‘Pisa, February 15th, 1822.‘My Dear Lord Byron,‘I enclose you a letter from Leigh Hunt, which annoys me on more than one account. You will observe the postscript, and you know me well enough to feel how painful the task is set me in commenting upon it. Hunt had urged me more than once to ask you to lend him this money. My answer consisted in sending him all I could spare, which I have now literally done. Your kindness in fitting up a part of your own house for his accommodation I sensibly felt, and willingly accepted from you on his part, but, believe me, without the slightest intention of imposing, or, if I could help it, allowing to be imposed, any heavier task on your purse. As it has come to this, in spite of my exertions, I will not conceal from you the low ebb of my own money affairs in the present moment, that is, my absolute incapacity of assisting Hunt farther.‘I do not think poor Hunt’s promise to pay in a given time is worth very much; but mine is less subject to uncertainty, and I should be happy to be responsible for any engagement he may have proposed toyou. I am so much annoyed by this subject that I hardly know what to write, and much less what to say; and I have need of all your indulgence in judging both my feelings and expressions. I shall see you by-and-by.‘Believe me, yours most faithfully and sincerely,‘P. B. Shelley.’
‘Pisa, February 15th, 1822.
‘My Dear Lord Byron,
‘I enclose you a letter from Leigh Hunt, which annoys me on more than one account. You will observe the postscript, and you know me well enough to feel how painful the task is set me in commenting upon it. Hunt had urged me more than once to ask you to lend him this money. My answer consisted in sending him all I could spare, which I have now literally done. Your kindness in fitting up a part of your own house for his accommodation I sensibly felt, and willingly accepted from you on his part, but, believe me, without the slightest intention of imposing, or, if I could help it, allowing to be imposed, any heavier task on your purse. As it has come to this, in spite of my exertions, I will not conceal from you the low ebb of my own money affairs in the present moment, that is, my absolute incapacity of assisting Hunt farther.
‘I do not think poor Hunt’s promise to pay in a given time is worth very much; but mine is less subject to uncertainty, and I should be happy to be responsible for any engagement he may have proposed toyou. I am so much annoyed by this subject that I hardly know what to write, and much less what to say; and I have need of all your indulgence in judging both my feelings and expressions. I shall see you by-and-by.
‘Believe me, yours most faithfully and sincerely,‘P. B. Shelley.’
Written to support Hunt’s direct application to Byron for a remittance, Shelley’s affectionate concern for the whole of the Hunt party puts it beyond question, that this epistle was written sincerely in the interest of the unfortunate man of letters, and without a notion of the injury it would do him in Byron’s esteem. It was Shelley’s way of saying, ‘Do lend the poor fellow the money onmypersonal security;’ and to readers bearing in mind the delicacy and tension that had succeeded the previous friendly relations of the two poets, it cannot be surprising that Shelley found himself unable to make such a request of Byron, without saying at the same time that he had done his utmost for his friend’s relief. All the same, the letter gave a view of Hunt’s character and dealings, that lowered him in the regard of the poet, who with generous incaution had fitted up rooms for the necessitous family in the Palazzo Lanfranchi. Opening Byron’s eyes to several matters, it informed him, that Hunt had for some time been sponging on the slender resources of his too yielding friend; that Hunt had for some time been pressing Shelley to apply to the Palazzo Lanfranchi for money; that Hunt’s direct application to the lord of that palazzo had not been made till the petitioner had done his utmost to force Shelley to prefer the request for him; that the applicant for a remittance had constrained Shelley to join in the request he had refused to make by himself. The letter must have caused Byron to suspect that Hunt had in former years bled Shelley copiously, and have shown him how powerless Shelley was to hold his own against the cool and clever practitioner of the art of getting money, without either earning it or stealing it. Byron’s comment on Shelley’s letter must have been to this effect: ‘So that is Mr. Hunt’s way of handling Shelley, is it? He won’t handle me so easily.’
Byron’s treatment of the Hunts in Italy displayed some of his least amiable traits. He should not have failed in courtesy to Mrs. Hunt, who was awomanand an invalid. He mighthave been more gracious, without being less firm, to theman. It was paltry of him, in his reasonable annoyance with the equally elegant and unscrupulous adventurer, to give an untrue account of the circumstances that determined him to start theLiberal. But on learning, at the end of June, from Hunt’s lips, that he had ceased to be editor of theExaminer, and was for the moment without a crown in his pocket, or without any means whatsoever for paying the weekly bills of his numerous family in the lower rooms of the Palazzo Lanfranchi, the author ofDon Juanhad good reason for feeling that, besides being on his guard against pecuniary imposition, he had better let Hunt see clearly, and at once, that he (the author ofDon Juan) would not submit tamely to exaction.
No less ignorant than Byron of the desperate state of his friend’s pecuniary affairs,—a state amounting to absolute destitution so far as the term is applicable to a clever man of letters,—till he spoke with Hunt at Leghorn, Shelley must have felt himself in a peculiarly delicate and painful position in regard to Byron, on hearing that their partner in theLiberalwas alike without income and any prospect of income, apart from the literary project, which was still only a project. For months he had been aware of the degree in which Byron was influenced by the advisers, who were entreating him to withdraw even at the last moment from his entanglement with the Hunts. For months he had been aware in how great a degree Byron had lost confidence in the literary venture, and how gladly he would have discovered a way of withdrawing honourably, and at no excessive cost, from an enterprise which he deemed foredoomed to failure. For months he had, in Hunt’s interest, maintained a hollow show of his former admiration for, and of his former attachment to, Byron, encouraging him to recover his former confidence in their joint enterprise, and to be assured that, on the arrival of theExaminer’seditor, his anticipations of catastrophe would be speedily followed by the triumph of the undertaking, in which they would be comrades. All this Shelley had endured and done for Hunt’s sake, in the hope of keeping the poet of overpowering popularity and sufficient purse in humour with the project, which under auspicious conditions would make Hunt prosperous for life. Byron’s repeated expressions of distrust in Hunt’s adequacy for his part in the undertaking had been met by Shelley with repetitions of the statement that ‘Hunt waseditor of theExaminer.’ When Hunt at length appeared on the scene, he wasnoteditor of theExaminer.
