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.’ [2]

Shelley 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’. [3]

But 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. [7]

But 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 hear
Thy song: like Proserpine, in Enna’s glen,
Thou seemest to my fancy,—singing here,
And gathering flowers, as that fair maiden, when
She lost the spring and Ceres her more dear. [9]

But 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.

‘Mrs. Shelley had at this time been writing some little Dramas on classical subjects, one of which was the Rape of Proserpine, a very graceful composition which she has never published. Shelley contributed to this the exquisite fable of Arethusa and the Invocation to Ceres.—Among the Nymphs gathering flowers on Enna were two whom she called Ino and Uno, names which I remember in the Dialogue were irresistibly ludicrous. She also wrote one on Midas, into which were introduced by Shelley, in the Contest between Pan and Apollo, the Sublime Effusion of the latter, and Pan’s characterised Ode.’

This statement of Medwin finally settles the question. The ‘friend’ at whose request, Mrs. Shelley says, [11] the lyrics were written by her husband, was herself. And she was the author of the dramas. [12]

The manuscript (Bodleian Library, MS. Shelley, d. 2) looks like a cheap exercise-book, originally of 40, now of 36 leaves, 8 1/4 x 6 inches, in boards. The contents are the dramas here presented, written in a clear legible hand—the equable hand of Mrs. Shelley. [13] There are very few words corrected or cancelled. It is obviously a fair copy. Mr. C. D. Locock, in his Examination of the Shelley Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1903, pp. 24-25), has already pointed out the valuable emendations of the ‘received’ text of Shelley’s lyrics which are found here. In fact the only mystery is why neither Shelley, nor Mary in the course of her long widowed years, should have published these curious, and surely not contemptible, by-products of their co-operation in the fruitful year 1820.

Footnotes

[1] Preface to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein.

[2] Mrs. Marshall, The Life and Letters of Mary W. Shelley, i. 216.

[3] Letter from Padua, 22 September 1818.

[4] 27 October 1818

[5] Letter to Mrs. Hunt, 28 August 1819.

[6] She had ‘thought of it’ at Marlow, as appears from her letter to Mrs. Gisborne, 30 June 1821 (in Mrs. Marshall, i. p. 291); but the materials for it were not found before the stay at Naples, and it was not actually begun ‘till a year afterwards, at Pisa’ (ibid.).

[7] Letter to T. L. Peacock, November 1820.

[8] Dr. Garnett, in his prefatory note, states that Orpheus ‘exists only in a transcript by Mrs. Shelley, who has written in playful allusion to her toils as amanuensis Aspetto fin che il diluvio cala, ed allora cerco di posare argine alle sue parole’. The poem is thus supposed to have been Shelley’s attempt at improvisation, if not indeed a translation from the Italian of the ‘improvvisatore’ Sgricci. The Shelleys do not seem to have come to know and hear Sgricci before the end of December 1820. The Italian note after all has no very clear import. And Dr. Garnett in 1905 inclined to the view that Orpheus was the work not of Shelley, but of his wife. A comparison of that fragment and the dramas here published seems to me to suggest the same conclusion, though in both cases Mary Shelley must have been helped by her husband.

[9] As published by Medwin, 1834 and 1847.

[10] The copy, 2 vols., was sold at Sotheby’s on the 6th December 1906: Mr. H. Buxton Forman (who was, I think, the buyer) published the contents in The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, By Thomas Medwin, A New Edition printed from a copy copiously amended and extended by the Author . . . Milford, 1913. The passage here quoted appears on p. 27 of the 2nd vol. of the 1847 edition (Forman ed., p. 252)

[11] The Hymns of Pan and Apollo were first published by Mrs. Shelley in the Posthumous Poems, 1824, with a note saying that they had been ‘written at the request of a friend to be inserted in a drama on the subject of Midas’. Arethusa appeared in the same volume, dated ‘Pisa, 1820’. Proserpine’s song was not published before the first collected edition of 1839.

[12] Not E. E. Williams (Buxton Forman, ed. 1882, vol. iv, p. 34). The manuscript of the poetical play composed about 1822 by the latter, ‘The Promise’, with Shelley’s autograph poem (‘Night! with all thine eyes look down’), was given to the Bodleian Library in 1914.

[13] Shelley’s lyrics are also in his wife’s writing—Mr. Locock is surely mistaken in assuming two different hands to this manuscript (The Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Methuen, 1909, vol. iii, p. xix).