IV
SCATTERED throughout Shelley’s writings we find many indications of his bisexual disposition. For example, his heroes, Laon, Athanase, and his heroines, Laone, Beatrice, etc., each combine masculine energy and intellect with a feminine grace and gentleness. His ideal of human beauty as of character, was bisexual, as can be seen from his comments on the Greek sculpture in Italy.[19] His highest praise is given to the statues of adolescent boys—a Ganymede, an Apollo: “It was difficult to conceive anything more delicately beautiful than the Ganymede; but the spirit-like lightness, the softness, the flowing perfection of these forms, surpass it. The countenance, though exquisite, lovely, and gentle, is not divine. There is a womanish vivacity of winning yet passive happiness, and yet a boyish inexperience exceedingly delightful.” On an Olinthus, he remarks:
“Another of those sweet and gentle figures of adolescent youth, in which the Greeks delighted.”
His description of the “Bacchus and Ampelus” is worth quoting at some length. “The figures are walking as it were with a sauntering and idle pace and talking to each other as they walk, and this is expressed in the motions of their delicate and flowing forms. One arm of Bacchus rests on the shoulder of Ampelus, and the other ... is gracefully thrown forward corresponding with the advance of the opposite leg.... Ampelus, with a beast skin over his shoulder, holds a cup in his right hand, and with his left half-embraces the waist of Bacchus. Just as you may have seen (yet how seldom from their dissevering and tyrannical institutions do you see) a younger and an elder boy at school walking in some remote grassy spot of their playground, with that tender friendship towards each other which has so much of love.”[20]
In a letter from Naples (December 22, 1818) he tells Peacock of one statue: “A Satyr, making love to a youth: in which the expressed life of the Sculpture and the inconceivable beauty of the form of the youth, overcome one’s repugnance to the subject.”
Personally I have never visited the Naples gallery, but I have been credibly informed that this statue is one of the very few indecently homosexual pieces. If so, it is curious that Shelley should have singled it out for mention, for he had a horror of everything crude or obscene.
Another statue that evidently fascinated him was the Louvre “Hermaphrodite,” for he refers to it in a fragment for Epipsychidion as:
That sweet marble monster of both sexes,
That looks so sweet and gentle, that it vexes
The very soul that the soul is gone
Which lifted from her limbs the veil of stone.
His delight in bisexual forms is also evident in his description of the angelic being, called “Hermaphroditus,” which was created by the Witch of Atlas.
A sexless thing it was, and in its growth
It seemed to have developed no defect
Of either sex, yet all the grace of both,
In gentleness and strength its limbs were decked,
The bosom swelled lightly with its full youth,
The countenance was such as might select
Some artist, that his skill should never die,
Imaging forth such perfect purity.