In Defence of Harriet Shelley Part 3

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 Sh.e.l.ley's favor. For two years Sh.e.l.ley 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 circ.u.mstances may rob a bank without sin.

III

It is 1814, it is the 16th of March, Sh.e.l.ley 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 doc.u.ments and letters and diaries on that side. Sh.e.l.ley kept a diary, the approaching Mary G.o.dwin kept a diary, her father kept one, her half-sister by marriage, adoption, and the dispensation of G.o.d 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 sc.r.a.ps of Harriet's writing, and no diary.

Harriet wrote plenty of letters to her husband--n.o.body knows where they are, I suppose; she wrote plenty of letters to other people--apparently they have disappeared, too. Peac.o.c.k 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 Sh.e.l.ley 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 on any buried head'--"

So it is poor Harriet, after all. Stern justice must take its course--justice tempered with delicacy, justice tempered with compa.s.sion, justice that pities a forlorn dead girl and refuses to strike her. Except in the back. Will not be ign.o.ble 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 Sh.e.l.ley 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 causes, 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 Sh.e.l.ley commits his next indiscretion and has to be guessed out of it at Harriet's expense.

"We may rest content with Sh.e.l.ley'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 att.i.tudes towards Miss. .h.i.tchener, 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 Sh.e.l.ley'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. G.o.dwin, detailing the G.o.dwinian share in the Sh.e.l.leyan events of 1814, she tells how Harriet Sh.e.l.ley came to her and her husband, agitated and weeping, to implore them to forbid Sh.e.l.ley the house, and prevent his seeing Mary G.o.dwin.

"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 Sh.e.l.leys 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-b.l.o.o.d.y-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 compet.i.tion 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 Sh.e.l.ley 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 Sh.e.l.ley 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, "Sh.e.l.ley 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: "Sh.e.l.ley is again a widower; his beauteous half went to town on Thursday."

Then Sh.e.l.ley 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 toward 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, Sh.e.l.ley was in London. He did not yet despair of reconciliation with Harriet, nor had he ceased to love her."

Sh.e.l.ley'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 Sh.e.l.ley 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 pa.s.sion 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 compet.i.tion 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 trust for once no erring guide!

Bid the remorseless feeling flee; 'Tis malice, 'tis revenge, 'tis pride, 'Tis anything but thee; O deign a n.o.bler pride to prove, And pity if thou canst not love."

This is in May--apparently towards the end of it. Harriet and Sh.e.l.ley 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 Sh.e.l.ley'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--Sh.e.l.ley 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 G.o.dwin--with sentiments like these in it: