Chapter XIV: From Marlow to Italy (2)

After staying a month at Milan--a month broken by a brief trip to Como, whose beauty surpassed everything the poet had ever beheld, with the exception of the arbutus islands of Killarney,--the Shelleys in May, 1818, travelled with a diminished party (Allegra having been taken off their hands, and Elise being detained for awhile at Venice to attend upon her) to Pisa, whence, in a three or four days, they proceeded to Leghorn, where they stayed for something like a month, and made the acquaintance of three individuals, who have their several and very different places in the Shelleyan story,--(1) Mr. Gisborne, the gentleman of liberal views, scholarly attainments, failing affairs, familiarity with opium, and inexpressibly hideous nose, whom Shelley found an oppressive bore, and therefore had the best right to regard with disfavour; (2) the democratic and godless Mrs. Gisborne, who, though he found her ‘the antipodes of enthusiasm,’ became Shelley’s sympathetic tutor in Spanish, and was clever enough to draw from him the poetical epistle _To Maria Gisborne_, and also to draw from his purse a good deal of money for her boy’s advantage; and (3) Henry Reveley (Mrs. Gisborne’s son by her former husband), a youthful and penniless engineer, for whose benefit the poet was adroitly manipulated into thinking, that the thing above all other things likely to promote the happiness of the human species and bring about the comity of nations, for which all good republicans were praying, was a steamboat that,--built by the young engineer and no other man,--should ply between Leghorn and Marseilles, for the advantage of mankind, and the especial enrichment of the Gisbornes.

Mrs. Shelley and the ‘very amiable, accomplished, and completely unprejudiced’ Mrs. Maria Gisborne formed an enthusiastic friendship; Mary of course regarding with interest the woman of mature age, who had been Mary Wollstonecraft’s friend in the previous century, and might have been Mary Wollstonecraft’s successor in William Godwin’s affections, whilst Maria was quick to see that with management she might use Mrs. Shelley’s influence over her husband for the advantage of the young man, who, had his mother yielded to William Godwin’s scarcely flattering suit, would have been Mrs. Shelley’s brother-by-affinity. There was much talk between the new friends of widely different ages about Mary Wollstonecraft;--talk in which Mrs. Maria Gisborne gave a delightful account of the personal charm and graces, the intellectual address and multifarious virtues, of Gilbert Imlay’s victim. Whilst Mary was delighted, Maria (with proper maternal concern) bethought herself how Mary’s enthusiasm for her mother’s ancient friend might be turned to profit. The friendship was fruitful of much correspondence,--bright, sparkling, superlatively entertaining epistles by Mary, an admirable letter-writer; and no less characteristic, though far less commendable letters by Maria; the attitude Maria assumed to her partner in the friendship being clearly defined in the concluding words of a letter she wrote her dearest Mrs. Shelley in October, 1819,--the words conveying young Henry Reveley’s affectionate remembrances to ‘his good friends, _patron and patroness_.’

At the Bagni di Lucca--whither the Shelleys moved after tarrying at Leghorn for about a month--Paolo, the clever Italian servant, who could do anything from cooking a dinner to grooming a horse, appears on the Shelleyan record. The one thing this treasure of a servant could not or would not do was to keep his accounts accurately; the financial inaccuracies being always too distinctly to his own advantage, not to rouse suspicions of his honesty, even from the beginning of his connection with the poet. At the Bagni, where Mary and Claire took horse-exercise, and seldom failed to attend the Sunday _conversazione_, though they declined to dance, _Rosalind and Helen_ was finished at Mrs. Shelley’s request some time before the poet, on 17th August, 1818, started with Claire for Venice, leaving his wife (as her letter of that date to Mrs. Gisborne shows) to take care of the house and her two children;--a letter from which it also appears that, on bidding her husband and sister adieu, Mary (who pressed Mrs. Gisborne to ‘come and cheer her solitude’) expected them both to be away for a considerable time. The next six days, however, were fruitful of change in the plans and prospects of all three. Holding steadily to his resolve not to be drawn into renewal of his former intimacy with Claire, Byron received Shelley with exuberant cordiality, and showed so much consideration for the feelings of his discarded mistress, as to grant her the companionship of her child for a week at Padua, where he imagined Mrs. Shelley to be then staying with her children. How came he to conceive that, instead of being with her babes at the Bagni di Lucca, Mrs. Shelley was at Padua?

There is no need for more precise evidence that the business, to which Mrs. Shelley referred in her letter to Mrs. Gisborne, was Claire’s rather than Shelley’s business:--that in taking Claire from the Bagni di Lucca to Venice, Shelley was actuated by the hope of affecting by personal intercourse with Byron, what he had failed to accomplish by letters. Byron having made it more than clear that, whilst ready to receive Allegra, he had no wish to see the child’s mother, it may seem strange that Shelley could still hope to put matters in train, for Claire’s restoration to her poet’s affectionate regard. But circumstances countenanced the quickly disappointed hope. Byron having taken Allegra to his arms, with a reassuring show of paternal interest in her, information had come to Shelley and the sisters, that the child grew daily in her father’s favour. There had been correspondence between Mrs. Hoppner and the sisters-by-affinity. Happy in the possession of her own lovely little boy (already in his eighth month), the Consul-General’s wife commiserated the young mother who was separated from her lovely little girl. Interested in Byron, who was already consulting her about arrangements for Allegra’s welfare, and probably over-rating her influence over him, Mrs. Hoppner may well have imagined that in compassing his reconcilement with Allegra’s mother, she would use her influence no less beneficially for him, than for Claire and her child. At the same time it was natural for Shelley to conceive that Byron’s growing affection for his daughter would occasion a revival of his tenderness for the child’s mother,--tenderness that, if they were brought together in a happy moment, might result in the reunion of their hearts. It was under these circumstances and with this hope that Shelley and Claire started for Venice.

Making the journey from Padua in a gondola, the voyagers entered their Venetian hotel at midnight of Saturday, 23rd August, 1818. On the morrow (Sunday) they went from their breakfast-table to Mrs. Hoppner’s abode, where Shelley left Claire, on going off at three p.m. to call on Byron. It is told in _Julian and Maddalo_ how Shelley played with Allegra in the billiard-room of the Palazzo Moçenijo, whilst waiting for Byron. In a well-known letter from Shelley to his wife it is told how cordially he was received by the poet of _Childe Harold_, who, covering his visitor with flattering civilities, seemed ready to oblige him in every respect but one. As Byron had no desire to see Claire, but on the contrary wished her to keep out of his path, it was incumbent on the diplomatic Shelley to account for her appearance at Venice in a way that should not reveal too abruptly one purpose of her long journey. A statement that she had come all the way from the Bagni di Lucca, only to get a peep at her child, was no announcement for Byron to receive without suspicion. It might move him to quick anger. A statement that she had come so far for the mere delight of seeing him would cause him to blaze into wrath. For the moment it was necessary to attribute Claire’s arrival on the Grand Canal to maternal impulse; but it would be imprudent to ascribe the labour and expense of so long a journey to so slight a motive. But on being given to understand that Mrs. Shelley and her family were at Padua, Byron would think it only natural for Claire to run by water from the University town to Venice. Hence the white fib which caused Byron to think Mrs. Shelley at Padua,--the misconception, on which the wily negotiator between Claire and her former admirer hastened to base an entreaty, that she might be allowed to take her child to Padua for a few days:--the misconception that caused Byron to place I Cappucini (the Este villa he had recently taken off Hoppner’s hands) at his friends’ service, and urge Shelley to lose no time in carrying his wife and her babes to the rural retreat, some twenty miles distant from hot and stuffy Padua.

It is not surprising that Byron was thus quick to put I Cappucini at Shelley’s service. It was needful for him to show the Shelleys some hospitable civility, on their coming to his part of Italy. At the same time he could not think of entertaining them at his home on the Grand Canal. The Palazzo Moçenijo was no place for the entertainment of gentlewomen; and even had it been an establishment to which he could have invited gentlewomen with propriety, Byron would not have asked the Shelleys and Claire to stay with him there. To Shelley he would gladly have given bed and board in the Palazzo; but nothing could have induced the poet, ever hankering for reconcilement with his wife, to welcome (under the observation of all Venice) as guests to his house the two ladies, whose presence there would not fail to revive the revolting Genevese scandal. Wishing to pay the Shelleys a full measure of hospitable courtesy, he also wished to keep the ladies at a safe distance from Venice. At I Cappucini (a villa not generally known to be in his tenure) they would be out of his way and concealed from the Venetian scandal-mongers, whilst receiving from him a considerable civility. Hence the offer at which Shelley caught so quickly, that before going to bed for a second time at Venice he wrote off to Mary, ordering her to pack her traps, and come at once to Venice under Paolo’s escort.

Were there no other evidence to the point, the mere fact that for some ten weeks they were Byron’s guests at I Cappucini would of itself show, how little cause the Shelleys saw to resent his treatment of Claire. Indeed, why should they,--how could they, conceive themselves injured in the matter by Byron, who in every stage of the affair had acted precisely in accordance with the rules of the social arrangement, which Shelley commended as a graceful and wholesome substitute for lawful marriage? On coming to regard Lady Byron resentfully and Claire with affection, Byron had only exercised the sacred privilege of a Free-Contract spouse in giving his heart to Claire, to have and hold it until he should be moved to give it to some one else. On ceasing to regard Claire tenderly, he had, in so far as she was concerned, done nothing forbidden by the favourers of the Free Contract. On the contrary, in every step of the business he shaped his course by Free Contract morals. To Claire he had said, ‘Our felicity having perished, in obedience to the forces that cause human beings to love and cease from loving one another, you go your way, whilst I go mine. Leaving me to select another object of affection, do you give your heart to some one who wishes for it. We have been happy together; the time has come for us to seek happiness apart from one another,’ At the same time, still speaking like an honourable Lawless Lover, Byron said, ‘But I cannot allow you to suffer in your purse for your goodness to me. I will take charge of your child, rear it affectionately, provide for it liberally,’ What was there in this for the Shelleys to resent, however sorry they might be for poor Claire, the brevity of whose dominion over Byron’s volatile affections of course disappointed and saddened them? When Mr. Froude wrote, as though Shelley necessarily regarded Byron as Claire’s seducer, he only revealed his absolute ignorance of facts, comprising much of what is most singular and interesting as well as most painful in Shelley’s story.

It no more occurred to Shelley to take that view of Byron’s conduct to Claire, than it occurred to him to think of himself as Mary’s seducer. To the hour of his death Shelley never faltered in saying that Byron behaved well to Claire’s child. That the Shelleys saw nothing to condemn seriously in his treatment of Claire herself, however much they regretted his inability to love her for a longer period, is shown by the friendly relations they maintained with him, the idolatrous extravagance of Shelley’s admiration for him, and the regard in which even Mrs. Shelley held him for some time. Till her admiration of Byron was lowered, and her confidence in him shaken, by his vacillation about the _Liberal_ and his treatment of the Hunts, Mrs. Shelley was not wanting in enthusiasm for the poet with ‘a divine nature,’ though no doubt her enthusiasm had not the fervour of her husband’s admiration for the divine poet. Even so late as December, 1821 (_vide_ Lady Shelley’s _Shelley Memorials_) she wrote from Pisa to Mrs. Gisborne, ‘Lord Byron is now living very sociably, giving dinners to his male acquaintance and writing divinely. Perhaps by this time you have seen _Cain_, and will agree with us in thinking it his finest production.’ The woman who resented Byron’s treatment of her friends, the Hunts, never seems to have discovered any cause for cordial anger in his treatment of her sister Claire, and, indeed, it is not easy to discover what Shelley and Mary, with their views about marriage, could reasonably condemn in his treatment of Allegra’s mother. By others it has been made a ground of severe censure, that Byron omitted to provide for Claire’s failing years. But in extenuation of Byron’s misconduct in this particular, if not to his perfect justification, it may be urged that, whilst believing her to have a friend on whom she had a stronger claim than on himself, he knew how her future had been provided for by the will, in which he figured as one of Shelley’s two executors and trustees.

At Este, where he wrote _Julian and Maddalo_ and the _Lines written among the Euganean Hills_, Shelley sorrowed for the death of his little Clara, the second daughter born to him by his second wife. From Padua, whilst the infant was languishing into death, Shelley wrote, on 22nd September, 1818, to his wife, then nursing the sick babe at Este, that though uneasy about their little one he was confident there was no danger. Two days later (24th September, 1818) Mary and Claire went to Padua, taking Clara with them to meet Shelley, who on realizing the infant’s peril hastened with her to Venice for medical advice,--a journey taken all too late, for the patient had barely been brought within the city when she died in her mother’s arms. The first to die of the three children, whom the Shelleys had taken out of England, Clara was buried in the Lido, beneath whose sands Byron would have rested had he breathed his last at Venice.

Leaving Este on 7th November, 1818, with his wife, Claire, Elise (who had returned to her mistress’s side, at the beginning of her residence at Este), and little William, Shelley journeyed towards Southern Italy in his own carriage, drawn by his own horses, Paolo acting as coachman,--a mode of travelling that proved no less tedious and wearisome than economical. Resting at Ferrara on the 8th, and at Bologna on the 9th inst., they came on the 19th of November to Rome, from which place Shelley started on or about the 8th of December (‘about a fortnight ago I left Rome,’ he wrote to Peacock on 22nd December, 1818, giving the approximate date of the departure[5]) for Naples, leaving Mary and the others of his party to follow him three days later, so as to give him time to choose lodgings for them before their arrival in the southern capital; the lodgings (opposite the Royal Gardens, with a full view of the bay) for which he paid three louis a-week.

That, on the occasion of the excursion to Vesuvius, Claire preferred to sit in a palanquin, whilst Shelley and Mary rode on mules, may have been due to timidity, referable to her accident at the Bagni di Lucca. It is, however, more probable that ill-health determined her to ascend the mountain in the least fatiguing manner. Anyhow, it is both certain and noteworthy that, on coming to Naples, Claire suffered so severely from bodily indisposition, that some two years and a half later, on having painful reasons for recalling all the domestic circumstances of their stay near the Royal Gardens, Mrs. Shelley, in her vindicatory epistle to Mrs. Hoppner (August, 1821), thought it right to speak of her sister’s Neapolitan illness. The illness, thus remembered by Mrs. Shelley, after an interval of two years and a half, as a matter likely to be misrepresented by her husband’s and Claire’s defamers, was no trifling ailment.

Before the last week of January, 1819, whilst Claire’s sickness was causing them much anxiety, the Shelleys were in trouble with the servants, whose chattering tongues caused them so much annoyance in later time. Cheating them at the Bagni di Lucca, Paolo--the clever knave, ever quick to serve his employers and himself at the same time--continued to cheat the Shelleys till the opening of the next year. Serving them by turns as cook, valet, groom, coachman, courier, and accountant, the fellow had opportunities for cheating them in each capacity, and doubtless made the most of the opportunities. Dealing with no one but Shelley, he might have played his game with impunity; but the scoundrel’s accounts were audited by Mrs. Shelley, who, whilst consenting to his mere petty pilferings, made a stand against his measures for positive plunder. The result was that Shelley discharged the man with warm words, which were perhaps something stronger and more caustic, through the poet’s deficient knowledge of Italian, than he meant them to be. The gentleman, who gives vent to his indignation in a language he has not mastered perfectly, is apt to say outrageous things. Anyhow, refusing to submit to an egregious attempt at extortion, Shelley discharged the rascal, who, in the usual way of fellows of his sort, covered his discomfiture with abuse and threats of vengeance. The man having been sent about his business, the Shelleys hoped to hear no more of him. But the hope was disappointed. Shelley and his wife had barely congratulated themselves on being quit of the rascal, when Elise married him.

Elise does not appear to have been an evil creature. But gossiping no less freely, servants gossip even more habitually, about their masters and mistresses, than their employers gossip about them. On their way from Este to Naples, Paolo and Elise, as they fell in love with one another, were communicative about their master and mistress. If Elise had more than Paolo to say on the interesting subject, Paolo, with his greater knowledge of the world, could tell her how her highly interesting facts ought to be regarded and dealt with inferentially. After telling Paolo where she was born, and giving him a general view of her childhood, Elise told him how she had been hired by Mrs. Shelley at Geneva, and travelling with her master and mistress to England, had lived with them at Bath and Marlow in that country. No doubt, also, she told him how Allegra had been born in England, taken to Milan, and by her (the deponent) carried to the great Lord Byron at Venice, in whose palace she (Elise, the deponent) had stayed for successive weeks. There was much talk between the Italian knave and the Swiss nurse about Miss Claire, and Mr. Hoppner (the Consul-General at Venice) and Madame Hoppner, the lady born of Swiss parents in Elise’s native land. Can it be questioned that, on arriving at Naples, the subtle Paolo and the quick-witted Elise conceived themselves to be in possession of an important family secret, their knowledge of which placed Monsignor Shelley and the Signora Shelley, and the Signora’s ‘cara sorella’ Claire, at their mercy? Paolo was jubilant. The next time the signor and signora were disagreeable on a matter of accounts, they should know, that _he_ knew what _they_ knew. Feeling tenderly to Mrs. Shelley and Miss Claire, for both had been very good to her, Elise hoped that Paolo would not be indiscreet. But Elise was a Swiss, and what can poor servants do, but make the most of their poor chances? A few weeks later Paolo, after dismissal from the service of a master and mistress whom he had plundered for six months, went his way, vowing to have his vengeance, unless the Signor Shelley paid him those other sequins. Two years and a half later Elise was writing to Madame Shelley for money, having received several gifts of money from the same lady, since leaving her service.

