by Mary Shelley
Shelley is tolerably well in health; the hot weather has done him good. We have been in high debate — nor have we come to any conclusion — concerning the land or sea journey to Naples. We have been thinking that when we want to go, although the equinox will be past, yet the equinoctial winds will hardly have spent themselves; and I cannot express to you how I fear a storm at sea with two such young children as William and Clara. Do you know the periods when the Mediterranean is troubled, and when the wintry halcyon days come? However, it may be we shall see you before we proceed southward.
We have been reading Eustace’s Tour through Italy; I do not wonder the Italians reprinted it. Among other select specimens of his way of thinking, he says that the Romans did not derive their arts and learning from the Greeks; that Italian ladies are chaste, and the lazzaroni honest and industrious; and that, as to assassination and highway robbery in Italy, it is all a calumny — no such things were ever heard of. Italy was the garden of Eden, and all the Italians Adams and Eves, until the blasts of hell (i.e. the French — for by that polite name he designates them) came. By the bye, an Italian servant stabbed an English one here — it was thought dangerously at first, but the man is doing better.
I have scribbled a long letter, and I daresay you have long wished to be at the end of it. Well, now you are; so my dear Mrs. Gisborne, with best remembrances, yours, obliged and affectionately,
Mary W. Shelley.
From Florence, where he arrived on the 20th, Shelley wrote to Mary, telling her that Clare had changed her intention of going in person to Venice, and had decided on the more politic course of remaining herself at Fusina or Padua, while Shelley went on to see Byron.
“Well, my dearest Mary,” he went on, “are you very lonely? Tell me truth, my sweetest, do you ever cry? I shall hear from you once at Venice and once on my return here. If you love me, you will keep up your spirits; and at all events tell me truth about it, for I assure you I am not of a disposition to be flattered by your sorrow, though I should be by your cheerfulness, and above all by seeing such fruits of my absence as was produced when I was at Geneva.”
It was during Shelley’s absence with Byron on their voyage round the lake of Geneva that Mary had begun to write Frankenstein. But on the day when she received this letter she was very uneasy about her little girl, who was seriously unwell from the heat. On writing to Shelley she told him of this; and, from his answer, one may infer that she had suggested the advisability of taking the child to Venice for medical advice.
Padua, Mezzogiorno.
My best Mary — I found at Mount Selica a favourable opportunity for going to Venice, when I shall try to make some arrangement for you and little Ca to come for some days, and shall meet you, if I do not write anything in the meantime, at Padua on Thursday morning. Clare says she is obliged to come to see the Medico, whom we missed this morning, and who has appointed as the only hour at which he can be at leisure, 8 o’clock in the morning. You must, therefore, arrange matters so that you should come to the Stella d’Oro a little before that hour, a thing only to be accomplished by setting out at half-past 3 in the morning. You will by this means arrive at Venice very early in the day, and avoid the heat, which might be bad for the babe, and take the time when she would at least sleep great part of the time. Clare will return with the return carriage, and I shall meet you, or send to you, at Padua. Meanwhile, remember Charles the First, and do you be prepared to bring at least some of Mirra translated; bring the book also with you, and the sheets of Prometheus Unbound, which you will find numbered from 1 to 26 on the table of the Pavilion. My poor little Clara; how is she to-day? Indeed, I am somewhat uneasy about her; and though I feel secure there is no danger, it would be very comfortable to have some reasonable person’s opinion about her. The Medico at Padua is certainly a man in great practice; but I confess he does not satisfy me. Am I not like a wild swan, to be gone so suddenly? But, in fact, to set off alone to Venice required an exertion. I felt myself capable of making it, and I knew that you desired it.... Adieu, my dearest love. Remember, remember Charles the First and Mirra. I have been already imagining how you will conduct some scenes. The second volume of St. Leon begins with this proud and true sentiment —
“There is nothing which the human mind can conceive which it may not execute.” Shakespeare was only a human being. Adieu till Thursday. — Your ever affectionate,
