The Age of Napoleon

by Will Durant

  Soon afterward Thomas Love Peacock found the poet almost delirious in his Fleet Street room. “Nothing that I have ever read, in tale or history, could present a more striking image of a sudden, violent, irresistible … passion, than that under which I found him labouring, when, at his request, I went up from the country to call on him …. His eyes were bloodshot, his hair and dress disordered. He caught up a bottle of laudanum, and said, ‘I never part from this.’”73

  Despite all obstacles, Shelley arranged to meet Mary at her mother’s grave. He reduced her resistance by telling her that Harriet had been unfaithful to him with a Mr. Ryan.74 He continued for some time to deny the legitimacy of the child that Harriet was now carrying (later he claimed it was his own). She denied his charge, and Shelley’s friends Peacock, Hogg, Trelawny, and his publisher Hookham supported her; Godwin later rejected it.75

  Shelley wrote to Harriet (still at Bath) and asked her to come to London. She came (July 14, 1814), and was received into her father’s house. The poet visited her there, and found her alarmingly ill. He begged her to give him a separation; she refused. On returning to his room he wrote to her a hectic letter assuming some kind of agreement:

  MY DEAREST FRIEND:

  Exhausted as I am with our interview, and secure of seeing you tomorrow, at 12, I cannot refrain from writing to you.

  I am made calm and happier by your assurances ….

  For this, dearest Harriet, from my inmost soul I thank you. This is perhaps the greatest among the many blessings which I have received, and still am destined to receive, at your hands. I loathed the very light of day, and looked upon my own being with deep and unutterable abhorrence. I lived in the hope of consolation and happiness from you and have not been deceived.

  I repeat (believe me for I am sincere) that my attachment to you is unimpaired: I conceive that it has acquired even a deeper and more lasting character, that it is now less exposed than ever to the fluctuations of phantasy or caprice. Our connection was not one of passion and impulse. Friendship was its basis, and on this basis it has been enlarged and strengthened. It is no reproach to me that you have never filled my heart with an all-sufficing passion ….

  Shall I not be more than a friend? Oh, far more Brother, Father of your child, so dear as it is to us both ….

  If you want to draw on the Bankers before I see you, Hookham will give you the cheques.

  Adieu. Bring my sweet babe. I must ever love her for your sake.

  Ever most affectionately yours,

  P. B. SHELLEY.76

  Harriet gave her own account in a letter of November 20, 1814, to Catherine Nugent:

  … Mary was determined to seduce him…. She heated his imagination by talking of her mother, and going to her grave with him every day, till at last she told him she was dying in love for him …. Why [Mary asked] could we not all live together? I as his sister, she as his wife? He had the folly to believe this possible, and sent for me, then residing at Bath. You may suppose how I felt at the disclosure. I was laid up for a fortnight after. I could do nothing for myself. He begged me to live…. Here I am, my dear friend, waiting to bring another infant into this woeful world. Next month I shall be confined. He will not be near me.

  H. SHELLEY.77

  Godwin gave some details in a letter of August 27, 1814, to John Taylor:

  I had the utmost confidence in him [Shelley]; I knew him susceptible of the noblest sentiments; he was a married man, who had lived happily with his wife for three years…. On Sunday, June 26th, he accompanied Mary, and her sister Jane Clairmont, to the tomb of Mary’s mother…. There, it seems, the impious idea occurred to him of seducing her, playing the traitor to me, and deserting his wife…. On Wednesday, the 6th of July, … he had the madness to disclose his plans to me and to ask my consent. I expostulated with him, … and with so much effect that for the moment he promised to give up his licentious love …. They both deceived me. In the night of the 27th Mary and her sister Jane escaped from my home; and the next morning I found a letter informing me what they had done.78

  Jane Clairmont was only stepsister to Mary, being the daughter of the second Mrs. Godwin by a former husband. Originally named Clara Mary Jane, she preferred to be called Clara, and became Clare or Claire. Born April 27, 1798, she was now sixteen years old, and was quite consciously nubile. Talented and generous, sensitive and proud, she fretted under the authority of a worried and irritable mother, and a stepfather too burdened and bankrupt to spare her any love. She appealed to Mary and Shelley to take her with them. They did, and on July 28, 1814, the three fled from London to Dover, and thence to France.

