Shelley: The Pursuit

Or hope can paint or suffering may achieve,

  We descanted, and I (for ever still

  Is it not wise to make the best of ill?)

  Argued against despondency, but pride

  Made my companion take the darker side.23

  The contrast in the personalities of his protagonists is carefully pointed out in a prose preface. The description of Maddalo is little more than a softened and generalized version of the analysis of Byron sent to Peacock.

  Count Maddalo is a Venetian nobleman of ancient family . . . [who] resides chiefly at his magnificent palace in that city. He 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 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 . . . . but . . . in social life no human being can be more gentle, patient, and unassuming than Maddalo. He is cheerful, frank, and witty. His more serious conversation is a sort of intoxication; men are held by it as by a spell.24

  The description of Julian is instantly recognizable as a self-portrait, though edged by what Mary Shelley called the ‘spirit that mocked itself’.

  Julian 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. Without concealing the evil in the world, he is forever speculating how good may be made superior. He is a complete infidel, and a scoffer at all things reputed holy; and Maddalo takes a wicked pleasure in drawing out his taunts against religion. What Maddalo thinks on these matters is not exactly known. Julian, in spite of his heterodox opinions, is conjectured by his friends to possess some good qualities. How far this is possible the pious reader will determine. Julian is rather serious.25

  The sense of lucid control and objective irony, almost of wit, is carried over into the narration and dialogue of the poem, and the fluency and natural simplicity of the verse movement is from the opening lines a masterly and artful achievement which Shelley had been working towards for years. Nothing could be more memorable in image and phrase than the fine austerity of the opening scenario, in which the atmosphere and the feelings of the Venetian landscape is brought slowly to bear on the human characterization.

  I rode one evening with Count Maddalo

  Upon the bank of land which breaks the flow

  Of Adria towards Venice: a bare strand

  Of hillocks, heaped from ever-shifting sand,

  Matted with thistles and amphibious weeds,

  Such as from earth’s embrace the salt ooze breeds,

  Is this; an uninhabited sea-side,

  Which the lone fisher, when his nets are dried,

  Abandons; and no other object breaks

  The waste, but one dwarf tree and some few stakes

  Broken and unrepaired, and the tide makes

  A narrow space of level sand thereon,

  Where ’twas our wont to ride while day went down.

  This ride was my delight. I love all waste

  And solitary places; where we taste

  The pleasure of believing what we see

  Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be . . . .26

  Julian and Maddalo are crossing back over the laguna from the Lido when Maddalo points out the dark windowless shape of the lunatic asylum which is to play a central role in the second section of the poem. Maddalo’s comment on Julian’s scoffing reaction to communal prayers at the asylum is, in the light of subsequent events, slightly uncanny:

  ‘What we behold

  Shall be the madhouse and its belfry tower,’

  Said Maddalo, ‘and ever at this hour

  Those who may cross the water, hear that bell

  Which calls the maniacs, each one from his cell,

  To vespers.’ — ‘As much skill as need to pray

  In thanks or hope for their dark lot have they

  To their stern maker,’ I replied. ‘O ho!

  You talk as in years past,’ said Maddalo.

  ‘’Tis strange men change not. You were ever still

  Among Christ’s flock a perilous infidel,

  A wolf for the meek lambs — if you can’t swim

  Beware of Providence.’ I looked on him,

  But the gay smile had faded in his eye.27

  The next day, Julian calls on Maddalo at his palace to continue their discussions. Maddalo is naturally still in bed, and there is an apparently unimportant interlude while Julian plays with Maddalo’s little girl, an obvious and charming portrait of Allegra. Here the scene is described with remarkable simplicity and directness of feeling. It is the product of intense artistic control, and the figure of the little girl is placed with deceptive ease, for she is to play a major part in the resolution of the poem.

  The following morn was rainy, cold and dim:

  Ere Maddalo arose, I called on him,

  And whilst I waited with his child I played;

  A lovelier toy sweet Nature never made,

  A serious, subtle, wild, yet gentle being,

  Graceful without design and unforeseeing,

  With eyes — Oh speak not of her eyes! — which seem

  Twin mirrors of Italian Heaven, yet gleam

  With such deep meaning, as we never see

  But in the human countenance: with me

  She was a special favourite: I had nursed

  Her fine and feeble limbs when she came first

  To this bleak world; and she yet seemed to know

  On second sight her ancient playfellow,

  Less changed than she was by six months or so;

  For after her first shyness was worn out

  We sate there, rolling billiard balls about,

  When the Count entered.28

  The child does not appear again until the final fifty lines of the poem; but Shelley places her here carefully in the thematic development of the work, as a kind of hostage both against fortune and against the purely intellectual side of Julian and Maddalo’s argument.

  This debate now continues at the palace, when Julian takes up the thread of their previous night’s talk. He again attacks religion and forms of faith which ‘break a teachless nature to the yoke’, and continues to argue that progress is within the control of the individual, whose mind remains free and open.

  ‘See

  This lovely child, blithe, innocent and free;

  She spends a happy time with little care,

  While we to such sick thoughts subjected are

  As came on you last night — it is our will

  That thus enchains us to permitted ill —

  We might be otherwise — we might be all

  We dream of happy, high, majestical.

