CLOSING SCENES.
Shelley’s Attachment to Jane Williams—Her Womanly Goodness—Her Devotion to her Husband—The Serpent is shut out from Paradise—Essay on the Devil—Shelley’s Happiness and Discord with Mary—Her Remorseful Verses—Trials of her Married Life—Essay on Christianity—San Terenzo and Lerici—The Casa Magni—Mary’s Illness and Melancholy at San Terenzo—Arrival of the ‘Don Juan’—Mutual Affection of Mrs. Shelley and Mrs. Williams—Shelley’s latest Visions and Hallucinations—Leigh Hunt’s Arrival in Italy—Shelley sails for Leghorn—Meeting of Shelley and Hunt—Improvement in Shelley’s Health—His Mediation between Hunt and Byron—The Hunts in the Palazzo Lanfranchi—Lady Shelley’s Account of the Difficulties between Byron and Shelley—Shelley’s Contentment with his Arrangements for the Hunts—He sets Sail for Lerici—The Fatal Storm—Cremation on the Sea-shore—Grave at Rome.
The time has come for a few more words about Shelley’s attachment to Jane Williams,—the last of the series of fair women who successively inspired him with feelings of adorative fondness, that, differing widely from such love as animated Byron towards his several mistresses, differed no less widely from the placid preferences of passionless friendship. No sympathetic student of the poet’s character and story can entertain even a momentary suspicion of the refinement and purity of Shelley’s regard for the gentle and fine-natured woman, to whom he addressed the saddest and sweetest poetry of his life’s closing term. To say this of the feelings that swayed his soul in all its successive services of homage towards his friend’s wife, is indeed to say no more than I would declare of each and all of the so-called platonic attachments that preceded his worship of Jane Williams.
I have no shadow of a doubt that the always abundant and sometimes glowing fervour of these attachments was never touched for a single instant by desire. On this point my confidence proceeds no less from my clear apprehension of the peculiarity which I venture to designate Shelley’s prime physical defect, than from an equally precise perception of his sentimental idiosyncrasy. But in respect to some of these so-called platonic attachments, this conviction is raised to still higher certainty by the conditions, under which Shelley approached the objects of his sentimental preference, or by the characteristics of the women he distinguished so highly. Though it would be absurd to infer anything from the moral rectitude or the delicacy of the young lady, who asked money of her poetical worshiper, and passed from her convent into wedlock only to be separated from her husband, after leading him (to use Mrs. Shelley’s expression) ‘a devil of a life’ for a very brief while, the conditions, under which Shelley was permitted to have personal intercourse with Emilia Viviani, put it beyond question that, in their curious intimacy, he never strayed beyond the lines of social decorum and conventional propriety. In the case of Emilia’s successor, confidence in the purity of Shelley’s passion, and in the delicacy of his addresses, is raised even higher,—is raised, indeed, to absolute certainty,—by the moral excellences of the lady, and all her domestic circumstances, as well as by all the other conditions and features of a friendship that, even in the tenderest and warmest of its emotional developments, could not have been more innocent had Shelley been a woman.
In some particulars the last of Shelley’s spiritual passions resembled his wilder and more tumultuous idolatry of Emilia Viviani. Just as he worshipt Emilia because fancy tricked him into thinking her a realization of his long-cherished ideal of all that was or could be admirable in womankind, he idolized Jane Williams as an example of the particular type of feminine loveliness that swayed his imagination whilst he was composing The Sensitive Plant. Whilst he worshipt Jane as the veritable realization of a pure anticipatory cognition, even as he had worshipt Emilia a year earlier for her imaginary correspondence to a more comprehensive conception of feminine excellence, Shelley rendered the homage of his spiritual devotion to Mrs. Williams in a way that reminds one of his manner of wooing Emilia. Associating his wife with himself in his addresses to Emilia, he made Jane’s husband a sympathetic co-operator in his addresses to Mrs. Williams, by selecting him for the fittest possible confidant of his affectionate regard for the lady, and even inducing him to act as the medium through which she received his friend’s adoration. There were indeed occasions when Williams and his wife were in this manner rendered the joint-recipients of the homage which she alone evoked, Mary being, at the same time, imperfectly cognizant of the course of the platonic suit to which Jane’s husband consented. In a former page I spoke of the affair with Emilia Viviani as a kind of three-cornered flirtation. The same term is applicable to the affair in which Edward Williams was scarcely less a principal than his wife and Shelley. The two three-cornered flirtations differed, however, in the fact that the later of them had a deeply interested, though by no means equally gratified, spectator of something of the proceedings. This spectator was Mary, who, whilst cognizant of the general progress of what she cannot be supposed to have approved, was kept wholly in the dark as to some of its incidents. Whilst Williams consented sympathetically to an affair of which he knew every particular, Mrs. Shelley consented submissively (though, of course, by no means cheerfully) to an affair respecting which she was far from fully informed.
