Shelley: The Pursuit

by Richard Holmes

  The house that Shelley found, the Casa Bertini, was on a modest scale. It had three floors, an elegantly tiled roof, new furnishings and freshly painted shutters, yet it was in its appointments little more than a large country cottage. It was owned by a local businessman, Signor G. B. del Chiappi, and was available for lease for the whole summer. Its greatest attraction was its neatness and its position, tucked away almost at the top of the unpaved, dusty yellow, hairpin road, which snaked up through the village and lost itself in the surrounding hills. While the front of the Casa Bertini commanded a curve of this road from its own small terrace garden, the back was shrouded in a densely overgrown little garden about twenty yards long, at the end of which was a rough arbour constructed out of laurel bushes. Only by parting this wall of half-tamed foliage with the hand could glimpses of the Lima be caught, glittering far below, through its sinuous margins of white shingle thrown up by the winter floods. Shelley realized at once that he had found a perfect setting to resume his work, and rode back two days later to tell the girls the good news. But nothing could be hurried in Tuscany at that, or any other time of the year. It was nearly another three weeks before the Casa Bertini was ready to receive them and the formalities complete. In the meantime, they adapted themselves to the pleasant, gossipy expatriate life of Livorno — ‘Leghorn’ to the literal-minded English — reading and studying in the mornings, walking out round the piazza and the old drum-like medieval fortifications of the harbour in the afternoon and taking tea and conversazione in the evening. Shelley had laid Dante aside for the time being, and was concentrating on the Greek dramatists. He read Hippolytus of Euripides, and then turned to Sophocles, whose measured philosophy and sensitive psychological characterization he found a revelation. He read Electra, Ajax and then Philoctetes, finding that he could translate with increasing swiftness and fluency. This last, with its symbolic themes of isolation, sickness and madness connected in Shelley’s mind with the research he had already undertaken into Tasso’s life.[4] He sketched out one or two scenes for this drama which he hoped to write at Bagni di Lucca, including a ‘Song’ about Tasso’s love for the Princess Leonora.

  Sometimes I see before me flee

  A silver spirit’s form, like thee,

  O Leonora, and I sit

  . . . still watching it,

  Till by the grated casement’s ledge

  It fades, with such a sigh, as sedge

  Breathes o’er the breezy streamlet’s edge.30

  The dramatic fragment of ‘Tasso’ is interesting, for it foreshadows how all Shelley’s attempts to create a poetic drama for the stage were to be overwhelmed, as both Coleridge and Keats were overwhelmed, by the massive presence of Shakespeare. Even the little song here carries the melancholy echo of Hamlet’s Ophelia. It was only when Shelley further developed the new modes already created in Queen Mab and The Revolt of Islam that he was to be able to break free into entirely original and individual forms of dramatic confrontation, set within epic or balladic frames. His most fruitful models were not to be the Elizabethan or Jacobean drama, but the Greek plays, Milton’s Paradise Regained, and Coleridge’s The Ancient Mariner.

  ‘Tasso’ did however indicate the directions in which Shelley was to turn his efforts later in 1818. It contained a poet called Count Maddalo, who became a major figure in one of Shelley’s greatest poems, written in the autumn. But it served especially to focus his attention on the mythological complex of ideas persistently recurring in the stories of Laon, of Philoctetes, of Tasso himself and of Prometheus — both Aeschylus’s and Mary Shelley’s.

  A sensational Renaissance story, already circulating among the English at Livorno, was added to this repertoire of source materials before Shelley departed for the Bagni. Mrs Gisborne had spent one evening talking to Mary about ‘a strange story that happened to her concerning a mad girl’.31 Finding the Shelleys’ interests were peculiarly adapted to such things, the next day she passed a copy of the ‘Cenci Manuscript’, the grim story of the evil Count Cenci of Rome, who had committed incest with his daughter the beautiful Beatrice, and was subsequently murdered by her. Mary was copying the manuscript into a small, dark calf notebook in a rounded copper-plate hand for Shelley to brood on, at the end of May. The villain is introduced in bold gothic fashion with the memorable sentence, ‘Sodomy was the least and Atheism the greatest of the vices of Francisco [Cenci] . . .’32

  Claire had been somewhat taken out of herself by Maria Gisborne’s pleasant though slightly strait-laced 28-year-old son Henry Reveley, a clever if submissive man who seemed, like his stepfather, to be over-shadowed by his mother. Mary was later to write of him, ‘he is under as complete a subordination as few boys of twelve are’, and again: ‘the pattern of good boys’.33 For Claire he already seemed the perfect subject for teasing, if not actually enticing; and how could one tease without being cheerful? Henry told Shelley of his education under John Rennie, the architect and engineer of Waterloo Bridge,34 and eagerly showed him round his waterside workshops where he was planning to construct a revolutionary marine engine powered by steam. Shelley’s interest was caught, and Henry joined their walks in the clear June evenings regularly, until they departed for the Bagni di Lucca and Casa Bertini. Shelley and Mary felt at last that their lives were beginning to take on the shape they had envisaged. Late at night they taught themselves Italian by reading together the comic and amorous cantos of Ariosto.

  Shelley, Mary, Claire, Milly Shields and the two children arrived at the Casa Bertini on 11 June, when the spa season was already well under way. They were all delighted. Signor Chiappi had hired them a full-time cook, and a cleaning maid who came every day, and Mary approved of the spick paintwork. Shelley chose as his study a small room looking out over the wooded hills of the Apennines, and unpacked his books fully for the first time since he had arrived in Italy. They quickly settled into a relaxed routine of studying, bathing at the spa and walking in the chestnut woods, and this remained virtually unbroken for the next seven weeks. Sometimes they hired horses and rode out into the surrounding hills, and occasionally they dressed and went down to the Casino where there were lively dances two evenings a week: ‘English and French country dances; quadrilles; waltzes; & Italian dances’, as Mary observed carefully.

  As he felt the heat of the Italian sun bringing back his health, Shelley frequently disappeared for whole days into the woods with his books, enjoying the open-air studies which he had originated at Bishopsgate and Marlow, usually beside some stream or waterfall. He continued to read steadily through his Greek authors, turning also now to Aristophanes and Plato, and began to build up a homogeneous impression of Athenian society in its golden age. Still perhaps thinking of ‘Tasso’, he read more sporadically among the Jacobeans, especially Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher. He sent a memorable and not altogether unmischievous portrait of himself at work in his open air study to Peacock, transforming himself gradually from a scholar into a dryad.

  [My pool] is surrounded on all sides by precipitous rocks, and the waterfall of the stream which forms it falls into it on one side with perpetual dashing. Close to it, on the top of the rocks, are alders, and above the great chestnut trees, whose long and pointed leaves pierce the deep blue sky in strong relief. The water of this pool . . . is as transparent as the air, so that the stones and sand at the bottom seem, as it were, trembling in the light of noonday. It is exceedingly cold also. My custom is to undress and sit on the rocks, reading Herodotus, until the perspiration has subsided, and then to leap from the edge of the rock into this fountain — a practice in the hot weather exceedingly refreshing. This torrent is composed, as it were, of a succession of pools and waterfalls, up which I sometimes amuse myself by climbing when I bathe, and receiving the spray over all my body, whilst I clamber up the moist crags with difficulty.35

  Thus began Shelley’s long love-affair with the waters of Italy; wherever he stayed, the waters received as much attention and enthusiasm as the architecture. But whether he was joined
in these aquatic sports he does not mention, and neither Mary’s journal nor Claire’s diary remark on them.36

  Mary now longed for the Gisbornes to join them, and make a somewhat remote existence slightly more sociable. She wrote to them in early July, happy with everything but the gran turismo. ‘I am sure you would be enchanted with everything but the English that are crowded here to the almost entire exclusion of the Italians . . . . We see none but the English, we hear nothing but English spoken. The walks are filled with English nurserymaids, a kind of animal I by no means like, & dashing staring Englishwomen, who surprise the Italians who are always carried about in Sedan Chairs, by riding on horseback. — For us we generally walk except last Tuesday, when Shelley and I took a long ride to il prato fiorito; a flowery meadow on the top of one of the neighbouring Apennines — We rode among chestnut woods hearing the noisy cicala, and there was nothing disagreeable in it except the steepness of the ascent . . . . Not long ago we heard a Cuckoo.’37

  For Shelley, the bustling life was invisible. ‘We have spent a month here already in our accustomed solitude (with the exception of one night at the Casino) and the choice society of all ages which I took care to pack up in a large trunk before we left England . . . .’ The trip to the Prato Fiorito filled him with delight at its sudden vistas of torrents and green ravines, and he planned at once to make a more extensive trip of two or three days to Monte San Peligrano, an ancient centre of summer pilgrimage. But Mary was not keen on complete immersion in rural pleasures, and he was unable to make the trip until two years later, when he went by himself. However he gradually persuaded her to come out riding in the evening more often.38

  Above all it was the climate and the countryside of the Italian Apennines that fascinated and attracted Shelley. He spent hours and hours simply gazing upwards at the changing skyscapes, and the shifting light values in the trees, and the blue-green transformations of the air in the Lima valley. ‘I take great delight in watching the changes of the atmosphere here,’ he told Mrs Gisborne, ‘& the growth of the thunder showers with which the noon is often over shadowed, & which break & fade away towards evening into flocks of delicate clouds. Our fire flies are fading away fast, but there is the planet Jupiter who rises majestically over the rift in the forest-covered mountains to the south, & the pale summer lightning which is spread out every night at intervals over the sky. No doubt Providence has contrived these things, that when the fire flies go out the low flying owl may see her way home.’39 Nearly every one of these details, the cloud growths, the storms, the sheet lightning, the planets, the fireflies, even the owl, were later to find their places in his poems. A letter he wrote to Godwin at this time, though it is short, and mostly taken up with politics, books and reviews, begins with the Italian sky. To Peacock he noted that the storms produced hail sometimes ‘about the size of a pigeon’s egg’, and observed how the clouds varied between ‘those finely woven webs of vapour which we see in English skies, and flocks of fleecy and slowly moving clouds, which all vanish before sunset’. The planets too came in for further notice in the clear evening skies, though when writing to Peacock there was again a certain mischievousness in his commentary. ‘We see a star in the east at sunset — I think it is Jupiter — almost as fine as Venus was last summer; but it wants a certain silver and aerial radiance, and soft yet piercing splendour which belongs, I suppose, to the latter planet by virtue of its at once divine and female nature. I have forgotten to ask the ladies if Jupiter produces on them the same effect.’40

  Shelley’s visits to the casino, rare as they were, apparently gave him more pleasure than they did Mary or even Claire. Shelley was much amused that although they looked forward to their outings so much, neither of the girls, when it came to the point, would actually dance: ‘I do not know whether they refrain from philosophy or protestantism.’41 He himself had no such scruples, though he told Peacock mockingly that there was pitifully little chance of being swept off one’s feet: ‘the women being far removed from anything which the most liberal annotator could interpret into beauty or grace, and apparently possessing no intellectual excellencies to compensate the deficiency. I assure you it is well that it is so, for the dances, especially the waltz, are so exquisitely beautiful that it would be a little dangerous to the newly unfrozen senses and imagination of us migrators from the neighbourhood of the pole. As it is — except in the dark — there could be no peril.’42

  But these frivolities barely rippled the surface of his days at the Casa Bertini. He luxuriated in the remoteness of everyday affairs, especially affairs in England, and hardly paused to note the news of the Westminster elections, or the political apostasy of the ‘beastly and pitiful wretch that Wordsworth!’ The generally favourable run of reviews which Mary’s Frankenstein was receiving, and his own pillorying in the Quarterly as a civil and religious pervert, evoked slightly more interest; but the anticipation of Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey alone aroused something like enthusiasm, and he suggested a motto from Ben Jonson, ‘Have you a stool there to be melancholy upon?’ Understanding from Peacock that the book was to be an attack on the pessimism and conservatism of modern English authors, he urged: ‘I hope you have given the enemy no quarter. Remember, it is a sacred war.’43 Later, in August, having received vague forewarning from Peacock, or having himself guessed that his own circle was involved, he wrote with sudden sharpness: ‘Well, what is in it? What is it? You are as secret as if the priest of Ceres had dictated its sacred pages.’44

  The mixture of moods which his letters from Casa Bertini reflect — the sense of well-being and amused detachment, suddenly cut across by moments of irritations or self-mockery — betray the difficulty he was having through June and July with his own writing. He had come to the Bagni primarily, as he had planned in Milan, to get a major piece of work done. But beyond the few fragments already begun at Livorno, his projected drama of ‘Tasso’ yielded nothing, and Mary’s suggestion that he take up and complete Rosalind and Helen — which he did — neither freed his creative faculties nor satisfied them. His reading, especially in the Greeks, went ahead rapidly; but his notebooks remained empty. Finally, almost as a kind of distraction, he started to put down translations of what he was reading. Though he did not fully realize it at the time, this almost casual act was his first significant literary step since his arrival in Italy. Translation was to prove an immensely important catalyst. Not only was he to produce several translated texts, excellent and highly significant in their own right; but a number of his own works were to be triggered by, or actually based upon, translations.

  Shelley’s reading of the Greek dramatists had given way by the end of June to reading Plato. Restlessness at being unable to write had set in, and on the first Saturday in July he hired a horse and rode alone down the long winding valley of the Lima as far as Lucca, where rivers combine and become the Serchio. It was a distance of about eighteen miles, but Shelley covered it in the course of the long evening, stopped the night, and returned on Sunday, when they all went to the casino. During this interlude, a plan had suddenly formed in his mind to translate the Symposium, and by Thursday the 9th he was at work. Occasionally reading sections to Mary as he went, he continued for a week, and by Friday the 17th he had completed a rough draft. He started off again to ride to Lucca, this time taking Claire with him, but she fell off her horse and they had to go back to the Casa Bertini to recover. The next day the trip was made successfully. Mary’s journal is not explicit on the point, but judging by the distance of the ride, and Claire’s evident inexpertise, it seems likely that she and Shelley spent the night together at Lucca, and returned the next day, as Shelley had done alone the week previously. Claire’s riding technique at least was not improved, for she fell off her horse again in August.45

  Shelley now handed the whole of his text over to Mary, who began a careful transcription on Monday the 20th. Discussion of various points of social and literary background, many of which were obscure to Mary, led him on to consider writing an intro
ductory essay. This he found more difficult, and he was still adding to it and clarifying it on 16 August, when outside events called his attention away.

  Shelley’s The Banquet Translated from Plato, together with his introduction, ‘A Discourse on the Manners of the Ancient Greeks Relative to the Subject of Love’, are the two works which of his whole output show most clearly his qualities as a pure scholar. When Hogg referred to the summer at Marlow as ‘a mere Atticism’, it is by these two works that one can assess the real value of that essentially gentlemanly classicism. The value is high. Shelley’s translation shows him perfectly in control of the overall sweep of the philosophic dialogue, masterly with the more impassioned sections of Socrates’s and Agathon’s speeches, and with a considerable gift for drawing out the individual character and style of each speaker. The general directness and limpidity of his style, while retaining a certain elegant formality, especially in its rhythms, is particularly pleasing. A comparison with Jowett’s great Victorian translation, and a popular modern one by W.D. Rouse, shows how Shelley holds the Attic balance between pedanticism and breezy familiarity, even at the most mundane level.[5] It has also been noted how the translations reflected the milieu in which they were made, and how, in this too, Shelley’s version is especially rich with the resonances of lived experience: ‘Jowett, for instance, somehow imparts to his Alcibiades the atmosphere together with the locutions of an English undergraduate, while Shelley’s Alcibiades carries about him, with something of a Byronic air and with an incommunicable verve and charm and freshness, the atmosphere of an accomplished man of the world, a spoilt darling of the gods.’46 Where Shelley is occasionally inaccurate, in more philosophic passages, it is because he has preferred to abandon the use of Scapula’s Greek lexicon, and rely on the interpretation given by Plato’s great Renaissance student, Marsilio Ficino, whose Latin text Shelley had alongside him at Casa Bertini as he worked.47