I

Friends who by practice of some envious skillWere torn apart—a wide wound, mind from mind,She did unite again with visions clearOf deep affection and of truth sincere.

And besides all this, as already indicated, there was to be a new era of universal peace for mankind:

The soldiers dreamed that they were blacksmiths, andWalked out of quarters in somnambulism,Round the red anvils you might see them standLike Cyclopses in Vulcan’s sooty abysmBeating their swords to Plough-shares.

In the face of these and many other points in the poems, we can only regard it as a kind of perversity, and a last relic of ancient prejudice, to refuse to recognise Shelley’s whole-hearted efforts in the great cause of human emancipation, and not to see how sincerely and at what a cost to himself these efforts were undertaken—not to see, indeed, that in his love-nature (the very kernel of his life) he was pushing his way forward to a new conception of the world, far more intimate and important than any at present generally attained to. We have alluded to Goethe already, and it is clear that the English poet, like his great German contemporary, possessed in his own nature an extraordinary sympathy with, and understanding of, every variety and phase of human temperament.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SHELLEYBYGEORGE BARNEFIELD

THE multitude of books about Shelley, and the partisan spirit which the majority of them breathe, are evidence of the force, complexity, and attractiveness of the poet’s personality. The biographers, however, have all been too confused by the inherent contradictions of his character to analyse it satisfactorily. Indeed, most of them have been too much put to it justifying, or explaining away, his peculiarities ever to ask themselves calmly how and why their hero differed from the average of poetic geniuses. They paint him for us as a young, graceful, rather feminine aristocrat, of revolutionary opinions, and somewhat unstable mind. They credit him with all the Christian virtues, and especially with purity of mind; yet they must record thathis contemporaries saw in him a Satanist, who not only preached moral anarchy, but actually committed adultery and abandoned his faithful wife. Of explanation they are totally barren.

We may, however, explain and resolve these contradictions by the light of modern psychology. That this should give us the key to his character will seem the less astonishing if we reflect that Shelley was preeminently the poet of unsatisfied love, through whose every poem there sounds the note of vague, often formless, erotic longing.

Let us first repeat some of the descriptions of his appearance. In Trelawny’sRecordswe find the author’s first impression noted thus: “Swiftly gliding in, blushing like a girl, a tall thin stripling held out both his hands; and although I could hardly believe, as I looked at his flushed feminine and artless face that it could be the poet, I returned his warm pressure. After the ordinary greetings and courtesies he sat down and listened.I was silent from astonishment: was it possible that this mild-looking, beardless boy could be the veritable monster at war with all the world?”

In Dowden’sLifethere is a description by one of Shelley’s Sion House schoolmates, Mr. Gellibrand: “Like a girl in boy’s clothes, fighting with open hands, and rolling on the floor when flogged, not from pain, but from a sense of indignity.”

The portraits of Shelley are not very reliable guides to his physical appearance, but they all depict him as remarkably feminine in feature. The writer remembers with amusement how an inquisitive landlady asked about a print of Clint’s portrait of Shelley, which graced the walls, if it was her young lodger’s sister! Doubtless the amiable dragon suspected that it was his fiancée.

This femininity extended beyond the facial features to the poet’s voice, which was shrill. If I am not mistaken one of his biographers also mentions that Shelley could not whistlelike a man; and his gait was peculiar and mincing[15].

We shall find, on closer study, that these physical traits were but the external indications of a deeper psychic femininity. Shelley, in fact, belonged to the class of double-natured, or intermediate, types—a class which embraces many artists of very diverse qualities: for example, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Wilde, and Tchaikowsky. We must, however, make clear at the outset of this paper that the poet himself was never fully aware of his inversion; although, towards the last few years of his troubled life, there are indications that the repressed impulses were breaking through the barriers, and were forcing themselves up into consciousness. It is interesting to notice that during the period 1811 to 1814 he gave these impulses almost no expression at all, and at the same time suffered much from his delusions. But from 1817 to the end of his life, while he was expressing these impulses in a sublimated but quite recognisable form, he only had one persecutory delusion. Had he lived a few more years he would have been driven either into some final and serious neurosis, or else to some form of conscious recognition and expression of the repressed homosexual component of his nature. Perhaps fortunately for Shelley, his early death cut short the conflict.

