Shelley: The Pursuit

by Richard Holmes

  The box also contained, besides the works of Scott, which were handed over to Mary, the first copy of Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey. The book was passed eagerly round from hand to hand, even to the Gisbornes, and they all thought back to the summer at Marlow in 1817. It seemed long ago. Shelley wrote his serious and complimentary appreciation to Peacock: ‘I suppose the moral is contained in what Falstaff says: “For God’s sake talk like a man of the world.’” He had no resentment, so much else had happened since the garden days at Marlow.12

  Later he told Peacock: ‘I have a study here in a tower something like Scythrop’s — where I am just beginning to recover the faculties of reading and writing. My health, whenever no Libecchio blows, improves. — From my tower I see the sea with its islands, Gorgona, Capria, Elba & Corsica on one side, & the Apennines on the other.’13

  Things were made more difficult at this time by the unreliability of the post from England. Shelley had received no news from Peacock since March, and he knew that at least three letters had gone astray at Naples. He wondered if Peacock had married, and inquired after Marianne St Croix. From Hogg he learned later in the month that Peacock had not married, but had found himself an excellent position in India House. Hogg noted with the old Oxford inflection: ‘He is well pleased with his change of fortune, and has taken a house in Stamford Street, which, as you might expect from a Republican, he has furnished very handsomely.’14 In subsequent letters Shelley inquired assiduously after the development of both Peacock’s and Hogg’s professional careers. ‘The race indeed,’ he remarked wistfully, ‘is not to the swift.’15

  Throughout July Shelley continued to work regularly at The Cenci in the glazing solitude of his tower each morning. In the scenes where Orsino attempts to persuade Giacomo — Beatrice’s brother — to the murder of his father Count Cenci, the psychoanalytic theme, the obsessive examination of conscience, becomes more and more explicitly stated: Orsino mutters in a stage monologue:

  … ’tis a trick of this same family

  To analyse their own and other minds.

  Such self-anatomy shall teach the will

  Dangerous secrets: for it tempts our powers,

  Knowing what must be thought, and may be done,

  Into the depth of darkest purposes:

  So Cenci fell into the pit. . . .16

  By Act V, Giacomo has realized, though too late, Orsino’s role of infernal analyst and tempter, and rounds furiously though vainly on him:

  O, had I never

  Found in thy smooth and ready countenance

  The mirror of my darkest thoughts; hadst thou

  Never with hints and questions made me look

  Upon the monster of my thought, until

  It grew familiar to desire…17

  Shelley also incorporated into Orsino’s monologues autobiographic material he had originally written without dramatic intention at Marlow in 1817. The finest extensions of Beatrice’s character, and the most immediate pieces of dramatic verse, again lie in the moments of intense self-analysis, accompanied as always by very deep fear. When questioned obliquely by her mother about the insanity which her father’s act of rape had produced in her, and which in turn eventually produces the Count’s murder, Beatrice answers:

  What are the words which you would have me speak?

  I, who can feign no image in my mind

  Of that which has transformed me: I, whose thought

  Is like a ghost shrouded and folded up

  In its own formless horror: of all words,

  That minister to mortal intercourse,

  Which wouldst thou hear?18

  Beatrice’s character changes and hardens throughout the play, so that by the trial scene, although she has reached heroic stature, she also has a cold cruelty of purpose which is in its own way as vicious as her father’s. This gives the play both its dramatic balance and irony, and equally, its failure to contain the least human warmth or moral richness. There is no figure with whom one can easily empathize. Beatrice is as much villain as heroine, and as Shelley noted, ‘It is in the restless and anatomizing casuistry with which men seek the justification of Beatrice…that the dramatic character of what she did and suffered, consists.’19 The whole drama is comfortless and pitiless and cold.

