In Dowden’s Life there is a description by one of Shelley’s Sion House schoolmates, Mr. Gellibrand: “Like a girl in boy’s clothes, fighting with open hands, and rolling on the floor when flogged, not from pain, but from a sense of indignity.”
The portraits of Shelley are not very reliable guides to his physical appearance, but they all depict him as remarkably feminine in feature. The writer remembers with amusement how an inquisitive landlady asked about a print of Clint’s portrait of Shelley, which graced the walls, if it was her young lodger’s sister! Doubtless the amiable dragon suspected that it was his fiancée.
This femininity extended beyond the facial features to the poet’s voice, which was shrill. If I am not mistaken one of his biographers also mentions that Shelley could not whistle like a man; and his gait was peculiar and mincing[15].
We shall find, on closer study, that these physical traits were but the external indications of a deeper psychic femininity. Shelley, in fact, belonged to the class of double-natured, or intermediate, types—a class which embraces many artists of very diverse qualities: for example, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Wilde, and Tchaikowsky. We must, however, make clear at the outset of this paper that the poet himself was never fully aware of his inversion; although, towards the last few years of his troubled life, there are indications that the repressed impulses were breaking through the barriers, and were forcing themselves up into consciousness. It is interesting to notice that during the period 1811 to 1814 he gave these impulses almost no expression at all, and at the same time suffered much from his delusions. But from 1817 to the end of his life, while he was expressing these impulses in a sublimated but quite recognisable form, he only had one persecutory delusion. Had he lived a few more years he would have been driven either into some final and serious neurosis, or else to some form of conscious recognition and expression of the repressed homosexual component of his nature. Perhaps fortunately for Shelley, his early death cut short the conflict.
From his early youth Shelley felt himself to be in some way radically unlike his fellows. At school he was shy, lonely, and introspective, avoiding games and seeking solitude. According to one of his contemporaries, he was disliked by his masters and hated by the elder boys, though adored by his equals in age. Certainly he suffered much at Eton where, under Dr. Keate, a pandemonium of indiscipline, bullying, and ferocious punishment seems to have flourished. In his manhood he was still “the companionless sensitive plant,” and could portray himself as “the herd-abandoned deer, struck by the hunter’s dart.” He was always fundamentally out of harmony with himself and with his fellows, a prey to the melancholy of Prince Athanase:
What was this grief which ne’er in other minds
A mirror found? He knew not. None could know.
It is sufficiently obvious that poems like Athanase, Alastor, and The Question, with their burden of tender melancholy and solitude were inspired by vague unsatisfied sexual emotion. 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, 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 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.” But it was the tragedy of his life that he lived in a society, whose whole influence, acting on him by suggestion from his earliest infancy, forced his conscious mind to seek love in the form of an idealised woman. Hence he never could achieve success, nor even peace of mind, in this quest. It was this deep-rooted, though unconscious, disparity between the sanctions of society and his own peculiar impulses, we feel, that lay at the root of his enthusiasm for Free Love. Godwin might deduce a theory of Free Love from his general philosophical premises, but with a sage of Godwin’s type it remained pure theory, and did not become an enthusiasm. With Shelley it was different; he began with an instinctive reaction against social laws and restrictions in the sphere of sex, and his general philosophic anarchism was a later addition which served as a rationalised justification of his instinctive tendencies. The fundamental article of his revolutionary creed is given in these lines from The Revolt of Islam:
Man and woman,
Their common bondage burst, may freely borrow
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. In The Visions of the Daughters of Albion, the girl Oothoon woos her lover by disclaiming all jealous restrictions and offering to bring him other girls to minister to his enjoyment: