Shelley: The Pursuit (87 page)

He was haunted by the problem of little Alba. How should she be sent to Italy? Who could take her if they could not? He had no peace from Mary until this could be settled. Only when the child had been presented to Byron, could it be guaranteed the kind of upbringing that it deserved; only then could Claire’s ambiguous position in Shelley’s household be clarified; and only then would
Mary be satisfied. ‘Can you suggest a plan?’ he wrote to Byron, explaining his ‘constant and gradual delay’. ‘Have you any friend, or person of trust, who is leaving England for Italy?’
⁸⁴
Besides, he wrote, with that curiously open and paternal affection he always displayed towards Claire’s child, as if he and not Byron were the real father, how ‘exquisitely beautiful’ she had become. ‘Her temper has lost much of its
vivacité
, and has become affectionate, and mild.’ Some of the only happy hours of these dreary winter weeks were spent watching Alba and his beloved William play together on the nursery floor. When William, now nearly two years old and highly mobile, was given raisins or sweetmeats he always hastened to put at least half, or even more, into little Alba’s mouth, a practice that delighted his father.
⁸⁵

Yet these charming distractions served in the end only to remind Shelley of the fragility and difficulties of his situation. These little children, and both their mothers, depended so completely on him for their ultimate happiness. ‘It is not health but life that I should seek in Italy,’ he told Godwin earnestly ‘& that not for my own sake, — I feel I am capable of trampling on all such weakness — but for the sake of those to whom my life may be a source of happiness utility security & honour — & to some of whom my death might be all that is the reverse.’
⁸⁶

In this winter mood of gloom and indecision Shelley began to compose the autobiographical fragments which make up the poem ‘Prince Athanase’, and most of which bear on the very early part of his life. None the less Part I of the poem reflects much of his feelings at Marlow, and the attempts of his friends to get at the root of his depression. One phrase, about the ‘mysterious grief’ inflicted on those who ‘owned no higher law Than love’, conjures up the whole disastrous complication of his enmeshed relationships with Harriet, Mary and Claire. When Prince Athanase’s friends speculate on his grief, and try to draw him out in conversation, he does not attempt to evade the subject. But in the end this makes his life appear only more painful, more hopeless and more enchained:

. . . nor did he,

Like one who labours with a human woe,

Decline this talk: as if its theme might be

Another, not himself, he to and fro

Questioned and canvassed it with subtlest wit;

And none but those who loved him best could know

That which he knew not, how it galled and bit

His weary mind, this converse vain and cold;

For like an eyeless nightmare grief did sit

Upon his being; a snake which fold by fold

Pressed out the life of life, a clinging fiend

Which clenched him if he stirred with deadlier hold; —

And so his grief remained — let it remain — untold.
⁸⁷

Yet the final image is strikingly close to the poems of 1815, and this itself suggests a direct interpolation of the immediate worries of the winter 1817–18 is inappropriate. In his manuscript, Shelley added a dry and not altogether unironic comment. ‘The Author was pursuing a fuller development of the ideal character of Athanase, when it struck him that in an attempt at extreme refinement and analysis, his conceptions might be betrayed into assuming a morbid character. The reader will judge whether he is a loser or gainer by the difference.’
⁸⁸
It is clear that he was struggling to get a grip on himself.

