Shelley: The Pursuit by Richard Holmes Page B

began, ‘My dear Love, Your letter received per parcel tonight was very unsatisfactory. You decide nothing and tell me nothing. — You say — “the Chancery expenses must be paid” but you do not say whether our going to Italy would obviate this necessity.’ 29
    Shelley wrote back four days later, with a variety of explanations. ‘We must go to Italy, on every ground. This weather does me great mischief. I nurse myself, & these kind people [the Hunts] nurse me with great care. I think of you my own beloved & study the minutest things relative to my health. I suffer today under a violent bowel complaint attended with pain in the side which I daresay will relieve me but which prevents me today from going out at all. Ihave thus put off engagements with Longdill & Godwin which must be done tomorrow. I have borrowed £250 from Horace Smith which is now at my bankers.’ 30 Mary answered this briskly by return of post, remarking that she could not understand his complaints about the weather since she had ‘seldom known any more pleasant’. She was not impressed by Horace Smith’s timely loan. ‘Your account of our expenses is by very much too favourable. You say that you have only borrowed £250 — our debts at Marlow are greater than you are aware of besides living in the mean time and articles of dress that I must buy — Now we cannot hope to sell the house for £1200 — And to think of going abroad with only about £200 would be madness . . . .’ She ended her note affectionately, but to the point. ‘Adieu my own love — Get rid of that nasty side ache — You will tell me the Italian sun will be the best physician — be it so — but money money . . . .’ 31
    To these frictions, as the month dragged on, were added Godwin’s request for cash in London, and a swelling number of local creditors who started calling at Albion House demanding bills rendered. The news of the house sale had quickly got about. Some time about 15 October Shelley was actually arrested for debt and detained for two days on the instance of his father and his old ally of the Irish days, Captain Pilfold. Sir Timothy’s solicitor Whitton estimated Shelley’s debts in this affair alone at some £1,500. 32
    But despite everything, Shelley pushed firmly ahead with his own literary projects. His main effort was still concentrated on finding Laon and Cythna a publisher. But he also found time to draft the beginning of an eclogue, to be called Rosalind and Helen , based on Mary’s relationship with her old Scottish schoolfriend Isabel Baxter. The poem is weak, and Shelley only forced himself to finish it at Mary’s request the following year, at the Bagni di Lucca. It is based on two stories told respectively by two sisters, Rosalind and Helen, which combine many of the private and public issues facing Shelley during 1817, and cover sketchily much of the material handled with infinitely greater skill and perception in Laon and Cythna . Rosalind’s story concerns an incestuous love-match, and a tyrannical father; Helen’s story narrates the tribulations of a family life destroyed by her husband Lionel’s political persecution. The emphasis on exile is also notable, and the two sisters meet each other at the beginning of the poem on the banks-of Lake Como, where Shelley was to search for a house in spring 1818.
    Lionel, like Laon, reflects Shelley’s own ambitions for radical political leadership, and his own state of spiritual exile. Crude as the workmanship is, frequently descending to a kind of fumbling sub-Skeltonic doggerel, it shows something of the way in which Shelley now saw his role as a writer. Lionel attacked the conventions and superstitions of ‘the priests’ in verses ‘wild and queer’:
Sothis grew a proverb: ‘Don’t get old
Till Lionel’s “Banquet in Hell” you hear,
And then you will laugh yourself young again.’
So the priests hated him, and he
Repaid their hate with cheerful glee.
    Frustrated by the