"Ode to the West Wind" proves that Shelley "could and did revise, invariably, for the better." We italicise the adverb. The poet's changing relations with Harriet Westbrook, however, create the problem which Professor Peck attacks most vigorously, and repeatedly. He sides with Harriet against her husband on much the same grounds as those presented by Mark Twain, whose essay is largely unfair to the intention of Dowden's work and is a misguided if spirited defence of a quite unreal Harriet. Professor Peck, who is nearer the evidence than Mark Twain could have been, supports and sometimes quotes the latter, and would agree with Amy Lowell that Shelley "brutally deserted" Harriet. Indeed, he describes the abandonment as "sudden, selfish, deliberate." He makes much of Shelley's reference, in a letter to Fanny Godwin, to "the ease and simplicity" of Harriet's habits, but fails to answer the account of his colleague,* Mr. Roger Ingpen (based largely, of course, on Hogg) of the later development in Harriet of extravagant ways. Professor Peck presents (I, 345) a list of six charges that other biographers have made against Harriet, only two of which, we agree, are really important. One is that Harriet had been unfaithful to Shelley in March, 1814; the other, that Eliza Westbrook persisted in remaining as a member of the Shelley household in spite of the poet's "unbounded abhorrence for this miserable wretch." The first of these charges Professor Peck meets by calling for the evidence, apart from the references contained in Shelley's letter to Mary of January 11th, 1817, and Godwin's letter to Baxter of May 12th, 1817. True, no certain evidence is available, yet was Shelley (who actually invited Harriet, calling himself her "firm and constant friend," to join him and Mary in Switzerland) the sort of man to produce such proof during *See Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Edited by Roger Ingpen. P. 422. Mr. Ingpen and Professor Peck are co-editors of the Julian Edition of Shelley's works. the suit in Chancery for the recovery of his children after Harriet's death, as Professor Peck thinks that he must have done if he had actually possessed it? Dr. Peck does not quote Shelley's words of 1820 to the remonstrant Southey in which he solemnly takes God to witness that he is “innocent of ill, either done or intended; the consequences you allude to flowed in no respect from me. If you were my friend, I could tell you a history that would make you open your eyes; but I shall certainly never make the public my familiar confidant." As Mary said, in her note to "Alastor,” "in all he did, he, at the time of doing it, believed himself justified to his own conscience." And Shelley's answer to the plaintiffs in the suit referred to above was that "this Defendant and his late wife agreed in consequence of certain differences between them to live separate and apart from each other, but this Defendant denies that he deserted his said wife otherwise than by separating from her as aforesaid." Dr. Peck asserts that the poet also “deserted" his and Harriet's children; but Shelley explained to the court that he had strongly desired to have the children with him during Harriet's life, but had yielded for the time to Harriet's wish to keep them with her, and that he had never "in any way abandoned or deserted them or had any intention of so doing." Why should not this explanation be accepted? Dr. Peck objects to Shelley's reticence about his past feelings for his first wife, when he was writing to Mary about poor Harriet's end. His reticence "leaves us cold, amazed, wondering" (I, 505). And again, he argues that if Harriet had given Shelley cause for divorce, he would, in 1817, at the Chancery trial, "hardly have spared his dead wife's memory when the custody of his two living children was at stake." (II, 185). These statements do not persuade us that the biographer knows his man. As to Eliza Westbrook, the author concedes that "she was perhaps the spark that set the magazine ablaze" and that she "should no doubt have withdrawn from the Shelley household earlier." But if Harriet loved her husband deeply why did she not dismiss the trouble-making Eliza? And the list of points presented against Harriet is in any case incomplete. We should add three: (1) That the marriage was not based on reciprocal love, but was entered into at Harriet's solicitation by a romantic and chivalrous youth of nineteen, who must have felt toward her much as Jules felt toward Phene in "Pippa Passes": If whoever loves Must be, in some sort, god or worshipper, (2) That Harriet had an honest but commonplace mind, The statement that "Shelley attempted to exonerate himself for his sudden attachment of 1814 by placing the blame upon Mary" (I, 367) is unsupported save by a letter from Harriet to her friend Catherine Nugent and by a sentence (which Professor Peck seems to misunderstand) in a lost letter from Shelley to Eliza. The former does not prove that Shelley actually so represented matters to Harriet, who had her natural wifely pride and who often exag gerated; nor does the latter mean that Shelley admitted what our author now asserts. Was he not rather trying charitably to anticipate Eliza's probable point of view? It is with real regret that we have expressed a less than favorable opinion of a work which must have taxed heavily the patience and perseverance of the writer. His readers must indeed approve the fidelity of the biographer to the requirements of his task, as he has conceived them. We must thank him also for the new material presented in the book proper and in the appendices, for his sound analysis of Elizabeth Hitchener's character, and for his sincere effort to examine Shelley's genius on its religious and reformatory sides. If the work does not yield a clear portrait of Shelley we must remind ourselves that no biography, “psychography" or other examination of a great figure—least of all, perhaps, of a poet-can be regarded as final or exhaustive. In the case of Shelley, the task has been essayed often and each contributor has played his part. Hogg has been chatty and human, Medwin gossipy yet informative, Peacock companionable, Dowden charitable and conscientious, Clutton-Brock urbane but casual, Maurois facile and gamesome, Mrs. Campbell frank and reasonable, while many briefer commentators have said some indispensable things. This at least may be said of the present biographer: that he has tried hard and long, and not always unsuccessfully, to balance the various accounts in the book-keeping of the Shelley problem. ART IN MODERN LIFE AND INDUSTRY BY ARTHUR THEODORE FINCH NYONE who at any time has tried to give expression to some sound idea in any field of work or thought has been countered by someone else or many somebodies who considered it as difficult, perhaps even dangerous, of application to our everyday life and mode of working. When further questioned for their grounds of objection to the idea, invariably one of their stock replies is that the public or public opinion would have nothing to do with it. Sometimes they go further than mere verbal objection and launch a campaign against the idea with their stalking-horse, the public, as the cover behind which they make the attack! If James Watt, Roebuck, or Robert Fulton, using Watt's engine to drive the first steamer on the Hudson, had succumbed to the chimeras of the somebodies, it is not unlikely that America's industrial development would have been different from what it is. Undeterred by the mugwumps, the men of ideas say "Let us do something"-something special, as did the pioneers of modern sanitation. Seeing what is bad in the field of manufacture of articles in daily use, there would come to them the idea that the bad can only be transformed by focussing attention on the fundamental principles of good design as a measure of common sense. It is the merit of the two Year Books for 1927 that they bring together a wealth of varied and representative illustrations of modern efforts in the production of good forms and appropriate decoration of household things and of sound architectural planning and construction in domestic and The Economic Laws of Art Production. By Sir Hubert Llewellyn Smith, G. C. B. New York: Oxford University Press. $1.50. The Studio Year Book of Decorative Art, 1927. Edited by Geoffrey Holme and Shirley B. Wainwright. New York: Stevens & Brown, wrappers $2; cloth, $2.50. Design in Everyday Life and Things: Year Book of the Design and Industries Association. United States as for England; Ernest Benn, Ltd. $2.50. |