Shelley: The Pursuit

by Richard Holmes

  One entry in Claire’s diary describing a morning trip through the streets of Livorno gives a vivid impression of her sharp eye and violently felt reactions which remained such a permanent pleasure to Shelley. ‘I see a beggar sitting at his post yawning with ennui — another crawling on all fours politely saluting a young washerwoman a bundle on her head & bare footed with “mi rincresce che La Mamma e ammalata” [I’m sorry to hear your Mamma is unwell]; Greeks with legs folded under them sitting upon the parapets & gazing stupidly upon the muddy current of the canal below…here men burning coffee before their doors, & there others beating the flock of matresses; violins squeeking and women singing. Life everywhere but like the life which is engendered of putrefaction creeping crawling worms not that wholesome strength of an agricultural product or that animation which is the child of Liberty.’20

  September and October at the Bagni were remarkably peaceful. Shelley and Mary took the waters, rode out in the afternoons and occasionally walked among the foothills of Monte Pisano. In the evening they read Boccaccio’s tales out loud to each other. At weekends, Shelley usually dined with Claire and the Masons at Pisa. Mary began her new novel, Valperga, and Shelley completed his final draft of the ‘Ode to Naples’, and dashed off the two comic acts of Swellfoot the Tyrant. It ended in high style with Iona Tarina (Queen Caroline) pulling on boots and spurs, ‘and a hunting-cap, buckishly cocked on one side, and tucking up her hair’, and leaping on to the back of the Minotaur. Then, with hunting cries and shouts, she and the Swinish Multitude pursue the evil Swellfoot (King George) and his knavish ministers (Castlereagh, Sidmouth etc.) off the stage; exeunt in full cry —

  Tallyho! tallyho!

  Through pond, ditch, and slough,

  Wind them, and find them,

  Like the Devil behind them,

  Tallyho! tallyho!21

  Altogether it was a highly successful combination of street pamphlet and revue sketch, with material drawn equally from Aristophanes and Shelley’s own Mask of Anarchy. Shelley did actually manage to get it published in England, and it is a great pity that the correspondence surrounding the publication has not survived, for it seems to have been nothing to do with Hunt or Ollier at all. Shelley, perhaps with the connivance and aid of Horace Smith,22 had it transmitted directly and anonymously to the old Godwinian publisher James Johnson, and thus short-circuited the liberal and respectable publishing network. The burlesque appeared in London early in the autumn of 1820 with the following title page:

  Oedipus Tyrannus

  or

  Swellfoot the Tyrant

  A Tragedy.

  In Two Acts.

  Translated from the Original Doric

  ‘Choose Reform or Civil War

  When thro’ thy streets, instead of hare with dogs,

  A consort Queen shall hunt a King with hogs,

  Riding on the IONIAN MINOTAUR.’

  London

  Published for the Author

  by J. Johnston, 98 Cheapside, and sold by

  all booksellers

  1820.

  This little edition must have made a considerable impact, for it was immediately seized by the politically motivated Society for the Suppression of Vice who threatened to prosecute Johnson. On this occasion Johnson withdrew the remaining copies, but it was just such confrontations, when persistently pursued, which Shelley himself advocated, ‘defying the government to prosecute for political libel’ as part of the overall radical strategy. When courageously practised by men like Carlile and Holyoake, it gradually freed the press from political control during the following fifteen years.23

  It was one of Shelley’s great tactical mistakes as a poet, a mistake for which Hunt must carry some of the blame, that he did not turn to this kind of publication sooner, or persist in it after 1820; though the choice was to be taken out of his hands on one memorable future occasion. Mary finally published the poem in her edition of 1839, by which time it was toothless.

  Other poems which belong to these retired weeks of September and October are more reflective. Shelley made a five-stanza adaptation of Dante’s Purgatorio, Canto 28, lines 1–51. He had first translated it in a fragment which Mary later entitled ‘Matilda Gathering Flowers’.24 Now he developed it into the completed poem ‘The Question’, with its ornate and exquisitely assembled description of a nosegay of ‘visionary flowers’.

