Shelley: The Pursuit

by Richard Holmes

  Shelley’s Defence has many weaknesses and peculiarities, most of them attributable to the circumstances under which it was hurriedly assembled in March. It is frequently repetitive and verbose, and the major passages have to be unearthed, like so many nuggets, from the surrounding rhetorical maremma. It also has many eccentricities of argument, as the extraordinary passage in which he gravely put forward the opinion that poets have generally been the wisest, happiest and best of men, and that ‘the greatest poets have been men of the most spotless virtue, of the most consummate prudence’. However, no doubt some mischievous Scythropian humour was here at work for Peacock’s benefit, for shortly afterwards he revealed among a list of poets’ minor peculiarities, ‘that Raphael was a libertine, that Spenser was a poet laureate’.86

  The heart of his Defence turns on the role of poetry as a force for freedom in society. Freedom from what, or for what? Taking poetry in the most comprehensive sense, he defined this in a celebrated summary which was his final answer to Peacock’s position.

  We have more moral, political, and historical wisdom than we know how to reduce into practise; we have more scientific and economic knowledge than can be accommodated to the just distribution of the produce which it multiplies. The poetry in these systems of thought is concealed by the accumulation of facts and calculating processes. . . . We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we want the generous impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the poetry of life; our calculations have outrun our conception. . . . The cultivation of those sciences which have enlarged the limits of the empire of man over the external world has for want of the poetical faculty proportionally circumscribed those of the internal world; and man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave.87

  Peacock’s argument in the Four Ages of Poetry has usually been underestimated; it was in fact a critique of written poetry which was to have a more and more serious application as the Victorian Age drew on. Yet it is difficult to believe that Shelley’s reply is not a profound one; or that in making it, he had not indeed made himself into one of those ‘mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present’. Despite Shelley’s hurry to prepare it, Ollier did not use the manuscript when it arrived in London, and it was eventually printed along with Shelley’s other Essays in 1840.

  The moment the article was dispatched with Mary’s help on 20 March 1821, Shelley turned his attention back to the state of the Italian political upheavals in which Piedmont had now joined. His letter to Peacock at the end of the month was as much about this as about the problems of poetry, and the daily attendance of Prince Mavrocordato at the Casa Aulla in a turban: ‘We are surrounded here in Pisa by revolutionary volcanoes.’ He added, with mild sleight of hand, that Claire was passing the carnival at Florence ‘& has been preter-naturally gay’.88 On the first of April Italian political excitements were joined by news from Greece that the Greek General Ypsilanti had raised the revolutionary standard in Wallachia, and was marching with an army, rumoured to contain 10,000 Greeks, on the northern provinces. Mavrocordato came to inform Mary and Shelley of this and of his impending departure for the scene of action. Mary was unusually ecstatic for her on a political issue, and wrote with many exclamation marks to Claire, ‘The Morea — Epirus — Servia are in revolt. Greece will most certainly be free.’ As a postscript to Mary’s letter, Shelley informed Claire that in London the Bill for Catholic Emancipation had passed its second reading by a majority of 497 to 11, and inquired after her plans for the summer. ‘We are yet undecided . . . say something to fix our determination.’89

  Shelley had been giving a good deal of thought to the summer. After his severe illness of the winter, Vaccà had advised plenty of exercise — perhaps he should buy a horse? Certainly he felt the need to free himself from the decidedly socializing existence that Mary had established at Pisa. He needed an excuse for getting outside. On 15 April he summoned his two most open-air companions, Edward Williams and Henry Reveley, and went to Livorno to see what could be found. It was a modest idea, though it was to have significant consequences. But it was not a horse: it was a small boat.

  Henry Reveley remembered the occasion well.90 ‘Shelley came to me at Leghorn in an unusually excited state, and said that he was tired of walking fourteen miles backwards and forwards, and that he must have a boat of some sort, but that he had very little money to spare.’ Reveley helped them purchase a slim, ten-foot boat, with a flat bottom and a very small draught of some few inches. It was of the kind that was used by huntsmen for navigating the network of local dikes and canals through the maremma; a very light, strong construction made of pitched canvas stretched over a pinewood frame.91 They had a few modifications made, including the mounting of a short mast and lugger sail, with a corresponding keel fitted to the hull. This took most of the day, and after purchasing some small stores to take home to Mary and Jane Williams, Shelley proposed that they make their maiden voyage home by moonlight to Pisa. Reveley decided to come with them for the trip, particularly as he had some local knowledge of the waterways. What happened next was very much in the order of things. About half-way through their journey, and some time towards midnight, Williams stood up in the little craft to make some adjustment, lost his balance, caught at the mast and in an instant capsized the whole boat. They were all three struggling in the dark water under the moon; Reveley swimming easily, Williams paddling in small circles, Shelley floundering and shouting.92 The section of the canal connecting Livorno and the Arno which they were then in was broad and deep, and Reveley could feel no bottom; the water was stabbingly cold.

  Reveley took charge. ‘I sent Williams ashore, as he could swim a little, and then caught hold of Shelley, and told him to be calm and quiet, and I would take him on shore. His answer was: “All right, never more comfortable in my life; do what you will with me.’” Williams got Shelley ashore, but it was quite a near thing, and on crawling up the bank Shelley collapsed on his face in a dead faint, from a mixture of cold and shock. Williams revived him while Reveley manfully plunged back in and recovered the boat, which seems to have been damaged. They walked across the fields to a nearby farmhouse, knocked up the Italians, and spent the night sleeping in front of roaring fires, after a large supper. Shelley was in ‘ecstasies of delight after his ducking’ but Williams and Reveley were less amused. For some strange reason Shelley considered it a good omen.93 The next morning Shelley and Williams walked back to Pisa with their story, and Reveley nursed the boat back to Livorno for repairs. Shelley sent detailed instructions about altering the position of the rowlocks, mounting a shallow rudder and refitting the keel so that it ran the whole length of the hull.94 The skiff was also to be smartly painted, so that altogether she would make, as he told Claire, ‘a very nice little shell, for the Nautilus your friend’.95 He envisaged a glorious summer spent pottering up the canals with Williams from a base at San Giuliano.

  The mood was broken when he got back to Pisa by tragic news: John Keats had died at Rome. An anguished letter had arrived from Hunt during his two days’ absence at Livorno. At first Shelley accepted the news with curious resignation, for he had been expecting it for some time. He wrote to Byron that evening, ‘Young Keats, whose “Hyperion” showed so great a promise, died lately at Rome from the consequences of breaking a blood-vessel, in paroxysms of despair at the contemptuous attack on his book in the “Quarterly Review”.’96 The Quarterly attack was always inextricably bound up in Shelley’s mind with Keats’s suffering, though in fact there was very little connection. The review had after all been published as long ago as September 1818, and there had been many favourable notices of the Lamia volume of 1820 since that time.97

  Yet Shelley had been working to create this mythic connection in his own mind between Keats’s consumption and the Quarterly. In November 1820 he had drafted, but not sent, a letter to Gifford, Editor of the Quarterly, in which he stated as a fact that the first effects on Keats of this review ‘are described to me to have r
esembled insanity, & it was by assiduous watching that he was restrained from effecting purposes of suicide. The agony of his sufferings at length produced the rupturing of a blood vessel in the lungs, & the usual process of consumption appears to have begun.’98 It is transparent from this unsent letter that Shelley was not thinking in any realistic way about Keats’s reaction to a review of 1818, but rather of his own reaction to the Quarterly attack on himself in 1819.

  Byron, when he received Shelley’s letter at Ravenna, read the sentence carefully with his head on one side. ‘I am very sorry to hear what you say of Keats — is it actually true? I did not think criticism had been so killing. . . . I read the review of “Endymion” in the “Quarterly”. It was severe, — but surely not so severe as many reviews in that and other journals upon others.’ Meaning of course, that he had read between the lines into the source of Shelley’s pain.99 He went on to criticize frankly what he had so far read of Keats’s work. Shelley’s odd but sympathetic letter served to remind Byron of other things that he and Shelley had in common besides Claire Clairmont, and he appended a tempting postscript. ‘PS. — Could not you and I contrive to meet this summer. Could not you take a run here alone?’ This idea was to bear fruit in August, but for the time being Shelley was left to brood in solitude on the death of his fellow-poet. He returned to reading ‘Hyperion’, but he wrote nothing.

  Apart from the boat, and plans for the summer, and Claire’s correspondence, there was a financial crisis which occupied much of Shelley’s mind during April. News had first arrived of this on 13 April through Horace Smith, who wrote to say that Brookes and Co had suddenly refused payment of the spring quarter of the annuity, and that the account was frozen, pending a suit of £120 brought by Dr Thomas Hume — the guardian of Shelley’s children. What particularly amazed and angered Smith was that the suit had been brought without prior warning either to him or Shelley, and yet with the connivance of both Sir Timothy’s solicitor Whitton, and Shelley’s solicitor Longdill. Shelley hurried over to consult his stand-by in emergencies, Tatty Tighe, at the Casa Silva, and probably some form of immediate loan was organized to tide him over.100 Horace Smith worked hard in London to sort the matter out, sending businesslike copies of all his correspondence with Hume, the solicitors and Sir Timothy to Shelley in Pisa. His mediation as a financial agent for Shelley was invaluable at this time, and otherwise Shelley’s Italian income might well have dried up altogether. The business, involving dilatory banks and inefficient arrangements to pay Dr Hume by standing order, was eventually sorted out in June.101[6] The one letter that Shelley wrote to Dr Hume at this time showed no trace of warmth or human interest in the children, and makes nothing but a formal inquiry into their ‘present state of health & intellectual improvement’. It was mainly concerned with his own sense of ‘the unexampled oppression’ exercised over him in ‘being forbidden the exercise of . . . parental duties’.102

  In Florence, when Claire heard of Shelley’s difficulties, she was alarmed for him, and was suddenly conscious of the precariousness of the life that they were all leading in Italy. On the day after she received the first explanations, she climbed alone to the top of the Boboli gardens overlooking Florence, and sat at the foot of a statue of Ceres, listening to the wind blowing through the fir trees below like the rushing of the sea. It suddenly brought to her mind ‘the many solitary hours of Lynmouth: since that time five years are past, every hour of which has brought its misfortune, each worse than the other’.103 Hearing of her depression, Shelley wrote: ‘I feel, my dear girl, that in case the failure of your expectations at Florence should induce you to think of other plans, we, that is you & I, ought to have a conversation together.’104 He talked to Mrs Mason about the school plan, and pondered whether he should bring Claire back to Pisa. Meanwhile Claire’s thoughts increasingly turned to Allegra in the convent at Bagnacavallo, and she started to have strange dreams about various people interceding to rescue the child.105

  Shelley’s thoughts of interceding at the other convent, St Anna, had long since receded when he heard that Emilia was to be married. But he composed a verse narrative, much in the style of Keats, about the death of a young virgin on her wedding night. Themes from sources as far apart as Frankenstein and The Cenci mingled in Shelley’s mind as he wrote. The piece was entitled ‘Ginevra’, and is written in the same notebook as Epipsychidion.106 The narrative section is not very successful, but after 200 lines it concludes with an unexpectedly fine dirge, containing imagery so macabre that Hazlitt picked it out for special mention in a preface to Shelley’s poems several years later.107 Like Chatterton’s celebrated song, ‘Al under the wyllowe tree’, it stands out vividly from its dramatic context, and there is something similar in the stark and bitter inspiration of the two pieces.

  She is still, she is cold

  On the bridal couch,

  One step to the white deathbed,

  And one to the bier,

  And one to the charnel — and one, oh where?

  The dark arrow fled

  In the noon.

  Ere the sun through heaven once more has rolled,

  The rats in her heart

  Will have made their nest,

  And the worms be alive in her golden hair,

  While the Spirit that guides the sun,

  Sits throned in his flaming chair,

  She shall sleep.108

  This, in its own way, was Shelley’s elegy for Emilia; or if not exactly for Emilia, for his conception of her as the beloved, as his epipsyche. There is no way of knowing how bitterly Shelley felt about it, but it does not seem to have been overwhelming. The notebook also contains pages of diagrams in which Shelley was working out the differing effects of head and following winds as they hit a sailing boat steered through various points of the compass.109

  The little skiff was brought back, in her new rig from Livorno by Reveley on the last day of April, and in the general excitement Mary and Shelley found that at long last the Gisbornes had forgotten themselves so far as to pay a visit to Pisa to watch her arrival. The Shelleys were ‘gentle, but cold’. For the whole of the next week, Shelley and Williams were afloat, exploring the canals around Pisa, and learning to handle the little craft. Reveley sometimes came over to crew, and he and Shelley successfully sailed her right down to Arno to the sea, and then the two or three miles south along the coast to Livorno. Shelley sailed her back single-handed. But there was no talk of swimming lessons, and such things as life-jackets were unheard of.110 Mary soothed any nagging worries in the company of Prince Mavrocordato, who continued to call almost daily to give his Greek lessons. He told Mary that he was preparing his military equipage and uniform, and promised to show it off before he departed.

  The return of the boat seemed to herald the real beginning of summer. The Williamses took up their summer residence in a large house, the Villa Marchese Poschi at Pugnano, some seven miles outside Pisa, while Shelley negotiated for a new residence at San Giuliano. On 8 May, they packed up their belongings at the Casa Aulla and sent them ahead to the Bagni. After a visit to Livorno, Shelley set sail with Henry Reveley to thread through the narrow waterways to their new residence, while Mary walked over with Prince Mavrocordato to dine with the Williamses at Pugnano, and then made her own way over to the Bagni. It seems to have been a different house this time, but still in the little crescent facing the Monte Pisano, with the canal conveniently running at the bottom of the garden. It was, Shelley told Claire, ‘a very nice house’. The baths were almost entirely deserted at this time in the season, but Shelley looked forward gratefully to the solitude they promised from social diversions, and eagerly stabled his sea horse by the edge of the canal, ready for explorations northwards towards Lucca and the Serchio.111

  The month of May, with one or two interruptions, was largely spent in these boating expeditions. Occasionally Mary gingerly allowed herself to be ferried up the canal for a visit to the Casa Silva, or to do shopping in Pisa, but for the most part Shelley was alon
e or with Edward Williams. The most ambitious of their expeditions took them through the maze of canals and cuts into the Serchio, and winding down through the desolate maremma with its thick rush-clumps and wild birds as far as the sea. Shelley made a loose verse-journal of the trip, describing how their course following the Serchio ‘twisting forth / Between the marble barriers which it clove / At Ripafratta’, and into the ‘pestilential deserts wild / Of tangled marsh and woods of stunted pine’ to the bay of Viareggio. It began with them going down to the skiff before dawn —

  Our boat is asleep on Serchio’s stream,

  Its sails are folded like thoughts in a dream . . .

  and shows in its simple, prosaic narration how the friendship between Shelley and Williams was gradually ripening into an easy intimacy, based on a common background and a shared love for slightly boyish adventuring:

  ‘Ay, heave the ballast overboard,

  And stow the eatables in the aft locker.’

  ‘Would not this keg be best a little lowered?’

  ‘No, now all’s right.’ ‘Those bottles of warm tea —

  (Give me some straw) — must be stowed tenderly;

  Such as we used, in summer after six,

  To cram in greatcoat pockets, and to mix

  Hard eggs and radishes and rolls at Eton,