IT IS to-day a hundred years since that sultry afternoon when Edward John Trelawny, aboard Byron’s schooner-yacht Bolivar, fretted anxiously in Leghorn Harbour and watched the threatening sky. The thunderstorm that broke about half-past six lasted only twenty minutes, but it was long enough to drown both Shelley and his friend Williams, very haphazard yachtsmen, who had set off a few hours earlier in their small craft. It was only some foolish red tape about quarantine that had prevented Trelawny from convoying them in the Bolivar; in which case, probably, that dauntless and all-competent adventurer could have saved them. He was already dubious of their navigating skill. So, if there is any comfort in the thought, one may conclude that Shelley—though of course doomed to some tragic end, for skylarks do not die in nests—was partly the victim of that invincible social and bureaucratic stupidity against which he had always nobly chafed.
Those of our clients who care to devote this week-end to some meditation on Shelley and what he still means to us can well begin with Professor Firkins’s excellent essay. Mr. Firkins, with his usual clarity, lays pen upon a number of considerations that have always occurred to Shelley’s readers, but are not often carefully thought out. For our own part, we also have a mind to reread Francis Thompson’s essay, which remains in our memory as a prismatic dazzle of metaphor. But there are two items which, if our high-spirited clients have not read, they should certainly take steps to meditate. Hogg’s description of Shelley at Oxford is as lovely a picture of youthful genius as one is likely to find: and Trelawny’s Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron gives the other panel of the portrait. It is surely not often that chance bequeaths us such sympathetic observers for both beginning and end of a great life. And then, of course, it is not impossible for our clients to recruit their imaginations by reading some of Shelley himself. If your hearts are what we like to think they are, you may
Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number.
But, for information about Shelley, Trelawny is the darling of all hearts. There is something indescribably manly in his rough, cheery, potent narrative, with its amazing vigour and humour. “As a general rule,” says he, “it is wise to avoid writers whose works amuse or delight you, for when you see them they will delight you no more.” But Shelley, he adds, was a grand exception to this very wise rule. One could happily spread several pages with excerpts from his good-humoured, observant companionship with Shelley and Byron. But, to commemorate the date now here, we intend to copy out part of his description of the burning of Shelley’s body on the Italian coast. Fine and gruesome as it is, we cannot help believing it not well enough known among those younger clients whom we daily cudgel towards virtue. Trelawny says:
The lonely and grand scenery that surrounded us so exactly harmonized with Shelley’s genius that I could imagine his spirit soaring over us. The sea was before us ... not a human dwelling was in sight. As I thought of the delight Shelley felt in such scenes of loneliness and grandeur whilst living, I felt we were no better than a herd of wolves or a pack of wild dogs, in tearing out his battered and naked body from the pure yellow sand that lay so lightly over it, to drag him back to the light of day; but the dead have no voice, nor had I power to check the sacrilege.... Even Byron was silent and thoughtful. We were startled and drawn together by a dull hollow sound that followed the blow of a mattock; the iron had struck a skull, and the body was soon uncovered. Lime had been strewn upon it; this, or decomposition, had the effect of staining it of a dark and ghastly indigo color. Byron asked me to preserve the skull for him; but remembering that he had formerly used one as a drinking-cup, I was determined Shelley’s should not be so profaned. The limbs did not separate from the trunk, as in the case of Williams’s body, so that the corpse was removed entire into the furnace. I had taken the precaution of having more and larger pieces of timber, in consequence of my experience of the day before of the difficulty of consuming a corpse in the open air with our apparatus. After the fire was well kindled we repeated the ceremony of the previous day; and more wine was poured over Shelley’s dead body than he had consumed during his life. This with the oil and salt made the yellow flames glisten and quiver. The heat from the sun and fire was so intense that the atmosphere was tremulous and wavy. The corpse fell open and the heart was laid bare. The frontal bone of the skull, where it had been struck with the mattock, fell off; and, as the back of the head rested on the red-hot bottom bars of the furnace, the brains literally seethed, bubbled, and boiled as in a cauldron, for a very long time.
Byron could not face this scene; he withdrew to the beach and swam off to the Bolivar. Leigh Hunt remained in the carriage. The fire was so fierce as to produce a white heat on the iron, and to reduce its contents to grey ashes. The only portions that were not consumed were some fragments of bones, the jaw, and the skull, but what surprised us all, was that the heart remained entire. In snatching this relic from the fiery furnace, my hand was severely burnt; and had any one seen me do the act I should have been put into quarantine.
After cooling the iron machine in the sea, I collected the human ashes and placed them in a box, which I took on board the Bolivar.
There are those still living who have shaken the hard, quick hand that snatched Shelley’s heart from the coals. Sir Sidney Colvin, for instance, who tells much about Trelawny in his Memories and Notes of Persons and Places. And ghastly as the above account may seem to those of tender sensibility, the parable it implies is too rich to be omitted. Lo! were they not words of Shelley’s that winged the greatest popular success in recent fiction?A And, though lulled long ago by the blue Mediterranean—
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,
Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams—
that burning, reckless heart survives to us little corrupted by time—survives as a symbol of poetic energy superior to the common routines of life. “Mighty meat for little guests, when the heart of Shelley was laid in the cemetery of Caius Cestius!”
