Shelley: The Pursuit (103 page)

This was a statement both of a poetical and a political credo, and it was for this direct and personal understanding of the classical world that Shelley had come to Italy.
[9]
His stay at Naples, disastrous and terrible in many other respects, nevertheless added this new dimension to his philosophy and provided him with the fundamental sense of the reality of Hellenic ideals and impulses from which the final stage of his writing was to be generated.

By February, a sense of movement started slowly and painfully to penetrate the Shelley household once more, and Shelley began organizing expeditions again. They all went to admire the wild water-birds on the Lago d’Agnano, and made two day-trips to the royal chase of the Caccia d’Astroni, with its pine-fringed lakes and forest of massive oaks engulfed in ‘purple darkness like an Italian midnight’. These were a success, and on the 23rd of the month he hired a
calèsse
, with two lively black horses, one running on free-harness in the Italian style, and drove sixty miles south to the Etruscan remains of Paestum. Shelley included in the party a young Englishman, Charles MacFarlane, who remembered years later how fast Shelley drove and how the wind and speed brought a flush to his pale cheeks.
⁵²

On this expedition they slept at Salerno, and rising well before dawn the next day drove rapidly along the shore road. ‘It was utterly dark, except when the long line of wave burst with a sound like thunder beneath the starless sky and cast up a kind of mist of cold white lustre.’ A broken bridge stopped the carriage seven miles outside the city, but Shelley ordered everyone out and they walked along the muddy road through the
maremma
, collecting bunches of huge, sweet-smelling violets until they reached the three temples. He pointed out to MacFarlane the way in which the yellow fluted columns were carefully slimmed towards the top, so as to produce an independent scale of perspective, ‘not that this symmetry diminishes your apprehension of their magnitude, but that it overpowers the idea of relative greatness’.
⁵³
On the return journey they stopped off at Tore Annunziata where MacFarlane was amazed to see Shelley leaping into a macaroni factory and watching with wild delight and equal attention the mechanical plunging of one of the pasta-pressing levers. Outside they were
besieged by beggars, and Shelley emptied his pockets of loose
scudi
. MacFarlane, hardly knowing what to expect next and deeply impressed by this flamboyant gesture of generosity, remarked feelingly to Shelley on the wretched condition of the Neapolitan poor. Shelley fixed him with his sudden earnest stare and observed that they at least had physical freedom. ‘I had ten times rather be a Neapolitan beggar than an English artisan or maid-of-all-work.’
⁵⁴
The
calèsse
was driven furiously back into Naples, calling in at Pompeii on the way to hear Vesuvius rumble.

The refreshment of this journey now decided Shelley that it was time to leave Naples, and move northwards with the spring, to Rome again. A last day was spent in the
studii
re-examining statues and paintings. He was both fascinated and repelled by Michelangelo’s study for the
Last Judgement
, which was in the royal collection, and commented on it with loaded atheistical humour. Moses was only less monstrous than his historical prototype; Christ was in an attitude of haranguing the assembly and showing signs of ‘common place resentment’; the heavenly host looked very like ‘ordinary people’, and those in Purgatory were ‘half-suspended in that Mahomet-coffin kind of attitude which most moderate Christians I believe expect to assume’. Only Hell was truly impressive as every step towards it ‘approximates to the region of the artist’s exclusive power . . . . Hell & Death are his real sphere.’ Shelley observed the devils and the damned, writhing in their knotted serpents, with a connoisseur’s eye, and concluded: ‘a kind of Titus Andronicus in painting — but the author surely no Shakespeare’. Thinking of the Inferno, he added the thoughtful observation: ‘What is terror without a contrast with & a connection with loveliness? How well Dante understood this secret.’
⁵⁵
He himself was to try it in a later poem on one of Leonardo’s pictures, the
Medusa
.

