Proserpine and Midas Part 1

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The editor came across the unpublished texts included in this volume as early as 1905.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.

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, [Footnote: 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.).]

under the t.i.tle of _Castruccio_, _Prince of Lucca_, and which was not published until 1823, as _Valperga_. It was indeed a laborious task.

The novel 'ill.u.s.trative of the manners of the Middle Ages in Italy'

had to be 'raked out of fifty old books', as Sh.e.l.ley said. [Footnote: Letter to T. L. Peac.o.c.k, November 1820.]

But heavy as the undertaking must have been, it certainly did not engross all the activities of Sh.e.l.ley'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. Sh.e.l.ley'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, ent.i.tled _Orpheus_, has been allotted by Dr. Garnett (_Relics of Sh.e.l.ley_, 1862) to the same category. [Footnote: Dr. Garnett, in his prefatory note, states that Orpheus 'exists only in a transcript by Mrs. Sh.e.l.ley, 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 Sh.e.l.ley's attempt at improvisation, if not indeed a translation from the Italian of the 'improvvisatore'

Sgricci. The Sh.e.l.leys 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 Sh.e.l.ley, 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 Sh.e.l.ley must have been helped by her husband.] Again, it may well be more than a coincidence, that the Proserpine motive occurs in that pa.s.sage from Dante's _Purgatorio_, canto 28, on 'Matilda gathering flowers', which Sh.e.l.ley 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.

[Footnote: As published by Medwin, 1834 and 1847.]

But we have a far more important, because a direct, testimony in a ma.n.u.script addition made by Thomas Medwin in the margin of a copy of his _Life of Sh.e.l.ley_ (1847). [Footnote: 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 Sh.e.l.ley, By Thomas Medwin, A New Edition printed from a copy copiously amended and extended by the Author_ . . . Milford, 1913. The pa.s.sage here quoted appears on p. 27 of the 2nd vol. of the 1847 edition (Forman ed., p. 252)] The pa.s.sage 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. Sh.e.l.ley had at this time been writing some little Dramas on cla.s.sical subjects, one of which was the Rape of Proserpine, a very graceful composition which she has never published. Sh.e.l.ley 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 Sh.e.l.ley, 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. Sh.e.l.ley says, [Footnote: The Hymns of Pan and Apollo were first published by Mrs. Sh.e.l.ley 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.] the lyrics were written by her husband, was herself. And she was the author of the dramas. [Footnote: Not E. E. Williams (Buxton Forman, ed. 1882, vol. iv, p. 34). The ma.n.u.script of the poetical play composed about 1822 by the latter, 'The Promise', with Sh.e.l.ley's autograph poem ('Night! with all thine eyes look down'), was given to the Bodleian Library in 1914.]

The ma.n.u.script (Bodleian Library, MS. Sh.e.l.ley, 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. Sh.e.l.ley. [Footnote: Sh.e.l.ley's lyrics are also in his wife's writing--Mr. Loc.o.c.k is surely mistaken in a.s.suming two different hands to this ma.n.u.script (_The Poems of Percy Bysshe Sh.e.l.ley_, Methuen, 1909, vol. iii, p. xix).]

There are very few words corrected or cancelled. It is obviously a fair copy. Mr. C. D. Loc.o.c.k, in his _Examination of the Sh.e.l.ley Ma.n.u.scripts in the Bodleian Library_ (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1903, pp. 24-25), has already pointed out the valuable emendations of the 'received' text of Sh.e.l.ley's lyrics which are found here. In fact the only mystery is why neither Sh.e.l.ley, 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.

II.

For indeed there is more than a personal interest attached to these writings of Mrs. Sh.e.l.ley's. The fact that the same mind which had revelled, a few years earlier, in the fantastical horrors of Frankenstein's abortive creation, could now dwell on the melancholy fate of Proserpine or the humorous disappointment of Midas, and delight in their subtle poetical or moral symbolism--this fact has its significance. It is one of the earliest indications of the revival, in the heart of Romanticism, of the old love of cla.s.sical myths and cla.s.sical beauty.

The subject is a wide one, and cannot be adequately dealt with in this place. But a few words may not be superfluous for a correct historical appreciation of Mrs. Sh.e.l.ley's attempt.

How deficient had been the sense of cla.s.sical beauty in the so-called cla.s.sical age of English literature, is a trite consideration of criticism. The treatment of mythology is particularly conclusive on this point. Throughout the 'Augustan' era, mythology was approached as a mere treasure-house of pleasant fancies, artificial decorations, 'motives', whether sumptuous or meretricious. Allusions to Jove and Venus, Mercury, Apollo, or Bacchus, are of course found in every other page of Dryden, Pope, Prior, Swift, Gay, and Parnell. But no fresh presentation, no loving interpretation, of the old myths occur anywhere. The immortal stories were then part and parcel of a sort of poetical curriculum through which the whole school must be taken by the stern masters Tradition and Propriety. There is little to be wondered at, if this matter of curriculum was treated by the more pa.s.sive scholars as a matter of course, and by the sharper and less reverent disciples as a matter of fun. Indeed, if any personality is then evinced in the adaptation of these old world themes, it is generally connected with a more or less emphatic disparagement or grotesque distortion of their real meaning.

When Dryden, for example, makes use of the legend of Midas, in his _Wife of Bath's Tale_, he makes, not Midas's minister, but his queen, tell the mighty secret--and thus secures another hit at woman's loquacity.

Prior's _Female Phaeton_ is a younger sister, who, jealous of her elder's success, thus pleads with her 'mamma':

I'll have my earl as well as she Or know the reason why.

And she wants to flaunt it accordingly.

Finally,

Fondness prevailed; mamma gave way; Kitty, at heart's desire, Obtained the chariot for a day, And set the world on fire.

Pandora, in Parnell's _Hesiod or the Rise of Woman_, is only a