Shelley in ItalyAuthor(s): Ralph PiteReviewed work(s):Source: The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 34, Nineteenth-Century Travel Writing (2004),pp. 46-60Published by: Modern Humanities Research AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3509483 .Accessed: 13/07/2012 06:36

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Shelley in Italy RALPH PITE

University of Liverpool

'I bel paese'

Shelley spent the last four years of his life in Italy. He left England in March I818, soon after publishing The Revolt of Islam, and travelled through France and Switzerland to Milan. After a year and a half spent visiting the major tourist centres of Italy -Venice, Rome, Naples, and Florence -Shelley and his family settled near Pisa until a few months before his death in spring 1822.

The immediate pretext for going abroad in I818 was Byron's insistence that Shelley bring him his illegitimate daughter, Allegra. Allegra's mother, Claire Clairmont was Mary Shelley's step-sister and a long-standing member of the Shelley household. Byron's demands, though, served Shelley's pur- pose: he was already restless and unwell in England, keen to renew his friendship with Byron and eager to see classical and Renaissance Italian art at first-hand. Over the four years he spent in Italy, however, all the original motives for his journey either altered or disappeared. Shelley took root for the first time in one place and community; he placed his relations with Byron on a different footing; he thought through afresh his way of seeing a country that was filled with antiquity.

These changes brought him gradually into dispute with contemporary English taste. While abroad Shelley went through a process of discovering how to co-ordinate inherited ideas of Italy with the place as it was. This accompanied a new understanding of his place within a social circle and altered his way of thinking about the role of the individual amidst events. It changed, therefore, his sense of his relationship to 'Life'.

The Continent had been largely closed to English visitors during the Napoleonic Wars. When, in the years after 1815, foreign travel was possible again, the English arrived in a rush, expecting to see Italian landscapes that made Claude Lorrain's paintings real and hoping to wander around Shakespeare's Venice or Virgil's Cumae.1 Italy had been so fully portrayed in advance, through literature, painting, and the currently fashionable travel- guides, that travellers found confirmation or disappointment everywhere. Entering Italy via the Simplon Pass, a Mrs Hinde remarked in I819: 'Here I

See C. P. Brand, Italy and the English Romantics: The Italianate Fashion in Early Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), pp. 7-25.

RALPH PITE

felt for the first time that I actually was in Italy, that country of which I had read so much and so long wished to see.'2

Samuel Rogers catches the same feeling of astonishment at being 'actually' there:

Am I in Italy? Is this the Mincius? [...] Such questions hourly do I ask myself; And not a finger-post on the road-side 'To Mantua' - 'To Ferrara' -but excites Surprise, and doubt, and self-congratulation.3

Lady Morgan, the raconteur and novelist, found her reading brought to life: 'There was likewise no want of figures that might well pass current for

Shylocks; and the gentleJessica is to be traced in almost every sunny female face that passes in the streets.' Effusive, Lady Morgan was also self-aware. 'Even the most Gothic traveller', she says, 'comes to Rome influenced by associations imbibed with early love, incorporated with youthful preposses- sion, and connected with childhood's first dream' (1n, 455). John Chetwood

Eustace, a classicist and Roman Catholic, shares the feeling of recognition and endorses it: 'How natural then is the emotion of the traveller when he first beholds the distant domes of a city of such figures in the History of the Universe, of such weight in the destinies of mankind, so familiar to the

imagination of the boy, so interesting to the feelings of the man!'3 Shelley and Mary were both scathing about Eustace's work because in it he presents an idealized Italy, a paradise violated by Napoleon's troops, and the present- day country, with its violence and decay, scarcely figures. The Italy he visits is full of reminders both of the classical past and the eighteenth-century past of the Grand Tour, now revived.' Eustace followed the Grand Tour route; so did Samuel Rogers, most other English tourists and even the Shelleys themselves. The whole of the English re-engagement with Italy (and with continental Europe altogether) after I8I5 is tinged with nostalgia for

Augustan certainties. The interest of Shelley lies in his departure from those attitudes and development of new relations to 'the beautiful country' of Italy.

2 C. A. Hinde, Journal of a Tour Made in Itay in the Winter of the Years i8ig and i820, ed. by M. Merlini, Biblioteca del Viaggio in Italia, 12 (Geneva: Slatkine, I982), p. 3I. 3 Samuel Rogers, Itay: A Poem, 2 vols in i (London: Murray, 1823 and 1828), I, 50. Compare The Italian Journal of Samuel Rogers, ed. byJ. R. Hale (London: Faber, 1956), p. 169.

