by Mary Shelley
She had kept up correspondence with Godwin, and her acquaintance with the Shelleys was half made before she saw them. She conceived an immediate affection for Mary, as well for her own as for her mother’s sake, and was to prove a constant and valuable friend, not to her only, but to Shelley, and most especially to Clare.
After a week in Florence, Mary’s journal was resumed.
Saturday, October 9. — Arrive at Florence. Read Massinger. Shelley begins Clarendon; reads Massinger, and Plato’s Republic. Clare has her first singing lesson on Saturday. Go to the opera and see a beautiful ballet
Monday, October 11. — Read Horace; work. Go to the Gallery. Shelley finishes the first volume of Clarendon. Read the Little Thief.
Wednesday, October 20. — Finish the First Book of Horace’s Odes. Work, walk, read, etc. On Saturday letters are sent to England. On Tuesday one to Venice. Shelley visits the Galleries. Reads Spenser and Clarendon aloud.
Thursday, October 28. — Work; read; copy Peter Bell. Monday night a great fright with Charles Clairmont. Shelley reads Clarendon aloud and Plato’s Republic. Walk. On Thursday the protest from the Bankers. Shelley writes to them, and to Peacock, Longdill, and H. Smith.
Tuesday, November 9. — Read Madame de Sevigné. Bad news from London. Shelley reads Clarendon aloud, and Plato. He writes to Papa.
On the 12th of November a son was born to the Shelleys, and brought the first true balm of consolation to his poor mother’s heart.
“You may imagine,” wrote Shelley to Leigh Hunt, “that this is a great relief and a great comfort to me amongst all my misfortunes.... Poor Mary begins (for the first time) to look a little consoled; for we have spent, as you may imagine, a miserable five months.”
The child was healthy and pretty, and very like William. Neither Mary’s strength nor her spirits were altogether re-established for some time, but the birth of “Percy Florence” was, none the less, the beginning of a new life for her. She turned, with the renewed energy of hope, to her literary work and studies. One of her first tasks was to transcribe the just written fourth act of Prometheus Unbound. She had work of her own on hand too; a historical novel, Castruccio, Prince of Lucca (afterwards published as Valperga), a laborious but very congenial task, which occupied her for many months.
And indeed all the solace of new and tender ties, all the animating interest of intellectual pursuits, was sorely needed to counteract the wearing effect of harassing cares and threatening calamities. Godwin was now being pressed for the accumulated unpaid house-rent of many years; so many that, when the call came, it was unexpected by him, and he challenged its justice. He had engaged in a law-suit on the matter, which he eventually lost. The only point which appeared to admit of no reasonable doubt was that Shelley would shortly be called upon to find a large sum of money for him, and this at a time when he was himself in unexpected pecuniary straits, owing to the non-arrival of his own remittances from England — a circumstance rendered doubly vexatious by the fact that a large portion of the money was pledged to Henry Reveley for the furtherance of his steamboat. A draft for £200, destined for this purpose, was returned, protested by Shelley’s bankers. And though the money was ultimately recovered, its temporary loss caused no small alarm. Meanwhile every mail brought letters from Godwin of the most harrowing nature; the philosophy which he inculcated in a case of bereavement was null and void where impending bankruptcy was concerned. He well knew how to work on his daughter’s feelings, and he did not spare her. Poor Shelley was at his wits’ end.
“Mary is well,” he wrote (in December) to the Gisbornes; “but for this affair in London I think her spirits would be good. What shall I, what can I, what ought I to do? You cannot picture to yourself my perplexity.”
It appeared not unlikely that he might even have to go to England, a journey for which his present state of health quite unfitted him, and which he could not but be conscious would be no permanent remedy, but only a temporary alleviation, of Godwin’s thoroughly unsound circumstances. Mary, in her grief for her father, began to think that the best thing for him might be to leave England altogether and settle abroad; an idea from which Mrs. Mason, with her strong sagacity, earnestly dissuaded her.
Her views on the point were expressed in a letter to Shelley Mary had written asking her if she could give Charles Clairmont any introductions at Vienna, where he had now gone to seek his fortune as a teacher of languages; and also begging for such assistance as she might be able to lend in the matter of obtaining access to historical documents or other MS. bearing on the subjects of Mary’s projected novel.
Mrs. Mason to Shelley.
My dear Sir — I deferred answering your letter till this post in hopes of being able to send some recommendations for your friend at Vienna, in which I have been disappointed; and I have now also a letter from my dear Mary; so I will answer both together. It gives me great pleasure to hear such a good account of the little boy and his mother.... I am sorry to perceive that your visit to Pisa will be so much retarded; but I admire Mary’s courage and industry. I sincerely regret that it is not in my power to be of service to her in this undertaking.... All I can say is, that when you have got all you can there (where I suppose the manuscript documents are chiefly to be found) and that you come to this place, I have scarcely any doubt of being able to obtain for you many books on the subject which interests you. Probably everything in print which relates to it is as easy to be had here as at Florence.... I am very sorry indeed to think that Mr. Godwin’s affairs are in such a bad way, and think he would be much happier if he had nothing to do with trade; but I am afraid he would not be comfortable out of England. You who are young do not mind the thousand little wants that men of his age are not habituated to; and I, who have been so many years a vagabond on the face of the earth, have long since forgotten them; but I have seen people of my age much discomposed at the absence of long-accustomed trifles; and though philosophy supports in great matters, it seldom vanquishes the small everydayisms of life. I say this that Mary may not urge her father too much to leave England. It may sound odd, but I can’t help thinking that Mrs. Godwin would enjoy a tour in foreign countries more than he would. The physical inferiority of women sometimes teaches them to support or overlook little inconveniences better than men.
“I am very sorry,” she writes to Mary in another letter, “to find you still suffer from low spirits. I was in hopes the little boy would have been the best remedy for that. Words of consolation are but empty sounds, for to time alone it belongs to wear out the tears of affliction. However, a woman who gives milk should make every exertion to be cheerful on account of the child she nourishes.”
Whether the plan for Godwin’s expatriation was ever seriously proposed to him or not, it was, at any rate, never carried out. But none the less for this did the Shelleys live in the shadow of his gloom, which co-operated with their own pecuniary strait, previously alluded to, and with the nipping effects of an unwontedly severe winter, to make life still difficult and dreary for them.
“Shelley Calderonised on the late weather,” wrote Mary to Mrs. Gisborne; “he called it an epic of rain with an episode of frost, and a few similes concerning fine weather. We have heard from England, although not from the Bankers; but Peacock’s letter renders the affair darker than ever. Ah! my dear friend, you, in your slow and sure way of proceeding, ought hardly to have united yourself to our eccentric star. I am afraid that you will repent it, and it grieves us both more than you can imagine that all should have gone so ill; but I think we may rest assured that this is delay, and not loss; it can be nothing else. I write in haste — a carriage at the door to take me out, and Percy asleep on my knee. Adieu. Charles is at Vienna by this time.”...
They had intended remaining six months at Florence, but the place suited Shelley so ill that they took advantage of the first favourable change in the weather, at the end of January, to remove to Pisa, where the climate was milder, and where they now had pleasant friends in the Masons at “C
asa Silva.” They wished, too, to consult the celebrated Italian surgeon, Vaccà, on the subject of Shelley’s health. Vaccà’s advice took the shape of an earnest exhortation to him to abstain from drugs and remedies, to live a healthy life, and to leave his complaint, as far as possible, to nature. And, though he continued liable to attacks of pain and illness, and on one occasion had a severe nervous attack, the climate of Pisa proved in the end more suitable to him than any other, and for more than two years he remained there or in the immediate neighbourhood. He and Mary were never more industrious than at this time; reading extensively, and working together on a translation of Spinoza they had begun at Florence, and which occupied them, at intervals, for many months. Little Percy, a most healthy and satisfactory infant, had in March an attack of measles, but so slight as to cause no anxiety. Once, however, during the summer they had a fright about him, when an unusually alarming letter from her father upset Mary so much as to cause in her nursling, through her, symptoms of an illness similar to that which had destroyed little Clara. On this occasion she authorised Shelley, at his earnest request, to intercept future letters of the kind, an authority of which he had to avail himself at no distant date, telling Godwin that his domestic peace, Mary’s health and happiness, and his child’s life, could no longer be entirely at his mercy.
No wonder that his own nervous ailments kept their hold of him. And to make matters better for him and for Mary, Paolo, the rascally Italian servant whom they had dismissed at Naples, now concocted a plot for extorting money from Shelley by accusing him of frightful crimes. Legal aid had to be called in to silence him. To this end they employed an attorney of Leghorn, named Del Rosso, and, for convenience of communication, they occupied for a few weeks Casa Ricci, the Gisbornes’ house there, the owners being absent in England. Shelley made Henry Reveley’s workshop his study. Hence he addressed his poetical “Letter to Maria Gisborne,” and here too it was that “on a beautiful summer evening while wandering among the lanes, whose myrtle hedges were the bowers of the fireflies (they) heard the carolling of the skylark, which inspired one of the most beautiful of his poems.”
If external surroundings could have made them happy they might have been so now, but Shelley, though in better health, was very nervous. Paolo’s scandal and the legal affair embittered his life, to an extent difficult indeed to estimate, for it is certain that for some one else’s sake, though whose sake has never transpired, he had accepted when at Naples responsibilities at once delicate and compromising. Paolo had knowledge of the matter, and used this knowledge partly to revenge himself on Shelley for dismissing him from his service, partly to try and extort money from him by intimidation. The Shelleys hoped they had “crushed him” with Del Rosso’s help, but they could not be certain, because, as Mary wrote to Miss Curran, they “could only guess at his accomplices.” With Shelley in a state of extreme nervous irritability, with Mary deprived of repose by her anguish on her father’s account and her feverish anxiety to help him, with Clare unsettled and miserable about Allegra, venting her misery by writing to Byron letters unreasonable and provoking, though excusable, and then regretting having sent them, they were not likely to be the most cheerful or harmonious of trios.
The weather became intolerably hot by the end of August, and they migrated to Casa Prinni, at the Baths of S. Giuliano di Pisa. The beauty of this place, and the delightful climate, refreshed and invigorated them all. They spent two or three days in seeing Lucca and the country around, when Shelley wrote the Witch of Atlas. Exquisite poem as it is, it was, in Mary’s mood of the moment, a disappointment to her. Ever since the Cenci she had been strongly impressed with the conviction that if he could but write on subjects of universal human interest, instead of indulging in those airy creations of fancy which demand in the reader a sympathetic, but rare, quality of imagination, he would put himself more in touch with his contemporaries, who so greatly misunderstood him, and that, once he had elicited a responsive feeling in other men, this would be a source of profound happiness and of fresh and healthy inspiration to himself. “I still think I was right,” she says, woman-like, in the Notes to the Poems of 1820, written long after Shelley’s death. So from one point of view she undoubtedly was, but there are some things which cannot be constrained. Shelley was Shelley, and at the moment when he was moved to write a poem like the Witch of Atlas, it was useless to wish that it had been something quite different.
His next poem was to be inspired by a human subject, and perhaps then poor Mary would have preferred a second Witch of Atlas.
CHAPTER XIII
September 1820-August 1821
The baths were of great use to Shelley in allaying his nervous irritability. Such an improvement in him could not be without a corresponding beneficial effect on Mary. In the study of Greek, which she had begun with him at Leghorn, she found a new and wellnigh inexhaustible fund of intellectual pleasure. Their life, though very quiet, was somewhat more varied than it had been at Leghorn, partly owing to their being within easy reach of Pisa and of their friends at Casa Silva.
The Gisbornes had returned from England, and, during a short absence of Clare’s, Mary tried, but ineffectually, to persuade Mrs. Gisborne to come and occupy her room for a time. Some circumstance had arisen which led shortly after to a misunderstanding between the two families, soon over, but painful while it lasted. It was probably connected with the abandonment of the projected steamboat; Henry Reveley, while in England, having changed his mind and reconsidered his future plans.
In October a curiously wet season set in.
Journal, Wednesday, October 18. — Rain till 1 o’clock. At sunset the arch of cloud over the west clears away; a few black islands float in the serene; the moon rises; the clouds spot the sky, but the depth of heaven is clear. The nights are uncommonly warm. Write. Shelley reads Hyperion aloud. Read Greek.
My thoughts arise and fade in solitude;
The verse that would invest them melts away
Like moonlight in the heaven of spreading day.
How beautiful they were, how firm they stood,
Flecking the starry sky like woven pearl.
Friday, October 20. — Shelley goes to Florence. Write. Read Greek. Wind N.W., but more cloudy than yesterday, yet sometimes the sun shines out; the wind high. Read Villani.
Saturday, October 21. — Rain in the night and morning; very cloudy; not an air stirring; the leaves of the trees quite still. After a showery morning it clears up somewhat, and the sun shines. Read Villani, and ride to Pisa.
Sunday, October 22. — Rainy night and rainy morning; as bad weather as is possible in Italy. A little patience and we shall have St. Martin’s summer. At sunset the arch of clear sky appears where it sets, becoming larger and larger, until at 7 o’clock the dark clouds are alone over Monte Nero; Venus shines bright in the clear azure, and the trunks of the trees are tinged with the silvery light of the rising moon. Write, and read Villani. Shelley returns with Medwin. Read Sismondi.
Of Tom Medwin, Shelley’s cousin and great admirer, who now for the first time appeared on the scene, they were to see, if anything, more than they wished.
He was a lieutenant on half-pay, late of the 8th Dragoons; much addicted to literature, and with no mean opinion of his own powers in that line.
Journal, Tuesday, October 24. — Rainy night and morning; it does not rain in the afternoon. Shelley and Medwin go to Pisa. Walk; write.
Wednesday, October 25. — Rain all night. The banks of the Serchio break, and by dark all the baths are overflowed. Water four feet deep in our house. “The weather fine.”
This flood brought their stay at the Baths to a sudden end. As soon as they could get lodgings they returned to Pisa. Here, not long after, Medwin fell ill, and was six weeks invalided in their house. They showed him the greatest kindness; Shelley nursing him like a brother. His society was, for a time, a tolerably pleasant change; he knew Spanish, and read with Shelley a great deal in that language, but he had no depth or breadth of
mind, and his literary vanity and egotism made him at last what Mary Shelley described as a seccatura, for which the nearest English equivalent is, a bore.
Journal, Sunday, November 12. — Percy’s birthday. A divine day; sunny and cloudless; somewhat cold in the evening. 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. Read Corinne. Write.
Monday, November 13. — Finish Corinne. Write. My eyes keep me from all study; this is very provoking.
Tuesday, November 14. — Write. Read Homer, Targione, and Spanish. A rainy day. Shelley reads Calderon.
Thursday, November 23. — Write. Read Greek and Spanish. Medwin ill. Play at chess.