Peacock’s letter sealed, and other notes sent off to his bankers, Brookes & Co., and to his publisher Ollier, Shelley helped with packing their trunks. He had a row with the landlord who wanted them to pay for panes of glass broken by the sirocco, but Shelley had preferred to sit in the draught.
⁵⁶
On the 27th he made the final arrangements for little Elena and signed the forms of birth registration and baptism. The next day they set off late, at 2 in the afternoon, with a new Italian servant, Vincenzo, driving the carriage, which was harnessed with their own horses.

The time for hurrying had long since passed, and the Shelleys spent five nights on the road to Rome. At Gaeta they passed a whole day walking by the seashore in the sunshine, picnicking in the woods. They stayed at an old inn built on the site of one of Cicero’s summer villas, precipitously overhanging the sea, and skirted in groves of olives and oranges. They played chess on the inn terrace, and Shelley leant back in his chair gazing at ‘an emerald sky of leaves starred
with innumerable globes of ripening fruit’. In the bay was an island which was called the ‘promontory of Circe’.

In the afternoon of 5 March they at last drew towards the Celestial City whose presence was announced by the wild, melancholy landscape of shattered aqueducts which commences at Albano, ‘arches after arches in unending lines stretching across the uninhabited wilderness, the blue defined outline of the mountains seen between them; masses of nameless ruins standing like rocks out of the plain; and the plain itself with its billowy & unequal surface announced the neighbourhood of Rome’.
⁵⁷
This time there was no hawk.

[1]
In some ways the situation had reverted to the time when Filippo Brunelleschi first entered the Holy City to study the architecture of the Pantheon, and found foxes running through the streets. See Vincent Cronin,
The Flowering of the Renaissance
, 1969, Ch. 1.

[2]
The medical man was a Scottish surgeon, Dr J. Bell, but Shelley did not actually put himself under his direction until about the middle of January 1819. Dr Bell diagnosed ‘a disease of the liver’ for which he prescribed ‘mercury and Cheltenham salts’ to be be used with much caution, together with daily riding exercise. Shelley was not under a medical man during the first five or six weeks of their stay in Naples, as Mary seeks to imply, and his physical disease was clearly in part the result of mental stress during these weeks, as Mary largely seeks to disguise.

[3]
The birth registration in the State Archives of Naples was first discovered and printed in photostat by N. I. White in 1947. There are a number of interesting minor points about this document. It is made out in official hand, and signed personally by Shelley and two witnesses, but not by Mary Shelley. Mary’s name is given on the document as ‘Maria Padurin’, an Italian mispronunciation of Mary Godwin which Shelley did not bother to correct. Shelley correctly gave his own age and address, but he allowed Mary’s age to be entered as 27 — when she was in fact 21. The only woman in Shelley’s household who was in her late 20s was Elise. In the certificate of baptism, which was made out by the parish priest of St Joseph at Chiaia, and not signed by Shelley, Mary’s name is more correctly given as Maria Godwin. When the death certificate was made out on 10 June 1820, little Elena’s age was given as from the day of baptism.

[4]
Byron had called her, simply, ‘a damned bitch’ which was for him almost an endearment.

[5]
It is probable that a good doctor at this time, without having the aid of chemical tests, could have diagnosed a definite pregnancy by the end of ten weeks. But even this goes outside the timescale for Foggi’s paternity, and it still does not cover illness caused by a threatened
miscarriage
. Mary, incidentally, announced
her
pregnancies to Shelley as definite after three months. They conceived a child in February 1819, she announced at the end of May; and it was born in November.

[6]
On 19 April 1822, Claire wrote to Mary: ‘I wish you would write me back what you wish Elise to say to you and what she is to say to Mad. H. I have tried in vain to compose it.’
Claire
, p. 279, h. 3.

[7]
For the background to the problem posed by Elena Adelaide Shelley, see Medwin’s extraordinary account of the ‘lady’ who followed Shelley to Naples and died there,
The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley
, pp. 204-10 which seems to suggest some confused knowledge of the affair; also N.I. White’s discussion,
Shelley
, II, pp. 71-83; Ivan Roe,
Shelley, the Last Phase
, 1953, pp. 161-81; and Ursula Orange, ‘Elise, Nursemaid to the Shelleys’,
Keats-Shelley Memorial Bulletin VI
, 1955. White’s hypothesis that Elena was simply a casual ‘adoption’ is inadequate to meet the mysteriousness of the affair, the persistence of blackmail and many other contradictory factors, or the emotional intensity and complication of the case. It was Miss Orange who first suggested the liaison between Shelley and Elise, and sketched the salient considerations of the solution. For further remarks concerning Shelley and Claire at this time, see Appendix I.

In hope by him great benefite to gaine,

And uncontrolled freedome to obtaine.

Faerie Queene
, Book V, Canto Il,
xxxii–iii
.

Talus eventually bludgeons the Giant over a cliff into the sea, which as Shelley observed, ‘is the usual way in which power deals with opinion’. Spenser did not have Shelley’s egalitarian sympathies.

[8]
Spenser’s meaning, as also his bias, is plain. The Giant observes that ‘realmes and nations run awry’,

All which he undertooke for to repaire

In sort as they were formed aunciently,

And all things would reduce unto equality.

Therefore the vulgar did about him flocke . . .

Like foolish flies about a honey-crocke,

[9]
In his celebration of the ‘perpetual commerce with external nature’, Shelley forgot or at least suppressed the great limitations to Greek society with respect to women and slaves, which he had so carefully defined in his introduction to the
Symposium
. The neologism ‘unpaithric’, from the Greek ‘upaithrios’ meaning ‘open-air, roofless’ is correctly assigned to Shelley in the
Oxford English Dictionary
.

Appendix to Chapter 18

It is my belief that this story of Shelley’s ‘situation at Naples’ in the winter of 1818, constructed from logical inferences based on a survey of the known facts, is the truth
as far as it goes
. There are however two further broad lines of consideration.

In the first place, it has to be accepted that because of the thinness of our knowledge about Elise Foggi, there are certain unresolved problems. These may be summarized as follows:

1. It is difficult to know out of what mixture of bitterness and loyalty towards the Shelleys Elise should tell the Hoppners the ‘Claire scandal’ without mentioning her own illegitimate child. The desire for revenge, ‘transference’ from her own case, and very probably jealousy of Claire — but
not
, significantly enough, blackmail (like Paolo) — obviously motivated her. But one would like to know more, especially of Elise’s movements through Italy in 1819–20, and of her ‘superior’ character as Claire called it years afterwards. It is still possible that some information remains to be gleaned from hitherto unknown records of Elise’s family at Chambéry.

2. One would also like to know more of the day-to-day life of Shelley’s travelling entourage in April 1818. The relevant evidence here is very scanty. The only noticeable points are Mary’s sudden decision to send away Elise rather than Milly Shields to Venice; Shelley’s alarming and apparently suicidal behaviour in the woods near Lake Como; and Shelley’s remarks in his letters
passim
about the sexual attractiveness of Italian women, who seemed at one moment to delight him and the next to disgust him. There is also his statement to Byron about the rights of the mother of an illegitimate child — ‘if she has no feeling, she has no claim’ — but at the time this was clearly directed at Claire, and could have no bearing until the decision to send Elena Adelaide out to foster parents in December. Mary’s letters and journal are not helpful; nor is the only other
source, Claire’s diary, which merely describes opera-going, sightseeing and endless games of chess. It is true that the diary is not yet available in manuscript for the last eight days of April (Elise departed from Milan on 28 April), but this is less promising than it might be supposed (
vide
Chapter 16, reference no. 36). Altogether the evidence for April, though in some ways suggestive, is really very bare; nor is it likely that there is anything further to be found by way of sources.

It is unlikely that either of these problem areas will ever be fully resolved; but as they are essentially questions not of
contrary
evidence, but simply of paucity of evidence, they cannot in the final consideration be taken as substantial objections. The great weight of the other factual and circumstantial evidence very largely overwhelms them.