LAON AND CYTHNA.
Origin of the Free-Contract Party--Divorce in Catholic
England--Nullification of Marriage--Consequences of the
Reformation--Edward the Sixth’s Commissioners for the Amendment of
Ecclesiastical Laws--Martin Bucer’s _Judgment touching Divorce_--John
Milton on Freedom of Divorce--Denunciations of Marriage by the
Godwinian Radicals--Poetical Fruits of the Genevese Scandal--Byron’s
Timidity--Shelley’s Boldness--His most extravagant Conclusions
touching Liberty of Affection--Appalling Doctrine of _Laon and
Cythna_--Shelley’s Purpose in publishing the Poem--Alarm of the
Olliers--Shelley’s Instructions to the frightened
Publishers--Suppression of the monstrous Poem--Friends in
Council--_Laon and Cythna_ manipulated into the _Revolt of Islam_--The
_Quarterly Review_ on the original Poem--Consequences to Shelley’s
Reputation--Irony of Fate.
Enough has been said of the egotisms of _Laon and Cythna_; but something
must be said of the reasons, why this extraordinary fruit of Shelley’s
genius should be withheld from those young people to whom it is now-a-days
offered, in fine type and on rich paper, as one of the choicest poems of
English literature. It must be stated frankly and fearlessly why, till
human nature has changed greatly and till existing human institutions and
sentiments have become mere matters of archæology, this poem, with all its
exquisite beauties of diction, must appear to all righteous and
sober-minded persons a perplexity and a scandal, that may be fruitful of
morbid thought and vicious action in young persons of light fancy and
loose principles.
Successive writers on Shelleyan questions have regarded the Free Contract
movement, in which the poet took so characteristic a part, as one of the
consequences of the great revolution which, towards the close of the last
century, disposed a considerable proportion of our own people, as well as
of the peoples more deeply and violently influenced by novel ideas, to
refer all social evils to existing institutions, and, in their impatience
of prevailing wrongs and wretchedness, to cry aloud for the quick and
total suppression of the social arrangements to which they attributed so
much mischief and misery. But the French Revolution did no more, in this
respect, than quicken a discontent and stimulate a movement that had
affected English life for generations and centuries. To discover the
origin of the Free Contract party in this country the student of social
phenomena must go back to the sixteenth century.
In pre-Reformation times, living under the control of a Church that,
knowing nothing of the larger divorce (_a vinculo matrimonii_ == from bond
of matrimony), and granting only in cases of extreme conjugal infidelity
the minor divorce (_a mensâ et thoro_ == from board and bed), subsequently
designated ‘judicial separation,’ which afforded no liberty of marrying
other spouses to the separated parties, our forefathers in this island
enjoyed practically a freedom of divorce, that under ordinary
circumstances enabled unhappily mated spouses to make lawful marriage with
other persons.
Knowing nothing of the complete divorce, the Church knew a great deal of
nullification of matrimony, and in her Courts throughout the country was
daily liberating uncongenial spouses, by decreeing that they had never
been man and wife. By discovering that they were first, second, or third
cousins,--by demonstrating, with the aid of two conveniently pliant
witnesses, that, at the time of their wedding, one of them was
pre-contracted to a third person,--by showing that on their marriage-day
they stood within the prohibited degrees of consanguinity, affinity or
spiritual affinity,--or by a confession that either of them had, before
their union, held wicked intercourse with a near relation of the other,--a
husband and wife could procure a judgment which declared they had _never
been married_; that they were still bachelor and single woman, and free to
contract matrimony in accordance with the rules of Holy Church. To a
couple bent on perfect liberation from a hateful union, it was always easy
to discover grounds for the nullification of their wedlock, and seldom
difficult to render those grounds apparent to an ecclesiastical judge. Two
spouses, bent on celebrating their union, often experienced great
difficulty in ascertaining that no impediments precluded them from valid
intermarriage; but the impediment which made their wedlock a nullity, were
always readily discoverable by the husband and wife who had come to hate
one another. So long as this state of things lasted, every canonical
impediment to matrimony operated like a turnstile gate, that, whilst
acting as a barrier to persons entering a building, affords a means of
egress to those who wish to leave it.
This state of things, however, came to an end with the Reformation. By
sweeping away all the canonical restrictions on matrimony, not ordered by
Scripture, the statute, 32 Henry VIII., c. 38, increased greatly the
freedom of marriage; but at the same time destroyed the liberty of divorce
enjoyed by our ancestors throughout successive centuries. Rendering
matrimony easier of entrance, it closed all the many gates, which had
hitherto afforded spouses the means of escape from conjugal wretchedness.
The chiefs of the Protestant party in Edward the Sixth’s time had,
however, no wish to perpetuate the condition of affairs, directly
consequent on Henry the Eighth’s mere abrogation of the non-scriptural
impediments to marriage. Condemning strongly the excessive liberty of
separation, which the ecclesiastical tribunals had for generations
afforded to society, they were no less unanimous in condemning the
doctrine of the absolute indissolubility of wedlock. If it was wrong on
the one hand to allow husbands and wives the liberty of separating on
frivolous pretexts, and to provide the fortress of marriage with numerous
gates of egress, whose double locks obeyed the pass-keys of perjury and
corruption; it was on the other hand no less hurtful to society and
impious to God, to constrain a pair of human creatures, in the name of
religion, to persevere in an association, that could not accomplish the
highest purposes of matrimony, and debarred the ill-assorted couple from
the serene and wholesome pleasures of Christian life. These were the views
of the Anglican leaders; views that found precise and memorable expression
in the famous code of ordinances (the _Reformatio Legum Ecclesiasticarum_)
prepared for the reformation of our ecclesiastical laws by Edward the
Sixth’s thirty-two commissioners for that purpose, who, doing away with
the minor divorce (_a mensâ et thoro_), decided that the divorce _a
vinculo matrimonii_ should be the only kind of matrimonial severance known
to English law, and that it should be granted, (1) in cases of extreme
conjugal faithlessness; (2) in cases where a husband, not guilty of
deserting his wife, had been for several years absent from her, under
circumstances which justified her in concluding that he was dead; (3) and
in cases of such violent hatred as rendered it in the highest degree
improbable, that the husband and wife would survive their animosities and
again love one another; it being expressly directed that this last
provision should not be construed as affecting spouses whose quarrels,
though frequent and distressing, were neither incessant nor in the highest
degree vehement. Had Edward the Sixth lived only a little longer these
ordinances would have become the law of the land;--law which, though
suppressed on the accession of Mary Tudor, would have been revived on the
rise of Elizabeth, and handed down to the present time.
Of course, the Anglican reformers conceived themselves to be justified in
disregarding the limitation, which our version of the Scriptures assigns
to liberty of divorce. Whilst some of them were of opinion that this
limitation was applicable only to the Jews, others held that, if a wrong
rendering of a particular word were replaced by its true English
equivalent, Scripture would be found to sanction the dissolution of
marriages, whose infelicity was due to nothing more than some serious
mental or moral disability. Of course, also, the Commissioners’
recommendations were a compromise between the requirements of bold
reformers who wished for a much larger, and of timid reformers, who would
have preferred a smaller, measure of freedom of divorce. Had Martin Bucer
been on the Commission, as he certainly would have been but for his recent
death, it cannot be questioned that the Commissioners would have ordained
a far greater liberty of dissolving unhappy marriages. It was Bucer’s
opinion (_vide_ his _Judgment touching Divorce_, addressed to Edward the
Sixth) that every marriage should be dissolved in which the husband and
wife did not ‘love one another to the height of dearness,’ or the husband
could not rightly govern and cherish the wife, or the wife was flagrantly
disobedient and unprofitable to her lord, or either party ‘defrauded the
other of conjugal benevolence,’--views which commended themselves so
cordially to John Milton, that he produced a new edition of Bucer’s tract,
in the middle of the seventeenth century.
Whilst showing how cordially he concurred in Martin Bucer’s conclusions,
John Milton’s four works on divorce--the _Doctrine and Discipline of
Divorce_, the _Tetrachordon_, the _Colasterion_, and the new edition of
Bucer’s _Judgment touching Divorce_--show also how far he went beyond the
sixteenth-century divine, in declaring every man’s right to secede from
an uncongenial partner, and to associate himself with an acceptable
helpmate. No libertine, for the gratification of vile desire, ever
demanded greater license of re-marriage than Milton, in the name of
religion, demanded for Christian men, for their spiritual advantage.
The old canon law, which insisted on the indissolubility of true
marriages, and, even in cases of adultery, afforded no larger divorce than
the separation from board and bed, having been revived at the close of
Elizabeth’s reign, our ancestors lived for several generations under a
matrimonial law of unprecedented rigour and narrowness, that in its
results demonstrated the sagacity and prudence of Edward the Sixth’s
Commissioners. Had the Commissioners’ proposals become law, England would
have escaped much of the profligacy that, after rendering her seventeenth
century proverbial for domestic libertinism, was less remarkable in the
eighteenth century, only because the usage of successive ages had rendered
society comparatively indifferent to it. Whilst no student of our social
history can question that throughout those centuries the English home
suffered severely from the excessive stringency of the matrimonial law,
every student of literature is cognizant of the stream of written protests
against the harshness and unyielding rigour of that law, from Elizabeth to
Victoria. That Milton shocked the lighter people of his time by his
assaults on the limitations of liberty of divorce is not to be conceived.
That he did not by his writings against those restrictions offend the more
precise and God-fearing of his contemporaries, appears from the regard in
which they held him as a religious poet, after his descent to darkness and
evil days. So far as concerns freedom of divorce, the Free Contract party
of William Godwin’s epoch required nothing that Milton would not have
granted, and urged little that Bucer would have hesitated to approve.
In 1813 (the year in which the anti-matrimonial note of _Queen Mab_ was
written), Shelley regarded marriage with the eyes and by the lights of
eighteenth-century writers, who decried the institution as the source of
human misery and depravation. The evils, that caused these writers to
distinguish themselves in the long war against wedlock, were no imaginary
grievances. On the contrary, they were evils which the Anglican reformers
foresaw would result from a too stringent marriage-law, and for which they
wished to provide by their proposals for divorce. They were evils crying
aloud for remedy throughout the country. Almost every parish of the land
had a miserably mated couple, whose union should have been terminated by
the law. For the mischief there was no remedy but the old cumbrous and
costly proceedings for obtaining the greater divorce,--_i.e._ the suit in
the first instance in the Ecclesiastical Court for the minor divorce from
board and bed, and the subsequent suit for the parliamentary severance of
the bond of marriage:--a process that, making divorce the luxury of the
rich, denied it altogether to the poor. In the first thirty-seven years of
the present century, only seventy suitors (less than two a-year) obtained
special parliamentary enactments for their liberation from wretched
wedlock. In the last thirty-seven years of the previous century, such
divorces were much less frequent. The rich alone could afford to pay for
the parliamentary relief. For the poor, and for the people raised only a
few degrees above poverty, there was no divorce. Under these
circumstances, whilst almost every rural village had a Stephen Blackpool,
there necessarily arose vehement discontent not only with the defective
marriage-law, but with marriage itself. Nothing was said against the
obstacles to entering marriage; but everywhere an outcry was heard against
the impossibility of getting out of marriage. Amongst the populace, social
sentiment permitted a man in many cases to be the physician of his own
trouble, and after deserting his lawful wife, to live with a woman who was
not his wife. The general grievance being the difficulty of escape from
uncongenial wedlock, the Radical writers dealt with this grievance, and
usually forbore to criticise the impediments to marriage, of which no
large number of people complained.
