Proserpine and Midas | Page 3

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 [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 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, [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 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. [Footnote: Letter to T. L. Peacock, November 1820.]
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)