On 20 January, Godwin, after lengthy and cautious inquiries about the possibilities of ophthalmia being infectious, arrived with his son William to spend two days with the Shelleys. William Godwin junior was then 15, and ignoring the rather solemn conversations of his half-sister and brother-in-law, he immediately attached himself to Claire. He spent the whole time laughing, and teasing her. Shelley was pleased to see her cheer up. In the afternoons they all went for a walk in the woods, and in the evening they played chess round the fire.
⁸⁹
Godwin was once again determinedly angling for money. He had worked out a plan for Shelley to secure a large
post obit
loan, and a life insurance from William Willats, a London financier. The Godwins hastily departed from Marlow on the 22nd when Shelley’s ophthalmia broke out again. But the visit was decisive in another way. It at last brought home to him that it was time to put the Italian plan into operation. He wrote letters to Hogg, and to solicitors in London, using Mary as an amanuensis. On the 25th, much to everyone’s surprise and delight, it was discovered that Albion House, which had been advertised on the market for sale since the previous November, had found a definite buyer. The decision to go to Italy was now made. Four days later, Shelley, all ophthalmia forgotten, was bundling into the London coach with Claire and Peacock. For the next five weeks their life was transformed into a sudden, ceaseless, whirl of social activity; legal conferences, tea parties, operas, visits to the museum, dinners at Hunt’s and Godwin’s, packing, casing up of books and fitting the children out with all those clothes and conveniences of which the Italians had surely never heard.

Shelley arranged to install himself at 119 Great Russell Street, a pleasant set of rooms near the British Museum, just off the bustle and thunder of carriages down the Tottenham Court Road. It was his last address in England. He was down in Marlow again on the 6th, helping Mary with the packing, and having
arranged to leave the final winding up of Albion House affairs with the local agent, Mr Madocks. There were several bills outstanding, both on the house itself, and at local suppliers. Shelley undertook to settle them through Madocks before he left England. To Madocks, and to the financier Willats, he gave assurances that he was unlikely to leave England until April, ‘if so soon’.
⁹⁰
None of these assurances and arrangements were fully honoured. On the 7th Shelley returned to London, having taken leave of his library, his garden and his statues of Venus and Apollo for the last time. Keats’s schoolmaster patron, the genial Cowden Clarke, revisiting the neighbourhood several years later was told by one of the richer residents that ‘they all considered Shelley a madman’. He had not made the usual formal calls, either on arrival or departure.
⁹¹

Mary, the children and the rest of the
ménage
arrived in the city three days later. Accompanied by Peacock they celebrated their first night in town by a grand visit to
Don Giovanni
. Peacock was paying special attentions to Claire, and on one of their shopping expeditions he seems to have told her about the Brazilian student Shelley had met many years ago in Edinburgh. At any rate, she wrote into her diary with evident relish, the proud lines of Pereira’s sonnet in his praise: ‘Sublimi Shelley — Cantor di verdade, Sorge Queen Mab a ristorar il mondo.’
⁹²
The next evening when they were all over at Paddington with the Hunts, Hogg dropped in, and also Keats, and Shelley once more failed to convert the younger poet into a disciple. There was music, Hunt played the piano, and Claire sang, like Constantia. On the 14th, St Valentine’s Day, Shelley took Claire once again to
Don Giovanni
at Covent Garden, and Hogg and Peacock made up the foursome. From then on almost every night of February was spent in festive mood. They went continually to hear Mozart at the opera, to see the prima ballerina Mademoiselle Milanie dance at the ballet, and to the theatre. During the day Peacock conducted them round the museums. They paid an admiring visit to the recently acquired Marbles that Lord Elgin had shipped from Greece. They saw an exhibition of painted glass, which Hunt then reviewed for the
Examiner
, while Shelley contributed a charitable critique of Peacock’s newly published
Rhododaphne
. They saw casts of Canova’s Castor and Melpomene in Bond Street, as a kind of aperitif before the piazzas and galleries of Italy. They went to see a lioness and her cubs in one of the travelling zoos, and they paid several visits to the Apollonicon, a monstrous barrel organ housed in St Martin’s Lane. It was reputed to have cost £10,000 to build, and no less than six organists could play upon it simultaneously, with results that sent Claire Clairmont, and several thousand others, into a marvelling ecstasy.

