by Mary Shelley
On the 8th of December Mary records —
Go on the sea with Shelley. Visit Capo Miseno, the Elysian Fields, Avernus, Solfatara. The Bay of Baiae is beautiful, but we are disappointed by the various places we visit.
The impression of the scene, however, remained after the temporary disappointment had been forgotten, and she sketched it from memory many years later in the fanciful introduction to her romance of The Last Man, the story of which purports to be a tale deciphered from sibylline leaves, picked up in the caverns.
Shelley, however, suffered from extreme depression, which, out of solicitous consideration for Mary, he disguised as much as possible under a mask of cheerfulness, insomuch that she never fully realised what he endured at this time until she read the mournful poems written at Naples, after he who wrote them had passed for ever out of sight.
She blamed herself then for what seemed to her her blindness, — for having perhaps let slip opportunities of cheering him which she would have sold her soul to recall when it was too late. That he, at the time, felt in her no such want of sympathy or help is shown by his concluding words in the advertisement of Rosalind and Helen, and Lines written among the Euganean Hills, dated Naples, 20th December, where he says of certain lines “which image forth the sudden relief of a state of deep despondency by the radiant visions disclosed by the sudden burst of an Italian sunrise in autumn on the highest peak of those delightful mountains,” that, if they were not erased, it was “at the request of a dear friend, with whom added years of intercourse only add to my apprehension of its value, and who would have had more right than any one to complain that she has not been able to extinguish in me the very power of delineating sadness.”
Much of this sadness was due to physical suffering, but external causes of anxiety and vexation were not wanting. One was the discovery of grave misconduct on the part of their Italian servant, Paolo. An engagement had been talked of between him and the Swiss nurse Elise, but the Shelleys, who thought highly of Elise and by no means highly of Paolo, tried to dissuade her from the idea. An illness of Elise’s revealed the fact that an illicit connection had been formed. The Shelleys, greatly distressed, took the view that it would not do to throw Elise on the world without in some degree binding Paolo to do his duty towards her, and they had them married. How far this step was well-judged may be a matter of opinion. Elise was already a mother when she entered the Shelleys service. Whether a woman already a mother was likely to do better for being bound for life to a man whom they “knew to be a rascal” may reasonably be doubted even by those who hold the marriage-tie, as such, in higher honour than the Shelleys did. But whether the action was mistaken or not, it was prompted by the sincerest solicitude for Elise’s welfare, a solicitude to be repaid, at no distant date, by the basest ingratitude. Meanwhile Mary lost her nurse, and, it may be assumed, a valuable one; for any one who studies the history of this and the preceding years must see all three of the poor doomed children throve as long as Elise was in charge of them.
Clare was ailing, and anxious too; how could it be otherwise? Just before Allegra’s third birthday, Mary received a letter from Mrs. Hoppner which was anything but reassuring. It gave an unsatisfactory account of the child, who did not thrive in the climate of Venice, and a still more unsatisfactory account of Byron.
Il faut espérer qu’elle se changera pour son mieux quand il ne sera plus si froid; mais je crois toujours que c’est très malheureux que Miss Clairmont oblige cette enfant de vivre à Venise, dont le climat est nuisible en tout au physique de la petite, et vraîment, pour ce que fera son père, je le trouve un peu triste d’y sacrifier l’enfant. My Lord continue de vivre dans une débauche affreuse qui tôt ou tard le menera a sà ruine....
Quant à moi, je voudrois faire tout ce qui est en mon pouvoir pour cette enfant, que je voudrois bien volontiers rendre aussi heureuse que possible le temps qu’elle restera avec nous; car je crains qu’après elle devra toujours vivre avec des étrangers, indifferents à son sort. My Lord bien certainement ne la rendra jamais plus à sa mère; ainsi il n’y a rien de bon à espérer pour cette chère petite.
This letter, if she saw it, may well have made Clare curse the day when she let Allegra go.
Still, after they returned to Rome at the beginning of March, a brighter time set in.
Journal, Friday, March 5. — After passing over the beautiful hills of Albano, and traversing the Campagna, we arrive at the Holy City again, and see the Coliseum again.
All that Athens ever brought forth wise,
All that Afric ever brought forth strange,
All that which Asia ever had of prize,
Was here to see. Oh, marvellous great change!
Rome living was the world’s sole ornament;
And dead, is now the world’s sole monument.
Sunday, March 7. — Move to our lodgings. A rainy day. Visit the Coliseum. Read the Bible.
Monday, March 8. — Visit the Museum of the Vatican. Read the Bible.
Tuesday, March 9. — Shelley and I go to the Villa Borghese. Drive about Rome. Visit the Pantheon. Visit it again by moonlight, and see the yellow rays fall through the roof upon the floor of the temple. Visit the Coliseum.
Wednesday, March 10. — Visit the Capitol, and see the most divine statues.
Not one of the party but was revived and invigorated by the beauty and overpowering interest of the surrounding scenes, and the delight of a lovely Italian spring. To Shelley it was life itself.
“The charm of the Roman climate,” says Mrs. Shelley, “helped to clothe his thoughts in greater beauty than they had ever worn before. And as he wandered among the ruins, made one with nature in their decay, or gazed on the Praxitelean shapes that throng the Vatican, the Capitol, and the palaces of Rome, his soul imbibed forms of loveliness which became a portion of itself.”
The visionary drama of Prometheus Unbound, which had haunted, yet eluded him so long, suddenly took life and shape, and stood before him, a vivid reality. During his first month at Rome he completed it in its original three-act form. The fourth act was an afterthought, and was added at a later date.
For a short, enchanted time — his health renewed, the deadening years forgotten, his susceptibilities sharpened, not paralysed, by recent grief — he gave himself up to the vision of the realisation of his life-dream; the disappearance of evil from the earth.
“He believed,” wrote Mary Shelley, “that mankind had only to will that there should be no evil, and there would be none.... That man should be so perfectionised as to be able to expel evil from his own nature, and from the greater part of the creation was the cardinal point of his system. And the subject he loved best to dwell on, was the image of one warring with the Evil Principle, oppressed not only by it, but by all, even the good, who were deluded into considering evil a necessary portion of humanity. A victim full of fortitude and hope, and the spirit of triumph emanating from a reliance in the ultimate omnipotence of good.”
“This poem,” he himself says, “was chiefly written upon the mountainous ruins of the Baths of Caracalla, among the flowers, glades, and thickets of odoriferous blossoming trees, which are extended in ever winding labyrinths upon its immense platforms and dizzy arches suspended in the air. The bright blue sky of Rome, and the effect of the vigorous awakening of spring in that divinest climate, and the new life with which it drenches the spirits even to intoxication, were the inspiration of this drama.”
And while he wrought and wove the radiant web of his poem, Mary, excited to greatest enthusiasm by the treasures of sculpture at Rome, and infected by the atmosphere of art around her, took up again her favourite pursuit of drawing, which she had discontinued since going to Marlow, and worked at it many hours a day, sometimes all day. She was writing, too; a thoroughly congenial occupation, at once soothing and stimulating to her. She studied the Bible, with the keen fresh interest of one who comes new to it, and she read Livy and Montaigne.
Little William was thriving, and growin
g more interesting every day. His beauty and promise and angelic sweetness made him the pet and darling of all who knew him, while to his parents he was a perpetual source of ever fresh and increasing delight. And his mother looked forward to the birth in autumn of another little one who might, in some measure, fill the place of her lost Clara.
Clare, who, also, was in better health, was not behindhand in energy or industry. Music was her favourite pursuit; she took singing-lessons from a good master and worked hard.
They led a somewhat less secluded life than at Naples, and at the house of Signora Dionizi, a Roman painter and authoress (described by Mary Shelley as “very old, very miserly, and very mean”), Mary and Clare, at any rate, saw a little of Italian society. For this, however, Shelley did not care, nor was he attracted by any of the few English with whom he came in contact. Yet he felt his solitude. In April, when the strain of his work was over, his spirits drooped, as usual; and he longed then for some congenial distraction, some human help to bear the burden of life till the moment of weakness should have passed. But the fount of inspiration, the source of temporary elation and strength, had not been exhausted by Prometheus.
