Shelley: The Pursuit (147 page)

Yet Shelley’s inner despondency was, as far as Claire was concerned, quite genuine. His letters during this winter, though they were few, are perhaps the most openly affectionate and sad that he ever wrote to her. For the first time, it seemed that it was now Shelley who was importuning Claire rather than she him. Perhaps this was the significance of the October days spent together in Livorno. ‘My dearest friend,’ he wrote to her just before Christmas, ‘I should be very glad to receive a confidential letter from you — one totally the reverse of those I write you; detailing all your present occupation and intimacies, & giving me some insight into your future plans. Do not think my affection & anxiety for you ever cease, or that I ever love you less although that love has been & still must be a source of disquietude to me. . . . Tell me [dearest —
deleted
] what you mean to do, & if it should give you pleasure come & live with us. The Williams’s always speak of you with praise and affection; & regret very much that you did not spend this winter with them but neither their regret nor their affection equal mine. . . .’
²¹
The pointed withdrawal of the endearment could only have been done because Shelley felt Claire herself would now frown upon it. How Shelley could have coped with Byron and Mary
and
Claire simultaneously at Pisa is impossible to envisage.

At the very end of the year, he wrote again, now almost reproachfully: ‘You do not tell me, my dearest Clare, anything of your plans, although you bid me be secret with respect to them. Assure yourself, my best friend, that anything you
seriously
enjoin me, that may be necessary for your happiness will be strictly observed by me. Write to me explicitly your projects and expectations. You know in some respects my sentiments both with regard to them and you. . . .’
²²

This last letter to Claire, of 31 December, also brought worrying news concerning the linch-pin of the Pisan scheme — Leigh Hunt. The storms that had swept Tuscany and the Arno had been general throughout the Mediterranean and the Bay of Biscay — wrecks had been reported all along the coast around Genoa, and three consecutive mail ships from France had not arrived. As far as Shelley knew, the Hunts had taken ship on the
Jane
, leaving the Port of London in mid-November, and had last been heard of off the Spanish coast. As Christmas arrived and passed, and still no news of their whereabouts reached Pisa, Shelley began to suspect the worst. ‘You may imagine,’ he told Claire, ‘and I am sure you will share our anxiety about poor Hunt. . . . I shall, of course, write to tell you the moment of his arrival.’
²³

The first weeks of the new year, 1822, were equally barren. The weather became less stormy, there was a series of fine frosty days, and yet Williams records that whole afternoons and evenings — sometimes ‘almost the whole day’ — passed in games of billiards. On 6 January Byron came in very excited with a project that a number of professors at the university had dreamed up of getting him to lend his name and financial assistance to a one-man steam-powered flying machine. But by the end of the evening Shelley had turned the subject to steam-powered yachts.
²⁴
On the 11th, when Shelley wrote to Peacock, there was still no news. ‘Lord Byron is established now [& gives a weekly dinner —
deleted
] & we are constant companions: no small relief this after the dreary solitude of the understanding & the imagination in which we passed the first years of our expatriation. . . . We expect Hunt here every day & remain in great anxiety on account of the heavy gales which he must have encountered at Christmas. Lord Byron has fitted up the lower apartments of his palace for him. . . . I have been long idle, — & as far as writing goes, despondent — but I am now engaged in Charles the 1st & a devil of a nut it is to crack.’ This last piece of Byronism merely covered the fact that Shelley had taken up the play for about the fourth time, written a few more fragments, and thrown it aside in disgust after some five days.
²⁵
Soon after Williams received a rejection letter from the manager of Covent Garden for his play
The Promise
. It was not easy living in Byron’s shadow.

The only piece of literary work that seems to have held Shelley consistently during these suspended weeks was Goethe’s
Faust.
In mid-January he received
a box from Paris containing among other things his Calderón, and the new edition of
Faust
(1820) illustrated with the superb gothic etchings of Moritz Retzch. These wiry, grotesque drawings had an enormous impact on Shelley, and the whole Faust story began to haunt his imagination. ‘We have just got the etchings of “Faust”,’ he wrote animatedly to Gisborne, ‘the painter is worthy of Goethe. The meeting of him and Margaret is wonderful. It makes all the pulses of my head beat — those of my heart have been quiet long ago.’ The translations which came with it did not impress him, nor those he had recently read in a copy of
Blackwood’s Magazine
, and he returned to his own version.
²⁶

The only two scenes of
Faust
which Shelley attempted and finished, were the ‘Prologue in Heaven’, and the celebrated Hartz Mountain scene on May Day night —
Walpurgisnacht.
Shelley managed well with this, translating carefully, but also catching the rapid, lurid distortions of the Brocken and the sense of seething night life, when any grotesque, inanimate shape or shadow may begin to squirm and crawl:

Are the screech, the lapwing, and the jay,

All awake as if’twere day?

See, with long legs and belly wide,

A salamander in the brake!

