The Real Shelley. New Views of the Poet's Life. Vol. 2 (of 2)

by John Cordy Jeaffreson

CHAPTER XIII.

LAON AND CYTHNA.

Origin of the Free-Contract Party—Divorce in Catholic England—Nullification of Marriage—Consequences of the Reformation—Edward the Sixth’s Commissioners for the Amendment of Ecclesiastical Laws—Martin Bucer’s Judgment touching Divorce—John Milton on Freedom of Divorce—Denunciations of Marriage by the Godwinian Radicals—Poetical Fruits of the Genevese Scandal—Byron’s Timidity—Shelley’s Boldness—His most extravagant Conclusions touching Liberty of Affection—Appalling Doctrine of Laon and Cythna—Shelley’s Purpose in publishing the Poem—Alarm of the Olliers—Shelley’s Instructions to the frightened Publishers—Suppression of the monstrous Poem—Friends in Council—Laon and Cythna manipulated into the Revolt of Islam—The Quarterly Review on the original Poem—Consequences to Shelley’s Reputation—Irony of Fate.

Enough has been said of the egotisms of Laon and Cythna; but something must be said of the reasons, why this extraordinary fruit of Shelley’s genius should be withheld from those young people to whom it is now-a-days offered, in fine type and on rich paper, as one of the choicest poems of English literature. It must be stated frankly and fearlessly why, till human nature has changed greatly and till existing human institutions and sentiments have become mere matters of archæology, this poem, with all its exquisite beauties of diction, must appear to all righteous and sober-minded persons a perplexity and a scandal, that may be fruitful of morbid thought and vicious action in young persons of light fancy and loose principles.

Successive writers on Shelleyan questions have regarded the Free Contract movement, in which the poet took so characteristic a part, as one of the consequences of the great revolution which, towards the close of the last century, disposed a considerable proportion of our own people, as well as of the peoples more deeply and violently influenced by novel ideas, to refer all social evils to existing institutions, and, in their impatience of prevailing wrongs and wretchedness, to cry aloud for the quick and total suppression of the social arrangements to which they attributed so much mischief and misery. But the French Revolution did no more, in this respect, than quicken a discontent and stimulate a movement that had affected English life for generations and centuries. To discover the origin of the Free Contract party in this country the student of social phenomena must go back to the sixteenth century.

In pre-Reformation times, living under the control of a Church that, knowing nothing of the larger divorce (a vinculo matrimonii == from bond of matrimony), and granting only in cases of extreme conjugal infidelity the minor divorce (a mensâ et thoro == from board and bed), subsequently designated ‘judicial separation,’ which afforded no liberty of marrying other spouses to the separated parties, our forefathers in this island enjoyed practically a freedom of divorce, that under ordinary circumstances enabled unhappily mated spouses to make lawful marriage with other persons.

Knowing nothing of the complete divorce, the Church knew a great deal of nullification of matrimony, and in her Courts throughout the country was daily liberating uncongenial spouses, by decreeing that they had never been man and wife. By discovering that they were first, second, or third cousins,—by demonstrating, with the aid of two conveniently pliant witnesses, that, at the time of their wedding, one of them was pre-contracted to a third person,—by showing that on their marriage-day they stood within the prohibited degrees of consanguinity, affinity or spiritual affinity,—or by a confession that either of them had, before their union, held wicked intercourse with a near relation of the other,—a husband and wife could procure a judgment which declared they had never been married; that they were still bachelor and single woman, and free to contract matrimony in accordance with the rules of Holy Church. To a couple bent on perfect liberation from a hateful union, it was always easy to discover grounds for the nullification of their wedlock, and seldom difficult to render those grounds apparent to an ecclesiastical judge. Two spouses, bent on celebrating their union, often experienced great difficulty in ascertaining that no impediments precluded them from valid intermarriage; but the impediment which made their wedlock a nullity, were always readily discoverable by the husband and wife who had come to hate one another. So long as this state of things lasted, every canonical impediment to matrimony operated like a turnstile gate, that, whilst acting as a barrier to persons entering a building, affords a means of egress to those who wish to leave it.

This state of things, however, came to an end with the Reformation. By sweeping away all the canonical restrictions on matrimony, not ordered by Scripture, the statute, 32 Henry VIII., c. 38, increased greatly the freedom of marriage; but at the same time destroyed the liberty of divorce enjoyed by our ancestors throughout successive centuries. Rendering matrimony easier of entrance, it closed all the many gates, which had hitherto afforded spouses the means of escape from conjugal wretchedness. The chiefs of the Protestant party in Edward the Sixth’s time had, however, no wish to perpetuate the condition of affairs, directly consequent on Henry the Eighth’s mere abrogation of the non-scriptural impediments to marriage. Condemning strongly the excessive liberty of separation, which the ecclesiastical tribunals had for generations afforded to society, they were no less unanimous in condemning the doctrine of the absolute indissolubility of wedlock. If it was wrong on the one hand to allow husbands and wives the liberty of separating on frivolous pretexts, and to provide the fortress of marriage with numerous gates of egress, whose double locks obeyed the pass-keys of perjury and corruption; it was on the other hand no less hurtful to society and impious to God, to constrain a pair of human creatures, in the name of religion, to persevere in an association, that could not accomplish the highest purposes of matrimony, and debarred the ill-assorted couple from the serene and wholesome pleasures of Christian life. These were the views of the Anglican leaders; views that found precise and memorable expression in the famous code of ordinances (the Reformatio Legum Ecclesiasticarum) prepared for the reformation of our ecclesiastical laws by Edward the Sixth’s thirty-two commissioners for that purpose, who, doing away with the minor divorce (a mensâ et thoro), decided that the divorce a vinculo matrimonii should be the only kind of matrimonial severance known to English law, and that it should be granted, (1) in cases of extreme conjugal faithlessness; (2) in cases where a husband, not guilty of deserting his wife, had been for several years absent from her, under circumstances which justified her in concluding that he was dead; (3) and in cases of such violent hatred as rendered it in the highest degree improbable, that the husband and wife would survive their animosities and again love one another; it being expressly directed that this last provision should not be construed as affecting spouses whose quarrels, though frequent and distressing, were neither incessant nor in the highest degree vehement. Had Edward the Sixth lived only a little longer these ordinances would have become the law of the land;—law which, though suppressed on the accession of Mary Tudor, would have been revived on the rise of Elizabeth, and handed down to the present time.

Of course, the Anglican reformers conceived themselves to be justified in disregarding the limitation, which our version of the Scriptures assigns to liberty of divorce. Whilst some of them were of opinion that this limitation was applicable only to the Jews, others held that, if a wrong rendering of a particular word were replaced by its true English equivalent, Scripture would be found to sanction the dissolution of marriages, whose infelicity was due to nothing more than some serious mental or moral disability. Of course, also, the Commissioners’ recommendations were a compromise between the requirements of bold reformers who wished for a much larger, and of timid reformers, who would have preferred a smaller, measure of freedom of divorce. Had Martin Bucer been on the Commission, as he certainly would have been but for his recent death, it cannot be questioned that the Commissioners would have ordained a far greater liberty of dissolving unhappy marriages. It was Bucer’s opinion (vide his Judgment touching Divorce, addressed to Edward the Sixth) that every marriage should be dissolved in which the husband and wife did not ‘love one another to the height of dearness,’ or the husband could not rightly govern and cherish the wife, or the wife was flagrantly disobedient and unprofitable to her lord, or either party ‘defrauded the other of conjugal benevolence,’—views which commended themselves so cordially to John Milton, that he produced a new edition of Bucer’s tract, in the middle of the seventeenth century.