By contrast Shelley underestimated the role that science was beginning to take in remolding ideas and institutions. He warned against letting the progress of science, which merely improves our tools, outrun the development of literature and philosophy, which consider our purposes;136 so the “unmitigated exercise of the calculating faculty” had further enriched the clever few, and had added to the concentration of wealth and power.137
Shelley’s discontent with his second father-in-law’s finances spread to Godwin’s philosophy. Having rediscovered Plato (he had translated the Symposium and the Ion), he passed from a naturalistic to a spiritual interpretation of nature and life. He now doubted the omnicompetence of reason, and had lost his enthusiasm for atheism. As he neared thirty he ceased to attack supernatural religion; now he thought, very much like the young Wordsworth, that nature was the outer form of a pervading inner soul. There might even be a kind of immortality: the vital force in the individual passes, at his death, into another form, but never dies.138
XIV. PISAN CANTO: 1821–22
Byron, when he reached Pisa, had almost outlived his sexual history, except for an idealizing memory as in the Haidee episodes in Don Juan. At Pisa Teresa Guiccioli lived with Byron, but in diminishing intimacy; he spent most of his time with his friends and Shelley’s. For them he arranged weekly dinners, where discussion ran freely. Shelley attended, stood his ground politely but firmly in argument, but slipped away before strong drinking began. Teresa tried to give substance to her quiet life by becoming friends with Mary Shelley and reading history to keep up with Mary’s intellectual interests. Byron disapproved of Teresa’s studies, preferring women whose intellect was modestly subordinated to their charms.
He had almost forgotten Allegra. Her mother pleaded with Mary Shelley to come to Florence to join her in a plan to go to Ravenna, abduct the girl, and bring her to a healthier climate and wider life. Shelley refused to allow this. Then came the news that on April 20, 1822, Allegra, five years old, had died of malaria in her convent. The event shared in the cooling of Shelley’s friendship with Byron. Earlier in this spring he had written to Leigh Hunt: “Particular dispositions in Lord Byron’s character render the close and exclusive intimacy with him, in which I find myself, … intolerable to me. Thus much, my best friend, I will confess and confide to you.”139
He tried to conceal his discomfort, for he had persuaded Byron to invite Hunt to come to Pisa and edit a new magazine, The Liberal, which Byron and Shelley planned to launch as an offset to the conservative Quarterly Review. Byron sent the bankrupt Hunt two hundred fifty pounds; Hunt and family sailed from London, hoping to reach Leghorn on July 1, 1822. Shelley promised to meet him.
Externally the first six months of that fatal year were a pleasant time for the two poets. They went riding together almost daily, and matched their marksmanship in a pistol club; Shelley almost equaled Byron’s accuracy of aim. “My health,” he wrote to Peacock, “is better; my cares lighter; and tho’ nothing will cure the consumption of my purse, yet it drags on a sort of life in death, very like its master, and seems, like Fortunatus’ purse, always empty, yet never quite exhausted.”140 In January Byron’s mother-in-law died, leaving him (despite the separation from his wife) properties that brought him an additional three thousand pounds per year. Flush, he ordered a commodious yacht to be built for himself at Leghorn, appointed John Trelawny its skipper, named it Bolivar in honor of the South American revolutionist, and invited Shelley and his new friends Edward Williams and Thomas Medwin to join him and the Gambas in a yachting trip in the coming summer. Shelley and Williams shared in having a smaller sailboat, eighty-four feet long, eight in the beam, to be built for them at a cost of eighty pounds. Trelawny named it Don Juan, Mary renamed it Ariel.141
Looking forward to a summer of boating, Byron engaged the Villa Dupuy near Leghorn. Shelley and Williams rented for their families the Casa Magni, near Lerici, on the shores of the Bay of Spezia, some forty miles north of Leghorn. On April 26, 1822, the Shelleys and Williams transferred their ménages to the Casa Magni, and there awaited the delivery of their boat.
