Shelley: The Pursuit

by Richard Holmes

  The only two scenes of Faust which Shelley attempted and finished, were the ‘Prologue in Heaven’, and the celebrated Hartz Mountain scene on May Day night — Walpurgisnacht. Shelley managed well with this, translating carefully, but also catching the rapid, lurid distortions of the Brocken and the sense of seething night life, when any grotesque, inanimate shape or shadow may begin to squirm and crawl:

  Are the screech, the lapwing, and the jay,

  All awake as if’twere day?

  See, with long legs and belly wide,

  A salamander in the brake!

  Every root is like a snake,

  And along the loose hillside,

  With strange contortions through the night,

  Curls, to seize or to affright. . . .

  Through the dazzling gloom

  The many-coloured mice, that thread

  The dewy turf beneath our tread,

  In troops each other’s motions cross,

  Through the heath and through the moss. . . .27

  The Retzch etchings began to fascinate him more and more until they took on a life of their own. Later he wrote again to Gisborne: ‘What etchings these are! I am never satiated with looking at them, & I fear it is the only sort of translation of which Faust is susceptible — I never perfectly understood the Hartz Mountain scene, until I saw the etching. — And then, Margaret in the summer house with Faust! — The artist makes one envy his happiness that he can sketch such things with calmness, which I dared only to look upon once, & which made my brain swim round only to touch the leaf on the opposite side of which I knew that it was figured.’28 With their macabre setting of the love between Faust and Margaret, the pictures obviously found a deep correspondence in Shelley’s own experiences. They are certainly weird enough.

  Shelley had first read Faust in company with Byron and M. G. Lewis at Geneva, and Goethe’s poem was clearly associated in his mind with Byron’s presence. It is perhaps for this reason that one can recognize a familiar, jaunty, aristocratic ease in some of Mephistopheles’s speeches. When they pause before descending into the valley to join the witches round their ‘heap of glimmering coals’, the following exchange takes place:

  Faust. In introducing us, do you assume

  The character of Wizard or of Devil?

  Mephistopheles. In truth, I generally go about

  in strict incognito; and yet one likes

  To wear one’s orders upon gala days.

  I have no ribbon at my knee; but here

  At home, the cloven foot is honourable.

  See you that snail there? — she comes creeping up,

  And with her feeling eyes hath smelt out something.

  I could not, if I would, mask myself here.

  Come now, we’ll go about from fire to fire:

  I’ll be the Pimp, and you shall be the Lover.29

  The cloven foot was of course fortuitous. But if there were elements of Byron in Mephistopheles, one begins to speculate about Shelley and Faust. The moment at the end of the scene, where Faust recognizes the animated corpse or phantom of his first love Margaret among the dancers, is translated with a kind of chilling, stony realism, and for the only time one is given to understand that Mephistopheles is not quite in control of the infernal proceedings:

  Faust. Seest thou not a pale,

  Fair girl, standing alone, far, far, away?

  She drags herself now forward with slow steps.

  And seems as if she moved with shackled feet:

  I cannot overcome the thought that she

  Is like poor Margaret.

  Mephistopheles. Let it be — pass on —

  No good can come of it — it, is not well

  To meet it — it is an enchanted phantom,

  A lifeless idol; with its numbing look,

  It freezes up the blood of man; and they

  Who meet its ghastly stare are turned to stone,

  Like those who saw Medusa.

  Faust. Oh, too true!

  Her eyes are like the eyes of a fresh corpse

  Which no belovèd hand has closed, alas!

  That is the breast which Margaret yielded to me —

  Those are the lovely limbs which I enjoyed!

  Mephistopheles. It is all magic, poor deluded fool!

  She looks to every one like his first love.30

  The appalling implication of Mephistopheles’s final line would not have been lost on Shelley; and the images throughout this closing passage — the Medusa, the unclosed eyes — would each have reached him with a shock not of surprise, but of recognition.

  Shelley turned again and again to these scenes of Goethe’s during the coming spring, and one can sense them moving behind many of the fragments he wrote during this unsettled and unproductive period. In April he was to write: ‘I have been reading over & over again Faust, & always with sensations that no other composition excites. It deepens the gloom & augments the rapidity of the ideas, & would therefore seem to be an unfit study for any person who is a prey to the reproaches of memory, & the delusions of an imagination not to be restrained.’31 He says no more, but the reference is obviously to himself.

  It was with Claire that Shelley had first begun to re-read Faust, and in February and March he encouraged her to complete, as a crown to her eighteen months of German study, a finished translation of the whole of Part I, which he promised her they would get published in England. The manuscript of Claire’s version has never been recovered,32 while Shelley’s was published in the first issue of the Liberal.

  By the end of January, the disconcerting news reached Pisa that the Hunts were still in England. They had indeed boarded the Jane in November, but had been held up by the terrible storms, first at Ramsgate, and later at Dartmouth. Finally, after many days of waiting and seasickness, Marianne Hunt decided that the journey with the children was too dangerous, and would have to be postponed until the spring; so they wintered near Dartmouth. This decision was to have a long train of disastrous consequences. In the first place, the several hundred pounds33 which Shelley had organized for Hunt on an extended loan from Horace Smith, was very largely dissipated on forfeited fares, extra living expenses in England and the arrival of unpaid bills from London. In the second place the Pisan circle, lacking its linch-pin for the production of the Liberal by the Triumvirate, began to spin in other directions. Without the unifying idea of this literary scheme, of which Hunt’s presence as managing editor of the machinery was an absolutely indispensable part, the friction between Shelley and Byron immediately began to increase.

  There was still the shooting club, and the dining club, and the late-night private conversations, but these were no longer enough. Shelley’s discontent appeared quickly in a letter to Horace Smith: ‘Lord Byron unites us at a weekly dinner where my nerves are generally shaken to pieces by sitting up, contemplating the rest making themselves vats of claret &c. till 3 o’clock in the morning. — We regret your absence exceedingly. . . . Hunt was expected & Lord B. had fitted up a part of his palace for his accommodation, when we heard that the late violent storms had forced him to put back, & that nothing could induce Marianne to put to sea again. — This for many reasons that I cannot now explain has produced a chaos of perplexities.’34 He wrote to Hunt direct on the same day, enclosing a draft for £150, and begging that he still try to sail at once, before ‘debts, responsibilities & expenses’ enmeshed him round. Without Hunt’s immediate presence the whole project was in danger.

  Various new figures had joined the Pisan group since the new year, and its literary atmosphere was slowly giving way to something more swashbuckling. One, a certain Captain Hay, attached himself to Byron, and spent time shooting in the maremma with the Gambas. He sent consignments of wild boar to the Palazzo Lanfranchi which went well with the claret at dinner.35

  Another, more significant figure, was Edward John Trelawny. Trelawny had arrived in Pisa on 14 January from Geneva, after months of urging from Edward Williams. Trelawny was, like Shelley, in h
is thirtieth year: he was a Cornishman and a professional adventurer who could turn his hand to anything; boats, horses, pistols, women and memoir-writing. He was a tall, swarthy figure, with a mass of black hair cuffed rather boyishly across his forehead and very white, smiling teeth glittering through a heavy black beard. He valued his piratical appearance, and though clearly a gentleman, he affected open shirts, coloured neckclothes, a strong enigmatic manner, and an endless supply of dramatic anecdotes. It says much for his style, that although regarded with instant suspicion by Mary, he very quickly won her favour, and later her affection and trust. Her portrait of him in the journal is very good, and tells a lot about both of them at this time.

  Trelawney is extravagant, — un giovane stravagante — partly natural and partly perhaps put on, but it suits him well, and if his abrupt but not unpolished manners be assumed, they are nevertheless in unison with his Moorish face (for he looks Oriental yet not Asiatic) his dark hair, his Herculean form, and then there is an air of extreme good nature which pervades his whole countenance, especially when he smiles, which assures me that his heart is good. He tells strange stories of himself, horrific ones, so that they harrow one up. . . . I believe them now I see the man, and, tired with the everyday sleepiness of human intercourse, I am glad to meet with one, who, among other valuable qualities, has the rare merit of interesting my imagination.36

  It is indicative of Mary’s manner that when he first met her, Trelawny thought she was 27, when she was really only 24.37 Trelawny’s first meeting with Shelley at the Williamses’ apartment, translating a piece of Calderón, produced an opposite extreme. His celebrated description of the ‘flushed, feminine, artless face’ and the boyish, stripling figure in ill-fitting black jacket and trousers may be compared with the Curran portrait, as a deliberate piece of hagiography.38 But the whole of the memoir he later wrote was, in this respect, another of his ‘strange stories’, and aimed at achieving the single effect which he put into the mouth of Jane Williams at that first meeting: ‘Shelley? Oh, he comes and goes like a spirit, no one knows when or where.’ Trelawny committed himself to Shelley’s side of the Arno, and in retrospect he wished to make his chosen poet contrast as strongly as possible with the worldliness he identified in Byron’s character. Byron’s comment at the time was: ‘Ay, the Snake has fascinated you; I am for making a man of the world of you; they will mould you into a Frankenstein monster.’39

  Trelawny brought with him to Pisa an idea that was in the long run to be more powerful in the affairs of the Pisan circle than the original scheme for the Liberal. It was presented to Shelley and Williams one evening in the shape of a small model. Williams wrote: ‘January 15th. Fine and frosty. Wrote a little. Trelawney called, and brought with him the model of an American schooner on which it is settled with Shelley & myself to build a boat 30 feet long, and Trelawney writes to [Captain] Roberts at Genoa to commence on it directly.’40

  On 7 February, Shelley and Williams rode out in a light carriage to make a five-day reconnaissance of the bay of La Spezia, north of Viareggio, with a view to spending spring and summer by the sea. Two of their days were spent sailing round the little bay of Lerici, opposite Portovenere, looking for suitable houses. Nothing was definitely decided upon, but by the time they returned to Pisa the idea had reached a new stage. Trelawny had presented Byron with drawings by Captain Roberts for a larger boat, and it had now become the ‘Spezia Plan’.

  Mary wrote to Maria Gisborne thoughtfully, during Shelley’s absence: ‘Shelley is now gone to La Spezia to get houses for our Colony for the summer. — It will be a large one, too large I am afraid for unity — yet I hope not — there will be Lord Byron who will have a large and beautiful boat built on purpose by some English navy officers at Genoa. — There will be the Countess Guiccioli and her brother — the Williams, who you know — Trelawny — a kind of half Arab Englishman. . . . There will be besides a Captain Roberts whom I do not know — a very rough subject I fancy — a famous angler &c. — We are to have a smaller boat.’41 Talk of the boats, and of houses in the bay, now dominated all other conversation; while the arrival of Hunt seemed to become a more and more distant prospect.

  The early Tuscan spring was already upon them, the hedges in the Giardino Scotto began to bud, and the days were warm and clear42 and in mid-February it was the time of Carnival again. Mary, who had regarded the pink top-hats and carnival parades so askance on their first arrival in Pisa in 1820, now took an active and delighted part in the proceedings. She promenaded along the Lung’Arno admiring and criticizing the masks with the Williamses — they voted ‘a Lawyer’ as the best of the season — and one evening Jane put on a Hindustani dress, and Mary garbed herself in Turkish costume.43 On another night a foursome, Jane and Edward, Mary and Trelawny, went to the Carnival fancy-dress ball or Veglione and danced till 3 in the morning. At long last, Mary’s period of retreat on the top floor of the Tre Palazzi seemed over. She gave small supper parties under the open windows, and looked forward with longing to the summer colony, imagining to herself the ‘sparkling waves, the olive covered hills & vines shrouded pergolas of Spezia’.44 Edward Trelawny’s presence had undoubtedly helped the coming of the spring.