Taking his views from these writers, it was natural for the youthful
Shelley to think and write chiefly of the evils arising from the law,
which forbade a man to leave his wife and straightway attach himself to
another woman. In constructing the note to _Queen Mab_, it was enough for
him to put together, with no common smartness and one or two original
touches, the remarks of previous writers on the troubles resulting from
the permanence of matrimonial obligations. Contemning marriage from his
boyhood, after the fashion of his teachers, he was eloquent about the
difficulty of escaping from it. Apart from a statement of the grand
principle that ‘love was free,’ and that every person should be at
liberty to marry whomsoever he pleased, he does not seem to have troubled
himself about the divers impediments to the first entrance into the
unendurable bondage, before he went to Geneva. It was otherwise on his
return from the residence in Switzerland with Byron.
The startling discovery, that they were believed to be living in
incestuous intimacy with the same two women, caused each of the poets to
ponder the nature of the crime with which rumour charged them. Stirring
and fascinating Byron’s imagination, the scandal bore fruit in _Manfred_
and _Cain_. Stimulating and holding Shelley’s fancy, it resulted in _Laon
and Cythna_. It is interesting to observe how differently the two poets
dealt with the same repulsive subject. For the timid sceptic and
half-hearted innovator, who to the last was (as Shelley put the case to
his wife at Pisa) ‘little better than a Christian,’ it was enough to point
to the crime in _Manfred_, as one of the hideous possibilities of vicious
desire,--as a monstrous and appalling extravagance of wickedness, too
hideous to be spoken of precisely; as an offence so loathsome and
revolting, that poetry could refer to it only by vague hints and obscure
suggestions. In _Cain_ he could refer with cynical mockery to times when,
if _Genesis_ were true, brothers necessarily mated with their sisters, for
the accomplishment of the Creator’s purpose;--mockery, that was not so
much a palliation of the iniquity, as an assault on the credibility of the
Book which seemed to sanction the wickedness.
Shelley handled the subject in a very different way. It was natural for
the thorough and unwavering disbeliever, who had formerly denied and still
questioned the existence of the Deity, and no less natural for the fervid
political theorist, who regarded all human governments and their
subordinate institutions as the mere contrivances of tyranny for the
subjugation and debasement of the peoples, to come to the conclusion that
the impediments to matrimony had no other foundation, and were in no
degree more entitled to the respect of reasonable men, than the
impediments to escape from wedlock. Absolutely ignorant of the social
conditions from which the hindrances to marriage had arisen, and no less
ignorant of the physical and social reasons for regarding most of them as
conducive to domestic purity, and some of them as needful for preserving
the human species from mental and bodily disease and deterioration,
Shelley was only carrying certain of his principles to certain of their
extreme logical conclusions, when he closed his consideration of the
impediments to marriage, by regarding them as so many capricious and
pernicious interferences with natural forces, which, if they were left to
take their own course, without let or hindrance from presumptuous, and
arrogant, and meddlesome mortals, would in due course bring the whole
human race under the dominion of universal love;--a dominion under which
all mankind for countless ages would have enjoyed unqualified felicity,
had it not been for the disastrous activity of tyrants and priests.
It was not in Shelley to distinguish between the various impediments, and
discover grounds for deciding that some of them should be retained, whilst
others might be abolished. To Shelley, a man’s right to marry his deceased
wife’s sister was not more obvious than a man’s right to marry his own
sister. Regarded by the new light, arising from the larger consideration
of the matrimonial law, to which he had been incited by the Genevese
scandal, the artificial hindrances to egress from matrimony were not more
demoralizing than the artificial hindrances to ingress into matrimony. For
human happiness marriage must be relieved of the impediments on its one
side, no less than of the hindrances on its other side. Love must be
restored to Freedom:--to freedom so perfect that a young man would be free
to marry his own sister, without the intervention of priest or the control
of lawyer; and after wearying of her be free to marry her younger sister
under circumstances in no way affecting his freedom in the future. This
discovery was the completion of Shelley’s social philosophy in respect to
the intercourse of the sexes;--the philosophy that is, in the opinion of
some of his admirers, a part of his title to be regarded as a man, who,
under auspicious circumstances, ‘might have been the Saviour of the
World!’
Having made this important discovery after his return from Geneva, Shelley
determined to communicate it to the world in a poem, which should teach
its readers that incest was nothing but an imaginary sin; that ceasing to
have the show of sin, on being rightly regarded, it was seen to be
compatible with the highest virtue; that it was one of the great
‘multitude of artificial vices,’ to whose existence the fewness of ‘real
virtues’ was referable; that instead of being loathsome, nauseous,
hideous, unutterably repulsive and sinful, the conjugal union of a brother
and sister under the Free Contract was permissible in the eyes of
philosophic moralists, and compatible with moral purity and the finest
delicacy in the brother and sister; that besides being altogether
permissible, and in no degree reprehensible, this conjugal union was a
virtuous relation, in which brothers and sisters would often stand towards
one another in a rightly-constituted society. To put this social doctrine
before the world, in the form most likely to commend it to the feelings of
youthful readers, and induce them to further every movement for a state of
things, in which brothers and sisters could so live together without
offending their neighbours, Shelley wrote _Laon and Cythna: or, The
Revolution of the Golden City: a Vision of the Nineteenth Century. In the
Stanza of Spenser._
Brother and sister of the same parents, Laon and Cythna, the hero and
heroine of the poem, are beings endowed with all the virtues conceivable
in perfect human nature, and are still enjoying the scenes of their
childhood in Argolis, when they pass from the state of mutual affection,
that is desirable in a brother of some sixteen or eighteen summers and a
sister (_ætat._ 12), to a state of mutual love that is desirable only
between young people who can in the ordinary course of things marry one
another. What follows from this state of things is indicated with
consummate delicacy by the poet, too wary and artful to shock his readers
in the second canto by clear disclosures, that might determine them to
refrain from perusing any later canto of a long poem. Laon and Cythna are
suddenly torn asunder by the agents of the tyrant, who figures in the poem
as a type of European monarchs in the nineteenth century, and soon after
their severance Cythna gives birth to the lovely child who owes her life
to Laon. In a later passage of the narrative, after he has been released
from the cage on the column’s top, and she, after divers painful
experiences, has been proclaimed the prophetess and supreme directress of
the revolutionists of the Golden City, Laon and Cythna come together under
circumstances, which prevent them from recognizing one another in the
first hour of their reunion. Laon is still uncertain whether she is really
his sister, or only bears a strong resemblance to her, when he hears
Cythna harangue the Golden City revolutionists in these words:--
‘My brethren, we are free! the plains and mountains,
The grey sea shore, the forests and the fountains,
Are haunts of happiest dwellers;--man and woman,
Their common bondage burst, may freely borrow
From _lawless love_ a solace for their sorrow;
For oft we still must weep, since we are human.
A stormy night’s serenest morrow,
Whose showers are pity’s gentle tears,
Whose clouds are smiles of those that die
Like infants without hopes or fears,
And whose beams are joys that lie
In blended hearts, now holds dominion;
The dawn of mind, which upwards on a pinion
Borne, swift as sun-rise, far illumines space,
And clasps this barren world in its own bright embrace!’
Fearful that the words ‘lawless love’ may frighten simple readers, Mr.
Buxton Forman (who thinks Shelley ‘might have been the Saviour of the
World’), in his most useful edition of Shelley’s works, appends to the
alarming words this note:--‘The words _lawless love_ seem to be used, not
in a conventional sense, but merely to signify _unshackled love_.’ True,
but ‘unshackled’ from what? Cythna meant that tyrant custom, or tyrant
anybody else, having been overthrown and rendered powerless for the
moment, her brethren and sisters were free to marry, and changing about to
remarry, in perfect liberty of affection--in love liberated from _the
shackles of human law_--in matrimony, no less easily entered than easily
quitted--in marriage, alike free from legal impediments to ingress, and
from legal impediments to egress--love, in fact, so perfectly free from
the supervision and control of human law, that it might be rightly styled
‘lawless love.’
Later in the poem’s story, when Cythna has rescued Laon from the tyrant’s
soldiers, and carried him off, on the ‘black Tartarian horse of giant
frame,’ to a picturesque ruin, the brother and sister, after recognizing
one another as whilom playmates in Argolis, pass through emotions, that
are set forth in the following stanzas:--
‘The autumnal winds, as if spell-bound, had made
A natural couch of leaves in that recess,
Which seasons none disturb, but in the shade
Of flowering parasites, did Spring love to dress
With their sweet blooms the wintry loneliness
Of those dead leaves, shedding their stars, whene’er
The wandering wind her nurslings might caress;
Whose intertwining fingers ever there,
Made music wild and soft that filled the listening air.
We know not where we go, or what sweet dream
May pilot us thro’ caverns strange and fair
Of far and pathless passion, while the stream
Of life, our bark doth on its whirlpools bear,
Spreading swift wings as sails to the dim air;
Nor should we seek to know, so the devotion
Of love and gentle thoughts be heard still there
Louder and louder from the utmost Ocean
Of universal life, attuning its commotion.
To the pure all things are pure! Oblivion wrapt
Our spirits, and the fearful overthrow
Of public hope was from our being snapt,
Tho’ linkèd years had bound it there; for now
A power, a thirst, a knowledge, which below
All thoughts, like light beyond the atmosphere,
Clothing its clouds with grace, doth ever flow,
Came on us, as we sate in silence there,
Beneath the golden stars of the clear azure air.
In silence which doth follow talk that causes
The baffled heart to speak with sighs and tears,
When wildering passion, swalloweth up the pauses
Of inexpressive speech:--the youthful years
Which we together past, their hopes and fears,
_The common blood which ran within our frames,
That likeness of the features which endears
The thoughts expressed by them, our very names_,
And all the wingèd hours which speechless memory claims
Had found a voice; ...
* * * * *
The meteor shewed the leaves on which we sate,
And Cythna’s glowing arms, and the thick ties
Of her soft hair which bent with gathered weight
My neck near hers, her dark and deepening eyes,
Which, as twin phantoms of one star that lies
O’er a dim well, move, though the star reposes,
Swam in our mute and liquid ecstasies,
Her marble brow, and eager lips, like roses,
With their own fragrance pale, which Spring but half uncloses.
