"Think of all this at the frightful hour of midnight, when the Hell-demon leans over your sleeping form, and inspires those thoughts which eventually will lead you to the gates of destruction… The fiend of the Sussex solitudes shrieked in the wilderness at midnight—he thirsts for thy detestable gore, impious Fergus. But the day of retribution will arrive. H + D=Hell Devil."[96]
That Shelley could jest thus lightly in the mock-terrific vein shows that his mind was fundamentally sane and well-balanced, and that he only regarded "fiendmongering" as a pleasantly thrilling diversion. His Zastrozzi (1810) and St. Irvyne (1811) were probably written with the same zest and spirit as his harrowing letter to "impious Fergus." They are the outcome of a boyish ambition to practise the art of freezing the blood, and their composition was a source of pride and delight to their author. A letter to Peacock (Nov. 9, 1818) from Italy re-echoes the note of child-like enjoyment in weaving romances:
"We went to see heaven knows how many more palaces—Ranuzzi, Marriscalchi, Aldobrandi. If you want Italian names for any purpose, here they are; I should be glad of them if I was writing a novel."
Zastrozzi was published in April, 1810, while Shelley was still at Eton, and with the £40 paid for the romance, he is said to have given a banquet to eight of his friends. Though the story is little more than a réchauffé of previous tales of terror, it evidently attained some measure of popularity. It was reprinted in The Romancist and Novelist's Library in 1839. Like Godwin, Shelley contrived to smuggle a little contraband theory into his novels, but his stock-in-trade is mainly that of the terrormongers. The book to which Shelley was chiefly indebted was Zofloya or the Moor (1806), by the notorious Charlotte Dacre or "Rosa Matilda," but there are many reminiscences of Mrs. Radcliffe and of "Monk" Lewis. The sources of Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne have been investigated in the Modern Language Review (Jan. 1912), by Mr. A. M. D. Hughes, who gives a complete analysis of the plot of Zofloya, and indicates many parallels with Shelley's novels. The heroine of Zofloya is clearly a lineal descendant of Lewis's Matilda, though Victoria di Loredani, with all her vices, never actually degenerates into a fiend. Victoria, it need hardly be stated, is nobly born, but she has been brought up amid frivolous society by a worthless mother, and: "The wildest passions predominated in her bosom; to gratify them she possessed an unshrinking, relentless soul that would not startle at the darkest crime."
Zofloya, who spurs her on, is the Devil himself. The plot is highly melodramatic, and contains a headlong flight, an earthquake and several violent deaths. In Zastrozzi, Shelley draws upon the characters and incidents of this story very freely. His lack of originality is so obvious as to need no comment. The very names he chooses are borrowed. Julia is the name of the pensive heroine in Mrs. Radcliffe's Sicilian Romance. Matilda carries with it ugly memories of the lady in Lewis's Monk; Verezzi occurs in The Mysteries of Udolpho; Zastrozzi is formed by prefixing an extra syllable to the name Strozzi from Zofloya. The incidents are those which happen every day in the realm of terror. The villain, the hero, the melancholy heroine, and her artful rival, develop no new traits, but act strictly in accordance with tradition. They never infringe the rigid code of manners and morals laid down for them by previous generations. The scenery is invariably appropriate as a setting to the incidents, and even the weather may be relied on to act in a thoroughly conventional manner. The characters are remarkable for their violent emotions and their marvellously expressive eyes. When Verezzi's senses are "chilled with the frigorific torpidity of despair," his eyes "roll horribly in their sockets." When "direst revenge swallows up every other feeling" in the soul of Matilda, her eyes "scintillate with a fiend-like expression." Incidents follow one another with a wild and stupefying rapidity. Every moment is a crisis. The style is startlingly abrupt, and the short, disconnected paragraphs are fired off like so many pistol shots. The sequence of events is mystifying—Zastrozzi's motive for persecuting Verezzi is darkly concealed until the end of the story, for reasons known only to writers of the novel of terror. Shelley's romance, in short, is no better and perhaps even worse than that of the other disciples of Mrs. Radcliffe and "Monk" Lewis.
St. Irvyne: or the Rosicrucian (1811), though it was written by a "Gentleman of the University of Oxford" and not by a schoolboy, shows slight advance on Zastrozzi either in matter or manner. The plot indeed is more bewildering and baffling than that of Zastrozzi. The action of the story is double and alternate, the scene shifts from place to place, and the characters appear and disappear in an unaccountable and disconcerting fashion. This time Godwin's St. Leon has to be added to the list of Shelley's sources. Ginotti, whose name is stolen from a brigand in Zofloya, is not the devil but one of his sworn henchmen, who has discovered and tasted the elixir vitae. Like Zofloya, he is surrounded by an atmosphere of mystery. So that he may himself die, Ginotti, like the old stranger in St. Leon, is anxious to impart his secret to another. He chooses as his victim, Wolfstein, a young noble who, like Leonardo in Zofloya, has allied himself with a band of brigands. The bandit, Ginotti, aids Wolfstein to escape with a beautiful captive maiden, for whom Shelley adopts the name Megalena from Zofloya. While the lovers are in Genoa, Megalena, discovering Wolfstein with a lady named Olympia, whose "character has been ruined by a false system of education," makes him promise to murder her rival. In Olympia's bedchamber Wolfstein's hand is stayed for a moment by the sight of her beauty—a picture which recalls the powerful scene in Mrs. Radcliffe's Italian, when Schedoni bends over the sleeping Ellena. After Olympia's suicide, Megalena and Wolfstein flee together from Genoa. In the tale of terror, as in the modern film-play, a flight of some kind is almost indispensable. Ginotti, whose habit of disappearing and reappearing reminds us of the ghostly monk in the ruins of Paluzzi, tells his history to Wolfstein, and, at the destined hour, bestows the prescription for the elixir, and appoints a meeting in St. Irvyne's abbey, where Wolfstein stumbles over the corpse of Megalena. Wolfstein refuses to deny God. Both Ginotti and his victim are blasted by lightning, amid which the "frightful prince of terror, borne on the pinions of hell's sulphurous whirlwind," stands before them.
"On a sudden Ginotti's frame, mouldered to a gigantic skeleton, yet two pale and ghastly flames glared in his eyeless sockets. Blackened in terrible convulsions, Wolfstein expired; over him had the power of hell no influence. Yes, endless existence is thine, Ginotti—a dateless and hopeless eternity of horror."
Interspersed with this somewhat inconsequent story are the adventures of Eloise, who is first introduced on her return home, disconsolate, to a ruined abbey. We are given to understand that the story is to unfold the misfortunes which have led to her downfall, but she is happily married ere the close. She accompanies her dying mother on a journey, as Emily in The Mysteries of Udolpho accompanied her father, and meets a mysterious stranger, Nempère, at a lonely house, where they take refuge. Nempère proves to be a less estimable character than Valancourt, who fell to Emily's lot in similar circumstances. He sells her to an English noble, Mountfort, at whose house she meets Fitzeustace, who, like Vivaldi in The Italian, overhears her confession of love for himself. Nempère is killed in a duel by Mountfort. At the close, Shelley states abruptly that Nempère is Ginotti, and Eloise is Wolfstein's sister. In springing a secret upon us suddenly on the last page, Shelley was probably emulating Lewis's Bravo of Venice; but the conclusion, which is intended to forge a connecting link between the tales, is unsatisfying. It is not surprising that the publisher, Stockdale, demanded some further elucidation of the mystery. Ginotti, apparently, dies twice, and Shelley's letters fail to solve the problem. He wrote to Stockdale: "Ginotti, as you will see, did not die by Wolfstein's hand, but by the influence of that natural magic, which, when the secret was imparted to the latter, destroyed him."[97] A few days later he wrote again, evidently in reply to further questions: "On a re-examination you will perceive that Mountfort physically did kill Ginotti, which must appear from the latter's paleness." The truth seems to be that Shelley was weary of his puppets, and had no desire to extricate them from the tangle in which they were involved, though he was impatient to see St. Irvyne in print, and spoke hopefully of its "selling mechanically to the circulating libraries."
Shelley took advantage of the privilege of writers of romance to palm off on the public some of his earliest efforts at versification. These poems, distributed impartially among the various characters, are introduced with the same laborious artlessness as the songs in a musical comedy. Megalena, though suffering from excruciating mental agony, finds leisure to scratch several verses on the walls of her cell. It would indeed be a poor-spirited heroine who could not deftly turn a sonnet to night or to the moon, however profound her woes. Superhuman strength and courage is an endowment necessary to all who would dwell in the realms of terror and survive the fierce struggle for existence. Peacock, in Nightmare Abbey, paints the Shelley of 1812 in Scythrop, who devours tragedies and German romances, and is troubled with a "passion for reforming the world." "He slept with Horrid Mysteries under his pillow, and dreamed of venerable eleutherarchs and ghastly confederates holding midnight conventions in subterranean caves… He had a certain portion of mechanical genius which his romantic projects tended to develop. He constructed models of cells and recesses, sliding panels and secret passages, that would have baffled the skill of the Parisian police." His bearing was that of a romantic villain: "He stalked about like the grand Inquisitor, and the servants flitted past him like familiars."
Although Shelley outgrew his youthful taste for horrors, his early reading left traces on the imagery and diction of his poetry. There is an unusual profusion in his vocabulary of such words as ghosts, shades, charnel, tomb, torture, agony, etc., and supernatural similes occur readily to his mind. In Alastor he compares himself to