  Shelley’s name was notably absent from these springtime excursions. He still spent a good deal of time in Byron’s company, and he was apparently the most enthusiastic advocate — apart from Trelawny, who had thus secured himself an unofficial post — of the boat-building scheme. He was perhaps aware, more clearly than any of the others, that it was the one thing that might hold the Pisan circle together long enough for Hunt to reach Italy. But his real preoccupations were elsewhere.

  In the first place, the inspiration and irritation of Byron’s talk on literary matters, had led him to try to make a decisive break with his own publisher Ollier. In many ways this was long overdue, but if Byron was the inspiration, John Gisborne was the invaluable instrument. Throughout January and February, Shelley wrote a series of forceful and increasingly angry letters to Ollier, backed up by a parallel series of explanations and requests to Gisborne. The remarkable change of tone in these letters showed how far his thinking on literary matters had been affected by Byron’s businesslike approach: ‘First, I wish to see [Ollier’s] accounts, and find out what is due to me upon them, and for what sum I may, if I please, draw on him. Secondly, to ask him whether he will buy the copyright of “Charles the First”, what he will give me, and when he will pay me. Thirdly, to discover whether he has printed and published the poem of “Hellas”, and if not to give it to some other publisher. . . . Fourthly, to make up a package of four copies of each of my poems, and send them. . . . In order to make this, or whatever other arrangements with Ollier, this letter shall be your authority. I am, all citizens of the world ought to be, especially curious regarding the article of money. What news?’45 One can hear clearly the accents of Mephistopheles, and they were probably not unwelcome to Gisborne. The titles of his poems published by Ollier, which Shelley now wished to see round his walls, along with the other books and potted plants were: The Revolt of Islam (1818); Rosalind and Helen (1819); The Cenci (2nd edition, 1821); Prometheus Unbound (1820); Epipsychidion (1821); and Adonais (Pisan imprint, 1821).

  Receiving no satisfactory news from Ollier on these points, Shelley wrote Gisborne a finalizing letter which reached London in mid-February: ‘I wish now to have done with Ollier as a publisher, & I should feel exceedingly grateful to you if you would undertake to extract me from his clutches. I give you hereby, full authority, to settle my accounts with him. . . . As the books are my property I would rather that they were burnt than that they remained in his possession.’46

  In London, Gisborne set about Shelley’s affairs, and inquired discreetly after a new publisher, as best he could. But it was not to prove as simple as Shelley had supposed. To begin with, Gisborne discovered that Shelley was in debt to Ollier for a sum of at least fifty or sixty pounds. The complications over settling accounts went on into the summer, and no new
publisher was found.

  Familiar emotional problems were also troubling Shelley, and towards these, too, he now adopted a more forthright policy. At the end of January Williams had been surprised to receive at his apartment a short letter from Shelley, enclosing a seven-stanza poem which began ‘The Serpent is shut out from Paradise’. During the previous week, Shelley had showed Williams a copy of the Epipsychidion, and had discussed with him his feelings about Emilia Viviani; that was to say, the feelings of his other self, the young Englishman who had died on his journey to the Sporades, and left behind a portfolio of poems. Williams had listened with sympathy. Now he read Shelley’s letter — a curious method of communication for one who lived two flights of stairs above. ‘My dear Williams, Looking over the portfolio in which my friend used to keep his verses, & in which those I sent you the other day were found, — I have lit upon these; which as they are too dismal for me to keep I send them you. . . . If any of the stanzas should please you, you may read them to Jane, but to no one else, — and yet on second thought I had rather you would not [six words deleted]. Yours ever affectionately, PBS.’ The appeal for help in the poem must have been fairly explicit to Williams. Its background, which Williams knew only too well, was the almost complete failure of feeling between Shelley and Mary; and the increasing strain of the friendship with Byron, which was referred to in the fourth stanza.