“ANY WIFE TO ANY HUSBAND”
Everything in life comes in series. One friend brings another. Mary and
Percy, after suffering so much from loneliness, suddenly found
themselves, without having sought it, the centre of a gay and pleasant
circle.
Chance had worked the miracle. First of all Shelley had begun to suffer
again from the pain in his side. The wind from the Apennines, so
boisterous in Florence during the winter, tried him greatly, and the
doctor recommended Pisa as more sheltered.
Tom Medwin, one of his cousins, came to join him there. Medwin had been
in a dragoon regiment in India, from which he was now retired with the
rank of Captain. He had literary aspirations, and on this account sought
the society of the only literary member of the family. He was a good
fellow, though a deadly bore, but he introduced to the Shelleys a
charming couple, the Williamses.
Edward Williams, after three years in the Navy, had exchanged from that
branch of the service into the 8th Dragoon Guards, then quartered in
India, where he had made Medwin’s acquaintance. He had been obliged to
sell out, he always explained, because of his health. Frank, fearless,
quite without side, and interested in everything, the Shelleys liked him
extremely, and they found his wife charming. She was a very pretty woman
with much sweetness of manner, and an excellent musician. The two
couples became great friends and at last the Shelleys knew the delights
of informal visiting, of ungrudging admiration and praise, and of the
perfect confidence which makes the joy of any real friendship.
The moment a social circle exists it attracts to its centre all the
lonely souls drifting round its circumference. Thus, came Taaffe, the
Irish count; Mavrocordato, the Greek prince; and an extraordinary
Italian priest with the diabolic and piercing eye of a Venetian
inquisitor. This was the reverend professor, Pacchiani, known as the
Devil of Pisa, abbé without religion, professor without a chair, amateur
of women and pictures, antiquary, pimp, dilettante, and go-between in
general.
Always with some _palazzo_ or other to let, he would take his commission
from the tenant as well as from the landlord; he would warmly recommend
a teacher of Italian, and divide with him the price paid for the
lessons; to the rich Englishman passing through Venice he would give, in
strictest confidence, the address of a _marquese_ wishing to sell an
Andrea del Sarto.
On familiar terms in every house the moment he had got his foot within
the door, he called Mary and her friend Jane, “la belle Inglese,” and
amused them by telling them tales of the great ladies of Pisa, to whom
he was father confessor and tame cat.
* * *
One of Pacchiani’s stories made a deep impression on Shelley. Count
Viviani, a great Florentine nobleman, had just married, for the second
time, a woman much younger than himself. By his first wife he had two
lovely daughters, and the new countess, jealous of their beauty, had
persuaded her husband to send them to Pisa and shut them up each in a
separate convent, until husbands were found who would take them without
dowries. The professor, who had known the _contessine_ since their
childhood, spoke with enthusiasm of their wit and beauty. The eldest in
particular was almost a genius.
“Poverina!” said Pacchiani. “She pines like a bird in a cage. She sees
her youth slipping away unused, and she is made for love. Yesterday she
was watering some flowers in her cell—she has nothing else to love but
her flowers—‘Yes,’ she told them, ‘you were born to vegetate, but we,
thinking beings, we were created for action and not to wither away in
one place. . . .’ A miserable place too is that convent of St. Anna; at
this moment the poor inmates are shivering with cold, being allowed
nothing to warm them but a few ashes which they carry about in an
earthen vase. You would pity them.”
This story reawoke in Shelley all his instincts of knight-errantry,
which the comforts of conjugal life had stilled during recent years. He
asked dozens of questions, and showed such hot indignation with the
Count, such interest in the fair victim, that Pacchiani could not resist
the pleasure—always delicious to an old man of his sort—of bringing
two young people together. He offered to take Shelley to the convent of
St. Anna.
It was in all conscience a miserable place, a ruinous building situated
in an unfrequented street in the suburbs. The visitors crossed a gloomy
portal and the abbé went to find Emilia. Mephistopheles came back
accompanied by Gretchen. He had not exaggerated her beauty. Her black
hair was tied in a simple knot, after the manner of a Greek Muse. Her
faultless contour seemed the work of Praxiteles: the marble-like pallor
of her skin made more resplendent her large black eyes full of a sleepy
voluptuousness, in which certain Italian women surpass even Orientals.
The moment she appeared in the sombre parlour, Shelley felt that he
loved her, and love with him was no desire of the flesh, but a need for
self-sacrifice to that which he adored. Ever at the back of his mind
dwelt his ideal of perfect physical beauty united to perfect spiritual
beauty, the myth of a lovely and persecuted woman whose knight he would
become, some Andromeda to whom he would play Perseus, some Princess for
whom he would be St. George; a myth which had always been the motive of
his love adventures, which had led him to run away with Harriet to save
her from her father, and to love Mary because she was unhappy. It was a
sentiment made up in proportions unknown to himself, of desire and pity,
which earthly perhaps in the beginning, had been so purified that it now
merely raised to the highest point his creative power in poetry.
In Mary he had long believed this mystic love had been found. She fell
indeed as little short of a goddess as any woman may be. For the first
time, perhaps, the real woman coincided with the Shelleyan image of her.
Nevertheless, daily life with her had shown him traits quite
incompatible with divinity. Mary, mother of a family and housekeeper,
was a drier, a more practical Mary, than the loving and courageous young
girl of Skinner Street. What Shelley had been used to praise as her
diamond-like purity now seemed to him to partake of the coldness of ice,
while her jealousy had become inconceivably petty. Worst of all, he now
knew her too intimately to be able any longer to find in her a
quickening of his ideas.
In the beautiful and mysterious Emilia, on the contrary, he could
incarnate his whole soul, because he knew nothing about her. At long
last, he discovered in this Italian convent, the adorable and fleeting
vision which he had pursued since boyhood, and which, every time that he
had thought to seize it, had vanished away, leaving him in presence of a
flesh-and-blood woman capable of wounding his sensitive soul.
On coming into the parlour, Emilia addressed herself to a caged bird in
terms which appeared to Shelley the most poetic in the world:
“Poor little bird, you are dying of languor! How I pity you! How much
you must suffer hearing the other birds calling to you, ere they depart
for warmer climes! But you are doomed, like me, to finish in this prison
your miserable life. . . . Ah, why can I not free you!”
She was fond of improvising thus in Italian fashion all sorts of spoken
poems that did not fail in quality—nor in quantity either. But Shelley
saw in her true genius. He begged leave to come and call upon her again,
and to bring with him his wife and his sister-in-law. She graciously
gave her permission.
When he described the visit to Mary, he made no secret of the sentiments
with which it had inspired him. Both of them were great readers of
Plato, and Mary was familiar with that love which is merely the
contemplation of supreme beauty. She would, however, have been better
pleased to see it awakened by a statue, or that Shelley, like Dante, had
never had the chance of speaking to his Beatrice. However, when Shelley
begged her to go with him to see the beautiful prisoner, she willingly
went.
She admitted that Emilia was beautiful in a Greek statue style, and of
surprising eloquence, but at the bottom of her heart she felt that she
preferred the chaste reserve of the viaggetory Englishwoman to this too
effusive Italian genius. She thought that Emilia’s voice was over-loud,
that her gestures, if expressive, were wanting in grace, and that she
was most agreeable when she held her tongue—which was seldom. However,
Mary was careful not to let her real sentiments appear on the surface;
on the contrary she expressed for Emilia the warmest friendship.
Claire, more impressionable than Mary, fell, like Shelley, an immediate
victim to Emilia’s charms. While Mary took the prisoner little presents,
books, a gold chain, Claire, who was poor, offered the only thing she
could give, namely, lessons in English. Emilia accepted with joy. An
endless correspondence began between the convent and Pisa, and it was
nothing but “Dear Sister!” “Adored Mary!” “_Sensible_ Percy! . . . _Caro
fratello!_” and even, in a mystic sense needless to say, “_Adorato
sposo!_” Strangely enough, “dear sister Mary” sometimes showed a slight
coldness. “But your husband tells me that this apparent coldness is only
the ashes which cover an affectionate heart.”
The truth is, that Emilia was beginning to get on dear sister Mary’s
nerves, for Shelley was busy in raising round her one of those aërial
worlds into which he loved to escape. He was writing, in her honour, a
magnificent love-poem, which he intended to make as mysterious as
Dante’s _Vita Nuova_, or the _Sonnets_ of Shakespeare.
“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.
True love in this differs from gold and clay
That to divide is not to take away.
Love is like understanding that grows bright,
Gazing on many truths; ’tis like thy light
Imagination! . . .
Narrow
The heart that loves, the brain that contemplates . . .
One object, and one form.”
He drew a picture of Emilia which was one long pæan to her beauty:
“Warm fragrance seems to fall from her light dress
And her loose hair: and where some heavy tress
The air of her own speed has disentwined,
The sweetness seems to satiate the faint wind.”
“The brightness
Of her divinest presence trembles through
Her limbs, as underneath a cloud of dew
Embodied in the windless heaven of June,
Amid the splendour of winged stars, the Moon
Burns inextinguishably beautiful.”
“Spouse! Sister! Angel! Pilot of the Fate
Whose course has been so starless! O too late
Beloved! O too soon adored by me!”
“Emily
A ship is floating in the harbour now. . . .”
It was the most impassioned of invitations to set sail for some lovely
and impossible Elysian isle. There
“We shall become the same, we shall be one
Spirit within two frames, oh! wherefore two? . . .
Our breath shall intermix, our bosoms bound,
And our veins beat together. . . .
One hope within two wills, one will beneath
Two overshadowing minds, one life, one death,
One heaven, one hell, one immortality,
And one annihilation. Woe is me!
The winged words on which my soul would pierce
Into the height of Love’s rare Universe,
Are chains of lead around its flight of fire——
I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire!”
Although Mary consoled herself by repeating that all these fine phrases
were addressed to the divine essence of Emilia and not a very pretty
girl with black eyes and black tresses, yet, at the same time, it was
vexing to see Shelley writing with such enthusiasm. Happily, he was so
engrossed by the ardour of composition that he had no time to go and see
the poem’s heroine. And while her platonic lover multiplied his aërial
metaphors, Emilia received from the Count, her father, a cynical
message. He had found a husband who would take her without a penny, and
he requested her to let him know whether she accepted. The gentleman in
question, a certain Biondi, was not attractive, and he inhabited a
distant castle, surrounded by swamps. Emilia had never seen him, nor was
she to see him before the wedding-day. Such Turkish customs were
supremely disgusting, yet what could she do? The Elfin king, married to
a very real Mary, could not, evidently, free her from her dungeon. Were
she to marry Biondi, this might be perhaps the beginning of a happier
life. And if she didn’t like the man, she would meet others she might
like, for _cavalieri sirventi_ are to be found even in the midst of a
swamp.
Shelley had not finished his poem before he learnt that Emilia was
married.
* * *
Six months later Mary wrote to a friend:
“Emilia has married Biondi; we hear that she leads him and his
mother—to use a vulgarism—a devil of a life. The conclusion of
our friendship, _à la Italiana_, puts me in mind of a nursery
rhyme which runs thus:
‘As I was going down Cranbourne Lane,
Cranbourne Lane was dirty,
And there I met a pretty maid
Who dropt to me a curtsy.
I gave her cakes, I gave her wine,
I gave her sugar-candy;
But oh! the little naughty girl,
She asked me for some brandy.’
“Now turn ‘Cranbourne Lane’ into Pisan acquaintances, which I am
sure are dirty enough, and ‘brandy’ into the wherewithal to buy
brandy, and you have the whole story of Shelley’s Italian
Platonics.”
And Shelley added: “I cannot look at my poem! The person whom it
celebrates was a cloud instead of a Juno. . . . I think one is always in
love with something or other; the error—and I confess it is not easy
for spirits cased in flesh and blood to avoid it—consists in seeking in
a mortal image the likeness of what is, perhaps, eternal.”