From his early youth Shelley felt himself to be in some way radically unlike his fellows. At school he was shy, lonely, and introspective, avoiding games and seeking solitude. According to one of his contemporaries, he was disliked by his masters and hated by the elder boys, though adored by his equals in age. Certainly he suffered much at Eton where, under Dr. Keate, apandemonium of indiscipline, bullying, and ferocious punishment seems to have flourished. In his manhood he was still “the companionless sensitive plant,” and could portray himself as “the herd-abandoned deer, struck by the hunter’s dart.” He was always fundamentally out of harmony with himself and with his fellows, a prey to the melancholy of Prince Athanase:

What was this grief which ne’er in other mindsA mirror found? He knew not. None could know.

It is sufficiently obvious that poems likeAthanase,Alastor, andThe Question, with their burden of tender melancholy and solitude were inspired by vague unsatisfied sexual emotion. Francis Thompson, in his beautiful essay on Shelley, maintained that the poet never grew beyond childhood. But, though there is much that is true in this view, it would be truer to say that in some respects Shelley remained always in the adolescent stage. For this tender sadness and vague self-pitying emotion are typical of a certain stage of adolescence,when the onset of puberty heightens and disturbs those impulses which, as modern psychologists are now on all sides admitting, are normal during the middle teens.

Shelley remained in some degree fixed at this phase. He was by nature liable to the warmest impulses of affection—often towards others of his own sex, and he felt Love as a woman feels it: it was “his whole existence.” But it was the tragedy of his life that he lived in a society, whose whole influence, acting on him by suggestion from his earliest infancy, forced his conscious mind to seek love in the form of an idealised woman. Hence he never could achieve success, nor even peace of mind, in this quest. It was this deep-rooted, though unconscious, disparity between the sanctions of society and his own peculiar impulses, we feel, that lay at the root of his enthusiasm for Free Love. Godwin might deduce a theory of Free Love from his general philosophical premises, but with a sage of Godwin’s type it remained pure theory, and did notbecome an enthusiasm. With Shelley it was different; he began with an instinctive reaction against social laws and restrictions in the sphere of sex, and his general philosophic anarchism was a later addition which served as a rationalised justification of his instinctive tendencies. The fundamental article of his revolutionary creed is given in these lines fromThe Revolt of Islam:

Man and woman,Their common bondage burst, may freely borrowFrom lawless love a solace for their sorrow.

Shelley’s insistence on the idea of lawless love differs somewhat from Blake’s enthusiasm for Free Love. Blake worshipped spontaneous energy and passion, which he believed to be purely masculine qualities; and his imagination, when it dwelt on this theme, could only conjure up an entirely masculine dream of unrestricted enjoyment. InThe Visions of the Daughters of Albion, the girl Oothoon woos her lover by disclaiming all jealous restrictions and offering to bring him other girls to minister to his enjoyment:

But silken nets and traps of adamant will Oothoon spread,And catch for thee girls of mild silver or of furious gold.I’ll lie beside thee on a bank, and view their wanton play.

In Shelley’s poetry there is no such excessive and entirely masculine picture of unrestricted indulgence, nor is there any expression of the male efferent desires. When Shelley speaks on this subject he speaks as a woman might.

Then that sweet bondage which is Freedom’s selfAnd rivets with sensation’s softest tieThe kindred sympathies of human souls,Needed no fetters of tyrannic law:Those delicate and timid impulsesIn Nature’s primal modesty arose,And with undoubted confidence disclosedThe growing longings of its dawning love.(Queen Mab.)

Love, in Shelley’s mind (as in a woman’s mind) meant sympathy and the passive experience of emotions and sensations. That is why he could understand the woman’s demand for freedom, and cry

Can Man be free if Woman be a slave?

IT will doubtless seem, to many readers, that the question of Shelley’s inversion is at once answered in the negative by the simple fact of his marriage. This, however, is a superficial view. Many quite inverted men have married, either without themselves realising the nature of their own abnormality, or for purely conventional and social reasons, or even with the hope of thus curing themselves of their inversion. We have to remember that Shelley was not conscious of having homosexual impulses; he had never admitted them to himself. He married twice, and all through his life women influenced him. Yet his relations with them were strangely troubled, and his most intimate “affairs” were erotic failures. His calf-love for Miss Grove had no concrete basisof physical attraction, and it soon died out. Then came his marriage with Harriet Westbrook. He was not in love with her, however. It is certain, though not always recognised, that he married her from quixotic motives, and that the element of erotic attraction was almost entirely absent. Harriet appealed to him to save her from petty tyranny and misery at home and at school, and Shelley, feeling himself called upon to play the hero, rescued her. Doubtless he imagined that he would soon love her in the proper romantic way, but Dowden makes it clear that Harriet never at any time held the first place in his affections.

This place was held, as a matter of fact, by a young man, Thomas Hogg, to whom Shelley, a supposedly joyful groom on the eve of his romantic marriage, writes thus: “Your noble and exalted friendship, the prosecution of your happiness, can alone engage my impassioned interest. This (i.e. his approaching marriage) more resembles exerted action than inspired passion.”

In another letter he says: “The late perplexing occurrence which called me to Town occupies my time, engrosses my thoughts. I shall tell you more of it when we meet, which I hope will be soon. It does not, however, so wholly occupy my thoughts, but that you and your interests still are predominant.”

This letter is quoted in Hogg’sLife of Shelley, with the date of August 16, 1811,the same month in which Shelley married.

The story of the failure of this absurd and tragic marriage is well enough known. Mary Godwin, who, like her mother, had a noticeable strain of the masculine in her, roused Shelley to a genuine romantic passion, which supplanted the remnants of his spurious chivalry for Harriet. He saw that his union with the latter was a mere mockery, founded on self-deception, and he did not hesitate to break it up. He had never been in love with Harriet; always he was in love with Love. His subsequent marriage with Mary was in many ways happy, and on the surfaceit seemed successful, for she had more than the ordinary intellect and was devoted to him. Yet it was not truly successful from the erotic point of view, as is obvious from the tone of sadness and melancholy in his later poetry. To the last he was the victim of melancholy, and in conflict with himself, for his love-impulses remained unsatisfied. As long as he did not acknowledge the inverted component in these impulses, he was forced to seek ideal love in the guise of a woman; and the same force which kept up this repression also made him idealise Woman so extravagantly. All through his poetry we find the same quest for an unreal ideal woman, who is at once a sister, a friend, a leader of men, and a sexual mate. It is the theme ofAlastorandThe Revolt of Islam; and inEpipsychidionhe relates how his whole life has been spent in seeking:

The shadow of that idol of my thought.

It would seem that at last he had found the ideal, forEpipsychidionis a rhapsody oflove for Emilia Viviani. But scarcely had the ink dried on the paper than he realised that Emilia, like Harriet, Mary, and Jane, was no Cythna, but a quite ordinary woman.

In spite of the views of romantic persons, the truth is that Shelley was not very susceptible to thephysicalcharms of real women. He was wholly influenced by his own conception of the ideal Heroine; and this conception was a curious mixture of sexual qualities. It is worth while contrasting Blake again with Shelley, in order to illustrate this point. Blake was unusually masculine. All his characters and his figures are strongly polarised—that is to say, he emphasised and exaggerated their typical sexual characteristics. His men all represent energy, passion, intellect, and muscular strength; his women are sweetness and tenderness incarnate. Women attracted him by reason of their specifically feminine qualities; but he did not idealise them, either collectively as a sex, or individually. Indeed, he thought they were entirely negative and passive incharacter: “In Heaven, there is no such thing as a female will.” Yet his married life was placid and very happy.

Now Shelley, on the other hand, loved to create androgynous types. He loved the feminine qualities when they were in men, and the masculine qualities in women. It would seem as if he were continually striving to create an idealbisexualcharacter. For example, consider the sensitive, graceful Prince Athanase or Laon; or, by contrast, the rebel Cythna, whose chief qualities are her vigorous intellect, her will-power, and her Amazonian heroism. And Shelley idealised women, both collectively and individually, in spite of the fact that his experience always contradicted him. His married life, to say the least, was not conspicuously successful. In this connexion it is interesting to note how constantly Shelley introduced a third party into his household, as if he were quite without the ordinary domestic jealousy of those who are “attached to that great sect whosedoctrine is, that each one should select out of the crowd a mistress or a friend, and all the rest, though fair and wise, commend to cold oblivion.”

When he married Harriet he quickly took her to York, to live there with Hogg. After this plan had broken down he induced Miss Hitchener to share his home; and when she departed, Elizabeth, Harriet’s sister, came in. Even when he eloped with Mary Godwin, Claire Clairmont accompanied the pair to the continent. Finally at Pisa, and at Casa Magni, he shared his house with Edward and Jane Williams.

THE second unusual feature in Shelley’s life of the heart was that his many friendships with men were no less romantic, and on the whole much more permanent and successful, than his affairs with women. Certainly they showed some of the same ideal character, but they also seemed real and concrete, in a way that his heterosexual affairs did not. We know little of his early affections, except for two instances. While he was at Eton, probably at the age of thirteen or fourteen, he had a remarkable affection for the Windsor physician, Dr. Lind. It is well known, of course, that at this period of puberty boys do quite normally tend to fall in love with men or older boys,[16]and to worship them as heroes. But Shelley’s love for Dr. Lind was unusually strong and tender, as is shown by the fact that it did not fade from his memory, as such boyish enthusiasms normally do, but persisted as one of his most precious recollections. InPrince Athanasewe find the good Doctor described as:

An old, old man with hair of silver-whiteAnd lips where heavenly smiles would hang and blendWith his wise words.

And the third and fourth cantos ofThe Revolt of Islamcontain a description of Dr. Lind, and record Shelley’s worship of him. It was not only on account of his anarchist teachings that Shelley loved this old man; nor merely because of his evident genius for soothing the troubled mind of the poet. There was also a certain tender physical attraction, which Shelley reveals by his description of the Hermit inThe Revolt of Islam.

The old man is “stately and beautiful.” His very looks are sufficient to heal: “And to my inmost soul his soothing looks he sent.” Shelley recalled, or imagined, thejoy of being embraced by this “divine old man” when he wrote of the Hermit’s care for the sick Laon.

He did enfoldHis giant arms around me to upholdMy wretched frame.* * * * *

And two stanzas later:

the pillowFor my light head was hollowed in his lapAnd my bare limbs his mantle did enwrap....

Then again in the second stanza of the fourth canto:

When the old man his boat had anchorédHe wound me in his arms with tender care,And very few but kindly words he said,And bore me through the tower adown a stair

There is evident in these quotations a certain desire to be caressed by this grand old rebel, and when we remember that Shelley had very little sympathy from either his Father or his Mother, this desire seems not unnatural; he demanded of Dr. Lind some of the physical love and tenderness which his parents had withheld. It would be a great mistake to imagine that, because thepoet, with his unrivalled command over language and his tendency to express abstract emotion, normally seems to dwell in ethereal regions, Shelley the man was not often acutely susceptible to the cravings for contact with the beloved. On the contrary, numerous passages express this yearning; only, as they are written with consummate art, and not put in narrative but in lyric form, most people seem to fail to realise their meaning.

What are kisses, whose fire claspsThe failing heart in languishment, or limbTwined within limb? or the quick dying gaspsOf the life meeting, when the faint eyes swimThrough tears of a wide mist boundless and dim,In one caress?

