Guy Christian Barnard

“ 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{37} 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Usually more passionate than the average man, he yet has to renounce much of the so-called pleasures of the world, and, in solitude, to wring from his own heart the meaning and purpose of life.
There is so much in Shelley’s poetry which shows him in these typical preliminary stages which precede illumination, that I will only refer to the Ode to the West Wind—a poem in which the intensity of passion, the despair with this life, and the overwhelming yearning for identification with nature,{112} which are typical of the mystic, find such poignant expression. ”

“ The vital power which perceives through “this life’s five windows of the soul,” can also transcend the limitations which they impose on it; but, to so transcend the senses, it must usually obliterate them for the time being; and with them go most of the ordinary conscious factors of personality.
So with Shelley we find, not merely the pathological results of mental dissociation, nor even only the signs of genius—swift and subtle intuitions scattered through his works—but also, at times, we see indications of powers which, for want of a better term, may be called occult. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The practical difference between the genius and the humble artist is that the former reaches heights of truth and beauty unattainable by the latter; heights which seem to require, for their attainment, the operation of obscure and even occult faculties. Inspiration, divination, direct intuitive perception of the nature both of things and{108} of men—these, when they are clarified and crystallised by a competent artist, constitute genius. ”

“ 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 their conscious mind they seek love in the form of a woman. ”

“ 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 ideal bisexual character. 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. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ A big school such as Eton usually provides for a boy of genius like young Percy a really terrible experience, soul-destroying{36} 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. ”

“ Just as the growth of a tumour indicates a certain autonomy of one portion of the body, so such phenomena as hallucination, double-personality, mediumistic trances, hysteria, and obsessions, indicate the autonomy of certain constituents of the mind or personality. But this capacity for decentralisation is not merely pathological in its effects; the same partial suspension of the control normally exercised by the conscious mind may liberate either the repressed impulses of the hysterical patient or the latent divinations and intuitions which mark the genius or the mystic. ”

“ In spite of the views of romantic persons, the truth is that Shelley was not very susceptible to the physical charms 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 ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is true that he never attained that more extended consciousness which characterises the great mystics, and that he died before his latent faculties were fully established; but he gave many indications of these faculties. That those indications were to some extent pathological is but natural, and redounds more to the discredit of society than of the poet. Given a nature fundamentally disposed to experience Love as an ardent and exalted comradeship towards those of his own sex, and given an environment in which that disposition is persecuted mercilessly ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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,{61} 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 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!{78}” “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. ”

“ 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{8} 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 is possible that he deferred somewhat to the feelings of his wife, for one can hardly suppose that Mary would enthuse over certain passages of Plato. On the whole, however, his timidity and weakness in handling this theme sprang from internal subjective causes. Instinctively he shrank from a definite conscious revelation of his own half-repressed impulses, even if that revelation were only made to himself. And yet Shelley was vaguely aware, in a quite general way, of a conflict within himself, even although he could not specify precisely the sources of the trouble. ”

“ 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.) ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In both men there was a strong desire for solitude and for companionship with nature, and also an ardent yearning for communion with some more spiritual universe. Both had, even in boyhood, a marked tendency to experience visions, which are commonly described as hallucinations. Blake studied the Bible, Swedenborg, and Boehme intensively; while Shelley, with all his varied reading and rationalistic proclivities, yet showed a strong predilection for mystical and occult writers. ”

“ From 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. ”

“ 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{39} 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. ”

“ The significance of all this lies in the fact that the authorities on psychoanalysis mostly seem to agree in attributing Paranoia, with its delusions of persecution and of jealousy, to a repression of homosexuality. [22] Dr. E. Jones{104} (Papers on Psychoanalysis) states: “In Paranoia, for instance, it is now known that such delusions always arise to begin with in connexion with persons whom the patient has tried to love, but for internal reasons (repression of homosexuality) has been unable to.” ”

“ 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 ”