  There grew pied wind-flowers and violets,

  Daisies, those pearled Arcturi of the earth,

  The constellated flower that never sets. . . .25

  Other adaptions included shortened versions of the Homeric Hymns ‘Apollo’ and ‘Pan’.

  But perhaps most successful were the two lyric fragments on the Moon. They were written at harvest-time when the huge presence rose through the mists of Monte Pisano to the north-east and hung above the long flat shadows of the Pisan plain.

  And like a dying lady, lean and pale,

  Who totters forth, wrapped in a gauzy veil,

  Out of her chamber, led by the insane

  And feeble wanderings of her fading brain,

  The moon arose up in the murky East,

  A white and shapeless mass — 26

  The second has all the Elizabethan melancholy grace of a sonnet by Philip Sidney:

  Art thou pale for weariness

  Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,

  Wandering companionless

  Among the stars that have a different birth, —

  And ever changing, like a joyless eye

  That finds no object worth its constancy?. . .27

  But it was not finished. Fine as these poems are, like tiny pieces of exquisite mantelpiece china, they represent a steady withdrawal of creative pressure and urgency. The presence of Greek and Italian translation, as a hard core within many of the poems of this summer and autumn of 1820, also show Shelley’s need to draw support and stimulation from more purely literary sources. In the last eighteen months of Shelley’s writing, these foreign literary presences become more and more important in his work. Dominant are the figures of Dante, Calderón and Goethe. They stand as powerful if shadowy figures behind his original poems, and also are brought into clear focus in a series of masterly poetic translations. These works, together with the prose translation of the Symposium of 1818, the solid workmanlike verse rendition of Euripides’s Cyclops of 1819, and the ‘Homeric Hymns,’ combined to make Shelley by far the most outstanding literary translator of his generation.

  At the end of September, Shelley brought Claire back from Livorno, and by agreement between Mary and Mrs Mason, she was given a room at the Casa Silva, since Mary now preferred not to have her at the Bagni. The only sign of disturbance was a letter from Shelley to Byron, in which he once again found himself defending Claire’s importunities. But this time a slightly firmer note had entered into his explanations, and one now feels that his sympathies had moved decidedly to Claire’s side over the issue of Allegra. ‘I wonder however at your being provoked at what Clare writes; though that she should write what is provoking is very probable. — You are conscious of performing your duty to Allegra, & your refusal to allow her to visit Clare at this distance you conceive to be part of your duty. That Clare should have wished to see her is natural. That her disappointment should vex her, & her vexation make her write absurdly is all in the usual order of things. But poor thing, she is very unhappy & in bad health, & she ought to be treated with as much indulgence as possible.’

  Reports had been circulating that Byron had intended to return to London. Shelley disbelieved these, but he seized upon the possibility that Byron might at any rate be considering leaving Italy. ‘As to me, I remain in Italy for the present. — If you really go to England, & leave Allegra in Italy, I think you had better arrange so that Clare might see Allegra in your absence if she pleases.’ This was the first time Shelley had ever suggested how his Lordship had better arrange his affairs. Equally, this was the second autumn since poor Claire had last set eyes on her ch
ild, and much future friction and unhappiness was to grow from this exacerbated situation.

  Shelley’s letter to Byron contains an intriguing postscript, though to Byron it probably had little significance. ‘PS If I were to go to Levant & Greece, could you be of any service to me? If so, I should be very much obliged to you.’28 This is the first time Shelley openly mentioned his scheme to set out on his travels again, and depart for the Near East. It is significant because as far as is known, it was a scheme which only Claire — and possibly also Tom Medwin — really knew about.

  On 10 October the Gisbornes returned from England to Livorno and to Casa Ricci, and on the following day a package of books was left with Claire at Casa Silva. Shelley sent off a brief note welcoming them home. ‘Clare tells me that you are returned, & that you even passed the Bagni without calling on us… we do not quite understand your silence.’29 Among the books was a new volume of Keats’s, Lamia, Isabella, the Eve of St Agnes, and Other Poems. These poems had a tremendous impact on Shelley,30 and Claire was already quoting from ‘Isabella’ in her diary of the 15th.

  Shelley’s previous opinion of Keats’s writing had not been high. He had regarded him as potentially a fine poet, but as yet a writer whose ‘mannerism’ and adherence to the Hunt ‘system’ of luxurious gentility in phrase and imagery had only shown forth his powers very indistinctly. His considered opinion of Endymion, given to Keats’s own publisher Ollier in September 1819 was that ‘much praise is due to me for having read [it], the Authors intention appearing to be that no person should possibly get to the end of it. Yet it is full of some of the highest & the finest gleams of poetry; indeed every thing seems to be viewed by the mind of a poet which is described in it. I think if he had printed about 50 pages of fragments from it I should have been led to admire Keats as a poet more than I ought, of which there is now no danger.’31

  Shelley’s main feeling about Keats’s poetry was that it lacked both grandeur of design, and the classical austerity of execution that he had struggled so hard to develop in his own work. This he now saw achieved to an outstanding degree in one major poem of the new 1820 volume, and his reaction was immediate and generous, though not perhaps entirely unpatronizing. He wrote to Marianne Hunt from San Giuliano on 29 October: ‘Keats’ new volume has arrived to us, & the fragment called Hyperion promises for him that he is destined to become one of the first writers of the age. — His other things are imperfect enough. . . . Where is Keats now? I am anxiously expecting him in Italy where I shall take care to bestow every possible attention on him. I consider his a most valuable life, & I am deeply interested in his safety. I intend to be the physician both of his body & his soul, to keep the one warm & to teach the other Greek & Spanish. I am aware indeed in part that I am nourishing a rival who will far surpass me and this is an additional motive & will be an added pleasure.’32 It is suggestive that the poem which Shelley liked at once is that which most closely resembles passages of his own work in Prometheus Unbound. Surprisingly, he made no mention of the great ‘Odes’.33

  At the time of Shelley’s writing, Keats was in fact miserably spending the last two days of an enforced quarantine period on board ship in the bay of Naples with his companion Joseph Severn. But Keats never made any attempt to contact Shelley at Pisa.

  On 17 October, almost exactly twelve months after the first conception of ‘Ode to the West Wind’, the weather began to break up over Tuscany, and the rains started.34 Shelley and Mary knew they would have to move back into Pisa, and other social complications were impinging, but for a few days they hung on at the Casa Prinni enjoying the last few hours of their peaceful household together, and watching the rain driving over the Monte Pisano. On the 18th and 19th there are two of the longest entries in Mary’s journal for many months, which give a strong impression of their serenity. The piece of verse, and the second entry, seem to have been entered in Shelley’s own hand, nostalgically recalling the simple happiness of the Byron summer long ago on Lac Leman.

  Oct. 18. — Rain till 1 o’clock. At sunset the arch of cloud over the west clears away; a few black islands float in the serene; the moon rises; the clouds spot the sky; but the depth of heaven is clear. The nights are uncommonly warm. Write. Shelley reads ‘Hyperion’ aloud. Read Greek.

  My thoughts rise and fade in solitude;

  The verse that would invest them melts away

  Like moonlight in the heaven of spreading day.

  How beautiful they were, how firm they stood,

  Flecking the starry sky like woven pearl!

  Oct 19th. — Ride to Pisa. Read Keats’ Poems. Henry Reveley calls. Walk. Read Greek. Wind N.N.W., cloudy, the sun shining at intervals. The spoils of the trees are scattered about, and the chestnuts are much browner than a week ago. In the evening the moon, with Venus just below her, sails through the clouds, but shines clearly where they are not.35

  But times had changed. Happiness was complicated and serenity was fragile.

  A visit to Livorno by Shelley and Tatty Tighe had brought back the news that the Gisbornes were acting somewhat strangely. It seems that what the Godwins had to say in London about Claire and Shelley, in some way put the affair of Elena — whom Shelley had always called circumspectly in his London letters to the Gisbornes his ‘Neapolitan charge’ — in a new light. Mary wrote to Maria Gisborne, but her letter does not make the matter very explicit, except to emphasize the vehemence with which she felt about it. In later correspondence between Shelley and Claire during the winter, Shelley too was to write of his erstwhile friends with savage distaste.

  Mary wrote to Mrs Gisborne: ‘When I saw you yesterday, you said you had written me a foolish letter, (foolish was your word, I think) but since you did not explain away any part of it, of course you meant that it should remain in full force. — A good dose on my return; — indeed I was tolerably astounded, and found Shelley in a state of considerable agitation — but this is not the purpose of this letter. — A Veil is now taken off from what was mysterious yesterday, and I now understand your refusal to visit us. . . . I see the ban of the Empire is gone out against us, and they who put it on must take it off. Of course it is quite impossible that we should visit you until we have first received you at our house. . . . [Henry] has chosen to join himself to your accusations. — He is young to do this. But what terms need to be made with Pariahs. And such, thank God a thousand and a million times, we are; long — very long, may we so continue. — When you said that filthy woman [i.e. Mrs Godwin] said she would not visit Hunt how I gloried in our infamy. Now is the time! join them, or us . . . .’36 As on later and similar occasions, Mary here showed a great gift for expressing powerful feelings and outraged denials, without actually stating or denying anything definite at all. One also senses that she did not really seek a reconciliation with the Gisbornes. In fact the breach was serious, and there was little communication between the two households for several months, and Shelley expressed furious indignation when they dropped the steam-boat project — although he himself had earlier advised them to abandon it.37 Henry Reveley, who had always been fond of Claire, and got on easily with Shelley, did not in the event treat the matter with such formality as his mother and stepfather and he soon started to visit Shelley regularly again at Pisa.

  Spurred on by what appeared then to be the beginnings of a new scandal concerning Claire, Mary and Mrs Mason hastily completed a scheme of sending her to pass the winter with the family of Dr Bojti in Florence. The Bojti family were a contact of the Masons through the medical faculty at Pisa; Dr Bojti was the Grand Duke Ferdinand III’s personal physician, and lived in a house opposite the Pitti Palace with a large family of daughters.38 Claire went as a paying guest, ostensibly to study German and make her debut in Florentine society, and the arrangement was in the first instance for one month. There is abundant later evidence that Shelley was deeply against the scheme, and that Claire herself was miserable; but circumstances had taken the decision at least temporarily out of their hands.


  Shelley himself took Claire to Florence on 20 October. They arrived at six in the evening and spent a last night together at the Fontana Inn. Claire made a note in her diary that obviously reflects Shelley’s bitter remarks about the Gisbornes: ‘Whoever does a benefit to another buys so much envy, malice, hatred and all uncharitableness from him.’39 The following morning introductions were made to the Bojtis, whom Claire had never met before. She entered in her diary: ‘Unpack my things. Shelley takes leave of me in the evening.’40 Eight days later she was to write: ‘Think of thyself as a stranger & traveller on the earth, to whom none of the many affairs of this world belong, and who has no permanent township on the globe.’41

  For Shelley, the drive back to Pisa was less unhappy. At long last, Tom Medwin really had come south for the winter. By chance they met in Florence, and Medwin came back with Shelley on the coach, talking non-stop about his adventures as a lieutenant in India. Medwin recalled: ‘It was nearly seven years since we parted; but I should immediately have recognised him in a crowd. His figure was emaciated, and somewhat bent; owing to near-sightedness, and his being forced to lean over his books, with his eyes almost touching them; his hair, still profuse, and curling naturally, was partially interspersed with grey…but his appearance was youthful, and his countenance, whether grave or animated, strikingly intellectual.’42 No doubt one of the first stories Medwin told Shelley was how he had miraculously found a copy of The Revolt of Islam on a Parsee waste-paper stall in Bombay.43