Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives (29 page)

The Shelleys left Naples on 28 February, the day of the ‘tremendous fuss’, and travelled back to Rome, where they took smart lodgings at the Palazzo Verospi on the Corso. After the misery of the winter, Rome appeared to offer everyone a new beginning. All three were entranced by its beauty and its history, evoked by Shelley in letters to Peacock which indicated that the city tested his powers of description to the limit. ‘Come to Rome’, he pleaded. ‘It is a scene by which expression is overpowered: which words cannot convey [. . .] It is a city of palaces and temples more glorious than those which any other city contains, and that of ruins more glorious than they.’
³⁷
 From Naples Shelley had written to Peacock asking him to join them out of a sense of desperate isolation, just as he asked Hunt to come because he needed someone to whom he could talk about the emotional turbulence which had overcome him. Now, he issued the invitation in a different vein.

Shelley wanted Peacock’s company so he could discuss his impressions of ‘the capital of the World’ with someone who would help him understand the intellectual and aesthetic implications of its beauties. He still sought companionship, and seemed to dread the thought of more lonely months with Mary and Claire. In April he wrote to the Gisbornes of his plan to return with Mary and Claire to Naples in June (due to an unspecified ‘combination of circumstances’)
³⁸
where they would spend the remainder of the year. ‘The object of this letter is to ask you to spend that period with us . . . What is a sail to Naples?  it is the season of tranquil weather & prosperous winds. If I knew the magic that lay in any given form of words I would employ them to persuade; but I fear that all I can say is, as you know with truth – we desire that you would come – we wish to see you.’
³⁹
Mary added her voice to this request, and told Hunt and Marianne how sorry she was that they would not join them in Italy. Like Shelley, she took pleasure in imagining their friends together in England. ‘I suppose’, she wrote to the Hunts, ‘that Peacock shews you Shelley’s letters so I need not describe those objects which delight us so much here.’
⁴⁰
Rome and a new pregnancy lifted her mood, and she sent the Hunts happy descriptions of William’s childish glee at the paintings of goats in the Vatican, and exchanged gossip about Hogg, whom Marianne was finding something of a trial.

Shelley spent his days wandering through Rome’s ancient cityscapes, notebook and pencil permanently on his person. He also started a play,
The Cenci
, which was based on an Italian story of incest and patricide read in a manuscript borrowed from the Gisbornes. Hunt was delighted when he received
The Cenci
, not least because he was the subject of its dedication. The dedication repaid Hunt for the praise lavished on Shelley in
Foliage,
in reviews of his poetry in
The Examiner
and in his article on ‘Young Poets’; and it was Shelley’s first public proclamation of loyalty to his critically beleaguered friend.
It was also a public proclamation of the value of friendship:

Had I known a person more highly endowed than yourself with all that it becomes a man to possess, I had solicited for this work the ornament of his name. One more gentle, honourable, innocent and brave; one of more exalted toleration for all who do and think evil, and yet himself more free from evil; one who knows better how to receive, and how to confer a benefit though he must ever confer far more than he can receive; one of simpler, and, in the highest sense of the word, of purer life and manners I never knew: and I had already been fortunate in friendships when your name was added to the list.

In that patient and irreconcilable enmity with domestic and political tyranny and imposture which the tenor of your life has illustrated and which, had I health and talents should illustrate mine, let us, comforting each other in our task, live and die.
⁴¹

The dedication to
The Cenci
celebrated Hunt’s good qualities, but it also praised his reaction to the personal attacks which had appeared continuously in the British press since the Shelleys’ departure. If Peacock provided Shelley with a model for intellectual engagement with the sights of classical antiquity, then Hunt provided a lesson in patience, and the manner in which a principled man could rise above critical opprobrium in the service of his art. For Shelley, whose work had received so little praise and so little notice, this was a valuable lesson.

Inspired by the thoughts of his friends and by the splendour of Rome, Shelley was finally able to produce work of astonishing complexity and grandeur. Over the course of long days in the secluded, grassy ruins of the monumental Baths of Caracalla he wrote
Prometheus Unbound
, a work considered by many to be his masterpiece.
Prometheus Unbound
was the product of months of sustained thinking, reading and writing, and it cost Shelley more effort than any poem he had written since eloping with Mary. Unlike
Alastor
,
Laon and Cythna
and ‘Julian and Maddalo’, it was conceived and written in solitude. Shelley was no Hunt, needing his friends by his side in order to write, and nor was he Keats, who felt compelled to withdraw from Hunt’s circle in order to discover an independent poetic voice. His poetry was inspired by both the company of friends and by isolation, as his circle faded in and out of his life and his poetic consciousness. By the end of 1819, he had begun to reach towards the answers to the questions asked in
Alastor
. Could a poet achieve greatness supported by others? Did the development of powers of intense perception necessarily involve a rejection of society? The answer, for Shelley at least, was for the poet to move between solitude and sociability, for the two opposing states to be suspended in productively balanced tension.

While Shelley wrote, Claire took singing lessons and Mary and three year old William toured the sights of Rome by carriage and sat in the gardens of the Villa Borghese, where Mary drew while William tumbled about on the grass. In the evenings they read and visited the Roman hostesses in whose salons the city’s intellectuals gathered. They renewed their friendship with Amelia Curran, the artist daughter of John Curran, whom Shelley had met in Ireland in 1812. She painted their portraits and, although Claire disliked hers and Amelia Curran was dissatisfied with the image she produced of Shelley, everyone was delighted with her depiction of William, who appears in his portrait as a blue-eyed, chubby, and rather serious toddler. With such delightful company in Rome, the Shelleys decided to postpone their journey back to Naples, and instead moved to airy new lodgings on the Via Sistina. In mid-May they were still in Rome, and their plans for the summer had become uncertain. They made the acquaintance of an English doctor, Dr Bell, who agreed to superintend the birth of Mary’s fourth child, due in November. Since Dr Bell was planning to spend his summer in either Pisa or Florence, this meant travelling north, rather than south, in order to be near him. Meanwhile William was beginning to wilt in the Roman sun. He too, his parents decided, would benefit from the cooler climate of Lucca and the north of Italy. They had already stayed in Rome longer than they intended, and were a little frightened by the effect of its cruel heat on their only surviving child.

The precautions made to safeguard William’s health came too late. At the end of May he developed malaria, and by the first week of June he was gravely ill. Mary and Shelley sat constantly by his bedside, Dr Bell called regularly, and Amelia Curran visited daily, hoping for more cheerful news. None came. On 7 June, Claire made a brief entry in her journal: ‘at noon-day’.
⁴²
Mary had lost two children in the space of a year. In 1815, after the death of her premature baby, she had written sorrowfully, ‘I was a mother & am so no longer.’
⁴³
Now she was a mother without children once again.

6

Exiles

The thought of remaining in Rome was unbearable. Three days after William’s death, the Shelleys and Claire left the city for good and travelled northwards to Montenero, a woodland village just outside Livorno. There they rented the Villa Valsovano, and settled for the summer. The Villa Valsovano was idyllic: a light, airy house, surrounded by vines and olive trees. Throughout the summer the air was thick with the scents of ripening peaches and hedgerows full of myrtle, and Italian labourers sang Rossini while they worked the land, accompanied by a perpetual, rhythmic chorus of cicadas.

The beauty of the house and its surroundings did little to lift Mary’s mood. On arrival at Montenero she collapsed into a deep and prolonged depression.  Clara’s death and the unhappiness of the Neapolitan winter had placed great strain on her, and she was still only twenty-one years old. Now, faced with the death of another child, she broke down completely. She wrote few letters, and those she did write were dominated by expressions of her own inadequacy. She tried to tell Marianne Hunt about their house and to avoid writing of her own feelings, since ‘if I would write any thing else about myself it would only be a list of hours spent in tears and grief’. But she could not help expressing something of her anguish to Marianne, with whom she had discussed the joys and trials of pregnancy and motherhood in Marlow in 1817. ‘Hunt used to call me serious what would he say to me now’, she pondered. ‘I feel that I am not fit for any thing & therefore not fit to live.’
¹

Hunt and Marianne, along with the rest of the Shelley’s English circle, greeted the news of William’s death with much sorrow, and in the weeks following their escape from Rome the bereaved parents were flooded with sympathetic letters.  Some of their correspondents were better at expressing their condolences than others.  Hogg wrote awkwardly and sincerely to Shelley, taking two pages to muster up the courage to address his friend’s loss. ‘I am truly sorry, both for the sake of Mary, and of yourself’, he wrote, ‘and I am myself much disappointed in the high expectations which I had indulged, of his proving the instrument of good to his own family and friends, and to the human race.’
²
Shelley was grateful to Hogg, who allowed him to rationalise his grief by representing William’s death as a public loss. His letter also permitted Shelley to write affectionately and unselfconsciously of his lost son. ‘Your little favourite had improved greatly both in mind and body before that fatal fever seized him’, he replied. ‘It was impossible to find a creature more gentle and intelligent. – His health and strength appeared to be perfect; and his beauty, the silken fineness of his hair, the transparence of his complexion, the animation and deep blue colour of his eyes were the astonishment of everyone.’
³

Mary’s devastating grief, meanwhile, provoked a panic-stricken response from Godwin. Her mother and half-sister had suffered from suicidal depression, and now her reaction to William’s death suggested that she might too succumb to its annihilating lure. He was terrified that she would follow Fanny’s example, and responded to her grief in the only way he knew, by seeking to reason her out of her misery. The result was a letter of condolence that can have done little to cheer its recipient. Godwin meant to be bracing, to remind her of the good that remained in her life, and of the good that she could do:

You must however allow me the privilege of a father and a philosopher, in expostulating with you upon this depression. I cannot but consider it as lowering your character in a memorable degree, and putting you quite among the commonality and mob of your sex, when I had thought I saw in you symptoms, entitling you to be ranked among the noble spirits that do honour to our nature. Oh, what a falling off is here! How bitterly is so inglorious a change to be deplored!

What is it you want that you have not? You have the husband of your choice, to whom you seem to be unalterably attached, a man of high intellectual endowments . . . you have all the goods of fortune, all the means of being useful to others, and shining in your proper sphere. But you have lost a child: and all the rest of the world, all that is beautiful, and all that has a claim upon your kindness, is nothing, because a child of three years old is dead!
⁴

Godwin was right to be worried about his daughter, but his rhetorical flourishes were unfortunate, and his advice was sent too soon. In any case, Godwin had his own troubles that summer. His letters were full of his financial woes, and were of little comfort to Mary.