The Gothic Element in Shelley's Writings

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THE GOTHIC ELEMENT IN SHELLEY'S WRITINGS

THESIS

Presented to the Graduate Council of the North

Texas State Teachers College in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

For the Degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

Olna Oatis Boaz, B. A.

Denton, Texas

January, 1948

151916 151916

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter Page

I. SHELLEY'S INTRODUCTION TO GOTHICISM ...... 1

II. IMITATION OF GOTHICISM ...... 18

III. TRANSMUTATION OF GOTHICISM ...... 82

BIBLIOGRAPHY . 0 0.. 0 .0 0 .. 0 .0 .. .0 .. .124

1ii CHAPTER I

SHETLLEY'S INTRODUCTION TO GOTHICISM

A sense of wonder, a love of the strange, a desire to feel the icy touch of fear are deeply rooted instincts of man. All tellers of tales know the lure of the marvelous.

The shadow of terror and the sense of wonder lurk in folk tales and ballads, in myths, and in legends. The myth makers of civilization's infancy, the story tellers of olden times, the court minstrels, singing of heroic exploits, the old housewives in chimney corners, telling their tales of fairies, ghosts, and goblins, have all made use of the strange, the terrible, and the wonderful.

Shelley, as befitted any boy gifted with a lively curiosity and a vivid imagination, was interested in the wonderful, the mysterious, and the strange. He loved to relate wonder tales to his little sisters; and he invented a fabulous tortoise inhabiting Warnham Pond, an equally fabulous snake of great age, and an old alchemist, who lived in the attic of Field Place. These flights of his versatile imagination excited the children and filled their minds with a pleasurable dread. Shelley punched holes in the ceiling of a low passage to find some hidden chamber on which to

1 2 fasten newer and more startling tales. For amusement, Shel- ley and his sisters dressed themselves in strange costumes to personate spirits and fiends.1 His interest in tales of the marvelous remained with him while he was at Eton; for here he continued to relate "his marvelous stories of fairy- land, of apparitions, spirits, and haunted ground, and his speculations were then . . . of the world beyond the grave.2

Science, also, provided food for his imagination. His interest in the occult sciences, natural philosophy, and chemistry caused him, while he was at Eton, to spend his pocket money on books "relative to these pursuits, on chemical apparatus and materials"; and many of the books treated of magic and witchcraft. He explored by night the traditional haunts of ghosts, and at one time planned to get admission to the vault, or charnel-house, at Warnham

Church and to wait there in trembling expectation for ghosts to appear. He consulted his books on the raising of ghosts, and on one occasion during his life at Eton set out to put his knowledge to the test. He took with him a skull, as directed by the books, and pursued his fearful way to a small stream. He stood with one foot on either side of the stream, drank three times from the skull, and waited for the

1 Thomas Jefferson Hogg, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shel- .l, p. 22.

2 Roger Ingpen, Shelley in England, p. 47. 3

ghost to appear. Disappointed when nothing happened, he de-

cided that he had probably failed to repeat the correct charm.3

This mood of Shelley's youth is recalled in the following lines from the "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty":

While yet a boy I sought for ghosts, and sped Through many a listening chamber, cave, and ruin, And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing Hopes of high talk with the departed dead. I called on poisonous names with which our youth is fed . . .

The same preoccupation with the dark, the gloomy, and the

mysterious is revealed in Alastor; or, the pirit of Soli-

tude:

I have watched Thy shadow, and the darkness of thy steps, And my heart ever gazes on the depth Of thy deep mysteries. I have made my bed In charnels and on coffins, where black death Keeps record of the trophies won from thee, Hoping to still these obstinate questionings Of thee and thine, by forcing some lone ghost Thy messenger, to render up the tale Of what we are.

Shelley's imagination was intrigued not only by books

on magic and witchcraft, but also by the wildly imaginative

literature of the period. Tales of fairies, giants, mon-

sters, bandits, assassins, and magicians held a singular

fascination for him. Lacking a school library at Sion

House, Shelley and his companions secretly patronized a small circulating library at Brentford, where six-penny volumes

3Hogg, op. cit., pp. 36-37. 1~ bound in blue wrappers and containing tales of thrilling ad- venture and of heroic and superhuman passion were available

These bluebooks, or "shilling shockers," were very popular during the period of Shelley's youth: Mrs. Radcliffe had retired from the Gothic lists in 1797, and Monk Lewis had admitted in 1801 that the "unheeded spell" of the tale of terror was growing weaker. Yet there were still enough readers in England who would agree with Catherine Morland that books should be "all horrid." The vigilant hacks took their cue, and the cheap presses were soon teeming with "horrid" bluebooks. The tale of terror was still very much alive, and in 1803 Shelley and his schoolmates at Sion House were resorting "under the rose" to a low circulating library in Brentford for the treasured blue-books.5

"Apart from the 'bluebooks,' the volumes that most delighted Shelley at this time were the romances of Anne

Radcliffe.,'Monk Lewis,' and Charlotte Dacre."6 Peacock in his Memoirs of S records Die Raiiber, Goethe's Faust, and four novels of Charles Brockden Brown as being "of all the works with which he was familiar, those which took the deepest root in [the poet's] mind,and had the strongest influence in the formation of his character."7 The prosaic realities of life drove him to the realms of fiction for the feeling of wonder and strangeness that his fancy craved;

4Felix Rabbe, Shelley, the Man and the Poet, I, 34-35.

5William W. Watt, Shilling Shockers of the Gothic School, p. 10.

61ngpen, OP. cit., p. 47. 7 As quoted by Montague Summers in The Gothic Quest, p. 121. g

and it is not surprising that he had faith in prodigies, in apparitions.,and in the evocation of the dead.8 Tales of terror had a marked effect upon him, for after reading a

horror story, he was subject to strange and sometimes fright-

ful dreams, and was haunted by apparitions that bore all the semblance of reality. He was given to waking dreams, a

sort of lethargy and abstraction that became habitual to

him, and after the fit was over, his eyes flashed, his lips

quivered, his voice was tremulous with emotion, a sort of ecstasy came over him, and he talked more like a spirit or

an angel than a human being. 9

This literature which exercised so profound an effect on the youthful Shelley was developed by a group of writers

known as the Gothic school. This school had its beginning

in the reaction against the formal and critical literature

of the first half of the eighteenth century. Inspiration

was found in the glamor and color of the middle ages, in

strange inexplicable occurrences, and in all aspects of na-

ture; the "Renascence of Wonder" had begun. The new kind of

romance found its first expression in Walpole's Castle of

Otranto, which was published on Christmas Eve of 1764. The immediate acceptance and popularity of the Castle of Otranto

"is an indication of the eagerness with which the readers of

8Rabbe, p_. cit., pp. 35-36.

9 Thomas Medwin, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, p. 27. 6

1765 desired to escape from the present and revel for a time

in strange, bygone centuries. "10 The first edition was sold

out in two months and others followed rapidly. It was

translated into French, German, and Italian.

Walpole, with his followers -- especially Mrs. Rad-

cliffe, Clara Reeve, "Monk" Lewis, Maturin, and Godwin -- developed a set pattern for the narrative of suspense and terror which is termed the Gothic novel. The Gothic novel,

in turn, was imitated by the "shilling shockers,'" which were

chapbooks of short stories either written according to the accepted pattern of the terror-romance school or boldly

condensed from existing stories.

The machinery of the Gothic novels and chapbooks de- viates little from the approved model, and is characterized

by looseness of plot construction. The stories themselves

fall into two general groups: those following such novels

as The Monk and The Italian, stories whose principal back-

ground was a monastery or convent; and those following the

lead of The Castle of Otranto and The Mysteries of Udolpho,

whose setting is the Gothic castle.1 1 New characters appear at random and relate their life histories upon appearing;

this device of breaking into the main sequence of events

causes confusion and snaps the thread of the story. Further confusion is brought about by the scattering of members of a

1 0 Edith Birkhead, The Tale of Terror, p. 12.

1 Watt, p. citi., p. 21. 7 family all over the earth at the beginning of a story, and gradually drawing them into the main setting and center of action; others, who have been living near each other for a lifetime, find, in the end, that they are brother and sister.1 2 A third complication of events is the running of one or more minor plots in conjunction with the major theme.

Lewis's Monk is an excellent example of Gothic plot structure. The main plot concerns the monk Ambrosio, but three sub-plots are loosely woven into the main action.

The second theme of importance is the love story of Don Raymond and Agnes. The connection between the two lines of action is through the convent of St. Clara at Madrid. It is at this convent, where Agnes is an unwilling nun, that Am- brosio discovers her guilty connection with Don Raymond; and it is here, while Agnes is imprisoned, supposedly for life, that Ambrosio accomplishes the ruin and death of his sister

Antonia and his own downfall. The other minor elements, the stories of the Bleeding Nun and of Ahasuerus, the Wan- dering Jew, are attached to the narrative of Raymond and Agnes.

The Monk is further confused by the dispersal of characters to far places and by hidden relationships among them.

Ambrosio is of unknown parentage; Antonia and Elvira are without relatives and friends. It is only when the prince of darkness is preparing to dash the monk to his death that

1 2 Ibid., pp. 46-47. 8 the secret of Ambrosio's parentage is revealed. The poor widow whom he poisoned and the young girl whom he dishon- ored and murdered are revealed as his mother and sister. Such relationships and their delayed revelation are typical of the working of the Gothic plot.

The situations follow a rigid and much-used pattern. Certain elements are considered necessary for the melodramatic effect that the authors wish to produce. Romantic love, tyrannical opposition, seduction, innocence in danger, dramatic rescue, perpetual flight, capture by bandits, incarceration, madness, supernatural visitation, lost heirs and inheritances, robberies, murder, and incest are used together or in appropriate groupings to arouse suspense, ex- citement, and horror.1 3

The following title-page synopses, the first from a plagiarized version of Clara Reeve's The Old Enlish Baron and the second a plagiarism of Mrs. Radcliffe's Italian, show the typical terror-romance stock plot: Lovell Castle, or the Rightful Heir Restored, a Gothic Tale; Narrating how a young Man, the Supposed Son of a Peasant, by a Train of Unparalleled Circum- stances, not only Discovers who were his Real Parents, but that they came, to Untimely Deaths; with His Ad- ventures in the Haunted Apartment, Discovery of the Fatal Closet, and Appearance of the Ghost of his Murdered Father; Relating, also, how the Murderer was Brought to Justice, with his Confession, and the Restoration of the Injured Orphan to his Title and Estates.1

1 3 Eino Railo, The Haunted Castle, pp. 1-327.

14Watt, 2p. cit., pp. 16-17. 9

The Midnight Assassin; or, Confessions of the Monk Rinaldi; containing a Complete History of his Diabolical Machinations and Unparalleled Ferocity. Together with a Circumstantial Account of that Scourge of Mankind the Inquisition; with the Manner of Bringing to Trial those Unfortunate Beings who are at its Disposal.1 5

The action of the Gothic novel is developed in settings

as stereotyped as the plot elements. The prime requisite is a gloomy half-ruined, haunted castle equipped with a clock for striking the climactic hour, a dank and evil-smelling

dungeon, a suite of haunted rooms, a tower in which to in-

carcerate an unwanted wife, ancestral pictures which glare

at the beholder, and assorted sliding panels, trap-doors,

and dimly lighted passages. The stories which do not have

their settings in the prescribed Gothic castle have their

background in a monastery or convent. The clock is re-

placed by the tolling bell; the tower, by the cell for soli-

tary confinement of innocent heroines; and the dank and

verminous dungeon, by the underground vault, which is used for starvation and torture.16

Such stage-settings form the stock-in-trade of horror-

romanticism in its oldest and purest form. It is so impor-

tant "that if it were eliminated the whole fabric of romance would be bereft of its foundation and lose its predominant

atmosphere. " 7 In the development of the Gothic castle,

15_bid., pp. 17-18. 1 61bid., pp. 21-31.

17Railo, 2p. cit., p. 7. 10

Walpole originated the convention and enlarged upon the underground portion, with its bewildering vaulted passages and secret doors. Clara Reeve contributed the suite of empty rooms, which were supposed to be haunted. Anne Radcliffe developed the use of this setting to the fullest extent.

She pictures the castle in detail, places it in a wild, in- accessible, and romantic setting, and throws over it the glamor of decaying splendor. It was she who brought into use the old abbey and monastery with their broken arches, solitary towers, and romantic gloom.1

Over these settings is thrown an atmosphere that is calculated to heighten the effects of strangeness and terror. This atmosphere, as well as the haunted castle, was developed primarily by Walpole, Reeve, and Radcliffe. The moon emerges from behind a cloud and reveals a ghastly scene to the villain, who is intent on some wicked scheme, and terrifies him so that the deed is left undone; or, perhaps, the moon, shining through the stained glass window of a church, reveals the glassy eyes of a victim to the cruel tyrant. The moon lends mystery tinged with fear and sadness. Lightning plays a role similar to that of the moon; at critical moments a flash reveals danger, or a sudden burst of thunder shakes the foundation of the castle, hinting at divine retribution. The wind moans along corri- dors and subterranean passages, putting out lights and

18Ibid d pp. 7-10. 11 causing doors to creak on their rusty hinges. 9 "Lurking shadows, flickering lights, fluttering tapestry, and unaccountable groans" 20 help to complete the required atmosphere of terror within the castle or monastery.

In addition to the effects produced by the wind, the lightning, and the moon on the inhabitants within the Gothic castle, nature has other roles to play. Thunderstorms rage, mountain torrents roar, winds moan and sob in sympathy with the varying moods of the characters. Dark and gloomy for- ests provide fit settings for robbery and murder. Steep precipices suggest suicide to unhappy victims of persecution. Lonely and desolate landscapes provide the proper terrain for the ever-recurring flight. Hooting owls, cir- cling ravens, and fluttering bats help to create a mysterious atmosphere by frightening the timorous heroine, depressing the sorrowful hero, or warning the tyrannical villain.

"The stereotyped puppets which cavort stiffly against this artificial background with the jerking of a certain time-worn set of strings"2 1 fall logically into two categories: the good and the bad. The hero and heroine with their helpers make up the first group, while the second is composed of "murderous monks, cruel abbesses, bluebeard barons, tyrannical parents, sorceresses, and bandits. e22

191bid.,pp. 11-12. 20Birkhead, i.t., p. 42.

21 Watt, op. cit., p. 31. 2 2Ibid., p. 31. 12

Supernatural characters follow this same grouping. Kind- hearted ghosts of parents warn the heroine of impending danger, or inform the hero of his true estate and heritage.

Emissaries of the prince of darkness plague the good characters at times, and at times, "borne on the sulphurous pinions of hell," they carry their luckless victims to doom. The heroine of the Gothic novel is a "rosy embodiment of womanly beauty and virtue," but under stereotyped development of character she becomes a "bloodless and unsub- stantial shadow. ,23 She is given to idealism, sentimental brooding, and melancholy; and often she is pictured as a doll-like being who is unaware of the wickedness of the world.2 4 Her most distinguishing characteristic is, however, a lack of common sense and practicality. She is beautiful and is accomplished in all feminine arts; and being a spineless creature, swept about like a leaf in autumn the wind by her own feelings, it is her business * . . to get into trouble, and then to pine away with the aid of her plaintive music and poetry and an herent inability for sighing and weeping, leaving almost the hopeless task of extrication to the unfortunate hero. The anly courage and initiative she ever displays is an unfailing tendency to explore the dark recesses of castles and convents, and even this is more attributable to curiosity than to courage.2 5 The hero, who rescues this beautiful, accomplished, but constantly swooning young heroine, is as ineffectual and

2 3 Railo, 2P. 2 cit., p. 283. 4 Ibid., p. 291.

2 5 Watt, a. cit., p. 33. 13

bloodless as she. Like his lady, he is virtuous, fair,

musical, and addicted to weeping and swooning under stress

of emotion. He is, however, more given to action; but he

shares her capacity for solitary exploration of dangerous

ground,26 which demonstrates his "inherent capacity for

falling victim to misfortunes so tragic that they impress his picture on the mind.,27

In contrast with the virtuous hero and heroine are the demon-women and the dark hero. Since from the viewpoint of the reading public of the Gothic novel "virtue is boring, insipid, unromantic; sin is fascinating, variegated, and romantic,n28 these wicked characters are more strongly developed and occupy a more prominent position in the action of the story.

The demon-woman is, in some novels, a real sorceress, or emissary of the powers of darkness, sent to lure the dark hero to ruin and everlasting punishment. In other tales she is not a supernatural character, but a darkly beautiful and passionate vampire whose function it is to love the virtuous hero and win him from his real love. In either role she is beautiful with a more than human beauty, and is purposeful, accomplished, and thoroughly depraved. She indulges in passionate rages when her plots fail, but until her victim

26 Ibid., p. 36. 2 7Railo, o. cit., p. 284.

28Ibid., p. 283. 14

is securely in her power she dissembles to perfection.

The dark, moody hero is sometimes the victim of the demon-woman, and sometimes her accomplice. His outward characteristics include "a high, white forehead shadowed

by ebon curls, a dark piercing glance, general beauty of

countenance, a manly character and a mysterious past.",2 9

Writers of Gothic novels "realizing that vice was far more

alluring to their readers than virtue, emphasized the por-

trayal of the dark villain, evolving that curious hybrid between heroism and villainy which later became known as the 'Byronic hero.,n 3 0 "He is a lonely being, his path is

solitary, his thoughts are morbid self-analysis and a desire to expand the intellectual kingdom of mankind.",3 1

Usually he is introduced as the villain, but in the end he does penance for his sins.3 2

Next in importance in the roster of villains is the murderous monk. The use of this character is the outgrowth of antagonism to the papacy. He is pictured as having "an acquiline nose, large, black, sparkling eyes ... dark brows

. . . [a] burning, piercing glance that few could withstand. "3 3

He is, or becomes, "a person . . . hardened in the ways of crime and vice, alarmingly gifted and strenuous, hypocritical,

2 9 Ibid., p. 219. 30 Watt, _a. _cit., pp. 34-35.

3lRailo, _. cit., p. 220. 3 2 Watt, 2. Cit., p. 35. 3 3 Railo, OP. _ci t., p. 174. 15

unfeeling and merciless."34 Women are his weakness, and he

is guilty of adultery, rape, and incest. He is used for

the purpose of introducing erotic scenes and of providing a peg upon which to hang the horror of great evil.3 5

Though the murderous monk is the supreme example of cruelty and horror, there are two other characters who vie

with him for that distinction. The "bluebeard baron" and

the cruel abbess are equally adept at creating difficulties

for the hero and heroine. The role of the baron is that of seducing the innocent heroine or forcing her into a love-

less marriage. The abbess, on the other hand, keeps the

unfortunate girl imprisoned behind the gray walls of the

convent. Starvation, physical cruelty, and mental torture are the lot of the unfortunate victims.

The supernatural characters, who appear regularly in the Gothic novel, fail to be really awe-inspiring and prove

to be a disappointment to the terror enthusiast. The sym-

pathetic ghosts of the departed parents and murdered lord

of the castle, who wants burial for his bones, are purely

mechanical and fail to alarm.3 6 Such apparitions as the

"Bleeding Nun," however, are more successful in thrilling

the reader. The most terrible of these visitants is Luci- fer, who is usually pictured as a gigantic monster with

341Ibid., pp. 173-189. 35 1bid., pp. 173-189.

36wa tt, 2p. cit., pp. 42-44. 16

tongues of flame darting from his mouth.

One ever-recurring figure, the Wandering Jew, is both

human and supernatural. The legend of the wanderer is

found in many countries and in many religions, and the wan-

derer himself has been known by many names. He is best

known in Gothic literature as Ahasuerus, and he presents the

problem of never-ending life. He is usually described as

having a "majestic appearance, with powerful features, and

large, black, flashing eyes; something in his glance awakens a secret awe akin to horror." 3 7 He is melancholy, grave,

and solemn. God has set his seal upon him -- "a flaming,

gleaming cross on his brow, which awakens the utmost ter-

ror in the beholder."38 The possessor of the philosopher's

stone or the elixir of life is a type developed from the

Wandering Jew.

These stereotyped puppet-characters of the Gothic novel have a way of speaking that is as artificial as the situa-

tions in which they find themselves. Their diction is

"flowery and abounds in long Latinate words.f139 Weeping,

sighing, exclamations, questions punctuate their discourse.

The first person is often avoided entirely, and "hero and heroine refer to themselves and each other as 'the luckless

Theodore' and 'the miserable Matilda.,'40 Rage provokes

37 Railo, op. cit., p. 197. 38 Ibid., p. 198.

39Watt, mp. cit., p. 45. 4oIbid., p. 46. 17

high-sounding epithets, and sorrow calls forth long passages of melancholy oratory.

Such, then, was the Gothic novel in Shelley's youth -- melodramatic tales of innocence persecuted by villains of

unparalleled ferocity in surroundings of romantic gloom. The working of the plots creaked with the artificiality of their machinery; the characters spoke in affected terms,

cavorted in stiff and unnatural attitudes, and reveled in

orgies of wickedness, self-pity, and despair. Though the

Gothic novel is faulty and artificial, its romantic appeal

is admitted; and to a boy of Shelley's temperament it was

irresistible. "He had shuddered and grown pale in reading

them, and while still full of his conceptions and still

palpitating with divine emotion, he attempted to make others

shudder and grow pale in their turn."4 And so on Janu-

ary 10, 1812, Shelley, in forwarding copies of Zastrozzi

and St. Ir his two efforts in Gothic romance, to God- win, writes: "From a reader, I became a writer of romance.#4 2

4 lRabbe, p_. ct., p. 62. 42Hogg, . cit., II, 55. CHAPTER II

IMITATION OF GOTHICISM

While Shelley was at Eton (1810) and under the spell of the occult sciences and the Gothic romance, he wrote his

first published work, Zastrozzi. Ingpen, in his editorial notes on Zastrozzi, comments on its resemblance to Charlotte

Dacre's Zof which was a favorite with Shelley. Paral-

lels with The Monk, The Italian, Rinaldo Rinaldini, St. Leon, Edgar Huntley, Arthur Mervyn, Sicilian Romance, and The Mys-

teries of Udolpho have been discovered by various critics.

Since Shelley's mind was saturated with the stock charac-

ters and situations of the typical Gothic romance and since his memory was unusually retentive, he could hardly have failed to reproduce characters, scenes, and phrases from favorite authors without conscious plagiarism.1

Zastrozzi, in plot, characters, and atmosphere, is a typical terror-romance. From the flamboyant opening statement -- "Torn from the society of all that he held dear on earth, the victim of secret enemies, and exiled from happiness, was the wretched Verezzil" -- to the melodramatic end --

lPercy Bysshe Shelley, Complete Works, edited by Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck, V, 297.

18 19

"and, with a wild, convulsive laugh of exulting revenge, he

[Zastrozzi] died" -- the plot is pure Gothic, as the following summary shows.

Verezzi, the hero of the tale, is loved by two women: Julia, Marchesa di Strobazzo, and Matilda, Contessa di

Laurentini. Julia, the lady of his choice, is fair, gentle, and modest; Matilda, the object of his detestation, is dark, bold, and voluptuous. Verezzi is on his way to Julia when, at an inn near Munich, he is drugged by his enemy, Zas- trozzi, and conveyed to a dark and gloomy cavern. There

Verezzi is chained to the wall, and left to languish in darkness, visited only by one of Zastrozzi's henchmen with inadequate supplies of bread and water.

A terrific thunderstorm wrecks the cavern; and Zas- trozzi, fearful of losing the sweetness of revenge, causes

Verezzi to be transferred to a lonely cottage on the heath.

Under the ministrations of a physician and Bianca, in whose cottage he has been placed, Verezzi recovers sufficiently to elude his captors and escape to Passau. Here he is sheltered by Claudine, an old woman who has recently lost a son.

Zastrozzi, in his furious hunt for the object of his revenge, comes, by accident, to one of the country castles of Matilda, Contessa di Laurentini. Matilda proposes that she take up the hunt for Verezzi while Zastrozzi perfects plans for the assassination of Julia. In her search for 20

Verezzi, Matilda moves to her hotel at Passau. In a moment

of despair at her inability to find Verezzi, Matilda at-

tempts suicide in the Danube. Rescued by Verezzi, she goes with him to Claudine's cottage. Reluctantly Verezzi agrees

to return with Matilda to her hotel. Verezzi's constant

praises of Julia vex Matilda, until, acting on Zastrozzi's

advice, she informs Verezzi that Julia is dead. The fearful

shock throws him into brain fever.

Recovery finds Verezzi still unreconciled to the advances of Matilda; loyalty to his dead Julia fills his soul

to the exclusion of all other attachments. Fearful of dis-

gusting him with the animality of her passions, Matilda plays ministering angel to the stricken Verezzi, calming,

soothing, entertaining him. On the advice of a physician,

Matilda conveys Verezzi to another of her castles, the Cas-

tella di Laurentini, located in a gloomy and remote spot

in Venetian territory. Here Matilda woos Verezzi with music

and unremitting attention, softening his grief with angelic

devotion. In private, however, her violent emotions run

riot.

Zastrozzi, called to the castle in consultation, plans with Matilda a scheme for insuring the realization of all

her hopes. Matilda leads Verezzi to a gloomy spot on the

brink of a terrifying chasm; an assassin darts out from the

concealing forest and menaces Verezzi with a dagger. Matil-

da, stepping between them, receives the blow of the dagger 21

in her white shoulder. Her ruse is successful; Verezzi in

gratitude makes her his wife. The virtuous Verezzi completely succumbs to the siren wiles of the passionate Ma-

tilda.

Before a month of bliss has passed, Matilda receives a

summons to appear before the Inquisition. In an effort to escape, the two conceal themselves in a small house in Ven- ice. Quietude palls, however, and a gondola ride on the

Laguna is proposed. At the height of their gaiety, Julia appears in a magnificent gondola lighted by innumerable flambeaux. Verezzi discovers that the ideal of his heart still lives; Matilda is wild at the discovery of Zastrozzi's perfidy.

Returning home, Matilda wins a declaration of undying fidelity from Verezzi; and, as he drinks to his vow, Julia appears. In desperation Verezzi draws his dagger and plunges it into his heart. Deprived of the object of her passion, Matilda snatches the dagger from her husband's breast, seizes Julia by the hair, and stabs her in a thousand places.

The Inquisition, however, has not been idle. Matilda and Zastrozzi are brought to trial for their crimes. Im- prisoned in the dungeons of il Conslio di dieci, Matilda reviews her past life. In sleep a vision urges her to repentance; she wakes and prays for forgiveness. At the trial 22

she urges Zastrozzi, also, to repent. Zastrozzi, however, boasts of his crimes, and the reason for his villainy is unfolded. The father of Verezzi was the betrayer of Olivia,

the mother of Zastrozzi. On her deathbed she had sworn her

son to vengeance. Zastrozzi had assassinated the elder

Verezzi, but mere death was not sufficient revenge -- a more

subtle vengeance was to be enacted on the son. Using Ma- tilda as a tool, he had struck at the younger Verezzi through his love. The result was excruciating agony in life and eternal torment through self-destruction. Zastrozzi's vengeance is complete.

In Zastrozzi Shelley has drawn freely upon the characters and incidents of the Gothic novels he had read; even the names are borrowed. Julia is the heroine of Mrs. Rad- cliffe's Sicilian Romance; Matilda is derived from Lewis's

The Monk; Verezzi occurs in The Mysteries of. Udolpho; and

Zastrozzi is formed by prefixing an extra syllable to the name Strozzi from Zofloza.2

Among these borrowings some interesting parallels with the novels of Charles Brockden Brown have been pointed out by Eleanor Sickels.3 Verezzi's awakening from drugged sleep in a mysterious cavern is somewhat like Edward Hunt- ley's awakening, after sleep-walking, in a pit at the bottom

2 Birkhead, _p. cit., pp. 122-123.

3 Eleanor Sickels, "Shelley and Charles Brockden Brown," Publications of the Modern Lanuage Association, XLV (1930), 1116-1128-. 23

of a cave. The similarity lies in the fact that neither understands the reason for his tragic imprisonment and the re-

sulting mystery and mental confusion. Edgar Huntley is

sheltered in a lonely cottage by an old woman as is Verezzi

by Bianca and Claudine. On Verezzi's arrival at Passau, he

sinks down on some stone steps leading to a magnificent man-

sion and falls asleep. On awakening he secures shelter with the peasant Claudine. In Arthur Mervyn the hero also sits

down on some stone steps to meditate. He, likewise, soon finds a patron. Matilda's attempt at suicide is reminiscent

of Welbeck's in Arthur Me=. A further parallel is the nonchalance with which both Verezzi and Edgar Huntley eaves- drop -- Verezzi on Matilda and Zastrozzi, and Edgar Huntley on Clithero.

Aside from the obvious parallels with The Monk, from which Matilda is drawn almost bodily, and St. Leon, wherein the hero is chained and starved in an underground dungeon,

Zastrozzi more nearly resembles the Zofloya of Charlotte

Dacre than any other Gothic romance. This resemblance4 is so strong as to suggest absolute plagiarism, not only of characters and incidents, but of words and phrases. The

4 Similarities enumerated, with the exception of those noted in the paragraph beginning "Other similarities . . 2" are also pointed out by Montague Summers in the introduction (pp. xx-xxii) of his edition of Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya; or, The Moor, and by A. M. D. Hughes, "Shelley's Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne, " Modern Language Review, VII (1912), 54-63. 24

opening scene of Zastrozzi is the abduction of Verezzi,

while in a drugged sleep, and his confinement in a cavern.

He is chained to the wall, with not even a little straw to

keep his limbs from the rock. He is left in darkness and

in ignorance of the reason for his imprisonment. In Zo-

floya Lilla suffers the same sort of confinement. Kid-

napped while in a swoon, she is carried to a remote cavern

and chained to the wall; coarse food and water form her

diet, the flinty ground her bed.

Verezzi is released from captivity on the destruction

of the cavern by lightning. The parallel incident in Zo- floya is the shattering of the robbers' cave. In both cases

the roof falls, and the captives are released.

After Verezzi's escape from Zastrozzi he wanders to

Passau, sits on lofty stone steps, and is befriended by a peasant woman who has lost a son. He agrees to work for her and take the place of the son she has lost. Leonardo, in Zofloya, fleeing from his disgraced home, meets an old woman who is weeping the untimely death of a son. He com- forts her and agrees to take the place of her son.

The situation between Verezzi and Matilda is reminiscent of that in Zofloya between Victoria and Henriquez.

In each case the brazen nature of the woman is repugnant to the man, whose affections are fastened on a gentle fairy- like blonde. Burning jealousy animates both Victoria and 25

Matilda, and each asks her fiendish helper to dispose of the hated rival. Both men endure agonies of torture on hearing of the death or disappearance of the loved one, and are nursed by the passionate ladies who pursue them. Each upon recovering from a swoon, finds his head upon the hated one's breast, and recoils from her as from a scorpion. Each declares unwavering devotion to the lost love, and sternly upbraids the designing female for not realizing that he is irrevocably another's.

The stratagems by which Victoria and Matilda attain their ends are the same. Victoria saves Berenza, whom she desires to be her lover, from the assassin's dagger by di- verting the stroke to her own shoulder. The situation presented itself and she used it for her purpose. Matilda, on the other hand, plans the assassin's attack with Zastrozzi for the definite purpose of securing Verezzi's gratitude.

Victoria makes an avowal of love while shamming sleep, and pretends a captivating modesty and shame at being overheard.

Hiding in the forest, Matilda, on hearing Verezzi approach, weeps and sobs at his unfeeling cruelty. She, too, pretends surprise and shame on being overheard. The two also have similar visions. Matilda dreams that Verezzi becomes a shrieking specter as she gLves him her hand at the altar. Vic- toria dreams that she replaces Lilla at the altar and that Henriquez becomes a skeleton. 26

The descriptions of the bridal feast in the two books

are but two versions of the same scene. Each is held in a

large gloomy castle, and no guests are present; wine flows,

and the most delicate of viands are served. Wild music

prompts the bride to clasp the groom and whirl him in a

giddy dance. Each lover declares himself weary of exces-

sive happiness and wishes to retire and trace in dreams the

pleasures of the day.

The murders and suicides are parallel also. Henriquez,

on awakening from drugged sleep and seeing that his bride is

Victoria and not Lilla, braces his sword hilt upon the floor and falls upon the point. Verezzi, when confronted with

the living Julia, plunges the dagger into his heart. On

the death of Henriquez, Victoria rushes to the cavern where

Lilla is confined and drags her forth by the hair to be

stabbed in many places before finally being thrown into the

thundering cataract below. Matilda, in vengeance, removes the still-dripping dagger from Verezzi's breast, catches

Julia by her floating hair, and stabs her a thousand times.

Each weeps over the corpse of her lover and pulls out handfuls of hair in her grief.

Other similarities are also to be noted. Victoria has for her advisor and helper the mysterious Zofloya; Matilda depends upon the revengeful Zastrozzi. Zastrozzi, however, is human; Zofloya is Satan in disguise. Each woman thinks 27 she is the dominating factor, but she is only the tool of the designing villain. Both of the women, by dispensation of

divine providence, are given a last chance to repent and

escape eternal damnation. Matilda avails herself of the

opportunity; but Victoria, remaining unrepentant, is de-

stroyed as was Ambrosio in The Monk.

Since Shelley chose for his models some of the most ex-

travagant, romantic, and sentimental products of the Gothic

school and since he was still adolescent when he wrote Zas-

trozzi, it is not surprising that the novel is full of faults

and excessive melodrama. An apt criticism of its form has

been given by Felix Rabbe:

It is, no doubt, far from being a masterpiece; it is in the blood-and-thunder style of Mrs. Radcliffe and of Lewis, and while exaggerating the defects of their style, it betrays in every line the most ingenuous inexperience of literary composition, without sequence, or variety, or probability.5

In form the novel is a "fevered kaleidoscope of fan-

tastic events. 6 In true Gothic manner, horror is heaped

upon horror. The very first phrase indicates melodramatic

action -- "Torn from the society of all that he held dear

on earth." Incarceration, romantic love, tyrannical op-

position, flight, brain fever, prophetic visions, emotional

excess, seduction, murder, and suicide follow in confusing

combination. Plunged into the rapid action of the story,

5Rabbe, 2p. cit., I, 62-63.

6 Dacre, 2. cit., p. xxi. 28 the reader has little time to adjust himself to the furious tempo of the action or the bewildering sequence of events; but this is a failing common to most terror romances. Zas- trozzi wishes to be avenged upon Verezzi, but the motive for such vindictive hatred is reserved for the final scene. The object of this secrecy is, probably, to perplex the reader; but such suspense as this device secures is purchased at the cost of motivation of Zastrozzi's actions. Verezzi's inability to leave Matilda and escape her hated advances lacks verity, but verity is neither expected nor needed by readers of this kind of fiction. Why he should be compelled to remain with her until he is finally forced into marriage is not explained. Excessive emotion and exagger-

ation add their typical brand of Gothic structural weakness.

Matilda is described as stabbing the body of the fair Julia

a thousand times. As Jeaffreson points out, since it takes

at least two seconds to plunge a dagger up to the hilt into

even the tenderest flesh and to withdraw the weapon for an-

other blow, Matilda must have spent considerably more than half an hour in puncturing the body of her rival.

The setting in which these melodramatic events are en-

acted is as typically Gothic as the action and theme. In

the beginning "a pitchy darkness involved the face of

things." The journey with the insensible victim is made

7John Cordy Jeaffreson, The Real Shelley, I, 116-117. 8 8helley, CoMlete Works, V, 5. 29

over a "remote and desolate heath"9 during "the whole day,

over which nature seemed to have drawn her most gloomy cur-

tain." 1 0 The journey ends at the iron door of a cavern, which yawns in a gloomy dell in an immense forest, and the

hapless victim is chained to a wall in a damp cell. Lan-

guishing in painful captivity for seemingly countless nights and days, Verezzi scarcely heeds the slimy lizards which

cross his naked limbs. Earthworms crawl and turn themselves

in his matted hair -- a truly Gothic-horror touch.

Verezzi's escape is an example of the use to which natural phenomena are put by this school of writers. A violent

thunderstorm shakes the cavern, and a scintillating flame

darts from the ceiling to the floor; the roof falls in.

From the dismal cavern Verezzi is transferred to the

traditional lonely cottage on the heath. Stereotyped es-

cape and flight lead him to a second cottage situated on a

pleasant and cultivated spot on the banks of the majestic

Danube and opposite a large forest. Zastrozzi in his pur-

suit of Verezzi rests for a while where "tall trees rising

above their heads warded off the meridian sun; the mossy banks beneath invited repose; but Zastrozzi, little recking a scene so fair, hastily scrutinized every recess which might afford an asylum to Verezzi."l

9Ibid. 10Ibid.,p. . bpIbid., p. 20. 30

Pushing on, Zastrozzi beholds a large and magnificent building whose battlements rise above the lofty trees. It is in the Gothic style of architecture and seems to be in- habited. "The building reared its pointed casements to the sky; their treillaged ornaments were silvered by the clear moonlight, to which the dark shades of the arches beneath formed a striking contrast." 1 2 Zastrozzi and his henchmen enter to find that "everything within was arranged with princely magnificence." Following a vaulted hall, Zastrozzi climbs a large flight of stairs to find a female in white robes leaning on the balustrade. A lamp burning near shows

Zastrozzi that he has found Matilda, and thus the reader enters Shelley's first Gothic castle.

No exploration of a Gothic castle would be complete without a visit to the dungeons; so Zastrozzi and Matilda obligingly seek the "lowest cavern of those dungeons which are under this building"14 to enjoy the spectacle of the suffering of Julia's faithful servant, Paulo, who is incar- cerated there. Paulo is later brought to the supper-room and poisoned in true Medici fashion. The picture is complete.

Nature, however, is preparing to show herself in Gothic mood. Zastrozzi and Matilda wander forth into the forest after Paulo, his eyes rolling horribly, has expired in agonized convulsions at their feet. The night is wearing away,

1 2 Ibid., p. 21. 13Ibid. 1 4 Ibid., p. 22. 31 but

The moonbeam darting her oblique rays from under volumes of lowering vapour, threatened an approaching storm. The lurid sky was tinged with yellowish lustre -- the forest-tops rustled in the rising tempest -- big drops fell -- a flash of lightning, and, instantly after, a peal of bursting thunder, struck with sudden terror the bosom of Matilda.1 5

But heedless of nature's efforts, they remain in the forest late. "Flushed with wickedness, they at last sought their respective couches, but sleep forsook their pillow. 16

Nature is again awe-inspiring when brain fever result- ing from news of Julia's supposed death causes Verezzi to agree to Matilda's wish to take him to another castle in the

Venetian territory, a retired and picturesque spot.

Verezzi is so melancholy, however, that "the terrific gran- deur of the Alps, the dashing cataract, as it foamed beneath their feet, ceased to excite those feelings of awe which formerly they were wont to inspire," 1 7 nor did the lofty pine groves inspire additional melancholy.

They travel on, where, in a gloomy and remote spot, stands the Castella di Laurentini.

It was situated in a dark forest -- lofty mountains around lifted their aspiring and craggy sum- mits to the skies. The mountains were clothed half up by ancient pines and plane-trees, whose immense branches, stretched far; and above, bare granite rocks, on which might be seen occasionally a scathed larch, lifted their gigantic and misshapen forms.

1Ibid., p. 24. l6 Ibid. 17Ibid., pp. 45-55. 32

In the center of an amphitheatre, formed by these mountains, surrounded by wood, stood the Castella di Laurentini, whose grey turrets and time-wor battlements overtopped the giants of the forest.l

Into this gloomy mansion was Verezzi conducted by Matilda.

To quiet her rioting emotions Matilda wanders about the

environs of the castle, heeding not the hour. Though the

evening is calm and serene and gently agitated by the even-

ing zephyr, the pines sigh mournfully, the evening star

faintly glitters in the twilight, the solemn calm of the

scene is not in unison with Matilda's soul. The soft, melancholy music floating on the southern gale -- nuns

chanting the requiem for the soul of a departed sister -- also fails to charm away the horrible, racking thoughts which press on her guilty soul.

Nature in her fiercer aspects is more in rapport with

the fiery passions that rage within the breast of Matilda as she

sat upon a fragment of jutting granite, and contemplated the storm that raged around her. The porten- tous calm of a more violent tempest, resembled the serenity which spread itself over Matilda's mind -- a serenity ynly to be succeeded by a fiercer paroxysm of passion. 9

The spot assigned for the carrying out of Zastrozzi's clever stratagem for winning the stubborn Verezzi to marriage with Matilda is chosen with great care, both for suitability and dramatic effect.

18Ibid.,p.o55. 191bid., p. 65. 33

On the right, thick umbrage of the forest trees rendered indistinguishable any one who might lurk there; on the left, a frightful precipice yawned, at whose base a deafening cataract dashed with tumultuous violence; around, misshapen end enormous masses of rock; and beyond, a gigantic and blackened mountain, reared its craggy summit to the skies.2 0

Nature in the Gothic novel is, indeed, cooperative with the moods and actions of the characters. When Matilda leads

Verezzi forth to woo him with music, soft words, and gentle actions,

the moon rising over the gigantic outline of the mountain, silvered the far-seen cataract. . . The azure sky was spangled with stars -- not a wind agitated the unruffled air -- not a cloud obscured the brilliant concavity of heaven.2 1

But when Matilda steals forth to meet and plot evil with

Zastrozzi,

The evening was gloomy, dense vapours overspread the air; the wind, low and hollow, sighed mournfully in the gigantic pine-trees, and whispered in low hissings among the witheged shrubs which grew on the rocky prominences.

The final scene is laid in what is recognized by the

Gothic following as the last degree of the horrible -- the gloomy prisons of the Inquisition. Matilda is there confined, by il Consiglio di dieci, in a damp and narrow cell, and left to meditate on her crimes. As she enters the dungeon, "the door, as it opened, grated harshly on its hinges.??23

2 0 Ibid., p. 69. 2 1Ibid., p. 58. 22Ibd.p. 68. 2 3 IbW I. .6.2Ibid., p. 92. 34

The lamp, "whose rays, darting in uncertain columns, showed by strong contrasts of light and shade, the extreme massi- ness of the passages."24 A Gothic frieze showed in the flickering light; and "the corbels, in various and gro- tesque forms, jutted from the tops of clustered pilas- ters." 2 5 Stern judges demand that she confess or be "put to the question." Exposed to public trial before the dread tribunal in all its medieval pageantry, Matilda and Zas- trozzi are condemned -- Matilda, possibly, to execution and Zastrozzi to the rack.

In plot and in setting Zastrozzi proves to be con- structed in true Gothic style; accordingly, the characters

Shelley has chosen play their parts in harmony with fixed standards of Gothic usage. Nearly all the stock characters are present as well as the stock situations and scenes. Matilda, cut from the pattern of Lewis's Matilda in The Monk, differs from her original only in the fact that she is mortal, while Lewis's Matilda is a fiend wearing human form. Shelley's Matilda does not need supernatural aid to be fiendish; she is wicked enough without Sa- tanic prompting.

Matilda, Marchesa de Strobazzo, is a woman of wealth and socialstanding. No ties seem to inhibit her, and her desire is her law. Her whole soul is wrapped up in one

2 4 Ibid. 2 5 Ibid. 35

idea: to gain the handsome Verezzi for herself. Her bosom

is scorched by an ardent and unquenchable fire. Determined

to win him even at the sacrifice of her womanly delicacy

and her moral scruples, she finds no scheme too wicked, no stratagem too wily to gain her ends. Cruelty and trick-

ery are part of her character. In the event that introduces her, she poisons a defenseless prisoner, plots with her evil genius the death of her rival, and passes a night of restless agitation in which her mind was harassed by contending passions, and her whole soul was wound up to deeds of horror and wickedness. She reveals herself in this manner:

I almost shudder at the sea of wickedness on which I am about to embark! But still, Verezzi -- ah! for him would I even lose my hopes of eternal happiness. In the sweet idea of calling him mine, no scrupu- lous delicacy, no mistaken superstitious fear, shall prevent me from-deserving him by daring acts -- No! I am resolved.

Deceit and artfulness color her relationship with

Verezzi. Though she woos him with pretended delicacy and assumed modesty, and gentleness, "still burning love, unre- pressed, unconquerable passion revelled through every vein; her senses, rendered delirious by guilty desire, were whirled around in an inexpressible ecstasy of anticipated 2 7 delight. ? No art was left untried, no blandishment omitted to secure her victim. Whatever he admired, she pretended to

2 6 Ibid., 27 pp. 24-25. Ibid., p. 75. 36

admire; every wish he expressed was anticipated by his art-

ful enchantress. When at last, through trickery, she wins

him, "the most triumphant anticipation of transports to

come filled her bosom; yet, knowing it to be necessary to

dissemble -- knowing that a shameless claim on his affec-

tions would but disgust Verezzi, 28 she pretends shame for her unmaidenly delight. On her wedding day, however, her "soul-felt triumph" is too great for utterance or conceal- ment. "The exultation of her inmost soul flashed in expressive glances from her scintillating eyes, expressive of

joy intense -- unutterable., 2 9

Fiendish rage, however, possesses the soul of Matilda as readily as voluptuous joy. At the death of Verezzi, she exclaims in a paroxysm of frantic rage,

"Knowest thou me? Knowest thou the injured Laurentini? Behold this dagger, reeking with my husband's blood -- behold that pale corse, in whose now cold breast thy accursed image revelling, impelled to commit the deed which deprives me of happiness for ever. . . . Die! detested wretch!"30

This vengeful murderess, nevertheless, is not beyond divine pity; for during her imprisonment when the "hour of midnight strue:k upon Matilda's soul as her death knell," 3 1 and "resistless horror revelled through her bosom, "32 a vision of divine forgiveness is granted her. "The ferocious

2 8Ibid., p. 2 9 74. Ibid., p. 76. 3 0 Ibid., p. 89.

3 1 Ibid., p. 92. 3 2 Ibid., p. 96. 37

passions, which so lately had battled fiercely in her bosom,

were calmed . . . sincerest penitence at this moment, agon-

ized whilst it calmed Matilda's soul." The passionate,

wicked Matilda is a changed creature:

No longer did the agony of despair torture her bosom. True, she was ill at ease: remorse for her crimes deeply affected her; and though her hopes for salvation were great, her belief in God and a future state firm, the heavy sighs which burst from her bosom, showed that the arrows of repentance had penetrated deeply.3 3

Julia, the typically Gothic heroine of Zastrozzi, ap-

pears in person in the climactic scene only. Following

the usual pattern for such characters, she is a "rosy em-

bodiment of womanly beauty and virtue" (according to

Verezzi's conception of her), but she is so imperfectly re-

vealed in the story that she becomes a "bloodless and unsub-

stantial shadow."t34 She is pictured through the doting

thoughts of her lover as the manifestation of all that is modest, virtuous, and beautiful. As heroine for Shelley's novel, however, she fails to fill a prominent place. Her use seems to be restricted to being, since she is the embodiment of all the womanly virtues, a foil for the pas-

sionate, voluptuous, brazen Matilda. Her role is that of

stumbling block in the path of Matilda's progress in the attainment of her desires.

Only two pictures of the gentle heroine are presented.

33 Ibid., p. 97. 34Railo, .ct., p.283. 38

The first shows the ethereal form of the pensive and melancholy Julia seated in a magnificent gondola lighted by innumerable flambeaux, whose blaze rivaled the meridian sun. She sits with vacant stare, unmoved by feelings of pleasure, unagitated by the gaiety which filled every other soul. The second is of Julia rushing to her destruction, with true Gothic-heroine lack of common sense, at the hotel of Matilda. She speaks in accents of distinction, in a voice of alarmed tenderness beseeching Verezzi to spare himself and her -- for all might yet be well. Verezzi, in strong convulsions falls backwards upon a sofa. "Serened to firmness from despair," Julia devotes her tenderest ministrations to Verezzi. The suicide of Verezzi being accomplished, Julia lies bereft of sense on the floor -- the "enanguished" and ever-swooning stereotyped heroine.

Roused by Matilda's violence, she casts her eyes upward, with a timid expression of apprehension on beholding the bloodstained dagger that menaces her life. At length, pierced by a thousand dagger thrusts, she expires upon the corpse of her loved one, and on her angelic features, even in death, is a smile of affection. The rigid formula has been followed to the last point -- hero and heroine in death are not divided.

Verezzi, the protagonist of this Gothic extravaganza, runs true to form. He is as ineffectual and helpless as any 39

hero of Gothic romance. He "is a poor fool, and anything but a man. '35 He is placed in the stock situations demanded by this school of writing, and his reactions can be charted

accurately by Gothic formula. Mysteriously abducted in the midst of drugged sleep and finding himself chained in a horrible cavern, he awakes and is "overcome by an excess of terror" and views "everything with that kind of inexplicable horror which a terrible dream is wont to excite.,"36

He gives himself up to grief and despair. After his release his mind recovers "that firm tone which it was wont to possess. ,37 But this firm tone lasts only long enough to help him escape; he soon weakly submits to being assisted first by the old peasant Claudine and later by Matilda.

Though meekly accepting the ministrations of Matilda, he remains adamant on one point: love her he will not.

Weakness, disguised as the power of overmastering love, is revealed in his reception of the news of JuliaIs death.

His nerveless fingers drop the pencil with which they are employed, and "in accents almost inarticulate from terror, "38 he begs Matilda to explain her horrid surmises. Maddened with tenfold horror, he is "unable to withhold his fleeting faculties from a sudden and chilly horror which seized

3 5 Newman Ivey White, The Unextinguished Hearth, p. 34.

36Shelley, Complete Works, V, 6.

37Ibid., p. 12. 381bid., p. 36. them"; 3 9 he falls senseless. Regaining consciousness for a moment, he rolls his eyes horribly; but again in violent

convulsions he falls to the floor and remains bereft of sense. A third time he revives, is overcome by resistless

delirium, dashes his head against the wall, and relapses

into insensibility. Tenderly nursed by Matilda, he re-

covers to mourn his lost love.

With heroic lack of sophistication, Verezzi allows him-

self to be deceived by the crafty Matilda. Trapped by her

schemes and lured. from loyalty to Julia's memory by the fascinations of the artful seductress, Verezzi succumbs blindly to his fate and declares that

though love like ours wants not the vain ties of human laws., yet, that our love may want not any sanction which could possibly be given to it, let immediate rders be given for the celebration of our union.) 0

Julia is forgotten; and "in all the transports of maddening love, "4 Verezzi declares his impatience for union with Ma- tilda.

Verezzi's greatest weakness is revealed when the idolized but forgotten Julia stands before him at the moment he is pledging eternal fidelity to Matilda. "Madness -- fiercest madness -- revelled through his brain.,, 42 Fran- tically he cries "no peace but in the grave for me. -- I

39 1bid. 40Ibid., p. 75. 4lIbid. 421bid.., p. 88. am -- I am -- married to Matilda.,a3 Taking the coward's way out of his difficulties, he plunges the dagger into his bosom. "His soul fled without a groan, and his body fell to the floor, bathed in purple blood."

Zastrozzi, the mysterious enemy of Verezzi, is animated by an insatiable desire for revenge. His extreme villainy and his fidelity to his fiendish purposes furnish a striking contrast to the actions and weaknesses of the poor, vacillating hero. As the stereotyped villain of terror- romance, he seems to be drawn largely from Zofloya. Lack- ing the supernatural element of his prototype, he manages well enough without diabolic inspiration. All the inspiration to villainy he needed was supplied by his mother.

With sarcasm and irony Jeaffreson describes this influence exerted upon Zastrozzi by his mother:

Possessing every virtue but womanly discretion and the power to forgive her enemies, the wretched and exemplary Olivia Zastrozzi died in her thirtieth year, after enjoining her son, Pietrino, to avenge his mother's wrongs. Having, in language appropriate to a pious son, mitigated his mother's mortal agonies with a vow to do her bidding, Pietrino passed from her grave to the cruel world, with a virtuous resolve to compass the destruction of his own father the elder Count Verezzi), his own half-brother, the younger Count Verezzi), and any persons in whom the same virtuous young Count should be strongly interested. On coming to full manhood, Olivia Zastrozzi's son, seizing the happy moment and making the most of it, plunged a dagger into his father's heart, sending him without shrift to the pit that is reserved in the nether regions for the seducers of trustful womankind.

431bid. 42

Having disposed of his father in this summary fashion Pietro Zastrozzi determines to wreak his vengeance on his half-brother by means more secret, ingenious, and horrible. Biding his time until the young Count Verezzi has won the love of Julia Mar- chesa di Strobazzo, whose affection he worthily re- ciprocates, and has also gained unintentionally the love of Matilda Contessa di Laurentini, whose passion he is most desirous of avoiding, Pietro Zas- trozzi is quick to see his advantage in the mutual jealousy and aversion of the two ladies, and in the embarrassments certain to arise from their idolatry of the same man. To afford his exemplary mother's soul the vindictive satisfaction for which so pure a spirit is naturally pining, Pietro Zastrozzi ap- proaches these ladies, and, by a series of subtle stratagems and diabolicalcontrivances, brings them and their Count to extremities of passion and despair; and to deaths, that under the more skilful manipulation of Mrs. Radcliffe or Monk Lewis, would have rendered Zastrozzi superlatively thrilling and sensational romance. 4

As strongly and implacably as he pursued his vengeance,

Zastrozzi faces the terrors of the Inquisition. Believing

not in a hereafter and smiling disdainfully, he endures the

tortures of the rack with an exulting laugh of satiated

revenge.

The other figures that appear on the pages of Zas-

trozzi are simply stock-plot characters. The inevitable

old women who help the hero appear in the persons of Bianca

and Claudine. Zastrozzi has his henchmen, who rejoice in

the typical Gothic novel names of Ugo and Bernardo. Julia has her faithful but unfortunate Paulo; Matilda, her loyal

Ferdinand Zeilnitz. These, together with the dread judges

and officers of il Consiglio di dieci, form the roster of

44Jeaffreson, o . ci., I, 112. 43

actors in Shelley's first essay in Gothic fiction.

In giving Zastrozzi to the world Shelley hoped that he had written a novel that would make him as famous as The Monk had made Lewis. 4 5 Shelley's youth and lack of careful workmanship doomed this first attempt. Montague Summers contends that with such models as Zofloya, The Monk, and The

Mysteries of Udolpho to guide him, Shelley should have "come off with flying colours. " 47Though extravagant and ludicrous, Zastrozzi is valuable in that it is an index to "the mental stuff and texture",48of Shelley at this period.

Zastrozzi was followed in 1811 by St. Iryne. These two attempts in the field of fiction show Shelley's imma- turity and that he is as yet purely imitative; in fact, he has let himself go with all the extravagance and romantic abandon of adolescence in following the lead of popular writers of melodramatic extravaganzas. Romantic love, seduction, flight, capture by bandits, the supernatural, the elixir of life, robbery, murder, and suicide revel in mad confusion on his pages. Every word that he writes is colored by his early preoccupation with these fantastic tales and by his deep interest in pseudo-science and the occult;

45Ibid., pp. 110-111. 46 Dacre, _. cit., p. xxiv. 4 Ibid. 48Jeaffreson, . cit., I, 111. 44 yet his dawning concern with social and religious problems finds its first crude expression in these preposterous

stories.

Published by Stockdale and advertised as having been written by a gentleman of the University of Oxford, this

second romance from the pen of Shelley had little success,

though the author intended to secure favorable publicity by "pouching"49 the reviewers. Shelley himself was aware

"of the imprudence of publishing a book so ill-digested as

St. Irvyne. "50 The gentlemen of the press, however, were not to be placated by such pouching as they may have re-

ceived, and they struck at the cause of the failure. One

reviewer concludes his criticism with this observation:

Would that this gentleman of Oxford had a taste for other and better pursuits, but as we presume him to be a young gentleman, this may in due time happen.5 1

The second critic takes the same view: Had not the title-page informed us that this curious "Romancel" was the production of "a gentleman, " a freshman of course, we should certainly have ascribed it to some "Miss" in her teens; who, having read the beautiful and truly poetic descriptions, in the un- rivalled romances of Mrs. Radcliffe [sic], imagined that to admire the writings of that lady, and to imi- tate her style were one and the same thing.5 2

49Jeaffreson, p. cit., I, 153.

5 0 Shelley, CoMlete Works, V, 297.

5 1 Newman Ivey White, The Unextinguished Hearth, p. 25, quoting The British Critic, XXXVII (January, 1811), 70-71. 5 2 Ibid., p. 36, quoting The Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine, iXI (January, 1912),T9-72. 45

St. Irvye has, even in comparison with the usual looseness in structure of the Gothic novel, a very poorly con- structed and ambiguous plot. "Consisting of two separate

stories, stitched together by an inexpert handler of the

literary needle, "53 the action proceeds with Gothic lack of unity and sequence. Further incoherence and ambiguity are occasioned by the author's inclusion, in the manner of

"Monk" Lewis, of asides in the form of comments or moralis- tic essays on his favorite themes. Despite this extraneous matter the story is pure terror-romance. Nearly all the stereotyped themes, characters, and plot devices of the

Gothic school are contained in this short novel. Alone upon an Alpine pass in a terrific thunderstorm, the high-souled Wolfstein, a miserable outcast from a noble family and "without one existent earthly being whom he might claim as friend, without one resource to which he might fly as an asylum from the horrors of neglect and poverty," wonders in a typical Gothic soliloquy why he "should longer drag on the galling chain of existence." He consid- ers the advisability of casting himself off the "precipice which yawned widely at his feet." Terrific paroxysms of excessive despair revel through every vein and he sinks senseless on "the rocky bosom of the mountains. 054

5 3 Jeaffreson, 92. cit.., I, 155. 54Shelley, Complete Works, V, 109-110. He is found by a company of monks, who, while attempting to revive Wolfstein, are put to flight by a band of robbers.

Wolfstein's fearless conduct earns him an invitation to become a member of the banditti. Accompanying the band to its secret cave, Wolfstein becomes a daring robber, though he remains high-souled and noble.

The band receives notice that an Italian count of immense wealth is journeying through its territory. In the ensuing attack the nobleman is murdered, and his beautiful daughter Megalena is captured. Wolfstein and Cavigini, the leader of the banditti, both are fascinated by the beauty of Megalena. Cavigini, exerting every art to win her attention, is regarded with haughtiness and aversion. The chief determines to take her by force if she does not yield will- ingly within twenty-four hours. Wolfstein in desperation poisons the bandit leader. His action is known to Ginotti, one of the boldest of the robbers; but Ginotti helps Wolf- stein to escape with Megalena.

The lovers go to Genoa. Here Wolfstein overcomes the reluctance of Megalena to union without marriage. In time, bored with each other's company, they plunge into the gaiety of social life. The lovely and innocent Megalena finds that she enjoys immoral life, and Wolfstein becomes a gambler.

Their whole stay in Genoa, however, is overshadowed by the mysterious surveillance of Ginotti, who seems to have supernatural knowledge of Wolfstein's past and present life. 47

He forces a promise from Wolfstein for future sanctuary when it shall be needed.

Olympia, a spoiled young Genoese girl, sets her heart

upon Wolfstein. Relationship between Megalena and Wolf-

stein becomes strained when she sees the lovely girl in his arms. Burning with jealousy, Megalena demands that Wolf-

stein slay Olympia as proof of his fidelity. Dagger in

hand, he enters Olympia's room; but he does not have suf-

ficient courage to carry out his cruel purpose. Olympia

awakens; and finding that she has no hope of winning his love, she plunges the dagger into her own heart. Since

Wolfstein has left his mask with his name on it in Olympia's

room, he and Megalena are forced to flee from Genoa to evade capture and punishment.

With characteristic heedlessness of the principles of unity, the story breaks at this point to introduce a new set of characters. Eloise de St. Irvyne is the heroine of this

portion of the tale. Eloise, traveling toward Geneva with

her invalid mother, who seeks relief from the illness which

consumes her, is forced, with her mother, to take shelter

in the home of the mysterious Nempere. Losing her mother in death soon afterward in Geneva, the friendless Eloise, against her better judgment, is persuaded by the fascinat-

ing seducer to be his mistress. A miserable life begins for the unhappy girl, but she is saved from further 48

degradation by the noble Mountfort, who has won her from

Nempere through a debt incurred by her betrayer in a gaming-

house. Happy in her freedom, Eloise gives her love to

Fitzeustace, the friend who lives with Mountfort. Her

lover is recalled to England by his father, whose views

on the subject of free love cause them to be married be-

fore setting forth on their journey to England.

Megalena and Wolfstein, in the meantime, have fled to

an estate in Bohemia which he has inherited from an uncle.

Ginotti appears and claims sanctuary. At last the reason for his interest in Wolfstein is revealed. Ginotti relates his life history, concluding with the statement that he has discovered the elixir of life and, now that he is ready to die, Wolfstein has been chosen as his successor. Overjoyed,

Wolfstein agrees to mix the ingredients of the elixir as directed and meet Ginotti at the ruined abbey near the castle of St. Irvyne.

Wolfstein appears at St. Irvyne and enters the cavern under the abbey. Restlessly he paces the vaults wait- ing for Ginotti. Suddenly he stumbles over the corpse of

Megalena. Ginotti arrives. Flushed and panting from ex- ertion, he demands that Wolfstein deny the Creator, Horror- stricken, Wolfstein refuses. Satan appears. Doom is passed upon the two impious ones. Wolfstein is blasted; blackened in terrible convulsions he dies -- but over him the power 49

of hell has no influence. Ginotti's frame moulders to a gigantic skeleton, yet two pale and ghastly flames glare in

his eyeless sockets. An endless existence is his -- "a date- less and hopeless eternity of horror."5 5

As an after thought comes a short paragraph stating

that Ginotti is Nempere and that Eloise is the sister of Wolfstein.

The plot and structure of this extravagant romance are

exceedingly confused and faulty. Montague Summers points

out that even the author was puzzled:

It is obvious that Shelley himself had no very clear idea with regard to his melodramatic puppets, for . . . when replying to his publishers, who not un- naturally demanded some explanation of various dilemmas which this ultra transpontine piece raises but fails to resolve, he not only answered in vague and elusive terms, which show clearly enough that he had involved his Ginottis and Wolfsteins, his Mega- lenas and Olympias in a tangle of lurid incidents wherefrom he was unable to extricate them with any probability.

The first puzzling and unexplained element is the crime, if crime it was, that caused the banishment of Wolfstein.

The curiosity is piqued. What could the high-souled and no-

ble Wolfstein have done to merit banishment so complete that he could never return to his home, banishment so absolute

that his sister speaks of him as dead? Even Megalena may not share the shameful secret. Wolfstein's conscience is declared clear from the commission of any wilful and

5 5 Dacre, 2_. cit., pp. xx-xxi. 50

deliberate crime before his association with the bandits.

As for the "event almost too dreadful for narration" that had "compelled him to quit his native country, in indigence

and disgrace, n56 is there a clue in the following lines

from the poem written by Wolfstein as he wanders at a dark

and silent hour on the mountainside?

But conscience in low noiseless whispering spoke.

'Twas then that her form on the whirlwind upholding, The ghost of the murdered Victoria strode; In her right hand a shadowy shroud she was holding, She swiftly advanced to my lonesome abode. I wildly then called on the tempest to bear me . . .57

A second enigma is the correct solution to the conflicting accounts of the fate of Eloise. Chapter VII, in introducing that portion of the story dealing with the career of Ginotti as Nempere, gives a touching version of the return of Eloise to the protection of her old home and her sister Marianne. Eloise is portrayed as raising her eyes streaming with tears, and returning after five years, pale, downcast, and friendless -- the victim of "wounds which the selfish unkindness of man hath made, and then sent her with them, unbound, on the wide and pitiless world."58 In contrast with this picture of the sorrowing and outcast Eloise, the conclusion of the Nempere-Eloise-

Fitzeustace episodes shows her happily married (in spite of her preference for a free-love union) to Fitzeustace.

56 Shelley, Complete Works, V, 124. 57Ii, 5 8 Ibid.,p. 115. 58Ibid.,b p. 155. 51

She is in England tasting "that happiness, which love and

innocence alone can give.??5 9 Did Fitzeustace, then, prove

false; or did Shelley forget the horrible existence he had

prepared for her and permit her to escape to England and

happiness without revisiting her home?

Two other ambiguities present interesting ground for

speculation: How did Megalena die, and why did Mountfort

think he had slain Nempere? Megalena's corpse appears in

the vaults of St. Irvyne's abbey. Mountfort rushes into the

presence of Eloise and Fitzeustace shouting that he must fly

as he has just killed Nempere; yet Nempere-Ginotti appears

at Wolfstein's cottage as though he had not been murdered.

In reply to Stockdale's request for enlightenment on these

two points, Shelley replied that "Megalena dies by the same

means as Wolfstein 6 and that "you will perceive that

Mountfort physically did kill Ginotti, which must appear

from the latter's paleness.1?61

Shelley's explanation is, in effect, no explanation at

all. If the secret of the elixir was the agent of death, why had it not killed Ginotti when he learned it? Then, too, Megalena was not privy to the secret. Wolfstein seems to have been blasted by the prince of terror, but Megalena is a corpse before Wolfstein reaches the vaults, for he

5 9 Ibid., p. 197. 60Jeaffreson, p. cit., 1, 160. 6 lDacre, op. cit., p. xxiv. 52

stumbles over her body. The frightful prince arrives much

later; and, in addition, the mark of death that he inflicts

is a blackened, blasted corpse -- Megalena is unmarked.

Shelley's implied explanation that Ginotti was physically

killed by Mountfort is, perhaps, acceptable. Ginotti,

though physically murdered, cannot die because he has drunk

the elixir of life. Such ambiguity opens the question of whether or not Shelley had thought of Ginotti and Nempere as the same man during the composition of the novel. It is possible that in appending the final paragraph, in which he states that Ginotti is Nempere, he failed to realize the complications such a statement would entail.

St. Iye lacks originality of theme and incident as well as coherence and unity of plot development. The sources are very much the same as those of Zastrozzi, but this time Godwin's St. Leon must be added to the list. It is from this source that Shelley takes the idea of the elixir of life. Ginotti, like the old stranger in St. Leon, must impart his perilous secret to another before he himself can claim the boon of death.6 2 In the death of Olympia,

Wolfstein's pausing, his hand stayed for a moment at the sight of her beauty, "recalls the powerful scene in Mrs. Rad- cliffe's Italian, when Schedoni bends over the sleeping

Ellena." Eloise's journey with her dying mother and her

6 2Birkhead, op. cit., p. 124. 53

meeting with a fascinating and mysterious stranger in a lonely house in which they are forced to lodge is reminis-

cent of a similar incident in The series of Udolfo.63 Parallels with Charles Brockden Brown's novels are to

be found in St. Irvyne as well as in Zastrozzi. The Satanic

fascination exercised by Nempere over the innocent Eloise

is similar to that of the mysterious ventriloquist Carwin

over Clara in Wieland:

Each girl is haunted by the face and personality of the man without loving him; each is persuaded, to her sorrow, to mee him at an unseasonable hour and in a lonely place. 4

There are further resemblances which appear in Ginotti's

surveillance and seemingly supernatural knowledge of Wolf-

stein's life and thoughts and the "mysterious knowledge and

malign providence of Carwin the ventriloquist and of Ormond

the 'secret witness' (i.e., plain eavesdropper)." Another

likeness is to be traced in the blasting, blackening death

of Wolfstein and the incineration of Weiland's father in

Weiland.6 5

The source, however, to which St. Irvyne, like Zas-

trozzi, bears the strongest affinity6 6 is the Zofloya of

Charlotte Dacre. As A. M. D. Hughes expresses it, "St. Irvyne uses up the supernatural element from Zofloya that

63Hughes, op. cit., p. 59. 64Sickels, op. .cit., p. 1119. 651bid. 6 61n the following discussion of similarities between St. Irye and Zofloya, those described, with the exception of the comparison of Wolfstein and Zofloya, have been noted by A. M. D. Hughes in "Shelley's Ze trozzi and St. Irvyne. " The ar- rangement, comments, and application are my own. 54 was left out of Zastrozzi and adds the elixir vitae motive from St. Leon."

Wolfstein is another Leonardo, more worldly wise, perhaps harder, and certainly more relentless; but their careers are similar. Both are scions of a noble house, exiled and penniless; both are members of a robber band; each has a Megalena for mistress. Their fates, however, are different -- Leonardo commits suicide, while Wolfstein is blasted in his greed for eternal life. Wolfstein has also taken a characteristic found in Zofloya. When "Zofloya went forth with any [to rob] . . . unanimously they swore, that when he was among them, they felt impelled to deeds which otherwise would have remained unattempted."67 Of

Wolfstein, "they all asserted that they felt, as it were, instinctively impelled to deeds of horror and danger, which, otherwise, must have remained unattempted even by the boldest."68

The Wolfstein-Olympia episode is drawn bodily from Zo-

y. Megalena sees Olympia in the arms of Wolfstein; and though he vows that he loves not Olympia, Megalena refuses to believe him or accept his love until he has slain Olym- pia. Leonardo is followed by his Megalena to the home of

Theresa. Finding the two in guilty embrace, Megalena refuses to be pacified until he has promised to assassinate

67Dacre, o2. cit.., p. 238.

68 Shelley, Complete Works, V, 113-114. 55

his temptress. His willingness to do the deed is accepted,

in this instance, in place of the accomplished assassina-

tion; but later she used her power to force him to attempt

the murder of Berenza. In each case the assassin leaves a

clue branded with a name which links him to the murder and forces him to flee from justice. Another link between

Olympia and Zofloya is the resemblance between the educa-

tion and training of Olympia and Victoria. Of Victoria and

Leonardo is said, "lavish and imprudent was the fondness be-

stowed by the parents upon their idolized offspring --

boundless and weak was the indulgence ever shewn them. 69

The consequence was that Victoria, "beautiful and accom-

plished as an angel, was proud, haughty, and self-sufficient

-- of a wild, ardent, and irrepressible spirit -- and bent

upon gaining the ascendancy in whatever she engaged. ,70 As

for Olympia, ". . . from habitual indulgence, her passions,

naturally violent and excessive, had become irresistible;

and when once she had fixed a determination in her mind,

that determination must either be effected, or she must

cease to exist.",7 1 Each conceives a violent passion for one who is irrevocably another's and whom she pursues until death intervenes.

Of the melodramatic puppets Shelley has half-borrowed, half-created, Wolfstein is, perhaps, the most striking.

69Dacre, op. cit., p. 2. 7 0 Ibid.

7 1 Shelley, Complete Works, V, 144. 56

He is what became known as the Byronic hero who was so popu-

lar with the readers of Gothic fiction, and he conforms to

type. He is young and handsome; "strange and impetuous fire"

darts "from his restless eyeballs." The red glare of the

bandits' torches reveals "the expression of stern serenity

and unyielding loftiness which sate upon the brow of Wolf-

stein"; "grief, in erasible traces, sate deeply implanted

on the front of the outcast."72 A full catalogue of his at-

tractions appears, however, in the following quotation:

Hiscountenance, spite of the woe with which the hard hand of suffering had marked it, was engaging and beautiful; not that beauty which may be freely acknowledged, but inwardly confessed by every beholder with sensation penetrating and resistless; his figure majestic and lofty, and the fire which flashed from his expressive eye, indefinably to herself, penetrated the inmost soul of the isolated Megalena.7 3

Wolfstein's soul, however, when "sublimed by the infuriate paroxysms of contending emotions," permits his countenance but one expression -- that of "dark and deliberate revenge."7

Wolfstein is the dark, mysterious hero in manner and deed as well as in appearance. He has the required mysterious past (so mysterious that it is never explained), the habit of morbid self-analysis, and the melancholy romanticism so desired in the Gothic hero-villain hybrid.

Megalens's beauty makes a profound impression; and the

7 2 Ibid., p. 112. 7 3 Ibid., p. 118. 741 bid., p. 120. 57

hapless Wolfstein, "ever the victim of impulsive feeling," 7 5

is riven by the conflicting passions which "revelled dread- fully in his burning brain: -- love, maddening, excessive,

unaccountable idolatry, as it were.",76 Such reaction to

love at first sight proves Wolfstein's claim to a place

among Gothicism's romantic heroes.

Lovely, adored girl [he exclaims], short is my time: pardon, therefore, the abruptness of my ad- dress . . . but I love you, I adore you to madness. I am not what I seem. Answer me! -- time is short.77

At a later period, when Megalena doubts his love, he exclaims passionately,

0 God! Megalena, dearest, adored Megalena! stop -- I love you, must ever love you: deign, at least, to hear me . . . If ever, for one instant, my soul was alienated from thee -- if ever it swerved from the affection which I have sworn to thee -- may the red right hand of God instantaneously dash me beneath the lowest abyss of hell!70

Though his heart, for a while bleeds as he says, "from the thorns which thou, cruel girl, hast implanted in it," his ardent and excessive passion changes to disgust and almost detestation: "it sinks in the merited abyss of ennui, or is followed by apathy which amply its origin deserved."

Though his romantic attachment to Megalena has ebbed so low, from indolence, or an "indefinably sympathetic connexion of soul, which forbade them to part during their mortal

7 5 Ibid., p. 117. 76 Ibid., p. 121.

77 Ibid., p. 122. 78 Ibid., p. 148. 58

existence," Wolfstein is irremediably linked to his mis-

tress. 7 9

Despite the prominence of melancholy romanticim in the character of Wolfstein, his habit of morbid self-analysis

is even more outstanding and brands him a hero-villain of

the first rank. In the opening scene his youthful figure

reclines against a jutting granite rock as he curses his

wayward destiny and implores the Almighty of Heaven to permit the thunderbolt to descend upon his head and end his useless existence. He soliloquizes on the suffering he has

been forced to endure -- "suffering unspeakable, indescrib-

able.tt 8O He is driven to impiety by desperation, and he

wonders what crimes he has committed which merit such suf-

fering as this. He often fixes his dark gaze upon the

ground, his "contracted eyebrow"8 evincing deep thought. Left in solitude and silence in the bandits' cave, he re-

clines on his mat in a corner of the cavern, retracing "in mental, sorrowing review" the past events of his life.

Pensively he wanders alone, while "dark images for futurity"8 3 possess his soul and he, shuddering, reflects upon what has passed. Awakened conscience upbraids him for the life which he has selected, and "with silent whisperings" stings "his soul to madness.h"8 In such mood as this, "absorbed in

79 Ibid., pp. 167-168. 8Obid., p. 109. 8lIbid., p. 112. 8 21bid., p. 113.

,p.11. 8 Ibid., pp. 114-115. 59

himself, with arms folded, and his eyes fixed upon the

earth, "85 he sinks upon a mossy bank, and, guided by the im- pulse of the moment, writes a few verses of melancholy

poetry. But "overcome by the wild retrospection of ideal

horror, which these swiftly-written lines excited in his 8 6 soul,"0 he destroys the paper on which they are written.

In analyzing his desire to possess Megalena he finds

that he shrinks not at the commission of crimes, that he is

now a hardened villain. He smothers the stings of conscience and determines to destroy "the very man who had

given him an asylum, when driven to madness by the horrors

of neglect and poverty. "8 7 After the murder he passes the night in half-waking dreams retracing the occurrences of the

eventful night. He ponders his future as a wanderer, hav-

ing no being on earth whom he can call friend and "carry-

ing with him that never-dying tormentor -- conscience. "88

In Wolfstein's relations with Ginotti, however, it is not conscience, but fear which colors his reflections;

Ginotti's strange surveillance and mysterious injunctions press, "like a load of ice, upon his breast.t"8 An encounter with Ginotti affects him in this manner:

Retired to rest, Wolfstein's mind, torn by contending paroxysms of passion, admitted not of sleep; he ruminated on the mysterious reappearance of

851bid., p. 115. 8 61bid. 87Ibid., p. 124. 88 Ibid., p. 130. 8 9Ibid., p. 134. 60

Ginotti; and the more he reflected, the more did the result of his reflections lead him astray. The strange gaze of Ginotti, and the consciousness that he was completely in the power of so indefinable a being; the consciousness that wheresoever he might go, Ginotti would still follow him, pressed upon Wolfetein's heart. Ignorant of what connexion they could have with this mysterious observer of his actions, his crimes recurred in hideous and disgust- ful array to the bewildered mind of Wolfstein; he reflected, that, although now exulting in youthful health and vigour, the time would come, the dreadful day of retribution, when endless damnation would yawn beneath his feet, and he would shrink from eternal punishment before the tribunal of that God whom he had insulted. To evade death, unconscious why, became an idea on which he dwelt with earnest- ness; he thought on it for a time, and being mournfully convinced of its impossibility strove to change the tenour of his reflection. 0

Different feelings animate his reflections, however, when

Ginotti reveals his secret. Wolfstein's guilty conscience and consequent aversion to death makes his frame tremble

"with a burning anticipation of what was about to occuri"91

a thirst for knowledge scorches his soul to madness --

"curiosity, resistless curiosity" reigns in his bosom.

Ginotti, the evil genius of Wolfstein, in the Gothic

pattern of stereotyped characters is the "Wandering Jew"

who is cursed with eternal life. In name, he is borrowed

from the robber who betrays Leonardo's secret cave in Zo-

fya; in character, he is taken from the general romantic

idea of the possessor of eternal life and specifically from

the old stranger in St. Leon. He is introduced as the

boldest of the robbers, the favorite of the chief. Although

90Iid., p. 137. 91Ibid., p. 198. 9 -' . g. 61

Ginotti is mysterious and reserved, his society is courted

with eagerness by members of the band. But "none knew his

history -- that he concealed within the deepest recesses

of his own bosom; nor could the most suppliant entreaties,

or threats of the most horrible punishments, have wrested

from him one particular concerning it.,"9 3 Never does he

throw off the mysterious mask, beneath which lis character

is veiled, until he is ready to reveal himself and his mo-

tives to Wolfstein.

Ginotti makes this revelation in a tone of solemnity "mixed 4 with concealed fierceness."9 The pale moon lights his dark, mysterious features, and his "coruscating eye fixed on his trembling victim's countenance, flashed with almost intolerable brilliancy.??95 The tale he unfolds is that of a youth filled with insatiable curiosity concerning the latent mysteries of nature. Natural philosophy became the science to which he directed his eager inquiries; these led "into a train of labyrinthic meditations, ,96 which in turn led to thoughts of death. "Selfish and self-interested?"97 as he was, he dreaded entering a new existence to which he was a stranger. He arrived at the conclusion that he "must either dive into the recesses of futurity" or he

93 Ibid., pp. 120-121. 94 Ibid., p. 169.

95 Ibid. 96 Ibid., p. 180. 9 7 Ibid. 62

"must not, cannot die.",9 8 At that time he believed that

there existed no God, but "Ahl at what an exorbitant price

have I bought the conviction that there is one!" 9 9 he now exclaims.

With sophistical arguments he had convinced himself of

the non-existence of a First Cause. Caring for nothing but self, and being "fond of calculating the effects of poison, "1 0 0 he tried his poisons upon a youth who had offended him.

The youth "expired in agonies the most terrific."101 Return-

ing from the youth's funeral, he was obsessed by a train of

strange thoughts: what right has he to expect to escape the dissolution common to all mankind? He contemplated suicide, but the sound of a bell from a neighboring convent restrained him.

A vision came to him, in which a beautiful phantasm

"borne on a sweet strain of music" asked, "Wilt thou come with me? wilt thou be mine?n10 2 The answer was an unhesi- tating no. The phantasm changed to "a form more hideous than the imagination of man is capable of portraying, whose proportions, gigantic and deformed, were seemingly blackened by the inerasible traces of the thunderbolts of God." 1 0 3

9 8 Ibid. 9 9 Ibid., p. 131. 1 0Ibid.0 1 0 1Ibid. 1 0 2 1bid., p. 1 0 183. 31bid., pp. 183-184. 63

The horrible monster seized him by the neck and demanded

that Ginotti acknowledge himself his. From that day "did

a deep-corroding melancholy usurp the throne"1 0 4 of Ginot-

ti's soul; he could not rest until he had ascertained the

method by which man might exist forever. Having found the

method, he had tried the pleasures of eternal life -- and

now with what pleasure he would forego it! To one man alone

would Ginotti reveal the secret -- Wolfstein was that man.

Ginotti, in his role of Nempere, retains only that characteristic of the possessor of the elixir of life which

enables him to fascinate the beholder. The deep tone of his

voice, the unwavering penetration of his eye, "scintillating

with a coruscation of mingled sternness and surprise,"1 0 5

captivate the inexperienced Eloise; he repels, yet holds

her. In person, Nempere is

Of gigantic stature, yet formed in the mould of exactest symmetry . . . His countenance of excessive beauty even, but dark, emanated with an expression of superhuman loveliness; not that grace which may freely be admired, but acknowledged in the inmost soul by sensations mysterious, and before unexperienced.lO6

To this quality of supernatural fascination he adds the at-

tributes of the "murderous monk" and the "bluebeard baron."

In the Nempere-Eloise episodes his role is that of accom- plishing the ruin of the heroine. In seducing Eloise he employs both his supernatural fascination and his ingenuity

104 Ibid., p. 184. 1 0 5 1bid., p. 158. 1 0 6 Ibid. and cruelty as the stereotyped monk or baron. He is portrayed as having a heart

more depraved than those of fiends, who first have torn some unsophisticated soul from the pinnacle of excellence, on which it sat smiling, and then triumphed in their hellish victory when it writhed in agonized remorse, and strove to hide its un- availing regret in the dus from which the fabric of her virtues had arisen.107

His crowning villainy, however, is his callous disposal of the mistress who no longer enchants him. He offers her as payment on a gambling debt, describing her as complacent in her position.

The third male character in this highly melodramatic tale is Fitzeustace -- the bloodless, unenterprising, fair

Gothic hero. He does little but accept the loving Eloise, who is ready to fall into his arms; he even leaves the chas- tising of Nempere to the more energetic Mountfort. A thumb- nail portrait is furnished by his friend to Eloise:

. . . he is an Irishman, and so very moral, and so averse to every species of gaiete de coeur, that you need be under no apprehension. In short, he is a love-sick swain, without ever having found what he calls a congenial female. Hevenders about, writes poetry, and, in short, is much too sentimental to occasion you any alarm on that account.10b

He fulfills the unexacting requirements, however, and helps to bring his portion of the story to a happy ending. Had he been required to do anything more rigorous than to sacrifice his belief in free love to satisfy his father's prejudice

1 0 71bid., p. 172. 1 0 8 Ibid., p. 189. 65

in favor of marriage, he might not be so satisfactory a

hero. In making even so slight a decision, "the tone of

his voice was tremulous, and a deadly settled paleness dwelt on his cheek." 1 0 9

Eloise, the delicate, the lovely, the talented, is all

that is required of the heroine of Gothic romance. When she

is introduced, her mother's ill health has "spread a deeper

shade of gloom over the features of Eloise.110 With roman-

tic lack of practicality, she accepts the hospitality of a

fascinating stranger, becomes enamored of him, and remembers tno more that she is about to lose her mother."ll

The dying mother warns her young daughter to beware of

any man who is "enveloped in deceit and mystery, 0112 and

particularly to avoid him if he is dark, reserved, and sus-

picious. "Spurn him from you," the mother advises, "as you

would a serpent; as one who aimed to lure your unsuspecting

innocence to the paths of destruction. "1 1 3 Eloise promises

tearfully and dutifully; but "the more she attempted it,

with the more painful recurrence of almost mechanical force,

did his recollection press upon her disturbed intellect.t"114

Eloise de St. Irvyne is a girl whose temper and dis- position are excellent, and more, she is "possessed of an uncommon sensibility"1 1 5 indispensable to the tender but

10 9 1bid., p. 196. 11 0Ibid., p. 156. 1llIbid., p.158.

11 2 1bid., p. 161. 1 1 3 1bid. 114Ibid. 115Ibid. 66 foolish Gothic heroine. She is, however, susceptible to prejudice and resigns herself, careless of the consequences that might follow, to the feelings of the moment. Every accomplishment she displays in the highest degree. She composes verses and sings them in thrilling accents, and her voice is "interestingly sweet.,116

Her education, nevertheless, has moulded her mind in an inferior degree of perfection:

The very convent at which she was educated, which afforded adventitious advantages so highly es- teemed by the world, prevented her mind from ob- taining that degree of expansiveness- and excellence which, otherwise, might have rendered Eloise nearer approaching perfection; the very routine of a convent education gave a false and pernicious bias to the ideas, as, luxuriant in youth, they unfolded themselves; and those sentiments which, had they been allowed to take the turn which nature intended, would have become coadjunctors of virtue, and strengtheners of that mind, which now they had rendered comparatively imbecile.1 1 7

Exercising the penchant of the terror-romance heroine for getting into difficulties despite her mother's warning, this unsuspecting girl meets her would-be seducer in a mysterious abbey and agrees to live in his home. Soon, "on the altar of vice, pride, and malice, was immolated the innocence of the spotless Eloise."1ll8

'Tis done; and amidst the vows of a transitory delirium of pleasure, regret, horror, and misery, arise! they shake their Gorgon locks at Eloise!

ll6 Ibid., p. 159. 1 17 1bid., p. 162. 11 8 1bid., p. 178. appalled she shudders with affright, and shrinks from the contemplation of the consequences of her imprudence. 119

One day, however, while she sits mentally retracing in mournful review "the concatenated occurrences which had led

2 0 her to become what she was, n1 her release comes. Her de- liverer assures her that he can never regard her other than as a suffering angel, spotless and untainted, even by surrounding depravity. Once again Eloise is vivacious; "the sweet spirit of social intercourse is not dead within."n1 2 1

Happiness and love are hers.

Shelley, however, in the character of Eloise has used his spineless, foolish heroine for a purpose that is not entirely Gothic. She becomes the vehicle for expressing his ideas on purity and free love. When Fitzeustace asks

Eloise's consent to their immediate union, this enlighten- ing conversation occurs:

"Know you not," exclaimed Eloise, in a low, fal- tering voice, "know you not that I have been another's?" "Oh! suppose me not," interrupted the impassioned Fitzeustace, "the slave of such vulgar and narrow- minded prejudice. Does the frightful vice and in- gratitude of Nempere sully the spotless excellence of my Eloise's soul? No, No, -- that must ever continue uncontaminated by the frailty of the body in which it is enshrined. It must rise superior to the earth: 'tis that which I adore, Eloise. Say, say, was that Nempere 's?" "Oh! no, never!" cried Eloise, with energy. "Nothing but fear was Nempere's."

119Ibid., pp. 178-179. 1 2 01Ibid., p. 186. 12 1Ibid., p. 190. 68

"Then why say you that ever you were his?" said Fitzeustace reproachfully.122

Megalena presents an entirely different picture from

that of the pure and unsullied Eloise. She, too, enters

the story as an unspoiled, lovely young girl; but how different is her development. Physically, she possesses great

beauty. Her figure is "cast in the mould of exact symmetry;"

her "blue and love-beaming eyes, from which occasionally

emanated a wild expression," are almost superhuman; her

auburn hair, which hangs "in unconfined tresses down her

damask cheek" completes "a resistless tout ensemble."1 2 3

She, too, writes verses and sings them meltingly. Conceiv-

ing a passion for her rescuer, she permits herself to quench

the "slight spark of virtue" which yet burned in her bosom

and to be persuaded that "to be Wolfstein's is not crimi- 4 nal.t12 Dissipated pleasures soon change the former mild and innocent Megalena:

Now, immersed in a succession of gay pleasures, Megalena was no longer the gentle interesting she, whose soul of sensibility would tremble if a worm beneath her feet expired; whose heart would sink within her at the tale of others' woe. She had become a fashionable belle, and forgot, in her new character, the fascinations of her old one.1 2 5

The depth of her degradation comes with her insistence on the murder of Olympia. When it has been accomplished,

"a smile of exquisitely gratified malice" illumines her

1 2 2 1bid., p. 194. 12 31bid., p. 117. 124 Ibid. 1 2 5 1bd Ibdp. 135. 12Ii., p. 143. 69

features "with terrific flame.?t126 Sophistically she claims

that she desired the death of Olympia as proof of her love

for Wolfstein. Wolfstein, while he is yet bound to her by

irrevocable ties, regards her as "a woman capable of the

most shocking enormities.",127 Wolfstein feels that he has

resisted vice and yielded but reluctantly to its influence.

Megalena, on the other hand, "has courted its advances,

and endeavored to conquer neither the suggestions of crime, nor the dictates of a nature prone to the attacks of appe-

tite. ?l28 Shelley seems to be using here the excess of

Gothic passion and emotion to point out the difference be-

tween injured innocence (Eloise) and cultivated vice .Mega- lena).

Such are the main characters of Shelley's second

Gothic romance. The minor figures, except in a few in- stances, serve merely for background. The robber band lends color and drama -- no Gothic novel is complete without one.

Olympia provides Shelley with an opportunity to express his ideas on education. Mountfort, since he is not pure enough for the spotless Eloise, is simply a means for extricating her from her difficulties. Agnes, however, lends an authen- tic Gothic touch. As the feminine associate of bandits, she is reminiscent of the Megalena of Zofloya in her role of bandit queen and of the robber's wife in The Monk. One

1 2 1261bid., p. 154. 7 Ibid. p. 168. 128Ibid. 70

characteristic that several of the figures share is their

ability as poets; Wolfstein, Megalena, Eloise, Fitzeustace,

and the bandit Steindolph write or sing ballads. It is a convention of the Gothic novel that the heroine, particu-

larly, compose verses and sing them in a melting voice; but

in St. Irvyne Shelley, with his usual extravagance and ex-

aggeration, has made poets of nearly all of his characters.

The excellence of these verses is, indeed, doubtful; yet

they are interesting as examples of the early expression of Shelley's poetical genius.

The setting of St. Irvyne is not as extravagantly

Gothic as that of Zastrozzi. The emphasis seems to be placed more on romantic emotion, mood, and atmosphere than on descriptions of physical location. There are, however, some extremely telling Gothic effects worked into the background of the action. The necessary gloom and strangeness of atmosphere is secured at the outset by a description of nature in one of her more awful moods:

Red thunder-clouds, borne on the wings of the midnight whirlwind, floated, at fits, athwart the crimson-colored orbit of the moon. . . . The bat- tling elements in wild confusion, seemed to threaten nature's dissolution; the ferocious thunderbolt, with impetuous violence, danced upon the mountains, and, collecting more terrific strength, severed gigantic rocks from their else eternal basements; the masses, with sound more frightful than the bursting thunder-peal, dashed toward the valley below. Horror and desolation marked their track.129

1 2 9 1bid., pp. 109-110. 71

Such a setting as the background for extreme despair and

contemplated suicide is definitely effective.

As the thunderstorm subsides, torches that "gleam like

meteors athwart the blackness of the tempest" throw a "waver-

ing light over the thickness of the storm. ,l30 Distant

sounds of song are borne on the breeze. Monks appear on

the Alpine pass at midnight, carrying a low bier covered

with a black pall, and "chanting a requiem for salvation of

the departed one." They are moving toward the convent to

deposit the remains "of one who has explored the frightful

path of eternity before them.,"1 3 1

The bandits' cavern is a terrifying spot.

Over the walls of the lengthened passages putrefac- tion has spread a bluish clamminess; damps hung around, and, at intervals, almost extinguished the torches, whose glare was scarcely sufficient to dissipate the impenetrable obscurity. . . . A blaz- ing wood fire threw its dubious rays upon the misshapen and ill-carved walls.132

In this cave, the wretched Megalena becomes a prey to de-

spair and terror, since the sole light in her cell, "by its dim flickering, only dissipated the almost palpable obscurity, in sufficient degree more assuredly to point out the circumambient horrors." 1 3 3 The melancholy wind sighs along the crevices of the cavern, and the dismal sound of rain inspires mournful reflection. The cave is a fitting

1 3 01bid., p. 110. 1 3 1Ibid., p. 111.

132Ibid., p. 112. 1 33Ibid., pp. 117-118. 72

background, also, for Steindolph's "metrical spectre tale"

of the repentant monk and the ghostly nun and for the murder of the bandit chief.

Gloomy, also, is Shelley's fanciful picture of the re-

turn of Eloise to St. Irvyne. She left it in May when spring

cast its loveliness over the landscape, but her sorrowful re-

turn is reflected in nature:

Dark, autumnal, and gloomy was the hour; the winds whistled hollow, and over the expanse of heaven was spread an unvarying sombreness of vapour; nothing was heard save the melancholy shriekings of the night-bird, which, soaring in the evening blast, broke the stillness of the scene, interrupting the meditations of frenzied enthusiasm; mingled with the sighing of the wind, which swept in languid and varying cadence amidst the leafless boughs.1 34

Another fateful period in Eloise's life takes place in a

melancholy setting. She meets Nempere by appointment at an

abbey, whose vast ruins reared their pointed casements to

the sky. Here masses of disjointed stone are scattered

about; and, "save by the whirrings of bats, the stillness which reigned, was uninterrupted. "1 3 5 Nature pities Eloise;

and, on the unhappy evening of her seduction, "the moon, which rode in cloudless and unsullied majesty, in the

leaden-coloured east, hath hidden her pale beams in a dusky cloud, as if blushing to contemplate so much wickedness."136

The regulation Gothic castle appears late in the novel, and but once. It is located in Bohemia and comes as a legacy

134Ibid., p. 155. 135Ilbid., p. 173.0 136Ibid., p. 178. 73

to Wolfstein. Desolate and dark are the scenes that sur-

round the no less desolate castle. Gloomy heaths stretch

far and wide, marked only by an occasional scathed pine or oak, "blasted by the thunderbolts of heaven. ,137 Descrip-

tion of the castle is passed over with the statement that it was built "like all those of Bohemian barons, in mingled

Gothic and barbarian architecture"; but over it the dim

moon beams faintly with sepulchral radiance, and the night-

raven pours "on the dull ear of evening her frightful screams. 1138

The final scene, as befits a terror-romance, takes

place in the vaults of the ruined abbey of St. Irvyne. On

that evening, not a breeze dares to move; not a sound

breaks the stillness of horror. Wolfstein paces the vaults

in his eager desire for the arrival of midnight. Ginotti

appears and asks him the supreme question: "Wolfstein, dost thou deny thy Creator?" Deeper grows the gloom in the cavern; darkness almost visible seems to press around them.

A sudden flash of lightning hisses through the vaults; a burst of frightful thunder seems "to convulse the universal fabric of nature"; and "borne on the pinions of hell's sulphurous whirlwind,!" the frightful prince of terror appears and howls in a voice "superior to the bursting thunder- peal. t139

13 7 1bid., p. 165. 1 381bid. 1 39 Ibid., p. 199. 74

As a work of fiction, St. Irvyne is a definite failure.

As slavishly imitative as Zastrozzi and infinitely more

tangled, obscure, and poorly written, it shows Shelley's

loss of interest in the Gothic romance as a means of expression. The Anti-Jacobin Review makes this suggestion

concerning Shelley, the imitator of Gothic novels:

As to this Oxford gentleman, we recommend him to the care of his tutor, who, after a proper jobation for past folly, would do well, by iMposition, to forbid him the use of the pen until he should have taken his bachelor's degree.140

But extravagant and flamboyant as these two romances are,

nevertheless, "they cannot be neglected by any student of

Shelley, since they serve to show . . . a certain development or education, and are . . . of very great importance

in our estimation of the poet's works.fl4 l

III Some time in 1810, in collaboration with his sister,

Elizabeth, Shelley published Original Poetry _ Victor and

Cazire, juvenile verses imitative of Scott, whose early poems he greatly admired, and more than imitative of "Monk"

Lewis, whose Tales of Terror on the library shelves at Field

Place had fascinated the children. This volume consists of seventeen poems, twelve of which were probably written by

4 1 0White, The Unextinguished Hearth, p. 36, quoting The Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine, XLI (January, 1912), 697. 141Dacre, 2p. cit., Introduction, p. xx. 75

Shelley. "St. Edmonds Eve" is a word for word plagiarism

of "The Black Canon of Elmham, or St. Edmond's Eve" in

Tales of Terror; and "Revenge" has been traced by Dr. A. B.

Young (Modern Language Review, 1906) to the story of the "Castle of Lindenberg" and the ballad of "Alonzo the Brave,"

in The Monk. "Ghasta, or the Avenging Demon," beginning with

a plagiarism of Chatterton, is a versification of the knight,

the bleeding nun, and the Wandering Jew as related in the

fourth chapter of Lewis's Monk. The last poem in the vol-

ume, the "Fragment, or the Triumph of Conscience," appears

to be a sequel to Charlotte Dacre's Zofloy1.142

The significance of Victor and Cazire lies in "its in-

dication of Shelley's deep-seated admiration, as a boy, for

the striking subject-matter and style of Chatterton, Lewis,

and Scott." 1 43 It is an "important document" l4 in the mental history of Shelley, as it shows his range at this early

period, "both of thought and of mental practice.l45 It

is childish and immature, but it "offers nothing to forbid

the anticipation of eventual excellence, and something to

encourage it." 1 4 6 An example of the early expression of

l4 2Peck, Shelley, I, 30-36. 14 3Ibid., p. 36. 4 4 1 Percy Bysshe Shelley, Original Poetyby Victor and Cazire, edited by Richard Garnett, London, John Lane, 1897 Introduction, p. xxv.

145Ibid. 146Ibid. 76

an idea which is later developed into a theme of splendid

significance is the following excerpt from "Song -- Trans- lated from the German":

Ah! grasp the dire dagger and couch the fell spear If vengeance and death to thy bosom be dear, The dastard shall perish, death's torments shall prove, For fate and revenge are decreed from above.

Ah! where is the hero, whose nerves strung by youth, Will defend the firm cause of justice and truth; With insatiate desire whose bosom shall swell, To give up the oppressor to judgement and Hell --

. . . . 0 ...... * .*0 0 0 0 * * t

The rewards of the brave are the transports of love. 1 47

Here is the core of a conception in crude application, which,

transmuted, becomes the motive of his great utterances against

tyranny and oppression -- development from the meaningless

revenge motif of the ridiculous Gothic villain, through the

down-with-tyranny-death-to-the-oppressor phase, to the grand culmination, in Prometheus Unbound, of love's victory over hate. The "transports of love" progress in the same fashion from the crude relationship between elementary Gothic heroes and heroines, through the devotion of Laon and Cythna, to the divine union of humanity and nature as symbolized in

Prometheus and Asia.

Another item of interest is that this first collection of poetry introduces the Wandering Jew, "that character which was to have during his [Shelley's] entire life the

147Shelley, Cpe Works, I, 15, 11. 1-8, 16. 77

most singular fascination for him, and who appeared, as a

result, in no less than four subsequent works from his

pen."11I8 This first appearance is in the plagiarized

"Ghasta"; he is called the stranger, but he is revealed as

the Wandering Jew by the ghost who cries,

"Mighty one I know thee now,

"Know thee by thy flaming brow,"

for

Of glowing flame a cross was there, Which threw a light around his form, Whilst his lank and raven hair. Floated wild upon the storm. 1 49

Shelley's poem, _The Wanderin _Jew, was written in 1810, when Shelley was eighteen,1 5 0 but was not published until after his death. Nature in her darkest aspects furnishes

the required melancholy atmosphere, and a convent and gloomy castle are the stage for more Gothic horrors. Rosa, the poor heroine who is being forced into a convent, is rescued by Paulo, who swears eternal fidelity to her. Later he confesses his terrible secret -- he is the Wandering Jew.

Victorio, Paulo's friend, loves Rosa, also. A witch evokes

Satan -- "a shadeless, hideous beast"1 5 1 -- and secures a magic philtre with which Victorio expects to gain Rosa's

14 8 Peck, 2T-. cit., I, 37.

188. 149Shelley, Complete Works, I, 31-32, 11. 169, 171; 185- 1 5 0 Peck, -2. cit;., I, 37.

1 5 1 Shelley, Complete Works, IV, Canto iv, 1. 317. 78 love. Rosa dies and is lost to Paulo forever.

As poetry, The Wandering Jew is undoubtedly bad; but

Shelley has demonstrated in it his ability to create and hold interest with a metrical tale. Its chief interest, however, lies in the use Shelley made of this theme in his later work. The development of this character is ably described by Peck:

To trace Shelley's varying management of the legend of Le Juif Errant from this his first extended effort in verse, through Qgeen Mab, The Assassins,, and Hellas is to trace in part the evolution of the poet's mind. . . . The figure of the Wandering Jew, compelled, for one "error" as Godwin would have termed it, to undergo eternal torment, awakened Shelley's sympathies and set his finger-tips itch- ing to be at an apologia for the unhappy and long- chastened Hebrew. But the theme of his first work on The Wander- ing Jew . . . is not the theme of the Ahasuerus of Queen Mab, forerunner of Prometheus, for on this second appearance he is no longer in flight from the Eternal Curse; he has turned rebel against One he deems a tyrant, and has flung down the gauge of his own denial of His omnipotency. It is not the theme, either, of the Jew in The Assassins, who is the Ahasuerus of Queen Mab in a new setting. Nor is it the "wise madtalk of the old Jew" of Hellas, the Shelleyan oracle of Berkeley's philosophy that "Nothing exists but as it is perceived" and that hence all tyrannies, which are mere chimaeras of the too-credulous mind, cease to exert their power when the mind becomes enlightened, and denies them a further lease of life. The woebegone wanderer of this early effort, pursued by the inescapable and enduring Curse, cries out in effect:

Me miserable! Which way shall I fly? Infinite wrath, and infinite despaire. Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell; 79

but does not suggest rebellion. On the other hand, he is mild, and kindly, and awakens our pity and com- miseration.152

The same year that Victor and Cazire was issued and

The Wander= Jew was written saw the publication of Post- humous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson, a collection of verse showing almost no improvement over the first edition of collected poetry. Of this group, the "Epithalamium" has been attributed by Hogg to some rhymester of the day.1 5 3

Although Shelley denied authorship,154 it is so typical of his views, themes, and abilities at this period that it is difficult to accept his denial. The Gothic setting is expressed in terms so like those used in Zastrozzi and St.

Irvyne and in some of the poems that the handiwork of Shel- ley is indicated. At midnight, lurid meteors shoot athwart the murky air; a fearful glare from dark storm-clouds shows the bending oak. Had the oak been "scathed," no further proof would be necessary. The "yell," a favorite word of

Shelley's, is soon heard; the much-used vision "enthroned upon a silvery cloud" is accompanied by the usual heavenly notes which "burst on his ravished ears. 1155

Shelleyan, also, are the thoughts that are expressed:

1 5 2 Peck, 2. cit., pp. 50-51. 1 5 3 Shelley, Complete Works, I, 415.

1541bid., p. 416. 155Ibid., pp. 43-44. I pondered on the woes of lost mankind, I ponder'd on the ceaseless rage of kings.l56

Tyranny receives its proper punishment:

Yes Francis! thine was the dear knife that tore A tyrant's heartstrings from his guilty breast, Thine was the daring at a tyrant's gore, To smile in triumph, to contemn the rest; And thine, lov'd glory of thy sex! to tear From its base shrine a despot's haughty soul, To laugh at sorrow in secure despair, To mock, with smiles, life's lingering control, And triumph mid the griefs that round thy fate did roll.

Yes! the fierce spirits of the avenging deep With endless tortures goad their guilty shades. I see the lank and ghastly spectres sweep Along the burning length of yon arcades; And I see Satan stalk athwart the plain; He hastes along the burning soil of hell. "Welcome, thou despots to my dark domain, "With maddening joy mine anguished senses swell "To welcome to their home the friends I love so well." 1 5 7

The similarity of ideas and expression in the quoted por-

tions of this poem and in those taken from "Song -- Trans- lated from the German" in Victor and Cazire is striking. In the latter poem, the hero is urged to grasp the "dire dagger" and "to give the oppressor to judgement and Hell."

In "Epithalamium" the hero takes the "dear knife" and plunges it into the guilty breast of the tyrant for whom Satan is preparing a welcome in- hell. Shelley is at his favorite pastime of repeating lmself, or someone very close to him is expressing Shelleyan adolescent ideas in a manner re- markably like Shelley's own; at any rate, he accepted it and

156Ibid., p. 43, 11. 5-6. 1 5 7 1bid., p. 45, 11. 51-68. 81 published it with his works where it becomes a part of the transmutation of horror, terror, and ugliness into the strange, the wonderful, and the beautiful. CHAPTER III

TRANSMUTATION OF GOTHICISM

Shelley began his career with "raucous delight in har- rowing moods of horror on a large but penny-dreadful scale, with juvenile, playful, and imitative frightfulness of graveyards, ghosts, demons, villains, persecutions, suffering perfection, suicides, and murders"; he was "a juvenile Gothicist plunging into excited play with the melodramatic, but especially with horror and mystery into ludicrous exag- geration. 12 Such excessively emotional stories with settings remote in time and space, idealized and artificial characters, romantic and violent actions in an atmosphere of extreme sensibility3 seem unpromising material, even though the alchemy of Shelley's genius was skillful, to be converted into the "potable gold" of great poetry. Shelley had his own ideas, however, as to their value to the poet, which he expressed in "A Defense of Poetry":

1Benjamin P. Kurtz, The Pursuit of Death, p. 78.

3 Robert D. Mayo, "How Long Was Gothic Fiction in Vogue?" Modern Language Notes, LVIII (January, 1943), 60.

82 83

Sorrow, terror, anguish, despair itself, are often the chosen expressions of an approximation to the highest good. Our sympathy in tragic fiction depends on this principle; tragedy delights by afford- ing a shadow of that pleasure which exists in pain. This is the source also of the melancholy which is inseparable from the sweetest melody.

The general trend of Shelley's development is from ghosts and demons to great themes of unseen reality; from grossly expressed grief, sorrow, and bereavement to exquisite elegies; from adolescent world-weariness to odes of tragic dejection; from puppet caperings in Gothic melodrama to hymns and dramas of freedom; from wild emotions of terror-romance to mystic lyrics and narratives of passion.

Yet

it were a mistake to assume that Shelley's thought and emotional attitudes followed a linear evolution; with new states of mind born of the death of old states; for that assumption would belie the essential character and movement of his mind, or genius. What Mr. Yeats believes to be true of all men -- that they do not change much "in their deepest thought" -- is particularly true of Shelley. . . . He perfected the intuitions, both in conception and expression, progressively leaving behind not the core of the idea but the cruder applications of it and the less beautiful poetizing of it.5

In Shelley's early verse the transmutation process is as yet only from prose to poetry, for the crude themes and horror effects are stillthe same outworn motifs and machinery. His utterance is ill-considered, hasty, and crude; his picturesque imaging, his undigested reading, his political

kShelley, Complete Works, VII, 133.

5 Kurtz,,a. cit., Introduction, p. xxi. and social theories have not yet been reflected in the

poetic mirror "which makes beautiful that which is dis- torted.,6

eenMab is the first real step in the development of

Shelley from the imitator of Gothic romance to the poet of

dignity and beauty of conception and execution. Benjamin 7 Kurtz, however, has given such a detailed discussion of the

background, development, and significance of the poem that a precis of his findings follows.

u Mab, representing the growth of Shelley's mind

from his eighteenth to his twenty-first year, was written

between nineteen and twenty. But out of the romantic ruc-

tion of Zastrozzi, St. Irvyne, and The Wandering Jew, Shelley

comes forward a la Godwin, Volney, and Southey, with a revolutionary theme of broad human concern, involving the highest interests of humanity, grandiosely conceived and vehemently poetized. It is the sort of thing that the Gen- tleman's Magazine of 1822 loved to call "the convulsive caperings of Pegasus labouring under colic pains." But it is also the sort of thing that puts Shelley in the class of

Carlyle, Goethe, and Tolstoi, the poets of social conscience.8

A sort of transition from Shelley's Gothic romances to

Shelley, Complete Works, VII, 115. 7 Kurtz, p.. cit., pp. 26-50. 8Ibid., p. 26. 85 this versified essay in anarchy and atheism is made in several poems of the Esdaile Manuscript, but especially in

"Henry and Louisa" and Zeinab and Kathema. Both poems cul- minate in horrible deaths, but each is primarily an indict- ment of society. In the former, a man seduced by an insane love of political glory and conquest comes to an evil end, and is followed voluntarily through the gates of death by a lovely and devoted woman, whose innocent life is thus tragically linked with his dark fate. In the latter, the

Cashmire maid, Zeinab, having been stolen from her home, is flung by her betrayers upon the streets of a Christian city, there to perish; rising desperately in crime against her persecutors, she is by blind and pitiless law condemned to death.9

Here is the old association of frightfulness and death; but, no longer merely gruesome devices to start shivers, it is now his most indignant and pathetic means of pointing protests against the criminal ambitions of governors and the cruelty of organized society. Death has changed from a bogey to a weapon, as the poet's mind has passed from fantastic play to serious protest.1 0

To the careful study of Godwin's Political Justice he confesses he owes "the inestimable boon of granted power, of arising from the state of intellectual sickliness and

9 1bid., pp. 28-29. 1 0Ibid., p. 29. 86

lethargy into which I was plunged two years ago, and of

which 'St. Irvyne' and 'Zastrozzi' were the distempered,

although unoriginal visions." What Lamb called "the spuri- ous engendering of books" produced in Shelley's case, first,

his Gothicism, and, second, his conviction that history is

a " recordof crimes and miseries." So, forsaking his

Gothic play, he dreams now of becoming a "mender of anti-

quated abuses." Oppressive despotism, whether of religion

or politics, is now the villain of the piece; but a villain

conceived with the seriousness of an inexperienced mind

piercingly aware of the suffering of humanity.1 1

Shelley's young soul was irrepressibly stirred, not

to write an autobiographical, analytical tale in the

fashion of Werther or La Nouvelle H6loise, but, like Volney,

to traverse imaginatively the misery of the past and pres-

ent; and to prophesy, with his imaginative Mab, the fall of

selfish governments and superstitious faiths, the extinc-

tion of poverty and ignorance, the universal triumph of

benevolence, and the advent of peace. Such is the compre-

hensive and romantic-revolutionary ideology of the poem:

after all, a sort of Gothic romance, filled as of old with

set bravura pieces of persecuted innocence and utter vil-

lainy, but transposed now to a tempestuous seriousness about matters of tremendous concern.1 2

llIbid., pp. 29-30. 12Ibid., P. 31. 87

Queen Mab may be as untrue to history as Zastrozzi is to human nature, but it is easy to discern how the play of the latter was a preparation for the dead-earnest indigna-

tion of the former, how a boy's extreme, excited conception

of how unmediated struggle between perfect heroes and utter

villains is transferred to the melodramatic problem of

tyranny and freedom.1 3

In search for a strong opening of the poem, Shelley

turned to his old fascination, his Gothic theme of power,

death, and handled it in his old way of extravagant terror.

Beginning with horror at the loathsomeness of the accompani-

ments of death, not realizing always the implications of his

philosophy in reference to his dismay, passing through

deserts or mirages of rationalism, naturalism, perfecti-

bility, pronouncing death itself a wonderful engine of

Necessity, but all the while never quite reconciled to the

mutability of the beautiful, Shelley at the last, thoroughly

aroused, in deepening passion, imagery, and music, gives

his thus far most notable intuition of birth, life, and

death.l4

Alastor; or, The irit of Solitude, written in a different tone from Queen Mab, contains only individual inter-

est; it is the out-pouring of Shelley's own emotions, imaginatively conceived, and softened by recent anticipation of

13Ibid. 14Ibid., PP. 34-50. 88 death. It is solemn in spirit, and expresses the broodings of a poet's heart in solitude. Physical suffering had turned his eyes inward, inclining him to ponder over the thoughts and emotions of his own soul rather than to make, as in queen Mab, the whole universe the object of his verse.1 5

Shelley states that his purpose in writing Alastor was to present a "youth of uncorrupted feelings and adventur- ous genius led forth by an imagination inflamed and purified through familiarity with all that is excellent and majestic, to the contemplation of the universe.nl6 The youth drinks of fountains of knowledge, but is not satiated. The beauty of the external world suffices for a while, but the time comes when he desires communion with an intelligence similar to his own. Imaging to himself the Being he loves, he en- dows it with all that is wise, wonderful, and beautiful.

Seeking in vain for a prototype of this vision and blasted by disappointment, he sinks into an early grave. Peck points out that this, the earliest narrative of the search for ideal beauty, which is so familiar a theme in Shelley's poetry from this time onward, owes some of its circumstances and part of its mood

to Shelley's boyhood romance with Harriet Grove, his walks and talks with her, his grief at the loss of his cousin's affection; his early preoccupation with the subjects of death, ghosts, the grave; his reading

1 5 Shelley, Complete Works, 1, 198. 16Ibid., p. 173. 1 7 Ibid 89

of Wordsworth, Southey, and Volney; his visit to Switzerland, and his trip up the Thames; and is colored throughout by the fear of approaching death which arose from his own physical condition, and his physician's view of the hopelessness of his case, in the spring of 1815.18

Shelley's debt to the Gothic writers for the mood and

setting of Alastor is evident. Mrs. Radcliffe, whose mind

was saturated with the poetry of her time, made much use

of the theme of retirement in the mountains. Shelley was much attracted to her novels, and "to give Mrs. Radcliffe

this recognition is, after all, merely to admit the force of that Gothic strain in literature which did so much to form Shelley's imagination."1 9 In A Sicilian Romance there is a passage which "reads like a miniature version of the poet's descent of the mountain in Alastor.,120 Shelley has used the scenic effects and the aspects of nature of the

Gothicists; but

To pass from this stuttering, huddled prose to the pure splendor of the language in Alastor is like being miraculously transported from the vapors of some pestilence-haunted valley (the figure is not inappropriate to the horrors of Mrs. Byrne and "Monk" Lewis) to the clear, vital air of a mountain peak. As for the atmosphere of the poem, whatever Gothic gloom there is has been so refined as to escape entirely from the criminal colors that stain the romantic wilds of both these writers.2 1

Peck, op. cit., I, 420-422. 1 9 Rarold Leroy Hoffman, An Odyssey of the Soul: Shel- ley's Alastor, p. 92. 2 0 Ibid, p. 109. 2 1 Ibid. p. 119. 90

Alastor has the roots of its development in Shelley's own Gothic novel, _St. Iy . It has been pointed out by Frederick L. Jones2 2 that Ginotti's story of his youth,

which he relates to Wolfstein in Chapter X of St. Irvyne, is similar to that of the poet in Alastor:

The experiences of the heroes of the novel and poem are essentially the same in kind though not in character, the difference being accounted for by the difference in the heroes. Ginotti is not a poet. But Ginotti and the poet both, from their earliest youth devote themselves to the passionate pursuit of learning; they wish to unveil the se- crets of nature, to drink deep of the fountains of divine philosophy. They both take nature to be all- sufficient, and to feel no need for human love or sympathy; to them learning is all-in-all; they are self-centered. Philosophy leads Ginotti to wrestle with the problem of death and a future life, which of course involves the problem of God; and in some inexplicable way he has managed to get his soul damned. The vision which appears to him in his sleep is therefore the Devil claiming his own. But the Poet is altogether unaware of any inner need until the vision, which is the incarnation of all that is beautiful and good and true, appears to him. Ginotti's "lovely vision" claims him; the Poet's vision also claims the Poet though tacitly, already knowing her victory.2

The principal advance in artistry in Alastor is that

Shelley has become contemplative, the note of extreme

radicalism found in Queen Mab is absent, and the whole poem is softer in tone. Rhetorical radicalism has given way to romantic mystery and a greater sensitiveness to nature.

He is treating ideas and situations which are fundamental

22 Frederick L. Jones, "Alastor Foreshadowed in St. Ir- vYrne," Publications of the Modern Language Association, LXIX (1934) 9 971.-.

231id., P. 971. 91

in his own character, and the whole is expressed with new verbal harmony.

In his other poems printed with Alastor in 1816,

melancholy graveyard themes predominate; yet the utterance

is vastly superior to similar themes in Victor and Cazire

and Posthumous Fragments. "The secret things of the grave 2 are there," 4 however; and if an answer were required to

the following questions, it would be "Shelley":

Who telleth a tale of unspeaking death? Who lifteth the veil of what is to come? Who painteth the shadows that are beneath The wide-winding caves of the peopled tomb?2 5

Such a tale he tells in the following lines from "A Summer- Evening Churchyard, Lechdale, Gloucestershire":

The dead are sleeping in their sepulchres: And, mouldering as they sleep, a thrilling sound, Half sense, half thought, among the darkness stirs, Breathed from their wormy beds all living things around, And mingling with the still night gnd mute sky Its awful hush is felt inaudibly. 2

All the phantoms do not rise from "wormy beds"; there are some "gentle ghosts, with eyes as fair as star-beams among

2 7 twilight trees.", We, too, are as evanescent as ghosts; for

We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon; How restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver,

Shelley, Complete Works, I, 204, 1. 19. 25bd 1.292.26 11. 25-28. Ibid., p. 205, 11. 19-24. 27Ibid., p. 201, 11. 3-4. 92

Streaking the darkness radiantly! -- yet soon Night closes round, and they are lost for ever.2 8

Graveyard speculation does not account completely for

the poetry of this period. Shelley still has a verse or so

to spare for his pet political themes. Wordsworth, the "lone star, whose light did shine On some frail bark in

winter's midnight roar"2 9 (an expression with a Gothic

tinge), is mourned as a deserter to the cause of freedom;

Napoleon, who has danced and reveled on the grave of Liberty

(more Gothicism), should be crept upon in his sleep by

Massacre, Treason, and Slavery; Rapine, Fear and Lust, to

stifle him, their minister.3 0 "The Daemon of the World,"

a "much corrected version of the first, second, eighth and

ninth Sections of Queen Mab,n31 simply re-expresses the

thought and feeling of the original poem with little, if any, improvement.

A fitting climax to this apprentice period of Shelley's development is "Mont Blanc," first published at the end of

History of a Six Week's Tour, 1817.32 Awe-inspiring, terrible, beautiful, Mont Blanc could not fail to create intense emotion and inspire philosophic speculation in a person of Shelley's temperament. Shelley's acquaintance with

2 8 Ibid., 2 9 p. 203, 11. 1-4. Ibid., p. 206, 11. 7-8.

30 Ibid., 11. 3-10. 3 1Ibid., p. 421. 3 2Ibid. 93

the standard Gothic Alpine description formula and the practice he had had in describing wild and impressive land-

scapes in his earlier works aided him to produce this poem.

The poet, when he gazes upon the prospect, seems

as in a trance sublime and strange To muse on my own separate phantasy, My own, my human mind which passively Now renders and receives fast influencings, Holding an unremitting interchange With the clear universe of things around- One legion of wild thoughts, whose wandering wings Now float above thy darkness, and now rest Where thou art no unbidden guest, In the still cave of the witch Poesy, Seeking among the shadows that pass by Ghosts of all things that are, some ihade of thee, Some phantom, some faint image . . . 3

In "Mont Blanc" the surrounding wilderness becomes a symbol of universal change; the mountains, governing strength of things, of both matter and mind. The poem demonstrates that in Shelley's enriched experience, his developing, en- hanced sensitiveness to nature, his deepening moods, he has divined a vaster meaning. He has reached "a serener and more solemn, more nearly sublime, reading of himself and humankind. ,34

In Laon and Cythna, written in 1817, Shelley returns to his great political and social themes. It is "a poem of political idealism, of hope, suffering, failure, and death . . . a projection . . . of Shelley's interests upon

33 1bid., p. 230, 11. 35-47. 3 4 Kurtz, op. cit., p. 106. 94

an epic canvas." 3 5 It is Shelley's purpose in this story

of human passion to paint

a succession of pictures illustrating the growth and progress of individual mind aspiring after excellence, and devoted to the love of mankind; its influence in refining and making pure the most daring and uncommon impulses of the imagination, the understanding, and the senses; its impatience at "all the oppressions which are done under the sun"; its tendency to awaken public hope and to enlighten and improve mankind; the rapid effects of the application of that tendency; the awakening of an immense nation from their slavery and degradation to a true sense of moral dignity and freedom; the bloodless dethronement of their oppressors, and the unveiling of the religious frauds by which they had been deluded into submission; the tranquility of successful patriot- ism, and the universal toleration and benevolence of true philanthropy; the treachery and barbarity of hired soldiers; vice not the object of punishment and hatred, but kindness and pity; the faithless- ness of tyrants; the confederacy of the Rulers of the World, and the restoration of the expelled Dynasty by foreign arms; the massacre and extermina- tion of the Patriots, and the victory of established power; the consequences of legitimate despotism, civil war, famine, plague, superstition, and an utter extinction of the domestic affections; the ju- dicial murder of the advocates of Liberty; the temporary triumph of oppression, that secure earnest of its final and inevitable fall; the transient nature of ignorance apd error, and the eternity of genius and virtue.3o

Ideas developed through Shelley's juvenile writings appear and are described with increased horror. Personified

Villainy, Tyranny, Hatred, and Bigotry, now connected with the supernatural, become the antagonists of Good. The incidents are but loosely strung together and are almost as

3 5 Ibid., p. 111.

36Shelley, Complete Works, I, 240-241. 95

preposterous as those of his novels, with the result that

"all the power of Shelley's ideal fervor and poetical

genius cannot prevent a certain sense of the ludicrous

mingling with the reader's admiration." 3 7 There is, how-

ever, in Leon and Cythna , "a chastening of the young ex-

tremism which first created the romantic villains of Zas-

trozzi and then converted them into the political villains 3 8 of Queen Mab.", Until now, Shelley has found the solution to evil and oppression in the death of the tyrant; but in

Leon and Cythna the fallacy of this practice is realized. "The tyrants, somehow, must be reconciled with the kingdom 3 9 of love.", The punishment which they receive comes with self-realization. To avenge evil on the perpetrator is

"only to increase the miserylt40 in the world.

Though Shelley's political hatreds have been modified by the broadening power of love and an awakened understanding, Iaon and Cythna is still wildly romantic and emotional; and intentionally so. In the original version, he has made his hero and heroine brother and sister for the purpose of startling "the reader from the trance of ordinary life.til His object in using this Gothic theme of incest was "to strengthen the moral sense, by forbidding it to waste its energies in seeking to avoid actions which are only crimes

3 7Todhunter, 2p. 3 8 cit., p. 68. Kurtz, 2p). cit., p.113. 39Ibid., p. 114. 4oIbid. 41Shelley, Complete Works., 1, 247. 96

of convention" -- an entirely different use of the same

theme which terror-romance fiction employs for the simple

motive of horrifying the reader.

In addition to this new treatment of the incest motif,

Shelley has transmuted other Gothic elements from his own

writings. The imprisonment of Laon is the outgrowth of

Verezzi's imprisonment. As Felix Rabbe points out, in Leon

and Cythna, Laon, separated from Cythna, as Verezzi from

Julia, is borne swooning to the mysterious cavern surmounted

by a pillar where he suffers unimaginable tortures (Canto III,

Stanza i and following). Both are chained.42 The hero of

the poem resembles the hero of the romance in being the vic-

tim of enemies. The fever that seized Laon in the grated cage and the fever that nearly killed Verezzi result in a temporary loss of memory. Their situations are similar, also, in that both, waking from unconsciousness, find themselves in the hands of their persecutors and are ordered to follow through a gloomy cavern to the place of their imprisonment in chains. Verezzi is bound to a wall, while

Laon is chained to a brazen pillar. Each suffers the loss of his jar of water and is left with but a crust of bread.

In Verezzi's case, "a small crust of bread was all that now remained of his scanty allowance of provisions." As for Laon,

42Rabbe, . .t.,i. I, 65-66. 97

The uprest Of the third sun brought hunger -- but the crust Which had been left, was to my craving breast Fuel, not food.43

Verezzi finds "the days and nights countless, in the same

monotonous uniformity of horror and despair."4 4 Lon ex-

presses the same feeling, but more poetically:

The sense of day and night, of false and true, Was dead within me.45

When both reach the state in which death is regarded as a

boon, they are released and tenderly nursed back to health

and sanity.

Developments of moral themes first crudely expressed

in Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne are expanded. Facing death by

torture, Zastrozzi, with true atheistic conviction, rejects

all religious belief and then dies satisfied with having

kept his oath of vengeance. He declares to Matilda,

I intend to meet death, to encounter annihilation, with tranquility. Am I not convinced of the non- existence of a Deity? Am I not convinced that death will but render this soul more free, more unfettered? Why need I then shudder at death? why need anyone, whose mind has risen above the shackles of prejudice, tpe errors of a false and injurious superstition40

In Laon and Cythna, Leon, also facing death by torture, expresses a similar conviction, but with more poetic elo- quence (Canto XI, Stanzas xv-xxv). In St. Irvyne these

4 3Shelley, Complete Works, I, 294, 11. 185-188.

Ibid., V, 7. 4 5Ibid., I, 295, 11. 208-209.

4 6 Ibid., V, 100. 98

theories of Zastrozzi are accentuated, and in Laon and Cythna they are developed poetically.47

There are, also, other influences from Shelley's child-

hood and adolescence. The first observation is made by

Todhunter, who thinks that one of the reasons for Shelley's

choosing the snake as the type of the good principle is

that Shelley had loved snakes from his childhood, and "the

old snake of Field Place" no doubt continued to "haunt his

8 imagination.,4 Jeaffreson links the fever of Laon and of

Verezzi with the fever and delusion of persecution which Shelley endured at Field Place. The plague scene, especially the frantic mother who declares that she is Pesti-

lence, recalls, to Eleanor Sickels, the chill horrors of

Charles Brockden Brown's descriptions in Arthur Mervyn.50

The significance of Laon and2 thna, as enunciated by

Kurtz, is that it is the step in the attainment of "that repentant renunciation toward hate with which Prometheus opens Shelley's greatest long poem, and which constitutes the spiritual unbinding of the Titan. The beginning of

Shelley's own unbinding from extremism is in The Revolt of

Islam [Laon and Cythna]. 51 Rossetti pronounces it

4 7These similarities are noted by Rabbe, p. cit.., I, 76-83. 4 8 Todhunter, a. cit., p. 63. 4 9Jeaffreson, _. cit., I, 121-122. 50 Eleanor Sickels, "Shelley and Charles Brockden Brown," p. 1124. 5 1 Kurtz, 22. cit. p. 116. 99

a great effort, and a near approach to a great poem; clearly, in more senses than one, greater than Alastor, though its vast scale and unmeasured ambition place it still more obviously in the category of imperfect achievements. Gorgeous ideality, humanitarian enthusiasm, and a passionate rush of invention, more especially of the horrible, go hand in hand in The Revolt of Islam. It affects the mind something like an enchanted palace of the Arabian Nights.52

"Prince Athanase: a Fragment,?" though preceding Iaon

and Cythna in time of composition, is in many respects a ma-

5 3 turer poem. Shelley's plan for the poem is similar to that

of Alastor, for the hero seeks through the world for the One

whom he may love. The lady whom he meets on a ship and who appears to be the embodiment of his ideal proves earthly and

unworthy. Crushed by disappointment, he dies; but on his

deathbed he receives a kiss from his true love.

The opening of the poem introduces Prince Athanase in

the guise of the youth who has grown weak and gray before his time, a picture which Shelley uses often. Athanase is the usual Shelleyan hero, "always the same, whether named

Lionel, Iiaon, or the poet of Alastor, [but] drawn with much firmer and subtler lines than they.,54 He is melancholy, bowed down by a weight of sorrow that he himself but dimly understands, and the cause of which he declines to reveal.

52 As quoted by Todhunter, op. cit., p. 89. 5 3 Shelley, Complete Works, III, 146.

5 4 Todhunter, p. cit., p. 89. 100

The depth of his sorrow is worthy of the most melancholy

of true Gothic heroes. As in the case of Wolfstein, one wonders

What sorrow strange, and shadowy, and unknown, Sent him, a hopeless wanderer, through mankind. 5 5 His friends, like those of Ginotti, rarely undertook to gain his secret,

For all who knew and loved him then perceived That there was drawn an adamntine veil Between his heart and mind. The projected theme of the two loves, which are not developed in the fragment, would probably have been written in the Gothic mood. "It would have been a lyric drama of pursuit, mistake and repentance, failure, and dying vision."5 7 In his pursuit of the Venus Urania, he is deceived by the Pandemian Venus in the shape of a fair woman; the object of his search appears only in time to kiss his dying lips.5b The situation is very much like the Verezzi-Matilda-Julia triangle of Zastrozzi, but how different are the implications and conceptions! Matilda-Pandemos has no function other than to gratify her own passions and unconsciously to assist Zastrozzi in his revenge; Julia-Urania, in her first role, is definitely too weak a figure for great inspiration,

55 Shelley, Complete Works, III, 133,v 11. 19-20. 5 6 Ibid.5 p. 136, 11. 86-88.

5 7 Kurtz, p. cit.., p. 135. 58 -Todhunter, a2. cit_., pp. 89-90. 101 though she is pictured as pure and noble. Verezzi fails as

Athanase; it is only his situation between noble and ig- noble love that recommends comparison -- a purified Zas- trozzi or Wolfstein is more in keeping with Shelley's meth- ods of transmutation. "Prince Athanase, " fragment though it is, forms a link between the juvenilia and the mature poems

"resembling the former in the naive idealism of its person- ages, but reaching toward the latter in the subtlety of its thought, and in the delicate perfection of its language and the grave and limpid music of its verse. "5 9

The Gothic mood is strong in "Prince Athanase," but it is overwhelming in Rosalind and Helen. It was not written,

Shelley remarks, to excite profound meditation, but if, "by interesting the affections and amusing the imagination, it awakens a certain ideal melancholy favorable to the reception of more important impressions," it will have accomplished its purpose.60 Todhunter attributed the poem to a feeble attempt on the part of Shelley to idealize real life in an idyll of the social oppression of women.6 1

The setting of Rosalind and Helen, the shores of Lake

Como in the first instance, allows Gothic extravagance of description. Rosalind, Helen, and Henry, to escape the sound of the sea, which stirs too much of "suffocating

59 Ibid., p. 90. 60Shelley, Complete Works, II, 5. 6 lTodhunter, oa. cit., p. 92. 102

sorrow,t162 seek out a secret spot in a "vast and antique 6 wood. " 3 A roofless temple provides a resting place.

Stillness reigns:

Gloom and the trance of nature now:

&*...... ".-S- .. * * 0 * 5 * Only the shadows creep: S *0 *

Only the owls and nightingales Wake in this dell when day-light fails. 6

Other sections of the narrative demand other settings: a

prison, a castle, and a second temple. It is in the use of

the latter temple that Eleanor Sickels traces another in-

debtedness to Charles Brockden Brown:

It seems only natural that Shelley, if he was as much fascinated as Peacock says he was by the temple- summerhouse in Wieland, would somewhere have incor- porated a similar idea in his verse. . . . Now in "Rosalind and Helen" there is a very similar temple, that built by Lionel's mother on the sea shore, wherein Lionel knows the highest exultation and death. . . . The correspondence . . . is exceedingly close: the temple is built on a promontory over water, not far from the house; it is built with a dome, and it is approached by a flight of steps; though Shelley does not specify in so many words the shape of his fane, the expression "circled by steps" indicates that it is the same as Brown's. Each temple, moreover, is dedicated to a purely private worship, and is frequented by the solitary worshiper at stated intervals. But each, after that worshiper's death, is made meeting place for friends and social converse 5: for here Wieland, his wife, sister, and brother-in-law, used to sit for music and conversation about an image of

6 2shelley, Complete Works, II, 9, 11. 66-67. 63Ibid., 64 p. 10, 1. 97. Ibid., 11. 131, 134, 136-7. 651 question this statement, for Helen, after the death of Lionel, says (in lines 1213-14), "The Mother of my Lionel, Had tended me in my distress." The temple is not mentioned after the death of Lionel. 103

Cicero; and here Lionel and JH en talked and sang. In each, too, a death occurs.

The plot of Rosalind and Helen, inspired by the broken

friendship between Mary Shelley and Isabel Baxter, is com-

plicated, in the Gothic manner, by containing three separate

stories. The chance encounter of the estranged friends and the gloomy spot to which they retire are machinery for the relating of these pathetic, emotional histories. The tale

inspired by the setting is Gothicism at its height:

This silent spot tradition old Had peopled with the spectral dead. For the roots of the speaker's hair felt cold And stiff, as with tremulous lips he told That a hellish shape at midnight led The ghost of a youth with hoary hair, And sat on the seat beside him there Till a naked child came wandering by, When the fiend would change to a lady fair! A fearful tale! The truth was worse: For here a sister and a brother Had solemnized a monstrous curse, Meeting in this fair solitude: For beneath yon very sky, Had they resigned to one another Body and soul. The multitude, Tracking them to the secret wood, Tore limb from limb their innocent child And stabbed and trampled on its mother; But the youth, for God's most holy grace, A priest saved to burn in the market-place.6 7 In this haunted place, Rosalind and Helen tell each other their stories, "which are not lacking in that lurid ghastliness of incident in which Shelley's somewhat morbid

.2Eleanor Sickels, "Shelley and Charles Brockden Brown," p. 112y. 67Shelley,0 Complete Works, II, 11-12, 11. 146-166. 104

imagination delighted.,"6 8 Rosalind relates a touching his-

tory which contains a few well-known Gothic touches. Her

passion for a handsome youth leads to a wedding. As they

stand on the altar stair, the ceremony is dramatically in-

terrupted by the return of her father from a distant land.

He rushes between the lovers crying, "Hold, hold! I tell

6 thee 'tis her brother!" 9 Four favorite Gothic themes are

illustrated in this incident: the return of the tyrant fa-

ther from the Holy Land, or any such romantically foreign

place, to stop a wedding between hero and heroine; the

scattering of families over the face of the earth and their

reunion at a dramatic moment; the discovery that two persons

who have lived near each other all their lives are brother

and sister; and incest, but for dramatic interference. The

portion of the story dealing with Rosalind's husband is

Gothic only in his tyrannical cruelty. The graveyard motif

makes its appearance when the father "is in the churchyard lying 7 0 among the worms,", and when the mother becomes "a

thing that did not stir, and the crawling worms were cradling her."7 1

Helen, in turn, pours forth her woes. Her story is one of high, devoted passion. Lionel, her lover, is a combination of the Alastor-poet and Iaon superimposed on a Zastrozzi-

6 8 Todhunter, 2. cit., p. 93. 6 9shelley, Complete Works, II, 15, 11. 297-298.

70Ibid., p. 16, 11. 318-319. 7 ., p. 17, 105

Ginotti base, coated with a liberal allowance of Prince

Athanase; in other words, he is a typical Shelleyan hero.

"Love and life in him were twins,"72 which marks a further

development in Shelley's conception of the ideal hero. His

words, as Cythna's do, lull the crowd like music. He wan-

ders afar, suffers some severely embittering experience, and

returns possessed of a strange melancholy. His wooing of

Helen is sincere, but, with Fitzeustace, he views marriage askance. He shares imprisonment with Verezzi and Ieon, and like them, he emerges a thin and languid form. Lionel's death is presented in an unusual way, and "the pain of utter despair which the death of a loved one unseals, until agony obliterated even the hope of rest in death, is presented simply and poignantly. . . . Yet he cannot resist using the old theme of the ugliness of death, the coffin worm, though he no longer uses it to create a mood of horror." 7 3

Despite the harking back to juvenile themes, Rosalind and Helen is a poem of interest to the student of Shelley's thought:

For in it, for the first time after his contact with tragic reality in his own life, and the maturing process of composing the long Islam, he has united his old book-bred ideas about life in general with his new realization of it through particular personal happenings, in an extended scale of finished composition. And something new has descended upon him: the fructification of ideas by pain, the

7 2 Ibid., p. 25, 1. 622.

73 Kurtz, o2. cit., p. 139. 106

harmonizing of his youthful, inexperienced tragic gloom, the poignancy of realized grief, the genuine submersion in sorrow, and then sincere revulsion to hope and faith.74

The poems published with Rosalind and Helen show little untransmuted Gothicism. "Lines Written among the Euganean

Hills" is composed on a note of deep melancholy, and there is "more poignant pain expressed in the wild music of the introductory lines, which fly restlessly onward, as that spiritual bark whose course they describe flies before the tempest of agony. In this poem Shelley is at his best."75

"The fymn to Intellectual Beauty,?" written in an ecstatic mood, makes use of a theme for which Shelley had a particular affinity -- the search for beauty. His habit of seeing the invisible, his deep emotionalism, and his constructive imagination have united in producing a poem of deep meaning. It is Shelley's becoming retrospective,

linking to his boyhood's extravagant awareness of the unknown . . . a later insight or vision, which is the real ground of the poem. . . . he recalls his graveyard wanderings and ghost-hunts, and describes his young failure to uncover a true spiritual life either. in the grave or in the poisonous conventional religion which youth is taught. These failures left him yet more curious about the invisi- bles. Then, of a spring day, while he was musing on the mystery, something in the vital, genial warmth of spring's rebirth stirred that glorious oneness of all life-processes which has always been the t vision of hoge greatly endowed with the poetic ima gina tion .7

75 ., p. 142. Todhunter, o. cit., p. 103 76 Kurtz, op .ci., p. 100. 107

The ghostly visitants of terror-romance are transfigured;

they have become a symbol of man's eternal search for

beauty.

"Julian and Maddalo," written in the conversational

form of Rosalind and Helen, shows Byron-Maddalo and Julian-

Shelley against a setting of wide ocean and the shore more barren than its billows. Later, a funereal bark takes them

to the romantic city of Venice, where the tolling of the madhouse bell is summoning the maniacs to prayer. This circumstance calls forth the following cynical comment from

Maddalo:

And such . . . is our mortality; And this must be the emblem and the sign Of what should be eternal and divine. -- And like that black and dreary bell, the soul Hung in a heaven-illumined tower, must toll Our thoughts and our desires to meet below Round the rent heart, and pray -- as madmen do For what? they know not, till the night of death, As sunset that strange vision, severeth Our memory from itself, and us from all We sought, and yet more baffled!7 7

Such sick and tragic thoughts lead to a decision to visit, through fast-falling rain and high-wrought sea (nature in

Gothic manner reflecting the mood of the characters), the madhouse, where

The clap of tortured hands, Fierce yells and howlings and lamentings keen, And laughter where complaint had merrier been, Moans, shrieks, and curses, and blaspheming prayers Accosted us.78

77 Shelley, Complete Works, III, 182, 11. 120-130.

78Ibid. p. 185, 11. 215-219. 108

The tale muttered by the maniac is one of acute suffering and woe. The madman's

Month after month . . . to bear this load And as a jade urged by the whip and goad To drag life on. 9

is reminiscent of Wolfstein's soliloquy on the Alpine pass:

For what then should I longer drag on this galling chain of existence?0d

Though each suffers the deepest agony of mind and wonders

why he is called upon to endure such torment, their basic

reactions are different. Wolfstein plunges into a career

of base crime and passion. The maniac tries to conquer his

deep hurt so that it may not make others sad., and is prepared

To do or suffer aught, as when a boy I did devote to justice, gnd to love My nature, worthless now! 1

The significance of "Julian and Maddalo" lies in the

fact that "out of the depths of hysterical agony that are

revealed dramatically in the ravings of a maniac, arose

the great theme of conquered agony in Prometheus . . . . The

stark suffering with which the poem is convulsed is some-

thing more than the grief of a fictitious maniac. . . . Here

is the personal, human original of the Titan's godlike misery. 82

7 9 Ibid., p. 187, 11. 300-302. 8OIbid., V, 5. 8 lIbid., p. 189, 11. 380-382. 8 2Kurtz, ,p. cit., p. 145. 109

In The Cenci there is deep mental agony and despair, but the ravings of the fictitious maniac of "Julian and Maddalo" are changed in tone and put into the sneering evil words of the criminally insane Cenci. "The futile, frenzied shrieking of Matilda and. her kind is forgotten in the passionate nobility or fearful calm of the speeches of Beatrice Cenci."8 3Shelley, in this poetic drama, has his feet placed firmly in reality, and "his grasp on the main facts of an historical period and his power in rendering human character 8 I prove his abilit y as a dramatic artist. The use of incest here is not the crime of convention as presented in Leon and Cythna; it reverts to the Gothic conception. It is, however, the brutal violence and vicious- ness of Count Cenci that give this theme its supreme ugliness rather than the idea of incest itself.

The plot of the drama permits a Gothic interpretation. Innocence in danger is allowed to suffer unimaginable tortures. The mad count, a prototype of the "bluebeard baron," carries a second role as the tyrannical parent. The characters fall into the usual categories: the tyrant and his henchmen, and the heroine with her faithful helpers. In the supporting cast, Marzio, the helper of Beatrice, suffers death for her as the faithful Paulo does for Julia in

83Birkhead, The Tale of Terror, p. 127. 8 Todhunter, a. cit., p. 121. 110

Zastrozzi; Andea assists Cenci as Ugoand Bernardo aid Zas-

trozzi. Orsino, the subtle plotter, introduces the libidi-

nous and scheming monk motif. The trial and conviction of

the heroine suggest the horrors of the Inquisition. Com-

posed of these melodramatic elements, The Cenci, neverthe-

less, by the artistry of their use becomes a powerful drama

of convincing reality which the same combination of inci-

dents never obtains in Gothic fiction.

In analyzing the character of Count Cenci, Kurtz states

that he belongs to the monsters of fiction, that he is of

the race of Barabbas and Sir Giles Overreach. "He is a de-

velopment of one of Shelley's earliest fascinations, for

he is Zastrozzi matured; another study in that absolute villainy which already has gone through one translation -- from shuddering fiction to indignant political theory. . . .

He is a monster, under fate; not a ranting, impossible vil- 8 lain." 5 This ranting and the utter villainy of his

character are revealed in his reaction to the death of his

sons. In describing this exceedingly dramatic scene Tod- hunter says:

The hate which seems to boil and bubble in hideous furtive laughter from the devil's caldron of his heart, is felt in every line of the speeches in which he exultantly proclaims to the horrified guests the joyful news of the death of his sons. 86

5 8 Kurtz, . cit., p. 191.

86 Todhunter, op. cit., p. 121. 111

Giacomo, spiritual brother to the weak and vacillat-

ing Verezzi, adds nothing to the stature of the character he represents; his weakness serves its only purpose in that

of foil to the strength of Beatrice. His midnight soliloquy,

the usual indulgence of Gothicism's "enanguished" heroes, does, however, contribute some excellent imaginative poetry, which, in the words of Todhunter, "produces a sensation like the awful hush that precedes a thunderstorm.",8 Beatrice, the victim of her father's incestuous passion, becomes a murderess; but, like Wolfstein, she remains high- souled and noble. Her motive, in addition to that of saving her body from becoming "a foul den" was to do "that which 'twere a deadly 8 crime to leave undone. " 9 In discussing the plan for the murder of her father, she reveals the in-

stinctive horror which possesses her soul:

I whose thought Is like a ghost shrouded and folded up In its own formless horror.9 0 In this passage

Shelley's thought, like that of Beatrice, is shrouded and folded up in its own formless horror; the image cannot be exposed, tested, analyzed, but its magnificence is beyond question; it reduces to a sort of childishness the attempts of Poe, Bulwer, and others to exploit the ghost in terror-breeding narrative.91

87Ibid., p. 125. 8 8 Shelley, Complete Works, II, 105. 89Ibid., p. 127, 11. 37-38. 9 0 Ibid., p. 105, 11. 109-111.

91Oscar W. Firkins, Power and Elusiveness in Shelley, p. 86. 112

In her anguish and despair she contemplates suicide, but

religious awe restrains her. To live under the conditions

in which she finds herself is impossible. Life and death

denied her, only the removal of the tyrant will solve the

problem. Tragedy and suffering bring out the strength of

her will and character. Faced with trial and punishment,

she

Stands like God's angel ministered upon By fiends; avenging such a nameless wrong As turns black parricide to piety.9 2

It is in the death of Beatrice that

Shelley achieves his most powerful handling of tragic death. Death in his early romances was mere play with fright. The death of the poet in Alastor is pathetic and sentimental. The deaths of Lon and Cythna are tragic to a certain degree. They arouse compassion for the blameless martyrs, and vividly remind us of the fearfulness of adventures in political idealism. But their tragedy is mediated by the blissful reunion of the lovers in the Temple of the Spirit. The deaths in Rosalind and Helen and Julian and Maddalo are not dramatically realized. The fall of Jupiter is but an abstraction. . . . But with the inevitability of the deed and the punishment, and with the effects of admiration, fear, and pity or compassion, the death of Beatrice becomes tragic in the full sense of the term: not meanly painful, but nobly and necessarily and fearfully and pitifully and endlessly painful.93

In The Cenci Shelley touches the profoundest depths of human passion. Incest, murder, vengeance, and retribution, treated melodramatically in his juvenilia, have been transformed into great tragedy; and in one instance, at least,

9 2 Shelley, Complete Works., II, 136, 11. 43-45.

93 Kurtz, 2p. cit., pp. 199-200. 113

that in which Beatrice cries,

My God! Can it be possible I have To die so suddenly? So young to go Under the obscure, cold, rotting, wormy ground?9 4

the poet's "beloved theme of the coffin-worm at long last achieves a truly tragic expressiveness, instead of the more or less crude, macaberesque effect of all its previous ap- pearances. i95

The Witch of Atlas is playful fantasy. In "To Mary," Shelley calls it a winged Vision -- a visionary rhyme. No darkness or gloom of melancholy appears. What marks of Gothicism it may contain lie in its fanciful setting and its

preoccupation with far-off things. Only such expressions as these in the following lines suggest Shelley's early Gothic landscapes:

And down the earthquaking cataracts which shiver Their snow-like waters into golden air, Or under chasms unfathom ble ever Sepulchre them, . . .96

The bastions of the storm, when through the sky The spirits of the tempest thundered by: -- 97

Todhunter interprets the poem as one in which Shelley's imagination, like a happy child, plays with the materials of poetry, surrounding itself with the things it loves best, and gloating over them as they

94Shelley, Co e Works, II, 151, 11. 48-50. 95 Kurtz, a. cit., p. 200.

96Shelley, Complete Works, IV, 28, 11. 329-332. 9 7 Ibid., p. 29, 11. 382-384. 114

lie strewn about in that apparent confusion of child's play, so bewildering to outsiders of the practical world. The Witch is probably an incarnation of the Spirit of Beauty in a playful mood.9 8

But whether the poem is just playful fantasy, or whether it

is weighted with deep meaning, it remains one of the most

beautiful of Shelley's verses. The words themselves, the

pictures they paint, and the music they make are loveliness

that should not "beat its wings for fame" 99 in vain.

One of the most delicately beautiful of Shelley's

Gothic transmutations is "Ode to the West Wind." This spark from "an unextinguished hearth"1 0 0 has, as Shelley wished his verse to have, "sweet though in sadness." 1 0 1 Pain,

suffering, triumph (though permitted personal application) are fused in idealized utterance. A new symbol has been added to Shelley's expression:

The wind, which with a powerful animism is named the very breath of Autumn's being, in a splendid spon- daic chaunt is described as driving the dead leaves, "yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, pestilence-stricken multitudes,," which flee like ghosts from an enchanter. Here are all the old properties: the ghosts and the enchanter, from the juvenilia and elsewhere, almost everywhere, in his poetry. . . . But now all these former properties and ideas are clothed in a new splendour of verbal beauty, and im- bued with a greater meaning than Shelley has ever achieved in equal space, from previous management of them.I02

9 8 Todhunter, p. cit., p. 225. 99 Shelley, Complete Works, IV, 17, 1. 19. 100Ibid., p. 297, 1. 66. 1 0 1Ibid., p. 297, 1. 61.

1 0 2 Kurtz, op. cit., pp. 202-203. 115

The closing lines of "Ode to the West Wind" and lines taken

from verses found in St. Irvyne show Shelley's retention of

an idea and his later expression of it with greater artistry

and deeper meaning. Eloise sings,

Oh! when shall day dawn on the night of the grave, Or summer succeed to the winter of death?l0 3

Shelley asks,

0, wind, If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

In Prometheus Unbound, Shelley is splashing "at a ten- league canvas with brushes of comet's hair." It is his answer to the misery of mankind. "It was inevitable," declares Kurtz, "that Shelley should eventually make a syn- thesis of his own experience in a great world-theme. In

Prometheus, at last he found an adequate theme, in which he could unite social breadth of meaning with personal inten- sity of feeling. 104 Such a procedure assures, in a person of Shelley's habit of retaining the core of each idea that has helped to form his thinking and writing, that familiar themes, devices, and characters will reappear, but will be colored by the greatness of the subject he is developing.

The physical miseries which Verezzi suffers become translated into the mental anguish of Prometheus -- the extreme torture of the sensitive mind on viewing the suffering

1 0 3 Shelley, CoMlete Works, V, 173. 4 1O Kurtz, _. cit., p. 158. 116 of humanity. The earthworms in Verezzi's hair cannot be classed with the refined cruelty practiced on Prometheus by the furies who show him the misery abroad in the world.

Wolfstein soliloquizes, and so does Prometheus. Wolfstein revels in self-pity, a posturing Gothic puppet; Prometheus,

"nailed in misery to these eagle-baffling mountains . . . utters his soliloquy, itself elemental and vast and stormy, like his outlook: a splendid summation of rebellion against evil, of courageous failure, endless suffering, and infinite

1 0 5 defiance." Zastrozzi stands and fearlessly awaits the fiat of his destiny; Prometheus is urged by Mercury to yield to Jupiter, but he refuses and faces the attacking furies as steadfastly as Zastrozzi faces the tortures of the rack. Shelley's boyhood incantations to raise the devil and G:inotti's summoning the frightful prince of terror are forerunners of Prometheus' "Phantasm of Jupiter, arise, appear !106

The frightful phantom which arises is the summation of all Shelley's villains. He is tyranny personified. As the shade of Jupiter appears in obedience to the summons,

The sound is of a whirlwind underground, Earthquake, and fire, and mountains cloven; The shape is awful like the sound, Clothed in dark purple, star-inwoven. A sceptre of pale gold To stay steps proud, o'er the slow cloud

1 0 5 Kurtz, o2. cit., p. 160. lO6 Shelley, Coplete Works, II, 185, 1. 221. 117

His veined hand doth hold. Cruel he looks, but calm and strong Like one who does, not suffers wrong.1 0 7

These two antagonists have been long in their development. They appear first as the puppet figures of puerile

Gothic fiction; Laon and Cythna show them transformed into the oppressed and the oppressor, political figures; in Pro- metheus Unbound they are the symbol of all tyranny and victims of tyranny. They have been translated to the realm of mythological symbolism. Demogorgon, a phantasm, a mighty darkness, has progressed from the simple ghost to a symbol of eternity. Asia, the feminine element, has grown from the

Gothic heroine, "a rosy embodiment of all the virtues," through Cythna, champion of women's freedom, the spirit of intellectual beauty, and the Witch of Atlas to the symbol of the loveliness of the world.

Moods and settings also undergo a transmutation process. Desolation, a favorite theme of the Gothicists, becomes beautiful in this exquisite lyric:

Ah, sister! Desolation is a delicate thing: It walks not on the earth, it floats not on the air, But treads with lulling footstep, and fans with silent wing The tender hopes which in their hearts the best and gentlest bear; Who, soothed to false repose by the fanning plumes above, And the music-stirring motion of its soft and busy feet, Dream visions of serial joy, and call the monster, love, And wake, and find the shadow Pain, as he whom now we greet.108

1 0 7 1bid., p. 186, 11. 231-239. 8 l bid., p. 203, 11. 772-779. 118

The lurid scenery of the juvenilia becomes strange, wonderful, and beautiful; yet it retains its Gothic characteristic of reflecting the moods of the characters:

The tongueless Caverns of the craggy hills Cried, 'Misery!' then; the hollow Heaven replied, 'Miseryl' And the Ocean's purple waves, Climbing the land, howled to the lashing winds, And the pale nations heard it, 'Misery! '109

In Hellas, a dramatic fragment, a phantom is summoned in the manner reminiscent of Prometheus Unbound. At the command of Ahasuerus, "The sulphureous mist is raised, 110 and the shade of Mahomet appears to reveal that

the full tide of power Ebbs to its death.lll

Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, has undergone another trans- formation. He is now one

whose spirit is a chronicle, Of strange and secret and forgotten things.1 1 2

The rebel of Queen Mab is described by Mahmud as being

raised above thy fellow men By thought as I by power -- 113

Thou art as God whom thou contem- platest.114

1091bid., p. 182, 11. 107-111. 1 1 OIbid., III, 45, 1. 830.

1111bi~d., pp. 45-46, 11. 848-849. 11 2 Ibid., p. 23, 11. 133-134.

1 13Ibid., p. 42, 11. 738-739.

l14Ibid.,1 p. 43, 1. 761. 119

On the other hand, Charles the First, also a dramatic fragment, is lacking in such specific Gothic elements as the

Wandering Jew. It doescontain, however, the transmuted

theme of tyranny and bigotry. Charles I, from what is revealed of him in his role of oppressor, would seem to be a

"gentle idealist, with much personal lovableness, and an affectionate domestic nature, transformed into a tyrant by being the slave of a tyrannical idea.n 1 1 5 Henrietta, the queen, like Matilda of Zastrozzi, unscrupulously uses argu- ment and flattery to gain her ends. The vice of the papacy is stressed with true Gothic intolerance. A further connection with Shelley's early writing appears in a variation of the summer-winter idea of "Bereavement":

. . . who would love May flowers If they succeed not to Winter's flaw.l16

Epipsychidion contains another version of this same theme:

From Spring to Autumn's sere maturity Light it unto the Winter of the tomb.'17

This poem, based on the old Gothic theme of incarceration of a beautiful daughter by the tyrannical parent, is Shelley's greatest expression, undoubtedly, of ideal love. It is the "culmination of a long development beginning with the

11 5 Todhunter, op. cit., p. 273. l1 6 Shelley, Complete Works, IV, 146, 11. 176-177. 17Ibid., II, 367, 11. 365-366. 1120

juvenilia, and extending through the love-in-death themes

of Queen Mab, Prince Athanase, The Revolt of Islam, Rosalind

and Helen, Julian and Maddalo, The Sensitive Plant, and The

Witch of Atlas, to say nothing of many of the lyrics. "118

Though this love is expressed with deeper reality in that

the ideal is expressed in terms of the real, it is still a

"violet-shrouded grave of woe."1 1 9

The Triumph of Life, unfinished at Shelley's death, makes use of the daemon-of-the-world idea employed in Queen

Mab and the Daemon of the World. In the Triumph of Life the

Shape in the car is life itself. The theme, however, is worked out with deeper spirituality and sensitiveness to nature. The character of this advance in Shelley's artistry

is pointed out by Kurtz:

To catch a view of how Shelley's mind characteris- tically reworked a theme as his artistry and experience deepened, one need only put Mab, the Daemon fragments, and the Triumph side by side. The history of the development, if not the making, of a poet's mind is in those three poems. A boy's ardent but rhetorical mouthing of what he has read about life, and a deeper passage or two in which he speaks better than he knows, are in Mab; a firmer dramatic grasp and a stronger artistry of image and music, but a yet unconquered bookishness, are in the Daemon; a profound insight and sincerity, fully informed by real and tragic experience, and a new music, the inevitable garment as well as soul of the greater understanding, are in the Triumph.120

ll 8 Kurtz, p.2 cit., p. 249.

11 9 Shelley, Complete Works, II, 359, 1. 69.

1 2 0 Kurtz, p. cit., p. 51. 121

Though the Triumph of Life and Prometheus Unbound show the highest point that Shelley's Gothic transmutations

reach, Adonais is a more exquisitely finished product.

Dealing with the supreme theme of the Gothic school --

death -- the poem shows the final art with which Shelley used this subject. Viewed as an elegy, it is beautiful; however, Shelley's transmutation of the crude, earlier themes may be traced. The first step in this sequence is

"Bereavement," written, perhaps, in Shelley's sixteenth year and included in St. Irvyne. In this early poem,

the sorrow of bereavement is essayed in an utterly incongruous medlyof galloping verse and dancing double rhyme. Again, it is hard, at first glance, to see in this boy, inexperienced in sadness, rid- ing cockhorse through quiet grief, swelling bosoms, streaming tears, and other soft signs of affection, any promise of the poet of the Adonais. Yet it is not too much to say, perhaps, that such a set of verses as "Bereavement" is the first elegiac pattern that Shelley, through long tutoring of years of realized grief and deepening poetic power, gradually converted, in many successive amendments into the highly wrought art of his greatest elegy.1 21

It is interesting to observe that in Adonais the Shel- leyan hero appears -- the one frail Form with branded brow who wanders with feeble steps over the world's wilderness. Righteous wrath at tyranny and persecution is present, also, in his furious denunciation of the reviewers.

Their punishment is to be the same as that meted out to the tyrants of Laon and Cythna: self-realization. But it is

12 1 Ibid. p. 8. 122

in the treatment of death itself that Shelley shows his

greatest aesthetic improvement. The grave and the coffin-

worm have lost their terror; ugliness no longer dominates

the death motif; sadness and sorrow remain, but death now is absorbed into the Eternal, where "naught waits for the

good but the spirit of love.",1 2 2

Shelley's faith in the essential indestructibility of

the beautiful and the good and his artistic expression of it was not the outcome of sudden realization:

Always he desired to see the unseen, the land beyond death, the "tower beyond tragedy."1 He played, therefore, with ghosts, wrestled with materialism, pursued dreams, preached idealism, suffered sig- nificant disappointment in all material adventures and disillusionment in all ardent friendships and loves, created hope out of wreck, attained vision, and then suddenly departed into the death which had always interested him as much as, if not more than anything else.l 2 3

His ashes were carried by Trelawney to Rome and buried in the Protestant cemetery. The lines which Trelawney added to Shelley's epitaph have double meaning: the first relates to the spirit of Shelley; the second, to the themes which, through the alchemy of his poetic genius, suffer a like change:

Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange.

This transmutation process is best described in Shelley's own words:

12 2 1bid., p. 11. 1 2 31bid., p. xxi. 123

Then thou becamest, a boy, More daring in thy frenzies: every shape Monstrous or vast, or beautifully wild, Which from sensation's relics, fancy culls; The spirits of the air, the shuddering ghost, The genii of the elements, the powers That give a shape to nature's varied works, Had life and place .

Then manhood gave Its strength and ardour to thy frenzied brain; Thine eager gaze scanned the stupendous scene.

Awhile thou stoodest Baffled and gloomy; then thou didst sum up The elements of all that thou didst know;

0 9 0 0 000 0 . 0 . 0...... 0 0& 0 0 0 09 . . Thou didst give it name and form, Intelligence, and unity, and power.124

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