Shelley: The Pursuit (46 page)

‘Nature rejects the monarch, not the man;

The subject, not the citizen: for kings

And subjects, mutual foes, forever play

A losing game into each other’s hands,

Whose stakes are vice and misery.

The man

Of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys.

Power, like a desolating pestilence,

Pollutes whate’er it touches; and obedience

Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,

Makes slaves of men, and, of the human frame,

A mechanized automaton . . . .’
¹⁰

The sharp sting of Shelley’s puritanism is never very far from the argument, and frequently breaks out with all the rhythms and menaces of religious revivalism. Here, for instance, he addresses the priests and princes of political and commercial power:

                  ‘. . . Are not thy days

Days of unsatisfying listlessness?

Dost thou not cry, ere night’s long rack is o’er,

‘‘When will the morning come?” Is not thy youth

A vain and feverish dream of sensualism?

Thy manhood blighted with unripe disease?

Are not thy views of unregretted death

Drear, comfortless and horrible? Thy mind,

Is it not morbid as thy nerveless frame,

Incapable of judgement, hope, or love?’
¹¹

The posture of attack is carried over into the ‘Notes’, where it is often expressed with sardonic scorn. Shelley observed that the sun is 95 million miles from the earth, and that light, which ‘consists either of vibrations propagated through a subtle medium, or of numerous minute particles’ takes a mere eight minutes seven seconds to pass between them. In contrast it takes ‘many years’ for the light to travel from the nearest star, and hence the material universe must surely contain a ‘plurality of worlds’ within ‘indefinite immensity’ (Note 2). Taking into account these modern astronomical considerations, he concludes:

It is impossible to believe that the Spirit that pervades this infinite machine begat a son upon the body of a Jewish woman; or is angered at the consequences of that necessity, which is a synonym of itself. All that miserable tale of the Devil, and Eve, and an Intercessor, with the childish mummeries of the God of the Jews, is irreconcilable with the knowledge of the stars. The works of His fingers have borne witness against Him.
¹²

The theme of free love provides the most successful example of the way in which Shelley managed to interrelate his poetry and his prose.
Queen Mab
opens in Canto I with the presentation of the sleeping girl, Ianthe, a picture of Harriet, whose dream is to form the substance of the poem. The lover regards her with deep physical tenderness and desire:

Her dewy eyes are closed,

And on their lids, whose texture fine

Scarce hides the dark blue orbs beneath,

The baby Sleep is pillowed:

Her golden tresses shade

The bosom’s stainless pride,

Curling like tendrils of the parasite

Around a marble column.
¹³

This description is echoed at the close of the last canto, when Ianthe awakes from her dream, and the blue eyes open to confront and welcome Henry’s (Shelley’s) ‘looks of speechless love’. The theme of free love is thus argued against the background of a warm and personal realization of a love relationship between two individuals. In the opening four cantos there are many references to the perversion, frustration and incapacitating effect of love caused by tyrannical systems of power and belief, both theological and political. In canto V, the cheapening of sexual love is presented directly as one of the consequences of a corrupt commercial system:

Even love is sold; the solace of all woe

Is turned to deadliest agony, old age

Shivers in selfish beauty’s loathing arms,

And youth’s corrupted impulses prepare

A life of horror from the blighting bane

Of commerce; whilst the pestilence that springs

From unenjoying sensualism, has filled

All human life with hydra-headed woes.
¹⁴

Shelley’s position here would at first appear to be fairly orthodox; he is attacking prostitution, venereal disease and promiscuity — all three of which were commonplaces of Regency society. But he then appends a note, which opens up the subject in a far more radical way. This is perhaps the greatest short statement on the subject of free love. It begins with a paean:

Love is inevitably consequent upon the perception of loveliness. Love withers under constraint; its very essence is liberty; it is compatible neither with obedience, jealousy, nor fear: it is there most pure, perfect, and unlimited, where its votaries live in confidence, equality and unreserve.
¹⁵

From here, Shelley goes on to argue that the ‘sexual connection’ should only last as long as partners 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.’ The marriage institution — let alone the Christian idea of ‘mortifying the flesh for the love of God’ — is just such an intolerable tyranny. Constancy itself has no virtue, and ‘there is nothing immoral in separation’. Shelley summarizes this argument:

Love is free: to promise for ever to love the same woman is not less absurd than to promise to believe the same creed: such a vow in both cases excludes us from all enquiry. The language of the votarist [of marriage] is this: the woman I now love may be infinitely inferior to many others; the creed I now profess may be a mass of errors and absurdities; but I exclude myself from all future information as to the amiability of the one and the truth of the other, resolving blindly and in spite of conviction to adhere to them. Is this the language of delicacy and reason? Is the love of such a frigid heart of more worth than its belief?

Considering this belief in its domestic light, Shelley makes shrewd points about the children of unhappy marriages, and the erosive effects of domestic quarrelling. ‘The early education of their children takes its colour from the squabbles of the parents; they are nursed in a systematic school of ill-humour, violence and
falsehood.’ Of the relations between husband and wife, he writes with equal perception: ‘The conviction that wedlock is indissoluble holds out the strongest of all temptations to the perverse: they indulge without restraint in acrimony and all the little tyrannies of domestic life, when they know that their victim is without appeal.’

Next Shelley attacks the ‘fanatical idea of chastity’, which he always argued led necessarily to prostitution, ‘destroying thereby all those exquisite and delicate sensibilities whose existence cold hearted worldings have denied; annihilating all genuine passion, and debasing that to a selfish feeling which is the excess of generosity and devotedness’. Of the convention of chastity outside marriage, he writes:

Chastity is a monkish and evangelical superstition, a greater foe to natural temperance even than unintellectual sensuality; it strikes at the root of all domestic happiness, and consigns more than half the human race to misery, that some few may monopolize according to law. A system could not well have been devised more studiously hostile to human happiness than marriage.

What then did Shelley propose to put in its place? Shelley was aware that he would be accused of preaching promiscuity and the destruction of the social network, but he would not be drawn to speculate far on the wider implications of his views.

I conceive that from the abolition of marriage, the fit and natural arrangement of sexual connection would result. I by no means assert that the intercourse would be promiscuous: on the contrary, it appears, from the relation of parent to child, that this union is generally of long duration, and marked above all others with generosity and self-devotion. But this is a subject which it is perhaps premature to discuss. That which will result from the abolition of marriage will be natural and right; because choice and change will be exempted from restraint.

This essay on free love typifies Shelley’s method of drawing on and combining several writers. The emphasis on the psychological and spiritual importance of ‘freedom’ and ‘choice’ comes from Godwin; the critique of the destructive effects of the conventional marriage relationship comes from Wollstonecraft and Chevalier Lawrence; the appeal to the ‘natural’ processes of change and constancy reflect Lucretius and Rousseau; the violent cut at the ‘monkish’ and ‘christian’ attitudes to physical love have Gibbon for their historical authority. But the passion and edge in the tone of the argument, the mixture of logic, sarcasm and urgency, is wholly Shelley’s. The essay ends with a memorable, and faintly mischievous image:

How would morality, dressed up in stiff stays and finery, start from her own disgusting image should she look in the mirror of nature!

The theme is now returned to the poem, where it is picked up again in the final Canto IX, in which Shelley is celebrating the vision of a politically and morally revolutionized world, in which ‘the habitable earth is full of bliss’,
¹⁶
and ‘all things are recreated, and the flame/Of consentaneous love inspires all life’.
¹⁷
Describing sexual love under this new dispensation, Shelley imagines how the conventionally profane has become naturally sacred:

‘Then, that sweet bondage which is Freedom’s self,

And rivets with sensation’s softest tie

The kindred sympathies of human souls,

Needed no fetters of tyrannic law:

Those delicate and timid impulses

In Nature’s primal modesty arose,

And with undoubted confidence disclosed

The growing longings of its dawning love,

Unchecked by dull and selfish chastity,

That virtue of the cheaply virtuous,

Who pride themselves in senselessness and frost. . . .

Woman and man, in confidence and love,

Equal and free and pure together trod

The mountain-paths of virtue, which no more

Were stained with blood from many a pilgrim’s feet . . . .’
¹⁸

The handling of the free love theme is characteristic of much of the strength and weakness of the whole work. The prose notes are constantly more powerful and effective than the long-drawn Miltonic or Southeyan rhetoric of the verse. Ideas are diffused by abstraction and repetition. The reader, however much he sympathizes with Shelley’s position, cannot be unaware of immaturity and inconsistency of thought, and a tendency to approach real human problems in a spirit of scornful, bookish brilliance. Shelley’s attitude to love is marred by two obvious blank spots. The first is his blindness to the intrinsic value of constancy in human relations, so that loving has the chance to develop from a static ‘sweet sensation’ into a cumulative process of discovery and exploration. We notice that Henry’s love is ‘speechless’. An earlier moralist and lover, Richard Steele, had observed, ‘to love her is a liberal education’. Shelley, less experienced, believed that ‘affection’ could simply ‘decay’ — presumably he imagined a painless, balanced and simultaneous process on both sides. His second blindness was to the way in which children made a fundamental alteration to the direction
and responsibilities of a love relationship. Shelley was to remain faithful to his free love principles throughout his life, but he was to pay dearly — and make others pay dearly — for his personal blindness in both these respects.

Queen Mab
was, however, to have a life quite independent of its author’s. In the twenty-five years from its first printing, this was undoubtedly the most widely read, the most notorious, and the most influential of all Shelley’s works. It was not read by ‘the sons and daughters of aristocrats’, nor was it read for its poetic qualities; it was read by middle-class and working-class radicals in cheap pirate editions. The poem was advertised, extracted and discussed in the radical papers such as Richard Carlile’s
Champion
and
Republican
; and established itself as a basic text in the self-taught working-class culture from which the early trade union movement of the 1820s, and the Chartism of the thirties and forties was to spring. The Owenite interest in Shelley is well known, and Thomas Cooper, the ‘Chartist Rhymer’ placed Shelley in the pantheon of republican and visionary poets alongside Milton and Byron.
[1]
Bernard Shaw was told by an old Chartist that ‘Queen Mab was known as the Chartists’ Bible’ — an evangelical role for which it was well-suited.
¹⁹