Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer Part 5

he describes as riding "on a white horse,"[E] in alliance with theology and statecraft, and whose admirers were "lawyers and priests."

[Footnote E: This doubtless alludes to the House of Hanover, the princ.i.p.al charge on whose armorial bearings is a white horse.]

After a series of powerful delineations, he describes slavery and freedom, justice, wisdom, peace and love, in exquisite terms. Then he turns to their lamps--science, poetry, and thought, which make secure "the lot of the dwellers in the cot."

He advises--That, on some spot of English ground, should be convened a great a.s.sembly of the fearless and the free, who shall come from the bounds of the English coast, and from every hut, village, and town, where, for other's misery and their own, they live, suffer, and moan.

Also,

"From the workhouse and the prison, Where, pale as corpses newly risen, Women, children, young and old, Groan for pain, and weep for cold;

"From the haunts of daily life, Where is waged the daily strife With common wants and common cares, Which sow the human heart with tares."

When face to face with their oppressors, no force should be used, but instead

"strong and simple words, Keen to wound as sharpened swords, And wide as targes let them be, With their shade to cover ye."

The description of the Peterloo ma.s.sacre which follows, is one of the finest pieces of composition in the language, and the poem concludes by calling the "Men of England, Heirs of Glory, Heroes of Unwritten Story," to

"Rise like lions after slumber In unvanquishable NUMBER!

Shake your chains to earth, like dew Which in sleep had fall'n on you; 'YE ARE MANY--THEY ARE FEW.'"

In a pamphlet, written ostensibly on the death of the Princess Charlotte, he calls attention to the fact that three men had been executed in the interests of the "big-hearted and generous capitalists," of whom we now-a-days hear so much from their interested admirers, but whose wings are now fortunately clipped.

Sh.e.l.ley considered that there was no real wealth but man's labor, and that speculators pandering to selfishness, the twin-sister of debased theology, took a pride in the production of useless articles of luxury and ostentation. Imbued with this spirit, a man of wealth imagines himself a patriot when employing laborers on the erection of a mansion, or a woman of fashion indulging in luxurious dress, fancies she is aiding the laboring poor. He observes of such instances as these:

"Who does not see that this is a remedy which aggravates, whilst it palliates the countless diseases of society? The poor are set to labor--for what? Not the food for which they famish; not the blankets for want of which their babes are frozen by the cold of their miserable hovels; not those comforts of civilization without which civilized man is far more miserable than the meanest savage, oppressed as he is by all its insidious evils, within the daily and taunting prospect of its innumerable benefits a.s.siduously exhibited before him; no, for the pride of power, for the miserable isolation of pride, for the false pleasures of the hundredth part of society."

Labor is required for physical, and leisure for moral improvement.

What is wanted, he considered, is a state to combine the advantages of both and have the evils of neither. In fact, any unnecessary labor which deprives the race of intellectual gain, and all times not required for the manufacture of commodities which are necessary for the subsistence of humanity, should be occupied only in mental or physical culture.

Sh.e.l.ley lays down as a principle that commerce is the venal interchange of what human art or nature yields, and which should not be purchased by wealth, but demanded by want. Labor and commerce, when badly regulated, scatter withering curses and open

"The doors to premature and violent death, To penury, famine, and full-fed disease."

Wealth was a living G.o.d, who rules in scorn, and whom peasants, n.o.bles, priests, and kings blindly reverence, and by whom everything is sold--the light of heaven, earth's produce, the peace of outraged conscience, the most despicable things, every object of life, and even life itself.

In a proper condition of society, which should be strictly co-operative, there would necessarily be no pauperism, and

"No meditative signs of selfishness, No jealous intercourse of wretched gain, No balancings of prudence, cold and long; In just and equal measure all is weighed; One scale contains the sum of human weal.

And one the good man's heart."

The fruits of Sh.e.l.ley's enunciations on the labor and capital questions, and the school of political economists to which he belonged, have made wondrous progress. The world is beginning to see that labor has the unrestricted right of coalition, that there should be only a standard day's work, according to the wants of society, with prohibition of labor for at least one day in the week; that legislation is required for the protection of the life and health of the working man, and that mines, factories, and workshops should be strictly controlled by sanitary officers selected by labor; that no children's work should be permitted, or women's, which may be considered unhealthy; that prison work should be regulated, and that laborers' co-operative and benevolent societies should be administered independently of the State.

