Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives (27 page)

Shelley’s first poetic engagement with the ideas of his friends came about because of Claire. By August Claire was desperate to see her daughter, of whom little had been heard since her departure for Venice in April. Elise, who stayed on in Venice to act as Allegra’s nanny, sent confused and partly illegible reports of her welfare, in which, Claire later recalled, she appeared to report that Byron had threatened to make Allegra his mistress as soon as she was old enough.
²¹
Elise would prove to have a flexible relationship with the truth, but Byron had given Claire little reason to trust him, and she reacted to Elise’s allegations with horror. During the long, lonely summer at Bagni di Lucca, Shelley and Claire grew closer than they had been for some time, as with no Allegra to look after, Claire once more devoted her attention to Shelley’s interests.

Mary, by contrast, was occupied by running a house and looking after her own small children. Moreover, the positive reviews
Frankenstein
received far eclipsed any attention paid to Shelley’s poetry in the press. Shelley was proud of his wife’s achievements but, given his frustration with his own creative inabilities during the summer of 1818, it is possible that her success acted as a barrier to communication between them. Certainly there is no suggestion that he discussed his failure to write original poetry with her in the same frank terms in which he described his lack of productivity to Peacock. There seems little doubt that he was growing restless, and that he did not share Mary’s enjoyment at their quiet life. So when Claire insisted on going to Venice to reassure herself about Allegra’s welfare, Shelley was only too happy to accompany her.

Shelley and Claire left for Venice on 17 August, leaving Mary behind at Bagni di Lucca. Although the ostensible reason for their journey was to see Allegra, Shelley also grasped the opportunity to renew his acquaintance with Byron. The prospect of seeing him again was intellectually bracing, even if his conduct towards Claire had revealed a crueller, darker side to his character than Shelley had previously observed. Mary, meanwhile, was told to put the time on her own to good use: ‘If you love me you will keep up your spirits – & at all events tell me the truth about it, for I assure you I am not of a disposition to be flattered by your sorrow though I should be by your cheerfulness.’
²²

Shelley and Claire arrived in Venice on 22 August, after almost a week on the road. The following day, acting on information received from Elise, they made their way to the house of the British Consul and his wife, Richard and Isabelle Hoppner.  There Claire was reunited with Allegra, who turned out to have been farmed out to the Hoppners shortly after her arrival in Venice. Byron had apparently decided, possibly with some justification, that his house was not a suitable place for a nursery. Shelley reported to Mary that Allegra was pale and less lively than she had been before her departure, but that she nevertheless seemed to be healthy. On the advice of the Hoppners, who were compulsive gossipmongers with much to say about Byron’s hatred of Claire and his louche lifestyle, Shelley decided to conceal Claire’s presence in Venice from Byron. He left her with Allegra and the Hoppners while he made his way to Byron’s home on the Grand Canal.

Shelley arrived at Byron’s grandly dilapidated
palazzo
in the middle of the afternoon, and received a warm welcome. He immediately tackled the issue of Claire and Allegra, and Byron was unexpectedly amenable to the suggestion that his estranged mistress should be allowed to spend some time with their daughter. Shelley gave him the spurious impression that Claire was with Mary and the children in nearby Padua, and Byron offered to house them all in his villa in the Euganean Hills for the remainder of the summer. It was an ideal solution. Claire and Allegra could be together, Byron could remain in Venice unbothered by either of them, and the Shelleys could leave their isolated retreat at Bagni di Lucca. Shelley accepted Byron’s offer with alacrity. The one problem was that in order to cover the lie he told Byron, Mary and her children would have to be spirited over the Appenines from far off Bagni di Lucca almost instantaneously. But this was a minor detail, and could easily be surmounted by the efforts of other people.

With the troublesome question of Claire so easily settled, Shelley was free to enjoy himself in his old friend’s company. Byron’s gondola was summoned, and they were taken across to the desolate, empty beaches of the Lido, where Byron’s horses were saddled and waiting. For the first time since leaving England, Shelley was able to talk freely about politics, literature and philosophy to someone other than Mary and Claire, and it had a powerful effect on his thinking. It was also a relief for both men to have an opportunity to talk about the personal difficulties of the last two years. ‘We rode along the sands of the sea talking’, Shelley told Mary. ‘Our conversation consisted in histories of his wounded feelings, & questions as to my affairs, & great professions of friendship and regard for me . . . We talked of literary matters, his fourth Canto which he says is very good, & indeed repeated some stanzas of great energy to me, & Foliage which he quizzes immoderately.’
²³
Byron was a sympathetic listener and he was reassuringly indignant at the failure of the English courts to award Shelley custody of his children by Harriet. Shelley’s ardently expressed admiration for
Foliage
– expressed in letters to Hunt –
was conveniently forgotten in the face of Byron’s disdain for the volume. Even if he privately disagreed with Byron, it was good to be talking about literature again, and it was equally pleasurable to hear a fellow poet talk frankly about his own compositions.

The day with Byron reignited Shelley’s imagination. In the weeks following their ride along the Lido, Shelley began to transmute their conversation into poetry, in his first major poem since the completion of
Laon and Cythna
almost a year before.  The poem in question was ‘Julian and Maddalo: A Conversation’ and in it Shelley attempted to address the difficulties of conversation with Byron, even while he drew inspiration from their renewed acquaintance. ‘Julian and Maddalo’ tells the story of a conversation between the titular characters, which starts as they ride on the ‘ever-shifting sand’ of the Lido and which takes them, via Count Maddalo’s Venetian
palazzo
, to a madhouse where they visit an imprisoned poet, who has been driven mad by his cold-hearted lady.

Julian, who is based on Shelley, is ‘an Englishman of good family, passionately attached to those philosophical notions which assert the power of man over his own mind, and the immense improvements of which, by the extinction of certain moral superstitions, human society may be yet susceptible.’ Count Maddalo, based on Byron, ‘is a person of the most consummate genius, and capable, if he would direct his energies to such an end, of becoming the redeemer of his degraded country.’  But while Julian has an optimistic faith in the power of the human mind, Count Maddalo is an embittered cynic: ‘it is his weakness to be proud: he derives, from a comparison of his own extraordinary mind with the dwarfish intellects that surround him, an intense apprehension of the nothingness of human life.’
²⁴
Julian and Maddalo explore their philosophical differences through a discussion of the poem’s Maniac, who reveals the problems with both Julian’s faith in the human spirit and Maddalo’s essential pessimism. Neither philosophy is able to explain the Maniac’s plight, and their conversation founders when they are confronted with the reality of the Maniac’s suffering. The Maniac himself is represented through speeches which, although they are disrupted by periods of silence (marked in Shelley’s poem by ellipses and textual gaps), present a more coherent narrative of his own life and the reasons for his suffering than that offered by either Julian or Maddalo. The Maniac is in fact the poem’s only poet, and several critics have argued that he, like Julian, is partly autobiographical.

‘Julian and Maddalo’ is, on the one hand, a celebration of conversation, of its philosophical and intellectual possibilities. But it also exposes problems with that which it celebrates. The final image of conversation in the poem is based, not on reality, but on an unobtainable ideal. ‘If I had been an unconnected man’, Julian announces, ‘I, from this moment, should have formed some plan/ Never to leave sweet Venice.’ He goes on to envisage the possibilities of a Venetian life:

                                               I might sit

In Maddalo’s great palace, and his wit

And subtle talk would cheer the winter night

And make me know myself, and the firelight

Would flash upon our faces, till the day

Might dawn and make me wonder at my stay:

But I had friends in London too: the chief

Attraction here, was that I sought relief

From the deep tenderness that maniac wrought

Within me – ’twas perhaps an idle thought,

But I imagined that if day by day

I watched him, and but seldom went away,

And studied all the beatings of his heart

With zeal, as men study some stubborn art

For their own good, and could by patience find

An entrance to the caverns of his mind,

I might reclaim him from his dark estate.

Julian imagines conversation with Maddalo which will cheer him and lead him to greater self-knowledge. Talking the night away is presented as an affirmation of friendship; conversation as the physical manifestation of companionship. Yet the lines which precede this image show that Julian’s vision has little basis in reality. Conversation with Maddalo has been neither cheering nor self-enlightening. Julian remains unaware of the flaws in both his argument and action. Briefly, he is entranced by the image of himself as the ideal friend, but he turns instead to the acquaintances he has been neglecting and the Maniac and Maddalo are forgotten. ‘The following morning’, Julian concludes, ‘urged by my affairs,/ I left bright Venice.’

‘Julian and Maddalo’ represented Shelley’s most sustained attempt to explore the philosophical ramifications of his friendship with Byron. In it he acknowledged how much he was influenced by Byron’s conversation, but he also pointed to the limitations of this influence.
Alastor
– written among friends at Bishopsgate – explored whether the poet needed to act alone in order to achieve a state of transcendent genius. Now, in the sad and solitary months that followed his encounter with Byron, Shelley wrote a poem which presented a sceptical critique of friendship as a vehicle for philosophical enlightenment. But, despite such scepticism, the very existence of ‘Julian and Maddalo’ testified to the inspirational power of human interaction. Through Count Maddalo’s speeches, Shelley incorporated Byron’s views into the most moving and important poetry he had produced for over a year.

‘Julian and Maddalo’ was composed during a period of great personal tumult for the Shelleys. The root cause of this was the lie Shelley told Byron: that Mary and the children were in Padua with Claire. This lie made it possible for Shelley to spend time with Byron, since it sidestepped any discussion of Claire’s whereabouts. But when Byron offered the Shelleys the use of his villa at Este, it became necessary to make the lie true with all possible speed. In the same letter in which Shelley related his conversation with Byron, he instructed Mary to pack up and bring the children to Este immediately. He enclosed detailed and demanding instructions for the journey: ‘Pray come instantly to Este, where I shall be waiting with Claire & Elise in the utmost anxiety for your arrival. You can pack up directly you get this letter & employ the next day in that.  The day after get up at four o’Clock, and go post to Lucca where you will arrive at 6.  Then take Vetturino for Florence to arrive the same evening. From Florence to Este is three days vetturino journey, and you could not I think do it quicker by the Post.’
²⁵
In Bagni di Lucca, Mary acceded to these demands. She spent her twenty-first birthday packing; kindly Maria Gisborne helped her close up the house; and on the evening of 31 August, three days after she received Shelley’s letter, she arrived in Florence. But it was not a good moment for her to be making an arduous journey, and Shelley had given little thought to the impact it would have on both her and their children, William and Clara. His carelessness would have disastrous consequences.