Shelley: The Pursuit

by Richard Holmes

  I

  The serpent is shut out from Paradise —

  The wounded deer must seek the herb no more

  In which its hearts cure lies —

  The widowed dove must cease to haunt a bower

  Like that which from its mate with feignèd sighs,

  Fled in the April hour —

  I too, must seldom seek again

  Near happy friends a mitigated pain. . . .

  . . .

  III

  … Therefore if now I see you seldomer

  Dear friends, dear friend, know that I only fly

  Your looks, because they stir

  Griefs that should sleep, and hopes that cannot die.

  The very comfort which they minister

  I scarce can bear; yet I,

  (So deeply is the arrow gone)

  Should quickly perish if it were withdrawn.

  IV

  When I return to my cold home, you ask

  Why I am not as I have lately been?

  You spoil me for the task

  Of acting a forced part in life’s dull scene.

  Of wearing on my brow the idle mask

  Of author, great or mean,

  In the world’s carnival. I sought

  Peace thus, & but in you I found it not.

  V

  Full half an hour today I tried my lot

  With various flowers, & every one still said

  ‘She loves me, loves me not.’

  And if this meant a vision long since fled —

  If it meant Fortune, Fame, or Peace of thought

  If it meant — (but I dread

  To speak what you may know too well)

  Still there was truth in the sad oracle. . . .47

  Williams had in fact seen Shelley and dined or shot with him at least four times in the previous week, and he did not take the poem altogether seriously. But he was warned, and he showed the whole missive to Jane. His journal for that day read: ‘Shelley sent us some beautiful but too melancholy lines — Call’d on Lord B. and accompanied him to the [shooting] ground — Broke a bottle at 30 paces. Dined with Mary and Shelley.’48

  During February, Williams made a point of walking alone with Shelley along the Arno, and they instituted a new ritual — the two of them breakfasting together with Jane. A two-day trip with Trelawny to Livorno, looking over schooners in the harbour, cheered Shelley with the thought of the fact that he and Williams would sail together all summer long across the Gulf of Spezia. It took definite shape in the mind’s eye. In Trelawny’s words to Captain Roberts: ‘. . . Will you lay us down a small beautiful one of about 17 or 18 feet? to be a thorough Varment at pulling and sailing…three luggs and a jib — backing ones! — She will be used for fishing, shooting, and as a tender for [Lord Byron’s] . . . .’49 That amount of sail for an eighteen-foot dinghy virtually implied wings; which was rather what Shelley had in mind.

  Slowly Jane Williams began to play her new part in Shelley’s life. On the first Saturday in February, she and Shelley — accompanied by Mary — made a day-long expedition to walk from Pisa through the Cascine pine forest to the sea. He commemorated it in a long loose letter-poem ‘The Pine Forest of the Cascine Near Pisa’, which began ‘Dearest, best and brightest, Come away . . . .’ It is not a notable piece of writing, but it contains — like ‘The Boat on the Serchio’ — vivid passages which catch the flavour of the expedition:

  We paused amid the pines that stood,

  The giants of the waste,

  Tortured by storms to shapes as rude

  With stems like serpents interlaced.

  How calm it was — the silence there

  By such a chain was bound,

  That even the busy woodpecker

  Made stiller by her sound

  The inviolable quietness. . . .

  And still, it seemed, the centre of

  The magic circle there,

  Was one whose being filled with love

  The breathless atmosphere.50

  Shelley reworked this lyric narrative during the spring, and it became two poems: ‘To Jane: The Invitation’, and ‘To Jane: The Recollection’. Jane also agreed to try her powers of ‘animal magnetism’ on Shelley, and one of the mesmerism sessions was recorded in his poem ‘The Magnetic Lady to Her Patient’. These, and other slight pieces, were almost the only original work that Shelley was able to conceive and execute during his continued proximity to the Palazzo Lanfranchi.

  Jane, like Claire before her, was musically inclined, and could sing ballads and popular tunes in her low, slightly husky voice. Shelley now applied to Horace Smith in Paris for a pedal harp to be purchased and dispatched via Marseilles and Livorno. He calculated the expenditure at seventy or eighty guineas, and asked Smith to advance him this amount immediately with his ‘accustomed kindness’. This was a sum, especially remembering the requirements of the Hunts, that Shelley could ill afford, and it is the one financial favour that Horace Smith is known to have refused him.51 Later, in March, Shelley purchased instead for Jane a beautiful Spanish guitar at Livorno; but while still waiting for the harp from Paris, he sent her a number of his lyric fragments, written during the previous years in Italy. A characteristic covering letter with one read: ‘Dear Jane, if this melancholy old song suits any of your tunes, or any that humour of the moment may dictate, you are welcome to it. Do not say it is mine to any one, even if you think so; indeed, it is from the torn leaf of a book out of date. How are you today, and how is Williams? Tell him that I dreamed of nothing but sailing, and fishing up coral. Yours ever affectionately, PBS.’52

  Almost telepathically, Claire chose this moment to burst in again on Shelley’s life from Florence. On 7 February, Claire had met Elise Foggi during a social evening at the Casa Boutourlin in Florence. Three days later Elise called on Claire at the Casa Bojti. According to a heavily deleted passage in Claire’s diary, she talked about her part in the Hoppner scandal. The entry appears to be: ‘E’s report of Naples and me.’53 Claire remained on terms with Elise, but she was thrown into a state of great turmoil and unhappiness, and determined to leave the Shelleys and Italy altogether, and go to Vienna where her brother Charles was studying. She was convinced from talking to Elise that Byron would never voluntarily allow her to see Allegra, and she had overwhelming fears that Allegra would die at Bagnacavallo.

  After rapid exchange of letters with Shelley between 12 and 14 February, the content of which is not known, Claire dispatched a series of letters to Byron, Shelley, Mary, Mrs Mason and Charles together on the 18th, announcing her intention of going to Vienna. The letter to Byron survives in a manuscript draft,54 in which she begs to see Allegra one last time before she leaves ‘upon a disagreeable and precarious life’. ‘I have often entreated Shelley to intercede for me, and he invariably answers that it is utterly useless’. The letter though passionate and in many ways pitiful, is yet organized with considerable skill. Claire implies that if Byron will let her see Allegra one last time, then she will surely leave Italy for ever, and he will be rid of her; on the other hand, if he will not, then she will not have the strength to start her new life, she will remain in Italy, and perhaps contemplate suicide: ‘it were better that I were dead’. The tone of this letter must certainly have shaken Byron, and no doubt he spent more than one uneasy night over it. But in the end these signs of policy decided him; he refused to believe that Claire was engaged in anything more than one further manoeuvre to get inside his defences again, and he remained adamant. Whether he even reconsidered Allegra’s welfare cannot be known. It was one of the greatest human errors of his life, and was the result of egoism.

  When Mary and Shelley received their letters on the 20th, Mary wrote back directly to Florence by special messenger commanding Claire not to leave before discussing her plans ‘in the midst of friends’.55 Claire was in Pisa by 6 o’clock the next evening. She stayed with the Williamses for four days, and talked exhaustively with them, Shelley and Mary and Mrs Mason. Her visit w
as concealed from Byron. After this, she returned to Florence in a calmer mood, determined to await events, and the fulfilment of a promise that Shelley had apparently made to work Byron round as the opportunity arose. The Masons were strongly in favour of Claire leaving to start her life again in Vienna; and so probably was Mary; but Shelley wanted Claire to stay on, and stay on she did. Later, at the end of March, she was to erupt with a further plan, this time to kidnap Allegra from Bagnacavallo; and this too required emergency measures at Pisa. After 13 April, however, Claire’s diary is blank for five months, for a series of tragedies occurred that did not seem to her to bear recalling.56

  During May, Shelley spent less time with Byron and more and more sailing in his skiff up and down the Arno. Williams records that he was on the river almost every day, and though usually they sailed together, he frequently met Shelley sailing back alone from a dawn trip far outside the city limits.