The other romance of Shelley’s early boyhood concerned a schoolboy friend at Sion House. Apparently the two boys were both of about the same age, eleven or twelve years. The episode is recorded in a fragmentary essay on the subject of Friendship, written shortly before Shelley’s death, and given in Hogg’sLife.

“The object of these sentiments was a boy about my own age, of a character eminently generous, brave, and gentle; and the elements of human feeling seemed to have been from his birth genially compounded within him. There was a delicacy and a simplicity in his manner inexpressibly attractive.... The tones of his voice were so soft and winning that every word pierced into my heart; and their pathos was so deep that in listening to him the tears have involuntarily gushed from my eyes. Such was the being for whom I first experienced the sacred sentiments of friendship. I remember in my simplicity writing to my mother a long account of his admirable qualities and my own devoted attachment. I suppose she thought me out of my wits, for she returned no answer to my letter. I remember we used to walk the whole playhours up and down by some moss-covered palings, pouring out our hearts in youthful talk.... I recollect thinking my friend exquisitely beautiful. Every night, whenwe parted to go to bed, we kissed each other like children—as we still were!”

There is a passion and intensity of emotion in all this which raises it above the level of the ordinary schoolboy friendship, even when we have allowed for the fact that this passage was written during the poet’s last years, and is therefore perhaps idealised. Still, in spite of the warmth of emotion, this idyll would not of itself, and taken apart from all corroborative evidence, show the poet’s fundamental inversion if it were not for the fact that Shelley cherished the memory of it in manhood. Many boys have a similar romance at that age, or a little later, but it is hardly remembered with emotion except by those who are in some degree inverted.

The bosom friend of Shelley’s early manhood was Thomas Hogg, for whom he had an extraordinary affection. During their short career at Oxford, the two inseparables spent almost all their time together. Every day they either breakfasted or lunchedtogether, went for a country ramble, or sat in Shelley’s room, reading, or re-modelling the universe. When Shelley was expelled, Hogg voluntarily put himself in the same position, and the pair went to live together in London. Their parents separated them, but they maintained an intimate correspondence.

After Shelley’s marriage with Harriet, Hogg joined the couple at Edinburgh, and then took them to his house at York. Here he apparently began to pay unwelcome attentions to Harriet, who informed her husband. Shelley appears not to have expressed the normal feelings of jealousy, and freely forgave Hogg; but he was disappointed to find that his idol, Hogg, had feet of clay. Shelley took Harriet away from York, and went to Keswick. From here he wrote several letters to his friend, in which we find such passages as these: “But pray write often; your last letter I have read as I would read your soul.” “If I thought we were to be long parted I should be wretchedly miserable—half-mad!” “I never doubted you—you, the brother of my soul.” “I do not know that absence will certainly cure love; but this I know, that it fearfully augments the intensity of friendship.”

Later on Shelley renewed his intimacy with Hogg, though never on the old terms of ardent affection. It has been suggested that he was mistaken in his suspicions, and that Hogg was really quite innocent. This view is quite tenable, since the evidence is very slender, and delusions of jealousy often accompany delusions of persecution; which latter Shelley certainly suffered from.

While at Keswick he wrote several long letters to Miss Elizabeth Hitchener, whom for a few months he regarded as his dearest friend. In these letters he tells her of Hogg’s crime, of his confession, and of his demands to be allowed again to live with the couple. In one letter Shelley states: “I do not love him” (dated November 26, 1811). In December, however, he writes to Hogg: “Think not that I am otherwisethan your friend, a friend to you now more fervent, more devoted than ever, for misery endears us to those whom we love. You are, you shall be my bosom friend.”[17]

Altogether this episode is complicated and confusing. The evidence against Hogg is confined to statements made by Shelley, in letters to Miss Hitchener, and these statements do not harmonise with Shelley’s extravagant expressions of affection for Hogg. The fact is that he both loved Hogg intensely and suspected him. For my own part, I think that Hogg was probably quite innocent of any great indiscretion, and that Shelley simply magnified some mild familiarity out of all proportion. That Shelley was subject to such mental exaggerations is well known, and the words which he imputed to the imaginary assassin at Tanyrallt: “By God, I will be revenged. I will murder your wife and ravish your sister,” sound very much like a stronger development of theidea that someone was making overtures to Harriet. As to his definite statements on the subject, they cannot weigh very heavily, as his statements were often only subjectively true. In addition, there are two stanzas inThe Revolt of Islamwhich may refer to Hogg, and which, in that case, would indicate that Shelley did finally admit that he was mistaken.

In canto 2, stanza xviii:

And that this friend was false, may now be saidCalmly—that he, like other men, could weepTears which are lies, and could betray and spreadSnares for that guileless heart which for his own had bled.

But in canto 5, stanza v, the friends are reconciled again:

Then suddenly I knew it was the youth,In whom its earliest hopes my spirit found;But envious tongues had stained his spotless truth,And thoughtless pride his love in silence bound,And shame and sorrow mine in toils had wound,While he was innocent and I deluded.

This last line probably represents the real truth of the whole matter; although, indeed,we have now no means of being certain about the affair.

Shelley’s short-lived enthusiasm for Miss Hitchener, whose name was mentioned above, is also instructive. It was based on the very slightest practical acquaintance with her, though their correspondence was lengthy and intimate; for Shelley always needed some recipient for his emotional or philosophical outpourings. After many letters had been exchanged, Shelley thought that at last his ideal being, the intellectual heroine, had been found; and Miss Hitchener came to live with him and Harriet as their “Spiritual Sister.” Unfortunately, they soon came to detest her. In December 1812 Shelley wrote to Hogg, telling him of the good lady’s departure, in these terms: “She is an artful, superficial, ugly, hermaphroditical beast of a woman, and my astonishment at my fatuity, inconsistency, and bad taste was never so great as after living four months with her as an inmate.” Surely there would haveto be something extraordinarily repulsive in this lady to justify such an outburst. Yet she would seem to have been quite a reasonable woman. This apparently unreasonable outburst is paralleled in another letter from Shelley to Hogg. After living with Harriet’s sister (Elizabeth) in his house, he wrote: “I certainly hate her with all my soul. It is a sight which awakens an inexpressible sensation of disgust and horror, to see her caress my poor little Ianthe, in whom I hereafter may find the consolation of sympathy.”

In thus idealising women before making their acquaintance, and yet in some cases being strongly repelled by them directly he lived at close quarters with them, Shelley behaved unreasonably, but it was a purely instinctive, and even unconscious, reaction.

Shelley was also strongly attached to two older and rather virile men, Trelawny and Peacock, to both of whom he appealed apparently as much by reason of his feminine charm as by his intellectual and poetic gifts.

I have already quoted Trelawny’s description of his first meeting with the “beardless boy, with a feminine, artless face.” To Peacock, Shelley seemed a wayward and innocent child, totally incapable of guiding himself safely through the hard world of practical affairs. Peacock was a practical man, and enjoyed playing the rôle of father and worldly guide; Shelley, moreover, liked to be allowed to be a child, and to let Peacock manage things for him. In the company of these two men he seemed instinctively to have become more naïve and feminine than he normally was; in other words, like all bisexual people, he automatically altered his polarity in accordance with his company.

Later on in his life he was much attracted by “Kind Hunt,” and a letter referring toThe Cencireveals his sentiment rather artlessly and charmingly: “I have written something different from anything else, and mean to dedicate it to you. I should not have done so without approval, but I askedyour picture last night, and it smiled assent.”

Several writers have sneered at Leigh Hunt’s friendship for Shelley because of the amount of money he received from the generous poet. Hunt has been called a parasite in consequence. I am not concerned with the genuineness of Hunt’s affection for Shelley, though I do not doubt it myself. What is certain is that Shelley had a very keen affection for Hunt, whom he addresses as “My dearest Friend,” and on whom he lavished money which he could ill afford to spend. It is noteworthy that an extravagent generosity towards friends is such a frequent characteristic of Uranians. One has only to think of the cases of Edward II, or of Michelangelo,[18]both of whom were shamelessly sponged on by their favourites, to realise that such men are an easy prey for parasites. Perhaps this is due to the fact that such generosity forms a channel along which some of therepressed sexual impulses may obtain an indirect expression.

Even if we call Shelley a fool for allowing men like Hunt and Godwin to drain his purse, we cannot but admire him for many of his other benefactions. Trelawny relates a touching instance, when Shelley divided a bag of Scudi between the Housekeeping expenses, Mary, and himself. Then, says Trelawny, he whispered to Mary: “I will give this to poor Tom Medwin, who wants to go to Naples and has no money.” “Why, Shelley has nothing left for himself,” said Trelawny, who had overheard. In his friendship for his cousin Medwin he revealed another typically Uranian characteristic, namely a gift for nursing. Medwin fell ill at Pisa, and a letter of his describes Shelley’s care for him.

“Shelley tended me like a brother. He applied my leeches, administered my medicines, and, during six weeks that I was confined to my room, was assiduous and unremitting in his affectionate care of me.”

When we thus survey the whole range of Shelley’s affections, and compare his love-affairs with his friendships, can we readily distinguish any great difference between them? Surely the erotic nature of his feelings towards his young school-friend, and towards Dr. Lind, Hogg, Hunt and the rest, is obvious enough, and were it not that these were balanced by obviously erotic relationships with women, we should be led to class him as a pure Uranian. Indeed, we must always remember that, since the whole weight of herd-suggestion actively fosters and encourages the expression of all feelings of love towards the opposite sex and actively represses any patently homosexual expression, one clear indication of the latter is worth more as evidence than a dozen conventional signs of the former. It is because this herd-suggestion is so strong and so persistent that many naturally inverted people are artificially induced to appear as lovers of women, and to behave in a manner that is for them unnatural.This appears to have been the grand tragedy of Shelley’s life, and the source of all his melancholy, his mental troubles, and his inconsistencies. As has been pointed out by Stopford Brooke, in his edition of Shelley’s Lyrics, “Love was felt by Shelley not quite naturally; not as Burns, or even Byron, felt it. Love, in his poetry, sometimes dies into dreams, sometimes likes its imagery better than itself. It is troubled with a philosophy.” And Stopford Brooke adds, “Of course, he was therefore fickle.” This is typical of all those who suffer from repressed (and hence unconscious) homosexual impulses of comrade-love; for with theirconsciousmind they seek love in the form of a woman. The quest is for them necessarily hopeless, and they are tormented and baffled by finding an inner falsity in each new object of their affections. One after another the dreams, the hopes, the ideals, are shattered, because the conscious mind is seeking a goal which is the polar opposite of that desired by the whole unconscious, butpurposive, self.

SCATTERED throughout Shelley’s writings we find many indications of his bisexual disposition. For example, his heroes, Laon, Athanase, and his heroines, Laone, Beatrice, etc., each combine masculine energy and intellect with a feminine grace and gentleness. His ideal of human beauty as of character, was bisexual, as can be seen from his comments on the Greek sculpture in Italy.[19]His highest praise is given to the statues of adolescent boys—a Ganymede, an Apollo: “It was difficult to conceive anything more delicately beautiful than the Ganymede; but the spirit-like lightness, the softness, the flowing perfection of these forms, surpass it. The countenance, though exquisite, lovely, and gentle, is not divine. There is a womanish vivacity of winning yet passivehappiness, and yet a boyish inexperience exceedingly delightful.” On an Olinthus, he remarks:

“Another of those sweet and gentle figures of adolescent youth, in which the Greeks delighted.”

His description of the “Bacchus and Ampelus” is worth quoting at some length. “The figures are walking as it were with a sauntering and idle pace and talking to each other as they walk, and this is expressed in the motions of their delicate and flowing forms. One arm of Bacchus rests on the shoulder of Ampelus, and the other ... is gracefully thrown forward corresponding with the advance of the opposite leg.... Ampelus, with a beast skin over his shoulder, holds a cup in his right hand, and with his left half-embraces the waist of Bacchus. Just as you may have seen (yet how seldom from their dissevering and tyrannical institutions do you see) a younger and an elder boy at school walking in some remote grassy spot of their playground, with thattender friendship towards each other which has so much of love.”[20]

In a letter from Naples (December 22, 1818) he tells Peacock of one statue: “A Satyr, making love to a youth: in which the expressed life of the Sculpture and the inconceivable beauty of the form of the youth, overcome one’s repugnance to the subject.”

Personally I have never visited the Naples gallery, but I have been credibly informed that this statue is one of the very few indecently homosexual pieces. If so, it is curious that Shelley should have singled it out for mention, for he had a horror of everything crude or obscene.

Another statue that evidently fascinated him was the Louvre “Hermaphrodite,” for he refers to it in a fragment forEpipsychidionas:

That sweet marble monster of both sexes,That looks so sweet and gentle, that it vexesThe very soul that the soul is goneWhich lifted from her limbs the veil of stone.

His delight in bisexual forms is also evident in his description of the angelic being, called “Hermaphroditus,” which was created by the Witch of Atlas.

A sexless thing it was, and in its growthIt seemed to have developed no defectOf either sex, yet all the grace of both,In gentleness and strength its limbs were decked,The bosom swelled lightly with its full youth,The countenance was such as might selectSome artist, that his skill should never die,Imaging forth such perfect purity.

One of the most peculiar traits in Shelley’s psychology was his interest in the theme of incest between a brother and sister. To most of his readers this pre-occupation with such a subject appears repulsive and inexplicable, for there is nothing attractive, or even interesting, in incestper se. Nevertheless, for some obscure reason, the subject fascinated Shelley; and I think we shall be able to explain this fact by connecting it with his general bisexual tendency. We have seen that his heroines and heroes were dual types, in whom the masculine andfeminine traits were blended, and that, inThe Witch of Atlas, he went a step further, and created an ideal Hermaphrodite, to symbolise his conception of perfect being. Surely it was in the same mood that he originally created Laon and Cythna to be brother and sister; thus emphasising their absolute similarity, and, by their incestuous union, achieving a more complete fusion of the two sexual natures. Swedenborg went a step further in this direction, when he said that two true lovers became, in Heaven, one angel.

It is important to remember that love, in Shelley’s mind, depended upon the perception of the similarity of two lovers; not upon any polar, or complementary attraction. Thus Alastor’s mind “thirsts for intercourse with an intelligence similar to itself”; while Laon refers to:

“Thatlikenessof the features which endears the thoughts expressed by them.” It was for this reason that Shelley made the Spirit of the Earth fall in love with his sister, the moon.

In real life, too, Shelley always sought for a similar soul to mate with. Thus, he calls Hogg: “The Brother of my soul”; and Miss Hitchener, before he knew her intimately, was his “spiritual sister.” And in the same key he cries to Emilia:

“Would we two had been twins of the same mother!” From all these considerations, I think we may suggest that Shelley’s pre-occupation with the theme of incest between brother and sister (for other forms of incest did not occupy his mind at all, except in the one instance ofThe Cenci, where the interest is purely dramatic) was in reality nothing but a disguised expression of his own bisexual nature; and that Hermaphroditus represents the logical development of this expression.

There can be little doubt that if Shelley had survived a few more years his true nature would have forced itself into his conscious recognition. He seems to have had a predilection for such classical authors as Theocritus, Moschus, and Plato, in all of whomthere is an atmosphere of “ideal homosexuality.” He translated a sonnet of Dante’s to Guido Cavalcanti, and another by the latter to Dante, and he had obviously appreciated the significance of Shakespeare’sSonnets.

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