  In Act V, after Beatrice has finally been condemned to death for Cenci’s murder, her habitual coolness and singlemindedness breaks down for a few moments, and she delivers perhaps the most celebrated speech of the play, ‘Can it be possible I have To die so suddenly? So young to go Under the obscure, cold rotting, wormy ground!’ The opening of this speech is almost entirely vitiated by its unconscious but massive plagiarism of Claudio’s speech in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure: ‘Aye, but to die, and go we know not where, To lie in cold obstruction and to rot.’20

  But after some eight lines it moves out of the Shakespearian orbit, and presents a perceptive glimpse into Beatrice’s identification between the God of her religion and the father of her family. The acuteness of this perception, and the relevance of it to Shelley’s examination of his own beliefs as a continuing atheist do not need emphasizing:

  If there should be

  No God, no Heaven, no Earth in the void world;

  The wide, gray, lampless, deep, unpeopled world!

  If all things then should be…my father’s spirit,

  His eye, his voice, his touch surrounding me;

  The atmosphere and breath of my dead life!

  If sometimes, as a shape more like himself,

  Even the form which tortured me on earth,

  Masked in gray hairs and wrinkles, he should come

  And wind me in his hellish arms, and fix

  His eyes on mine, and drag me down, down, down!21

  Yet here, and at other emotional heights, the coarse melodrama of Shelley’s stage writing is painfully evident, and from a literary point of view The Cenci remains almost entirely a pastiche of Shakespearian and Jacobean drama. After the tremendous advances of ‘Julian and Maddalo’ and Prometheus, it marks a sharp decline of imaginative power. For the time being, his emotions were exhausted and the drama served him largely as a vehicle for private documentation and mental relief. It is curious that Mary Shelley’s later opinion was that Act V of The Cenci is ‘the finest thing he ever wrote’.22

  The final draft of The Cenci was finished on 8 August. A popular success had been very much in the front of Shelley’s mind all the time he wrote, and perhaps for this reason he seemed extraordinarily unaware of the real nature and quality of the work he had produced. At the end of July he had even taken the precaution of alerting Peacock, sending a copy of the Italian manuscript, and secretly revealing his ambitions for Covent Garden, Miss O’Neil and Edmund Kean. He described his copy of the Reni portrait, but ostentatiously drew back from connecting himself with an actual performance of the play. He wanted it to be anonymous, or else his name would drag it down into disrepute, and anyway, ‘God forbid that I shd. see [Miss O’Neil] play it — it would tear my nerves to pieces.’23 At the beginning of August Shelley began to write to his publisher Charles Ollier after a silence of many months, and no less than four letters were dispatched from Livorno in rapid succession. His tone was now changed, and he spoke of interesting manuscripts without sending them: ‘I have more poetry if you like, but you shall have it not without asking.’24 With the three acts of Prometheus Unbound, the five acts of The Cenci and ‘Julian and Maddalo’, on his desk, he felt justifiably confident. As far as Ollier remaining his publisher was concerned, he wrote, ‘I have no inclination to change unless you wish it, as your neglect might give me reason to suppose.’25

  As a second line of attack, he sent the manuscript of ‘Julian and Maddalo’ to Hunt on 15 August, asking him to give it to Ollier for publication ‘but without my Name’.26

  While Shelley busied himself with his campaign for a popular readership in England, Mary struggled towards the surface of her depression. It was a slow process. On 4 August, Shelley’s t
wenty-seventh birthday, she began her journal again largely to please him. It commenced: ‘LEGHORN — I begin my Journal on Shelley’s birthday. We have now lived five years together; and if all the events of the five years were blotted out, I might be happy; but to have won, and then cruelly to have lost, the associations of four years, is not an accident to which the human mind can bend without much suffering.’27 The wish that all the years of her life with Shelley were blotted out marked the extreme point of Mary’s crisis. From the moment when she accepted the reality of this feeling, she began very gradually to rebuild her life in Italy once again.

  Throughout August she noted ‘write’ in her journal, and this almost certainly refers to her intensely private and self-exploratory novel Mathilda which served as a therapeutic instrument for her. In this, it was not unlike The Cenci.28 By August, she was some six months pregnant, and the palpable presence of this new life steadily became the focus of new hopes and new confidence. For Shelley the new child helped to restore a more understanding and sympathetic relationship with Mary, and the symbolic hope of the new birth entered into his poetry of the autumn.

  But the improvement seemed agonizingly slow. It was not helped by Godwin, who wrote to Mary with little sympathy for her loss, and even less appreciation of her state, urging his own need for further money, and abusing Shelley for not supplying it. He had detected something of Mary’s own bitterness towards Shelley, and tried, quite literally, to capitalize on it. Shelley intercepted his letters, and wrote angrily to Hunt: ‘. . . I cannot expose her to Godwin in this state…[the letter] received yesterday, and addressed to her, called her husband (me) “a disgraceful and flagrant person” tried to persuade her that I was under great engagements to give him more money (after having given him £4,700), and urged her if she ever wished a connection to continue between him and her to force me to get money for him. . . .I have not yet shewn her the letter — but I must. I doubt whether I ought not to expose this solemn lie; for such, and not a man, is Godwin. . . . I have bought bitter knowledge with £4,700. I wish it were all yours now!’ Later, when Godwin was threatened with the loss of his house because of unpaid bills, Shelley decided to suppress all his letters to Mary.29 When he wrote to Aemilia Curran to inquire about a small pyramidical stone monument for the little grave in Rome, Shelley explained: ‘Mary’s spirits still continue wretchedly depressed — more so than a stranger (tho’ perhaps I should not call you so) could imagine.’ He could not forbear, however, to brighten the picture with news of The Cenci — ‘which Mary likes’ — and detailed inquiries about having an engraving made of the Reni portrait to go on the frontispiece of the popular edition with which he intended to take London by storm.

  At Livorno, the main sources of activity remained Claire and the Gisbornes. Claire had embarked on a vigorous series of music and singing lessons, taken three times a week with the best music-master in the city. One of the earliest signs of Mary’s recovery were her complaints about the expense — 4 crowns a month — as against three shillings a lesson in Rome. Shelley thought it well spent. Claire had also continued her teasing friendship with the Gisbornes’ 30-year-old son, the well-behaved engineer Henry Reveley. They were joined on 4 September by Charles Clairmont, who suddenly arrived after fifteen months of study in Spain to see his sister and the Shelleys. He rapidly adapted himself to the Shelley household, and contrived to aid Claire in her campaign to make poor Henry rather less well behaved. By the end of September Claire had a proposal of marriage from Henry; but the Gisbornes apparently thought it unsuitable, and anyway Claire turned him down.30 Shelley took a paternal interest in Reveley, despite the fact that he was three years his senior. He listened to Henry’s dream of designing and manufacturing a prototype oceangoing steamboat, to run a service between Livorno, Genoa and Marseilles and became convinced of Henry’s talents as an engineer. He announced that he would back the project financially, and by the end of October Henry’s dream had turned into the reality of a signed contract with local boat-builders, a workshop full of models for casting and forging, and a negotiated loan for ship’s timber.31 The Gisbornes, who agreed to share in the financing, regarded this project as more satisfactory than the marital one.

  Although Shelley was sometimes inclined to compare Maria in her earnest culture and sensibility to Mrs Boinville, he was kindly disposed towards the Gisbornes as a family, and they were kind to him in return. Yet Shelley felt he could indulge himself a little at their expense. To Peacock, he wrote as if they might have passed untransformed into the pages of Nightmare Abbey. ‘Mrs Gisborne is a sufficiently amiable & very accomplished woman she is ) & — how far she may be I don’t know for she is the antipodes of enthusiasm. Her husband a man with little thin lips receding forehead & a prodigious nose is an excessive bore. His nose is something quite Slawkenburgian — it weighs on the imagination to look at it, — it is that sort of nose which transforms all the gs its wearer utters into ks. It is a nose once seen never to be forgotten and which requires the utmost stretch of Christian charity to forgive. I, you know, have a little turn up nose; Hogg has a large hook one but add them both together, square them, cube them, you would have but a faint idea of the nose to which I refer.’32 The Gisbornes also had a large, amiable dog called Oscar which doted on Mary.33

  A real portrait which gave Shelley much pleasure at this time, was a long-requested one of Leigh Hunt. This finally arrived from London in the third week of August.34 The thought of Hunt and his family, and the great support they had been to him in the crisis of the winter of 1816, helped Shelley considerably during the solitary hours in the tower at Villa Valsovano. Shortly after receiving the picture, Shelley propped it in front of his desk and wrote the letter which dedicated The Cenci to Hunt. He concluded it on a heroic note:

  In that patient and irreconcilable enmity with domestic and political tyranny and imposture, which the tenor of your life has illustrated, and which, had I the health and talents, should illustrate mine, let us, comforting each other in our task, live and die.35

  He dated it from Rome, where the play had first been conceived and drafted. Hunt did not read this generous dedication until an edition of 250 copies had been printed in Leghorn during October and shipped in unbound sheets to Peacock at Stamford Street in London.36

  Together with Hunt’s picture, more books, reviews and the first of a steady stream of Examiners had arrived in August. Shelley took these up to his Scythrop’s tower, and many days at the end of August were spent catching up on English political and literary news, and musing on the loneliness of his self-imposed Italian banishment. In a letter to Peacock of the 24th, he launched into a long fantasy about living again in England. ‘I most devoutly wish that I were living near London. — I don’t think I shall settle so far off as Richmond, & to inhabit any intermediate spot on the Thames would be to expose myself to the river damps, not to mention that it is not much to my taste — My inclinations point to Hampstead, but I dont know. . . .’

  Here Shelley appeared to break off the letter, and walk round his glass tower, looking westwards over the bay, and northwards across the maremma between Livorno and Pisa to the distant Apennines. For a moment it all seemed unreal to him, as if he was only half-awake and dreaming. He picked up his pen again and wrote rapidly: ‘All that I see in Italy — and from my tower window I now see the magnificent peaks of the Apennine half enclosing the plain — is nothing — it dwindles to smoke in the mind, when I think of some familiar forms of scenery little perhaps in themselves over which old remembrances have thrown a delightful colour. How we prize what we despised when present! So the ghosts of our dead associations rise & haunt us in revenge for our having let them starve, & abandoned them to perish.’37 Peacock would know how literally this was to be interpreted. The mood hung on in Shelley’s mind, and deepened in September as the summer sun blazed on and on, and life seemed to move more and more slowly, and only the nights were cool.

  22. The West Wind: Florence 1819

  Up in the glas
s tower, Shelley leafed through the reviews and journals that the Gisbornes took from Paris. The impression he had already gained from Hunt’s Examiner pieces about the state of English politics was strengthened. A crisis comparable to, or even greater than, those of 1812 and 1817 seemed to be in the making, though it was difficult to be sure. ‘England seems to be in a very disturbed state, if we may judge by some Paris Papers,’ he mused to Peacock. ‘I suspect it is rather overrated, but when I hear them talk of paying in gold — nay I dare say take steps towards it, confess that the sinking fund is a fraud &c. I no longer wonder.’ He reverted briefly to the old Whig-liberal sententiae: ‘But the change should commence among the higher orders, or anarchy will only be the last flash before despotism. I wonder & tremble.’ Yet no political change Shelley could foresee at that moment could ever touch Peacock in the East India Company: ‘You are well sheltered.’1

  The mood of permanent summer siesta, and the long solitary mornings spent reading and musing, were suddenly broken by dramatic news from England. Peacock had especially posted a set of English papers by the coach mail from London which only took two weeks. These arrived on 5 September, and almost entirely swamped the appearance of a long-awaited box from Ollier, containing a first edition of Rosalind and Helen, and Keats’s Endymion, the same day.

  The news from England concerned politics: on 16 August at St Peter’s Field, on the outskirts of Manchester, a public meeting of some 60,000 working men and women had been brutally attacked and dispersed by mounted militiamen. The result had been a massacre of unarmed civilians which went down in history as Peterloo. It looked like the beginning of the English Revolution.

  There was not much Whig-liberalism in Shelley’s immediate reaction to Ollier on the 6th: ‘The same day that your letter came, came news of the Manchester work, & the torrent of my indignation has not yet done boiling in my veins. I await anxiously to hear how the Country will express its sense of this bloody murderous oppression of its destroyers. “Something must be done . . . What yet I know not.”’2 In his fury, he had quoted from his own Cenci, where Beatrice first conceives the assassination of her father. The passage continues: ‘. . . something which shall make The thing that I have suffered but a shadow In the dread lightning which avenges it; Brief, rapid, irreversible, destroying The consequence of what it cannot cure.’3