Part 3 (2/2)

At length upon the lone Chorasmian sh.o.r.e He paused, a wide and melancholy waste Of putrid marshes. A strong impulse urged His steps to the sea-sh.o.r.e. A swan was there, Beside a sluggish stream among the reeds.

It rose as he approached, and, with strong wings Scaling the upward sky, bent its bright course High over the immeasurable main.

His eyes pursued its flight:--”Thou hast a home, Beautiful bird! thou voyagest to thine home, Where thy sweet mate will twine her downy neck With thine, and welcome thy return with eyes Bright in the l.u.s.tre of their own fond joy.

And what am I that I should linger here, With voice far sweeter than thy dying notes, Spirit more vast than thine, frame more attuned To beauty, wasting these surpa.s.sing powers In the deaf air, to the blind earth, and heaven That echoes not my thoughts?” A gloomy smile Of desperate hope wrinkled his quivering lips.

For Sleep, he knew, kept most relentlessly Its precious charge, and silent Death exposed, Faithless perhaps as Sleep, a shadowy lure, With doubtful smile mocking its own strange charms.

William, the eldest son of Sh.e.l.ley and Mary G.o.dwin, was born on the 24th of Jan., 1816. In the spring of that year they went together, accompanied by Miss Clairmont, for a second time to Switzerland. They reached Geneva about the 15th of May, and were soon after joined by Lord Byron and his travelling physician, Dr. Polidori. Sh.e.l.ley had not yet made Byron's acquaintance, though he had sent him a copy of _Queen Mab_, with a letter, which miscarried in the post. They were now thrown into daily intercourse, occupying the villas Diodati and Mont Alegre at no great distance from each other, pa.s.sing their days upon the lake in a boat which they purchased, and spending the nights in conversation. Miss Clairmont had known Byron in London, and their acquaintance now ripened into an intimacy, the fruit of which was the child Allegra. This fact has to be mentioned by Sh.e.l.ley's biographer, because Allegra afterwards became an inmate of his home; and though he and Mary were ignorant of what was pa.s.sing at Geneva, they did not withdraw their sympathy from the mother of Lord Byron's daughter. The lives of Byron and Sh.e.l.ley during the next six years were destined to be curiously blent. Both were to seek in Italy an exile-home; while their friends.h.i.+p was to become one of the most interesting facts of English literary history. The influence of Byron upon Sh.e.l.ley, as he more than once acknowledged, and as his wife plainly perceived, was, to a large extent, depressing. For Byron's genius and its fruits in poetry he entertained the highest possible opinion. He could not help comparing his own achievement and his fame with Byron's; and the result was that in the presence of one whom he erroneously believed to be the greater poet, he became inactive. Sh.e.l.ley, on the contrary, stimulated Byron's productive faculty to n.o.bler efforts, raised his moral tone, and infused into his less subtle intellect something of his own philosophical depth and earnestness. Much as he enjoyed Byron's society and admired his writing, Sh.e.l.ley was not blind to the imperfections of his nature. The sketch which he has left us of Count Maddalo, the letters written to his wife from Venice and Ravenna, and his correspondence on the subject of Leigh Hunt's visit to Italy, supply the most discriminating criticism which has yet been pa.s.sed upon his brother poet's character. It is clear that he never found in Byron a perfect friend, and that he had not accepted him as one with whom he sympathized upon the deeper questions of feeling and conduct. Byron, for his part, recognized in Sh.e.l.ley the purest nature he had ever known. ”He was the most gentle, the most amiable, and least worldly-minded person I ever met; full of delicacy, disinterested beyond all other men, and possessing a degree of genius joined to simplicity as rare as it is admirable. He had formed to himself a _beau ideal_ of all that is fine, high-minded, and n.o.ble, and he acted up to this ideal even to the very letter.”

Toward the end of June the two poets made the tour of Lake Geneva in their boat, and were very nearly wrecked off the rocks of Meillerie. On this occasion Sh.e.l.ley was in imminent danger of death from drowning. His one anxiety, however, as he wrote to Peac.o.c.k, was lest Byron should attempt to save him at the risk of his own life. Byron described him as ”bold as a lion;” and indeed it may here be said, once and for all, that Sh.e.l.ley's physical courage was only equalled by his moral fearlessness. He carried both without bravado to the verge of temerity, and may justly be said to have never known what terror was. Another summer excursion was a visit to Chamouni, of which he has left memorable descriptions in his letters to Peac.o.c.k, and in the somewhat Coleridgian verses on Mont Blanc. The preface to _Laon and Cythna_ shows what a powerful impression had been made upon him by the glaciers, and how he delighted in the element of peril. There is a tone of exultation in the words which record the experiences of his two journeys in Switzerland and France:--”I have been familiar from boyhood with mountains and lakes and the sea, and the solitude of forests.

Danger, which sports upon the brink of precipices, has been my playmate. I have trodden the glaciers of the Alps, and lived under the eye of Mont Blanc. I have been a wanderer among distant fields. I have sailed down mighty rivers, and seen the sun rise and set, and the stars come forth, whilst I have sailed night and day down a rapid stream among mountains. I have seen populous cities, and have watched the pa.s.sions which rise and spread, and sink and change amongst a.s.sembled mult.i.tudes of men. I have seen the theatre of the more visible ravages of tyranny and war, cities and villages reduced to scattered groups of black and roofless houses, and the naked inhabitants sitting famished upon their desolated thresholds.”

On their return to the lake, the Sh.e.l.leys found M. G. Lewis established with Byron. This addition to the circle introduced much conversation about apparitions, and each member of the party undertook to produce a ghost story. Polidori's _Vampyre_ and Mrs. Sh.e.l.ley's _Frankenstein_ were the only durable results of their determination. But an incident occurred which is of some importance in the history of Sh.e.l.ley's psychological condition. Toward midnight on the 18th of July, Byron recited the lines in _Christabel_ about the lady's breast; when Sh.e.l.ley suddenly started up, shrieked, and fled from the room. He had seen a vision of a woman with eyes instead of nipples. At this time he was writing notes upon the phenomena of sleep to be inserted in his _Speculations on Metaphysics_, and Mrs. Sh.e.l.ley informs us that the mere effort to remember dreams of thrilling or mysterious import so disturbed his nervous system that he had to relinquish the task. At no period of his life was he wholly free from visions which had the reality of facts. Sometimes they occurred in sleep and were prolonged with painful vividness into his waking moments.

Sometimes they seemed to grow out of his intense meditation, or to present themselves before his eyes as the projection of a powerful inner impression. All his sensations were abnormally acute, and his ever-active imagination confused the border-lands of the actual and the visionary.

Such a nature as Sh.e.l.ley's, through its far greater susceptibility than is common even with artistic temperaments, was debarred in moments of high-strung emotion from observing the ordinary distinctions of subject and object; and this peculiar quality must never be forgotten when we seek to estimate the proper proportions of _Dichtung und Wahrheit_ in certain episodes of his biography. The strange story, for example, told by Peac.o.c.k about a supposed warning he had received in the spring of this year from Mr. Williams of Tremadoc, may possibly be explained on the hypothesis that his brooding thoughts had taken form before him, both ear and eye having been unconsciously pressed into the service of a subjective energy.[14]

On their return to England in September, Sh.e.l.ley took a cottage at Great Marlow on the Thames, in order to be near his friend Peac.o.c.k. While it was being prepared for the reception of his family, he stayed at Bath, and there heard of Harriet's suicide. The life that once was dearest to him, had ended thus in misery, desertion, want. The mother of his two children, abandoned by both her husband and her lover, and driven from her father's home, had drowned herself after a brief struggle with circ.u.mstance.

However Sh.e.l.ley may have felt that his conscience was free from blame, however small an element of self-reproach may have mingled with his grief and horror, there is no doubt that he suffered most acutely. His deepest ground for remorse seems to have been the conviction that he had drawn Harriet into a sphere of thought and feeling for which she was not qualified, and that had it not been for him and his opinions, she might have lived a happy woman in some common walk of life. One of his biographers a.s.serts that ”he continued to be haunted by certain recollections, partly real and partly imaginative, which pursued him like an Orestes,” and even Trelawny, who knew him only in the last months of his life, said that the impression of that dreadful moment was still vivid. We may trace the echo of his feelings in some painfully pathetic verses written in 1817;[15] and though he did not often speak of Harriet, Peac.o.c.k has recorded one memorable occasion on which he disclosed the anguish of his spirit to a friend.[16]

Sh.e.l.ley hurried at once to London, and found some consolation in the society of Leigh Hunt. The friends.h.i.+p extended to him by that excellent man at this season of his trouble may perhaps count for something with those who are inclined to judge him harshly. Two important events followed immediately upon the tragedy. The first was Sh.e.l.ley's marriage with Mary G.o.dwin on the 30th of December, 1816. [Whether Sh.e.l.ley would have taken this step except under strong pressure from without, appears to me very doubtful. Of all men who ever lived, he was the most resolutely bent on confirming his theories by his practice; and in this instance there was no valid reason why he should not act up to principles professed in common by himself and the partner of his fortunes, no less than by her father and her mother. It is, therefore, reasonable to suppose that he yielded to arguments; and these arguments must have been urged by G.o.dwin, who had never treated him with cordiality since he left England in 1816. G.o.dwin, though overrated in his generation and almost ludicrously idealized by Sh.e.l.ley, was a man whose talents verged on genius. But he was by no means consistent. His conduct in money-matters shows that he could not live the life of a self-sufficing philosopher; while the irritation he expressed when Sh.e.l.ley omitted to address him as Esquire, stood in comic contradiction with his published doctrines. We are therefore perhaps justified in concluding that he worried Sh.e.l.ley, the one enthusiastic and thoroughgoing follower he had, into marrying his daughter in spite of his disciple's protestations; nor shall we be far wrong if we surmise that G.o.dwin congratulated himself on Mary's having won the right to bear the name of a future baronet.]

The second event was the refusal of Mr. Westbrook to deliver up the custody of his grandchildren. A chancery suit was inst.i.tuted; at the conclusion of which, in March, 1817, Lord Eldon deprived Sh.e.l.ley of his son and daughter on the double ground of his opinions expressed in _Queen Mab_, and of his conduct toward his first wife. The children were placed in the hands of a Dr. Hume, to be educated in accordance with principles diametrically opposed to their parent's, while Sh.e.l.ley's income was mulcted in a sum of 200_l._ for their maintenance. Thus sternly did the father learn the value of that ancient aeschylean maxim, t? d??sa?t?

pa?e??, the doer of the deed must suffer. His own impulsiveness, his reckless a.s.sumption of the heaviest responsibilities, his overweening confidence in his own strength to move the weight of the world's opinions, had brought him to this tragic pa.s.s--to the suicide of the woman who had loved him, and to the sequestration of the offspring whom he loved.

Sh.e.l.ley ought not to be made the text for any sermon; and yet we may learn from him as from a hero of Hebrew or h.e.l.lenic story. His life was a tragedy; and like some protagonist of Greek drama, he was capable of erring and of suffering greatly. He had kicked against the altar of justice as established in the daily sanct.i.ties of human life; and now he had to bear the penalty. The conventions he despised and treated like the dust beneath his feet, were found in this most cruel crisis to be a rock on which his very heart was broken. From this rude trial of his moral nature he arose a stronger being; and if longer life had been granted him, he would undoubtedly have presented the enn.o.bling spectacle of one who had been lessoned by his own audacity, and by its bitter fruits, into harmony with the immutable laws which he was ever seeking to obey. It is just this conflict between the innate rect.i.tude of Sh.e.l.ley's over-daring nature and the circ.u.mstances of ordinary existence, which makes his history so tragic: and we may justly wonder whether, when he read the Sophoclean tragedies of dipus, he did not apply their doctrine of self-will and Nemesis to his own fortunes.

CHAPTER V.

LIFE AT MARLOW, AND JOURNEY TO ITALY.

Amid the torturing distractions of the Chancery suit about his children, and the still more poignant anguish of his own heart, and with the cloud of what he thought swift-coming death above his head, Sh.e.l.ley worked steadily, during the summer of 1817, upon his poem of _Laon and Cythna_.

Six months were spent in this task. ”The poem,” to borrow Mrs. Sh.e.l.ley's words, ”was written in his boat, as it floated under the beech-groves of Bisham, or during wanderings in the neighbouring country, which is distinguished for peculiar beauty.” Whenever Sh.e.l.ley could, he composed in the open air. The terraces of the Villa Cappuccini at Este, and the Baths of Caracalla were the birthplace of _Prometheus_. _The Cenci_ was written on the roof of the Villa Valsovano at Leghorn. The Cascine of Florence, the pine-woods near Pisa, the lawns above San Giuliano, and the summits of the Euganean Hills, witnessed the creation of his loveliest lyrics; and his last great poem, the _Triumph of Life_, was transferred to paper in his boat upon the Bay of Spezia.

If _Alastor_ had expressed one side of Sh.e.l.ley's nature, his devotion to Ideal Beauty, _Laon and Cythna_ was in a far profounder sense representative of its author. All his previous experiences and all his aspirations--his pa.s.sionate belief in friends.h.i.+p, his principle of the equality of women with men, his demand for bloodless revolution, his confidence in eloquence and reason to move nations, his doctrine of free love, his vegetarianism, his hatred of religious intolerance and tyranny--are blent together and concentrated in the glowing cantos of this wonderful romance. The hero, Laon, is himself idealized, the self which he imagined when he undertook his Irish campaign. The heroine, Cythna, is the helpmate he had always dreamed, the woman exquisitely feminine, yet capable of being fired with male enthusiasms, and of grappling the real problems of our nature with a man's firm grasp. In the first edition of the poem he made Laon and Cythna brother and sister, not because he believed in the desirability of incest, but because he wished to throw a glove down to society, and to attack the intolerance of custom in its stronghold. In the preface, he tells us that it was his purpose to kindle in the bosoms of his readers ”a virtuous enthusiasm for those doctrines of liberty and justice, that faith and hope in something good, which neither violence, nor misrepresentation, nor prejudice, can ever wholly extinguish among mankind;” to ill.u.s.trate ”the growth and progress of individual mind aspiring after excellence, and devoted to the love of mankind;” and to celebrate Love ”as the sole law which should govern the moral world.” The wild romantic treatment of this didactic motive makes the poem highly characteristic of its author. It is written in Spenserian stanzas, with a rapidity of movement and a dazzling brilliance that are Sh.e.l.ley's own. The story relates the kindling of a nation to freedom at the cry of a young poet-prophet, the temporary triumph of the good cause, the final victory of despotic force, and the martyrdom of the hero, together with whom the heroine falls a willing victim. It is full of thrilling incidents and lovely pictures; yet the tale is the least part of the poem; and few readers have probably been able either to sympathize with its visionary characters, or to follow the narrative without weariness. As in the case of other poems by Sh.e.l.ley--especially those in which he attempted to tell a story, for which kind of art his genius was not well suited--the central motive of _Laon and Cythna_ is surrounded by so radiant a photosphere of imagery and eloquence that it is difficult to fix our gaze upon it, blinded as we are by the excess of splendour. Yet no one now can read the terrible tenth canto, or the lovely fifth, without feeling that a young eagle of poetry had here tried the full strength of his pinions in their flight. This truth was by no means recognized when _Laon and Cythna_ first appeared before the public. Hooted down, derided, stigmatized, and howled at, it only served to intensify the prejudice with which the author of _Queen Mab_ had come to be regarded.

I have spoken of this poem under its first name of _Laon and Cythna_. A certain number of copies were issued with this t.i.tle;[17] but the publisher, Ollier, not without reason dreaded the effect the book would make; he therefore induced Sh.e.l.ley to alter the relations.h.i.+p between the hero and his bride, and issued the old sheets with certain cancelled pages under the t.i.tle of _Revolt of Islam_. It was published in January, 1818.

While still resident at Marlow, Sh.e.l.ley began two autobiographical poems--the one _Prince Athanase_, which he abandoned as too introspective and morbidly self-a.n.a.lytical, the other _Rosalind and Helen_, which he finished afterwards in Italy. Of the second of these compositions he entertained a poor opinion; nor will it bear comparison with his best work. To his biographer its chief interest consists in the character of Lionel, drawn less perhaps exactly from himself than as an ideal of the man he would have wished to be. The poet in _Alastor_, Laon in the _Revolt of Islam_, Lionel in _Rosalind and Helen_, and Prince Athanase, are in fact a remarkable row of self-portraits, varying in the tone and scale of idealistic treatment bestowed upon them. Later on in life, Sh.e.l.ley outgrew this preoccupation with his idealized self, and directed his genius to more objective themes. Yet the autobiographic tendency, as befitted a poet of the highest lyric type, remained to the end a powerful characteristic.

Before quitting the first period of Sh.e.l.ley's development, it may be well to set before the reader a specimen of that self-delineative poetry which characterized it; and since it is difficult to detach a single pa.s.sage from the continuous stanzas of _Laon and Cythna_, I have chosen the lines in _Rosalind and Helen_ which describe young Lionel:

To Lionel, Though of great wealth and lineage high, Yet through those dungeon walls there came Thy thrilling light, O Liberty!

And as the meteor's midnight flame Startles the dreamer, sun-like truth Flashed on his visionary youth, And filled him, not with love, but faith, And hope, and courage mute in death; For love and life in him were twins, Born at one birth: in every other First life, then love its course begins, Though they be children of one mother; And so through this dark world they fleet Divided, till in death they meet: But he loved all things ever. Then He past amid the strife of men, And stood at the throne of armed power Pleading for a world of woe: Secure as one on a rock-built tower O'er the wrecks which the surge trails to and fro, 'Mid the pa.s.sions wild of human kind He stood, like a spirit calming them; For, it was said, his words could find Like music the lulled crowd, and stem That torrent of unquiet dream, Which mortals truth and reason deem, But is revenge and fear and pride.

Joyous he was; and hope and peace On all who heard him did abide, Raining like dew from his sweet talk, As where the evening star may walk Along the brink of the gloomy seas, Liquid mists of splendour quiver.

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