  On August 20 the pilgrims reached Lucerne. There Shelley found no message for him, and no money from London. He had in his purse only twenty-eight pounds. Sadly he told his comrades that he must return to England and settle his finances. By boat and carriage they hurried north, and on September 13, 1814, they were again in London. He spent the next twenty months hiding from his creditors, and raising more loans to feed himself, Mary, Claire, and Godwin, who still refused to see him but welcomed cash remittances. Meanwhile Harriet gave birth to her second child, Charles; Mary gave birth to her first, William; and Claire leaped into Byron’s bed. Finally the poet’s grandfather died, leaving to Shelley’s father, now Sir Timothy Shelley, property valued at eighty thousand pounds. Shelley was now heir apparent, but not so recognized by his father. He offered to resign his rights in exchange for a life annuity of a thousand pounds; it was agreed; and Shelley pledged two hundred a year to Harriet. On May 4, 1816, he, Mary, William, and Claire left again for Dover and France. Nine days before them Byron had “kicked the dust of England from his feet.”

  VIII. SWISS HOLIDAY: BYRON AND SHELLEY, 1816

  Both poets, independently, had chosen Switzerland as their haven, and Geneva as their center of operations. Shelley’s party arrived on May 15, and took lodgings in suburban Sécheron. Byron and his retinue boarded at Ostend a sumptuous coach which he had ordered built, at a cost of five hundred pounds, on the model of one used by Napoleon and captured at Genappe as part of the trophies of Waterloo; it had a bed, a library, and all facilities for dining. Byron made a special tour of the ground and the remains of the battle; and probably at Brussels that evening composed the stanzas 21 to 28 that were to be especially memorable in Canto III of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.

  Late on May 25 he checked in at the Hotel d’Angleterre, a mile north of Geneva center. The entry register required him to give his age; he wrote “100.” Claire Clairmont, who had been eagerly checking arrivals, discovered this, and sent him a note commiserating on his age and suggesting a rendezvous. On May 27 he came across Shelley, Mary, and Claire at a boat landing; this was the first meeting of the poets. Byron had read Queen Mab, had praised its poetry, but had been politely silent about its politics; it was too much to expect a youth of twenty-four to understand the virtues of aristocracy—though they might have agreed on the convenience of inheritance. Shelley to the end considered Byron his superior in poetry.

  On July 4 he leased a home at Montallègre, two miles from Geneva, on the southern shore of Lake Geneva. On July 7 Byron rented the Villa Diodati, ten minutes’ walk from Shelley. They united in leasing a small sailboat, and the two families often joined in sailing on the lake, or in an evening of discussion at the Villa Diodati. There, on June 14, Byron suggested that each write a ghost story. They tried; all confessed failure except Mary, who, aged nineteen, produced one of the most famous novels of the nineteenth century—Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus; it was published in 1818, with a preface by Shelley. Among many other remarkable features it posed two problems still of basic interest: Can science create life? And can it keep its powers from producing evil as well as good?

  Byron also suggested that he and Shelley undertake to circumnavigate the lake in their modest boat, stopping at historic spots, especially those made famous by Rousseau’s Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse. Shelley agreed, though he still had not learned t
o swim. They set out, with two boatmen, on June 22, and took two days to reach Meillerie (in Savoy). There they lingered on the spot where, in the novel, Saint-Preux, banished from Julie, had supposedly written her name upon the rocks. Resuming their voyage, the poets ran into a sudden storm; the waves repeatedly climbed over the prow into the boat, threatening to capsize it. Byron later recalled the scene: “I stripped off my coat, made him strip off his and take hold of an oar, telling him that I thought … I could save him if he would not struggle when I took hold of him…. He answered with the greatest coolness that he had no notion of being saved, that I would have enough to do to save myself, and begged not to trouble me.”79

  The storm subsided, the poets landed and rested, and on the next morning they visited Chillon and the castle where François de Bonnevard had been imprisoned (1530–36) by the Duke of Lausanne. At Clarens—Shelley holding Rousseau’s novel in his hands as a guide—the poets walked over the ground made memorable as a sanctuary of French Romanticism. On June 27 they docked at Ouchy, port of Lausanne; that night Byron wrote The Prisoner of Chillon and sketched the stanzas on Rousseau in Childe Harold. On June 28 the poets visited the Lausanne home in which Gibbon had written The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. On July 1 the wanderers were back at Montallègre and Diodati. During the next two weeks Byron wrote the third canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, and Claire Clairmont copied it for him, knowing now one of the few happy moments in her life.

