Shelley: The Pursuit (122 page)

After three days at the Tre Donzelle, the Shelleys, with the help and advice of their new friends the Masons at the Casa Silva, took spacious apartments on the mezzanine floor at the Casa Frassi on the north-west and sunny side of the Lung’ Arno. Mary particularly was delighted with these rooms and the economy. ‘We have two bed rooms, 2 sitting rooms kitchen servants rooms nicely furnished — & very clean &
new
(a great thing on this country) for 4 guineas and a ½ a month — the rooms are light and airy — so you see we begin to profit by
Italian prices — one learns this very slowly but I assure you a crown here goes as far in the conveniences & necessaries of life as £1 in England.’ Milly was not, incidentally, any longer with them, having changed her employer in Florence, so that their servants were now all Italian and Mary tended to give much more personal attention to her child. The Italians were not entirely satisfactory, they ‘teaze us out of our lives’, and Mary thought of engaging another Swiss. But in the end they managed to adapt to Italian ways.

Shelley’s arrival at Pisa in January 1820 marked an important change in the manner of his life. Since leaving Marlow almost exactly two years earlier in 1818, it had really been that of a nomad. He had been constantly on the move: London, Milan, Bagni di Lucca, Venice, Naples, Rome, Livorno, Florence — eight residences in rather less than twenty-four months. The restlessness of his journeyings, and the inherent sense of rootlessness, was obscured by the day-today details of his life, for there seemed such a multiplicity of reasons and motives — domestic, financial and political ones — to explain why he should always move on. But the deep cause of this need to move is certainly one of the profoundest questions which can be asked about his life. Like the poet in
Alastor
, one is left always with a dilemma: was Shelley running away from something, or was he running after something?

The residence at Pisa, which was to last, off and on, for well over two years, cut decisively across this pattern of movement. Pisa became the nearest thing Shelley ever had to a home anywhere since leaving Field Place. Yet there is evidence that the need for movement had been stabilized at Pisa, rather than permanently outgrown. Shelley was to make a series of excursions from Pisa between 1820 and 1822, and to live temporarily at various houses within the vicinity. The desire for an ever-expanding field of journeyings returned: after England, it had been Europe; but after Europe, it was to become — in his mind at least — Africa and the Near East. Significantly, the confidante for these new urges was no longer Mary, but Claire; and in a more literary and dreamy way, certain of his new lady acquaintances at Pisa.

Once they had settled at the Casa Frassi, Shelley made a quick visit to the Gisbornes at Livorno on his own, partly to see the latest developments of the steam-boat, and partly to explain why he had settled on Pisa rather than at Villa Valsovano again. He returned on 2 February, and from this time dates the growing intimacy with the Masons, which gradually surplanted the influence of the Gisbornes and calderonizing.

Mrs Mason, of the Casa Silva, was not in fact Mrs Mason at all, but the Countess, Lady Margaret Mountcashell. She had grown up on extensive family estates in Ireland, and during adolescence, her governess had been Mary Wollstonecraft. The effect of this was lasting. She became a correspondent of
Godwin’s, an ardent republican and one of the few feminist members of the United Irishmen movement. She had been marginally involved in the uprisings of the nineties, and had attended in London the famous trial for treason of the working-men’s leaders Hardy, Home Tooke and Thelwall. Later she had published political pamphlets and books in Godwin’s Juvenile Library. During the Napoleonic wars she had abandoned Earl Mountcashell, and gone to live in Pisa under the name of Mason with a talented expatriate agronomist of similar political sympathies, George William Tighe.

Tighe was universally liked by the Shelleys and affectionately known as ‘Tatty’ because of his scientific interest in agriculture. Tatty’s advanced knowledge of the chemistry of soil compounds and organic growth both amused and delighted Shelley, who kept extensive notes in the back of the same notebook in which he had drafted the last stanzas of the ‘Ode to the West Wind’, and the unfinished ‘Ballad’ of the starving mother.

Shelley’s agricultural notes included a list of the forty-seven known chemical elements, descriptions of the action of electrolysis, capillary attraction and the use of acid as a fertilizer. There are references to magnesium, silica and ‘hexagonal cells’; remarks on the ‘dairy system’, human food consumption and elementary statistics on the productivity of land per acre in comparative terms of potatoes, milk and butter. It is also clear from these notes that Tatty Tighe had encouraged Shelley to read Davy’s lectures on agriculture, and to consider the problems set by Malthusian social theory in terms of population figures and food production. It is very characteristic of Shelley that he did not feel the need to separate this scientific information from his poetry by starting another notebook.
⁷

When the friendship with the Masons commenced in 1820, they had two daughters, Laurette aged 10½, and Nerina aged 4½. Claire was very kind and friendly towards these two little girls, and Mrs Mason in turn, came to look on Claire as something of a grown-up daughter. She developed both social and intellectual ambitions for Claire, and Claire came to call Mrs Mason her ‘Minerva’. Lady Mountcashell was at this time a tall, gaunt, rather brusque and distinctly Celtic woman in her mid-forties, a great
raconteuse
, of considerable charm and with much force of character.
⁸

During the early part of February, she deluged the Shelley household with pamphlets about Ireland. At the Casa Silva there were long, lively discussions about the Irish Rebellion and the horror of Castlereagh’s influence both in Ireland and in England. After one of these powerful discussions, Claire recorded that she had a ‘horrid dream about Skinner Street & apoplectic fits’.
⁹
A letter from Mary to Marianne Hunt also showed the Mountcashell influence since it was almost entirely filled by a long Jeremiad against ‘King Cant’, and those
‘Castlereaghish men’, who were detested by all radicals.
¹⁰
Visits between the Casa Frassi and the Casa Silva became a daily feature of the life at Pisa, and the Shelleys and the Masons soon began to dine frequently in one another’s company.

Mary took up riding, and Shelley was visited by Vaccà. The astute doctor, who spoke fluent English, observed Shelley closely and examined and questioned him on his symptoms. His diagnosis was simple: that Shelley should refrain from special medicines, take plenty of exercise and take care of himself — all would then be well. In the season he recommended the pleasant advantages of the
bagni
, either at Lucca or locally. He seemed at once very
simpàtico
both to Mary and to Shelley: ‘a great republican & no Christian’.
¹¹
In passing, he also diagnosed an indisposition of Claire’s, much to her disgust: ‘Vaccà says I am scrofulous and I say he is ridiculous.’
¹²
But actually he was perfectly right, and she had to have treatment in Florence a year later. A friendship with Vaccà gradually grew up, and the Shelleys sometimes met him socially with other doctors at the Casa Silva. They had thus gained an
entrée
into the circle of the university by the autumn of 1820.

The Pisan Carnival, which ended on the day after St Valentine’s day, gave them an early chance to see the city take to the streets in festive mood. The place filled with ‘scamps, raffs etc.’ with tousled hair and torn shirts, many of them apparently university students. There were bargees, and beggars, and galley slaves cheerfully dressed in yellow and red cloth over their chains. The Italian notables showed a weakness for pink silk hats, large whiskers, twirling canes and white satin shoes, with party-coloured ribands in their buttonholes, which Mary perceived were symbols of nobility.
¹³
She found it all singularly garish, but Claire took a carriage and rode down the Lung’ Arno with the Mason children, all of them shrieking with delight behind paper masks.
¹⁴

After the excitement of the Carnival, Shelley and Mary settled down at the Casa Frassi. The new servant arrived on the 28th, and Claire kept full diary entries which record the discussions which became a regular feature of the Shelley-Mason households. The subjects were highly varied. On one day the interest centred around Locke’s remark about the social persecution of intellectual dissenters: ‘And where is the man to be found that can patiently prepare himself to bear the name of Whimsical, Sceptical, or Atheist which he is sure to meet with who does in the least scruple any of the Common opinions?’ On another occasion Mrs Mason and Professor Vaccà discussed the powers of the human nose. On a third, they talked of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, the legendary republican Irish aristocrat who had been executed for plotting a mass assassination attempt against the English ministers in Dublin in 1798. In the light of subsequent news from England, this was an odd coincidence.
¹⁵

The spell of fine weather broke, and during the last week of February Shelley
was unwell again, despite the attentions of Vaccà. For Mary it was ‘days of idleness and nursing’.
¹⁶
That this illness was entirely the effect of the Pisan climate seems unlikely. On 3 March, when he had recovered, Shelley immediately rode over to Livorno, where he stayed until the 6th, and having returned, wrote the following short letter to John and Maria Gisborne: ‘My dear friends, I have written at a venture the letters which it seems to me are requisite. — I have ordered my Florence Banker to send you all that remains in his hands; you will receive it in a day or two & tell me the amount, & I will make up the deficiency from Pisa. — I enclose an outside calculation of the expenses at Naples calculated in ducats — I think it as well to put into the hands of Del Rosso or whoever engages to do the business 150 ducats. — or more, as you see occasion. — but on this you will favour me so far as to allow your judgement to regulate mine.’
¹⁷
Shelley’s trip to Livorno had concerned the baby Elena, who was now 14 months old. For some reason it had now become necessary to administer further money in her connection, and Shelley had decided to take the Gisbornes into his confidence. That Mary was not told of these latest developments is shown by Shelley’s next letter of 19 March, in which he refers to the use of a pseudonym to maintain secrecy: ‘If it is necessary to
write
again on the subject of Del Rosso, address not
Medwin
, nor Shelley, but simply “Mr Jones”.’
¹⁸

Shelley’s application for the services of a lawyer suggests that some complication had arisen in Naples, and it seems likely that this was connected with Elise Foggi’s presence in Florence during January. Obviously more money was required for the support of the child: Shelley’s letter makes it quite clear that the money was to be paid
by
the lawyer, (not to him, for any legal service) on account of — possibly disputed — ‘expenses at Naples’. Despite the precautions for secrecy, there is no indication that either Elise or her husband were at this point engaged in anything approaching blackmail; yet from this time on Shelley’s sense of responsibility towards the child seems to have become an increasing burden. Possibly one part of del Rosso’s commission was to find new foster parents for Elena in Naples, or else confirm that those at No. 45 Vico Canale were satisfactory. This might also explain the subject of Shelley’s other letters ‘written at a venture’; but there is no definite evidence.

Why should Shelley have involved the Gisbornes in this business, while taking great precautions to keep it secret from Mary? Since the child was inextricably linked with Mary’s miseries in Naples and Rome, it is not difficult to understand why he should want to keep further thought of it from her. He also wanted peace in his own household. His later decision to keep her own father’s correspondence from her shows a similar kind of motive. The Gisbornes on the other hand, with their knowledge of Italy and their independence of mind, were in an extremely practical position to help him. Shelley would not have had much
misgiving about their ‘social prejudices’ concerning an illegitimate offspring, considering as he did that Maria was both ‘atheistic’ and ‘democratic’. In completely discounting social prejudice, Shelley may have been in the long run over-optimistic. But immediate practical aid and advice the Gisbornes did provide, and arrangements seemed to be running smoothly in March and April; Shelley after all was supporting the steam-boat.

Mary seemed blissfully unaware of these developments. She wrote to Maria Gisborne only of darning needles, arrowroot tea and little Percy’s mild attack of measles. While she organized domestic affairs — the new servant, the cooking and the clothes at the Casa Frassi — Shelley and Claire were more frequently out roving through Pisa together. They had a brush with the ubiquitous Colonel Calicot Finch, who had now appeared in Tuscany. Shelley and Claire had spotted a long-legged gentleman with an umbrella pursuing a little dirty blacksmith’s boy through the streets calling ‘thief!’ When he caught up with him, the gentleman shook the child by the collar, and roared at him ‘with the greatest vehemence’. Shelley decided to intervene; but the umbrella man swung round and roared in turn at Shelley in Italian that it was none of his business. Mary continued the little scenario with evident amusement: ‘A crowd collected — Claire twitched Shelley & remonstrated — Don Quixote did not like to leave the boy in thrawl but deafened by the tall strider’s vociferations & overcome by Claire’s importunities he departed — & then Claire out of breath with terror as you may well suppose said “for mercy’s sake have nothing to do with those people it’s the reverend Colonel Calicot Finch” so they escaped the attack.’
¹⁹
Subsequently Calicot Finch was ‘impudent’ to one of the university doctor’s wives and was given his
congé
.
²⁰
But on the whole life at Pisa suited them all, and by the end of the month they had moved to new and even more ‘lightsome & spacious’ rooms at the very top of the Casa Frassi overlooking the vista of the Arno. Mary wrote to Sophia Stacey in Rome, ‘we shall remain here stationary until the end of May, when Mr.S is ordered to the Baths of Lucca, where we shall accordingly pass the summer — I am afraid that it does not accord with your plans,
bella Sofia
, to pass it there likewise: will not you also be one of the swallows to return to see his new most excellent and most gracious majesty [George IV] crowned?’ Shelley added a poem: ‘On a Dead Violet’ and a postscript which countermanded Mary’s tacit refusal of an invitation: ‘When you come to Pisa continue to see us — Casa Frassi, Lung’Arno.’
²¹