MIRANDA
Great excitement such as travelling royalties always arouse reigned in
the Pisan circle at the expected arrival of the Pilgrim. Mary, at
Shelley’s request, had taken for him the Palazzo Lanfranchi, stateliest
on the Lung’ Arno. Helped by the Williamses, she had done what she could
to put this ancient palace in order. The vanguard arrived in the persons
of the Guiccioli and her father, Count Gamba; the Shelleys gave them a
cordial welcome. The Countess was an agreeable surprise. “She is a very
pretty, sentimental, innocent Italian,” Shelley wrote, “who, if I know
anything of human nature and my Byron, will hereafter have plenty of
opportunity to repent her rashness.”
When Don Juan himself followed, all Pisa was at the windows to see the
English Devil and his menagerie. The procession was well worth seeing;
five carriages, six men-servants, nine horses, dogs, monkeys, peacocks,
and ibises, all in line. The Shelleys were a little anxious as to what
Byron would think of the palazzo, but fortunately it pleased him. He
said he liked these old places dating back to the Middle Ages. In
reality it dated to the sixteenth century, and was said to have been
built from designs by Michael Angelo, but the noble lord always mixed up
hopelessly architectural styles. The dark and damp cellars in particular
delighted him. He spoke of them as dungeons and subterranean cells, and
had cushions taken down so that he might sleep there.
He became at once the social centre of the Pisan circle, while Shelley
remained its moral centre. Byron was visited from curiosity and
admiration; Shelley from sympathy. Shelley got up early and read Goethe,
Spinoza or Calderon until midday; then he was off to the pine-woods,
where he worked in solitude until evening. Byron got up at midday and,
after a light breakfast, went for a ride, or to practise
pistol-shooting. In the evening he visited the Guiccioli, and coming
home at eleven, would often work until two or three in the morning. Then
in a state of feverish cerebral excitement, he would go to bed, sleep
badly, and remain in bed half the following day.
The English in Pisa made a dead set at him. Even the most Puritan
amongst them could not be severe on an authentic lord who brought to
them on foreign soil so delightful an epitome of London’s Vanity Fair.
The pleasure he took in giving scandal, what was it but a mark of
orthodox respect? If indifference is justly considered an offence,
surely defiance must be accepted as a token of humility? And was it not
patent that he could not exist without going into society, paying court
to women, accepting dinners and returning them? He met with the greatest
indulgence. But when he tried to win the same for Shelley, the
resistance was thoroughly British. In society Shelley was bored and did
not hide it. In questions of morality it was easy to guess that he put
the Spirit before the Letter, that he believed in Redemption rather than
in Original Sin. Faith in the perfectibility of man is naturally the
most heinous of crimes, since if believed in, it would force one to work
for man’s perfectibility. The mere smell of it makes society fly to arms
for its destruction. All “nice” women treated the Shelleys as pariahs
and outcasts.
Shelley laughed at this, preferring a thousand times the cool fresh air
of night to the hot and smoky atmosphere of card-rooms. But Mary
hankered to go everywhere. There was a certain Mrs. Beauclerc, gayest of
English ladies in Pisa, who gave balls, “being afflicted,” as Byron
said, “with a litter of seven daughters all at the age when these
animals are obliged to waltz for their livelihood.” Mary’s fixed idea
was to be invited to one of these balls. “Everybody goes to them,” she
said. Shelley, distressed, looked up at the sky, “Everybody! Who is this
mythical monster? Have you ever seen it, Mary?”
To win the favour of “everybody” she even went to Church Service, but
the parson preached against Atheists, and kept looking at her in such a
marked manner that, in spite of her desire to conform, her dignity as a
wife prevented her from ever going again.
All these social worries, balls and dinner parties, seemed to Shelley of
an incredible vulgarity. When he was a boy of twenty, he had judged
fashionable life as criminal, now it appeared to him contemptible, which
was much more serious. To escape from Mary’s absurd reproaches and
regrets, he would take refuge with the Williamses. There he found anew
the harmonious and affectionate atmosphere that was essential to him.
Edward Williams had a gay, generous nature in which there was nothing
petty. Jane’s grace and sweetness, the gentleness of her movements, the
soothing beauty of her voice, were as reposeful and pleasant as some
delightful garden. Perhaps in his youth she would have pleased Shelley
less. Then he dreamed always of heroic qualities in women, but to-day he
asked from them the gift of forgetfulness rather than courage and
strength.
Jane sang, and her voice carried him momentarily away from his tragic
memories, and the chilly rectitude of his home. Just as formerly, when
Harriet wounded him, and he read in Mary’s eyes all the consolation they
promised him, so now he contemplated in Jane’s an image of the Antigone
whom he had surely known and loved in a previous existence.
But he no longer considered it necessary to destroy in order to rebuild,
to abandon Mary in order to fly with Jane. She was married to a good
fellow, whose friend he wished loyally to remain, and it was necessary
also to consider the feelings of Mary, poor unhappy woman. He was in
love with Jane, but it was an immaterial love, without hope, and almost
without desire.
She lent herself cleverly to the romantic business, would pass her hand
through his hair, smooth his forehead, try to cure his sadness by her
personal magnetism. She and her husband were as a marvellous fountain of
friendship, at which a poet, weary of suffering, could cool his fever.
Jane and Edward were Ferdinand and Miranda, the splendid, princely
couple, and Shelley was their faithful Ariel. . . . Round the happy
lovers flitted a captive and guardian Spirit serving their will and
doing his spiriting gently.
The Williamses had often spoken to Shelley of one of their friends,
Trelawny, an extraordinary man, corsair and pirate, who at twenty-eight
had already led a life of adventure all the world over, on land as well
as on sea. He now desired ardently to be admitted to the Pisa circle,
and he overwhelmed the Williamses with letters: “If I come, shall I be
able to know Shelley? Above all, shall I be able to know Byron? Is it
possible to approach him?”
Williams, in daily intercourse with the two Poets, no longer held them
in any awe, so he replied with a touch of impatience, “Of course you
will see them. Shelley is the simplest of men. . . . As to Byron, that
will depend entirely on yourself.”
Trelawny reached Pisa late one evening and went at once to the Tre
Palazzi on the Lung’ Arno where the Williamses and the Shelleys lived on
different stories under the same roof. He and the Williamses were in
animated conversation when he perceived in the passage near the open
door a pair of glittering eyes steadily fixed on his. Jane going to the
doorway laughingly said, “Come in, Shelley, it’s only our friend Tre
just arrived.”
Shelley glided in, blushing like a girl, and holding out his two hands
gave the sailor’s a warm pressure. Trelawny looked at him with surprise.
It was hard to believe that this flushed and artless face could be that
of the genius and rebel, reviled as a monster in England, and whom the
Lord Chancellor had deprived of his rights as a father. Shelley, on his
side, admired Trelawny’s bold, wild face, raven-black moustache,
handsome half-Arab type. Both of them were so astounded they could find
nothing to say. To relieve their embarrassment Jane asked Shelley what
book he had in his hand.
His face brightened and he answered briskly: “Calderon’s _Magico
Prodigioso_. I am translating some passages in it.”
“Oh, read it to us!”
Immediately Shelley, shoved off from the shore of commonplace incidents
that could not interest him, began to translate from the open book, in
so masterly a manner with such perfection of form that Trelawny no
longer doubted his identity.
A dead silence followed the reading. Trelawny looked up and seeing no
one asked, “Where is he?”
“Who?” said Jane. “Shelley? Oh, he comes and goes like a spirit no one
knows when or where.”
The next day it was Shelley himself who took Trelawny to call on Byron.
Here the surroundings were very different. A large marble hall, a giant
staircase, powdered footmen and surly dogs. Trelawny, like every one
else, saw in Byron’s external appearance all the traits with which
imagination endows genius, but the great man’s conversation struck him
as commonplace. He seemed too to be playing a part, and an out-of-date
one—that of a rake-hell of the Regency. He told stories about actors,
boxers and hard-drinkers, and of how he had swum the Hellespont. Of this
exploit he was very proud.
At three the horses were brought round. After riding for a couple of
hours, the party dismounted at a small _podere_, pistols were sent for,
a cane was stuck into the ground behind the house and a piece of money
placed in a slit at the top of the cane. Byron, Shelley and Trelawny
fired at fifteen paces, and their firing was pretty equal. Each time the
cane or the coin was hit by one or the other. Trelawny was pleased to
see that despite his feminine appearance, Shelley could hold his own
with men.
On the way back they talked poetry, and Trelawny cited a couplet from
_Don Juan_ as an example of felicitous rhyming. Byron, won over, brought
his horse round to trot beside him.
“Confess now,” said he, “you expected to find me a Timon of Athens or a
Timur the Tartar, and you’re surprised to find a man of the world—never
in earnest—laughing at all things mundane?”
Then he muttered as to himself:
“The world is a bundle of hay,
Mankind are the asses who pull.”
* * *
Trelawny returned with Shelley and Mary. “How different Byron is to
anything one expects of him!” said he. “There’s no mystery about him at
all. On the contrary he talks too freely, and says things he had much
better not say. He seems as jealous and impulsive as a woman, and maybe
is more dangerous.”
“Mary,” said Shelley, “Trelawny has found out Byron already. How stupid
we were—how long it took us.”
“The reason is,” said Mary, “that Trelawny lives with the living, and we
live with the dead.”