Shelley Part 8

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 r.e.t.a.r.ding 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 mult.i.tude, 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 gra.s.sy 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 pa.s.sing of a mult.i.tude, which is presented at the same time to the eye of fancy by acc.u.mulated images. The next eleven triplets introduce the presiding genius of the pageant. Students of Petrarch's _Trionfi_ will not fail to note what Sh.e.l.ley owes to that poet, and how he has trans.m.u.ted 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 sh.e.l.l 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 c.r.a.pe

Was bent, a dun and faint ethereal gloom Tempering the light. Upon the chariot beam A Ja.n.u.s-visaged Shadow did a.s.sume

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 Villa Magni, and the elemental fervour of Italian heat to which he recklessly exposed himself, contributed to make Sh.e.l.ley 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 at last arrived in Genoa, whence they again sailed for Leghorn. Sh.e.l.ley 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 Sh.e.l.ley'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 c.o.c.kneyism. Hunt was himself hardly powerful enough to understand the true magnitude of Sh.e.l.ley, though he loved him; and the tender solicitude of the great, unselfish Sh.e.l.ley, for the smaller, harmlessly conceited Hunt, is pathetic. They spent a pleasant day or two together, Sh.e.l.ley 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 a.s.sented 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, Sh.e.l.ley 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 G.o.ds 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 Sh.e.l.ley'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 alter the storm, Trelawny rode to Pisa, and communicated his tears 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 Sh.e.l.ley's boat. A week pa.s.sed, Trelawny patrolling the sh.o.r.e with the coast-guardsmen, but hearing of no new discovery, until at last two bodies were cast upon the sand. One found near Via Reggio, on the 18th of July, was Sh.e.l.ley's. It had his jacket, "with the volume of Sophocles 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 Ma.s.sa, 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 Sh.e.l.ley 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 Emba.s.sy at Florence. After some difficulty it was granted.

What remains to be said concerning the cremation of Sh.e.l.ley's body on the 16th 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 Sh.e.l.ley'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 Sh.e.l.ley 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 Sh.e.l.ley'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 s.n.a.t.c.hing 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."

Sh.e.l.ley's heart was given to Hunt, who subsequently, not without reluctance and unseemly dispute, resigned it to Mrs. Sh.e.l.ley. It is now at Bos...o...b... His ashes were sent by Trelawny to Rome and buried in the Protestant cemetery, so touchingly described by him in his letter to Peac.o.c.k, and afterwards so sublimely in _Adonais_. The epitaph, composed by Hunt, ran thus: "Percy Bysshe Sh.e.l.ley, Cor Cordium, Natus iv. Aug.

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 Sh.e.l.ley:

Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange.

"And so," writes Lady Sh.e.l.ley, "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 s.n.a.t.c.hed from life under circ.u.mstances 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."

CHAPTER VIII.

EPILOGUE.

After some deliberation I decided to give this little work on Sh.e.l.ley the narrative rather than the essay form, impelled thereto by one commanding reason. Sh.e.l.ley's life and his poetry are indissolubly connected. He acted what he thought and felt, with a directness rare among his brethren of the poet's craft; while his verse, with the exception of _The Cenci_, expressed little but the animating thoughts and aspirations of his life.

That life, moreover, was "a miracle of thirty years," so crowded with striking incident and varied experience that, as he said himself, he had already lived longer than his father and ought to be reckoned with the men of ninety. Through all vicissitudes he preserved his youth inviolate, and died, like one whom the G.o.ds love, or like a hero of h.e.l.lenic story, young, despite grey hairs and suffering. His life has, therefore, to be told, in order that his life-work may be rightly valued: for, great as that was, he, the man, was somehow greater; and n.o.ble as it truly is, the memory of himself is n.o.bler.

To the world he presented the rare spectacle of a man pa.s.sionate for truth, and unreservedly obedient to the right as he discerned it. The anomaly which made his practical career a failure, lay just here. The right he followed was too often the ant.i.thesis of ordinary morality: in his desire to cast away the false and grasp the true, he overshot the mark of prudence. The blending in him of a pure and earnest purpose with moral and social theories that could not but have proved pernicious to mankind at large, produced at times an almost grotesque mixture in his actions no less than in his verse. We cannot, therefore, wonder that society, while he lived, felt the necessity of a.s.serting itself against him. But now that he has pa.s.sed into the company of the great dead, and time has softened down the asperities of popular judgment, we are able to learn the real lesson of his life and writings. That is not to be sought in any of his doctrines, but rather in his fearless bearing, his resolute loyalty to an unselfish and in the simplest sense benevolent ideal. It is this which const.i.tutes his supreme importance for us English at the present time.

Ours is an age in which ideals are rare, and we belong to a race in which men who follow them so single-heartedly are not common.

As a poet, Sh.e.l.ley contributed a new quality to English literature--a quality of ideality, freedom, and spiritual audacity, which severe critics of other nations think we lack. Byron's daring is in a different region: his elemental worldliness and pungent satire do not liberate our energies, or cheer us with new hopes and splendid vistas. Wordsworth, the very ant.i.thesis to Sh.e.l.ley in his reverent accord with inst.i.tutions, suits our meditative mood, sustains us with a sound philosophy, and braces us by healthy contact with the Nature he so dearly loved. But in Wordsworth there is none of Sh.e.l.ley's magnetism. What remains of permanent value in Coleridge's poetry--such work as _Christabel_, the _Ancient Mariner_, or _Kubla Khan_--is a product of pure artistic fancy, tempered by the author's mysticism. Keats, true and sacred poet as he was, loved Nature with a somewhat sensuous devotion. She was for him a mistress rather than a Diotima; nor did he share the prophetic fire which burns in Sh.e.l.ley's verse, quite apart from the direct enunciation of his favourite tenets. In none of Sh.e.l.ley's greatest contemporaries was the lyrical faculty so paramount; and whether we consider his minor songs, his odes, or his more complicated choral dramas, we acknowledge that he was the loftiest and the most spontaneous singer of our language. In range of power he was also conspicuous above the rest. Not only did he write the best lyrics, but the best tragedy, the best translations, and the best familiar poems of his century. As a satirist and humourist, I cannot place him so high as some of his admirers do; and the purely polemical portions of his poems, those in which he puts forth his antagonism to tyrants and religions and custom in all its myriad forms, seem to me to degenerate at intervals into poor rhetoric.

While his genius was so varied and its flight so unapproached in swiftness, it would be vain to deny that Sh.e.l.ley, as an artist, had faults from which the men with whom I have compared him were more free. The most prominent of these are haste, incoherence, verbal carelessness, incompleteness, a want of narrative force, and a weak hold on objective realities. Even his warmest admirers, if they are sincere critics, will concede that his verse, taken altogether, is marked by inequality. In his eager self-abandonment to inspiration, he produced much that is unsatisfying simply because it is not ripe. There was no defect of power in him, but a defect of patience; and the final word to be p.r.o.nounced in estimating the larger bulk of his poetry is the word immature. Not only was the poet young; but the fruit of his young mind had been plucked before it had been duly mellowed by reflection. Again, he did not care enough for common things to present them with artistic fulness. He was intolerant of detail, and thus failed to model with the roundness that we find in Goethe's work. He flew at the grand, the s.p.a.cious, the sublime; and did not always succeed in realizing for his readers what he had imagined. A certain want of faith in his own powers, fostered by the extraordinary discouragement under which he had to write, prevented him from finishing what he began, or from giving that ultimate form of perfection to his longer works which we admire in shorter pieces like the _Ode to the West Wind_. When a poem was ready, he had it hastily printed, and pa.s.sed on to fresh creative efforts. If anything occurred to interrupt his energy, he flung the sketch aside. Some of these defects, if we may use this word at all to indicate our sense that Sh.e.l.ley might by care have been made equal to his highest self, were in a great measure the correlative of his chief quality--the ideality, of which I have already spoken, he composed with all his faculties, mental, emotional, and physical, at the utmost strain, at a white heat of intense fervour, striving to attain one object, the truest and most pa.s.sionate invest.i.ture for the thoughts which had inflamed his ever-quick imagination. The result is that his finest work has more the stamp of something natural and elemental--the wind, the sea, the depth of air--than of a mere artistic product. Plato would have said: the Muses filled this man with sacred madness, and, when he wrote, he was no longer in his own control. There was, moreover, ever-present in his nature an effort, an aspiration after a better than the best this world can show, which prompted him to blend the choicest products of his thought and fancy with the fairest images borrowed from the earth on which he lived. He never willingly composed except under the impulse to body forth a vision of the love and light and life which was the spirit of the power he worshipped. This persistent upward striving, this earnestness, this pa.s.sionate intensity, this piety of soul and purity of inspiration, give a quite unique spirituality to his poems. But it cannot be expected that the colder perfections of Academic art should be always found in them. They have something of the waywardness and negligence of nature, something of the _asymmetreia_ we admire in the earlier creations of Greek architecture. That Sh.e.l.ley, acute critic and profound student as he was, could conform himself to rule and show himself an artist in the stricter sense, is, however, abundantly proved by _The Cenci_ and by _Adonais_. The reason why he did not always observe this method will be understood by those who have studied his _Defence of Poetry_, and learned to sympathize with his impa.s.sioned theory of art.

Working on this small scale, it is difficult to do barest justice to Sh.e.l.ley's life or poetry. The materials for the former are almost overwhelmingly copious and strangely discordant. Those who ought to meet in love over his grave, have spent their time in quarrelling about him and baffling the most eager seeker for the truth.[34] Through the turbid atmosphere of their recriminations it is impossible to discern the whole personality of the man. By careful comparison and refined manipulation of the biographical treasures at our disposal, a fair portrait of Sh.e.l.ley might still be set before the reader with the accuracy of a finished picture. [That labour of exquisite art and of devoted love still remains to be accomplished, though in the meantime Mr. W. M. Rossetti's Memoir is a most valuable instalment.] Sh.e.l.ley in his lifetime bound those who knew him with a chain of loyal affection, impressing observers so essentially different as Hogg, Byron, Peac.o.c.k, Leigh Hunt, Trelawny, Medwin, Williams, with the conviction that he was the gentlest, purest, bravest, and most spiritual being they had ever met. The same conviction is forced upon his biographer. During his four last years this most loveable of men was becoming gradually riper, wiser, truer to his highest instincts. The imperfections of his youth were being rapidly absorbed. His self-knowledge was expanding, his character mellowing, and his genius growing daily stronger. Without losing the fire that burned in him, he had been lessoned by experience into tempering its fervour; and when he reached the age of twenty-nine, he stood upon the height of his most glorious achievement, ready to unfold his wings for a yet sublimer flight. At that moment, when life at last seemed about to offer him rest, unimpeded activity, and happiness, death robbed the world of his maturity. Posterity has but the product of his cruder years, the a.s.surance that he had already outlived them into something n.o.bler, and the tragedy of his untimely end.