  Shelley still shot and dined with Byron, and with every appearance of cordiality. A plan for them all to put on an amateur production of Othello — Byron as Iago, Trelawny as the Moor, Mary as Desdemona and Shelley directing — was taken up and later abandoned. Once at dinner, Shelley quoted enthusiastically from Childe Harold much of which he knew by heart, and Byron, after listening with satisfaction until the end of the stanza, laughed modestly and called across the table ‘Heavens! Shelley, what infinite nonsense are you quoting?’ Williams regarded this as a fine example of Byron’s insensibility ‘to his real merit’.57

  Yet despite the congeniality, the issue of Allegra was a deeply divisive one between Shelley and Byron. Shelley did try, as he had promised, to change Byron’s determination, but he met with coldness and even suspicion. Shelley in turn reacted with barely suppressed fury. But his position was difficult as mediator, and he had already committed himself in the previous year to approval of Byron’s treatment of the child. Shelley also felt that Byron might use the Hoppner business against Claire, and even as a last resort against himself.

  Much of these fears and frustrations appear in a fragmentary letter of his to Claire, which is not dated, but seems to belong to March. One sees clearly how Shelley had been forced into two almost completely contradictory positions: one expressed by his commitments at Pisa, the other by his commitment to Claire. ‘It is of vital importance both to me and to yourself, to Allegra even, that I should put a period to my intimacy with LB, and that without éclat. No sentiments of honour or justice restrain him (as I strongly suspect) from the basest insinuations, and the only mode in which I could effectually silence him I am reluctant (even if I had proof) to employ during my father’s life. But for your immediate feelings I would suddenly and irrevocably leave this country which he inhabits, nor ever enter it but as an enemy to determine our differences without words. But at all events I shall soon see you, and then we will weigh both your plans and mine . . . .’58 From this, one would not be surprised if Shelley had left Pisa within the week, or had had a pistol duel with Byron the next day. No doubt Claire half awaited such events.

  Yet Byron certainly did not. In the same month that Shelley wrote this to Claire, and probably within days of so writing, Shelley had successfully secured a large loan on Hunt’s behalf from Byron, with his own word and inheritance as security. He had also written to Hunt of his own and Byron’s renewed enthusiasm for the Pisa scheme. The loan was worth £250 in Italian money, and Shelley immediately dispatched £220 to Hunt by the exchange through Brookes; the remaining thirty pounds he kept at Pisa as an encouragement and precaution for Hunt.59 ‘[Lord Byron] expresses again the greatest eagerness to undertake [the journal] & proceed with it, as well as the greatest confidence in you as his associate. He is forever dilating upon his impatience of your delay & his disappointment at your not having already arrived. . . . I imagine it will be no very difficult task to execute that which you have assigned to me — to keep him in heart with the project until your arrival.’

  Yet even to Hunt, Shelley admitted that the constant proximity with Byron just across the Arno at the Lanfranchi was becoming an enormous strain. The air was too charged emotionally between them, and quite apart from the difficulties caused through social status, and the crushing reminders of Byron’s fame and immense popularity as a poet, there was the curious overbearing intensity, almost a romantic intensity, with which the presence of one affected the other. It was almost as if Byron was physically too close to Shelley. ‘Particular circumstances, — or rather I should say, particular dispositions in Lord B’s character render the close & exclusive intimacy with him in which I find myself, intolerable to me; thus much my best friend I will confess & confide to you. . . . However…I will take care to preserve the little influence I may have over this Proteus in whom such strange extremes are reconciled until we meet.’60 Shelley was determined to hang on at all costs at Pisa until Hunt’s arrival, and the commencement of the journal. But when would Hunt come?

  Meanwhile, there was still the skiff. Shelley’s river sailing was now becoming much more skilful, with increased experience of the sharp current and squall winds of the Arno, and he could now accomplish extended journeys with considerable finesse. One bright, clear Saturday morning, with strong southerly winds blowing sometimes close to gale force across the maremma, he and Williams sailed the length of the canal from Pisa to Livorno between 11.30 and 2 in the afternoon, a distance of about eighteen miles in two and a half hours.61 On 21 March, Trelawny arrived back in Pisa with the news that Roberts was about to launch Shelley’s new sailing boat at Livorno. She was to be sailed round to Genoa for final trials and fittings, and Roberts was then to take command of Byron’s larger schooner. Shelley and Mary celebrated with Jane and Edward, all four of them going on a dignified but somewhat precarious sail up the Arno in the skiff. Trelawny, much in favour, continued to visit the Tre Palazzi on most evenings.62

  Shelley was still struggling in vain to get some large poem launched. One fragment that seems to belong to this time is an unfinished drama concerning a Lady on an Enchanted Isle. She has been abandoned by her beloved, but she is accompanied by an Indian youth: one can perhaps gloss here the Lady as Mary, and the Youth as Trelawny. Writing an interpretative note to her edition of 1839, Mary explained that the Lady ‘is accompanied by a Youth, who loves the lady, but whose passion she returns only with a sisterly affection’. The drama never developed further than a dialogue between the two, which is full of spent images from Prometheus and a vague atmosphere of Shakespeare’s Tempest. But the picture of the Lady among the potted plants in the south-facing windows of their apartment — the mysterious Isle — is sadly evocative. The Lady herself speaks:

  At length I rose, and went,

  Visiting my flowers from pot to pot, and thought

  To set new cuttings in the empty urns,

  And when I came to that beside the lattice,

  I saw two little dark-green leaves

  Lifting the light mould at their birth, and then

  I half-remembered my forgotten dream.

  And day by day, green as a gourd in June,

  The plant grew fresh and thick, yet no one knew

  What plant it was; its stem and tendrils seemed

  Like emerald snakes. . . .63

  But Shelley could build up nothing which showed any real creative promise from this piece, and it too was thrown aside. March also saw the final collapse of ‘Charles I’, the drama he had been sketching and announcing for nearly two years. ‘. . . a slight circumstance gave a new train to my ideas & shattered the fragile edifice when half built,’ he told Hunt. ‘What motives have I to write. — I had motives — and I thank the god of my own heart they were totally different from those of the other apes of humanity who make mouths in the glass of time — but what are those motives now? The only inspiration of an ordinary kind I could descend to acknowledge would be the earning £100 for you — & that it seems I cannot.’64

  There was however one small fragment that survived the wreck of ‘Charles 1’ beautifully
intact. It was a song, rich with Shakespearian associations like the ‘Song from Tasso’ of 1818, but transcending that and finding its own true note. Shelley’s stage direction said it was to be sung by the Court Fool, Archy. Perhaps the accompaniment was that of a Spanish guitar. ‘I’ll go live under the ivy that overgrows the terrace, and count the tears shed on its old roots as the wind plays the song. . . .’

  Heigho! the lark and the owl!

  One flies the morning, and one lulls the night: —

  Only the nightingale, poor fond soul,

  Sings like the fool through darkness and light.

  ‘A widow bird sate mourning for her love

  Upon a wintry bough;

  The frozen wind crept on above,

  The freezing stream below.

  ‘There was no leaf upon the forest bare,

  No flower upon the ground,

  And little motion in the air

  Except the mill-wheel’s sound.’65

  That was all.

  March which had entered quietly, went out suddenly like a lion. On the 24th, the long-smouldering resentment and suspicion of the Pisan garrison soldiers against the English gentlemen who rode out from the Lanfranchi with Lord Byron, exploded in a violent incident. The English were really to blame. A shooting party consisting of Lord Byron, Count Gamba, Taaffe, Trelawny, Captain Hay and Shelley was returning from the farmhouse where they usually practised, along the main road into Pisa. Some dozen or so yards behind them was the Countess Guiccioli’s carriage with two Italian attendants and La Guiccioli and Mary Shelley inside. The whole party was moving leisurely back towards Pisa, with the riders — all six of them — in animated conversation strung out in a line across the road. When they were still a few hundred yards outside the Porta della Piazza, an Italian dragoon called Sergeant-Major Masi came beating down the same road at full gallop, also making for the Porta della Piazza. Masi was part of the Pisan garrison, and it appears that he was late coming back from off-duty and was hurrying to make up time. Shelley also said afterwards that he was probably drunk, but this is not certain. Although the English party must surely have heard the approaching hooves from behind, they made no attempt to make way on the road, but remained strung out across its whole width. The business of passing and overtaking on horse or in carriage had its own social etiquette, and lesser men were expected to give way to greater. Taaffe was on the extreme right nearest the ditch, Lord Byron next to him, then Shelley, and the others ranged across the road to the left. The dragoon Masi did not however break his gallop.