In Defence of Harriet Shelley

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.”

Примечания

1

What she was after was guarantees of his excellence. That he stood ready to desert his wife and child was one of them, apparently.