  Where is the love, beauty, and truth we seek

  But in our mind? . . .’29

  As it stands, Julian’s argument is obviously weak, and his recourse to the example of the child is a very superficial kind of Wordsworthian platitude. Maddalo replies briskly and to the point: ‘You talk Utopia.’ Julian rejoins that these things remain to be tried: ‘So taught those kings of old philosophy Who reigned, before Religion made men blind.’ Adroitly refusing to embroil himself in an argument about Greek and Christian ethics, Maddalo again replies realistically that Julian can make ‘such a system refutation-tight As far as words go’, but that individual lives do not in fact work out like that. To illustrate his argument, Maddalo introduces the fourth major figure in the poem, the Maniac:

  ‘. . . I knew one like you

  Who to this city came some months ago,

  With whom I argued in this sort, and he

  Is now gone mad . . . .’

  With this dry introduction, Maddalo once again whirls Julian into his gondola and they sail off through the ‘fast-falling rain and high-wrought sea
’ to visit the asylum which Maddalo had pointed out the evening before.

  The poem now reaches its central section, and the whole texture of the verse and the argument is imperceptibly and cunningly transformed. The violence of the weather and the sea begins to carry over into the human landscape, and the language abandons its fine-drawn austerity of style:

  We disembarked. The clap of tortured hands,

  Fierce yells and howlings and lamentings keen,

  And laughter where complaint had merrier been,

  Moans, shrieks, and curses, and blaspheming prayers

  Accosted us. We climbed the oozy stairs

  Into an old courtyard.30

  They are taken to the Maniac who is in an upper chamber, sitting at a piano by the open window, while the wind blows in spatters of rain and spray from the laguna, and disorders his long hair. He is leaning his head against a book of music. His hands are twined together and he mutters quietly to himself. For the next 200 lines, the poem consists of his monologue, which is broken off several times, and recommences without apparent logic or connection. He talks and shouts and weeps. In his prose preface, Shelley defined with deliberate brevity the role of the Maniac, in which the lack of personal history or personal characterization is emphasized.

  Of the Maniac I can give no information. He seems, by his own account, to have been disappointed in love. He was evidently a very cultivated and amiable person when in his right senses. His story, told at length, might be like many other stories of the same kind: the unconnected exclamations of his agony will perhaps be found a sufficient comment for the text of every heart.31

  Maddalo’s commentary on the Maniac reinforces this mysterious lack of information. ‘Alas, what drove him mad?’ asks Julian:

  ‘I cannot say:

  A lady came with him from France, and when

  She left him and returned, he wandered then

  About yon lonely isles of desert sand

  Till he grew wild — he had no cash or land

  Remaining, — the police had brought him here —

  Some fancy took him and he would not bear

  Removal; so I fitted up for him

  Those rooms beside the sea, to please his whim,

  And sent him busts and books and urns for flowers . . .’32

  The Maniac’s monologue makes an extraordinarily powerful and effective contract with the coolness, the disinterestedness, of the rest of the poem. This effect is carefully planned by Shelley. The reader is at once aware that in the asylum he is moving into a region which is, strictly speaking, paranormal. The scenario has already warned him of this. The monologue is saturated with ideas of pathological sexual disturbance: sadistic torture, necrophilia, self-castration, suicide, revulsion from familiarity without love. Yet none of these ideas are pursued or explained by the Maniac: they bubble up, burst and subside.

  ‘That you had never seen me — never heard

  My voice, and more than all had ne’er endured

  The deep pollution of my loathed embrace —

  That your eyes ne’er had lied love in my face —

  That, like some maniac monk, I had torn out

  The nerves of manhood by their bleeding root

  With mine own quivering fingers, so that ne’er

  Our hearts had for a moment mingled there

  To disunite in horror — these were not

  With thee, like some suppressed and hideous thought

  Which flits athwart our musings, but can find

  No rest within a pure and gentle mind . . .’33

  The Maniac never entirely gives way to these feelings at any point; he always insists in brief lucid moments that he intends no harm, that he casts away ‘All human passions, all revenge, all pride’. Yet his resolution and his lucidity never lasts for very long, and in the end he exhausts himself, breaks off, smiles sadly, and goes to lie down on a sofa where he falls into a heavy sleep, disturbed only by weeping. The effect of the whole passage is brilliant and traumatic. The Maniac is like a dream that visits Julian and Maddalo simultaneously, and some of what he says refers indirectly to their own conscious or waking experience. Rather than a real character or person, he is part of a person, the part which lies below the threshold of consciousness. It is symbolic that he is both found and left asleep by his visitors. Shelley stresses in the preface that the Maniac’s experience is exemplary, ‘a comment for the text of every heart’.

