I do not doubt that Field Place could give us some painful and hitherto undivulged particulars about the poor girl, whom Shelley certainly illuminated out of Christianity when she was still a child, and who, according to Shelley’s words (spoken soon after their marriage, to Southey, at Keswick), was expelled from her Clapham boarding-school for embracing the opinions, which he offered to her and her schoolfellows. But what good would come to Shelley’s reputation by the display of any more details of his victim’s eventual debasement? Southey’s words were no less true and just, than scorching, when he wrote (see Robert Southey’s Correspondence with Caroline Bowles, 1881) in his August-1820 letter to Shelley at Pisa: ‘Be this as it may, ask your own heart, whether you have not been the whole, sole, and direct cause of her destruction. You corrupted her opinions; you robbed her of her moral and religious principles; you debauched her mind. But for you and your lessons, she might have gone through the world innocently and happily.’ As he read these scathing words, Shelley may well have dismissed all hope of good to come to his posthumous fame from the vindicatory story, which, even yet, may be published to his injury. Shelley was accountable for Harriett Westbrook’s depravation. To exhibit for the first time any peculiarly revolting feature of that depravation might cause men of honour and sensibility to realize more vividly than before the consequences of Shelley’s action towards the unhappy girl; but to do so could not take a feather’s weight from the heavy burden of his accountability for the ruin to which he brought her. To point to any incident of that depravation as something to justify Shelley in ‘leaving her to slide’ into deeper guilt, would be an extravagance of injustice to the poor girl.
Powerless to palliate at any point his misdeeds to Harriett, the story, which might, perhaps, account more precisely for his withdrawal from her, could neither justify, nor tend by a single hair’s-breadth to justify, Shelley’s action towards Mary Godwin and her father. No injury, done to a man by A, can justify him in doing B a grievous injury. Yet, to hear some of the Shelleyan apologists talk, one would imagine that, to show Harriett did her husband a greater wrong than any she has hitherto been proved to have done him, would be to clear him of all blameworthiness for dealing his familiar friend the most cruel blow, that can be given to a loving father. As no demonstration of her badness would lessen his responsibility for her depravation, or in any degree justify his way of dealing with his intimate friend’s sixteen-years-old daughter, it is to be hoped that the world will not be invited by any biographer to consider the story by which Shelley thought he could open Southey’s eyes.
The efforts that have been made during the last twenty-five years to prove Shelley an almost sacred social regenerator, should be considered in connexion with the literature that has created sympathy and admiration for the few noteworthy Englishwomen who have, in recent generations, lived connubially with men to whom they were not married:—the literature (of countless essays and articles) that has celebrated the virtues of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Godwin, and, not content with rating Marian Evans at her high proper worth, as the literary equal of Dickens, Thackeray, and the late Lord Lytton, has dealt with her admirable novels, as though they were a kind of new sacred scripture.
Of those novels I think far too highly to write aught in their disparagement. On other than purely literary grounds, I also think too worshipfully of Marian Evans (let her nom de plume be dropt as a thing that has served its turn) to wish to take aught from the homage that is her due. It is proverbially difficult to foretell the degree of esteem in which a greatly powerful and popular writer will be held by future generations. But in Marian Evans’s case there is neither difficulty nor fear in predicting her place throughout all time in the history of English literature. She may be surpassed by women of future time. But, come what may, she never can be anything less than by far the first and greatest of the Victorian Englishwomen of Letters. It was my hope that the splendour of her literary fame would be spared the honours of biographical celebration; that the interest of her unique literary personality should pass down to posterity under her universally familiar nom de plume; and that her strictly personal and private story might be lost sight of as far as possible.
Two of my reasons for this hope outweighed all the others. So long as her association with George Henry Lewes should not be brought before the world in clear and permanent record, it would remain a thing of her privacy, a matter of which there would be no need for tongue or pen to say a word, an affair in respect to which good taste and good feeling would dispose every person to be reticent. But on being offered in clear type to the whole world’s consideration, on being laid on every library table and every drawing-room table of the country, for approval or disapproval, ceasing to be an affair on which one might be silent, it would become an affair on which every educated person of all the English-speaking peoples would be bound, i.e. constrained by domestic and other social duties, to form an opinion of approval or disapproval, and to declare it. To give publicity to the circumstances of that association, would be to raise for discussion in every family of the English-speaking peoples, the many perilous questions touching the origin, history, uses, and usefulness of lawful marriage;—to raise the whole group of dangerous domestic questions, which Shelley would fain have forced upon universal consideration by the anti-matrimonial doctrine of Queen Mab and Laon and Cythna. I was not thinking only of Marian Evans’s fame, and of the many hard things that would necessarily be said of her in controversies about these social questions, when I hoped that her domestic association with George Henry Lewes would be withheld as long as possible from general knowledge. The story has now been told, to the gratification of the enemies of marriage. I do not blame Mr. Cross for revealing what he may well have deemed himself powerless to keep from universal consideration for any long time. He had, I am sure, the best motives for doing what I hoped he would not do; and it cannot be questioned that, after deciding to give the world a complete biography of the famous woman, with whose story he is so honourably associated, he selected the least objectionable way of accomplishing his purpose.
