Time has confirmed this sensible opinion. A more brutal, a more ruthless, a more utterly unfeeling book does not exist in English literature. Save for the rhetoric about the “pallid slaves,” and some Byronic transports over the body of Zela, the story knows less of sympathy than a crocodile. Moreover, it is nowhere amusing. What carries it along, what made it a success in its own time, and has won it a reprint in our own, is its superlative vividness. The picture may be that of a man, shot in the heart, spinning about; it may be the impression of thick resistance which human flesh offers to the hand that stabs;—whatever it may be, image or sensation, it is real, it is true, and it is the unconscious artist who affects us and no mere business of superlative photography. Overlong, chaotic, and ruffianly as it is, the book is no lifeless curiosity of literature.
Such was the existence from which the deserter and adventurer returned to Europe. Were one to swallow the book whole, it might well be imagined that the Trelawny who arrived in London was a proper subject for a gallows. Yet the adventurer who in England took the place that was his by birth as a gentleman’s son was no skull and bones ruffian. There are no stories, no rumours that tell of ruffianism or ruffianly qualities; when this young Arab-featured man called on his neighbours, there were no blanched faces at the windows, or wild whispers to send the ladies upstairs and hide the spoons. Sometimes a good family will unaccountably produce a ruffianly type; the incident is rare, but it is encountered,—but Trelawny was not of these.
The Younger Son who had been born with something dark and ancient in his blood, who had endured a savage and neglected boyhood and adolescence, had returned to England reasonably civilised at least. Such was not the customary result of seven years of piracy!
The explanation is probably a very simple one; the boy savage, the demon midshipman, had grown up. With the arrival of manhood, the fundamental qualities of the man’s character and original mind had broken through the barbarism of his early life.
The streak of Celtic battle savagery he had inherited was still in his veins; he never lost it. Seven years later, while accompanying Byron to the revolt in Greece, he spoke of “the best of all excitement.” The poet showed curiosity. “Fighting,” added Trelawny, and was not guilty of a pose. There were times when he showed a certain cold-blooded streak; the pirate was not touchily fastidious. He had a mind, he was a born observer, and he was nobody’s fool. There is no evidence that he had much imaginative quality. The ideas he had, he clung to emotionally, for they were really emotions in borrowed clothes. His enthusiasm for “Europe’s pallid slaves,” for instance;—what is it but his own transmuted resentment for his own loveless and cruel boyhood,—what was his hatred of “sycophants, priests and kings” but his own hatred of those in authority who had oppressed his youth? He does not appear ever to have arrived at any intellectual understanding of his attitude.
The young man of mystery returned to England with a little money, and presently carried out an anchor to windward. He married, and in a sentence of matchless pathos, lamented his rose-decked chain. He had become “a shackled, care-worn and spirit-broken married man of the civilised west.” There are those who say that the lady was frivolous and wasteful. It probably mattered little, for the adventurer’s relations with his various wives were astoundingly casual; they have something of the kiss and good-bye of the legendary sailor.
The roses of matrimony beginning to lose their petals, the younger son took to escaping on vagabond adventures. The incredible snobbery of contemporary British life, “its mystic castes, coteries, sets and sects, its ... purseproud tuft-hunting and toadying” got on the nerves of this man who had seen life in the raw. Fleeing to Switzerland, he made friends with another wandering Briton, one Mr. Edward Elliker Williams, a half-pay lieutenant of the Eighth Dragoons. Mr. Williams chattered for hours of his marvellous friend, Mr. Percy Shelley, the poet, who had so splendidly defied the ideas and conventions of contemporary Britain. There was a man and a rebel! Expelled from Oxford for atheism, the hero of a romantic elopement at eighteen, the hero of a defiant free union at twenty-one, the contemner and accuser of every dastardly sycophant, king and priest in the solar system. And a poet, sir!
Mr. Shelley the exile,—here was a man for Trelawny of his own unconventional mould. Shelley the rebel. Shelley the Lucifer! He would go to him; the sycophants, kings and so forths had better take care. “I swore to dedicate myself,” said the pirate later, “hand and heart to war, even to the knife, against the triple alliance of hoary headed impostors, their ministers and priests!” How the rhetoric brings before one’s eyes the liberal anger at the Tory reaction following the wild revolutionary years!
Mr. Williams arranged the meeting, and took “our friend Tre” to Pisa. Was “Tre” a little disappointed at the appearance of the exiled Lucifer and poetic arch-scandaliser; had he prepared himself for something robust, defiant and rhetorical, someone quite in his own style? There are times when this emotion seems visible between the lines of Trelawny’s account of the meeting. Whatever the expectation may have been, Shelley won his piratic visitor heart and soul. A young man with an Arab’s thin nose and bronzed cheeks and a young man with great open eyes, a boy’s fresh face and a crown of yellow hair,—the pirate and the scholar rebel—a fantastic alliance!
No wild outcries from British throats, however, disturbed the stout and comfortable Italian padres who stopped in the streets of Pisa to take snuff, and wandered off brushing the specklets of brown dust from their soutanes. Incomprehensible Ingleses! The exiles were all under thirty, they had all made their lives something of an adventure, they were all glad to be alive.