insidious literature is like blue water; you know what it is that makes
it blue, but you cannot produce and verify any detail of the cloud of
microscopic dust in it that does it. Your adversary can dip up a
glassful and show you that it is pure white and you cannot deny it; and
he can dip the lake dry, glass by glass, and show that every glassful is
white, and prove it to any one’s eye–and yet that lake was blue and you
can swear it. This book is blue–with slander in solution.
Let the reader examine, for example, the paragraph of comment which
immediately follows the letter containing Shelley’s self-exposure which
we have been considering. This is it. One should inspect the individual
sentences as they go by, then pass them in procession and review the
cake-walk as a whole:
“Shelley’s happiness in his home, as is evident from this
pathetic letter, had been fatally stricken; it is evident,
also, that he knew where duty lay; he felt that his part was to
take up his burden, silently and sorrowfully, and to bear it
henceforth with the quietness of despair. But we can perceive
that he scarcely possessed the strength and fortitude needful
for success in such an attempt. And clearly Shelley himself
was aware how perilous it was to accept that respite of
blissful ease which he enjoyed in the Boinville household; for
gentle voices and dewy looks and words of sympathy could not
fail to remind him of an ideal of tranquillity or of joy which
could never be his, and which he must henceforth sternly
exclude from his imagination.”
That paragraph commits the author in no way. Taken sentence by sentence
it asserts nothing against anybody or in favor of anybody, pleads for
nobody, accuses nobody. Taken detail by detail, it is as innocent as
moonshine. And yet, taken as a whole, it is a design against the reader;
its intent is to remove the feeling which the letter must leave with him
if let alone, and put a different one in its place–to remove a feeling
justified by the letter and substitute one not justified by it. The
letter itself gives you no uncertain picture–no lecturer is needed to
stand by with a stick and point out its details and let on to explain
what they mean. The picture is the very clear and remorsefully faithful
picture of a fallen and fettered angel who is ashamed of himself; an
angel who beats his soiled wings and cries, who complains to the woman
who enticed him that he could have borne his wayward lot, he could have
stood by his duty if it had not been for her beguilements; an angel who
rails at the “boundless ocean of abhorred society,” and rages at his poor
judicious sister-in-law. If there is any dignity about this spectacle it
will escape most people.
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