Page:In defense of Harriet Shelley, and other essays.djvu/66

 MARK TWAIN

I find no fault with that sentence except that the &quot;perhaps&quot; 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 &quot;evidence&quot; offered that Harriet was hard and proud and standing out against a reconciliation is a poem the poem in which Shelley beseeches her to &quot;bid the remorse less feeling flee&quot; and &quot;pity&quot; if she &quot;cannot love.&quot; We have just that as &quot;evidence,&quot; 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.

Shelley s love poems may be very good evidence, but we know well that they are &quot;good for this day and train &quot;only.&quot; 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 suddenly by the poet s plunge into an adoring pas sion 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 Shelley outside of that poem, and one has no right to insert them into her character on such

�� �