On 26th January, 1822, when no breath of discord had yet ruffled his relations with Byron, Shelley, from his own apartment in the same house in which the Williamses had a set of rooms (a house on the Lung’Arno, but divided by the river from Byron’s palazzo), sent Williams The Serpent is shut out from Paradise, together with the characteristic note, which instructed Williams, that he might read to ‘Jane, but to no one else,’ the poem, containing the confession:
‘Therefore, if now I see you seldomer,
Dear friends, dear friend! know that I only fly
Your looks, because they stir
Grief that should sleep, and hopes that cannot die:
The very comfort that they minister
I scarce can bear, yet I,
So deeply is the arrow gone,
Should quickly perish if it were withdrawn.
When I return to my cold home, you ask
Why I am not as I have ever been.
You spoil me for the task
Of acting a forced part in life’s dull scene,—
Of wearing on my brow the idle mask
Of author, great or mean,
In the world’s carnival. I sought
Peace thus, and, but in you, I found it not.’
The little effort of literary mystification, to be observed in the note which accompanied these verses to Edward Williams, affords another point of resemblance between the Emilia-Viviani affair and the affair with Jane Williams. Just as the Epipsychidion was offered to the public with a preface which attributed the composition to the real author’s ‘unfortunate friend’ who ‘died at Florence, as he was preparing for a voyage to one of the wildest of the Sporades,’ the verses are offered to Edward Williams as poetry taken from the portfolio in which the poet’s friend used ‘to keep his verses,’—the object of this misrepresentation to Williams and Jane, who were in the real author’s confidence, being less than obvious. Given, of course, for a reason no less sufficient than manifest, the direction that the verses should be shown to no one but Jane was, no doubt, duly observed by the receivers of the poem. Williams, in his diary, may well have styled the verses ‘beautiful, but too melancholy lines.’ One can imagine how commiseratingly the happy husband and wife (to whom the verses were sent, or rather the husband through whom the verses were transmitted, and the wife to whom they were addressed) spoke of the wretchedness of their friend who, in his inability to find contentment, such as their own mutual happiness, in the society of his Mary, spoke of his chambers in the same house (the Tre Palazzi) as his ‘cold home.’ It is certainly less surprising that Shelley desired the verses to be withheld from Mary, than that he was so communicative respecting the cheerlessness of the apartment, of which she was the mistress.
A brief note on the poem’s first line (‘The serpent is shut out from Paradise’), written at a time when it was Byron’s humour to call Shelley ‘the serpent’ or ‘the snake.’ Accepting the title in good part, and indeed as a compliment, Shelley, only a few weeks before sending the verses to the Williamses, had written to Byron about the culprit, who was not burned at Lucca for scattering the eucharistic wafers from the altar, ‘I hear this morning that the design, which certainly had been in contemplation, of burning my fellow serpent, has been abandoned, and that he has been condemned to the galleys.’ Knowing how Shelley regarded the serpent as typical of the wisdom, that is especially hateful to bigots, and delighted in regarding himself as akin to the serpent in being largely endowed with the same wisdom, Byron had of course more reasons for calling him ‘the snake’ than he troubled himself to declare, when he observed ‘Goethe’s Mephistofilus calls the serpent who tempted Eve “my aunt the renowned snake”; and I always insist that Shelley is nothing but one of her nephews, walking about on the tip of his tail’; a peculiarly Byronic flippancy that appears in the concluding paragraph of Shelley’s Essay on the Devil—‘... before this misconduct it hopped along upon its tail; a mode of progression which, if I was a serpent, I should think the severer punishment of the two.’
Few readers will question that this remarkable coincidence of humour and verbal form in the Byronic utterance and the Shelleyan essay (an essay withheld from the public eye long after the death of both poets) should be deemed a clear indication, that Byron either perused the essay or was the originator of at least one of its humorous sallies. If Byron did not take the thought and words from the essay, Shelley must be assumed to have taken them from him. To the present writer the coincidence is part of the superabundant evidence that, Byron was accountable for the piquancy, incisiveness, and Don-Juanesque levity that distinguish the Essay on the Devil from all Shelley’s other prose productions. For the purpose of exalting the younger at the expense of the elder poet, many extravagant things have been written about Shelley’s influence on Byron. That Shelley influenced Byron greatly is unquestionable, but it is not to be supposed the influences arising from the close, and for a while harmonious, intercourse of the two poets, were altogether one-sided,—that whilst receiving much from his familiar companion, Byron gave him nothing. The Essay on Christianity and the Essay on the Devil are distinctly assignable to the same period of Shelley’s literary productiveness; and to turn from the one to the other, is to pass from the society of the Real Shelley, to the society of Shelley speaking under the inspiration of Byronic mockery.