The sphere of Shelley’s sorrow at the time he wrote these lines to Mrs. Williams was Mary Godwin. In the time of Harriet Westbrook, Mary had been the “star.”
The romantic lover often feigns in explanation of his nostalgia that in some previous existence he had been enamored of a nymph—an Egeria—or a woman transcending the ordinary mould—“some Lilith or Helen or Antigone.”[150] Shelley inquires eagerly in one of his letters about the new poem by Horace Smith, “The Nympholept.” In the somewhat unclassical sense that the term came to have in the romantic movement, Shelley is himself the perfect example of the nympholept. In this respect as in others, however, he merely continues Rousseau. “If it had not been for some memories of my youth and Madame d’Houdetot,” says Jean-Jacques, “the loves that I have felt and described would have been only with sylphids.”[151]
Chateaubriand speaks with aristocratic disdain of Rousseau’s Venetian amours, but on the “ideal” side he is not only his follower but perhaps the supreme French example of nympholepsy. He describes his lady of dreams sometimes like Rousseau as the “sylphid,” sometimes as his “phantom of love.” He had been haunted by this phantom almost from his childhood. “Even then I glimpsed that to love and be loved in a way that was unknown to me was destined to be my supreme felicity. … As a result of the ardor of my imagination, my timidity and solitude, I did not turn to the outer world, but was thrown back upon myself. In the absence of a real object, I evoked by the power of my vague desires a phantom that was never to leave me.” To those who remember the closely parallel passages in Rousseau, Chateaubriand will seem to exaggerate the privilege of the original genius to look on himself as unique when he adds: “I do not know whether the history of the human heart offers another example of this nature.”[152] The pursuit of this phantom of love gives the secret key to Chateaubriand’s life. He takes refuge in the American wilderness in order that he may have in this primitive Arcadia a more spacious setting for his dream.[153]
If one wishes to see how very similar these nympholeptic experiences are not only from individual to individual, but from country to country, one has only to compare the passages I have just been quoting from Chateaubriand with Shelley’s “Epipsychidion.” Shelley writes of his own youth:
There was a Being whom my spirit oft
Met on its visioned wanderings, far aloft,
In the clear golden prime of my youth’s dawn,
Upon the fairy isles of sunny lawn,
Amid the enchanted mountains, and the caves
Of divine sleep, and on the air-like waves