P. B. S.
His next letter, however, announced yet another revolution in Clare’s plans. Her heart failed her at the idea of remaining to endure her suspense all alone in a strange place; and so, braving the possible consequences of Byron’s discovering her move before he was informed of it, she went on with Shelley to Venice, and, the morning after their arrival, proceeded to Mr. Hoppner’s house. Here she was kindly welcomed by him and his wife, a pretty Swiss woman, with a sympathetic motherly heart, who knew all about her and Allegra. They insisted, too, on Shelley’s staying with them, and he was nothing loth to accept the offer, for Byron’s circle would not have suited him at all.
He was pleased with his hostess, something in whose appearance reminded him of Mary. “She has hazel eyes and sweet looks, rather Maryish,” he wrote. And in another letter he described her as
So good, so beautiful, so angelically mild that, were she wise too, she would be quite a Mary. But she is not very accomplished. Her eyes are like a reflection of yours; her manners are like yours when you know and like a person.
He could enjoy no pleasure without longing for Mary to share it, and from the moment he reached Venice he was planning impatiently for her to follow him, to experience with him the strange emotions aroused by the first sight of the wonderful city, and to make acquaintance with his new friends.
He lost no time in calling on Byron, who gave him a very friendly reception. Shelley’s intention on leaving Lucca was to go with his family to Florence, and the plan he urged on Byron was that Allegra should come to spend some time there with her mother. To this Byron objected, as likely to raise comment, and as a reopening of the whole question. He was, however, in an affable mood, and not indisposed to meet Shelley halfway. He had heard of Clare’s being at Padua, but nothing of her subsequent change of plan; and, assuming that the whole party were staying there, he offered to send Allegra as far as that, on a week’s visit. Finding that things were not as he supposed, and that Mrs. Shelley was likely to come presently to Venice, he proposed to lend them for some time a villa which he rented at Este, and to let Allegra stay with them. The offer was promptly and gratefully accepted by Shelley. The fact of Clare’s presence in Venice had, perforce, to be kept dark; for that there was no help; the great thing was to get her and Allegra away as soon as possible. He sent directions to Mary to pack up at once and travel with the least possible delay to Este. There he would meet her with Clare, Allegra, and Elise, who were to be established, with Mary’s little ones, at Byron’s villa, Casa Cappucini, while she and he proceeded to Venice.
When the letter came, Mary had the Gisbornes staying with her on a visit. For that reason, and on account of little Clara’s indisposition, the summons to depart so suddenly can hardly have been welcome; she obeyed it, however, and left the Bagni di Lucca on the 31st of August. Owing to delays about the passport, her journey took rather longer than they had expected. The intense heat of the weather, added to the fatigue of travelling and probably change of diet, seriously affected the poor baby, who, by the time they got to Este on 5th September, was dangerously ill. Shelley, who had been waiting for them impatiently, was also far from well, and their visit to Venice had to be deferred for more than a fortnight, during which Mary had time to hear enough of Venetian society to horrify and disgust her.
Journal, Saturday, September 5. — Arrive at Este. Poor Clara is dangerously ill. Shelley is very unwell, from taking poison in Italian cakes. He writes his drama of Prometheus. Read seven cantos of Dante. Begin to translate A Cajo Graccho of Monti, and Measure for Measure.
Wednesday, September 1
6. — Read the Filippo of Alfieri. Shelley and Clare go to Padua. He is very ill from the effects of his poison.
To Mrs. Gisborne she wrote as follows —
September 1818.
My dear Mrs. Gisborne — I hasten to write to you to say that we have arrived safe, and yet I can hardly call it safe, since the fatigue has given my poor Ca an attack of dysentery; and although she is now somewhat recovered from that disorder, she is still in a frightful state of weakness and fever, and is reduced to be so thin in this short time that you would hardly know her again.
