Chapter XVI: Closing Scenes (1)

Shelley’s Attachment to Jane Williams--Her Womanly Goodness--Her
Devotion to her Husband--_The Serpent is shut out from
Paradise_--_Essay on the Devil_--Shelley’s Happiness and Discord with
Mary--Her Remorseful Verses--Trials of her Married Life--_Essay on
Christianity_--San Terenzo and Lerici--The Casa Magni--Mary’s Illness
and Melancholy at San Terenzo--Arrival of the ‘Don Juan’--Mutual
Affection of Mrs. Shelley and Mrs. Williams--Shelley’s latest Visions
and Hallucinations--Leigh Hunt’s Arrival in Italy--Shelley sails for
Leghorn--Meeting of Shelley and Hunt--Improvement in Shelley’s
Health--His Mediation between Hunt and Byron--The Hunts in the Palazzo
Lanfranchi--Lady Shelley’s Account of the Difficulties between Byron
and Shelley--Shelley’s Contentment with his Arrangements for the
Hunts--He sets Sail for Lerici--The Fatal Storm--Cremation on the
Sea-shore--Grave at Rome.

The time has come for a few more words about Shelley’s attachment to Jane Williams,--the last of the series of fair women who successively inspired him with feelings of adorative fondness, that, differing widely from such love as animated Byron towards his several mistresses, differed no less widely from the placid preferences of passionless friendship. No sympathetic student of the poet’s character and story can entertain even a momentary suspicion of the refinement and purity of Shelley’s regard for the gentle and fine-natured woman, to whom he addressed the saddest and sweetest poetry of his life’s closing term. To say this of the feelings that swayed his soul in all its successive services of homage towards his friend’s wife, is indeed to say no more than I would declare of each and all of the so-called platonic attachments that preceded his worship of Jane Williams.

I have no shadow of a doubt that the always abundant and sometimes glowing fervour of these attachments was never touched for a single instant by desire. On this point my confidence proceeds no less from my clear apprehension of the peculiarity which I venture to designate Shelley’s prime physical defect, than from an equally precise perception of his sentimental idiosyncrasy. But in respect to some of these so-called platonic attachments, this conviction is raised to still higher certainty by the conditions, under which Shelley approached the objects of his sentimental preference, or by the characteristics of the women he distinguished so highly. Though it would be absurd to infer anything from the moral rectitude or the delicacy of the young lady, who asked money of her poetical worshiper, and passed from her convent into wedlock only to be separated from her husband, after leading him (to use Mrs. Shelley’s expression) ‘a devil of a life’ for a very brief while, the conditions, under which Shelley was permitted to have personal intercourse with Emilia Viviani, put it beyond question that, in their curious intimacy, he never strayed beyond the lines of social decorum and conventional propriety. In the case of Emilia’s successor, confidence in the purity of Shelley’s passion, and in the delicacy of his addresses, is raised even higher,--is raised, indeed, to absolute certainty,--by the moral excellences of the lady, and all her domestic circumstances, as well as by all the other conditions and features of a friendship that, even in the tenderest and warmest of its emotional developments, could not have been more innocent had Shelley been a woman.

In some particulars the last of Shelley’s spiritual passions resembled his wilder and more tumultuous idolatry of Emilia Viviani. Just as he worshipt Emilia because fancy tricked him into thinking her a realization of his long-cherished ideal of all that was or could be admirable in womankind, he idolized Jane Williams as an example of the particular type of feminine loveliness that swayed his imagination whilst he was composing _The Sensitive Plant_. Whilst he worshipt Jane as the veritable realization of a pure anticipatory cognition, even as he had worshipt Emilia a year earlier for her imaginary correspondence to a more comprehensive conception of feminine excellence, Shelley rendered the homage of his spiritual devotion to Mrs. Williams in a way that reminds one of his manner of wooing Emilia. Associating his wife with himself in his addresses to Emilia, he made Jane’s husband a sympathetic co-operator in his addresses to Mrs. Williams, by selecting him for the fittest possible confidant of his affectionate regard for the lady, and even inducing him to act as the medium through which she received his friend’s adoration. There were indeed occasions when Williams and his wife were in this manner rendered the joint-recipients of the homage which she alone evoked, Mary being, at the same time, imperfectly cognizant of the course of the platonic suit to which Jane’s husband consented. In a former page I spoke of the affair with Emilia Viviani as a kind of three-cornered flirtation. The same term is applicable to the affair in which Edward Williams was scarcely less a principal than his wife and Shelley. The two three-cornered flirtations differed, however, in the fact that the later of them had a deeply interested, though by no means equally gratified, spectator of something of the proceedings. This spectator was Mary, who, whilst cognizant of the general progress of what she cannot be supposed to have approved, was kept wholly in the dark as to some of its incidents. Whilst Williams consented sympathetically to an affair of which he knew every particular, Mrs. Shelley consented submissively (though, of course, by no means cheerfully) to an affair respecting which she was far from fully informed.

On 26th January, 1822, when no breath of discord had yet ruffled his relations with Byron, Shelley, from his own apartment in the same house in which the Williamses had a set of rooms (a house on the Lung’Arno, but divided by the river from Byron’s palazzo), sent Williams _The Serpent is shut out from Paradise_, together with the characteristic note, which instructed Williams, that he might read to ‘Jane, but to no one else,’ the poem, containing the confession:

‘Therefore, if now I see you seldomer,
Dear friends, dear _friend_! know that I only fly
Your looks, because they stir
Grief that should sleep, and hopes that cannot die:
The very comfort that they minister
I scarce can bear, yet I,
So deeply is the arrow gone,
Should quickly perish if it were withdrawn.

When I return to my cold home, you ask
Why I am not as I have ever been.
_You_ spoil me for the task
Of acting a forced part in life’s dull scene,--
Of wearing on my brow the idle mask
Of author, great or mean,
In the world’s carnival. I sought
Peace thus, and, but in you, I found it not.’

The little effort of literary mystification, to be observed in the note which accompanied these verses to Edward Williams, affords another point of resemblance between the Emilia-Viviani affair and the affair with Jane Williams. Just as the _Epipsychidion_ was offered to the public with a preface which attributed the composition to the real author’s ‘unfortunate friend’ who ‘died at Florence, as he was preparing for a voyage to one of the wildest of the Sporades,’ the verses are offered to Edward Williams as poetry taken from the portfolio in which the poet’s friend used ‘to keep his verses,’--the object of this misrepresentation to Williams and Jane, who were in the real author’s confidence, being less than obvious. Given, of course, for a reason no less sufficient than manifest, the direction that the verses should be shown to _no one but Jane_ was, no doubt, duly observed by the receivers of the poem. Williams, in his diary, may well have styled the verses ‘beautiful, but too melancholy lines.’ One can imagine how commiseratingly the happy husband and wife (to whom the verses were sent, or rather the husband _through_ whom the verses were transmitted, and the wife _to_ whom they were addressed) spoke of the wretchedness of their friend who, in his inability to find contentment, such as their own mutual happiness, in the society of his Mary, spoke of his chambers in the same house (the Tre Palazzi) as his ‘cold home.’ It is certainly less surprising that Shelley desired the verses to be withheld from Mary, than that he was so communicative respecting the cheerlessness of the apartment, of which she was the mistress.

A brief note on the poem’s first line (‘The serpent is shut out from Paradise’), written at a time when it was Byron’s humour to call Shelley ‘the serpent’ or ‘the snake.’ Accepting the title in good part, and indeed as a compliment, Shelley, only a few weeks before sending the verses to the Williamses, had written to Byron about the culprit, who was _not_ burned at Lucca for scattering the eucharistic wafers from the altar, ‘I hear this morning that the design, which certainly had been in contemplation, of _burning my fellow serpent_, has been abandoned, and that he has been condemned to the galleys.’ Knowing how Shelley regarded the serpent as typical of the wisdom, that is especially hateful to bigots, and delighted in regarding himself as akin to the serpent in being largely endowed with the same wisdom, Byron had of course more reasons for calling him ‘the snake’ than he troubled himself to declare, when he observed ‘_Goethe’s Mephistofilus_ calls the serpent who tempted Eve “my aunt the renowned snake”; and I always insist that Shelley is nothing but one of her nephews, _walking about on the tip of his tail_’; a peculiarly Byronic flippancy that appears in the concluding paragraph of Shelley’s _Essay on the Devil_--‘... before this misconduct it hopped along upon its tail; a mode of progression which, if I was a serpent, I should think the severer punishment of the two.’

Few readers will question that this remarkable coincidence of humour and verbal form in the Byronic utterance and the Shelleyan essay (an essay withheld from the public eye long after the death of both poets) should be deemed a clear indication, that Byron either perused the essay or was the originator of at least one of its humorous sallies. If Byron did not take the thought and words from the essay, Shelley must be assumed to have taken them from him. To the present writer the coincidence is part of the superabundant evidence that, Byron was accountable for the piquancy, incisiveness, and Don-Juanesque levity that distinguish the _Essay on the Devil_ from all Shelley’s other prose productions. For the purpose of exalting the younger at the expense of the elder poet, many extravagant things have been written about Shelley’s influence on Byron. That Shelley influenced Byron greatly is unquestionable, but it is not to be supposed the influences arising from the close, and for a while harmonious, intercourse of the two poets, were altogether one-sided,--that whilst receiving much from his familiar companion, Byron gave him nothing. The _Essay on Christianity_ and the _Essay on the Devil_ are distinctly assignable to the same period of Shelley’s literary productiveness; and to turn from the one to the other, is to pass from the society of the Real Shelley, to the society of Shelley speaking under the inspiration of Byronic mockery.

At this late point of their brief association, when he is under the sway of a spiritual attachment that endured till his death, and she is regarding his services of homage to her familiar friend, the occasion rises for inquiring, whether Mary has experienced an average share of felicity since she eloped from the old home in Skinner Street? whether Shelley has been to her all she hoped of him, when she took the momentous step of July, 1814? whether, in addition to trouble, for which he is in no degree to be held responsible, she has endured trouble he either caused her, or might have preserved her from? whether her anticipations of felicity from their association have been realized? whether, in brief, their marriage has been a happy one?

Much has been written of the perfect happiness that came to both Shelley and Mary from their association. It has been proclaimed by romantic biography that the soul of each found its perfect complement in the other’s soul, that their conjugal intimacy was singularly felicitous, and that, whilst they dwelt together in harmony seldom accorded to spouses, neither was ever for a single moment disappointed in the other. The present writer ventures to declare no less confidently that their marriage was by no means remarkable for happiness,--that they were not a well-mated couple.

