The Life and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Volume I Part 20

I will write as soon as any change takes place. The misery of these hours is beyond calculation. The hopes of my life are bound up in him.--Ever yours affectionately,

M. W. S.

I am well, and so is Sh.e.l.ley, although he is more exhausted by watching than I am. William is in a high fever.

Sixty death-like hours did Sh.e.l.ley watch, without closing his eyes. Clare, her own troubles forgotten in this moment of mortal suspense, was a devoted nurse.

As for Mary, her very life ebbed with William's, but as yet she bore up.

There was no real hope from the first moment of the attack, but the poor child made a hard struggle for life. Two more days and nights of anguish and terror and deadly sinking of heart,--and then, in the blank page following _June 4_, the last date entered in the diary, are the words--

The journal ends here.--P. B. S.

On Monday, the 7th of June, at noonday, William died.

CHAPTER XII

JUNE 1819-SEPTEMBER 1820

It was not fifteen months since they had all left England; Sh.e.l.ley and Mary with the sweet, blue-eyed "Willmouse," and the pretty baby, Clara, so like her father; Clare and the "bluff, bright-eyed little Commodore,"

Allegra; the Swiss nurse and English nursemaid; a large and lively party, in spite of cares and anxieties and sorrows to come. In one short, spiritless paragraph Mary, on the 4th of August, summed up such history as there was of the sad two months following on the blow which had left her childless.

_Journal, Wednesday, August 4, 1819, Leghorn_ (Mary).--I begin my journal on Sh.e.l.ley's birthday. We have now lived five years together; and if all the events of the five years were blotted out, I might be happy; but to have won and then cruelly to have lost, the a.s.sociations of four years, is not an accident to which the human mind can bend without much suffering.

Since I left home I have read several books of Livy, _Clarissa Harlowe_, the _Spectator_, a few novels, and am now reading the Bible, and Lucan's _Pharsalia_, and Dante. Sh.e.l.ley is to-day twenty-seven years of age. Write; read Lucan and the Bible. Sh.e.l.ley writes the _Cenci_, and reads Plutarch's _Lives_. The Gisbornes call in the evening. Sh.e.l.ley reads _Paradise Lost_ to me. Read two cantos of the _Purgatorio_.

Three days after William's death, Sh.e.l.ley, Mary, and Clare had left Rome for Leghorn. Once more they were alone together--how different now from the three heedless young things who, just five years before, had set out to walk through France with a donkey!

Sh.e.l.ley, then, a creature of feelings and theories, full of unbalanced impulses, vague aspirations and undeveloped powers; inexperienced in everything but uncomprehended pain and the dim consciousness of half-realised mistakes. Mary, the fair, quiet, thoughtful girl, earnest and impa.s.sioned, calm and resolute, as ignorant of practical life as precocious in intellect; with all her mind worshipping the same high ideals as Sh.e.l.ley's, and with all her heart worshipping him as the incarnation of them. Clare her very opposite; excitable and enthusiastic, demonstrative and capricious, clever, but silly; with a mind in which a smattering of speculative philosophy, picked up in G.o.dwin's house, contended for the mastery with such social wisdom as she had picked up in a boarding school. Both of them mere children in years. Now poor Clare was older without being much wiser, saddened yet not sobered; suffering bitterly from her ambiguous position, yet unable or unwilling to put an end to it; the worse by her one great error, which had brought her to dire grief; the better by one great affection--for her child,--the source of much sorrow, it is true, but also of truest joy of self-devotion, and the only instrument of such discipline that ever she had.

Sh.e.l.ley had found what he wanted, the faithful heart which to his own afforded peace and stability and the balance which, then, he so much needed; a kindred mind, worthy of the best his had to give; knowing and expecting that best, too, and satisfied with nothing short of it. And his best had responded. In these few years he had realised powers the extent of which could not have been foretold, and which might, without that steady sympathy and support, have remained unfulfilled possibilities for ever. In spite of the far-reaching consequences of his errors, in spite of torturing memories, in spite of ill-health, anxiety, poverty, vexation, and strife, the Sh.e.l.ley of _Queen Mab_ had become the Sh.e.l.ley of _Prometheus Unbound_ and the _Cenci_.

Of this development he himself was conscious enough. In so far as he was known to his contemporaries, it was only by his so-called atheistic opinions, and his departures theoretical and actual, from conventional social morality; and even these owed their notoriety, not to his genius, but to the fact that they were such strange vagaries in the heir to a baronetcy. In his new life he had, indeed, known the deepest grief as well as the purest love, but those griefs which are memorial shrines of love did not paralyse him. They were rather among the influences which elicited the utmost possibilities of his nature; his lost children, as lovely ideals, were only half lost to him.

But with Mary it was otherwise. Her occupation was gone. When after the death of her first poor little baby, she wrote: "Whenever I am left alone to my own thoughts, and do not read to divert them, they always come back to the same point--that I was a mother, and am so no longer;" a new sense was dawning in her which never had waned, and which, since William's birth, had a.s.serted itself as the key to her nature.

She had known very little of the realities of life when she left her father's house with Sh.e.l.ley, and he, her first reality, belonged in many ways more to the ideal than to the real world. But for her children, her a.s.sociation with him, while immeasurably expanding her mental powers, might have tended to develop these at the expense of her emotional nature, and to starve or to stifle her human sympathies. In her children she found the link which united her ideal love with the universal heart of mankind, and it was as a mother that she learned the sweet charities of human nature. This maternal love deepened her feelings towards her own father, it gave her sympathy with Clare and helped towards patience with her, it saved her from overmuch literary abstraction, and prevented her from pining when Sh.e.l.ley was buried in dreams or engrossed in work, and she loved these children with the unconscious pa.s.sionate grat.i.tude of a reserved nature towards anything that constrains from it the natural expression of that fund of tenderness and devotion so often hidden away under a perversely undemonstrative manner. Now, in one short year, all this was gone, and she sank under the blow of William's loss. She could not even find comfort in the thought of the baby to be born in autumn, for, after the repeated rending asunder of beloved ties, she looked forward to new ones with fear and trembling, rather than with hope. The physical reaction after the strain of long suspense and watching had told seriously on her health, never strong at these times; the efforts she had made at Naples were no longer possible to her. Even Clare with all her misery was, in one sense, better off than she, for Allegra _lived_. She tried to rise above her affliction, but her care for everything was gone; the whole world seemed dull and indifferent. Poor Sh.e.l.ley, only too liable to depression at all times, and suffering bitterly himself from the loss of his beloved child, tried to keep up his spirits for Mary's sake.

Thou sittest on the hearth of pale Despair, Where, For thine own sake, I cannot follow thee.

Perhaps the effort he thus made for her sake had a bracing effect on himself, but the old Mary seemed gone,--lost,--and even he was powerless to bring her back; she could not follow him; any approach of seeming forgetfulness in others increased her depression and gloom.

The letter to Miss Curran, which follows, was written within three weeks of William's death.

LEGHORN, _27th June 1819_.

MY DEAR MISS CURRAN--I wrote to you twice on our journey, and again from this place, but I found the other day that Sh.e.l.ley had forgotten to send the letter; and I have been so unwell with a cold these last two or three days that I have not been able to write. We have taken an airy house here, in the vicinity of Leghorn, for three months, and we have not found it yet too hot. The country around us is pretty, so that I daresay we shall do very well. I am going to write another stupid letter to you, yet what can I do? I no sooner take up my pen than my thoughts run away with me, and I cannot guide it except about _one_ subject, and that I must avoid. So I entreat you to join this to your many other kindnesses, and to excuse me. I have received the two letters forwarded from Rome. My father's lawsuit is put off until July. It will never be terminated. I hear that you have quitted the pestilential air of Rome, and have gained a little health in the country. Pray let us hear from you, for both Sh.e.l.ley and I are very anxious--more than I can express--to know how you are. Let us hear also, if you please, anything you may have done about the tomb, near which I shall lie one day, and care not, for my own sake, how soon. I never shall recover that blow; I feel it more than at Rome; the thought never leaves me for a single moment; everything on earth has lost its interest to me. You see I told you that I could only write to you on one subject; how can I, since, do all I can (and I endeavour very sincerely) I can think of no other, so I will leave off. Sh.e.l.ley is tolerably well, and desires his kindest remembrances.--Most affectionately yours,

MARY W. Sh.e.l.lEY.

Their sympathetic friend, Leigh Hunt, grieved at the tone of her letters and at Sh.e.l.ley's account of her, tried to convey to her a little kindly advice and encouragement.

8 YORK BUILDINGS, NEW ROAD.

_July 1819._

MY DEAR MARY--I was just about to write to you, as you will see by my letter to Sh.e.l.ley, when I received yours. I need not say how it grieves me to see you so dispirited. Not that I wonder at it under such sufferings; but I know, at least I have often suspected, that you have a tendency, partly const.i.tutional perhaps, and partly owing to the turn of your philosophy, to look over-intensely at the dark side of human things; and they must present double dreariness through such tears as you are now shedding. Pray consent to take care of your health, as the ground of comfort; and cultivate your laurels on the strength of it. I wish you would strike your pen into some more genial subject (more obviously so than your last), and bring up a fountain of gentle tears for us. That exquisite pa.s.sage about the cottagers shows what you could do.[36]

Mary received his counsels submissively, and would have carried them out if she could. But her nervous prostration was beyond her own power to cure or remove, and it was hard for others and impossible for herself to know how far her dejected state was due to mental and how far to physical causes.

Sh.e.l.ley was not, and dared not be, idle. He worked at his Tragedy and finished it; many of the Fragments, too, belong to this time. They are the speech of pain, but those who can teach in song what they learn in suffering have much, very much to be thankful for. Mary persisted in study; she even tried to write. But the spring of invention was low.

She exerted herself to send to Mrs. Hunt an account of their present life and surroundings.

LEGHORN, _28th August 1819_.

MY DEAR MARIANNE--We are very dull at Leghorn, and I can therefore write nothing to amuse you. We live in a little country house at the end of a green lane, surrounded by a _podere_. These _poderi_ are just the things Hunt would like. They are like our kitchen-gardens, with the difference only that the beautiful fertility of the country gives them. A large bed of cabbages is very unpicturesque in England, but here the furrows are alternated with rows of grapes festooned on their supporters, and the hedges are of myrtle, which have just ceased to flower; their flower has the sweetest faint smell in the world, like some delicious spice. Green gra.s.sy walks lead you through the vines.

The people are always busy, and it is pleasant to see three or four of them transform in one day a bed of Indian corn to one of celery. They work this hot weather in their shirts, or smock-frocks (but their b.r.e.a.s.t.s are bare), their brown legs nearly the colour, only with a rich tinge of red in it, of the earth they turn up. They sing, not very melodiously, but very loud, Rossini's music, "Mi rivedrai, ti rivedr," and they are accompanied by the _cicala_, a kind of little beetle, that makes a noise with its tail as loud as Johnny can sing; they live on trees; and three or four together are enough to deafen you. It is to the _cicala_ that Anacreon has addressed an ode which they call "To a Gra.s.shopper" in the English translations.

Well, here we live. I never am in good spirits--often in very bad; and Hunt's portrait has already seen me shed so many tears that, if it had his heart as well as his eyes, he would weep too in pity. But no more of this, or a tear will come now, and there is no use for that.

By the bye, a hint Hunt gave about portraits. The Italian painters are very bad; they might make a nose like Sh.e.l.ley's, and perhaps a mouth, but I doubt it; but there would be no expression about it. They have no notion of anything except copying again and again their Old Masters; and somehow mere copying, however divine the original, does a great deal more harm than good.

Sh.e.l.ley has written a good deal, and I have done very little since I have been in Italy. I have had so much to see, and so many vexations, independently of those which G.o.d has kindly sent to wean me from the world if I were too fond of it. Sh.e.l.ley has not had good health by any means, and, when getting better, fate has ever contrived something to pull him back. He never was better than the last month of his stay in Rome, except the last week--then he watched sixty miserable death-like hours without closing his eyes; and you may think what good that did him.

We see the _Examiners_ regularly now, four together, just two months after the publication of the last. These are very delightful to us. I have a word to say to Hunt of what he says concerning Italian dancing.

The Italians dance very badly. They dress for their dances in the ugliest manner; the men in little doublets, with a hat and feather; they are very stiff; nothing but their legs move; and they twirl and jump with as little grace as may be. It is not for their dancing, but their pantomime, that the Italians are famous. You remember what we told you of the ballet of _Oth.e.l.lo_. They tell a story by action, so that words appear perfectly superfluous things for them. In that they are graceful, agile, impressive, and very affecting; so that I delight in nothing so much as a deep tragic ballet. But the dancing, unless, as they sometimes do, they dance as common people (for instance, the dance of joy of the Venetian citizens on the return of Oth.e.l.lo), is very bad indeed.

I am very much obliged to you for all your kind offers and wishes.

Hunt would do Sh.e.l.ley a great deal of good, but that we may not think of; his spirits are tolerably good. But you do not tell me how you get on; how Bessy is, and where she is. Remember me to her. Clare is learning thorough ba.s.s and singing. We pay four crowns a month for her master, lessons three times a week; cheap work this, is it not? At Rome we paid three shillings a lesson and the master stayed two hours.

The one we have now is the best in Leghorn.

I write in the morning, read Latin till 2, when we dine; then I read some English book, and two cantos of Dante with Sh.e.l.ley. In the evening our friends the Gisbornes come, so we are not perfectly alone.

I like Mrs. Gisborne very much indeed, but her husband is most dreadfully dull; and as he is always with her, we have not so much pleasure in her company as we otherwise should....

The neighbourhood of Mrs. Gisborne, "charming from her frank and affectionate nature," and full of intellectual sympathy with the Sh.e.l.leys, was a boon indeed at this melancholy time. Through her Sh.e.l.ley was led to the study of Spanish, and the appearance on the scene of Charles Clairmont, who had just pa.s.sed a year in Spain, was an additional stimulus in this direction. Together they read several of Calderon's plays, from which Sh.e.l.ley derived the greatest delight, and which enabled him for a time to forget everyday life and its troubles. Another diversion to his thoughts was the scheme of a steamboat which should ply between Leghorn and Ma.r.s.eilles, to be constructed by Henry Reveley, mainly at Sh.e.l.ley's expense. He was elated at promoting a project which he conceived to be of great public usefulness and importance, and happy at being able to do a friend a good turn. He followed every stage of the steamer's construction with keen interest, and was much disappointed when the idea was given up, as, after some months, it was; not, however, until much time, labour, and money had been expended on it.

Mary, though she endeavoured to fill the blanks in her existence by a.s.siduous reading, could not escape care. Clare was in perpetual thirst for news of her Allegra, and G.o.dwin spared them none of his usual complaints. He, too, was much concerned at the depressed tone of Mary's letters, which seemed to him quite disproportionate to the occasion, and thought it his duty to convince her, by reasoning, that she was not so unhappy as she thought herself to be.

SKINNER STREET, _9th September 1819_.

MY DEAR MARY--Your letter of 19th August is very grievous to me, inasmuch as you represent me as increasing the degree of your uneasiness and depression.

You must, however, allow me the privilege of a father and a philosopher in expostulating with you on this depression. I cannot but consider it as lowering your character in a memorable degree, and putting you quite among the commonalty and mob of your s.e.x, when I had thought I saw in you symptoms ent.i.tling you to be ranked among those n.o.ble spirits that do honour to our nature. What a falling off is here! How bitterly is so inglorious a change to be deplored!

What is it you want that you have not? You have the husband of your choice, to whom you seem to be unalterably attached, a man of high intellectual attainments, whatever I and some other persons may think of his morality, and the defects under this last head, if they be not (as you seem to think) imaginary, at least do not operate as towards you. You have all the goods of fortune, all the means of being useful to others, and shining in your proper sphere. But you have lost a child: and all the rest of the world, all that is beautiful, and all that has a claim upon your kindness, is nothing, because a child of two years old is dead.