CHAPTER XIV.

FROM MARLOW TO ITALY.

The Hunts and the Shelleys--Their Intimacy--Pecuniary

Difficulties--Dealings with Money-lenders--Leigh Hunt relieves Shelley

of £1400--His Testimony to Shelley’s virtuous Manners--Shelley’s

Benevolence at Marlow--At the Opera--Departure for Italy--The fated

Children--Shelley’s literary Work and studious Life in

Italy--Milan--Allegra sent to her Father--Elise the Swiss Nurse--Her

Knowledge and Suspicions--Claire and her ‘Sister’--Their Affectionate

Intercourse and Occasional Quarrels--Shelley’s Affection for

Claire--Vagrants in Italy--Pisa--Leghorn--Maria Gisborne--Her Husband

and Son--Claire and Shelley at Venice--Trick played on Byron--His

Civilities to the Shelleys--Little Clara’s Death--Paolo the Knave--He

falls in Love with Elise--Their Marriage--Paolo’s Wrath and

Vengeance--Emilia Viviani--Shelley’s Adoration of Her--The

three-cornered Flirtation--Mrs. Shelley’s Attitude and

Action--Shelley’s Fault in the Affair--His subsequent Shame at the

Business--The imaginary Assault at the Pisan Post Office.

It has been already noticed how the Shelleyan apologists deal with the

evidence that, in December, 1816, when Harriett’s suicide held the

attention of the literary coteries, Shelley’s conduct towards her had the

approval of his friend Leigh Hunt and two other unbiased judges,--his

bookseller and his attorney (the same attorney who treated the poet so

scurvily in the spring of 1821). Whilst using Leigh Hunt as a witness to

the excellence of Shelley’s conduct to his wife, the Shelleyan apologists

imply that, in the December of 1816, the two poets had long been intimate

friends. It is, however, certain that, till the end of the autumn of 1816,

the two ‘friends’ knew so little of one another that they were nothing

more than slight acquaintances. How little Hunt cared about the author of

_Alastor_ at any time prior to Harriett’s suicide, appears from his

confession that, on receiving certain sets of verses from the still

youthful literary aspirant, he neither printed them in the _Examiner_ nor

returned them to their author, but after ‘unfortunately mislaying them,’

forgot all about them,--_i.e._ tossed them disdainfully to the waste-paper

basket. Something (weeks or months) later, on seeing reason to render the

_amende honorable_ to the young author whom he had treated so

contemptuously, Hunt put in the _Examiner_ (December, 1816) an article

that, referring to Shelley as one of ‘three young writers, who appeared to

promise a considerable addition of strength to the new school,’ and also

spoke of him as ‘the author of a poetical work entitled _Alastor, or the

Spirit of Solitude_;’ no line of which poem had been seen by the poetical

editor, when he alluded to it thus cautiously in the apologetic note. ‘We

shall,’ Hunt says of the poet, of whose writings he had seen nothing but

the ‘one or two specimens,’ so lightly pitched into the wicker-basket,

after a hasty glance at their contents, ‘procure what he has published,

and if the rest answer to what we have seen, we shall have no hesitation

in announcing him for a very striking and original thinker.’ That these

words of Hunt’s pen appeared in the _Examiner_, so late as 1st December,

1816, is conclusive evidence of how little he cared _for_, and knew _of_,

Shelley up to the very moment of Harriett’s death. Yet in these latest

years of grace, we have been required to believe there can have been

nothing very reprehensible in Shelley’s conduct to his wife, since it had

the approval of so precise a moralist as Leigh Hunt, who, by reason of his

long-standing intimacy with Shelley, must have known all about it.[4]

But if Hunt was tardy in responding to Shelley’s repeated overtures for

friendship, he atoned for previous negligence by his subsequent pains to

plant himself in the affection of the young man, whom he had treated with

scant courtesy. The editor of the _Examiner_ was too sincere a man to

admire aught till he had found it admirable. But on seeing Shelley’s

titles to his homage, he promptly acknowledged them, and on discovering

his virtues, declared his generous admiration of them in no uncertain

voice. The Hermit of Marlow and the poet of Hampstead’s ‘Vale of Health’

became close friends. Whilst Marianne (Mrs. Hunt) discovered her dearest

and ever-loving familiar in Mrs. Shelley, their husbands had all thoughts

and things (money not excluded) in common. Admiring one another’s

writings, the poets backed each other’s bills. Circumstances constraining

him to fly from Lisson Grove, or the ‘Vale of Health,’ and seek a place of

retirement from creditors, Hunt found the needful seclusion at Marlow,

where he stayed, on one occasion, for nearly three months. On the other

hand, towards the close of 1817, when tradesmen were troubling him sorely

to pay certain bills for necessaries, supplied to the late Mrs. Shelley,

the author of _Alastor_ made quick march from Bisham Wood to Hampstead

Heath, and found hospitality with concealment in the ‘Vale of Health,’

where he delighted his host’s children by playing with them in an equally

amiable and frolicsome manner.

It was during this sojourn with the Hunts that Shelley came, one winterly

afternoon, on the poor woman, lying in a fit upon the heath, with a little

boy by her side, and was so greatly incensed by the reluctance of the

nearest householders to open their doors and arms to her. Why Shelley, who

eventually carried the sufferer to Hunt’s quarters (which were near at

hand), did not carry her there in the first instance, does not appear. It

is, however, on the record that, he deferred taking so obvious and

reasonable a course till he had vainly tried to get her admitted to nearer

houses, whose occupants declined to act charitably in the

matter,--possibly, because they thought he might as well take his

_protégée_ to the place where he was himself staying. One of the

individuals, to whose benevolence he vainly appealed in this emergency,

being a gentleman who was stepping out of his carriage at the door of his

own goodly mansion, the indignant poet is said to have told the selfish

householder roundly, that he might expect to have his house burnt over

his head in the quickly-coming revolution, when the poor would settle

accounts summarily with the rich. As it is told, the story redounds to

Shelley’s honour and the rich householder’s shame. But as some of the

story’s truth may be on its unrecorded side, judicious readers will

decline to condemn the householder. It is, however, to the poet’s credit

that, seeing a poor woman in need of help, he eventually helped her in the

best way, by taking her to his own place of abode, and sending for the

nearest doctor.

