Fearful that the words ‘lawless love’ may frighten simple readers, Mr. Buxton Forman (who thinks Shelley ‘might have been the Saviour of the World’), in his most useful edition of Shelley’s works, appends to the alarming words this note:—‘The words lawless love seem to be used, not in a conventional sense, but merely to signify unshackled love.’ True, but ‘unshackled’ from what? Cythna meant that tyrant custom, or tyrant anybody else, having been overthrown and rendered powerless for the moment, her brethren and sisters were free to marry, and changing about to remarry, in perfect liberty of affection—in love liberated from the shackles of human law—in matrimony, no less easily entered than easily quitted—in marriage, alike free from legal impediments to ingress, and from legal impediments to egress—love, in fact, so perfectly free from the supervision and control of human law, that it might be rightly styled ‘lawless love.’
Later in the poem’s story, when Cythna has rescued Laon from the tyrant’s soldiers, and carried him off, on the ‘black Tartarian horse of giant frame,’ to a picturesque ruin, the brother and sister, after recognizing one another as whilom playmates in Argolis, pass through emotions, that are set forth in the following stanzas:—
‘The autumnal winds, as if spell-bound, had made
A natural couch of leaves in that recess,
Which seasons none disturb, but in the shade
Of flowering parasites, did Spring love to dress
With their sweet blooms the wintry loneliness
Of those dead leaves, shedding their stars, whene’er
The wandering wind her nurslings might caress;
Whose intertwining fingers ever there,
Made music wild and soft that filled the listening air.
We know not where we go, or what sweet dream
May pilot us thro’ caverns strange and fair
Of far and pathless passion, while the stream
Of life, our bark doth on its whirlpools bear,
Spreading swift wings as sails to the dim air;
Nor should we seek to know, so the devotion
Of love and gentle thoughts be heard still there
Louder and louder from the utmost Ocean
Of universal life, attuning its commotion.
To the pure all things are pure! Oblivion wrapt
Our spirits, and the fearful overthrow
Of public hope was from our being snapt,
Tho’ linkèd years had bound it there; for now
A power, a thirst, a knowledge, which below
All thoughts, like light beyond the atmosphere,
Clothing its clouds with grace, doth ever flow,
Came on us, as we sate in silence there,
Beneath the golden stars of the clear azure air.
In silence which doth follow talk that causes
The baffled heart to speak with sighs and tears,
When wildering passion, swalloweth up the pauses
Of inexpressive speech:—the youthful years
Which we together past, their hopes and fears,
The common blood which ran within our frames,
That likeness of the features which endears
The thoughts expressed by them, our very names,
And all the wingèd hours which speechless memory claims
Had found a voice; ...
********
The meteor shewed the leaves on which we sate,
And Cythna’s glowing arms, and the thick ties
Of her soft hair which bent with gathered weight
My neck near hers, her dark and deepening eyes,
Which, as twin phantoms of one star that lies
O’er a dim well, move, though the star reposes,
Swam in our mute and liquid ecstasies,
Her marble brow, and eager lips, like roses,
With their own fragrance pale, which Spring but half uncloses.
The meteor to its far morass returned:
The beating of our veins one interval
Made still; and then I felt the blood that burned
Within her frame, mingle with mine, and fall
Around my heart like fire; and over all
A mist was spread, the sickness of a deep
And speechless swoon of joy, as might befall
Two disunited spirits when they leap
In union from this earth’s obscure and fading sleep.
Was it one moment that confounded thus
All thought, all sense, all feeling, into one
Unutterable power, which shielded us
Even from our own cold looks, when we had gone
Into a wide and wild oblivion
Of tumult and of tenderness? or now
Had ages, such as make the moon and sun,
The seasons, and mankind their changes know,
Left fear and time unfelt by us alone below?
I know not. What are kisses whose fire clasps
The failing heart in languishment, or limb
Twined within limb? or the quick dying gasps
Of the life meeting, when the faint eyes swim
Thro’ tears of a wide mist boundless and dim,
In one caress? What is the strong controul
Which leads the heart that dizzy steep to climb,
Where far over the world those vapours roll
Which blend two restless frames in one reposing soul?
It is the shadow which doth float unseen,
But not unfelt, o’er blind mortality,
Whose divine darkness fled not, from that green
And lone recess, where lapt in peace did lie
Our linkèd frames; till, from the changing sky,
That night and still another day had fled;
And then I saw and felt. The moon was high,
The clouds, as of coming storm, were spread
Under its orb,—loud winds were gathering overhead.
Cythna’s sweet lips seemed lurid in the moon,
Her fairest limbs with the night wind were chill,
And her dark tresses were all loosely strewn
O’er her pale bosom:—all within was still,
And the sweet peace of joy did almost fill
The depth of her unfathomable look:—
And we sate calmly, though that rocky hill,
The waves contending in its caverns strook,
For they foreknew the storm, and the grey ruin shook.
There we unheeding sate, in the communion
Of interchangèd vows, which, with a rite
Of faith most sweet and sacred, stamped our union.—
Few were the living hearts which could unite
Like ours, or celebrate a bridal night
With such close sympathies, for to each other
Had high and solemn hopes, the gentle might
Of earliest love, and all the thoughts which smother
Cold Evil’s power, now linked a sister and a brother.’
At the poem’s close, in reward for all their good deeds in a naughty world, and all their pains of self-sacrifice for the promotion of human happiness, this brother and sister (after death), together with the charming child, who is the issue of their incestuous embraces, are permitted to enter the boat of hollow pearl, in which they are carried to the islands of the blest, to repose in everlasting felicity near ‘The Temple of the Spirit.’
Lest it should be said that I misrepresent the story in a particular, which, though important, affects in no way the poem’s principal doctrine, let it be observed that to some readers this charming child appears to have been the tyrant’s daughter, instead of Laon’s offspring. Sir John Taylor Coleridge’s memorable article in the Quarterly Review shows that, whilst recognizing with repugnance, the incest of Laon’s intercourse with his sister, he regarded the child as the issue of the despot’s passion. But on this point I conceive the reviewer to have erred through the mystifications and ambiguities of the narrative. To me it is clear that Shelley meant to intimate to careful readers of the monstrous story, that Cythna’s child was Laon’s daughter. The question, however, does not touch the poem’s main purpose, as offspring would be the natural sequence of the endearments interchanged by the brother and sister in the picturesque ruin.
The two actors of the poem, in whom it is sought to interest the reader most strongly, and for whose stainless purity and unqualified goodness the author solicits our admiration, are a brother and sister, whose embraces result in the birth of a little girl, no less lovely in person and mind than her parents. The main purpose of the poem, which has numerous subordinate and minor objects, is to plant the incestuous pair in the reader’s affection, and lure him into regarding so exemplary an instance of conjugal affection with sympathy and approval. By some of the less daring of the Shelleyan zealots it has indeed been urged that Laon and Cythna should be regarded as a mere poetic ‘vision’ (as it is described on the title-page), and the pure outgrowth of exuberant fancy, and not as a serious contribution to social philosophy, intended to influence the judgment and conduct of its readers. To this plea a sufficient answer is found in the pains taken by Shelley to provide the work with a carefully worded prose preface, in which he intimated, that the poem was addressed to persons thirsting ‘for a happier condition of moral and political society;’ that the hurtful institutions and principles assailed in the poem were the hurtful institutions and principles then dominant in European society, and especially of English society; that the doctrines of the poem were offered for the solution of the various religious problems, political problems, and economical problems, then holding the attention and troubling the minds of earnest philanthropists; that, notwithstanding its artistic form and beauty, the poem was offered as a serious contribution to political and social philosophy, and had been written with a view to practical results in human conduct.
By others of the less courageous of the Shelleyan zealots, it is urged that, instead of definitely recommending conjugal love between a brother and a sister as a relation to be countenanced, or even tolerated by England in the nineteenth century, Laon and Cythna merely reminds readers that, instead of violating any principle of natural morals, the connubial intercourse of a brother and sister would be unobjectionable, and might even be positively virtuous, in a country whose laws either encourage or only permit such an association. This apology for the prime doctrine of Laon and Cythna may as well be considered in connexion with what the poet says on the subject in the last sentence of the preface, which runs thus:—
‘In the personal conduct of my Hero and Heroine, there is one circumstance which was intended to startle the reader from the trance of ordinary life. It was my object to break through the crust of those outworn opinions on which established institutions depend. I have appealed therefore to the most universal of all feelings, and have endeavored to strengthen the moral sense, by forbidding it to waste its energies in seeking to avoid actions which are only crimes of convention. It is because there is so great a multitude of artificial vices, that there are so few real virtues. Those feelings alone which are benevolent or malevolent, are essentially good or bad. The circumstance of which I speak, was introduced, however, merely to accustom men to that charity and toleration which the exhibition of a practice widely differing from their own, has a tendency to promote. Nothing indeed can be more mischievous, than many actions innocent in themselves, which might bring down upon individuals the bigotted contempt and rage of the multitude.’
To this last sentence of the preface to Laon and Cythna, Shelley (obviously by an after-thought, and in consequence of the pressure put upon him by some friend or friends) appended this foot-note—‘The sentiments connected with and characteristic of this circumstance have no personal reference to the writer’!!!
The last paragraph of the preface to Laon and Cythna is preceded by these words, ‘Love is celebrated everywhere as the sole law which should govern the moral world.’ Having regard to the abrupt transition from the present to the past tense, the significant difference (in style) of the last paragraph from the preceding paragraph, and the known conflict that occurred between the author and publisher before the poem had passed the press, few critical readers will decline to think with me that the last paragraph, instead of being part of the preface when it left Shelley’s pen, was an after-thought, written to meet Ollier’s objections to the incestuous relation of Laon and Cythna. Nor will it, I think, be questioned, that the astounding note was an after-thought to the after-thought, and was put at the foot of the last paragraph, because Ollier, or Hunt, or Peacock, pointed out to the author that the poem, commending the incest of brother and sister, would expose him to the most hideous of imputations.