Part 5 (1/2)

It has been said that Sh.e.l.ley, as a landscape painter, is decidedly Turneresque; and there is much in _Prometheus Unbound_ to justify this opinion. The scale of colour is light and aerial, and the darker shadows are omitted. An excess of luminousness seems to be continually radiated from the objects at which he looks; and in this radiation of many-coloured lights, the outline itself is apt to be a little misty. Sh.e.l.ley, moreover, pierced through things to their spiritual essence. The actual world was less for him than that which lies within it and beyond it. ”I seek,” he says himself, ”in what I see, the manifestation of something beyond the present and tangible object.” For him, as for the poet described by one of the spirit voices in _Prometheus_, the bees in the ivy-bloom are scarcely heeded; they become in his mind,--

Forms more real than living man, Nurslings of immortality.

And yet who could have brought the bees, the lake, the sun, the bloom, more perfectly before us than that picture does?[26] What vignette is more exquisitely coloured and finished than the little study of a pair of halcyons in the third act?[27] Blake is perhaps the only artist who could have ill.u.s.trated this drama. He might have shadowed forth the choirs of spirits, the trailing voices and their thrilling songs, phantasmal Demogorgon, and the charioted Hour. Prometheus, too, with his ”flowing limbs,” has just Blake's fault of impersonation--the touch of unreality in that painter's Adam.

Pa.s.sing to _The Cenci_, we change at once the moral and artistic atmosphere. The lyrical element, except for one most lovely dirge, is absent. Imagery and description are alike sternly excluded. Instead of soaring to the empyrean, our feet are firmly planted on the earth. In exchange for radiant visions of future perfection, we are brought into the sphere of dreadful pa.s.sions--all the agony, endurance, and half-maddened action, of which luckless human innocence is capable. To tell the legend of Beatrice Cenci here, is hardly needed. Her father, a monster of vice and cruelty, was bent upon breaking her spirit by imprisonment, torture, and nameless outrage. At last her patience ended; and finding no redress in human justice, no champion of her helplessness in living man, she wrought his death. For this she died upon the scaffold, together with her step-mother and her brothers, who had aided in the execution of the murder. The interest of _The Cenci_, and it is overwhelmingly great, centres in Beatrice and her father; from these two chief actors in the drama, all the other characters fall away into greater or less degrees of unsubstantiality. Perhaps Sh.e.l.ley intended this--as the maker of a bas-relief contrives two or three planes of figures for the presentation of his ruling group. Yet there appears to my mind a defect of accomplishment, rather than a deliberate intention, in the delineation of Orsino. He seems meant to be the wily, crafty, Machiavellian reptile, whose calculating wickedness should form a contrast to the daemonic, reckless, almost maniacal fiendishness of old Francesco Cenci. But this conception of him wavers; his love for Beatrice is too delicately tinted, and he is suffered to break down with an infirmity of conscience alien to such a nature. On the other hand the uneasy vacillations of Giacomo, and the irresolution, born of feminine weakness and want of fibre, in Lucrezia, serve to throw the firm will of Beatrice into prominent relief; while her innocence, sustained through extraordinary suffering in circ.u.mstances of exceptional horror--the innocence of a n.o.ble nature thrust by no act of its own but by its wrongs beyond the pale of ordinary womankind--is contrasted with the merely childish guiltlessness of Bernardo. Beatrice rises to her full height in the fifth act, dilates and grows with the approach of danger, and fills the whole scene with her spirit on the point of death. Her sublime confidence in the justice and essential rightness of her action, the glance of self-a.s.sured purity with which she annihilates the cut-throat brought to testify against her, her song in prison, and her tender solicitude for the frailer Lucrezia, are used with wonderful dramatic skill for the fulfilment of a feminine ideal at once delicate and powerful. Once and once only does she yield to ordinary weakness; it is when the thought crosses her mind that she may meet her father in the other world, as once he came to her on earth.

Sh.e.l.ley dedicated _The Cenci_ to Leigh Hunt, saying that he had striven in this tragedy to cast aside the subjective manner of his earlier work, and to produce something at once more popular and more concrete, more sober in style, and with a firmer grasp on the realities of life. He was very desirous of getting it acted, and wrote to Peac.o.c.k requesting him to offer it at Covent Garden. Miss O'Neil, he thought, would play the part of Beatrice admirably. The manager, however, did not take this view; averring that the subject rendered it incapable of being even submitted to an actress like Miss O'Neil. Sh.e.l.ley's self-criticism is always so valuable, that it may be well here to collect what he said about the two great dramas of 1819. Concerning _The Cenci_ he wrote to Peac.o.c.k:--”It is written without any of the peculiar feelings and opinions which characterise my other compositions; I having attended simply to the impartial development of such characters, as it is probable the persons represented really were, together with the greatest degree of popular effect to be produced by such a development.” ”_Cenci_ is written for the mult.i.tude, and ought to sell well.” ”I believe it singularly fitted for the stage.” ”_The Cenci_ is a work of art; it is not coloured by my feelings, nor obscured by my metaphysics. I don't think much of it. It gave me less trouble than anything I have written of the same length.”

_Prometheus_, on the other hand, he tells Ollier, ”is my favourite poem; I charge you, therefore, specially to pet him and feed him with fine ink and good paper”--which was duly done. Again:--”For _Prometheus_, I expect and desire no great sale; _Prometheus_ was never intended for more than five or six persons; it is in my judgment of a higher character than anything I have yet attempted, and is perhaps less an imitation of anything that has gone before it; it is original, and cost me severe mental labour.” Sh.e.l.ley was right in judging that _The Cenci_ would be comparatively popular; this was proved by the fact that it went through two editions in his lifetime. The value he set upon _Prometheus_ as the higher work, will hardly be disputed. Unique in the history of literature, and displaying the specific qualities of its author at their height, the world could less easily afford to lose this drama than _The Cenci_, even though that be the greatest tragedy composed in English since the death of Shakespere. For reasons which will be appreciated by lovers of dramatic poetry, I refrain from detaching portions of these two plays. Those who desire to make themselves acquainted with their author's genius, must devote long and patient study to the originals in their entirety.

_Prometheus Unbound_, like the majority of Sh.e.l.ley's works, fell still-born from the press. It furnished punsters with a joke, however, which went the round of several papers; this poem, they cried, is well named, for who would bind it? Of criticism that deserves the name, Sh.e.l.ley got absolutely nothing in his lifetime. The stupid but venomous reviews which gave him occasional pain, but which he mostly laughed at, need not now be mentioned. It is not much to any purpose to abuse the authors of mere rubbish. The real lesson to be learned from such of them as may possibly have been sincere, as well as from the failure of his contemporaries to appreciate his genius--the sneers of Moore, the stupidity of Campbell, the ignorance of Wordsworth, the priggishness of Southey, or the condescending tone of Keats--is that nothing is more difficult than for lesser men or equals to pay just homage to the greatest in their lifetime. Those who may be interested in studying Sh.e.l.ley's att.i.tude toward his critics, should read a letter addressed to Ollier from Florence, October 15, 1819, soon after he had seen the vile attack upon him in the _Quarterly_, comparing this with the fragments of an expostulatory letter to the Editor, and the preface to _Adonais_.[28] It is clear that, though he bore scurrilous abuse with patience, he was prepared if needful to give blow for blow. On the 11th of June, 1821, he wrote to Ollier:--”As yet I have laughed; but woe to those scoundrels if they should once make me lose my temper!” The stanzas on the _Quarterly_ in _Adonais_, and the invective against Lord Eldon, show what Sh.e.l.ley could have done if he had chosen to castigate the curs. Meanwhile the critics achieved what they intended. Sh.e.l.ley, as Trelawny emphatically tells us, was universally shunned, coldly treated by Byron's friends at Pisa, and regarded as a monster by such of the English in Italy as had not made his personal acquaintance. On one occasion he is even said to have been knocked down in a post-office by some big bully, who escaped before he could obtain his name and address; but this is one of the stories rendered doubtful by lack of precise details.

CHAPTER VI.

RESIDENCE AT PISA.

On the 26th of January, 1820, the Sh.e.l.leys established themselves at Pisa.

From this date forward to the 7th of July, 1822, Sh.e.l.ley'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 Sh.e.l.ley'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 Sh.e.l.ley and his wife lived on terms of the closest friends.h.i.+p. Among foreigners, the physician Vacca, the improvisatore Sgricci, and the Greek prince Mavrocordato, have to be recorded. It will be seen from this enumeration that Sh.e.l.ley 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, Sh.e.l.ley 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. Sh.e.l.ley'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 impa.s.sioned eloquence and the most ethereal imagination, we shall be equally astonished. Every chord of the poet's lyre is touched, from the deep ba.s.s string that echoes the diurnal speech of such a man as Sh.e.l.ley was, to the fine vibrations of a treble merging its rarity of tone in accents super-sensible to ordinary ears. One pa.s.sage 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 sh.o.r.e Vomits its wrecks, and still howls on for more.

Yet in its depth what treasures! You will see That which was G.o.dwin,--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 l.u.s.tre 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-sh.e.l.l, One of the richest of the deep. And there Is English Peac.o.c.k, 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 learned 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 Sh.e.l.leys, has recorded many interesting details of their Pisan life, as well as valuable notes of Sh.e.l.ley'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. ”Sh.e.l.ley tended me like a brother. He applied my leeches, administered my medicines, and during six weeks that I was confined to my room, was a.s.siduous 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 a.s.surance 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 h.e.l.l 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 s??et??, 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 Sh.e.l.ley whimsically complains that even intelligent and sympathetic critics confounded the ideal pa.s.sion 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 coa.r.s.e abuse of vulgar scribblers, was enough to make a man so sincerely modest as Sh.e.l.ley 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 a.s.semble; 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 Ta.s.so'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 Sh.e.l.ley 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 polis.h.i.+ng 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 ma.n.u.scripts that his compositions, even as we now possess them, were no mere improvisations. The pa.s.sage 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 a.s.serted 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 aesthetic 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 Sh.e.l.ley'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 Sh.e.l.ley 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 n.o.ble 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.

Sh.e.l.ley, 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. Sh.e.l.ley 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. Sh.e.l.ley 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 Sh.e.l.ley's sympathy for this unfortunate lady took the form of love, which, however spiritual and Platonic, was not the less pa.s.sionate. The result was the composition of _Epipsychidion_, the most unintelligible of all his poems to those who have not a.s.similated 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 aegean 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 aegean girds this chosen home, With ever-changing sound and light and foam Kissing the sifted sands and caverns h.o.a.r; And all the winds wandering along the sh.o.r.e 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.