Defence of Harriet Shelley | Page 7

May thy unwithering soul not cease to burn, Still may thine heart with those pure thoughts o'erflow Which force from mine such quick and warm return."
Was the girl of seventeen glad and proud and happy? We may conjecture that she was.
That was the year 1812. Another year passed still happily, still successfully--a child was born in June, 1813, and in September, three months later, Shelley addresses a poem to this child, Ianthe, in which he points out just when the little creature is most particularly dear to him:
Exhibit C
"Dearest when most thy tender traits express The image of thy mother's loveliness."
Up to this point the fabulist counsel for Shelley and prosecutor of his young wife has had easy sailing, but now his trouble begins, for Shelley is getting ready to make some unpleasant history for himself, and it will be necessary to put the blame of it on the wife.
Shelley had made the acquaintance of a charming gray-haired, young- hearted Mrs. Boinville, whose face "retained a certain youthful beauty"; she lived at Bracknell, and had a young daughter named Cornelia Turner, who was equipped with many fascinations. Apparently these people were sufficiently sentimental. Hogg says of Mrs. Boinville:
"The greater part of her associates were odious. I generally found there two or three sentimental young butchers, an eminently philosophical tinker, and several very unsophisticated medical practitioners or medical students, all of low origin and vulgar and offensive manners. They sighed, turned up their eyes, retailed philosophy, such as it was," etc.
Shelley moved to Bracknell, July 27th (this is still 1813) purposely to be near this unwholesome prairie-dogs' nest. The fabulist says: "It was the entrance into a world more amiable and exquisite than he had yet known."
"In this acquaintance the attraction was mutual"--and presently it grew to be very mutual indeed, between Shelley and Cornelia Turner, when they got to studying the Italian poets together. Shelley, "responding like a tremulous instrument to every breath of passion or of sentiment," had his chance here. It took only four days for Cornelia's attractions to begin to dim Harriet's. Shelley arrived on the 27th of July; on the 31st he wrote a sonnet to Harriet in which "one detects already the little rift in the lover's lute which had seemed to be healed or never to have gaped at all when the later and happier sonnet to Ianthe was written"--in September, we remember:
Exhibit D
"EVENING. TO HARRIET
"O thou bright Sun! Beneath the dark blue line Of western distance that sublime descendest, And, gleaming lovelier as thy beams decline, Thy million hues to every vapor lendest, And over cobweb, lawn, and grove, and stream Sheddest the liquid magic of thy light, Till calm Earth, with the parting splendor bright, Shows like the vision of a beauteous dream; What gazer now with astronomic eye Could coldly count the spots within thy sphere? Such were thy lover, Harriet, could he fly The thoughts of all that makes his passion dear, And turning senseless from thy warm caress Pick flaws in our close-woven happiness."
I cannot find the "rift"; still it may be there. What the poem seems to say is, that a person would be coldly ungrateful who could consent to count and consider little spots and flaws in such a warm, great, satisfying sun as Harriet is. It is a "little rift which had seemed to be healed, or never to have gaped at all." That is, "one detects" a little rift which perhaps had never existed. How does one do that? How does one see the invisible? It is the fabulist's secret; he knows how to detect what does not exist, he knows how to see what is not seeable; it is his gift, and he works it many a time to poor dead Harriet Shelley's deep damage.
"As yet, however, if there was a speck upon Shelley's happiness it was no more than a speck"--meaning the one which one detects where "it may never have gaped at all"--"nor had Harriet cause for discontent."
Shelley's Latin instructions to his wife had ceased. "From a teacher he had now become 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