Proserpine and Midas (2 page)

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

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). [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 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)] 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, [Footnote: 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.] 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 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.]

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. [Footnote: 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).] 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.

II.

For indeed there is more than a personal interest attached to these writings of Mrs. Shelley'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 classical myths and classical 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. Shelley's attempt.

How deficient had been the sense of classical beauty in the so-called classical 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 passive 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

'shining vengeance... A pleasing bosom-cheat, a specious ill'

sent by the gods upon earth to punish the race of Prometheus.

The most poetical fables of Greece are desecrated by Gay into mere miniatures for the decoration of his
Fan
.

Similar instances abound later on. When Armstrong brings in an apostrophe to the Naiads, it is in the course of a _Poetical Essay on the Art of Preserving Health_. And again, when Cowper stirs himself to intone an
Ode to Apollo
, it is in the same mock-heroic vein:

Patron of all those luckless brains, That to the wrong side leaning Indite much metre with much pains And little or no meaning...

Even in Gray's--'Pindaric Gray's'--treatment of classical themes, there is a sort of pervading
ennui
, or the forced appreciativeness of a gouty, disappointed man. The daughter of Jove to whom he dedicates his hymns too often is 'Adversity'. And classical reminiscences have, even with him, a dull musty tinge which recalls the antiquarian in his Cambridge college-rooms rather than the visitor to Florence and Rome. For one thing, his allusions are too many, and too transitory, to appear anything but artistic tricks and verse- making tools. The 'Aegean deep', and 'Delphi's steep', and 'Meander's amber waves', and the 'rosy-crowned Loves', are too cursorily summoned, and dismissed, to suggest that they have been brought in for their own sweet sakes.

It was thus with all the fine quintessences of ancient lore, with all the pearl-like accretions of the faiths and fancies of the old world: they were handled about freely as a kind of curious but not so very rare coins, which found no currency in the deeper thoughts of our modern humanity, and could therefore be used as a mere badge of the learning and taste of a literary 'coterie'.

The very names of the ancient gods and heroes were in fact assuming that abstract anaemic look which common nouns have in everyday language. Thus, when Garrick, in his verses _Upon a Lady's Embroidery_, mentions 'Arachne', it is obvious that he does not expect the reader to think of the daring challenger of Minerva's art, or the Princess of Lydia, but just of a plain spider. And again, when Falconer, in his early
Monody on the death of the Prince of Wales
, expresses a rhetorical wish

'to aid hoarse howling Boreas with his sighs,'

that particular son of Astraeus, whose love for the nymph Orithyia was long unsuccessful, because he could not 'sigh', is surely far from the poet's mind; and 'to swell the wind', or 'the gale', would have served his turn quite as well, though less 'elegantly'.

Even Gibbon, with all his partiality for whatever was pre- or post- Christian, had indeed no better word than 'elegant' for the ancient mythologies of Greece and Rome, and he surely reflected no particularly advanced opinion when he praised and damned, in one breath, 'the pleasant and absurd system of Paganism.' [Footnote: Essay on the Study of Literature, Section 56.] No wonder if in his days, and for a long time after, the passionate giants of the Ages of Fable had dwindled down to the pretty puppets with which the daughters of the gentry had to while away many a school hour.

But the days of this rhetorical--or satirical, didactic--or perfunctory, treatment of classical themes were doomed. It is the glory of Romanticism to have opened 'magic casements' not only on 'the foam of perilous seas' in the West, but also on

the chambers of the East, The chambers of the Sun, that now From ancient melody had ceased. [Footnote: Blake,
Poetical Sketches
, 1783.]

Romanticism, as a freshening up of all the sources of life, a general rejuvenescence of the soul, a ubiquitous visiting of the spirit of delight and wonder, could not confine itself to the fields of mediaeval romance. Even the records of the Greek and Roman thought assumed a new beauty; the classical sense was let free from its antiquarian trammels, and the perennial fanes resounded to the songs of a more impassioned worship.

The change, however, took some time. And it must be admitted that in England, especially, the Romantic movement was slow to go back to classical themes. Winckelmann and Goethe, and Chenier--the last, indeed, practically all unknown to his contemporaries--had long rediscovered Antiquity, and felt its pulse anew, and praised its enduring power, when English poetry had little, if anything, to show in answer to the plaintive invocation of Blake to the Ancient Muses.

The first generation of English Romantics either shunned the subject altogether, or simply echoed Blake's isolated lines in isolated passages as regretful and almost as despondent. From Persia to Paraguay Southey could wander and seek after exotic themes; his days could be 'passed among the dead'--but neither the classic lands nor the classic heroes ever seem to have detained him. Walter Scott's 'sphere of sensation may be almost exactly limited by the growth of heather', as Ruskin says; [Footnote:
Modern Painters
, iii. 317] and when he came to Rome, his last illness prevented him from any attempt he might have wished to make to enlarge his field of vision. Wordsworth was even less far-travelled, and his home-made poetry never thought of the 'Pagan' and his 'creed outworn', but as a distinct
pis-aller
in the way of inspiration. [Footnote:
Sonnet
'The world is too much with us'; cf.
The Excursion
, iv. 851-57.] And again, though Coleridge has a few magnificent lines about them, he seems to have even less willingly than Wordsworth hearkened after

The intelligible forms of ancient poets, The fair humanities of old religion. [Footnote:
The Piccolomini
, II, iv.]

It was to be otherwise with the later English Romantic poets. They lived and worked at a time when the whole atmosphere and even the paraphernalia of literary composition had just undergone a considerable change. After a period of comparative seclusion and self- concentration, England at the Peace of Amiens once more found its way to Europe--and vice versa. And from our point of view this widening of prospects is especially noticeable. For the classical revival in Romanticism appears to be closely connected with it.

It is an alluring subject to investigate. How the progress of scholarship, the recent 'finds' of archaeology, the extension of travelling along Mediterranean shores, the political enthusiasms evoked by the stirrings of young Italy and young Greece, all combined to reawaken in the poetical imagination of the times the dormant memories of antiquity has not yet been told by the historians of literature. [Footnote: At least as far as England is concerned. For France, cf. Canat,
La renaissance de la Grece antique
, Hachette, Paris, 1911.]