But now contempt is mocking thy gray hairs;Thou art descending to the darksome graveUnhonored and unpitied, but by thoseWhose pride is passing by like thine.And sheds like thine a glare that fades before the sunOf Truth, and shines but in the dreadful nightThat long has lowered above the ruined world.[27]
The third part ofQueen Mabcontains a glowing picture of the Golden Age—of the world as it will be, when reason willbe the sole guide of men. For this Shelley is indebted mainly to Godwin’sPolitical Justice.
For his denunciation of the professions Shelley is indebted to the Essay on “Trades and Professions” in Godwin’sEnquirer. With regard to commerce, Godwin says that the introduction of barter and sale into society was followed by vice and misery. “Barter and sale being once introduced, the invention of a circulating medium in the precious metals gave solidity to the evil, and afforded a field upon which for the rapacity and selfishness of man to develop all their refinements.”[28]Shelley says:
Commerce has set the mark of selfishnessThe signet of its all-enslaving powerUpon a shining ore, and called it gold.[29]
Godwin expresses his opinion of merchants as follows: “There is no being on the face of the earth with a heart more thoroughly purged from every remnant of the weakness of benevolence and sympathy.”[30]
And Shelley writes:
Commerce! beneath whose poison-breathing shadeNo solitary virtue dares to spring.
Shelley says that soldiers—
... are the hired bravos who defendThe tyrant’s throne—the bullies of his fear:These are the sinks and channels of worst vice,The refuse of society, the dregsOf all that is most vile, etc.
His note on this passage was taken bodily from Essay V of Godwin’sEnquirer. With regard to clergymen, Shelley expresses his opinion thus:
Then grave and hoary-headed hypocritesWithout a hope, a passion, or a loveWho, through a life of luxury and liesHave crept by flattery to the seats of powerSupport the system whence their honors flow
Godwin’s verdict is not so severe. “Clergymen,” he says, “are timid in enquiry, prejudiced in opinion, cold, formal,the slave of what other men may think of them, rude, dictatorial, impatient of contradiction, harsh in their censures, and illiberal in their judgments.”
Queen Mabthen is a fierce diatribe against existing institutions. It contains very little constructive philosophy. What value has it for mankind? Does it serve any purpose apart from giving pleasure to the aesthetic faculties? It assuredly does. It awakens the social conscience. The first step for the sinner on the road to conversion is to try to realize the sinful state of his soul. The same is true of a nation in need of reform. Unless its shortcomings are vividly brought home to it, reformation will never take place. To do this was and still is the work ofQueen Mab. It laid bare the weaknesses of State and Church; it engendered the spirit of compassion and thus paved the way for reform.
VIEWS ON MARRIAGE AND LOVE
In September, 1813, Shelley wrote a sonnet, already quoted, to Ianthe, his first child, in which he says that the babe was dear to him not only for its own sweet sake, but for the mother’s, and that the mother had grown dearer to him for the babe’s. Hogg informs us, however, that about this time the ardor of Shelley’s affection for his wife was beginning to cool. It is scarcely correct to speak of the ardor of his affection, for it may be doubted that he ever loved Harriet very ardently. If he had been seriously in love with his wife, he would not have written Miss Hitchener two months after his marriage that he loved her “more than any relation,” and that she was the sister of his soul.[31]However this may be, it is certain that in 1814 Shelley and his wife did not get along well together. Harriet was beautiful and amiable, and adopted in a somewhat parrot-like manner the views of her husband. As she grew older she no doubt developed tastes more in keeping with the conventions of that society which Shelley detested. Professor Dowden suggests that motherhood produced in her character a change that did not harmonize with her husband’s idealism. She was no longer an ardent schoolgirl, but a woman who has found out that one must grapple with the realities of life in some way more practical than the one hitherto followed. Her sister urged her to look for the style and elegance suitable to the wife of a prospective baronet. This was repugnant to Shelley’s republican simplicity. “I have often thought,” Peacock writes, “that, if Harriet had nursed her own child, and if the sister had not lived with them, the link of their married life would not have been so readily broken.” Harriet sympathized less and less with her husband’s aspirations, and as a consequence Shelley turned to other women for the encouragement and inspiration which he once got from his wife. He spent too much of his time in the company of the Newtons, Boinvilles, and Turners torender possible the retention of his wife’s affections. On March 16, 1814, Shelley wrote a letter to Hogg, which plainly shows that he found no happiness in his home. “I have been staying with Mrs. Boinville for the last month; I have escaped, in the society of all that friendship and philosophy combine, from the dismaying solitude of myself.... I have sunk into a premature old age of exhaustion.... Eliza is still with us—not here!—but (with his wife) ... I certainly hate her with all my heart and soul.” Shelley’s second marriage in St. George’s Church, on March 22, does not throw any light on the relations that existed between himself and his wife. They celebrated this second ceremony simply to dispel all doubts concerning the validity of the first one in Edinburgh. On April 18, Mrs. Boinville wrote to Hogg that Shelley was at her house, that Harriet had gone to town (presumably to her father’s), and that Eliza was living at Southampton. J. C. Jeafferson says that it was Shelley who deserted Harriet and not Harriet, Shelley. According to this biographer, Shelley left her at Binfield on May 18, 1814.[32]Shelley still hoped to regain his wife’s love, and in some verses inscribed, “To Harriet, 1814,” he appeals pathetically for her affection. Harriet had become cold and proud, and refused to meet his advances toward a reconciliation. Her pride, Shelley believed, was incompatible with virtue. When he found that he had “clasped a shadow,” his anguish, owing to his great sensitiveness, was extreme. Other men put up with their wives’ imperfections, and why could not Shelley have done the same? It must be remembered, though, that these men have other interests to occupy their thoughts, and other friends to give them the sympathy and love denied them at home. This was not the case with Shelley. He had few friends and many enemies. It should not surprise us then to find him snatching at the first vision “which promised him the longed-for boon of human love.” This vision appeared to him in the person of Mary Godwin.
