assuaged her some more, next she assuaged him some more; then they both
assuaged one another simultaneously; and so they went on by the hour
assuaging and assuaging and assuaging, until at last what was the result?
They were in love. It will happen so every time.
“He had married a woman who, as he now persuaded himself, had
never truly loved him, who loved only his fortune and his rank,
and who proved her selfishness by deserting him in his misery.”
I think that that is not quite fair to Harriet. We have no certainty
that she knew Cornelia had turned him out of the house. He went back to
Cornelia, and Harriet may have supposed that he was as happy with her as
ever. Still, it was judicious to begin to lay on the whitewash, for
Shelley is going to need many a coat of it now, and the sooner the reader
becomes used to the intrusion of the brush the sooner he will get
reconciled to it and stop fretting about it.
After Shelley’s (conjectured) visit to Harriet at Bath–8th of June to
18th– “it seems to have been arranged that Shelley should henceforth
join the Skinner Street household each day at dinner.”
Nothing could be handier than this; things will swim along now.
“Although now Shelley was coming to believe that his wedded
union with Harriet was a thing of the past, he had not ceased
to regard her with affectionate consideration; he wrote to her
frequently, and kept her informed of his whereabouts.”
We must not get impatient over these curious inharmoniousnesses and
irreconcilabilities in Shelley’s character. You can see by the
biographer’s attitude towards them that there is nothing objectionable
about them. Shelley was doing his best to make two adoring young
creatures happy: he was regarding the one with affectionate consideration
by mail, and he was assuaging the other one at home.
“Unhappy Harriet, residing at Bath, had perhaps never desired
that the breach between herself and her husband should be
irreparable and complete.”
I find no fault with that sentence except that the “perhaps” is not
strictly warranted. It should have been left out. In support–or shall
we say extenuation? –of this opinion I submit that there is not
sufficient evidence to warrant the uncertainty which it implies. The
only “evidence” offered that Harriet was hard and proud and standing out
against a reconciliation is a poem–the poem in which Shelley beseeches
her to “bid the remorseless feeling flee” and “pity” if she “cannot
love.” We have just that as “evidence,” and out of its meagre materials
the biographer builds a cobhouse of conjectures as big as the Coliseum;
conjectures which convince him, the prosecuting attorney, but ought to
fall far short of convincing any fair-minded jury.
Shelley’s love-poems may be very good evidence, but we know well that
they are “good for this day and train only.” We are able to believe that
they spoke the truth for that one day, but we know by experience that
they could not be depended on to speak it the next. The very
supplication for a rewarming of Harriet’s chilled love was followed so
suddenly by the poet’s plunge into an adoring passion for Mary Godwin
that if it had been a check it would have lost its value before a lazy
person could have gotten to the bank with it.
Hardness, stubbornness, pride, vindictiveness–these may sometimes reside
in a young wife and mother of nineteen, but they are not charged against
Harriet Shelley outside of that poem, and one has no right to insert them
into her character on such shadowy “evidence” as that. Peacock knew
Harriet well, and she has a flexible and persuadable look, as painted by
him:
“Her manners were good, and her whole aspect and demeanor such
manifest emanations of pure and truthful nature that to be once
in her company was to know her thoroughly. She was fond of her
husband, and accommodated herself in every way to his tastes.
If they mixed in society, she adorned it; if they lived in
retirement, she was satisfied; if they travelled, she enjoyed
the change of scene.”
“Perhaps” she had never desired that the breach should be irreparable and