“BATH (postmark July 7, 1814).
“MY DEAR SIR,—You will greatly oblige me by giving the
enclosed to Mr. Shelley. I would not trouble you, but it is
now four days since I have heard from him, which to me is an
age. Will you write by return of post and tell me what has
become of him? as I always fancy something dreadful has
happened if I do not hear from him. If you tell me that he is
well I shall not come to London, but if I do not hear from you
or him I shall certainly come, as I cannot endure this dreadful
state of suspense. You are his friend and you can feel for me.
“I remain yours truly,
“H. S.”
Even without Peacock's testimony that “her whole aspect and demeanor were manifest emanations of a pure and truthful nature,” we should hold this to be a truthful letter, a sincere letter, a loving letter; it bears those marks; I think it is also the letter of a person accustomed to receiving letters from her husband frequently, and that they have been of a welcome and satisfactory sort, too, this long time back—ever since the solemn remarriage and reconciliation at the altar most likely.
The biographer follows Harriet's letter with a conjecture. He conjectures that she “would now gladly have retraced her steps.” Which means that it is proven that she had steps to retrace—proven by the poem. Well, if the poem is better evidence than the letter, we must let it stand at that.
Then the biographer attacks Harriet Shelley's honor—by authority of random and unverified gossip scavengered from a group of people whose very names make a person shudder: Mary Godwin, mistress to Shelley; her part-sister, discarded mistress of Lord Byron; Godwin, the philosophical tramp, who gathers his share of it from a shadow—that is to say, from a person whom he shirks out of naming. Yet the biographer dignifies this sorry rubbish with the name of “evidence.”
Nothing remotely resembling a distinct charge from a named person professing to know is offered among this precious “evidence.”
1. “Shelley believed” so and so.
2. Byron's discarded mistress says that Shelley told Mary Godwin so and so, and Mary told her.
3. “Shelley said” so and so—and later “admitted over and over again that he had been in error.”
4. The unspeakable Godwin “wrote to Mr. Baxter” that he knew so and so “from unquestionable authority”—name not furnished.
How any man in his right mind could bring himself to defile the grave of a shamefully abused and defenseless girl with these baseless fabrications, this manufactured filth, is inconceivable. How any man, in his right mind or out of it, could sit down and coldly try to persuade anybody to believe it, or listen patiently to it, or, indeed, do anything but scoff at it and deride it, is astonishing.