Proserpine and Midas

By Mary Shelley

The Hours have oped the palace of the dawn
And through the Eastern gates of Heaven, Aurora
Comes charioted on light, her wind-swift steeds,
Winged with roseate clouds, strain up the steep.
She loosely holds the reins, her golden hair,
Its strings outspread by the sweet morning breeze[,]
Blinds the pale stars. Our rural tasks begin;
The young lambs bleat pent up within the fold,
The herds low in their stalls, & the blithe cock
Halloos most loudly to his distant mates.
But who are these we see? these are not men,
Divine of form & sple[n]didly arrayed,
They sit in solemn conclave. Is that Pan,
Our Country God, surrounded by his Fauns?
And who is he whose crown of gold & harp
Are attributes of high Apollo?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anna Ruggieri
• Release date: Mar 24, 2017
• ISBN: 9788826042060

Mary Shelley

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was born in 1797, the daughter of two of the leading radical writers of the age. Her mother died just days after her birth and she was educated at home by her father and encouraged in literary pursuits. She eloped with and subsequently married the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, but their life together was full of hardship. The couple were ruined by disapproving parents and Mary lost three of her four children. Although its subject matter was extremely dark, her first novel Frankenstein (1818) was an instant sensation. Subsequent works such as Mathilda (1819), Valperga (1823) and The Last Man (1826) were less successful but are now finally receiving the critical acclaim that they deserve.

Book preview

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Proserpine and Midas

First digital edition 2017 by Anna Ruggieri

Contents

PREFATORY NOTE.

INTRODUCTION.

PROSERPINE.A DRAMA IN TWO ACTS.

ACT I.

ACT II

MIDAS.A DRAMA IN TWO ACTS.

ACT I.

ACT II

PREFATORY NOTE.

The editor came across the unpublished texts included in thisvolume as early as 1905. Perhaps he ought to apologize for delayingtheir appearance in print. The fact is he has long been afraid ofoverrating their intrinsic value. But as the great Shelleycentenary year has come, perhaps this little monument of hiswife’s collaboration may take its modest place among thetributes which will be paid to his memory. For Mary Shelley’smythological dramas can at least claim to be the propersetting forsome of the most beautiful lyrics of the poet, which so far havebeen read in undue isolation. And even as a literary sign of thosetimes, as an example of that classical renaissance which theromantic period fostered, they may not be altogethernegligible.

These biographical and literary points have been dealt with inan introduction for which the kindest help was long ago receivedfrom the late Dr. Garnett and the late Lord Abinger. Sir WalterRaleigh was also among the first to give both encouragement andguidance. My friends M. Emile Pons and Mr. Roger Ingpen have readthe book in manuscript. The authorities of the Bodleian Library andof the Clarendon Press have been as generously helpful as is theirwell-known wont. To all the editor wishesto record hisacknowledgements and thanks.

STRASBOURG.

INTRODUCTION.

I.

‘The compositions published in Mrs. Shelley’slifetime afford but an inadequate conception of the intensesensibility and mental vigour of this extraordinarywoman.’

Thus wrote Dr. Garnett, in 1862 (Preface to his Relics ofShelley). The words of praise may have sounded unexpectedly warm atthat date. Perhaps the present volume will make the reader morewilling to subscribe, or less inclined to demur.

Mary Godwin in her younger days certainly possessed a fair shareof that nimbleness of invention which generally characterizes womenof letters.Her favourite pastime as a child, she herselftestifies,1had been to write stories. And a dearer pleasure hadbeen—to use her own characteristic abstract and elongated wayof putting it—‘the following up trains of thought whichhad for their subject the formation of a succession of imaginaryincidents’. All readers of Shelley’s life remember howlater on, as a girl of nineteen—anda two years’wife—she waspresent, ‘a devout but nearly silentlistener’, at the long symposia held by her husband and Byronin Switzerland (June 1816), and how the pondering over‘German horrors’, and a common resolve to perpetrateghost stories of theirown, led her to imagine that most unwomanlyof all feminine romances, Frankenstein. The paradoxical effort wasparadoxically successful, and, as publishers’ lists aver tothis day, Frankenstein’s monster has turned out to be thehardest-lived specimen ofthe‘raw-head-and-bloody-bones’ school of romantic tales.So much, no doubt, to the credit of Mary Shelley. But morecreditable, surely, is the fact that she was not tempted, as‘Monk’ Lewis had been, to persevere in those lugubriousthemes.

Although her publishers—et pour cause—insisted onstyling her ‘the author of Frankenstein’, an entirelydifferent vein appears in her later productions. Indeed, a quietreserve of tone, a slow, sober, and sedate bearing, are henceforthcharacteristic of all her literaryattitudes. It is almost a case ofrunning from one to the other extreme. The force of style whicheven adverse critics acknowledged in Frankenstein was sometimesperilously akin to the most disputable kinds of romantic rant. Butin the historical or society novels which followed, in thecontributions which graced the ‘Keepsakes’ of thethirties, and even—alas—in the various prefaces andcommentaries which accompanied the publication of so many poems ofShelley, his wife succumbed to an increasing habit ofalmostVictorian reticence and dignity. And those later novels and tales,though they sold well in their days and were kindly reviewed, canhardly boast of any reputation now. Most of them are pervaded by abrooding spirit of melancholy of the ‘moping’ ratherthan the ‘musical’ sort, and consequently ratherineffective as an artistic motive. Students of Shelley occasionallyscan those pages with a view to pick some obscure ‘hints andindirections’, some veiled reminiscences, in the stories ofthe adventuresand misfortunes of The Last Man or Lodore. And thebooks 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. Itis as if the pulse which had been beating so wildly, sofrantically, in Frankenstein (1818), had lapsed, with Valperga(1823) and the rest, into an increasingly sluggish