At Naples it is certain that Shelley was far from happy. The fancy seems to have possessed him that he was encountered there by the same lady, whom he imagined to have pressed her love upon him (under circumstances set forth on a previous page of this work) in 1816, just before he started for Geneva with Mary and Claire. The whole affair was imaginary. No woman’s heart was offered to him in 1816. No lady was in that year guilty of unwomanly extravagance, through admiration of his poetry. As she was a mere creature of his fancy, the lady, who paid him so remarkable and embarrassing a compliment, cannot really have met him in Naples, and told him that she had in two different years tracked him through Europe, in obedience to her hopeless affection for him. It does not follow, however, that he recognized the unreality of his impressions, and was deliberately untruthful (in 1821-2) in speaking of his intercourse with the lady, who cannot have died in the winter of 1818-19, as she had never breathed the breath of life. It is impossible to say how far Shelley was the fool of his own fancy in this matter, _if_ he was aught less than the master of it. As he was certainly in several matters untruthful, in the most precise and literal sense of the word, it is not unfair to suspect him of pure imposture in this curious business. Upon the whole, however, it appears more probable that he in course of time became a fitful believer in the story, of whose imaginary character he was cognizant at the season of its inception; that in the latter stages of the hallucination he was the dupe of a trick he had practised on his own mind. It accords with this theory, that the victim of semi-delusion was sometimes very miserable at Naples, expressing his wretchedness in pathetic verses which he hid from Mary, whilst acting in divers ways, so as to make his wife imagine him to be set on concealing from her some cause of mental anguish.

Leaving Naples on 26th February, 1819, Shelley (making the return journey, even as he had travelled southwards, with his own horses) retraced his steps to Rome, where he remained for something over three months, during which time he underwent no slight annoyance from indications of the disfavour with which he was regarded by the English tourists. ‘Such is the spirit of the English abroad as well as at home,’ he wrote bitterly to Peacock, after remarking that, with the exception of five individuals at the utmost, he was regarded ‘as a rare prodigy of crime and pollution, whose look even might infect.’ Whilst insisting that he magnified and multiplied the signs of disapproval, that touched him so keenly, his widow could not venture to assert he had no real ground for the despondency, which she referred to his sense of being shunned, in the land of the stranger, by people of his own nation. There is something droll and touching in the pains taken by the poor lady to inform posterity that, if her Shelley suffered much from the insolence of some of the more vulgar of the travelling English, he was called upon by the Earl of Guildford and Sir William Drummond, during his stay at Rome; the pains thus taken to relieve the poet of dishonour being all the more pathetic, because the asperity of the lady’s reflections on vulgar English tourists reveals how sensible William Godwin’s daughter was, that she was in no small degree accountable for the slights offered to her husband. Poor Mrs. Shelley had better have been silent. The English who visited Rome two generations since were seldom remarkable for vulgarity; the least exalted and refined of them being at least fit companions for the young lady who, at the dawn of a certain July morning, slipt through her father’s shop to the arms of her lover. They may have been victims of prejudice, but it was not a sign of vulgarity that English gentlemen, travelling with ladies in Italy, thought it best to keep out of Shelley’s way, and that the ladies did not care to make his wife’s acquaintance. In attributing the seclusion of their Roman life to the narrowness of her husband’s means and the delicacy of his health, Mrs. Shelley only drew attention to the real causes of the exclusion from society he would have enjoyed, and she was pining to enter.

Towards the close of April, 1819, it was the intention of the Shelleys to withdraw from the capital where they were ill at ease, and to return to Naples after the first week of the ensuing month; but changing their plans they lingered at Rome till they were visited with trouble, far more oppressive and blighting, than the pain of being slighted and left to themselves. They were still at Rome when their little William (the second to die of the three fated children) passed from them, after a short illness, in the middle of his fourth year, breathing his last breath on the 6th or 7th of June; on the earlier day according to one of Mrs. Shelley’s letters, but on the later according to the stone, placed to his memory in the Protestant cemetery of the Italian capital. Henceforth Rome was associated in the minds of either parent with a supreme sorrow. Whilst Shelley was deeply moved by the child’s death, Mary yielded to melancholy, that was only mitigated by the birth of her second son (the present Sir Percy Florence Shelley) in the ensuing November.

Withdrawing from Rome as soon as they had laid their boy in the grave, Shelley and his wife (with Claire for their comforter) carried their sorrow to Leghorn, where they rested at the Villa Valsovano, midway between the city and Monte Nero, till they moved at the end of September to Florence, Shelley having already made a flying trip from the Villa Valsovano to the last-named city, to select pleasant apartments for six months.

