Shelley: The Pursuit (94 page)

Dismissing the direct physical expression of homosexual love — an ‘operose and diabolical machination’, as he graphically described the act of buggery — Shelley explains his own theory of ‘certain phenomena connected with sleep’, which has already been examined in relation to
Alastor
. He then developed his critique of Greek homosexuality as an index of an unjust and distorted society.

Probably there were innumerable instances among that exalted and refined people, in which never any circumstance happens [to] the lover and his beloved by which natural modesty was wronged. The lover appeased his physical instinct with his wife or his slave; or was engrossed in such lofty thoughts and feelings as admitted of no compromise between them and less intense emotions. Thus much is to be admitted, that represent this passion as you will, there is something totally irreconcileable in its cultivation to the beautiful order of social life, to an equal participation in which all human beings have an indefeasible claim, and from which half of the human race [
i.e.
the female half], by the Greek arrangement, were excluded. This invidious distinction of human kind, as a class of beings of intellectual nature, into two sexes, is a remnant of savage barbarism which we have less excuse than they for not having totally abolished.
⁵⁷

Through the issue of homosexuality, Shelley wished to direct his readers’ attention on to the specific limitations of Plato’s thought in particular, and Greek society in general, with respect to slaves and women. He regarded this Greek
exploitation of slaves and women as mere property as the fundamental anachronism of their social and intellectual life. Referring to heterosexual love, he summarized:

The fact is, that the modern Europeans have in this circumstance, and in the abolition of slavery, made an improvement the most decisive in the regulation of human society; and all the virtue and the wisdom of the Periclean age arose under other institutions,
in spite of
the diminution which personal slavery and the inferiority of women, recognized by law and by opinion, must have produced in moral, political and metaphysical science . . . .
⁵⁸

Next, Shelley wished to compare this failure of the Greeks with what he regarded as an equal failure and distortion in modern European society.

The action by which this [homosexual] passion was expressed, taken in its grossest sense, is indeed sufficiently detestable. But a person must be blinded by superstition to conceive of it as more horrible than the usual intercourse endured by almost every youth of England with a diseased and insensible, prostitute. It cannot be more unnatural, for nothing defeats and violates nature, or the purposes for which the sexual instincts are supposed to have existed, than prostitution. Nor is it possible that the society into which the one plunges its victim should be more pernicious than the other.
⁵⁹

He defended the Greek erotic writing as compared with modern obscenity.

The ideas suggested by Catullus, Martial, Juvenal and Suetonius never occur among the Greeks; or even among those Romans, who, like Lucretius, Virgil, Horace, imitated them. The Romans were brutally obscene; the Greeks seem hardly capable of obscenity in a strict sense. How innocent is even the Lysistrata of Aristophanes compared with the infamous perversions of Catullus! The earlier dramatic English writers are often frightfully obscene, exceeding even the Romans. I should consider obscenity to consist in the capability of associating disgusting images with the act of the sexual instinct. Luxury produced for the Romans what the venereal disease did for the writers of James [1], and after the redeeming interval over which Milton presided the effects of both were united, under Charles II, to infect literature.
⁶⁰
[7]

After this critical and historically comparative approach which Shelley urged towards Plato and Greek society, the ‘Discourse’ is finally focused on the moral,
psychological and ideal nature of Love as the universal and dominant human passion. Here Shelley picked out certain favourite passages in the
Symposium
itself. Of the speeches, those of Pausanias (2nd), Aristophanes (4th), Agathon (5th) and Socrates (6th) touched him most closely.

