The Real Shelley. New Views of the Poet's Life. Vol. 2 (of 2)

by John Cordy Jeaffreson

It no more occurred to Shelley to take that view of Byron’s conduct to Claire, than it occurred to him to think of himself as Mary’s seducer. To the hour of his death Shelley never faltered in saying that Byron behaved well to Claire’s child. That the Shelleys saw nothing to condemn seriously in his treatment of Claire herself, however much they regretted his inability to love her for a longer period, is shown by the friendly relations they maintained with him, the idolatrous extravagance of Shelley’s admiration for him, and the regard in which even Mrs. Shelley held him for some time. Till her admiration of Byron was lowered, and her confidence in him shaken, by his vacillation about the Liberal and his treatment of the Hunts, Mrs. Shelley was not wanting in enthusiasm for the poet with ‘a divine nature,’ though no doubt her enthusiasm had not the fervour of her husband’s admiration for the divine poet. Even so late as December, 1821 (vide Lady Shelley’s Shelley Memorials) she wrote from Pisa to Mrs. Gisborne, ‘Lord Byron is now living very sociably, giving dinners to his male acquaintance and writing divinely. Perhaps by this time you have seen Cain, and will agree with us in thinking it his finest production.’ The woman who resented Byron’s treatment of her friends, the Hunts, never seems to have discovered any cause for cordial anger in his treatment of her sister Claire, and, indeed, it is not easy to discover what Shelley and Mary, with their views about marriage, could reasonably condemn in his treatment of Allegra’s mother. By others it has been made a ground of severe censure, that Byron omitted to provide for Claire’s failing years. But in extenuation of Byron’s misconduct in this particular, if not to his perfect justification, it may be urged that, whilst believing her to have a friend on whom she had a stronger claim than on himself, he knew how her future had been provided for by the will, in which he figured as one of Shelley’s two executors and trustees.

At Este, where he wrote Julian and Maddalo and the Lines written among the Euganean Hills, Shelley sorrowed for the death of his little Clara, the second daughter born to him by his second wife. From Padua, whilst the infant was languishing into death, Shelley wrote, on 22nd September, 1818, to his wife, then nursing the sick babe at Este, that though uneasy about their little one he was confident there was no danger. Two days later (24th September, 1818) Mary and Claire went to Padua, taking Clara with them to meet Shelley, who on realizing the infant’s peril hastened with her to Venice for medical advice,—a journey taken all too late, for the patient had barely been brought within the city when she died in her mother’s arms. The first to die of the three children, whom the Shelleys had taken out of England, Clara was buried in the Lido, beneath whose sands Byron would have rested had he breathed his last at Venice.

Leaving Este on 7th November, 1818, with his wife, Claire, Elise (who had returned to her mistress’s side, at the beginning of her residence at Este), and little William, Shelley journeyed towards Southern Italy in his own carriage, drawn by his own horses, Paolo acting as coachman,—a mode of travelling that proved no less tedious and wearisome than economical. Resting at Ferrara on the 8th, and at Bologna on the 9th inst., they came on the 19th of November to Rome, from which place Shelley started on or about the 8th of December (‘about a fortnight ago I left Rome,’ he wrote to Peacock on 22nd December, 1818, giving the approximate date of the departure[5]) for Naples, leaving Mary and the others of his party to follow him three days later, so as to give him time to choose lodgings for them before their arrival in the southern capital; the lodgings (opposite the Royal Gardens, with a full view of the bay) for which he paid three louis a-week.

That, on the occasion of the excursion to Vesuvius, Claire preferred to sit in a palanquin, whilst Shelley and Mary rode on mules, may have been due to timidity, referable to her accident at the Bagni di Lucca. It is, however, more probable that ill-health determined her to ascend the mountain in the least fatiguing manner. Anyhow, it is both certain and noteworthy that, on coming to Naples, Claire suffered so severely from bodily indisposition, that some two years and a half later, on having painful reasons for recalling all the domestic circumstances of their stay near the Royal Gardens, Mrs. Shelley, in her vindicatory epistle to Mrs. Hoppner (August, 1821), thought it right to speak of her sister’s Neapolitan illness. The illness, thus remembered by Mrs. Shelley, after an interval of two years and a half, as a matter likely to be misrepresented by her husband’s and Claire’s defamers, was no trifling ailment.

Before the last week of January, 1819, whilst Claire’s sickness was causing them much anxiety, the Shelleys were in trouble with the servants, whose chattering tongues caused them so much annoyance in later time. Cheating them at the Bagni di Lucca, Paolo—the clever knave, ever quick to serve his employers and himself at the same time—continued to cheat the Shelleys till the opening of the next year. Serving them by turns as cook, valet, groom, coachman, courier, and accountant, the fellow had opportunities for cheating them in each capacity, and doubtless made the most of the opportunities. Dealing with no one but Shelley, he might have played his game with impunity; but the scoundrel’s accounts were audited by Mrs. Shelley, who, whilst consenting to his mere petty pilferings, made a stand against his measures for positive plunder. The result was that Shelley discharged the man with warm words, which were perhaps something stronger and more caustic, through the poet’s deficient knowledge of Italian, than he meant them to be. The gentleman, who gives vent to his indignation in a language he has not mastered perfectly, is apt to say outrageous things. Anyhow, refusing to submit to an egregious attempt at extortion, Shelley discharged the rascal, who, in the usual way of fellows of his sort, covered his discomfiture with abuse and threats of vengeance. The man having been sent about his business, the Shelleys hoped to hear no more of him. But the hope was disappointed. Shelley and his wife had barely congratulated themselves on being quit of the rascal, when Elise married him.

Elise does not appear to have been an evil creature. But gossiping no less freely, servants gossip even more habitually, about their masters and mistresses, than their employers gossip about them. On their way from Este to Naples, Paolo and Elise, as they fell in love with one another, were communicative about their master and mistress. If Elise had more than Paolo to say on the interesting subject, Paolo, with his greater knowledge of the world, could tell her how her highly interesting facts ought to be regarded and dealt with inferentially. After telling Paolo where she was born, and giving him a general view of her childhood, Elise told him how she had been hired by Mrs. Shelley at Geneva, and travelling with her master and mistress to England, had lived with them at Bath and Marlow in that country. No doubt, also, she told him how Allegra had been born in England, taken to Milan, and by her (the deponent) carried to the great Lord Byron at Venice, in whose palace she (Elise, the deponent) had stayed for successive weeks. There was much talk between the Italian knave and the Swiss nurse about Miss Claire, and Mr. Hoppner (the Consul-General at Venice) and Madame Hoppner, the lady born of Swiss parents in Elise’s native land. Can it be questioned that, on arriving at Naples, the subtle Paolo and the quick-witted Elise conceived themselves to be in possession of an important family secret, their knowledge of which placed Monsignor Shelley and the Signora Shelley, and the Signora’s ‘cara sorella’ Claire, at their mercy? Paolo was jubilant. The next time the signor and signora were disagreeable on a matter of accounts, they should know, that he knew what they knew. Feeling tenderly to Mrs. Shelley and Miss Claire, for both had been very good to her, Elise hoped that Paolo would not be indiscreet. But Elise was a Swiss, and what can poor servants do, but make the most of their poor chances? A few weeks later Paolo, after dismissal from the service of a master and mistress whom he had plundered for six months, went his way, vowing to have his vengeance, unless the Signor Shelley paid him those other sequins. Two years and a half later Elise was writing to Madame Shelley for money, having received several gifts of money from the same lady, since leaving her service.

At Naples it is certain that Shelley was far from happy. The fancy seems to have possessed him that he was encountered there by the same lady, whom he imagined to have pressed her love upon him (under circumstances set forth on a previous page of this work) in 1816, just before he started for Geneva with Mary and Claire. The whole affair was imaginary. No woman’s heart was offered to him in 1816. No lady was in that year guilty of unwomanly extravagance, through admiration of his poetry. As she was a mere creature of his fancy, the lady, who paid him so remarkable and embarrassing a compliment, cannot really have met him in Naples, and told him that she had in two different years tracked him through Europe, in obedience to her hopeless affection for him. It does not follow, however, that he recognized the unreality of his impressions, and was deliberately untruthful (in 1821-2) in speaking of his intercourse with the lady, who cannot have died in the winter of 1818-19, as she had never breathed the breath of life. It is impossible to say how far Shelley was the fool of his own fancy in this matter, if he was aught less than the master of it. As he was certainly in several matters untruthful, in the most precise and literal sense of the word, it is not unfair to suspect him of pure imposture in this curious business. Upon the whole, however, it appears more probable that he in course of time became a fitful believer in the story, of whose imaginary character he was cognizant at the season of its inception; that in the latter stages of the hallucination he was the dupe of a trick he had practised on his own mind. It accords with this theory, that the victim of semi-delusion was sometimes very miserable at Naples, expressing his wretchedness in pathetic verses which he hid from Mary, whilst acting in divers ways, so as to make his wife imagine him to be set on concealing from her some cause of mental anguish.

Leaving Naples on 26th February, 1819, Shelley (making the return journey, even as he had travelled southwards, with his own horses) retraced his steps to Rome, where he remained for something over three months, during which time he underwent no slight annoyance from indications of the disfavour with which he was regarded by the English tourists. ‘Such is the spirit of the English abroad as well as at home,’ he wrote bitterly to Peacock, after remarking that, with the exception of five individuals at the utmost, he was regarded ‘as a rare prodigy of crime and pollution, whose look even might infect.’ Whilst insisting that he magnified and multiplied the signs of disapproval, that touched him so keenly, his widow could not venture to assert he had no real ground for the despondency, which she referred to his sense of being shunned, in the land of the stranger, by people of his own nation. There is something droll and touching in the pains taken by the poor lady to inform posterity that, if her Shelley suffered much from the insolence of some of the more vulgar of the travelling English, he was called upon by the Earl of Guildford and Sir William Drummond, during his stay at Rome; the pains thus taken to relieve the poet of dishonour being all the more pathetic, because the asperity of the lady’s reflections on vulgar English tourists reveals how sensible William Godwin’s daughter was, that she was in no small degree accountable for the slights offered to her husband. Poor Mrs. Shelley had better have been silent. The English who visited Rome two generations since were seldom remarkable for vulgarity; the least exalted and refined of them being at least fit companions for the young lady who, at the dawn of a certain July morning, slipt through her father’s shop to the arms of her lover. They may have been victims of prejudice, but it was not a sign of vulgarity that English gentlemen, travelling with ladies in Italy, thought it best to keep out of Shelley’s way, and that the ladies did not care to make his wife’s acquaintance. In attributing the seclusion of their Roman life to the narrowness of her husband’s means and the delicacy of his health, Mrs. Shelley only drew attention to the real causes of the exclusion from society he would have enjoyed, and she was pining to enter.

Towards the close of April, 1819, it was the intention of the Shelleys to withdraw from the capital where they were ill at ease, and to return to Naples after the first week of the ensuing month; but changing their plans they lingered at Rome till they were visited with trouble, far more oppressive and blighting, than the pain of being slighted and left to themselves. They were still at Rome when their little William (the second to die of the three fated children) passed from them, after a short illness, in the middle of his fourth year, breathing his last breath on the 6th or 7th of June; on the earlier day according to one of Mrs. Shelley’s letters, but on the later according to the stone, placed to his memory in the Protestant cemetery of the Italian capital. Henceforth Rome was associated in the minds of either parent with a supreme sorrow. Whilst Shelley was deeply moved by the child’s death, Mary yielded to melancholy, that was only mitigated by the birth of her second son (the present Sir Percy Florence Shelley) in the ensuing November.

Withdrawing from Rome as soon as they had laid their boy in the grave, Shelley and his wife (with Claire for their comforter) carried their sorrow to Leghorn, where they rested at the Villa Valsovano, midway between the city and Monte Nero, till they moved at the end of September to Florence, Shelley having already made a flying trip from the Villa Valsovano to the last-named city, to select pleasant apartments for six months.