  It was her fate to bring misfortune with her. Her open devotion to Byron raised Swiss gossip to a point where it hurt: the two poets, it charged, were living in promiscuous relations with two sisters. Some imaginative souls called Byron and Shelley incarnate devils; and one English lady traveling in Switzerland fainted when Byron appeared at Mme. de Staël’s Coppet salon.80 Perhaps the gossip shared in Byron’s determination to end his relations with Claire. He asked Shelley not to let her come to the Villa Diodati anymore. Claire, now three months pregnant with Byron’s child, pleaded to be allowed one more visit, but was dissuaded.

  On July 24 Shelley took Claire and Mary on a trip to Chamonix in Savoy. They failed that day—succeeded on the next—in their attempt to reach the Mer-de-Glace. Returning to Switzerland, they stopped at a Chartreuse monastery in Montenvers. Under his signature in the guest book—irritated by the pious entries before his own—he wrote, in Greek: “Eimi philanthropos demokratikos t’atheos te—” (I am a lover of mankind, a democrat, and an atheist).81 When Byron, shortly thereafter, stopped at the same place, he blotted out the “atheos” fearing that it would be used against Shelley in England. It was.82

  On August 29 Shelley, Mary, and Claire left for England. Byron gave Shelley the manuscript of The Prisoner of Chillon and Cantos III and IV of Childe Harold for delivery to the publisher John Murray. Shelley himself, busy with Mary and Claire, brought only the “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” and the ode “Mount Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni [Chamonix].” This ode is almost as confused as the rivulets of ice that curl down the mountain slopes to the Mer-de-Glace. Shelley found his impressions so many and so diverse that he was unable to give them any clear expression; and while for a time he thought of the towering mass as voicing Wordsworth’s Nature God, he fell back upon the feeling of a cold immensity disdainfully silent before all human judgments.

  The “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” also shows some influence of Wordsworth, but Shelley’s “intimations of immortality” soon fade. He wonders why there is darkness as well as light, evil as well as good. He dreams that man might yet be saved by a deepening and broadening of the aesthetic sense, and the pursuit of the beautiful in thought and deed as well as in flesh and form:

  I vowed that I would dedicate my powers

  To thee and thine—have I not kept the vow? …

  … never joy illumed my brow

  Unlinked with hope that thou wouldst free

  This world from its dark slavery,

  That thou—O awful Loveliness,

  Wouldst give whate’er these words cannot express.83

  In the end the attempts of Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley to find a benevolent friend in nature failed before its calm neutrality. Wordsworth surrendered to the Church of England; Byron and Shelley surrendered to despair.

  IX. DECAY IN VENICE: BYRON, 1816–18

  In September, 1816, Hobhouse came down from England, and joined Byron in an extensive tour of the Swiss Alps. In October they crossed them into Italy. They were well received at Milan; the educated Italians honored Byron as England’s greatest living poet, and appreciated his evident distaste for Austrian rule in Lombardy. He took a box at La Scala. Stendhal saw him there, and described him ecstatically: “I was struck by his eyes…. I have never in my life seen anything more beautiful or more expressive. Even today, if I come to think of the expression which a great painter should give to a genius, this sublime head at once appears before me…. I shall never forget the divine expression of his face; it was the serene air of power and genius.”84

  Poet and friend reached Venice on November 16, 1816. Hobhouse left him for hurried sightseeing, and soon went on to Rome; Byron took lodgings in a side street off the Piazza San Marco, and made a mistress of his landlord’s wife, Marianna Segati. Even so he found time to complete Manfred and (September, 1818) to begin Don Juan, in which he passed from gloomy, romantic, self-indulgent brooding to rollicking, humorous, realistic satire.

  Manfred, of course, is Byron again, now disguised as a melancholy misanthrope in a Gothic castle. Feeling “a strong curse upon my soul,” and brooding over his sins, he summons the witches from their Alpine lairs, and asks from them one gift—forgetfulness. They answer that forgetfulness comes only with death. He climbs the Jungfrau, and sees in a lightning-blasted pine tree a symbol of himself—”a blighted trunk upon a cursèd rock, which but supplies a feeling to decay.” He seeks death by trying to jump from a cliff; a hunter stops him, leads him to a mountain cottage, offers him a warming wine, and asks the reason for his despair. Manfred, taking the wine for blood, replies in words that might be taken as a confession of incest:

  I say ‘tis blood! the pure warm stream

  Which ran in the veins of my fathers, and in ours

  When we were in our youth, and had our heart,

  And loved each other as we should not love;

  And that was shed; but still rises up,

  Coloring the clouds that shut me out from heaven.

  He envies the hunter’s free and healthy life

  By danger dignified, yet guiltless; hopes

  Of cheerful old age and a quiet grave,

  With cross and garland over its green turf,

  And thy grandchildren’s love for epitaph;

  This do I see—and then I look within—

  It matters not—my soul was scorched already.

  He gives the hunter gold, and departs. Using his unsanctioned science, he summons Astarte, in whom he sees the figure of his forbidden love. His appeal to her to forgive him—”Astarte, my beloved, speak to me!”—is one of the high flights of Byronic passion and sentiment. Like the major criminals in Gulliver’s land of the Luggnaggians, he has been condemned to immortality, and thinks it the greatest possible penalty; he begs her, out of her mystic power, to grant him the gift of death. She accommodates him: “Manfrtd, tomorrow ends thy earthly life.” An attendant witch applauds his courage: “He mastereth himself, and makes his torture tributary to his will. Had he been one of us he would have made an awful spirit.” Milton’s Satan may have left here one of many echoes in Byron’s works. —To the abbot who, on the following evening, seeks to win him back to Christ, Manfred answers that it is too late, and adds:

  There is an order

  Of mortals on the earth, who do become

  Old in their youth, and die ere middle age,

  Without the violence of warlike death.

  And when Manfred leaves for his last rendezvous, the abbot mourns:

  This should have been a no
ble creature; he

  Hath all the energy which would have made

  A goodly frame of glorious elements,

  Had they been wisely mingled.

  As if challenging the world to think that its darkest suspicions of him were now confessed, Byron sent Manfred to England, and Murray published it on June 16, 1817. A week later a review in a London paper called for an end to all sympathy for Byron, who “has coloured Manfred into his own personal features…. Manfred has exiled himself from society, and what is to be the ground of our compassion for the exile? Simply the commission of one of the most revolting crimes. He has committed incest!”85

  On April 17, 1817, Byron left Venice to spend a month with Hobhouse in Rome. His foot deterred him from touring the museums, but he saw the massive relics of classical Rome, and visited Pompeii; “I stand a ruin amidst ruins,” said Childe Harold.86 By May 28 he was back in Venice.

  In December he succeeded, after many trials, in selling Newstead Abbey and its lands for £94,500; he instructed his London banker, Douglas Kinnaird, to pay all the poet’s debts, and send him £3,300 annually from the earnings of the residue; in addition to this he now agreed to receive payment for his poems. Flush, he bought the sumptuous Palazzo Mocenigo on the Grand Canal. He peopled it with fourteen servants, two monkeys, two mastiffs, and a new mistress—Margarita Cogni, proud wife of a local banker. He was not monogynous; he boasted of having had two hundred women, seriatim, in Venice.87 On January 20, 1817, he informed Kinnaird that “in the evenings I go out sometimes, and indulge in coition always”; and on May 9, 1818, he wrote to the banker, “I have a world of harlotry.”88 By midsummer he had fallen far from the divinity described by Stendhal two years before; he was fat, his hair was turning gray, and he looked older than his thirty years. Shelley was shocked to find him so when they met again.