It was already summer when, one morning, soon after sunrise, I set out
from Genoa for Tuscany. The road to Spezia along the Riviera di Levante,
among the orange groves and the olives, between the mountains and the
sea, is one of the most beautiful in Europe. Forgotten, or for the most
part unused, by the traveller who is the slave of the railway, it has
not the reputation of its only rivals, the Corniche road from Nice to
Mentone, the lovely highway from Castellamare to Sorrento, or the road
between Vietri and Amalfi, where the strange fantastic peaks lead you at
last to the solitary and beautiful desert of Paestum, where Greece seems
to await you entrenched in silence among the wild-flowers. And there,
too, on the road to Tuscany, after the pleasant weariness of the way,
which is so much longer than those others, some fragment of antiquity is
to be the reward of your journey, though nothing so fine as the deserted
holiness of Paestum, only the dust of the white temple of Aphrodite
crowning the western horn of Spezia, where it rises splendid out of the
sea in the sun of Porto Venere.
This forgotten way among the olive gardens on the lower slopes of the
mountains over the sea, seems to me more joyful than any other road in
the world. It leads to Italy. Within the gate where all the world is a
garden, the way climbs among the olives and oranges, fresh with the
fragrance of the sea, the perfume of the blossoms, to the land of
heart's desire, where Pisa lies in the plain under the sorrowful gesture
of mountains like a beautiful mutilated statue, where Arno, parted from
Tiber, is lost in the sea, dowered with the glory of Florence, the
tribute of the hills, the spoil of many streams, the golden kiss of the
sun; while Tuscany, splendid with light and joy, stands neither for God
nor for His enemies, but for man, to whom she has given everything
really without an afterthought, the songs that shall not be forgotten;
the pictures full of youth; and above all Beauty, that on a night in
spring came to her from Greece as it is said among the vineyards, before
the vines had budded. For even as Love came to us from heaven, and was
born in a stable among the careful oxen, where a few poor shepherds
found a Mother with her Child, so Beauty was born in a vineyard in the
earliest dawn, when some young men came upon the hard white precious
body of a goddess, and drew her from the earth, and began to worship
her. Then in their hearts Beauty stirred, as Love did in the hearts of
the shepherds and the kings. Nor was that vision, so full of wisdom (a
vision of birth or resurrection, was it?) less fruitful than that other
so full of Love, when Mary, coming in the twilight of dawn, saw the
angel and heard his voice, and after weeping in the garden, heard Love
Himself call her by name. Well, if the resurrection of God was revealed
in Palestine, it was here among the Tuscan hills that man rose from the
dead and first saw the beauty of the flowers and the mystery of the
hills. Here, too, is holy land if you but knew it, full of old forgotten
gods, out-fashioned deities beside whose shrines, though they be hushed,
you may still hear the prayers of worshippers, the tears of desire, the
laughter of the beloved. For the old gods are not dead. Though they be
forgotten and the voice of Jesus full of sorrowful promises has beguiled
the world, still every morning is Aphrodite new born in the spume of the
sea, and in many an isle forsaken you may catch the notes of Apollo's
lyre, while Dionysus, in the mysterious heat of midday when the
husbandman is sleeping, still steals among the grapes, and Demeter even
yet in the sunset seeks Persephone among the sheaves of corn. If Jesus
wanders in the ways of the city to comfort those who have forgotten the
sun, in the woods the gods are still upon their holy thrones, and their
love constraineth us. Immortal and beloved, how should they pass away,
for, beside their secret places, of old we have hushed our voices, and
children have played with them no less than with Jesus of Nazareth. The
gods pass, only their gifts remain, the sun and the hills and the sea,
but in us they are immortal, not one have we suffered to creep away into
oblivion.
Thus I, thinking of the way, came to Nervi. Now the way from Genoa out
of the Pisan gate to Nervi is none of the pleasantest, being suburb all
the way; but those eight _chilometri_ over and done with, there is
nothing but delight between you and Spezia. Nervi itself, that
surprising place where beauty is all gathered into a nosegay of sea and
seashore, will not keep you long, for the sun is high, and the road is
calling, and the heat to come; moreover, the beautiful headland of
Portofino seems to shut out all Italy from your sight. Once there, you
tell yourself, what may not be seen, the Carrara hills, Spezia perhaps,
even Pisa maybe, miles and miles away, where Arno winds through the
marshes behind the Pineta to the sea. Now, whether or not in your heart
of hearts you hope for Pisa, a white peak of Carrara you certainly hope
to see, and that ... why, that is Tuscany. So you set out, leaving Genoa
and her suburb at last behind you, and, climbing among olive groves,
orange gardens, and flaming oleanders, with here a magnolia heavy with
blossom, there a pomegranate mysterious with fruit and flowers, after
another five miles you come to Recco, a modest, sleepy village, where it
is good to eat and rest. In the afternoon you may very pleasantly take
boat for Camogli, that ancient seafaring place, full of the débris of
the sea, old masts and ropes, here a rusty anchor, there a golden net,
with sailors lying asleep on the parapet of the harbour, and the whole
place full of the soft sea wind, languorous and yet virile withal, the
shady narrow ways, the low archways, the crooked steps pleasant with the
song of the sea, the rhythm of the waters.