Fruitful of the pleasures, that usually result from the close and

affectionate intercourse of congenial friends, the intimacy of the two

poets was fruitful also to the elder poet of advantages which he may not

have been base enough to compass deliberately, but was unquestionably base

enough to accept. Towards the close of 1817, Shelley was raising money, in

some cases, by post-obits, and, in other cases, by loans charged on his

eventual estate. How much he raised by these processes in the later months

of 1817 and the earlier months of 1818, does not appear; but probably the

greater part of the heavy debt he put on his estate, between his coming of

age and his death, was created by pecuniary transactions of this

particular period. Of the terms at which he procured ready money, enough

for the reader’s purpose appears from a letter, in which he is seen

raising money at the rate of 2000_l._ in future repayment, for every

1000_l._ put into his hands. At a rough computation from this transaction,

he may be presumed to have received a clear sum of 11,000_l._ for the

22,000_l._, with which he charged his estate before his death. In addition

to the money raised by loans charged on the estate, he also borrowed

largely on post-obits, that were, of course, never paid, as he

pre-deceased his father. Whether they passed through his hands to

tradesmen for value received, or to needy friends, the sums so raised were

paid to, and spent by, him; and it is obvious from what has been said of

the estates to which he was entitled in remainder, that, had Shelley

survived his father (who died 1844), and continued to live as prodigally

from 1822 to 1844, he would have found himself, on the cessation of his

allowance of 1000_l._ a-year, a quite poor, if not an absolutely

penniless, man at his father’s death.

Raising money on these ruinous terms, towards the end of 1817, and in the

opening weeks of the following year, Shelley raised it with the cognizance

of Leigh Hunt. The money came to the younger poet’s hands whilst he was

living in closest intimacy with the gentleman who, whenever money was

passing about, never failed to see why he should not have some of it,

without working for it. Under these circumstances, it is not surprising

that, whilst arranging his own affairs, Shelley was induced to think he

might as well arrange Hunt’s affairs also. Nor is it surprising that Hunt

took the same view of the case. The entire amount sucked from Shelley by

Hunt at this period may have been exaggerated. Miss Mitford may have been

repeating an inaccurate story, when she wrote how the brokers swept off

the younger poet’s chairs, tables, and bedding for the satisfaction of one

of Hunt’s numerous creditors. But it is certain that Shelley (_ætat._ 25)

gave Hunt (_ætat._ 33) 1400_l._ in one gift, and that this was not the

only sum of money to pass in some way or other from the younger poet to

the man of letters who, besides being eight years Shelley’s senior, was

editor and joint-proprietor of a flourishing newspaper. Hunt himself

confesses to have taken this 1400_l._ in one lump from his young friend.

In judging this affair, readers should not lose sight of the difference of

the two men in respect to age,--Shelley being only twenty-five years old,

and much younger than his years in character and worldly experience,

whilst Hunt was a man of middle-age, who had been trained in poverty to be

keenly mindful of his own interest, though affecting to be wholly

regardless of it. Familiar with all the particulars of Shelley’s by no

means prosperous circumstances, cognizant of the means by which Shelley

had obtained the money, aware that the gift of 1400_l._ signified a

withdrawal of twice as much from the not ample estate, which would be

Shelley’s only provision for himself and family after his father’s death,

this mature man of the world took this young man’s money,--not in payment

for work done, but as a gift. The affair is all the more discreditable to

Hunt, because he was the editor of a powerful journal, whilst Shelley was

a literary aspirant, who, in making his senior so enormous a gift, may be

supposed to have been actuated, in some degree, by regard for the editor’s

power to serve him or injure him on the press. To think of Shelley

pressing the notes for 1400_l._ on his friend, and of Hunt taking them

with much effusion after a graceful show of reluctance, is to remember how

Shelley, in his Oxford days, wrote about ‘pouching the villains,’ who had

it in their power to praise his novel.

Some two years after his sojourn of many weeks at Marlow, Hunt, to clear

his friend’s reputation from some of the charges poured upon him by the

_Quarterly_ Reviewer, produced in the _Examiner_ (10th October, 1819) a

vindicatory article, that contains the following account of Shelley’s

manner of living at Marlow:--

The _Reviewer_, says Hunt in this article, ‘asserts that he’ [_i.e._

Shelley] ‘is shamefully dissolute in his conduct! We heard of similar

assertions when we resided in the same house with Mr. Shelley for

nearly three months; and how was he living all that time? As much like

Plato himself, as all his theories resemble Plato--or rather, still

more like a Pythagorean. This was the round of his daily life,--he was

up early; breakfasted sparingly; wrote this _Revolt of Islam_ all the

morning; went out in his boat, or into the woods with some Greek

author or the Bible in his hands; came home to a dinner of vegetables

(for he took neither meat nor wine); visited, if necessary, the sick

and fatherless, whom others gave Bibles to and no help; wrote or

studied again, or read to his wife and friends the whole evening; took

a crust of bread, or a glass of whey, for his supper; and went early

to bed. This is literally the whole of the life he led, or that we

believe he now leads in Italy; nor have we ever known him, in spite of

the malignant and ludicrous exaggerations on this point, deviate,

notwithstanding his theories, even into a single action which those

who differ with him might think blameable. We do not say that he would

always square his conduct by their opinions as a matter of principle;

we only say that he acted just as if he did so square it. We forbear,

out of regard for the very bloom of their beauty, to touch upon

numberless other charities and generosities which we have known him

exercise; but this we must say, in general, that we never lived with a

man who gave so complete an idea of an ardent and principled aspirant

in Philosophy as Percy Shelley, and that we believe him, from the

bottom of our hearts, to be one of the noblest hearts as well as heads

which the world has seen for a long time. We never met, in short, with

a being who came nearer, perhaps so near, to that height of humanity

mentioned in the conclusion of an essay of Lord Bacon’s, where he

speaks of excess of charity, and of its not being in the power of “man

or angel to come in danger by it.”’

