Shelley: The Pursuit

by Richard Holmes

  He will awake no more, oh, never more! —

  Within the twilight chamber spreads apace

  The shadow of white Death, and at the door

  Invisible Corruption waits to trace

  His extreme way to her dwelling-place;

  The eternal Hunger sits, but pity and awe

  Soothe her pale rage, nor dares she to deface

  So fair a prey, till darkness, and the law

  Of change, shall o’er his sleep the mortal curtain draw.12

  The wonderfully exact use of such a word as ‘extreme’; and the enormous sinister force in the use of the personifications — a skill that he had been maturing from his Lechlade poem of 1815, through the Mask of Anarchy and into Epipsychidion — these show Shelley’s powers at their height. It continued spasmodically in some of the Spring imagery of the second section of the poem, ‘Grief has made young Spring wild’. Without apparently the least effort of phrase or sharpness of adjective, individual lines seem to tap a prototypic force close to the original signification of Adonis as fertility god:

  The amorous birds now pair in every brake,

  And build their mossy homes in field and brere;

  And the green lizard, and the golden snake,

  Like unimprisoned flames, out of their trance awake.13

  There is also an extraordinary power of sadness in the passage where he finally discovered the great elegiac phrase he had not quite been able to develop in the poem to his little son William:

  He is a portion of the loveliness

  Which once he made more lovely: he doth bear

  His part, while the one Spirit’s plastic stress

  Sweeps through the dull dense world. . . .14

  The stanzas of homage to the young poets Chatterton, Sir Philip Sidney and Lucan are also deeply moving.

  Writing of the poem after his own death, Mary observed that ‘there is much in the Adonais which seems now more applicable to Shelley himself than to the young and gifted poet whom he mourned. The poetic view he takes of death, and the lofty scorn he displays towards his calumniators, are as a prophecy on his own destiny. . . .’15 But this confuses, though understandably, a sentimental half-truth with the real degree to which Shelley was at the time forcing the myth of Keats’s death to express his own almost unbearably bitter feelings. More and more, the extent to which his great poetry and writing of the autumn and winter of 1819–20 had been suppressed or ignored or turned aside was borne in on him. The prospect of renewed friendship with Byron, outstandingly the most successful English poet of the age, had especially brought this home, and was half exposed in the abjectness and self-effacement of the comments on his own work in letters to Byron of May and June. His claims to be ‘morbidly indifferent’ to praise or blame rang most painfully false. Nor had the sense of social persecution softened with time. But in none of Shelley’s private correspondence is this made quite so agonizingly clear, as in certain passages of his prose preface to Adonais. This had originally been conceived of as a critical defence of ‘Hyperion’, yet that was not how it turned out the moment Shelley put pen to paper at San Giuliano:

  As a man, I shrink from notice and regard; the ebb and flow of the world vexes me; I desire to be left in peace. Persecution, contumely, and calumny have been heaped upon me in profuse measure; and domestic conspiracy and legal oppression have violated in my person the most sacred rights of nature and humanity. The bigot will say it was the recompense of my errors; the man of the world will call it the result of my imprudence; but never upon one head. . . .16

  This was no apologia for ‘Hyperion’, it was pro vita sua. Strangely enough it was John Taaffe, the bore, the bringer of guinea pigs and bad verses, who thoughtfully and gently saved Shelley from this further humiliation. An exchange of letters in early July shows that having been given the proofs to read, Taaffe persuaded Shelley to cancel this and several other passages of the preface, and indeed almost convinced him to omit some of the more naked pieces of self-description in the poem.17

  The sheets of the finished edition, in its elegant Didot type, were shipped from Livorno without further delay in mid-July. But Shelley retained several bound up copies for personal distribution: to the Gisbornes, to Byron, to Claire, to Joseph Severn in Rome; and no doubt to Emilia, the Masons, and other friends in Pisa. ‘The poet & the man are two different natures,’ he explained to the Gisbornes, ‘though they exist together they may be unconscious of each other, & incapable of deciding upon each other’s powers & effects by any reflex act.’18 Perhaps this was, as in the case of Epipsychidion, just another line of defence and extenuation of the personal element in his work. Or perhaps it was true:

  The breath whose might I have invoked in song

  Descends on me; my spirit’s bark is driven,

  Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng

  Whose sails were never to the tempest given;

  The massy earth and spherèd skies are riven!

