Defence of Harriet Shelley | Page 5

simplest reader can perceive its form, its details,
and its relation to the rest of the landscape, but thinks it must help him
examine it and understand it; so its drifting mind settles upon it with
that intent, but always with one and the same result: there is a change
of temperature and the mountain is hid in a fog. Every time it sets up a
premise and starts to reason from it, there is a surprise in store for the

reader. It is strangely nearsighted, cross-eyed, and purblind. Sometimes
when a mastodon walks across the field of its vision it takes it for a rat;
at other times it does not see it at all.
The materials of this biographical fable are facts, rumors, and poetry.
They are connected together and harmonized by the help of suggestion,
conjecture, innuendo, perversion, and semi-suppression.
The fable has a distinct object in view, but this object is not
acknowledged in set words. Percy Bysshe Shelley has done something
which in the case of other men is called a grave crime; it must be
shown that in his case it is not that, because he does not think as other
men do about these things.
Ought not that to be enough, if the fabulist is serious? Having proved
that a crime is not a crime, was it worth while to go on and fasten the
responsibility of a crime which was not a crime upon somebody else?
What is the use of hunting down and holding to bitter account people
who are responsible for other people's innocent acts?
Still, the fabulist thinks it a good idea to do that. In his view Shelley's
first wife, Harriet, free of all offense as far as we have historical facts
for guidance, must be held unforgivably responsible for her husband's
innocent act in deserting her and taking up with another woman.
Any one will suspect that this task has its difficulties. Any one will
divine that nice work is necessary here, cautious work, wily work, and
that there is entertainment to be had in watching the magician do it.
There is indeed entertainment in watching him. He arranges his facts,
his rumors, and his poems on his table in full view of the house, and
shows you that everything is there--no deception, everything fair and
above board. And this is apparently true, yet there is a defect, for some
of his best stock is hid in an appendix-basket behind the door, and you
do not come upon it until the exhibition is over and the enchantment of
your mind accomplished--as the magician thinks.
There is an insistent atmosphere of candor and fairness about this book
which is engaging at first, then a little burdensome, then a trifle
fatiguing, then progressively suspicious, annoying, irritating, and
oppressive. It takes one some little time to find out that phrases which
seem intended to guide the reader aright are there to mislead him; that
phrases which seem intended to throw light are there to throw darkness;
that phrases which seem intended to interpret a fact are there to

misinterpret it; that phrases which seem intended to forestall prejudice
are there to create it; that phrases which seem antidotes are poisons in
disguise. The naked facts arrayed in the book establish Shelley's guilt in
that one episode which disfigures his otherwise superlatively lofty and
beautiful life; but the historian's careful and methodical
misinterpretation of them transfers the responsibility to the wife's
shoulders as he persuades himself. The few meagre facts of Harriet
Shelley's life, as furnished by the book, acquit her of offense; but by
calling in the forbidden helps of rumor, gossip, conjecture, insinuation,
and innuendo he destroys her character and rehabilitates Shelley's--as
he believes. And in truth his unheroic work has not been barren of the
results he aimed at; as witness the assertion made to me that girls in the
colleges of America are taught that Harriet Shelley put a stain upon her
husband's honor, and that that was what stung him into repurifying
himself by deserting her and his child and entering into scandalous
relations with a school-girl acquaintance of his.
If that assertion is true, they probably use a reduction of this work in
those colleges, maybe only a sketch outlined from it. Such a thing as
that could be harmful and misleading. They ought to cast it out and put
the whole book in its place. It would not deceive. It would not deceive
the janitor.
All of this book is interesting on account of the sorcerer's methods and
the attractiveness of some of his characters and the repulsiveness of the
rest, but no part of it is so much so as are the chapters wherein he tries
to think he thinks he sets forth the causes