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It is difficult to imagine Frankenstein on the stage; it must, at least, lose very much in dramatic representation. Like its modern successor, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,—that remarkable story which bears a certain affinity to Frankenstein,—its subtle allegorical significance would be overweighted, if not lost, by the effect of the grosser and more material incidents which are all that could be played, and which, as described, must have bordered on the ludicrous. Still the charm of life imparted by a human impersonation to any portion, even, of one’s own idea, is singularly powerful; and so Mary felt it. She would have liked to repeat the experience. Her situation, looked at in the face, was unenviable. She was unprovided for, young, delicate, and with a child dependent on her. Her rich connections would have nothing to do with her, and her boy did not possess in their eyes the importance which would have attached to him had he been heir to the baronetcy. She had talent, and it had been cultivated, but with her sorely-tried health and spirits, the prospect of self-support by the compulsory production of imaginative work must, at the time, have seemed unpromising enough.
Two sheet-anchors of hope she had, and by these she lived. They were, her child—so friendless but for her—and the thought of Shelley’s fame. The collecting and editing of his MSS., this was her work; no one else should do it. It seemed as though her brief life with him had had for its purpose to educate her for this one object.
Those who now, in naming Shelley, feel they name a part of everything beautiful, ethereal, and spiritual—that his words are so inextricably interwoven with certain phases of love and beauty as to be indistinguishable from the very thing itself—may well find it hard to realise how little he was known at the time when he died.
With other poets their work is the blossom and fruit of their lives, but Shelley’s poetry resembles rather the perfume of the flower, that subtle quality pertaining to the bloom which can be neither described, nor pourtrayed, nor transmitted; an essence of immortality.
Not many months after this the news of Byron’s early death struck a kind of remorseful grief into the hearts of his countrymen. A letter of Miss Welsh’s (Mrs. Carlyle) gives an idea of the general feeling—
“I was told it,” she says, “in a room full of people. Had I heard that the sun and moon had fallen out of their spheres it could not have conveyed to me the feeling of a more awful blank than did the simple words, ‘Byron is dead.’”
How many, it may be asked, were conscious of any blank when the news reached them that Shelley had been “accidentally drowned”? Their numbers might be counted by tens.
The sale, in every instance, of Mr. Shelley’s works has been very confined,
was his publishers’ report to his widow. One newspaper dismissed his memory by the passing remark, “He will now find out whether there is a Hell or not.”