At the close of the next January, leaving Claire behind them at Florence, Shelley moved with his wife and their babe to Pisa, where he resided chiefly (either in the city or at the neighbouring baths of St. Julian) till the fatal migration to San Terenzo. Of all his several Italian resting-places, Pisa is the spot to which the mind turns most often, and, on the whole, most agreeably, in the survey of the poet’s later years. It was at Pisa that he nursed his cousin Medwin in sickness, would fain have cherished the dying Keats, wrote Adonais, worshipt Emilia Viviani, lived closely with Byron (first on friendly and then on uneasy terms), made the acquaintance of the Williamses, joined hands with Trelawny, and again befriended the Hunts. But of all the Shelleyan associations with Pisa, none is more interesting to the student of the poet’s nature, or perhaps more memorable to lovers of his song, than his sentimental idolatry of the Contessina, with whom Mrs. Shelley bravely maintained a romantic correspondence, as though she were a cordial sharer of her husband’s affectionate regard for the imprisoned beauty.
There is no need to reproduce what Medwin tells so agreeably, and perhaps with less than his usual inaccuracy, of the Contessina, whose dreamily voluptuous eyes, Grecian contour, darksome tresses, pale complexion, musical voice, and winning air of gentle sadness, stirred Shelley to discover in her conventual home a scene of barbarous captivity;—to inveigh against the cruelty of the father, who could immure so radiant a creature in so gloomy a building; to conceive himself defrauded of his proper felicity by the circumstances which rendered their union impossible; and in his tumultuous yearnings for the unattainable to cry aloud unto her:—
‘Seraph of Heaven! too gentle to be human,
Veiling beneath that radiant form of Woman
All that is insupportable in thee
Of light, and love, and immortality!
Sweet Benediction in the eternal Curse!
Veiled Glory of this lampless Universe!
Thou Moon beyond the clouds! Thou living Form
Among the Dead! Thou Star above the Storm!
Thou Wonder, and thou Beauty, and thou Terror!
Thou Harmony of Nature’s art! Thou Mirror
In whom, as in the splendour of the Sun,
All shapes look glorious which thou gazest on!
*******
I never thought before my death to see
Youth’s vision thus made perfect. Emily,
I love thee; though the world by no thin name
Will hide that love, from its unvalued shame.
*******
Spouse! Sister! Angel! Pilot of the Fate
Whose course has been so starless! O too late
Belovèd! O too soon adored, by me!
For in the fields of immortality
My spirit should at first have worshipped thine,
A divine presence in a place divine;
Or should have moved beside it on this earth,
A shadow of that substance, from its birth;
But not as now: ... I love thee; yes, I feel
That on the fountain of my heart a seal
Is set, to keep its waters pure and bright
For thee, since in those tears thou hast delight.
*******
Thy wisdom speaks in me, and bids me dare
Beacon the rocks on which high hearts are wreckt.
I never was attached to that great sect,
Whose doctrine is, that each one should select
Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend,
And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend
To cold oblivion, though it is in the code
Of modern morals, and the beaten road
Which those poor slaves with weary footsteps tread,
Who travel to their home among the dead
By the broad highway of the world, and so
With one chained friend, perhaps a jealous foe,
The dreariest and the longest journey go.
*******
Emily,
A ship is floating in the harbour now,
A wind is hovering o’er the mountain’s brow;
There is a path on the sea’s azure floor,
No keel has ever ploughed that path before;
The halcyons brood around the foamless isles;
The treacherous ocean has forsworn its wiles;
The merry mariners are bold and free:
Say, my heart’s sister, wilt thou sail with me?’
Whilst Shelley’s passion for Emilia was running its brief course, between some time (probably a late one) of autumn, 1820, and an early day of spring, 1821, they exchanged letters; Emilia in her letters usually addressing her worshiper as ‘Caro Fratello,’ but once in a while honouring him with the loftier and warmer title of ‘Adorato Sposo,’—a term the young lady doubtless used in a spiritual sense, and with unqualified confidence that he would construe it in no other sense. At the same time Emilia and Mrs. Shelley, exchanging visits and other courtesies, appropriate to gentlewomen affectionately disposed to one another, maintained a sisterly correspondence with the pen, each styling the other ‘Cara Sorella.’ Mr. Rossetti is of opinion that no one, not even ‘a scandal-monger beyond belief,’ has ever ventured to insinuate that the mutual affection of Shelley and Emilia ‘was other than platonic.’ And in the sense, in which the word is used by those who think it applicable to every cordial attachment of two persons of opposite sex, that is attended by no incident likely to increase the population, there can be no question the affair was platonic. How could it have been otherwise? The daughter of an Italian nobleman, Emilia, living under the discipline and surveillance of a religious house, never saw Shelley under circumstances affording either of them an opportunity for throwing aside the restraints of etiquette and decorum. It does not, however, follow that the sentiment of Epipsychidion, overflowing in some of its tenderest passages with vehement admiration of Emilia’s personal charms, falls within the most liberal definition of the elastic term.
That Shelley’s pulses were quickened for a single instant during either his interviews with Emilia, or the meditations resulting in the poem, by emotions which (to use his own phrase) would have ‘approximated him to the circle of a servant girl and her sweetheart,’ I have not the faintest suspicion. And this book has failed in one respect if its readers find much difficulty in believing that robust sensuous fervour was in no degree accountable for the composition of the finest love poem in the literature of the universe. Had he been conscious of emotion, hovering however lightly over the confines of desire, it is inconceivable that Shelley would have made his wife an accomplice in his addresses to Emilia’s feelings. It was due to the prime defect of his lower nature, that he was capable of inducing Mary to play a part in the three-cornered flirtation.
In writing to Peacock after the game had been played out, that he had ‘made acquaintance in an obscure convent with the only Italian for whom he ever felt any interest,’ Shelley declared the full measure, and the real quality and complexion, of his genuine concern in Emilia. He had been interested in a charming girl. Gratified in his artistic sensibility by her personal loveliness, precisely as a connoisseur is gratified by the beauty of an exquisite piece of sculpture, and stirred to sympathetic curiosity by what was to him novel and singular in her altogether commonplace position and story, he, for the first time during his residence in Italy, felt a strong interest in one of its people,—an interest that, disposing him to think well of her, moved him to credit her with all the excellencies of womankind. All that followed was the result of the excitement of a powerfully imaginative brain, acting with equal vigour and subtlety, whilst it perfected its conceptions with the self-concentrated energy of a power, wholly disconnected from the animal that possessed it. Endowing Emilia with all the conceivable virtues of womankind, he worshipt a being that was less a reality than the offspring of his fancy.
Whether he showed as much of chivalric feeling as he did of egotistic waywardness in distempering with egregious flattery the mind of the young woman, who was designed by her father to pass from her convent into wedlock with a man of her own social degree, is a question that may be left for the reader’s unaided consideration. Left also for the present may be the question whether the chivalrous Shelley showed proper chivalric care of his wife’s feelings in constraining her to witness and to further his platonic suit, when a moment’s consideration would have told him that, even if the suit did not vex her to vulgar jealousy, to hear him pour the idolatries of Epipsychidion on the object of his imaginary passion, would necessarily cause her the keenest anguish which a sensitive and sentimental wife can experience,—the pain of discovering herself far beneath her husband’s ideal standard of feminine excellence; the pain of discovering him capable of rendering greater homage to another woman than to herself; the pain of feeling herself much less than necessary to his happiness.
In judging an enthusiast one must ever make allowance for his particular enthusiasm. Were it otherwise, one would attribute singular indelicacy, as well as defective knowledge of feminine nature, to those of the Shelleyan zealots who argue that Mary had no reason to resent or disapprove the attachment, which she could not think ‘other than platonic,’ as though it were not in the nature of every sensitive and sentimental woman (and Mary possessed both qualities in an eminent degree) to prize her husband’s admiration of her mental endowments, his regard for her moral graces, his sympathy with, and loyalty to, her spiritual nature, far more highly than his matter-of-course consideration for those of her domestic privileges and personal rights, in respect to which the law would afford her some measure of inadequate protection and miserable remedy, should he venture to violate them. From what these zealots say, it would seem that, whilst he was chiefly admirable and delightful for his mental powers and spiritual graces, Mrs. Shelley had no right to feel aggrieved when he used them to declare his intellectual and sentimental preference for another woman, because she had every reason to know the lower forces of his nature were in no way affected by the spiritual idolatry.
By others of the Shelleyan apologists it is argued that Mrs. Shelley’s conduct, in becoming as it were an accomplice in her husband’s idolatry of Emilia, is evidence that her feelings were in no way wounded by his attention to the beautiful girl. But to argue in this way is to attribute to Mrs. Shelley an insensibility, wholly foreign to a nature by no means wanting in womanly feeling, discernment, spirit, and fervour. Because she showed what is usually called ‘good sense’ in concealing her annoyance, whilst consenting prudently to what a less clever woman would have resisted indignantly, it is not to be imagined that she really loved the cara sorella to whom she paid visits and wrote gushing letters, or would, at any moment of their acquaintance, have been sorry to hear that Emilia, with the darksome tresses and voluptuous eyes, had gone off to Jericho. What Shelley’s wife felt for the Contessina is not to be learnt from the letters that passed between the two young women, nor from the epistles Mrs. Shelley wrote about her cara sorella to Leigh Hunt and divers other people, whilst her husband was passing through the agitations of his spiritual love for Emilia the Matchless. It was not for the young wife, humouring her husband for the sake of preserving her power over him, to tell his friends he was making a goose of himself, or to write bitter things against Emilia which would only bring upon her the imputation she was most anxious to avoid—the imputation of being jealous of her spiritual rival. But when Emilia the angelic had passed from the Pisan convent into marriage with the Italian gentleman whom she soon worried into hating her, and Shelley having survived his passion for her, had passed to the dominion of another spiritual mistress, Mrs. Shelley told Mrs. Gisborne, with equal candour and piquancy, what she really thought of Emilia, of Shelley’s love of the young lady, and of her rather different love of him.
Reflecting disdainfully on her ‘dirty enough’ Pisan acquaintances, Mrs. Shelley gave Mrs. Gisborne to understand that, not content with the cakes, wine, and sugar-candy of spiritual love, Emilia, to her worshiper’s horror, asked him to give her a considerable sum of money,—a demand that may acquit him of want of gallantry in writing (vide Forman’s edition of Shelley’s Prose Works) to John Gisborne from Lerici on 18th June, 1822, just three weeks before the fatal boat-accident:—