Throughout The Cenci as he finally completed it, there are passages of monologue — not only from Beatrice but also from Giacomo her brother, and Orsino a fellow-plotter — which describe in an intensely personal way the effects of evil actions on the mind. At several points one is aware that Shelley is writing dramatized autobiography. The motivations and the consequences of evil, in psychological and analytic terms, form the main theme of the drama. In this the play runs a direct parallel with the central scene of Prometheus, the confrontation between Asia and Demogorgon in Act II. In one, evil is examined at a domestic level, in the other, at a cosmic one. In contrast the Count himself, the only completely evil figure in the play, is psychologically insignificant, and has many of the grosser attributes of a pantomime demon. Shelley wrote that the events of the play in ‘all conspiring to one tremendous end’, would be ‘as a light to make apparent some of the most dark and secret caverns of the human heart’. It was an idea that seemed to haunt him.
The other Roman memorial, the portrait of Beatrice Cenci, also had a peculiar attraction. Shelley not only visited it at the Colonna Palace but had his own copy which he kept on the wall of his room at Via Sestina, and was delighted when the Italian servants instantly recognized it as La Cenci.19 It is by Guido Reni, said to be painted while she was actually in prison awaiting trial; it was subsequently moved to the Barberini Palace, and finally to the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica. From the way Shelley described this portrait, it is obvious that not only was he deeply moved by it but also that he strongly empathized with her personality:
There is a fixed and pale composure upon the features . . . . Her head is bound with folds of white drapery from which the yellow strings of her golden hair escape, and fall about her neck. The moulding of her face is exquisitely delicate; the eyebrows are distinct and arched; the lips have that permanent meaning of imagination and sensibility which suffering has not repressed . . . . Her forehead is large and clear; her eyes, which we are told were remarkable for their vivacity, are swollen with weeping and lustreless, but beautifully tender and serene . . . . Beatrice Cenci appears to have been one of those rare persons in whom energy and gentleness dwell together without destroying one another . . . .20
But the most remarkable thing about the Reni portrait is something Shelley did not mention, and we have no hint if he ever consciously realized it; or if anyone else in the household did. But it is immediately apparent to an outside observer that there is a most striking resemblance between the Reni portrait of La Cenci and the Curran portrait of Shelley.
Both are oddly androgynous creations, whose glance is a mixture of defiance and pathos; the broad, pale forehead; the delicately arched brows; the large almond-shaped eyes; and finally the long faintly aquiline nose — these upper features are so markedly similar that it seems almost certain that Aemilia Curran was influenced by the Reni, even if she was not aware of the common elements between the two subjects.[3] As Shelley developed his drama so too did he develop his identification with Beatrice, and Miss Curran seems to have discovered this in a strangely unconscious way in her painting.
The identity between male and female, or at least the transposable or interchangeable elements between the two sexes had long been an under-theme of Shelley’s writing. The masculine role frequently assigned to his heroines like Cythna or Asia, and the passivity of his male lovers like the poet of Alastor, is one of the constant and original features of his poetry. With his work on The Cenci, Shelley showed signs of developing this feature further into the realization and acceptance of certain elements in his own personality and temperament. Again, the importance of the play lies in its character as a psychological documentary. In later poems, especially ‘The Witch of Atlas’ and Epipsychidion, he was to pursue questions of bisexuality and androgynous creative powers with more deliberation.
