Shelley: The Pursuit (119 page)

[3]
It was exactly this kind of liberalism that Hazlitt ridiculed in a retrospective essay of autumn 1825: ‘But the great thing was to be genteel, and keep out of the rabble. They that touch pitch are defiled. “No connection with the mob”, was labelled on the back of every friend of the People. Every faithful retainer of the Opposition took care to disclaim all affinity with such fellows as [Henry] Hunt, Carlile, or Cobbett… the chief dread of the Minority was to be confounded with the populace, the
Canaille
etc.’

[4]
The only piece of Shelley’s writing published at this critical time in England in fact appeared in the fifth issue of the
Republican
, on 24 December 1819. Ironically, it was his old
Declaration of Rights
dating from 1812, and Carlile did not know the name of the author.

[5]
John Taylor Coleridge, after this suitable debut, became a King’s Bench judge and the biographer of Keble.

[6]
The Fudge family were characters in a popular children’s series of stories that Tom Moore had written.

[7]
The unreformed House of Commons.

[8]
The ‘gentler sisters’ are of course the London prostitutes, and Shelley wrote in his own footnote: ‘What would the husk and excuse for virtue be without its kernel prostitution?’
Chastity
in order to rhyme with
miserè
has to be pronounced genteelly.

[9]
In the event Richard Carlile was to prove indomitable, and he published and was damned for many more years; during this imprisonment, at Dorchester jail, he wrote one of the earliest popular features on family planning and birth control, called
What is Love
, based on an illegal pamphlet by the young John Stuart Mill.

23. From the Gallery: Florence 1820

Mary’s fourth child was born on the morning of 12 November 1819. After all their arrangements, Dr Bell did not manage to be present, but the labour was an easy one, over in two hours. To Shelley’s great delight the child was a boy: small, but healthy and pretty. Much of Shelley’s relief and pleasure came from the evident effect on Mary. ‘Poor Mary begins (for the first time) to look a little consoled. For we have spent as you may imagine a miserable five months.’
¹
They christened him after his father and his birthplace, Percy Florence Shelley.

Both Shelley and Mary found the child very absorbing, and the days being shorter, and darker, they slipped by unnoticed. Shelley went out less by himself, and Mary again omitted to keep her journal. After a week or so, he began slowly to send off letters, but he did not hurry to complete them. To Maria Gisborne, he calderonized on Calderón. ‘I have been lately voyaging in a sea without my pilot, & although my sail has often been torn, my boat become leaky, & the log lost, I have yet sailed in a kind of way from island to island. . . .
I have been reading Calderon without you.’
By way of a P.S. he copied out four stanzas from the
Cisma de Inglaterra
, a play about incestuous love, without bothering to translate them from the Spanish.
²
To John Gisborne he wrote sagely of Theocritus and the British Funds and the follies of youth. ‘All of us who are worth any thing spend our manhood in unlearning the follies, or expiating the mistakes of our youth.’
³
To Aemilia Curran in Rome, he spoke of the new baby, and Godwin’s debts, and his vague plan to go secretly to England in the spring.
⁴

After receiving news from Henry Reveley of another birth, that of an eighty-three-pound bronze air cylinder for the steam-boat in the workshop at Livorno, he calderonized on the Creation. Anxious to please Shelley, Reveley had described in great detail the casting of the mould and the ‘massy stream of a bluish dazzling whiteness’ of molten metal rushing in like ‘the twinkling of a shooting star’. Shelley replied in kind: ‘Your volcanic description of the birth of the Cylinder is very characteristic both of you & of it. One might imagine God when he made the earth, & saw the granite mountains & flinty promontories flow into their craggy forms, & the splendour of their fusion filling millions of miles of void space, like the tail of a comet, so looking & so delighting in his work. God sees his machine spinning round the sun & delights in its success, & has taken out patents to supply all the suns in space with the same manufacture. — Your boat will be to the Ocean of Water what the earth is to the Ocean of Aether — a prosperous & swift voyager.’ The metal steamer had been transformed into one of Shelley’s luminous airships. Charles Clairmont, who had left the Palazzo Marini on 10 November ‘not without many lamentations as all true lovers pay’, had been commissioned to write an account of the Trieste Steam Boat especially for Reveley.
⁵

A letter to Hunt of the 18th discussed baby clothes and the difficulties of translation. In between were slipped tentative literary inquiries: ‘You do not tell me whether you have received my lines on the Manchester affair. . . . The “Julian and Maddalo” I do not know how it ought to be published. What do you think best to do with it? Do as you like.’ There were a few sentences on politics, the need to hold the balance between ‘popular impatience and tyrannical obstinacy’. The great thing to do, Shelley wrote, pressing the cause of moderation in a way designed to appeal to the editor of the
Examiner
, ‘is to inculcate with fervour both the right of resistance and the duty of forbearance’. But even on this occasion he could not quite restrain his radicalism. ‘You know my principles incite me to take all the good I can get in politics, for ever aspiring to something more. I am one of those whom nothing will fully satisfy, but who am ready to be partially satisfied by all that is practicable. We shall see.’
⁶

By the end of November Mary was slowly beginning to return to something like her old self. When she looked back at the five months at Livorno it was to ‘shudder with horror’: yet it was also to be capable of looking back. Practical details began to absorb her attention. She worried about getting flannel for Percy Florence to wrap him against the Italian winter; and she began to complain loudly over the remissness of Hunt’s letter-writing. She joined Shelley in inquiries about the poems: what of
The Mask
sent a few days before they left Leghorn, ‘which is now 2 months ago’? and what of
Peter Bell the Third
, which she herself had copied? Mary took pleasure in the calderonizing game which Shelley played with Maria Gisborne. She reported how one day he stood at the window and announced that the weather of late had been ‘an epic of rain with an episode of frost & a few similes concerning fine weather’.
⁷
She felt calmer in herself now, and enjoyed the improvement in Claire’s singing under her new Florentine music-master. She asked after the ‘rustics’ at Marlow and on learning that Peacock had not married Marianne St Croix observed with something of her old archness, ‘this shepherd King has I am afraid forgotten his crook & his mistress’. One cloud on the horizon was the distant prospect of Shelley’s trip to England in the spring. This was ostensibly to help Godwin. But Mary had reached a new assessment of her father, and she was less easily made guilty by his ceaseless financial troubles. She felt determined to set her face against Shelley’s leaving Italy without her, for this reason or any other. She enlisted Marianne Hunt’s sympathy. ‘Shelley in his last letter mentioned something about his return to England — but this is very vague — I hope — how ardently you may guess, that it will not be…his return would be in so many ways so dreadful a thing that I cannot dwell long enough upon the idea to conceive it possible. — We do not think of all returning.’
⁸
Part of the difficulty here was money. Mary’s control of the housekeeping showed that they had lived for the first time ‘in an economical manner’ in Italy, only since they had taken up residence in Tuscany. To break up the household, and incur travelling expenses would be ‘madness’. Whether Mary feared that Shelley might embroil himself politically in London is not clear: but she wrote to Marianne of the danger of his visit if it were known, and ‘arrests & a thousand other things’. It was probably arrests for debt, rather than for seditious libel, that she feared.
⁹

For the time being Shelley did not press the point. He was delighted with the new-found harmony produced by the presence of the child. On 2 December Mary was writing that she felt well and strong, and that Percy Florence was nearly three times as big as when he was born, though there were still no flannel petticoats for him from Genoa.
¹⁰

Perhaps the sight of such a blooming mother and child prompted Shelley to think back to the death of that unknown mother’s baby which had so appalled him at Peterloo. The image had run right through his poems of September and October, and he had reverted to it in the opening of his letter concerning the trial of Richard Carlile in November. At any rate, immediately over the page in the white-backed notebook in which he had worked on the last stanzas of the ‘Ode to the West Wind’, he began to sketch out stanzas for a ballad concerning a starving mother with an infant at her breast. The first verse arrived without explanation, but urgently:

Give me a piece of that fine white bread

I would give you some blood for it

Before I faint & my infant is dead

Oh, give me a little bit
¹¹

Gradually the poem established itself as the appeal of a starving woman to a parish priest, young Parson Richards. The woman explains how she was ruined — seduced — by a ‘trinket of gold’, and gradually sickened in hunger and penury, until her need became shameless and desperate. Holding her baby in her arms, she appeals to the parson across the rectory gate.

… the single blanket of threadbare woof

Under which we both cried to sleep

Is gone — the rain drenches us through the roof

And I moan — but no longer weep

What would it avail me to prostitute

This lean body squalid and wild

And yet by the God who made me I’d do’t

If I could but save my child

Perhaps you would like — but alas you are

A staid and a holy man

And, if you were not,…would any one care

For these limbs so meagre and wan

The frankness, the unintentional irony, and the stumbling simplicity of her speaking voice, show the urgent impulse which had inspired the forms and style of
The Mask
and
Peter Bell the Third
driven to a final extremity of directness. It is as if the message of man’s inhumanity to man had become so overwhelming in Shelley’s mind that every intervening form — politics, satire, even the decorum of poetry, had eventually to fall back before the simple, agonizing, human speech of suffering and need. The man who was later to become famed as the greatest rhetorician and the most sublime lyricist of all the English Romantic poets, was actually driven to writing like this in order to say what he really had to say:

The poor thing sucks and no milk will come,

He would cry but his strength is gone, —

His wasting weakness has left him dumb,

Ye can hardly hear him moan.

The skin round his eyes is pale and blue,

His eyes are glazed, not with tears —

I wish for a little moment that you

Could know what a mother fears.

Shelley continued this poem in other manuscripts. In his final draft the young parson never speaks; he walks down frowning to the wicket gate, and by the time he gets there both mother and child have collapsed. The poem ends abruptly, with a lethal twist so quietly understated it almost escapes observation:

The man of God with a surly frown

To the garden wicket paced

And he saw the woman had fallen down

With her face below her waist.

The child lay stiff as a frozen straw

In the woman’s white cold breast —

And the parson in its dead features saw

His own to the truth expressed.

He turned from the bosom whose heart was broke

Once it pillowed him as he slept. —

He turned from the lips that no longer spoke

From the eyes that no longer wept. —