Whilst showing how cordially he concurred in Martin Bucer’s conclusions, John Milton’s four works on divorce—the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, the Tetrachordon, the Colasterion, and the new edition of Bucer’s Judgment touching Divorce—show also how far he went beyond the sixteenth-century divine, in declaring every man’s right to secede from an uncongenial partner, and to associate himself with an acceptable helpmate. No libertine, for the gratification of vile desire, ever demanded greater license of re-marriage than Milton, in the name of religion, demanded for Christian men, for their spiritual advantage.
The old canon law, which insisted on the indissolubility of true marriages, and, even in cases of adultery, afforded no larger divorce than the separation from board and bed, having been revived at the close of Elizabeth’s reign, our ancestors lived for several generations under a matrimonial law of unprecedented rigour and narrowness, that in its results demonstrated the sagacity and prudence of Edward the Sixth’s Commissioners. Had the Commissioners’ proposals become law, England would have escaped much of the profligacy that, after rendering her seventeenth century proverbial for domestic libertinism, was less remarkable in the eighteenth century, only because the usage of successive ages had rendered society comparatively indifferent to it. Whilst no student of our social history can question that throughout those centuries the English home suffered severely from the excessive stringency of the matrimonial law, every student of literature is cognizant of the stream of written protests against the harshness and unyielding rigour of that law, from Elizabeth to Victoria. That Milton shocked the lighter people of his time by his assaults on the limitations of liberty of divorce is not to be conceived. That he did not by his writings against those restrictions offend the more precise and God-fearing of his contemporaries, appears from the regard in which they held him as a religious poet, after his descent to darkness and evil days. So far as concerns freedom of divorce, the Free Contract party of William Godwin’s epoch required nothing that Milton would not have granted, and urged little that Bucer would have hesitated to approve.
In 1813 (the year in which the anti-matrimonial note of Queen Mab was written), Shelley regarded marriage with the eyes and by the lights of eighteenth-century writers, who decried the institution as the source of human misery and depravation. The evils, that caused these writers to distinguish themselves in the long war against wedlock, were no imaginary grievances. On the contrary, they were evils which the Anglican reformers foresaw would result from a too stringent marriage-law, and for which they wished to provide by their proposals for divorce. They were evils crying aloud for remedy throughout the country. Almost every parish of the land had a miserably mated couple, whose union should have been terminated by the law. For the mischief there was no remedy but the old cumbrous and costly proceedings for obtaining the greater divorce,—i.e. the suit in the first instance in the Ecclesiastical Court for the minor divorce from board and bed, and the subsequent suit for the parliamentary severance of the bond of marriage:—a process that, making divorce the luxury of the rich, denied it altogether to the poor. In the first thirty-seven years of the present century, only seventy suitors (less than two a-year) obtained special parliamentary enactments for their liberation from wretched wedlock. In the last thirty-seven years of the previous century, such divorces were much less frequent. The rich alone could afford to pay for the parliamentary relief. For the poor, and for the people raised only a few degrees above poverty, there was no divorce. Under these circumstances, whilst almost every rural village had a Stephen Blackpool, there necessarily arose vehement discontent not only with the defective marriage-law, but with marriage itself. Nothing was said against the obstacles to entering marriage; but everywhere an outcry was heard against the impossibility of getting out of marriage. Amongst the populace, social sentiment permitted a man in many cases to be the physician of his own trouble, and after deserting his lawful wife, to live with a woman who was not his wife. The general grievance being the difficulty of escape from uncongenial wedlock, the Radical writers dealt with this grievance, and usually forbore to criticise the impediments to marriage, of which no large number of people complained.
Taking his views from these writers, it was natural for the youthful Shelley to think and write chiefly of the evils arising from the law, which forbade a man to leave his wife and straightway attach himself to another woman. In constructing the note to Queen Mab, it was enough for him to put together, with no common smartness and one or two original touches, the remarks of previous writers on the troubles resulting from the permanence of matrimonial obligations. Contemning marriage from his boyhood, after the fashion of his teachers, he was eloquent about the difficulty of escaping from it. Apart from a statement of the grand principle that ‘love was free,’ and that every person should be at liberty to marry whomsoever he pleased, he does not seem to have troubled himself about the divers impediments to the first entrance into the unendurable bondage, before he went to Geneva. It was otherwise on his return from the residence in Switzerland with Byron.
The startling discovery, that they were believed to be living in incestuous intimacy with the same two women, caused each of the poets to ponder the nature of the crime with which rumour charged them. Stirring and fascinating Byron’s imagination, the scandal bore fruit in Manfred and Cain. Stimulating and holding Shelley’s fancy, it resulted in Laon and Cythna. It is interesting to observe how differently the two poets dealt with the same repulsive subject. For the timid sceptic and half-hearted innovator, who to the last was (as Shelley put the case to his wife at Pisa) ‘little better than a Christian,’ it was enough to point to the crime in Manfred, as one of the hideous possibilities of vicious desire,—as a monstrous and appalling extravagance of wickedness, too hideous to be spoken of precisely; as an offence so loathsome and revolting, that poetry could refer to it only by vague hints and obscure suggestions. In Cain he could refer with cynical mockery to times when, if Genesis were true, brothers necessarily mated with their sisters, for the accomplishment of the Creator’s purpose;—mockery, that was not so much a palliation of the iniquity, as an assault on the credibility of the Book which seemed to sanction the wickedness.
Shelley handled the subject in a very different way. It was natural for the thorough and unwavering disbeliever, who had formerly denied and still questioned the existence of the Deity, and no less natural for the fervid political theorist, who regarded all human governments and their subordinate institutions as the mere contrivances of tyranny for the subjugation and debasement of the peoples, to come to the conclusion that the impediments to matrimony had no other foundation, and were in no degree more entitled to the respect of reasonable men, than the impediments to escape from wedlock. Absolutely ignorant of the social conditions from which the hindrances to marriage had arisen, and no less ignorant of the physical and social reasons for regarding most of them as conducive to domestic purity, and some of them as needful for preserving the human species from mental and bodily disease and deterioration, Shelley was only carrying certain of his principles to certain of their extreme logical conclusions, when he closed his consideration of the impediments to marriage, by regarding them as so many capricious and pernicious interferences with natural forces, which, if they were left to take their own course, without let or hindrance from presumptuous, and arrogant, and meddlesome mortals, would in due course bring the whole human race under the dominion of universal love;—a dominion under which all mankind for countless ages would have enjoyed unqualified felicity, had it not been for the disastrous activity of tyrants and priests.
It was not in Shelley to distinguish between the various impediments, and discover grounds for deciding that some of them should be retained, whilst others might be abolished. To Shelley, a man’s right to marry his deceased wife’s sister was not more obvious than a man’s right to marry his own sister. Regarded by the new light, arising from the larger consideration of the matrimonial law, to which he had been incited by the Genevese scandal, the artificial hindrances to egress from matrimony were not more demoralizing than the artificial hindrances to ingress into matrimony. For human happiness marriage must be relieved of the impediments on its one side, no less than of the hindrances on its other side. Love must be restored to Freedom:—to freedom so perfect that a young man would be free to marry his own sister, without the intervention of priest or the control of lawyer; and after wearying of her be free to marry her younger sister under circumstances in no way affecting his freedom in the future. This discovery was the completion of Shelley’s social philosophy in respect to the intercourse of the sexes;—the philosophy that is, in the opinion of some of his admirers, a part of his title to be regarded as a man, who, under auspicious circumstances, ‘might have been the Saviour of the World!’
Having made this important discovery after his return from Geneva, Shelley determined to communicate it to the world in a poem, which should teach its readers that incest was nothing but an imaginary sin; that ceasing to have the show of sin, on being rightly regarded, it was seen to be compatible with the highest virtue; that it was one of the great ‘multitude of artificial vices,’ to whose existence the fewness of ‘real virtues’ was referable; that instead of being loathsome, nauseous, hideous, unutterably repulsive and sinful, the conjugal union of a brother and sister under the Free Contract was permissible in the eyes of philosophic moralists, and compatible with moral purity and the finest delicacy in the brother and sister; that besides being altogether permissible, and in no degree reprehensible, this conjugal union was a virtuous relation, in which brothers and sisters would often stand towards one another in a rightly-constituted society. To put this social doctrine before the world, in the form most likely to commend it to the feelings of youthful readers, and induce them to further every movement for a state of things, in which brothers and sisters could so live together without offending their neighbours, Shelley wrote Laon and Cythna: or, The Revolution of the Golden City: a Vision of the Nineteenth Century. In the Stanza of Spenser.
Brother and sister of the same parents, Laon and Cythna, the hero and heroine of the poem, are beings endowed with all the virtues conceivable in perfect human nature, and are still enjoying the scenes of their childhood in Argolis, when they pass from the state of mutual affection, that is desirable in a brother of some sixteen or eighteen summers and a sister (ætat. 12), to a state of mutual love that is desirable only between young people who can in the ordinary course of things marry one another. What follows from this state of things is indicated with consummate delicacy by the poet, too wary and artful to shock his readers in the second canto by clear disclosures, that might determine them to refrain from perusing any later canto of a long poem. Laon and Cythna are suddenly torn asunder by the agents of the tyrant, who figures in the poem as a type of European monarchs in the nineteenth century, and soon after their severance Cythna gives birth to the lovely child who owes her life to Laon. In a later passage of the narrative, after he has been released from the cage on the column’s top, and she, after divers painful experiences, has been proclaimed the prophetess and supreme directress of the revolutionists of the Golden City, Laon and Cythna come together under circumstances, which prevent them from recognizing one another in the first hour of their reunion. Laon is still uncertain whether she is really his sister, or only bears a strong resemblance to her, when he hears Cythna harangue the Golden City revolutionists in these words:—
‘My brethren, we are free! the plains and mountains,
The grey sea shore, the forests and the fountains,
Are haunts of happiest dwellers;—man and woman,
Their common bondage burst, may freely borrow
From lawless love a solace for their sorrow;
For oft we still must weep, since we are human.
A stormy night’s serenest morrow,
Whose showers are pity’s gentle tears,
Whose clouds are smiles of those that die
Like infants without hopes or fears,
And whose beams are joys that lie
In blended hearts, now holds dominion;
The dawn of mind, which upwards on a pinion
Borne, swift as sun-rise, far illumines space,
And clasps this barren world in its own bright embrace!’