From Pausanias he drew the distinction between Pandemic and Uranian love which frequently underlies much of his love poetry. The first is fleshly, promiscuous, temporal and concerned equally with young women and young boys. The second, Uranian love, is essentially masculine, deeply felt with the whole personality, both fleshly and spiritual, faithful over long periods and perhaps for life, and fundamentally improving and educative. According to the limited Greek system, Uranian love could only be held between two men, or a man and a youth of equal social status. It could not concern women or young boys, or slaves. The distinction between Pandemic and Uranian love was very important to Shelley, though he considered its homosexual and class interpretation as a characteristic piece of Greek barbarism. It was the matured, heterosexual and egalitarian form of Uranian love which Mary Shelley later referred to as ‘our sort of civilized love’ in the letter to Hunt. The two kinds of love are also referred to in Mary’s interpretative note on ‘Prince Athanase’. ‘The idea Shelley had formed of Prince Athanase was a good deal modelled on
Alastor
. In the first sketch of the poem, he named it
Pandemos and Urania
. Athanase seeks through the world the One whom he may love. He meets, in the ship in which he is embarked, a lady who appears to him to embody his ideal of love and beauty. But she proves to be Pandemos, or the earthly and unworthy Venus; who, after disappointing his cherished dreams and hopes, deserts him . . . . “On his death-bed, the lady who can really reply to his soul comes and kisses his lips.’ ”
⁶¹
Urania, if she exists, is also a woman. This Platonic, or strictly speaking, Pausanian, interpretation also reflects a good deal on the structure of Shelley’s
Epipsychidion
, to be written two and a half years later, though it by no means explains the theme.

In translating Pausanias’s description of Uranian Aphrodite, Shelley made a notable adjustment and addition to the text, pointing it towards his own constant concern with the small, intimate and progressive community of friends:

And it is easy to distinguish those who especially exist under the influence of this power [
Urania
], by their choosing in early youth as the objects of their love those in whom the intellectual faculties have begun to develop: in preference to mere youths. For those who begin to love in this manner, seem to me to be preparing to pass their whole life together in a community of good and evil, and not ever lightly deceiving those who love them, to be faithless to their vows.
⁶²

The
enigmatic and thoughtful phrase about the ‘community of good and evil’ is entirely Shelley’s own. He has also widened the application of the Greek, which clearly talks about ‘young boys in their green thoughtlessness’, in order to make the Uranian qualities of dedication and loyalty apply to both young men and young women.
[8]

Aristophanes’s daring and comic parable of man’s dual nature — divided by the gods ‘as I have seen [hard-boiled] eggs cut with hairs’ — was Shelley’s second key text. He was fascinated by the psychological acuity of the Greek. Several concepts rapidly reinforced the lines along which Shelley’s thought had naturally been developing. There were the ideas of the divided self; the self in search of its tally (
lispae
) or double; and the fear of yet a further division within the psyche, ‘like those figures painted on the columns, divided through the middle of our nostrils’, which was the threat of insanity from the gods. But perhaps the greatest curiosity to him in Aristophanes’s speech was that of the third unnamed sex, the Hermaphrodite.

The androgynous sex, both in appearance and in name, was common both to male and female; its name alone remains, which labours under a reproach . . . the male was produced from the Sun, the female from the Earth; and that sex which participated in both sexes, from the Moon, by reason of the androgynous nature of the Moon.
⁶³

Shelley later saw a fine Greek copy of the Hermaphrodite in Rome, and explored both its psychological and poetic possibilities in later writing, especially ‘The Witch of Atlas’ and
Epipsychidion
.

Shelley left a special notation in a manuscript notebook, on the speech of Agathon, the young tragic poet of 31 in whose house the banquet was held. He wrote that it was a ‘wonderful description of love’, and marked the passages on the tenderness and delicacy of Love’s transit through ‘the souls and inmost natures of Gods and men’. He considered ‘Agathon a poem’, and later incorporated a section of his speech in
Prometheus Unbound
.
⁶⁴

But it was finally the sage Diotima’s philosophy, given in Socrates’s speech, which drew Shelley’s overwhelming interest. He marked six separate passages in his notebook, under the general heading of approval, ‘Diotima’s Atheism’.
⁶⁵
He was fascinated above all else by the argument between Diotima and Socrates
which proves that Love cannot, after all, be a divine god. Love is, rather, a special
intermediary
force, in that strange daemonic level which exists between the known human world, and the perfect and for ever unknowable divine one. In this passage, Shelley found Plato penetrating directly into his own most private, inner obsession with the world of demons, which had always hovered uneasily in his mind between gothic metaphor and psychological reality. Given at length, it makes perhaps the finest example of Shelley’s translation skills, and the most suggestive indication of how one level of his creative writing was going to develop after leaving the Bagni di Lucca.

