<p><SPAN name="link2H_4_0001" id="link2H_4_0001"></SPAN></p>
<h2> I </h2>
<p>I have committed sins, of course; but I have not committed enough of them
to entitle me to the punishment of reduction to the bread and water of
ordinary literature during six years when I might have been living on the
fat diet spread for the righteous in Professor Dowden's Life of Shelley,
if I had been justly dealt with.</p>
<p>During these six years I have been living a life of peaceful ignorance. I
was not aware that Shelley's first wife was unfaithful to him, and that
that was why he deserted her and wiped the stain from his sensitive honor
by entering into soiled relations with Godwin's young daughter. This was
all new to me when I heard it lately, and was told that the proofs of it
were in this book, and that this book's verdict is accepted in the girls'
colleges of America and its view taught in their literary classes.</p>
<p>In each of these six years multitudes of young people in our country have
arrived at the Shelley-reading age. Are these six multitudes unacquainted
with this life of Shelley? Perhaps they are; indeed, one may feel pretty
sure that the great bulk of them are. To these, then, I address myself, in
the hope that some account of this romantic historical fable and the
fabulist's manner of constructing and adorning it may interest them.</p>
<p>First, as to its literary style. Our negroes in America have several ways
of entertaining themselves which are not found among the whites anywhere.
Among these inventions of theirs is one which is particularly popular with
them. It is a competition in elegant deportment. They hire a hall and bank
the spectators' seats in rising tiers along the two sides, leaving all the
middle stretch of the floor free. A cake is provided as a prize for the
winner in the competition, and a bench of experts in deportment is
appointed to award it. Sometimes there are as many as fifty contestants,
male and female, and five hundred spectators. One at a time the
contestants enter, clothed regardless of expense in what each considers
the perfection of style and taste, and walk down the vacant central space
and back again with that multitude of critical eyes on them. All that the
competitor knows of fine airs and graces he throws into his carriage, all
that he knows of seductive expression he throws into his countenance. He
may use all the helps he can devise: watch-chain to twirl with his
fingers, cane to do graceful things with, snowy handkerchief to flourish
and get artful effects out of, shiny new stovepipe hat to assist in his
courtly bows; and the colored lady may have a fan to work up her effects
with, and smile over and blush behind, and she may add other helps,
according to her judgment. When the review by individual detail is over, a
grand review of all the contestants in procession follows, with all the
airs and graces and all the bowings and smirkings on exhibition at once,
and this enables the bench of experts to make the necessary comparisons
and arrive at a verdict. The successful competitor gets the prize which I
have before mentioned, and an abundance of applause and envy along with
it. The negroes have a name for this grave deportment-tournament; a name
taken from the prize contended for. They call it a Cake-walk.</p>
<p>This Shelley biography is a literary cake-walk. The ordinary forms of
speech are absent from it. All the pages, all the paragraphs, walk by
sedately, elegantly, not to say mincingly, in their Sunday-best, shiny and
sleek, perfumed, and with boutonnieres in their button-holes; it is rare
to find even a chance sentence that has forgotten to dress. If the book
wishes to tell us that Mary Godwin, child of sixteen, had known
afflictions, the fact saunters forth in this nobby outfit: "Mary was
herself not unlearned in the lore of pain"—meaning by that that she
had not always traveled on asphalt; or, as some authorities would frame
it, that she had "been there herself," a form which, while preferable to
the book's form, is still not to be recommended. If the book wishes to
tell us that Harriet Shelley hired a wet-nurse, that commonplace fact gets
turned into a dancing-master, who does his professional bow before us in
pumps and knee-breeches, with his fiddle under one arm and his crush-hat
under the other, thus: "The beauty of Harriet's motherly relation to her
babe was marred in Shelley's eyes by the introduction into his house of a
hireling nurse to whom was delegated the mother's tenderest office."</p>
<p>This is perhaps the strangest book that has seen the light since
Frankenstein. Indeed, it is a Frankenstein itself; a Frankenstein with the
original infirmity supplemented by a new one; a Frankenstein with the
reasoning faculty wanting. Yet it believes it can reason, and is always
trying. It is not content to leave a mountain of fact standing in the
clear sunshine, where the simplest reader can perceive its form, its
details, and its relation to the rest of the landscape, but thinks it must
help him examine it and understand it; so its drifting mind settles upon
it with that intent, but always with one and the same result: there is a
change of temperature and the mountain is hid in a fog. Every time it sets
up a premise and starts to reason from it, there is a surprise in store
for the reader. It is strangely nearsighted, cross-eyed, and purblind.