This was perhaps the most lively, sociable and urbane month Shelley ever
spent in his life. After the weeks of depression and indecision, he threw himself into it with energy and delight. The world of Bisham Woods, and Laon and Cythna, and the solitary skiff on the Thames seemed far away. Equally, he seemed to have forgotten, the decision once made, that he was about to uproot his whole life, and to go into what was in effect a forced exile. February was a charmed limbo. His old friend Hogg, bustling out regularly to join the celebrations from his legal apartments in Garden Temple, especially appreciated the change. He wrote in his oracular fashion to a friend that Shelley ‘had lately parted with his house at Marlow for an advantageous price & with his opinion gratis that a wise man can only benefit his species by dwelling upon a wold in the midst of a morass or on the highest summit of a mountain’.

Shelley was no longer the aloof, critical observer of city pleasures, that he had been of old. ‘He is now in town arrayed in purple and fine linen, in a blue coat & white waistcoat; for three weeks he has been a punctual attendant at the Opera; he condescends to admire Madame Fodor & Mademoiselle Millanie & to haunt Exhibitions, Concerts & Theatres.’ His wine bill at Messrs Gilbey & Co. rose to the unprecedented heights of nine guineas. Meanwhile the carriage was being prepared at a coaching house in Long Acre.
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Hogg could not avoid a few twinges of doubt, but he brushed them off as briskly as he could. ‘In a short time he intends to go abroad to visit Paris & perhaps Italy; it seems unjust to leave our native country where only he can be of great utility, & such being his sentiments, his absense will not I believe be very long, but he will return to reside in the vicinity of London.’
⁹⁴

For Mary, this was a taste of the city life with Shelley she never forgot. She had, after all, been brought up by Godwin to officiate at evening dinners and entertainments, and to enjoy the public glare of theatres and concerts. Her
Frankenstein
had finally been published, and sensational reviews were coming in from the journals, and distinguished writers like Scott and Tom Moore were signifying their approval of the unknown author. Mary adored the theatre and the opera. Despite Peacock’s opinion that Shelley hated stage comedies, he too enjoyed these nights out immensely, and he took a regular box at Covent Garden. Hunt nostalgically recalled such evenings long after Shelley had departed. ‘We look up to your box almost hoping to see a thin, patrician-looking cosmopolite leaning out upon us, and a sedate-faced young lady bending in a similar direction, with her great tablet of a forehead, and her white shoulders unconscious of a crimson gown.’
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Shelley also visited the pantomime with Claire, and its garish magic completely entranced him. Shelley loved stage contrivances and melodrama. Many years later, after Mary had visited the German Opera, she wrote to Hogg: ‘We liked the music, & the incantation
scene would have made Shelley scream with delight, flapping owls, ravens, hopping toads, queer reptiles, fiery serpents, skeleton huntsmen . . . .’
⁹⁶

Apart from review contributions for the
Examiner
, Shelley wrote little or nothing. But in Hunt circles poetry was a social art, and on 14 February three competitive sonnets on the subject of the Nile were written during an evening party at Lisson Grove. The competitors were Hunt, Keats and Shelley.
⁹⁷
Not surprisingly perhaps, Hunt’s is far the most competent while both Keats’s and Shelley’s betray embarrassment. Egyptian subjects were very much in vogue, for in the autumn of 1817 the British Museum had taken receipt of fragments and sculptures from the Empire of the Ramases, some dating from
circa
2000 BC. Among these were the celebrated Rosetta Stone, and the massive figure of Ramases II taken from the King’s Funerary Temple at Thebes and presented by Henry Salt and J. L. Burckhardt. This figure, perhaps the most famous of all Egyptian fragments, is carved in blue and white granite. Much was also being written in the press about the startling Egyptian finds, and when Walter Coulson, the editor, visited Marlow over Christmas it had been often discussed. Visits to the British Museum with Horace Smith prompted Shelley to suggest that they might both produce a sonnet on the subject. Smith, the stockbroker poet who had agreed to be Shelley’s financial agent in London, faithfully produced a workmanlike poem. Shelley produced ‘Ozymandias’. It is the finest sonnet he ever wrote: harsh, dramatic and deeply expressive of his eternal hatred of tyranny and his brooding philosophic scepticism. The poem was published in Hunt’s
Examiner
shortly before he left England,
ave atque vale
: