Shelley: The Pursuit

by Richard Holmes

  [4] Alexander von Humboldt, Sir Humphry Davy and Sir William Hamilton all carried out major research into volcanic activity during Shelley’s lifetime. Mount Etna erupted in 1792, and again at the end of 1819; Vesuvius erupted in 1794, and was partly active again during the period of Shelley’s visit to Naples in 1818.

  20. The Palace of the Dark

  Prometheus Unbound was near completion early in April 1819. Shelley relaxed by going to see the Easter illumination of St Peter’s in the Vatican with Mary and Claire. On the 16th he began to read Paradise Lost out loud in the evenings, and on the 25th he gave Mary the manuscript of Prometheus to read. She makes no comment in her journal.

  Mary was still feeling depressed and withdrawn. ‘God knows why but I have suffered more from [ill spirits] ten times over than I ever did before I came to Italy evil thoughts will hang about me — but this is only now and then — ’1. She was cheered a little by the entrée of a bluff English eccentric, the Revd Colonel Finch, ‘a mixture of Abelard & old Blucher’, into their small circle of acquaintances. The Shelleys christened him Calicot, after one of Tom Moore’s story characters. At least he was someone for Mary to laugh at. There was also the Emperor of Austria, who came to give a feast at the Capitol at the end of April. The galleries of the palazzos were hung with coloured silks, and there were fireworks in the evening. ‘I have not room to tell you,’ Mary gossipped to Maria Gisborne in her letter, ‘how gracefully the old venerable Pope fulfilled the Church ceremonies.’ Shelley asked Mary to inquire about herbs for flea powder.2

  Shelley had few thoughts of publication. The effort of composition had exhausted him, and he walked out much less. He stayed at the Corso reading, or took leisurely turns in a carriage content to observe the constant flux of the Italians going about their daily business. He consigned his manuscript to the bottom of his trunk after Mary had read it, and it is not mentioned again in his letters for several months. Not until September did he write to Charles Ollier, who knew of the poem from Peacock: ‘My “Prometheus” which has been long finished, is now being transcribed, & will soon be forwarded to you for publication. It is in my judgement, of a higher character than any thing I have yet attempted . . . .’3 He had confidence and satisfaction in it; but he was not confident of his audience.[1] In the meantime he needed a subject with a more obvious appeal: something more extroverted, more popular. Perhaps Italian life might provide it?

  Shelley looked around him carefully. For the first time he was beginning to see Rome as a living city rather than an enormous museum. He had ceased to be a tourist. ‘In the square of St Peter’s there are about 300 fettered criminals at work, hoeing out the weeds that grow between the stones of the pavement. Their legs are heavily ironed, & some are chained two by two. They sit in long rows hoeing out the weeds, dressed in party-coloured clothes. Near them sit or saunter, groups of soldiers armed with loaded muskets . . . . It is the emblem of Italy: moral degradation contrasted with the glory of nature & the arts.’4

  Simultaneously with this growing identification with the real Italy, came the bitter realization that since he was not a tourist, he really was an exile. After receiving the depressed and anxious letters from Naples, Peacock had written strongly suggesting that Shelley would be wise to return to England. ‘How is it possible!’ Shelley replied. ‘Health competence, tranquility all these Italy permits & England takes away.’ Perhaps there were five people alone, he wrote, who did not regard him ‘as a rare prodigy of crime & pollution whose look even might infect’. Events at Naples no doubt contributed to this gloomy self-accusation. They still planned to return south in the summer to Naples where presumably they would visit Elena, but no mention of this was made to Peacock. Instead Shelley sent greetings via him to Mrs Boinville, ‘I desire such remembrances to her as an exile & a Pariah may be permitted to address to an acknowledged member of the community of mankind.’ Was this a conscious echo of Frankenstein’s monster talking on the glacier? Perhaps; at any rate it was not entirely unsarcastic. ‘It was hardly possible for a person of the extreme subtlety & delicacy of Mrs Boinville’s understanding & affections,’ wrote Shelley cordially, ‘to be quite sincere & constant.’ There are other indications in his letters that the ‘spirit of the English abroad’ was becoming increasingly uncongenial to him, and the fashionable Corso, and the sociable soirées of Signora Dioniga had become distasteful.

  However, some sort of relief was at hand. On 23 April Claire’s sharp and roving eye spotted the disappearing shape of Aemilia Curran in the Borghese Gardens. Miss Curran was the eloquent, independent and high-spirited elder daughter of John Philpot Curran, the Irish politician. Claire and Mary knew her through Curran’s friendship with the Godwins; and Shelley had also met her during his expedition to Dublin in 1812. Inquiries were made, and a card left.5 It was indeed Miss Curran, and she was delighted to meet them. Visits were exchanged and she soon became a frequent companion of their carriage rides and gallery visits.

  Miss Curran was a good example of the Godwinian breed: an Irish radical in politics, and sturdily independent in person, she had decided to go abroad and educate herself. She lived completely alone at No. 64 Via Sestina, a narrow but elegant street of closely packed stone houses on the northern heights of Rome and giving immediately on to the commanding and beautiful piazza of the Trinità dei Monti. Her main occupation was painting. She seems to have supported herself partly by turning out competent society portraits in oils. She spoke Italian fluently and adapted herself well to European life. She was still living like a hermit in Rome in 1821, and in the summer of 1822 she was to be found living with equal satisfaction in the faubourg of St Germain in Paris. She had a revivifying effect on the Shelleys. A few days after this new acquaintanceship, Mary gave up her drawing for painting; and on 5 May Claire began to sit for her portrait by Miss Curran. Claire and Shelley went up to see her at Via Sestina on several afternoons, and Shelley learnt that there were rooms to be had next door at No. 65.

  On 5 May also occurred an unpleasant incident which made the society of the Corso definitely unwelcome. Mary and Claire recorded cryptically: ‘S.’s adventure at the Post Office.’6 Tom Medwin, who met Shelley at Pisa in 1821, was told the story, and recorded it, muddling the date and place (he thought it was Pisa) in his usual fashion. The essential facts seem to have been that Shelley ‘was at the Post Office asking for his letters, addressed, as is usual in Italy, Poste-Restante, when a stranger in a military cloak, on hearing him pronounce his name, said “What, are you that damned atheist, Shelley?” and without more preamble, being a tall, powerful man, struck him such a blow that it felled him to the ground, and stunned him. On coming to himself, Shelley found the ruffian had disappeared.’7 Medwin adds various fanciful details about a mysterious pursuit to Genoa, which seem to be pure invention. Claire’s word ‘adventure’ suggests, however, that Shelley may not have allowed himself to be knocked unconscious quite so docilely as Medwin pretends, and recalling the incident on the Rhine boat in 1814 it sounds unlikely. The damned atheist probably gave as much as he got. They moved to No. 65 Via Sestina the next day.

  The house was the last one before the Trinità, and immediately below it were the three graceful landings of the Spanish Steps — already the haunt of flower-sellers — and the Piazza di Spagna containing the elegant ochre scallop of the Bernini fountain. Beyond was laid out one of the finest Baroque vistas in Rome, stretching south-eastwards over the Palazzo Borghese and across the Tiber to the huge machicolated drum of Castel San Angelo, where Cellini had once manned the guns, and beyond that again to the hovering silver green dome of St Peter’s and the dark walls of the Città del Vaticano. The area of the Trinità and the Spanish Steps was to become known eventually as the ‘Romantic’ or ‘English quarter’, and to fill in consequence with Victorian travel agencies and tea-rooms. But in 1819 it was relatively undiscovered. Two winters later, when Keats and Joseph Severn arrived in Rome, they took a cheap apartment in the first house at the bottom of the Steps. Keats’s
room directly overlooked the Bernini fountain, and at night it was full of the sound of splashing water. Claire entered in her diary for 6 May: ‘L’Ultima Casa sulla Trinità dei Monti. In the evening walk on the Trinità with S . . . .’ They admired the view as the light faded. They were joined by Dr Bell, the distinguished Scottish physician who Shelley had decided to consult about his health.

  The next morning Shelley was sitting for his portrait at No. 64. In the following month Aemilia Curran produced or at least started portraits of Mary and little Willmouse, besides those of Claire and Shelley. It is a great pity that this completed set has not survived. The first two have been lost; Claire’s was finished and is certainly the best, though she herself disliked it.8 Perhaps she thought she looked too irritable; or that there was too much flesh under her chin.

  The portrait of Shelley is the most famous painting Miss Curran ever executed. It is not generally known, however, that the work was unfinished, and the artist herself felt that it was a very bad likeness indeed. It remained stacked in her studio until 1822, awaiting an opportunity for alteration and completion. When Mary sent for it in July 1822, Miss Curran replied: ‘The [portrait] you now write for I thought was not to be enquired for; it was so ill done, and I was on the point of burning it with others before I left Italy. I luckily saved it just as the fire was scorching it, and it is packed it up with my other pictures at Rome . . . .’9[2]

  The month of May in Rome not only marked Shelley’s escape from the society of the Corso but also an artistic shift of address. It was now Renaissance and not ancient Classical Rome which held Shelley’s attention. There are almost no records of walks in the Capitol and Forum, but several visits to the great palazzos. At the end of April Shelley had first seen the portrait of Beatrice Cenci, and in May he returned to the seed idea which he had found in the Cenci manuscript at Livorno. On the 11th he spent the afternoon visiting the grim buildings of the Palazzo Cenci down by the Tiber Island, with its iron-fenced windows and its small dim courtyard. The building is sinister in a retiring rather than an imposing way: it is hidden at the centre of a labyrinth of old blackened houses and dark alleys, which crowd tightly round it so that it is impossible to get a clear view of the shape and size of the whole. One always ends up under the shadow of one of its walls. It worked quickly on Shelley’s imagination, and on the 14th Mary noted that he was already drafting ‘his Tragedy’. He had found his popular subject. He would write a melodrama, specifically for the London stage, intending the actress Mademoiselle O’Neil to take the leading role of Beatrice Cenci at Covent Garden.

  It was an ambitious project for all its popular intention. It required gifts of stage plotting and dialogue that Shelley had not previously exercised, and of course he intended to write verse drama. The whole subject was under discussion in the Shelley household, and kindled considerable emotion. At first there was even some doubt who should write it. Mary recalled: ‘Shelley’s imagination became strongly excited, and he urged the subject to me as one fitted for a tragedy. More than ever I felt my incompetence; but I entreated him to write it instead . . . . This tragedy is the only one of his works that he communicated to me during its progress. We talked over the arrangement of the scenes together.’10 Claire was also reading the Cenci manuscript and on the evening of the 12th she, Shelley, Mary and Miss Curran had a discussion ‘concerning Jealousy’ at the studio at No. 64.

  On the following day Claire wrote the first letter to Byron after a long silence: ‘Did you ever read the history of the Cenci’s a most frightful & horrible story? I am sorely afraid to say that in the elder Cenci you may behold yourself in twenty years . . . but if I live Allegra shall never be a Beatrice.’ Since Count Cenci, besides being an atheist, a sodomite and a rapacious materialist, had also murdered his two eldest sons, and raped his eldest daughter Beatrice, this was fairly strong stuff from Claire. On reflection she crossed out the second sentence; but it was still legible.11

  The picture Claire gives of the Shelley household at Via Sestina in mid-May is fairly morbid. ‘Mr Bell, one of the first English surgeons has seen Shelley (who has been very ill) and he has ordered him to pass the summer at Naples & says if S has any consumptive symptoms left by the approach of next winter he must pass the cold season at Tunis . . . . And if Shelley were to die there is nothing left for us but dying.’12 That Claire was orchestrating things somewhat for Byron’s benefit, is indicated by the fact that two days earlier she had been with Shelley and Aemilia Curran on a day’s expedition to Tivoli, and described it in her diary that evening as ‘one of the pleasantest [days] of my life and one as only Italy can give’.13 None the less, the plan to go further south, to North Africa or even the Near East, remained at the back of Shelley’s mind throughout his time in Italy, as one further place of retreat. In 1821 he was to talk seriously to Claire about it; though not to Mary.

  The decision to return to Naples depended on Shelley’s health and the news of Elena. Mary clearly wished to go north to rejoin the Gisbornes in Tuscany, and except for Shelley’s consumptive symptoms, one has the strong impression that she wanted no more to do with Naples. Shelley made her write to the Gisbornes, begging them to come south too for the summer, as a kind of compromise; he had also written himself, promising ‘a piano & some books, & little else, — besides ourselves: but . . . it is intolerable to think of you being buried in Livorno’.14 The Gisbornes in the end declined, and nothing remained but to see what June would bring. Meanwhile Shelley continued working sporadically at The Cenci, while Mary read Boccaccio’s Decameron, and Claire flicked rapidly through Dante’s Purgatorio, keeping an eye out for suitable locations for herself and Byron.15

  What was it that attracted Shelley so persistently to the theme of The Cenci? Partly it was a reaction to the prolonged work on the Promethean theme: it was a complete change of scale and style. From cosmic drama, with its intricate meshing of symbolic levels, he turned to domestic melodrama, with a bold simple plot of outrage and revenge, and a language almost entirely bare of all imagery. He later wrote: ‘I have avoided with great care in writing this play the introduction of what is commonly called mere poetry, and I imagine there will scarcely be found a detached simile or a single isolated description . . . .’16 In many respects he had written ‘carelessly’, that is ‘without an over-fastidious and learned use of words’. Artistically, this was a relief. But above all the Cencis’ history offered him a subject which he knew already had a lurid popularity among the expatriate English: indeed there is some evidence that he wrote partly under the fear that someone else would take the idea back to London before he did. But few other writers would have felt confident enough of their powers, or careless enough of their reputation, to try and put a story of incest and parricide on the London stage under their own name. The experience with Laon and Cynthia had already taught Shelley that incest was a profoundly controversial and sensitive subject with the London public, and one can certainly trace in its choice an impulse that goes back to the Oxford days of The Necessity of Atheism. It is interesting that Shelley did not make Count Cenci an atheist too, though there is authority for it in the manuscript. Instead he makes him a fervent Catholic, as Shelley put it, ‘deeply tinged with religion’. This was, in the end, a more subtle and provocative choice than atheism, and much more to Shelley’s avowedly shocking purpose. His comments on religion in the preface to the play are suggestive; and show his shrewd penetration into the daily life of Rome:

  To a Protestant apprehension there will appear something unnatural in the earnest and perpetual sentiment of the relations between God and men which pervade the tragedy of the Cenci. It will especially be startled at the combination of an undoubting persuasion of the truth of the popular religion with a cool and determined perseverance in enormous guilt. But religion in Italy is not, as in Protestant countries, a cloak to be worn on particular days; or a passport which those who do not wish to be railed at carry with them to exhibit; or a gloomy passion for penetrating the impenetrable mysteri
es of our being, which terrifies its possessor at the darkness of the abyss to the brink of which it has conducted him . . . . It has no necessary connection with any one virtue. The most atrocious villain may be rigidly devout, and without any shock to established faith, confess himself to be so. Religion pervades intensely the whole frame of society, and is according to the temper of the mind which it inhabits, a passion, a persuasion, an excuse, a refuge; never a check. Cenci himself built a chapel in the court of his Palace, and dedicated it to St Thomas the Apostle, and established masses for the peace of his soul.17

  The personal horror with which Shelley clearly reacted to this ‘culture of hypocrisy’ shows his own deeply puritan root. Moreover, his description of the ‘passion for penetrating into the mysteries of our being’, as a religious impulse (a Protestant one), is perhaps one of the few times he formally admitted the religious element in his own nature. Such powerful and lurid ingredients strongly attracted Shelley to the evil tale of Renaissance family brutality.

  The two living Roman monuments to the Cenci story — the palazzo and the picture of Beatrice — were also attracting him at a different and probably less conscious level. The Cenci Palace itself filled his mind with a disturbing symbolic force. He wrote later of it as if it had been one of the specimens in his dream catalogue. ‘The Palace is situated in an obscure corner of Rome, near the quarter of the Jews, and from the upper windows you see the immense ruins of Mount Palatine half hidden under their profuse overgrowth of trees. There is a court in one part of the Palace (perhaps that in which Cenci built the Chapel to St Thomas), supported by granite columns and adorned with antique friezes of fine workmanship, and built up, according to the ancient Italian fashion, with balcony over balcony of open-work. One of the gates of the Palace formed of immense stones and leading through a passage, dark and lofty and opening into gloomy subterranean chambers, struck me particularly.’18 The palace was for him like the gateway into an underground Inferno, a metaphysical rather than physical one, a hell of the mind.