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 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.