Defence of Harriet Shelley | Page 8

a pupil." Mrs. Boinville and her young married
daughter Cornelia were teaching him Italian poetry; a fact which warns
one to receive with some caution that other statement that Harriet had
no "cause for discontent."
Shelley had stopped instructing Harriet in Latin, as before mentioned.
The biographer thinks that the busy life in London some time back, and
the intrusion of the baby, account for this. These were hindrances, but
were there no others? He is always overlooking a detail here and there
that might be valuable in helping us understand a situation. For instance,
when a man has been hard at work at the Italian poets with a pretty
woman, hour after hour, and responding like a tremulous instrument to
every breath of passion or of sentiment in the meantime, that man is
dog-tired when he gets home, and he can't teach his wife Latin; it
would be unreasonable to expect it.
Up to this time we have submitted to having Mrs. Boinville pushed

upon us as ostensibly concerned in these Italian lessons, but the
biographer drops her now, of his own accord. Cornelia "perhaps" is
sole teacher. Hogg says she was a prey to a kind of sweet melancholy,
arising from causes purely imaginary; she required consolation, and
found it in Petrarch. He also says, "Bysshe entered at once fully into
her views and caught the soft infection, breathing the tenderest and
sweetest melancholy, as every true poet ought."
Then the author of the book interlards a most stately and fine
compliment to Cornelia, furnished by a man of approved judgment who
knew her well "in later years." It is a very good compliment indeed, and
she no doubt deserved it in her "later years," when she had for
generations ceased to be sentimental and lackadaisical, and was no
longer engaged in enchanting young husbands and sowing sorrow for
young wives. But why is that compliment to that old gentlewoman
intruded there? Is it to make the reader believe she was well-chosen and
safe society for a young, sentimental husband? The biographer's device
was not well planned. That old person was not present--it was her other
self that was there, her young, sentimental, melancholy, warm-blooded
self, in those early sweet times before antiquity had cooled her off and
mossed her back.
"In choosing for friends such women as Mrs. Newton, Mrs. Boinville,
and Cornelia Turner, Shelley gave good proof of his insight and
discrimination." That is the fabulist's opinion--Harriet Shelley's is not
reported.
Early in August, Shelley was in London trying to raise money. In
September he wrote the poem to the baby, already quoted from. In the
first week of October Shelley and family went to Warwick, then to
Edinburgh, arriving there about the middle of the month.
"Harriet was happy." Why? The author furnishes a reason, but hides
from us whether it is history or conjecture; it is because "the babe had
borne the journey well." It has all the aspect of one of his artful
devices-- flung in in his favorite casual way--the way he has when he
wants to draw one's attention away from an obvious thing and amuse it
with some trifle that is less obvious but more useful--in a history like
this. The obvious thing is, that Harriet was happy because there was
much territory between her husband and Cornelia Turner now; and
because the perilous Italian lessons were taking a rest; and because, if

there chanced to be any respondings like a tremulous instrument to
every breath of passion or of sentiment in stock in these days, she
might hope to get a share of them herself; and because, with her
husband liberated, now, from the fetid fascinations of that sentimental
retreat so pitilessly described by Hogg, who also dubbed it "Shelley's
paradise" later, she might hope to persuade him to stay away from it
permanently; and because she might also hope that his brain would
cool, now, and his heart become healthy, and both brain and heart
consider the situation and resolve that it would be a right and manly
thing to stand by this girl-wife and her child and see that they were
honorably dealt with, and cherished and protected and loved by the
man that had promised these things, and so be made happy and kept so.
And because, also--may we conjecture this?--we may hope for the
privilege of taking up our cozy Latin lessons again, that used to be so
pleasant, and brought us so near together--so near, indeed, that often
our heads touched, just as heads do over Italian lessons; and our hands
met in casual and unintentional, but still most delicious and thrilling
little contacts and momentary clasps, just as they inevitably do over
Italian lessons. Suppose one should say to any young wife: "I find that