Shelley: The Pursuit (144 page)

To Byron he wrote of eight wagons dispatched from Florence to carry his Lordship’s hand luggage (it had nearly been made sixteen by an oversight) and kept him in good humour by a dexterous employment of interesting subjects. ‘My convent friend [Emilia Viviani], after a great deal of tumult, &c., is at length married, and is watched by her brother-in-law with great assiduity. . . . They have made a great fuss at Pisa about my intimacy with this lady. Pray do not mention anything of what I told you; as the whole truth is not known and Mary might be very much annoyed at it. “Don Juan” Cantos 3, 4 and 5,1 see are just published in Paris. . . . “Don Juan” is your great victory over the alleged inflexibility of your powers; and interest must be made to take an embargo off such precious merchandise. I have seen the Countess [Guiccioli] frequently, and I pronounce you secure against any of my female friends here. I will trust you with Mrs Williams. Have you formed any plan for Allegra here?. . .’
⁶⁴
Byron was expected any time from the beginning of October, but his Lordship had a penchant for late entries on any important social occasion.

The only setback to Shelley’s plan at this stage was the disappointing news that Horace Smith’s wife had been taken ill with dysentery and fever at Paris, brought on by the unaccustomed heat, and could on no account be persuaded to move further south than the suburbs of Versailles that season. Smith was obviously bitterly disappointed himself, as his ambition to visit Florence had been lifelong, and he had also quickly realized that the presence of Byron at Pisa would
‘doubtless impart a little more life to the humdrumosity of that dull & learned City’.
⁶⁵
Both Shelley and Mary much regretted Smith’s decision, and Shelley was inclined to tempt him over Mrs Smith’s head with visions of an especially lovely house on the Arno. He did not entirely give him up. In the meantime Shelley asked him the favour of purchasing three books which were to have a significant bearing on the writing of the coming winter and spring: a complete edition of Calderón, a French translation of Kant and a German
Faust
.
⁶⁶

In this bustle of arrangements, time was still found for a peaceful seaside expedition of four days duration to the Gulf of Spezia. Shelley’s only companions were Mary and Claire, and on the road out, they picnicked under the olive trees, as in the old days. At Spezia they spent one afternoon sailing, and another riding; while on their leisurely return journey they visited the marble mines of Carrara, gazing up with awe at their towering cliffs of white and ochre, and walking quietly under the large autumnal moon.
⁶⁷
One consequence of this little holiday was the firm tactical decision for Shelley and Mary to make their winter home at Pisa, while Claire should return alone for Christmas to Florence. For the first time ever in Italy they decided to furnish their own house, and on their return, Claire was dispatched back to Livorno with instructions to vary her German exercises with shopping expeditions for suitable chairs and beds and tables.
⁶⁸

While the Shelleys, and the Williams and La Guiccioli and most of the rest of Pisan society impatiently awaited the appearance of the Byronic carriage on the road from Florence, Shelley suddenly and rather unexpectedly found himself engaged in another long poem. Since Prince Mavrocordato’s departure in the summer, news of the Grecian struggle had been filtering back into Italy. The Tuscan cities in particular found themselves the centre of the latest reports and rumours, since Livorno like Marseilles, had become one of the Philhellenes’ regular ports of embarkation. The Tuscan government fed and quartered Greek patriots returning from the Wallachian struggle via the Mediterranean to the Morea. Prince Argyropoli, Mavrocordato’s cousin, had remained in Pisa, and was a hot source of Greek news, while Edward Williams shared and encouraged Shelley’s passionate identification with this new focus of the revolutionary struggle.
⁶⁹
These circumstances combined to inspire Shelley in the composition of a verse drama on the Greek war, based on
The Persians
of Aeschylus, and later christened by Williams,
Hellas.

Hellas
seems to have been begun at Livorno. Shelley unexpectedly appeared at Claire’s lodgings on the evening of 5 October, after having sent her the upsetting news that Byron would not be bringing Allegra with him to Pisa.
⁷⁰
Shelley stayed alone with Claire for the next few days, and began writing his drama.
Claire’s own entry states that they read Schiller’s play
Joan of Arc
together in German — Claire tutoring Shelley. On the 6th there was ‘Thunder & Lightning all Night’, and on the 8th she and Shelley drank tea with some Italian friends. On the 9th Shelley helped Claire pack up her belongings, and that evening they arrived at San Giuliano at 8 o’clock.

Shelley announced
Hellas
to Ollier, two days after he had returned to the Bagni on 11 October, saying that its subject was ‘in a certain degree transitory’, and that it should be immediately advertised since it would ‘soon be ready’.
⁷¹
The drama was actually posted to Ollier a month later, on 11 November, for ‘
immediate
publication’.

For the rest of the month, the Williamses put up Claire at Pugnano, but Shelley and Claire continued to read German together — now moving on to Goethe’s
Faust
— and visits were exchanged between San Giuliano and Pugnano almost daily. For one significant moment, it was Claire who stayed with Shelley at San Giuliano, and Mary who moved to Pugnano.
⁷²
The Hoppner affair was no doubt having its aftermath at San Giuliano during October, and the flexibility of Shelley’s arrangements suggest that as a result a greater frankness of behaviour was admitted between Mary and Claire.

Shelley was also writing with great freedom and energy. The preface to
Hellas
is one of the most active political statements on the struggle for liberty which Shelley ever framed, and parts of it had to be suppressed by Ollier. It also contains the classic English statement of Philhellenism — that movement of political, literary and military idealism which swept the whole of Europe, especially between the years of 1820 and 1824. Although it is dedicated ‘To His Excellency Prince Alexander Mavrocordato’, yet the action of the drama is almost entirely visionary and mystic.

Its cast-list of half a dozen names includes among the speakers Christ, Mahomet, Ahasuerus the Wandering Jew and the Phantom of Mahomet II. Despite the gestures towards epic action off-stage, and lumbering reportage of battles and smoke and carrion, the real subject of the poem — and where its poetry alone begins to grip — seems to be religious guilt. It considers the effect of past evil on the present, as so often in Shelley, both in historical and psychological terms. The poem contrasts, in this light, the difference between the great rational and humane tradition of classical Greek philosophy, with the superseding ideology of guilt and punishment represented for Shelley by the supreme authoritarianism of institutionalized Christian religion. There are several interesting prose notes to the poem on this subject, and altogether the work represents one of the most sophisticated and historically mature statements of Shelley’s atheism.

But the drama is rightly celebrated for its declaration of Philhellenism:

We are all Greeks. Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts have their root in Greece. But for Greece — Rome, the instructor, the conqueror, or the metropolis of our ancestors, would have spread no illumination with her arms, and we might still have been savages and idolaters; or, what is worse, might have arrived at such a stagnant and miserable state of social institution as China and Japan possess.

The human form and the human mind attained to a perfection in Greece which has impressed its image on those faultless productions, whose very fragments are the despair of modern art, and has propagated impulses which cannot cease, through a thousand channels of manifest or imperceptible operation, to ennoble and delight mankind until the extinction of the race.
⁷³

This declaration, fine as it is in itself, gains immeasurably from the knowledge that its author had also written a great translation of the
Symposium
, a wonderful set of travel letters from Naples, the first two acts of
Prometheus Unbound
, and the ‘Notes on Florentine Sculpture’. Occasionally, though rarely, the verse lyrics of
Hellas
also come close to Shelley’s best work:

Temples and towers,

Citadels and marts, and they

Who live and die there, have been ours,

And may be thine, and must decay;

But Greece and her foundations are

Built below the tide of war,

Based on the crystàlline sea

Of thought and its eternity;

Her citizens, imperials spirits,

Rule the present and the past,

On all this world of men inherits

Their seal is set.
⁷⁴

After experimenting with the long free lines of
Epipsychidion
, and the rigid formality of the stanza patterns in ‘The Witch of Atlas’ and
Adonais
, Shelley was slowly returning to the tight, rapid-running line of the poetry of 1819, with its simplicity of speech and its driving, insistent rhythms. But he had not yet established his new form, and
Hellas
contained a bewildering variety of metrical variations.

The presence of Ahasuerus in the drama also showed Shelley reaching back for new developments of old ideas. The use of the Wandering Jew, a figure last found explicitly in
Queen Mab
and
The Assassins
of 1814, pointed again to that
strange reversion to old themes and feelings, the recycling of old imagery, of which Shelley’s illness at Pisa in the winter of 1820–1 had first given forewarning. A curious inward spiralling of Shelley’s imagination seemed to be in operation, as if it had been full circle through the experience of Italy, and was now, as he began to feel the stability of Pisa, coming back at a new angle and elevation through the field of experience and psychological stress undergone in the years 1814–15.

In a scene whose mechanism recalls the summoning of the Phantom of Jupiter in
Prometheus Unbound
, but whose subject goes further back to the poetry of the
Alastor
period, Ahasuerus summons the Phantom of Mahomet II. His explanation of this ghostly phenomenon, given to the present Turkish ruler, is in purely psychological terms.

Ahasuerus.
What thou seest

Is but the ghost of thy forgotten dream.

A dream itself, yet less, perhaps, than that

Thou call’st reality. Thou mayst behold

How cities, on which Empire sleeps enthroned,

Bow their towered crests to mutability. . . .

The Past

Now stands before thee like an Incarnation

Of the To-come; yet wouldst thou commune with

That portion of thyself which was ere thou

Didst start for this brief race whose crown is death,

Dissolve with that strong faith and fervent passion

Which called it from the uncreated deep,

Yon cloud of war…and draw with mighty will

The imperial shade hither.
⁷⁵

This passage is not nearly as fine as the equivalent scene in
Prometheus Unbound
, but Shelley’s prose commentary on it in the notes throws considerable light on his own personal experiences with ‘visions’, and goes part of the way to explaining some of the more weird occurrences of the next spring and early summer. He wrote:

The manner of the invocation of the spirit of Mahomet the Second will be censured as over subtle. I could easily have made the Jew a regular conjuror, and the Phantom an ordinary ghost. I have preferred to represent the Jew as disclaiming all pretension, or even belief, in supernatural agency, and as tempting Mahmud to that state of mind in which ideas may be supposed to assume the force of sensations through the confusion of thought with the
objects of thought, and the excess of passion animating the creations of imagination.

It is a sort of natural magic, susceptible of being exercised in a degree by any one who should have made himself master of the secret associations of another’s thoughts.
⁷⁶