Shelley: The Pursuit (130 page)

At the time of Shelley’s writing, Keats was in fact miserably spending the last two days of an enforced quarantine period on board ship in the bay of Naples with his companion Joseph Severn. But Keats never made any attempt to contact Shelley at Pisa.

On 17 October, almost exactly twelve months after the first conception of ‘Ode to the West Wind’, the weather began to break up over Tuscany, and the rains started.
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Shelley and Mary knew they would have to move back into Pisa, and other social complications were impinging, but for a few days they hung on at the Casa Prinni enjoying the last few hours of their peaceful household together, and watching the rain driving over the Monte Pisano. On the 18th and 19th there are two of the longest entries in Mary’s journal for many months, which give a strong impression of their serenity. The piece of verse, and the second entry, seem to have been entered in Shelley’s own hand, nostalgically recalling the simple happiness of the Byron summer long ago on Lac Leman.

Oct. 18. — Rain till 1 o’clock. At sunset the arch of cloud over the west clears away; a few black islands float in the serene; the moon rises; the clouds spot the sky; but the depth of heaven is clear. The nights are uncommonly warm. Write. Shelley reads ‘Hyperion’ aloud. Read Greek.

My thoughts rise and fade in solitude;

The verse that would invest them melts away

Like moonlight in the heaven of spreading day.

How beautiful they were, how firm they stood,

Flecking the starry sky like woven pearl!

Oct 19th. — Ride to Pisa. Read Keats’ Poems. Henry Reveley calls. Walk. Read Greek. Wind N.N.W., cloudy, the sun shining at intervals. The spoils of the trees are scattered about, and the chestnuts are much browner than a week ago. In the evening the moon, with Venus just below her, sails through the clouds, but shines clearly where they are not.
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But times had changed. Happiness was complicated and serenity was fragile.

A visit to Livorno by Shelley and Tatty Tighe had brought back the news that the Gisbornes were acting somewhat strangely. It seems that what the Godwins
had to say in London about Claire and Shelley, in some way put the affair of Elena — whom Shelley had always called circumspectly in his London letters to the Gisbornes his ‘Neapolitan charge’ — in a new light. Mary wrote to Maria Gisborne, but her letter does not make the matter very explicit, except to emphasize the vehemence with which she felt about it. In later correspondence between Shelley and Claire during the winter, Shelley too was to write of his erstwhile friends with savage distaste.

Mary wrote to Mrs Gisborne: ‘When I saw you yesterday, you said you had written me a foolish letter, (foolish was your word, I think) but since you did not explain away any part of it, of course you meant that it should remain in full force. — A good dose on my return; — indeed I was tolerably astounded, and found Shelley in a state of considerable agitation — but this is not the purpose of this letter. — A Veil is now taken off from what was mysterious yesterday, and I now understand your refusal to visit us. . . . I see the ban of the Empire is gone out against us, and they who put it on must take it off. Of course it is quite
impossible
that we should visit you until we have first received you at our house. . . . [Henry] has chosen to join himself to your accusations. — He is young to do this. But what terms need to be made with Pariahs. And such, thank God a thousand and a million times, we are; long — very long, may we so continue. — When you said that filthy woman [
i.e.
Mrs Godwin] said she would not visit Hunt how I gloried in our infamy. Now is the time! join them, or us . . . .’
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As on later and similar occasions, Mary here showed a great gift for expressing powerful feelings and outraged denials, without actually stating or denying anything definite at all. One also senses that she did not really seek a reconciliation with the Gisbornes. In fact the breach was serious, and there was little communication between the two households for several months, and Shelley expressed furious indignation when they dropped the steam-boat project — although he himself had earlier advised them to abandon it.
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Henry Reveley, who had always been fond of Claire, and got on easily with Shelley, did not in the event treat the matter with such formality as his mother and stepfather and he soon started to visit Shelley regularly again at Pisa.

Spurred on by what appeared then to be the beginnings of a new scandal concerning Claire, Mary and Mrs Mason hastily completed a scheme of sending her to pass the winter with the family of Dr Bojti in Florence. The Bojti family were a contact of the Masons through the medical faculty at Pisa; Dr Bojti was the Grand Duke Ferdinand III’s personal physician, and lived in a house opposite the Pitti Palace with a large family of daughters.
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Claire went as a paying guest, ostensibly to study German and make her debut in Florentine society, and the arrangement was in the first instance for one month. There is abundant later evidence that Shelley was deeply against the scheme, and that Claire herself was
miserable; but circumstances had taken the decision at least temporarily out of their hands.

Shelley himself took Claire to Florence on 20 October. They arrived at six in the evening and spent a last night together at the Fontana Inn. Claire made a note in her diary that obviously reflects Shelley’s bitter remarks about the Gisbornes: ‘Whoever does a benefit to another buys so much envy, malice, hatred and all uncharitableness from him.’
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The following morning introductions were made to the Bojtis, whom Claire had never met before. She entered in her diary: ‘Unpack my things. Shelley takes leave of me in the evening.’
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Eight days later she was to write: ‘Think of thyself as a stranger & traveller on the earth, to whom none of the many affairs of this world belong, and who has no permanent township on the globe.’
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For Shelley, the drive back to Pisa was less unhappy. At long last, Tom Medwin really had come south for the winter. By chance they met in Florence, and Medwin came back with Shelley on the coach, talking non-stop about his adventures as a lieutenant in India. Medwin recalled: ‘It was nearly seven years since we parted; but I should immediately have recognised him in a crowd. His figure was emaciated, and somewhat bent; owing to near-sightedness, and his being forced to lean over his books, with his eyes almost touching them; his hair, still profuse, and curling naturally, was partially interspersed with grey…but his appearance was youthful, and his countenance, whether grave or animated, strikingly intellectual.’
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No doubt one of the first stories Medwin told Shelley was how he had miraculously found a copy of
The Revolt of Islam
on a Parsee waste-paper stall in Bombay.
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They returned to Mary at San Giuliano on the 22nd, and Medwin was installed in the space vacated by Claire. Three days later, on the 25th, the constant rains flooded the little village: the baths all overflowed, and the canal broke its banks at the bottom of the garden. By nightfall their hall was four feet deep in the water, which had poured through the garden from the canal and from the piazza in front of the baths.
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They sat in the upper windows, and watched the peasants driving the cattle off the Pisan plain to the safety of the hills. ‘A fire was kept up to guide them across the ford; and the forms of the men and the animals showed in dark relief against the red glare of the flame, which was reflected again in the waters that filled the square.’
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Shelley rode in the next day to arrange lodgings in Pisa for the winter, and with Medwin’s help they moved back on the last weekend of October.

26. The Tuscan Set: 1821

The Shelleys’ new winter apartments were on the Lung’Arno at the Casa Galetti, where Tom Medwin lodged with them. It stood next to one of the marble palaces, and the Shelleys occupied the whole of the mezzanine floor facing south, finding it was comfortable and warm. Shelley used Medwin’s presence to secure two separate rooms higher on the fourth floor, both with open fireplaces. One of these became Medwin’s bedroom, and the other Shelley’s private study. Shelley was glad of his independence.
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Medwin made himself agreeable to Shelley; they read together and played chess, and to Shelley’s relief he saw that ‘Mary likes him well enough’. There was a slightly invalid atmosphere in the house, for Mary had an eye inflammation and found it difficult either to read or write, while Shelley found the change in the weather — and perhaps other changes — had brought back his chronic nephritic pains. Medwin tried to amuse and distract them both with readings from his Indian journal,
²
and Shelley was sufficiently grateful and impressed to write on 10 November to Ollier recommending that the publisher take on Medwin’s
Sketches in Hindoostan with Other Poems.
Unlikely as it might sound, Ollier promptly published these the following year.

With this letter, Shelley enclosed manuscripts for a new collection of his own. He intended it to be published anonymously with the title poem ‘Julian and Maddalo’. They were ‘all my saddest poems raked into one heap’, and included some of the poems of private grief written at Naples in 1818–19; the unfinished narrative ‘Marenghi’, based on the history of an exile in the Pisan
maremma
during the sixteenth century;
³
and some of the fragments composed at San Giuliano. None of these were ever published in Shelley’s lifetime.
⁴

November was an unhappy month for Shelley, and Medwin observed his symptoms with sympathy and sometimes alarm. He later wrote, ‘Shelley had . . . during that winter been subject to a prostration, physical and psychical, the most cruel to witness, though he was never querelous or out of temper, never by
an irritable word hurt the feelings of those about him. . . . So sensitive was he of external impressions, so magnetic, that I have seen him, after threading the carnival crowd in the Lung-’Arno Corso, throw himself half-fainting into a chair, over-powered by the atmosphere of evil passions, as he used to say, in that sensual and unintellectual crowd . . . his physical sufferings — they, if they did not produce, tended to aggravate his mental ones. He was a martyr to the most painful complaint, Nephritis, for which he . . . was now trying Scott’s vitriolic acid baths, much in vogue. This malady constantly menaced to end fatally. During its paroxysms he would roll on the floor in agony.’ Medwin told Shelley that he had seen the so-called ‘animal magnetism’ practised in India in similar circumstances and that he himself had ‘benefitted by it at Geneva’. Shelley agreed to let Medwin experiment during the next convenient attack.
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There is no doubt that apart from his nephritis, much of Shelley’s immediate misery was caused by Claire’s absence in Florence. He worried about her, and he deeply missed her friendship and company. Nine days after her departure, he wrote a long letter, which shows very well how he felt. They were not feelings he cared to reveal to Mary: ‘My dearest Clare, I wrote you a kind of scrawl the other day merely to show that I had not forgotten you, and as it was taxed with a postscript by Mary, it contained nothing that I wished it to contain.’ That word
taxed
was very expressive.

News had already reached Shelley through mutual Italian acquaintances of Claire’s unhappiness at Florence. ‘Keep up your spirits, my best girl, until we meet at Pisa. But for Mrs Mason, I should say, come back immediately and give up a plan so inconsistent with your feelings — as it is, I fear you had better endure — at least until you come here. You know, however, whatever you shall determine on, where to find one ever affectionate Friend, to whom your absence is too painful for your return ever to be unwelcome. I think it moreover for your own interest to observe a certain — ’. The gap is apparently in the manuscript, to indicate tiresome propriety.
⁶

Shelley made no secret of his own ill-health, or his dependence on Claire’s sympathy. ‘I have suffered within this last week a violent access of my disease, with a return of those spasms that I used to have. . . . As to pain, I care little for it; but the nervous irritability which it leaves is a great and serious evil to me, and which, if not incessantly combated by myself and soothed by others, would leave me nothing but torment in life. — I am now much better. Medwin’s cheerful conversation is of some use to me, but what would it be to your sweet consolation, my own Claire?’

He described the layout of their rooms at Casa Galetti — in which Mary ‘has a very good room below, and there is plenty of space for the babe’. Shelley made a great point of his study two floors above. ‘Congratulate me on my seclusion.’

Shelley next explained how the Gisbornes intended to defraud him by using the marine engine cast with his money to set up a commercial machine shop with a powered bellows. He had had a long and ‘very explicit’ conversation with Henry, setting out his own views, and he was even more explicit with Claire. ‘The Gisbornes are people totally without faith. — I think they are altogether the most filthy and odious animals with which I ever came in contact. — They do not visit Mary as they promised, and indeed if they did, I certainly should not stay in the house to receive them.’ The Gisbornes did not in the event defraud Shelley of his money, and all the evidence suggests that he was paid back a good deal of his original investment — which had, anyway, been partly in the nature of a gift. Shelley did not mention to Claire here that he had just posted an extremely polite note to Mr Gisborne requesting Arabian grammars or dictionaries, forwarding some back number of the
Galignani’s Messenger
, and concluding with ‘My kind regards to Mrs G., & Henry. — Yours very truly.’
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So much, perhaps, was still due to propriety.