Shelley: The Pursuit

by Richard Holmes

  Claire’s thoughts were of course exclusively on Byron. She knew that making love with him had not changed his essentially casual attitude towards her, and already she had picked up, with that sensitivity which so delighted Shelley, a perfect echo of the Byronic dégagement. ‘I know not how to address you,’ she wrote, ‘I cannot call you friend for though I love you you do not feel even interest for me; fate has ordained that the slightest accident that should befall you should be agony to me; but were I to float by your window drowned all you would say would be “Ah voila” . . . .’ She knew that perhaps her greatest hold over him was simply her youth, and she played that card with delicacy and sincerity ‘. . . a few days ago I was eighteen; people of eighteen always love truly & tenderly; & I who was educated by Godwin however erroneous my creed have the highest adoration for truth.’10 Between her and Shelley it seemed like a kind of conspiracy.

  The journey to Geneva took another six days. They followed the main tourist route south-eastwards through Troyes, which now bored them, then Dijon and Poligny. In the Jura they found that spring was late in arriving. Tourists were not yet expected, and reluctant hospitality and snow greeted them. But they pressed on, divided between awe at the scenery and irritation at the local population. At Les Rousses they hired a four-horse closed carriage, ten men to dig them out of drifts, and scandalized everyone by setting off at 6 in the evening. They huddled in stale rugs, snow pelting against the windows of the carriage, and darkness falling rapidly.11 Through the freezing windows, Mary recorded the first note in a theme that was to come to dominate her imagination during the next five months, ‘Never was a scene more awefully desolate. The trees in these regions are incredibly large, and stand in scattered clumps over the white wilderness; the vast expanse of snow was chequered only by these gigantic pines, and the poles that marked our road: no river or rock-encircled lawn relieved the eye, by adding the picturesque to the sublime. The natural silence of that uninhabited desert contrasted strangely with the voices of the men who conducted us, who, with animated tones and gestures called to one another in a patois composed of French and Italian, creating disturbance, where but for them, there was none.’12

  Then suddenly, they came down out of the snow and foreboding pines, and were jogging through the sweet lake air in the outskirts of Geneva. They forgot the icy desert wilderness, a dream of premonition, and gazed eagerly upon the bustling illuminated prettiness of the lake. But writing to Peacock the next morning, 15 May, Shelley recalled the same grim passage: ‘The trees in this region are incredibly large, but stand in scattered clumps in the white wilderness. Never was scene more awefully desolate as that which we passed in one evening of our last days journey.’13

  They drove straight to Monsieur Dejean’s Hotel d’Angleterre in the fashionable suburb of Secheron, the regular stopping point for all well-to-do English travellers passing by the Lake, and also Byron’s expected port of call. Shelley took an inexpensive set of rooms on the upper floor, and hired a small sailing boat for the duration of their stay. Their windows looked pleasantly southwards over the blueness of the lake, with the terraced vine fields opposite as yet showing no crop. Above them the haze of Alps stretched backwards and upwards in darker and darker tones until finally, above and beyond them all — when the morning light was clear — the single glittering white fang of Mont Blanc appeared. ‘We do not enter society here,’ wrote Mary, ‘yet our time passes swiftly and delightfully. We read Italian and Latin during the heats of noon, and when the sun declines we walk in the garden of the hotel, looking at the rabbits relieving fallen cockchaffers, and watching the motions of a myriad of lizards, who inhabit a southern wall of the garden.’ On most evenings, at about 6 p.m., all three of them embarked on the little boat and drifted over the lake for an hour or two. As they came in towards land, about 10 o’clock, Mary noted how the sweet scents of spring flowers and new-mown grass would blow across the water to meet them. They hung limply over the sides of the boat and gazed down into the clear water as the pebbled bottom and innumerable fish rose up silently towards them. These details were later to be transferred into the mind of Victor Frankenstein as he ferried his young wife across the lake on the evening of his doomed marriage day.14

  Briefly, Shelley was overwhelmed by a strong feeling of homesickness which he himself found strange, and he expanded it in his letter to Peacock. The very beauty of the country around him reminded him of his feeling for English scenes, and he thought of the Lake poets, especially Wordsworth. ‘Our Poets & our Philosophers our mountains & our lakes, the rural lanes & fields which are ours so especially, are ties which unless I become utterly senseless can never be broken asunder. These and the memory of them if I never should return, these & the affections of the mind with which having once been united they are inseparably united, will make the name of England, my country dear to me forever, even if I should permanently return to it no more.’

  Then, feeling better, he dismissed thoughts of exile and ‘sentimental gossip’, and ended briskly, ‘We are now at Geneva, where or in the neighbourhood we shall remain probably until the autumn. I shall return almost immediately, within a fortnight or three weeks, to attend to the least exertions which Longdill is to make for the settlement of my affairs — of course I shall see you then.’ Mary he noted was busy writing up a journal, otherwise she would have sent him a letter in Latin.15

  The long-awaited arrival of Byron, ten days later, soon put all thoughts of returning to grapple with business affairs far from Shelley’s mind. The Napoleonic carriage appeared at about midnight on 25 May, spattered with mud from a vigorous sightseeing trip. Byron and Dr Polidori had been over the battlefield of Waterloo, and up the Rhine among the wild and beautiful scenery that Shelley had observed in rather less comfort two summers before.

  Polidori, who had been commissioned for £500 by Murray to keep a private diary of the trip, tended to give the impression that while he had been visiting the galleries, Byron had visited the chambermaids. In fact, Byron’s thoughts had been turning constantly and sadly to Augusta, who alone would have appreciated the sights that he did, the Rhine crags and castles, and in the loneliness of the early hours he had at last turned to poetry again. The opening section of Canto III of Childe Harold was already under way in his notebook. It was on the Rhine that a famous altercation between Byron and Polidori had already taken place. The young Polidori, still only aged 21, had turned abruptly on the poet after sourly reading a eulogium of Byron’s works, and asked what, pray, could Byron do better than he except write poetry. ‘First . . . I can hit with a pistol the keyhole of that door — Secondly, I can swim across that river to yonder point — and thirdly, I can give you a d — d good thrashing.’16 That, at any rate, was how Byron cared to recall the incident six years later. Byron was ready for a change of society.

  Claire knew of their arrival within half an hour, for she had heard the carriage noise and bustle of servants, and checked the register where Byron, overcome with weariness, had put his age as 100. In the anxious note she sent up, Shelley’s complicity was again useful: ‘Direct under cover to Shelley for I do not wish to appear either in love or curious.’ But Byron went off to Geneva the following morning on business, and there was no contact between the two parties for the rest of the day, the Shelleys pursuing their usual routine on the lake in the evening. Claire decided that this diffidence on both sides was too ridiculous, and after staying up late that night, she wrote a piqued but thoroughly practical and straightforward note to him at 2 in the morning. ‘I have been in this weary hotel this fortnight and it seems so unkind, so cruel of you to treat me with such marked indifference. Will you go straight up to the top of the house this evening at ½ past seven & I will infallibly be on the landing place and show you the room.’17 With that she went to bed.

  The next morning, spotting Byron and Polidori rowing in from an excursion on the lake, she seized the opportunity and brought Shelley and Mary to walk along the plage. Byron disembarked, leaving Polidori to
float offshore, and splashed up the beach with his slight limp. Here the famous introduction was at last made, Mr Shelley very formal and Lord Byron a little cool. The two poets were shy with each other, Claire’s presence adding awkwardness, but Byron hastily invited Shelley to dine alone with him that evening and with a quick bow to Mary and Claire, stumped back to see to the boat.

  Polidori made up the third member of the party in the evening, and noted in his diary: ‘P[ercy] S[helley], the author of Queen Mab, came; bashful, shy consumptive; twenty-six; separated from his wife; keeps the two daughters of Godwin, who practise his theories; one L[ord] B[yron]’s.’18 Shelley, with his pallor and his silence and his advanced theories, appeared to Polidori older than he was, but Byron felt he could relax in his company and the dinner was a success. From the final part of Polidori’s entry, it seems as if Claire’s invitation was finally taken up. Later Byron was to write with a rather assumed shrug to Augusta: ‘I was not in love, nor have any love left for any, but I could not exactly play the stoic with a woman who had scrambled eight hundred miles to unphilosophize me.’ He added, with a touch of self-pity which was more to the point, ‘beside I had been regaled of late with so many “two courses and a desert” (Alas!) of aversion, that I was fain to take a little love (if pressed particularly) by way of novelty.’19 Claire did press particularly.

  The next day, Polidori was properly introduced all round, and Byron and the Shelleys began a regular arrangement of breakfasting together — a meal that was not altogether familiar to Byron. Polidori noted: ‘Was introduced by Shelley to Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, called here Mrs Shelley . . . . No names announced, no ceremony, — each speaks when he pleases.’ There was something to be said for Shelley’s ‘theories’ after all. They boated and dined together with increasing frequency, and Shelley and Byron began to plan a whole summer spent together. At the Plainpalais, outside Geneva, they visited the bust and memorial of Jean Jacques Rousseau, and discovered a common enthusiasm.

  The first thing was to get clear of the Hotel d’Angleterre, which was expensive and inconvenient; already stories were beginning to circulate about their curious entente. Shelley talked Byron into splitting the purchase of a properly rigged sailing boat, with a sufficiently deep keel and draught to withstand the occasionally violent squalls. Byron discovered a possible set of residences with a harbour, on the opposite southern side of the lake, near Compegny, about three miles beyond Geneva. There was a large porticoed house, with an extensive shaded balcony along its length, commanding a broad view of the Lake and the Jura. It was known as the Villa Diodati, and Milton had once occupied it. Below, about eight minutes’ walk down a narrow, tortuous track through the vine fields, was a smaller, two-storied chalet which gave directly on to the lake and commanded the small private harbour. This was known by the cheerful name of Montalègre. These seemed almost ideal properties for Byron and Shelley respectively, though the leases were rather high in the best Swiss fashion. Negotiations were opened with the landlords.

  Meanwhile the talk continued between the two poets, and became more intimate. Shelley fascinated Byron with the lurid details of his career, which he narrated as commonplace, and Byron listened with amused sympathy. Polidori, who seems to have been present at many of these discussions, noted down the topics, some of them characteristically distorted by Shelley, and sometimes added his own caustic commentary. Of Harriet and Mary and Claire, he noted on the 30th: ‘[Shelley] gone through much misery, thinking he was dying; married a girl for the mere sake of letting her have the jointure that would accrue to her; recovered; found he could not agree; separated; paid Godwin’s debts, and seduced his daughter; then wondered that he would not see him. The sister [i.e. Claire] left the father to go with the other. Got a child. All clever, and no meretricious appearance. He is very clever and the more I read his “Queen Mab” the more beauties I find.’20

  The next day, Shelley’s reminiscences went even further back into the mythologies of Dr Lind and Harriet Grove. ‘Shelley is another instance of wealth inducing relations to confine for madness, and was only saved by his physician being honest. He was betrothed from a boy to his cousin, for age; another came who had as much [money] as he would have, and she left him “because he was an atheist”.’21 Of Godwin Shelley talked bitterly. ‘When starving, a friend to whom he had given £2000 though he knew it, would not come near him.’ Mary impressed Polidori by reciting Coleridge’s grim satire against Pitt, ‘A War Eclogue’, in which the three voices of Fire, Famine and Slaughter chant of the statesman’s damnation — ‘which persuades me [Coleridge] is a poet’. Polidori was surprised by the taste among the Shelleys for the macabre, but glad when Shelley requested him to vaccinate little William, which he did on 2 June. The doctor received in thanks a gold chain and seal.

  Shelley took Montalègre without more ado at the beginning of June, and Byron, whose negotiations had been more protracted, moved into the Villa Diodati, above them on the hill, ten days later. Their new boat arrived on 8 June, and Shelley established its moorings in the little harbour. Polidori noted: ‘Into the new boat — Shelley’s — and talked till the ladies’ brains whizzed with giddiness about idealism. Back; rain; puffs of wind.’ Other subjects Polidori noted were madness, and names involved in the Irish revolutionary movement. Shelley was also, according to Byron, busy ‘dosing’ him with Wordsworth. In the evenings sometimes Claire managed to slip away up to the Diodati. But it was not altogether easy, for she found Polidori’s presence awkward, and she was anxious, she wrote in a note to Byron, that his suspicions should not be aroused. This was clearly a defensive device of Byron’s, for we know that he had told Polidori of the relationship on the first night they dined with Shelley. But by June there was also another piece of information that Polidori may or may not have known. Claire was pregnant. For Shelley it was a cloud, but a distant one.[1]

  Things became easier for Claire when the two households drew together as a result of a spell of bad weather in the last fortnight of June. There was less sailing to be done, and they joined together in literary discussions and projects at the Diodati. The talk went on late into the evenings, and when the rain was falling, Shelley’s party often stopped over the night. Polidori was laid up on a couch, having slipped and sprained his ankle attempting to perform a gallantry for Mary on the path through the vine fields on 15 June. He had begun a play, which ‘all agreed was worth nothing’, but the conversation with Shelley on that same night led in intriguing directions. ‘Shelley and I had a conversation about principles — whether man was to be thought merely an instrument.’

  Sitting in the long, candlelit drawing-room at the Diodati, with rain beating at the large balcony windows, and thunder and lightning frequently descending across the lake from the Jura, the subjects turned upon the life force, galvanism and the principles of animation. Polidori had qualified in Edinburgh at the exceptional age of 19, and the discussion was balanced between his considerable knowledge of contemporary medicine and Shelley’s more speculative interest in Erasmus Darwin’s work, and the possible applications of the kind of electrical instruments Shelley had experimented with at Oxford. Mary, who sat silently with Claire, half drawn back in the flickering shadows, listened with fascination as the men talked and theorized. She recalled: ‘Many and long were the conversations between Lord Byron and Shelley to which I was a devout but nearly silent listener. During one of these, various philosophical doctrines were discussed, and among others the nature of the principle of life, and whether there was any probability of it ever being discovered and communicated. They talked of the experiments of Dr Darwin . . . who preserved a piece of vermicelli in a glass case till by some extraordinary means it began to move with voluntary motion. Not thus, after all, would life be given. Perhaps a corpse would be reanimated; galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth.’22

  These speculative discussions, which continued
on the nights of 16 and 17 June, became merged with the idea that, after the disappointment of Polidori’s play, they should all try their hands at writing a ghost story. The previous week Polidori had been discussing problems of somnambulism with Dr Odier in Geneva, and someone, perhaps Byron, had brought in a copy of a very rare collection of German horror stories, translated under the title of Fantasmagoriana. On the 17th they all went to a ball at Madame Odier’s for part of the evening, except Polidori with his bad ankle, and these subjects were continued. Polidori was annoyed to be left out, since he had taken a fancy to Mary and her free thinking, though she responded drily enough to his gallantries by saying that she thought of him as a younger brother. Surrounded by the irritability and frustrations of the young doctor and also Claire’s tensions, and deep in the world of horror stories and speculations, Shelley found himself slipping into a mood of morbidity and oppression. Mary too was assailed by disturbing ideas and fantasies, and for once she felt threatened by Shelley’s power to frighten and unsettle.

  Shelley’s ghost story was never written down, but received a single explosive performance, on the night of the 18th. They were all sitting in the long room at the Diodati, and Polidori records what happened. ‘Twelve o’clock really began to talk ghostly. L[ord] B[yron] repeated some verses of Coleridge’s “Christabel��, of the witch’s breast; when silence ensued, and Shelley suddenly shrieking and putting his hands to his head, ran out of the room with a candle.’ In Coleridge’s poem, the witch, Geraldine, first appears as a beautiful and benighted princess, lost in the forest. But in reality she is a Lamia — a disguised serpent — and she is intent on both the spiritual and physical possession of the young girl, Christabel. Christabel’s father mistakenly gives Geraldine shelter in the castle. The witch is actually lodged in Christabel’s chamber, and when they retire to bed, she casts a kind of dreaming spell on her, and then proceeds to undress in front of her sleepy, half-closed eyes. The verse runs: