The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein (11 page)

I was sitting beside him when he died. I had been reading to him from Goethe’s
The Sorrows of Young Werther
, a novel which I had always intended to study with all the more enthusiasm since it had been extolled to me by Bysshe. My father had an excellent knowledge of German, but I am not sure that he understood or was even listening to my words; I simply wished to reassure him of my presence. Suddenly he opened his eyes. “It is not that Werther loved too much,” he said. “He lived too long.” And then he slipped away.

I had expected some change at the moment of death, some sense of departure, but not of the kind I witnessed. It was as if his life had never been; it was as if he had reverted to some previous state, before life had infused him. He had gone back. I felt his pulse, and the side of his neck, but all had gone.

SO ANOTHER FRANKENSTEIN WAS BURIED
in the hill behind the little church at Chamonix; I was the only mourner of my immediate family, but I was followed to the grave by the servants of the household as well as the employees of my father’s business and by the same villagers who had attended Elizabeth’s funeral. I wept freely—but perhaps I was weeping for myself.

I remained in Switzerland for two months, during which period I put my affairs in order and relinquished the administration of the company to M. Fabre who had always been trusted by my father. I had written to the Master of my college
in Oxford, explaining the reasons for my delay and asking him for leave of absence until the following term; this was permitted, under the statutes, and I looked forward to returning to my studies with redoubled zeal and ambition. I was now the heir to a large fortune, which I could employ without check or scrutiny, and I had already determined to devote it to my pursuits in the science of life.

I was happy to return for other reasons. I had heard nothing of Bysshe for several months, and I was eager to learn of all his exploits in London. Now I contemplated the notion of renting a commodious house in the city, where he and I could live in close intercourse. I had other schemes, drawn up in my mind’s eye with as much fidelity as if I sat with an architect beside me. I planned to create a great laboratory, where I could engage in experiments on the largest possible scale. I wished to build a “gallery of life” where all the emerging forms of primitive existence could be displayed. In truth, I wished to become a benefactor of mankind. So, in the early autumn of that eventful year, I returned with enthusiasm and anticipation to England. I believed that in London a man with sovereigns in his pocket is master of his destiny. In this, however, I was to be proved mistaken.

WHEN I ARRIVED IN LONDON
I rented rooms in Jermyn Street, but took the precaution of having my heavy luggage sent before me to Oxford. I had scarcely swallowed down a plate of beef, in the chop-house next to St. James’s church, when I made my way to Poland Street. The windows of Bysshe’s old lodging were closed, and so I mounted the stairs and rapped upon the door with the ivory cane I had brought with me from Switzerland. A young woman came to the door, nursing a small infant. I was at a loss for words in that instant, and simply stared at her.

“Yes, sir?”

“Mr. Shelley?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Is Mr. Shelley here?”

“No one of that name.”

“Percy Bysshe Shelley?”

“No, sir. John Donaldson. His wife, Amelia, which is me. And this is Arthur.” She patted the baby with her free hand.

I must say that I experienced a moment of relief. “Forgive me, Mrs. Donaldson. May I ask if you have lived here long?”

“We came early in the summer, sir. We are from Devon.”

“There was a young man here before you, I believe. He is a friend of mine—”

“Oh. The young party. I did hear something of him from
Mr. Lawson above us. A strange party. Very volatile. Is that so?” I nodded. “He vanished, sir. He left one morning. Never seen again. Now you are here—” She retreated into the rooms which I knew so well, and presently returned with a small volume. “If you were to find him, would you give him this?” She handed me the book that I recognised as a copy of
Lyrical Ballads
. He had often read from it, during our evening conversations. “I found it beneath the settle. It must have fallen. Mr. Donaldson and I have no use for it, sir.”

I gave her a sovereign, which she accepted with many expressions of delight. I considered calling upon Daniel West -brook in Whitechapel for news of Bysshe. Yet the memory of that neighbourhood, dark and dim, dissuaded me. Instead I determined to return to Oxford, where Bysshe might find me if he so wished. I retained my chambers in Jermyn Street, however, as a refuge from the quiet life of the university.

FLORENCE, MY COLLEGE SERVANT
, greeted me at the top of the staircase with an expression of surprise. “Well, Mr. Frankenlime, we was despairing of you.”

“Never despair, Florence.”

“Then the head porter tells us you was coming back. So I gave them a good clean.” She motioned towards my rooms. “You will find them in a state of perfection.”

“I am pleased to hear it.” I walked past her and, on opening the door, was relieved to see my luggage piled high in a corner.

So I entered once more the diurnal round of divine service, college meals, and college friendships. Such was the nature of the place that, as soon as I had settled myself in my rooms, I felt
a resurgence of my old life. I sought out the company of Horace Lang, who had known Bysshe before my own arrival at Oxford; together we walked by the Thames towards Binsey, or towards Godstow, and speculated about our poet. Lang had heard nothing from him since Bysshe’s forced departure from the college, and so I enlightened him about the radical meetings in London. It was with a feeling of some excitement, then, that we learned of the imminent arrival of Mr. Coleridge as a lecturer in the Welsh Hall in Cornmarket Street. His poetry was already known to me, of course, partly through
Lyrical Ballads
and partly through my own earnest enquiries into the political and economic science of the day. Ever since I had begun reading his essays in the
Friend
, I had entertained a vast respect for his intellectual powers no less than for his mental agility that seemed to surmount every challenge.

The series of lectures he was about to undertake was entitled “The Course of English Poetry,” and on the evening of the first lecture the Welsh Hall was packed to suffocation with the young men of the university. When Mr. Coleridge walked upon the platform he seemed unwell; he had a hectic flush upon his cheeks but otherwise his complexion was pale. He appeared older than I had imagined, unless his hair were preternaturally white, and his hands shook as he approached the rostrum. He was by no means ill favoured, having the open visage of a child, but there was an indefinable languor about him that suggested sloth or lack of will.

“Gentlemen,” he said, taking some papers from the pocket of his jacket, “you must forgive my frailty. I have recently returned from a long journey, during which my health has suffered. But I pray and hope that the mind is untouched by
the tortures of the body.” At this the audience hurrahed and, given the generosity of the reception, Coleridge seemed to be eased. He began talking from his notes on the roots of English poetry in the Anglo-Saxon bards, but it was laboured stuff. He had no real enthusiasm for these subjects. Sensing the restlessness of his audience, I think, he laid aside his papers and began to speak warmly and spontaneously about the genius of the language itself. He had an inspired eye, if I may put it that way, and seemed able to catch sight of phrases and sentences before he uttered them. He spoke of language possessing an organic rather than a mechanical form; he extolled its active agency, as an instrument of the imagination, and declared that “man creates the world in which he lives.” I noted down one sentiment in particular that interested me immensely. “Newton,” he said, “claimed that his theories were created by experiment and observation. Not so. They were created by his mind and imagination.” Coleridge no longer seemed weary, and in the fire of his utterance his countenance had become ennobled; he spoke very freely, with a sibilance that was strangely appealing, and he used his gestures to great effect. “Under the impress of the imagination,” he went on, “nature is instinct with passion and with change. It is altered—it is moved—by human perception.” In what sense did he mean “moved”? Did it simply denote change, or could it be construed as the sensation of pity or of joy?

I believe that these sentiments were quite novel to the audience assembled in the Welsh Hall, and they listened with keen anticipation. Coleridge seemed to be exalted by their attention, and I noticed that the hectic flush upon his cheeks had been succeeded by a radiance of—I know not what—of
belief, of self-belief. “All knowledge,” he said, “rests on the coincidence of a subject with an object in living unity. We must discover the in-dwelling and living ground of all things. In that procedure, we may render the mind intuitive of the spiritual.”

I was greatly encouraged by his words, since I pursued my own researches with the firm conviction that all life was one and that the same spirit of existence breathed through all created forms. These were almost the very words that Coleridge himself then used, when he stepped towards us from behind the rostrum, and declared that “everything has a life of its own, and we are all
one life.”
There was some scattered applause at this, although his sentiments were so far from the usual that many could not follow their path or, rather, their ascent. I had never seen a man so transformed by the power of utterance, so that it would not have seemed to me at all surprising if he had ascended to the ceiling in an act of apotheosis. He spoke eloquently of Shakespeare, and of the dramatist’s words bringing the whole soul of man into activity, and then proceeded with an improvised celebration of the imagination itself. I wished that Bysshe had been with me at this hour. “The primary imagination,” Coleridge said, “I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a representation in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation.” So men could become like gods. Was that his meaning? What can be imagined, can be formed into the image of truth. The vision could be created.

I walked back to my rooms in a state of great excitement, while explaining to Lang the importance of Coleridge’s lecture.

“Do you mean to say,” he asked me, “that you are willing to test your wildest fantasies?”

“The imagination is the strongest possible power. Do you not recall that Adam dreamed, and that when he awoke he found it truth?”

“In the same narrative, Victor, there is a warning against the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.”

“Are we to be prevented from reaching up to the branch? Surely not.”

“I am a mere student of theology.”

“Where there is nothing more to learn?”

“The ways of God are infinite. But I do not share your—”

“Ambition?”

“Craving. Your fierce desire to explore unknown ways. You have spoken to me of the forbidden knowledge of the adepts. Of the ancient conjurors.”