‘But’, [said Socrates], ‘Love is confessed by all to be a great God’. . . . ‘Do you not call those alone happy who possess all things that are beautiful and good?’ — ‘Certainly’ — ‘You have confessed that Love, through his desire for things beautiful and good, possesses not those materials of happiness’. — ‘Indeed such was my concession.’ — ‘But how can we conceive a God to be without the possession of what is beautiful and good?’ — ‘In no manner, I confess.’ — ‘Observe, then, that you do not consider Love to be a God.’ — ‘What then’, I said, ‘is Love a mortal?’ — ‘By no means.’ — ‘But what, then?’ — ‘Like those things which I have before instanced, he is neither mortal or immortal, but something intermediate.’ — ‘What is that, O Diotima?’ — ‘A great Daemon, Socrates; and every thing daemoniacal holds an intermediate place between what is divine and what is mortal.’

‘What is his power and nature?’ I enquired. — ‘He interprets and makes a communication between divine and human things, conveying the prayers and sacrifices of men to the Gods, and communicating the commands and directions concerning the mode of worship most pleasing to them, from Gods to men . . . . Through him subsist all divination, and the science of sacred things as it relates to sacrifices, and expiations, and disenchantments, and prophecy, and magic. The divine nature cannot immediately communicate with what is human, but all that intercourse and converse which is conceded by the Gods to men, both whilst they sleep and when they wake, subsists through the intervention of Love; and he who is wise in the science of this intercourse is supremely happy, and participates in the daemoniacal nature; whilst he is who wise in any other science or art, remains a mere ordinary slave. These daemons are, indeed, many and various, and one of them is Love.
⁶⁶

It was to this study, ‘this science’, of the intermediary sphere, and to the recognition of Love and the other daemons ‘many and various’, some good and some evil, that Shelley was to direct much of the more obscure and private parts of his thought and writing in Italy. This Platonic passage provided the occult key. The
Symposium
as a whole, made especially his own through this brilliant
summer translation of 1818, formed for Shelley a symbolic guide to the perplexities and paradoxes of his own mental processes. Given the sceptical cast of Shelley’s mind, Plato remained for him, over the next four years, the nearest thing to his Bible. In times of distress — and there were to be many — Plato was never far from his thoughts.

[1]
This letter is also important evidence of Shelley’s general attitude to the responsibilities of a father, and the rights of a mother, in the case of an illegitimate child. It was to have an application in other circumstances during the winter of the year. The phrase, ‘if she has no feeling, she has no claim’ is particularly relevant.

[2]
Murray published
Beppo
in February 1818; Shelley was asked to bring a copy to Lord Byron in his book box, but he forgot it.

[3]
The Tre Donzelle still stands there, virtually unchanged in appearance, the left corner building of what is now the Piazza Garibaldi. Its ground floor has been metamorphosed into an English tea-room. See plate 27.

[4]
Philoctetes, the great Athenian bowman, was marooned on an island by the Greek expedition who sailed to destroy Troy, because of the demoralization caused by the appalling wound in his foot. He lived in solitude for nearly ten years, a prey to hallucinations and recurring spasms of terrible pain when the abscess burst. Finally he was rescued by Odysseus and the young Neoptolemus, because an oracle had warned the Greeks that Troy would not fall without Philoctetes and his Bow. Sophocles’s drama turns on the terrible effect that solitude has had on Philoctetes’s mind, and the difficulty with which he is persuaded to accept the inevitability of past injustice and the necessity of returning to a society which had once persecuted him but now desperately needs him. The divine intervention of Herakles is eventually required to persuade him to return.