The Age of Napoleon

by Will Durant

  X. SHELLEY PATER FAMILIAS: 1816–18

  On September 8, 1816, Shelley, Mary, their child William, his Swiss nurse Elise Foggi, and Claire Clairmont reached England. All but Shelley went to Bath; he hurried to London, expecting to find there five hundred pounds from his father. None came, and he had to default on his promise to give three hundred pounds to his desperate father-in-love. Godwin fumed; Shelley fled to his lawless mate in Bath.

  There, on September 26 and October 3, Mary received tender letters from her half sister Fanny Godwin. Born in France in 1794, Fanny was the “natural” daughter of Captain Imlay and Mary Wollstonecraft. She had been adopted by Godwin on his marriage to her mother. Despite his kindness she had been unhappy under the unwilling care of his second wife, Mrs. Clairmont. Her letters reveal a gentle soul, bearing misfortune bravely, blaming no one, and timidly eager to please. Mary had been sisterly to her, but after Mary and Claire went off with Shelley Fanny had no protection against her stepmother. When the elopers returned to England their precarious finances did not encourage them to add Fanny to their fold. On October 12 Shelley brought to Mary and Claire the news that Fanny had gone to Swansea, secluded herself in a hotel room, and killed herself with opium.

  The Furies had little mercy on Shelley. On returning to England he had inquired about his wife, to whom he was still legally bound. He learned that she was living with her father, and was regularly receiving four hundred pounds a year. In November he sought to visit her, but was told that she had disappeared. On December 12, 1816, the Times reported that her body had been recovered, two days before, from the Serpentine Lake in Hyde Park.

  Anxious to get custody of his offspring by Harriet—daughter Ianthe and son Charles—Shelley hurried to legalize with marriage his union with Mary (December 30, 1816). Through three months his claim for the children dragged on in the Court of Chancery. Mary assured him that she would be “very happy to receive those darling treasures”—the children of Harriet—under her care. But Harriet’s father and sister contested Shelley’s claim on the grounds that he was an avowed atheist and a disbeliever in legal marriage, who had deserted his wife and eloped with an unmarried woman; such a man, they argued, was not likely to bring up the children in a manner fit for life in England. The court disallowed the argument from theology, but recognized the others, and decided against Shelley (March, 1817). However, his choice of foster parents was sanctioned by the court, and he agreed to contribute one hundred twenty pounds a year for their maintenance.

  While her husband was litigating in London, Mary watched over Claire Clairmont, who, still only nineteen, gave birth (January 12, 1817) to a daughter ultimately named Allegra. Claire’s letters to Byron, since leaving Switzerland, had not been answered, though Shelley’s were; and the thought that Byron would never acknowledge the child drove the mother to despair. Shelley appealed to Byron for instructions, taking care to stress Allegra’s beauty. Byron agreed to take and care for the child if she were brought to him. Mary complicated matters (September, 1817) by giving birth to her second child, who was baptized Clara Everina. Mother and child ailed, and soon all the adults agreed that what the family needed was the warmth and sky and fruits of Italy. On March 11, 1818, they crossed to France, and began the long ride, by mal-de-mer coaches, to Milan.

  Thence Shelley sent Byron an invitation to come and see Allegra. Fearing that this might lead to a renewed liaison with Claire, Byron refused; instead, he suggested, her nurse should take the child to Venice, and if the adoption plan proved satisfactory, the mother should be free to visit Allegra now and then. Claire reluctantly consented. Byron found the little girl so lovely and lovable that he took her into his palace; but Allegra was so frightened by his animals and concubines that Byron soon paid Richard Hoppner, British consul, and his wife, to take the child into their home.

  Hearing of this, Shelley and Claire (leaving Mary and her children at Lucca) went to Venice, and found Allegra reasonably well treated. Byron received Shelley cordially, took him on a gondola ride to the Lido, and invited him and his family, with Claire and Allegra, to stay as long as they liked in Byron’s villa, I Cappuccini, at Este. Mary came from Lucca with her children, but Clara Everina sickened on the way, and died in Venice (September 24, 1818). On October 29, after a month’s stay in I Cappuccini, they bade goodbye to Allegra, and headed south for Rome.