Lady [Sydney] Morgan, Italy, 2 vols (London: Colburn, I82I), I, I73. A Classical Tour through Italy, 2nd edn, 2 vols (London: Mawman, I814), I, 199. The book went through

eight editions between I813 and I841. Joseph Forsyth, Remarks on Antiquities, Arts and Letters During an Excursion to Italy in the Tears 1802 and 1803, first published in 1813, reached its fourth edition in 1835 (London: Murray, I835). 6

Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Letters, ed. by F. L. Jones, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, I964), II, 54; hereafter, Letters. See also Mary's letter to Maria Gisborne, 17 August i8i8, in The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, ed. by Betty T. Bennett, 3 vols (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), I, 78.

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Shelley in Italy

The art-historian, Duncan Bull, notes English travellers' taste in painting for 'reminiscences of given localities invested with the dignity of classical allusions [...]. This concern with Italian light and what might be called its romantic qualities became the hallmark of almost every British artist who visited Italy after [Richard] Wilson'.7 Wilson (I713/14-I782), a disciple of Poussin and Claude, painted particular Italian scenes as if they were allu- sions to a classical past. The scenes were 'romantic' because they pointed away from themselves towards the receding, luminous horizon. His 'Classical

Landscape' (I76I) draws the eye across a river and settled plain towards a golden horizon where particular objects disappear in a blaze of light. The

trajectory and momentum of the painting reduce the Italian scene to a

secondary role, directing the viewer towards a sublime encounter.8 Duncan Bull contrasts Wilson's depictions of Italy with those of Turner in

'Ancient Rome' and 'Modern Rome' (I839). These, according to Bull, 'sug- gest that the classical past is like the dream world of a charged imagination'.' Turner, in other words, takes the sites of modern Rome as proof that the classical image is no more than a dream, an illusion exposed by the actual

place. It is the dream, though, of 'a charged imagination'. The classical world cannot any longer be alluded to as Wilson alludes to it nor can it be rediscovered as Eustace suggests. Instead the painter recreates it in his or her

imagination. The real place and its picturesque landscapes are combined to form an arena where the artist discovers and displays his or her imaginative power.

Madame de Stal's Corinne, ou l'Italie (I807), which Percy and Mary Shelley both read, makes the sights of Rome suggest and half-recreate such a power. Knowing about such places from books will inform the mind, she argues, but it cannot fill the imagination: The imagination's memories are born of a more immediate and deep-seated impression that gives life to thought and makes us into a kind of witness to what we have learned [...]. Suddenly a broken column, a half-wrecked bas-relief, stones linked to the indestructible style of ancient architects, remind you that there is an eternal power in man, a divine spark, and that you must never grow weary of lighting it in yourself and of rekindling it in others."'

7 Classic Ground: British Artists and the Landscape of Italy, i740o-830 (New Haven, CT: Yale Center for British Art, I98I), pp. 2, 5.

8 The painting is held in Southampton City Art Gallery; it is reproduced in Raymond Lister, British Romantic Painting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 27. 9 Classic Ground, p. 8. Turner's paintings are: 'Ancient Rome: Agrippina Landing with the Ashes of Germanicus. The Triumphal Bridge and Palace of the Caesars Restored' (1839, BJ 378) and 'Modern Rome - Campo Vaccino' (I839, BJ 379). Turner painted another pair illustrating the same contrast in I842: 'The Dogana [sic], San Giorgio, Citella, from the Steps of the Europa' (BJ 396) and 'Campo Santo, Venice' (BJ 397). On Turner's work in Italy, see John Gage, J. M. W. Turner: 'A Wonderful Range of Mind' (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987). t0 Madame de Stael, Corinne; or, Italy, trans. by Avriel H. Goldberger (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers

University Press, I987), pp. 64-65.

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RALPH PITE

In their decay, the ruins are reminders of 'indestructible style' which persists as an 'eternal power in man, a divine spark'. The city, with its twisting alleys, hidden and surprising places, regenerates the power that built it originally, the imagination- the same power that now transforms antiquarian interest into an 'impression' that gives life. In archaeological excavations, her hero later declares, 'it is as if you bring back to life what you discover, as if the

past reappears beneath the dust that has buried it'. Likewise in the gardens of Rome, 'the mythology of the ancients seems to take new life' (pp. 73, 87).

De Stael uses as an epigraph to the novel lines from Petrarch in which he vows that his love for Laura will become famous in Italy: 'udrallo il bel paese I Ch'Appenin parte, e'l mar circonda e l'Alpe."' Laura's name, Petrarch

says, will resound in the beautiful country that is divided by the Appenines and encircled by the sea and the Alps. Petrarch was writing in Avignon and Madame de Stael wrote Corinne in Coppet, near Geneva; both think of Italy from afar as 'il bel paese', as an Edenic, promised land, protected by natural barriers: the Alps and the embracing sea. For both, too, their art will enter the country they cannot reach. Petrarch's fame will restore Laura's and his own presence in Italy. By quoting Petrarch as an epigraph, de Stael suggests that Corinne too will be heard. The novel's heroine will champion the rights of the oppressed Italian nation. So, as much as Corinne suggests at various

points that the best response to Italy is an imaginative recreation of its lost

glory, its epigraph declares that the book itself will help actually to bring about the same restoration.

