Shelley: The Pursuit

by Richard Holmes

  Another acquaintance was Count John Taaffe, an Irish littérateur and traveller whose Papism had been rewarded with the honorary title of Knight Commander of the Order of St John of Jerusalem, an anachronism which suited his character. He had adopted another honorary title, ‘the poet laureate of Pisa’, which may have amused Shelley rather less. He was interested in the possibility of translating Dante, and had published a book of Eastern Tales, Padilla, in 1816. Mary regarded him as a rather ridiculous and pompous bore, but Shelley was more patient with him, since they had a common ground on the issue of translation. In the spring of 1821 he helped Taaffe with the proofs and publication of his Comment on Dante. Taaffe first began to call regularly with Pacchiani in the beginning of December. His role of bore seems to have had its own specialized social function in the Shelley household, for Taaffe — like Medwin, who was also to serve time in this way — seemed to ease the constant feeling of personal friction between Shelley and Mary, by the very ridiculousness of his presence. He was something to laugh about privately together — which was a great service.

  A third acquaintance, of a more distinguished social background, was the young exiled Greek nobleman Prince Alexander Mavrocordato, then aged 29. His introduction, later in December, came through his cousin Prince Argyropoli, who was also within Pacchiani’s circle. Mavrocordato was the leader of the Greek patriots in Europe who had been exiled because of the Turkish occupation of their native land. He had seen some service as a personal aide to the ruler of Wallachia, and he awaited anxiously the arrival of a popular Greek uprising against the Turks, when he dreamed of returning to lead his people. Many of the Philhellenic underground networks of this period centred on Mavrocordato, and in Mary’s eyes especially he had the glamour of a liberator and potential hero in the field. Though small, stout, balding and bespectacled, he was both an educated and able man who had some real grasp of political action and government administration, and compared with the other potential Greek leaders, was a paradigm of personal integrity. Unexpectedly, his dream of leadership was to become reality, a very few months after he first met the Shelleys.

  The last, and in some ways the most important of the new Pisan circle was, perhaps ironically, discovered by Claire. On 29 November she went with Professor Pacchiani to visit a young lady in the nearby Convent of St Anna. This was Contessa Emilia Viviani, who, at the age of 19, was undergoing the traditional Italian custom of incarceration while her parents anxiously negotiated for a husband of suitable social and financial standing. Actually Emilia was a little old for these negotiations to be still continuing, but this situation was brought about by her exceptional good looks which demanded an exceptional marital offer. A jealous mother was also involved, for Emilia’s father, Count Niccolò Viviani, the present Governor of Pisa, had committed the indiscretion of marrying a wife thirty years his junior.23 Mary described Emilia as ‘romantic and pathetic . . .very beautiful, very talented, who writes Italian with an elegance and delicacy equal to the foremost authors of the best Italian epoch. . . . She sees nothing else but the servants and idiots. She never goes out, but is shut up in two small rooms which look out on the not very picturesque kitchen garden of the convent. She always laments her pitiful condition. Her only hope is to get married. . . .’24

  The attentions of the young English Miss Clairmont were regarded as suitable by the Abbess of St Anna, and Claire was soon recording letters and visits several times a week. The letters continued even when Claire was back in Florence. Mary first saw Emilia on 1 December; and eight days later they began to read Greek and Spanish together.25

  It is not known when Shelley was first granted visiting rights to the convent. But his first sight of Emilia in December was like a revelation. Medwin, who accompanied Shelley on his early visits, left an acute account of the impression Emilia made on his cousin. Although Medwin was always careless and unreliable in matters of names and dates and external details, he was often curiously apt in his penetration of Shelley’s states of mind, and never more so than in his description of Emilia Viviani:

  Emilia was indeed lovely and interesting. Her profuse black hair, tied in the most simple knot, after the manner of a Greek Muse in the Florence Gallery, displayed to its full height her brow, fair as that of the marble of which I speak. She was also of about the same height as the antique. Her features possessed a rare faultlessness, and almost Grecian contour, the nose and forehead making a straight line, — a style of face so rare, that I remember Bartolini’s telling Byron that he had scarcely an instance of such in the numerous casts of busts which his studio contained. Her eyes had the sleepy voluptuousness, if not the colour of Beatrice Cenci’s. They had indeed no definite colour, changing with the changing feeling, to dark or light, as the soul animated them. Her cheek was pale, too, as marble, owing to her confinement and want of air, or perhaps ‘to thought’. . . .26

  Emilia appealed to Shelley as an incarnation of prototypes which had originally been fictions, or sculptured ideals. She was a series of artistic and imaginary conceptions made into one flesh, and she performed in Shelley’s imagination the feat of Pygmalion. Further, in a way that almost alarmingly recalls Harriet Westbrook, Emilia Viviani was trapped in the proprieties of social custom and parental domination. Her situation was extremely and painfully artificial, and she was doomed to be a passive object of social and financial barter. Shelley, who was still a semi-invalid throughout December, and racked by sudden nephritic attacks, reacted as in a dream.

  He was also reacting against the loss of Claire. Claire’s departure before Christmas was to mark the reintroduction of ideal and partly imaginary romantic friendships in Shelley’s life, of which in earlier years in England — and before Claire’s presence — Elizabeth Hitchener and Cornelia Boinville had been notable victims. Absentia Clariae was not, after all, to bring Mary happiness.

  Ten days before Christmas, during one of his nephritic spasms, Medwin tried the experiment with ‘animal magnetism’ that he had prearranged with Shelley. Both Mary and Claire were present, and also Taaffe and a certain Major Pittman, so it was something of a public trial. Recalling his success, Medwin wrote: ‘The imposition of my hand on his forehead, instantly put a stop to his spasms, and threw him into a deep slumber, which for want of a better name has been called somnambulism. He slept with eyes open. During the continuance of it, I led him from one part of the room to the sofa in the other end; and when the trance was overpast, after the manner of all somnambulists, he would not admit that he had slept, or that he had made any replies, which I elicited from him by questioning; those replies being pitched in the same tone of voice as my own.’ According to Claire, however, Shelley was rather more reticent than Medwin remembers: ‘he begs them not to ask him more questions because he shall say what he ought not’. Perhaps embroidering on his achievement, Medwin also said that Shelley on his request improvised some Italian verses ‘which were faultless’.27

  The subject of mesmerism obviously fascinated the Shelleys, much as galvanism had done at the Diodati in 1816. Claire wrote as a result of their discussions, ‘Magnetism is much tho secretly used in France, and they explain, the miracles which Hume speaks of as being well attested done at a french Bishop’s Tomb, by a magnetic chain. To be a magnetiser it requires, a profound belief, a capacity of intense application to the act of volition and they assert, pure motives, for if he should attempt to magnetise a person upon one outward motive, with another internal & discordant, the experiment will fail.’28

  Medwin was delighted to be a source of new information on this topic. ‘Shelley had never previously heard of Mesmerism, and I showed him a treatise I composed, embodying most of the facts recorded by its adepts, and he was particularly struck by a passage in Tacitus, no incredulous historian, who seriously related two cases in Egypt . . . .’ The conversation then moved on to the issue of the limitations of a strictly ‘materialist’ philosophy. Shelley said that mesmerism seemed to prove that ‘a separation from the mind and body took place �
�� the one being most active and the other an inert mass of matter’. Medwin adds that Shelley thought this was an argument for ‘the immortality of the soul’, implying perhaps theistic tendencies. But the belief in an immaterial ‘soul’, like the immaterial ‘ghost’, did not seem to Shelley to have anything to do with the existence of a Deity, as his argument with Byron and Monk Lewis had demonstrated in 1816.

  Yet Shelley’s illness at Pisa that winter did have the curious effect of bringing him back to old realms of speculation. The intermediary world of Plato’s daemons and kaka-daimons, and the old haunted imagery began to reappear in his poetry with increasing power and frequency. Shelley’s main notebook of this winter, which contains the draft of his essay ‘On the Devil’ also contains several curious diabolic sketches, the most striking of which appear on the endpapers at the back and front.29

  Shelley’s dabbling with hypnotism continued throughout 1821, and he found it especially efficacious when the ‘magnetizer’ was a woman. The relationship set up between therapist and patient was obviously one that appealed to him, and in its mixture of intense intimacy and clinical detachment, he found some expression of his emotional needs. The image of the beloved woman as magnetizer appears in Epipsychidion.

  ‘After my departure from Pisa,’ Medwin wrote, ‘he was magnetised by a lady, which gave rise to the beautiful stanzas entitled “The Magnetic Lady to Her Patient”, and during which operation, he made the same reply to an enquiry as to his disease, and its cure, as he had done to me, — “What would cure me would kill me,” — meaning lithotomy. Mrs Shelley also magnetised him, but soon discontinued the practice, from finding that he got up in his sleep, and went one night to the window, (fortunately barred,) having taken to his old habit of sleepwalking, which I mentioned, in his boyhood, and also in London.’30[2]

  Shelley was temporarily better on 21 December, and Claire played two games of chess with him before they went to visit Emilia Viviani for two hours.31 In the evening they all went to hear one of Sgricci’s performances at the Pisan theatre, an improvisation of Iphigenia in Tauris over a full five acts. Shelley was impressed, but Mary was in raptures and filled most of a long letter to Hunt with Sgricci’s praises. ‘He is handsome — his person small but elegant — and his motions graceful beyond description. . . . I am inclined to think that in the perfection in which he possesses this art it is by no means an inferior power to that of a printed poet.’ The theatre was half empty, except for a few university students, and talking to Sgricci afterwards Shelley remarked on the spiritual deadness of Pisa. Some of his phrases, remembered by Mary, have a curious resonance about them, and appear in later ‘Pisan poems’. ‘As Shelley told him . . . he appeared in Pisa as Dante among the ghosts — Pisa is a city of the dead and they are shrunk from his living presence.’32

  Two days later Claire departed on the Florence diligence, escorted by the ubiquitous Pacchiani, and Shelley, overcome by a sudden sense of loss, was unwell all over Christmas. Sometimes Mary read to him in between his spasms. His eyes watered. Mary wrote to Maria Gisborne on the last day of the year, ‘Shelley has had a cold in his eyes which has prevented him writing and reading for above a fortnight. — How does this cold weather agree with Mr Gisborne. — I hope he keeps close to the fire and lets the wind howl vainly.’33 Meanwhile Claire wrote in her diary with her thoughts turned alternately to Shelley at Pisa and Byron at Ravenna: ‘A great Poet resembles Nature — he is a Creator and a Destroyer, he presides over the birth & death of images, the prototypes of things — the torrent of his sentiments should flow like waves one after the other, each distinctly formed and visible yet linked between its predecessor and its follower as to form between them both by beauty and necessity an indissoluble connection.’34

  Throughout January 1821 Shelley continued a prey to various infections, ophthalmia, boils and the chronic nephritis. Whenever he was well enough he paid a morning or afternoon visit to the convent of St Anna. He seems to have done little writing except his essay ‘On the Devil’, a finished draft of which probably belongs to this month. When it was announced that Sgricci was giving a performance at Lucca, he persuaded Mary to go alone, taking little Percy with her. His boils were bad, and his face ‘swelled dreadfully’,35 so he was in no travelling condition. In a characteristic phrase of this time, Mary ‘cooked up a party with Pacchiani’, and was away for two days. The improvisation was a success — as Claire heard at stunning length — but Pacchiani was not, and Mary escaped from him early on. ‘He would make one believe that he attracts the great as a milk pail does flies on a summer morning.’36

  Claire had been taken ill with a scrofulous gland on reaching Florence, and Shelley wrote sadly: ‘It seems that it would have been better for you to remain at Pisa. Yet being now at Florence make the best profit of your situation. . . .’ He advised her to pursue Mrs Mason’s social contacts assiduously so that she might make herself more independent. Later they were to discuss a plan for Claire set to up a small school for English children at Pisa. Meanwhile he prescribed ‘bustle and occupation’. His own health was still bad: ‘I have suffered also considerably from my disease; and am already in imagination preparing to be cut for the stone, in spite of Vaccà’s consolatory assurance.’ There was one other source of comfort. ‘I see Emilia sometimes, who always talks of you and laments your absence. She continues to enchant me infinitely; and I soothe myself with the idea that I make the discomfort of her captivity lighter to her by demonstration of the interest which she has awakened in me.’37

  The relationship between the invalid Shelley and the 19-year-old prisoner of the convent was developing rather more rapidly than Shelley would quite admit to Claire. The whole thing had in his mind a strangely unreal quality, almost as if she was part of his illness, as a vivid hallucination is part of a fever. Shelley sent a little verse letter in reply to a bunch of flowers which Emilia had had delivered to the Casa Galetti, on a day when he was ill and could not visit:

  Madonna, wherefore has thou sent to me

  Sweet-basil and mignonette?

  Embleming love and health, which never yet

  In the same wreath might be.

  Alas, and they are wet!

  Is it with thy kisses or thy tears?38

  It tells a good deal about his feelings for Emilia, and the way in which he tried to modulate them, when this is compared with the first draft he made in his notebook, but never sent:

  Oh my beloved why have you

  Sent sweet basil & mignonette?

  Why when I kiss their leaves find I them wet

  With thine adored tears dearer than heavens dew.39

  In two other notebooks he made fragmentary drafts of five Italian letters to Emilia, though it is impossible to say on exactly which days Shelley sent them. In the second letter he promised to help her by having an influential friend write to the Prior of St Nicholas at Pisa. In the third, he wrote: ‘Here we are then, bound by a few days’ friendship, gathered together by some strange fortune from the ends of the earth to be perhaps a consolation to each other . . . .’ In the fourth, the whole fragment consists simply of: ‘tu Emilia ch’era più bella a vedere che il giglio bianco sul suo verde stelo e più fresca che la Maia quando . . .’ You, Emilia, who were lovelier to behold than the white lily on its green stem and fresher than May when . . .

  The fifth letter fragment seems to contain the essence of the fever dream which she had become for Shelley. ‘Many times you thus [appear to] me. Your dark eyes, ever most beautiful, are above me. I seem to feel your hand on mine and your lips — but then I close my eyes until you cease to love — then it will be quenched like a flame which lacks fuel. I have suffered much in health today . . . .’ Most expressive of all is the fact that Shelley having written this passage struck the whole of it through with his pen, and probably never sent it.40

  Some of Emilia’s letters, both to Mary and to Shelley during these weeks, have survived.41 They show perfectly Emilia’s mixture of naïvété and charming adoles
cent cunning in dealing with Mary, notably in a letter of the end of December: ‘You seem to me a little cold, on some occasions, and this makes me a little nervous of you [un po’ di soggezionie]; but I realize that your Husband speaks justly, and that your apparent coldness is only the ash which covers a radiant heart [un cuore affettuoso].’42 To Shelley, her notes are pitched at an altogether more impassioned level, and one can see in the almost Petrarchan use of sun and moon and stars as love-witnesses, the immediate source of the imagery which Shelley was now preparing to use in his poem about her. ‘Dear Friend, and my own Brother: — I write to you by the radiance of the Moon. I cannot bear to use any other light, for that would appear as an insult to this most clear and beautiful Daughter of Heaven. What sweetness I feel when I gaze upon her. . . . I have made my usual evening prayer on my knees before the window, and I have made it with greater devotion. These stupid people here believe that I worship the Moon. . . .’43