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 an 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 cafes, 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