Shelley’s apartments were in the Casa Prinni, the second house on the left of the entrance to the crescent. It had large ground-floor rooms flanking an arched entrance hall, and a back garden planted with oranges and lemons which stretched right down to the banks of the canal.1 Shelley rented the whole house at about thirteen sequins a month, which was not altogether cheap for such a retired situation: ‘I could get others something cheaper & a great deal worse; but if we would write it is requisite to have space.’2 He was to remain relatively peacefully in this retreat until the end of October.
The little household, with an Italian cook Caterina, settled in quickly enough, although Claire was ill shortly after moving, and noted cryptically that she dreamt she saw a ghost.3 The escape to San Giuliano came as a great relief to Shelley. One of his first actions was to unburden his feelings in a long and demolishing letter to Godwin. For this, he spent one day at Pisa consulting with Tatty Tighe in his study among the shelves of sprouting potatoes in glass pots, and then carefully wrote out a five-page draft. He had at last found adequate words for what should perhaps have been said long before he left England: ‘I have given you within a few years the amount of a considerable fortune, & have destituted myself, for the purpose of realising it of nearly four times the amount. Except for the good will which this transaction seems to have produced between you & me, this money, for any advantage that it ever conferred on you, might as well have been thrown into the sea. Had I kept in my own hands this £4 or £5000 & administered it in trust for your permanent advantage I should have been indeed your benefactor. The error however was greater in the man of mature age extensive experience & penetrating intellect than in the crude & impetuous boy. Such an error is seldom committed twice.’
He explained further that his present situation was delicate, and Mary had not been kept fully informed. ‘My affairs are in a state of the most complicated embarrassment: added to which I am surrounded by circumstances in which any diminution of my very limited resources might involve me in personal peril. I fear that you & I are not on such terms as to justify me in exposing to you the actual state of my delicate & emergent situation which the most sacred considerations imperiously require me to conceal from Mary. . . .’ This was a course of concealment that Mary herself had acquiesced in, to spare herself, and through her the baby, pain or ill-health. ‘Your letters from their style & spirit (such is your erroneous notion of taste) never fail to produce an appalling effect on her frame; on one occasion, [united with other circumstances — deleted in draft] agitation of mind produced through her a disorder in the child, similar to that which destroyed our little girl two years ago. . . . On that occasion Mary at my request [gave me the liberty — deleted in draft] authorized me to intercept such letters or information as I might judge likely to disturb her mind.’4 Besides Godwin’s financial importunities, Shelley was here undoubtedly referring to the events of 14–17 June concerning Elena. There is another fragment of a draft which refers to his own severe nephritic pains on that occasion.5
Godwin’s fury on receiving this letter was demonstrated by the long explanation and tirade to which he subjected the Gisbornes in London. There was much discussion of Claire’s folly and Paolo’s villainy, though as far as can be judged this concerned what Maria Gisborne called ‘the old story’ — that is, Byron and Allegra. Whether the Gisbornes in turn told Godwin of Elena Adelaide Shelley seems doubtful. But their good opinion of Shelley was undermined when they returned to Italy.6
After dispatching this letter to Godwin, Shelley decided that it was a suitable moment to fulfil an ambition of two years’ standing, and make his pilgrimage to Monte San Pelegrino above Lucca. Claire and Mary accompanied him as far as the town on Friday, 11 August, where they spent the night at the Croce di Malta. He departed at dawn on Saturday, and was gone for the rest of the weekend. It was the first time he had really got away on his own since leaving Naples in the spring of 1819. The weather was blazingly hot, but he journeyed all the way on foot, and climbed to the little chapel which was sited on the peak of the Monte. He returned exhausted to San Giuliano late on Sunday evening. It was during this solitary expedition that he conceived his long and fantastic poem ‘The Witch of Atlas’.
He began work on it immediately on Monday morning, and it was completed two days later, 16 August. Mary noted the progress of this work in her journal, and the rapidity of composition — more than 200 lines each day — is unmatched by any other work. Shelley himself recorded the speed of the three-day composition in a set of dedicatory verses to Mary, and gave the impression of taking pride in it as a mere feat of skill. The poem has virtually no plot, but loosely recounts the wizardry and mischief of the mysterious Witch, who creates a strange and beautiful hermaphroditic companion, and a magical airship for both of them to travel in, and journeys through the world and through history. Much of the imagery of creative fire, of sailing in air and water, and of electric energy, is skimmed off from Prometheus Unbound. But unlike that poem, there is a deliberate absence of intellectual structure, and the verse has everywhere the air of brilliant improvisation. Especially in its stress on fire and movement and speed of line, ‘The Witch of Atlas’ gives the impression of a poetical aerobatics display.
. . . she would often climb
The steepest ladder of the crudded rack
Up to some beakèd cape of cloud sublime,
And like Arion on the dolphin’s back
Ride singing through the shoreless air; — oft-time
Following the serpent lightning’s winding track,
She ran upon the platforms of the wind,
And laughed to hear the fire-balls roar behind.7
The manuscript of the poem is frequently decorated with sketches of boats under sail.
