Shelley: The Pursuit (129 page)

As Shelley declaimed, the piazza under their windows gradually filled up with the loud grunting and squealing of pigs brought in for sale at the fair. Finally, the farmyard noises threatened to drown out the whole recitation, and Shelley broke off his reading with a laugh. ‘He compared it to the “chorus of frogs” in the satiric drama of Aristophanes; and, it being an hour of merriment, and one ludicrous association suggesting another, he imagined a political-satirical drama on the circumstances of the day, to which the pigs would serve as chorus.’
¹⁹
At the end of August he actually began such a drama, and completed it in September. It was called
Swellfoot the Tyrant.

In the evening of St Bartholomew’s day, they all went to watch the horseraces, in a thoroughly good mood. A week later Shelley took Claire to Livorno to begin her improving month’s vacation. He remained with her for two days. She probably stayed with Italian friends of the Gisbornes, and possibly even at the Casa Ricci itself. She read
Clarissa
, did Latin exercises and bathed daily, receiving regular letters from the Casa Silva and Casa Prinni, occasional news of Ravenna and once a long letter from Charles at Vienna. Weekends were frequently spent with the Masons at Pisa, and Shelley usually arrived to take her out for a talk and a walk. They read anxiously the news of the Carbonari campaigns around Naples, and discussed them animatedly.

One entry in Claire’s diary describing a morning trip through the streets of Livorno gives a vivid impression of her sharp eye and violently felt reactions which remained such a permanent pleasure to Shelley. ‘I see a beggar sitting at his post yawning with
ennui
— another crawling on all fours politely saluting a young washerwoman a bundle on her head & bare footed with “mi rincresce che La Mamma e ammalata” [I’m sorry to hear your Mamma is unwell]; Greeks with legs folded under them sitting upon the parapets & gazing stupidly upon the muddy current of the canal below…here men burning coffee before their doors, & there others beating the flock of matresses; violins squeeking and women singing. Life everywhere but like the life which is engendered of putrefaction creeping crawling worms not that wholesome strength of an agricultural product or that animation which is the child of Liberty.’
²⁰

September and October at the Bagni were remarkably peaceful. Shelley and Mary took the waters, rode out in the afternoons and occasionally walked among the foothills of Monte Pisano. In the evening they read Boccaccio’s tales out loud to each other. At weekends, Shelley usually dined with Claire and
the Masons at Pisa. Mary began her new novel,
Valperga
, and Shelley completed his final draft of the ‘Ode to Naples’, and dashed off the two comic acts of
Swellfoot the Tyrant.
It ended in high style with Iona Tarina (Queen Caroline) pulling on boots and spurs, ‘and a hunting-cap, buckishly cocked on one side, and tucking up her hair’, and leaping on to the back of the Minotaur. Then, with hunting cries and shouts, she and the Swinish Multitude pursue the evil Swellfoot (King George) and his knavish ministers (Castlereagh, Sidmouth etc.) off the stage;
exeunt in full cry
—

Tallyho! tallyho!

Through pond, ditch, and slough,

Wind them, and find them,

Like the Devil behind them,

Tallyho! tallyho!
²¹

Altogether it was a highly successful combination of street pamphlet and revue sketch, with material drawn equally from Aristophanes and Shelley’s own
Mask of Anarchy.
Shelley did actually manage to get it published in England, and it is a great pity that the correspondence surrounding the publication has not survived, for it seems to have been nothing to do with Hunt or Ollier at all. Shelley, perhaps with the connivance and aid of Horace Smith,
²²
had it transmitted directly and anonymously to the old Godwinian publisher James Johnson, and thus short-circuited the liberal and respectable publishing network. The burlesque appeared in London early in the autumn of 1820 with the following title page:

Oedipus Tyrannus

or

Swellfoot the Tyrant

A Tragedy.

In Two Acts.

Translated from the Original Doric

‘Choose Reform or Civil War

When thro’ thy streets, instead of hare with dogs,

A consort Queen shall hunt a King with hogs,

Riding on the IONIAN MINOTAUR.’

London

Published for the Author

by J. Johnston, 98 Cheapside, and sold by

all booksellers

1820.

This little edition must have made a considerable impact, for it was immediately seized by the politically motivated Society for the Suppression of Vice who threatened to prosecute Johnson. On this occasion Johnson withdrew the remaining copies, but it was just such confrontations, when persistently pursued, which Shelley himself advocated, ‘defying the government to prosecute for political libel’ as part of the overall radical strategy. When courageously practised by men like Carlile and Holyoake, it gradually freed the press from political control during the following fifteen years.
²³

It was one of Shelley’s great tactical mistakes as a poet, a mistake for which Hunt must carry some of the blame, that he did not turn to this kind of publication sooner, or persist in it after 1820; though the choice was to be taken out of his hands on one memorable future occasion. Mary finally published the poem in her edition of 1839, by which time it was toothless.

Other poems which belong to these retired weeks of September and October are more reflective. Shelley made a five-stanza adaptation of Dante’s
Purgatorio
, Canto 28, lines 1–51. He had first translated it in a fragment which Mary later entitled ‘Matilda Gathering Flowers’.
²⁴
Now he developed it into the completed poem ‘The Question’, with its ornate and exquisitely assembled description of a nosegay of ‘visionary flowers’.

There grew pied wind-flowers and violets,

Daisies, those pearled Arcturi of the earth,

The constellated flower that never sets. . . .
²⁵

Other adaptions included shortened versions of the Homeric Hymns ‘Apollo’ and ‘Pan’.

But perhaps most successful were the two lyric fragments on the Moon. They were written at harvest-time when the huge presence rose through the mists of Monte Pisano to the north-east and hung above the long flat shadows of the Pisan plain.

And like a dying lady, lean and pale,

Who totters forth, wrapped in a gauzy veil,

Out of her chamber, led by the insane

And feeble wanderings of her fading brain,

The moon arose up in the murky East,

A white and shapeless mass —
²⁶

The second has all the Elizabethan melancholy grace of a sonnet by Philip Sidney:

Art thou pale for weariness

Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,

Wandering companionless

Among the stars that have a different birth, —

And ever changing, like a joyless eye

That finds no object worth its constancy?. . .
²⁷

But it was not finished. Fine as these poems are, like tiny pieces of exquisite mantelpiece china, they represent a steady withdrawal of creative pressure and urgency. The presence of Greek and Italian translation, as a hard core within many of the poems of this summer and autumn of 1820, also show Shelley’s need to draw support and stimulation from more purely literary sources. In the last eighteen months of Shelley’s writing, these foreign literary presences become more and more important in his work. Dominant are the figures of Dante, Calderón and Goethe. They stand as powerful if shadowy figures behind his original poems, and also are brought into clear focus in a series of masterly poetic translations. These works, together with the prose translation of the
Symposium
of 1818, the solid workmanlike verse rendition of Euripides’s
Cyclops
of 1819, and the ‘Homeric Hymns,’ combined to make Shelley by far the most outstanding literary translator of his generation.

At the end of September, Shelley brought Claire back from Livorno, and by agreement between Mary and Mrs Mason, she was given a room at the Casa Silva, since Mary now preferred not to have her at the Bagni. The only sign of disturbance was a letter from Shelley to Byron, in which he once again found himself defending Claire’s importunities. But this time a slightly firmer note had entered into his explanations, and one now feels that his sympathies had moved decidedly to Claire’s side over the issue of Allegra. ‘I wonder however at your being provoked at what Clare writes; though that she should write what is provoking is very probable. — You are conscious of performing your duty to Allegra, & your refusal to allow her to visit Clare at this distance you conceive to be part of your duty. That Clare should have wished to see her is natural. That her disappointment should vex her, & her vexation make her write absurdly is all in the usual order of things. But poor thing, she is very unhappy & in bad health, & she ought to be treated with as much indulgence as possible.’

Reports had been circulating that Byron had intended to return to London. Shelley disbelieved these, but he seized upon the possibility that Byron might at any rate be considering leaving Italy. ‘As to me, I remain in Italy for the present. — If you really go to England, & leave Allegra in Italy, I think you had better arrange so that Clare might see Allegra in your absence if she pleases.’ This was the first time Shelley had ever suggested how his Lordship
had better
arrange his affairs. Equally, this was the second autumn since poor Claire had last set eyes on her child, and much future friction and unhappiness was to grow from this exacerbated situation.

Shelley’s letter to Byron contains an intriguing postscript, though to Byron it probably had little significance. ‘PS If I were to go to Levant & Greece, could you be of any service to me? If so, I should be very much obliged to you.’
²⁸
This is the first time Shelley openly mentioned his scheme to set out on his travels again, and depart for the Near East. It is significant because as far as is known, it was a scheme which only Claire — and possibly also Tom Medwin — really knew about.

On 10 October the Gisbornes returned from England to Livorno and to Casa Ricci, and on the following day a package of books was left with Claire at Casa Silva. Shelley sent off a brief note welcoming them home. ‘Clare tells me that you are returned, & that you even passed the Bagni without calling on us… we do not
quite
understand your silence.’
²⁹
Among the books was a new volume of Keats’s,
Lamia, Isabella, the Eve of St Agnes, and Other Poems.
These poems had a tremendous impact on Shelley,
³⁰
and Claire was already quoting from ‘Isabella’ in her diary of the 15th.

Shelley’s previous opinion of Keats’s writing had not been high. He had regarded him as potentially a fine poet, but as yet a writer whose ‘mannerism’ and adherence to the Hunt ‘system’ of luxurious gentility in phrase and imagery had only shown forth his powers very indistinctly. His considered opinion of
Endymion
, given to Keats’s own publisher Ollier in September 1819 was that ‘much praise is due to me for having read [it], the Authors intention appearing to be that no person should possibly get to the end of it. Yet it is full of some of the highest & the finest gleams of poetry; indeed every thing seems to be viewed by the mind of a poet which is described in it. I think if he had printed about 50 pages of fragments from it I should have been led to admire Keats as a poet more than I ought, of which there is now no danger.’
³¹

Shelley’s main feeling about Keats’s poetry was that it lacked both grandeur of design, and the classical austerity of execution that he had struggled so hard to develop in his own work. This he now saw achieved to an outstanding degree in one major poem of the new 1820 volume, and his reaction was immediate and generous, though not perhaps entirely unpatronizing. He wrote to Marianne Hunt from San Giuliano on 29 October: ‘Keats’ new volume has arrived to us, & the fragment called Hyperion promises for him that he is destined to become one of the first writers of the age. — His other things are imperfect enough. . . . Where is Keats now? I am anxiously expecting him in Italy where I shall take care to bestow every possible attention on him. I consider his a most valuable life, & I am deeply interested in his safety. I intend to be the physician both of his body & his
soul, to keep the one warm & to teach the other Greek & Spanish. I am aware indeed in part that I am nourishing a rival who will far surpass me and this is an additional motive & will be an added pleasure.’
³²
It is suggestive that the poem which Shelley liked at once is that which most closely resembles passages of his own work in
Prometheus Unbound.
Surprisingly, he made no mention of the great ‘Odes’.
³³