Shelley: The Pursuit (120 page)

And how that parson . . .

Becomes thy . . .

More than my words to say …
¹²

Shelley made little attempt to integrate his versions, though he did later fair copy one into a notebook for Claire. Perhaps she liked it better than Mary. He did not bother to send it to Hunt or Ollier. The poem was still being rejected as unsuitable for printing by editors in 1889.

In December life became more social and frivolous at the Palazzo Marini under the influence of a charming young English girl, Miss Sophia Stacey, and her dragon-like elderly chaperone, Miss Corbet Parry-Jones, who had arrived on a cultural grand tour. Their appearance was not entirely by chance, since Miss Stacey was a ward of one of Shelley’s Sussex uncles, and she had heard that the intriguing not to say disreputable black sheep of the clan, the atheist, eloper and poet Percy Bysshe, was in winter residence at Florence. Miss Parry-Jones was finally persuaded by Miss Stacey to pay a formal visit to the Shelleys, and interpreting the situation instantly, he set out to charm them both off their feet. There was not much difficulty, as Mary observed with amusement. ‘The younger one was entousiasmée to see him — the elder said he was a very shocking man — but finding that we became the mode she melted.’

Miss Parry-Jones was a little elderly Welshwoman ‘without the slightest education’ who valiantly learnt French and Italian which she spoke with a strong Welsh lilt and mixed indiscriminately with her own native tongue. Sophia Stacey was attractive, lively and relatively unaffected, as Mary was prepared to admit, and ‘sings well for an english dilettante’. Though in Mary’s opinion, she paid too much attention to her ‘sweet voice’, and not enough to her scales. Claire immediately joined Shelley’s campaign, and rapidly made herself indispensable as a companion and interpreter during lessons with the Italian music-master. One or two other young English ladies appear to have joined the group. One of them, a certain Miss Jones, had had a very severe music-master in England, and when asked by her suave Italian Gaspero Pelleschi to sing the scales, promptly burst into floods of tears. The poor Pelleschi was aghast at this strange English reaction and exclaimed hopelessly to Claire, ‘non capisco questo effeto’. The Shelleys, as confirmed expatriates, were highly amused.
¹³
Claire was ‘as busy as a bee’, and Madame du Plantis’s common sitting-room at the palazzo, with its tiny marble fireplace, now became a place of great popular resort.
¹⁴

The weather in Florence during December and much of January 1820 turned bitterly cold, and there were severe frosts. Mary stayed at home much of the time, busy with her child, and Sophia Stacey recalled in her diary how Mrs Shelley seemed to be permanently in bed with a little night table on her knees, elegantly equipped with pen and ink and blotter.
¹⁵
Shelley on the other hand was continually plunging out on energetic expeditions to the galleries, and frequently called for Miss Stacey and the other English girls. He had adopted a huge serge winter cloak, topped off with an extravagant grey fur collar which encased his pale, smiling face up to the ears, and kept him warm in the narrow blustery alleys of Florence. Despite the freezing winds, he continued to keep his neck open without scarf or cravat in the old
déshabillé
manner. These details were noticed by an amateur English artist, a Mr Tompkyns, who became friendly with the family and painted Shelley’s portrait in early January.
¹⁶
Sophia was obviously most flattered by Shelley’s attentions. He made a point of helping her with her Italian, and taught her the words of a Carbonari ballad and a local love-song. They seem to have gone visiting the galleries together, probably with Claire and Miss Jones as well, making a voluble and attractive female party, and perfectly adapted to Shelley’s social tastes. Sophia records carefully in her diary the two occasions when Shelley lifted her bodily down from a carriage; and also the evening when she had a ‘dreadfull tooth ache’ at the Palazzo Marini, and Shelley came downstairs especially from his apartment and with great gentleness applied a cotton lint to the offending molar at the back of her mouth.
¹⁷

Shelley’s ‘Notes on Sculptures in Florence’ written during this time afford some idea of the liveliness and attraction of his conversation during the visits to the Uffizi with Sophia and Claire. One of his earliest notes, on an unidentified athlete, begins: ‘Curse these fig leaves; why is a round tin thing more decent than a cylindrical marble one? An exceedingly fine statue. . . .’
¹⁸
Another, on a
Venus Genetrix
observes: ‘Remarkable for the voluptuous effect of her finely proportioned form seen through the folds of a drapery, the original of which must have been the “woven wind” of Chios.’
¹⁹
A third, on another
Venus
, comments: ‘A very insipid person in the usual insipid attitude of this lady. The body and hips and where the lines of the — fade into the thighs is exquisitely imagined and executed.’
²⁰
On a
Leda
, the judgement is made in two sentences: ‘Leda with a very ugly face. I should be a long time before I should make love with her.’
²¹

Shelley’s descriptions, where they are developed beyond these apt and provoking conversational gambits, tend to concentrate on two aspects of the sculpture. One is the technical details of drapery, limb-joint, and posed gesture by which a voluptuous or explicitly sexual effect is achieved by the sculptor. The other is the emotional, or more especially, the
moral
characterization expressed by a figure or group. His remarks show very little strictly aesthetic appreciation, and almost no interest in the purely formal relations of line, plane or volume. He writes, in effect, as if the stone statues were living theatrical
tableaux
. The sense that the statues were actually alive is one of the most interesting parts of his appreciation, and frequently gives such a personal twist to his remarks that they tell far more about his own feelings than about the way the piece of stone has been carved. Sometimes they approach the condition of prose poems. Of ‘A Youth said to be Apollo’, he wrote:

The countenance though exquisite, lovely and gentle is not divine. There is a womanish vivacity of winning yet passive happiness and yet a boyish inexperience exceedingly delightful. . . . It is like a spirit even in dreams. The neck is long yet full and sustains the head with its profuse and knotted hair as if it needed no sustaining.
²²

Here Shelley seemed to have moved himself into a world of half-conscious revery, and one is aware of the presence of bisexual themes which had first been consciously liberated and recognized by the sight of the
Sleeping Hermaphrodite
in the Borghese Palace at Rome. Shelley’s longest notes are confined to three subjects: ‘The Bacchus and Ampelus’, with its comment on adolescent friendships; ‘A Statue of Minerva’, representing the uniquely Greek form of maenadic insanity; and the statue of ‘The Niobe’. The latter is one of the great pieces of the gallery and shows Niobe drawing to the safety of her body her last child before it is murdered by Zeus. The sculptor ‘seems in the marble to have scarcely suspended her terror’, and it had the most profound effect on Shelley. His description is not in fact very good, since it is too emotionally involved, but both his own and Mary’s letters frequently spoke of it as the most impressive single work of sculpture that he ever saw in Italy, and he remembered it ever after with a kind of awe. The reason lay partly in its connection with the figure of the mother and child at Peterloo which had developed into a dominating poetic motif during the autumn. Further study of the artistic effect of combining beauty with great pain or revulsion produced the unfinished poem ‘On the Medusa’, which meditates on the qualities of a repulsive picture attributed to Leonardo.

Perhaps the most delightful and characteristic of his gallery notes is on the little statue of the
Venus Anodyomene
, a beautiful Greek copy dating from the third century AD and standing a little over three feet high. It is carved in marble which is richly stained and flecked with areas of dark amber and gold, and has a polished surface which shines in sunlight almost like water. The girl is naked except for two simple armbands.
[1]
Shelley responded with a fine essay on erotic suggestion.

She seems to have just issued from the bath, and yet to be animated with the [joy] of it. She seems all soft and mild enjoyment, and the curved lines of her fine limbs flow into each other with never-ending continuity of sweetness. Her face expresses a breathless yet passive and innocent voluptuousness without affection, without doubt; it is at once desire and enjoyment and the pleasure arising from both. Her lips… have the tenderness of arch yet pure and affectionate desire, and the mode in which the ends are drawn in yet opened by the smile which forever circles round them, and the tremulous curve into which they are wrought by inextinguishable desire, and the tongue lying against the lower lip as in the listlessness of passive joy, express love, still love.

Her eyes seem heavy and swimming with pleasure, and her small forehead fades on both sides into that sweet swelling and then declension of the bone over the eye and prolongs itself to the cheek in that mode which expresses simple and tender feelings.

The neck is full and swollen as with the respiration of delight and flows with gentle curves into her perfect form.

Her form is indeed perfect. She is half sitting on and half rising from a shell, and the fullness of her limbs, and their complete roundness and perfection, do not diminish the vital energy with which they seem to be embued. The mode in which the lines of the curved back flow into and around the thighs, and the wrinkled muscles of the belly, wrinkled by the attitude, is truly astonishing . . . . This perhaps is the finest personification of Venus, the Deity of superficial desire, in all antique statuary. Her pointed and pear-like bosom ever virgin — the virgin Mary might have this beauty, but alas!…
²³

How much of all these ‘Notes on Sculpture’ were personally explained to Sophia Stacey is not known, but Shelley did write especially for her several short love-lyrics intended to be sung to music. These included the famous ‘Song Written for an Indian Air’, adapted from an Oriental love-lyric and beginning

When I arise from dreams of thee

In the first sweet sleep of night . . .

Others were ‘Love’s Philosophy’, ‘To Sophia’ and probably the little song ‘I fear thy kisses gentle maiden’.
²⁴

Miss Stacey and Miss Parry-Jones were required to continue on their cultural tour to Rome after Christmas, and Shelley took much trouble in arranging introductions to Signora Dioniga before they eventually departed at the end of December.
²⁵
Shelley later sent Sophia a copy of Hunt’s anthology
The Literary Pocket-Book
. In it he inscribed a three-stanza song, ‘Buona Notte’, which he had first composed in Italian. It ended:

The hearts that on each other beat

From evening close to morning light

Have nights as good as they are sweet

But never
say
good night.
²⁶

He hoped to see her once more in Tuscany, and Mary later wrote in the spring from Pisa, but they never met again.

With these diversions, much of the urgency went out of Shelley’s writing during December, and in the absence of any more dramatic or decisive news from England, the immediate pressure of politics seemed to relax, and his letters took on a more distant tone. Much of his bitterness had for the moment been exorcized from the
Quarterly’s
attack, mostly by the poem ‘Ode to the West Wind’, but also by reading a copy of Lockhart’s fine defence of
The Revolt of Islam
in
Blackwood’s
which Ollier thoughtfully sent. The two magazines were later circulated to the Gisbornes as ‘bane and antidote’.

Shelley continued to ask Ollier about the fate of
The Cenci
and
Peter Bell the Third
and ‘Julian and Maddalo’, but he seemed almost resigned to hearing nothing definite until the spring, perhaps guessing that much must have been rejected.
²⁷
Yet he continued to dwell on the political theme, and December saw the completion of the fourth and last act of
Prometheus Unbound
, written at noticeably low poetic pressure. It was perhaps difficult to compose a great operatic finale to Revolution and Victory when actual political conditions in England were in such a critical state of suspension. Mary transcribed the final act, and it was dispatched to Ollier around Christmas time.
²⁸

The need to face up to a realistic appraisal of the English situation, decided Shelley to embark on a prose essay on the history of the growth of individual liberty and free institutions in society; and more especially on the methods of democratic reform immediately available in England. This work, one of the most intellectually demanding he ever embarked upon, was begun in mid-December and eventually finished in May 1820. It was entitled
A Philosophical View of Reform
.