THE DISCIPLES
The sailor who had come to Pisa to admire two great men found that it
was he, on the contrary, who was admired by them. It is true that when
Trelawny was absent, Byron said of him: “If we could get him to wash his
hands and not to tell lies, we might make a gentleman of him,” but when
he was present Byron treated him with the greatest respect. Like all
artists, Byron and Shelley wrote in order to console themselves for not
living, and a man of action appeared to these two men of dreams as a
strange and enviable phenomenon.
Shelley consulted Trelawny as to nautical terms, and drew with him, on
the sandy shores of the Arno, keels, sails, and sea-charts. “I’ve missed
my vocation,” said he. “I ought to have been a sailor.”
“A man who neither smokes nor swears can never be a sailor,” Trelawny
told him.
Byron, an imaginary corsair, would have liked to learn from a real
corsair the ways and customs of the brotherhood, and did his utmost in
Trelawny’s company to talk in cynical and bravado fashion. Trelawny,
quick to perceive his influence over Byron, tried to make use of it in
the service of Shelley.
“You know,” said he as they rode together one day, “that you might help
Shelley a good deal at small cost by a friendly word or two in your next
work, such as you have given to other writers of much less merit.”
“All trades have their secrets,” Byron answered. “If we crack up a
popular author, he repays us in the same coin, capital and interest. But
Shelley! A bad investment. . . . Who reads the Snake? . . . Besides, if
he cast off the slough of his mystifying metaphysics, he would want no
puffing.”
“But why do your London friends treat him so cavalierly? They rarely
notice him when they meet him at your place. Yet he is as well-born and
bred as any of them. What are they afraid of?”
Byron smiled and whispered in Trelawny’s ear:
“Shelley is not a Christian.”
“Are they?”
“Ask them.”
“If I met the Devil at your table,” said Trelawny, “I should treat him
as a friend of yours.”
The Pilgrim looked at him keenly to see if there were a double meaning,
then moving his horse up nearer said in a low voice of admirably acted
fear and respect:
“The Devil is a Royal Personage.”
* * *
With the Williamses, Trelawny was more outspoken. The three of them
formed the chorus to the tragedy; knowing they were not made for the
chief parts, they took pleasure in commenting the acting of those who
were.
“One might imagine,” said Trelawny, “that Byron is jealous of Shelley.
Yet Murray is obliged to call on the police to protect his premises
every time he publishes a new canto of _Childe Harold_, while poor
Shelley hasn’t got ten readers. Byron has high birth, riches, beauty,
glory, love . . .”
“Yes,” Williams interrupted, “but Byron is the slave to his passions and
to any woman who is at all decided. Shelley in his nutshell of a boat
floats in mid-stream on the Arno, and refuses to let it carry him away.
His ideas are well-grounded, he holds a doctrine. Byron is incapable of
holding one for two consecutive hours. He is well aware of this, and
can’t forgive himself for it. You see it in the triumphant tone in which
he speaks of Shelley’s misfortunes.”
“Byron,” said Jane, “is a spoiled child, but neither he nor Shelley
understands men. Shelley loves them too much, and Byron not enough.”
“What’s so terrible about Shelley,” said Trelawny, “is that he has not
the smallest instinct of self-preservation. . . . The other day when I
was diving in the Arno, he said he so much regretted not being able to
swim. ‘Try,’ said I. ‘Put yourself on your back, and you’ll float to
begin with.’
“He stripped and jumped in without the smallest hesitation. He sank to
the bottom and lay there like a conger-eel, not making the least
movement to save himself. He would have drowned if I had not instantly
fished him out.”
Jane sighed, knowing how much the thought of suicide haunted Shelley’s
mind. He often repeated that nearly every one he had loved had died in
this way.
“Yet he doesn’t seem unhappy?”
“No, because he lives in his dreams. But in real life don’t you think he
suffers from the impossibility of spreading his ideas, from his books
that don’t sell, from his unhappy home life? Death must often appear to
him like the awakening from a nightmare.”
“He believes in a future life,” said Trelawny. “Those who call him an
Atheist don’t know him. He has often told me that he thinks the French
philosophy of the eighteenth century false and pernicious. Plato and
Dante have overcome Diderot for him. All the same he doesn’t regret his
attitude towards established religion. . . . ‘Why,’ I asked him, ‘do you
call yourself an Atheist? It annihilates your chances in this world.’
‘It is a word of abuse,’ said he, ‘to stop discussion, a painted Devil
to frighten fools. I used it to express my abhorrence of superstition. I
took it up as a knight takes up a gauntlet, in defiance of injustice.
The delusions of Christianity are fatal to genius and originality; they
limit thought.’”
Thus spoke the chorus in unanimity, and did not perhaps perceive that
their adoration of Shelley fed and grew on his misfortunes. We are more
inclined to love that which we can pity than that which we must admire.
Man finds in the spectacle of unmerited failure flattering arguments
which explain his own ill-luck. The blend of admiration and compassion
is one of the surest recipes for love. It would have needed much
humility of mind for Williams and Trelawny to have the same affection
for the brilliant Byron that they had for poor dear Shelley.
While the disciples discoursed in this fashion, the Master worked in the
pine-woods outside Pisa. There the sea-winds had thrown down one of the
pines, which now hung suspended over a deep pool of glimmering water.
Under the lee of the trunk, and nearly hidden, sat the Poet like some
wild thing, the way to his retreat pointed out by quantities of
scattered papers, covered with the scrawls of unfinished poems.
When in his day-dreaming he forgot everything, even the dinner hour,
Mary and Trelawny would go off to find him. Tre had constituted himself
_cavalier’ sirvente_ to the forsaken lady, and paid her court in corsair
fashion which she, in her honest woman-way, found very amusing.
The loose sand and hot sun soon knocked her up. She sat down under the
cool canopy of the pines and Trelawny continued the Poet-chase alone. He
found him at last, but so absorbed by some inner vision, that to avoid
startling him, Trelawny drew his attention first by the crackling of the
pine-needles. He picked up an Æschylus, a Shakespeare, then a scribbled
paper: “To Jane with a guitar”: but he could only make out the two first
lines:
“Ariel to Miranda. Take
This slave of music. . . .”
He hailed him, and Shelley, turning his head, answered faintly, “Hello!
Come in.”
“Is this your study?” Trelawny asked.
“Yes,” he answered, “and these trees are my books—they tell no lies. In
composing, one’s faculties must not be divided: in a house there is no
solitude: a door shutting, a footstep heard, a bell ringing, a voice,
causes an echo in your brain, and dissolves your visions.
“Here you have the river rushing by you, the birds chattering . . .
“The river flows by like Time, and all the sounds of Nature
harmonize. . . . It is only the human animal that is discordant and
disturbs me. Oh, how difficult it is to know why we are here, a
perpetual torment to ourselves and to every living thing!”
Trelawny interrupted to tell him that his wife was waiting for him at
the edge of the wood. He started up, snatched up his scattered books and
papers and thrust them into his hat and jacket pockets, sighing, “Poor
Mary! hers is a sad fate. She can’t bear solitude, nor I society—the
quick coupled with the dead.”
He began to proffer excuses to her, but she, either to hide her emotions
or form a Godwinesque lack of any, began in a bantering tone: “What a
wild goose you are, Percy! If my thoughts have strayed from my book, it
was to the Opera, and my new dress from Florence, and especially to the
ivy wreath so much admired for my hair, and not to you, you silly
fellow! When I left home my satin slippers had not arrived. These are
serious matters. . . .”
But in Mary’s pleasantries there was always a note which rang false.