Shelley: The Pursuit (96 page)

That these arrangements, the packing, the pre-dawn departure, and the five days of hard travelling in the blazing August weather, with the children, would be very hard for Mary did not really occur to Shelley. He thought, perhaps rightly, that Claire’s happiness was at stake, and on such an occasion Mary must defer to it. His gentle excuses were not altogether serious: ‘I have done for the best & my own beloved Mary you must soon come & scold me if I have done wrong & kiss me if I have done right — for I am sure I do not know which — & it is only the event can shew.’ This did not soften the timetable.

The letter broke off as a gondola arrived to take Shelley to the bank to obtain an order of fifty pounds for Mary’s travelling expenses. Later at the bank he scrawled a P.S.: ‘Kiss the blue darlings for me & don’t let William forget me —
Ca
cant recollect me.’ He missed the post, but the letter went express. Later perhaps, he woke Claire with the good news.

On the 25th or 26th they quietly departed from Venice for Este with Elise and Allegra and the good wishes of the Hoppners. They did not know, because in the situation there was no way of knowing, that at the Bagni di Lucca little Clara was ill, slightly feverish and unable to take food, and Mary was intensely anxious about her. For ten days Shelley and Claire basked in the sun at the Villa Capuccini, awaiting Mary’s arrival. They found the house cheerful and full of the radiant Italian light, set on the brow of one of the rolling foothills of the Euganean range, and commanding a view southwards over the plain of Lombardy. In the mornings, to westwards, before the heat of the day had filled the air with a blue haze, they could make out the distant line of the Apennines. Once again Shelley spent many hours observing the rising and setting of the sun and moon and evening star, and studying the slow architectural developments of ‘the golden magnificence of autumnal clouds’. ‘Behind us here’, he wrote to Peacock, ‘are the Euganean hills, not so beautiful as those of Bagni di Lucca, with Arqua where Petrarch’s house and tomb are religiously preserved & visited. At
the end of our garden is an extensive Gothic castle, now the habitation of owls and bats, where the Medici family resided before they came to Florence.’
⁸
Shelley found that, at night, when the moon ‘sunk behind the black and heavy battlements’, he could call up the owls, and obtain a satisfactory echo from the massive looming wall of the crumbling fortress.
⁹

But the great feature of the Villa Capuccini was its summerhouse, situated at the end of a stone-flagged path stretching across the little back garden and reached by a glass doorway in the hall at the back of the house. The path was shaded by a trellis of vines trained across wooden frames to make one of the charming pergolas typical of the region. Shelley set up his study in this little summerhouse, scattering it with his few books and papers, and each morning he would make his way through the tunnel of sunlight and shade to write.

After the translation of the
Symposium
, his mind was again turning to the Promethean theme which he had unsuccessfully attempted to develop at Livorno and at Lucca in the stage play about Tasso. Realizing that the act of translation had both released and sustained his creative powers, he now turned to another Greek text, the
Prometheus Bound
of Aeschylus, and began to work some of it over into English. He no longer attempted to work methodically at a strict translation, but played around with certain images and speeches, adapting, extending and improvising as he went. He gradually came to the conclusion that by using the Aeschylean play as a base, he could attempt to re-create in English a version of the missing third part of the Aeschylean trilogy, the
Prometheus Unbound
. He could adapt the Aeschylean mythology and symbolism to the themes of political revolution and moral regeneration which had consistently concerned him in his previous epic poems,
Queen Mab
and
The Revolt of Islam
.

The process of adaption was to prove a slow and immensely arduous one. Upon no other of his poems did Shelley lavish such concentrated work over such a long period. By 22 September he had written twenty-six manuscript pages, and by 8 October he was writing to Peacock that he had ‘just finished the first act of a lyric & classical drama to be called “Prometheus Unbound”. Yet two months later in Naples, he was still redrafting this first act, and he wrote that it had been ‘completed’ at the end of January 1819. The second and third acts of
Prometheus
were finished in Rome by June 1819, but the fourth and final act was not conceived or added until the winter of 1819 in Florence. In all,
Prometheus Unbound
was sixteen months in composition. Yet the original idea, grounded upon Aeschylus’
Prometheus
remains as he first conceived it in September, living quietly with Claire at Este, and writing in the shaded summer-house of the Villa Capuccini.

Meanwhile, as Mary pressed to conform to Shelley’s gruelling travel scheme, aided as far as Lucca by Mrs Gisborne, little Clara became increasingly ill. By a
kind of sympathy at the Villa Capuccini, Shelley made himself sick by eating some Italian cakes which he thought — for no apparent reason — must have been poisoned. Mary arrived on Saturday, 5 September, six days after her twenty-first birthday which she had celebrated alone by packing their books at the Casa Bertini. She was greeted by Shelley and Claire, who had been alone together, with Allegra and Elise, for three weeks. The 5th September is also important for it is the first time that Paolo Foggi met Elise. Little Clara was rather worryingly ill, and Shelley’s stomach upset was turning into dysentery. Claire too seems to have been ill, and on the 16th the two of them went into Padua, to consult a doctor, since a proper
medico
could not be found in the country. Mary noted anxiously ‘[Shelley] is very ill from the effects of his poison’; and of the baby, ‘Poor Clara is dangerously ill’.
¹⁰
Little Clara’s condition was aggravated by her weakness from travelling and her teething. Shelley was the first to recover fully, and Mary noted that he was again writing hard in the summerhouse, and reading Sophocles’s
Oedipus
to her in the evenings. He wrote to Byron that he had been ‘four or five times on the point of setting out to Venice’, but that Clara’s illness had kept him ‘an anxious prisoner’ at Este. ‘We have domesticated ourselves unceremoniously here, and find it, as I think you would find it, a most delightful residence.’
¹¹
But Byron did not take the hint.

On Tuesday, 22 September, Shelley again took Claire into Padua to visit the doctor, but arriving too late in the morning, they missed her appointment. They had also intended to ask the
medico’s
advice about little Clara. Shelley was not unduly concerned, and he decided to go on alone to keep his long-promised visit to Byron at the Palazzo Mocenigo, and stay until Thursday. He sent Claire back to Este with a note to Mary, once again issuing a rather severe travelling time-table. ‘Clare says she is obliged to come to see the Medico whom we missed this morning, & who has appointed as the only hour at which he can be at leisure, ½ past 8 in the morning. — You must therefore arrange matters so that you should come to the
Stella d’Oro
a little before that hour — a thing only to be accomplished by setting out at ½ past 3 in the morning.’ Shelley intended to meet them at Padua, and then take Mary back to see Byron at Venice, while Claire returned to Este. Despite an explanation about avoiding the heat, this did not really alter the fact that Mary and the baby were again being fitted to Claire’s convenience. Shelley was not entirely happy about his treatment of Mary and the child. ‘My poor little Clara how is she today? Indeed I am somewhat uneasy about her, and though I feel secure there is no danger, it would be very comfortable to have some reasonable person’s opinion about her. The Medico at Padua is certainly a man in great practise, but I confess he does not satisfy me. — Am I not like a wild swan to be gone so suddenly?’ He added a mysterious remark about not addressing her yet as ‘Lady Shelley’ — which was perhaps
intended to remind her of the favours of fortune to come. Shelley finished his instructions by urging Mary to continue a translation of Ariosto which she had been attempting to work on since his departure from the Bagni di Lucca; and also for her to bring the manuscript of his own poem ‘. . . the sheets of “Prometheus Unbound” which you will find numbered 1 to 26 on the table of the pavilion’.
¹²
With that, he set off for Venice, and the intoxication of Byron’s late night conversation, and the long rides across the deserted Lido.

How far Shelley was underestimating or simply ignoring Mary’s worries about the child can be seen by the entirely different tone of one of her own letters to Maria Gisborne, which had arrived in Livorno four days previously. ‘. . . the fatigue has given my poor little
Ca
an attack of dysentery and although she is now somewhat recovered from that disorder she is still in a frightful state of weakness and fever and is reduced to be so thin in this short time that you would hardly know her again — the physician of Este is a stupid fellow but there is one come from Padua & who appears clever so I hope under his care she will soon get well, although we are still in great anxiety concerning her.’
¹³
A forced journey from Este to Venice, which was to begin at 3.30 in the morning and end at 5 in the afternoon was not perhaps the most suitable treatment in the circumstances.
¹⁴

The upshot was rapid, and surely foreseeable. By the time little Clara had reached the Stella d’Oro at Padua on Thursday morning, she was again seriously ill. Shelley however insisted on continuing the prearranged journey into Venice, rather than put her under the care of the Paduan
medico
who had treated her previously. As the journey continued, Clara showed ‘symptoms of increased weakness and even convulsive motions of the mouth and eyes’, which as Shelley said made him ‘anxious to see the physician’. At Fusina, where travellers boarded the gondolas to cross the lagoon into Venice, Shelley found he had forgotten their travel permit and was held up by the customs guards on duty. Mary was now frantic with the difficulties and delays, and Shelley forced their way on to the boat with a characteristic outburst. ‘They could not resist [his] impetuosity at such a moment,’ Mary wrote afterwards.
¹⁵
In the gondola, the child grew worse. They reached the inn, and Shelley immediately took another boat to find Byron’s physician, Dr Aglietti. But he had made no previous arrangement, and the doctor was not to be found at home. Meanwhile Mary remained alone in the hall of the Venetian inn, in the ‘most dreadful distress’, as the child’s convulsions grew worse. Before Shelley had returned, in a state of desperation, Mary had managed to summon a local doctor through the servants. But all he could tell was that there was no hope. Little Clara’s convulsions ceased, and she grew quiet, and died silently about one hour after they had arrived in Venice. Shelley returned to see her die in Mary’s arms. A few minutes later, the Hoppners
arrived by gondola, having been alerted by a messenger, and took off the stunned and weeping party to the consulate. Clara was buried the next morning. Shelley wrote to Claire that Mary was by this ‘unexpected stroke reduced to a kind of despair. She is better today.’
¹⁶

But Mary was not really ‘better’ for another twelve months. The death of little Clara, to which Shelley’s carelessness and unconcern had distinctly contributed, brought to a state of crisis the already strained relations between husband and wife. Other events were to compound further the situation during the winter, and Mary went into a long period of decline and isolated misery. When the birth of a new child, in November 1819, finally brought her back into full engagement with her life in Italy, she was a matured and rather hardened woman, who had come to accept both more realistically and more coldly the nature and limitations of her relationship with Shelley. Between young Mary and the matured one there is a distinct emotional caesura. Something of it can be seen in the comparison of the two portraits of her, the first drawn before her departure for Italy, and the second painted after her return to England. She worked herself through this crisis, a sort of mental breakdown, partly with the help of a long autobiographical novel which she wrote but retained in manuscript, called ‘Mathilda’.
¹⁷
Many side-effects flowed from this ‘kind of despair’ which overwhelmed her, but one of the most important was the end of the state of confidentiality which had hitherto existed between her and Shelley. Certain parts of Shelley’s emotional life were now forever closed from her. He found it easier to turn to Claire, and to others, for understanding. From the death of little Clara until the spring of 1819, there is only one complete letter of Mary’s extant, although her journal continues in its usual laconic fashion. For 25 September she entered, ‘This is the Journal of misfortune.’
¹⁸

After Clara’s burial, and a weekend during which Lord Byron and the Hoppners kindly attempted to distract Shelley and Mary with tours round the palaces, bridges and museums of Venice, the couple returned subdued to Este. Byron gave Mary the manuscript of his new poem ‘Mazeppa’ and told her gravely how helpful it would be if she could find time to fair-copy it. Shelley returned to the summerhouse and continued work sporadically on
Prometheus Unbound
, and made a draft of the ‘Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills’, a poem of great personal unhappiness.