Shelley worked on The Cenci quietly for a week at Via Sestina, and on 23 May, went by himself on a visit to Albano. Mary continued with her Boccaccio, and Claire eagerly consumed a copy of The Infernal Quixote, a novel about a young woman corrupted by Mary Wollstonecraft’s principles.21 Three days after Shelley’s return, little William fell ill with a stomach complaint which quickly threatened to make him dangerously feverish. He had perhaps caught some germ from Aemilia Curran who had been painting his portrait the previous week, and had then fallen ill for several days.22 Dr Bell called on the 27th, and his diagnosis was encouraging, for Shelley took Claire out for a social evening at the Academy of Music in the Piazza di Spagna. By the 29th Willmouse appeared to be better and Shelley dated his completion of the first draft of The Cenci on this day.23 Mary used their temporary fright to persuade Shelley not to go southwards again to Naples, where it would be too hot during the summer for the little boy. Instead she successfully urged the mountain cool of the Bagni di Lucca, which was within riding distance of the Gisbornes as she had originally wanted. Another argument was the fact that Bell, for whom they had now developed a great trust and personal liking, was himself going north during the summer to attend a valued patient, the Princess Paulina Borghese. Mary told Shelley that she wanted Dr Bell to be present at the birth of her next child, for she had recently disclosed that she had become pregnant in February. All this news Mary wrote with some semblance of her former enthusiasm to Mrs Gisborne, adding detailed requests about cooks and houseservants. She even looked forward to doing a little entertaining.24
But on 2 June, only five days before their planned departure from Rome, William had a serious relapse. On the 4th he started serious convulsions, as little Clara had done the previous year at Venice. Dr Bell was in constant attendance, and Shelley exhausted himself by sitting up in the room for three consecutive days and nights.25 He was determined not to let this child die, his 4-year-old son, the most precious child of his life. Claire wrote a brief note to the Gisbornes on the 5th. Two days later, at midday, Willmouse died, silently, without fuss. He was buried at once in the Protestant Cemetery.
On 10 June the Shelleys left Rome. They drove slowly northwards, and arrived in Livorno seven days later. Mary gave up writing her journal. Shelley wrote numbly to Peacock: ‘You will be kind enough to tell all my friends . . . . It is a great exertion to me to write this, & it seems to me as if, hunted by calamity as I have been, that I should never recover any cheerfulness again.’26 Claire noted without comment their arrival at the Aquila Nera Inn at Livorno, and a visit to the Gisbornes. She refers to a small country house Shelley took on the outskirts of Livorno in the third week of June, the Villa Valsovano near the village of Monte Nero some 3 kilometres to the south of the port. Then her diary too breaks off. Mary did not begin her journal again till August 1819; and Claire’s diary does not recommence until January of 1820. The Roman spring had deceived them; they were almost crushed by life.
[1]Prometheus Unbound did not reach England until the end of 1819, and was not published until the summer of 1820. It was then printed as the title poem to a collection of Shelley’s Italian poetry. It was reviewed steadily from June 1820 until the end of 1821. Despite the fact that the reviews were mixed — the Quarterly crucified it, Blackwood’s praised and generously defended it — the book did not sell. Public opinion was against Shelley’s work in London, and the book was regarded as disreputable rather than daring. It is not certain how much money Ollier lost on the edition, but the jibe went that Prometheus was unbound because the publisher could not afford to bind it up. This was undoubtedly the greatest of Shelley collections printed during his lifetime.
[2]Perhaps it was not so lucky. The present painting in the National Portrait Gallery shows no sign of scorching, which suggests that Miss Curran touched it up after hearing of Shelley’s death. The ‘official’ portrait is both wooden and querulous, and the mouth and neck are sentimentally finished. It is interesting to compare the style with the buxom life and energy in Miss Curran’s painting of Claire.
[3]In September 1819 Shelley commissioned Miss Curran to execute a copy of the Reni portrait, to
be used in England as the frontispiece to the first edition of The Cenci (1820).
21. The Hothouse: Livorno 1819
The summer of 1819 at Monte Nero was a time of great unhappiness in Shelley’s household. The bustling ménage that had left Dover in 1818 was now grimly depleted. The sense of childlessness affected all three of them: Claire had lost her darling Allegra at Milan; Clara had died at Venice; Shelley’s little Elena had been left behind at Naples; and now finally their favourite, their only son, Willmouse was buried at Rome. The household seemed to be infected, it was a ruin, a graveyard.
Shelley, as ever, fought strongly against the crisis of feeling. Though he wrote miserably to Peacock at the end of the month about the heavy weight of ‘misfortune added to exile, & solitude’, and spoke secretly of his desperate longing to return to England he soon drew a line with a curt ‘Enough of melancholy’, and would talk only of books and politics.1 Claire busied herself with looking after Mary, for she too, like Shelley, always showed herself unexpectedly strong and stubborn in times of emergency. But it was Mary, who had just begun to recover during the spring from the depression of Naples, who was hardest hit. She had a total relapse of feeling, and plunged into an even greater mood of despair and isolation which was in effect a severe nervous breakdown. She wrote few letters during these months, and these as she wrote to Miss Curran were ‘stupid’. ‘I no sooner take up my pen than my thoughts run away with me & I cannot guide it except about one subject & that I must avoid.’2 And more succinctly: ‘I never shall recover that blow. . . . Everything on earth has lost its interest to me.’ To Marianne Hunt she showed perhaps unconsciously how she again blamed Shelley: ‘We came to Italy thinking to do Shelley’s health good — but the Climate is not any means warm enough to be of benefit to him & yet it is that that has destroyed my two children.’ This letter too was short: ‘if I would write anything else about myself it would only be a list of hours spent tears & grief [sic].’3
The following March, Claire explained to Byron how bad things had been.
‘Last May I had promised to go to Venice but Shelley could not do it. Our little boy died and we came to Livorno — here I was nearer [to you] but Mary was so melancholy and so sickly that I cannot imagine how she could have been left alone.’4 For Claire to have thrown away a chance of seeing Allegra, Mary must have been desperate indeed.
Shelley realized clearly enough what was happening to Mary, but he took a deliberate decision to remain beyond the radius of her misery, and to help her from the outside only. He decided that it was best to leave her to live out her own feelings and despair by herself. He continued his reading and writing through the summer, and took certain practical measures to establish his routine independently of hers. It was a harsh but characteristic commitment to his own craft. A fragment of a poem he wrote puts the matter simply:
My dearest Mary, wherefore hast thou gone,
And left me in this dreary world alone?
Thy form is here indeed — a lovely one —
But thou art fled, gone down the dreary road,
That leads to Sorrow’s most obscure abode;
Thou sittest on the hearth of pale despair,
Where
For thine own sake I cannot follow thee
Do thou return for mine.5
This poem Shelley wrote to her directly, like a letter; but Mary did not allow it to be published until the second edition of the Poetical Works of 1839. He also twice tried to write of William’s death itself, but the two poems came out stiffened and formalized by grief, and remain unfinished. One breaks off on the brink of the discovery of one of Shelley’s most celebrated elegiac phrases:
Let me think that through low seeds
Of sweet flowers and sunny grass
Into their hues and scents may pass
A portion — 6
It was only two years later, in Adonais that Shelley finally found the completion of that line of thought and verse.
The Villa Valsovano, where with the help of the Gisbornes the stunned household found themselves residing by the end of June, provided Shelley with the ideal place to embark on a period of recuperation. It was a spacious, simple stone building, dating back at least two centuries, part country villa and part farmhouse. It was within sight of the sea, but set in its own garden and olive plantation on rising ground which gave a magnificent view of the surrounding countryside. It was outside the bustle of Livorno, but close enough to the municipal walls to make the walk to the Gisbornes’ house an easy and pleasurable daily excursion.
Mary described it listlessly as ‘an airy house’, but judging by her letters she barely seems to have taken it in until the end of August. It was only then that she began to notice the charm of the deep green lane that led up to the villa gate, and the sleepy singing of the local peasants who worked in the surrounding fields. The furrowed rows contained a fascinating mixture of vines, cabbages, olives, fig and peach trees, corn and even apparently celery. It was a typical podère, a mixture of farm and kitchen garden, perfectly calculated, Mary thought, to appeal to Leigh Hunt. Mary spent much time sitting on one or other of the many stone arbour seats which were concealed round the garden, watching the peasants at work. It seemed to soothe her: ‘they work this hot weather in their shorts or smock frocks (but their breasts are bare) their brown legs nearly the colour only with a rich tinge of red in it with the earth they turn up. — They sing not very melodiously but very loud — Rossini’s music Mi revedrai, ti revedro, and they are accompanied by the cicada . . .’7
But for Shelley the great thing about the Villa Valsovano was its tower. It was really a kind of balcony placed on the roof. It was glassed in on all sides, and suspended Shelley in the blazing sunlight above the landscape of the farm and the blue curving line of the bay, as if he were encased in one of his solitary floating airships. The design is characteristic of the Livorno region, and can still be seen more or less elaborately incorporated into the modern buildings along the front. For Shelley it became his fortress of physical and intellectual light. He ascended into it, closing behind him the darkness and human misery below. Mary much later recalled: ‘Shelley made [this] his study; it looked out on a wide prospect of fertile country, and commanded a view of the near sea. The storms that sometimes varied our day showed themselves most picturesquely as they were driven across the ocean; sometimes the dark lurid clouds dipped towards the waves, and became water-spouts that churned up the waters beneath, as they were chased onward and scattered by the tempest. At other times the dazzling sunlight and heat made it almost intolerable to every other; but Shelley basked in both, and his health and spirits revived under their influence. In this airy cell he wrote the principal part of “The Cenci”.’8 It was now the second draft of his poem that Shelley was slowly labouring over. But sealed off in his cell, too hot for anyone else to stand the direct sunlight, he worked on alone.
Shelley forced himself to adopt a regular routine. He awoke usually at 7 in the morning, and lay reading in bed for half an hour; he then dressed and breakfasted alone. ‘After breakfast, ascend my tower, and read or write until two. Then we dine — after dinner I read Dante with Mary, gossip a little, eat grapes & figs, sometimes walk, though seldom; and at ½ past 5 pay a visit to Mrs Gisborne who reads Spanish with me until near seven. We then come for Mary & stroll about until suppertime.’9 Shelley, who could already read and translate Lucretius, Plato and Dante from the original, had decided that it was a good moment to turn to a fourth language in order to read the work of the great Spanish playwright Calderón. Maria Gisborne was also a great help to Shelley with Mary, and the suppers which rounded off the day were frequently eaten en partie. When Shelley did decide to walk out, it was either to visit the Gisbornes alone, or else to take Claire to the sea. He found Mary a difficult companion. Claire was the best, but she was sometimes moody and unreliable in the old manner, and as Shelley said, ‘sometimes does not dress in exactly the right time’. Claire had always had a weakness for slee
ping through not only breakfast but also dinner; however, when she did manage to come, she was Shelley’s closest company. Milly Shields, their English servant, also seems to have supplied Shelley with a mild diversion, when she took to star-gazing in the garden after dark. Shelley wrote: ‘Milly surprised us the other day by first discovering a comet, on which we have been speculating. “She may make a stir, like a great astronomer.”’10
Another instrument of Shelley’s recuperation was Peacock’s first box of books, which having been sent off by sea in November the previous year, had finally arrived at Livorno harbour. Shelley was especially interested by eight back numbers of Cobbett’s Political Register, and a copy of his lively democratic and agrarian sermon A Year’s Residence in the United States of America, about his period of exile in 1817. Cobbett had been chased out of England by the threat of a government prosecution for seditious or blasphemous libel, but was now back at work in the Home Counties. Shelley’s opinion of Cobbett was markedly changing, along with his whole approach to the mass democratic movement in England. ‘Cobbett still more and more delights me, with all my horror of the sanguinary commonplaces of his creed. His design to overthrow Bank notes by forgery is very comic.’11 Shelley could not have written these two sentences eighteen months previously.
Shelley: The Pursuit Page 78