XV. IMMOLATION: SHELLEY, 1822
Only some poetic trance could have chosen so lonely a place, or so wild an environment, for a vacation. Casa Magni was large enough for two families, but it was unfurnished, and was approaching disintegration. It was surrounded on three sides by forest, and in front by the sea, whose waves sometimes reached the door. “Gales and squalls hailed our first arrival,” Mary Shelley later recalled, and “the natives were wilder than the place. Had we been wrecked on an island of the South Seas we could scarcely have felt ourselves farther from civilization and comfort.”142
On May 12 the Ariel arrived from Genoa. Williams, who had been in the Navy, and Shelley, still unable to swim, were delighted with the boat, and spent many an afternoon or evening sailing along the coast. Seldom had Shelley been so happy or so well. Sometimes the women joined them; but Mary was pregnant again, frequently ill, and unhappy because her husband would not let her see her father’s plaintive letters.143
In the house or on the boat Shelley wrote his final poem, “The Triumph of Life,” which was cut short at line 544 by his final voyage. There is no triumph in it, for it describes a procession of various human types, all failures and decayed, hurrying to death. At line 82 the shade of Rousseau rises to explain the stupidity of civilization; he shows history’s famous figures—Plato, Caesar, Constantine, Voltaire, Napoleon—caught in the same mad rush for wealth or power; and recommends, as the only escape, a return to a simple and natural life.
Not yet thirty, Shelley, after thought of suicide on June 18, 1822, wrote to Trelawny:
Should you meet with any scientific persons capable of preparing the Prussic acid, or essential oil of bitter almonds, I should regard it as a great kindness if you would procure me a small quantity…. I would give any price for this medicine…. I need not tell you I have no intention of suicide at present, but I confess it would be a comfort to me to hold in my possession that golden key to the chamber of perpetual rest.144
Perhaps to help his sick wife, Shelley had invited Claire Clairmont to come from Florence and spend the summer at Casa Magni. She came early in June, in time to help Mary through an almost fatal miscarriage. On June 22 Shelley, nearing a nervous breakdown, suffered a nightmare so terrifying that he ran from his room to Mary screaming.
On July 1 news reached them that Leigh Hunt and family had reached Genoa, and were preparing to leave it by a local transport vessel to join Byron at Leghorn. Shelley, anxious to welcome his faithful friend, to ease Byron’s reception of him, and to strengthen his partner’s fading interest in their new magazine, decided to sail at once in the Ariel with Williams for Leghorn. Mary had premonitions of disaster. “I called Shelley back two or three times…. I cried bitterly when he went away.”145
The Ariel left Casa Magni at noon July 1, and reached Leghorn safely at nine that evening. Shelley greeted Hunt joyfully, but was depressed to learn that the Tuscan authorities had ordered the Gambas to leave their territory at once, and that Byron, resolved to follow Teresa, was planning to leave Leghorn soon to join her in Genoa. Nevertheless Byron agreed to honor his agreement with Hunt, and to have the Hunts occupy rooms in the Casa Lanfranchi at Pisa. Shelley accompanied them to Pisa, saw them settled, and drove back to Leghorn on July 7.
He spent the morning of Monday, July 8, shopping for the family at Casa Magni. Williams urged him to hurry, to catch the favorable wind then blowing toward Lerici. Captain Roberts of the Bolivar predicted a storm for that afternoon, and advised a day’s delay; Williams urged immediate departure; Shelley agreed; and about half past one that afternoon the Ariel sailed from Leghorn with Shelley, Williams, and a young sailor, Charles Vivian.
