LAST DAYS.
The advance of spring made the climate of Pisa too hot for comfort; and
early in April Trelawny and Williams rode off to find a suitable lodging
for themselves and the Shelleys on the Gulf of Spezia. They pitched upon
a house called the Villa Magni, between Lerici and San Terenzio, which
"looked more like a boat or a 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." When it came to
be inhabited, the central hall was used for the living and eating room
of the whole party. The Shelleys occupied two rooms facing each other;
the Williamses had one of the remaining chambers, and Trelawny another.
Access to these smaller apartments could only be got through the saloon;
and this circumstance once gave rise to a ludicrous incident, when
Shelley, having lost his clothes out bathing, had to cross, in puris
naturalibus, not undetected, though covered in his retreat by the clever
Italian handmaiden, through a luncheon party assembled in the
dining-room. The horror of the ladies at the poet's unexpected
apparition and his innocent self-defence are well described by Trelawny.
Life in the villa was of the simplest description. To get food was no
easy matter; and the style of the furniture may be guessed by Trelawny's
laconic remark that the sea was his only washing-basin.
They arrived at Villa Magni on the 26th of April, and began a course of
life which was not interrupted till the final catastrophe of July 8.
These few weeks were in many respects the happiest of Shelley's life. We
seem to discern in his last letter of importance, recently edited by Mr.
Garnett, that he was now conscious of having reached a platform from
which he could survey his past achievement, and whence he would probably
have risen to a loftier altitude, by a calmer and more equable exercise
of powers which had been ripening during the last three years of life in
Italy. Meanwhile, "I am content," he writes, "if the heaven above me is
calm for the passing moment." And this tranquillity was perfect, with
none of the oppressive sense of coming danger, which distinguishes the
calm before a storm. He was far away from the distractions of the world
he hated, in a scene of indescribable beauty, among a population little
removed from the state of savages, who enjoyed the primitive pleasures
of a race at one with nature, and toiled with hardy perseverance on the
element he loved so well. His company was thoroughly congenial and well
mixed. He spent his days in excursions on the water with Williams, or in
solitary musings in his cranky little skiff, floating upon the shallows
in shore, or putting out to sea and waiting for the landward breeze to
bring him home. The evenings were passed upon the terrace, listening to
Jane's guitar, conversing with Trelawny, or reading his favourite poets
aloud to the assembled party.
In this delightful solitude, this round of simple occupations, this
uninterrupted communion with nature, Shelley's enthusiasms and
inspirations revived with their old strength. He began a poem, which, if
we may judge of its scale by the fragment we possess, would have been
one of the longest, as it certainly is one of the loftiest of his
masterpieces. The "Triumph of Life" is composed in no strain of
compliment to the powers of this world, which quell untameable spirits,
and enslave the noblest by the operation of blind passions and
inordinate ambitions. It is rather a pageant of the spirit dragged in
chains, led captive to the world, the flesh and the devil. The sonorous
march and sultry splendour of the terza rima stanzas, bearing on their
tide of song those multitudes of forms, processionally grand, yet misty
with the dust of their own tramplings, and half-shrouded in a lurid robe
of light, affect the imagination so powerfully that we are fain to
abandon criticism and acknowledge only the daemonic fascinations of this
solemn mystery. Some have compared the "Triumph of Life" to a
Panathenaic pomp: others have found in it a reflex of the burning summer
heat, and blazing sea, and onward undulations of interminable waves,
which were the cradle of its maker as he wrote. The imagery of Dante
plays a part, and Dante has controlled the structure. The genius of the
Revolution passes by: Napoleon is there, and Rousseau serves for guide.
The great of all ages are arraigned, and the spirit of the world is
brought before us, while its heroes pass, unveil their faces for a
moment, and are swallowed in the throng that has no ending. But how
Shelley meant to solve the problems he has raised, by what sublime
philosophy he purposed to resolve the discords of this revelation more
soul-shattering than Daniel's "Mene", we cannot even guess. The poem, as
we have it, breaks abruptly with these words: "Then what is Life? I
cried"--a sentence of the profoundest import, when we remember that the
questioner was now about to seek its answer in the halls of Death.
To separate any single passage from a poem which owes so much of its
splendour to the continuity of music and the succession of visionary
images, does it cruel wrong. Yet this must be attempted; for Shelley is
the only English poet who has successfully handled that most difficult
of metres, terza rima. His power over complicated versification cannot
be appreciated except by duly noticing the method he employed in
treating a structure alien, perhaps, to the genius of our literature,
and even in Italian used with perfect mastery by none but Dante. To
select the introduction and part of the first paragraph will inflict
less violence upon the "Triumph of Life" as a whole, than to detach one
of its episodes.
Swift as a spirit hastening to his task
Of glory and of good, the Sun sprang forth
Rejoicing in his splendour, and the mask
Of darkness fell from the awakened Earth.
The smokeless altars of the mountain snows
Flamed above crimson clouds, and at the birth
Of light, the Ocean's orison arose,
To which the birds tempered their matin lay.
All flowers in field or forest which unclose
Their trembling eyelids to the kiss of day,
Swinging their censers in the element,
With orient incense lit by the new ray,
Burned slow and inconsumably, and sent
Their odorous sighs up to the smiling air;
And, in succession due, did continent,
Isle, ocean, and all things that in them wear
The form and character of mortal mould,
Rise as the Sun their father rose, to bear
Their portion of the toil, which he of old
Took as his own, and then imposed on them.
But I, whom thoughts which must remain untold
Had kept as wakeful as the stars that gem
The cone of night, now they were laid asleep,
Stretched my faint limbs beneath the hoary stem
Which an old chestnut flung athwart the steep
Of a green Apennine. Before me fled
The night; behind me rose the day; the deep
Was at my feet, and Heaven above my head,--
When a strange trance over my fancy grew
Which was not slumber, for the shade it spread
Was so transparent that the scene came through
As clear as, when a veil of light is drawn
O'er evening hills, they glimmer; and I knew
That I had felt the freshness of that dawn
Bathe in the same cold dew my brow and hair,
And sate as thus upon that slope of lawn
Under the self-same bough, and heard as there
The birds, the fountains, and the ocean, hold
Sweet talk in music through the enamoured air.
And then a vision on my brain was rolled.
Such is the exordium of the poem. It will be noticed that at this point
one series of the interwoven triplets is concluded. The "Triumph of
Life" itself begins with a new series of rhymes, describing the vision
for which preparation has been made in the preceding prelude. It is not
without perplexity that an ear unaccustomed to the windings of the terza
rima, feels its way among them. Entangled and impeded by the
labyrinthine sounds, the reader might be compared to one who, swimming
in his dreams, is carried down the course of a swift river clogged with
clinging and retarding water-weeds. He moves; but not without labour:
yet after a while the very obstacles add fascination to his movement.
As in that trance of wondrous thought I lay,
This was the tenour of my waking dream:--
Methought I sate beside a public way
Thick strewn with summer dust, and a great stream
Of people there was hurrying to and fro,
Numerous as gnats upon the evening gleam,
All hastening onward, yet none seemed to know
Whither he went, or whence he came, or why
He made one of the multitude, and so
Was borne amid the crowd, as through the sky
One of the million leaves of summer's bier;
Old age and youth, manhood and infancy,
Mixed in one mighty torrent did appear:
Some flying from the thing they feared, and some
Seeking the object of another's fear;
And others, as with steps towards the tomb,
Pored on the trodden worms that crawled beneath,
And others mournfully within the gloom
Of their own shadow walked and called it death;
And some fled from it as it were a ghost,
Half fainting in the affliction of vain breath.
But more, with motions which each other crossed,
Pursued or spurned the shadows the clouds threw,
Or birds within the noon-day ether lost,
Upon that path where flowers never grew--
And weary with vain toil and faint for thirst,
Heard not the fountains, whose melodious dew
Out of their mossy cells for ever burst;
Nor felt the breeze which from the forest told
Of grassy paths, and wood-lawn interspersed,
With over-arching elms, and caverns cold,
And violet banks where sweet dreams brood;--but they
Pursued their serious folly as of old.
Here let us break the chain of rhymes that are unbroken in the text, to
notice the extraordinary skill with which the rhythm has been woven in
one paragraph, suggesting by recurrences of sound the passing of a
multitude, which is presented at the same time to the eye of fancy by
accumulated images. The next eleven triplets introduce the presiding
genius of the pageant. Students of Petrarch's "Trionfi" will not fail to
note what Shelley owes to that poet, and how he has transmuted the
definite imagery of mediaeval symbolism into something metaphysical and
mystic.
And as I gazed, methought that in the way
The throng grew wilder, as the woods of June
When the south wind shakes the extinguished day;
And a cold glare, intenser than the noon
But icy cold, obscured with blinding light
The sun, as he the stars. Like the young moon--
When on the sunlit limits of the night
Her white shell trembles amid crimson air,
And whilst the sleeping tempest gathers might,--
Doth, as the herald of its coming, bear
The ghost of its dead mother, whose dim form
Bends in dark ether from her infant's chair;
So came a chariot on the silent storm
Of its own rushing splendour, and a Shape
So sate within, as one whom years deform,
Beneath a dusky hood and double cape,
Crouching within the shadow of a tomb.
And o'er what seemed the head a cloud-like crape
Was bent, a dun and faint ethereal gloom
Tempering the light. Upon the chariot beam
A Janus-visaged Shadow did assume
The guidance of that wonder-winged team;
The shapes which drew it in thick lightnings
Were lost:--I heard alone on the air's soft stream
The music of their ever-moving wings.
All the four faces of that charioteer
Had their eyes banded; little profit brings
Speed in the van and blindness in the rear,
Nor then avail the beams that quench the sun,
Or that with banded eyes could pierce the sphere
Of all that is, has been, or will be done.
So ill was the car guided--but it past
With solemn speed majestically on.
The intense stirring of his imagination implied by this supreme poetic
effort, the solitude of the Villa Magni, and the elemental fervour of
Italian heat to which he recklessly exposed himself, contributed to make
Shelley more than usually nervous. His somnambulism returned, and he saw
visions. On one occasion he thought that the dead Allegra rose from the
sea, and clapped her hands, and laughed, and beckoned to him. On another
he roused the whole house at night by his screams, and remained
terror-frozen in the trance produced by an appalling vision. This mood
he communicated, in some measure, to his friends. One of them saw what
she afterwards believed to have been his phantom, and another dreamed
that he was dead. They talked much of death, and it is noticeable that
the last words written to him by Jane were these:--"Are you going to
join your friend Plato?"
The Leigh Hunts arrived at last in Genoa, whence they again sailed for
Leghorn. Shelley heard the news upon the 20th of June. He immediately
prepared to join them; and on the 1st of July set off with Williams in
the "Don Juan" for Leghorn, where he rushed into the arms of his old
friend. Leigh Hunt, in his autobiography, writes, "I will not dwell upon
the moment." From Leghorn he drove with the Hunts to Pisa, and
established them in the ground-floor of Byron's Palazzo Lanfranchi, as
comfortably as was consistent with his lordship's variable moods. The
negotiations which had preceded Hunt's visit to Italy, raised
forebodings in Shelley's mind as to the reception he would meet from
Byron; nor were these destined to be unfulfilled. Trelawny tells us how
irksome the poet found it to have "a man with a sick wife, and seven
disorderly children," established in his palace. To Mrs. Hunt he was
positively brutal; nor could he tolerate her self-complacent husband,
who, while he had voyaged far and wide in literature, had never wholly
cast the slough of Cockneyism. Hunt was himself hardly powerful enough
to understand the true magnitude of Shelley, though he loved him; and
the tender solicitude of the great, unselfish Shelley, for the smaller,
harmlessly conceited Hunt, is pathetic. They spent a pleasant day or two
together, Shelley showing the Campo Santo and other sights of Pisa to
his English friend. Hunt thought him somewhat less hopeful than he used
to be, but improved in health and strength and spirits. One little touch
relating to their last conversation, deserves to be recorded:--"He
assented warmly to an opinion I expressed in the cathedral at Pisa,
while the organ was playing, that a truly divine religion might yet be
established, if charity were really made the principle of it, instead of
faith."
On the night following that day of rest, Shelley took a postchaise for
Leghorn; and early in the afternoon of the next day he set sail, with
Williams, on his return voyage to Lerici. The sailor-boy, Charles
Vivian, was their only companion. Trelawny, who was detained on board
the "Bolivar", in the Leghorn harbour, watched them start. The weather
for some time had been unusually hot and dry. "Processions of priests
and religiosi have been for several days past praying for rain;" so runs
the last entry in Williams's diary; "but the gods are either angry or
nature too powerful." Trelawny's Genoese mate observed, as the "Don
Juan" stood out to sea, that they ought to have started at three a.m.
instead of twelve hours later; adding "the devil is brewing mischief."
Then a sea-fog withdrew the "Don Juan" from their sight. It was an
oppressively sultry afternoon. Trelawny went down into his cabin, and
slept; but was soon roused by the noise of the ships' crews in the
harbour making all ready for a gale. In a short time the tempest was
upon them, with wind, rain, and thunder. It did not last more than
twenty minutes; and at its end Trelawny looked out anxiously for
Shelley's boat. She was nowhere to be seen, and nothing could be heard
of her. In fact, though Trelawny could not then be absolutely sure of
the catastrophe, she had sunk, struck in all probability by the prow of
a felucca, but whether by accident or with the intention of running her
down is still uncertain.
On the morning of the third day after the storm, Trelawny rode to Pisa,
and communicated his fears to Hunt. "I then went upstairs to Byron. When
I told him, his lip quivered, and his voice faltered as he questioned
me." Couriers were despatched to search the sea-coast, and to bring the
"Bolivar" from Leghorn. Trelawny rode in person toward Via Reggio, and
there found a punt, a water-keg, and some bottles, which had been in
Shelley's boat. A week passed, Trelawny patrolling the shore with the
coast-guardsmen, but hearing of no new discovery, until at last two
bodies were cast upon the sand. One found near the Via Reggio, on the
18th of July, was Shelley's. It had his jacket, "with the volume of
Aeschylus in one pocket, and Keats's poems in the other, doubled back,
as if the reader, in the act of reading, had hastily thrust it away."
The other, found near the tower of Migliarino, at about four miles'
distance, was that of Williams. The sailor-boy, Charles Vivian, though
cast up on the same day, the 18th of July, near Massa, was not heard of
by Trelawny till the 29th.
Nothing now remained but to tell the whole dreadful truth to the two
widowed women, who had spent the last days in an agony of alternate
despair and hope at Villa Magni. This duty Trelawny discharged
faithfully and firmly. "The next day I prevailed on them," he says, "to
return with me to Pisa. The misery of that night and the journey of the
next day, and of many days and nights that followed, I can neither
describe nor forget." It was decided that Shelley should be buried at
Rome, near his friend Keats and his son William, and that Williams's
remains should be taken to England. But first the bodies had to be
burned; and for permission to do this Trelawny, who all through had
taken the lead, applied to the English Embassy at Florence. After some
difficulty it was granted.
What remains to be said concerning the cremation of Shelley's body on
the 6th of August, must be told in Trelawny's own words. Williams, it
may be stated, had been burned on the preceding day.
"Three white wands had been stuck in the sand to mark the poet's grave,
but as they were at some distance from each other, we had to cut a
trench thirty yards in length, in the line of the sticks, to ascertain
the exact spot, and it was nearly an hour before we came upon the grave.
"In the meantime Byron and Leigh Hunt arrived in the carriage, attended
by soldiers, and the Health Officer, as before. The lonely and grand
scenery that surrounded us, so exactly harmonized with Shelley's genius,
that I could imagine his spirit soaring over us. The sea, with the
islands of Gorgona, Capraja, and Elba, was before us; old battlemented
watch-towers stretched along the coast, backed by the marble-crested
Apennines glistening in the sun, picturesque from their diversified
outlines, and not a human dwelling was in sight.
"As I thought of the delight Shelley felt in such scenes of loneliness
and grandeur whilst living, I felt we were no better than a herd of
wolves or a pack of wild dogs, in tearing out his battered and naked
body from the pure yellow sand that lay so lightly over it, to drag him
back to the light of day; but the dead have no voice, nor had I power to
check the sacrilege--the work went on silently in the deep and
unresisting sand, not a word was spoken, for the Italians have a touch
of sentiment, and their feelings are easily excited into sympathy. Byron
was silent and thoughtful. We were startled and drawn together by a
dull, hollow sound that followed the blow of a mattock; the iron had
struck a skull, and the body was soon uncovered.... After the fire was
well kindled we repeated the ceremony of the previous day; and more wine
was poured over Shelley's dead body than he had consumed during his
life. This with the oil and salt made the yellow flames glisten and
quiver. The heat from the sun and fire was so intense that the
atmosphere was tremulous and wavy.... The fire was so fierce as to
produce a white heat on the iron, and to reduce its contents to grey
ashes. The only portions that were not consumed were some fragments of
bones, the jaw, and the skull; but what surprised us all was that the
heart remained entire. In snatching this relic from the fiery furnace,
my hand was severely burnt; and had any one seen me do the act, I should
have been put into quarantine."
Shelley's heart was given to Hunt, who subsequently, not without
reluctance and unseemly dispute, resigned it to Mrs. Shelley. It is now
at Boscombe. His ashes were carried by Trelawny to Rome and buried in
the Protestant cemetery, so touchingly described by him in his letter to
Peacock, and afterwards so sublimely in "Adonais". The epitaph, composed
by Hunt, ran thus: "Percy Bysshe Shelley, Cor Cordium, Natus iv. August
MDCCXCII. Obiit VIII Jul. MDCCCXXII." To the Latin words Trelawny,
faithfullest and most devoted of friends, added three lines from Ariel's
song, much loved in life by Shelley:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
"And so," writes Lady Shelley, "the sea and the earth closed over one
who was great as a poet, and still greater as a philanthropist; and of
whom it may be said, that his wild spiritual character seems to have
prepared him for being thus snatched from life under circumstances of
mingled terror and beauty, while his powers were yet in their spring
freshness, and age had not come to render the ethereal body decrepit, or
to wither the heart which could not be consumed by fire."