At the close of the next January, leaving Claire behind them at Florence, Shelley moved with his wife and their babe to Pisa, where he resided chiefly (either in the city or at the neighbouring baths of St. Julian) till the fatal migration to San Terenzo. Of all his several Italian resting-places, Pisa is the spot to which the mind turns most often, and, on the whole, most agreeably, in the survey of the poet’s later years. It was at Pisa that he nursed his cousin Medwin in sickness, would fain have cherished the dying Keats, wrote _Adonais_, worshipt Emilia Viviani, lived closely with Byron (first on friendly and then on uneasy terms), made the acquaintance of the Williamses, joined hands with Trelawny, and again befriended the Hunts. But of all the Shelleyan associations with Pisa, none is more interesting to the student of the poet’s nature, or perhaps more memorable to lovers of his song, than his sentimental idolatry of the Contessina, with whom Mrs. Shelley bravely maintained a romantic correspondence, as though she were a cordial sharer of her husband’s affectionate regard for the imprisoned beauty.

There is no need to reproduce what Medwin tells so agreeably, and perhaps with less than his usual inaccuracy, of the Contessina, whose dreamily voluptuous eyes, Grecian contour, darksome tresses, pale complexion, musical voice, and winning air of gentle sadness, stirred Shelley to discover in her conventual home a scene of barbarous captivity;--to inveigh against the cruelty of the father, who could immure so radiant a creature in so gloomy a building; to conceive himself defrauded of his proper felicity by the circumstances which rendered their union impossible; and in his tumultuous yearnings for the unattainable to cry aloud unto her:--

‘Seraph of Heaven! too gentle to be human,
Veiling beneath that radiant form of Woman
All that is insupportable in thee
Of light, and love, and immortality!
Sweet Benediction in the eternal Curse!
Veiled Glory of this lampless Universe!
Thou Moon beyond the clouds! Thou living Form
Among the Dead! Thou Star above the Storm!
Thou Wonder, and thou Beauty, and thou Terror!
Thou Harmony of Nature’s art! Thou Mirror
In whom, as in the splendour of the Sun,
All shapes look glorious which thou gazest on!

* * * * *

I never thought before my death to see
Youth’s vision thus made perfect. Emily,
I love thee; though the world by no thin name
Will hide that love, from its unvalued shame.

* * * * *

Spouse! Sister! Angel! Pilot of the Fate
Whose course has been so starless! O too late
Belovèd! O too soon adored, by me!
For in the fields of immortality
My spirit should at first have worshipped thine,
A divine presence in a place divine;
Or should have moved beside it on this earth,
A shadow of that substance, from its birth;
But not as now: ... I love thee; yes, I feel
That on the fountain of my heart a seal
Is set, to keep its waters pure and bright
For thee, since in those _tears_ thou hast delight.

* * * * *

Thy wisdom speaks in me, and bids me dare
Beacon the rocks on which high hearts are wreckt.
I never was attached to that great sect,
Whose doctrine is, that each one should select
Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend,
And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend
To cold oblivion, though it is in the code
Of modern morals, and the beaten road
Which those poor slaves with weary footsteps tread,
Who travel to their home among the dead
By the broad highway of the world, and so
With one chained friend, perhaps a jealous foe,
The dreariest and the longest journey go.

* * * * *

Emily,
A ship is floating in the harbour now,
A wind is hovering o’er the mountain’s brow;
There is a path on the sea’s azure floor,
No keel has ever ploughed that path before;
The halcyons brood around the foamless isles;
The treacherous ocean has forsworn its wiles;
The merry mariners are bold and free:
Say, my heart’s sister, wilt thou sail with me?’

Whilst Shelley’s passion for Emilia was running its brief course, between some time (probably a late one) of autumn, 1820, and an early day of spring, 1821, they exchanged letters; Emilia in her letters usually addressing her worshiper as ‘Caro Fratello,’ but once in a while honouring him with the loftier and warmer title of ‘Adorato Sposo,’--a term the young lady doubtless used in a spiritual sense, and with unqualified confidence that he would construe it in no other sense. At the same time Emilia and Mrs. Shelley, exchanging visits and other courtesies, appropriate to gentlewomen affectionately disposed to one another, maintained a sisterly correspondence with the pen, each styling the other ‘Cara Sorella.’ Mr. Rossetti is of opinion that no one, not even ‘a scandal-monger beyond belief,’ has ever ventured to insinuate that the mutual affection of Shelley and Emilia ‘was other than platonic.’ And in the sense, in which the word is used by those who think it applicable to every cordial attachment of two persons of opposite sex, that is attended by no incident likely to increase the population, there can be no question the affair was platonic. How could it have been otherwise? The daughter of an Italian nobleman, Emilia, living under the discipline and surveillance of a religious house, never saw Shelley under circumstances affording either of them an opportunity for throwing aside the restraints of etiquette and decorum. It does not, however, follow that the sentiment of _Epipsychidion_, overflowing in some of its tenderest passages with vehement admiration of Emilia’s personal charms, falls within the most liberal definition of the elastic term.

That Shelley’s pulses were quickened for a single instant during either his interviews with Emilia, or the meditations resulting in the poem, by emotions which (to use his own phrase) would have ‘approximated him to the circle of a servant girl and her sweetheart,’ I have not the faintest suspicion. And this book has failed in one respect if its readers find much difficulty in believing that robust sensuous fervour was in no degree accountable for the composition of the finest love poem in the literature of the universe. Had he been conscious of emotion, hovering however lightly over the confines of desire, it is inconceivable that Shelley would have made his wife an accomplice in his addresses to Emilia’s feelings. It was due to the prime defect of his lower nature, that he was capable of inducing Mary to play a part in the three-cornered flirtation.

In writing to Peacock after the game had been played out, that he had ‘made acquaintance in an obscure convent with the only Italian for whom he ever felt any interest,’ Shelley declared the full measure, and the real quality and complexion, of his genuine concern in Emilia. He had been interested in a charming girl. Gratified in his artistic sensibility by her personal loveliness, precisely as a connoisseur is gratified by the beauty of an exquisite piece of sculpture, and stirred to sympathetic curiosity by what was to him novel and singular in her altogether commonplace position and story, he, for the first time during his residence in Italy, felt a strong interest in one of its people,--an interest that, disposing him to think well of her, moved him to credit her with all the excellencies of womankind. All that followed was the result of the excitement of a powerfully imaginative brain, acting with equal vigour and subtlety, whilst it perfected its conceptions with the self-concentrated energy of a power, wholly disconnected from the animal that possessed it. Endowing Emilia with all the conceivable virtues of womankind, he worshipt a being that was less a reality than the offspring of his fancy.

Whether he showed as much of chivalric feeling as he did of egotistic waywardness in distempering with egregious flattery the mind of the young woman, who was designed by her father to pass from her convent into wedlock with a man of her own social degree, is a question that may be left for the reader’s unaided consideration. Left also for the present may be the question whether the chivalrous Shelley showed proper chivalric care of his wife’s feelings in constraining her to witness and to further his platonic suit, when a moment’s consideration would have told him that, even if the suit did not vex her to vulgar jealousy, to hear him pour the idolatries of _Epipsychidion_ on the object of his imaginary passion, would necessarily cause her the keenest anguish which a sensitive and sentimental wife can experience,--the pain of discovering herself far beneath her husband’s ideal standard of feminine excellence; the pain of discovering him capable of rendering greater homage to another woman than to herself; the pain of feeling herself much less than necessary to his happiness.

In judging an enthusiast one must ever make allowance for his particular enthusiasm. Were it otherwise, one would attribute singular indelicacy, as well as defective knowledge of feminine nature, to those of the Shelleyan zealots who argue that Mary had no reason to resent or disapprove the attachment, which she could not think ‘other than platonic,’ as though it were not in the nature of every sensitive and sentimental woman (and Mary possessed both qualities in an eminent degree) to prize her husband’s admiration of her mental endowments, his regard for her moral graces, his sympathy with, and loyalty to, her spiritual nature, far more highly than his matter-of-course consideration for those of her domestic privileges and personal rights, in respect to which the law would afford her some measure of inadequate protection and miserable remedy, should he venture to violate them. From what these zealots say, it would seem that, whilst he was chiefly admirable and delightful for his mental powers and spiritual graces, Mrs. Shelley had no right to feel aggrieved when he used them to declare his intellectual and sentimental preference for another woman, because she had every reason to know the lower forces of his nature were in no way affected by the spiritual idolatry.

