Shelley: The Pursuit (97 page)

After the first fortnight of October Mary seems to have found the atmosphere at the Villa Capuccini too melancholy, and she and Shelley returned to Venice for the rest of the month, dutifully distracting themselves with gondola trips, visits to the opera and a regular dinner engagement at the Hoppners’. Claire remained at Este with Allegra and Elise. One of the Hoppners’ Italian acquaintances, the Chevalier Mengaldo, learning of Mary’s authorship of
Frankenstein
,
enthusiastically retold in detail several ghost stories, three of which Mary transcribed woodenly into her journal for 20 October. She later used them in her
London Magazine
article of 1824. The Chevalier, who had fought and been honourably wounded in Napoleon’s Russian campaign, gallantly escorted Mary out to opera and comedies, although privately she was dismissing them as ‘wretched’ and ‘stupid beyond measure’.
¹⁹
Shelley took the opportunity to slip away in a gondola, spending many afternoons riding with Byron along their favourite windswept Lido, and most evenings talking far into the night in the inner sanctum of Palazzo Mocenigo. Besides more personal matters, Shelley discussed Plato’s
Symposium
and
The Republic
with Byron, and lent him a text. He was always anxious to improve Byron’s mind, if not his morals, when he got the chance. In return, Byron drew his attention to a violent attack on Mr Hunt and Mr Shelley in the
Quarterly
, perhaps from his own version of the improving motive.
²⁰

Shelley’s first delight with the gondolas and waterways and palaces of Venice slowly gave way to a deep disgust and aversion. To begin with it was largely political; he was appalled by the dungeons of the Doge’s Palace, ‘where the sufferers were roasted to death or madness by the ardours of an Italian sun, and others called the Pozzi, or wells, deep underneath, and communicating with those on the roof by secret passages where the prisoners were confined sometimes half up to their middles in stinking water’. As at Chillon, one suspects that the image of claustrophobic confinement was particularly appalling to him. Yet these signs of ancient tyranny were as nothing to the abject spirit of the place under its present occupation by Austrian troops. The Austrians, he noted, levied sixty per cent taxes and were quartered freely on the inhabitants; their soldiers swaggered brutally through the city, and dominated the public entertainments.
²¹
[1]

But politics formed only the objectionable dress of Venetian society, for there was also the repulsive flesh beneath. Shelley’s hypersensitive nerves prickled with the Venetian combination of the beautiful and the disgusting, the graceful and the vile. He was both impressed and horrified by the gradual revelation of Byron’s private life, and the extraordinary mixture of energy and cynicism with which it affected Byron’s mental outlook. He wrote a long analysis to Peacock, which shows, besides his own acuteness of observation, that continuing puritan combination of revulsion and fascination in Shelley’s own make-up.

I entirely agree with what you say about Childe Harold [Canto IV]. The spirit in which it is written is, if insane, the most wicked & mischievous insanity that ever was given forth. It is a kind of obstinate & self-willed folly in which
he hardens himself. I remonstrated with him in vain on the tone of mind from which such a view of things alone arises. For its real root is very different from its apparent one, & nothing can be less sublime than the true source of these expressions of contempt & desperation. The fact is, that first, the Italian women are perhaps the most contemptible of all who exist under the moon; the most ignorant the most disgusting, the most bigoted, the most filthy. Countesses smell so of garlick that an ordinary Englishman cannot approach them. Well, LB is familiar with the lowest sort of these women, the people his gondolieri pick up in the streets. He allows fathers & mothers to bargain with him for their daughters, & though this is common enough in Italy, yet for an Englishman to encourage such sickening vice is a melancholy thing. He associates with wretches who seem almost to have lost the gait and physiognomy of man, & who do not scruple to avow practices which are not only not named but I believe seldom even conceived in England. He says he disapproves, but he endures. He is not yet an Italian & is heartily & deeply discontented with himself, & contemplating in the distorted mirror of his own thoughts, the nature & the destiny of man, what can he behold but objects of contempt & despair?
²²

Yet despite this degradation, and even perhaps partly because of it, Shelley’s estimate of Byron’s greatness as a poet and potential greatness as a public figure, were enormously enhanced by his Venetian visit. He already recognized that
Don Juan
was going to be ‘infinitely better’ than
Beppo
, and had the makings of one of the great satirical poems of the age. The paradoxes and contradictions of the situation troubled him deeply. He knew also that while their own friendship had been sealed by the past weeks in Venice, the fundamental opposition of their temperaments and tastes had been sharply revealed. How could he account for these things, and what, if any, was their wider philosophic significance? Shelley turned these questions over in his mind.

Claire was still at Este with Allegra, and on the last Saturday in October Shelley went back alone to the Villa Capuccini to sort out his books and papers and collect the child, who was due to be returned to the Hoppners. He took the opportunity to spend four quiet days at the villa, writing in the summerhouse and talking with Claire, and playing with the child in the evenings. He may also have had reasons to talk seriously with Elise. By the time he returned to Venice, on Thursday, 29 October, he had completed the first draft of his great Venetian poem ‘Julian and Maddalo’. This is the first of his masterworks, one of the four best long poems he ever wrote.

‘Julian and Maddalo’ arose directly from Shelley’s meditation on his visit to Byron. The simple outlines of the poem are deliberately and intensely realistic:
Julian is Shelley, and Count Maddalo — his name extracted from the Tasso manuscript — is Lord Byron. The setting of the poem is Venice, their own Venice of leisurely gondola trips, of rides on the Lido, of discussions at the Palazzo Mocenigo. The graceful philosophic argument and the strong clash of temperaments from which the dialogue of the poem is constructed form Shelley’s attempt to evaluate as exactly as possible the full human significance of his own disagreement with Byron’s approach to life. Maddalo is a philosophic pessimist and cynic, who pretends to believe that most men are mere sheep and that all men are at the mercy of chance and circumstance and their own passions. Julian chooses to argue as a progressive and an optimist, believing that men’s circumstances can be changed, that society is capable of continuous improvement, and that individuals can in the end command their own faculties and fates. Maddalo argues as a behaviourist, Julian as an evolutionist. Maddalo is essentially apolitical, Julian is a reformer if not a revolutionary. The confrontation is brought into poetry with extraordinary ease and skill.

This day had been cheerful but cold, and now

The sun was sinking, and the wind also.

Our talk grew somewhat serious, as may be

Talk interrupted with such raillery

As mocks itself, because it cannot scorn

The thoughts it would extinguish: — ’twas forlorn,

Yet pleasing, such as once, so poets tell,

The devils held within the dales of Hell

Concerning God, freewill and destiny:

Of all that earth has been or yet may be,

All that vain men imagine or believe,

Or hope can paint or suffering may achieve,

We descanted, and I (for ever still

Is it not wise to make the best of ill?)

Argued against despondency, but pride

Made my companion take the darker side.
²³

The contrast in the personalities of his protagonists is carefully pointed out in a prose preface. The description of Maddalo is little more than a softened and generalized version of the analysis of Byron sent to Peacock.

Count Maddalo is a Venetian nobleman of ancient family . . . [who] resides chiefly at his magnificent palace in that city. He is a person of the most consummate genius, and capable, if he would direct his energies to such an end, of becoming the redeemer of his degraded country. But it is his weakness
to be proud: he derives from a comparison of his own extraordinary mind with the dwarfish intellects that surround him, an intense apprehension of the nothingness of human life . . . . but . . . in social life no human being can be more gentle, patient, and unassuming than Maddalo. He is cheerful, frank, and witty. His more serious conversation is a sort of intoxication; men are held by it as by a spell.
²⁴

The description of Julian is instantly recognizable as a self-portrait, though edged by what Mary Shelley called the ‘spirit that mocked itself’.

Julian is an Englishman of good family, passionately attached to those philosophical notions which assert the power of man over his own mind, and the immense improvements of which, by the extinction of certain moral superstitions, human society may be yet susceptible. Without concealing the evil in the world, he is forever speculating how good may be made superior. He is a complete infidel, and a scoffer at all things reputed holy; and Maddalo takes a wicked pleasure in drawing out his taunts against religion. What Maddalo thinks on these matters is not exactly known. Julian, in spite of his heterodox opinions, is conjectured by his friends to possess some good qualities. How far this is possible the pious reader will determine. Julian is rather serious.
²⁵

The sense of lucid control and objective irony, almost of wit, is carried over into the narration and dialogue of the poem, and the fluency and natural simplicity of the verse movement is from the opening lines a masterly and artful achievement which Shelley had been working towards for years. Nothing could be more memorable in image and phrase than the fine austerity of the opening scenario, in which the atmosphere and the feelings of the Venetian landscape is brought slowly to bear on the human characterization.

I rode one evening with Count Maddalo

Upon the bank of land which breaks the flow

Of Adria towards Venice: a bare strand

Of hillocks, heaped from ever-shifting sand,

Matted with thistles and amphibious weeds,

Such as from earth’s embrace the salt ooze breeds,

Is this; an uninhabited sea-side,

Which the lone fisher, when his nets are dried,

Abandons; and no other object breaks

The waste, but one dwarf tree and some few stakes

Broken and unrepaired, and the tide makes

A narrow space of level sand thereon,

Where ’twas our wont to ride while day went down.

This ride was my delight. I love all waste

And solitary places; where we taste

The pleasure of believing what we see

Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be . . . .
²⁶

Julian and Maddalo are crossing back over the laguna from the Lido when Maddalo points out the dark windowless shape of the lunatic asylum which is to play a central role in the second section of the poem. Maddalo’s comment on Julian’s scoffing reaction to communal prayers at the asylum is, in the light of subsequent events, slightly uncanny:

‘What we behold

Shall be the madhouse and its belfry tower,’

Said Maddalo, ‘and ever at this hour

Those who may cross the water, hear that bell

Which calls the maniacs, each one from his cell,

To vespers.’ — ‘As much skill as need to pray

In thanks or hope for their dark lot have they

To their stern maker,’ I replied. ‘O ho!

You talk as in years past,’ said Maddalo.

‘’Tis strange men change not. You were ever still

Among Christ’s flock a perilous infidel,

A wolf for the meek lambs — if you can’t swim

Beware of Providence.’ I looked on him,

But the gay smile had faded in his eye.
²⁷

The next day, Julian calls on Maddalo at his palace to continue their discussions. Maddalo is naturally still in bed, and there is an apparently unimportant interlude while Julian plays with Maddalo’s little girl, an obvious and charming portrait of Allegra. Here the scene is described with remarkable simplicity and directness of feeling. It is the product of intense artistic control, and the figure of the little girl is placed with deceptive ease, for she is to play a major part in the resolution of the poem.