PERCY SHELLEY By Will Durant
When Shelley heard that Keats had died, by tubercle bacilli and the Quarterly Review, he sank into a long seclusion, and poured his wrath and grief into the greatest of English elegies, Adonais. He must have felt, with his feminine sensitivity to every wind of fate, how closely bound was his own destiny with that of Keats-how soon he, too, would fall defeated in the eternal war of poetry and fact.
For Shelley, as Sir Henry Maine would have put it, had based his life and thought on the “State of Nature,” on Rousseau’s dream of a Golden Age in which all men had been, or would be, equal, and he was almost physiologically hostile to that “Historical Method” which balances ideals with realities, and aspirations with history. He could not read history; it seemed to him an abominable record of miseries and crimes; in every age that he studied he sought out not the actual conduct and vicissitudes of men, but their poetry and their religion, their ideal feelings and desires; he knew Aeschylus better than he knew Thucydides; and he forgot that in Aeschylus Prometheus was bound. What could be more certain than his suffering?
He was as sensitive as his “Sensitive Plant,” subject like it to quick decay while rougher fibers flourished and survived. He described himself through Julian as “Me, who am as a nerve o’er which do creep the else unfelt oppressions of this earth.” No one would have thought, seeing this delicate lad, never quite adult, that he had set all England fuming with his heresies. Trelawney, meeting him for the first time, wrote:“Was it possible this mild-looking, beardless boy could be the veritable monster at war with all the world?” McCready, the painter, said that he could not portray Shelley’s face, because it was “too beautiful,” and too elusively so; the man’s soul was elsewhere.
No one was ever more completely or exclusively a poet. He is to poets what Spenser was before Shelley came—the very embodiment of all that poetry means. “Poetry,” he wrote, in his famous “Defense,”—“poetry, and the principle of Self, of which money is the visible incarnation, are the God and the Mammon of the world…. But it exceeds all imagination to conceive what would have been the moral condition of the world if neither Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Calderon, Lord Bacon nor Milton had ever existed; if Raphael and Michelangelo had never been born; if the Hebrew poetry had never been translated; if a revival of the study of Greek literature had never taken place; if no monuments of ancient sculpture had been handed down to us; and if the poetry of the religion of the ancient world had been extinguished together with its beliefs.”
On July 8, 1822, Shelley and his friend Williams left the Casa Magni in which they were staying on the island of Lerici, and sailed in Shelley’s boat, the Ariel, across the Bay of Spezzia to Leghorn, to meet the impoverished Leigh Hunt and his abounding family, whom Shelley had recklessly invited to Italy as his guests. The little sailboat accomplished the trip to Leghorn safely, but as they were all about to return, the skies announced a storm. Hunt decided to remain behind with his brood, and to come the next day, but Shelley insisted on returning to Lerici; Mary Shelley and Mrs.Williams had been left there alone, and would be worried if their men did not appear. As the two youths set out from the harbor the sailors on the ships they passed warned them to comeback. But they sailed on.
When they failed to reach Casa Magni that night Mary Shelley knew that fate had taken her poet from her. She broke out in wild despair, and engaged a vessel early the next morning to take her to Leghorn. There she found Hunt and Byron, but no Williams or Shelley. Byron went energetically to work and had the coast searched for mile after mile. It was not till after eight days that they found the body of Williams, lying bloated and almost unrecognizable on the sands; and not for another two days did they find Shelley—all that remained of him, the flesh torn away from his bones by vultures, the face gone beyond recognition; they knew him only from the Sophocles in one pocket and the Keats in another.
The law of Tuscany required that bodies thrown up by the sea must be burnt to avoid pestilence. So Byron and Hunt and Trelawney built a pyre, and when the body was half consumed, Trelawney snatched the heart out of the flames. The widow had the heart buried near Keats in the Protestant Cemetery at Rome, under a slab bearing the simple words, Cor cordium—“heart of hearts.” When she died, twenty-nine years later, it was found that her copy of Adonais contained (in a silken covering) the ashes of her dead lover, at that page which speaks of immortality, and the hope that springs forever in defeated men.
Grateful thanks to
CLASSIC LITERATURES group, Facebook
