Shelley: The Pursuit

by Richard Holmes

  By the end of November Mary was slowly beginning to return to something like her old self. When she looked back at the five months at Livorno it was to ‘shudder with horror’: yet it was also to be capable of looking back. Practical details began to absorb her attention. She worried about getting flannel for Percy Florence to wrap him against the Italian winter; and she began to complain loudly over the remissness of Hunt’s letter-writing. She joined Shelley in inquiries about the poems: what of The Mask sent a few days before they left Leghorn, ‘which is now 2 months ago’? and what of Peter Bell the Third, which she herself had copied? Mary took pleasure in the calderonizing game which Shelley played with Maria Gisborne. She reported how one day he stood at the window and announced that the weather of late had been ‘an epic of rain with an episode of frost & a few similes concerning fine weather’.7 She felt calmer in herself now, and enjoyed the improvement in Claire’s singing under her new Florentine music-master. She asked after the ‘rustics’ at Marlow and on learning that Peacock had not married Marianne St Croix observed with something of her old archness, ‘this shepherd King has I am afraid forgotten his crook & his mistress’. One cloud on the horizon was the distant prospect of Shelley’s trip to England in the spring. This was ostensibly to help Godwin. But Mary had reached a new assessment of her father, and she was less easily made guilty by his ceaseless financial troubles. She felt determined to set her face against Shelley’s leaving Italy without her, for this reason or any other. She enlisted Marianne Hunt’s sympathy. ‘Shelley in his last letter mentioned something about his return to England — but this is very vague — I hope — how ardently you may guess, that it will not be…his return would be in so many ways so dreadful a thing that I cannot dwell long enough upon the idea to conceive it possible. — We do not think of all returning.’8 Part of the difficulty here was money. Mary’s control of the housekeeping showed that they had lived for the first time ‘in an economical manner’ in Italy, only since they had taken up residence in Tuscany. To break up the household, and incur travelling expenses would be ‘madness’. Whether Mary feared that Shelley might embroil himself politically in London is not clear: but she wrote to Marianne of the danger of his visit if it were known, and ‘arrests & a thousand other things’. It was probably arrests for debt, rather than for seditious libel, that she feared.9

  For the time being Shelley did not press the point. He was delighted with the new-found harmony produced by the presence of the child. On 2 December Mary was writing that she felt well and strong, and that Percy Florence was nearly three times as big as when he was born, though there were still no flannel petticoats for him from Genoa.10

  Perhaps the sight of such a blooming mother and child prompted Shelley to think back to the death of that unknown mother’s baby which had so appalled him at Peterloo. The image had run right through his poems of September and October, and he had reverted to it in the opening of his letter concerning the trial of Richard Carlile in November. At any rate, immediately over the page in the white-backed notebook in which he had worked on the last stanzas of the ‘Ode to the West Wind’, he began to sketch out stanzas for a ballad concerning a starving mother with an infant at her breast. The first verse arrived without explanation, but urgently:

  Give me a piece of that fine white bread

  I would give you some blood for it

  Before I faint & my infant is dead

  Oh, give me a little bit11

  Gradually the poem established itself as the appeal of a starving woman to a parish priest, young Parson Richards. The woman explains how she was ruined — seduced — by a ‘trinket of gold’, and gradually sickened in hunger and penury, until her need became shameless and desperate. Holding her baby in her arms, she appeals to the parson across the rectory gate.

  … the single blanket of threadbare woof

  Under which we both cried to sleep

  Is gone — the rain drenches us through the roof

  And I moan — but no longer weep

  What would it avail me to prostitute

  This lean body squalid and wild

  And yet by the God who made me I’d do’t

  If I could but save my child

  Perhaps you would like — but alas you are

  A staid and a holy man

  And, if you were not,…would any one care

  For these limbs so meagre and wan

  The frankness, the unintentional irony, and the stumbling simplicity of her speaking voice, show the urgent impulse which had inspired the forms and style of The Mask and Peter Bell the Third driven to a final extremity of directness. It is as if the message of man’s inhumanity to man had become so overwhelming in Shelley’s mind that every intervening form — politics, satire, even the decorum of poetry, had eventually to fall back before the simple, agonizing, human speech of suffering and need. The man who was later to become famed as the greatest rhetorician and the most sublime lyricist of all the English Romantic poets, was actually driven to writing like this in order to say what he really had to say:

  The poor thing sucks and no milk will come,

  He would cry but his strength is gone, —

  His wasting weakness has left him dumb,

  Ye can hardly hear him moan.

  The skin round his eyes is pale and blue,

  His eyes are glazed, not with tears —

  I wish for a little moment that you

  Could know what a mother fears.

  Shelley continued this poem in other manuscripts. In his final draft the young parson never speaks; he walks down frowning to the wicket gate, and by the time he gets there both mother and child have collapsed. The poem ends abruptly, with a lethal twist so quietly understated it almost escapes observation:

  The man of God with a surly frown

  To the garden wicket paced

  And he saw the woman had fallen down

  With her face below her waist.

  The child lay stiff as a frozen straw

  In the woman’s white cold breast —

  And the parson in its dead features saw

  His own to the truth expressed.

  He turned from the bosom whose heart was broke

  Once it pillowed him as he slept. —

  He turned from the lips that no longer spoke

  From the eyes that no longer wept. —

  And how that parson . . .

  Becomes thy . . .

  More than my words to say …12

  Shelley made little attempt to integrate his versions, though he did later fair copy one into a notebook for Claire. Perhaps she liked it better than Mary. He did not bother to send it to Hunt or Ollier. The poem was still being rejected as unsuitable for printing by editors in 1889.

  In December life became more social and frivolous at the Palazzo Marini under the influence of a charming young English girl, Miss Sophia Stacey, and her dragon-like elderly chaperone, Miss Corbet Parry-Jones, who had arrived on a cultural grand tour. Their appearance was not entirely by chance, since Miss Stacey was a ward of one of Shelley’s Sussex uncles, and she had heard that the intriguing not to say disreputable black sheep of the clan, the atheist, eloper and poet Percy Bysshe, was in winter residence at Florence. Miss Parry-Jones was finally persuaded by Miss Stacey to pay a formal visit to the Shelleys, and interpreting the situation instantly, he set out to charm them both off their feet. There was not much difficulty, as Mary observed with amusement. ‘The younger one was entousiasmée to see him — the elder said he was a very shocking man — but finding that we became the mode she melted.’

  Miss Parry-Jones was a little elderly Welshwoman ‘without the slightest education’ who valiantly learnt French and Italian which she spoke with a strong Welsh lilt and mixed indiscriminately with her own native tongue. Sophia Stacey was attractive, lively and relatively unaffected, as Mary was prepared to admit, and ‘sings well for an english dilettante’. Though in Mary’s opinion, she paid too much attention to her ‘sweet voice’, and not e
nough to her scales. Claire immediately joined Shelley’s campaign, and rapidly made herself indispensable as a companion and interpreter during lessons with the Italian music-master. One or two other young English ladies appear to have joined the group. One of them, a certain Miss Jones, had had a very severe music-master in England, and when asked by her suave Italian Gaspero Pelleschi to sing the scales, promptly burst into floods of tears. The poor Pelleschi was aghast at this strange English reaction and exclaimed hopelessly to Claire, ‘non capisco questo effeto’. The Shelleys, as confirmed expatriates, were highly amused.13 Claire was ‘as busy as a bee’, and Madame du Plantis’s common sitting-room at the palazzo, with its tiny marble fireplace, now became a place of great popular resort.14

  The weather in Florence during December and much of January 1820 turned bitterly cold, and there were severe frosts. Mary stayed at home much of the time, busy with her child, and Sophia Stacey recalled in her diary how Mrs Shelley seemed to be permanently in bed with a little night table on her knees, elegantly equipped with pen and ink and blotter.15 Shelley on the other hand was continually plunging out on energetic expeditions to the galleries, and frequently called for Miss Stacey and the other English girls. He had adopted a huge serge winter cloak, topped off with an extravagant grey fur collar which encased his pale, smiling face up to the ears, and kept him warm in the narrow blustery alleys of Florence. Despite the freezing winds, he continued to keep his neck open without scarf or cravat in the old déshabillé manner. These details were noticed by an amateur English artist, a Mr Tompkyns, who became friendly with the family and painted Shelley’s portrait in early January.16 Sophia was obviously most flattered by Shelley’s attentions. He made a point of helping her with her Italian, and taught her the words of a Carbonari ballad and a local love-song. They seem to have gone visiting the galleries together, probably with Claire and Miss Jones as well, making a voluble and attractive female party, and perfectly adapted to Shelley’s social tastes. Sophia records carefully in her diary the two occasions when Shelley lifted her bodily down from a carriage; and also the evening when she had a ‘dreadfull tooth ache’ at the Palazzo Marini, and Shelley came downstairs especially from his apartment and with great gentleness applied a cotton lint to the offending molar at the back of her mouth.17

  Shelley’s ‘Notes on Sculptures in Florence’ written during this time afford some idea of the liveliness and attraction of his conversation during the visits to the Uffizi with Sophia and Claire. One of his earliest notes, on an unidentified athlete, begins: ‘Curse these fig leaves; why is a round tin thing more decent than a cylindrical marble one? An exceedingly fine statue. . . .’18 Another, on a Venus Genetrix observes: ‘Remarkable for the voluptuous effect of her finely proportioned form seen through the folds of a drapery, the original of which must have been the “woven wind” of Chios.’19 A third, on another Venus, comments: ‘A very insipid person in the usual insipid attitude of this lady. The body and hips and where the lines of the — fade into the thighs is exquisitely imagined and executed.’20 On a Leda, the judgement is made in two sentences: ‘Leda with a very ugly face. I should be a long time before I should make love with her.’21

  Shelley’s descriptions, where they are developed beyond these apt and provoking conversational gambits, tend to concentrate on two aspects of the sculpture. One is the technical details of drapery, limb-joint, and posed gesture by which a voluptuous or explicitly sexual effect is achieved by the sculptor. The other is the emotional, or more especially, the moral characterization expressed by a figure or group. His remarks show very little strictly aesthetic appreciation, and almost no interest in the purely formal relations of line, plane or volume. He writes, in effect, as if the stone statues were living theatrical tableaux. The sense that the statues were actually alive is one of the most interesting parts of his appreciation, and frequently gives such a personal twist to his remarks that they tell far more about his own feelings than about the way the piece of stone has been carved. Sometimes they approach the condition of prose poems. Of ‘A Youth said to be Apollo’, he wrote:

  The countenance though exquisite, lovely and gentle is not divine. There is a womanish vivacity of winning yet passive happiness and yet a boyish inexperience exceedingly delightful. . . . It is like a spirit even in dreams. The neck is long yet full and sustains the head with its profuse and knotted hair as if it needed no sustaining.22

  Here Shelley seemed to have moved himself into a world of half-conscious revery, and one is aware of the presence of bisexual themes which had first been consciously liberated and recognized by the sight of the Sleeping Hermaphrodite in the Borghese Palace at Rome. Shelley’s longest notes are confined to three subjects: ‘The Bacchus and Ampelus’, with its comment on adolescent friendships; ‘A Statue of Minerva’, representing the uniquely Greek form of maenadic insanity; and the statue of ‘The Niobe’. The latter is one of the great pieces of the gallery and shows Niobe drawing to the safety of her body her last child before it is murdered by Zeus. The sculptor ‘seems in the marble to have scarcely suspended her terror’, and it had the most profound effect on Shelley. His description is not in fact very good, since it is too emotionally involved, but both his own and Mary’s letters frequently spoke of it as the most impressive single work of sculpture that he ever saw in Italy, and he remembered it ever after with a kind of awe. The reason lay partly in its connection with the figure of the mother and child at Peterloo which had developed into a dominating poetic motif during the autumn. Further study of the artistic effect of combining beauty with great pain or revulsion produced the unfinished poem ‘On the Medusa’, which meditates on the qualities of a repulsive picture attributed to Leonardo.

  Perhaps the most delightful and characteristic of his gallery notes is on the little statue of the Venus Anodyomene, a beautiful Greek copy dating from the third century AD and standing a little over three feet high. It is carved in marble which is richly stained and flecked with areas of dark amber and gold, and has a polished surface which shines in sunlight almost like water. The girl is naked except for two simple armbands.[1] Shelley responded with a fine essay on erotic suggestion.

  She seems to have just issued from the bath, and yet to be animated with the [joy] of it. She seems all soft and mild enjoyment, and the curved lines of her fine limbs flow into each other with never-ending continuity of sweetness. Her face expresses a breathless yet passive and innocent voluptuousness without affection, without doubt; it is at once desire and enjoyment and the pleasure arising from both. Her lips… have the tenderness of arch yet pure and affectionate desire, and the mode in which the ends are drawn in yet opened by the smile which forever circles round them, and the tremulous curve into which they are wrought by inextinguishable desire, and the tongue lying against the lower lip as in the listlessness of passive joy, express love, still love.

  Her eyes seem heavy and swimming with pleasure, and her small forehead fades on both sides into that sweet swelling and then declension of the bone over the eye and prolongs itself to the cheek in that mode which expresses simple and tender feelings.

  The neck is full and swollen as with the respiration of delight and flows with gentle curves into her perfect form.

  Her form is indeed perfect. She is half sitting on and half rising from a shell, and the fullness of her limbs, and their complete roundness and perfection, do not diminish the vital energy with which they seem to be embued. The mode in which the lines of the curved back flow into and around the thighs, and the wrinkled muscles of the belly, wrinkled by the attitude, is truly astonishing . . . . This perhaps is the finest personification of Venus, the Deity of superficial desire, in all antique statuary. Her pointed and pear-like bosom ever virgin — the virgin Mary might have this beauty, but alas!…23

  How much of all these ‘Notes on Sculpture’ were personally explained to Sophia Stacey is not known, but Shelley did write especially for her several short love-lyrics intended to be sung to music. These included the fam
ous ‘Song Written for an Indian Air’, adapted from an Oriental love-lyric and beginning

  When I arise from dreams of thee

  In the first sweet sleep of night . . .

  Others were ‘Love’s Philosophy’, ‘To Sophia’ and probably the little song ‘I fear thy kisses gentle maiden’.24

  Miss Stacey and Miss Parry-Jones were required to continue on their cultural tour to Rome after Christmas, and Shelley took much trouble in arranging introductions to Signora Dioniga before they eventually departed at the end of December.25 Shelley later sent Sophia a copy of Hunt’s anthology The Literary Pocket-Book. In it he inscribed a three-stanza song, ‘Buona Notte’, which he had first composed in Italian. It ended:

  The hearts that on each other beat

  From evening close to morning light

  Have nights as good as they are sweet

  But never say good night.26

  He hoped to see her once more in Tuscany, and Mary later wrote in the spring from Pisa, but they never met again.

  With these diversions, much of the urgency went out of Shelley’s writing during December, and in the absence of any more dramatic or decisive news from England, the immediate pressure of politics seemed to relax, and his letters took on a more distant tone. Much of his bitterness had for the moment been exorcized from the Quarterly’s attack, mostly by the poem ‘Ode to the West Wind’, but also by reading a copy of Lockhart’s fine defence of The Revolt of Islam in Blackwood’s which Ollier thoughtfully sent. The two magazines were later circulated to the Gisbornes as ‘bane and antidote’.