This evidence from a witness who had received 1400_l._ in a lump from the

subject of his eulogy, might be dismissed with a smile, were it not that

it has recently been produced as a valid and conclusive testimony to

Shelley’s moral worth, by a writer who knew everything about him. The

defence having been so dealt with, it is well for readers to recall the

character of the eulogist, and the circumstances of his brief, though

close, association with the man, of whose life he wrote so

authoritatively. It should be remembered that the witness, affecting to

have formed his opinion of Shelley’s character from a long acquaintance,

was the editor who, at the beginning of December, 1816, had not read a

line of _Alastor_, and in his unconcern for the young poet, had recently

‘chucked’ his verses into the waste-paper basket. In writing that, to his

knowledge, Shelley had never committed a single action to be reprehended

by moralists differing from him on matters of opinion, Leigh Hunt showed

either how little he knew of Shelley, or how little he cared for the truth

or falsehood of what he wrote in his friend’s behalf. If Hunt really

believed that Shelley’s conduct towards William Godwin covered no single

blameworthy action, he had been strangely misinformed respecting a chief

and recent episode of his friend’s story. On the other hand, if he wrote

the vindicatory article with a sufficient knowledge of that passage of

Shelley’s career, he wrote it mendaciously. It is not surprising that,

after gushing over Shelley’s goodness to the poor at Marlow, the

vindicator of slandered virtue forbore, ‘out of regard for the very bloom

of their beauty,’ to touch upon ‘the poet’s numberless other charities and

generosities.’ The moral effect of the vindication would not have been

heightened by either a precise declaration or a general acknowledgment of

the extent to which the writer had himself profited by such exhibitions of

virtue.

But though the testimony to character is necessarily affected by our

knowledge of the witness’s peculiar obligations to the giver of great

gifts, it is only fair to Hunt to record that the truthfulness of his

viewy account of Shelley’s manner of living at Marlow is placed beyond

question by the evidence of contemporary letters, and the more precise

statements of witnesses in no degree open to suspicion. Without adhering

rigidly to the diet, which writers imperfectly acquainted with the

philosopher’s doctrine and discipline are wont to style Pythagorean,

Shelley refrained from meat and wine during the greater part of his Marlow

time. Once and again during that period he lapsed suddenly or by degrees

from the rules of the vegetarians, but only to return to them with a

stronger opinion that his health required him to abstain from flesh and

fermented drinks. It was not possible for a man so sympathetic and

observant of human life about him to live anywhere without

compassionating the unfortunate of his own species; and there is a

superabundance of evidence that, living at Marlow during a season of

insufficient employment and keen distress for struggling people, he did

all and more than he could afford for the relief of the poor of his

immediate neighbourhood. Giving money to several families, whom he placed

on the list of his regular weekly pensioners, he visited the recipients of

his bounty in their comfortless cottages, and in other ways showed himself

mindful of the first duty of the rich to their extremely indigent

neighbours. Ministering to the necessities of the poor in this deliberate

manner, he at the same time relieved them fitfully, in obedience to sudden

impulses of pity and benevolence. On the other hand, whilst acting towards

the poor of Marlow precisely as he had acted towards the poor of Tremadoc,

he was in some instances less than duly mindful of another, and no less

sacred, obligation. It would be more pleasant to remember how the Hermit

of Marlow entered a neighbour’s garden without the shoes, which a minute

earlier he had taken from his feet and given to a poor beggar-woman, were

not the story of this rather fantastic act of benevolence associated with

less agreeable stories of unpaid bills. The poet, who gave Leigh Hunt

1400_l._ in a single donation, should not have cleared away from Marlow

without paying his doctor’s charges for medical service.

Shelley’s last evening in London (the evening of 10th March, 1818) he

passed pleasantly at the Opera-house, on the occasion of the first

performance in England of Rossini’s _Barbiere di Siviglia_, the part of

Count Almaviva being performed by Garcia, who on the same occasion made

his first appearance in an English house. The first night of the new opera

and the new singer--a singer of Garcia’s celebrity, and an opera of the

_Barber’s_ enduring popularity--still remains a memorable night of our

operatic annals; and it is pleasant to remember that Peacock (a fine

connoisseur of music), Shelley (ever sensitive to music, without being a

nice or scientific critic of its composers), Claire (a musical

enthusiast), and Mrs. Shelley, were at the opera on so interesting an

occasion, and after the performance supped together, after the wont of

play-goers seventy years since.

Early the next morning, Shelley’s carriage (possibly the same carriage in

which poor Harriett paid visits something less than four years since)

rolled slowly from the capital, to which he never returned. Stacked high

and freighted heavily with luggage, the carriage held a numerous

family-party,--Shelley, Mrs. Shelley, Claire, and their Swiss maid, Elise,

besides the three children, _viz._, (1) Willie, two years and a few weeks

of age, (2) Allegra, just a year and two months old, and (3) little

six-months-old Clara. Two of the children, Willie and the wee Clara (named

after her aunt Claire) had been christened on the previous Monday (9th

March, 1816), when Allegra was probably also admitted to the Church

militant here on earth. What a group of babes, journeying, each and all,

to early death in the land of the foreigner! Baby Clara went out of

England to die a few months later at Venice; Willie found his last bed at

Rome in the following year; Allegra perished of fever at the Bagna Cavallo

convent in the April of 1822, only a few months before the poet, who had

nursed her in her earliest infancy, was swept from life by the wild

hurricane. To think of the early deaths of these children, followed thus

speedily by the poet, who took them out with him to Italy, is to imagine

Fate and Death attending the heavily-laden coach as it moved slowly

seaward along the Dover Road,--the same road along which Claire and Mary

had sped with Harriett’s husband, on quicker wheels, little more than

three years and six months since.

