RESIDENCE AT PISA.
On the 26th of January, 1820, the Shelleys established themselves at Pisa.
From this date forward to the 7th of July, 1822, Shelley’s life divides
itself into two periods of unequal length; the first spent at Pisa, the
baths of San Giuliano, and Leghorn; the second at Lerici on the Bay of
Spezia. Without entering into minute particulars of dates or recording
minor changes of residence, it is possible to treat of the first and
longer period in general. The house he inhabited at Pisa was on the south
side of the Arno. After a few months he became the neighbour of Lord
Byron, who engaged the Palazzo Lanfranchi in order to be near him; and
here many English and Italian friends gathered round them. Among these
must be mentioned in the first place Captain Medwin, whose recollections
of the Pisan residence are of considerable value, and next Captain
Trelawny, who has left a record of Shelley’s last days only equalled in
vividness by Hogg’s account of the Oxford period, and marked by signs of
more unmistakable accuracy. Not less important members of this private
circle were Mr. and Mrs. Edward Elleker Williams, with whom Shelley and
his wife lived on terms of the closest friendship. Among foreigners, the
physician Vaccà, the improvisatore Sgricci, and the Greek prince
Mavrocordato, have to be recorded. It will be seen from this enumeration
that Shelley was no longer solitary; and indeed it would appear that now,
upon the eve of his accidental death, he had begun to enjoy an immunity
from many of his previous sufferings. Life expanded before him: his
letters show that he was concentrating his powers and preparing for a
fresh flight; and the months, though ever productive of poetic
masterpieces, promised a still more magnificent birth in the future.
In the summer and autumn of 1820, Shelley produced some of his most genial
poems: the _Letter to Maria Gisborne_, which might be mentioned as a
pendent to _Julian and Maddalo_ for its treatment of familiar things; the
_Ode to a Skylark_, that most popular of all his lyrics; the _Witch of
Atlas_, unrivalled as an Ariel-flight of fairy fancy; and the _Ode to
Naples_, which, together with the _Ode to Liberty_, added a new lyric form
to English literature. In the winter he wrote the _Sensitive Plant_,
prompted thereto, we are told, by the flowers which crowded Mrs. Shelley’s
drawing-room, and exhaled their sweetness to the temperate Italian
sunlight. Whether we consider the number of these poems or their diverse
character, ranging from verse separated by an exquisitely subtle line from
simple prose to the most impassioned eloquence and the most ethereal
imagination, we shall be equally astonished. Every chord of the poet’s
lyre is touched, from the deep bass string that echoes the diurnal speech
of such a man as Shelley was, to the fine vibrations of a treble merging
its rarity of tone in accents super-sensible to ordinary ears. One passage
from the _Letter to Maria Gisborne_ may here be quoted, not for its
poetry, but for the light it casts upon the circle of his English friends.
You are now
In London, that great sea, whose ebb and flow
At once is deaf and loud, and on the shore
Vomits its wrecks, and still howls on for more.
Yet in its depth what treasures! You will see
That which was Godwin,--greater none than he
Though fallen--and fallen on evil times--to stand
Among the spirits of our age and land,
Before the dread tribunal of _To come_
The foremost, while Rebuke cowers pale and dumb.
You will see Coleridge--he who sits obscure
In the exceeding lustre and the pure
Intense irradiation of a mind,
Which, with its own internal lightning blind,
Flags wearily through darkness and despair--
A cloud-encircled meteor of the air,
A hooded eagle among blinking owls.
You will see Hunt; one of those happy souls
Which are the salt of the earth, and without whom
This world would smell like what it is--a tomb;
Who is, what others seem. His room no doubt
Is still adorned by many a cast from Shout,
With graceful flowers tastefully placed about;
And coronals of bay from ribbons hung,
And brighter wreaths in neat disorder flung,
The gifts of the most learn’d among some dozens
Of female friends, sisters-in-law, and cousins.
And there is he with his eternal puns,
Which beat the dullest brain for smiles, like duns
Thundering for money at a poet’s door;
Alas! it is no use to say, “I’m poor!”--
Or oft in graver mood, when he will look
Things wiser than were ever read in book,
Except in Shakespere’s wisest tenderness.
You will see Hogg; and I cannot express
His virtues, though I know that they are great,
Because he locks, then barricades the gate
Within which they inhabit. Of his wit
And wisdom, you’ll cry out when you are bit.
He is a pearl within an oyster-shell,
One of the richest of the deep. And there
Is English Peacock, with his mountain fair,--
Turn’d into a Flamingo, that shy bird
That gleams in the Indian air. Have you not heard
When a man marries, dies, or turns Hindoo,
His best friends hear no more of him. But you
Will see him, and will like him too, I hope,
With the milk-white Snowdonian antelope
Match’d with this camelopard. His fine wit
Makes such a wound, the knife is lost in it;
A strain too learnèd for a shallow age,
Too wise for selfish bigots; let his page
Which charms the chosen spirits of the time,
Fold itself up for the serener clime
Of years to come, and find its recompense
In that just expectation. Wit and sense,
Virtue and human knowledge; all that might
Make this dull world a business of delight,
Are all combined in Horace Smith. And these,
With some exceptions, which I need not tease
Your patience by descanting on, are all
You and I know in London.
Captain Medwin, who came late in the autumn of 1820, at his cousin’s
invitation, to stay with the Shelleys, has recorded many interesting
details of their Pisan life, as well as valuable notes of Shelley’s
conversation. “It was nearly seven years since we had parted, but I should
have immediately recognized him in a crowd. His figure was emaciated, and
somewhat bent, owing to near-sightedness, and his being forced to lean
over his books, with his eyes almost touching them; his hair, still
profuse, and curling naturally, was partially interspersed with grey; but
his appearance was youthful. There was also a freshness and purity in his
complexion that he never lost.” Not long after his arrival, Medwin
suffered from a severe and tedious illness. “Shelley tended me like a
brother. He applied my leeches, administered my medicines, and during six
weeks that I was confined to my room, was assiduous and unintermitting in
his affectionate care of me.” The poet’s solitude and melancholy at this
time impressed his cousin very painfully. Though he was producing a long
series of imperishable poems, he did not take much interest in his work.
“I am disgusted with writing,” he once said, “and were it not for an
irresistible impulse, that predominates my better reason, should
discontinue so doing.” The brutal treatment he had lately received from
the _Quarterly Review_, the calumnies which pursued him, and the coldness
of all but a very few friends, checked his enthusiasm for composition. Of
this there is abundant proof in his correspondence. In a letter to Leigh
Hunt, dated Jan. 25, 1822, he says: “My faculties are shaken to atoms and
torpid. I can write nothing; and if _Adonais_ had no success, and excited
no interest, what incentive can I have to write?” Again: “I write little
now. It is impossible to compose except under the strong excitement of an
assurance of finding sympathy in what you write.” Lord Byron’s company
proved now, as before, a check rather than an incentive to production: “I
do not write; I have lived too long near Lord Byron, and the sun has
extinguished the glow-worm; for I cannot hope, with St. John, that _the
light came into the world and the world knew it not_.” “I despair of
rivalling Lord Byron, as well I may, and there is no other with whom it is
worth contending.” To Ollier, in 1820, he wrote: “I doubt whether I shall
write more. I could be content either with the hell or the paradise of
poetry; but the torments of its purgatory vex me, without exciting my
powers sufficiently to put an end to the vexation.” It was not that his
spirit was cowed by the Reviews, or that he mistook the sort of audience
he had to address. He more than once acknowledged that, while Byron wrote
for the many, his poems were intended for the understanding few. Yet the
συνετοὶ, as he called them, gave him but scanty encouragement. The cold
phrases of kindly Horace Smith show that he had not comprehended
_Prometheus Unbound_; and Shelley whimsically complains that even
intelligent and sympathetic critics confounded the ideal passion described
in _Epipsychidion_ with the love affairs of “a servant-girl and her
sweetheart.” This almost incomprehensible obtuseness on the part of men
who ought to have known better, combined with the coarse abuse of vulgar
scribblers, was enough to make a man so sincerely modest as Shelley doubt
his powers, or shrink from the severe labour of developing them.[29] “The
decision of the cause,” he wrote to Mr. Gisborne, “whether or no _I_ am a
poet, is removed from the present time to the hour when our posterity
shall assemble; but the court is a very severe one, and I fear that the
verdict will be, guilty--death.” Deep down in his own heart he had,
however, less doubt: “This I know,” he said to Medwin, “that whether in
prosing or in versing, there is something in my writings that shall live
for ever.” And again he writes to Hunt: “I am full of thoughts and plans,
and should do something, if the feeble and irritable frame which encloses
it was willing to obey the spirit. I fancy that then I should do great
things.” It seems almost certain that the incompleteness of many longer
works designed in the Italian period, the abandonment of the tragedy on
Tasso’s story, the unfinished state of _Charles I._, and the failure to
execute the cherished plan of a drama suggested by the Book of Job, were
due to the depressing effects of ill-health and external discouragement.
Poetry with Shelley was no light matter. He composed under the pressure of
intense excitement, and he elaborated his first draughts with minute care
and severe self-criticism.
These words must not be taken as implying that he followed the Virgilian
precedent of polishing and reducing the volume of his verses by an anxious
exercise of calm reflection, or that he observed the Horatian maxim of
deferring their publication till the ninth year. The contrary was
notoriously the case with him. Yet it is none the less proved by the state
of his manuscripts that his compositions, even as we now possess them,
were no mere improvisations. The passage already quoted from his _Defence
of Poetry_ shows the high ideal he had conceived of the poet’s duty toward
his art; and it may be confidently asserted that his whole literary career
was one long struggle to emerge from the incoherence of his earlier
efforts, into the clearness of expression and precision of form that are
the index of mastery over style. At the same time it was inconsistent with
his most firmly rooted æsthetic principles, to attempt composition except
under an impulse approaching to inspiration. To imperil his life by the
fiery taxing of all his faculties, moral, intellectual and physical, and
to undergo the discipline exacted by his own fastidious taste, with no
other object in view than the frigid compliments of a few friends, was
more than even Shelley’s enthusiasm could endure. He, therefore, at this
period required the powerful stimulus of some highly exciting cause from
without to determine his activity.
Such external stimulus came to Shelley from three quarters early in the
year 1821. Among his Italian acquaintances at Pisa, was a clever but
disreputable Professor, of whom Medwin draws a very piquant portrait. This
man one day related the sad story of a beautiful and noble lady, the
Contessina Emilia Viviani, who had been confined by her father in a dismal
convent of the suburbs, to await her marriage with a distasteful husband.
Shelley, fired as ever by a tale of tyranny, was eager to visit the fair
captive. The Professor accompanied him and Medwin to the convent-parlour,
where they found her more lovely than even the most glowing descriptions
had led them to expect. Nor was she only beautiful. Shelley soon
discovered that she had “cultivated her mind beyond what I have ever met
with in Italian women;” and a rhapsody composed by her upon the subject of
Uranian Love--Il Vero Amore--justifies the belief that she possessed an
intellect of more than ordinary elevation. He took Mrs. Shelley to see
her, and both did all they could to make her convent-prison less irksome,
by frequent visits, by letters, and by presents of flowers and books. It
was not long before Shelley’s sympathy for this unfortunate lady took the
form of love, which, however spiritual and Platonic, was not the less
passionate. The result was the composition of _Epipsychidion_, the most
unintelligible of all his poems to those who have not assimilated the
spirit of Plato’s _Symposium_ and Dante’s _Vita Nuova_. In it he
apostrophizes Emilia Viviani as the incarnation of ideal beauty, the
universal loveliness made visible in mortal flesh:--
Seraph of Heaven! too gentle to be human,
Veiling beneath that radiant form of woman
All that is insupportable in thee
Of light, and love, and immortality!
He tells her that he loves her, and describes the troubles and deceptions
of his earlier manhood, under allegories veiled in deliberate obscurity.
The Pandemic and the Uranian Aphrodite have striven for his soul; for
though in youth he dedicated himself to the service of ideal beauty, and
seemed to find it under many earthly shapes, yet has he ever been deluded.
At last Emily appears, and in her he recognizes the truth of the vision
veiled from him so many years. She and Mary shall henceforth, like sun and
moon, rule the world of love within him. Then he calls on her to fly. They
three will escape and live together, far away from men, in an Ægean
island. The description of this visionary isle, and of the life to be led
there by the fugitives from a dull and undiscerning world, is the most
beautiful that has been written this century in the rhymed heroic metre.
It is an isle under Ionian skies,
Beautiful as a wreck of Paradise;
And, for the harbours are not safe and good,
This land would have remained a solitude
But for some pastoral people native there,
Who from the Elysian, clear, and golden air
Draw the last spirit of the age of gold,
Simple and spirited, innocent and bold.
The blue Ægean girds this chosen home,
With ever-changing sound and light and foam
Kissing the sifted sands and caverns hoar;
And all the winds wandering along the shore
Undulate with the undulating tide.
There are thick woods where sylvan forms abide,
And many a fountain, rivulet, and pond,
As clear as elemental diamond,
Or serene morning air. And far beyond,
The mossy tracks made by the goats and deer,
(Which the rough shepherd treads but once a year,)
Pierce into glades, caverns, and bowers, and halls
Built round with ivy, which the waterfalls
Illumining, with sound that never fails
Accompany the noonday nightingales;
And all the place is peopled with sweet airs.
The light clear element which the isle wears
Is heavy with the scent of lemon-flowers,
Which floats like mist laden with unseen showers,
And falls upon the eyelids like faint sleep;
And from the moss violets and jonquils peep,
And dart their arrowy odour through the brain,
Till you might faint with that delicious pain.
And every motion, odour, beam, and tone,
With that deep music is in unison:
Which is a soul within a soul--they seem
Like echoes of an antenatal dream.
It is an isle ’twixt heaven, air, earth, and sea,
Cradled, and hung in clear tranquillity;
Bright as that wandering Eden, Lucifer,
Washed by the soft blue oceans of young air.
It is a favoured place. Famine or Blight,
Pestilence, War, and Earthquake, never light
Upon its mountain-peaks; blind vultures, they
Sail onward far upon their fatal way.
The wingèd storms, chanting their thunder-psalm
To other lands, leave azure chasms of calm
Over this isle, or weep themselves in dew,
From which its fields and woods ever renew
Their green and golden immortality.
And from the sea there rise, and from the sky
There fall, clear exhalations, soft and bright,
Veil after veil, each hiding some delight,
Which sun or moon or zephyr draws aside,
Till the isle’s beauty, like a naked bride
Glowing at once with love and loveliness,
Blushes and trembles at its own excess:
Yet, like a buried lamp, a soul no less
Burns in the heart of this delicious isle,
An atom of the Eternal, whose own smile
Unfolds itself, and may be felt not seen
O’er the grey rocks, blue waves, and forests green,
Filling their bare and void interstices.
Shelley did not publish _Epipsychidion_ with his own name. He gave it to
the world as the composition of a man who had “died at Florence, as he was
preparing for a voyage to one of the Sporades,” and he requested Ollier
not to circulate it, except among a few intelligent readers. It may almost
be said to have been never published, in such profound silence did it
issue from the press. Very shortly after its appearance he described it to
Leigh Hunt as “a portion of me already dead,” and added this significant
allusion to its subject matter:--“Some of us have in a prior existence
been in love with an Antigone, and that makes us find no full content in
any mortal tie.” In the letter of June 18, 1822, again he says:--“The
_Epipsychidion_ I cannot look at; the person whom it celebrates was a
cloud instead of a Juno; and poor Ixion starts from the Centaur that was
the offspring of his own embrace. If you are curious, however, to hear
what I am and have been, it will tell you something thereof. It is an
idealized history of my life and feelings. I think one is always in love
with something or other; the error, and I confess it is not easy for
spirits cased in flesh and blood to avoid it, consists in seeking in a
mortal image the likeness of what is, perhaps, eternal.” This paragraph
contains the essence of a just criticism. Brilliant as the poem is, we
cannot read it with unwavering belief either in the author’s sincerity at
the time he wrote it, or in the permanence of the emotion it describes.
The exordium has a fatal note of rhetorical exaggeration, not because the
kind of passion is impossible, but because Shelley does not convince us
that in this instance he had really been its subject. His own critique,
following so close upon the publication of _Epipsychidion_, confirms the
impression made by it, and justifies the conclusion that he had utilized
his feeling for Emilia to express a favourite doctrine in impassioned
verse.
To students of Shelley’s inner life _Epipsychidion_ will always have high
value, independently of its beauty of style, as containing his doctrine of
love. It is the full expression of the esoteric principle presented to us
in _Alastor_, the _Hymn to Intellectual Beauty_, and _Prince Athanase_.
But the words just quoted, which may be compared with Mrs. Shelley’s note
to _Prince Athanase_, authorize our pointing out what he himself
recognized as the defect of his theory. Instead of remaining true to the
conception of Beauty expressed in the _Hymn_, Shelley “sought through the
world the One whom he may love.” Thus, while his doctrine in
_Epipsychidion_ seems Platonic, it will not square with the _Symposium_.
Plato treats the love of a beautiful person as a mere initiation into
divine mysteries, the first step in the ladder that ascends to heaven.
When a man has formed a just conception of the universal beauty, he looks
back with a smile upon those who find their soul’s sphere in the love of
some mere mortal object. Tested by this standard, Shelley’s identification
of Intellectual Beauty with so many daughters of earth, and his
worshipping love of Emilia, is a spurious Platonism. Plato would have said
that to seek the Idea of Beauty in Emilia Viviani was a retrogressive
step. All that she could do, would be to quicken the soul’s sense of
beauty, to stir it from its lethargy, and to make it divine the eternal
reality of beauty in the supersensual world of thought. This Shelley had
already acknowledged in the _Hymn_; and this he emphasizes in these
words:--“The error consists in seeking in a mortal image the likeness of
what is, perhaps, eternal.”
The fragments and cancelled passages published in Forman’s edition do not
throw much light upon _Epipsychidion_. The longest, entitled _To his
Genius_ by its first editor, Mr. Garnett, reads like the induction to a
poem conceived and written in a different key, and at a lower level of
inspiration. It has, however, this extraordinary interest that it deals
with a love which is both love and friendship, above sex, spiritual,
unintelligible to the world at large. Thus the fragment enables the
student better to realize the kind of worship so passionately expressed in
_Epipsychidion_.
The news of Keats’s death at Rome on the 27th of December, 1820, and the
erroneous belief that it had been accelerated, if not caused, by a
contemptible review of _Endymion_ in the _Quarterly_, stirred Shelley to
the composition of _Adonais_. He had it printed at Pisa, and sent copies
to Ollier for circulation in London. This poem was a favourite with its
author, who hoped not only that it might find acceptance with the public,
but also that it would confer lustre upon the memory of a poet whom he
sincerely admired. No criticisms upon Shelley’s works are half so good as
his own. It is, therefore, interesting to collect the passages in which he
speaks of an elegy only equalled in our language by _Lycidas_, and in the
point of passionate eloquence even superior to Milton’s youthful lament
for his friend. “The _Adonais_, in spite of its mysticism,” he writes to
Ollier, “is the least imperfect of my compositions.” “I confess I should
be surprised if that poem were born to an immortality of oblivion.” “It is
a highly wrought _piece of art_, and perhaps better, in point of
composition, than anything I have written.” “It is absurd in any review to
criticize _Adonais_, and still more to pretend that the verses are bad.”
“I know what to think of _Adonais_, but what to think of those who
confound it with the many bad poems of the day, I know not.” Again,
alluding to the stanzas hurled against the infamous _Quarterly_ reviewer,
he says:--“I have dipped my pen in consuming fire for his destroyers;
otherwise the style is calm and solemn.”
With these estimates the reader of to-day will cordially agree. Although
_Adonais_ is not so utterly beyond the scope of other poets as
_Prometheus_ or _Epipsychidion_, it presents Shelley’s qualities in a form
of even and sustained beauty, brought within the sphere of the dullest
apprehensions. Shelley, we may notice, dwells upon the _art_ of the poem;
and this, perhaps, is what at first sight will strike the student most. He
chose as a foundation for his work those laments of Bion for Adonis, and
of Moschus for Bion, which are the most pathetic products of Greek idyllic
poetry; and the transmutation of their material into the substance of
highly spiritualized modern thought, reveals the potency of a Prospero’s
wand. It is a metamorphosis whereby the art of excellent but positive
poets has been translated into the sphere of metaphysical imagination.
Urania takes the place of Aphrodite; the thoughts and fancies and desires
of the dead singer are substituted for Bion’s cupids; and instead of
mountain shepherds, the living bards of England are summoned to lament
around the poet’s bier. Yet it is only when Shelley frees himself from the
influence of his models, that he soars aloft on mighty wing. This point
too, is the point of transition from death, sorrow, and the past to
immortality, joy, and the rapture of the things that cannot pass away. The
first and second portions of the poem are, at the same time, thoroughly
concordant, and the passage from the one to the other is natural. Two
quotations from _Adonais_ will suffice to show the power and sweetness of
its verse.
The first is a description of Shelley himself following Byron and
Moore--the “Pilgrim of Eternity,” and Ierne’s “sweetest lyrist of her
saddest wrong”--to the couch where Keats lies dead. There is both pathos
and unconscious irony in his making these two poets the chief mourners,
when we remember what Byron wrote about Keats in _Don Juan_, and what
Moore afterwards recorded of Shelley; and when we think, moreover, how far
both Keats and Shelley have outsoared Moore, and disputed with Byron his
supreme place in the heaven of poetry.
Midst others of less note, came one frail Form,
A phantom among men, companionless
As the last cloud of an expiring storm,
Whose thunder is its knell. He, as I guess,
Had gazed on Nature’s naked loveliness,
Actæon-like, and now he fled astray
With feeble steps o’er the world’s wilderness,
And his own thoughts, along that rugged way,
Pursued like raging hounds their father and their prey.
A pard-like Spirit beautiful and swift--
A Love in desolation masked--a Power
Girt round with weakness; it can scarce uplift
The weight of the superincumbent hour;
It is a dying lamp, a falling shower,
A breaking billow;--even whilst we speak
Is it not broken? On the withering flower
The killing sun smiles brightly: on a cheek
The life can burn in blood, even while the heart may break.
His head was bound with pansies over-blown,
And faded violets, white and pied and blue;
And a light spear topped with a cypress cone,
Round whose rude shaft dark ivy-tresses grew
Yet dripping with the forest’s noon-day dew,
Vibrated, as the ever-beating heart
Shook the weak hand that grasped it. Of that crew
He came the last, neglected and apart;
A herd-abandoned deer, struck by the hunter’s dart.
The second passage is the peroration of the poem. No where has Shelley
expressed his philosophy of man’s relation to the universe with more
sublimity and with a more imperial command of language than in these
stanzas. If it were possible to identify that philosophy with any
recognized system of thought, it might be called pantheism. But it is
difficult to affix a name, stereotyped by the usage of the schools, to the
aerial spiritualism of its ardent and impassioned poet’s creed.
The movement of the long melodious sorrow-song has just been interrupted
by three stanzas, in which Shelley lashes the reviewer of Keats. He now
bursts forth afresh into the music of consolation:--
Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep!
He hath awakened from the dream of life.
’Tis we who, lost in stormy visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife,
And in mad trance strike with our spirit’s knife
Invulnerable nothings. _We_ decay
Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief
Convulse us and consume us day by day,
And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.
He has outsoared the shadow of our night;
Envy and calumny, and hate and pain,
And that unrest which men miscall delight,
Can touch him not and torture not again;
From the contagion of the world’s slow stain
He is secure, and now can never mourn
A heart grown cold, a head grown grey in vain;
Nor, when the spirit’s self has ceased to burn,
With sparkless ashes load an unlamented urn.
He lives, he wakes--’tis Death is dead, not he;
Mourn not for Adonais.--Thou young Dawn,
Turn all thy dew to splendour, for from thee
The spirit thou lamentest is not gone;
Ye caverns and ye forests, cease to moan!
Cease, ye faint flowers and fountains, and thou Air
Which like a mourning veil thy scarf hadst thrown
O’er the abandoned Earth, now leave it bare
Even to the joyous stars which smile on its despair!
He is made one with Nature: there is heard
His voice in all her music, from the moan
Of thunder, to the song of night’s sweet bird;
He is a presence to be felt and known
In darkness and in light, from herb and stone,
Spreading itself where’er that Power may move
Which has withdrawn his being to its own;
Which wields the world with never wearied love,
Sustains it from beneath, and kindles it above.
He is a portion of the loveliness
Which once he made more lovely: he doth bear
His part, while the One Spirit’s plastic stress
Sweeps through the dull dense world, compelling there
All new successions to the forms they wear;
Torturing th’ unwilling dross that checks its flight
To its own likeness, as each mass may bear;
And bursting in its beauty and its might
From trees and beasts and men into the Heaven’s light.
But the absorption of the human soul into primeval nature-forces, the
blending of the principle of thought with the universal spirit of beauty,
is not enough to satisfy man’s yearning after immortality. Therefore in
the next three stanzas the indestructibility of the personal self is
presented to us, as the soul of Adonais passes into the company of the
illustrious dead who, like him, were untimely slain:--
The splendours of the firmament of time
May be eclipsed, but are extinguished not:
Like stars to their appointed height they climb,
And death is a low mist which cannot blot
The brightness it may veil. When lofty thought
Lifts a young heart above its mortal lair,
And love and life contend in it, for what
Shall be its earthly doom, the dead live there,
And move like winds of light on dark and stormy air.
The inheritors of unfulfilled renown
Rose from their thrones, built beyond mortal thought,
Far in the Unapparent. Chatterton
Rose pale, his solemn agony had not
Yet faded from him; Sidney, as he fought
And as he fell and as he lived and loved,
Sublimely mild, a Spirit without spot,
Arose; and Lucan, by his death approved:--
Oblivion as they rose, shrank like a thing reproved.
And many more, whose names on Earth are dark,
But whose transmitted effluence cannot die
So long as fire outlives the parent spark,
Rose, robed in dazzling immortality.
“Thou art become as one of us,” they cry;
“It was for thee yon kingless sphere has long
Swung blind in unascended majesty,
Silent alone amid an Heaven of song.
Assume thy wingèd throne, thou Vesper of our throng!”
From the more universal and philosophical aspects of his theme, the poet
once more turns to the special subject that had stirred him. Adonais lies
dead; and those who mourn him, must seek his grave. He has escaped: to
follow him is to die; and where should we learn to dote on death
unterrified, if not in Rome? In this way the description of Keats’s
resting-place beneath the pyramid of Cestius, which was also destined to
be Shelley’s own, is introduced:--
Who mourns for Adonais? oh come forth,
Fond wretch! and show thyself and him aright.
Clasp with thy panting soul the pendulous Earth;
As from a centre, dart thy spirit’s light
Beyond all worlds, until its spacious might
Satiate the void circumference: then shrink
Even to a point within our day and night;
And keep thy heart light, let it make thee sink
When hope has kindled hope, and lured thee to the brink.
Or go to Rome, which is the sepulchre,
Oh, not of him, but of our joy: ’tis nought
That ages, empires, and religions there
Lie buried in the ravage they have wrought;
For such as he can lend,--they borrow not
Glory from those who made the world their prey;
And he is gathered to the kings of thought
Who waged contention with their time’s decay,
And of the past are all that cannot pass away.
Go thou to Rome,--at once the Paradise,
The grave, the city, and the wilderness;
And where its wrecks like shattered mountains rise,
And flowering weeds and fragrant copses dress
The bones of Desolation’s nakedness,
Pass, till the Spirit of the spot shall lead
Thy footsteps to a slope of green access,
Where, like an infant’s smile, over the dead
A light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread;
And grey walls moulder round, on which dull Time
Feeds, like slow fire upon a hoary brand;
And one keen pyramid with wedge sublime,
Pavilioning the dust of him who planned
This refuge for his memory, doth stand
Like flame transformed to marble; and beneath,
A field is spread, on which a newer band
Have pitched in Heaven’s smile their camp of death,
Welcoming him we lose with scarce extinguished breath.
Here pause: these graves are all too young as yet
To have outgrown the sorrow which consigned
Its charge to each; and if the seal is set,
Here, on one fountain of a mourning mind,
Break it not thou! too surely shalt thou find
Thine own well full, if thou returnest home,
Of tears and gall. From the world’s bitter wind
Seek shelter in the shadow of the tomb.
What Adonais is, why fear we to become?
Yet again the thought of Death as the deliverer, the revealer, and the
mystagogue, through whom the soul of man is reunited to the spirit of the
universe, returns; and on this solemn note the poem closes. The symphony
of exultation which had greeted the passage of Adonais into the eternal
world, is here subdued to a graver key, as befits the mood of one whom
mystery and mourning still oppress on earth. Yet even in the somewhat less
than jubilant conclusion we feel that highest of all Shelley’s
qualities--the liberation of incalculable energies, the emancipation and
expansion of a force within the soul, victorious over circumstance,
exhilarated and elevated by contact with such hopes as make a feebler
spirit tremble:
The One remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven’s light for ever shines, Earth’s shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments.--Die,
If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek!
Follow where all is fled!--Rome’s azure sky,
Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words, are weak.
The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak.
Why linger, why turn back, why shrink, my Heart?
Thy hopes are gone before: from all things here
They have departed; thou shouldst now depart!
A light is past from the revolving year,
And man and woman; and what still is dear
Attracts to crush, repels to make thee wither.
The soft sky smiles, the low wind whispers near:
’Tis Adonais calls! oh, hasten thither!
No more let Life divide what Death can join together.
That light whose smile kindles the Universe,
That beauty in which all things work and move,
That benediction which the eclipsing curse
Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love
Which through the web of being blindly wove
By man and beast and earth and air and sea,
Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of
The fire for which all thirst, now beams on me,
Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality.
The breath whose might I have invoked in song
Descends on me; my spirit’s bark is driven
Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng
Whose sails were never to the tempest given.
The massy earth and spherèd skies are riven!
I am borne darkly, fearfully afar;
Whilst burning through the inmost veil of Heaven,
The soul of Adonais, like a star,
Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.
It will be seen that whatever Shelley may from time to time have said
about the immortality of the soul, he was no materialist, and no believer
in the extinction of the spiritual element by death. Yet he was too wise
to dogmatize upon a problem which by its very nature admits of no solution
in this world. “I hope,” he said, “but my hopes are not unmixed with fear
for what will befall this inestimable spirit when we appear to die.” On
another occasion he told Trelawny: “I am content to see no farther into
futurity than Plato and Bacon. My mind is tranquil; I have no fears and
some hopes. In our present gross material state our faculties are clouded;
when Death removes our clay coverings, the mystery will be solved.” How
constantly the thought of death as the revealer was present to his mind,
may be gathered from an incident related by Trelawny. They were bathing in
the Arno, when Shelley, who could not swim, plunged into deep water, and
“lay stretched out at the bottom like a conger eel, not making the least
effort or struggle to save himself.” Trelawny fished him out, and when he
had taken breath, he said: “I always find the bottom of the well, and
they say Truth lies there. In another minute I should have found it, and
you would have found an empty shell. Death is the veil which those who
live call life; they sleep, and it is lifted.” Yet being pressed by his
friend, he refused to acknowledge a formal and precise belief in the
imperishability of the human soul. “We know nothing; we have no evidence;
we cannot express our inmost thoughts. They are incomprehensible even to
ourselves.” The clear insight into the conditions of the question conveyed
by the last sentence is very characteristic of Shelley. It makes us regret
the non-completion of his essay on a _Future Life_, which would certainly
have stated the problem with rare lucidity and candour, and would have
illuminated the abyss of doubt with a sense of spiritual realities not
often found in combination with wise suspension of judgment. What he clung
to amid all perplexities, was the absolute and indestructible existence of
the universal as perceived by us in love, beauty, and delight. Though the
destiny of the personal self be obscure, these things cannot fail. The
conclusion of the _Sensitive Plant_ might be cited as conveying the
quintessence of his hope upon this most intangible of riddles.
Whether the Sensitive Plant, or that
Which within its boughs like a spirit sat,
Ere its outward form had known decay,
Now felt this change, I cannot say.
I dare not guess; but in this life
Of error, ignorance, and strife,
Where nothing is, but all things seem,
And we the shadows of the dream:
It is a modest creed, and yet
Pleasant, if one considers it,
To own that death itself must be,
Like all the rest, a mockery.
That garden sweet, that lady fair,
And all sweet shapes and odours there,
In truth have never passed away:
’Tis we, ’tis ours, are changed; not they.
For love, and beauty, and delight,
There is no death nor change; their might
Exceeds our organs, which endure
No light, being themselves obscure.
But it is now time to return from this digression to the poem which
suggested it, and which, more than any other, serves to illustrate its
author’s mood of feeling about the life beyond the grave. The last lines
of _Adonais_ might be read as a prophecy of his own death by drowning. The
frequent recurrence of this thought in his poetry is, to say the least,
singular. In _Alastor_ we read:--
A restless impulse urged him to embark
And meet lone Death on the drear ocean’s waste;
For well he knew that mighty Shadow loves
The slimy caverns of the populous deep.
The _Ode to Liberty_ closes on the same note:--
As a far taper fades with fading night;
As a brief insect dies with dying day,
My song, its pinions disarrayed of might,
Drooped. O’er it closed the echoes far away
Of the great voice which did its flight sustain,
As waves which lately paved his watery way
Hiss round a drowner’s head in their tempestuous play.
The _Stanzas written in Dejection, near Naples_, echo the thought with a
slight variation:--
Yet now despair itself is mild,
Even as the winds and waters are;
I could lie down like a tired child,
And weep away the life of care
Which I have borne, and yet must bear,--
Till death like sleep might steal on me,
And I might feel in the warm air
My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea
Breathe o’er my dying brain its last monotony.
Trelawny tells a story of his friend’s life at Lerici, which further
illustrates his preoccupation with the thought of death at sea. He took
Mrs. Williams and her children out upon the bay in his little boat one
afternoon, and starting suddenly from a deep reverie, into which he had
fallen, exclaimed with a joyful and resolute voice, “Now let us together
solve the great mystery!” Too much value must not be attached to what
might have been a mere caprice of utterance. Yet the proposal not
unreasonably frightened Mrs. Williams, for Shelley’s friends were
accustomed to expect the realization of his wildest fancies. It may
incidentally be mentioned that before the water finally claimed its
victim, he had often been in peril of life upon his fatal element--during
the first voyage to Ireland, while crossing the Channel with Mary in an
open boat, again at Meillerie with Byron, and once at least with Williams.
A third composition of the year 1821 was inspired by the visit of Prince
Mavrocordato to Pisa. He called on Shelley in April, showed him a copy of
Prince Ipsilanti’s proclamation, and announced that Greece was determined
to strike a blow for freedom. The news aroused all Shelley’s enthusiasm,
and he began the lyrical drama of _Hellas_, which he has described as “a
sort of imitation of the _Persae_ of _Æschylus_.” We find him at work upon
it in October; and it must have been finished by the end of that month,
since the dedication bears the date of November 1st, 1821. Shelley did not
set great store by it. “It was written,” he says, “without much care, and
in one of those few moments of enthusiasm which now seldom visit me, and
which make me pay dear for their visits.” The preface might, if space
permitted, be cited as a specimen of his sound and weighty judgment upon
one of the greatest political questions of this century. What he says
about the debt of the modern world to ancient Hellas, is no less pregnant
than his severe strictures upon the part played by Russia in dealing with
Eastern questions. For the rest, the poem is distinguished by passages of
great lyrical beauty, rising at times to the sublimest raptures, and
closing on the half-pathetic cadence of that well-known Chorus, “The
world’s great age begins anew.” Of dramatic interest it has but little;
nor is the play, as finished, equal to the promise held forth by the
superb fragment of its so-called Prologue.[30] This truly magnificent
torso must, I think, have been the commencement of the drama as conceived
upon a different and more colossal plan, which Shelley rejected for some
unknown reason. It shows the influence not only of the Book of Job, but
also of the Prologue in Heaven to Faust, upon his mind.
The lyric movement of the Chorus from _Hellas_, which I propose to quote,
marks the highest point of Shelley’s rhythmical invention. As for the
matter expressed in it, we must not forget that these stanzas are written
for a Chorus of Greek captive women, whose creed does not prevent their
feeling a regret for the “mightier forms of an older, austerer worship.”
Shelley’s note reminds the reader, with characteristic caution and
frankness, that “the popular notions of Christianity are represented in
this Chorus as true in their relation to the worship they superseded, and
that which in all probability they will supersede, without considering
their merits in a relation more universal.”
Worlds on worlds are rolling ever
From creation to decay,
Like the bubbles on a river
Sparkling, bursting, borne away.
But they are still immortal
Who, through birth’s orient portal,
And death’s dark chasm hurrying to and fro,
Clothe their unceasing flight
In the brief dust and light
Gathered around their chariots as they go;
New shapes they still may weave,
New gods, new laws receive;
Bright or dim are they, as the robes they last
On Death’s bare ribs had cast.
A power from the unknown God,
A Promethean conqueror came;
Like a triumphal path he trod
The thorns of death and shame.
A mortal shape to him
Was like the vapour dim
Which the orient planet animates with light.
Hell, Sin, and Slavery came,
Like bloodhounds mild and tame,
Nor preyed until their Lord had taken flight.
The moon of Mahomet
Arose, and it shall set:
While blazoned as on heaven’s immortal noon
The cross leads generations on.
Swift as the radiant shapes of sleep
From one whose dreams are paradise,
Fly, when the fond wretch wakes to weep,
And day peers forth with her blank eyes;
So fleet, so faint, so fair,
The Powers of earth and air
Fled from the folding star of Bethlehem:
Apollo, Pan, and Love,
And even Olympian Jove
Grew weak, for killing Truth had glared on them.
Our hills, and seas, and streams,
Dispeopled of their dreams,
Their waters turned to blood, their dew to tears,
Wailed for the golden years.
In the autumn of this year Shelley paid Lord Byron a visit at Ravenna,
where he made acquaintance with the Countess Guiccioli. It was then
settled that Byron, who had formed the project of starting a journal to be
called _The Liberal_ in concert with Leigh Hunt, should himself settle in
Pisa. Leigh Hunt was to join his brother poets in the same place. The
prospect gave Shelley great pleasure, for he was sincerely attached to
Hunt; and though he would not promise contributions to the journal, partly
lest his name should bring discredit on it, and partly because he did not
choose to appear before the world as a hanger-on of Byron’s, he thoroughly
approved of a plan which would be profitable to his friend by bringing him
into close relation with the most famous poet of the age.[31] That he was
not without doubts as to Byron’s working easily in harness with Leigh
Hunt, may be seen in his correspondence; and how fully these doubts were
destined to be confirmed, is only too well known.
At Ravenna he was tormented by the report of some more than usually
infamous calumny, concerning the position of Miss Clairmont in his
household. That it made profound impression on his mind, appears from a
remarkable letter addressed to his wife on the 16th and 17th of August
from Ravenna. In it he repeats his growing weariness, and his wish to
escape from society to solitude; the weariness of a nature wounded and
disappointed by commerce with the world, but neither soured nor driven to
fury by cruel wrongs. It is noticeable at the same time that he clings to
his present place of residence:--“our roots never struck so deeply as at
Pisa, and the transplanted tree flourishes not.” At Pisa he had found real
rest and refreshment in the society of his two friends, the Williamses.
Some of his saddest and most touching lyrics of this year are addressed to
Jane--for so Mrs. Williams was called; and attentive students may perceive
that the thought of Emilia was already blending by subtle transitions with
the new thought of Jane. One poem, almost terrible in its intensity of
melancholy, is hardly explicable on the supposition that Shelley was quite
happy in his home.[32] These words must be taken as implying no reflection
either upon Mary’s love for him, or upon his own power to bear the
slighter troubles of domestic life. He was not a spoiled child of fortune,
a weak egotist, or a querulous complainer. But he was always seeking and
never finding the satisfaction of some deeper craving. In his own words,
he had loved Antigone before he visited this earth: and no one woman could
probably have made him happy, because he was for ever demanding more from
love than it can give in the mixed circumstances of mortal life. Moreover,
it must be remembered that his power of self-expression has bestowed
permanent form on feelings which may have been but transitory; nor can we
avoid the conclusion that, sincere as Shelley was, he, like all poets,
made use of the emotion of the moment for purposes of art, converting an
ephemeral mood into something typical and universal. This was almost
certainly the case with _Epipsychidion_.
So much at any rate had to be said upon this subject; for careful readers
of Shelley’s minor poems are forced to the conviction that during the last
year of his life he often found relief from a wretchedness, which, however
real, can hardly be defined, in the sympathy of this true-hearted woman.
The affection he felt for Jane was beyond question pure and honourable.
All the verses he addressed to her, passed through her husband’s hands
without the slightest interruption to their intercourse; and Mrs. Shelley,
who was not unpardonably jealous of her Ariel, continued to be Mrs.
Williams’s warm friend. A passage from Shelley’s letter of June 18, 1822,
expresses the plain prose of his relation to the Williamses:--“They are
people who are very pleasing to me. But words are not the instruments of
our intercourse. I like Jane more and more, and I find Williams the most
amiable of companions. She has a taste for music, and an eloquence of form
and motions that compensate in some degree for the lack of literary
refinement.”
Two lyrics of this period may here be introduced, partly for the sake of
their intrinsic beauty, and partly because they illustrate the fecundity
of Shelley’s genius during the months of tranquil industry which he passed
at Pisa. The first is an Invocation to Night:--
Swiftly walk over the western wave,
Spirit of Night!
Out of the misty eastern cave,
Where all the long and lone daylight,
Thou wovest dreams of joy and fear,
Which make thee terrible and dear,--
Swift be thy flight!
Wrap thy form in a mantle grey,
Star-inwrought!
Blind with thine hair the eyes of day,
Kiss her until she be wearied out.
Then wander o’er city, and sea, and land,
Touching all with thine opiate wand--
Come, long-sought!
When I arose and saw the dawn,
I sighed for thee;
When light rode high, and the dew was gone,
And noon lay heavy on flower and tree,
And the weary Day turned to his rest,
Lingering like an unloved guest,
I sighed for thee.
Thy brother Death came, and cried,
“Wouldst thou me?”
Thy sweet child Sleep, the filmy-eyed,
Murmured like a noon-tide bee,
“Shall I nestle near thy side?
Wouldst thou me?”--And I replied,
“No, not thee!”
Death will come when thou art dead,
Soon, too soon--
Sleep will come when thou art fled;
Of neither would I ask the boon
I ask of thee, beloved Night--
Swift be thine approaching flight,
Come soon, soon!
The second is an Epithalamium composed for a drama which his friend
Williams was writing. Students of the poetic art will find it not
uninteresting to compare the three versions of this Bridal Song, given by
Mr. Forman.[33] They prove that Shelley was no careless writer.
The golden gates of sleep unbar
Where strength and beauty, met together,
Kindle their image like a star
In a sea of glassy weather!
Night, with all thy stars look down--
Darkness, weep thy holiest dew!
Never smiled the inconstant moon
On a pair so true.
Let eyes not see their own delight;
Haste, swift Hour, and thy flight
Oft renew.
Fairies, sprites, and angels, keep her!
Holy stars, permit no wrong!
And return to wake the sleeper,
Dawn, ere it be long.
O joy! O fear! what will be done
In the absence of the sun!
Come along!
Lyrics like these, delicate in thought and exquisitely finished in form,
were produced with a truly wonderful profusion in this season of his
happiest fertility. A glance at the last section of Mr. Palgrave’s _Golden
Treasury_ shows how large a place they occupy among the permanent jewels
of our literature.
The month of January added a new and most important member to the little
Pisan circle. This was Captain Edward John Trelawny, to whom more than to
any one else but Hogg and Mrs. Shelley, the students of the poet’s life
are indebted for details at once accurate and characteristic. Trelawny had
lived a free life in all quarters of the globe, far away from literary
cliques and the society of cities, in contact with the sternest realities
of existence, which had developed his self-reliance and his physical
qualities to the utmost. The impression, therefore, made on him by Shelley
has to be gravely estimated by all who still incline to treat the poet as
a pathological specimen of humanity. This true child of nature recognized
in his new friend far more than in Byron the stuff of a real man. “To
form a just idea of his poetry, you should have witnessed his daily life;
his words and actions best illustrated his writings.” “The cynic Byron
acknowledged him to be the best and ablest man he had ever known. The
truth was, Shelley loved everything better than himself.” “I have seen
Shelley and Byron in society, and the contrast was as marked as their
characters. The former, not thinking of himself, was as much at ease as in
his own home, omitting no occasion of obliging those whom he came in
contact with, readily conversing with all or any who addressed him,
irrespective of age or rank, dress or address.” “All who heard him felt
the charm of his simple, earnest manner: while Byron knew him to be exempt
from the egotism, pedantry, coxcombry, and more than all the rivalry of
authorship.” “Shelley’s mental activity was infectious; he kept your brain
in constant action.” “He was always in earnest.” “He never laid aside his
book and magic mantle; he waved his wand, and Byron, after a faint show of
defiance, stood mute.... Shelley’s earnestness and just criticism held him
captive.” These sentences, and many others, prove that Trelawny, himself
somewhat of a cynic, cruelly exposing false pretensions, and detesting
affectation in any form, paid unreserved homage to the heroic qualities
this “dreamy bard,”--“uncommonly awkward,” as he also called him--bad
rider and poor seaman as he was--“over-sensitive,” and “eternally brooding
on his own thoughts,” who “had seen no more of the waking-day than a girl
at a boarding-school.” True to himself, gentle, tender, with the courage
of a lion, “frank and outspoken, like a well-conditioned boy, well-bred
and considerate for others, because he was totally devoid of selfishness
and vanity,” Shelley seemed to this unprejudiced companion of his last
few months that very rare product for which Diogenes searched in vain--a
man.
Their first meeting must be told in Trelawny’s own words--words no less
certain of immortality than the fame of him they celebrate. “The
Williamses received me in their earnest, cordial manner; we had a great
deal to communicate to each other, and were in loud and animated
conversation, when I was rather put out by observing in the passage near
the open door, opposite to where I sat, a pair of glittering eyes steadily
fixed on mine; it was too dark to make out whom they belonged to. With the
acuteness of a woman, Mrs. Williams’s eyes followed the direction of mine,
and going to the doorway she laughingly said, ‘Come in, Shelley, it’s only
our friend Tre just arrived.’ Swiftly gliding in, blushing like a girl, a
tall, thin stripling held out both his hands; and although I could hardly
believe, as I looked at his flushed, feminine, and artless face, that it
could be the poet, I returned his warm pressure. After the ordinary
greetings and courtesies he sat down and listened. I was silent from
astonishment: was it possible this mild-looking, beardless boy, could be
the veritable monster at war with all the world?--excommunicated by the
Fathers of the Church, deprived of his civil rights by the fiat of a grim
Lord Chancellor, discarded by every member of his family, and denounced by
the rival sages of our literature as the founder of a Satanic school? I
could not believe it; it must be a hoax. He was habited like a boy, in a
black jacket and trousers, which he seemed to have outgrown, or his
tailor, as is the custom, had most shamefully stinted him in his
‘sizings.’ Mrs. Williams saw my embarrassment, and to relieve me asked
Shelley what book he had in his hand? His face brightened, and he answered
briskly,--
“‘Calderon’s _Magico Prodigioso_--I am translating some passages in it.’
“‘Oh, read it to us.’
“Shoved off from the shore of commonplace incidents that could not
interest him, and fairly launched on a theme that did, he instantly became
oblivious of everything but the book in his hand. The masterly manner in
which he analysed the genius of the author, his lucid interpretation of
the story, and the ease with which he translated into our language the
most subtle and imaginative passages of the Spanish poet, were marvellous,
as was his command of the two languages. After this touch of his quality I
no longer doubted his identity; a dead silence ensued; looking up, I
asked,--
“‘Where is he?’
“Mrs. Williams said, ‘Who? Shelley? Oh, he comes and goes like a spirit,
no one knows when or where.’”
Two little incidents which happened in the winter of 1821-2 deserve to be
recorded. News reached the Pisan circle early in December that a man who
had insulted the Host at Lucca, was sentenced to be burned. Shelley
proposed that the English--himself, Byron, Medwin, and their friend Mr.
Taafe--should immediately arm and ride off to rescue him. The scheme took
Byron’s fancy; but they agreed to try less Quixotic measures before they
had recourse to force, and their excitement was calmed by hearing that the
man’s sentence had been commuted to the galleys. The other affair brought
them less agreeably into contact with the Tuscan police. The party were
riding home one afternoon in March, when a mounted dragoon came rushing
by, breaking their ranks and nearly unhorsing Mr. Taafe. Byron and Shelley
rode after him to remonstrate; but the man struck Shelley from his saddle
with a sabre blow. The English then pursued him into Pisa, making such a
clatter that one of Byron’s servants issued with a pitchfork from the Casa
Lanfranchi, and wounded the fellow somewhat seriously, under the
impression that it was necessary to defend his master. Shelley called the
whole matter “a trifling piece of business;” but it was strictly
investigated by the authorities; and though the dragoon was found to have
been in the wrong, Byron had to retire for a season to Leghorn. Another
consequence was the exile of Count Gamba and his father from Tuscany,
which led to Byron’s final departure from Pisa.
The even current of Shelley’s life was not often broken by such
adventures. Trelawny gives the following account of how he passed his
days: he “was up at six or seven, reading Plato, Sophocles, or Spinoza,
with the accompaniment of a hunch of dry bread; then he joined Williams in
a sail on the Arno, in a flat-bottomed skiff, book in hand, and from
thence he went to the pine-forest, or some out-of-the-way place. When the
birds went to roost he returned home, and talked and read until midnight.”
The great wood of stone pines on the Pisan Maremma was his favourite
study. Trelawny tells us how he found him there alone one day, and in what
state was the MS. of that prettiest lyric, _Ariel, to Miranda take_. “It
was a frightful scrawl; words smeared out with his finger, and one upon
the other, over and over in tiers, and all run together in most ‘admired
disorder;’ it might have been taken for a sketch of a marsh overgrown with
bulrushes, and the blots for wild ducks; such a dashed-off daub as
self-conceited artists mistake for a manifestation of genius. On my
observing this to him, he answered, ‘When my brain gets heated with
thought, it soon boils, and throws off images and words faster than I can
skim them off. In the morning, when cooled down, out of the rude sketch
as you justly call it, I shall attempt a drawing.’”
A daily visit to Byron diversified existence. Byron talked more sensibly
with Shelley than with his commonplace acquaintances; and when he began to
gossip, Shelley retired into his own thoughts. Then they would go
pistol-shooting, Byron’s trembling hand contrasting with his friend’s
firmness. They had invented a “little language” for this sport: firing was
called _tiring_; hitting, _colping_; missing, _mancating_, &c. It was in
fact a kind of pigeon Italian. Shelley acquired two nick-names in the
circle of his Pisan friends, both highly descriptive. He was Ariel and the
Snake. The latter suited him because of his noiseless gliding movement,
bright eyes and ethereal diet. It was first given to him by Byron during a
reading of _Faust_. When he came to the line of Mephistophiles, “Wie meine
Muhme, die berühmte Schlange” and translated it, “My aunt, the renowned
Snake,” Byron cried, “Then you are her nephew.” Shelley by no means
resented the epithet. Indeed he alludes to it in his letters and in a poem
already referred to above.
Soon after Trelawny’s arrival the party turned their thoughts to nautical
affairs. Shelley had already done a good deal of boating with Williams on
the Arno and the Serchio, and had on one occasion nearly lost his life by
the capsizing of their tiny craft. They now determined to build a larger
yacht for excursions on the sea; while Byron, liking the project of a
summer residence upon the Bay of Spezia, made up his mind to have one too.
Shelley’s was to be an open boat carrying sail, Byron’s, a large decked
schooner. The construction of both was entrusted to a Genoese builder,
under the direction of Trelawny’s friend, Captain Roberts. Such was the
birth of the ill-fated _Don Juan_, which cost the lives of Shelley and
Williams, and of the _Bolivar_, which carried Byron off to Genoa before he
finally set sail for Greece. Captain Roberts was allowed to have his own
way about the latter; but Shelley and Williams had set their hearts upon a
model for their little yacht, which did not suit the Captain’s notions of
sea-worthiness. Williams overruled his objections, and the _Don Juan_ was
built according to his cherished fancy. “When it was finished,” says
Trelawny, “it took 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. She was fast, strongly built, and Torbay rigged.” She was christened
by Lord Byron, not wholly with Shelley’s approval; and one young English
sailor, Charles Vivian, in addition to Williams and Shelley, formed her
crew. “It was great fun,” says Trelawny, “to witness Williams teaching the
poet how to steer, and other points of seamanship. As usual, Shelley had a
book in hand, saying he could read and steer at the same time, as one was
mental, the other mechanical.” “The boy was quick and handy, and used to
boats. Williams was not as deficient as I anticipated, but over-anxious,
and wanted practice, which alone makes a man prompt in emergency. Shelley
was intent on catching images from the ever-changing sea and sky, he
heeded not the boat.” It ought finally to be added that Shelley and
Williams re-christened the yacht, more to their liking, the _Ariel_.