Shelley: The Pursuit

by Richard Holmes

  They returned to Mary at San Giuliano on the 22nd, and Medwin was installed in the space vacated by Claire. Three days later, on the 25th, the constant rains flooded the little village: the baths all overflowed, and the canal broke its banks at the bottom of the garden. By nightfall their hall was four feet deep in the water, which had poured through the garden from the canal and from the piazza in front of the baths.44 They sat in the upper windows, and watched the peasants driving the cattle off the Pisan plain to the safety of the hills. ‘A fire was kept up to guide them across the ford; and the forms of the men and the animals showed in dark relief against the red glare of the flame, which was reflected again in the waters that filled the square.’45 Shelley rode in the next day to arrange lodgings in Pisa for the winter, and with Medwin’s help they moved back on the last weekend of October.

  26. The Tuscan Set: 1821

  The Shelleys’ new winter apartments were on the Lung’Arno at the Casa Galetti, where Tom Medwin lodged with them. It stood next to one of the marble palaces, and the Shelleys occupied the whole of the mezzanine floor facing south, finding it was comfortable and warm. Shelley used Medwin’s presence to secure two separate rooms higher on the fourth floor, both with open fireplaces. One of these became Medwin’s bedroom, and the other Shelley’s private study. Shelley was glad of his independence.1 Medwin made himself agreeable to Shelley; they read together and played chess, and to Shelley’s relief he saw that ‘Mary likes him well enough’. There was a slightly invalid atmosphere in the house, for Mary had an eye inflammation and found it difficult either to read or write, while Shelley found the change in the weather — and perhaps other changes — had brought back his chronic nephritic pains. Medwin tried to amuse and distract them both with readings from his Indian journal,2 and Shelley was sufficiently grateful and impressed to write on 10 November to Ollier recommending that the publisher take on Medwin’s Sketches in Hindoostan with Other Poems. Unlikely as it might sound, Ollier promptly published these the following year.

  With this letter, Shelley enclosed manuscripts for a new collection of his own. He intended it to be published anonymously with the title poem ‘Julian and Maddalo’. They were ‘all my saddest poems raked into one heap’, and included some of the poems of private grief written at Naples in 1818–19; the unfinished narrative ‘Marenghi’, based on the history of an exile in the Pisan maremma during the sixteenth century;3 and some of the fragments composed at San Giuliano. None of these were ever published in Shelley’s lifetime.4

  November was an unhappy month for Shelley, and Medwin observed his symptoms with sympathy and sometimes alarm. He later wrote, ‘Shelley had . . . during that winter been subject to a prostration, physical and psychical, the most cruel to witness, though he was never querelous or out of temper, never by an irritable word hurt the feelings of those about him. . . . So sensitive was he of external impressions, so magnetic, that I have seen him, after threading the carnival crowd in the Lung-’Arno Corso, throw himself half-fainting into a chair, over-powered by the atmosphere of evil passions, as he used to say, in that sensual and unintellectual crowd . . . his physical sufferings — they, if they did not produce, tended to aggravate his mental ones. He was a martyr to the most painful complaint, Nephritis, for which he . . . was now trying Scott’s vitriolic acid baths, much in vogue. This malady constantly menaced to end fatally. During its paroxysms he would roll on the floor in agony.’ Medwin told Shelley that he had seen the so-called ‘animal magnetism’ practised in India in similar circumstances and that he himself had ‘benefitted by it at Geneva’. Shelley agreed to let Medwin experiment during the next convenient attack.5

  There is no doubt that apart from his nephritis, much of Shelley’s immediate misery was caused by Claire’s absence in Florence. He worried about her, and he deeply missed her friendship and company. Nine days after her departure, he wrote a long letter, which shows very well how he felt. They were not feelings he cared to reveal to Mary: ‘My dearest Clare, I wrote you a kind of scrawl the other day merely to show that I had not forgotten you, and as it was taxed with a postscript by Mary, it contained nothing that I wished it to contain.’ That word taxed was very expressive.

  News had already reached Shelley through mutual Italian acquaintances of Claire’s unhappiness at Florence. ‘Keep up your spirits, my best girl, until we meet at Pisa. But for Mrs Mason, I should say, come back immediately and give up a plan so inconsistent with your feelings — as it is, I fear you had better endure — at least until you come here. You know, however, whatever you shall determine on, where to find one ever affectionate Friend, to whom your absence is too painful for your return ever to be unwelcome. I think it moreover for your own interest to observe a certain — ’. The gap is apparently in the manuscript, to indicate tiresome propriety.6

  Shelley made no secret of his own ill-health, or his dependence on Claire’s sympathy. ‘I have suffered within this last week a violent access of my disease, with a return of those spasms that I used to have. . . . As to pain, I care little for it; but the nervous irritability which it leaves is a great and serious evil to me, and which, if not incessantly combated by myself and soothed by others, would leave me nothing but torment in life. — I am now much better. Medwin’s cheerful conversation is of some use to me, but what would it be to your sweet consolation, my own Claire?’

  He described the layout of their rooms at Casa Galetti — in which Mary ‘has a very good room below, and there is plenty of space for the babe’. Shelley made a great point of his study two floors above. ‘Congratulate me on my seclusion.’

  Shelley next explained how the Gisbornes intended to defraud him by using the marine engine cast with his money to set up a commercial machine shop with a powered bellows. He had had a long and ‘very explicit’ conversation with Henry, setting out his own views, and he was even more explicit with Claire. ‘The Gisbornes are people totally without faith. — I think they are altogether the most filthy and odious animals with which I ever came in contact. — They do not visit Mary as they promised, and indeed if they did, I certainly should not stay in the house to receive them.’ The Gisbornes did not in the event defraud Shelley of his money, and all the evidence suggests that he was paid back a good deal of his original investment — which had, anyway, been partly in the nature of a gift. Shelley did not mention to Claire here that he had just posted an extremely polite note to Mr Gisborne requesting Arabian grammars or dictionaries, forwarding some back number of the Galignani’s Messenger, and concluding with ‘My kind regards to Mrs G., & Henry. — Yours very truly.’7 So much, perhaps, was still due to propriety.

  But the request for Arabic grammars was now repeated to Claire, ‘for a purpose and a motive as you may conceive’. He dilated on his scheme: ‘[Medwin and I] have also been talking of a plan to be accomplished with a friend of his, a man of large fortune, who will be at Leghorn next spring, and who designs to visit Greece, Syria, and Egypt in his own ship. This man has conceived a great admiration for my verses, and wishes above all things that I could be induced to join his expedition. How far all this is practicable, considering the state of my finances I know not yet. I know that if it were it would give me the greatest pleasure, and the pleasure might be either doubled or divided by your presence or absence. All this will be explained and determined in time; meanwhile lay to your heart what I say, and do not mention it in your letter to Mary.’8

  The idea of sailing away, of going to the East, or to distant isles, moved uneasily in Shelley’s mind between poetry and reality. Did Medwin’s friend ‘of large fortune’ really exist? Certainly he never materialized. But the journey was a plan or a vision that embraced Claire — and not much later, another girl. During this winter it was essentially the plan of a sick man, and a trapped one; it was a vision of open sea viewed from a closed harbour, but it was none the less powerful for that.

  November passed painfully by. To Peacock Shelley explained that he had no taste for original composition, ‘the recep
tion the public have given me might go far enough to damp any man’s enthusiasm’. He had been reading nothing but Greek and Spanish: ‘Plato and Calderón have been my gods.’9 Mary was working downstairs on her new novel Valperga, set in the medieval period, which, as Shelley observed evenly, ‘she has raked out of fifty old books’.

  At least there was Medwin’s company at the Casa Galetti, and on expeditions to the Campo Santo. Once Shelley discussed Foundling Hospitals: there was one at Pisa which he took Medwin to see.10 Shelley talked with Medwin a good deal about translation, and read Spanish and Italian with him. He discussed an idea he had had of translating the whole of the Divina Commedia, and showed Medwin the fragment of his version from the Purgatorio, ‘Mathilda Gathering Flowers’. Medwin recalled: ‘Shelley was well conscious of his talent for translation, and told me that disheartened as he was with the success of his Original composition, he thought of dedicating his time to throwing the grey veil of his own words over the perfect and glowing forms of other writers.’11

  Medwin encouraged Shelley after his own fashion, and one morning brought down a rough version of Inferno, Canto XXXIII — the incarceration of Count Ugolino in a tower at Pisa with his two sons. All three were starved, and the grim poem implies, without explicitly stating, that Ugolino committed the act of cannibalism before he died, which he constantly and obsessively repeats, with a vulpine-like snapping of his jaws, in his infernal incarnation. Shelley gingerly corrected parts of Medwin’s rough, and supplied the rewriting of several stanzas. The Ugolino Canto dwelt in Shelley’s mind, especially as Ugolino’s tower — La Torre della Fame — still stood in the city by the Ponte al Mare on the Arno.[1] The result of his brooding was ‘The Tower of Famine’, one of the last poems of the year, and one of the first of those admirable, short, meditative pieces which can be loosely grouped as his ‘Pisan poems’. In ‘The Tower of Famine’ he substituted the cannibal image for one more familiar, and haunting; but the strange, displaced, faintly infernal aspect which Pisa sometimes revealed to him is clearly shown, that ‘desolation of a city, which was the cradle, and is now the grave of an extinguished people’. The stanza form is the English terza rima, and it ends:

  There stands the pile, a tower amid the towers

  And sacred domes; each marble-ribbèd roof,

  The brazen-gated temples, and the bowers

  Of solitary wealth, — the tempest-proof

  Pavilions of the dark Italian air, —

  Are by its presence dimmed — they stand aloof,

  And are withdrawn — so that the world is bare;

  As if a spectre wrapped in shapeless terror

  Amid a company of ladies fair

  Should glide and glow, till it became a mirror

  Of all their beauty, and their hair and hue,

  The life of their sweet eyes, with all its error,

  Should be absorbed, till they to marble grew.12

  Medwin found there was something faintly disquieting about Shelley’s reading of poetry. He was confined to bed for some time by a travel illness, and Shelley frequently came up to read to him at the top of the Casa Galetti. He remembered how Shelley could produce an effect ‘almost electric’ with his recitation of ‘The Witch of Atlas’, and how he took a peculiar pleasure in Wordsworth’s ‘Peter Bell’, and the various associations it had for him. ‘Shelley used to chuckle, with his peculiar hysterical cachination, over this Nursery Tale of Wordsworth’s and to repeat the stanza which forms the motto of his own “Peter Bell”, with tears running down his laughing eyes, as he gave utterance to, —

  This is Hell, and in this smother,

  All are damnable and damned,

  Each one damning, damns the other,

  They are damned by one another,

  By no other are they damned.’13

  But it was probably not until January 1821 that Shelley began his essay ‘On Devils and the Devil’.

  Five days before Claire was due to return to Pisa from the Bojtis for the last week of November, Shelley wrote to her in Florence. He explained, several times over, that he wanted her to return to Pisa at the expiry of her first month’s ‘probationary’ period, without definitely cancelling the arrangement with the Bojtis for the rest of the winter. ‘How I long to see you again, and take what care I can of you — but do not imagine that if I did not most seriously think it best for you that I would advise you to return. I have suffered horribly from my side, but my general health decidedly improves, and there is now no doubt that it is a disease of the kidneys which, however it sometimes makes life intolerable has, Vaccà assures me, no tendency to endanger it. May it be prolonged that I may be the source of whatever consolation or happiness you are capable of receiving!’14

  Claire did not make a practice of commenting in her diary on her letters either from Shelley or Mary, or on the news from Ravenna. But she amused herself by composing captions for imaginary cartoons of Byron, some of which were fairly savage. There is also one such caption-piece for Shelley during November.

  ‘Caricature for poor [dear — deleted] S. He looking very sweet & smiling. A little [child — deleted] Jesus Christ playing about the room. He says: Then grasping a small knife & looking mild I will quietly murder that little child. Another. Himself & God Almighty. He says If you please God Almighty, I had rather be damned with Plato & Lord Bacon than go to Heaven with Paley & Malthus. God Almighty: It shall be quite as you please, pray don’t stand upon ceremony. Shelley’s three aversions. God Almighty, Lord Chancellor & didactic Poetry.’15

  Claire came back to Pisa on 21 November, and resumed her regular attendance on Mrs Mason at the Casa Silva. Four days later she spent the day in Livorno with Shelley, and came back late, at 9 in the evening, ‘very tired’. It was during this excursion together that Shelley and Claire together convinced each other that she would have to go back to Florence in December. Medwin, who now met her for the first time, was very much struck by Claire, though he believed her to be four or five years older than she actually was. ‘I remember her in 1820, living en pension at Florence, then twenty-six or twenty-seven years of age. She might have been mistaken for an Italian, for she was a brunette with very dark hair and eyes. . . . She possessed considerable accomplishments — spoke French and Italian, particularly the latter, with all its nuances and niceties . . . and possessed an esprit de société rare among our country women.’16

  The acceptance of the dissolution of the old triangular ménage between Shelley, Mary and Claire did not have immediate or drastic repercussions. For at Pisa the esprit de société now suddenly and quite unexpectedly became general in the weeks before Christmas. For the first time since their arrival in Italy in 1818, the Shelley household at Casa Galetti became a genuinely open and hospitable one, and a routine of evening dinners and concert visits and conversazione began which had not occurred since the London spring of Madame Millanie and Mozart and the Hampstead literary tea-parties. In this sudden flurry of social activity, the departure of Claire to lead her own life in Florence somehow seemed more in the order of things. Although it was not to be without emotional consequences for Shelley.

  The winter of 1820–1 at Pisa had at first promised to be a depressing one — quite apart from Shelley’s nephritic attacks. Mary entered irritably in her journal on a wet afternoon in mid-November: ‘It would be pleasant enough living in Pisa if one had a carriage, and could escape from one’s house to the country without mingling with the inhabitants; but the Pisans and the Scolari, in short, the whole population, are such that it would sound strange to an English person if I attempted to express what I feel concerning them — crawling and crab-like through their sapping streets.’17 In other words, that Pisa would be pleasant enough except for the Pisans. But these feelings dramatically changed through the rapid blossoming of a friendship with one of the professors of the science faculty at Pisa University at the end of the month.

  Francesco Pacchiani first made his appearance on 24 November, exactly one of those wet Fridays wh
en they all stayed indoors and read the papers. It would seem that it was Claire who met Pacchiani at Mrs Mason’s, rather than at the Casa Galetti.18 On the following Sunday he spent the evening, and on Tuesday he supped. It was Pacchiani who introduced Shelley to a wider circle of Pisan acquaintances; he was just the man to do it. An Italian of Prato by birth, he had made a brilliant academic career, holding both the Chairs of Logic and Metaphysics at Pisa by the age of 32, while lecturing on mathematic and theoretical physics with the personal recommendations of Humboldt, Gay-Lussac and Cuvier. In 1817, Colonel Calicot Finch reported that he was still one of the two most popular lecturers among the students, with a fashionable following in Pisan society. In fact his career was on the decline, and when Shelley met him in 1820, he had, at the age of 49, just been dismissed by the university authorities, and was living among the salons and cafés of Pisa on his reputation as a conversationalist. He was a formidable social enemy with a lethal gift for concocting sobriquets which stuck, and was one of the best-known public eccentrics in Pisa. Medwin remembered how tall he was, with dark eyes and bony features, and a generally Moorish expression which blended well with his surroundings. Professor Pacchiani’s own sobriquet was Il Diavolo di Pisa, an appointment which Medwin says Shelley greatly appreciated, remarking that every city should have its own. He was in fact reputed to be, as he quickly told Mary, more than a little mad.19

  Although the friendship with Pacchiani did not remain intimate for very long, it lasted sufficiently for other introductions to follow. They were a colourful collection of human oddities, with a distinct air of the raffish. First among them was the celebrated Tommaso Sgricci, a native law student of Pisa, who had abandoned his profession to pursue his self-created career of Improvvisatore — a mixture of poet, stage medium and theatrical impresario. He was a highly strung personality — in fact something of a hysteric — with a natural sensibility for Greek drama and one of those rare automatic memories which could absorb dates, names, plot, quotations and whole texts with little apparent effort. In 1820, at the age of 32, he was at the height of an international career, which had triumphantly carried audiences both at Rome and Paris. At one of his evening accademie he could reportedly produce a three-part programme of spontaneously improvised poems: one in blank verse, one in terza rime and a complete two-and-a-half-hour tragedy on a classical theme. The inexhaustible creative faculties which this performance seemed to suggest, deeply fascinated Shelley, though he sensed the staginess of Sgricci.20 Byron had seen him perform in Ravenna earlier in the year and wrote extenuatingly to Hobhouse: ‘he is also a celebrated Sodomite, a character by no means so much respected in Italy as it should be; but they laugh instead of burning, and the women talk of it as a pity in a man of talent, but with greater tolerance than could be expected, and only express their hopes that he may yet be converted to adultery’.21 He first spent the evening at the Casa Galetti on 1 December, and Mary said that he improvised with ‘admirable fervour and justice’, though he was too fond of female applause.22