Sidetracks

by Richard Holmes

  To Laughter

  Thy friends were never mine thou heartless fiend:

  Silence and solitude & calm & storm,

  Hope, before whose veiléd shrine all spirits bend

  In worship, & the rainbow vested form

  Of conscience, that within thy hollow heart

  Can find no throne – the love of such great powers

  Which has requited mine in many hours

  Of loneliness, thou ne’er hast felt; depart!

  Thou canst not bear the moon’s great eye, thou fearest

  A fair child clothed in smiles – aught that is high

  Or good or beautiful – Thy voice is dearest

  To those who mock at truth & Innocency.

  I, now alone, weep without shame to see

  How many broken hearts lie bare to thee.

  The most soaring line in this rather tortuous poem, ‘Thou canst not bear the moon’s great eye’, lends the whole piece the silvery atmosphere of a nocturnal soliloquy, and one recalls Shelley’s meditative midnight walks down the little track through the vine fields that linked Byron’s villa with his own cottage of Montalegré. Shelley’s high-minded defence of ‘aught that is high or good or beautiful’ is typical of his immature Platonism, and would have tickled Scrope. It is also possible to see a reference to Claire in the ‘fair child clothed with smiles’: for Claire, though pregnant, was already in the role of Byron’s cast-off mistress and may well have been the butt of some sly remarks at the Diodati ‘How many broken hearts lie bare to thee’).

  Shelley’s general complaint in the sonnet is that none of the ‘great powers’ which he himself worships – Silence, Solitude, Hope and Conscience – finds a place in Laughter’s ‘hollow heart’. It is an interesting coincidence that this sentiment finds an exact echo in Byron’s own, slightly ambivalent, response to Scrope’s indefatigable wit. When Scrope came to visit him at Newstead Abbey, after the death of their mutual friend Matthews in 1811, Byron wrote:

  Davies has been here, and has invited me to Cambridge for a week in October, so that, peradventure, we may encounter glass to glass. His gaiety (death cannot mar it) has done me service; but, after all, ours was a hollow laughter. You will write to me? I am solitary.

  Did Byron perhaps confide something of the same feeling to Shelley in 1816 at the Diodati? And was the sonnet the result? It is certainly a possibility.

  Yet this is all speculation. How and why Scrope got his hands on the little notebook, whether Byron was malicious or merely muddled in letting him see it, and how the angry sonnet ‘To Laughter’ came to disappear without trace in Shelley’s (or Mary’s) other papers must all remain mysteries. Some fuller explanation may be forthcoming when Dr Chernaik and Mr Burnet publish their complete transcription of the notebook in The Times Literary Supplement this spring.

  For scholars, as indeed for bankers and antiquarians, the cardinal interest of the trunk must lie in the minute evaluation of the Byron and Shelley prizes therein. But for a biographer, a rather different kind of enchantment flits and winks through the sad ruins of that paper Pompeii. All mysteries, all clues, all speculations seem to lead inexorably back to the elusive character and career of Scrope himself. Beside the ‘Mont Blanc’ notebook, now enshrined in its glass case, lies a tiny, ragged-edged betting book, much thumbed and covered in columns of jottings. Bend closer; the ink is a little faded, the writing a little … tipsy. ‘Won at shooting – 5 shillings. Lost at billiards – 10 shillings. Lost at fishing – 5 shillings. Won at Throwing Stones – 18 shillings. Lost at chicken driving – £1.’ It is not much of a poem, perhaps, but it is still a vivid revelation of poor Scrope’s obsessions and contradictions.

  In his own way, Scrope was as much of a Romantic extremist, as much a representative of the ‘spirit of the age’ as his more illustrious companions. When we discover that Byron calculated that his friend was still worth £50,000 in 1816 (say, a round million pounds in contemporary currency) the suddenness and stunning size of his ruin within four years takes on something like magnificence, something that Gatsby might have felt ‘truly grand’.

