Mary Shelley to Shelley.

Mary Shelley to Mrs. Hoppner.

Shelley showed this letter to Byron and asked for the address of Hoppner, but Byron begged to be allowed to send it himself.

“The Hoppners,” he said, “had extracted a promise from me not to speak to you of this affair; in openly confessing that I have not kept my promise I must observe some form. That is why I wish to send the letter myself. My observations, besides, will give more weight to it.”

Shelley readily consented and gave the letter to his host. Mary never received an answer.

⁂

The important question that Byron wished to discuss with Shelley was the fate of Allegra in case he—Byron—should leave Ravenna. Countess Guiccioli wished to go to Switzerland; Byron, who preferred Tuscany, begged Shelley to write to the Countess to describe life in Florence and Pisa in such attractive fashion that she would agree to go to one or the other.

Shelley had never seen his friend’s mistress, but he was so used to be asked to intervene in the affairs of his acquaintance that he did not hesitate to write the letter asked, and it was so vigorous that it carried the day. It was suddenly decided that Byron and the Countess should join the Shelleys at Pisa. As to Allegra, Byron agreed to take her also. Claire not being there, he saw no reason for not doing so.

Before leaving Ravenna, Shelley went to see the child at the Convent of Bagna-Cavallo. He found her taller, but also more delicate and paler. Her lovely black hair fell in curls over her shoulders. She appeared in the midst of her companions as a being of a finer and nobler race. A kind of contemplative seriousness seemed to overlie her former vivacity.

She was shy at first, but Shelley having given her a gold chain which he brought from Ravenna, she became more friendly. She led him to the convent garden, running and skipping so quickly that he could scarcely follow her; she showed him her little bed, her chair. He asked her what he should say to her mama.

“Che mi manda un baccio e un bel vestituro.”

“E come voi il vestituro sia fatto?”

“Tutte di seta e d’oro.”

And to her father:

“Che venga farmi un visitino e che porta seco la mammina.”

A difficult message to transmit to her noble father.

The dominant trait of the child seemed to Shelley to be vanity. Her education was defective, but she could recite a great many prayers by heart, spoke of Paradise, dreamed of it, and knew long lists of saints. This was the sort of training that Byron desired.

Great excitement such as travelling royalties always arouse reigned in the Pisan circle at the expected arrival of the Pilgrim. Mary, at Shelley’s request, had taken for him the Palazzo Lanfranchi, stateliest on the Lung’ Arno. Helped by the Williamses, she had done what she could to put this ancient palace in order. The vanguard arrived in the persons of the Guiccioli and her father, Count Gamba; the Shelleys gave them a cordial welcome. The Countess was an agreeable surprise. “She is a very pretty, sentimental, innocent Italian,” Shelley wrote, “who, if I know anything of human nature and my Byron, will hereafter have plenty of opportunity to repent her rashness.”

When Don Juan himself followed, all Pisa was at the windows to see the English Devil and his menagerie. The procession was well worth seeing; five carriages, six men-servants, nine horses, dogs, monkeys, peacocks, and ibises, all in line. The Shelleys were a little anxious as to what Byron would think of the palazzo, but fortunately it pleased him. He said he liked these old places dating back to the Middle Ages. In reality it dated to the sixteenth century, and was said to have been built from designs by Michael Angelo, but the noble lord always mixed up hopelessly architectural styles. The dark and damp cellars in particular delighted him. He spoke of them as dungeons and subterranean cells, and had cushions taken down so that he might sleep there.

He became at once the social centre of the Pisan circle, while Shelley remained its moral centre. Byron was visited from curiosity and admiration; Shelley from sympathy. Shelley got up early and read Goethe, Spinoza or Calderon until midday; then he was off to the pine-woods, where he worked in solitude until evening. Byron got up at midday and, after a light breakfast, went for a ride, or to practise pistol-shooting. In the evening he visited the Guiccioli, and coming home at eleven, would often work until two or three in the morning. Then in a state of feverish cerebral excitement, he would go to bed, sleep badly, and remain in bed half the following day.