Starting for Italy on 11th March, 1818, Shelley was within four years and

four months of his death when he left the country of his birth for

ever:--the four years and four months during which he wrote _Julian and

Maddalo_ (1818), _Lines written among the Euganean Hills_ (1818), _Stanzas

written in Dejection, near Naples_ (1818), _Prometheus Unbound_ (1818-19),

_The Cenci_ (1819), _Ode to Heaven_ (1819), _An Exhortation_ (1819), _Ode

to the West Wind_ (1819), _An Ode to the Assertors of Liberty_ (1819),

_The Mask of Anarchy_ (1819), _Peter Bell the Third_ (1819), _The

Sensitive Plant_ (1820), _A Vision of the Sea_ (1820), _The Cloud_ (1820),

_To a Skylark_ (1820), _Ode to Liberty_ (1820), _Œdipus Tyrannus, or

Swellfoot the Tyrant_ (1820), _Letter to Maria Gisborne_ (1820), _The

Witch of Atlas_ (1820), _Epipsychidion_ (1820-21), _Autumn: A Dirge_

(1820), _Adonais_ (1821), _Hellas_ (1821), the unfinished _Charles the

First_ (1821-22), and the commencement of _The Triumph of Life_ (1822). To

take a general view of Shelley’s industry during this closing and

brightest term of a genius that, after moving slowly to perfect

development, was still in the fulness of its power and promise when it

passed abruptly from the world, readers must recall the strong stream of

minor poems that flowed from his pen during these latest years of his

existence. Remembrance must also be had of the Translations (from Homer,

Euripides, Plato, Bion, Moschus, Virgil, Dante, Calderon), the Notes on

the Roman and Florentine sculptures, the perfect part of the unfinished

_Defence of Poetry_, the _Essay on Christianity_, and the other

multifarious prose writings, including the Italian letters, whose

publication would by themselves have made a reputation for an ordinary

_littérateur_. Such exuberant productiveness in different departments of

the higher literature is comparable only with the profuse and versatile

fecundity of Byron’s genius during the same period. To suggest any other

comparison of the work accomplished by Byron and Shelley, during their

concurrent years of voluntary exile, would be foreign to the purpose of

the present writer, who, in dealing successively with the lives of the two

poets, has studiously and jealously resisted every temptation to be the

critic of either.

It lies, however, well within his province to remark that in the

comparison of their lives in Italy, Shelley, from one point of view, has

greatly the advantage of the poet with whom he will ever be associated.

Perhaps no modern English poet of the highest class (pardon me, Mr.

Swinburne) was ever more devoid than Byron of scholarly enthusiasm.

Relying in his earlier time on Hobhouse for archæology and history, the

author of _Childe Harold_ never made a nearer approach to severe study

than when he helped the Venetian monks of St. Lazarus to produce their

English-Armenian grammar. Denied his poetical genius, he would have

thought a daily newspaper and the _Gentleman’s Magazine_ sufficient

literature for any reasonable English peer. With it, he was usually

content with the intellectual food and excitement, afforded by good

magazines and the best of the current _belles lettres_. Shelley, on the

other hand, had a natural taste and turn for scholarly labour. Under no

conceivable circumstances could he have justified Mr. Buxton Forman’s high

opinion, and become the Saviour of the World; but stript of his faculty of

song, he might, under several different sets of conceivable conditions,

have developed into a great and famous scholar. Never a severe student (in

the severest and technical sense of the term) he was from his boyhood a

fitful, and sometimes a no less laborious than curious, reader of

literature, seldom attractive to those who lack the studious disposition.

Delighting in old Greek authors at Bishopgate, he became in Italy a

strenuous, habitual, and sympathetic reader of authors, who are mere names

to the semi-educated rabble. Rising with the bird he glorified, whilst

Byron was turning from his first into his second sleep, he went to books

for happiness. To show he caught the spirit of the authors he perused, one

needs only to point to the series of his free-handed and sympathetic

Translations. Reading indoors in foul weather, he read in the sunshine

when the skies were cloudless. If he was not thinking or writing, he was

poring over printed or written pages. On starting for walk or ride, his

last thought on crossing the threshold was to make sure he had the book of

the moment in his pocket; and, so wide was the range of his studious

interests, the book might be Greek or Latin, German or Spanish, or an

Arabic manuscript which he was tackling with Medwin’s scarcely adequate

assistance. Whilst Byron was a superb poet and mere man of the world,

Shelley was a keen student as well as a superb poet. These are matters to

be remembered by those who would know the Real Shelley, as he lived out

the latest of his few years in Italy.

Taking his carriage, together with his women, babes, and baggage, across

the Channel, Shelley travelled leisurely from Calais through France, by

the way of Rheims, Langres, and Lyons (whence he wrote to Leigh Hunt on

22nd March, 1818), Les Echelles, and crossing the Alps, entered Milan on

an early day in April, 1818, from which last-named city Allegra was sent

to Byron (at Venice), who, whilst expressing his readiness and wish to

have care of the child, declined to receive the child’s mother. Baby

Allegra was therefore sent to her father’s palazzo on the Grand Canal

under the charge of the female servant, described by Moore in his _Life of

Byron_ as ‘a Swiss nurse, a young girl not above nineteen or twenty years

of age, and in every respect unfit to have the charge of such an infant,

without the superintendence of some more experienced person.’ The nurse,

described thus slightingly by Moore, was Elise, who, on receiving

instructions to convey the child to the palazzo, understood that she would

return to her mistress at Milan, after seeing Allegra settled in her new

home. As Mrs. Shelley had no wish to part with the girl, who, under

maternal surveillance, had proved a sufficient nurse for Willie and

Clara, she had no intention to be without Elise’s services for many days.

