No less ignorant than Byron of the desperate state of his friend’s pecuniary affairs,—a state amounting to absolute destitution so far as the term is applicable to a clever man of letters,—till he spoke with Hunt at Leghorn, Shelley must have felt himself in a peculiarly delicate and painful position in regard to Byron, on hearing that their partner in the Liberal was alike without income and any prospect of income, apart from the literary project, which was still only a project. For months he had been aware of the degree in which Byron was influenced by the advisers, who were entreating him to withdraw even at the last moment from his entanglement with the Hunts. For months he had been aware in how great a degree Byron had lost confidence in the literary venture, and how gladly he would have discovered a way of withdrawing honourably, and at no excessive cost, from an enterprise which he deemed foredoomed to failure. For months he had, in Hunt’s interest, maintained a hollow show of his former admiration for, and of his former attachment to, Byron, encouraging him to recover his former confidence in their joint enterprise, and to be assured that, on the arrival of the Examiner’s editor, his anticipations of catastrophe would be speedily followed by the triumph of the undertaking, in which they would be comrades. All this Shelley had endured and done for Hunt’s sake, in the hope of keeping the poet of overpowering popularity and sufficient purse in humour with the project, which under auspicious conditions would make Hunt prosperous for life. Byron’s repeated expressions of distrust in Hunt’s adequacy for his part in the undertaking had been met by Shelley with repetitions of the statement that ‘Hunt was editor of the Examiner.’ When Hunt at length appeared on the scene, he was not editor of the Examiner.
Entering his Pisan home on the 1st November, 1821, Byron took up his abode in the stately house at a time when his relations with Shelley were altogether cordial, and Shelley’s admiration of him was at its highest extravagance. Delighted with his reception and treatment at Ravenna in the previous August, Shelley had now spent more than two months in emotions of generous and romantic worship of Byron’s greatness; and it was his fortune, perhaps his good fortune, to regard Byron with the same idolatrous enthusiasm for something more than another two months, before his admiration of so angelic a being was qualified by painful suspicions that he had rated his idol somewhat too highly,—suspicions followed at a brief interval by the differences which, but for his concern for Hunt’s interests, would, perhaps, have caused ‘the worm’ to turn and writhe in open mutiny against ‘the God.’
Fascinated at Ravenna by the great poet’s courtesies and flattering manifestations of confidence, Shelley exulted for a brief while in the prospect of figuring before the world as the great Byron’s peculiar and most influential friend. Whilst it is curious to observe in his letters from Ravenna to his wife, and in some of his subsequent epistles to Horace Smith, Peacock, and Gisborne, how greatly he was impressed by the pomp and grandeur of his ‘noble friend’s’ domestic arrangements, it is even more interesting to contemplate in the same letters the boyish simplicity and exultation, with which Shelley spoke of the great Byron’s regard for him, and of the advantages that would accrue to him from familiar association with so superlative a personage. Possessing the great poet’s ear, he enjoyed his confidence. Byron was moving to Pisa in compliance with his advice. It was he (and no other man) who had taken the finest palace on the Lung’Arno of Pisa for the great Byron’s sufficient accommodation.
To read attentively certain of the published letters that passed between Shelley and his wife whilst he was at Ravenna, is to see how they frightened one another through the post into imagining themselves the victims of a conspiracy that aimed at rendering their lives miserable and insecure;—to see also how, for several days after their reunion, they continued to nurse the wild and terrifying fancy that, to protect themselves against fanatical enemies, working for their destruction, to guard themselves and their child from death by poison or the knife, it was needful for them to surround themselves with powerful friends.
That Mary might not resist his purpose of staying another winter and spring in the city, where he would have Byron for his neighbour and most familiar associate, Shelley instructed her to rate at their proper worth the security and protection she and her husband would derive from Byron’s countenance:—security and protection they might sorely need at Florence or any other Italian capital, now that they had been selected for exemplary persecution by the fanatical enemies of Free Thought. That they had provoked the animosity of implacable adversaries was manifest from what had come to his ears at Ravenna. Instructing his wife that the current calumnies about himself should be regarded as preliminary measures for their destruction, taken by subtle and resolute foes, who would be satisfied with nothing less than his and her ruin, Shelley wished her to realize the perils of their position and determine what course they had better adopt for the preservation of life, liberty, happiness. Though attractive to them for divers considerations, Florence, for reasons darkly hinted at in the correspondence, would now abound with dangers to which they had better not expose themselves. For himself he would like nothing better than to retire with his Mary and her child to an island inhabited by no one but themselves, and there devote either to oblivion, or to future generations, the overflowings of a mind which, timely withdrawn from the contagion, would be kept fit for no baser object. If they determined on settling on a desert island, they should have the courage to go to it in no company but their own. There should be no compromise in the matter, no concession to weaknesses, begotten of long intercourse with the human race. If they took two or three chosen companions with them, the devil would be sure to appear amongst them. No, should they decide to emigrate to a desolate island, they must make the voyage by themselves. In brief, they should build a boat and shut upon their retreat the flood-gates of the world. On second and saner thoughts, however, he was of opinion they had better not build a boat and retreat behind the flood-gates.
The proposal for emigration to a solitary island having been dismissed as an impracticable project, Shelley begged Mary to consider another plan for defeating the enemies, banded together for their destruction. Instead of retiring to a desolate island, or offering their breasts to the assassin’s dagger at Florence, they might remain at Pisa under conditions that would render existence at the same time safer and more agreeable than heretofore. Instead of traversing the treacherous sea in an open boat to a tenantless island, it would surely be better for her and himself to stay where they were, to surround themselves with a few congenial people, even though the devil should be one of them, and in short to do their best to make themselves happy at Pisa, and the neighbouring Baths, for another twelve months. The Williamses would remain at Pisa, if she and he decided to remain there. The Hunts also would be at Pisa at least for the winter, should Leigh Hunt determine on migrating to Italy. Lord Byron and his Italian friends would be there also; and though the Gambas and Teresa Guiccioli might not be desirable acquaintances from every point of view, Byron’s friendship would be invaluable. What had occurred to account for so quick a change of sentiment respecting Florence and the plan of wintering there? Positively nothing besides Byron’s determination to settle at Pisa for a few months or years.
As the choice of alternatives lay between emigration to a solitary island and another term of residence at Pisa, it is not surprising that Mrs. Shelley decided in favour of the latter. Whilst few women were less qualified for seclusion, few had a keener appetite for society, than William Godwin’s clever and brilliant daughter. The woman, who fretted at the isolation and monotony of her existence at Naples and Rome, would have died of ennui or gone mad in a month in the severe seclusion of a sea-girt paradise, with no companions but her husband and her little boy. It had not been her intention to stay another year at Pisa. For several reasons she would have preferred wintering at Florence with the Horace Smiths. She had seen enough of Pisa, and more than enough of some of her ‘dirty enough’ Pisan acquaintances. But weeks before Byron, with his bodyguard of liveried lacqueys and his menagerie of domesticated animals, took possession of the Palazzo Lanfranchi, she was well pleased with the notion of staying longer at Pisa.
So the circle was formed towards the close of 1821 under favourable auspices:—the circle whose life was described so fully in The Real Lord Byron, that its doings need only be alluded to cursorily in the present chapter. It was the circle of Teresa Guiccioli and the Gambas (Teresa’s father and brother, with whom she lived at a short distance from the Lanfranchi palace); the Williamses, of whose social endowments mention has been made on a previous page; pleasant Tom Medwin, whose books afford only faint indications of the elegant taste and generous qualities that endeared him to the author of Adonais; handsome, shrewd, adventurous, high-hearted Trelawny, who joined the party at the opening of the year 1822; and Taafe, the blundering rider and writer, whose clumsy horsemanship occasioned the fracas with the serjeant-major and the guard at the city, that eventually resulted in Byron’s migration to Genoa,—the circle of charming and diversely memorable men and women, that had Byron for its planet and Shelley for its chief subordinate luminary. Had the Hunts fulfilled the hopes of their especial friends, and entered Leghorn Harbour in time to keep Christmas at Pisa, the Shelleys would have been, at least for a time, altogether satisfied and delighted with this circle of new and old acquaintances, who had gathered about them rather than about the poet of brighter and wider celebrity, whom they had drawn to what may be called their own coterie:—a circle which, though keeping its virtues as far as possible to itself, and having little or nothing to do with the general society of Pisa, or any other set of Pisan visitors, contributed not a little to the enlivenment of the usually tranquil, not to say rather torpid, little town.
The excess of Shelley’s enthusiasm for Byron pointed, however, to an inevitable revulsion of feeling, in which the worshiper would probably think as much too lightly, as he had in former time thought far too worshipfully, of his hero. The younger poet’s idolatry was, to use a familiar expression, too strong to last. No man of sensibility and self-respect can persist for any great length of time in regarding himself as a worm and his fellow-man and daily companion as a god. To regard one’s next-door neighbour as divine to-day, is to regard him as altogether, and in some respects meanly, human six months hence. There were other considerations, to satisfy any clear-sighted and judicial observer of the intercourse of the two poets at Ravenna, and of their regard for one another, that it was not in the nature of things for the man of rank and high celebrity, and the man of very inferior rank and no celebrity, to live together for twelve months without friction and disagreement. In truth, they were never wholly at ease with one another.
Elevated slightly, but only by one or two generations of ancestral dignity, above people of the middle way of life, Shelley possessed precisely the degree of aristocratic quality to render him sensitive for his dignity in his relations with a man of Byron’s superior rank; far more sensitive than he would have been had he, like Tom Moore, stept, by right of genius, from a wine-shop to the salons of ‘the great.’ At the same time, the uneasiness of his attitude towards Byron, whilst chiefly referable to their difference of social degree, was increased by his sense of Byron’s superiority in fame and wealth. How this uneasiness affected Shelley, even when he felt most cordially and idolatrously towards his ‘noble friend,’ appears from the letter he dated on 10th August, 1821, from Ravenna (vide Moore’s Life) to Mrs. Shelley, where he speaks of his inability to ask money of Byron for Hunt’s benefit. ‘Lord Byron and I,’ he wrote, ‘are excellent friends, and were I reduced to poverty, or were I a writer who had no claims to an higher station than I possess,—or did I possess an higher than I deserve, we should appear in all things as such, and I would freely ask him any favour. Such is not now the case. The demon of mistrust and pride lurks between two persons in our situation, poisoning the freedom of our intercourse.’