The meteor to its far morass returned:
The beating of our veins one interval
Made still; and then I felt the blood that burned
Within her frame, mingle with mine, and fall
Around my heart like fire; and over all
A mist was spread, the sickness of a deep
And speechless swoon of joy, as might befall
Two disunited spirits when they leap
In union from this earth’s obscure and fading sleep.
Was it one moment that confounded thus
All thought, all sense, all feeling, into one
Unutterable power, which shielded us
Even from our own cold looks, when we had gone
Into a wide and wild oblivion
Of tumult and of tenderness? or now
Had ages, such as make the moon and sun,
The seasons, and mankind their changes know,
Left fear and time unfelt by us alone below?
I know not. What are kisses whose fire clasps
The failing heart in languishment, or limb
Twined within limb? or the quick dying gasps
Of the life meeting, when the faint eyes swim
Thro’ tears of a wide mist boundless and dim,
In one caress? What is the strong controul
Which leads the heart that dizzy steep to climb,
Where far over the world those vapours roll
Which blend two restless frames in one reposing soul?
It is the shadow which doth float unseen,
But not unfelt, o’er blind mortality,
Whose divine darkness fled not, from that green
And lone recess, where lapt in peace did lie
Our linkèd frames; till, from the changing sky,
That night and still another day had fled;
And then I saw and felt. The moon was high,
The clouds, as of coming storm, were spread
Under its orb,--loud winds were gathering overhead.
Cythna’s sweet lips seemed lurid in the moon,
Her fairest limbs with the night wind were chill,
And her dark tresses were all loosely strewn
O’er her pale bosom:--all within was still,
And the sweet peace of joy did almost fill
The depth of her unfathomable look:--
And we sate calmly, though that rocky hill,
The waves contending in its caverns strook,
For they foreknew the storm, and the grey ruin shook.
There we unheeding sate, in the communion
Of interchangèd vows, which, with a rite
Of faith most sweet and sacred, stamped our union.--
Few were the living hearts which could unite
Like ours, or celebrate a bridal night
With such close sympathies, for to each other
Had high and solemn hopes, the gentle might
Of earliest love, and all the thoughts which smother
Cold Evil’s power, now linked a sister and a brother.’
At the poem’s close, in reward for all their good deeds in a naughty
world, and all their pains of self-sacrifice for the promotion of human
happiness, this brother and sister (after death), together with the
charming child, who is the issue of their incestuous embraces, are
permitted to enter the boat of hollow pearl, in which they are carried to
the islands of the blest, to repose in everlasting felicity near ‘The
Temple of the Spirit.’
Lest it should be said that I misrepresent the story in a particular,
which, though important, affects in no way the poem’s principal doctrine,
let it be observed that to some readers this charming child appears to
have been the tyrant’s daughter, instead of Laon’s offspring. Sir John
Taylor Coleridge’s memorable article in the _Quarterly Review_ shows that,
whilst recognizing with repugnance, the incest of Laon’s intercourse with
his sister, he regarded the child as the issue of the despot’s passion.
But on this point I conceive the reviewer to have erred through the
mystifications and ambiguities of the narrative. To me it is clear that
Shelley meant to intimate to careful readers of the monstrous story, that
Cythna’s child was Laon’s daughter. The question, however, does not touch
the poem’s main purpose, as offspring would be the natural sequence of the
endearments interchanged by the brother and sister in the picturesque
ruin.
The two actors of the poem, in whom it is sought to interest the reader
most strongly, and for whose stainless purity and unqualified goodness the
author solicits our admiration, are a brother and sister, whose embraces
result in the birth of a little girl, no less lovely in person and mind
than her parents. The main purpose of the poem, which has numerous
subordinate and minor objects, is to plant the incestuous pair in the
reader’s affection, and lure him into regarding so exemplary an instance
of conjugal affection with sympathy and approval. By some of the less
daring of the Shelleyan zealots it has indeed been urged that _Laon and
Cythna_ should be regarded as a mere poetic ‘vision’ (as it is described
on the title-page), and the pure outgrowth of exuberant fancy, and _not_
as a serious contribution to social philosophy, intended to influence the
judgment and conduct of its readers. To this plea a sufficient answer is
found in the pains taken by Shelley to provide the work with a carefully
worded prose preface, in which he intimated, that the poem was addressed
to persons thirsting ‘for a happier condition of moral and political
society;’ that the hurtful institutions and principles assailed in the
poem were the hurtful institutions and principles then dominant in
European society, and especially of English society; that the doctrines of
the poem were offered for the solution of the various religious problems,
political problems, and economical problems, then holding the attention
and troubling the minds of earnest philanthropists; that, notwithstanding
its artistic form and beauty, the poem _was_ offered as a serious
contribution to political and social philosophy, and had been written with
a view to practical results in human conduct.
By others of the less courageous of the Shelleyan zealots, it is urged
that, instead of definitely recommending conjugal love between a brother
and a sister as a relation to be countenanced, or even tolerated by
England in the nineteenth century, _Laon and Cythna_ merely reminds
readers that, instead of violating any principle of natural morals, the
connubial intercourse of a brother and sister would be unobjectionable,
and might even be positively virtuous, in a country whose laws either
encourage or only permit such an association. This apology for the prime
doctrine of _Laon and Cythna_ may as well be considered in connexion with
what the poet says on the subject in the last sentence of _the_ preface,
which runs thus:--
‘In the personal conduct of my Hero and Heroine, there is one
circumstance which _was_ intended to startle the reader from the
trance of ordinary life. It _was_ my object to break through the crust
of those outworn opinions on which established institutions depend. I
have appealed therefore to the most universal of all feelings, and
have endeavored to strengthen the moral sense, by forbidding it to
waste its energies in seeking to avoid actions _which are only crimes
of convention_. It is because there is so great a multitude of
artificial vices, that there are so few real virtues. Those feelings
alone _which are benevolent or malevolent, are essentially good or
bad. The circumstance of which I speak, was introduced, however,
merely to accustom men to that charity and toleration which the
exhibition of a practice widely differing from their own, has a
tendency to promote._ Nothing indeed can be more mischievous, than
many actions innocent in themselves, which might bring down upon
individuals the bigotted contempt and rage of the multitude.’
To this last sentence of the preface to _Laon and Cythna_, Shelley
(obviously by an after-thought, and in consequence of the pressure put
upon him by some friend or friends) appended this foot-note--‘The
sentiments connected with and characteristic of this circumstance have no
personal reference to the writer’!!!
The last paragraph of the preface to _Laon and Cythna_ is preceded by
these words, ‘Love is celebrated everywhere as the sole law which should
govern the moral world.’ Having regard to the abrupt transition from the
present to the past tense, the significant difference (in style) of the
last paragraph from the preceding paragraph, and the known conflict that
occurred between the author and publisher before the poem had passed the
press, few critical readers will decline to think with me that the last
paragraph, instead of being part of the preface when it left Shelley’s
pen, was an after-thought, written to meet Ollier’s objections to the
incestuous relation of Laon and Cythna. Nor will it, I think, be
questioned, that the astounding note was an after-thought _to_ the
after-thought, and was put at the foot of the last paragraph, because
Ollier, or Hunt, or Peacock, pointed out to the author that the poem,
commending the incest of brother and sister, would expose him to the most
hideous of imputations.
But what do the statements of the last paragraph amount to? (1) That in
making Laon and Cythna live like a married couple, the poet merely aimed
at startling his readers out of the trance of ordinary life.--(2) That in
so startling his readers he wished to enable them to break away from the
notion, that there was something inherently vicious in a brother’s
connubial association with his own sister.--(3) That Shelley rated such
incest as a mere crime of convention, to be placed in the same category
with offences against the game-laws, the excise-laws, or a custom’s
tariff.--(4) That feelings should not be judged by their results, but by
their effect on the disposition of the person entertaining them.--(5) That
in so startling his readers out of an antiquated repugnance to the
particular kind of incest, he hoped to render them tolerant of, and
charitable towards, persons committing the mere offence against
conventional morality.--(6) That though, in his opinion, no rule of
natural morals forbade a man to marry his own sister, the poet thought his
readers had better refrain from such incest, since, though _innocent in
itself_, the perpetration of it would be likely to infuriate the bigoted
multitude. This from the man who, according to his most fervid idolaters,
would have redeemed the world from sin and wretchedness, had he worked for
its regeneration under auspicious circumstances.
Is the incest of brother and sister a mere crime of convention? The
science of morals, of course, is progressive. What is virtue in a rude
state of society becomes crime in a high state of civilization. Some
countries, lying well within the wide and vague boundaries of
civilization, are behind other countries in the science of morals. What is
crime in England may be honesty in Thibet. There are offences about which
we may hesitate to say off-hand, whether they are offences against natural
morals or mere crimes of convention. But surely action that is maleficent
to the mental and physical welfare of mankind, wherever it may be
practised, is not action about which there can be any uncertainty.
Permitted in the country, where (by his own confession in prose) he
commended it to tolerance and charitable consideration, the license
commended by Shelley would poison the springs of domestic virtue, whilst
producing its universal results on the bodily shape, nervous force, and
moral health of the people. Permitted amongst the settlers on a barbarous
coast, it would in a few generations be fruitful of such physical
infirmity and debasement, as are ever accompanied with moral depravation.
Action so universally maleficent is universally wicked. Though it may be
less mischievous in its consequences, the conduct recommended in _Laon and
Cythna_ is no less essentially wicked, in a small and thinly populated
island, than in a great city.
The poem having been written to the last line, Shelley sent it to Messrs.
C. and J. Ollier, of Welbeck Street, whom he had selected for his
publishers, at the request of their friend Leigh Hunt. As the book was to
be produced at Shelley’s cost, the publishers of course wished to publish
it. But these gentlemen looked for money, instead of disaster, from
business with their client. On finding that the poem was an apology for
incest, they took counsel with one another, and probably with their
lawyer. The result was that, when the poem was nearly, if not altogether
printed, one of the Messrs. Ollier wrote to Shelley, stating they could
not venture to produce a work, so certain to put them in an ignominious
position. Instead of feeling for the men of business, and shrinking from
the thought of injuring them, Shelley urged them to go on in the road to
ruin. But the publishers were less manageable than Shelley hoped to find
them. They repeated their wish to be quit of so dangerous a book.
Whereupon, dating from Marlow, on 11th December, 1817, Shelley wrote _the_
Mr. Ollier (who was attending to the matter) a letter that contained these
words,--
‘There is one compromise you might make, though that would still be
injurious to me. Sherwood and Neely wished to be the principal
publishers. Call on them, and say that it was through a mistake that
you undertook the principal direction of the book, as it was my wish
that it should be theirs, and that I have written to you to that
effect. This, if it would be advantageous to you, would be detrimental
to, but not utterly destructive of, my views. To withdraw your name
entirely, would be to inflict on me a bitter and undeserved injury.’