Sometimes when a mastodon walks across the field of its vision it takes it
for a rat; at other times it does not see it at all.</p>
<p>The materials of this biographical fable are facts, rumors, and poetry.
They are connected together and harmonized by the help of suggestion,
conjecture, innuendo, perversion, and semi-suppression.</p>
<p>The fable has a distinct object in view, but this object is not
acknowledged in set words. Percy Bysshe Shelley has done something which
in the case of other men is called a grave crime; it must be shown that in
his case it is not that, because he does not think as other men do about
these things.</p>
<p>Ought not that to be enough, if the fabulist is serious? Having proved
that a crime is not a crime, was it worth while to go on and fasten the
responsibility of a crime which was not a crime upon somebody else? What
is the use of hunting down and holding to bitter account people who are
responsible for other people's innocent acts?</p>
<p>Still, the fabulist thinks it a good idea to do that. In his view
Shelley's first wife, Harriet, free of all offense as far as we have
historical facts for guidance, must be held unforgivably responsible for
her husband's innocent act in deserting her and taking up with another
woman.</p>
<p>Any one will suspect that this task has its difficulties. Any one will
divine that nice work is necessary here, cautious work, wily work, and
that there is entertainment to be had in watching the magician do it.
There is indeed entertainment in watching him. He arranges his facts, his
rumors, and his poems on his table in full view of the house, and shows
you that everything is there—no deception, everything fair and above
board. And this is apparently true, yet there is a defect, for some of his
best stock is hid in an appendix-basket behind the door, and you do not
come upon it until the exhibition is over and the enchantment of your mind
accomplished—as the magician thinks.</p>
<p>There is an insistent atmosphere of candor and fairness about this book
which is engaging at first, then a little burdensome, then a trifle
fatiguing, then progressively suspicious, annoying, irritating, and
oppressive. It takes one some little time to find out that phrases which
seem intended to guide the reader aright are there to mislead him; that
phrases which seem intended to throw light are there to throw darkness;
that phrases which seem intended to interpret a fact are there to
misinterpret it; that phrases which seem intended to forestall prejudice
are there to create it; that phrases which seem antidotes are poisons in
disguise. The naked facts arrayed in the book establish Shelley's guilt in
that one episode which disfigures his otherwise superlatively lofty and
beautiful life; but the historian's careful and methodical
misinterpretation of them transfers the responsibility to the wife's
shoulders as he persuades himself. The few meagre facts of Harriet
Shelley's life, as furnished by the book, acquit her of offense; but by
calling in the forbidden helps of rumor, gossip, conjecture, insinuation,
and innuendo he destroys her character and rehabilitates Shelley's—as
he believes. And in truth his unheroic work has not been barren of the
results he aimed at; as witness the assertion made to me that girls in the
colleges of America are taught that Harriet Shelley put a stain upon her
husband's honor, and that that was what stung him into repurifying himself
by deserting her and his child and entering into scandalous relations with
a school-girl acquaintance of his.</p>
<p>If that assertion is true, they probably use a reduction of this work in
those colleges, maybe only a sketch outlined from it. Such a thing as that
could be harmful and misleading. They ought to cast it out and put the
whole book in its place. It would not deceive. It would not deceive the
janitor.</p>
<p>All of this book is interesting on account of the sorcerer's methods and
the attractiveness of some of his characters and the repulsiveness of the
rest, but no part of it is so much so as are the chapters wherein he tries
to think he thinks he sets forth the causes which led to Shelley's
desertion of his wife in 1814.</p>
<p>Harriet Westbrook was a school-girl sixteen years old. Shelley was teeming
with advanced thought. He believed that Christianity was a degrading and
selfish superstition, and he had a deep and sincere desire to rescue one
of his sisters from it. Harriet was impressed by his various philosophies
and looked upon him as an intellectual wonder—which indeed he was.
