The story of the failure of this absurd and tragic marriage is well enough known. Mary Godwin, who, like her mother, had a noticeable strain of the masculine in her, roused Shelley to a genuine romantic passion, which supplanted the remnants of his spurious chivalry for Harriet. He saw that his union with the latter was a mere mockery, founded on self-deception, and he did not hesitate to break it up. He had never been in love with Harriet; always he was in love with Love. His subsequent marriage with Mary was in many ways happy, and on the surface it seemed successful, for she had more than the ordinary intellect and was devoted to him. Yet it was not truly successful from the erotic point of view, as is obvious from the tone of sadness and melancholy in his later poetry. To the last he was the victim of melancholy, and in conflict with himself, for his love-impulses remained unsatisfied. As long as he did not acknowledge the inverted component in these impulses, he was forced to seek ideal love in the guise of a woman; and the same force which kept up this repression also made him idealise Woman so extravagantly. All through his poetry we find the same quest for an unreal ideal woman, who is at once a sister, a friend, a leader of men, and a sexual mate. It is the theme of Alastor and The Revolt of Islam; and in Epipsychidion he relates how his whole life has been spent in seeking:
The shadow of that idol of my thought.
It would seem that at last he had found the ideal, for Epipsychidion is a rhapsody of love for Emilia Viviani. But scarcely had the ink dried on the paper than he realised that Emilia, like Harriet, Mary, and Jane, was no Cythna, but a quite ordinary woman.
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; his women are sweetness and tenderness incarnate. Women attracted him by reason of their specifically feminine qualities; but he did not idealise them, either collectively as a sex, or individually. Indeed, he thought they were entirely negative and passive in character: “In Heaven, there is no such thing as a female will.” Yet his married life was placid and very happy.
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. His married life, to say the least, was not conspicuously successful. In this connexion it is interesting to note how constantly Shelley introduced a third party into his household, as if he were quite without the ordinary domestic jealousy of those who are “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.”
When he married Harriet he quickly took her to York, to live there with Hogg. After this plan had broken down he induced Miss Hitchener to share his home; and when she departed, Elizabeth, Harriet’s sister, came in. Even when he eloped with Mary Godwin, Claire Clairmont accompanied the pair to the continent. Finally at Pisa, and at Casa Magni, he shared his house with Edward and Jane Williams.
III
THE second unusual feature in Shelley’s life of the heart was that his many friendships with men were no less romantic, and on the whole much more permanent and successful, than his affairs with women. Certainly they showed some of the same ideal character, but they also seemed real and concrete, in a way that his heterosexual affairs did not. We know little of his early affections, except for two instances. While he was at Eton, probably at the age of thirteen or fourteen, he had a remarkable affection for the Windsor physician, Dr. Lind. It is well known, of course, that at this period of puberty boys do quite normally tend to fall in love with men or older boys,[16] and to worship them as heroes. But Shelley’s love for Dr. Lind was unusually strong and tender, as is shown by the fact that it did not fade from his memory, as such boyish enthusiasms normally do, but persisted as one of his most precious recollections. In Prince Athanase we find the good Doctor described as:
An old, old man with hair of silver-white
And lips where heavenly smiles would hang and blend
With his wise words.
And the third and fourth cantos of The Revolt of Islam contain a description of Dr. Lind, and record Shelley’s worship of him. It was not only on account of his anarchist teachings that Shelley loved this old man; nor merely because of his evident genius for soothing the troubled mind of the poet. There was also a certain tender physical attraction, which Shelley reveals by his description of the Hermit in The Revolt of Islam.