The Life and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Volume I Part 21

The human species may be divided into two great cla.s.ses: those who lean on others for support, and those who are qualified to support. Of these last, some have one, some five, and some ten talents. Some can support a husband, a child, a small but respectable circle of friends and dependents, and some can support a world, contributing by their energies to advance their whole species one or more degrees in the scale of perfectibility. The former cla.s.s sit with their arms crossed, a prey to apathy and languor, of no use to any earthly creature, and ready to fall from their stools if some kind soul, who might compa.s.sionate, but who cannot respect them, did not come from moment to moment and endeavour to set them up again. You were formed by nature to belong to the best of these cla.s.ses, but you seem to be shrinking away, and voluntarily enrolling yourself among the worst.

Above all things, I entreat you, do not put the miserable delusion on yourself, to think there is something fine, and beautiful, and delicate, in giving yourself up, and agreeing to be nothing. Remember too, though at first your nearest connections may pity you in this state, yet that when they see you fixed in selfishness and ill humour, and regardless of the happiness of every one else, they will finally cease to love you, and scarcely learn to endure you.

The other parts of your letter afford me much satisfaction. Depend upon it, there is no maxim more true or more important than this; Frankness of communication takes off bitterness. True philosophy invites all communication, and withholds none.

Such a letter tended rather to check frankness of communication than to bind up a broken heart. Poor Mary's feelings appear in her letter to Miss Curran, with whom she was in correspondence about a monumental stone for the tomb in Rome.

The most pressing entreaties on my part, as well as Clare's, cannot draw a single line from Venice. It is now six months since we have heard, even in an indirect manner, from there. G.o.d knows what has happened, or what has not! I suppose Sh.e.l.ley must go to see what has become of the little thing; yet how or when I know not, for he has never recovered from his fatigue at Rome, and continually frightens me by the approaches of a dysentery. Besides, we must remove. My lying-in and winter are coming on, so we are wound up in an inextricable dilemma. This is very hard upon us; and I have no consolation in any quarter, for my misfortune has not altered the tone of my Father's letters, so that I gain care every day. And can you wonder that my spirits suffer terribly? that time is a weight to me? And I see no end to this. Well, to talk of something more interesting, Sh.e.l.ley has finished his tragedy, and it is sent to London to be presented to the managers. It is still a _deep secret_, and only one person, Peac.o.c.k (who presents it), knows anything about it in England. With Sh.e.l.ley's public and private enemies, it would certainly fall if known to be his; his sister-in-law alone would hire enough people to d.a.m.n it. It is written with great care, and we are in hopes that its story is sufficiently polished not to shock the audience. We shall see.

Continue to direct to us at Leghorn, for if we should be gone, they will be faithfully forwarded to us. And when you return to Rome just have the kindness to inquire if there should be any stray letter for us at the post-office. I hope the country air will do you real good.

You must take care of yourself. Remember that one day you will return to England, and that you may be happier there.--Affectionately yours,

M. W. S.

At the end of September they removed to Florence, where they had engaged pleasant lodgings for six months. The time of Mary's confinement was now approaching, an event, in Sh.e.l.ley's words, "more likely than any other to retrieve her from some part of her present melancholy depression."

They travelled by short, easy stages; stopping for a day at Pisa to pay a visit to a lady with whom from this time their intercourse was frequent and familiar. This was Lady Mountcashel, who had, when a young girl, been Mary Wollstonecraft's pupil, and between whom and her teacher so warm an attachment had existed as to arouse the jealousy and dislike of her mother, Lady Kingsborough. She had long since been separated from Lord Mountcashel, and lived in Italy with a Mr. Tighe and their two daughters, Laura and Nerina. As Lady Mountcashel she had entertained G.o.dwin at her house during his visit to Ireland after his first wife's death. She is described by him as a remarkable person, "a republican and a democrat in all their sternness, yet with no ordinary portion either of understanding or good nature." In dress and appearance she was somewhat singular, and had that disregard for public opinion on such matters which is habitually implied in the much abused term "strong-minded." In this respect she had now considerably toned down. Her views on the relations of the s.e.xes were those of William G.o.dwin, and she had put them into practice. But she and the gentleman with whom she lived in permanent, though irregular, union had succeeded in constraining, by their otherwise exemplary life, the general respect and esteem. They were known as "Mr. and Mrs. Mason," and had so far lived down criticism that their actual position had come to be ignored or forgotten by those around them. Mr. Tighe, or "Tatty," as he was familiarly called by his few intimates, was of a retiring disposition, a lover of books and of solitude. Mrs. Mason was as remarkable for her strong practical common sense as for her talents and cultivation and the liberality of her views. She had a considerable knowledge of the world, and was looked up to as a model of good breeding, and an oracle on matters of deportment and propriety.