A letter from Harriet to Hookham, dated July 7, shows that she was anxious to be with her husband again. But the time for reconciliation had passed. Whenever Shelley hatedor loved anybody, he did so intensely. Everybody was either an angel or a devil; and Harriet had ceased to be an angel. “Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.” Dowden says Shelley persuaded himself that Harriet was false to him and had given her heart to a Mr. Ryan. There is no ground for the charge of unfaithfulness, as Peacock, Thornton Hunt, and Trelawny bear testimony concerning her innocence.
Shelley believed that Harriet had ceased to love him, and that he was consequently free to contract a union with another. He puts forth this doctrine in the notes toQueen Mab. “A husband and wife ought to continue so long united as they love each other.... There is nothing immoral in this separation.... The conviction that wedlock is indissoluble holds out the strongest of all temptations to the perverse.... Prostitution is the legitimate offspring of marriage.” He considered marriage a useless institution, and expressed this view inSt. Irvyne. “Say, Eloise, do not you think it an insult to two souls, united to each other in the irrefragable covenants of love and congeniality, to promise in the sight of a Being whom they know not, that fidelity which is certain otherwise.” He does not think that promiscuous intercourse will follow the abolition of marriage. Love, and not money, honors, or convenience will be the bond of these unions when marriage is abolished, and this will result in more faithfulness than obtains at present. “The parties having acted upon selection are not likely to forget this selection when the interview is over.”[33]In his review of Hogg’sMemoirs of Prince Alexy Haimatoff, Shelley regards with horror the recommendation of the tutor to Alexy to indulge in promiscuous intercourse. “It is our duty to protest against so pernicious and disgusting an opinion.” In a letter to Hogg, written after the latter’s attempt to seduce Harriet, we find the following: “But do not love one (Harriet) who can not return it, who if she could, ought to stiffle her desire to do so. Love is not a whirlwind that is unvanquishable.”
Shelley’s views on marriage agree with those of Godwin. They both looked on marriage as a human institution, and consequently thought it might be modified or abolishedentirely. They considered happiness man’s highest good, and unhappiness man’s only evil. Vows and promises are immoral because the thing promised may prove at any time detrimental to one’s happiness. For this reason husband and wife should not bind themselves to live always together. This doctrine appealed to Shelley because it agreed with his views on freedom and his passion for opposing the traditions of society.
Heretofore it has been found convenient to lay the blame for all the radical views of Shelley at the door of Godwin. In the case of those on marriage a good deal of the blame must be borne by Sir James Lawrence.
In a letter to Lawrence, dated August 17, 1812, Shelley writes: “YourEmpire of the Naires, which I read this spring, succeeded in making me a perfect convert to its doctrines. I then retained no doubts of the evils of marriage—Mrs. Wollstonecraft reasons too well for that—but I had been dull enough not to perceive the greatest argument against it, until developed in the Naires, prostitution both legal and illegal.” Hogg says that Shelley and his young friends read Lawrence’s tale with delight.[34]This work, intended to vindicate the rights of women, is a plea for free love. It pictures the Kingdom of the Naires as a Paradise of Love, where neither jealousy nor envy, quarreling nor hatred, have any place. Infanticide and the sufferings that follow in the wake of illicit intercourse are there unknown. “It would be unjust to conclude,” Lawrence writes, “that every voluntary union would be short-lived.” He claims that, although constancy is no merit in itself, still it obtains in the Kingdom of the Naires to a greater extent than in Europe. “Know ye not that though constancy is no merit it is a source of happiness; and that though inconstancy is no crime, it is no blessing much less a boast.”[35]There is some resemblance between this and the following from Shelley’sNotes to Queen Mab: “Constancy has nothing virtuous in itself independently of the pleasure it confers, and partakes of the temporizing spirit of vice in proportion as it endures tamely moral defects of magnitude in the object of its indiscreet choice.” In another place Lawrence writes: “Twohearts whom love with its loadstone has touched, will stick together, nought will tear asunder. But soon as the magnetic power has ceased, say, why should wedlock link in iron fetters, superfluous even when they are not vexatious, those bodies which the soul of love has left?”[36]In the notes toQueen Mabwe read—“A husband and wife ought to continue so long united as they love each other; any law which should bind them to cohabitation for one moment after the decay of their affection would be a most intolerable tyranny, and the most unworthy of toleration.”[37]“Among the Naires there are neither courtesans nor virgins, for the two extremes are equally unnatural and equally detrimental to the state. Love there shuns not the light of the sun, nor is it, as in Europe, degraded as a vice, nor allied to infamy and guilt.”
Shelley lived at a time when the marriage ideal was not held in high repute. Lawrence describes many kinds of abominable travesties of marriage. In Persia, to silence the scruples of the lustful, “they have contrived contracts of enjoyment (for it would be wicked to call them contracts of marriage) for very short periods of time; these are formally signed and countersigned, and many priests gain their livelihood by giving their benediction to this orthodox prostitution.”[38]Marriage was a mere formality for a great many. In France, Montesquieu writes, “a husband, who would wish to keep his wife to himself, would be considered a disturber of the public happiness, and as a madman who would monopolise the light of the sun. He who loves his own wife, is one who is not agreeable enough to gain the affections of any other man’s wife, who takes advantage of a law to make amends for his own want of amiability; and who contributes, as far as lies in his power, to overturn a tacit convention, that is conducive to the happiness of both sexes.”[39]In England conditions were no better. A husband might consort with as many women as he chose and his wife could get no redress. In Italy and Spain, the inhabitants, “too fond of liberty to respect the duties of marriage and too attached to their names to suffertheir extinction, require only representatives, and not sons as their heirs. It is a pity that the Naire system is not known to them; but cicesbeism is a palliative to marriage and an ingenious compromise between family pride and natural independence, and it is better to be inconsistent and happy than unhappy and rational.”[40]
In no country of Europe is the marriage vow kept. Why not then, argued Shelley, abolish this institution which makes hypocrites of men? “Marriage is the tomb of love.... Two lovers only meet when in good humor, or when resolved to be so; a married couple think themselves entitled to torment each other with their ill-humors. When a lover presents a trifle to his beloved, she receives it with smiles; when a husband makes a present to his wife, which indeed happens seldom enough, he runs the risk of being told that he has no taste, or that she could have bought it cheaper.”[41]
The Empire of the Nairesis not so much an exposition of the free-love system of the Naires as a grossly distorted and exaggerated picture of the miseries that follow from the present system of regulating the relations between the sexes in the different countries of the world. Lawrence draws horrible pictures of misery, degradation, and even murder that are a consequence of our opinions on love and marriage. “Whenever women are treated like slaves,” he writes, “they act like slaves with artifice and hypocricy.”[42]Shelley affirms that “the present system of constraint does no more, in the majority of instances, than make hypocrites of open enemies.”[43]
Lawrence attributes the social evil to the existing code of morality. If a girl falls, she is driven from her home, and the only road then open to her is that which leads to the brothel. “Prostitution,” says Shelley, “is the legitimate offspring of marriage and its accompanying errors. Women for no other crime than having followed the dictates of a natural appetite are driven with fury from the comforts and sympathies of society. Society avenges herself on the criminals of her own creation.”[44]
It does not seem that Shelley made much use of the plot or rather of the different incidents of theEmpire of the Naires. However, it may not be amiss to indicate the slight resemblance that exists between the story of Margaret Montgomery and that of Rosalind inRosalind and Helen.
Rosalind loves a young man whom she is about to marry. On the day fixed for the wedding, her father returns from a distant land to die, and informs them that Rosalind and her lover are brother and sister.
Hold, hold!He cried! I tell thee ’tis her brother!Thy mother, boy, beneath the sodOf yon churchyard rests in her shroud so cold;I am now weak and pale, and old:We were once dear to one another,I and that corpse! Thou art our child!
Her betrothed falls dead on the receipt of this news. Rosalind marries another who uses her very cruelly, perhaps because she gives birth to an illegitimate child. Her husband dies, and his will, because she was adulterous,
Imported, that if e’er againI sought my children to beholdOr in my birthplace did remainBeyond three days, whose hours were told,They should inherit naught:
InThe NairesMargaret Montgomery and James Forbes had known and loved each other from childhood. Shortly before the time set for their wedding, James’ father sent a letter to Margaret’s father breaking off the marriage in the most positive terms. The latter’s pride was inflamed, and a quarrel ensued in which Forbes was mortally wounded. The dying man sent for Margaret and told her that she and her lover are sister and brother, that he and not Montgomery was her father, and hence her mother’s and his opposition to the marriage. Margaret is enceinte, and her reputed father turns her out of doors. Her lover is killed in Naples. A friend sends Margaret some money during her stay in London. Shelley makes Rosalind, who has been dispossessed too, receive some money from an old servant.
Rosalind and Margaret are separated from their life-long friends who know—
What to the evil world is dueAnd therefore sternly did refuse
to link themselves with the infamy of ones so lost as their sinning sisters. In both cases common misery reunites them and their friends again.
In May or June, 1814, Shelley became acquainted with Mary Godwin. Her father described her as being “singularly bold, somewhat imperious, and active in mind; her desire of knowledge is great, and her perseverance in everything she undertakes almost invincible.” She was brought up in an atmosphere of free thought, having spent most of her girlhood with Mr. Baxter, a faithful disciple of Godwin. Shelley and Mary had many sympathies in common, and it is not surprising to find them soon falling in love with each other.
Peacock tells us that Shelley at this time was in agony. On the one hand he was tormented by his desire to treat Harriet rightly, and on the other by his passion for Mary. Passion won the day, and on July 28 Shelley eloped with Mary to the Continent. He tried to ease his conscience by offering Harriet his friendship and protection. He wrote her from the Continent and urged her to join himself and Mary in Switzerland. He assured her that she would find in him a firm, constant friend to whom her interests would be always dear.
While passing judgment on Shelley one should not forget that he simply put into practice those doctrines which he believed to be true. Neither Shelley nor Mary thought they were inflicting any wrong on Harriet as long as they offered her their friendship and protection.
In September, 1814, Shelley, Mary and Jane Clairmont, Mary’s half-sister, settled in London. About this time he was troubled a great deal with money embarrassments and was in continual hiding from the bailiffs. Toward the end of the year he read “the tale of Godwin’s American disciple in romance, Charles Brockden Brown.”[45]“Brown’s four novels,” says Peacock, “Schiller’s Robbers, and Goethe’s Faust, were of all the works with which he was familiar those which took the deepest root in Shelley’s mind and had the strongest influence in the formation of his character.”