Entering his Pisan home on the 1st November, 1821, Byron took up his abode in the stately house at a time when his relations with Shelley were altogether cordial, and Shelley’s admiration of him was at its highest extravagance. Delighted with his reception and treatment at Ravenna in the previous August, Shelley had now spent more than two months in emotions of generous and romantic worship of Byron’s greatness; and it was his fortune, perhaps his good fortune, to regard Byron with the same idolatrous enthusiasm for something more than another two months, before his admiration of so angelic a being was qualified by painful suspicions that he had rated his idol somewhat too highly,—suspicions followed at a brief interval by the differences which, but for his concern for Hunt’s interests, would, perhaps, have caused ‘the worm’ to turn and writhe in open mutiny against ‘the God.’
Fascinated at Ravenna by the great poet’s courtesies and flattering manifestations of confidence, Shelley exulted for a brief while in the prospect of figuring before the world as the great Byron’s peculiar and most influential friend. Whilst it is curious to observe in his letters from Ravenna to his wife, and in some of his subsequent epistles to Horace Smith, Peacock, and Gisborne, how greatly he was impressed by the pomp and grandeur of his ‘noble friend’s’ domestic arrangements, it is even more interesting to contemplate in the same letters the boyish simplicity and exultation, with which Shelley spoke of the great Byron’s regard for him, and of the advantages that would accrue to him from familiar association with so superlative a personage. Possessing the great poet’s ear, he enjoyed his confidence. Byron was moving to Pisa in compliance with his advice. It was he (and no other man) who had taken the finest palace on the Lung’Arno of Pisa for the great Byron’s sufficient accommodation.
To read attentively certain of the published letters that passed between Shelley and his wife whilst he was at Ravenna, is to see how they frightened one another through the post into imagining themselves the victims of a conspiracy that aimed at rendering their lives miserable and insecure;—to see also how, for several days after their reunion, they continued to nurse the wild and terrifying fancy that, to protect themselvesagainst fanatical enemies, working for their destruction, to guard themselves and their child from death by poison or the knife, it was needful for them to surround themselves with powerful friends.
That Mary might not resist his purpose of staying another winter and spring in the city, where he would have Byron for his neighbour and most familiar associate, Shelley instructed her to rate at their proper worth the security and protection she and her husband would derive from Byron’s countenance:—security and protection they might sorely need at Florence or any other Italian capital, now that they had been selected for exemplary persecution by the fanatical enemies of Free Thought. That they had provoked the animosity of implacable adversaries was manifest from what had come to his ears at Ravenna. Instructing his wife that the current calumnies about himself should be regarded as preliminary measures for their destruction, taken by subtle and resolute foes, who would be satisfied with nothing less than his and her ruin, Shelley wished her to realize the perils of their position and determine what course they had better adopt for the preservation of life, liberty, happiness. Though attractive to them for divers considerations, Florence, for reasons darkly hinted at in the correspondence, would now abound with dangers to which they had better not expose themselves. For himself he would like nothing better than to retire with his Mary and her child to an island inhabited by no one but themselves, and there devote either to oblivion, or to future generations, the overflowings of a mind which, timely withdrawn from the contagion, would be kept fit for no baser object. If they determined on settling on a desert island, they should have the courage to go to it in no company but their own. There should be no compromise in the matter, no concession to weaknesses, begotten of long intercourse with the human race. If they took two or three chosen companions with them, the devil would be sure to appear amongst them. No, should they decide to emigrate to a desolate island, they must make the voyage by themselves. In brief, they should build a boat and shut upon their retreat the flood-gates of the world. On second and saner thoughts, however, he was of opinion they had better not build a boat and retreat behind the flood-gates.
The proposal for emigration to a solitary island having been dismissed as an impracticable project, Shelley begged Mary toconsider another plan for defeating the enemies, banded together for their destruction. Instead of retiring to a desolate island, or offering their breasts to the assassin’s dagger at Florence, they might remain at Pisa under conditions that would render existence at the same time safer and more agreeable than heretofore. Instead of traversing the treacherous sea in an open boat to a tenantless island, it would surely be better for her and himself to stay where they were, to surround themselves with a few congenial people, even though the devil should be one of them, and in short to do their best to make themselves happy at Pisa, and the neighbouring Baths, for another twelve months. The Williamses would remain at Pisa, if she and he decided to remain there. The Hunts also would be at Pisa at least for the winter, should Leigh Hunt determine on migrating to Italy. Lord Byron and his Italian friends would be there also; and though the Gambas and Teresa Guiccioli might not be desirable acquaintances from every point of view, Byron’s friendship would be invaluable. What had occurred to account for so quick a change of sentiment respecting Florence and the plan of wintering there? Positively nothing besides Byron’s determination to settle at Pisa for a few months or years.
As the choice of alternatives lay between emigration to a solitary island and another term of residence at Pisa, it is not surprising that Mrs. Shelley decided in favour of the latter. Whilst few women were less qualified for seclusion, few had a keener appetite for society, than William Godwin’s clever and brilliant daughter. The woman, who fretted at the isolation and monotony of her existence at Naples and Rome, would have died ofennuior gone mad in a month in the severe seclusion of a sea-girt paradise, with no companions but her husband and her little boy. It had not been her intention to stay another year at Pisa. For several reasons she would have preferred wintering at Florence with the Horace Smiths. She had seen enough of Pisa, and more than enough of some of her ‘dirty enough’ Pisan acquaintances. But weeks before Byron, with his bodyguard of liveried lacqueys and his menagerie of domesticated animals, took possession of the Palazzo Lanfranchi, she was well pleased with the notion of staying longer at Pisa.
So the circle was formed towards the close of 1821 under favourable auspices:—the circle whose life was described so fully inThe Real Lord Byron, that its doings need only be alluded tocursorily in the present chapter. It was the circle of Teresa Guiccioli and the Gambas (Teresa’s father and brother, with whom she lived at a short distance from the Lanfranchi palace); the Williamses, of whose social endowments mention has been made on a previous page; pleasant Tom Medwin, whose books afford only faint indications of the elegant taste and generous qualities that endeared him to the author ofAdonais; handsome, shrewd, adventurous, high-hearted Trelawny, who joined the party at the opening of the year 1822; and Taafe, the blundering rider and writer, whose clumsy horsemanship occasioned the fracas with the serjeant-major and the guard at the city, that eventually resulted in Byron’s migration to Genoa,—the circle of charming and diversely memorable men and women, that had Byron for its planet and Shelley for its chief subordinate luminary. Had the Hunts fulfilled the hopes of their especial friends, and entered Leghorn Harbour in time to keep Christmas at Pisa, the Shelleys would have been, at least for a time, altogether satisfied and delighted with this circle of new and old acquaintances, who had gathered aboutthemrather than about the poet of brighter and wider celebrity, whom they had drawn to what may be called their own coterie:—a circle which, though keeping its virtues as far as possible to itself, and having little or nothing to do with the general society of Pisa, or any other set of Pisan visitors, contributed not a little to the enlivenment of the usually tranquil, not to say rather torpid, little town.
The excess of Shelley’s enthusiasm for Byron pointed, however, to an inevitable revulsion of feeling, in which the worshiper would probably think as much too lightly, as he had in former time thought far too worshipfully, of his hero. The younger poet’s idolatry was, to use a familiar expression, too strong to last. No man of sensibility and self-respect can persist for any great length of time in regarding himself as a worm and his fellow-man and daily companion as a god. To regard one’s next-door neighbour as divine to-day, is to regard him as altogether, and in some respects meanly, human six months hence. There were other considerations, to satisfy any clear-sighted and judicial observer of the intercourse of the two poets at Ravenna, and of their regard for one another, that it was not in the nature of things for the man of rank and high celebrity, and the man of very inferior rank and no celebrity, to live together for twelve months without frictionand disagreement. In truth, they were never wholly at ease with one another.
Elevated slightly, but only by one or two generations of ancestral dignity, above people of the middle way of life, Shelley possessed precisely the degree of aristocratic quality to render him sensitive for his dignity in his relations with a man of Byron’s superior rank; far more sensitive than he would have been had he, like Tom Moore, stept, by right of genius, from a wine-shop to the salons of ‘the great.’ At the same time, the uneasiness of his attitude towards Byron, whilst chiefly referable to their difference of social degree, was increased by his sense of Byron’s superiority in fame and wealth. How this uneasiness affected Shelley, even when he felt most cordially and idolatrously towards his ‘noble friend,’ appears from the letter he dated on 10th August, 1821, from Ravenna (videMoore’sLife) to Mrs. Shelley, where he speaks of his inability to ask money of Byron for Hunt’s benefit. ‘Lord Byron and I,’ he wrote, ‘are excellent friends, and were I reduced to poverty, or were I a writer who had no claims to an higher station than I possess,—or did I possess an higher than I deserve, we should appear in all things as such, and I would freely ask him any favour. Such is not now the case. The demon of mistrust and pride lurks between two persons in our situation, poisoning the freedom of our intercourse.’
Though he did not go to Ravennain orderto confer with Byron on Hunt’s affairs, Shelley journeyed thitherwith the purposeof interesting Byron in them. For some time Shelley had been troubled in his mind by the thought of his friend’s financial difficulties; and he had not been many hours in the Palazzo Guiccioli, before he found occasion to speak sympathetically of Hunt’s pecuniary distress. On hearing how Byron had given theMemoirsto Tom Moore, and how Moore had sold them to Murray for 2000l., Shelley grudged Moore the gift that would have been so serviceable to the author ofRimini. ‘I wish,’ he wrote to his wife, ‘I had been in time to have interceded for a part of it for poor Hunt.’ Though theLiberalwas altogether Byron’s project, it was at Shelley’s instance that the projector of the luckless magazine selected Hunt for the position of editorial coadjutor; and whilst making this selectioninhis own interest, though at Shelley’s instance, Byron, no doubt, had pleasure in feeling that the arrangement, whichpromised advantage to himself, would be beneficial to a struggling man of letters. This fact alone gave the faint colouring of truth to Byron’s subsequent mis-statements, respecting the benevolent motives and humane purpose that determined him to start theLiberal. At Ravenna (where he carefully refrained from asking Byron to advance money for Hunt’s travelling expenses) Shelley could congratulate himself on Byron’s offer to take Hunt for hiscollaborateur, without regarding it as a favour done to himself, or thinking of it as a proposal for an arrangement that could, under any contingency, compromise his own independence of, and freedom from, obligation to the poet of exalted rank. The case was altered a few months later, when Byron’s vacillation put Shelley under the necessity of doing his utmost to hold him to his engagement with Hunt. On exerting himself for this end, it was natural for the sensitive Shelley to feel that he might be suspected of speaking in his own, no less than in Hunt’s, interest; to feel that after all he was asking a pecuniary favour of Byron. In this sensitiveness for his independence, and jealous care to avoid every appearance of seeking or accepting material advantage from his social superior, readers may see the explanation of Shelley’s resolve to share neither in the profits nor theéclatof the literary enterprise.
Under these circumstances, it would have been passing strange had Shelley persisted in his reverential regard for Byron. In any case, his idolatry of so imperfect a hero would have perished more or less abruptly under the conditions of close intimacy and daily intercourse for a considerable period; but the annoyance, resulting to the younger poet from a state of things which compelled him to combat Byron’s irresolution with words, that might expose him to ungenerous suspicion, accelerated the moment for the inevitable revulsion of feeling. The differences which, but for Shelley’s devotion to Hunt’s interest, would perhaps have developed rapidly into open rupture, were capable of adjustment; but they necessarily resulted in a permanent change in Shelley’s feeling for Byron. The differences admitted of adjustment. For a season they were adjusted. None the less they changed the younger poet’s regard for his noble friend. The transient revival of Shelley’s hope that, after all, theLiberalwould enrich Hunt, was attended with no renewal of his old enthusiasm for the author ofDon Juan,about whom he soon began to write and chatter as much too disparagingly as he had formerly written and talked too worshipfully. Instead of flaming into frank rage, he concealed his irritation from his former idol, whilst venting it from time to time in bitter words whispered to Mary’s ear, and bitter words written to correspondents, who were not likely to report them to Byron.
The old story of unreasonable hope, ending in unreasonable disappointment, was told yet again,—the story told so often in Shelley’s troublous record! Shelley idolized his eldest sister only to discover in a brief while how unworthy she was of his good opinion. The first period of his extravagant admiration of Hogg was followed abruptly by a period in which he detested him. After mistaking Eliza Hitchener for an angel, he soon mistook her for a brown she-devil. Delighting in Eliza Westbrook for a season, he quickly learnt to loathe her. Vowing to love Harriett Westbrook for ever, he found life intolerable with her in less than three nuptial years. Vowing to worship his second wife above all other women, he, in due course, discovered her inferiority to Emilia Viviani and Jane Williams. Meaning to be happy with Hogg for ever, he soon flitted from York, to get out of his way. Throwing himself on Byron in August, 1821, with the intention of delighting in him for ever, he quickly began to vapour about fighting him. Either Shelley lacked steadfastness of affection, or was singularly unfortunate in selecting his objects of affection. In this respect he resembled Byron, whom he also resembled in his unamiable and undignified practice of writing bitterly of people whom he had ceased to love.
On passing from affection for his sister Elizabeth, he wrote in angry disparagement of her. On coming to uneasy terms with his mother, he wrote disdainfully of her mental narrowness. On ceasing to delight in Eliza Hitchener, he wrote of her that she was a brown demon and an hermaphrodite. After idolizing Mrs. Boinville, he wrote about her insincerity. After quarrelling with Eliza Westbrook, he wrote of her that she was a loathsome worm. Writing thus of women with whom he was out of humour, he dealt in the same way with men he no longer liked. Having loved his father in his childhood, he was only at manhood’s threshold when he began to write monstrous untruths to his discredit. In the interval between thefirst period and the second period of his affection for Hogg, he wrote of him that he was a treacherous friend, a libertine, and a seducer. Whilst living in friendship with Thomas Love Peacock, he wrote of him as though he was attached to a free-handed benefactor by considerations of self-interest. Soon after worshiping Byron as a god, he wrote of him (on 2nd March, 1822, to Leigh Hunt) that certain dispositions of his character, rendered him intolerable as an intimate associate, and (on 18th June, 1822, to John Gisborne) that he was ‘the nucleus of all that is hateful and tiresome’ in society. It is thus Shelley wrote of his former friends after falling out with them. Whilst reflecting with reasonable severity on Byron’s readiness to ‘libel his friends all round,’ the Shelleyan apologists say nothing of Shelley’s exhibitions of the same ungenerous propensity.
Whilst Byron vacillated between hope and despair for the success of theLiberal, between a cordial disposition to persist in the enterprise and a fainthearted inclination to drop it, Shelley (for Hunt’s sake) and Hunt (for his own sake) were determined to hold their unsteady partner to his compact with them. If Byron suspected Shelley and Hunt of a design to use him for their own ends, the suspicion certainly was not groundless. Shelley and Hunt became in a certain sense confederates against their partner, in having an understanding and mutual confidence from which he was excluded. Shelley’s chief, thoughnotsole, interest in the affair was his concern for Hunt (his senior by eight years). Had he been acting only for himself, Shelley, on discerning the faintest disposition on Byron’s part to withdraw from the venture, would have said, ‘If your heart is not in the enterprise, let it be dropt like so many other designs, as a mere project not to be acted upon.’ But Shelley was acting in the interest of a friend, to whom he was in the highest degree desirous of rendering substantial service; a friend whom he wished to have near him in Italy (a powerful consideration, that largely qualified the disinterestedness of his otherwise unselfish action); a friend who (videShelley’s letter of 2nd March, 1822—in Forman’s edition of the poet’sProse Works) had committed to him ‘the task of keeping Byron in heart with the project until his arrival.’ Consequently, when Byron showed a wish to retire from the enterprise, Shelley said, ‘You are bound for poor Hunt’s sake to go on with it.’
Long before Hunt left England, Shelley knew Byron would fain have withdrawn from the project for starting theLiberal, but in his absent friend’s interest pressed Byron to persist in the enterprise. Long before he left England, Hunt himself knew that Byron had repented of inviting him to Italy, and would have dropt the project of the magazine, had it not been for Shelley. On sailing from England in May, Hunt knew he was setting out to fix himself on a man who, but for Shelley, would have told him to remain at home,—a fact not to be overlooked in the estimate of Hunt’s conduct, in going out to Italy with concealment of the main feature of his financial trouble. From the moment when they combined to hold Byron to an arrangement from which he wished to retire, Shelley and Hunt (acting together in the manner described by Shelley’s own pen) were confederates against him, in being set on using him for their own ends against his own will.
One would like to know how far Byron was cognizant of the irritation he caused Shelley by his vacillations about the literary project. Yet more one would like to know to what extent he was aware of Shelley’s permanent change of feeling for him. It is difficult to conceive that so sensitive a man failed to detect the change of sentiment. But Byron’s egotism may have blinded him to what his sensibility would otherwise have discovered. On the other hand, it must be remembered that, in his loyalty to the absent Hunt, and in his keen desire to nurse Byron’s favour and influence for Hunt’s benefit, Shelley was at great pains to conceal from his former idol the deep-seated alteration of his regard for him. It is conceivable that, notwithstanding the February ‘differences,’ Byron never knew how completely he had fallen from Shelley’s heart and homage. Anyhow, the two poets remained in daily intercourse with one another, and maintained a show of undiminished friendliness. Playing billiards with Byron, and contending with him in pistol-practice, Shelley often figured in the Byronic riding-parties, and appeared at the weekly dinner-parties of the Palazzo Lanfranchi. At the same time Mrs. Shelley lived sociably with Teresa Guiccioli.
CLOSING SCENES.
Shelley’s Attachment to Jane Williams—Her Womanly Goodness—Her Devotion to her Husband—The Serpent is shut out from Paradise—Essay on the Devil—Shelley’s Happiness and Discord with Mary—Her Remorseful Verses—Trials of her Married Life—Essay on Christianity—San Terenzo and Lerici—The Casa Magni—Mary’s Illness and Melancholy at San Terenzo—Arrival of the ‘Don Juan’—Mutual Affection of Mrs. Shelley and Mrs. Williams—Shelley’s latest Visions and Hallucinations—Leigh Hunt’s Arrival in Italy—Shelley sails for Leghorn—Meeting of Shelley and Hunt—Improvement in Shelley’s Health—His Mediation between Hunt and Byron—The Hunts in the Palazzo Lanfranchi—Lady Shelley’s Account of the Difficulties between Byron and Shelley—Shelley’s Contentment with his Arrangements for the Hunts—He sets Sail for Lerici—The Fatal Storm—Cremation on the Sea-shore—Grave at Rome.
Shelley’s Attachment to Jane Williams—Her Womanly Goodness—Her Devotion to her Husband—The Serpent is shut out from Paradise—Essay on the Devil—Shelley’s Happiness and Discord with Mary—Her Remorseful Verses—Trials of her Married Life—Essay on Christianity—San Terenzo and Lerici—The Casa Magni—Mary’s Illness and Melancholy at San Terenzo—Arrival of the ‘Don Juan’—Mutual Affection of Mrs. Shelley and Mrs. Williams—Shelley’s latest Visions and Hallucinations—Leigh Hunt’s Arrival in Italy—Shelley sails for Leghorn—Meeting of Shelley and Hunt—Improvement in Shelley’s Health—His Mediation between Hunt and Byron—The Hunts in the Palazzo Lanfranchi—Lady Shelley’s Account of the Difficulties between Byron and Shelley—Shelley’s Contentment with his Arrangements for the Hunts—He sets Sail for Lerici—The Fatal Storm—Cremation on the Sea-shore—Grave at Rome.
The time has come for a few more words about Shelley’s attachment to Jane Williams,—the last of the series of fair women who successively inspired him with feelings of adorative fondness, that, differing widely from such love as animated Byron towards his several mistresses, differed no less widely from the placid preferences of passionless friendship. No sympathetic student of the poet’s character and story can entertain even a momentary suspicion of the refinement and purity of Shelley’s regard for the gentle and fine-natured woman, to whom he addressed the saddest and sweetest poetry of his life’s closing term. To say this of the feelings that swayed his soul in all its successive services of homage towards his friend’s wife, is indeed to say no more than I would declare of each and all of the so-called platonic attachments that preceded his worship of Jane Williams.
I have no shadow of a doubt that the always abundant and sometimes glowing fervour of these attachments was never touched for a single instant by desire. On this point my confidence proceeds no less from my clear apprehension of the peculiarity which I venture to designate Shelley’s prime physical defect, than from an equally precise perception of hissentimental idiosyncrasy. But in respect to some of these so-called platonic attachments, this conviction is raised to still higher certainty by the conditions, under which Shelley approached the objects of his sentimental preference, or by the characteristics of the women he distinguished so highly. Though it would be absurd to infer anything from the moral rectitude or the delicacy of the young lady, who asked money of her poetical worshiper, and passed from her convent into wedlock only to be separated from her husband, after leading him (to use Mrs. Shelley’s expression) ‘a devil of a life’ for a very brief while, the conditions, under which Shelley was permitted to have personal intercourse with Emilia Viviani, put it beyond question that, in their curious intimacy, he never strayed beyond the lines of social decorum and conventional propriety. In the case of Emilia’s successor, confidence in the purity of Shelley’s passion, and in the delicacy of his addresses, is raised even higher,—is raised, indeed, to absolute certainty,—by the moral excellences of the lady, and all her domestic circumstances, as well as by all the other conditions and features of a friendship that, even in the tenderest and warmest of its emotional developments, could not have been more innocent had Shelley been a woman.
In some particulars the last of Shelley’s spiritual passions resembled his wilder and more tumultuous idolatry of Emilia Viviani. Just as he worshipt Emilia because fancy tricked him into thinking her a realization of his long-cherished ideal of all that was or could be admirable in womankind, he idolized Jane Williams as an example of the particular type of feminine loveliness that swayed his imagination whilst he was composingThe Sensitive Plant. Whilst he worshipt Jane as the veritable realization of a pure anticipatory cognition, even as he had worshipt Emilia a year earlier for her imaginary correspondence to a more comprehensive conception of feminine excellence, Shelley rendered the homage of his spiritual devotion to Mrs. Williams in a way that reminds one of his manner of wooing Emilia. Associating his wife with himself in his addresses to Emilia, he made Jane’s husband a sympathetic co-operator in his addresses to Mrs. Williams, by selecting him for the fittest possible confidant of his affectionate regard for the lady, and even inducing him to act as the medium through which she received his friend’s adoration. There were indeed occasions whenWilliams and his wife were in this manner rendered the joint-recipients of the homage which she alone evoked, Mary being, at the same time, imperfectly cognizant of the course of the platonic suit to which Jane’s husband consented. In a former page I spoke of the affair with Emilia Viviani as a kind of three-cornered flirtation. The same term is applicable to the affair in which Edward Williams was scarcely less a principal than his wife and Shelley. The two three-cornered flirtations differed, however, in the fact that the later of them had a deeply interested, though by no means equally gratified, spectator of something of the proceedings. This spectator was Mary, who, whilst cognizant of the general progress of what she cannot be supposed to have approved, was kept wholly in the dark as to some of its incidents. Whilst Williams consented sympathetically to an affair of which he knew every particular, Mrs. Shelley consented submissively (though, of course, by no means cheerfully) to an affair respecting which she was far from fully informed.
On 26th January, 1822, when no breath of discord had yet ruffled his relations with Byron, Shelley, from his own apartment in the same house in which the Williamses had a set of rooms (a house on the Lung’Arno, but divided by the river from Byron’s palazzo), sent WilliamsThe Serpent is shut out from Paradise, together with the characteristic note, which instructed Williams, that he might read to ‘Jane, but to no one else,’ the poem, containing the confession:
‘Therefore, if now I see you seldomer,Dear friends, dearfriend! know that I only flyYour looks, because they stirGrief that should sleep, and hopes that cannot die:The very comfort that they ministerI scarce can bear, yet I,So deeply is the arrow gone,Should quickly perish if it were withdrawn.When I return to my cold home, you askWhy I am not as I have ever been.Youspoil me for the taskOf acting a forced part in life’s dull scene,—Of wearing on my brow the idle maskOf author, great or mean,In the world’s carnival. I soughtPeace thus, and, but in you, I found it not.’
The little effort of literary mystification, to be observed in the note which accompanied these verses to Edward Williams, affords another point of resemblance between the Emilia-Viviani affair and the affair with Jane Williams. Just as theEpipsychidionwas offered to the public with a preface which attributed the composition to the real author’s ‘unfortunate friend’ who ‘died at Florence, as he was preparing for a voyage to one of the wildest of the Sporades,’ the verses are offered to Edward Williams as poetry taken from the portfolio in which the poet’s friend used ‘to keep his verses,’—the object of this misrepresentation to Williams and Jane, who were in the real author’s confidence, being less than obvious. Given, of course, for a reason no less sufficient than manifest, the direction that the verses should be shown tono one but Janewas, no doubt, duly observed by the receivers of the poem. Williams, in his diary, may well have styled the verses ‘beautiful, but too melancholy lines.’ One can imagine how commiseratingly the happy husband and wife (to whom the verses were sent, or rather the husbandthroughwhom the verses were transmitted, and the wifetowhom they were addressed) spoke of the wretchedness of their friend who, in his inability to find contentment, such as their own mutual happiness, in the society of his Mary, spoke of his chambers in the same house (the Tre Palazzi) as his ‘cold home.’ It is certainly less surprising that Shelley desired the verses to be withheld from Mary, than that he was so communicative respecting the cheerlessness of the apartment, of which she was the mistress.
A brief note on the poem’s first line (‘The serpent is shut out from Paradise’), written at a time when it was Byron’s humour to call Shelley ‘the serpent’ or ‘the snake.’ Accepting the title in good part, and indeed as a compliment, Shelley, only a few weeks before sending the verses to the Williamses, had written to Byron about the culprit, who wasnotburned at Lucca for scattering the eucharistic wafers from the altar, ‘I hear this morning that the design, which certainly had been in contemplation, ofburning my fellow serpent, has been abandoned, and that he has been condemned to the galleys.’ Knowing how Shelley regarded the serpent as typical of the wisdom, that is especially hateful to bigots, and delighted in regarding himself as akin to the serpent in being largely endowed with the samewisdom, Byron had of course more reasons for calling him ‘the snake’ than he troubled himself to declare, when he observed ‘Goethe’s Mephistofiluscalls the serpent who tempted Eve “my aunt the renowned snake”; and I always insist that Shelley is nothing but one of her nephews,walking about on the tip of his tail’; a peculiarly Byronic flippancy that appears in the concluding paragraph of Shelley’sEssay on the Devil—‘... before this misconduct it hopped along upon its tail; a mode of progression which, if I was a serpent, I should think the severer punishment of the two.’
Few readers will question that this remarkable coincidence of humour and verbal form in the Byronic utterance and the Shelleyan essay (an essay withheld from the public eye long after the death of both poets) should be deemed a clear indication, that Byron either perused the essay or was the originator of at least one of its humorous sallies. If Byron did not take the thought and words from the essay, Shelley must be assumed to have taken them from him. To the present writer the coincidence is part of the superabundant evidence that, Byron was accountable for the piquancy, incisiveness, and Don-Juanesque levity that distinguish theEssay on the Devilfrom all Shelley’s other prose productions. For the purpose of exalting the younger at the expense of the elder poet, many extravagant things have been written about Shelley’s influence on Byron. That Shelley influenced Byron greatly is unquestionable, but it is not to be supposed the influences arising from the close, and for a while harmonious, intercourse of the two poets, were altogether one-sided,—that whilst receiving much from his familiar companion, Byron gave him nothing. TheEssay on Christianityand theEssay on the Devilare distinctly assignable to the same period of Shelley’s literary productiveness; and to turn from the one to the other, is to pass from the society of the Real Shelley, to the society of Shelley speaking under the inspiration of Byronic mockery.
At this late point of their brief association, when he is under the sway of a spiritual attachment that endured till his death, and she is regarding his services of homage to her familiar friend, the occasion rises for inquiring, whether Mary has experienced an average share of felicity since she eloped from the old home in Skinner Street? whether Shelley has been to her all she hoped of him, when she took the momentous step of July,1814? whether, in addition to trouble, for which he is in no degree to be held responsible, she has endured trouble he either caused her, or might have preserved her from? whether her anticipations of felicity from their association have been realized? whether, in brief, their marriage has been a happy one?
Much has been written of the perfect happiness that came to both Shelley and Mary from their association. It has been proclaimed by romantic biography that the soul of each found its perfect complement in the other’s soul, that their conjugal intimacy was singularly felicitous, and that, whilst they dwelt together in harmony seldom accorded to spouses, neither was ever for a single moment disappointed in the other. The present writer ventures to declare no less confidently that their marriage was by no means remarkable for happiness,—that they were not a well-mated couple.
In respect to intellectual endowments and sympathy, it cannot be questioned for a moment that Shelley was more fitly matched with Mary Godwin than with Harriett Westbrook; but mental unison is not sufficient for perfect conjugal concord. I do not suggest that during the eight years’ interval between their elopement and Shelley’s death they ceased to care for one another. On the contrary, I have no doubt that, loving him with girlish vehemence in the summer of 1814, Mary loved Shelley at the bottom of her heart till the summer of 1822, though (we have her word for it) she sometimes behaved to him so as to imply that his felicity was by no means her chief concern. I have also no doubt, that Shelley never survived his affectionate concern for Mary, though he cannot have delighted in her greatly when he sighed to Emilia, and instructed the Williamses not to let his wife suspect how much happier he was in their rooms of the Tre Palazzi than in his own apartment. It is possible for a married couple to be held strongly by a deep-seated sentiment of mutual dependence, and yet to live on uneasy, and even exasperating, terms, with one another. It was so, at times, with Shelley and Mary. Knowledge comes to the student of human nature from observing how deep-seated attachment sometimes survives superficial sympathy in mated couples. Superficial sympathy must have perished from the mutual regard of Mary and Shelley, when he looked to other women for the higher felicity she was powerless to afford him.Yet they persisted in loving one another at the bottom of their hearts.
Apart from her reasonable grounds of complaint against her husband, Mrs. Shelley was a woman whose lot was fruitful of trouble and trial. Her health was far from good, and during the eight years of her connection with Shelley she endured five (including her miscarriage at San Terenzo) of those illnesses, which, though desired by wives who have never had experience of them, are by no means conducive to physical vigour. She gave birth to four children, and wept over the graves of three of them, losing two of them when they had lived long enough to gain firm hold of her heart. Her grief at the last of these bereavements was excessive. An ardent and strongly affectionate creature (how could Mary Wollstonecraft’s daughter be otherwise?), she had in girlhood loved her father and her sisters vehemently. Her half-sister had perished dismally. Through Claire’s too fervid temper, and the successive ill-consequences of her luckless alliance with Byron, Mary had (to put the case mildly) derived more vexation than contentment from her close intercourse with her sister-by-affinity. Loving her old father and wishing him well, she was continually receiving doleful intelligence from England that, instead of mending, his affairs grew steadily more desperate. Pining for the diversions of society, she had often fretted at being excluded from it in foreign capitals, no less than in her native country. It was also against the contentment of this unwilling exile from England, that during her successive illnesses and her trials with her children, she never had the consolations of a home, worthy to be called a home. To render existence fairly comfortable in any transient abiding-place, more especially when the abiding-place is a single set of rooms, it is needful for a woman to be an adept in housewifely arts and the smaller domestic economies. But the woman who in her girlhood shirked the matters of the house, to which her step-mother wished her to give attention, was as shiftless and helpless a home-keeper as John Westbrook’s daughter. From this lack of housewifely knowingness and capacity, she suffered much and Shelley not a little. One would fain forget that the poet, who has done so much for the happiness of English firesides, never knew the comforts of a home, after passing from Field Place, and that he suffered in this respect chiefly through the incompetence of his wives, both ofwhom he took from a social grade in which to keep house cleverly is woman’s first duty. Due in no small measure to nervous fancies, Shelley’s bodily ailments were due in a larger degree to comfortless feeding. At the same time he suffered from causes, in respect to which his wife was blameless. His temperament would under any circumstances have exposed him to sudden visitations of melancholy; and in the memories that haunted him—memories of the kindred from whom he had estranged himself, and the poor girl who drowned herself in the Serpentine—he had constant sources of sadness.
Even if they had been altogether fitted to one another, Shelley and Mary would in their Italian life have missed the average of connubial enjoyment. But they were not precisely adapted to one another. Whilst his taste was for studious or meditative seclusion, she had been designed by nature for a career of action and gaiety. ‘She,’ Shelley once said to Trelawny, ‘can’t bear solitude, nor I society—the quick coupled with the dead,’ When he was pining for green fields or sea-breezes, she thought of ball-rooms and assemblies. Under the most auspicious influences their contrarieties of temper would have brought them into conflict. Habitual melancholy is perhaps the most trying temper in a husband, for a wife to endure with patient cheerfulness; and though it was relieved by occasional moods of blithesomeness and jubilant elation, despondency was Shelley’s normal condition in his later years. Whilst he harassed Mary with unseasonable and bootless moanings, she worried him with the perversities of her Wollstonecraft vehemence and captiousness,—with the temper that disposed all the Wollstonecrafts to discover egregious insults in trivial slights, and imagine themselves the victims of human malignity whenever the wind blew from the wrong point of the compass.
In other respects Shelley was a trying husband, in whom Mary had reason to be disappointed. At an early stage of their association she discovered how little reliance could be placed on the accuracy of his statements; a cruel mortification for the girl, who had sacrificed so much for him in her romantic belief of all he told her. Natural annoyance at this discovery can have been only mitigated by her ability to refer all his inaccuracies of statement to poetic imaginativeness. Throughout his time with her, Shelley was seeing visions which he mistookfor real occurrences, and telling her stories at manifest discord with historic veracity.
Throughout this biography I have exercised a jealous caution in assigning biographical value to the egotisms of the Shelleyan verse, and have repeatedly cautioned readers against dealing with the poet’s references to his former experiences, as good evidence in respect to matters of fact. On the other hand I have not hesitated to regard his poetry as evidential of his temper and sentiment at the moment of its composition. It cannot be questioned that theStanzas, written in Dejection, near Naples, were the result of sincere emotion, and could have been composed only in a mood of the profoundest melancholy. Nor can it be doubted that, whilst displaying the general state of feeling, theStanzasreflect no less faithfully the writer’s particular sentiments, during the sorrowful mood. How does Shelley write of himself in these memorable lines, when he had been connubially linked to William Godwin’s daughter for something less than three and a half years?
‘Alas! I have nor hope nor health,Nor peace within nor calm around,Nor that content surpassing wealthThe sage in meditation found,And walked with inward glory crowned—Nor fame, nor power,nor love, nor leisure;Others I see whom these surround—Smiling they live, and call life pleasure:—To me that cup has been dealt in another measure.’
Without declining to concur in Mr. Rossetti’s opinion, that Shelley did notintendthe reference to his love-less lot to reflect on his wife, I venture to say that, had he been sensible of owing much to her devotion, had she been to him the perpetual spring of gladness that a loving wife ever is to the man who loves her thoroughly, had their union been as felicitous as they hoped it to prove, he could not have thus spoken of himself as alike fameless, powerless, andlove-less. I even go further, and say that, had their marriage been a happy one, Shelley in his miserable mood would have paused in the enumeration of divers woes, to render grateful acknowledgment of the solace he derived, in the midst of manifold sufferings, from the knowledge that he wasnotunbeloved. It is also a matter of biographical significance that in 1821—the year in which his passion forEmilia Viviani was succeeded by his milder devotion to Jane Williams—Shelley wrote inGinevraof marriage as
‘life’s great cheat; a thingBitter to taste, sweet in imagining,’—
words of melancholy meaning from the poet, who in the same year confided to the Williamses how wretched he was in his own home. Trelawny, whose acquaintance with Shelley was brief and not of a kind to render him the confidant of the poet’s most delicate secrets, saw enough of Mary’s relations with her husband to make him regard them as something less than altogether happy in their union. That the woman, who in her girlhood had sharp tiffs and lively altercations with her sister Claire, had similar differences with her husband—differences that of course arise frequently between husband and wife without extinguishing their mutual affection, but still differences thatdo notarise between altogether congenial and happily mated couples—we know from Mrs. Shelley’s regretful and penitential verse. How did the sorrowing widow address the spirit of the husband whom she often worried with her perversities?—
‘Oh, gentle Spirit!*********Now fierce remorse and unreplying deathWaken a chord within my heart, whose breath,Thrilling and keen, in accents audibleA tale of unrequited love doth tell.It was not anger,—while thy earthly dressEncompassed still thy soul’s rare loveliness,All anger was atoned by many a kindCaress or tear, that spoke the softened mind.—It speaks of cold neglect, averted eyes,That blindly crushed thy soul’s fond sacrifice;—My heart was all thine own,—but yet a shellClosed in it’s core, which seemed impenetrable,Till sharp-toothed misery tore the husk in twain,Which gaping lies, nor may unite again.Forgive me!’