  I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar;

  Whilst, burning through the inmost veil of Heaven,

  The soul of Adonais, like a star,

  Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.19

  In the middle of the printing arrangements for Adonais, news of another form of extramural publication reached Shelley from London. One of the pirate working-class publishers had brought out a cheap popular edition — of Queen Mab.

  This interesting news — a ‘droll circumstance’ was Shelley’s first reaction — reached him from London in a letter from Horace Smith who treated the whole matter as an unfortunate impropriety. The pirate was a certain William Clark of Cheapside, who specialized in printing cheap editions of ‘dangerous’ radical authors, especially Tom Paine, Palmer and Volney. He had come across a copy of Shelley’s private edition of Queen Mab of 1813, and secretly set it up in print again. It was at once noticed by three radical working-class papers: the Aurora Borealis, Benbow’s John Bull’s British Journal, and none less than Wooler’s own British Gazette, which wrote a long approving article on 6 May. ‘. . . the work has ever been one for which earnest enquiry has been made; and imperfect copies in manuscript have fetched extraordinary prices. A bookseller has at last been found.’20 A flurry of reviews followed in the larger circulation papers of the literary middle class, notably in the Literary Gazette, the Monthly Magazine and the Literary Chronicle.21 As in the case of Swellfoot the Tyrant, a prosecution by the Society for the Suppression of Vice immediately followed, and Clark after selling some fifty copies was forced to take it off the market. But it was this courageous act of piracy that brought Shelley’s work once more to the attention of Richard Carlile, and it was as a result of Clark’s edition of 1821 that Carlile’s various editions of 1822, 1823, 1826 and 1832 followed, together with Watson and Heatherington’s ‘Chartist’ edition of 1839, and Shelley’s name was assured currency in the working movement for the next twenty years.[1]

  This was precisely the kind of publication that much of Shelley’s best work required; a fact which Shelley vaguely recognized in his chronic dissatisfaction with Ollier, and his spasmodic attempts to publish through different channels. His reaction to the piracy was complicated, and contradictory, for he was drawn two ways, both alarmed and delighted. His immediate reaction to Ollier, his official publisher, was to dismiss the whole thing angrily. ‘I have not seen [Queen Mab] for some years, but inasmuch as I recollect it is villainous trash . . . pray give all manner of publicity to my disapprobation of this publication.’22 But in a few days he told John Gisborne about it with something close to relish: ‘. . . Queen Mab, a poem written by me when very young, in the most furious style, with long notes against Jesus Christ, & God the Father and the King & the Bishops & marriage & the Devil knows what, is just published by one of the low booksellers in the Strand, against my wish & consent, and all the people are at loggerheads about it. — Horace Smith gives me this account. You may imagine how much I am amused.’ He added that for the sake of a dignified a
ppearance, ‘& really because I wish to protest against all the bad poetry in it’, he had instructed Ollier to disclaim it formally and applied for a legal injunction.23

  Public letters of formal disclaimer duly followed to Hunt, as editor of the Examiner, and to Ollier for insertion in the Morning Chronicle. ‘I fear it is better fitted to injure than to serve the cause of freedom.’ But as far as an injunction was concerned, Shelley found himself in the same position as Southey, when one of his early radical pieces, Wat Tyler, was similarly honoured: because the edition was pirated there was no legal resource except direct prosecution of the bookseller himself. The irony was not lost on Shelley; but unlike Southey, he had no deep objections to the piracy; the one thing that might have upset him, the original dedication to Harriet Shelley, had been tactfully omitted by Clark. As for the furore, he felt beyond any but its most indirect effects in Italy. What more could they do to his reputation? To Claire he remarked stoically on ‘the abuse which all the government prints are pouring forth on me’, but concluded: ‘I enjoy & am amused with the turmoil of these poor people; but perhaps it is well for me that the Alps & the Ocean are between us.’24 Later, in September, he quietly asked Horace Smith, and independently Hunt, to procure copies for him: ‘I should like very well to see it.’25 In fact, he had considerable interest in his earliest offspring.

