Mathilda

This passage beginning "He was a believer in the divinity of genius" is not in F of F – A. Cf. the discussion of genius in "Giovanni Villani" (Mary Shelley's essay in The Liberal, No. IV, 1823), including the sentence: "The fixed stars appear to abberate [sic]; but it is we that move, not they." It is tempting to conclude that this is a quotation or echo of something which Shelley said, perhaps in conversation with Byron. I have not found it in any of his published writings.

77

Is this wishful thinking about Shelley's poetry? It is well known that a year later Mary remonstrated with Shelley about The Witch of Atlas, desiring, as she said in her 1839 note, "that Shelley should increase his popularity… It was not only that I wished him to acquire popularity as redounding to his fame; but I believed that he would obtain a greater mastery over his own powers, and greater happiness in his mind, if public applause crowned his endeavours… Even now I believe that I was in the right." Shelley's response is in the six introductory stanzas of the poem.

78

The preceding paragraphs about Elinor and Woodville are the result of considerable revision for the better of F of F – A and S-R fr. Mary scored out a paragraph describing Elinor, thus getting rid of several clichés ("fortune had smiled on her," "a favourite of fortune," "turning tears of misery to those of joy"); she omitted a clause which offered a weak motivation of Elinor's father's will (the possibility of her marrying, while hardly more than a child, one of her guardian's sons); she curtailed the extravagance of a rhapsody on the perfect happiness which Woodville and Elinor would have enjoyed.

79

The death scene is elaborated from F of F – A and made more melodramatic by the addition of Woodville's plea and of his vigil by the death-bed.

80

F of F – A ends here and F of F – B resumes.

81

A similar passage about Mathilda's fears is cancelled in F of F – B but it appears in revised form in S-R fr. There is also among these fragments a long passage, not used in Mathilda, identifying Woodville as someone she had met in London. Mary was wise to discard it for the sake of her story. But the first part of it is interesting for its correspondence with fact: "I knew him when I first went to London with my father he was in the height of his glory & happiness – Elinor was living & in her life he lived – I did not know her but he had been introduced to my father & had once or twice visited us – I had then gazed with wonder on his beauty & listened to him with delight – " Shelley had visited Godwin more than "once or twice" while Harriet was still living, and Mary had seen him. Of course she had seen Harriet too, in 1812, when she came with Shelley to call on Godwin. Elinor and Harriet, however, are completely unlike.

82

Here and on many succeeding pages, where Mathilda records the words and opinions of Woodville, it is possible to hear the voice of Shelley. This paragraph, which is much expanded from F of F – B, may be compared with the discussion of good and evil in Julian and Maddalo and with Prometheus Unbound and A Defence of Poetry.

83

In the revision of this passage Mathilda's sense of her pollution is intensified; for example, by addition of "infamy and guilt was mingled with my portion."

84

Some phrases of self-criticism are added in this paragraph.

85

In F of F – B this quotation is used in the laudanum scene, just before Level's (Woodville's) long speech of dissuasion.

86

The passage "air, & to suffer … my compassionate friend" is on a slip of paper pasted across the page.

87

This phrase sustains the metaphor better than that in F of F – B: "puts in a word."

88

This entire paragraph is added to F of F – B; it is in rough draft in S-R fr.

89

This is changed in the MS of Mathilda from "a violent thunderstorm." Evidently Mary decided to avoid using another thunderstorm at a crisis in the story.

90

The passage "It is true … I will" is on a slip of paper pasted across the page.

91

In the revision from F of F – B the style of this whole episode becomes more concise and specific.

92

An improvement over the awkward phrasing in F of F – B: "a friend who will not repulse my request that he would accompany me."

93

Spencer's Faery Queen Book 1 – Canto [9]

94

These two paragraphs are not in F of F – B; portions of them are in S-R fr.

95

This speech is greatly improved in style over that in F of F – B, more concise in expression (though somewhat expanded), more specific. There are no corresponding S-R fr to show the process of revision. With the ideas expressed here cf. Shelley, Julian and Maddalo, ll. 182-187, 494-499, and his letter to Claire in November, 1820 (Julian Works, X, 226). See also White, Shelley, II, 378.

96

This solecism, copied from F of F – B, is not characteristic of Mary Shelley.

97

This paragraph prepares for the eventual softening of Mathilda's feeling. The idea is somewhat elaborated from F of F – B. Other changes are necessitated by the change in the mode of presenting the story. In The Fields of Fancy Mathilda speaks as one who has already died.

98

Cf. Shelley's emphasis on hope and its association with love in all his work. When Mary wrote Mathilda she knew Queen Mab (see Part VIII, ll. 50-57, and Part IX, ll. 207-208), the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, and the first three acts of Prometheus Unbound. The fourth act was written in the winter of 1819, but Demogorgon's words may already have been at least adumbrated before the beginning of November:

To love and bear, to hope till hope createsFrom its own wreck the thing it contemplates.

99

Shelley had written, "Desolation is a delicate thing" (Prometheus Unbound, Act I, l. 772) and called the Spirit of the Earth "a delicate spirit" (Ibid., Act III, Sc. iv, l. 6).

100

Purgatorio, Canto 28, ll. 31-33. Perhaps by this time Shelley had translated ll. 1-51 of this canto. He had read the Purgatorio in April, 1818, and again with Mary in August, 1819, just as she was beginning to write Mathilda. Shelley showed his translation to Medwin in 1820, but there seems to be no record of the date of composition.

101

An air with this title was published about 1800 in London by Robert Birchall. See Catalogue of Printed Music Published between 1487 and 1800 and now in the British Museum, by W. Barclay Squire, 1912. Neither author nor composer is listed in the Catalogue.

102

This paragraph is materially changed from F of F – B. Clouds and darkness are substituted for starlight, silence for the sound of the wind. The weather here matches Mathilda's mood. Four and a half lines of verse (which I have not been able to identify, though they sound Shelleyan – are they Mary's own?) are omitted: of the stars she says,

the wind is in the treeBut they are silent; – still they roll alongImmeasurably distant; & the vaultBuilt round by those white clouds, enormous cloudsStill deepens its unfathomable depth.

103

If Mary quotes Coleridge's Ancient Mariner intentionally here, she is ironic, for this is no merciful rain, except for the fact that it brings on the illness which leads to Mathilda's death, for which she longs.

104

This quotation from Christabel (which suggests that the preceding echo is intentional) is not in F of F – B.

105

Cf. the description which opens Mathilda.

106

Among Lord Abinger's papers, in Mary's hand, are some comparable (but very bad) fragmentary verses addressed to Mother Earth.

107

At this point four sheets are cut out of the notebook. They are evidently those with pages numbered 217 to 223 which are among the S-R fr. They contain the conclusion of the story, ending, as does F of F – B with Mathilda's words spoken to Diotima in the Elysian Fields: "I am here, not with my father, but listening to lessons of wisdom, which will one day bring me to him when we shall never part. THE END." Some passages are scored out, but not this final sentence. Tenses are changed from past to future. The name Herbert is changed to Woodville. The explanation must be that Mary was hurrying to finish the revision (quite drastic on these final pages) and the transcription of her story before her confinement, and that in her haste she copied the pages from F of F – B as they stood. Then, realizing that they did not fit Mathilda, she began to revise them; but to keep her MS neat, she cut out these pages and wrote the fair copy. There is no break in Mathilda in story or in pagination. This fair copy also shows signs of haste: slips of the pen, repetition of words, a number of unimportant revisions.

108

Here in F of F – B there is an index number which evidently points to a note at the bottom of the next page. The note is omitted in Mathilda. It reads:

"Dante in his Purgatorio describes a grifon as remaining unchanged but his reflection in the eyes of Beatrice as perpetually varying (Purg. Cant. 31) So nature is ever the same but seen differently by almost every spectator and even by the same at various times. All minds, as mirrors, receive her forms – yet in each mirror the shapes apparently reflected vary & are perpetually changing – "

109

See note 20. Mary Shelley had suffered this torture when Clara and William died.

110

See the end of Chapter V.

111

This sentence is not in F of F – B or in S-R fr.

112

Here is printed the opening of F of F – A, which contains the fanciful framework abandoned in Mathilda. It has some intrinsic interest, as it shows that Mary as well as Shelley had been reading Plato, and especially as it reveals the close connection of the writing of Mathilda with Mary's own grief and depression. The first chapter is a fairly good rough draft. Punctuation, to be sure, consists largely of dashes or is non-existent, and there are some corrections. But there are not as many changes as there are in the remainder of this MS or in F of F – B.

113

It was in Rome that Mary's oldest child, William, died on June 7, 1819.

114

Cf. two entries in Mary Shelley's journal. An unpublished entry for October 27, 1822, reads: "Before when I wrote Mathilda, miserable as I was, the inspiration was sufficient to quell my wretchedness temporarily." Another entry, that for December 2, 1834, is quoted in abbreviated and somewhat garbled form by R. Glynn Grylls in Mary Shelley (London: Oxford University Press, 1938), p. 194, and reprinted by Professor Jones (Journal, p. 203). The full passage follows: "Little harm has my imagination done to me & how much good! – My poor heart pierced through & through has found balm from it – it has been the aegis to my sensibility – Sometimes there have been periods when Misery has pushed it aside – & those indeed were periods I shudder to remember – but the fairy only stept aside, she watched her time – & at the first opportunity her … beaming face peeped in, & the weight of deadly woe was lightened."

115

An obvious reference to Frankenstein.

116

With the words of Fantasia (and those of Diotima), cf. the association of wisdom and virtue in Plato's Phaedo, the myth of Er in the Republic, and the doctrine of love and beauty in the Symposium.

117

See Plato's Symposium. According to Mary's note in her edition of Shelley's Essays, Letters from Abroad, etc. (1840), Shelley planned to use the name for the instructress of the Stranger in his unfinished prose tale, The Coliseum, which was written before Mathilda, in the winter of 1818-1819. Probably at this same time Mary was writing an unfinished (and unpublished) tale about Valerius, an ancient Roman brought back to life in modern Rome. Valerius, like Shelley's Stranger, was instructed by a woman whom he met in the Coliseum. Mary's story is indebted to Shelley's in other ways as well.

118

Mathilda.

119

I cannot find a prototype for this young man, though in some ways he resembles Shelley.

120

Following this paragraph is an incomplete one which is scored out in the MS. The comment on the intricacy of modern life is interesting. Mary wrote: "The world you have just quitted she said is one of doubt & perplexity often of pain & misery – The modes of suffering seem to me to be much multiplied there since I made one of the throng & modern feelings seem to have acquired an intracacy then unknown but now the veil is torn aside – the events that you felt deeply on earth have passed away & you see them in their nakedness all but your knowledge & affections have passed away as a dream you now wonder at the effect trifles had on you and that the events of so passing a scene should have interested you so deeply – You complain, my friends of the"

121

The word is blotted and virtually illegible.

122

With Diotima's conclusion here cf. her words in the Symposium: "When any one ascending from a correct system of Love, begins to contemplate this supreme beauty, he already touches the consummation of his labour. For such as discipline themselves upon this system, or are conducted by another beginning to ascend through these transitory objects which are beautiful, towards that which is beauty itself, proceeding as on steps from the love of one form to that of two, and from that of two, to that of all forms which are beautiful; and from beautiful forms to beautiful habits and institutions, and from institutions to beautiful doctrines; until, from the meditation of many doctrines, they arrive at that which is nothing else than the doctrine of the supreme beauty itself, in the knowledge and contemplation of which at length they repose." (Shelley's translation) Love, beauty, and self-knowledge are keywords not only in Plato but in Shelley's thought and poetry, and he was much concerned with the problem of the presence of good and evil. Some of these themes are discussed by Woodville in Mathilda. The repetition may have been one reason why Mary discarded the framework.

123

Mathilda did have such a friend, but, as she admits, she profited little from his teachings.

124

In F of F – B there is another, longer version (three and a half pages) of this incident, scored out, recounting the author's return to the Elysian gardens, Diotima's consolation of Mathilda, and her request for Mathilda's story. After wandering through the alleys and woods adjacent to the gardens, the author came upon Diotima seated beside Mathilda. "It is true indeed she said our affections outlive our earthly forms and I can well sympathize in your disappointment that you do not find what you loved in the life now ended to welcome you here[.] But one day you will all meet how soon entirely depends upon yourself – It is by the acquirement of wisdom and the loss of the selfishness that is now attached to the sole feeling that possesses you that you will at last mingle in that universal world of which we all now make a divided part." Diotima urges Mathilda to tell her story, and she, hoping that by doing so she will break the bonds that weigh heavily upon her, proceeds to "tell this history of strange woe."