Every root is like a snake,

And along the loose hillside,

With strange contortions through the night,

Curls, to seize or to affright. . . .

Through the dazzling gloom

The many-coloured mice, that thread

The dewy turf beneath our tread,

In troops each other’s motions cross,

Through the heath and through the moss. . . .
²⁷

The Retzch etchings began to fascinate him more and more until they took on a life of their own. Later he wrote again to Gisborne: ‘What etchings these are! I am never satiated with looking at them, & I fear it is the only sort of translation of which Faust is susceptible — I never perfectly understood the Hartz Mountain scene, until I saw the etching. — And then, Margaret in the summer house with Faust! — The artist makes one envy his happiness that he can sketch such things with calmness, which I dared only to look upon once, & which made my brain swim round only to touch the leaf on the opposite side of which I knew that it was figured.’
²⁸
With their macabre setting of the love between Faust and Margaret, the pictures obviously found a deep correspondence in Shelley’s own experiences. They are certainly weird enough.

Shelley had first read
Faust
in company with Byron and M. G. Lewis at Geneva, and Goethe’s poem was clearly associated in his mind with Byron’s presence. It is perhaps for this reason that one can recognize a familiar, jaunty, aristocratic ease in some of Mephistopheles’s speeches. When they pause before descending into the valley to join the witches round their ‘heap of glimmering coals’, the following exchange takes place:

Faust
. In introducing us, do you assume

The character of Wizard or of Devil?

Mephistopheles
. In truth, I generally go about

in strict incognito; and yet one likes

To wear one’s orders upon gala days.

I have no ribbon at my knee; but here

At home, the cloven foot is honourable.

See you that snail there? — she comes creeping up,

And with her feeling eyes hath smelt out something.

I could not, if I would, mask myself here.

Come now, we’ll go about from fire to fire:

I’ll be the Pimp, and you shall be the Lover.
²⁹

The cloven foot was of course fortuitous. But if there were elements of Byron in Mephistopheles, one begins to speculate about Shelley and Faust. The moment at the end of the scene, where Faust recognizes the animated corpse or phantom of his first love Margaret among the dancers, is translated with a kind of chilling, stony realism, and for the only time one is given to understand that Mephistopheles is not quite in control of the infernal proceedings:

Faust
. Seest thou not a pale,

Fair girl, standing alone, far, far, away?

She drags herself now forward with slow steps.

And seems as if she moved with shackled feet:

I cannot overcome the thought that she

Is like poor Margaret.

Mephistopheles
. Let it be — pass on —

No good can come of it — it, is not well

To meet it — it is an enchanted phantom,

A lifeless idol; with its numbing look,

It freezes up the blood of man; and they

Who meet its ghastly stare are turned to stone,

Like those who saw Medusa.

Faust
. Oh, too true!

Her eyes are like the eyes of a fresh corpse

Which no belovèd hand has closed, alas!

That is the breast which Margaret yielded to me —

Those are the lovely limbs which I enjoyed!

Mephistopheles.
It is all magic, poor deluded fool!

She looks to every one like his first love.
³⁰

The appalling implication of Mephistopheles’s final line would not have been lost on Shelley; and the images throughout this closing passage — the Medusa, the unclosed eyes — would each have reached him with a shock not of surprise, but of recognition.

Shelley turned again and again to these scenes of Goethe’s during the coming spring, and one can sense them moving behind many of the fragments he wrote during this unsettled and unproductive period. In April he was to write: ‘I have been reading over & over again Faust, & always with sensations that no other composition excites. It deepens the gloom & augments the rapidity of the ideas, & would therefore seem to be an unfit study for any person who is a prey to the reproaches of memory, & the delusions of an imagination not to be restrained.’
³¹
He says no more, but the reference is obviously to himself.

It was with Claire that Shelley had first begun to re-read
Faust
, and in February and March he encouraged her to complete, as a crown to her eighteen months of German study, a finished translation of the whole of Part I, which he promised her they would get published in England. The manuscript of Claire’s version has never been recovered,
³²
while Shelley’s was published in the first issue of the
Liberal.

By the end of January, the disconcerting news reached Pisa that the Hunts were still in England. They had indeed boarded the
Jane
in November, but had been held up by the terrible storms, first at Ramsgate, and later at Dartmouth. Finally, after many days of waiting and seasickness, Marianne Hunt decided that the journey with the children was too dangerous, and would have to be postponed until the spring; so they wintered near Dartmouth. This decision was to have a long train of disastrous consequences. In the first place, the several hundred pounds
³³
which Shelley had organized for Hunt on an extended loan from Horace Smith, was very largely dissipated on forfeited fares, extra living expenses in England and the arrival of unpaid bills from London. In the second place the Pisan circle, lacking its linch-pin for the production of the
Liberal
by the Triumvirate, began to spin in other directions. Without the unifying idea of this literary scheme, of which Hunt’s presence as managing editor of the
machinery
was an absolutely indispensable part, the friction between Shelley and Byron immediately began to increase.