  The weather was now getting hotter, and the July days slipped past easily, and Shelley was soothed with the idea of Adonais sailing towards England. Boating in the skiff continued on the triangle between San Giuliano, Pisa and Pugnano. Mary noted fireflies and the cicada in her journal. The after-dinner walks and discussions with the Williamses now formed almost their only regular social recreation. The Gisbornes were preparing to move permanently to London, and Shelley’s main contact with them consisted in buying, or helping to sell, secondhand furniture. Shelley managed to procure several useful items for himself including classical books, a German dictionary for Claire and a microscope and a target pistol.

  Claire also seemed predisposed towards peaceful behaviour. She left Florence for her summer break, and Shelley and Williams took three days off to move her from Pisa to Livorno. Mary was not having her at San Giuliano. She wrote letters, studied German, tried going to church and also swimming. She found herself more adept at the latter, though when the waves were high the water always tended to jump down her throat.26 Towards the end of the month, she was allowed to visit Pisa for a few days, and shuttled between the Casa Silva and the Williams’s villa at Pugnano. She occasionally visited San Giuliano, but she does not seem to have managed to stay overnight there, though Shelley would walk over to Pisa to have breakfast with her.27 When she visited the convent of St Anna, she was told coyly that Emilia had adopted the habit of praying to a saint, ‘but every time she changes her lover, she changes her Saint’. Both Claire and Shelley considered this a fine flower of convent education.28

  At the end of July Claire went back to the ozone of Livorno, and Shelley departed for Florence. He was accompanying the Gisbornes to bid them a final farewell on their journey to England. Shelley and the Gisbornes parted in mutual accord, or at least Shelley and John Gisborne did; the understanding was to serve as the basis for him to act as Shelley’s literary agent in London. Shelley was also carrying out a commission for Horace Smith. Smith had decided to leave England and move south with his wife, partly for reasons of health, and partly because he was bored with his legal career. Shelley was anxious to find a house in Florence in return for Smith’s dedicated work in his financial affairs. Shelley was delighted that after three long years of prevarication by Hunt and Hogg, he had at last seduced one member of his old circle in London to join him in Italy. He suspected, with good reason, that once one moved, the rest might follow. This, combined with the new friendliness of Byron, began to make Shelley think that the end of the year might see Tuscany — Pisa or Florence — become a permanent home for him.

  The prospect of drawing together some kind of English literary colony at Pisa began to balance in his mind against the old dreams of cutting free from his commitments and going east. Thus, on the eve of his twenty-ninth birthday, his oldest scheme of all, the ideal of a radical commune of like spirits, was after many vicissitudes and transformations beginning to re-emerge in Italian colours. Throughout the alarms and excursions of the next few months, which saw almost no time for serious or sustained writing, the strenuous effort to hold together the volatile and conflicting interests of his various friends became Shelley’s paramount consideration. He wanted a nucleus for the new community and he regarded himself, rightly, as the only person who could reconcile the potential factions. He worked hard at it. For the first time since he had been overwhelmed by the confusion and misery and conflicting loyalties which beset him in the winter of 1818–19 at Naples, he felt that his life had some real social purpose. The task of reconciling his friendships with three people — with Mary, with Claire and with Byron — became the first objective; as it remained the last. Yet throughout Shelley again revealed his toughness, his resource and his not inconsiderable cunning, in the depth of these human complications.

  When Shelley returned from Florence to San Giuliano on 2 August, the wheels of life which had turned slowly and remotely among the green waterways of Pisa, suddenly seemed to speed up. A summons awaited him from Byron: why didn’t he run to Ravenna at once? Shelley kissed Mary and left the following morning.29 Mary did not like to see him go: it was, after all, his birthday the next day, and she would have preferred them to celebrate it quietly together. Instead she wrote in her journal for the 4th: ‘Shelley’s birthday. Seven years are now gone; what changes! what a life! We now appear tranquil; yet who knows what wind — but I will not prognosticate evil; we have had enough of it. When Shelley came to Italy, I said all is well if it were permanent; it was more passing than an Italian twilight. . . .’30 She consoled herself by working hard at the clean copy of Valperga, and spending more and more time with the Williamses. For the first time they became ‘Edward ’and ‘Jane’ in the journal, and on the 6th Mary read Edward the fictionalized history of her breakdown, Mathilda. She awaited the post from Ravenna.

  But Shelley, for all his haste, had not gone directly on his journey. The evening of the 3rd found him not at Florence but at Livorno, where he appeared unexpectedly at Claire’s. He spent the night there, and at 5 the next morning they were up and rowing in the harbour. They visited friends, and then after breakfast took a sailing boat, and celebrated Shelley’s birthday on the water. Claire noted: ‘Then we sail out into the sea. A very fine warm day. The white sails of ships upon the horizon looked like doves stooping over the water. Dine at the Giardinetto. Shelley goes at two.’31 It was the last birthday that Shelley celebrated. Claire had a pain in her stomach.

  From Livorno, Shelley took the diligence and spent the night at Empoli, on the way to Florence. At dawn on Sunday the 5th he travelled into Florence, hired an open calèsse and drove flat out for Bologna. On the way they had a crash, an event which Shelley recounted with glee. ‘. . . The old horse stumbled & threw me & the fat vetturino into a slope of meadow over the hedge. — My angular figure stuck where it was pitched, but my vetturino’s spherical form rolled fairly to the bottom of the hill, & that with so few symptoms of reluctance in the life that animated it, that my ridicule (for it was the drollest sight in the world) was suppressed by the fear that the poor devil had been hurt.’32 But driver, horse and calèsse all survived the effects of Shelley’s high spirits, and he covered the road from Florence to Bologna, a distance of some seventy-five miles, in about twenty hours of non-stop driving, having departed from Florence late on Sunday morning, and arrived soon after dawn on Monday the 6th. Part of the reason for the haste was a need to cover his tracks from both Claire and Mary.

  From Florence he had dispatched a note to Claire that makes it clear that he had not told her of his trip to see Byron. He recounted that he had slept at Empoli ‘as one might naturally sleep after taking a double
dose of opium’ — a phrase that does not quite explain itself — but that he was ‘in doubt about his hours’ and would probably not be able to see her ‘so soon as Thursday’. He signed ‘Yours ever most affectionately, S.’ and advised her to keep off green fruit. In other words she knew nothing of Ravenna.33 But another note, to Mary from Bologna, also shows that she in her turn had not been told of his birthday visit to Claire at Livorno. He breathlessly explained failure to arrive in Bologna the previous evening, by ‘having made an embarrasing & inexplicable arrangement for more than twelve hours’ and having travelled ‘all night at the rate of 2 miles an hour’. In this way, the day spent with Claire was concealed from Mary. Shelley’s only mention of Claire was to suggest tactfully that now, in his absence, Mary might invite her to spend a few days at San Giuliano: but she should not be told of the visit to Albe. ‘My love to the Williams’s — Kiss my pretty one, & accept an affectionate one from me in return for the cold. . . .’ But he deleted the last five words. Anyway his chaise for Ravenna was waiting. ‘Yours ever, S.’34 He arrived at Ravenna, a further fifty miles, at 10 that night, and was greeted by a delighted Byron who looked sleek and healthy, with a rather receding hairline. They talked, as was their custom on such occasions, till 5 in the morning.35

  Shelley was Byron’s honoured guest for the next ten days, and the reunion, despite one dramatic eruption, was a great success. At the time of Shelley’s visit, Byron was still established in a splendid and extensive set of apartments within the palace of Countess Guiccioli’s erstwhile husband. The count had recently divorced La Guiccioli, who had been living with Byron as her cavaliere servente in the palace, and she was now banished to Florence for fear of incarceration within a convent.[2] She was on an allowance of 1,200 crowns a year, and Byron on an income of £4,000. For once Byron was living within his means, and even — he told Shelley — giving a quarter of it to charity.