In the absence, however, of a nurse, suitable or otherwise, for Allegra at

Byron’s palazzo, Mrs. Shelley consented that Elise should remain in charge

of Claire’s child at Venice, till another arrangement could be made for

her care. Hence it came to pass that Mrs. Shelley was deprived of her

proper nurse till the following August, when Elise returned to her

mistress at Este.

It would be unreasonable to assume that the nurse who brought the child to

the Palazzo Moçenijo had grounds for regarding Byron as the child’s

father. Servants are required all the world over to do what they are told,

without asking why or wherefore. Moreover, it is usual with employers to

be at some pains to prevent their servants from discovering the why and

wherefore of orders they are told to execute, for the furtherance of

affairs of secresy. Some twenty months before Elise took Allegra to

Venice, she (a young Swiss girl) had been hired at Geneva by Mrs. Shelley

to act as her little boy’s nurse. Living with the Shelleys at Geneva,

whilst the city was bubbling with hideous scandal about them, it is not to

be imagined that Elise went to England without having heard something of

the Genevese gossip to her employers’ discredit. Who was more likely to be

waylaid and questioned by the scores of Genevese tattlers, bent on

gathering evidence to the truth of stories, that had already passed from

Switzerland to England? Coming to the girl’s ears, the gossip could not

fail to make her suspicious respecting her master’s intimacy with the

young lady, whom he styled his sister. If she had heard nothing of the

gossip, she, anyhow, soon became an observer of facts that must have

awakened her curiosity and suspicion.

Accompanying the Shelleys and Claire to England, she served them as

nursemaid at Bath and Marlow. At Bath the quick-witted girl observed signs

that Claire would soon be a mother. Soon it devolved on her to look after

Claire’s infant as well as Mrs. Shelley’s little boy. Elise must have

known that Allegra was Claire’s offspring; but the facts coming under the

servant’s observation afforded her no information respecting the child’s

paternity. On that point she was doubtless left to inference and

conjecture. Though they could not help taking her in some degree into

their confidence--at least, could not prevent her from seeing what went on

under her own eyes, and drawing her own inferences from what she saw--it

is not likely that Mary and Claire told their Swiss maid who was Allegra’s

father. Several considerations must have disposed them to be silent to her

on that point. Honour and prudence forbade them to confide so delicate a

secret to the young nurse, who would be almost sure to let it out to her

fellow-servants and the Marlow gossip-mongers, and write about it in her

next letter to her friends at Geneva,--a secret which, if it were blabbed

at Marlow, would soon be talked about in London, and travel to the ears of

William Godwin and Mrs. Godwin, from whom both sisters were especially

desirous to withhold the fact of Allegra’s birth. Moreover, whilst keenly

alive to the reasons for withholding the secret from Elise, the sisters

must have felt they could gain nothing by confiding it to her. Knowing

that Elise would naturally receive with suspicion any story they might

tell her about Allegra’s paternity, they knew that of all stories the

truth was the story she was least likely to believe. The natural course

for two ladies in so embarassing a position to take towards their young

female servant, would be to tell her a more or less romantic fib, that

would not greatly aggravate their trouble if she blabbed it to her

familiars.

Probably Elise was told that her mistress’s sister was married under

circumstances, that compelled her for the present to keep her marriage a

profound secret. At the same time Elise was entreated, with tears and

pathetic assurances of eternal gratitude for her fidelity, to guard the

secret thus confided to her honour. Claire (a clever hand at fibbing, when

fibs might serve her purpose) was just the girl to trick out such a story

in the prettiest style, and Elise was just the quick-witted damsel to

receive the confidence with a proper show of credulity, and laugh in her

sleeve at it as mere fiction.

In the meantime Elise saw what she saw, and (though only a poor Swiss

nursemaid) had a right to draw inferences from what she saw. It did not

escape the smart girl’s notice that, whilst living affectionately with

Claire, Shelley seemed to care for her little girl, quite as much as he

cared for Mrs. Shelley’s little boy,--that he nursed little Allegra, and

sung to her, for the half-hour at a time, just as though she were his own

infant. Is it not told in _Julian and Maddalo_ by Shelley himself, how he

delighted in his sister Claire’s babe, and

‘nursed

Her fine and feeble limbs when she came first

To this bleak world;’

and in the ‘lovely toy’s’ infancy made himself ‘her antient play-fellow?’

Under these circumstances, Elise may well have come to the conclusion that

Allegra’s ‘antient play-fellow’ was also her young father. Elise’s

disposition to take this view of the case would not have been less strong,

had she known how Shelley had provided for Claire and her child by his

will. Though I am dealing conjecturally with mere inferences from admitted

facts, I have little doubt that Elise took this view of Allegra’s

paternity at Marlow, that she went with the child to Italy under the same

impression, and that she held to the same opinion on delivering the little

girl into Byron’s custody at Venice. To show by documentary evidence that,

before starting from Milan with Allegra in her charge, Elise had been

expressly informed of the child’s relation to Byron, would take nothing

from the strength of my suspicion that, in conveying Allegra to her

father, Elise imagined herself to be conveying Shelley’s child to the

famous Lord Byron, in order that he should make arrangements for the

child’s future education:--it having been determined (for reasons obvious

to Elise’s imagination) that her master had better not figure as principal

in arrangements, so likely to fix the little girl’s paternity on him.

Readers who concur with the present writer in this suspicion (which, in

the absence of evidence sufficient for transmuting suspicion to

conviction, is offered as nothing more than a reasonable hypothesis), will

concur with him also in regarding Elise’s misconception and the

circumstances of Allegra’s transference from the Shelleys’ care to her

father’s keeping, as the source of the subsequent story (believed by the

Hoppners, who had it in some shape or other from Elise and her husband)

that Claire had given birth to a child by Shelley, which he had sent to a

Foundling Hospital.

Of one thing there must now be an end in Shelleyan biography,--the

practice of writing about Claire, as though she were a sort of fallen

woman, to whom the Shelleys in their magnanimity showed great kindness,

though she had scarcely any claim upon them for protection. As the family

coach (so heavily laden with babies, and baggage, and womankind) rolled

through France, Claire (so recently acknowledged as their sister by

Shelley and Mary in their _Six Weeks’ Tour_)--Claire, to whom Shelley had

assigned in his will no less than 12,000_l._ of his scarcely ample

estate--never thought of herself as aught else than Mrs. Shelley’s sister.

On the other hand, though these children of the same home were only

sisters-by-affinity, Mary Shelley had no disposition to think herself

anything else than Shelley’s wife and Claire’s sister. If blood is thicker

than water, habit is stronger than either; and the two girls (still only

quite young girls) had been habituated from childhood to think of one

another as sisters. Taught from the same books and by the same governess,

playing with the same toys, placed for punishment in opposite corners of

the same room, whipt with the same rod, kissed every night by the same

‘papa,’ these children of different parents, but the same home, had been

trained to think of one another as sisters, and nothing else than sisters.

Of course they had their tiffs and quarrels. Without blood, they were far

more sisters to one another, than those sisters of the whole blood, Eliza

and Harriett Westbrook. Nor may Claire be regarded as a sister who, like

the too vehemently maligned Eliza, fixed herself on a younger sister and

her husband, and would not allow them to throw her off. Claire and Mary

(as Mr. Kegan Paul shows by the evidences which he contradicts in his

text) were girls of about the same age, though Claire was probably some

months older. Shelley never came to dislike Claire. There were moments

when he admired her, delighted in her, loved her; but never an hour in

which he regarded her with aversion, though the vivacious girl was given

to rally, flout, mock, cross him till he fairly lost his temper. In the

last month of his life (18th June, 1822), Shelley (_vide_ Forman’s edition

of _Shelley’s Prose Works_) wrote from Lerici of this wayward, piquant,

charming creature, ‘She is vivacious and talkative; and though she teases

me sometimes, I like her.’ How greatly he cared for her is shown by the

munificence with which he provided for her and her child by his will.

Going with them to Italy as their sister, Claire (one or two flying trips

excepted) was incessantly with Shelley and her sister for the first twenty

months of their life in Italy. During the last two years and a half of the

term,--when she had taken to giving music and language lessons in

Florence, and was in that capital the animating spirit of the little

circle of admirers whom she drew about her by her riant beauty and

brilliant style, her wit and accomplishments, her gaiety and irresistible

sprightliness,--she looked to ‘the Shelleys’ (whether they were living in

a villa or on a flat) as her home. No doubt she received great kindness

from the Shelleys; but no less certain is it that she repaid them in kind.

If she was unhappy, raging against Byron, dismally wretched (as the too

vehemently happy often are in the intervals between periods of elation),

she made a rush for ‘home,’ On the other hand, when the Shelleys were

languishing and in trouble, their first thought was to signal for Claire,

to fly over to them and brighten them. When Mary was sickening for the

illness, that resulted, at the Casa Magni, in her miscarriage shortly

before the fatal boat accident, Claire was by her side. It was ill for

Mary Godwin’s fame, when Mr. Froude the other day published a few scraps

of ineffectual writing, in evidence that she cordially disliked the

sister, with whom she was merely having a tiff. Far worse will it be for

Mary Shelley’s reputation for sincerity and feminine loyalty, should it

ever appear from scraps of her writing that, whilst living with every show

of affection for her sister, she was thinking unamiably of her, and

putting notes to her discredit in a secret record.

Of course, on leaving England for the last time, Mrs. Shelley had no wish

to have Claire perpetually with her, nor any expectation that she and her

husband would have Allegra’s mother on their hands, in a certain sense,

for more than four years. On the failure of the negotiations with Byron,

it was, of course, Mrs. Shelley’s hope that her lovely sister, after

reconciling herself to Byron’s aversion of her, would win the love of some

more stedfast admirer, and pass from girlish lightness to matronly honour.

In case Claire should not marry, it was doubtless hoped alike by Shelley

and his wife that, after seeing the world for awhile under their

protection, and completing her education, she would strike out a career

for herself. That the two young (_quite_ young) women had their

disagreements of opinion and conflicts of temper in Italy, even as they

had bickered and clashed (whilst loving one another abundantly) in former

time, was a matter of course with two girls, so self-dependent and fervid,

so sensitive and quick-tempered. But one needs only to look at published

letters for a superabundance of evidence that Claire’s intercourse with

the Shelleys from the spring of 1818 to the Midsummer of 1822, though

ruffled now and again by gusts of impetuosity and passages of superficial

discord, was the intercourse of near relations, held together by the usual

forces of mutual liking and genuine attachment.

Writing from Bagni di Lucca on 17th August, 1818, to Mrs. Gisborne,

immediately after Shelley and Claire had started for Venice to see Byron,

Mrs. Shelley (_vide_ _Shelley Memorials_) says, ‘Shelley and C[laire] are

gone; they went to-day to Venice on important business’ (how cautiously

the writer refers to the business!); ‘and I am left to take care of the

house. Now, if all of you, or any of you, would come and cheer my

solitude, it would be exceedingly kind.’ At the Bagni di Lucca, Shelley

and his wife had taken horse-exercise almost every evening, having Claire

for their companion in their rides, till she hurt her knee in falling from

her horse:--an accident that for a time incapacitated her for exercise in

the saddle.

