THE ROMAN CEMETERY
At the end of another month the villa must again be given up to Byron
and Allegra restored to him. The cold and rainy weather gave Shelley the
idea of pushing farther south. To feel happy he needed warmth and
sympathy. New climates and new places might cheat his sorrow.
The road to Rome wound along among already reddening vineyards. At every
step the travellers passed teams of cream-coloured oxen of Virgilian
beauty. They went through Ferrara and Bologna, where they saw such
quantities of statues, pictures and churches that Shelley’s brain became
like the portfolio of an architect or a print-shop or a commonplace
book. Passing by the romantic cities of Rimini, Spoleto and Terni, they
reached the Campagna di Roma, an absolute solitude, yet picturesque and
charming. When they entered Rome an immense hawk was sailing in the air
over their heads.
The majestic ruins of Rome impressed Shelley tremendously. The English
burying-place, under the pyramidal tomb of Cestius, appeared to him the
most beautiful and solemn cemetery he had ever seen. The wind whispered
in the leaves of the trees overhanging tombs which were mostly of women
and young people. If one were to die, it is there one might desire to
sleep.
From Rome they went on to Naples, where they took rooms which looked
across the Villa Nazionali to the blue waters of the bay, for ever
changing and for ever the same. Vesuvius was in a state of eruption, and
day and night they saw volumes of smoke rolling up and fountains of
liquid fire. The black bituminous vapour and the fiery light were
reflected in the sea. The climate was that of an English spring, though
lacking a little that crescendo of sweetness which delights one in
England when April’s there.
They went to Pompeii, to Salerno, to Pæstum, getting exquisite but
transitory glimpses, that leave in the memory dim white visions as of
some half-remembered dream. But, in spite of all this beauty, they were
not happy. They knew no one and their perpetual loneliness was hard to
bear.
Basking in the splendid Italian sunshine they thought with longing of
Windsor, of Marlow, even of London. What was the use of all these
mountains, of all this blue sky without any friends? Social enjoyment,
in some form or other, is the Alpha and Omega of existence, and, no
matter how real or how beautiful the actual landscape may be, it
dwindles into smoke in the mind when one thinks of some familiar forms
of scenery, commonplace perhaps in themselves, but over which old
memories throw a delightful hue.
In the streets they looked with envy at the workmen and even at the
beggars with whom other workmen and other beggars passed the time of
day. Shelley, who felt himself so full of affection for mankind, was
painfully surprised to find himself always alone in the midst of
multitudes. Mary disliked particularly being “a foreigner” where-ever
she went. She was at the beginning of a new pregnancy; Claire got on her
nerves insupportably. She had serious domestic troubles: The Italian
valet, Paolo, had seduced the Swiss nurse. Mary insisted he should marry
her, and when at last he consented to do so, it was to take his
departure immediately with his wife, vowing vengeance against Shelley.
Next Claire fell ill of a mysterious malady which Mary misunderstood.
Discontented and tired of Naples they decided to return to Rome. A need
of constant change ate up their tranquillity; they were like a sick man
who for ever seeks a fresher, cooler place in the bed, and seeks in vain
since he takes with him his fever wherever he moves. The heat of the
southern spring had tired the little boy, “Willmouse,” his father’s
darling. The doctor advised them to take him northwards immediately to
Lucca. They were on the point of starting when he was seized with a
violent attack of dysentery.
During sixty hours, Shelley held the child’s hand in his; he loved him
more and more. Willie was an affectionate, intelligent and sensitive
child. He had beautiful hair, fair and silky, a transparent complexion,
Shelley’s eyes, blue and animated. While he slept the Italian maids
would come on tiptoe in to the room to point him out one to the other.
Already in the convulsions of death, the doctor still hoped to save him.
He lived three days longer and then died at noon on a day of gorgeous
sunshine. He was buried in the Protestant cemetery which on his first
visit to Rome had so impressed Shelley by its loveliness and solemn
seclusion. The wind was still whispering in the leaves of the trees.
Near an ancient tomb in the sunny flower-starred grass, Shelley saw his
dead child disappear.
Fanny . . . Harriet . . . Baby Clara . . . William. . . . It seemed to
him that he was surrounded by a pestilential atmosphere which infected
one after the other all those he had loved best.
* * *
The young couple, whom the gods thus amused themselves in persecuting,
had, so far, bravely borne the blows. But now Mary gave up the struggle.
Shelley took her away to a pleasant villa in the country, but she was
indifferent to everything. Always she saw little feet running over the
sands at Naples, heard delicious childish phrases expressing mingled
love and glee. Motionless, gazing away in a sort of torpor, she only
roused herself to talk of the tomb in Rome. She wanted for her beautiful
boy a block of white marble, and flowers.
Godwin, hearing of her condition, and using “the privilege of a father
and a philosopher,” expostulated with her. She was putting herself quite
among “the commonalty and mob of her sex.” What did she need that she
had not? She possessed the husband of her choice, and all the goods of
fortune, and thereby the means of being useful to others. “But you have
lost a child, and all the rest of the world, and all that is beautiful,
and all that has a claim upon your kindness is nothing, because a child
of three years old is dead!”
Shelley himself gently complained:
“My dearest Mary, wherefore hast thou gone,
And left me in this dreary world alone?
Thy form is here indeed—a lovely one—
But _thou_ art fled, gone down the dreary road
That leads to Sorrow’s most obscure abode.”
As for him, he had his aërial refuges, and once safely shut therein the
lugubrious tragedies of his life seemed like absurd nightmares. He
occupied himself with _Prometheus_, a new presentation of the one and
only theme of his genius: the war of the Spirit against Matter, the war
of Free Man against the World. In it Jupiter becomes a sort of Lord
Castlereagh, the Titan another Shelley, a victim filled with hope and
confident in the ultimate triumph of Good. The cloudless skies, the
eddyings of the wild west wind, each and all were a pretext for singing
his faith filled with the optimism of despair, and which no misfortune
could quell.
When the moment for Mary’s confinement was near, they went on to
Florence, in order to be within reach of a good doctor. But the best
doctor was Florence herself, a city in which solitude has no bitterness.
At Florence one lives with Dante; one sits by the side of Savonarola;
one watches Giotto pass by. In the churches Brunelleschi and Donatello
are still in friendly rivalry. The statues in the streets live with a
more intense life than anywhere else. On the Piazza di San Miniato,
Michael Angelo’s _David_ triumphantly challenges Bandinelli’s silly
_Neptune_ and clumsy _Hercules_. One suffers less from not knowing the
children who play near one, because one possesses the children of Della
Robbia.
From the hill of San Miniato Shelley loved to gaze over the city. The
red roofs stood out sharply, the Arno rolled its yellow, rain-swollen
waters between the old houses, which seemed to huddle along the quays
and bridges like a crowd of human beings; in the distance the valley
touched a horizon of bluish hills.
In the intellectual atmosphere of Florence, Mary began to take a new
interest in life. At the boarding-house she “mixed a little with the
people downstairs.” She got through the birth-time quickly and well.
When once more she found herself with a baby in her arms, she smiled for
the first time since the death of William.
She had her son christened Percy Florence.