In respect to intellectual endowments and sympathy, it cannot be questioned for a moment that Shelley was more fitly matched with Mary Godwin than with Harriett Westbrook; but mental unison is not sufficient for perfect conjugal concord. I do not suggest that during the eight years’ interval between their elopement and Shelley’s death they ceased to care for one another. On the contrary, I have no doubt that, loving him with girlish vehemence in the summer of 1814, Mary loved Shelley at the bottom of her heart till the summer of 1822, though (we have her word for it) she sometimes behaved to him so as to imply that his felicity was by no means her chief concern. I have also no doubt, that Shelley never survived his affectionate concern for Mary, though he cannot have delighted in her greatly when he sighed to Emilia, and instructed the Williamses not to let his wife suspect how much happier he was in their rooms of the Tre Palazzi than in his own apartment. It is possible for a married couple to be held strongly by a deep-seated sentiment of mutual dependence, and yet to live on uneasy, and even exasperating, terms, with one another. It was so, at times, with Shelley and Mary. Knowledge comes to the student of human nature from observing how deep-seated attachment sometimes survives superficial sympathy in mated couples. Superficial sympathy must have perished from the mutual regard of Mary and Shelley, when he looked to other women for the higher felicity she was powerless to afford him. Yet they persisted in loving one another at the bottom of their hearts.

Apart from her reasonable grounds of complaint against her husband, Mrs. Shelley was a woman whose lot was fruitful of trouble and trial. Her health was far from good, and during the eight years of her connection with Shelley she endured five (including her miscarriage at San Terenzo) of those illnesses, which, though desired by wives who have never had experience of them, are by no means conducive to physical vigour. She gave birth to four children, and wept over the graves of three of them, losing two of them when they had lived long enough to gain firm hold of her heart. Her grief at the last of these bereavements was excessive. An ardent and strongly affectionate creature (how could Mary Wollstonecraft’s daughter be otherwise?), she had in girlhood loved her father and her sisters vehemently. Her half-sister had perished dismally. Through Claire’s too fervid temper, and the successive ill-consequences of her luckless alliance with Byron, Mary had (to put the case mildly) derived more vexation than contentment from her close intercourse with her sister-by-affinity. Loving her old father and wishing him well, she was continually receiving doleful intelligence from England that, instead of mending, his affairs grew steadily more desperate. Pining for the diversions of society, she had often fretted at being excluded from it in foreign capitals, no less than in her native country. It was also against the contentment of this unwilling exile from England, that during her successive illnesses and her trials with her children, she never had the consolations of a home, worthy to be called a home. To render existence fairly comfortable in any transient abiding-place, more especially when the abiding-place is a single set of rooms, it is needful for a woman to be an adept in housewifely arts and the smaller domestic economies. But the woman who in her girlhood shirked the matters of the house, to which her step-mother wished her to give attention, was as shiftless and helpless a home-keeper as John Westbrook’s daughter. From this lack of housewifely knowingness and capacity, she suffered much and Shelley not a little. One would fain forget that the poet, who has done so much for the happiness of English firesides, never knew the comforts of a home, after passing from Field Place, and that he suffered in this respect chiefly through the incompetence of his wives, both of whom he took from a social grade in which to keep house cleverly is woman’s first duty. Due in no small measure to nervous fancies, Shelley’s bodily ailments were due in a larger degree to comfortless feeding. At the same time he suffered from causes, in respect to which his wife was blameless. His temperament would under any circumstances have exposed him to sudden visitations of melancholy; and in the memories that haunted him--memories of the kindred from whom he had estranged himself, and the poor girl who drowned herself in the Serpentine--he had constant sources of sadness.

Even if they had been altogether fitted to one another, Shelley and Mary would in their Italian life have missed the average of connubial enjoyment. But they were not precisely adapted to one another. Whilst his taste was for studious or meditative seclusion, she had been designed by nature for a career of action and gaiety. ‘She,’ Shelley once said to Trelawny, ‘can’t bear solitude, nor I society--the quick coupled with the dead,’ When he was pining for green fields or sea-breezes, she thought of ball-rooms and assemblies. Under the most auspicious influences their contrarieties of temper would have brought them into conflict. Habitual melancholy is perhaps the most trying temper in a husband, for a wife to endure with patient cheerfulness; and though it was relieved by occasional moods of blithesomeness and jubilant elation, despondency was Shelley’s normal condition in his later years. Whilst he harassed Mary with unseasonable and bootless moanings, she worried him with the perversities of her Wollstonecraft vehemence and captiousness,--with the temper that disposed all the Wollstonecrafts to discover egregious insults in trivial slights, and imagine themselves the victims of human malignity whenever the wind blew from the wrong point of the compass.

In other respects Shelley was a trying husband, in whom Mary had reason to be disappointed. At an early stage of their association she discovered how little reliance could be placed on the accuracy of his statements; a cruel mortification for the girl, who had sacrificed so much for him in her romantic belief of all he told her. Natural annoyance at this discovery can have been only mitigated by her ability to refer all his inaccuracies of statement to poetic imaginativeness. Throughout his time with her, Shelley was seeing visions which he mistook for real occurrences, and telling her stories at manifest discord with historic veracity.

Throughout this biography I have exercised a jealous caution in assigning biographical value to the egotisms of the Shelleyan verse, and have repeatedly cautioned readers against dealing with the poet’s references to his former experiences, as good evidence in respect to matters of fact. On the other hand I have not hesitated to regard his poetry as evidential of his temper and sentiment at the moment of its composition. It cannot be questioned that the _Stanzas, written in Dejection, near Naples_, were the result of sincere emotion, and could have been composed only in a mood of the profoundest melancholy. Nor can it be doubted that, whilst displaying the general state of feeling, the _Stanzas_ reflect no less faithfully the writer’s particular sentiments, during the sorrowful mood. How does Shelley write of himself in these memorable lines, when he had been connubially linked to William Godwin’s daughter for something less than three and a half years?

‘Alas! I have nor hope nor health,
Nor peace within nor calm around,
Nor that content surpassing wealth
The sage in meditation found,
And walked with inward glory crowned--
Nor fame, nor power, _nor love_, nor leisure;
Others I see whom these surround--
Smiling they live, and call life pleasure:--
To me that cup has been dealt in another measure.’

Without declining to concur in Mr. Rossetti’s opinion, that Shelley did not _intend_ the reference to his love-less lot to reflect on his wife, I venture to say that, had he been sensible of owing much to her devotion, had she been to him the perpetual spring of gladness that a loving wife ever is to the man who loves her thoroughly, had their union been as felicitous as they hoped it to prove, he could not have thus spoken of himself as alike fameless, powerless, and _love-less_. I even go further, and say that, had their marriage been a happy one, Shelley in his miserable mood would have paused in the enumeration of divers woes, to render grateful acknowledgment of the solace he derived, in the midst of manifold sufferings, from the knowledge that he was _not_ unbeloved. It is also a matter of biographical significance that in 1821--the year in which his passion for Emilia Viviani was succeeded by his milder devotion to Jane Williams--Shelley wrote in _Ginevra_ of marriage as

‘life’s great cheat; a thing
Bitter to taste, sweet in imagining,’--

words of melancholy meaning from the poet, who in the same year confided to the Williamses how wretched he was in his own home. Trelawny, whose acquaintance with Shelley was brief and not of a kind to render him the confidant of the poet’s most delicate secrets, saw enough of Mary’s relations with her husband to make him regard them as something less than altogether happy in their union. That the woman, who in her girlhood had sharp tiffs and lively altercations with her sister Claire, had similar differences with her husband--differences that of course arise frequently between husband and wife without extinguishing their mutual affection, but still differences that _do not_ arise between altogether congenial and happily mated couples--we know from Mrs. Shelley’s regretful and penitential verse. How did the sorrowing widow address the spirit of the husband whom she often worried with her perversities?--

‘Oh, gentle Spirit! * * *
* * * * * *
Now fierce remorse and unreplying death
Waken a chord within my heart, whose breath,
Thrilling and keen, in accents audible
A tale of unrequited love doth tell.
It was not anger,--while thy earthly dress
Encompassed still thy soul’s rare loveliness,
All anger was atoned by many a kind
Caress or tear, that spoke the softened mind.--
It speaks of cold neglect, averted eyes,
That blindly crushed thy soul’s fond sacrifice;--
My heart was all thine own,--but yet a shell
Closed in it’s core, which seemed impenetrable,
Till sharp-toothed misery tore the husk in twain,
Which gaping lies, nor may unite again.
Forgive me!’

(_Vide_ Mrs. Shelley’s _The Choice_, a poem of 159 verses, printed in
Volume I of Mr. Buxton Forman’s edition of _Shelley’s Works_.)

Penitential utterances, such as this pathetic plaint, should of course be construed generously; but Mr. Buxton Forman goes much too far beyond the line, that divides generous construction from sentimental misconstruction, when he says,--

‘I cannot regard this passage as indicating anything more than a
natural feeling of remorse in the noble heart of a woman who has
suddenly lost an idolized husband, and fancies all kinds of
deficiencies in her conduct to him.’

An example of the kind of remorseful confession, to which Mr. Forman’s words would be fairly applicable, appears in the prose, employed by Mrs. Shelley on another occasion to exhibit her bitter sense of her own wifely remissness. Speaking of the melancholy that visited her husband at Naples, Mrs. Shelley says:--

‘... then he escaped to solitude, and in verses, which he hid from
fear of wounding me, poured forth morbid but too natural bursts of
discontent and sadness. One looks back with unspeakable regret and
gnawing remorse to such periods; fancying that, had one been more
alive to the nature of his feelings, and more attentive to soothe
them, such would not have existed.’

A general confession of a remorseful sense of not having been all that she should have been to her husband, of regret that she had not been more studious _of_ and considerate _for_ his feelings, the prose statement is at the most an utterance of sorrowful compunction for shortcomings, that might have been altogether imaginary. Far otherwise is it with the verses of _The Choice_, comprising several distinct statements of fact, which the biographer is bound to consider, without regard to the poetical form, in which they are submitted to his consideration. In them it is asserted by Shelley’s wife, that she was often angry with him, that she made him fully aware of her anger, that she used to atone for her ebullitions of temper by approaching him with tears and appeasing him with caresses, that she persecuted him with sullenness, that even to the last--when anguish at losing him stirred her to sincerity, and swept away the delusions of her vain self-conceit--she was set on making him imagine, and even on persuading herself, that he was something less than lord and master of her whole heart. Are we to suppose that, in respect to each of these positive assertions, Mrs. Shelley was the dupe of her imagination;--that she was never angry with her husband, never made him sensible of her anger, never kissed him into forgiving her exhibitions of petulance, never punished him with sullen and averted eyes, never pretended that her heart was not wholly in his possession? The Shelleyan vindicators, who never hesitate to take the poet’s words _au pied de la lettre_, whenever the severest and most literal way of construing his poetical egotisms favours their belief in his superhuman goodness, are the last persons who should reduce Mrs. Shelley’s series of positive assertions into a mere show of natural regret, that she was not so good a wife as she might have been. To me and most readers of this page, her statements must remain evidence, on her own confession, that her life with Shelley was fruitful of the bickerings and contentions, the petty pettishnesses and paltry petulances, the divergences of sentiment and conflicts of feeling, that so often qualify the contentment, and only too often end in extinguishing the mutual affection, of mated couples.

And small the blame to William Godwin’s daughter, that she was guilty of all the positive offences with which she charged herself in the criminatory and penitential verses! Had she erred far more grievously, a generous sympathy would stir every large-hearted and impartial judge of her case, to become her advocate at least to the extent of pleading, that she received from the husband, whom she loved, precisely the slights, so sensitive and proud and quick-tempered a woman would necessarily find exasperating and intolerable in the highest degree. In saying that Shelley’s affection for Mrs. Williams was a sentiment, so refined and delicate, so absolutely pure of love’s grosser appetency, that her husband’s ‘genuinely attached friend could without blame both entertain and avow it,’ Mr. Rossetti says no more than the truth. But we cannot concur with him in thinking that Shelley could entertain and avow the sentiment without disloyalty to his own wife. It was not in his power to entertain the sentiment for two women at the same time. The sentiment was the ethereal, finer, higher element of the passion he had formerly felt for Mary; of the love he offered her in 1814, in return for the devotion and sacrifices he required from her; of the love, whose vehement avowal had determined her to commit herself to his keeping, in defiance of social rule and censure. Before he could bestow it on Jane Williams, Shelley had to take from Mary the sentimental regard which, to a woman of her sensibility, pride, imaginativeness and sentimentalism, was so far the larger part of the consideration, as almost to amount to the whole of the consideration, by which he had acquired possession of her. Endowed with youth, beauty, intellectual address, wit, imagination, taste, tact, the liveliest sensibilities, and literary aptitude bordering on genius, Mrs. Shelley was required to descend from the throne of her husband’s heart, in order that it should be occupied, now by such an ignoble though lovely animal as Emilia Viviani, and now by a lady, whose mental powers and personal attractions were greatly inferior to her own,--a lady whose want of literary culture he lamented; whose highest accomplishment was a faculty of singing simple airs to her guitar. To suggest that Mary loved the Italian girl whom she styled her ‘cara sorella,’ or in the secret chambers of her fervid and sensitive heart, deemed herself aught else than grievously wronged by her husband’s devotion to the lady with the guitar, is to display a startling ignorance of the sentimental forces that animate and control high-hearted and finely sympathetic women.

Though the passionate ferocity which distinguished Shelley’s earlier writings against priests and creeds, and the tyrannies of custom, waned almost to extinction, under the softening and mellowing influences of time, and of his steadily increasing knowledge of human nature, letters, dated by his hand in the closing months of his existence, show how tenacious he was to the last of his principal conclusions on questions of social philosophy; how even to his final hour he declared against all existing governments as iniquitous and cruel, against marriage as a depraving institution, against Christianity as a pernicious delusion. Though he lived to take larger and sympathetic views of Christ’s character and career, the author of the _Essay on Christianity_ was no less hostile than the poet of _Queen Mab_ and _Laon and Cythna_, to the Christianity of the churches.

On its arrival at Pisa, the intelligence of Allegra’s death operated like a signal for dispersion to the members of the Byron-Shelleyan coterie, already disposed to move to other places, by the consequences of the recent affair with the mounted trooper and the soldiers at the barrier. Indeed, Byron was already turning his thoughts to villegiatura at Monte-Nero, and Shelley had despatched the Williamses and Claire to Spezia, to reconnoitre the country, in order to discover an eligible summer residence for his party on the coast of the bay. On his return from Spezia, Williams saw at a glance that Shelley had trouble at his heart. Appointed to break the calamity to Allegra’s mother, Shelley shrunk from the task. Deciding to defer the performance of the painful duty, till Claire should have been withdrawn from the vicinity of the Palazzo Lanfranchi, he prevailed on her to go back to Spezia on the morrow, in the company of his wife and Trelawny. Though he was no doubt guided chiefly by care for her feelings, the course thus taken by Shelley may also have resulted in some degree from an apprehension that, if the dismal tidings were communicated to her at the Tre Palazzi, she might in the first paroxysms of her mental torture escape his control, hasten to the other side of the Lung’ Arno, and forcing her way into Byron’s presence overwhelm him with reproaches for sending her child to Bagna Cavallo, in contemptuous disregard of her expostulations and predictions of disaster. Anyhow, it was wisely decided that Claire should not make acquaintance with the sharpest grief of her existence till she should be well away from Byron, who, though profoundly disturbed by the loss of his illegitimate daughter, showed no sign of relenting towards his former mistress.

