Shelley: The Pursuit

by Richard Holmes

For the rest of the month, the Williamses put up Claire at Pugnano, but Shelley and Claire continued to read German together — now moving on to Goethe’s Faust — and visits were exchanged between San Giuliano and Pugnano almost daily. For one significant moment, it was Claire who stayed with Shelley at San Giuliano, and Mary who moved to Pugnano.72 The Hoppner affair was no doubt having its aftermath at San Giuliano during October, and the flexibility of Shelley’s arrangements suggest that as a result a greater frankness of behaviour was admitted between Mary and Claire.

  Shelley was also writing with great freedom and energy. The preface to Hellas is one of the most active political statements on the struggle for liberty which Shelley ever framed, and parts of it had to be suppressed by Ollier. It also contains the classic English statement of Philhellenism — that movement of political, literary and military idealism which swept the whole of Europe, especially between the years of 1820 and 1824. Although it is dedicated ‘To His Excellency Prince Alexander Mavrocordato’, yet the action of the drama is almost entirely visionary and mystic.

  Its cast-list of half a dozen names includes among the speakers Christ, Mahomet, Ahasuerus the Wandering Jew and the Phantom of Mahomet II. Despite the gestures towards epic action off-stage, and lumbering reportage of battles and smoke and carrion, the real subject of the poem — and where its poetry alone begins to grip — seems to be religious guilt. It considers the effect of past evil on the present, as so often in Shelley, both in historical and psychological terms. The poem contrasts, in this light, the difference between the great rational and humane tradition of classical Greek philosophy, with the superseding ideology of guilt and punishment represented for Shelley by the supreme authoritarianism of institutionalized Christian religion. There are several interesting prose notes to the poem on this subject, and altogether the work represents one of the most sophisticated and historically mature statements of Shelley’s atheism.

  But the drama is rightly celebrated for its declaration of Philhellenism:

  We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts have their root in Greece. But for Greece — Rome, the instructor, the conqueror, or the metropolis of our ancestors, would have spread no illumination with her arms, and we might still have been savages and idolaters; or, what is worse, might have arrived at such a stagnant and miserable state of social institution as China and Japan possess.

  The human form and the human mind attained to a perfection in Greece which has impressed its image on those faultless productions, whose very fragments are the despair of modern art, and has propagated impulses which cannot cease, through a thousand channels of manifest or imperceptible operation, to ennoble and delight mankind until the extinction of the race.73

  This declaration, fine as it is in itself, gains immeasurably from the knowledge that its author had also written a great translation of the Symposium, a wonderful set of travel letters from Naples, the first two acts of Prometheus Unbound, and the ‘Notes on Florentine Sculpture’. Occasionally, though rarely, the verse lyrics of Hellas also come close to Shelley’s best work:

  Temples and towers,

  Citadels and marts, and they

  Who live and die there, have been ours,

  And may be thine, and must decay;

  But Greece and her foundations are

  Built below the tide of war,

  Based on the crystàlline sea

  Of thought and its eternity;

  Her citizens, imperials spirits,

  Rule the present and the past,

  On all this world of men inherits

  Their seal is set.74

  After experimenting with the long free lines of Epipsychidion, and the rigid formality of the stanza patterns in ‘The Witch of Atlas’ and Adonais, Shelley was slowly returning to the tight, rapid-running line of the poetry of 1819, with its simplicity of speech and its driving, insistent rhythms. But he had not yet established his new form, and Hellas contained a bewildering variety of metrical variations.

  The presence of Ahasuerus in the drama also showed Shelley reaching back for new developments of old ideas. The use of the Wandering Jew, a figure last found explicitly in Queen Mab and The Assassins of 1814, pointed again to that strange reversion to old themes and feelings, the recycling of old imagery, of which Shelley’s illness at Pisa in the winter of 1820–1 had first given forewarning. A curious inward spiralling of Shelley’s imagination seemed to be in operation, as if it had been full circle through the experience of Italy, and was now, as he began to feel the stability of Pisa, coming back at a new angle and elevation through the field of experience and psychological stress undergone in the years 1814–15.

  In a scene whose mechanism recalls the summoning of the Phantom of Jupiter in Prometheus Unbound, but whose subject goes further back to the poetry of the Alastor period, Ahasuerus summons the Phantom of Mahomet II. His explanation of this ghostly phenomenon, given to the present Turkish ruler, is in purely psychological terms.

  Ahasuerus. What thou seest

  Is but the ghost of thy forgotten dream.

  A dream itself, yet less, perhaps, than that

  Thou call’st reality. Thou mayst behold

  How cities, on which Empire sleeps enthroned,

  Bow their towered crests to mutability. . . .

  The Past

  Now stands before thee like an Incarnation

  Of the To-come; yet wouldst thou commune with

  That portion of thyself which was ere thou

  Didst start for this brief race whose crown is death,

  Dissolve with that strong faith and fervent passion

  Which called it from the uncreated deep,

  Yon cloud of war…and draw with mighty will

  The imperial shade hither.75

  This passage is not nearly as fine as the equivalent scene in Prometheus Unbound, but Shelley’s prose commentary on it in the notes throws considerable light on his own personal experiences with ‘visions’, and goes part of the way to explaining some of the more weird occurrences of the next spring and early summer. He wrote:

  The manner of the invocation of the spirit of Mahomet the Second will be censured as over subtle. I could easily have made the Jew a regular conjuror, and the Phantom an ordinary ghost. I have preferred to represent the Jew as disclaiming all pretension, or even belief, in supernatural agency, and as tempting Mahmud to that state of mind in which ideas may be supposed to assume the force of sensations through the confusion of thought with the objects of thought, and the excess of passion animating the creations of imagination.

  It is a sort of natural magic, susceptible of being exercised in a degree by any one who should have made himself master of the secret associations of another’s thoughts.76

  One can recognize here Shelley’s mind turning not only on some of his own experiences but the experiences he had created for others, as during the disturbances at Kentish Town during the latter part of 1814. He now seemed to recognize his talents in this field. As a philosophical, rather than a purely psychological observation, this note also has clear reference to the discussion of daemons and kaka-daimons and the ‘intermediary world’ of Shelley’s translation of the Symposium.

  When Hellas was posted to Ollier on 11 November, Shelley considered it ‘written at the suggestion of the events of the moment’ and as a ‘mere improvise’.77 His main object was to get it published and circulated in aid of the Greek cause as speedily as possible. He had hopes that the work might appear in Ollier’s bookshop in time for Christmas, but the publisher ran true to form and a small edition appeared quietly in February 1822. One part of the preface took slightly longer to find its way into print:

  Should the English people ever become free, they will reflect upon the part which those who presume to represent their will have played in the great drama of the revival of liberty. . . . This is the age of the war of the oppressed against the oppressors, and every one of those ringleaders of the privileged gangs of murderers and swindle
rs, called Sovereigns, look to each other for aid against the common enemy, and suspend their mutual jealousies in the presence of a mightier fear. Of this holy alliance all the despots of the earth are virtual members. But a new race has arisen throughout Europe, nursed in the abhorrence of the opinions which are its chains, and she will continue to produce fresh generations to accomplish that destiny which tyrants forsee and dread.78

  This avowal of political belief was first published in 1892.79 The little edition, with its Greek Epigraph, ‘I am the Prophet of Victorious Struggles’ echoing the engraving on Mavrocordato’s ring, reached Shelley in April 1822. It was the last of his works he ever saw in print.

  Towards the end of October, Shelley and Mary had settled on the house that they would take at Pisa. It was to be a large, unfurnished apartment occupying the whole of the top of the Tre Palazzi di Chiesa, an elegant building at the extreme eastern end of the Lung’Arno, just inside the ancient city wall, and overlooking the Ponte Fortezza. Below them on the south side was the formal Giardino Scotto with its pleasant walks and carefully tended shrubs, while beyond stretched a magnificent vista through lines of pines and cypresses, across the Pisan maremma, and as far as the sea. Mary wrote that ‘the rooms we inhabit are south, and look over the whole country to the sea, so that we are entirely out of the bustle and disagreeable puzzi etc, of the town, and hardly know that we are so enveloped until we descend into the street’.80 The Williamses were also searching for unfurnished rooms, and eventually moved into the ground floor of the Tre Palazzi. From the entrance gate, at street level, the Arno curved away to the left, with its line of tethered boats and skiffs; the Palazzo Lanfranchi was clearly visible diagonally across the river at a distance of some hundred yards, marked out from the row of buildings by its landing steps, and white marble façade, and commanding balcony on the first floor.