Brown’s most important novel,Wieland, is a gruesome tale in which the horrors portrayed owe their existence to the errors of the sufferers. Wieland, a very religious man, is deceived by an unscrupulous ventriloquist who persuades him that a voice from heaven bids him sacrifice the life of his wife and four children. “If Wieland had framed juster notions of moral duty, and of the divine attributes; or if he had been gifted with ordinary equanimity or foresight, the double tongued deceiver would have been baffled and repelled.” This is the doctrine of Shelley; he believed that the evils of society were man’s own creation.
Ye princes of the earth, ye sit aghastAmid the ruin which yourselves have made.Yes, Desolation heard your trumpet’s blast,And sprang from sleep.[46]
Brown’s views on love are almost as radical as those of Godwin. Wieland’s sister is in love with Pleyel, and is anxious to act in such a way as to give him hope and at the same time not to appear too forward. “Time was,” she says, “when these emotions would be hidden with immeasurable solicitude from every human eye. Alas! these airy and fleeting impulses of shame are gone. My scruples were preposterous and criminal. They are bred in all hearts, by a perverse and vicious education, and they would have maintained their place in my heart had not my portion been set in misery. My errors have taught me thus much wisdom; that those sentiments which we ought not to disclose it is criminal to harbor.”[47]Shelley’s ideal woman would hold the same views. He writes:
And women too, frank, beautiful and kind ...... From custom’s evil taint exempt and pureSpeaking the wisdom once they could not think,Looking emotions once they feared to feel.And changed to all which once they dared not beYet, being now, made earth like heaven.
In May, 1816, Shelley, accompanied by Mary and Jane Clairmont, started for Italy. It is probable that the undesirable state of Shelley’s health, together with the constant beggingof Godwin, determined them to leave England. J. C. Jeafferson maintains that Miss Clairmont persuaded Shelley to accompany her to Geneva, where she was to meet Lord Byron. It is quite certain though that Mary and Shelley were ignorant of Byron’s intrigue with Miss Clairmont. The most that can be said is that Jane’s solicitations may have hastened their departure.
In September, 1816, the Shelleys returned to London. About a month afterwards news reached them that Fanny Imlay (Mary’s half-sister) had committed suicide. It is said that love for Shelley drove her to despair. In December Shelley was seeking for Harriet, of whom he had lost trace some time previously. On December 10, her body was found in the Serpentine. Very little is known of the life she led after her separation from Shelley. Rumor had it that she drank heavily and became the mistress of a soldier, who deserted her.
It may be that “in all Shelley did, he, at the time of doing it, believed himself justified to his own conscience,” but surely that conscience is warped which finds no cause for remorse in Shelley’s treatment of his first wife. No one can view his self-complacency and assumption of righteousness at this time without feelings of detestation. On the day he heard the news of his wife’s suicide he wrote to Mary: “Everything tends to prove, however, that beyond the shock of so hideous a catastrophe having fallen on a human being once so nearly connected with me, there would in any case, have been little to regret.” “Little to regret” save the shock to his nerves. What about the suffering of the poor woman that forced her to commit such a terrible deed?
Shelley claimed his children from the Westbrooks, but the claim was denied. The children were committed to the care of a Dr. Hume, of Hanwell. Lord Eldon gave his judgment against Shelley on the ground that Shelley’s opinions led to immoral conduct. Shelley gave vent to his rage in sixteen vitriolic stanzas, which he addressed to the Lord Chancellor.
During his residence at Marlow on the Thames in 1817, Shelley wroteThe Revolt of Islam, which was first published under the titleLaon and Cythna. In its first form it contained violent attacks on theism and Christianity; and the hero andheroine were brother and sister. Ollier refused to publish it unless everything indicating such a relationship were removed, and Shelley reluctantly consented to make the necessary alterations.
The Revolt of Islamopens with an allegorical myth in which the strife between a serpent and an eagle—good and evil—is described. While the poet sympathizes with the snake, a mysterious woman (Asia in Prometheus Unbound) suddenly appears and conducts him to heaven. There he meets Laon and Cythna who recount the sufferings which made them worthy of this heavenly place. First of all, Laon tells about his love for Cythna, who is described as a shape of brightness moving upon the earth. She mourned with him over the servitude—
In which the half of humankind were mewed,Victims of lust and hate, the slaves of slaves,She mourned that grace and power were thrown as foodTo the hyena lust, who, among graves,Over his loathed meal, laughing in agony raves.[48]
Cythna determines to make all good and just. By the force of kindness she will “disenchant the captives,” and “then millions of slaves shall leap in joy as the benumbing cramp of ages shall leave their limbs.” The happiness of the lovers was rudely interrupted. Cythna is taken away by the emissaries of the tyrant Othman; and Laon, who killed three of the king’s slaves while defending her, is cast into prison. A hermit sets him free, conveys him to an island, and supports him there for seven years. During all of this time Laon’s mind is deranged. He recovers, however, and then they both embark to help overthrow the tyrant Othman. The revolutionists are successful principally because of the influence of their leader, who is a woman, Laone. Such is the strength of her quiet words that none dare harm her. Tyrants send their armed slaves to quell—
Her power, they, even like a thundergustCaught by some forest, bend beneath the spellOf that young maiden’s speech, and to their chiefs rebel.[49]
Some of the revolutionists demand that Othman be put to death for his crimes. Laon interposes and tells them that if their hearts are tried in the true love of freedom they should cease to dread this one poor lonely man. Here is Godwin’s doctrine again:
The chastened willOf virtue sees that justice is the lightOf love, and not revenge and terror and despite.[50]
That same night the tyrant with the aid of a foreign army treacherously attacks the revolutionists. In the midst of the carnage
A black Tartarian horse of giant frameComes trampling o’er the dead; the living bleedBeneath the hoofs of that tremendous steedOn which like to an angel robed in whiteSate one waving a sword.[51]
Needless to say, this is Cythna who comes to rescue Laon. They both flee to a lonely ruin where they recount to each other the stories of their sufferings. Cythna tells that she was carried to a submarine cavern by order of the tyrant, and that she was fed there by an eagle. She became a mother, and was comforted for a while by the caresses of her child until it mysteriously disappeared. An earthquake changed the position of the cavern, and Cythna is rescued by some passing sailors. She is taken to the city of Othman, where she leads the revolutionists as described in the previous cantos. Want and pestilence follow in the wake of massacre, and cause awful misery. An Iberian priest in whose breast “hate and guile lie watchful” says that God will not stay the plague until a pyre is built and Laon and Cythna burned upon it. An immense reward is offered for their capture. The person who brings them both alive shall espouse the princess and reign with the king. A stranger comes to the tyrant’s court and tells them that they themselves have made all the desolation which they bewail. However, he cannot expect them to change their ways so he promises to betray Laon if they will only allow Cythna to go to America. The tyrant agrees to the stranger’s terms,who then tells them that he is Laon himself. He is placed upon the altar, and as the torches are about to be applied to it Cythna appears on her Tartarian steed. The priest urges his comrades to seize her, but the king has scruples about breaking his promise. She is set on the pyre, however, and both perish in the flames. They wake reclining—
On the waved and golden sandOf a clear pool, upon a bank o’ertwinedWith strange and star-bright flowers, which to the windBreathed divine odour.[52]
A boat approaches them with an angel (Cythna’s child) in it. They are all carried in this “curved shell of hollow pearl” to a haven of rest and joy.
This disconnected story serves as a vehicle to convey exhortations regarding liberty and justice. Thus, during the voyage from the cavern to Othman’s city, Cythna delivers an address to the sailors which contains some of the best passages in the poem. She tells them for example:
To feel the peace of self-contentment’s lot,To own all sympathies, and outrage none,And in the inmost bowers of sense and thought,Until life’s sunny day is quite gone down,To sit and smile with Joy, or, not aloneTo kiss salt tears from the worn cheek of woe;To live as if to love and live were one;This is not faith or law, nor those who bowTo thrones on Heaven or Earth such destiny may know.[53]
The poem aims at kindling a virtuous enthusiasm for the doctrines of liberty and equal rights to all. “It is a series of pictures illustrating the growth and progress of individual mind aspiring after excellence” and the regeneration of humanity. Laon is the expression of ideal devotion to the happiness of mankind; and Cythna is a type of the new woman, “the free, equal, fearless companion of man.” The poem depicts “the awakening of an immense nation from their slavery and degradation to a true sense of moral dignity and freedom; the tranquillity of successful patriotism and theuniversal toleration and benevolence of true philanthropy.” It concludes by showing that the triumph of oppression is temporary and a sure pledge of its inevitable fall.
So much attention is here given toThe Revolt of Islambecause of the influence on it of a love story—The Missionary, by Miss Owenson—an influence which up to the present has escaped the notice of Shelley students.[54]In a letter to Hogg, dated June 27, 1811, Shelley writes “the only thing that has interested me, if I except your letters, has been one novel. It is Miss Owenson’sMissionary, an Indian tale; will you read it? It is really a divine thing; Luxima, the Indian, is an angel. What a pity we cannot incorporate these creatures of fancy; the very thoughts of them thrill the soul! Since I have read this book, I have read no other.”[55]This tale is a very striking one, and it is not strange that Shelley made its philosophy his own. The descriptions are so vivid, the tale so simple, and the experiences recorded apparently so true, that it takes a maturer mind than Shelley’s to lay bare the fallacies of the work and to unmask its half truths. No outline of the story can give an idea of its strength. In the beginning of the seventeenth century Hilarion Count d’Acugna of the royal house of Braganza joins the Franciscans, and on account of his zeal and piety is known as “the man without a fault.” He is full of zeal for the salvation of souls and goes to India to convert pagans to Christianity. “Devoted to a higher communion his soul only stooped from heaven to earth, to relieve the sufferings he pitied, or to correct the errors he condemned; to substitute peace for animosity ... to watch, to pray, to fast, to suffer for all. Such was the occupation of a life, active as it was sinless.” Passages like the above serve as sugar coating for the following: “Hitherto the life of the young monk resembled the pure and holy dream of saintly slumbers, for itwas still a dream; splendid indeed, but unsubstantial, dead to all those ties which constitute at once the charm and the anxiety of existence, which agitate while they bless the life of man, the spring of human affection lay untouched within his bosom and the faculty of human reason unused within his mind.... Yet these feelings though unexercised were not extinct; they betrayed their existence even in the torpid life he had chosen, etc.” The missionary spends some time at Lahore studying the dialects of Upper India under the tutelage of a Pundit. During his stay there the Guru of Cashmere comes to Lahore for the ceremony of Upaseyda. He is accompanied by his beautiful and accomplished granddaughter, Luxima, the Prophetess and Brachmachira of Cashmere.
The Pundit tells the missionary about the wonderful influence that the Guru’s granddaughter, Luxima, has over the people of the place, just as the old man ofThe Revolt of Islam, who represents Shelley’s teacher, Dr. Lind, tells Laon about the extraordinary influence of Cythna on the people she meets. “The Indians of the most distinguished rank drew back as she approached lest their very breath should pollute that region of purity her respiration consecrated, and the odour of the sacred flowers, by which she was adorned, was inhaled with an eager devotion, as if it purified the soul it almost seemed to penetrate.” The Pundit says that “her beauty, her enthusiasm, her graces, and her genius, alike capacitate her to propagate and support the errors of which she herself is the victim.” The old man tells Laon that Cythna—
Paves her path with human hearts, and o’er it flingsThe wildering gloom of her immeasurable wings.
At the ceremony of Upaseyda, which the Guru holds, disputants of various sects put forth the claims of their respective religions. “A devotee of the Musnavi sect took the lead; he praised the mysteries of the Bhagavat, and explained the profound allegory of the six Ragas.... A disciple of the Vedanti school spoke of the transports of mystic love, and maintained the existence of spirit only; while a follower of Buddha supported the doctrine of matter, etc.” The missionary takes advantage of this opportunity to tell them aboutChristianity. “The impression of his appearance was decisive, it sank at once to the soul; and he imposed conviction on the senses, ere he made his claim on the understanding.... He ceased to speak and all was still as death. His hands were folded on his bosom, to which his crucifix was pressed; his eyes were cast in meekness on the earth; but the fire of his zeal still played like a ray from heaven on his brow.” This reminds one at once of Canto IX, ofThe Revolt of Islam:
And Oromaze, Joshua, and Mahomet,Moses and Buddah, Zerdhust and Brahm and Foh,A tumult of strange names, which never metBefore, as watchwords of a single woe,Arose; each raging votary ’gan to throwAloft his armed hands, and each did howl“Our God alone is God!”—And slaughter nowWould have gone forth, when from beneath a cowlA voice came forth, which pierced like ice through every soul.’Twas an Iberian priest from whom it cameA zealous man, who led the legioned west,With words which faith and pride had stopped in flame,To quell the unbelievers....He ceased, and theyA space stood silent, as far, far awayThe echoes of his voice among them died;And he knelt down upon the dust, alwayMuttering the curses of his speechless pride.
There is a striking resemblance between this cowled Iberian priest and the Iberian Franciscan ofThe Missionary.
The missionary looked to the conversion of the prophetess as the most effectual means of accomplishing the conversion of the nation. With this end in view he goes to Cashmere, and unexpectedly comes upon Luxima one morning, praying at a shrine. “Silently gazing in wonder upon each other, they stood finely opposed, the noblest specimens of the human species...; she, like the East, lovely and luxuriant; he, like the West, lofty and commanding; the one, radiant in all the luster, attractive in all the softness which distinguishes her native regions; the other, towering in all the energy, which marks his ruder latitudes.” They meet again and again, andthe result is they fall in love with each other. It is significant from the point of view of the influence of theMissionarythat in Alastor Shelley meets his ideal love “in the vale of Cashmire.” The way the novelist develops the progress of this sentiment, which both the priest and the priestess had vowed to suppress, canscarcelybe surpassed. She describes how their new mode of feeling was opposed by their ancient habits of thinking, and how their minds “struggling between a natural bliss and a religious principle of resistance, between a passionate sentiment and an habitual self-command, become a scene of conflict and agitation.”
Old age with its gray hair,And wrinkled legends of unworthy thingsAnd icy sneers is nought; it cannot dareTo burst the chains which life forever flingsOn the entangled soul’s aspiring wings.[56]
Luxima succumbed to the warfare. She overcame the traditions and laws by which she was bound; and hence Shelley’s great admiration for her. She embraced Christianity less in faith than in love. She did not feel guilty because she thought her sentiments of love were true to all life’s natural impulses. The missionary, on the other hand, must have excited in Shelley pity for the man and hatred for the institutions which stood in the way of their happiness. “He had not, indeed, relinquished a single principle of his moral feeling—he had not yet vanquished a single prejudice of his monastic education; to feel, was still with him to be weak; to love, a crime; and to resist, perfection.” Luxima is excommunicated, deprived of caste and declared a wanderer and an outcast upon the earth. They both elude their pursuers and join a caravan which is on its way to Tatta. On their journey the missionary tells her that they must soon separate, as duty demands that he continue the work of his ministry. He will see to it that she is well cared for in a convent at Tatta. Luxima upbraids him for his selfishness. He replies that it is not the prospect of his degradation and humiliation which deters him from staying with her, but the thought that by so doing he will commit a crime—break his vows. “Pity then,” the missionary says,“and yet respect him who, loving thee and virtue equally, can never know happiness without nor with thee—who thus condemned to suffer without ceasing submits not to his fate, but is overpowered by its tyranny, and who alike helpless and unresigned opposes while he suffers and repines while he endures.” Continency was unintelligible to Shelley, and he criticizes it in Canto XII as follows:
... that sudden routOne checked who never in his mildest dreamsFelt awe from grace or loveliness, the seamsOf his rent heart so hard and cold a creedHad seared with blistering ice; but he misdeemsThat he is wise whose wounds do only bleedOnly for self; thus thought the Iberian priest indeedAnd others too thought he was wise to seeIn pain and fear and hate something divine;In love and beauty no divinity.
Shelley believed that “the worthiness of every action is to be estimated by the quantity of pleasurable sensation it is calculated to produce,”[57]that the ideal of man was to love and to be loved. Luxima says: “Be that heaven my witness that I would not for the happiness I have abandoned and the glory I have lost, resign that desert whose perilous solitudes I share with thee. Oh! my Father, and my friend, thou alone hast taught me to know that the paradise of woman is the creation of her heart; that it is not the light or air of heaven, though beaming brightness and breathing fragrance, nor all that is loveliest in Nature’s scenes, which form the sphere of her existence and enjoyment! It is alone the presence of him she loves; it is that mysterious sentiment of the heart which diffuses a finer sense of life through the whole being; and which resembles, in its singleness and simplicity, the primordial idea which in the religion of my fathers is supposed to have preceded time and worlds, and from which all created good has emanated.”[58]
In the preface toThe Revolt of IslamShelley writes that he “sought to enlist the harmony of metrical language ... and the rapid and subtle transitions of human passion in the causeof a liberal and comprehensive morality.” For this purpose he chose “a story of human passion in its most universal character, diversified with moving and romantic adventures and appeal, in contempt of all artificial opinions or institutions to the common sympathies of every human breast. What is theMissionarybut “a story of human passion appealing in contempt of all artificial opinions or institutions to the common sympathies of every human heart?” WhenThe Revolt of Islamfirst appeared, Laon and Cythna were brother and sister. Their love like that of the missionary and priestess is considered illicit. Not only are the motifs of both very similar, but many of the incidents are identical. The influence of theMissionaryon theRevoltwill perhaps appear more clearly if we put these incidents in parallel columns. In the second canto—
The missionary and Luxima reach a cavern which bears a slight resemblance to the caverns ofThe Revolt. He discovers that the priestess is dying from a wound received during the melée at Lahore. “Answering the eloquence of her languid and tender looks, he exclaims, ‘Yes, dearest, and most unfortunate, ourdestiniesare now inseparably united! Together we have loved, together we have resisted, together we have erred, and together we have suffered; lost alike to the glory and the fame which our virtues and the conquest of our passions obtained for us; alike condemned by our religions and our countries, there now remains nothing on earth for us but each other.’” This recalls to mind the dedication ofThe Revolt of Islam—
There is no danger to a man that knowsWhat life and death is; there’s not any lawExceeds his knowledge: neither is it lawfulThat he should stoop to any other law.
As the end of Luxima approaches she bids her beloved live and preach peace and mercy, and love to Brahmin andChristian. “But should thy eloquence and thy example fail, tell them my story! tell them how I have suffered, and how even thou has failed—thou, for whom I forfeited my caste, my country and my life; for ’tis too true, that still more loving than enlightened, my ancient habits of belief clung to my mind, thou to my heart; still I lived thy seeming proselyte, that I might still live thine; and now I die as Brahmin women die; a Hindoo in my feelings and my faith—dying for him I loved and believing as my fathers believed.”[59]
This bears some resemblance to that part of Cythna’s speech in the cavern, Canto IX, where she glories in the triumph of their love over the opposition of the world.
I fear nor prizeAught that can now betide unshared by thee.
Cythna thinks that shewill soon dieand believes like Luxima that the story of their love will be a source of inspiration to mankind
Our many thoughts and deeds, our life and love,Our happiness, and all that we have beenImmortally must live and burn and moveWhen we shall be no more.
There are, of course, some differences between the two stories, especially in the conclusions (Cythna and Laon are burned, while Luxima alone dies and the Missionary is never heard of again); but many of the incidents of both are so alike as to justify us in believing that those inThe Revoltwere derived fromThe Missionary. This is confirmed by the fact that Shelley makes more attacks in this poem on priests and the celibacy of the clergy than in any other. In the preface to the poem, Shelley says that “although the mere composition occupied no more than six months, the thoughts thus arranged were slowly gathered in as many years.” It is suggestive that the idea of composing the poem came to him in 1811, the year in which he first read theMissionary. In this same year he wrote a little poem entitled anEssay on Love, no copy of which is now extant.[60]Should one ever come to light, it may showremarkable similarity to the love poemThe Revolt of Islam, where “love is celebrated everywhere as the sole law which should govern the moral world.”[61]
It has been said that Shelley was a libertine, but there seems to be no proof for this assertion. Hogg, who was his most intimate friend at Oxford, says the purity and sanctity of Shelley’s life were most conspicuous. “He was offended, and indeed more indignant than would appear to be consistent with the singular mildness of his nature at a coarse and awkward jest, especially if it were immodest and uncleanly; in the latter case his anger was unbounded, and his uneasiness preeminent.” With the exception of his elopement with Mary Godwin there is nothing in his life to indicate that he was licentious. “Die ruhe, klarheit, sicherheit und stärke seines geschlechtlichen empfündens, das frei ist von aller lüsternheit oder unnatürlichkeit ist bei seiner feinfühligen, nervosen körperanlage besonders bemerkenswert.”[62]
True, Shelley loved many women, but this does not prove that he was immoral. His love is platonic and not sensual. Platonic love is described by Howell as “a love abstracted from all corporeal gross impressions and sensual appetites, but consists in contemplations and ideas of the mind.”[63]It is a passion having its source in the enjoyment of beauty and goodness.
“What is love or friendship?” Shelley asks. “Is it capable of no extension, no communication?” Lord Kaimes defines love to be a particularization of the general passion, but this is the love of sensation, of sentiment—the absurdest of absurd vanities; it is the love of pleasure, not the love of happiness. The one is a love which is self-centered, self-devoted, self-interested ... selfishness, monopoly in its very soul; but love, the love which we worship—virtue, heaven, disinterestedness—in a word.”[64]Love seeks the good of all, not because its object is a minister to its pleasures, but because it is really worthy.
Platonism, laying emphasis upon the function of the soul as opposed to the senses, treats “love as a purely spiritual passion devoid of all sensuous pleasure.”[65]Beauty is a spiritual thing, the splendor of God’s light shining in all things. It is that quality of an object which draws us to it andmakesus love it. Man should love everything and everybody because they are all beautiful. Shelley says:
True love in this differs from gold and clay,That to divide is not to take awayLove is like understanding, that grows brightGazing on many truths;[66]
In another place he says “the meanest of our fellow beings contains qualities, which, developed, we must admire and adore.” Beauty is something more than outward appearance. The source of its power lies in the soul. “The platonic theory of beauty teaches that the beauty of the body is a result of the formative energy of the soul.” According to the Platonist Ficino the soul has descended from heaven and has framed a body in which to dwell. True lovers are those whose souls have departed from heaven under the same astral influences and who, accordingly, are informed with the same idea in imitation of which they frame their earthly bodies.”[67]“We are born,” writes Shelley, “into the world, and there is something within us which, from the instant that we live, more and more thirsts after its likeness.... The discovery of its antitype; the meeting with an understanding capable of clearly estimating our own ... with a frame whose nerves like the chords of two exquisite lyres, strung to the accompaniment of one delightful voice, vibrate with the vibrations of our own;... this is the invisible and unattainable point to which love tends.”[68]According to Plato wisdom is the most lovely of all ideas and the human being who has the greatest amount of wisdom is the most lovable. Platonic love then concerns only the soul, and the union of lover and beloved is simply a union of their souls. “I am led to love a being,” Shelley says, “not because it stands in the physicalrelation of blood to me but because I discern an intellectual relationship.”[69]Whenever Shelley sees one possessing beauty and virtue he cannot help loving that person.
I never was attached to that great sectWhose doctrine is that each one should selectOut of the crowd a mistress or a friendAnd all the rest though fair and wise commendTo cold oblivion;[70]
Again
NarrowThe heart that loves, the brain that contemplatesThe life that wears, the spirit that createsOne object, and one form, and builds therebyA sepulchre for its eternity.
This is the doctrine of Diotima in Plato’sSymposium, which Shelley has translated as follows: “He who aspires to love rightly, ought from his earliest youth to seek an intercourse with beautiful forms.... He ought then to consider that beauty in whatever form it resides is the brother of that beauty which subsists in another form; and if he ought to pursue that which is beautiful in form it would be absurd to imagine that beauty is not one and the same thing in all forms, and would therefore remit much of his ardent preferences towards one, through his perception of the multitude of claims upon his love.”
In the preface toAlastorShelley says that the poem represents a youth (himself) of uncorrupted feelings led forth to the contemplation of the universe. “But the period arrives when these objects cease to suffice. His mind is at length awakened, and thirsts for intercourse with an intelligence similar to himself. He images to himself the Being whom he loves.” This image unites all of wonderful or wise or beautiful which the poet could depict. Shelley sought this ideal all through life, and when he thought he found it went into raptures. Disillusionment, however, soon followed, andAlastoris the expression of his despair at not finding an embodiment of his ideal.
If we keep in mind that Shelley was a platonist, we shall be able to form a more intelligent estimate of his love lyrics and his relations with women. In his first wife, Harriet, he saw courage, a desire for freedom, and a willingness to learn his doctrines.
Thou art sincere and good, of resolute mindFree from heart-withering customs’ cold control,Of passion lofty, pure and subdued.
As soon as she ceased to take interest in his studies, his love for her began to wane. “Every one must know,” he tells Peacock, “that the partner of my life should be one who can feel poetry and understand philosophy.” A month or two after his first marriage he tells Elizabeth Hitchener that he loves her. Seeing that she possessed high intelligence, great love of mankind, and a tendency to oppose existing institutions, he straightway calls her the “sister of his soul.”
Later on he meets a beautiful, sentimental Italian girl, Emilia Viviani, imagines she is the perfect ideal which he had formed in his youth, and writes theEpipsychidion. “Emilia,” says Professor Dowden, “beautiful, spiritual, sorrowing, became for him a type and symbol of all that is most radiant and divine in nature, all that is most remote and unattainable, yet ever to be pursued—the ideal of beauty, truth, and love.”[71]Epipsychidionis the poetic embodiment of the feelings awakened in Shelley by this supposed discovery of the incarnation of the ideal. Emilia turned out to be an ordinary human creature, and then Shelley wished to blot out the memory of her entirely. In a letter to Mr. Gisborne, June, 1822, Shelley says: “I think one is always in love with something or other; the error—and I confess it is not easy for spirits cased in flesh and blood to avoid it—consists in seeking in a mortal image the likeness of what is, perhaps eternal.” “Such illusions,” says Dowden, “may be of service in keeping alive within us the aspiration for the highest things, but assuredly they have a tendency to draw away from real persons some of those founts of feeling which are needed to keep fresh and bright the common ways and days of our life.”[72]
Some of Shelley’s views on women and the family were derived from Mary Wollstonecraft’sVindication of the Rights of Women. “According to the prevailing opinion,” says Mrs. Wollstonecraft, “women were made for men.” All their cares and anxieties are directed towards getting husbands. They deck themselves out with artificial graces that enable them to exercise a short lived tyranny. “Love in their bosoms, taking place of every nobler passion, their sole ambition is to look fair, to raise emotion instead of inspiring respect; and this ignoble desire, like the servility in absolute monarchies, destroys all strength of character.”[73]Women then should not depend on their charms alone, because these have little effect on their husband’s heart “when they are seen every day when the summer is past and gone.” Her first care should be to improve her mind, to exercise her God-given faculties, assert her individuality. This can never be, though, as long as she is the plaything of man. If one may contest the divine right of kings one may also contest the divine right of husbands. Women should bow only to reason and cease being the modest slaves of opinion. It is a violation of the sacred rights of humanity to exact blind obedience and meek submission of women. “The being who patiently endures injustice will soon become unjust.”