  Moreover, his wit – by all accounts a fine, high-strung mixture of academic pedantry, gaming slang, religiosity and smoking-room farce – was obviously memorable (if only as Shelley remembered it) and renowned throughout London and Cambridge, while his sense of social deportment and rigid code of honour (which extended to duelling, if not to manuscripts) had a far finer tone than the mannered punctiliousness of the average St James’s dandy. His exile, like Beau Brummell’s, was a last gesture of good taste. It is touching, in the circumstances, that Byron chose to praise him in the following terms: ‘Whatever Davies says I will swear to – and that’s more than he would.’

  Morally, Scrope was flawed, to an almost tragic degree, and it is this darker dimension that the minutiae of his trunk seem to establish for the first time. His gambling, like his drinking, has a kind of remorseless self-destructiveness that one can see piling up, bet by bet, bill by bill, debt by debt, in the account books. Yet he remained curiously lucid about his own fate, curiously self-mocking and detached, so that when the end came he could accept it with a good grace, almost a spirituality, that Gronow seems to hint at years later in the Tuileries gardens.

  Two anecdotes – one from Byron, one from Gronow – sum up this quality, this scroopishness, shall we say, better than all others. The first dates from 1814, when Byron and he dined one night together at the Cocoa-Tree. Byron recounts:

  Sat from six till midnight – drank between us one bottle of champagne and six of claret, neither of which wines ever affect me. Offered to take Scrope home in my carriage; but he was typsy and pious, and I was obliged to leave him on his knees praying to I know not what purpose or pagod.

  It is an expressive picture, Scrope Davies, drunk but still elegant, kneeling by a clubland dining table, silently saying his prayers as the servants carried away the bottles, snuffed the candles, and counted the small change.

  The second anecdote has no date, but belongs perhaps to Scrope’s last years in England, for it has a sense of imminent departure about it. In a single night of cards, Scrope had succeeded in entirely dispossessing a young aristocrat of everything he owned. As dawn filtered through the curtains,

  the poor youth sank down upon a sofa, in abject misery, when he reflected that he was a beggar; for he was on the point of marriage. Scrope Davies, touched by his despair, entered into conversation with him, and ended by giving him back the whole of his losses, upon a solemn promise that he never would play again. The only thing that Scrope retained of his winnings was one of the little carriages of that day, called a dormeuse, from its being fixed up with a bed; for he said, ‘When I travel in it I shall sleep the better for having acted rightly.’

  The story is exquisitely scroopish in its blend of kindness and cynicism, the don and the gambler ironically reconciled; and yet it is also shadowed by the same tragic quality, the sense of the inevitable, lonely, ruined exile awaiting him – in the long years of shiftless beds in small, squalid, foreign hotels, alone with his debts and his memories.

  Now finally he has returned with his trunk: his last dormeuse, his ‘dice-box’, his dustbin, his monument. And he seems, in the end, to have won: his story is the talk of clubs and common rooms once more, and his name has come home from obscurity. A long-planned biography by Hillier and Davies will no doubt be with us soon; the letters will take their place in Professor Marchand’s great edition in a fine flurry of appendices; and his position in the Romantic saga will be assured. Moreover, there is one other circumstance that would have pleased Scrope. The entire contents of his trunk will probably prove to be worth between one and two million dollars: so, in the end, he doubled his stakes and swept the board.

  TO THE TEMPEST GIVEN

  A radio-play based on Shelley’s last days in Italy

  wind, storm and sea

  SHELLEY

  The breath whose might I have invoked in Song Descends on m
e: my spirit’s bark is driven Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng Whose sails were never to the Tempest given; The massy earth and spheréd skies are riven! I am born darkly, fearfully afar …

  fades to seaside, gulls, modern children on holiday

  HOLMES … Yes, my ‘spirit’s bark’. Shelley always loved boats. At Eton, at Oxford, on Highgate ponds it was paper boats, at Pisa a skiff. That’s what brought him to San Terenzo in April 1822, a sailing holiday really, far away from the crowds, the ‘trembling throng’. He rented a beach house, Casa Magni, right at the sea’s edge, miles from anywhere.

  It still exists: seven white-washed arches below, four white-washed rooms above, and a long open balcony directly overlooking the surf: a primitive, magical place. Shelley loved the whole set-up. He had a 24-foot yacht especially built for him at the naval dockyards up the coast at Genoa. Typically it had too much sail and too much ballast: very fast and very unstable.

  SHELLEY Like Anacreon’s swallow, I have left my Nile, and have taken up my summer quarters here, in a lonely house close to the sea side, surrounded by the soft and sublime scenery of the Gulph of Spezia. – I do not write. – I have lived too long near Lord Byron and the sun has extinguished the glowworm … We have been out now several days in our boat, the Don Juan, although we have sought in vain for an opportunity of trying her against the feluccas or other large craft in the bay: she passes the small ones as a Comet might pass the dullest planets in heaven.

  HOLMES On the surface, Shelley was as happy as he’d ever been, suntanned, healthy, revelling in the outdoor life; bathing, sailing, picnicking. His clever young wife, Mary, was with him; and various friends and children packed into the four inhabitable rooms of the Casa Magni. From the various accounts they have left of these last weeks, we can discover a great deal about what was going on, especially from Mary. But it is not always easy to understand at first.

  MARY Our house, Casa Magni, was close to the village of Lerici; the sea came up to the door, a steep wooded hill sheltered it from behind. The proprietor of the estate on which it was situated was insane … The scene was of unimaginable beauty. The blue extent of the waters, the almost landlocked bay, the near castle of Lerici shutting it in to the east, and distant Porto Venere to the west, formed a picture such as one sees in Salvator Rosa’s landscapes only … But sometimes the gales and squalls surrounded the bay with foam, and the sea roared unremittingly, so that we almost fancied ourselves on board a ship.

  HOLMES In reality, what was going on at Casa Magni, below the holiday surface, was very mysterious, very strange. To begin with, a small point, in May and June, one by one all their Italian servants – their cook, their nanny, their odd-job man – left them, saying the place was too remote, too peculiar. Then it became clear that Shelley’s wife Mary, who had travelled as happily as a gypsy with him all over Italy for the last four years, was uneasy about this place.

  MARY The sense of misfortune hung over my spirits. No words can tell you how I hated our house and the country about it. Shelley reproached me for this – his health was good and the place quite after his own heart – What could I answer? – No words could describe my feelings – the beauty of the woods made me weep and shudder … My only moments of peace were on board that unhappy boat, when lying down with my head on his knees, I shut my eyes and felt the wind and our swift motion alone.

  HOLMES Of course, the biographer has to intervene here and say that we are hearing Mary in retrospect. She may have been the cool, intellectual daughter of the philosopher William Godwin; but she was also a novelist and the author of Frankenstein. She was an imaginative woman, and surely her testimony was affected by the appalling series of things that subsequently occurred? Perhaps so: truth is a shimmering, uncertain element, that is refracted through time, like sunlight through shifting water. Yet there is one letter of hers, actually written at this moment, to a friend in Livorno, Leigh Hunt, who was planning to visit them after coming out especially all the way from England. In it Mary already expresses the same feelings of unease, of menacing beauty, and everything being somehow out of control. And more than that.

  MARY My dear friend, I know that Shelley has some idea of persuading you to come here. I am too ill to write the reasonings, only let me entreat you, let no persuasions induce you to come. Selfish feelings, you may be sure, do not dictate me – but it would be complete madness to come. I wish I could write more, I wish I could break my chains and leave this dungeon.

  HOLMES The idea of being held captive, of being trapped in some enchanted prison at Casa Magni, affected other members of the holiday party with Shelley. His old friend Edward Williams, who was there with his beautiful rather sporty young wife Jane, was a solid, extravert type not given to fanciful notions. Williams had been to Eton (like Shelley), served in the navy, and then as an officer in the East India Company army. Throughout his time with the Shelleys he kept a daily Journal, in a bluff matter-of-fact manner, which nevertheless seems almost unconsciously to reflect the disturbing atmosphere of the place, and sense of imminent disaster.

  WILLIAMS 4th May. Went fishing with Shelley – no sport. Returned late, a heavy swell getting up. I think if there are no tides in the Mediterranean that there are strong currents on which the moon both at the full and change has a very powerful effect.

  5th May. Kept awake during the whole night by a heavy swell, which made a noise upon the beach like the discharge of heavy artillery.

  7th May. In the afternoon I made an effort with Jane in the rowing boat to put to sea … but a wave struck her on the bow while launching and almost swamped her. I landed Jane half drowned on the rocks. In the evening a heavy thunderstorm passed over – one flash of lightning over Lerici was particularly vivid. The steeple of the place has already been struck, and the inhabitants say at a time when there was not a cloud to be seen.

  HOLMES But at the centre of this seascape of beauty and disturbance was always Shelley himself, acting in ways that came to seem increasingly strange, as if he was himself the eye of some invisible storm. Within a week of arriving at Casa Magni, an uncanny incident occurred.

  surf

  WILLIAMS After tea while walking with Shelley on the terrace and observing the effect of moonlight on the waters, he complained of being unusually nervous, and stopping short he grasped me violently by the arm and stared steadily on the white surf that broke upon the beach under our feet. Observing him sensibly affected, I demanded of him if he were in pain – but he only answered, saying ‘There it is again! – there!’ He recovered after some time, and declared that he saw, as plainly as then he saw me, a naked child rise from the sea, clap its hands as if in joy and smiling at him. This was a trance that it required some reasoning and philosophy entirely to wake him from, so forcibly had the vision operated on his mind.

  HOLMES There can be no doubt that Williams, who did not live to correct or add to this Journal, was telling the truth as he experienced it at the time that evening on the terrace. But what did the vision mean, and who was the child? Williams himself put it down to a ‘rather melancholy’ conversation he had had with Shelley, probably about the very recent death of Allegra, Claire Clairmont’s illegitimate child by Byron.

  Claire had only been told of this death three days earlier at the Casa Magni; at the first shock of the news Shelley feared she would go mad, and he himself felt bitterly guilty at ever letting Byron take custody of the child. Williams put the vision itself down to Shelley’s ‘ever wandering and lively imagination’; to which one might add a dose of laudanum which Shelley sometimes took when under stress. But there were other children that Shelley might have been haunted by, in connection with his wife. As Byron said pointedly, Shelley’s manner of life killed off children very effectively. His first child by Mary had died after a premature birth; his little daughter Clara had died from travel-sickness in Venice; his favourite son, little Willmouse, had died of fever in Rome. His surviving son Percy was frail, and Mary was again suffering from an uncomfo
rtable preg- nancy, which the primitive conditions at Casa Magni – washing in the sea, carrying water in pails, cooking on open fires, really as if they were camping – did nothing to ease.

  SHELLEY Mary is at present about three months advanced in pregnancy, and the irritability and languor which accompany this state is always distressing and sometimes alarming … She still continues to suffer terribly from languor and hysterical affectations.

  HOLMES Shelley’s refusal to adapt his mode of life to Mary’s needs at Casa Magni suggests a much deeper marital discord, from which the seaside life with Edward and Jane Williams was a kind of escape. Here we begin to glimpse a little deeper into the truth of these last weeks, and the extraordinary atmosphere of brooding tension like a coming storm. Shelley gradually admitted this, to his old friends the Gisbornes in London, but kept it a secret from Mary.

  SHELLEY Italy is more and more delightful to me … I can only feel the want of those who can feel, and understand me. Whether from proximity and the continuity of domestic intercourse, Mary does not. The necessity of concealing from her thoughts that would pain her, necessitates this, perhaps.

  It is the curse of Tantalus, that a person possessing such excellent powers and so pure a mind as hers, should not excite the sympathy indispensable to their application to domestic life.