THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE POET SHELLEY
BY
EDWARD CARPENTER

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE POET SHELLEY
BY
GEORGE BARNEFIELD

BIBLIOGRAPHY

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF
THE POET SHELLEY

BOOKS BY EDWARD CARPENTER

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE
POET SHELLEY

BY
EDWARD CARPENTER

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:

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.

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]

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.

And so (returning to The Witch of Atlas) we find that the double-natured one, the Hermaphrodite, was bidden extend his storm-outspeeding wings,[6] till the vision of the coming redemption should at last descend upon the earth, while at the same time with regard to the lady witch herself it is said:

Finally, even the soldiers have visions, they dream that they are beating their swords into plough-shares!

Thus it will be perceived that this poem, The Witch of Atlas, if closely looked into, discloses itself as a description, and, indeed, as a prophecy, of the coming of a being who was to combine the characteristics of the two sexes, and whose arrival on the Earth, and acknowledged sway there, was to be the signal of the coming of a new age. Perhaps, indeed, Shelley saw (in the radiance of the inner light) that in the process of the world-evolution such a being would inevitably arise. But the poem, as might be expected, is somewhat carefully wrapt up in its expression, and disguised in its general content by digressions, so that the casual and hasty reader (and likely enough this was its author’s desire and contrivance) is partly lost and does not always attain to catch the real purport and intention of the whole.

Perhaps it is this—this careful wrapping up and concealment of the main purport—which explains the curious neglect on the part of critics and others, from which the poem has suffered this long time—all the more curious because one might certainly have been inclined to suppose beforehand that the air of mystery would have had the opposite effect, namely of directing attention to the poem. Professor Dowden, for example, who is usually very scrupulous about such matters, gives hardly any space to The Witch of Atlas; and Mrs. Campbell (Shelley and the Unromantics), who is generally a keen and active-minded observer, ignores the work altogether! one is left to conclude (as the omissions could hardly be accidental) that these and other critics have deliberately passed the poem by on account of its fanciful and Utopian character, yet this in itself is hardly an adequate reason, since in reality the importance of the poem consists in the veritable glimpse it affords of the working of Shelley’s mind and of the ideals which he entertained, rather than in the actual practicability of the latter.

The third point that I wish to emphasise is the conclusion, derived from modern psycho-sexual studies, that delusions and mental aberrations can frequently be traced to some disturbance or repression of an intimate love-passion.

Apart from Freud and all his works, we can easily see the great probability of this conclusion. The love-instinct roots so deep and dates so far back—even to the very beginnings of human life in the earth—that necessarily any displacement of it affects the human being most profoundly. It would not do to say at once and without collateral evidence that Shelley’s mental disturbances were due to repressed or disappointed love, but we have to hold that clue in mind, remembering at the same time his extremely emotional and imaginative nature. Shelley’s later love-affairs are pretty well known, but there does not seem to be one among them which quite answers the requirements of the case. Harriet Grove and Harriet Westbrook may soon be dismissed. Mary Godwin had more hold on the poet’s affection, but her nature was cold and argumentative—too like her father’s—and there is little indication of an attachment between her and the poet sufficiently passionate to cause by its rupture any actual dislocation of the latter’s mind. Trelawny, with whom on one occasion I had a longish conversation, was somewhat contemptuous of Mary as a rather shallow person much attracted by society considerations; and though I think Trelawny himself was often swayed by prejudice and personal bias, yet it must be allowed that he knew Mary pretty well. Then there is Emilia Viviani (alluded to above) to whom Shelley wrote the long and enthusiastic poem Epipsychidion; but here again, though the poem is full of rarely beautiful passages, one cannot help feeling that it is “up in the air” all the time—a charming piece of work, but wanting in actuality and grip on life.

There remain Shelley’s attachments to men friends, but these again are somewhat disappointing. Hogg, whose name is often associated with that of the poet, was, one would say, a rather uninspiring creature, but who has this claim to our respect—that he certainly was genuinely attached to Shelley. Though rather commonplace in character, it yet may be said of him that he was virile and of quite keen intellect. He was also very susceptible to feminine attractions. He obviously liked Shelley much; but Shelley may fairly be said to have loved him, and in quite romantic manner. Then, at a later time, there appeared that other devoted friend, Trelawny, who, after reading Shelley’s Poems could not rest till he had made the poet’s acquaintance, and who after that returned again and again to the poet’s side, and to be with him. He was a very different type from Hogg, somewhat bombastic, but spirited and adventurous.

One concludes that Shelley certainly attracted the devotion of his men friends; and on the other hand, that he was capable of warm and faithful attachment to them, some of them.[7]

This is, I think, clearly indicated not only by his relations with Hogg and by numerous passages in Adonais and other poems, but by the fact of his giving so much time and thought to the translation of Plato’s Symposium (whose chief subject, of course, is love between men) as well as to the study (see his letters) of the Greek statuary. Modern psychoanalysis has forced on people recognition of the fact that avoidance of certain words or of allusions to certain subjects does not by any means justify one in concluding that such words or subjects were not present to the speaker’s or writer’s mind. Rather the contrary. In many cases (as Barnefield reminds us) such avoidance indicates an over-self-consciousness which leads the speaker or writer to suppress the very things which interest him most, or the words which would betray his interest.

Shelley was by his very nature greatly in advance of his age. And The Witch of Atlas shows this. All through that strange poem there peep in and out suggestions of sex-variation and of variations in sex-attraction.[8] That poem was written a hundred years ago, but to-day the same subjects have become almost an obsession, and situations are freely handled and discussed which would (as the saying goes) cause our grandfathers and grandmothers to turn in their graves! What there may be preparing we do not know; but we can see that civilisation has arrived at a cusp or turning-point in its progress, where further movement is likely to be in a quite unexpected direction. Love between two persons of like sex is nowadays widely accepted, as being an attachment resting on a sympathy and soul-union very deep and sincere—even though it may elude the physical ties or take little account of them.

The modern Woman’s movement—so concrete and world-wide in its character—seems destined to impress this more feminine conception of love on the present age. That movement began with Mary Wolstonecraft, whose Rights of Women is even to this day one of the very best books on the subject with which it deals; and one can trace her influence extending down into the mind and philosophic outlook of Shelley, and colouring many passages in his poems. I do not, of course, mean that this last variety of affection (comradeship it might be called) was the only or even chief variety in Shelley’s mind. But there it was, and quite possibly it was kept out of sight just on account of the strange spell or attraction the subject exercised upon him.

Without having myself any prejudice against those people whose predominant love-attraction is towards their own sex, and believing, as I do, that many of that type belong to the highest ranges of humanity, I still do not think that Shelley quite shared their temperament. What temperamental changes he might have developed in the further course of his unfinished life, of course we do not know; but his fervent and unceasing idealisation of his female friends does, to my mind, make any contention of the above kind seem decidedly difficult. Shelley was quite normal, I should say, in the majority of his love affairs; but his rapid and fertile imagination may have rendered it possible for him (as in The Witch of Atlas) to leap to the understanding of things which to the majority of human beings still remain occult and unintelligible.

It will be remembered that in the last-mentioned poem, when the Wizard-lady steps into the boat which is destined to bear her through all the Kingdoms of the Earth, she brings to birth there (or creates):

The word that will necessarily attract attention here is the word “sexless.” When one recalls what was said at the very outset of this paper, namely, that the love-element and love-interests saturate all Shelley’s poems, and recalls also the degree to which in modern life the word “love” is wedded and welded with the thought of sex, one cannot help wondering whether he intentionally inserted this word “sexless” in order to indicate a change which was taking place in his mind, or whether he felt such a change to be impending. One need not press the point, but the passage suggests that he was thinking of a new type of human being (at present folded in sleep, but whose coming he perhaps foresaw)—a being having the grace of both sexes, and full of such dreams as would one day become the inspiration of a new world-order, yet of such a nature that its love would not be dependent (as, indeed, most loves now are) on mere sexual urge and corporeal desire, but would be a vivid manifestation of the universal creative Life, in the body even as in the soul. This word “sexless” occurs again—so that it does not appear to be quite accidental—in stanza lxviii of the same poem, where the author in truly Shelleyan fashion describes the lady of the boat as “like a sexless bee tasting all blossoms and confined to none”—a wizard-maiden floating down the torrent of this life “with eye serene and heart unladen.”

Whether Shelley believed in this Vision of a new type—in the sense of thinking it would ever become an actual and realisable thing—may be left undecided, but as an indication of the kind of dream that was at that time occupying his mind, it seems to me of the greatest interest. I think somehow that his instinctive feelings were pointing out the actual direction of our future evolution. There is no doubt that in the present day Sex is ceasing to wield the glamour which once surrounded it. We know too much about it! Its queer vagaries and anomalies, its variations and fluctuations (dating from past ages of the world) have been almost too well and exhaustively studied. Sex in its ordinary procedure seems to belong to a somewhat ancient and pre-human order of things, clumsy and elephantine and, like many ancient institutions, oppressive in the last degree to women. And the question which now remains for us to ask will be as follows: Is it not very probable that those human types of the future which have both elements, the masculine and the feminine, present in their natures, will not be so sexually excitable as those other types (with whom we have been more familiar in the past) who being built, like Plato’s divided sections of humanity, on a lopsided plan, are always rushing about to find their lost counterparts, and rather madly and incontinently plunging into new relationships, which again they dissolve almost as soon as contracted? And may we not reasonably expect that those people whose natures contain both elements will be more stable and reliable than the others, while at the same time—since they share the great driving-force of the universe—they will by no means be wanting in life and energy?

On all sides to-day we hear of the existence of such double-natured folk, and though it may be that at certain periods they become more than usually numerous, yet the evidence shows that in all ages and places they have been frequent. Jacobus Le Moyne, who travelled as an artist with a French expedition to Florida in 1564, left some very interesting drawings representing the Indians of that region and their customs; and among them one representing the “Hermaphrodites,” as they were at that time called, apparently tall and powerful men, beardless, but with long and abundant hair, and naked except for a loin cloth, who were represented as engaged in carrying wounded or dying fellow-Indians on their backs or on litters to places of safety. He says of them that, “in Florida such folk of double nature are frequent ... and, indeed, those who are stricken with any infectious disease are borne by the Hermaphrodites to certain appointed places, and nursed and cared for by them, until they may be restored to full health.” Quite similar stories are told by Charleroix, de Pauw, and others; and one seems to get a glimpse in them of an intermediate class of human beings who made themselves useful to the community, not only by their muscular strength but by their ability and willingness to act as nurses and attendants on the sick and dying. Similar types exist in abundance to-day as we know; but it is needless to say that they are not Hermaphrodites in the strict sense of the term—i.e. human beings uniting in one person the complete functions both male and female—since there is no evidence that such beings do in actual fact exist! But it is evident that they were what we call intermediate types, in the sense of being men with much of the psychologic character of women, or in some cases women with the mentality of men; and the early travellers, who had less concrete and reliable information than we have, and who were already prepossessed by a belief in the possibility of complete Hermaphroditism, leapt easily to the conclusion that these strange beings were indeed of that double nature.[9]

It is quite possible, and, indeed, probable, that Shelley, who was an omnivorous reader, had already come across suggestions in this direction. Plato alone would have given him much food for thought. The god Dionysus, one of the very finest figures in the Greek mythology, and one whose features have often been compared with those of Christ, is frequently represented as Androgyne (double-sexed). Apollo is portrayed in the sculptures with a feminine—sometimes extremely feminine—figure. The great hero Achilles passed his youth among women, and in feminine disguise. And so on, and so on.

A big school such as Eton usually provides for a boy of genius like young Percy a really terrible experience, soul-destroying and calculated to crush out all originality; yet there are occasions when even such a place may become the nurse of heroic inspirations, and may kindle in a young soul the redeeming flame of splendid ambition. For such a school is a miniature of the great world, and may bring the boy into closest contact, friendly or hostile, with every variety of character and temperament, and so may rouse and develop faculties which under ordinary circumstances would have remained dormant. We see in Mr. Barnefield’s paper how a vivid and absorbing attachment sprang up between Percy and a young school-friend, which the elder folk, as we gather (and quite as usual), did not encourage. We now see—and late psychological studies have made this abundantly clear—that love, even a quite unregulated though ardent love, may become in boyhood one of the best guides and tutors of the growing soul. And we know, too, that such an attachment between persons of like sex (whether in school-life or apart from it) as between two youths or two young women, or between a grown man and a boy, or an elder woman and a girl—though deprived of some of love’s recognised and obvious satisfactions—may contain, and often does contain, the elements of a deep and lasting devotion.

In large schools all sorts of soul-shattering experiences occur and recur—violent enthusiasms, insane jealousness, bitter hatreds, rivalries, sexual outrages, and so forth. There are two very common results: one attraction, the other repulsion.

Imagine for a moment a boy of Shelley’s high idealism of mind suddenly transported into such a Babel! It is difficult for outsiders to quite realise or face the situation, at any rate as it was at that time—the filthy talk, the gross and insolent habits, the fagging and bullying, the hideous dullness of the lessons, the beguilement of the time by sex-indulgences, the rather brutal floggings (carried out by idiotic masters under the impressions that they were suppressing lust, when they were really rousing and redoubling the same), etc.

That the boy of whom we are speaking, finding himself in such a situation, should have suffered a kind of agony and that consequently his mental balance should at times have been upset, seems a very moderate assumption, and one which quite possibly would account for his “hallucinations”—as far as the existence of these may be satisfactorily established.

With reference to the duplication of the elements just mentioned in Shelley’s nature, it may be suggested that the blending of the masculine and feminine temperaments does undoubtedly in some cases produce persons whose perceptions are so subtle and complex and rapid as to come under the head of genius. “It may possibly point to a further grade of evolution than that usually attained, and a higher order of consciousness, imperfectly realised, of course, but indicated. This interaction, in fact, between the masculine and feminine, this mutual illumination of logic and intuition, this combination of action and meditation may not only raise and increase the power of each of these faculties, but it may give the mind a new quality and a new power of perception corresponding to the blending of subject and object in consciousness. It may possibly lead to the development of that third order of perception which has been called the Cosmic consciousness, and which may also be termed divination. (“He who knows the masculine,” says the great Lao-tsze, “and at the same time keeps to the feminine will be the whole world’s channel; Eternal virtue will not depart from him, and he will return again to the state of an infant.” To the state of an infant! That is, he will become undifferentiated from Nature, who is his Mother and who will lend him all her faculties.)[10] There is a certain danger—as doubtless many writers have discovered—in talking about visions, or about Second Sight, or, indeed, about any subject which lies near the margin of definite and measurable perception—the danger I mean for the inquirer of being set down or passed by as a mere romancer or as a foolish and credulous person whose opinion carries no weight. However, this danger occurs in many fields of human thought and inquiry, and naturally cannot be entirely guarded against. It is largely due to the paltry character of our ordinary life. A noble and active mind must surely carry with it ever-expanding powers and interests, and at each stage the new powers may well be perceived and classed as “visionary”; but that forms no reason why the vision should be immediately rejected! It only forms a reason for the more careful testing of new experiences.

With regard to the fusing or blending of the two temperaments, the masculine and the feminine, it has been observed that this double evolution is often accompanied by a considerable development of higher powers, more or less occult and difficult to explain. Certainly this development was marked in the case of Shelley. His swift intuitions, his quite extraordinary facility in the acquirement of Greek and Latin, and in the composition of verse (not to mention other attainments) compelled attention. It may be that in such cases the two natures, male and female, react upon each other, stimulating to higher efforts and even fertilising each other. It has often been noticed that mediums (spiritualistic) have a like double temperament; and it might be contended (from his frequent visions and illuminations) that Shelley was to some degree mediumistic. There is a passage in Elie Reclus’ account of the Western Inoits[11] of Alaska, in which the author describes the privations and ordeals through which, in the Arctic regions, the Angakok has to pass in preparation for the rôle of prophet and diviner. “At an early age the novice courts solitude. He wanders in the long nights across silent plains filled with the chilly whiteness of the moon; he listens to the wind moaning over the desolate floes. And then the Aurora borealis, that ardently sought occasion for ‘drinking in the light’—the Angakok mournful and rapt must absorb all its splendours!... And now the future sorcerer is no longer a child. Many a time he has felt himself in the presence of Sidné, the Esquimaux Demeter; he has divined it by the shiver which ran through his veins, by the tingling of his flesh and the bristling of his hair. He passes through a series of initiations, knowing well that his spirit will not be loosed from the burden of dense matter until the moon has looked him in the face, and darted a certain ray into his eyes. At last, his own Genius, evoked from the bottomless depths of existence, appears to him, having scaled the immensity of the heavens and climbed across the abysses of the ocean. Uniting himself with the Double from beyond the grave, the soul of the Angakok flies upon the wings of the wind, and quitting the body at will sails swift and light through the universe.”

There is much in this passage remindful of Shelley and his frequent absorption in Nature, and no one who has studied the Eastern initiations in the present day will fail to recognise what I mean. Reclus, continuing the above passage, passes in review the numerous sects of primitive religion which may be found on the surface of the globe, and then says, “I think the object of their ambition is ecstasy, union with God, absorption into the infinite spirit, into the soul of the universe.” Personally, I believe somehow that Reclus is right, and that even beneath Shelley’s revolt in early days against conventional religion, there is discernible this same yearning and need for identification with the universal life.

That a marked gift in the direction of ecstasy and divination should be associated with a certain fusion between the masculine and the feminine temperaments, might seem at first sight an unlikely proposition; but as far back in history as Herodotus we find the curious remark that certain classes of Scythians, suffering from a tendency to effeminacy[12] were called Enarees or Androgynes and were endowed by Venus with the power of Divination.

This idea of a double sex clearly haunted the minds of early peoples, and I have suggested (Intermediate Types, p. 82) that this idea may date not only from the fact that the sex-temperament in its earliest form is undifferentiated, but also from the fact that the great leaders of mankind have so often shown this fusion in themselves. “The feminine traits in genius (as in a Shelley or a Byron) are well marked in the present day. We have only to go back to the Persian Bâb of the last century, or to a St. Francis or even to a Jesus of Nazareth, to find the same traits present in founders and leaders of religious movements in historical times. And it becomes easy to suppose the same again of those early figures—who once probably were men—those Apollos, Buddhas, Dionysus, Osiris, and so forth—to suppose that they, too, were somewhat bi-sexual in temperament, and that it was really largely owing to that fact that they were endowed with far-reaching powers and became leaders of mankind.”

Finally, and apart from any question of mental strain and want of balance, there remain certain other general points (with regard to our poet’s Psychology) which we should do well to consider here. We have noted the great predominance of the love-interest in his life, and at the same time the marked idealism with which he invested matters of sex, and we are fain to see now that both these peculiarities are, in general, more markedly feminine than masculine. If we add to them the somewhat hysterical tendency indicated by Shelley’s behaviour at various times, we arrive at three undeniable marks of the feminine temperament, and are impelled to conclude that the poet’s nature was really intermediate (or double) in character—intermediate as between the masculine and feminine or double as having that twofold outlook upon the world.

The time has gone by when a remark of this kind could be interpreted as derogatory. On the contrary, it is quite open to anyone nowadays to take the positive line and maintain that the combination of the masculine and the feminine in this case does really indicate that the Poet had reached a higher level of evolution than usual. That is a conclusion at least as probable and arguable as the opposite. No one can contemplate Shelley’s portrait, or read the descriptions of his personality left by his contemporaries without feeling that therein a double nature (at once both masculine and feminine) is implied and portrayed. I may mention the gazelle-like eyes, the shy yet excitable manner, the high-pitched voice, the tenderness and courage combined, the genius for passionate friendship (as shown, for instance, in early days towards that other boy at school).[13]

Or again I may mention his extreme generosity, as to Emilia Viviani or to Tom Medwin, often when he himself was “on the rocks”; or his interest in, and care for, Claire Clairmont’s and Byron’s child, Allegra; or yet again his abiding love of the open air, his strange strength and resolution of character, united to a softness of expression and a mildness of bearing which (Trelawny says) were “deceptive”—and all these things combining to produce a weird impression as of one who hardly belonged to the ordinary world with which mortals are familiar.

In conclusion, and with regard to the somewhat pessimist tendency observable in Shelley’s latest work, it is not necessary to suppose, as some do, a particular “disappointment in love” so much as to perceive that at the time of his death he had arrived at a rather penetrating perception of the inadequacy of the existing world to meet and satisfy the inner needs of his spirit, and consequently at a certain attitude of resignation. Some of the latest events of his life rather favour this reading. There is a story told by Trelawny of how, on one occasion when he and Shelley were bathing in a deep pool in the Arno, and he was urging Shelley to lie on his back on the surface of the water, and learn to float in that way, Shelley did, indeed, remain motionless, but rapidly began to sink (as may well have really happened owing to his little corpulence of body) and Trelawny explained with his usual self-insistence how if he had not instantly fished Shelley out, the latter would certainly have been drowned! It throws some light on the situation when we realise that during those few last years the poet was living almost recklessly in the presence of death. His little yacht was so cranky that there was (as he himself well knew) considerable danger in sailing it. Ballasted with lumps of pig iron, as it was on that last voyage, it had already become a mark for the jokes of its occupants; and there is a story that when some observer asked him in warning tones as to what might happen if the boat were upset, Shelley gaily replied, “Why, of course, I should go to the bottom with the other pigs!” If not strictly accurate, this story perhaps gives an effective impression, and contributes some elements of dramatic truth.

The Witch of Atlas was not approved of by Mary Shelley, because (she said), “It had no human interest,” yet the author himself defends the poem vigorously, saying, “If you unveil my Witch no priest nor primate can shrive you of that sin”—from which one may conclude that the poem was in reality, and in its author’s opinion, full of human interest, though the same might be somewhat hidden and not very obvious for Mary to discover.

Shelley’s poems were by no means deficient in inner meaning, and to suppose that many of them were written merely as skits and freaks of fancy is to betray a non-appreciation of the almost over-intense earnestness of the Poet’s mind. Women’s Rights and the emancipation of Women—a subject now to the last degree approved and popular—became the main theme of Laon and Cythna (now entitled The Revolt of Islam). The praise of Marriage “warm and kind” and the beauty of a tender and permanent love constituted one of the “Many thousand” gracious schemes for the benefit of mankind, which the Witch was supposed to have invented:[14]