‘The Epipsychidion I cannot look at; the person whom it celebrates was a cloud instead of a Juno, and poor Ixion starts from the centaur that was the offspring of his own embrace.’
Whilst penning these lines, Shelley was still moving along the comparatively tranquil stream of his melancholy attachment to Jane Williams, the last of his spiritual brides, to whose singing and guitar he listened on the evening after writing the letter, as he paced to and fro on the Casa Magni terrace, whilst Mary lay a-bed faint and exhausted by her recent miscarriage.
Before he passes to the concluding term of Shelley’s residence at Pisa, the reader should be informed of another of those imaginary incidents, which would have had prominence in the record, had Shelley lived to be his own biographer. In the summer of 1820, whilst Mr. Tighe (son of the still famous Mrs. Tighe) was staying at Pisa, Shelley came in high excitement to that gentleman (or at least told Medwin he had gone to Mr. Tighe) with this strange story. He (Shelley, the narrator of the affair to Medwin, if not to Tighe) had gone to the Post Office of Pisa for letters, and had barely uttered his name to the clerk of the Poste-restante bureau, when a stranger, with a military cloak hanging from his shoulders, exclaimed, ‘What, are you that d——d atheist, Shelley?’ and forthwith felled him to the ground with a stunning fist-blow,—a blow rendering the poet unconscious, whilst the doer of the violent deed went off, cloak and all. According to the story, given to Medwin some three months or so after the alleged occurrence, Shelley and Tighe tracked the ruffianly assailant to the Tre Donzelle of Pisa, and on learning he had started for Genoa, hastened thither in the hope of overtaking and punishing him. Mr. Rossetti suggests that, in respect to this alleged assault, Medwin, the original historian of the affair, may have given a loose account of some adventure that is said to have taken place at Rome. But I see no reason to accept this suggestion. Though comically inaccurate in his reminiscences, Medwin was an honest gentleman and a precise note-taker. On coming to Pisa to stay with Shelley in the late autumn of 1820, he was a diarist who took pains to record exactly the things seen by him, and the things (true or false) told to him by other people. Without giving Shelley as his authority for the narrative, he tells the story of the assault as one of the matters which came to his knowledge soon after his arrival at Pisa, during his familiar intercourse with his cousin. Whilst fully cognizant of the gentleman’s literary defects, I do not question that he had the story of the assault from Shelley’s lips, and passed it on through one of his note-books with substantial accuracy. It is certain no such attack was made on Shelley at Pisa. The marvellous story must be regarded as an affair of delusion, semi-delusion, or sheer untruth.
CHAPTER XV.
PISAN ACQUAINTANCES.
The Williamses—Shelley at Ravenna—The Shelley-Claire Scandal—Shelley’s startling Letter to Mrs. Shelley—Examination of the Letter—Its wild Inaccuracies—Mrs. Shelley’s vindicatory Letter to Mrs. Hoppner—Demonstration that Byron was authorized by Shelley to withhold the Letter—Explanation of the Shelley-Claire Scandal—Shelley’s Visit to Allegra at Bagna-Cavallo—Project for starting the Liberal—Leigh Hunt invited to edit the Liberal—Shelley’s Change of Plans—His Pretexts and Reasons for changing them—Leigh Hunt’s Way of dealing with his Friends—His Concealment of his financial Position—Byron at Pisa—Hunt’s Misadventures on his Outward Voyage—Byron’s Discouragement in respect to the Liberal—Differences between Byron and Shelley—Shelley’s Position between Byron and Hunt—The Byron-Shelley ‘Set’ at Pisa—Shelley and Hunt in secret League against Byron—Shelley’s Change of Feeling towards Byron—Was Byron aware of the Change?
Though leading a life of seclusion and studious industry, Shelley escaped at Pisa from the social estrangement, almost amounting to social isolation, which had alternately irritated and depressed him during the earlier stages of his residence in Italy, and would have affected him still more painfully, had it not been for Claire’s exhilarating vivaciousness. If he made no friends in the Tuscan city, Pisa at least afforded him acquaintances,—Vacca the physician (who wisely treating the poet as a malade imaginaire told him to confide in nature for the proper treatment of his maladies); Sgricci the improvisatore, whose peculiar faculty stirred the poet’s curiosity and admiration; and the dissolute Professor who introduced him to Emilia Viviani. Receiving his cousin Tom Medwin in the late autumn of 1820 for a long visit, he made the acquaintance of Medwin’s especial friends, the Williamses, early in the following year,—Edward Williams, whilom lieutenant in the 8th Dragoons, and in still earlier time a midshipman of the Navy, who, boasting a lineal descent from Oliver Cromwell, and displaying at least an amateur’s aptitude for literature and the fine arts, possessed various mental and moral qualities, to render him no less acceptable to Mary than her husband; and Jane Williams, the last of the several women, fair or otherwise, to move Shelley to platonic affection. From time to time, also, at Pisa, Shelley saw something of Lady Mountcashel, whose acquaintance he had made at Florence,—the gentlewoman of letters, who, whilst corresponding regularly with her old friend, Claire’s mother, had her reasons for living abroad under the name and style of Mrs. Mason, together with her cold and capricious daughter, who ranged herself for a while with Claire’s admirers. But of all Shelley’s Pisan associates, in the time preceding Byron’s tenure of the Palazzo Lanfranchi, none is more deserving of commemoration than the Prince Mavrocordatos, with whom Shelley played chess and lived for awhile on terms of domestic intimacy, before dedicating Hellas to him, as ‘an imperfect token’ of the author’s ‘admiration, sympathy, and friendship.’ That Shelley had some other and less creditable associates at the Tuscan city and the adjacent Baths, may be inferred from the contemptuous and even disgustful severity with which Mrs. Shelley spoke of their Pisan acquaintances as a ‘dirty enough’ lot of people.
In July, 1821, the Shelleys designed to spend the next winter in Florence with Mr. and Mrs. Horace Smith, whom they had promised to introduce to the glories of the Uffizi and Pitti galleries; and in accordance with this purpose Shelley went to Florence at the end of July to choose a suitable residence. But this scheme for the winter fell through; Mrs. Smith’s ill health determining Horace Smith to postpone their Italian trip,—an opportune change of purpose, that liberated the Shelleys from their engagement to winter at Florence, just as they were wishing for a decent pretext for throwing the Smiths over, and wintering again at Pisa, where they would be members of the great Byron’s especial circle.