The physician of Este is a stupid fellow; but there is one come from Padua, and who appears clever; so I hope under his care she will soon get well, although we are still in great anxiety concerning her. I found Mr. Shelley very anxious for our non-arrival, for, besides other delays, we were detained a whole day at Florence for a signature to our passport. The house at Este is exceedingly pleasant, with a large garden and quantities of excellent fruit. I have not yet been to Venice, and know not when I shall, since it depends upon the state of Clara’s health. I hope Mr. Reveley is quite recovered from his illness, and I am sure the baths did him a great deal of good. So now I suppose all your talk is how you will get to England. Shelley agrees with me that you could live very well for your £200 per annum in Marlow or some such town; and I am sure you would be much happier than in Italy. How all the English dislike it! The Hoppners speak with the greatest acrimony of the Italians, and Mr. Hoppner says that he was actually driven from Italian society by the young men continually asking him for money. Everything is saleable in Venice, even the wives of the gentry, if you pay well. It appears indeed a most frightful system of society. Well! when shall we see you again? Soon, I daresay. I am so much hurried that you will be kind enough to excuse the abruptness of this letter. I will write soon again, and in the meantime write to me. Shelley and Clare desire the kindest remembrances. — My dear Mrs. Gisborne, affectionately yours,
Mary W. S.
Casa Capuccini, Este.
Send our letters to this direction.
No more of the journal was written till the 24th, and in the meantime great trouble had fallen on the writers. Shelley was impatient for Clara to be within reach of better medical advice, and anxious to get Mary to Venice. He went forward himself on the 22d, returning next day as far as Padua to meet Mary and Clara, with Clare, who, however, only came over to Padua to see the Medico. The baby was very ill, and was getting worse every hour, but they judged it best to press on. In their hurry they had forgotten their passport, and had some difficulty in getting past the dogana in consequence. Shelley’s impetuosity carried all obstacles before it, and the soldiers on duty had to give way. On reaching Venice Mary went straight with her sick child to the inn, while Shelley hurried for the doctor. It was too late. When he got back (without the medical man) he found Mary well-nigh beside herself with distress. Another doctor had already been summoned, but little Clara was dying, and in an hour all was over.
This blow reduced Mary to “a kind of despair”; — the expression is Shelley’s. Mr. Hoppner, on hearing what had happened, insisted on taking them away at once from the inn to his house. Four days she spent in Venice after that, the first of which was a blank; of the second she merely records —
An idle day. Go to the Lido and see Albé there.
After that she roused herself. There was Shelley to be comforted and supported, there was Byron to be interviewed. One of her objects in coming had been to try and persuade him after all to let Allegra stay. So she nerved herself to pay this visit, and to go about and see something of Venice with Shelley.
Sunday, September 27. — Read fourth canto of Childe Harold. It rains. Go to the Doge’s Palace, Ponte dei Sospiri, etc. Go to the Academy with Mr. and Mrs. Hoppner, and see some fine pictures. Call at Lord Byron’s and see the Farmaretta.
Monday, September 28. — Go with Mrs. Hoppner and Cavaliere Mengaldo to the Library. Shopping. In the evening Lord Byron calls.
Tuesday, September 29. — Leave Venice, and arrive at Este at night. Clare is gone with the children to Padua.
Wednesday, September 30. — The chicks return. Transcribe Mazeppa. Go to the opera in the evening.
A quiet, sad fortnight at Este followed. An idle one it was not, for Shelley not only wrote Julian and Maddalo, but worked on portions of his drama of Prometheus Unbound, the idea of which had haunted him ever since he came to Italy. Clare, for the time, was happy with her child. Mary read several plays of Shakespeare and the lives of Alfieri and Tasso in Italian.
On the 12th of October she arrived once more at Venice with Shelley. She passed the greater part of her time there with the Hoppners, who were exceedingly friendly. Shelley visited Byron several times, probably trying to get an extension of leave for Allegra. In this, however, he must have failed, as on the 24th he went to Este to fetch her, returning with her on the 29th. Having restored the poor little girl to the Hoppners’ care, he and Mary went once more to Este, but this time only to prepare for departure. On the 5th of November the whole party, including Elise (who was not retained for Allegra’s service), left the Villa Capuccini and travelled by slow stages to Rome.
No further allusion to her recent bereavement is to be found in Mary’s journal. She attempted to behave like the Stoic her father had wished her to be. She had written to him of her affliction, and received the following answer from the philosopher —
Skinner Street, 27th October 1818.
My dear Mary — I sincerely sympathise with you in the affliction which forms the subject of your letter, and which I may consider as the first severe trial of your constancy and the firmness of your temper that has occurred to you in the course of your life; you should, however, recollect that it is only persons of a very ordinary sort, and of a pusillanimous disposition, that sink long under a calamity of this nature. I assure you such a recollection will be of great use to you. We seldom indulge long in depression and mourning except when we think secretly that there is something very refined in it, and that it does us honour.
Such a homily, at such a time, must have made Mary feel like a person of a very ordinary sort indeed. But she strove, only too hard, to carry out her father’s principles; for, by doing violence to her sensitive nature, she might crush but could not kill it. The passionate impulses of her mother were curiously mated in her with her father’s reflective temperament; and the noble courage which she inherited from Mary Wollstonecraft went hand in hand with somewhat of Godwin’s constitutional shrinking from any manifestation of emotion. And the effect of determinate, excessive self-restraint on a heart like hers was to render the crushed feelings morbid in their acuteness, and to throw on her spirits a load of endurance which was borne, indeed, but at ruinous cost, and operated largely, among other causes, to make her seem cold when she was really suffering.
At such times it was not altogether well for her that she was Shelley’s companion. For, when his health and spirits were good, he craved and demanded companionship, — personal, intellectual, playful, — companionship of all sorts; but when they ebbed, when his vitality was low, when the simultaneous exaltation of conception and labour of realisation — a tremendous expenditure of force — was over, and left him shattered, shaken, surprised at himself like one who in a dream falls from a height and awakens with the shock, — tired, and yet dull, — then the one panacea for him was animal spirits in some congenial acquaintance; whether a friend or a previous stranger mattered little, provided the personality was congenial and the spirits buoyant. Mary did her best, bravely and nobly. But the loss of a child was one thing to Shelley, another thing to her. She strove to overcome the low spirits from which she suffered. But endurance, though more heroic than spontaneous cheerfulness, is not to be compared with it in its benign effect on other people; nay, it may even have a depressing effect when a yielding to emotion “of the ordinary sort” may not. All these truths, however, do not become evident at once; like other life-experience they have to be spell
ed out by slow and painful degrees.
To seek for respite from grief or care in intellectual culture and the acquisition of knowledge was instinctive and habitual both in Shelley and in Mary. They visited Ferrara and Bologna, then travelled by a winding road among the Apennines to Terni, where they saw the celebrated waterfall —
It put me in mind of Sappho leaping from a rock, and her form vanishing as in the shape of a swan in the distance.
Friday, November 20. — We travel all day the Campagna di Roma — a perfect solitude, yet picturesque, and relieved by shady dells. We see an immense hawk sailing in the air for prey. Enter Rome. A rainy evening. Doganas and cheating innkeepers. We at length get settled in a comfortable hotel.
After one week in Rome, during which they visited as many of the wonders of the Eternal City as the time allowed, they journeyed on to Naples, reading Montaigne by the way.
At Naples they remained for three months. Of their life there Mary’s journal gives no account; she confines herself almost entirely to noting down the books they read, and one or two excursions. They lived in very great seclusion, greater than was good for them, but Shelley suffered much from ill-health, and not a little from its treatment by an unskilful physician. They read incessantly, — Livy, Dante, Sismondi, Winkelmann, the Georgics and Plutarch’s Lives, Gil Blas, and Corinne. They left no beautiful or interesting scene unvisited; they ascended Vesuvius, and made excursions to Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Paestum.