The psychology of the poet Shelley

Late studies in the Psychology of Sex have led to some interesting speculations with regard to the poet Shelley; and it is with pleasure that I write a few lines by way of introduction to the following paper by my friend, George Barnefield, which puts very clearly, as I think, some points in Shelley’s temperament which have hitherto been neglected or misunderstood, and which call for renewed consideration.

Not having myself made a special study of the Modern Psychology, I do not pretend to certify to the absolute truth of the theories put forward by Mr. Barnefield, but I do certainly think, after due consideration, that they are worthy of very careful study. The profound divergence of Shelley’s ideals from the accepted forms of our modern life is a subject which, though it has always attracted attention, has never, I think, been adequately explained or even presented for intelligent comprehension; and it is only perhaps in late years that it has become possible, through the great advances that have been made in psychological Science, to arrive at a valid understanding of the inner nature of our greatest modern poet.

It has been a sort of commonplace of literary criticism to talk somewhat vaguely of Shelley’s feminine appearance and disposition, or to quote (in passing) Matthew Arnold’s remarks about his “ineffectual wings,” or again to dwell on the poet’s more or less proved liability to delusions; but there has (quite naturally) been no attempt to relate these peculiarities to each other or to see their real bearing on the subject under discussion. And this attitude has made it easy for hostile critics to spread exaggerated and unfounded ideas.[1]

The points which I wish to bring to notice in the present Introduction are (1) the degree to which the love-element and interest saturate all Shelley’s poetry; (2) how, while showing the utmost boldness in facing out certain problems connected with sex (incest, polygamy, etc.), he does at the same time treat with marked reserve and a kind of childlike innocence any direct reference to physical sex-acts; and (3) the modern or Freudian view that the origin of mental delusions can frequently be traced to some intimate disturbance or repression of a love-passion.

With regard to (1) it has to be noted of course that while the love-interest occupies such a large part of the general field of Shelley’s poetry, it occurs almost always in a very diffused and abstract form. I need only refer in this connexion to three of his main poems, namely, to Prometheus Unbound, in which the love-invocations are strangely ethereal, extending directly and confessedly to all of Nature and Humanity, but never dwelling for a moment on the concrete corporeal charm of a single human being; or to Epipsychidion, in which there is a like diffusion and abstractness, though the confessed inspiration of the love is a known and acknowledged Woman (Emilia Viviani); or again to Adonais, in which the definitely portrayed and glorified object of the poem is a Man. In all these cases (I need hardly say) sex and the sex-contacts which play so conspicuous a part in quite modern literature, are kept well in the background. Whatever Shelley’s real sentiments may have been, these matters are certainly treated by him as quite subordinate and hardly demanding consideration.

This idealising habit was rooted in the very grain and texture of Shelley’s mind; and though it may be open to a Mechanical Age to scoff at the same, yet there remains a seed of prophecy in it and a promise of deliverance from that double nightmare which continually oppresses us, and from which we so hardly discern the means of escape. I mean the Nightmare of Gold and the Nightmare of Blood.[2] For to-day the delusion of monetary gain is indeed a nightmare; it clouds all free and spontaneous activity of the human spirit, and its paralysing influence derives from the false though ingrained belief that only by sacrificing our lives in the pursuit of riches shall we be able (each one of us) to escape into freedom; while the delusion of Redemption by the spilling of Blood (which from the beginning of the world has been accepted as the orthodox means of Salvation) is now confirmed by our failure to perceive that whoever seeks to gain advantage for himself by sacrificing others is really tightening the chains of his own captivity. Shelley, being free from either of these delusions, may be counted the prophet of a new era for mankind.

Yet, at the time in question, Shelley himself was constantly “in love”; and either on the one hand exalting the objects of his adorations into an ideal sphere, or on the other hand claiming perfect liberty and license of action and expression for them. How are we to reconcile these varying attitudes and moods--or is it not necessary to reconcile them?... Perhaps this last suggestion is the best. Like most predominantly emotional people, though liable to kaleidoscopic variations of outlook, any sustained effort to harmonise these and render them consistent with each other was painful and irksome to him. Yet it is this very variability (but with nucleus of iron determination and persistence) which is largely the key and explanation of Shelley’s character. It gave him his wide sympathy with and understanding of different and almost opposing types of humanity, and gave him at the same time his strong determination to get at the root of things--with the result that he ultimately combined in himself a great range of qualities, both masculine and feminine. If he had had a longer and more effective experience of the actual world (so we sometimes think) it might have been possible for him to bring into line or give even more definite form and expression to these two sides of his nature. Familiarity with the work-a-day world of practical life would, we think, have made it difficult for him to linger much longer among the abstract beauties of Nature--the “mountains and fountains” of his youthful dreams; and would have compelled him into another region where he would have found an abundance of quite solid building material ready to his hand.

Prometheus Unbound carries the love of Nature into the realm of the Ideal; and Epipsychidion does the same for the love of Woman; but Adonais to most English ears sounds strange in its loving and highly imaginative glorification of a Man; yet it is a long and elaborately wrought poem, and perhaps in some ways the most carefully written and direct and concrete of Shelley’s greater works. “To that high Capital where kingly death Keeps his pale Court in beauty and decay....” It seems impossible for anyone to be insensible to the charm and distinction of the language--its warmth, its intensity, its glorious movement. Yet how are the love-expressions in it to be taken? Are they to be put aside as amiable but rather meaningless enthusiasms, or are they to be interpreted directly and candidly, as meaning what they say? A foreigner once said to me, “You English have a strange and sinister gift for pretending that you do not see things which are straight before your eyes.”... Shelley was not like that. His lovely candour, his crystalline purity of mind, would not brook disguise, or countenance any harlotry with deceit, and a great part of his precious life was consumed in tearing from his own eyes the bandages which the feeble conventions of that age had bound around them. For a boy at school to adore and idealise one of the masters, and to say so, must have seemed at that time a thing outrageously contrary to all the traditions of British respectability; yet the young Percy’s devotion to Dr. Lind (see the first stanzas of Prince Athanase) has a touch of more than romance about it, and it is well-known that the growing boy always kept a sacred place in his heart for the memory of this his former teacher. There are two fragments of Prince Athanase preserved to us, and in the second of these the boy seems to recall the very words of “that divine old man” when he says:

Dost thou remember yet When the curved moon, then lingering in the west, Paused in yon waves her mighty horns to wet, How in those beams we walked, half resting on the sea? ’Tis just one year--sure thou dost not forget. Then Plato’s words of light in thee and me Lingered like moonlight in the moonless east, For we had just then read--thy memory Is faithful now--the story of the feast;[3] And Agathon and Diotima seemed From death and dark forgetfulness released.

I quote this passage almost complete, not only on account of its great intrinsic beauty, but because it holds for us something that was evidently very dear to the young poet--the memory of how he and his old friend had on one occasion walked on the shore together reciting in intimate converse the words of Agathon and Diotima as recorded in that most precious of the Platonic dialogues, the _Symposium_--a memory evidently very precious to Shelley, just because of his love for the one old man who in the desert of those Eton days had gone out of his way to encourage and assist him.

I say that this devotion to Dr. Lind--the devotion of a schoolboy to one many years his senior--throws great light on the inner nature of the youth and exposes for us how the latter’s affections might well, at that time, have had an ideal cast and character, and not have been entirely swayed by the ordinary pandemic love of the male for the female.

Among the fragments of Shelley’s poems preserved to us, there is one short piece of only a few lines from Epipsychidion, written apparently in allusion to (or suggested by) a well-known statue in the Louvre, the Hermaphrodite.

And others swear you’re a Hermaphrodite, Like that sweet marble monster of both sexes, Which looks so sweet and gentle that it vexes The very soul that[4] the soul is gone, Which lifted from her limbs the veil of stone.

I quote this, not because the allusion to an hermaphrodite positively proves anything, but because it certainly illustrates the poet’s wide-ranging interest in whatever might possibly fall within the domain of human experience. And, indeed, there are quite a few other references among the Poems to this subject of Hermaphrodites. A careful reading, for instance, of The Witch of Atlas shows that the creation of a strange Being of double sex is the central theme of that weirdly beautiful poem. The supposed mother of this Being was “a lovely lady garmented in light” and around her birth (a thing, indeed, most interesting to us) floats the age-long prophecy of the ultimate redemption of mankind.[5]

Her cave was stored with scrolls of strange device Which taught the expiations at whose price Men from the gods might win that happy age, Too lightly lost, redeeming native vice; And which might quench the earth-consuming rage Of gold and blood--till men should live and move Harmonious as the sacred stars above.

Here one can hardly do otherwise than pause a moment over the vision indicated--the epitome and exposure of the mortal sins and consequent disasters which afflict our modern world--“the earth-consuming rage of Gold and Blood.” When we contemplate the frantic scramble of to-day (insanely and murderously furious as it is) in pursuit of Gold, and the rivers, the oceans of Blood poured out in the horrible process, when we think of the regiments and regiments of soldiers and mercenaries mangled and torn (and each one having wife or daughter or friend or lover to give his or her life in exchange), when we realise what all this horrible scramble means, including the endless slaughter of the innocent and beautiful animals, and the fear, the terror, the agony in which the latter exist--we can but pay homage to the clear-eyed youth who, with lightning swiftness, leapt to the understanding of the whole sordid situation, and saw that only a new type of human being combining the male and the female, could ultimately save the world--a being having the feminine insight and imagination to perceive the evil, and the manly strength and courage to oppose and finally annihilate it.