complete. The truth is, we do not even know that there was any breach at
all at this time. We know that the husband and wife went before the
altar and took a new oath on the 24th of March to love and cherish each
other until death–and this may be regarded as a sort of reconciliation
itself, and a wiping out of the old grudges. Then Harriet went away, and
the sister-in-law removed herself from her society. That was in April.
Shelley wrote his “appeal” in May, but the corresponding went right along
afterwards. We have a right to doubt that the subject of it was a
“reconciliation,” or that Harriet had any suspicion that she needed to be
reconciled and that her husband was trying to persuade her to it–as the
biographer has sought to make us believe, with his Coliseum of
conjectures built out of a waste-basket of poetry. For we have
“evidence” now–not poetry and conjecture. When Shelley had been dining
daily in the Skinner Street paradise fifteen days and continuing the
love-match which was already a fortnight old twenty-five days earlier,
he forgot to write Harriet; forgot it the next day and the next. During
four days Harriet got no letter from him. Then her fright and anxiety
rose to expression-heat, and she wrote a letter to Shelley’s publisher
which seems to reveal to us that Shelley’s letters to her had been the
customary affectionate letters of husband to wife, and had carried no
appeals for reconciliation and had not needed to:
“BATH (postmark July 7, 1814).
“MY DEAR SIR,– You will greatly oblige me by giving the
enclosed to Mr. Shelley. I would not trouble you, but it is
now four days since I have heard from him, which to me is an
age. Will you write by return of post and tell me what has
become of him? as I always fancy something dreadful has
happened if I do not hear from him. If you tell me that he is
well I shall not come to London, but if I do not hear from you
or him I shall certainly come, as I cannot endure this dreadful
state of suspense. You are his friend and you can feel for me.
“I remain yours truly,
“H. S.”
Even without Peacock’s testimony that “her whole aspect and demeanor were
manifest emanations of a pure and truthful nature,” we should hold this
to be a truthful letter, a sincere letter, a loving letter; it bears
those marks; I think it is also the letter of a person accustomed to
receiving letters from her husband frequently, and that they have been of
a welcome and satisfactory sort, too, this long time back–ever since the
solemn remarriage and reconciliation at the altar most likely.
The biographer follows Harriet’s letter with a conjecture.
He conjectures that she “would now gladly have retraced her steps.”
Which means that it is proven that she had steps to retrace–proven by
the poem. Well, if the poem is better evidence than the letter, we must
let it stand at that.
Then the biographer attacks Harriet Shelley’s honor–by authority of
random and unverified gossip scavengered from a group of people whose
very names make a person shudder: Mary Godwin, mistress to Shelley; her
part-sister, discarded mistress of Lord Byron; Godwin, the philosophical
tramp, who gathers his share of it from a shadow–that is to say, from a
person whom he shirks out of naming. Yet the biographer dignifies this
sorry rubbish with the name of “evidence.”
Nothing remotely resembling a distinct charge from a named person
professing to know is offered among this precious “evidence.”
1. “Shelley believed” so and so.
2. Byron’s discarded mistress says that Shelley told Mary Godwin so and
so, and Mary told her.
3. “Shelley said” so and so–and later “admitted over and over again
that he had been in error.”
4. The unspeakable Godwin “wrote to Mr. Baxter” that he knew so and so
“from unquestionable authority”–name not furnished.
How-any man in his right mind could bring himself to defile the grave of
a shamefully abused and defenceless girl with these baseless
fabrications, this manufactured filth, is inconceivable. How any man, in