It has been said that Shelley was a libertine, but there seems to be no proof for this assertion. Hogg, who was his most intimate friend at Oxford, says the purity and sanctity of Shelley’s life were most conspicuous. “He was offended, and indeed more indignant than would appear to be consistent with the singular mildness of his nature at a coarse and awkward jest, especially if it were immodest and uncleanly; in the latter case his anger was unbounded, and his uneasiness preeminent.” With the exception of his elopement with Mary Godwin there is nothing in his life to indicate that he was licentious. “Die ruhe, klarheit, sicherheit und stärke seines geschlechtlichen empfündens, das frei ist von aller lüsternheit oder unnatürlichkeit ist bei seiner feinfühligen, nervosen körperanlage besonders bemerkenswert.”[62]
True, Shelley loved many women, but this does not prove that he was immoral. His love is platonic and not sensual. Platonic love is described by Howell as “a love abstracted from all corporeal gross impressions and sensual appetites, but consists in contemplations and ideas of the mind.”[63] It is a passion having its source in the enjoyment of beauty and goodness.
“What is love or friendship?” Shelley asks. “Is it capable of no extension, no communication?” Lord Kaimes defines love to be a particularization of the general passion, but this is the love of sensation, of sentiment—the absurdest of absurd vanities; it is the love of pleasure, not the love of happiness. The one is a love which is self-centered, self-devoted, self-interested ... selfishness, monopoly in its very soul; but love, the love which we worship—virtue, heaven, disinterestedness—in a word.”[64] Love seeks the good of all, not because its object is a minister to its pleasures, but because it is really worthy.
Platonism, laying emphasis upon the function of the soul as opposed to the senses, treats “love as a purely spiritual passion devoid of all sensuous pleasure.”[65] Beauty is a spiritual thing, the splendor of God’s light shining in all things. It is that quality of an object which draws us to it and makes us love it. Man should love everything and everybody because they are all beautiful. Shelley says:
True love in this differs from gold and clay,
That to divide is not to take away
Love is like understanding, that grows bright
Gazing on many truths;[66]
In another place he says “the meanest of our fellow beings contains qualities, which, developed, we must admire and adore.” Beauty is something more than outward appearance. The source of its power lies in the soul. “The platonic theory of beauty teaches that the beauty of the body is a result of the formative energy of the soul.” According to the Platonist Ficino the soul has descended from heaven and has framed a body in which to dwell. True lovers are those whose souls have departed from heaven under the same astral influences and who, accordingly, are informed with the same idea in imitation of which they frame their earthly bodies.”[67] “We are born,” writes Shelley, “into the world, and there is something within us which, from the instant that we live, more and more thirsts after its likeness.... The discovery of its antitype; the meeting with an understanding capable of clearly estimating our own ... with a frame whose nerves like the chords of two exquisite lyres, strung to the accompaniment of one delightful voice, vibrate with the vibrations of our own;... this is the invisible and unattainable point to which love tends.”[68] According to Plato wisdom is the most lovely of all ideas and the human being who has the greatest amount of wisdom is the most lovable. Platonic love then concerns only the soul, and the union of lover and beloved is simply a union of their souls. “I am led to love a being,” Shelley says, “not because it stands in the physical relation of blood to me but because I discern an intellectual relationship.”[69] Whenever Shelley sees one possessing beauty and virtue he cannot help loving that person.
I never was attached to that great sect
Whose doctrine is that each one should select
Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend
And all the rest though fair and wise commend
To cold oblivion;[70]
Again
Narrow
The heart that loves, the brain that contemplates
The life that wears, the spirit that creates
One object, and one form, and builds thereby
A sepulchre for its eternity.
This is the doctrine of Diotima in Plato’s Symposium, which Shelley has translated as follows: “He who aspires to love rightly, ought from his earliest youth to seek an intercourse with beautiful forms.... He ought then to consider that beauty in whatever form it resides is the brother of that beauty which subsists in another form; and if he ought to pursue that which is beautiful in form it would be absurd to imagine that beauty is not one and the same thing in all forms, and would therefore remit much of his ardent preferences towards one, through his perception of the multitude of claims upon his love.”