Shelley: The Pursuit

by Richard Holmes

  Shelley continued to ask Ollier about the fate of The Cenci and Peter Bell the Third and ‘Julian and Maddalo’, but he seemed almost resigned to hearing nothing definite until the spring, perhaps guessing that much must have been rejected.27 Yet he continued to dwell on the political theme, and December saw the completion of the fourth and last act of Prometheus Unbound, written at noticeably low poetic pressure. It was perhaps difficult to compose a great operatic finale to Revolution and Victory when actual political conditions in England were in such a critical state of suspension. Mary transcribed the final act, and it was dispatched to Ollier around Christmas time.28

  The need to face up to a realistic appraisal of the English situation, decided Shelley to embark on a prose essay on the history of the growth of individual liberty and free institutions in society; and more especially on the methods of democratic reform immediately available in England. This work, one of the most intellectually demanding he ever embarked upon, was begun in mid-December and eventually finished in May 1820. It was entitled A Philosophical View of Reform.

  On the 15th Shelley alerted Ollier. ‘I am preparing an octavo on reform — a commonplace kind of book — which, now that I see the passion of party will postpone the great struggle till another year, I shall not trouble myself to finish for this season. I intend it to be an instructive and readable book, appealing from the passions to the reasons of men.’29 The pace of Shelley’s political hopes, and of his poetic production was slowing down simultaneously. The moderation into prose and ‘reason’ marks the clear end of the great creative burst of autumn 1819. Yet this tapped undercurrent of power and vision was to remain a permanent if hidden resource of Shelley’s imagination for the rest of his life. Like the great creative efforts of 1812 and 1817 — which were, equally, responses to political and social crises in society — the effort of 1819 pushed forward the range of Shelley’s literary powers. It established in his mind more mature conceptions both of the actions and sufferings of other men, and of his own. In artistic terms the greatest gains were in economy and intensity of style.

  At the end of the year he wrote a short letter to Hunt, which consciously marks the end of this period. He asked, without much hope of getting a real answer, why Hunt still wouldn’t write regular letters to them? Furthermore, when he did write, why wouldn’t he write about politics? And why, at least, wouldn’t he write about politics and the actual ‘State of the country’ in his own paper the Examiner? — for after the trial of Carlile in November, the Liberal press had fallen very quiet. ‘Every word a man has to say is valuable to the public now, and thus you will at once gratify your friend, nay instruct, and either exhilarate him or force him to be resigned, and awaken the minds of the people.’ His own writings he made as if to dismiss; ‘I have been a drone instead of a bee in this business, thinking that perhaps, as you did not acknowledge any of my late enclosures another would not be welcome to you.’ He felt resignation rather than resentment. At the end of the letter he concluded, without much conviction, ‘I suppose we shall soon have to fight in England. Affectionate love to and from all.’ In a postscript he included a sonnet, ‘England in 1819’, though he now had no illusions about its reception. ‘I do not expect you to publish it, but you may show it to whom you please.’30 The poem looks back over the crowded events of that autumn, and is one of the strongest, sparest pieces he ever wrote. The handling of the rhythms is particularly powerful. It is bitter and disenchanted, yet the ghost of hope still walks, as she did under the hooves of Anarchy.

  An old, mad, blind, despised and dying king;

  Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow

  Through public scorn, — mud from a muddy spring;

  Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know,

  But leech-like to their fainting country cling,

  Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow;

  A people starved and stabbed in the untilled field;

  An army, which liberticide and prey

  Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield;

  Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay;

  Religion, Christless, Godless — a book sealed;

  A Senate, — Time’s worst statute unrepealed;

  Are graves, from which a glorious Phantom may

  Burst to illumine our tempestuous day.31

  The stress in the penultimate line falls with deliberate intention on may; the Promethean future possibility which always remains open. Leigh Hunt of course did not publish this poem, though oddly enough a piece did appear over Shelley’s name in Hunt’s literary paper the Indicator in the last issue of the year. It was one of the little two-stanza love-songs written for Miss Sophia Stacey.

  What is all this sweet work worth

  If thou kiss not me?32

  So the year 1819 ended.

  [1]The sculpture is now catalogued as No. 188, Venere di Bagni, and stands in the south gallery of the Uffizi overlooking the Arno. See plate 26.

  24. The Reformer: Pisa 1820

  The cold of January 1820, and the departure of their young English friends from Florence drew the Shelley household in upon itself at Palazzo Marini. Shelley developed a rheumatic pain in his side, which was solicitously reported by Mary to Mrs Gisborne: his plans for a new year excursion to Livorno had to be cancelled. Instead Shelley stayed in and read aloud to Mary: Sophocles, and the New Testament — each Evangelist in turn. It was probably these days which saw the drafts of his unfinished ‘Essay on Christianity’, a sketch of Jesus Christ as an enemy of institutionalized religion and the Old Law, and as one of the first of the great social reformers. Reflecting on what he saw as Christ’s compromises with the old society, and his calculated adaptation of his message to the understanding of simple people, Shelley recalled his own experiences during the previous months and concluded: ‘All reformers have been compelled to practise this misrepresentation of their own true feelings and opinions.’1

  Claire began her diary again, and she recorded a busy social life with the other English residents in the house, notably the families of the Hardings and the Meadows. Her lessons with the gentle Pelleschi continued, but when she went out to the galleries it was usually with the Meadows or the du Plantis daughters, Zoïde and Louisa. Shelley did not go any more. On the 12th, she noted without comment Allegra’s third birthday. She had already heard that Byron had moved from Venice to Ravenna with his new mistress, Countess Teresa Guiccioli.

  There were heavy falls of snow on the 13th and 14th and Florence lay under whiteness. Claire led Zoïde, Louisa and the Harding children out into the garden to throw snowballs during a spell of sunshine, but again Shelley did not join them. Instead he remained in doors, reading The Tempest with Mary. Pelleschi said it was the hardest winter in Florence for seventy years.2

  Claire’s own reading, when she found time for it, still showed Shelley’s guiding presence. While studying social life in classical Greece, she noted the superior freedom of Graecian women compared with Roman ones. She entered thoughtfully: ‘Pythagoras says when you sacrifice to the celestial gods let it be with an odd number, & when to the terrestial — with an even — “for the odd number is most perfect because it cannot be divided into two equal parts as the even number may which is therefore the symbol of division” — let this rule be applied to marriage and we shall find the cause of its unhappy querulous state.’3 On such a view, a ménage à trois formed the smallest stable social unit. Claire may have hoped this issue was reasonably settled for the time being in her life with Shelley and Mary. But in fact the old trouble of absentia Clariae was to raise itself again in an unexpected and threatening fashion during the coming spring. There was little to indicate this, except that Claire noted for 23 January: ‘Elise calls. Take a short walk.’4 There was no equivalent entry in Mary’s journal; only, the following day: ‘Walk with Shelley’ — which implied private discussion.

  Throughout January, Mary and Shelley had been debating in which direction they should turn t
heir steps during the new year. The cold had made impossible any immediate move after Christmas, and the idea of Shelley’s secret visit to London had been made impracticable by the pains in his side. Rome seemed too distant, and anyway its unhealthy climate and unhappy associations made it unthinkable for Mary. There remained therefore Tuscany, where they had already established close friends: the Gisbornes at Livorno and perhaps too the Masons at Pisa. The Gisbornes obviously wished them to return to the Villa Valsovano, and Reveley would have liked his patron on the spot during the boat-building. Yet various factors pointed to Pisa: it was an ancient Italian university city, rather than a commercial centre like Livorno; it was much less of an expatriate English colony than ‘Leghorn’; and it was strategically placed on the main coaching route between Florence and Livorno, allowing relatively rapid journeys in either direction or northwards through the Apennines to Bagni di Lucca. Pisa also had the great attraction for Shelley of being built along a curve of the river Arno, which was eminently navigable for small boats from this point. A further consideration was the fact that the most distinguished Italian doctor and surgeon in the region, Andrea Vaccà, was resident at Pisa, where he held a professorship at the university. Vaccà had studied at Paris and London, and was renowned as a distinguished writer on medical topics and a man of broad European culture.

  Over Christmas, several letters from Shelley’s old boyhood friend and cousin Tom Medwin had reached Florence from Geneva, and in mid-January, Shelley wrote, Inviting him to join them: ‘we are fixed for the ensuing year in Tuscany’. Shelley wrote as one who no longer thought of returning to England, and had given himself up to the delights of Italy. ‘You used, I remember, to paint very well; & you were remarkable, if I do not mistake, for a peculiar taste in, & knowledge of the belle arti — Italy is the place for you — the very place — The Paradise of exiles — the retreat of Pariahs — but I am thinking of myself rather than of you.’ Of his own writing, he said little, though he still set it clearly in a political context: ‘I have enough of unrebuked hope remaining to be struck with horror at the proceedings in England. . . . These are not times in which one has much spirit for writing Poetry; although there is a keen air in them that sharpens the wits of men and makes them imagine vividly even in the midst of despondence.’5 This was precisely what he had achieved at Florence.

  Now in the last fortnight of January, a sudden thaw set in, and from the 23rd Florence was bathed in long hours of mild spring sunshine. After two days, Shelley promptly decided to move to Pisa without further delay. He did not even bother to inquire about lodgings ahead, but ordered the girls to pack, and walking down to the Arno booked a passage by river to Empoli on the 26th. They started at 8 in the morning, and the Meadows and Zoïde du Plantis came to wave them off at the quay in the thin morning sunlight. A stiff, piercing east wind blew down the river, and though it froze them through, it had the effect of whisking them the thirty-odd miles to Empoli in five hours.6 At just after 5 o’clock the same evening, they crossed by coach over the main bridge into Pisa, and put up at the first inn on the left of the Lung’ Arno Regio, the Albergo delle Tre Donzelle.

  The Tre Donzelle stands on the north side of the Arno, at the edge of the little piazza where the Ponte Mezzo deposits the main coach road from Florence and Empoli. Like many other of the riverside buildings, it presents a bleached façade of mellow orange stone standing three stories high, its windows shuttered and its roof covered in large curved tiles. From its windows the Shelleys could see the Arno bending away in a long bow shape to left and right, the banks clustered by an unbroken line of elegant buildings and palaces, many of them with marble frontages and balconies, intricately mullioned windows, and finely ornamented coping stones of terracotta. Several of the palaces dated from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, among them the Palazzo Medici, the Palazzo Toscanelli and the Palazzo Reale. This curving vista of stone, duplicated in muted yellows and oranges in the curve of the river, presented an aspect that was serene and aristocratic, with a simplicity of line recalling classical rather than Renaissance Rome.

  It pleased Shelley very much. Yet for all its aristocratic graces, the city was faded. Originally a flourishing marine centre, Pisa had slowly been enclosed by the maremma, in much the same way as Rye in England had been enclosed by marshes. Its eminence and its population had steadily declined since the seventeenth century. The stonework of the façades was cracked and crumbling, many of the large palazzos — including the Medici — were not in full use, and in the areas near the city walls, whole streets were crumbling into the ground and overrun by wild vegetation. The ancient cittadèlla vècchia, with its huge club-like tower, stood guarding the western approaches by the Ponte al Mare amid the ruins of medieval prosperity and faded glories of Galileo Galilei, Count Ugolino and the Pisanos. It was a city in its dotage, a city as Shelley soon appreciated, of memories and ghosts.