Liberals must learn from their enemies, must organize and let the ramifications of unshackled thought spread through the lands, and must, above all, conserve the control of education. Whereever there is a church or chapel, let there be beside it a hall or club, in which shall be inculcated the simple doctrines of a pure, integralised religion.

On the statute book of England there yet remains a law directed against the freedom of the press and discussion; to even discuss the question of the divinity of Christ was considered blasphemy, and the person so offending was punished most severely by the criminal laws.

At the present time this wretched remnant of the dark ages is practically a dead letter. The friends of Sh.e.l.ley suffered from this most intolerant spirit. Keats, it is believed by many, was wounded unto death for daring to speak on behalf of freedom, and we are given glimpses in the _Adonais_ of his feelings on the subject; Leigh Hunt and his brother were imprisoned and fined for the same; the publisher of the pirated edition of Sh.e.l.ley's _Queen Mab_ was cast into Newgate; Eaton, a London bookseller, had been sentenced by Lord Ellenborough to a lengthened incarceration, for publishing Paine's _Age of Reason_, and hundreds of others suffered similarly. The abominable circ.u.mstance of Eaton's conviction caused great uproar; the Marquis of Wellesley, in the House of Lords, stated it was "contrary to the mild spirit of the Christian religion; for no sanction can be found under that dispensation which will warrant a government to impose disabilities and penalties upon any man on account of his religious opinions."

Sh.e.l.ley, who was then only nineteen years of age, and had himself suffered from bigotry at Oxford, threw himself publicly into the controversy with great vehemence, with "a composition of great eloquence and logical exactness of reasoning, and the truths which it contains on the subject of universal toleration are now generally admitted." Lady Sh.e.l.ley, from whom I have just quoted, says that her husband's father, "from his earliest boyhood to his latest years, whatever varieties of opinion may have marked his intellectual course, never for a moment swerved from the n.o.ble doctrine of unbounded liberty of thought and speech. To him the rights of intellect were sacred; and all kings, teachers, or priests who sought to circ.u.mscribe the activity of discussion, and to check by force the full development of the reasoning powers, he regarded as enemies to the independence of man, who did their utmost to destroy the spiritual essence of our being."

To Sh.e.l.ley's able advocacy, and to his appeals against the stamping out of political and social truths opposed to custom, particularly the celebrated letter to Lord Ellenborough, it cannot be denied that the toleration now enjoyed in Great Britain owes much.

Sh.e.l.ley was one of those who most earnestly deprecated punishment by death. In his early years, if a man stole a sheep, or shot a hare, committed forgery or larceny, was a recusant catholic or a wizard, there was, on his conviction, but one penalty meted out--death. To Sh.e.l.ley's sensitive nature, this painted and tinged everything around him with an aspect of blood. In one of his political pamphlets, summoning all his energies, he depicts in fearful colors, the depraved example of an execution--how it brutalized the race, and how it was the duty of man not to commit murder on his fellow-man, in the name of the laws. The abolition of the first of these, he stated that reformers should propose on the eve of a great political change. He considered that the punishment by death harbored revenge and retaliation, which legislation should be the means of eradicating, and he urged that

"Governments which derive their inst.i.tutions from the existence of circ.u.mstances of barbarism and violence, with some rare exceptions, perhaps, are b.l.o.o.d.y in proportion as they are despotic, and form the manners of their subjects to a sympathy with their own spirit."

In England, as in many other countries, capital punishment is now only employed on conviction of murder or high treason. In Spain and Italy it was totally abolished, on the foundation of their young republics.

Thus have the labors of Sh.e.l.ley, and other reformers for the good of humanity, aided to extinguish crime made law.

Cruelty to animals was another reform agitated by Sh.e.l.ley. His love for the animal kingdom and hatred of blood-shedding, was so great, that he personally carried the pa.s.sion to such an extent as to become a vegetarian, and endeavored to induce others to be the same, in an admirable argument of some length in the notes to "Queen Mab."

The subject of the Rights of Women is approached and expatiated on, perhaps learnedly, by individuals utterly incompetent to deal with the question. Such persons, frequently armed with Sunday-school plat.i.tudes, believing in the inferiority of women, consequent on the supposed fall, and doubtless with heads paved with good intentions, as a certain place is said to be, do more harm than good to the cause.

This is not wanted, and is worse than useless. To found a real republic on a solid basis, it can be legislated for only by removing the ancient landmarks by a gradual process, and coming face to face with a new order of things, without bias or prejudice borrowed from the past. Thus that n.o.ble woman, Mary Wolstonecraft, as well as John Stuart Mill, Percy Bysshe Sh.e.l.ley, and numerous others, have treated this all-important question, which cannot be shirked by the race. True reformers ask: What was the condition of the s.e.x in the past? Look down the revolving cycles and note. In ancient Egypt, woman in the upper cla.s.ses was almost the equal of man, and although, like Cleopatra, she could wield the sceptre, yet in the lower her condition was wretched; in Asia, a mere slave and object of Zenana l.u.s.t; in savagedom, a beast of burthen. In Rome and Greece, Sh.e.l.ley shall tell the story:

"Among the ancient Greeks the male s.e.x, one half of the human race, received the highest cultivation and refinement; whilst the other, so far as intellect is concerned, were educated as slaves, and were raised but few degrees in all that related to moral or intellectual excellence above the condition of savages.... The Roman women held a higher consideration in society, and were esteemed almost as the equal partners with their husbands in the regulation of domestic economy and the education of their children."

Regard the incidents of a Jewish wooing, in which the woman had no voice, and of the marriage, the infernal punishments for adultery, and the accounts of the seraglios of the Hebrew kings equalled only by Turkish harems, and some of the pa.s.sages in the inspired Book of Numbers, for instance, in which the horrible truth is frequently too evident, and only equalled by the fact that after l.u.s.t had played out its pa.s.sion, unfortunate women, taken in captivity, could, by divine command, be turned adrift to rot or starve. In Christian Feudalism we find nothing much better. If I have read history correctly, and I may be wrong--the upper-grade women in mediaeval Europe, who were adored, not with love, but with lascivious and sensual worship, by Christian knights and troubadours, and who, like criminals to the halter, were forced, rarely with their own consent, into the arms of men they disliked or had never seen, or were placed in conventual houses against their wills. Of the lower-grade women, I need only offer one example--and that is sufficient to show their awful degradation; the French and German feudal lord had the right of _cuissage_, or, in plain English, the embraces of his serf-retainer's bride on the marriage night.

Sh.e.l.ley considered that in consequence of all this, men had forgotten their duties to the other s.e.x, and that even at the time at which he lived woman was still in great social bondage, improperly educated, tied down by restrictions, and refused partic.i.p.ation in the higher positions of labor. He called not in vain, against the inequality of the s.e.xes, and a.s.serted that woman's position must and should be altered by forgetting the tyranny of the past, and, be determined, for the good of the future.

We should be rejoiced that eloquent exponents of the abominations of former ages, the evils of the present, and the proper position of the future, are now hard at work. The "Women's Rights" party is up teaching men their duties on every continent; in distant India, the Brahmo Somaj is battling, not vainly, against the horrors of the Zenana, and in conservative England, which has been stormed, and the forlorn hope is now taking possession of the citadel; everywhere it is the same. Yes, woman, thanks to Sh.e.l.ley and the reformers, is about to be emanc.i.p.ated and free; free to earn her living, how, where, and when she likes; the equal of man, who shall no longer play such fantastic tricks as he did in the past, in proof of his dignity and superiority. The fourth of July is not long past and gone; I trust that in the dim vista of the future, our descendants will keep a national holiday, or a day to be set apart on which shall be celebrated the "Declaration of the Independence of Women," and then, perhaps, Sh.e.l.ley's description of woman in the "Episychidion" will be more apparent:

"Seraph of heaven! too gentle to be human, Veiling beneath the radiant form of woman All that is unsupportable in thee, Of light, and love, and immortality."