The English in Pisa made a dead set at him. Even the most Puritan amongst them could not be severe on an authentic lord who brought to them on foreign soil so delightful an epitome of London’s Vanity Fair. The pleasure he took in giving scandal, what was it but a mark of orthodox respect? If indifference is justly considered an offence, surely defiance must be accepted as a token of humility? And was it not patent that he could not exist without going into society, paying court to women, accepting dinners and returning them? He met with the greatest indulgence. But when he tried to win the same for Shelley, the resistance was thoroughly British. In society Shelley was bored and did not hide it. In questions of morality it was easy to guess that he put the Spirit before the Letter, that he believed in Redemption rather than in Original Sin. Faith in the perfectibility of man is naturally the most heinous of crimes, since if believed in, it would force one to work for man’s perfectibility. The mere smell of it makes society fly to arms for its destruction. All “nice” women treated the Shelleys as pariahs and outcasts.

Shelley laughed at this, preferring a thousand times the cool fresh air of night to the hot and smoky atmosphere of card-rooms. But Mary hankered to go everywhere. There was a certain Mrs. Beauclerc, gayest of English ladies in Pisa, who gave balls, “being afflicted,” as Byron said, “with a litter of seven daughters all at the age when these animals are obliged to waltz for their livelihood.” Mary’s fixed idea was to be invited to one of these balls. “Everybody goes to them,” she said. Shelley, distressed, looked up at the sky, “Everybody! Who is this mythical monster? Have you ever seen it, Mary?”

To win the favour of “everybody” she even went to Church Service, but the parson preached against Atheists, and kept looking at her in such a marked manner that, in spite of her desire to conform, her dignity as a wife prevented her from ever going again.

All these social worries, balls and dinner parties, seemed to Shelley of an incredible vulgarity. When he was a boy of twenty, he had judged fashionable life as criminal, now it appeared to him contemptible, which was much more serious. To escape from Mary’s absurd reproaches and regrets, he would take refuge with the Williamses. There he found anew the harmonious and affectionate atmosphere that was essential to him. Edward Williams had a gay, generous nature in which there was nothing petty. Jane’s grace and sweetness, the gentleness of her movements, the soothing beauty of her voice, were as reposeful and pleasant as some delightful garden. Perhaps in his youth she would have pleased Shelley less. Then he dreamed always of heroic qualities in women, but to-day he asked from them the gift of forgetfulness rather than courage and strength.

Jane sang, and her voice carried him momentarily away from his tragic memories, and the chilly rectitude of his home. Just as formerly, when Harriet wounded him, and he read in Mary’s eyes all the consolation they promised him, so now he contemplated in Jane’s an image of the Antigone whom he had surely known and loved in a previous existence.

But he no longer considered it necessary to destroy in order to rebuild, to abandon Mary in order to fly with Jane. She was married to a good fellow, whose friend he wished loyally to remain, and it was necessary also to consider the feelings of Mary, poor unhappy woman. He was in love with Jane, but it was an immaterial love, without hope, and almost without desire.

She lent herself cleverly to the romantic business, would pass her hand through his hair, smooth his forehead, try to cure his sadness by her personal magnetism. She and her husband were as a marvellous fountain of friendship, at which a poet, weary of suffering, could cool his fever. Jane and Edward were Ferdinand and Miranda, the splendid, princely couple, and Shelley was their faithful Ariel. . . . Round the happy lovers flitted a captive and guardian Spirit serving their will and doing his spiriting gently.

The Williamses had often spoken to Shelley of one of their friends, Trelawny, an extraordinary man, corsair and pirate, who at twenty-eight had already led a life of adventure all the world over, on land as well as on sea. He now desired ardently to be admitted to the Pisa circle, and he overwhelmed the Williamses with letters: “If I come, shall I be able to know Shelley? Above all, shall I be able to know Byron? Is it possible to approach him?”

Williams, in daily intercourse with the two Poets, no longer held them in any awe, so he replied with a touch of impatience, “Of course you will see them. Shelley is the simplest of men. . . . As to Byron, that will depend entirely on yourself.”

Trelawny reached Pisa late one evening and went at once to the Tre Palazzi on the Lung’ Arno where the Williamses and the Shelleys lived on different stories under the same roof. He and the Williamses were in animated conversation when he perceived in the passage near the open door a pair of glittering eyes steadily fixed on his. Jane going to the doorway laughingly said, “Come in, Shelley, it’s only our friend Tre just arrived.”

