Whither he went, or whence he came, or why
He made one of the multitude, yet so
Was borne amid the crowd as through the sky
One of the million leaves of summer’s bier. —
Old age & youth, manhood & infancy,
Mixed in one mighty torrent did appear,
Some flying from the thing they feared & some
Seeking the object of another’s fear. . . .24
Shelley (the poet is now his own narrator and observer, as Dante casts his own persona in the Inferno) sits under his tree and gazes upon this stream of humanity, seeing everything in ‘a cold glare, intenser than the noon, But icy cold’, which obscures ‘with (blinding) light The Sun, as he the stars’. Gradually the scurrying, flitting activity begins to concentrate into a massive crowd, and from this, driven by a huge hooded figure, bursts forth the Chariot.
This is the central image, and the key passage of the poem. Throughout the description, Shelley is constantly reshaping the exact picture of the Chariot itself, so that it takes on a protean, hallucinatory quality, its outlines always altering and shifting as if seen through distortions of light or water. It begins clearly as one of the chariots of the Roman Forum, but gradually it turns into a kind of vast, trundling, crushing Moloch, and from that diffuses further into something simply like a great storm wave thundering through disturbed sea, and leaving behind it a creaming wake. The effect is brutal and terrifying. The Chariot is the chariot of Life, and those who dance around it are those whom Life will unhesitatingly crush, their intellectual joy and sexual energy fruitlessly sacrificed and destroyed. It is one of the great images in English poetry.
The crowd gave way, & I arose aghast,
Or seemed to rise, so mighty was the trance,
And saw like clouds upon the thunder blast
The million with fierce song and maniac dance
Raging around; such seemed the jubilee
As when to greet some conqueror’s advance
Imperial Rome poured forth her living sea
From senate house & forum & theatre. . . .
… Now swift, fierce & obscene
The wild dance maddens in the van, & those
Who lead it, fleet as shadows on the green,
Outspeed the chariot & without repose
Mix with each other in tempestuous measure
To savage music… Wilder as it grows,
They, tortured by the agonizing pleasure,
Convulsed & on the rapid whirlwinds spun
Of that fierce Spirit, whose unholy leisure
Was soothed by mischief since the world begun,
Throw back their heads & loose their streaming hair,
And in their dance round her who dims the Sun
Maidens & youths fling their wild arms in air
As their feet twinkle; they recede, and now
Bending within each other’s atmosphere
Kindle invisibly; and as they glow
Like moths by light attracted & repelled,
Oft to their bright destruction come & go.
Till like two clouds into one vale impelled
That shake the mountains when their lightnings mingle
And die in rain, — the fiery band which held
Their natures, snaps — ere the shock cease to tingle
One falls and then another in the path
Senseless, nor is the desolation single,
Yet ere I can say where — the Chariot hath
Past over them; nor other trace I find
But as of foam after the Ocean’s wrath
Is spent upon the desert shore. — Behind,
Old men and women foully disarrayed
Shake their grey hairs in the insulting wind,
Limp in the dance & strain with limbs decayed
To reach the car of light which leaves them still
Farther behind & deeper in the shade.25
It is at the moment of facing this appalling image of despair that Shelley discovers Rousseau, like the old root, resting at his side. Rousseau now offers to act as Shelley’s commentator and guide, and he explains the nature of the Triumph and points out many great public figures in it, including Napoleon, Catherine the Great, the Roman Emperors, the Popes, Kant, Voltaire, Bacon, even Plato. All of them, Rousseau explains, had one underlying failure: their philosophy
Taught them not this — to know themselves; their might
Could not repress the mutiny within,
And for the morn of truth they feigned, deep night
Caught them ere evening.26
This section of the poem is in many places only roughly blocked in; there are many gaps and inconsistencies in the stanzas, and in the margins of his manuscript Shelley left names and portraits whom he had not yet fitted in.
The second section of the poem is now developed. Rousseau begins to tell Shelley his own experiences of life, and especially of love, his own Epipsychidion. For him, the ideal woman brought disastrous knowledge of reality. Moving ‘between desire & shame’, Rousseau had questioned her about the true nature of human relations. In reply she gave him a cup to drink, a cup of experience. The ‘multiple image’ with which Shelley presents this flash of horrific discovery is unsurpassed anywhere else in his writing:
I rose; and, bending at her sweet command,
Touched with faint lips the cup she raised,
And suddenly my brain became as sand
Where the first wave had more than half erased
The track of deer on desert Labrador,
Whilst the fierce wolf from which they fled amazed
Leaves his stamp visibly upon the shore
Until the second bursts — so on my sight
Burst a new Vision never seen before. . . .27
The new vision is Rousseau’s own first sight of the Chariot of Life in triumph. He describes more carefully the appearance of the young people who dance around it, and especially how the air all about them is full of shadows, and spirits, dark flitting shapes, like ‘a flock of vampire-bats before the glare Of the tropic sun’. Some of these shapes and phantoms come from the faces of the young people. It is as if layers of their youth were continually peeling away from their flesh and taking on their own grotesque forms of life, like hideous animated masks. The visage beneath gradually shrinks and twists as these masks or ‘idols’ fly off jibbering into the shadows.
… I became aware
Of whence those forms proceeded which thus stained
The track in which we moved; after brief space
From every form the beauty slowly waned,
From every firmest limb & fairest face
The strength & freshness fell like dust, & left
The action & the shape without the grace
Of life; the marble brow of youth was cleft
With care, and in the eyes where once hope shone
Desire like a lioness bereft
Of its last cub, glared ere it died; each one
Of that great crowd sent forth incessantly
These shadows, numerous as the dead leaves blown
In Autumn evening from a poplar tree.
Each like himself & like each other were
At first, but soon distorted seemed to be
Obscure clouds moulded by the casual air;
And of this stuff the car’s creative ray
Wrought all the busy phantoms that were there
As the sun shapes the clouds; thus on the way
Mask after mask fell from the countenance
And form of all; and long before the day
Was old, the joy which waked like Heaven’s glance
The sleepers in the oblivious valley, died;
And some grew weary of the ghastly dance
And fell, as I have fallen, by the way side. . . .28
This is Shelley’s final explanation of his own world of ghosts and spirits: ‘projections’ of his own personality, parts of himself left behind, or in the na
me of his old sceptical master Lucretius, ‘idols’, self-created delusions, and none the less real for that. The poem was now over five hundred lines long. Where Rousseau began to talk of those who ‘Fell, as I have fallen by the wayside’, here, on his manuscript sheet, Shelley stopped, and wrote in tiny neat lettering: ‘Alas I kiss you Jane.’29 His train of thought was broken, and writing and scratching out half a dozen more lines, he put the manuscript away in his pocket. He did not write any more of it; in the end there was no time.*
Claire had arrived back at the Casa Magni on 7 June. She was now in good spirits, talkative and teasing as in the old days: Shelley called her ‘la fille aux mille projets’.30 Two days later, Mary was very ill in the excessive, sweltering heat and almost had a miscarriage, but she recovered. She began to hate the house.31 Then on the 13th, looking like a pirate frigate, the Bolivar sailed into the bay of Lerici and fired a six-gun salute to the Don Juan. Captain Roberts and Trelawny were aboard, taking the ship from Genoa to Lord Byron at Livorno. Mary was glad of their company and they dined and stayed on at the Casa Magni for five days, making an excuse of the heavy swell and changes in the rigging.
The sea had got up so much on the 15th that the Bolivar was taken into Lerici harbour, and the Don Juan was moored up alongside her. Shelley and Williams looked enviously at the massive American rigging of their sister ship, with its three masts and cluster of topsails. In conversation with Captain Roberts, a scheme was conceived to re-rig the Don Juan, and build a false stern and prow section to increase the narrow, streamlined elegance of her profile. Roberts agreed to stay behind at Lerici when the Bolivar sailed.
At 8 o’clock on the morning of 16 June Mary’s illness did finally result in a bad miscarriage. She bled profusely and when Shelley sent for a doctor and for ice, nobody came to the remote house for seven hours. Mary thought she was going to die. ‘I lay nearly lifeless — kept from fainting by brandy, vinegar eau de Cologne &c — at length ice was brought to our solitude — it came before the doctor so Claire and Jane were afraid of using it . . . .’32 But Shelley was quite ruthless in the emergency: he had a tin hip bath filled up with the ice, and plunged Mary into it and made her sit still till all the bleeding stopped. The rest of the household looked on in helpless horror, but his method worked. Two days later he wrote to John Gisborne: ‘I succeeded in checking the haemorrhage and fainting fits, so that when the physician arrived all danger was over, and he had nothing to do but applaud me for by boldness. [Mary] is now doing well, and the sea baths will soon restore her.’33 But she did not recover quickly, and at the beginning of July was only just able to ‘crawl from [her] bedroom to the terrace’.34 Claire was a great help to Mary at this time; but Jane Williams was more concerned with Shelley. It was she who went out with the men in the boat, sometimes taking the guitar Shelley had given her with its inlaid fretwork of flowers, so that the music floated across the water to the Casa Magni.
On 18 June Trelawny took the Bolivar out of Lerici harbour, and made south for Livorno. Captain Roberts and Williams began refitting the Don Juan, mounting the fore and aft sections, and preparing the new topmast rigging they had designed for both masts. It took up all their time for the next week. Shelley no longer had the release of sailing, except for the little shallop, and he stayed at the Casa Magni writing letters to Trelawny and John Gisborne, and working intermittently on his poem. His letter to Trelawny, whom he had only just waved off, was very strange. Most of it consisted of a long request for a lethal dose of ‘the Prussic Acid, or essential oil of bitter almonds’. He explained that he had 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’. The letter does not ring quite right, it is both morbid and artificial at the same time, and one has the feeling that Shelley was trying deliberately to impress Trelawny with his own uncertain state. One reason for Shelley’s guilt and depression appeared in the line of postscript: ‘PS. Mary is better, though still excessively weak.’35 He knew Trelawny was fond of Mary, and perhaps he felt that the Cornishman blamed his treatment of her.
To John Gisborne, he wrote more freely: ‘Italy is more and more delightful to me. . . . I only feel the want of those who can feel, and understand me. Whether from proximity and the continuity of domestic intercourse, Mary does not. The necessity of concealing from her thoughts that would pain her, necessitates this, perhaps. It is the curse of Tantalus . . . .’ The Williamses on the other hand he found more and more pleasing, though as he aptly put it ‘words are not the instruments of our intercourse’. Claire was ‘vivacious and talkative, and though she teases me sometimes, I like her’. Though he was not writing — ‘Imagine Demosthenes reciting a Philippic to the waves of the Atlantic’ — he was feeling well, and outwardly contented. The bay of Lerici was dazzlingly fine in the changing lights, and the sailing magical. ‘[My boat] is swift and beautiful, and appears quite a vessel. Williams is captain, and we drive along this delightful bay in the evening wind, under the summer moon, until earth appears another world. Jane brings her guitar, and if the past and the future could be obliterated, the present would content me so well that I could say with Faust to the passing moment, “Remain, thou, thou art so beautiful.”’36
Shelley composed little songs and poems for Jane, one of which ‘The Keen Stars are Twinkling . . .’ he left in her room with a note: ‘I commit [it] to your secrecy and your mercy, and will try to do better another time.’37 Other poems belonging to these few days were the dedication of her guitar, ‘Ariel to Miranda . . .’, ‘When the Lamp is Shattered’, and the ‘Lines Written in the Bay of Lerici’:
And the fisher with his lamp
And spear about the low rocks damp
Crept, and struck the fish which came
To worship the delusive flame. . . .38
He had cast his spell over Jane, and she once reported with terror that she had seen his figure walk twice along the terrace while he was actually aboard the boat.39
Shelley kept a small white vellum notebook40 in his pocket in which he jotted parts of these brief lyrics and ariettes, as he called them to Jane. He translated a few more lines of Faust, and sketched boats, sailing rigs and a chariot with a rider whipping on his horse who turns to look balefully back at him.41 He also put odd Biblical fragments in the notebook. In the middle of one page is: ‘Thou shalt be hidden from the scourge of the angel — Thou shalt be in league with the stones of the field.’ And at the bottom: ‘Thou makest me to possess the iniquities of my youth’; and ‘The mind’s invisible tyranny’.42 On the front inside cover he wrote in large, black ink: ‘The Spring rebels not against winter but it succeeds it — the dawn rebels not against night but it disperses it.’
Definite news had now reached Lerici of Hunt, who had arrived at long last in Genoa and was about to sail to Livorno. Captain Roberts and Williams hurried to finish the refitting so they could sail to meet him, and the Don Juan was relaunched on the 22nd. She now had two complete new sets of topmast rigging, and could fly three spinnakers and a storm jib. She looked ‘like a vessel of 50 tons’ Williams wrote with pride. But despite all the new woodwork and rigging, she floated three inches higher on her revised ballast load.43 Shelley told Mary that they intended to sail on the 24th, but she begged him not to go, as she felt helpless without him and worried about the health of the child Percy Florence.
On the night before the planned departure, Williams wrote in his journal that ‘Shelley sees spirits and alarms the whole house’.44 Mary’s account, later written to Maria Gisborne, is genuinely horrifying.
… The fright my illness gave him caused a return of nervous sensations & visions as bad as in his worst times. I think it was the Saturday after my illness while yet unable to walk I was confined to my bed — in the middle of the night I was awoken by hearing him scream & come rushing into my room; I was sure he was asleep & tried to waken him by calling on him, but he continued to scream which inspired me with such a panic that
I jumped out of bed & ran across the hall to Mrs Williams’s room where I fell through weakness, though I was so frightened that I got up again immediately — she let me in & Williams went to Shelley who had been wakened by my getting out of bed — he said that he had not been asleep & that it was a vision that he saw that had frightened him — 45
Under questioning, Shelley explained that he had seen two visions: one was of the lacerated figures of Edward and Jane covered with blood who staggered into his room supporting each other and shouted, ‘Get up Shelley the sea is flooding the house & it is all coming down.’ The other vision was when he rushed into Mary’s room to waken her: he saw his own figure bending over the bed strangling her. Shelley did not sail for Genoa the next day, for Mary had a relapse as a result of these visitations.46 He talked to her calmly in the morning about the many other visions that he had been seeing lately. The only one Mary records was another meeting with himself.’. . . He had seen the figure of himself which met him as he walked on the terrace & said to him — “How long do you mean to be content?” ’47 It was of course his Zoroastrian double; he had at last succeeded in thoroughly terrifying Mary.
The trip to meet Hunt was now postponed until 1 July, when Hunt should have arrived at Livorno. The heat was again oppressive, and in San Terenzo and Lerici church prayers were offered for rain. At night the Fiesta of St John was celebrated on the shore, and the local people danced and sang wildly in the surf.48 Two days before sailing, Shelley wrote a long letter to Horace Smith in Versailles, largely about politics. ‘It seems to me that things have now arrived at such a crisis as requires every man plainly to utter his sentiments on the inefficacy of the existing religions no less than political systems for restraining & guiding mankind. Let us see the truth whatever that may be — ’ Having finished the letter, he turned it round and wrote crosswise on top of his previous writing: ‘I still inhabit this divine bay, reading Spanish dramas & sailing & listening to the most enchanting music.’49 Shelley seems to have had some discussion with Williams on public affairs too, and on the last day of the month, Williams sat on the deck of the Don Juan as the topmast rigging was being reset for the final time and read Shelley’s copy of Queen Mab under the baking sun. ‘An astonishing work.’50