A few days later, the Shelleys, with Claire and the Williamses, were settled in their narrow and comfortless quarters at the Casa Magni (San Terenzo), some three miles from the wretched little town of Sarzana, some four or five minutes (by fast boat) from the equally squalid and picturesque Lerici, and within an hour’s sail of Spezia. It would be an exaggeration to say that even in Italy it would be impossible to discover, amidst scenes of incomparable loveliness, a meaner, dirtier, more poverty-stricken, more repulsive sea-side village than San Terenzo; but one keeps well between the lines of severe historic veracity in saying no English tourists, of the means and social quality of the Shelleys and Williamses, ever made their abode (from choice and for pleasure) in a more unclean and ill-favoured Italian village for a considerable period. No words can commend too highly the peculiar and winning beauties of the surrounding scenery; but the village itself is doleful, unclean, and appallingly hideous. The same may be said of the wretched inhabitants of the village, that contains only a single dwelling, in any degree fit for the habitation of gentle people. Now that it boasts an upper storey (built since Shelley’s time) and contains twice as many rooms as it had when it housed the poet and his companions, the Casa Magni is far from an alluring and impressive residence. Sixty years since the massive and unsightly tenement (whilom a Jesuits’ convent) contained on its solitary floor over a cavernous basement no more than four habitable rooms--(1) a large dining-hall, (2) the room in which Mrs. Shelley and Claire used to sleep, (3) the bedroom occupied by the Williamses, and (4) Shelley’s sleeping apartment; the three bedrooms opening into the grand saloon. In these four rooms five people (_six_, when Claire was of the party) contrived to live in what must have been a superlatively comfortless and ‘pigging’ fashion; the cooking for the family being done in some out-building, where the servants slept and had their meals. Built so close to the sea, that at high-water the waves tumble noisily about the base of the structure, this marine abode has at its rear neither a single olive-tree, nor the space in which to plant one. The one redeeming feature of this unsatisfactory piece of domestic architecture was (in Shelley’s time), and still is, a broad terrace supported by arches of strong masonry, that running along the whole sea-ward front of the edifice, at the level of the floor of the one set of rooms, served the Shelleys in fine weather as a fifth room, when no fierce sun drove its occupants to the backward parts of the house.

The large dining-hall (with the doors of the bed-rooms opening into it) was the grand chamber, through which Shelley passed without a single thread of raiment on his person, to the dismay of his friends of both sexes, when he lost his clothes whilst bathing; it having escaped the poet that, by merely putting his head into the room and summoning Trelawny or Williams to his side, he might have compassed the timely retirement of the ladies, so as to spare their feelings an embarrassing and painful surprise. The large terrace towards the sea was the place, where Shelley delighted to sit for hours together (_vide_ Shelley’s letter to John Gisborne of 18th of June, 1822) in the summer evenings, listening to the pleasant but comparatively artless music of Jane Williams’s voice and guitar.

It is not surprising that Mrs. Shelley entered this comfortless and altogether unsatisfactory place of abode with drooping spirits, and that every week she spent in it heightened her aversion for the place. Suffering from a state of health, that promised the birth of another child towards the close of the year, she would under the most favourable circumstances have found it difficult to control the irritability, and combat the depressing languor, that always afflicted her at such a time of bodily trouble. Placed at the sea-side, when she was pining for green fields and rural quietude; exposed to the glaring and scorching suns of an unusually hot and dry season, when she thirsted for cool rivulets and murmurous trees; told to make herself at home and take life easily in a house singularly deficient in its arrangements, at the extremity of a barbarous village, where she could not get the food for her frugal table without sending for it to Sarzana or Lerici, she may be pardoned for murmuring at the prospect of passing several months in so distasteful and even exasperating a place. Shelley, on the other hand, was for a while in excellent spirits, and finding San Terenzo altogether to his mind was displeased with his wife for disliking what he enjoyed. He even scolded her for being discontented without a cause. ‘No words,’ she wrote in August, 1822 (_vide_ Forman’s edition of _Shelley’s Works_) to Mrs. Gisborne, ‘can tell you how I hated our house and the country about it. Shelley reproached me for this--his health was good and the place was quite after his own heart.’ Whether it was chivalric of Shelley to reproach his sick wife for disliking what he enjoyed, is a question that may be left for his extravagant idolaters. For me it is enough to say, that in this respect he acted as men too often act, when they are unusually well and their wives are annoyingly ill. No doubt it was annoying to him. Charmed with the bay of Spezia, when he made a flying visit to it in the previous summer, he had for months been looking forward to a term of residence amidst its beauties. It was hard for him, that Mary could not keep her ailments and discontent to herself. Knowing how he had been counting on the felicity of living near Lerici, how he and Williams had for months been looking forward to the delight of sailing about the bay, and running to and fro between Leghorn and Lerici in the lovely boat, that was being built for them at Genoa, it was Mary’s manifest duty to enjoy what he enjoyed, or at least to pretend that she enjoyed it. No doubt she was in a delicate state of health. But what of that? It is usual for young wives to be so at times.

Brought round from Genoa by Mr. Heslop and two English seamen, Shelley’s new boat entered Lerici harbour on 12th May, 1822, and on trial afforded the liveliest gratification both to the poet and Williams (joint-owners of the craft), the latter of whom wrote of her performance in his diary, ‘She fetches whatever she looks at. In short, we have now a perfect plaything for the summer.’ The perfect plaything was a fatal toy. Henceforth Shelley and his friend passed most of their time on the water; Mary sometimes accompanying them in their swift passages over the dancing waves. ‘My only moments of peace,’ she wrote in the middle of August, 1822, to Mrs. Gisborne, ‘were on board that unhappy boat when lying down with my head on his knee I shut my eyes and felt the wind and our swift motion alone.’ But these moments of peace were of no benefit to her health. Threatened with a miscarriage on the 8th of June, she endured another week of extreme discomfort before she was prostrated by the misadventure, that nearly put an end to her life. It was some alleviation of Mary’s misery, that in her illness she had two companions of her own rank and sex,--Jane Williams, the blamelessness of whose behaviour towards Shelley is demonstrated by his wife’s affection for her; and Claire, who, after withdrawing from San Terenzo for a few weeks, was by this time again an inmate of the Casa Magni. But from inexperience and want of nerve, Claire and Jane proved such poor nurses at the most alarming and perilous crisis of their patient’s trouble, that she would have died of hemorrhage had not Shelley (_vide_ his letter of 18th June, 1822, to John Gisborne, and Mrs. Shelley’s letter of the following August to Mrs. Gisborne), with an address and boldness for which his brief medical training may have been accountable, made her sit in ice till the blood ceased to flow.