On the 22d of April Mary notes —
Visit the Palazzo Corunna, and see the picture of Beatrice Cenci.
The interest in the old idea was revived in him; he became engrossed in the subject, and soon after his “lyrical drama” was done, he transferred himself to this other, completely different work. There was no talk, now, of passing it on to Mary, and indeed she may well have recoiled from the unmitigated horrors of the tale. But, though he dealt with it himself, Shelley still felt on unfamiliar ground, and, as he proceeded, he submitted what he wrote to Mary for her judgment and criticism; the only occasion on which he consulted her about any work of his during its progress towards completion.
Late in April they made the acquaintance of one English (or rather, Irish) lady, who will always be gratefully remembered in connection with the Shelleys.
This was Miss Curran, a daughter of the late Irish orator, who had been a friend of Godwin’s, and to whose death Mary refers in one of her letters from Marlow.
Mary may, perhaps, have met her in Skinner Street; in any case, the old association was one link between them, and another was afforded by similarity in their present interests and occupations. Mary was very keen about her drawing and painting. Miss Curran had taste, and some skill, and was vigorously prosecuting her art-studies in Rome. Portrait painting was her especial line, and each of the Shelley party, at different times, sat to her; so that during the month of May they met almost daily, and became well acquainted.
This new interest, together with the unwillingness to bring to an end a time at once so peaceful and so fruitful, caused them once and again to postpone their departure, originally fixed for the beginning of May. They stayed on longer than it is safe for English people to remain in Rome. Ah! why could no presentiment warn them of impending calamity? Could they, like the Scottish witch in the ballad, have seen the fatal winding-sheet creeping and clinging ever higher and higher round the wraith of their doomed child, they would have fled from the face of Death. But they had no such foreboding.
Not a fortnight after his portrait had been taken by Miss Curran, William showed signs of illness. How it was that, knowing him to be so delicate, — having learned by bitterest experience the danger of southern heat to an English-born infant, — having, as early as April, suspected the Roman air of causing “weakness and depression, and even fever” to Shelley himself, how, after all this, they risked staying in Rome through May is hard to imagine.
They were to pay for their delay with the best part of their lives. William sickened on the 25th, but had so far recovered by the 30th that his parents, though they saw they ought to leave Rome as soon as he was fit to travel, were in no immediate anxiety about him, and were making their summer plans quite in a leisurely way; Mary writing to ask Mrs. Gisborne to help them with some domestic arrangements, begging her to inquire about houses at Lucca or the Baths of Pisa, and to engage a servant for her.
The journal for this and the following days runs —
Sunday, May 30. — Read Livy, and Persiles and Sigismunda. Draw. Spend the evening at Miss Curran’s.
Monday, May 31. — Read Livy, and Persiles and Sigismunda. Draw. Walk in the evening.
Tuesday, June 1. — Drawing lesson. Read Livy. Walk by the Tiber. Spend the evening with Miss Curran.
Wednesday, June 2. — See Mr. Vogel’s pictures. William becomes very ill in the evening.
Thursday, June 3. — William is very ill, but gets better towards the evening. Miss Curran calls.
Mary took this opportunity of begging her friend to write for her to Mrs. Gisborne, telling her of the inevitable delay in their journey.
Rome, Thursday, 3d June 1819.
Dear Mrs. Gisborne — Mary tells me to write for her, for she is very unwell, and also afflicted. Our poor little William is at present very ill, and it will be impossible to quit Rome so soon as we intended. She begs you, therefore, to forward the letters here, and still to look for a servant for her, as she certainly intends coming to Pisa. She will write to you a day or two before we set out.
William has a complaint of the stomach; but fortunately he is attended by Mr. Bell, who is reckoned even in London one of the first English surgeons.
I know you will be glad to hear that both Mary and Mr. Shelley would be well in health were it not for the dreadful anxiety they now suffer.
Emelia Curran.
Two days after, Mary herself wrote a few lines to Mrs. Gisborne.
5th June 1819.
William is in the greatest danger. We do not quite despair, yet we have the least possible reason to hope.
I will write as soon as any change takes place. The misery of these hours is beyond calculation. The hopes of my life are bound up in him. — Ever yours affectionately,
M. W. S.
I am well, and so is Shelley, although he is more exhausted by watching than I am. William is in a high fever.
Sixty death-like hours did Shelley watch, without closing his eyes. Clare, her own troubles forgotten in this moment of mortal suspense, was a devoted nurse.
As for Mary, her very life ebbed with William’s, but as yet she bore up. There was no real hope from the first moment of the attack, but the poor child made a hard struggle for life. Two more days and nights of anguish and terror and deadly sinking of heart, — and then, in the blank page following June 4, the last date entered in the diary, are the words —
The journal ends here. — P. B. S.
On Monday, the 7th of June, at noonday, William died.
CHAPTER XII
June 1819-September 1820
It was not fifteen months since they had all left England; Shelley and Mary with the sweet, blue-eyed “Willmouse,” and the pretty baby, Clara, so like her father; Clare and the “bluff, bright-eyed little Commodore,” Allegra; the Swiss nurse and English nursemaid; a large and lively party, in spite of cares and anxieties and sorrows to come. In one short, spiritless paragraph Mary, on the 4th of August, summed up such history as there was of the sad two months following on the blow which had left her childless.
Journal, Wednesday, August 4, 1819, Leghorn (Mary). — I begin my journal on Shelley’s birthday. We have now lived five years together; and if all the events of the five years were blotted out, I might be happy; but to have won and then cruelly to have lost, the associations of four years, is not an accident to which the human mind can bend without much suffering.
Since I left home I have read several books of Livy, Clarissa Harlowe, the Spectator, a few novels, and am now reading the Bible, and Lucan’s Pharsalia, and Dante. Shelley is to-day twenty-seven years of age. Write; read Lucan and the Bible. Shelley writes the Cenci, and reads Plutarch’s Lives. The Gisbornes call in the evening. Shelley reads Paradise Lost to me. Read two cantos of the Purgatorio.
Three days after William’s death, Shelley,
Mary, and Clare had left Rome for Leghorn. Once more they were alone together — how different now from the three heedless young things who, just five years before, had set out to walk through France with a donkey!
Shelley, then, a creature of feelings and theories, full of unbalanced impulses, vague aspirations and undeveloped powers; inexperienced in everything but uncomprehended pain and the dim consciousness of half-realised mistakes. Mary, the fair, quiet, thoughtful girl, earnest and impassioned, calm and resolute, as ignorant of practical life as precocious in intellect; with all her mind worshipping the same high ideals as Shelley’s, and with all her heart worshipping him as the incarnation of them. Clare her very opposite; excitable and enthusiastic, demonstrative and capricious, clever, but silly; with a mind in which a smattering of speculative philosophy, picked up in Godwin’s house, contended for the mastery with such social wisdom as she had picked up in a boarding school. Both of them mere children in years. Now poor Clare was older without being much wiser, saddened yet not sobered; suffering bitterly from her ambiguous position, yet unable or unwilling to put an end to it; the worse by her one great error, which had brought her to dire grief; the better by one great affection — for her child, — the source of much sorrow, it is true, but also of truest joy of self-devotion, and the only instrument of such discipline that ever she had.
Shelley had found what he wanted, the faithful heart which to his own afforded peace and stability and the balance which, then, he so much needed; a kindred mind, worthy of the best his had to give; knowing and expecting that best, too, and satisfied with nothing short of it. And his best had responded. In these few years he had realised powers the extent of which could not have been foretold, and which might, without that steady sympathy and support, have remained unfulfilled possibilities for ever. In spite of the far-reaching consequences of his errors, in spite of torturing memories, in spite of ill-health, anxiety, poverty, vexation, and strife, the Shelley of Queen Mab had become the Shelley of Prometheus Unbound and the Cenci.