In Defence of Harriet Shelley [16]
and take up with his wife again. It seems to intimate that the paradise is cooling towards him; that he is warned off by acclamation; that he must not even venture to tempt with one last tear his friend Cornelia's ungentle mood, for her eye is glazed and cold and dares not entreat her lover to stay:
Exhibit E
"Pause not! the time is past! Every voice cries 'Away!' Tempt not with one last tear thy friend's ungentle mood; Thy lover's eye, so glazed and cold, dares not entreat thy stay: Duty and dereliction guide thee back to solitude."
Back to the solitude of his now empty home, that is!
"Away! away! to thy sad and silent home; Pour bitter tears on its desolated hearth." . . . . . . . .
But he will have rest in the grave by-and-by. Until that time comes, the charms of Bracknell will remain in his memory, along with Mrs. Boinville's voice and Cornelia Turner's smile:
"Thou in the grave shalt rest--yet, till the phantoms flee Which that house and hearth and garden made dear to thee ere while, Thy remembrance and repentance and deep musings are not free From the music of two voices and the light of one sweet smile."
We cannot wonder that Harriet could not stand it. Any of us would have left. We would not even stay with a cat that was in this condition. Even the Boinvilles could not endure it; and so, as we have seen, they gave this one notice.
"Early in May, Shelley was in London. He did not yet despair of reconciliation with Harriet, nor had he ceased to love her."
Shelley's poems are a good deal of trouble to his biographer. They are constantly inserted as "evidence," and they make much confusion. As soon as one of them has proved one thing, another one follows and proves quite a different thing. The poem just quoted shows that he was in love with Cornelia, but a month later he is in love with Harriet again, and there is a poem to prove it.
"In this piteous appeal Shelley declares that he has now no grief but one--the grief of having known and lost his wife's love."
Exhibit F
"Thy look of love has power to calm The stormiest passion of my soul."
But without doubt she had been reserving her looks of love a good part of the time for ten months, now--ever since he began to lavish his own on Cornelia Turner at the end of the previous July. He does really seem to have already forgotten Cornelia's merits in one brief month, for he eulogizes Harriet in a way which rules all competition out:
"Thou only virtuous, gentle, kind, Amid a world of hate."
He complains of her hardness, and begs her to make the concession of a "slight endurance"--of his waywardness, perhaps--for the sake of "a fellow-being's lasting weal." But the main force of his appeal is in his closing stanza, and is strongly worded:
"O tract for once no erring guide! Bid the remorseless feeling flee; 'Tis malice, 'tis revenge, 'tis pride, 'Tis anything but thee; I deign a nobler pride to prove, And pity if thou canst not love."
This is in May--apparently towards the end of it. Harriet and Shelley were corresponding all the time. Harriet got the poem--a copy exists in her own handwriting; she being the only gentle and kind person amid a world of hate, according to Shelley's own testimony in the poem, we are permitted to think that the daily letters would presently have melted that kind and gentle heart and brought about the reconciliation, if there had been time but there wasn't; for in a very few days--in fact, before the 8th of June--Shelley was in love with another woman.
And so--perhaps while Harriet was walking the floor nights, trying to get her poem by heart--her husband was doing a fresh one--for the other girl --Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin--with sentiments like these in it:
Exhibit G
Exhibit E
"Pause not! the time is past! Every voice cries 'Away!' Tempt not with one last tear thy friend's ungentle mood; Thy lover's eye, so glazed and cold, dares not entreat thy stay: Duty and dereliction guide thee back to solitude."
Back to the solitude of his now empty home, that is!
"Away! away! to thy sad and silent home; Pour bitter tears on its desolated hearth." . . . . . . . .
But he will have rest in the grave by-and-by. Until that time comes, the charms of Bracknell will remain in his memory, along with Mrs. Boinville's voice and Cornelia Turner's smile:
"Thou in the grave shalt rest--yet, till the phantoms flee Which that house and hearth and garden made dear to thee ere while, Thy remembrance and repentance and deep musings are not free From the music of two voices and the light of one sweet smile."
We cannot wonder that Harriet could not stand it. Any of us would have left. We would not even stay with a cat that was in this condition. Even the Boinvilles could not endure it; and so, as we have seen, they gave this one notice.
"Early in May, Shelley was in London. He did not yet despair of reconciliation with Harriet, nor had he ceased to love her."
Shelley's poems are a good deal of trouble to his biographer. They are constantly inserted as "evidence," and they make much confusion. As soon as one of them has proved one thing, another one follows and proves quite a different thing. The poem just quoted shows that he was in love with Cornelia, but a month later he is in love with Harriet again, and there is a poem to prove it.
"In this piteous appeal Shelley declares that he has now no grief but one--the grief of having known and lost his wife's love."
Exhibit F
"Thy look of love has power to calm The stormiest passion of my soul."
But without doubt she had been reserving her looks of love a good part of the time for ten months, now--ever since he began to lavish his own on Cornelia Turner at the end of the previous July. He does really seem to have already forgotten Cornelia's merits in one brief month, for he eulogizes Harriet in a way which rules all competition out:
"Thou only virtuous, gentle, kind, Amid a world of hate."
He complains of her hardness, and begs her to make the concession of a "slight endurance"--of his waywardness, perhaps--for the sake of "a fellow-being's lasting weal." But the main force of his appeal is in his closing stanza, and is strongly worded:
"O tract for once no erring guide! Bid the remorseless feeling flee; 'Tis malice, 'tis revenge, 'tis pride, 'Tis anything but thee; I deign a nobler pride to prove, And pity if thou canst not love."
This is in May--apparently towards the end of it. Harriet and Shelley were corresponding all the time. Harriet got the poem--a copy exists in her own handwriting; she being the only gentle and kind person amid a world of hate, according to Shelley's own testimony in the poem, we are permitted to think that the daily letters would presently have melted that kind and gentle heart and brought about the reconciliation, if there had been time but there wasn't; for in a very few days--in fact, before the 8th of June--Shelley was in love with another woman.
And so--perhaps while Harriet was walking the floor nights, trying to get her poem by heart--her husband was doing a fresh one--for the other girl --Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin--with sentiments like these in it:
Exhibit G