Mary accurately described it as ‘wildly fanciful, full of brilliant imagery, and disregarding human interest and passion, to revel in the fantastic ideas that [Shelley’s] imagination suggested’.8 In fact she sharply disliked the poem, and criticized Shelley for writing in this way. She felt that it stemmed essentially from a ‘morbid feeling’, and represented a shrinking away from the realities of human passion and social sympathy. Shelley wrote in his dedicatory verse:
How, my dear Mary, — are you critic-bitten
(For vipers kill, though dead) by some review,
That you condemn these verses I have written,
Because they tell no story, false or true?9
Mary’s distaste points towards one of the most interesting features of the poem, the further exploration of the bisexual theme. In this sense the poem does have human and passionate content, but one which Mary did not want to recognize. At the end of his dedication, Shelley warned:
If you unveil my Witch, no priest nor primate
Can shrive you of that sin, — if sin there be
In love, when it becomes idolatry.
Shelley had first consciously met the idea of the hermaphrodite in Aristophanes’ speech in his translation of the Symposium made at the Bagni di Lucca. At Rome he had seen a statue of the hermaphrodite, which was kept at that time in the Palazzo Borghese.10 There had been in fact two hermaphrodite statues in Rome, but one of them, the original Greek work of fifth century BC, had been sold to Napoleon and shipped to the Louvre, where it remains, though removed from the public galleries, to this day. Shelley’s hermaphrodite was a much restored but nevertheless magnificent Hellenistic copy, exquisitely reworked by Andrea Bergondi.11 The hermaphrodite is asleep, lying on its belly, with the serene face cradled on its right arm and exposed to the viewer. The large eyes are closed, and the elegant curling hair is tied in with a simple band. The sculptor has cunningly arranged the disposition of the body so that the upper torso is slightly raised to reveal one breast, while the body below the waist is twisted on the right hip and the shapely legs drawn up, to concentrate the viewer’s attention on a dramatic and lavishly executed pair of curving haunches.
In his poem, the Witch herself creates a hermaphrodi
te. The beautiful bisexual creature is the Witch’s companion and servant, a sort of sorcerer’s apprentice, who symbolizes all the potential energies of Nature, sexual and electric. But for the most part the hermaphrodite remains, like its original marble image in Rome, sleeping; for its freedoms are potential only.
Then by strange art she kneaded fire and snow
Together, tempering the repugnant mass
With liquid love — all things together grow
Through which the harmony of love can pass;
And a fair Shape out of her hands did flow —
A living Image, which did far surpass
In beauty that bright shape of vital stone
Which drew the heart out of Pygmalion.
A sexless thing it was, and in its growth
It seemed to have developed no defect
Of either sex, yet all the grace of both, —
In gentleness and strength its limbs were decked. . . .
And ever as she went, the Image lay
With folded wings and unawakened eyes;
And o’er its gentle countenance did play
The busy dreams, as thick as summer flies,
Chasing the rapid smiles that would not stay. . . .12
The idea of the sleeping potential, symbolized in the hermaphrodite, is brought out towards the end of the poem in the Witch’s interference in human affairs. She conjures out the good or comic impulses which have lain dormant in the characters of the evil or repressed. The Witch performs her ‘magic’ over priests and kings, and soldiers (who dream they are blacksmiths); and above all over lovers who have been restricted by the codes of their society:
And timid lovers who had been so coy,
They hardly knew whether they loved or not,
Would rise out of their rest, and take sweet joy,
To the fulfilment of their inmost thought;
And when next day the maiden and the boy
Met one another, both, like sinners caught,
Blushed at the thing which each believed was done
Only in fancy — till the tenth moon shone. . . .13
Yet here and throughout the poem, the language is only working with intermittent force. The one exception is an extraordinary passage where the Witch exerts her magic on those who are about to die. She creates an eternity of suspended animation for them, as if they were a species of human seed, and the Witch was — as in an earlier phrase, — ‘a horticultural adept’.
For on the night when they were buried, she
Restored the embalmers’ ruining, and shook
The light out of the funeral lamps, to be
A mimic day within that deathy nook;
And she unwound the woven imagery
Of second childhood’s swaddling bands, and took
The coffin, its last cradle, from its niche,
And threw it with contempt into a ditch.
And there the body lay, age after age,
Mute, breathing, beating, warm, and undecaying,
Like one asleep in a green hermitage,
With gentle smiles about its eyelids playing,
And living in its dreams beyond the rage
Of death or life: while they were still arraying
In liveries ever new, the rapid, blind
And fleeting generations of mankind.14
This finely controlled and imagined passage shows a mature transformation, not without a certain irony, of that urge to escape into a world of eternal rebirth which he had exploited sentimentally in the lyrics of July. But ‘The Witch of Atlas’ as a whole remains a light-weight virtuoso piece. For Shelley it served as a release of feelings, a finger-exercise in composition.
In the seclusion of the Casa Prinni, he threw the manuscript aside and turned to a second piece of serious correspondence, this time with Robert Southey. In June, he had written from Pisa to inquire if Southey was really the author of the Quarterly attack of the previous year, and in the course of this letter he managed to insult Southey unnecessarily by accusing him of having ‘abandoned’ the cause to which his early writings were devoted.15 In his reply, the elder poet icily denied the authorship of the review, and then angrily challenged Shelley’s own opinions. ‘. . . Have they not brought immediate misery upon others, and guilt, which is all but irremediable, upon yourself?’ He urged Shelley to turn back to Christianity, and bring himself to ‘a sense of your miserable condition’.16
This was not calculated to soothe Shelley, especially at such a juncture, and he wrote back in furious indignation. ‘You select a single passage out of a life otherwise not only spotless but spent in an impassioned pursuit of virtue, which looks like a blot, merely because I regulated my domestic arrangements without deferring to the notions of the vulgar . . . .’ The issue of the Quarterly was now far removed from Shelley’s mind, but he struck back hard where he knew Southey was most vulnerable. ‘I cannot hope that you will be candid enough to feel, or if you feel, to own, that you have done ill in accusing, even in your mind, an innocent and a persecuted man, whose only real offence is the holding opinions something similar to those which you once held respecting the existing state of society.’17 Memories of the old disagreements at Keswick in 1811, and the old political resentments, had quickly flared up in Shelley’s mind. On 20 August Claire made a fair copy of the letter for Shelley; one suspects that this also was information unsuitable for Mary. Yet Shelley was still not quite past the hope of softening Southey, and he sent immediate instructions to Ollier for copies of The Cenci and Prometheus to be dispatched to Keswick. He also added a postscript to Southey, that at the time of writing he was suffering from agonizing pains in his side.
When this letter eventually reached Great Hall, Southey rose to the occasion as a representative of respectable English society. He had, after all, sacrificed his own writing career to his massive domestic responsibilities. He no longer minced words, but embarked with a businesslike relish on a proper Christian demolition of Shelley’s private life, starting with the expulsion from Oxford, and going on to an inquisition on the merits of Harriet Shelley’s suicide: ‘ask your own heart, whether you have not been the whole, sole and direct cause of her destruction. You corrupted her opinions; you robbed her of her moral and religious principles; you debauched her mind.’ He summarized with dutiful force: ‘you have reasoned yourself into a state of mind so pernicious that your character, with your domestic arrangements, as you term it, might furnish the subject for the drama more instructive, and scarcely less painful, than the detestable story of the Cenci, and this has proceeded directly from your principles. . . . It is the Atheist’s Tragedy.’18 With this, and further urging to the Book of Common Prayer, Southey broke off the correspondence, and it was never resumed on either side. Both men, while consistently signing themselves ‘sincere well-wishers’, had succeeded in deeply wounding each other, for both men had deep causes for secret bitterness and private remorse.
Yet despite these distant thunderings, the Shelley household had surmounted the crisis of June, and the beginning of a regular routine of walks and baths and carriage rides began to have its beneficial effect. Life grew lighter and more relaxed. Claire went over to stay for four days with the Masons and their children at Pisa, and in the course of this visit it was decided that she should go away to the seaside at Livorno for a few weeks. There she could get on with her studies, sea-bathe for her health and enjoy improving correspondence with Mrs Mason. On 24 August, she and the Masons rode back with another English lady, a Miss Field, to spend the festival day of St Bartholomew’s at San Giuliano. The little village was rapidly filling up with people and carriages and farm animals, the windows were hung with bunting, and preparations were being made for the traditional horse-racing through the streets. After the party had arrived at the Casa Prinni, Shelley decided to give a festival reading of one of his political odes. Mary says later that it was the ‘Ode to Liberty’ written the previous spring, but it seems more likely that it was an extract from his
new ‘Ode to Naples’, which he was currently writing about the insurrection in Southern Italy.
As Shelley declaimed, the piazza under their windows gradually filled up with the loud grunting and squealing of pigs brought in for sale at the fair. Finally, the farmyard noises threatened to drown out the whole recitation, and Shelley broke off his reading with a laugh. ‘He compared it to the “chorus of frogs” in the satiric drama of Aristophanes; and, it being an hour of merriment, and one ludicrous association suggesting another, he imagined a political-satirical drama on the circumstances of the day, to which the pigs would serve as chorus.’19 At the end of August he actually began such a drama, and completed it in September. It was called Swellfoot the Tyrant.
In the evening of St Bartholomew’s day, they all went to watch the horseraces, in a thoroughly good mood. A week later Shelley took Claire to Livorno to begin her improving month’s vacation. He remained with her for two days. She probably stayed with Italian friends of the Gisbornes, and possibly even at the Casa Ricci itself. She read Clarissa, did Latin exercises and bathed daily, receiving regular letters from the Casa Silva and Casa Prinni, occasional news of Ravenna and once a long letter from Charles at Vienna. Weekends were frequently spent with the Masons at Pisa, and Shelley usually arrived to take her out for a talk and a walk. They read anxiously the news of the Carbonari campaigns around Naples, and discussed them animatedly.