It needs not many words to show how little the extreme Shelleyan Socialists are justified in pointing to that story, as evidence that Marian Evans concurred in their desire for the substitution of lawless for lawful wedlock. Still a struggling woman of letters, she was living in the circles of Free Thought, when she came to think of marriage in some such way as the pious Martin Bucer thought of it in the sixteenth century, as the devout Milton thought of it in the seventeenth century, as the honest and temperate William Godwin thought of it before his abandonment of Free Contract views. It was an error of judgment (arising partly from defective knowledge of the dangerous forces of human nature, and partly from the co-operation of the egotism and the modesty, which prevented her from seeing how greatly she differed in her mental and moral faculties from other people); but it was certainly in no degree due to any lack of delicacy or moral sensibility, that she conceived all spouses capable of living as virtuously and loyally in Free Contract as she knew herself to be. It was under these circumstances that, whilst regarding certain social questions in some such way as they are regarded by ‘the flower’ of the Free Contract party (men abundantly endowed with learning and mental acuteness, with benevolence and moral rectitude), it devolved upon her to decide, whether she could live righteously in the closest and tenderest intimacy with a man, who had won her heart, without being able to make her his wife.
It is not easy to recall how much she sacrificed of dignity and happiness by her decision, and at the same time to think patiently of the man, for whose sake she made such an enormous sacrifice. Had the lot that came to her in her autumnal age, only befallen her at the perfection of her powers, her life might have been no less fruitful of happiness to herself, than it was beneficent to her species. To think that such a lot might have befallen her, could have scarcely failed to befall her, had she answered the fatal question in another way, is to feel resentfully against the man who, at the instigation of mere masculine selfishness, attached himself to her, and in doing so bemuddled her existence, and shut her out from so many of life’s sweetest joys. Had he acted the part of a gentleman in the matter, she would, at the dawn of her celebrity, have married happily, for she was a woman to inspire love. It is more generally known that she wanted some of the elements of feminine beauty, than that she was in some respects personally charming. Together with the brow of mental power, she had eyes memorably eloquent of genius and sympathy, and a smile that, startling or rather gently surprising the beholder (seeing it for the first time), changed all the character of the countenance, which it brightened into momentary beauty. It is not for printed words to tell, how this ineffably charming smile changed and beautified the face, that, in its expressionless moments, was unattractive. Fortunate in the abundance of her fine rich tresses, she was also fortunate in her musical voice. It was the music of a gentle and lofty nature; for which alone many a man would have loved her.
Enough has been said to indicate how Marian Evans came to hold the views respecting marriage, which made it possible for the woman of lofty nature and fine moral sensibility to consent to Mr. Lewes’s suit. Compassion for him may be held largely accountable for her consent and self-sacrifice. Though he was the cause of his own domestic misfortunes, he was to be commiserated for them. And, in nine cases out of every ten, when a fine-natured woman does what she ought not to do, she takes the wrong step in obedience to a generous impulse. Hence she took the step which she lived to regret profoundly (no careful reader of her novels can question that), without, however, surviving her affection for him during his life. Possibly, when she was being drawn into his power, she did not trouble herself to think much of the possible effects of her example. If she thought seriously of that matter, she, thinking as she then did of marriage, may well have concluded that the effects of her example would not be pernicious, since the Free Contract in which she could live virtuously appeared to her an estate, in which the rest of her sex might also live righteously. But the reasons are obvious, why the still comparatively obscure woman of letters may have thought the social influence of her example—the act of a single and comparatively unknown person, hidden from general observation in vast London—was too light a matter for serious consideration. The case was far otherwise a few years later; when in the exercise of her art she had enlarged her knowledge of human nature, had pondered more thoughtfully the several social problems connected with marriage, had realized the evils certain to ensue from the substitution of the Free Contract for lawful wedlock, and had won for herself a place and eminence, necessarily attended, in the case of so conscientious a woman, with a lively and anxious desire to use her influence for good ends, and no other ends. When vast power comes to such a woman, it never fails to create in her a lively, a keen, even at times a torturing, sense of responsibility.
Is it strange that Marian Evans was often sad? that the knowledge of her power over men and women was more fruitful of sorrow than of delight to her? I may be wrong in thinking, but I like to think, that one of the motives, which determined her to accept the love of the man, to whom she gave her hand after Mr. Lewes’s death, was that she might, by the celebration of her marriage, do her best to preserve her name and fame and the story of her former life from being used to discredit an institution and a rite she venerated. Anyhow her marriage was an act, by which she publicly and impressively declared her disapproval of the great purpose of the enemies of marriage, and denied their right to speak of her as one of themselves. The act was thus interpreted by those innovators, who at the time of the marriage spoke with no little warmth of her miserable abandonment of their cause and principles. And the deed was not misconstrued. She could not have proclaimed more effectually her deliberate opinion that the ordinances of marriage are salutary and sacred, and that it is the duty of women to comply with them. Instead of making for the end desired by the extreme Shelleyan Socialists, the story of the great novelist’s life sets forth nothing more clearly than that she regarded the main condition of her association with Mr. Lewes, regretfully.
Is there any reason to fear that the extreme Shelleyan Socialists will ever see the accomplishment of their desire? None. It is more probable for Shelley’s poetry to be forgotten, than for his social views to be acted upon. The churches of the land are strong enough to guard marriage against its enemies. If the churches were as powerless as fortunately they are powerful for its preservation, the domestic conservatism of the English people—a sentiment no less strong in the homes of English liberals than the homes of their political opponents—could by itself safeguard lawful wedlock from destruction. The women of England are not so unintelligent and powerless, that they are likely to be wheedled by specious phrases out of the dignity and privileges secured to them by matrimony.