Shelley glided in, blushing like a girl, and holding out his two hands gave the sailor’s a warm pressure. Trelawny looked at him with surprise. It was hard to believe that this flushed and artless face could be that of the genius and rebel, reviled as a monster in England, and whom the Lord Chancellor had deprived of his rights as a father. Shelley, on his side, admired Trelawny’s bold, wild face, raven-black moustache, handsome half-Arab type. Both of them were so astounded they could find nothing to say. To relieve their embarrassment Jane asked Shelley what book he had in his hand.

His face brightened and he answered briskly: “Calderon’s Magico Prodigioso. I am translating some passages in it.”

“Oh, read it to us!”

Immediately Shelley, shoved off from the shore of commonplace incidents that could not interest him, began to translate from the open book, in so masterly a manner with such perfection of form that Trelawny no longer doubted his identity.

A dead silence followed the reading. Trelawny looked up and seeing no one asked, “Where is he?”

“Who?” said Jane. “Shelley? Oh, he comes and goes like a spirit no one knows when or where.”

The next day it was Shelley himself who took Trelawny to call on Byron. Here the surroundings were very different. A large marble hall, a giant staircase, powdered footmen and surly dogs. Trelawny, like every one else, saw in Byron’s external appearance all the traits with which imagination endows genius, but the great man’s conversation struck him as commonplace. He seemed too to be playing a part, and an out-of-date one—that of a rake-hell of the Regency. He told stories about actors, boxers and hard-drinkers, and of how he had swum the Hellespont. Of this exploit he was very proud.

At three the horses were brought round. After riding for a couple of hours, the party dismounted at a small podere, pistols were sent for, a cane was stuck into the ground behind the house and a piece of money placed in a slit at the top of the cane. Byron, Shelley and Trelawny fired at fifteen paces, and their firing was pretty equal. Each time the cane or the coin was hit by one or the other. Trelawny was pleased to see that despite his feminine appearance, Shelley could hold his own with men.

On the way back they talked poetry, and Trelawny cited a couplet from Don Juan as an example of felicitous rhyming. Byron, won over, brought his horse round to trot beside him.

“Confess now,” said he, “you expected to find me a Timon of Athens or a Timur the Tartar, and you’re surprised to find a man of the world—never in earnest—laughing at all things mundane?”

Then he muttered as to himself:

⁂

Trelawny returned with Shelley and Mary. “How different Byron is to anything one expects of him!” said he. “There’s no mystery about him at all. On the contrary he talks too freely, and says things he had much better not say. He seems as jealous and impulsive as a woman, and maybe is more dangerous.”

“Mary,” said Shelley, “Trelawny has found out Byron already. How stupid we were—how long it took us.”

“The reason is,” said Mary, “that Trelawny lives with the living, and we live with the dead.”

The sailor who had come to Pisa to admire two great men found that it was he, on the contrary, who was admired by them. It is true that when Trelawny was absent, Byron said of him: “If we could get him to wash his hands and not to tell lies, we might make a gentleman of him,” but when he was present Byron treated him with the greatest respect. Like all artists, Byron and Shelley wrote in order to console themselves for not living, and a man of action appeared to these two men of dreams as a strange and enviable phenomenon.

Shelley consulted Trelawny as to nautical terms, and drew with him, on the sandy shores of the Arno, keels, sails, and sea-charts. “I’ve missed my vocation,” said he. “I ought to have been a sailor.”

“A man who neither smokes nor swears can never be a sailor,” Trelawny told him.

Byron, an imaginary corsair, would have liked to learn from a real corsair the ways and customs of the brotherhood, and did his utmost in Trelawny’s company to talk in cynical and bravado fashion. Trelawny, quick to perceive his influence over Byron, tried to make use of it in the service of Shelley.

“You know,” said he as they rode together one day, “that you might help Shelley a good deal at small cost by a friendly word or two in your next work, such as you have given to other writers of much less merit.”

“All trades have their secrets,” Byron answered. “If we crack up a popular author, he repays us in the same coin, capital and interest. But Shelley! A bad investment. . . . Who reads the Snake? . . . Besides, if he cast off the slough of his mystifying metaphysics, he would want no puffing.”

“But why do your London friends treat him so cavalierly? They rarely notice him when they meet him at your place. Yet he is as well-born and bred as any of them. What are they afraid of?”

Byron smiled and whispered in Trelawny’s ear:

“Shelley is not a Christian.”

“Are they?”

“Ask them.”

“If I met the Devil at your table,” said Trelawny, “I should treat him as a friend of yours.”

