put +the whole book in its place. It would not deceive. It would not deceive +the janitor. + +All of this book is interesting on account of the sorcerer's methods and +the attractiveness of some of his characters and the repulsiveness of the +rest, but no part of it is so much so as are the chapters wherein he +tries to think he thinks he sets forth the causes which led to Shelley's +desertion of his wife in 1814. + +Harriet Westbrook was a school-girl sixteen years old. Shelley was +teeming with advanced thought. He believed that Christianity was a +degrading and selfish superstition, and he had a deep and sincere desire +to rescue one of his sisters from it. Harriet was impressed by his +various philosophies and looked upon him as an intellectual wonder-- +which indeed he was. He had an idea that she could give him valuable +help in his scheme regarding his sister; therefore he asked her to +correspond with him. She was quite willing. Shelley was not thinking of +love, for he was just getting over a passion for his cousin, Harriet +Grove, and just getting well steeped in one for Miss Hitchener, a school- +teacher. What might happen to Harriet Westbrook before the letter- +writing was ended did not enter his mind. Yet an older person could have +made a good guess at it, for in person Shelley was as beautiful as an +angel, he was frank, sweet, winning, unassuming, and so rich in +unselfishness, generosities, and magnanimities that he made his whole +generation seem poor in these great qualities by comparison. Besides, +he was in distress. His college had expelled him for writing an +atheistical pamphlet and afflicting the reverend heads of the university +with it, his rich father and grandfather had closed their purses against +him, his friends were cold. Necessarily, Harriet fell in love with him; +and so deeply, indeed, that there was no way for Shelley to save her from +suicide but to marry her. He believed himself to blame for this state of +things, so the marriage took place. He was pretty fairly in love with +Harriet, although he loved Miss Hitchener better. He wrote and explained +the case to Miss Hitchener after the wedding, and he could not have been +franker or more naive and less stirred up about the circumstance if the +matter in issue had been a commercial transaction involving thirty-five +dollars. + +Shelley was nineteen. He was not a youth, but a man. He had never had +any youth. He was an erratic and fantastic child during eighteen years, +then he stepped into manhood, as one steps over a door-sill. He was +curiously mature at nineteen in his ability to do independent thinking +on the deep questions of life and to arrive at sharply definite decisions +regarding them, and stick to them--stick to them and stand by them at +cost of bread, friendships, esteem, respect, and approbation. + +For the sake of his opinions he was willing to sacrifice all these +valuable things, and did sacrifice them; and went on doing it, too, when +he could at any moment have made himself rich and supplied himself with +friends and esteem by compromising with his father, at the moderate +expense of throwing overboard one or two indifferent details of his cargo +of principles. + +He and Harriet eloped to Scotland and got married. They took lodgings in +Edinburgh of a sort answerable to their purse, which was about empty, and +there their life was a happy, one and grew daily more so. They had only +themselves for company, but they needed no additions to it. They were as +cozy and contented as birds in a nest. Harriet sang evenings or read +aloud; also she studied and tried to improve her mind, her husband +instructing her in Latin. She was very beautiful, she was modest, quiet, +genuine, and, according to her husband's testimony, she had no fine lady +airs or aspirations about her. In Matthew Arnold's judgment, she was +"a pleasing figure." + +The pair remained five weeks in Edinburgh, and then took lodgings in +York, where Shelley's college mate, Hogg, lived. Shelley presently ran +down to London, and Hogg took this opportunity to make love to the young +wife. She repulsed him, and reported the fact to her husband when he got +back. It seems a pity that Shelley did not copy this creditable conduct +of hers some time or other when under temptation, so that we might have +seen the author of his biography hang the miracle in the skies and squirt +rainbows at it. + +At the end of the first year of marriage--the most trying year for any +young couple, for then the mutual failings are coming one by one to +light, and the necessary adjustments are being made in pain and +tribulation--Shelley was able to recognize that his marriage venture had +been a safe one. As we have seen, his love for his wife had begun in a +rather shallow way and with not much force, but now it was become deep +and strong, which entitles his wife to a broad credit mark, one may +admit. He addresses a long and loving poem to her, in which both passion +and worship appear: + +Exhibit A + + "O thou + Whose dear love gleamed upon the gloomy path + Which this lone spirit travelled, + . . . . . . . . . . . . . + . . . wilt thou not turn + Those spirit-beaming eyes and look on me. + Until I be assured that Earth is Heaven + And Heaven is Earth? + . . . . . . . . + Harriet! let death all mortal ties dissolve, + But ours shall not be mortal." + + +Shelley also wrote a sonnet to her in August of this same year in +celebration of her birthday: + +Exhibit B + + Ever as now with hove and Virtue's glow + May thy unwithering soul not cease to burn, + Still may thine heart with those pure thoughts o'erflow + Which force from mine such quick and warm return." + + +Was the girl of seventeen glad and proud and happy? We may conjecture +that she was. + +That was the year 1812. Another year passed still happily, still +successfully--a child was born in June, 1813, and in September, three +months later, Shelley addresses a poem to this child, Ianthe, in which he +points out just when the little creature is most particularly dear to +him: + +Exhibit C + + "Dearest when most thy tender traits express + The image of thy mother's loveliness." + + +Up to this point the fabulist counsel for Shelley and prosecutor of his +young wife has had easy sailing, but now his trouble begins, for Shelley +is getting ready to make some unpleasant history for himself, and it will +be necessary to put the blame of it on the wife. + +Shelley had made the acquaintance of a charming gray-haired, young- +hearted Mrs. Boinville, whose face "retained a certain youthful beauty"; +she lived at Bracknell, and had a young daughter named Cornelia Turner, +who was equipped with many fascinations. Apparently these people were +sufficiently sentimental. Hogg says of Mrs. Boinville: + + "The greater part of her associates were odious. I generally + found there two or three sentimental young butchers, an + eminently philosophical tinker, and several very + unsophisticated medical practitioners or medical students, all + of low origin and vulgar and offensive manners. They sighed, + turned up their eyes, retailed philosophy, such as it was," + etc. + +Shelley moved to Bracknell, July 27th (this is still 1813) purposely to +be near this unwholesome prairie-dogs' nest. The fabulist says: "It was +the entrance into a world more amiable and exquisite than he had yet +known." + +"In this acquaintance the attraction was mutual"--and presently it grew +to be very mutual indeed, between Shelley and Cornelia Turner, when they +got to studying the Italian poets together. Shelley, "responding like a +tremulous instrument to every breath of passion or of sentiment," had his +chance here. It took only four days for Cornelia's attractions to begin +to dim Harriet's. Shelley arrived on the 27th of July; on the 31st he +wrote a sonnet to Harriet in which "one detects already the little rift +in the lover's lute which had seemed to be healed or never to have gaped +at all when the later and happier sonnet to Ianthe was written"--in +September, we remember: + +Exhibit D + + "EVENING. TO HARRIET + + "O thou bright Sun! Beneath the dark blue line + Of western distance that sublime descendest, + And, gleaming lovelier as thy beams decline, + Thy million hues to every vapor lendest, + And over cobweb, lawn, and grove, and stream + Sheddest the liquid magic of thy light, + Till calm Earth, with the parting splendor bright, + Shows like the vision of a beauteous dream; + What gazer now with astronomic eye + Could coldly count the spots within thy sphere? + Such were thy lover, Harriet, could he fly + The thoughts of all that makes his passion dear, + And turning senseless from thy warm caress + Pick flaws in our close-woven happiness." + + +I cannot find the "rift"; still it may be there. What the poem seems to +say is, that a person would be coldly ungrateful who could consent to +count and consider little spots and flaws in such a warm, great, +satisfying sun as Harriet is. It is a "little rift which had seemed to +be healed, or never to have gaped at all." That is, "one detects" a +little rift which perhaps had never existed. How does one do that? +How does one see the invisible? It is the fabulist's secret; he knows +how to detect what does not exist, he knows how to see what is not +seeable; it is his gift, and he works it many a time to poor dead Harriet +Shelley's deep damage. + +"As yet, however, if there was a speck upon Shelley's happiness it was no +more than a speck"--meaning the one which one detects where "it may never +have gaped at all"--"nor had Harriet cause for discontent." + +Shelley's Latin instructions to his wife had ceased. "From a teacher he +had now become a pupil." Mrs. Boinville and her young married daughter +Cornelia were teaching him Italian poetry; a fact which warns one to +receive with some caution that other statement that Harriet had no +"cause for discontent." + +Shelley had stopped instructing Harriet in Latin, as before mentioned. +The biographer thinks that the busy life in London some time back, and +the intrusion of the baby, account for this. These were hindrances, but +were there no others? He is always overlooking a detail here and there +that might be valuable in helping us understand a situation. For +instance, when a man has been hard at work at the Italian poets with a +pretty woman, hour after hour, and responding like a tremulous instrument +to every breath of passion or of sentiment in the meantime, that man is +dog-tired when he gets home, and he can't teach his wife Latin; it would +be unreasonable to expect it. + +Up to this time we have submitted to having Mrs. Boinville pushed upon +us as ostensibly concerned in these Italian lessons, but the biographer +drops her now, of his own accord. Cornelia "perhaps" is sole teacher. +Hogg says she was a prey to a kind of sweet melancholy, arising from +causes purely imaginary; she required consolation, and found it in +Petrarch. He also says, "Bysshe entered at once fully into her views and +caught the soft infection, breathing the tenderest and sweetest +melancholy, as every true poet ought." + +Then the author of the book interlards a most stately and fine compliment +to Cornelia, furnished by a man of approved judgment who knew her well +"in later years." It is a very good compliment indeed, and she no doubt +deserved it in her "later years," when she had for generations ceased to +be sentimental and lackadaisical, and was no longer engaged in enchanting +young husbands and sowing sorrow for young wives. But why is that +compliment to that old gentlewoman intruded there? Is it to make the +reader believe she was well-chosen and safe society for a young, +sentimental husband? The biographer's device was not well planned. That +old person was not present--it was her other self that was there, her +young, sentimental, melancholy, warm-blooded self, in those early sweet +times before antiquity had cooled her off and mossed her back. + +"In choosing for friends such women as Mrs. Newton, Mrs. Boinville, and +Cornelia Turner, Shelley gave good proof of his insight and +discrimination." That is the fabulist's opinion--Harriet Shelley's is +not reported. + +Early in August, Shelley was in London trying to raise money. In +September he wrote the poem to the baby, already quoted from. In +the first week of October Shelley and family went to Warwick, then +to Edinburgh, arriving there about the middle of the month. + +"Harriet was happy." Why? The author furnishes a reason, but hides from +us whether it is history or conjecture; it is because "the babe had borne +the journey well." It has all the aspect of one of his artful devices-- +flung in in his favorite casual way--the way he has when he wants to draw +one's attention away from an obvious thing and amuse it with some trifle +that is less obvious but more useful--in a history like this. The +obvious thing is, that Harriet was happy because there was much territory +between her husband and Cornelia Turner now; and because the perilous +Italian lessons were taking a rest; and because, if there chanced to be +any respondings like a tremulous instrument to every breath of passion or +of sentiment in stock in these days, she might hope to get a share of +them herself; and because, with her husband liberated, now, from the +fetid fascinations of that sentimental retreat so pitilessly described by +Hogg, who also dubbed it "Shelley's paradise" later, she might hope to +persuade him to stay away from it permanently; and because she might also +hope that his brain would cool, now, and his heart become healthy, and +both brain and heart consider the situation and resolve that it would be +a right and manly thing to stand by this girl-wife and her child and see +that they were honorably dealt with, and cherished and protected and +loved by the man that had promised these things, and so be made happy and +kept so. And because, also--may we conjecture this? --we may hope for +the privilege of taking up our cozy Latin lessons again, that used to be +so pleasant, and brought us so near together--so near, indeed, that often +our heads touched, just as heads do over Italian lessons; and our hands +met in casual and unintentional, but still most delicious and thrilling +little contacts and momentary clasps, just as they inevitably do over +Italian lessons. Suppose one should say to any young wife: "I find that +your husband is poring over the Italian poets and being instructed in the +beautiful Italian language by the lovely Cornelia Robinson"--would that +cozy picture fail to rise before her mind? would its possibilities fail +to suggest themselves to her? would there be a pang in her heart and a +blush on her face? or, on the contrary, would the remark give her +pleasure, make her joyous and gay? Why, one needs only to make the +experiment--the result will not be uncertain. + +However, we learn--by authority of deeply reasoned and searching +conjecture--that the baby bore the journey well, and that that was why +the young wife was happy. That accounts for two per cent. of the +happiness, but it was not right to imply that it accounted for the other +ninety-eight also. + +Peacock, a scholar, poet, and friend of the Shelleys, was of their party +when they went away. He used to laugh at the Boinville menagerie, and +"was not a favorite." One of the Boinville group, writing to Hogg, said, +"The Shelleys have made an addition to their party in the person of a +cold scholar, who, I think, has neither taste nor feeling. This, Shelley +will perceive sooner or later, for his warm nature craves sympathy." +True, and Shelley will fight his way back there to get it--there will be +no way to head him off. + +Towards the end of November it was necessary for Shelley to pay a +business visit to London, and he conceived the project of leaving Harriet +and the baby in Edinburgh with Harriet's sister, Eliza Westbrook, +a sensible, practical maiden lady about thirty years old, who had spent +a great part of her time with the family since the marriage. She was +an estimable woman, and Shelley had had reason to like her, and did like +her; but along about this time his feeling towards her changed. Part of +Shelley's plan, as he wrote Hogg, was to spend his London evenings with +the Newtons--members of the Boinville Hysterical Society. But, alas, +when he arrived early in December, that pleasant game was partially +blocked, for Eliza and the family arrived with him. We are left +destitute of conjectures at this point by the biographer, and it is my +duty to supply one. I chance the conjecture that it was Eliza who +interfered with that game. I think she tried to do what she could +towards modifying the Boinville connection, in the interest of her young +sister's peace and honor. + +If it was she who blocked that game, she was not strong enough to block +the next one. Before the month and year were out--no date given, let us +call it Christmas--Shelley and family were nested in a furnished house in +Windsor, "at no great distance from the Boinvilles"--these decoys still +residing at Bracknell. + +What we need, now, is a misleading conjecture. We get it with +characteristic promptness and depravity: + + "But Prince Athanase found not the aged Zonoras, the friend of + his boyhood, in any wanderings to Windsor. Dr. Lind had died + a year since, and with his death Windsor must have lost, for + Shelley, its chief attraction." + +Still, not to mention Shelley's wife, there was Bracknell, at any rate. +While Bracknell remains, all solace is not lost. Shelley is represented +by this biographer as doing a great many careless things, but to my mind +this hiring a furnished house for three months in order to be with a man +who has been dead a year, is the carelessest of them all. One feels for +him--that is but natural, and does us honor besides--yet one is vexed, +for all that. He could have written and asked about the aged Zonoras +before taking the house. He may not have had the address, but that is +nothing--any postman would know the aged Zonoras; a dead postman would +remember a name like that. + +And yet, why throw a rag like this to us ravening wolves? Is it +seriously supposable that we will stop to chew it and let our prey +escape? No, we are getting to expect this kind of device, and to give it +merely a sniff for certainty's sake and then walk around it and leave it +lying. Shelley was not after the aged Zonoras; he was pointed for +Cornelia and the Italian lessons, for his warm nature was craving +sympathy. + + +II + +The year 1813 is just ended now, and we step into 1814. + +To recapitulate, how much of Cornelia's society has Shelley had, thus +far? Portions of August and September, and four days of July. That is +to say, he has had opportunity to enjoy it, more or less, during that +brief period. Did he want some more of it? We must fall back upon +history, and then go to conjecturing. + + "In the early part of the year 1814, Shelley was a frequent + visitor at Bracknell." + +"Frequent" is a cautious word, in this author's mouth; the very +cautiousness of it, the vagueness of it, provokes suspicion; it makes one +suspect that this frequency was more frequent than the mere common +everyday kinds of frequency which one is in the habit of averaging up +with the unassuming term "frequent." I think so because they fixed up a +bedroom for him in the Boinville house. One doesn't need a bedroom if +one is only going to run over now and then in a disconnected way to +respond like a tremulous instrument to every breath of passion or of +sentiment and rub up one's Italian poetry a little. + +The young wife was not invited, perhaps. If she was, she most certainly +did not come, or she would have straightened the room up; the most +ignorant of us knows that a wife would not endure a room in the condition +in which Hogg found this one when he occupied it one night. Shelley was +away--why, nobody can divine. Clothes were scattered about, there were +books on every side: "Wherever a book could be laid was an open book +turned down on its face to keep its place." It seems plain that the wife +was not invited. No, not that; I think she was invited, but said to +herself that she could not bear to go there and see another young woman +touching heads with her husband over an Italian book and making thrilling +hand-contacts with him accidentally. + +As remarked, he was a frequent visitor there, "where he found an easeful +resting-place in the house of Mrs. Boinville--the white-haired Maimuna-- +and of her daughter, Mrs. Turner." The aged Zonoras was deceased, but +the white-haired Maimuna was still on deck, as we see. "Three charming +ladies entertained the mocker (Hogg) with cups of tea, late hours, +Wieland's Agathon, sighs and smiles, and the celestial manna of refined +sentiment." + +"Such," says Hogg, "were the delights of Shelley's paradise in +Bracknell." + +The white-haired Maimuna presently writes to Hogg: + + "I will not have you despise home-spun pleasures. Shelley is + making a trial of them with us--" + +A trial of them. It may be called that. It was March 11, and he had +been in the house a month. She continues: + + Shelley "likes then so well that he is resolved to leave off + rambling--" + +But he has already left it off. He has been there a month. + + "And begin a course of them himself." + +But he has already begun it. He has been at it a month. He likes it so +well that he has forgotten all about his wife, as a letter of his +reveals. + + "Seriously, I think his mind and body want rest." + +Yet he has been resting both for a month, with Italian, and tea, and +manna of sentiment, and late hours, and every restful thing a young +husband could need for the refreshment of weary limbs and a sore +conscience, and a nagging sense of shabbiness and treachery. + + "His journeys after what he has never found have racked his + purse and his tranquillity. He is resolved to take a little + care of the former, in pity to the latter, which I applaud, and + shall second with all, my might." + +But she does not say whether the young wife, a stranger and lonely +yonder, wants another woman and her daughter Cornelia to be lavishing so +much inflamed interest on her husband or not. That young wife is always +silent--we are never allowed to hear from her. She must have opinions +about such things, she cannot be indifferent, she must be approving or +disapproving, surely she would speak if she were allowed--even to-day and +from her grave she would, if she could, I think--but we get only the +other side, they keep her silent always. + + "He has deeply interested us. In the course of your intimacy + he must have made you feel what we now feel for him. He is + seeking a house close to us--" + +Ah! he is not close enough yet, it seems-- + + "and if he succeeds we shall have an additional motive to + induce you to come among us in the summer." + +The reader would puzzle a long time and not guess the biographer's +comment upon the above letter. It is this: + + "These sound like words of s considerate and judicious friend." + +That is what he thinks. That is, it is what he thinks he thinks. No, +that is not quite it: it is what he thinks he can stupefy a particularly +and unspeakably dull reader into thinking it is what he thinks. He makes +that comment with the knowledge that Shelley is in love with this woman's +daughter, and that it is because of the fascinations of these two that +Shelley has deserted his wife--for this month, considering all the +circumstances, and his new passion, and his employment of the time, +amounted to desertion; that is its rightful name. We cannot know how the +wife regarded it and felt about it; but if she could have read the letter +which Shelley was writing to Hogg four or five days later, we could guess +her thought and how she felt. Hear him: + . . . . . . . + "I have been staying with Mrs. Boinville for the last month; + I have escaped, in the society of all that philosophy and + friendship combine, from the dismaying solitude of myself." + +It is fair to conjecture that he was feeling ashamed. + + "They have revived in my heart the expiring flame of life. + I have felt myself translated to a paradise which has nothing + of mortality but its transitoriness; my heart sickens at the + view of that necessity which will quickly divide me from the + delightful tranquillity of this happy home--for it has become + my home. + . . . . . . . + "Eliza is still with us--not here!--but will be with me when + the infinite malice of destiny forces me to depart." + +Eliza is she who blocked that game--the game in London--the one where we +were purposing to dine every night with one of the "three charming +ladies" who fed tea and manna and late hours to Hogg at Bracknell. + +Shelley could send Eliza away, of course; could have cleared her out long +ago if so minded, just as he had previously done with a predecessor of +hers whom he had first worshipped and then turned against; but perhaps +she was useful there as a thin excuse for staying away himself. + + "I am now but little inclined to contest this point. + I certainly hate her with all my heart and soul . . . . + + "It is a sight which awakens an inexpressible sensation of + disgust and horror, to see her caress my poor little Ianthe, + in whom I may hereafter find the consolation of sympathy. + I sometimes feel faint with the fatigue of checking the + overflowings of my unbounded abhorrence for this miserable + wretch. But she is no more than a blind and loathsome worm, + that cannot see to sting. + + "I have begun to learn Italian again . . . . Cornelia + assists me in this language. Did I not once tell you that I + thought her cold and reserved? She is the reverse of this, as + she is the reverse of everything bad. She inherits all the + divinity of her mother . . . . I have sometimes forgotten + that I am not an inmate of this delightful home--that a time + will come which will cast me again into the boundless ocean of + abhorred society. + + "I have written nothing but one stanza, which has no meaning, + and that I have only written in thought: + + "Thy dewy looks sink in my breast; + Thy gentle words stir poison there; + Thou hast disturbed the only rest + That was the portion of despair. + Subdued to duty's hard control, + I could have borne my wayward lot: + The chains that bind this rained soul + Had cankered then, but crushed it not. + + "This is the vision of a delirious and distempered dream, which + passes away at the cold clear light of morning. Its surpassing + excellence and exquisite perfections have no more reality than + the color of an autumnal sunset." + +Then it did not refer to his wife. That is plain; otherwise he would +have said so. It is well that he explained that it has no meaning, for +if he had not done that, the previous soft references to Cornelia and the +way he has come to feel about her now would make us think she was the +person who had inspired it while teaching him how to read the warm and +ruddy Italian poets during a month. + +The biography observes that portions of this letter "read like the tired +moaning of a wounded creature." Guesses at the nature of the wound are +permissible; we will hazard one. + +Read by the light of Shelley's previous history, his letter seems to be +the cry of a tortured conscience. Until this time it was a conscience +that had never felt a pang or known a smirch. It was the conscience of +one who, until this time, had never done a dishonorable thing, or an +ungenerous, or cruel, or treacherous thing, but was now doing all of +these, and was keenly aware of it. Up to this time Shelley had been +master of his nature, and it was a nature which was as beautiful and as +nearly perfect as any merely human nature may be. But he was drunk now, +with a debasing passion, and was not himself. There is nothing in his +previous history that is in character with the Shelley of this letter. +He had done boyish things, foolish things, even crazy things, but never +a thing to be ashamed of. He had done things which one might laugh at, +but the privilege of laughing was limited always to the thing itself; +you could not laugh at the motive back of it--that was high, that was +noble. His most fantastic and quixotic acts had a purpose back of them +which made them fine, often great, and made the rising laugh seem +profanation and quenched it; quenched it, and changed the impulse to +homage. + +Up to this time he had been loyalty itself, where his obligations lay-- +treachery was new to him; he had never done an ignoble thing--baseness +was new to him; he had never done an unkind thing that also was new to +him. + +This was the author of that letter, this was the man who had deserted his +young wife and was lamenting, because he must leave another woman's house +which had become a "home" to him, and go away. Is he lamenting mainly +because he must go back to his wife and child? No, the lament is mainly +for what he is to leave behind him. The physical comforts of the house? +No, in his life he had never attached importance to such things. Then +the thing which he grieves to leave is narrowed down to a person--to the +person whose "dewy looks" had sunk into his breast, and whose seducing +words had "stirred poison there." + +He was ashamed of himself, his conscience was upbraiding him. He was the +slave of a degrading love; he was drunk with his passion, the real +Shelley was in temporary eclipse. This is the verdict which his previous +history must certainly deliver upon this episode, I think. + +One must be allowed to assist himself with conjectures like these when +trying to find his way through a literary swamp which has so many +misleading finger-boards up as this book is furnished with. + +We have now arrived at a part of the swamp where the difficulties and +perplexities are going to be greater than any we have yet met with-- +where, indeed, the finger-boards are multitudinous, and the most of them +pointing diligently in the wrong direction. We are to be told by the +biography why Shelley deserted his wife and child and took up with +Cornelia Turner and Italian. It was not on account of Cornelia's sighs +and sentimentalities and tea and manna and late hours and soft and sweet +and industrious enticements; no, it was because "his happiness in his +home had been wounded and bruised almost to death." + +It had been wounded and bruised almost to death in this way: + +1st. Harriet persuaded him to set up a carriage. + +2d. After the intrusion of the baby, Harriet stopped reading aloud and +studying. + +3d. Harriet's walks with Hogg "commonly conducted us to some fashionable +bonnet-shop." + +4th. Harriet hired a wet-nurse. + +5th. When an operation was being performed upon the baby, "Harriet stood +by, narrowly observing all that was done, but, to the astonishment of the +operator, betraying not the smallest sign of emotion." + +6th. Eliza Westbrook, sister-in-law, was still of the household. + +The evidence against Harriet Shelley is all in; there is no more. Upon +these six counts she stands indicted of the crime of driving her husband +into that sty at Bracknell; and this crime, by these helps, the +biographical prosecuting attorney has set himself the task of proving +upon her. + +Does the biographer call himself the attorney for the prosecution? +No, only to himself, privately; publicly he is the passionless, +disinterested, impartial judge on the bench. He holds up his judicial +scales before the world, that all may see; and it all tries to look so +fair that a blind person would sometimes fail to see him slip the false +weights in. + +Shelley's happiness in his home had been wounded and bruised almost to +death, first, because Harriet had persuaded him to set up a carriage. +I cannot discover that any evidence is offered that she asked him to set +up a carriage. Still, if she did, was it a heavy offence? Was it +unique? Other young wives had committed it before, others have committed +it since. Shelley had dearly loved her in those London days; possibly he +set up the carriage gladly to please her; affectionate young husbands do +such things. When Shelley ran away with another girl, by-and-by, this +girl persuaded him to pour the price of many carriages and many horses +down the bottomless well of her father's debts, but this impartial judge +finds no fault with that. Once she appeals to Shelley to raise money-- +necessarily by borrowing, there was no other way--to pay her father's +debts with at a time when Shelley was in danger of being arrested and +imprisoned for his own debts; yet the good judge finds no fault with her +even for this. + +First and last, Shelley emptied into that rapacious mendicant's lap a sum +which cost him--for he borrowed it at ruinous rates--from eighty to one +hundred thousand dollars. But it was Mary Godwin's papa, the +supplications were often sent through Mary, the good judge is Mary's +strenuous friend, so Mary gets no censures. On the Continent Mary rode +in her private carriage, built, as Shelley boasts, "by one of the best +makers in Bond Street, "yet the good judge makes not even a passing +comment on this iniquity. Let us throw out Count No. 1 against Harriet +Shelley as being far-fetched, and frivolous. + +Shelley's happiness in his home had been wounded and bruised almost to +death, secondly, because Harriet's studies "had dwindled away to nothing, +Bysshe had ceased to express any interest in them." At what time was +this? It was when Harriet "had fully recovered from the fatigue of her +first effort of maternity,. . . and was now in full force, vigor, and +effect." Very well, the baby was born two days before the close of June. +It took the mother a month to get back her full force, vigor, and effect; +this brings us to July 27th and the deadly Cornelia. If a wife of +eighteen is studying with her husband and he gets smitten with another +woman, isn't he likely to lose interest in his wife's studies for that +reason, and is not his wife's interest in her studies likely to languish +for the same reason? Would not the mere sight of those books of hers +sharpen the pain that is in her heart? This sudden breaking down of a +mutual intellectual interest of two years' standing is coincident with +Shelley's re-encounter with Cornelia; and we are allowed to gather from +that time forth for nearly two months he did all his studying in that +person's society. We feel at liberty to rule out Count No. 2 from the +indictment against Harriet. + +Shelley's happiness in his home had been wounded and bruised almost to +death, thirdly, because Harriet's walks with Hogg commonly led to some +fashionable bonnet-shop. I offer no palliation; I only ask why the +dispassionate, impartial judge did not offer one himself--merely, I mean, +to offset his leniency in a similar case or two where the girl who ran +away with Harriet's husband was the shopper. There are several occasions +where she interested herself with shopping--among them being walks which +ended at the bonnet-shop--yet in none of these cases does she get a word +of blame from the good judge, while in one of them he covers the deed +with a justifying remark, she doing the shopping that time to find +easement for her mind, her child having died. + +Shelley's happiness in his home had been wounded and bruised almost to +death, fourthly, by the introduction there of a wet-nurse. The wet-nurse +was introduced at the time of the Edinburgh sojourn, immediately after +Shelley had been enjoying the two months of study with Cornelia which +broke up his wife's studies and destroyed his personal interest in them. +Why, by this time, nothing that Shelley's wife could do would have been +satisfactory to him, for he was in love with another woman, and was never +going to be contented again until he got back to her. If he had been +still in love with his wife it is not easily conceivable that he would +care much who nursed the baby, provided the baby was well nursed. +Harriet's jealousy was assuredly voicing itself now, Shelley's conscience +was assuredly nagging him, pestering him, persecuting him. Shelley +needed excuses for his altered attitude towards his wife; Providence +pitied him and sent the wet-nurse. If Providence had sent him a cotton +doughnut it would have answered just as well; all he wanted was something +to find fault with. + +Shelley's happiness in his home had been wounded and bruised almost to +death, fifthly, because Harriet narrowly watched a surgical operation +which was being performed upon her child, and, "to the astonishment of +the operator," who was watching Harriet instead of attending to his +operation, she betrayed "not the smallest sign of emotion." The author +of this biography was not ashamed to set down that exultant slander. +He was apparently not aware that it was a small business to bring into +his court a witness whose name he does not know, and whose character and +veracity there is none to vouch for, and allow him to strike this blow at +the mother-heart of this friendless girl. The biographer says, "We may +not infer from this that Harriet did not feel"--why put it in, then?-- +"but we learn that those about her could believe her to be hard and +insensible." Who were those who were about her? Her husband? He hated +her now, because he was in love elsewhere. Her sister? Of course that +is not charged. Peacock? Peacock does not testify. The wet-nurse? She +does not testify. If any others were there we have no mention of them. +"Those about her" are reduced to one person--her husband. Who reports +the circumstance? It is Hogg. Perhaps he was there--we do not know. +But if he was, he still got his information at second-hand, as it was the +operator who noticed Harriet's lack of emotion, not himself. Hogg is not +given to saying kind things when Harriet is his subject. He may have +said them the time that he tried to tempt her to soil her honor, but +after that he mentions her usually with a sneer. "Among those who were +about her" was one witness well equipped to silence all tongues, abolish +all doubts, set our minds at rest; one witness, not called, and not +callable, whose evidence, if we could but get it, would outweigh the +oaths of whole battalions of hostile Hoggs and nameless surgeons--the +baby. I wish we had the baby's testimony; and yet if we had it it would +not do us any good--a furtive conjecture, a sly insinuation, a pious +"if" or two, would be smuggled in, here and there, with a solemn air of +judicial investigation, and its positiveness would wilt into dubiety. + +The biographer says of Harriet, "If words of tender affection and +motherly pride proved the reality of love, then undoubtedly she loved her +firstborn child." That is, if mere empty words can prove it, it stands +proved--and in this way, without committing himself, he gives the reader +a chance to infer that there isn't any extant evidence but words, and +that he doesn't take much stock in them. How seldom he shows his hand! +He is always lurking behind a non-committal "if" or something of that +kind; always gliding and dodging around, distributing colorless poison +here and there and everywhere, but always leaving himself in a position +to say that his language will be found innocuous if taken to pieces and +examined. He clearly exhibits a steady and never-relaxing purpose to +make Harriet the scapegoat for her husband's first great sin--but it is +in the general view that this is revealed, not in the details. His +insidious literature is like blue water; you know what it is that makes +it blue, but you cannot produce and verify any detail of the cloud of +microscopic dust in it that does it. Your adversary can dip up a +glassful and show you that it is pure white and you cannot deny it; and +he can dip the lake dry, glass by glass, and show that every glassful is +white, and prove it to any one's eye--and yet that lake was blue and you +can swear it. This book is blue--with slander in solution. + +Let the reader examine, for example, the paragraph of comment which +immediately follows the letter containing Shelley's self-exposure which +we have been considering. This is it. One should inspect the individual +sentences as they go by, then pass them in procession and review the +cake-walk as a whole: + + "Shelley's happiness in his home, as is evident from this + pathetic letter, had been fatally stricken; it is evident, + also, that he knew where duty lay; he felt that his part was to + take up his burden, silently and sorrowfully, and to bear it + henceforth with the quietness of despair. But we can perceive + that he scarcely possessed the strength and fortitude needful + for success in such an attempt. And clearly Shelley himself + was aware how perilous it was to accept that respite of + blissful ease which he enjoyed in the Boinville household; for + gentle voices and dewy looks and words of sympathy could not + fail to remind him of an ideal of tranquillity or of joy which + could never be his, and which he must henceforth sternly + exclude from his imagination." + +That paragraph commits the author in no way. Taken sentence by sentence +it asserts nothing against anybody or in favor of anybody, pleads for +nobody, accuses nobody. Taken detail by detail, it is as innocent as +moonshine. And yet, taken as a whole, it is a design against the reader; +its intent is to remove the feeling which the letter must leave with him +if let alone, and put a different one in its place--to remove a feeling +justified by the letter and substitute one not justified by it. The +letter itself gives you no uncertain picture--no lecturer is needed to +stand by with a stick and point out its details and let on to explain +what they mean. The picture is the very clear and remorsefully faithful +picture of a fallen and fettered angel who is ashamed of himself; an +angel who beats his soiled wings and cries, who complains to the woman +who enticed him that he could have borne his wayward lot, he could have +stood by his duty if it had not been for her beguilements; an angel who +rails at the "boundless ocean of abhorred society," and rages at his poor +judicious sister-in-law. If there is any dignity about this spectacle it +will escape most people. + +Yet when the paragraph of comment is taken as a whole, the picture is +full of dignity and pathos; we have before us a blameless and noble +spirit stricken to the earth by malign powers, but not conquered; +tempted, but grandly putting the temptation away; enmeshed by subtle +coils, but sternly resolved to rend them and march forth victorious, at +any peril of life or limb. Curtain--slow music. + +Was it the purpose of the paragraph to take the bad taste of Shelley's +letter out of the reader's mouth? If that was not it, good ink was +wasted; without that, it has no relevancy--the multiplication table would +have padded the space as rationally. + +We have inspected the six reasons which we are asked to believe drove a +man of conspicuous patience, honor, justice, fairness, kindliness, and +iron firmness, resolution, and steadfastness, from the wife whom he loved +and who loved him, to a refuge in the mephitic paradise of Bracknell. +These are six infinitely little reasons; but there were six colossal +ones, and these the counsel for the destruction of Harriet Shelley +persists in not considering very important. + +Moreover, the colossal six preceded the little six and had done the +mischief before they were born. Let us double-column the twelve; then we +shall see at a glance that each little reason is in turn answered by a +retorting reason of a size to overshadow it and make it insignificant: + +1. Harriet sets up carriage. 1. CORNELIA TURNER. +2. Harriet stops studying. 2. CORNELIA TURNER. +3. Harriet goes to bonnet-shop. 3. CORNELIA TURNER. +4. Harriet takes a wet-nurse. 4. CORNELIA TURNER. +5. Harriet has too much nerve. 5. CORNELIA TURNER. +6. Detested sister-in-law.fi. 6. CORNELIA TURNER. + +As soon as we comprehend that Cornelia Turner and the Italian lessons +happened before the little six had been discovered to be grievances, +we understand why Shelley's happiness in his home had been wounded and +bruised almost to death, and no one can persuade us into laying it on +Harriet. Shelley and Cornelia are the responsible persons, and we cannot +in honor and decency allow the cruelties which they practised upon the +unoffending wife to be pushed aside in order to give us a chance to waste +time and tears over six sentimental justifications of an offence which +the six can't justify, nor even respectably assist in justifying. + +Six? There were seven; but in charity to the biographer the seventh +ought not to be exposed. Still, he hung it out himself, and not only +hung it out, but thought it was a good point in Shelley's favor. For two +years Shelley found sympathy and intellectual food and all that at home; +there was enough for spiritual and mental support, but not enough for +luxury; and so, at the end of the contented two years, this latter detail +justifies him in going bag and baggage over to Cornelia Turner and +supplying the rest of his need in the way of surplus sympathy and +intellectual pie unlawfully. By the same reasoning a man in merely +comfortable circumstances may rob a bank without sin. + + +III + +It is 1814, it is the 16th of March, Shelley has, written his letter, he +has been in the Boinville paradise a month, his deserted wife is in her +husbandless home. Mischief had been wrought. It is the biographer who +concedes this. We greatly need some light on Harriet's side of the case +now; we need to know how she enjoyed the month, but there is no way to +inform ourselves; there seems to be a strange absence of documents and +letters and diaries on that side. Shelley kept a diary, the approaching +Mary Godwin kept a diary, her father kept one, her half-sister by +marriage, adoption, and the dispensation of God kept one, and the entire +tribe and all its friends wrote and received letters, and the letters +were kept and are producible when this biography needs them; but there +are only three or four scraps of Harriet's writing, and no diary. +Harriet wrote plenty of letters to her husband--nobody knows where they +are, I suppose; she wrote plenty of letters to other people--apparently +they have disappeared, too. Peacock says she wrote good letters, but +apparently interested people had sagacity enough to mislay them in time. +After all her industry she went down into her grave and lies silent +there--silent, when she has so much need to speak. We can only wonder at +this mystery, not account for it. + +No, there is no way of finding out what Harriet's state of feeling was +during the month that Shelley was disporting himself in the Bracknell +paradise. We have to fall back upon conjecture, as our fabulist does +when he has nothing more substantial to work with. Then we easily +conjecture that as the days dragged by Harriet's heart grew heavier and +heavier under its two burdens--shame and resentment: the shame of being +pointed at and gossiped about as a deserted wife, and resentment against +the woman who had beguiled her husband from her and now kept him in a +disreputable captivity. Deserted wives--deserted whether for cause or +without cause--find small charity among the virtuous and the discreet. +We conjecture that one after another the neighbors ceased to call; that +one after another they got to being "engaged" when Harriet called; that +finally they one after the other cut her dead on the street; that after +that she stayed in the house daytimes, and brooded over her sorrows, and +nighttimes did the same, there being nothing else to do with the heavy +hours and the silence and solitude and the dreary intervals which sleep +should have charitably bridged, but didn't. + +Yes, mischief had been wrought. The biographer arrives at this +conclusion, and it is a most just one. Then, just as you begin to half +hope he is going to discover the cause of it and launch hot bolts of +wrath at the guilty manufacturers of it, you have to turn away +disappointed. You are disappointed, and you sigh. This is what he says +--the italics [''] are mine: + + "However the mischief may have been wrought--'and at this day + no one can wish to heap blame an any buried head'--" + +So it is poor Harriet, after all. Stern justice must take its course-- +justice tempered with delicacy, justice tempered with compassion, justice +that pities a forlorn dead girl and refuses to strike her. Except in the +back. Will not be ignoble and say the harsh thing, but only insinuate +it. Stern justice knows about the carriage and the wet-nurse and the +bonnet-shop and the other dark things that caused this sad mischief, and +may not, must not blink them; so it delivers judgment where judgment +belongs, but softens the blow by not seeming to deliver judgment at all. +To resume--the italics are mine: + + "However the mischief may have been wrought--and at this day no + one can wish to heap blame on any buried head--'it is certain + that some cause or causes of deep division between Shelley and + his wife were in operation during the early part of the year + 1814'." + +This shows penetration. No deduction could be more accurate than this. +There were indeed some causes of deep division. But next comes another +disappointing sentence: + + "To guess at the precise nature of these cafes, in the absence + of definite statement, were useless." + +Why, he has already been guessing at them for several pages, and we have +been trying to outguess him, and now all of a sudden he is tired of it +and won't play any more. It is not quite fair to us. However, he will +get over this by-and-by, when Shelley commits his next indiscretion and +has to be guessed out of it at Harriet's expense. + +"We may rest content with Shelley's own words"--in a Chancery paper drawn +up by him three years later. They were these: "Delicacy forbids me to +say more than that we were disunited by incurable dissensions." + +As for me, I do not quite see why we should rest content with anything of +the sort. It is not a very definite statement. It does not necessarily +mean anything more than that he did not wish to go into the tedious +details of those family quarrels. Delicacy could quite properly excuse +him from saying, "I was in love with Cornelia all that time; my wife kept +crying and worrying about it and upbraiding me and begging me to cut +myself free from a connection which was wronging her and disgracing us +both; and I being stung by these reproaches retorted with fierce and +bitter speeches--for it is my nature to do that when I am stirred, +especially if the target of them is a person whom I had greatly loved and +respected before, as witness my various attitudes towards Miss Hitchener, +the Gisbornes, Harriet's sister, and others--and finally I did not +improve this state of things when I deserted my wife and spent a whole +month with the woman who had infatuated me." + +No, he could not go into those details, and we excuse him; but, +nevertheless, we do not rest content with this bland proposition to puff +away that whole long disreputable episode with a single mean, meaningless +remark of Shelley's. + +We do admit that "it is certain that some cause or causes of deep +division were in operation." We would admit it just the same if the +grammar of the statement were as straight as a string, for we drift into +pretty indifferent grammar ourselves when we are absorbed in historical +work; but we have to decline to admit that we cannot guess those cause or +causes. + +But guessing is not really necessary. There is evidence attainable-- +evidence from the batch discredited by the biographer and set out at the +back door in his appendix-basket; and yet a court of law would think +twice before throwing it out, whereas it would be a hardy person who +would venture to offer in such a place a good part of the material which +is placed before the readers of this book as "evidence," and so treated +by this daring biographer. Among some letters (in the appendix-basket) +from Mrs. Godwin, detailing the Godwinian share in the Shelleyan events +of 1814, she tells how Harriet Shelley came to her and her husband, +agitated and weeping, to implore them to forbid Shelley the house, and +prevent his seeing Mary Godwin. + + "She related that last November he had fallen in love with Mrs. + Turner and paid her such marked attentions Mr. Turner, the + husband, had carried off his wife to Devonshire." + +The biographer finds a technical fault in this; "the Shelleys were in +Edinburgh in November." What of that? The woman is recalling a +conversation which is more than two months old; besides, she was probably +more intent upon the central and important fact of it than upon its +unimportant date. Harriet's quoted statement has some sense in it; for +that reason, if for no other, it ought to have been put in the body of +the book. Still, that would not have answered; even the biographer's +enemy could not be cruel enough to ask him to let this real grievance, +this compact and substantial and picturesque figure, this rawhead-and- +bloody-bones, come striding in there among those pale shams, those +rickety spectres labeled WET-NURSE, BONNET-SHOP, and so on--no, the +father of all malice could not ask the biographer to expose his pathetic +goblins to a competition like that. + +The fabulist finds fault with the statement because it has a technical +error in it; and he does this at the moment that he is furnishing us an +error himself, and of a graver sort. He says: + + "If Turner carried off his wife to Devonshire he brought her + back and Shelley was staying with her and her mother on terms + of cordial intimacy in March, 1814." + +We accept the "cordial intimacy"--it was the very thing Harriet was +complaining of--but there is nothing to show that it was Turner who +brought his wife back. The statement is thrown in as if it were not only +true, but was proof that Turner was not uneasy. Turner's movements are +proof of nothing. Nothing but a statement from Turner's mouth would have +any value here, and he made none. + +Six days after writing his letter Shelley and his wife were together +again for a moment--to get remarried according to the rites of the +English Church. + +Within three weeks the new husband and wife were apart again, and the +former was back in his odorous paradise. This time it is the wife who +does the deserting. She finds Cornelia too strong for her, probably. +At any rate, she goes away with her baby and sister, and we have a +playful fling at her from good Mrs. Boinville, the "mysterious spinner +Maimuna"; she whose "face was as a damsel's face, and yet her hair was +gray"; she of whom the biographer has said, "Shelley was indeed caught in +an almost invisible thread spun around him, but unconsciously, by this +subtle and benignant enchantress." The subtle and benignant enchantress +writes to Hogg, April 18: "Shelley is again a widower; his beauteous half +went to town on Thursday." + +Then Shelley writes a poem--a chant of grief over the hard fate which +obliges him now to leave his paradise and take up with his wife again. +It seems to intimate that the paradise is cooling towards him; that he is +warned off by acclamation; that he must not even venture to tempt with +one last tear his friend Cornelia's ungentle mood, for her eye is glazed +and cold and dares not entreat her lover to stay: + +Exhibit E + + "Pause not! the time is past! Every voice cries 'Away!' + Tempt not with one last tear thy friend's ungentle mood; + Thy lover's eye, so glazed and cold, dares not entreat thy + stay: + Duty and dereliction guide thee back to solitude." + +Back to the solitude of his now empty home, that is! + + "Away! away! to thy sad and silent home; + Pour bitter tears on its desolated hearth." + . . . . . . . . + +But he will have rest in the grave by-and-by. Until that time comes, +the charms of Bracknell will remain in his memory, along with Mrs. +Boinville's voice and Cornelia Turner's smile: + + "Thou in the grave shalt rest--yet, till the phantoms flee + Which that house and hearth and garden made dear to thee ere while, + Thy remembrance and repentance and deep musings are not free + From the music of two voices and the light of one sweet smile." + +We cannot wonder that Harriet could not stand it. Any of us would have +left. We would not even stay with a cat that was in this condition. +Even the Boinvilles could not endure it; and so, as we have seen, they +gave this one notice. + + "Early in May, Shelley was in London. He did not yet despair + of reconciliation with Harriet, nor had he ceased to love her." + +Shelley's poems are a good deal of trouble to his biographer. They are +constantly inserted as "evidence," and they make much confusion. As soon +as one of them has proved one thing, another one follows and proves quite +a different thing. The poem just quoted shows that he was in love with +Cornelia, but a month later he is in love with Harriet again, and there +is a poem to prove it. + + "In this piteous appeal Shelley declares that he has now no + grief but one--the grief of having known and lost his wife's + love." + +Exhibit F + + "Thy look of love has power to calm + The stormiest passion of my soul." + + +But without doubt she had been reserving her looks of love a good part of +the time for ten months, now--ever since he began to lavish his own on +Cornelia Turner at the end of the previous July. He does really seem to +have already forgotten Cornelia's merits in one brief month, for he +eulogizes Harriet in a way which rules all competition out: + + "Thou only virtuous, gentle, kind, + Amid a world of hate." + +He complains of her hardness, and begs her to make the concession of +a "slight endurance"--of his waywardness, perhaps--for the sake of +"a fellow-being's lasting weal." But the main force of his appeal is +in his closing stanza, and is strongly worded: + + "O tract for once no erring guide! + Bid the remorseless feeling flee; + 'Tis malice, 'tis revenge, 'tis pride, + 'Tis anything but thee; + I deign a nobler pride to prove, + And pity if thou canst not love." + +This is in May--apparently towards the end of it. Harriet and Shelley +were corresponding all the time. Harriet got the poem--a copy exists in +her own handwriting; she being the only gentle and kind person amid a +world of hate, according to Shelley's own testimony in the poem, we are +permitted to think that the daily letters would presently have melted +that kind and gentle heart and brought about the reconciliation, if there +had been time but there wasn't; for in a very few days--in fact, before +the 8th of June--Shelley was in love with another woman. + +And so--perhaps while Harriet was walking the floor nights, trying to get +her poem by heart--her husband was doing a fresh one--for the other girl +--Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin--with sentiments like these in it: + +Exhibit G + + To spend years thus and be rewarded, + As thou, sweet love, requited me + When none were near. + . . . thy lips did meet + Mine tremblingly; . . , + + " Gentle and good and mild thou art, + Nor can I live if thou appear + Aught but thyself." . . . + + +And so on. "Before the close of June it was known and felt by Mary and +Shelley that each was inexpressibly dear to the other." Yes, Shelley had +found this child of sixteen to his liking, and had wooed and won her in +the graveyard. But that is nothing; it was better than wooing her in her +nursery, at any rate, where it might have disturbed the other children. + +However, she was a child in years only. From the day that she set her +masculine grip on Shelley he was to frisk no more. If she had occupied +the only kind and gentle Harriet's place in March it would have been a +thrilling spectacle to see her invade the Boinville rookery and read the +riot act. That holiday of Shelley's would have been of short duration, +and Cornelia's hair would have been as gray as her mother's when the +services were over. + +Hogg went to the Godwin residence in Skinner Street with Shelley on that +8th of June. They passed through Godwin's little debt-factory of a book- +shop and went up-stairs hunting for the proprietor. Nobody there. +Shelley strode about the room impatiently, making its crazy floor quake +under him. Then a door "was partially and softly opened. A thrilling +voice called 'Shelley!' A thrilling voice answered, 'Mary!' And he +darted out of the room like an arrow from the bow of the far-shooting +King. A very young female, fair and fair-haired, pale, indeed, and with +a piercing look, wearing a frock of tartan, an unusual dress in London at +that time, had called him out of the room." + +This is Mary Godwin, as described by Hogg. The thrill of the voices +shows that the love of Shelley and Mary was already upward of a fortnight +old; therefore it had been born within the month of May--born while +Harriet was still trying to get her poem by heart, we think. I must not +be asked how I know so much about that thrill; it is my secret. The +biographer and I have private ways of finding out things when it is +necessary to find them out and the customary methods fail. + +Shelley left London that day, and was gone ten days. The biographer +conjectures that he spent this interval with Harriet in Bath. It would +be just like him. To the end of his days he liked to be in love with two +women at once. He was more in love with Miss Hitchener when he married +Harriet than he was with Harriet, and told the lady so with simple and +unostentatious candor. He was more in love with Cornelia than he was +with Harriet in the end of 1813 and the beginning of 1814, yet he +supplied both of them with love poems of an equal temperature meantime; +he loved Mary and Harriet in June, and while getting ready to run off +with the one, it is conjectured that he put in his odd time trying to get +reconciled to the other; by-and-by, while still in love with Mary, he +will make love to her half-sister by marriage, adoption, and the +visitation of God, through the medium of clandestine letters, and she +will answer with letters that are for no eye but his own. + +When Shelley encountered Mary Godwin he was looking around for another +paradise. He had, tastes of his own, and there were features about the +Godwin establishment that strongly recommended it. Godwin was an +advanced thinker and an able writer. One of his romances is still read, +but his philosophical works, once so esteemed, are out of vogue now; +their authority was already declining when Shelley made his acquaintance +--that is, it was declining with the public, but not with Shelley. They +had been his moral and political Bible, and they were that yet. Shelley +the infidel would himself have claimed to be less a work of God than a +work of Godwin. Godwin's philosophies had formed his mind and interwoven +themselves into it and become a part of its texture; he regarded himself +as Godwin's spiritual son. Godwin was not without self-appreciation; +indeed, it may be conjectured that from his point of view the last +syllable of his name was surplusage. He lived serene in his lofty world +of philosophy, far above the mean interests that absorbed smaller men, +and only came down to the ground at intervals to pass the hat for alms to +pay his debts with, and insult the man that relieved him. Several of his +principles were out of the ordinary. For example, he was opposed to +marriage. He was not aware that his preachings from this text were but +theory and wind; he supposed he was in earnest in imploring people to +live together without marrying, until Shelley furnished him a working +model of his scheme and a practical example to analyze, by applying the +principle in his own family; the matter took a different and surprising +aspect then. The late Matthew Arnold said that the main defect in +Shelley's make-up was that he was destitute of the sense of humor. This +episode must have escaped Mr. Arnold's attention. + +But we have said enough about the head of the new paradise. Mrs. Godwin +is described as being in several ways a terror; and even when her soul +was in repose she wore green spectacles. But I suspect that her main +unattractiveness was born of the fact that she wrote the letters that are +out in the appendix-basket in the back yard--letters which are an outrage +and wholly untrustworthy, for they say some kind things about poor +Harriet and tell some disagreeable truths about her husband; and these +things make the fabulist grit his teeth a good deal. + +Next we have Fanny Godwin--a Godwin by courtesy only; she was Mrs. +Godwin's natural daughter by a former friend. She was a sweet and +winning girl, but she presently wearied of the Godwin paradise, and +poisoned herself. + +Last in the list is Jane (or Claire, as she preferred to call herself) +Clairmont, daughter of Mrs. Godwin by a former marriage. She was very +young and pretty and accommodating, and always ready to do what she could +to make things pleasant. After Shelley ran off with her part-sister +Mary, she became the guest of the pair, and contributed a natural child +to their nursery--Allegra. Lord Byron was the father. + +We have named the several members and advantages of the new paradise in +Skinner Street, with its crazy book-shop underneath. Shelley was all +right now, this was a better place than the other; more variety anyway, +and more different kinds of fragrance. One could turn out poetry here +without any trouble at all. + +The way the new love-match came about was this: + +Shelley told Mary all his aggravations and sorrows and griefs, and about +the wet-nurse and the bonnetshop and the surgeon and the carriage, and +the sister-in-law that blocked the London game, and about Cornelia and +her mamma, and how they had turned him out of the house after making so +much of him; and how he had deserted Harriet and then Harriet had +deserted him, and how the reconciliation was working along and Harriet +getting her poem by heart; and still he was not happy, and Mary pitied +him, for she had had trouble herself. But I am not satisfied with this. +It reads too much like statistics. It lacks smoothness and grace, and is +too earthy and business-like. It has the sordid look of a trades-union +procession out on strike. That is not the right form for it. The book +does it better; we will fall back on the book and have a cake-walk: + + "It was easy to divine that some restless grief possessed him; + Mary herself was not unlearned in the lore of pain. His + generous zeal in her father's behalf, his spiritual sonship to + Godwin, his reverence for her mother's memory, were guarantees + with Mary of his excellence.--[What she was after was + guarantees of his excellence. That he stood ready to desert + his wife and child was one of them, apparently.]-- The new + friends could not lack subjects of discourse, and underneath + their words about Mary's mother, and 'Political Justice,' and + 'Rights of Woman,' were two young hearts, each feeling towards + the other, each perhaps unaware, trembling in the direction of + the other. The desire to assuage the suffering of one whose + happiness has grown precious to us may become a hunger of the + spirit as keen as any other, and this hunger now possessed + Mary's heart; when her eyes rested unseen on Shelley, it was + with a look full of the ardor of a 'soothing pity.'" + +Yes, that is better and has more composure. That is just the way it +happened. He told her about the wet-nurse, she told him about political +justice; he told her about the deadly sister-in-law, she told him about +her mother; he told her about the bonnet-shop, she murmured back about +the rights of woman; then he assuaged her, then she assuaged him; then he +assuaged her some more, next she assuaged him some more; then they both +assuaged one another simultaneously; and so they went on by the hour +assuaging and assuaging and assuaging, until at last what was the result? +They were in love. It will happen so every time. + + "He had married a woman who, as he now persuaded himself, had + never truly loved him, who loved only his fortune and his rank, + and who proved her selfishness by deserting him in his misery." + +I think that that is not quite fair to Harriet. We have no certainty +that she knew Cornelia had turned him out of the house. He went back to +Cornelia, and Harriet may have supposed that he was as happy with her as +ever. Still, it was judicious to begin to lay on the whitewash, for +Shelley is going to need many a coat of it now, and the sooner the reader +becomes used to the intrusion of the brush the sooner he will get +reconciled to it and stop fretting about it. + +After Shelley's (conjectured) visit to Harriet at Bath--8th of June to +18th-- "it seems to have been arranged that Shelley should henceforth +join the Skinner Street household each day at dinner." + +Nothing could be handier than this; things will swim along now. + + "Although now Shelley was coming to believe that his wedded + union with Harriet was a thing of the past, he had not ceased + to regard her with affectionate consideration; he wrote to her + frequently, and kept her informed of his whereabouts." + +We must not get impatient over these curious inharmoniousnesses and +irreconcilabilities in Shelley's character. You can see by the +biographer's attitude towards them that there is nothing objectionable +about them. Shelley was doing his best to make two adoring young +creatures happy: he was regarding the one with affectionate consideration +by mail, and he was assuaging the other one at home. + + "Unhappy Harriet, residing at Bath, had perhaps never desired + that the breach between herself and her husband should be + irreparable and complete." + +I find no fault with that sentence except that the "perhaps" is not +strictly warranted. It should have been left out. In support--or shall +we say extenuation? --of this opinion I submit that there is not +sufficient evidence to warrant the uncertainty which it implies. The +only "evidence" offered that Harriet was hard and proud and standing out +against a reconciliation is a poem--the poem in which Shelley beseeches +her to "bid the remorseless feeling flee" and "pity" if she "cannot +love." We have just that as "evidence," and out of its meagre materials +the biographer builds a cobhouse of conjectures as big as the Coliseum; +conjectures which convince him, the prosecuting attorney, but ought to +fall far short of convincing any fair-minded jury. + +Shelley's love-poems may be very good evidence, but we know well that +they are "good for this day and train only." We are able to believe that +they spoke the truth for that one day, but we know by experience that +they could not be depended on to speak it the next. The very +supplication for a rewarming of Harriet's chilled love was followed so +suddenly by the poet's plunge into an adoring passion for Mary Godwin +that if it had been a check it would have lost its value before a lazy +person could have gotten to the bank with it. + +Hardness, stubbornness, pride, vindictiveness--these may sometimes reside +in a young wife and mother of nineteen, but they are not charged against +Harriet Shelley outside of that poem, and one has no right to insert them +into her character on such shadowy "evidence" as that. Peacock knew +Harriet well, and she has a flexible and persuadable look, as painted by +him: + + "Her manners were good, and her whole aspect and demeanor such + manifest emanations of pure and truthful nature that to be once + in her company was to know her thoroughly. She was fond of her + husband, and accommodated herself in every way to his tastes. + If they mixed in society, she adorned it; if they lived in + retirement, she was satisfied; if they travelled, she enjoyed + the change of scene." + +"Perhaps" she had never desired that the breach should be irreparable and +complete. The truth is, we do not even know that there was any breach at +all at this time. We know that the husband and wife went before the +altar and took a new oath on the 24th of March to love and cherish each +other until death--and this may be regarded as a sort of reconciliation +itself, and a wiping out of the old grudges. Then Harriet went away, and +the sister-in-law removed herself from her society. That was in April. +Shelley wrote his "appeal" in May, but the corresponding went right along +afterwards. We have a right to doubt that the subject of it was a +"reconciliation," or that Harriet had any suspicion that she needed to be +reconciled and that her husband was trying to persuade her to it--as the +biographer has sought to make us believe, with his Coliseum of +conjectures built out of a waste-basket of poetry. For we have +"evidence" now--not poetry and conjecture. When Shelley had been dining +daily in the Skinner Street paradise fifteen days and continuing the +love-match which was already a fortnight old twenty-five days earlier, +he forgot to write Harriet; forgot it the next day and the next. During +four days Harriet got no letter from him. Then her fright and anxiety +rose to expression-heat, and she wrote a letter to Shelley's publisher +which seems to reveal to us that Shelley's letters to her had been the +customary affectionate letters of husband to wife, and had carried no +appeals for reconciliation and had not needed to: + + "BATH (postmark July 7, 1814). + "MY DEAR SIR,-- You will greatly oblige me by giving the + enclosed to Mr. Shelley. I would not trouble you, but it is + now four days since I have heard from him, which to me is an + age. Will you write by return of post and tell me what has + become of him? as I always fancy something dreadful has + happened if I do not hear from him. If you tell me that he is + well I shall not come to London, but if I do not hear from you + or him I shall certainly come, as I cannot endure this dreadful + state of suspense. You are his friend and you can feel for me. + "I remain yours truly, + "H. S." + + +Even without Peacock's testimony that "her whole aspect and demeanor were +manifest emanations of a pure and truthful nature," we should hold this +to be a truthful letter, a sincere letter, a loving letter; it bears +those marks; I think it is also the letter of a person accustomed to +receiving letters from her husband frequently, and that they have been of +a welcome and satisfactory sort, too, this long time back--ever since the +solemn remarriage and reconciliation at the altar most likely. + +The biographer follows Harriet's letter with a conjecture. +He conjectures that she "would now gladly have retraced her steps." +Which means that it is proven that she had steps to retrace--proven by +the poem. Well, if the poem is better evidence than the letter, we must +let it stand at that. + +Then the biographer attacks Harriet Shelley's honor--by authority of +random and unverified gossip scavengered from a group of people whose +very names make a person shudder: Mary Godwin, mistress to Shelley; her +part-sister, discarded mistress of Lord Byron; Godwin, the philosophical +tramp, who gathers his share of it from a shadow--that is to say, from a +person whom he shirks out of naming. Yet the biographer dignifies this +sorry rubbish with the name of "evidence." + +Nothing remotely resembling a distinct charge from a named person +professing to know is offered among this precious "evidence." + +1. "Shelley believed" so and so. + +2. Byron's discarded mistress says that Shelley told Mary Godwin so and +so, and Mary told her. + +3. "Shelley said" so and so--and later "admitted over and over again +that he had been in error." + +4. The unspeakable Godwin "wrote to Mr. Baxter" that he knew so and so +"from unquestionable authority"--name not furnished. + +How-any man in his right mind could bring himself to defile the grave of +a shamefully abused and defenceless girl with these baseless +fabrications, this manufactured filth, is inconceivable. How any man, in +his right mind or out of it, could sit down and coldly try to persuade +anybody to believe it, or listen patiently to it, or, indeed, do anything +but scoff at it and deride it, is astonishing. + +The charge insinuated by these odious slanders is one of the most +difficult of all offences to prove; it is also one which no man has a +right to mention even in a whisper about any woman, living or dead, +unless he knows it to be true, and not even then unless he can also prove +it to be true. There is no justification for the abomination of putting +this stuff in the book. + +Against Harriet Shelley's good name there is not one scrap of tarnishing +evidence, and not even a scrap of evil gossip, that comes from a source +that entitles it to a hearing. + +On the credit side of the account we have strong opinions from the people +who knew her best. Peacock says: + + "I feel it due to the memory of Harriet to state my most + decided conviction that her conduct as a wife was as pure, as + true, as absolutely faultless, as that of any who for such + conduct are held most in honor." + +Thornton Hunt, who had picked and published slight flaws in Harriet's +character, says, as regards this alleged large one: + + "There is not a trace of evidence or a whisper of scandal + against her before her voluntary departure from Shelley." + +Trelawney says: + + "I was assured by the evidence of the few friends who knew both + Shelley and his wife--Hookham, Hogg, Peacock, and one of the + Godwins--that Harriet was perfectly innocent of all offence." + +What excuse was there for raking up a parcel of foul rumors from +malicious and discredited sources and flinging them at this dead girl's +head? Her very defencelessness should have been her protection. The +fact that all letters to her or about her, with almost every scrap of her +own writing, had been diligently mislaid, leaving her case destitute of a +voice, while every pen-stroke which could help her husband's side had +been as diligently preserved, should have excused her from being brought +to trial. Her witnesses have all disappeared, yet we see her summoned in +her grave-clothes to plead for the life of her character, without the +help of an advocate, before a disqualified judge and a packed jury. + +Harriet Shelley wrote her distressed letter on the 7th of July. On the +28th her husband ran away with Mary Godwin and her part-sister Claire to +the Continent. He deserted his wife when her confinement was +approaching. She bore him a child at the end of November, his mistress +bore him another one something over two months later. The truants were +back in London before either of these events occurred. + +On one occasion, presently, Shelley was so pressed for money to support +his mistress with that he went to his wife and got some money of his that +was in her hands--twenty pounds. Yet the mistress was not moved to +gratitude; for later, when the wife was troubled to meet her engagements, +the mistress makes this entry in her diary: + + "Harriet sends her creditors here; nasty woman. Now we shall + have to change our lodgings." + +The deserted wife bore the bitterness and obloquy of her situation two +years and a quarter; then she gave up, and drowned herself. A month +afterwards the body was found in the water. Three weeks later Shelley +married his mistress. + +I must here be allowed to italicize a remark of the biographer's +concerning Harriet Shelley: + + "That no act of Shelley's during the two years which + immediately preceded her death tended to cause the rash act + which brought her life to its close seems certain." + +Yet her husband had deserted her and her children, and was living with a +concubine all that time! Why should a person attempt to write biography +when the simplest facts have no meaning to him? This book is littered +with as crass stupidities as that one--deductions by the page which bear +no discoverable kinship to their premises. + +The biographer throws off that extraordinary remark without any +perceptible disturbance to his serenity; for he follows it with a +sentimental justification of Shelley's conduct which has not a pang of +conscience in it, but is silky and smooth and undulating and pious-- +a cake-walk with all the colored brethren at their best. There may be +people who can read that page and keep their temper, but it is doubtful. +Shelley's life has the one indelible blot upon it, but is otherwise +worshipfully noble and beautiful. It even stands out indestructibly +gracious and lovely from the ruck of these disastrous pages, in spite of +the fact that they expose and establish his responsibility for his +forsaken wife's pitiful fate--a responsibility which he himself tacitly +admits in a letter to Eliza Westbrook, wherein he refers to his taking up +with Mary Godwin as an act which Eliza "might excusably regard as the +cause of her sister's ruin." + + + + + +End of Project Gutenberg Etext of Defence of Harriet Shelley, by Twain + diff --git a/old/mtdhs10.zip b/old/mtdhs10.zip Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..334b0b8 --- /dev/null +++ b/old/mtdhs10.zip diff --git a/old/mtdhs11.txt b/old/mtdhs11.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..ad0f060 --- /dev/null +++ b/old/mtdhs11.txt @@ -0,0 +1,2012 @@ +The Project Gutenberg Etext of Defense of Harriet Shelley, by Twain +#32 in our series by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) + +Copyright laws are changing all over the world. 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FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS*Ver.10/04/01*END* + + + + + +This etext was produced by David Widger <widger@cecomet.net> + + + + + +IN DEFENSE OF HARRIET SHELLEY + +by Mark Twain + + + +I + +I have committed sins, of course; but I have not committed enough of them +to entitle me to the punishment of reduction to the bread and water of +ordinary literature during six years when I might have been living on the +fat diet spread for the righteous in Professor Dowden's Life of Shelley, +if I had been justly dealt with. + +During these six years I have been living a life of peaceful ignorance. +I was not aware that Shelley's first wife was unfaithful to him, and that +that was why he deserted her and wiped the stain from his sensitive honor +by entering into soiled relations with Godwin's young daughter. This was +all new to me when I heard it lately, and was told that the proofs of it +were in this book, and that this book's verdict is accepted in the girls' +colleges of America and its view taught in their literary classes. + +In each of these six years multitudes of young people in our country have +arrived at the Shelley-reading age. Are these six multitudes +unacquainted with this life of Shelley? Perhaps they are; indeed, one +may feel pretty sure that the great bulk of them are. To these, then, I +address myself, in the hope that some account of this romantic historical +fable and the fabulist's manner of constructing and adorning it may +interest them. + +First, as to its literary style. Our negroes in America have several +ways of entertaining themselves which are not found among the whites +anywhere. Among these inventions of theirs is one which is particularly +popular with them. It is a competition in elegant deportment. They hire +a hall and bank the spectators' seats in rising tiers along the two +sides, leaving all the middle stretch of the floor free. A cake is +provided as a prize for the winner in the competition, and a bench of +experts in deportment is appointed to award it. Sometimes there are as +many as fifty contestants, male and female, and five hundred spectators. +One at a time the contestants enter, clothed regardless of expense in +what each considers the perfection of style and taste, and walk down the +vacant central space and back again with that multitude of critical eyes +on them. All that the competitor knows of fine airs and graces he throws +into his carriage, all that he knows of seductive expression he throws +into his countenance. He may use all the helps he can devise: watch- +chain to twirl with his fingers, cane to do graceful things with, snowy +handkerchief to flourish and get artful effects out of, shiny new +stovepipe hat to assist in his courtly bows; and the colored lady may +have a fan to work up her effects with, and smile over and blush behind, +and she may add other helps, according to her judgment. When the review +by individual detail is over, a grand review of all the contestants in +procession follows, with all the airs and graces and all the bowings and +smirkings on exhibition at once, and this enables the bench of experts to +make the necessary comparisons and arrive at a verdict. The successful +competitor gets the prize which I have before mentioned, and an abundance +of applause and envy along with it. The negroes have a name for this +grave deportment-tournament; a name taken from the prize contended for. +They call it a Cakewalk. + +This Shelley biography is a literary cake-walk. The ordinary forms of +speech are absent from it. All the pages, all the paragraphs, walk by +sedately, elegantly, not to say mincingly, in their Sunday-best, shiny +and sleek, perfumed, and with boutonnieres in their button-holes; it is +rare to find even a chance sentence that has forgotten to dress. If the +book wishes to tell us that Mary Godwin, child of sixteen, had known +afflictions, the fact saunters forth in this nobby outfit: "Mary was +herself not unlearned in the lore of pain"--meaning by that that she had +not always traveled on asphalt; or, as some authorities would frame it, +that she had "been there herself," a form which, while preferable to the +book's form, is still not to be recommended. If the book wishes to tell +us that Harriet Shelley hired a wet-nurse, that commonplace fact gets +turned into a dancing-master, who does his professional bow before us in +pumps and knee-breeches, with his fiddle under one arm and his crush-hat +under the other, thus: "The beauty of Harriet's motherly relation to her +babe was marred in Shelley's eyes by the introduction into his house of a +hireling nurse to whom was delegated the mother's tenderest office." + +This is perhaps the strangest book that has seen the light since +Frankenstein. Indeed, it is a Frankenstein itself; a Frankenstein with +the original infirmity supplemented by a new one; a Frankenstein with the +reasoning faculty wanting. Yet it believes it can reason, and is always +trying. It is not content to leave a mountain of fact standing in the +clear sunshine, where the simplest reader can perceive its form, its +details, and its relation to the rest of the landscape, but thinks it +must help him examine it and understand it; so its drifting mind settles +upon it with that intent, but always with one and the same result: there +is a change of temperature and the mountain is hid in a fog. Every time +it sets up a premise and starts to reason from it, there is a surprise in +store for the reader. It is strangely nearsighted, cross-eyed, and +purblind. Sometimes when a mastodon walks across the field of its vision +it takes it for a rat; at other times it does not see it at all. + +The materials of this biographical fable are facts, rumors, and poetry. +They are connected together and harmonized by the help of suggestion, +conjecture, innuendo, perversion, and semi-suppression. + +The fable has a distinct object in view, but this object is not +acknowledged in set words. Percy Bysshe Shelley has done something which +in the case of other men is called a grave crime; it must be shown that +in his case it is not that, because he does not think as other men do +about these things. + +Ought not that to be enough, if the fabulist is serious? Having proved +that a crime is not a crime, was it worth while to go on and fasten the +responsibility of a crime which was not a crime upon somebody else? What +is the use of hunting down and holding to bitter account people who are +responsible for other people's innocent acts? + +Still, the fabulist thinks it a good idea to do that. In his view +Shelley's first wife, Harriet, free of all offense as far as we have +historical facts for guidance, must be held unforgivably responsible for +her husband's innocent act in deserting her and taking up with another +woman. + +Any one will suspect that this task has its difficulties. Any one will +divine that nice work is necessary here, cautious work, wily work, and +that there is entertainment to be had in watching the magician do it. +There is indeed entertainment in watching him. He arranges his facts, +his rumors, and his poems on his table in full view of the house, and +shows you that everything is there--no deception, everything fair and +above board. And this is apparently true, yet there is a defect, for +some of his best stock is hid in an appendix-basket behind the door, and +you do not come upon it until the exhibition is over and the enchantment +of your mind accomplished--as the magician thinks. + +There is an insistent atmosphere of candor and fairness about this book +which is engaging at first, then a little burdensome, then a trifle +fatiguing, then progressively suspicious, annoying, irritating, and +oppressive. It takes one some little time to find out that phrases which +seem intended to guide the reader aright are there to mislead him; that +phrases which seem intended to throw light are there to throw darkness; +that phrases which seem intended to interpret a fact are there to +misinterpret it; that phrases which seem intended to forestall prejudice +are there to create it; that phrases which seem antidotes are poisons in +disguise. The naked facts arrayed in the book establish Shelley's guilt +in that one episode which disfigures his otherwise superlatively lofty +and beautiful life; but the historian's careful and methodical +misinterpretation of them transfers the responsibility to the wife's +shoulders as he persuades himself. The few meagre facts of Harriet +Shelley's life, as furnished by the book, acquit her of offense; but by +calling in the forbidden helps of rumor, gossip, conjecture, insinuation, +and innuendo he destroys her character and rehabilitates Shelley's--as he +believes. And in truth his unheroic work has not been barren of the +results he aimed at; as witness the assertion made to me that girls in +the colleges of America are taught that Harriet Shelley put a stain upon +her husband's honor, and that that was what stung him into repurifying +himself by deserting her and his child and entering into scandalous +relations with a school-girl acquaintance of his. + +If that assertion is true, they probably use a reduction of this work in +those colleges, maybe only a sketch outlined from it. Such a thing as +that could be harmful and misleading. They ought to cast it out and put +the whole book in its place. It would not deceive. It would not deceive +the janitor. + +All of this book is interesting on account of the sorcerer's methods and +the attractiveness of some of his characters and the repulsiveness of the +rest, but no part of it is so much so as are the chapters wherein he +tries to think he thinks he sets forth the causes which led to Shelley's +desertion of his wife in 1814. + +Harriet Westbrook was a school-girl sixteen years old. Shelley was +teeming with advanced thought. He believed that Christianity was a +degrading and selfish superstition, and he had a deep and sincere desire +to rescue one of his sisters from it. Harriet was impressed by his +various philosophies and looked upon him as an intellectual wonder-- +which indeed he was. He had an idea that she could give him valuable +help in his scheme regarding his sister; therefore he asked her to +correspond with him. She was quite willing. Shelley was not thinking of +love, for he was just getting over a passion for his cousin, Harriet +Grove, and just getting well steeped in one for Miss Hitchener, a school- +teacher. What might happen to Harriet Westbrook before the letter- +writing was ended did not enter his mind. Yet an older person could have +made a good guess at it, for in person Shelley was as beautiful as an +angel, he was frank, sweet, winning, unassuming, and so rich in +unselfishness, generosities, and magnanimities that he made his whole +generation seem poor in these great qualities by comparison. Besides, +he was in distress. His college had expelled him for writing an +atheistical pamphlet and afflicting the reverend heads of the university +with it, his rich father and grandfather had closed their purses against +him, his friends were cold. Necessarily, Harriet fell in love with him; +and so deeply, indeed, that there was no way for Shelley to save her from +suicide but to marry her. He believed himself to blame for this state of +things, so the marriage took place. He was pretty fairly in love with +Harriet, although he loved Miss Hitchener better. He wrote and explained +the case to Miss Hitchener after the wedding, and he could not have been +franker or more naive and less stirred up about the circumstance if the +matter in issue had been a commercial transaction involving thirty-five +dollars. + +Shelley was nineteen. He was not a youth, but a man. He had never had +any youth. He was an erratic and fantastic child during eighteen years, +then he stepped into manhood, as one steps over a door-sill. He was +curiously mature at nineteen in his ability to do independent thinking +on the deep questions of life and to arrive at sharply definite decisions +regarding them, and stick to them--stick to them and stand by them at +cost of bread, friendships, esteem, respect, and approbation. + +For the sake of his opinions he was willing to sacrifice all these +valuable things, and did sacrifice them; and went on doing it, too, when +he could at any moment have made himself rich and supplied himself with +friends and esteem by compromising with his father, at the moderate +expense of throwing overboard one or two indifferent details of his cargo +of principles. + +He and Harriet eloped to Scotland and got married. They took lodgings in +Edinburgh of a sort answerable to their purse, which was about empty, and +there their life was a happy, one and grew daily more so. They had only +themselves for company, but they needed no additions to it. They were as +cozy and contented as birds in a nest. Harriet sang evenings or read +aloud; also she studied and tried to improve her mind, her husband +instructing her in Latin. She was very beautiful, she was modest, quiet, +genuine, and, according to her husband's testimony, she had no fine lady +airs or aspirations about her. In Matthew Arnold's judgment, she was +"a pleasing figure." + +The pair remained five weeks in Edinburgh, and then took lodgings in +York, where Shelley's college mate, Hogg, lived. Shelley presently ran +down to London, and Hogg took this opportunity to make love to the young +wife. She repulsed him, and reported the fact to her husband when he got +back. It seems a pity that Shelley did not copy this creditable conduct +of hers some time or other when under temptation, so that we might have +seen the author of his biography hang the miracle in the skies and squirt +rainbows at it. + +At the end of the first year of marriage--the most trying year for any +young couple, for then the mutual failings are coming one by one to +light, and the necessary adjustments are being made in pain and +tribulation--Shelley was able to recognize that his marriage venture had +been a safe one. As we have seen, his love for his wife had begun in a +rather shallow way and with not much force, but now it was become deep +and strong, which entitles his wife to a broad credit mark, one may +admit. He addresses a long and loving poem to her, in which both passion +and worship appear: + +Exhibit A + + "O thou + Whose dear love gleamed upon the gloomy path + Which this lone spirit travelled, + . . . . . . . . . . . . . + . . . wilt thou not turn + Those spirit-beaming eyes and look on me. + Until I be assured that Earth is Heaven + And Heaven is Earth? + . . . . . . . . + Harriet! let death all mortal ties dissolve, + But ours shall not be mortal." + + +Shelley also wrote a sonnet to her in August of this same year in +celebration of her birthday: + +Exhibit B + + "Ever as now with hove and Virtue's glow + May thy unwithering soul not cease to burn, + Still may thine heart with those pure thoughts o'erflow + Which force from mine such quick and warm return." + + +Was the girl of seventeen glad and proud and happy? We may conjecture +that she was. + +That was the year 1812. Another year passed still happily, still +successfully--a child was born in June, 1813, and in September, three +months later, Shelley addresses a poem to this child, Ianthe, in which he +points out just when the little creature is most particularly dear to +him: + +Exhibit C + + "Dearest when most thy tender traits express + The image of thy mother's loveliness." + + +Up to this point the fabulist counsel for Shelley and prosecutor of his +young wife has had easy sailing, but now his trouble begins, for Shelley +is getting ready to make some unpleasant history for himself, and it will +be necessary to put the blame of it on the wife. + +Shelley had made the acquaintance of a charming gray-haired, young- +hearted Mrs. Boinville, whose face "retained a certain youthful beauty"; +she lived at Bracknell, and had a young daughter named Cornelia Turner, +who was equipped with many fascinations. Apparently these people were +sufficiently sentimental. Hogg says of Mrs. Boinville: + + "The greater part of her associates were odious. I generally + found there two or three sentimental young butchers, an + eminently philosophical tinker, and several very + unsophisticated medical practitioners or medical students, all + of low origin and vulgar and offensive manners. They sighed, + turned up their eyes, retailed philosophy, such as it was," + etc. + +Shelley moved to Bracknell, July 27th (this is still 1813) purposely to +be near this unwholesome prairie-dogs' nest. The fabulist says: "It was +the entrance into a world more amiable and exquisite than he had yet +known." + +"In this acquaintance the attraction was mutual"--and presently it grew +to be very mutual indeed, between Shelley and Cornelia Turner, when they +got to studying the Italian poets together. Shelley, "responding like a +tremulous instrument to every breath of passion or of sentiment," had his +chance here. It took only four days for Cornelia's attractions to begin +to dim Harriet's. Shelley arrived on the 27th of July; on the 31st he +wrote a sonnet to Harriet in which "one detects already the little rift +in the lover's lute which had seemed to be healed or never to have gaped +at all when the later and happier sonnet to Ianthe was written"--in +September, we remember: + +Exhibit D + + "EVENING. TO HARRIET + + "O thou bright Sun! Beneath the dark blue line + Of western distance that sublime descendest, + And, gleaming lovelier as thy beams decline, + Thy million hues to every vapor lendest, + And over cobweb, lawn, and grove, and stream + Sheddest the liquid magic of thy light, + Till calm Earth, with the parting splendor bright, + Shows like the vision of a beauteous dream; + What gazer now with astronomic eye + Could coldly count the spots within thy sphere? + Such were thy lover, Harriet, could he fly + The thoughts of all that makes his passion dear, + And turning senseless from thy warm caress + Pick flaws in our close-woven happiness." + + +I cannot find the "rift"; still it may be there. What the poem seems to +say is, that a person would be coldly ungrateful who could consent to +count and consider little spots and flaws in such a warm, great, +satisfying sun as Harriet is. It is a "little rift which had seemed to +be healed, or never to have gaped at all." That is, "one detects" a +little rift which perhaps had never existed. How does one do that? +How does one see the invisible? It is the fabulist's secret; he knows +how to detect what does not exist, he knows how to see what is not +seeable; it is his gift, and he works it many a time to poor dead Harriet +Shelley's deep damage. + +"As yet, however, if there was a speck upon Shelley's happiness it was no +more than a speck"--meaning the one which one detects where "it may never +have gaped at all"--"nor had Harriet cause for discontent." + +Shelley's Latin instructions to his wife had ceased. "From a teacher he +had now become a pupil." Mrs. Boinville and her young married daughter +Cornelia were teaching him Italian poetry; a fact which warns one to +receive with some caution that other statement that Harriet had no +"cause for discontent." + +Shelley had stopped instructing Harriet in Latin, as before mentioned. +The biographer thinks that the busy life in London some time back, and +the intrusion of the baby, account for this. These were hindrances, but +were there no others? He is always overlooking a detail here and there +that might be valuable in helping us understand a situation. For +instance, when a man has been hard at work at the Italian poets with a +pretty woman, hour after hour, and responding like a tremulous instrument +to every breath of passion or of sentiment in the meantime, that man is +dog-tired when he gets home, and he can't teach his wife Latin; it would +be unreasonable to expect it. + +Up to this time we have submitted to having Mrs. Boinville pushed upon +us as ostensibly concerned in these Italian lessons, but the biographer +drops her now, of his own accord. Cornelia "perhaps" is sole teacher. +Hogg says she was a prey to a kind of sweet melancholy, arising from +causes purely imaginary; she required consolation, and found it in +Petrarch. He also says, "Bysshe entered at once fully into her views and +caught the soft infection, breathing the tenderest and sweetest +melancholy, as every true poet ought." + +Then the author of the book interlards a most stately and fine compliment +to Cornelia, furnished by a man of approved judgment who knew her well +"in later years." It is a very good compliment indeed, and she no doubt +deserved it in her "later years," when she had for generations ceased to +be sentimental and lackadaisical, and was no longer engaged in enchanting +young husbands and sowing sorrow for young wives. But why is that +compliment to that old gentlewoman intruded there? Is it to make the +reader believe she was well-chosen and safe society for a young, +sentimental husband? The biographer's device was not well planned. That +old person was not present--it was her other self that was there, her +young, sentimental, melancholy, warm-blooded self, in those early sweet +times before antiquity had cooled her off and mossed her back. + +"In choosing for friends such women as Mrs. Newton, Mrs. Boinville, and +Cornelia Turner, Shelley gave good proof of his insight and +discrimination." That is the fabulist's opinion--Harriet Shelley's is +not reported. + +Early in August, Shelley was in London trying to raise money. In +September he wrote the poem to the baby, already quoted from. In +the first week of October Shelley and family went to Warwick, then +to Edinburgh, arriving there about the middle of the month. + +"Harriet was happy." Why? The author furnishes a reason, but hides from +us whether it is history or conjecture; it is because "the babe had borne +the journey well." It has all the aspect of one of his artful devices-- +flung in in his favorite casual way--the way he has when he wants to draw +one's attention away from an obvious thing and amuse it with some trifle +that is less obvious but more useful--in a history like this. The +obvious thing is, that Harriet was happy because there was much territory +between her husband and Cornelia Turner now; and because the perilous +Italian lessons were taking a rest; and because, if there chanced to be +any respondings like a tremulous instrument to every breath of passion or +of sentiment in stock in these days, she might hope to get a share of +them herself; and because, with her husband liberated, now, from the +fetid fascinations of that sentimental retreat so pitilessly described by +Hogg, who also dubbed it "Shelley's paradise" later, she might hope to +persuade him to stay away from it permanently; and because she might also +hope that his brain would cool, now, and his heart become healthy, and +both brain and heart consider the situation and resolve that it would be +a right and manly thing to stand by this girl-wife and her child and see +that they were honorably dealt with, and cherished and protected and +loved by the man that had promised these things, and so be made happy and +kept so. And because, also--may we conjecture this?--we may hope for +the privilege of taking up our cozy Latin lessons again, that used to be +so pleasant, and brought us so near together--so near, indeed, that often +our heads touched, just as heads do over Italian lessons; and our hands +met in casual and unintentional, but still most delicious and thrilling +little contacts and momentary clasps, just as they inevitably do over +Italian lessons. Suppose one should say to any young wife: "I find that +your husband is poring over the Italian poets and being instructed in the +beautiful Italian language by the lovely Cornelia Robinson"--would that +cozy picture fail to rise before her mind? would its possibilities fail +to suggest themselves to her? would there be a pang in her heart and a +blush on her face? or, on the contrary, would the remark give her +pleasure, make her joyous and gay? Why, one needs only to make the +experiment--the result will not be uncertain. + +However, we learn--by authority of deeply reasoned and searching +conjecture--that the baby bore the journey well, and that that was why +the young wife was happy. That accounts for two per cent. of the +happiness, but it was not right to imply that it accounted for the other +ninety-eight also. + +Peacock, a scholar, poet, and friend of the Shelleys, was of their party +when they went away. He used to laugh at the Boinville menagerie, and +"was not a favorite." One of the Boinville group, writing to Hogg, said, +"The Shelleys have made an addition to their party in the person of a +cold scholar, who, I think, has neither taste nor feeling. This, Shelley +will perceive sooner or later, for his warm nature craves sympathy." +True, and Shelley will fight his way back there to get it--there will be +no way to head him off. + +Towards the end of November it was necessary for Shelley to pay a +business visit to London, and he conceived the project of leaving Harriet +and the baby in Edinburgh with Harriet's sister, Eliza Westbrook, +a sensible, practical maiden lady about thirty years old, who had spent +a great part of her time with the family since the marriage. She was +an estimable woman, and Shelley had had reason to like her, and did like +her; but along about this time his feeling towards her changed. Part of +Shelley's plan, as he wrote Hogg, was to spend his London evenings with +the Newtons--members of the Boinville Hysterical Society. But, alas, +when he arrived early in December, that pleasant game was partially +blocked, for Eliza and the family arrived with him. We are left +destitute of conjectures at this point by the biographer, and it is my +duty to supply one. I chance the conjecture that it was Eliza who +interfered with that game. I think she tried to do what she could +towards modifying the Boinville connection, in the interest of her young +sister's peace and honor. + +If it was she who blocked that game, she was not strong enough to block +the next one. Before the month and year were out--no date given, let us +call it Christmas--Shelley and family were nested in a furnished house in +Windsor, "at no great distance from the Boinvilles"--these decoys still +residing at Bracknell. + +What we need, now, is a misleading conjecture. We get it with +characteristic promptness and depravity: + + "But Prince Athanase found not the aged Zonoras, the friend of + his boyhood, in any wanderings to Windsor. Dr. Lind had died + a year since, and with his death Windsor must have lost, for + Shelley, its chief attraction." + +Still, not to mention Shelley's wife, there was Bracknell, at any rate. +While Bracknell remains, all solace is not lost. Shelley is represented +by this biographer as doing a great many careless things, but to my mind +this hiring a furnished house for three months in order to be with a man +who has been dead a year, is the carelessest of them all. One feels for +him--that is but natural, and does us honor besides--yet one is vexed, +for all that. He could have written and asked about the aged Zonoras +before taking the house. He may not have had the address, but that is +nothing--any postman would know the aged Zonoras; a dead postman would +remember a name like that. + +And yet, why throw a rag like this to us ravening wolves? Is it +seriously supposable that we will stop to chew it and let our prey +escape? No, we are getting to expect this kind of device, and to give it +merely a sniff for certainty's sake and then walk around it and leave it +lying. Shelley was not after the aged Zonoras; he was pointed for +Cornelia and the Italian lessons, for his warm nature was craving +sympathy. + + +II + +The year 1813 is just ended now, and we step into 1814. + +To recapitulate, how much of Cornelia's society has Shelley had, thus +far? Portions of August and September, and four days of July. That is +to say, he has had opportunity to enjoy it, more or less, during that +brief period. Did he want some more of it? We must fall back upon +history, and then go to conjecturing. + + "In the early part of the year 1814, Shelley was a frequent + visitor at Bracknell." + +"Frequent" is a cautious word, in this author's mouth; the very +cautiousness of it, the vagueness of it, provokes suspicion; it makes one +suspect that this frequency was more frequent than the mere common +everyday kinds of frequency which one is in the habit of averaging up +with the unassuming term "frequent." I think so because they fixed up a +bedroom for him in the Boinville house. One doesn't need a bedroom if +one is only going to run over now and then in a disconnected way to +respond like a tremulous instrument to every breath of passion or of +sentiment and rub up one's Italian poetry a little. + +The young wife was not invited, perhaps. If she was, she most certainly +did not come, or she would have straightened the room up; the most +ignorant of us knows that a wife would not endure a room in the condition +in which Hogg found this one when he occupied it one night. Shelley was +away--why, nobody can divine. Clothes were scattered about, there were +books on every side: "Wherever a book could be laid was an open book +turned down on its face to keep its place." It seems plain that the wife +was not invited. No, not that; I think she was invited, but said to +herself that she could not bear to go there and see another young woman +touching heads with her husband over an Italian book and making thrilling +hand-contacts with him accidentally. + +As remarked, he was a frequent visitor there, "where he found an easeful +resting-place in the house of Mrs. Boinville--the white-haired Maimuna-- +and of her daughter, Mrs. Turner." The aged Zonoras was deceased, but +the white-haired Maimuna was still on deck, as we see. "Three charming +ladies entertained the mocker (Hogg) with cups of tea, late hours, +Wieland's Agathon, sighs and smiles, and the celestial manna of refined +sentiment." + +"Such," says Hogg, "were the delights of Shelley's paradise in +Bracknell." + +The white-haired Maimuna presently writes to Hogg: + + "I will not have you despise home-spun pleasures. Shelley is + making a trial of them with us--" + +A trial of them. It may be called that. It was March 11, and he had +been in the house a month. She continues: + + Shelley "likes then so well that he is resolved to leave off + rambling--" + +But he has already left it off. He has been there a month. + + "And begin a course of them himself." + +But he has already begun it. He has been at it a month. He likes it so +well that he has forgotten all about his wife, as a letter of his +reveals. + + "Seriously, I think his mind and body want rest." + +Yet he has been resting both for a month, with Italian, and tea, and +manna of sentiment, and late hours, and every restful thing a young +husband could need for the refreshment of weary limbs and a sore +conscience, and a nagging sense of shabbiness and treachery. + + "His journeys after what he has never found have racked his + purse and his tranquillity. He is resolved to take a little + care of the former, in pity to the latter, which I applaud, and + shall second with all, my might." + +But she does not say whether the young wife, a stranger and lonely +yonder, wants another woman and her daughter Cornelia to be lavishing so +much inflamed interest on her husband or not. That young wife is always +silent--we are never allowed to hear from her. She must have opinions +about such things, she cannot be indifferent, she must be approving or +disapproving, surely she would speak if she were allowed--even to-day and +from her grave she would, if she could, I think--but we get only the +other side, they keep her silent always. + + "He has deeply interested us. In the course of your intimacy + he must have made you feel what we now feel for him. He is + seeking a house close to us--" + +Ah! he is not close enough yet, it seems-- + + "and if he succeeds we shall have an additional motive to + induce you to come among us in the summer." + +The reader would puzzle a long time and not guess the biographer's +comment upon the above letter. It is this: + + "These sound like words of s considerate and judicious friend." + +That is what he thinks. That is, it is what he thinks he thinks. No, +that is not quite it: it is what he thinks he can stupefy a particularly +and unspeakably dull reader into thinking it is what he thinks. He makes +that comment with the knowledge that Shelley is in love with this woman's +daughter, and that it is because of the fascinations of these two that +Shelley has deserted his wife--for this month, considering all the +circumstances, and his new passion, and his employment of the time, +amounted to desertion; that is its rightful name. We cannot know how the +wife regarded it and felt about it; but if she could have read the letter +which Shelley was writing to Hogg four or five days later, we could guess +her thought and how she felt. Hear him: + . . . . . . . + "I have been staying with Mrs. Boinville for the last month; + I have escaped, in the society of all that philosophy and + friendship combine, from the dismaying solitude of myself." + +It is fair to conjecture that he was feeling ashamed. + + "They have revived in my heart the expiring flame of life. + I have felt myself translated to a paradise which has nothing + of mortality but its transitoriness; my heart sickens at the + view of that necessity which will quickly divide me from the + delightful tranquillity of this happy home--for it has become + my home. + . . . . . . . + "Eliza is still with us--not here!--but will be with me when + the infinite malice of destiny forces me to depart." + +Eliza is she who blocked that game--the game in London--the one where we +were purposing to dine every night with one of the "three charming +ladies" who fed tea and manna and late hours to Hogg at Bracknell. + +Shelley could send Eliza away, of course; could have cleared her out long +ago if so minded, just as he had previously done with a predecessor of +hers whom he had first worshipped and then turned against; but perhaps +she was useful there as a thin excuse for staying away himself. + + "I am now but little inclined to contest this point. + I certainly hate her with all my heart and soul . . . . + + "It is a sight which awakens an inexpressible sensation of + disgust and horror, to see her caress my poor little Ianthe, + in whom I may hereafter find the consolation of sympathy. + I sometimes feel faint with the fatigue of checking the + overflowings of my unbounded abhorrence for this miserable + wretch. But she is no more than a blind and loathsome worm, + that cannot see to sting. + + "I have begun to learn Italian again . . . . Cornelia + assists me in this language. Did I not once tell you that I + thought her cold and reserved? She is the reverse of this, as + she is the reverse of everything bad. She inherits all the + divinity of her mother . . . . I have sometimes forgotten + that I am not an inmate of this delightful home--that a time + will come which will cast me again into the boundless ocean of + abhorred society. + + "I have written nothing but one stanza, which has no meaning, + and that I have only written in thought: + + "Thy dewy looks sink in my breast; + Thy gentle words stir poison there; + Thou hast disturbed the only rest + That was the portion of despair. + Subdued to duty's hard control, + I could have borne my wayward lot: + The chains that bind this rained soul + Had cankered then, but crushed it not. + + "This is the vision of a delirious and distempered dream, which + passes away at the cold clear light of morning. Its surpassing + excellence and exquisite perfections have no more reality than + the color of an autumnal sunset." + +Then it did not refer to his wife. That is plain; otherwise he would +have said so. It is well that he explained that it has no meaning, for +if he had not done that, the previous soft references to Cornelia and the +way he has come to feel about her now would make us think she was the +person who had inspired it while teaching him how to read the warm and +ruddy Italian poets during a month. + +The biography observes that portions of this letter "read like the tired +moaning of a wounded creature." Guesses at the nature of the wound are +permissible; we will hazard one. + +Read by the light of Shelley's previous history, his letter seems to be +the cry of a tortured conscience. Until this time it was a conscience +that had never felt a pang or known a smirch. It was the conscience of +one who, until this time, had never done a dishonorable thing, or an +ungenerous, or cruel, or treacherous thing, but was now doing all of +these, and was keenly aware of it. Up to this time Shelley had been +master of his nature, and it was a nature which was as beautiful and as +nearly perfect as any merely human nature may be. But he was drunk now, +with a debasing passion, and was not himself. There is nothing in his +previous history that is in character with the Shelley of this letter. +He had done boyish things, foolish things, even crazy things, but never +a thing to be ashamed of. He had done things which one might laugh at, +but the privilege of laughing was limited always to the thing itself; +you could not laugh at the motive back of it--that was high, that was +noble. His most fantastic and quixotic acts had a purpose back of them +which made them fine, often great, and made the rising laugh seem +profanation and quenched it; quenched it, and changed the impulse to +homage. + +Up to this time he had been loyalty itself, where his obligations lay-- +treachery was new to him; he had never done an ignoble thing--baseness +was new to him; he had never done an unkind thing that also was new to +him. + +This was the author of that letter, this was the man who had deserted his +young wife and was lamenting, because he must leave another woman's house +which had become a "home" to him, and go away. Is he lamenting mainly +because he must go back to his wife and child? No, the lament is mainly +for what he is to leave behind him. The physical comforts of the house? +No, in his life he had never attached importance to such things. Then +the thing which he grieves to leave is narrowed down to a person--to the +person whose "dewy looks" had sunk into his breast, and whose seducing +words had "stirred poison there." + +He was ashamed of himself, his conscience was upbraiding him. He was the +slave of a degrading love; he was drunk with his passion, the real +Shelley was in temporary eclipse. This is the verdict which his previous +history must certainly deliver upon this episode, I think. + +One must be allowed to assist himself with conjectures like these when +trying to find his way through a literary swamp which has so many +misleading finger-boards up as this book is furnished with. + +We have now arrived at a part of the swamp where the difficulties and +perplexities are going to be greater than any we have yet met with-- +where, indeed, the finger-boards are multitudinous, and the most of them +pointing diligently in the wrong direction. We are to be told by the +biography why Shelley deserted his wife and child and took up with +Cornelia Turner and Italian. It was not on account of Cornelia's sighs +and sentimentalities and tea and manna and late hours and soft and sweet +and industrious enticements; no, it was because "his happiness in his +home had been wounded and bruised almost to death." + +It had been wounded and bruised almost to death in this way: + +1st. Harriet persuaded him to set up a carriage. + +2d. After the intrusion of the baby, Harriet stopped reading aloud and +studying. + +3d. Harriet's walks with Hogg "commonly conducted us to some fashionable +bonnet-shop." + +4th. Harriet hired a wet-nurse. + +5th. When an operation was being performed upon the baby, "Harriet stood +by, narrowly observing all that was done, but, to the astonishment of the +operator, betraying not the smallest sign of emotion." + +6th. Eliza Westbrook, sister-in-law, was still of the household. + +The evidence against Harriet Shelley is all in; there is no more. Upon +these six counts she stands indicted of the crime of driving her husband +into that sty at Bracknell; and this crime, by these helps, the +biographical prosecuting attorney has set himself the task of proving +upon her. + +Does the biographer call himself the attorney for the prosecution? +No, only to himself, privately; publicly he is the passionless, +disinterested, impartial judge on the bench. He holds up his judicial +scales before the world, that all may see; and it all tries to look so +fair that a blind person would sometimes fail to see him slip the false +weights in. + +Shelley's happiness in his home had been wounded and bruised almost to +death, first, because Harriet had persuaded him to set up a carriage. +I cannot discover that any evidence is offered that she asked him to set +up a carriage. Still, if she did, was it a heavy offence? Was it +unique? Other young wives had committed it before, others have committed +it since. Shelley had dearly loved her in those London days; possibly he +set up the carriage gladly to please her; affectionate young husbands do +such things. When Shelley ran away with another girl, by-and-by, this +girl persuaded him to pour the price of many carriages and many horses +down the bottomless well of her father's debts, but this impartial judge +finds no fault with that. Once she appeals to Shelley to raise money-- +necessarily by borrowing, there was no other way--to pay her father's +debts with at a time when Shelley was in danger of being arrested and +imprisoned for his own debts; yet the good judge finds no fault with her +even for this. + +First and last, Shelley emptied into that rapacious mendicant's lap a sum +which cost him--for he borrowed it at ruinous rates--from eighty to one +hundred thousand dollars. But it was Mary Godwin's papa, the +supplications were often sent through Mary, the good judge is Mary's +strenuous friend, so Mary gets no censures. On the Continent Mary rode +in her private carriage, built, as Shelley boasts, "by one of the best +makers in Bond Street, "yet the good judge makes not even a passing +comment on this iniquity. Let us throw out Count No. 1 against Harriet +Shelley as being far-fetched, and frivolous. + +Shelley's happiness in his home had been wounded and bruised almost to +death, secondly, because Harriet's studies "had dwindled away to nothing, +Bysshe had ceased to express any interest in them." At what time was +this? It was when Harriet "had fully recovered from the fatigue of her +first effort of maternity,. . . and was now in full force, vigor, and +effect." Very well, the baby was born two days before the close of June. +It took the mother a month to get back her full force, vigor, and effect; +this brings us to July 27th and the deadly Cornelia. If a wife of +eighteen is studying with her husband and he gets smitten with another +woman, isn't he likely to lose interest in his wife's studies for that +reason, and is not his wife's interest in her studies likely to languish +for the same reason? Would not the mere sight of those books of hers +sharpen the pain that is in her heart? This sudden breaking down of a +mutual intellectual interest of two years' standing is coincident with +Shelley's re-encounter with Cornelia; and we are allowed to gather from +that time forth for nearly two months he did all his studying in that +person's society. We feel at liberty to rule out Count No. 2 from the +indictment against Harriet. + +Shelley's happiness in his home had been wounded and bruised almost to +death, thirdly, because Harriet's walks with Hogg commonly led to some +fashionable bonnet-shop. I offer no palliation; I only ask why the +dispassionate, impartial judge did not offer one himself--merely, I mean, +to offset his leniency in a similar case or two where the girl who ran +away with Harriet's husband was the shopper. There are several occasions +where she interested herself with shopping--among them being walks which +ended at the bonnet-shop--yet in none of these cases does she get a word +of blame from the good judge, while in one of them he covers the deed +with a justifying remark, she doing the shopping that time to find +easement for her mind, her child having died. + +Shelley's happiness in his home had been wounded and bruised almost to +death, fourthly, by the introduction there of a wet-nurse. The wet-nurse +was introduced at the time of the Edinburgh sojourn, immediately after +Shelley had been enjoying the two months of study with Cornelia which +broke up his wife's studies and destroyed his personal interest in them. +Why, by this time, nothing that Shelley's wife could do would have been +satisfactory to him, for he was in love with another woman, and was never +going to be contented again until he got back to her. If he had been +still in love with his wife it is not easily conceivable that he would +care much who nursed the baby, provided the baby was well nursed. +Harriet's jealousy was assuredly voicing itself now, Shelley's conscience +was assuredly nagging him, pestering him, persecuting him. Shelley +needed excuses for his altered attitude towards his wife; Providence +pitied him and sent the wet-nurse. If Providence had sent him a cotton +doughnut it would have answered just as well; all he wanted was something +to find fault with. + +Shelley's happiness in his home had been wounded and bruised almost to +death, fifthly, because Harriet narrowly watched a surgical operation +which was being performed upon her child, and, "to the astonishment of +the operator," who was watching Harriet instead of attending to his +operation, she betrayed "not the smallest sign of emotion." The author +of this biography was not ashamed to set down that exultant slander. +He was apparently not aware that it was a small business to bring into +his court a witness whose name he does not know, and whose character and +veracity there is none to vouch for, and allow him to strike this blow at +the mother-heart of this friendless girl. The biographer says, "We may +not infer from this that Harriet did not feel"--why put it in, then?