Back to the Madhouse

"The madhouse I know well"... 

I first heard about this madhouse in The Passion, a novel by Jeanette Winterson. Rowing in the dark around it, in my mind. And then there we were— in the madhouse island in the lagoon.  And it keeps coming back, now in Melwin's Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, speaking about Shelley's stay in "that degraded city", together with his friend Byron.

 

Childe Harold and Beppo are not more different characters than were the Byron of Geneva, and the Byron of Venice. Mr. Moore has delighted to rake up all the filthy details of his low amours in that degraded city, of which Shelley speaking says, "he had no conception of the escesses to which avarice, cowardice, superstition, ignorance, powerless lust, and all the brutality which degrade human nature, could be carried, till he had passes a few days there." He has also drawn a portrait of his noble poet friend, which reminds us of what Chesterfield said of Bolingbroke: "His youth was there distracted by the tumult and storm of pleasures in which he most licentiously triumphed, devoid of all decorum. His fine imagination often heated and exhausted the body in deifying the prostitute of the night, and his convivial joys were pushed to all the extravagance of frantic Bacchanals. His passions injured both his understanding and his character." 

But without quoting what Shelley says, in speaking of his dissipations, Julian and Maddalo is also preceious as a faithful picture of Venice. We seem to sail with the two friends in their gondola—to view with them that gorgeous sunset, from Lido, when—

They turned, and saw the city, and could mark 

How from the many isles in the broad gleam,

Its temples and its palaces did seem

Like fabrics of enchantment piled to heaven.

The madhouse, so graphically drawn, on the island, I know well; but whether the harrowing history of the maniac was imaginary, or but the dim shadowing out of his own sufferings, and a prognostic of what might befal himself, I cannot pretend to determine. Who can read it without shedding tears? and how thrilling is the comment of Maddalo, on the destinies of himself and Julian!

       

Most wretched men

Are cradled into poetry by wrong—

They learn in suffering what they teach in song.

 

 

 

 

 —oOo—