To return to the Shelleys.It was decided that the summer of 1822 should be spent with the Williamses, and after some search a house just capable of holding both families was found near Lerici, on the east side of the Bay of Spezzia.It was a lonely, wind-swept place, with its feet in the waves.The natives were half-savage; there was no furniture, and no facility for getting provisions.The omens opened badly.At the moment of moving in, news of Allegra's death came; Shelley was shaken and saw visions, and Mary disliked the place at first sight.Still, there was the sea washing their terrace, and Shelley loved the sea (there is scarcely one of his poems in which a boat does not figure, though it is usually made of moonstone); and, while Williams fancied himself as a navigator, Trelawny was really at home on the water.A certain Captain Roberts was commissioned to get a boat built at Genoa, where Byron also was fitting out a yacht, the 'Bolivar'.When the 'Ariel'--for so they called her--arrived, the friends were delighted with her speed and handiness.She was a thirty-footer, without a deck, ketch-rigged.[1] Shelley's health was good, and this June, passed in bathing, sailing, reading, and hearing Jane sing simple melodies to her guitar in the moonlight, was a gleam of happiness before the end.It was not so happy for Mary, who was ill and oppressed with housekeeping for two families, and over whose relations with Shelley a film of querulous jealousy had crept.
[1 Professor Dowden, 'Life of Shelley', vol.ii., p.501, says "schooner-rigged." This is a landsman's mistake.]
Leigh Hunt, that amiable, shiftless, Radical man of letters, was coming out from England with his wife; on July 1st Shelley and Williams sailed in the 'Ariel' to Leghorn to meet them, and settle them into the ground-floor of Byron's palace at Pisa.
His business despatched, Shelley returned from Pisa to Leghorn, with Hunt's copy of Keats's 'Hyperion' in his pocket to read on the voyage home.Though the weather looked threatening, he put to sea again on July 8th, with Williams and an English sailor-boy.Trelawny wanted to convoy them in Byron's yacht, but was turned back by the authorities because he had no port-clearance.The air was sultry and still, with a storm brewing, and he went down to his cabin and slept.When he awoke, it was to see fishing-boats running into harbour under bare poles amid the hubbub of a thunder-squall.In that squall the 'Ariel' disappeared.It is doubtful whether the unseaworthy craft was merely swamped, or whether, as there is some reason to suppose, an Italian felucca ran her down with intent to rob the Englishmen.In any case, the calamity is the crowning example of that combination of bad management and bad luck which dogged Shelley all his life.It was madness to trust an open boat, manned only by the inexperienced Williams and a boy (for Shelley was worse than useless), to the chances of a Mediterranean storm.And destiny turns on trifles; if the 'Bolivar' had been allowed to sail, Trelawny might have saved them.
He sent out search-parties, and on July 19th sealed the despairing women's certainty of disaster by the news that the bodies had been washed ashore.Shelley's was identified by a copy of Sophocles in one coat-pocket and the Keats in another.
What Trelawny then did was an action of that perfect fitness to which only the rarest natures are prompted: he charged himself with the business of burning the bodies.This required some organisation.There were official formalities to fulfil, and the materials had to be assembled--the fuel, the improvised furnace, the iron bars, salt and wine and oil to pour upon the pyre.In his artless 'Records' he describes the last scene on the seashore.Shelley's body was given to the flames on a day of intense heat, when the islands lay hazy along the horizon, and in the background the marble-flecked Apennines gleamed.
Byron looked on until he could stand it no longer, and swam off to his yacht.The heart was the last part to be consumed.By Trelawny's care the ashes were buried in the Protestant cemetery at Rome.
It is often sought to deepen our sense of this tragedy by speculating on what Shelley would have done if he had lived.
But, if such a question must be asked, there are reasons for thinking that he might not have added much to his reputation.
It may indeed be an accident that his last two years were less fertile in first-rate work than the years 1819 and 1820, and that his last unfinished poem, 'The Triumph of Life', is even more incoherent than its predecessors; yet, when we consider the nature of his talent, the fact is perhaps significant.His song was entirely an affair of uncontrolled afflatus, and this is a force which dwindles in middle life, leaving stranded the poet who has no other resource.Some men suffer spiritual upheavals and eclipses, in which they lose their old selves and emerge with new and different powers; but we may be fairly sure that this would not have happened to Shelley, that as he grew older he would always have returned to much the same impressions; for his mind, of one piece through and through, had that peculiar rigidity which can sometimes be observed in violently unstable characters.The colour of his emotion would have fluctuated--it took on, as it was, a deepening shade of melancholy; but there is no indication that the material on which it worked would have changed.
