CLOSING SCENES.
Shelley’s Attachment to Jane Williams--Her Womanly Goodness--Her
Devotion to her Husband--_The Serpent is shut out from
Paradise_--_Essay on the Devil_--Shelley’s Happiness and Discord with
Mary--Her Remorseful Verses--Trials of her Married Life--_Essay on
Christianity_--San Terenzo and Lerici--The Casa Magni--Mary’s Illness
and Melancholy at San Terenzo--Arrival of the ‘Don Juan’--Mutual
Affection of Mrs. Shelley and Mrs. Williams--Shelley’s latest Visions
and Hallucinations--Leigh Hunt’s Arrival in Italy--Shelley sails for
Leghorn--Meeting of Shelley and Hunt--Improvement in Shelley’s
Health--His Mediation between Hunt and Byron--The Hunts in the Palazzo
Lanfranchi--Lady Shelley’s Account of the Difficulties between Byron
and Shelley--Shelley’s Contentment with his Arrangements for the
Hunts--He sets Sail for Lerici--The Fatal Storm--Cremation on the
Sea-shore--Grave at Rome.
The time has come for a few more words about Shelley’s attachment to Jane
Williams,--the last of the series of fair women who successively inspired
him with feelings of adorative fondness, that, differing widely from such
love as animated Byron towards his several mistresses, differed no less
widely from the placid preferences of passionless friendship. No
sympathetic student of the poet’s character and story can entertain even a
momentary suspicion of the refinement and purity of Shelley’s regard for
the gentle and fine-natured woman, to whom he addressed the saddest and
sweetest poetry of his life’s closing term. To say this of the feelings
that swayed his soul in all its successive services of homage towards his
friend’s wife, is indeed to say no more than I would declare of each and
all of the so-called platonic attachments that preceded his worship of
Jane Williams.
I have no shadow of a doubt that the always abundant and sometimes glowing
fervour of these attachments was never touched for a single instant by
desire. On this point my confidence proceeds no less from my clear
apprehension of the peculiarity which I venture to designate Shelley’s
prime physical defect, than from an equally precise perception of his
sentimental idiosyncrasy. But in respect to some of these so-called
platonic attachments, this conviction is raised to still higher certainty
by the conditions, under which Shelley approached the objects of his
sentimental preference, or by the characteristics of the women he
distinguished so highly. Though it would be absurd to infer anything from
the moral rectitude or the delicacy of the young lady, who asked money of
her poetical worshiper, and passed from her convent into wedlock only to
be separated from her husband, after leading him (to use Mrs. Shelley’s
expression) ‘a devil of a life’ for a very brief while, the conditions,
under which Shelley was permitted to have personal intercourse with Emilia
Viviani, put it beyond question that, in their curious intimacy, he never
strayed beyond the lines of social decorum and conventional propriety. In
the case of Emilia’s successor, confidence in the purity of Shelley’s
passion, and in the delicacy of his addresses, is raised even higher,--is
raised, indeed, to absolute certainty,--by the moral excellences of the
lady, and all her domestic circumstances, as well as by all the other
conditions and features of a friendship that, even in the tenderest and
warmest of its emotional developments, could not have been more innocent
had Shelley been a woman.
In some particulars the last of Shelley’s spiritual passions resembled his
wilder and more tumultuous idolatry of Emilia Viviani. Just as he worshipt
Emilia because fancy tricked him into thinking her a realization of his
long-cherished ideal of all that was or could be admirable in womankind,
he idolized Jane Williams as an example of the particular type of feminine
loveliness that swayed his imagination whilst he was composing _The
Sensitive Plant_. Whilst he worshipt Jane as the veritable realization of
a pure anticipatory cognition, even as he had worshipt Emilia a year
earlier for her imaginary correspondence to a more comprehensive
conception of feminine excellence, Shelley rendered the homage of his
spiritual devotion to Mrs. Williams in a way that reminds one of his
manner of wooing Emilia. Associating his wife with himself in his
addresses to Emilia, he made Jane’s husband a sympathetic co-operator in
his addresses to Mrs. Williams, by selecting him for the fittest possible
confidant of his affectionate regard for the lady, and even inducing him
to act as the medium through which she received his friend’s adoration.
There were indeed occasions when Williams and his wife were in this
manner rendered the joint-recipients of the homage which she alone evoked,
Mary being, at the same time, imperfectly cognizant of the course of the
platonic suit to which Jane’s husband consented. In a former page I spoke
of the affair with Emilia Viviani as a kind of three-cornered flirtation.
The same term is applicable to the affair in which Edward Williams was
scarcely less a principal than his wife and Shelley. The two
three-cornered flirtations differed, however, in the fact that the later
of them had a deeply interested, though by no means equally gratified,
spectator of something of the proceedings. This spectator was Mary, who,
whilst cognizant of the general progress of what she cannot be supposed to
have approved, was kept wholly in the dark as to some of its incidents.
Whilst Williams consented sympathetically to an affair of which he knew
every particular, Mrs. Shelley consented submissively (though, of course,
by no means cheerfully) to an affair respecting which she was far from
fully informed.
On 26th January, 1822, when no breath of discord had yet ruffled his
relations with Byron, Shelley, from his own apartment in the same house in
which the Williamses had a set of rooms (a house on the Lung’Arno, but
divided by the river from Byron’s palazzo), sent Williams _The Serpent is
shut out from Paradise_, together with the characteristic note, which
instructed Williams, that he might read to ‘Jane, but to no one else,’ the
poem, containing the confession:
‘Therefore, if now I see you seldomer,
Dear friends, dear _friend_! know that I only fly
Your looks, because they stir
Grief that should sleep, and hopes that cannot die:
The very comfort that they minister
I scarce can bear, yet I,
So deeply is the arrow gone,
Should quickly perish if it were withdrawn.
When I return to my cold home, you ask
Why I am not as I have ever been.
_You_ spoil me for the task
Of acting a forced part in life’s dull scene,--
Of wearing on my brow the idle mask
Of author, great or mean,
In the world’s carnival. I sought
Peace thus, and, but in you, I found it not.’
The little effort of literary mystification, to be observed in the note
which accompanied these verses to Edward Williams, affords another point
of resemblance between the Emilia-Viviani affair and the affair with Jane
Williams. Just as the _Epipsychidion_ was offered to the public with a
preface which attributed the composition to the real author’s ‘unfortunate
friend’ who ‘died at Florence, as he was preparing for a voyage to one of
the wildest of the Sporades,’ the verses are offered to Edward Williams as
poetry taken from the portfolio in which the poet’s friend used ‘to keep
his verses,’--the object of this misrepresentation to Williams and Jane,
who were in the real author’s confidence, being less than obvious. Given,
of course, for a reason no less sufficient than manifest, the direction
that the verses should be shown to _no one but Jane_ was, no doubt, duly
observed by the receivers of the poem. Williams, in his diary, may well
have styled the verses ‘beautiful, but too melancholy lines.’ One can
imagine how commiseratingly the happy husband and wife (to whom the verses
were sent, or rather the husband _through_ whom the verses were
transmitted, and the wife _to_ whom they were addressed) spoke of the
wretchedness of their friend who, in his inability to find contentment,
such as their own mutual happiness, in the society of his Mary, spoke of
his chambers in the same house (the Tre Palazzi) as his ‘cold home.’ It is
certainly less surprising that Shelley desired the verses to be withheld
from Mary, than that he was so communicative respecting the cheerlessness
of the apartment, of which she was the mistress.
A brief note on the poem’s first line (‘The serpent is shut out from
Paradise’), written at a time when it was Byron’s humour to call Shelley
‘the serpent’ or ‘the snake.’ Accepting the title in good part, and indeed
as a compliment, Shelley, only a few weeks before sending the verses to
the Williamses, had written to Byron about the culprit, who was _not_
burned at Lucca for scattering the eucharistic wafers from the altar, ‘I
hear this morning that the design, which certainly had been in
contemplation, of _burning my fellow serpent_, has been abandoned, and
that he has been condemned to the galleys.’ Knowing how Shelley regarded
the serpent as typical of the wisdom, that is especially hateful to
bigots, and delighted in regarding himself as akin to the serpent in being
largely endowed with the same wisdom, Byron had of course more reasons
for calling him ‘the snake’ than he troubled himself to declare, when he
observed ‘_Goethe’s Mephistofilus_ calls the serpent who tempted Eve “my
aunt the renowned snake”; and I always insist that Shelley is nothing but
one of her nephews, _walking about on the tip of his tail_’; a peculiarly
Byronic flippancy that appears in the concluding paragraph of Shelley’s
_Essay on the Devil_--‘... before this misconduct it hopped along upon its
tail; a mode of progression which, if I was a serpent, I should think the
severer punishment of the two.’
Few readers will question that this remarkable coincidence of humour and
verbal form in the Byronic utterance and the Shelleyan essay (an essay
withheld from the public eye long after the death of both poets) should be
deemed a clear indication, that Byron either perused the essay or was the
originator of at least one of its humorous sallies. If Byron did not take
the thought and words from the essay, Shelley must be assumed to have
taken them from him. To the present writer the coincidence is part of the
superabundant evidence that, Byron was accountable for the piquancy,
incisiveness, and Don-Juanesque levity that distinguish the _Essay on the
Devil_ from all Shelley’s other prose productions. For the purpose of
exalting the younger at the expense of the elder poet, many extravagant
things have been written about Shelley’s influence on Byron. That Shelley
influenced Byron greatly is unquestionable, but it is not to be supposed
the influences arising from the close, and for a while harmonious,
intercourse of the two poets, were altogether one-sided,--that whilst
receiving much from his familiar companion, Byron gave him nothing. The
_Essay on Christianity_ and the _Essay on the Devil_ are distinctly
assignable to the same period of Shelley’s literary productiveness; and to
turn from the one to the other, is to pass from the society of the Real
Shelley, to the society of Shelley speaking under the inspiration of
Byronic mockery.
At this late point of their brief association, when he is under the sway
of a spiritual attachment that endured till his death, and she is
regarding his services of homage to her familiar friend, the occasion
rises for inquiring, whether Mary has experienced an average share of
felicity since she eloped from the old home in Skinner Street? whether
Shelley has been to her all she hoped of him, when she took the momentous
step of July, 1814? whether, in addition to trouble, for which he is in
no degree to be held responsible, she has endured trouble he either caused
her, or might have preserved her from? whether her anticipations of
felicity from their association have been realized? whether, in brief,
their marriage has been a happy one?
Much has been written of the perfect happiness that came to both Shelley
and Mary from their association. It has been proclaimed by romantic
biography that the soul of each found its perfect complement in the
other’s soul, that their conjugal intimacy was singularly felicitous, and
that, whilst they dwelt together in harmony seldom accorded to spouses,
neither was ever for a single moment disappointed in the other. The
present writer ventures to declare no less confidently that their marriage
was by no means remarkable for happiness,--that they were not a well-mated
couple.
In respect to intellectual endowments and sympathy, it cannot be
questioned for a moment that Shelley was more fitly matched with Mary
Godwin than with Harriett Westbrook; but mental unison is not sufficient
for perfect conjugal concord. I do not suggest that during the eight
years’ interval between their elopement and Shelley’s death they ceased to
care for one another. On the contrary, I have no doubt that, loving him
with girlish vehemence in the summer of 1814, Mary loved Shelley at the
bottom of her heart till the summer of 1822, though (we have her word for
it) she sometimes behaved to him so as to imply that his felicity was by
no means her chief concern. I have also no doubt, that Shelley never
survived his affectionate concern for Mary, though he cannot have
delighted in her greatly when he sighed to Emilia, and instructed the
Williamses not to let his wife suspect how much happier he was in their
rooms of the Tre Palazzi than in his own apartment. It is possible for a
married couple to be held strongly by a deep-seated sentiment of mutual
dependence, and yet to live on uneasy, and even exasperating, terms, with
one another. It was so, at times, with Shelley and Mary. Knowledge comes
to the student of human nature from observing how deep-seated attachment
sometimes survives superficial sympathy in mated couples. Superficial
sympathy must have perished from the mutual regard of Mary and Shelley,
when he looked to other women for the higher felicity she was powerless to
afford him. Yet they persisted in loving one another at the bottom of
their hearts.
Apart from her reasonable grounds of complaint against her husband, Mrs.
Shelley was a woman whose lot was fruitful of trouble and trial. Her
health was far from good, and during the eight years of her connection
with Shelley she endured five (including her miscarriage at San Terenzo)
of those illnesses, which, though desired by wives who have never had
experience of them, are by no means conducive to physical vigour. She gave
birth to four children, and wept over the graves of three of them, losing
two of them when they had lived long enough to gain firm hold of her
heart. Her grief at the last of these bereavements was excessive. An
ardent and strongly affectionate creature (how could Mary Wollstonecraft’s
daughter be otherwise?), she had in girlhood loved her father and her
sisters vehemently. Her half-sister had perished dismally. Through
Claire’s too fervid temper, and the successive ill-consequences of her
luckless alliance with Byron, Mary had (to put the case mildly) derived
more vexation than contentment from her close intercourse with her
sister-by-affinity. Loving her old father and wishing him well, she was
continually receiving doleful intelligence from England that, instead of
mending, his affairs grew steadily more desperate. Pining for the
diversions of society, she had often fretted at being excluded from it in
foreign capitals, no less than in her native country. It was also against
the contentment of this unwilling exile from England, that during her
successive illnesses and her trials with her children, she never had the
consolations of a home, worthy to be called a home. To render existence
fairly comfortable in any transient abiding-place, more especially when
the abiding-place is a single set of rooms, it is needful for a woman to
be an adept in housewifely arts and the smaller domestic economies. But
the woman who in her girlhood shirked the matters of the house, to which
her step-mother wished her to give attention, was as shiftless and
helpless a home-keeper as John Westbrook’s daughter. From this lack of
housewifely knowingness and capacity, she suffered much and Shelley not a
little. One would fain forget that the poet, who has done so much for the
happiness of English firesides, never knew the comforts of a home, after
passing from Field Place, and that he suffered in this respect chiefly
through the incompetence of his wives, both of whom he took from a social
grade in which to keep house cleverly is woman’s first duty. Due in no
small measure to nervous fancies, Shelley’s bodily ailments were due in a
larger degree to comfortless feeding. At the same time he suffered from
causes, in respect to which his wife was blameless. His temperament would
under any circumstances have exposed him to sudden visitations of
melancholy; and in the memories that haunted him--memories of the kindred
from whom he had estranged himself, and the poor girl who drowned herself
in the Serpentine--he had constant sources of sadness.
Even if they had been altogether fitted to one another, Shelley and Mary
would in their Italian life have missed the average of connubial
enjoyment. But they were not precisely adapted to one another. Whilst his
taste was for studious or meditative seclusion, she had been designed by
nature for a career of action and gaiety. ‘She,’ Shelley once said to
Trelawny, ‘can’t bear solitude, nor I society--the quick coupled with the
dead,’ When he was pining for green fields or sea-breezes, she thought of
ball-rooms and assemblies. Under the most auspicious influences their
contrarieties of temper would have brought them into conflict. Habitual
melancholy is perhaps the most trying temper in a husband, for a wife to
endure with patient cheerfulness; and though it was relieved by occasional
moods of blithesomeness and jubilant elation, despondency was Shelley’s
normal condition in his later years. Whilst he harassed Mary with
unseasonable and bootless moanings, she worried him with the perversities
of her Wollstonecraft vehemence and captiousness,--with the temper that
disposed all the Wollstonecrafts to discover egregious insults in trivial
slights, and imagine themselves the victims of human malignity whenever
the wind blew from the wrong point of the compass.
In other respects Shelley was a trying husband, in whom Mary had reason to
be disappointed. At an early stage of their association she discovered how
little reliance could be placed on the accuracy of his statements; a cruel
mortification for the girl, who had sacrificed so much for him in her
romantic belief of all he told her. Natural annoyance at this discovery
can have been only mitigated by her ability to refer all his inaccuracies
of statement to poetic imaginativeness. Throughout his time with her,
Shelley was seeing visions which he mistook for real occurrences, and
telling her stories at manifest discord with historic veracity.
Throughout this biography I have exercised a jealous caution in assigning
biographical value to the egotisms of the Shelleyan verse, and have
repeatedly cautioned readers against dealing with the poet’s references to
his former experiences, as good evidence in respect to matters of fact. On
the other hand I have not hesitated to regard his poetry as evidential of
his temper and sentiment at the moment of its composition. It cannot be
questioned that the _Stanzas, written in Dejection, near Naples_, were the
result of sincere emotion, and could have been composed only in a mood of
the profoundest melancholy. Nor can it be doubted that, whilst displaying
the general state of feeling, the _Stanzas_ reflect no less faithfully the
writer’s particular sentiments, during the sorrowful mood. How does
Shelley write of himself in these memorable lines, when he had been
connubially linked to William Godwin’s daughter for something less than
three and a half years?
‘Alas! I have nor hope nor health,
Nor peace within nor calm around,
Nor that content surpassing wealth
The sage in meditation found,
And walked with inward glory crowned--
Nor fame, nor power, _nor love_, nor leisure;
Others I see whom these surround--
Smiling they live, and call life pleasure:--
To me that cup has been dealt in another measure.’
Without declining to concur in Mr. Rossetti’s opinion, that Shelley did
not _intend_ the reference to his love-less lot to reflect on his wife, I
venture to say that, had he been sensible of owing much to her devotion,
had she been to him the perpetual spring of gladness that a loving wife
ever is to the man who loves her thoroughly, had their union been as
felicitous as they hoped it to prove, he could not have thus spoken of
himself as alike fameless, powerless, and _love-less_. I even go further,
and say that, had their marriage been a happy one, Shelley in his
miserable mood would have paused in the enumeration of divers woes, to
render grateful acknowledgment of the solace he derived, in the midst of
manifold sufferings, from the knowledge that he was _not_ unbeloved. It is
also a matter of biographical significance that in 1821--the year in which
his passion for Emilia Viviani was succeeded by his milder devotion to
Jane Williams--Shelley wrote in _Ginevra_ of marriage as
‘life’s great cheat; a thing
Bitter to taste, sweet in imagining,’--
words of melancholy meaning from the poet, who in the same year confided
to the Williamses how wretched he was in his own home. Trelawny, whose
acquaintance with Shelley was brief and not of a kind to render him the
confidant of the poet’s most delicate secrets, saw enough of Mary’s
relations with her husband to make him regard them as something less than
altogether happy in their union. That the woman, who in her girlhood had
sharp tiffs and lively altercations with her sister Claire, had similar
differences with her husband--differences that of course arise frequently
between husband and wife without extinguishing their mutual affection, but
still differences that _do not_ arise between altogether congenial and
happily mated couples--we know from Mrs. Shelley’s regretful and
penitential verse. How did the sorrowing widow address the spirit of the
husband whom she often worried with her perversities?--
‘Oh, gentle Spirit! * * *
* * * * * *
Now fierce remorse and unreplying death
Waken a chord within my heart, whose breath,
Thrilling and keen, in accents audible
A tale of unrequited love doth tell.
It was not anger,--while thy earthly dress
Encompassed still thy soul’s rare loveliness,
All anger was atoned by many a kind
Caress or tear, that spoke the softened mind.--
It speaks of cold neglect, averted eyes,
That blindly crushed thy soul’s fond sacrifice;--
My heart was all thine own,--but yet a shell
Closed in it’s core, which seemed impenetrable,
Till sharp-toothed misery tore the husk in twain,
Which gaping lies, nor may unite again.
Forgive me!’
(_Vide_ Mrs. Shelley’s _The Choice_, a poem of 159 verses, printed in
Volume I of Mr. Buxton Forman’s edition of _Shelley’s Works_.)
Penitential utterances, such as this pathetic plaint, should of course be
construed generously; but Mr. Buxton Forman goes much too far beyond the
line, that divides generous construction from sentimental misconstruction,
when he says,--
‘I cannot regard this passage as indicating anything more than a
natural feeling of remorse in the noble heart of a woman who has
suddenly lost an idolized husband, and fancies all kinds of
deficiencies in her conduct to him.’
An example of the kind of remorseful confession, to which Mr. Forman’s
words would be fairly applicable, appears in the prose, employed by Mrs.
Shelley on another occasion to exhibit her bitter sense of her own wifely
remissness. Speaking of the melancholy that visited her husband at Naples,
Mrs. Shelley says:--
‘... then he escaped to solitude, and in verses, which he hid from
fear of wounding me, poured forth morbid but too natural bursts of
discontent and sadness. One looks back with unspeakable regret and
gnawing remorse to such periods; fancying that, had one been more
alive to the nature of his feelings, and more attentive to soothe
them, such would not have existed.’
A general confession of a remorseful sense of not having been all that she
should have been to her husband, of regret that she had not been more
studious _of_ and considerate _for_ his feelings, the prose statement is
at the most an utterance of sorrowful compunction for shortcomings, that
might have been altogether imaginary. Far otherwise is it with the verses
of _The Choice_, comprising several distinct statements of fact, which the
biographer is bound to consider, without regard to the poetical form, in
which they are submitted to his consideration. In them it is asserted by
Shelley’s wife, that she was often angry with him, that she made him fully
aware of her anger, that she used to atone for her ebullitions of temper
by approaching him with tears and appeasing him with caresses, that she
persecuted him with sullenness, that even to the last--when anguish at
losing him stirred her to sincerity, and swept away the delusions of her
vain self-conceit--she was set on making him imagine, and even on
persuading herself, that he was something less than lord and master of her
whole heart. Are we to suppose that, in respect to each of these positive
assertions, Mrs. Shelley was the dupe of her imagination;--that she was
never angry with her husband, never made him sensible of her anger, never
kissed him into forgiving her exhibitions of petulance, never punished him
with sullen and averted eyes, never pretended that her heart was not
wholly in his possession? The Shelleyan vindicators, who never hesitate to
take the poet’s words _au pied de la lettre_, whenever the severest and
most literal way of construing his poetical egotisms favours their belief
in his superhuman goodness, are the last persons who should reduce Mrs.
Shelley’s series of positive assertions into a mere show of natural
regret, that she was not so good a wife as she might have been. To me and
most readers of this page, her statements must remain evidence, on her own
confession, that her life with Shelley was fruitful of the bickerings and
contentions, the petty pettishnesses and paltry petulances, the
divergences of sentiment and conflicts of feeling, that so often qualify
the contentment, and only too often end in extinguishing the mutual
affection, of mated couples.
And small the blame to William Godwin’s daughter, that she was guilty of
all the positive offences with which she charged herself in the
criminatory and penitential verses! Had she erred far more grievously, a
generous sympathy would stir every large-hearted and impartial judge of
her case, to become her advocate at least to the extent of pleading, that
she received from the husband, whom she loved, precisely the slights, so
sensitive and proud and quick-tempered a woman would necessarily find
exasperating and intolerable in the highest degree. In saying that
Shelley’s affection for Mrs. Williams was a sentiment, so refined and
delicate, so absolutely pure of love’s grosser appetency, that her
husband’s ‘genuinely attached friend could without blame both entertain
and avow it,’ Mr. Rossetti says no more than the truth. But we cannot
concur with him in thinking that Shelley could entertain and avow the
sentiment without disloyalty to his own wife. It was not in his power to
entertain the sentiment for two women at the same time. The sentiment was
the ethereal, finer, higher element of the passion he had formerly felt
for Mary; of the love he offered her in 1814, in return for the devotion
and sacrifices he required from her; of the love, whose vehement avowal
had determined her to commit herself to his keeping, in defiance of social
rule and censure. Before he could bestow it on Jane Williams, Shelley had
to take from Mary the sentimental regard which, to a woman of her
sensibility, pride, imaginativeness and sentimentalism, was so far the
larger part of the consideration, as almost to amount to the whole of the
consideration, by which he had acquired possession of her. Endowed with
youth, beauty, intellectual address, wit, imagination, taste, tact, the
liveliest sensibilities, and literary aptitude bordering on genius, Mrs.
Shelley was required to descend from the throne of her husband’s heart, in
order that it should be occupied, now by such an ignoble though lovely
animal as Emilia Viviani, and now by a lady, whose mental powers and
personal attractions were greatly inferior to her own,--a lady whose want
of literary culture he lamented; whose highest accomplishment was a
faculty of singing simple airs to her guitar. To suggest that Mary loved
the Italian girl whom she styled her ‘cara sorella,’ or in the secret
chambers of her fervid and sensitive heart, deemed herself aught else than
grievously wronged by her husband’s devotion to the lady with the guitar,
is to display a startling ignorance of the sentimental forces that animate
and control high-hearted and finely sympathetic women.
Though the passionate ferocity which distinguished Shelley’s earlier
writings against priests and creeds, and the tyrannies of custom, waned
almost to extinction, under the softening and mellowing influences of
time, and of his steadily increasing knowledge of human nature, letters,
dated by his hand in the closing months of his existence, show how
tenacious he was to the last of his principal conclusions on questions of
social philosophy; how even to his final hour he declared against all
existing governments as iniquitous and cruel, against marriage as a
depraving institution, against Christianity as a pernicious delusion.
Though he lived to take larger and sympathetic views of Christ’s character
and career, the author of the _Essay on Christianity_ was no less hostile
than the poet of _Queen Mab_ and _Laon and Cythna_, to the Christianity of
the churches.
On its arrival at Pisa, the intelligence of Allegra’s death operated like
a signal for dispersion to the members of the Byron-Shelleyan coterie,
already disposed to move to other places, by the consequences of the
recent affair with the mounted trooper and the soldiers at the barrier.
Indeed, Byron was already turning his thoughts to villegiatura at
Monte-Nero, and Shelley had despatched the Williamses and Claire to
Spezia, to reconnoitre the country, in order to discover an eligible
summer residence for his party on the coast of the bay. On his return
from Spezia, Williams saw at a glance that Shelley had trouble at his
heart. Appointed to break the calamity to Allegra’s mother, Shelley shrunk
from the task. Deciding to defer the performance of the painful duty, till
Claire should have been withdrawn from the vicinity of the Palazzo
Lanfranchi, he prevailed on her to go back to Spezia on the morrow, in the
company of his wife and Trelawny. Though he was no doubt guided chiefly by
care for her feelings, the course thus taken by Shelley may also have
resulted in some degree from an apprehension that, if the dismal tidings
were communicated to her at the Tre Palazzi, she might in the first
paroxysms of her mental torture escape his control, hasten to the other
side of the Lung’ Arno, and forcing her way into Byron’s presence
overwhelm him with reproaches for sending her child to Bagna Cavallo, in
contemptuous disregard of her expostulations and predictions of disaster.
Anyhow, it was wisely decided that Claire should not make acquaintance
with the sharpest grief of her existence till she should be well away from
Byron, who, though profoundly disturbed by the loss of his illegitimate
daughter, showed no sign of relenting towards his former mistress.
A few days later, the Shelleys, with Claire and the Williamses, were
settled in their narrow and comfortless quarters at the Casa Magni (San
Terenzo), some three miles from the wretched little town of Sarzana, some
four or five minutes (by fast boat) from the equally squalid and
picturesque Lerici, and within an hour’s sail of Spezia. It would be an
exaggeration to say that even in Italy it would be impossible to discover,
amidst scenes of incomparable loveliness, a meaner, dirtier, more
poverty-stricken, more repulsive sea-side village than San Terenzo; but
one keeps well between the lines of severe historic veracity in saying no
English tourists, of the means and social quality of the Shelleys and
Williamses, ever made their abode (from choice and for pleasure) in a more
unclean and ill-favoured Italian village for a considerable period. No
words can commend too highly the peculiar and winning beauties of the
surrounding scenery; but the village itself is doleful, unclean, and
appallingly hideous. The same may be said of the wretched inhabitants of
the village, that contains only a single dwelling, in any degree fit for
the habitation of gentle people. Now that it boasts an upper storey
(built since Shelley’s time) and contains twice as many rooms as it had
when it housed the poet and his companions, the Casa Magni is far from an
alluring and impressive residence. Sixty years since the massive and
unsightly tenement (whilom a Jesuits’ convent) contained on its solitary
floor over a cavernous basement no more than four habitable rooms--(1) a
large dining-hall, (2) the room in which Mrs. Shelley and Claire used to
sleep, (3) the bedroom occupied by the Williamses, and (4) Shelley’s
sleeping apartment; the three bedrooms opening into the grand saloon. In
these four rooms five people (_six_, when Claire was of the party)
contrived to live in what must have been a superlatively comfortless and
‘pigging’ fashion; the cooking for the family being done in some
out-building, where the servants slept and had their meals. Built so close
to the sea, that at high-water the waves tumble noisily about the base of
the structure, this marine abode has at its rear neither a single
olive-tree, nor the space in which to plant one. The one redeeming feature
of this unsatisfactory piece of domestic architecture was (in Shelley’s
time), and still is, a broad terrace supported by arches of strong
masonry, that running along the whole sea-ward front of the edifice, at
the level of the floor of the one set of rooms, served the Shelleys in
fine weather as a fifth room, when no fierce sun drove its occupants to
the backward parts of the house.
The large dining-hall (with the doors of the bed-rooms opening into it)
was the grand chamber, through which Shelley passed without a single
thread of raiment on his person, to the dismay of his friends of both
sexes, when he lost his clothes whilst bathing; it having escaped the poet
that, by merely putting his head into the room and summoning Trelawny or
Williams to his side, he might have compassed the timely retirement of the
ladies, so as to spare their feelings an embarrassing and painful
surprise. The large terrace towards the sea was the place, where Shelley
delighted to sit for hours together (_vide_ Shelley’s letter to John
Gisborne of 18th of June, 1822) in the summer evenings, listening to the
pleasant but comparatively artless music of Jane Williams’s voice and
guitar.
It is not surprising that Mrs. Shelley entered this comfortless and
altogether unsatisfactory place of abode with drooping spirits, and that
every week she spent in it heightened her aversion for the place.
Suffering from a state of health, that promised the birth of another
child towards the close of the year, she would under the most favourable
circumstances have found it difficult to control the irritability, and
combat the depressing languor, that always afflicted her at such a time of
bodily trouble. Placed at the sea-side, when she was pining for green
fields and rural quietude; exposed to the glaring and scorching suns of an
unusually hot and dry season, when she thirsted for cool rivulets and
murmurous trees; told to make herself at home and take life easily in a
house singularly deficient in its arrangements, at the extremity of a
barbarous village, where she could not get the food for her frugal table
without sending for it to Sarzana or Lerici, she may be pardoned for
murmuring at the prospect of passing several months in so distasteful and
even exasperating a place. Shelley, on the other hand, was for a while in
excellent spirits, and finding San Terenzo altogether to his mind was
displeased with his wife for disliking what he enjoyed. He even scolded
her for being discontented without a cause. ‘No words,’ she wrote in
August, 1822 (_vide_ Forman’s edition of _Shelley’s Works_) to Mrs.
Gisborne, ‘can tell you how I hated our house and the country about it.
Shelley reproached me for this--his health was good and the place was
quite after his own heart.’ Whether it was chivalric of Shelley to
reproach his sick wife for disliking what he enjoyed, is a question that
may be left for his extravagant idolaters. For me it is enough to say,
that in this respect he acted as men too often act, when they are
unusually well and their wives are annoyingly ill. No doubt it was
annoying to him. Charmed with the bay of Spezia, when he made a flying
visit to it in the previous summer, he had for months been looking forward
to a term of residence amidst its beauties. It was hard for him, that Mary
could not keep her ailments and discontent to herself. Knowing how he had
been counting on the felicity of living near Lerici, how he and Williams
had for months been looking forward to the delight of sailing about the
bay, and running to and fro between Leghorn and Lerici in the lovely boat,
that was being built for them at Genoa, it was Mary’s manifest duty to
enjoy what he enjoyed, or at least to pretend that she enjoyed it. No
doubt she was in a delicate state of health. But what of that? It is usual
for young wives to be so at times.
Brought round from Genoa by Mr. Heslop and two English seamen, Shelley’s
new boat entered Lerici harbour on 12th May, 1822, and on trial afforded
the liveliest gratification both to the poet and Williams (joint-owners of
the craft), the latter of whom wrote of her performance in his diary, ‘She
fetches whatever she looks at. In short, we have now a perfect plaything
for the summer.’ The perfect plaything was a fatal toy. Henceforth Shelley
and his friend passed most of their time on the water; Mary sometimes
accompanying them in their swift passages over the dancing waves. ‘My only
moments of peace,’ she wrote in the middle of August, 1822, to Mrs.
Gisborne, ‘were on board that unhappy boat when lying down with my head on
his knee I shut my eyes and felt the wind and our swift motion alone.’ But
these moments of peace were of no benefit to her health. Threatened with a
miscarriage on the 8th of June, she endured another week of extreme
discomfort before she was prostrated by the misadventure, that nearly put
an end to her life. It was some alleviation of Mary’s misery, that in her
illness she had two companions of her own rank and sex,--Jane Williams,
the blamelessness of whose behaviour towards Shelley is demonstrated by
his wife’s affection for her; and Claire, who, after withdrawing from San
Terenzo for a few weeks, was by this time again an inmate of the Casa
Magni. But from inexperience and want of nerve, Claire and Jane proved
such poor nurses at the most alarming and perilous crisis of their
patient’s trouble, that she would have died of hemorrhage had not Shelley
(_vide_ his letter of 18th June, 1822, to John Gisborne, and Mrs.
Shelley’s letter of the following August to Mrs. Gisborne), with an
address and boldness for which his brief medical training may have been
accountable, made her sit in ice till the blood ceased to flow.
But if he may be commended for saving her life on this occasion, Shelley
retarded his wife’s restoration by alarming her a few days later by
exhibitions of nervous derangement, that was chiefly referable to his
apprehensions for her safety. At all times liable at any moment to
impulses of fancy, resulting in visions whose vividness, even when they
lacked the persistency and steadiness of distinct hallucination, was
inconsistent with perfect mental sanity, he had in the previous month,
whilst enjoying unusually good health, occasioned the Williamses no little
concern by his excitement at a mere illusion, which for some time he
mistook for an actual occurrence. On the evening of 6th May, 1822, whilst
pacing the Casa Magni terrace, he stopt suddenly, grasped Edward Williams
violently by the arm, and staring stedfastly at the white surf at their
feet, gave signs of acute mental torture. In reply to a question from
Williams, he exclaimed excitedly, ‘There it is again--there!’ The cause of
his disturbance was his vivid imagination that little Allegra, naked and
lovely, rose out of the surf to his view, clapt her hands in joy, and
smiled at him. So powerfully was Shelley affected by this apparition of
the child, for whom he had provided by his will no less liberally than he
provided for his own children, that his friends found it difficult to
induce him to regard it as a mere illusion of his fancy. In the excitement
coming to him from his wife’s illness, Shelley (to use her words)
underwent ‘a return of nervous sensations and visions as bad as in his
worst times;’ one of these visitations being a singularly hideous attack
of nightmare, attended with a repulsive dream that affected him both at
the moment and for some time afterwards, as though it were a real
adventure. During the night of Saturday, 22nd June, 1822, Mrs. Shelley was
roused from her sleep by a scream. Almost at the same moment Shelley
(whose sleeping-room was on the other side of the great dining-hall)
rushed into her room, screaming frantically. Under the impression that he
was asleep, she tried to waken him by calling loudly to him; but instead
of replying to her cries, he continued to scream so violently and
alarmingly, that she sprang from her bed in a panic, and hastening from
her bedroom ran across the dining-hall into the Williamses’ sleeping
chamber, where, in her weakness and fright, she fell to the ground. As
Shelley, on being restored to his senses and soothed into something like
equanimity, declared he had not screamed, his companions came to the
conclusion that he was unconscious during the whole course of his violent
emotion;--that in his alarm at a dream he had crossed the hall and burst
into his wife’s room in his sleep. The dream’s first vision was that
Edward and Jane Williams (with their bodies lacerated and their bones
starting through the skin) approached with these words, ‘Get up, Shelley,
the sea is flooding the house and it is all coming down;’ words that
caused Shelley to imagine he went to his window and saw the sea rushing
into the house. The dream’s second vision was that he saw himself in the
act of strangling his own wife. In the morning, whilst talking with Mary
about the last night’s disturbance, he told her ‘that he had had many
visions lately.’ One of these recent visions (a vision, that is described
in two or three different ways by the poet’s biographers) was that a
cloaked figure approached his bedside and beckoned him out of the bedroom
into the dining-hall, when, lifting the hood of his cloak, the ghostly
visitant, after displaying Shelley’s own features to the agitated dreamer,
inquired in Spanish ‘Art thou satisfied?’ and vanished. On being thus
confronted and tormented by his own wraith, Shelley screamed loud enough
to rouse the house, even as he did on the subsequent occasion when he saw
his own wraith in the act of strangling his own wife. The appearance and
reappearance of his own wraith were distinctly referable to a scene of one
of Calderon’s dramas, that had stirred his imagination profoundly and with
morbid consequences.
The nervous excitement, that came to Shelley from his wife’s recent
illness and consequent debility, was heightened by the knowledge that the
beloved Hunts were at Genoa, and by the expectation of hearing at any
moment of their arrival at Leghorn. On 19th June, 1822, on the third day
from Mary’s imminent danger, he wrote Hunt a letter, in the hope that it
would reach him at the former port; a letter in which the writer promised
to set sail for Leghorn on hearing his friend had left Genoa. For the
fulfilment of this promise, Shelley, on Monday, 1st July, 1822, departed
from Lerici for Leghorn, in the company of Captain Roberts, the builder of
the boat which had been christened the ‘Don Juan’ in compliment to Byron,
and with Edward Williams by his side. It was with no common emotion that
Mary parted with him. Twice, if not thrice, he was on the point of leaving
her, when the poor lady,--who loved him passionately in spite of their
frequent bickerings, and who was possessed by vague previsions of some
approaching calamity,--called him back to her arms, to put yet another
kiss on his slight and sunburnt face, to win yet another smile from his
mobile features, to look once again into his forward-set stag-eyes of
deepest azure, to rest her eyes once again on his flowing tresses, whose
glossy brownness was darkened rather than whitened or tarnished by their
few threads of grey,--to repeat the often uttered declaration that, if he
did not come back to her quickly, she would speedily return with their
child to their rooms (still on their hands) at the Tre Palazzi, on the
Pisan Lung’ Arno. ‘They went,’ she wrote with the awful pathos of sacred
sorrow in the following month, ‘and Jane, Claire, and I remained alone
with the children.’ Well, might she weep! For never more was she to press
her lips against the slight sun-burnt visage, see herself in those
deep-blue eyes, pass her hand over the flowing brown curls, hear the voice
which, harsh though it might be to others,--shrill, sharp, strident under
impulses of anger, as she knew it to be,--was life’s and love’s own music
to her ear and heart. The sense of coming trouble covered and held her.
Not that she feared for _him_. The apprehension of seeing and hearing him
no more never troubled her, nor occurred to her for a single instant. Her
fear was that in his absence she might lose their child;--that death would
enter the Casa Magni, and bear away the darling boy Percy, even as the
ruthless foe of human happiness had with his finger’s point touched her
bright, warm boy Willie into cold, unfeeling clay.
Disaster was far from Shelley’s thoughts as his little schooner--his
perfect plaything for the summer--cut and danced over the waves on its way
to Leghorn, where he would embrace Hunt and Marianne, and kiss their
children. From the beginning of the year, his health (never so weakly as
he persuaded himself and his friends into thinking it) had been steadily
improving. His breast had grown broader, his figure more robust, his limbs
less lathy. If it still wanted massiveness, his countenance had
relinquished its former slightness and look of almost girlish fragility.
Exposure to sea-air and scorching suns had tanned and bronzed the cheeks,
that were never wanting in ruddiness. Of late he had allowed his
moustaches to grow, and though they were poor, downy, boyish things in
Trelawny’s opinion, they gave his aspect a certain degree of manliness
which his face had lacked, on the occasion of his introduction to the
stalwart Cornishman. Now that he had dismissed dull care and nervous
fancies, in the elation of the brief voyage that would bring him to Hunt’s
presence, he had the appearance of a man who might enjoy life for many a
year, and live ‘to make old bones.’ And, indeed, nothing in the ailments,
which he magnified, or in the constitution, which he underrated, forbade
the hope that he would maintain his family’s reputation for longevity.
Without being altogether imaginary, his most serious maladies--dyspepsia
and a certain amount of renal trouble--were no infirmities to preclude a
confident opinion that, in the absence of fatal misadventure, he might
survive to green old age. In truth, though so much has been written of his
physical delicacy and constant sufferings from serious malady, there was
no reason why, with wholesome diet and freedom from excessive mental
trouble, Shelley should not have lived to his grandfather’s age.
Occasionally, no doubt, he suffered from renal stone, the painful malady
that so often attends dyspepsia; but with proper treatment and care for
his food he might in a few years have outgrown his disposition to the
disorder, which, though afflicting, is by no means necessarily fatal. In
deeming himself a sufferer from the malady, which killed the Third
Napoleon, he may not have been the mere victim of nervous fancy; but even
in that case the operation for his relief would not necessarily have
resulted in his death, as he seems to have imagined, whilst penning the
well-known lines of _The Magnetic Lady to her Patient_ (1822):--
‘What would cure, that would kill me, Jane:
And as I must on earth abide
Awhile, yet tempt me not to break
My chain.’
Anyhow, he never seemed in better health, nor was in higher spirits, than
when he sprang from his little schooner at Leghorn, and, throwing himself
into Leigh Hunt’s embrace, declared himself ‘inexpressibly delighted,’ and
‘inexpressibly happy.’ For the moment Hunt also (though he had landed with
his numerous family at Leghorn, with just sixty crowns less than nothing
in hand) was unutterably delighted and happy on seeing the pleasant and
cordial face of the friend, on whom he would have preyed steadily and
largely, had not fate stept between them. For the next few days Shelley
was busy with the affairs of his _protégé_, who had come out from England
to fix himself on Byron, though knowing well that the author would fain
have been liberated from his engagement to start the _Liberal_. One of
Lady Shelley’s most notable departures from biographical fairness (to use
no stronger word) appears on p. 195 of _Shelley Memorials_, where she
speaks of Byron’s reluctance in July, 1822, to embark in the _Liberal_, as
though it were a sudden change of purpose that, taking Shelley by
surprise at so late a stage of the preliminary arrangements, would have
justified him in breaking at once and for ever with the vacillating poet.
For months Shelley had been aware of Byron’s regret at having committed
himself to the hazardous enterprise. No doubt (as I have already remarked)
the project was Byron’s own design. Though in proposing to take Hunt for
his literary coadjutor he was actuated in some degree by benevolent
concern for a struggling man of letters, Byron must, of course, be
regarded as having been actuated in a higher degree by a selfish concern
for his own interests. His subsequent assertion that he was wholly
animated in the choice, and even in the project, by benevolence, was a
miserable misrepresentation. It cannot be gainsaid that Byron promised to
start the _Liberal_ and to take Hunt for one of his partners in the
enterprise. It is also indisputable that, when a man gives his word, he
should keep it. All these matters being admitted, it remains, however,
that Byron’s engagement was one from which he should have been liberated
by both Shelley and Hunt, as soon as he showed a wish to be released from
it.
The arrangement of three poets, three men, three gentlemen, for
co-operation in a literary enterprise, differs from an arrangement of
three tradesmen for a purely commercial undertaking. The project for
starting the _Liberal_ was a project from which each of the three
adventurers could honourably retire, on giving the others timely notice of
his purpose to do so. That Byron’s first intimation of a wish to retreat
from the affair was given long before Hunt left England is indisputable.
On receiving it both Hunt and Shelley should have disclaimed the
disposition to cause him any embarrassment. In honour they were the more
bound to do so,--because he was so much the strongest of the three in fame
and purse; because in case of success the venture promised to be so much
more beneficial to themselves than to him; and because they could not
press him to persist in the enterprise against his will, without showing
too lively a regard for their own interests. In taking the other course,
and conspiring to hold Byron to the arrangement for their own ends, Hunt
(for his own advantage) and Shelley (for Hunt’s profit) were guilty at
least of sharp practice. From February to the end of June, they had been
acting together confidentially against their powerful friend. For months
they had known of Byron’s wish to get out of the affair. At the beginning
of July, just four calendar months had passed since Shelley wrote from
Pisa to his fellow-conspirator in England (2nd March, 1822),--‘I imagine
it will be no very difficult task to execute that which you have assigned
me--to keep him in heart with the project until your arrival.’ Yet in her
book Lady Shelley, speaking of the affair as it stood on 1st July, 1822,
says,--
‘Byron had _by this time_ been persuaded by Thomas Moore, and some of
his other friends in London, that the projected magazine, about which
he had been very anxious at first, would be injurious to his fame and
interests; and Shelley _now_’ (‘by this time’ and ‘now,’ as though
Byron now for the first time showed his distaste for the project, in
which he was constrained to embark by the two confederates)--‘found
him so desirous of making any possible retreat from his engagements,
that, had he not feared he might damage his friend’s interests, he
would have quarrelled outright with the noble poet. He was very much
out of spirits when he left; and that was the last interview they ever
had.’
In saying that Shelley parted in dejection from Byron, Lady Shelley is
scarcely in accord with the best authorities touching the result of his
action in Hunt’s behalf. Hopeful that Hunt and Byron would work together
harmoniously for any considerable term, he could not well be, and
certainly was not. But Mrs. Shelley’s words may be taken as conclusive
evidence, that her husband was pleased with the immediate consequence of
his mediation between the poet, who would fain have shipt the Hunts back
to England, and the poet who had come to Italy with the purpose of
planting himself on Byron. Speaking of her husband’s exertions to put the
two partners at least in transient accord, Mrs. Shelley, in her August
letter to Mrs. Gisborne, says:--
‘Shelley had past most of the time at Pisa--arranging the affairs of
the Hunts--and skrewing L. B.’s mind to the sticking place about the
journal. He had found this a difficult task at first, but at length he
had succeeded to his heart’s content with both points. Mrs. Mason said
that she saw him in better health and spirits than she had ever known
him, when he took leave of her on Sunday, July 7th, his face burnt by
the sun and his heart light that he had succeeded in rendering the
Hunts tolerably comfortable.’
This would of itself dispose of Lady Shelley’s assertion that Shelley
retired in depression from his final negotiations of Byron. On Thursday,
4th July, Shelley had written of the Hunts and of Byron’s obligation to
take them at least for a brief while altogether on his hands, ‘Lord Byron
must of course furnish the requisite funds at present, as I cannot; but he
seems inclined to depart without the necessary explanations and
arrangements due to such a situation as Hunt’s. These, in spite of
delicacy, I must procure.’ Three days later (Sunday, 7th August) he is in
high spirits at having brought Byron into better humour with the Hunts,
and made the Hunts fairly comfortable. With Byron he has ‘succeeded’ to
his heart’s content; and in respect to the Hunts he is positively
‘light-hearted.’ Confirmed by several contemporary writings, Mrs.
Shelley’s testimony respecting her husband’s satisfaction with and
consequent elation at his arrangements for the Hunts, represents the view
of Captain Roberts, Trelawny, Lady Mountcashel, the Hunts themselves,
indeed of everyone of Shelley’s friends, who saw him in the last days of
his existence at Pisa or Leghorn. The unquestionable success of his
negotiations with Byron cannot have failed to gratify him. Yet Lady
Shelley requires us to believe that he retired from those negotiations
‘very much out of spirits.’
On finding in July how he had been kept in ignorance of Hunt’s retirement
from the _Examiner_, Byron might reasonably and honourably have used the
concealment as a sufficient reason for breaking at once with the crafty
practitioner. He had invited Hunt, _as_ the Editor of the _Examiner_, to
co-operate with him; he had furnished rooms in his house for the Hunts, on
the understanding that Leigh Hunt had at least a sufficient income for the
payment of his weekly bills; and now, through Hunt’s wary concealment of
the real state of his affairs, he found himself with a numerous and
absolutely destitute family in his house,--found himself, also, required
by Shelley to take the maintenance of this penniless family altogether on
his own hands--at least for a time. Byron had reason for resentment on
finding himself over-reached and imposed upon in this unscrupulous and
impudent manner. But what could he do? Mrs. Hunt was alarmingly ill, her
children were guiltless of wilful complicity in the father’s extortionate
manœuvre. He could not turn the sick woman and her babes out-of-doors. He
could not even turn the wily operator on the pockets of his acquaintances
out-of-doors. The clever, dextrous, irresistibly charming fellow had not a
crown in his purse. For the moment Shelley could not relieve the
necessities of the family, whom he had brought out from England and thrown
upon Byron’s hands in so comical a manner. Shelley stated the situation
precisely to his wife on the 4th of July, when he wrote, ‘Lord Byron must
of course furnish the requisite funds at present, as I cannot.’ One must
needs smile at the thought of the three prime actors in the droll
affair:--at the thrifty Byron’s dismay on being suddenly called upon to
provide board and pocket-money, as well as bed and house-room, for the
impecunious family; at the free-handed Shelley’s clear perception of
Byron’s duty to these equally charming and shiftless Micawbers; at Hunt’s
chagrin at the coldness with which he was welcomed to the Palazzo
Lanfranchi. It is to Byron’s credit that he did all that honour and
humanity required of him under the circumstances; and at the same time to
his discredit that he did it ungraciously. Finding he ‘was in for it,’
without any easy and congenial way of escape, he started the _Liberal_;
carried the Hunts in his train to Genoa; and, without causing Leigh Hunt
more misery than he deserved, did divers things he should for his own
dignity’s sake have left undone. It is not surprising that, after dropping
a good deal of money and credit on the _Liberal_ in a faint-hearted way,
he declined to sacrifice himself yet further, for the advantage of his
unsatisfactory partner.
After spending seven days between Leghorn and Pisa, Shelley set sail for
Lerici in his little schooner with Edward Williams, who was longing to get
back to his wife at the Casa Magni, and Charles Vivian, the young sailor
who was the only regular nautical ‘hand’ on board the swift but unsteady
craft. Contradicting one another even to the latest point of Shelley’s
career, the authorities are at variance respecting the frame of mind in
which he started on his brief voyage to death. On the one hand it is
declared that he left Leghorn in dejection, and on the other that he went
out of port in the highest elation. On seeking information from those who
bade him farewell as he stept into his boat, Mrs. Shelley was assured that
he went off ‘in one of those extravagant fits of good spirits in which’ he
was ‘sometimes seen.’ The truth seems to be that, though dispirited for a
few minutes by a despondent letter from Mary, he speedily recovered the
jubilant air that had distinguished him on the previous day at Pisa, and
in his satisfaction at the latest arrangements for the Hunts started in
the happiest temper. He did not, however, glide out of the harbour
without forewarning of the gale that was rising for his destruction. The
day had been intensely hot, and a violent thunderstorm had broken over the
gulf in the forenoon. Captain Roberts had even hinted that the voyagers
should wait for more settled weather on the morrow:--an ominous hint from
the ‘Don Juan’s’ builder. But though Shelley was faintly disposed to take
the captain’s advice, Edward Williams, in his eagerness for his wife’s
society, would hear of no delay, insisting with the wind then blowing they
should be home in seven hours. Even as the ‘Don Juan’ slipt out of the
harbour the Genoese mate of Byron’s yacht, ‘Bolivar,’ remarked to his
captain, Trelawny, in reference to the dark clouds, rolling up from the
south-west in threatening masses, that ‘the devil was brewing mischief.’
Three hours later the devil of this nautical prediction had for a brief
while his own way with the gulf. It was about three p.m. when the small
schooner scudded away from the Leghorn mole, from whose extremity Captain
Roberts watched her performance till she passed beyond the range of his
unaided vision at the rate of some seven knots an hour. At 6.30 Trelawny,
who had gone to his cabin on board the ‘Bolivar,’ was roused from his
afternoon’s slumber by noises, familiar to his nautical ear. Going on
board he found the sky darkened by fog to almost nocturnal gloom, and
learnt from the disturbances of the air and the commotion of the shipping
in the harbour, that a mighty storm was on the point of breaking over the
sea. A few minutes later the din and hubbub and shrill pipings of
countless mariners were silenced by the thunder and wind and rattling rain
of a wild and overpowering squall. The storm spent its fiercest fury in
twenty minutes,--the brief passage of time during which the ‘Don Juan,’
that perfect plaything for the summer, foundered and sunk beneath the
tumult of the angry billows.
Knowing from the force of the rising wind, even before she had passed from
his view whilst he stood at the mole’s end, that the ‘Don Juan’ was in for
a stiff breeze and hard weather, Captain Roberts went from the mole to the
authorities, who could give him leave to ascend the lighthouse tower. On
getting their permission to do so he climbed the Leghorn lighthouse, from
whose summit he succeeded in sighting the toy-schooner with a glass, when
she was some ten miles out at sea, off Via Reggio. The vessel was in view
long enough for the captain to observe that her crew were in the act of
taking in the top-sails. But it was only a glimpse he got of the boat
before the sea-fog stole it from his sight. The circuit of the sea,
covered by the captain’s glass, was alive with shipping, driven wildly by
the mighty tempest; but when the sky and view cleared, though the gazer
from the lighthouse saw again every other vessel he had held in sight
before the transient obscuration, he looked in vain for the one vessel, in
which he was personally interested.
On her recovery from a depth of from ten to fifteen fathoms of water in
the following September, it was discovered that the ‘Don Juan’ had not
capsized. She had gone under, swamped by an overwhelming sea or overborne
by a felucca that ran her down. The large hole in her stern, and other
signs of violence countenancing the latter conjecture, gave rise to the
suspicion that she had been struck by a felucca in a piratical attempt to
seize her, in the hope of getting possession of the dollars she was
supposed to have on board. At this distance of time there is no need to
examine the unsatisfactory evidence that favours this hideous hypothesis.
That the ‘Don Juan’ was followed from Leghorn Harbour by pirates, set on
making prize of the money she was believed to carry, is not unlikely. She
may have been chased and even run down by pirates, set on plundering her
in the open sea; but even in that case it is more probable that the
immediate cause of her submergence was accidental collision, than that her
piratical pursuers selected a moment for striking so slight a vessel, when
the violence of the storm and the tumult of the waters rendered it
impossible for them to board her. But at this date it matters little why
and how she foundered.
It is more interesting to know that, sudden as it was, the catastrophe
might have come more suddenly:--that the poet and his comrades had at
least a brief minute or two, in which to prepare for the fate that did not
overtake them altogether unawares. That they were taking in their topsails
off Via Reggio is a sufficient indication that they were alive to the
peril of their position before they passed from Captain Roberts’s view.
That on its recovery Edward Williams’s corpse was found almost without
clothing shows that before the little schooner went down he had time to
realize the imminence of the danger, and to prepare for an attempt to save
himself by swimming. On the other hand, the submerged boat and the remains
of the three drowned bodies were found too near the point, at which
Captain Roberts sighted and lost sight of them, for any difference of
opinion respecting the hour or even the approximate minute of the
catastrophe. At the most, they had only a few minutes to live when they
busied themselves in hauling in their top-sails. A minute or two after
passing from the view of the watcher on the lighthouse they were
themselves face to face with death. In September, 1822, the vessel was
discovered off Via Reggio; and on the 22nd of the previous July, just a
fortnight after the fatal storm, the remains of Shelley’s corpse, and the
remains of Edward Williams’s body, were found on shore,--those of Shelley
being found near Via Reggio, on the Tuscan coast, whilst all that remained
of Edward Williams’s manly form and presence had been carried to a point,
some three miles distant, at the Bocca Lericcio, hard by the Migliarino
tower. Three weeks later Charles Vivian’s skeleton was brought to shore by
the waves, at a distance of some four miles from the spot to which Edward
Williams’s corpse had been carried.
How Shelley and Williams acted, as the schooner was already sinking
beneath them, one may infer confidently from the characters and mutual
affection of the two men; from the notable difference in respect to the
clothing of what was recovered of their disfigured bodies; and from what
we know of Shelley’s demeanour on previous occasions (notably and
especially on the occasion of the squall off St. Gingoux in the summer of
1816), when he was in danger of death from drowning. It cannot be doubted
that, whilst hastily stripping himself of his raiment, Williams proposed
to do his best to save his friend as well as himself. To this proposal it
is certain that the poet (who on the former occasion had firmly refused
the help of so expert a swimmer as Byron) answered calmly that he was
ready for death, was even glad to embrace the fate so mercifully offered
to him; and that, after so refusing to diminish his comrade’s chance of
escape, and after enjoining him to bear his love to Mary and Jane and
Claire at the Casa Magni, he anticipated without dismay or vain regret, on
the contrary, welcomed with mingled complacence and curiosity, the moment
when he should pass through the veil that divides the here from the
hereafter,--the moment that would give him the knowledge for which he had
so long hungered and thirsted.
Possibly in that last minute or two, his mind was visited momentarily by
tender and subduing thoughts of old joys and interests, former sorrows and
ambitions, exhausted enmities and profitless contentions, disappointed
hopes and unachieved aspirations. I conceive that thoughts of the old home
and parents, from whose love he had severed himself, of Eton and poor old
Keate, of Oxford and Hogg, of scenes about Keswick and Killarney, together
with thoughts of more recent friends and less distant places, flitted
across his brain, ever so quick and imaginative, now so abnormally active,
and in a trice to be still for ever. Doubtless he thought of his little
boy at San Terenzo, his other boy whom he had buried at Rome; possibly
also of his children in England, and of the lovely girl who had given
birth to them,--the sweet, bright, radiant girl who died in the water of
the cold Serpentine, even as he would now die in the water of the angry
sea. As he sate calmly on the sinking boat, and studied the successive
visions of his own life’s panorama, he may be conceived to have remembered
things he had done, and things he had left undone, to his regret. In his
doubt and curiosity he may also be conceived to have hoped that, should
death prove the gateway to another life for him, it would be a life, in
which the ways of duty and righteousness are more clearly marked and more
easily discovered, than the ways of righteousness and duty in this
darksome, and troublous, and perplexing existence. Thus, as he sate
a-thinking in the foundering boat, Shelley sunk beneath the turbulent and
cruel waves, so remorseless for the woe they work, so heedless of the
lives they devour.
To tell all that needs yet to be told requires few words. All the world
knows how Shelley’s torn, and wasted, and disfigured corpse was reduced to
ashes, and a few fragments of bone (with the exception of the heart that
would _not_ be burnt) on the pyre, that was piled and lit for its
cremation, on the sands of the seashore, to which the relenting waves
carried him all too late. Again and again it has been told how, under the
fierce light of a southern sky and sun, at the marge of the whispering
sea, and within view of the remote Apennines, this revival of a classic
rite was performed with precise care for classic requirements, in the
presence of Byron, Trelawny, Leigh Hunt, and a guard of soldiers. Who
needs to be told again, how the copy of Keats’s last book (found in
Shelley’s pocket, doubled back at the _Eve of St. Agnes_, as though he had
been perusing it, till death’s summons made him put it aside hurriedly)
was thrown upon the blazing pyre? What reader of Mr. Rossetti’s
description of the burning of the great poet’s body has not heard the
cries of the curlew, that wheeling close about the pyre, and screaming
miserably, refused to be driven away? It is the story of every household,
where poetry is prized and genius is honoured, that Shelley’s ashes were
conveyed to Rome, and there deposited in the new Protestant Cemetery
(_not_ the _old_ burial-ground, that holds the dust of Keats and Mary
Godwin’s first-born son), at a spot planted by Trelawny, with laurels and
cypresses, and marked by the stone of this record:--
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
Cor Cordium
Natus iv Aug. MDCCXCII
Obiit viii Jul. MDCCCXXII
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.