  Yet the core of the city still flourished. Behind the Lung’ Arno Mediceo and the Tre Donzelle stood the towers of numerous churches, and the buildings of the university, founded in the twelfth century, with its famous medical faculty and botanical gardens, and its lively eccentric circle of students and professors. There was a semi-active opera and theatre, and the great architectural monuments of the cathedral, the battistèro and the Leaning Tower in the Piazza dei Miracoli continued to draw a steadily increasing stream of English, French and German tourists from the end of the eighteenth century onwards. This served to keep the pulse of the city’s commerce alive when all else stagnated.

  The strangely dream-like, other-worldly quality of the city during the time of Shelley’s residence was emphasized by the distinctive quality of the architecture, which had earned itself separate recognition as the Pisan style. It was a hybrid, an evocative mixture of influences. The bold and simple arches and columns of the Romanesque were laid against flat surfaces of undecorated stone, and austerely repeated across whole façades and upon several levels. Against this were sudden bursts of Gothic extravagance, ornate clusters of pinnacles, intricate mullioning, characterized by the dense and busy carving of the octagonal pulpit or the great cathedral gates. Then there was a third element, an undertone of something altogether more exotic and pagan. This could be seen especially in the gourd-like doming on the battistero, and in the mosque-like simplicity of the interior of the Camposanto Monumentale. It was a recognizably Moorish influence, which recalled Pisa’s ancient connection with the trade routes to Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean, and which must have found a profound echo in Shelley’s mind. It is interesting that, alone among Italian cities, Shelley never looked on Pisa with a tourist’s eye. He wrote no architectural or artistic notes on its great showpieces, and nowhere did he record comment on its paintings or carvings. Yet he wrote several poems and prose fragments about the city, which caught the atmosphere of the place, at certain times and in certain lights. In this unexpected way Pisa was to serve as a mirror of his own deepest feelings.

  After three days at the Tre Donzelle, the Shelleys, with the help and advice of their new friends the Masons at the Casa Silva, took spacious apartments on the mezzanine floor at the Casa Frassi on the north-west and sunny side of the Lung’ Arno. Mary particularly was delighted with these rooms and the economy. ‘We have two bed rooms, 2 sitting rooms kitchen servants rooms nicely furnished — & very clean & new (a great thing on this country) for 4 guineas and a ½ a month — the rooms are light and airy — so you see we begin to profit by Italian prices — one learns this very slowly but I assure you a crown here goes as far in the conveniences & necessaries of life as £1 in England.’ Milly was not, incidentally, any longer with them, having changed her employer in Florence, so that their servants were now all Italian and Mary tended to give much more personal attention to her child. The Italians were not entirely satisfactory, they ‘teaze us out of our lives’, and Mary thought of engaging another Swiss. But in the end they managed to adapt to Italian ways.

  Shelley’s arrival at Pisa in January
1820 marked an important change in the manner of his life. Since leaving Marlow almost exactly two years earlier in 1818, it had really been that of a nomad. He had been constantly on the move: London, Milan, Bagni di Lucca, Venice, Naples, Rome, Livorno, Florence — eight residences in rather less than twenty-four months. The restlessness of his journeyings, and the inherent sense of rootlessness, was obscured by the day-today details of his life, for there seemed such a multiplicity of reasons and motives — domestic, financial and political ones — to explain why he should always move on. But the deep cause of this need to move is certainly one of the profoundest questions which can be asked about his life. Like the poet in Alastor, one is left always with a dilemma: was Shelley running away from something, or was he running after something?

  The residence at Pisa, which was to last, off and on, for well over two years, cut decisively across this pattern of movement. Pisa became the nearest thing Shelley ever had to a home anywhere since leaving Field Place. Yet there is evidence that the need for movement had been stabilized at Pisa, rather than permanently outgrown. Shelley was to make a series of excursions from Pisa between 1820 and 1822, and to live temporarily at various houses within the vicinity. The desire for an ever-expanding field of journeyings returned: after England, it had been Europe; but after Europe, it was to become — in his mind at least — Africa and the Near East. Significantly, the confidante for these new urges was no longer Mary, but Claire; and in a more literary and dreamy way, certain of his new lady acquaintances at Pisa.