The Note, headed ‘Even love is sold,’ contains the following passages of especial interest:—
‘Not even the intercourse of the sexes is exempt from the despotism of positive institution. Law pretends even to govern the indisciplinable wanderings of passion, to put fetters on the clearest deductions of reason, and, by appeals to the will, to subdue the involuntary affections of our nature. Love is inevitably consequent upon the perception of loveliness....
‘How long then ought the sexual connection to last? What law ought to specify the extent of the grievances which should limit its duration? A husband and wife ought to continue so long united as they love each other: any law which should bind them to cohabitation for one moment after the decay of their affection, would be a most intolerable tyranny, and the most unworthy of toleration. How odious an usurpation of the right of private judgment should that law be considered, which should make the ties of friendship indissoluble, in spite of the caprices, the inconstancy, the fallibility, and capacity for improvement of the human mind. And by so much would the fetters of love be heavier and more unendurable than those of friendship, as love is more vehement and capricious, more dependent on those delicate peculiarities of imagination, and less capable of reduction to the ostensible merits of the object....
‘But if happiness be the object of morality, of all human unions and disunions; if the worthiness of every action is to be estimated by the quantity of pleasurable sensation it is calculated to produce, then the connection of the sexes is so long sacred as it contributes to the comfort of the parties, and is naturally dissolved when its evils are greater than its benefits. There is nothing immoral in this separation. Constancy has nothing virtuous in itself, independently of the pleasure it confers, and partakes of the temporizing spirit of vice in proportion as it endures tamely moral defects of magnitude in the object of its indiscreet choice. Love is free: to promise for ever to love the same woman, is not less absurd than to promise to believe the same creed: such a vow, in both cases, excludes us from all inquiry. The language of the votarist is this: The woman I now love may be infinitely inferior to many others; the creed I now profess may be a mass of errors and absurdities, but I exclude myself from all future information as to the amiability of the one and the truth of the other, resolving blindly, and in spite of conviction, to adhere to them. Is this the language of delicacy and reason? Is the love of such a frigid heart of more worth than its belief?...
‘Prostitution is the legitimate offspring of marriage and its accompanying errors.... Chastity is a monkish and evangelical superstition, a greater foe to natural temperance even than unintellectual sensuality; it strikes at the root of all domestic happiness, and consigns more than half of the human race to misery, that some few may monopolize according to law. A system could not well have been devised more studiously hostile to human happiness than marriage.
‘I conceive that, from the abolition of marriage, the fit and natural arrangement of sexual connection would result. I by no means assert that the intercourse would be promiscuous: on the contrary; it appears, from the relation of parent to child, that this union is generally of long duration, and marked above all others with generosity and self-devotion. But this is a subject which it is perhaps premature to discuss. That which will result from the abolition of marriage, will be natural and right; because choice and change will be exempted from restraint.’
After perusing this Note of Queen Mab, readers who would have a perfect view of Shelley’s opinions (in 1812-16) respecting the relations of the sexes, should look at the letter he wrote from Lynton, on 17th August, 1812, to Sir James Lawrence (alias the Chevalier de Lawrence), the eccentric littérateur who is chiefly memorable at the present date for his Empire of the Nairs.
From this letter and Note of Queen Mab, it appears that when, by his own admission, he was living happily with the beautiful girl, whom he had illuminated out of the Christian faith and instructed to regard the rite and obligations of marriage with levity, the chivalric Shelley held these views touching the intercourse of the sexes:—
(1) The wanderings of amatory passion are indisciplinable, and every attempt to stay those wanderings of desire is a futile effort ‘to subdue the involuntary affections of human nature.’
(2) ‘Love’ being ‘inevitably consequent upon the perception of loveliness,’ it is natural and necessary for a sensitive and rightly constituted man to regard with love every woman in whom he perceives a high degree of loveliness.