INTRODUCTION.
PROSERPINE.
PROSERPINE.
MIDAS.
MIDAS.
INTRODUCTION.
I.
‘
The
compositions published in Mrs. Shelley’s lifetime afford but an
inadequate conception of the intense sensibility and mental vigour
of
this extraordinary woman.’Thus
wrote Dr. Garnett, in 1862 (Preface to his Relics of Shelley). The
words of praise may have sounded unexpectedly warm at that date.
Perhaps the present volume will make the reader more willing to
subscribe, or less inclined to demur.Mary
Godwin in her younger days certainly possessed a fair share of that
nimbleness of invention which generally characterizes women of
letters. Her favourite pastime as a child, she herself
testifies,1
had been to write stories. And a dearer pleasure had been—to use
her own characteristic abstract and elongated way of putting
it—‘the
following up trains of thought which had for their subject the
formation of a succession of imaginary incidents’. All readers of
Shelley’s life remember how later on, as a girl of nineteen—and a
two years’ wife—she was present, ‘a devout but nearly silent
listener’, at the long symposia held by her husband and Byron in
Switzerland (June 1816), and how the pondering over ‘German
horrors’, and a common resolve to perpetrate ghost stories of their
own, led her to imagine that most unwomanly of all feminine
romances,
Frankenstein. The paradoxical effort was paradoxically successful,
and, as publishers’ lists aver to this day, Frankenstein’s
monster has turned out to be the hardest-lived specimen of the
‘raw-head-and-bloody-bones’ school of romantic tales. So much, no
doubt, to the credit of Mary Shelley. But more creditable, surely,
is
the fact that she was not tempted, as ‘Monk’ Lewis had been, to
persevere in those lugubrious themes.Although
her publishers—et pour cause—insisted on styling her ‘the
author of Frankenstein’, an entirely different vein appears in her
later productions. Indeed, a quiet reserve of tone, a slow, sober,
and sedate bearing, are henceforth characteristic of all her
literary
attitudes. It is almost a case of running from one to the other
extreme. The force of style which even adverse critics acknowledged
in Frankenstein was sometimes perilously akin to the most
disputable
kinds of romantic rant. But in the historical or society novels
which
followed, in the contributions which graced the ‘Keepsakes’ of
the thirties, and even—alas—in the various prefaces and
commentaries which accompanied the publication of so many poems of
Shelley, his wife succumbed to an increasing habit of almost
Victorian reticence and dignity. And those later novels and tales,
though they sold well in their days and were kindly reviewed, can
hardly boast of any reputation now. Most of them are pervaded by a
brooding spirit of melancholy of the ‘moping’ rather than the
‘musical’ sort, and consequently rather ineffective as an
artistic motive. Students of Shelley occasionally scan those pages
with a view to pick some obscure ‘hints and indirections’, some
veiled reminiscences, in the stories of the adventures and
misfortunes of The Last Man or Lodore. And the books may be good
biography at times—they are never life.Altogether
there is a curious contrast between the two aspects, hitherto
revealed, of Mary Shelley’s literary activities. It is as if the
pulse which had been beating so wildly, so frantically, in
Frankenstein (1818), had lapsed, with Valperga (1823) and the rest,
into an increasingly sluggish flow.The
following pages may be held to bridge the gap between those two
extremes in a felicitous way. A more purely artistic mood, instinct
with the serene joy and clear warmth of Italian skies, combining a
good deal of youthful buoyancy with a sort of quiet and
unpretending
philosophy, is here represented. And it is submitted that the
little
classical fancies which Mrs. Shelley never ventured to publish are
quite as worthy of consideration as her more ambitious prose
works.For
one thing they give us the longest poetical effort of the writer.
The
moon of Epipsychidion never seems to have been thrilled with the
music of the highest spheres. Yet there were times when Shelley’s
inspiration and example fired her into something more than her
usual
calm and cold brilliancy.One
of those periods—perhaps the happiest period in Mary’s life—was
during the early months in Italy of the English ‘exiles’. ‘She
never was more strongly impelled to write than at this time; she
felt
her powers fresh and strong within her; all she wanted was some
motive, some suggestion to guide her in the choice of a
subject.’2Shelley
then expected her to try her hand at a drama, perhaps on the
terrible
story of the Cenci, or again on the catastrophes of Charles the
First. Her Frankenstein was attracting more attention than had ever
been granted to his own works. And Shelley, with that touching
simplicity which characterized his loving moments, showed the
greatest confidence in the literary career of his wife. He helped
her
and encouraged her in every way. He then translated for her Plato’s
Symposium. He led her on in her Latin and Italian studies. He
wanted
her—probably as a sort of preliminary exercise before her flight
into tragedy—to translate Alfieri’s Myrrha. ‘Remember Charles
the First, and do you be prepared to bring at least some of Myrrha
translated,’ he wrote; ‘remember, remember Charles the First and
Myrrha,’ he insisted; and he quoted, for her benefit, the
presumptuous aphorism of Godwin, in St. Leon, ‘There is nothing
which the human mind can conceive which it may not execute’.3But
in the year that followed these auspicious days, the strain and
stress of her life proved more powerful on Mary Shelley than the
inspiration of literature. The loss of her little girl Clara, at
Venice, on the 24th of September 1818, was cruel enough. However,
she
tried hard not to show the ‘pusillanimous disposition’ which,
Godwin assured his daughter, characterizes the persons ‘that sink
long under a calamity of this nature’.4
But the death of her boy, William, at Rome, on the 4th of June
1819,
reduced her to a ‘kind of despair’. Whatever it could be to her
husband, Italy no longer was for her a ‘paradise of exiles’. The
flush and excitement of the early months, the ‘first fine careless
rapture’, were for ever gone. ‘I shall never recover that blow,’
Mary wrote on the 27th of June 1819; ‘the thought never leaves me
for a single moment; everything on earth has lost its interest for
me,’ This time her imperturbable father ’philosophized’ in
vain. With a more sympathetic and acuter intelligence of her case,
Leigh Hunt insisted (July 1819) that she should try and give her
paralysing sorrow some literary expression, ‘strike her pen into
some... genial subject... and bring up a fountain of gentle tears
for
us’. But the poor childless mother could only rehearse her
complaint—‘to have won, and thus cruelly to have lost’ (4
August 1819). In fact she had, on William’s death, discontinued her
diary.Yet
on the date just mentioned, as Shelley reached his twenty-seven
years, she plucked up courage and resumed the task. Shelley,
however
absorbed by the creative ardour of his Annus mirabilis, could not
but
observe that his wife’s ‘spirits continued wretchedly depressed’
(5 August 1819); and though masculine enough to resent the fact at
times more than pity it, he was human enough to persevere in that
habit of co-operative reading and writing which is one of the
finest
traits of his married life. ‘I write in the morning,’ his wife
testifies, ‘read Latin till 2, when we dine; then I read some
English book, and two cantos of Dante with Shelley’5
—a fair average, no doubt, of the homely aspect of the great days
which produced The Cenci and Prometheus.On
the 12th November, in Florence, the birth of a second son, Percy
Florence Shelley, helped Mary out of her sense of bereavement.
Subsequent letters still occasionally admit ‘low spirits’. But
the entries in the Journal make it clear that the year 1819-20 was
one of the most pleasantly industrious of her life. Not Dante only,
but a motley series of books, great and small, ancient and modern,
English and foreign, bespoke her attention. Not content with Latin,
and the extemporized translations which Shelley could give her of
Plato’s Republic, she started Greek in 1820, and soon came to
delight in it. And again she thought of original composition.
‘Write’, ‘work,’—the words now occur daily in her Journal.
These must mainly refer to the long historical novel, which she had
planned, as early as 1819,6
under the title of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca, and which was not
published until 1823, as Valperga. It was indeed a laborious task.
The novel ‘illustrative of the manners of the Middle Ages in Italy’
had to be ‘raked out of fifty old books’, as Shelley said.
7But
heavy as the undertaking must have been, it certainly did not
engross
all the activities of Shelley’s wife in this period. And it seems
highly probable that the two little mythological dramas which we
here
publish belong to this same year 1820.The
evidence for this date is as follows. Shelley’s lyrics, which these
dramas include, were published by his wife (Posthumous Poems, 1824)
among the ‘poems written in 1820’. Another composition, in blank
verse, curiously similar to Mary’s own work, entitled Orpheus, has
been allotted by Dr. Garnett (Relics of Shelley, 1862) to the same
category.
8 Again, it
may well be more than a coincidence, that the Proserpine motive
occurs in that passage from Dante’s Purgatorio, canto 28, on
‘Matilda gathering flowers’, which Shelley is known to have
translated shortly before Medwin’s visit in the late autumn of
1820.O
come, that I may hearThy song: like Proserpine, in Enna’s glen,Thou
seemest to my fancy,—singing here,And gathering flowers, as that
fair maiden, whenShe lost the spring and Ceres her more
dear.9But
we have a far more important, because a direct, testimony in a
manuscript addition made by Thomas Medwin in the margin of a copy
of
his Life of Shelley (1847).
10 The
passage is clearly intended—though chronology is no more than any
other exact science the ‘forte’ of that most tantalizing of
biographers—to refer to the year 1820.
‘