Defence of Harriet Shelley | Page 4

been

living on the fat diet spread for the righteous in Professor Dowden's
Life of Shelley, if I had been justly dealt with.
During these six years I have been living a life of peaceful ignorance. I
was not aware that Shelley's first wife was unfaithful to him, and that
that was why he deserted her and wiped the stain from his sensitive
honor by entering into soiled relations with Godwin's young daughter.
This was all new to me when I heard it lately, and was told that the
proofs of it were in this book, and that this book's verdict is accepted in
the girls' colleges of America and its view taught in their literary
classes.
In each of these six years multitudes of young people in our country
have arrived at the Shelley-reading age. Are these six multitudes
unacquainted with this life of Shelley? Perhaps they are; indeed, one
may feel pretty sure that the great bulk of them are. To these, then, I
address myself, in the hope that some account of this romantic
historical fable and the fabulist's manner of constructing and adorning it
may interest them.
First, as to its literary style. Our negroes in America have several ways
of entertaining themselves which are not found among the whites
anywhere. Among these inventions of theirs is one which is particularly
popular with them. It is a competition in elegant deportment. They hire
a hall and bank the spectators' seats in rising tiers along the two sides,
leaving all the middle stretch of the floor free. A cake is provided as a
prize for the winner in the competition, and a bench of experts in
deportment is appointed to award it. Sometimes there are as many as
fifty contestants, male and female, and five hundred spectators. One at
a time the contestants enter, clothed regardless of expense in what each
considers the perfection of style and taste, and walk down the vacant
central space and back again with that multitude of critical eyes on
them. All that the competitor knows of fine airs and graces he throws
into his carriage, all that he knows of seductive expression he throws
into his countenance. He may use all the helps he can devise: watch-
chain to twirl with his fingers, cane to do graceful things with, snowy
handkerchief to flourish and get artful effects out of, shiny new
stovepipe hat to assist in his courtly bows; and the colored lady may
have a fan to work up her effects with, and smile over and blush behind,
and she may add other helps, according to her judgment. When the

review by individual detail is over, a grand review of all the contestants
in procession follows, with all the airs and graces and all the bowings
and smirkings on exhibition at once, and this enables the bench of
experts to make the necessary comparisons and arrive at a verdict. The
successful competitor gets the prize which I have before mentioned,
and an abundance of applause and envy along with it. The negroes have
a name for this grave deportment-tournament; a name taken from the
prize contended for. They call it a Cakewalk.
This Shelley biography is a literary cake-walk. The ordinary forms of
speech are absent from it. All the pages, all the paragraphs, walk by
sedately, elegantly, not to say mincingly, in their Sunday-best, shiny
and sleek, perfumed, and with boutonnieres in their button-holes; it is
rare to find even a chance sentence that has forgotten to dress. If the
book wishes to tell us that Mary Godwin, child of sixteen, had known
afflictions, the fact saunters forth in this nobby outfit: "Mary was
herself not unlearned in the lore of pain"--meaning by that that she had
not always traveled on asphalt; or, as some authorities would frame it,
that she had "been there herself," a form which, while preferable to the
book's form, is still not to be recommended. If the book wishes to tell
us that Harriet Shelley hired a wet-nurse, that commonplace fact gets
turned into a dancing-master, who does his professional bow before us
in pumps and knee-breeches, with his fiddle under one arm and his
crush-hat under the other, thus: "The beauty of Harriet's motherly
relation to her babe was marred in Shelley's eyes by the introduction
into his house of a hireling nurse to whom was delegated the mother's
tenderest office."
This is perhaps the strangest book that has seen the light since
Frankenstein. Indeed, it is a Frankenstein itself; a Frankenstein with the
original infirmity supplemented by a new one; a Frankenstein with the
reasoning faculty wanting. Yet it believes it can reason, and is always
trying. It is not content to leave a mountain of fact standing in the clear
sunshine, where the