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 defenseless 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 offenses 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 offense.”
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 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.”