“One night loud cries were heard issuing from the saloon. The Williamses rushed out of their room in alarm; Mrs. Shelley fainted at the door. Entering the saloon, the Williamses found Shelley staring horribly into the air, and evidently in a state of trance. They waked him, and he related that a figure wrapped in a mantle came to his bedside and beckoned him. He must then have risen in his sleep, for he followed the imaginary figure into the saloon, when it lifted the hood of its mantle, ejaculated ‘siete sodisfatto,’ and vanished.”

A little later (May 6, 1822), he was one day walking with Edward Williams when he suddenly caught hold of Williams’ arm, stared at the sea, and exclaimed, “There it is again! There!” Afterwards he explained to his friend that he had seen the child Allegra, naked, rising from the sea and smiling at him.

At another time he dreamed that Edward Williams appeared like a corpse, and warned him that the sea was flooding the house.

Now, although it is possible, and to most people will appear probable, that these strange visions were mere subjective figments of the poet’s overheated brain, yet they were curiously prophetic. Shelley and Edward Williams were drowned together in July 1822—within a few weeks of these apparitions. There is, indeed, much evidence in favour of the objective reality of such apparitions. Myers, Gurney, Flamarion, and several other well-known investigators have shown that before, or shortly after death such phantasms have frequently been seen; sometimes by the person whose death is impending, sometimes by near friends. It would seem that they are even perceived by animals in some instances. In the particular case which we are discussing, scientific evidence is, of course, not available, and we have to rely on quite ordinary witnesses. But it would seem that the phenomena affected at least one person besides Shelley. When relating these events, Mary says that:

“Shelley had often seen these figures when ill; but the strangest thing is that Mrs. Williams saw him. Now Jane, though a woman of sensibility, has not much imagination, and is not in the slightest degree nervous, neither in dreams or otherwise.”

Mary then narrates that Jane, while standing at a window with Trelawny, saw Shelley twice pass in front of the window, although he was, as a matter of fact, nowhere near the place at the time; and, of course, Trelawny could not see the phantom.

I have said enough, perhaps, to indicate that Shelley may have possessed the germs of powers and faculties that are at once vaster and subtler than those familiar to us all. It is true that he never attained that more extended consciousness which characterises the great mystics, and that he died before his latent faculties were fully established; but he gave many indications of these faculties. That those indications were to some extent pathological is but natural, and redounds more to the discredit of society than of the poet. Given a nature fundamentally disposed to experience Love as an ardent and exalted comradeship towards those of his own sex, and given an environment in which that disposition is persecuted mercilessly; granted also a considerable liability to mental decentralisation to begin with; and one sees that a strong repression was bound to follow, and that some degree of paranoia would be the probable result of that repression.

But there were other things in Shelley’s nature, psychic faculties of tremendous significance which, having first been revealed by the intuitions which inspired his poetry and his thought, were gradually growing in power, and but for his death would doubtless have established themselves. Shelley, had he lived, would have taken his place beside the great mystics.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Complete Poetical Works of Shelley, Oxford Press.