Shelley: The Pursuit (146 page)

Under Shelley’s inspiration, besides finishing his play
The Promise
, Williams had also begun a diary. In its pages, besides a record of his and Shelley’s reading, he kept a close account of the shooting expeditions. On one day he recorded: ‘Lord B. hit, at the distance of 14 yards, the bulls-eye four times, and a half-crown piece three. The last shot struck the piece of money so exactly in the centre that it was afterwards found with the ball enclosed within it — the sides being drawn to the centre like a three-cornered cocked hat. — Call’d in the morning on Lrd B — His pistols were Wilkinson’s.’
³
Three days later it was Shelley who hit the half-crown twice: he and Byron seem to have been by far the best shots among the party and there was a certain rivalry between the two. Tom Medwin noted their different styles of shooting: Byron drew a long aim, with a hand that visibly trembled, yet usually produced a high standard of hits. Shelley, on the contrary, took a sudden, rapid aim, with a rock-steady hand — ‘all firmness’ — and also produced regularly good shooting.
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Of the two, one has the impression from Williams’s journal that Byron had the edge.

The shooting gradually changed from a casual exercise into a shared obsession. Byron rode out on a Hussar saddle slung with several pistols in decorated leather holsters; Shelley spent several hours a week preparing his own targets and carried them round in his pocket. Between them they even created a special shooting
patois
: ‘firing,
tiring
; hitting,
colping
; missing,
mancating
; riding,
cavalling
. . .’.
⁵

Pisa was at this time a garrisoned city, and the Tuscan authorities, for all their liberality towards the Greek patriots, were on constant alert for agitators and
carbonari
sympathizers. The officers and soldiers of the Pisan guard observed the English milord’s daily mounted expeditions to and from the city gates with a certain professional interest, and they noted down for future reference the bearded Venetian cut-throat Tita. Relations were not altogether happy between Byron’s camp-followers and the local Pisan populace, and a situation gradually grew up during the winter that had dangerous potential.

The society of the ladies became progressively more retired and feminine, as that of the men became more flamboyant and masculine. Mary, Jane Williams and La Guiccioli became constant companions, meeting together regularly at
the Tre Palazzi. They too rode out together, but it was no longer in the company of the men, but usually in a close carriage with a posse of servants. There were few visitors besides Williams, and occasionally Taaffe, and none from the Pisan university set of the previous year. Mary records that in December she went only once to the opera. She filled the house with potted plants which lined the southfacing window-sills.
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Her main outside interest was helping choose the furniture for the Hunts’s apartment which was to be on the ground floor of the Palazzo Lanfranchi; yet she very rarely saw Byron to speak to.
⁷
Edward Williams had become Shelley’s amanuensis, and it was he who clean-copied
Hellas
for the press, and he who afterwards took down at daily dictation Shelley’s translation of Spinoza’s
Tractatus Theologico-Politicus.
This philosophic work had been begun at Marlow in the winter of 1817, with Shelley dictating to Mary, and taken up again at Florence in 1820. It had now been decided that Williams should help him to bring it to a close, and Byron would write a biographic preface. Mary’s help was no longer required in this sphere. Her letters to Maria Gisborne in London show little signs of outward life, except to observe languidly that ‘My Lord is now living very sociably, giving dinners to his male acquaintance and writing divinely; perhaps by this time you have seen “Cain” and will agree with us in thinking it his finest production . . .’.
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She was considering making mince pies for Christmas.

Byron installed a splendid billiard table at the Lanfranchi, and Shelley and Williams spent much time patrolling its green perimeter. The riding and the shooting and the billiards steadied Shelley’s spirits, and his health seems to have been materially better than during previous Italian winters, while Byron’s regular dinners, usually on Wednesdays, were at first a great pleasure. By contrast Shelley’s writing almost completely stopped. The only poem that he began working on during these months was the draft of a translation of Goethe’s
Faust
, but it went slowly.

The curiously hypnotic effect that Byron’s theatrical mode of life was having on Shelley is indicated by an extraordinary incident which occurred on 12 December. News had reached Pisa late in the evening that an unknown Italian was about to be burnt by the state authorities at Lucca for an act of sacrilege: stealing a wafer-box from a church. Although the report was totally unsubstantiated, and without any corroborating details, Shelley rushed to the Lanfranchi and proposed that he and Lord Byron should organize an armed party of English to ride through the night ‘and rescue the man by force’.
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Byron demurred, but was sufficiently drawn into the conspiratorial atmosphere of Shelley’s wild suggestion to sit up with him, Williams and Medwin until 2 in the morning, having dispatched Count Taaffe to ride through the frosty night and bring back a first-hand report. Since no further definite information was obtained,
Byron promised to draw up a ‘memorial to the Grand Duke of Tuscany’, the next day, and the party dispersed for the night. The next morning Shelley sent over a faintly sheepish note from the Tre Palazzi. ‘My dear Lord Byron, I hear this morning that the design which certainly had been in contemplation of burning my fellow serpent has been abandoned & that he has been condemned to the gallies . . . .’
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Even this was not correct: the man had escaped to Florence.

Altogether one has the impression that while Byron’s presence continued to inhibit Shelley as a writer — as it had done at Geneva in 1816 — it yet acted upon him as a goad. Shelley delighted in Byron’s private company, but his public presence constituted a permanent challenge and a dare. Within the field of Byron’s social life, Shelley’s actions frequently had a quality of exaggeration, almost of staginess. The two poets, holding separate court on either side of the Arno, rivalled each other in everything they did, and implicitly challenged each member of the Pisan circle to confer loyalties on one party or the other. At first the confrontation was exciting and mutually stimulating, but gradually it became an exhausting performance for Shelley.

One direct consequence of these feelings was the recklessness with which Shelley and Williams put their little skiff to sail on the swollen Arno, long after the weather had broken in mid-December, and violent storms and lightning burst frequently over the city. Mary remembered how the local Italians remarked on their crazy, English foolhardiness.
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Williams’s entry for 20 December is typical: ‘Cloudy — strong gales from the South. S and I sail furiously against a violent current for a considerable distance up the Arno. The storm however increasing we reached the shore only just in time.’
¹²
On Christmas Day they made another such expedition, in ‘violent wind with rain at intervals’, and then landed to dine with Byron and his party. Byron observed these expeditions from his balcony with a mixture of admiration and irony. Once, on receiving a letter attacking Shelley’s writings from London, he observed acidly: ‘[The Snake] alone, in this age of humbug, dares stem the current, as he did today the flooded Arno in his skiff, although I could not observe he made any progress. The attempt is better than being swept along as the rest are, with the filthy garbage scoured from its banks.’
¹³
The weather grew steadily rougher, the Serchio burst its banks, and the water on the Arno rose above the level of the arches on one of the bridges. The danger that Shelley had played with was vividly illustrated on 26 December, when a local boatman took to the river to recover a gentleman’s hat, was caught in a whirlpool caused by one of the bridges, capsized and drowned.
¹⁴

In social gatherings — at the dinner table, on the shooting expeditions, or in the billiard room — it was Shelley’s and Byron’s conversation which dominated the proceedings by their continual counterpoint. Both men allowed each other a formal advantage: Shelley was absolutely rigid in his recognition of Byron’s
superior social status — ‘my dear
Lord
Byron’; Byron in turn always appeared to submit to Shelley’s critical judgement on literary matters (it being understood that he regarded
Don Juan
and
Cain
as very great poems). Medwin was immensely impressed by this fact when one morning Byron handed Shelley the manuscript of a poem ‘The Deformed Transformed’. Shelley took it over to the window to read, and having read it carefully, returned to where Byron leaned against the mantelpiece and announced that ‘he liked it the least of all his works; that it smelt too strongly of “Faust”; and besides, that there were two lines in it, word for word from Southey.’ Medwin quailed inwardly at the cool frankness of this judgement, but ‘. . . Byron turned deadly pale, seized the MS., and committed it to the flames, seeming to take a savage delight in seeing it consume’.
¹⁵
Yet in part, this too was a stage device. Byron had another copy safely in his desk, and a revised version was published two years later by Murray. Equally, Shelley’s respect for Byron’s aristocracy was strictly a formality — he did not observe it in his private letters to his friends, and he came to believe that Byron’s insistence on rank was one of his most damaging faults.

Medwin recalled the contrasting styles of their conversation, which, like their shooting, were deliberately exaggerated in company to act as foils to each other.

[Byron’s] talk was at that time a dilution of his letters, full of
persiflage
and
calembourg
[
sic
]. Shelley used to compare him to Voltaire, to whom he would have thought it the greatest compliment to be compared. . . . Both professed the same speculative — I might say, sceptical turn of mind; the same power of changing the subject from grave to gay; the same mastery over the sublime, the pathetic, the comic. . . . Shelley frequently lamented that it was almost impossible to keep Byron to any one given point. He flew about from subject to subject like a will-o’-the-wisp. . . . Every word of Shelley’s was almost oracular; his reasoning subtle and profound, his opinions, whatever they were, sincere and undisguised; whilst with Byron, such was his love of mystification, it was impossible to know when he was in earnest. . . . He dealt, too, in the gross and indelicate, of which Shelley had an utter abhorrence, and often left him in ill-disguised disgust.
¹⁶

Some of their jokes, which Medwin recorded, though they sound lame in isolation, give an indication of the mischievous humour of both men. During one of their many conversations concerning translation, which were the result of Shelley’s work on
Faust
, Byron suddenly remarked with a suggestive leer that ‘Sale, the translator of the Koran, was suspected of being an Islamite, but a very different one from you, Shiloh’ — a reference to the doctrines of atheism and free love in
The Revolt of Islam
.
¹⁷
While on another occasion, apropos of the translation of colloquialisms and endearments, Shelley observed in a mild
voice that a letter Byron had once received from his Lady Byron beginning ‘Dearest Duck’ would sound curious in Italian — ‘Anitra Carissima’.
¹⁸

At one of the dinners, the two poets so far forgot themselves as to lay a public bet of £1,000 to be paid by whichever of them first came into his family inheritance. Byron of course was always laying wagers on such things: shooting, swimming, boxing, racing. But for Shelley to lay out the equivalent of one year of his Italian income on a smoking-room bet was nothing less than extra ordinary.
¹⁹

Shelley gave a very different impression of the friendship to Claire in Florence. ‘The Exotic as you please to call me droops in this frost — a frost both moral and physical — a solitude of the heart. — These late days I have been unable to ride — the cold towards sunset is so excessive & my side reminding me that I am mortal. Medwin rides almost constantly with Lord B & the party sometimes consists of Gamba, Taaffe, Medwin & the Exotic who unfortunately belonging to the order of mimosa thrives ill in so large a society. I cannot endure the company of many persons, & the society of one is either great pleasure or great pain. . . . I am employed in nothing — I read — but I have no spirits for serious composition — I have no confidence and to write in solitude or put forth thoughts without sympathy is unprofitable vanity.’ He wrote to her of the storms and the floods, and of Mary’s rheumatism, which now kept her even more within doors, taking laudanum — but he did not mention the boat, or the dinners, or the bets.
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