Father Figure

There is hardly anything more enjoyable to me than coming upon one of my literary favorites writing about another. Mark Twain's essay "In Defense of Harriet Shelley" is, as the title suggests, a beautiful, loving, fatherly perspective on Percy Shelley's first wife, Harriet. Everybody knows that the love story between Percy and Mary Shelley is one of the great romances in literary history, but his first wife certainly was a lovely person who did nothing wrong.

Twain was the father of three daughters, and he had a wonderful, compassionate sensitivity to Harriet's plight. Yet his defense of her did not require him to impugn Shelley. He was able to turn the same warm, fatherly eye onto the Poet himself, in this description of Shelley's character:

"He had done things which one might laugh at, but the privilege of laughing was limited always to the thing itself; you could not laugh at the motive back of it - that was high, that was noble. His most fantastic and quixotic acts had a purpose back of them which made them fine, often great, and made the rising laugh seem profanation and quenched it; quenched it, and changed the impulse to homage."