Page:In defense of Harriet Shelley, and other essays.djvu/46

 MARK TWAIN

air of judicial investigation, and its positiveness would wilt into dubiety.

The biographer says of Harriet, &quot;If words of tender affection and motherly pride proved the reality of love, then undoubtedly she loved her first born child.&quot; That is, if mere empty words can prove it, it stands proved and in this way, with out committing himself, he gives the reader a chance to infer that there isn t any extant evidence but words, and that he doesn t take much stock in them. How seldom he shows his hand ! He is always lurk ing behind a non-committal &quot;if&quot; or something of that kind; always gliding and dodging around, dis tributing colorless poison here and there and every where, but always leaving himself in a position to say that his language will be found innocuous if taken to pieces and examined. He clearly exhibits a steady and never-relaxing purpose to make Harriet the scapegoat for her husband s first great sin but it is in the general view that this is revealed, not in the details. His insidious literature is like blue water; you know what it is that makes it blue, but you cannot produce and verify any detail of the cloud of microscopic dust in it that does it. Your adversary can dip up a glassful and show you that it is pure white and you cannot deny it ; and he can dip the lake dry, glass by glass, and show that every glassful is white, and prove it to any one s eye and yet that lake was blue and you can swear it. This book is blue with slander in solution.

Let the reader examine, for example, the para graph of comment which immediately follows the

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