-- +"but we learn that those about her could believe her to be hard and +insensible." Who were those who were about her? Her husband? He hated +her now, because he was in love elsewhere. Her sister? Of course that +is not charged. Peacock? Peacock does not testify. The wet-nurse? She +does not testify. If any others were there we have no mention of them. +"Those about her" are reduced to one person--her husband. Who reports +the circumstance? It is Hogg. Perhaps he was there--we do not know. +But if he was, he still got his information at second-hand, as it was the +operator who noticed Harriet's lack of emotion, not himself. Hogg is not +given to saying kind things when Harriet is his subject. He may have +said them the time that he tried to tempt her to soil her honor, but +after that he mentions her usually with a sneer. "Among those who were +about her" was one witness well equipped to silence all tongues, abolish +all doubts, set our minds at rest; one witness, not called, and not +callable, whose evidence, if we could but get it, would outweigh the +oaths of whole battalions of hostile Hoggs and nameless surgeons--the +baby. I wish we had the baby's testimony; and yet if we had it it would +not do us any good--a furtive conjecture, a sly insinuation, a pious +"if" or two, would be smuggled in, here and there, with a solemn air of +judicial investigation, and its positiveness would wilt into dubiety. + +The biographer says of Harriet, "If words of tender affection and +motherly pride proved the reality of love, then undoubtedly she loved her +firstborn child." That is, if mere empty words can prove it, it stands +proved--and in this way, without committing himself, he gives the reader +a chance to infer that there isn't any extant evidence but words, and +that he doesn't take much stock in them. How seldom he shows his hand! +He is always lurking behind a non-committal "if" or something of that +kind; always gliding and dodging around, distributing colorless poison +here and there and everywhere, but always leaving himself in a position +to say that his language will be found innocuous if taken to pieces and +examined. He clearly exhibits a steady and never-relaxing purpose to +make Harriet the scapegoat for her husband's first great sin--but it is +in the general view that this is revealed, not in the details. His +insidious literature is like blue water; you know what it is that makes +it blue, but you cannot produce and verify any detail of the cloud of +microscopic dust in it that does it. Your adversary can dip up a +glassful and show you that it is pure white and you cannot deny it; and +he can dip the lake dry, glass by glass, and show that every glassful is +white, and prove it to any one's eye--and yet that lake was blue and you +can swear it. This book is blue--with slander in solution. + +Let the reader examine, for example, the paragraph of comment which +immediately follows the letter containing Shelley's self-exposure which +we have been considering. This is it. One should inspect the individual +sentences as they go by, then pass them in procession and review the +cake-walk as a whole: + + "Shelley's happiness in his home, as is evident from this + pathetic letter, had been fatally stricken; it is evident, + also, that he knew where duty lay; he felt that his part was to + take up his burden, silently and sorrowfully, and to bear it + henceforth with the quietness of despair. But we can perceive + that he scarcely possessed the strength and fortitude needful + for success in such an attempt. And clearly Shelley himself + was aware how perilous it was to accept that respite of + blissful ease which he enjoyed in the Boinville household; for + gentle voices and dewy looks and words of sympathy could not + fail to remind him of an ideal of tranquillity or of joy which + could never be his, and which he must henceforth sternly + exclude from his imagination." + +That paragraph commits the author in no way. Taken sentence by sentence +it asserts nothing against anybody or in favor of anybody, pleads for +nobody, accuses nobody. Taken detail by detail, it is as innocent as +moonshine. And yet, taken as a whole, it is a design against the reader; +its intent is to remove the feeling which the letter must leave with him +if let alone, and put a different one in its place--to remove a feeling +justified by the letter and substitute one not justified by it. The +letter itself gives you no uncertain picture--no lecturer is needed to +stand by with a stick and point out its details and let on to explain +what they mean. The picture is the very clear and remorsefully faithful +picture of a fallen and fettered angel who is ashamed of himself; an +angel who beats his soiled wings and cries, who complains to the woman +who enticed him that he could have borne his wayward lot, he could have +stood by his duty if it had not been for her beguilements; an angel who +rails at the "boundless ocean of abhorred society," and rages at his poor +judicious sister-in-law. If there is any dignity about this spectacle it +will escape most people. + +Yet when the paragraph of comment is taken as a whole, the picture is +full of dignity and pathos; we have before us a blameless and noble +spirit stricken to the earth by malign powers, but not conquered; +tempted, but grandly putting the temptation away; enmeshed by subtle +coils, but sternly resolved to rend them and march forth victorious, at +any peril of life or limb. Curtain--slow music. + +Was it the purpose of the paragraph to take the bad taste of Shelley's +letter out of the reader's mouth? If that was not it, good ink was +wasted; without that, it has no relevancy--the multiplication table would +have padded the space as rationally. + +We have inspected the six reasons which we are asked to believe drove a +man of conspicuous patience, honor, justice, fairness, kindliness, and +iron firmness, resolution, and steadfastness, from the wife whom he loved +and who loved him, to a refuge in the mephitic paradise of Bracknell. +These are six infinitely little reasons; but there were six colossal +ones, and these the counsel for the destruction of Harriet Shelley +persists in not considering very important. + +Moreover, the colossal six preceded the little six and had done the +mischief before they were born. Let us double-column the twelve; then we +shall see at a glance that each little reason is in turn answered by a +retorting reason of a size to overshadow it and make it insignificant: + +1. Harriet sets up carriage. 1. CORNELIA TURNER. +2. Harriet stops studying. 2. CORNELIA TURNER. +3. Harriet goes to bonnet-shop. 3. CORNELIA TURNER. +4. Harriet takes a wet-nurse. 4. CORNELIA TURNER. +5. Harriet has too much nerve. 5. CORNELIA TURNER. +6. Detested sister-in-law 6. CORNELIA TURNER. + +As soon as we comprehend that Cornelia Turner and the Italian lessons +happened before the little six had been discovered to be grievances, +we understand why Shelley's happiness in his home had been wounded and +bruised almost to death, and no one can persuade us into laying it on +Harriet. Shelley and Cornelia are the responsible persons, and we cannot +in honor and decency allow the cruelties which they practised upon the +unoffending wife to be pushed aside in order to give us a chance to waste +time and tears over six sentimental justifications of an offence which +the six can't justify, nor even respectably assist in justifying. + +Six? There were seven; but in charity to the biographer the seventh +ought not to be exposed. Still, he hung it out himself, and not only +hung it out, but thought it was a good point in Shelley's favor. For two +years Shelley found sympathy and intellectual food and all that at home; +there was enough for spiritual and mental support, but not enough for +luxury; and so, at the end of the contented two years, this latter detail +justifies him in going bag and baggage over to Cornelia Turner and +supplying the rest of his need in the way of surplus sympathy and +intellectual pie unlawfully. By the same reasoning a man in merely +comfortable circumstances may rob a bank without sin. + + +III + +It is 1814, it is the 16th of March, Shelley has, written his letter, he +has been in the Boinville paradise a month, his deserted wife is in her +husbandless home. Mischief had been wrought. It is the biographer who +concedes this. We greatly need some light on Harriet's side of the case +now; we need to know how she enjoyed the month, but there is no way to +inform ourselves; there seems to be a strange absence of documents and +letters and diaries on that side. Shelley kept a diary, the approaching +Mary Godwin kept a diary, her father kept one, her half-sister by +marriage, adoption, and the dispensation of God kept one, and the entire +tribe and all its friends wrote and received letters, and the letters +were kept and are producible when this biography needs them; but there +are only three or four scraps of Harriet's writing, and no diary. +Harriet wrote plenty of letters to her husband--nobody knows where they +are, I suppose; she wrote plenty of letters to other people--apparently +they have disappeared, too. Peacock says she wrote good letters, but +apparently interested people had sagacity enough to mislay them in time. +After all her industry she went down into her grave and lies silent +there--silent, when she has so much need to speak. We can only wonder at +this mystery, not account for it. + +No, there is no way of finding out what Harriet's state of feeling was +during the month that Shelley was disporting himself in the Bracknell +paradise. We have to fall back upon conjecture, as our fabulist does +when he has nothing more substantial to work with. Then we easily +conjecture that as the days dragged by Harriet's heart grew heavier and +heavier under its two burdens--shame and resentment: the shame of being +pointed at and gossiped about as a deserted wife, and resentment against +the woman who had beguiled her husband from her and now kept him in a +disreputable captivity. Deserted wives--deserted whether for cause or +without cause--find small charity among the virtuous and the discreet. +We conjecture that one after another the neighbors ceased to call; that +one after another they got to being "engaged" when Harriet called; that +finally they one after the other cut her dead on the street; that after +that she stayed in the house daytimes, and brooded over her sorrows, and +nighttimes did the same, there being nothing else to do with the heavy +hours and the silence and solitude and the dreary intervals which sleep +should have charitably bridged, but didn't. + +Yes, mischief had been wrought. The biographer arrives at this +conclusion, and it is a most just one. Then, just as you begin to half +hope he is going to discover the cause of it and launch hot bolts of +wrath at the guilty manufacturers of it, you have to turn away +disappointed. You are disappointed, and you sigh. This is what he says +--the italics [''] are mine: + + "However the mischief may have been wrought--'and at this day + no one can wish to heap blame an any buried head'--" + +So it is poor Harriet, after all. Stern justice must take its course-- +justice tempered with delicacy, justice tempered with compassion, justice +that pities a forlorn dead girl and refuses to strike her. Except in the +back. Will not be ignoble and say the harsh thing, but only insinuate +it. Stern justice knows about the carriage and the wet-nurse and the +bonnet-shop and the other dark things that caused this sad mischief, and +may not, must not blink them; so it delivers judgment where judgment +belongs, but softens the blow by not seeming to deliver judgment at all. +To resume--the italics are mine: + + "However the mischief may have been wrought--and at this day no + one can wish to heap blame on any buried head--'it is certain + that some cause or causes of deep division between Shelley and + his wife were in operation during the early part of the year + 1814'." + +This shows penetration. No deduction could be more accurate than this. +There were indeed some causes of deep division. But next comes another +disappointing sentence: + + "To guess at the precise nature of these cafes, in the absence + of definite statement, were useless." + +Why, he has already been guessing at them for several pages, and we have +been trying to outguess him, and now all of a sudden he is tired of it +and won't play any more. It is not quite fair to us. However, he will +get over this by-and-by, when Shelley commits his next indiscretion and +has to be guessed out of it at Harriet's expense. + +"We may rest content with Shelley's own words"--in a Chancery paper drawn +up by him three years later. They were these: "Delicacy forbids me to +say more than that we were disunited by incurable dissensions." + +As for me, I do not quite see why we should rest content with anything of +the sort. It is not a very definite statement. It does not necessarily +mean anything more than that he did not wish to go into the tedious +details of those family quarrels. Delicacy could quite properly excuse +him from saying, "I was in love with Cornelia all that time; my wife kept +crying and worrying about it and upbraiding me and begging me to cut +myself free from a connection which was wronging her and disgracing us +both; and I being stung by these reproaches retorted with fierce and +bitter speeches--for it is my nature to do that when I am stirred, +especially if the target of them is a person whom I had greatly loved and +respected before, as witness my various attitudes towards Miss Hitchener, +the Gisbornes, Harriet's sister, and others--and finally I did not +improve this state of things when I deserted my wife and spent a whole +month with the woman who had infatuated me." + +No, he could not go into those details, and we excuse him; but, +nevertheless, we do not rest content with this bland proposition to puff +away that whole long disreputable episode with a single mean, meaningless +remark of Shelley's. + +We do admit that "it is certain that some cause or causes of deep +division were in operation." We would admit it just the same if the +grammar of the statement were as straight as a string, for we drift into +pretty indifferent grammar ourselves when we are absorbed in historical +work; but we have to decline to admit that we cannot guess those cause or +causes. + +But guessing is not really necessary. There is evidence attainable-- +evidence from the batch discredited by the biographer and set out at the +back door in his appendix-basket; and yet a court of law would think +twice before throwing it out, whereas it would be a hardy person who +would venture to offer in such a place a good part of the material which +is placed before the readers of this book as "evidence," and so treated +by this daring biographer. Among some letters (in the appendix-basket) +from Mrs. Godwin, detailing the Godwinian share in the Shelleyan events +of 1814, she tells how Harriet Shelley came to her and her husband, +agitated and weeping, to implore them to forbid Shelley the house, and +prevent his seeing Mary Godwin. + + "She related that last November he had fallen in love with Mrs. + Turner and paid her such marked attentions Mr. Turner, the + husband, had carried off his wife to Devonshire." + +The biographer finds a technical fault in this; "the Shelleys were in +Edinburgh in November." What of that? The woman is recalling a +conversation which is more than two months old; besides, she was probably +more intent upon the central and important fact of it than upon its +unimportant date. Harriet's quoted statement has some sense in it; for +that reason, if for no other, it ought to have been put in the body of +the book. Still, that would not have answered; even the biographer's +enemy could not be cruel enough to ask him to let this real grievance, +this compact and substantial and picturesque figure, this rawhead-and- +bloody-bones, come striding in there among those pale shams, those +rickety spectres labeled WET-NURSE, BONNET-SHOP, and so on--no, the +father of all malice could not ask the biographer to expose his pathetic +goblins to a competition like that. + +The fabulist finds fault with the statement because it has a technical +error in it; and he does this at the moment that he is furnishing us an +error himself, and of a graver sort. He says: + + "If Turner carried off his wife to Devonshire he brought her + back and Shelley was staying with her and her mother on terms + of cordial intimacy in March, 1814." + +We accept the "cordial intimacy"--it was the very thing Harriet was +complaining of--but there is nothing to show that it was Turner who +brought his wife back. The statement is thrown in as if it were not only +true, but was proof that Turner was not uneasy. Turner's movements are +proof of nothing. Nothing but a statement from Turner's mouth would have +any value here, and he made none. + +Six days after writing his letter Shelley and his wife were together +again for a moment--to get remarried according to the rites of the +English Church. + +Within three weeks the new husband and wife were apart again, and the +former was back in his odorous paradise. This time it is the wife who +does the deserting. She finds Cornelia too strong for her, probably. +At any rate, she goes away with her baby and sister, and we have a +playful fling at her from good Mrs. Boinville, the "mysterious spinner +Maimuna"; she whose "face was as a damsel's face, and yet her hair was +gray"; she of whom the biographer has said, "Shelley was indeed caught in +an almost invisible thread spun around him, but unconsciously, by this +subtle and benignant enchantress." The subtle and benignant enchantress +writes to Hogg, April 18: "Shelley is again a widower; his beauteous half +went to town on Thursday." + +Then Shelley writes a poem--a chant of grief over the hard fate which +obliges him now to leave his paradise and take up with his wife again. +It seems to intimate that the paradise is cooling towards him; that he is +warned off by acclamation; that he must not even venture to tempt with +one last tear his friend Cornelia's ungentle mood, for her eye is glazed +and cold and dares not entreat her lover to stay: + +Exhibit E + + "Pause not! the time is past! Every voice cries 'Away!' + Tempt not with one last tear thy friend's ungentle mood; + Thy lover's eye, so glazed and cold, dares not entreat thy + stay: + Duty and dereliction guide thee back to solitude." + +Back to the solitude of his now empty home, that is! + + "Away! away! to thy sad and silent home; + Pour bitter tears on its desolated hearth." + . . . . . . . . + +But he will have rest in the grave by-and-by. Until that time comes, +the charms of Bracknell will remain in his memory, along with Mrs. +Boinville's voice and Cornelia Turner's smile: + + "Thou in the grave shalt rest--yet, till the phantoms flee + Which that house and hearth and garden made dear to thee ere while, + Thy remembrance and repentance and deep musings are not free + From the music of two voices and the light of one sweet smile." + +We cannot wonder that Harriet could not stand it. Any of us would have +left. We would not even stay with a cat that was in this condition. +Even the Boinvilles could not endure it; and so, as we have seen, they +gave this one notice. + + "Early in May, Shelley was in London. He did not yet despair + of reconciliation with Harriet, nor had he ceased to love her." + +Shelley's poems are a good deal of trouble to his biographer. They are +constantly inserted as "evidence," and they make much confusion. As soon +as one of them has proved one thing, another one follows and proves quite +a different thing. The poem just quoted shows that he was in love with +Cornelia, but a month later he is in love with Harriet again, and there +is a poem to prove it. + + "In this piteous appeal Shelley declares that he has now no + grief but one--the grief of having known and lost his wife's + love." + +Exhibit F + + "Thy look of love has power to calm + The stormiest passion of my soul." + + +But without doubt she had been reserving her looks of love a good part of +the time for ten months, now--ever since he began to lavish his own on +Cornelia Turner at the end of the previous July. He does really seem to +have already forgotten Cornelia's merits in one brief month, for he +eulogizes Harriet in a way which rules all competition out: + + "Thou only virtuous, gentle, kind, + Amid a world of hate." + +He complains of her hardness, and begs her to make the concession of +a "slight endurance"--of his waywardness, perhaps--for the sake of +"a fellow-being's lasting weal." But the main force of his appeal is +in his closing stanza, and is strongly worded: + + "O tract for once no erring guide! + Bid the remorseless feeling flee; + 'Tis malice, 'tis revenge, 'tis pride, + 'Tis anything but thee; + I deign a nobler pride to prove, + And pity if thou canst not love." + +This is in May--apparently towards the end of it. Harriet and Shelley +were corresponding all the time. Harriet got the poem--a copy exists in +her own handwriting; she being the only gentle and kind person amid a +world of hate, according to Shelley's own testimony in the poem, we are +permitted to think that the daily letters would presently have melted +that kind and gentle heart and brought about the reconciliation, if there +had been time but there wasn't; for in a very few days--in fact, before +the 8th of June--Shelley was in love with another woman. + +And so--perhaps while Harriet was walking the floor nights, trying to get +her poem by heart--her husband was doing a fresh one--for the other girl +--Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin--with sentiments like these in it: + +Exhibit G + + To spend years thus and be rewarded, + As thou, sweet love, requited me + When none were near. + . . . thy lips did meet + Mine tremblingly; . . , + + " Gentle and good and mild thou art, + Nor can I live if thou appear + Aught but thyself." . . . + + +And so on. "Before the close of June it was known and felt by Mary and +Shelley that each was inexpressibly dear to the other." Yes, Shelley had +found this child of sixteen to his liking, and had wooed and won her in +the graveyard. But that is nothing; it was better than wooing her in her +nursery, at any rate, where it might have disturbed the other children. + +However, she was a child in years only. From the day that she set her +masculine grip on Shelley he was to frisk no more. If she had occupied +the only kind and gentle Harriet's place in March it would have been a +thrilling spectacle to see her invade the Boinville rookery and read the +riot act. That holiday of Shelley's would have been of short duration, +and Cornelia's hair would have been as gray as her mother's when the +services were over. + +Hogg went to the Godwin residence in Skinner Street with Shelley on that +8th of June. They passed through Godwin's little debt-factory of a book- +shop and went up-stairs hunting for the proprietor. Nobody there. +Shelley strode about the room impatiently, making its crazy floor quake +under him. Then a door "was partially and softly opened. A thrilling +voice called 'Shelley!' A thrilling voice answered, 'Mary!' And he +darted out of the room like an arrow from the bow of the far-shooting +King. A very young female, fair and fair-haired, pale, indeed, and with +a piercing look, wearing a frock of tartan, an unusual dress in London at +that time, had called him out of the room." + +This is Mary Godwin, as described by Hogg. The thrill of the voices +shows that the love of Shelley and Mary was already upward of a fortnight +old; therefore it had been born within the month of May--born while +Harriet was still trying to get her poem by heart, we think. I must not +be asked how I know so much about that thrill; it is my secret. The +biographer and I have private ways of finding out things when it is +necessary to find them out and the customary methods fail. + +Shelley left London that day, and was gone ten days. The biographer +conjectures that he spent this interval with Harriet in Bath. It would +be just like him. To the end of his days he liked to be in love with two +women at once. He was more in love with Miss Hitchener when he married +Harriet than he was with Harriet, and told the lady so with simple and +unostentatious candor. He was more in love with Cornelia than he was +with Harriet in the end of 1813 and the beginning of 1814, yet he +supplied both of them with love poems of an equal temperature meantime; +he loved Mary and Harriet in June, and while getting ready to run off +with the one, it is conjectured that he put in his odd time trying to get +reconciled to the other; by-and-by, while still in love with Mary, he +will make love to her half-sister by marriage, adoption, and the +visitation of God, through the medium of clandestine letters, and she +will answer with letters that are for no eye but his own. + +When Shelley encountered Mary Godwin he was looking around for another +paradise. He had, tastes of his own, and there were features about the +Godwin establishment that strongly recommended it. Godwin was an +advanced thinker and an able writer. One of his romances is still read, +but his philosophical works, once so esteemed, are out of vogue now; +their authority was already declining when Shelley made his acquaintance +--that is, it was declining with the public, but not with Shelley. They +had been his moral and political Bible, and they were that yet. Shelley +the infidel would himself have claimed to be less a work of God than a +work of Godwin. Godwin's philosophies had formed his mind and interwoven +themselves into it and become a part of its texture; he regarded himself +as Godwin's spiritual son. Godwin was not without self-appreciation; +indeed, it may be conjectured that from his point of view the last +syllable of his name was surplusage. He lived serene in his lofty world +of philosophy, far above the mean interests that absorbed smaller men, +and only came down to the ground at intervals to pass the hat for alms to +pay his debts with, and insult the man that relieved him. Several of his +principles were out of the ordinary. For example, he was opposed to +marriage. He was not aware that his preachings from this text were but +theory and wind; he supposed he was in earnest in imploring people to +live together without marrying, until Shelley furnished him a working +model of his scheme and a practical example to analyze, by applying the +principle in his own family; the matter took a different and surprising +aspect then. The late Matthew Arnold said that the main defect in +Shelley's make-up was that he was destitute of the sense of humor. This +episode must have escaped Mr. Arnold's attention. + +But we have said enough about the head of the new paradise. Mrs. Godwin +is described as being in several ways a terror; and even when her soul +was in repose she wore green spectacles. But I suspect that her main +unattractiveness was born of the fact that she wrote the letters that are +out in the appendix-basket in the back yard--letters which are an outrage +and wholly untrustworthy, for they say some kind things about poor +Harriet and tell some disagreeable truths about her husband; and these +things make the fabulist grit his teeth a good deal. + +Next we have Fanny Godwin--a Godwin by courtesy only; she was Mrs. +Godwin's natural daughter by a former friend. She was a sweet and +winning girl, but she presently wearied of the Godwin paradise, and +poisoned herself. + +Last in the list is Jane (or Claire, as she preferred to call herself) +Clairmont, daughter of Mrs. Godwin by a former marriage. She was very +young and pretty and accommodating, and always ready to do what she could +to make things pleasant. After Shelley ran off with her part-sister +Mary, she became the guest of the pair, and contributed a natural child +to their nursery--Allegra. Lord Byron was the father. + +We have named the several members and advantages of the new paradise in +Skinner Street, with its crazy book-shop underneath. Shelley was all +right now, this was a better place than the other; more variety anyway, +and more different kinds of fragrance. One could turn out poetry here +without any trouble at all. + +The way the new love-match came about was this: + +Shelley told Mary all his aggravations and sorrows and griefs, and about +the wet-nurse and the bonnetshop and the surgeon and the carriage, and +the sister-in-law that blocked the London game, and about Cornelia and +her mamma, and how they had turned him out of the house after making so +much of him; and how he had deserted Harriet and then Harriet had +deserted him, and how the reconciliation was working along and Harriet +getting her poem by heart; and still he was not happy, and Mary pitied +him, for she had had trouble herself. But I am not satisfied with this. +It reads too much like statistics. It lacks smoothness and grace, and is +too earthy and business-like. It has the sordid look of a trades-union +procession out on strike. That is not the right form for it. The book +does it better; we will fall back on the book and have a cake-walk: + + "It was easy to divine that some restless grief possessed him; + Mary herself was not unlearned in the lore of pain. His + generous zeal in her father's behalf, his spiritual sonship to + Godwin, his reverence for her mother's memory, were guarantees + with Mary of his excellence.--[What she was after was + guarantees of his excellence. That he stood ready to desert + his wife and child was one of them, apparently.]--The new + friends could not lack subjects of discourse, and underneath + their words about Mary's mother, and 'Political Justice,' and + 'Rights of Woman,' were two young hearts, each feeling towards + the other, each perhaps unaware, trembling in the direction of + the other. The desire to assuage the suffering of one whose + happiness has grown precious to us may become a hunger of the + spirit as keen as any other, and this hunger now possessed + Mary's heart; when her eyes rested unseen on Shelley, it was + with a look full of the ardor of a 'soothing pity.'" + +Yes, that is better and has more composure. That is just the way it +happened. He told her about the wet-nurse, she told him about political +justice; he told her about the deadly sister-in-law, she told him about +her mother; he told her about the bonnet-shop, she murmured back about +the rights of woman; then he assuaged her, then she assuaged him; then he +assuaged her some more, next she assuaged him some more; then they both +assuaged one another simultaneously; and so they went on by the hour +assuaging and assuaging and assuaging, until at last what was the result? +They were in love. It will happen so every time. + + "He had married a woman who, as he now persuaded himself, had + never truly loved him, who loved only his fortune and his rank, + and who proved her selfishness by deserting him in his misery." + +I think that that is not quite fair to Harriet. We have no certainty +that she knew Cornelia had turned him out of the house. He went back to +Cornelia, and Harriet may have supposed that he was as happy with her as +ever. Still, it was judicious to begin to lay on the whitewash, for +Shelley is going to need many a coat of it now, and the sooner the reader +becomes used to the intrusion of the brush the sooner he will get +reconciled to it and stop fretting about it. + +After Shelley's (conjectured) visit to Harriet at Bath--8th of June to +18th--"it seems to have been arranged that Shelley should henceforth +join the Skinner Street household each day at dinner." + +Nothing could be handier than this; things will swim along now. + + "Although now Shelley was coming to believe that his wedded + union with Harriet was a thing of the past, he had not ceased + to regard her with affectionate consideration; he wrote to her + frequently, and kept her informed of his whereabouts." + +We must not get impatient over these curious inharmoniousnesses and +irreconcilabilities in Shelley's character. You can see by the +biographer's attitude towards them that there is nothing objectionable +about them. Shelley was doing his best to make two adoring young +creatures happy: he was regarding the one with affectionate consideration +by mail, and he was assuaging the other one at home. + + "Unhappy Harriet, residing at Bath, had perhaps never desired + that the breach between herself and her husband should be + irreparable and complete." + +I find no fault with that sentence except that the "perhaps" is not +strictly warranted. It should have been left out. In support--or shall +we say extenuation?--of this opinion I submit that there is not +sufficient evidence to warrant the uncertainty which it implies. The +only "evidence" offered that Harriet was hard and proud and standing out +against a reconciliation is a poem--the poem in which Shelley beseeches +her to "bid the remorseless feeling flee" and "pity" if she "cannot +love." We have just that as "evidence," and out of its meagre materials +the biographer builds a cobhouse of conjectures as big as the Coliseum; +conjectures which convince him, the prosecuting attorney, but ought to +fall far short of convincing any fair-minded jury. + +Shelley's love-poems may be very good evidence, but we know well that +they are "good for this day and train only." We are able to believe that +they spoke the truth for that one day, but we know by experience that +they could not be depended on to speak it the next. The very +supplication for a rewarming of Harriet's chilled love was followed so +suddenly by the poet's plunge into an adoring passion for Mary Godwin +that if it had been a check it would have lost its value before a lazy +person could have gotten to the bank with it. + +Hardness, stubbornness, pride, vindictiveness--these may sometimes reside +in a young wife and mother of nineteen, but they are not charged against +Harriet Shelley outside of that poem, and one has no right to insert them +into her character on such shadowy "evidence" as that. Peacock knew +Harriet well, and she has a flexible and persuadable look, as painted by +him: + + "Her manners were good, and her whole aspect and demeanor such + manifest emanations of pure and truthful nature that to be once + in her company was to know her thoroughly. She was fond of her + husband, and accommodated herself in every way to his tastes. + If they mixed in society, she adorned it; if they lived in + retirement, she was satisfied; if they travelled, she enjoyed + the change of scene." + +"Perhaps" she had never desired that the breach should be irreparable and +complete. The truth is, we do not even know that there was any breach at +all at this time. We know that the husband and wife went before the +altar and took a new oath on the 24th of March to love and cherish each +other until death--and this may be regarded as a sort of reconciliation +itself, and a wiping out of the old grudges. Then Harriet went away, and +the sister-in-law removed herself from her society. That was in April. +Shelley wrote his "appeal" in May, but the corresponding went right along +afterwards. We have a right to doubt that the subject of it was a +"reconciliation," or that Harriet had any suspicion that she needed to be +reconciled and that her husband was trying to persuade her to it--as the +biographer has sought to make us believe, with his Coliseum of +conjectures built out of a waste-basket of poetry. For we have +"evidence" now--not poetry and conjecture. When Shelley had been dining +daily in the Skinner Street paradise fifteen days and continuing the +love-match which was already a fortnight old twenty-five days earlier, +he forgot to write Harriet; forgot it the next day and the next. During +four days Harriet got no letter from him. Then her fright and anxiety +rose to expression-heat, and she wrote a letter to Shelley's publisher +which seems to reveal to us that Shelley's letters to her had been the +customary affectionate letters of husband to wife, and had carried no +appeals for reconciliation and had not needed to: + + "BATH (postmark July 7, 1814). + "MY DEAR SIR,--You will greatly oblige me by giving the + enclosed to Mr. Shelley. I would not trouble you, but it is + now four days since I have heard from him, which to me is an + age. Will you write by return of post and tell me what has + become of him? as I always fancy something dreadful has + happened if I do not hear from him. If you tell me that he is + well I shall not come to London, but if I do not hear from you + or him I shall certainly come, as I cannot endure this dreadful + state of suspense. You are his friend and you can feel for me. + "I remain yours truly, + "H. S." + + +Even without Peacock's testimony that "her whole aspect and demeanor were +manifest emanations of a pure and truthful nature," we should hold this +to be a truthful letter, a sincere letter, a loving letter; it bears +those marks; I think it is also the letter of a person accustomed to +receiving letters from her husband frequently, and that they have been of +a welcome and satisfactory sort, too, this long time back--ever since the +solemn remarriage and reconciliation at the altar most likely. + +The biographer follows Harriet's letter with a conjecture. +He conjectures that she "would now gladly have retraced her steps." +Which means that it is proven that she had steps to retrace--proven by +the poem. Well, if the poem is better evidence than the letter, we must +let it stand at that. + +Then the biographer attacks Harriet Shelley's honor--by authority of +random and unverified gossip scavengered from a group of people whose +very names make a person shudder: Mary Godwin, mistress to Shelley; her +part-sister, discarded mistress of Lord Byron; Godwin, the philosophical +tramp, who gathers his share of it from a shadow--that is to say, from a +person whom he shirks out of naming. Yet the biographer dignifies this +sorry rubbish with the name of "evidence." + +Nothing remotely resembling a distinct charge from a named person +professing to know is offered among this precious "evidence." + +1. "Shelley believed" so and so. + +2. Byron's discarded mistress says that Shelley told Mary Godwin so and +so, and Mary told her. + +3. "Shelley said" so and so--and later "admitted over and over again +that he had been in error." + +4. The unspeakable Godwin "wrote to Mr. Baxter" that he knew so and so +"from unquestionable authority"--name not furnished. + +How-any man in his right mind could bring himself to defile the grave of +a shamefully abused and defenceless girl with these baseless +fabrications, this manufactured filth, is inconceivable. How any man, in +his right mind or out of it, could sit down and coldly try to persuade +anybody to believe it, or listen patiently to it, or, indeed, do anything +but scoff at it and deride it, is astonishing. + +The charge insinuated by these odious slanders is one of the most +difficult of all offences to prove; it is also one which no man has a +right to mention even in a whisper about any woman, living or dead, +unless he knows it to be true, and not even then unless he can also prove +it to be true. There is no justification for the abomination of putting +this stuff in the book. + +Against Harriet Shelley's good name there is not one scrap of tarnishing +evidence, and not even a scrap of evil gossip, that comes from a source +that entitles it to a hearing. + +On the credit side of the account we have strong opinions from the people +who knew her best. Peacock says: + + "I feel it due to the memory of Harriet to state my most + decided conviction that her conduct as a wife was as pure, as + true, as absolutely faultless, as that of any who for such + conduct are held most in honor." + +Thornton Hunt, who had picked and published slight flaws in Harriet's +character, says, as regards this alleged large one: + + "There is not a trace of evidence or a whisper of scandal + against her before her voluntary departure from Shelley." + +Trelawney says: + + "I was assured by the evidence of the few friends who knew both + Shelley and his wife--Hookham, Hogg, Peacock, and one of the + Godwins--that Harriet was perfectly innocent of all offence." + +What excuse was there for raking up a parcel of foul rumors from +malicious and discredited sources and flinging them at this dead girl's +head? Her very defencelessness should have been her protection. The +fact that all letters to her or about her, with almost every scrap of her +own writing, had been diligently mislaid, leaving her case destitute of a +voice, while every pen-stroke which could help her husband's side had +been as diligently preserved, should have excused her from being brought +to trial. Her witnesses have all disappeared, yet we see her summoned in +her grave-clothes to plead for the life of her character, without the +help of an advocate, before a disqualified judge and a packed jury. + +Harriet Shelley wrote her distressed letter on the 7th of July. On the +28th her husband ran away with Mary Godwin and her part-sister Claire to +the Continent. He deserted his wife when her confinement was +approaching. She bore him a child at the end of November, his mistress +bore him another one something over two months later. The truants were +back in London before either of these events occurred. + +On one occasion, presently, Shelley was so pressed for money to support +his mistress with that he went to his wife and got some money of his that +was in her hands--twenty pounds. Yet the mistress was not moved to +gratitude; for later, when the wife was troubled to meet her engagements, +the mistress makes this entry in her diary: + + "Harriet sends her creditors here; nasty woman. Now we shall + have to change our lodgings." + +The deserted wife bore the bitterness and obloquy of her situation two +years and a quarter; then she gave up, and drowned herself. A month +afterwards the body was found in the water. Three weeks later Shelley +married his mistress. + +I must here be allowed to italicize a remark of the biographer's +concerning Harriet Shelley: + + "That no act of Shelley's during the two years which + immediately preceded her death tended to cause the rash act + which brought her life to its close seems certain." + +Yet her husband had deserted her and her children, and was living with a +concubine all that time! Why should a person attempt to write biography +when the simplest facts have no meaning to him? This book is littered +with as crass stupidities as that one--deductions by the page which bear +no discoverable kinship to their premises. + +The biographer throws off that extraordinary remark without any +perceptible disturbance to his serenity; for he follows it with a +sentimental justification of Shelley's conduct which has not a pang of +conscience in it, but is silky and smooth and undulating and pious-- +a cake-walk with all the colored brethren at their best. There may be +people who can read that page and keep their temper, but it is doubtful. +Shelley's life has the one indelible blot upon it, but is otherwise +worshipfully noble and beautiful. It even stands out indestructibly +gracious and lovely from the ruck of these disastrous pages, in spite of +the fact that they expose and establish his responsibility for his +forsaken wife's pitiful fate--a responsibility which he himself tacitly +admits in a letter to Eliza Westbrook, wherein he refers to his taking up +with Mary Godwin as an act which Eliza "might excusably regard as the +cause of her sister's ruin." + + + + +End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Defense of Harriet Shelley +by Mark Twain + diff --git a/old/mtdhs11.zip b/old/mtdhs11.zip Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..5961f82 --- /dev/null +++ b/old/mtdhs11.zip |