Shelley loved to idealize the real--to gift the mechanism of
the material universe with a soul and a voice, and to bestow such also
on the most delicate and abstract emotions and thoughts of the mind.
the material universe with a soul and a voice, and to bestow such also
on the most delicate and abstract emotions and thoughts of the mind.
Shelley copy
' And like my words they were no more.
NOTES:
_274 spokes B, edition 1839; spoke 1820.
_276 lightenings B; lightnings 1820.
_280 mines B; mine 1820.
_282 poised B; poized edition 1839; poured 1820.
THE EARTH:
The joy, the triumph, the delight, the madness!
The boundless, overflowing, bursting gladness, _320
The vaporous exultation not to be confined!
Ha! ha! the animation of delight
Which wraps me, like an atmosphere of light,
And bears me as a cloud is borne by its own wind.
THE MOON:
Brother mine, calm wanderer, _325
Happy globe of land and air,
Some Spirit is darted like a beam from thee,
Which penetrates my frozen frame,
And passes with the warmth of flame,
With love, and odour, and deep melody _330
Through me, through me!
THE EARTH:
Ha! ha! the caverns of my hollow mountains,
My cloven fire-crags, sound-exulting fountains
Laugh with a vast and inextinguishable laughter.
The oceans, and the deserts, and the abysses, _335
And the deep air's unmeasured wildernesses,
Answer from all their clouds and billows, echoing after.
They cry aloud as I do. Sceptred curse,
Who all our green and azure universe
Threatenedst to muffle round with black destruction, sending _340
A solid cloud to rain hot thunderstones,
And splinter and knead down my children's bones,
All I bring forth, to one void mass battering and blending,--
Until each crag-like tower, and storied column,
Palace, and obelisk, and temple solemn, _345
My imperial mountains crowned with cloud, and snow, and fire,
My sea-like forests, every blade and blossom
Which finds a grave or cradle in my bosom,
Were stamped by thy strong hate into a lifeless mire:
How art thou sunk, withdrawn, covered, drunk up _350
By thirsty nothing, as the brackish cup
Drained by a desert-troop, a little drop for all;
And from beneath, around, within, above,
Filling thy void annihilation, love
Bursts in like light on caves cloven by the thunder-ball. _355
NOTES:
_335-_336 the abysses, And 1820, 1839; the abysses Of B.
_355 the omitted 1820.
THE MOON:
The snow upon my lifeless mountains
Is loosened into living fountains,
My solid oceans flow, and sing and shine:
A spirit from my heart bursts forth,
It clothes with unexpected birth _360
My cold bare bosom: Oh! it must be thine
On mine, on mine!
Gazing on thee I feel, I know
Green stalks burst forth, and bright flowers grow,
And living shapes upon my bosom move: _365
Music is in the sea and air,
Winged clouds soar here and there,
Dark with the rain new buds are dreaming of:
'Tis love, all love!
THE EARTH:
It interpenetrates my granite mass, _370
Through tangled roots and trodden clay doth pass
Into the utmost leaves and delicatest flowers;
Upon the winds, among the clouds 'tis spread,
It wakes a life in the forgotten dead,
They breathe a spirit up from their obscurest bowers. _375
And like a storm bursting its cloudy prison
With thunder, and with whirlwind, has arisen
Out of the lampless caves of unimagined being:
With earthquake shock and swiftness making shiver
Thought's stagnant chaos, unremoved for ever, _380
Till hate, and fear, and pain, light-vanquished shadows, fleeing,
Leave Man, who was a many-sided mirror,
Which could distort to many a shape of error,
This true fair world of things, a sea reflecting love;
Which over all his kind, as the sun's heaven _385
Gliding o'er ocean, smooth, serene, and even,
Darting from starry depths radiance and life, doth move:
Leave Man, even as a leprous child is left,
Who follows a sick beast to some warm cleft
Of rocks, through which the might of healing springs is poured; _390
Then when it wanders home with rosy smile,
Unconscious, and its mother fears awhile
It is a spirit, then, weeps on her child restored.
Man, oh, not men! a chain of linked thought,
Of love and might to be divided not, _395
Compelling the elements with adamantine stress;
As the sun rules, even with a tyrant's gaze,
The unquiet republic of the maze
Of planets, struggling fierce towards heaven's free wilderness.
Man, one harmonious soul of many a soul, _400
Whose nature is its own divine control,
Where all things flow to all, as rivers to the sea;
Familiar acts are beautiful through love;
Labour, and pain, and grief, in life's green grove
Sport like tame beasts, none knew how gentle they could be! _405
His will, with all mean passions, bad delights,
And selfish cares, its trembling satellites,
A spirit ill to guide, but mighty to obey,
Is as a tempest-winged ship, whose helm
Love rules, through waves which dare not overwhelm, _410
Forcing life's wildest shores to own its sovereign sway.
All things confess his strength. Through the cold mass
Of marble and of colour his dreams pass;
Bright threads whence mothers weave the robes their children wear;
Language is a perpetual Orphic song, _415
Which rules with Daedal harmony a throng
Of thoughts and forms, which else senseless and shapeless were.
The lightning is his slave; heaven's utmost deep
Gives up her stars, and like a flock of sheep
They pass before his eye, are numbered, and roll on! _420
The tempest is his steed, he strides the air;
And the abyss shouts from her depth laid bare,
Heaven, hast thou secrets? Man unveils me; I have none.
NOTE:
_387 life B; light 1820.
THE MOON:
The shadow of white death has passed
From my path in heaven at last, _425
A clinging shroud of solid frost and sleep;
And through my newly-woven bowers,
Wander happy paramours,
Less mighty, but as mild as those who keep
Thy vales more deep. _430
THE EARTH:
As the dissolving warmth of dawn may fold
A half unfrozen dew-globe, green, and gold,
And crystalline, till it becomes a winged mist,
And wanders up the vault of the blue day,
Outlives the noon, and on the sun's last ray _435
Hangs o'er the sea, a fleece of fire and amethyst.
NOTE:
_432 unfrozen B, edition 1839; infrozen 1820.
THE MOON:
Thou art folded, thou art lying
In the light which is undying
Of thine own joy, and heaven's smile divine;
All suns and constellations shower _440
On thee a light, a life, a power
Which doth array thy sphere; thou pourest thine
On mine, on mine!
THE EARTH:
I spin beneath my pyramid of night,
Which points into the heavens dreaming delight, _445
Murmuring victorious joy in my enchanted sleep;
As a youth lulled in love-dreams faintly sighing,
Under the shadow of his beauty lying,
Which round his rest a watch of light and warmth doth keep.
THE MOON:
As in the soft and sweet eclipse, _450
When soul meets soul on lovers' lips,
High hearts are calm, and brightest eyes are dull;
So when thy shadow falls on me,
Then am I mute and still, by thee
Covered; of thy love, Orb most beautiful, _455
Full, oh, too full!
Thou art speeding round the sun
Brightest world of many a one;
Green and azure sphere which shinest
With a light which is divinest _460
Among all the lamps of Heaven
To whom life and light is given;
I, thy crystal paramour
Borne beside thee by a power
Like the polar Paradise, _465
Magnet-like of lovers' eyes;
I, a most enamoured maiden
Whose weak brain is overladen
With the pleasure of her love,
Maniac-like around thee move
Gazing, an insatiate bride, _470
On thy form from every side
Like a Maenad, round the cup
Which Agave lifted up
In the weird Cadmaean forest. _475
Brother, wheresoe'er thou soarest
I must hurry, whirl and follow
Through the heavens wide and hollow,
Sheltered by the warm embrace
Of thy soul from hungry space, _480
Drinking from thy sense and sight
Beauty, majesty, and might,
As a lover or a chameleon
Grows like what it looks upon,
As a violet's gentle eye _485
Gazes on the azure sky
Until its hue grows like what it beholds,
As a gray and watery mist
Glows like solid amethyst
Athwart the western mountain it enfolds, _490
When the sunset sleeps
Upon its snow--
THE EARTH:
And the weak day weeps
That it should be so.
Oh, gentle Moon, the voice of thy delight _495
Falls on me like thy clear and tender light
Soothing the seaman, borne the summer night,
Through isles for ever calm;
Oh, gentle Moon, thy crystal accents pierce
The caverns of my pride's deep universe, _500
Charming the tiger joy, whose tramplings fierce
Made wounds which need thy balm.
PANTHEA:
I rise as from a bath of sparkling water,
A bath of azure light, among dark rocks,
Out of the stream of sound.
IONE:
Ah me! sweet sister, _505
The stream of sound has ebbed away from us,
And you pretend to rise out of its wave,
Because your words fall like the clear, soft dew
Shaken from a bathing wood-nymph's limbs and hair.
PANTHEA:
Peace! peace! a mighty Power, which is as darkness, _510
Is rising out of Earth, and from the sky
Is showered like night, and from within the air
Bursts, like eclipse which had been gathered up
Into the pores of sunlight: the bright visions,
Wherein the singing spirits rode and shone, _515
Gleam like pale meteors through a watery night.
IONE:
There is a sense of words upon mine ear.
PANTHEA:
An universal sound like words: Oh, list!
DEMOGORGON:
Thou, Earth, calm empire of a happy soul,
Sphere of divinest shapes and harmonies, _520
Beautiful orb! gathering as thou dost roll
The love which paves thy path along the skies:
THE EARTH:
I hear: I am as a drop of dew that dies.
DEMOGORGON:
Thou, Moon, which gazest on the nightly Earth
With wonder, as it gazes upon thee; _525
Whilst each to men, and beasts, and the swift birth
Of birds, is beauty, love, calm, harmony:
THE MOON:
I hear: I am a leaf shaken by thee!
DEMOGORGON:
Ye Kings of suns and stars, Daemons and Gods,
Ethereal Dominations, who possess _530
Elysian, windless, fortunate abodes
Beyond Heaven's constellated wilderness:
A VOICE FROM ABOVE:
Our great Republic hears: we are blest, and bless.
DEMOGORGON:
Ye happy Dead, whom beams of brightest verse
Are clouds to hide, not colours to portray, _535
Whether your nature is that universe
Which once ye saw and suffered--
A VOICE: FROM BENEATH:
Or as they
Whom we have left, we change and pass away.
DEMOGORGON:
Ye elemental Genii, who have homes
From man's high mind even to the central stone _540
Of sullen lead; from heaven's star-fretted domes
To the dull weed some sea-worm battens on:
A CONFUSED VOICE:
We hear: thy words waken Oblivion.
DEMOGORGON:
Spirits, whose homes are flesh; ye beasts and birds,
Ye worms and fish; ye living leaves and buds; _545
Lightning and wind; and ye untameable herds,
Meteors and mists, which throng air's solitudes:--
NOTE:
_547 throng 1820, 1839; cancelled for feed B.
A VOICE:
Thy voice to us is wind among still woods.
DEMOGORGON:
Man, who wert once a despot and a slave;
A dupe and a deceiver; a decay; _550
A traveller from the cradle to the grave
Through the dim night of this immortal day:
ALL:
Speak: thy strong words may never pass away.
DEMOGORGON:
This is the day, which down the void abysm
At the Earth-born's spell yawns for Heaven's despotism, _555
And Conquest is dragged captive through the deep:
Love, from its awful throne of patient power
In the wise heart, from the last giddy hour
Of dread endurance, from the slippery, steep,
And narrow verge of crag-like agony, springs _560
And folds over the world its healing wings.
Gentleness, Virtue, Wisdom, and Endurance,
These are the seals of that most firm assurance
Which bars the pit over Destruction's strength;
And if, with infirm hand, Eternity, _565
Mother of many acts and hours, should free
The serpent that would clasp her with his length;
These are the spells by which to reassume
An empire o'er the disentangled doom.
To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite; _570
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent; _575
This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory!
NOTES:
_559 dread B, edition 1839; dead 1820.
_575 falter B, edition 1839; flatter 1820.
CANCELLED FRAGMENTS OF "PROMETHEUS UNBOUND".
[First printed by Mr. C. D. Locock, "Examination of the Shelley
Manuscripts at the Bodleian Library", 1903, pages 33-7. ]
(following 1. _37. )
When thou descendst each night with open eyes
In torture, for a tyrant seldom sleeps,
Thou never; . . .
. . .
(following 1. _195. )
Which thou henceforth art doomed to interweave
. . .
(following the first two words of 1. _342. )
[Of Hell:] I placed it in his choice to be
The crown, or trampled refuse of the world
With but one law itself a glorious boon--
I gave--
. . .
(following 1. _707. )
SECOND SPIRIT:
I leaped on the wings of the Earth-star damp
As it rose on the steam of a slaughtered camp--
The sleeping newt heard not our tramp
As swift as the wings of fire may pass--
We threaded the points of long thick grass
Which hide the green pools of the morass
But shook a water-serpent's couch
In a cleft skull, of many such
The widest; at the meteor's touch
The snake did seem to see in dream
Thrones and dungeons overthrown
Visions how unlike his own. . .
'Twas the hope the prophecy
Which begins and ends in thee
. . .
(following 2. 1. _110. )
Lift up thine eyes Panthea--they pierce they burn
PANTHEA:
Alas! I am consumed--I melt away
The fire is in my heart--
ASIA:
Thine eyes burn burn! --
Hide them within thine hair--
PANTHEA:
O quench thy lips
I sink I perish
ASIA:
Shelter me now--they burn
It is his spirit in their orbs. . . my life
Is ebbing fast--I cannot speak--
PANTHEA:
Rest, rest!
Sleep death annihilation pain! aught else
. . .
(following 2. 4. _27. )
Or looks which tell that while the lips are calm
And the eyes cold, the spirit weeps within
Tears like the sanguine sweat of agony;
. . .
UNCANCELLED PASSAGE.
(following 2. 5. _71. )
ASIA:
You said that spirits spoke, but it was thee
Sweet sister, for even now thy curved lips
Tremble as if the sound were dying there
Not dead
PANTHEA:
Alas it was Prometheus spoke
Within me, and I know it must be so
I mixed my own weak nature with his love
. . . And my thoughts
Are like the many forests of a vale
Through which the might of whirlwind and of rain
Had passed--they rest rest through the evening light
As mine do now in thy beloved smile.
CANCELLED STAGE DIRECTIONS.
(following 1. _221. )
[THE SOUND BENEATH AS OF EARTHQUAKE AND THE DRIVING OF WHIRLWINDS--THE
RAVINE IS SPLIT, AND THE PHANTASM OF JUPITER RISES, SURROUNDED BY
HEAVY CLOUDS WHICH DART FORTH LIGHTNING. ]
(following 1. _520. )
[ENTER RUSHING BY GROUPS OF HORRIBLE FORMS; THEY SPEAK AS THEY PASS IN
CHORUS. ]
(following 1. _552. )
[A SHADOW PASSES OVER THE SCENE, AND A PIERCING SHRIEK IS HEARD. ]
NOTE ON "PROMETHEUS UNBOUND", BY MRS. SHELLEY.
On the 12th of March, 1818, Shelley quitted England, never to return.
His principal motive was the hope that his health would be improved by
a milder climate; he suffered very much during the winter previous to
his emigration, and this decided his vacillating purpose. In December,
1817, he had written from Marlow to a friend, saying:
'My health has been materially worse. My feelings at intervals are of
a deadly and torpid kind, or awakened to such a state of unnatural and
keen excitement that, only to instance the organ of sight, I find the
very blades of grass and the boughs of distant trees present
themselves to me with microscopic distinctness. Towards evening I sink
into a state of lethargy and inanimation, and often remain for hours
on the sofa between sleep and waking, a prey to the most painful
irritability of thought. Such, with little intermission, is my
condition. The hours devoted to study are selected with vigilant
caution from among these periods of endurance. It is not for this that
I think of travelling to Italy, even if I knew that Italy would
relieve me. But I have experienced a decisive pulmonary attack; and
although at present it has passed away without any considerable
vestige of its existence, yet this symptom sufficiently shows the true
nature of my disease to be consumptive. It is to my advantage that
this malady is in its nature slow, and, if one is sufficiently alive
to its advances, is susceptible of cure from a warm climate. In the
event of its assuming any decided shape, IT WOULD BE MY DUTY to go to
Italy without delay. It is not mere health, but life, that I should
seek, and that not for my own sake--I feel I am capable of trampling
on all such weakness; but for the sake of those to whom my life may be
a source of happiness, utility, security, and honour, and to some of
whom my death might be all that is the reverse. '
In almost every respect his journey to Italy was advantageous. He left
behind friends to whom he was attached; but cares of a thousand kinds,
many springing from his lavish generosity, crowded round him in his
native country, and, except the society of one or two friends, he had
no compensation. The climate caused him to consume half his existence
in helpless suffering. His dearest pleasure, the free enjoyment of the
scenes of Nature, was marred by the same circumstance.
He went direct to Italy, avoiding even Paris, and did not make any
pause till he arrived at Milan. The first aspect of Italy enchanted
Shelley; it seemed a garden of delight placed beneath a clearer and
brighter heaven than any he had lived under before. He wrote long
descriptive letters during the first year of his residence in Italy,
which, as compositions, are the most beautiful in the world, and show
how truly he appreciated and studied the wonders of Nature and Art in
that divine land.
The poetical spirit within him speedily revived with all the power and
with more than all the beauty of his first attempts. He meditated
three subjects as the groundwork for lyrical dramas. One was the story
of Tasso; of this a slight fragment of a song of Tasso remains. The
other was one founded on the Book of Job, which he never abandoned in
idea, but of which no trace remains among his papers. The third was
the "Prometheus Unbound". The Greek tragedians were now his most
familiar companions in his wanderings, and the sublime majesty of
Aeschylus filled him with wonder and delight. The father of Greek
tragedy does not possess the pathos of Sophocles, nor the variety and
tenderness of Euripides; the interest on which he founds his dramas is
often elevated above human vicissitudes into the mighty passions and
throes of gods and demi-gods: such fascinated the abstract imagination
of Shelley.
We spent a month at Milan, visiting the Lake of Como during that
interval. Thence we passed in succession to Pisa, Leghorn, the Baths
of Lucca, Venice, Este, Rome, Naples, and back again to Rome, whither
we returned early in March, 1819. During all this time Shelley
meditated the subject of his drama, and wrote portions of it. Other
poems were composed during this interval, and while at the Bagni di
Lucca he translated Plato's "Symposium". But, though he diversified
his studies, his thoughts centred in the Prometheus. At last, when at
Rome, during a bright and beautiful Spring, he gave up his whole time
to the composition. The spot selected for his study was, as he
mentions in his preface, the mountainous ruins of the Baths of
Caracalla. These are little known to the ordinary visitor at Rome. He
describes them in a letter, with that poetry and delicacy and truth of
description which render his narrated impressions of scenery of
unequalled beauty and interest.
At first he completed the drama in three acts. It was not till several
months after, when at Florence, that he conceived that a fourth act, a
sort of hymn of rejoicing in the fulfilment of the prophecies with
regard to Prometheus, ought to be added to complete the composition.
The prominent feature of Shelley's theory of the destiny of the human
species was that evil is not inherent in the system of the creation,
but an accident that might be expelled. This also forms a portion of
Christianity: God made earth and man perfect, till he, by his fall,
'Brought death into the world and all our woe. '
Shelley believed that mankind had only to will that there should be no
evil, and there would be none. It is not my part in these Notes to
notice the arguments that have been urged against this opinion, but to
mention the fact that he entertained it, and was indeed attached to it
with fervent enthusiasm. That man could be so perfectionized as to be
able to expel evil from his own nature, and from the greater part of
the creation, was the cardinal point of his system. And the subject he
loved best to dwell on was the image of One warring with the Evil
Principle, oppressed not only by it, but by all--even the good, who
were deluded into considering evil a necessary portion of humanity; a
victim full of fortitude and hope and the spirit of triumph emanating
from a reliance in the ultimate omnipotence of Good. Such he had
depicted in his last poem, when he made Laon the enemy and the victim
of tyrants. He now took a more idealized image of the same subject. He
followed certain classical authorities in figuring Saturn as the good
principle, Jupiter the usurping evil one, and Prometheus as the
regenerator, who, unable to bring mankind back to primitive innocence,
used knowledge as a weapon to defeat evil, by leading mankind, beyond
the state wherein they are sinless through ignorance, to that in which
they are virtuous through wisdom. Jupiter punished the temerity of the
Titan by chaining him to a rock of Caucasus, and causing a vulture to
devour his still-renewed heart. There was a prophecy afloat in heaven
portending the fall of Jove, the secret of averting which was known
only to Prometheus; and the god offered freedom from torture on
condition of its being communicated to him. According to the
mythological story, this referred to the offspring of Thetis, who was
destined to be greater than his father. Prometheus at last bought
pardon for his crime of enriching mankind with his gifts, by revealing
the prophecy. Hercules killed the vulture, and set him free; and
Thetis was married to Peleus, the father of Achilles.
Shelley adapted the catastrophe of this story to his peculiar views.
The son greater than his father, born of the nuptials of Jupiter and
Thetis, was to dethrone Evil, and bring back a happier reign than that
of Saturn. Prometheus defies the power of his enemy, and endures
centuries of torture; till the hour arrives when Jove, blind to the
real event, but darkly guessing that some great good to himself will
flow, espouses Thetis. At the moment, the Primal Power of the world
drives him from his usurped throne, and Strength, in the person of
Hercules, liberates Humanity, typified in Prometheus, from the
tortures generated by evil done or suffered. Asia, one of the
Oceanides, is the wife of Prometheus--she was, according to other
mythological interpretations, the same as Venus and Nature. When the
benefactor of mankind is liberated, Nature resumes the beauty of her
prime, and is united to her husband, the emblem of the human race, in
perfect and happy union. In the Fourth Act, the Poet gives further
scope to his imagination, and idealizes the forms of creation--such as
we know them, instead of such as they appeared to the Greeks. Maternal
Earth, the mighty parent, is superseded by the Spirit of the Earth,
the guide of our planet through the realms of sky; while his fair and
weaker companion and attendant, the Spirit of the Moon, receives bliss
from the annihilation of Evil in the superior sphere.
Shelley develops, more particularly in the lyrics of this drama, his
abstruse and imaginative theories with regard to the Creation. It
requires a mind as subtle and penetrating as his own to understand the
mystic meanings scattered throughout the poem. They elude the ordinary
reader by their abstraction and delicacy of distinction, but they are
far from vague. It was his design to write prose metaphysical essays
on the nature of Man, which would have served to explain much of what
is obscure in his poetry; a few scattered fragments of observations
and remarks alone remain. He considered these philosophical views of
Mind and Nature to be instinct with the intensest spirit of poetry.
More popular poets clothe the ideal with familiar and sensible
imagery.
Shelley loved to idealize the real--to gift the mechanism of
the material universe with a soul and a voice, and to bestow such also
on the most delicate and abstract emotions and thoughts of the mind.
Sophocles was his great master in this species of imagery.
I find in one of his manuscript books some remarks on a line in the
"Oedipus Tyrannus", which show at once the critical subtlety of
Shelley's mind, and explain his apprehension of those 'minute and
remote distinctions of feeling, whether relative to external nature or
the living beings which surround us,' which he pronounces, in the
letter quoted in the note to the "Revolt of Islam", to comprehend all
that is sublime in man.
'In the Greek Shakespeare, Sophocles, we find the image,
Pollas d' odous elthonta phrontidos planois:
a line of almost unfathomable depth of poetry; yet how simple are the
images in which it is arrayed!
"Coming to many ways in the wanderings of careful thought. "
If the words odous and planois had not been used, the line might have
been explained in a metaphorical instead of an absolute sense, as we
say "WAYS and means," and "wanderings" for error and confusion. But
they meant literally paths or roads, such as we tread with our feet;
and wanderings, such as a man makes when he loses himself in a desert,
or roams from city to city--as Oedipus, the speaker of this verse, was
destined to wander, blind and asking charity. What a picture does this
line suggest of the mind as a wilderness of intricate paths, wide as
the universe, which is here made its symbol; a world within a world
which he who seeks some knowledge with respect to what he ought to do
searches throughout, as he would search the external universe for some
valued thing which was hidden from him upon its surface. '
In reading Shelley's poetry, we often find similar verses, resembling,
but not imitating the Greek in this species of imagery; for, though he
adopted the style, he gifted it with that originality of form and
colouring which sprung from his own genius.
In the "Prometheus Unbound", Shelley fulfils the promise quoted from a
letter in the Note on the "Revolt of Islam". (While correcting the
proof-sheets of that poem, it struck me that the poet had indulged in
an exaggerated view of the evils of restored despotism; which, however
injurious and degrading, were less openly sanguinary than the triumph
of anarchy, such as it appeared in France at the close of the last
century. But at this time a book, "Scenes of Spanish Life", translated
by Lieutenant Crawford from the German of Dr. Huber, of Rostock, fell
into my hands. The account of the triumph of the priests and the
serviles, after the French invasion of Spain in 1823, bears a strong
and frightful resemblance to some of the descriptions of the massacre
of the patriots in the "Revolt of Islam". ) The tone of the composition
is calmer and more majestic, the poetry more perfect as a whole, and
the imagination displayed at once more pleasingly beautiful and more
varied and daring. The description of the Hours, as they are seen in
the cave of Demogorgon, is an instance of this--it fills the mind as
the most charming picture--we long to see an artist at work to bring
to our view the
'cars drawn by rainbow-winged steeds
Which trample the dim winds: in each there stands
A wild-eyed charioteer urging their flight.
Some look behind, as fiends pursued them there,
And yet I see no shapes but the keen stars:
Others, with burning eyes, lean forth, and drink
With eager lips the wind of their own speed,
As if the thing they loved fled on before,
And now, even now, they clasped it. Their bright locks
Stream like a comet's flashing hair: they all
Sweep onward. '
Through the whole poem there reigns a sort of calm and holy spirit of
love; it soothes the tortured, and is hope to the expectant, till the
prophecy is fulfilled, and Love, untainted by any evil, becomes the
law of the world.
England had been rendered a painful residence to Shelley, as much by
the sort of persecution with which in those days all men of liberal
opinions were visited, and by the injustice he had lately endured in
the Court of Chancery, as by the symptoms of disease which made him
regard a visit to Italy as necessary to prolong his life. An exile,
and strongly impressed with the feeling that the majority of his
countrymen regarded him with sentiments of aversion such as his own
heart could experience towards none, he sheltered himself from such
disgusting and painful thoughts in the calm retreats of poetry, and
built up a world of his own--with the more pleasure, since he hoped to
induce some one or two to believe that the earth might become such,
did mankind themselves consent. The charm of the Roman climate helped
to clothe his thoughts in greater beauty than they had ever worn
before. And, as he wandered among the ruins made one with Nature in
their decay, or gazed on the Praxitelean shapes that throng the
Vatican, the Capitol, and the palaces of Rome, his soul imbibed forms
of loveliness which became a portion of itself. There are many
passages in the "Prometheus" which show the intense delight he
received from such studies, and give back the impression with a beauty
of poetical description peculiarly his own. He felt this, as a poet
must feel when he satisfies himself by the result of his labours; and
he wrote from Rome, 'My "Prometheus Unbound" is just finished, and in
a month or two I shall send it. It is a drama, with characters and
mechanism of a kind yet unattempted; and I think the execution is
better than any of my former attempts. '
I may mention, for the information of the more critical reader, that
the verbal alterations in this edition of "Prometheus" are made from a
list of errata written by Shelley himself.
***
THE CENCI.
A TRAGEDY IN FIVE ACTS.
[Composed at Rome and near Leghorn (Villa Valsovano), May-August 5,
1819; published 1820 (spring) by C. & J. Ollier, London. This edition
of two hundred and fifty copies was printed in Italy 'because,' writes
Shelley to Peacock, September 21, 1819, 'it costs, with all duties and
freightage, about half what it would cost in London. ' A Table of
Errata in Mrs. Shelley's handwriting is printed by Forman in "The
Shelley Library", page 91. A second edition, published by Ollier in
1821 (C. H. Reynell, printer), embodies the corrections indicated in
this Table. No manuscript of "The Cenci" is known to exist. Our text
follows that of the second edition (1821); variations of the first
(Italian) edition, the title-page of which bears date 1819, are given
in the footnotes. The text of the "Poetical Works", 1839, 1st and 2nd
editions (Mrs. Shelley), follows for the most part that of the editio
princeps of 1819. ]
DEDICATION, TO LEIGH HUNT, ESQ.
Mv dear friend--
I inscribe with your name, from a distant country, and after an
absence whose months have seemed years, this the latest of my literary
efforts.
Those writings which I have hitherto published, have been little else
than visions which impersonate my own apprehensions of the beautiful
and the just. I can also perceive in them the literary defects
incidental to youth and impatience; they are dreams of what ought to
be, or may be. The drama which I now present to you is a sad reality.
I lay aside the presumptuous attitude of an instructor, and am content
to paint, with such colours as my own heart furnishes, that which has
been.
Had I known a person more highly endowed than yourself with all that
it becomes a man to possess, I had solicited for this work the
ornament of his name. One more gentle, honourable, innocent and brave;
one of more exalted toleration for all who do and think evil, and yet
himself more free from evil; one who knows better how to receive, and
how to confer a benefit, though he must ever confer far more than he
can receive; one of simpler, and, in the highest sense of the word, of
purer life and manners I never knew: and I had already been fortunate
in friendships when your name was added to the list.
In that patient and irreconcilable enmity with domestic and political
tyranny and imposture which the tenor of your life has illustrated,
and which, had I health and talents, should illustrate mine, let us,
comforting each other in our task, live and die.
All happiness attend you! Your affectionate friend,
PERCY B. SHELLEY.
Rome, May 29, 1819.
THE CENCI.
PREFACE.
A manuscript was communicated to me during my travels in Italy, which
was copied from the archives of the Cenci Palace at Rome, and contains
a detailed account of the horrors which ended in the extinction of one
of the noblest and richest families of that city during the
Pontificate of Clement VIII, in the year 1599. The story is, that an
old man having spent his life in debauchery and wickedness, conceived
at length an implacable hatred towards his children; which showed
itself towards one daughter under the form of an incestuous passion,
aggravated by every circumstance of cruelty and violence. This
daughter, after long and vain attempts to escape from what she
considered a perpetual contamination both of body and mind, at length
plotted with her mother-in-law and brother to murder their common
tyrant. The young maiden, who was urged to this tremendous deed by an
impulse which overpowered its horror, was evidently a most gentle and
amiable being, a creature formed to adorn and be admired, and thus
violently thwarted from her nature by the necessity of circumstance
and opinion. The deed was quickly discovered, and, in spite of the
most earnest prayers made to the Pope by the highest persons in Rome,
the criminals were put to death. The old man had during his life
repeatedly bought his pardon from the Pope for capital crimes of the
most enormous and unspeakable kind, at the price of a hundred thousand
crowns; the death therefore of his victims can scarcely be accounted
for by the love of justice. The Pope, among other motives for
severity, probably felt that whoever killed the Count Cenci deprived
his treasury of a certain and copious source of revenue. (The Papal
Government formerly took the most extraordinary precautions against
the publicity of facts which offer so tragical a demonstration of its
own wickedness and weakness; so that the communication of the
manuscript had become, until very lately, a matter of some
difficulty. ) Such a story, if told so as to present to the reader all
the feelings of those who once acted it, their hopes and fears, their
confidences and misgivings, their various interests, passions, and
opinions, acting upon and with each other, yet all conspiring to one
tremendous end, would be as a light to make apparent some of the most
dark and secret caverns of the human heart.
On my arrival at Rome I found that the story of the Cenci was a
subject not to be mentioned in Italian society without awakening a
deep and breathless interest; and that the feelings of the company
never failed to incline to a romantic pity for the wrongs, and a
passionate exculpation of the horrible deed to which they urged her,
who has been mingled two centuries with the common dust. All ranks of
people knew the outlines of this history, and participated in the
overwhelming interest which it seems to have the magic of exciting in
the human heart. I had a copy of Guido's picture of Beatrice which is
preserved in the Colonna Palace, and my servant instantly recognized
it as the portrait of La Cenci.
This national and universal interest which the story produces and has
produced for two centuries and among all ranks of people in a great
City, where the imagination is kept for ever active and awake, first
suggested to me the conception of its fitness for a dramatic purpose.
In fact it is a tragedy which has already received, from its capacity
of awakening and sustaining the sympathy of men, approbation and
success. Nothing remained as I imagined, but to clothe it to the
apprehensions of my countrymen in such language and action as would
bring it home to their hearts. The deepest and the sublimest tragic
compositions, King Lear and the two plays in which the tale of Oedipus
is told, were stories which already existed in tradition, as matters
of popular belief and interest, before Shakspeare and Sophocles made
them familiar to the sympathy of all succeeding generations of
mankind.
This story of the Cenci is indeed eminently fearful and monstrous:
anything like a dry exhibition of it on the stage would be
insupportable. The person who would treat such a subject must increase
the ideal, and diminish the actual horror of the events, so that the
pleasure which arises from the poetry which exists in these
tempestuous sufferings and crimes may mitigate the pain of the
contemplation of the moral deformity from which they spring. There
must also be nothing attempted to make the exhibition subservient to
what is vulgarly termed a moral purpose. The highest moral purpose
aimed at in the highest species of the drama, is the teaching the
human heart, through its sympathies and antipathies, the knowledge of
itself; in proportion to the possession of which knowledge, every
human being is wise, just, sincere, tolerant and kind. If dogmas can
do more, it is well: but a drama is no fit place for the enforcement
of them. Undoubtedly, no person can be truly dishonoured by the act of
another; and the fit return to make to the most enormous injuries is
kindness and forbearance, and a resolution to convert the injurer from
his dark passions by peace and love. Revenge, retaliation, atonement,
are pernicious mistakes. If Beatrice had thought in this manner she
would have been wiser and better; but she would never have been a
tragic character: the few whom such an exhibition would have
interested, could never have been sufficiently interested for a
dramatic purpose, from the want of finding sympathy in their interest
among the mass who surround them. It is in the restless and
anatomizing casuistry with which men seek the justification of
Beatrice, yet feel that she has done what needs justification; it is
in the superstitious horror with which they contemplate alike her
wrongs and their revenge, that the dramatic character of what she did
and suffered, consists.
I have endeavoured as nearly as possible to represent the characters
as they probably were, and have sought to avoid the error of making
them actuated by my own conceptions of right or wrong, false or true:
thus under a thin veil converting names and actions of the sixteenth
century into cold impersonations of my own mind. They are represented
as Catholics, and as Catholics deeply tinged with religion. To a
Protestant apprehension there will appear something unnatural in the
earnest and perpetual sentiment of the relations between God and men
which pervade the tragedy of the Cenci. It will especially be startled
at the combination of an undoubting persuasion of the truth of the
popular religion with a cool and determined perseverance in enormous
guilt. But religion in Italy is not, as in Protestant countries, a
cloak to be worn on particular days; or a passport which those who do
not wish to be railed at carry with them to exhibit; or a gloomy
passion for penetrating the impenetrable mysteries of our being, which
terrifies its possessor at the darkness of the abyss to the brink of
which it has conducted him. Religion coexists, as it were, in the mind
of an Italian Catholic, with a faith in that of which all men have the
most certain knowledge. It is interwoven with the whole fabric of
life. It is adoration, faith, submission, penitence, blind admiration;
not a rule for moral conduct. It has no necessary connection with any
one virtue. The most atrocious villain may be rigidly devout, and
without any shock to established faith, confess himself to be so.
Religion pervades intensely the whole frame of society, and is
according to the temper of the mind which it inhabits, a passion, a
persuasion, an excuse, a refuge; never a check. Cenci himself built a
chapel in the court of his Palace, and dedicated it to St. Thomas the
Apostle, and established masses for the peace of his soul. Thus in the
first scene of the fourth act Lucretia's design in exposing herself to
the consequences of an expostulation with Cenci after having
administered the opiate, was to induce him by a feigned tale to
confess himself before death; this being esteemed by Catholics as
essential to salvation; and she only relinquishes her purpose when she
perceives that her perseverance would expose Beatrice to new outrages.
I have avoided with great care in writing this play the introduction
of what is commonly called mere poetry, and I imagine there will
scarcely be found a detached simile or a single isolated description,
unless Beatrice's description of the chasm appointed for her father's
murder should be judged to be of that nature. (An idea in this speech
was suggested by a most sublime passage in "El Purgaterio de San
Patricio" of Calderon; the only plagiarism which I have intentionally
committed in the whole piece. )
In a dramatic composition the imagery and the passion should
interpenetrate one another, the former being reserved simply for the
full development and illustration of the latter. Imagination is as the
immortal God which should assume flesh for the redemption of mortal
passion. It is thus that the most remote and the most familiar imagery
may alike be fit for dramatic purposes when employed in the
illustration of strong feeling, which raises what is low, and levels
to the apprehension that which is lofty, casting over all the shadow
of its own greatness. In other respects, I have written more
carelessly; that is, without an over-fastidious and learned choice of
words. In this respect I entirely agree with those modern critics who
assert that in order to move men to true sympathy we must use the
familiar language of men, and that our great ancestors the ancient
English poets are the writers, a study of whom might incite us to do
that for our own age which they have done for theirs. But it must be
the real language of men in general and not that of any particular
class to whose society the writer happens to belong. So much for what
I have attempted; I need not be assured that success is a very
different matter; particularly for one whose attention has but newly
been awakened to the study of dramatic literature.
I endeavoured whilst at Rome to observe such monuments of this story
as might be accessible to a stranger. The portrait of Beatrice at the
Colonna Palace is admirable as a work of art: it was taken by Guido
during her confinement in prison. But it is most interesting as a just
representation of one of the loveliest specimens of the workmanship of
Nature. There is a fixed and pale composure upon the features: she
seems sad and stricken down in spirit, yet the despair thus expressed
is lightened by the patience of gentleness. Her head is bound with
folds of white drapery from which the yellow strings of her golden
hair escape, and fall about her neck. The moulding of her face is
exquisitely delicate; the eyebrows are distinct and arched: the lips
have that permanent meaning of imagination and sensibility which
suffering has not repressed and which it seems as if death scarcely
could extinguish. Her forehead is large and clear; her eyes, which we
are told were remarkable for their vivacity, are swollen with weeping
and lustreless, but beautifully tender and serene. In the whole mien
there is a simplicity and dignity which, united with her exquisite
loveliness and deep sorrow, are inexpressibly pathetic. Beatrice Cenci
appears to have been one of those rare persons in whom energy and
gentleness dwell together without destroying one another: her nature
was simple and profound. The crimes and miseries in which she was an
actor and a sufferer are as the mask and the mantle in which
circumstances clothed her for her impersonation on the scene of the
world.
The Cenci Palace is of great extent; and though in part modernized,
there yet remains a vast and gloomy pile of feudal architecture in the
same state as during the dreadful scenes which are the subject of this
tragedy. The Palace is situated in an obscure corner of Rome, near the
quarter of the Jews, and from the upper windows you see the immense
ruins of Mount Palatine half hidden under their profuse overgrowth of
trees. There is a court in one part of the Palace (perhaps that in
which Cenci built the Chapel to St. Thomas), supported by granite
columns and adorned with antique friezes of fine workmanship, and
built up, according to the ancient Italian fashion, with balcony over
balcony of open-work. One of the gates of the Palace formed of immense
stones and leading through a passage, dark and lofty and opening into
gloomy subterranean chambers, struck me particularly.
Of the Castle of Petrella, I could obtain no further information than
that which is to be found in the manuscript.
THE CENCI: A TRAGEDY IN FIVE ACTS.
DRAMATIS PERSONAE:
COUNT FRANCESCO CENCI.
GIACOMO, BERNARDO, HIS SONS.
CARDINAL CAMILLO.
PRINCE COLONNA.
ORSINO, A PRELATE.
SAVELLA, THE POPE'S LEGATE.
OLIMPIO, MARZIO, ASSASSINS.
ANDREA, SERVANT TO CENCI.
NOBLES. JUDGES. GUARDS, SERVANTS.
LUCRETIA, WIFE OF CENCI AND STEP-MOTHER OF HIS CHILDREN.
BEATRICE, HIS DAUGHTER.
THE SCENE LIES PRINCIPALLY IN ROME, BUT CHANGES DURING THE FOURTH
ACT TO PETRELLA, A CASTLE AMONG THE APULIAN APENNINES.
TIME. DURING THE PONTIFICATE OF CLEMENT VIII.
ACT 1.
SCENE 1. 1:
AN APARTMENT IN THE CENCI PALACE.
ENTER COUNT CENCI AND CARDINAL CAMILLO.
CAMILLO:
That matter of the murder is hushed up
If you consent to yield his Holiness
Your fief that lies beyond the Pincian gate. --
It needed all my interest in the conclave
To bend him to this point; he said that you _5
Bought perilous impunity with your gold;
That crimes like yours if once or twice compounded
Enriched the Church, and respited from hell
An erring soul which might repent and live: --
But that the glory and the interest _10
Of the high throne he fills, little consist
With making it a daily mart of guilt
As manifold and hideous as the deeds
Which you scarce hide from men's revolted eyes.
CENCI:
The third of my possessions--let it go! _15
Ay, I once heard the nephew of the Pope
Had sent his architect to view the ground,
Meaning to build a villa on my vines
The next time I compounded with his uncle:
I little thought he should outwit me so! _20
Henceforth no witness--not the lamp--shall see
That which the vassal threatened to divulge
Whose throat is choked with dust for his reward.
The deed he saw could not have rated higher
Than his most worthless life:--it angers me! _25
Respited me from Hell! So may the Devil
Respite their souls from Heaven! No doubt Pope Clement,
And his most charitable nephews, pray
That the Apostle Peter and the Saints
Will grant for their sake that I long enjoy _30
Strength, wealth, and pride, and lust, and length of days
Wherein to act the deeds which are the stewards
Of their revenue. --But much yet remains
To which they show no title.
CAMILLO:
Oh, Count Cenci!
So much that thou mightst honourably live _35
And reconcile thyself with thine own heart
And with thy God, and with the offended world.
How hideously look deeds of lust and blood
Through those snow white and venerable hairs! --
Your children should be sitting round you now, _40
But that you fear to read upon their looks
The shame and misery you have written there.
Where is your wife? Where is your gentle daughter?
Methinks her sweet looks, which make all things else
Beauteous and glad, might kill the fiend within you. _45
Why is she barred from all society
But her own strange and uncomplaining wrongs?
Talk with me, Count,--you know I mean you well.
I stood beside your dark and fiery youth
Watching its bold and bad career, as men _50
Watch meteors, but it vanished not--I marked
Your desperate and remorseless manhood; now
Do I behold you in dishonoured age
Charged with a thousand unrepented crimes.
Yet I have ever hoped you would amend, _55
And in that hope have saved your life three times.
CENCI:
For which Aldobrandino owes you now
My fief beyond the Pincian. --Cardinal,
One thing, I pray you, recollect henceforth,
And so we shall converse with less restraint. _60
A man you knew spoke of my wife and daughter--
He was accustomed to frequent my house;
So the next day HIS wife and daughter came
And asked if I had seen him; and I smiled:
I think they never saw him any more. _65
CAMILLO:
Thou execrable man, beware! --
CENCI:
Of thee?
Nay, this is idle: --We should know each other.
As to my character for what men call crime
Seeing I please my senses as I list,
And vindicate that right with force or guile, _70
It is a public matter, and I care not
If I discuss it with you. I may speak
Alike to you and my own conscious heart--
For you give out that you have half reformed me,
Therefore strong vanity will keep you silent _75
If fear should not; both will, I do not doubt.
All men delight in sensual luxury,
All men enjoy revenge; and most exult
Over the tortures they can never feel--
Flattering their secret peace with others' pain. _80
But I delight in nothing else. I love
The sight of agony, and the sense of joy,
When this shall be another's, and that mine.
And I have no remorse and little fear,
Which are, I think, the checks of other men. _85
This mood has grown upon me, until now
Any design my captious fancy makes
The picture of its wish, and it forms none
But such as men like you would start to know,
Is as my natural food and rest debarred _90
Until it be accomplished.
CAMILLO:
Art thou not
Most miserable?
CENCI:
Why miserable? --
No. --I am what your theologians call
Hardened;--which they must be in impudence,
So to revile a man's peculiar taste. _95
True, I was happier than I am, while yet
Manhood remained to act the thing I thought;
While lust was sweeter than revenge; and now
Invention palls:--Ay, we must all grow old--
And but that there remains a deed to act _100
Whose horror might make sharp an appetite
Duller than mine--I'd do,--I know not what.
When I was young I thought of nothing else
But pleasure; and I fed on honey sweets:
Men, by St. Thomas! cannot live like bees, _105
And I grew tired:--yet, till I killed a foe,
And heard his groans, and heard his children's groans,
Knew I not what delight was else on earth,
Which now delights me little. I the rather
Look on such pangs as terror ill conceals, _110
The dry fixed eyeball; the pale, quivering lip,
Which tell me that the spirit weeps within
Tears bitterer than the bloody sweat of Christ.
I rarely kill the body, which preserves,
Like a strong prison, the soul within my power, _115
Wherein I feed it with the breath of fear
For hourly pain.
NOTE:
_100 And but that edition 1821; But that editions 1819, 1839.
CAMILLO:
Hell's most abandoned fiend
Did never, in the drunkenness of guilt,
Speak to his heart as now you speak to me;
I thank my God that I believe you not. _120
[ENTER ANDREA. ]
ANDREA:
My Lord, a gentleman from Salamanca
Would speak with you.
CENCI:
Bid him attend me
In the grand saloon.
[EXIT ANDREA. ]
CAMILLO:
Farewell; and I will pray
Almighty God that thy false, impious words
Tempt not his spirit to abandon thee. _125
[EXIT CAMILLO. ]
CENCI:
The third of my possessions! I must use
Close husbandry, or gold, the old man's sword,
Falls from my withered hand. But yesterday
There came an order from the Pope to make
Fourfold provision for my cursed sons; _130
Whom I had sent from Rome to Salamanca,
Hoping some accident might cut them off;
And meaning if I could to starve them there.
I pray thee, God, send some quick death upon them!
Bernardo and my wife could not be worse _135
If dead and damned:--then, as to Beatrice--
[LOOKING AROUND HIM SUSPICIOUSLY. ]
I think they cannot hear me at that door;
What if they should? And yet I need not speak
Though the heart triumphs with itself in words.
NOTES:
_274 spokes B, edition 1839; spoke 1820.
_276 lightenings B; lightnings 1820.
_280 mines B; mine 1820.
_282 poised B; poized edition 1839; poured 1820.
THE EARTH:
The joy, the triumph, the delight, the madness!
The boundless, overflowing, bursting gladness, _320
The vaporous exultation not to be confined!
Ha! ha! the animation of delight
Which wraps me, like an atmosphere of light,
And bears me as a cloud is borne by its own wind.
THE MOON:
Brother mine, calm wanderer, _325
Happy globe of land and air,
Some Spirit is darted like a beam from thee,
Which penetrates my frozen frame,
And passes with the warmth of flame,
With love, and odour, and deep melody _330
Through me, through me!
THE EARTH:
Ha! ha! the caverns of my hollow mountains,
My cloven fire-crags, sound-exulting fountains
Laugh with a vast and inextinguishable laughter.
The oceans, and the deserts, and the abysses, _335
And the deep air's unmeasured wildernesses,
Answer from all their clouds and billows, echoing after.
They cry aloud as I do. Sceptred curse,
Who all our green and azure universe
Threatenedst to muffle round with black destruction, sending _340
A solid cloud to rain hot thunderstones,
And splinter and knead down my children's bones,
All I bring forth, to one void mass battering and blending,--
Until each crag-like tower, and storied column,
Palace, and obelisk, and temple solemn, _345
My imperial mountains crowned with cloud, and snow, and fire,
My sea-like forests, every blade and blossom
Which finds a grave or cradle in my bosom,
Were stamped by thy strong hate into a lifeless mire:
How art thou sunk, withdrawn, covered, drunk up _350
By thirsty nothing, as the brackish cup
Drained by a desert-troop, a little drop for all;
And from beneath, around, within, above,
Filling thy void annihilation, love
Bursts in like light on caves cloven by the thunder-ball. _355
NOTES:
_335-_336 the abysses, And 1820, 1839; the abysses Of B.
_355 the omitted 1820.
THE MOON:
The snow upon my lifeless mountains
Is loosened into living fountains,
My solid oceans flow, and sing and shine:
A spirit from my heart bursts forth,
It clothes with unexpected birth _360
My cold bare bosom: Oh! it must be thine
On mine, on mine!
Gazing on thee I feel, I know
Green stalks burst forth, and bright flowers grow,
And living shapes upon my bosom move: _365
Music is in the sea and air,
Winged clouds soar here and there,
Dark with the rain new buds are dreaming of:
'Tis love, all love!
THE EARTH:
It interpenetrates my granite mass, _370
Through tangled roots and trodden clay doth pass
Into the utmost leaves and delicatest flowers;
Upon the winds, among the clouds 'tis spread,
It wakes a life in the forgotten dead,
They breathe a spirit up from their obscurest bowers. _375
And like a storm bursting its cloudy prison
With thunder, and with whirlwind, has arisen
Out of the lampless caves of unimagined being:
With earthquake shock and swiftness making shiver
Thought's stagnant chaos, unremoved for ever, _380
Till hate, and fear, and pain, light-vanquished shadows, fleeing,
Leave Man, who was a many-sided mirror,
Which could distort to many a shape of error,
This true fair world of things, a sea reflecting love;
Which over all his kind, as the sun's heaven _385
Gliding o'er ocean, smooth, serene, and even,
Darting from starry depths radiance and life, doth move:
Leave Man, even as a leprous child is left,
Who follows a sick beast to some warm cleft
Of rocks, through which the might of healing springs is poured; _390
Then when it wanders home with rosy smile,
Unconscious, and its mother fears awhile
It is a spirit, then, weeps on her child restored.
Man, oh, not men! a chain of linked thought,
Of love and might to be divided not, _395
Compelling the elements with adamantine stress;
As the sun rules, even with a tyrant's gaze,
The unquiet republic of the maze
Of planets, struggling fierce towards heaven's free wilderness.
Man, one harmonious soul of many a soul, _400
Whose nature is its own divine control,
Where all things flow to all, as rivers to the sea;
Familiar acts are beautiful through love;
Labour, and pain, and grief, in life's green grove
Sport like tame beasts, none knew how gentle they could be! _405
His will, with all mean passions, bad delights,
And selfish cares, its trembling satellites,
A spirit ill to guide, but mighty to obey,
Is as a tempest-winged ship, whose helm
Love rules, through waves which dare not overwhelm, _410
Forcing life's wildest shores to own its sovereign sway.
All things confess his strength. Through the cold mass
Of marble and of colour his dreams pass;
Bright threads whence mothers weave the robes their children wear;
Language is a perpetual Orphic song, _415
Which rules with Daedal harmony a throng
Of thoughts and forms, which else senseless and shapeless were.
The lightning is his slave; heaven's utmost deep
Gives up her stars, and like a flock of sheep
They pass before his eye, are numbered, and roll on! _420
The tempest is his steed, he strides the air;
And the abyss shouts from her depth laid bare,
Heaven, hast thou secrets? Man unveils me; I have none.
NOTE:
_387 life B; light 1820.
THE MOON:
The shadow of white death has passed
From my path in heaven at last, _425
A clinging shroud of solid frost and sleep;
And through my newly-woven bowers,
Wander happy paramours,
Less mighty, but as mild as those who keep
Thy vales more deep. _430
THE EARTH:
As the dissolving warmth of dawn may fold
A half unfrozen dew-globe, green, and gold,
And crystalline, till it becomes a winged mist,
And wanders up the vault of the blue day,
Outlives the noon, and on the sun's last ray _435
Hangs o'er the sea, a fleece of fire and amethyst.
NOTE:
_432 unfrozen B, edition 1839; infrozen 1820.
THE MOON:
Thou art folded, thou art lying
In the light which is undying
Of thine own joy, and heaven's smile divine;
All suns and constellations shower _440
On thee a light, a life, a power
Which doth array thy sphere; thou pourest thine
On mine, on mine!
THE EARTH:
I spin beneath my pyramid of night,
Which points into the heavens dreaming delight, _445
Murmuring victorious joy in my enchanted sleep;
As a youth lulled in love-dreams faintly sighing,
Under the shadow of his beauty lying,
Which round his rest a watch of light and warmth doth keep.
THE MOON:
As in the soft and sweet eclipse, _450
When soul meets soul on lovers' lips,
High hearts are calm, and brightest eyes are dull;
So when thy shadow falls on me,
Then am I mute and still, by thee
Covered; of thy love, Orb most beautiful, _455
Full, oh, too full!
Thou art speeding round the sun
Brightest world of many a one;
Green and azure sphere which shinest
With a light which is divinest _460
Among all the lamps of Heaven
To whom life and light is given;
I, thy crystal paramour
Borne beside thee by a power
Like the polar Paradise, _465
Magnet-like of lovers' eyes;
I, a most enamoured maiden
Whose weak brain is overladen
With the pleasure of her love,
Maniac-like around thee move
Gazing, an insatiate bride, _470
On thy form from every side
Like a Maenad, round the cup
Which Agave lifted up
In the weird Cadmaean forest. _475
Brother, wheresoe'er thou soarest
I must hurry, whirl and follow
Through the heavens wide and hollow,
Sheltered by the warm embrace
Of thy soul from hungry space, _480
Drinking from thy sense and sight
Beauty, majesty, and might,
As a lover or a chameleon
Grows like what it looks upon,
As a violet's gentle eye _485
Gazes on the azure sky
Until its hue grows like what it beholds,
As a gray and watery mist
Glows like solid amethyst
Athwart the western mountain it enfolds, _490
When the sunset sleeps
Upon its snow--
THE EARTH:
And the weak day weeps
That it should be so.
Oh, gentle Moon, the voice of thy delight _495
Falls on me like thy clear and tender light
Soothing the seaman, borne the summer night,
Through isles for ever calm;
Oh, gentle Moon, thy crystal accents pierce
The caverns of my pride's deep universe, _500
Charming the tiger joy, whose tramplings fierce
Made wounds which need thy balm.
PANTHEA:
I rise as from a bath of sparkling water,
A bath of azure light, among dark rocks,
Out of the stream of sound.
IONE:
Ah me! sweet sister, _505
The stream of sound has ebbed away from us,
And you pretend to rise out of its wave,
Because your words fall like the clear, soft dew
Shaken from a bathing wood-nymph's limbs and hair.
PANTHEA:
Peace! peace! a mighty Power, which is as darkness, _510
Is rising out of Earth, and from the sky
Is showered like night, and from within the air
Bursts, like eclipse which had been gathered up
Into the pores of sunlight: the bright visions,
Wherein the singing spirits rode and shone, _515
Gleam like pale meteors through a watery night.
IONE:
There is a sense of words upon mine ear.
PANTHEA:
An universal sound like words: Oh, list!
DEMOGORGON:
Thou, Earth, calm empire of a happy soul,
Sphere of divinest shapes and harmonies, _520
Beautiful orb! gathering as thou dost roll
The love which paves thy path along the skies:
THE EARTH:
I hear: I am as a drop of dew that dies.
DEMOGORGON:
Thou, Moon, which gazest on the nightly Earth
With wonder, as it gazes upon thee; _525
Whilst each to men, and beasts, and the swift birth
Of birds, is beauty, love, calm, harmony:
THE MOON:
I hear: I am a leaf shaken by thee!
DEMOGORGON:
Ye Kings of suns and stars, Daemons and Gods,
Ethereal Dominations, who possess _530
Elysian, windless, fortunate abodes
Beyond Heaven's constellated wilderness:
A VOICE FROM ABOVE:
Our great Republic hears: we are blest, and bless.
DEMOGORGON:
Ye happy Dead, whom beams of brightest verse
Are clouds to hide, not colours to portray, _535
Whether your nature is that universe
Which once ye saw and suffered--
A VOICE: FROM BENEATH:
Or as they
Whom we have left, we change and pass away.
DEMOGORGON:
Ye elemental Genii, who have homes
From man's high mind even to the central stone _540
Of sullen lead; from heaven's star-fretted domes
To the dull weed some sea-worm battens on:
A CONFUSED VOICE:
We hear: thy words waken Oblivion.
DEMOGORGON:
Spirits, whose homes are flesh; ye beasts and birds,
Ye worms and fish; ye living leaves and buds; _545
Lightning and wind; and ye untameable herds,
Meteors and mists, which throng air's solitudes:--
NOTE:
_547 throng 1820, 1839; cancelled for feed B.
A VOICE:
Thy voice to us is wind among still woods.
DEMOGORGON:
Man, who wert once a despot and a slave;
A dupe and a deceiver; a decay; _550
A traveller from the cradle to the grave
Through the dim night of this immortal day:
ALL:
Speak: thy strong words may never pass away.
DEMOGORGON:
This is the day, which down the void abysm
At the Earth-born's spell yawns for Heaven's despotism, _555
And Conquest is dragged captive through the deep:
Love, from its awful throne of patient power
In the wise heart, from the last giddy hour
Of dread endurance, from the slippery, steep,
And narrow verge of crag-like agony, springs _560
And folds over the world its healing wings.
Gentleness, Virtue, Wisdom, and Endurance,
These are the seals of that most firm assurance
Which bars the pit over Destruction's strength;
And if, with infirm hand, Eternity, _565
Mother of many acts and hours, should free
The serpent that would clasp her with his length;
These are the spells by which to reassume
An empire o'er the disentangled doom.
To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite; _570
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent; _575
This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory!
NOTES:
_559 dread B, edition 1839; dead 1820.
_575 falter B, edition 1839; flatter 1820.
CANCELLED FRAGMENTS OF "PROMETHEUS UNBOUND".
[First printed by Mr. C. D. Locock, "Examination of the Shelley
Manuscripts at the Bodleian Library", 1903, pages 33-7. ]
(following 1. _37. )
When thou descendst each night with open eyes
In torture, for a tyrant seldom sleeps,
Thou never; . . .
. . .
(following 1. _195. )
Which thou henceforth art doomed to interweave
. . .
(following the first two words of 1. _342. )
[Of Hell:] I placed it in his choice to be
The crown, or trampled refuse of the world
With but one law itself a glorious boon--
I gave--
. . .
(following 1. _707. )
SECOND SPIRIT:
I leaped on the wings of the Earth-star damp
As it rose on the steam of a slaughtered camp--
The sleeping newt heard not our tramp
As swift as the wings of fire may pass--
We threaded the points of long thick grass
Which hide the green pools of the morass
But shook a water-serpent's couch
In a cleft skull, of many such
The widest; at the meteor's touch
The snake did seem to see in dream
Thrones and dungeons overthrown
Visions how unlike his own. . .
'Twas the hope the prophecy
Which begins and ends in thee
. . .
(following 2. 1. _110. )
Lift up thine eyes Panthea--they pierce they burn
PANTHEA:
Alas! I am consumed--I melt away
The fire is in my heart--
ASIA:
Thine eyes burn burn! --
Hide them within thine hair--
PANTHEA:
O quench thy lips
I sink I perish
ASIA:
Shelter me now--they burn
It is his spirit in their orbs. . . my life
Is ebbing fast--I cannot speak--
PANTHEA:
Rest, rest!
Sleep death annihilation pain! aught else
. . .
(following 2. 4. _27. )
Or looks which tell that while the lips are calm
And the eyes cold, the spirit weeps within
Tears like the sanguine sweat of agony;
. . .
UNCANCELLED PASSAGE.
(following 2. 5. _71. )
ASIA:
You said that spirits spoke, but it was thee
Sweet sister, for even now thy curved lips
Tremble as if the sound were dying there
Not dead
PANTHEA:
Alas it was Prometheus spoke
Within me, and I know it must be so
I mixed my own weak nature with his love
. . . And my thoughts
Are like the many forests of a vale
Through which the might of whirlwind and of rain
Had passed--they rest rest through the evening light
As mine do now in thy beloved smile.
CANCELLED STAGE DIRECTIONS.
(following 1. _221. )
[THE SOUND BENEATH AS OF EARTHQUAKE AND THE DRIVING OF WHIRLWINDS--THE
RAVINE IS SPLIT, AND THE PHANTASM OF JUPITER RISES, SURROUNDED BY
HEAVY CLOUDS WHICH DART FORTH LIGHTNING. ]
(following 1. _520. )
[ENTER RUSHING BY GROUPS OF HORRIBLE FORMS; THEY SPEAK AS THEY PASS IN
CHORUS. ]
(following 1. _552. )
[A SHADOW PASSES OVER THE SCENE, AND A PIERCING SHRIEK IS HEARD. ]
NOTE ON "PROMETHEUS UNBOUND", BY MRS. SHELLEY.
On the 12th of March, 1818, Shelley quitted England, never to return.
His principal motive was the hope that his health would be improved by
a milder climate; he suffered very much during the winter previous to
his emigration, and this decided his vacillating purpose. In December,
1817, he had written from Marlow to a friend, saying:
'My health has been materially worse. My feelings at intervals are of
a deadly and torpid kind, or awakened to such a state of unnatural and
keen excitement that, only to instance the organ of sight, I find the
very blades of grass and the boughs of distant trees present
themselves to me with microscopic distinctness. Towards evening I sink
into a state of lethargy and inanimation, and often remain for hours
on the sofa between sleep and waking, a prey to the most painful
irritability of thought. Such, with little intermission, is my
condition. The hours devoted to study are selected with vigilant
caution from among these periods of endurance. It is not for this that
I think of travelling to Italy, even if I knew that Italy would
relieve me. But I have experienced a decisive pulmonary attack; and
although at present it has passed away without any considerable
vestige of its existence, yet this symptom sufficiently shows the true
nature of my disease to be consumptive. It is to my advantage that
this malady is in its nature slow, and, if one is sufficiently alive
to its advances, is susceptible of cure from a warm climate. In the
event of its assuming any decided shape, IT WOULD BE MY DUTY to go to
Italy without delay. It is not mere health, but life, that I should
seek, and that not for my own sake--I feel I am capable of trampling
on all such weakness; but for the sake of those to whom my life may be
a source of happiness, utility, security, and honour, and to some of
whom my death might be all that is the reverse. '
In almost every respect his journey to Italy was advantageous. He left
behind friends to whom he was attached; but cares of a thousand kinds,
many springing from his lavish generosity, crowded round him in his
native country, and, except the society of one or two friends, he had
no compensation. The climate caused him to consume half his existence
in helpless suffering. His dearest pleasure, the free enjoyment of the
scenes of Nature, was marred by the same circumstance.
He went direct to Italy, avoiding even Paris, and did not make any
pause till he arrived at Milan. The first aspect of Italy enchanted
Shelley; it seemed a garden of delight placed beneath a clearer and
brighter heaven than any he had lived under before. He wrote long
descriptive letters during the first year of his residence in Italy,
which, as compositions, are the most beautiful in the world, and show
how truly he appreciated and studied the wonders of Nature and Art in
that divine land.
The poetical spirit within him speedily revived with all the power and
with more than all the beauty of his first attempts. He meditated
three subjects as the groundwork for lyrical dramas. One was the story
of Tasso; of this a slight fragment of a song of Tasso remains. The
other was one founded on the Book of Job, which he never abandoned in
idea, but of which no trace remains among his papers. The third was
the "Prometheus Unbound". The Greek tragedians were now his most
familiar companions in his wanderings, and the sublime majesty of
Aeschylus filled him with wonder and delight. The father of Greek
tragedy does not possess the pathos of Sophocles, nor the variety and
tenderness of Euripides; the interest on which he founds his dramas is
often elevated above human vicissitudes into the mighty passions and
throes of gods and demi-gods: such fascinated the abstract imagination
of Shelley.
We spent a month at Milan, visiting the Lake of Como during that
interval. Thence we passed in succession to Pisa, Leghorn, the Baths
of Lucca, Venice, Este, Rome, Naples, and back again to Rome, whither
we returned early in March, 1819. During all this time Shelley
meditated the subject of his drama, and wrote portions of it. Other
poems were composed during this interval, and while at the Bagni di
Lucca he translated Plato's "Symposium". But, though he diversified
his studies, his thoughts centred in the Prometheus. At last, when at
Rome, during a bright and beautiful Spring, he gave up his whole time
to the composition. The spot selected for his study was, as he
mentions in his preface, the mountainous ruins of the Baths of
Caracalla. These are little known to the ordinary visitor at Rome. He
describes them in a letter, with that poetry and delicacy and truth of
description which render his narrated impressions of scenery of
unequalled beauty and interest.
At first he completed the drama in three acts. It was not till several
months after, when at Florence, that he conceived that a fourth act, a
sort of hymn of rejoicing in the fulfilment of the prophecies with
regard to Prometheus, ought to be added to complete the composition.
The prominent feature of Shelley's theory of the destiny of the human
species was that evil is not inherent in the system of the creation,
but an accident that might be expelled. This also forms a portion of
Christianity: God made earth and man perfect, till he, by his fall,
'Brought death into the world and all our woe. '
Shelley believed that mankind had only to will that there should be no
evil, and there would be none. It is not my part in these Notes to
notice the arguments that have been urged against this opinion, but to
mention the fact that he entertained it, and was indeed attached to it
with fervent enthusiasm. That man could be so perfectionized as to be
able to expel evil from his own nature, and from the greater part of
the creation, was the cardinal point of his system. And the subject he
loved best to dwell on was the image of One warring with the Evil
Principle, oppressed not only by it, but by all--even the good, who
were deluded into considering evil a necessary portion of humanity; a
victim full of fortitude and hope and the spirit of triumph emanating
from a reliance in the ultimate omnipotence of Good. Such he had
depicted in his last poem, when he made Laon the enemy and the victim
of tyrants. He now took a more idealized image of the same subject. He
followed certain classical authorities in figuring Saturn as the good
principle, Jupiter the usurping evil one, and Prometheus as the
regenerator, who, unable to bring mankind back to primitive innocence,
used knowledge as a weapon to defeat evil, by leading mankind, beyond
the state wherein they are sinless through ignorance, to that in which
they are virtuous through wisdom. Jupiter punished the temerity of the
Titan by chaining him to a rock of Caucasus, and causing a vulture to
devour his still-renewed heart. There was a prophecy afloat in heaven
portending the fall of Jove, the secret of averting which was known
only to Prometheus; and the god offered freedom from torture on
condition of its being communicated to him. According to the
mythological story, this referred to the offspring of Thetis, who was
destined to be greater than his father. Prometheus at last bought
pardon for his crime of enriching mankind with his gifts, by revealing
the prophecy. Hercules killed the vulture, and set him free; and
Thetis was married to Peleus, the father of Achilles.
Shelley adapted the catastrophe of this story to his peculiar views.
The son greater than his father, born of the nuptials of Jupiter and
Thetis, was to dethrone Evil, and bring back a happier reign than that
of Saturn. Prometheus defies the power of his enemy, and endures
centuries of torture; till the hour arrives when Jove, blind to the
real event, but darkly guessing that some great good to himself will
flow, espouses Thetis. At the moment, the Primal Power of the world
drives him from his usurped throne, and Strength, in the person of
Hercules, liberates Humanity, typified in Prometheus, from the
tortures generated by evil done or suffered. Asia, one of the
Oceanides, is the wife of Prometheus--she was, according to other
mythological interpretations, the same as Venus and Nature. When the
benefactor of mankind is liberated, Nature resumes the beauty of her
prime, and is united to her husband, the emblem of the human race, in
perfect and happy union. In the Fourth Act, the Poet gives further
scope to his imagination, and idealizes the forms of creation--such as
we know them, instead of such as they appeared to the Greeks. Maternal
Earth, the mighty parent, is superseded by the Spirit of the Earth,
the guide of our planet through the realms of sky; while his fair and
weaker companion and attendant, the Spirit of the Moon, receives bliss
from the annihilation of Evil in the superior sphere.
Shelley develops, more particularly in the lyrics of this drama, his
abstruse and imaginative theories with regard to the Creation. It
requires a mind as subtle and penetrating as his own to understand the
mystic meanings scattered throughout the poem. They elude the ordinary
reader by their abstraction and delicacy of distinction, but they are
far from vague. It was his design to write prose metaphysical essays
on the nature of Man, which would have served to explain much of what
is obscure in his poetry; a few scattered fragments of observations
and remarks alone remain. He considered these philosophical views of
Mind and Nature to be instinct with the intensest spirit of poetry.
More popular poets clothe the ideal with familiar and sensible
imagery.
Shelley loved to idealize the real--to gift the mechanism of
the material universe with a soul and a voice, and to bestow such also
on the most delicate and abstract emotions and thoughts of the mind.
Sophocles was his great master in this species of imagery.
I find in one of his manuscript books some remarks on a line in the
"Oedipus Tyrannus", which show at once the critical subtlety of
Shelley's mind, and explain his apprehension of those 'minute and
remote distinctions of feeling, whether relative to external nature or
the living beings which surround us,' which he pronounces, in the
letter quoted in the note to the "Revolt of Islam", to comprehend all
that is sublime in man.
'In the Greek Shakespeare, Sophocles, we find the image,
Pollas d' odous elthonta phrontidos planois:
a line of almost unfathomable depth of poetry; yet how simple are the
images in which it is arrayed!
"Coming to many ways in the wanderings of careful thought. "
If the words odous and planois had not been used, the line might have
been explained in a metaphorical instead of an absolute sense, as we
say "WAYS and means," and "wanderings" for error and confusion. But
they meant literally paths or roads, such as we tread with our feet;
and wanderings, such as a man makes when he loses himself in a desert,
or roams from city to city--as Oedipus, the speaker of this verse, was
destined to wander, blind and asking charity. What a picture does this
line suggest of the mind as a wilderness of intricate paths, wide as
the universe, which is here made its symbol; a world within a world
which he who seeks some knowledge with respect to what he ought to do
searches throughout, as he would search the external universe for some
valued thing which was hidden from him upon its surface. '
In reading Shelley's poetry, we often find similar verses, resembling,
but not imitating the Greek in this species of imagery; for, though he
adopted the style, he gifted it with that originality of form and
colouring which sprung from his own genius.
In the "Prometheus Unbound", Shelley fulfils the promise quoted from a
letter in the Note on the "Revolt of Islam". (While correcting the
proof-sheets of that poem, it struck me that the poet had indulged in
an exaggerated view of the evils of restored despotism; which, however
injurious and degrading, were less openly sanguinary than the triumph
of anarchy, such as it appeared in France at the close of the last
century. But at this time a book, "Scenes of Spanish Life", translated
by Lieutenant Crawford from the German of Dr. Huber, of Rostock, fell
into my hands. The account of the triumph of the priests and the
serviles, after the French invasion of Spain in 1823, bears a strong
and frightful resemblance to some of the descriptions of the massacre
of the patriots in the "Revolt of Islam". ) The tone of the composition
is calmer and more majestic, the poetry more perfect as a whole, and
the imagination displayed at once more pleasingly beautiful and more
varied and daring. The description of the Hours, as they are seen in
the cave of Demogorgon, is an instance of this--it fills the mind as
the most charming picture--we long to see an artist at work to bring
to our view the
'cars drawn by rainbow-winged steeds
Which trample the dim winds: in each there stands
A wild-eyed charioteer urging their flight.
Some look behind, as fiends pursued them there,
And yet I see no shapes but the keen stars:
Others, with burning eyes, lean forth, and drink
With eager lips the wind of their own speed,
As if the thing they loved fled on before,
And now, even now, they clasped it. Their bright locks
Stream like a comet's flashing hair: they all
Sweep onward. '
Through the whole poem there reigns a sort of calm and holy spirit of
love; it soothes the tortured, and is hope to the expectant, till the
prophecy is fulfilled, and Love, untainted by any evil, becomes the
law of the world.
England had been rendered a painful residence to Shelley, as much by
the sort of persecution with which in those days all men of liberal
opinions were visited, and by the injustice he had lately endured in
the Court of Chancery, as by the symptoms of disease which made him
regard a visit to Italy as necessary to prolong his life. An exile,
and strongly impressed with the feeling that the majority of his
countrymen regarded him with sentiments of aversion such as his own
heart could experience towards none, he sheltered himself from such
disgusting and painful thoughts in the calm retreats of poetry, and
built up a world of his own--with the more pleasure, since he hoped to
induce some one or two to believe that the earth might become such,
did mankind themselves consent. The charm of the Roman climate helped
to clothe his thoughts in greater beauty than they had ever worn
before. And, as he wandered among the ruins made one with Nature in
their decay, or gazed on the Praxitelean shapes that throng the
Vatican, the Capitol, and the palaces of Rome, his soul imbibed forms
of loveliness which became a portion of itself. There are many
passages in the "Prometheus" which show the intense delight he
received from such studies, and give back the impression with a beauty
of poetical description peculiarly his own. He felt this, as a poet
must feel when he satisfies himself by the result of his labours; and
he wrote from Rome, 'My "Prometheus Unbound" is just finished, and in
a month or two I shall send it. It is a drama, with characters and
mechanism of a kind yet unattempted; and I think the execution is
better than any of my former attempts. '
I may mention, for the information of the more critical reader, that
the verbal alterations in this edition of "Prometheus" are made from a
list of errata written by Shelley himself.
***
THE CENCI.
A TRAGEDY IN FIVE ACTS.
[Composed at Rome and near Leghorn (Villa Valsovano), May-August 5,
1819; published 1820 (spring) by C. & J. Ollier, London. This edition
of two hundred and fifty copies was printed in Italy 'because,' writes
Shelley to Peacock, September 21, 1819, 'it costs, with all duties and
freightage, about half what it would cost in London. ' A Table of
Errata in Mrs. Shelley's handwriting is printed by Forman in "The
Shelley Library", page 91. A second edition, published by Ollier in
1821 (C. H. Reynell, printer), embodies the corrections indicated in
this Table. No manuscript of "The Cenci" is known to exist. Our text
follows that of the second edition (1821); variations of the first
(Italian) edition, the title-page of which bears date 1819, are given
in the footnotes. The text of the "Poetical Works", 1839, 1st and 2nd
editions (Mrs. Shelley), follows for the most part that of the editio
princeps of 1819. ]
DEDICATION, TO LEIGH HUNT, ESQ.
Mv dear friend--
I inscribe with your name, from a distant country, and after an
absence whose months have seemed years, this the latest of my literary
efforts.
Those writings which I have hitherto published, have been little else
than visions which impersonate my own apprehensions of the beautiful
and the just. I can also perceive in them the literary defects
incidental to youth and impatience; they are dreams of what ought to
be, or may be. The drama which I now present to you is a sad reality.
I lay aside the presumptuous attitude of an instructor, and am content
to paint, with such colours as my own heart furnishes, that which has
been.
Had I known a person more highly endowed than yourself with all that
it becomes a man to possess, I had solicited for this work the
ornament of his name. One more gentle, honourable, innocent and brave;
one of more exalted toleration for all who do and think evil, and yet
himself more free from evil; one who knows better how to receive, and
how to confer a benefit, though he must ever confer far more than he
can receive; one of simpler, and, in the highest sense of the word, of
purer life and manners I never knew: and I had already been fortunate
in friendships when your name was added to the list.
In that patient and irreconcilable enmity with domestic and political
tyranny and imposture which the tenor of your life has illustrated,
and which, had I health and talents, should illustrate mine, let us,
comforting each other in our task, live and die.
All happiness attend you! Your affectionate friend,
PERCY B. SHELLEY.
Rome, May 29, 1819.
THE CENCI.
PREFACE.
A manuscript was communicated to me during my travels in Italy, which
was copied from the archives of the Cenci Palace at Rome, and contains
a detailed account of the horrors which ended in the extinction of one
of the noblest and richest families of that city during the
Pontificate of Clement VIII, in the year 1599. The story is, that an
old man having spent his life in debauchery and wickedness, conceived
at length an implacable hatred towards his children; which showed
itself towards one daughter under the form of an incestuous passion,
aggravated by every circumstance of cruelty and violence. This
daughter, after long and vain attempts to escape from what she
considered a perpetual contamination both of body and mind, at length
plotted with her mother-in-law and brother to murder their common
tyrant. The young maiden, who was urged to this tremendous deed by an
impulse which overpowered its horror, was evidently a most gentle and
amiable being, a creature formed to adorn and be admired, and thus
violently thwarted from her nature by the necessity of circumstance
and opinion. The deed was quickly discovered, and, in spite of the
most earnest prayers made to the Pope by the highest persons in Rome,
the criminals were put to death. The old man had during his life
repeatedly bought his pardon from the Pope for capital crimes of the
most enormous and unspeakable kind, at the price of a hundred thousand
crowns; the death therefore of his victims can scarcely be accounted
for by the love of justice. The Pope, among other motives for
severity, probably felt that whoever killed the Count Cenci deprived
his treasury of a certain and copious source of revenue. (The Papal
Government formerly took the most extraordinary precautions against
the publicity of facts which offer so tragical a demonstration of its
own wickedness and weakness; so that the communication of the
manuscript had become, until very lately, a matter of some
difficulty. ) Such a story, if told so as to present to the reader all
the feelings of those who once acted it, their hopes and fears, their
confidences and misgivings, their various interests, passions, and
opinions, acting upon and with each other, yet all conspiring to one
tremendous end, would be as a light to make apparent some of the most
dark and secret caverns of the human heart.
On my arrival at Rome I found that the story of the Cenci was a
subject not to be mentioned in Italian society without awakening a
deep and breathless interest; and that the feelings of the company
never failed to incline to a romantic pity for the wrongs, and a
passionate exculpation of the horrible deed to which they urged her,
who has been mingled two centuries with the common dust. All ranks of
people knew the outlines of this history, and participated in the
overwhelming interest which it seems to have the magic of exciting in
the human heart. I had a copy of Guido's picture of Beatrice which is
preserved in the Colonna Palace, and my servant instantly recognized
it as the portrait of La Cenci.
This national and universal interest which the story produces and has
produced for two centuries and among all ranks of people in a great
City, where the imagination is kept for ever active and awake, first
suggested to me the conception of its fitness for a dramatic purpose.
In fact it is a tragedy which has already received, from its capacity
of awakening and sustaining the sympathy of men, approbation and
success. Nothing remained as I imagined, but to clothe it to the
apprehensions of my countrymen in such language and action as would
bring it home to their hearts. The deepest and the sublimest tragic
compositions, King Lear and the two plays in which the tale of Oedipus
is told, were stories which already existed in tradition, as matters
of popular belief and interest, before Shakspeare and Sophocles made
them familiar to the sympathy of all succeeding generations of
mankind.
This story of the Cenci is indeed eminently fearful and monstrous:
anything like a dry exhibition of it on the stage would be
insupportable. The person who would treat such a subject must increase
the ideal, and diminish the actual horror of the events, so that the
pleasure which arises from the poetry which exists in these
tempestuous sufferings and crimes may mitigate the pain of the
contemplation of the moral deformity from which they spring. There
must also be nothing attempted to make the exhibition subservient to
what is vulgarly termed a moral purpose. The highest moral purpose
aimed at in the highest species of the drama, is the teaching the
human heart, through its sympathies and antipathies, the knowledge of
itself; in proportion to the possession of which knowledge, every
human being is wise, just, sincere, tolerant and kind. If dogmas can
do more, it is well: but a drama is no fit place for the enforcement
of them. Undoubtedly, no person can be truly dishonoured by the act of
another; and the fit return to make to the most enormous injuries is
kindness and forbearance, and a resolution to convert the injurer from
his dark passions by peace and love. Revenge, retaliation, atonement,
are pernicious mistakes. If Beatrice had thought in this manner she
would have been wiser and better; but she would never have been a
tragic character: the few whom such an exhibition would have
interested, could never have been sufficiently interested for a
dramatic purpose, from the want of finding sympathy in their interest
among the mass who surround them. It is in the restless and
anatomizing casuistry with which men seek the justification of
Beatrice, yet feel that she has done what needs justification; it is
in the superstitious horror with which they contemplate alike her
wrongs and their revenge, that the dramatic character of what she did
and suffered, consists.
I have endeavoured as nearly as possible to represent the characters
as they probably were, and have sought to avoid the error of making
them actuated by my own conceptions of right or wrong, false or true:
thus under a thin veil converting names and actions of the sixteenth
century into cold impersonations of my own mind. They are represented
as Catholics, and as Catholics deeply tinged with religion. To a
Protestant apprehension there will appear something unnatural in the
earnest and perpetual sentiment of the relations between God and men
which pervade the tragedy of the Cenci. It will especially be startled
at the combination of an undoubting persuasion of the truth of the
popular religion with a cool and determined perseverance in enormous
guilt. But religion in Italy is not, as in Protestant countries, a
cloak to be worn on particular days; or a passport which those who do
not wish to be railed at carry with them to exhibit; or a gloomy
passion for penetrating the impenetrable mysteries of our being, which
terrifies its possessor at the darkness of the abyss to the brink of
which it has conducted him. Religion coexists, as it were, in the mind
of an Italian Catholic, with a faith in that of which all men have the
most certain knowledge. It is interwoven with the whole fabric of
life. It is adoration, faith, submission, penitence, blind admiration;
not a rule for moral conduct. It has no necessary connection with any
one virtue. The most atrocious villain may be rigidly devout, and
without any shock to established faith, confess himself to be so.
Religion pervades intensely the whole frame of society, and is
according to the temper of the mind which it inhabits, a passion, a
persuasion, an excuse, a refuge; never a check. Cenci himself built a
chapel in the court of his Palace, and dedicated it to St. Thomas the
Apostle, and established masses for the peace of his soul. Thus in the
first scene of the fourth act Lucretia's design in exposing herself to
the consequences of an expostulation with Cenci after having
administered the opiate, was to induce him by a feigned tale to
confess himself before death; this being esteemed by Catholics as
essential to salvation; and she only relinquishes her purpose when she
perceives that her perseverance would expose Beatrice to new outrages.
I have avoided with great care in writing this play the introduction
of what is commonly called mere poetry, and I imagine there will
scarcely be found a detached simile or a single isolated description,
unless Beatrice's description of the chasm appointed for her father's
murder should be judged to be of that nature. (An idea in this speech
was suggested by a most sublime passage in "El Purgaterio de San
Patricio" of Calderon; the only plagiarism which I have intentionally
committed in the whole piece. )
In a dramatic composition the imagery and the passion should
interpenetrate one another, the former being reserved simply for the
full development and illustration of the latter. Imagination is as the
immortal God which should assume flesh for the redemption of mortal
passion. It is thus that the most remote and the most familiar imagery
may alike be fit for dramatic purposes when employed in the
illustration of strong feeling, which raises what is low, and levels
to the apprehension that which is lofty, casting over all the shadow
of its own greatness. In other respects, I have written more
carelessly; that is, without an over-fastidious and learned choice of
words. In this respect I entirely agree with those modern critics who
assert that in order to move men to true sympathy we must use the
familiar language of men, and that our great ancestors the ancient
English poets are the writers, a study of whom might incite us to do
that for our own age which they have done for theirs. But it must be
the real language of men in general and not that of any particular
class to whose society the writer happens to belong. So much for what
I have attempted; I need not be assured that success is a very
different matter; particularly for one whose attention has but newly
been awakened to the study of dramatic literature.
I endeavoured whilst at Rome to observe such monuments of this story
as might be accessible to a stranger. The portrait of Beatrice at the
Colonna Palace is admirable as a work of art: it was taken by Guido
during her confinement in prison. But it is most interesting as a just
representation of one of the loveliest specimens of the workmanship of
Nature. There is a fixed and pale composure upon the features: she
seems sad and stricken down in spirit, yet the despair thus expressed
is lightened by the patience of gentleness. Her head is bound with
folds of white drapery from which the yellow strings of her golden
hair escape, and fall about her neck. The moulding of her face is
exquisitely delicate; the eyebrows are distinct and arched: the lips
have that permanent meaning of imagination and sensibility which
suffering has not repressed and which it seems as if death scarcely
could extinguish. Her forehead is large and clear; her eyes, which we
are told were remarkable for their vivacity, are swollen with weeping
and lustreless, but beautifully tender and serene. In the whole mien
there is a simplicity and dignity which, united with her exquisite
loveliness and deep sorrow, are inexpressibly pathetic. Beatrice Cenci
appears to have been one of those rare persons in whom energy and
gentleness dwell together without destroying one another: her nature
was simple and profound. The crimes and miseries in which she was an
actor and a sufferer are as the mask and the mantle in which
circumstances clothed her for her impersonation on the scene of the
world.
The Cenci Palace is of great extent; and though in part modernized,
there yet remains a vast and gloomy pile of feudal architecture in the
same state as during the dreadful scenes which are the subject of this
tragedy. The Palace is situated in an obscure corner of Rome, near the
quarter of the Jews, and from the upper windows you see the immense
ruins of Mount Palatine half hidden under their profuse overgrowth of
trees. There is a court in one part of the Palace (perhaps that in
which Cenci built the Chapel to St. Thomas), supported by granite
columns and adorned with antique friezes of fine workmanship, and
built up, according to the ancient Italian fashion, with balcony over
balcony of open-work. One of the gates of the Palace formed of immense
stones and leading through a passage, dark and lofty and opening into
gloomy subterranean chambers, struck me particularly.
Of the Castle of Petrella, I could obtain no further information than
that which is to be found in the manuscript.
THE CENCI: A TRAGEDY IN FIVE ACTS.
DRAMATIS PERSONAE:
COUNT FRANCESCO CENCI.
GIACOMO, BERNARDO, HIS SONS.
CARDINAL CAMILLO.
PRINCE COLONNA.
ORSINO, A PRELATE.
SAVELLA, THE POPE'S LEGATE.
OLIMPIO, MARZIO, ASSASSINS.
ANDREA, SERVANT TO CENCI.
NOBLES. JUDGES. GUARDS, SERVANTS.
LUCRETIA, WIFE OF CENCI AND STEP-MOTHER OF HIS CHILDREN.
BEATRICE, HIS DAUGHTER.
THE SCENE LIES PRINCIPALLY IN ROME, BUT CHANGES DURING THE FOURTH
ACT TO PETRELLA, A CASTLE AMONG THE APULIAN APENNINES.
TIME. DURING THE PONTIFICATE OF CLEMENT VIII.
ACT 1.
SCENE 1. 1:
AN APARTMENT IN THE CENCI PALACE.
ENTER COUNT CENCI AND CARDINAL CAMILLO.
CAMILLO:
That matter of the murder is hushed up
If you consent to yield his Holiness
Your fief that lies beyond the Pincian gate. --
It needed all my interest in the conclave
To bend him to this point; he said that you _5
Bought perilous impunity with your gold;
That crimes like yours if once or twice compounded
Enriched the Church, and respited from hell
An erring soul which might repent and live: --
But that the glory and the interest _10
Of the high throne he fills, little consist
With making it a daily mart of guilt
As manifold and hideous as the deeds
Which you scarce hide from men's revolted eyes.
CENCI:
The third of my possessions--let it go! _15
Ay, I once heard the nephew of the Pope
Had sent his architect to view the ground,
Meaning to build a villa on my vines
The next time I compounded with his uncle:
I little thought he should outwit me so! _20
Henceforth no witness--not the lamp--shall see
That which the vassal threatened to divulge
Whose throat is choked with dust for his reward.
The deed he saw could not have rated higher
Than his most worthless life:--it angers me! _25
Respited me from Hell! So may the Devil
Respite their souls from Heaven! No doubt Pope Clement,
And his most charitable nephews, pray
That the Apostle Peter and the Saints
Will grant for their sake that I long enjoy _30
Strength, wealth, and pride, and lust, and length of days
Wherein to act the deeds which are the stewards
Of their revenue. --But much yet remains
To which they show no title.
CAMILLO:
Oh, Count Cenci!
So much that thou mightst honourably live _35
And reconcile thyself with thine own heart
And with thy God, and with the offended world.
How hideously look deeds of lust and blood
Through those snow white and venerable hairs! --
Your children should be sitting round you now, _40
But that you fear to read upon their looks
The shame and misery you have written there.
Where is your wife? Where is your gentle daughter?
Methinks her sweet looks, which make all things else
Beauteous and glad, might kill the fiend within you. _45
Why is she barred from all society
But her own strange and uncomplaining wrongs?
Talk with me, Count,--you know I mean you well.
I stood beside your dark and fiery youth
Watching its bold and bad career, as men _50
Watch meteors, but it vanished not--I marked
Your desperate and remorseless manhood; now
Do I behold you in dishonoured age
Charged with a thousand unrepented crimes.
Yet I have ever hoped you would amend, _55
And in that hope have saved your life three times.
CENCI:
For which Aldobrandino owes you now
My fief beyond the Pincian. --Cardinal,
One thing, I pray you, recollect henceforth,
And so we shall converse with less restraint. _60
A man you knew spoke of my wife and daughter--
He was accustomed to frequent my house;
So the next day HIS wife and daughter came
And asked if I had seen him; and I smiled:
I think they never saw him any more. _65
CAMILLO:
Thou execrable man, beware! --
CENCI:
Of thee?
Nay, this is idle: --We should know each other.
As to my character for what men call crime
Seeing I please my senses as I list,
And vindicate that right with force or guile, _70
It is a public matter, and I care not
If I discuss it with you. I may speak
Alike to you and my own conscious heart--
For you give out that you have half reformed me,
Therefore strong vanity will keep you silent _75
If fear should not; both will, I do not doubt.
All men delight in sensual luxury,
All men enjoy revenge; and most exult
Over the tortures they can never feel--
Flattering their secret peace with others' pain. _80
But I delight in nothing else. I love
The sight of agony, and the sense of joy,
When this shall be another's, and that mine.
And I have no remorse and little fear,
Which are, I think, the checks of other men. _85
This mood has grown upon me, until now
Any design my captious fancy makes
The picture of its wish, and it forms none
But such as men like you would start to know,
Is as my natural food and rest debarred _90
Until it be accomplished.
CAMILLO:
Art thou not
Most miserable?
CENCI:
Why miserable? --
No. --I am what your theologians call
Hardened;--which they must be in impudence,
So to revile a man's peculiar taste. _95
True, I was happier than I am, while yet
Manhood remained to act the thing I thought;
While lust was sweeter than revenge; and now
Invention palls:--Ay, we must all grow old--
And but that there remains a deed to act _100
Whose horror might make sharp an appetite
Duller than mine--I'd do,--I know not what.
When I was young I thought of nothing else
But pleasure; and I fed on honey sweets:
Men, by St. Thomas! cannot live like bees, _105
And I grew tired:--yet, till I killed a foe,
And heard his groans, and heard his children's groans,
Knew I not what delight was else on earth,
Which now delights me little. I the rather
Look on such pangs as terror ill conceals, _110
The dry fixed eyeball; the pale, quivering lip,
Which tell me that the spirit weeps within
Tears bitterer than the bloody sweat of Christ.
I rarely kill the body, which preserves,
Like a strong prison, the soul within my power, _115
Wherein I feed it with the breath of fear
For hourly pain.
NOTE:
_100 And but that edition 1821; But that editions 1819, 1839.
CAMILLO:
Hell's most abandoned fiend
Did never, in the drunkenness of guilt,
Speak to his heart as now you speak to me;
I thank my God that I believe you not. _120
[ENTER ANDREA. ]
ANDREA:
My Lord, a gentleman from Salamanca
Would speak with you.
CENCI:
Bid him attend me
In the grand saloon.
[EXIT ANDREA. ]
CAMILLO:
Farewell; and I will pray
Almighty God that thy false, impious words
Tempt not his spirit to abandon thee. _125
[EXIT CAMILLO. ]
CENCI:
The third of my possessions! I must use
Close husbandry, or gold, the old man's sword,
Falls from my withered hand. But yesterday
There came an order from the Pope to make
Fourfold provision for my cursed sons; _130
Whom I had sent from Rome to Salamanca,
Hoping some accident might cut them off;
And meaning if I could to starve them there.
I pray thee, God, send some quick death upon them!
Bernardo and my wife could not be worse _135
If dead and damned:--then, as to Beatrice--
[LOOKING AROUND HIM SUSPICIOUSLY. ]
I think they cannot hear me at that door;
What if they should? And yet I need not speak
Though the heart triumphs with itself in words.
