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 on 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 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 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 specters 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 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: