Mathilda by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (free novel reading sites txt) ๐
Woodville, the poet, is virtually perfect, "glorious from his youth," like "an angel with winged feet"--all beauty, all goodness, all gentleness. He is also successful as a poet, his poem written at the age of twenty-three having been universally acclaimed. Making allowance for Mary's exaggeration and wishful thinking, we easily recognize Shelley: Woodville has his poetic ideals, the charm of his conversation, his high moral qualities, his sense of
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[50] Cf. Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, I, 48: "the wingless, crawling hours." This phrase ("my part in submitting ... minutes") and the remainder of the paragraph are an elaboration of the simple phrase in F of FโA, "my part in enduring itโ," with its ambiguous pronoun. The last page of Chapter VIII shows many corrections, even in the MS of Mathilda. It is another passage that Mary seems to have written in some agitation of spirit. Cf. note 26.
[51] In F of FโA there are several false starts before this sentence. The name there is Welford; on the next page it becomes Lovel, which is thereafter used throughout The Fields of Fancy and appears twice, probably inadvertently, in Mathilda, where it is crossed out. In a few of the S-R fr it is Herbert. In Mathilda it is at first Herbert, which is used until after the rewritten conclusion (see note 83) but is corrected throughout to Woodville. On the final pages Woodville alone is used. (It is interesting, though not particularly significant, that one of the minor characters in Lamb's John Woodvil is named Lovel. Such mellifluous names rolled easily from the pens of all the romantic writers.) This, her first portrait of Shelley in fiction, gave Mary considerable trouble: revisions from the rough drafts are numerous. The passage on Woodville's endowment by fortune, for example, is much more concise and effective than that in S-R fr. Also Mary curbed somewhat the extravagance of her praise of Woodville, omitting such hyperboles as "When he appeared a new sun seemed to rise on the day & he had all the benignity of the dispensor of light," and "he seemed to come as the God of the world."
[52] This passage beginning "his station was too high" is not in F of FโA.
[53] This passage beginning "He was a believer in the divinity of genius" is not in F of FโA. Cf. the discussion of genius in "Giovanni Villani" (Mary Shelley's essay in The Liberal, No. IV, 1823), including the sentence: "The fixed stars appear to abberate [sic]; but it is we that move, not they." It is tempting to conclude that this is a quotation or echo of something which Shelley said, perhaps in conversation with Byron. I have not found it in any of his published writings.
[54] Is this wishful thinking about Shelley's poetry? It is well known that a year later Mary remonstrated with Shelley about The Witch of Atlas, desiring, as she said in her 1839 note, "that Shelley should increase his popularity.... It was not only that I wished him to acquire popularity as redounding to his fame; but I believed that he would obtain a greater mastery over his own powers, and greater happiness in his mind, if public applause crowned his endeavours.... Even now I believe that I was in the right." Shelley's response is in the six introductory stanzas of the poem.
[55] The preceding paragraphs about Elinor and Woodville are the result of considerable revision for the better of F of FโA and S-R fr. Mary scored out a paragraph describing Elinor, thus getting rid of several clichรฉs ("fortune had smiled on her," "a favourite of fortune," "turning tears of misery to those of joy"); she omitted a clause which offered a weak motivation of Elinor's father's will (the possibility of her marrying, while hardly more than a child, one of her guardian's sons); she curtailed the extravagance of a rhapsody on the perfect happiness which Woodville and Elinor would have enjoyed.
[56] The death scene is elaborated from F of FโA and made more melodramatic by the addition of Woodville's plea and of his vigil by the death-bed.
[57] F of FโA ends here and F of FโB resumes.
[58] A similar passage about Mathilda's fears is cancelled in F of FโB but it appears in revised form in S-R fr. There is also among these fragments a long passage, not used in Mathilda, identifying Woodville as someone she had met in London. Mary was wise to discard it for the sake of her story. But the first part of it is interesting for its correspondence with fact: "I knew him when I first went to London with my father he was in the height of his glory & happinessโElinor was living & in her life he livedโI did not know her but he had been introduced to my father & had once or twice visited usโI had then gazed with wonder on his beauty & listened to him with delightโ" Shelley had visited Godwin more than "once or twice" while Harriet was still living, and Mary had seen him. Of course she had seen Harriet too, in 1812, when she came with Shelley to call on Godwin. Elinor and Harriet, however, are completely unlike.
[59] Here and on many succeeding pages, where Mathilda records the words and opinions of Woodville, it is possible to hear the voice of Shelley. This paragraph, which is much expanded from F of FโB, may be compared with the discussion of good and evil in Julian and Maddalo and with Prometheus Unbound and A Defence of Poetry.
[60] In the revision of this passage Mathilda's sense of her pollution is intensified; for example, by addition of "infamy and guilt was mingled with my portion."
[61] Some phrases of self-criticism are added in this paragraph.
[62] In F of FโB this quotation is used in the laudanum scene, just before Level's (Woodville's) long speech of dissuasion.
[63] The passage "air, & to suffer ... my compassionate friend" is on a slip of paper pasted across the page.
[64] This phrase sustains the metaphor better than that in F of FโB: "puts in a word."
[65] This entire paragraph is added to F of FโB; it is in rough draft in S-R fr.
[66] This is changed in the MS of Mathilda from "a violent thunderstorm." Evidently Mary decided to avoid using another thunderstorm at a crisis in the story.
[67] The passage "It is true ... I will" is on a slip of paper pasted across the page.
[68] In the revision from F of FโB the style of this whole episode becomes more concise and specific.
[69] An improvement over the awkward phrasing in F of FโB: "a friend who will not repulse my request that he would accompany me."
[70] These two paragraphs are not in F of FโB; portions of them are in S-R fr.
[71] This speech is greatly improved in style over that in F of FโB, more concise in expression (though somewhat expanded), more specific. There are no corresponding S-R fr to show the process of revision. With the ideas expressed here cf. Shelley, Julian and Maddalo, ll. 182-187, 494-499, and his letter to Claire in November, 1820 (Julian Works, X, 226). See also White, Shelley, II, 378.
[72] This solecism, copied from F of FโB, is not characteristic of Mary Shelley.
[73] This paragraph prepares for the eventual softening of Mathilda's feeling. The idea is somewhat elaborated from F of FโB. Other changes are necessitated by the change in the mode of presenting the story. In The Fields of Fancy Mathilda speaks as one who has already died.
[74] Cf. Shelley's emphasis on hope and its association with love in all his work. When Mary wrote Mathilda she knew Queen Mab (see Part VIII, ll. 50-57, and Part IX, ll. 207-208), the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, and the first three acts of Prometheus Unbound. The fourth act was written in the winter of 1819, but Demogorgon's words may already have been at least adumbrated before the beginning of November:
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates.
[75] Shelley had written, "Desolation is a delicate thing" (Prometheus Unbound, Act I, l. 772) and called the Spirit of the Earth "a delicate spirit" (Ibid., Act III, Sc. iv, l. 6).
[76] Purgatorio, Canto 28, ll. 31-33. Perhaps by this time Shelley had translated ll. 1-51 of this canto. He had read the Purgatorio in April, 1818, and again with Mary in August, 1819, just as she was beginning to write Mathilda. Shelley showed his translation to Medwin in 1820, but there seems to be no record of the date of composition.
[77] An air with this title was published about 1800 in London by Robert Birchall. See Catalogue of Printed Music Published between 1487 and 1800 and now in the British Museum, by W. Barclay Squire, 1912. Neither author nor composer is listed in the Catalogue.
[78] This paragraph is materially changed from F of FโB. Clouds and darkness are substituted for starlight, silence for the sound of the wind. The weather here matches Mathilda's mood. Four and a half lines of verse (which I have not been able to identify, though they sound Shelleyanโare they Mary's own?) are omitted: of the stars she says,
But they are silent;โstill they roll along
Immeasurably distant; & the vault
Built round by those white clouds, enormous clouds
Still deepens its unfathomable depth.
[79] If Mary quotes Coleridge's Ancient Mariner intentionally here, she is ironic, for this is no merciful rain, except for the fact that it brings on the illness which leads to Mathilda's death, for which she longs.
[80] This quotation from Christabel (which suggests that the preceding echo is intentional) is not in F of FโB.
[81] Cf. the description which opens Mathilda.
[82] Among Lord Abinger's papers, in Mary's hand, are some comparable (but very bad) fragmentary verses addressed to Mother Earth.
[83] At this point four sheets are cut out of the notebook. They are evidently those with pages numbered 217 to 223 which are among the S-R fr. They contain the conclusion of the story, ending, as does F of FโB with Mathilda's words spoken to Diotima in the Elysian Fields: "I am here, not with my father, but listening to lessons of wisdom, which will one day bring me to him when we shall never part. THE END." Some passages are scored out, but not this final sentence. Tenses are changed from past to future. The name Herbert is changed to Woodville. The explanation must be that Mary was hurrying to finish the revision (quite drastic on these final pages) and the transcription of her story before her confinement, and that in her haste she copied the pages from F of FโB as they stood. Then, realizing that they did not fit Mathilda, she began to revise them; but to keep her MS neat, she cut out these pages and wrote the fair copy. There is no break
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