(_Vide_ _Shelley Memorials_.)
To see the nature of this advice, readers must remember how usual it was
in former time for several different firms of booksellers to be concerned
in the publication of the same work. The principal publisher in these
joint-enterprises,--_i.e._ the publisher in negotiation with the author,
and to whom the author looked as _his_ publisher--had the direction of,
and chief responsibility in, the business. His name, or the name of his
house, appeared on the title-page before the names of the other
publishers. Thus holding a place of honour, he held also the post of
greatest danger; for in case of proceedings against the author and
publisher of an unlawful publication, it was the way of the law to hold
the first and principal publisher as more responsible than the other
associated booksellers, and even in some cases to regard the latter as
being in no degree morally accountable for the contents of the work. In
accordance with this trade-usage, Messrs. Sherwood, Neely, and Jones, of
Paternoster Row, were associated in 1817, as second and subordinate
publishers with Messrs. C. and J. Ollier, of Welbeck Street.
Shelley’s suggestion was that, as the Olliers were frightened, they should
slip out of the more dangerous position, by inducing Sherwood, Neely, and
Jones to step into it by misrepresentation. The Olliers were instructed by
Shelley to tell the other set of publishers an untruth, that was a rather
complicated untruth. They were instructed to keep their alarm to
themselves, and say to their comrades in the trade, ‘We took the principal
direction of the book _through a mistake_’ (a sheer untruth), ‘as it was
Mr. Shelley’s wish for you to be his principal publishers’ (another sheer
untruth), ‘and therefore as Mr. Shelley has written us to that effect’ (a
third untruth on a point of fact) ‘we think even at this late stage of the
business you had better figure as principal publishers’ (a false
suggestion of motive). That the Olliers did as Shelley thus instructed
them, may be inferred from the fact that, on the title-page (the 1818
title-page) of _Laon and Cythna_, Sherwood, Neely, and Jones, figure as
principal publishers.
_Laon and Cythna_ was published, in so far that a few copies (_three_
copies, according to some writers on the subject, but probably a larger
number) passed into circulation; one of them being the copy, that afforded
the _Quarterly_ Reviewer an opportunity for making his memorable onslaught
on the book. But this had barely been accomplished, when the poem was an
addition to the considerable list of the works, written by Shelley and
speedily suppressed. What was the immediate cause of the renewal of their
alarm does not appear; but the book was no sooner out, than the Messrs.
Ollier decided that not another copy should be issued with their name on
the title-page. Probably they acted on their lawyer’s urgent
representation, that, unless it were promptly suppressed, so scandalous a
book would certainly result in their prosecution. It has been repeatedly
averred that their alarm proceeded chiefly from the freedom with which the
poem dealt with matters of religion and politics. But the changes which
converted _Laon and Cythna_ into _The Revolt of Islam_, show that this was
not the case. Some of the changes, no doubt, modified the terms relating
to the Almighty; but the prime purpose of the alterations was to relieve
the poem of its incestuous sentiment. Unquestionably the publishers were
alarmed by the book’s blasphemy and political extravagance; but their most
serious apprehension was fear of such an outcry against the poem’s
indecency, as would put them on trial for issuing an obscene book. On
reconsideration the publishers saw that in case of such a prosecution, it
would avail them nothing that their name appeared after ‘Sherwood, Neely,
and Jones,’ on the title-page of the book, of which they would be proved
to have been the principal publishers. No wonder they were firm. No wonder
also that Shelley was in the highest state of excitement for his own
interests,--and of indignation at his publisher’s cowardice. What the
Olliers felt was, of course, felt by the other publishers.
Matters were in this position, when it occurred to some ingenious student
of the suppressed poem, that it would be easy to relieve the work of its
incestuous quality and some of its most objectionable passages touching
religion, by cancelling a few leaves and replacing them with leaves, that
would change the character and complexion of the whole performance. By
dropping the final paragraph (with its note) from the Preface, producing a
new title-page, and altering fifty-five lines of the body of the book, it
would be easy to manipulate, at a trifling cost, the printed sheets out of
their egregious offensiveness into comparative innocence. Who was the
originator of this ingenious suggestion does not appear; but the editorial
ingenuity of the proposal inclines one to attribute it to Leigh Hunt.
Anyhow, the suggestion was carried out by a council, consisting of one of
the Messrs. Ollier, the author, Peacock, and some other of the author’s
personal friends (Leigh Hunt and Hogg being, no doubt, of the number).
Never perhaps was stranger work done by a literary committee at successive
meetings. At the sittings of the council, Shelley (says Peacock)
‘contested the proposed alterations step by step; in the end, sometimes
adopting, more frequently modifying, never originating, and always
insisting that his poem was spoiled.’ No wonder he fought his friends
point by point. The poem had been written to demonstrate the purity and
loveliness of the extremest kind of Free Love. By changing Cythna from
Laon’s sister, to a mere orphan, living under the protection of his
parents, the alterations deprived the poem of the prime doctrine it was
intended to inculcate. The poem that should have proclaimed the beauty and
holiness of incestuous Love was manipulated into a mere poetic apology for
Lawless Love of an ordinary and less interesting kind. So castrated, the
Poem of Incest could no longer generate the sentiment, whose activity was
needful, in Shelley’s opinion, for the attainment of ‘a happier condition
of moral and political society.’ As any reader may learn from a careful
study of the poem, enough mischief was left in _The Revolt of Islam_ to
satisfy an ordinary enthusiast for lawless love; but Shelley was an
‘extra’-ordinary enthusiast for wedlock without restrictions. It is
imputed to him for righteousness by his idolaters, that he persisted to
the last in the pure and unqualified doctrine of the unaltered poem. In
reference to Lady Shelley’s quite inaccurate statement that the poet (in
1817-18) was ‘convinced of the propriety of making’ the ‘alterations,’
which converted _Laon and Cythna_ into _The Revolt of Islam_, Mr. Buxton
Forman remarks proudly of the teacher, who might have been the Saviour of
the World, ‘There is nothing in his subsequent history to countenance the
idea that he regarded _Laon and Cythna_ as in any way offensive.’