  XI. SHELLEY: ZENITH, 1819–21

  Between his arrival in Rome (1819) and his reunion with Byron in Pisa (1821) the great events in Shelley’s life were his poems. There had been flashes of high excellence before, as here and there in Queen Mab, and latterly as in “Ozymandias” (1817) —a sonnet of compact thought and startling force. The “Lines Written in the Euganean Hills” (1818) lack such concentration of thought and chiseled form; and the “Lines Written in Dejection near Naples” (1818) are too self-pitying to invite condolence; a man should not wear his grievances on his sleeve. But now, in three years, came Prometheus Unbound, “Ode to the West Wind,” “To a Skylark,” “The Cloud,” Epipsychidion, and Adonais. We pass by The Cenci (1819), in which Shelley, with some success, tried to rival John Webster and other Elizabethan-Jacobean dramatists in a dark and bloody story of incest and murder.

  Prometheus Unbound, according to the author’s preface, was written atop the Baths of Caracalla in Rome in 1820. He had challenged the Elizabethans with The Cenci; now he risked the farthest grasp of his ambition by challenging the Greeks. In Prometheus Bound Aeschylus had shown the “Foreknower” as a rebellious Titan chained to a rock in the Caucasus for revealing to mankind too much of the tree of knowledge. In the lost remainder of the trilogy, according to tradition, Zeus had relented and had freed Prometheus from the rock, and from the eagle which, by divine command, had continually pecked at the hero’s liver, like doubt at a rebel’s certainties. Shelley’s “lyrical drama” (as he called it) pictures Zeus as a crusty old Bourbon cruelly responsible for the misfortunes of mankind and the misbehavior of the earth; Prometheus blasts him with all the ardor of an Oxford undergraduate summoning bishops to the obsequies of God. Then the Titan regrets the intensity of his curse: “I wish no living thing to suffer pain.”89 He returns to his chosen task—to bring wisdom and love to all mankind. The Spirit of the Earth, rejoicing, hails him: “Thou art more than God, being wise and kind.”90

  Through Act I the speeches are bearable, and the lyrics of the attendant spirits rumble with elemental power, sparkle with ambrosial metaphors, and ride on melodious rhymes. But speeches, theological or atheological, are not the lightning of poetry; odes become odious and lyrics lose their lure when they fall upon the reader with confusing profusion; beauty unending becomes a bore. Too much of Shelley’s poetry is emotion remembered without tranquillity. As we proceed we sense something of weakness in these verses, too many sentiments for too few deeds; too many moods and lines of hearts and flowers (”I am as a drop of dew that dies,” says the Spirit of the Earth91). It is a style that can adorn a lyric but slows a drama—which, by its name, should move with action; a “lyrical drama” is a contradiction in terms.

  By contrast the “Ode to the West Wind” (1819) stirs us throughout, for its powerful inspiration is compressed into seventy lines. Here Shelley’s richness of rhymes has no time to cloy; the emotion is not spread thin, but is centered on one idea—that the winter of our discontent may hopefully be followed by some spring of growth. This time-honored metaphor repeatedly occurs in Shelley; it sustained him when his world of hopes and dreams seemed to fall in ruins before the onset of experience. He prayed that his ideas, like fallen leaves before the wind, might be preserved and spread through the “airy incantation of his verse.” They were.

  That ode, which touches the peaks of poetry, was “conceived and chiefly written” (Shelley tells us) “in a wood that skirts the Arno near Florence, and on a day when that tempestuous wind … was collecting the vapours which pour down the autumnal rains.”92 Why had he left Rome? Partly because he had either to seclude himself or to be
ar the nearness of British tourists who thought of him not as a great poet but as an adulterous atheist. More keenly he and Mary felt the death of their child William (June 7, 1819), after only four years of life. Neither parent ever fully recovered from the loss of both their children within nine months. Gray hairs appeared among Shelley’s brown, though he was only twenty-seven.

  After burying William in the English cemetery at Rome, the family moved north to Livorno, Anglice Leghorn. Wandering in a garden there, Shelley felt hurt, as any poet might, at the frightened flight of birds on his approach. One especially fascinated him by its singing as it soared. Going back to his room, he composed the first form of “To a Skylark,” with its haunting, brooding hexameters. Those airy stanzas offend not with their rhymes, for every line is warm with feeling and solid with thought.

  On October 2, 1819, the Shelleys moved to Florence, where Mary gave birth to her third child, soon named Percy. In Florence Claire Clairmont found employment as a governess, and at last freed Shelley from her care. On October 29, 1820, he moved his family to the Hotel Tre Palazzi in Pisa, where he had perhaps the strangest adventure of all.

  Despite his repeated illnesses he had not lost his sensitivity to sexual gravitation; and when he found a woman not only beautiful but unfortunate the double attraction overwhelmed him. Emilia Viviani was a girl of high family, who had been, against her will, placed in a convent near Pisa to safeguard her virginity till a financially proper husband could be found for her. Shelley, Mary, and sometimes Claire went to see her, and all were charmed by her classic features, her modest manners, and her confiding simplicity. The poet idealized her, made her the object of his waking dreams, and wrote some of them out in Epipsychidion (”To a soul unique”?), which was published under a pseudonym in 1821. Some surprising lines:

  I never thought before my death to see

  Youth’s vision thus made perfect. Emily,

  I love thee; though the world by no thin name

  Will hide that love from its unvalued shame.

  Would we two had been twins of the same mother!

  Or, that the name my heart lent to another

  Could be a sister’s bond for her and thee,

  Blending two beams of one eternity!

  Yet were one lawful and the other true,

  These names, though dear, could paint not, as is due,

  How beyond refuge I am thine. Ah me!

  I am not thine: I am a part of thee.

  And so from ecstasy to ecstasy:

  Spouse, Sister! Angel! Pilot of the Fate

  Whose course has been so starless! O too late

  Belovèd! O too soon adored, by me!

  For in the fields of immortality

  My spirit should at first have worshipped thine,

  A divine presence in a place divine.

  Clearly the youth of twenty-eight was in a condition favoring idealization; our laws and morals cannot quite regulate our glands; and if one is a genius or a poet, he must find outlet and relief in act or art. In this case the ailment was cured or redeemed by a poem that oscillates between absurdity and excellence:

  The day is come, and thou wilt fly with me….

  A ship is floating in the harbour now,

  A wind is hovering o’er the mountain’s brow

  to take them to an island in the blue Aegean;

  It is an isle ‘twixt Heaven, Air, Earth, and Sea,

  Cradled, and hung in clear tranquillity …

  This isle and house are mine, and I have vowed

  Thee to be lady of the solitude.

  There she shall be his love, and he be hers:

  Our breath shall intermix, our bosoms bound,

  And our veins beat together; and our lips

  With other eloquence than words, eclipse

  The soul that burns between them, and the wells

  Which boil under our being’s inmost cells,

  The fountains of our deepest life, shall be

  Confused in Passion’s golden purity …

  I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire!93

  Can this be “Shelley plain”? Poor Mary, left to her baby Percy and her own dreams, did not see these effusions for some time. Meanwhile the vision faded; Emilia married, and (according to Mary) led her husband “a devil of a life”;94 Shelley repented his melodious sin, and Mary nursed his desolation with motherly understanding.

  He was roused to better poetry when he heard that Keats had died (February 23, 1821). He may not have cared much for Endymion, but the “savage criticism” with which the Quarterly Review had greeted Keats’s major effort so angered him that he called upon their common Muse to inspire in him a fitting threnody. On June 11 he wrote to his London publisher: “‘Adonais’ is finished, and you will soon receive it. It is little adapted for popularity, but is perhaps the least imperfect of my compositions.”95 He had chosen as its form the difficult Spenserian stanza so recently used with a better font of rhymes by Byron in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage; and he worked on the requiem with all the care of a sculptor carving a monument to a friend; but the demands of the rigid mold gave to some of the fifty-five stanzas an air of artificiality that a less hurried art might have concealed. The theme too hastily assumed that a review had killed Keats, and the mourner asked that “the curse of Cain light on his head who pierced thy innocent breast”;96 but the autopsy of Keats showed that he had died of acute tuberculosis.

  In the final stanzas Shelley welcomed his own death as a blessed reunion with the undying dead:

  The One remains, the many change and pass;

  Heaven’s light forever shines, Earth’s shadows fly;

  Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,

  Stains the white radiance of Eternity,

  Until Death tramples it to fragments.—Die,

  If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek! …

  Why linger, why turn back, why shrink, my Heart?

  Thy hopes are gone before; from all things here

  They have departed; thou shouldst now depart!…

  ’Tis Adonais calls! Oh! hasten thither,

  No more let Life divide what Death can join together….

  I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar;

  Whilst, burning through the inmost veil of Heaven,

  The soul of Adonais, like a star,

  Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.97

  Keats might have answered with his unforgettable lines:

  Now more than ever seems it rich to die,

  To cease upon the midnight with no pain,

  Whilst thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad

  In such an ecstasy!98

  XII. LOVE AND REVOLUTION: BYRON, 1818–21

  Shelley retained varied memories of Byron in their last meeting—his fine manners, candid conversation, generous impulses—and his apparent content with a degrading promiscuity of companions and courtesans. “The Italian women with whom he associates are perhaps the most contemptible of all who exist under the moon…. Byron is familiar with the lowest sort of these women, the people his gondoliers pick up in the streets. He allows fathers and mothers to bargain with him for their daughters…. But that he is a great poet I think his address to the ocean proves.”99 Byron was well aware of his abandonment of English morals and tastes; the English code had outlawed him, and he would reject it in return. Yet he told a friend in 1819, “I was disgusted and tired with the life I led in Venice, and was glad to turn my back on it.”100 He succeeded, with the help, patience, and devotion of Teresa Guiccioli.

  They first met on her visit from Ravenna to Venice in April, 1819. She was nineteen, petite, pretty, vain, convent-educated, warmhearted, passionate. Her husband, Count Alessandro Guiccioli, fifty-eight, had had two previous marriages, and was often immersed in business. It was for precisely such a situation that the current moral code of the upper-class Italians allowed a woman to have a cavaliere servente—a gentleman servitor who would be always within call to admire, amuse, or escort
her, and be rewarded with a kiss of her hand—or something more if they were discreet and the husband was preoccupied or tired. There was moderate danger of a duel, but sometimes the husband would appreciate the aid, and would absent himself a while. So the Contessa felt free to be drawn to the Englishman’s handsome face, intriguing conversation, and charming limp. Or in her later words:

  His noble and exquisitely beautiful countenance, the tone of his voice, his manners, the thousand enchantments that surrounded him, rendered him so different, and so superior a being to any whom I had hitherto seen, that it was impossible that he should not have left the most profound impression upon me. From that evening, during the whole of my subsequent stay in Venice, we met every day.101

  Those days of reckless happiness ended when the Count took Teresa back to Ravenna. Byron sent her some promissory notes, as on April 22, 1819: “I assure you that you shall be my last passion. Before I knew you, I felt an interest in many women, but never in one only. Now I love you; there is no other woman in the world for me.” So far as we know, he kept that pledge.

  On June 1, in his “heavy Napoleonic carriage,” he left Venice for Ravenna as a tourist seeking Dante’s remains. Teresa welcomed him; the Count was complaisant; Byron wrote to a friend: “They make love a good deal here, and assassinate a little.”102 He was allowed to take Teresa to La Mira (seven miles south of Venice), where he had a villa; there the love affair advanced unhindered even by Teresa’s hemorrhoids.103 Allegra joined them there and made the party respectable. Tom Moore dropped in, and now received from Byron the manuscript of “My Life and Adventures,” which was to cause so much commotion after the author’s death.

  From La Mira Byron took Teresa to Venice, where she lived with him in his Palazzo Mocenigo. There her father reclaimed her, and—forbidding Byron to follow—took her back to Ravenna. On arrival Teresa fell so convincingly ill that the Count hurriedly sent for her lover. Byron came (December 24, 1819), and, after some wandering, settled down as a paying tenant on the third floor of the Count’s palace. He brought with him into his new quarters two cats, six dogs, a badger, a falcon, a tame crow, a monkey, and a fox. Amid this life of varied dedications he wrote more of Don Juan, some rhetorical and unstageable plays on Venetian doges, a more presentable drama about Sardanapalus, and, in July, 1821, Cain: A Mystery, which completed the abomination of his name in England.