By others of the Shelleyan apologists it is argued that Mrs. Shelley’s conduct, in becoming as it were an accomplice in her husband’s idolatry of Emilia, is evidence that her feelings were in no way wounded by his attention to the beautiful girl. But to argue in this way is to attribute to Mrs. Shelley an insensibility, wholly foreign to a nature by no means wanting in womanly feeling, discernment, spirit, and fervour. Because she showed what is usually called ‘good sense’ in concealing her annoyance, whilst consenting prudently to what a less clever woman would have resisted indignantly, it is not to be imagined that she really loved the _cara sorella_ to whom she paid visits and wrote gushing letters, or would, at any moment of their acquaintance, have been sorry to hear that Emilia, with the darksome tresses and voluptuous eyes, had gone off to Jericho. What Shelley’s wife felt for the Contessina is not to be learnt from the letters that passed between the two young women, nor from the epistles Mrs. Shelley wrote about her _cara sorella_ to Leigh Hunt and divers other people, _whilst_ her husband was passing through the agitations of his spiritual love for Emilia the Matchless. It was not for the young wife, humouring her husband for the sake of preserving her power over him, to tell his friends he was making a goose of himself, or to write bitter things against Emilia which would only bring upon her the imputation she was most anxious to avoid--the imputation of being jealous of her spiritual rival. But when Emilia the angelic had passed from the Pisan convent into marriage with the Italian gentleman whom she soon worried into hating her, and Shelley having survived his passion for her, had passed to the dominion of another spiritual mistress, Mrs. Shelley told Mrs. Gisborne, with equal candour and piquancy, what she really thought of Emilia, of Shelley’s love of the young lady, and of her rather different love of him.

Reflecting disdainfully on her ‘dirty enough’ Pisan acquaintances, Mrs. Shelley gave Mrs. Gisborne to understand that, not content with the cakes, wine, and sugar-candy of spiritual love, Emilia, to her worshiper’s horror, asked him to give her a considerable sum of money,--a demand that may acquit him of want of gallantry in writing (_vide_ Forman’s edition of Shelley’s _Prose Works_) to John Gisborne from Lerici on 18th June, 1822, just three weeks before the fatal boat-accident:--

‘The _Epipsychidion_ I cannot look at; the person whom it celebrates
was a cloud instead of a Juno, and poor Ixion starts from the centaur
that was the offspring of his own embrace.’

Whilst penning these lines, Shelley was still moving along the comparatively tranquil stream of his melancholy attachment to Jane Williams, the last of his spiritual brides, to whose singing and guitar he listened on the evening after writing the letter, as he paced to and fro on the Casa Magni terrace, whilst Mary lay a-bed faint and exhausted by her recent miscarriage.

Before he passes to the concluding term of Shelley’s residence at Pisa, the reader should be informed of another of those imaginary incidents, which would have had prominence in the record, had Shelley lived to be his own biographer. In the summer of 1820, whilst Mr. Tighe (son of the still famous Mrs. Tighe) was staying at Pisa, Shelley came in high excitement to that gentleman (or at least told Medwin he had gone to Mr. Tighe) with this strange story. He (Shelley, the narrator of the affair to Medwin, if not to Tighe) had gone to the Post Office of Pisa for letters, and had barely uttered his name to the clerk of the Poste-restante bureau, when a stranger, with a military cloak hanging from his shoulders, exclaimed, ‘What, are you that d----d atheist, Shelley?’ and forthwith felled him to the ground with a stunning fist-blow,--a blow rendering the poet unconscious, whilst the doer of the violent deed went off, cloak and all. According to the story, given to Medwin some three months or so after the alleged occurrence, Shelley and Tighe tracked the ruffianly assailant to the Tre Donzelle of Pisa, and on learning he had started for Genoa, hastened thither in the hope of overtaking and punishing him. Mr. Rossetti suggests that, in respect to this alleged assault, Medwin, the original historian of the affair, may have given a loose account of some adventure that is said to have taken place at Rome. But I see no reason to accept this suggestion. Though comically inaccurate in his reminiscences, Medwin was an honest gentleman and a precise note-taker. On coming to Pisa to stay with Shelley in the late autumn of 1820, he was a diarist who took pains to record exactly the things seen by him, and the things (true or false) told to him by other people. Without giving Shelley as his authority for the narrative, he tells the story of the assault as one of the matters which came to his knowledge soon after his arrival at Pisa, during his familiar intercourse with his cousin. Whilst fully cognizant of the gentleman’s literary defects, I do not question that he had the story of the assault from Shelley’s lips, and passed it on through one of his note-books with substantial accuracy. It is certain no such attack was made on Shelley at Pisa. The marvellous story must be regarded as an affair of delusion, semi-delusion, or sheer untruth.