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- Herausgeber: Youcanprint
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
It is customary to regard Mary Shelley’s claims to literary distinction as so entirely rooted and grounded in her husband’s as to constitute a merely parasitic growth upon his fame. It may be unreservedly admitted that her association with Shelley, and her care of his writings and memory after his death, are the strongest of her titles to remembrance. It is further undeniable that the most original of her works is also that which betrays the strongest traces of his influence. Frankenstein was written when her brain, magnetized by his companionship, was capable of an effort never to be repeated. But if the frame of mind which engendered and sustained the work was created by Shelley, the conception was not his, and the diction is dissimilar to his. Both derive from Godwin, but neither is Godwin’s. The same observation, except for an occasional phrase caught from Shelley, applies to all her subsequent work. The frequent exaltation of spirit, the ideality and romance, may well have been Shelley’s—the general style of execution neither repeats nor resembles him. Mary Shelley’s voice, then, is not to die away as a mere echo of her illustrious husband’s. She has the prima facie claim to a hearing due to every writer who can assert the possession of a distinctive individuality; and if originality be once conceded to Frankenstein , as in all equity it must, none will dispute the validity of a title to fame grounded on such a work.
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Table of contents
INTRODUCTION.
I. THE SISTERS OF ALBANO.
II. FERDINANDO EBOLI.
III. THE EVIL EYE.
IV. THE DREAM.
V. THE MOURNER.
VI. THE FALSE RHYME.
VII. A TALE OF THE PASSIONS; OR, THE DEATH OF DESPINA.
VIII. THE MORTAL IMMORTAL.
IX. TRANSFORMATION.
X. THE SWISS PEASANT.
XI. THE INVISIBLE GIRL.
XII. THE BROTHER AND SISTER. AN ITALIAN STORY.
XIII. THE PARVENUE.
XIV. THE POLE.
XV. EUPHRASIA. A TALE OF GREECE.
XVI. THE ELDER SON.
XVII. THE PILGRIMS.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Tales and Stories
ISBN: 9788827827741
Youcanprint Self-Publishing
INTRODUCTION.
It
is customary to regard Mary Shelley’s claims to literary
distinction as so entirely rooted and grounded in her husband’s as
to constitute a merely parasitic growth upon his fame. It may be
unreservedly admitted that her association with Shelley, and her
care
of his writings and memory after his death, are the strongest of
her
titles to remembrance. It is further undeniable that the most
original of her works is also that which betrays the strongest
traces
of his influence.
Frankenstein was
written when her brain, magnetized by his companionship, was
capable
of an effort never to be repeated. But if the frame of mind which
engendered and sustained the work was created by Shelley, the
conception was not his, and the diction is dissimilar to his. Both
derive from Godwin, but neither is Godwin’s. The same observation,
except for an occasional phrase caught from Shelley, applies to all
her subsequent work. The frequent exaltation of spirit, the
ideality
and romance, may well have been Shelley’s—the general style of
execution neither repeats nor resembles him.Mary
Shelley’s voice, then, is not to die away as a mere echo of her
illustrious husband’s. She has the
prima facie claim
to a hearing due to every writer who can assert the possession of a
distinctive individuality; and if originality be once conceded
to
Frankenstein, as in
all equity it must, none will dispute the validity of a title to
fame
grounded on such a work. It has solved the question itself—it is
famous. It is full of faults venial in an author of nineteen; but,
apart from the wild grandeur of the conception, it has that which
even the maturity of mere talent never attains—the insight of
genius which looks below the appearances of things, and perhaps
even
reverses its own first conception by the discovery of some
underlying
truth. Mary Shelley’s original intention was probably that which
would alone have occurred to most writers in her place. She meant
to
paint Frankenstein’s monstrous creation as an object of unmitigated
horror. The perception that he was an object of intense compassion
as
well imparted a moral value to what otherwise would have remained a
daring flight of imagination. It has done more: it has helped to
create, if it did not itself beget, a type of personage unknown to
ancient fiction. The conception of a character at once justly
execrable and truly pitiable is altogether modern. Richard the
Third
and Caliban make some approach towards it; but the former is too
self-sufficing in his valour and his villainy to be deeply pitied,
and the latter too senseless and brutal. Victor Hugo has made
himself
the laureate of pathetic deformity, but much of his work is a
conscious or unconscious variation on the original theme of
Frankenstein.None
of Mary Shelley’s subsequent romances approached
Frankenstein in
power and popularity. The reason may be summed up in a
word—Languor.
After the death of her infant son in 1819, she could never again
command the energy which had carried her so vigorously
through
Frankenstein.
Except in one instance, her work did not really interest her. Her
heart is not in it.
Valperga contains
many passages of exquisite beauty; but it was, as the authoress
herself says, “a child of mighty slow growth;” “laboriously
dug,” Shelley adds, “out of a hundred old chronicles,” and
wants the fire of imagination which alone could have
interpenetrated
the mass and fused its diverse ingredients into a satisfying whole.
Of the later novels,
The Last Man
excepted, it is needless to speak, save for the autobiographic
interest with which Professor Dowden’s fortunate discovery has
informed the hitherto slighted pages of
Lodore. But
The Last Man
demands great attention, for it is not only a work of far higher
merit than commonly admitted, but of all her works the most
characteristic of the authoress, the most representative of Mary
Shelley in the character of pining widowhood which it was her
destiny
to support for the remainder of her life. It is an idealized
version
of her sorrows and sufferings, made to contribute a note to the
strain which celebrates the final dissolution of the world. The
languor which mars her other writings is a beauty here, harmonizing
with the general tone of sublime melancholy. Most pictures of the
end
of the world, painted or penned, have an apocalyptic character.
Men’s
imaginations are powerfully impressed by great convulsions of
nature;
fire, tempest, and earthquake are summoned to effect the
dissolution
of the expiring earth. In
The Last Man
pestilence is the sole agent, and the tragedy is purely human. The
tale consequently lacks the magnificence which the subject might
have
seemed to invite, but, on the other hand, gains in pathos—a pathos
greatly increased when the authoress’s identity is recollected, and
it is observed how vividly actual experience traverses her web of
fiction. None can have been affected by Mary Shelley’s work so
deeply as Mary Shelley herself; for the scenery is that of her
familiar haunts, the personages are her intimates under thin
disguises, the universal catastrophe is but the magnified image of
the overthrow of her own fortunes; and there are pages on pages
where
every word must have come to her fraught with some unutterably
sweet
or bitter association. Yet, though her romance could never be to
the
public what it was to the author, it is surprising that criticism
should have hitherto done so little justice either to its pervading
nobility of thought or to the eloquence and beauty of very many
inspired passages.When
The Last Man is
reprinted it will come before the world as a new work. The same is
the case with the short tales in this collection, the very
existence
of which is probably unknown to those most deeply interested in
Mary
Shelley. The entire class of literature to which they belong has
long
ago gone into Time’s wallet as “alms for oblivion.” They are
exclusively contributions to a form of publication utterly
superseded
in this hasty age—the Annual, whose very name seemed to prophesy
that it would not be perennial. For the creations of the intellect,
however, there is a way back from Avernus. Every new generation
convicts the last of undue precipitation in discarding the work of
its own immediate predecessor. The special literary form may be
incapable of revival; but the substance of that which has pleased
or
profited its age, be it Crashaw’s verse, or Etherege’s comedies,
or Hoadly’s pamphlets, or what it may, always repays a fresh
examination, and is always found to contribute some element useful
or
acceptable to the literature of a later day. The day of the
“splendid
annual” was certainly not a vigorous or healthy one in the history
of English
belles-lettres. It
came in at the ebb of the great tide of poetry which followed on
the
French Revolution, and before the insetting of the great tide of
Victorian prose. A pretentious feebleness characterizes the
majority
of its productions, half of which are hardly above the level of the
album. Yet it had its good points, worthy to be taken into account.
The necessary brevity of contributions to an annual operated as a
powerful check on the loquacity so unfortunately encouraged by the
three-volume novel. There was no room for tiresome descriptions of
minutiæ, or interminable talk about uninteresting people. Being,
moreover, largely intended for the perusal of high-born maidens in
palace towers, the annuals frequently affected an exalted order of
sentiment, which, if intolerable in insincere or merely mechanical
hands, encouraged the emotion of a really passionate writer as much
as the present taste for minute delineation represses it. This
perfectly suited Mary Shelley. No writer felt less call to
reproduce
the society around her. It did not interest her in the smallest
degree. The bent of her soul was entirely towards the ideal. This
ideal was by no means buried in the grave of Shelley. She aspired
passionately towards an imaginary perfection all her life, and
solaced disappointment with what, in actual existence, too often
proved the parent of fresh disillusion. In fiction it was
otherwise;
the fashionable style of publication, with all its faults,
encouraged
the enthusiasm, rapturous or melancholy, with which she adored the
present or lamented the lost. She could fully indulge her taste for
exalted sentiment in the Annual, and the necessary limitations of
space afforded less scope for that creeping languor which relaxed
the
nerve of her more ambitious productions. In these little tales she
is
her perfect self, and the reader will find not only the
entertainment
of interesting fiction, but a fair picture of the mind, repressed
in
its energies by circumstances, but naturally enthusiastic and
aspiring, of a lonely, thwarted, misunderstood woman, who could
seldom do herself justice, and whose precise place in the
contemporary constellation of genius remains to be
determined.The
merit of a collection of stories, casually written at different
periods and under different influences, must necessarily be
various.
As a rule, it may be said that Mary Shelley is best when most
ideal,
and excels in proportion to the exaltation of the sentiment
embodied
in her tale. Virtue, patriotism, disinterested affection, are very
real things to her; and her heroes and heroines, if generally above
the ordinary plane of humanity, never transgress the limits of
humanity itself. Her fault is the other way, and arises from a
positive incapacity for painting the ugly and the commonplace. She
does her best, but her villains do not impress us. Minute
delineation
of character is never attempted; it lay entirely out of her sphere.
Her tales are consequently executed in the free, broad style of the
eighteenth century, towards which a reaction is now fortunately
observable. As stories, they are very good. The theme is always
interesting, and the sequence of events natural. No person and no
incident, perhaps, takes a very strong hold upon the imagination;
but
the general impression is one of a sphere of exalted feeling into
which it is good to enter, and which ennobles as much as the
photography of ugliness degrades. The diction, as usual in the
imaginative literature of the period, is frequently too ornate, and
could spare a good many adjectives. But its native strength is
revealed in passages of impassioned feeling; and remarkable command
over the resources of the language is displayed in descriptions of
scenes of natural beauty. The microscopic touch of a Browning or a
Meredith, bringing the scene vividly before the mind’s eye, is
indeed absolutely wanting; but the landscape is suffused with the
poetical atmosphere of a Claude or a Danby. The description at the
beginning of The
Sisters of Albano
is a characteristic and beautiful instance.The
biographical element is deeply interwoven with these as with all
Mary
Shelley’s writings. It is of especial interest to search out the
traces of her own history, and the sources from which her
descriptions and ideas may have been derived.
The Mourner has
evident vestiges of her residence near Windsor when
Alastor was
written, and probably reflects the general impression derived from
Shelley’s recollections of Eton. The visit to Pæstum in
The Pole recalls
one of the most beautiful of Shelley’s letters, which Mary,
however, probably never saw. Claire Clairmont’s fortunes seem
glanced at in one or two places; and the story of
The Pole may be
partly founded on some experience of hers in Russia. Trelawny
probably suggested the subjects of the two Greek tales,
The Evil Eye, and
Euphrasia. The Mortal Immortal
is a variation on the theme of
St. Leon, and
Transformation on
that of
Frankenstein. These
are the only tales in the collection which betray the influence of
Godwin, and neither is so fully worked out as it might have been.
