Shelley: The Pursuit

by Richard Holmes

  If Shelley had read this paragraph while he was still in England, it is conceivable that he might never have chosen exile. But it was all too late. The Revolt of Islam seemed to be nothing but a devastating failure. His whole life appeared to have been misdirected.

  During January 1818, Shelley was again attacked by ophthalmia, probably the result of his Christmas visits to the Marlow cottagers distributing the blankets. The disease was so bad that he was virtually unable to read and had to forgo the long immersions in Gibbon and Paradise Lost with which he had been soothing himself. Mary brought in Hogg and Peacock to distract him, but in the evenings she banished everyone from the room and had long, serious talks with him which she noted briefly in her journal. After a few days, the ophthalmia eased, and they went for walks together by the grey Thames and Shelley began translating Homer’s ‘Hymns’.83

  He was haunted by the problem of little Alba. How should she be sent to Italy? Who could take her if they could not? He had no peace from Mary until this could be settled. Only when the child had been presented to Byron, could it be guaranteed the kind of upbringing that it deserved; only then could Claire’s ambiguous position in Shelley’s household be clarified; and only then would Mary be satisfied. ‘Can you suggest a plan?’ he wrote to Byron, explaining his ‘constant and gradual delay’. ‘Have you any friend, or person of trust, who is leaving England for Italy?’84 Besides, he wrote, with that curiously open and paternal affection he always displayed towards Claire’s child, as if he and not Byron were the real father, how ‘exquisitely beautiful’ she had become. ‘Her temper has lost much of its vivacité, and has become affectionate, and mild.’ Some of the only happy hours of these dreary winter weeks were spent watching Alba and his beloved William play together on the nursery floor. When William, now nearly two years old and highly mobile, was given raisins or sweetmeats he always hastened to put at least half, or even more, into little Alba’s mouth, a practice that delighted his father.85

  Yet these charming distractions served in the end only to remind Shelley of the fragility and difficulties of his situation. These little children, and both their mothers, depended so completely on him for their ultimate happiness. ‘It is not health but life that I should seek in Italy,’ he told Godwin earnestly ‘& that not for my own sake, — I feel I am capable of trampling on all such weakness — but for the sake of those to whom my life may be a source of happiness utility security & honour — & to some of whom my death might be all that is the reverse.’86

  In this winter mood of gloom and indecision Shelley began to compose the autobiographical fragments which make up the poem ‘Prince Athanase’, and most of which bear on the very early part of his life. None the less Part I of the poem reflects much of his feelings at Marlow, and the attempts of his friends to get at the root of his depression. One phrase, about the ‘mysterious grief’ inflicted on those who ‘owned no higher law Than love’, conjures up the whole disastrous complication of his enmeshed relationships with Harriet, Mary and Claire. When Prince Athanase’s friends speculate on his grief, and try to draw him out in conversation, he does not attempt to evade the subject. But in the end this makes his life appear only more painful, more hopeless and more enchained:

  . . . nor did he,

  Like one who labours with a human woe,

  Decline this talk: as if its theme might be

  Another, not himself, he to and fro

  Questioned and canvassed it with subtlest wit;

  And none but those who loved him best could know

  That which he knew not, how it galled and bit

  His weary mind, this converse vain and cold;

  For like an eyeless nightmare grief did sit

  Upon his being; a snake which fold by fold

  Pressed out the life of life, a clinging fiend

  Which clenched him if he stirred with deadlier hold; —

  And so his grief remained — let it remain — untold.87

  Yet the final image is strikingly close to the poems of 1815, and this itself suggests a direct interpolation of the immediate worries of the winter 1817–18 is inappropriate. In his manuscript, Shelley added a dry and not altogether unironic comment. ‘The Author was pursuing a fuller development of the ideal character of Athanase, when it struck him that in an attempt at extreme refinement and analysis, his conceptions might be betrayed into assuming a morbid character. The reader will judge whether he is a loser or gainer by the difference.’88 It is clear that he was struggling to get a grip on himself.

  On 20 January, Godwin, after lengthy and cautious inquiries about the possibilities of ophthalmia being infectious, arrived with his son William to spend two days with the Shelleys. William Godwin junior was then 15, and ignoring the rather solemn conversations of his half-sister and brother-in-law, he immediately attached himself to Claire. He spent the whole time laughing, and teasing her. Shelley was pleased to see her cheer up. In the afternoons they all went for a walk in the woods, and in the evening they played chess round the fire.89 Godwin was once again determinedly angling for money. He had worked out a plan for Shelley to secure a large post obit loan, and a life insurance from William Willats, a London financier. The Godwins hastily departed from Marlow on the 22nd when Shelley’s ophthalmia broke out again. But the visit was decisive in another way. It at last brought home to him that it was time to put the Italian plan into operation. He wrote letters to Hogg, and to solicitors in London, using Mary as an amanuensis. On the 25th, much to everyone’s surprise and delight, it was discovered that Albion House, which had been advertised on the market for sale since the previous November, had found a definite buyer. The decision to go to Italy was now made. Four days later, Shelley, all ophthalmia forgotten, was bundling into the London coach with Claire and Peacock. For the next five weeks their life was transformed into a sudden, ceaseless, whirl of social activity; legal conferences, tea parties, operas, visits to the museum, dinners at Hunt’s and Godwin’s, packing, casing up of books and fitting the children out with all those clothes and conveniences of which the Italians had surely never heard.

  Shelley arranged to install himself at 119 Great Russell Street, a pleasant set of rooms near the British Museum, just off the bustle and thunder of carriages down the Tottenham Court Road. It was his last address in England. He was down in Marlow again on the 6th, helping Mary with the packing, and having arranged to leave the final winding up of Albion House affairs with the local agent, Mr Madocks. There were several bills outstanding, both on the house itself, and at local suppliers. Shelley undertook to settle them through Madocks before he left England. To Madocks, and to the financier Willats, he gave assurances that he was unlikely to leave England until April, ‘if so soon’.90 None of these assurances and arrangements were fully honoured. On the 7th Shelley returned to London, having taken leave of his library, his garden and his statues of Venus and Apollo for the last time. Keats’s schoolmaster patron, the genial Cowden Clarke, revisiting the neighbourhood several years later was told by one of the richer residents that ‘they all considered Shelley a madman’. He had not made the usual formal calls, either on arrival or departure.91

  Mary, the children and the rest of the ménage arrived in the city three days later. Accompanied by Peacock they celebrated their first night in town by a grand visit to Don Giovanni. Peacock was paying special attentions to Claire, and on one of their shopping expeditions he seems to have told her about the Brazilian student Shelley had met many years ago in Edinburgh. At any rate, she wrote into her diary with evident relish, the proud lines of Pereira’s sonnet in his praise: ‘Sublimi Shelley — Cantor di verdade, Sorge Queen Mab a ristorar il mondo.’92 The next evening when they were all over at Paddington with the Hunts, Hogg dropped in, and also Keats, and Shelley once more failed to convert the younger poet into a disciple. There was music, Hunt played the piano, and Claire sang, like Constantia. On the 14th, St Valentine’s Day, Shelley took Claire once again to Don Giovanni at Covent Garden, and Hogg and Peacoc
k made up the foursome. From then on almost every night of February was spent in festive mood. They went continually to hear Mozart at the opera, to see the prima ballerina Mademoiselle Milanie dance at the ballet, and to the theatre. During the day Peacock conducted them round the museums. They paid an admiring visit to the recently acquired Marbles that Lord Elgin had shipped from Greece. They saw an exhibition of painted glass, which Hunt then reviewed for the Examiner, while Shelley contributed a charitable critique of Peacock’s newly published Rhododaphne. They saw casts of Canova’s Castor and Melpomene in Bond Street, as a kind of aperitif before the piazzas and galleries of Italy. They went to see a lioness and her cubs in one of the travelling zoos, and they paid several visits to the Apollonicon, a monstrous barrel organ housed in St Martin’s Lane. It was reputed to have cost £10,000 to build, and no less than six organists could play upon it simultaneously, with results that sent Claire Clairmont, and several thousand others, into a marvelling ecstasy.

  This was perhaps the most lively, sociable and urbane month Shelley ever spent in his life. After the weeks of depression and indecision, he threw himself into it with energy and delight. The world of Bisham Woods, and Laon and Cythna, and the solitary skiff on the Thames seemed far away. Equally, he seemed to have forgotten, the decision once made, that he was about to uproot his whole life, and to go into what was in effect a forced exile. February was a charmed limbo. His old friend Hogg, bustling out regularly to join the celebrations from his legal apartments in Garden Temple, especially appreciated the change. He wrote in his oracular fashion to a friend that Shelley ‘had lately parted with his house at Marlow for an advantageous price & with his opinion gratis that a wise man can only benefit his species by dwelling upon a wold in the midst of a morass or on the highest summit of a mountain’.

  Shelley was no longer the aloof, critical observer of city pleasures, that he had been of old. ‘He is now in town arrayed in purple and fine linen, in a blue coat & white waistcoat; for three weeks he has been a punctual attendant at the Opera; he condescends to admire Madame Fodor & Mademoiselle Millanie & to haunt Exhibitions, Concerts & Theatres.’ His wine bill at Messrs Gilbey & Co. rose to the unprecedented heights of nine guineas. Meanwhile the carriage was being prepared at a coaching house in Long Acre.93 Hogg could not avoid a few twinges of doubt, but he brushed them off as briskly as he could. ‘In a short time he intends to go abroad to visit Paris & perhaps Italy; it seems unjust to leave our native country where only he can be of great utility, & such being his sentiments, his absense will not I believe be very long, but he will return to reside in the vicinity of London.’94

  For Mary, this was a taste of the city life with Shelley she never forgot. She had, after all, been brought up by Godwin to officiate at evening dinners and entertainments, and to enjoy the public glare of theatres and concerts. Her Frankenstein had finally been published, and sensational reviews were coming in from the journals, and distinguished writers like Scott and Tom Moore were signifying their approval of the unknown author. Mary adored the theatre and the opera. Despite Peacock’s opinion that Shelley hated stage comedies, he too enjoyed these nights out immensely, and he took a regular box at Covent Garden. Hunt nostalgically recalled such evenings long after Shelley had departed. ‘We look up to your box almost hoping to see a thin, patrician-looking cosmopolite leaning out upon us, and a sedate-faced young lady bending in a similar direction, with her great tablet of a forehead, and her white shoulders unconscious of a crimson gown.’95 Shelley also visited the pantomime with Claire, and its garish magic completely entranced him. Shelley loved stage contrivances and melodrama. Many years later, after Mary had visited the German Opera, she wrote to Hogg: ‘We liked the music, & the incantation scene would have made Shelley scream with delight, flapping owls, ravens, hopping toads, queer reptiles, fiery serpents, skeleton huntsmen . . . .’96

  Apart from review contributions for the Examiner, Shelley wrote little or nothing. But in Hunt circles poetry was a social art, and on 14 February three competitive sonnets on the subject of the Nile were written during an evening party at Lisson Grove. The competitors were Hunt, Keats and Shelley.97 Not surprisingly perhaps, Hunt’s is far the most competent while both Keats’s and Shelley’s betray embarrassment. Egyptian subjects were very much in vogue, for in the autumn of 1817 the British Museum had taken receipt of fragments and sculptures from the Empire of the Ramases, some dating from circa 2000 BC. Among these were the celebrated Rosetta Stone, and the massive figure of Ramases II taken from the King’s Funerary Temple at Thebes and presented by Henry Salt and J. L. Burckhardt. This figure, perhaps the most famous of all Egyptian fragments, is carved in blue and white granite. Much was also being written in the press about the startling Egyptian finds, and when Walter Coulson, the editor, visited Marlow over Christmas it had been often discussed. Visits to the British Museum with Horace Smith prompted Shelley to suggest that they might both produce a sonnet on the subject. Smith, the stockbroker poet who had agreed to be Shelley’s financial agent in London, faithfully produced a workmanlike poem. Shelley produced ‘Ozymandias’. It is the finest sonnet he ever wrote: harsh, dramatic and deeply expressive of his eternal hatred of tyranny and his brooding philosophic scepticism. The poem was published in Hunt’s Examiner shortly before he left England, ave atque vale:

  I met a traveller from an antique land

  Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

  Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,

  Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

  And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

  Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

  Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

  The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:

  And on the pedestal these words appear:

  ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

  Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’

  Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

  Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

  The lone and level sands stretch far away.98

  Apart from business connected with the house at Marlow, and the immediate arrangements for the coach and the journey, Shelley had only one other important affair to arrange: Godwin’s finances. By the technical device of having his own life insured against the possibility of dying before Sir Timothy, Shelley was able to secure a very substantial post obit, and Godwin expected to benefit handsomely. It is not quite clear how much the sum amounted to, but it may have been a sum as large as £4,500; at any rate the liability to Willats was £9,000.99 Godwin’s delight at hearing of this agreement was quickly dashed when he discovered that Shelley, as in 1815, had decided to make use of a good part of this money for his own expenses. He wrote acknowledging the receipt of ‘the sum mentioned in your letter. I acknowledge with equal explicitness my complete disappointment. I observe the expression you use, that you are “resolved to keep in your hands the power conferred by the difference of the two sums”.’100

  Godwin pressed Shelley to leave all the post obit money in England, under a joint account, requiring joint signatures; but Shelley would not accept this, for he had learnt his lesson and was not leaving financial hostages behind. Godwin’s bitter reaction brought out much of that mixture of shame and hostility towards Shelley that he had tried to suppress since the marriage of 1816. His letter, the last one we have from him to Shelley in England, sadly recalls the declining course which the relationship between master and protégé had run, ever since 1812. Godwin wrote that he had ‘reflected much on the subject. I am ashamed of the tone I have taken with you in all our late conversations. I have played the part of a supplicant, and deserted that of a philosopher. It was not thus I talked with you when I first knew you. I will talk so no more. I will talk principles; I will talk Political Justice; whether it makes for me or against me, no matter. I am fully capable of this . . . . I have nothing to say to you of a passionate nature;
least of all do I wish to move your feelings; less than the least to wound you. All that I have to say in the calmness of philosophy, and moves far above the atmosphere of vulgar sensations. If you have the courage to hear me, come; if you have not, be it so.’101

  This final appeal, intended by Godwin to be dignified and even majestic, had to Shelley’s ear a mixture of hypocrisy and pathos, and his answer was eloquent. Having assured himself that Godwin had received the allotted money, he broke off contact. Throughout the month of February, his last in England, while he was lodging at Great Russell Street and visiting friends virtually every evening, he did not once call on Godwin. Meanwhile, abandoning every restraint, Godwin wrote to him again and again, on the 2, 3, 5 and 10 February; and renewed the onslaught on the 17th, 22nd, 24th and 25th. There is no record of Shelley replying, and Godwin’s own letters have not survived, probably because Shelley tore them up.102 As a last resort, five days before they left London, Godwin slipped in to see his daughter while Shelley was out. By chance, or perhaps by Godwin’s calculation, Shelley returned while he was still there, and a stiff but polite reconciliation followed.

  Over their last weekend, the 7 and 8 March, Shelley called briefly on Godwin, and stayed to tea. But he visited in company with Hogg, Peacock and Horace Smith, so it was impossible to talk business. Claire also visited her mother, Mrs Godwin, to say farewell. On Monday the 9th, Godwin was permitted to come to the christening of William and little Clara at St Giles-in-the-Fields. Claire also had Alba baptized according to Byron’s instructions, ‘Clara Allegra’, adding: ‘reputed daughter of Rt Hon. George Gordon, Lord Byron, Peer of no fixed residence, travelling on the continent’. They all returned to Russell Street, but once again Shelley had Peacock and Horace Smith on hand, and the visitors left early. Later in the evening Hunt and Bessy Kent walked down from Paddington, and arranged a farewell dinner for the following day. On Tuesday the 11th they were busy packing, and various friends looked in to say goodbye. The children were put to bed early in precaution for the next day’s journey, and Hunt and Marianne came down to celebrate Shelley’s last night. After supper, exhausted, Shelley fell asleep on the couch, and the Hunts crept away without finally saying goodbye at all.