  Julian’s reaction to the Maniac is that he never was ‘impressed so much’, and that for both of them ‘our argument was quite forgot’. They return to the palace, and talk till dawn about the meaning of what they have witnessed. They are inconclusive. Julian observes that the root of the Maniac’s suffering seemed to come from ‘some deadly change in love Of one vowed so deeply that he dreamed not of’. Maddalo recalls the power of his language, ‘the colours of his mind seemed yet unworn’:

  And I remember one remark which then

  Maddalo made. He said: ‘Most wretched men

  Are cradled into poetry by wrong,

  They learn in suffering what they teach in song.’34

  The final section of the poem draws rapidly to its conclusion. There is another radiant description of the Venice which so attracted Julian, the gondolas, the buildings and statues, Maddalo’s conversation. Julian wishes to stay, but he is called back to London. He is unable to put into action a plan to help the Maniac, but he describes it. He is now thinking in terms of human psychology far more than philosophic argument:

  . . . 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 . . .35

  The underground cavern or labyrinth was to recur again and again in Shelley’s Italian writing, as an image of the spiritual quest for the truth about oneself.

  The poem ends with Julian’s return, years later, to Venice. Maddalo had travelled far away in the mountains of Armenia, and ‘his dog was dead’. But the little girl has grown up into a fine young woman, ‘Like one of Shakespeare’s’, and she retells how the Maniac was visited again by his lover and then died. ‘And was this not enough? They met — they parted.’ The calm, beautiful, courtly presence of the girl comes through strongly and positively as a human value opposed to the pathological ravings of the Maniac. Yet there is no final confirmation at the end, for the Maniac’s sufferings are not explained or justified. The note is elegiac, austere and confidential, and Shelley breaks off the poem with effective suddenness, giving no moral or conclusion overtly.

  I urged and questioned still, she told me how

  All happened — but the cold world shall not know.36

  Of Shelley’s major poems, ‘Julian and Maddalo’ remains perhaps the most subtle, the most oblique and the most suggestive in terms of psychological analysis. It is also the poem in which human characterization and the expressiveness of the Italian landscape are most delicately and harmoniously fused. The skill, lightness, elegance and emotional control of the verse indicate that he had reached a new level of maturity.

  The subsequent history of the manuscript is strange, as with nearly all Shelley’s best works. Although he sent a fair copy to Hunt for printing in the Examiner at the end of the year, and several times wrote to Ollier in 1820, suggesting how it might be published both separately and with other poems, it was not in fact printed until after his death.37 In August 1819 he wrote to Hunt introducing the poem as ‘in some degrees consistent with your own ideas of the manner in which Poetry ought to be written. I have employed a certain familiar style of language to express the actual way in which people talk with each other . . . .’ Of Julian, Maddalo and the Maniac he wrote: ‘two of the characters you will recognise; the third is also in some degree a painting f
rom nature, but, with respect to time and place, ideal’. Hunt did nothing.

  In Florence, a year later, in 1819, he was planning to use the Venetian poem as a model for further work: ‘I mean to write three other poems, the scenes of which will be laid at Rome, Florence, and Naples, but the subjects of which will all be drawn from dreadful or beautiful realities, as that of this was.’38 So, although it remained unpublished, the poem came to represent for Shelley an important standard of ‘realistic’ writing which was opposed to the general rhetoric and idealistic drift of much of his own until the completion of Prometheus.[2] The poem indeed in its critique of Julian’s idealism — for Shelley a form of self-criticism — and its insistence on the values of psychological understanding, self-knowledge and personal experience, had already reached what was in many ways a far more advanced intellectual position than the Manichean ideology of Prometheus. It is in its human penetration and subtlety of self-discovery that ‘Julian and Maddalo’s’ greatness lies: an achievement for which Shelley had suffered much, and on account of which much suffering was still in store for all of them.

  [1] Dr Polidori was arrested in 1817 for asking a trooper to remove his busby at the opera.

  [2] Beyond Shelley’s lifetime, ‘Julian and Maddalo’ was to have a strong influence on the development of Robert Browning’s best work, especially in the Italian Monologues such as ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’.

  18. The Tombs of Naples: 1818

  Shelley and Elise returned Allegra to the care of the Hoppners, and on Saturday, 31 October 1818, he and Mary took leave of Byron. They were not to meet him again for nearly three years. Elise pressed to return to the Shelley household, and although this was awkward, it was allowed. The party, now consisting of little Willmouse, Milly Shields, Elise and Paolo Foggi, rejoined Claire at Este, and after five days of packing and preparation they set out to travel steadily southwards and take up winter lodgings in Naples. Not caring to keep a personal journal, Shelley began his series of long travel letters to Peacock. They show an eager and unselfconscious delight in the tourism which took his mind off other things, and a steadily increasing eye for the small, telling detail. At a farm north of Ferrara, ‘the country of Pasiphaes’, he counted sixty-three white and dove-grey oxen in their stalls. He noted the strange look of the closed and unpainted window shutters of the farmhouse; the flattened threshing floor still like that described in the Georgics, so that ‘neither the mole nor the toad nor the ant’ could hide in crevices; the heaps of coloured zucki or pumpkins stored for feeding the hogs; and the turkeys and fowls walking free in the yard, ‘& two or three dogs who bark with a sharp hylactism’. The farm-hands had a blunt incivility of manners which had ‘an English air with it, very encouraging to those accustomed to the impudent & polished lying of the inhabitants of the cities’.1