Shelley: The Pursuit

  At Naples, Mary might well have come to see in Paolo the possible practical solution to their difficulties, and so, no doubt, might Elise. Mary urged them to marry. Shelley on the contrary, would have preferred a more personal and less obviously ‘respectable’ solution, and was extremely unhappy about the match.42 He wanted to keep the child; Mary, who had just lost Clara, could not apparently bear it. But Paolo’s presence tended to force the decision. The gap between Elena’s birth on 27 December 1818 and her registration on 27 February 1819 represents a time while this was still under discussion. Paolo and Elise’s marriage in the third week of January falls at a half-way point.43 One suspects that only at the very moment when the Shelleys finally decided to leave Naples did Mary’s opinion prevail. But Shelley, while leaving the child with its mother and stepfather, decided to have the child registered in his own name, and it is clear from what he wrote later that he occasionally still hoped to bring it back into his household at Pisa.44 The child would have to be registered as Shelley or Foggi to be legitimate; Shelley deliberately chose the first course, leaving himself wide open to Paolo’s later blackmail. Mary says that Elise became an Italian Catholic, and this would explain why the child was baptized.

  Shelley might have agreed to pay Foggi an allowance, and we know that he did indeed have ‘expenses at Naples’.45 In 1820, however, it would seem that Elise herself left the child with the Neapolitan foster parents at Vico Canale. It sickened with ‘a fever of dentition’, and died. Immediately, Foggi could no longer claim an allowance, and then the claim turned to blackmail in June 1820.

  After Elena’s death, Elise must have felt some pangs of guilt and remorse, as Shelley himself so obviously did in his letter to the Gisbornes. So while Paolo’s blackmailing attempts to extort more money logically commenced in June 1820, Elise’s story to the Hoppners was given that summer not for financial gain, like Paolo, but under the influence of her own sense of guilt, and her apparently deep bitterness towards Shelley. Both of these were strong emotional reactions. But more than this, Elise, as the mother of Shelley’s ‘Neapolitan charge’ — or, as he elsewhere called the child, ‘my Neapolitan’ — showed in her story that she was intensely jealous of Claire. She was always closer to Claire than to Mary, and in some senses she seemed to consider herself Claire’s rival for Shelley’s affections, while Mary stood beyond either of them.

  Perhaps Elise genuinely did believe her own story about Claire being Shelley’s mistress. The details of the clandestine birth are perhaps a transference of her own remorseful memory of the birth of Elena. No doubt Shelley did surreptitiously employ and reward a discreet physician and midwife when Elena was born. A midwife’s name appears on the baptism certificate, Gaetana Musto. Moreover Elise told her story to her old employers, the Hoppners, out of guilt and grief and jealousy, not out of any desire to reap a reward. She was not, after all, like Paolo, who knew that the financial value of such scandals lay purely in the fact that it has not yet been disclosed. Elise, in her own way like Shelley, was miserable at being the victim of circumstances. Would she have grieved, any less than Shelley, that her poor child was dead?

  Neither Shelley nor Mary ever saw Elise again, though Elise sometimes applied to Mary and Shelley for money, since Paolo was not supporting her properly. This was done, according to Mary, in a quite innocent and beseeching way, and without a hint of blackmail. But Mary, apparently, disapproved of Shelley answering these requests with help.46

  Three years later, in February and March of 1822, Claire and Elise met in Florence and became intimate once more. For several weeks they were meeting almost every other day.47 At the beginning of this intimacy, on 10 February 1822, Elise talked to Claire about her story to the Hoppners. Claire was deeply upset by certain things Elise told her, and wrote of her ‘miserable spirits’; but it was news of Byron’s attitude to Allegra which apparently caused this. At any rate, Claire’s anger against Elise must have been short-lived, judging from their continued friendship, and suggests that Claire sympathized strongly with her over Elena. Yet Claire made Elise agree to write letters denying an illicit connection between Shelley and Claire, both to Mary and to Mrs Hoppner as a legal weapon against further scandal.[6] But these letters do not mention Elena, who had been dead for two years.

  This then, as far as one can reasonably judge, was the true background to Shelley’s deep misery, ill-health and sometimes suicidal depressions during the winter at Naples of 1818-19. One inference becomes more and more overwhelming as the facts and probabilities of the case slip into place. This inference is that little Elena was more than Elise’s illegitimate child and Shelley’s ‘charge’. It is that when Shelley registered with the Neapolitan authorities as Elena’s father, what he stated and signed was not — as in the case of ‘Maria Padurin’s’ maternity — a convenient falsehood; but, on the contrary, it was a painful and highly inconvenient statement of fact. Elena Adelaide Shelley, that poor little creature of fate, was Shelley’s own illegitimate daughter by the ‘superior’ and sexually experienced woman, Elise Foggi.

  In the very nature of the case, absolute certainty will always remain elusive. In the unlikely event that the papers of the Livornese lawyer del Rosso, who later dealt with Shelley’s allowance for Elena and Paolo Foggi’s persistent blackmail attempts, should eventually be unearthed, it is still doubtful if further light could be thrown on the matter. That Shelley, with the history of his previous relations with Elizabeth Hitchener, and the Boinvilles, not to mention Claire Clairmont herself, should have become deliberately or accidentally embroiled with Elise seems, on reflection, not altogether surprising; nor was it to be the last of such interludes in Italy. It is perhaps disconcerting that such a tract of his emotional life should be so largely — yet so understandably — obscured from view, although there is the continuous strand of ambiguous elusions in his poetry from ‘Julian and Maddalo’ onwards which seems to refer to his sense of guilt and misery. Yet it is the very persistence of otherwise inexplicable elements in his story which are finally convincing: the persistence of Shelley’s deep personal interest and involvement with the child; the persistence of Foggi’s blackmail which otherwise could have been so rapidly disarmed and, on a signal occasion in 1821, publicly disclaimed; the persistence of Elise’s bitterness towards Shelley; and finally the persistent sense of some continuing and radical rupture in the relationship between Shelley and Mary. The very fact of the illegitimate child would have immeasurably deepened the wound already opened by little Clara’s death at Venice. But that their old friend and companion Elise was the child’s mother, and even worse, that the untrustworthy Paolo Foggi had been drawn inextricably into such an intimate emotional entanglement, sufficiently explains the stresses and tensions within the household in December, and in January 1819. Even if this is not the whole story, it is enough.[7]

  By the end of January 1819, Shelley at least was struggling hard with his illness and depression, and beginning to take regular rides through Naples and into the surrounding countryside. He again visited the galleries, though the standing and walking still exhausted him. He heaved his mind away from his own troubles to write to Peacock with a good attempt at his old political satire. ‘I am writing as from among sepulchres, you from the habitations of men yet unburied; tho the Sexton Castlereagh after having dug their grave stands with his spade in his hand evidently doubting whether he will not be forced to occupy it himself.’ Peacock’s news from England concerning the increasing political tension served at first as a relief and diversion; but slowly it began to rouse Shelley to a political consciousness that had been slumbering for virtually twelve months. This arousal was to be the keynote of his great work in 1819.

  Shelley inquired if it was Cobbett’s excellent influence he detected in the refusal of juries to convict in four government prosecutions over forged paper money, and added majestically: ‘Cobbet is a fine [popular hymn-writer] — does his influence increase or diminish? What a pity that so powerful a genius should be combine
d with the most odious moral qualities.’48 He fed Peacock European political news, especially the first rumours of a Catalan rising against the Spanish monarchy. Then he began to consider his own writing with respect to the political movements for liberation that seemed to be in the wind. Apropos of his first act of Prometheus, which Mary had clean-copied just before Christmas, he wrote one of his most deliberate literary declarations of the year.

  I consider Poetry very subordinate to moral & political science, & if I were well, certainly I should aspire to the latter; for I can conceive a great work, embodying the discoveries of all ages, & harmonizing the contending creeds by which mankind have been ruled. Far from me is such an attempt & I shall be content by exercising my fancy to amuse myself & perhaps some others, & cast what weight I can into the right scale of that balance which the Giant (of Arthegall) holds.49

  Shelley was here recalling a conversation he had once had with Peacock in which he interpreted Sir Arthegall’s iron-man Talus, in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, as the brute force of repressive government. The Giant on the other hand he regarded as the radical and popular protagonist, and it was with the Giant that Shelley sided.[8]

  Thoughts of Castlereagh, and rumours of a change in Liverpool’s administration — for the Duke of Wellington had been brought into the Cabinet in 1818, and among liberals there was growing fear of a military dictatorship — brought Shelley’s attention back for a moment to his own problems: ‘To what does it amount?’ he asked Peacock, ‘for besides my natural interest in it, I am on the watch to vindicate my most sacred rights invaded by the Chancery.’ The birth of Elena Shelley had set him thinking once more about Ianthe and Charles.

  The image that he had conjured up of Sexton Castlereagh standing over graves lingered in Shelley’s mind, and combined grotesquely with other images peculiar to his residence at Naples, to produce the first and one of the most violent of his own popular hymns on the state of political oppression in England. This appears to be the first time Shelley had returned to the genre since his pastiche of Coleridge in 1812, ‘The Devil’s Walk’. It is interesting that it was probably thoughts of Cobbett which brought him back to a style of writing which through this year he made peculiarly and brilliantly his own. The poem that Shelley now sketched is venomous in tone, livid with hatred and yet perfectly controlled in its rhythms. The short balladic stanzas roll out flatly in the first three lines and then plunge home through the last two with a single long murderous thrust. This control, together with the exploitation of dissonance and half-rhyme to set up a continual humming and whining among the vowels is characteristic of the mature Shelley and produces a grim undercurrent of sound like a kind of tribal keening. The poem is nothing if not savage. ‘Lines Written During the Castlereagh Administration’:

  Corpses are cold in the tomb;

  Stones on the pavement are dumb;

  Abortions are dead in the womb,

  And their mothers look pale — like the death-white shore

  Of Albion, free no more.

  Her sons are as stones in the way —

  They are masses of senseless clay —

  They are trodden, and move not away —

  The abortion with which she travaileth

  Is Liberty, smitten to death.

  Then trample and dance, thou Oppressor!

  For thy victim is no redresser;

  Thou art sole lord and possessor

  Of her corpses, and clods, and abortions — they pave

  Thy path to the grave . . . .

  Ay, marry thy ghastly wife!

  Let Fear and Disquiet and Strife

  Spread thy couch in the chamber of Life!

  Marry Ruin, thou Tyrant! and God be thy guide

  To the bed of the bride!50

  Thoughts of tombs and sepulchres took Shelley back to the pre-Christmas expedition to Pompeii, and using John Eustace’s A Classical Tour for his guidebook, he carefully reconstructed their visit for Peacock’s benefit. Recalling the return along the road of Neapolitan tombs, with the long shadows of sunset and a chill evening wind stirring, he forgot the guidebook and threw off almost casually to Peacock perhaps the best piece of prose he ever wrote in Italy. It is steeped in the elegiac imagery that was to fill his poems at a later date, and yet radiant with that sense of Greek energy and harmony which was his greatest source of intellectual hope. His anger against the Christian and imperial cultures of guilt and violence which had threatened to destroy the Greek ideal, is also powerfully present.

  These tombs were the most impressive things of all. The wild woods surround them on either side and along the broad stones of the paved road which divides them, you hear the late leaves of autumn shiver & rustle in the stream of the inconstant wind as it were like the step of ghosts. The radiance and magnificence of these dwellings of the dead, the white freshness of the scarcely finished marble, the impassioned or imaginative life of the figures which adorn them contrast strangely with the simplicity of the houses of those who were living when Vesuvius overwhelmed their city . . . . I now understand why the Greeks were such great Poets, & above all I can account, it seems to me, for the harmony the unity the perfection the uniform excellence of all their works of art. They lived in a perpetual commerce with external nature and nourished themselves upon the spirit of its forms. Their theatres were all open to the mountains & the sky. Their columns, that ideal type of a sacred forest, with its roof of interwoven tracery admitted the light & wind, the odour & the freshness of the country penetrated the cities. Their temples were mostly upaithric; & the flying clouds the stars or the deep sky were seen above. O, but for that series of wretched wars which terminated in the Roman conquest of the world, but for the Christian religion which put a finishing stroke to the ancient system; but for those changes which conducted Athens to its ruin, to what an eminence might not humanity have arrived!51

  This was a statement both of a poetical and a political credo, and it was for this direct and personal understanding of the classical world that Shelley had come to Italy.[9] His stay at Naples, disastrous and terrible in many other respects, nevertheless added this new dimension to his philosophy and provided him with the fundamental sense of the reality of Hellenic ideals and impulses from which the final stage of his writing was to be generated.

  By February, a sense of movement started slowly and painfully to penetrate the Shelley household once more, and Shelley began organizing expeditions again. They all went to admire the wild water-birds on the Lago d’Agnano, and made two day-trips to the royal chase of the Caccia d’Astroni, with its pine-fringed lakes and forest of massive oaks engulfed in ‘purple darkness like an Italian midnight’. These were a success, and on the 23rd of the month he hired a calèsse, with two lively black horses, one running on free-harness in the Italian style, and drove sixty miles south to the Etruscan remains of Paestum. Shelley included in the party a young Englishman, Charles MacFarlane, who remembered years later how fast Shelley drove and how the wind and speed brought a flush to his pale cheeks.52

  On this expedition they slept at Salerno, and rising well before dawn the next day drove rapidly along the shore road. ‘It was utterly dark, except when the long line of wave burst with a sound like thunder beneath the starless sky and cast up a kind of mist of cold white lustre.’ A broken bridge stopped the carriage seven miles outside the city, but Shelley ordered everyone out and they walked along the muddy road through the maremma, collecting bunches of huge, sweet-smelling violets until they reached the three temples. He pointed out to MacFarlane the way in which the yellow fluted columns were carefully slimmed towards the top, so as to produce an independent scale of perspective, ‘not that this symmetry diminishes your apprehension of their magnitude, but that it overpowers the idea of relative greatness’.53 On the return journey they stopped off at Tore Annunziata where MacFarlane was amazed to see Shelley leaping into a macaroni factory and watching with wild delight and equal attention the mechanical plunging of one of the pasta-pressing levers. Outsid
e they were besieged by beggars, and Shelley emptied his pockets of loose scudi. MacFarlane, hardly knowing what to expect next and deeply impressed by this flamboyant gesture of generosity, remarked feelingly to Shelley on the wretched condition of the Neapolitan poor. Shelley fixed him with his sudden earnest stare and observed that they at least had physical freedom. ‘I had ten times rather be a Neapolitan beggar than an English artisan or maid-of-all-work.’54 The calèsse was driven furiously back into Naples, calling in at Pompeii on the way to hear Vesuvius rumble.

  The refreshment of this journey now decided Shelley that it was time to leave Naples, and move northwards with the spring, to Rome again. A last day was spent in the studii re-examining statues and paintings. He was both fascinated and repelled by Michelangelo’s study for the Last Judgement, which was in the royal collection, and commented on it with loaded atheistical humour. Moses was only less monstrous than his historical prototype; Christ was in an attitude of haranguing the assembly and showing signs of ‘common place resentment’; the heavenly host looked very like ‘ordinary people’, and those in Purgatory were ‘half-suspended in that Mahomet-coffin kind of attitude which most moderate Christians I believe expect to assume’. Only Hell was truly impressive as every step towards it ‘approximates to the region of the artist’s exclusive power . . . . Hell & Death are his real sphere.’ Shelley observed the devils and the damned, writhing in their knotted serpents, with a connoisseur’s eye, and concluded: ‘a kind of Titus Andronicus in painting — but the author surely no Shakespeare’. Thinking of the Inferno, he added the thoughtful observation: ‘What is terror without a contrast with & a connection with loveliness? How well Dante understood this secret.’55 He himself was to try it in a later poem on one of Leonardo’s pictures, the Medusa.