In Defence of Harriet Shelley

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 fleeWhich that house and hearth and garden made dear to thee ere while,Thy remembrance and repentance and deep musings are not freeFrom 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 calmThe 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 meWhen none were near.… thy lips did meetMine tremblingly;…“Gentle and good and mild thou art,Nor can I live if thou appearAught 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[1]. 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.’”