Given to the world on Shelley’s bare assertion, any such statement will have little effect on critical readers. Nor will it be more effectual on judicial minds for being supported by statements by Mrs. Shelley and other persons, deriving their information from Shelley. Fifty such statements will be nothing more than Shelley’s own statement, uttered by his lips through fifty tubes. A statement, having no evidential value on its first utterance, does not acquire evidential value from mere reiteration. Nor will it be of any avail for any biographer, drawing his information from Field Place, to produce the mere substance of any such remarkable statement, and require critical readers to accept the facts on the bare authority of Shelley’s representatives. Field Place has been too often misled by its authentic evidences to wildly erroneous conclusions respecting Shelley, for critical readers to be in a humour to accept any more of its quite sincere statements of fact without distrust.
Field Place has been induced by its evidences to think the poet a man of aristocratic descent, though his lineal ancestors, from Elizabethan to Georgian time, were at best small landowners, entitled to bear arms.
Field Place has been induced by Clint’s composition to think of the poet’s face as symmetrically beautiful, and having a straight and delicately-modelled nose; though he really had unsymmetrical features, and a little turn-up nose.
Field Place has been led by its authentic evidences to ascribe the poet’s estrangement from his family wholly to the religious and political differences that at most only embittered the quarrel, which is shown by Sir Bysshe Shelley’s will and codicil, and the certain facts of the poet’s story, to have resulted from causes, having no connexion with questions of religion and politics.
Field Place is under the impression that Mary and Claire were not related in any way whatever to one another.
Though Mary Godwin was not educated, any more than Amelia Opie or Jane Austen, to be a Free Lover, Field Place is under the impression that she was educated to think lightly of the matrimonial rite.
Though Mary Godwin did not give herself to Shelley without enduring a strong conflict of passion and duty, Field Place is under the impression that she suffered from no such conflict.
Though the Lord Chancellor’s decree was given in steady consideration of Shelley’s conduct to his first wife, Field Place is under the impression that in delivering the decree, which denied to Shelley the custody of his children by Harriett Westbrook, the Lord Chancellor had no regard to the poet’s conduct to his first wife.
Holding in its hands the conclusive evidence of Shelley’s great affection for Claire in 1816 and 1817, Field Place is under the impression that Shelley regarded her with disapproval and aversion in those years.
Surely, critical students of Shelley’s story have in these facts sufficient grounds for declining to put implicit confidence in the biographical discretion and exactitude of Field Place:—sufficient reasons for saying ‘as Field Place is under so many erroneous impressions respecting the story of its poet, is it not more than probable that Field Place is under an erroneous impression respecting his reasons for leaving his first wife?’