In Defence of Harriet Shelley Part 4

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 Sh.e.l.ley that each was inexpressibly dear to the other." Yes, Sh.e.l.ley 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 Sh.e.l.ley 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 Sh.e.l.ley'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 G.o.dwin residence in Skinner Street with Sh.e.l.ley on that 8th of June. They pa.s.sed through G.o.dwin's little debt-factory of a book-shop and went up-stairs hunting for the proprietor. n.o.body there.

Sh.e.l.ley strode about the room impatiently, making its crazy floor quake under him. Then a door "was partially and softly opened. A thrilling voice called 'Sh.e.l.ley!' 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 G.o.dwin, as described by Hogg. The thrill of the voices shows that the love of Sh.e.l.ley 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.

Sh.e.l.ley 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. .h.i.tchener 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 G.o.d, through the medium of clandestine letters, and she will answer with letters that are for no eye but his own.

When Sh.e.l.ley encountered Mary G.o.dwin he was looking around for another paradise. He had tastes of his own, and there were features about the G.o.dwin establishment that strongly recommended it. G.o.dwin 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 Sh.e.l.ley made his acquaintance --that is, it was declining with the public, but not with Sh.e.l.ley. They had been his moral and political Bible, and they were that yet. Sh.e.l.ley the infidel would himself have claimed to be less a work of G.o.d than a work of G.o.dwin. G.o.dwin's philosophies had formed his mind and interwoven themselves into it and become a part of its texture; he regarded himself as G.o.dwin's spiritual son. G.o.dwin 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 pa.s.s 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 Sh.e.l.ley furnished him a working model of his scheme and a practical example to a.n.a.lyze, 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 Sh.e.l.ley's make-up was that he was dest.i.tute 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. G.o.dwin 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 f.a.n.n.y G.o.dwin--a G.o.dwin by courtesy only; she was Mrs.

G.o.dwin's natural daughter by a former friend. She was a sweet and winning girl, but she presently wearied of the G.o.dwin paradise, and poisoned herself.

Last in the list is Jane (or Claire, as she preferred to call herself) Clairmont, daughter of Mrs. G.o.dwin 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 Sh.e.l.ley 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. Sh.e.l.ley 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:

Sh.e.l.ley 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 sons.h.i.+p to G.o.dwin, 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 a.s.suage 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 Sh.e.l.ley, 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 a.s.suaged her, then she a.s.suaged him; then he a.s.suaged her some more, next she a.s.suaged him some more; then they both a.s.suaged one another simultaneously; and so they went on by the hour a.s.suaging and a.s.suaging and a.s.suaging, 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 Sh.e.l.ley 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 Sh.e.l.ley's (conjectured) visit to Harriet at Bath--8th of June to 18th--"it seems to have been arranged that Sh.e.l.ley should henceforth join the Skinner Street household each day at dinner."

Nothing could be handier than this; things will swim along now.

"Although now Sh.e.l.ley 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 Sh.e.l.ley's character. You can see by the biographer's att.i.tude towards them that there is nothing objectionable about them. Sh.e.l.ley was doing his best to make two adoring young creatures happy: he was regarding the one with affectionate consideration by mail, and he was a.s.suaging 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 Sh.e.l.ley 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.

Sh.e.l.ley'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 pa.s.sion for Mary G.o.dwin 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 Sh.e.l.ley outside of that poem, and one has no right to insert them into her character on such shadowy "evidence" as that.

Peac.o.c.k 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. Sh.e.l.ley 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 Sh.e.l.ley 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 Sh.e.l.ley's publisher which seems to reveal to us that Sh.e.l.ley'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. Sh.e.l.ley. 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 Peac.o.c.k'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 Sh.e.l.ley's honor--by authority of random and unverified gossip scavengered from a group of people whose very names make a person shudder: Mary G.o.dwin, mistress to Sh.e.l.ley; her part-sister, discarded mistress of Lord Byron; G.o.dwin, the philosophical tramp, who gathers his share of it from a shadow--that is to say, from a person whom he s.h.i.+rks 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. "Sh.e.l.ley believed" so and so.

2. Byron's discarded mistress says that Sh.e.l.ley told Mary G.o.dwin so and so, and Mary told her.

3. "Sh.e.l.ley said" so and so--and later "admitted over and over again that he had been in error."

4. The unspeakable G.o.dwin "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 astonis.h.i.+ng.

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 Sh.e.l.ley's good name there is not one sc.r.a.p of tarnis.h.i.+ng evidence, and not even a sc.r.a.p of evil gossip, that comes from a source that ent.i.tles it to a hearing.

On the credit side of the account we have strong opinions from the people who knew her best. Peac.o.c.k 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: