The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Part 57

He looked as calm and keen as is the engine Which tortures and which kills, exempt itself From aught that it inflicts; a marble form, A rite, a law, a custom: not a man. _5 He frowned, as if to frown had been the trick Of his machinery, on the advocates Presenting the defences, which he tore And threw behind, muttering with hoa.r.s.e, harsh voice: 'Which among ye defended their old father _10 Killed in his sleep?' Then to another: 'Thou Dost this in virtue of thy place; 'tis well.'

He turned to me then, looking deprecation, And said these three words, coldly: 'They must die.'

BERNARDO: And yet you left him not?

CAMILLO: I urged him still; _15 Pleading, as I could guess, the devilish wrong Which prompted your unnatural parent's death.

And he replied: 'Paolo Santa Croce Murdered his mother yester evening, And he is fled. Parricide grows so rife _20 That soon, for some just cause no doubt, the young Will strangle us all, dozing in our chairs.

Authority, and power, and h.o.a.ry hair Are grown crimes capital. You are my nephew, You come to ask their pardon; stay a moment; _25 Here is their sentence; never see me more Till, to the letter, it be all fulfilled.'

BERNARDO: O G.o.d, not so! I did believe indeed That all you said was but sad preparation For happy news. Oh, there are words and looks _30 To bend the sternest purpose! Once I knew them, Now I forget them at my dearest need.

What think you if I seek him out, and bathe His feet and robe with hot and bitter tears?

Importune him with prayers, vexing his brain _35 With my perpetual cries, until in rage He strike me with his pastoral cross, and trample Upon my prostrate head, so that my blood May stain the senseless dust on which he treads, And remorse waken mercy? I will do it! _40 Oh, wait till I return!

[RUSHES OUT.]

CAMILLO: Alas, poor boy!

A wreck-devoted seaman thus might pray To the deaf sea.

[ENTER LUCRETIA, BEATRICE, AND GIACOMO, GUARDED.]

BEATRICE: I hardly dare to fear That thou bring'st other news than a just pardon.

CAMILLO: May G.o.d in heaven be less inexorable _45 To the Pope's prayers than he has been to mine.

Here is the sentence and the warrant.

BEATRICE [WILDLY]: O My G.o.d! Can it be possible I have To die so suddenly? So young to go Under the obscure, cold, rotting, wormy ground! _50 To be nailed down into a narrow place; To see no more sweet sunshine; hear no more Blithe voice of living thing; muse not again Upon familiar thoughts, sad, yet thus lost-- How fearful! to be nothing! Or to be... _55 What? Oh, where am I? Let me not go mad!

Sweet Heaven, forgive weak thoughts! If there should be No G.o.d, no Heaven, no Earth in the void world; The wide, gray, lampless, deep, unpeopled world!

If all things then should be...my father's spirit, _60 His eye, his voice, his touch surrounding me; The atmosphere and breath of my dead life!

If sometimes, as a shape more like himself, Even the form which tortured me on earth, Masked in gray hairs and wrinkles, he should come _65 And wind me in his h.e.l.lish arms, and fix His eyes on mine, and drag me down, down, down!

For was he not alone omnipotent On Earth, and ever present? Even though dead, Does not his spirit live in all that breathe, _70 And work for me and mine still the same ruin, Scorn, pain, despair? Who ever yet returned To teach the laws of Death's untrodden realm?

Unjust perhaps as those which drive us now, Oh, whither, whither?

LUCRETIA: Trust in G.o.d's sweet love, _75 The tender promises of Christ: ere night, Think, we shall be in Paradise.

BEATRICE: 'Tis past!

Whatever comes, my heart shall sink no more.

And yet, I know not why, your words strike chill: How tedious, false, and cold seem all things. I _80 Have met with much injustice in this world; No difference has been made by G.o.d or man, Or any power moulding my wretched lot, 'Twixt good or evil, as regarded me.

I am cut off from the only world I know, _85 From light, and life, and love, in youth's sweet prime.

You do well telling me to trust in G.o.d; I hope I do trust in him. In whom else Can any trust? And yet my heart is cold.

[DURING THE LATTER SPEECHES GIACOMO HAS RETIRED CONVERSING WITH CAMILLO, WHO NOW GOES OUT; GIACOMO ADVANCES.]

GIACOMO: Know you not, Mother...Sister, know you not? _90 Bernardo even now is gone to implore The Pope to grant our pardon.

LUCRETIA: Child, perhaps It will be granted. We may all then live To make these woes a tale for distant years: Oh, what a thought! It gushes to my heart _95 Like the warm blood.

BEATRICE: Yet both will soon be cold.

Oh, trample out that thought! Worse than despair, Worse than the bitterness of death, is hope: It is the only ill which can find place Upon the giddy, sharp, and narrow hour _100 Tottering beneath us. Plead with the swift frost That it should spare the eldest flower of spring: Plead with awakening earthquake, o'er whose couch Even now a city stands, strong, fair, and free; Now stench and blackness yawn, like death. Oh, plead _105 With famine, or wind-walking Pestilence, Blind lightning, or the deaf sea, not with man!

Cruel, cold, formal man; righteous in words, In deeds a Cain. No, Mother, we must die: Since such is the reward of innocent lives; _110 Such the alleviation of worst wrongs.

And whilst our murderers live, and hard, cold men, Smiling and slow, walk through a world of tears To death as to life's sleep; 'twere just the grave Were some strange joy for us. Come, obscure Death, _115 And wind me in thine all-embracing arms!

Like a fond mother hide me in thy bosom, And rock me to the sleep from which none wake.

Live ye, who live, subject to one another As we were once, who now...

NOTE: _105 yawn edition 1821; yawns editions 1819, 1839.

[BERNARDO RUSHES IN.]

BERNARDO: Oh, horrible! _120 That tears, that looks, that hope poured forth in prayer, Even till the heart is vacant and despairs, Should all be vain! The ministers of death Are waiting round the doors. I thought I saw Blood on the face of one...What if 'twere fancy? _125 Soon the heart's blood of all I love on earth Will sprinkle him, and he will wipe it off As if 'twere only rain. O life! O world!

Cover me! let me be no more! To see That perfect mirror of pure innocence _130 Wherein I gazed, and grew happy and good, Shivered to dust! To see thee, Beatrice, Who made all lovely thou didst look upon...

Thee, light of life ... dead, dark! while I say, sister, To hear I have no sister; and thou, Mother, _135 Whose love was as a bond to all our loves...

Dead! The sweet bond broken!

[ENTER CAMILLO AND GUARDS.]

They come! Let me Kiss those warm lips before their crimson leaves Are blighted...white...cold. Say farewell, before Death chokes that gentle voice! Oh, let me hear _140 You speak!

NOTE: _136 was as a Rossetti cj.; was a editions 1819, 1821, 1839.

BEATRICE: Farewell, my tender brother. Think Of our sad fate with gentleness, as now: And let mild, pitying thoughts lighten for thee Thy sorrow's load. Err not in harsh despair, But tears and patience. One thing more, my child: _145 For thine own sake be constant to the love Thou bearest us; and to the faith that I, Though wrapped in a strange cloud of crime and shame, Lived ever holy and unstained. And though Ill tongues shall wound me, and our common name _150 Be as a mark stamped on thine innocent brow For men to point at as they pa.s.s, do thou Forbear, and never think a thought unkind Of those, who perhaps love thee in their graves.

So mayest thou die as I do; fear and pain _155 Being subdued. Farewell! Farewell! Farewell!

BERNARDO: I cannot say, farewell!

CAMILLO: Oh, Lady Beatrice!

BEATRICE: Give yourself no unnecessary pain, My dear Lord Cardinal. Here, Mother, tie My girdle for me, and bind up this hair _160 In any simple knot; ay, that does well.

And yours I see is coming down. How often Have we done this for one another; now We shall not do it any more. My Lord, We are quite ready. Well, 'tis very well. _165

THE END.

NOTE ON THE CENCI, BY MRS. Sh.e.l.lEY.

The sort of mistake that Sh.e.l.ley made as to the extent of his own genius and powers, which led him deviously at first, but lastly into the direct track that enabled him fully to develop them, is a curious instance of his modesty of feeling, and of the methods which the human mind uses at once to deceive itself, and yet, in its very delusion, to make its way out of error into the path which Nature has marked out as its right one. He often incited me to attempt the writing a tragedy: he conceived that I possessed some dramatic talent, and he was always most earnest and energetic in his exhortations that I should cultivate any talent I possessed, to the utmost. I entertained a truer estimate of my powers; and above all (though at that time not exactly aware of the fact) I was far too young to have any chance of succeeding, even moderately, in a species of composition that requires a greater scope of experience in, and sympathy with, human pa.s.sion than could then have fallen to my lot,--or than any perhaps, except Sh.e.l.ley, ever possessed, even at the age of twenty-six, at which he wrote The Cenci.

On the other hand, Sh.e.l.ley most erroneously conceived himself to be dest.i.tute of this talent. He believed that one of the first requisites was the capacity of forming and following-up a story or plot. He fancied himself to he defective in this portion of imagination: it was that which gave him least pleasure in the writings of others, though he laid great store by it as the proper framework to support the sublimest efforts of poetry. He a.s.serted that he was too metaphysical and abstract, too fond of the theoretical and the ideal, to succeed as a tragedian. It perhaps is not strange that I shared this opinion with himself; for he had hitherto shown no inclination for, nor given any specimen of his powers in framing and supporting the interest of a story, either in prose or verse. Once or twice, when he attempted such, he had speedily thrown it aside, as being even disagreeable to him as an occupation.

The subject he had suggested for a tragedy was Charles I: and he had written to me: 'Remember, remember Charles I. I have been already imagining how you would conduct some scenes. The second volume of "St.

Leon" begins with this proud and true sentiment: "There is nothing which the human mind can conceive which it may not execute."

Shakespeare was only a human being.' These words were written in 1818, while we were in Lombardy, when he little thought how soon a work of his own would prove a proud comment on the pa.s.sage he quoted. When in Rome, in 1819, a friend put into our hands the old ma.n.u.script account of the story of the Cenci. We visited the Colonna and Doria palaces, where the portraits of Beatrice were to be found; and her beauty cast the reflection of its own grace over her appalling story. Sh.e.l.ley's imagination became strongly excited, and he urged the subject to me as one fitted for a tragedy. More than ever I felt my incompetence; but I entreated him to write it instead; and he began, and proceeded swiftly, urged on by intense sympathy with the sufferings of the human beings whose pa.s.sions, so long cold in the tomb, he revived, and gifted with poetic language. This tragedy is the only one of his works that he communicated to me during its progress. We talked over the arrangement of the scenes together. I speedily saw the great mistake we had made, and triumphed in the discovery of the new talent brought to light from that mine of wealth (never, alas, through his untimely death, worked to its depths)--his richly gifted mind.

We suffered a severe affliction in Rome by the loss of our eldest child, who was of such beauty and promise as to cause him deservedly to be the idol of our hearts. We left the capital of the world, anxious for a time to escape a spot a.s.sociated too intimately with his presence and loss. (Such feelings haunted him when, in "The Cenci", he makes Beatrice speak to Cardinal Camillo of

'that fair blue-eyed child Who was the lodestar of your life:'--and say-- All see, since his most swift and piteous death, That day and night, and heaven and earth, and time, And all the things hoped for or done therein Are changed to you, through your exceeding grief.')

Some friends of ours were residing in the neighbourhood of Leghorn, and we took a small house, Villa Valsovano, about half-way between the town and Monte Nero, where we remained during the summer. Our villa was situated in the midst of a podere; the peasants sang as they worked beneath our windows, during the heats of a very hot season, and in the evening the water-wheel creaked as the process of irrigation went on, and the fireflies flashed from among the myrtle hedges: Nature was bright, sunshiny, and cheerful, or diversified by storms of a majestic terror, such as we had never before witnessed.

At the top of the house there was a sort of terrace. There is often such in Italy, generally roofed: this one was very small, yet not only roofed but glazed. This Sh.e.l.ley made his study; it looked out on a wide prospect of fertile country, and commanded a view of the near sea. The storms that sometimes varied our day showed themselves most picturesquely as they were driven across the ocean; sometimes the dark lurid clouds dipped towards the waves, and became water-spouts that churned up the waters beneath, as they were chased onward and scattered by the tempest. At other times the dazzling sunlight and heat made it almost intolerable to every other; but Sh.e.l.ley basked in both, and his health and spirits revived under their influence. In this airy cell he wrote the princ.i.p.al part of "The Cenci". He was making a study of Calderon at the time, reading his best tragedies with an accomplished lady living near us, to whom his letter from Leghorn was addressed during the following year. He admired Calderon, both for his poetry and his dramatic genius; but it shows his judgement and originality that, though greatly struck by his first acquaintance with the Spanish poet, none of his peculiarities crept into the composition of "The Cenci"; and there is no trace of his new studies, except in that pa.s.sage to which he himself alludes as suggested by one in "El Purgatorio de San Patricio".

Sh.e.l.ley wished "The Cenci" to be acted. He was not a playgoer, being of such fastidious taste that he was easily disgusted by the bad filling-up of the inferior parts. While preparing for our departure from England, however, he saw Miss O'Neil several times. She was then in the zenith of her glory; and Sh.e.l.ley was deeply moved by her impersonation of several parts, and by the graceful sweetness, the intense pathos, the sublime vehemence of pa.s.sion she displayed. She was often in his thoughts as he wrote: and, when he had finished, he became anxious that his tragedy should be acted, and receive the advantage of having this accomplished actress to fill the part of the heroine. With this view he wrote the following letter to a friend in London: