The influence of such a wife on Shelley’s more vehement, visionary temperament can hardly be over-estimated. Their moods did not always suit or coincide; each, at times, made the other suffer. It could not be otherwise with two natures so young, so strong, and so individual. But, if forbearance may have been sometimes called for on the one hand, and on the other a charity which is kind and thinks no evil, it was only a part of that discipline from which the married life of geniuses is not exempt, and which tests the temper and quality of the metal it tries; an ordeal from which two noble natures come forth the purer and the stronger.
The indirect, unconscious power of elevation of character is great, and not even a Shelley but must be the better for association with it, not even he but must be the nobler, “yea, three times less unworthy” through the love of such a woman as Mary. He would not have been all he was without her sustaining and refining influence; without the constant sense that in loving him she loved his ideals also. We owe him, in part, to her.
Love—the love of Love—was Shelley’s life and creed. This, in Mary’s creed, was interpreted as love of Shelley. By all the rest she strove to do her duty, but, when the end came, that survived as the one great fact of her life—a fact she might have uttered in words like his—
And where is Truth? On tombs; for such to thee
Has been my heart; and thy dead memory
Has lain from (girlhood), many a changeful year,
Unchangingly preserved, and buried there.
F. D. & Co.
Printed by R. & R. Clark, Edinburgh.
POSTSCRIPT
Since this book was printed, a series of letters from Harriet Shelley to an Irish friend, Mrs. Nugent, containing references to the separation from Shelley, has been published in the New York Nation. These letters, however, add nothing to what was previously known of Harriet’s history and life with Shelley. After November 1813 the correspondence ceases. It is resumed in August 1814, after the separation and Shelley’s departure from England. Harriet’s account of these events—gathered by her at second-hand from those who can, themselves, have had no knowledge of the facts they professed to relate—embodies all the slanderous reports adverted to in the seventh chapter of the present work, and all the gratuitous falsehoods circulated by Mrs. Godwin;—falsehoods which Professor Dowden, in the Appendix to his Life of Shelley, has been at the trouble directly to disprove, statement by statement;—falsehoods of which the Author cannot but hope that an amply sufficient, if an indirect, refutation may be found in the present Life of Mary Shelley.