Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives (36 page)

Shelley was in fact extremely lonely during the period that Mary developed her friendship with Mavrocordato. While both he and Mary were beginning to accept that their relationship had changed, and that the intimacy which marked their elopement and their lives together in 1815–16 could not easily be recaptured, they responded to this realisation differently. Mary made new friends, looked after Percy Florence (now a sturdy one year old) and concentrated on
Valperga
, about which Shelley was dismissive, perhaps because he felt that he was no longer influencing the intellectual direction of her work. Mary’s novel, he told Peacock, was ‘raked out of fifty old books’,
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hardly a flattering description of his wife’s meticulous historical research.

Shelley responded by turning once more to the absent Claire. Claire had few of the distractions available to Mary, and was able, even at a distance, to focus much of her attention on Shelley. He spent a good deal of time writing long letters meant for her eyes alone. ‘I wrote to you a kind of scrawl the other day merely to shew that I had not forgotten you,’
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he explained at one point, ‘& as it was taxed with a postscript by Mary, it contained nothing that I wished it to contain.’ Claire sent her responses care of Mrs Mason (or to ‘Mr Jones’ at the Pisa post office) in order to keep Mary in the dark about their correspondence. To Claire, Shelley expressed some of the frustration he felt at the quiet domestic life he was leading in Pisa, and even suggested he was meditating a change in his circumstances. He told her he had been asked to join an expedition to Greece, Eygpt and Syria, by a gentleman who admired his verses. ‘How far all this is practicable, considering the state of my finances I know not yet. I know that if it were it would give me the greatest pleasure, & the pleasure might be either doubled or divided by your presence or absence.’
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Was Shelley, as this hints, really contemplating fleeing Italy with Claire, leaving Mary and their baby behind? Probably not: even in the darkest days of their relationship, he never seems to have made serious plans to abandon Mary as he had Harriet. But this letter shows, at the very least, that the possibility of freedom – from domestic cares, from Mary, to act on his feelings for Claire – was enticing.

The letters to Claire suggest that Shelley did not treat Mary well during their second Pisan winter, but he was himself under a good deal of strain. Mary’s depression was deep and long-lasting and when she emerged from the worst of its blackness she often seemed like a different woman, who had thrown up impenetrable defences against further emotional torment. Shelley was unwell again, and locked into a marriage which must sometimes have felt more isolating than a solitary bachelor existence. It was therefore almost inevitable that with Mary absorbed in other things and with Claire living separately, a man who had always needed female attention should find a new object for his affections. She was Teresa Viviani, the daughter of the governor of Pisa.

The Shelleys met Teresa through Claire, who was introduced to her by Pacchiani during one of her visits to Pisa. Teresa was living at the Convent of St Anna while her father conducted negotiations for her marriage. She was nineteen years old, extremely pretty, and more than capable of persuading Shelley, Mary and Claire that she was a victim of a tyrannical and patriarchal system which deprived her of her liberty while arrangements were made to sell her to the highest bidder. The Convent of St Anna, like Allegra’s convent at Bagnacavallo, operated both as a nunnery and as an exclusive private boarding school for well-bred young ladies, and a less dramatic interpretation of the facts is that Teresa was kept at school until a suitable husband and home could be found for her. But her situation was unenviable, since one reason for her continued residence at the convent was the presence at her father’s house of a young and jealous stepmother, even if the reality of her day to day existence was not as romantically awful as the Shelleys and Claire believed. They promptly christened her Emilia, a name which, with its Chaucerian connotations, seemed more suited to the romance of her plight. Mary and Claire felt sorry for her.  They, after all, had made their own choices, and it was a shock to find that a young woman could be so constrained by the orders of her father. Mary may also have had additional sympathy, since she knew all too well the difficulties of living with one’s stepmother. But although Mary was sufficiently interested in Emilia to include a portrait of her in
Valperga,
she came to realise that she was manipulative, had exaggerated her suffering, and was determined to catch Shelley’s attention.

In this, she succeeded. Shelley’s interest in Emilia’s predicament was quickly succeeded by interest in her person. She was beautiful, unobtainable and had plenty of time to write him slightly melancholic but undeniably coquettish letters. She wrote to him as her ‘dear brother’ and deployed the language of sisterhood which Shelley himself had used in the past to rationalise his relationship with Claire. She knew exactly what she was doing, and how to respond most tantalisingly to Shelley’s increasingly ardent letters. ‘To show that your familiarity does not displease’, she told him in mid-December, ‘I write to you in your own tone of confidence and sweet friendship.’ ‘My Claire’, she continued coyly, ‘will say that she is
jealous
: but let her reflect that I do not write thus save to her good brother and to mine.’
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Mary probably recognised the signs of infatuation in her husband, but knew enough of his character to realise she could do little about it. Perhaps she did not feel inclined to do so. She was too reserved and too proud to impose her affections where she felt they were not wanted. A year later she wrote dismissively of the episode to Maria Gisborne, in a letter which contained a wry reference to Shelley’s ‘Italian platonics’.
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 It was beneath her to compete for her husband’s attention with the teenage martyr of the Convent of St Anna.

It was, however, one thing for Shelley to exchange letters with a beautiful prisoner, but quite another for him to write a poem about his enchantment. The poem in question was
Epipyschidion
(‘On the Subject of the Soul’).
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Shelley attempted to keep knowledge of its existence from Mary, sending it to Charles Ollier for anonymous publication from Mrs Mason’s house and including with the poem a fictional Preface which announced ‘the writer of the following lines died at Florence’.  Florence was the town in which baby Percy was born, and it was during the Shelleys’ time there that Mary had (in Shelley’s eyes) failed to lift herself from the depression caused by the death of William. The winter they spent there thus marked a turning point in their relationship, so this Preface cannot have offered Mary much comfort when she became aware of the poem’s existence some time after its completion. Shelley told Ollier that the poem was ‘a production of a portion of me already dead’
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and later confessed to John Gisborne that ‘it is an idealised history of my life and feelings’. He continued ‘I think one is always in love with something or other; the error, and I confess it is not easy for spirits cased in flesh and blood to avoid it, consists in seeking in a mortal image the likeness of what is perhaps eternal.’
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Epipsychidion
is Shelley’s spiritual autobiography. In it Emilia is transformed from convent girl into a vision of ideal womanhood. She is a ‘Seraph of Heaven! too gentle to be human’ and ‘Youth’s vision thus made perfect’, who leads him into ‘light, life and peace’. She presents a striking contrast with Mary, who is presented in the poem as ‘the cold chaste Moon’, ‘Who makes all beautiful on which she smiles,/ That wandering shrine of soft yet icy flame/ Which ever is transformed, yet still the same,/ And warms not but illumines.’ Claire makes an appearance in the poem as a comet, ‘beautiful and fierce,/ Who drew the heart of this frail Universe/ Towards thine own; till, wreckt in that convulsion,/ Alternating attraction and repulsion,/ Thine went astray and that was rent in twain.’ But
Epipsychidion
is more than a straightforward exploration of Shelley’s relationships with women. Like ‘Julian and Maddalo’ and ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’ it is a meditation on the nature of human interaction.  However, unlike ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’
it has an ambivalence about the value of interaction, which is expressed through the stylised allegory and through Shelley’s presentation of himself as a passive recipient of female companionship. The women of
Epipyschidion
are strange and disturbing figures who bear little relation to the male friends evoked so lovingly in ‘Maria Gisborne’.

Shelley’s interest in Emilia slowly waned over the course of 1821 and dissipated by the time of her marriage to an Italian nobleman in September of that year. But the interlude widened the developing rift between Shelley and Mary, and made her more cautious in both her emotional and her intellectual engagement with him. She moved steadily forward with
Valperga
, a novel in which elements of Shelley’s character appear in the heroine, Euthanasia, but in which she nevertheless asserted her intellectual independence. For his part, Shelley was involved in a separate dialogue in the spring of 1821, with one of those friends celebrated in ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’, Thomas Love Peacock. In February he received a copy of Charles Ollier’s
Literary Miscellany
, a short-lived magazine which printed in its first issue an essay by Peacock on ‘The Four Ages of Poetry’. Peacock’s essay purported to be a history of poetry, but the main focus of its witty rhetoric was an attack on the preoccupations of contemporary writers. ‘Mr Scott digs up the poachers and cattle-stealers of the ancient border. Lord Byron cruises for thieves and pirates on the shores of the Morea and among the Greek Islands . . . Mr Wordsworth picks up village legends from old women and sextons.’ From these examples Peacock produced a grand rhetorical flourish: an indictment of modern poetry:

A poet in our times is a semi-barbarian in a civilised community. He lives in the days that are past. His ideas, thoughts, feelings, associations, are all with barbarous manners, obsolete customs, and exploded superstitions. The march of his intellect is like that of a crab, backward.  The brighter the light diffused around him by the progress of reason, the thicker is the darkness of antiquated barbarism, in which he buries himself like a mole.
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Shelley was hurt by Peacock’s sparkling denunciation of contemporary poetry and responded by writing his own essay in ‘A Defence of Poetry’.

The ‘Defence’ is a
magisterial assertion of the significance of the poetic vocation. It draws on a wide variety of philosophical and intellectual traditions to support its subtle and detailed argument and is a plea for the importance of poets and poetry in the regeneration of a corrupt and damaged universe. This is most apparent in the essay’s famous conclusion. ‘Poets’, Shelley claimed, ‘are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration, the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present, the words which express what they understand not, the trumpets which sing to battle and feel not what they inspire: the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World.’
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This final phrase, which Shelley first wrote, in a modified form, in his ‘Philosophical View of Reform’, is one of his most enduring. But it is illuminating to remember that this powerful claim for the value of the poetic consciousness (a claim which has become indelibly associated with the idea of the Romantic genius) arose because of the gauntlet thrown down by Peacock, Shelley’s brilliant, challenging friend.

In Rome, another ‘unacknowledged legislator’ was finally fading from the world he once hoped to enchant. Keats’s last days were a nightmare of pain and grief, although narratives of his end were later sanitised to emphasise his heroism. His hagiographer in chief was Joseph Severn, who was at his side throughout his illness, but even Severn’s determination to present Keats as a triumphant immortal spirit could not mask the despair of his friend’s final weeks. In mid-January, despite the severity of Keats’s illness, Severn considered bringing him back to England, since, as he told one correspondent, ‘half the cause of his danger has arisen from the loss of England – from the dread of never seeing it more.’
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But Keats was far too ill to be moved, and at the end of February Severn sent the following letter to Charles Brown: