JUNE 1819-SEPTEMBER 1820
It was not fifteen months since they had all left England; Shelley and
Mary with the sweet, blue-eyed "Willmouse," and the pretty baby, Clara, so
like her father; Clare and the "bluff, bright-eyed little Commodore,"
Allegra; the Swiss nurse and English nursemaid; a large and lively party,
in spite of cares and anxieties and sorrows to come. In one short,
spiritless paragraph Mary, on the 4th of August, summed up such history as
there was of the sad two months following on the blow which had left her
childless.
_Journal, Wednesday, August 4, 1819, Leghorn_ (Mary).--I begin my
journal on Shelley's birthday. We have now lived five years together;
and if all the events of the five years were blotted out, I might be
happy; but to have won and then cruelly to have lost, the associations
of four years, is not an accident to which the human mind can bend
without much suffering.
Since I left home I have read several books of Livy, _Clarissa
Harlowe_, the _Spectator_, a few novels, and am now reading the Bible,
and Lucan's _Pharsalia_, and Dante. Shelley is to-day twenty-seven
years of age. Write; read Lucan and the Bible. Shelley writes the
_Cenci_, and reads Plutarch's _Lives_. The Gisbornes call in the
evening. Shelley reads _Paradise Lost_ to me. Read two cantos of the
_Purgatorio_.
Three days after William's death, Shelley, Mary, and Clare had left Rome
for Leghorn. Once more they were alone together--how different now from
the three heedless young things who, just five years before, had set out
to walk through France with a donkey!
Shelley, then, a creature of feelings and theories, full of unbalanced
impulses, vague aspirations and undeveloped powers; inexperienced in
everything but uncomprehended pain and the dim consciousness of
half-realised mistakes. Mary, the fair, quiet, thoughtful girl, earnest
and impassioned, calm and resolute, as ignorant of practical life as
precocious in intellect; with all her mind worshipping the same high
ideals as Shelley's, and with all her heart worshipping him as the
incarnation of them. Clare her very opposite; excitable and enthusiastic,
demonstrative and capricious, clever, but silly; with a mind in which a
smattering of speculative philosophy, picked up in Godwin's house,
contended for the mastery with such social wisdom as she had picked up in
a boarding school. Both of them mere children in years. Now poor Clare was
older without being much wiser, saddened yet not sobered; suffering
bitterly from her ambiguous position, yet unable or unwilling to put an
end to it; the worse by her one great error, which had brought her to dire
grief; the better by one great affection--for her child,--the source of
much sorrow, it is true, but also of truest joy of self-devotion, and the
only instrument of such discipline that ever she had.
Shelley had found what he wanted, the faithful heart which to his own
afforded peace and stability and the balance which, then, he so much
needed; a kindred mind, worthy of the best his had to give; knowing and
expecting that best, too, and satisfied with nothing short of it. And his
best had responded. In these few years he had realised powers the extent
of which could not have been foretold, and which might, without that
steady sympathy and support, have remained unfulfilled possibilities for
ever. In spite of the far-reaching consequences of his errors, in spite of
torturing memories, in spite of ill-health, anxiety, poverty, vexation,
and strife, the Shelley of _Queen Mab_ had become the Shelley of
_Prometheus Unbound_ and the _Cenci_.
Of this development he himself was conscious enough. In so far as he was
known to his contemporaries, it was only by his so-called atheistic
opinions, and his departures theoretical and actual, from conventional
social morality; and even these owed their notoriety, not to his genius,
but to the fact that they were such strange vagaries in the heir to a
baronetcy. In his new life he had, indeed, known the deepest grief as well
as the purest love, but those griefs which are memorial shrines of love
did not paralyse him. They were rather among the influences which elicited
the utmost possibilities of his nature; his lost children, as lovely
ideals, were only half lost to him.
But with Mary it was otherwise. Her occupation was gone. When after the
death of her first poor little baby, she wrote: "Whenever I am left alone
to my own thoughts, and do not read to divert them, they always come back
to the same point--that I was a mother, and am so no longer;" a new sense
was dawning in her which never had waned, and which, since William's
birth, had asserted itself as the key to her nature.
She had known very little of the realities of life when she left her
father's house with Shelley, and he, her first reality, belonged in many
ways more to the ideal than to the real world. But for her children, her
association with him, while immeasurably expanding her mental powers,
might have tended to develop these at the expense of her emotional nature,
and to starve or to stifle her human sympathies. In her children she found
the link which united her ideal love with the universal heart of mankind,
and it was as a mother that she learned the sweet charities of human
nature. This maternal love deepened her feelings towards her own father,
it gave her sympathy with Clare and helped towards patience with her, it
saved her from overmuch literary abstraction, and prevented her from
pining when Shelley was buried in dreams or engrossed in work, and she
loved these children with the unconscious passionate gratitude of a
reserved nature towards anything that constrains from it the natural
expression of that fund of tenderness and devotion so often hidden away
under a perversely undemonstrative manner. Now, in one short year, all
this was gone, and she sank under the blow of William's loss. She could
not even find comfort in the thought of the baby to be born in autumn,
for, after the repeated rending asunder of beloved ties, she looked
forward to new ones with fear and trembling, rather than with hope. The
physical reaction after the strain of long suspense and watching had told
seriously on her health, never strong at these times; the efforts she had
made at Naples were no longer possible to her. Even Clare with all her
misery was, in one sense, better off than she, for Allegra _lived_. She
tried to rise above her affliction, but her care for everything was gone;
the whole world seemed dull and indifferent. Poor Shelley, only too liable
to depression at all times, and suffering bitterly himself from the loss
of his beloved child, tried to keep up his spirits for Mary's sake.
Thou sittest on the hearth of pale Despair,
Where,
For thine own sake, I cannot follow thee.
Perhaps the effort he thus made for her sake had a bracing effect on
himself, but the old Mary seemed gone,--lost,--and even he was powerless
to bring her back; she could not follow him; any approach of seeming
forgetfulness in others increased her depression and gloom.
The letter to Miss Curran, which follows, was written within three weeks
of William's death.
LEGHORN, _27th June 1819_.
MY DEAR MISS CURRAN--I wrote to you twice on our journey, and again
from this place, but I found the other day that Shelley had forgotten
to send the letter; and I have been so unwell with a cold these last
two or three days that I have not been able to write. We have taken an
airy house here, in the vicinity of Leghorn, for three months, and we
have not found it yet too hot. The country around us is pretty, so
that I daresay we shall do very well. I am going to write another
stupid letter to you, yet what can I do? I no sooner take up my pen
than my thoughts run away with me, and I cannot guide it except about
_one_ subject, and that I must avoid. So I entreat you to join this to
your many other kindnesses, and to excuse me. I have received the two
letters forwarded from Rome. My father's lawsuit is put off until
July. It will never be terminated. I hear that you have quitted the
pestilential air of Rome, and have gained a little health in the
country. Pray let us hear from you, for both Shelley and I are very
anxious--more than I can express--to know how you are. Let us hear
also, if you please, anything you may have done about the tomb, near
which I shall lie one day, and care not, for my own sake, how soon. I
never shall recover that blow; I feel it more than at Rome; the
thought never leaves me for a single moment; everything on earth has
lost its interest to me. You see I told you that I could only write to
you on one subject; how can I, since, do all I can (and I endeavour
very sincerely) I can think of no other, so I will leave off. Shelley
is tolerably well, and desires his kindest remembrances.--Most
affectionately yours,
MARY W. SHELLEY.
Their sympathetic friend, Leigh Hunt, grieved at the tone of her letters
and at Shelley's account of her, tried to convey to her a little kindly
advice and encouragement.
8 YORK BUILDINGS, NEW ROAD.
_July 1819._
MY DEAR MARY--I was just about to write to you, as you will see by my
letter to Shelley, when I received yours. I need not say how it
grieves me to see you so dispirited. Not that I wonder at it under
such sufferings; but I know, at least I have often suspected, that you
have a tendency, partly constitutional perhaps, and partly owing to
the turn of your philosophy, to look over-intensely at the dark side
of human things; and they must present double dreariness through such
tears as you are now shedding. Pray consent to take care of your
health, as the ground of comfort; and cultivate your laurels on the
strength of it. I wish you would strike your pen into some more genial
subject (more obviously so than your last), and bring up a fountain of
gentle tears for us. That exquisite passage about the cottagers shows
what you could do.[36]
Mary received his counsels submissively, and would have carried them out
if she could. But her nervous prostration was beyond her own power to cure
or remove, and it was hard for others and impossible for herself to know
how far her dejected state was due to mental and how far to physical
causes.
Shelley was not, and dared not be, idle. He worked at his Tragedy and
finished it; many of the Fragments, too, belong to this time. They are the
speech of pain, but those who can teach in song what they learn in
suffering have much, very much to be thankful for. Mary persisted in
study; she even tried to write. But the spring of invention was low.
She exerted herself to send to Mrs. Hunt an account of their present life
and surroundings.
LEGHORN, _28th August 1819_.
MY DEAR MARIANNE--We are very dull at Leghorn, and I can therefore
write nothing to amuse you. We live in a little country house at the
end of a green lane, surrounded by a _podere_. These _poderi_ are just
the things Hunt would like. They are like our kitchen-gardens, with
the difference only that the beautiful fertility of the country gives
them. A large bed of cabbages is very unpicturesque in England, but
here the furrows are alternated with rows of grapes festooned on their
supporters, and the hedges are of myrtle, which have just ceased to
flower; their flower has the sweetest faint smell in the world, like
some delicious spice. Green grassy walks lead you through the vines.
The people are always busy, and it is pleasant to see three or four of
them transform in one day a bed of Indian corn to one of celery. They
work this hot weather in their shirts, or smock-frocks (but their
breasts are bare), their brown legs nearly the colour, only with a
rich tinge of red in it, of the earth they turn up. They sing, not
very melodiously, but very loud, Rossini's music, "Mi rivedrai, ti
rivedro," and they are accompanied by the _cicala_, a kind of little
beetle, that makes a noise with its tail as loud as Johnny can sing;
they live on trees; and three or four together are enough to deafen
you. It is to the _cicala_ that Anacreon has addressed an ode which
they call "To a Grasshopper" in the English translations.
Well, here we live. I never am in good spirits--often in very bad; and
Hunt's portrait has already seen me shed so many tears that, if it had
his heart as well as his eyes, he would weep too in pity. But no more
of this, or a tear will come now, and there is no use for that.
By the bye, a hint Hunt gave about portraits. The Italian painters are
very bad; they might make a nose like Shelley's, and perhaps a mouth,
but I doubt it; but there would be no expression about it. They have
no notion of anything except copying again and again their Old
Masters; and somehow mere copying, however divine the original, does a
great deal more harm than good.
Shelley has written a good deal, and I have done very little since I
have been in Italy. I have had so much to see, and so many vexations,
independently of those which God has kindly sent to wean me from the
world if I were too fond of it. Shelley has not had good health by any
means, and, when getting better, fate has ever contrived something to
pull him back. He never was better than the last month of his stay in
Rome, except the last week--then he watched sixty miserable death-like
hours without closing his eyes; and you may think what good that did
him.
We see the _Examiners_ regularly now, four together, just two months
after the publication of the last. These are very delightful to us. I
have a word to say to Hunt of what he says concerning Italian dancing.
The Italians dance very badly. They dress for their dances in the
ugliest manner; the men in little doublets, with a hat and feather;
they are very stiff; nothing but their legs move; and they twirl and
jump with as little grace as may be. It is not for their dancing, but
their pantomime, that the Italians are famous. You remember what we
told you of the ballet of _Othello_. They tell a story by action, so
that words appear perfectly superfluous things for them. In that they
are graceful, agile, impressive, and very affecting; so that I delight
in nothing so much as a deep tragic ballet. But the dancing, unless,
as they sometimes do, they dance as common people (for instance, the
dance of joy of the Venetian citizens on the return of Othello), is
very bad indeed.
I am very much obliged to you for all your kind offers and wishes.
Hunt would do Shelley a great deal of good, but that we may not think
of; his spirits are tolerably good. But you do not tell me how you get
on; how Bessy is, and where she is. Remember me to her. Clare is
learning thorough bass and singing. We pay four crowns a month for her
master, lessons three times a week; cheap work this, is it not? At
Rome we paid three shillings a lesson and the master stayed two hours.
The one we have now is the best in Leghorn.
I write in the morning, read Latin till 2, when we dine; then I read
some English book, and two cantos of Dante with Shelley. In the
evening our friends the Gisbornes come, so we are not perfectly alone.
I like Mrs. Gisborne very much indeed, but her husband is most
dreadfully dull; and as he is always with her, we have not so much
pleasure in her company as we otherwise should....
The neighbourhood of Mrs. Gisborne, "charming from her frank and
affectionate nature," and full of intellectual sympathy with the Shelleys,
was a boon indeed at this melancholy time. Through her Shelley was led to
the study of Spanish, and the appearance on the scene of Charles
Clairmont, who had just passed a year in Spain, was an additional stimulus
in this direction. Together they read several of Calderon's plays, from
which Shelley derived the greatest delight, and which enabled him for a
time to forget everyday life and its troubles. Another diversion to his
thoughts was the scheme of a steamboat which should ply between Leghorn
and Marseilles, to be constructed by Henry Reveley, mainly at Shelley's
expense. He was elated at promoting a project which he conceived to be of
great public usefulness and importance, and happy at being able to do a
friend a good turn. He followed every stage of the steamer's construction
with keen interest, and was much disappointed when the idea was given up,
as, after some months, it was; not, however, until much time, labour, and
money had been expended on it.
Mary, though she endeavoured to fill the blanks in her existence by
assiduous reading, could not escape care. Clare was in perpetual thirst
for news of her Allegra, and Godwin spared them none of his usual
complaints. He, too, was much concerned at the depressed tone of Mary's
letters, which seemed to him quite disproportionate to the occasion, and
thought it his duty to convince her, by reasoning, that she was not so
unhappy as she thought herself to be.
SKINNER STREET, _9th September 1819_.
MY DEAR MARY--Your letter of 19th August is very grievous to me,
inasmuch as you represent me as increasing the degree of your
uneasiness and depression.
You must, however, allow me the privilege of a father and a
philosopher in expostulating with you on this depression. I cannot
but consider it as lowering your character in a memorable degree, and
putting you quite among the commonalty and mob of your sex, when I had
thought I saw in you symptoms entitling you to be ranked among those
noble spirits that do honour to our nature. What a falling off is
here! How bitterly is so inglorious a change to be deplored!
What is it you want that you have not? You have the husband of your
choice, to whom you seem to be unalterably attached, a man of high
intellectual attainments, whatever I and some other persons may think
of his morality, and the defects under this last head, if they be not
(as you seem to think) imaginary, at least do not operate as towards
you. You have all the goods of fortune, all the means of being useful
to others, and shining in your proper sphere. But you have lost a
child: and all the rest of the world, all that is beautiful, and all
that has a claim upon your kindness, is nothing, because a child of
two years old is dead.
The human species may be divided into two great classes: those who
lean on others for support, and those who are qualified to support. Of
these last, some have one, some five, and some ten talents. Some can
support a husband, a child, a small but respectable circle of friends
and dependents, and some can support a world, contributing by their
energies to advance their whole species one or more degrees in the
scale of perfectibility. The former class sit with their arms crossed,
a prey to apathy and languor, of no use to any earthly creature, and
ready to fall from their stools if some kind soul, who might
compassionate, but who cannot respect them, did not come from moment
to moment and endeavour to set them up again. You were formed by
nature to belong to the best of these classes, but you seem to be
shrinking away, and voluntarily enrolling yourself among the worst.
Above all things, I entreat you, do not put the miserable delusion on
yourself, to think there is something fine, and beautiful, and
delicate, in giving yourself up, and agreeing to be nothing. Remember
too, though at first your nearest connections may pity you in this
state, yet that when they see you fixed in selfishness and ill
humour, and regardless of the happiness of every one else, they will
finally cease to love you, and scarcely learn to endure you.
The other parts of your letter afford me much satisfaction. Depend
upon it, there is no maxim more true or more important than this;
Frankness of communication takes off bitterness. True philosophy
invites all communication, and withholds none.
Such a letter tended rather to check frankness of communication than to
bind up a broken heart. Poor Mary's feelings appear in her letter to Miss
Curran, with whom she was in correspondence about a monumental stone for
the tomb in Rome.
The most pressing entreaties on my part, as well as Clare's, cannot
draw a single line from Venice. It is now six months since we have
heard, even in an indirect manner, from there. God knows what has
happened, or what has not! I suppose Shelley must go to see what has
become of the little thing; yet how or when I know not, for he has
never recovered from his fatigue at Rome, and continually frightens me
by the approaches of a dysentery. Besides, we must remove. My lying-in
and winter are coming on, so we are wound up in an inextricable
dilemma. This is very hard upon us; and I have no consolation in any
quarter, for my misfortune has not altered the tone of my Father's
letters, so that I gain care every day. And can you wonder that my
spirits suffer terribly? that time is a weight to me? And I see no end
to this. Well, to talk of something more interesting, Shelley has
finished his tragedy, and it is sent to London to be presented to the
managers. It is still a _deep secret_, and only one person, Peacock
(who presents it), knows anything about it in England. With Shelley's
public and private enemies, it would certainly fall if known to be
his; his sister-in-law alone would hire enough people to damn it. It
is written with great care, and we are in hopes that its story is
sufficiently polished not to shock the audience. We shall see.
Continue to direct to us at Leghorn, for if we should be gone, they
will be faithfully forwarded to us. And when you return to Rome just
have the kindness to inquire if there should be any stray letter for
us at the post-office. I hope the country air will do you real good.
You must take care of yourself. Remember that one day you will return
to England, and that you may be happier there.--Affectionately yours,
M. W. S.
At the end of September they removed to Florence, where they had engaged
pleasant lodgings for six months. The time of Mary's confinement was now
approaching, an event, in Shelley's words, "more likely than any other to
retrieve her from some part of her present melancholy depression."
They travelled by short, easy stages; stopping for a day at Pisa to pay a
visit to a lady with whom from this time their intercourse was frequent
and familiar. This was Lady Mountcashel, who had, when a young girl, been
Mary Wollstonecraft's pupil, and between whom and her teacher so warm an
attachment had existed as to arouse the jealousy and dislike of her
mother, Lady Kingsborough. She had long since been separated from Lord
Mountcashel, and lived in Italy with a Mr. Tighe and their two daughters,
Laura and Nerina. As Lady Mountcashel she had entertained Godwin at her
house during his visit to Ireland after his first wife's death. She is
described by him as a remarkable person, "a republican and a democrat in
all their sternness, yet with no ordinary portion either of understanding
or good nature." In dress and appearance she was somewhat singular, and
had that disregard for public opinion on such matters which is habitually
implied in the much abused term "strong-minded." In this respect she had
now considerably toned down. Her views on the relations of the sexes were
those of William Godwin, and she had put them into practice. But she and
the gentleman with whom she lived in permanent, though irregular, union
had succeeded in constraining, by their otherwise exemplary life, the
general respect and esteem. They were known as "Mr. and Mrs. Mason," and
had so far lived down criticism that their actual position had come to be
ignored or forgotten by those around them. Mr. Tighe, or "Tatty," as he
was familiarly called by his few intimates, was of a retiring disposition,
a lover of books and of solitude. Mrs. Mason was as remarkable for her
strong practical common sense as for her talents and cultivation and the
liberality of her views. She had a considerable knowledge of the world,
and was looked up to as a model of good breeding, and an oracle on matters
of deportment and propriety.
She had kept up correspondence with Godwin, and her acquaintance with the
Shelleys was half made before she saw them. She conceived an immediate
affection for Mary, as well for her own as for her mother's sake, and was
to prove a constant and valuable friend, not to her only, but to Shelley,
and most especially to Clare.
After a week in Florence, Mary's journal was resumed.
_Saturday, October 9._--Arrive at Florence. Read Massinger. Shelley
begins Clarendon; reads Massinger, and Plato's _Republic_. Clare has
her first singing lesson on Saturday. Go to the opera and see a
beautiful ballet
_Monday, October 11._--Read Horace; work. Go to the Gallery. Shelley
finishes the first volume of Clarendon. Read the _Little Thief_.
_Wednesday, October 20._--Finish the First Book of Horace's Odes.
Work, walk, read, etc. On Saturday letters are sent to England. On
Tuesday one to Venice. Shelley visits the Galleries. Reads Spenser and
Clarendon aloud.
_Thursday, October 28._--Work; read; copy _Peter Bell_. Monday night a
great fright with Charles Clairmont. Shelley reads Clarendon aloud and
_Plato's Republic_. Walk. On Thursday the protest from the Bankers.
Shelley writes to them, and to Peacock, Longdill, and H. Smith.
_Tuesday, November 9._--Read Madame de Sevigne. Bad news from London.
Shelley reads Clarendon aloud, and Plato. He writes to Papa.
On the 12th of November a son was born to the Shelleys, and brought the
first true balm of consolation to his poor mother's heart.
"You may imagine," wrote Shelley to Leigh Hunt, "that this is a great
relief and a great comfort to me amongst all my misfortunes.... Poor
Mary begins (for the first time) to look a little consoled; for we
have spent, as you may imagine, a miserable five months."
The child was healthy and pretty, and very like William. Neither Mary's
strength nor her spirits were altogether re-established for some time, but
the birth of "Percy Florence" was, none the less, the beginning of a new
life for her. She turned, with the renewed energy of hope, to her literary
work and studies. One of her first tasks was to transcribe the just
written fourth act of _Prometheus Unbound_. She had work of her own on
hand too; a historical novel, _Castruccio, Prince of Lucca_ (afterwards
published as _Valperga_), a laborious but very congenial task, which
occupied her for many months.
And indeed all the solace of new and tender ties, all the animating
interest of intellectual pursuits, was sorely needed to counteract the
wearing effect of harassing cares and threatening calamities. Godwin was
now being pressed for the accumulated unpaid house-rent of many years; so
many that, when the call came, it was unexpected by him, and he challenged
its justice. He had engaged in a law-suit on the matter, which he
eventually lost. The only point which appeared to admit of no reasonable
doubt was that Shelley would shortly be called upon to find a large sum of
money for him, and this at a time when he was himself in unexpected
pecuniary straits, owing to the non-arrival of his own remittances from
England--a circumstance rendered doubly vexatious by the fact that a large
portion of the money was pledged to Henry Reveley for the furtherance of
his steamboat. A draft for L200, destined for this purpose, was returned,
protested by Shelley's bankers. And though the money was ultimately
recovered, its temporary loss caused no small alarm. Meanwhile every mail
brought letters from Godwin of the most harrowing nature; the philosophy
which he inculcated in a case of bereavement was null and void where
impending bankruptcy was concerned. He well knew how to work on his
daughter's feelings, and he did not spare her. Poor Shelley was at his
wits' end.
"Mary is well," he wrote (in December) to the Gisbornes; "but for this
affair in London I think her spirits would be good. What shall I, what
can I, what ought I to do? You cannot picture to yourself my
perplexity."
It appeared not unlikely that he might even have to go to England, a
journey for which his present state of health quite unfitted him, and
which he could not but be conscious would be no permanent remedy, but only
a temporary alleviation, of Godwin's thoroughly unsound circumstances.
Mary, in her grief for her father, began to think that the best thing for
him might be to leave England altogether and settle abroad; an idea from
which Mrs. Mason, with her strong sagacity, earnestly dissuaded her.
Her views on the point were expressed in a letter to Shelley Mary had
written asking her if she could give Charles Clairmont any introductions
at Vienna, where he had now gone to seek his fortune as a teacher of
languages; and also begging for such assistance as she might be able to
lend in the matter of obtaining access to historical documents or other
MS. bearing on the subjects of Mary's projected novel.
MRS. MASON TO SHELLEY.
MY DEAR SIR--I deferred answering your letter till this post in hopes
of being able to send some recommendations for your friend at Vienna,
in which I have been disappointed; and I have now also a letter from
my dear Mary; so I will answer both together. It gives me great
pleasure to hear such a good account of the little boy and his
mother.... I am sorry to perceive that your visit to Pisa will be so
much retarded; but I admire Mary's courage and industry. I sincerely
regret that it is not in my power to be of service to her in this
undertaking.... All I can say is, that when you have got all you can
there (where I suppose the manuscript documents are chiefly to be
found) and that you come to this place, I have scarcely any doubt of
being able to obtain for you many books on the subject which interests
you. Probably everything in print which relates to it is as easy to be
had here as at Florence.... I am very sorry indeed to think that Mr.
Godwin's affairs are in such a bad way, and think he would be much
happier if he had nothing to do with trade; but I am afraid he would
not be comfortable out of England. You who are young do not mind the
thousand little wants that men of his age are not habituated to; and
I, who have been so many years a vagabond on the face of the earth,
have long since forgotten them; but I have seen people of my age much
discomposed at the absence of long-accustomed trifles; and though
philosophy supports in great matters, it seldom vanquishes the small
everydayisms of life. I say this that Mary may not urge her father too
much to leave England. It may sound odd, but I can't help thinking
that Mrs. Godwin would enjoy a tour in foreign countries more than he
would. The physical inferiority of women sometimes teaches them to
support or overlook little inconveniences better than men.
* * * * *
"I am very sorry," she writes to Mary in another letter, "to find you
still suffer from low spirits. I was in hopes the little boy would
have been the best remedy for that. Words of consolation are but empty
sounds, for to time alone it belongs to wear out the tears of
affliction. However, a woman who gives milk should make every exertion
to be cheerful on account of the child she nourishes."
Whether the plan for Godwin's expatriation was ever seriously proposed to
him or not, it was, at any rate, never carried out. But none the less for
this did the Shelleys live in the shadow of his gloom, which co-operated
with their own pecuniary strait, previously alluded to, and with the
nipping effects of an unwontedly severe winter, to make life still
difficult and dreary for them.
"Shelley Calderonised on the late weather," wrote Mary to Mrs.
Gisborne; "he called it an epic of rain with an episode of frost, and
a few similes concerning fine weather. We have heard from England,
although not from the Bankers; but Peacock's letter renders the affair
darker than ever. Ah! my dear friend, you, in your slow and sure way
of proceeding, ought hardly to have united yourself to our eccentric
star. I am afraid that you will repent it, and it grieves us both more
than you can imagine that all should have gone so ill; but I think we
may rest assured that this is delay, and not loss; it can be nothing
else. I write in haste--a carriage at the door to take me out, and
_Percy_ asleep on my knee. Adieu. Charles is at Vienna by this
time."...
They had intended remaining six months at Florence, but the place suited
Shelley so ill that they took advantage of the first favourable change in
the weather, at the end of January, to remove to Pisa, where the climate
was milder, and where they now had pleasant friends in the Masons at "Casa
Silva." They wished, too, to consult the celebrated Italian surgeon,
Vacca, on the subject of Shelley's health. Vacca's advice took the shape
of an earnest exhortation to him to abstain from drugs and remedies, to
live a healthy life, and to leave his complaint, as far as possible, to
nature. And, though he continued liable to attacks of pain and illness,
and on one occasion had a severe nervous attack, the climate of Pisa
proved in the end more suitable to him than any other, and for more than
two years he remained there or in the immediate neighbourhood. He and Mary
were never more industrious than at this time; reading extensively, and
working together on a translation of Spinoza they had begun at Florence,
and which occupied them, at intervals, for many months. Little Percy, a
most healthy and satisfactory infant, had in March an attack of measles,
but so slight as to cause no anxiety. Once, however, during the summer
they had a fright about him, when an unusually alarming letter from her
father upset Mary so much as to cause in her nursling, through her,
symptoms of an illness similar to that which had destroyed little Clara.
On this occasion she authorised Shelley, at his earnest request, to
intercept future letters of the kind, an authority of which he had to
avail himself at no distant date, telling Godwin that his domestic peace,
Mary's health and happiness, and his child's life, could no longer be
entirely at his mercy.
No wonder that his own nervous ailments kept their hold of him. And to
make matters better for him and for Mary, Paolo, the rascally Italian
servant whom they had dismissed at Naples, now concocted a plot for
extorting money from Shelley by accusing him of frightful crimes. Legal
aid had to be called in to silence him. To this end they employed an
attorney of Leghorn, named Del Rosso, and, for convenience of
communication, they occupied for a few weeks Casa Ricci, the Gisbornes'
house there, the owners being absent in England. Shelley made Henry
Reveley's workshop his study. Hence he addressed his poetical "Letter to
Maria Gisborne," and here too it was that "on a beautiful summer evening
while wandering among the lanes, whose myrtle hedges were the bowers of
the fireflies (they) heard the carolling of the skylark, which inspired
one of the most beautiful of his poems."[37]
If external surroundings could have made them happy they might have been
so now, but Shelley, though in better health, was very nervous. Paolo's
scandal and the legal affair embittered his life, to an extent difficult
indeed to estimate, for it is certain that for some one else's sake,
though _whose_ sake has never transpired, he had accepted when at Naples
responsibilities at once delicate and compromising. Paolo had knowledge of
the matter, and used this knowledge partly to revenge himself on Shelley
for dismissing him from his service, partly to try and extort money from
him by intimidation. The Shelleys hoped they had "crushed him" with Del
Rosso's help, but they could not be certain, because, as Mary wrote to
Miss Curran, they "could only guess at his accomplices." With Shelley in a
state of extreme nervous irritability, with Mary deprived of repose by her
anguish on her father's account and her feverish anxiety to help him, with
Clare unsettled and miserable about Allegra, venting her misery by writing
to Byron letters unreasonable and provoking, though excusable, and then
regretting having sent them, they were not likely to be the most cheerful
or harmonious of trios.
The weather became intolerably hot by the end of August, and they migrated
to Casa Prinni, at the Baths of S. Giuliano di Pisa. The beauty of this
place, and the delightful climate, refreshed and invigorated them all.
They spent two or three days in seeing Lucca and the country around, when
Shelley wrote the _Witch of Atlas_. Exquisite poem as it is, it was, in
Mary's mood of the moment, a disappointment to her. Ever since the _Cenci_
she had been strongly impressed with the conviction that if he could but
write on subjects of universal _human_ interest, instead of indulging in
those airy creations of fancy which demand in the reader a sympathetic,
but rare, quality of imagination, he would put himself more in touch with
his contemporaries, who so greatly misunderstood him, and that, once he
had elicited a responsive feeling in other men, this would be a source of
profound happiness and of fresh and healthy inspiration to himself. "I
still think I was right," she says, woman-like, in the _Notes to the Poems
of 1820_, written long after Shelley's death. So from one point of view
she undoubtedly was, but there are some things which cannot be
constrained. Shelley was Shelley, and at the moment when he was moved to
write a poem like the _Witch of Atlas_, it was useless to wish that it
had been something quite different.
His next poem was to be inspired by a human subject, and perhaps then poor
Mary would have preferred a second Witch of Atlas.