The biographer says of Harriet, “If words of tender affection and motherly pride proved the reality of love, then undoubtedly she loved her firstborn child.”  That is, if mere empty words can prove it, it stands proved—­and in this way, without 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 lurking behind a non-committal “if” or something of that kind; always gliding and dodging around, distributing colorless poison here and there and everywhere, 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 paragraph of comment which immediately follows the letter containing Shelley’s self-exposure which we have been considering.  This is it.  One should inspect the individual sentences as they go by, then pass them in procession and review the cake-walk as a whole: 

“Shelley’s happiness in his home, as is evident from this pathetic letter, had been fatally stricken; it is evident, also, that he knew where duty lay; he felt that his part was to take up his burden, silently and sorrowfully, and to bear it henceforth with the quietness of despair.  But we can perceive that he scarcely possessed the strength and fortitude needful for success in such an attempt.  And clearly Shelley himself was aware how perilous it was to accept that respite of blissful ease which he enjoyed in the Boinville household; for gentle voices and dewy looks and words of sympathy could not fail to remind him of an ideal of tranquillity or of joy which could never be his, and which he must henceforth sternly exclude from his imagination.”

That paragraph commits the author in no way.  Taken sentence by sentence it asserts nothing against anybody or in favor of anybody, pleads for nobody, accuses nobody.  Taken detail by detail, it is as innocent as moonshine.  And yet, taken as a whole, it is a design against the reader; its intent is to remove the feeling which the letter must leave with him if let alone, and put a different one in its place—­to remove a feeling justified by the letter and substitute one not justified by it.