In the cool of the afternoon you leave Camogli and climb by the byways
to Ruta, whence you may see all the Gulf of Genoa, with the proud city
herself in the lap of the mountains, and there, yes, far away, you may
see the stainless peaks of Tuscany, whiter than snow, shining in the
quiet afternoon; and nearer, but still far away, the crest of the horn
of Spezia, with the ruined church of Porto Venere--a church or a temple,
is it?--on the headland beside the island of Palmaria. Beside you are
the sea and the hills, two everlasting things, with here an old villa,
beautiful with many autumns, in a grove of cypress, ilex, and myrtle,
those three holy trees that mark death, mystery, and love; while far
down on the seashore where the foam is whitest, stands a little ruined
chapel in which the gulls cry all day long. But your heart turns ever
toward Italy yonder--towards the hills of marble. Will one ever reach
them, those far-away pure peaks immaculate in silence, like a thought of
God in the loneliness of the mountains? Far away below you lies Rapallo
in the crook of the bay among the oleanders and vines. It is there you
must sleep, far away still from those visionary peaks, which yet will in
some strange way give you a sense of security, as though a legion of
bright angels, ghosts in the pale night (for they fade away in the
twilight), invisible to other men, were on guard to keep you from all
harm. Somehow it is always into a dreamless sleep one falls in Rapallo,
that beautiful and guarded place behind Portofino, where the sea is like
a lake, so still it is, and all the flowers of the world seem to have
run for shelter. It is as though one had seen the Holy City, and though
it was still far off, it was enough, one was content.
[Illustration: ON THE ROAD]
Rapallo itself, as you find on your first morning, is beautiful, chiefly
by reason of its sea-girt tower. The old castle is a prison, and the
town itself, full of modern hotels, is yet brisk with trade in oil and
lace; but it is not these things that will hold you there, but that
sea-tower and the joy of the woods and gardens. And then there are some
surprising things not far away. Portofino, for instance, with its great
pine and the ilex woods, its terraced walk and the sea, not the lake of
Rapallo, but the sea itself, full of strength and wisdom. Then there
is San Fruttuoso, with its convent among the palm trees by the seashore,
whither the Doria are still brought by sea for burial. Here they lie,
generation on generation, of the race which loved the sea; almost
coffined in the deep, for the waves break upon the floor of the crypt
that holds them. They could not lie more fitly than on the shore of this
sea they won and held for Genoa. San Fruttuoso is difficult to reach
save by sea. In the summer the path from Portofino is pleasant enough,
but at any other time it is almost impassable. And indeed the voyage by
boat from Rapallo to Portofino, and thence to San Fruttuoso, should be
chosen, for the beauty of the coast, which, as I think, can nowhere be
seen so well and so easily as here. Then, in returning to Portofino, the
road along the coast should be followed through Cervara, where Guido,
the friend of Petrarch and founder of the convent, lies buried, where
Francis I, prisoner of Charles V, was wind-bound, to S. Margherita, the
sister-town of Rapallo, and thence through S. Michele di Pagana, where
you may see a spoiled Vandyck, to Rapallo. Who may speak of all the
splendid valleys and gardens that lie along this shore, for they are
gardens within a garden, and where all the world is so fair it is not of
any private pleasaunce that one thinks, but of the hills and the
wild-flowers and the sea, the garden of God.
And if the road, so far, from Genoa beggars description, so that I have
thought to leave it almost without a word, what can I hope to say of the
way from Rapallo to Chiavari? Starting early, perhaps in the company of
a peasant who is returning to his farm among the olives, you climb, in
the genial heat, among the lower slopes between the great hills and the
sea, along terraces of olives, through a whole long day of sunshine,
with the song of the cicale ever in your ears, the mysterious
long-drawn-out melody of the _rispetti_ of the peasant girls reaching
you ever. And then from the stillness among the olives, where the shade
is delicate and fragile, of silver and gold, and the streams creep
softly down to the sea, the evening will come as you pass along the
winding ways of Chiavari, for in the golden weather one is minded to go
softly. So in the twilight pursuing your way you follow the beautiful
road to Sestri-Levante, where again you are within sound of the sea that
breaks on the one side on a rocky and lofty shore, and on the other
creeps softly into a flat beach, the town itself rising on the
promontory between these two bays. There, under the headland among the
woods, you may find a chapel of black and white marble, surely the haunt
of Stella Maris, who has usurped the place of Aphrodite.
Many days might be spent among the woods of Sestri, but the road calls
from the mountains, and it is ever of Tuscany that you think as you set
out at last, leaving the sea behind you for the hills, climbing into the
Passo di Bracco, that, as it seems, alone divides you from the land you
seek. It is a far journey from Sestri to Spezia, but with a good horse,
in spite of the hill, you may cover it in a single long day from sunrise
to sunset. The climb begins almost at once, and continues really for
some eighteen miles, till Baracchino and the Osteria Baracca are
reached, in a desolate region of mountains that stretch away for ever,
billow on billow. Then you descend only to mount again through the
woods, till evening finds you at La Foce, the last height before Spezia;
and suddenly at a turning of the way the sunset flames before you,
staining all the sea with colour, and there lies Tuscany, those fragile,
stainless peaks of Carrara faintly glowing in the evening sun purple and
blue and gold, with here a flush as of dawn, there the heart of the
sunset. And all before you lies the sea, with Spezia and the great ships
in its arms; while yonder, like a jewel on the cusp of a horn, Porto
Venere shines; and farther still, Lerici in the shadow of the hills
washed by the sea, stained by the blood of the sunset, its great castle
seeming like some splendid ship in the midst of the waters. From the
bleak height of La Foce, whence all the woods seem to have run down to
the shore, slowly one by one the lights of the city appear like great
golden night flowers; soon they are answered from the bay, where the
ships lie solemnly, sleepily at anchor, and at last the great light of
the Pharos throws its warning over sea and seashore; and gathering in
the distance on the far horizon, the night splendid with blue and gold,
overwhelms the world, bringing coolness and as it were a sort of
reconciliation. So it is quite dark when, weary, at last you find
yourself in Spezia at the foot of the Tuscan hills.
Spezia is a modern city which has obliterated the more ancient
fortresses, whose ruins still guard the two promontories of her gulf.
The chief naval station in Italy, she has crowned all the heights and
islands with forts, and in many a little creek hidden away, you
continually come upon warships, naval schools, hospitals, and such,
while in her streets the sailors and soldiers mingle together, giving
the town a curiously modern character, for indeed there is little else
to call your attention. The beautiful bay which lies between Porto
Venere and Lerici behind the line of islands, that are really
fortifications, is, in spite of every violation, a spectacle of
extraordinary beauty, and in the old days--not so long ago, after
all--when the woods came down to the sea, and Spezia was a tiny village,
less even than Lerici is to-day, it must have been one of the loveliest
and quietest places in the world. Shut out from Italy by the range of
hills that runs in a semicircle from horn to horn of her bay, in those
days there were just sun and woods and sea, with a few half pagan
peasants and fishermen to break the immense silence. And, as it seems to
me, by reason of some magic which still haunts this mysterious seashore,
it is ever that world half pagan that you seek, leaving Spezia very
gladly every morning for San Terenzo and Lerici for Porto Venere and the
enchanted coast.
Leaving Spezia very early in the morning, there is nothing more
delightful than the voyage across the land-locked bay, past the
beautiful headlands and secret coves, to San Terenzo and Lerici. If you
leave the steamer at San Terenzo, you may walk along a sort of seawall,
built out of the cliff and boulders of the shore, round more than one
little promontory, to Lerici, whose castle seems to guard the Tuscan
sea. Walking thus along the shore, you pass the Villa Magni, Shelley's
house, standing, not as it used to do, up out of the sea, for the road
has been built really in the waves; but in many ways the same still, for
instance with the broad balcony on the first storey, which pleased
Shelley so much; and though a second storey has been added since, and
even the name of the house changed, a piece of vandalism common enough
in Italy to-day, where, since they do not even spare their own
traditions and ancient landmarks, it would be folly to expect them to
preserve ours, still you may visit the rooms in which he lived with
Mary, and where he told Claire of the death of Allegra.
The house stands facing the sea in the deepest part of the bay, nearer
to San Terenzo than to Lerici. Both Trelawney and Williams had been
searching all the spring for a summer villa for the Shelleys, who, a
little weary perhaps of Byron's world, had determined to leave Pisa and
to spend the summer on the Gulf of Spezia. Byron was about to establish
himself just beyond Livorno, on the slopes of Montenero, in a huge and
rambling old villa with eighteenth century frescoes on the walls, and a
tangled park and garden running down to the dusty Livorno highway. The
place to-day is a little dilapidated, and its statues broken, but in the
summer months it becomes the paradise of a school of girls, a fact which
I think might have pleased Byron.