Mary Shelley was evidently more at home with a human than with a
superhuman ideal; her enthusiasm soars high, but does not transcend
the possibilities of human nature. The artistic merit of her tales
will be diversely estimated, but no reader will refuse the
authoress
facility of invention, or command of language, or elevation of
soul.
I. THE SISTERS OF ALBANO.
“
And
near Albano’s scarce divided wavesShine
from a sister valley;—and afarThe
Tiber winds, and the broad ocean lavesThe
Latian coast where sprang the Epic war,
‘
Arms
and the Man,’ whose re-ascending starRose
o’er an empire; but beneath thy rightTully
reposed from Rome; and where yon barOf
girdling mountains intercepts the sightThe
Sabine farm was till’d, the weary bard’s delight.”It
was to see this beautiful lake that I made my last excursion before
quitting Rome. The spring had nearly grown into summer, the trees
were all in full but fresh green foliage, the vine-dresser was
singing, perched among them, training his vines: the cicada had not
yet begun her song, the heats therefore had not commenced; but at
evening the fire-flies gleamed among the hills, and the cooing
aziola
assured us of what in that country needs no assurance—fine weather
for the morrow. We set out early in the morning to avoid the heats,
breakfasted at Albano, and till ten o’clock passed our time in
visiting the Mosaic, the villa of Cicero, and other curiosities of
the place. We reposed during the middle of the day in a tent
elevated
for us at the hill-top, whence we looked on the hill-embosomed
lake,
and the distant eminence crowned by a town with its church. Other
villages and cottages were scattered among the foldings of
mountains,
and beyond we saw the deep blue sea of the southern poets, which
received the swift and immortal Tiber, rocking it to repose among
its
devouring waves. The Coliseum falls and the Pantheon decays,—the
very hills of Rome are perishing,—but the Tiber lives for ever,
flows for ever, and for ever feeds the land-encircled Mediterranean
with fresh waters.Our
summer and pleasure-seeking party consisted of many: to me the most
interesting person was the Countess Atanasia D——, who was as
beautiful as an imagination of Raphael, and good as the ideal of a
poet. Two of her children accompanied her, with animated looks and
gentle manners, quiet, yet enjoying. I sat near her, watching the
changing shadows of the landscape before us. As the sun descended,
it
poured a tide of light into the valley of the lake, deluging the
deep
bank formed by the mountain with liquid gold. The domes and turrets
of the far town flashed and gleamed, the trees were dyed in
splendour; two or three slight clouds, which had drunk the radiance
till it became their essence, floated golden islets in the lustrous
empyrean. The waters, reflecting the brilliancy of the sky and the
fire-tinted banks, beamed a second heaven, a second irradiated
earth,
at our feet. The Mediterranean, gazing on the sun,—as the eyes of a
mortal bride fail and are dimmed when reflecting her lover’s
glance,—was lost, mixed in his light, till it had become one with
him.—Long (our souls, like the sea, the hills, and lake, drinking
in the supreme loveliness) we gazed, till the too full cup
overflowed, and we turned away with a sigh.At
our feet there was a knoll of ground, that formed the foreground of
our picture; two trees lay basking against the sky, glittering with
the golden light, which like dew seemed to hang amid their
branches;
a rock closed the prospect on the other side, twined round by
creepers, and redolent with blooming myrtle; a brook, crossed by
huge
stones, gushed through the turf, and on the fragments of rock that
lay about, sat two or three persons, peasants, who attracted our
attention. One was a hunter, as his gun, lying on a bank not far
off,
demonstrated, yet he was a tiller of the soil; his rough straw hat,
and his picturesque but coarse dress, belonged to that class. The
other was some contadina, in the costume of her country, returning,
her basket on her arm, from the village to her cottage home. They
were regarding the stores of a pedlar, who with doffed hat stood
near: some of these consisted of pictures and prints—views of the
country, and portraits of the Madonna. Our peasants regarded these
with pleased attention.
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Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!
