It is 1814,it is the 16th of March,Shelley has,written his letter,he has been in the Boinville paradise a month,his deserted wife is in her husbandless home.Mischief had been wrought.It is the biographer who concedes this.We greatly need some light on Harriet's side of the case now;we need to know how she enjoyed the month,but there is no way to inform ourselves;there seems to be a strange absence of documents and letters and diaries on that side.Shelley kept a diary,the approaching Mary Godwin kept a diary,her father kept one,her half-sister by marriage,adoption,and the dispensation of God kept one,and the entire tribe and all its friends wrote and received letters,and the letters were kept and are producible when this biography needs them;but there are only three or four scraps of Harriet's writing,and no diary.
Harriet wrote plenty of letters to her husband--nobody knows where they are,I suppose;she wrote plenty of letters to other people--apparently they have disappeared,too.Peacock says she wrote good letters,but apparently interested people had sagacity enough to mislay them in time.
After all her industry she went down into her grave and lies silent there--silent,when she has so much need to speak.We can only wonder at this mystery,not account for it.
No,there is no way of finding out what Harriet's state of feeling was during the month that Shelley was disporting himself in the Bracknell paradise.We have to fall back upon conjecture,as our fabulist does when he has nothing more substantial to work with.Then we easily conjecture that as the days dragged by Harriet's heart grew heavier and heavier under its two burdens--shame and resentment:the shame of being pointed at and gossiped about as a deserted wife,and resentment against the woman who had beguiled her husband from her and now kept him in a disreputable captivity.Deserted wives--deserted whether for cause or without cause--find small charity among the virtuous and the discreet.
We conjecture that one after another the neighbors ceased to call;that one after another they got to being "engaged"when Harriet called;that finally they one after the other cut her dead on the street;that after that she stayed in the house daytimes,and brooded over her sorrows,and nighttimes did the same,there being nothing else to do with the heavy hours and the silence and solitude and the dreary intervals which sleep should have charitably bridged,but didn't.
Yes,mischief had been wrought.The biographer arrives at this conclusion,and it is a most just one.Then,just as you begin to half hope he is going to discover the cause of it and launch hot bolts of wrath at the guilty manufacturers of it,you have to turn away disappointed.You are disappointed,and you sigh.This is what he says --the italics ['']are mine:
"However the mischief may have been wrought--'and at this day no one can wish to heap blame an any buried head'--"So it is poor Harriet,after all.Stern justice must take its course--justice tempered with delicacy,justice tempered with compassion,justice that pities a forlorn dead girl and refuses to strike her.Except in the back.Will not be ignoble and say the harsh thing,but only insinuate it.Stern justice knows about the carriage and the wet-nurse and the bonnet-shop and the other dark things that caused this sad mischief,and may not,must not blink them;so it delivers judgment where judgment belongs,but softens the blow by not seeming to deliver judgment at all.
To resume--the italics are mine:
"However the mischief may have been wrought--and at this day no one can wish to heap blame on any buried head--'it is certain that some cause or causes of deep division between Shelley and his wife were in operation during the early part of the year 1814'."This shows penetration.No deduction could be more accurate than this.
There were indeed some causes of deep division.But next comes another disappointing sentence:
"To guess at the precise nature of these cafes,in the absence of definite statement,were useless."Why,he has already been guessing at them for several pages,and we have been trying to outguess him,and now all of a sudden he is tired of it and won't play any more.It is not quite fair to us.However,he will get over this by-and-by,when Shelley commits his next indiscretion and has to be guessed out of it at Harriet's expense.
"We may rest content with Shelley's own words"--in a Chancery paper drawn up by him three years later.They were these:"Delicacy forbids me to say more than that we were disunited by incurable dissensions."As for me,I do not quite see why we should rest content with anything of the sort.It is not a very definite statement.It does not necessarily mean anything more than that he did not wish to go into the tedious details of those family quarrels.Delicacy could quite properly excuse him from saying,"I was in love with Cornelia all that time;my wife kept crying and worrying about it and upbraiding me and begging me to cut myself free from a connection which was wronging her and disgracing us both;and I being stung by these reproaches retorted with fierce and bitter speeches--for it is my nature to do that when I am stirred,especially if the target of them is a person whom I had greatly loved and respected before,as witness my various attitudes towards Miss Hitchener,the Gisbornes,Harriet's sister,and others--and finally I did not improve this state of things when I deserted my wife and spent a whole month with the woman who had infatuated me."No,he could not go into those details,and we excuse him;but,nevertheless,we do not rest content with this bland proposition to puff away that whole long disreputable episode with a single mean,meaningless remark of Shelley's.