About six-thirty that evening a heavy storm, with thunder, wind, and rain, fell upon the Bay of Spezia, and hundreds of vessels hurried into harbor. At Casa Magni the storm was so severe that the three women waiting anxiously there c
omforted themselves with the conclusion that the two husbands had waited out the storm at Leghorn. Then Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday passed. “The real anguish of these moments,” Mary later wrote, “transcends all the fictions that the most glowing imagination ever portrayed. Our seclusion, the savage nature of the inhabitants of the neighboring village, and our immediate vicinity to the troubled sea, combined to imbue with strange horror our days of uncertainty.”146 On Friday a letter came from Hunt to Shelley, including lines that brought terror to the waiting women: “Pray tell us how you got home, for they say you had bad weather after you sailed on Monday, and we are anxious.” Jane Williams and Mary rode all day to Pisa. By midnight they reached Casa Lanfranchi, found Byron and Hunt there, and were assured that Shelley and Williams had left Leghorn on Monday. They rode on through the night, and reached Leghorn at two o’clock on the morning of Saturday, July 13. There Trelawny and Roberts tried to calm them with the possibility that the Ariel had been blown to Corsica or Elba. Byron commissioned Roberts to use the Bolivar to search the sea and shore between Leghorn and Lerici. Trelawny accompanied Mary and Jane on a futile search along the coast for signs or news of the missing men. He stayed with the mourning women at Casa Magni till July 18, and then left to make further inquiries. On July 19 he returned to them, and revealed to them, as gently as he could, that the corpses of their husbands had been found washed upon the shore near Viareggio on July 17 or 18. (About July 30 the mutilated body of Charles Vivian was found four miles farther north, and was buried on the shore.) He took Mary and Jane to Pisa, where Byron offered them rooms in the Casa Lanfranchi, but they took quarters nearby. Mary wrote to a friend: “Lord Byron is very kind to me, and comes with the Guiccioli to see us often.”147
The bodies had already been buried in the sands by natives. Tuscan law forbade such buried corpses to be exhumed or reburied; but Trelawny knew that Mrs. Shelley wished Shelley’s remains to be interred near those of their son William in Rome. He persuaded the Tuscan authorities to allow exhumation, on condition that the remains be burned on the shore. The bodies had been mutilated or consumed almost beyond recognition; but in one jacket a volume of Sophocles was found in one pocket and a volume of Keats in the other.148
On August 15 Byron, Hunt, and Trelawny, with a quarantine official and an English officer, Captain Shenley, stood by as a squad of soldiers burned the remains of Williams. The next day, at a spot across from Elba, the remains of Shelley were exhumed and burned in the presence of Byron, Hunt, Trelawny, and some neighboring villagers. Into the flames Trelawny threw incense, wine, and oil, and pronounced incantations consigning the ashes to “the Nature which he worshipped.”149 Byron, unable to bear the spectacle to the end, swam off to the Bolivar. After three hours nearly all of the body had fallen away except the heart. Trelawny, at the cost of a burned hand, snatched the heart from the fire. A casket containing the ashes was taken to Rome, and was buried in a new cemetery close by the old Protestant cemetery that held the remains of child William. Shelley’s heart was given by Trelawny to Hunt, and by him to Mary. At her death in 1851 the ashes of the heart were found in her copy of Adonais.
XVI. TRANSFIGURATION: BYRON, 1822–24
In September, 1822, Byron and the Gambas moved from Pisa to Albaro, a suburb of Genoa. The several moves of body, mind, and mood that he had made since leaving England had tired him, and he had begun to tire even of Teresa’s untiring love. His sharp eyes and sardonic spirit had removed the veils of life, and apparently had left no reality that could stir him to idealism or devotion. He was the most famous living poet, but he was not proud of his poetry; the febrile plaints of Childe Harold seemed unmanly now, and the clever cynicism of Don Juan left author and reader naked in a disillusioned world. “A man,” he now felt, “ought to do something more for mankind than write verses.”150 At Genoa he asked his physician to tell him “which is the best and quickest poison?”151
Greece offered him a redeeming death. It had fallen subject to the Turks in 1465, and had become somnolent under alien domination. Byron, in Childe Harold (Canto 11, lines 73–84), had called upon it to revolt: “Hereditary bondsmen! Know ye not / Who would be free themselves must strike the blow?” Greece had revolted in 1821, but it was without arms, without money, without unity; it was crying out for help from the nations to which it had transmitted its rich inheritance. It had sent a committee to London to seek funds; the committee sent representatives to Genoa with a challenge to Byron to use some of his wealth in furthering the revolution he had sought to inspire. On April 7, 1823, he told the emissaries that he was at the service of the Greek Provisional Government.
He was transformed. He was now all action. Cynicism gave way to dedication; poetry was laid aside; romance graduated from rhymes to resolution. After putting aside some funds for the Hunts and above all for Teresa, he devoted the remainder of his fortune to the Greek Revolution. He instructed his agents in London to sell everything of his in England that could bring money, and to send him the proceeds. He sold the Bolivar for half its cost, and engaged an English vessel, the Hercules, to take him, Pietro Gamba, and Trelawny to Greece with some cannon and ammunition, and with medical supplies for a thousand men for two years. Teresa Guiccioli struggled to keep him with her; he resisted her affectionately, and had the consolation of knowing that she and her parents had received permission to return to their home in Ravenna. He told Lady Blessington: “I have a presentiment that I shall die in Greece. I hope it may be in action, for that would be a good finish to a very triste existence.”152
On July 16, 1823, the Hercules left Genoa for Greece. After exasperating delays it anchored (August 3) at Argostólion, the port of Cephalonia, largest of the Ionian Islands. This was still fifty miles from Greece, but Byron was forced to fret away months there; he had hoped to join, at Missolonghi, the most inspiring of the Greek leaders; but Marco Bozzaris had been killed in action, Missolonghi was in Turkish hands, and Turkish warships controlled all western approaches to the Greek mainland. Early in December Prince Alexandros Mavrokordatos recaptured Missolonghi, and on the 29th Byron left Cephalonia. Colonel Leicester Stanhope, agent of the Greek committee that was raising funds in England to aid the revolution, wrote from Missolonghi: “All are looking forward to Lord Byron’s arrival as they would be to the coming of the Messiah.”153 After several adventures and delays the young savior reached Missolonghi, January 4, 1824, and received a joyous welcome from prince and people scenting gold.
Mavrokordatos commissioned him to pay, provision, and lead a squad of six hundred Suliotes—bellicose barbarians part Greek, part Albanian. He was not inspired by their appearance, and he knew that the Greek revolutionists were divided into rival factions under leaders more political than martial. Nevertheless he was happy to have been assigned an active role, and did not delay in dispensing aid; to Mavrokordatos alone he gave some two thousand pounds a week to keep the Missolonghians in food and spirit. Meanwhile he lived in a villa north of the town and near the shore, “on the verge,” said Trelawny, “of the most dismal swamp I have ever seen.” The Suliotes proved disorderly and rebellious, more anxious to get his money than his leadership; the young Lochinvar’s hope for martial action had to wait till order and morale had been restored. Trelawny, never good at waiting, went off to seek adventure elsewhere. Only Pietro Gamba remained close to Byron, watching over him anxiously as he saw him failing under the heat, the worry, and the malarial air.
On February 15, visiting Colonel Stanhope, Byron suddenly grew pale and fell to the ground in convulsions, unconscious, and foaming at the mouth. He recovered consciousness, and was taken to his villa. Doctors gathered around him, and applied leeches to bleed him. When these were removed the bleeding could not be soon stopped, and Byron fainted from loss of blood. On February 18 his Suliotes rioted again, threatening to invade his villa and kill all available foreigners. He rose from his bed and calmed them, but his hope to lead them against the Turks at Lepanto faded, and with it his dream of a fruitful and her
oic death. He was comforted by a letter from Augusta Leigh, enclosing a picture of his daughter Ada and Annabella’s description of the child’s habits and temperament. His eyes lighted with a moment’s happiness. Everything normal had been denied him.
On April 9 he went out riding with Pietro. They were caught in a heavy rain on their way back, and Byron that evening suffered chills and fever. On the 11th his fever grew worse; he took to his bed, felt his strength ebbing, and recognized that he was dying. Sometimes, in those last ten days, he thought of religion, but “to say the truth,” he remarked, “I find it equally difficult to know what to believe in this world and what not to believe. There are so many plausible reasons for inducing me to die a bigot, as there have been to make me hitherto live a freethinker.”154 Dr. Julius Millingen, his chief physician, recorded:
It is with infinite regret that I must state that, although I seldom left Lord Byron’s pillow during the latter part of his illness, I did not hear him make any, even the smallest, mention of religion. At one moment I heard him say, “Shall I sue for mercy?” After a long pause he added: “Come, come; no weakness! Let’s be a man to the end.”