Shelley: The Pursuit (128 page)

After dispatching this letter to Godwin, Shelley decided that it was a suitable moment to fulfil an ambition of two years’ standing, and make his pilgrimage to Monte San Pelegrino above Lucca. Claire and Mary accompanied him as far as the town on Friday, 11 August, where they spent the night at the Croce di Malta. He departed at dawn on Saturday, and was gone for the rest of the weekend. It was the first time he had really got away on his own since leaving Naples in the spring of 1819. The weather was blazingly hot, but he journeyed all the way on foot, and climbed to the little chapel which was sited on the peak of the Monte. He returned exhausted to San Giuliano late on Sunday evening. It was during this solitary expedition that he conceived his long and fantastic poem ‘The Witch of Atlas’.

He began work on it immediately on Monday morning, and it was completed two days later, 16 August. Mary noted the progress of this work in her journal, and the rapidity of composition — more than 200 lines each day — is unmatched by any other work. Shelley himself recorded the speed of the three-day composition in a set of dedicatory verses to Mary, and gave the impression of taking pride in it as a mere feat of skill. The poem has virtually no plot, but loosely recounts the wizardry and mischief of the mysterious Witch, who creates a strange and beautiful hermaphroditic companion, and a magical airship for both of them to travel in, and journeys through the world and through history. Much of the imagery of creative fire, of sailing in air and water, and of electric energy, is skimmed off from
Prometheus Unbound.
But unlike that poem, there is a deliberate absence of intellectual structure, and the verse has everywhere the air of brilliant improvisation. Especially in its stress on fire and movement and speed of line, ‘The Witch of Atlas’ gives the impression of a poetical aerobatics display.

. . . she would often climb

The steepest ladder of the crudded rack

Up to some beakèd cape of cloud sublime,

And like Arion on the dolphin’s back

Ride singing through the shoreless air; — oft-time

Following the serpent lightning’s winding track,

She ran upon the platforms of the wind,

And laughed to hear the fire-balls roar behind.
⁷

The manuscript of the poem is frequently decorated with sketches of boats under sail.

Mary accurately described it as ‘wildly fanciful, full of brilliant imagery, and disregarding human interest and passion, to revel in the fantastic ideas that [Shelley’s] imagination suggested’.
⁸
In fact she sharply disliked the poem, and criticized Shelley for writing in this way. She felt that it stemmed essentially from a ‘morbid feeling’, and represented a shrinking away from the realities of human passion and social sympathy. Shelley wrote in his dedicatory verse:

How, my dear Mary, — are you critic-bitten

(For vipers kill, though dead) by some review,

That you condemn these verses I have written,

Because they tell no story, false or true?
⁹

Mary’s distaste points towards one of the most interesting features of the poem, the further exploration of the bisexual theme. In this sense the poem does have human and passionate content, but one which Mary did not want to recognize. At the end of his dedication, Shelley warned:

If you unveil my Witch, no priest nor primate

Can shrive you of that sin, — if sin there be

In love, when it becomes idolatry.

Shelley had first consciously met the idea of the hermaphrodite in Aristophanes’ speech in his translation of the
Symposium
made at the Bagni di Lucca. At Rome he had seen a statue of the hermaphrodite, which was kept at that time in the Palazzo Borghese.
¹⁰
There had been in fact two hermaphrodite statues in Rome, but one of them, the original Greek work of fifth century BC, had been sold to Napoleon and shipped to the Louvre, where it remains, though removed from the public galleries, to this day. Shelley’s hermaphrodite was a much restored but nevertheless magnificent Hellenistic copy, exquisitely reworked by Andrea Bergondi.
¹¹
The hermaphrodite is asleep, lying on its belly, with the serene face cradled on its right arm and exposed to the viewer. The large eyes are closed, and the elegant curling hair is tied in with a simple band. The sculptor has cunningly arranged the disposition of the body so that the upper torso is slightly raised to reveal one breast, while the body below the waist is twisted on the right hip and the shapely legs drawn up, to concentrate the viewer’s attention on a dramatic and lavishly executed pair of curving haunches.

In his poem, the Witch herself creates a hermaphrodite. The beautiful bisexual creature is the Witch’s companion and servant, a sort of sorcerer’s apprentice, who symbolizes all the potential energies of Nature, sexual and electric. But for the most part the hermaphrodite remains, like its original marble image in Rome, sleeping; for its freedoms are potential only.

Then by strange art she kneaded fire and snow

Together, tempering the repugnant mass

With liquid love — all things together grow

Through which the harmony of love can pass;

And a fair Shape out of her hands did flow —

A living Image, which did far surpass

In beauty that bright shape of vital stone

Which drew the heart out of Pygmalion.

A sexless thing it was, and in its growth

It seemed to have developed no defect

Of either sex, yet all the grace of both, —

In gentleness and strength its limbs were decked. . . .

And ever as she went, the Image lay

With folded wings and unawakened eyes;

And o’er its gentle countenance did play

The busy dreams, as thick as summer flies,

Chasing the rapid smiles that would not stay. . . .
¹²

The idea of the sleeping potential, symbolized in the hermaphrodite, is brought out towards the end of the poem in the Witch’s interference in human affairs. She conjures out the good or comic impulses which have lain dormant in the characters of the evil or repressed. The Witch performs her ‘magic’ over priests and kings, and soldiers (who dream they are blacksmiths); and above all over lovers who have been restricted by the codes of their society:

And timid lovers who had been so coy,

They hardly knew whether they loved or not,

Would rise out of their rest, and take sweet joy,

To the fulfilment of their inmost thought;

And when next day the maiden and the boy

Met one another, both, like sinners caught,

Blushed at the thing which each believed was done

Only in fancy — till the tenth moon shone. . . .
¹³

Yet here and throughout the poem, the language is only working with intermittent force. The one exception is an extraordinary passage where the Witch exerts her magic on those who are about to die. She creates an eternity of suspended animation for them, as if they were a species of human seed, and the Witch was — as in an earlier phrase, — ‘a horticultural adept’.

For on the night when they were buried, she

Restored the embalmers’ ruining, and shook

The light out of the funeral lamps, to be

A mimic day within that deathy nook;

And she unwound the woven imagery

Of second childhood’s swaddling bands, and took

The coffin, its last cradle, from its niche,

And threw it with contempt into a ditch.

And there the body lay, age after age,

Mute, breathing, beating, warm, and undecaying,

Like one asleep in a green hermitage,

With gentle smiles about its eyelids playing,

And living in its dreams beyond the rage

Of death or life: while they were still arraying

In liveries ever new, the rapid, blind

And fleeting generations of mankind.
¹⁴

This finely controlled and imagined passage shows a mature transformation, not without a certain irony, of that urge to escape into a world of eternal rebirth which he had exploited sentimentally in the lyrics of July. But ‘The Witch of Atlas’ as a whole remains a light-weight virtuoso piece. For Shelley it served as a release of feelings, a finger-exercise in composition.

In the seclusion of the Casa Prinni, he threw the manuscript aside and turned to a second piece of serious correspondence, this time with Robert Southey. In June, he had written from Pisa to inquire if Southey was really the author of the
Quarterly
attack of the previous year, and in the course of this letter he managed to insult Southey unnecessarily by accusing him of having ‘abandoned’ the cause to which his early writings were devoted.
¹⁵
In his reply, the elder poet icily denied the authorship of the review, and then angrily challenged Shelley’s own opinions. ‘. . . Have they not brought immediate misery upon others, and guilt, which is all but irremediable, upon yourself?’ He urged Shelley to turn back to Christianity, and bring himself to ‘a sense of your miserable condition’.
¹⁶

This was not calculated to soothe Shelley, especially at such a juncture, and he wrote back in furious indignation. ‘You select a single passage out of a life otherwise not only spotless but spent in an impassioned pursuit of virtue, which looks like a blot, merely because I regulated my domestic arrangements without deferring to the notions of the vulgar . . . .’ The issue of the
Quarterly
was now far removed from Shelley’s mind, but he struck back hard where he knew Southey was most vulnerable. ‘I cannot hope that you will be candid enough to feel, or if
you feel, to own, that you have done ill in accusing, even in your mind, an innocent and a persecuted man, whose only real offence is the holding opinions something similar to those which you once held respecting the existing state of society.’
¹⁷
Memories of the old disagreements at Keswick in 1811, and the old political resentments, had quickly flared up in Shelley’s mind. On 20 August Claire made a fair copy of the letter for Shelley; one suspects that this also was information unsuitable for Mary. Yet Shelley was still not quite past the hope of softening Southey, and he sent immediate instructions to Ollier for copies of
The Cenci
and
Prometheus
to be dispatched to Keswick. He also added a postscript to Southey, that at the time of writing he was suffering from agonizing pains in his side.

When this letter eventually reached Great Hall, Southey rose to the occasion as a representative of respectable English society. He had, after all, sacrificed his own writing career to his massive domestic responsibilities. He no longer minced words, but embarked with a businesslike relish on a proper Christian demolition of Shelley’s private life, starting with the expulsion from Oxford, and going on to an inquisition on the merits of Harriet Shelley’s suicide: ‘ask your own heart, whether you have not been the whole, sole and direct cause of her destruction. You corrupted her opinions; you robbed her of her moral and religious principles; you debauched her mind.’ He summarized with dutiful force: ‘you have reasoned yourself into a state of mind so pernicious that your character, with your domestic arrangements, as you term it, might furnish the subject for the drama more instructive, and scarcely less painful, than the detestable story of the Cenci, and this has proceeded directly from your principles. . . . It is the Atheist’s Tragedy.’
¹⁸
With this, and further urging to the Book of Common Prayer, Southey broke off the correspondence, and it was never resumed on either side. Both men, while consistently signing themselves ‘sincere well-wishers’, had succeeded in deeply wounding each other, for both men had deep causes for secret bitterness and private remorse.

Yet despite these distant thunderings, the Shelley household had surmounted the crisis of June, and the beginning of a regular routine of walks and baths and carriage rides began to have its beneficial effect. Life grew lighter and more relaxed. Claire went over to stay for four days with the Masons and their children at Pisa, and in the course of this visit it was decided that she should go away to the seaside at Livorno for a few weeks. There she could get on with her studies, sea-bathe for her health and enjoy improving correspondence with Mrs Mason. On 24 August, she and the Masons rode back with another English lady, a Miss Field, to spend the festival day of St Bartholomew’s at San Giuliano. The little village was rapidly filling up with people and carriages and farm animals, the windows were hung with bunting, and preparations were being made for the traditional horse-racing through the streets. After the party had arrived at the
Casa Prinni, Shelley decided to give a festival reading of one of his political odes. Mary says later that it was the ‘Ode to Liberty’ written the previous spring, but it seems more likely that it was an extract from his new ‘Ode to Naples’, which he was currently writing about the insurrection in Southern Italy.