These discoveries are followed by dramatic incidents and tragic scenes. Sitting with Matilda in the villa of the eastern suburb, the Count Verezzi is in the act of drinking to her, with protestations of eternal fidelity, when the pensive and melancholy Julia appears at the supper-table. ‘My adored Matilda!’ the Count is saying, ‘this is to thy happiness,—this is to thy every wish; and if I cherish a single thought which centres not in thee, may the most horrible tortures which ever poisoned the peace of man drive me instantly to distraction! God of Heaven! witness thou my oath, and write it in letters never to be erased! Ministering spirits, who watch over the happiness of mortals, attend! for here I swear eternal fidelity, indissoluble, unutterable affection, to Matilda!’
No sooner has the Count Verezzi delivered himself of this oration than Julia comes into the room. The Count has been taken at his word! The ministering spirits are in attendance! If she has not appeared as a witness against him, Julia has come to inquire why her affianced suitor is living so intimately with Matilda. No wonder that Verezzi dashes the goblet to the ground! that his frame is agitated with convulsions! that, ‘seized with sudden madness, he draws the dagger from his girdle, and with fellest intent raises it high!’
‘Raised with fellest intent,’ the gleaming poniard is in a trice buried in the Count’s breast. Whilst ‘his soul flies without a groan, his body falls upon the floor bathed in purple blood.’ Furious at the spectacle, Matilda plucks the weapon from her husband’s corse, and rushes upon the pensive and melancholy intruder, who, seeing mischief in the Contessa’s flashing eyes, and danger in the ensanguined weapon, turns and flies towards the door. ‘Nerved anew by this futile attempt to escape her vengeance, the ferocious Matilda seizes Julia’s floating hair, and holding her back with fiend-like strength, stabs her in a thousand places, and with exulting pleasure again and again buries the dagger to the hilt in her body, even after all remains of life are annihilated.’ On throwing the dagger from her, Matilda di Laurentini regards a terrific scene with sullen gaze.
As it takes at least two seconds to plunge a dagger up to the hilt into the tenderest flesh and to withdraw the weapon for another blow, the Countess must have spent considerably more than half-an-hour in stabbing the Marchesa’s body. Bearing in mind the amount of muscular effort requisite for driving a dagger up to the hilt into a human body, one is not surprised to learn that the murderess exhausted herself. Bearing in mind also the number of square inches on the surface of a woman’s body, no reader will question that Julia’s body was frightfully disfigured by the thousand stabs in a thousand different places.
Julia’s murder is of course followed by the punishment of the murderess, and of the supreme villain who may be said to have educated her to perpetrate the monstrous crime. Zastrozzi is racked to death. No particulars are given of Matilda di Laurentini’s last agonies, but the reader is left under the impression that she has died or will die by the executioner.
Published in a single duodecimo volume, this tale of horror contains about as many words as a single volume of an ordinary three-volume novel. Perhaps more horrors have never been crowded into so short a romance. The tortures endured by Verezzi during his successive imprisonments afflict the memory. Verezzi’s father is poniarded to death by his bastard son. Julia’s faithful servant, Paulo, dies in the presence of his poisoners, groaning horribly and writhing in hideous convulsions. Matilda makes a futile attempt to throw herself into the Danube. The dagger-scene in the vicinity of the Castella di Laurentini would not have been more terrific had the mock-assailant been a veritable bravo. The Count Verezzi commits suicide. Julia is stabbed in a thousand different spots of her body. Zastrozzi is racked to death. The Contessa di Laurentini is left for execution.
Affording not a single indication of literary taste or wholesome sentiment, the story is badly written, morbid, unnatural, and superlatively foolish, from its first to its last page. To Shelley’s reasonable and honest biographers, the performance is of great value and interest on account of the view it gives of the future poet’s culture, attainments, and mental condition towards the close of his career at Eton. Allowance should of course be made for the author’s youth, his inexperience of human nature and society, and the difficulties besetting every puerile essayist in an arduous department of literature. But when all allowances have been made, the book remains a thing of evidence to the utter discredit of all the fine things that have been written by certain of the poet’s adulators about his intellectual precocity. He would not have laboured at this crude tale in his seventeenth year, corrected it for the press, and published it in his eighteenth year, hoping to win fame by it, had he, in his boyhood, acquired the knowledge of English literature, for which several historians of his earlier career have given him credit, or had he been the sincere and strenuous student of natural science the same writers have declared him. Had he perused the works of the higher English writers with critical discernment as well as delight, the Etonian would have written his mother tongue with less inelegance and feebleness. Had his care for natural science exceeded the commonplace curiosity of a youth, given to play tricks with an air-pump, an electrical machine, and a chest of chemical materials, his mind would have been too fully occupied to have a hankering for the miserable distinction that comes to the writers of bad novels.
Though it is not regarded as a faultless performance in the coteries of the Shelleyan enthusiasts, passages of considerable merit and indications of fine feeling have been discovered in this superlatively foolish story, by some of the gentlemen who have in these later years constituted themselves the peculiar guardians of Shelley’s honour, and the especial interpreters of his philosophical utterances.
In the superabundance of his veneration for every line written, and every scrap of paper known to have been touched by the poet, Mr. Buxton Forman, is educating the English people to regard Zastrozzi as a performance that, instead of being perused lightly and laughed over merrily, should be studied with due regard to the various readings of its two different editions,—the original edition of 1810, and the reprint of 1839, in The Romancist and Novelist’s Library. Wherever those editions differ by an inverted comma, a mark of punctuation, a dropt letter, or a letter too many, Mr. Buxton Forman calls attention to the difference, as though each trivial diversity of the two texts were a matter of high importance. Believing that delicate meanings may be found in the poet’s occasional slips of spelling, Mr. Forman calls attention to the remarkable fact, that the word ‘ceiling’ in the reprint is spelt ‘cieling’ in the original edition; the no less curious and significant circumstance that the word ‘escritoire’ of the later edition is spelt escrutoire in the edition that passed straight to the world from the author’s own hand and eye. In like manner we are invited to notice the difference of a perfectly formed ‘s’ between the ‘mishapen’ of Shelley’s own text, and the ‘misshapen’ of the reprint. Mr. Forman calls attention to an even bolder departure from the original text in the reprint, which may well be regarded with suspicion and mistrust by the Shelleyan specialists. Whilst the original edition contains the sentence, ‘The most horrible scheme of vengeance at at this instant glances across Zastrozzi’s mind,’ the editor of the 1839 edition has the daring (not altogether innocent of irreverence) to omit the second ‘at.’ From the standpoint and principles of an editor, who regards Shelley as a being who might have been the Saviour of the World, Mr. Buxton Forman is of course right in attaching great importance to these differences of the two editions, of an almost sacred performance. But to the profane mind of the present writer, who, instead of thinking Shelley in any respect comparable with the Saviour of the World, and conceives him to have been a rather foolish schoolboy in the earlier months of 1809, a very foolish Oxford undergraduate in the later months of 1810, and a still more foolish undergraduate in the earlier months of 1811, it appears that these differences of the two editions of Zastrozzi are of no more importance than the proverbial difference between ‘tweedledum’ and ‘tweedledee.’
It is, however, interesting to observe how the hero of the puerile novel corresponds with the hero of Laon and Cythna,—to observe also how Shelley (holding to crudities and fantastic fancies, which any other man of similar strength would have hurled to his soul’s rubbish-bin), reproduces in the great poem some of the subordinate details of the immature romance.