Shelley: The Pursuit

by Richard Holmes

  At Ferrara Shelley went eagerly to view the souvenirs of Ariosto and Tasso. He prised off a splinter of wood from the door of Tasso’s grated prison, remarking grimly that ‘when I say it is really a very decent dungeon, I speak as one who has seen the prisons in the Doges palace at Venice’. He observed Ariosto’s plain wooden chair, which ‘has survived its cushion as it has its master’, and peered at the three voluptuous bronze nymphs perched sportively on the circumference of his decorative ink-stand. Considering the two poets’ manuscripts, he launched into a mild essay in graphology.

  The handwriting of Ariosto is a small firm & pointed character expressing as I should say a strong & keen but circumscribed energy of mind, that of Tasso is large free & flowing except that there is a checked expression in the midst of its flow which brings the letters into a smaller compass than one expected from the beginning of the word.

  On Tasso’s script, which is not unlike his own, he commented: ‘It is the symbol of an intense and earnest mind exceeding at times its own depth, and admonished to return by the chilliness of the waters of oblivion striking upon its adventurous feet.’ Seeing in his mind’s eye Peacock’s eyebrows raised amusedly, he dipped his pen and added: ‘ — You know I always seek in what I see the manifestation of something beyond the present & tangible object: and as we do not agree in physiognomy so we may not agree now.’2

  Coming out of the museum library, Shelley stopped short at the door when a hand appeared rattling a wooden box for charity. He gazed for a moment with horror at a figure like some apparition from one of his own dreams, a shape enveloped from head to ankle in ‘a ghost like drapery of white flannel’, with even its face masked by a kind of network visor of cloth, the eyes alone glittering through the slits. ‘I imagine this man had been adjudged to suffer this penance for some crime known only to himself & his confessor,’ Shelley wrote afterwards, adding more briskly, ‘this kind of exhibition is a striking instance of the power of the Catholic superstition over the human mind.’3 The draped figure reappeared in the fragment of a story, ‘The Colosseum’, which Shelley began several weeks later at Rome.

  From Ferrara they travelled to Bologna, ‘a city of Colonnades’, with its large picture gallery, and its Corinthian Madonna di Luca on the hill. Shelley enjoyed walking round it in the moonlight, and observing the sinister effect of its huge leaning brick towers built by the military-minded nobility. ‘There are two towers here one 400 foot high ugly things built of brick, which lean both different ways, & with the delusion of moonlight shadows you almost fancy the city is rocked by an earthquake.’ At the gallery Shelley gazed at pictures by Correggio, Guido, Domenichino and Guercino which he enthusiastically described to Peacock, though ridiculing their religious implications. His eye was caught by Guido’s delicately suggestive picture of Love chasing Fortune. Love was ‘trying to catch her by the hair and her face was half turned towards him, her long chestnut hair was floating in the stream of the wind and threw its shadow over her fair forehead’.4 It was an image of desire that he himself had used frequently in his poetry, and it struck him almost with a kind of nostalgia.

  After two days at Bologna, they travelled on by the coastal road through Fossombrone, Spoleto with its magnificent aqueduct, Terni and its famous waterfall, and finally reached Rome on Friday, 20 November. They had decided to hire their own horses and let Paolo do the driving, which, as Mary said, was very economical and very disagreeable.

  Shelley thought the Terni waterfall the grandest natural spectacle he had ever seen except for the glaciers of Montanvert, and described with minute care the strange hallucinatory effect of the light and movement of the great mass of water as it fell 300 feet into the valley of the Velino. ‘It comes in thick & tawny folds flaking off like solid snow gliding down a mountain . . . . Your eye follows it & is lost below . . . . The very imagination is bewildered in it . . . . We past half an hour in one spot looking at it, & thought but a few minutes had gone by.’5 Mary was put in mind of Sappho leaping from a rock, ‘and her form vanishing as in the shape of a swan in the distance’. It was almost her only personal observation throughout the whole journey.6 Their arrival in Rome was greeted by an immense hawk sailing in the sky high above the Campagna di Roma searching for prey.

  They remained in Rome for a week. Shelley was obviously overwhelmed by his first impressions and was content to be swept round the standard sights with the other visitors: St Peter’s, the Colosseum, the Forum, the Capitol, the fountains and the piazzas. More than anything he was struck by the way that Nature had reasserted herself among the ruins: within the sixteen-mile circuit of the ancient wall were to be found whole fields of wild flowers, grassy lanes, green knolls overlooking the Tiber and copses of fig trees among the ruins.[1] The Colosseum especially amazed Shelley in this respect, for it had become an immense garden ruin, a hortus conclusus, in which nature and civilization had reached a kind of harmony. ‘It has been changed by time into the image of an ampitheatre of rocky hills overgrown by the wild olive the myrtle & the fig tree, & threaded by little paths which wind among its ruined stairs & immeasurable galleries; the copse-wood overshadows you as you wander through its labyrinths & the wild weeds of this climate of flowers bloom under your feet . . . . I can scarcely believe that when encrusted with Dorian marble & ornamented by columns of Egyptian granite its effect could have been so sublime and so impressive . . . .’7 Mary found that the ruins disappointed ‘in quantity’, and the opera Shelley took her to on their second evening was ‘the worst I ever saw’.8 The next two mornings she spent sketching in the Colosseum with Willmouse while Shelley took Claire to view the grosser aspects of the Vatican.

  Shelley found time during this week to sketch out 2,000 words of his fragmentary story, ‘The Colosseum’. A blind old man, accompanied by his daughter in a manner vaguely reminiscent of Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus, is taken into the ruins of the Colosseum. The old man imagines the Colosseum as a magic cavern filled with exotic beasts. ‘Are they not caverns such as the untamed elephant might choose, amid the Indian wilderness, wherein to hide her cubs; such as, were the sea to overflow the earth, the mightiest monsters of the deep would change into their spacious chambers?’9 They meet there a stranger whose figure Shelley drew from the penitent at Ferrara. The strange youth, who inhabits the Colosseum like a ghost, attempts to introduce himself to the pair, having heard the old man speak mystically of the circle round ‘the internal nature of each being’ which prevents human contact. But here, just as a theme is beginning to appear, the manuscript ends, leaving one interesting detail. On the youth’s shoes there is carved an image which was to appear in later letters from Rome and finally in Shelley’s poem Prometheus Unbound. ‘His snow white feet were fitted with ivory sandals, delicately sculptured in the likeness of two female figures, whose wings met upon the heel, and whose eager and half-divided lips seem quivering to meet.’10 The long, slow crystallization of apparently disparate images like this was to give Shelley’s mature poetry much of its richness in the coming months. For the time being it remained dormant.

  On 27 November, Shelley decided to go ahead of his party, and travel alone to Naples, ostensibly to arrange rooms, without the expense of all of them having to ‘alight at an Inn’ in Naples while accommodation was found. Whether Shelley had any other private business to attend to in Naples was not immediately apparent. He travelled day and night by vetturino, crossing the notorious Pontine Marshes after dark in the company of a Lombard merchant and a gross Calabrian priest. The priest expressed frantic terror of robbers on the road, while the merchant talked genially of the recent murder of two bishops.11 The priest was further terrified by the sight of Shelley withdrawing his customary brace of pistols from his travelling bag. Shelley did this with deliberate display, and the coach-driver had to be called down to quiet the priest’s ‘hysterics’. The Calabrian had his revenge when, on arrival at Naples, they witnessed at close quarters a youth stabbed to death in the neck as he ran out of a shop. Shelley reacted wi
th horror and the priest, showing the true courage and dignity of his cloth, laughed heartily in Shelley’s face. Shelley was furious: ‘the priest attempted to quiz me as what the English call a flat. I never felt such an inclination to beat anyone, Heaven knows I have little power, but he saw that I looked extremely displeased & was silent’.12 The incident confirmed Shelley’s opinion of the Italian church, although this was neither the first nor last time that the way he brandished his pistols got him into difficulties.

  Shelley took lodgings in the respectable tourist quarter of Naples, at No. 250 Riviera di Chiaia. The rooms appear to have been on the first or second floor, with a splendid view from the tall windows, overlooking the Royal Gardens, and beyond ‘the blue waters of the bay, forever changing yet forever the same, & encompassed by the mountainous island of Capreae [sic], the lofty peaks which overhang Salerno, & the woody hill of Posilypo whose promontories hide from us Misenum & the lofty isle Inarime which with its divided summit forms the opposite horn of the bay’. Mary and Claire and the entourage arrived two days later, on 1 December. They could not but be pleased with the rooms, and consider themselves ‘well off’; but Mary was tired and in low spirits. Shelley walked her in the Royal Gardens, pointed out the smoke from Vesuvius, and enthused about the delicious March wildness of the climate, which allowed them to sit in the evenings without a fire and with the windows open. They had ‘almost all the productions of an English summer’. But Mary could not be cheered, and ten days later she was writing to Maria Gisborne that she still felt wearied and overcome by the fatigue of the long journey — ‘so you must expect a very stupid letter’.13 Claire was ill, with a return of the complaint which had apparently been troubling her when she attended the Paduan medico in early October.

  On top of everything, Mary now discovered that there was some sort of romantic intrigue afoot between the Italian, Paolo Foggi and Elise. This attachment had first become obvious during the journey from Venice and the week spent in Rome, and Mary tried strongly to discourage it. So did Shelley. ‘We all tried to dissuade her,’ Mary wrote afterwards, ‘we knew Paolo to be a rascal, and we thought so well of her that we believed him to be unworthy of her.’14 As far as she could tell, they had at least temporarily succeeded. But it did not make the atmosphere at Riviera di Chiaia any less strained. Moreover, in between bouts of enthusiastic sightseeing, Shelley himself appeared to lapse into a mysterious gloom. He noted that at night, from their windows, the plume of smoke above Vesuvius was transformed into a dull red glow.15 The old nephritic trouble in his side began relentlessly to return.

  The only day-to-day record of the Shelley household during the months of December and January is Mary’s journal. This shows that Shelley made a great effort to busy them all with sightseeing during the first three weeks, and visits were arranged to the ancient theatre at Herculaneum on Saturday the 5th, and by boat through the Bay of Baiae on Tuesday the 8th, calling at the Mare Morto, the Elysian Fields, and the Cavern of the Sibyl. Shelley was still gathering images to reappear in his poems: ‘the sea . . . was so translucent that you could see the hollow caverns clothed with the glaucous sea-moss, & the leaves & branches of those delicate weeds that pave the unequal bottom of the water’;16 while Mary merely noted, ‘The Bay of Baiae is beautiful; but we are disappointed by the various places we visit.’17 On Sunday the 13th they went to the opera, and the next Tuesday they visited Virgil’s tomb. On Wednesday the 17th they made an afternoon and evening expedition to the volcanic head of Vesuvius, which turned out to be almost traumatic. Mary exhausted herself, Claire was practically abandoned by her guides in the dark, and Shelley became extremely ill during the descent by torchlight, with an agonizing pain in his side, and virtually collapsed at the guides’ hermitage in ‘a state of intense bodily suffering’. He nevertheless managed to write it up in one of his most brilliant descriptive letters to Peacock the following morning.

  Three days before Christmas, Shelley organized yet one more expedition, this time to Pompeii. In the ruined city, Shelley walked brooding through the streets, mentally noting the mosaics, the ‘little winged figures & small ornaments of exquisite elegance’, and the Greek bas-reliefs of Egyptian angels in the temples. He approved of the number and grandeur of the public buildings. Under the portico of the Temple of Jupiter, the party camped for luncheon, ‘we sate & pulled out our oranges & figs & bread & apples (sorry fare you will say) & rested to eat’.18 They munched in silence, gazing out over the blueness of the bay and the mountains of Sorrento. It was beautiful and yet disquieting. ‘Every now & then we heard the subterranean thunder of Vesuvius; its distant deep peals seemed to shake the very air & light of day which interpenetrated our frames with the sullen & tremendous sound.’

  They returned by the eastern gate, as the sun set and the shadows lengthened, and walked among the exquisitely carved marble tombs which stand along either side of the consular road. He noted on the stucco wall of one of the tombs ‘little emblematic figures of a relief exceedingly low, of dead or dying animals & little winged genii, & female forms bending in groups in some funeral office’. It seemed to him suddenly as if these were not like English tombs, hiding decay, but like ‘voluptuous chambers for immortal spirits’.

  Mary’s journal for the rest of December and all January is confined to the barest entries, usually recording books read by her or Shelley — Dante, Livy and Winckelmann’s History of Ancient Art — and frequently entering nothing more than the date. This silence in fact covers an extreme personal crisis for Shelley, and December 1818 is the date attached to one of his most despairing and self-pitying lyrics, ‘Stanzas Written in Dejection, Near Naples’.

  Alas! I have nor hope nor health,

  Nor peace within nor calm around,

  Nor that content surpassing wealth

  The sage in meditation found,

  And walked with inward glory crowned . . . .

  I could lie down like a tired child,

  And weep away the life of care . . . .19

  Other manuscript fragments dating from this period included the ‘Invocation to Misery’, and the unfinished stanza beginning ‘My head is wild with weeping’.20 Shelley was also probably working on the Maniac section of ‘Julian and Maddalo’ at this time, and the story of the Pisan ‘Marenghi’ who was forced into life-long exile in the Maremma in reparation for an unknown crime.21

  Writing twenty years afterwards, Mary chose to indicate this period of crisis without fully explaining the cause. But of her own emotional separation from Shelley she is remarkably frank.

  At this time, Shelley suffered greatly in health. He put himself under the care of a medical man, who promised great things, and made him endure severe bodily pain, without any good results.[2] Constant and poignant physical suffering exhausted him; and though he preserved the appearance of cheerfulness, and often greatly enjoyed our wanderings in the environs of Naples, and our excursions on its sunny sea, yet many hours were passed when his thoughts, shadowed by illness, became gloomy, — and then he escaped to solitude, and in verses, which he hid from fear of wounding me, poured forth morbid but too natural bursts of discontent and sadness. One looks back with unspeakable regret and gnawing remorse to such periods; fancying that, had one been more alive to the nature of his feelings, and more attentive to soothe them, such would not have existed. And yet, enjoying as he appeared to do every sight or influence of earth or sky, it was difficult to imagine that any melancholy he showed was aught but the effect of the constant pain to which he was a martyr.

  We lived in utter solitude.22

  After the disastrous expedition to Vesuvius on the 17th, Shelley wrote three letters to friends in England just before Christmas. They were to Peacock, to Hunt and to Hogg, and they show, without giving any direct reason, that Shelley was extremely depressed and, for the first time in Italy, lonely and homesick. His letter to Peacock, after completing the magnificent Vesuvius description, ended mournfully: ‘I have depression enough of spirits & not good health, thoug
h I believe the warm air of Naples does me good. We see absolutely no one here — Adieu.’23 Most of his letter to Hunt, the first one for many weeks, consisted of a rather morbid defence of his own character against the supposed attacks of Southey in the Quarterly Review. It ended somewhat abruptly urging that Hunt should bring himself and Peacock as soon as possible to Italy in the spring: ‘Now pray write directly, addressed as usual to Livorno, because I shall be in a fever till I know whether you are coming or no. I ought to say, I have neither good health or spirits just now, & that your visit wd be a relief to both.’24 The letter to Hogg, briefest of all, contained a sketch of their journeyings and a violent attack on Italian women, who ‘are disgusting with ignorance and prostitution’, and the strong implication that somehow ‘We shall meet again soon’.25 Neither the letter to Hunt or Hogg mentioned Claire, or any of the servants, or gave any indication of Mary’s bad spirits. In fact nothing that Shelley wrote at the time goes any way to explain the real causes of his misery. Yet physical illness and depression were symptoms, rather than causes, of Shelley’s unhappiness. His mysterious troubles at Naples arose from practical problems and difficulties of the most tangible human kind. Not until eighteen months after he had left Naples, did Shelley write a confidential letter to the Gisbornes which gives the basis for an explanation. ‘My Neapolitan charge is dead. It seems as if the destruction that is consuming me were as an atmosphere which wrapt & infected everything connected with me. The rascal Paolo has been taking advantage of my situation at Naples in December 1818 to attempt to extort money by threatening to charge me with the most horrible crimes. He is connected with some English here [i.e. Livorno] who hate me with a fervour that almost does credit to their phlegmatic brains, & listen & vent the most prodigious falsehoods. An ounce of civet good apothecary to sweeten this dunghill of a world.’26