Shelley: The Pursuit

by Richard Holmes

  But the great feature of the Villa Capuccini was its summerhouse, situated at the end of a stone-flagged path stretching across the little back garden and reached by a glass doorway in the hall at the back of the house. The path was shaded by a trellis of vines trained across wooden frames to make one of the charming pergolas typical of the region. Shelley set up his study in this little summerhouse, scattering it with his few books and papers, and each morning he would make his way through the tunnel of sunlight and shade to write.

  After the translation of the Symposium, his mind was again turning to the Promethean theme which he had unsuccessfully attempted to develop at Livorno and at Lucca in the stage play about Tasso. Realizing that the act of translation had both released and sustained his creative powers, he now turned to another Greek text, the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus, and began to work some of it over into English. He no longer attempted to work methodically at a strict translation, but played around with certain images and speeches, adapting, extending and improvising as he went. He gradually came to the conclusion that by using the Aeschylean play as a base, he could attempt to re-create in English a version of the missing third part of the Aeschylean trilogy, the Prometheus Unbound. He could adapt the Aeschylean mythology and symbolism to the themes of political revolution and moral regeneration which had consistently concerned him in his previous epic poems, Queen Mab and The Revolt of Islam.

  The process of adaption was to prove a slow and immensely arduous one. Upon no other of his poems did Shelley lavish such concentrated work over such a long period. By 22 September he had written twenty-six manuscript pages, and by 8 October he was writing to Peacock that he had ‘just finished the first act of a lyric & classical drama to be called “Prometheus Unbound”. Yet two months later in Naples, he was still redrafting this first act, and he wrote that it had been ‘completed’ at the end of January 1819. The second and third acts of Prometheus were finished in Rome by June 1819, but the fourth and final act was not conceived or added until the winter of 1819 in Florence. In all, Prometheus Unbound was sixteen months in composition. Yet the original idea, grounded upon Aeschylus’ Prometheus remains as he first conceived it in September, living quietly with Claire at Este, and writing in the shaded summer-house of the Villa Capuccini.

  Meanwhile, as Mary pressed to conform to Shelley’s gruelling travel scheme, aided as far as Lucca by Mrs Gisborne, little Clara became increasingly ill. By a kind of sympathy at the Villa Capuccini, Shelley made himself sick by eating some Italian cakes which he thought — for no apparent reason — must have been poisoned. Mary arrived on Saturday, 5 September, six days after her twenty-first birthday which she had celebrated alone by packing their books at the Casa Bertini. She was greeted by Shelley and Claire, who had been alone together, with Allegra and Elise, for three weeks. The 5th September is also important for it is the first time that Paolo Foggi met Elise. Little Clara was rather worryingly ill, and Shelley’s stomach upset was turning into dysentery. Claire too seems to have been ill, and on the 16th the two of them went into Padua, to consult a doctor, since a proper medico could not be found in the country. Mary noted anxiously ‘[Shelley] is very ill from the effects of his poison’; and of the baby, ‘Poor Clara is dangerously ill’.10 Little Clara’s condition was aggravated by her weakness from travelling and her teething. Shelley was the first to recover fully, and Mary noted that he was again writing hard in the summerhouse, and reading Sophocles’s Oedipus to her in the evenings. He wrote to Byron that he had been ‘four or five times on the point of setting out to Venice’, but that Clara’s illness had kept him ‘an anxious prisoner’ at Este. ‘We have domesticated ourselves unceremoniously here, and find it, as I think you would find it, a most delightful residence.’11 But Byron did not take the hint.

  On Tuesday, 22 September, Shelley again took Claire into Padua to visit the doctor, but arriving too late in the morning, they missed her appointment. They had also intended to ask the medico’s advice about little Clara. Shelley was not unduly concerned, and he decided to go on alone to keep his long-promised visit to Byron at the Palazzo Mocenigo, and stay until Thursday. He sent Claire back to Este with a note to Mary, once again issuing a rather severe travelling time-table. ‘Clare says she is obliged to come to see the Medico whom we missed this morning, & who has appointed as the only hour at which he can be at leisure, ½ past 8 in the morning. — You must therefore arrange matters so that you should come to the Stella d’Oro a little before that hour — a thing only to be accomplished by setting out at ½ past 3 in the morning.’ Shelley intended to meet them at Padua, and then take Mary back to see Byron at Venice, while Claire returned to Este. Despite an explanation about avoiding the heat, this did not really alter the fact that Mary and the baby were again being fitted to Claire’s convenience. Shelley was not entirely happy about his treatment of Mary and the child. ‘My poor little Clara how is she today? Indeed I am somewhat uneasy about her, and though I feel secure there is no danger, it would be very comfortable to have some reasonable person’s opinion about her. The Medico at Padua is certainly a man in great practise, but I confess he does not satisfy me. — Am I not like a wild swan to be gone so suddenly?’ He added a mysterious remark about not addressing her yet as ‘Lady Shelley’ — which was perhaps intended to remind her of the favours of fortune to come. Shelley finished his instructions by urging Mary to continue a translation of Ariosto which she had been attempting to work on since his departure from the Bagni di Lucca; and also for her to bring the manuscript of his own poem ‘. . . the sheets of “Prometheus Unbound” which you will find numbered 1 to 26 on the table of the pavilion’.12 With that, he set off for Venice, and the intoxication of Byron’s late night conversation, and the long rides across the deserted Lido.

  How far Shelley was underestimating or simply ignoring Mary’s worries about the child can be seen by the entirely different tone of one of her own letters to Maria Gisborne, which had arrived in Livorno four days previously. ‘. . . the fatigue has given my poor little Ca an attack of dysentery and although she is now somewhat recovered from that disorder she is still in a frightful state of weakness and fever and is reduced to be so thin in this short time that you would hardly know her again — the physician of Este is a stupid fellow but there is one come from Padua & who appears clever so I hope under his care she will soon get well, although we are still in great anxiety concerning her.’13 A forced journey from Este to Venice, which was to begin at 3.30 in the morning and end at 5 in the afternoon was not perhaps the most suitable treatment in the circumstances.14

  The upshot was rapid, and surely foreseeable. By the time little Clara had reached the Stella d’Oro at Padua on Thursday morning, she was again seriously ill. Shelley however insisted on continuing the prearranged journey into Venice, rather than put her under the care of the Paduan medico who had treated her previously. As the journey continued, Clara showed ‘symptoms of increased weakness and even convulsive motions of the mouth and eyes’, which as Shelley said made him ‘anxious to see the physician’. At Fusina, where travellers boarded the gondolas to cross the lagoon into Venice, Shelley found he had forgotten their travel permit and was held up by the customs guards on duty. Mary was now frantic with the difficulties and delays, and Shelley forced their way on to the boat with a characteristic outburst. ‘They could not resist [his] impetuosity at such a moment,’ Mary wrote afterwards.15 In the gondola, the child grew worse. They reached the inn, and Shelley immediately took another boat to find Byron’s physician, Dr Aglietti. But he had made no previous arrangement, and the doctor was not to be found at home. Meanwhile Mary remained alone in the hall of the Venetian inn, in the ‘most dreadful distress’, as the child’s convulsions grew worse. Before Shelley had returned, in a state of desperation, Mary had managed to summon a local doctor through the servants. But all he could tell was that there was no hope. Little Clara’s convulsions ceased, and she grew quiet, and died silently about one hour after they had arrived in Venice. Sh
elley returned to see her die in Mary’s arms. A few minutes later, the Hoppners arrived by gondola, having been alerted by a messenger, and took off the stunned and weeping party to the consulate. Clara was buried the next morning. Shelley wrote to Claire that Mary was by this ‘unexpected stroke reduced to a kind of despair. She is better today.’16

  But Mary was not really ‘better’ for another twelve months. The death of little Clara, to which Shelley’s carelessness and unconcern had distinctly contributed, brought to a state of crisis the already strained relations between husband and wife. Other events were to compound further the situation during the winter, and Mary went into a long period of decline and isolated misery. When the birth of a new child, in November 1819, finally brought her back into full engagement with her life in Italy, she was a matured and rather hardened woman, who had come to accept both more realistically and more coldly the nature and limitations of her relationship with Shelley. Between young Mary and the matured one there is a distinct emotional caesura. Something of it can be seen in the comparison of the two portraits of her, the first drawn before her departure for Italy, and the second painted after her return to England. She worked herself through this crisis, a sort of mental breakdown, partly with the help of a long autobiographical novel which she wrote but retained in manuscript, called ‘Mathilda’.17 Many side-effects flowed from this ‘kind of despair’ which overwhelmed her, but one of the most important was the end of the state of confidentiality which had hitherto existed between her and Shelley. Certain parts of Shelley’s emotional life were now forever closed from her. He found it easier to turn to Claire, and to others, for understanding. From the death of little Clara until the spring of 1819, there is only one complete letter of Mary’s extant, although her journal continues in its usual laconic fashion. For 25 September she entered, ‘This is the Journal of misfortune.’18

  After Clara’s burial, and a weekend during which Lord Byron and the Hoppners kindly attempted to distract Shelley and Mary with tours round the palaces, bridges and museums of Venice, the couple returned subdued to Este. Byron gave Mary the manuscript of his new poem ‘Mazeppa’ and told her gravely how helpful it would be if she could find time to fair-copy it. Shelley returned to the summerhouse and continued work sporadically on Prometheus Unbound, and made a draft of the ‘Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills’, a poem of great personal unhappiness.

  After the first fortnight of October Mary seems to have found the atmosphere at the Villa Capuccini too melancholy, and she and Shelley returned to Venice for the rest of the month, dutifully distracting themselves with gondola trips, visits to the opera and a regular dinner engagement at the Hoppners’. Claire remained at Este with Allegra and Elise. One of the Hoppners’ Italian acquaintances, the Chevalier Mengaldo, learning of Mary’s authorship of Frankenstein, enthusiastically retold in detail several ghost stories, three of which Mary transcribed woodenly into her journal for 20 October. She later used them in her London Magazine article of 1824. The Chevalier, who had fought and been honourably wounded in Napoleon’s Russian campaign, gallantly escorted Mary out to opera and comedies, although privately she was dismissing them as ‘wretched’ and ‘stupid beyond measure’.19 Shelley took the opportunity to slip away in a gondola, spending many afternoons riding with Byron along their favourite windswept Lido, and most evenings talking far into the night in the inner sanctum of Palazzo Mocenigo. Besides more personal matters, Shelley discussed Plato’s Symposium and The Republic with Byron, and lent him a text. He was always anxious to improve Byron’s mind, if not his morals, when he got the chance. In return, Byron drew his attention to a violent attack on Mr Hunt and Mr Shelley in the Quarterly, perhaps from his own version of the improving motive.20

  Shelley’s first delight with the gondolas and waterways and palaces of Venice slowly gave way to a deep disgust and aversion. To begin with it was largely political; he was appalled by the dungeons of the Doge’s Palace, ‘where the sufferers were roasted to death or madness by the ardours of an Italian sun, and others called the Pozzi, or wells, deep underneath, and communicating with those on the roof by secret passages where the prisoners were confined sometimes half up to their middles in stinking water’. As at Chillon, one suspects that the image of claustrophobic confinement was particularly appalling to him. Yet these signs of ancient tyranny were as nothing to the abject spirit of the place under its present occupation by Austrian troops. The Austrians, he noted, levied sixty per cent taxes and were quartered freely on the inhabitants; their soldiers swaggered brutally through the city, and dominated the public entertainments.21[1]

  But politics formed only the objectionable dress of Venetian society, for there was also the repulsive flesh beneath. Shelley’s hypersensitive nerves prickled with the Venetian combination of the beautiful and the disgusting, the graceful and the vile. He was both impressed and horrified by the gradual revelation of Byron’s private life, and the extraordinary mixture of energy and cynicism with which it affected Byron’s mental outlook. He wrote a long analysis to Peacock, which shows, besides his own acuteness of observation, that continuing puritan combination of revulsion and fascination in Shelley’s own make-up.