He had an idea that she could give him valuable help in his scheme
regarding his sister; therefore he asked her to correspond with him. She
was quite willing. Shelley was not thinking of love, for he was just
getting over a passion for his cousin, Harriet Grove, and just getting
well steeped in one for Miss Hitchener, a school-teacher. What might
happen to Harriet Westbrook before the letter-writing was ended did not
enter his mind. Yet an older person could have made a good guess at it,
for in person Shelley was as beautiful as an angel, he was frank, sweet,
winning, unassuming, and so rich in unselfishness, generosities, and
magnanimities that he made his whole generation seem poor in these great
qualities by comparison. Besides, he was in distress. His college had
expelled him for writing an atheistical pamphlet and afflicting the
reverend heads of the university with it, his rich father and grandfather
had closed their purses against him, his friends were cold. Necessarily,
Harriet fell in love with him; and so deeply, indeed, that there was no
way for Shelley to save her from suicide but to marry her. He believed
himself to blame for this state of things, so the marriage took place. He
was pretty fairly in love with Harriet, although he loved Miss Hitchener
better. He wrote and explained the case to Miss Hitchener after the
wedding, and he could not have been franker or more naive and less stirred
up about the circumstance if the matter in issue had been a commercial
transaction involving thirty-five dollars.</p>
<p>Shelley was nineteen. He was not a youth, but a man. He had never had any
youth. He was an erratic and fantastic child during eighteen years, then
he stepped into manhood, as one steps over a door-sill. He was curiously
mature at nineteen in his ability to do independent thinking on the deep
questions of life and to arrive at sharply definite decisions regarding
them, and stick to them—stick to them and stand by them at cost of
bread, friendships, esteem, respect, and approbation.</p>
<p>For the sake of his opinions he was willing to sacrifice all these
valuable things, and did sacrifice them; and went on doing it, too, when
he could at any moment have made himself rich and supplied himself with
friends and esteem by compromising with his father, at the moderate
expense of throwing overboard one or two indifferent details of his cargo
of principles.</p>
<p>He and Harriet eloped to Scotland and got married. They took lodgings in
Edinburgh of a sort answerable to their purse, which was about empty, and
there their life was a happy, one and grew daily more so. They had only
themselves for company, but they needed no additions to it. They were as
cozy and contented as birds in a nest. Harriet sang evenings or read
aloud; also she studied and tried to improve her mind, her husband
instructing her in Latin. She was very beautiful, she was modest, quiet,
genuine, and, according to her husband's testimony, she had no fine lady
airs or aspirations about her. In Matthew Arnold's judgment, she was "a
pleasing figure."</p>
<p>The pair remained five weeks in Edinburgh, and then took lodgings in York,
where Shelley's college mate, Hogg, lived. Shelley presently ran down to
London, and Hogg took this opportunity to make love to the young wife. She
repulsed him, and reported the fact to her husband when he got back. It
seems a pity that Shelley did not copy this creditable conduct of hers
some time or other when under temptation, so that we might have seen the
author of his biography hang the miracle in the skies and squirt rainbows
at it.</p>
<p>At the end of the first year of marriage—the most trying year for
any young couple, for then the mutual failings are coming one by one to
light, and the necessary adjustments are being made in pain and
tribulation—Shelley was able to recognize that his marriage venture
had been a safe one. As we have seen, his love for his wife had begun in a
rather shallow way and with not much force, but now it was become deep and
strong, which entitles his wife to a broad credit mark, one may admit. He
addresses a long and loving poem to her, in which both passion and worship
appear:</p>
<p>Exhibit A</p>
<p>"O thou<br/>
Whose dear love gleamed upon the gloomy path<br/>
Which this lone spirit travelled,<br/>
.............<br/>
... wilt thou not turn<br/>
Those spirit-beaming eyes and look on me.<br/>
Until I be assured that Earth is Heaven<br/>
And Heaven is Earth?<br/>
........<br/>
Harriet! let death all mortal ties dissolve,<br/>
But ours shall not be mortal."<br/></p>
<p>Shelley also wrote a sonnet to her in August of this same year in
celebration of her birthday:</p>
<p>Exhibit B</p>
<p>"Ever as now with Love and Virtue's glow<br/>
May thy unwithering soul not cease to burn,<br/>
Still may thine heart with those pure thoughts o'erflow<br/>
Which force from mine such quick and warm return."<br/></p>
<p>Was the girl of seventeen glad and proud and happy? We may conjecture that
she was.</p>
<p>That was the year 1812. Another year passed still happily, still
successfully—a child was born in June, 1813, and in September, three
months later, Shelley addresses a poem to this child, Ianthe, in which he
points out just when the little creature is most particularly dear to him:</p>
<p>Exhibit C</p>
<p>"Dearest when most thy tender traits express<br/>
The image of thy mother's loveliness."<br/></p>
<p>Up to this point the fabulist counsel for Shelley and prosecutor of his
young wife has had easy sailing, but now his trouble begins, for Shelley
is getting ready to make some unpleasant history for himself, and it will
be necessary to put the blame of it on the wife.</p>
<p>Shelley had made the acquaintance of a charming gray-haired, young-hearted
Mrs. Boinville, whose face "retained a certain youthful beauty"; she lived
at Bracknell, and had a young daughter named Cornelia Turner, who was
equipped with many fascinations. Apparently these people were sufficiently
sentimental. Hogg says of Mrs. Boinville:</p>
<p>"The greater part of her associates were odious. I generally<br/>
found there two or three sentimental young butchers, an<br/>
eminently philosophical tinker, and several very<br/>
unsophisticated medical practitioners or medical students, all<br/>
of low origin and vulgar and offensive manners. They sighed,<br/>
turned up their eyes, retailed philosophy, such as it was,"<br/>
etc.<br/></p>
<p>Shelley moved to Bracknell, July 27th (this is still 1813) purposely to be
near this unwholesome prairie-dogs' nest. The fabulist says: "It was the
entrance into a world more amiable and exquisite than he had yet known."</p>
<p>"In this acquaintance the attraction was mutual"—and presently it
grew to be very mutual indeed, between Shelley and Cornelia Turner, when
they got to studying the Italian poets together. Shelley, "responding like
a tremulous instrument to every breath of passion or of sentiment," had
his chance here. It took only four days for Cornelia's attractions to
begin to dim Harriet's. Shelley arrived on the 27th of July; on the 31st
he wrote a sonnet to Harriet in which "one detects already the little rift
in the lover's lute which had seemed to be healed or never to have gaped
at all when the later and happier sonnet to Ianthe was written"—in
September, we remember:</p>
<p>Exhibit D</p>
<p>"EVENING. TO HARRIET<br/>
<br/>
"O thou bright Sun! Beneath the dark blue line<br/>
Of western distance that sublime descendest,<br/>
And, gleaming lovelier as thy beams decline,<br/>
Thy million hues to every vapor lendest,<br/>
And over cobweb, lawn, and grove, and stream<br/>
Sheddest the liquid magic of thy light,<br/>
Till calm Earth, with the parting splendor bright,<br/>
Shows like the vision of a beauteous dream;<br/>
What gazer now with astronomic eye<br/>
Could coldly count the spots within thy sphere?<br/>
Such were thy lover, Harriet, could he fly<br/>
The thoughts of all that makes his passion dear,<br/>
And turning senseless from thy warm caress<br/>
Pick flaws in our close-woven happiness."<br/></p>
<p>I cannot find the "rift"; still it may be there. What the poem seems to
say is, that a person would be coldly ungrateful who could consent to
count and consider little spots and flaws in such a warm, great,
satisfying sun as Harriet is. It is a "little rift which had seemed to be
healed, or never to have gaped at all." That is, "one detects" a little
rift which perhaps had never existed. How does one do that? How does one
see the invisible? It is the fabulist's secret; he knows how to detect
what does not exist, he knows how to see what is not seeable; it is his
gift, and he works it many a time to poor dead Harriet Shelley's deep
damage.</p>
<p>"As yet, however, if there was a speck upon Shelley's happiness it was no
more than a speck"—meaning the one which one detects where "it may
never have gaped at all"—"nor had Harriet cause for discontent."</p>
<p>Shelley's Latin instructions to his wife had ceased. "From a teacher he
had now become a pupil." Mrs. Boinville and her young married daughter
Cornelia were teaching him Italian poetry; a fact which warns one to
receive with some caution that other statement that Harriet had no "cause
for discontent."</p>
<p>Shelley had stopped instructing Harriet in Latin, as before mentioned. The
biographer thinks that the busy life in London some time back, and the
intrusion of the baby, account for this. These were hindrances, but were
there no others? He is always overlooking a detail here and there that
might be valuable in helping us understand a situation. For instance, when
a man has been hard at work at the Italian poets with a pretty woman, hour
after hour, and responding like a tremulous instrument to every breath of
passion or of sentiment in the meantime, that man is dog-tired when he
gets home, and he can't teach his wife Latin; it would be unreasonable to
expect it.</p>
<p>Up to this time we have submitted to having Mrs. Boinville pushed upon us
as ostensibly concerned in these Italian lessons, but the biographer drops
her now, of his own accord. Cornelia "perhaps" is sole teacher. Hogg says
she was a prey to a kind of sweet melancholy, arising from causes purely
imaginary; she required consolation, and found it in Petrarch. He also
says, "Bysshe entered at once fully into her views and caught the soft
infection, breathing the tenderest and sweetest melancholy, as every true
poet ought."</p>
<p>Then the author of the book interlards a most stately and fine compliment
to Cornelia, furnished by a man of approved judgment who knew her well "in
later years." It is a very good compliment indeed, and she no doubt
deserved it in her "later years," when she had for generations ceased to
be sentimental and lackadaisical, and was no longer engaged in enchanting
young husbands and sowing sorrow for young wives. But why is that
compliment to that old gentlewoman intruded there? Is it to make the
reader believe she was well-chosen and safe society for a young,
sentimental husband? The biographer's device was not well planned. That
old person was not present—it was her other self that was there, her
young, sentimental, melancholy, warm-blooded self, in those early sweet
times before antiquity had cooled her off and mossed her back.</p>
<p>"In choosing for friends such women as Mrs. Newton, Mrs. Boinville, and
Cornelia Turner, Shelley gave good proof of his insight and
discrimination." That is the fabulist's opinion—Harriet Shelley's is
not reported.</p>
<p>Early in August, Shelley was in London trying to raise money. In September
he wrote the poem to the baby, already quoted from. In the first week of
October Shelley and family went to Warwick, then to Edinburgh, arriving
there about the middle of the month.</p>
<p>"Harriet was happy." Why? The author furnishes a reason, but hides from us
whether it is history or conjecture; it is because "the babe had borne the
journey well." It has all the aspect of one of his artful devices—flung
in in his favorite casual way—the way he has when he wants to draw
one's attention away from an obvious thing and amuse it with some trifle
that is less obvious but more useful—in a history like this. The
obvious thing is, that Harriet was happy because there was much territory
between her husband and Cornelia Turner now; and because the perilous
Italian lessons were taking a rest; and because, if there chanced to be
any respondings like a tremulous instrument to every breath of passion or
of sentiment in stock in these days, she might hope to get a share of them
herself; and because, with her husband liberated, now, from the fetid
fascinations of that sentimental retreat so pitilessly described by Hogg,
who also dubbed it "Shelley's paradise" later, she might hope to persuade
him to stay away from it permanently; and because she might also hope that
his brain would cool, now, and his heart become healthy, and both brain
and heart consider the situation and resolve that it would be a right and
manly thing to stand by this girl-wife and her child and see that they
were honorably dealt with, and cherished and protected and loved by the
man that had promised these things, and so be made happy and kept so. And
because, also—may we conjecture this?—we may hope for the
privilege of taking up our cozy Latin lessons again, that used to be so
pleasant, and brought us so near together—so near, indeed, that
often our heads touched, just as heads do over Italian lessons; and our
hands met in casual and unintentional, but still most delicious and
thrilling little contacts and momentary clasps, just as they inevitably do
over Italian lessons. Suppose one should say to any young wife: "I find
that your husband is poring over the Italian poets and being instructed in
the beautiful Italian language by the lovely Cornelia Robinson"—would
that cozy picture fail to rise before her mind? would its possibilities
fail to suggest themselves to her? would there be a pang in her heart and
a blush on her face? or, on the contrary, would the remark give her
pleasure, make her joyous and gay? Why, one needs only to make the
experiment—the result will not be uncertain.</p>
<p>However, we learn—by authority of deeply reasoned and searching
conjecture—that the baby bore the journey well, and that that was
why the young wife was happy. That accounts for two per cent. of the
happiness, but it was not right to imply that it accounted for the other
ninety-eight also.</p>
<p>Peacock, a scholar, poet, and friend of the Shelleys, was of their party
when they went away. He used to laugh at the Boinville menagerie, and "was
not a favorite." One of the Boinville group, writing to Hogg, said, "The
Shelleys have made an addition to their party in the person of a cold
scholar, who, I think, has neither taste nor feeling. This, Shelley will
perceive sooner or later, for his warm nature craves sympathy." True, and
Shelley will fight his way back there to get it—there will be no way
to head him off.</p>
<p>Toward the end of November it was necessary for Shelley to pay a business
visit to London, and he conceived the project of leaving Harriet and the
baby in Edinburgh with Harriet's sister, Eliza Westbrook, a sensible,
practical maiden lady about thirty years old, who had spent a great part
of her time with the family since the marriage. She was an estimable
woman, and Shelley had had reason to like her, and did like her; but along
about this time his feeling towards her changed. Part of Shelley's plan,
as he wrote Hogg, was to spend his London evenings with the Newtons—members
of the Boinville Hysterical Society. But, alas, when he arrived early in
December, that pleasant game was partially blocked, for Eliza and the
family arrived with him. We are left destitute of conjectures at this
point by the biographer, and it is my duty to supply one. I chance the
conjecture that it was Eliza who interfered with that game. I think she
tried to do what she could towards modifying the Boinville connection, in
the interest of her young sister's peace and honor.</p>
<p>If it was she who blocked that game, she was not strong enough to block
the next one. Before the month and year were out—no date given, let
us call it Christmas—Shelley and family were nested in a furnished
house in Windsor, "at no great distance from the Boinvilles"—these
decoys still residing at Bracknell.</p>
<p>What we need, now, is a misleading conjecture. We get it with
characteristic promptness and depravity:</p>
<p>"But Prince Athanase found not the aged Zonoras, the friend of<br/>
his boyhood, in any wanderings to Windsor. Dr. Lind had died<br/>
a year since, and with his death Windsor must have lost, for<br/>
Shelley, its chief attraction."<br/></p>
<p>Still, not to mention Shelley's wife, there was Bracknell, at any rate.
While Bracknell remains, all solace is not lost. Shelley is represented by
this biographer as doing a great many careless things, but to my mind this
hiring a furnished house for three months in order to be with a man who
has been dead a year, is the carelessest of them all. One feels for him—that
is but natural, and does us honor besides—yet one is vexed, for all
that. He could have written and asked about the aged Zonoras before taking
the house. He may not have had the address, but that is nothing—any
postman would know the aged Zonoras; a dead postman would remember a name
like that.</p>
<p>And yet, why throw a rag like this to us ravening wolves? Is it seriously
supposable that we will stop to chew it and let our prey escape? No, we
are getting to expect this kind of device, and to give it merely a sniff
for certainty's sake and then walk around it and leave it lying. Shelley
was not after the aged Zonoras; he was pointed for Cornelia and the
Italian lessons, for his warm nature was craving sympathy.</p>
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