Mrs. Shelley and Claire went together to the _conversazione_, where they

were so vastly amused by the whimsical braggart,--an Englishman who,

speaking Italian fluently with his national accent and intonation, told

the sisters how at Lisbon he, fighting on foot with the brace of pistols,

that never missed fire or aim, put to flight thirty well-armed and

well-mounted robbers. Whilst Mrs. Shelley was listening with outward

civility and secret amusement to this man of valour and brave speech,

Claire’s dark eyes overflowed with fun and piquant gaiety, as she

whispered a saucy speech in her sister’s ear.

In November and December, 1819, Shelley and the sisters were staying at

Florence in the _pension_, whence Mrs. Shelley wrote one of her most

amusing letters to Mrs. Gisborne.

In the letter she wrote for Mrs. Hoppner’s eyes (the letter, some of whose

passages were copied and dressed not long since by Mr. Froude for the

readers of the _Nineteenth Century_) for the exculpation of Shelley and

Claire, from the revolting charge that came to his ears at Ravenna in the

August of 1821, Mrs. Shelley blazed into sisterly wrath at the suggestion

that Claire was capable of the wickedness with which she was charged:--

‘I will add,’ writes the indignant sister to Mrs. Hoppner, from Pisa,

on 10th August, 1821, ‘that Claire has been separated from us for

about a year. She lives with a respectable German family at Florence.

The reasons for this were obvious. Her connexion with us made her

manifest as the Miss _Clermont_’ (_sic_ in Froude’s transcript; but

Mr. Froude is proverbially inaccurate in handling manuscripts) ‘the

mother of Allegra. Besides, we live much alone. She enters much into

society there; and, solely occupied with the idea of the welfare of

her child, she wished to appear such that she may not be thought in

after times to be unworthy of fulfilling the maternal duties. You

ought to have paused before you tried to convince the father of her

child of such unheard-of atrocities on her part. If his generosity and

knowledge of the world had not made him reject the slander with the

ridicule it deserved, what irretrievable mischief you would have

occasioned her!’

It is of the woman, who writes in this strain of Claire’s devotion to her

child, and strenuous efforts to qualify herself to be a good mother to her

offspring, that Mr. Kegan Paul makes the staggering, though possibly

correct, announcement that she thought her sister unfit to have the charge

of Allegra.

It has been already told how Claire was by her sick sister’s side, when

the latter was dropping into the ill-health, which preceded her

miscarriage at San Terenzo. In the well-known letter to Mrs. Gisborne from

Pisa (dated 15th August, 1822,--five weeks and three days after Shelley’s

death), Mrs. Shelley makes repeated mention of her sister and nurse.

Claire was the sedulous and loving nurse, who administered the brandy and

eau-de-Cologne, and applied the vinegar, that kept her sister from fatal

fainting, during the seven long hours of her most imminent danger. It was

from anxiety for the patient, no less than from ignorance of the way in

which it should be used, that Claire (in the doctor’s absence) lacked the

courage to use the ice, which at the close of those hours Shelley himself

applied so freely and effectually. The helpful, bright, sweet-voiced,

tender-handed Claire remained at the Casa Magni, when Shelley had gone off

to Leghorn and Pisa, leaving his wife in her weakness, to brood with

unutterable melancholy over her previsions of approaching calamity. The

saddest hours Mary spent in that season of deepening gloom, were the hours

when Claire was not by her side, to divert her thoughts, and cheer her

spirits. As soon as Claire and Jane Williams had started for their evening

walk, Shelley’s wife was revisited by the feeling that disaster would

speedily befall her only remaining child. Possessed by wretchedness,

whilst gazing on one of the fairest scenes of all Italy, Mary used to pace

slowly up and down the seaward terrace, sinking momentarily from deep to

deeper dejection, during the needful absence of the sister and friend,

whose society just enabled her to endure the growing burden of grief and

care, that without their sympathy would have been unendurable. Such was

the service of love Claire is known, by the evidence of letters, to have

rendered her sister.

Figuring thus pleasantly in Mrs. Shelley’s letters, Claire shows forth no

less agreeably in the series of Shelley’s letters, that appear in Mr.

Buxton Forman’s edition of the poet’s prose writings. At the Bagni di

Lucca, in July and August, 1818, Claire and Mary are regular attendants of

the Sunday _conversazioni_, though they refrain from dancing for reasons

known doubtless to themselves, whilst Shelley is uncertain whether they

decline to dance from philosophy or Protestantism. Leaving Mary and her

babes at the Bagni in August, Shelley and Claire go off to Venice,

performing part of the journey in the almost springless one-horse

cabriolet, that causing Shelley much discomfort fatigues Claire

exceedingly. Falling in with a German, who has just recovered from an

attack of malarial fever caught in the Pontine Marshes, Shelley is

disposed to travel in his company to Padua, when Claire, by her

entreaties, prevails on him to avoid the stranger from whom he may catch

the fever, dreaded by tourists in Italy. At Venice, where she is received

cordially by the Hoppners, and avoided by Allegra’s father, Claire is seen

flitting hither and thither, on foot or by gondola, under Shelley’s

brotherly escort. By-and-by, when Mary has come with her babes to Este,

the sisters are with Shelley at the villa Byron has lent them;--the house

where Mary’s little Clara sickens of the illness, so soon to end in death

at Venice. When the Shelleys move southward, Claire has her seat in the

heavily laden coach, travelling with them to Rome, and in their company

taking her first cursory view of the manifold attractions of the Holy

City. Shelley having preceded them by a few days, the sisters journey

together to Naples with little Willie and his nurse, and with Paolo for

the charioteer of their private carriage. At Resina, when Shelley and Mary

mount mules for the ascent, Claire seats herself in the chair in which she

is carried up Vesuvius ‘on the shoulders of four men, much like a member

of Parliament after he has gained his election, and looking’ (says Shelley

in his letter of 22nd December, 1818, to Peacock) ‘with less reason,

quite as frightened.’ At Rome with the Shelleys, when their boy’s death

plunges them in wretchedness, Claire is their companion and comforter in

the ensuing months of despair. In the autumn of 1819 she is with them at

Florence, where it amuses Shelley to observe how Lady Mountcashel’s

daughter, fickle as the breeze, is alternately in love and out of humour

with Claire, who is in the highest and brightest of her changeful spirits

at the delightful prospect of setting off in a day or two for Vienna.

Whether this trip was made for business as well as for pleasure does not

appear; but whilst fruitful of delightful anticipations, the run to the

Austrian capital may have had a graver purpose. For, set on being a

self-dependent and self-sustaining young woman, Claire is seldom without a

new scheme for the achievement of her purpose. She means to establish

herself as a teacher of languages and music. She will sing herself into

universal fame as an operatic _prima donna_. She will condescend for a

while to be the resident governess of a family of the highest quality.

Writing and talking of her as _la fille aux mille projêts_, Shelley is

ready at all times to aid her with sympathy, counsel, and money, in

furtherance of each and all of her various schemes for finding suitable

employment. Participating in her hopes, he shares her disappointments.

Words cannot express his disdain for the mental narrowness, and moral

debasement, and perverse wickedness of the gentlewoman who, after

arranging to take Claire for her governess, avoided the compact, on being

told of Miss Clairmont’s recent entanglement with Lord Byron, and of the

relation in which she stood to Byron’s illegitimate daughter.

Shelley’s attachment to Claire is the more remarkable, because the same

fervour and capriciousness, that so often set her at discord with Mary,

rendered her at times alike unruly and unreasonable to him. Alternating

between the highest of high spirits and the most dismal moods of

despondency, Claire suffered also from a temper, whose freakish vehemence

might well have made Shelley despair of keeping on good terms with her.

But though she often hurt and incensed him, she never extinguished his

fondness for her. Probably Shelley liked her all the better for being as

quick to twit and flout him into a pet, as clever in rallying and coaxing

him back into good temper. Possibly the wayward Claire saw she confirmed

him in his attachment to her, by whipping him every now and then into

transient mutiny against her influence. In moments of resentment Shelley

could write angrily and disparagingly of Claire. But all the same it

stands out clear upon the record that in eight long years he never

revolted steadily against the charming girl and brilliant woman, of whom

Byron wearied in much less than the same number of months. ‘Claire is with

us,’ Shelley wrote to John Gisborne, from the Casa Magni, on 18th June,

1822, ‘and the death of her child seems to have restored her to

tranquillity. Her character is somewhat altered. She is vivacious and

talkative; and though she teases me sometimes, I like her,’

It was thus that Shelley and Mary wrote of their ‘sister’ Claire,--the

sister in whose society Mrs. Shelley seemed to delight, and Shelley

certainly delighted; the sister for whose future he had provided by the

two legacies of 6000_l._ each. At the same time the letters, written to

the poet and his wife, overflow with evidence that their correspondents

regarded Claire as a young gentlewoman, to be rated as a member of

Shelley’s domestic circle, and treated with the respect due to his wife’s

sister. Yet Lady Shelley would push Claire from the position thus assigned

to her by Shelley and his wife, and recognized by all their friends. There

must be an end to writing about Claire, as though she were aught else than

Mrs. Shelley’s sister. There must be an end of referring to her as a sort

of fallen woman, to whom Shelley and his wife were magnanimously

beneficent.

In one notable respect Shelley’s life with his second wife in Italy

resembled his life with his first wife in England, Scotland, Ireland, and

Wales. It was a restless and vagrant existence. Students and men of

letters are usually restful and home-loving creatures. But, though

something less of a rover towards the end of his Italian time, than he was

during his first marriage, Shelley never stayed long in the same place. In

1818 he passed about a month at Milan, three or four days at Pisa, a month

or so at Leghorn, between eleven and twelve weeks at Bagni di Lucca,

something more than ten weeks at Venice and Este, three weeks at Rome.

Passing from Rome to Naples in the later part of December, 1818, he

returned to Rome after spending eight or ten weeks in the more southern

capital. From Rome he went again (in the summer of 1819) to the

neighbourhood of Leghorn, where he rested for something over three

months, before migrating to Florence for the winter of 1819-20. In the

February of 1820 he was at Pisa, where he remained (now in the city and

now at the neighbouring baths) for a longer time than at any of the other

places he visited; but even at Pisa, the place in which his roots (to use

his own expression) struck deeper than anywhere else in Italy, he was a

mere settler for the season. Of the twenty-six months (from the earlier

time of February, 1820, to April, 1822), he spent nineteen months at or

near Pisa, including the time passed in the trip to Ravenna and other

excursions; but he never planted himself there so as to touch the soil

beneath the surface. Moving in April, 1822, to Lerici, where he lived less

on land than water, he perished three months later.

At Venice, through his intimacy with such Italian ladies as the Countess

Albrizzi and the Countess Benzoni (countesses with crowded salons, albeit

Shelley may have been justified in saying they smelt of garlic), and his

unedifying familiarity with such women as Marianna Segati and Margarita

Cogni,--and in later Italian time through his close association with

Teresa Guiccioli, the Gambas, and the Romagnese revolutionists,--Byron

knew the Italians and studied them closely, though doubtless under

conditions that disposed him in the end to think too lowly of them. But to

the last Shelley’s knowledge of modern Italy and the modern Italians was

no deeper or more accurate than the knowledge to be picked up by an

observant holiday-maker in a six weeks’ tour.

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.