I now approach a very delicate portion of my essay: the question of the marriage relation. By many it is scouted with much virtuous indignation, but I conceive that the liberal, who, like too many, dare not discuss this matter in its broadest and widest aspects, should be stigmatized as unworthy of the name. Christ is reported to have urged the admirers of his ethical system to take up their cross and follow him, leaving father, mother, wife, children, and all they may have--thus Sh.e.l.ley acted, and it bears as equally pregnant lessons to free thinkers as it did to those Syrian fishermen. Oh, that liberals had as much "faith" in the truth, in the efficacy of their cause, as the first Christians are said to have had in the teachings of that Christ whom they regarded not as a Divinity, but as a son of G.o.d, as we to-day are sons of G.o.d, of the most high! Oh, that we could carry that "faith" into our beliefs, and the determination to be stopped at no obstacle which may bar the progress of truth, which must conquer in the end!

The favorite theme in the writings of Sh.e.l.ley is "Eros," love of the individual, of the race, of nature, and in this he follows Christ, in whose system of Philosophy, Love is ever the pre-dominating idea which permeates mankind with its beneficial effects, and will, when the b.a.s.t.a.r.d tinsel with which the truths of the Nazarene are hidden, be replaced by that pure gold which it is impossible to trace in the enunciations of any previous philosopher. This subject is always present to Sh.e.l.ley, and he thus appeals in one of his poems to the

"Great Spirit, deepest Love!

Which rulest and dost move All things which live, and are."

In another place he inquires--

"What is love? Ask him who lives, what is life? Ask him who adores, what is G.o.d?"

And in the same essay he describes love as

"The bond and sanction which connects man with man, and with everything which exists."

Elsewhere he points out that the attainment of love

"urges forth the power of man to arrest the faintest shadow of that without the possession of which there is no rest nor respite to the heart over which it rules, (and that) so soon as this want or power is dead, man becomes the living sepulchre of himself, and what yet survives is the mere husk of what once he was."

Of such was Sh.e.l.ley's philosophy of love, and I would ask if it be conceivable that the abominable calumny prompted by theological virus, that he kept a seraglio, as his friend Leigh Hunt informs us was reported, had any real existence. Sh.e.l.ley was too pure for any such idea as that of promiscuous s.e.xual intercourse to be acted on by himself; his life, which lies open before us, refutes the diabolical invention. The fact was, that at the early age of nineteen he married Harriet Westbrook, the daughter of a retired tavern keeper, a woman without soul and that congeniality of disposition which a man overflowing with the pulses of genius should have chosen. After a wretched existence without intellectual sympathy, and on the advice of her father, who did not agree with his ideas on religion, they parted by mutual consent, never to meet again. Sh.e.l.ley about this period met his second wife, a woman of the highest powers of mind and charm of body, Mary Wolstonecraft G.o.dwin, the auth.o.r.ess of _Frankenstein_ and other works, daughter of William G.o.dwin, the novelist, and author of _Political Justice_ and Mary Wolstonecraft, the gifted writer of _The Rights of Women_. We are told by Lady Sh.e.l.ley that, "To her, as they met one eventful day in St. Pancras churchyard, by her mother's grave, Bysshe, in burning words, poured forth the tale of his wild past, how he had suffered, how he had been misled, and how, if supported by her love, he hoped, in future years, to enroll his name with the wise and good, who had done battle for their fellow-men and been true through all adverse storms to the cause of humanity. Unhesitatingly she placed her hand in his, and linked her fortune with his own."

After the death of his first wife, on the solicitation of G.o.dwin, who was anxious for the landed interests of his grandchildren, a _legal_ union was performed. After looking on this episode, in the most charitable manner, I am confident the sternest moralist cannot but "acknowledge that the pa.s.sionate love of a boy should not be held a serious blemish, in a man whose subsequent life was exceptional in virtue and beneficence."

Believing, as I have explained, in the divinity of love, Sh.e.l.ley regarded everything in the relation of the s.e.xes with the most intense horror, which was not consistent with "freedom;" and by which he most certainly did not signify the license attributed by many. When he looked around and saw the withering blast of forced marriages, conjugal hatred and prost.i.tution, can we be astonished at his pa.s.sionately exclaiming:

"Even love is sold; the solace of all woe Is turned to deadliest agony, old age Shivers in selfish beauty's loathing arms, And youth's corrupted impulses prepare A life of horror from the blighting bane Of commerce, whilst the pestilence that springs From unenjoying sensualism, has filled All human life with hydra-headed woes?"