The Pilgrim looked at him keenly to see if there were a double meaning, then moving his horse up nearer said in a low voice of admirably acted fear and respect:

“The Devil is a Royal Personage.”

⁂

With the Williamses, Trelawny was more outspoken. The three of them formed the chorus to the tragedy; knowing they were not made for the chief parts, they took pleasure in commenting the acting of those who were.

“One might imagine,” said Trelawny, “that Byron is jealous of Shelley. Yet Murray is obliged to call on the police to protect his premises every time he publishes a new canto of Childe Harold, while poor Shelley hasn’t got ten readers. Byron has high birth, riches, beauty, glory, love . . .”

“Yes,” Williams interrupted, “but Byron is the slave to his passions and to any woman who is at all decided. Shelley in his nutshell of a boat floats in mid-stream on the Arno, and refuses to let it carry him away. His ideas are well-grounded, he holds a doctrine. Byron is incapable of holding one for two consecutive hours. He is well aware of this, and can’t forgive himself for it. You see it in the triumphant tone in which he speaks of Shelley’s misfortunes.”

“Byron,” said Jane, “is a spoiled child, but neither he nor Shelley understands men. Shelley loves them too much, and Byron not enough.”

“What’s so terrible about Shelley,” said Trelawny, “is that he has not the smallest instinct of self-preservation. . . . The other day when I was diving in the Arno, he said he so much regretted not being able to swim. ‘Try,’ said I. ‘Put yourself on your back, and you’ll float to begin with.’

“He stripped and jumped in without the smallest hesitation. He sank to the bottom and lay there like a conger-eel, not making the least movement to save himself. He would have drowned if I had not instantly fished him out.”

Jane sighed, knowing how much the thought of suicide haunted Shelley’s mind. He often repeated that nearly every one he had loved had died in this way.

“Yet he doesn’t seem unhappy?”

“No, because he lives in his dreams. But in real life don’t you think he suffers from the impossibility of spreading his ideas, from his books that don’t sell, from his unhappy home life? Death must often appear to him like the awakening from a nightmare.”

“He believes in a future life,” said Trelawny. “Those who call him an Atheist don’t know him. He has often told me that he thinks the French philosophy of the eighteenth century false and pernicious. Plato and Dante have overcome Diderot for him. All the same he doesn’t regret his attitude towards established religion. . . . ‘Why,’ I asked him, ‘do you call yourself an Atheist? It annihilates your chances in this world.’ ‘It is a word of abuse,’ said he, ‘to stop discussion, a painted Devil to frighten fools. I used it to express my abhorrence of superstition. I took it up as a knight takes up a gauntlet, in defiance of injustice. The delusions of Christianity are fatal to genius and originality; they limit thought.’ ”

Thus spoke the chorus in unanimity, and did not perhaps perceive that their adoration of Shelley fed and grew on his misfortunes. We are more inclined to love that which we can pity than that which we must admire. Man finds in the spectacle of unmerited failure flattering arguments which explain his own ill-luck. The blend of admiration and compassion is one of the surest recipes for love. It would have needed much humility of mind for Williams and Trelawny to have the same affection for the brilliant Byron that they had for poor dear Shelley.

While the disciples discoursed in this fashion, the Master worked in the pine-woods outside Pisa. There the sea-winds had thrown down one of the pines, which now hung suspended over a deep pool of glimmering water. Under the lee of the trunk, and nearly hidden, sat the Poet like some wild thing, the way to his retreat pointed out by quantities of scattered papers, covered with the scrawls of unfinished poems.

When in his day-dreaming he forgot everything, even the dinner hour, Mary and Trelawny would go off to find him. Tre had constituted himself cavalier’ sirvente to the forsaken lady, and paid her court in corsair fashion which she, in her honest woman-way, found very amusing.

The loose sand and hot sun soon knocked her up. She sat down under the cool canopy of the pines and Trelawny continued the Poet-chase alone. He found him at last, but so absorbed by some inner vision, that to avoid startling him, Trelawny drew his attention first by the crackling of the pine-needles. He picked up an Æschylus, a Shakespeare, then a scribbled paper: “To Jane with a guitar”: but he could only make out the two first lines:

He hailed him, and Shelley, turning his head, answered faintly, “Hello! Come in.”

“Is this your study?” Trelawny asked.