However, the Shelleys were thinking of no such faded splendour as Villa
Dupoy for their summer retreat. "Shelley had no pride or vanity to
provide for," says Trelawney, "yet we had the greatest difficulty in
finding any house in which the humblest civilised family could exist.
"On the shores of this superb bay, only surpassed in its natural beauty
and capability by that of Naples, so effectually had tyranny paralysed
the energies and enterprise of man, that the only indication of human
habitation was a few most miserable fishing villages scattered along the
margin of the bay. Near its centre, between the villages of San Terenzo
and Lerici, we came upon a lonely and abandoned building called the
Villa Magni, though it looked more like a boat or bathing house than a
place to live in. It consisted of a terrace or ground-floor unpaved, and
used for storing boat-gear and fishing-tackle, and of a single storey
over it, divided into a hall or saloon and four small rooms which had
once been white-washed; there was one chimney for cooking. This place we
thought the Shelleys might put up with for the summer. The only good
thing about it was a verandah facing the sea, and almost over it. So we
sought the owner and made arrangements, dependent on Shelley's approval,
for taking it for six months."
Shelley at once decided to accept the offer of this house, though it was
unfurnished. Mary and Claire presently set out for Spezia, Shelley
remaining in Pisa to manage the removal of the furniture. He reached
Lerici on 28th April, writing, immediately on his arrival, to Mary in
Spezia.
_April 28, 1822_.
"DEAREST MARY,--I am this moment arrived at Lerici, where I am
necessarily detained waiting the furniture, which left Pisa last night
at midnight; and as the sea has been calm and the wind fair, may expect
them every moment.... Now to business--Is the Magni House taken? if not
pray occupy yourself instantly in finishing the affair, even if you are
obliged to go to Sarzana, and send a messenger to me to tell me of your
success. I, of course, cannot leave Lerici, to which place the boats
(for we were obliged to take two) are directed. But _you_ can come over
in the same boat that brings this letter, and return in the evening.
"I ought to say that I do not think there is accommodation for you all
at this inn; and that even if there were, you would be better off at
Spezia; but if the Magni House is taken, then there is no possible
reason why you should not take a row over in the boat that will bring
this, but don't keep the men long. I am anxious to hear from you on
every account.--Ever yours, S."
Shelley's fears as to the accommodation of Lerici were by no means
without foundation. Within the last two years a decent inn has been open
there in the summer, but before that the primitive and not very clean
hostelry in which, as I suppose, Shelley lodged, was all that awaited
the traveller.[8] It was not for long, however, that Shelley was left in
doubt about the house. Villa Magni became his, and, after much trouble
with the furniture, for the officials put the customs duty at £300
sterling, they were allowed to bring it ashore, the harbour-master
agreeing to consider Villa Magni "as a sort of depôt, until further
leave came from the Genoese Government."
It was here that, very soon after they had taken possession of the
house, Claire learned from Shelley's lips of the death of her child, and
on 21st May set out for Florence. A few evenings later, Shelley, walking
with Williams on the terrace, and observing the effect of the moonshine
on the water, grasped Williams, as he says, "violently by the arm and
stared steadfastly on the white surf that broke upon the beach at our
feet. Observing him sensibly affected, I demanded of him if he were in
pain; but he only answered by saying, 'There it is again--there!' He
recovered after some time, and declared that he saw, as plainly as he
then saw me, a naked child (Allegra) rise from the sea and clap its
hands as in joy, smiling at him." Was this a premonition of his own
death, a hint, as it were, that in such a place one like Shelley might
well hope for from the gods? Certainly that shore was pagan enough.
Sometimes on moonlight nights, in the hot weather, the half savage
natives of San Terenzo would dance among the waves, singing in chorus;
while Mrs. Shelley tells us that the beauty of the woods made her "weep
and shudder." So strong and vehement was her dread that she preferred to
go out in the boat which she feared, rather than to walk among the paths
and alleys of the trees hung with vines, or in the mysterious silence of
the olives.
Thus began that happy last summer of Shelley's life. Day by day, he,
with Trelawney and Williams, watched for that fatal plaything, the
little boat _Ariel_, which Trelawney had drawn in her actual dimensions
for him on the sands of Arno, while he, with a map of the Mediterranean
spread before him, sitting in this imaginary ship, had already made
wonderful voyages. And one day as he paced the terrace with Williams,
they saw her round the headland of Porto Venere. Twenty-eight feet long
by eight she was: built in Genoa from an English model that Williams,
who had been a sailor, had brought with him. Without a deck,
schooner-rigged, it took, says Trelawney, "two tons of iron ballast to
bring her down to her bearings, and then she was very crank in a breeze,
though not deficient in beam." Truly Shelley was no seaman. "You will do
no good with Shelley," Trelawney told Williams, "until you heave his
books and papers overboard, shear the wisps of hair that hang over his
eyes, and plunge his arms up to the elbows in a tar bucket." But he
said, "I can read and steer at the same time." Read and steer! But
indeed it was on this very bay, and almost certainly in the _Ariel_,
that he wrote those perfect lines: "She left me at the silent time."
It was here too, in Lerici, that Shelley wrote "The Triumph of Life,"
that splendid fragment in _terza rima_, which is like a pageant suddenly
broken by the advent of Death: that ends with the immortal question--
"Then, what is life? I cried,"
which was for ever to remain unanswered, for he had gone, as he said,
"to solve the great mystery." Well, the story is an old one, I shall not
tell it again; only here in the bay of Lerici, with his words in my
ears, his house before me, and the very terrace where he worked, the
ghost of that sorrowful and splendid spirit seems to wander even yet.
What was it that haunted this shore, full of foreboding, prophesying
death?
It was to meet Leigh Hunt that Shelley set out on 1st July with Williams
in the _Ariel_ for Leghorn. For weeks the sky had been cloudless, full
of the mysterious light, which is, as it seems to me, the most beautiful
and the most splendid thing in the world. In all the churches and by the
roadsides they were praying for rain. Shelley had been in Pisa with Hunt
showing him that most lovely of all cathedrals, and, listening to the
organ there, he had been led to agree that a truly divine religion might
even yet be established if Love were really made the principle of it
instead of Faith. On the afternoon following that serene day at Pisa, he
set sail for Lerici from Leghorn with Williams and the boy Charles
Vivian. Trelawney was on the _Bolivar_, Byron's yacht, at the time, and
saw them start. His Genoese mate, watching too, turned to him and said,
"They should have sailed this morning at three or four instead of now;
they are standing too much inshore; the current will set them there."
Trelawney answered, "They will soon have the land-breeze." "Maybe,"
continued the mate, "she will soon have too much breeze; that gaff
topsail is foolish in a boat with no deck and no sailor on board." Then,
pointing to the south-west,--"Look at those black lines and the dirty
rags hanging on them out of the sky--they are a warning; look at the
smoke on the water; the devil is brewing mischief." Then the mist which
had hung all day in the offing swallowed the _Ariel_ for ever.
It was not until many days after this, Trelawney tells us, "that my
worst fears were confirmed. Two bodies were found on the shore--one near
Viareggio, which I went and examined. The face and hands and parts of
the body not protected by the dress were fleshless. The tall, slight
figure, the jacket, the volume of Aeschylus in one pocket, and Keats'
poems[9] in the other, doubled back, as if the reader, in the act of
reading, had hastily thrust it away, were all too familiar to me to
leave a doubt in my mind that this mutilated corpse was any other than
Shelley's."
A certain light has been thrown on the manner in which Shelley and his
friend met their death in a letter which Mr. Eyre wrote to the _Times_
in 1875.[10] Trelawney had always believed that the Livorno sailors knew
more than they cared to tell of that tragedy. For one thing, he had seen
an English oar in one of their boats just after the storm; for another
the laws were such in Tuscany, that had a fishing-boat gone to the
rescue of the _Ariel_ and brought off the poet and his companions, she
would with her crew have been sent into quarantine for fear of cholera.
It is not, however, to the Duchy of Tuscany that Shelley owes his death,
but to the cupidity of the Tuscan sailors, one of them having confessed
to the crime of running down the boat, seeing her in danger, in the hope
of finding gold on "the milord Inglese." There seems but little reason
for doubting this story, which Vincent Eyre communicated to the _Times_
in 1875: Trelawney eagerly accepts it, and though Dr. Garnett and
Professor Dowden politely forbear to accuse the Italians, such crimes
appear to have been sufficiently common in those days to confirm us,
however reluctantly, in this explanation. Thus died perhaps the greatest
lyric poet that even England had ever borne, an exile, and yet not an
exile, for he died in Italy, the fatherland of us all. Ah! "'tis Death
is dead, not he," for in the west wind you may hear his song, and in the
tender night his rare mysterious music; when the skylark sings it is as
it were his melody, and in the clouds you may find something of the
refreshment of his spirit.
"Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange."