I say that this devotion to Dr. Lind—the devotion of a schoolboy to one many years his senior—throws great light on the inner nature of the youth and exposes for us how the latter’s affections might well, at that time, have had an ideal cast and character, and not have been entirely swayed by the ordinary pandemic love of the male for the female.
Among the fragments of Shelley’s poems preserved to us, there is one short piece of only a few lines from Epipsychidion, written apparently in allusion to (or suggested by) a well-known statue in the Louvre, the Hermaphrodite.
And others swear you’re a Hermaphrodite,
Like that sweet marble monster of both sexes,
Which looks so sweet and gentle that it vexes
The very soul that[4] the soul is gone,
Which lifted from her limbs the veil of stone.
I quote this, not because the allusion to an hermaphrodite positively proves anything, but because it certainly illustrates the poet’s wide-ranging interest in whatever might possibly fall within the domain of human experience. And, indeed, there are quite a few other references among the Poems to this subject of Hermaphrodites. A careful reading, for instance, of The Witch of Atlas shows that the creation of a strange Being of double sex is the central theme of that weirdly beautiful poem. The supposed mother of this Being was “a lovely lady garmented in light” and around her birth (a thing, indeed, most interesting to us) floats the age-long prophecy of the ultimate redemption of mankind.[5]
Her cave was stored with scrolls of strange device
Which taught the expiations at whose price
Men from the gods might win that happy age,
Too lightly lost, redeeming native vice;
And which might quench the earth-consuming rage
Of gold and blood—till men should live and move
Harmonious as the sacred stars above.
Here one can hardly do otherwise than pause a moment over the vision indicated—the epitome and exposure of the mortal sins and consequent disasters which afflict our modern world—“the earth-consuming rage of Gold and Blood.” When we contemplate the frantic scramble of to-day (insanely and murderously furious as it is) in pursuit of Gold, and the rivers, the oceans of Blood poured out in the horrible process, when we think of the regiments and regiments of soldiers and mercenaries mangled and torn (and each one having wife or daughter or friend or lover to give his or her life in exchange), when we realise what all this horrible scramble means, including the endless slaughter of the innocent and beautiful animals, and the fear, the terror, the agony in which the latter exist—we can but pay homage to the clear-eyed youth who, with lightning swiftness, leapt to the understanding of the whole sordid situation, and saw that only a new type of human being combining the male and the female, could ultimately save the world—a being having the feminine insight and imagination to perceive the evil, and the manly strength and courage to oppose and finally annihilate it.
And so (returning to The Witch of Atlas) we find that the double-natured one, the Hermaphrodite, was bidden extend his storm-outspeeding wings,[6] till the vision of the coming redemption should at last descend upon the earth, while at the same time with regard to the lady witch herself it is said:
With motion like the spirit of that wind
Whose soft step deepens slumber, her light feet
Past through the peopled haunts of human kind,
Scattering sweet visions from her presence sweet
Through fane and palace-court, and labyrinth mined
With many a dark and subterranean street ...
Finally, even the soldiers have visions, they dream that they are beating their swords into plough-shares!
Thus it will be perceived that this poem, The Witch of Atlas, if closely looked into, discloses itself as a description, and, indeed, as a prophecy, of the coming of a being who was to combine the characteristics of the two sexes, and whose arrival on the Earth, and acknowledged sway there, was to be the signal of the coming of a new age. Perhaps, indeed, Shelley saw (in the radiance of the inner light) that in the process of the world-evolution such a being would inevitably arise. But the poem, as might be expected, is somewhat carefully wrapt up in its expression, and disguised in its general content by digressions, so that the casual and hasty reader (and likely enough this was its author’s desire and contrivance) is partly lost and does not always attain to catch the real purport and intention of the whole.