“Yes,” he answered, “and these trees are my books—they tell no lies. In composing, one’s faculties must not be divided: in a house there is no solitude: a door shutting, a footstep heard, a bell ringing, a voice, causes an echo in your brain, and dissolves your visions.

“Here you have the river rushing by you, the birds chattering . . .

“The river flows by like Time, and all the sounds of Nature harmonize. . . . It is only the human animal that is discordant and disturbs me. Oh, how difficult it is to know why we are here, a perpetual torment to ourselves and to every living thing!”

Trelawny interrupted to tell him that his wife was waiting for him at the edge of the wood. He started up, snatched up his scattered books and papers and thrust them into his hat and jacket pockets, sighing, “Poor Mary! hers is a sad fate. She can’t bear solitude, nor I society—the quick coupled with the dead.”

He began to proffer excuses to her, but she, either to hide her emotions or form a Godwinesque lack of any, began in a bantering tone: “What a wild goose you are, Percy! If my thoughts have strayed from my book, it was to the Opera, and my new dress from Florence, and especially to the ivy wreath so much admired for my hair, and not to you, you silly fellow! When I left home my satin slippers had not arrived. These are serious matters. . . .”

But in Mary’s pleasantries there was always a note which rang false.

Byron, after promising Shelley to bring Allegra to Pisa, arrived without her, and Claire, who had come expressly from Florence to wait about the city in the hopes of seeing the child, was horribly alarmed on learning she had been left in the convent of Bagna-Cavallo. Her Italian friends gave her a sinister description of this convent, set down in the middle of the marshes of the Romagna, and in the most unhealthy climate. The nuns—Capucins—ignored hygiene, fed the children disgracefully, and did not warm them at all. Claire could not see a fire without thinking of her poor little darling who never saw or felt a cheerful blaze.

This high-spirited young woman was brought, through maternal anguish, to an abnegation that was sublime. She wrote to Byron that she would renounce ever seeing Allegra again so long as she lived, if he would consent to put her in a good English School. “I can no longer resist,” she said, “the internal inexplicable feeling which haunts me that I shall never see her any more.”

Byron made no reply. There was some talk amongst Claire’s friends of rescuing Allegra by stratagem, but Shelley begged her to have patience. While agreeing with her as to Byron’s cruelty, he disapproved of thoughtless violence. . . . “Lord Byron is inflexible and you are in his power. Remember, Claire, when you rejected my earnest advice, and checked me with that contempt which I had never merited from you at Milan and how vain is now your regret! This is the second of my sibylline volumes. If you wait for the third, it may be sold at a still higher price.”

He called upon Byron to plead Claire’s cause, but the moment Byron heard her name he gave an impatient shrug of the shoulders. “Oh, women can’t exist without making scenes!” Shelley told him what Claire had heard about the unsuitability of the convent. “What do I know about it?” he said. “I have never been there.” Then, when Claire’s anguish and her fears were described to him, a smile of malicious satisfaction passed over his face.

“I had difficulty in restraining myself from knocking him down,” said Shelley afterwards at Lady Mountcashell’s. “I was furious but I was wrong. He can no more help being what he is than that door can help being a door.”

But old Mr. Tighe told him, “You are quite wrong in your fatalism. If I were to horsewhip that door it would still remain a door, but if Lord Byron were well horsewhipped my opinion is he would become as humane as he is now inhumane. It’s the subserviency of his friends that makes him the insolent tyrant he is.”

On hearing of Shelley’s failure, Claire fell into such despair that Mary and Shelley would not allow her to return to Florence alone amongst strangers. They were going to spend the summer at the sea with the Williamses and they invited her to go with them.

Shelley looked forward with eagerness to this plan. Williams and he had consulted Trelawny about a boat, and he was having one built for them at Genoa by Captain Roberts, a friend of his. They had already christened her the Don Juan in honour of Byron, who had also commissioned Roberts to build him a schooner with a covered-in deck; the Bolivar.

Shelley and Williams saw themselves masters of the Mediterranean. Their wives were less enthusiastic. While the two young men drew charts of the bay upon the sand, Mary and Jane walked together, philosophized, and picked violets by the road-side.

“I hate this boat!” said Mary.

“So do I,” Jane agreed. “But it’s no use saying anything, it would do no good and merely spoil their pleasure.”

So as to put their projects into action, two houses were necessary at the seaside. They thought of the Bay of Spezzia. Shelley and Williams hunted for these houses along its shores in vain. Lord Byron, who wished to join them, must have a palazzo, but he was obliged to give up the idea at once, since even two fishermen’s houses were not to be had. Williams and his wife determined to make one last search; to distract Claire from her troubles they took her with them.

They had left Pisa but a few hours when Lord Byron wrote to Shelley that he had received bad news of Allegra. An epidemic of typhus had broken out in the Romagna. The nuns had taken no preventative measures. The child, already weak and tired, had caught the fever. She was dead. “I do not know,” he added, “that I have anything to reproach in my conduct and certainly nothing in my feelings and intentions towards the dead. But it is a moment when we are apt to think that, if this or that had been done such events might have been prevented—though every day and hour shows us that they are the most natural and inevitable. I suppose that Time will do his usual work—Death has done his.”

The Shelleys went to call on him. He was paler than usual, but as calm as ever.

Two days later the Williamses and Claire came back from their expedition. Shelley, fearing some act of violence on her part if she were told of her misfortune while in Byron’s neighbourhood, resolved to say nothing to her so long as they remained in Pisa.

Williams had not found the two furnished houses he sought. Along the entire coast there was but one house to let, a big unfurnished and abandoned building known as the Casa Magni at Lerici, with a veranda facing the sea and almost over it.

Shelley, who desired above all things to get Claire out of Pisa, decided to take the Casa Magni. The two households must live together. Inconvenient? That didn’t matter. No furniture? Furniture could be sent from Pisa. When Shelley was really determined on a thing, nothing could resist him. “I go forward,” said he, “until I am stopped. But nothing ever does stop me.”

The Custom House officials, the boatmen, raised scores of difficulties. Shelley brushed them aside by the sheer force of a will-power that takes no notice of the outside world, and in a few days the two families were settled in at the seaside.

⁂

Casa Magni has been a Jesuit convent. It was a white house standing almost in the sea, and backing against a forest. A terrace, supported on arches, overhung the superb Bay of Spezzia. The ground floor was unpaved and uninhabitable, being reached by the waves when the sea was rough. It was used simply for storing boat-gear and fishing tackle. The single storey over this was divided into a large hall or saloon, and four small bedrooms which opened from it: two for Shelley and Mary, one for the Williamses and one for Claire. The accommodation was scanty, and the first evening depressing. Down below the waves beat against the rocks with a mournful persistency. The Williamses and Shelleys could think of nothing but Claire, and she, with no idea of the dreadful truth, imagined they were annoyed at having her there with them in a house which was obviously too small. She said so, and offered to go back to Florence. Every one cried out against this. Jane whispered something to Mary, and the two withdrew to the Williamses’ room. Shelley joined them. Claire went towards the room after a moment or two: she found them in eager conversation which instantly ceased as they saw her. Then before a single word had been uttered, she said:

The next day she wrote Byron a terrible letter, which he returned to Shelley complaining of Claire’s harshness towards him, and begging Shelley to let her know he would allow her to make any arrangements she liked for the burial of their child.

She replied with a sombre irony that for the future she left everything to him, and that all she asked was a portrait of Allegra and a piece of her hair. Byron became surprisingly pliable, sent almost at once a very pretty miniature and a dark curl. Claire took leave of her friends at Casa Magni, and went back to Florence to live amongst strangers, who, knowing nothing of her grief, could do nothing to revive it.

Byron decided to have his daughter buried in England, in the church of Harrow-on-the-Hill, where he had been at school, and to place on the wall above the grave a marble tablet with the words:

But the Rector of Harrow and the church-wardens considered it immoral to admit into their church the body of an illegitimate child, more particularly if the epitaph disclosed the name of the father. Allegra was therefore buried outside the church, and with no inscription, which was of course the proper thing to do.

Lord Byron, who had never set foot inside the convent of Bagna-Cavallo while Allegra was alive, went to visit it some time after the child’s death, for now his regrets lent it a romantic and sentimental interest, inspired him with a fine meditation on death and on himself: “I shall go to her, but she shall not return to me.”

The second Samuel was quite right.

Shelley was charmed with Casa Magni. He liked the wild solitude of the place, the forest behind the house, the rocky and wooded bays and the fisherman’s poor villages.

But Mary felt lost and unhappy. Again pregnant, anxious, irritable, she would have much preferred to live in a city near a good doctor. She thought the peasantry uncouth and hateful, their Genovese jargon disgusted her as much as the dialect of Tuscany had pleased her. The presence of Jane Williams, so appreciated by her at Pisa, began to get on her nerves. Housekeeping in common is for women the acid test. There were stupid quarrels over servants and frying pans. Shelley spoke too warmly of Jane’s perfection, and wrote her too divine serenades.

To all Mary’s grumblings he replied with his usual sweetness. With the utmost tenderness he caressed and consoled her. “Poor Mary,” he said of her, “it is the curse of Tantalus to be endowed with such fine qualities, and yet unable to excite the sympathy indispensable to their application to domestic life.”

He knew he could not change her, that her physical condition explained a good deal of her peevishness, which he bore with patient affection. What she constantly reproached him with was his complete indifference to the things that other men thought worth while. She still admired him as much as ever, in him alone she found the strength on which to lean. But why could he never use this strength to his own advantage? He seemed to have no notion of his own interests. His personality was not in his own eyes what theirs is for men in general, something strictly limited by definite boundaries; no, his poured outwards in a sort of luminous fringe melting into that of his friends, and even into that of perfect strangers. As to the customs and cares of human societies he continued to ignore them.

Every month he went to Leghorn to draw his allowance. He brought back a bagful of scudi which he emptied out upon the floor. Then with the fire-shovel he gathered the coins together in a heap, which he flattened out into a sort of cake with his foot. Always with the shovel he cut the cake into two parts. One was for Mary: rent and housekeeping. The other half was again divided into two, of which one went to Mary as pin-money, and the other remained for Percy. But Mary knew what was meant by “for Percy”: it was for Godwin despite all vows, for Claire, for the Hunts. . . .

One day Captain Roberts was expected over to luncheon from Genoa. Conscious that their anchorite way of living would not suit ordinary mortals, there was considerable commotion at the villa, but notwithstanding the bother and turmoil the three women, as is woman’s wont, seemed to enjoy it. The visitor came and he was most anxious to see the Poet of whom he had heard so much, but Shelley had disappeared. They sat down to table without him. Suddenly one of the trio of ladies cried out, “Oh my gracious!” and Mary, turning round, saw Shelley completely naked crossing the room, and trying to hide behind the maid-servant.

“Percy, how dare you!” she cried, which was imprudent, for Shelley, considering himself unjustly attacked, abandoned his refuge and came up to the table to explain. The ladies covered their faces with their hands. Yet he was good to look at, his hair full of seaweed, his slender body wet and scented with the salt of the sea.

But the daughter of William Godwin had a horror of such unconventional happenings.

⁂

Shelley and Williams waited for their boat with the impatience of schoolboys, and the moment a strange sail, coming from the direction of Leghorn, doubled the point of Lerici, they rushed down to the beach.

After Allegra’s death Shelley had written to Roberts to change the name of his boat from the Don Juan to the Ariel. Everything which reminded him of Byron was now hateful to him. Great therefore was his surprise and anger, when on the arrival of his little yacht, he saw painted in enormous letters in the middle of the mainsail: Don Juan. Byron, told of the change of name, had forced Roberts, in spite of Shelley’s orders, to print the sign of the Devil upon the Platonic bark. Armed with hot water, soap and brushes, Shelley and Williams set to work to wash out the infamy from their poor boat. They had no success. They tried turpentine, which failed equally. Then they consulted specialists, who were of opinion that a bit of sail would have to be cut clean out and a new piece inserted; nothing short of this could mend the case. Shelley had the operation performed at once.

The Genoese captain who had sailed the boat to Lerici, said that she sailed and worked well, but was a ticklish boat to manage. Shelley and Williams, enthusiastic but incompetent yachtsmen, had insisted on having her built to a design made by a naval officer for Williams, before he left England. The lovely sweeping lines of the model enchanted them, but the boat when built to plan required a couple of tons of iron ballast to bring her down to her bearings, and even then was very crank in a breeze.

The two owners of the Ariel determined to man her themselves, with the help of Charles Vivian, a young sailor. Shelley was awkward as a woman in all things appertaining to boats, but full of good intentions. He tangled himself up in the rigging, read Sophocles while trying to steer, and several times just missed falling overboard. But never in his life had he been so happy. When Trelawny saw his seamanship, he took Williams by the arm and advised him to add to the crew a Genoese accustomed to the coast. Williams was hurt . . . three seasoned sailors such as they . . . and was he not Captain? And had he not Shelley?

“Shelley! You’ll never do any good with him until you shear the wisps of hair that hang over his eyes, heave his Greek Poets overboard, and plunge his arms up to the elbow in a tar-bucket.”

The Ariel drew too much water to be run on shore at Casa Magni, so Williams with the aid of a carpenter built a tiny dinghy of basketwork, covered with tarred canvas. It was a fragile toy which upset at a touch. The Poet was delighted with it, although it capsized continually, and gave him many a ducking.

One evening, as he dragged the skiff out from the house, he saw Jane and her two children on the sands. He invited her to bring them for a row. “With careful stowage,” said he, “there is room for us all in my barge.” She squatted in the bottom of the frail skiff with her babies, and the gunwale sank to within six inches of the water; a puff of wind, the smallest movement of any one of them, and it must cant over, fill, and glide from under them.

Jane understood that Percy intended to float on the water near the shore, but he, proud to show a lovely woman how well he sculled, bent to his oars, and they were soon out on the blue waters of the bay. Then, shipping the oars, he fell into a deep reverie. Jane was seized with the most awful terror. There was no eye watching them, no boat within a mile, the shore was fast receding, the water deepening, and the Poet dreaming. She made several remarks, but they met with no response.

Suddenly he raised his head, his face brightened as with a bright thought, and he exclaimed, joyfully, “Now let us together solve the great mystery!”

Had Jane uttered a cry, her children were lost. Shelley might made a sudden movement, the bark would capsize, the waters wrap them round as a winding-sheet. . . . Suppressing her terror, she answered promptly, “No, thank you, not now, I should like my dinner first and so would the children. . . . And look, there is Edward coming on shore with Trelawny . . . they’ll be so surprised at our being out at this time, and Edward says this boat is not safe.”

“Safe!” cried the Poet, “I’d go to Leghorn or anywhere in her.”

Jane felt that the Angel of Death, who always attended the Poet on the water, now spread his wings and vanished.

“You haven’t yet written the words for the Indian air,” she said carelessly.

“Yes, I have,” he answered, “but you must play me the air again, and I’ll try and make the thing better.”

Meanwhile he had paddled his cockleshell into shallow water; as soon as Jane saw the sandy bottom, she snatched up her babies, and clambered out so hurriedly that the punt was turned over and the Poet pinned down underneath it. He rose with it on his back, like a hermit-crab in any old empty shell.

“Jane, are you mad?” cried her husband, surprised at her lubberly way of getting out of a boat. “Had you waited a moment, we would have hauled the boat up.”

“No, thank you. Oh, I have escaped the most dreadful fate! Never will I put my foot in that horrid coffin again. ‘Solve the great mystery!’ . . . Why, he is the greatest of all mysteries! Who can predict what he will do? . . . He is seeking after what we all avoid—death. I wish we were away. I shall always be in terror.”

But the Poet’s boyish face wore its accustomed innocent and radiant expression. During this glorious summer, nothing seemed able to mar his joy. Of an evening he liked to go sailing in the Ariel by moonlight. Mary sitting at his feet, her head against his knees, remembered how she had sat thus on the stormy cross-channel journey ten years ago. Ten years . . . what quantities of things had happened in ten years. How much subtler, crueller, and more treacherous Life had been, than either of them had then imagined.

Sitting in the stern, Jane sang an Indian serenade, accompanying it on the guitar, while Shelley gazed up into the dark blue sky of June, where the moon burned inextinguishably beautiful, suffusing the mountain-clouds with intolerable brilliancy. His mind was emptied of thought, his senses annihilated in a delicious ecstasy, his soul clipt in a net woven of dew-beams, seemed to be floating on waves of love and odour and deep melody. He walked again among the splendid visions, the crystalline palaces, the iridescent vapours, which during so long a time had appeared to him the sole reality. He knew to-day that there existed another universe, a harsh and inflexible one but in these higher regions, only animated by the liquid and undulating sweetness of song, by the invisible movement of luminous spheres, in these regions the jealousy of women, money-worries, political quarrels, appeared so infinitely petty that they could hot touch his wild, sweet, incommunicable happiness. He would have liked to swoon away in ravishment while saying with Faust to the passing moment, “Verweile doch! Du bist so schön.”