“Sunday, September 27. Read fourth canto of Childe Harold. It rains. Go to the Doge’s Palace, Ponte dei Sospiri, etc. Go to the Academy with Mr. and Mrs. Hoppner, and see some fine pictures, call at Lord Byron’s and see the Fornarina.”
⁂
The Fornarina was Byron’s latest mistress, a peasant woman with a face of the fine antique Venetian type. “You will see how beautiful she is,” Byron had told Shelley. “Very fine black eyes and the figure of a Juno, wavy black hair which reflects the moonlight: one of those women who would go to hell for love. I like that sort of animal, and I should certainly have preferred Medea to any other woman in the world.”
Certainly this beautiful baker’s wife was a strange sort of animal, and quite untamable. She was so fierce that all the servants were terrified of her, even Tita, the gigantic gondolier. She was jealous, insupportable, and false as the devil, besides being perfectly ridiculous from the moment she had insisted on replacing her veil and shawl by fashionable gowns and hats with ostrich feathers. Byron flung these into the fire every time he saw them, and then she went out and bought others. But he put up with her follies because she amused him. He liked her vivacity, her Venetian dialect, her violence. Her coarse and animal nature was, he imagined, more of a rest to him than anything else after intellectual labour. Thanks to her his poem advanced with a splendid motion, with something of the wild and natural movement of the sea or the passionate love of a woman.
To the Shelleys, who were ultra-refined, this magnificent animal was highly displeasing. They exchanged sorrowful glances. During the few days they spent in Venice, Shelley became better acquainted with Byron’s mode of life and he judged it with severity. The Poet admitted to his orgies the lowest women picked up by his gondolieri in the streets. Then, despising himself, he decreed that man is despicable. His cynicism now appeared to Shelley to be nothing but a graceful mask for his sensuality.
At length the Shelleys went back to Este, depressed by their return there without their little girl. Yet the house was cheerful. In the garden a vine-covered pergola led to a summer-house which Shelley made his study. From thence you saw the ruins of the ancient castle of Este in the foreground, then, like a green sea, Lombardy’s waveless plains, on which cities and villages seemed like islands bounded by vaporous air . . . in the distance many-domed Padua, a peopled solitude, and the towers of Venice glittering in the sunshine against a sapphire sky.
He worked hard. He had begun Prometheus Unbound, a lyrical drama on the Book of Job. He tried to fix in verse light as wing-beats the melancholy beauty of these autumn days. But no sooner had the intoxicating joy of composition faded than he felt himself once more alone and forgotten. It seemed to him that in the frail bark which carried beneath an alien sky his group of youthful exiles Misery stood at the helm.
CHAPTER XXVII
THE ROMAN CEMETERY
At the end of another month the villa must again be given up to Byron and Allegra restored to him. The cold and rainy weather gave Shelley the idea of pushing farther south. To feel happy he needed warmth and sympathy. New climates and new places might cheat his sorrow.
The road to Rome wound along among already reddening vineyards. At every step the travellers passed teams of cream-coloured oxen of Virgilian beauty. They went through Ferrara and Bologna, where they saw such quantities of statues, pictures and churches that Shelley’s brain became like the portfolio of an architect or a print-shop or a commonplace book. Passing by the romantic cities of Rimini, Spoleto and Terni, they reached the Campagna di Roma, an absolute solitude, yet picturesque and charming. When they entered Rome an immense hawk was sailing in the air over their heads.