  I entirely agree with what you say about Childe Harold [Canto IV]. The spirit in which it is written is, if insane, the most wicked & mischievous insanity that ever was given forth. It is a kind of obstinate & self-willed folly in which he hardens himself. I remonstrated with him in vain on the tone of mind from which such a view of things alone arises. For its real root is very different from its apparent one, & nothing can be less sublime than the true source of these expressions of contempt & desperation. The fact is, that first, the Italian women are perhaps the most contemptible of all who exist under the moon; the most ignorant the most disgusting, the most bigoted, the most filthy. Countesses smell so of garlick that an ordinary Englishman cannot approach them. Well, LB is familiar with the lowest sort of these women, the people his gondolieri pick up in the streets. He allows fathers & mothers to bargain with him for their daughters, & though this is common enough in Italy, yet for an Englishman to encourage such sickening vice is a melancholy thing. He associates with wretches who seem almost to have lost the gait and physiognomy of man, & who do not scruple to avow practices which are not only not named but I believe seldom even conceived in England. He says he disapproves, but he endures. He is not yet an Italian & is heartily & deeply discontented with himself, & contemplating in the distorted mirror of his own thoughts, the nature & the destiny of man, what can he behold but objects of contempt & despair?22

  Yet despite this degradation, and even perhaps partly because of it, Shelley’s estimate of Byron’s greatness as a poet and potential greatness as a public figure, were enormously enhanced by his Venetian visit. He already recognized that Don Juan was going to be ‘infinitely better’ than Beppo, and had the makings of one of the great satirical poems of the age. The paradoxes and contradictions of the situation troubled him deeply. He knew also that while their own friendship had been sealed by the past weeks in Venice, the fundamental opposition of their temperaments and tastes had been sharply revealed. How could he account for these things, and what, if any, was their wider philosophic significance? Shelley turned these questions over in his mind.

  Claire was still at Este with Allegra, and on the last Saturday in October Shelley went back alone to the Villa Capuccini to sort out his books and papers and collect the child, who was due to be returned to the Hoppners. He took the opportunity to spend four quiet days at the villa, writing in the summerhouse and talking with Claire, and playing with the child in the evenings. He may also have had reasons to talk seriously with Elise. By the time he returned to Venice, on Thursday, 29 October, he had completed the first draft of his great Venetian poem ‘Julian and Maddalo’. This is the first of his masterworks, one of the four best long poems he ever wrote.

  ‘Julian and Maddalo’ arose directly from Shelley’s meditation on his visit to Byron. The simple outlines o
f the poem are deliberately and intensely realistic: Julian is Shelley, and Count Maddalo — his name extracted from the Tasso manuscript — is Lord Byron. The setting of the poem is Venice, their own Venice of leisurely gondola trips, of rides on the Lido, of discussions at the Palazzo Mocenigo. The graceful philosophic argument and the strong clash of temperaments from which the dialogue of the poem is constructed form Shelley’s attempt to evaluate as exactly as possible the full human significance of his own disagreement with Byron’s approach to life. Maddalo is a philosophic pessimist and cynic, who pretends to believe that most men are mere sheep and that all men are at the mercy of chance and circumstance and their own passions. Julian chooses to argue as a progressive and an optimist, believing that men’s circumstances can be changed, that society is capable of continuous improvement, and that individuals can in the end command their own faculties and fates. Maddalo argues as a behaviourist, Julian as an evolutionist. Maddalo is essentially apolitical, Julian is a reformer if not a revolutionary. The confrontation is brought into poetry with extraordinary ease and skill.

  This day had been cheerful but cold, and now

  The sun was sinking, and the wind also.

  Our talk grew somewhat serious, as may be

  Talk interrupted with such raillery

  As mocks itself, because it cannot scorn

  The thoughts it would extinguish: — ’twas forlorn,

  Yet pleasing, such as once, so poets tell,

  The devils held within the dales of Hell

  Concerning God, freewill and destiny:

  Of all that earth has been or yet may be,

  All that vain men imagine or believe,