But before the superlatively offensive poem had been manipulated into a
comparatively inoffensive one, some copies of _Laon and Cythna_ had passed
from the publisher’s hands to the world. Whether these copies were no
more, or several more, than three, does not matter. If they were only
three, they were enough to darken the poet’s fame and cloud his happiness
for the rest of his days. Three hundred copies in circulation could not
have been more disastrous to his social credit than those _three_, one of
which was lent to the _Quarterly_ Reviewer.
Is it wonderful that Shelley, during the few years still remaining to him
of a brief existence, lived under the world’s ban, and though producing
works of incomparable art in quick succession, produced them only to stir
the wrath of critics, and aggravate the pain he endured from the world’s
neglect of his genius? It was known, and could not be gainsaid, in every
coterie of men of letters, how abruptly he had left his first childish
wife; how, on breaking with so young and lovely a creature, he told her to
‘do as other women did’; how within a few weeks of breaking with this
girl, he had carried off his familiar friend’s sixteen-years-old daughter;
and how in language of matchless beauty and vigour, he had used all the
powers of his poetic genius, not only to deride marriage, but to teach his
readers that the most repulsive and blighting of all the several kinds of
incestuous love was wholesome, innocent, and beautiful. Is it surprising
that in less than a year and four months from the publication of _Laon and
Cythna_, he wrote from Rome to Peacock, ‘I am regarded by all who know or
hear of me, except, I think, on the whole, five individuals, as a rare
prodigy of crime and pollution, whose look even might infect?’ Is it
surprising that, critics, fully cognizant of the power and many
excellences of his poetry, forbore to extol his genius, from a
conscientious repugnance to his social philosophy, and a fear that by
applauding the poet they should strengthen the hands of the social
innovator? Is it surprising that, whilst temperate and judicious men of
letters were silent about what they secretly admired, but could not
venture to openly commend, less discerning critics in their abhorrence of
the social innovator, wrote wild nonsense about the stupid trash, the
drivel and buffoonery of his finest productions?
Of course, these less discerning critics had better have imitated the more
temperate and discreet men of letters, and held their peace. But critics
are human; and when men speak under the influence of strong resentment,
they are apt to say wild things. To point to the angry things written to
Shelley’s discredit, when the passions he had stirred were at their
fiercest rage, as evidence of a singular and unaccountable blindness to
the excellences of fine poetry, is to misread the signs of a former time.
Like Byron, the author of _Laon and Cythna_ provoked a storm he was not
permitted to survive; though he would have survived it, had he lived to
middle age and continued to write in the vein of _Prometheus Unbound_ and
_Adonais_. It is not wonderful that violent things were said of the man,
who had done violence to society’s finest sensibilities. What occurred to
his annoyance more than sixty years since would occur now-a-days to a
similar offender,--say, to a novelist of high culture and singular
aptitude for his department of literary art, guilty of producing a novel
whose hero and heroine, born of the same parents, and reared in the same
home, should live and love like Laon and Cythna; the whole romance being
cunningly devised and skilfully worked out, for the purpose of luring
readers to the opinion that brothers and sisters ought to be allowed to
marry one another. After all that has been done during the last fifty
years to make people tolerant of the Free Contract, what would happen if
such a story came to us one fine day from the pen of a young and
remarkably able writer (_ætat._ 25), together with his assurance that the
work was ‘an experiment on the temper of the public mind,’ and an attempt
to bring about ‘happier conditions of moral and political society?’ Would
critics be mealy-mouthed and weigh their words precisely in declaring the
experiment an outrage, and the attempt a monstrous scandal? Would they be
less outspoken on discovering that the young writer, at so early a stage
of his existence, had put away his first wife, seduced his intimate
friend’s sixteen-years-old daughter, written strongly on previous
occasions against chastity and conjugal constancy, and been declared by
the Lord Chancellor a person whose _conduct_ proved him unfit to have the
charge of his children?
One is often asked to explain what is meant by ‘the irony of fate.’ It is
easier to explain a term by an example than by words. It was fate’s irony
that, whilst the poet, who exhibited a brother’s incestuous intercourse
with his sister as sinless and beautiful, escaped the imputation he may be
said to have invited by the personal note at the end of the Preface, the
world was induced to charge the crime passionately on another poet, who
had only written of such incest vaguely as an enormity of wickedness, or
mockingly as the familiar arrangement of a remote period. Another example
of fate’s irony is found in the fact that, when Byron was suffering in
posthumous fame from the Beecher-Stowe calumny, the more fervid of the
Shelleyan enthusiasts and the more fervid of the Shelleyan socialists
combined to decry him as a prodigy of wickedness for practising the form
of Lawless Love, which Shelley had declared compatible with virtue. Fate
also was set upon another exploit in irony, when she determined that the
poem, which a committee of men of the world declared unfit for circulation
during the profligate Regency, should be produced _verbatim_ for the moral
edification of the men, and women, and young people of Victorian England.