Mathilda Part 7

But I was languid and many hours pa.s.sed before I could reach the cottage, dragging as I did my slow steps, and often resting on the wet earth unable to proceed.

I particularly mark this night, for it was that which has hurried on the last scene of my tragedy, which else might have dwindled on through long years of listless sorrow. I was very ill when I arrived and quite incapable of taking off my wet clothes that clung about me.

In the morning, on her return, my servant found me almost lifeless, while possessed by a high fever I was lying on the floor of my room.

I was very ill for a long time, and when I recovered from the immediate danger of fever, every symptom of a rapid consumption declared itself. I was for some time ignorant of this and thought that my excessive weakness was the consequence of the fever; [_sic_] But my strength became less and less; as winter came on I had a cough; and my sunken cheek, before pale, burned with a hectic fever. One by one these symptoms struck me; & I became convinced that the moment I had so much desired was about to arrive and that I was dying. I was sitting by my fire, the physician who had attended me ever since my fever had just left me, and I looked over his prescription in which digitalis was the prominent medecine. "Yes," I said, "I see how this is, and it is strange that I should have deceived myself so long; I am about to die an innocent death, and it will be sweeter even than that which the opium promised."

I rose and walked slowly to the window; the wide heath was covered by snow which sparkled under the beams of the sun that shone brightly thro' the pure, frosty air: a few birds were pecking some crumbs under my window.[81] I smiled with quiet joy; and in my thoughts, which through long habit would for ever connect themselves into one train, as if I shaped them into words, I thus addressed the scene before me:

"I salute thee, beautiful Sun, and thou, white Earth, fair and cold!

Perhaps I shall never see thee again covered with green, and the sweet flowers of the coming spring will blossom on my grave. I am about to leave thee; soon this living spirit which is ever busy among strange shapes and ideas, which belong not to thee, soon it will have flown to other regions and this emaciated body will rest insensate on thy bosom

"Rolled round in earth's diurnal course With rocks, and stones, and trees.

"For it will be the same with thee, who art called our Universal Mother,[82] when I am gone. I have loved thee; and in my days both of happiness and sorrow I have peopled your solitudes with wild fancies of my own creation. The woods, and lakes, and mountains which I have loved, have for me a thousand a.s.sociations; and thou, oh, Sun! hast smiled upon, and borne your part in many imaginations that sprung to life in my soul alone, and which will die with me. Your solitudes, sweet land, your trees and waters will still exist, moved by your winds, or still beneath the eye of noon, though[83] [w]hat I have felt about ye, and all my dreams which have often strangely deformed thee, will die with me. You will exist to reflect other images in other minds, and ever will remain the same, although your reflected semblance vary in a thousand ways, changeable as the hearts of those who view thee. One of these fragile mirrors, that ever doted on thine image, is about to be broken, crumbled to dust. But everteeming Nature will create another and another, and thou wilt loose nought by my destruction.[84]

"Thou wilt ever be the same. Recieve then the grateful farewell of a fleeting shadow who is about to disappear, who joyfully leaves thee, yet with a last look of affectionate thankfulness. Farewell! Sky, and fields and woods; the lovely flowers that grow on thee; thy mountains & thy rivers; to the balmy air and the strong wind of the north, to all, a last farewell. I shall shed no more tears for my task is almost fulfilled, and I am about to be rewarded for long and most burthensome suffering. Bless thy child even even [_sic_] in death, as I bless thee; and let me sleep at peace in my quiet grave."

I feel death to be near at hand and I am calm. I no longer despair, but look on all around me with placid affection. I find it sweet to watch the progressive decay of my strength, and to repeat to myself, another day and yet another, but again I shall not see the red leaves of autumn; before that time I shall be with my father. I am glad Woodville is not with me for perhaps he would grieve, and I desire to see smiles alone during the last scene of my life; when I last wrote to him I told him of my ill health but not of its mortal tendency, lest he should conceive it to be his duty to come to me for I fear lest the tears of friends.h.i.+p should destroy the blessed calm of my mind. I take pleasure in arranging all the little details which will occur when I shall no longer be. In truth I am in love with death; no maiden ever took more pleasure in the contemplation of her bridal attire than I in fancying my limbs already enwrapt in their shroud: is it not my marriage dress? Alone it will unite me to my father when in an eternal mental union we shall never part.

I will not dwell on the last changes that I feel in the final decay of nature. It is rapid but without pain: I feel a strange pleasure in it.

For long years these are the first days of peace that have visited me.

I no longer exhaust my miserable heart by bitter tears and frantic complaints; I no longer the [_sic_] reproach the sun, the earth, the air, for pain and wretchedness. I wait in quiet expectation for the closing hours of a life which has been to me most sweet & bitter. I do not die not having enjoyed life; for sixteen years I was happy: during the first months of my father's return I had enjoyed ages of pleasure: now indeed I am grown old in grief; my steps are feeble like those of age; I have become peevish and unfit for life; so having pa.s.sed little more than twenty years upon the earth I am more fit for my narrow grave than many are when they reach the natural term of their lives.

Again and again I have pa.s.sed over in my remembrance the different scenes of my short life: if the world is a stage and I merely an actor on it my part has been strange, and, alas! tragical. Almost from infancy I was deprived of all the testimonies of affection which children generally receive; I was thrown entirely upon my own resources, and I enjoyed what I may almost call unnatural pleasures, for they were dreams and not realities. The earth was to me a magic lantern and I [a] gazer, and a listener but no actor; but then came the transporting and soul-reviving era of my existence: my father returned and I could pour my warm affections on a human heart; there was a new sun and a new earth created to me; the waters of existence sparkled: joy! joy! but, alas! what grief! My bliss was more rapid than the progress of a sunbeam on a mountain, which discloses its glades & woods, and then leaves it dark & blank; to my happiness followed madness and agony, closed by despair.

This was the drama of my life which I have now depicted upon paper.

During three months I have been employed in this task. The memory of sorrow has brought tears; the memory of happiness a warm glow the lively shadow of that joy. Now my tears are dried; the glow has faded from my cheeks, and with a few words of farewell to you, Woodville, I close my work: the last that I shall perform.

Farewell, my only living friend; you are the sole tie that binds me to existence, and now I break it[.] It gives me no pain to leave you; nor can our seperation give you much. You never regarded me as one of this world, but rather as a being, who for some penance was sent from the Kingdom of Shadows; and she pa.s.sed a few days weeping on the earth and longing to return to her native soil. You will weep but they will be tears of gentleness. I would, if I thought that it would lessen your regret, tell you to smile and congratulate me on my departure from the misery you beheld me endure. I would say; Woodville, rejoice with your friend, I triumph now and am most happy. But I check these expressions; these may not be the consolations of the living; they weep for their own misery, and not for that of the being they have lost. No; shed a few natural tears due to my memory: and if you ever visit my grave, pluck from thence a flower, and lay it to your heart; for your heart is the only tomb in which my memory will be enterred.

My death is rapidly approaching and you are not near to watch the flitting and vanis.h.i.+ng of my spirit. Do no[t] regret this; for death is a too terrible an [_sic_] object for the living. It is one of those adversities which hurt instead of purifying the heart; for it is so intense a misery that it hardens & dulls the feelings. Dreadful as the time was when I pursued my father towards the ocean, & found their [_sic_] only his lifeless corpse; yet for my own sake I should prefer that to the watching one by one his senses fade; his pulse weaken--and sleeplessly as it were devour his life in gazing. To see life in his limbs & to know that soon life would no longer be there; to see the warm breath issue from his lips and to know they would soon be chill--I will not continue to trace this frightful picture; you suffered this torture once; I never did.[85] And the remembrance fills your heart sometimes with bitter despair when otherwise your feelings would have melted into soft sorrow.

So day by day I become weaker, and life flickers in my wasting form, as a lamp about to loose it vivifying oil. I now behold the glad sun of May. It was May, four years ago, that I first saw my beloved father; it was in May, three years ago that my folly destroyed the only being I was doomed to love. May is returned, and I die. Three days ago, the anniversary of our meeting; and, alas! of our eternal seperation, after a day of killing emotion, I caused myself to be led once more to behold the face of nature. I caused myself to be carried to some meadows some miles distant from my cottage; the gra.s.s was being mowed, and there was the scent of hay in the fields; all the earth look[ed] fresh and its inhabitants happy. Evening approached and I beheld the sun set. Three years ago and on that day and hour it shone through the branches and leaves of the beech wood and its beams flickered upon the countenance of him whom I then beheld for the last time.[86] I now saw that divine orb, gilding all the clouds with unwonted splendour, sink behind the horizon; it disappeared from a world where he whom I would seek exists not; it approached a world where he exists not[.] Why do I weep so bitterly? Why my [_sic_] does my heart heave with vain endeavour to cast aside the bitter anguish that covers it "as the waters cover the sea." I go from this world where he is no longer and soon I shall meet him in another.

Farewell, Woodville, the turf will soon be green on my grave; and the violets will bloom on it. _There_ is my hope and my expectation; your's are in this world; may they be fulfilled.[87]

NOTES TO _MATHILDA_

Abbreviations:

_F of F--A_ _The Fields of Fancy_, in Lord Abinger's notebook _F of F--B_ _The Fields of Fancy_, in the notebook in the Bodleian Library _S-R fr_ fragments of _The Fields of Fancy_ among the papers of the late Sir John Sh.e.l.ley-Rolls, now in the Bodleian Library

[1] The name is spelled thus in the MSS of _Mathilda_ and _The Fields of Fancy_, though in the printed _Journal_ (taken from _Sh.e.l.ley and Mary_) and in the _Letters_ it is spelled _Matilda_. In the MS of the journal, however, it is spelled first _Matilda_, later _Mathilda_.

[2] Mary has here added detail and contrast to the description in _F of F--A_, in which the pa.s.sage "save a few black patches ... on the plain ground" does not appear.

[3] The addition of "I am alone ... withered me" motivates Mathilda's state of mind and her resolve to write her history.

[4] Mathilda too is the unwitting victim in a story of incest. Like Oedipus, she has lost her parent-lover by suicide; like him she leaves the scene of the revelation overwhelmed by a sense of her own guilt, "a sacred horror"; like him, she finds a measure of peace as she is about to die.

[5] The addition of "the precious memorials ... grat.i.tude towards you," by its suggestion of the relations.h.i.+p between Mathilda and Woodville, serves to justify the detailed narration.

[6] At this point two sheets have been removed from the notebook.

There is no break in continuity, however.

[7] The descriptions of Mathilda's father and mother and the account of their marriage in the next few pages are greatly expanded from _F of F--A_, where there is only one brief paragraph. The process of expansion can be followed in _S-R fr_ and in _F of F--B_. The development of the character of Diana (who represents Mary's own mother, Mary Wollstonecraft) gave Mary the most trouble. For the identifications with Mary's father and mother, see Nitchie, _Mary Sh.e.l.ley_, pp. 11, 90-93, 96-97.

[8] The pa.s.sage "There was a gentleman ... school & college vacations"

is on a slip of paper pasted on page 11 of the MS. In the margin are two fragments, crossed out, evidently parts of what is supplanted by the subst.i.tuted pa.s.sage: "an angelic disposition and a quick, penetrating understanding" and "her visits ... to ... his house were long & frequent & there." In _F of F--B_ Mary wrote of Diana's understanding "that often receives the name of masculine from its firmness and strength." This adjective had often been applied to Mary Wollstonecraft's mind. Mary Sh.e.l.ley's own understanding had been called masculine by Leigh Hunt in 1817 in the _Examiner_. The word was used also by a reviewer of her last published work, _Rambles in Germany and Italy, 1844_. (See Nitchie, _Mary Sh.e.l.ley_, p. 178.)

[9] The account of Diana in _Mathilda_ is much better ordered and more coherent than that in _F of F--B_.

[10] The description of the effect of Diana's death on her husband is largely new in _Mathilda_. _F of F--B_ is frankly incomplete; _F of F--A_ contains some of this material; _Mathilda_ puts it in order and fills in the gaps.

[11] This paragraph is an elaboration of the description of her aunt's coldness as found in _F of F--B_. There is only one sentence in _F of F--A_.

[12] The description of Mathilda's love of nature and of animals is elaborated from both rough drafts. The effect, like that of the preceding addition (see note 11), is to emphasize Mathilda's loneliness. For the theme of loneliness in Mary Sh.e.l.ley's work, see Nitchie, _Mary Sh.e.l.ley_, pp. 13-17.

[13] This paragraph is a revision of _F of F--B_, which is fragmentary. There is nothing in _F of F--A_ and only one scored-out sentence in _S-R fr_. None of the rough drafts tells of her plans to join her father.

[14] The final paragraph in Chapter II is entirely new.

[15] The account of the return of Mathilda's father is very slightly revised from that in _F of F--A_. _F of F--B_ has only a few fragmentary sentences, scored out. It resumes with the paragraph beginning, "My father was very little changed."

[16] Symbolic of Mathilda's subsequent life.

[17] _Illusion, or the Trances of Nourjahad_, a melodrama, was performed at Drury Lane, November 25, 1813. It was anonymous, but it was attributed by some reviewers to Byron, a charge which he indignantly denied. See Byron, _Letters and Journals_, ed. by Rowland E. Prothero (6 vols. London: Murray, 1902-1904), II, 288.

[18] This paragraph is in _F of F--B_ but not in _F of F--A_. In the margin of the latter, however, is written: "It was not of the tree of knowledge that I ate for no evil followed--it must be of the tree of life that grows close beside it or--". Perhaps this was intended to go in the preceding paragraph after "My ideas were enlarged by his conversation." Then, when this paragraph was added, the figure, noticeably changed, was included here.

[19] Here the MS of _F of F--B_ breaks off to resume only with the meeting of Mathilda and Woodville.

[20] At the end of the story (p. 79) Mathilda says, "Death is too terrible an object for the living." Mary was thinking of the deaths of her two children.

[21] Mary had read the story of Cupid and Psyche in Apuleius in 1817 and she had made an Italian translation, the MS of which is now in the Library of Congress. See _Journal_, pp. 79, 85-86.

[22] The end of this paragraph gave Mary much trouble. In _F of F--A_ after the words, "my tale must," she develops an elaborate figure: "go with the stream that hurries on--& now was this stream precipitated by an overwhelming fall from the pleasant vallies through which it wandered--down hideous precipieces to a desart black & hopeless--".

This, the original ending of the chapter, was scored out, and a new, simplified version which, with some deletions and changes, became that used in _Mathilda_ was written in the margins of two pages (ff. 57, 58). This revision is a good example of Mary's frequent improvement of her style by the omission of purple patches.

[23] In _F of F--A_ there follows a pa.s.sage which has been scored out and which does not appear in _Mathilda_: "I have tried in somewhat feeble language to describe the excess of what I may almost call my adoration for my father--you may then in some faint manner imagine my despair when I found that he shunned [me] & that all the little arts I used to re-awaken his lost love made him"--. This is a good example of Mary's frequent revision for the better by the omission of the obvious and expository. But the pa.s.sage also has intrinsic interest.

Mathilda's "adoration" for her father may be compared to Mary's feeling for G.o.dwin. In an unpublished letter (1822) to Jane Williams she wrote, "Until I met Sh.e.l.ley I [could?] justly say that he was my G.o.d--and I remember many childish instances of the [ex]cess of attachment I bore for him." See Nitchie, _Mary Sh.e.l.ley_, p. 89, and note 9.

[24] Cf. the account of the services of Fantasia in the opening chapter of _F of F--A_ (see pp. 90-102) together with note 3 to _The Fields of Fancy_.

[25] This pa.s.sage beginning "Day after day" and closing with the quotation is not in _F of F--A_, but it is in _S-R fr_. The quotation is from _The Captain_ by John Fletcher and a collaborator, possibly Ma.s.singer. These lines from Act I, Sc. 3 are part of a speech by Lelia addressed to her lover. Later in the play Lelia attempts to seduce her father--possibly a reason for Mary's selection of the lines.