  Lord Byron had still not arrived, but his train was expected any day, and in the meantime Shelley kept up his flow of letters, switching nimbly from Don Juan to furniture, to the Countess Guiccioli, to Tuscan aid for Greek patriots. He never gave up Allegra: ‘The Countess tells me that you think of leaving Allegra for the present at the convent. Do as you think best — but I can pledge myself to find a situation for her here. . . .’81 Leigh Hunt and his family were expected before the end of November; Horace Smith was still a remote possibility.

  Shelley sent reports both to Hogg and John Gisborne in London. It is interesting that it was Gisborne who was given the substance of Shelley’s feelings. Hogg got a formal essay on Plato’s Republic — ‘surely the foundation of true politics’ — and the merits of botany over game shooting. To Gisborne, Shelley wrote with a certain sardonic realism about the Pisan scheme: ‘Did I tell you that Lord Byron comes to settle at Pisa, & that he has a plan of writing a periodical work in conjunction with Hunt? . . . he has been expected every day these six weeks. — La Guiccioli his cara sposa who attends him impatiently, is a very pretty sentimental, [stupid — deleted] innocent, superficial Italian, who has sacrificed an immense fortune to live for Lord Byron; and who, if I know anything of my friend, of her, or of human nature will hereafter have plenty of leisure and opportunity to repent of her rashness. . . . We have furnished a house in Pisa, & I mean to make it our headquarters. — I shall get all my books out [from England], & intrench myself — like a spider in a web.’82

  It was perhaps characteristic of Shelley that he should have given a totally different impression on this last point to Hogg. ‘I have some thoughts, if I could get a respectable appointment, of going to India, or any where where I might be compelled to active exertion, & at the same time enter into an entirely new sphere of action. — But this I dare say is a mere dream, & I shall probably have no opportunity of making it a reality, but finish as I have begun.’83 This recurrence of the old Eastern scheme at the very time that he was leasing a house and buying furniture, was perhaps not unconnected with the fact that Claire was about to disappear for her winter hibernation in the society of Florence. It was Peacock, not Hogg, who rose to the practical implications of this vague restlessness, and returned a managing sort of letter which reached Shelley in mid-November, to say that East India House did not employ any functionaries outside men of its own company. For the first time one senses that Peacock had misread his old friend: ‘There is nothing that would give me so much pleasure (because I think there is nothing that would be more beneficial to you) than to see you following some scheme of flesh and blood — some interesting matter connected with the business of life, in the tangible shape of a practical man: and I shall make it a point of sedulous enquiry to discover if . . .’ and so on.84 Peacock was now aged 36; it was three and a half years since he had last talked to Shelley face to face.

  Dreams of his Eastern scheme, set against the rapidly materializing reality of the Pisan plan, produced the last and finest of that group of Italian landscapes which come together as Shelley’s ‘Pisan poems’. ‘Evening: Ponte Al Mare, Pisa’ may have been written at any time towards the end of summer 1821, either in September or October. But certainly it was before the breaking of the weather, the departure of Claire and the arrival of Byron. Despite its Italian setting, and the underlying reference to Pisa as one of Dante’s infernal cities — a place of blown straws, of ghosts, not men — the poem is essentially English in character. Its simplicity of presentation, its easy, adept phrasing and its carefully chosen details, make it an almost perfect English tone poem. It is also an interior landscape, an exact image of a human state of mind and spirit. Pisa reflects the watching mind, as the river reflects Pisa. The image of the third stanza was one Shelley adapted from the ‘Ode to Liberty’ of the previous year, as he realized its full potential. ‘Evening: Ponte Al Mare, Pisa’:

  The sun is set; the swallows are asleep;

  The bats are flitting fast in the gray air;

  The slow soft toads out of damp corners creep,

  And evening’s breath, wandering here and there

  Over the quivering surface of the stream,

  Wakes not one ripple from its summer dream.

  There is no dew on the dry grass to-night,

  Nor damp within the shadow of the trees;

  The wind is intermitting, dry, and light;

  And in the inconstant motion of the breeze

  The dust and straws are driven up and down,

  And whirled about the pavement of the town.

  Within the surface of the fleeting river

  The wrinkled image of the city lay,

  Immovably unquiet, and forever

  It trembles, but it never fades away;

  Go to the East. . . .

  You, being changed, will find it then as now.

  The chasm in which the sun has sunk is shut

  By darkest barriers of cinereous cloud,

  Like mountain over mountain huddled — but

  Growing and moving upwards in a crowd,

  And over it a space of watery blue,

  Which the keen evening star is shining through.85

  The Ponte Al Mare was at the far end of the town from the Tre Palazzi and the Ponte Fortezza. The river flowed under it and then turned westwards to the sea.

  [1] Richard Carlile, although he wrote scathingly of Clark’s surrender to the Society for the Suppression of Vice, always acknowledged him as the first publisher of Queen Mab at ‘his shop near St Clement’s in the Strand’, and continued to print Clark’s name on the backleaf of his own later editions of the poem during the 1820s.

  [2] This was the customary form of legal redress which the Papal States allowed dissatisfied husbands in place of alimony.

  [3] As usual at such a crucial point, the MS sources were subsequently tampered with, and the original has not survived. Mary’s letter was first printed, ‘an exact copy of the holograph’, by John Murray in 1922. Murray’s note explains itself: ‘it may be as well to state that an imperfect version of this letter was printed in Professor Dowden’s “Life of Shelley” (1886), a
nd also in Mrs Julian Marshall’s “Life and Letters of Mary Shelley”. In both transcripts there are many significant omissions . . .’

  [4] A deliberate exaggeration on Shelley’s part: Hoppner, for all his inventiveness, never suggested that Shelley actually beat Mary.

  [5] This is confirmed by his remark in the letter to the Gisbornes of 30 June 1820, very shortly before the news of Elena’s death, that he intended to bring her to Tuscany as soon as she recovered. But of course he never got the chance.

  [6] In the event Mary’s novel was only published two years later by W. B. Whittaker, and when her circumstances were radically altered. Some things did not change however: all the profits went to William Godwin.

  28. The Byron Brigade: 1822

  Claire was the first person to know of Byron’s arrival, just as years before, she was the first person to hear his carriage wheels on the gravel and spot his name in the register of Monsieur Dejean’s Hotel at Geneva. This time, they were both in carriages. Shelley had finally packed Claire off on the coach for Florence on the morning of 1 November 1821, when they parted under a radiant blue sky. ‘Just before Empoli,’ Claire wrote in her diary at Florence that night, ‘we passed Lord B — and his travelling train. As we approached Florence we entered also a thick white fog so that the Signora Durrazzini said, “Par che i cieli cascin addosso”.’ As if the skies were about to collapse on top of you.1

  Byron descended upon Pisa that evening, and the lights of the Palazzo Lanfranchi blazed across the waters of the Arno until late into the night. The next day, 2 November, Shelley paid a formal call, and was profusely greeted, thanked and presented with a copy of Byron’s new poem Cain. La Guiccioli now took up her official residence: Shelley had already pointed out to Edward Williams, some days earlier, when they were arranging his Lordship’s furniture, that Byron’s massive bed sported the Byron arms, ‘Crede Byron’. On the 6th, Byron, La Guiccioli and her brother Pietro Gamba returned the formal call to the Tre Palazzi, and social relations were now established. On the 7th Byron applied for permission to practise pistol-shooting in the grounds of the Palazzo Lanfranchi, and had his request courteously but firmly refused: no fire-arms were permitted to be used within the city walls.