Part 1 (1/2)
Prosepine and Midas.
by Mary Sh.e.l.ley.
PREFATORY NOTE.
The editor came across the unpublished texts included in this volume as early as 1905. Perhaps he ought to apologize for delaying their appearance in print. The fact is he has long been afraid of overrating their intrinsic value. But as the great Sh.e.l.ley centenary year has come, perhaps this little monument of his wife's collaboration may take its modest place among the tributes which will be paid to his memory. For Mary Sh.e.l.ley's mythological dramas can at least claim to be the proper setting for some of the most beautiful lyrics of the poet, which so far have been read in undue isolation. And even as a literary sign of those times, as an example of that cla.s.sical renaissance which the romantic period fostered, they may not be altogether negligible.
These biographical and literary points have been dealt with in an introduction for which the kindest help was long ago received from the late Dr. Garnett and the late Lord Abinger. Sir Walter Raleigh was also among the first to give both encouragement and guidance. My friends M. Emile Pons and Mr. Roger Ingpen have read the book in ma.n.u.script. The authorities of the Bodleian Library and of the Clarendon Press have been as generously helpful as is their well-known wont. To all the editor wishes to record his acknowledgements and thanks.
STRASBOURG.
INTRODUCTION.
I.
'The compositions published in Mrs. Sh.e.l.ley'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 Sh.e.l.ley_).
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 G.o.dwin 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, [Footnote: Preface to the 1831 edition of _Frankenstein_.] 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 Sh.e.l.ley'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-b.l.o.o.d.y-bones' school of romantic tales. So much, no doubt, to the credit of Mary Sh.e.l.ley.
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 att.i.tudes. 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 Sh.e.l.ley, his wife succ.u.mbed 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 Sh.e.l.ley 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 Sh.e.l.ley'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 cla.s.sical fancies which Mrs. Sh.e.l.ley 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 Sh.e.l.ley'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.' [Footnote: Mrs. Marshall, _The Life and Letters of Mary W. Sh.e.l.ley_, i. 216.]
Sh.e.l.ley 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 Sh.e.l.ley, 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 G.o.dwin, in _St. Leon_, 'There is nothing which the human mind can conceive which it may not execute'.
[Footnote: Letter from Padua, 22 September 1818.]
But in the year that followed these auspicious days, the strain and stress of her life proved more powerful on Mary Sh.e.l.ley 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, G.o.dwin a.s.sured his daughter, characterizes the persons 'that sink long under a calamity of this nature'. [Footnote: 27 October 1818] 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 rehea.r.s.e 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 Sh.e.l.ley reached his twenty-seven years, she plucked up courage and resumed the task. Sh.e.l.ley, 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 Sh.e.l.ley [Footnote: Letter to Mrs.
Hunt, 28 August 1819.]--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 Sh.e.l.ley, 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 Sh.e.l.ley could give her of Plato's _Republic_, she started Greek in 1820, and soon came to delight in it.