Turner's 'dream-world of a charged imagination' and de Stal's reminders of an eternal power in man turn Italy into an opportunity to form Paradise in the imagination. Both find in modern Italy the absence of the perfection they had arrived expecting. Art, they claim, can remedy the loss because it will renew degenerate Venice and fallen Rome. Richard Wilson's paintings of Italy point towards an ideal world set at a distance. For him the classical

may be rediscovered within the modern. Turner and de Stael imply instead that the imagination must be actively engaged in converting Italy's ruins into the vestiges of an indestructible ideal.12

This Italian Heaven

Shelley, during his time in Italy, moved between these different ways of relat-

ing to the country without choosing finally any one of them. One reason why he reached such an original view of the landscape, the nation, and his place within it is that he began to see the sky differently.

" Francis Petrarch, Rime Sparse, no. I46. ' On ruins and nation-building, see Carolyn Springer, The Marble [Wilderness: Ruins and Representation in

Italian Romanticism, 1775-I850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, I987), pp. I-I8, and Anne Janowitz, England's Ruins: Poetic Purpose and the ,ational Landscape (Oxford: Blackwell, I990), pp. 20-53.

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Shelley in Italy

Nearly all the English poets who describe Italy share a fascination with Italian light, something that unsurprisingly is found among the painters too. Samuel Rogers sees the painterly made actual: 'long flat roofs, just such as Poussin drew, | Caught by a sun-beam slanting through a cloud' (Italy, I, 39). John Edmund Reade, in his later and more cliche-ridden poem, Italy: A

Poem, finds the skies about Italy confirming that the land is Paradise: O thou loved land which still art Paradise! Thou that embodiest all the Poets dream! Thou, that art bathed, as in a fount, by skies Of Heaven's own tincture.13

'Bathed [...] by skies', Reade says, not merely 'bathed in light'. The place is

literally heaven. The sky touches the earth and embodies a dream.

Shelley's first sight of Italian skies is similar and comparatively conven- tional: 'The loveliness and serenity of the sky made the deepest difference in

my sensations - I depend on these things for life for in the smoke of cities & the tumult of humankind & the chilling fogs & rain of our own country I can hardly be said to live' (to Thomas Love Peacock, 6 April I818, Letters, II,

3-4). Loveliness and serenity would have been what the Shelleys' reading would have led them to expect. Felicia Hemans's 'Sonnet.- To Italy' (1812), for instance, compares 'unclouded suns' and 'myrtle-shores' with 'Albion's

[...] ever-varying skies'.'4 Mary Shelley felt the contrast repeatedly: 'Stay no longer, I beseech you in yon cloud-environed isle [...]. Even friends there are only to be seen through a murky mist which will not be under the

bright sky of dear Italy' (Mary's postscript to Percy's letter to Leigh Hunt, 22

January I822, Letters, II, 383).1' Back in Italy after Percy Shelley's death, Mary began to find the memory of Italian sunshine oppressive, as becomes clear from her journals written at the time."'

Shelley's reactions, from the beginning, are rather different from his wife's. Beneath the serenity of the sky, he finds Milan Cathedral: built of white marble & cut into pinnacles of immense height & the utmost delicacy of workmanship, & loaded with sculpture. The effect of it, piercing the solid blue with those groupes [sic] of dazzling spires relieved by the serene depth of this Italian Heaven, or by moonlight when the stars seemed gathered among those sculptured shapes is beyond any thing I had imagined architecture capable of producing.

(to Peacock, 20 April I818, Letters, II, 7-8)

'3 John Edmund Reade, Italy: A Poem in Six Parts: With Historical and Classical Notes (1838), new edn (London: Longman, 1845), p. 9. 1 Quoted in Roderick Marshall, Italy in English Literature 1755-1815: Origins of the Romantic Interest in Italy

(New York: Columbia University Press, 1934), p. 395. '' See also her own letter to Leigh Hunt, 6 April 1819 (Letters of Mary IV. Shelley, I, 90-91). 16 See The Journals of Mary Shelley, ed. by Paula Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert, 2 vols (Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1987), nI, 465, 469, 471, 476. See also her short story, 'Recollections of Italy', The London Alagazine, 9 (January-June, 1824), 21-26.

50

RALPH PITE

He had expected these effects from Nature, not art. Milan Cathedral is the first instance of human artefacts imitating the infinite grandeur of Mont Blanc:

Far, far above, piercing the infinite sky, Mont Blanc appears, -still, snowy, and serene - Its subject mountains their unearthly forms Pile around it, ice and rock, broad vales between Of frozen floods, unfathomable deeps, Blue as the overhanging heaven.17

In the argument of the whole poem, Mont Blanc reveals a 'secret strength of things I Which governs thought' (11. I39-40, Poems, I, 549). The mountain reveals how far human perceptions are directed from the outside. Yet Shelley thinks of it, too, as the moment of self-consciousness so that, when he sees that the world determines his perceptions, Shelley can declare that the opposite is true as well: that the world is shaped by how man perceives it.

In 'Mont Blanc', the mind and the world are seen as reflections of one another, indistinguishable and innately harmonious. When Shelley saw Milan Cathedral he modelled his understanding of it on his earlier experi- ence of sublime mountainous landscapes. In the poems he started to write in Italy, Shelley continues to use landscape as a way of reflecting on how mind and world interact. As he does so, he reconsiders the conventionality of his own perceptions, asking himself in what sense Italy could truly be thought of as a paradise.

In September and October i818, Shelley and his family lived at Byron's villa at Este, south-west of Venice. 'Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills' suggests he found it an idyllic spot:

Beneath is spread like a green sea The waveless plain of Lombardy, Bounded by the vaporous air, Islanded by cities fair; Underneath day's azure eyes Ocean's nursling Venice lies. (Poems II, 433, 1. 90)

This landscape is viewed as in a painting by Richard Wilson. Shelley's eye moves across a plain towards the horizon lost in 'vaporous air'. He is enter- ing a 'Classical Landscape' and finds he is occupying already one of the 'flowering islands [that] lie ] In the waters of wide Agony' (11. 66-67). He makes this position paradoxical, though. He calls the plain of Lombardy a 'green sea' and so recalls from earlier in the poem 'the deep wide sea of Misery' as well as the 'waters of wide Agony'. The 'green sea' appears to be the exact and consoling opposite of his earlier misery but also recalls it. It seems suspiciously easy for Shelley to turn places from misery to joy and he intends that suspect quality. This is another landscape peopled by Shelley's

1 'Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni', 11. 60-65, The Poems of Shelley, ed. by G. M. Matthevws and K. Everest, 3 vols (London: Longman, I989-), I, 545; hereafter Poems.

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Shelley in Italy

own desires even as he claims that it simply was heaven. His active creation of the effect and his passive acceptance of the state co-exist with deliberately unnerving coolness.

Shelley also alters the pictorial conventions he invokes here. Wilson's

picture suggests a horizon that recedes beyond the frame. Shelley likewise takes us through the landscape towards an invisible vanishing-point. Where Wilson places a luminous glow, however, Shelley finds Venice:

Lo! the sun upsprings behind, Broad, red, radiant, half reclined On the level quivering line Of the waters crystalline; And before that chasm of light, As within a furnace bright, Column, tower, and dome, and spire, Shine like obelisks of fire. (Poems, 11, 434, 1. IOO)

Where you would expect the horizon 'to unite earth and heaven', Shelley places fallen Venice, half-confirming the co-presence visitors expected to find and at the same time challenging their assumptions. Golden Italian light illuminates a place whose obelisks are 'pointing' (1. io8)

To the sapphire-tinted skies As the flames of sacrifice From the marble shrines did rise, As to pierce the dome of gold Where Apollo spoke of old. (1. i o)

Venice, on the brink of a chasm of light, stands in silhouette. In its fall and

decay, it may be merely one of the 'clouds which stain truth's rising day' (1. i6I), yet it appears to be piercing the solid blue, like Milan Cathedral. Its

buildings seem to resemble the flames that discovered the truths of the oracle. Deceptive and truth-revealing, Venice declares a form of truth whose moral ambiguity the traveller's preconceptions seek to disguise. 'Mont Blanc'

implicitly attacked Christian accounts of natural beauty as proofs of God's goodness. The 'Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills' do something similar with Venice.

Lady Morgan, for instance, who like all English visitors of the time lamented the defeat of republican Venice, consoles herself with future hopes and present beauties: Such images of desolation and ruin are encountered, in every detail of the moral and exterior aspect of the city, as dissipate all visionary anticipations [...]. Yet if the character of interest with which Venice was once visited is changed, its intensity is rather increased than lessened; and in a picturesque point of view, it never perhaps was more beautiful, or more striking, than at the present moment.'8

18 Ita, II, 451-52. Eustace is fiercer: 'Luxury had corrupted every mind, and unbraced every sinew. Hence Venice [. . .] became the foul abode of effeminacy, of wantonness, and of debauchery' (Classical Tour, I, 76).

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RALPH PITE

The ruins of Venice are beautiful if regrettable and desolation even produces a more intense effect. Lady Morgan's 'picturesque point of view' admires the

decay while remaining untouched by it. Shelley's poem is uneasy about the perspective that allows people to concentrate still on the beauties of Venice

despite its decline. The freedom of the traveller (temporary and artificial in some ways) enables him or her to gloss desolation as an instance of 'ruin' and an occasion for the picturesque.'9

The ambiguities of Venice in 'Lines Written among the Euganean Hills' start to dislocate the traveller's presumption. Characteristically, in 'Julian and Maddalo', begun at the same time as 'Euganean Hills' and completed later, Shelley asks whether he is himself self-deceived in claiming to have

gone beyond the self-deceptions of picturesque taste. The indistinguishable mixture of heaven and hell that Shelley sees from the hills is separated out into the later poem's two characters. Julian sees in Italy a 'Paradise of exiles'; Maddalo, modelled on Byron, sees in Venice continual proof of human

imprisonment and failure. The figure of Maddalo is, then, partly an attempt to continue the implicit claim of the earlier poem that Shelley sees Italy more

truthfully than other visitors do. The contrast with Julian, who is much more like Shelley himself, resists that claim by accentuating Shelley's own desire to idealize.

Julian's first celebration of Venice is notably cliched. Eustace had entered the city at evening: Venice 'was faintly illuminated by the rays of the setting sun, and rising from the waters with its numberless domes and towers [...] it

presented the appearance of a vast city floating on the bosom of the ocean'. The same sights 'in evening's gleam' look toJulian ' like fabrics of enchant- ment piled to Heaven'. Maddalo responds to this familiar, touristic enthu- siasm by dryly promising 'a better station' which will reveal the tower of the Venetian madhouse silhouetted against the setting sun. Julian's 'piled to Heaven' loses its grand surety because of Shelley's repetition of the word: the madhouse is another 'pile' built upon 'the harbour piles'. The poem's lan-

guage works against Julian, making him sound as enthused as Eustace, as

eager to disguise the precarious or disgusting foundations of enchantment.2' There is evidence to suggest that Shelley originally intended the poem

as a rebuke to Byron for his despondency. One expects from the opening that in what follows Julian's enthusiasm will be tempered and Maddalo will come to recognize his own innate goodness of heart. Julian's hackneyed ideas about Italy seem harmless enough and perhaps they would preserve

'1 The Colosseum in Rome offered English travellers something similar to Venice. Its decay to Lady Morgan was 'so beautiful' that you could not regret it. Eustace found its 'peculiar solemnity' a sign of Rome's continuity with the past. Shelley is more hesitant. The Colosseum leads visitors to contemplate, he says, 'something beyond themselves'. See Lady Morgan, Italy, II, i87; Eustace, Classical Tour, I, 404; Shelley's Prose, ed. by David Clark (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, I954), p. 227. See also Forsyth, Remarks on Antiquities, pp. I59-6o.

20 Eustace, Classical Tour, i, 64; Shelley, 'Julian and Maddalo', 11. 78, 90, 92, IOI (Poems, ii, 668-69).

53

54 Shelley in Italy

Maddalo from his unbridled gloom. At the close, however, after the two of them have listened to the Maniac's soliloquy, Julian's zeal for feeling looks more threatening.

But I imagined that if day by day I watched him, and but seldom went away, And studied all the beatings of his heart [...] I might reclaim him from his dark estate. (11. 568, 574)

'This was all I Accomplished not' apparently but the thought was, Julian claims, more than a passing whim: 'what I now designed I Made for long years impression on my mind' (11. 577, 580). Julian's happy self-acceptance belies the strength of the impression. The thought seems exactly as idle and careless as he says it is not.

Julian wants to appear philanthropic and comes across as self-involved. He gives the impression too of fearing criticism and justifies himself by saying that the plan would have worked if he had not had duties elsewhere:

If I had been an unconnected man, I, from this moment, should have formed some plan Never to leave sweet Venice, -for to me It was delight to ride by the lone sea. (1. 547)

The blitheness casts doubt on Julian's 'connectedness', either to loved ones or to the audience he tries to persuade. In line with this, Venice is reduced to a cliche again: it is 'sweet' and 'bright' and full of'delight'. His riding 'by the lone sea' reinforces the disappointment by recalling earlier lines whereJulian is less defensive and more self-aware:

I love all waste And solitary places; where we taste The pleasure of believing what we see Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be. (1. 14)

The change between beginning and end turns 'Julian and Maddalo' into one of Shelley's 'saddest verses' as he called it himself (Letters, II, 246). The poem's planned rebuke to Byron turns into a criticism ofJulian's (perhaps Shelley's) failure to live up to its opening.

Shelley's poems from earlier in I818 had suggested that one should not come to Italy to find vestiges of paradise so much as an opportunity to look

directly into heaven - a direct look that might reveal something much more

peculiar and ambiguous than one would expect. In 'Julian and Maddalo' this becomes a more dangerous and potentially painful action. Julian says he

especially enjoys the 'pleasure of believing what we see' and Shelley's line ending allows that sense for a moment to stand alone, before he adds 'Is boundless'. Julian becomes the focus of so much animosity in the poem because when it proves difficult to 'believe what we see' -when he encoun- ters the Maniac's deep distress -Julian backs off. He does so while also believing that he could help and could help through keeping a close eye on

RALPH PITE

the Maniac: 'if day by day I watched him [...] I might reclaim him' (11. 568, 574). The reader doubts this; Julian's philanthropy seems a way of blocking out understanding and his (in)ability to see the Maniac clearly and humanely seems the source of the trouble, not its cure. When looking dir- ectly involves looking into something ambiguous or difficult, Julian retreats into the cliches of travel-writing and then goes home. These withdrawals allow him to continue to believe that what he sees 'is boundless', ignoring now both the wishfulness of that belief and any problematic thing in the world around.

The self-rebuke implied here may be coloured by events in Shelley's life. Between beginning the poem in September i818 and finishing it, probably in the summer of the following year, Percy and Mary lost two children. Their daughter, Clara, died on 24 September i818, William on 7 June I8I9. After their deaths, Mary suffered from severe depression and Shelley was afflicted by the fear that he was partially responsible and the suspicion that Mary blamed him. By presenting Julian's buoyant self-deception, Shelley could confront the accusation that his self-assured manner was an irresponsible one (especially by contrast with Mary's visible misery). He could take the accusation so seriously as to imply that it was wrong. The case against him is very strongly felt and yet Shelley would not plead guilty. Indeed the clarity of the poem's self-portrayal begins to do what Julian cannot. It confesses the self-deceptions that Julian does not perceive. The poem's balance between self-blame and self-exculpation is paralleled, in other poems of 1819, by a new hesitancy in Shelley's attention to 'what we see'.

Where?

Shelley registers the shock of his bereavement as an abrupt stillness in which objects around lose their associations or meaning. The Euganean Hills had fulfilled the promise of Shelley's expectations: as he wandered 'wheresoe'er he may' he found 'such a one' -an example of the flowering islands or the Hesperides.21 After William's death the places Shelley visits in Italy have become ironic facts:

(With what truth may I say Roma! Roma! Roma!

Non e pii come era prima!) This is the motto to Shelley's 'To William Shelley' (I819)22 and it translates Wordsworth's 'Ode' to a particular place:

21 'Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills', 11. 30, 68 (Poems, II, 431, 433). 22

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Poetical Works, ed. by Thomas Hutchinson, corrected by G. M. Matthews (Oxford: Oxford University Press, I970), p. 58I; hereafter PWV

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Shelley in Italy

It is not now as it has been of yore; Turn wheresoe'er I may,

By night or day The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

The famous image of disaster offered by the ruins of Rome has become, for

Shelley, a scene of private loss and this pushes apart the feeling and the

place. 'Roma' is no longer what it was because it cannot represent to him former greatness and former glory. Because 'there has pass'd away a glory' from Shelley's life, he finds how the types of loss do not measure up to actual loss.23 He may say on the basis of what has happened what Wordsworth perceived as the universal condition but he can say it only in a foreign lan-

guage. 'In the accents of an unknown land I He sung new sorrow' as Shelley says of himself in 'Adonais' (1819).24 The Italian declares the immediacy of his loss and yet prevents direct or complete access to the feelings it produces.

Shelley's poem to his wife, written during their grief ('To Mary Shelley', PW, p. 582), achieves the form of sympathy that arises from this hesitancy:

But thou art fled, gone down the dreary road That leads to Sorrow's most obscure abode; Thou sittest on the hearth of pale despair,

Where For thine own sake I cannot follow thee. (1. 4)

Her state of mind is one from which he must protect himself if he is to be of any help. He cannot help that. The delayed 'Where' sounds more like sympathy than self-defensiveness. Her condition is another foreign place easily interpreted but nevertheless distinct. A year earlier Shelley's 'To Mary-' (I818) is more demanding of her and of the landscape: 'O Mary dear, that you were here; [ The Castle echo whispers "Here!"' (1. 15, PW, p. 553)-

This significant change in Shelley's perspective on 'Here', Italy, can be compared to a new style of painting. Thomas Jones (I742-I803), a Welsh gentleman-painter travelled to southern Italy in I776-83. At first he worked along the familiar lines of Richard Wilson but late in his visit he began to paint in the open air, choosing townscapes visible from the terraces of his studio. In his 'Buildings in Naples' (1782), the domes and towers of the city recede into the left-hand background beneath darkening clouds.25 From the right, the strongly lit top storey of a house extends more than halfway across the canvas. Its plaster has crumbled in places to show the brick beneath; the whitewash has patchily worn thin. Such an unimpressive building imposes itself on the picture against a backdrop of ancient monuments and clear,

23 Wordsworth's Poems of 1807, ed. by A. R.Jones (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987), p. I33. 24 'Adonais', 11. 301-02, Shelley's Poetry and Prose, ed. by Donald Reiman and Sharon Powers (New York:

Norton, i977), p. 400; hereafter PP. 25 Held in the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff; reproduced in Lister, British Romantic Painting, p. 60.

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blue sky. Ancient and modern, ornamental and plain, national and domestic are opposed in order to assert a co-existence that does not harmonize. The composition of the painting (the building divides it into a golden section) finds, however, a harmony in the scene that accentuates differences of tex- ture. The shabbiness of the modern building is set against the painterly, solid blue of the sky and dramatic, encroaching clouds.

If contemporary Italy is being shown here, set against the traditional scene without becoming absorbed in it, the urban setting has still not been revea- led. The wall of the building is dominated by the closed shutters of a balcony and, beside it, the black space of an open window. Rooms inside are hidden in deep shadow or blocked off by closed doors. Once the eye concentrates on the black rectangle at the centre of the wall, the smaller rectangles of shadow, placed across the townscape to the left, become more prominent. The whole city, though plainly visible, resists the painter's gaze. Italy, it app- ears, will not be taken up into the foreigner's expectations. Jones's painting, like Shelley's grief-stricken poems, acknowledges an unexotic and immovable distance between visitor and place.2"

The Pisan Circle

Shelley and his family journeyed constantly around Italy before William's death. Afterwards, they returned to Tuscany and stayed in and around Pisa for nearly three years. In April 1822, they moved up the coast to Lerici, near La Spezia, but up until then Shelley had stayed longer in one place than at any time since childhood. In 1821 he wrote to Peacock about Byron's com- pany: 'no small relief this after the dreary solitude of the understanding & the imagination in which we past [sic] the first years of our expatriation, yoked to all sorts of miseries & discomforts' (?IT January 1821, Letters, II,

273).27 Expatriation is first recorded in the OED in I8I6. The verb expatriate originally meant 'to withdraw voluntarily from one's native country' and is first recorded in I784. During and after the Napoleonic Wars the sense of 'forced' expatriation began to take over. In retrospect, Shelley finds the 'Paradise of exiles' a gloomy place of expatriation. Likewise, freedom from the persecution he had suffered in England has changed into another kind of imprisonment, 'yoked', he says, 'to all sorts of miseries & discomforts'.

26 Rossellini's film, Viaggio in Italia (I953) makes similar use of dark windows. A visiting English couple try to rouse their housekeeper during siesta and find they have violated unknown customs. An elderly Italian woman appears from the darkness and crossly sends them away, speaking in incomprehensible Neapolitan. Compare also V. S. Pritchett's visitors to the Mediterranean in 'Handsome is as Handsome Does': 'The clay-coloured houses [.. .] in the sun stood out white and tall. The roofs went up in tiers and over each roof a pair of windows stared like alien witnesses. She was startled to think that she had brought her life to a place so strange to her' (The Second Penguin Book of English Short Stories, ed. by Christopher Dolley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), pp. 236-37.

'7 Mary complained to Maria Gisborne of their solitude xwhen travelling; see Letters of tMay [I Shelley, I, 85.

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Shelley in Italy

In Pisa, Shelley cultivated social contacts to relieve his own and Mary's loneliness. He tried informally to organize a circle that would recreate the best of the society he had left and so form an 'expatriate community', as we would now understand it. Two couples, Edward and Jane Williams and Maria Gisborne and her husband, were joined by Byron, Leigh Hunt, William Medwin, andJohn Taafe as well as by enlightened Italians such as Dr Vacca. Whatever his relationship with each, it is clear that Shelley thought of them all as forming a circle together.28

A social existence served Mary and Percy in different ways and, as Percy recognizes in his 'Letter to Maria Gisborne', the circle was valuable because it allowed all its members variety. They could be 'babbling gossips' and also seek 'those deepest wells of passion and thought | Wrought by wise poets in the waste of years' (11. 165, 171-72, PP, p. 317). Two years earlier Italy had of- fered a range of possibilities that stretched from one extreme to another, from heaven to hell. In I820 the options are more various:

on the sea shore We watched the ocean and the sky together, Under the roof of blue Italian weather. (1. I45)

This begins Shelley's and Maria's 'communion' with each other and not only with nature. As they look from the land's edge towards the sky's horizon they find that everything is safely enclosed by the blue of Italy. The roof of blue contains all the world and, at the same time, it rises in a dome above the charmed circle of Shelley's friends. The poem's echoes of'Frost at Midnight' and 'The Aeolian Harp' adopt Coleridge's affection for a domestic centre, enfolded by the beauties of nature. Italy is not any longer somewhere to visit; it has become a context within which Shelley and his circle may live, watched over by the sky: 'above I One chasm of Heaven smiles, like the eye of Love | On the unquiet world' (1. 126).

The community at Pisa is surrounded by Italy, observant of its ways and concerned for its destiny. Yet it remains quite separate. For Shelley, this becomes a vantage-point, lending him detachment. He may speak from here to the Neapolitans who are fighting for their freedom and, in 'Hellas' (1821), to the Greeks in their war of liberation. His distance from events gives him, he feels, clearer understanding. He is no longer lying 'asleep in Italy' as he fears in 'The Mask of Anarchy' (1819); he is poised in readiness for illumina- tion: 'before me fled I The night; behind me rose the day; the Deep I Was at my feet, and Heaven above my head' ('The Triumph of Life', 1. 26, PP, p. 456). Shelley has retired into the centre which is also the birthplace of a new day.

28 If Percy initiated many of their contacts, Mary undoubtedly enjoyed them. After his death, she wrote: 'Why is the companion of Shelley companionless - the centre of a loved circle deserted by all?' (Journals, II, 484).

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Likewise, Shelley tells Maria Gisborne that Italian peasant songs are 'rude, but made sweet by distance' ('Letter to Maria Gisborne', 1. 287). The remark is very knowing about the sentimentalities of tourism. It is typical of the

poem's creation of a cool solidarity among the well-travelled few. Although they have not gone native like Lord Byron, Shelley and his friends know more intimately than most the country in which the sweetness of art is

always easily found because so habitually desired and expected. If the 'Letter to Maria Gisborne' responds with new amusement to

the intimacy Shelley's poetry helps create, 'The Boat on the Serchio' (1821) inquires into its justification. Shelley wonders whether the luck and advan-

tage of his position might be the beginning of a more questionable with- drawal. In the poem, Lionel and Melchior have found an island of the blest:

They from the throng of men had stepped aside, And made their home under the green hill-side. It was that hill [...] Which the circumfluous plain waving below,

Like a wide lake of green fertility, With streams and fields and marshes bare,

Divides from the far Apennines - which lie Islanded in the immeasurable air. (11, 37, 4I, PW, p. 655)

The poem is reminiscent of'Lines Written among the Euganean Hills'. The 'waveless plain' of Lombardy is replaced now by a plain 'waving below' which is described in more particular detail, with 'streams and fields and marshes bare'. Similarly in the 'Letter', 'The ripe corn under the undulating air I Undulates like an ocean' (1. 119). Both plains may resemble seas but the likeness does not contain them. 'Waving' placed against the elaborate 'circumfluous' (rather like the comic repetition of 'undulates' after 'undulat-

ing' and 'under') confirms the existence of something the mind cannot ent- irely grasp. What Lionel and Melchior have made into their idyllic, secluded home survives the idealization they feel. The place extends beyond the

picture of heaven they have found there, rather as Thomas Jones's Naples is both tangible and secret, civil but strange.

Rousseau in 'The Triumph of Life' questions whether the first-person pro- tagonist can 'forbear | To join the dance' (1. I88, PP, p. 460). By doing so, he raises the poem's central issue: whether you can ever properly claim to have

'stepped aside' like Lionel and Melchior 'from the throng of men'. Shelley's visionary claims for himself as a poet involved an aspiration towards such detachment yet he repeatedly doubted both the possibility and the merits of standing apart from the rest of humanity. In Italy, the conflict Shelley felt between expectations and fact led him to reconsider the problem and to reach a more reconciled position. Italy led him to dwell upon both the

deceptiveness and the necessity of understanding 'life' from the outside, through thought as much as action or engagement. This new point of view is

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60 Shelley in Itay

accompanied, as we have seen, by his new enjoyment of a social circle in Pisa. It led too to his most successful collaborative work. When editing The Liberal with Leigh Hunt and Lord Byron, Shelley was able for the first time to co-operate with others without becoming either domineering or craven. It was his Italian experience that enabled Shelley to treat his co-editors as independent equals.