The Pundit tells the missionary about the wonderful influence that the Guru’s granddaughter, Luxima, has over the people of the place, just as the old man of The Revolt of Islam, who represents Shelley’s teacher, Dr. Lind, tells Laon about the extraordinary influence of Cythna on the people she meets. “The Indians of the most distinguished rank drew back as she approached lest their very breath should pollute that region of purity her respiration consecrated, and the odour of the sacred flowers, by which she was adorned, was inhaled with an eager devotion, as if it purified the soul it almost seemed to penetrate.” The Pundit says that “her beauty, her enthusiasm, her graces, and her genius, alike capacitate her to propagate and support the errors of which she herself is the victim.” The old man tells Laon that Cythna—
Paves her path with human hearts, and o’er it flings
The wildering gloom of her immeasurable wings.
At the ceremony of Upaseyda, which the Guru holds, disputants of various sects put forth the claims of their respective religions. “A devotee of the Musnavi sect took the lead; he praised the mysteries of the Bhagavat, and explained the profound allegory of the six Ragas.... A disciple of the Vedanti school spoke of the transports of mystic love, and maintained the existence of spirit only; while a follower of Buddha supported the doctrine of matter, etc.” The missionary takes advantage of this opportunity to tell them about Christianity. “The impression of his appearance was decisive, it sank at once to the soul; and he imposed conviction on the senses, ere he made his claim on the understanding.... He ceased to speak and all was still as death. His hands were folded on his bosom, to which his crucifix was pressed; his eyes were cast in meekness on the earth; but the fire of his zeal still played like a ray from heaven on his brow.” This reminds one at once of Canto IX, of The Revolt of Islam:
And Oromaze, Joshua, and Mahomet,
Moses and Buddah, Zerdhust and Brahm and Foh,
A tumult of strange names, which never met
Before, as watchwords of a single woe,
Arose; each raging votary ’gan to throw
Aloft his armed hands, and each did howl
“Our God alone is God!”—And slaughter now
Would have gone forth, when from beneath a cowl
A voice came forth, which pierced like ice through every soul.
’Twas an Iberian priest from whom it came
A zealous man, who led the legioned west,
With words which faith and pride had stopped in flame,
To quell the unbelievers....
He ceased, and they
A space stood silent, as far, far away
The echoes of his voice among them died;
And he knelt down upon the dust, alway
Muttering the curses of his speechless pride.
There is a striking resemblance between this cowled Iberian priest and the Iberian Franciscan of The Missionary.
The missionary looked to the conversion of the prophetess as the most effectual means of accomplishing the conversion of the nation. With this end in view he goes to Cashmere, and unexpectedly comes upon Luxima one morning, praying at a shrine. “Silently gazing in wonder upon each other, they stood finely opposed, the noblest specimens of the human species...; she, like the East, lovely and luxuriant; he, like the West, lofty and commanding; the one, radiant in all the luster, attractive in all the softness which distinguishes her native regions; the other, towering in all the energy, which marks his ruder latitudes.” They meet again and again, and the result is they fall in love with each other. It is significant from the point of view of the influence of the Missionary that in Alastor Shelley meets his ideal love “in the vale of Cashmire.” The way the novelist develops the progress of this sentiment, which both the priest and the priestess had vowed to suppress, can scarcely be surpassed. She describes how their new mode of feeling was opposed by their ancient habits of thinking, and how their minds “struggling between a natural bliss and a religious principle of resistance, between a passionate sentiment and an habitual self-command, become a scene of conflict and agitation.”
Old age with its gray hair,
And wrinkled legends of unworthy things
And icy sneers is nought; it cannot dare
To burst the chains which life forever flings
On the entangled soul’s aspiring wings.[56]
Luxima succumbed to the warfare. She overcame the traditions and laws by which she was bound; and hence Shelley’s great admiration for her. She embraced Christianity less in faith than in love. She did not feel guilty because she thought her sentiments of love were true to all life’s natural impulses. The missionary, on the other hand, must have excited in Shelley pity for the man and hatred for the institutions which stood in the way of their happiness. “He had not, indeed, relinquished a single principle of his moral feeling—he had not yet vanquished a single prejudice of his monastic education; to feel, was still with him to be weak; to love, a crime; and to resist, perfection.” Luxima is excommunicated, deprived of caste and declared a wanderer and an outcast upon the earth. They both elude their pursuers and join a caravan which is on its way to Tatta. On their journey the missionary tells her that they must soon separate, as duty demands that he continue the work of his ministry. He will see to it that she is well cared for in a convent at Tatta. Luxima upbraids him for his selfishness. He replies that it is not the prospect of his degradation and humiliation which deters him from staying with her, but the thought that by so doing he will commit a crime—break his vows. “Pity then,” the missionary says, “and yet respect him who, loving thee and virtue equally, can never know happiness without nor with thee—who thus condemned to suffer without ceasing submits not to his fate, but is overpowered by its tyranny, and who alike helpless and unresigned opposes while he suffers and repines while he endures.” Continency was unintelligible to Shelley, and he criticizes it in Canto XII as follows:
... that sudden rout
One checked who never in his mildest dreams
Felt awe from grace or loveliness, the seams
Of his rent heart so hard and cold a creed
Had seared with blistering ice; but he misdeems
That he is wise whose wounds do only bleed
Only for self; thus thought the Iberian priest indeed
And others too thought he was wise to see
In pain and fear and hate something divine;
In love and beauty no divinity.
Shelley believed that “the worthiness of every action is to be estimated by the quantity of pleasurable sensation it is calculated to produce,”[57] that the ideal of man was to love and to be loved. Luxima says: “Be that heaven my witness that I would not for the happiness I have abandoned and the glory I have lost, resign that desert whose perilous solitudes I share with thee. Oh! my Father, and my friend, thou alone hast taught me to know that the paradise of woman is the creation of her heart; that it is not the light or air of heaven, though beaming brightness and breathing fragrance, nor all that is loveliest in Nature’s scenes, which form the sphere of her existence and enjoyment! It is alone the presence of him she loves; it is that mysterious sentiment of the heart which diffuses a finer sense of life through the whole being; and which resembles, in its singleness and simplicity, the primordial idea which in the religion of my fathers is supposed to have preceded time and worlds, and from which all created good has emanated.”[58]