In Defence of Harriet Shelley Part 5

"There is not a trace of evidence or a whisper of scandal against her before her voluntary departure from Sh.e.l.ley."

Trelawney says:

"I was a.s.sured by the evidence of the few friends who knew both Sh.e.l.ley and his wife--Hookham, Hogg, Peac.o.c.k, and one of the G.o.dwins--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 defenselessness should have been her protection. The fact that all letters to her or about her, with almost every sc.r.a.p of her own writing, had been diligently mislaid, leaving her case dest.i.tute 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 Sh.e.l.ley wrote her distressed letter on the 7th of July. On the 28th her husband ran away with Mary G.o.dwin 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, Sh.e.l.ley 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 grat.i.tude; 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 Sh.e.l.ley married his mistress.

I must here be allowed to italicize a remark of the biographer's concerning Harriet Sh.e.l.ley:

"That no act of Sh.e.l.ley'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 cra.s.s stupidities as that one--deductions by the page which bear no discoverable kins.h.i.+p 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 Sh.e.l.ley'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.

Sh.e.l.ley's life has the one indelible blot upon it, but is otherwise wors.h.i.+pfully n.o.ble 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 G.o.dwin as an act which Eliza "might excusably regard as the cause of her sister's ruin."