Defence of Harriet Shelley | Page 6

which led to Shelley's
desertion of his wife in 1814.
Harriet Westbrook was a school-girl sixteen years old. Shelley was
teeming with advanced thought. He believed that Christianity was a
degrading and selfish superstition, and he had a deep and sincere desire
to rescue one of his sisters from it. Harriet was impressed by his
various philosophies and looked upon him as an intellectual wonder--
which indeed he was. He had an idea that she could give him valuable
help in his scheme regarding his sister; therefore he asked her to
correspond with him. She was quite willing. Shelley was not thinking
of love, for he was just getting over a passion for his cousin, Harriet
Grove, and just getting well steeped in one for Miss Hitchener, a
school- teacher. What might happen to Harriet Westbrook before the

letter- writing was ended did not enter his mind. Yet an older person
could have made a good guess at it, for in person Shelley was as
beautiful as an angel, he was frank, sweet, winning, unassuming, and so
rich in unselfishness, generosities, and magnanimities that he made his
whole generation seem poor in these great qualities by comparison.
Besides, he was in distress. His college had expelled him for writing an
atheistical pamphlet and afflicting the reverend heads of the university
with it, his rich father and grandfather had closed their purses against
him, his friends were cold. Necessarily, Harriet fell in love with him;
and so deeply, indeed, that there was no way for Shelley to save her
from suicide but to marry her. He believed himself to blame for this
state of things, so the marriage took place. He was pretty fairly in love
with Harriet, although he loved Miss Hitchener better. He wrote and
explained the case to Miss Hitchener after the wedding, and he could
not have been franker or more naive and less stirred up about the
circumstance if the matter in issue had been a commercial transaction
involving thirty-five dollars.
Shelley was nineteen. He was not a youth, but a man. He had never had
any youth. He was an erratic and fantastic child during eighteen years,
then he stepped into manhood, as one steps over a door-sill. He was
curiously mature at nineteen in his ability to do independent thinking
on the deep questions of life and to arrive at sharply definite decisions
regarding them, and stick to them--stick to them and stand by them at
cost of bread, friendships, esteem, respect, and approbation.
For the sake of his opinions he was willing to sacrifice all these
valuable things, and did sacrifice them; and went on doing it, too, when
he could at any moment have made himself rich and supplied himself
with friends and esteem by compromising with his father, at the
moderate expense of throwing overboard one or two indifferent details
of his cargo of principles.
He and Harriet eloped to Scotland and got married. They took lodgings
in Edinburgh of a sort answerable to their purse, which was about
empty, and there their life was a happy, one and grew daily more so.
They had only themselves for company, but they needed no additions
to it. They were as cozy and contented as birds in a nest. Harriet sang
evenings or read aloud; also she studied and tried to improve her mind,
her husband instructing her in Latin. She was very beautiful, she was

modest, quiet, genuine, and, according to her husband's testimony, she
had no fine lady airs or aspirations about her. In Matthew Arnold's
judgment, she was "a pleasing figure."
The pair remained five weeks in Edinburgh, and then took lodgings in
York, where Shelley's college mate, Hogg, lived. Shelley presently ran
down to London, and Hogg took this opportunity to make love to the
young wife. She repulsed him, and reported the fact to her husband
when he got back. It seems a pity that Shelley did not copy this
creditable conduct of hers some time or other when under temptation,
so that we might have seen the author of his biography hang the
miracle in the skies and squirt rainbows at it.
At the end of the first year of marriage--the most trying year for any
young couple, for then the mutual failings are coming one by one to
light, and the necessary adjustments are being made in pain and
tribulation--Shelley was able to recognize that his marriage venture had
been a safe one. As we have seen, his love for his wife had begun in a
rather shallow way and with not much force, but now it was become
deep and strong, which entitles his wife to a broad credit mark, one
may admit. He addresses a long and loving poem to her, in which both
passion and