 Section 4 of How to Tell a Story and Other Essays by Mark Twain. It is 1814. It is the 16th of March. Shelly has written his letter. He has been in the Boineville Paradise a month. His deserted wife is in her husbandless home. Mischief had been wrought. It is the biographer who concedes this. We greatly need some light on Harriet's side of the case now. We need to know how she enjoyed the month. But there is no way to inform ourselves. There seems to be a strange absence of documents and letters and diaries on that side. Shelly kept a diary. The approaching Mary Godwin kept a diary. Her father kept one. Her half-sister-by-marriage adoption and the dispensation of God kept one. And the entire tribe and all its friends wrote and received letters. And the letters were kept and are producible when this biography needs them. But there are only three or four scraps of Harriet's writing and no diary. Harriet wrote plenty of letters to her husband. Nobody knows where they are, I suppose. She wrote plenty of letters to other people. Apparently they have disappeared too. Peacock says she wrote good letters. But apparently interested people had sagacity enough to mislay them in time. After all her industry she went down into her grave and lies silent there, silent when she has so much need to speak. We can only wonder at this mystery not account for it. No, there is no way of finding out what Harriet's state of feeling was during the month that Shelly was desporting himself in the Bracknell Paradise. We have to fall back upon conjecture, as our fabulous does when he has nothing more substantial to work with. Then we easily conjecture that as the days dragged by Harriet's heart grew heavier and heavier under its two burdens, shame and resentment, the shame of being pointed at and gossiped about as a deserted wife, and resentment against the woman who had beguiled her husband from her and now kept him in a disreputable captivity. Deserted wives, deserted whether for cause or without cause, find small charity among the virtuous and the discreet. We conjecture that one after another the neighbors ceased to call, that one after another they got to being engaged when Harriet called, that finally they one after another cut her dead on the street, that after that she stayed in the house day-times, and brooded over her sorrows, and night-times did the same, there being nothing else to do with the heavy hours and the silence and solitude and the dreary intervals which sleep should have charitably bridged, but didn't. Yes, mischief had been wrought. The biographer arrives at this conclusion, and it is a most just one. Then, just as you begin to have hope he is going to discover the cause of it and launch hot bolts of wrath at the guilty manufacturers of it, you have to turn away disappointed. You are disappointed and you sigh. This is what he says. The italics are mine. However the mischief may have been wrought, and at this day no one can wish to heap blame on any buried head. So it is poor Harriet after all. Stern justice must take its course, justice tempered with delicacy, justice tempered with compassion, justice that pities a forlorn dead girl and refuses to strike her, except in the back will not be ignoble and say the harsh thing, but only insinuated. Stern justice knows about the carriage and the wet nurse and the bonnet shop and the other dark things that cause this sad mischief, and may not, must not blink them. So it delivers judgment where judgment belongs, but softens the blow by not seeming to deliver judgment at all. To resume, the italics are mine. However the mischief may have been wrought, and at this day no one can wish to heap blame on any buried head. It is certain that some cause or causes of deep division between Shelley and his wife were in operation during the early part of the year 1814. This shows penetration. No deduction could be more accurate than this. There were indeed some causes of deep division, but next comes another disappointing sentence. To guess at the precise nature of these causes in the absence of definite statement were useless. Why, he has already been guessing at them for several pages, and we have been trying to out-guess him, and now, all of a sudden, he is tired of it and won't play any more. It is not quite fair to us. However, he will get over this by and by when Shelley commits his next indiscretion, and has to be guessed out of it at Harriet's expense. He may rest content with Shelley's own words. In a chance-re-paper drawn up by him three years later, they were these. Delicacy forbids me to say more than that we were disunited by incurable dissensions. As for me, I do not quite see why we should rest content with anything of the sort. It is not a very definite statement. It does not necessarily mean anything more than that he did not wish to go into the tedious details of those family quarrels. Delicacy could quite properly excuse him from saying, I was in love with Cornelia all that time. My wife kept crying and worrying about it, and upbraiding me, and begging me to cut myself free from a connection which was wronging her, and disgracing us both. And I, being stung by these reproaches, retorted with fierce and bitter speeches. For it is my nature to do that, when I am stirred, especially if the target of them is a person whom I had greatly loved and respected before, as witness my various attitudes towards Miss Hitchner, the Gisborne's, Harriet's sister, and others. And finally I did not improve this state of things when I deserted my wife and spent a whole month with a woman who had infatuated me. No, he could not go into those details, and we excuse him. But, nevertheless, we do not rest content with this bland proposition to puff away that whole long, disreputable episode with a single meaningless remark of Shelly's. We do admit that it is certain that some cause or causes of deep division were in operation. We would admit it, just the same, if the grammar of the statement were as straight as a string, for we drift into pretty indifferent grammar ourselves, when we are absorbed in historical work, but we have to decline to admit that we cannot guess those cause or causes. But guessing is not really necessary. There is evidence attainable, evidence from the batch discredited by the biographer, and set out at the back door in his appendix basket, and yet a court of law would think twice before throwing it out, whereas it would be a hardy person who would venture to offer in such a place a good part of the material which is placed before the readers of this book as evidence, and so treated by this daring biographer. Among some letters in the appendix basket from Mrs. Godwin, detailing the Godwinian share in the Shellyan events of 1814, she tells how Harriet Shelly came to her and her husband agitated and weeping to implore them to forbid Shelly the house, and prevent his seeing Mary Godwin. She related that last November he had fallen in love with Mrs. Turner and paid her such marked attentions Mr. Turner, the husband, had carried off his wife to Devonshire. The biographer finds a technical fault in this. The Shellys were in Edinburgh in November. What of that? The woman is recalling a conversation which is more than two months old. Besides she was probably more intent upon the central and important fact of it than upon its unimportant date. Harriet's quoted statement has some sense in it. For that reason, if for no other, it ought to have been put in the body of the book. Still, that would not have answered. Even the biographer's enemy could not be cruel enough to ask him to let this real grievance, this compact and substantial and picturesque figure, this raw head and bloody bones come striding in there among those pale shams, those rickety specters labelled wet nurse, bonnet shop and so on. No, the father of all malice could not ask the biographer to expose his pathetic goblins to a competition like that. The fabulist finds fault with the statement because it has a technical error in it, and he does this at the moment that he is furnishing us an error himself, and of a grave or sort. He says, if Turner carried off his wife to Devonshire, he brought her back and Shelley was staying with her and her mother on terms of cordial intimacy in March 1814. We accept the cordial intimacy. It was the very thing Harriet was complaining of, but there is nothing to show that it was Turner who brought his wife back. The statement is thrown in as if it were not only true, but was proof that Turner was not uneasy. Turner's movements are proof of nothing. Nothing but a statement from Turner's mouth would have any value here, and he made none. Six days after writing his letter, Shelley and his wife were together again for a moment to get remarried according to the rites of the English Church. Within three weeks the new husband and wife were apart again, and the former was back in his odorous paradise. This time it is the wife who does the deserting. She finds Cornelia too strong for her, probably. At any rate she goes away with her baby and sister, and we have a playful fling at her from good Mrs. Boyneville, the mysterious spinner Maimuna. She whose face was as a damsel's face, and yet her hair was gray. She of whom the biographer has said Shelley was indeed caught in an almost invisible thread spun around him, but unconsciously by this subtle and benignant enchantress. The subtle and benignant enchantress writes to Hogg, April 18th, Shelley is again a widower. His beautyous half went to town on Thursday. Then Shelley writes a poem, a chant of grief over the hard fate which obliges him now to leave his paradise and take up with his wife again. It seems to intimate that the paradise is cooling toward him, that he is warned off by acclamation, that he must not even venture to tempt with one last tear his friend Cornelia's un-gentle 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 un-gentle 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, poor 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. Boynville'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 erewhile 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 Boynville's could not endure it. And so, as we have seen, they gave this one notice. Early in May Shelly was in London. He did not yet despair of reconciliation with Harriet, nor had he ceased to love her. Today'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 Shelly declares that he has now no grief but one, the grief of having known and lost his wife's love. 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 will. But the main force of his appeal is in his closing stanza, and is strongly worded. O trust for once no airing guide, bid the remorseless feeling flee, to his malice, to his revenge, to his pride, to his anything but thee. O dain 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 eighth 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. To spend years thus and be rewarded, as thou, sweet love, requited me when none were near. Thy lips did meet mine tremblingly. Gentle and good and mild thou art, nor can I live if thou appear ought but thyself. And so on. Before the close of June it was known and felt by Mary and Shelley that each was inexpressibly dear to the other. Yes, Shelley had found this child of sixteen to his liking, and had wooed and won her in the graveyard. But that is nothing. It was better than wooing her in her nursery, at any rate, where it might have disturbed the other children. However, she was a child in years only. From the day that she set her masculine grip on Shelley, he was to frisk no more. If she had occupied the only kind and gentle Harriet's place in March, it would have been a thrilling spectacle to see her invade the Boyneville Rookery and read the riot-hacked. That holiday of Shelley's would have been of short duration, and Cornelia's hair would have been as gray as her mother's when the services were over. Hogg went to the Godwin residence in Skinner Street with Shelley on the 8th of June. They passed through Godwin's little debt factory of a bookshop, and went upstairs hunting for the proprietor. Nobody there. Shelley strode about the room impatiently, making its crazy floor quake under him. Then a door was partially and softly opened. A thrilling voice called Shelley. A thrilling voice answered, Mary. And he darted out of the room like an arrow from the bow of the far-shooting king. A very young female, fair and fair-haired, pale indeed, and with a piercing look wearing a frock of tartan, an unusual dress in London at that time, had called him out of the room. This is Mary Godwin, as described by Hogg. The thrill of the voices shows that the love of Shelley and Mary was already upward of a fortnight old. Therefore it had been born within the month of May, born while Harriet was still trying to get her poem by heart, we think. I must not be asked how I know so much about that thrill. It is my secret. The biographer and I have private ways of finding out things when it is necessary to find them out, and the customary methods fail. Shelley left London that day and was gone ten days. The biographer conjectures that he spent this interval with Harriet in Bath. It would be just like him. To the end of his days he liked to be in love with two women at once. He was more in love with Miss Hitchner when he married Harriet than he was with Harriet, and told the Lady so with simple and unostentatious candour. He was more in love with Cornelia than he was with Harriet in the end of 1813 and the beginning of 1814, yet he supplied both of them with love poems of an equal temperature meantime. He loved Mary and Harriet in June, and while getting ready to run off with one it is conjectured that he put in his odd time trying to get reconciled to the other. By and by, while still in love with Mary, he will make love to her half-sister by marriage, adoption, and the visitation of God through the medium of clandestine letters, and she will answer with letters that are for no I but his own. When Shelley encountered Mary Godwin he was looking around for another paradise. He had tastes of his own, and there were features about the Godwin establishment that strongly recommended it. Godwin was an advanced thinker and an able writer. One of his romances is still read, but his philosophical works, once so esteemed, are out of vogue now. Their authority was already declining when Shelley made his acquaintance, that is, it was declining with the public, but not with Shelley. They had been his moral and political Bible, and they were that yet. Shelley the Infidel would himself have claimed to be less a work of God than a work of Godwin. Godwin's philosophies had formed his mind and interwoven themselves into it and become a part of its texture. He regarded himself as Godwin's spiritual Godwin was not without self-appreciation. Indeed it may be conjectured that from his point of view the last syllable of his name was surplicage. He lived serene in his lofty world of philosophy, far above the mean interests that absorbed smaller men, and only came down to the ground at intervals to pass the hat for alms to pay his debts with, and insult the man that relieved him. Several of his principles were out of the ordinary. For example, he was opposed to marriage. He was not aware that his preachings from this text were but theory and wind. He supposed he was in earnest in imploring people to live together without marrying, until Shelley furnished him a working model of his scheme and a practical example to analyze by applying the principle in his own family. The matter took a different and surprising aspect then. The late Matthew Arnold said that the main defect in Shelley's makeup was that he was destitute of the sense of humor. This episode must have escaped Mr. Arnold's attention. But we have said enough about the head of the new paradise. Mrs. Godwin is described as being in several ways a terror, and even when her soul was in repose, she wore green spectacles. But I suspect that her main unattractiveness was born of the fact that she wrote the letters that are out in the appendix basket in the backyard, letters which are an outrage and wholly untrustworthy, for they say some kind things about poor Harriet and tell some disagreeable truths about her husband. And these things make the fabulous grit his teeth a good deal. Next we have Fanny Godwin, a Godwin by courtesy only. She was Mrs. Godwin's natural daughter by a former friend. She was a sweet and winning girl, but she presently wearied of the Godwin paradise and poisoned herself. Last in the list is Jane, or Claire, as she preferred to call herself, Claremont, daughter of Mrs. Godwin by a former marriage. She was very young and pretty and accommodating, and all was ready to do what she could to make things pleasant. After Shelly ran off with her part-sister Mary, she became the guest of the pair, and contributed a natural child to their nursery, Allegra. Lord Byron was the father. We have named the several members and advantages of the new paradise in Skinner Street, with its crazy bookshop underneath. Shelly was all right now, this was a better place than the other, more variety anyway, and more different kinds of fragrance. One could turn out poetry here without any trouble at all. The way the new love match came about was this. Shelly told Mary all his aggravations and sorrows and griefs, and about the wet nurse, and the bonnet shop, and the surgeon, and the carriage, and the sister-in-law that blocked the London game, and about Cornelia and her mama, and how they had turned him out of the house after making so much of him, and how he had deserted Harriet, and then Harriet had deserted him, and how the reconciliation was working along, and Harriet getting her poem by heart, and still he was not happy, and Mary pitied him, for she had had trouble herself. But I am not satisfied with this. It reads too much like statistics. It lacks smoothness and grace, and is too earthy and business-like. It has the sordid look of a trade's union procession out on strike. That is not the right form for it. The book does it better. We will fall back on the book, and have a cake-walk. It was easy to divine that some restless grief possessed him. Mary herself was not unlearned in the lore of pain. His generous zeal in her father's behalf, his spiritual sonship to Godwin, his reverence for her mother's memory, were guarantees with Mary of his excellence. What she was after was guarantees of his excellence, that he stood ready to desert his wife and child was one of them, apparently. The new friends could not lack subjects of discourse, and, underneath their words about Mary's mother and political justice and rights of woman, were two young hearts, each feeling towards the other, each perhaps unaware, trembling in the direction of the other. The desire to swage the suffering of one whose happiness has grown precious to us may become a hunger of the spirit as keen as any other, and this hunger now possessed Mary's heart. When her eyes rested unseen on Shelley, it was with a look full of the odour of a soothing pity. Yes, that is better and has more composure. That is just the way it happened. He told her about the wet nurse. She told him about political justice. He told her about the deadly sister-in-law. She told him about her mother. He told her about the bonnet shop. She murmured back about the rights of woman. Then he assuaged her. Then she assuaged him. Then he assuaged her some more. Next. She assuaged him some more. Then they both assuaged one another simultaneously, and so they went on by the hour, assuaging and assuaging and assuaging, until at last what was the result? They were in love. It will happen so every time. He had married a woman who, as he now persuaded himself, had never truly loved him, who loved only his fortune and his rank, and who proved her selfishness by deserting him in his misery. I think that that is not quite fair to Harriet. We have no certainty that she knew Cornelia had turned him out of the house. He went back to Cornelia, and Harriet may have supposed that he was as happy with her as ever. Still it was judicious to begin to lay on the white wash, for Shelly is going to need many a coat of it now, and the sooner the reader becomes used to the intrusion of the brush, the sooner he will get reconciled to it, and stop fratting about it. After Shelly's conjectured, visit to Harriet at Bath, 8th of June to 18th, it seems to have been arranged that Shelly should henceforth join the Skinner Street household each day at dinner. Nothing could be handier than this. Things will swim along now. Although now Shelly was coming to believe that his wedded union with Harriet was a thing of the past, he had not ceased to regard her with affectionate consideration. He wrote to her frequently and kept her informed of his whereabouts. We must not get impatient over these curious inharmoniousnesses and irreconcilabilities in Shelly's character. You can see by the biographer's attitude toward them that there is nothing objectionable about them. Shelly was doing his best to make two adoring young creatures happy. He was regarding the one with affectionate consideration by mail, and he was assuaging the other one at home. Unhappy Harriet, residing at Bath, had perhaps never desired that the breach between herself and her husband should be irreparable and complete. I find no fault with that sentence except that the Perhaps is not strictly warranted. It should have been left out. In support, or shall we say extenuation, of this opinion I submit that there is not sufficient evidence to warrant the uncertainty which it implies. The only evidence offered that Harriet was hard and proud and standing out against a reconciliation is a poem, the poem in which Shelly beseeches her to bid the remorseless feeling flee, and pity if she cannot love. We have just that as evidence, and out of its meager materials the biographer builds a cobhouse of conjectures as big as the Coliseum, conjectures which convince him, the prosecuting attorney, but ought to fall far short of convincing any fair-minded jury. Shelly's love poems may be very good evidence, but we know well that they are good for this day and train only. We are able to believe that they spoke the truth for that one day, but we know by experience that they could not be depended on to speak it the next. The very supplication for a re-warming of Harriet's chilled love was followed so subtly by the poet's plunge into an adoring passion for Mary Godwin that if it had been a check it would have lost its value before a lazy person could have gotten to the bank with it. Hardness, stubbornness, pride, vindictiveness—these may sometimes reside in a young wife and mother of nineteen, but they are not charged against Harriet Shelly outside of that poem, and one has no right to insert them into her character on such shadowy evidence as that. Peacock knew Harriet well, and she has a flexible and persuadable look as painted by him. Her manners were good, and her whole aspect and demeanor such manifest emanations of pure and truthful nature that to be once in her company was to know her thoroughly. She was fond of her husband, and accommodated herself in every way to his tastes. If they mixed in society she adored it. If they lived in retirement she was satisfied. If they travelled she enjoyed the change of scene. Perhaps she had never desired that the breach should be irreparable and complete. The truth is we do not even know that there was any breach at all at this time. We know that the husband and wife went before the altar, and took a new oath on the twenty-fourth of March to love and cherish each other until death, and this may be regarded as a sort of reconciliation itself, and a wiping out of the old grudges. Then Harriet went away, and the sister-in-law removed herself from her society. That was in April. Shelly wrote his appeal in May, but the corresponding went right along afterwards. We have a right to doubt that the subject of it was a reconciliation, or that Harriet had any suspicion that she needed to be reconciled, and that her husband was trying to persuade her to it, as the biographer has sought to make us believe, with his coliseum of conjectures built out of a waste-basket of poetry, for we have evidence now, not poetry and conjecture. When Shelly had been dining daily in the Skinner Street Paradise fifteen days, and continuing the love-match, which was already a fortnight old, twenty-five days earlier, he forgot to write Harriet. Forgot it the next day and the next. During four days Harriet got no letter from him. Then her fright and anxiety rose to expression-heat, and she wrote a letter to Shelly's publisher, which seems to reveal to us that Shelly's letters to her had been the customary affectionate letters of husband to wife, and had carried no appeals for reconciliation, and had not needed to. Bath Postmark July 7th, 1814 My dear sir, you will greatly oblige me by giving the enclosed to Mr. Shelly. 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 demeanour 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 re-marriage 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 honour 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. One, Shelley believed so-and-so. Two, Byron's discarded mistress says that Shelley told Mary Godwin so-and-so, and Mary told her. Three, Shelley said so-and-so, and later admitted over and over again that he had been in error. Four, 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 defenceless 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. The charge insinuated by these odious slanders is one of the most difficult of all offenses to prove. It is also one which no man has a right to mention, even in a whisper about any woman living or dead, unless he knows it to be true, and not even then, unless he can also prove it to be true. There is no justification for the abomination of putting this stuff in the book. Against Harriet Shelley's good name there is not one scrap of tarnishing evidence, not even a scrap of evil gossip that comes from a source that entitles it to a hearing. On the credit side of the account we have strong opinions from the people who knew her best. Peacock says, I feel it due to the memory of Harriet to state my most decided conviction that her conduct as a wife was as pure as true as absolutely faultless as that of any who for such conduct are held most in honour. Thornton Hunt, who had picked and published slight flaws in Harriet's character, says, as regards this alleged large one, there is not a trace of evidence or a whisper of scandal against her before her voluntary departure from Shelley. Trelawney says, I was assured by the evidence of the few friends who knew both Shelley and his wife, Hookam, Hogg, Peacock, and one of the Godwins, that Harriet was perfectly innocent of all offence. What excuse was there for raking up a parcel of foul rumours from malicious and discredited sources and flinging them at this dead girl's head? Her very defencelessness should have been her protection. The fact that all letters to her or about her, with almost every scrap of her own writing, had been diligently mislaid, leaving her case destitute of a voice, while every pen stroke which could help her husband's side had been as diligently preserved, should have excused her from being brought to trial. Her witnesses have all disappeared. Yet we see her summoned in her grave clothes to plead for the life of her character, without the help of an advocate, before a disqualified judge and a packed jury. Harriet Shelley wrote her distressed letter on the seventh of July. On the twenty-eighth her husband ran away with Mary Godwin and her part-sister Claire to the Continent. He deserted his wife when her confinement was approaching. She bore him a child at the end of November. His mistress bore him another one, something over two months later. The truants were back in London before either of these events occurred. On one occasion, presently, Shelley was so pressed for money to support his mistress with, that he went to his wife and got some money of his that was in her hands—twenty pounds. Yet the mistress was not moved to gratitude. For later, when the wife was troubled to meet her engagements, the mistress makes this entry in her diary. Harriet sends her creditors here. Nasty woman! Now we shall have to change our lodgings. The deserted wife bore the bitterness and obliquy of her situation two years and a quarter. Then she gave up and drowned herself. A month afterwards the body was found in the water. Three weeks later Shelley married his mistress. I must here be allowed to italicise a remark of the biographers concerning Harriet Shelley, that no act of Shelley's during the two years which immediately preceded her death tended to cause the rash act which brought her life to its close seems certain. Yet her husband had deserted her and her children and was living with a concubine all that time. Why should a person attempt to write biography when the simplest facts have no meaning to him? This book is littered with, as crass stupidities is that one, deductions by the page which bear no discoverable kinship to their premises. The biographer throws off that extraordinary remark without any perceptible disturbance to his serenity, for he follows it with a sentimental justification of Shelley's conduct which has not a pang of conscience in it, but is silky and smooth and undulating and pious, a cakewalk with all the coloured brethren at their best. There may be people who can read that page and keep their temper, but it is doubtful. Shelley's life has the one indelible blot upon it, but is otherwise worshipfully noble and beautiful. It even stands out indestructibly gracious and lovely from the ruck of these disastrous pages, in spite of the fact that they expose and establish his responsibility for his forsaken wife's pitiful fate, a responsibility which he himself tacitly admits in a letter to Eliza Westbrook wherein he refers to his taking up with Mary Godwin as an act which Eliza might exclusively regard as the cause of her sister's ruin. The Pathfinder and the Deer Slayer stand at the head of Cooper's novels as artistic creations. There are others of his works which contain parts as perfect as are to be found in these and scenes even more thrilling. Not one can be compared with either of them as a finished whole. The defects in both of these tales are comparatively slight. They were pure works of art. The Five Tales reveal an extraordinary fullness of invention, one of the very greatest characters in fiction, Natty Bumpo. The craft of the woodsman, the tricks of the trapper, all the delicate art of the forest, were familiar to Cooper from his youth up, Professor Brander Matthews. Cooper is the greatest artist in the domain of romantic fiction yet produced by America, Wilkie Collins. It seems, to me, that it was far from right for the Professor of English Literature in Yale, the Professor of English Literature in Columbia, and Wilkie Collins to deliver opinions on Cooper's literature without having read some of it. It would have been much more decorous to keep silent and let persons talk who have read Cooper. Cooper's art has some defects. In one place in Deer Slayer and in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offenses against literary art out of a possible 115. It breaks the record. There are nineteen rules governing literary art in the domain of romantic fiction, some say twenty-two. In Deer Slayer, Cooper violated eighteen of them. These eighteen require, one, that a tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere. But the Deer Slayer tale accomplishes nothing and arrives in the air. Two, they require that the episodes of a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale and shall help to develop it. But as the Deer Slayer tale is not a tale, and accomplishes nothing and arrives nowhere, the episodes have no rightful place in the work, since there was nothing for them to develop. Three, they require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others. But this detail has often been overlooked in the Deer Slayer tale. Four, they require that the personages in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there. But this detail also has been overlooked in the Deer Slayer tale. Five, they require that when the personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances and have a discoverable meaning, also a discoverable purpose, and a show of relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject in hand, and be interesting to the reader and help out the tale, and stop when the people cannot think of anything more to say. But this requirement has been ignored from the beginning of the Deer Slayer tale to the end of it. Six, they require that when the author describes the character of a personages in his tale, the conduct and conversation of that personage shall justify said description. But this law gets little or no attention in the Deer Slayer tale, as Natty Bumpo's case will amply prove. Seven, they require that when a personage talks like an illustrated, guilt-edged, tree-calf, hand-tooled, seven-dollar friendship's offering in the beginning of a paragraph, he shall not talk like a negro minstrel in the end of it. But this rule is flung down and danced upon in the Deer Slayer tale. Eight, they require that crass stupidities shall not be played upon the reader as the craft of the woodsmen, the delicate art of the forest, by either the author or the people in the tale. But this rule is persistently violated in the Deer Slayer tale. Nine, they require that the personages of a tale shall confine themselves to possibilities and let miracles alone. Or if they venture a miracle, the author must so plausibly set it forth as to make it look possible and reasonable. But these rules are not respected in the Deer Slayer tale. Ten, they require that the author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and in their fate, and that he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones. But the reader of the Deer Slayer tale dislikes the good people in it, is indifferent to the others, and wishes they would all get drowned together. Eleven, they require that the characters in a tale shall be so clearly defined that the reader can tell beforehand what each will do in a given emergency. But in the Deer Slayer tale this rule is vacated. In addition to these large rules there are some little ones. These require that the author shall, twelve, say what he is proposing to say, not merely come near it. Thirteen, use the right word, not its second cousin. Fourteen, eschew surplicage. Fifteen, not omit necessary details. Sixteen, avoid slovenliness of form. Seventeen, use good grammar. Eighteen, employ a simple and straightforward style. Even these seven are coldly and persistently violated in the Deer Slayer tale. Cooper's gift in the way of invention was not a rich endowment. But such as it was, he liked to work it, he was pleased with the effects, and indeed he did some quite sweet things with it. In his little box of stage properties he kept six or eight cunning devices, tricks, artificies, for his savages and woodsmen to deceive and circumvent each other with, and he was never so happy as when he was working these innocent things and seeing them go. A favourite one was to make a moccasin'd person tread in the tracks of the moccasin'd enemy, and thus hide his own trail. Cooper wore out barrels and barrels of moccasins in working that trick. Another stage property that he pulled out of his box, pretty frequently, was his broken twig. He prized his broken twig above all the rest of his effects, and worked it the hardest. It is a restful chapter in any book of his when somebody doesn't step on a dry twig and alarm all the reds and whites for two hundred yards around. Every time a Cooper person is in peril, and absolute silence is worth four dollars a minute, he is sure to step on a dry twig. There may be a hundred handier things to step on, but that wouldn't satisfy Cooper. Cooper requires him to turn out and find a dry twig, and if he can't do it, go and borrow one. In fact, the Leather Stocking Series ought to have been called the Broken Twig Series. I am sorry there is not room to put in a few dozen instances of the delicate art of the forest as practiced by Natty Bumpo and some of the other Cooperian experts. Perhaps we may venture two or three samples. Cooper was a sailor, a naval officer. Yet he gravely tells us how a vessel, driving towards a lee shore in a gale, is steered for a particular spot by her skipper, because he knows of an undertow there which will hold her back against the gale and save her. For just pure woodcraft, or sailorcraft, or whatever it is, isn't that neat? For several years Cooper was daily in the society of artillery, and he ought to have noticed that when a cannon ball strikes the ground it either buries itself or skips a hundred feet or so, skips again a hundred feet or so, and so on till finally it gets tired and rolls. Now in one place he loses some females, as he always calls women, in the edge of a wood near a plain at night in a fog on purpose, to give Bumpo a chance to show off the delicate art of the forest before the reader. These mislaid people are hunting for a fort. They hear a cannon blast, and a cannon ball presently comes rolling into the wood and stops at their feet. To the females this suggests nothing. The case is very different with the admirable Bumpo. I wish I may never know peace again if he doesn't strike out promptly and follow the track of that cannon ball across the plain through the dense fog and find the fort. Isn't it a daisy? If Cooper had any real knowledge of nature's ways of doing things, he had a most delicate art in concealing the fact. For instance, one of his acute Indian experts, Chingakook, pronounced Chicago I think, has lost the trail of a person he is tracking through the forest. Apparently that trail is hopelessly lost. Neither you nor I could ever have guessed out the way to find it. It was very different with Chicago. Chicago was not stumped for long. He turned a running stream out of its course, and there in the slush in its old bed were that person's moccasin tracks. The current did not wash them away as it would have done in all other like cases. No, even the eternal laws of nature have to vacate when Cooper wants to put up a delicate job of woodcraft on the reader. We must be a little wary when Brander Matthews tells us that Cooper's books reveal an extraordinary fullness of invention. As a rule I am quite willing to accept Brander Matthews' literary judgments and applaud his lucid and graceful phrasing of them. But that particular statement needs to be taken with a few tons of salt. Bless your heart, Cooper hadn't any more invention than a horse, and I don't mean a high class horse either. I mean a clothes horse. It would be very difficult to find a really clever situation in Cooper's books, and still more difficult to find one of any kind which he has failed to render absurd by his handling of it. Look at the episodes of The Caves, and at the celebrated scuffle between Macquah and those others on the table land a few days later, and at Harry Harry's queer water transit from the castle to the ark, and at Dearslayer's half-hour with his first corpse, and at the quarrel between Harry Harry and Dearslayer later, and at—but choose for yourself. You can't go amiss. If Cooper had been an observer, his inventive faculty would have worked better. Not more interestingly, but more rationally, more plausibly. Cooper's proudest creations in the way of situations suffer noticeably from the absence of the observer's protecting gift. Cooper's eye was splendidly inaccurate. Cooper seldom saw anything correctly. He saw nearly all things as through a glass-eyed darkly. Of course, a man who cannot see the commonest little everyday matters accurately is working at a disadvantage when he is constructing a situation. In the Dearslayer tale Cooper has a stream which is fifty feet wide where it flows out of a lake. It presently narrows to twenty as it meanders along for no given reason, and yet when a stream acts like that it ought to be required to explain itself. Fourteen pages later the width of the brook's outlet from the lake has suddenly shrunk thirty feet and become the narrowest part of the stream. This shrinkage is not accounted for. The stream has bends in it, a sure indication that it has alluvial banks and cuts them. Yet these bends are only thirty and fifty feet long. If Cooper had been a nice and punctilious observer, he would have noticed that the bends were oftener nine hundred feet long than short of it. Cooper made the exit of that stream fifty feet wide in the first place for no particular reason. In the second place he narrowed it to less than twenty to accommodate some Indians. He bends a sapling to the form of an arch over this narrow passage and conceals six Indians in its foliage. They are laying for a settler's scowl or ark which is coming up the stream on its way to the lake. It is being hauled against the stiff current by a rope whose stationary end is anchored in the lake. Its rate of progress cannot be more than a mile an hour. Cooper describes the ark, but pretty obscurely. In the matter of dimensions it was little more than a modern canal boat. Let us guess then that it was about one hundred and forty feet long. It was of greater breadth than common. Let us guess then that it was about sixteen feet wide. This leviathan had been prowling down bends which were but a third as long as itself and scraping between banks where it had only two feet of space to spare on each side. We cannot too much admire this miracle. A low-roofed log-dwelling occupies two-thirds of the ark's length, a dwelling ninety feet long and sixteen feet wide, let us say, a kind of vestibule train. The dwelling has two rooms, each forty-five feet long and sixteen feet wide, let us guess. One of them is the bedroom of the hotter girls, Judith and Hetty. The other is the parlor in the daytime. At night it is Papa's bed chamber. The ark is arriving at the stream's exit now whose width has been reduced to less than twenty feet to accommodate the Indians, say to eighteen. There is a foot to spare on each side of the boat. Did the Indians notice that there was going to be a tight squeeze there? Did they notice that they could make money by climbing down out of that arched sapling and just stepping aboard when the ark scraped by? No, other Indians would have noticed these things, but Cooper's Indians never notice anything. Cooper thinks they are marvelous creatures for noticing, but he was almost always in error about his Indians. There was seldom a sane one among them. The ark is one hundred and forty feet long. The dwelling is ninety feet long. The idea of the Indians is to drop softly and secretly from the arched sapling to the dwelling as the ark creeps along under it at the rate of a mile an hour and butcher the family. It will take the ark a minute and a half to pass under. It will take the ninety foot dwelling a minute to pass under. Now, then, what did the six Indians do? It would take you thirty years to guess, and even then you would have to give it up, I believe. Therefore I will tell you what the Indians did. Their chief, a person of quite extraordinary intellect for a Cooper Indian, warily watched the canal boat as it squeezed along under him, and when he got his calculations find down to exactly the right shade as he judged, he let go and dropped and missed the house. That is actually what he did. He missed the house and landed in the stern of the scow. It was not much of a fall, yet it knocked him silly. He lay there unconscious. If the house had been ninety-seven feet long he would have made the trip. The fault was Cooper's, not his. The air lay in the construction of the house. Cooper was no architect. There still remained in the roost five Indians. The boat has passed under and is now out of their reach. Let me explain what the five did. You would not be able to reason it out for yourself. Number one jumped for the boat, but fell in the water a stern of it. Then, number two jumped for the boat, but fell in the water still farther a stern of it. Then, number three jumped for the boat and fell a good way a stern of it. Then, number four jumped for the boat and fell in the water away a stern. Then, even number five made a jump for the boat, for he was a Cooper Indian. In the matter of intellect the difference between a Cooper Indian and the Indian that stands in front of the cigar shop is not spacious. The Scow episode is really a sublime burst of invention, but it does not thrill, because the inaccuracy of the details throws a sort of air of fictitiousness and general improbability over it. This comes of Cooper's inadequacy as an observer. The reader will find some examples of Cooper's high talent for inaccurate observation in the account of the shooting match in the Pathfinder. A common wrought nail was driven lightly into the target, its head having been first touched with paint. The color of the paint is not stated, an important omission, but Cooper deals freely in important omissions. No, after all, it was not an important omission, for this nail head is a hundred yards from the marksmen, and could not be seen by them at that distance, no matter what its color might be. How far can the best eyes see a common housefly? A hundred yards? It is quite impossible. Very well, eyes that cannot see a housefly, that is, a hundred yards away, cannot see an ordinary nail head at that distance, for the size of the two objects is the same. It takes a keen eye to see a fly or a nail head at fifty yards, one hundred and fifty feet. Can the reader do it? The nail was lightly driven, its head painted, and game called. Then the Cooper Miracles began. The bullet of the first marksman chipped an edge of the nail head. The next man's bullet drove the nail a little way into the target, and removed all the paint. Haven't the Miracles gone far enough now? Not to suit Cooper, for the purpose of this whole scheme is to show off his prodigy, dear Slayer Hawkeye, long, rifle, leather, stocking, pathfinder, bumpo, before the ladies. Be all ready to clinch it, boys, cried out pathfinder, stepping into his friend's tracks, the instant they were vacant. Never mind a new nail. I can see that, though the paint is gone, and what I can see I can hit at a hundred yards, though it were only a mosquito's eye. Be ready to clinch. The rifle cracked, the bullet sped its way, and the head of the nail was buried in the wood, covered by the piece of flattened lead. There, you see, is a man who could hunt flies with a rifle, and command a dookal salary in a Wild West show today, if we had him back with us. The recorded feat is certainly surprising just as it stands, but it is not surprising enough for Cooper. Cooper adds a touch. He has made pathfinder do this miracle with another man's rifle, and not only that, but pathfinder did not have even the advantage of loading it himself. He had everything against him, and yet he made that impossible shot, and not only made it, but did it with absolute confidence, saying, Be ready to clinch. Now a person like that would have undertaken that same feat with a brick bat, and with Cooper to help, he would have achieved it too. Pathfinder showed off handsomely that day before the ladies. His very first feat was a thing which no Wild West show can touch. He was standing with a group of marksmen, observing a hundred yards from the target, mind. One jasper raised his rifle, and drove the center of the bullseye. Then the quartermaster fired. The target exhibited no result this time. There was a laugh. It's a dead miss, said Major Lundy. Pathfinder waited an impressive moment or two, and then said in that calm, indifferent, know-it-all way of his, No, Major. He has covered Jasper's bullet, as will be seen if anyone will take the trouble to examine the target. Wasn't it remarkable how could he see that little pellet fly through the air and enter that distant bullet-hole? Yet that is what he did, for nothing is impossible to a Cooper person. Did any of those people have any deep-seated doubts about this thing? No. Or that would imply sanity. And these were all Cooper people. The respect for Pathfinder's skill, and for his quickness and accuracy of sight, the italics are mine, was so profound and general that the instant he made this declaration, the spectators began to distrust their own opinions, and a dozen rushed to the target in order to ascertain the fact. There, sure enough, it was found that the quartermaster's bullet had gone through the hole made by Jasper's, and that, too, so accurately as to require a minute examination to be certain of the circumstances, which, however, was soon clearly established by discovering one bullet over the other in the stump against which the target was placed. They made a minute examination. But never mind. How could they know that there were two bullets in that hole without digging the latest one out? For neither probe nor eyesight could prove the presence of any more than one bullet. Did they dig? No, as we shall see. It is the Pathfinder's turn now. He steps out before the ladies, takes aim and fires, but alas, here is a disappointment. An incredible and unimaginable disappointment, for the target's aspect is unchanged. There is nothing there but that same old bullet hole. If one dared to hint at such a thing, cried Major Duncan, I should say that the Pathfinder has also missed the target. As nobody had missed it yet, the also was not necessary. But never mind about that, for the Pathfinder is going to speak. No, no, Major, said he confidently, that would be a risky declaration. I didn't load the piece, I can't say what was in it, but if it was led, you will find the bullet driving down those of the quartermaster and Jasper, else is not my name Pathfinder. A shout from the target announced the truth of this assertion. Is the miracle sufficient, as it stands? Not for Cooper. The Pathfinder speaks again, as he now slowly advances toward the stage occupied by the females. That's not all, boys, that's not all. If you find the target touched at all, I'll own to amiss. The quartermaster cut the wood, but you'll find no wood cut by that last messenger. The miracle is at last complete. He knew, doubtless saw, at the distance of a hundred yards, that his bullet had passed into the hole without fraying the edges. There were now three bullets in that one hole, three bullets embedded processionally in the body of the stump back of the target. Everybody knew this, somehow or other, and yet nobody had dug any of them out to make sure. Cooper is not a close observer, but he is interesting. He is certainly always that, no matter what happens. And he is more interesting when he is not noticing what he is about than when he is. This is a considerable merit. The conversations in the Cooper Books have a curious sound in our modern ears. To believe that such talk really ever came out of people's mouths would be to believe that there was a time when time was of no value to a person who thought he had something to say. When it was the custom to spread a two-minute remark out to ten, when a man's mouth was a rolling mill and busied itself all day long in turning four-foot pigs of thought into thirty-foot bars of conversational railroad iron by attenuation, when subjects were seldom faithfully stuck to, but the talk wandered all around and arrived nowhere. When conversations consisted mainly of irrelevancies, with here and there a relevancy, a relevancy with an embarrassed look as not being able to explain how it got there, Cooper was certainly not a master in the construction of dialogue. Inaccurate observation defeated him here as it defeated him in so many other enterprises of his. He even failed to notice that the man who talks corrupt English six days in the week must and will talk it on the seventh, and can't help himself. In the Dear Slayer story, he lets Dear Slayer talk the showiest kind of book talk sometimes, and at other times the basest of base dialects. For instance, when someone asks him if he has a sweetheart, and if so where she abides, this is his majestic answer. She's in the forest, hanging from the boughs of the trees, in a soft rain, in the dew on the open grass, the clouds that float about in the blue heavens, the birds that sing in the woods, the sweet springs where I slake my thirst, and in all the other glorious gifts that come from God's providence. And he preceded that a little before with this. It concerns me as all things that touches a fran concerns a fran. And this is another of his remarks. If I was engine-born now, I might tell of this, or carry in the scalp and boast of the exploit before the whole tribe, or if my enemy had only been a bear, and so on. We cannot imagine such a thing as a veteran scotch commander-in-chief comporting himself in the field like a windy, melodramatic actor. But Cooper could. On one occasion Alice and Cora were being chased by the French through a fog in the neighborhood of their father's fort. Cried an eager pursuer, who seemed to direct the operations of the enemy, stand firm and be ready, my gallant sixtieths. Suddenly exclaimed a voice above them, wait to see the enemy, fire low, and sweep the glaces. Father, father! exclaimed a piercing cry from out the mist. It is I, Alice, they own Elsie. Spare, oh, save your daughters! Hold! shouted the former speaker, in the awful tones of parental agony, the sound reaching even to the woods, and rolling back in solemn echo, to she! God has restored me, my children! Throw open the sally-port, to the field, sixtieths, to the field! Pull not a trigger, lest ye kill my lambs! Drive off these dogs of France with your steel! Cooper's word sense was singularly dull. When a person has a poor ear for music, he will flat and sharp, right along, without knowing it. He keeps near the tune, but it is not the tune. When a person has a poor ear for words, the result is a literary, flatting and sharping. You perceive what he is intending to say, but you also perceive that he doesn't say it. This is Cooper. He was not a word musician. His ear was satisfied with the approximate word. I will furnish some circumstantial evidence in support of this charge. My instances are gathered from half a dozen pages of the tale called Dear Slayer. He uses verbal for oral, precision for facility, phenomena for marvels, necessary for predetermined, unsophisticated for primitive, preparation for expectancy, rebuked for subdued, dependent on for resulting from, fact for condition, fact for conjecture, precaution for caution, explain for determined, mortified for disappointed, meretricious for factitious, materially for considerably, decreasing for deepening, increasing for disappearing, embedded for enclosed, treacherous for hostile, stood for stooped, softened for replaced, rejoined for remarked, situation for condition, different for differing, insensible for insentient, brevity for celerity, distrusted for suspicious, mental imbecility for imbecility, eyes for sight, counteracting for opposing, funeral obsequies for obsequies. There have been daring people in the world who claimed that Cooper could write English, but they are all dead now. All dead but Lounsbury—I don't remember that Lounsbury makes the claim in so many words, still he makes it, for he says that Dear Slayer is a pure work of art. Pure in that connection means faultless, faultless in all details, and language is a detail. If Mr. Lounsbury had only compared Cooper's English with the English which he writes himself, but it is plain that he didn't. And so it is likely that he imagines until this day that Cooper's is as clean and compact as his own. Now I feel sure, deep down, in my heart, that Cooper wrote about the poorest English that exists in our language, and that the English of Dear Slayer is the very worst that even Cooper ever wrote. I may be mistaken, but it does seem to me that Dear Slayer is not a work of art in any sense. It does seem to me that it is destitute of every detail that goes to the making of a work of art. In truth, it seems to me that Dear Slayer is just simply a literary delirium tremors. A work of art? It has no invention. It has no order, system, sequence, or result. It has no life likeness, no thrill, no stir, no seeming of reality. Its characters are confusedly drawn, and by their acts and words they prove that they are not the sort of people the author claims that they are. Its humor is pathetic, its pathos is funny, its conversations are indescribable, its love scenes odious, its English a crime against the language. Counting these out, what is left is art. I think we must all admit that. End of Chapter 3. Phenomore Cooper's Literary Offenses. Read by John Greenman.