She had kept up correspondence with G.o.dwin, and her acquaintance with the Sh.e.l.leys was half made before she saw them. She conceived an immediate affection for Mary, as well for her own as for her mother's sake, and was to prove a constant and valuable friend, not to her only, but to Sh.e.l.ley, and most especially to Clare.

After a week in Florence, Mary's journal was resumed.

_Sat.u.r.day, October 9._--Arrive at Florence. Read Ma.s.singer. Sh.e.l.ley begins Clarendon; reads Ma.s.singer, and Plato's _Republic_. Clare has her first singing lesson on Sat.u.r.day. Go to the opera and see a beautiful ballet

_Monday, October 11._--Read Horace; work. Go to the Gallery. Sh.e.l.ley finishes the first volume of Clarendon. Read the _Little Thief_.

_Wednesday, October 20._--Finish the First Book of Horace's Odes.

Work, walk, read, etc. On Sat.u.r.day letters are sent to England. On Tuesday one to Venice. Sh.e.l.ley visits the Galleries. Reads Spenser and Clarendon aloud.

_Thursday, October 28._--Work; read; copy _Peter Bell_. Monday night a great fright with Charles Clairmont. Sh.e.l.ley reads Clarendon aloud and _Plato's Republic_. Walk. On Thursday the protest from the Bankers.

Sh.e.l.ley writes to them, and to Peac.o.c.k, Longdill, and H. Smith.

_Tuesday, November 9._--Read Madame de Sevigne. Bad news from London.

Sh.e.l.ley reads Clarendon aloud, and Plato. He writes to Papa.

On the 12th of November a son was born to the Sh.e.l.leys, and brought the first true balm of consolation to his poor mother's heart.

"You may imagine," wrote Sh.e.l.ley to Leigh Hunt, "that this is a great relief and a great comfort to me amongst all my misfortunes.... Poor Mary begins (for the first time) to look a little consoled; for we have spent, as you may imagine, a miserable five months."

The child was healthy and pretty, and very like William. Neither Mary's strength nor her spirits were altogether re-established for some time, but the birth of "Percy Florence" was, none the less, the beginning of a new life for her. She turned, with the renewed energy of hope, to her literary work and studies. One of her first tasks was to transcribe the just written fourth act of _Prometheus Unbound_. She had work of her own on hand too; a historical novel, _Castruccio, Prince of Lucca_ (afterwards published as _Valperga_), a laborious but very congenial task, which occupied her for many months.

And indeed all the solace of new and tender ties, all the animating interest of intellectual pursuits, was sorely needed to counteract the wearing effect of hara.s.sing cares and threatening calamities. G.o.dwin was now being pressed for the acc.u.mulated unpaid house-rent of many years; so many that, when the call came, it was unexpected by him, and he challenged its justice. He had engaged in a law-suit on the matter, which he eventually lost. The only point which appeared to admit of no reasonable doubt was that Sh.e.l.ley would shortly be called upon to find a large sum of money for him, and this at a time when he was himself in unexpected pecuniary straits, owing to the non-arrival of his own remittances from England--a circ.u.mstance rendered doubly vexatious by the fact that a large portion of the money was pledged to Henry Reveley for the furtherance of his steamboat. A draft for 200, destined for this purpose, was returned, protested by Sh.e.l.ley's bankers. And though the money was ultimately recovered, its temporary loss caused no small alarm. Meanwhile every mail brought letters from G.o.dwin of the most harrowing nature; the philosophy which he inculcated in a case of bereavement was null and void where impending bankruptcy was concerned. He well knew how to work on his daughter's feelings, and he did not spare her. Poor Sh.e.l.ley was at his wits' end.

"Mary is well," he wrote (in December) to the Gisbornes; "but for this affair in London I think her spirits would be good. What shall I, what can I, what ought I to do? You cannot picture to yourself my perplexity."

It appeared not unlikely that he might even have to go to England, a journey for which his present state of health quite unfitted him, and which he could not but be conscious would be no permanent remedy, but only a temporary alleviation, of G.o.dwin's thoroughly unsound circ.u.mstances.

Mary, in her grief for her father, began to think that the best thing for him might be to leave England altogether and settle abroad; an idea from which Mrs. Mason, with her strong sagacity, earnestly dissuaded her.

Her views on the point were expressed in a letter to Sh.e.l.ley Mary had written asking her if she could give Charles Clairmont any introductions at Vienna, where he had now gone to seek his fortune as a teacher of languages; and also begging for such a.s.sistance as she might be able to lend in the matter of obtaining access to historical doc.u.ments or other MS. bearing on the subjects of Mary's projected novel.

MRS. MASON TO Sh.e.l.lEY.

MY DEAR SIR--I deferred answering your letter till this post in hopes of being able to send some recommendations for your friend at Vienna, in which I have been disappointed; and I have now also a letter from my dear Mary; so I will answer both together. It gives me great pleasure to hear such a good account of the little boy and his mother.... I am sorry to perceive that your visit to Pisa will be so much r.e.t.a.r.ded; but I admire Mary's courage and industry. I sincerely regret that it is not in my power to be of service to her in this undertaking.... All I can say is, that when you have got all you can there (where I suppose the ma.n.u.script doc.u.ments are chiefly to be found) and that you come to this place, I have scarcely any doubt of being able to obtain for you many books on the subject which interests you. Probably everything in print which relates to it is as easy to be had here as at Florence.... I am very sorry indeed to think that Mr.

G.o.dwin's affairs are in such a bad way, and think he would be much happier if he had nothing to do with trade; but I am afraid he would not be comfortable out of England. You who are young do not mind the thousand little wants that men of his age are not habituated to; and I, who have been so many years a vagabond on the face of the earth, have long since forgotten them; but I have seen people of my age much discomposed at the absence of long-accustomed trifles; and though philosophy supports in great matters, it seldom vanquishes the small everydayisms of life. I say this that Mary may not urge her father too much to leave England. It may sound odd, but I can't help thinking that Mrs. G.o.dwin would enjoy a tour in foreign countries more than he would. The physical inferiority of women sometimes teaches them to support or overlook little inconveniences better than men.

"I am very sorry," she writes to Mary in another letter, "to find you still suffer from low spirits. I was in hopes the little boy would have been the best remedy for that. Words of consolation are but empty sounds, for to time alone it belongs to wear out the tears of affliction. However, a woman who gives milk should make every exertion to be cheerful on account of the child she nourishes."

Whether the plan for G.o.dwin's expatriation was ever seriously proposed to him or not, it was, at any rate, never carried out. But none the less for this did the Sh.e.l.leys live in the shadow of his gloom, which co-operated with their own pecuniary strait, previously alluded to, and with the nipping effects of an unwontedly severe winter, to make life still difficult and dreary for them.

"Sh.e.l.ley Calderonised on the late weather," wrote Mary to Mrs.

Gisborne; "he called it an epic of rain with an episode of frost, and a few similes concerning fine weather. We have heard from England, although not from the Bankers; but Peac.o.c.k's letter renders the affair darker than ever. Ah! my dear friend, you, in your slow and sure way of proceeding, ought hardly to have united yourself to our eccentric star. I am afraid that you will repent it, and it grieves us both more than you can imagine that all should have gone so ill; but I think we may rest a.s.sured that this is delay, and not loss; it can be nothing else. I write in haste--a carriage at the door to take me out, and _Percy_ asleep on my knee. Adieu. Charles is at Vienna by this time."...

They had intended remaining six months at Florence, but the place suited Sh.e.l.ley so ill that they took advantage of the first favourable change in the weather, at the end of January, to remove to Pisa, where the climate was milder, and where they now had pleasant friends in the Masons at "Casa Silva." They wished, too, to consult the celebrated Italian surgeon, Vacca, on the subject of Sh.e.l.ley's health. Vacca's advice took the shape of an earnest exhortation to him to abstain from drugs and remedies, to live a healthy life, and to leave his complaint, as far as possible, to nature. And, though he continued liable to attacks of pain and illness, and on one occasion had a severe nervous attack, the climate of Pisa proved in the end more suitable to him than any other, and for more than two years he remained there or in the immediate neighbourhood. He and Mary were never more industrious than at this time; reading extensively, and working together on a translation of Spinoza they had begun at Florence, and which occupied them, at intervals, for many months. Little Percy, a most healthy and satisfactory infant, had in March an attack of measles, but so slight as to cause no anxiety. Once, however, during the summer they had a fright about him, when an unusually alarming letter from her father upset Mary so much as to cause in her nursling, through her, symptoms of an illness similar to that which had destroyed little Clara.

On this occasion she authorised Sh.e.l.ley, at his earnest request, to intercept future letters of the kind, an authority of which he had to avail himself at no distant date, telling G.o.dwin that his domestic peace, Mary's health and happiness, and his child's life, could no longer be entirely at his mercy.

No wonder that his own nervous ailments kept their hold of him. And to make matters better for him and for Mary, Paolo, the rascally Italian servant whom they had dismissed at Naples, now concocted a plot for extorting money from Sh.e.l.ley by accusing him of frightful crimes. Legal aid had to be called in to silence him. To this end they employed an attorney of Leghorn, named Del Rosso, and, for convenience of communication, they occupied for a few weeks Casa Ricci, the Gisbornes'

house there, the owners being absent in England. Sh.e.l.ley made Henry Reveley's workshop his study. Hence he addressed his poetical "Letter to Maria Gisborne," and here too it was that "on a beautiful summer evening while wandering among the lanes, whose myrtle hedges were the bowers of the fireflies (they) heard the carolling of the skylark, which inspired one of the most beautiful of his poems."[37]

If external surroundings could have made them happy they might have been so now, but Sh.e.l.ley, though in better health, was very nervous. Paolo's scandal and the legal affair embittered his life, to an extent difficult indeed to estimate, for it is certain that for some one else's sake, though _whose_ sake has never transpired, he had accepted when at Naples responsibilities at once delicate and compromising. Paolo had knowledge of the matter, and used this knowledge partly to revenge himself on Sh.e.l.ley for dismissing him from his service, partly to try and extort money from him by intimidation. The Sh.e.l.leys hoped they had "crushed him" with Del Rosso's help, but they could not be certain, because, as Mary wrote to Miss Curran, they "could only guess at his accomplices." With Sh.e.l.ley in a state of extreme nervous irritability, with Mary deprived of repose by her anguish on her father's account and her feverish anxiety to help him, with Clare unsettled and miserable about Allegra, venting her misery by writing to Byron letters unreasonable and provoking, though excusable, and then regretting having sent them, they were not likely to be the most cheerful or harmonious of trios.

The weather became intolerably hot by the end of August, and they migrated to Casa Prinni, at the Baths of S. Giuliano di Pisa. The beauty of this place, and the delightful climate, refreshed and invigorated them all.

They spent two or three days in seeing Lucca and the country around, when Sh.e.l.ley wrote the _Witch of Atlas_. Exquisite poem as it is, it was, in Mary's mood of the moment, a disappointment to her. Ever since the _Cenci_ she had been strongly impressed with the conviction that if he could but write on subjects of universal _human_ interest, instead of indulging in those airy creations of fancy which demand in the reader a sympathetic, but rare, quality of imagination, he would put himself more in touch with his contemporaries, who so greatly misunderstood him, and that, once he had elicited a responsive feeling in other men, this would be a source of profound happiness and of fresh and healthy inspiration to himself. "I still think I was right," she says, woman-like, in the _Notes to the Poems of 1820_, written long after Sh.e.l.ley's death. So from one point of view she undoubtedly was, but there are some things which cannot be constrained. Sh.e.l.ley was Sh.e.l.ley, and at the moment when he was moved to write a poem like the _Witch of Atlas_, it was useless to wish that it had been something quite different.

His next poem was to be inspired by a human subject, and perhaps then poor Mary would have preferred a second Witch of Atlas.

CHAPTER XIII

SEPTEMBER 1820-AUGUST 1821

The baths were of great use to Sh.e.l.ley in allaying his nervous irritability. Such an improvement in him could not be without a corresponding beneficial effect on Mary. In the study of Greek, which she had begun with him at Leghorn, she found a new and wellnigh inexhaustible fund of intellectual pleasure. Their life, though very quiet, was somewhat more varied than it had been at Leghorn, partly owing to their being within easy reach of Pisa and of their friends at Casa Silva.

The Gisbornes had returned from England, and, during a short absence of Clare's, Mary tried, but ineffectually, to persuade Mrs. Gisborne to come and occupy her room for a time. Some circ.u.mstance had arisen which led shortly after to a misunderstanding between the two families, soon over, but painful while it lasted. It was probably connected with the abandonment of the projected steamboat; Henry Reveley, while in England, having changed his mind and reconsidered his future plans.

In October a curiously wet season set in.

_Journal, Wednesday, October 18._--Rain till 1 o'clock. At sunset the arch of cloud over the west clears away; a few black islands float in the serene; the moon rises; the clouds spot the sky, but the depth of heaven is clear. The nights are uncommonly warm. Write. Sh.e.l.ley reads _Hyperion_ aloud. Read Greek.

My thoughts arise and fade in solitude; The verse that would invest them melts away Like moonlight in the heaven of spreading day.

How beautiful they were, how firm they stood, Flecking the starry sky like woven pearl.

_Friday, October 20._--Sh.e.l.ley goes to Florence. Write. Read Greek.

Wind N.W., but more cloudy than yesterday, yet sometimes the sun s.h.i.+nes out; the wind high. Read Villani.

_Sat.u.r.day, October 21._--Rain in the night and morning; very cloudy; not an air stirring; the leaves of the trees quite still. After a showery morning it clears up somewhat, and the sun s.h.i.+nes. Read Villani, and ride to Pisa.