On its arrival at Pisa, the intelligence of Allegra’s death operated like a signal for dispersion to the members of the Byron-Shelleyan coterie, already disposed to move to other places, by the consequences of the recent affair with the mounted trooper and the soldiers at the barrier. Indeed, Byron was already turning his thoughts to villegiatura at Monte-Nero, and Shelley had despatched the Williamses and Claire to Spezia, to reconnoitre the country, in order to discover an eligible summer residence for his party on the coast of the bay. On his return from Spezia, Williams saw at a glance that Shelley had trouble at his heart. Appointed to break the calamity to Allegra’s mother, Shelley shrunk from the task. Deciding to defer the performance of the painful duty, till Claire should have been withdrawn from the vicinity of the Palazzo Lanfranchi, he prevailed on her to go back to Spezia on the morrow, in the company of his wife and Trelawny. Though he was no doubt guided chiefly by care for her feelings, the course thus taken by Shelley may also have resulted in some degree from an apprehension that, if the dismal tidings were communicated to her at the Tre Palazzi, she might in the first paroxysms of her mental torture escape his control, hasten to the other side of the Lung’ Arno, and forcing her way into Byron’s presence overwhelm him with reproaches for sending her child to Bagna Cavallo, in contemptuous disregard of her expostulations and predictions of disaster. Anyhow, it was wisely decided that Claire should not make acquaintance with the sharpest grief of her existence till she should be well away from Byron, who, though profoundly disturbed by the loss of his illegitimate daughter, showed no sign of relenting towards his former mistress.
A few days later, the Shelleys, with Claire and the Williamses, were settled in their narrow and comfortless quarters at the Casa Magni (San Terenzo), some three miles from the wretched little town of Sarzana, some four or five minutes (by fast boat) from the equally squalid and picturesque Lerici, and within an hour’s sail of Spezia. It would be an exaggeration to say that even in Italy it would be impossible to discover, amidst scenes of incomparable loveliness, a meaner, dirtier, more poverty-stricken, more repulsive sea-side village than San Terenzo; but one keeps well between the lines of severe historic veracity in saying no English tourists, of the means and social quality of the Shelleys and Williamses, ever made their abode (from choice and for pleasure) in a more unclean and ill-favoured Italian village for a considerable period. No words can commend too highly the peculiar and winning beauties of the surrounding scenery; but the village itself is doleful, unclean, and appallingly hideous. The same may be said of the wretched inhabitants of the village, that contains only a single dwelling, in any degree fit for the habitation of gentle people. Now that it boasts an upper storey (built since Shelley’s time) and contains twice as many rooms as it had when it housed the poet and his companions, the Casa Magni is far from an alluring and impressive residence. Sixty years since the massive and unsightly tenement (whilom a Jesuits’ convent) contained on its solitary floor over a cavernous basement no more than four habitable rooms—(1) a large dining-hall, (2) the room in which Mrs. Shelley and Claire used to sleep, (3) the bedroom occupied by the Williamses, and (4) Shelley’s sleeping apartment; the three bedrooms opening into the grand saloon. In these four rooms five people (six, when Claire was of the party) contrived to live in what must have been a superlatively comfortless and ‘pigging’ fashion; the cooking for the family being done in some out-building, where the servants slept and had their meals. Built so close to the sea, that at high-water the waves tumble noisily about the base of the structure, this marine abode has at its rear neither a single olive-tree, nor the space in which to plant one. The one redeeming feature of this unsatisfactory piece of domestic architecture was (in Shelley’s time), and still is, a broad terrace supported by arches of strong masonry, that running along the whole sea-ward front of the edifice, at the level of the floor of the one set of rooms, served the Shelleys in fine weather as a fifth room, when no fierce sun drove its occupants to the backward parts of the house.
The large dining-hall (with the doors of the bed-rooms opening into it) was the grand chamber, through which Shelley passed without a single thread of raiment on his person, to the dismay of his friends of both sexes, when he lost his clothes whilst bathing; it having escaped the poet that, by merely putting his head into the room and summoning Trelawny or Williams to his side, he might have compassed the timely retirement of the ladies, so as to spare their feelings an embarrassing and painful surprise. The large terrace towards the sea was the place, where Shelley delighted to sit for hours together (vide Shelley’s letter to John Gisborne of 18th of June, 1822) in the summer evenings, listening to the pleasant but comparatively artless music of Jane Williams’s voice and guitar.
It is not surprising that Mrs. Shelley entered this comfortless and altogether unsatisfactory place of abode with drooping spirits, and that every week she spent in it heightened her aversion for the place. Suffering from a state of health, that promised the birth of another child towards the close of the year, she would under the most favourable circumstances have found it difficult to control the irritability, and combat the depressing languor, that always afflicted her at such a time of bodily trouble. Placed at the sea-side, when she was pining for green fields and rural quietude; exposed to the glaring and scorching suns of an unusually hot and dry season, when she thirsted for cool rivulets and murmurous trees; told to make herself at home and take life easily in a house singularly deficient in its arrangements, at the extremity of a barbarous village, where she could not get the food for her frugal table without sending for it to Sarzana or Lerici, she may be pardoned for murmuring at the prospect of passing several months in so distasteful and even exasperating a place. Shelley, on the other hand, was for a while in excellent spirits, and finding San Terenzo altogether to his mind was displeased with his wife for disliking what he enjoyed. He even scolded her for being discontented without a cause. ‘No words,’ she wrote in August, 1822 (vide Forman’s edition of Shelley’s Works) to Mrs. Gisborne, ‘can tell you how I hated our house and the country about it. Shelley reproached me for this—his health was good and the place was quite after his own heart.’ Whether it was chivalric of Shelley to reproach his sick wife for disliking what he enjoyed, is a question that may be left for his extravagant idolaters. For me it is enough to say, that in this respect he acted as men too often act, when they are unusually well and their wives are annoyingly ill. No doubt it was annoying to him. Charmed with the bay of Spezia, when he made a flying visit to it in the previous summer, he had for months been looking forward to a term of residence amidst its beauties. It was hard for him, that Mary could not keep her ailments and discontent to herself. Knowing how he had been counting on the felicity of living near Lerici, how he and Williams had for months been looking forward to the delight of sailing about the bay, and running to and fro between Leghorn and Lerici in the lovely boat, that was being built for them at Genoa, it was Mary’s manifest duty to enjoy what he enjoyed, or at least to pretend that she enjoyed it. No doubt she was in a delicate state of health. But what of that? It is usual for young wives to be so at times.
Brought round from Genoa by Mr. Heslop and two English seamen, Shelley’s new boat entered Lerici harbour on 12th May, 1822, and on trial afforded the liveliest gratification both to the poet and Williams (joint-owners of the craft), the latter of whom wrote of her performance in his diary, ‘She fetches whatever she looks at. In short, we have now a perfect plaything for the summer.’ The perfect plaything was a fatal toy. Henceforth Shelley and his friend passed most of their time on the water; Mary sometimes accompanying them in their swift passages over the dancing waves. ‘My only moments of peace,’ she wrote in the middle of August, 1822, to Mrs. Gisborne, ‘were on board that unhappy boat when lying down with my head on his knee I shut my eyes and felt the wind and our swift motion alone.’ But these moments of peace were of no benefit to her health. Threatened with a miscarriage on the 8th of June, she endured another week of extreme discomfort before she was prostrated by the misadventure, that nearly put an end to her life. It was some alleviation of Mary’s misery, that in her illness she had two companions of her own rank and sex,—Jane Williams, the blamelessness of whose behaviour towards Shelley is demonstrated by his wife’s affection for her; and Claire, who, after withdrawing from San Terenzo for a few weeks, was by this time again an inmate of the Casa Magni. But from inexperience and want of nerve, Claire and Jane proved such poor nurses at the most alarming and perilous crisis of their patient’s trouble, that she would have died of hemorrhage had not Shelley (vide his letter of 18th June, 1822, to John Gisborne, and Mrs. Shelley’s letter of the following August to Mrs. Gisborne), with an address and boldness for which his brief medical training may have been accountable, made her sit in ice till the blood ceased to flow.
But if he may be commended for saving her life on this occasion, Shelley retarded his wife’s restoration by alarming her a few days later by exhibitions of nervous derangement, that was chiefly referable to his apprehensions for her safety. At all times liable at any moment to impulses of fancy, resulting in visions whose vividness, even when they lacked the persistency and steadiness of distinct hallucination, was inconsistent with perfect mental sanity, he had in the previous month, whilst enjoying unusually good health, occasioned the Williamses no little concern by his excitement at a mere illusion, which for some time he mistook for an actual occurrence. On the evening of 6th May, 1822, whilst pacing the Casa Magni terrace, he stopt suddenly, grasped Edward Williams violently by the arm, and staring stedfastly at the white surf at their feet, gave signs of acute mental torture. In reply to a question from Williams, he exclaimed excitedly, ‘There it is again—there!’ The cause of his disturbance was his vivid imagination that little Allegra, naked and lovely, rose out of the surf to his view, clapt her hands in joy, and smiled at him. So powerfully was Shelley affected by this apparition of the child, for whom he had provided by his will no less liberally than he provided for his own children, that his friends found it difficult to induce him to regard it as a mere illusion of his fancy. In the excitement coming to him from his wife’s illness, Shelley (to use her words) underwent ‘a return of nervous sensations and visions as bad as in his worst times;’ one of these visitations being a singularly hideous attack of nightmare, attended with a repulsive dream that affected him both at the moment and for some time afterwards, as though it were a real adventure. During the night of Saturday, 22nd June, 1822, Mrs. Shelley was roused from her sleep by a scream. Almost at the same moment Shelley (whose sleeping-room was on the other side of the great dining-hall) rushed into her room, screaming frantically. Under the impression that he was asleep, she tried to waken him by calling loudly to him; but instead of replying to her cries, he continued to scream so violently and alarmingly, that she sprang from her bed in a panic, and hastening from her bedroom ran across the dining-hall into the Williamses’ sleeping chamber, where, in her weakness and fright, she fell to the ground. As Shelley, on being restored to his senses and soothed into something like equanimity, declared he had not screamed, his companions came to the conclusion that he was unconscious during the whole course of his violent emotion;—that in his alarm at a dream he had crossed the hall and burst into his wife’s room in his sleep. The dream’s first vision was that Edward and Jane Williams (with their bodies lacerated and their bones starting through the skin) approached with these words, ‘Get up, Shelley, the sea is flooding the house and it is all coming down;’ words that caused Shelley to imagine he went to his window and saw the sea rushing into the house. The dream’s second vision was that he saw himself in the act of strangling his own wife. In the morning, whilst talking with Mary about the last night’s disturbance, he told her ‘that he had had many visions lately.’ One of these recent visions (a vision, that is described in two or three different ways by the poet’s biographers) was that a cloaked figure approached his bedside and beckoned him out of the bedroom into the dining-hall, when, lifting the hood of his cloak, the ghostly visitant, after displaying Shelley’s own features to the agitated dreamer, inquired in Spanish ‘Art thou satisfied?’ and vanished. On being thus confronted and tormented by his own wraith, Shelley screamed loud enough to rouse the house, even as he did on the subsequent occasion when he saw his own wraith in the act of strangling his own wife. The appearance and reappearance of his own wraith were distinctly referable to a scene of one of Calderon’s dramas, that had stirred his imagination profoundly and with morbid consequences.
The nervous excitement, that came to Shelley from his wife’s recent illness and consequent debility, was heightened by the knowledge that the beloved Hunts were at Genoa, and by the expectation of hearing at any moment of their arrival at Leghorn. On 19th June, 1822, on the third day from Mary’s imminent danger, he wrote Hunt a letter, in the hope that it would reach him at the former port; a letter in which the writer promised to set sail for Leghorn on hearing his friend had left Genoa. For the fulfilment of this promise, Shelley, on Monday, 1st July, 1822, departed from Lerici for Leghorn, in the company of Captain Roberts, the builder of the boat which had been christened the ‘Don Juan’ in compliment to Byron, and with Edward Williams by his side. It was with no common emotion that Mary parted with him. Twice, if not thrice, he was on the point of leaving her, when the poor lady,—who loved him passionately in spite of their frequent bickerings, and who was possessed by vague previsions of some approaching calamity,—called him back to her arms, to put yet another kiss on his slight and sunburnt face, to win yet another smile from his mobile features, to look once again into his forward-set stag-eyes of deepest azure, to rest her eyes once again on his flowing tresses, whose glossy brownness was darkened rather than whitened or tarnished by their few threads of grey,—to repeat the often uttered declaration that, if he did not come back to her quickly, she would speedily return with their child to their rooms (still on their hands) at the Tre Palazzi, on the Pisan Lung’ Arno. ‘They went,’ she wrote with the awful pathos of sacred sorrow in the following month, ‘and Jane, Claire, and I remained alone with the children.’ Well, might she weep! For never more was she to press her lips against the slight sun-burnt visage, see herself in those deep-blue eyes, pass her hand over the flowing brown curls, hear the voice which, harsh though it might be to others,—shrill, sharp, strident under impulses of anger, as she knew it to be,—was life’s and love’s own music to her ear and heart. The sense of coming trouble covered and held her. Not that she feared for him. The apprehension of seeing and hearing him no more never troubled her, nor occurred to her for a single instant. Her fear was that in his absence she might lose their child;—that death would enter the Casa Magni, and bear away the darling boy Percy, even as the ruthless foe of human happiness had with his finger’s point touched her bright, warm boy Willie into cold, unfeeling clay.
Disaster was far from Shelley’s thoughts as his little schooner—his perfect plaything for the summer—cut and danced over the waves on its way to Leghorn, where he would embrace Hunt and Marianne, and kiss their children. From the beginning of the year, his health (never so weakly as he persuaded himself and his friends into thinking it) had been steadily improving. His breast had grown broader, his figure more robust, his limbs less lathy. If it still wanted massiveness, his countenance had relinquished its former slightness and look of almost girlish fragility. Exposure to sea-air and scorching suns had tanned and bronzed the cheeks, that were never wanting in ruddiness. Of late he had allowed his moustaches to grow, and though they were poor, downy, boyish things in Trelawny’s opinion, they gave his aspect a certain degree of manliness which his face had lacked, on the occasion of his introduction to the stalwart Cornishman. Now that he had dismissed dull care and nervous fancies, in the elation of the brief voyage that would bring him to Hunt’s presence, he had the appearance of a man who might enjoy life for many a year, and live ‘to make old bones.’ And, indeed, nothing in the ailments, which he magnified, or in the constitution, which he underrated, forbade the hope that he would maintain his family’s reputation for longevity. Without being altogether imaginary, his most serious maladies—dyspepsia and a certain amount of renal trouble—were no infirmities to preclude a confident opinion that, in the absence of fatal misadventure, he might survive to green old age. In truth, though so much has been written of his physical delicacy and constant sufferings from serious malady, there was no reason why, with wholesome diet and freedom from excessive mental trouble, Shelley should not have lived to his grandfather’s age. Occasionally, no doubt, he suffered from renal stone, the painful malady that so often attends dyspepsia; but with proper treatment and care for his food he might in a few years have outgrown his disposition to the disorder, which, though afflicting, is by no means necessarily fatal. In deeming himself a sufferer from the malady, which killed the Third Napoleon, he may not have been the mere victim of nervous fancy; but even in that case the operation for his relief would not necessarily have resulted in his death, as he seems to have imagined, whilst penning the well-known lines of The Magnetic Lady to her Patient (1822):—
‘What would cure, that would kill me, Jane:
And as I must on earth abide
Awhile, yet tempt me not to break
My chain.’
Anyhow, he never seemed in better health, nor was in higher spirits, than when he sprang from his little schooner at Leghorn, and, throwing himself into Leigh Hunt’s embrace, declared himself ‘inexpressibly delighted,’ and ‘inexpressibly happy.’ For the moment Hunt also (though he had landed with his numerous family at Leghorn, with just sixty crowns less than nothing in hand) was unutterably delighted and happy on seeing the pleasant and cordial face of the friend, on whom he would have preyed steadily and largely, had not fate stept between them. For the next few days Shelley was busy with the affairs of his protégé, who had come out from England to fix himself on Byron, though knowing well that the author would fain have been liberated from his engagement to start the Liberal. One of Lady Shelley’s most notable departures from biographical fairness (to use no stronger word) appears on p. 195 of Shelley Memorials, where she speaks of Byron’s reluctance in July, 1822, to embark in the Liberal, as though it were a sudden change of purpose that, taking Shelley by surprise at so late a stage of the preliminary arrangements, would have justified him in breaking at once and for ever with the vacillating poet. For months Shelley had been aware of Byron’s regret at having committed himself to the hazardous enterprise. No doubt (as I have already remarked) the project was Byron’s own design. Though in proposing to take Hunt for his literary coadjutor he was actuated in some degree by benevolent concern for a struggling man of letters, Byron must, of course, be regarded as having been actuated in a higher degree by a selfish concern for his own interests. His subsequent assertion that he was wholly animated in the choice, and even in the project, by benevolence, was a miserable misrepresentation. It cannot be gainsaid that Byron promised to start the Liberal and to take Hunt for one of his partners in the enterprise. It is also indisputable that, when a man gives his word, he should keep it. All these matters being admitted, it remains, however, that Byron’s engagement was one from which he should have been liberated by both Shelley and Hunt, as soon as he showed a wish to be released from it.