But if he may be commended for saving her life on this occasion, Shelley retarded his wife’s restoration by alarming her a few days later by exhibitions of nervous derangement, that was chiefly referable to his apprehensions for her safety. At all times liable at any moment to impulses of fancy, resulting in visions whose vividness, even when they lacked the persistency and steadiness of distinct hallucination, was inconsistent with perfect mental sanity, he had in the previous month, whilst enjoying unusually good health, occasioned the Williamses no little concern by his excitement at a mere illusion, which for some time he mistook for an actual occurrence. On the evening of 6th May, 1822, whilst pacing the Casa Magni terrace, he stopt suddenly, grasped Edward Williams violently by the arm, and staring stedfastly at the white surf at their feet, gave signs of acute mental torture. In reply to a question from Williams, he exclaimed excitedly, ‘There it is again--there!’ The cause of his disturbance was his vivid imagination that little Allegra, naked and lovely, rose out of the surf to his view, clapt her hands in joy, and smiled at him. So powerfully was Shelley affected by this apparition of the child, for whom he had provided by his will no less liberally than he provided for his own children, that his friends found it difficult to induce him to regard it as a mere illusion of his fancy. In the excitement coming to him from his wife’s illness, Shelley (to use her words) underwent ‘a return of nervous sensations and visions as bad as in his worst times;’ one of these visitations being a singularly hideous attack of nightmare, attended with a repulsive dream that affected him both at the moment and for some time afterwards, as though it were a real adventure. During the night of Saturday, 22nd June, 1822, Mrs. Shelley was roused from her sleep by a scream. Almost at the same moment Shelley (whose sleeping-room was on the other side of the great dining-hall) rushed into her room, screaming frantically. Under the impression that he was asleep, she tried to waken him by calling loudly to him; but instead of replying to her cries, he continued to scream so violently and alarmingly, that she sprang from her bed in a panic, and hastening from her bedroom ran across the dining-hall into the Williamses’ sleeping chamber, where, in her weakness and fright, she fell to the ground. As Shelley, on being restored to his senses and soothed into something like equanimity, declared he had not screamed, his companions came to the conclusion that he was unconscious during the whole course of his violent emotion;--that in his alarm at a dream he had crossed the hall and burst into his wife’s room in his sleep. The dream’s first vision was that Edward and Jane Williams (with their bodies lacerated and their bones starting through the skin) approached with these words, ‘Get up, Shelley, the sea is flooding the house and it is all coming down;’ words that caused Shelley to imagine he went to his window and saw the sea rushing into the house. The dream’s second vision was that he saw himself in the act of strangling his own wife. In the morning, whilst talking with Mary about the last night’s disturbance, he told her ‘that he had had many visions lately.’ One of these recent visions (a vision, that is described in two or three different ways by the poet’s biographers) was that a cloaked figure approached his bedside and beckoned him out of the bedroom into the dining-hall, when, lifting the hood of his cloak, the ghostly visitant, after displaying Shelley’s own features to the agitated dreamer, inquired in Spanish ‘Art thou satisfied?’ and vanished. On being thus confronted and tormented by his own wraith, Shelley screamed loud enough to rouse the house, even as he did on the subsequent occasion when he saw his own wraith in the act of strangling his own wife. The appearance and reappearance of his own wraith were distinctly referable to a scene of one of Calderon’s dramas, that had stirred his imagination profoundly and with morbid consequences.

The nervous excitement, that came to Shelley from his wife’s recent illness and consequent debility, was heightened by the knowledge that the beloved Hunts were at Genoa, and by the expectation of hearing at any moment of their arrival at Leghorn. On 19th June, 1822, on the third day from Mary’s imminent danger, he wrote Hunt a letter, in the hope that it would reach him at the former port; a letter in which the writer promised to set sail for Leghorn on hearing his friend had left Genoa. For the fulfilment of this promise, Shelley, on Monday, 1st July, 1822, departed from Lerici for Leghorn, in the company of Captain Roberts, the builder of the boat which had been christened the ‘Don Juan’ in compliment to Byron, and with Edward Williams by his side. It was with no common emotion that Mary parted with him. Twice, if not thrice, he was on the point of leaving her, when the poor lady,--who loved him passionately in spite of their frequent bickerings, and who was possessed by vague previsions of some approaching calamity,--called him back to her arms, to put yet another kiss on his slight and sunburnt face, to win yet another smile from his mobile features, to look once again into his forward-set stag-eyes of deepest azure, to rest her eyes once again on his flowing tresses, whose glossy brownness was darkened rather than whitened or tarnished by their few threads of grey,--to repeat the often uttered declaration that, if he did not come back to her quickly, she would speedily return with their child to their rooms (still on their hands) at the Tre Palazzi, on the Pisan Lung’ Arno. ‘They went,’ she wrote with the awful pathos of sacred sorrow in the following month, ‘and Jane, Claire, and I remained alone with the children.’ Well, might she weep! For never more was she to press her lips against the slight sun-burnt visage, see herself in those deep-blue eyes, pass her hand over the flowing brown curls, hear the voice which, harsh though it might be to others,--shrill, sharp, strident under impulses of anger, as she knew it to be,--was life’s and love’s own music to her ear and heart. The sense of coming trouble covered and held her. Not that she feared for _him_. The apprehension of seeing and hearing him no more never troubled her, nor occurred to her for a single instant. Her fear was that in his absence she might lose their child;--that death would enter the Casa Magni, and bear away the darling boy Percy, even as the ruthless foe of human happiness had with his finger’s point touched her bright, warm boy Willie into cold, unfeeling clay.

Disaster was far from Shelley’s thoughts as his little schooner--his perfect plaything for the summer--cut and danced over the waves on its way to Leghorn, where he would embrace Hunt and Marianne, and kiss their children. From the beginning of the year, his health (never so weakly as he persuaded himself and his friends into thinking it) had been steadily improving. His breast had grown broader, his figure more robust, his limbs less lathy. If it still wanted massiveness, his countenance had relinquished its former slightness and look of almost girlish fragility. Exposure to sea-air and scorching suns had tanned and bronzed the cheeks, that were never wanting in ruddiness. Of late he had allowed his moustaches to grow, and though they were poor, downy, boyish things in Trelawny’s opinion, they gave his aspect a certain degree of manliness which his face had lacked, on the occasion of his introduction to the stalwart Cornishman. Now that he had dismissed dull care and nervous fancies, in the elation of the brief voyage that would bring him to Hunt’s presence, he had the appearance of a man who might enjoy life for many a year, and live ‘to make old bones.’ And, indeed, nothing in the ailments, which he magnified, or in the constitution, which he underrated, forbade the hope that he would maintain his family’s reputation for longevity. Without being altogether imaginary, his most serious maladies--dyspepsia and a certain amount of renal trouble--were no infirmities to preclude a confident opinion that, in the absence of fatal misadventure, he might survive to green old age. In truth, though so much has been written of his physical delicacy and constant sufferings from serious malady, there was no reason why, with wholesome diet and freedom from excessive mental trouble, Shelley should not have lived to his grandfather’s age. Occasionally, no doubt, he suffered from renal stone, the painful malady that so often attends dyspepsia; but with proper treatment and care for his food he might in a few years have outgrown his disposition to the disorder, which, though afflicting, is by no means necessarily fatal. In deeming himself a sufferer from the malady, which killed the Third Napoleon, he may not have been the mere victim of nervous fancy; but even in that case the operation for his relief would not necessarily have resulted in his death, as he seems to have imagined, whilst penning the well-known lines of _The Magnetic Lady to her Patient_ (1822):--

‘What would cure, that would kill me, Jane:
And as I must on earth abide
Awhile, yet tempt me not to break
My chain.’

Anyhow, he never seemed in better health, nor was in higher spirits, than when he sprang from his little schooner at Leghorn, and, throwing himself into Leigh Hunt’s embrace, declared himself ‘inexpressibly delighted,’ and ‘inexpressibly happy.’ For the moment Hunt also (though he had landed with his numerous family at Leghorn, with just sixty crowns less than nothing in hand) was unutterably delighted and happy on seeing the pleasant and cordial face of the friend, on whom he would have preyed steadily and largely, had not fate stept between them. For the next few days Shelley was busy with the affairs of his _protégé_, who had come out from England to fix himself on Byron, though knowing well that the author would fain have been liberated from his engagement to start the _Liberal_. One of Lady Shelley’s most notable departures from biographical fairness (to use no stronger word) appears on p. 195 of _Shelley Memorials_, where she speaks of Byron’s reluctance in July, 1822, to embark in the _Liberal_, as though it were a sudden change of purpose that, taking Shelley by surprise at so late a stage of the preliminary arrangements, would have justified him in breaking at once and for ever with the vacillating poet. For months Shelley had been aware of Byron’s regret at having committed himself to the hazardous enterprise. No doubt (as I have already remarked) the project was Byron’s own design. Though in proposing to take Hunt for his literary coadjutor he was actuated in some degree by benevolent concern for a struggling man of letters, Byron must, of course, be regarded as having been actuated in a higher degree by a selfish concern for his own interests. His subsequent assertion that he was wholly animated in the choice, and even in the project, by benevolence, was a miserable misrepresentation. It cannot be gainsaid that Byron promised to start the _Liberal_ and to take Hunt for one of his partners in the enterprise. It is also indisputable that, when a man gives his word, he should keep it. All these matters being admitted, it remains, however, that Byron’s engagement was one from which he should have been liberated by both Shelley and Hunt, as soon as he showed a wish to be released from it.

The arrangement of three poets, three men, three gentlemen, for co-operation in a literary enterprise, differs from an arrangement of three tradesmen for a purely commercial undertaking. The project for starting the _Liberal_ was a project from which each of the three adventurers could honourably retire, on giving the others timely notice of his purpose to do so. That Byron’s first intimation of a wish to retreat from the affair was given long before Hunt left England is indisputable. On receiving it both Hunt and Shelley should have disclaimed the disposition to cause him any embarrassment. In honour they were the more bound to do so,--because he was so much the strongest of the three in fame and purse; because in case of success the venture promised to be so much more beneficial to themselves than to him; and because they could not press him to persist in the enterprise against his will, without showing too lively a regard for their own interests. In taking the other course, and conspiring to hold Byron to the arrangement for their own ends, Hunt (for his own advantage) and Shelley (for Hunt’s profit) were guilty at least of sharp practice. From February to the end of June, they had been acting together confidentially against their powerful friend. For months they had known of Byron’s wish to get out of the affair. At the beginning of July, just four calendar months had passed since Shelley wrote from Pisa to his fellow-conspirator in England (2nd March, 1822),--‘I imagine it will be no very difficult task to execute that which you have assigned me--to keep him in heart with the project until your arrival.’ Yet in her book Lady Shelley, speaking of the affair as it stood on 1st July, 1822, says,--