retorting reason of a size to overshadow it and make it insignificant:
1. Harriet sets up carriage. 1. CORNELIA TURNER.
2. Harriet stops studying. 2. CORNELIA TURNER.
3. Harriet goes to bonnet-shop. 3. CORNELIA TURNER.
4. Harriet takes a wet-nurse. 4. CORNELIA TURNER.
5. Harriet has too much nerve. 5. CORNELIA TURNER.
6. Detested sister-in-law.fi. 6. CORNELIA TURNER.
As soon as we comprehend that Cornelia Turner and the Italian lessons
happened before the little six had been discovered to be grievances,
we understand why Shelley’s happiness in his home had been wounded and
bruised almost to death, and no one can persuade us into laying it on
Harriet. Shelley and Cornelia are the responsible persons, and we cannot
in honor and decency allow the cruelties which they practised upon the
unoffending wife to be pushed aside in order to give us a chance to waste
time and tears over six sentimental justifications of an offence which
the six can’t justify, nor even respectably assist in justifying.
Six? There were seven; but in charity to the biographer the seventh
ought not to be exposed. Still, he hung it out himself, and not only
hung it out, but thought it was a good point in Shelley’s favor. For two
years Shelley found sympathy and intellectual food and all that at home;
there was enough for spiritual and mental support, but not enough for
luxury; and so, at the end of the contented two years, this latter detail
justifies him in going bag and baggage over to Cornelia Turner and
supplying the rest of his need in the way of surplus sympathy and
intellectual pie unlawfully. By the same reasoning a man in merely
comfortable circumstances may rob a bank without sin.
III
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